Hermenautic Circle blog

Dmitri Tsykalov's amazing fruit and vegetable skulls.  (Via.)

** Originally published at World Now: The presidential candidate for Mexico's ruling conservative party has said she'd invite President Felipe Calderon to be attorney general if she won Sunday's vote, a surprise proposal made in the final hours of campaigning. National Action Party candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota, the first female presidential hopeful from a major party in Mexico, made the pitch Wednesday at her closing campaign event in Jalisco state (link in Spanish). "I want someone who will defend your children ... who is not afraid," Vazquez Mota told supporters at the Omnilife stadium in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara....

Dear beloved audience,

As well as being the publisher and editor for TamTam Books, I also had a passion for book buying for the store Book Soup in West Hollywood (Los Angeles).   I can't tell you how much fun it is to purchase incredible books for that store.  The customers there are top-notch, the staff great, and just one big huge zowie of a great time. The magic moment for me is when Ennio Morricone at Book Soup whistled the main theme from The Scilican Clan to me!

Ennio Morricone meets fan Tosh at Book Soup

Also I have to give high praise to the "Rep" who are the faces of the publishing house.  They do a remarkable job in going through the weeded jungle of their catalogs and present me the best and the most unusual books.  And to be honest I never really cared about the cost of the book, but how unique it is and how it fits in the Book Soup moody world.

This is the thirteenth installment in Tom Nealon’s acclaimed and apophenic food history series De Condimentis.

Only in Cockaigne and the innocent dreams of children does maple syrup flow directly from trees onto our johnny cakes. In the real world, starch, stored for the winter, is converted to sugar in the spring, and makes its way up the trunk of the maple tree. Since time immemorial the journey of this slightly sweet liquid has been interrupted by humans punching holes in the side of the tree, draining off the liquid, then boiling the sap down into syrup.

In the past, maples were tapped from Virginia to Northern Canada, though currently only a few US states, Ontario, and Quebec produce meaningful amounts. Maple trees grow the world over in abundance, so why does only North America produce syrup? The traditional response is that the conditions for sap production only exist in North America — cold spring nights with warmer days cause the trees to produce sap, which then rises up the trunk as it warms. Because where in the rest of the world is it colder at night than it is during the day? The truth, as you may have guessed, is somewhat more complicated and politically fraught.

Along with the decision to reinstate slavery in France’s oversea colonies, the institutionalized plunder of art museums across Europe, the deaths of millions of Europeans during 17 years of war, and the renaming of the mille-feuille (a deliciously ancient dessert), Europe’s failure to crack the secret of maple syrup was Napoleon’s fault.

*

The origin stories of the maple sap harvest are typically nonsensical (usually a variation of: an archery contest, an errant arrow hitting a maple, a fortuitously placed bucket near an even more fortuitously placed fire, etc.), but the paucity of local foods in the northeastern United States (beyond a wealth of fish and game) would no doubt have spurred experimentation — though, it’s also true, as the tales highlight, that maple syrup is a pain in the ass to make.

Somewhere between 20 and 40 gallons of raw sap (or maple water) is boiled down, slowly so as not to carbonize the sugars, into about one gallon of syrup. Further care must be taken not to screw up the rich cocktail of trace ingredients that make maple syrup unique. The region, weather, geography, soil and other elements (what the French refer to as terroir) combine to give maple syrup its character. Around 300 flavor-affecting compounds (amino acids, phenols, salts, minerals, sugars) have been identified that appear in one syrup or another — and, ideally, they all make it through the boiling-down process. Producing maple sugar requires further boiling until all the liquid is gone.

Until European honey bees were imported in 1622, honey was unusual north of Mexico, making any naturally occurring sugar even more appealing, and no doubt hastening the discovery of maple syrup. Not that the presence of honey would explain away the lack of experimentation with European maples — these were people, after all, who routinely water boarded each other over things like cloves, and the things they did for sugar are truly unspeakable.

A word on maple syrup vs. maple sugar before proceeding. Maple syrup is poetic, dense, sometimes even difficult. The more expensive varieties — from the early harvest — are light and pleasant but not challenging; later on come the darker syrups, the more interesting flavors. Maple sugar, on the other hand, has had much of the interest removed from it, which is why some perfectly sensible people (say, myself) will have nothing to do with it. Still, unless refined further, maple sugar is not completely lacking in character — there is some tree in there.

*

In 1685, Thomas Gale (famed anti-papist and coiner of the term neoplatonism), at a meeting of the relatively newly formed Royal Society, noted that Aristotle once mentioned that “sugar or honey of maple” was capable of “curing mad persons and making sober persons mad” (or as Captain O’Hagan memorably noted: “These boys get that syrup in ‘em, they get all antsy in their pantsy”). The mountains in Greece would have provided a sound, if brief, climate, for sap collection, and considering the lengths the Greeks and Romans went to produce fish sauce, it’s not difficult to imagine some level of medicinal maple syrup production. Regrettably, the only surviving book on ancient cookery, the Roman compilation De Re Coquinaria, preserves no mention of maple syrup. Like much of ancient food (and other) knowledge, the secret of maple syrup was lost — along with any information as to how widespread its use was.

These boys get that syrup in 'em, they get all antsy in their pantsy.

In fact, belief in the medicinal value of maple sap (both as untreated “maple water” and as syrup) has been persistent up until the present. Charlevoix wrote in his 1766 Travels: “it has not that Rawness which causes the Pleurisy but on the contrary a balsamick Virtue which sweetens the Blood and a certain Salt which keeps up the Heat.” Maple sap was almost universally acknowledged as a healthier alternative to “West Indies sugar,” and other reports had it assuaging diseases of the breast, curing stomach ailments, and preventing wind (our ancestors were more obsessed with farts than the average 6-year-old boy). Recent research shows that maple syrup does in fact contain relatively high levels of antioxidant polyphenols (in case you are oxidizing too quickly) as well as abscisic acid, a phytohormone linked to insulin production (thus balancing the effects of the sugar). So, good on you, Aristotle.

From a Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture Bulletin, 1793

While America’s native peoples had been producing syrup for centuries, using heated rocks dropped into the maple water to concentrate it (since they lacked metal pots), it was the colonists who first refined it to sugar — often noting that maple sugar was unknown to the “savages” who simply turned it into a syrup. This was during the spread of sugar cane into the Caribbean, and the resultant spread of refining technologies. During the 19th century the abolitionists tried to promote maple sugar as a non-slave trade alternative to Caribbean sugar. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of bleeding humans for a variety of diseases, there also arose a cult of tree bleeders who believed that the tapping of maples relieved excess pressure that was “injurious to them in respect to their fruitfulness” (1725, Dictionaire Oeconomique).

So, maple syrup was popular and widely known, and, after all, it was sugar for which wars were routinely fought. Why was there no attempt to produce maple syrup in Europe? Actually, there was.

*

A pair of letters from 1684 preserved in the doings of the Royal Society describe a maple harvest in England, one enclosing sugar from Canadian maple production, one describing maple sugar harvested in Black Notley, Essex:

“I engaged a friend and neighbor of mine, and ingenious apothecary, to boil the juice of the greater maple, a tree which grows freely half a mile from my residence. Having made an extract, we found a whitish substance like to brown sugar, and tasting very sweet, immersed in a substance the color and consistency of molasses. Upon curing, I have no doubt it will make perfect sugar.”

For the next half century, European maple use continued to be more experimental than anything else, but interest on the continent, especially in France and Germany (maple sugar and syrup had found many early devotees in France, but they had been content to import it from Québec), began to wax in the mid-18th century.

In 1744 Charlevoix suggested to the Duchess Les diguières that French maples be tapped (like the ones in French Canada); and around the same time, Brissot de Warville forecast a sugar revolution if they could make it work, and noted that M. Noialles had provided proof of concept in his garden in St. Germain. Sadly, De Warville, a member of the anti-monarchy but relatively mild, syrup loving Girondist group, was executed by extremist elements in 1793. Robespierre — perhaps a believer in terroir and the notion that the geography and climate in France would produce embarrassingly inferior syrup to that produced in Canada — egged on the san-culottes (who probably just didn’t want to spend their springtime boiling maple syrup) into destroying the Girondists and leaving still-born the dream of a French maple syrup industry.

Elsewhere, Graf Zichy (who isn’t especially famous but has a terrific name) planted 20 thousand acres of maples in 1794; and land owners throughout Eastern Bohemia and Sweden were performing trials — largely with the aim of making maple sugar, not syrup. By 1811, there were some 49 European maple farms with 2,000 to 20,000 trees each.

What these attempts prove is that, despite much protesting to the contrary, you really can harvest maple syrup in Europe. What does this mean? Either they discovered the secret of the maple and chose not to pursue it — a course that is ludicrous on the face of it, given the uncommon deliciousness of maple syrup and humanity’s timeless and perpetual quest for dessert — or they really never figured it out. For most of European history, the only sweetener available was honey (sugar did not appear in Europe until the crusaders brought it back in the 12th century), so both possibilities seem monstrous in their unlikelihood. Yet one of the two is true.

*

Here’s what happened.

When war (re)erupted between Britain and France in 1803, in order to stave off a British assault, Napoleon’s fleet threatened the sugar-producing West Indies. In 1806, he instituted The Continental System, a blockade of British and Irish ports that prevented that sugar from reaching Europe. That sugar needed to be replaced, however — what is France without the éclair or tartes aux pommes? Had French maple growers started earlier, it might have been maple sugar that saved the day; instead, it was the unassuming sugar beet.

Quicker to plant and harvest, advances in refining technology also made beet sugar easier to automate — and France quickly became a major sugar producer. Peace was declared in 1815 and the blockade raised, but sugar beet subsidies continue to this day — making Europe, inexplicably and in defiance of all economic sense, a net exporter of sugar. Imagine the regal stands of maple trees dotting the European countryside if they had chosen to subsidize maples all those years instead of beets!

France actual (left) vs. projected

And that is precisely what the Comte D’Artois thought. The Comte, one of the most conservative members of the aristocracy to survive the revolution, who his own brother accused of being “plus royaliste que le roi”, had fled to Spain after the Bastille was stormed in 1789. Despite this setback, he always figured on returning, with the monarchy, to France and had the connections to keep the environment propitious for his return. The Comte had learned the lessons of the English and American Revolutions well, and recognized that a well forested country was a country easily occupied by peasant revolutionaries. Where Cromwell cut down all the trees in Ireland, the Comte had but to put prevent their being planted in the first place. Working behind the scenes, and fortunate that his home region of Artois was the area most likely to be planted with maples, D’Artois pushed France towards sugar beets. After he moved to London in 1807, he was able to amplify his effect by convincing the English that he was working against French sugar production – a clever half-truth. Napoleon, for his part, and tactician that he was, knew that a diverse alternate sugar supply was far superior to a mono-culture of sugar beets. His belief in a French maple syrup industry is even written into the Napoleonic Code (See, for example, Book II Title II lines 566-68 aimed at regulating property disputes arising from maple taps) – he was also, however, extremely busy fighting a five front war.

Even after Napoleon’s surrender and incarceration on Elba in 1815, the Comte D’Artois, the younger brother of Louis XVI (deposed in 1793) and Louis XVIII (King of France post-Napoleon), conspired to prevent his return. Having turned one of Napoleon’s companions on Elba (accounts differ as to whether it was Charles Tristan, marquis de Montholon who somewhat curiously followed Napoleon into exile, the Irish surgeon Dr. James Roche Verling, Henri Bertrand, or some combination) he orchestrated first his slow weakening via arsenic poisoning, and then his death. Ironically, Napoleon’s own love of syrup was used against him for the denouement: The fatal cyanide was hidden in his beloved orgeat syrup (an almond and sugar syrup popular in France since the middle ages). The Comte D’Artois, later Charles X, King of France, would have appreciated the irony that maple syrup never would have concealed the flavor of the cyanide.

*

So maple syrup never gained a foothold in Europe. Despite the above-described early attempts to commercialize maple operations in France, Germany and Sweden, it was virtually unknown until recently — even in the Baltic, which has a perfect climate for it. Some of these areas, and notably Russia, have some level of birch syrup production (which led to a few tense weeks during the Cold War when Russian and Alaskan birch farmers were brought to the brink), but maple has generally remained the purview of Québec and Vermont (with New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan also producing meaningful quantities).

Other replacement attempts have followed. Log Cabin started making maple — then shortly afterwards, maple-flavored — syrup in 1887. As the decades rolled on, the percentage of actual maple in the syrup has gone gradually down until it disappeared entirely, to be replaced by flavored corn syrup. Recently, Log Cabin and others have rolled out corn syrup-free products made with real sugar. So maple, serially unsuccessful at breaking into the sugar market, has waited it out and achieved the reverse. Now sugar is trying to break into the maple syrup market.

X’s “Under the Big Black Sun” album came out June 30, 1982. Here’s “Hungry Wolf” from it.

Twenty-sixth in a series of thirty-five posts by John Hilgart. HiLobrow yields to no one in our admiration for his spelunkery into the mysterious and gorgeous depths of comics that we grew up reading without ever noticing what he’s shown us. Check out the manifesto and FAQ of Hilgart’s 4CP project.

Ghouls

Click on image for larger version

*

Click on image for larger version

CREDITS: Art by Nick Cardy. From The Brave and the Bold #116, 1974.

***

SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: SUBSUPERMEN — Golden Age heroes who didn’t make the grade | MEET THE L.I.S. — John Hilgart discovers “implicit superheroes” concealed within comic-book mastheads | 4CP FRIDAY — themed comic-book detail galleries, curated by admirers of John Hilgart’s 4CP project | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — 25 writers on 25 Jack Kirby panels | ANNOTATED GIF — Kerry Callen brings comic book covers to life | CHESS MATCH — a gallery of pulp fiction chess games | COMICALLY VINTAGE — that’s-what-she-said vintage comic panels | DC — THE NEW 52 — an 11-year-old reviews DC’s new lineup | FILE X — a one-of-a-kind gallery of “X” pulp paperback covers | SECRET PANEL — Silver Age comics’ double entendres | SKRULLICISM — they lurk among us

CLICK HERE for more comics and cartoon-related posts on HiLobrow.

laughingsquid:

Fruit and Vegetable Skulls by Dimitri Tsykalov

bisoufume

It is Friday, after all.

1. I have given up hunt-and-pecking on my phone in favor of two-thumbed texting. I make more typos, but I think it’s still faster overall. Also, makes me feel like I am still capable of learning new things, thus, win.

2. Finally read The Manual of Detection, which I liked a whole bunch, and think would be good to discuss in combination with Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. 

3. Listening to We Are Anonymous, which also has a good companion read in Epic Win For Anonymous, especially if you, like me, are fascinated by online communities and how people affiliate with them, or really with anything (sports teams, political parties, etc.) that is a way of claiming a particular type of identity.

