Who is the Mad Charlton Romance Cover Captioner, and why did he think “Dual ownership of a boat seldom works out” was a good way to start a cover caption? (See also: “no-no,” with quotation marks around it.)
[Image: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].
[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].
[Images: An architectural "instrument" for the San Andreas Fault, designed and fabricated by student David Hecht at GSAPP].
[Images: From a map of the San Andreas Fault, cutting through the Carrizo Plain, by T.W. Dibblee (1973), courtesy of the USGS].
LOVE LEADING THE PILGRIMS
Hello!
In case you were wondering, this is not going to morph into a blog composed exclusively of me interviewing other authors. But I sure like doing said interviews, and I am now pleased to present another one!
I was intrigued by N. Griffin’s debut novel, The Whole Stupid Way We Are, from the moment I heard its excellent title. It’s about Dinah, church choir director’s daughter who sings off-key, and Skint, who walks coatless through brutal cold; about their friendship and the things that divide them. For a book whose characters have some very hard-to-deal-with experiences, it’s surprisingly funny, and the prose is always precise, whether evoking an escape from detention, the play of sunlight on a toddler’s feet, or how it feels when your help can’t fix what you want to fix.
So I asked N. Griffin some questions. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, but if you are extremely concerned about such things you might want to wait to look at this interview until you’ve finished reading the book. Which, in case it wasn’t obvious from the above, I recommend that you do.
SR: I love the names in TWSWWA. How do you choose character names?
NG: Thank you! Naming the characters is one of the most fun parts about writing books, I think. For TWSWWA, Dinah’s name came first. When I was just starting to write the book, I was working with a woman whose name I adored. Let’s call her Mynah Deech. I loved saying “Mynah Deech” so much I worked it into conversation at every opportunity—“What do you think Mynah Deech would think of this?” and “We better check with Mynah Deech!” In fact, I wanted to steal her whole name for my book but I thought that would be too weird so I settled for a name that rhymed with it and came up with Dinah Beach. All of the other names just felt right to me, and some of the names are sort of a broken-up, messed-up version of a word that was central to my heart while I was writing the book. A MYSTERY! :)
SR: I was struck by Skint’s angry passion about social issues far removed from the considerable challenges of his day-to-day life. At what point in the writing process did that aspect of his character become clear to you?
NG: It was always clear to me; one of the first things I knew about Skint was this. I think this aspect of his character came from two places for me—first, I know so many kids who care this much about suffering and the world, and we never seem to pay attention to that aspect of teenagers. We prefer to think they are only and entirely self-centered, and I know that is beyond not true. I also knew that Skint’s passion for this was an outlet for all the anger in his life—he can’t express what is going on at home, but he can get riled up about the world in a public way, and all his personal hurt and upset gets added to his natural compassion and comes out with all the intensity that would suggest.
SR: Dinah genuinely cares about Skint, but also seems to see him as a project or a job. She comes up with strategies to distract & cheer him: “Outings, she thought firmly, and good ideas to think about. Pretending, talismans, things to do with trees.” I think many of us have known and/or been Dinahs. What do you think drives that particular intense need to help people who may or may not benefit from our efforts?
NG: For Dinah, I think it’s the same intense love and compassion as Skint has, only hers is focused on the personal and her own aching for Skint. I also think she truly thinks she’s helping him, and that can be an intoxicating feeling—who doesn’t want to feel like they are needed like that? But the balance is off for sure, and I think that’s something lots of people take years to make sense of. Not that I know anything about that. No sirree. ;)
SR: I hope I can say this without giving too much away: I was impressed that you leave certain things unresolved at the end. Did you always know you wanted to give that shape to the story, or did you have previous drafts that went in other directions?
NG: Nope, that was always how it was. I think I wrote the last scene when I was only a third of the way through the first of my million drafts. For me, the arc of the story is that of their friendship, not of their whole entire lives. And when that arc was complete, so was the book.
SR: And finally: Dinah and Skint regularly embark on “Fantastic or Excruciating?” adventures:
“An FoE is an entertainment where you can’t tell beforehand whether it will be fabulous and surreal or only just a misery-making fiasco that will make you ache for the performers involved because it is all so awful and the performers are unaware. Or maybe they are aware. And then it is even worse.”
Have you ever done this yourself, and if so, can you describe one?
NG: Oh, my lordie, yes, all the time and even still! Every single FoE in the book except for Walter is one that I have actually experienced. There are so many more, too! I would adore to hear about other people’s FoE’s. I live for this kind of thing.
SR: Thanks for answering, NG!
Like James Cameron’s Titanic, the plot of which was merely an excuse to squire viewers around every inch of an impressively constructed human-container, Escape from Alcatraz is a virtual tour thinly disguised as a dramatic movie; however, because there were no CD-Roms in 1979, perhaps we can be slightly more forgiving of Don Siegel. I enjoy Alcatraz, but not because of its plot; rather, it’s because I’m fascinated by the theme of existential and epistemological jailbreak in the oeuvre of creative types — from postmoderist theorists to this movie’s two stars, Clint Eastwood and Patrick McGoohan — who were born between 1924–33. As I’ve proposed elsewhere, members of this cohort were a “silent” generation only in the sense that at some level they recognized themselves as inmates in a prison with invisible bars… and they were silently determined to tunnel their way to freedom. This movie literalizes the invisible-prison metaphor in a ham-fisted manner, to be sure; but the blocking in the odd scene shown here — the Warden, whom at least some viewers at the time would have recognized as the creator and star of the 1967–68 British TV show The Prisoner, squeezes into jailbreak artist Frank Morris’s tiny cell for a not entirely unpleasant chat — conveys a particularly subtle notion. In what Foucault called (in 1975) a “disciplinary society,” the distinction between the inside and the outside of a prison ceases to be a meaningful one; there is no escape.
An occasional series analyzing some of the author’s favorite moments in the positioning or movement of actors in a movie.
THIRTIES (1934–43): It Happened One Night (1934) | The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) | The Guv’nor (1935) | The 39 Steps (1935) | Young and Innocent (1937) | The Lady Vanishes (1938) | Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) | The Big Sleep (1939) | The Little Princess (1939) | Gone With the Wind (1939) | His Girl Friday (1940)
FORTIES (1944–53): The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) | The Asphalt Jungle (1950) | The African Queen (1951)
FIFTIES (1954–63): A Bucket of Blood (1959) | Beach Party (1963)
SIXTIES (1964–73): For Those Who Think Young (1964) | Thunderball (1965) | Clambake (1967) | Bonnie and Clyde (1967) | Madigan (1968) | Wild in the Streets (1968) | Barbarella (1968) | Harold and Maude (1971) | The Mack (1973) | The Long Goodbye (1973)
SEVENTIES (1974–83): Les Valseuses (1974) | Eraserhead (1976) | The Bad News Bears (1976) | Breaking Away (1979) | Escape from Alcatraz (1979) | Apocalypse Now (1979) | Caddyshack (1980) | Stripes (1981) | Blade Runner (1982) | Tender Mercies (1983) | Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
EIGHTIES (1984–93): Repo Man (1984) | Buckaroo Banzai (1984) | Raising Arizona (1987) | RoboCop (1987) | Goodfellas (1990) | Candyman (1992) | Dazed and Confused (1993)
NINETIES (1994–2003): The Fifth Element (1997)
OUGHTS (2004–13): District 9 (2009)
Joshua Glenn’s most recent books (2012) are UNBORED: THE ESSENTIAL FIELD GUIDE TO SERIOUS FUN (with Elizabeth Foy Larsen); and SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: 100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS (with Rob Walker).
GoogleFaces: An independent searching agent hovering the world to spot all the faces that are hidden on earth.
“The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human’s most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations.”
“One of the key aspects of this project, is the autonomy of the face searching agent and the amount of data we are investigating. The source of our image data is halfway voluntary provided by Google Maps. Our agent flips through one satellite image after the other, in order to feed the face detection algorithm with landscape samples. The corresponding iteration algorithm steps sequentially along the latitude and longitude of our globe. Once the agent circumnavigated the world, it switches to the next zoom level and starts all over again.”
via Tim M.
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.
Chris: Not to make TWC all-Moroder all the time or anything, but this little story is the most charming moment of gear nerdiness I’ve seen in a while.
Sheila E, 1985, playing lead percussion upright and singing “The Glamorous Life” simultaneously. Then somebody drapes a fur coat on her.
