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Voice of the Imagination, whole no. 25, October 1942

Page 3

IMAGI-NATION

A. Merritt "I wouldn't be without 'The Voice of Imagi-nation' for anything and hereby renew my subscription. " Who is Alojo? I want to write him a letter on that really understanding and beautifully written piece of his in the current member." (Alojo estas la adoptita Esperanto-nomo de Arthur Louis Joquel, now of Washington, DC, (Bx 1351.)

ROTHMAN from New Cumberland General Depot, Penn (Do not use this adres! 13 Aug 42: " From now on you and the rest of fandom is going to have to bear with my handwriting, as I am miles from the nearest typer. Just another of the horrors of war -- for, as you see from the envelope, yrs truly is now in uniform. " It all happened (one nite?) so fast I'm still a bit astonished, although so far it has been more like an amusing game than anything else. You strip-tease for the physical exam, hear the Lieut tell you you're in, wait a couple of weeks until you get a postcard telling you to report, ready to go to camp. You shake hands with everybody in the office, rush madly around visiting relations, get sworn in and find yourself a soldier. (What do U do with him?) Then off to camp, feeling slightly silly at lining up in the railroad station in front of everybody, but at the same time realizing the tremendousness of that moment -- just like you've seen it in the moom-pitchers from the last war. The drunks in the train arguing with the sergeant -- off to the guardhouse with them. Never a dull moment. " The next day (Today! Whaddya know?) the ordeal of getting uniforms and lugging that couple-of-hundred pounds of barracks bag across the camp. The shots in the arm -- which I'm just starting to feel -- ow. " I look cute as all hell ("Hell is Forever!") in an overseas cap. " Oh well, most of youse guys will soon be thru the same thing, if you haven't already. " Don't worry, Morojo, I'm in for non-combatant duty only. Not that I intend to gloat about it. I feel too much for the people who are fighting. Somehow it does not seem right for a person to make a celebration because he doesn't have to do any fighting."
From WALT(Helen Morgan)LIEBSCHER, late of 101 S Eastern, Joliet, Ill: "Dear Vomorons: Firstly I'm sending you my pitch. (Batter up!) I know it will have the honor spot. Sorry I didn't have a better one but my true beauty never seems to come out in snapshots, Technicolor is the only thing that halfway does justice to my Grecian puss. (See cover.) " Received a letter from Tucker yesterday in which he conveyed the heart-breaking news that he was resigning from fandom. Probably the old prude will re-enter next week, but that old clonker won't have nothing on me. I wish to announce that I am resigning from fandom. I wish to announce that I am re-entering fandom. There, I claim the distinction of being the only fan that resigned from fandom and re-entered in the same paragraph."

Jack F. Speer Continuation of letter dated 30 Jan F42 from which started in Vom #22, pg 10. See letter later in this ish for adres: "Didn't 4sj collab on this issue (#2), Morojo? Only your signature appears after the love and best wishes. (Greeting purely personal. --Morojo) " (I hope you're not reading this letter all in one dose; I've been writing it off and on for four days now.) " One of the best reasons put forward for so much of classic art being nude is that clothes have a tendency to date a work of art, whereas the nude form, in the best art, is fairly changeless. (No pockets in which to put money.) But how many of the Vomaidens are expected to endure a time when the people that look at them every day will be dressed quite differently from our present fashions? Furthermore, the thing that makes them popular with the fans is their nakedness. I've heard the argument that there is nothing more pleasing, more delicate than the flowing curves of a nude woman, and that was a very interesting section of Second Stage Lensman where Kinnison was trying to explain to the Amazon why she was beautiful, but I doubt it. The standards of beauty, whether absolute or resident in human psychology, are very unlikely perfectly exemplified in a natural object; and it's my belief that the pleasure I get from looking at some scantily-clad art pieces is a sublimation of the sex instinct, and not primarily related to the aesthetic sense. So long as the sublimation's sublimated enuf, OK. " Gee, I hope Ron Levy isn't serious, in his dreams of American fandom as a paradise of good-fellowship and sincerity and stuff. This is the kind of a letter that should be read over again in the cold gray dawn of the morning after, before mailing. DREvans' letter which immediately followed it was an effective refutation. Oh, Ron may have been kidding in his letter, but it's quite possible for a guy to get to feeling that way. " The English speak quite truly in referring to the rapid-fire character of VoM's plays on words. I wonder how many of your readers catch and appreciate such sparkles as 'humerous-as-usual...makes no bones about it'. (But they gnaw right from wrong.) Countless others I notice; I wonder how many I don't. And I wonder how few notice the things I sprinkle thru SusPro and other places. " Oh, some comments on the Heinlein speech. I agree with it 99%, but will mainly note the exceptions. There's his putting the finger on time-binding as the essential characteristic which distinguishes the human from the not-human. But then he goes on and destroys the usefulness of the distinction with the words 'to anything like the extent that the human race does'. Personally, I think that humanity, intelligence, call it what you will, must be defined something like the above-suggested definition for fans, as something that possess a large pot of the mass of characteristics. " His definition of 'fact' is of questionable value. A fact must be defined to include the idea that it's used in the thought processes. The difficulty, then, is to put in a form that the thought processes can use, something that happened in the actual world before July 4, 1941, or February 2, 1942, or whatever the date may be. That's where all the trouble comes in--translating from the actual happening to the cognition of it.

