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* * * ****Cameron Kunzelman**** * * * In my life as a critic and academic, I am often fortunate enough to go places, read things, and generally have experiences with no expectations around them. I just want to learn without a real goal, and then, after the fact, I assemble that together. Normally that writing has some kind of critical thesis or a desire to say something specific about the world, but I am going to warn you right now that my trip to the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University was simply an excuse to wallow in the past. I have no bigger claim than a series of facts and suppositions, speculations of the most archival sort, that I think readers of the _Ancillary Review of Books_ will find as fascinating as I did. What comes next is a story of looking at the personal papers and archives of many luminaries in science fiction and fantasy—Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and more. It’s an excuse to root around in the history of sff in its most meat-and-potatoes, workaday, unglamorous mode. With that in mind, and the fanzine style of the past hot on my brain, you will forgive me if I slip into the informal mode of the “trip report” to explain to you what I got into. Just imagine that I’m telling you about the worst con experiences of 1977, and you can fall into a dream with me… * * * My journey to Bowling Green began with my application for the Pop Culture Summer Institute, a week-long program sponsored by the Pop Culture Association that helps put scholars and critics in the archive at BGSU for a week of intensive engagement with the materials held there. The holdings at the archive are extensive and varied. There are personal papers, deep collections of specialist literature, professional publications, fanworks, film and video, statues, and seemingly any other kind of pop culture material and ephemera that you could imagine. Additionally, it is located in the same building as the Music Library and Bill Schurk Music Archive, which meant that a number of my colleagues in the institute were working with materials held across these archives and, therefore, across the full audiovisual spectrum. I spoke with folks who were working on the cultural position of the Village People, how _Dungeons & Dragons_ fanzines understood the first major events in the official worlds of the game, and how films of the 1990s communicated ideas of science and cyberspace to an intrigued public. The remit was large, and the possibilities of going down rabbit holes were substantial. My own goal was more minor in scope. I just wanted to look at the Joanna Russ papers held by BGSU. My understanding is that there are two major holdings of the Joanna Russ archive: those at BGSU and those at U of Oregon. My understanding is that the split is partially about content and partially about context—Russ was a writer as well as an academic, and she taught at Binghamton, then briefly at UC Boulder, then finally at the University of Washington from 1977 through to her retirement from academia in 1991. Afterwards, she moved to Tucson, AZ, where she lived until her death in 2011 at the age of 74. Beginning in 1969, Russ began donating her papers to the Pop Culture Archive, and she continued to do so sporadically for the next decade or so. The papers are mostly made up of drafts of stories, some criticism, and some correspondence that was seemingly generated before her move to the West Coast, given that the last complete draft in the papers is 1978’s _The Two of Them_. My understanding is that the Oregon papers are geared toward work produced after that date, both professional and personal, and there are lots of things in the finding aid for the Oregon collection that suggest that Russ held some items back from donation to Bowling Green. The Jerome Library at BGSU. _Photo viaBhockey10 @ Wikimedia Commons._ Everyone who has ever done research in an archive or personal papers is hit with some of the same astonishments and questions. I will speedrun some of them for you to create some context for what I write after this. The first is that the Russ papers, beginning where they do in her juvenalia from before the age of 10, have a very distinct feeling of telling a story. The differences in the posthumously donated papers at Oregon and the more carefully curated story of a young genius barreling toward a creative career at BGSU feel _produced_ by the master storyteller. I was able to read many of Russ’s unpublished plays as well as some of the stories she wrote in college and shortly after. I think these are as good as anything she published later in life. It gives the impression, perhaps accurately, that Russ arrived fully formed; everything after was just purposeful tinkering. “Laura, The Camp, and That Terrible Thing” is a highlight of this material, and its story of guilt and moral culpability wallows in ideas that Russ would continue to engage with later. “Katy and I”, an early draft of her famous “When It Changed”, is full of corrections and, for a lack of a better word, acts of _sharpening_. It’s delightful to see Russ work in the margins. The second is that reading archival materials and personal papers can feel disarmingly intimate; but the Russ collection proper resists that. I