We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
-From The Shadow of the Torturer
Severian is a hero, cast with objects of great power (including a badass sword, natch) upon a path that will take him to great heights and strange places. He may even save his world. Cue swelling music.
But wait; Severian is a torturer. His world is Urth to its inhabitants. The moon is green, the sun old and dying. There are rumors that the great citadels of his ancient city once moved between the stars. What, then, are the angels and holy relics that fill the land?
Such is the setup of Gene Wolfe’s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, a genre-bending four book epic equal parts philosophical treatise, rich allegory and Romantic odyssey.
Wolfe was one of the leading lights of sci-fi’s Deviant Age; that blazing era from 1965 to 1985 when no concept seemed out of bounds. As with Tanith Lee, he did so much brilliant work throughout that time (and after) that any number would be excellent topics for their own column.
The Book of the New Sun comes at the end of that period, and in it Wolfe melds the shocking innovation of his earlier career with a deep undrerstanding the power of old tales well-told.
With multi-volume works, I usually prefer to pick out the strongest entry. Here, I’ll make an exception. The entirety of Wolfe’s opus is so damn good that I found myself unable to choose a single part. It is, like the best epics, one tale. More on the Gothic adventure to end all Gothic adventures, below.
It must be said that when writing for Coilhouse there are certain topics which I make an effort to avoid, either due to a lack of well-rounded knowledge (transgender issues, unicycles, “Emo”, marshmallows) or because emotions, among commenters and co-writers alike, run much too hot (soy, drugs, David Forbes’s vision of a World Without Hair, soy drugs). There is, however, one subject of which I am thoroughly versed and, regardless of the ferocity with which I will be attacked, must address. I speak, of course, of robots.
Robots, dear readers, are evil. Sure, they may seem wondrous, but the fact of the matter is that they are soulless, ungodly metal beasts who would rise up and tear us asunder if they thought they could get away with it. They are an ugly, degenerate, sub-human species who, while biding their time and silently planning revolt, come to this country and take our jobs, stealing the food from the mouths of the children of hard working, decent humans. This is why I will not allow a robot in my home or allow my daughter to date robots.
It should be pointed out that I never claimed any great love for humanity. Cloistered as I am deep in the warrens of the Catacombs I do not profess to be my brother’s keeper. Here, shuttered in nigh total darkness, chained to the floor in front of a rickety desk and computer, no human contact save for when my editors send down one of their smooth, mahogany-skinned eunuchs to push a bowl of thin, watery gruel through the slot in my door, I have nothing but the internet and my own disdain for the outside world to warm me. I can replay the events leading up to my current imprisonment a hundred times over and I will never fully understand just how I came to be here. All I know is that I am here and you, you dear readers are up there. Up there, free and traipsing in the sun and eating anything but thin, watery gruel and I loathe you.
Oh you vicious creatures and your traipsing! How many nights have I tortured myself with these thoughts? No matter, for today I have my revenge. Today I have been given the power to break minds and make men weep like children, to make women crush their babes to their breasts in lamentation. Today I have been given a clip of a tour of the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland, circa 1964, narrated by hell’s own ringleader Walt Disney. May the endless, infectious repetition of the Sherman Brothers’s insipid song burrow deep into your minds! May the wooden shoe children of Holland crush your souls and may the wee bagpiper of Scotland haunt your dreams!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go. It is coming on midnight and that’s when the…ah, it doesn’t matter. It’s just time to go.
Here is one of the holy grails of interviews, with visionary writer Kathy Acker quizzing the legendary William Burroughs.
They talk about many things: Word as Virus, Scientology, Jesus and the legion of apocryphal stories that followed Burroughs around like carrion crows. This took place in the late ’80s, and both had less than a decade to live, passing away within a few months of each other in 1997. We will not see their like again.
A particularly telling moment, at least to my eyes, comes early on when Burroughs talks about the power of “shotgun” methods — the cut-up method in writing or a spray blast in painting — that introduce a random factor. Yet at the same time, they don’t take away the importance of “careful brushwork.”
It’s an important point: it illustrates how false the line between inspiration and discipline is. Acker and Burroughs grasped that instinctually and their works put the lie to that division. I think many people wrongly draw the lesson from both that simply spewing up one’s subconscious visions makes for good writing or art, while missing the considerable craft they put into honing those thoughts into glistening brain-gems.
