We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.
Stephen Vincent Benét, Litany for Dictatorships
These days, Stephen Vincent Benét is remembered, when he’s remembered at all, as the author of modern tall tales like The Devil and Daniel Webster, the epic Civil War ode John Brown’s Body or his reams of sentimental young adventure stories. Much of his other work is out of print.
That’s a shame, because after 1935, spurred by fascism, war and depression (his own as well as the country’s) Benét produced a series of brilliantly haunting works, both poetry and fiction. These oft-apocalyptic visions — which he did not hesitate to label nightmares — laid the groundwork for what we often expect the End to look like. Anytime a fictional future humanity looks out over the ruins of familiar landmarks, sees the birthrate tank or gets betrayed by its machines, there’s a debt owed to Benét.
An mp3 of an old radio program based on one of his apocalypse poems:
Unicorn tank illustration by Roman Papusev. Larger here.
These steam-powered unicorn tanks belong to the world of “Black Ice Heart” a Russian novel-in-progress by Leonid Alekhin. The plot of the book is not yet fully known; Alekhin releases only snippets of scenes and dialogue on his journal. From what I’ve been able to translate, the story takes place on the fictitious continent of Akemon, which is devastated by technological revolution. The continent’s technology runs on a combustible mineral called Phlogiston, and its scientific secrets are based on the learnings of four ancient tribes. The inheritors of this knowledge became the houses of four different territories (Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire), and each house developed its own pattern of technology as a result. The steam tanks belong to the Diamond territory, and they use it to defend themselves against aggression from the south (from the Ruby and possibly other territories).
Another take on The Unicorn by Boris Kharlamov. Larger here.
Most of the novel’s illustrations come from the talented Roman Papsuev. Here are the other illustrations from the story so far:
This looks like it’s going to be an interesting story! The atmosphere reminds me of what Philip Pullman created for the amazing His Dark Materials Trilogy, on which the film The Golden Compass was based. As Alekhin reveals more of the story, I’m really hoping to see some interesting female characters as well.
Gamers everywhere are mourning the loss of Gary Gygax, godfather of RPGs. After recovering from the initial shock, my thoughts turned immediately to an old friend, author Wayne Chambliss, who knew the man personally. I’d like to thank Wayne from the bottom of my polyhedral heart for taking the time to share some of his memories of Gygax here on Coilhouse. ~Mer
E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died on Tuesday. He was 69.
I can’t say I was surprised to hear the news. Last July, Gary told me he was already a year over his “expiration date”—the six months doctors gave him upon diagnosing his abdominal aneurysm. So, I wasn’t surprised. But I am hurting.
I don’t know why I miss him so much. I didn’t know him well. I spent maybe sixteen hours with him altogether. Sixteen hours on the porch of his house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Two long, summer days. Even so, Gary was an easy guy to like. He looked like a cross between Gandalf and Stan Lee, with a Lucky Strikes voice and a big laugh. He was a marvelous storyteller, an autodidact with wide interests, and, of course, the developer of an incalculably influential game system millions of people have been playing all over the world since 1974—including myself and at least 33% of this blog’s masthead.
The original Dungeon Master.
There are plenty of obituaries online right now that cover the basic facts of his life. The one in the New York Times seems representative: it contains no misspellings, but also very little of the man I knew, however slightly.
My friend Paul La Farge does a much better job. In a 2006 issue of The Believer (“Destroy All Monsters”), he tells the story of our first trip to Lake Geneva in a way that gets Gary Gygax right. For anyone even vaguely interested in Gary’s biography, Dungeons & Dragons or TSR, I strongly recommend Paul’s article. In my opinion, it is the last word on the subject. Moreover, its postscript is a more fitting eulogy for Gary than anything I could write myself—or have read anywhere else about him.
Maybe it’s simple. Maybe losing Gary is simply part of losing something even larger I will not, cannot, get back.
Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor’s degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charleston, S.C. But Shepard’s descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education. During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.
Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.
Adam Shepard asks, who is John Galt? No, really… who is he? Why are you laughing? (photo by Nicole Hill)
I’ll preface my opinions by stating that I believe wholeheartedly in the power of self-perpetuating positivity, of elbow grease over idle hope. Self-pity is certainly one of the more corrosive emotions in the human canon, and I have to think that even in the most dire circumstances, one can improve a bad situation by somehow preserving their sense of self-worth. (Easier said than done, of course.) That being stated, Scratch Beginnings is a self-aggrandizing, dishonest account that does not deserve the hype.
A fresh-faced, educated young man in excellent mental and physical health who keeps an emergency credit card tucked into his back pocket isn’t starting from scratch. He’s starting from privilege. Shepard has had a lifetime of parental “you can be anything you want to be, sweetie” hand-holding to bolster him. It shows in every page of his solipsistic account.
It would appear that the writer Douglas Wolk has only a single brain, of normal size, in his shaggy head. However, I remain unconvinced that he’s not storing another one (massive, turgid, jigglingly all-knowing) in some top secret subterranean storage facility which he accesses remotely. There’s just no other explanation for the bottomless depths of his knowledge on certain subjects, namely comics, pop music, fringe culture and vegetarian cuisine.
His latest book, Reading Comics, is a must-read for veterans and newbies alike, and there’s a fantastic interview with Wolk by Tom Spurgeon up over at the Comics Reporter right now. If you’re in the bay area, Wolk will be in town this coming Saturday, Feb. 23, for WonderCon, giving a talk called “The Senses-Shattering Return of the Novel of Ideas!” at the Comic Arts Conference. Not to be missed.
I’m more than halfway through The Bad Popes by Eric Russell Chamberlin. Oh, it’s a knee-slapper, to say the least. Plenty of illicit sex, violence, greed, avarice, conspiracy, etc. Chamberlin denudes the nasty personal habits and dirty professional deeds of various popes throughout history. Short of The Name of the Rose and Memoirs of A Gnostic Dwarf*, it’s the most earthy and entertaining book I’ve read relating to the papacy.
Ever heard of The Cadaver Synod? Pope Stephen VI, consecrated in 896, ordered the rotting corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, be exhumed and put on trial for various crimes against the church. Poor bastard was nine-months dead when they dug him up. Stephen dressed the ripe stiff in papal robes, propped it up in a chair, and proceeded to scream unintelligibly at it for several hours in front of a rapt audience. Afterwards, Formosus was declared guilty and his body was dragged through the streets of Rome, then thrown into the river Tiber. Not suprisingly, the morbid spectacle turned public opinion against Stephen. Rumors spread that the dead pontiff had washed up on the banks of the Tiber and was performing miracles. Stephen VI was eventually deposed and strangled to death in prison.
Left: Early tarot card depiction of Pope Joan. Right: La Papesse as Antichrist, wearing a jaunty tiara.
Chamberlin also addresses the origins of good old “Pope Joan“, that legendary, likely imaginary Papesse who supposedly reigned from 855 to 858 (Protestants used to loooove bringing her up as proof of their moral superiority to Catholics). As the story goes, she was an Englishwoman who fell in love with a Benedictine monk, disguised herself as a dude and joined his order. Eventually she moved to Rome where she impressed everyone with her vast knowledge, becoming a cardinal, and then pope. (In earlier, juicy versions of this fable, Joan was already knocked up at the time of her election, and actually squeezed one out during the procession to the Lateran!) Chamberlin hypothesizes that these tall tales stem from accounts of The Rule of Harlots: a period of the papacy where various popes were either the progeny of dastardly, influential aristocratic women, or boinking them. In doing so, he has introduced me to my favorite new word… Pornocracy.
