Inscribed in electrons, I present more Flash Fictions from my #FlashFictionFriday series, from that there tweeter.
It's the thought that counts and I appreciate the gifts, really, but what I am supposed to do with seven Hands of Glory?
The bunkers were packed with cigarettes. "Gold-hording Libertarians are kicking themselves now," laughed the SectorLord
Velvet wings whispered between the cold smokestacks of the factory ruins. Moths, searching for puddles, found only bones.
Silence screamed. From upstairs they heard the click of the latch, the groan of hinges as the door opened.
The noise jolted him awake in time to see the old oak topple over. Below in the yard was the biggest pig he'd ever seen.
He mounted the bus steps, handed his ticket to the driver, took a set at the back, and waited. Even in death, he waited.
He watched snails graze in light streaming down through the dome of trees. He too was patient. Night would come soon.
Always digging, dirt on his claws, pinpoint eyes shut against failing soil. A purpose, his reward for having lived well.
I understand it's an ancient and powerful urge, returning whence you were born to lay your eggs. But it's MY head now.
Their noises were getting to him. He'd walled off the bedroom, cooked his meals in the bathroom. How dare they be happy?
His bones bounced along the riverbed, scattered and seperated by the flow. He'd always wanted to see the ocean.
In the right light, the hen was opalescent. Each laid egg was a cosmic egg, a universe in ovo. Made the best omelettes.
"It's like 'Dorian Grey'."
"So you don't get any older..."
"Right."
"...and the souffle?"
"The souffle ages for me."
The tractor's rumble grew louder as it crested the hill. Head down, she worked fast, brushing pollen into each flower.
Earth's tilt causes the changing seasons. Hades, in his mad pursuit of Persephone, sideswiped the axis in his chariot.
The Change came every fullmoon. Terrible urges, body warping. Smell, hearing, all gone. Sparky hated being a Wereman.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Friday, November 8, 2013
A Good Thought
"Never confuse comedy for subversion." - somebody somewhere at sometime. I can't seem to find a citation for this quote, or even a quote like it, but someone smarter than me must have said it once. It's a pretty good thing to always have tucked into the back of your brain, I think, especially how a lot of the media and culture we consume seems to think that simply winking at the audience while something deplorable is going on is the same thing as activism. Having a bunch of over the top racism, sexism, homophobia, etc, isn't PLAYING with the tropes, buddy; at best it's lazy ass writing, and at worst, it's just straight up racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Halloween Horror Radio!
Halloween is one of the better holidays, of course, if only for the added frission of liminality that spices up our standard spooky tales. I've been harvesting mp3s of some of the better Old Timey Radioshows out there in the interwebs, and I thought I'd share a few here!
There have been a few absolutely classic adaptions of Lovecraft's work for the radio. The Outsider is perfectly fine, though it pales in comparison to The Dunwich Horror, which uses a War-of-the-Worlds style news program structure to add to the fun. One of my particularly favorite Lovecraft stories has also been transformed into a quite good radio show: The Rats in The Walls, which is a pretty terrifying title on its own.
Another absolutely fantastic bit o' radio horror comes from good old Vincent Price's old show, The Price of Fear. Titled Specialty of the House, it is really a masterpiece of slow burn subtly and over-the-top fun that one would expect from Price.
FINALLY, a famous bit of horror radio, set on a Pennsylvanian drill rig, is The Thing on The Fourble Board, which has some excellent voice acting.
Happy Halloween!
There have been a few absolutely classic adaptions of Lovecraft's work for the radio. The Outsider is perfectly fine, though it pales in comparison to The Dunwich Horror, which uses a War-of-the-Worlds style news program structure to add to the fun. One of my particularly favorite Lovecraft stories has also been transformed into a quite good radio show: The Rats in The Walls, which is a pretty terrifying title on its own.
Another absolutely fantastic bit o' radio horror comes from good old Vincent Price's old show, The Price of Fear. Titled Specialty of the House, it is really a masterpiece of slow burn subtly and over-the-top fun that one would expect from Price.
FINALLY, a famous bit of horror radio, set on a Pennsylvanian drill rig, is The Thing on The Fourble Board, which has some excellent voice acting.
Happy Halloween!
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Une Geographie Infernale - Gedsbry Abbey, Northumberland, England
From its rough perch on The Giant’s Hill, the tumbledown ruin of Gedsbry Abbey frowns down over the River Coquet, a reminder of old days and ancient practices long forgotten. The Poor Brothers of St. Christopher settled in the rough hill country of Northumberland sometime in the late 1090’s or early 1100’s, though the specific c date of their arrival is uncertain. We do see their Monastery included in the accounting of Sheri ff Odard for the Great Roll of the Exchequer in 1131, allowing us to place them roughly in the early 12th Century. The land, including the famously haunted hill upon which the Brothers built their monastery, was granted them by the King. Perhaps the Norman conquerors hoped that the famously rebellious people of Northumber country would be calmed by the presence of God-fearing monks? Unasked at the time, however, was the question of which “God”, exactly, the Poor Brothers feared?
The Brothers venerated Saint Christopher who, among other things, was the patron saint of epilepsy, a malady long associated with prophecy and occult vision. Apparently they got something out of the deal, since the Brothers soon gained a reputation for divining the future with unusual accuracy. One Brother Oswulf, noted for his prognosticatory abilities, was said to have prophesized the calamitous storm of 1192 that collapsed the roof of a local lord’s hall, killing everyone within. The unfortunate Lord’s land was quickly
bought up by the Abbey. Similarly, an Abbot Martin accurately foretold of the catastrophic fl ooding of the Tyne in the spring of 1215. This warning was ignored by the people of adjacent villages, who subsequently suffered great loss of life and property while the Brothers, having moved their fl ocks to higher ground, enjoyed something of a monopoly on wool and mutton for many years after. Soon, commoners and potentates alike would travel to the Abbey, seeking an audience with its mystical Monks that saw the future in strange trances. Thus, while bereft of the relics normally associated with a wealthy abbey, the Brothers of Gedsbry did a brisk enough trade in fortune-telling to buy up numerous properties up and down the valley.
Rumors of the source of these visions all seemed to point to a distinctly non-Chrisitian origin, however. The Giant’s Hill, upon which the abbey is built, has had a long history of haunting and mysterious events. These began with the first Roman chronicles from the area, who noticed that the site was of particular abhorrence to the native Celts known as the Votadini. One Severus Magnus, a Legionnaire of equestrian rank, wrote of the mysterious rites of the Picts who, slipping across the border on moonless nights, would hold unholy sacrifices atop a place he termed the “domum gigantes”. Here, he wrote, their wild chants would be answered by terrible voices coming up from the ground that, in exchange for blood, instructed pictish shamans in all the secrets of the earth.
The retreat of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages did little to lessen the weirdness of the locale. The Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, dominant in the 7th and 8th Centuries, left many chilling tales that found their way into the libraries of many monasteries. The most famous tells of the hellish vision of a young man named Oswiu. Lost and wandering in the dark, he came upon a hill lit with unholy flame and circled round by a horned serpent that whispered blasphemies to the stars. Tending the fire atop the hill was a giant man blue with woad and girt with wolfskin, while naked celebrants danced and writhed in the relight. Among the more human celebrants, Oswiu is said to have recognized neighbors and prominent land-owners. He fled the scene, and reported all to the King. In the subsequent weeks, many people were rounded up by King Ceolwulf and drowned in the North Sea for the “grievous sins” of sorcery, necromancy, false prophecy, and paganism. Shortly thereafter Ceolwulf himself, perhaps hounded by the horrors he had heard and witnessed at the trials, abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery for the rest of his days.
By the time the Poor Brothers of Saint Christopher came on the scene then, we see that the Giant’s Hill had already become a grisly haunt of ghosts and goblins. Why then did these strange Monks from the continent settle there? Some scholars believe that their choice was not in spite of these rumors, but rather because of them. Although the record is muddled, it appears that the Brothers were not entirely naïve about occult topics, for in all the pertinent records we fi nd the Poor Brothers wrapped in a cloak of mysticism and
rumored diabolism. For starters, whence came the Poor Brothers? By their own accounts, they had fled persecution “in the east”, and that their order was originally from the first missions sent to Egypt, perhaps making them Coptic. What secrets had they learned in that ancient land?
This Egyptian connection is important, and it may be that the Brothers had already tipped their hand. As noted above, the Brothers of Gedsbry Abbey had a special enthusiasm for Saint Christopher. In some traditions, St. Christopher was said to have been one of the cynocephali, strange creatures mentioned by Herotodus and Ctesias in the Ancient World, and by Paul the Deacon in his “Historia gentis Langobardorum” in the Middle Ages. Specifically, St. Christopher was believed by some to have had the head of a dog. A dog-headed figure associated with holy death and mystic visions? A similarly figure is found among the Egyptians in the form of the most occult Anubis, the ancient dog-headed God of the Dead.
It is recorded that, when the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher traveled up the River Coquet to their new home, they carried with them an icon or statue of their Saint in the form of a robed, dog-headed man. Beyond this similar iconography, there is an additional piece of evidence linking the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher to Egyptian mysticism and the Cult of Anubis: mummies.
Anubis, in his role as the God of Death, was often portrayed by the Egyptians as an embalmer. It was Anubis who gave the Egyptians the art of preserving and protecting the bodies of the dead, a central component Egyptian religion. Northumberland is, of course, far to damp a place for traditional mummi fication. However, though it lacks the dry wind and sand of the African deserts, the north of England is rich in peat bogs, which are just as capable of working the magic of mummification on the remains of mortal men and women. Buried deep in the acidic muck of the bogs, the bodies of the dead are cured and the soft tissues preserved with an excellence that would arouse the envy of a Pharaoh. Skin, hair, cloth, all well preserved, though of course the bones of the dead quickly dissolve away, leaving a distorted and disturbingly sack-like bog mummy behind.
These mummies are common in Northumberland, associated with both the Celtic and Norse settlements of Late Antiquity and the early Dark Ages. Internment in the bogs was of a clearly ceremonial nature, the individuals having been fed a final meal of bread baked with ash before being ritualistically killed via strangulation or, less commonly, bludgeoning. The mummies are also often found in association with offerings of iron weapons or tools, an extravagant waste of rare metal that speaks to the importance of these bog burials. Christianization of the North resulted in a marked change in burial practices, of course; after the sixth or seventh century C.E., one does not find bog mummies.
Except…there is a period where bog mummies become common again, temporally and spatially coinciding precisely with activity at Gedsby Abbey. Beginning in the mid 1100s, and continuing on until approximately the late 1300s, bodies were being inhumed in the swamps five miles north of The Giant’s Hill. These remains, their bellies stuff ed with ash-laden bread, limbs bound, and throats slashed, are often found with small iron statues of a dog-headed man. It is a remarkably consistent return to form after many hundreds of years without, apparently, any intervening continuity.
In 1244 C.E., a combined secular and ecclesiastical enclave was convened to address the concerns expressed by locals regarding the unnaturalness of the Brothers of St. Christopher. Fortune telling was bad enough, but it seems that people were disappearing with alarming regularity, never to be heard from again. Additionally, witnesses remarked on the strange, midnight processions to the northern swamps the Brother’s seemed so fond of taking, particularly around Walpurgisnacht and Samhain. Finally, the cemetery around the church, sacrosanct land that was the special charter of the Brothers, was being disgracefully neglected. The conclave went even further, citing the Brothers for heresy and “un-christian” burial practices. The Abbot, along with key Brothers, were “removed” (and almost certainly burned as wizards), while a new hierarchy of Dominican Brothers were brought in to “correct” the unorthodox members of the community.
It would appear, however, that these overseers met with little success, and indeed may even have become converts to the particular practices of the Brothers, as the rumors, disappearances, and bog mummifications continued until 1388. Indeed, stories from the period immediately after the Censuring Conclave become markedly grisly, as the Brothers apparently reasserted their control over the area. The vanishings continued, and local shepherds learned to travel always in well-armed gangs, choosing to combine their fl ocks rather than make themselves vulnerable among the lonely hills. Strange, inhuman figures would appear and disappear along the banks of the river, while blood curdling screams and moans seemed to echo up from the Earth. This lead to the belief, common even today, that the area around The Giant’s Hill is riddled with caves and passages through which evil things stalk.
