{"id":20989,"date":"2024-01-16T15:00:18","date_gmt":"2024-01-16T23:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=20989"},"modified":"2024-01-16T15:04:08","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T23:04:08","slug":"r-i-p-howard-waldrop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2024\/01\/16\/r-i-p-howard-waldrop\/","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Howard Waldrop"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019m sad that <a href=\"https:\/\/locusmag.com\/2024\/01\/howard-waldrop-1946-2024\/\">Howard Waldrop has died<\/a>, age 77.<\/p>\r\n<p>I\u2019m trying to remember when I first encountered his work. Probably sometime in the \u201980s? Even though he was never all that widely popular with readers, several prominent editors loved his work; for example, I might have seen a story or two of his in <cite>Omni<\/cite>, under Ellen Datlow\u2019s editorship, or in Gardner Dozois\u2019s <cite>Year\u2019s Best Science Fiction<\/cite> volumes. I think it was not long after my first encounters with his work that I bought his first few collections: <cite>Howard Who?<\/cite>, <cite>All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past<\/cite>, and <cite>Night of the Cooters<\/cite>. And by then I was a big fan.<\/p>\r\n<p>A few months after <cite>Strange Horizons<\/cite> launched, we decided to start doing \u201cauthor focus\u201d issues, where we would pick a specific author and have material by or about them in all of the magazine\u2019s departments. Our first such issue (in early 2001) focused on Howard. Here\u2019s the <a href=\"http:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/non-fiction\/articles\/three-ways-of-looking-at-howard-waldrop-and-then-some\/\">introduction that I wrote for that issue<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>In that piece, I listed some examples of his (as I put it) \u201codd and wonderful\u201d stories:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>\u201cA Dozen Tough Jobs\u201d: A modern version of the twelve labors of Hercules set in the American South. [I didn\u2019t mention in that writeup that it\u2019s been pointed out that there are some sort-of similarities between this story and the movie <cite>O Brother, Where Art Thou<\/cite> (which includes a character named Vernon T. Waldrip).]<\/li>\r\n  <li>\u201cThe Sawing Boys\u201d: An utterly brilliant roll-on-the-floor-laughing retelling of \u201cThe Bremen Town Musicians\u201d mixed thoroughly with Damon Runyon. [Which is also, as I put it later in my article, \u2018about the changes in society brought about by the rise of mass communication.\u2019]<\/li>\r\n  <li>\u201cDer Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen\u201d (\u201cThe Down-Going of the Men of the Sun-Setting Lands,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cThe Decline of the Cowboys\u201d): A German-Expressionist Sherlock Holmes vampire Western.<\/li>\r\n  <li>\u201cFin de Cycl\u00e9\u201d: Proust, Jarry, Rousseau, and M\u00e9li\u00e8s create a groundbreaking film to exonerate Dreyfus. Plus, a duel on the Eiffel Tower, featuring a velocipede!<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I haven\u2019t re-read \u201cThe Sawing Boys\u201d in a long time; not sure what I would think of it now. But at the time, it was one of my favorite stories by anybody.<\/p>\r\n<p>I think my favorite of Howard\u2019s stories that I read later is probably \u201cHeart of Whitenesse\u201d; for more on my experience reading that, see my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jed.hartman\/posts\/pfbid0KVjVhUvNEBHfJsaAUq7d8htzoMFGMkv2oLAEEsMKNRbfBgL785uZmNtkaffoCsb7l\">2022 Facebook post about it<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>I met Howard once in person; I think it was a couple years after the <cite>SH<\/cite> special issue, and I was pretty sure he wouldn\u2019t remember me from our correspondence, so I reminded him that <cite>SH<\/cite> had done a special issue about him and his work. He said something that made me suspect he was mixing us up with another magazine, but I figured that wasn\u2019t important.<\/p>\r\n<p>I was in rooms with him a couple of later times, but never really talked with him.<\/p>\r\n<p>But I\u2019m sad that he\u2019s gone.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>I\u2019ll close with one of my favorite bits from a story of his, from \u201cFrench Scenes\u201d (which I <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/01\/09\/french-scenes\/\">wrote about in 2003<\/a>):<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>The main thing guys like Godard and Truffaut had going for them was that they didn't understand English very well.<\/p>\r\n<p>Like in <cite>Riot in Cell Block 11<\/cite>, when Neville Brand gets shot at by the prison guard with a Thompson, he yells:<\/p>\r\n<p>\u201cLook out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>What the <i>Cahiers<\/i> people heard was:<\/p>\r\n<p>\u201cSteady, <i>mon fr\u00e8re<\/i>! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,28,27,26,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-short-stories","category-speculative-fiction","category-strange-horizons","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20989"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20994,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989\/revisions\/20994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}