Comics Enriched Their Lives! #15
by T. Hodler
Friday, November 6, 2009
Most of the collectors whose libraries we bought were dead years before the libraries came to us, so the only way we could judge the level of eccentricity in the collectors was the books themselves, or from other evidence. …
An Orientalist named Paul Linebarger, whose father, we were told, had been Sun Yat-sen’s lawyer, had absolutely wonderful books, but he had other things, too. He was an early expert on psychological warfare, which I believe he later taught. In one of his closets, for example, we found a huge pile of anticommunist comic books in Mongolian. Paul Linebarger also wrote science fiction, under the name Cordwainer Smith. And he had an interest in ladies’ lingerie. One of the more unusual things we bought from his estate was a bra mannequin, complete with bra. Several drawers full of bras we let lie.
I realize that most of you have probably never heard of Smith, but that’s okay. We won’t shy away from celebrating the unjustly obscure here. Scanners need no longer live in vain.
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Labels: China, Comics Enriched Their Lives, Cordwainer Smith, propaganda, science fiction, underwear
The uninformed may correct that shortcoming here:
http://cordwainer-smith.com/
Never heard that about the bras, though.
Cordwainer Smith, it seems, was a man with many different identities.
The influence of Cordwainer Smith may be very easily underestimated (if not undergarmented). We are now in the quadrupled generation of trickle-down, but the vision of Smith is present. I don't think that he wrote any novels, but a lot of short stories, dense and challenging, are probably worth digging up and delving into. A lower level of paranoia than Dick, but a visionary who held onto ancient storytelling roots…was he a Asian studies scholar or do I have him mixed up with someone else? I do recall him being lauded in the early 70's (which is probably the last time I actually read his stuff) as being essential reading.
Paul, from the "probably more than you want to know" department: Linebarger wrote the SF novel Norstrilia set in the shared continuity of his SF stories — it's also his least opaque and most accessible work, and I'd recommend it to anyone as a jumping-in point — as well as the non-SF novels Atomsk, Ria and Carola.
"I realize that most of you have probably never heard of Smith"
This is why I love this blog, presumptions that read as snobbery no matter how they're intended or interpreted. Bravo!
Yeah, like an audience of comics nerds never heard of this guy, please.
You might be right, Jeffrey, and maybe Smith is more popular than I thought. I hope so! No offense or condescension was intended, really.
I never heard of him, haha.
I've never heard of him either, but that's because I'm such a snob that I don't read. Anything.
The image of Larry McMurtry dolefully regarding drawersfull of "Cordwainer's" bras is a pretty choice once. Thanks.
He's been on my list of people I should read for close to half my life, I realize. Thanks for reminding me. I liked the one story of his I did read all those years ago.
If I remember correctly (and I think I do), Larry McMurtry once called up Fantagraphics in the mid-1990s and ordered "one of everything" from the Fantagraphics catalog.