For the third straight year, The Cimmerian is proud to be presenting a set of Awards honoring Howardian achievements in the realms of research and scholarship. Voting for these awards is open to all readers and contributors to TC. If you have done this before, you know the drill. If not, read on, and begin participating in one of the most fun activities Howard studies has to offer.

All Cimmerian readers and contributors are encouraged to vote. You may or may not know it, but you have been earning voting power in these Awards all year long — every time you purchased an issue, contributed a letter or an essay, or helped out with my annual coverage of big Howard events. These activities earned you VOTES, which you can now apply to each award category. Here’s how it works:

1. First, calculate how many votes you have earned. Use the following guide:

1 VOTE for each issue of Volume 3 of The Cimmerian you have purchased.
2 VOTES for each letter published in The Lion’s Den for Volume 3.
3 VOTES for each essay or poem published in The Cimmerian for Volume 3.
2 VOTES for contributing pictures or anecdotes to TC‘s coverage for the June 2006 Robert E. Howard Days.
2 VOTES for contributing pictures or anecdotes to TC‘s coverage of the November World Fantasy Convention.

For this year’s voting, only Volume 3 (black and gold issues) count; latecomers who purchased back issues from Volume 1 and 2 cannot apply those old issues to this year’s voting. If you are a subscriber, feel free to add on the votes for the issues you are due to receive soon (November, December, Awards, and Index). Some people worry overmuch about this calculation, but don’t sweat it. Just tell me what number you came up with and how you did it, and I will check this against my records and let you know if it needs tweaking. A single vote either way usually isn’t enough to swing a category to a different winner — except in 2004 when Steve Tompkins pulled a Kennedy/Nixon on me and took the Third Place Hyrkanian by a single vote, the bastard. (Kidding, Steve, kidding. Bastard….)

2. Now that you have your vote total, you can browse through the List of Nominees and start selecting your choices. Remember, you get to apply your total amount of votes to each category (for instance, if you have calculated 20 votes, you get to apply 20 to the book category, twenty to the First Place Essay category, 20 to the Second Place Essay category, etc.) Also remember that within each category you may split up your votes any way you wish (10 votes to the first nominee, five to the second, five to the third, etc.) If there is a category where you have no opinion (if you didn’t read any of the nominees, for instance), just put ABSTAIN for that category.

3. Next to your vote for each category, take a minute and write a paragraph about why you voted the way you did. I print these comments anonymously in TC‘s annual awards issue. It’s a great help to me, and it gives the nominees some much-appreciated feedback on their work, even when they don’t win. Best of all, if you submit such comments with your votes, you get a free Limited copy of the annual Awards issue. So don’t just send in votes, toss some commentary into the mix for each category.

4. Once you have decided on how your votes are to be allocated, e-mail me your ballot with your list of winners and commentary. Here’s a sample ballot that you can use as a template:

______________________________

CIMMERIAN AWARDS BALLOT

NAME:
NUMBER OF VOTES I HAVE CALCULATED FOR MYSELF:
ATLANTEAN AWARD (Best Book — Single Author): [winner(s) and comments]
VALUSIAN AWARD (Best Book — Anthology): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — FIRST PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — SECOND PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
HYRKANIAN AWARD — THIRD PLACE (Best Essay): [winner(s) and comments]
AQUILONIAN AWARD (Best Periodical): [winner(s) and comments]
STYGIAN AWARD (Best Website): [winner(s) and comments]
VENARIUM AWARD (Emerging Scholar): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK RIVER AWARD (Special Achievement): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK CIRCLE AWARD (Lifetime Achievement): [winner(s) and comments]
BLACK CIRCLE NOMINEE (who you want on next year’s Black Circle ballot): [winner(s) and comments]

________________________________

It’s that simple. When I receive your ballot, I will record your votes in a spreadsheet. All voting is kept strictly confidential, and as editor of TC I myself do not vote. The balloting will remain open throughout February, and close at midnight on March 1, 2007. The winners will subsequently be announced live at the 2007 Robert E. Howard Days festival, on Friday Night after the banquet, at the pavilion. Be there or be nowhere.

