Dormouse Hunting Museum

Off to Devon, so instead of the usual ramblings here’s some information about Sneznik’s Dormouse Hunting Museum, from the rather wonderful ‘Nothing to See Here’ blog.

Bon weekend!

M. R. James the dramatist

And one more thing about M. R. James; he wrote his stories to be read out loud, and they still perform incredibly well. Come Halloween - or indeed any other cold, dark, spooky night - it’s well worth getting a few friends round, sitting down in front of the fire, and reading him to your (terrified) audience.

Quite apart from the spooky fun of it, it’s a fascinating insight into M. R. James the dramatist; his pacing, handling of tone, and character delineation and deployment are masterly.

Oh, and in a final chilling connection - while Provost at Eton, the aging MRJ taught the young Christopher Lee. The cold, bone white baton of spook was passed on to the next generation…

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! And a nice cup of tea…

Writing daily here’s been a very interesting exercise, if only because it’s made me ponder writers I’ve got a lot out of it and think about why I’ve found them so engaging. But I haven’t written about two of my great teenage obsessions – M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft.

MRJ’s ghost stories – and Edwardian ghost stories in general – fascinated me as a teenager. I think it was the combination of the profoundly comforting, secure world that most of them begin, and the subsequent destabilisation / revelation of the limits of that world.

I see MRJ as the great poet of threatened repression. Read from that point of view, so much of his imagery is so resonant – the menacing bedsheets in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’, the terror implicit in people having fun together when you’re on your own in ‘Number 13’, and, perhaps most memorably, the mouth buried beneath a pillow in ‘Casting the Runes’ –

‘So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Intimacy – or the prospect of intimacy – is deeply destructive to worldviews built on repression. The English are a famously repressed bunch; hence, I would suspect, the attractiveness and emotional power of MRJ’s haunted explorations of emotional frigidity at breaking point, as it’s exposed to the possibility of contact.

And what about HPL? My first reading of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is one of the great book experiences of my life. I read it when I was about 14, on a skiing holiday – arctic wastes in prose, arctic wastes outside the window, mountains shadowing both.

HPL opened up whole worlds for me – worlds I found oddly attractive. Reading any one of the ‘real world’ stories (as opposed to the out and out fantasies), I was always falling for the locations – Boston, Arkham, Old New York, and so on. Notwithstanding the cosmic horror and sanity blasting reality of HPL’s world, these are places I’d love to live in.

Partially, that’s because HPL’s universe is such a beautiful place – the romantic sublime in all its awesome power made wildly successful pulp horror fiction. In HPL, terror often comes from enforced scale shifts, from a sudden, panicked realisation of the true place of humanity in the universe, and the consequent utter meaningless of our lives.

But once you’ve got over that, what mysteries and wonders to behold…! Even if, by implication, you have to lose your humanity to do so – becoming an ageless toad thing to swim to Unknown R’yleh, or a strange cone-like creature in a globe spanning prehistoric, pre-human civilisation, or a disembodied living brain in a glass jar carried between the planets by giant, cosmic insects.

And it’s worth remembering that humanity itself can be a source of the terror of difference for others – the implied experience of the resurrected alien characters in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ is fascinating, as is the protagonist’s changing response to them. He moves from terror to interest to respect to empathy, finally saluting the key characteristics that the profoundly alien and the profoundly human share.

‘Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!’

And of course to make the cosmic terrifying, it helps to have something cosy and homely to set it against. Hence also the appeal of Lovecraft’s earthbound locations – they need to be comforting and attractive, to make the rupture from them all the more upsetting. They’re nostalgia made stone; in literary terms, they function absolutely as idealised but artifical and eminently frangible Edens.

So that’s H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James; two writers that hypnotised me, both playing with innocence and experience and finding horror in the relationships and transitions between the two.

Interregnum

Well, if my timings are right, as I type this Tony Blair has resigned as PM and Gordon Brown has yet to be asked to form a new government. We of the UK are ungoverned! What a lovely feeling. I am going to celebrate with a cappuccino at the coffee bar round the corner.

<Edit>

Ruled again! Curse it… Good coffee, though.

The coffee of freedom!

Seeing the world

At Arvon last week I was ranting – as you do – about John Burdett’s ‘Bangkok 8’, the only psychedelic transvestite Thai reincarnation police procedural you’ll ever need to read (apart, of course, from its sequel ‘Bangkok Tattoo’).