4. Trying to figure out how to not be scared of GoodReads. I have made an author page there but I have not, shall we say, fleshed it out or visited it much. I just hate star rankings and they make me anxious and I also hate that they’re the first thing you see. Writers on GoodReads, how do you manage it?

5. Here is a robot in a bow tie. Okay it is not actually a robot, but it is deliberately robotesque:

 

 

** Originally published at Vice.com: We’re now less than two weeks away from Mexico’s presidential election, and at this point, few people would have expected that the otherwise unsurprising democratic process of voting would be accompanied by scenes of rabble-rousing students chanting and singing along with mariachi bands outside the studios of Mexico’s leading television network. These scenes, part of a nascent student movement known as #YoSoy132, are now becoming regular features on the nightly news in Mexico. Imagine that, young people protesting media bias and media manipulation by the thousands in a country with little precedent for such collective...

Specimen’s “Returning From a Journey” “video single” came out June 29, 1982.

HiLobrow is pleased to present the seventeenth installment of our serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook. New installments will appear each Friday for 24 weeks.

Marooned on a South Sea island, Humphrey Arbuthnot and his friends awaken the last two members of an advanced race, who have spent 250,000 years in a state of suspended animation. Using astral projection, Lord Oro visits London and the battlefields of the Western Front; horrified by the degraded state of modern civilization, he activates chthonic technology capable of obliterating it. Will Oro’s beautiful daughter, Yva, who has fallen in love with Humphrey, stop him in time?

“If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance,” says Lydia Millet in a blurb written for HiLoBooks. “When the World Shook has it all — English gentlemen of leisure, a devastating shipwreck, a volcanic tropical island inhabited by cannibals, an ancient princess risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.”

Haggard’s only science fiction novel was first published in 1919. In September 2012, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of When the World Shook, with an introduction by Atlantic Monthly contributing editor James Parker. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDERING!

SUBSCRIBE to HiLobrow’s serialized fiction via RSS.

LAST WEEK: “‘The vein had been crushed by the blow, and gave way. Bickley worked and worked, and just in time he tied it up before you died. Oh! then I felt as though I loved Bickley, though afterwards Bastin said that I ought to have loved him, since it was not Bickley who stopped the bleeding, but his prayer.’ ‘Perhaps it was both,’ I suggested.”

ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

***

CHAPTER XIX
THE PROPOSALS OF BASTIN AND BICKLEY

So far as my body was concerned I grew well with great rapidity, though it was long before I got back my strength. Thus I could not walk far or endure any sustained exertion. With my mind it was otherwise. I can not explain what had happened to it; indeed I do not know, but in a sense it seemed to have become detached and to have assumed a kind of personality of its own. At times it felt as though it were no longer an inhabitant of the body, but rather its more or less independent partner. I was perfectly clear-headed and of insanity I experienced no symptoms. Yet my mind, I use that term from lack of a better, was not entirely under my control. For one thing, at night it appeared to wander far away, though whither it went and what it saw there I could never remember.

I record this because possibly it explains certain mysterious events, if they were events and not dreams, which shortly I must set out. I spoke to Bickley about the matter. He put it by lightly, saying that it was only a result of my long and most severe illness and that I should steady down in time, especially if we could escape from that island and its unnatural atmosphere. Yet as he spoke he glanced at me shrewdly with his quick eyes, and when he turned to go away I heard him mutter something to himself about “unholy influences” and “that confounded old Oro.”

The words were spoken to himself and quite beneath his breath, and of course not meant to reach me. But one of the curious concomitants of my state was that all my senses, and especially my hearing, had become most abnormally acute. A whisper far away was now to me like a loud remark made in a room.

Bickley’s reflection, for I can scarcely call it more, set me thinking. Yva had said that Oro sent me medicine which was administered to me without Bickley’s knowledge, and as she believed, saved my life, or certainly my reason. What was in it? I wondered. Then there was that Life-water which Yva brought and insisted upon my drinking every day. Undoubtedly it was a marvelous tonic and did me good. But it had other effects also. Thus, as she said would be the case, after a course of it I conceived the greatest dislike, which I may add has never entirely left me, of any form of meat, also of alcohol. All I seemed to want was this water with fruit, or such native vegetables as there were. Bickley disapproved and made me eat fish occasionally, but even this revolted me, and since I gained steadily in weight, as we found out by a simple contrivance, and remained healthy in every other way, soon he allowed me to choose my own diet.

About this time Oro began to pay me frequent visits. He always came at night, and what is more I knew when he was coming, although he never gave me warning. Here I should explain that during my illness Bastin, who was so ingenious in such matters, had built another hut in which he and Bickley slept, of course when they were not watching me, leaving our old bed-chamber to myself.

Well, I would wake up and be aware that Oro was coming. Then he appeared in a silent and mysterious way, as though he had materialised in the room, for I never saw him pass the doorway. In the moonlight, or the starlight, which flowed through the entrance and the side of the hut that was only enclosed with latticework, I perceived him seat himself upon a certain stool, looking like a most majestic ghost with his flowing robes, long white beard, hooked nose and hawk eyes. In the day-time he much resembled the late General Booth whom I had often seen, except for certain added qualities of height and classic beauty of countenance. At night, however, he resembled no one but himself, indeed there was something mighty and godlike in his appearance, something that made one feel that he was not as are other men.

For a while he would sit and look at me. Then he began to speak in a low, vibrant voice. What did he speak of? Well, many matters. It was as though he were unburdening that hoary soul of his because it could no longer endure the grandeur of its own loneliness. Amongst sundry secret things, he told me of the past history of this world of ours, and of the mighty civilisations which for uncounted ages he and his forefathers had ruled by the strength of their will and knowledge, of the dwindling of their race and of the final destruction of its enemies, although I noticed that now he no longer said that this was his work alone. One night I asked him if he did not miss all such pomp and power.

Then suddenly he broke out, and for the first time I really learned what ambition can be when it utterly possesses the soul of man.

“Are you mad,” he asked, “that you suppose that I, Oro, the King of kings, can be content to dwell solitary in a great cave with none but the shadows of the dead to serve me? Nay, I must rule again and be even greater than before, or else I too will die. Better to face the future, even if it means oblivion, than to remain thus a relic of a glorious past, still living and yet dead, like that statue of the great god Fate which you saw in the temple of my worship.”

“Bastin does not think that the future means oblivion,” I remarked.

“I know it. I have studied his faith and find it too humble for my taste, also too new. Shall I, Oro, creep a suppliant before any Power, and confess what Bastin is pleased to call my sins? Nay, I who am great will be the equal of all greatness, or nothing.”

He paused a while, then went on:

“Bastin speaks of ‘eternity.’ Where and what then is this eternity which if it has no end can have had no beginning? I know the secret of the suns and their attendant worlds, and they are no more eternal than the insect which glitters for an hour. Out of shapeless, rushing gases they gathered to live their day, and into gases at last they dissolve again with all they bore.”

“Yes,” I answered, “but they reform into new worlds.”

“That have no part with the old. This world, too, will melt, departing to whence it came, as your sacred writings say, and what then of those who dwelt and dwell thereon? No, Man of today, give me Time in which I rule and keep your dreams of an Eternity that is not, and in which you must still crawl and serve, even if it were. Yet, if I might, I confess it, I would live on for ever, but as Master not as Slave.”

*

On another night he began to tempt me, very subtly. “I see a spark of greatness in you, Humphrey,” he said, “and it comes into my heart that you, too, might learn to rule. With Yva, the last of my blood, it is otherwise. She is the child of my age and of a race outworn; too gentle, too much all womanly. The soul that triumphs must shine like steel in the sun, and cut if need be; not merely be beauteous and shed perfume like a lily in the shade. Yet she is very wise and fair,” here he looked at me, “perchance of her might come children such as were their forefathers, who again would wield the sceptre of the dominion of the earth.”

I made no answer, wondering what he meant exactly and thinking it wisest to be silent.

“You are of the short-lived races,” he went on, “yet very much a man, not without intelligence, and by the arts I have I can so strengthen your frame that it will endure the shocks of time for three such lives as yours, or perchance for more, and then—”

Again he paused and went on:

“The Daughter of kings likes you also, perhaps because you resemble—” here he fixed me with his piercing eyes, “a certain kinglet of base blood whom once she also liked, but whom it was my duty to destroy. Well, I must think. I must study this world of yours also and therein you may help me. Perhaps afterwards I will tell you how. Now sleep.”

In another moment he was gone, but notwithstanding his powerful command, for a while I could not sleep. I understood that he was offering Yva to me, but upon what terms? That was the question. With her was to go great dominion over the kingdoms of the earth. I could not help remembering that always this has been and still is Satan’s favourite bait. To me it did not particularly appeal. I had been ambitious in my time—who is not that is worth his salt? I could have wished to excel in something, literature or art, or whatever it might be, and thus to ensure the memory of my name in the world.

Of course this is a most futile desire, seeing that soon or late every name must fade out of the world like an unfixed photograph which is exposed to the sun. Even if it could endure, as the old demigod, or demidevil, Oro, had pointed out, very shortly, by comparison with Time’s unmeasured vastness, the whole solar system will also fade. So of what use is this feeble love of fame and this vain attempt to be remembered that animates us so strongly? Moreover, the idea of enjoying mere temporal as opposed to intellectual power, appealed to me not at all. I am a student of history and I know what has been the lot of kings and the evil that, often enough, they work in their little day.

Also if I needed any further example, there was that of Oro himself. He had outlived the greatness of his House, as a royal family is called, and after some gigantic murder, if his own story was to be believed, indulged in a prolonged sleep. Now he awoke to find himself quite alone in the world, save for a daughter with whom he did not agree or sympathise. In short, he was but a kind of animated mummy inspired by one idea which I felt quite sure would be disappointed, namely, to renew his former greatness. To me he seemed as miserable a figure as one could imagine, brooding and plotting in his illuminated cave, at the end of an extended but misspent life.

Also I wondered what he, or rather his ego, had been doing during all those two hundred and fifty thousand years of sleep. Possibly if Yva’s theory, as I understood it, were correct, he had reincarnated as Attila, or Tamerlane, or Napoleon, or even as Chaka the terrible Zulu king. At any rate there he was still in the world, filled with the dread of death, but consumed now as ever by his insatiable and most useless finite ambitions.

Yva, also! Her case was his, but yet how different. In all this long night of Time she had but ripened into one of the sweetest and most gentle women that ever the world bore. She, too, was great in her way, it appeared in her every word and gesture, but where was the ferocity of her father? Where his desire to reach to splendour by treading on a blood-stained road paved with broken human hearts? It did not exist. Her nature was different although her body came of a long line of these power-loving kings. Why this profound difference of the spirit? Like everything else it was a mystery. The two were as far apart as the Poles. Everyone must have hated Oro, from the beginning, however much he feared him, but everyone who came in touch with her must have loved Yva.

*

Here I may break into my personal narrative to say that this, by their own confession, proved to be true of two such various persons as Bastin and Bickley.

“The truth, which I am sure it would be wrong to hide from you, Arbuthnot,” said the former to me one day, “is that during your long illness I fell in love, I suppose that is the right word, with the Glittering Lady. After thinking the matter over also, I conceived that it would be proper to tell her so if only to clear the air and prevent future misunderstandings. As I remarked to her on that occasion, I had hesitated long, as I was not certain how she would fill the place of the wife of the incumbent of an English parish.”

“Mothers’ Meetings, and the rest,” I suggested.

“Exactly so, Arbuthnot. Also there were the views of the Bishop to be considered, who might have objected to the introduction into the diocese of a striking person who so recently had been a heathen, and to one in such strong contrast to my late beloved wife.”

“I suppose you didn’t consider the late Mrs. Bastin’s views on the subject of re-marriage. I remember that they were strong,” I remarked rather maliciously.

“No, I did not think it necessary, since the Scriptural instructions on the matter are very clear, and in another world no doubt all jealousies, even Sarah’s, will be obliterated. Upon that point my conscience was quite easy. So when I found that, unlike her parent, the Lady Yva was much inclined to accept the principles of the faith in which it is my privilege to instruct her, I thought it proper to say to her that if ultimately she made up her mind to do so—of course this was a sine qua non—I should be much honoured, and as a man, not as a priest, it would make me most happy if she would take me as a husband. Of course I explained to her that I considered, under the circumstances, I could quite lawfully perform the marriage ceremony myself with you and Bickley as witnesses, even should Oro refuse to give her away. Also I told her that although after her varied experiences in the past, life at Fulcombe, if we could ever get there, might be a little monotonous, still it would not be entirely devoid of interest.”

“You mean Christmas decorations and that sort of thing?”

“Yes, and choir treats and entertaining Deputations and attending other Church activities.”

“Well, and what did she say, Bastin?”

“Oh! she was most kind and flattering. Indeed that hour will always remain the pleasantest of my life. I don’t know how it happened, but when it was over I felt quite delighted that she had refused me. Indeed on second thoughts, I am not certain but that I shall be much happier in the capacities of a brother and teacher which she asked me to fill, than I should have been as her husband. To tell you the truth, Arbuthnot, there are moments when I am not sure whether I entirely understand the Lady Yva. It was rather like proposing to one’s guardian angel.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s about it, old fellow. ‘Guardian Angel’ is not a bad name for her.”

Afterwards I received the confidence of Bickley.

“Look here, Arbuthnot,” he said. “I want to own up to something. I think I ought to, because of certain things I have observed, in order to prevent possible future misunderstandings.”

“What’s that?” I asked innocently.

“Only this. As you know, I have always been a confirmed bachelor on principle. Women introduce too many complications into life, and although it involves some sacrifice, on the whole, I have thought it best to do without them and leave the carrying on of the world to others.”

“Well, what of it? Your views are not singular, Bickley.”

“Only this. While you were ill the sweetness of that Lady Yva and her wonderful qualities as a nurse overcame me. I went to pieces all of a sudden. I saw in her a realisation of every ideal I had ever entertained of perfect womanhood. So to speak, my resolves of a lifetime melted like wax in the sun. Notwithstanding her queer history and the marvels with which she is mixed up, I wished to marry her. No doubt her physical loveliness was at the bottom of it, but, however that may be, there it was.”

“She is beautiful,” I commented; “though I daresay older than she looks.”

“That is a point on which I made no inquiries, and I should advise you, when your turn comes, as no doubt it will, to follow my example. You know, Arbuthnot,” he mused, “however lovely a woman may be, it would put one off if suddenly she announced that she was—let us say—a hundred and fifty years old.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “for nobody wants to marry the contemporary of his great-grandmother. However, she gave her age as twenty-seven years and three moons.”