There have been a few slight changes in the rules this year, which I will mention here. Most importantly, the Black Circle Award rules have been revamped. Now each year there is a BLACK CIRCLE AWARD category but also a BLACK CIRCLE NOMINEE category. The NOMINEE category is used to vote people up into the AWARD category for the following year — someone needs to get 25% or more of the NOMINEE vote to get pushed into the AWARD category the next year. The AWARD category is now winner-take-all. Therefore: since last year Rusty Burke and Don Herron were the only ones to pass 25%, they are the only two nominees in this year’s Black River Award category. That contest is winner-take-all. Meanwhile, for the BLACK CIRCLE NOMINEE, put in the name(s) of who you would like to see make the winner-take-all Black Circle Award contest next year. Clear as mud?

I have also decided to loosen up the Essay rules a bit, to allow Book Introductions that are lengthy and substantive enough to function as standalone essays in their own right.

The past two years have seen around half of the total readership of The Cimmerian vote. I would love to get that percentage up this year. If you are at all confused about the voting, feel free to pop me an e-mail and I will guide you through it. It really is a lot of fun if you at all care about Howard studies and the various items released in the field. Feel free to pepper the various e-mail lists with discussions about the various categories and nominees — make your cases and generate groundswells for your favorites. Last year saw an unprecedented number of Howard books and essays hit the streets, so the categories are as competitive as they’ve ever been. Your favorite scholars need your help and your vote. You’ve got a whole month to think it over and send in your ballot. Have fun, e-mail me with any questions, and stay tuned this June for the winners.

UPDATE: You may have noticed that the ballot has been getting tweaked all day as various people have alerted me to oversights or questions requiring some judgment calls. For instance, I’ve taken Leon Nielsen out of the Venarium Award category, as both his book and one of his articles are technically 2007 releases due to be up for awards next year. Therefore I’m saving Leon’s appearance as a Venarium contender for the 2008 awards. A few other overlooked items have been added as well — how could we have forgotten to put Novalyne Price on the Black Circle ballot?! It looks as if the ballot is pretty solid now, though, and won’t be changing from here on out.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and is set for a spectacular 2007. The Howard centennial leaves us Howard fans out of breath but with a sizable achievement to our everlasting credit. This year will be hard for future generations to top.

The attempt to get a Cimmerian out every month in 2006 failed — too many real-life responsibilities got in the way down the home stretch for me to make it happen. Nevertheless, I’m committed to getting out the remaining 2006 issues necessary to make Volume 3 a complete set. I’m going to attempt finishing the November, December, and Awards issues during the next few weeks, and will start work on the V3 Index soon. Volume 3 slipcases will also be coming sometime this spring.

If all goes as planned, Volume 4 will start with a February issue, and we’ll try for a bimonthly schedule going forward. Also keep a lookout for the 2007 Awards ballot, which will appear on this website soon. And as Rob points out in the last post, there is much in store for Howard fans in the coming year. The Complete Letters, the Del Rey Best of REH set, and much more. Just because the centennial is over doesn’t mean that we’re due for a Howard drought.

I’ll post here when the rest of the 2006 Cimmerians ship.

S.T. Joshi’s article “Bran Mak Morn and History” in Two-Gun Bob: A Centennial Study of Robert E. Howard comes trailing a backstory that originated with the author’s 1996 magnum opus H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. That book more than deserved its Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards, but phrases from the pages (502-503) on which Robert E. Howard is introduced as an untutored provincial-turned-pen pal were destined (and designed?) to live in infamy among even the least touchy Howardists: “Fanatical cadre of supporters,” “subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature,” “[Howard’s] views are not of any great substance and profundity,” “Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy.” The artful dismissal-intensifier “does not even begin to approach” is surpassed a page later when Joshi quotes Lovecraft’s “There’s a bird whose basic mentality seems to me just about the good respectable citizen’s. . .” evaluation of REH in a December 14, 1935 letter to Kenneth Sterling and then editorializes “If Howard’s later devotees would adhere to this view, they would make themselves a little less ridiculous in proclaiming vast profundity and originality for his work.” Only a little less ridiculous, mind you — that might qualify as the unkindest cut of all, were there not many cuts yet to come.