feel like I have the shape of her, but there is a decided lack of vulnerability in what is collected that also feels purposeful. (It would come later in the week as I moved into other archives.) Russ’s path through life was a complicated one—a middle-class Jewish woman, early an outspoken feminist and later an outspoken lesbian, working through the upper crust of academia through to the Ivy League while, at every moment, attempting to make it in both a literary and commercial science fiction market that had a hard time figuring out what to do with her. A register of submissions in her papers shows her trying to find a home for her work anywhere that it might fit— _Fantasy & Science Fiction_, _Harper’s Bazaar_ , _Ellery Queen_ , _New Yorker_ , _Playboy_ —and the submissions outmatch the “SOLD” statements by ten to one or more. She struggled, but that struggle is rarely evinced in the archive in plain language. Instead, we see it in the drafts, abandoned or improved, and the constant production of resumes that might help her get a day job. Finally, Russ projects an almost austere intellectual rigor in even her most minor nonfiction. She speaks out of the archive as an Atomic Age genius, one of the voices of a new era who was going to shape the world. Much is made of her winning a Westinghouse science prize in high school, a full scholarship to Cornell, and then, later, attending Yale, where she dove into fiction writing and theatre. Looking at the photos, and reading the press releases and resumes, you get the sense that she was the scion of a new, better age. She was pointedly intelligent, a fact noted by basically everyone she engaged with, and many of her personal annoyances (documented in letters and in public criticism of her peers) seemed to hinge on instances where she just thought someone else was _wrong_ in a profound way, either factually or in their word choice in a science fiction novel. In her 2019 book on Russ, Gwyneth Jones quotes one of Russ’s former students, Kathryn Cramer, about this characteristic of Russ’s and its compounding effects—“rigor plus depression made her a harder critic than she wanted to be.” And, in response to a different question, Cramer claimed that “in retrospect Joanna at her peak, were she living in 2016, would be recognized as an Asperger’s type.” While I am not qualified to make any type of diagnostic claim, Russ’s clear frustration and demand for comprehensive mastery from herself and others seemed to be beyond her control. I will admit that not immediately finding the human Russ in her papers was a little disappointing to me. When you read the published fiction and nonfiction, especially _How To Suppress Women’s Writing_, you get the sense of a woman made of stone who was able to face the sexism of her time with an iron will. The specificity of her critiques of society as well as sff give the impression of Russ as someone who has worked out the pure math of reality and from that has derived a vision of the possibility of equality in the world. One only has to read her contributions to the famous _Khatru_ symposium to get a taste of this. I think what I wanted to learn from the papers was the process, the thinking, the wrestling that inevitably happens with the production of thought. In the drafts, what I mostly got were minor corrections and the occasional marginal comment. These are delightful and sometimes informative, but they are not the wrestling that I had hoped for. My impression of Russ as a writer, developed from reading all of the papers at the Browne, is that she could write and rewrite, constantly tightening, without really losing focus on a story that was mostly worked out in the first draft. This makes reading the drafts of the stories frustrating in many ways, because they are mostly exercises in dialing in specifics. This is not surprising from someone who was trained in the Milford way, later the Clarion way, which is to say: someone trained in the precise function of words and how they interrelate to produce a new world. (Delany’s pillorying of Le Guin around this issue, and Russ’s own 1968 PhilCon speech on style, are indicative of how this argument was made for this cohort of writers.) In any case, for a scholar of textual transformation, there is probably much in these Russ papers, but for me there was very little of direct interest. Page 5 of Joanna Russ’s 1968 PhilCon Speech, from the BGSU digital gallery I was much more surprised by what was _not_ in the finding aid. In fact, the most notable materials in the Russ archives for me are not things that are “findable” at all without putting your hands on the pages. It is clear that Joanna Russ had a _thing_ about wasting paper. She did not do it. Paper seemed to haunt her. The childhood newspaper she put out for her neighborhood had an ad in the back requesting clean paper, which one can pretty easily intuit comes from a particular postwar American experience. Whatever the reason, the fact is that the vast majority of the drafting work that Russ did over the course of the 1960s through the early 1980s was on the back of other sheets of paper. And what is on those sheets of paper is so comprehensive, and extensive, as to make its own shadow archive of the world around her. It is on the backs of these official drafts that I