Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

One of my oldest friends died a couple days ago. He was in his early 80s. You can read the factual details about him on the File 770 website, in entry 4 in the miscellaneous post for February 6. I am away from home and posting on my pokey little tablet, so I can’t provide links or even write much, so I shall just say that Lee and I became friends about 50 years ago when we were both single and were regularly cast together as roommates at Mythcons.

Our friendship was not much about serious mythopoeic literature, but centered on politics in which we were both interested, him professionally as an elections supervisor. Lee also enticed me, and later B., to attend the Oz conventions which were a regular part of his schedule. For many years they were held annually at Asilomar near here. Lee and Dolores, whom he had delightfully married, would fly from LA to San Jose or Monterey and I would pick them up. We’d have dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey and then proceed to the conference center. I also visited them regularly whenever I ventured south. Neither of them drove, not as much of a rarity in Angelinos as you might think, but having a driver at his disposal didn’t alter Lee’s invariable preference for eating at the same burger/pasta/salad place a block from their apartment, where he was an esteemed regular.

As he was also in the Mythopoeic Society, where he handled back issue orders for many years and spent Mythcons mostly sitting behind the Society sales table. I shall miss his acute intelligence and occasional wicked sense of humor.

Here's yet another characterization of sf cons as unwelcoming and elitist. I find that a very strange charge. In my youth I was stepped on by all sorts of elites, but I never had any trouble finding sf cons welcoming and joyous.

But I know why this is. It's because I didn't go to sf cons with a chip on my shoulder. I had figured out that literary sf cons are about written sf literature. If you go to a focused special-interest con, you have to focus on what interest you have in that, and put other interests in abeyance for the weekend. I once went to a festival celebrating Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies. I'm famously excoriating on those, but I shut up about that for the weekend and accepted the celebration of what's good about them (and there are good things about them, just not anything having to do with Tolkien). Last month I went to a Clark Ashton Smith conference. I'd never paid more attention to Clark Ashton Smith than the length of time it took to read one or another short story by him, but for that weekend I focused on Clark Ashton Smith - and learned a lot.

And the reason these small specialty conferences are hostile to other interests is because they feel beleaguered. They're a community and they have an interest. There's a lot more comics fans than there are literary sf fans, as the size of comics cons will reveal, and they've got plenty of conventions of their own. Same with movies. If they come in to the small specialty cons, they'll drown out what the con is there for. Decades ago there was a joke in the Mythopoeic Society that Star Wars was the black hole of conversation; that once it came up, it took over the discussion.

I don't expect these cons to change their focus for me. I don't march into a literary sf con and demand to be taken as a comics fan, as the poster did. They're a community; you can join that community if you have any interest in its subject. (Some of the Clark Ashton Smith attendees had barely begun reading his work, and they weren't denigrated by the hoary old specialists, because they were showing interest; they weren't demanding the con be about something else.) Blend into the environment you're in, if you have any interest in it at all. There'll be a chance for a different environment next weekend.

PS: Kayla Allen corrected a small factual error in the post.