AGAIN...

It is after worldcon, and as per usual, I haven't put much of the material I obtained away. Most of the zines are stuck in plastic bags, and the few books I bought are sitting in a pile near the computer. However, I did unpack the bag with the clothes much sooner than expected (usually it takes a couple of months) because I kept tripping over the bag.

Anyway, one of the free things I walked away with was an issue of WEIRD TALES. April 2008. It offends some of my sensibilities, since it has "The 85 Weirdest Storytellers", and it lists people like Andy Warhol...John Waters...Andy Kaufman...Kurt Vonnegut...William S. Burroughs...

Andy Warhol was a con artist of the supreme type. He wasn't a story teller.He created issues where people created stories about him, such as pointing a film camera at the Empire State Building for eight hours and releasing it, unedited to a theater and drawing attention to himself. Ditto the film called "Sleep". This is not high drama, art or substance. Kitsch.

John Waters doesn't belong here. He crafted movie stories around disgust.

Andy Kaufman was a performance artist.

Vonnegut rates so low as a science fiction writer that when he died, no one wrote tributes to him in LOCUS Magazine. The editor did that, and he was the only one.

William S. Burroughs is well known for writing books no one was ever able to finish. Of the members of the Beat Generation, he was the only one who remained ambulatory the longest.

Seems to be a lot of lame art in the magazine, and a circle of people who know one another and publish one another and scratch each others backs.