Margaux: Good news for atheists brought to you by Pope Francis
Bad news for fictional female characters in television – TV executives not so comfortable with mothers who “work too hard” at their “away” jobs (NPR)
Good news from Banksy
This is a beautiful thing that happened: Balpreet Kaur & a douchebag demonstrate strength of character on the internet (Jezebel)
Informative Rob Ford video from the young Torontonians (teenagers / Globe & Mail)
Other things happening in Toronto this weekend:
Wednesday Lupypciw & FAG & Christie Pits Park bring you QUEER NOISE SOLIDARITY followed by No Pants No Problem afterparty
Prince Nifty album release party at Holy Oak
and HOMOPHILIA w/ DJs Chris Randle and Alex Ostroff at the Yukon
Carl: This interview with Lawrence Wright packs an advanced degree’s worth of non-fiction writing tips into a very short space.
Dr. Jay Michaelson is vice president of the Arcus Foundation and the author of five books and two hundred articles on religion, sexuality, ethics, and contemplative practice. His most recent book, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist
Jay is a contributing editor to the Forward newspaper and associate editor of Religion Dispatches magazine, and his articles appear in The Daily Beast, Salon, The Huffington Post, and other publications. Other books include Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism and Another Word for Sky: Poems.
Yesterday, Jay contributed to a discussion on Huffington Post Live about recent hate crimes directing against LGBT people. We've included the video below along with a companion piece originally posted on Huffington Post.
The murder of Mark Carson, targeted for being gay, is the third, and most serious, in a recent string of attacks against gay men in New York City. The horrific act, under investigation as a hate crime, has brought appropriate condemnations from all quarters.
But what it should not have brought is surprise. On the contrary -- Carson's murder highlights the shortcomings of a rights-based, marriage-based approach to LGBT equality, and cries out for deeper, and more difficult, forms of engagement.
With states falling like dominos into the marriage-equality camp, many have expressed shock that homophobic hatred and violence is "still" possible. But why is this shocking? The advent of civil rights for African Americans did not end racial violence, still widespread nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. Feminism has not ended violence against women. Indeed, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, to echo President Obama's historic turn of phrase, legal inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. Submerged beneath it are deep-seated patterns of injustice, privilege, prejudice and fear.
In an astonishingly short period of time, homophobia has gone from commonplace to contemptible. To take but one example, star athletes are today punished for saying a word - "faggot" -- that was one of the most common slurs of 'trash talk' just five years ago. Indeed, in coverage of Carson's murder, the word, like the 'n-word,' was referred to only euphemistically, as an "antigay slur."
This change is welcome, but it is also so rapid as to induce whiplash. And banning language from polite speech does not remove it from consciousness. On the contrary: the tamping down of hatred only increases its intensity, leading to tragic bursts of rage.
So too the advances in same-sex marriage, the cultural acceptance of LGBT people, and other hard-earned markers of the normalization of sexual diversity. All of these are crucial signposts on the path to equality, and they did not come about overnight; they were, in fact, the culmination of decades of struggle. But none of them, nor all of them altogether, can uproot the roots of homophobia, which lie (among other places) within religion, culture and psychology.
In social struggles, legal equality is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Yes, the state's imprimatur upon animus is now being, gradually, removed. But the animus itself remains. Carson's murder; the other acts of violence against LGBT people in New York; and, further from the camera's lights but more tragic and more prevalent, the spree of violence against transgender people -- particularly transgender women of color, some of the most vulnerable members of the LGBT community -- are not vestiges of bygone days we thought we'd left behind. Rather, they are a reminder that most of the work still lies ahead.
The work to come is different from what's come before. To be sure, legal inequality still persists in most states; in my home state of Florida, for example, I can be fired from a job simply for being gay, and my husband and I cannot adopt a child. But the real debates take place not in legislatures but in living rooms, locker rooms, and, yes, churches as well. For example, religious leaders cannot stand on the sidelines, or equivocate between 'sin' and 'sinner.' You're either opening hearts or closing them, fighting hatred or abetting it. Unfortunately, neutrality is not an option.
Nor is blissful ignorance. It's fun to live in "gay ghettos," or closed bubbles of like-minded friends. But these spaces are permeable. They are not as safe as they seem. And if we want to fight the causes of violence, LGBT folks and our allies need to venture out of them, and have more difficult conversations with those who aren't yet allies. This is more difficult than winning lawsuits; it takes time, and requires vulnerability, dialogue, and persistence. It is the responsibility of all of us, not just a few lobbyists and lawmakers. But personal relationships, personal stories, and personal experiences are the water that will erode the stone of the hardened heart. Nothing else will.
Nor can we imagine that because some of us are secure, all of us are secure. Progress has been uneven. It has not reached LGBT people in red states, in conservative religious families, in many communities of color, or in economically disadvantaged communities. It has not encompassed those whose gender presentation is different from the norm, or who do not "pass," or who are not "just like everyone else." These are people who live in constant threat of violence and marginalization, often intersecting with other forms of oppression.
Carson's murder reminds us that violence can strike anyone, anywhere. But it should also remind us that some people live with this fear every day.
Some privileged pundits have recently opined that the gay mission has been accomplished, that gay organizations should shut their doors, that victory may now be declared. To them, I suppose, Carson's murder is just an anomaly -- and those of more marginalized people, like Ce Ce Acoff, the most recent transgender woman of color victimized by hate, are simply invisible.
But this violence is neither anomalous nor invisible. It should not even be surprising. Rather, it is a reminder that hate doesn't disappear when discriminatory laws are taken off the books. For those of us who need reminding.
The e-mail you get after you write an article about number theory is very interesting. For one thing, you’re reminded of phrasings which have one meaning among mathematicians, but a slightly different one outside the tribe.
The majority of the e-mail I’ve gotten about the bounded gaps piece concerns two questions of this kind: I’ll answer them both here, in case other readers are following the link from Slate to the blog.
Q: You say that the number of primes less than X is about X/log(X), but don’t you mean X/ln(X)?
A: When mathematicians say “log” we mean the natural log, the thing which in some other contexts (e.g. Google’s search bar calculator) is denoted “ln.” But mathematicians never say “ln.” (To be honest, we kind of think the base-10 logarithm should be called “lu.”)
Q: You say that every positive number is the product of primes, but this is not true for prime numbers themselves, which can’t be expressed as products.
A: A prime number is indeed the product of prime numbers! It is the product of just one prime number, itself.
What about 1? It’s the product of zero prime numbers.
Xbox 360’s Kinect causes trouble for users during next-gen livestream reveal | Polygon
“Xbox 360 Kinect owners had some trouble today watching Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal due to device’s response to “Xbox” commands spoken during the livestream. Several users took to Twitter to document their problems, which included pausing, opening Xbox Live or quitting the stream entirely.”
HiLobrow is pleased to present the fourteenth installment of our serialization of Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist. New installments will appear each Thursday for eighteen weeks.
“The Devolutionist” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, July 1921) is the third occult-science-fiction Dr. Kinney story; the others are “The Lord of Death” (June 1919), “The Queen of Life” (August 1919), and “The Emancipatrix” (September 1921). Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — by means of Venusian technology — Dr. Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on other planets. In this story, they visit a double planet: Hafen is the abode of capitalists, Holl of workers. A nearby planet of “cooperative democrats” is in trouble, so Kinney & co. step in.
Cobbler and one-reeler writer Homer Eon Flint (1888–1924) published a number of pulp science fiction stories — including “The Planeteer” (1918; one of the earliest examples of cosmic sci-fi) and The Blind Spot (1921, with Austin Hall) — during the genre’s Radium Age. Everett Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years calls Flint “in many ways the outstanding writer of s-f in the Munsey pulp magazines.” Flint died in a crash near Oakland, Calif., after supposedly stealing a taxi at gunpoint in order to use it in a bank hold-up.
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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |16 | 17 | 18
XIV
UNDER MARTIAL LAW
Van Emmon was pretty cross because Billie, through Mona, had told Fort about Powart’s game. More than once he protested hotly, “You shouldn’t have done that! It’s all their affair, not ours!”
And Billie usually returned, just as warmly, “I don’t care! I think Powart is a scoundrel!” And it was in the midst of one of these tiffs that the doctor interrupted, exactly as though the telepathy was telephony:
“Quiet, you two. Fort has called at the prison, and is being introduced to young Ernol. He —”
“I’ve been talking with your father,” Fort was saying to the son. The guard had left them alone in the cell. “But he isn’t interested in my ideas. He seems to think he’s done all that needs to be done in getting himself imprisoned.”
The boy nodded. “He considers himself a martyr, Mr. Fort; and I guess he’s satisfied like everybody else.” He spoke bitterly.
All Fort’s own youthful enthusiasm returned with a rush. “You’re just the chap I’m looking for! If you’re genuinely ambitious to do the people a great service, now’s your chance!”
And he went on to tell the boy about Powart’s frame-up. He gave every detail of Mona’s strange disclosure, and the boy believed him absolutely.
“I might have known there was some trick about it!” cried the lad. “Alma isn’t that kind of a planet! By Heaven, Powart deserves to be assassinated!”
