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March 31, 2008

World Con 1981

At Planet Stories Books we have recently reprinted two major collections by C.L. Moore—Black God’s Kiss, the Jirel of Joiry stories, and Northwest of Earth, the Complete Northwest Smith stories. Kick-ass stories by a wonderful writer.

This weekend I was reminiscing with a friend about the time I met Ms. Moore, and a flood of memories came pouring out. 

It was 1981 and the World Science Fiction Convention was in Denver. I worked for Ace Books in sales and marketing. I was one of three, had 16 states and Colorado was one of them. It was the perfect opportunity to attend my first World Con. 

My pal Warren Norwood had just had his first novel, The Windhover Tapes: An Image of Voices, published by Bantam, so it was sort of his coming out party. Being a published author, Warren didn’t have any money, so I told him he could room with me on Ace Books’ nickel.

A great convention! Science fiction was in transition. Star Wars had been let loose upon an unsuspecting public and films were duking it out with books for the love and money of the fans. 

I got on the elevator and a lovely young lady stepped in behind me. She was dressed, painstakingly, like Indiana Jones, complete with, olfactorily , about three days worth of sweat. She was speaking in an animated fashion to her companion. She slapped her thigh to make a point, and a cloud of dust sprang up beneath her hand. I was stunned, and so failed to ask if, as it appeared, she had hand-pasted the tiny little day-old-beard follicles to her face. Wow!

Later, I think it was at the GoH banquet, a heated argument sprang up about banning “media” from our beloved World Con. Said advocate wanted books and magazines—only. A lot has happened in 27 years.

Now my good bud, Warren C. Norwood was, like me, a salesman. Hell, he got in his truck and drove around the country, armed with covers of The Windhover Tapes: An Image of Voices, and pre-sold it to wholesalers. As I recall, the first print run was over 100,000 copies! The man could sell.

So, jolly salesman that he was, Warren met and knew everyone at World Con by the second day and he introduced me around. In the dealer room, I had the good fortune to meet Catherine Lucille Moore. Memory, as faulty as it is, has her standing tall and willowy. Her hair was cut short and very white. She was kind and gracious and had a swell smile.

Donald Grant had just published a great collection of Northwest Smith stories, Scarlet Dreams, a limited hard cover with illustrations by Alicia Austin. I bought one right then and there and got Ms. Moore's autograph. Meeting C.L. Moore is right up there as one of my greatest publishing memories.

Lots of things happened at this World Con. My Clarion East buddy Bruce Sterling was there. We had both recently read R.A. Lafferty’s rip-roaring novel The Flame is Green and were raving about it. We were both Lafferty fans before, but this was a pretty extraordinary book. Bruce had discovered it and told me to read it. A copy was not easy to find. Still isn’t.

Well, Bruce and I attended an Ace cocktail party in the Ace suite. Ace was republishing Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers. There was a blow-up of the new cover on the wall. Not nearly as good as the original Leo and Diane Dillon cover when the book had been a Terry Carr Ace Science Fiction Special—but I understand, new covers make old product fresh and saleable. I had just been out selling the book in my territory (Technically the books were sold by Kable News representatives, but most of them didn’t know science fiction and fantasy from a dead dog, so I was out spreading the good news.). I suspect my territory made up most of the put-out on that edition of Nine Hundred Grandmothers. What a collection, I still salivate thinking about some of those stories like “Slow Tuesday Night.” Man, “Primary Education of the Camaroi,” “Land of the Great Horses,” which had first been published in Dangerous Visions—one of the greatest short story collections in history—in my humble opinion. And I am referring to both collections.

So Ray Lafferty had had more than a wee bit of whatever he was drinking, and, as an Ace employee, I was asked to politely remove him from the party. He was using a walker, bad knees he said, temporary, he said. So Bruce and I removed Mr. Lafferty and ourselves and went off in search of adventure. We wandered the halls of the Con hotel letting Ray, wobbling and weaving, follow his nose. Bruce and I were just happy to be in the great man’s company.

Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, in his own way, was bigger than life. He was a grand Irishman like Finn McCool striding through the hotel, his mighty shoulders brushing both walls at the same time. I took one side and Bruce took the other lest the good ship Lafferty list too far to stern or port and capsize. The impact of that mighty fall could well have brought the hotel down, Sampson-like, around our ears.

I have a memory of Ray, maybe not at this convention, but sometime, giving a young and sloe-eyed Carolyn Cherryh a big, slobbery, mildly lecherous hug and declaring her “My fellow Oklahoman!” Carolyn seemed to take it in stride and I suspected this was not the first such hug she had endured.

