It's comforting to read this post -- and the comments -- from people who have experiences so similar to mine. You who know who Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Mansion, right?) and Soft Machine are and sometimes burn old letters. I believe I even said exactly the same thing about needing some Sundman after reading Stephenson. I surely recall being in a McCrorys Five and Dime. I can still hear the voice of the ancient sales clerk there, in her librarian glasses: "Keen I help you boiz?" as she tried, obviously, to prevent us from shop-lifting -- which we, as obviously, were doing.
I loved reading this. Sometimes life is indeed more interesting than fiction. ("Truth is stranger than fiction" also reminds me of an album by a band I can't remember called "Ruth is Stranger Than Richard") I got to know you, John, in a whole different way than I remember at Xavier, and I identify very much. I wish I had known you better then,...
Another fascinating story, and well told. I knew Albert Compton a little, and am sad to say it was just that, a little. Such a sorry ending he had. You never know the way life will take you. Sometimes it’s methodical, predictable, other times it goes in those ways one never saw coming in their wildest dreams. Thanks for sharing all this John. It’s the personal stuff that connects.
Thank you. Time is funny ain't it? I used to think of my personal history as a kind of linear thing — this happened, and then that happened, and then the next thing happened — often with some kind of implied cause and effect, but always with the things that happened earlier somehow more distant. Now when I look back, although the cause-and-effect stuff is what makes a story go, the recentness of any event in the past has no relation to how 'real' it feels to me. I remember stuff that you & I did as kids as clearly as anything I did 10 or 15 or 2 or 26 years ago. It's just a big soup. I'm trying to figure out how to makes sense of it. If I do, I'll be sure to let you know.
I enjoyed this a lot, John. You've a real way with telling a story. What a colourful life you've led.
I used to exchange letters with romantic partners, particularly with my first juvenile love who lived over 4 hours from me, and all-in-all they filled a shoebox. It was a real flashback to imagine receiving and reading those letters. Many years later, I burned all such letters of past lovers in the dark, overlooking a black bay, all out of a sense of protecting their privacy (it felt unfair for their words to be read by anyone else outside of the moments and contexts those words were conceived) and in an act of moving on.
I was sorry to hear of Albert's final destination. But I'm glad you and he found and fostered a friendship while you could.
Some letters are best discarded, for any of a variety of reasons. Although burning them may sound a bit melodramatic, sometimes it's necessary to do stuff like that to purge the bad vibes & move on. I loved & respected my father a lot, but it seemed that half of the letters I had from him dealt with the bad shit that had happened between us, not the good stuff. So it was healthy to throw away the bad ones and forget that stuff. And I've thrown out a ton of other letters from various people because they were, in a word, boring. (And I assure you that I've sent an uncountable number of boring letters myself. I hope the recipients have discarded them!)
I wonder if all of Albert's letters will please me as much as the one in this post did. The entire letter is one paragraph, no breaks between sentences, but every sentence perfectly punctuated. He goes from Teddy Kennedy 'next in line for death!' to Sport Cola, from the mock-romantic 'do you hate my guts because I'm fat?' to 'Do you know what I like to do? Shoot people with a water pistol from a moving bike,' from Dante to Lord of the Rings. I just think it's marvelous.
I noticed that you restacked this post. Thank you, I really appreciate it.
The letter, writing and receiving, is a form of communication that I feel melancholic seeing dwindle. I sent my first romantic letter circa 1999, which was on the cusp of all things digital. Kept it up for a number of years afterwards and was glad to have done so. There really is nothing like finding that hand sealed message on the floor beneath the letterbox. It's about as intimate a communication one can send or receive; the time, thought, effort, the unique handwriting, and everything from doodles to little gifts that may be included. Truly a special exchange.
Aye, not all letters or written thoughts should be preserved for the original recipient let alone anyone else that could discover them in shoebox in an attic post mortem! I guess I'd be on the side of hoping the letters I've sent over the years found their way to the flame or the mulch. Not everything needs to be preserved. Sometimes things were meant for a moment in time, and should be left there, having served their purpose.
I enjoyed Albert's letter immensely. I agree with all you say above. He seemed to have a keen mind for a lad his age and reminds me of a friend of mine back in Ireland in some respects. It makes his departure all the greater a loss.
No worries about the restack. I don't read generally as much as I'd like but I do try to find time to read your writing as it is proving time and again to be something special. Keep it up!
I’ve been reading John since AOTA and no other writer writes what I feel more. This story is particularly poignant to me. I hope John continues to figure it out (which is more helping us figure it out.) Creation Science needs its genesis and now that I know a little more of the back story of Albert, I want to understand him more.
I highly recommend all the works of this inspiring and insightful storyteller. Sure, you can read Stephenson but you’ll always come back to John Sundman.