The horrors eventually came to a head in the spring of 1388, with a particularly gruesome discovery. A peat cutter, draining some of the bogs in search of fuel, uncovered a whole cache of mummies, carefully arranged in a circle around a central body that had been tied to a heavy iron chair. This central mummy was a particularly horrific jumble of remains, and only partly human. According to the tale, the head of this poor victim had been removed, replaced by the skull of large hound or wolf, strapped in place on the stump of the corpse’s neck and surmounted with an iron crown. On this unusual piece of headwear was stamped the following phrase, recorded in the annals of the village priest, Father Osric: “Fraternitatem presertim leges Mors Canisque”, Latin for “Brotherhood of the Sainted Dog of Death. Furthermore, around the neck of this composite mummy was found an amulet bearing the insignia of St. Christopher.
Imagine the furor such a discovery must have wrought! All the tales of hellish idolatry, black magic, and demoniacal evil confirmed in an instant! What happened next is difficult to piece together, for those involved seemed to have made an effort to efface their subsequent actions from the historical record. However, this much is known. It seems that, having summoned Father Osric and some of the more important local land-owners, it was decided that the Poor Brothers must be apprehended or driven from the area. To this end, they summoned the local Undersheri ff and his men and, under cover of darkness, they came upon the Abbey unawares in the night.
It is not clear whether they had planned to confront the Brothers with this evidence, or if they had simply decided to attack. Regardless it seems that, despite being surprised by the sudden assault, the Brothers attempted some violence in their defense. A melee soon developed in which many on both sides were killed, some in a particularly horrible and “indescribable” way, at least according to a letter sent by the Undersheri ff after the fact. Some Brothers seemed to have fled into the swamps, while the Abbot and many of the Brothers seemed to have died in a fire that consumed the main church, screaming defiance and blasphemies to the end. I write “seemed to have died” since, apparently, no remains were ever found, not even a charred bit of bone. Also, one must remember the tales of the tunnels rumored to have turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese. Did these “Brothers of the Sainted Dog of Death” escape into the subterranean world?
The ruins remain to this day, a Historical Heritage Site registered with the U.K., though visited only rarely by tourists of the Occult. Strange lights are sometimes seen, illuminating windows briefly as they flit through the Abbey. People have told tales of a huge black dog that stalks through the ruins silently on moonless nights, and at least one man, a poet of unusual sensitivity, went mad after spending the night there in the early 1930s. None have found the tunnels and chambers rumored to lie beneath the hulk of the Abbey, though in truth few have tried. I myself visited it in the mid 1980s, and can attest that there is something unearthly about the place, a brooding watchfulness that seems to resent the clumsy footfall of intruders from the wider world. Still, it is a lovely bit of ruins in a landscape noted for its rugged beauty, and should not be missed by my fellow travelers. Go in the daytime, however, and make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to get back to the village before twilight.
bought up by the Abbey. Similarly, an Abbot Martin accurately foretold of the catastrophic fl ooding of the Tyne in the spring of 1215. This warning was ignored by the people of adjacent villages, who subsequently suffered great loss of life and property while the Brothers, having moved their fl ocks to higher ground, enjoyed something of a monopoly on wool and mutton for many years after. Soon, commoners and potentates alike would travel to the Abbey, seeking an audience with its mystical Monks that saw the future in strange trances. Thus, while bereft of the relics normally associated with a wealthy abbey, the Brothers of Gedsbry did a brisk enough trade in fortune-telling to buy up numerous properties up and down the valley.
Rumors of the source of these visions all seemed to point to a distinctly non-Chrisitian origin, however. The Giant’s Hill, upon which the abbey is built, has had a long history of haunting and mysterious events. These began with the first Roman chronicles from the area, who noticed that the site was of particular abhorrence to the native Celts known as the Votadini. One Severus Magnus, a Legionnaire of equestrian rank, wrote of the mysterious rites of the Picts who, slipping across the border on moonless nights, would hold unholy sacrifices atop a place he termed the “domum gigantes”. Here, he wrote, their wild chants would be answered by terrible voices coming up from the ground that, in exchange for blood, instructed pictish shamans in all the secrets of the earth.
The retreat of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages did little to lessen the weirdness of the locale. The Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, dominant in the 7th and 8th Centuries, left many chilling tales that found their way into the libraries of many monasteries. The most famous tells of the hellish vision of a young man named Oswiu. Lost and wandering in the dark, he came upon a hill lit with unholy flame and circled round by a horned serpent that whispered blasphemies to the stars. Tending the fire atop the hill was a giant man blue with woad and girt with wolfskin, while naked celebrants danced and writhed in the relight. Among the more human celebrants, Oswiu is said to have recognized neighbors and prominent land-owners. He fled the scene, and reported all to the King. In the subsequent weeks, many people were rounded up by King Ceolwulf and drowned in the North Sea for the “grievous sins” of sorcery, necromancy, false prophecy, and paganism. Shortly thereafter Ceolwulf himself, perhaps hounded by the horrors he had heard and witnessed at the trials, abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery for the rest of his days.
By the time the Poor Brothers of Saint Christopher came on the scene then, we see that the Giant’s Hill had already become a grisly haunt of ghosts and goblins. Why then did these strange Monks from the continent settle there? Some scholars believe that their choice was not in spite of these rumors, but rather because of them. Although the record is muddled, it appears that the Brothers were not entirely naïve about occult topics, for in all the pertinent records we fi nd the Poor Brothers wrapped in a cloak of mysticism and
rumored diabolism. For starters, whence came the Poor Brothers? By their own accounts, they had fled persecution “in the east”, and that their order was originally from the first missions sent to Egypt, perhaps making them Coptic. What secrets had they learned in that ancient land?
This Egyptian connection is important, and it may be that the Brothers had already tipped their hand. As noted above, the Brothers of Gedsbry Abbey had a special enthusiasm for Saint Christopher. In some traditions, St. Christopher was said to have been one of the cynocephali, strange creatures mentioned by Herotodus and Ctesias in the Ancient World, and by Paul the Deacon in his “Historia gentis Langobardorum” in the Middle Ages. Specifically, St. Christopher was believed by some to have had the head of a dog. A dog-headed figure associated with holy death and mystic visions? A similarly figure is found among the Egyptians in the form of the most occult Anubis, the ancient dog-headed God of the Dead.
These mummies are common in Northumberland, associated with both the Celtic and Norse settlements of Late Antiquity and the early Dark Ages. Internment in the bogs was of a clearly ceremonial nature, the individuals having been fed a final meal of bread baked with ash before being ritualistically killed via strangulation or, less commonly, bludgeoning. The mummies are also often found in association with offerings of iron weapons or tools, an extravagant waste of rare metal that speaks to the importance of these bog burials. Christianization of the North resulted in a marked change in burial practices, of course; after the sixth or seventh century C.E., one does not find bog mummies.
Except…there is a period where bog mummies become common again, temporally and spatially coinciding precisely with activity at Gedsby Abbey. Beginning in the mid 1100s, and continuing on until approximately the late 1300s, bodies were being inhumed in the swamps five miles north of The Giant’s Hill. These remains, their bellies stuff ed with ash-laden bread, limbs bound, and throats slashed, are often found with small iron statues of a dog-headed man. It is a remarkably consistent return to form after many hundreds of years without, apparently, any intervening continuity.
In 1244 C.E., a combined secular and ecclesiastical enclave was convened to address the concerns expressed by locals regarding the unnaturalness of the Brothers of St. Christopher. Fortune telling was bad enough, but it seems that people were disappearing with alarming regularity, never to be heard from again. Additionally, witnesses remarked on the strange, midnight processions to the northern swamps the Brother’s seemed so fond of taking, particularly around Walpurgisnacht and Samhain. Finally, the cemetery around the church, sacrosanct land that was the special charter of the Brothers, was being disgracefully neglected. The conclave went even further, citing the Brothers for heresy and “un-christian” burial practices. The Abbot, along with key Brothers, were “removed” (and almost certainly burned as wizards), while a new hierarchy of Dominican Brothers were brought in to “correct” the unorthodox members of the community.
It would appear, however, that these overseers met with little success, and indeed may even have become converts to the particular practices of the Brothers, as the rumors, disappearances, and bog mummifications continued until 1388. Indeed, stories from the period immediately after the Censuring Conclave become markedly grisly, as the Brothers apparently reasserted their control over the area. The vanishings continued, and local shepherds learned to travel always in well-armed gangs, choosing to combine their fl ocks rather than make themselves vulnerable among the lonely hills. Strange, inhuman figures would appear and disappear along the banks of the river, while blood curdling screams and moans seemed to echo up from the Earth. This lead to the belief, common even today, that the area around The Giant’s Hill is riddled with caves and passages through which evil things stalk.
The horrors eventually came to a head in the spring of 1388, with a particularly gruesome discovery. A peat cutter, draining some of the bogs in search of fuel, uncovered a whole cache of mummies, carefully arranged in a circle around a central body that had been tied to a heavy iron chair. This central mummy was a particularly horrific jumble of remains, and only partly human. According to the tale, the head of this poor victim had been removed, replaced by the skull of large hound or wolf, strapped in place on the stump of the corpse’s neck and surmounted with an iron crown. On this unusual piece of headwear was stamped the following phrase, recorded in the annals of the village priest, Father Osric: “Fraternitatem presertim leges Mors Canisque”, Latin for “Brotherhood of the Sainted Dog of Death. Furthermore, around the neck of this composite mummy was found an amulet bearing the insignia of St. Christopher.
Imagine the furor such a discovery must have wrought! All the tales of hellish idolatry, black magic, and demoniacal evil confirmed in an instant! What happened next is difficult to piece together, for those involved seemed to have made an effort to efface their subsequent actions from the historical record. However, this much is known. It seems that, having summoned Father Osric and some of the more important local land-owners, it was decided that the Poor Brothers must be apprehended or driven from the area. To this end, they summoned the local Undersheri ff and his men and, under cover of darkness, they came upon the Abbey unawares in the night.
It is not clear whether they had planned to confront the Brothers with this evidence, or if they had simply decided to attack. Regardless it seems that, despite being surprised by the sudden assault, the Brothers attempted some violence in their defense. A melee soon developed in which many on both sides were killed, some in a particularly horrible and “indescribable” way, at least according to a letter sent by the Undersheri ff after the fact. Some Brothers seemed to have fled into the swamps, while the Abbot and many of the Brothers seemed to have died in a fire that consumed the main church, screaming defiance and blasphemies to the end. I write “seemed to have died” since, apparently, no remains were ever found, not even a charred bit of bone. Also, one must remember the tales of the tunnels rumored to have turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese. Did these “Brothers of the Sainted Dog of Death” escape into the subterranean world?
The ruins remain to this day, a Historical Heritage Site registered with the U.K., though visited only rarely by tourists of the Occult. Strange lights are sometimes seen, illuminating windows briefly as they flit through the Abbey. People have told tales of a huge black dog that stalks through the ruins silently on moonless nights, and at least one man, a poet of unusual sensitivity, went mad after spending the night there in the early 1930s. None have found the tunnels and chambers rumored to lie beneath the hulk of the Abbey, though in truth few have tried. I myself visited it in the mid 1980s, and can attest that there is something unearthly about the place, a brooding watchfulness that seems to resent the clumsy footfall of intruders from the wider world. Still, it is a lovely bit of ruins in a landscape noted for its rugged beauty, and should not be missed by my fellow travelers. Go in the daytime, however, and make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to get back to the village before twilight.
From Samizdat, V.1 n.1
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Flash Fiction Archive the Third
Here's a third collection of my Flash Fiction, from my #FlashFictionFriday series on the Twitter. Enjoy!
Gut-bound hair wreathes hung from the eaves. Insects nailed to the door with rose thorns. Clearly, we had Fairies.
Celebrations of R'lyeh's subduction down the Nankai Trough were dampened by petrologic models of a metamorphic Cthulhu.
Lanterns bobbed through the fog, accompanied by the faint noises of men and dogs. Cursing, I ran for the woods.
Fifty miles back, the crashed Saucer hissed in the thunderstorm. Behind him in the truck bed, the tarp stirred.
"Why buzzsaw arms!?" he shouted, scrambling up the tree. "Science!" I said. Below, B.U.N.Y.O.N.'s eyes glowed red.
The rain of blood may have cast the world into despair and madness but, by God, it really helped our melon patch.
As we dug we found more pipes leading into the house. Water, ozone, salt water, treacle, chicken blood...we kept digging.