Eventually, Ray’s very accurate nose led us to the annual party hosted by the Japanese fan group. Bruce and I thought we were headed for the SFWA suite, but Ray made a sudden right turn, and a door was opened as if on cue. A lovely Japanese lady in traditional garb stood aside and our Cúchulainn strode in, dominating the room. Then dear old Ray spun around, sat down in a chair by the door and promptly passed out.

Our hostess commented, matter-of-factly, “Lafferty-san, he always drunk.” I reached behind Ray’s head and cranked the window shut lest he catch cold in his sleep. A host handed me a Schlitz tallboy and proffered a plate of jellied-something cut into cubes, with frilly-tipped toothpicks stuck into them. And that was that.

At this convention I met Robert Silverberg for the first time. And Larry Niven, and Steven Barnes! Jim Baen, at his party, handed out advanced reading copies of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

 Now, I usually drank more than Warren, and he would be up every morning noisily shuffling his 3x5 cards on which he kept notes about everything. I would be buried under the covers hoping 10 more minutes of sleep would cure a hangover. So the morning after the Baen party, I was lying there wishing I was dead and Warren was sitting in the bathtub laughing uproariously. His laughs echoed painfully, to my ears, off of the bathroom tiles. Whilst soaking in the tub, Warren had started reading Hitchhiker. He came running out of the bathroom, dripping wet with a towel around his waist and began reading to me. Despite myself I started laughing too. This was good stuff!

Later, two more Clarion East pals, William F. Wu and James Patrick Kelly escorted me into the SFWA suite so I could drink free beer. Of course, I was on an Ace expense account, but to salesmen and sports writers, free beer always tastes best. And I was in the SFWA suite, by golly!

In those days World Con had a GoH banquet. You had to buy tickets, so I went and Warren didn’t. The Guest of Honor was Clifford Simak. I will never forget his GoH speech which was a reminiscence of his years as a writer. He concluded, evoking memories of City by thanking us all for letting him sit by our campfire and tell the stories the dogs used to tell. I had tears in my eyes.

Later, Warren and I wandered through the streets of downtown Denver in the wee hours of the morning. We had each carried away a beer from the SFWA suite. I gave mine to a homeless man who was up late, sitting on the sidewalk and leaning against the handy wall of a bank. I remember him as being very grateful.

Back in our room, Warren and I tried, unsuccessfully to close some floor-to-ceiling drapes. We were too drunk to be coordinated and way too drunk to know better. Perched on the back of two chairs we managed to fall, bring the drapes down on our heads, and just barely avoid making a quick exit out a fifth story window.

On Sunday, I drove down to Colorado Springs to watch early season NFL football with my friend Rod. Monday I flew home. Tuesday morning I received a phone call informing me that I had been laid off. I was the next-to-last Ace field agent to go. Shortly after, the parent company, Grosset and Dunlap, went belly up and all the sales staff was out on the street.

But what a time I had! So many people I had loved forever but never met…so many people gone now, including Warren. But so many friends made and still around. And this year, World Con is in Denver again. What wonders will I see?

 

 

 

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March 14, 2008

Drinking Tea

The house has some age on it. It is well-kept but old enough to have learned a thing or two. It's been around the block. The front yard has green grass and newly planted trees. The walkway winds past several bushes toward the front door where two clay chimera (qilin) wait. A tea plant grows in a bed by the walk, camellia sinensis.

A small metal sign hangs to the right of the front door, proclaiming “TeaMaster” with a drawing of a Yixing clay teapot, a Gongfu (Kungfu) pot. To the left of the front door is the long rectangular kitchen window. There is a large, beautiful bush in front of the window. I should learn its name. Two Stellar’s jays live there. They greet visitors and watch the goings-on inside.

My Tea Master meets me at the door. “Hi Pierce, come in!” He looks much younger than his age.  He is squarely built and has the broad shoulders of someone who regularly plays at taijijian (tai chi sword). He moves from his center, his dandian. He has balance and grace and is obviously connected to di (earth) and tian (heaven). His smile is genuine and welcoming.

I enter and smell the pleasant, homey smell of wood smoke. It is winter in Seattle, cold and wet. The warming fire is also welcoming. The flooring is compressed bamboo. It is beautiful and sturdy. My Tea Master believes in sustaining the earth. Bamboo does that.

Cha Shifu (Tea Master or Tea Teacher or Honored Tea Father) leads me through the clean and compact kitchen. Several large white cups with metal strainers in them sit on the counter. He has been tasting tea, professionally, judging its quality, comparing it.

Past the kitchen is a small wood paneled room with a long table made of compressed bamboo. Six bamboo chairs surround it. Several of the chairs are the type I think of as “Shifu” chairs. They remind me of my Internal Arts Shifu, my Grand Shifu who told the story of Master Jou, Tsung-Hwa. Master Jou wondered why some martial artists lived longer than others. He, Master Jou, concluded that the healthiest men had perfect posture, which included sitting well. These chairs invite proper posture.

