Incendium Amoris

Moving

2007-04-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

I am taking a hiatus from blogging, until after I move out at the end of this month. Have to start packing up my stuff as I'm moving either to Toronto, or Hamilton temporarily, depending on if and when the apartment in Toronto is ready. Uncertain if and when I'll have Internet access--depends if there is another free wireless signal in the area...

The Weekend Grind

2007-04-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

The Easter weekend is nearly over and, as I try to reflect upon the significant events of this weekend, I realize that my life is messed up. Consider:

Friday
(1) My landlord kicked out a fellow boarder for smoking pot in his room, and eating out other people's food from the refridgerator and then,
(2) She asked me to help clean out his room, and I discover a few articles of my clothing (two shirts, a ragged pair of jeans, and a suit jacket that I stupidly didn't realize were missing) in his closet as well as stuffed underneath his mattress.
(3) Among his articles, a court notice of a failure to appear in criminal court for multiple charges of petty theft (under $5000) and other valuables, such as a passport, which
(4) The landlord gathers together, including much of what is taken for clothes stolen from stores, and calls a friend to hold these things ransom, until she can get the said tenant to pay back the $1000 of rent money and a $250 cell phone she believes he stole from her.

Saturday
(1) Wake up early, unable to sleep, seized with excruciating pain in my left leg and
(2) Head over to an independent coffee shop around 10 in the morning for breakfast, and to kill an hour before
(3) Taking my car in to the shop to change the transmission fluid, which takes an hour to finish and
(4) When I am finished, I make my way over to the International Centre for the All About Pets Show alone, instead of going to church
(5) I wander alone for two full hours, looking at, trying to figure out and eliminating what specific breed of dog I want to own, asking about prices, breed temperaments, training, nutrition, compatibility with cats, recommendations for first-time owners, and watched a show about neighbourhood-friendly dog training, as well as a flyball competition.

(6) Went over to fiancée's for afternoon dinner, and watched the fateful Leaf game.

Sunday
(1) Wake up promptly, after dozing off early last night, and still have the lingering pain of yesterday,
(2) And try to kill the pain by talking with my chatty landlord, while having a morning coffee and half an egg-salad sandwich before
(3) I decide to kill time (boredom, loneliness, and the pain) by heading to see movie, yet again, alone, in this case, Grindhouse, since it seemed the longest, original and most entertaining of movies out this weekend, and I get to the movie theatre as the previews begin,
(4) And I watch the movie, though half way into the movie the pain in my left leg grows unbearable at points that I bite my lip, wimper and almost cry, but I'm sitting at the very top above all other few movie-goers, then
(5) I head over to my fiancée's place for dinner, as well as the fateful Islanders game, and find some alleviation in the company of family, food, and pain-relieving creams and narcotics like Tylenol and Lakota, though the pain remains strenuous, but
(6) Upon arriving back at my abode, I am happy to find the house empty and this euphoria relieves some of the ache in my left leg before
(7) I receive a text message from my fiancée, and a back-and-forth text conversation, to my elation, ensues until recently.

Weak in the Knee

2007-04-05T02:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after looking at apartments over a four day weekday stretch, I had the leisure of sleeping in. Waking up for early morning appointments to look at one- and two-bedroom apartments at times when I am usually asleep, to travel to undiscovered parts of Toronto and evaluate each one with a criteria known and occult expected by my absentee fiancée, to call and arrange with landlords times to see an apartment and then show up the next day to discover that they lied over the phone about availability, can be tiring. I was exhausted, especially, after looking at apartments that were still occupied, and having to remain steadfast against the presence of their disgruntled occupants and their cranky tirades about my transgression upon their everyday lives, and having to look expediently around the structure and interior of an apartment under the Evil Eye of these occupants. Questioning landlords about prices, availability, underground parking, proximity to subway, pets allowed or not, utilities included, and lease terms, was as frustrating in person as well as over the phone due to their sometimes duplicity as explaining poetry to a class of first-year university students.

Off My Feet

2007-03-31T01:10:00.000-07:00

A trip to the doctor's office this past Thursday has confirmed I have aggravated some latent infirmity in my left knee, a fracture or tear. The daily, growing strain placed on my left leg's muscles is causing a slight limp in my walk now. As a result, my doctor sent me to have several X-Rays taken of the region of my left knee to identify the precise problem. Next Thursday I return to have the results revealed to me, and a medical solution to the problem offered by my doctor. I hope this won't affect my ability to work.

Otherwise I have been steadily reading Tom Harpur's new book Water Into Wine: An Empowering Vision of the Gospels. My left leg is probably grateful that I am not a strict believer of any Christian orthodox, evangelical or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, because I have not been up on my feet in distress.

The Insatiate Countess

2007-03-28T03:10:00.000-07:00

I'm staying awake over-night with a pot of coffee, and by reading Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies. My fiancée is flying in 6 to 7 hours down to Trinidad for 2 weeks in order to finalise the wedding plans. I'm driving her to the airport in 4 hours.

Yesterday, early in the morning, I finally took my car into a garage to have the oil changed and the drums and shoes of the brakes replaced, so I slept for only 4 hours last night. Some modern Joe mixed with some Renaissance titillation ought to have some dramatic effect on my half-awake, half-asleep brain. I have a choice: William Barkstead and Lewis Machin's The Insatiate Countess, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Thomas Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy and John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian in this Oxford Volume of English Drama.

A fresh change from Wace's Roman de Brut out of a copy of Arthurian Chronicles, translated by Eugene Mason, that I borrowed from the Library. I considered reading Layamon's Brut afterwards but decided otherwise.

The Investment of a Lifetime

2007-03-20T03:40:00.000-07:00

As the time draws nigh to the day set for the wedding in July, I am beginning to feel the gravitational pull of this significant occasion - as a groom - against my conscious sense of Life. Things are awry: The work week is fleeting, finances are waning, weekends are transitory, and, to top it off, the guest list is growing. Next week, my fiancée is flying out early on Wednesday morning to Trinidad to secure the final arrangements for our wedding, bring over centre-pieces, and work out any other outstanding things. She is the mastermind of this wedding: I am forever indebted to her industrious labours.

Over the past week, too, I kept busy reading a number of horror novels: Brian Keene's Ghoul, Richard Laymon's Among The Missing, and Graham Masterton's break-out novel The Manitou. The two veteran horror-meisters, Laymon and Masterton's novels were filled with the classic terrifying Spirit of the Weird, while the only disappointment was the dull and unpoetic descriptive writing of rookie Keene. I even tried reading his Bram-Stoker-Award-winning novel The Conqueror Worms but I kept remembering the sceptical words of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know." I just can't help but insist that the quality of Keene's stilted writing falls short of his own imaginative ambition--it's especially sad that the back-cover's description of the novel was more exciting than the actual words on the pages themselves. Reading is an imaginative investment. The words of a novel ought to be more profitable than the paper they are printed on, otherwise they're not worth the paper they were printed on.

Inheritors of Visionary Literature

2007-03-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

"...horror has to do with the numinous, the uncovering of the terrible truth that is there under the everyday. That is only another articulation of uncovering the transcendent truth under the everyday."

China Miéville

All literature is visionary. It is this human experience of the visionary in literature that encompasses all: writers, characters and readers alike, who participate unwittingly in this literary production of unconsciously held beliefs and assumptions. The picture of this unconscious or visionary world is not to be confused with the economic model of a human assembly or production line. It is a world of imagination that produces an extra-visionary sequence of phases that can widen and/or narrow as the perspective of each individual becomes involved in the process. Howard Philip Lovecraft offers this picture of the reader's involvement in the imaginative production of "weird" literature in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

Here: the world envisioned by Lovecraft is a negative or contrasting image of writers, characters and readers. He is appealing to the positive or receptive reader who "sees" or experiences the actual message or prophecy envisioned which underlies his words. The visionary experience widens for those who understand the spiritual meaning behind his written words. Such a type of reader is not only an inheritor of his message, but also an active participant in the cosmos of visionary literature:

But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

The visionary experience of literature is the truest liberty: it excludes only those who are unwilling to open their eyes and see.

The 300 Club

2007-03-11T03:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the public library again. I borrowed Peter Straub's Koko, Michael Slade's Headhunter and the 2-disc DVD BBC production of Gormenghast based on Mervyn Peake's trilogy of Gormenghast novels--Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. Before plunging deep into contemplation about any of these paintings of imaginative horrors, however, I went with my fiancée to watch, or rather, soak my eyes in the Titus Andronicus-like, comic book / cinematic gore of 300 last night. The movie was nothing short of Spartan in its cruel and intractable power to hold its viewers in the deep grip of fear and pity, while staving off any expectation of purely mindless spectacle.

"And if my vision range beyond..."

2007-03-09T04:15:00.000-08:00

O my soul, keep the rest unknown!
It is too like a sound of moan
When the charnel-eyed
Pale Horse has nighed:
Yea, none shall gather what I hide!

Why load men's minds with more to bear
That bear already ails to spare?
From now alway
Till my last day
What I discern I will not say.

Let time roll backward if it will;
(Magians who drive the midnight quill
With brain aglow
Can see it so,)
What I have learnt no man shall know.

And if my vision range beyond
The blinkered sight of souls in bond,
- By truth made free -
I'll let all be,
And show to no man what I see.

Thomas Hardy, "He Resolves To Say No More"

Yesterday I quickly borrowed a set of Everyman editions of Selected Poems from Thomas Hardy, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the Brampton Public Library at the Civic Centre before heading off to work. As much as I enjoyed reading out-loud the intertwined sprung rhythm and sacred religious zeal of Hopkins, I rather preferred meditating on Thomas Hardy's elegiac poetry. I can't help but identify personally - as predicted by a frie nd - with Thomas Hardy's sense of arduous struggle reflected in his words, composition and poesis against the stubborn and proud-worn intractability of things broken, of things falling apart, of dysfunctional mutability, of crumbling words, and downward spirituality in the "real modern world." He picks up his small, down-trodden words with such proud, hard-lived, unreal truth--that wrestling angel of experience--and builds them up to a new-found glory.

Monsters as People

2007-02-27T02:47:00.000-08:00

Nearly a week has passed, everything slow and languid, like all things in a heavy Canadian winter, including reading. As only a Canadian ought to in winter, I have just finished reading the Governor General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize nominated novel The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. To everything there is a season, and especially when it comes to reading Canadian Literature, that spirit of pathetic fallacy borne in the Canadian-born reader seems to have an affinity for winter, inwardly. Reading Todd Swift's dark and stormy description of Soucy's novel from his article "Monsters as People" in the January/February 2007 issue of Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books opened a window to the possibility of Great Can Lit for me:

Nothing had prepared me for the novel The Immaculate Conception by French Quebec author, Gaétan Soucy--nothing, that is, other than the works of de Sade, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Kafka, and a host of other writers; tormented by the nearly impossible promises of God (or Good), they make elaborate work of the Devil (or Evil), and in the process, bring into the world the very suffering they would quarrel with.

