Kip Manley's Blog, page 44

No. 27: tends to crumble (Closing)

Boom & Bang & Rattle & Crash

No. 27: tends to crumble (Act IV)

the Question mark – la Différance – Laissez-majesté – what She might Ask –

No. 27: tends to crumble (Act III)

Eyelids a-Twitch – Played again – How she Might hear – “The hell with the milk” –

No. 27: tends to crumble (Act II)

“Quite distressing” – well as She might – taking Any hand – Something falls –

No. 27: tends to crumble (Act I)

“The first order of Business” – at This table – antique Punk bullshit – the Basics of Security –

No. 27: tends to crumble (Opening)

the Blue room – Bottles & Cartons & Tubs & Boxes –

Things to keep in mind (The secret of misdirection)

M Train is a self-portrait of the artist in late middle age, and it’s to her credit that she includes most of the everyday stuff other rock stars are usually afraid to mention. She potters, stares out of the window, does the laundry, reads; she buys, makes and thinks about coffee. (There’s a lot of death and coffee, but no sex or taxes.) This is not the ageing rock star à la Keith Richards or Lemmy, maintaining the gnarly crocodile-skinned persona to the bitter end. But though she gives the impression of spilling the (Arabica) beans, there are also signs of something more ambiguous—details that make you distrust the performance of homeyness, or least take it with a pinch of artisanal honeycomb. There is, for instance, her membership of something called the CDC or Continental Drift Club, which (allegedly) holds semi-annual conventions in places such as Bremen, Reykjavik, Jena and Berlin. “Formed in the early 1980s by a Danish meteorologist,” she explains, “the CDC is an obscure society serving an independent branch of the earth science community. Twenty-seven members, scattered around the hemispheres, have pledged their dedication to the perpetuation of remembrance specifically in regard to Alfred Wegener, who pioneered the theory of continental drift.” Reviewers seem to have taken this at face value, but even if such a strange little cloistered society did exist, why exactly would Patti Smith be asked to join? Note the “dedication to the perpetuation of remembrance”: is our allegorical leg being pulled here just a bit? And is it just coincidence that nestling in her book bag are authors such as W.G. Sebald, César Aira, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas and others, writers who purposively smudge the line between memoir and fiction? M Train, with its dot-dash series of woozy photographs, even looks like a Sebald text, and I got the same queasy feeling from it that I’ve often had reading him: half-admiring, half-sceptical; almost seduced, but finally left cold. As with a flawless magician, you know there’s some form of misdirection going on, and it chips away at your pleasure in the performance. (I was annoyed at myself for assuming her visit to a “place called Café Bohemia” was some kind of wink-wink sign, when it’s also a fairly common name in Mexico, where she happened to be.)

—Ian Penman

Things to keep in mind (The secret of the stone in your shoe)

In his lectures, Teller explained that the trick did not originate with him. It is based on techniques developed by a largely forgotten man named David P. Abbott, a loan shark who lived in Omaha and did magic in front of invitation-only audiences in his specially built parlor. Houdini, Kellar, Ching Ling Foo, Thurston—all the great magicians of the era made the pilgrimage to Omaha and left baffled. One of Abbott’s tricks involved a golden ball that floated in the air around him. But rather than use a thread suspended from the ceiling, Abbott revealed posthumously in his Book of Mysteries, he ran the thread horizontally from his ear to the wall. By manipulating that thread with his careful hands, he could make that golden ball seem as though it were defying reality. Best of all, he could pass a hoop over it—what magicians call a prover—and eliminate a piece of thread from his audience’s range of possibility, because a horizontal thread had never entered their imagination. They were looking only for the vertical.

The real point of magic, Teller said during those lectures, is “telling a beautiful lie. It lets you see what the world would be like if cause and effect weren’t bound by physics.” It’s the collision between what you know and what you see that provides magic’s greatest spark.

So Teller rigged a thread in his home library, and he put Abbott’s ancient instructions on a music stand—pages that had been miraculously saved from a trash fire years before—and he went to work on making the impossible seem real. Eventually, he decided that the ball shouldn’t float but roll. That would look simpler, but it would be harder. He practiced some more at a mirrored dance studio in Toronto, and at a cabin deep in the woods, and on the empty stage in Penn & Teller’s theater. After every show for eighteen months, he would spend at least an hour, by himself, trying to make the Red Ball obey. (“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect,” Teller says.)

—Chris Jones

Things to keep in mind (The secret of eavesdropping)

If you listen to what people are actually saying, and reproduce it faithfully, that material will find a useful place whatever you are writing. I like to isolate found material so that it becomes a kind of absurd commentary on the story’s events, especially in fiction set in the present day; but I also like to take found material out of its present-day context and use it to point up the oddness of an imagined future, or country, or character. If you want the unheimlich, you must have dissonance, although you have to be careful not to overdo it. Establish a context, then violate it quite sparingly. In weird fiction the strange is made to intrude on and threaten briefly the normal; but it’s equally important to threaten the strange with the normal. I get many of my effects by making sure of that two-way process. (If we’re to talk about more immersive fiction, ie fantasy or space opera, another benefit of this device is to create discontinuities, glitches in the so-called “logic” of the so-called “secondary world” which make it harder for the reader to suspend disbelief and escape into the fiction.)

—M. John Harrison

No. 27: “ – tends to crumble – ”

In which decisions begin to realize consequences. “The way out of most antinomies.” 36 pages with color cover. $3.00 plus shipping and handling.

the Blue room – Bottles & Cartons & Tubs & Boxes – “The first order of Business” – at This table – antique Punk bullshit – the Basics of Security – “Quite distressing” – well as She might – taking Any hand – Something falls – Eyelids a-Twitch – Played again – How she Might hear – “The hell with the milk” – the Question mark – la Différance – Laissez-majesté – what She might Ask – Boom & Bang & Rattle & Crash