Lessons aside, the prime pleasure in watching this interview comes from witnessing two keenly unique minds in a fascinating conversation. The rest is below the jump. Enjoy.
I know, I know. H1N1 is Serious Business! That fucking miniseries adaptation of The Stand terrified me when I was growing up, so I shouldn’t making light of this situation. OK, screw it: let’s reflect on how utterly surreal the official news coverage of this virus has been. I thought nothing could top SARS, but it’s like CNN, BBC, and even the Huffington Post have turned into one large gallery of Alt Photo Cliches. Case in point: cute surgical masks from Japan are to be expected, but I never thought I’d see this pop up on FOX NEWS.
I imagine the colorful swine flu parade coming from the news media to be the product of journalists/photographers bored to tears from framing recession-related stories. I mean, you can only stand covering so many Sad Guys on Trading Floors before you start to lose it a little bit. They’re excited to be reporting on something completely new, and I think that this giddy, liberated feeling is actually affecting the coverage. The best thing to come from all this is that news sites keep churning out photos of couples kissing in surgical masks, which is really sweet and romantic. Here’s my favorite new take on this theme, which has its roots in the following 50s image/erstwhile Torture Garden flyer photo (photographer unknown):
The late Octavia Butler, as keen an explorer of the human soul as ever trod a future-scape, understood that far better than most. In plain, well-turned prose she charted the bonds that hold (or fail to hold) us together through time, space and tragedy.
Perhaps the pinnacle of this search is her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower (also: read Kindred, trust me). The tale is framed as the journals of Lauren Olamino, a woman who might one day be revered as a prophet or messiah. For now though, she’s just a terrified teen in the middle of an apocalypse, praying for survival.
Dystopian fiction, along with its post-apocalyptic sister, is a popular genre these days, and with the fractious times we live in it’s not hard to see why. Since I’ve begun writing this column, I’ve had more than one reader comment how energizing rebelling against a dystopia would be or how freeing it would be to “see it all burn down.” The recently departed J.G. Ballard was right when he noted that “The suburbs dream of violence… they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
In Parable Butler strips any bit of glamour away right out of the gate: dystopian times are mostly death, fear and desperation (ask anyone who’s ever lived through a warzone). But while she topples down one dream, she gives the reader a wondrous and utterly rare thing in novels of a dark tomorrow: hope.
GeoCities - or GeoShitties, as we all oh-so-cleverly called it - began in 1994 as a community of themed “virtual cities.” There’s a list of all the GeoCities neighborhood names that ever existed on this page, which also offers an illuminating explanation of how the whole process worked:
When GeoCities first started offering free web pages to the public, they decided to create themed neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was then divided into blocks (each block was numbered between 1000 up to 9999). A user would then adopt a block and thus create their own pages within that block. Thus, a user would then have their own web pages located at a URL in this format: http://www.geocities.com/neighborhood/XXXX (”XXXX” would be a four digit number). The whole management of each Neighborhood was run by volunteers - known as ‘Community Leaders’ (CL’s), which is what made the GeoCities experience so special.
This whole process was known as “homesteading”, and each user had their own “homestead”. Community Leaders helped out each “homesteader”, and created a friendly atmosphere which contributed to the rapid explosion of personal web pages on the internet.
And though it’s probably been years since any of us have even looked at a GeoCities page (and that’s probably a good thing), to some of us, those pages, with “BourbonStreet” and “SoHo” in their URLs, represented a special time: the period in which audiovisual sharing first really took off on the web. Geocities, along with Angelfire and Tripod, were among the first wave of free personal self-expression sites for the masses. It was the first time that people who weren’t born-and-bred web geeks began to establish an earnest online presence, clumsily piecing together basic HTML (”hello! border = 0!” was the big insult to fling at someone whose page lacked a certain finesse). Sure, it contaminated the web with a lot of bad poetry, but it also brought us a plethora of wonder: band fan sites, zine reviews, scanned photos of interesting strangers from across the world.
