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XMas '89 letter from FACTSHEET FIVE
December 1989
Dear Friends:
@MIKE = Last December ended with FACTSHEET FIVE showing a profit
of about $1140 for the year. Concurrently, the magazine added
another phone line and swallowed another room of our house as
office space, and even those quarters are starting to get cramped
(don't tell Carolyn I said that!). This led into the major
development of 1989 for me<197>I'm now self-employed full-time as
a publisher. But more on that later.
@MIKE = In January Kathy Manley and I drove down to Philadelphia
for the planning meeting for the 1989 continental anarchist
gathering. This was the meeting that left me pretty well
disillusioned with the state of the anarchist movement. Several
people appear to be trying to make careers out of being anarchist
politicians. Fortunately, our local reading group has remained
fun, and so I've been active on the local level while letting the
continent do what it wants.
@MIKE = January also saw me buy a new computer for FACTSHEET
FIVE. For you techies out there, it's a 12 MHz 286 machine made
by Zeos. (For you non-techies, that's a reasonable compromise
between fancy features and cost). After losing one power supply
(which the company quickly replaced) it's been a reliable
machine, and I can recommend the company to those who dare to buy
by mail order. I now have sufficient computing equipment in house
to make producing FF relatively easy, although there's always
room for more toys.
@CAROLYN = NO MORE TOYS! (And no magazines under the bed!) (As,
you probably gathered, this is Carolyn, now, in the indented
paragraphs.) In addition to computers, we also acquired new
residents in the form of mice in the woodpile in our basement.
The cat beat us to a few, but we successfully trapped eight in a
plastic humane trap and dumped them in an aquarium. They were
really very cute and provided some entertainment until the
weather warmed enough in the spring to transplant them to a large
open space. Fortunately, overcrowding appeared to inhibit
breeding, so we still only had eight. Actually, we still have
one we've made a pet, since we judged it too weak to make it on
its own (and two more caught this winter).
@MIKE = RPI approved my leave of absence in mid-January and the
cat was out of the bag as far as my department was concerned.
Technically I can go back and finish the PhD degree next Fall,
but the way things look right now, I won't be doing so. Between
the success FF is having and some political changes at the
university, RPI just doesn't feel like the right place for me any
more.
@MIKE = In January I started working a weekly shift at our local
food co-op, putting groceries on the shelves an hour and a half
each week. I started off stocking the health and beauty aids
department, about which I knew nothing, but it was sufficiently
complex to keep me from getting bored. As a result, we can buy
our food at near-wholesale prices there, and do 99% of our
shopping at the co-op these days.
@CAROLYN = The more I hear about the mega-corparations which own
name brands, the better I feel about not buying from them.
@MIKE = February marked my second full year of remaining sober.
For some reason it also brought about a couple of chunks of good
publicity for FF. One was an article I wrote for ARTPAPER, a
Minneapolis tabloid, about censorship hassles experienced by some
cartoonists. Another was an article on fanzines in PENTHOUSE,
using FF and myself as the authorities on the subject. This
brought in a few hundred responses, including a notable influx of
mail from military bases. I was also interviewed by CAMPUS
REVIEW, the Cleveland PLAIN DEALER and the Orlando SENTINEL, and
contributed articles to KINDRED SPIRIT and OVO.
@CAROLYN = The term was under way for me in more mundane ways,
including teaching my course in "materials science for
physicists." I felt particularly good about it this year, as two
of my students have gone off to graduate school in the field (one
at Harvard, and one at RPI), and report the course was surprising
useful. (I also feel too young to be feeling so benignly
paternalistic (maternalistic just doesn't have the right
connotations) towards ex-students. In a more humbling
adventure, it took the two of us (a physicist and an engineer)
about five hours to decipher the circuit map on the back of the
stove and track the problem down to a bad thermister. (However,
at least we got it right<197>the stove works again, which is better
than you get sometimes even spending the money for a service
technician.)
@MIKE = In February I was elected to the Board of Directors of
the food co-op to fill a vacancy, and was confirmed in this
position at the general membership meeting in April. I soon found
myself as the chair of the Finance Committee, and many of my
waking hours and a few of my sleeping ones are now filled with
the details of running a million-dollar mostly-volunteer
enterprise. It's been an interesting contrast with my own smaller
business.