"It Was Like A Tentacle But Not Exactly..."

2007-02-21T04:20:00.001-08:00

Coming to the end of Darkfall, I was surprised to find Koontz acknowledging homage in this story to another earlier influential pulp writer. The secret cognate of Darkfall's "police procedural" plot may be William Hjortsberg's 1978 novel Falling Angel, but Koontz leaves no question in this great libation poured to the gods of genre that Howard Philip Lovecraft is the Zeus of the "horror novel." After thwarting the Bocor Lavelle's attempt to slaughter his children, Lieutenant Jack Dawson watches with craven horror as the voodoo spirits of evil come to claim their holocaust from the depths of Hell:

Something snaked up from the depths. It was like a tentacle but not exactly a tentacle, like a chitinous insect leg but not exactly an insect leg, sharply jointed in several places and yet as sinuous as a serpent. It soared up to a height of fifteen feet. The tip of the thing was equipped with long whiplike appendages that writhed around a loose, drooling, toothless mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Worse, it was in some ways exceedingly clear that this was only a minor feature of the huge beast rising from the Gates; it was as small, proportionately, as a human finger compared to an entire human body. Perhaps this was the only thing that the escaping Lovecraftian entity had thus far been able to extrude between the opening Gates--this one finger.

The direct source for Koontz's beast from the depths of Hell is a short story ("The Call of Cthulhu") written in 1926 by Lovecraft. Above, Koontz condenses three separate accounts presented by several characters in Lovecraft's narrative into his own allusive though Christianized passage:

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

the newly opened depths...It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

The slight difference: Lovecraft's Old Ones (Cthulhu) are based on his own skeptical evolutionary universe, whereas Koontz translates his Ancient Ones into his own hopeful modern anthropological and/or Christianized vision.

What can be said about Darkfall by Dean Koontz is this: it is an imaginative study in (pulp) influences.

A Study In Darkfall

2007-02-17T05:31:00.000-08:00

A novel as circuitous as Darkfall by Dean Koontz, although awkwardly tawdry in terms of mechanics, is best understood as a fusebox of literary conventions. The afterword written by Koontz himself added to the end of the newest 2007 edition of this novel, which was originally published in 1984 , is telling:

I do not rate Darkfall among my best work, but I'll be immodest enough to say that I think it's a fun read. The only ambition here was to produce a page-turning entertainment; I wanted to cross the horror novel with the police procedural, while mixing a love story and a measure of comic dialogue.

Koontz is accurate when he describes his novel as a cross of the "horror novel with the police procedural." He makes no bones about his plot in Darkfall being overly conventional and thus seemingly mechanical. This is a fair description of the literary vision of Dean Koontz: always hinged on past conventions and stories.

But Koontz is a poetically crafty writer in Darkfall. To make up for mechanical plots he hot-wires his reader using po etically-loaded words into an underlying circuit board of familiar literary conventions. His words are electric in the sense that they spark "pure information" in the reader which can feel like literary deja vu. Consider your reponse to the following passage:

"Look, Rebecca, I'm not saying it's voodoo or anything the least bit supernatural. I'm not a particularly superstitious man. My point is that these murders might be the work of someone who does believe in voodoo, that there is something ritualistic about them. The condition of the corpses certainly points in that direction. I didn't say voodoo works. I'm only suggesting that the killer might think it works, and his belief in voodoo might lead us to him and give us some of the evidence we need to convict him."

My response to this passage is literary: I see Koontz pointing to Harry Angel and the unconventional series of bizarre and occult investigations from William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel. Reading this excerpt I got the sense of imitation or conventionality because the words and implied plot sounded like something fantastic out of a '50s pot-boiler detective movie or novel. Only later did I associate these words, allegorically-speaking, with Hjortsberg's original 1978 noir detective thriller: "A spellbinding novel of murder, mystery, and the occult, Falling Angel pits a tough New York private eye against the most fearsome adversary a detective ever faced. For Harry Angel, a routine missing-persons case soon turns into a fiendish nightmare of voodoo and black magic, of dizzying peril and violent death -- a world in which the shadow he chases seems to be the shadow he casts."

This is why I enjoy Dean Koontz: his plots are mechanical, but his words electric.

The New Pathetic Fallacy

2007-02-16T03:45:00.000-08:00

Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetary in the Snow

I offer this inconsequential thought after reading Dean Koontz's Darkfall:

The new pathetic fallacy of literature ( "the lights went out"), which one experiences reading weird, suspense and horror stories, is a simple inversion of the old imaginative ideal of Romanticism: it is claustrophobic, technological and introverted, instead of uplifting, natural and extroverted. Howard Philip Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, first established this in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. It was the first complete historical and critical effort to establish the whole new tradition and poetics of a modern pulp genre: Weird Literature. He wrote about a dark primal vision for supernatural horror in literature based on a deeper cosmic and evolutionary vision: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." His novel evolutionary perspective caught on later with modern-day writers like Dean Koontz, Stephen King, etc. because it was imaginatively compatible with the unconscious experience of modern electric society. As Marshall McLuhan described in Understanding Media: "With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no loner depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism." When electricity fails, as we experienced a few years ago during the blackout in Ontario, our nerves begin to fail. The dangerous potential for the human being of the electric age is to regress into a catatonic, tribal shellshock described by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: "unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once moved into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence."

The Point of Confession

2007-02-12T02:15:00.000-08:00

I was reading Heart-Shaped Box earlier, admitting as I was reading that I didn't possess a half-decent command of a technical poetic vocabulary to describe the cadences of prose. Are there any critics who have written about the pulse of a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, or a section? Who has described - a writer - about the rhetorical significance of a run-on sentence, or vernacular speech, or dashes, or commas, or epigraphs, or section titles, or picto-graphic icons spread across a book, like the drawing of a heart in Heart-Shaped Box with each section number etched into its own heart?

Who can I read to understand better?

Heart-Broken

2007-02-10T01:50:00.000-08:00

Just pausing, while I read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, to try and put something thoughful into writing about this strange book.

When I was a university student - just a few months ago - it was easier taking that first brazen step and translating a single, or jumble of thoughts from my mind into words on the page. Today, I miss the attention of the teacher and classroom - the crowds of diverse people and opinions - where someone paid attention to what I had to say or write about a poem, novel, short story, or theory even if they didn't share my perspective, opinion or bias. I want to write something great and inspired about the books I read, like Heart-Shaped Box, but in the end I come home to my rented room after work to read as escape from the "demonic, disorderly, and depressing" vexations of making a living, to recover from being run downhill every day. I realize University was my Eden: I can't go back, I can only remember.

I want to write something about Heart-Shaped Box but I can't seem to pull my thoughts together without a literary audience.

Bat Out of Hell

2007-02-08T02:16:00.000-08:00

Just a short update for now:

No joke . . . there's a bat in the house where I live. After arriving home from work tonight, I was notified by my soon-to-be-departing fellow tenant of today's mid-day appearance of the terrorizing bat in the house. The result: my bedroom door is firmly closed and locked, just to be sure. I have a leftover cup or two of coffee, water and orange juice, as well as a stash of two unopened bags of chips - Sweet Chili Heat and Black Pepper Jack - which I purposely left in a closet in my room, for the night.

As for books: tonight, I'm finishing John Webster's The White Devil. Tomorrow, I pick up my long awaited copy of Stephen King's son, Joe Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box. And yesterday, I was reading Austin Clarke's The Question.

Addendum: I found the bat in the upstairs washroom near to my room, by accident. Just a little thing. Opened the downstairs door, caught the bat in a towel and tossed the towel outside. Good riddance.

The Deadly Percheron

2007-02-01T05:38:00.000-08:00

After months of positioning my laptop at or above head-level, precipitously on dressers, or cardboard boxes or miscellaneous objects, near the window in my room, just to tap into the free neighbourhood wireless broadband signal, I discover I can sit with my computer, back to the window by the edge of my bed, and still pick up the signal. The trade off: I couldn't watch the movie The Illusionist, which I had borrowed from my fiancée, because the volume of dialogue plays too low to hear capably with some DVDs on this computer. I was disappointed severely, considering I watched Salton Sea a few weeks ago without any troubles from the audio department.

I haven't slept tonight but I kept awake reading John Franklin Bardin's 1946 novel, The Deadly Percheron, from start to finish. The day before, I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men after a week's worth of time. What's next? Perhaps a Mario Puzo novel.

Lookin Through the Wrong End of the Glass

2007-01-30T01:57:00.000-08:00

"One other thing he said. You'd think a man that had waited eighty some odd years on God to come into his life, well, you'd thing he'd come. If he didn't you'd still have to figure that he knew what he was doin. I don't know what other description of God you could have. So what you end up with is that those he has spoke to are the ones that must of needed it the worst. That's not a easy thing to accept. Particularly as it might apply to someone like Loretta. But then maybe we are all of us lookin through the wrong end of the glass. Always have been."

Bell in Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men

Birthday Photo #4

2007-01-29T00:46:00.000-08:00

A dynamic snapshot of me, blowing out my birthday cupcake at the Sultan's Tent

Birthday Photo #3

2007-01-29T00:43:00.000-08:00

My fiancée's mom, a friend, my fiancée, and I:
together celebrating before devouring the beautiful birthday cake

Birthday Photo #2

2007-01-29T00:38:00.000-08:00

The birthday cake that my fiancée started baking at the midnight hour

Birthday Photo #1

2007-01-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

Picture of me - on my 24th birthday

The Best Of ...

2007-01-21T23:05:00.000-08:00

A short update tonight:

When I get them, I'll post the digital photos that were snapped this past Saturday night, on my 24th birthday--at Viv's place, at the Sultan's Tent. Until then, I'll be reading Stephen King's Insomnia and some short stories from Robert Bloch.

Blood-curdling Tales

2007-01-16T03:50:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I finished reading Jack Ketchum's Off Season. Up until about a week ago Ketchum was unheard of before I happened upon his name advertised on one of those spinal-cracker paper inserts in my copy of Richard Laymon's The Cellar. Initially, when I saw his name marketed alongside Richard Laymon and two other unknown Horror novelists for an avid Horror reader book club, I expected to read straight-out pulp. Perhaps Ketchum's updated dedication to his two greatest mentors--Robert Bloch and Stephen King--was the first hint of his Minor cult status. Unlike Bloch or King, Ketchum's Off Season tears at its reader limb-by-limb in a frenzy of edgy, visceral gore - specifically, cannibalism - like Maenads in a 20th Century Bacchae. While a reader experiences the intimate psychic world of psychoses in Surround Sound in Bloch's or King's stories, in Ketchum's novel, the reader is wracked on a visceral level by a terrorizing, slasher style of natural human gore minus the violin, that splatters blood across the lens of the reader.