“Nothing doing,” replied the athlete promptly, his eyes sparkling with the old light. “The first thing is to get you out of here; you, and the other hundred and fifty who were put in at the same time.”
Whereupon he proceeded to outline a scheme such as would look utterly incredible in the mere planning. Perhaps it is best to relate the thing as it happened, instead.
Two nights after Fort’s call on Ernol, Fort again presented himself to Reblong. This time it was at the engineer’s apartments.
“I was hoping to find you about to go on duty. I’ve been wondering how your engines control the steering.” He was eying Reblong steadily. “Some time when it is convenient I wish you would show me all over the ship, and explain everything.” He turned as though to leave.
“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Fort,” Reblong hurried to assure him. “I’d just as soon accommodate you right now as at any time. The ship is always open to me.”
Reblong had said exactly what Fort had hoped and planned that he would say. Fifteen minutes later the two men were inside the big air-cruiser, alone except for a few cleaners, who were finishing the usual work of preparing the ship for its next cruise. But Reblong could not know that Fort had carefully made sure of this fact beforehand.
The engineer took the athlete from one end of the cruiser to the other, showing him how the pilot was able to control its motions with the utmost delicacy, thanks to automatic mechanism in the engine-room, electrically connected with the bridge.
“Suppose I was the pilot now,” commented Fort, standing on the bridge and looking up at the stars. “All I need to do is to set these dials”— indicating the pilot’s instruments —“to ‘ascend,’ and the engine-room would do the rest automatically. Is that it?”
Reblong said this was practically true, and led the way back to the engine-room. The place was full of a gurgling sound, now, due to the fuel being run into the tanks. Reblong glanced at the indicating tube. “We’ve already got enough,” he estimated, “to take the ship a thousand miles.”
And next instant Fort had leaped upon him. Reblong staggered back in his surprise, stumbled against a chair, and sat down heavily, helpless as a child in the athlete’s iron grip.
“Sorry, old man,” remarked Fort, meanwhile pushing him, chair and all, toward the instrument-table. “But it’s simply got to be done.” Like a flash he let go the engineer and snatched a strap from the table — where he had of course previously placed it — and again threw himself upon his man before Reblong recovered from his surprise. In a second he was strapped tight in his chair; and not until then did he think to use his feet. Another strap put an end to his kicking.
“Surprised you, didn’t I?” The athlete was enjoying himself hugely.
“Now —I must remind you that I’m taking a big chance in doing this. If you make a noise, I shall treat you as any desperate man would treat you!” There was a look in his eyes which clinched the matter.
Immediately he disappeared in the direction of the nearest cleaners. Reblong heard sounds of struggling from time to time; and evidently he implicitly believed that Fort would take vengeance upon him if he called for help; for he kept perfectly quiet. After perhaps twenty minutes the athlete returned, breathing heavily, but happy.
“The last one almost spilled my beans,” said he — to use the expression Smith employed. “He happened to see me shutting another one into a closet, and jumped me from behind. I had to lay him out.”
Reblong must have looked alarmed. “Oh, no harm done. They’ll all live to tell about it for the next twenty years.”
Next he made certain adjustments in the engine-room mechanism. Then he went to the telephone, and located the man in charge of the depot. “Hello —Mr. Fort speaking; Reblong isn’t able to come to the phone.” He winked at the man in the chair. “There’s something wrong with the fuel indicator. Shut off the supply for a while, will you?”
The gurgling soon stopped. Reblong watched in continued silence as Fort disappeared again, this time taking the elevator to the bridge. He was back again in a couple of minutes.
“Now, old man,” addressing the engineer, “you can guess what I’m up to. I’m going to navigate this cruiser alone!”
“I’ve set everything for the ascent. You see what I’ve done; if I’ve made any mistakes, it means good-by for the Cobulus, for me, and — for you!
“I leave it to your good sense to tell me if there’s anything I’ve overlooked.” And he laid his hands on the starting-levers.
Reblong said nothing so far, such was his chagrin and wonder. But now he evidently considered seriously what Fort had said.
“I see you mean it, Mr. Fort. And — you ought to know that once you’ve cleared the landing-dock, you’ll have a hard time to keep her level unless you’re up on the bridge. That is, while you’re shifting the wing-angle. But you ought to be down here to do that; and, meanwhile, she might nose down and slam into something, and —” Reblong shuddered.
“I see.” The athlete pondered for a moment. Then he lifted the engineer bodily, chair and all, and moved him over nearer the instrument. Next he loosened one of Reblong’s hands, just enough to permit him to reach certain of the levers. He also did some more tying of knots and shifting of buckles, roped the chair to a stanchion, and made sure that Reblong could not undo himself.
“It’s up to you,” said Fort with the new light in his eyes. “You run this thing as it ought to be run, and you’re safe. Trick me in any way, and I’ll get you!”
Reblong took a single look at those eyes. “I understand,” said he, in a low voice; and without further ado the athlete went to the elevator.
In less than a minute the order came to “cast off.” The engineer did not hesitate, but threw the levers and turned the wheels which Fort had expected to operate himself. Another second and the great craft was rising from its seat.
Shouts, muffled and faint because of the ship’s double windows, sounded from outside. Reblong saw the sheds sinking rapidly below him. In thirty seconds the vessel was free of the dock.
“First gear ahead,” came the signal; and again Reblong obeyed. Practically he had no choice. Another man, of nobler training, might have preferred to be loyal at all costs. But Reblong, the representative Capellan workman, saw the lights of the sheds shift slowly to the rear, then go out of sight as the speed increased. He saw one or two fliers preparing to pursue, but he knew that the cruiser would easily outstrip the best of them.
The Cobulus had got clear away!
It was an hour later that the four, this time through the doctor and young Ernol, learned the sequel to Fort’s daring feat. The boy was alone in his cell, awake in the darkness, when one of the guards marched up to his door and unlocked it.
“Come out,” he ordered; and Ernol preceded him down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, through another corridor and thence into the exercise grounds. On the other side of this was a small building, with no opening save one door, now bright with light. Inside, Ernol found the other men who had been arrested with him, closely watched by a dozen of the prison guards. His father was not there; apparently they were waiting for him to be brought.
“It worked all right,” whispered the man at Ernol’s right, as the boy was lined up. Ernol only nodded slightly, keeping his eyes fixed upon the door. A moment later, the elder Ernol arrived, accompanied by a man whom the doctor instantly recognized.
It was Eklan Norbith, the man whose infernally ingenious use of the clock’s pendulum had wrung the truth about the secret photographs from the boy’s father. He looked even more cruel and repellant now, than he had that night on the couch. Apparently quite recovered, he made a truly forbidding figure.
He had evidently been sent for by the warden; for, with a slow, malignant stare at the row of prisoners, he stated the case in his heavy, ominous tones:
“You are all supposed to know the rules. One of you has been smuggling drugs into the prison; we have found specimens in each cell. It only remains to learn which of you is the guilty party; and that, I propose to uncover within one minute!”
He paused, and glared around again. The stillness was unbroken for a moment; then one prisoner coughed nervously. This started half the rest to doing the same; and under cover of the noise, Ernol whispered to the man on his right:
“No sight of him yet! I’m afraid you showed the drug too soon.”
“I waited until I heard the clock strike,” protested the other; and then both stood on their guard as the commission’s deputy went on with his arraignment:
“It is my duty to inform you, although you probably already know it, that this building is made of iron. Floor, walls, and ceiling are the same.” The doctor saw that the prisoners’ feet were all bare. “And the whole place is heavily wired with high-power electricity!
“The guards and I will now leave you to yourselves.” His teeth showed in an evil smile. “We will give you a few kilowatts as a starter, and shut it off after ten seconds. If you are not ready by that time to tell me which of you is guilty, I will then let you have the current twice as strong!”
The prisoners looked at each other anxiously. Ernol threw back his head defiantly.
“Don’t weaken!” he exclaimed. “The juice can’t hurt you!”
Immediately the guards backed out, keeping their weapons trained on the crowd. Norbith was the last to go. He left the door open; and from where the boy stood he could plainly watch the man as he worked the switches, just outside.
Instantly the place was in an uproar. Of course, the doctor felt nothing of the prickling, nerve-shaking pain that gripped every one of those barefoot men. They leaped and darted here and there, bluish sparks flashing wherever they touched the iron; or they fell after a step or two and writhed on the floor, shrieking and cursing with the exquisite torture of that awful current. Ernol alone kept from shouting; he stood and took it, trembling like a leaf.
But it lasted only a moment or two. The uproar ceased. Norbith stepped back into the room.
“Well?” The slow smile again. “Want to tell now?”
For answer the boy clapped his hand to his mouth and blew a shrill whistle. Norbith stared in astonishment. Then, all of a sudden, a tremendous thing happened.
