Rick Wayne's Blog, page 57

(Art) Macabre and Erotic Obsessions: Contemporary Japanese Illustration

I return to Japan on Wednesday. For those who don’t know, I’ve been splitting my time between Tokyo and the US for the last few years while I complete my third novel, Feast of Shadows, which is proving difficult. (But then, there’s really nothing like it.)

But I am not a Japanophile, nor am I one of that peculiar breed of Westerner who arrives with pockets full of pop culture, bubbling fan of a movie based on a book they never read.

Japan is not anime or hentai anymore than Germany is beer and furry porn, although both include those things. In her art, however, Japan does exhibit an intense fascination with the erotic and the macabre.

Subjects are overwhelmingly female, regardless of the gender of the artist. Men, when they are depicted, tend to be beastly — insects or rapists — or inanimate objects like automatons, or the soulless products of the assembly lines they tend in real life.

But you must not think of the women depicted as individuals, per se, although sometimes they are. Nor are they typically objects, sexual or otherwise, even when portrayed in sexual acts. They are Japan herself.

Several themes emerge, notably violation of the body: rape, dismemberment, transfiguration, forced mechanization — but also confusion, loss, nature, and (importantly) identity.

Japanese people are, for the most part, overwhelmingly polite, positive, diligent, urban, hard-working, respectful, orderly, submissive, and chaste. But they are children of a narcissistic culture which admits no outsiders. Non-Japanese can never become citizens, for example.

Comfortably ensconced in its archipelago, isolated for centuries, Japan fell in love with itself and so banished the rest of the world. The appearance of Commodore Perry and his US naval gunboats in 1853 was such a shock that it is impossible to overstate its significance. Almost overnight, a thousand-year tradition cracked. Japan became schizophrenic.

What followed was the manic and total reorganization of society, the most intense ever undertaken, whereby Japan intended to beat the West at its own game — to prove its superiority and so recapture its sanity and sense of place in the cosmos.

For a time, that seemed immanent. In 1905, for example, Japan became the first Asiatic country to defeat a major Western power. But it was not to last. In the perverse poetry of history, the land of the rising sun, as she called herself, was defeated by the very power of that sun.

Failing a military solution, she tried an economic one. For a time, that too seemed like it might succeed. But ultimately, Japan’s “economic miracle,” as it was called, collapsed in the mid-90s, leaving her deflated and unsure.

The Japanese believe — have believed for centuries — that there is one perfect way to do everything: to be a man, to be a woman, to paint a flower, to make tea, to manufacture a car. Her artisans and craftsmen strive for that one perfect way, which is why their produce is synonymous with quality.

Having discovered she is not the world’s one perfect culture, but in fact a stranger on planet earth, Japan has become trapped in a bland reverence of the past, the old but uniquely Japanese way of life, so unlike any other on the planet. (Her language, for example, is unrelated to any of those around her. Linguists are not even certain where to put it.)

Her people now go about in a kind of rote but incomplete repetition — machines bound by duty and propriety rather than programming — as their society slowly disintegrates around them. The economy stagnant, the population declining, Japan — or what was Japan — is, in a very real sense, evaporating.

Her artists, then, are preoccupied with body and identity (who are we?), with beauty and perfection (what is the perfect way?), with perversion and deformation (what have we become?), and especially with reproduction and death, twins in opposition (can we survive?).

What follows is not a survey. I’m sure I have omitted some big names and misrepresented others. It is merely a personal collection, a sample of the art I’ve accumulated during my time there.

I’ve focused on illustration, but one can find similar themes in sculpture and handicraft. Artists I’ve featured before are linked in their name. (You can also read Notes on the Japanese Aesthetic and SHUNGA! The Art of the Woodblock Money Shot for more.)

We start with this thoughtful watercolor by Jun Ayafuya in which a schoolgirl walks through flooded rice fields, symbolic of old Japan, toward an unknown destination.

[image error]

Both her and the landscape, which is roughly Fuji-shaped, are perfectly reflected in the still water, but if you look closely at the tones (or if you invert the image), you can see that the upper half, the “real” part, is actually paler than the reflection, whose sky is bluer and foliage greener. The “real” is in a sense the reflection, and the girl, who is modern Japan, is stuck following a rigid path set by the past.

Note also how the right and left halves of the image are symmetrical — rough reflections of each other, giving no sense of progress. You could easily make an animated GIF of this image where the path continually scrolls underneath her as she walks and nothing really changes.