found the information that I was looking for, those humanizing things that revealed she was just one of us. I pieced together several resumes that she put together for secretarial work in New York, which was the day job that she had while simultaneously changing sff and being nominated for (and winning) major awards in the field. I found lecture notes from classes on the history of literature. I found a syllabus for one of her courses on science fiction as well as a list of recommended reading for students. A large part of the draft of _The Two of Them_ was typed on the back of a draft copy of Samuel Delany’s _Heavenly Breakfast_ that, presumably, Russ felt fit for recycling. Much of that manuscript is also typed on the back of departmental memos from Binghamton’s English Department, in which doctoral students were advocating for the standards of the degree to shift with the times and the expertise of the faculty. There’s a final exam for a science fiction class in 1974 where Russ asked students to answer 38 factual questions about 11 different science fiction novels (including _The Einstein Intersection_ __and _Stranger in a Strange Land_) followed by five short answer questions including “Discuss Bradbury’s attitude toward futuristic technology and interplanetary colonization, using significant examples from _The Martian Chronicles_.” The backs of these drafts go on and on, and they consumed much of my time working through the Russ papers. Joanna Russ was a public intellectual in the strongest sense, standing in for a certain strand of sff in a crucial moment, and yet it was the things that she found literally disposable that provided the most insight for me. I did not go to the archive looking to “solve” her, but I will admit to hoping that I could find some additional contexts or information that I did not have. I thought I might find marginalia in _The Female Man_ __that might give some contours to the ongoing discussions of its handling of transition, read as liberatory by some and deeply transphobic by others. Or maybe I would get some of her thoughts on the profound nihilism of _We Who Are About To…_ and what it might have meant for her ongoing political struggles. I didn’t. I found a different thing. * * * One of the benefits of traveling to an archive is being able to follow a trail, and, after working through the Russ materials in my first couple days, I began to chase Russ around the other papers and materials collected at BGSU. For example, there is an extensive, fascinating collection of correspondence with Samuel Delany in the Robert S. Bravard papers. It is dozens of folders in size, and it took me a full day to look through three of them. Bravard worked at Lock Haven University from the 1960s forward, eventually climbing the ranks to Head of Library Services, and he became a bibliographer/biographer for “Chip” Delany, as well as a close friend. I worked through some of these materials for signs of Russ. (Allow me a brief aside: these Delany and Bravard papers are wild. Chip is just giving Bravard whatever he has on hand with the expectation that Bravard will send everything along to the proper Delany archive at Yale, and so there is a profound connection and intimacy developed between these two men. I’ve now read enough Delany correspondence to know that when you started writing letters to that man it was only a matter of time before you started having very frank discussions of sex and sexuality, and so the papers make for a really interesting snapshot in time as Bravard starts remarking on his own sexual development, why he married his wife, sexual encounters he had before he met her, and so on. Delany starts sending him pornographic stories that he is writing for a _different_ guy, who is in prison and just needs some material to look at. Bravard, of course, offers qualitative feedback on this material. There is _a lot_ of very thoughtful Delany correspondence here that I have never seen remarked on—a couple of the Bravard pieces have made their way into Delany nonfiction collections, but not most of it.) Samuel Delany c. 1972, from a Sam Moskowitz profile for _Village Preservation_ Ultimately, the most interesting Russ information in the Delany papers that I found was a letter from Russ, dated 1976, centering on some feedback she was providing to Delany about his longform critique of _The Dispossessed_. Characteristically unforgiving about Le Guin’s prose, Russ hones in on the language of the book repeatedly, and praises Delany’s insight in the way that a friend who is really holding it down for you can do. In brief asides, she speaks to a few things that would appear through the rest of her life. One is a brief comment on Delany’s recent back pain, which she responds to empathetically: “[…] it has come clear long ago (for me, anyway) that physical pain is like nothing else and far more unpleasant. The other things one can do something about.” Physical pain would come to define much of the rest of Russ’s life—constant, nightmarish back pain and an eventual diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome was partially responsible for her significant drawing down of publication in the last years of her life. It is also clear from the letter that Russ is deeply frustrated with her peers in sff at that time, and