@MIKE = FACTSHEET FIVE's resident curmudgeon Garry De Young
dropped by for an afternoon later in the month, on the way back
from a press conference in Washington DC. We had a nice chat
about everything from the Federal Reserve to the difficulty of
getting the Supreme Court to listen.
@MIKE = FACTSHEET FIVE got a bit more legitimate in March, with
its own bank account. As soon as I started describing my
requirements to the banker<197>lots of small checks from all over
the place<197>he knew who I was, since we'd been depositing them
all in our personal account. I also stepped up my exercise
program with the purchase of a stationary bicycle. This strikes
many people as insane, but it's ideal for me, since I can review
videotapes while I'm pedaling<197>something that would be
difficult with a more mobile bicycle.
@CAROLYN = I haven't done any stationary cycling, but I did fly
out to St. Louis to give a talk at the spring meeting of the
American Physical Society (actually that's physicists, not
athletes). I called Eric Gunderson, an old friend from Caltech,
out of the blue and spent some time sight-seeing with him. Yes,
I went up in the arch and was suitably impressed. I was
disappointed by the slightly cold weather when I first arrived
(I'd had enough of that already), but it eventually warmed up to
provide beautiful sunny days with daffodils in bloom, beating
spring in Albany by about two months. We had a fairly cold
winter, but very little snow. That meant little shoveling, but
was hard on the plants (for those of you more fortunate warmer
climate types I should perhaps explain that the snow provides
some insulation).
@MIKE = Meanwhile I was still in school for the first part of the
year, carrying a fairly heavy class load (I've now pretty much
finished the requirements for the PhD with the exception of minor
things like writing a dissertation). As part of this, I gave a
presentation to our Material Culture course using artifacts from
the NASA Apollo program stored in the RPI archives. It was pretty
successful, in that all of us felt we learned things from playing
with the bits of spacecraft wiring and such.
@CAROLYN = In early April, Gay Kendall, a friend and one of the
afore-mentioned former students, and I went on an alleged skiing
trip. The alleged is because after being hasseled about the
discount coupons we had (we were offered the same package for
$120 instead of $20) we decided to go on a hike instead. We
"discoved" a marvelous hiking area there in the Catskills which
has been popular for more than a century. Of course, we had no
maps (the ranger claimed to have had them once), but fortunately
met up with a local self-appointed and very patient guide.
Luckily, with his help, I was able to persuade Gay it was time to
go back when the snow started flying faster. And very wet, cold,
tired, but content we were when we returned.
@MIKE = We hosted the second of a series of FACTSHEET FIVE
parties in April, with about 40 people showing up. This included
Jacob Rabinowitz, who was so excited that he showed up a day
early and helped clean the place. Thanks, Jake.
@MIKE = I saw my doctor in April and I seem to be very healthy
with the exception of chronically <I>low<D> blood pressure. There
doesn't seem to be anything to be done about this unless it gets
so low that the Red Cross won't take any more of my platelets,
which hasn't happened yet. Perhaps the exercise bike has done too
good a job.
@CAROLYN = With spring promising an appearance soon, we took a
snowy hike at one of the Nature Conservancy wild lands preserves.
There are several around here that we are slowly visiting, part
of a remarkably sucessful national and international program of
conserving wildlife by buying the land outright rather than using
lobbying efforts.
@MIKE = My last class at RPI was towards the end of April, and I
escaped shortly thereafter to a life of self-employment. What
this means is that I work 65 hours a week or so putting out
FACTSHEET FIVE, for a pay rate of something under $2 an hour. But
it beats the heck out of having to put on a tie and go into an
office or work as an engineer. The magazine has been very
successful this year, with the circulation increasing from 4000
to almost 7000. It looks like a price hike in February 1990 will
be required to keep the project on a firm financial footing, so
I'll be able to continue staying home and being self-employed.
@MIKE = We had some visiting dignitaries spend a night as they
passed through: Miekal And, Liz Was, Liaizon Wakest & their
friend Eric stopped on the way to somewhere else. We had local
experioddicist Geof Huth and his wife over for dinner as well,
and discussed curious literature and played with their computer
writing and art objects far into the night.
