(Fotheringay)
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Hurl the Weaklings to the Fire! - A breakdown of thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography
Okay, so I've been putting off talking about it directly. My reasons? It involves a complicated web of self-examination to discuss the topic, I suspect. The topic? L. Sprague De Camp's rather infamous biography of HP Lovecraft.
Not that it's a bad bio. Written back in the mid-70s, it was a sufficiently scholarly work to make the academics take notice, & is credited with finalizing Lovecraft's ascent to his portenteous position as the 20th century's 'Master o' the Macabre'. It's a pretty thick whomping volume, too; I got ahold of the slightly expurgated paperback version, which excludes 13,000 words of L. Sprague's sprawling (yet strangely unsympathetic) prose-narration of Lovecraft's life.
It's fascinating to watch L. Sprague berate Lovecraft across time and space, bellowing at him like some fulvous-hued gym coach. There are biggish chunks of the book where he breaks into open stigmatization, scolding Lovecraft for not attending to his craft in a properly professional manner, mocking his self-taught typing style, & getting all pissy at the dissolution of his marriage (the tongue clucking is nigh-audible). De Camp writes with a craftman's eye, yet seems to have little sympathy for making actual art & the eccentricities it can entail; his summarization of Lovecraft's work is that he produced a decent lump of 'entertainment' (his exact word), & that he could have produced a whole lot more 'entertainment' if he'd manned up, eaten more red meat, & transcended his constant crushing sense of self-doubt (this last, at least, I can agree with). Sprague writes like a hyper-actualized, accultured, heterosexual white male in full possession of his so-called faculties; never dogged by spurts of psychoses, always able to go to bed & rise at a decent hour, & just damn sick of all these crybabies whining on when they should be story-bombing every available publisher, invincible ego primed to absorb any and all rejections.
While I agree that ego transformation is important, & that the artist must be capable of opening themselves to rejection in order to 'make it'/deliver their work into the hands of their readers, I certainly wouldn't classify a hyper-sensitive visionary with rejection issues as anything less of an artist on account of his querulous tuning. Lovecraft was indeed a visionary; L. Sprague was a respected writer of many things, most notably sword n' sorcery yarns distending from Robert E. Howard. He was possessed of the ability to move in highly normative circles, & confesses at the beginning of the bio that he feels singularly qualified to write about Lovecraft due to his subject's alien nature contrasting sharply with his own. Herein lies the boundary between writing-as-craft & writing-as-art; De Camp frequently reiterates his disgust that Lovecraft should EVER think of himself as special, or better/different (the terms seem interchangeable) than other people, in any way. To him, writing is ultimately like spinning wool, with small consideration for Beauty or shamanic 'nonsense,' & certainly conferring no right to sacred exaltation. Conversely, to Lovecraft writing was an invocation, in which he strove to personify abstract extradimensional impressions, symbols, & arcane revelations seemingly received via atavistic astral/dreamtime states, psyche all-the-while in violent revolt against the norms of his age. Couple this to HP's insistence on being a cogwork rational materialist in waking life, & one wonders how he managed to stay sane at all.
In short, De Camp is just too damn normal to write a bio of Lovecraft (LeGuin says something similar to this in her review of the biography), & I'm glad to see that there's a more respected contemporary bio written by S.T. Joshi. And yet...it was a good book. I learned a lot from it, & had my first extended glimpses into Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence; it also allowed me to juxtapose two very antipodal creative personalities (biographer & biographee). I'd recommend Lovecraft: A Biography overall, though I'll confess I'm not feeling very compelled to branch out into De Camp's fiction. A man so insistent on marginalizing relative artistic value can't have a whole lot to say. Some of the garbage he spews is frustratingly prosaic - really, there's 'no such thing as good or bad art, it's all subjective'? Piffle. Dismissing high art on the premise that 'it's all high art to somebody' is lazy, callous, & self-suppressive thinking. I refuse to believe there's no difference between Shakespeare and Duck Dynasty, so out the window that reasoning goes.
In conclusion, I must acknowledge that Lovecraft was very (frustratingly) self-defeating. He reacted to the merest hint of rejection with paroxysms of innermost doubt, resulting in his writing tapering off towards the end of his life. De Camp is right to address these traits, and fully justified in using them as red-flag examples for other writers, though the reader wonders at the very personal wording he chooses at times. This highlights the quixotic modern mass fascination with Lovecraft: many of those who profess to have been inspired by HP wax long about how they hate his writing style, abhor his racism, & think of him as having more psychological than artistic value. Yet all of them are caught up in his universe, battling his monsters, invoking his gods, & crying out at the black uncaring abyss he postulated. Lovecraft accessed something far beyond mere 'entertainment;' he gave the 20th century a new-birthed pantheon. For that, for everything (especially his vestigial passion for tricorne hats & periwigs), I forgive him his myriad faults. Hopefully someone will similarly forgive me one day.