it is this frustration that would later fuel the writing of _How To Suppress Women’s Writing_ and _Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts_ __in short succession less than a decade later. Commenting on Kate Wilhelm’s then-recent _The Clewiston Test_ , Russ works through how she feels that Wilhelm completely misunderstands lesbians (“if she thinks Lesbians are like that, she’s slandering her friends”), and I got the sense that it was about slightly more than Wilhelm there, given Russ’s frustration that is apparent on the page: > It’s an odd book and seems to me both very much out of control and embodying some weird sort of heroic-masochistic female fantasy which I can’t quite see, possibly because it isn’t mine. The book is full of impossible people—cringing drunkards and mad Lesbians and heroic heroines and vicious husbands—now don’t sit there and smile; I know you told me so years ago, but I really had no idea what Kate was up to. Later: “It is going to be a real exercise in self-control not to write the literary equivalent of ‘oh, shit!’ in _F &SF_ and leave it at that.” She continues for a couple pages, noting that Paul David Novitski had recently written to her about how “Kate is very down on polemical literature,” to which Russ responded that this was “simple-minded,” and then ends the letter with many well wishes and two things scribed in ink: “love, Joanne” and “Kate is a bully.” The other place that I found much of the context that I was looking for around Russ was in the Susan Koppelman papers. Koppelman was a scholar who had a fascinating career largely dedicated to scouring the archives and older publications of under-discussed, or historically obscured, women authors. She edited many volumes of these re-found stories to make them available to scholars and the reading public, and she was one of the major forces reshaping our understanding of women writers in the America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She was deeply engaged with this politics of publication and celebration until her death in 2024. Since her passing, her papers have been moved to BGSU, and so I believe I might be one of the few people to have looked through her Russ-specific files, other than the archivist who catalogued it. Russ appears in a couple capacities in the Koppelman papers, most notably as a long-running close friend, and they advocated for one another professionally (writing letters of support for grants and opportunities, such as a letter I read from Koppelman supporting Russ for an unsuccessful Guggenheim application). The Russ material is spread out across a “subject file” that Koppelman used as a way of sorting materials about figures she wrote about and a broader “correspondence” folder, although these splits are less substantial than they are illustrative about how Koppelman understood these relationships. The collection of materials around Russ is fascinating because Koppelman really does have notable ephemera that I would be hard-pressed to find in any other place—a 1991 letter to the editor at _off our backs_ where Russ complains that Jewish lesbian groups holding their events at religious ceremonies alienated her as an atheist Jewish lesbian; a rejection letter from _Ms._ where Russ attempted to help Koppelman get a short story published (a hand-written note from Russ at the bottom of the page suggests submitting to Marilyn Hacker at the _Kenyon Review_. “Mention me,” Russ writes.) It is the interpersonal material that stretches across these two files that I found the most engaging and explanatory, however. Russ wrote several poems to Koppelman in the guise of a “giant baby” that read as howls about the difficulty of life: “I want happy LUNCHES! / I want my knees to not hurt during LUNCH! / I want my back not to hurt during LUNCH!” indicates the directness of these pieces. In a letter from Tucson in 1992, Russ performs a longform analysis and feedback writeup of one of Koppelman’s stories, interrupted briefly by “my bakc [sic] is hurting and my typing is getting worse,” before turning to a “hour’s talk, all gossip and Catching Up” with Russ’s friend Cynthia, who she finds impossibly attractive. “I don’t expect all this to Lead to Anything nor do I feel terrible that it won’t,” she writes. I had to sit back in my chair for a little while. Before I looked at the interrelated papers, I had found it difficult to learn much about Russ’s life after retirement. She wrote some books on feminist politics in the 1990s, but the first (_To Write Like A Woman_) is mostly collected material from across her career. Even in the substantive critical analytical biography written by Gwyneth Jones, the long elaboration outward after her most productive period of writing feels mostly like a slow fade to black. The line I have heard most often is that her chronic fatigue and chronic pain made writing very difficult for her, and her last science fiction story was published in 1997. A letter to Koppelman from September of 1994 gave me some much-needed context for this period. It is clear that Russ had undergone a mental episode of some sort, and that Koppelman had written her with both questions and some kind of ultimatum (Koppelman did not keep a copy of her own letter). Russ writes: > I think your idea is a good one: if I ever