To my right, to the west, is a room all of bamboo and glass and light. There is a long bamboo table for study and calligraphy, and a taller table with two statues of the goddess Kuan Yin. Each statue has a small tea cup in front and each cup contains tea. Cha Shifu has taught me to pour a cup to the goddess each day to honor her. The room feels good, it is a right place to be, like my Grand Shifu’s garden in Texas.

Cha Shifu and I sit. We talk of various things, the weather, friends, health, tai chi, while he prepares tea. Today is a new tea so he hands me the pot with the wet leaves that I might sample their virtue. The aroma is sweet and enticing, fine leaves indeed! I look down. The leaves are full and whole and healthy. They seem happy with the hot water that has brought them back to life. There is qi.

Re-hydrating tea leaves is often called “Awakening the dragon.” And I always feel a certain dragon qi, dragon energy about newly invigorated leaves of the camellia sinensis plant…at least when the tea is a good one.

Cha Shifu pours. I tap the table twice with two fingers thanking him, silently, for the good tea which he is serving. Tasting, I suck the tea back across the palate and along the sides of the tongue then across the back of the tongue and down the throat. This is a good tea, it is sweet and tastes of bamboo and what I used to call vanilla, but have now learned should really be spoken of as “orchid.” Orchid is one sign of a fine tea (and vanilla is a member of the orchid family).

The tail down my throat is smooth, and long, and pleasing. Cha Shifu sometimes uses the English word “lingering” as a noun and I have come to appreciate the concept. A good tea does indeed linger on the palate, sometimes for tens of minutes. And it is a pleasant sensation that one is loathe to relinquish.

I guess at the tea and get it right—Bi Mu Dan—White Peony, one of the few true and authentic Chinese white teas. It is from Fujian province. Cha Shifu is always pleased when I guess correctly—note the use of the word “guess”—and he is never too surprised when I am wrong, as long as I am not too wrong.

We drink the tea and discuss it. This White Peony comes from his own gardens in Fujian and it is made from spring leaves instead of the more usual summer leaves. Spring is sweeter than summer, but more fragile.

The tea is indeed a good one and lasts for many pourings and we talk about our tai chi and he tells me more about Kuan Yin. It is a good day. In the Way of Tea (chadao) it is right to enjoy the now, the present. What could be better than tea friends? What could be better than the focus, a tea meditation really, where the woes and worries of life are forgotten in a place of good company and good tea?

Finally, the tea is drunk and it is time to work. Yang balances yin and work earns the repose and the splendid tea. To quote Cha Shifu “Tea makes a happy day.”

 

 

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March 02, 2008

How to Beat a Bean

“Beans are neither fruit nor musical.” Nancy Cartwright

"With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bent arm for a pillow--I have still joy in the midst of all these things." Kungfu-tse 

Rice is the food without which most of this world would not turn. But not in Texas. In Texas, it’s beans. Yeah, sure, over there in East Texas as you get close to Louisiana, they start eating rice with their beans, but shoot, they eat pork barbecue too! However, that’s a subject for another day.

Growing up in Texas, if there was one certain thing, as sure as the sun would come up and the land would get hotter than hell before the sun went back down, it was beans on the supper table. Most of my family came from Fort Worth or parts west, out in West Texas where it got really hot. And we ate beans. We called them red beans and it confused the hell out of me when I grew up and went somewhere else and red beans were really red and shaped like little kidneys. 

What we were really eating was pinto beans, God bless them! There’s a lot of ways to cook pinto beans and all of them good. My mother mostly cooked them with a bit of meat, some onion, and tomatoes. We ate them with corn bread.

I remember, when I was little, we had a pressure cooker that Mother was a little fearful of. She would put in the beans, tighten down the lid and leave the kitchen in a hurry. I was young then, but I kind or remember a pressure gauge of some sort that rattled around, and I remember best the day the pressure cooker blew and Mother had to scrape beans off the ceiling.

Then there was the story they always told about my brother Ronnie. Seems one time when he was a baby (16 years before I was born), he was crying. And he cried, and no one could get him to stop. Finally his grandmother said something like “Give me that child!” She took Brother into the kitchen and the crying ended. Everyone rushed in to see what had happened, and there was Mammy (grandmother) feeding my brother red beans.

As I have moved through this life, two steps forward and one step back, I have learned how to cook pretty well. But over the years I continued to struggle with beans. I tried all of the folk remedies: Soak them over night; bring them to a boil, turn it off and cover them for an hour; pour off your soaking liquid and wash them again.