@CAROLYN = Not to disappoint those of you who are expecting a
catalogue of car repairs, during the year we had to cope with
failures of the Toyota's brakes, the Toyota's engine and
transmission (apparently simultaneously, spelling its demise),
and the Datsun's muffler and and tires. Fortunately, since we
would now be up to three dead cars in the driveway, we gave the
old VW bug away to a student who replaced the main oil seal in
our driveway (he believed in wiring by trial and error<197>I've
never seen a distributor cap explode before). I finally bit the
bullet and had the Toyota and the old Gremlin (both of certain
sentimental attachment) towed away, so we are now coping fairly
well with just one car (the Datsun, in case you weren't
following).
@MIKE = CAMPUS VOICE is a publication with a lot more money than
mine. As proof of this, they sent a photographer up from New York
to take some pictures for the article they published on FF.
Actually, the few pictures took nine hours, with lights and
fisheye lenses and makeup and an assistant and who knows how much
film. Now I know another activity I'm going to avoid in the
future.
@MIKE = The Libertarian Book Club invited me to come down to New
York City to talk to them in May, and I accepted, talking about
some of the problems various people had had with self-publishing,
from bankruptcy to censorship. I also spent some time with a
reporter from the NEW YORK POST, and so got my picture and story
in another newspaper.
@CAROLYN = We also traveled out to the hinterlands (defined as
greater than 5 miles from a 24 hour grocery store) a few times
this summer to help with the construction project of our friend
Marianne, another member of the local anarchist group. She is
building a get away cabin on their land (about 160 acres) in the
shape (the cabin, not the land) of a truncated icosohedron. (For
the uninitiated an icosohedron is a solid with 20 triangular
sides, meeting in groups of five.) This results in a beautiful
and appropriate structure for the site, near a natural waterfall,
but meant for a lot of difficult compund angle cuts in the
rafters, a problem compounded by the lack of electricity and
therefore power tools at the construction site.
@MIKE = June saw me run out to Boston for another talk, this time
at the Primal Plunge bookstore. It was largely the same as the
one I'd just done in New York, but fortunately there was no
audience overlap.
@MIKE = I did a massive advertising mailing in June, sending
information on FF to something over 3000 libraries across the
country. This proved to be a dismal failure for getting new
subscriptions. But library business has been picking up recently,
as I get recommended on the library version of the old boy
network.
@CAROLYN = We had been feeding the birds from a feeder all
winter, which resulted in a large number of nests in our yard,
and an equal upsurge in the number of fledglings to be rescued
from the dogs. We caught one baby grackle with a deformed leg
and kept it for awhile, but it eventually succumbed (probably, we
were informed, from the defects which caused the parent birds to
kick it out of the nest in the first place). Ah, well I'll still
probably try again given the opportunity, despite the frequent
feedings required. (I had to take the bird into work on days in
which Mike was going to be out for more than two hours at a
stretch.)
@MIKE = More newspaper publicity in June, as the WASHINGTON POST
called me up to talk for a few hours. They produced what may well
have been the most condescending article on the small press all
year, but it did get me a few subscriptions.
@CAROLYN = In July we traveled out to California for Mike's
brother David's wedding to Kari Maxwell (who is now Kari
Gunderloy, much to Mike's mother's satisfaction<197>I may finally be
off the hook for keeping my own name). This was a very lavish
and beautiful affair at the Bel Air Bay in Malibu, and actually
involved getting Michael into a tux, a feat not accomplished even
for his own wedding. Of course we took the opportunity to visit
with his family and mine. I spent a couple of days with my
sister Evelyn in Oceanside, even getting to experience watching
her react to a bee sting and having to cope with the bureaucracy
required from the insurance company to acquire the necessary
shots and medications. Typically enough, she was stung within
the first five minutes of our arriving on the beach, so we didn't
get to hit the waves until we were back up at my parents in
Camarillo. From Camarillo, my parents had arranged a trip by
small plane to the Santa Cruz in the Channel Islands. The
islands are a preserve owned partly owned by the Nature
Conservancy, and are being returned to their "natural" (pre
-European) state. This is a spectacular journey in space and
time, walking along the sands picking up (and replacing) abundant
abalone shells and spotting courmorant nesting sites.
@MIKE = I upgraded my publishing technology a bit more in July
with the purchase of Ventura Publisher, a program which allows me
to see the entire magazine on screen before I print anything out,
and adds a lot of typesetting flexibility to my operation. It's
been a big help in cramming ever-more information into an
affordable number of pages. I also started buying file cabinets
in a so far vain attempt to control the fanzine influx around
here.