Inexorably the toffee glacier advanced, grinding the hills to dust as it approached town. Never piss off a Candy Wizard.
The vines were meant for soil erosion. Grew fast, strangled a Company man who came to check. I collected seed carefully.
"Canopic jars?" I asked, peering into the pantry. "Canning time soon," she answered, feeling the edge of her knife
The trick in birdwatching is to remain perfectly still, sometimes for hours. I'm good at it myself. Oh! Turkey Vultures!
"Work ain't what it used to be" said Poseidon, polishing sand grains as slightly acidic waters ate away at his carapace.
Butterflies gathered on the mud, wet with piss. Maybe, I thought, he'll be home tonight. Wings shimmered in the heat.
"detect can I that None" .pauses He. "?fabric space/time in problems any seen you have, accident Chronoengine the Since"
The rain ended, the clouds scattered, but something wasn't right. Had there always been two suns? Had they always been blue?
The raccoons are a real problem, for sure, but I'm more mad at the people that sold them the guns in the first place.
Plotting global seismicity on a map centered on the south pole, words emerged. Of course, I don't appreciate profanity.
The rocket, with a record of Earth's history, science, and art, rose into the sky. "Now," he said "to destroy the Earth."
The ceiling glistend with egg jellies. Chitin debris littered the floor. "Son," he said, "clean up after your pet."
Sara leaned off the dock with her torch. Wriggling, silvery things swam to the light. "We'll bring Dad to us" she said
"Teeth are taxonomically valuable." They unfurled a tentacle, "For instance, dentomorph b3 is common in garbage strata
The War against God was surprisingly short, once we found the bastard. (He was in the Gaps, buying overpriced khakis.)
The tangled bush was too lush when everything else died. It moved without wind. He should have buried him somewhere else
We got the iceblock into the warm garage to melt. If you squint, you can see the shape inside, tall, twisted, dark.
Putting down a vengeful spirit was the easy part. My hair smelled like holy herbs, and the security deposit? Lost cause.
"I'll take it."
"Sight unseen?"
"Sure."
"Look, it's a Mk 2. Patched frame, iffy pump-"
"Blonde?"
"Yeah-"
"I'll pay cash"
"Oil ain't the only thing under these salt domes. Take a listen." He hands me the headset, and I hear a moaning chant.
A jagged piece of bloody onyx had been stabbed into my door. "The Shorn Priests of Ix!" he gasped. "What did you DO?"
I watched stars arc through the sky, dimmed only by the feeble red glow of a low sun during the planet's short summers.
"Something's got the dogs riled up," he said, looking through the shutters into the yard. The ten animals dug furiously.
"This new Generation! Lazy! Focused on 'technology'!" Old Man grumbled. I felt the chert blade of my spear, and grinned.
"Annabel Lee" was the fastest ship of her type, scudding between Cloud Kingdoms like a falcon. Her Capn was a driven man
"Tower status?"
"On schedule! At the gem gate of the 3rd heaven!"
"Soon we'll meet God!"
"And then he better watch out"
She had a rum flask, cloth, the knife and cup, and two names, one burning in her mind, the other freezing her heart.
Snow falls, flurries soon building to a blizzard. Shoulders hunched, she walks on, dragging the ruined sleigh.
He dug through most of the cook shack to find the cans he'd saved, fat and swollen. Outside, the men weighed their gold.
The sand hissed under his shell as Poseidon drug himself across the badlands. He'd left an ocean here, some time ago.
"Oil wells hidden in LA, right? Well," he said, swirling a vial of soul residue, "our extractors are similarly discrete"
Choking, she spat out the fruit, eventually retching behind the tree. "Yeah," said the snake, "takes getting-used-to."
Teeth falling out, sinking, naked in class; unlike his Grampa Randolph, Bob Carter never got the hang of the Dreamlands.
Libraries were the worst, full of wide-open minds, thoughts sieving through them, a real feast. It tested even his will.
"Odd folks," he said, "but six months rent in advance. Lotsa crates. Seemed real excited about the marshes here about."
"Miles of pure sea salt!" Leaning on his rake, he gazed across the flats. He saw me fidgeting. "You can piss anywhere."
He was desperately ready for peace, but the rest of him voted against dying. Sobbing, he lurched forward into the night.
"Calm," Master wheezed. "Find the storm's center, simply BE." Breathing, I let my eyes unfocus and saw it: a dolphin.
After all that jostling, It's bendy, many-legged host finally got comfy.
The bananas had been loaded onto the ship.
It rippled through minds, hunting suitable lodgings. Swimming through crowds was hard but Bad Ideas are very streamlined.
"Know seed bombs? Seed balls you toss, to green the city. It's like that," he said, hefting a sphere, "but with viruses".
She had an eyepatch and was good with a knife. They called her "Mary of the Seven Tombs." He never felt like asking why.
He dug fast. The Circean glamor occupying the guards wouldn't last long. His spade splintered wood: the coffin, at last.
Dyer, W., 1934, On buried fault lines, observed seismicity, and ritualistic murder: Geognostic Review, v.14, p.134-188.
Gut-bound hair wreathes hung from the eaves. Insects nailed to the door with rose thorns. Clearly, we had Fairies.
Celebrations of R'lyeh's subduction down the Nankai Trough were dampened by petrologic models of a metamorphic Cthulhu.
Lanterns bobbed through the fog, accompanied by the faint noises of men and dogs. Cursing, I ran for the woods.
Fifty miles back, the crashed Saucer hissed in the thunderstorm. Behind him in the truck bed, the tarp stirred.
"Why buzzsaw arms!?" he shouted, scrambling up the tree. "Science!" I said. Below, B.U.N.Y.O.N.'s eyes glowed red.
The rain of blood may have cast the world into despair and madness but, by God, it really helped our melon patch.
As we dug we found more pipes leading into the house. Water, ozone, salt water, treacle, chicken blood...we kept digging.
Inexorably the toffee glacier advanced, grinding the hills to dust as it approached town. Never piss off a Candy Wizard.
The vines were meant for soil erosion. Grew fast, strangled a Company man who came to check. I collected seed carefully.
"Canopic jars?" I asked, peering into the pantry. "Canning time soon," she answered, feeling the edge of her knife
The trick in birdwatching is to remain perfectly still, sometimes for hours. I'm good at it myself. Oh! Turkey Vultures!
"Work ain't what it used to be" said Poseidon, polishing sand grains as slightly acidic waters ate away at his carapace.
Butterflies gathered on the mud, wet with piss. Maybe, I thought, he'll be home tonight. Wings shimmered in the heat.
"detect can I that None" .pauses He. "?fabric space/time in problems any seen you have, accident Chronoengine the Since"
The rain ended, the clouds scattered, but something wasn't right. Had there always been two suns? Had they always been blue?
The raccoons are a real problem, for sure, but I'm more mad at the people that sold them the guns in the first place.
Plotting global seismicity on a map centered on the south pole, words emerged. Of course, I don't appreciate profanity.
The rocket, with a record of Earth's history, science, and art, rose into the sky. "Now," he said "to destroy the Earth."
The ceiling glistend with egg jellies. Chitin debris littered the floor. "Son," he said, "clean up after your pet."
Sara leaned off the dock with her torch. Wriggling, silvery things swam to the light. "We'll bring Dad to us" she said
"Teeth are taxonomically valuable." They unfurled a tentacle, "For instance, dentomorph b3 is common in garbage strata
The War against God was surprisingly short, once we found the bastard. (He was in the Gaps, buying overpriced khakis.)
The tangled bush was too lush when everything else died. It moved without wind. He should have buried him somewhere else
We got the iceblock into the warm garage to melt. If you squint, you can see the shape inside, tall, twisted, dark.
Putting down a vengeful spirit was the easy part. My hair smelled like holy herbs, and the security deposit? Lost cause.
"I'll take it."
"Sight unseen?"
"Sure."
"Look, it's a Mk 2. Patched frame, iffy pump-"
"Blonde?"
"Yeah-"
"I'll pay cash"
"Oil ain't the only thing under these salt domes. Take a listen." He hands me the headset, and I hear a moaning chant.
A jagged piece of bloody onyx had been stabbed into my door. "The Shorn Priests of Ix!" he gasped. "What did you DO?"
I watched stars arc through the sky, dimmed only by the feeble red glow of a low sun during the planet's short summers.
"Something's got the dogs riled up," he said, looking through the shutters into the yard. The ten animals dug furiously.
"This new Generation! Lazy! Focused on 'technology'!" Old Man grumbled. I felt the chert blade of my spear, and grinned.
"Annabel Lee" was the fastest ship of her type, scudding between Cloud Kingdoms like a falcon. Her Capn was a driven man
"Tower status?"
"On schedule! At the gem gate of the 3rd heaven!"
"Soon we'll meet God!"
"And then he better watch out"
She had a rum flask, cloth, the knife and cup, and two names, one burning in her mind, the other freezing her heart.
Snow falls, flurries soon building to a blizzard. Shoulders hunched, she walks on, dragging the ruined sleigh.
He dug through most of the cook shack to find the cans he'd saved, fat and swollen. Outside, the men weighed their gold.
The sand hissed under his shell as Poseidon drug himself across the badlands. He'd left an ocean here, some time ago.
Choking, she spat out the fruit, eventually retching behind the tree. "Yeah," said the snake, "takes getting-used-to."
Teeth falling out, sinking, naked in class; unlike his Grampa Randolph, Bob Carter never got the hang of the Dreamlands.
Libraries were the worst, full of wide-open minds, thoughts sieving through them, a real feast. It tested even his will.
"Odd folks," he said, "but six months rent in advance. Lotsa crates. Seemed real excited about the marshes here about."
"Miles of pure sea salt!" Leaning on his rake, he gazed across the flats. He saw me fidgeting. "You can piss anywhere."
He was desperately ready for peace, but the rest of him voted against dying. Sobbing, he lurched forward into the night.
"Calm," Master wheezed. "Find the storm's center, simply BE." Breathing, I let my eyes unfocus and saw it: a dolphin.
After all that jostling, It's bendy, many-legged host finally got comfy.
The bananas had been loaded onto the ship.
It rippled through minds, hunting suitable lodgings. Swimming through crowds was hard but Bad Ideas are very streamlined.
"Know seed bombs? Seed balls you toss, to green the city. It's like that," he said, hefting a sphere, "but with viruses".
She had an eyepatch and was good with a knife. They called her "Mary of the Seven Tombs." He never felt like asking why.
He dug fast. The Circean glamor occupying the guards wouldn't last long. His spade splintered wood: the coffin, at last.
Dyer, W., 1934, On buried fault lines, observed seismicity, and ritualistic murder: Geognostic Review, v.14, p.134-188.
Volumes from the Crimson Hexagon: A History of The Necronomicon
Necronomicon
PUBLICATION HISTORY
- Written by Abdul Alhazred in ~730 C.E.
- Yazzid III outlaws the Al Azif in 745 C.E.
- Theodorus Philetas translates Al Azif into Greek in 950 C.E., giving it the name “Necronomicon”, meaning “A Study of the Dead”
- Patriarch Michael orders all copies of the Necronomicon burnt. Arabic copy believed lost.
- Olaus Wormius produces Latin translation in 1228.
- Pope Gregory IX suppresses both Latin and Greek translations.
- Greek Edition Published in Germany (1440s), quickly outlawed.
- John Dee produces an English Translation in 1575, though it is never published.
- Th e Sussex Manuscript, a partial and very incomplete English translation of the Necronomicon, is published in very limited numbers in 1597.
- Latin reprint issued in Spain in 1661
A HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON
The danger of the written word lies in its longevity; long after the author is dust their thoughts continue to exist, a bridge between different times and different ways of thinking. This danger has long been recognized by those in power, who have enough trouble controlling the lives and thoughts of the living let alone those of the dead, who are beyond the reach of even the direst of threats. Often the only recourse available to those in power is to transfer their threats and censure onto the works themselves, banning and burning as quickly and as completely as possible in hopes of stemming the tide. Of course there is the danger that, by reacting too violently against a book, you enhance its mystique and demonstrate its potential to those watching.
The Necronomicon is, in many ways, the archetype of such banned and condemned volumes. Written in Damascus in 730 C.E., this volume soon gained a truly fearsome reputation. This is likely a result of its having been penned by a truly Faustian character, Abd al-Azrad (or, more romantically westernized as Abdul Alhazred The Mad Arab), a wizard, alchemist, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist all rolled into one.