As you peruse the galleries (click for larger images), keep in mind the themes: body and identity, beauty and perfection, perversion and deformation, and especially reproduction and death — or, the erotic and the macabre.

Hikari Shimoda

Aya Kato

Shohei Otomo

Takato Yamamoto

Yuji Moriguchi

Kotaro Chiba

Satoru Imatake

Masaaki Sasamoto

Toshio Saeki

Yuko Shimizu

Miho Hirano

Namio Harukawa

Jun Kumaori

Tomoko Kashiki

Shintaro Kago

Junko Mizuno

Tetsuya Ishida

As a bonus, sculpture by Tsutomu Kawakami, which depicts an emaciated female body, like a wraith, fading away — both a figure from old Japanese folklore and Japan herself:

[image error]

 

On the good and the popular

“When young people are just beginning to pass from the ranks of the many to those of the few, a ludicrous, but fortunately transient error may occur. The young person who has only recently discovered that there is in music something far more lastingly delightful than catchy tunes may go through a phase in which the mere occurrence of such a tune in any work makes him disdain it as ‘cheap.’ And another young man, at the same stage, may disdain as ‘sentimental’ any picture whose subject makes a ready appeal to the normal affections of the human mind. It is as if, having once discovered that there are other things to be demanded of a house than comfort, you then concluded that no comfortable house could be ‘good architecture.’

I have said this error is transient. I meant transient in real lovers of music or of painting. But in status seekers and devotees of culture it sometimes becomes a fixation.”

— C.S. Lewis, “An Experiment in Criticism”

(Fiction) Like Magic

[image error]

“Look at this,” Hammond nodded down the road from where we were parked.

A vintage black Jaguar purred as it rolled to a stop in front of the bistro down the street. From our vantage, we could see the back of it clearly. It looked awfully familiar.

“Is it just me,” he said, “or does that look like the car from the video?”

The chef didn’t have any cars registered in his name. We’d checked. So I snapped a picture of the license plate, which hadn’t been visible in the footage. We watched in silence as the man himself walked out of the plain, unmarked door just down from the restaurant, bald head and everything. He was even wearing the same coat.

Hammond started the car as I took a few more pictures.

“Who’s driving?” he asked.

I shook my head. A man, it looked like, but I couldn’t see.

The Jag pulled away and we followed. It was a sweet car, too—an MK10, four-door, all black. Late 60s I’d say. We tailed it north to the office of a commercial moving company, strictly nonresidential, specializing in large items, like art for offices and expensive factory equipment. He met with them while Hammond and I waited down the road and across the street.

“Think he’s going somewhere?” I asked.

Hammond nodded. “Tell me again how you found this guy.”

“I never told you a first time,” I teased.

“Come on,” he chided. “How many million people in this city? We got a random picture of one. You go away and come back a couple days later with a name. How’s that work? And don’t say facial recognition because that’s bullshit. We didn’t have a face.” He turned to look at me. “This guy’s a ghost. Here he’s implicated in at least four murders and God knows what else, and we got no way to find him. And yet, you pull his name out of thin air.”

“Like magic,” I said.

He scoffed.

It was nice being back with Craig, but there was a definite illicit feel to the whole thing that I could’ve done without. For reasons he didn’t want to elaborate, he got away from his partner, Detective Rigdon, for the afternoon, and it seemed to me he didn’t want the man to know, like he felt it was cheating—a work affair. I never got the whole bromance thing. Too many fucking rules.

“Look,” I said. “I took a gamble and it paid off.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough that I didn’t mind leaving it there.

Hammond turned back to watch the door down the road. The Jag was nowhere in sight.

“You don’t wanna tell me,” he said, “that’s your prerogative. Just don’t insult my intelligence, all right? That a fucking deal?”

I scowled. “Whatever. You don’t get to pick and choose what you wanna know and what you don’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. I mention anything to do with the occult, anything at all, and you cover your ears and start making baby noises. La-la-la-la-la.”

“No, no. I do not.”

I’d tried to talk to him a couple times. I tried to talk to him after the Sacchi case. We had a row. He thought I was going over, as in losing it. Got hard for him to trust me with his life after that, which I understood. Eventually, I put in for a transfer. More for his sake—and his family’s—than mine.

“Target’s on the move,” I said flatly.

Étranger stepped from the office door as the black Jag pulled up with perfect timing. They drove a few miles down the road to a florist, where the chef spent all of five minutes before coming out with a tasteful bouquet.

