Written by Fred Patten, and published on the LASFS Rex Rotary, November 16, 1966. Intended for Apa L, 109th Distribution, LASFS Meeting no. 1527, November 17, 1966. Address: 1825 Greenfield Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90025. Phone: GRanite 36321.

########################################################################################################

Material is beginning to pour in for the fanzine for Forry. Stories, articles, and letters of all lengths; there must be more than 50 pages of stuff in far, and more arriving every day. We're a little short on artwork yet, but various of the local fan artists have promised to make up for that deficiency. And -- would you believe that the fanzine will have newsstand distribution? How about glowing reviews in all the prozines? Well, the Collectors Book Store in Hollywood has put in an order for 25 copies for retail sale. That's not bad, considering that I'm only just beginning to get the material onto stencil now -- that'll be my Big Project for the next couple of weeks. If any of you want to submit a contribution for publication alongside Edmond Hamilton & Leigh Brackett's, John Berry's, Kriss Neville's, George Locke's, Earl Kemp's, and many others, you'd better hurry or I won't have time to work it into the fanzine. And get your $5 in to Walt Daugherty for the dinner; time is growing short.

if you're interested in animated cartoons, don't forget that the Russian feature-length cartoon, "The Magic Horse", plus a shorter Russian cartoon, will be shown next Wednesday in Founders Hall (FH 133) on the USC campus, 3401 University Avenue, at 8:00 p.m. for only 50¢. A couple of weeks ago, a group of us -- the Johnstones, Owen and Hilda, Don Simpson, and myself -- enjoyed Japanese night, and we're all looking forward to these two Russian cartoons. Does anybody else care to join our group?

-- BEING COMMENTS ON THE PREVIOUS DISTRIBUTION

Small, isn't it? The smallest, I believe, since the *First* Distribution, away back in the prehistoric past. Well, let's see how we do now that Jack's through talking about Scientology.

Dave Van Arnam -- Your Progress Report #1 sounds as though it'll be well worth reading; I'm already impatient to get my copy. I'm also looking forward to getting my membership card to see what number I got; I think I put in for #33 to John Boardman, who signed my receipt when I joined at the DisCon, though since the receipts weren't numbered, I don't suppose you have any record of that. Well, just don't give me too high a number. ## Star Goodgie? Hey, I'll bet Lin Carter could write a novel around that title -- and Ace would probably publish it without changing it. ## Your index factor/Realpub sounds a bit too complicated for me. If anybody wants to go to the trouble of figuring out how many "real" fanzines I've published, I'll be mildly curious to see his result, but not overly so. I consider all of my publications real, no matter how short or how regular.

Tom Digby -- An hour per page is the average time it takes me to write a fanzine, too. That's assuming that I'm sitting at the typer and composing on stencil. If I'm typing from a manuscript, the stenciling time is cut in half. My d.c.'s are invariably done at home, right onto stencil. If I've got a more formal article, book review. Or the like, I may mull it over earlier, throw together a rough draft during slack time at work, and then polish it up as I stencil it at home later; the final stenciling will usually take less than an hour, but there's no telling how long the whole job may take. I usually do my final stenciling on Tuesday or Wednesday night, and run RR off on Wednesday, though occasionally other factors intervene. This week, for example, I'm finishing typing RR and running it off tonight, on Thursday, despite what it says on the colophon overleaf. I had planned to do the job last night -- and got about as far as the d.c.'s -- when Bruce and Dian dropped over unexpectedly with the latest FAPA Mailing, and I got preoccupied in that for the rest of the evening. So this is a last-minute in-the-typer issue, batted out between my arriving home after work at about 5 p.m., and my leaving for the Meeting about 7:30 -- 2 ½ hours to finish a couple of pages; a not impossible job. (Fortunately, I seldom eat dinner on Thursdays until Kal's-after-the-Meeting, anyway.) I'm habitually a last-minute type. ## Yes, I certainly consider Apa L to be a part of the current "LASFS image"; I don't see how you could possibly avoid the connection. And I still think that to take material that had been published in Apa L first and then run it through SHAGGY would make SHAGGY a reprint zine, no matter how recent the reprinted material was. (I also would not want the best Apa L material appearing immediately in SHAGGY because that would preempt its republication in The Best from APA L.) I really consider the whole question to be academic; how much material is there in Apa L that would be worth reprinting in SHAGGY, anyway? ## Has fandom ever claimed that it had a monopoly on feuds in print? (If I ever said anything to give the impression that I thought so, I'm sorry.) Look at some of the newspaper wars in the last century. ## Any extras I have of Apa L covers, or of anything else, gets either thrown out or given to Bruce Pelz for his sale of Apa L surplus pages at a cent each, or however much it is that he charges. If you want any extras of the covers, try to catch me at the club each week as we're leaving,, and I'll try to see if I have any left over. I usually do; I invariably run 55 copies.