A veritable hurricane swooped down upon the place. There was a vast rush of wind, accompanied by a thunderous noise, like breakers. Then two huge masses of metal clanged against the sides of the building; there was a grinding crash, and the whole structure rocked and swayed as though in the grasp of some supernatural monster. Next second the lights went out; the wires had snapped.
“All aboard; look out, below!” sang out a voice. It was Fort, calling from far overhead.
And then, slowly at first but with quickening speed, the iron building rose into the air; arose, and floated away like a toy balloon. It was fast in the grip of the Cobulus‘s grappling-irons!
Norbith was the only officer left in the room. He regained his senses with lightning speed. Out came his electric torch; he trained it on the prisoners.
“By God!” he cursed. “You’ll not get away, you —” And he fumbled with the weapon in his belt.
It was one of the boxlike machine guns. Young Ernol hesitated only an instant. Then he dashed forward.
The box spat fire. The boy threw his weight against the deputy, so that the man lost his balance and toppled out the door into the arms of the guards below.
And the doctor brought his own mind back to his body not one second before the lad, burnt through and through by the flame of the man’s weapon, fell back into the room — dead.
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, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.”
HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels (both original and reissued) on HiLobrow, and to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. The following titles can be read in serial form via HiLobrow.com and/or purchased in gorgeous paperback form online or via your local independent bookstore: 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, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.
ORIGINAL FICTION from HILOBROW: James Parker’s swearing-animal fable The Ballad of Cocky The Fox, later published in limited-edition paperback by HiLoBooks; plus: a newsletter, The Sniffer, by Patrick Cates, and further stories: “The Cockarillion”) | Karinne Keithley Syers’s hollow-earth adventure Linda, later published in limited-edition paperback; plus: ukulele music, and a “Floating Appendix”) | Matthew Battles’s stories “Gita Nova“, “Makes the Man,” “Imago,” “Camera Lucida,” “A Simple Message”, “Children of the Volcano”, “The Gnomon”, “Billable Memories”, “For Provisional Description of Superficial Features”, “The Dogs in the Trees”, “The Sovereignties of Invention”, and “Survivor: The Island of Dr. Moreau”; several of these later appeared in the collection The Sovereignties of Invention, published by Red Lemonade | Robert Waldron’s high-school campus roman à clef The School on the Fens | Peggy Nelson’s “Mood Indigo“, “Top Kill Fail“, and “Mercerism” | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Joshua Glenn’s “The Lawless One”, and the mashup story “Zarathustra vs. Swamp Thing” | Adam McGovern and Paolo Leandri’s Idoru Jones comics | John Holbo’s “Sugarplum Squeampunk” | “Another Corporate Death” (1) and “Another Corporate Death” (2) by Mike Fleisch | Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Frank Fiorentino’s graphic novel “The Song of Otto” (excerpt) | “Manoj” and “Josh” by Vijay Balakrishnan | “Verge” by Chris Rossi, and his audio novel Low Priority Hero | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | EPIC WINS: THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | EPIC WINS: THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn | EPIC WINS: THE ILIAD by Stephen Burt | EPIC WINS: THE MYTH OF THE ELK by Matthew Battles | EPIC WINS: GOTHAMIAD by Chad Parmenter | TROUBLED SUPERHUMAN CONTEST: Charles Pappas, “The Law” | CATASTROPHE CONTEST: Timothy Raymond, “Hem and the Flood” | TELEPATHY CONTEST: Rachel Ellis Adams, “Fatima, Can You Hear Me?” | OIL SPILL CONTEST: A.E. Smith, “Sound Thinking | LITTLE NEMO CAPTION CONTEST: Joe Lyons, “Necronomicon” | SPOOKY-KOOKY CONTEST: Tucker Cummings, “Well Marbled” | INVENT-A-HERO CONTEST: TG Gibbon, “The Firefly”
Venus of Google - Matthew Plummer-Fernandez
“The Venus of Google was ‘found’ via a Google search-by-image, googling a photograph taken of an object I had been handed over in a game of exquisite corpse. The Google search returned visually similar results, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment. I then used a similar algorithmic image-comparison technique to drive the automated design of a 3D printable object. The ‘Hill-Climbing’ algorithm starts with a plain box shape and tries thousands of random transformations and comparisons between the shape and the image, eventually mutating towards a form resembling the found image in both shape and colour.”
Venus of Google, 2013
From the Long Tail Multiplier Series/ Algorithm
27.2 x 14.9 x 8.0 cm
z-corp powder 3D Print
In Slate today, I have a piece about Yitang Zhang’s amazing proof of the bounded gaps conjecture. Actually, very little of the article is about Zhang himself or his proof; I wanted instead to explain why mathematicians believed that bounded gaps (or twin primes) was true in the first place, via Cramér’s heuristic that primes behave like random numbers.
And a lot of twin primes is exactly what number theorists expect to find no matter how big the numbers get—not because we think there’s a deep, miraculous structure hidden in the primes, but precisely because we don’t think so. We expect the primes to be tossed around at random like dirt. If the twin primes conjecture were false, that would be a miracle, requiring that some hitherto unknown force be pushing the primes apart.
SPIN premieres an Old Money track today in anticipation of their mixtape Fire In The Dark. “Doctor Doctor” – best Robitussin-themed song you’ve heard in a decade or your money back. #SYRUP #HEALTHCARE #CREAM.
GÉRARD DE NERVAL (Gérard Labrunie, 1808–55) achieved early renown thanks to his translation of Goethe’s Faust (in which Satan was portrayed as a dandy); and his posthumously published autobiography Aurélia has been credited, by such admirers as René Daumal and Antonin Artaud as having introduced irreality — an uncanny slippage between reality and dreams, myth, magic, and the fantasies of the unconscious — into French literature. (André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism: “Nerval possessed to a marvellous degree that spirit with which we claim kinship.”) Yet these days, the only thing most of us know about him is that he supposedly paraded a lobster on a pale blue silk leash through the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Typically understood today as nothing more than bohemian self-promotion, in fact this type of activity on Nerval’s part ought to be regarded as an early, crypto-political mode of street theater. In Paris during the late 1820s and early 1830s, Nerval was a member of the Bouzingos (Shit-Heels), a cohort — whose number included Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, and Philothée O’Neddy — of aesthetic separatists for whom irony and ostentatious uselessness served as a last-ditch redoubt against the inexorable advance of Progress, a religious cult (in their analysis) whose doctrine of efficiency and utility was in those days just beginning to leak out of the economic sphere into society and even culture. (“Nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless,” insists the preface to Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.) It was Nerval who coined the term “ivory tower” to describe an idealized refuge from the vulgar bourgeois era. He never found one: At the age of 47, Nerval hanged himself from a basement window grating.
***
On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Arthur Conan Doyle, Morrissey, Arthur Cravan, Sun Ra.
READ MORE about members of the Autotelic Generation (1805–14).
Susan Katz Miller is a former Newsweek reporter and former US correspondent for New Scientist. She blogs on interfaith families for the Huffington Post and OnBeingBoth.com. She lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband and two interfaith teenagers. Her book, Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family, will be published by Beacon Press in October. This post originally appeared at her OnBeingBoth blog.
In a regular feature titled “Ask Interfaith Mom,” I plan to tackle your questions about raising interfaith kids. Here’s a great question from a comment on a recent post about interfaith grandparents:
Question: In raising my son both, I realize his grandparents will not always like or support how we are bringing the two traditions together and I am interested in ways to present to them that they should always feel free to opt out of saying anything or doing anything they don’t really believe. Thanks for any guidance you have!
One of the most liberating aspects of choosing both family religions is that you give yourself permission to pass on to your children that which is meaningful to you, rather than a required system of beliefs and practices. And in making your own choices, you set a precedent that your children will have the right to opt into or out of any of these beliefs or practices.
Discussing this freedom with your parents (the grandparents) will help them to feel comfortable making their own choices about whether or not to participate in any ritual or prayer they might encounter when celebrating with your interfaith family. Ideally then, the idea that they have permission to participate, or not, would be integral and natural, and would not need to be announced in a formal manner.
But of course, it may take time for extended family members to reach this state of appreciation. Grandparents who have spent a lifetime in a “monofaith” environment, and who may still feel sadness over the fact that their grandchildren will not be raised exclusively in their own religion, cannot always be expected to jump into interfaith practice with enthusiasm. What I can tell you is that many who have started out reluctant or even upset over the idea of an interfaith upbringing, over time have come to appreciate the way extended interfaith families are able to share spiritual inspiration, religious history, and cultures.