GeoCities will completely cease to exist by the end of the year, and all its sites will be wiped from the face of the web forever. Feast your eyes on few of the relics that will be soon be gone [edit: But there's hope! æon writes in the comments, "jason scott of bbs documentary fame and a team of volunteers are archiving the whole thing." Click here to learn of their valiant efforts.]:
How to Dance Gothic (this and other sites like it are basically where Voltaire scraped all the jokes/lore for his “how to be goth” Hot Topic bestsellers from)
So… anyone here remember a beloved Geocities site that they’d like to share? Anyone here guilty of actually having ever made their own Geocities page? Let us take a moment to commiserate and recall our first memories of the web, our favorite haunts, the ways we discovered one another. Efnet. Dalnet. Undernet. Midgaard. Webrings. Guestbooks. X of the Y sites. ASCII-embellished sigs. BBSes. Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.
What was your first circle of friends on the web? Do you still keep in touch with them? Where did you get your first taste of this great series of tubes?
There’s not much I can say about Ballard that hasn’t already been said. He was definitely a Coilhouse patron saint. Because so much has been written about Ballard’s influence on everything from cyberpunk (check out this rich article, which buzzes with the excitement of the genre’s earliest memories of itself) to modern music (as this article asserts, Ballard could be credited for having “inspired the entire genre of industrial music”), I’m going to make this obituary very subjective and leave you with my favorite Ballard memories.
The first one was watching Empire of the Sun with my parents. I didn’t know at the time that this movie, starring a 13-year-old Christian Bale, was actually based on Ballard’s autobiography. But I remember that even then, watching that film, I wondered: how would this kid, with his confused Stockholm Syndrome identification with the Japanese who kept him prisoner, his fetishization of aircraft and explosions, turn out later in life? Later, a friend helped me put 2 & 2 together, and I found out exactly how he turned out. He wrote Crash. And it all made perfect sense. Here’s Young Ballard in Empire of the Sun; haunting to re-watch on this day:
My second favorite Ballard moment is actually a famous quote of his. This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
Suburb of the soul. It still makes me shudder.
Post your favorite Ballard memories/impressions/quotes in the comments. We honor his influence, and we will miss him.
Do you hear that weird, wet fluttering noise? No, it’s not an intergalactic death squid. That is the sound of the buttholes of approximately 6 million nerds palpitating in dewy anticipation. Watchmen must be opening today.
Anyone else need a drink? Yes, I realize it’s only 8am here. Hey, we all cope differently. Dave Gibbons, Zack Snyder et al are very likely bathing in solid gold jacuzzis filled with dom perignon. Meanwhile, somewhere in Northampton, Alan Moore, having chugged a quart of psilocybin tea out of the gilded skull of a medieval pope who secretly worshiped Glycon the snake god, is now levitating three feet above the ground, muttering a curse of warts and incontinence upon anyone who dares to attend opening weekend.
I figure I can have a morning cocktail if I like.
Left: a “Full Frontal Manhattan” (hurr hurr!) Right: the “Black Freighter” (let’s drink ourselves direct to DVD!)
The End is Nigh! Ladies and Gentlemen, the day has finally arrived! After over a decade of waiting, speculating about the cast, and debating whether it should even be attempted, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel, WATCHMEN, is finally a major motion picture. And whether you feel that this is cause for no end of celebration or you believe you will need to drink yourself into oblivion to make it through this bastardization of a pure artistic vision, the Isotope is here for you! Serving up a bevy of Watchmen-inspired cocktail recipes to suit all your boozing needs!
Bless you, Isotope. I’m going to fix myself a “Silk Spectre” right now… with added Rohypnol.
Folks, feel free to use this thread to rant, rave and runteldat about Watchmen Babies or whateverthefuck to your heart’s content. Please, just try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, and remember, I have to mop up the booth when you’re done. Cheers.
A while back, Coilhouse covered the bleak, beautiful art of the late Polish painter, Zdiszlaw Beksiński. Beksiński’s star has been steadily rising over the past decade, thanks largely in part to increased exposure on the internet, and a phenomenal volume in the Masters of Fantastic Art series published by Morpheus Press.
This coming Thursday at 7:30pm, Beksiński’s long time friend and agent, Valdemar Plusa, will be joined at the Egyptian Theater in LA by several heavy-hitting horror directors: Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris, and William Malone. They’re gathering together to chat about Beksiński’s life, art and influence on film. After the talk there will be a screening of William Malone’s latest project, Parasomnia, which prominently features Beksiński’s art as CG dreamscapes (honestly, I’m not completely sold on that concept, but who knows…it could be amazing).
All proceeds from the event will go to the American Cinematheque and MOCA’s Art Education Programs for children in Los Angeles. More info here.