“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend?” I asked as we pulled into traffic.

Hammond laughed. Genuinely. He just looked at me and shook his head.

“What?” I asked.

“For all the women you’ve dated, you’d think you’d be able to tell the difference.”

“The difference between what?”

He put the car in drive and pulled out. “That’s a funeral arrangement, you dope.”

“Really? How could you tell?”

“You didn’t see the white lilies? And the fern branches? In a short round pot? Give a gal something like that and she’s liable to think you’re planning to kill her.”

We passed a gourmet grocer and watch and shoe repair shop, on the roof of which stood a gray wolf as big as a horse. It watched us as we passed. Pretty sure I was the only one who saw it. I didn’t say anything.

“How do you not know that?” he asked.

“Whatever, man. Flowers are flowers. I get whatever looks nice. Or whatever she says she wants.”

“By ‘she’ do you mean the one with the colorful hair and the yoga legs?”

“Yoga legs?” I turned to him. “That’s what you remember?”

He shrugged. “What was her name again? Kinsey?”

“Kinney,” I said after a moment.

“Ah,” he said in understanding. He got from my tone that we weren’t together anymore. “She liked you,” he said. “She liked you a lot.”

I didn’t reply, and he waited a few minutes before asking. “You wanna talk about it?”

I made a face. “What do you think?”

“I’m just asking,” he said holding up a hand.

I watched the Jag, which was several cars ahead of us in traffic, as we inched toward the freeway. It took us another twenty minutes to get there, after which we wound through Queens and crossed the river before turning north up the FDR. Hammond followed at a safe distance. That we were following a vintage car and not just another silver SUV made it easy enough to spot, even if we lost sight for a minute.

“You think I don’t listen to you?” Hammond asked out of the blue.

I squinted at him. “What?”

“You said I don’t get to pick and choose what I wanna know and what I don’t,” he explained very deliberately, like he wanted to be sure I understood his meaning. “Does that mean you think I don’t listen to you?”

I kept squinting at him as he changed lanes on the expressway. “What’s with you? You got ball cancer or something?”

“Close, actually.”

He pulled a stick of gum from his pocket. He handed it to me, but I refused and he unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. I could smell the mint.

“Dinah and I got this gal we talk to,” he said. “You know, a complete stranger you tell all your secrets to. But I like her, believe it or not. She doesn’t let me get away with the bullshit. Not that I’d ever let her know that. Anyway, the consensus seems to be that I can open up all right but I’m not a very good listener.”

I shook my head with a smile, choking back the easy jibe.

“Laugh all you want, Chase. Some of us take our relationships seriously.”

“That’s not why I’m laughing, ass. I’m laughing because it took you almost fifty years to figure that shit out.”

He nodded solemnly—like it was my words, versus what everyone else in his life had been telling him, that clinched the truth of it.

“You’re not a bad listener,” I explained. “You’re just selective. When you wanna be, you’re Fred fucking Rogers.”

He shook his head. “In the session the other day, I was distracted. Dinah thought I was mad, but I couldn’t stop thinking about a case I had recently. My Alexa Sacchi, I guess.”

“Who’s that?”

“The triple I mentioned. This Chinese girl. Wasn’t much older than my Hadlee. I sent her to you. The Chinese girl. Did I tell you that?”

I shook my head.

“She started talking about . . . you know, all that kinda stuff.” He waved a hand. “She had a tarot deck and was talking curses and shit and I thought ‘Oh Christ. Here we go.’ And I told her to talk to you. I thought you could sort it all out. I didn’t wanna deal. I already had a caseload up to my sack and I didn’t want to waste time wading through all the—” He stopped.

We watched as the Jag exited the expressway. Hammond hit the blinker and we followed it into Spanish Harlem.

He sighed, like he was sorry he mentioned anything and wanted to wrap it up. “So now I’m wondering if I treat all the women in my life that way.”

He was asking me because I didn’t count. In Craig Hammond’s mind, I wasn’t a woman. At least, not in any way that counted.

“You really worried?” I asked.

“I’m just wondering how many times I’ve sent the girls to their mother like that, when they were going on about school or some boy or something, because I was too busy trying to put some asshole away.”

“Naw,” I said. “I don’t see it. No offense to Dinah, but you’ve always been a better dad than a husband.”

He nodded again, wistfully.

I turned to him. “You wanna talk about it?” I asked with a wry smile.

He snorted. “Fuck you.”

