“Imagination to power,” as the French students said. “Be practical, do the impossible,” because if you don’t do the impossible, as I’ve cried out over and over again, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do. And that impossible is both in our own conviction and in our shared conviction with our brothers and sisters, to begin to try to create, or work toward a very distinct notion of what constitutes a finally truly liberated as well as ecological society. A utopian notion, not a futuristic notion.
Posted 1387 days ago.
He was the born confidant, the shadowy friend, the evasive supporter. What you assert he does not deny. In a sense he acts out feminine attributes in relationships, he yields, he consoles, he sustains. He is the felt in the bedroom slipper, the storm strips on the wintry windows, the wool lining back of piano keys, the interlining in conversations, the shock absorber on the springs of cars, the lightning conductor. He is the invisible man. When he worked at the press with us, and Gonzalo’s anarchism, erratic hours, cause us so much anguish and extra work, he was the receptive ear, the devoted helper. In his diary he asserted his physical hungers and fulfillments. But I have yet to know this enigmatic friend.
Posted 1395 days ago.
Oh, hey, I kinda lost the conceit on the last one, didn’t I. Shoulda been something like Heptanomicon, instead of an ansible quote.
Anyway. —The kid’s now had a thirteenth birthday, which has me feeling the passage of time in all kinds of ways; the first draft of no. 39 proceeds apace, on track to finish on time, if not necessarily under budget (there’s already one scene that went on for over 1,800 words because it took me a while to figure out what it was trying to do, so that’s gonna need to be completely restaged on the rewrite, and no, it’s not the one with the adraxone monologue). —But it’s nothing we can’t handle.
Click here, then, for the cover reveal (or here, for the underlying image): the VERN, Chilli’s unofficial headquarters on Southeast Belmont, as fine a Tower as he’s ever likely to fall from. —The real name of the joint is Hanigan’s Tavern, but it’s been called the Vern by just about everybody ever since the night somebody parked a tall truck a little too close. Or, at least, that used to be the real name: couple of years ago a couple of entrepreneurs added this dive to their portfolio of reclaimed watering holes, remaking the interior with tchotchkes salvaged from other dead bars, redoing the menu and the liquor shelf, and renaming the new joint officially as the Vern, which seems to miss several important points all at once.
In the meanwhile, my coffee cup’s (once more) almost empty, which means the cat asleep on my lap is about to be rudely awakened (again), and I’ve yet to hit today’s word count. Happy November, y’all.
Posted 1397 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
It is a fine new day and the suns are bright. Dew glistens on the robot and the axe. The robot says Good morning, or perhaps it is the axe, which you stole as a child from the secret fortress in the mountain, and which looks very grave today. Suddenly a mother ship of the enemy pierces the upper atmosphere, blotting out a sun. The axe begins to sing. Nothing could be finer than to live inside an opera, just before the aria of the war.
Posted 1403 days ago.
Whatever, in short, occurs to us we are fond of referring to some species or class of things, with all of which it has a nearly exact resemblance: and though we often know no more about them than about it, yet we are apt to fancy that by being able to do so, we show ourselves to be better acquainted with it, and to have a more thorough insight into its nature. But when something quite new and singular is presented, we feel ourselves incapable of doing this. The memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance. If by some of its qualities it seems to resemble, and to be connected with a species which we have before been acquainted with, it is by others separated and detached from that, and from all the other assortments of things we have hitherto been able to make. It stands alone and by itself in the imagination, and refuses to be grouped or confounded with any set of objects whatever. The imagination and memory exert themselves to no purpose, and in vain look around all their classes of ideas in order to find one under which it may be arranged. They fluctuate to no purpose from thought to thought, and we remain still uncertain and undetermined where to place it, or what to think of it. It is this fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits that they excite, which constitute the sentiment properly called Wonder, and which occasion that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others, when wondering at some new object, and which are the natural symptoms of uncertain and undetermined thought. What sort of a thing can that be? What is that like? are the questions which, upon such an occasion, we are all naturally disposed to ask. If we can recollect many such objects which exactly resemble this new appearance, and which present themselves to the imagination naturally, and as it were of their own accord, our Wonder is entirely at an end. If we can recollect but a few, and which it requires too some trouble to be able to call up, our Wonder is indeed diminished, but not quite destroyed. If we can recollect none, but are quite at a loss, it is the greatest possible.
Posted 1411 days ago.
Approached differently, the construction of science and religion as antagonists implied a third position representing where the categories both convene and collapse. In my last book I deployed this trinary in a genealogy of the category “religions,” but here I want to follow the third term. Negatively valenced, it is understood to be superstition and in this respect appears as the double of either religion or science. Hence, a certain cross-section of scientists trumpeted the power of their respective domain by suggesting that all of religion was a superstition. Positively valenced, the third term is magic, which was often supposed to take the best elements of religion and science together or to recover things suppressed by “modern” science or religion. Indeed, most of what gets classified as contemporary esotericism or occultism came into being as an attempt to repair the rupture between religion and science.