do call you in that state again, the best thing you can do is call the police. I’m not going to apologize because I don’t think what I did was my fault—any more than falling down from MS is someone’s fault—but it is hardly your fault either. You can’t deal with it—probably no one can—and I certainly can’t when it’s gone on for three and a half months, which is what happened. I tried not to inflict it on you until it became so bad that I was actually planning how to kill myself. Ronnie persuaded me to take my medication up (the doctor kept insisting that I shouldn’t—I’m getting a new psychiatrist) and things got a little better. Each jump up helped, and finally at almost the 20 mg. dose (the pills) the world righted itself. The letter continues descriptively, and turns to talking about the literal weather before Russ reiterates her feelings: “It’s a disability issue, one of the difficult and unfortunate things that mental disabilities can do. You don’t have to deal with it—it’s not your responsibility.” This had been a long-running issue for Russ—she voluntarily participated in electroshock therapy in the early 1980s and had been on antidepressants since that time—but I’m struck again, typing this, about the clarity that Russ believes she has on the problem and on the solution, and how lonely both of those are. This is a woman writing to one of her longest friends and, in what she sees as an act of kindness, absolving that friend of any interpersonal responsibility. This clarity of judgment, whatever we think of it ourselves, was just as clear in a letter from earlier that year where Russ worked to nail down what she perceived as failures in the political movements in her lifetime, advocating for a comprehensive criticism of the political spectrum that we’d call something close to intersectionality today. In a letter from April in the same year, she’s fed up with Judith Butler’s _Bodies That Matter_, criticizing the alienating language of the text and working through the difficulty Russ experienced in her academic life. You can feel an utter dispiritedness, a sense that she believed academic feminism gave up too many of its goals so that it could be recognized academically; she perceives that many people writing about the politics that mattered so much to her seemed alienated from the conditions she was most familiar with, and this dispiritedness is paired with what I can only describe as a dread of possibility: > The threats and the threats of threats are everywhere. Does anybody pass a street person without feeling at least a little bit scared? (It could be me. If I’m living on a pension and inflation gets bad enough, it actually could be me.) Maybe one of the Kennedys can but I can’t. I also get a sense that the enormity of the political programme of the world pressed on her then as much as ever, and that it was emblematized at the despair she felt at Butler being a central figure for the discussion of the feminist project: “Obviously ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is a cluster definition, not a matter of a single qualification; so who gets left out? What’s attached to it? (everything) This is what we should be discussing That would be interesting and useful, I think” [sic]. And then in September, that phone call to Koppelman. * * * I will return to Russ momentarily, but let me tell you first about some other things in quick order. Koppelman kept up a short correspondence with Alice Sheldon, already outed as the real figure behind the James Tiptree Jr. name, from 1983 forward. It begins professionally and quickly becomes quite personal. By November of that year, prompted by an undocumented event, Koppelman is writing to Sheldon to tell her that > I think you are depressed now. Joanna once told me that you had written to her that you have bouts with disabling depression. Those were not her words, nor, I think your words. They are the words I use to express what I heard about you. “Mostly,” Koppelman writes, “I am writing because I wanted you to know that I am thinking of you.” Sheldon’s long-running mental health issues are well-documented, as is her death. It is difficult to describe the humor and, for lack of a better word, pranksterism that appears in these letters alongside these low moments. There is a postcard where Sheldon asks Koppelman to promise she will never reveal how Sheldon and Koppelman were introduced, which would frustrate their friend Joanna— > she’ll probably get so curious she’ll make something up—a secret network of women Talking About Her, or god knows. I don’t think it’s being cruel, we can always tell her the unglamourous [sic] truth. But that sharp-nosed drive to get every last thing straight fills me with laughter + love. The triangular relationship, viewed from my position after all three of these women are dead, makes me very emotional. In simply reading the Russ letters, I perceived this same thing, which Sheldon so pithily sums up—this compulsion to get everything straight, and the profound frustration when things simply will not arrange in the way you need or hoped them to be. In following the Sheldon thread, I ended up in the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro papers, which are currently unprocessed. However, Yarbro had neat files, and so the correspondence is