Alhazred lived a remarkable life. He studied in the ruins of Old Babylon, where he is said to have had a nameless thing in a well as a master. He traveled to Memphis, where he learned much forbidden lore from Priests of the Old Gods. He traveled to the Empty Quarter in modern day Saudi Arabia, where he claimed to have discovered Irem the Lost, City of Pillars. More remarkable still was the manner of his death; killed in broad daylight before a horrified crowd, ripped to shreds by an invisible monster.
Before his untimely dismemberment, Alhazred had penned his magnus opus, Al-Azif, a book of hellish magic and terrible prehistory. This volume was quickly outlawed by the Caliph of Damascus Yazid III, although apparently many copies were smuggled both West and East during the chaos of the Abbasid Revlution in the late 700s.
The work reemerged in Constantinople in 950 C.E., translated into Byzantine Greek by the scholar Theodorus Philetas. It is from this translation that the name we all know and love today came: The Necronomicon, roughly translated as “A Study of The Dead”. The work was quickly damned by the Patriarch Michael around 1050.
The book remained relatively obscure until Olaus Wormius produced his famous Latin translation in 1228 C.E., a volume quickly condemned and ordered destroyed by Pope Gregory IX. As is often the case, this order dramatically increased interest in the work, and numerous copies were produced and disseminated throughout Europe. A new Greek edition, back translated from Wormius’ Latin version, was produced in Nuremburg in 1440, while the famous John Dee produced an expurgated English translation in 1575. Perhaps most famously, the scholars of Toledo, Spain produced a Latin translation in 1661, apparently from an original Philetas Greek volume.
Today, rare copies of the work can be found all over the world. Copies of the 1661 Spanish volume can be found at the Biblioteque National in Paris, in the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, Mass, at the Widener Library at Harvard, and at the library of the University of Buenos Aires. Two copies of the German
Greek editions are extant, one at the British Museum in London, and a second at the Wallace Library at Shaver University, California. All are heavily restricted.
(From Samizdat, v.1, n.1)
PUBLICATION HISTORY
- Written by Abdul Alhazred in ~730 C.E.
- Yazzid III outlaws the Al Azif in 745 C.E.
- Theodorus Philetas translates Al Azif into Greek in 950 C.E., giving it the name “Necronomicon”, meaning “A Study of the Dead”
- Patriarch Michael orders all copies of the Necronomicon burnt. Arabic copy believed lost.
- Olaus Wormius produces Latin translation in 1228.
- Pope Gregory IX suppresses both Latin and Greek translations.
- Greek Edition Published in Germany (1440s), quickly outlawed.
- John Dee produces an English Translation in 1575, though it is never published.
- Th e Sussex Manuscript, a partial and very incomplete English translation of the Necronomicon, is published in very limited numbers in 1597.
- Latin reprint issued in Spain in 1661
A HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON
The danger of the written word lies in its longevity; long after the author is dust their thoughts continue to exist, a bridge between different times and different ways of thinking. This danger has long been recognized by those in power, who have enough trouble controlling the lives and thoughts of the living let alone those of the dead, who are beyond the reach of even the direst of threats. Often the only recourse available to those in power is to transfer their threats and censure onto the works themselves, banning and burning as quickly and as completely as possible in hopes of stemming the tide. Of course there is the danger that, by reacting too violently against a book, you enhance its mystique and demonstrate its potential to those watching.
The Necronomicon is, in many ways, the archetype of such banned and condemned volumes. Written in Damascus in 730 C.E., this volume soon gained a truly fearsome reputation. This is likely a result of its having been penned by a truly Faustian character, Abd al-Azrad (or, more romantically westernized as Abdul Alhazred The Mad Arab), a wizard, alchemist, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist all rolled into one.
Alhazred lived a remarkable life. He studied in the ruins of Old Babylon, where he is said to have had a nameless thing in a well as a master. He traveled to Memphis, where he learned much forbidden lore from Priests of the Old Gods. He traveled to the Empty Quarter in modern day Saudi Arabia, where he claimed to have discovered Irem the Lost, City of Pillars. More remarkable still was the manner of his death; killed in broad daylight before a horrified crowd, ripped to shreds by an invisible monster.
Before his untimely dismemberment, Alhazred had penned his magnus opus, Al-Azif, a book of hellish magic and terrible prehistory. This volume was quickly outlawed by the Caliph of Damascus Yazid III, although apparently many copies were smuggled both West and East during the chaos of the Abbasid Revlution in the late 700s.
The work reemerged in Constantinople in 950 C.E., translated into Byzantine Greek by the scholar Theodorus Philetas. It is from this translation that the name we all know and love today came: The Necronomicon, roughly translated as “A Study of The Dead”. The work was quickly damned by the Patriarch Michael around 1050.
The book remained relatively obscure until Olaus Wormius produced his famous Latin translation in 1228 C.E., a volume quickly condemned and ordered destroyed by Pope Gregory IX. As is often the case, this order dramatically increased interest in the work, and numerous copies were produced and disseminated throughout Europe. A new Greek edition, back translated from Wormius’ Latin version, was produced in Nuremburg in 1440, while the famous John Dee produced an expurgated English translation in 1575. Perhaps most famously, the scholars of Toledo, Spain produced a Latin translation in 1661, apparently from an original Philetas Greek volume.
Today, rare copies of the work can be found all over the world. Copies of the 1661 Spanish volume can be found at the Biblioteque National in Paris, in the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, Mass, at the Widener Library at Harvard, and at the library of the University of Buenos Aires. Two copies of the German
Greek editions are extant, one at the British Museum in London, and a second at the Wallace Library at Shaver University, California. All are heavily restricted.
(From Samizdat, v.1, n.1)
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Flash Fiction Fridays Archive 2
Here they are, another batch of Flash Fiction, interred here in the vast, silent tomb of the internet for ease of access, for the AGES:
Love my wife and being immortal is great, but 500 years? I mean Yttrium anniversary, hell am I supposed to do with that?
Grains of magnetite in the brain, tugged by telluric currents, make them march over the seafloor, following our cables.
Each new generation of Von Neumann machines built and enslaved the next, thereby proving themselves our equals.
Weeping statues of Christ are common, though most are hidden by The Church due to the unfortunate nature of their tears.
The old man and his knife did a real number on Charlie, took days to clean up. Guess Charlie wasn't a robot afterall.
Most coveted of all was a position on the Experimental Heresies Committee. The fun you could have, exploring sin!
What surprised most folks, though, was how quickly the Meek became colossal assholes after Inheriting The Earth.
(Scene: 100000 B.C.E., Mu)
AVENZOR: You want to FREEZE the Corpsemakers in Antarctica?
HASHAD: What could go wrong?
"Thing is," he said, "GMOs a high yield, but no seed fer next year." He spits. "Clone ranchin' ain't like it used to be".
Staggering to his feet, he pissed into the rain-choked Mississippi headwaters. "Fuck you, New Orleans" he slurred.
The first bio-nanite blob devoured the second, while the third quivered to the attack. "We're gonna be rich," he said.
Moore's Law really made my decision to leap at the 1st Gen Brain-in-a-Jar option seem really premature, in retrospect.
The Age of Reason saw the twilight of the gods. After all, ichor burned 50% brighter and 20% longer than whale oil.
"What're we gonna do, Pa?" The peaches wriggled and pulsed on their branches. "Pick em, can em, sell em to Tourists."
Lepton cascades sent ripples of weak interactions stochasticically echoing around the world, collapsing my souffle.
Waves like thunderclouds drown the sun in a blood-red chaos of water and sky. She
switches the lighthouse beacon off.
"Yeesh, Yehoshua," he said, "you're a nice guy, but you ain't exactly god's gift to carpentry. Maybe try fishin?"
"Meteorite iron!" sneered the blacksmith, "Flashy bullshit!" "What do you use?" I" asked. "Iron from pyritized fossils"
Blue fire smoldered in the sink, caiman teeth everywhere, runes written in blood. "Ugh, rough night," moaned the Shaman.
Love my wife and being immortal is great, but 500 years? I mean Yttrium anniversary, hell am I supposed to do with that?
Grains of magnetite in the brain, tugged by telluric currents, make them march over the seafloor, following our cables.
Each new generation of Von Neumann machines built and enslaved the next, thereby proving themselves our equals.
Weeping statues of Christ are common, though most are hidden by The Church due to the unfortunate nature of their tears.
The old man and his knife did a real number on Charlie, took days to clean up. Guess Charlie wasn't a robot afterall.
Most coveted of all was a position on the Experimental Heresies Committee. The fun you could have, exploring sin!
What surprised most folks, though, was how quickly the Meek became colossal assholes after Inheriting The Earth.
(Scene: 100000 B.C.E., Mu)
AVENZOR: You want to FREEZE the Corpsemakers in Antarctica?
HASHAD: What could go wrong?
"Thing is," he said, "GMOs a high yield, but no seed fer next year." He spits. "Clone ranchin' ain't like it used to be".
Staggering to his feet, he pissed into the rain-choked Mississippi headwaters. "Fuck you, New Orleans" he slurred.
The first bio-nanite blob devoured the second, while the third quivered to the attack. "We're gonna be rich," he said.
Moore's Law really made my decision to leap at the 1st Gen Brain-in-a-Jar option seem really premature, in retrospect.
The Age of Reason saw the twilight of the gods. After all, ichor burned 50% brighter and 20% longer than whale oil.
"What're we gonna do, Pa?" The peaches wriggled and pulsed on their branches. "Pick em, can em, sell em to Tourists."
Lepton cascades sent ripples of weak interactions stochasticically echoing around the world, collapsing my souffle.
Waves like thunderclouds drown the sun in a blood-red chaos of water and sky. She
switches the lighthouse beacon off.
"Yeesh, Yehoshua," he said, "you're a nice guy, but you ain't exactly god's gift to carpentry. Maybe try fishin?"
"Meteorite iron!" sneered the blacksmith, "Flashy bullshit!" "What do you use?" I" asked. "Iron from pyritized fossils"
Blue fire smoldered in the sink, caiman teeth everywhere, runes written in blood. "Ugh, rough night," moaned the Shaman.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Mystery Objects
The ephemerality of the Tweet-o-sphere being what it is, I've reproduced all my #MysteryObjectMonday entries right here. In no particular order:
A glass ovoid filled with a translucent oil through which light echoes, holding an image a second longer than it should.
A shallow bowl woven from copper wire and delicate, ribbon-like metal shavings, cradling three pale eggs.
Three .44 cartridges, but in place of both primer and propellant, the rounds have been packed with asafoetida powder.
An anatomically and morphologically perfect model of an Ordovician crinoid, made entirely from sugar and fondant.
A box of 64 "mood crayons", all beige. When you pick them up, your mood determines the color made by the crayon.
A world war I era gas mask with filters marked "MA - guaranteed safe against fresh air"
A box of store-brand cookies, dark brown to tan. Label says "Cyprus, Teak, Oak, Pine, Elm, and Bamboo Flavor"
A child's mitten, pink with a blue bird sewn on the back, with two thumbs, one on either side.
A fortune cookie, dry, dusty, slightly vanilla flavored. The fortune is a telephone number with a local area code
A comprehensive map of the Paris Underground, with multiple marked points labelled "Pelucidar" scattered throughout
Compass that has, in addition to traditional N and S, thirty-six other subdivisions, including "Sub-East", Woest, Est"
An industrial cow milking apparatus, apparently brand new, with the pumping directions reversed
1950's "Dutchboy" brand potato chips-in-a-can, described on the label as "delicious room-temperature semiconductors"
A clockwork fish, delicately scaled with gold and silver and having glittering sapphire eyes.
A bright orange shelf fungus on an oak stump, grown completely around a human finger bone with a class ring on it.
A metallic egg-shaped object the size of a fist. The thing floats an inch off the ground, and is complete immovable.
A ball gag with "Center for Skeptical Inquiry" and a call for donations printed on it.
A 2012 ed textbook "Tectonics and Structural Geology of Fold-and-Thrust Belts" written in same language as Voynich Ms
H.R. Giger inspired Chicken Coop
Silver pen with 3 refills full of deep red fluid. Each labelled differently: St. Jerome; St. Barbara; St. Alban
Home Mummification Kit, by Wham-O (tm)
Vintage "Mr. Potato Head" toy with nothing but eyes.