However, everyone in an interfaith family (or for that matter, living in our religiously pluralistic society) is going to have moments, often when visiting a more traditional place of worship, when they may want to opt out of participating in a prayer or ritual. Let’s get to some challenging specifics: for instance, taking communion at church. In some churches, the ritual of taking communion becomes a public declaration around who has the right to participate. In such a setting, it would be important to reassure interfaith family members in advance (whether a grandparent, spouse, or interfaith child) that it is fine to remain seated in the pew, and not go up to take communion. Explain that even some Christians abstain from communion at certain times or in certain places, for their own personal reasons, or because not every Christian denomination invites all Christians from other denominations to participate. While those who choose not to take communion may feel like they are sticking out by staying seated, in theory no one should ask them why they remained in the pew.
When you design an interfaith family celebration, this is your opportunity to make the rituals and prayers as inclusive as possible. Ideally, such a celebration would be so welcoming that no one would feel the need to abstain. Sometimes, this means recasting a prayer or ritual to be more radically inclusive, and explicitly inviting all to participate. Personally, I have seen Jewish people (and even a rabbi) take communion at a super-progressive Christian service in which the communion ritual was presented as a metaphorical table where all share food and drink together, based on the Jewish rituals of blessing over bread and wine, regardless of religious institutional membership or beliefs.
To take another example from the other side of the aisle, the bris, or Jewish ritual circumcision for baby boys, can be difficult for non-Jewish family members. Honestly, it is difficult for many Jewish people too, some of whom now oppose circumcision and have designed baby-welcoming ceremonies that do not involve cutting. It’s important to share all the different viewpoints on this ritual with non-Jewish family. I do understand why some interfaith families choose to have a bris, and the deep meaning it has for some Jewish family members. But I don’t think anyone (Jewish or otherwise) should feel required to attend the ceremony. And it would be important to communicate this permission to participate, or not, to everyone in the extended family as early as possible to avoid misunderstandings. Both the new grandparents and their intermarried children must make an extra effort to empathize with each other at this vulnerable moment around birth: the new parents must try hard to accept and not resent family members who choose not to participate, and family must try hard to accept and not resent the choice of the new parents to honor (or conversely, to move away from) such an ancient ritual.
Sometimes, grandparents may surprise you with their willingness to participate, and cross theological boundaries. For instance, I was worried about how my Jewish father would react to hearing his interfaith grandchildren say a traditional Christian prayer such as the Lord’s Prayer in our interfaith community Gathering. To my surprise, I saw my father reciting the prayer along with his grandchildren, and discovered that he said this prayer in his public school classroom everyday, growing up in the 1930s. Since the prayer does not mention Jesus, my father did not even realize until much later that this is officially a Christian prayer. As an adult interfaith child who was raised Jewish, my own appreciation of the Lord’s Prayer is heightened by the knowledge that many scholars have pointed out the parallels between the language in the Lord’s Prayer and the Kaddish and other central Jewish prayers. So a moment I had anticipated as possibly problematic became an opportunity for interesting theological discussion with my parents.
What experiences have you had in including interfaith grandparents? Or, what is your perspective as an interfaith grandparent? And what questions do you have for “Ask Interfaith Mom”?
HiLobrow is pleased to present the tenth installment of our serialization of E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man. New installments will appear each Wednesday for 20 weeks.
Several thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads. At the cost of a certain amount of agency, these devices will permit us to move unhindered through time and space, and to live complacent, well-regulated lives. However, when one of these devices goes awry, a “clockwork man” appears accidentally in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village. Comical yet mind-blowing hijinks ensue.
Considered the first cyborg novel, The Clockwork Man was first published in 1923 — the same year as Karel Capek’s pioneering android play, R.U.R.
“This is still one of the most eloquent pleas for the rejection of the ‘rational’ future and the conservation of the humanity of man. Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity, this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue.” — Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950. “Perhaps the outstanding scientific romance of the 1920s.” — Anatomy of Wonder (1995)
In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish a gorgeous paperback edition of The Clockwork Man, with a new Introduction by Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the science fiction and science blog io9. Newitz is also author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006).
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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
Perhaps it was the strong glare of light issuing from the half-open door of the Templar’s Hall that attracted the attention of the Clockwork man as he wandered along towards the lower end of the town. He entered, and found himself in a small lobby curtained off from the main body of the hall. He must have made some slight noise as he stepped upon the bare boards, for the curtain was swept hastily back, and the Curate, who was acting as chief steward of the proceedings, came hurriedly forward.
As he approached the figure standing beneath the incandescent lamp, the clerical beam upon the Curate’s clean-shaven features deepened into a more secular expression of heartfelt relief.
“I’m so glad you have come at last,” he began, in a strong whisper, “I was beginning to be afraid you were going to disappoint us.”
“I am certainly late,” remarked the Clockwork man, “about eight thousand years late, so far as I can judge.”
The Curate scarcely seemed to catch this remark. “Well, I’m glad you’ve turned up,” he went on, “it’s so pitiful when the little ones have to be disappointed, and they have been so looking forward to the conjuring. Your things have arrived.”
“What things?” enquired the Clockwork man.
“Your properties,” said the Curate, “the rabbits and mice, and so forth. They came this afternoon. I had them put on the stage.”
He fingered nervously with his watch, and then his eye rested for a second upon the other’s head gear.
“Excuse me, but you are the conjurer, aren’t you?” he enquired, a trifle anxiously.
Before the Clockwork man had time to reply to this embarrassing question, the curtain was again swiftly drawn, and an anxious female face appeared. “James, has the conjurer — Oh, yes, I see he has. Do be quick, James. The picture is nearly over.”
The face disappeared, and the Curate’s doubts evaporated for the moment. “Will you come this way?” he continued, and led the way through a long, dark passage to the back of the hall. Behind the screen, upon which the picture was being shown, there was a small space, and here a stage had been erected. Upon a small table in the centre stood a large bag and some packages. The Curate adjusted the small gas-jet so as to produce an illumination sufficient to move about. “We must talk low,” he explained, pointing to the screen in front of them, “the cinematograph is still showing. We shall be ready in about ten minutes. Can you manage in that time?”
But the Clockwork man made no reply. He stood in the middle of the stage and slowly lifted a finger to his nose. The Curate’s doubts returned. Something seemed to occur to him as he examined his companion more closely. “You haven’t been taking anything, my good man, have you? Anything of an alcoholic nature?”
“Conjuring,” said the Clockwork man, slowly, “obsolete form of entertainment. Quickness of the hand deceives the eye.”
“Er — yes,” murmured the Curate. He laughed, rather hysterically, and clasped his hands behind his back. “I suppose you do the — er — usual things — gold watches and so forth out of — er — hats. The children have been so looking forward —”
He paused and unclasped his hands. The Clockwork man was looking at him very hard, and his eyes were rolling in their sockets in a most bewildering fashion. There was a long pause.
“Dear me,” the Curate resumed at last, “there must be some mistake. You don’t look to me like a conjurer. You see, I wrote to Gamages, and they promised they would send a man. Naturally, I thought when you —”
“Gamages,” interrupted the Clockwork man, “wait —I seem to understand — it comes back to me — universal providers — cash account — nine and ninepence — nine and ninepence — nine and ninepence — I beg your pardon.”
“Really!” The Curate’s jaw dropped several inches. “I must apologise. You see, I’m really rather flurried. I have the burden of this entertainment upon my shoulders. It was I who arranged the conjuring. I thought it would be so nice for the children.” He started rubbing his hands together vigorously, as though to cover up his embarrassment. “Then — then you aren’t the man from Gamages?”
“No,” said the Clockwork man, with a certain amount of dignity, “I am the man from nowhere.”
The Curate’s hands became still. “Oh, dear.” He wrestled with the blankness in his mind. “You’re certainly — forgive me for saying it — rather an odd person. I’m afraid we’ve both made a mistake, haven’t we?”
“Wait,” said the Clockwork man, as the Curate walked hesitatingly towards the door, “I begin to grasp things — conjuring —”
“But are you the conjurer?” asked the Curate, coming back.
“Where I come from,” was the astonishing reply, “we are all conjurers. We are always doing conjuring tricks.”
The Curate’s hands were busy again. “I really am quite at a loss,” he murmured.
“It was a characteristic of the earlier stages of the human race,” said the Clockwork man, as though he were addressing a class of students upon some abstruse subject, “that they exercised the arts of legerdemain, magic, illusion and so forth, purely as forms of entertainment in their leisure hours.”