@CAROLYN = In August I decided I couldn't stand the kitchen
anymore and began ripping it up in prepartion for a long-planned
overhaul. I did succeed in removing an ugly drop ceiling to
return the kitchen to its spacious 10 foot height, installing a
new lighting fixture, squaring off a corner which had been a
mish-mash of tacky bends, and stripping the walls of some of
their layers of contact paper and plastic tile board so they
could be painted, and the floor of fake parquet linoleum tile so
the real hardwood floor could be restored. I stopped in the
middle of building in shelves and before painting, to make way
for the Factsheet Party, and I'm afraid its been that way ever
since. (But now its my mess and not someone else's, so it feels
better.)
@MIKE = The third FACTSHEET FIVE party happened in August, with
something over 65 people here (I was being the harried host, and
so lost count. Next time someone else goes to the bus station to
pick people up). A good time was had by all, and there were only
a dozen or so people still around for breakfast the next morning.
Also on the FF front, I put together a booklet of the collected
"Why Publish?" columns from the magazine, and had my first week
with over $1000 income (this has now become routine<197>but
expenses have risen as well).
@CAROLYN = We had some of the anarchist group over here in August
to help paint the garage (to match the house<197>yellow and green)
and again in September to help chainsaw the remains of two trees
which we had had to have cut down. As much as I didn't want to
see them go both were dying and one was threatening the
neighbor's house and the other the electricity lines, and in
several storms since then I've been glad they're down. It turns
out the most of the cost of tree removal is the cutting up and
hauling away, so we did this with our own and a friend's chain
saw and a rented chipper. Neither project is completely done,
but much farther along then would be with many more hours spent
by ourselves. (And if it wasn't for the recent firewood delivery
waiting to be hauled to the basement (the just cut trees won't be
ready until next season), my driveway would finally be clear of
logs to be sawn and cars to be towed.
@MIKE = Bob and Nora LeChevalier and their friend Athelstan
stopped by on the way to the Worldcon in Boston. They're the
major folks behind lojban, an artificial language which I find
quite fascinating though I ran out of time to try to learn it
some months back.
@MIKE = For my thirtieth birthday in September Carolyn and I
drove down to the Thelemic Arts Center an hour or so south of
here, where I proceeded to speak on the topic of "Fanzines and
Transformation". The audience was a bit sparse, but we made some
money for TAC, and I thought it was a pretty good way to spend
the day. Besides, it was my last chance to have an audience trust
me.
@MIKE = I learned to run a cash register in September. Actually,
I had to, since I was part of a team to completely revise the way
the co-op's cash registers were used. It's fun, but probably
wouldn't be if I had to do it for 8 hours every day.
@MIKE = Yael Dragwyla and her friend George popped in later in
the month, since they had business on the East Coast. We spent a
few hours getting acquainted in person, after being good friends
through the mail already. (Try explaining <I>that<D> to the average man
in the street! I have friends all over the country who I've never
met).
@MIKE = September was a big month for FF, as I switched to
bimonthly publication (from quarterly). Now I'm putting out six
issues a year instead of four, which makes any given issue less
work but seems to add up to more work overall. But it was
necessary for financial stability, as well as to keep the
individual issues from growing to the size of phone books.
@CAROLYN = The fall term has of course been going apace for me,
with an undergraduate course in modern optics<197>a good bunch, this
year<197>and a graduate lab course in non-linear optics using my
laser lab. I just finished teaching the last classes today and
will have only the final and reports to deal with before
Christmas.
@MIKE = I finished my second gallon of blood donations in
September. For those who don't already know, I'm a pheresis
donor. Pheresis is a technique where they hook you up to a
machine for an hour or so. The machine pumps blood out of one
arm, separates off the platelets, and gives everything else back.
There's always a heavy demand for platelets, and since you can
donate once every couple of weeks instead of only every sixty
days I get called pretty often. In fact, I've now passed Carolyn
in the number of pints I've given, and she's been at it much
longer than I.
@CAROLYN = But mine were whole blood!
@MIKE = Gary Smith, who used to put out WINGED MERCURY MESSENGER,
dropped by at the tail end of the month. Now Gary networks in
person rather than by mail, and we spent an intense couple of
days swapping information about who was doing what and going
through each other's resource collections.