Not that it's a bad bio. Written back in the mid-70s, it was a sufficiently scholarly work to make the academics take notice, & is credited with finalizing Lovecraft's ascent to his portenteous position as the 20th century's 'Master o' the Macabre'. It's a pretty thick whomping volume, too; I got ahold of the slightly expurgated paperback version, which excludes 13,000 words of L. Sprague's sprawling (yet strangely unsympathetic) prose-narration of Lovecraft's life.
It's fascinating to watch L. Sprague berate Lovecraft across time and space, bellowing at him like some fulvous-hued gym coach. There are biggish chunks of the book where he breaks into open stigmatization, scolding Lovecraft for not attending to his craft in a properly professional manner, mocking his self-taught typing style, & getting all pissy at the dissolution of his marriage (the tongue clucking is nigh-audible). De Camp writes with a craftman's eye, yet seems to have little sympathy for making actual art & the eccentricities it can entail; his summarization of Lovecraft's work is that he produced a decent lump of 'entertainment' (his exact word), & that he could have produced a whole lot more 'entertainment' if he'd manned up, eaten more red meat, & transcended his constant crushing sense of self-doubt (this last, at least, I can agree with). Sprague writes like a hyper-actualized, accultured, heterosexual white male in full possession of his so-called faculties; never dogged by spurts of psychoses, always able to go to bed & rise at a decent hour, & just damn sick of all these crybabies whining on when they should be story-bombing every available publisher, invincible ego primed to absorb any and all rejections.
While I agree that ego transformation is important, & that the artist must be capable of opening themselves to rejection in order to 'make it'/deliver their work into the hands of their readers, I certainly wouldn't classify a hyper-sensitive visionary with rejection issues as anything less of an artist on account of his querulous tuning. Lovecraft was indeed a visionary; L. Sprague was a respected writer of many things, most notably sword n' sorcery yarns distending from Robert E. Howard. He was possessed of the ability to move in highly normative circles, & confesses at the beginning of the bio that he feels singularly qualified to write about Lovecraft due to his subject's alien nature contrasting sharply with his own. Herein lies the boundary between writing-as-craft & writing-as-art; De Camp frequently reiterates his disgust that Lovecraft should EVER think of himself as special, or better/different (the terms seem interchangeable) than other people, in any way. To him, writing is ultimately like spinning wool, with small consideration for Beauty or shamanic 'nonsense,' & certainly conferring no right to sacred exaltation. Conversely, to Lovecraft writing was an invocation, in which he strove to personify abstract extradimensional impressions, symbols, & arcane revelations seemingly received via atavistic astral/dreamtime states, psyche all-the-while in violent revolt against the norms of his age. Couple this to HP's insistence on being a cogwork rational materialist in waking life, & one wonders how he managed to stay sane at all.
In short, De Camp is just too damn normal to write a bio of Lovecraft (LeGuin says something similar to this in her review of the biography), & I'm glad to see that there's a more respected contemporary bio written by S.T. Joshi. And yet...it was a good book. I learned a lot from it, & had my first extended glimpses into Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence; it also allowed me to juxtapose two very antipodal creative personalities (biographer & biographee). I'd recommend Lovecraft: A Biography overall, though I'll confess I'm not feeling very compelled to branch out into De Camp's fiction. A man so insistent on marginalizing relative artistic value can't have a whole lot to say. Some of the garbage he spews is frustratingly prosaic - really, there's 'no such thing as good or bad art, it's all subjective'? Piffle. Dismissing high art on the premise that 'it's all high art to somebody' is lazy, callous, & self-suppressive thinking. I refuse to believe there's no difference between Shakespeare and Duck Dynasty, so out the window that reasoning goes.
In conclusion, I must acknowledge that Lovecraft was very (frustratingly) self-defeating. He reacted to the merest hint of rejection with paroxysms of innermost doubt, resulting in his writing tapering off towards the end of his life. De Camp is right to address these traits, and fully justified in using them as red-flag examples for other writers, though the reader wonders at the very personal wording he chooses at times. This highlights the quixotic modern mass fascination with Lovecraft: many of those who profess to have been inspired by HP wax long about how they hate his writing style, abhor his racism, & think of him as having more psychological than artistic value. Yet all of them are caught up in his universe, battling his monsters, invoking his gods, & crying out at the black uncaring abyss he postulated. Lovecraft accessed something far beyond mere 'entertainment;' he gave the 20th century a new-birthed pantheon. For that, for everything (especially his vestigial passion for tricorne hats & periwigs), I forgive him his myriad faults. Hopefully someone will similarly forgive me one day.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Final Revision of an Earlier bit of Draughtsmanship....