“Now that sounds interesting,” murmured the Curate, as the other paused, although rather for matter than for breath, “it’s so authoritative — as though it were a quotation from some standard work. All the same, and much as I should like to hear more —”
“It is a quotation,” explained the Clockwork man solemnly, “from a work I was reading when I — when the thing happened to me. It is published by Gamages, and the price is nine and ninepence — nine and ninepence — Oh, bother —”
“I’ll make a note of it,” said the Curate. “But you must really excuse me now. I have so much to see to. There’s the refreshments. The sandwiches are only half cut —”
“It was not until the fifty-ninth century,” continued the Clockwork man, speaking with a just perceptible click, “that man became a conjurer in real life. We have here an instance of the complete turning over of human ideas. Ancient man conjured for amusement; modern man conjures as a matter of course, since the invention of the clock and all that its action implies, including the discovery of at least three new dimensions, or fields of action, man’s simplest act of an utilitarian nature may be regarded as a sort of conjuring trick. Certainly our forefathers, if they could see us as we are now constituted, would regard them as such —”
“So frightfully interesting,” the Curate managed to interpose, “but I really cannot spare the time.” He had reverted now to the alcoholic diagnosis.
“The work in question,” continued the Clockwork man, without taking any notice at all of the other’s impatience, “is of a satirical nature. Its purpose is to awaken people to a sense of the many absurdities in modern life that result from a too mechanical efficiency. It is all in my head. I can spin it all out, word for word —”
“Not now,” hastily pleaded the Curate. “Some other time I should be glad to hear it. I am,” his mouth opened very wide, “a great reader myself. And of course, as a professional conjurer, your interest in such a book would be two-fold.”
“When you asked me if I were a conjurer,” said the Clockwork man, “I at once recalled the book. You see, it’s actually in my head. That is how we read books now. We wear them inside the clock, in the form of spools that unwind. What you have said brings it all back to me. It suddenly occurs to me that I am indeed a conjurer, and that all my actions in this backward world must be regarded in the light of magic.”
The Curate’s eyebrows shot up in amazement. “Magic?” he queried, with a short laugh. “Oh, we didn’t bargain for magic. Only the usual sleight of hand.”
“You see, I had lost faith in myself,” said the Clockwork man, plaintively. “I had forgotten what I could do. I was so terribly run down.”
“Ah,” said the Curate, kindly, “very likely that’s what it is. The weather has been very trying. One does get these aberrations. But I do hope you will be able to struggle through the performance, for the children’s sake. Dear me, how did you manage to do that?”
The Curate’s last remark was rapped out on a sharp note of fright and astonishment, for the Clockwork man, as though anxious to demonstrate his willingness to oblige, had performed his first conjuring trick.
Now the Curate, apart from a tendency to lose his head on occasion, was a perfectly normal individual. There was nothing myopic about him. The human mind is so constituted that it can only receive certain impressions of abnormal phenomena slowly and through the proper channels. All sorts of fantastic ideas, intuitions, apprehensions and vague suspicions had been dancing upon the floor of the Curate’s brain as he noticed certain peculiarities about his companion. But he would probably not have given them another thought if it had not been for what now happened.
It would require a mathematical diagram to describe the incident with absolute accuracy. The Curate, of course, had heard nothing about the Clockwork man’s other performances; he had scarcely heeded the hints thrown out about the possibility of movement in other dimensions. It seemed to him, in the uncertain light of their surroundings, that the Clockwork man’s right arm gradually disappeared into space. There was no arm there at all. Afterwards, he remembered a brief moment when the arm had begun to grow vague and transparent; it was moving very rapidly, in some direction, neither up nor down, nor this way or that, but along some shadowy plane. Then it went into nothing, evaporated from view. And just as suddenly, it swung back into the plane of the curate’s vision, and the hand at the end of it grasped a silk hat.
The Curate’s heart thumped slowly. “But how did you do it?” he gasped. “And your arm, you know — it wasn’t there!”
So far as the Clockwork man’s features were capable of change, there passed across them a faint expression of triumph and satisfaction. “I perceive,” he remarked, “that I have indeed lapsed into a world of curiously insufficient and inefficent beings. I have fallen amongst the Unclocked. They cannot perceive Nowhere. They do not understand Nowhen. They lack senses and move about on a single plane. Henceforth, I shall act with greater confidence.”
He threw the hat into infinity and produced a parrot cage with parrot.
“Stop it!” the Curate gasped. “My heart, you know — I have been warned — sudden shocks.” He staggered to the wall and groped blindly for an emergency exit, which he knew to be there somewhere. He found it, forced the door open and fell limply upon the pavement outside.
The Clockwork man turned slowly and surveyed the prostrate figure. “A rudimentary race,” he soliloquised, with his finger nose-wards, “half blind, and painfully restricted in their movements. Evidently they have only a few senses — five at the most.” He passed out into the street, carefully avoiding the body.
“They have a certain freedom,” he continued, still nursing his nose, “within narrow limits. But they soon grow limp. And when they fall down, or lose balance, they have no choice but to embrace the earth.”
He waddled along, with his head stuck jauntily to one side. “I have nothing to fear,” he added, “from such a rudimentary race of beings.”
“Evidently,” his thoughts ran on, “they must regard me as an extraordinary being. And, of course, I am — and far superior. I am a superior being suffering from a nervous breakdown.”
He stopped himself abruptly, as though this view of the matter solved a good many problems.
“I must get myself seen to,” he mused, “because, of course, that accounts for everything; my lapse into this defunct order of things and my inability to move about freely in the usual, multiform manner. And it accounts for my absurd behaviour just now.”
He turned slowly, as though considering whether to return and explain matters to the curate. “I must have frightened him,” he whispered, almost audibly, “but I only wanted to show him and the parrot cage happened to be handy.”
He trundled forward again and lurched into the middle of the street.
“Death,” he reflected, “that was death, I suppose. They still die.”
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, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon 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. So far, we have published 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, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. 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; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, serialized between March and July 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.
A Giorgio Moroder story: apropos of his appearance on a certain new album — a few years ago on ILX, someone named Tilman posted saying he’d been doing research into “I Feel Love“‘s production, saying he was “particularily interested in the delay effect that he uses to “double” the synth riff, and the other means with which he creates “metrical dissonances”, e.g. the echo effects.” He indicated that he’d contacted Moroder directly about this. Moroder replied with this graphic, adding:
“Dear Mr. Tilman
this is the only way i can help yousaluti
Giorgio Moroder”This is the greatest thing ever, of course. Credit to my friend Grady for the reminder.
“if this indeed sounds to you like a “scary encroachment of technology,” Wasik’s word of assurance offers little consolation. The fact that the gadgets are unseen, activities are automated, and cloud intelligence saturates our environment means that the encroachment will be effectively total precisely because it will be invisible and, as they say, frictionless.”
“It’s as if there were some abstract plane of human existence that no one had yet achieved because we were fettered by our need to be directly engaged with the material world. I suppose that makes this a kind of gnostic fantasy. When we no longer have to tend to the world, we can focus on … what exactly?”
HiLobrow is pleased to present the first installment of our serialization of “The Comet,” a 1920 science fiction story by W.E.B. DuBois, the most important black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. “The Comet” was originally published as the tenth chapter of Du Bois’s avant-garde fiction, poetry, and autobiographical collection Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. New installments will appear each Tuesday for five weeks.
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ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that swirled down Broadway. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him save in a way that stung. He was outside the world — “nothing!” as he said bitterly. Bits of the words of the walkers came to him.
“The comet?”
“The comet —”
Everybody was talking of it. Even the president, as he entered, smiled patronizingly at him, and asked:
“Well, Jim, are you scared?”
“No,” said the messenger shortly.
“I thought we’d journeyed through the comet’s tail once,” broke in the junior clerk affably.
“Oh, that was Halley’s,” said the president; “this is a new comet, quite a stranger, they say — wonderful, wonderful! I saw it last night. Oh, by the way, Jim,” turning again to the messenger, “I want you to go down into the lower vaults today.”
The messenger followed the president silently. Of course, they wanted him to go down to the lower vaults. It was too dangerous for more valuable men. He smiled grimly and listened.
“Everything of value has been moved out since the water began to seep in,” said the president; “but we miss two volumes of old records. Suppose you nose around down there, — it isn’t very pleasant, I suppose.”
“Not very,” said the messenger, as he walked out.
“Well, Jim, the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time,” said the vault clerk, as he passed over the keys; but the messenger passed silently down the stairs. Down he went beneath Broadway, where the dim light filtered through the feet of hurrying men; down to the dark basement beneath; down into the blackness and silence beneath that lowest cavern. Here with his dark lantern he groped in the bowels of the earth, under the world.