relatively sorted. I took a wild hour reading through the Tanith Lee correspondence, and I eventually focused on the James Tiptree Jr. file, begun in 1973 when Yarbro and Sheldon traded letters substantially before Tiptree was “outed” as Sheldon. Someone more knowledgeable about both of these people than I am should go engage with these documents, given their relatively recent accessibility in the archive, but what I can tell you is that they tell a patient, clear story of a deep connection between two people, one of whom is pretending to be someone else. Alice Sheldon Chelsea Quinn Yarbro While Yarbro’s own letters are not in the papers, Sheldon’s responses tell both sides of the story, and some are disturbing and clearly written from the position of what Koppelman called Sheldon’s “disabling depression.” October 1973, while discussing a short story: “I am so profoundly pessimistic that I find it hard to envision humans of any sex just living. I guess I really believe we’re non-viable.” Same letter: “By the way, maybe I should say—Joanna Russ asked me, so maybe somebody else wonders—I’m not gay. Or at least I haven’t found it out in a long life. Gays do not uptight me, I tend to like ‘em except in former years the overt ones tended to be so stuck in their bag. Oppression syndrome.” December 1976, in the reveal letter: “Also part of my depression is that [my husband] is threatened with blindness…is what I look like important? Five ft. 8. 135 lbs, grins a lot in a depressed way […].” In looking for Russ, I found myself drawn into the Sheldon labyrinth, despite having a stronger sense of the Tiptree biography before I saw these letters. I do not think that any account of these figures, writing from the depth of the situation they all found themselves in, prepares you for the unmediated scrawl on the page. Digging through those Yarbro letters, which draw down to a trickle post-Sheldon reveal, I was reminded of a letter Sheldon wrote to Koppelman in December of 1983: > Depression is when the bottom falls out and—as you say—one falls to that place where no light or energy exist. Yes, I think there could be ‘not sad’ depression—what is the knife of pain in real depression is (to me) the feeling of irretrievable time passing, passing inexorably while I lie on couch DOING NOTHING. I’ve always had trouble with Time. The down escalators you can’t get off—and if someone you love is ahead of you on it, no power of humanity can enable you to give them even one of your steps…if one could not care about Time… Responding to Koppelman’s own chronic pain, Sheldon seemed to produce a final claim: “I’m only afraid that it’s one of those conditions where the only choice is to live with it or not live.” Four years later, Sheldon would kill her disabled husband and herself, and it’s impossible to sit in the archive and read these things and not think about the fullness of time. Of knowing. Of sitting with Time. This insight into Sheldon’s understanding of the world, even at her lowest, resonates into the Russ story for me, especially given the relative unavailability of information about her late life (as far as I am aware). But I will return to that shortly. In December of 1973, Sheldon wrote to Yarbro: > As I told Ursula, [corresponding with Russ is] a little like corresponding with a conflagration, a desperately brilliant, active, furious mind. [. . .] She does not display that rather automatic kindliness and humour that most women do. I think that’s good; she will get something done. August 1975: > Russ when she is explaining calmly and slowly enough to be followed is a luminously engaging mind, that is the way I think of her because in thinking or art people must always be judged at their high marks. * * * In reading a lot of Russ in draft, in conversation, unsorted, reworked, these are the ways that I see her now. I think that there is an astounding moral clarity that she reaches in the 1990s about the interrelation of all oppression. There’s a demand to look to the margins, to the people most affected, to find the real solutions. In the letters to Koppelman she is about as clear on this as I can imagine someone being. As her student said, this clarity also seemed to contribute to her feeling miserable, alongside a series of compounding effects. The shock therapy did not seem to help her much, and Sheldon intimates in a letter to Koppelman in June of 1984 that Russ experienced “spotty amnesia” in the wake of the treatment. Which leads me to write about the latest letter in any of the materials that I looked at, a letter to Koppelman from October 2010 which was contained in the subject file materials from the former’s papers. Russ was 73 years old, and looking up her posted address reveals a retirement community in Tucson. It’s a letter about a memory—recalling a conversation the two had about height and class and speech patterns and how women garner respect in situations that don’t accommodate them. It’s about Russ’s hand—she’s pulled a tendon that makes it hard to type. She’s still typing on a typewriter, although it’s getting hard to find materials to support that. It’s a fast page and a quarter, and it ends with that Russ clarity: “And hoping physically that you’re not too bad. Old age has taught me how frustrating physical problems can be and how they