“And doubtless for once did not tell the truth. But, as she does not look more than twenty-five, I think that we may all agree to let it stand at that, namely, twenty-seven, plus an indefinite period of sleep. At any rate, she is a sweet and most gracious woman, apparently in the bloom of youth, and, to cut it short, I fell in love with her.”

“Like Bastin,” I said.

“Bastin!” exclaimed Bickley indignantly. “You don’t mean to say that clerical oaf presumed—well, well, after all, I suppose that he is a man, so one mustn’t be hard on him. But who could have thought that he would run so cunning, even when he knew my sentiments towards the lady? I hope she told him her mind.”

“The point is, what did she tell you, Bickley?”

“Me? Oh, she was perfectly charming! It really was a pleasure to be refused by her, she puts one so thoroughly at one’s ease.” (Here, remembering Bastin and his story, I turned away my face to hide a smile.) “She said—what did she say exactly? Such a lot that it is difficult to remember. Oh! that she was not thinking of marriage. Also, that she had not yet recovered from some recent love affair which left her heart sore, since the time of her sleep did not count. Also, that her father would never consent, and that the mere idea of such a thing would excite his animosity against all of us.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

“Not quite. She added that she felt wonderfully flattered and extremely honoured by what I had been so good as to say to her. She hoped, however, that I should never repeat it or even allude to the matter again, as her dearest wish was to be able to look upon me as her most intimate friend to whom she could always come for sympathy and counsel.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing, of course, except that I promised everything that she wished, and mean to stick to it, too. Naturally, I was very sore and upset, but I am getting over it, having always practised self-control.”

“I am sorry for you, old fellow.”

“Are you?” he asked suspiciously. “Then perhaps you have tried your luck, too?”

“No, Bickley.”

His face fell a little at this denial, and he answered:

“Well, it would have been scarcely decent if you had, seeing how lately you were married. But then, so was that artful Bastin. Perhaps you will get over it—recent marriage, I mean—as he has.” He hesitated a while, then went on: “Of course you will, old fellow; I know it, and, what is more, I seem to know that when your turn comes you will get a different answer. If so, it will keep her in the family as it were—and good luck to you. Only—”

“Only what?” I asked anxiously.

“To be honest, Arbuthnot, I don’t think that there will be real good luck for any one of us over this woman—not in the ordinary sense, I mean. The whole business is too strange and superhuman. Is she quite a woman, and could she really marry a man as others do?”

“It is curious that you should talk like that,” I said uneasily. “I thought that you had made up your mind that the whole business was either illusion or trickery—I mean, the odd side of it.”

“If it is illusion, Arbuthnot, then a man cannot marry an illusion. And if it is trickery, then he will certainly be tricked. But, supposing that I am wrong, what then?”

“You mean, supposing things are as they seem to be?”

“Yes. In that event, Arbuthnot, I am sure that something will occur to prevent your being united to a woman who lived thousands of years ago. I am sorry to say it, but Fate will intervene. Remember, it is the god of her people that I suppose she worships, and, I may add, to which the whole world bows.”

At his words a kind of chill fell upon me. I think he saw or divined it, for after a few remarks upon some indifferent matter, he turned and went away.

Shortly after this Yva came to sit with me. She studied me for a while and I studied her. I had reason to do so, for I observed that of late her dress had become much more modern, and on the present occasion this struck me forcibly. I do not know exactly in what the change, or changes, consisted, because I am not skilled in such matters and can only judge of a woman’s garments by their general effect. At any rate, the gorgeous sweeping robes were gone, and though her attire still looked foreign and somewhat oriental, with a touch of barbaric splendour about it—it was simpler than it had been and showed more of her figure, which was delicate, yet gracious.

“You have changed your robes, Lady,” I said. “Yes, Humphrey. Bastin gave me pictures of those your women wear.” (On further investigation I found that this referred to an old copy of the Queen newspaper, which, somehow or other, had been brought with the books from the ship.) “I have tried to copy them a little,” she added doubtfully.

“How do you do it? Where do you get the material?” I asked.

“Oh!” she answered with an airy wave of her hand, “I make it—it is there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, but she only smiled radiantly, offering no further explanation. Then, before I could pursue the subject, she asked me suddenly:

“What has Bickley been saying to you about me?” I fenced, answering: “I don’t know. Bastin and Bickley talk of little else. You seem to have been a great deal with them while I was ill.”

“Yes, a great deal. They are the nearest to you who were so sick. Is it not so?”

“I don’t know,” I answered again. “In my illness it seemed to me that you were the nearest.”

“About Bastin’s words I can guess,” she went on. “But I ask again—what has Bickley been saying to you about me? Of the first part, let it be; tell me the rest.”

I intended to evade her question, but she fixed those violet, compelling eyes upon me and I was obliged to answer.

“I believe you know as well as I do,” I said; “but if you will have it, it was that you are not as other human women are, and that he who would treat you as such, must suffer; that was the gist of it.”

“Some might be content to suffer for such as I,” she answered with quiet sweetness. “Even Bastin and Bickley may be content to suffer in their own little ways.”

“You know that is not what I meant,” I interrupted angrily, for I felt that she was throwing reflections on me.

“No; you meant that you agreed with Bickley that I am not quite a woman, as you know women.”

I was silent, for her words were true.

Then she blazed out into one of her flashes of splendour, like something that takes fire on an instant; like the faint and distant star which flames into sudden glory before the watcher’s telescope.

“It is true that I am not as your women are—your poor, pale women, the shadows of an hour with night behind them and before. Because I am humble and patient, do you therefore suppose that I am not great? Man from the little country across the sea, I lived when the world was young, and gathered up the ancient wisdom of a greater race than yours, and when the world is old I think that I still shall live, though not in this shape or here, with all that wisdom’s essence burning in my breast, and with all beauty in my eyes. Bickley does not believe although he worships. You only half believe and do not worship, because memory holds you back, and I myself do not understand. I only know though knowing so much, still I seek roads to learning, even the humble road called Bastin, that yet may lead my feet to the gate of an immortal city.”

“Nor do I understand how all this can be, Yva,” I said feebly, for she dazzled and overwhelmed me with her blaze of power.

“No, you do not understand. How can you, when even I cannot? Thus for two hundred and fifty thousand years I slept, and they went by as a lightning flash. One moment my father gave me the draught and I laid me down, the next I awoke with you bending over me, or so it seemed. Yet where was I through all those centuries when for me time had ceased? Tell me, Humphrey, did you dream at all while you were ill? I ask because down in that lonely cavern where I sleep a strange dream came to me one night. It was of a journey which, as I thought, you and I seemed to make together, past suns and universes to a very distant earth. It meant nothing, Humphrey. If you and I chanced to have dreamed the same thing, it was only because my dream travelled to you. It is most common, or used to be. Humphrey, Bickley is quite right, I am not altogether as your women are, and I can bring no happiness to any man, or at the least, to one who cannot wait. Therefore, perhaps you would do well to think less of me, as I have counselled Bastin and Bickley.”

Then again she gazed at me with her wonderful, great eyes, and, shaking her glittering head a little, smiled and went.

But oh! that smile drew my heart after her.

***

NEXT WEEK: “People ran to and fro pointing upwards. Searchlights, like huge fingers of flame, stole across the sky; guns boomed. At last, in the glare of a searchlight, we saw a long and sinister object floating high above us and gleaming as though it were made of silver. Flashes came from it followed by terrible booming reports that grew nearer and nearer. A house collapsed with a crash just behind us.”

Stay tuned!

***

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: You are reading H. Rider Haggard’s When The World Shook. Also read our serialization of: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail and “As Easy As A.B.C.” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

999’s “Wild Sun” single came out June 29, 1982.

Autumn Evening by Philip Buchanan Prosthetic Knowledge Plants

Essays

• On the Natural History of Surveillance
• adiZones and Lo-Lifes
• The Chameleonic Impulse
• Robopix
• Jed Martin’s Charmed Career

 

Still from Timo Arnall’s Robot Readable World (Robopix)

 

Artist Profiles

• Adam Harvey
• Bradley Pitts
• Christopher Baker
• Daniel Temkin
• Hannah Perry

CV Dazzle by Adam Harvey

Interviews

• Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta

 

Amalia Pica at Chisenhale Gallery

Reviews

• Amalia Pica at Chisenhale Gallery
• Jana Euler at Real Fine Arts

 

Series

• Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Plants
• Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: The Female Pixel
• Two poems by Caroline Contillo
• Assembled Texts by Harm van den Dorpel
• Wavelength: “Japanese Noise: A Reminder” by C. Spencer Yeh

 

 

Pixel Paul

More

• The Golden Age of Dutch Aerial Landscapes
• Reality Drone TV
• Hennessy Youngman Beyond Youtube
• Pixel Paul
• Analog Film in a Digital World
• Glitching on Tumblr

 

Significant Objects — cofounded by Rob Walker and HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn — sent out another check today.

Last year, Significant Objects chose Girls Write Now to receive all proceeds from one of its “volumes” of stories and auctions. Walker and Glenn were thrilled to donate over $1,700 to this worthy organization. But today’s check is going out on behalf of twenty-four contributors to the Significant Objects book who requested that their honoraria be donated to Girls Write Now.

HiLobrow is proud of regular contributor Greg Rowland, and friend and one-off contributor Mark Frauenfelder, whose names are on the list of those Significant Objects authors donating to Girls Write Now. Well done!

PS: As mentioned yesterday, another batch of writers (including three HiLobrow contributors) directed their fees to 826 National.

DON’T FORGET: Join HiLobrow and Significant Objects contributors Luc Sante, Mimi Lipson, Annie Nocenti, and Jason Grote, plus Matthew Sharpe, Shelley Jackson, and Ben Greenman — as well as editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker — as they read stories from and celebrate the release of the Significant Objects book at New York’s Strand Book Store, on July 10 from 7 pm to 8 pm. Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. The event will be located in the Strand’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street. Tell your friends!

newman-hall:

Vogue 1953

It's just after midnight, and I'm relieved to say that after a brutal marathon day and evening of work, I've just sent a pretty decent Magic Circle rewrite to my editor.  We will have one more pass through it next week; the ending still isn't right, and I did a lot of new writing for the last stretch that will probably look rough when I come back to it after a few days off.  Final deadline: next Friday.  I will be glad to see the back of this one, though of course books always come back at you for copy-edit, proofing, etc. 

Need to leave for the airport in about 5.5 hours, so I think I will pack now and then see if there's any chance I might get a few hours of sleep.  It may not be an option, as it's been 3 or 4 in the morning before I've fallen asleep the last couple nights....

Light reading around the edges: David Gordon's The Serialist, which I absolutely loved.

Bonus links: nice swim bit with shout-out to my old teacher Doug Stern; Olympic training technology; "First, then, read your book."

xintra: John Roberts is the most perplexing intellect in politics since Henry Kissinger - but with no obvious libido, save a sick thing for justice.

Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:

Margaux: B.F. Skinner, the villainized behavioral scientist, is the ghost behind the most recent issue of the Atlantic. I pulled B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” years ago from a random bookshelf scan because I thought the title was funny. All I knew about B.F. Skinner was that, as an experiment, he put his young daughter in a box. The title seemed appropriate for such a man. Though when I read the book, it was surprisingly thoughtful and interesting, and B.F. Skinner kind of seemed more like a friend than a comical monster. Since then, I’ve always had warm feelings towards Principal Skinner, the good-intentioned principle on The Simpsons who continuously gets abused.

The Atlantic‘s headlining article “The Perfect Self” by David H. Freedman is about how B.F. Skinner’s behavioral science is in the lead for the  figuring-out-how-to-combat-obesity race. David H. Freedman reminds us that B.F. Skinner was strongly against punishment in the area of behaviorial modification and that, to date, the most sinister manifestation of his findings is Weight Watchers.

B.F. Skinner’s main theory: “All organisms tend to do what the world around them rewards them for doing. When an organism is in some way prompted to perform a certain behaviour, and that behavoir is ‘reinforced’ – with a pat on the back, nourishment, comfort, money – the organism is more likely to repeat the behaviour,” is echoed in other neighboring  articles.

It’s a challenge to make your own positive behavioral boxes or to spot the boxes that others have put you in. The Atlantic explores some of these puzzles with an Editor’s Note from James Bennet, a short story on the evils of good students desperate for the right awards by Molly Patterson, “Honors Track”, and a short text on “Dumb Kids’ Class” by Mark Bowden, who discusses the benefits of being underestimated. Mark Bowden himself bounced back between dumb and smart class as did I and probably lots of kids do around the age of eleven – as you try to work out which is your more advantageous option (or your teachers try to work out which is their more advantageous option).

I always love  dumb or stupidity as a subject. Like in some of John Currin’s work,

or in this this exceedingly pleasing 2003 documentary by Albert Nerenberg, Stupidity. You can see the full documentary here. If I remember correctly the best parts of it were short interviews with the very few acedemics in the world who study stupidity – attempting to talk about it still seems to be a curse or a taboo, something that can get you in all sorts of trouble. During the interviews, when the academics made any mistakes in speaking, they would look around slowly and cautiously as though someone was about to accuse them of being a moron. Such disorienting pleasures!

Speaking of disorienting pleasures, I just went to the contemporary museum in Bentonville, Arkansas that Alice Walton of the Walmart family founded, Crystal Bridges.

Carl: I am going to use Natalie Zina Walschots’ prose-poem-like “Postcards from the Polaris Prize” (parts One and Two) to help me decide how to fill the final space on my ballot, because they’re the best things the Polaris ever made happen except for the prize itself.

Maybe I will vote for Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life, because Natalie wrote: “David fires a rock at the forehead of Goliath. David is seventeen feet tall and made of marble. David is willing to send a soldier to his death after watching a woman bathe. David is an award-winning environmentalist and broadcaster. David is sometimes called Ziggy Stardust, sometimes the Goblin King. David is married to a Spice Girl. David has been frozen, buried, and locked in a plexiglass case suspended above the River Thames.” Or maybe Marie-Pierre Arthur’s record, because Nat says, ” In every movie that ever brushes against the narrative of a young woman coming-of-age, there is a scene is which she is sitting in the passenger seat of a car, the window rolled down, holding her hand out in the wind like it is a smooth bird.” Though I think that might be a very subtle insult.

This week I discovered Jenny Woolworth’s Women in Punk Blog, which only has a post every four or five months, but one of those posts is an 86-page including interviews with Alice Bag and Liliput, and other posts are entire mixtapes. So quit yer complaining. Also, this is a good list. And so is this. And the Supreme Court didn’t strike down health-care reform, so Happy Canada and/or America Day, or neither if you prefer.