In 2001 Howard occasioned what has to be the worst passage in one of Joshi’s very best books, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Here is as good a place as any to mention that when Joshi is writing about those like Campbell or Shirley Jackson or Thomas Ligotti who broadcast on his preferred frequencies and speak to his sensibilities, few genre critics repay reading as much as he does. Otherwise, however, he can be so condemnatory as to suggest a reflexively merciless, possibly infanticidal tribal deity casting the aesthetically or morally misshapen forth into the Outer Darkness. Let’s steel ourselves to gaze upon his expanded inventory of Howardian infractions (page 148 in the Campbell book):

Howard’s prodigious imagination in conceiving the life and actions of primitive peoples is certainly remarkable. It was probably derived from his own fascination with what he perceived to be the freedoms of barbarian life and his implacable hostility to civilization — attitudes fostered by his being the descendant of one of the original settlers of Texas and his lifelong residence in the remote village of Cross Plains. These provocative conceptions are, however, frequently offset by a lamentable crudity of expression and a yielding to the most hackneyed conceptions of pulp fiction: characters who are broad caricatures rather than living beings; lurid bloodletting and melodrama; implausibility of action, especially with regard to supernatural phenomena; and a general slovenliness in diction and plot development. Howard and his work have attracted a small but vocal band of cheerleaders who are determined to give him high rank as a writer and thinker, but it is unlikely that he will ever have as high a standing as, say, his friend H. P. Lovecraft in general literature.

(Continue reading this post)

Looks like I figured correctly when I earlier predicted that the vast majority of those overpriced eBay Howard items would remain unsold. Almost every one of the auctions ended without a single bid, even while lots of other people listed items at low starting prices and had them bidded up into the correct ballpark.

Out of the dozens of auction winners in the past few days, the only one that qualifies as a sucker bought two of Van Hise’s chapbooks for at least double what he would have paid anywhere else. I guess if you’re real lazy, real dumb, or real loaded you don’t care what you pay, but it’s embarrassing nonetheless.

In a previous posting, eBay madness, I noted some of the Howard items being hawked for ridiculous prices at that site. Apparently I spoke too soon. Has there ever been a time when there was such a magnificent variety of Howard items on eBay, and at such absurdly bloated prices?

Grant Conans for $200 a pop when they are easily available elsewhere at $20? Bob Price booklets for up to $100, not as a hotly contested bid but as a minimum starting price? A freaking REH Days postcard that is widely available for fifty cents each June being offered by James Van Hise for a “Buy It Now” price of $20? This is outrageous.

And the weirdest thing is that all of this stuff has hit within the last week or so, and from a wide variety of different sellers. If one dealer had tried to game the market in this way, that’s one thing. But with so many items listed from multiple sellers, it makes you wonder what is happening. Did the World Fantasy Convention somehow convince dealers that there is a large Howard market out there, a market they were previously unaware of? Is there just a centennial swell at play? Whatever it is, it’s damn strange.

Browsing through the list one can see the Grant Conans, the Gnome Conans, assorted pulps, the Bob Price booklets, assorted REHupas, Howard Collectors, the Baen paperbacks, Jonathan Bacon’s old Fantasy Crossroads, all the early Dark Man issues, all three issues of Cromlech, foreign fanzines signed by Glenn Lord, Amras, Lone Star Fictioneers, an Always Comes Evening for a flat $1500, a 1937 Weird Tales for $275. It’s also amazing how many items are listed at set prices, with the dealers refusing to let them be auctioned so that the market could naturally determine the highest bid.

I guess it’s just possible that collectible prices for REH are actually going through the roof, but I think it’s much more likely that these dealers are fishing for suckers, and most of these items will never sell at such ludicrous prices. That’s the reason the dealers have them locked down with high “Buy It Now” prices rather than auction them, because they are fairly sure they would never get these amounts in an open market. I’m not a collector (thank God), but if I was I would forget about this forum and do my searching at abebooks or addall, where prices are reasonable and fairly competitive. Looking at all of this sitting out there blows me away. I’m really interested to see how much of it sells. Wow.