I'll have to read something else by Ketchum - next I'm reading Stephen King's Insomnia.

Tragic Laughter

2007-01-15T04:36:00.000-08:00

"A joke owes its character to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something ludicrously different."

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

"It is a psychological decoy which gives a false impression of relief so that the more dangerous issues can fester undisturbed"

Tony Staveacre

"I have found--especially on the stage--that when I finish a stunt, I can get a laugh by just standing still and looking at the audience as if I was surprised and slightly hurt to think they would laugh at me. It always brings a bigger laugh."

Buster Keaton

Appeal of the Spectrally Macabre

2007-01-08T01:20:00.000-08:00

Horror is a bleak genre, and occasionally, when our lives are steeped in dark moments, the darkness that is visible in these claustrophobic visions of the world becomes a kind of modern tragic poetry. Richard Laymon, compared with Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, John Saul, Peter Straub, Graham Masterton and Stephen King, likes to indulge in what Lovecraft called the "appeal of the spectrally macabre" in his tales. What stands for the "spectrally macabre" in Laymon's The Cellar is the sexual monstrosity associated with the Beast House: a clawed, nocturnal beast with a libido and body of exceptionally grosse and monstrous sadism, which has reigned in Malcasa Point since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. All of the characters of this novel are driven tragically somehow, by sexual abuse, or fear, or vengeance, into the morbid mythology of this small-town tourist attraction that has been the unholy site of many unexplained murders.

At the centre of Laymon's novels are the tragically destructive sexual urges, desires and delusions of the libido, or Id - human and Nature alike - that sometimes transmogrifies the world into a Freudian nightmare.

A Voice Crying In The Wilderness

2007-01-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

"No one who had not been in the wilderness of North America could understand that experience, the way it made a man feel he could be reborn, but only with terrible hazards, the way it made him distrust language and the life of the streets or the court or the army encampment. Once it had you, the wilderness would not let go, it was magnificent beyond telling, it was worse than your worst nightmare."

Philip Marchand, Ghost Empire

Under The Rock

2007-01-03T03:17:00.000-08:00

An update is overdue: visiting and spending time with family, blood and soon-to-be in-law kin, over the holidays is done. Kept busy with reading, too: Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas. Awaiting the Son of Stephen King, Bram Stoker Award-winner, Joe Hill's first novel to be published, Heart-Shaped Box: a supernatural tale of horror about an aging rock star and sometimes collector of things morbid named Judas Coyne, who buys a ghost for sale on the Internet. Hill's first published book 20th Century Ghosts is a rare, highly-recommended (and multiple award-winning) collection of entertaining, literary short stories that are unlike any Horror being written today. His writing skill is capably poetic but readable by today's standards, a symmetry of fear-mongering wit and delight, something that is inimitable. Clive Barker, Dean Koontz and Graham Masterton come close with their striking imagination and poetic writing in three books - Books of Blood, Odd Thomas and Spirit - to achieving works of epistolary sainthood, like Paul, replete with that halo of canonization, where Joe Hill seems with 20th Century Ghosts an iconographic writer with promise, a potential Messiah of Horror: having both literary and horror credilibity.

His father Stephen King is in that alternative league of Horror writers who describe poetically iconographic - or perhaps, iconoclastic - images, settings and situations using words to affect Fear in his readers. They are writers who plunge their readers into Psychological States of Horror usually rooted in freakishly realistic, historical and/or psychology traumas, which sometimes incorporate the Supernatural - like Bentley Little's The Burning - but usually refrain - such as Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die or John Saul's Punish The Sinners.

I'm finishing reading Bentley Little's The Resort tonight, and hope to start John Saul's The Manhattan Hunt Club by tomorrow. That is, if my landlord isn't nagging me again, trying to collect the rent earlier this month -- since her daughter who handles the money is flying to Guyana for who knows how long.

Omletteville

2006-12-20T02:39:00.000-08:00

Living In A Rented Room

2006-12-19T23:52:00.000-08:00

Just a short update:

I'm still adjusting to some of the bizarre anecdotes of living on my own in a rented room: such as, having to stand while filching Internet access, or the limited supply of food and drink, as well as a truncated snacking schedule, due to a limited weekly budget. Or dealing with a landlord who out-Mothers my own Mother, in addition to her daughter, who always arrives to collect rent at the earliest hours of the morning, as I lay asleep, and implores if she could have the money earlier in the month as it's convenient for her mortgage. Over a month ago, it was early morning peals of screaming between the landlord and a welfare tenant, who didn't like the way she was treating him but refused to move elsewhere. These days if I'm not shored up in my room, door locked, surreptitiously eating a late-night meal in the privacy of my room, watching a borrowed DVD movie, surfing the Internet, or reading a book, avoiding the 'little wants' ("Can you do this for me, Dave?") of the landlord, I'm spending time with Viv--the only good thing I have left in my life.

This photo (right) was taken last Saturday - we were dressed up for my work's Company X-mas Party.

Mr. Murder

2006-12-10T21:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning, at a loss to explain why some ill throbbing of insomnia has awakened me, I decided to bide this wakeful time by reading Dean Koontz’s Mr. Murder. Appropriately, after reading a few, select pages I paused to reflect on my own sleeplessness, and I formed at that moment a connection in my own mind with a character’s in the novel that helped me realize something about Dean Koontz’s fiction.

There is some truth, although it is only a kind of bleached truth, to the colorful declaration that once you’ve read one Dean Koontz novel, you’ve pretty much read everything he’s ever written. I’m enjoying Koontz’s Mr. Murder for this very sake, studying the method to his madness: recognizing a disturbing pattern of secret dread aroused in the consciousness of two characters, a mystery novelist, and a programmed killer, from whence unknown.

For a writer accused of being formulaic, Koontz never seems to let his writing style slip into sloppy long-winded sentences, clichés and poor syntax, but is quite tight and subtle, rhetorically. He is the only other writer I know of, aside from Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, who can pull off a firm gradatio:

Though she knows what he wants, she does not know what he needs any more than he does. When he gets what he wants, and when it does not quench the hot need in him, Heather will learn the pattern of emotion that is now so familiar to him: need fosters frustration; frustration grows into anger; anger leads to hatred; hatred generates violence—and violence sometimes soothes. (36)

This degree of sophistication and originality is unexpected of Horror or Thriller writers, but Mr. Murder is, in terms of the evolution of 20^th Century Weird Fiction, one of the first meta-fictional novels. Comparing this novel with his earlier breakthrough novel Watchers, I suddenly realize how dangerously easy it is – in this illiterate reader-centric universe of consumer readers - to slip into the fallacy of accusing writers of being formulaic.

Back In Black

2006-12-08T00:44:00.000-08:00

Over a month, and I finally discover - thanks to a fellow boarder - that some fool in the neighbourhood hasn't secured his wireless network, which means I am filching someone else's Internet Access. I may have had to re-arrange the furniture in my room, as well as elevate my computer atop an awkward plastic stand meant for storing magazines and miscellaneous papers to be at window-level, not to mention type standing up, but I'm back again.

Aside from sleeping, eating and working, I've kept busy reading a select of masterful contemporary novelists - mostly what I would call Supernatural Horror - over the last month: Peter Straub's lost boy lost girl, Bentley Little's Dispatch and Return, Graham Masterton's Spirit, David Morrell's Creepers and M. John Harrison's Light. Yesterday, I started reading Dean Koontz's Mr. Murder. Perhaps I'll post some of my thoughts on Mr. Koontz - having read one of his other novels: Watchers, already.

Moving

2006-11-06T23:35:00.000-08:00

This Saturday I'm moving out: to a single bed-room for rent in a shared house, in the proximity of 427 and Finch area. I won't have Internet Access until who knows when - and when I do, I'll probably have Dial-up, only. Until then, I probably won't be posting anything.

A Nightmare World

2006-11-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

Salvador Dali The Birth of Liquid Desires, 1932

The Dream in Punish The Sinners - like most Horror fiction - seems to follow something of a Surreal idiom for unconsciously-laden meaning within the novel's occult language of Psychology. When Peter Balsam's girlfriend, Margo slumps into a deep, nightmarish sleep in the wake of discovering the perverse nature of the Society of St. Peter the Martyr's secret meetings, she dreams:

She was outside the rectory, and she knew what was going on inside. But she couldn't stop it. She could only crouch in the darkness outside, listening to the sounds, hearing first the chanting, and then the moaning, knowing that Peter was inside, that he was in the middle of that group of six strange priests, and that they were seducing him. Their hands touching him, and their lips kissing him in a way that only her hand should have touched him, only her lips should have kissed him.

Disturbing images of eldritch 'satanic sexual abuse' committed by the priests of the Order - though this novel predates the American conspiracy of the late 1980s and early 1990s - are evoked in Margo's fear-driven unconscious mind. This is but Margo's baleful unconscious prologue to the neurotic transformations of much deeper tensions which are themselves shockingly left bare:

Then she was suddenly inside the rectory, inside that oddly lit room, watching the naked priests, their wrinkled bodies glistening sweatily in the candlelight as they stripped Peter's clothes from him, their fingers greedily playing over his smooth skin, their tongues clucking away in that strange language. And then they were holding him down and Monsignor Vernon, grown suddenly to a towering height, stood of Peter, his monstrous organ thrusting toward Peter's gaping mouth. The priest began advancing toward Peter, and Margo looked on in horror. She wanted to scream, but couldn't make any sound escape her lips. She tried to lunge forward, tried to rescue Peter from the grasp of the old men, but she couldn't make her feet move. They seemed to be mired in heavy mud. All she could do was look on in mutely fascinated horror as Monsignor Vernon, suddenly enveloped in halo, forced his penis into Peter Balsam's mouth. And finally, as the immense glans disappeared between his lips, she screamed.

The more dangerous issue of Childhood Trauma - the emblazened traumatic image of the post-coital murder of Monsignor Vernon's parents by his disturbed sister - from the opening scene of Punish The Sinner is awakened in the reader unconsciously by Margo's nightmare of priestly sexual abuse. Saul's Psychology of Childhood Traumas - festering undisturbed hitherto, as fear - stalks after the reader's own psyche like mythical Furies with poetically eldritch Memories and Dreams in this novel.