June Konigsberg -- Yes, the "Alice" special was really bad. They tried to make it as cute as could be. Did you notice that they threw in as much as possible from other popular fairy-tale/fantasies, too? The three witches, of course (Hansel & Gretel's, Snow White's, and the Sleeping Beauty's), who Alice defeated by saying "Oh, no, I read all about you in other books." And the bit that she could only get to be queen by following the blue brick road -- well, they didn't actually call it a blue brick road, but they implied it strongly enough that you couldn't miss the reference -- which actually turned into yellow flagstone after the first set. And similar atrocities. Yes, I'm familiar with the 1933 Charlotte Henry movie version, which is really quite excellent -- its mail flaw is that everything moves much too swiftly, because they tried to pack all of both books into the one movie, which was short enough as it was. But it was the only movie version I know of that tried to remain faithful to Carroll's books, rather than just trying to milk them of all possible good photogenic material. And I think that W.C. Fields in the 1933 version was an even better Humpty Dumpty than Jimmy Durante in the TV special, though I'll grant you that Durante was better than just about everybody else on that program. (Jack Palance as the Jabberwocky and Nanette Fabray as the White Queen were the only two that stood out at all favorably in their roles; and the White King/Alice's father did a good job with the part they gave him -- which was mostly to just stand around and act fatherly.) Disney's 1951 "Alice" was disappointing to purists in that it didn't seem to take advantage of all that Carroll offered, but it didn't leave you with a sense of outrage, like this TV spectacular did.

Fred Hollander -- I think you've made the best decision in not trying to revive SHAGGY right now. Later, perhaps, but for now, let's see what can be done with HIPPOCAMP. Actually, even if you were perfectly qualified to edit SHAGGY right now, I still think this would not be a good time to try a revival, because of the 2nd reason you cite here: the club as a whole doesn't seem to be ready to support a revived SHAGGY, and no matter how good its editor might be, it needs at least an active majority (or a fairly large active minority) of the club behind it. A year from now, though, and who knows? I'd say that you'd better have gotten out at least four issues of HIPPOCAMP in that length of time if you want to show that you're qualified to keep SHAGGY going on a regular schedule.

Jean Berman -- I think Alice is supposed to be about 12 years old at most; actually, somewhere between 8 and 12 -- I always had the impression that she was a somewhat precocious child of the younger age. How old was Alice Liddell when Carroll wrote that story around here? Hmm, you're right; she was 12 by the time Carroll finished writing the story and presented the illustrated manuscript to her. Well, she's always seemed younger to me. ## A poad sounds like a Groke -- "She was not particularly big and didn't look dangerous either, but you felt that she was terribly evil and would wait for ever. And that was awful." -- in which case see Jansson's illustration in Finn Family Moomintroll.

Chuck Crayne -- Well, if a spatial engineer must be one who is "exceptionally astute and imaginative", I feel sure that a large percentage of those who qualify for the post will be enjoyers of science-fiction (if not members of fandom). For that matter, I wonder how many of the current set of astronauts have ever read s-f and enjoyed it? There'd be something worth finding out -- maybe Campbell or Pohl should take a poll to find out.

Sally Crayne -- The elections went more-or-less as I'd hope, except for one bit disappointment -- Reagan got in. (I was one of the100,000 or so who split the ticket for Brown and Finch.) But at least Prop. 16, the "Clean" bill, was killed, and I'm so happy about that that I'm willing to relax and give Reagan a chance to show what he can do. (This is easiest on the nerves, as there's not much else I could do except move to another state.) Actually, the way things look, Prop.16 is dead only in name and not in spirit; the censorship forces will doubtlessly try again, and they do now have a man in the Governor's Mansion who favors them, so the picture's not as bright as it could be. The public will have to stay alert so that nobody slips something past us. Right now, though, it seems to already be jump-on-Kuchel time; the victorious conservative wing of the GOP is moving to eject the last strong member of the liberal wing still in office, and Sam Yorty is putting on his hobnailed boots, doubtlessly with an eye toward capturing the Democratic nomination for Senator in a year when the Republican Party will be feuding among itself. Since I'm strongly in favor of Kuchel, I'm anxious to see how things develop on this front. (But John Wayne or Chuck Conners instead of Kuchel? I suppose the party bosses are trying to ride what seems to be a winning trend, but this actors-in-politics is going to be carried too far. (Has anyone heard what Wayne or Conners themselves think of trying to run for a political post?) ## Gee, all this reminds me of the weeping & wailing from certain quarters in the first days of Apa L, just after Goldwater was defeated; you'd've thought that the world was coming to an end. The most extreme reaction at that time came in FAPA, of course, when Curt Janke resigned his membership in protest that FAPA hadn't elected Goldwater president. Not just that the majority of the members of FAPA had been anti-Goldwater, but that they hadn't elected him president. Do you think we could hold Bruce Pelz responsible, in his capacity as Director of the LASFS, for not seeing to it that Brown won?

And that's it. A six-page manuscript for EXPLITIVE arrived today, but it's now 6:15, and I'm obviously not going to have time to stencil it and run it off before the Meeting. Six pages would be a bit too much to do in my free time on Thursday before the Meeting even if I didn't have my own zine to finish? Bĵo, do you think you could mail your manuscripts to me a day or so earlier?