Thanksgiving! Baked turkey, with dressing made of biscuit and cornbread crumbs, sage, onions, eggs, celery salt and what not; hot biscuits and fresh butter yellow as gold; rich gravy; fruit cakes containing citron, candied pineapple and cherries, currents, raisins, dates, spices, pecans, almonds, walnuts; pea salad; pumpkin pie, apple pie, mince pie with pecans; rich creamy milk, chocolate, or tea — my Southern ancestors were quite correct in adopting the old New England holiday.

I hope you had as enjoyable a Thanksgiving this year as I did. I don’t know when I enjoyed a holiday more.

That’s Robert E. Howard, writing to H. P. Lovecraft in December of 1932. In some ways, he didn’t have much to be thankful for. The Depression had hit hard, several of his reliable markets had stopped publishing, and his life’s savings was lost when the Cross Plains banks failed. But he still had his friends, and the joys of football games and boxing matches, and the serene and comforting cornucopia of riches and memories that is a Thanksgiving dinner with loved ones.

For that 1932 holiday he told HPL that he spent the morning doing chores, then went with Lindsey Tyson to a football game in Brownwood between Howard Payne College and Southwestern University, fierce rivals who on that day were battling for the “championship of the Texas Conference.” Before the game he ate dinner at “the home of a friend” — Tevis Clyde Smith, perhaps? — and then

we helped him unload a bunch of steers, in order to facilitate an early arrival at the game. They were the finest, fattest, big Hereford critters I’ve seen in a longest time; and one of them was the meanest and wildest I ever saw. The three of us fought him all over the hill, and after we got him in the corral, we couldn’t get the ropes off. We had two ropes on him, or he’d have killed some of us. When he’d plunge at one of us, the other would haul him back, and so on. As it was both of us had some narrow shaves. We finally got one lasso off his horns, but to save our necks, we couldn’t get the other off. We had him hauled against the corral fence, and every time we slacked the rope, he took every inch of it, and tried to murder us. At last I threw a doubled lariat around his huge neck and snubbed his head down against the fence, and held him there while the rope was cast off his horns. Then it was every man for himself!

After that adventure, Howard “picked up another friend and repairing to the stadium, witnessed one of the fiercest, closest and hardest-fought games I have ever seen.” He describes the game to Lovecraft in detailed and poetic terms that still roil the blood seventy years later. “Primitive ferocity…heaving among the helmets…charging at blinding speed…driving with all the power of his iron legs…struck the line like a thunderbolt…devastating stiff-arm…terrific punishment…sheer power…desperate plunges…” As the game neared its end, Howard’s keen eye caught a scene of the sort that his stories reek of, the kind of scene that summed up Life itself to the Texan in all of its tragic majesty and red ruin:

Always the big fullback was in the midst of the battle, fighting with every ounce of his iron frame and ferocious spirit. Then toward the last of the game, something happened. I don’t know what it was. I was watching the ball, when a yell went up, and we saw the big Indian down. His leg was hurt. They carried him off the field and laid him on the sidelines, where they began working over his injury. A big German lad was sent in in his place. He was good, but he was not Hoot Masur. Southwestern began an implacable drive. They marched irresistibly down the field, fighting for every inch. At last, on the sidelines, the injured player rose, with the aid of his companions. He began to limp up and down the lines, leaning heavily on a team-mate. Doggedly he plodded, half-dragging his injured member, his heavy jaw set stoically. Out on the field his team-mates, crippled by his loss, were being pushed slowly back toward their own goal. The fullback let go of his supporter, and walked alone, limping deeply, moving slowly. From time to time he worked at the injured leg, stooping, flexing, trying to bend his knee. Then he would resume his endless plodding. I forgot to watch the game in the fascination of watching that grim pathetic figure toiling along the sidelines — up and down — up and down. The sun was sinking, and the long shadow of the grandstands fell across the field. In that shadow the fullback plodded. Once, somewhere, I saw an old German print or woodcutting, depicting a woodcutter in a peaked hood carrying a bundle of sticks through the Black Forest. I was irresistibly reminded of this print. The peaked hood was there, even, the peaked hood of a grey sweater-like garment worn by football players when not in the game. There were the same massive shoulders, made abnormally broad by the bulge of the shoulder-pads beneath the sweater; the same slouching, forward bending pace. The shadows of the forest were to an extent repeated in the shadows of the grandstand. Only the bundle of sticks was missing, but the figure etched in the shadow stooped and toiled as if it bore the weight of a world on its shoulders. There was tragedy in the sight; he was eating his heart out because he was not back in the game, stopping those merciless onsets, giving freely of his thews and heart and blood, eating up punishment that would have snapped the bones of a lesser man. There was nothing of the story-book sob-stuff about the business. But to me, at least, there was a savage pathos in the sight of that grim, mighty figure plodding up and down the lines, striving vainly to work his bitterly injured leg back into shape, so he could re-enter the game. At last, when his captainless team was making its last stand, with its back to the wall, he sank down on the naked ground and covered his eyes with his hands. He would not watch the defeat of his mates. But that defeat did not come. Fighting like madmen, they broke up the attack just half a foot from the goal-line. The final score: Howard Payne 6, Southwestern 0. The fullback’s touchdown in the first quarter was the only score. As the grandstands emptied and people rushed down onto the field to congratulate the winners, I saw him limping slowly through the throng, toward his teammates.

Drama? You will see it on the football field, raw and real and naked, unaided by footlights, stage settings, or orchestras.

After the game it was time to repair to a local restaurant for a second gargantuan meal, a repast of “roast turkey and oyster dressing and ice cream” gorged while watching “the shirt-tail parade and the other antics of the celebrating collegians.” In 1932 Howard was but twenty-six, still only a few years removed from his time at Howard Payne and from his wayward youth. He was young, and he was with friends, and he had both watched and participated in a day chock full of hard work and brutal masculine struggle against nature and implacable foes. He had fought and he had feasted, in much the same way his new hero Conan was about to begin doing in the pages of Weird Tales for the very first time a scant few weeks later.

Howard finished the most enjoyable holiday in his memory by driving home with Lindsey “through the forty miles of hill country, through one of those still, clear, crisp star-filled nights that you enjoy only during good football weather. Simple and unsophisticated enjoyment, yet somehow I got more kick out of the whole affair than I’ve gotten out of more expensive and less innocent pleasures. We didn’t even take a drink of liquor.” After all, what use is liquor on a day punch-drunk with the mead of Life? On that Thanksgiving Howard had received a stirring confirmation of the way he viewed the world, a 50-yard-line view of the best and worst that existence had to offer. In his description of that day we see the writer’s mind at work, simmering with the dreams and thoughts that fueled his fiction.

Later in that same letter to Lovecraft Howard proclaims: “By God, I demand freedom for myself. And if I can’t have it, I’d rather be dead.” Over the next four years he would make good on this promise as his certainties about Life began to unravel and spiral into the abyss. But on Thanksgiving of 1932 the spirit of Robert E. Howard was free, and shone with a brilliance that melted away both the shadows of the Great Depression and the dark mantle of the depression that was all his own.

In the end, Life isn’t about freedom from struggle or tragedy or despair, it’s about what you do in the face of it. Whether it’s a dwindling group of battered pilgrims giving thanks to God, or a battered Indian fullback holding his head in his hands as his team wins, or a battered writer seeing in everything around him the seeds of his life’s work, drunk with the sheer humanity of it all. We all undergo great hardships in this world, but occasionally a day or a moment appears like an oasis, reminding us of all that is good and free. More than any other day, Thanksgiving conjures such feelings within us. We can read Howard’s thoughts seventy-four years later and share in his exultation, in the process reminding ourselves of the good in our own lives. Family, friends, passions, luck. Different draughts for each of us, but all drawn from the same sweet well.