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IMAGI-NATION A. Merritt "I wouldn't be without 'The Voice of Imagi-nation' for anything and hereby renew my subscription. " Who is Alojo? I want to write him a letter on that really understanding and beautifully written piece of his in the current member." (Alojo estas la adoptita Esperanto-nomo de Arthur Louis Joquel, now of Washington, DC, (Bx 1351.) ROTHMAN from New Cumberland General Depot, Penn (Do not use this adres! 13 Aug 42: " From now on you and the rest of fandom is going to have to bear with my handwriting, as I am miles from the nearest typer. Just another of the horrors of war -- for, as you see from the envelope, yrs truly is now in uniform. " It all happened (one nite?) so fast I'm still a bit astonished, although so far it has been more like an amusing game than anything else. You strip-tease for the physical exam, hear the Lieut tell you you're in, wait a couple of weeks until you get a postcard telling you to report, ready to go to camp. You shake hands with everybody in the office, rush madly around visiting relations, get sworn in and find yourself a soldier. (What do U do with him?) Then off to camp, feeling slightly silly at lining up in the railroad station in front of everybody, but at the same time realizing the tremendousness of that moment -- just like you've seen it in the moom-pitchers from the last war. The drunks in the train arguing with the sergeant -- off to the guardhouse with them. Never a dull moment. " The next day (Today! Whaddya know?) the ordeal of getting uniforms and lugging that couple-of-hundred pounds of barracks bag across the camp. The shots in the arm -- which I'm just starting to feel -- ow. " I look cute as all hell ("Hell is Forever!") in an overseas cap. " Oh well, most of youse guys will soon be thru the same thing, if you haven't already. " Don't worry, Morojo, I'm in for non-combatant duty only. Not that I intend to gloat about it. I feel too much for the people who are fighting. Somehow it does not seem right for a person to make a celebration because he doesn't have to do any fighting." From WALT(Helen Morgan)LIEBSCHER, late of 101 S Eastern, Joliet, Ill: "Dear Vomorons: Firstly I'm sending you my pitch. (Batter up!) I know it will have the honor spot. Sorry I didn't have a better one but my true beauty never seems to come out in snapshots, Technicolor is the only thing that halfway does justice to my Grecian puss. (See cover.) " Received a letter from Tucker yesterday in which he conveyed the heart-breaking news that he was resigning from fandom. Probably the old prude will re-enter next week, but that old clonker won't have nothing on me. I wish to announce that I am resigning from fandom. I wish to announce that I am re-entering fandom. There, I claim the distinction of being the only fan that resigned from fandom and re-entered in the same paragraph." Jack F. Speer Continuation of letter dated 30 Jan F42 from which started in Vom #22, pg 10. See letter later in this ish for adres: "Didn't 4sj collab on this issue (#2), Morojo? Only your signature appears after the love and best wishes. (Greeting purely personal. --Morojo) " (I hope you're not reading this letter all in one dose; I've been writing it off and on for four days now.) " One of the best reasons put forward for so much of classic art being nude is that clothes have a tendency to date a work of art, whereas the nude form, in the best art, is fairly changeless. (No pockets in which to put money.) But how many of the Vomaidens are expected to endure a time when the people that look at them every day will be dressed quite differently from our present fashions? Furthermore, the thing that makes them popular with the fans is their nakedness. I've heard the argument that there is nothing more pleasing, more delicate than the flowing curves of a nude woman, and that was a very interesting section of Second Stage Lensman where Kinnison was trying to explain to the Amazon why she was beautiful, but I doubt it. The standards of beauty, whether absolute or resident in human psychology, are very unlikely perfectly exemplified in a natural object; and it's my belief that the pleasure I get from looking at some scantily-clad art pieces is a sublimation of the sex instinct, and not primarily related to the aesthetic sense. So long as the sublimation's sublimated enuf, OK. " Gee, I hope Ron Levy isn't serious, in his dreams of American fandom as a paradise of good-fellowship and sincerity and stuff. This is the kind of a letter that should be read over again in the cold gray dawn of the morning after, before mailing. DREvans' letter which immediately followed it was an effective refutation. Oh, Ron may have been kidding in his letter, but it's quite possible for a guy to get to feeling that way. " The English speak quite truly in referring to the rapid-fire character of VoM's plays on words. I wonder how many of your readers catch and appreciate such sparkles as 'humerous-as-usual...makes no bones about it'. (But they gnaw right from wrong.) Countless others I notice; I wonder how many I don't. And I wonder how few notice the things I sprinkle thru SusPro and other places. " Oh, some comments on the Heinlein speech. I agree with it 99%, but will mainly note the exceptions. There's his putting the finger on time-binding as the essential characteristic which distinguishes the human from the not-human. But then he goes on and destroys the usefulness of the distinction with the words 'to anything like the extent that the human race does'. Personally, I think that humanity, intelligence, call it what you will, must be defined something like the above-suggested definition for fans, as something that possess a large pot of the mass of characteristics. " His definition of 'fact' is of questionable value. A fact must be defined to include the idea that it's used in the thought processes. The difficulty, then, is to put in a form that the thought processes can use, something that happened in the actual world before July 4, 1941, or February 2, 1942, or whatever the date may be. That's where all the trouble comes in--translating from the actual happening to the cognition of it.