Thank you for these very kind words. I confess that I went to bed last night happy with the number of 'reads' this post had received, but disappointed in how few 'likes' and shares it had gotten. I won't tell you how much work I put into writing these things; it's too embarrassing, and it makes me wonder if I'm wasting time I should be spending on Mountain of Devils & other pressing work. So it's very gratifying to log on this morning to find your encouraging note. I appreciate it very much.
I am resolved, by the way, to keep posting here as regularly as I can. I've just got to find a way to do it more efficiently. As a guy who's made most of his living since 1980 as a writer, one would think I would have figured some of that stuff out by now!
Per request, I'm adding in what I said over on Mastodon:
"Distinctive memoir-plus-resonance DeLillo feeling to this post. R.I.P. Albert."
Also, explaining, " a long time since Ratner's Star for me but IIRC that book of his will do nicely for what I had in mind -- the Mid-Atlantic understated colloquial with numinous stuff offstage."
You know that Niven and Pournelle wrote a take on Dante's Inferno? It's called Inferno. I liked it rather a lot when I read it in (*consults life list*) 1976.
If I remember right, Pournelle is the guy from whom I borrowed the temporal expression Real Soon Now, which he used to use in his column in a popular computing magazine or some such. Other than that I don't think I've read anything by either author, although I'm aware of them.
You should definitely read a little bit of Niven (I like his short stories best); intriguing ideas, bare-bones characters (not Asimov bareboned, but still not Holden Caulfield) and Strange Things.
Larry Niven was a darling of hard SF fans from the 1970s. I believe jerry Pournelle was his first collaborator (he had many in his later career). Yes, it's the same guy who wrote the regular column for Byte Magazine. One of their collaborations I count among my top five favorite SF novels of all time: The Mote in God's Eye. (Others are Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.)
John, thank you for your belated obituary. I confess I do not see the connection between your childhood friend's childhood, and him working in a liquor store after dropping out of college where he sounds like he reinvented himself.
I don't see the connection either. It's a total mystery to me. I would love to know what happened, but I have to accept that I never will. It's this tension that's driving me.
It's comforting to read this post -- and the comments -- from people who have experiences so similar to mine. You who know who Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Mansion, right?) and Soft Machine are and sometimes burn old letters. I believe I even said exactly the same thing about needing some Sundman after reading Stephenson. I surely recall being in a McCrorys Five and Dime. I can still hear the voice of the ancient sales clerk there, in her librarian glasses: "Keen I help you boiz?" as she tried, obviously, to prevent us from shop-lifting -- which we, as obviously, were doing.
I loved reading this. Sometimes life is indeed more interesting than fiction. ("Truth is stranger than fiction" also reminds me of an album by a band I can't remember called "Ruth is Stranger Than Richard") I got to know you, John, in a whole different way than I remember at Xavier, and I identify very much. I wish I had known you better then,...
Thanks for this friendly comment. For whatever it's worth, I don't know if I knew anybody well back at Xavier. What a long ago time, huh. Did you happen to read my earlier post in which I talked about Xavier & what a colossal shock to the system that that was for me? You might get a kick out of it: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/catholicism-and-human-sexual-response?r=38b5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Another fascinating story, and well told. I knew Albert Compton a little, and am sad to say it was just that, a little. Such a sorry ending he had. You never know the way life will take you. Sometimes it’s methodical, predictable, other times it goes in those ways one never saw coming in their wildest dreams. Thanks for sharing all this John. It’s the personal stuff that connects.
Thank you. Time is funny ain't it? I used to think of my personal history as a kind of linear thing — this happened, and then that happened, and then the next thing happened — often with some kind of implied cause and effect, but always with the things that happened earlier somehow more distant. Now when I look back, although the cause-and-effect stuff is what makes a story go, the recentness of any event in the past has no relation to how 'real' it feels to me. I remember stuff that you & I did as kids as clearly as anything I did 10 or 15 or 2 or 26 years ago. It's just a big soup. I'm trying to figure out how to makes sense of it. If I do, I'll be sure to let you know.
I enjoyed this a lot, John. You've a real way with telling a story. What a colourful life you've led.
I used to exchange letters with romantic partners, particularly with my first juvenile love who lived over 4 hours from me, and all-in-all they filled a shoebox. It was a real flashback to imagine receiving and reading those letters. Many years later, I burned all such letters of past lovers in the dark, overlooking a black bay, all out of a sense of protecting their privacy (it felt unfair for their words to be read by anyone else outside of the moments and contexts those words were conceived) and in an act of moving on.
I was sorry to hear of Albert's final destination. But I'm glad you and he found and fostered a friendship while you could.