The Accomplice
The sparrow and the
nightingale
- I am their ally.
Feather-friend to the crow &
- I am their ally.
Feather-friend to the crow &
the raven, to all
carrion-feasters of the wing -
Kin to the owl bearing blessed night
on the tide of its wings -
I am brother to the songbird,
to the screech and sonar-silence of gloaming,
to the holy rite of kill and consumption,
to the mournful cry & low piping air of the loon.
(In short)
I am the accomplice of all-hallowed night,
Though the cock's crowing does not set me to flight.
Copyright Scott J. Couturier 2015
Kin to the owl bearing blessed night
on the tide of its wings -
I am brother to the songbird,
to the screech and sonar-silence of gloaming,
to the holy rite of kill and consumption,
to the mournful cry & low piping air of the loon.
(In short)
I am the accomplice of all-hallowed night,
Though the cock's crowing does not set me to flight.
Copyright Scott J. Couturier 2015
Friday, December 11, 2015
At Home With The Dead: The Dream-Quest for Definitive Obscurity
Greetings all. Up semi-bright (quite overcast outside, actually) and quasi-early, primarily due to joint pain I suspect is connected with the mutational weather. There's no snow (yet), & Northern Michigan is doing that decidedly un-charming brown thing, overset with short, pinched days of perpetual gray. Very big change from the bright burning sun of the desert, though ironically the weather is just as warm.
I've spent the last several hours combing the Internet for all things Weird Fiction, Lovecraftian & otherwise. As always, the sheer colossal (one could even say Cyclopean) breadth of information, blogs, magazines, & websites swamps my psyche. I feel lost in a vast, bustling, whispering maze of like-minded beings, incapable of getting a foothold or starting a seminal dialogue, awed & intimidated by the infrastructure of a vein of literature I didn't even know existed until a mere half-decade ago. It seems strange to me that the work of Lovecraft (hoary, phantasmagoric, occultish, obtuse, heavy, wet) has inspired such a vast, mainstream response; a testament to the truly primordial & extradimensional powers he contacted & named. There are Cthulhu collectibles of every sort (though I note no one seems preoccupied with endless reiterative depictions of Hastur or Nodens of the Great Abyss), endless collections & magazines dedicated to 'Weird' fiction (many make explicit the need to deal with Lovecraftian thematics), & message boards & Facebook groups aplenty, where the enthusiastic & truly dedicated can conjoin, ramble, & wax philosophic. Indeed, I find one of the key elements excluding me from deeper interactions is my relative newness to the genre o' the Weird (though my brain has been hardwired to its cosmic sensibilities from birth). I've only just finished reading the main bulk of Lovecraft (still have The Horror in the Museum to explore), & have only read the Hyperborea collection by Clark Ashton Smith (I'm ravenous for more, but his books are rare, flighty specimens. Gonna hafta order off of Amazon, methinks). Of Robert E. Howard I have little direct experience (I've got the majority of his fiction in book form, & plan to start my muscle-bound, leather-scented journey soon), and of course that's just scratching the surface. My partner has been reading C.L. Moore & freaking out over her. Just found a collection of M.R. James's ghost stories the other day. Algernon Blackwood & Arthur Machen remain unplumbed. Then there's Kuttner, Merritt, Chambers, Bierce, Long, William Hope Hodgson, etc etc etc. This bevy of still-unread supernal fiction is simultaneously overwhelming & a comfort.
So, just how does an aspiring reverer of strange & subconscious visions, an acolyte of the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, figure out just where the heck he fits in a teeming world of billions of babbling souls? It's a tricky thornbush of a question. Lovecraft certainly never figured it out while materially incarnate, & most of his contemporaries have sunk to abysms far deeper than the crushing blackness entombing antique R'lyeh. I'm thinking an excellent place to start would be to polish off some of the short stories I've been developing & get them submitted to the myriad of weird/genre publications that proliferate across the Internet, but I still feel I'm missing some primal, obvious aspect to this whole mass-community business. I'm not a very good fanboy; I love desperately that which I love, but not in a sterile, preserved-under-glass way. Most of the communities I stumble across seem to be folk heatedly debating aspects of the Mythos, 'geeking,' or showing off their own work with excessive force (how do creative exchanges happen these days, with all the swollen-ego swaggering?). I read about Lovecraft & Company, & marvel at the complete lack of irony they expressed. Now, it seems the writer has to tailor themselves to excessive niche markets; there are boundaries to Weird fiction, & an entire over-ripe ethos permeating the genre's contemporary manifestation. Reading at the flurry of letters exchanged by the pioneers of the Weird, it quickly becomes clear that they were not caught up in self-abstraction, or more concerned about their market that their creative output. They were, collectively, advanced dredgers of the subconscious, sublimating their transcendent dream-quests into concrete, wildly vivid expressions. It was a movement, a renaissance of pulp sensationalism wedded to deep powers and dark catacombs of the self; one can readily draw comparisons to Chaos Magic, & the self-constructed occult systems of Austin Osman Spare (was delighted to discover that Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith actually discussed Spare's work, & exchanged prints of his paintings).