Chris: I’m always reticient to link to my B2TW comrades here, because it can seem a little too incestuous, but Margaux’s Paris Review advice column response to the misguided query “What books impress a guy? What should I read to seem cool, sexy, and effortlessly smart?” was so impious and wise: “The only way to be cool, sexy and effortlessly smart without just being seemingly so is to build your own stupid house of books. Feel free to use all the wrong books in all the wrong ways, but the house really has to be real and you need to know why the house is there, in that specific location, in that specific configuration.”

“I am going to write a poem about using Meryl Streep’s laugh as a ringtone. / I’ve bookmarked an LA Times article from 1989 / in which her giggle eruptions are explored with great amazement. / I’ve tweeted extensively on the tone and timbre of/ each particular laugh.”

Up here Canada Day shares its 24 hours with Pride, a happy coincidence indeed. I’ll be at Shame, wearing a Will Munro pin, and this week Sarah Liss explained why.

Image from Radio Telephony, in the public domain

I was interviewed by Steve Thomas for his Circulating ideas podcast a few weeks ago and interviewed by Kayhan B., Erin Anderson and Doug Mirams for their Bibliotech podcast a week earlier. I don’t listen to many professional-type podcasts but both of these conversations were a really good chance to talk over some of the issues facing the profession today in addition to just me going “bla bla…” about myself. Both shows have had a host of other guests and I’ve been digging around in the archives finding other stuff to listen to. If you’re podcast-oriented, these are two shows to put in regular rotation.

As was just announced over at the Significant Objects website, today a number of contributors to the Significant Objects book (forthcoming from Fantagraphics in July) collectively donated $450 to the youth creative-writing tutoring program 826 National!

Significant Objects was co-founded by Rob Walker and HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn. In 2009–10, Significant Objects raised over $2,200 for 826 National via the auctions associated with the second “volume” of the project’s stories.

HiLobrow is proud to mention that our contributors Douglas Wolk and Gary Panter, not to mention HiLobrow cofounder Matthew Battles, were among those donating their honoraria to 826 National. Well done!

DON’T FORGET: Join HiLobrow and Significant Objects contributors Luc Sante, Mimi Lipson, Annie Nocenti, and Jason Grote, plus Matthew Sharpe, Shelley Jackson, and Ben Greenman — as well as editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker — as they read stories from and celebrate the release of the Significant Objects book at New York’s Strand Book Store, on July 10 from 7 pm to 8 pm. Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. The event will be located in the Strand’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street. Tell your friends!

xintra: BACKROOM. OBAMA: You better pass Health Care. ROBERTS: OK but I want to kill women, money, privacy and bring back slave labor. OBAMA: Oh, OK

In May I answered interview questions for the Chronicle of Higher Education's "My Daily Read" feature, and the piece is up now at their website.

xintra: US TAXPAYERS: You don't get education or infrastructure anymore, but Hey! Black Ops just installed a new Egyptian son-of-a-bitch! Praise Him

Government Issue’s “Make an Effort” EP came out June 28, 1982.Here’s “Sheer Terror” from it.

From Glitch-Hop

Among the recent grop of gif-based glitch Tumblrs is Year of the Glitch, a glitch-a-day blog run by the artist Philip Stearns featuring a
totalizing glitch, where any trace of the previous media has been
virtually destroyed. Meanwhile, Tumblrs Glitch Gifs, Glitch-Hop, Glitchee, and Compression Errors feature glitches gleaned from popular, recognizable sources, where amusement comes from the intrusion of a chance-like error on a recognizable piece of media. There’s even Food Mosh, a glitch take on the popularity of pictures of food. These are more easily classified as utilizing datamoshing, where manipulations in digital compression produce pixel bleeding. 

Some theory about the practice is can be provided by Thomas Levin: “What is at stake in the vocabulary of such ‘compression errors’—evident
both in the domains of avant-garde video and in the more popular idiom
of music video—is a rendering readable of ‘differencing,’ of what I call
the ‘preductive aesthetics of the absent image.’”

Studies: Dither + Flicker No. 1 from Year of the Glitch

Via Food Mosh

"Since this study, I can’t stop enumerating the contents of fridge surfaces."

(I was laughing as I read this: the suggested correlation between number of fridge magnets and total amount of stuff in household struck me as suspect, with the thought in my head being something like "my fridge has a fair number of magnets on it, but I don't have an excessive amount of stuff, especially if you exclude books."  Then I saw the actual picture in the article and flinched with horror - clearly I do not have a lot of magnets on my refrigerator!)

The illustration in the article:
My fridge:
The magnets themselves are a set of Andy Warhol cats my mother gave me, plus a few miscellaneous others; they are holding up gym schedules for Chelsea Piers and local yoga, a postcard a friend sent from Alaska and a snapshot of freesias at an English flower shop sent to me by Becky from Cambridge, a book of stamps and the mammogram referral that is for September and that needs to stay somewhere findable in the meantime.

(I have a fantasy of living in a monastic cell with no stuff!)

I am slightly at the end of my tether after two nights of very poor sleep on the quality/quantity front.  I will do a marathon novel revision session today, at least after I go to the allergist for shots, but I don't think I'm going to make my deadline.  Need to leave for the airport at 5:30am tomorrow and suspect that means I will just stay up all night.  Not feeling very good about this!

HiLobrow is pleased to present the sixth installment of our serialization of Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins: A Story of the English Revolution and After. New installments will appear each Thursday for 16 weeks.

Trapped in a London laboratory during a worker uprising in 1924, ex-artillery officer and physics instructor Jeremy Tuft awakens 150 years later — in a neo-medieval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Not only have his fellow Londoners forgotten most of what humankind used to know, before civilization collapsed, but they don’t particularly care to re-learn any of it. Though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his own era’s smug doctrine of Progress, Tuft eventually decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful. That is, until northern English and Welsh tribes threaten London — at which point he sets about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.

Shanks’ post-apocalyptic novel, a pessimistic satire on Wellsian techno-utopian novels, was first published in 1920. In October, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of The People of the Ruins, with an introduction by Tom Hodgkinson.

SUBSCRIBE to HiLobrow’s serialized fiction via RSS.

LAST WEEK: “She held out two fingers to him, a perplexing action; but it seemed from the stiffness of her arm that she did not expect him to kiss them. He shook and dropped them awkwardly and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he was able to examine the first lady of England and her surroundings, while, with much less interest and an expression of stupid aloofness, she examined him.”

ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |15 |16

***

CHAPTER VI
THE GUNS

1

During the days that immediately followed, the Speaker left Jeremy to make himself at home as best he could in the new world. For a time Jeremy was inclined to fear that by a single obstinacy he had forfeited the old man’s favor. He had been removed from the little room which he had first occupied to another, larger and more splendidly furnished, near the Speaker’s own apartments. But he had pleaded, with a rather obvious confidence in his right to insist, that he should be allowed to continue his friendship with Roger Vaile. Some obscure loyalty combined with his native self-will to harden him in this desire; and the Speaker was displeased by it. He had evidently had some other companion and instructor in mind.

“The young man is brainless, like all his kind,” he objected. “You will get no good from him.”

“But he did save my life. Why would he think of me if I forgot him now?”

“No man could have done less for you than he did. You ought not to let that influence you.”

The wrangle was short but too rapidly grew bitter. To end it Jeremy cried with a gesture of half-humorous despair, “Well, at least he is my oldest living friend.”

The Speaker shrugged his shoulders and gave way without a smile; but he seemed from this moment to have abandoned him to the company he thus wilfully chose. For the better part of a day Jeremy was pleased by his deliverance from a dangerous and uncomfortable old fanatic. Thereafter he fell to wondering, with growing intensity, what were now his chances of meeting again with the Speaker’s daughter.

When he rejoined Roger Vaile, that placid young man received him without excitement, and informed him that they might spend the next few days in seeing the sights of London. Jeremy’s great curiosity answered this suggestion with delight; and in his earliest explorations with Roger he found many surprises within a small radius. The first were in the great gardens of the Treasury, which, so far as he could make out, in the absence of most of the familiar landmarks, took in all St. James’s Park, as well as what had been the sites of Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station. Certainly, as he rambled among them, he came upon the ruins of the Victoria Memorial, much battered and weathered, and so changed in aspect by time and by the shrubs which grew close around it that for several moments it escaped his recognition.

Outside the walls of the Treasury such discoveries were innumerable. Jeremy was astonished to find alternately how much and how little he remembered of London, how much and how little had survived. Westminster Bridge, looking old and shaky, still stood; but the Embankment was getting to be disused, chiefly on account of a great breach in it, how caused Roger could not tell him, in the neighborhood of Charing Cross. On both sides of this breach the great men who owned houses in Whitehall and the Strand were beginning to push their gardens down to the water’s edge. Indeed, as Jeremy learnt by his own observation and by close questioning of Roger, the growth of huge gardens was one of the conspicuous signs of the age.

There existed, it seemed, an aristocracy of some wealth descended mostly from those supporters of the first and second Speakers who had taken their part in putting down the Reds and restoring order more than a hundred years before. Where one of the old ruling families, great land-owners, great manufacturers, or great financiers had possessed a member of resolute and combative disposition, it had survived to resume its place in the new state. The rest were descendants of obscure soldiers of fortune. This class, of which Roger Vaile was an inconsiderable cadet, owned vast estates in some, though not in all, parts of the country. Here and there, as Jeremy surmised, where small-holders and market-gardeners had taken a firm grip, the landowning class had little power. But elsewhere it was strong, and drew great revenues from the soil, from corn, from tobacco, and from wool.

These revenues were spent by the ruling families—Roger called them “the big men”—in enlarging the gardens of their houses in London. They cared little to build. Houses stood in plenty, many even now unclaimed. But gradually the deserted houses were pulled down, their materials carted away and their sites elaborately planted. Jeremy walked in a great shrubbery of rhododendrons where Charing Cross Station had been and in a rose-garden over the deep-buried foundations of Scotland Yard. He observed that this fashion, which was becoming a mania, was creating again the old distinction between the City of London, which was still a trading center, and the City of Westminster, which was still the seat of government, although a revolutionary mob of somewhat doctrinaire inclinations had burnt down the Houses of Parliament quite early in the Troubles.

These excursions fascinated Jeremy, and he endeavored to make them useful by cross-examining Roger, as they walked about together, on the condition of society. But that typical man of far from self-conscious age had only scanty information to give. Even on the government of the country he was vague and unsatisfactory, though, when he had nothing better to do, he worked with the other clerks on the Speaker’s business. Jeremy sometimes saw him and his companions at work, copying documents in a laborious round-hand or making entries in a great leather-bound and padlocked ledger. He felt often inclined to re-introduce into a profession which had forgotten it the blessed principle of the card index; but, after consideration, he abstained from complicating this idyllically simple bureaucracy. Besides, there was no need for labor-saving devices. Clerks swarmed in the Treasury. A few years in the Speaker’s service was the proper occupation for a young man of good family who was beginning life; and the tasks which it involved weighed on them lightly.

The business of government was not elaborate or complex. Apparently the provinces looked very much after themselves under the direction of a medley of authorities, whose titles and powers Jeremy could by no means compose into a system. He heard vaguely of two potentates, prominent among the rest and typical of them, the Chairman of Bradford, who seemed responsible for a great part of the north, and the President of Wales, who had a palace at Cardiff. Jeremy guessed that the titles of these “big men” had survived from all sorts of “big men” of his own time. The Chairman of Bradford for example might inherit his power from the chairman of some vanished revolutionary or reactionary committee, or perhaps even, since he was concerned in a peculiar way with the great weaving trade of Yorkshire, from that of an employers’ federation or a conciliation board. The President of Wales, whose relations with his tough, savage, uncouth miners were unusual, Jeremy suspected of being the successor of a trade union leader. The names and figures of these men lingered obscurely, powerfully, menacingly in his mind. The Speaker rarely interfered with them so long as they collected his taxes regularly and with an approach to completeness. And his taxes were moderate, for the public services were not exigent.

Jeremy caught a glimpse of one of these public services one day when Roger was taking him on a longer expedition than usual, to see the great northwestern quarter of old London. This district was one of the largest of those which, by some freak of chance, had escaped fire and bombardment and had been merely deserted, left to rot and collapse as they stood. Jeremy was anxious to examine this curiosity, and pressed Roger to take him there. It was when they were walking between the venerable and dangerously leaning buildings of Regent Street that they passed a column of brown-clad men on the march.

“Soldiers!” cried Jeremy, and paused to watch them go by.

“Yes, soldiers,” Roger murmured with a smile of good-natured contempt, trying to draw him along. But Jeremy’s curiosity had been aroused. He suddenly remembered, and then closed his lips on an enigmatical remark which the Speaker had made about guns; and he insisted on staying where he was until the regiment had gone out of sight. Their uniforms, an approximation to khaki, yet of a different shade, their rifles, clumsy and antiquated in appearance, their feet wrapped in rags and shod with raw-hide sandals, combined with their shambling, half-ashamed, half-sulky carriage to give them the air of a parody on the infantry of the Great War.

“Whom do they fight?” he asked abstractedly, still standing and gazing after them.

“No one,” Roger answered, with the same expression of contemptuous tolerance. “They are good for nothing; there has been no war in England for a hundred years.”

“But are there no foreign wars?”

“None that concern us.” And Roger went on to explain in an uninterested and scrappy manner that there was always fighting somewhere on the Continent, that the Germans and the Russians and the Polish were forever at one another’s throats, that the Italians could not live at peace with one another or with their neighbors on the Adriatic, and that the peoples of Eastern Europe seemed bent on mutual extermination. “But we never interfere,” he said. “It isn’t our business, though sometimes the League tries to make out that it is. And we need no army. It’s a fad of the Speaker’s, though he could always get Canadians if he wanted them.”

“The League? Canadians?” Jeremy interjected.

“Yes; the Canadian bosses hire out armies when any one wants them. They do say that that ruffian who is staying with the Speaker came over for some such reason. But I can’t see why we should want Canadians.”

“But you said… something… the League?”

“Oh, the old League!” Roger answered carelessly. “Surely that existed in your time, didn’t it? I mean the League of Nations.” And, as Jeremy said nothing, he continued: “You know, they sit at Geneva and tell every one how to manage his own affairs. We take no notice of them, except that we send them a contribution every year. And I don’t know why we should do even that. The officials are always all Germans… so close, you know…”

Jeremy fell into a profound reverie, out of which he presently emerged to ask, “Does your army have any guns… cannon, I mean?”

Roger shook his head. “You mean the sort of big gun that used to throw exploding shells. No; I don’t believe there’s such a thing left in the world. I never, heard of one.”

