Everything is now fandom and fandom is now everything

Just the other day I noted in the sidebar my bemusement that heated lettercolumn exchanges in the New York Review of Books now resemble nothing so much as those found in fanzines like Richard E. Geis's The Alien Critic, back in the day.

In further bemusement, I see that the New York Times Magazine is running a profile--in next Sunday's issue--of the late Andrew J. Offutt. By his son Chris, focussing on Offutt's prodigious lifetime output of pornographic novels.

Like most people who were involved in the subculture of science fiction fanzines and conventions in the mid-to-late 1970s, I remember Andy Offutt as an SF writer with a large presence in fandom and a reputation for approachability and generosity. And I remember his wife Jodie as an ever greater presence in printed fanzines.

But I have to admit that my first reaction was to be startled that the article doesn't so much as mention Offutt's two years as president of SFWA (1976-78). Immediately followed by the realization that I was mentally recapitulating the logic of Field and Stream's legendary 1959 review of Lady Chatterley's Lover ("One is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping"), the difference being that Field and Stream was joking and my brain was not.