Morbid Streak in the Puritan Imagination

2006-11-03T05:15:00.000-08:00

As much as I seem inured to connect John Saul's Punish The Sinners exclusively with the Supernatural Horror of Howard Philip Lovecraft, I would be skewing the novel's expression of a "profoundly morbid streak in the [religious fundamentalist] imagination." I have substituted the interpolation "religious fundamentalist" where Lovecraft originally had written "Puritan" - Saul's American small town of Neilsville, after all, is lorded over by an archaic conservative Catholic Theocracy influenced clandestinely by a "cult-like" Religious Order.

This is the original apocalyptic theme of American literature onward from Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 epistolary novel Wieland, or the Transformation.

The militant Order is: the Society of St. Peter the Martyr. Its six members are dedicated exclusively to bringing about a militant Reformation of the ruling spirit, as well as moral rapture, harkening to the medieval Italian Inquisition of the Catholic Church. Of course Monsignor Vernon, the protagonist, Peter Balsam's former best friend, champions the strict Doctrine of this occult tribunal:

But as the questioning continued, each of the priests taking his turn, Balsam realized that they wanted more of him than a simple statement of his knowledge of the beliefs of the Church. They were trying to determine if there were flaws in his faith; if there were areas in which he was not in agreement with the Doctrines.

Suddenly a spirit of thanatos--or perhaps, libido--besets Neilsville's dense population of young pubescent teen-agers. Neilsville's Theocratic foundation is jarred by a seemingly random outbreak of attempted suicide, carried out by one of the popular girls at the church school. Then, former bonds of kinship begin to crumble further as the suicidal girl gets back at her religiously fanatical snooping mother by withdrawing from her, in effect denying her of any psychological catharsis as a parent. And then the Religious Order seeks to excommunicate the suicidal daughter and her family for this grave Mortal Sin from the Catholic Church.

A brief visionary moment is experienced by one meek, devout, and religious student, Marilyn Crane, however, amidst Balsam's controversial psychology class. Marilyn recalls her charged ethereal glimpse of Mary, the 'Sorrowful Mother' of Jesus with the anti-Semitic Order members standing in the room observing an experimental Relaxation Therapy exercise:

"The priests of the Sanhedrin. The Jews who condemned our Lord. They were here, six of them, and they were watching the Sorrowful Mother. But she wasn't paying any attention to them. She wanted to talk to me. But I don't know why."

See John 18:12-24 for the story identified by Marilyn above.

Miskatonic Country

2006-11-02T01:30:00.000-08:00

Changing from Clive Barker's Blood-and-Guts Horror - Books of Blood - to that unexplored country of Supernatural Horror mixed with Modern Psychology in John Saul's 1978, second novel Punish The Sinners has been relatively easy. Saul's novel is essentially a working psycho-analytical session that is told in narrative - allegorically speaking - with the reader visiting like a patient, following Saul's words like a pendulum-swinging chained-watch into hypnosis, guiding the reader with plot and character on a journey back to unearth childhood trauma in the psyche, and eventually confronting this adulthood "fear of the unknown."

I would argue for calling Punish The Sinners Supernatural Horror mixed with Modern Psychology as Saul's writing from the start draws upon literary elements iconographically associated with the story-telling of Lovecraft - without being counterfeit. However, Saul's Punish The Sinners pushes this secret doctrine of Lovecraftian fiction even beyond into an occult language. The novel is replete with its own subliminal connections, or meta-fictional commentaries, artfully incorporated into the dialogue:

"I guess most towns are like that," Margo agreed."You don't really get a feel for them from the downtown area. You have to see where the people live. And even then, it's not easy. People in small towns aren't as friendly as they're supposed to be. Unless you're a native, of course. If you're not, forget it. You're a newcomer for at least twenty years."

"I thought that only happened in New England," Peter laughed.

The gesture is familiar enough, without betraying too much of the authour's sleight of hand. With these occult words Saul invokes the weird spirit of Lovecraft's original Mythical Miskatonic Region--Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich--which was based on New England:

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre 'kick'. Here is material for a really profound study in group neuroticism; for certainly, none can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

[...] the true epicure of the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteem most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

City of the Gods of Horror

2006-10-29T01:50:00.000-08:00

Quaid's striving to out-Lovecraft Lovecraft in Clive Barker's torture chamber short story "Dread" from the Books of Blood: Volume 2 has left me struggling with a real literary paradox lifeless and stiff like a corpse now. I visualize the Mengelean experiment as a hyper-Surreal nightmare manifested through the images of psychological torture pricking sadistically at Stephen's childhood traumas. Except Stephen is delivered from his dread, and Quaid is left to learn his:

Another creak, as it came up the stairs towards him, the ridiculous dream. It had to be a dream. After all, he knew no clowns, no axe-killers. So how could that absurd image, the same image that woke him night after night, be anything but a dream?

... leaving Quaid's mind driven to madness by archetypal clichés of Horror fiction. Creaking stairs. Haunted dreams. Caricatures of past Horror: Stephen King's It, The Shining or Frederic Brown's Here Comes A Candle.

Stephen returns in his resurrected, impoverished, pauper-like condition to Quaid's House of Torture with an axe, driven by the violent John the Baptist-like fate of Old Man Crowley at the homeless shelter, like an avatar of Vengeance. And Quaid's nightmare is realized:

Then it appeared, the face of a fool. Pale to whiteness in the light of the moon, it's young features bruised, unshaven and puffy, its smile open like a child's smile. It had bitten its lips in its excitement. Blood was smeared across its lower jaw, and its gums were almost black with blood. Still it was a clown. Indisputably a clown even to its ill-fitting clothes, so incongruous, so pathetic.

Stephen out-Stephen Kings Stephen King. And Quaid, like Barker, goes straight to Hell with his vision of Pandemonium, City of the Gods of Horror:

There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams comes true.

The Lock Up

2006-10-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

The words of the harrowing figure of Quaid in Clive Barker's "Dread" continues to sketch with gloomy chiaroscuro a dreadful something - of pure discarnate fear yet to be realized - in my imagination. I think of Quaid, as a revered caricature of Lovecraft the story-teller subliminally endorsing, in effect harking back with his emphatic words to that original story of the Lovecraftian "beast" of fear:

"I fear, you fear, we fear," Quaid was fond of saying. "He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing in the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat."

... sounds like Lovecraft himself in Supernatural Horror in Literature. However, Quaid out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft with his twisted invention. He conducts what might only be imagined as a cruel, terrorizing, Pavlovian trial on his opposing classmate, and later mistress, Cheryl. He tells Stephen (the narrator):

"I locked her away you see, Steve." Quaid was as unemotional as a newsreader. "To see if I could needle her into showing her dread a little bit."

Then Quaid shows him the whole slew of photos taken during the experiment of Cheryl's degenerative and eventual break down - how he compelled Cheryl, a strict vegetarian, to consume a rancid old piece of meat. Where I stopped reading tonight ... with much suspense ... Stephen was captured and locked up by Quaid.

Barker's Bible of Horror

2006-10-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

These days I've been staying the intellectual course by reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood: Volume One to Three, and so far I've progressed to the Second Volume in spite of the ever-widening dearth of free time.

The strangest thing is whenever I faithfully study while simultaneously reading Barker's incarnadine Bible of Horror from 1984 I can't help hearing the eerie drip, dripping echo of Northrop Frye's words in The Great Code.

I wrote in an essay "The Paranoid Vision: Frye, Lovecraft and Theosophy" a while ago:

Reflecting on the great “kerygma, or proclaiming rhetoric, of the Bible,” Frye proposes that the “human imaginative response, as we have it in literature and the arts, where the language is purely the imaginative and hence hypothetical” (Frye Code 231), have as modern successors, absorbed and evolved into something new beyond the grand cosmic or mythical vision of the Bible.

What I meant to illustrate here are those unacknowledged, and well-proven ancient structures that girt the words of a story (which we come to think of as literary) with the tradition of kerygmatic, or proclaiming rhetoric of the Bible. The very relationship in literature of an ancient book (or canonical) - whether it is the Christian Bible, Necronomicon or Koran - to any modern story-telling is a poetically bonding experience, something which the reader experiences, consciously or unconsciously, in many tales.

For example Richard Condon's 1959 thriller novel, The Manchurian Candidate, as a friend pointed out once, is Hamlet told with the political argot of the Cold War. I also think that Richard Laymon's Body Rides is an anti-heroic and vulgar wet dream psychological-fantasy version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight set in the modern realm.

I was thinking in particular of a character from Barker's tale "Dread" who seemed to pay homage to, with as much self-effacing caricature as endorsement for, the 20th Century Solomon, or Preacher of Horror, H.P. Lovecraft. He writes:

"I fear, you fear, we fear," Quaid was fond of saying. "He, she or it fears. There's no conscious thing in the face of the world that doesn't know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat."

... invoking, or rather speaking those very words as though they were learned by rote from Lovecraft himself out of his landmark 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

Temporary Dwellings

2006-10-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

A short update: the house is up for sale. A visitor has already come to view the house - late in the evening even though the listing was just put on the market today - and the realtors have scheduled an open house for this upcoming Sunday, also. Looks like I'll have to find a place of my own to live soon, perhaps even sooner than I hoped. What available time I have now I'll be spending searching for a temporary dwelling to abide in, or if my fiancée and I can manage it, even better, a place for us to live.

Everybody's A Book of Blood

2006-10-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

Max Ernst, The Temptation of St. Anthony 1945

"Everybody's a book of blood. Wherever we're opened, we're red."

--Clive Barker's Books of Blood

A night or two ago, I was thinking about how I'd explain, or better express the way I understand this very gory metaphor evoked in Barker's epigraph to the first volume of the Books of Blood. I always tend to think of and see an extended metaphorical expression as something active and animated in terms of the human imagination, instead of breathless and inanimate. His writing style is truly poetic to the very unconscious core, and it was in his stories that I was reminded of the shocking psycho-sexual, Freudian images of Surrealism--particularly having Salvador Dali (below) and Max Ernst (above) in mind. Barker's gory, yet literary elucidation above is like that of the Surrealist painters, whose paintings are never stilted with a stale expressiveness but shock quite animately with eldritch images revealing a deeper unconscious essence of being. I picture Barker as wanting the reader to envision a shape-shifting image in his or her own mind of a Daliesque body--a vivisection of violence: manuscript constituted by mutilated human parts--dismembered arms and hands tattooed with the ink of random sentences, flipping open its own pages made flesh, which are dripping with deep-sanguine blood, while reading.

Salvador Dali, Autumnal Cannibalism 1936

Rising Up and Rising Down

2006-10-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

A week later and I'm bogged down with countless things still to do in addition to working five days a week: customizing a new cellphone, finding a place - once my parents sell our present home - to live for my fiancée and I, as well as reading the encyclopedic abridged edition of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means - a life-time work of anthropology which ought to be as pertinent to the comprehension of our times as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance is to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

I'll post about things literary soon -- and with less pretension, I hope.

