Albert Hodkinson, A Great And Ordinary Man

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Friday, I attended a memorial service for Albert Hodkinson. Albert lived next door and was for over 45 years the best neighbor anybody could hope for. We used to have evening chats over the backyard fence about matters both simple and profound.

Here's one thing I learned from him: Navigating your Halifax home from a bombing raid over Berlin, you flew west until you came to the white cliffs of Dover. Then you turned right and flew up the coast until you came to the Thames. Then you turned left and flew upriver until you came to the old Roman road. You turned right and followed it up past York, where your airfield was. It was a hell of a lot easier than using a sextant during a bumpy flight in a prop bomber.

Yes. The man was in the RAF in WWII when it mattered most--"never, many, and much" as Churchill put it. Albert Hodkinson was one of those ordinary men who accomplished extraordinary things, when the future looked darkest, and saved the world from fascist domination. 

Albert's father was a pro football player when he was young. Then WWI came along and trench warfare and a foot injury that ended his dreams forever. Having served as an infantryman, he advised his son to become an airman. Albert wanted to be a pilot but, he was from London's East End and the brass told him, "Only gentlemen get to fly aircraft." So he was made a mechanic. But then, "They ran out of gentlemen," and he was sent out to drop bombs on Germany.

Albert was also a literary man, like me. He wrote story poems about his experiences in the war. They dealt with his doings and those of others, of what it's like to fly out on a bombing mission, and what it's like to fly back from one. My son Sean recorded him reading all 20 of his war poems and posted them on YouTube. At the end of each reading Sean would ask a question or two about what it was like and some of the answers were amazing.

Afterward, Sean said, "The one thing he never talked about was what it felt like dropping the bombs. He flew into the darkness. Then he flew out of the darkness. In between: silence."

So, three days ago, Marianne and Sean and I honored the passing of a man who would have told you as he told me that he was nobody special. And yet his children and his grandchildren and his great grandchildren live in a country and a world that could have been infinitely worse if it were not for him and his compatriots. Gentlemen and Eastenders alike.

All, in my estimation, heroes. 

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Phil Ochs, Dead Fifty Years Ago Today

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A half century later, the man is still dead. And we're still doing our best to forget him.

Phil Ochs was, to put an easy label on it, a protest singer. His song, “I Ain't a-Marching Anymore,” about a soldier refusing to march off to yet another war, became, ironically, the theme song to a thousand anti-war protest marches in the sixties. His “Draft Dodger Rag” (Ohhhh, I'm just sixteen I got a ruptured spleen and I always carry a purse...) was a hoot. “Love Me, I'm a Liberal” bit the hand that wanted to feed him so fiercely it bleeds to this day. And his long and complicated and wonderful “Crucifixion” proved that he was at heart an artist, who could have had a celebrated career, analogous to Bob Dylan's, if his outrage at injustice hadn't demanded he put all his heart and soul and being into political action.

Ochs spoke truth to power while at the same time making Saturday-and-evening protesters, like me, who went to rallies, signed petitions, and stood in the drizzling rain holding candles for a few hours and then went home to cocktails and dinner, feel like devout Christians who hadn't yet given everything they owned to the poor.

It's been five decades since Phil Ochs, after a struggle with bipolar disorder and alcoholism, committed suicide. The confluence of these two diseases proved stronger than his will to live. Those who resented his activism did their best to pretend he never existed. Those who agreed with his goals but hadn't reshaped our lives to the Cause shamefacedly did pretty much the same.

He was simply too sincere for any of us.

So tonight, let all of us who have failed to live up to his example bow our heads and raise a glass to a man who, in e. e. cummings's phrase, was “more brave than me:more blond than you.”

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A Box Full of Controversy

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Look what I found! I've been reorganizing (and, in many cases discarding) my papers and I came across a box containing the "A User's Guide to the Postmoderns" papers.

This requires a brief explanation.

Way back in 1986, I was feeling annoyed that the writers I felt were writing the absolute best SF at that time were--with the exception of William Gibson, who was a phenomenon--not getting a fraction of the attention they deserved. So I wrote a mock-manifesto, published in Asimov's, praising Gibson, Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pat Cadigan, and many others in comically exaggerated rhetoric.

