Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

waning nostalgia

I just don't know. There's was something about an entry over at Bellona Times, juxtaposing a John C. Wright interview and one with David Bromige, that got me into a nostaglic funk about the late '80s and my introduction to Usenet [via work]. Two names, Tom Maddox and Tim Maroney, or as I came to think of them while picking my way through their flameworn spat on alt.postmodern and rec.arts.sf-lovers Mad Dogs and Maroon.

Those were the days, though they seem so long ago, as those two would daily do battle. You could feel the heat, and I made up my mind then and there never to post to any group on Usenet. Maddox, I last heard of, when he and his friend William Gibson wrote a couple of teleplays for The X Files, First Person Shooter (2000) and Kill Switch (1998). If you nose around the Usenet archives you can still find some traces of what they wrought.

But back to Mr Wright, a guy I don't know — as my dear old, departed dad would say — from a load of hay. His first book, a sample chapter of which lies here, reminds me of two other books, Cross-Time Engineer by Leo Frankowski and The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phœnician by Edward Lester Arnold. Funny thing how the mind works. I read Phra all the way through and had a fun sort of time, but the Conrad Stargard adventure just had too little reward for me. I should've known by its lurid cover, but some age-old adage snuck into my brainpan. Now that I think of it, both Bellamy's utopian SF novel Looking Backward and Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court use the same unstuck-in-time theme to get on with their polemic yarning and proselytizing, but they wrote less deadeningly.

I was saddened to learn that David Bromige had suffered a stroke. I had taken some classes from him back in the early '80s. He'd introduced me to language poets and poetry, Oulipo, and much, much more. I was last in touch with him in the mid-'90s while working in the belly of the beast. I still have a great photo of him somewhere holding his new-born daughter, Margaret, at a death-of-summer party I threw one strange October out on the family ranch in Schellville.