In short, I find myself in awe of (& primarily spending my time with) the dead instead of the living. This suits me fine; I'm atavistically drawn to atavism, & have had little luck finding modern writers capable of surrendering to vision over self-awareness. However, I've also barely plumbed the inky depths of modern Weird fiction, & acknowledge that my supreme out-of-stepness may be a simple manifestation of technophobia & uncharitable disillusion. The only solution I've been able to manifest is to Keep Working: ultimately recognition & compensation are tertiary to the making of a thing, but I would love to find some fellow voyagers on the wide, beatific river Oukranos.
I've spent the last several hours combing the Internet for all things Weird Fiction, Lovecraftian & otherwise. As always, the sheer colossal (one could even say Cyclopean) breadth of information, blogs, magazines, & websites swamps my psyche. I feel lost in a vast, bustling, whispering maze of like-minded beings, incapable of getting a foothold or starting a seminal dialogue, awed & intimidated by the infrastructure of a vein of literature I didn't even know existed until a mere half-decade ago. It seems strange to me that the work of Lovecraft (hoary, phantasmagoric, occultish, obtuse, heavy, wet) has inspired such a vast, mainstream response; a testament to the truly primordial & extradimensional powers he contacted & named. There are Cthulhu collectibles of every sort (though I note no one seems preoccupied with endless reiterative depictions of Hastur or Nodens of the Great Abyss), endless collections & magazines dedicated to 'Weird' fiction (many make explicit the need to deal with Lovecraftian thematics), & message boards & Facebook groups aplenty, where the enthusiastic & truly dedicated can conjoin, ramble, & wax philosophic. Indeed, I find one of the key elements excluding me from deeper interactions is my relative newness to the genre o' the Weird (though my brain has been hardwired to its cosmic sensibilities from birth). I've only just finished reading the main bulk of Lovecraft (still have The Horror in the Museum to explore), & have only read the Hyperborea collection by Clark Ashton Smith (I'm ravenous for more, but his books are rare, flighty specimens. Gonna hafta order off of Amazon, methinks). Of Robert E. Howard I have little direct experience (I've got the majority of his fiction in book form, & plan to start my muscle-bound, leather-scented journey soon), and of course that's just scratching the surface. My partner has been reading C.L. Moore & freaking out over her. Just found a collection of M.R. James's ghost stories the other day. Algernon Blackwood & Arthur Machen remain unplumbed. Then there's Kuttner, Merritt, Chambers, Bierce, Long, William Hope Hodgson, etc etc etc. This bevy of still-unread supernal fiction is simultaneously overwhelming & a comfort.
So, just how does an aspiring reverer of strange & subconscious visions, an acolyte of the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, figure out just where the heck he fits in a teeming world of billions of babbling souls? It's a tricky thornbush of a question. Lovecraft certainly never figured it out while materially incarnate, & most of his contemporaries have sunk to abysms far deeper than the crushing blackness entombing antique R'lyeh. I'm thinking an excellent place to start would be to polish off some of the short stories I've been developing & get them submitted to the myriad of weird/genre publications that proliferate across the Internet, but I still feel I'm missing some primal, obvious aspect to this whole mass-community business. I'm not a very good fanboy; I love desperately that which I love, but not in a sterile, preserved-under-glass way. Most of the communities I stumble across seem to be folk heatedly debating aspects of the Mythos, 'geeking,' or showing off their own work with excessive force (how do creative exchanges happen these days, with all the swollen-ego swaggering?). I read about Lovecraft & Company, & marvel at the complete lack of irony they expressed. Now, it seems the writer has to tailor themselves to excessive niche markets; there are boundaries to Weird fiction, & an entire over-ripe ethos permeating the genre's contemporary manifestation. Reading at the flurry of letters exchanged by the pioneers of the Weird, it quickly becomes clear that they were not caught up in self-abstraction, or more concerned about their market that their creative output. They were, collectively, advanced dredgers of the subconscious, sublimating their transcendent dream-quests into concrete, wildly vivid expressions. It was a movement, a renaissance of pulp sensationalism wedded to deep powers and dark catacombs of the self; one can readily draw comparisons to Chaos Magic, & the self-constructed occult systems of Austin Osman Spare (was delighted to discover that Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith actually discussed Spare's work, & exchanged prints of his paintings).