And, if that whets your appetite for Thai mythology, there’s much else out there – S.P. Somtow’s short stories and in particular his rather lovely coming of age novel ‘Jasmine Nights’ deal very directly with Thailand’s unreal realms, while Graham Joyce’s ‘Smoking Poppy’ is a much more oblique and restrained take on intersections between fantasy and reality. And that’s just for starters…

What’s interesting is how many of the characters in these novels perceive the fantastic. They take visions of past lives, strange ghosts, practising magicians, exotic curses, and so on, completely in their stride. Reading about such things may be a form of escape for us, but for them it’s the everyday world.

Ostensibly, that takes these books into the realms of fantasy, where Frodo is completely unsurprised by Gandalf’s existence and behaviour because he knows that wizards are real. But there are no hobbits in these books. They deal with authentic worldviews, rooted in direct experience, held by entirely non-fictional people who – if you step on a plane – you can go and meet and chat to.

Commonly, fantasy writing is seen as a form of escapism, but this kind of work points to an opposite function. It understands fantasy to include ‘things unexperienced’ as well as ‘things impossible’, reminding us again and again that there are many more ways of interpreting and engaging with this world than the overly reductive, rationalising modes we so easily fall back on.

Norming, performing

Thomas More notes of the Utopians that ‘they believe that the dead mix freely with the living… the sense of their ancestors’ presence discourages any bad behaviour in private.’ Observation is control; bad behaviour here is deviance from social norms, rather than anything more fundamentally immoral - and the observing dead ensure that those social norms are adhered to, everywhere.

Which made me realise how a sense of being observed is key to social control; and why, in certain kinds of religion, it’s very important that the deity is known to be omniscient. And that leads to ‘1984’, and Orwell’s treatment of Big Brother. Can ‘1984’ be read as religious as much as political satire? Really, it’s taking on any kind of oppressive social structure, however it’s dressed - political, religious, cultural, etc.

And that leads on to a very different kind of ‘Big Brother’. On reality TV, ‘bad behaviour in private’ is actively encouraged – conflict is drama, after all. The purpose of observation here isn’t to enforce a set of pre-existing norms; it’s to encourage the extreme, for our viewing pleasure.

So we’ve inverted Utopia, Airstrip One, and arrived at a place where observation is for the creation of extreme entertainment. Or are these the new norms that we’re meant to embrace? Over-reaction, exhibitionism and a slow process of knock-out until only one of us wins…

Monk ponder work

The dissolution of the monasteries made monks of us all, taking the monastic organisation of time and labour in pursuit of transcendent ends and releasing it into Northern European society as a whole. ‘Laborare est orare’ (itself all verbs, all doing) is made the founding principle of modern society; now our expectation is that work itself can and should be a transcendent activity, a fulfilment in itself.

Zali to rock hard

Zali over at iotacism is playing a solo set at the Klinker in Stoke Newington tomorrow, details (and groovy music downloads) here. Go see him! He will rock unfeasibly hard. Would be there myself, but alas I shall be rowing. A useful skill given current rainfall levels.

Year’s Best Excitement

Oh and - after last week’s Arvon happiness, and the weekend’s Infinity Plus thrills, even more excitement at Allumination Central!

Heather Lindsley’s rather excellent short story ‘Just Do It’ is now out in ‘Year’s Best SF 12′, where she joins luminaries including Liz Williams, Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow and Michael Swanwick. It’s in the shops now, go buy!

You can also read her online - here’s her elegant and evocative short story ‘Mayfly’, over at Strange Horizons.

Mirroring the Fifth Head

An image from Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ popped into my head this morning. Number Five, the protagonist of the first section of the book, catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror and for a second doesn’t recognise himself.

The book is very concerned with people seeing and describing themselves when they don’t really know themselves. It plays with this in a variety of different ways; amongst others, there’s a shapeshifting alien narrator who’s assumed another’s identity so completely that he isn’t aware of the joins, a wealth of buried relationships between characters, and indeed Five’s own relationship with his mysterious patrimony.

Verrry interesting resonances in the novel, but (taken slightly out of context) it’s also an intriguing way of thinking about the process of writing; of reading back over and reflecting that writing. So often you find subjects and themes that seem to have been entirely spontaneously generated, connections within the text that seem to have come from nowhere.

Writing a first draft, looking back over it, gives us a mirror filled with distance from ourselves; an artefact to peer into and be genuinely surprised by. In this context, that makes many of the characters in ‘Fifth Head’ writer analogues – people trying to explain the world to themselves, and through that to us, and along the way finding both familiarity and deep newness in the narratives they create.