@MIKE = At the start of October we drove down to New Jersey for
my Grandfather's 80th birthday party. This got a big chunk of the
family together in one place at one time. Of course we spent a
lot of it eating. And, since we both had to get back the next
day, we spent eight hours or so of the day driving. Fortunately
the weather was good.
@MIKE = FF got yet another business tool in October, a postage
meter. The savings in time, not to mention wear and tear on my
tongue, has been considerable.
@MIKE = I joined a couple of other co-op Board members on a trip
to the annual NEFCO (New England Federation of Co-Operatives)
meeting in Brattleboro, Vermont. We found out that our store is
doing things differently from almost everyone else<197>but since
we're pretty successful, we probably won't rush to change them.
We also got a chance to wander through the Brattleboro Co-op,
which is a substantial market presence in town, and one
contributor to our own visions of future growth.
@CAROLYN = In October Evelyn Lau, a novelist-friend from way back
was doing a book promotion tour on this coast and was able to
vist for a few days. We picked a good day to show her our local
tourist attraction, Cohoes falls<197>it had just rained heavily and
was at the most spectacular I ever had seen it, complete with
rainbows in the massive plumes of spray. (Cohoes falls has the
distinction of being totally unheard of and also the second
largest falls this side of the Mississippi.) We also took the
train down to New York City to expose her to a new cultural
experience.
@MIKE = While Carolyn and Evelyn were in New York, I got the
chance to help out at something exciting: a barn-raising. Peter
Bellomo got a couple of us from the anarchist group to come up to
his farm and help put up a ten foot by twenty foot pole barn. We
had a great time swarming over it with hammers, dropping pieces
of lumber, and wrestling with plans that were verbal rather than
drawn, but by the end of the day, it was not only standing, it
looked pretty good.
@MIKE = I started November out by flying to Ann Arbor with Gayle
Anderson, one of the Co-op's managers, for the annual NASCO
(North American Students of Co-Operation) conference. It was a
great experience and very empowering<197>it's nice to know that
there are a lot of people in this country searching for economic
alternatives. We crashed with Matt Madden, who I knew from his
publishing activities, and got the chance to meet a lot of the
Ann Arbor area fanzine community.
@MIKE = The next weekend I took the bus into New York City for
another speaking engagement<197>an art show opening at Minor
Injury Gallery. Fortunately the show was of fanzine art, so I
actually knew a little about what I was talking about. I made a
lot of connections to people and had a good itme despite being
put off as usual by the sheer size of the city.
@MIKE = The local paper finally discovered me in November, and so
I had a story appear in the Albany TIMES-UNION. This led to
another interview with the local AP stringer, so I may yet show
up in <I>your<D> local paper (they tell me it'll go out to New
York papers in January and nationally some time after that). If
they print the story and cut the ordering information for FF, why
not send a letter to the editor to your local paper telling
people where to find me? Thanks.
@CAROLYN = The end of November is time for the annual Materials
Research Society conference, again in Boston, so I was able to
pop out for three days and see old friends and renew old contacts
and collaborations. I admit to some feelings of smugness hearing
the people from more Southernly climes complain of the cold<197>I
didn't mind, it was warmer than Albany (which is to say the
temperature readings required two digits). The return home by
Greyhound bus was enlivened by the start of a snowfall. (Have you
ever felt a bus slither?) Since then, the temperature hasn't been
above freezing for more than about 20 hours in the last couple of
weeks. Hopefully an unusually cold fall (my God it's not even
winter yet) will mean warmer weather later on. Maybe I'll move
to the Bahamas.
@MIKE = Budgeting seems to have been the big activity for the
last couple of weeks (along with putting out FACTSHEET FIVE #33,
6900 copies of 120 pages, which have mostly left our house as I
write this). besides our own budget, there were endless meetings
to hammer the Co-op budget into shape. We also hosted the
founding meeting of the Small Press Support Foundation, a group
designed to help out struggling small publishers. I'm donating
10% of FACTSHEET's profits to this cause, and urge other
publishers to follow suit in 1990, when we get our tax exemption.
@CAROLYN = All told a pretty good year, this one. We wish you
all joy and happiness in the coming one, and send you our
love<197>
Carolyn MacDonald
Michael Gunderloy
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