How exaggerated? Well, the subtitle of "A User's Guide to the Postmoderns" was Including the Battle for the Future, Unbridled Ambition, the Fate of the Children in the Starship, the Cyberpunk-Humanist Wars, Blood under the Banquet Tables, Metaphors Run Amok, and the Destruction of Atlantis! If Metaphors Run Amok didn't tell you that that the narration was tongue-in-cheek, then you were definitely humor-deaf.

It turned out that a lot of the Asimov's readership were definitely humor-deaf. (If you want to know the entire story it can be found in my introduction to Tachyon Publication's chapbook, The Postmodern Archipelago. Which can be bought here.)

Back to the box. Peeking out of the green folder is the original typescript of the essay. Beneath it are the published responses in various fanzines. (I remember that the Texas one--really pissed--was abruptly handed to me at the Worldcon by a fan who said, "Here!" and fled.) To its right and above are outraged letters to Asimov's, mostly objecting that they'd never heard of any of these writers and doubted they'd ever amount to anything. And one from Ed Bryant who not only liked my essay but understood that it was meant to be funny. Ed was a Mensch.

The very shabby sheet in the bottom right corner contains my notes for how the essay should be ordered. Feel free to enlarge it and marvel at my hideous handwriting and the incoherence of the notes. Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be writers who draft their prose like this. Under it are responses from various writers who felt unfairly excluded from the essay. One of them was from a writer, to whom I wrote back, saying: You're right. I was wrong. Here's why it happened. You should have been included for these reasons. I apologize. Which caught him by surprise, but I meant every word of it. He should have been in the essay and I regret he wasn't to this very day. Also that I didn't include Nancy Kress, who did not complain about being excluded.

The others, not so much.

And, very best for last, inside the cardboard box itself are letters from almost everyone I profiled. I wrote them asking questions about their work and their ambitions and for permission to quote them. Their answers were all straightforward and honest. One of the humanists shared his correspondence with a major cyberpunk about what SF should and shouldn't be. When Pat Cadigan objected to what I planned to write about her, and I offered to quote whatever she might want said verbatim, she wrote back (in longhand) that it was physically impossible for her to praise herself. And James Patrick Kelly wrote a letter whose every sentence was not only quotable but worthy of putting at the heading of this post. Also Lucius Shepard's reaction after reading the essay--he lamented not being called a gunslinger, "or at least a thug."

Ah, but we were all so young, and earnest, and hardworking, and ambitious!

And to answer your question: No. Almost everyone in the box is still alive. You can read its contents when we're dead.

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Your Kevin Bacon Number with Stalin.

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I met Sergei Nikitich Krushchev once--sort of. I shook his hand and got his autograph on one of his books anyway.

This was at a lecture Nikita Krushchev's son gave at Rowan University on the 51st anniversary of the Glassboro Summit. (You can look it up, using Google.) When he was done speaking, he asked for questions and there was the usual awkward silence. So I raised my hand and asked about something I'd always wondered. Both Robert Heinlein and Edward Teller had argued passionately for a nuclear first strike on the USSR in the 1950s. Were there similar voices in Russia arguing for a first strike against the United States?

"No," he said. "You had nine atomic bombs for every one of ours. The imbalance was too great."

That gave everyone else permission to as questions and they did. The most interesting response to which was elicited by "Did you ever meet Stalin?"

Well, he said (I paraphrase here), when I was in college, studying to be a rocket engineer, my friends and I went to Red Square for the parade where they showed off all the latest rocketry. Stalin and the other big leaders were on top of Lenin's Tomb, so we jumped up and down and waved and shouted, "Comrade Stalin! Comrade Stalin!" He looked down on us and said, "Hello there."

Sergei Nikitich smiled, then, gestured at the audience and said, "So. You met me, I met Stalin."

Which means that his Kevin Bacon number with Stalin was one. Mine is two. And if you ever met me at a convention or a book signing... Well, then, no matter what your politics might be, you and Stalin have a Kevin Bacon number of three.

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