In short, I find myself in awe of (& primarily spending my time with) the dead instead of the living. This suits me fine; I'm atavistically drawn to atavism, & have had little luck finding modern writers capable of surrendering to vision over self-awareness. However, I've also barely plumbed the inky depths of modern Weird fiction, & acknowledge that my supreme out-of-stepness may be a simple manifestation of technophobia & uncharitable disillusion. The only solution I've been able to manifest is to Keep Working: ultimately recognition & compensation are tertiary to the making of a thing, but I would love to find some fellow voyagers on the wide, beatific river Oukranos.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Non-Lucid Lucidity: or, The Author Rhetorically Defends his Bedtime
There's something lucid about experiencing a crippling day of illness following hard on a day of festivity. To have the flesh transported so acutely in two very different directions in such a short space - bewildering, to say the least. In case the reader is wondering: Yes, I had a very REAL Thanksgiving, followed closely by a very REAL (& quite feisty) triumvirate of ailments. I'll spare the hoary details; let's just say I felt worked-over by the seven plagues of Egypt. I found myself staring at the ceiling & giggling hysterically, contemplating the fact that, although I was relatively sure I wasn't dying, it felt like I was dying. How many lives have been snuffed out after long, horrific ravages of illness, the soul tossed into the gulag of plague for a spell before being quickened and loosed?
By the time I'd recovered enough strength to walk sans staggering, I'd developed a deep, abiding sense of gratefulness (a grotesque Thanksgiving miracle, perhaps?) for the thrum of a well-functioning human body. A body whose operations are so refined, well-timed & uninhibited by microbe or mutation that the mind & spirit are free to employ it as a launching-place, & tread the ether unconcerned with the ever-waxing threat of clogged heart valves or the metastasis of lurking cancers. Due to proclivities for such projections, artists are often somewhat unkempt in appearance (at least in their natural habitats). The mind, the spirit is off holding court in alien dimensions & attending strange sabbats, not contemplating sock compatibility (at least this is the excuse I offer when some highly-conscious-of-propriety individual points out that I've absentmindedly put my shirt on inside-out). Such 'mistakes' may seem hilarious (perhaps even troubling) to some, who will attempt to project their epistemological values (justified belief or opinion?) on the person breaking the seeming taboo. This is one of the most common, minor perils in my line of work; I can't even begin to estimate how many times friends/family members/enemies/associates/postmen have upbraided me on my unstructured wake-and-sleep schedule. The active (even studied) disorientation of the senses is an immemorial tool of the poet, the magician, & the bard. Sadly, our hyper-modern hyper-materialistic reality considers the Promethean pursuit of craft and Beauty (ie: idle scribbling) a poor excuse for staying up after ten o'clock (though a media-binge marathon is somehow apt justification!).
My newfangled answer to all incongruities of perception is to Love. Simply, idiotically, against the grain of all terrestrial turmoil: Love. To be human is a shocking (as in PTSD) blessing: we are all walking wounded, half-blinded by the orchestrated horror of the world & our own subsumed Divinity. In the wake of my illness I felt actually lighthearted, open to a gust of wind exciting raptures, achingly grateful for the entities I call friends, family & lovers. I'm sure that a resurgent sense of jaded regularity will dull these feelings in short order, but I will strain to remember them, and moreover to embody them. For me, this means writing: for you, it probably means something else.
By the time I'd recovered enough strength to walk sans staggering, I'd developed a deep, abiding sense of gratefulness (a grotesque Thanksgiving miracle, perhaps?) for the thrum of a well-functioning human body. A body whose operations are so refined, well-timed & uninhibited by microbe or mutation that the mind & spirit are free to employ it as a launching-place, & tread the ether unconcerned with the ever-waxing threat of clogged heart valves or the metastasis of lurking cancers. Due to proclivities for such projections, artists are often somewhat unkempt in appearance (at least in their natural habitats). The mind, the spirit is off holding court in alien dimensions & attending strange sabbats, not contemplating sock compatibility (at least this is the excuse I offer when some highly-conscious-of-propriety individual points out that I've absentmindedly put my shirt on inside-out). Such 'mistakes' may seem hilarious (perhaps even troubling) to some, who will attempt to project their epistemological values (justified belief or opinion?) on the person breaking the seeming taboo. This is one of the most common, minor perils in my line of work; I can't even begin to estimate how many times friends/family members/enemies/associates/postmen have upbraided me on my unstructured wake-and-sleep schedule. The active (even studied) disorientation of the senses is an immemorial tool of the poet, the magician, & the bard. Sadly, our hyper-modern hyper-materialistic reality considers the Promethean pursuit of craft and Beauty (ie: idle scribbling) a poor excuse for staying up after ten o'clock (though a media-binge marathon is somehow apt justification!).
