Kip Manley's Blog, page 47

Four on the floor

—203 days ago.

But why dwell on what’s been and done and gone, baby, gone. —The first draft of no. 26, “ – only borders lie – ”, is 16,375 words long. Short, for a first draft, but that’s good, that’s good: there are a number of scenes here that need not to be what they are, and I need room to swing a machete. (There’s a whole character running around in there that paradoxically enough there isn’t enough room for; patrons will know more what I mean.)

But so much for having five in the pocket by the time we launch, ha ha.

But we weren’t gonna dwell! —Well maybe a little. —Of all the chapters of vol. 3 to be written thus far, this one, the fourth one, the one that was just going to be a simple monster-of-the-week bughunt, and maybe a memory palace up on Mount Tabor, maybe, this one has ended up being by far the most different, as perhaps you’ll see when it’s released. —But for all that, I’m still where I was going to, in the strictest terms of characters A and points B and facts C in time for the various events D; and yet, having gotten where I was going by zigging this way, instead of that, well. —I’m not sure, I guess, what happens next?

Which is pretty much mostly where I was the last time I wrote one of these, back in April—a mere 203 days ago. (Don’t do the math. It’s gruesome.) —I think the next scene, the first of no. 27, “ – tends to crumble – ”, I think it’s going to start in that blue attic, which is mostly just a painted-over memory of that white attic, the one I glimpsed that time I went to a Hallowe’en party dressed as the Fool, and the woman dressed as Death slipped me some acid; later, we hung out in a cemetery. —It was the nineties. You know how it was.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of existence)

If I tell a “rationalist” or people in the current scientific culture a good way to do vegetable gardening is to speak to the f--ries and ask them where you should put the plants—get advice, in other words, what Findhorn did, where they spoke to the devas—the response tends to be, “But there’s no such thing as f--ries, they don’t exist. You can’t do that. They don’t exist, show me them, where do they live?”

Now when I was studying maths, our maths teacher came in one day and wrote on the board, “Let I be such that I squared= -1.” And for the whole rest of the first lesson we were all saying, “But you can’t have a square root of a minus number, it doesn’t exist!” He said, “Well think of it as another dimension.” —“Okay, another dimension, which direction is it, where is it, you know, tell me this dimension”—all the sort of things people would say if you said f--ries might exist in another dimension. So basically, we refused to co-operate because the square root of -1 doesn’t exist. But the mathematics thing is, well who cares whether it is exists or not? The thing is, does it work? So you start working as if it exists, and I emphasize as if, because that’s the magical formula: you act as if something is true, you act as if the tarot pack really was the wisdom of the ancients.

And the mathematician finds that not only does it work—you can create a mathematics on what they call imaginary numbers—but, the amazing thing is, it turns out to be utterly fundamental to the way the universe works. You know, electricity and all that sort of thing depends on these “imaginary” numbers. And you realize that that has gone on throughout history, because actually numbers don’t exist any more than f--ries and yet our whole economy is built on them. So as a mathematician I wasn’t hung up on whether these things exist or not, but the question for me is, “Do they work? Do they get you somewhere?” And our mathematics master, because we did maths and higher maths, we also had to do physics in those days, and when we went off to do them he said, “Oh, you’re off to the folklore department now.” He was very scornful about these scientists with their insistence that they would only work with things that existed! He said, “That gets in the way of sheer logic.” So I see it as really quite fundamental to my magical thinking, the fact that I learned that what matters is whether something works, not whether it exists or not.

—Ramsey Dukes

Things to keep in mind (The secret of kings)

In her doctoral thesis, “Kings. What a Good Idea”, Pamela Freeman writes that in stories in which a king is the protagonist, we’re likely to see the oft-used “Rightful Heir” or “Missing Heir” trope. See: King Arthur, Aragorn, Harry Potter, Rand from The Wheel of Time, Eragon, and most novels that involve a young boy that leaves his home to embark on an adventure. On one hand lie patriarchal inheritance laws that govern the transmission of inheritance between male blood lines, an issue of justice and fairness that is familiar to most people, despite or because of its problematic gendered connotations. On a more emotional level, there’s hunger to belong and to complete a family, that the truth about one’s blood line and birth status is worth knowing and that without the truth the person will live a suspended life fraught with emotional anxieties. Conservative or not, this plot-line directly confronts our emotional anxieties.

The question then becomes why people living in democratic countries would be interested in reading books about social stratification and monarchy. Pro-monarchists (the real-world kind) usually defend royalty on the basis that monarchs represent all of their citizens and thus provide continuity and identity to a nation, whereas elected officials can only represent their constituents. (For those who say, “but… presidents?” most pro-monarchists live in constitutional monarchies that use a parliamentary system. Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected by the people.)