The Medieval Endorsement

2006-10-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

Before I plan to hand over my sole copy of W.S Merwin's recent new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to a workmate, who, based on his delight with classic stories like Homer's Odyssey, asked me to endorse other classic literary adventures for him to read, I was killing time before work by re-reading it.

While reading those very potent, mythologically rich descriptions of Biblical and Classical proportions found in the Gawain-poet's tale - of the translatio imperii, of King Solomon's pentangle, of Christ's wounds, of Mary, the Queen of Heaven's image, and of knightly virtues - intuitively, I felt my mind wafting with an idea never conceived of before evoked by some orchestrated ineffable source.

Understanding these ideas in my own bizarre way, I thought analogously of the function of endorsement in advertising - a celebrated name or place of renowned association intended poetically to uplift the value of something above and beyond mundane reality to a far greater mythological significance. We're requested as readers of this medieval tale by the Gawain-poet to conceive of the extra poetic meaning associated with these well-known mythological endorsements.

Freudian Slip

2006-10-12T04:33:00.000-07:00

Sigmund Freud

Kept apart in my mind from the affairs of everyday living, my dedicated and scholarly examination of supernatural horror literature has grown into something of a foreboding and occult ritual of night-time reading. Tonight, I was reading one of many brutal and debauched short stories ("Pig Blood Blues") taken out of Clive Barker's Books of Blood together in ever-twining tandem with Richard Laymon's Body Rides. The odd thing or coincidence about these two horror-meisters is this: one is a modern, contemporary British writer with a very literary, well-crafted style who has a large American following, and the other is a latter-day American writer with a very chatty, pulp style who was and is (to quote Wikipedia), "lesser known in North America than elsewhere, as he achieved much of his success in Europe, particularly the United Kingdom."

I was silently agog in my own mind for the longest time with trying to figure out this literary mystery. The attempt to piece together the fragments of dissociative knowledge, in effect literature as a whole, has always been for me - especially as an English major - a very frightening and traumatic but rewarding religious experience. Reading has sometimes opened up "terrifying vistas, and of our frightful position therein," to quote H.P. Lovecraft, in my own own mind. By the bye, these two respective horror writers Barker and Laymon conduct themselves very differently, stylistically, with their words and sentences to convey ideas in their tales: one is symbolic, sophisticated and ornamental and the other, blunt, surreal and tantalizing.

Yet the subjects and plots of their stories seem to me to share a common anthropological interest: a scary almost fetish-like encyclopedic anatomy of 'normative' and 'diseased' human decadence. Everything Freudian and Biblical from the exploration and fears related to: anatomy, sex, pubescence, fantasy, seduction, relationships, incest, superstition, temptation, voyeurism, sado-masochism, rites of passage, molestation, adultery, sexual abuse, fetishes, virginity, bondage, childhood to sexual orientation.

Why Laymon's writing style failed to arouse much commercial success in his own country is likely related to cultural factors in America. His protagonist in Body Rides - Neal Darden - is very much a modernized Gawain figure, whose courteous act of chivalry thrusts him into an underground reality that is gravely caught up in a decadent cycle of worldly temptation, slaughter and other hitherto repressed outbursts of sexuality. The Second Earl of Rochester would have been proud of Laymon.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

2006-10-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

Since returning home Tuesday morning after spending the long, Thansgiving weekend in Collingwood with my fiancée, her family and friends, for work's sake I haven't felt that keen, self-impelled drive - two failed attempts - to write an interesting blog entry.

Over these past two days - still trying to think of something relevant - I haven't had much luck thinking of something to write about: life itself has felt as though it were lagging before my very eyes.

Yesterday I finished reading Matthew Pearl's The Poe Shadow, but I just haven't cared to write anything, book-wise. I keep reading new and old books from day to day out of habit - I think, to keep my mind distracted from my daily, worldly concerns - but sometimes my mind just doesn't want to let go of my thoughts, as though waiting till some faraway, promising time or kingdom come.

I'm not too worried, actually; my fiancée has kept me from becoming that seeksorrow I once thought I was.

Feast of Booths

2006-10-04T23:05:00.000-07:00

Over the past week, including last weekend, truly, I couldn't think of something worthwhile to write on this blog. And I'm heading up to Collingwood with my fiancée anon Friday night from work, to spend the apt Thanksgiving long weekend celebrating with family, friends and churchgoers the start of the Feast of Booths (Tabernacles). Last year, due to the grave demands of fourth-year university, I had decided not to attend the Feast of Booths. This year, I'm looking forward to spending personal and social time with my fiancée, as well as our mutual friends, recuperating from the scarring lives of bosses, supervisors, co-workers and inebriated customers from the bar.

Some Of Your Blood

2006-09-28T00:32:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from the decadent, cult horror of Richard Laymon's Body Rides, yesterday, I picked up and started reading Theodore Sturgeon's classic 1956 pulp-horror story, Some Of Your Blood. I learned about Sturgeon by accident, incidentally, while perusing the website of a notable, modern "classic horror" publication company, Millipede Press, after I had read their recent edition of Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die. Their re-print publications are what I would consider horror's equivalent to the academic Norton Critical Editions - complete with a learned introduction by a notable modern horror author reflecting on the work's significance, and justifying its apotheosis into the literary canon, as well as extra tidbits. Other forthcoming titles include Frederic Brown's Here Comes a Candle, and Roland Torpor's The Tenant, William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, and John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron.

Theodore Sturgeon is also somewhat recognizable, at least satirically, and indirectly, in his amusing literary re-incarnation as Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout.

Sunday Afternoon

2006-09-27T02:40:00.000-07:00

A photo taken recently of Viv and I

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

2006-09-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

The work week is complete prematurely for me, thanks to the absence of a co-worker, which meant I began and also ceased working earlier in the day. Before arriving at home, I stopped over at Shopper's Drug Mart to pick up a new Mach-3 razor blade, new Nivea shaving cream and new Aqua Velva aftershave, staying true to my promise, that I would shave my unkempt, hirsute face Friday night. I have, in the mean time, been reading Harold Bloom's Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? over the past few nights and days, and feeling especially, silently nostalgic and yet crestfallen because I used to devote extraordinary time to reading classic writers, wholeheartedly believing strongly in literature's uplift. Obviously, I haven't given up on literature, merely by changing my genre direction, but my present experience reading is starting to feel more like (to adopt a phrase from 2 Chronicles 24:5) "travelling out into the cities" of books and gathering from all literature something to strengthen the house of my mind and experience as an adult. But then again I'm just thinking out-loud. The temptation is to put Bloom's book down to read something with more pulp, almost belligerent to the psyche, like Peter Straub's Hellfire Club, or Richard Laymon's raunchy magical horror Body Rides.

Happy Birthday

2006-09-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Happy 24th Birthday, Viv!

Kalpas Of Eternity

2006-09-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

A copy of this 1962 collectable publication of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (right) , first published in 1908, nearly a century ago, has found its way into my book collection. Hodgson is one of those authors hitherto forgotten a generation or two after his demise, who, if it weren't for mentionable praise in H.P. Lovecraft's landmark 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, would be forgotten by and large.

Lovecraft says this of The House on the Borderland:

"...perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water."

The Fourth Bear

2006-09-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Months ago the Seth MacFarlane of the book world, Jasper Fforde, came out with his second novel in the Jack Spratt "Nursery Crime" series, called The Fourth Bear. The comparison is apt: Fforde's novels operate with the same (though more literary, and therefore more sophisticated) brand of humour as Family Guy. Every one of Fforde's books is set in his imaginative alternative universe where fiction and reality commingle, with the usual "nonsensical cutaways" and inside literary jokes and parodies working on levels which only a bibliophile could appreciate.

The absurd humour centres around Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, two seasoned police officers of the derelict Nursery Crime Division.

You get jokes like this:

He explained the news to Mary, who said, "How about if we do a plot device number twenty-six and pretend not to look for him?"

"So you're suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?"

Mary nodded enthusiastically. "Pretty much."

"No, we're going to follow plot device number thirty-eight."

Mary narrowed her eyes. "Which one is that again?"

"We wait until they beg for our assistance, then save the day. For now we follow orders. After all, do you think we'd get the support Copperfield is getting if it was an NCD inquiry?"

Hey Buster!

2006-09-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Arriving home prematurely from work an hour earlier tonight due to a dearth of work, as well as feeling a bit dour and defeated by a bullying team of a work week and supervisors, I sat down and watched the kind of movie that's beginning to grow on me: the good old silver screen knockabout comedy, Steamboat Bill Jr. with Buster Keaton. Months ago, I got hold of a two-DVD set called Legends of the Silver Screen one with two pictures from Charlie Chaplin--The Kid and Tillie's Punctured Romance--and another with a double feature from Buster Keaton--The General and Steamboat Bill Jr.--together.

I love watching Keaton for two simple facts: (1) his clumsy and unabashed, yet impressively daring knockabout acrobatics, and (2) the famous and charistmatic look of pathos in his tragic eyes, and youthful dead-pan facial expressions onscreen.

I guess ever since I read and wrote a paper discussing vaudeville or knockabout comedy in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, affirming a love of all things slapstick from an early age since discovering SCTV and Jim Carey's knockabout comedy, I've become a sucker for the original vaudeville movie stars.

The Oresteia

2006-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Before I headed off to a dreadful and abusive day of work at the warehouse, having finally received the second volume of David Grene and Richmond Lattimore's Greek Tragedies series, I read Aeschylus' The Libation Bearers, or Choephoroe. I'll probably have to go back and read it a second time if I truly wish to understand and experience the full extent of the play's tragic meaning. The foremost concern in my over-enthusiastic mind was with identifying the formal structure (i.e. Prologue, Parode, Episodes, Stasimons, Kommoi, and Exode) and elements (Metabasis, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, etc) of ancient Greek tragedy from Aristotle's Poetics, which I finally learned in a course last year.

And now I can say that I've read Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides), albeit somewhat out of sequence.

The Face That Must Die

2006-09-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

I'm near finishing Dean Koontz's Watchers, as I continue in my somewhat dubious - and not attending school, unjustified - quest to educate myself about twentieth-century Weird fiction, but instead I put it down to read Ramsey Campbell's legendary 1979 tale of a psychotic killer, The Face That Must Die. The book lives up to its reputation of high literary innovation, as a satire of Thatcher-era English literary homophobia (Campbell cites Chandler and Whittington-Egan as two examples), and in fact transcends the common clichés of Weird or Horror fiction. I'm still only 48 pages into the novel, so I'll refrain from commenting, and conjecturing further about the storyline.