My newfangled answer to all incongruities of perception is to Love. Simply, idiotically, against the grain of all terrestrial turmoil: Love. To be human is a shocking (as in PTSD) blessing: we are all walking wounded, half-blinded by the orchestrated horror of the world & our own subsumed Divinity. In the wake of my illness I felt actually lighthearted, open to a gust of wind exciting raptures, achingly grateful for the entities I call friends, family & lovers. I'm sure that a resurgent sense of jaded regularity will dull these feelings in short order, but I will strain to remember them, and moreover to embody them. For me, this means writing: for you, it probably means something else.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Reality: The Affectation
Well, gosh darn it, we seem to be nearing the lateral end of November. I was charitably poked the other day and reminded that one of my chief duties is to cook up brain matter to splash judiciously on this page. Someone wanders off from writing an already sporadic-as-hell blog for a few months, and the readers of said page naturally assume a failing of purpose, a waning of vital force; yet here I be, quite alive, the better for a dozen strange sojourns, & straining at the seams with cogitation. Expect a few bumps and bramble-scrapings 'afore this post terminates. I'm listening to a lovely sludgy psych thing called Mr. Flood's Party, & it's manning my nerves for the immediate present.
Have moved back to Michigan, and spent several months adjusting to a very different (yet oddly familiar) new existence. All seems well as the snow begins to fall in graceful, mild quantity...very different than the desert, here. It took me a month to fully compute and integrate the sheer abundance of trees & green life, and then there was a long lingering Autumn, with mild but everlasting rust colors spilling over the hills (odd, I always thought of the area as flatter). I'm prepared for the coming crystalline flood, only slightly apprehensive, but the old Nordic blood is beginning to boil a little. I grit my teeth and exhale a cloud whenever I step out the door. There are no cacti in sight.
So, in short, 2015: the Year I Hurtled. I came up to Michigan twice on visits, then executed a full cross-country move with my boyfriend and his nephew. Settled back into the house I lived in before I went away to college, and have been gradually unfurling my senses. Always odd to come back to a town you've lived away from for many years, odder still if it's altered as much as TC; it was always a tourist-fed community, but it seems the ol' berg has exploded into something of a boomtown. The two-lane road that ran near my house ten years ago has swelled into a five-lane monstrosity. There's a tantalizing array of restaurants and about two-trillion locally made beers, a genuinely bustling downtown district, etc etc...the half/mask prosperity of inspired gentrification. I believe the new season of South Park addresses the phenomena with abundant causticness.
However, prosperity is prosperity. There's a lot of dedicated artistic energy being focused here. And the lakes, forests & dunes are every bit as beautiful as they have been declared in countless magazines. I merely observe, & do not complain (tho railing about the yearly influx of 'Fudgies' is a hallowed local tradition, after all!).
On to business: I know there are a few people very interested to know what happens to Kelrob and Jacobson in the next installment of The Magistricide. I've been spending a large amount of energy adapting to my new, very-different-than-a-trailer-perched-on-the-edge-of-reality existence; however, I have been doing some very devout, if periodic, writing. Much of my effort has been poured into a series of weird fantastical tales, which I'm hoping to polish and submit for zine publication in the next year. I've hacked at The Curse of Roc-Thalian, which has gotten itself into a very gooey, horrible flow - I definitely seem to be fusing elements of horror & fantasy with larger interpersonal arcs, & have hope for the book, though I doubt it will see print before early-to-mid 2016. I know I swore to get it published by October of this year, & admit the deadline became a somewhat uncomfortable lodestone in the midst of drastically & concretely altering my life. However, the book is mostly writ, and my editor (remember that friendly poke mentioned above?) is currently looking it over. With the luck of Dionysus and the fetid blessings of Nyarlathotep, the third installment of The Magistricide will burst into the world slightly before the leaves & flowers, along with a trickle of shorter fiction.
I've got more to relate; expect increased clutter on this page in future days. Lots of thoughts ricocheting in me brainpan: Lovecraft (& L. Sprague de Camp's rather infamous bio of him), Clark Ashton Smith (found a beautiful - but overpriced - hardbound book of his in town, drooled & walked away), krautrock (currently listening to later Kraan, which is kinda like disco-prog), getting the podcast up and humming, the fact that people have been rationalized out of an understanding of magic, allowing them to be constantly enspelled by corporate wizardry, downed Russian planes & the viscera left behind by suicide vests (Always remember, War ain't good for business: War IS business!), & a host of other glandular secretions desirous of being expressed in language. In short: The Curse of Roc-Thalian still being written. Also writing a host of odd and depraved little fictions. Have moved to Michigan, unified my family, & am prepared to endure the coming freeze-out. Also I like using &s now, apparently......AFFECTATION?