The Jag pulled into a three-story public parking garage.

“Shit,” he said.

If we followed them right behind, there’s a good chance we’d be spotted. If we rolled around the block, we’d probably lose them on foot.

“There,” I pointed.

Just inside the alley between the garage and a hair salon there were three open spots, reserved specifically for police. Hammond pulled in as I pulled the car’s department registration from the glove compartment and tossed it on the dash.

We jumped out at the same time.

“You go east,” he said, and took off the other way.

I moved down the alley, eyes scanning the parking garage for any signs of the Jag or the man in the fantastic coat. But there was nothing. I ran out to the main road at the far side of the alley which was lined with single-story shops on both sides of the street, the kind with narrow facings crammed full of wares where the signs displayed the brands for sale rather than the name of the store. Men’s clothes, a couple ladies’ boutiques, a Farmacia Latina proudly displaying the Puerto Rican flag, a combo wig shop and hair salon, a convenience store, a falafel shop, a taqueria, a pet supply store, a liquor store, and more, all the way down to the train tracks that ran over the street two blocks from me.

Cars were parked at meters along the street, and there was the usual forest of telephone poles and street signs. With the crowd, I didn’t have any trouble keeping cover. And the chef wasn’t hard to spot, not with that bald head and that pot of flowers cradled in his arm. He crossed the street and stopped two blocks down in front of a large mural painted on a brick wall facing the main road. It was a swirling, floral, blue-and-white tribute to a goateed man, whose likeness took up most of the image. He was looking up and away to the horizon warmly but resolutely. Smaller depictions, presumably scenes from his life, fell away on both sides of his head surrounded by turning bands of flowers and curls. Most of it was done in white paint. The shading and contrast was all the same tone of gray-blue. The sidewalk underneath was filled with flowers and votive candles of all kinds.

The chef added his contribution, which looked horribly formal and out of place, before stepping back to admire the image. I took the opportunity to snap a photo of the mural from my perch behind a parked car on the other side of the street. A quick image search told me this was a memorial to a local man named Alonso White, who had apparently died the year before. I read as much as I could. He seemed like quite the guy: community organizer, counselor, later an ordained Unitarian. Had some political ambitions but not the kind that got anyone worried.

I glanced up from my phone every few seconds to check my quarry, who seemed to be paying his respects. That was when I caught the date of Alonso’s death. And that made me pause. He blew himself up in some Wall Street office the very same night Kent Cormack was shot—the night I had my first seizure in decades.

When I looked up, the chef was gone.

“Fuck!”

I turned my head right, then left, and spotted him walking down the road under the train tracks. I just had time to see him disappear around the corner on the other side. I ran after, drawing a screech and a couple honks when I crossed the road, but as soon as I passed the train and took the same turn, I ran right into a dead end. I slapped my hand against a wall of brick. I spun and scanned the street in every direction. But he was gone.

“Shit!”

That’s when I saw someone on the roof of the building across from me—a big guy in a leather coat. He turned and walked away before I got a good look at him, but I’m positive it was the driver of the Jag. It was a set-up.

We’d been made.

———————————————————–

rough cut from To the White of the Bone, third course of my forthcoming five-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

cover image by Aykut Aydogdu

The worst curse I can lay upon you is that you find your...

[image error]

The worst curse I can lay upon you is that you find your heart’s desire.

“The Black Mirror” by William Newzam Prior Nicholson

(Art) Macabre and Erotic Obsessions: Contemporary Japanese Illustration

I return to Japan on Wednesday. For those who don’t know, I’ve been splitting my time between Tokyo and the US for the last few years while I complete my third novel, Feast of Shadows, which is proving difficult. (But then, there’s really nothing like it.)

But I am not a Japanophile, nor am I one of that peculiar breed of Westerner who arrives with pockets full of pop culture, bubbling fan of a movie based on a book they never read.

Japan is not anime or hentai anymore than Germany is beer and furry porn, although both include those things. In her art, however, Japan does exhibit an intense fascination with the erotic and the macabre.

Subjects are overwhelmingly female, regardless of the gender of the artist. Men, when they are depicted, tend to be beastly — insects or rapists — or inanimate objects like automatons, or the soulless products of the assembly lines they tend in real life.

But you must not think of the women depicted as individuals, per se, although sometimes they are. Nor are they typically objects, sexual or otherwise, even when portrayed in sexual acts. They are Japan herself.