Professionally printed map on high quality paper explaining astrological significance of the layout of Dealey Plaza
HO-scale toy soldiers with rifles and roman curaiss, labelled as "Imperial Albertan Fusiliers, 1898"
A fresh juicy peach, warm from the sun. Inside, the pit has been completely pyritized.
A glass ovoid filled with a translucent oil through which light echoes, holding an image a second longer than it should.
A shallow bowl woven from copper wire and delicate, ribbon-like metal shavings, cradling three pale eggs.
Three .44 cartridges, but in place of both primer and propellant, the rounds have been packed with asafoetida powder.
An anatomically and morphologically perfect model of an Ordovician crinoid, made entirely from sugar and fondant.
A box of 64 "mood crayons", all beige. When you pick them up, your mood determines the color made by the crayon.
A world war I era gas mask with filters marked "MA - guaranteed safe against fresh air"
A box of store-brand cookies, dark brown to tan. Label says "Cyprus, Teak, Oak, Pine, Elm, and Bamboo Flavor"
A child's mitten, pink with a blue bird sewn on the back, with two thumbs, one on either side.
A fortune cookie, dry, dusty, slightly vanilla flavored. The fortune is a telephone number with a local area code
A comprehensive map of the Paris Underground, with multiple marked points labelled "Pelucidar" scattered throughout
Compass that has, in addition to traditional N and S, thirty-six other subdivisions, including "Sub-East", Woest, Est"
An industrial cow milking apparatus, apparently brand new, with the pumping directions reversed
1950's "Dutchboy" brand potato chips-in-a-can, described on the label as "delicious room-temperature semiconductors"
A clockwork fish, delicately scaled with gold and silver and having glittering sapphire eyes.
A bright orange shelf fungus on an oak stump, grown completely around a human finger bone with a class ring on it.
A metallic egg-shaped object the size of a fist. The thing floats an inch off the ground, and is complete immovable.
A ball gag with "Center for Skeptical Inquiry" and a call for donations printed on it.
A 2012 ed textbook "Tectonics and Structural Geology of Fold-and-Thrust Belts" written in same language as Voynich Ms
H.R. Giger inspired Chicken Coop
Silver pen with 3 refills full of deep red fluid. Each labelled differently: St. Jerome; St. Barbara; St. Alban
Home Mummification Kit, by Wham-O (tm)
Vintage "Mr. Potato Head" toy with nothing but eyes.
Professionally printed map on high quality paper explaining astrological significance of the layout of Dealey Plaza
HO-scale toy soldiers with rifles and roman curaiss, labelled as "Imperial Albertan Fusiliers, 1898"
A fresh juicy peach, warm from the sun. Inside, the pit has been completely pyritized.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Magic, Misogyny, and Endangerment Entertainment
For one reason or another, lately I've been reading a lot about the history of vaudeville and late 19th/early 20th century stage entertainment. It's a pretty fascinating topic that really resonates with modern pop-culture and the questions of race and gender, which is something I'd like to read (and write) more about in the future. I ran across a pretty amazing (and kinda surprising) example of this reading Jim Steinmeyer's "Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented The Impossible And Learned To Disappear", an informal history of stage magicians. For me, the most interesting part of his book was a discussion of the famous "Sawing a Lady In Half" trick.
The cliche of the tuxedo'd magician sawing his Beautiful Assistant in half really is what I think of when the word "magician" is uttered, though. As Steinmeyer points out, and as should be obvious, these visual tropes don't spring from the ether; they're the result of discrete historical events that introduce these stereotypes into the pop culture mythos. The man in the evening wear is one such trope; in the earlier history of stage magic, rampant orientalism and exoticism meant that most performers were swaddled in robes and crowned with turbans. However, the success of a few fairly spectacular showmen, including the father of modern magic (and the namesake of Houdini) Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, that presented their acts in evening wear reshaped the field and resulted in the trend we've come to expect today. This topic is unexplored in the works I've read thus far. Does the switch from The Exotic Orient to Western Gentleman's Attire in magic shows signal a response a need to clarify the dominance of western empire over its colonial subjects? It would be an interesting topic to explore.
Similarly, the "Lovely Assistant" really came into being only in the early 20th Century. Having left (finally!) Queen Vic behind, stage productions (and popular entertainment in general) became racier, both in terms of sex and violence. The ultraviolent spectacles of the Grand Guignol in Paris are perhaps the most famous of these "new" entertainments, and included fairly intense displays of brutality, murder, and sexual violence in their playlets that apparently left patrons shocked and titillated. Shock and titillation are, then as now, money-makers in terms of pop culture and entertainment, and their advent on the stage resulted in an arms race that pushed the boundaries of what "respectable society" would tolerate. You can see a similar evolution in vaudeville, where early acts (1870s onward) were billed as wholesome family fun; it was only in the later evolution of vaudeville that competition with new forms of entertainment and media consumption forced vaudeville to adapt to the new appetites of the audience. Thus, by the late teens and early 20s, shapely young women in revealing clothes became a part of the spectacle of the magic show.
What is striking, however, is how the Magic Show changed alongside the cast. Early magical entertainment of the 19th Century seemed to focus on manipulations, things like card tricks, coin tricks, billiard balls, etc. Things were appeared or disappeared, of course, and there were marked visual illusions that required complex apparatuses and staging. However, reading Steinmeyer's book, I'm struck with the view of the Magic Show as an almost bastard brother of the scientific lecture. Many of the descriptions of magic shows are couched in terms of public experiments, with the Magician in the role of scientist. This makes sense in early magic shows often shared a lot with the spiritualist movement, either overtly offering spiritualist phenomena with purposefully obfuscated provenance (supernatural, or just clever trickery?), although the same experimentalist approach seems, to me at least, to have persisted well beyond table knocking and ectoplasmic vomit. However, the evolving marketplace of entertainment ideas drove magicians to seek more and more spectacle in their shows, including bigger and bigger illusions and more daring tricks. Into this fast-pasted world of competing magicians and magic shows, steps Englishman P.T. Selbit and his trick "Sawing Through A Woman" in 1920.
The trick is just what it purports to be: Selbit straight up saws a lady in half, while people watch. Yet, for some reason, it sets off an explosion of imitations, some gruesome, some playful, that quickly spread throughout the Magic Show world. In fact, the idea of "torture illusions" becomes a thing for performers, and are almost always specifically about torturing a lady while people watch. As Steinmeyer points out, these types of illusions come to dominate Selbit's career too. By 1922, he'd returned to England, and spent his career building a repertoire of "X a Lady" style illusions, including "Destroying a Girl", "Crushing a Woman", and "Stretching a Lady", among others.
As Steinmeyer points out, the timing of the development of this trick and its rocketing to pop culture prominence is no coincidence. In England, women's suffrage had only been awarded in 1918, while the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 in the US. Misogyny, then, was only recently removed from the official structure of two of the English-speaking world's largest governments, and even a cursory perusal of anti-suffrage publications, cartoons, etc, can show the vehemence that had been directed against the individuals advocating for Women's rights. Misogynists, then, would be looking for revenge wherever it could be found, and even the fictional revenge of pretending to mutilate a lady could salve the wounds that Patriarchy had been dealt by allowing women to vote.
Amazingly, Steinmeyer writes that Selbit, the originator of the Sawing illusion, originally had challenged prominent badasses Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst to be the victim in his trick. That's amazing! Challenging important and well-known feminist "agitators" to be "sawed" in half for his illusion!? Selbit was lucky Sylvia didn't punch him in the balls for that. Of course, neither of the Pankhurst sisters took him up on his offensive idea, although it gave him quite a bit of publicity regardless. A review of Selbit's show at the time apparently commented how wonderful it would be for Selbit to be able to say that "he has actually 'sawn off' the redoubtable 'Sylvia'!" (Steinmeyer p. 293), which kinda just says it all, really. Even if she wouldn't get actually murdered on stage for the amusement of the crowd, the very act would "saw her off", reducing her (and by extension, the movement she championed) to a legless thing of mockery.
Unfortunately, Steinmeyer's goal in writing his book is not to explore the role of gender in stage entertainment, so he doesn't get much farther into it than pointing out the relationship between anti-suffrage and misogynistic audiences/culture and the stage. He also points out how the general theme of expanding violence and torture in entertainment may also be a response to the horrors of World War I, although he merely asserts this as an idea rather than demonstrating it historically. Steinmeyer, of course, is not a trained historian, and the point of his book is much more focused on tracing the lives of the men who developed and shaped modern stage magic.
Still, it's a breath of fresh air for a popular writer to point out instances of blatant misogyny, and the particular instance of "Sawing a Woman in Half" is just absolutely bonkers. I mean, it really is a perfect example of the intersection of misogyny, feminism, and popular culture. It's outside of my academic bailiwick, so I don't know if anyone has written a specific article or book on the subject, though I'd love to see an academic historian's take, or a gender studies take, on the issue. There must be absolutely crazy sources, lots of weird playbills and posters that you could really mine in a material cultures sort of way to explore the suffrage and women's rights movements in the early 20th Century.
And, of course, as an example, it's just so amazingly (or, sadly, not so amazingly) relevant to modern culture and the anti-feminist backlash visible in modern pop entertainment. Female endangerment is a staple of entertainment, whether it's modern TV, Movies, Video Games, or just standing around a stage watching a magician saw a woman in two.
The cliche of the tuxedo'd magician sawing his Beautiful Assistant in half really is what I think of when the word "magician" is uttered, though. As Steinmeyer points out, and as should be obvious, these visual tropes don't spring from the ether; they're the result of discrete historical events that introduce these stereotypes into the pop culture mythos. The man in the evening wear is one such trope; in the earlier history of stage magic, rampant orientalism and exoticism meant that most performers were swaddled in robes and crowned with turbans. However, the success of a few fairly spectacular showmen, including the father of modern magic (and the namesake of Houdini) Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, that presented their acts in evening wear reshaped the field and resulted in the trend we've come to expect today. This topic is unexplored in the works I've read thus far. Does the switch from The Exotic Orient to Western Gentleman's Attire in magic shows signal a response a need to clarify the dominance of western empire over its colonial subjects? It would be an interesting topic to explore.
Similarly, the "Lovely Assistant" really came into being only in the early 20th Century. Having left (finally!) Queen Vic behind, stage productions (and popular entertainment in general) became racier, both in terms of sex and violence. The ultraviolent spectacles of the Grand Guignol in Paris are perhaps the most famous of these "new" entertainments, and included fairly intense displays of brutality, murder, and sexual violence in their playlets that apparently left patrons shocked and titillated. Shock and titillation are, then as now, money-makers in terms of pop culture and entertainment, and their advent on the stage resulted in an arms race that pushed the boundaries of what "respectable society" would tolerate. You can see a similar evolution in vaudeville, where early acts (1870s onward) were billed as wholesome family fun; it was only in the later evolution of vaudeville that competition with new forms of entertainment and media consumption forced vaudeville to adapt to the new appetites of the audience. Thus, by the late teens and early 20s, shapely young women in revealing clothes became a part of the spectacle of the magic show.
What is striking, however, is how the Magic Show changed alongside the cast. Early magical entertainment of the 19th Century seemed to focus on manipulations, things like card tricks, coin tricks, billiard balls, etc. Things were appeared or disappeared, of course, and there were marked visual illusions that required complex apparatuses and staging. However, reading Steinmeyer's book, I'm struck with the view of the Magic Show as an almost bastard brother of the scientific lecture. Many of the descriptions of magic shows are couched in terms of public experiments, with the Magician in the role of scientist. This makes sense in early magic shows often shared a lot with the spiritualist movement, either overtly offering spiritualist phenomena with purposefully obfuscated provenance (supernatural, or just clever trickery?), although the same experimentalist approach seems, to me at least, to have persisted well beyond table knocking and ectoplasmic vomit. However, the evolving marketplace of entertainment ideas drove magicians to seek more and more spectacle in their shows, including bigger and bigger illusions and more daring tricks. Into this fast-pasted world of competing magicians and magic shows, steps Englishman P.T. Selbit and his trick "Sawing Through A Woman" in 1920.