..........reality is an affectation. G'night n' talk soon.
Kindly Afterthought:
Have moved back to Michigan, and spent several months adjusting to a very different (yet oddly familiar) new existence. All seems well as the snow begins to fall in graceful, mild quantity...very different than the desert, here. It took me a month to fully compute and integrate the sheer abundance of trees & green life, and then there was a long lingering Autumn, with mild but everlasting rust colors spilling over the hills (odd, I always thought of the area as flatter). I'm prepared for the coming crystalline flood, only slightly apprehensive, but the old Nordic blood is beginning to boil a little. I grit my teeth and exhale a cloud whenever I step out the door. There are no cacti in sight.
So, in short, 2015: the Year I Hurtled. I came up to Michigan twice on visits, then executed a full cross-country move with my boyfriend and his nephew. Settled back into the house I lived in before I went away to college, and have been gradually unfurling my senses. Always odd to come back to a town you've lived away from for many years, odder still if it's altered as much as TC; it was always a tourist-fed community, but it seems the ol' berg has exploded into something of a boomtown. The two-lane road that ran near my house ten years ago has swelled into a five-lane monstrosity. There's a tantalizing array of restaurants and about two-trillion locally made beers, a genuinely bustling downtown district, etc etc...the half/mask prosperity of inspired gentrification. I believe the new season of South Park addresses the phenomena with abundant causticness.
However, prosperity is prosperity. There's a lot of dedicated artistic energy being focused here. And the lakes, forests & dunes are every bit as beautiful as they have been declared in countless magazines. I merely observe, & do not complain (tho railing about the yearly influx of 'Fudgies' is a hallowed local tradition, after all!).
On to business: I know there are a few people very interested to know what happens to Kelrob and Jacobson in the next installment of The Magistricide. I've been spending a large amount of energy adapting to my new, very-different-than-a-trailer-perched-on-the-edge-of-reality existence; however, I have been doing some very devout, if periodic, writing. Much of my effort has been poured into a series of weird fantastical tales, which I'm hoping to polish and submit for zine publication in the next year. I've hacked at The Curse of Roc-Thalian, which has gotten itself into a very gooey, horrible flow - I definitely seem to be fusing elements of horror & fantasy with larger interpersonal arcs, & have hope for the book, though I doubt it will see print before early-to-mid 2016. I know I swore to get it published by October of this year, & admit the deadline became a somewhat uncomfortable lodestone in the midst of drastically & concretely altering my life. However, the book is mostly writ, and my editor (remember that friendly poke mentioned above?) is currently looking it over. With the luck of Dionysus and the fetid blessings of Nyarlathotep, the third installment of The Magistricide will burst into the world slightly before the leaves & flowers, along with a trickle of shorter fiction.
I've got more to relate; expect increased clutter on this page in future days. Lots of thoughts ricocheting in me brainpan: Lovecraft (& L. Sprague de Camp's rather infamous bio of him), Clark Ashton Smith (found a beautiful - but overpriced - hardbound book of his in town, drooled & walked away), krautrock (currently listening to later Kraan, which is kinda like disco-prog), getting the podcast up and humming, the fact that people have been rationalized out of an understanding of magic, allowing them to be constantly enspelled by corporate wizardry, downed Russian planes & the viscera left behind by suicide vests (Always remember, War ain't good for business: War IS business!), & a host of other glandular secretions desirous of being expressed in language. In short: The Curse of Roc-Thalian still being written. Also writing a host of odd and depraved little fictions. Have moved to Michigan, unified my family, & am prepared to endure the coming freeze-out. Also I like using &s now, apparently......AFFECTATION?
..........reality is an affectation. G'night n' talk soon.
Kindly Afterthought:
“Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.”- Alan W. Watts
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Strange Wine
Hello, all you esoteric darlings and those further affixed in the cryptosphere. I should warn the lot of you: I've been reading Harlan Ellison, and he tends to lend a certain profuse flare to my ramblings. Which is good, because honesty is called for on all fronts. Especially the honesty of the lie, that profane means by which the artist decants truth to strange wine.
Last week I 'came out' to my parents. I indulge in parenthesis due to my boredness with the entire epistemological concept of coming out. I've been with both men and women over the course of my life, and consider myself definitively pansexual. My current partner (Shayne) and I have been together for a good while. He's a (here's the part where I simultaneously get to brag and make him blush) polymath: writer, musician, visual artist. We constantly bounce ideas, concepts and visions off of each other, and he's one of the prime editors of my books. I now announce to the entire gaping interwebs: yes, I am in absolute love with a man. There. I guess that's my coming out. Envision a cloud of expanding glitter if it suits your symbolic fancy.
