MOONSHINE NO. 4 Issued by John F. Burke from 57 Beauclair Drive, Liverpool 15, after a month's absence from the FIDO mailing. Conveyed to youse guys through the kindness of JMRosenblum. HEROIC Now they ask, Where are those who with competent art will hymn the .post-mortem of our heroes' deeds? Anatomizing their hearts extract with blue-black fingers, nipped by the igloo warmth of the deep uncommittal trousers' pocket, routine romance from blood and bone. Exposing to the gallery gaze escaping little liaisons and antipathies in a thickening stream from the body. Thickening slowing piling in a brown plano-graphic streak that will come out easily in cold water and came out easily in cold water unaffected by the salt. Each goes to death along a narrow line of tangents spirals and ricochets retracing paths into a little scribble but observing writes Universe. And paying expensively for existence with destroyed consciousness and mutilated realities to me the plangent operation communicates surgical fever. ERIC C. HOPKINS. TOPICAL TUNE "Please give me Something to Remember you By" - as an unpaid contributor to WONDER STORIES pleaded with Hugo Gernsback. If you find this sheet is larger than the others in the FIDO mailing, just use your scissors, and save us the trouble of doing it this end. If you don't find it's larger, then you're crazy, because it is. BASIC ENGLISH The translation of the Bible into Basic English (a system using only 850 words, added to slightly for this particular work) has just been completed after 10 years.. We wonder if "Gray Lensman" or "Galactic Patrol" will ever be tackled?
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	FROM D.R. SMITH: Regarding Hopkins remarks (in MOONSHINE No. 1), I think that if Hopkins lives a cheap and gaudy life it is his own fault and no-one else's. He seems to be labouring under the impression that if a thing is plentiful and readily available to the masses it is therefore worthless, that now anyone can turn on Beethoven or purchase recorded versions of his works these works therefore cease to be great, that now for a modest sum one can get a Medici print of a masterpiece art is doomed, that anything mass-produced and therefore cheap is necessarily ugly. I think he is rather too gloomy about things, with too much of a feudalistic idea that the good things of life should be for the few and that the rest should. have nothing. The tiny roomed houses he criticises are better than the mouldering two- roomed cottages which they have replaced; that they are likely to collapse in twenty years instead of two hundred is a good thing rather than a bad, for they will then give place to improved structures - we hope! It is no Utopia that we live in - but it is better for most of us than the world of the previous generation, far better, than life ten generations ago. We are, in fact, farther on in the struggle of our race up from the beast, a blind meaningless struggle for most of us but one in which we play an infinitesimal part, a confused struggle with no conscious direction to it but the urge to live; to propagate the race, and to invent and build. Occasionally two masses of people fall out as to the best way to do it, or the urge to expand and improve of one mass of people clashes with the similar aspirations of another, and then there is war. For if there was not war, one lot or the other would have to change their ideas for a new set of conceptions, and this neither will do voluntarily as anyone who changes his opinions except by having others forcibly thrust on him is regarded with detestation by the rest of humanity, or at least by those who agree with the abandoned principles instead of the new ones, As most excellently shown by the conduct of certain pacifist fans when Youd changed his opinions! [If this is true, then anyone with any sort of doctrine whatever must hate Sam considering the number of times he has changed his opinions!] As a contribution to the "Books which should be read" [You mean Non-Fantasy Books] list, a few which I have recently derived pleasure and information from are "The Arts of Mankind" by van Loon, "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the God" by Robert Graves [The first is shortly to be issued in two volumes in the Penguin series], "Journey Around my Skull" by thingumebob and "Doctor, Here's Your Hat" by whatsisname, "World's End" by Upton Sinclair, "The Nonsensibus" compiled by Wyndham Lewis, and on such a list should also go such works as "The Forsyte Saga", "Penguin Island", and "The Decameron". The F.Orlin Tremaine magazine, COMET, features a large number of fan writers. England is represented by Frank Edward Arnold and "Charnock Walsby" (L.V.Heald). The excellent penguin anthology of American Short Stories features one superb fantasy by Stephen Vincent Benet (who also has three amusing fantasies in various Penguin Parades) - "Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly Gates", as well as eleven other first-class examples of the art of the short story by Hemingway, Saroyan, and others. Our best wishes for the month go to the fan who is not writing a novel! Who is he, you ask? As a matter of fact, we don't know.
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