Go figure. I could probably write a complete (probably comprehensive third year) university-level English course entitled '20th-Century Weird Fiction' using my growing knowledge of the evolution of Weird and Horror fiction. It'd read something like this:

This course examines first the early twentieth-century ‘pulp’ literary tradition of Weird literature, as articulated by H.P. Lovecraft, as well as his contemporaries, and then focuses next on the thriller, horror and New Weird genres of today’s American and British ‘pulp’ literature.

Then again, I think I just have my head in the clouds these days.

Bold and the Beautiful

2006-09-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

A shot of my beautiful fiancée Vivian on the plane to Trinidad

Eros and Psyche

2006-09-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

A memorable photo of Viv, I and Great-Uncle Cupid

The Beach

2006-09-05T00:09:00.000-07:00

A candid night-time shot of Uncle Kamal, Aunt Camille and I, at Los Iros (and yes, he is wearing a soccer ball on his head!)

The Day of Pentecost

2006-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

A photo of Aunt Camille and Uncle Kamal's lively Pentecostal church

All In The Family

2006-09-04T23:54:00.000-07:00

Viv, I, Devan, Keshav and Aunt Karen at Maracas Bay lookout point

King of the Hill

2006-09-04T23:49:00.000-07:00

Uncle Derajh walking towards Fort George

Sermon on the Mount

2006-09-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

A hill-top shot of Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad, from Fort George

Life of the Rich and Famous

2006-09-04T23:33:00.000-07:00

A snapshot of luxury homes atop the hill in Chaguaramas, Trinidad

Subhanallah

2006-09-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

An interior photo of Salima's breathtaking Islamic decor

I Saw The Sign

2006-09-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

A sign posted across the street from a marketplace in Trinidad

The Vixen

2006-09-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

A snapshot of a fox at the cottage taken by my mom.

There Has To Be Something Better Than This

2006-09-02T04:15:00.000-07:00

"There being a divine order of learning superior to mundane knowledge, and its being available--the time is most appropriate for the further restoration of this sacred tradition."

Manly P. Hall

"These times are ripe for a more serious knowledge than hitherto permitted, though still very limited, so far."

Madame Blavatsky

"Yet perhaps it is only through the study of works of human imagination that we can make any real contact with the level of vision beyond faith."

Northrop Frye

The Beach

2006-08-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

A photo taken of Viv and I at Los Iros beach, Trinidad

The Fruit Of The Trees Of The Garden

2006-08-31T00:45:00.000-07:00

Catching mangos (not this one) on the first evening in Trinidad

Update

2006-08-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

Back to posting again, and work today, having returned from a two-week trip to Trinidad last Thursday, after nearly three weeks of silence. I will showcase a few significant photos, of family, and of scenery, from the trip in some upcoming posts.

Miss Marple, You Are Wonderful

2006-08-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

"You'd probably like it if the rest of the house were like this," Mrs. Bamberger said. "Most young people feel that way. My husband and I just love the old cottage, low ceiling and all. It reminded us of Miss Marple."

Richard smiled: that was perfect. The original building needed only a thatched roof to make it an English country cottage in an Agatha Christie novel.

Peter Straub, Floating Dragon

The Ballad of Jephthah

2006-08-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

Hamlet: O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!

Polonius: What a treasure had he, my lord?

Hamlet: Why--
"One fair daughter, and no more,
The which he loved passing well."

Judges 11:30-31, and 11:34-35

30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, 31 Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

34 And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter, thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.

Fearful Places

2006-08-04T01:40:00.000-07:00

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Revelation 12:9

I gave in yesterday, I admit, and put down Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels to start reading Peter Straub's chilling Dragon Floating. My July issue of Locus magazine, the one with the sundering gaze of Peter Straub on the front cover, still lies agape in front of the computer to his full two-page interview "Fearful Places." This interview I remember fondly since Straub offers one of the most simple, if somewhat psychoanalytical stories of his own writing:

In my work, both the supernatural and more 'mainstream' forms of horror come from the same set of circumstances. In one case, these experiental sources are treated unconsciously, and they are mediated by the imagery that is open to you when you want to write what is called 'horror.' (78)

I had this massive book, the Modern Library Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and I carried it around as though it were the Bible. It spoke to me. It presented horrific, ghastly, unnatural, moonlit events brightened by lightning bolts, with a soundtrack of crumbling castles and dying monks! It was a landscape where I felt immediately at home. (79)

Based on Dragon Floating I've noticed that Straub's writing, compared to his counterpart Stephen King's, psychologically terrorizes and explodes the reader's deeper tensions surreptitiously from deep down within the untapped unconscious. Balefully, he tricks his readers into drawing intimately close to the characters themselves based on an entirely vulnerable, and often sinister, sympathy (or fear) constructed like a Golden Calf in the author's devilish imagination. Then slowly, after he has with entirely false mortal fear lighted and discharged some neurotic transformations in the reader's mind, the most dangerous (spiritual or psychological) issue is left to fester undisturbed (allegorically) beneath the whole plot in the unquestioning reader's mind.

This 'Paranoid Vision,' as I conceive in my own mind, epitomised in horror, terrorizes the reader with imagined, sadistic supernatural or human horrors threatening the wishful, spiritual promise of catharsis in this world. The latent promise in this psychological 'quest' for readers and victims alike is a traumatic realization of our own delusional ('blind' or constructed) understanding of the world, and hopefully a faint hankering for something spiritual, or psychologically alleviating, in a world full of idols.

Supernatural Horror In Literature

2006-08-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

Nearly a week later and I'm still reading Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, with just over 200 pages left, although I've been tempted lately to set it aside in order to read two other books: Peter Straub's Floating Dragon and Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die. I'm trying these days to broaden, in a somewhat out-of-joint chronological fashion, my study of reputable horror literature, and Straub (left) and Campbell (bottom right) were recognizable almost brand names. Other reputable writers of "supernatural horror" (as Lovecraft called it) I'm looking to read in the future include: Robert Bloch, Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant and Clive Barker. I managed to stretch, if not broaden my perspective slightly after discovering and reading Fritz Leiber's philosophical, yet truly Weird Our Lady of Darkness, Joe Hill's unputdownable, incisive horror short stories in 20th Century Ghosts, as well as some of the tales from Campbell's eldritch anthology Alone With The Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991. Eventually this: The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith, Vol. 1, edited by David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi, will arrive by mail in November packaged with a revised annotated edition by Donald Sidney-Fryer of Smith's stellar epic poem The Hashish-Eater, or the Apocalypse of Evil.

But all in due time. Heading to Niagara Falls for the day.

King of the Hill

2006-07-27T00:25:00.000-07:00

"By the time Nick got back from disposing of our comic collection, we were lying on our stomachs, side by side in front of MTV's Spring Break. I had the novel out and was going through some passages I had high-lighted . . . something I usually never did. As I said, I was a poor, unmotivated student, but Lord of the Flies had excited me, distracted my imagination for a week or so, made me want to live barefoot and naked on an island, with my own tribe of boys to dominate and lead in savage rituals. I read and reread the parts about Jack painting his face, smitten with a desire to smear colored muds on my own face, to be primitive and unknowable and free."

Eric, the gibbous protagonist of the short story "The Cape," in Joe Hill's short story collection 20th Century Ghosts.

The first shady tentacles of Eric's deranged inner character, as a teenager, emerge as he mistakenly snatches his superhero brother's visiting girlfriend, Angie. She, unfortunately, mistakes his sadistic love of demonic Jack and his primitive, oppressive political power in William Golding's Lord of the Flies for a civilizing love of literature. Eric taints his inner, moral sense of true, affectionate Love with the polluted ebb and flow of his own primitive, sado-masochistic urges. Angie later leaves Eric after not only his DUI, or his lazy, pathetic direction in life, but especially after she catches him standing with knife in hand staring at her throat, daydreaming with an obsessive, murderous glare in his eye.

Eric exacts his revenge on Angie, biblically, like the serpent against Eve, in the end, after he re-discovers his cape at home: promising to let her soar high up in the sky with him - like gods, or at least superheroes - but instead letting go of her to plummet to her own death.

Breakfast Of Champions

2006-07-25T02:50:00.000-07:00

"... and the little kids snickered at Bug like they always did; in truth people were not so nice to Bug, which was why he became a murderer; for in later life he judged people too quickly and usually assigned them evil negative ratings, because most cases were ambiguous and he had been hurt so many times that he did not give ambiguous cases the benefit of the doubt; so he killed them, though of course he had a perfect right to do so since I, Big George, eat a thousand boys for breakfast, and enjoy it, too."

--After Bug is openly humiliated by his parents in front of his classmates for accidentally tipping his sister overboard into the ocean in William T. Vollman's You Bright and Risen Angels

Reading this frank and brutal admission of Big George's immediately called to mind a nexus of thoughts. If the reader recalls that Big George is, in the blackout narrator's view, "pure electrical consciousness," he is inadvertantly linking himself with the force of a sinister demiurge, fallen angel or profane god of Ba'al worshipped woefully by the Israelites in the Bible. Electricity is connected in this novel with the biblical, firebrand image of Moloch the brutal profane god whose cruel worshippers, balefully mesmerized and woebegone, desperately satisfied his voracious murderous appetite by sacrificing their own children.

And they built the high places of the Ba‘al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire Mo'lech; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jeremiah 32:35)

The image of Moloch - a baleful deity or idol in the Bible - has figured as a significant and damning metaphor in modern literature for countless successive generations of young spirits sacrificed in ignorance - to tyrannical ideas, technology and war. Allen Ginsberg in his poem Howl used Moloch most famously in Part Two in his snarling, bewailing cries against the modern world:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
         their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
         nation?
  Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
         tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
         stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
         weeping in the parks!
  Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
         loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
         judger of men!
  Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
         crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
         sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
         Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
         ned governments!
  Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
         blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
         are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
         bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
         tomb!
  Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
         Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
         streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
         tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
         smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
  Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
         whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
         whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
         whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
         Moloch whose name is the Mind!
  Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
         Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
         Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
  Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
         I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
         who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
         Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
         Light streaming out of the sky!
  Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
         skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
         industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
         houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
  They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
         ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
         Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
         us!

Blackout: The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness

2006-07-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

"...now who could that be, I suggest, but Big George, and who could he be but pure electrical consciousness itself, insinuating itself everywhere, drifting in and out of all stories and machines [....] Of course it is in the nature of electricity to flow round and round and back and forth, even against itself sometimes, and short itself out under disadventageous circumstances."