Onwards to further revelations. I've been living in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the last two years (or, more precisely, in a trailer at the very edge of the Chihuahuan desert in sight of Organ, NM). It's been a cleansing, bedeviling, maddened, sweet, drifting, horrible, divine experience, but a myriad of considerations have led me to the decision to move back up to my home town of Traverse City, Michigan. This will put me back in the sphere of my family, which is one of the primary goals; one of the other primary goals is to wed my biological family to my chosen family. Shayne and his nephew Evan will be moving with me up north.
This is all the result of what I am dubbing Project Love, an explicit magical working established at the crest of Venus retrograde. I confess to being a mere dabbler in the occult, though the symbolism of the ceremonial magicians has a pleasing tendency to spring into my path. I hereby (gather close folks: here comes an announcement) declare myself a dedicated syncretist. The walls and subdivisions of genre (alongside magic, science, religion, and God) have no meaning to me save as artificial boundaries to be generatively violated. It's the dawn of a new millennia, and everything old is new. Which means the new will consist of a twisting, permuting, perverting, and venerate remaking of the old. Having fresh visions extrapolated from the current boundaries of human perception is desecration and reverence encompassed in a single act. It's our sacred duty to yearn for the past while sculpting the future.
All of which is very high falutin' talk, I admit. This brings me to my final announcement: I'm a writer. This might seem self-evident (or so I flatter myself), but I've long been a-straying in the realms of metaphysical dissemination, and find myself ultimately unfulfilled. Fiction, to me, encompasses the greatest act of magic: all the arcane numerologies and Promethean intent of the arch-magicians serve as inspiration and fuel for my desire to write. As I mentioned above, I've been reading Harlan Ellison, and he's particularly adept at reminding the individual to be true to their native mode of expression. I hereby yield myself to the instinct of craft, and clamp the Muse's teat between loving lips. I pray she won't mind the bruises.
Thank you, gentle reader. Allow me this indulgence of ye ol' Victorian convention, and understand you are loved.
Last week I 'came out' to my parents. I indulge in parenthesis due to my boredness with the entire epistemological concept of coming out. I've been with both men and women over the course of my life, and consider myself definitively pansexual. My current partner (Shayne) and I have been together for a good while. He's a (here's the part where I simultaneously get to brag and make him blush) polymath: writer, musician, visual artist. We constantly bounce ideas, concepts and visions off of each other, and he's one of the prime editors of my books. I now announce to the entire gaping interwebs: yes, I am in absolute love with a man. There. I guess that's my coming out. Envision a cloud of expanding glitter if it suits your symbolic fancy.
Onwards to further revelations. I've been living in Las Cruces, New Mexico for the last two years (or, more precisely, in a trailer at the very edge of the Chihuahuan desert in sight of Organ, NM). It's been a cleansing, bedeviling, maddened, sweet, drifting, horrible, divine experience, but a myriad of considerations have led me to the decision to move back up to my home town of Traverse City, Michigan. This will put me back in the sphere of my family, which is one of the primary goals; one of the other primary goals is to wed my biological family to my chosen family. Shayne and his nephew Evan will be moving with me up north.
This is all the result of what I am dubbing Project Love, an explicit magical working established at the crest of Venus retrograde. I confess to being a mere dabbler in the occult, though the symbolism of the ceremonial magicians has a pleasing tendency to spring into my path. I hereby (gather close folks: here comes an announcement) declare myself a dedicated syncretist. The walls and subdivisions of genre (alongside magic, science, religion, and God) have no meaning to me save as artificial boundaries to be generatively violated. It's the dawn of a new millennia, and everything old is new. Which means the new will consist of a twisting, permuting, perverting, and venerate remaking of the old. Having fresh visions extrapolated from the current boundaries of human perception is desecration and reverence encompassed in a single act. It's our sacred duty to yearn for the past while sculpting the future.
All of which is very high falutin' talk, I admit. This brings me to my final announcement: I'm a writer. This might seem self-evident (or so I flatter myself), but I've long been a-straying in the realms of metaphysical dissemination, and find myself ultimately unfulfilled. Fiction, to me, encompasses the greatest act of magic: all the arcane numerologies and Promethean intent of the arch-magicians serve as inspiration and fuel for my desire to write. As I mentioned above, I've been reading Harlan Ellison, and he's particularly adept at reminding the individual to be true to their native mode of expression. I hereby yield myself to the instinct of craft, and clamp the Muse's teat between loving lips. I pray she won't mind the bruises.
Thank you, gentle reader. Allow me this indulgence of ye ol' Victorian convention, and understand you are loved.
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