He drew a long breath as he threw back the last great iron door and stepped into the fetid slime within. Here at last was peace, and he groped moodily forward. A great rat leaped past him and cobwebs crept across his face. He felt carefully around the room, shelf by shelf, on the muddied floor, and in crevice and corner. Nothing. Then he went back to the far end, where somehow the wall felt different. He sounded and pushed and pried. Nothing. He started away. Then something brought him back. He was sounding and working again when suddenly the whole black wall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond. He peered in; it was evidently a secret vault — some hiding place of the old bank unknown in newer times. He entered hesitatingly. It was a long, narrow room with shelves, and at the far end, an old iron chest. On a high shelf lay the two missing volumes of records, and others. He put them carefully aside and stepped to the chest. It was old, strong, and rusty. He looked at the vast and old-fashioned lock and flashed his light on the hinges. They were deeply incrusted with rust. Looking about, he found a bit of iron and began to pry. The rust had eaten a hundred years, and it had gone deep. Slowly, wearily, the old lid lifted, and with a last, low groan lay bare its treasure — and he saw the dull sheen of gold!
“Boom!”
A low, grinding, reverberating crash struck upon his ear. He started up and looked about. All was black and still. He groped for his light and swung it about him. Then he knew! The great stone door had swung to. He forgot the gold and looked death squarely in the face. Then with a sigh he went methodically to work. The cold sweat stood on his forehead; but he searched, pounded, pushed, and worked until after what seemed endless hours his hand struck a cold bit of metal and the great door swung again harshly on its hinges, and then, striking against something soft and heavy, stopped. He had just room to squeeze through. There lay the body of the vault clerk, cold and stiff. He stared at it, and then felt sick and nauseated. The air seemed unaccountably foul, with a strong, peculiar odor. He stepped forward, clutched at the air, and fell fainting across the corpse.
He awoke with a sense of horror, leaped from the body, and groped up the stairs, calling to the guard. The watchman sat as if asleep, with the gate swinging free. With one glance at him the messenger hurried up to the sub-vault. In vain he called to the guards. His voice echoed and re-echoed weirdly. Up into the great basement he rushed. Here another guard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in the messenger’s heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank. The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and stretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glanced about. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling! “Robbery and murder,” he whispered slowly to himself as he saw the twisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on his desk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone — with all this money and all these dead men — what would his life be worth? He glanced about, tiptoed cautiously to a side door, and again looked behind. Quietly he turned the latch and stepped out into Wall Street.
How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was high-noon — Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in his limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddily against the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight.
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, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon 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. So far, we have published 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, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage. 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; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013.
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.
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].With an artist’s brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using “oil” paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the “needle” (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlooked—overlistened?—acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in “plastic” materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].metahaven - The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton
HiLobrow is pleased to present the eleventh installment of our serialization of Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage (also known as Lest Ye Die). New installments will appear each Monday for 25 weeks.
When war breaks out in Europe — war which aims successfully to displace entire populations — British civilization collapses utterly and overnight. The ironically named Theodore Savage, an educated and dissatisfied idler, must learn to survive by his wits in the new England, where 20th-century science, technology, and culture are regarded with superstitious awe and terror.
The book — by a writer best known today for her suffragist plays, treatises, and activism — was published in 1922. In September 2013, HiLoBooks will publish it in a gorgeous paperback edition, with an Introduction by Gary Panter.
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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 | 25
Theodore lived through the winter — as all his fellows lived — destructively, on the legacy and remnant of other men’s savings and makings; scraping and grubbing in other men’s ground, burning furniture and wood-work, the product of other men’s labours, and taking no thought for the morrow. At the beginning of winter some four or five score of human shadows, men and women, crept about the dead streets and the fields beyond them in their daily quest for the means to keep life in their bodies; but, as the weeks drew on and the winter hardened, starvation and the sickness born of starvation reduced their numbers by a half. Those lived best who were most skilful at the trapping of vermin; and they had long been existing on little but rat-flesh, when some hunters of rats, on the track of their prey, discovered a treasure beyond price — a godsend — in the shape of sacks of grain in the cellar of an empty brewery.
The discovery meant more than a supply of food and the staving-off of death by starvation; with the possession of resources that, with care, might last for weeks there came into being a common interest, the fellowship that makes a social system. After the first wild struggle — the rush to fill their hands and cram their gnawing stomachs — the shadows and skeletons of men controlled their instincts and took counsel; the fact that their stomachs were full and their craving satisfied gave back to them the power of construction, of fore-thought and restraint; they ceased to be instinctively inimical and wholly animal and took common measures for the preservation and rationing of their heaven-sent windfall. They advised, consulted, heard opinion and gave it, were reasonable; counted their numbers in relation to the size of their hoard; and in the end decided, by common consent, on the amount of the daily portion which was to be allotted to each in return for his share in the duty of guarding it — against the cravings of their own hunger as well as against the inroads of rats and mice…. With food — with property — they were human again; capable of plans for the morrow, of concerted and intelligent action. The enmity they had hitherto felt against each other was suddenly transferred to the stranger — the foreigner — who might force his way in and acquire a share in their treasure. Hence they took precautions against the arrival of the stranger, kept watch and ward on the outskirts of the town and drove away the chance newcomer, so that the knowledge of their good fortune should not spread. With duties shared, the dead sense of comradeship revived; they began to recognize and greet each other as they came for their daily portion. And if some were restrained only by the common watchfulness from appropriating more than their share of the common stock, there were others in whom stirred the sense of honour.
For a week or more they lived under the beginnings of a social system which was rendered possible by their certainty of a daily mess; and then came what, perhaps, was inevitable — discovery of pilfering from the store that gave life to them all. The pilferers, detected by the night-guard, fled on the instant, well knowing that their sin against the very existence of the little community was a sin beyond hope of forgiveness; they eluded pursuit in the darkness and by morning had vanished from the neighbourhood. For the time only; since they took with them the knowledge of the hoarded grain they had forfeited — a knowledge which was power and a weapon to themselves, a danger to those they had fled from. Two days later, after nightfall, a skeleton rabble, armed with knives, clubs and stones, was led into the town by the renegades; and there was fought out a fierce, elementary battle, a struggle of starved men for the prize of life itself…. From the first the case of the defenders was hopeless; outnumbered and taken by surprise, they were beaten in detail, overwhelmed — and in less than five minutes the survivors were flying for their lives, the darkness their only hope of safety.
Theodore Savage was of the remnant who owed their lives to darkness and the speed with which they fled. As he neared the outskirts of the town and slackened, exhausted, to draw breath, he heard the patter of running steps behind him and for a moment believed himself pursued — till a passing burst of moonlight showed the runner as a woman, like himself seeking safety in flight. A young woman, with a sobbing open mouth, who clutched at his arm and besought him not to leave her to be killed — to save her, to get her away! … He knew her by sight as he knew all the members of the destitute little community — a girl with a face once plump, now hollowed, whom he had seen daily when she came, in stupid wretchedness, to hold out her bowl for her share of the common ration; one of a squalid company of three or four women who herded together — and whose habit of instinctive fellowship was broken by the sudden onslaught which had driven them apart in flight.
“I don’t know where they’ve all gone,” she wailed. “Don’t leave me — for Gawd’s saike don’t leave me…. Ow, whatever shall I do? … I dunno where to go — for Gawd’s sake…”
He would gladly have been rid of her lamenting helplessness but she clung to him in a panic that would not be gainsaid, as fearful almost of the lonely dark ahead as of the bloody brawl she had fled from.
“Hold your tongue,” he ordered as he pulled her along. “Don’t make that noise or they’ll hear us. And keep close to me — keep in the shadow.”
She obeyed and stilled her sobbing to gasps and whimpers — holding tightly to his arm while he hurried her through by-streets to the open country. He knew no more than she where they were going when they left the silent outskirts of the town behind them, and, pressing against each other for warmth, bent their heads to a January wind.
That night for Theodore Savage was the beginning of an odd partnership, a new phase of his life uncivilized. The girl who had clutched at him as the drowning clutch at straws was destined to bear him company for more than a winter’s night and a journey to comparative safety; being by nature and training of the type that clings, as a matter of right, to whomsoever will fend for it, she drifted after him instinctively. When she woke in the morning in the shelter he had found for her she looked round for him to guide and, if possible, feed her — and awaited his instructions passively.
One human being — so it did not threaten him with violence — was no more to him than another, and perhaps he hardly noticed that when he rose and moved on she followed. From that hour forth she was always at his heels — complaining or too wretched to complain. He would let her hang on his arm as they trudged and shared his findings of food with her — because she had followed, was there; and it was some time before he realized that he had shouldered a responsibility which had no intention of shifting itself from his back…. When he realized the fact he had already tacitly accepted it; and for the first few weeks of their existence in common he was too fiercely occupied in the task of keeping them both alive to consider or define his relationship to the creature who whimpered and stumbled at his heels and took scraps of food from his hands. When, at last, he considered it, the relationship was established on both sides. She was his dependent, after the fashion of a child or an accustomed dog; and having learned to look to him for food, for guidance and protection, she could be cast off only by direct cruelty and the breaking of a daily habit.