-The anonymous cry of an interrupting narrator in the electric wilderness

Big George is aptly the chief narrator of the first part of Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels: "The History of Electricity." Here (above) is a fine example of the authour's erudite storytelling. The dissident voice, a projection of the author ("The damned keyboard stops for a second, and I have a chance to input now in spite of a pounding headache and a feeling that it is a waste of time to beat Big George...") into the narrative, hijacks the authorial "electrical" narrative flow of Big George. This blackout of an electrical grid, as people in Ontario will recognize, in Big George's third-person storytelling, embodied by the narrative interruption, jarringly makes his reader aware of a number of realizations or levels of meaning:

(a) Big George revealed prior to this chapter that he is a product, or former member, of the Society of Daniel.
(b) Big George is the embodiment, or voice, of electricity, according to the intervening, second narrator.
(c) The Society of Daniel's ideals spread and brought the world closer to the American (Tribal) Dream with the technological imperialism of electricity.
(d) The Society of Daniel unleashed the Ideals and still manipulates, behind the scenes, electricity universally.
(e) Electricity is at odds with the mechanical technology of the typewriter (or keyboard)

Therefore a blackout reveals:

(e) Big George is a poster-child of electricity and its effects, in words, life and imagination, and is different from the author's persona, as well as typewriter and its technological effects upon words, life and imagination.
(f) The Society of Daniel and its members are at the centre of a conspiracy for worldwide domination and capitalization.
(g) Big George's narrative is representative of an "electrical" hegemonic voice, history and storytelling.
(h) The reader should be wary of the Society of Daniel and its plans for globalization.
(i) Electricity is not necessarily a positive thing: (1) because it short-circuits and (2) gives the Society of Daniel the means to effect a worldwide Apocalypse (violence as a means to the rapturous end) ala Revelation.
(j) The Global Village is divided in civil war: (Human) Electricity vs. (Natural) Tribalism.

The Book of Generators

2006-07-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

The readings from the Book of Generators, while morally instructive, were a bit like hauling shingles to Albany as far as we were concerned, for when one's whole life is devoted to studying such worthies as Tesla, Steinmetz, Nunn and Lambe, and outwitting their marketing schemes in a highly practical way, then further information on grand electrical figures and doings must be pigeonholed as "career development" rather than "entertainment."

from William T. Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels

The Book of Generators being yet another concocted American mythical pseudo-Bible and history, of the imaginary Society of Daniel, complete with Hagiography of the electrifying, pioneering lives of Nikola Tesla, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Lucien Lucius Nunn, and someone named Lambe. Although one of the narrators claims the Society of Daniel, which is headed by a man named Mr. White, is named after Daniel Boone, the Biblical underhand criticizing a modern Conservative, political and evangelical Christianity (e.g. the Rapture movement) currently in power ala Book of Daniel is ever present.

You Bright and Risen Angels

2006-07-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

The book I'm reading now You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann even seventy pages in seems to be assuredly one of those immense, sprawling, enigmatic masterpieces of literature hitherto unacknowledged. There is on the front cover one of those typically over-generalized newspaper review proclamations, this one from USA Today, obviously pandering to the browsing bookstore types, calling this novel: "A bold and abrasive act of imagination, reminiscent of both Pynchon's V and the futurist fantasies of William Burroughs."

Truly an appropriate, yet unfair comparison. I, personally, would laud Vollmann with even greater praise as being one of those rare writers, like Shakespeare, whose writing and meaning T.S. Eliot described in one of his essays as "expansive," that is, his writing encompasses a greater understanding than his contemporaries. The sheer originality in his novel, ironically, I can only describe in terms of comparisons: the absurd war-mongering plot of Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 or Heller's Catch-22, the political fairy-tale fable of Orwell's Animal Farm, and the strange, lolling, rhythmic writing style of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

On the back of the book: In the jungles of South America, on the ice fields of Alaska, the plains of the Midwest, and the streets of San Francisco, a fearsome battle wages. The insects are vying for world domination; the inventors of electricity stand in evil opposition. Bug, a young man, rebels against his own kind and joins forces with the insects. Wayne, a thug, allies himself with the malevolent forces of electricity and vows to assassinate the praying mantis who tends bar in Oregon. A brusque La Pasionaria with the sprightly name of Millie Jeads leads an intrepid band of revolutionaries.

The Forbidden Book

2006-07-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

"Also," Donaldus continued, "I'll probably tell the story--at least in spots--in a somewhat poetic style. Don't let that put you off. It merely helps me organize my thoughts and select the significant items. I won't be straying in the least from the strict truth as I've discovered it; though there may be traces of paramentals in my story, I suppose, and certainly one ghost. I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence."

from Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness

A paramental, according to Thibaut de Castries's cult book Megapolisomancy (prediction of the future by means of large cities) is the spirit being, in the strictest sense of a malevolent dæmon (attendant, ministering, or indwelling spirit), or ganglionic energy, manifested in a particular city or megapolis.

Thibaut de Castries's cult-book Megapolisomancy is a forgotten menacing occult book of frightening symbolic wisdom possessed by the protagonist Franz Westen and his neighbour Donaldus in Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness. Strictly speaking, the ominous and forbidden book is itself a demonic parody of Lovecraft's original fabricated mythical book, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon. Instead of containing, like Lovecraft's esoteric book, "biographies and the secrets of the planet's dread early history" of a new, blood-curdling evolutionary mythology of god-like, sidereal creatures lurking beneath the earth, Leiber's made-up volume reads forboding, spiritual or prophetic, meaning in the modern urban architecture of the city like a demonic Book of Life.

Et tu, Brute?

2006-07-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

Now if only I knew Latin: The Fifth International Congress For Medieval Latin Studies is hosting an international scholarly congress on "Interpreting Latin Texts in the Middle Ages" at York University and University of Toronto from August 1st to 6th 2006.

Best New Horror

2006-07-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

I took a side-step from Matthew Pearl's historical literary thriller, The Dante Club into a book, which arrived recently in the mail, that is wholeheartedly, and in a way you might also say, genetically, loyal to the Horror genre. The book is 20th Century Ghosts, a short story collection written by Joe Hill, a truncated pseudonym for Joseph Hillstrom King, the second child of horror-meisters Stephen and Tabitha King. His short stories are, unlike his infamous father's pulp fiction, truer to the subtlely and cleverly executed, well-crafted, witty, original storytelling of a writer like Ray Bradbury. According to the June 22nd post on Joe Hill's official website, 20th Century Ghosts was recently awarded two Bram Stoker Awards: for Best New Horror and Best Short Story Collection. You would figure a book and writer of this repute - I got hooked after reading his literary interview / article "Joe Hill: The Point of Confession" in July's issue of Locus magazine - out since 2005 would be now available widely, but, alas, 20th Century Ghosts has been only printed exclusively by one minor British publishing company, PS Publishing. I had to personally, and indirectly, order my copy from an American merchant, who had imported a few copies, via Alibris.

Here I offer summaries from Joe Hill's website of two stories I've read from 20th Century Ghosts. You can tell just from reading these how much Hill is aware of and plays wickedly with the formulas of Horror fiction, without feeding his readers the boring old sour, lukewarm stories.

Abraham's Boys:

My story, tentatively titled “Abraham’s Boys,” concerns the tortured relationship between an old and disgraced Van Helsing, and the two sons who fear and loathe him.

Best New Horror:

The hero of “Best New Horror” is the burned-out editor of an annual horror anthology, a man who finds himself drawn into a quixotic search for a young writer with a macabre reputation. Be careful what you go looking for. You might find it...

Haunted America

2006-07-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

"We have a crime of terror upon us," Mayor Lincoln said, aiming a stern finger at Kurtz. "And the police department is falling apart--that's why it has to do with it. I shan't allow Nicholas Rey to remain involved in this matter in any capacity. One more mistake and he shall face his discharge. Some state senators came to me today, John. They're appointing another committee to propose abolishing all city police departments statewide and replacing them with a state-run metropolitan police force if we can't finish this. They're dead set. I shan't see that happen under my watch--understand that! I won't see my city's police department pulled apart."

The Dante Club, 167

-----------------------------------

The Dante-derived murders themselves have no counterpart in history, but police biographies and city records document a sharp rise in New England's murder rate immediately following the Civil War, as well as widespread corruption and underhanded partnerships between detectives and professional criminals. Nicholas Rey is a fictional character, but he faces the very real challenges of the first African-American policemen in the nineteenth century, many of whom were veterans of the Civil War and were of mixed racial backgrounds; an overview of their circumstances can be found in W. Marvin Dulaney's Black Police in America.

--from Matthew Pearl's Historical Note, included in the trade paperback edition of The Dante Club.

Kraken Wakes

2006-07-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

My fiancée and I were among the throngs of people who saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, leaving delighted and amused, contributing to its reported record-setting profitable opening weekend. The fantastic plot continues onward from the first movie, as written in the article, with:

Jack Sparrow (Depp) ... caught up in another tangled web of supernatural intrigue; Jack owes a blood debt to the legendary Davy Jones, Ruler of the Ocean Depths, who captains the ghostly Flying Dutchman. Unless the ever-crafty Jack figures a cunning way out of this Faustian pact, he will be cursed to an afterlife of eternal servitude and damnation.

The anonymous writer of this online article has a knack for glossing the movie's imaginative, mythical plot without making the movie sound trite; something it is not. I should say, whomever is responsible for writing the script for these movies has a clever wit as well as an ear for everything from self-deprecation, humorous timing, Deep's quirky swagger for acting, combined with a mish-mash of nautical cliché and myth (Davy Jones [pictured above left] sends a great sea-beast , the Kraken, after Sparrow and his crew, and about whose mythical origins, quite comically, two endearing illiterate pirates share witty, and quite memorable, learned discussions over the course of the movie).

The Dante Club

2006-07-11T00:38:00.000-07:00

About Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club:

1865 Boston, a small group of literary geniuses puts the finishing touches on America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and prepares to unveil the remarkable visions of Dante to the New World. The powerful old guard of Harvard College wants to keep Dante out—believing that the infiltration of such foreign superstitions onto our bookshelves would prove as corrupting as the foreign immigrants invading Boston harbor. The members of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields —endure the intimidation of their fellow Boston Brahmins for a sacred literary cause, an endeavor that has sustained Longfellow in the hellish aftermath of his wife’s tragic death by fire.

But the plans of the Dante Club come to a screeching halt when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only the members of the Dante Club realize that the style and form of the killings are stolen directly from Dante’s Inferno and its singular account of Hell’s punishments. With the police baffled, lives endangered and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find a way to stop the killer.

The brunt of the burden falls to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose unique literacy in both poetry and medicine continues to pull him into the center of the struggle. An outcast policeman, Nicholas Rey, the first and only black member of the Boston police department, places his future on the line after discovering the secrets of the Dante Club. Together, they find the key to the murders where they least expect it: closer than they could have imagined.

The first canto from the re-released first American translation of Dante, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously.

And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;

So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.

After my weary body I had rested,
The way resumed I on the desert slope,
So that the firm foot ever was the lower.

And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!