Well none of these methods worked to my satisfaction. The first thing I learned was, however Mother made those beans with tomatoes, she damn sure must not have cooked them in with the beans. Everyone, all the books, and every bean-cooking expert who ever put a pot on a stove says do not cook your beans with acid, it will make them tough. I ate a lot of tough beans before I gave up on putting tomatoes in with my beans.

Then I moved to Seattle. A strange little juxtaposition occurred. I moved away from red (pinto) bean heaven (Texas) as far west and north as you can get without being in Alaska, and I happened upon an old bean cooking method that dates back at least to New England and probably on over to the Old Country. In Seattle, Washington, I discovered the ceramic bean pot.

I may have discovered a ceramic bean pot, but I didn’t buy it, I just looked at it every time I went down to Pike Place Market and wandered through the Sur La Table store there. I looked at it, wondering if this was it. I wondered if this “thing” was the answer to my prayers. Then along came my friend Chris, a Canadian, who was hankering for a pot of Boston Baked Beans. I’m sure he didn’t call them that, I don’t know what Canadians call baked white beans with molasses, but Chris had a hankering.

So Chris proposed to buy me that bean pot I was always looking at if I would cook him up a mess of Canadian Baked Beans. I agreed, we had a deal, he bought me the pot and I went off home to learn how to use it. All my life beans had been cooked on the stove top, and always in an open pot, at least ever since the pressure cooker blew. But this thing was meant to cook beans in the oven. I guess that’s where the “baked” part came in.

I decided to give the pot a test run before I invited Chris over.

Following the directions, I loaded all the ingredients into my new pot and put it into a 325F oven. And I waited. And I waited. Then I waited some more and those darned beans had yet to even come to a simmer. So I decided to help them along. I pulled the cooker out of the oven, put it on the stove top where any self-respecting bean pot should be to begin with, and I turned on the electric burner. I put in on what you might call “kind of low.”

Then I left it alone to do its work. Some time later I was in the living room when I heard a sort of “flumph” sound. There was not anything in that kitchen that was supposed to make a “flumph” sound. Fearing the worst, I went in, and the new bean pot that Chris had just bought for me was split down the middle and there were half-cooked white beans everywhere. They were all over the stove top. They were on the floor. They were running down the front of the oven door. And worst of all, they were all over the front burner and starting to do just that—burn! And they were inside and under the burners, too. And…there was molasses in the beans. It was sticky and it burnt.

Well, I cleaned up my mess, trudged back down to the Sur La Table store and bought another ceramic bean pot. This time I decided I would leave it in the oven until hell froze over, if I had to, or, until the beans were done.

It was springtime in Seattle and the sun was making one of its rare appearances. Instead of fretting, I decided to take a nap while my beans cooked. So I opened the balcony door in my bedroom, stretched out on my bed and slept. I slept for several hours and I woke up to the most wonderful aroma. “Man,” I thought, “My neighbor is cooking something that smells really good!” As I got up and headed down the stairs that heavenly aroma increased as I neared the kitchen, and I knew, I knew! That smell was my beans.

I grabbed a couple of oven mitts, pulled the pot out, and took off the little lid. The beans were simmering away and they looked as good as they smelled. They tasted even better.

Shortly after that, Chris got his baked beans and then I gave my new pot the ultimate test. Red beans, I would cook red beans. So I washed and sorted a pound of pintos, cubed a slab of salt pork, chopped an onion and put everything in the bean pot along with water to cover, salt, pepper, and some powdered habanero. Well, it worked. I did not have to soak my beans, I did not have to bring my beans to a boil then wait one hour and wash them again…I just had to make sure to add water if the beans came uncovered and I had to have the patience to wait two hours, three hours, maybe even more. Then I consistently got the best beans I have ever had. The pot liquor was indescribable!

If I wanted tomatoes, I added them after the beans were done. And, like any good Texan, occasionally, when the mood hit me, instead of pintos, I cooked up some black-eyed peas. And they were wonderful too and didn’t take nearly as much time. Oh, and after the beans were done, I cooked up some corn bread in my iron skillet in the oven, too.

Now, eleven years later, I still bake beans, but I use stock and water, and I have fallen in love with heirloom beans. Anasazi—like pintos but richer; Red Appaloosas—smaller, and pretty like their name, and maybe the best beans I’ve ever had, and a whole slew of other heirlooms, some of them ancestors to the pinto, some not. Oh, I still cook up a pot of pintos every now and then, it is my heritage, but there are more good beans out there today than I have time to try.

"Beans are highly nutritious and satisfying, they can also be delicious if and when properly prepared, and they possess over all vegetables the great advantage of being just as good, if not better, when kept waiting, an advantage in the case of people whose disposition or occupation makes it difficult for them to be punctual at mealtime.” Andre Simon (1877-1970) The Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy (1952)

"Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear." Aesop

Find good heirloom beans at www.ranchogordo.com

 

 

 

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