Posted 1490 days ago.
And though a Collection is not esteemed to carry with it a Proof of Genius and Understanding like a genuine Composition, yet the Labour must be allowed greater, as ’tis certainly more easy for a Person to pen his own Thoughts, than dexterously to select and range those of others; more especially if he has them to seek, compare and correct from a large Variety of Authors in different Languages. This has been my Task. And I wish my Performance may be looked on like the Bee’s Industry; as Honey will not lose its Taste or Virtue, by reflecting that that Insect was only a Collector, not Author of its Sweetness.
Posted 1501 days ago.
Four weeks ago it was unconscionably hot. Remember? The heat dome squatting over the Pacific Northwest, and temperatures inside our shaded breezy house rivaling the usual outer bounds of high temperature outside for a day late in June. —When our internal temperature finally dropped below 80°, I could once more turn on my elderly Mac without fearing it would melt, and open up the file to see how far I’d got. (I do have other ways to write, but when it’s 110° outside and only twenty degrees cooler within, one would much rather lie on a bed without thinking rather than strive, diligently, to unstick oneself from one’s ways.) So I opened up the file to see I was only just barely quite halfway through the first draft of no. 38: the barker had only just started his (completely rewritten) spiel. —That was four weeks ago.
Since then: the gates have opened; we’ve been exploring the centerpiece of the whole dam’ thing (which didn’t snap into focus almost until I was upon it) (and then there’s the whole new character it turns out I didn’t need, who I have to go back and unwrite, sorry Nick)—but: but. I still haven’t gotten to Gun Street. I’m not sure no. 38 will be done in time to appear in August. I think I’m gonna miss the deadline. (Whoosh.)
No. 38, “ – Ekumen ain’t everything – ”, lines up if you like with the fifteenth card of the Major Arcana, Old Mister Scratch his own dam’ self: dark sides and shadow selves, forbidden thoughts released, the ties that bind made manifest to be tested and indulged: when snowballs don’t stand a chance, as we prepare to take our leave of the realm of fucking around, and our first steps into the world of finding out. —Perhaps that’s why picking my way through’s been so infuriatingly slow?
Sure. Let’s blame that.
Structurally speaking, this is the last of the wind-up installments: the next, no. 39, sits in the very middle of this volume, the apex of its rising action: decisions will be made, positions staked, irrevocable actions taken, perhaps even a blow or two to be struck. And then the four falling, unwinding installments, echoing and reverberating, and the final climactic novelette, no. 44, that will end the volume and the season. (Should I have tagged this with a spoiler warning? Do you feel spoiled? Apologies.) —Maybe that also has something to do with it.
If you follow the Pixelfed, you’ve already seen the cover reveal: a photo taken in the middle of the Tilikum Crossing, which the kid once said is like the sort of bridge they have in Pokémon cities. It won’t, insofar as I know, appear in the novelette itself. —Go, then, and prepare thyself for the Dog Days. They’re a-comin’.
Posted 1508 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
His argument was that the name we give to that supposed author disguised a bias modern folk have for writing and against listening. In Kanigel’s words, literary critics of the twentieth century associated reading and writing with “advanced civilizations,” and disliked the “repetition and stereotype” that characterizes oral poetry, a leaning that “blinded them to the fecund richness of illiterate cultures.” Although this theory had been modestly proposed by a number of scholars before Parry, and the groundwork was laid by the French scholar Marcel Jousse, who himself grew up amid the oral songsmithery of a largely illiterate community in France, Parry’s innovation lay in the scientific way he proved his inklings.
Using numerical methods, he counted exactly how many times the “ornamental epithets” so characteristic of Homeric epics—γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη (bright-eyed Athena), πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης (loud-roaring sea), and so on—appeared, and, crucially, where in the dactylic hexameter of the poem’s lines they cropped up. Such epithets were not, Parry showed, functionally descriptive at all; they tended to provide no new information about whatever story was being told, but instead existed for what he called the “convenience” of people performing the song. The epithets showed up in “prescribed position and order,” he wrote, essentially filling in metrical gaps wherever they occurred, “giving a permanent, unchanging sense of strength and beauty.”
Posted 1530 days ago.
Modernity becomes a nonteleological category when used to describe multiple, overlapping lifeworlds, sexual norms, and self-understandings produced by an unevenly developing world system. Those lifeworlds and sexual norms that characterized an increasingly residual world of feudal peasantry, small proprietors, urban artisans, and noble classes combined and came into conflict with the emergent norms and lifeworlds of cities, proletarian populations, and ascendant national bourgeoisies. Thematizing this unevenness and conflict establishes the disjunctive temporality and shifting borders of change without representing the historical process as some unilinear succession or archæology settled into impassable, sedimented layers.
Posted 1562 days ago.