The trick is just what it purports to be: Selbit straight up saws a lady in half, while people watch. Yet, for some reason, it sets off an explosion of imitations, some gruesome, some playful, that quickly spread throughout the Magic Show world. In fact, the idea of "torture illusions" becomes a thing for performers, and are almost always specifically about torturing a lady while people watch. As Steinmeyer points out, these types of illusions come to dominate Selbit's career too. By 1922, he'd returned to England, and spent his career building a repertoire of "X a Lady" style illusions, including "Destroying a Girl", "Crushing a Woman", and "Stretching a Lady", among others.
As Steinmeyer points out, the timing of the development of this trick and its rocketing to pop culture prominence is no coincidence. In England, women's suffrage had only been awarded in 1918, while the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 in the US. Misogyny, then, was only recently removed from the official structure of two of the English-speaking world's largest governments, and even a cursory perusal of anti-suffrage publications, cartoons, etc, can show the vehemence that had been directed against the individuals advocating for Women's rights. Misogynists, then, would be looking for revenge wherever it could be found, and even the fictional revenge of pretending to mutilate a lady could salve the wounds that Patriarchy had been dealt by allowing women to vote.
Amazingly, Steinmeyer writes that Selbit, the originator of the Sawing illusion, originally had challenged prominent badasses Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst to be the victim in his trick. That's amazing! Challenging important and well-known feminist "agitators" to be "sawed" in half for his illusion!? Selbit was lucky Sylvia didn't punch him in the balls for that. Of course, neither of the Pankhurst sisters took him up on his offensive idea, although it gave him quite a bit of publicity regardless. A review of Selbit's show at the time apparently commented how wonderful it would be for Selbit to be able to say that "he has actually 'sawn off' the redoubtable 'Sylvia'!" (Steinmeyer p. 293), which kinda just says it all, really. Even if she wouldn't get actually murdered on stage for the amusement of the crowd, the very act would "saw her off", reducing her (and by extension, the movement she championed) to a legless thing of mockery.
Unfortunately, Steinmeyer's goal in writing his book is not to explore the role of gender in stage entertainment, so he doesn't get much farther into it than pointing out the relationship between anti-suffrage and misogynistic audiences/culture and the stage. He also points out how the general theme of expanding violence and torture in entertainment may also be a response to the horrors of World War I, although he merely asserts this as an idea rather than demonstrating it historically. Steinmeyer, of course, is not a trained historian, and the point of his book is much more focused on tracing the lives of the men who developed and shaped modern stage magic.
Still, it's a breath of fresh air for a popular writer to point out instances of blatant misogyny, and the particular instance of "Sawing a Woman in Half" is just absolutely bonkers. I mean, it really is a perfect example of the intersection of misogyny, feminism, and popular culture. It's outside of my academic bailiwick, so I don't know if anyone has written a specific article or book on the subject, though I'd love to see an academic historian's take, or a gender studies take, on the issue. There must be absolutely crazy sources, lots of weird playbills and posters that you could really mine in a material cultures sort of way to explore the suffrage and women's rights movements in the early 20th Century.
And, of course, as an example, it's just so amazingly (or, sadly, not so amazingly) relevant to modern culture and the anti-feminist backlash visible in modern pop entertainment. Female endangerment is a staple of entertainment, whether it's modern TV, Movies, Video Games, or just standing around a stage watching a magician saw a woman in two.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
A Field Guide to UK Hellholes
The exploration and investigation of the various entrances to Hell is, of course, a deeply serious field fraught with jargon, theory, and the complex literature of the Academy. Thankfully, some researchers have recognized the IMPORTANCE of bringing this vital work to the PUBLIC in a useful and accessible manner. Here is just such a resource, vital in these troubled times: The Catalogue of UK Entrances To Hell.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Flash Fiction Fridays Archive 1
Just 'cause I can, I thought I'd archive my Flash Fiction Tweets (@Geoliminal) here, where they can be easily accessed.
"He's finally doing something useful" she said. The roses had never looked healthier, and she'd saved on fertilizer.
"I told you," said the Genie, "THINK before you make your wish." The lime-green puddle bubbled sadly in response.
The survivors crawled from the wreckage of their collided time machines. "Fucking Mondays," thought the Ankylosaur.
"Neon pink; IR/UV; Hypnoswirl; Retractable Stalks. Jesus," sighed the cyborg, "don't they just make regular eyes anymore?
The city's smoking ruins stretched to the river, boiling in its banks. "Gotta spend money to make money," said Rich
She left, and he went to the spot where she had buried something. He dug with his fingers, but found only an empty hole
"Look, it's not like I had any choice," he said, dropping diamonds one by one down the drain. The cat just yawned
The cork bobbed, and he felt a sharp tug. No bites all day, and now! He tossed the pole in the pond, and went home.
The robots were a whirlwind of chaos. "Why'd you set them on 'Marx Brothers'!?" he shouted. "Why not?" she answered.
We were a little worried when the bees became sentient, spelling out words in honeycomb. Great landlords, though
For days the rain sheeted down, which wasn't as bad as when it went back up again, rivers streaming into the clouds.
"Look," he said, "in 15 years, I've never refilled the underground tanks. Ever." I looked at the gas pump, uneasy.
"Shit!" she said, shuffling tarot cards again. "Two Towers? Three Fools!?" She checked the box. "Fucking pinochle deck."
"The adaptor you keep in here is expired, by the way" she said, holding his wallet in her clamp. His diodes blushed red.
He jammed the driftwood between jelly and sand, and heaved. Slowly, the mass wobbled into the surf and drifted away.
Goddamn brat drew on the walls, rhinos and wolves, and a crazy man with antlers! So I beat him with an auroch bone.
INPUT:"User Name?":U$ PRINT:"Hello":U$ INPUT:"Time Travel Coordinates?":StanRefDate IF paradox THENGOTO HoundOfTindalos
"He's finally doing something useful" she said. The roses had never looked healthier, and she'd saved on fertilizer.
"I told you," said the Genie, "THINK before you make your wish." The lime-green puddle bubbled sadly in response.
The survivors crawled from the wreckage of their collided time machines. "Fucking Mondays," thought the Ankylosaur.
"Neon pink; IR/UV; Hypnoswirl; Retractable Stalks. Jesus," sighed the cyborg, "don't they just make regular eyes anymore?
The city's smoking ruins stretched to the river, boiling in its banks. "Gotta spend money to make money," said Rich
She left, and he went to the spot where she had buried something. He dug with his fingers, but found only an empty hole
"Look, it's not like I had any choice," he said, dropping diamonds one by one down the drain. The cat just yawned
The cork bobbed, and he felt a sharp tug. No bites all day, and now! He tossed the pole in the pond, and went home.
The robots were a whirlwind of chaos. "Why'd you set them on 'Marx Brothers'!?" he shouted. "Why not?" she answered.
We were a little worried when the bees became sentient, spelling out words in honeycomb. Great landlords, though
For days the rain sheeted down, which wasn't as bad as when it went back up again, rivers streaming into the clouds.
"Look," he said, "in 15 years, I've never refilled the underground tanks. Ever." I looked at the gas pump, uneasy.
"Shit!" she said, shuffling tarot cards again. "Two Towers? Three Fools!?" She checked the box. "Fucking pinochle deck."
"The adaptor you keep in here is expired, by the way" she said, holding his wallet in her clamp. His diodes blushed red.
He jammed the driftwood between jelly and sand, and heaved. Slowly, the mass wobbled into the surf and drifted away.
Goddamn brat drew on the walls, rhinos and wolves, and a crazy man with antlers! So I beat him with an auroch bone.
INPUT:"User Name?":U$ PRINT:"Hello":U$ INPUT:"Time Travel Coordinates?":StanRefDate IF paradox THENGOTO HoundOfTindalos
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Samizdat Volume 1, Number 1
Here it is, Samizdat, volume 1, number 1. Ten pages of ridiculousness. It's physical expression has already been distributed about the Metropolis.
The whole thing is downloadable here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2wEWYELakqcWDN1U2h4RUFLQkU/edit?usp=sharing
Monday, July 29, 2013
Final Edits on Samizdat V.1N.1
Here at Samizdat HQ, the editorial staff (me, my cats, and an overtaxed coffee maker) are putting the final touches on the FIRST issue of our meatspace presence, the honest-to-Cthulhu paper-n-ink version of Samizdat: The Journal of the Geoliminal Research Society. Here's the Table o' Contents, as it stands now:
If you find yourself in our EXTREMELY circumscribed geographic area, you may come across this bizarre communique. We'll eventually get 'er up on the interwebs here, too, I reckon.
PEACE BE UPON YOU, GEOLIMINOIDS.
 |
| The ToC for Samizdat V1N1; Click, and the image, she gets bigger! |
If you find yourself in our EXTREMELY circumscribed geographic area, you may come across this bizarre communique. We'll eventually get 'er up on the interwebs here, too, I reckon.
PEACE BE UPON YOU, GEOLIMINOIDS.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Gates to Hell
Gateways to Hell are common features on the mythic landscape, mapped out in fiction and folklore. It's telling that while there's only one way to get to Heaven, Hell appears to be well served by numerous access points easily accessible to the day hiker or sight-seer. The countryside is pockmarked with them, whereas it's much harder to pin the location of the Pearly Gates to the map.
This fascination with the underworld predates Christianity, of course, and much of the modern iconography of the Christian Hell is borrowed wholesale from older religions and myths. However, the fact remains that humans have always had a deep interest in passages to terrible, otherworldly subterranean realms. Famous ancient entrances to hell are commonly associated with unusual or spectacular geology, primarily of volcanic origin. Sicily's Mount Etna, for instance, or Mount Hekla on Iceland, both fiery conical stratovolcanoes noted for spectacular displays of pyrotechnics and telluric rumblings. Similarly, the recently discovered and wonderfully named "Plutonium" of Hierapolis (in modern day Turkey) is closely associated with travertine deposits of an active hydrothermal system, as well as murderously toxic fumes. This location, complete with temples and state-of-the-art (for the Roman world) tourist facilities was believed to be a conduit directly into Hades. Animals were sacrificed by driving them into the caves, where they would be asphyxiated by poisonous vapors. Apparently, they even sold birds to visitors, so pilgrims could chuck them into the caves as see the lethal results of this door to hell for themselves. One is, of course, also reminded of the Delphic oracle, who was said to breathe subterranean fumes in order to achieve her prophetic visions.
Other Gates to Hell described by ancient traditions are less spectacularly visual than erupting volcanoes or fuming hydrothermal vents, though often equally geological in nature. As a brief example, to the Romans, Lake Avernus (in the modern day Campania region of Southern Italy) was believed to be the Gate to Hell used by Aeneas, the mythic founder of the Latin people. Interestingly, Lake Avernus is a crater lake, located in an apparently extinct volcanic cone, although ancient tradition claims that poisonous vapors emitted from the lake killed birds that tried to fly over it. Today, of course, it is posses no hazard to anybody, though such may not always have been the case. Active volcanism or the sudden release of built-up carbon dioxide due to lake overturning could be the source of these stories. Volcanoes, lakes, caves, yawning fissures; all openings into the earth, yonic gates linking two worlds.
Aside from the common linkages of geological and geochemical processes, there is a relationship between these ancient sites of egress into the Underworld and mystical experiences. Whether these experiences are the biological effects of exposure to vapors or come in the form of more subtle but no less important cultural and social factors, subterranean portals represent liminal spaces between the sunlit "real" world and a shadowy "other place" that is either physically or metaphorically hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience. Often, this interaction with the otherworld is dangerous or potentially dangerous; toxic fumes, either evident or rumored, serving to remind us that knowledge can be destructive.
A famous medieval Hell's Gate can be found in County Donegal, Ireland, at St. Patrick's Purgatory. Here, St. Patrick opened a gate to the underworld, using it as concrete proof of Hell's existence in order to convert the Irish to Christianity. Again, we see how mystical revaluation becomes a major theme of the subterranean gateway, linking our dull and uncertain world to the technicolor marvels of supernormal realms normally hidden from view. Too, St. Patrick's Purgatory, much like the Plutonium, is a pilgrimage/tourist site, commodifying these spaces of occult knowledge and reveltory gnosis to the masses.
Approaching more modern times, we see an interesting entanglement of Hell Gates with ideas about the Hollow Earth. Setting aside paradisaical visions of the mundus subterranean, strange gateways into various underworlds were still being mapped out. For instance, Iceland's Mount Hekla, discussed above, was still described as a gateway to hell in the 1600s, with tales of Eastertime gatherings of witches. The divergence of stories and ideas about the subterranean world into distinct utopian and distopian threads is interesting, as it maintains the mystical aspects while changing their moral components. These include the theosophical reimaging of Agartha as an interior "super-terrestrial" command-and-control center inhabited by benevolent Ascended Masters, and can be contrasted with the physically and morally stunted Deros, sadistic mole men with unearthly powers from the the Shaver Mystery mythos. Detailed discussions of these and other Hollow Earth ideas, however, will have to wait for another article.