In order to draw Jeremy away from his meditations in Regent Street, Roger had taken him by the elbow, and from that had slipped his arm into Jeremy’s own. They walked along together in an amicable silence. Unexpected and violent events had drawn these two young men into a friendship which otherwise they would never have chosen, but which was perhaps not more arbitrary and not less real than the love of the mother for the child. Though their minds were so dissimilar, yet Jeremy felt a sort of confidence and familiarity in Roger’s presence; and Roger took a queer pride in Jeremy’s existence.

The district into which they entered when they got beyond the wilderness that had been Regent’s Park was a singular and striking reminder of the time when London was a great and populous city. Every stage of desolation and decay was to be seen in that appalling tract, which had lost the trimness and prosperity of its flourishing period without acquiring the solemn and awful aspect of nobler ruins. Every scrap of wood and metal had long been torn from these slowly perishing houses. Some had collapsed into their own cellars and were gradually being covered over. Some, which had been built of less enduring bricks, seemed merely to have melted, leaving only faint irregularities on the surface of the ground. Others stood gaunt and crazily leaning, with ragged staring gaps where the windows had been. Even as they passed one of these they heard the resounding collapse of a wall they could not see, while the outer walls heaved visibly nearer to ruin.

And here and there enterprising squatters had cleared large spaces, joining up the old villa-gardens into fair-sized fields. These people lived in rude huts, made of old timbers and rough heaps of brickwork, in corners of their clearings. Some distaste or horror seemed to keep them from the empty houses in the shadow of which they dwelt. Jeremy saw in the fields bowed laborious figures wrapped in rags which forbade him to say whether they were men or women, and troops of dirty, half-naked children. Roger followed the direction of his glance and said that the squatters among the deserted houses were people little better than savages, who could not get work in the agricultural districts or had mutinously deserted their proper employers.

Jeremy shuddered and went on without replying. The plan of these old streets was still recognizable enough for him to lead the way, as if in a dream, through St. John’s Wood to Swiss Cottage. Here they had to scramble across a tumbled ravine, which was all that was left of the Metropolitan Railway, and up the steep rise of FitzJohn’s Avenue to the little village of Hampstead clinging isolated on the edge of the hill. As they came into the village, Jeremy drew Roger into a side-track which he recognized, from one drooping Georgian house standing lonely there, as what he had known under the name of Church Row. The church remained, and beyond it Jeremy could see a farm half-hidden among trees. But he went no further. He turned his face abruptly southwards and stayed, gazing across London in that moment of perfect clearness which sometimes precedes the twilight of early summer.

For a moment, what he saw seemed to be what he had always known. At this distance the slope below seemed still to be covered with houses, and showed none of the hideousness of their decay. Farther out, in the valley, rose the spires and towers of innumerable churches, and beyond them came the faint blue line of the Surrey hills. But as he gazed he realized suddenly the greater purity of the air, the greater beauty of the view. London blackened no longer all the heaven above it, and the green gaps in the waste of buildings were larger and greener. Almost he thought he saw a silver line where the Thames should have been; but perhaps he imagined this, though he knew that the river was no longer dark and foul.

In his joy and contentment at the lovely scene he began to speak to Roger in a rapt, dreamy voice, as though he were indeed the mouthpiece and messenger of a less fortunate time. “You are happier than we were,” he said, “though you are poorer. Your air is clean, you have room, you live at peace, you have time to live. But we were forced to live in thick, smoky air; we fought and quarreled, and disputed. The more difficult our lives became, the less time we had for them. This age seems to me,” he continued, warming to his subject and ignoring Roger’s placid silence, “like a man who has been walking at full speed on a long dusty road, only trying to see how many miles he can cover in a day. Suddenly he grows exhausted and stops. I have done it. I can remember how delicious it was to lie down in a field off the road, to let the business all go, not to care where one got to or when. It was this peacefulness we should have been aiming at all the time, only we never knew….” Roger’s silence at last stopped him, and he turned to see what his companion was thinking. The expression of trouble on Roger’s face brought up a question on his own.

“It has just occurred to me,” Roger said slowly and reluctantly, “that it will be quite dark before we can get through all those houses….” He paused and shivered slightly. “I don’t quite like…”

They set off homewards, and darkness overtook them in the middle of Finchley Road. Roger did not speak again of his fears. Jeremy could not determine whether they were of violent men or of dead men. But he felt their presence. Roger, hardly spoke or listened until they were once again in inhabited streets.

It was on the following morning that the Speaker again sent for Jeremy.

2

Jeremy answered the second summons with a little excitement but with a heart more at rest than on the first occasion. He found the Speaker leaning at his open window, his head thrust out, his foot tapping restlessly on the ground. It was some moments before the abstracted old man would take any notice of his visitor. When he did so, he turned round with an air of restless and forced geniality.

“Well, Jeremy Tuft,” he cried, rubbing his hands together, “and have you learnt much from your friend?”

Jeremy replied stolidly that Roger had answered one way or another all the questions he had had time to ask. Some instinct kept him to his not very candid stubbornness. He was not going to be bullied into deserting Roger, of whose intellectual gifts he had nevertheless no very high opinion.

But the Speaker nodded without apparent displeasure. “And now you know all about our affairs?” he enquired.

Jeremy, still stolidly, shook his head but made no other answer. The Speaker suddenly changed his manner and, coming close to Jeremy, took him caressingly by the arm. “I know you don’t,” he murmured in a voice full of cajolery. “But tell me—you must have seen enough of our people—what do you think of them? What do you think can be done with them?” He leant slightly back and regarded the silent young man with an expression of infinite cunning. Then, as he got no response, he went on: “Tell me, what would you do if you were in my place—you, a man rich with all the knowledge of a wiser time than this? How would you begin to make things better?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know…” Jeremy cried at last, almost pathetically. “I can’t make these people out at all.” And, with that, he felt restored in his mind the former consciousness of an intellectual kinship between him and the old Jew.

But the Speaker continued with his irritating air of a ripe man teasing a green boy. “You remember the time when the whole world was full of the marvels of science. We suffered misfortune, and all the wise men, all the scientists, perished. But by a miracle you have survived. Can you not restore for us all the civilization of your own age?”

Jeremy frowned and answered hesitatingly. “How can I? What could I do by myself? And anyway, I was only a physicist. I know something about wireless telegraphy…. But then I could do nothing without materials, and at best precious little single-handed.” He meditated explaining just how much one man could know of the working of twentieth-century machinery, opened his mouth again and then closed it. He strongly suspected that the Speaker was merely fencing with him. He felt vaguely irritated and alone.

The old man dropped Jeremy’s arm, spun his great bulk round on his heel with surprising lightness and paced away to the other end of the room. There he stood apparently gazing with intent eyes into a little mirror which hung on the wall. Jeremy stayed where he had been left, forlorn, perplexed, hopeless, staring with no expectation of an answer at those huge, bowed, enigmatic shoulders. He was almost at the point of screaming aloud when the Speaker turned and said seriously with great deliberation:

“Well, I am going to show you something that you have not seen, something that not more than twenty persons know of besides myself. And you are going to see it because I trust you to be loyal to me, to be my man. Do you understand?” He did not wait for Jeremy’s doubtful nod, but abruptly jerked the bell-pull on the wall. When this was done they waited together in silence. A servant answered the summons; and the Speaker said: “My carriage.” The carriage was announced. The silence continued unbroken while they settled themselves in it, in the little enclosed courtyard that had once been Downing Street. It was not until they were jolting over the ruts of Whitehall that Jeremy said, almost timidly:

“Where are we going?”

“To Waterloo,” the Speaker answered, so brusquely that Jeremy was deterred from asking more, and leant back by his companion to muster what patience he could.

He had already been to Waterloo under Roger’s guidance. It was the station for the few lines of railway that still served the south of England; and they had gone there to see the train come in from Dover. But it had been so late that Roger had refused to wait any longer for it, though Jeremy had been anxious to do so. They had seen nothing but an empty station, dusty and silent. At one platform an engine had stood useless so long that its wheels seemed to have been rusted fast to the metals. Close by a careless or unfortunate driver had charged the buffers at full speed and crashed into the masonry beyond. The bricks were torn up and piled in heaps; but the raw edges were long weathered, and some of them were beginning to be covered with moss. The old glass roof, which he remembered, was gone and the whole station lay open to the sky. Pools from a recent shower glistened underfoot. Here and there a workmen sat idle and yawning on a bench or lay fast asleep on a pile of sacks.

This picture returned vividly to Jeremy as he rode by the Speaker’s side. It seemed to him the fit symbol of an age which had loosened its grip on civilization, which cared no longer to mend what time or chance had broken, which did not care even to put a new roof over Waterloo Station. He reflected again, as he thought of it, that perhaps it did not much matter, that the grip on civilization had been painfully hard to maintain, that there was something to be said for sleeping on a pile of sacks in a sound part of the station instead of repairing some other part of it. “We wretched ants,” he told himself, “piled up more stuff than we could use, and though the mad people of the Troubles wasted it, yet the ruins are enough for this race to live in for centuries. And aren’t they more sensible than we were? Why shouldn’t humanity retire from business on its savings? If only it had done it before it got that nervous breakdown from overwork!”

He was aroused by the carriage lurching into the uneven slope of the approach. The squalor that had once surrounded the great terminus had withered, like the buildings of the station itself, into a sort of mitigated and quiescent ugliness. As, at the Speaker’s gesture, he descended from the carriage, he saw a young tree pushing itself with serene and graceful indifference through the tumbled ruins of what had once been an unlovely lodging-house. A hot sun beat down on and was gradually dispelling a thin morning haze. It gilded palely the gaunt, harsh lines of the station that generations of weathering could never make beautiful.

The Speaker, still resolutely silent, led the way inside, where their steps echoed hollowly in the empty hall. But the echoes were suddenly disturbed by another sound; and, as they turned a corner Jeremy was enchanted to see a long train crawling slowly into the platform. It slackened speed, blew off steam with appalling abruptness and force, and came to a standstill before it had completely pulled in. Jeremy could see two little figures leaping from the cab of the engine and running about aimlessly on the platform, half hidden by the still belching clouds of steam.

“Another breakdown!” the Speaker grunted with sudden ferocity; and he turned his face slightly to one side as though it pained him to see the crippled engine. Jeremy would have liked to go closer, but dared not suggest it. Instead he dragged, like a loitering child, a yard or two behind his formidable companion and gazed eagerly at the distant wreaths of steam. But he only caught a glimpse of a few passengers sitting patiently on heaps of luggage or on the ground, as though they were well used to such delays in embarkation. He ran after his guide, who had now passed the disused locomotive rusted to the rails, and was striding along the platform and down the slope at the end, into a wilderness of crossing metals. Here and there in this desert could be seen a track bright with recent use; but it was long since many of them had known the passage of a train. In some cases only streaks of red in the earth or sleepers almost rotted to nothing showed where the line had been. They passed a signal-box: a man sat placidly smoking at the top of the steps outside the open door. They went on further; into the desolation that surrounds a great station, here made more horrible by the absence of movement, by the pervading air of ruin and decay.

When they had walked a few hundred yards from the end of the platform, they came to a group of buildings, which, in spite of their dilapidation, had about them a certain appearance of still being used. “The repairing sheds,” said the Speaker, pointing through an open door to a group of men languidly active round what looked like a small shunting-engine. Then he entered a narrow passage between two buildings.

As they went down this defile, a noise of hammering and another noise like that of a furnace grew louder and louder; and at the end of the passage there was a closed door. The Speaker paused and looked at Jeremy with a doubtful expression, as though for the last time weighing his loyalty. Then he seized a hanging chain and pulled it vigorously. A bell clanged, harsh and melancholy, inside the building. Before the last grudging echoes had died away, there was a rattling of bolts and bars, and the door was opened to the extent of about a foot. An old man in baggy, blue overalls, with dirty, white hair, and a short, white beard, stood in the opening, blinking suspiciously at the intruders.

He stood thus a minute in a hostile attitude, ready to leap back and slam the door to again. But all at once his expression changed, he shouted something over his shoulder and became exceedingly respectful. As Jeremy followed the Speaker past him into the black interior of the shed he bowed and muttered a thick incoherent welcome in a tongue which was hardly recognizable as English, so strange were its broad and drawling sounds.

Inside, huge shapes of machinery were confused with thick shadows, which jerked spasmodically at the light from an open furnace. It was some moments before Jeremy got the proper use of his eyes in the murky air of the shed. When he did he received an extraordinary impression. A group of old men, all in the same baggy blue overalls as the first who opened the door, had turned to greet them and were bowing and shuffling in an irregular and comical rhythm. Round the walls the obscure pieces of mechanism resolved themselves into all the appurtenances of a foundry, hammers, lathes and machines for making castings, in every stage of neglect and disrepair, some covered with dust, some immovably rusted, some tilted drunkenly on their foundation plates, some still apparently capable of use. And behind the gang of old men, raised on trestles in the middle of the floor, were two long and sinister tubes of iron.

The Speaker stood on one side, fixing on Jeremy a look of keen and exultant enquiry. Jeremy advanced towards the two tubes, a word rising to his tongue. He had not taken two steps before he was certain.

“Guns!” he whispered in a tense and startled voice.

“Guns!” replied the Speaker, not repressing an accent of triumph.

Jeremy went on and the old men shuffled on one side to make way for him, clucking with mingled agitation and pride. He examined the guns with the eye of an expert, ran his fingers over them, peered down the barrels, and rose with a nod of satisfaction. They seemed to be wire-wound, rifled, breech-loading guns, of which only the breech mechanism was missing.

They resembled very closely the sixty-pounders of his own experience, though they were somewhat smaller. When the breech mechanism was supplied, they would be efficient and deadly weapons of a kind that he well knew how to handle.

***

NEXT WEEK: “Once they had been obtained, they had slaved for years with senile docility to satisfy the demands which the Speaker’s senile and half-lunatic enthusiasm made on their disappearing knowledge. Somehow he had created in them a queer pride, a queer spirit of endeavor. That grotesque chorus of ancients had become inspired with a single anxiety, to create before they perished a gun which could be fired without instantly destroying those who fired it.”

Stay tuned!

***

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; and H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012.

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

‘Erotic Discourse’ at Zabludowicz Gallery

 

In a conversation with Francesca Gavin last month you said,
“I see the clips from TV as being as much my personal memories as the ones
from my own life, yet also having resonance with our collective national
consciousness.” Much of your work blends footage you’ve shot yourself,
personalized footage shot by strangers, and the ersatz human experience offered
by TV and adverts. It assumes pop cultural references naturally interpolate
into one’s personal memories.

That quote was in reference to my editing style. I was explaining how my
editing derives from listening to hip hop and dance music, and music production
techniques. I look at the looping and sampling of sound, and then use those
methods to play with audio and video in a similar way.