Some letters are best discarded, for any of a variety of reasons. Although burning them may sound a bit melodramatic, sometimes it's necessary to do stuff like that to purge the bad vibes & move on. I loved & respected my father a lot, but it seemed that half of the letters I had from him dealt with the bad shit that had happened between us, not the good stuff. So it was healthy to throw away the bad ones and forget that stuff. And I've thrown out a ton of other letters from various people because they were, in a word, boring. (And I assure you that I've sent an uncountable number of boring letters myself. I hope the recipients have discarded them!)
I wonder if all of Albert's letters will please me as much as the one in this post did. The entire letter is one paragraph, no breaks between sentences, but every sentence perfectly punctuated. He goes from Teddy Kennedy 'next in line for death!' to Sport Cola, from the mock-romantic 'do you hate my guts because I'm fat?' to 'Do you know what I like to do? Shoot people with a water pistol from a moving bike,' from Dante to Lord of the Rings. I just think it's marvelous.
I noticed that you restacked this post. Thank you, I really appreciate it.
The letter, writing and receiving, is a form of communication that I feel melancholic seeing dwindle. I sent my first romantic letter circa 1999, which was on the cusp of all things digital. Kept it up for a number of years afterwards and was glad to have done so. There really is nothing like finding that hand sealed message on the floor beneath the letterbox. It's about as intimate a communication one can send or receive; the time, thought, effort, the unique handwriting, and everything from doodles to little gifts that may be included. Truly a special exchange.
Aye, not all letters or written thoughts should be preserved for the original recipient let alone anyone else that could discover them in shoebox in an attic post mortem! I guess I'd be on the side of hoping the letters I've sent over the years found their way to the flame or the mulch. Not everything needs to be preserved. Sometimes things were meant for a moment in time, and should be left there, having served their purpose.
I enjoyed Albert's letter immensely. I agree with all you say above. He seemed to have a keen mind for a lad his age and reminds me of a friend of mine back in Ireland in some respects. It makes his departure all the greater a loss.
No worries about the restack. I don't read generally as much as I'd like but I do try to find time to read your writing as it is proving time and again to be something special. Keep it up!
I’ve been reading John since AOTA and no other writer writes what I feel more. This story is particularly poignant to me. I hope John continues to figure it out (which is more helping us figure it out.) Creation Science needs its genesis and now that I know a little more of the back story of Albert, I want to understand him more.
I highly recommend all the works of this inspiring and insightful storyteller. Sure, you can read Stephenson but you’ll always come back to John Sundman.
Thank you for these very kind words. I confess that I went to bed last night happy with the number of 'reads' this post had received, but disappointed in how few 'likes' and shares it had gotten. I won't tell you how much work I put into writing these things; it's too embarrassing, and it makes me wonder if I'm wasting time I should be spending on Mountain of Devils & other pressing work. So it's very gratifying to log on this morning to find your encouraging note. I appreciate it very much.
I am resolved, by the way, to keep posting here as regularly as I can. I've just got to find a way to do it more efficiently. As a guy who's made most of his living since 1980 as a writer, one would think I would have figured some of that stuff out by now!
Per request, I'm adding in what I said over on Mastodon:
"Distinctive memoir-plus-resonance DeLillo feeling to this post. R.I.P. Albert."
Also, explaining, " a long time since Ratner's Star for me but IIRC that book of his will do nicely for what I had in mind -- the Mid-Atlantic understated colloquial with numinous stuff offstage."
You know that Niven and Pournelle wrote a take on Dante's Inferno? It's called Inferno. I liked it rather a lot when I read it in (*consults life list*) 1976.
If I remember right, Pournelle is the guy from whom I borrowed the temporal expression Real Soon Now, which he used to use in his column in a popular computing magazine or some such. Other than that I don't think I've read anything by either author, although I'm aware of them.
You should definitely read a little bit of Niven (I like his short stories best); intriguing ideas, bare-bones characters (not Asimov bareboned, but still not Holden Caulfield) and Strange Things.
Larry Niven was a darling of hard SF fans from the 1970s. I believe jerry Pournelle was his first collaborator (he had many in his later career). Yes, it's the same guy who wrote the regular column for Byte Magazine. One of their collaborations I count among my top five favorite SF novels of all time: The Mote in God's Eye. (Others are Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.)
Thanks. I don't think I'll look at anybody else's take on The Inferno until I've finished writing this book. "Anxiety of Influence" and all that.
I had to read the Niven/Pournelle Dante-knockoff for a class once and remember thinking it wasn't great but that was circa 1985.
Lucifer’s Hammer continues to amaze and one of my dreams is to understand the inferno.
John, thank you for your belated obituary. I confess I do not see the connection between your childhood friend's childhood, and him working in a liquor store after dropping out of college where he sounds like he reinvented himself.
I don't see the connection either. It's a total mystery to me. I would love to know what happened, but I have to accept that I never will. It's this tension that's driving me.