Freeman states that “tyranny has been replaced with an image of pastoral care, ensuring that today will be like tomorrow, protecting us from political machinations and…extremes of any kind.” She links a distrust of elected officials and desire for continuity with epic fantasy’s focus on “rightful kings.” Writers use kings precisely because they’re traditional, and therefore meaningful. Of course, the common image of a rightful king preserving the collective peace amongst his people is a historical judo-flip unsupported by an even cursory empirical observation but, nevertheless, rightful kings prance around and disseminate compassionate justice in epic fantasies with more regularity than they ever did in history and this has led critics to deride the genre as escapist because it’s not “real.”

—Sarah Shoker

Things to keep in mind (The secret of romance)

When, in the twelfth century, this kind of social isolation is overcome and the feudal nobility becomes aware of itself as a universal class, with a newly elaborated and codified ideology, there arises what can only be called a contradiction between the older positional notion of evil and this emergent class solidarity. Romance may then be understood as an imaginary “solution” to this contradiction, a symbolic answer to the question of how my enemy can be thought of as being evil, that is, as other than myself and marked by some absolute difference, when what is responsible for his being so characterized is simply the identity of his own conduct with mine, which—challenges, points of honor, tests of strength—he reflects as in a mirror image. In the romance, this conceptual dilemma is overcome by a dramatic passage from appearance to reality: the hostile knight, in armor, his identity unknown, exudes that insolence which marks a fundamental refusal of recognition and stamps him as the bearer of the category of evil, up to the moment in which, defeated and unmasked, he asks for mercy and tells his name: “Sire, Yidiers, li filz Nut, ai non” (Erec et Enide, 1042), at which point he becomes simply one knight among others and loses all his sinister unfamiliarity. This moment, in which the antagonist ceases to be a villain, is thus what distinguishes the use of the category of evil in romance from that to be found in the chanson de geste or the classical western: but it has other, more positive consequences for the development of the new form as well. For now that the experience of evil can no longer be invested in any definitive or permanent way in this or that human agent, it must be expelled from the world of purely human affairs in a kind of foreclosure and projectively reconstituted into something like a free-floating and disembodied realm in its own right, that baleful optical illusion which we henceforth know as the realm of sorcery or of magic, and which thus completes the requirements for the emergence of romance as a distinctive new genre. Yet as a literary device, this vision of a realm of magic superimposed on the earthly, purely social world, clearly outlives the particular historical and ideological contradiction which it was invented to resolve, thereby furnishing material for other quite different symbolic uses as the form itself is adapted to the varying historical situations described above.

—Fredric Jameson

Things to keep in mind (The secret of the grotesque)

While modernists generally held dankness in suspect, a few held a certain type of affection for this atmosphere, if only because it was an object of intense scrutiny. The earliest modernist rapprochements with dankness saw it as the cradle of a mythical atmosphere, an atmosphere that preceded modernity. Within the 20th century, particularly in the writings of Bachelard, the dank underground is embraced precisely because it is such an anti-modern quality. Bachelard wished to bring the cosmopolitan, urban and modernized subject back in touch with the atmospheric depths of the cellar. Finally, we see fleeting senses of dankness in the writings and ideas of Anthony Vidler or Peter Eisenman; their collective focus on excavation and subterranean uncanny space served as a type of corrective to a project of rationalization, but it also returned us to images of grotto-like spaces for its physical articulation.

Today, in the name of environmentalism, architects are digging into the earth in an effort to release its particular climatic qualities. Passive ventilation schemes often involve underground constructions such as “labyrinths” or “thermosiphons” that release the earth’s cool and wet air. The earth that architects reach into is one that has been so technified and rationalized, so measured and considered, that it barely contains mythical or uncanny aspects. However, this return to the earth’s substrate enables other possibilities. Rather than turn to the earth to find a mytho-poetic or uncanny quality, we might develop a new sensibility. Perhaps we can understand the earth of architecture and its dankness through the lens presented within this brief essay. In other words, it is time that we understood dankness to hold history itself.

—David Gissen

No. 25: two sweetest passions (Closing)

White towers

No. 25: two sweetest passions (Act IV)

what’s On the Radio – an Audience – some God-damned fools – there was a Gate –

No. 25: two sweetest passions (Act III)

Level A, Furniture – the warmth of March – what’s In the Envelope – the Nearest book – “You’re it; That’s all” –

No. 25: two sweetest passions (Act II)

“My sister” – Third Annual – Light; Hope; Truth – the Chords of Tom and Gary –

No. 25: two sweetest passions (Act I)

Monte Carlo – the Ell-word, the Jay-word – Crisp little tents –