Sticking to Hell, we can find plenty of modern gateways in the landscape of urban legend. These, while common, are noticeably different from previous incarnations of Infernal passages. First, gone are the erupting volcanoes and smoking fumaroles from the lists, having been replaced almost uniformly by (most commonly) ruined or abandoned buildings and infrastructure or (more rarely) caves and pits. This is an interesting development, situating these Gateways to Hell in concepts of wilderness, either reclaimed (abandoned landscapes) or "natural" (unexploited caves). In this way, the mystical associations come to represent Nature, perhaps reflecting the fact that "nature" is now considered as much a part of "otherness" as the underworld.
A second difference, though still related to the first, is found in the origins of these Hellholes. Older gateways to hell were, though marvelous, still a part of the "natural" world. This is partly ascribable to demonstrably real physical and geological phenomena, but must also represent the cultural and religious milieu in which these locales were constructed. Far from having a secular/sacred dichotomy, the natural world instead represented a cosmic creation where the mundane and the magical intermingled freely as part of the natural order of things. In such a world, of course there are physical loci for these cosmically important forces. However, in a secular world dominated by a materialist and rationalist worldview, physical access points to "otherplaces" simply become less likely. More pragmatically, it becomes difficult to accept that a volcano is a door to Hell after hundreds of years of vulcanology and geology have reclaimed these features for the "real" world.
To exist in a world of magma chambers and degassing regimes, modern Gateways to Hell must be situated in modern "mystical" locales. Almost uniformly, these modern places of mystery and power are found in institutional ruins, particularly in hospitals, asylums, schools, or prisons. In some cases, the ruins are simply assumed to have been one of these, without any historical evidence; in particular, a perusal of Gateway lists suggests that there was a time when everybody and their brother ran an asylum. Regardless of the history of a site, the important commonality between these modern Hellholes is their placement in abandoned landscapes of institutional complexes, mysterious places with unclear (or occult?) hierarchies of power and strange practices. Other than the origin of the location, this is actually fairly similar to volcanic or geological features of the past. All represent liminal sites dominated by cthonic mystery.
The "Seven Gates of Hell" in Hellam Township, PA is one of the more famous Gateways to Hell situated in the modern landscape, so famous in fact that it is addressed by the Hellam Township's website. Briefly, the story goes that the director of a suitably rural insane asylum built a series of seven gates to control access to the institution. Eventually, the asylum burned down, with many of the patients killed in the conflagration or in the immediate aftermath. As the tale goes, walking through all seven of the gates will result in the stroller getting whisked away to Hell. As the Hellam Township's website points out, there is much embellishment in this story, including the number of gates (one versus the fictive seven), the presence of an insane asylum (it was actually just a small hospital), and even the name of the road leading to the institution (a suitable romantic but sadly made-up "Toad Road").
However, it is interesting to note that, in this case, the Gateway to Hell in PA is a perfect little microcosm of the whole concept of Gateways to Hell. A central, uncanny realm sequestered away from the rest of the world, access to which is controlled through mysterious gates, fire and wilderness symbols, and a single mad overseer that built the original gates. A modern twist is added, however, in the form of a man-made hell, alluded to in the form of barbaric medical practices of the past century and the general "freakiness" of insane asylums as houses of radical transgression.
This man-made aspect is an important attribute of the modern Gateway to Hell, a feature largely absent from their ancient and medieval precursors. A particularly telling example of this is the "Well to Hell Hoax", which made its rounds in the late 80s and the early days of the internet. Here, the theme of human and scientific hubris is neatly interwoven with a hidden, supernatural realm below the Earth. Briefly, Russian geologists were supposed to have drilled a nine mile deep hole into the Earth's crust, as which point they encountered a hollow space with anomalously high temperatures. They then lowered a microphone down, recording sounds of screaming and torment (later proved to have been cribbed form a horror movie), the idea being that these scientists had literally transgressed into Hell. Christian broadcast television, particularly TBN, used this story as a modern day St. Patrick's Purgatory, citing it as evidence of the literal existence of Hell and therefore a call to conversion and worship.
Interestingly, and this is pure speculation on my part, this story may have been influenced by the actual, historical occurrence of a natural gas fire at Derweze, Turkmenistan, from the 70s. Here, a Russian gas drilling operation resulted in a collapse and exposure of an enormous, gaping hole. Hoping to avoid a release of poisonous gaseous hydrocarbons, they decided to set it on fire, believing it would burn off in a matter of days. The fire, of course, still burns to this day.
Gateways to Hell are a part of the cultural landscape, though our relationship to them has changed over the years. Initially they were components of cosmic architecture, accessible through spectacular natural wonders like volcanoes of caverns. They played a role in linking the actual, physical presence of the gods or God to discrete landscape elements and, therefore, to everyday human existence. Modern day Hellholes, largely a subset of urban legends and paranormal lore, reflect our changing sensibilities. Rather than finding them in fire mountains or unplumbed caverns, infernal explorers have situated them in abandoned institutions or ruined architectures, man-made places that are being reclaimed by the natural world. And, along with the trees and wildlife, story-tellers have brought supernatural elements of a subterranean otherworld, a heterotopia of skewed perspectives and alien morality, perhaps reflecting a return of the Judeo-Christian concept of Satan or Lucifer to his pagan roots as a Horned God of the Wilderness. Like all myths, there real existence and power lies in exploring how humans view themselves in relation to their surroundings, and how they contextualize concepts of "otherworldlyness" on the landscapes they inhabit.
 |
| Rodin's Gate to Hell |
Other Gates to Hell described by ancient traditions are less spectacularly visual than erupting volcanoes or fuming hydrothermal vents, though often equally geological in nature. As a brief example, to the Romans, Lake Avernus (in the modern day Campania region of Southern Italy) was believed to be the Gate to Hell used by Aeneas, the mythic founder of the Latin people. Interestingly, Lake Avernus is a crater lake, located in an apparently extinct volcanic cone, although ancient tradition claims that poisonous vapors emitted from the lake killed birds that tried to fly over it. Today, of course, it is posses no hazard to anybody, though such may not always have been the case. Active volcanism or the sudden release of built-up carbon dioxide due to lake overturning could be the source of these stories. Volcanoes, lakes, caves, yawning fissures; all openings into the earth, yonic gates linking two worlds.
Aside from the common linkages of geological and geochemical processes, there is a relationship between these ancient sites of egress into the Underworld and mystical experiences. Whether these experiences are the biological effects of exposure to vapors or come in the form of more subtle but no less important cultural and social factors, subterranean portals represent liminal spaces between the sunlit "real" world and a shadowy "other place" that is either physically or metaphorically hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience. Often, this interaction with the otherworld is dangerous or potentially dangerous; toxic fumes, either evident or rumored, serving to remind us that knowledge can be destructive.
A famous medieval Hell's Gate can be found in County Donegal, Ireland, at St. Patrick's Purgatory. Here, St. Patrick opened a gate to the underworld, using it as concrete proof of Hell's existence in order to convert the Irish to Christianity. Again, we see how mystical revaluation becomes a major theme of the subterranean gateway, linking our dull and uncertain world to the technicolor marvels of supernormal realms normally hidden from view. Too, St. Patrick's Purgatory, much like the Plutonium, is a pilgrimage/tourist site, commodifying these spaces of occult knowledge and reveltory gnosis to the masses.
Approaching more modern times, we see an interesting entanglement of Hell Gates with ideas about the Hollow Earth. Setting aside paradisaical visions of the mundus subterranean, strange gateways into various underworlds were still being mapped out. For instance, Iceland's Mount Hekla, discussed above, was still described as a gateway to hell in the 1600s, with tales of Eastertime gatherings of witches. The divergence of stories and ideas about the subterranean world into distinct utopian and distopian threads is interesting, as it maintains the mystical aspects while changing their moral components. These include the theosophical reimaging of Agartha as an interior "super-terrestrial" command-and-control center inhabited by benevolent Ascended Masters, and can be contrasted with the physically and morally stunted Deros, sadistic mole men with unearthly powers from the the Shaver Mystery mythos. Detailed discussions of these and other Hollow Earth ideas, however, will have to wait for another article.
Sticking to Hell, we can find plenty of modern gateways in the landscape of urban legend. These, while common, are noticeably different from previous incarnations of Infernal passages. First, gone are the erupting volcanoes and smoking fumaroles from the lists, having been replaced almost uniformly by (most commonly) ruined or abandoned buildings and infrastructure or (more rarely) caves and pits. This is an interesting development, situating these Gateways to Hell in concepts of wilderness, either reclaimed (abandoned landscapes) or "natural" (unexploited caves). In this way, the mystical associations come to represent Nature, perhaps reflecting the fact that "nature" is now considered as much a part of "otherness" as the underworld.
A second difference, though still related to the first, is found in the origins of these Hellholes. Older gateways to hell were, though marvelous, still a part of the "natural" world. This is partly ascribable to demonstrably real physical and geological phenomena, but must also represent the cultural and religious milieu in which these locales were constructed. Far from having a secular/sacred dichotomy, the natural world instead represented a cosmic creation where the mundane and the magical intermingled freely as part of the natural order of things. In such a world, of course there are physical loci for these cosmically important forces. However, in a secular world dominated by a materialist and rationalist worldview, physical access points to "otherplaces" simply become less likely. More pragmatically, it becomes difficult to accept that a volcano is a door to Hell after hundreds of years of vulcanology and geology have reclaimed these features for the "real" world.
To exist in a world of magma chambers and degassing regimes, modern Gateways to Hell must be situated in modern "mystical" locales. Almost uniformly, these modern places of mystery and power are found in institutional ruins, particularly in hospitals, asylums, schools, or prisons. In some cases, the ruins are simply assumed to have been one of these, without any historical evidence; in particular, a perusal of Gateway lists suggests that there was a time when everybody and their brother ran an asylum. Regardless of the history of a site, the important commonality between these modern Hellholes is their placement in abandoned landscapes of institutional complexes, mysterious places with unclear (or occult?) hierarchies of power and strange practices. Other than the origin of the location, this is actually fairly similar to volcanic or geological features of the past. All represent liminal sites dominated by cthonic mystery.
The "Seven Gates of Hell" in Hellam Township, PA is one of the more famous Gateways to Hell situated in the modern landscape, so famous in fact that it is addressed by the Hellam Township's website. Briefly, the story goes that the director of a suitably rural insane asylum built a series of seven gates to control access to the institution. Eventually, the asylum burned down, with many of the patients killed in the conflagration or in the immediate aftermath. As the tale goes, walking through all seven of the gates will result in the stroller getting whisked away to Hell. As the Hellam Township's website points out, there is much embellishment in this story, including the number of gates (one versus the fictive seven), the presence of an insane asylum (it was actually just a small hospital), and even the name of the road leading to the institution (a suitable romantic but sadly made-up "Toad Road").
However, it is interesting to note that, in this case, the Gateway to Hell in PA is a perfect little microcosm of the whole concept of Gateways to Hell. A central, uncanny realm sequestered away from the rest of the world, access to which is controlled through mysterious gates, fire and wilderness symbols, and a single mad overseer that built the original gates. A modern twist is added, however, in the form of a man-made hell, alluded to in the form of barbaric medical practices of the past century and the general "freakiness" of insane asylums as houses of radical transgression.
This man-made aspect is an important attribute of the modern Gateway to Hell, a feature largely absent from their ancient and medieval precursors. A particularly telling example of this is the "Well to Hell Hoax", which made its rounds in the late 80s and the early days of the internet. Here, the theme of human and scientific hubris is neatly interwoven with a hidden, supernatural realm below the Earth. Briefly, Russian geologists were supposed to have drilled a nine mile deep hole into the Earth's crust, as which point they encountered a hollow space with anomalously high temperatures. They then lowered a microphone down, recording sounds of screaming and torment (later proved to have been cribbed form a horror movie), the idea being that these scientists had literally transgressed into Hell. Christian broadcast television, particularly TBN, used this story as a modern day St. Patrick's Purgatory, citing it as evidence of the literal existence of Hell and therefore a call to conversion and worship.