When
I was a kid I would raid my brother’s room while he was out, and listen to his
tapes. He is over 10 years older than me and was heavily into the rave scene. I
distinctively remember nicking a rave tape from 92, so I was probably about
7-8. The stories about what he got up to were also influential.

The
rave scene is one pop-culture reference, among many, that reoccurs in my work.
I feel close to that youth/social movement and the music that spun out of it,
but I have always felt slightly outside of it too, which made it easy to
romanticize the whole thing until it became a part of what I did in my late
teens.

If
we think of rave culture as the last British subculture before the mass use of
the Internet, it may well be being revived to a certain degree, but in an age
where everything is consumed at a much faster pace, the cache of collective
knowledge is being recycled in imagery and reference and its continual reviving
from the archive of popular culture. As we live in an age where things are
increasingly fragmented, i am looking at the media as if it provides us a basic
image of our lives, (meanings, values) to form a totality to which these
fragments can be understood.

I
film a lot of my own footage, like my nieces playing, or record conversations
with my friends. In the same context, I collect the personalized footage shot
by strangers. They say that when you go to the cinema, you look for yourself in
films’ characters. I’ll often choose footage because it’s the type of banal
experiences that I have had, but with different characters. Within my work I
like to confuse and intertwine my footage and that taken from an advert or a
sitcom.

Pete [Morrow] used to hate it when people talked about an episode of Friends as if it was
something that happened in their life, or made an analogy, “it’s like in
Friends, when Joey said…’

It’s
not only playing out the personal through popular culture but, it’s also about
placing the personal experience within a wider cultural context. Within this
timeline of mass and subcultural references I can locate my personal experience
in a way that I hope other people relate to, in some ways autobiographical, but
in a way that is not overly personal, is not only about me but the viewer as
well.

That’s
what I mean by collective national consciousness – the personal and
non-personal becoming incorporated into one grand scheme. Relaying back an
image that feeds back on itself.

In relation to
cultivating grand schemes, when I think the analysis offered by Hebdige, and
other British cultural theorists working in the late 1970s to early 1990s, I
feel like they couldn’t anticipate the kind of process of developing one’s own
adolescent identity within a massively saturated visual culture that
thematically reoccurs in your work.

I
feel that underground social movements like punk were described by Hebdige and
such as means of giving autonomy to the disenfranchised. I am working with my
friend Harry Burke on some text for his blog at the moment about this subject
and as he puts it, perhaps they were unable to predict the ‘potential attack on
the autonomous subject’.

If I
use an albeit shallow example of social change brought about by the fast pace
commercialization enabled by forces like the internet, I’d use the example of
how fashion now doesn’t have the capability to remain outside of the mainstream
for long. Historically – to wear a certain item of clothing could operates as a
code of defiance to the system and individuality. The pace of things means that
before you know it, it will be in every Topshop on every High Street in the
country. I could, but won’t, also go into the collapse of the record industry
how we knew, but that’s a whole other, much longer, discussion.

As
we evolve among signs, our identity becomes partly a process of managing the
signs we consume; the catalogues and gigabytes. It’s important to invent with
the ‘do it yourself’ mentality of the past, and to be aware that footage and
imagery are our readymades, and that this common imaginary is dictated by power
sources. It’s worth considering what the social functions, and how we produce
relationships with this material and within the world.

But
let’s also not forget feelings here – I think music, fashion, and a lot of
these images have and always and will always, makes people feel something, in
the same way breaking up with lover makes you feel something. There are
powerful sensory experiences to be found in cultural products, just as much as
they can be found in personal events.

Going
back to our discussion about pop references being absorbed into one’s life, a
lot of what my work is getting at is the feeling that emerges from the personal
colliding with these social symbols. As Harry would put it (perhaps better than
me), ‘maybe we can call it a narrative act of creating subjectivity through
personal encounters with shared visual symbols.’

Tell me about hannahperry.com…

My website is access point to an archive of finished works rather than a online viewing platform, it’s why I have a password on the site. It also encourages people to email me and ask for the log-in details, which initiates one-on-one contact with people interested in my work, and encourages a dialogue. I also want people to come and see the work in a physical space, as I’ve set it up to be seen.

With the While It Lasts installation for Zabludowicz Collection, I created a cinematic environment that was impossible to replicate online. There are many reasons why I dislike showing my video work online, primarily because within the work, I try to set a rhythm or pace with fast edits which is totally lost if it stutters, the audio goes out of sync, stops half way through or if the video isn’t displayed properly, such as when it only half loads – all of which often happens. Bass sound is awful on tinny laptop speakers. And when the work is viewed in a channel surfing manner, and not for its full duration, it doesn’t receive the same element of consideration because the viewer doesn’t see them as they do in an exhibition context.

The immerse element of the work stems from the videos themselves (the changes of pace throughout which demands the attention of the viewer), the installations (creating a physical environment out of elements of the film which the viewer passes through) and the performance (where the audience sits in the middle of the performers and surround sound speakers). With so many artists whose work I’ve experienced first on the Internet, when I see it in real life, it tends to be bigger, louder or more interesting than I anticipated.

With the installed photographs, and other pieces at Zabludowicz, the installation felt akin to walking into a YouTube video. You also did a performance with Pete Morrow, which I missed. What happened?

We did an audio performance with me on a sampler, Pete on drums and 10 female performers. I put a lot of the sound bites (samples) through AbletonLive and added effects to them, so some were more unrecognizable than others.

Originally, we were going remix the exhibited film’s full soundtrack, but in the end, we focused on a specific section, beginning with the sound of children singing a Beach Boys’ song, a telephone conversation between a friend and myself, marching footsteps in heals (which is mixed in to the tempo of a Pussycat Dolls beat), and a girl dancing.

Within the film, all these elements play as a series of vignettes, or introductions to a moment in our transition towards adulthood. Whilst the film looks at this from the male and female perspective, the specific section we chose is about the feminine and becoming aware of your sexuality- although we chose this mainly because the sounds are better. 

The performance was an ‘event’ after the advent, so to speak. The audience sat in the middle and the 10 female performers marched around them, acting like a metronome. When they fell into a rhythm and pace, we began to add other audio elements. Pete played along to their timing and I followed with the altered soundbites.

I’d been thinking a lot about remixing in the context of rhythms/cycles, patterns of social moments and events.  

 

 

Age:

27

Location:

London

How long have you been working creatively with
technology? How did you start?

Always.
Technology is an integral part of making in one way or another. Whatever your
medium inevitably you’ll need to use programs like Photoshop.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How
did you start using them?

 

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I
studied fine art at Goldsmiths College and then fine art at the Royal Academy
of Arts in London both being interdisciplinary with no specialism. I have
always done a bit of everything. It’s the Goldsmiths way: jack-of-all-trades
and master of none.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you
think your work with traditional media relates to your work with
technology?

With
traditional, I am going to differentiate that between analogue and
digital. Video is the main part of my practice, and I’ve developed a language that mixes analogue and digital
found footage with mine, along with
brand and individual imagery.

My
process involves a lot of processing. One example of this is taking footage filmed on
my iPhone and processing it through VHS players, Aftereffects or DV capturing
devices to confuse the content and to make
it look like something from YouTube or an advert. This creates textures and
displacement. I am currently working on a web based project, whilst at the same time on some printed material using more
traditional processes like silk screening, trying to mirroring certain editing
techniques like repetition and rhythm.

Technology
is becoming more and more innate to grow up with. For example, my mum doesn’t
know how to turn a computer on, and I always finds it particularly humiliating
when I am leaning how to do something in After Effects from a 10 year old
American boy’s YouTube tutorial!

So in my
work, old and new media go full circle.

Are you involved in other creative or social
activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I am
about to attempt to writing something for a friend’s blog, although, in foresight, I should probably stick to Facebook and DJing.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have
you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your
art practice in a significant way?

Just
an artist. I worked at MOT International gallery after I graduated for
a couple of years where I learnt a lot,  and in a post production
house in Soho. Although it was relevant, all that taught me was that I
didn’t want to
work in post production, it’s not autonomous enough.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Dr
Dre, Steve Reich, my older brother, that sort of thing. Artists like
Sarah Lucas, Clunie Reid, Richard Prince, Seth Price and Mark Leckey
have all been key figures in sculpting my artistic taste.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art
community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Oh
loads. I last worked with Ben Vickers on some HTML coding for my current show
with bubblybyte.org.
In the past I’ve worked with LuckyPDF, Harry Sanderson from Your Body is a
Temple and musician/music producer Pete Morrow. Next I want to work with Harry
Burke on some text.

Do you actively study art history?

I am
not ill informed, but I don’t actively study it. I have always been more
interested in music and TV.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical
theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

I am
currently reading a few thing; Rhythmanalysis by Henri Lefebvre- it’s a
critical

text
that analyses rhythms of urban spaces and the effects of those rhythms on the
inhabitants.  Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus-a social critique
through art and music and SUBCULTURE AND THE MEANING OF STYLE about
subversion to normalcy.

I
have always been more interested in sociological texts; Giddens, Goffman, and
especially Bourdieu text Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste, although
one art referencing book that I read which I think is reallyrelevant
is PostProduction by Nicolas Bourriaud. I don’t think this has
much to do with the way I make work, the work would be the same without
it.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are
concerned about?

See the “tell me about hannahperry.com” question

 

somber ombre

Last month I was fortunate to visit the Musée Mechanique (warning: plays music when you click). It is an experience I definitely recommend. My favorite thing was the Carnival.

These photos do not capture the actual motion, which is kind of the whole point, but you can see the loving detail with which the builder, a carny himself, replicated his environment in miniature.

Oh but wait! As soon as I’d typed the above, it occurred to me that of course many many people besides me admire the Carnival, and most likely someone had indeed captured it while operating. And indeed, thanks to Kevin Syoza, you can see it in action:

** Originally published at World Now: Why is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador running for president of Mexico again after his politically damaging response to the 2006 election? Why isn't Marcelo Ebrard, the outgoing mayor of Mexico City, running for the leftist coalition instead? For weeks, the question has popped up in the cocktail chatter of many residents of this progressive-leaning megacity. As reported in The Times on Wednesday, dogged campaigner Lopez Obrador has moved up in polls but remains behind the front-runner with just days before voting. In this scenario, gloom is rising among liberal Mexican voters who thought Ebrard...

I was struck by these endpapers and decided to form a company to reproduce marbled paper as wallpaper. Has anyone ever done that? In any case, I’m going to need 5 million dollars immediately.

Amalia Pica, 2012.  Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo: Mark Blower.

There is a particular romance in miscommunication, wrought by difference and distance. The undelivered letter, the intercepted telegram, the voicemail message never played back are the chance minutiae which drive the action of the plot forward, or cause it to veer dramatically off-course. Mislaid memoranda and transposed missives are Greek Fates for the modern era, where rupture is a stronger organizing force than the continuity of a single thread. Still, it is strange to contemplate crossed-wires in a contemporary context, where a missed cue – the probable end-result of too many functional, thus distractible, multiple-channel communication devices – still engenders the ultimate social faux pas: You didn’t get the message?

Managers and technocrats determined to allay postmodern anxiety seek to reduce error in manifestations of human passion, from theaters of war to those of love, both on- and off-line. To a certain extent clinical psychology, too, helps condition us to distinguish signal from noise. Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love laments the disappearance of social discomfiture via the easy connectivity peddled by Internet dating sites: 

After all, it’s not so very different to an arranged marriage. Not done in the name of family order and hierarchy by despotic parents, but in the name of safety for the individuals involved, through advance agreements that avoid randomness, chance encounters and in the end any existential poetry, due to the categorical absence of risks. 

Where are exhilaration and ecstasy without some amount of personal risk? This conundrum resonates throughout London-based artist Amalia Pica’s sculpture, installation, and performance works, which consider moments of potential for point-to-point communication – and by extension, human connection; togetherness. Using not especially technological materials, the invariable “failure” of Pica’s work to draw disparate subjectivities into dialogue is most always a result of the aesthetic formalism of mediation, a quality borne out in the quiet beauty of her installations. Exhibited in the New Museum’s second triennial this year, Pica’s pleasing post-Minimal projection Venn Diagram (Under the Spotlight) (2011) expanded upon an earlier preoccupation with the diagrams from the ink-on-paper series Untitled (2006). The mathematical illustrations were banned in 1970s Argentina, where Pica grew up, for the perceived danger in clear expressions of collectivity. 

Her interest in the visualization of interaction and exchange might seem to have pragmatic applications today, although significantly it is the symbolism of “the social” (in the above case a field of color rather than a cloud or network,) which is philosophically operative beyond the direct representation of raw data. In this sense, her body of work forms a critique of the individual’s pure egoism as much as particular barriers to communication (chance, timing, autocracy) – playing with language, symbol and signal to “talk about talking.” Barring an algorithm to calculate the compatibility of notional personality tics, favorite 90s slasher flicks or other equally ambiguous criteria, Pica’s most reliable device describing the relationship between two is a single line: forming a bond or being deflected.

Pica’s current solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery coincides with the culmination of a yearlong project undertaken in the East London borough local to the art space. For I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011/12), the artist loaned out a pink granite Echeveria plant, modeled after a variety of the Mexican succulent growing in Kew Gardens, to neighborhood families for a one-week period each. Generally cutting the figure of a too-large artichoke, Pica’s roaming sculpture packs into a hard rolling case that might otherwise accommodate an alto saxophone. By redefining the notion of public sculpture as something shareable rather than fixed or ideologically domineering, Pica provided a rare opportunity for participants to experience an artwork in the intimacy of the home; notwithstanding any out-of-the-ordinary activity required to facilitate its borrow and return. Through handling Pica’s sculpture, the tangible and intangible traces of a community might be sensed from its condition, as one notes dog-eared pages and expiration dates stamped into the public library book. 

If Pica’s artwork gestures towards an ideal form of communication, structures and motifs including signal flags, strings of electric lights and colorful bunting reemerge in various constellations, flickering at varying stages of remove. Such is the case for her well-known Untitled (fiesta lights) (2006), a festoon of bulbs which draws the viewer into the gallery from the street and spans the foyer colorfully until it is anaesthetized (filter-less) upon entering the white cube; the single zagging strand droops gracefully until dropping repeated loose loops onto a hook against the far wall. The center of the gymnasium-like space is dominated by Switchboard (2012), a lengthy double partition pock-marked along its surface as neatly as a wedge of Emmenthaler. The work’s narrow cross-section reveals these standardized “holes” to be a dense network of outward-facing tin-can telephones; emptied of coconut milk, sweet corn, baked beans and stretched tightly together with string in configurations too complex to aurally trace. While not especially functional, Switchboard plays into childhood notions of telecommunications: the direct line traveling window to window, held taught enough across the block to carry urgent vibrations of the voice. Switchboard here contains echoes of If These Walls Could Talk (2010): tin cans and string stretched between the perimeter walls (with no access for an interested listener), as well as Eavesdropping (2011): found drinking glasses stuck to the wall with glue which invite opportunity to overhear activity on the unseen side opposite. In each case the viewer’s sensitivity to sonic space is heightened, although only in Switchboard is there a chance for “social listening” – to the sighs and movements of another body – within the confines of the exhibition itself.