Happy Thanksgiving.

At the end of film critic Kenneth Turan’s new book Now In Theaters Everywhere: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Blockbuster, he includes his 1979 essay “Behind the Scenes: Conan the Barbarian” which might be of interest to fans of Howard and of that film. A recent Los Angeles Times book review by Tara Ison calls that particular essay “a wonderful look at the origins and development of a then-high-risk film project” but adds that “the story ends, disappointingly, in pre-production” rather than also describing the shooting of the film. Still, if you are a fan of that movie, you may want to hunt it down.

On the REH Innercircle e-mail group, Gary Romeo alerts Howard fans to an interview with the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, M. T. Anderson, who mentions that he’s been reading none other than Robert E. Howard and jonesing to write a book centering around barbarian themes. Pretty cool coming from a guy who made his name writing award-winning pop-up books and the like. (Hat tip: Don Herron)

Apropos to my last post is news that Cross Plains Universe, the book of Howardian-themed stories written by Texans and given away at the World Fantasy Convention, has become a hot item on eBay, with each copy offered being sold for $35-$40. For those of you who want a copy, especially one signed by many of the writers who attended the con, keep your eyes peeled. One copy was recently offered with a “Buy It Now” price of $25, and someone snapped it up right away.

Those of you who read The Cimmerian will be privy to a behind the scenes story in November about how the book almost was derailed at the last minute by Paradox Entertainment lawyers on the warpath. All week at the convention I heard various stories about the incident, and it soured a lot of people on Paradox’s stewardship of the Howard legacy. With luck it was a one-time faux pas, and in the future the newly formed REH foundation will help to prevent such things from happening.

UPDATE: Paradox’s Licensing Manager Leigh Stone writes in to say that the sundry stories floating around the con about the production of the book were “entirely untrue,” while Rusty Burke assures me that Paradox “bent over backwards” to help with the book and hence have been unfairly mis-characterized as bad guys in this scenario. This flatly contradicts the numerous anecdotes we all heard at the con, so I’ll be sure to include the Paradox/REH Foundation side of things in the TC trip report as well.

UPDATE #2: The WFC people have announced that they have extra copies of this book, which can be had for $19 here. Of course, if you want the signed copies, you’ll still have to haunt eBay.

Lately I have noticed that various sellers on eBay have been posting certain Howard items for absolutely ridiculous prices. Right now there is a copy of Dark Valley Destiny, signed by both de Camps (as most copies out there are) but not even in a slipcase, being offered for the laughable price of $60. With a little searching one could probably find a better copy with slipcase for $20 max, and probably a lot less.

Meanwhile, last week someone was trying to sell individual Don Grant Conan books for $200 per copy. When you consider all the things that series has going against it — incomplete, terrible art, lots of editorial mistakes and emendations — the true silliness of such a price sinks in. The books are not even that rare. Needless to say, he didn’t sell any of them.

At the World Fantasy Convention, the dealers were fairly well stocked in Howard materials, everything from the latest hardcovers, trades, and paperbacks to all of the old books, fanzines, and ephemera, even some REHupa mailings. But there too I noticed that the prices in almost all cases were prohibitive. Paperbacks that usually sell for $5 or so online were listed at $15 or even $20 per copy. I did notice one discrepancy, though: there were two copies of Heroes from Bear Creek from one dealer, and each was listed at only $20, far below the $50-$100 it usually sells for on eBay these days.

It seems that with the resurgence in interest in Howard and the thrill of the centennial, some of the more craven collectors and speculators are testing the market by dangling items out there at high prices and seeing if anyone bites. I like to see Howard collectibles move up in price as a sign of his increased viability and popular interest, but it’s an organic process connected to rarity of the item and contents, print runs, quality, etc. There’s a difference between good Howard collectors and suckers, and the sellers on eBay are slowly learning the difference. It’ll be interesting to see how long the prices on some of this stuff remain inflated before people get real again. Eventually they will return to the tried and true method of starting them at a low price and then letting the auction process work its magic, instead of placing stuff out there with outsized reserve and “Buy It Now” prices.