In the beginning that was all; she followed because she did not know what else to do; he led and they hungered together. For the most part they were silent with the speechlessness of misery, and it was days before he even asked her name, weeks before he knew more of her life in the past than was betrayed by a Cockney accent. So long as existence was a craving and a fear, where nothing mattered save hunger and the fending-off of present death, the fact that she was a woman meant no more to him than her dependence and his own responsibility; thus her companionship was no more than the bodily presence of a human being whose needs were his own, whose terrors and whose enemies were his.
They prowled and starved together through the long bitterness of winter in a world stripped bare of its last year’s harvest where all hungry mouths strove to keep other mouths at a distance; and time and again, when they grubbed for food or sought to take shelter, they were driven away with threats and with violence by those who already held possession of some tract of street or country. No claim to ownership could stand against the claim of a stronger, and one man, meeting them, would avoid them, slink out of their way — because, being two, they could strip him if the mood should take them. And when they, in their turn, sighted three or four figures in the distance, they made haste to take another road.
Once, when a solitary wayfarer shrank from them and scuttled to the cover of a ragged patch of firewood, there came back to Theodore, like a rushing mighty wind, the memory of his last days in London, the thought of his journey down to York. The strange, glad fellowship of the outbreak of war, the eagerness to serve and be sacrificed; the friendliness of strangers, the dear love of England, the brotherhood!… The creature who scuttled at his very sight would have been his brother in those first days of splendid sacrifice! “Lord God!” he said and laughed long and uncontrollably; while the girl, Ada, stared in open-mouthed bewilderment — then pulled at his arm and began to cry, believing he was going off his head.
In their hunted and fugitive life their wanderings, of necessity, were planless; they drifted east or west, by this road or that, as fear, the weather or the cravings of their hunger prompted. They sought food, thought food only and, as far as possible, avoided the neighbourhood of those, their fellow-men, who might try to share their meagre findings. House-room, bare house-room, stood ready for their taking in the country as well as in the town; but wherever there was more than house-room — food or the mere possibility of food — the human wolf was at hand to dispute it with his rivals. There was a time when a road, followed blindly, led them down to the sea and the corpse of a pretentious little watering-place — where stiff, blank terraces of ornate brick and plaster stared out at the unbroken sea-line; they found themselves shelter in a bow-windowed villa that still bore the legend “Ocean View: Apartments,” trudged along the tide-mark in search of sand-crabs and fished from an iron-legged pier. When a long winter gale swept the pier with breakers and put a stop to their fishing, they turned and tramped inland again…. And there was another time when they were the sole inhabitants of a stretch of Welsh mining-village — they knew it for Welsh by the street-names — where they hunted their rats and grubbed for roots in allotments already trampled over. For very starvation they moved on again; and later — how much later they could not remember — took shelter, because they could go no further, in a cottage on the outskirts of a moor-land hamlet, where they were almost at extremity when a bitter spell of cold, at the end of winter, sent them food in the shape of frozen rooks and starlings. And, a day or two later, they were driven out again; Theodore, searching for dead birds in the snow, met others engaged in the same hungry quest — other and earlier settlers in the neighbourhood who saw in him a poacher on their scanty hunting-grounds and, gathering together in a common hate and need, fell on the intruders and chased them out with stones and threats. Theodore and the girl were hunted from their homestead and out on to the bleakness of the moor; whence, looking back breathless and aching from their bruises, they saw half a dozen yelling starvelings who still threatened them with shouts and upraised fists…. They went on blindly because they dared not stay; and that, for many days, was the last they saw of mankind.
It must have been towards the end of February or the beginning of March that they ended their long goings to and fro and found the refuge that, for many months, was to give them hiding and sustenance. Since they had been driven from their last shelter they had sighted no enemy in the shape of a living man, but the days that followed their flight had been almost foodless; and in the end they had come near to death from exposure on a stretch of hill and heath-covered country where they lost all sense of direction or even of desire. There, without doubt, they would have left their bones if there had not already been a promise of spring in the air; as it was, they could hardly drag themselves along when the moor dropped suddenly into a valley, a wide strip of land once pasture, now bleak and blackened from the passing of the poison-fire which had seared it from end to end. Here and there were charred mummies of men and of animals, lying thickest round a farmhouse, partly burned out; but beyond the burned farmhouse was a stream that might yield them fish; and with the warmth that was melting the snow on the hilltops little shafts of green life were piercing through the blackened soil. Before dark, in what once had been a garden, they scraped with their nails and their knives and found food — worm-eaten roots that would once have seemed unfit for cattle, that they thrust into their mouths unwashed. They sheltered for the night within the skeleton walls of the farm ; and when, with morning, they crawled into the sun, the last patch of snow had vanished from the hills and the tiny shafts of green were more radiant against the blackened soil…. The long curse and barrenness of winter was over and Nature was beginning anew her task of supporting her children.
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, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon 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. So far, we have published 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, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, Edward Shanks’s The People of the Ruins, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, and J.D. Beresford’s Goslings. Forthcoming: E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, and Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses. 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; Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins, serialized between May and September 2012; William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, serialized between June and December 2012; J.D. Beresford’s Goslings, serialized between September 2012 and May 2013; and Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage, serialized between March and August 2013.
“Verso Books have offered Rhizome readers in the UK a chance to win a 3D printed Guy Debord action figure.”
(via Front Page)”>Rhizome | Guy Debord Limited Edition Action Figure Giveaway)
My 20th Harvard reunion book is in hand, offering a social snapshot of a certain educationally (and mostly financially) elite slice of the US population.
Here is what Harvard alums name their kids. These are chosen by alphabetical order of surname from one segment of the book. Most of these children are born between 2003 and the present. They are grouped by family.
Molly, Danielle
Zachary, Zoe, Alex
Elias, Ella, Irena
Sawyer, Luke
Peyton, Aiden
Richard, Sonya
Grayson, Parker, Saya
Yoomi, Dae-il
Io, Pico, Daphne
Lucine, Mayri
Matthew, Christopher
Richard, Annalise, Ryan
Jackson
Christopher, Sarah, Zachary, Claire
Shaiann, Zaccary
Alexandra, Victoria, Arianna, Madeline
Samara
Grace, Luke, Anna
William, Cecilia, Maya
Bode, Tyler
Daniel, Catherine
Alex, Gretchen
Nathan, Spencer, Benjamin
Ezekiel, Jesse
Matthew, Lauren, Ava, Nathan
Samuel, Katherine, Peter, Sophia
Ameri, Charles
Sebastian
Andrew, Zachary, Nathan
Alexander, Gabriella
Liam
Andrew, Nadia
Caroline, Elizabeth
Paul, Andrew
Shania, Tell, Delia
Saxon, Beatrix
Benjamin
Nathan, Lukas, Jacob
Noah, Haydn, Ellyson
Freddie
Leonidas, Cyrus
Isabelle, Emma
Joseph, Theodore
Asha, Sophie, Tejas
Gabriela, Carlos, Sebastian
Brendan, Katherine
Rayne
James, Seeger, Arden
Helena, Freya
Alexandra, Matthew
George
If you saw these names, would you be able to guess roughly what part of the culture they were drawn from? Are there ways in which the distribution is plainly different from “standard” US naming practice?
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| Wallace Berman in Larkspur |
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| Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim's "And God Created Woman" |
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| The Lark Theater in Larkspur where I saw my first movie, which was "And God Created Woman" |
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| John Reed in Larkspur (photo by Wallace Berman) |
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| Semina Gallery in Larkspur (photo by Charles Brittin) |
In which the remarkable Aaron Mandel presents a taxonomy of the terrible, terrible things that turn up in digital music archives. Read, listen, crack up.
The most amazing one that I’ve found to date is Charts Hits 2013’s clone of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” It features a vocalist who makes no attempt to sound like Macklemore, and even so, he’s in way over his head. Clearly, the guy is reading from a lyric sheet. He says “mezzanine” like it rhymes with “nine” and says that he’s draped in a “Leonard mink.” The horn riff is also agonizingly squared off, with every note played at exactly the same volume.
This “Thrift Shop” clone is on the Spotify playlist of musical spam we mentioned above, but really, it’s way too good to miss, so here’s a YouTube link too.
At risk of becoming a MapBox fan blog:
Here’s a nice quote from the article:
The team uses some techniques to ensure that they’re capturing peak growth, which is May/June in the northern hemisphere and December/January in the southern. In addition, because the process favors darker pixels, the first output can seem very dim and underexposed, says Loyd.
“It’s a completely natural product,” says Loyd. “Every pixel is a real pixel captured by an camera in the sky. But it’s also completely synthetic.” The goal for the map is to capture roughly what the naked eye can see from space, but for an idealized cloudless planet trapped in eternal summer.