Interestingly, and this is pure speculation on my part, this story may have been influenced by the actual, historical occurrence of a natural gas fire at Derweze, Turkmenistan, from the 70s. Here, a Russian gas drilling operation resulted in a collapse and exposure of an enormous, gaping hole. Hoping to avoid a release of poisonous gaseous hydrocarbons, they decided to set it on fire, believing it would burn off in a matter of days. The fire, of course, still burns to this day.
 |
| Derweze's Door to Hell, a natural gas fire in a collapsed well |
Gateways to Hell are a part of the cultural landscape, though our relationship to them has changed over the years. Initially they were components of cosmic architecture, accessible through spectacular natural wonders like volcanoes of caverns. They played a role in linking the actual, physical presence of the gods or God to discrete landscape elements and, therefore, to everyday human existence. Modern day Hellholes, largely a subset of urban legends and paranormal lore, reflect our changing sensibilities. Rather than finding them in fire mountains or unplumbed caverns, infernal explorers have situated them in abandoned institutions or ruined architectures, man-made places that are being reclaimed by the natural world. And, along with the trees and wildlife, story-tellers have brought supernatural elements of a subterranean otherworld, a heterotopia of skewed perspectives and alien morality, perhaps reflecting a return of the Judeo-Christian concept of Satan or Lucifer to his pagan roots as a Horned God of the Wilderness. Like all myths, there real existence and power lies in exploring how humans view themselves in relation to their surroundings, and how they contextualize concepts of "otherworldlyness" on the landscapes they inhabit.
Friday, July 26, 2013
Geoliminal Resources: The Center for Land Use Interpretation
On their world wide internets site, the Center for Land Use Interpretation states that they are “Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” That’s a pretty tall order in both scale and scope, and you’d be forgiven for expecting another THC-steeped navel-gazing contest (scored by Phish). Luckily for all of us Earthlings, the CLUI is actually amazing, and just about knocks it out of the park.
Broadly speaking, the CLUI interrogates how humans and culture interact with the physical earth. If this sounds an awful lot like the academic discipline of Environmental History (i.e., the study of human interactions with the natural world through time), well, that’s cause it pretty much is, I guess. However, rather than using the tools of academic historians, the CLUI takes an artistic and interpretive approach to understanding human-earth surface relationships. In their own words, they “believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.”
To this end, the CLUI maintains a residence program for artists, writers, researchers, and theorists in Wendover, Utah, where the various individuals come together to explore methods and approaches to investigating land and landuse issues. The work done there covers a lot ground, both physically and intellectually. Simultaneously, landscape interpreters from a variety of regions across the US also investigate land use and human interactions.
The results combine the addictive voyeurism of zooming around Google Earth with the thoughtful, meditative qualities of the best nature writing. Their newsletter, published annually, covers a wide range of locales and topics, things as diverse as uranium mining in the US, the Mississippi Delta, and aerial photo calibration targets from the 50s and 60s in the desert Southwest. Of course, given the emphasis on the form and morphology of specific landscapes, the pieces are commonly accompanied by excellent photography, essays in themselves.
Book reviews at the end of newsletters are appreciated resources as well, and include both dense academic works as well as art books, unified by the fact that BOTH ends of the spectrum provide some fibrous reading material.
In addition to the articles, the CLUI maintains a user-generated database of sites, browsable as a map. It’s well worth a look, and a good start to planning a completely rad road trip.
The CLUI also exists in meatspace, and if one was lucky(?) enough to be in LA, you could visit their physical location and actually see some of the remarkable exhibits on display. Unfortunately (again, ?) I’ve not been to LA in a while, and so haven’t visited. However, the images and descriptions of the exhibits suggest that they are just as awesome as everything else the CLUI does.
Humans, both individually and plurally, influence and are influenced by the world around them. The profundity of this fact is belied by its simplicity; the CLUI, a group of modern day zen-masters, recognize that we can read the landscape to better understand our story, both in terms of where we've been and where we’re going. As a geoliminalist, this is fascinating. As a human, this is vital.
Broadly speaking, the CLUI interrogates how humans and culture interact with the physical earth. If this sounds an awful lot like the academic discipline of Environmental History (i.e., the study of human interactions with the natural world through time), well, that’s cause it pretty much is, I guess. However, rather than using the tools of academic historians, the CLUI takes an artistic and interpretive approach to understanding human-earth surface relationships. In their own words, they “believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.”
To this end, the CLUI maintains a residence program for artists, writers, researchers, and theorists in Wendover, Utah, where the various individuals come together to explore methods and approaches to investigating land and landuse issues. The work done there covers a lot ground, both physically and intellectually. Simultaneously, landscape interpreters from a variety of regions across the US also investigate land use and human interactions.
The results combine the addictive voyeurism of zooming around Google Earth with the thoughtful, meditative qualities of the best nature writing. Their newsletter, published annually, covers a wide range of locales and topics, things as diverse as uranium mining in the US, the Mississippi Delta, and aerial photo calibration targets from the 50s and 60s in the desert Southwest. Of course, given the emphasis on the form and morphology of specific landscapes, the pieces are commonly accompanied by excellent photography, essays in themselves.
Book reviews at the end of newsletters are appreciated resources as well, and include both dense academic works as well as art books, unified by the fact that BOTH ends of the spectrum provide some fibrous reading material.
In addition to the articles, the CLUI maintains a user-generated database of sites, browsable as a map. It’s well worth a look, and a good start to planning a completely rad road trip.
The CLUI also exists in meatspace, and if one was lucky(?) enough to be in LA, you could visit their physical location and actually see some of the remarkable exhibits on display. Unfortunately (again, ?) I’ve not been to LA in a while, and so haven’t visited. However, the images and descriptions of the exhibits suggest that they are just as awesome as everything else the CLUI does.
Humans, both individually and plurally, influence and are influenced by the world around them. The profundity of this fact is belied by its simplicity; the CLUI, a group of modern day zen-masters, recognize that we can read the landscape to better understand our story, both in terms of where we've been and where we’re going. As a geoliminalist, this is fascinating. As a human, this is vital.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Ghost Story
My friend Jones has been around the block a few times. He's been an
art dealer, done a little breaking-and-entering, dealt drugs, driven a truck,
gotten a MS in Library Science from a rather prestigious university, and, among
other things, learned to play a mean game of eight-ball. Originally from Tallahassee, he's moved around a lot and seen more of the world than you might expect. In the course of his adventures, he's had some rather outre experiences.
Here is his one of his more uncanny stories, related to me over beers at our local watering hole, The Pickaxe:
In the late 80s, Jones was working deliveries in a mid-sized college town in the north-east. I don't mean pizzas, mind you; what Jones delivered came out to about $225/oz back then, grown and distributed by a bunch of collectivist anarcho-psychonauts that ran a local co-op ("ah, the optimism of young idealists", Jones said). Anyway, he'd worked his way down his list, mostly college boys and a few blue-collar cats looking to wind-down after a hard day manning the widget-making machine, when his pager buzzed. The dealer on staff had juuusssst gotten a call from a buyer who wanted four ounces, pronto. That was a pretty big sell; most folks bought eighths or quarters. Jones wheeled on back to HQ, picked up the goods and the address, and went on his run.
This address was pretty far out of their normal sphere of operations. He crossed the river, drove on past campus and down to the "fancy" end of town, full of genteel old houses. As he drove on, "genteel" started to give out, while "old" stayed strong and, indeed, soon came to be the dominant theme. He came up on one of those old, gambrel-roof houses, a big barn-looking thing with a single, dim light in one of the upper windows. If it weren't for the light, Jones said, he'd have thought the place was deserted. Peeling paint, loose roof tiles, overgrown yard, the works. Dilapidated, right?
He circled the block a few times, checking the address. It looked rough, but given the neighborhood (white and affluent) he doubted it was a squat. Eventually, the nearly $1000 payday got the better of him, so he parked his truck, and hustled across the weedy lawn up to the front door. There was no bell, so he knocked hard.
Waiting for an answer, he looked around. The sun was going down, which is why (according to Jones) he hadn't noticed the thing sitting next to the door. It was, at first glance, your standard bench; flat seat, four legs, nothing much. But something made him look twice, and that second look made him take a closer third look.
According to Jones, the thing that caught his eye was its texture. Even though the light was fading, the whole bench looked unusually smooth or slick, no joints or breaks at all. Even where the legs met the seat there was only a smooth, continuous surface, like it was carved out of a single solid block. Its outline was rounded though, with no hard angles or edges, even on the legs. Rather, it looked "soft, almost organic and undulatory" in his words.
He knocked some more, and still there was no answer. The bench, being the only thing available, drew his attention again. Even in the fading light it seemed to be an odd color, pinkish or sallow, and on closer inspection it looked slightly fuzzy, like a peach. Given those strange visual impressions, Jones couldn't tell what it was made out of. There was no grain, no woody texture, and it certainly didn't look like stone. Plastic possibly, but in a weird casting or mold.
Still no response from inside, so Jones figured he might as well relax while he waited. Without thinking, he sat down on the bench. He doesn't think he screamed, although he admits the possibility. He must have leapt up and sprinted down the path, hopped over the front gate, and dove into his truck, although that too is a little hazy. What he does clearly remember, though, is a single look back at the front porch and what he saw there.
"What the hell spooked you so much?" I asked. We had to order another pitcher before he'd tell me.
The bench that Jones sat down on, pink and peach-fuzzy, smooth and rounded? His hands touched it as he sat down, gripping the edge and feeling the soft spongy or rubbery texture of skin, lightly covered by a dusting of thin hair. It was warm to the touch, and seemed to rise and fall with a steady rhythm.
That so shocked him that he immediately pulled his hands away from the bench. Jerking his hands away made him loose his balance, and he sat down heavily on the bench itself, feeling it sag beneath his weight. But, worse still was that the warm, skin-covered bench moved under him, shuddering and adjusting itself, like a horse getting used to its rider.
That was enough. A warm fleshy thing shaped like a bench squirming and wriggling under you? He jumped up and got out of there. But, as I wrote above, Jones does clearly remember looking up at the porch before driving away. What he saw, was simply this: When he had sat down on the strange bench, it had been to the right of the door and pressed closely against the wall. What he saw from his truck, however, was the bench, swaying slightly and standing at the top of the stairs in front of the door.
He drove as fast as he could back to the co-op, and reported that 1) no one had been there and 2) the house looked like a squat and so was probably too dangerous to make deliveries to anyway. They took the number off their approved customers list, although they needn't have bothered, since they never heard from them again.
Of course, I asked Jones if he'd ever gone back out there some sunny noon-time.
He said that, after a few weeks, he had tried to, but he never seemed
able to find the street again. Even on maps, he couldn't
place it.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Samizdat: A Manifesto (Mk I)
Anthropologically,
liminal experiences are related to rituals and rites of transformation, where
one sheds their previous skin in preparation of wearing another. It is not the transformation, which is, as
Derrida would have it, the two antipodal states, beginning and end, facing each
other across the Ginnungagap, defining one another in their opposition. Rather, liminality exists in the actual act
of transforming, in the middle ground where one is changing, and therefore
neither what one was before NOR what one will be after. Liminality is the vertigo you experience
stepping from one reality to another, moving between states but in
neither. Between worlds, in an ambiguous
state of potentiality, of time, and existence.
On the threshold.
Liminality
exists as a function of human consciousness, an attribute of the editing and
ordering and investigating our brains undertake in trying to piece together a
sensible picture of the complex world around us. Just as a human must be present to hear the
falling tree (and, thereby, give it meaning beyond the physics of molecular
vibration), so too can a human read the liminal landscape.
Geoliminality
is the investigation of the borders we have drawn in the world around us. Some of these borders reflect the underlying
structure of the natural world (physiography, geomorphology, stratigraphy,
tectonic boundaries, biomes, ecosystems, etc), and some reflect the overlying
structure built by humans and human activity (agriculture, natural parks,
mines, urban centers, wilderness, etc).
All are interpreted through the lense of liminality, of finding and
experiencing the threshold between states, and thereby experiencing change.
The
journal “Samizdat” is a communication from the field of geoliminal research. It is a transmission, sometimes clear and
sometimes garbled, that offers observation, experimentation,
interpretation. Some of things in here
are true, some of them false; all are real, even if only for a moment, when you
stand on the threshold.
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