Chamberlin eschews a bland professorial style in favor of fairly plainspoken writing, and his dry sense of humor about the subject matter reminds me of Alice K. Turner’s approach to The History of Hell, yet another well-researched, highly entertaining read that deals with some of the sillier and more political aspects of Christian dogma. Highly recommended.
*Incidentally, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf gets my vote for Most Jaw-Droppingly Disgusting Opening Paragraph Ever Written. Even better than the ejaculatory beginning of The Dirt. Must read.
…But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself. –It’s dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.
excerpt from “A Distance From the Sea”
by Weldon Kees
(born February 24th, 1914 – presumed dead July 18th, 1955)
A poet, a novelist, a painter, a jazz composer, a photographer, an art critic, a radio personality and a filmmaker, Weldon Kees wore many hats. Always dapper, always daring without compromising his accessibility, he was a true mid-century Renaissance man: the twitchy post-war poster child of avant garde America.
On the rare occasion that I meet folks with knowledge of Kees, it’s all I can do not to grab their ears and plant a big, wet one on ’em. Despite his brilliance and polymathic output (perhaps in part because he’s hard to pigeonhole) Kees isn’t too well known outside of a small, devout cult of literati who seem to want to keep his legacy a secret. Personally, I wish his work would receive more wide-ranging attention.
Pope Benedict releases the bats, via Worth1000’s If Goths Ruled.
Catwalk Ghost writes, “I came across the book named GOTH: Undead Subculture, which is a rather nice collection of essays about goth style and subcultural practices. But, one essay by Anna Powell, called “God’s own Medicine” about religion and beliefs in UK Goth scene made me laugh my ass off! So here are some quotes. I won’t quote the whole essay, ’cause each sentence of it is an instant comedy classic:
“As a sacred pararelegious space, the goth nightclub resembles conventionally religious practices in various ways. Like certain religious ceremonies, the goth club may feature the consumption of alcohol and psychotropic drugs and include forms of dancing that may become ecstatic, as in trance dance. The goth DJ … has a psychically separate “pulpit” from which to deliver musical “sermon”. Goth clubbers in the United Kingdom often travel long distances on “pilgrimages” to see their favorite Djs play venues” (pp 259-360)
Here comes more:
“As in some religious practices, the space of the nightclub is forbidden to some; only those deemed worthy are allowed entrance.” (p 360)
“The fact that admission is selective also suggests that the space within is sacred and needs protection from the profane defilement of nongoths.” (p 360)
Artist Brian Dettmer carves up books to reveal their essence in sculptural form. Under his surgery, sales an anatomical reference book becomes a shadowbox of elegant bones; the overwhelming complexity of an encyclopedia manifests itself as a busy, diagrammatic universe of multi-tiered images and words. The book content, sliced into intersecting overlays, begins to resemble a busy highway as seen from above. Relationships between different parts of the book become exposed in an ever-circulating pattern. These sculptures amplify the sensuality of holding a book a hundred times over. This idea of paper-fetish ties in strongly with why we feel the need to publish Coilhouse in printed form. Clicking on blogs is fun, but nothing beats the feeling of turning a crisp page. [via ashiikankwe]
a befuddling coroner’s photo of retired doctor John Bentley, 1966
Dear diary, today my heart leapt when Agent Scully suggested spontaneous human combustion…
-Agent Fox Mulder
Ho hum, the good old days. Pluto was still a planet, Nessie, Big Foot and leprechauns frolicked unfettered among us and the theoretical possibility of true Spontaneous Human Combustion seemed feasible. Well, to me, at any rate. I’m not really sure what’s to blame for that. (Repo Man? Krook from Bleak House? My unhealthy childhood obsession with Brad Dourif?) In any case, Ablaze! was required bathroom reading in my apartment for many years. Until quite recently, I clung to my hope that there was a chance, albeit remote, of my asshole ex being inexplicably reduced to a pile of ashes with feet.
Alas, thanks to a series of informative scientific articles and National Geographic specials, believers must face facts: SHC is a most likely myth.