And never moved she from before my face,
Nay, rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.

The time was the beginning of the morning,
And up the sun was mounting with those stars
That with him were, what time the Love Divine

At first in motion set those beauteous things;
So were to me occasion of good hope,
The variegated skin of that wild beast,

The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lion’s aspect which appeared to me.

He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;

And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness,
And many folk has caused to live forlorn!

She brought upon me so much heaviness,
With the affright that from her aspect came,
That I the hope relinquished of the height.

And as he is who willingly acquires,
And the time comes that causes him to lose,
Who weeps in all his thoughts and is despondent,

E’en such made me that beast withouten peace,
Which, coming on against me by degrees
Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent.

While I was rushing downward to the lowland,
Before mine eyes did one present himself,
Who seemed from long-continued silence hoarse.

When I beheld him in the desert vast,
“Have pity on me,” unto him I cried,
“Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by country both of them.

Sub Julio was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A Poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned.

But thou, why goest thou back to such annoyance?
Why climb’st thou not the Mount Delectable,
Which is the source and cause of every joy?”

“Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain
Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?”
I made response to him with bashful forehead.

“O, of the other poets honour and light,
Avail me the long study and great love
That have impelled me to explore thy volume!

Thou art my master, and my author thou,
Thou art alone the one from whom I took
The beautiful style that has done honour to me.

Behold the beast, for which I have turned back;
Do thou protect me from her, famous Sage,
For she doth make my veins and pulses tremble.”

“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape;

Because this beast, at which thou criest out,
Suffers not any one to pass her way,
But so doth harass him, that she destroys him;

And has a nature so malign and ruthless,
That never doth she glut her greedy will,
And after food is hungrier than before.

Many the animals with whom she weds,
And more they shall be still, until the Greyhound
Comes, who shall make her perish in her pain.

He shall not feed on either earth or pelf,
But upon wisdom, and on love and virtue;
‘Twixt Feltro and Feltro shall his nation be;

Of that low Italy shall he be the saviour,
On whose account the maid Camilla died,
Euryalus, Turnus, Nisus, of their wounds;

Through every city shall he hunt her down,
Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,
There from whence envy first did let her loose.

Therefore I think and judge it for thy best
Thou follow me, and I will be thy guide,
And lead thee hence through the eternal place,

Where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations,
Shalt see the ancient spirits disconsolate,
Who cry out each one for the second death;

And thou shalt see those who contented are
Within the fire, because they hope to come,
Whene’er it may be, to the blessed people;

To whom, then, if thou wishest to ascend,
A soul shall be for that than I more worthy;
With her at my departure I will leave thee;

Because that Emperor, who reigns above,
In that I was rebellious to his law,
Wills that through me none come into his city.

He governs everywhere, and there he reigns;
There is his city and his lofty throne;
O happy he whom thereto he elects!”

And I to him: “Poet, I thee entreat,
By that same God whom thou didst never know,
So that I may escape this woe and worse,

Thou wouldst conduct me there where thou hast said,
That I may see the portal of Saint Peter,
And those thou makest so disconsolate.”

Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.

Dante and Poe

2006-07-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

I can say quite confidently that the afternoon, and soon to be "evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." Outside the omnipresent clouds are growling, almost barking with the peal of far-away thunder and my dog, Lady, has been quivering at my feet all morning. What is the thunder saying to her?

My new book of choice, The Dante Club, likewise, presents some ominous words from its fake fear-mongering preface:

I have waived any recompensation, for this was no longer a preface I set out to write but a warning. Kenneth Stanton's death throws wide open the closed portal of Dante's arrival to our world, of the secrets still lying dormant in our own age. Of these I only wish to caution you, reader. Please, if you continue, remember first that words can bleed.

Evidently, Matthew Pearl just came out with his second book, another American literary thriller, called The Poe Shadow.

The Story of Jacob Sullivan

2006-07-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

Straight from the SFWA: The most recent science-fiction novel, Mindscan, based on Kurzwell's radical notions of artificial intelligence and consciousness, from Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer, yet again won another top award. For a full decade Sawyer has been winning bountiful writing awards every year somewhere across the globe, with the exception of 1994.

Just read the novel summary and you'll understand why:

The novel tells the story of Jacob Sullivan, a young man who copies his consciousness into an artificial body, since he believes his biological body is about to die due to a congenital illness. But shortly after this, a cure is found for his condition, and the biological version must battle the copy for the right to be considered the real Jake Sullivan.

Romance of the Fallen

2006-07-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

And when I smelled its exhalation, I had no power to withdraw, but would have approached to take it if I had dared stretch out my hand to it. But the sharp and piercing thorns that grew from it kept me at a distance. Cutting, sharp spikes, nettles, and barbed thorns allowed me no way to advance, for I was afraid of hurting myself.

Guillaume de Lorris, Romance of the Rose

So Confirm'd Was He In Sin

2006-07-07T01:32:00.000-07:00

Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber;
Which we will take, until my roof whirl around
With the vertigo: and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic,
Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales,
Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine.
So, of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods.

Volpone in Jonson's Volpone, or the Fox waxing erotic to Celia, lecherously, like Bolloxinion in John Wilmoth, the Earl of Rochester's pornographic satire Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery.

Death of Sardanapalus

2006-07-06T14:20:00.000-07:00

After fussing over what to read next, this afternoon I started reading Ben Jonson's Volpone from a recent compilation entitled Seven Masterpieces of Jacobean Drama edited by Frank Kermode. The book contains a trove of other, major and minor, English Renaissance plays: Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger Tragedy, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling.

Having read briefly up until Act 2, Scene 1, the play seems, so far, cleverly and masterfully plotted. A better play to read, and dramatize in the imagination, than the previous, annoying Jonson play I had to read: Poetaster.

Long Weekend Redux

2006-07-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

After a long, and intense, Canada Day weekend I figured a real update was long overdue. Having Friday off Viv and I departed in the early afternoon for the cottage on Crystal Lake to beat the common urban exodus. We arrived in under 3 hours including a stop-over mid-way for lunch at McDonalds in Beaverton as well as buying a few items at a bustling supermarket in Fenelon Falls for a planned BBQ dinner later that night. Once we arrived and settled ourselves in to our room, and a brief tour of my mom's raising garden, we went for a quick errand to Kinmount for the appropriate long-weekend amenities: alcohol and fireworks. We made a quick heritage detour nigh on our return drive to the township of Galway to show my fiancée some of the withering old gravestones for one ancestral line of my family: the nineteenth-century immigrant ancestors of my mother's father's family originally from (get this) Limerick, Ireland.

Upon our return to an empty cottage and a dour sky with pouty, grey clouds we fired up the old blackened, weary barbeque and cooked some prime cuts of beef and baked a few pre-packaged sour cream and chives baked potatoes for dinner. We had to contend with a few finicky fits of pelting rain and the barbque's propane running out, however, overall our meal cooked and tasted delicious - of course officiated by my fiancée - and my mom returned from her dad's and joined us in time for the end of the meal. My grandfather later joined us, too, and he chatted tersely with Viv and I before we set off to see the Superman movie at the famous Highland Cinemas in Kinmount. Our first day.

Then I awakened early next morning, Saturday, rising, instinctively, with the beckoning of the morning sun for a breakfast of coffee and eggs. Though I couldn't beseech my sleeping beauty, my fiancée to get out of bed this early, I sat outside dashing peanuts across the front lawn of our hilltop property for the chipmunks and birds in the morning hours. An hour or two later my uncle Doug arrived - travelling from Windsor - as well as my mom's cousin's wife Jessica and her two sons, who own the cottage that was formerly my grandfather's home which he was reared in, for a morning visit. About this time my fiancée woke up, and I heated up the left-overs of the previous night's meal for her breakfast. She joined us, and we sat around listening to my well-travelled uncle, who is a trucker, tell marvelous stories of he and his wife's winning fortunes at Ontario casinos and race-horse tracks. Unfortunately, we had to leave shortly after noon to return to the city - a short escape - to attend my godbrother's BBQ in Etobicoke.

We rested for a short while after returning to Brampton, and then left to visit my godbrother and his family, of whom I hadn't seen for two years since the christening of his adorable daughter Mckenna. We sat around chatting with my godbrother, his family, and guests - respectively, his best friend and fiancée and next-door neighbour and his wife - before retreating inside from the rude pell of rain and eating a pleasant sit-down meal. Plans were set for everyone to head over to Ribs Fest nearby, and fireworks later, but we left and returned to my fiancée's place for a meal and heading back to launch our own fireworks in the park.

Sunday, I woke up early and told to get ready for another busy day - this time a church peer was hosting a day-long get-together in Drumbo, outside of Brantford and Cambridge, on their farm. After a delicious, hearty meal a bunch of us crammed into two cars, one of them mine, loaded up two canoes and drove over to the town of Ayr. What followed was a fun-filled, adventurous, bug-ridden three-hour canoe ride - with my fiancée, her brother and two other 'city-slicker' friends - down the local river. I managed, in the duration, to lose my new, expensive rim-less glasses in the river after swatting them off my face into the water, trying to smack the ravenous swarms of deer flies eating us alive three-quarters along the way. As a result, next day we had to buy a new pair, as well as sunglasses before I could return to my daily, weekly routine of work.

Education

2006-07-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

But surely our job as teachers is to puzzle, confuse, and amaze. We must rear a generation of students who will gaze in wonder at texts and artifacts, quick to puzzle over a translation, slow to project or to appropriate, quick to assume there is a significance, slow to generalize about it [...] For the flat, generalizing, presentist view of the past encapsulates it and makes it boring, whereas amazement yearns toward an understanding, a significance, that is always just a little beyond both our theories and our fears.

Caroline Walker Bynum

Metamorphosis and Identity

2006-07-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

The wisest bit of contemporary criticism, aside from Harold Bloom, I've read in a long while:

[I] resist drawing analogies between past and present until each is put in its own context. Just as current notions of change must be understood in their full social, philosophical, and semantic range before they are helpful as tools, so medieval understandings of mutatio should be explored across and among medieval discourses before comparisons are drawn to modern problems. It is unwise, for example, to relate Gerald's [of Wales] bearded lady to modern circuses or modern theories of gender-bending before we look, first, at the stories and concepts among which Gerald embeds his account and, second, at how words such as "monster" or "marvel" or even "beard" occur in other types of literature and discourse communities in Gerald's own day.

Caroline Walker Bynum, "Introduction" Metamorphosis and Identity.

For Now We See Through A Glass, Darkly.

2006-07-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

From the maker of the sophisticated digitalized film Waking Life, the umpteenth movie based on Philip K. Dick's short pulp fiction: A Scanner Darkly. No doubt the title is a technological / sci-fi take on Paul's words from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 12.