The scale of the hearing device explodes for Acoustic Radar in Cardboard (2012), a crude gramophone-like form with a bell wide enough to catch conversations floating nearby. At the exhibition’s private viewing, one becomes paranoid that the occasional performer’s riveted listening technique might also be an act of critical surveillance, until a personal trial of the receiver assures that the instrument’s recycled material absorbs mostly atmospheric buzz. The sound piece Overhearing Fiesta by Raffaelle Carrà (2012), a lively recording of an Italian singer in Spanish intended for commercial distribution in Latin America, is activated by motion sensors in the mostly vacant far corner of the gallery – a casual expression of jubilation periodically emanating from behind the wall. While this particular seepage seems compatible with city environs, where calm is ever a luxury, the dying refrain soon attunes the listener also to the muffled external sounds of rubber tires rolling across rain-soaked pavement and the clamor of children in the schoolyard next door. 

Within the controlled volume of the art gallery, Pica’s pieces resonate softly together, without jostling; the room is studiously arranged, confidently spare. In the overhead space and in between the works, circulating air seems alert to the crackle of potential transmission. Still, the spatial emptiness of the gallery describes a lack unfulfilled by the waylaid, fitful longing of these various attempts to communicate, no matter how indirectly. 

Perhaps the greatest risk identifiable in Pica’s practice, then, is the imperfectly incessant desire to both hear and speak – without any guarantee of a sympathetic address, reply, or other meaningful exchange. Pica’s patient waiting game seeks neither validation nor instant gratification, informed by the wisdom of living and the loneliness which imbues contemporary means of (im)personal communication, despite surface connectivity. That Pica’s performances and sculptures never fully achieve the poetry of perfect mediation is yet another clear signal; that human relations might find their best collective expression outside the realm of the visual, even outside art. 

 

Lydia Lunch’s “13:13” album came out June 27, 1982. Here’s a live performance of “Thirsty Animal” from that era.

HiLobrow is pleased to present the third installment of our serialization of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. New installments will appear each Wednesday for 21 weeks.

In the far future, an unnamed narrator, who along with what remains of the human race dwells uneasily in an underground fortress-city surrounded by Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, “Ab-humans,” Brutes, and enormous slugs and spiders, follows a telepathic distress signal into the unfathomable darkness. The Earth’s surface is frozen, and what’s worse — at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached “the Barrier of Life” that separates our dimension from one populated by “monstrosities and Forces” who have sought humankind’s destruction ever since. Armed only with a lightsaber-esque weapon called a Diskos, our hero braves every sort of terror en route to rescue a woman he loves but has never met.

Hodgson’s tale of autochthonic future horror, which influenced H.P. Lovecraft, was first published in 1912. In November, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of The Night Land, with an Afterword by Erik Davis. Our otherwise unabridged version begins and ends with the most dramatic moments in this epic tale: chapters Two and Eleven. “For all its flaws and idiosyncracies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding,” says China Miéville in his blurb for our edition of the book. “A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.”

SUBSCRIBE to HiLobrow’s serialized fiction via RSS.

LAST WEEK: “And pondering and dreaming thus, as a young man may, I could fancy this aeon-lost One were whispering beauty into my ears, in verity; so clear had my memory grown, and so much had I pondered. And lo! as I stood there, harking and communing with my thoughts, I thrilled suddenly, as if I had been smitten; for out of all the everlasting night a whisper was thrilling and thrilling upon my more subtile hearing.”

ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

***

And one other thing there is which I would make clear. Many and oft a time had I heard a thrilling of sweet, faint laughter about me, and the stirring of the aether by words too gentle to come clearly; and these I make no doubt came from Naani, using her brain-elements unwittingly and in ignorance; but very eager to answer my callings; and having no knowledge that, far off across the blackness of the world, they thrilled about me, constantly.

And after Naani had made clear all that I have set out concerning the Lesser Refuge, she told further how that food was not plentiful with them; though, until the reawakening of the Earth-Current, they had gone unknowing of this, being of small appetite, and caring little for aught; but now wakened, and newly hungry, they savoured a lack of taste in all that they ate; and this we could well conceive, from our reasonings and theory; but happily not from our knowledge.

And we said unto them, that the soil had lost its life, and the crops therefrom were not vital; and a great while it would take for the earth within their pyramid to receive back the life-elements. And we told them certain ways by which they might bring a more speedy life to the soil; and this they were eager to do, being freshly alive after so long a time of half-life.

And now, you must know that in all the great Redoubt the story went downwards swiftly, and was published in all the Hour-Sheets, with many comments; and the libraries were full of those who would look up the olden Records, which for so long had been forgotten, or taken, as we of this day would say, with a pinch of salt.

And all the time I was pestered with questions; so that, had I not been determined, I should scarce have been allowed to sleep; moreover, so much was writ about me, and my power to hear, and divers stories concerning tales of love, that I had been like to have grown mazed to take note of it all; yet some note I did take, and much I found pleasant; but some displeasing.

And, for the rest, I was not spoiled, as the saying goes; for I had my work to do; moreover, I was always busied Listening, and having speech through the darkness. Though if any saw me so, they would question; and because of this, I kept much to the Tower of Observation, where was the Master Monstruwacan, and a greater discipline.

And then began a fresh matter; though but an old enough trick; for I speak now of the days that followed that re-opening of the talk between the Pyramids. Oft would speech come to us out of the night; and there would be tales of the sore need of the Lesser Redoubt, and callings for help. Yet, when I sent the Master-Word abroad, there would be no answering. And so I feared that the Monsters and Forces of Evil knew.

Yet, at times, the Master-Word would answer to us, beating steadily in the night; and when we questioned afresh, we knew that they in the Lesser Redoubt had caught the beat of the Master-Word, and so made reply; though it had not been they who had made the previous talk, which we had sought to test by the Word. And then they would make contradiction of all that had been spoken so cunningly; so that we knew the Monsters and Forces had sought to tempt some from the safety of the Redoubt. Yet, was this no new thing, as I have made to hint; saving that it grew now to a greater persistence, and there was a loathsome cunning in the using of this new knowledge to the making of wicked and false messages by those evil things of the Night Land. And it told to us, as I have made remark, how that those Monsters and Forces had a full awaredness of the speech between the Pyramids; yet could they have no power to say the Master-Word; so had we some test left, and a way to sure knowledge of what made talk in the night.

And all that I have told should bring to those of this Age something of the yet unbegotten terror of that; and a quiet and sound thankfulness to God, that we suffer not as humanity shall yet suffer.

But, for all this, let it not be thought that they of that Age accounted it as suffering; but as no more than the usual of human existence. And by this may we know that we can meet all circumstances, and use ourselves to them and live through them wisely, if we be but prudent and consider means of invention.

And through all the Night Land there was an extraordinary awakening among the Monsters and Forces; so that the instruments made constant note of greater powers at work out there in the darkness; and the Monstruwacans were busied recording, and keeping a very strict watch. And so was there at all that time a sense of difference and awakening, and of wonders about, and to come.

And from The Country Whence Comes The Great Laughter, the Laughter sounded constant… as it were an uncomfortable and heart-shaking voice-thunder rolling thence over the Lands, out from the unknown East. And the Pit of the Red Smoke filled all the Deep Valley with redness, so that the smoke rose above the edge, and hid the bases of the Towers upon the far side.

And the Giants could be seen plentiful around the Kilns to the East; and from the Kilns great belches of fire; though the meaning of it, as of all else, we could not say; but only the cause.

And from the Mountain Of The Voice, which rose to the South-East of the South-East Watcher, and of which I have made no telling hitherto, in this faulty setting-out, I heard for the first time in that life, the calling of the Voice. And though the Records made mention of it; yet not often was it heard. And the calling was shrill, and very peculiar and distressful and horrible; as though a giant-woman, hungering strangely, shouted unknown words across the night. And this was how it seemed to me; and many thought this to describe the sound.

And, by all this, may you perceive how that Land was awakened.

And other tricks there were to entice us into the Night Land; and once a call came thrilling in the aether, and told to us that certain humans had escaped from the Lesser Redoubt, and drew nigh to us; but were faint for food, and craved succour. Yet, when we sent the Master-Word into the night, the creatures without could make no reply; which was a very happy thing for our souls; for we had been all mightily exercised in our hearts by this one message; and now had proof that it was but a trap.

And constantly, and at all hours, I would have speech with Naani of the Lesser Redoubt; for I had taught her how she might send her thoughts through the night, with her brain-elements; but not to over-use this power; for it exhausts the body and the powers of the mind, if it be abused by exceeding usage.

Yet, despite that I had taught her the use of her brain-elements, she sent her message always without strength, save when she had use of the instrument; and this I set to the cause that she had not the health force needful; but, apart from this, she had the Night-Hearing very keen; though less than mine.

And so, with many times of speech, and constant tellings of our doings and thoughts, we drew near in the spirit to one another; and had always a feeling in our hearts that we had been given previous acquaintance.

And this, as may be thought, thrilled my heart very strangely.

IV
THE HUSHING OF THE VOICE

(“Dearest, thine own feet tread the world at night—
Treading, as moon-flakes step across a dark—
Kissing the very dew to holier light. …
Thy Voice a song past mountains, which to hark
Frightens my soul with an utter lost delight.”)

Now, one night, towards the end of the sixteenth hour, as I made ready to sleep, there came all about me the thrilling of the aether, as happened oft in those days; but the thrilling had a strange power in it; and in my soul the voice of Naani sounded plain, all within and about me.

Yet, though I knew it to be the voice of Naani, I answered not immediately; save to send the sure question of the Master-Word into the night. And, directly, I heard the answer, the Master-Word beating steadily in the night; and I questioned Naani why she had speech with me by the Instrument at that time, when all were sleeping, and the watch set among the Monstruwacans; for they in the little Pyramid had their sleep-time to commence at the eleventh hour; so that by this it was five hours advanced towards the time of waking; and Naani should have slept; nor have been abroad to the Tower of Observation, apart from her father. For I supposed that she spoke by the Instrument, her voice sounding very clear in my brain. Yet, to this question, she made no answer in kind; but gave a certain thing into my spirit, which set me trembling; for she said certain words, that began:—

“Dearest, thine own feet tread the world at night. …” And it well may be that she set me to tremble; for as the words grew about me, there wakened a memory-dream how that I had made these same words to Mirdath the Beautiful in the long-gone Eternity of this our Age, when she had died and left me alone in all the world. And I was weak a little with the tumult and force of my emotion; but in a moment I called eagerly with my brain-elements to Naani to give some explaining of this thing that she had spoken to the utter troubling of my heart.

Yet, once more she made no direct answer; but spoke the words again to me across all the dark of the world. And it came to me suddenly, that it was not Naani that spoke; but Mirdath the Beautiful, from out of all the everlasting night. And I called:—”Mirdath! Mirdath,” with my brain-elements, into the night; and lo! the far, faint voice spoke again to my spirit through all the darkness of eternity, saying again those words. Yet, though the voice was the voice of Mirdath the Beautiful, it was also the voice of Naani; and I knew in all my heart that this thing was in verity; and that it had been given to me to be birthed once more into this world in the living-time of that Only One, with whom my spirit and essence hath mated in all ages through the everlasting. And I called with my brain-elements and all my strength to Naani; but there came no answer; neither sign of hearing, though through hours I called.

And thus at last I came to an utter exhaustion; but neither could be quiet, nor sleep. Yet, presently, I slept.

And when I waked, my first memory was of the wondrous thing which had befallen in the sleep-time; for none in all this world could have known those words; save it had been the spirit of Mirdath, my Beautiful One, looking from above my shoulder in that utter-lost time, as I made those words to her, out of an aching and a broken heart. And the voice had been the voice of Mirdath; and the voice of Mirdath had been the voice of Naani. And what shall any say to this, save that which I had in my heart.

And immediately I called to Naani, once, and again twice; and in a little moment there came all about me the throbbing of the Master-Word, beating solemnly in the night; and I sent the Master-Word to give assurance, and immediately the voice of Naani, a little weak as was it always when she had not the Instrument, but sent the message with her brain-elements.

And I answered her, and questioned her eagerly concerning her sayings of the past time of sleep; but she disclaimed, and made clear to me that she had no knowledge of having spoken; but had slept through all that time of which I made to tell; and, indeed, had dreamed a very strange dream.

And for a little while I was confused, and meditated, not knowing what to think; but came suddenly again to a knowledge that Naani’s far voice was thrilling the aether all about; and that she would tell to me her dream; which had set strong upon her mind.

And she told the dream to me, and in the dream she had seen a tall, dark man, built very big, and dressed in unfamiliar clothing. And the man had been in a little room, and very sorrowful, and lonesome; and in her dream she had gone nigh to him.

And presently the man made to write, that he might ease him by giving expression to his sorrow; and Naani had been able to read the words that he wrote; though to her waking spirit the language in which they were writ was strange and unknown. Yet she could not remember what he had writ, save but one short line, and this she had mind of in that he had writ the word Mirdath above. And she spoke of the strangeness of this thing, that she should dream of this name; but supposed that I had fixed it upon her, by my first callings.

And then did I, with something of a tremble in my spirit, ask Naani to tell me what she remembered of the writing of that big, sorrowful stranger. And, in a little moment, her far voice said these words all about me:—

“Dearest, thine own feet tread the world at night….”

But no more had she memory of. Yet it was a sufficiency, and I, maybe with a mad, strange triumph in my soul, said unto her with my brain-elements that which remained of those words. And my spirit felt them strike upon the spirit of Naani, and awake her memory, as with the violence of a blow. And for a little while she stumbled, dumb before so much newness and certainly. And her spirit then to waken, and she near wept with the fright and the sudden, new wonder of this thing.

And immediately, all about me there came her voice thrilling, and the voice was the voice of Mirdath, and the voice of Naani; and I heard the tears of her spirit make pure and wonderful the bewildered and growing gladness of her far voice. And she asked me, as one who had suddenly opened the Gates of Memory, whether she might be truly Mirdath. And I, utter weak and shaken strangely because of this splendour of fulfilment, could make no instant answer. And she asked again, but using mine old love-name, and with a sureness in her far voice. And still I was so strangely dumb, and the blood to thud peculiar in mine ears; and this to pass; and speech to come swift.

And this way to be that meeting of our spirits, across all the everlasting night.

