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.

Il Papa

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.

Zeus

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.

Venus

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.

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

The Popess

Anatomy of a Mo'ai (from Samzidat V1n1)

From Samizdat, V.1 N.1

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

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:

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.

The View From Our Lair