can mess up one’s work and one’s thinking.” She would die the following April. * * * I strongly encourage anyone interested in Russ, or the figures around her in the American genre fiction scene of the 20th century, to see what BGSU has to offer if you are able. The archives of science fiction are scattered hither and yon, although, thankfully, we have some density points like the Eaton Collection at Riverside and the BGSU Library. My week exploring these papers has given me a few things, notably an understanding of the deep interrelation of all of these figures and the importance of folks who might not be considered core to sff history (like Koppelman or Bravard) but who had a measurable, deeply important impact on how it came to be produced and contextualized. When Delany essayed about the paraliterary, the writing that is massively cultural and yet unmarked with the imprimatur of the properly literary, he was telling us all that we had an obligation to read the margins _and_ understand the relationships between the paraliterary genres—sff, pornography, comics, and so on. I’ve developed even more of an appreciation for the connections between the _figures_ of the paraliterary world after this trip, something I’ve been relatively uninterested in before. Now I see these two webs of connection, between the writing and the people, as unbroken. Another thing my journey to the BGSU has revealed to me is how much things have changed when it comes to correspondence. What will the interested people of the future look at? Maybe they will thrill at the idea of reading email threads saved by the few who would think to do so. There was a moment where I was holding a post card, tossed off by Alice Sheldon in just a moment or two, and I wondered about all of the context and ephemeral beauty from key figures in our field that were never inscribed anywhere but instead just disappeared into the black hole of chat programs; IRC, then AIM, then Discord as differently-shaped voids for the things the future might want to know. Historically important Twitter DMs forever lost on the platform. It’s no different than someone trashing their letters, I know, but the idea that no one will be able to do what I have just been doing, for most generations of writers going forward—sort of shook me a little. (If you want to start a physical correspondence, my PO box info can be found here.) While I went looking for Russ, I ended up finding much more, which is what you’re in for with an archive trip. And I find myself thinking about the last letter in that Russ file, and about Sheldon’s great robber Time. * * * **Cameron Kunzelman** is a critic. He podcasts for Ranged Touch. His books _The World Is Born From Zero_ and _Everything Is Permitted: On Assassin’s Creed_ are available now wherever you get books. * * * **Transparency Statement** This article was commissioned from a hard pitch. The author and editors are acquainted through previous podcast work & professional/critical spaces. This article was edited by Jake Casella Brookins and copyedited by Misha Grifka Wander. ARB did not arrange any review copies for this article. The author received an honorarium for this article, at standard ARB rates. The header image for this article was created by Misha Grifka Wander using assets from Canva Pro. No AI-generated imagery was used. Please consider subscribing to ARB’s Patreon to support the magazine and our writers. ARB is a BookShop.org affiliate and may receive a portion of book sales purchased through links on this page. Please visit our Support & Transparency page to learn more. ### Share this: * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### Related posts: * Patterns, Guts: Style and Substance in _This Is How You Lose The Time War_ * A Meal of Thorns 37 – THE HISTORIAN with Sean Guynes * A Meal of Thorns 03 – PIRANESI with Misha Grifka Wander * Wow! Signal: August 2024 * Wow! Signal: July 2024

“Keep far from a false charge; do not bring death on those who are innocent and in the right, for I will not acquit the

Formed in St. Louis in 1982 by Andy Hawkins, Gabe Katz, and Ted Epstein. In 1986, they moved to NYC and recorded their debut, released by SST in 1987. “Undertow,” was released by Enemy in 1989. A 3rd LP, “Cyclotron,” was released in 1991 on Avant. In 2001, Hawkins and Katz joined with Tim Wyskida. In 2012, Katz departed and was replaced by Will Dahl. In early 2015, BIG released Before Ever After.

Sometimes, it's more important to be good than it is to be nice.

A free field guide to what stops people from voting, and what to do about it. English and Spanish, ready to print.

A security issue in Omarchy’s default Docker configuration meant that essentially every program running in the user’s desktop session could escalate to root without a password, sudo, or a privilege prompt. If you use Omarchy, the most important takeaway is simple: update to 4.0.1. I reported this issue privately through the project’s responsible-disclosure process. The underlying configuration has since been patched, so I’m publishing the details now to explain what the issue is and let users know to update their systems.

The University's internal investigation launched last year has dismissed all complaints against Nathan Cofnas, and found his ideas 'represented lawful free speech'