And you shall have for a memory-picture, how that Naani stood there in the world in that far eternity, and, with her spirit having speech with mine, looked back through the part-opened gates of her memory, into the past of this our life and Age. Yet more than this she saw, and more than was given to me in that Age; for she had memory now and sight of other instances, and of other comings together, which had some confusion and but half-meanings to me. Yet of this our present Age and life, we spoke as of some yesterday; but very hallowed.

Now, as may be conceived, the wonder of this surety which had come into my life stirred me fiercely to its completion; for all my heart and spirit cried out to be with that one who was Mirdath, and now spoke with the voice of Naani.

Yet, how should this be won; for none among all the learned men of that Mighty Pyramid knew the position of the Lesser Redoubt; neither could the Records and Histories of the World give us that knowledge; only that there was a general thought among the Students and the Monstruwacans that it lay between the North-West and the North-East. But no man had any surety; neither could any conceive of the distance from us of that Refuge.

And counting all this, there was yet the incredible danger and peril of the Night Land, and the hunger and desolation of the Outer Lands, which were sometimes named the Unknown Lands.

And I spoke much with Naani concerning this matter of their position; yet neither she nor her father, the Master Monstruwacan of that Refuge, had any knowing either of our position; only that the Builder of the Lesser Redoubt had come out of the Southward World in the Beginning, as they had knowledge of by the Records.

Also, the father of Naani set that ancient Compass to bear; for, as he made explanation to us through the Instrument, so great a power of the Earth-Current must be ours that, perchance it was our force which did affect the pointer from steadfastness. For, indeed, the needle did swing in an arc, as we heard, that held between the North and the South; within the Westward arc; but this it had done ever with them, and so was a very helpless guide; save that, maybe, as we had thought, the force of the Earth-Current that was with us, had in truth some power to pull the needle towards us. And if this were so of verity, we made a reckoning that set the Lesser Redoubt to the North; and they did likewise, and put us to the South; yet was it all built upon the sand of guess-work; and nothing to adventure the life and soul upon.

Now we, of curiosity; though a million times had it been done in the past ages, set the compass before us, having it from the Great Museum. But, as ever in that age, it did spin if we but stirred the needle, and would stop nowheres with surety, for the flow of the Earth-Current from the “Crack” beneath the Pyramid had a power to affect it away from the North, and to set it wandering. And this may seem very strange to this present Age; yet to that, it was most true to the seeming nature of things; and harder to believe that ever it did once point steadfastly, to prove a guide of sureness, and unfailing.

For, be it known, we knew the positions of the Land by tradition, coming from that ancient time when, in the Half-Gloom they had builded the Pyramid; they having known the use of that ancient compass, and with sight of the Sun had named the Positions; though we of that far future day had forgotten the very beginnings of those Names of Direction; and used them but because our fathers did a million years and more. And likewise we did the same with the names of the day and the night and the weeks and the months and the years; though of the visible markings of these there was nothing but only and always the everlasting night; yet the same seeming very natural to that people.

Now, Naani, having heed to my constant questions, craved with an utter keen hunger that I might come to her; but yet forbade it, in that it were better to live and commune in the spirit, than to risk my soul, and mayhaps die, in the foolishness of trying to find her in all the darkness of the dead world. Yet, no heed had I taken of her commands, had I but known of a surety the direction in which she might be discovered; and gained some knowledge of the space between, for this might be named by thousands of miles, or but by hundreds; though a great distance it was surely.

Yet, one other thing there was, that has point in this place; for when I sent my speech out into the night, using my brain-elements, I came to know that, whether I had a knowledge of the North, or no knowledge at the moment, yet did I turn oft with a sure instinction to that Direction. And of this, the Master Monstruwacan took very great note, and had me to experiment many a time and way, and so enclosed about with screens, or with bandages across mine eyes, that I could not, save by that inward Knowing, have any knowledge to point me the way. Yet would I turn Northwards very frequent, by a certain feeling; and seemed unable of speech, if I were turned otherwise by force.

But when we asked Naani whether she had an unusualness in this matter, she could discover none; and we could but take note curiously of that which affected my habits; and which truly I set to the attracting of her spirit; for I had mind that she did be somewheres out that way in the darkness of the world; but yet was this no more than to suppose, as you perceive.

And the Master Monstruwacan wrote a study of this matter of the Northwardness of my turning; and it was set out in the Hour-Slips of the Tower of Observation; and so it came to be copied by the Hour-Slips of the great cities, and made much comment, and much calling up to me through the home instruments; so that with this, and the speech that went about concerning my powers to hear, I was much in talk, and diversely pleased and oft angered by overmuch attention and importunity.

And now, whilst I pondered this matter in all my spirit and being, how that I should some way come to Naani, there befell a very terrible thing. And in this wise must I tell it:—

It was at the seventeenth hour, when all the millions of the Mighty Pyramid slept, that I was with the Master Monstruwacan in the Tower of Observation taking my due turn. And sudden, I heard the thrilling of the aether all about me, and the voice of Naani in my soul, speaking. And I sent the Master-Word into the darkness of the world, and presently, I heard the solemn answer beating steadfastly in the night; and immediately I called to Naani with my brain-elements, to know what thing troubled her in her sleep.

And her voice came into my spirit, weak and far and faint, and so that scarce I could make to hear the words. Yet, in a while I gathered that all the peoples of the Lesser Redoubt were in very deadly trouble; for that the Earth-Current had failed suddenly and mightily; and they had called her from her sleep, that she might listen whether we answered their callings by the Instrument; but, indeed, no calling had come to us.

And they who had been of late so joyful, were now grown old with sorrow in but an hour or two; for they feared that the fresh coming of the Earth-Current had been but the final flicker and outburst before the end. And, even in this short while of our speech, did it seem to me that the voice of Naani grew further off from me; and I felt like to have broken my heart with the trouble of this thing.

And through all that remained of that sleep-time, did I converse with Naani, as might two lovers who shall presently part forever. And when the cities awoke, the news went throughout them, and all our millions were in sorrow and trouble.

And thus was it for, maybe, a little month; and in that time had the voice of Naani grown so weak and far-off that even I that had the Night-Hearing, could scarce make real its meaning. And every word was to me a treasure and a touch upon my soul; and my grief and trouble before this certain parting drove me that I could not eat, neither have rest; and this did the Master Monstruwacan take upon him to chide and correct; for that, if any were to help, how should it be done if I that had the Night-Hearing, and heard even now that the recording Instruments were dumb, came to ill-health.

And because of this, and such wisdom as was mine, I made to eat and order my life that I might have my full powers. Yet was this beyond all my strength; for, presently, I knew that the people of the Lesser Pyramid were threatened by the monsters that beset them; and later I had knowledge from faint, far words whispered in my brain, that there had been a fight with an outside Force that had harmed many in their minds; so that in madness they had opened the gate and had run from the Lesser Pyramid, out into the darkness of the Lands about them; and there had their physical bodies fallen to the monsters of those Lands; but of their souls who may know?

And this, we set assuredly to the failure of the Earth-Current, which had robbed them of all force and power; so that, in those few weeks all life and joy of living had left them; and neither hunger nor thirst had they, much, nor any great desire to live; but yet a new and mighty fear of death. And this doth seem very strange.

And, as may be thought, all this made the Peoples of the Great Redoubt think newly of the Earth-Current that issued from the “Crack” beneath the Pyramid; and of their latter end; so that much was writ in the Hour-Slips concerning this matter; yet in the main to assure us that we ourselves might each be free from a disturbed heart; though some went foolishly to the other event, and spoke of a speedy danger to us, likewise; as is ever the way. But the truth of our own case lay, maybe, somewhere between.

And all the Hour-Slips were full also of imaginings of the terror of those poor humans out in the darkness of the world, facing that end which must come upon all, even upon our mighty Pyramid; though, as most would believe, so far away in some future eternity, that we have no cause to trouble.

And there were sad poems writ to the peoples of that Lesser Redoubt, and foolish plans set about to rescue them; but none to put them to effect; and no way by which so great a thing might be done; and doth but show how loosely people will speak out of an over-security. Yet to me, there had come a certain knowledge that I must make the adventure, though I achieved naught save mine own end. Yet, it were better to cease quickly, than that I should feel, as now I did feel.

That same night, in the Eighteenth Hour, there was a great disturbance in the aether about the Mighty Pyramid; and I was awakened suddenly by the Master Monstruwacan; that I might use my gift of the Night-Hearing to hearken for the throbbing of the Master-Word, which they had thought to come vaguely through the Instruments; but no one of the Monstruwacans was sensitive enough of soul to account truly whether this was so.

And lo! as I sat up in the bed, there came the sound of the Master-Word, beating in the night about the Pyramid. And immediately there was a crying in the aether all about me:—”We are coming! We are coming!”

And mine inwards leaped and sickened me a moment, so shaken was I with a sudden belief; for the message seemed some ways to come to me from very near to the Great Redoubt; as that they who sent it were nigh to hand.

And, forthwith, I called the Master-Word into the night; but no answer did there come for a while, and then a faint thrilling of the aether about me, and the weak pulse of the Master-Word in the night, sent by a far voice, strangely distant. And I knew that the voice was the voice of Naani; and I put a question through all the darkness of the dead world, whether she were within the Lesser Redoubt, and safe thus far.

And presently, there came a faint disturbance about me, and a small voice in my soul, speaking weakly and out of an infinite distance; and I knew that far away through the night Naani spoke feebly, with her brain-elements; and that she abode within the Lesser Pyramid; but that she too had heard that strange pulse of the Master-Word in the night, and that message:—”We are coming! We are coming!” And vastly had this thing disturbed her, waking her within her sleep; so that she knew not what to think; save that we were devising some method to come to them. But this I removed from doubt, saying that she must not build on vain hoping; for I would not have her doubly tortured by the vanity of such believing. And, thereafter, having said such things as I might, though few they were, to comfort her, I bade her, gently, to sleep; and turned therewith to the Master Monstruwacan, who waited in quiet patience; and had no knowledge of that which I had heard and sent; for his hearing was but the normal; though his brain and heart were such as made me to love him.

And I told the Master Monstruwacan many things as I put my clothing about me; how that there had indeed been the calling of the Master-Word; but not by any of that Lesser Redoubt; but that, to my belief, it had come from nigh about the Great Pyramid. Moreover, it was sent by no instrument; as I wotted that he did guess; but, as it seemed to me, by the brain-elements of many, calling in unison.

And all this did I set out to the Master Monstruwacan; and with something uncertain of fear and trouble in my heart; yet with a blind expectation; as, indeed, who would not. Though, no longer was I shaken by that first thought of Her nearness.

***

NEXT WEEK: “And here I must make known that these weapons did not shoot; but had a disk of grey metal, sharp and wonderful, that spun in the end of a rod of grey metal, and were someways charged by the Earth-Current, so that were any but stricken thereby, they were cut in twain so easy as aught. And the weapons were contrived to the repelling of any Army of Monsters that might make to win entrance to the Redoubt.”

Stay tuned!

***

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, serialized between April and July 2012; H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, serialized between March and August 2012; and Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012.

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

Final deliberations over the Polaris Prize shortlist continue this week among hundreds of jurors across the land, including tonight in a “Salon” (read panel discussion) at the Drake in Toronto. One of the discoveries the jury pointed me to this year is A Tribe Called Red, who provide the first convincing instance I’ve heard of aboriginal/electronic-dance-music fusion since the pioneering of Tanya Tagaq and before her, Buffy Sainte Marie. It’s always a mystery to me that, for all Canadian musicians’ cosmopolitan explorations, these sounds remain so obscured in our pop traditions. It might be an understandable hesitation towards exploitation and appropriation (even when native people themselves are the agents, as pow wow sounds are often related to sacred traditions). The history of borrowing and recontextualizing cultures in North American pop music is violently troubling, of course. But it’s also the whole history of North American pop music. So Tribe Called Red and others in this vein right now may propose a dare worth doubling.

More and more the ArtBase has become a focal point of many of our projects at Rhizome. We’ve been focusing our efforts on web based works, but today we ask for your help in our efforts to restore access to some of the earliest forms of networked based artistic practices that predate the web. 

Donate to our summer fundraiser by July 1st to give Rhizome the support needed to preserve works on obsolete hardware. Your $25 donation will help us get one step closer to securing these tools and restoring access to these early network based works, some of which have not been seen in nearly twenty years. 

We hope you will support Rhizome’s Preservation Initiative today. Thank you for your continued support! 

 

3 Meryl Streep Moon via Buzzfeed

 

#IHATEPOETRY

 

Listen.

I’m just going to put this out there:

I love words, but I hate poetry.

There, I said it.

Who knew it was this serious?

I will never not hate it with a passion.

 

Here’s why I hate poetry: If you have something to
say,

Say it directly. There’s no need for all of these
boring words.

 

JUST SAY IT.

 

I want to drown it in metaphors, similes, etc.

I’m not reading this garbage.

 

I DON’T EVEN GET IT.

 

What’s the point of poetry?

It’s not like I’m going to go around rhyming.

I hate reading it in English. I hate writing it in
French.

My mind does not work this way.

Poetry is the only thing I don’t actually like.

 

Don’t get me started on that symbolism crap.

Why can’t a tree just be a tree?

Where is my dumb poetry book.

 

Poems are literally the worst.

I hate them so much I might die.

Words can not even express how much I truly detest
poetry.

It’s useless. And why does it have to rhyme?

Go shove a hyperbole up your ass.

 

 

***

 

I am going to write a poem about using Meryl Streep’s
laugh as a ringtone.

 

I’ve bookmarked an LA Times article from 1989

in which her giggle eruptions are explored with
great amazement.

 

I’ve tweeted extensively on the tone and timbre of

each particular laugh. Countless hours on Youtube
have been spent

researching and cataloging her various chortles,
cackles and rolling crack-ups.

 

Hers is an auditory knowing glance, vibrating the
air with

sympathetic joy. To watch a supercut of her recorded
laughter is

to change or enhance the trajectory of your day

for the better, for the more equanimous, for the
more open.

 

For these reasons and more,

I am going to write a poem about using Meryl
Streep’s laugh as a ringtone. 

 

TO       UTION SERVICE

DREAM MATTR

Pulsallama’s single “The Devil Lives In My Husband’s Body” came out June 26, 1982. Here’s the original promo video. NYC calypso-new wave about Tourette’s! AMAZEBALLS

Ruts DC’s “Whatever We Do” single came out June 26, 1982.

Bananarama’s “Shy Boy” single came out June 26, 1982. Here’s the original promo video.

Hüsker Dü’s “In a Free Land” single came out June 26, 1982.

Dexy’s Midnight Runners released their “Come On Eileen” single on June 26, 1982. Here’s a live (or live-ish?) performance from that era.