Several themes emerge, notably violation of the body: rape, dismemberment, transfiguration, forced mechanization — but also confusion, loss, nature, and (importantly) identity.

Japanese people are, for the most part, overwhelmingly polite, positive, diligent, urban, hard-working, respectful, orderly, submissive, and chaste. But they are children of a narcissistic culture which admits no outsiders. Non-Japanese can never become citizens, for example.

Comfortably ensconced in its archipelago, isolated for centuries, Japan fell in love with itself and so banished the rest of the world. The appearance of Commodore Perry and his US naval gunboats in 1853 was such a shock that it is impossible to overstate its significance. Almost overnight, a thousand-year tradition cracked. Japan became schizophrenic.

What followed was the manic and total reorganization of society, the most intense ever undertaken, whereby Japan intended to beat the West at its own game — to prove its superiority and so recapture its sanity and sense of place in the cosmos.

For a time, that seemed immanent. In 1905, for example, Japan became the first Asiatic country to defeat a major Western power. But it was not to last. In the perverse poetry of history, the land of the rising sun, as she called herself, was defeated by the very power of that sun.

Failing a military solution, she tried an economic one. For a time, that too seemed like it might succeed. But ultimately, Japan’s “economic miracle,” as it was called, collapsed in the mid-90s, leaving her deflated and unsure.

The Japanese believe — have believed for centuries — that there is one perfect way to do everything: to be a man, to be a woman, to paint a flower, to make tea, to manufacture a car. Her artisans and craftsmen strive for that one perfect way, which is why their produce is synonymous with quality.

Having discovered she is not the world’s one perfect culture, but in fact a stranger on planet earth, Japan has become trapped in a bland reverence of the past, the old but uniquely Japanese way of life, so unlike any other on the planet. (Her language, for example, is unrelated to any of those around her. Linguists are not even certain where to put it.)

Her people now go about in a kind of rote but incomplete repetition — machines bound by duty and propriety rather than programming — as their society slowly disintegrates around them. The economy stagnant, the population declining, Japan — or what was Japan — is, in a very real sense, evaporating.

Her artists, then, are preoccupied with body and identity (who are we?), with beauty and perfection (what is the perfect way?), with perversion and deformation (what have we become?), and especially with reproduction and death, twins in opposition (can we survive?).

What follows is not a survey. I’m sure I have omitted some big names and misrepresented others. It is merely a personal collection, a sample of the art I’ve accumulated during my time there.

I’ve focused on illustration, but one can find similar themes in sculpture and handicraft. Artists I’ve featured before are linked in their name. (You can also read Notes on the Japanese Aesthetic and SHUNGA! The Art of the Woodblock Money Shot for more.)

We start with this thoughtful watercolor by Jun Ayafuya in which a schoolgirl walks through flooded rice fields, symbolic of old Japan, toward an unknown destination.

[image error]

Both her and the landscape, which is roughly Fuji-shaped, are perfectly reflected in the still water, but if you look closely at the tones (or if you invert the image), you can see that the upper half, the “real” part, is actually paler than the reflection, whose sky is bluer and foliage greener. The “real” is in a sense the reflection, and the girl, who is modern Japan, is stuck following a rigid path set by the past.

Note also how the right and left halves of the image are symmetrical — rough reflections of each other, giving no sense of progress. You could easily make an animated GIF of this image where the path continually scrolls underneath her as she walks and nothing really changes.

As you peruse the galleries (click for larger images), keep in mind the themes: body and identity, beauty and perfection, perversion and deformation, and especially reproduction and death — or, the erotic and the macabre.

Hikari Shimoda

Aya Kato

Shohei Otomo

Takato Yamamoto

Yuji Moriguchi

Kotaro Chiba

Satoru Imatake

Masaaki Sasamoto

Toshio Saeki

Yuko Shimizu

Miho Hirano

Namio Harukawa

Jun Kumaori

Tomoko Kashiki

Shintaro Kago

Junko Mizuno

Tetsuya Ishida

As a bonus, sculpture by Tsutomu Kawakami, which depicts an emaciated female body, like a wraith, fading away — both a figure from old Japanese folklore and Japan herself:

[image error]

 

Every time we sit another Congress, I inexplicably think...

[image error]

Every time we sit another Congress, I inexplicably think of this painting by Vito Campanella.

Free Lance

[image error]

Not to glorify the gig economy, but if you are a freelancer, you are a mercenary.

The earliest recorded use of the term (so far discovered) comes from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, in which a feudal lord declares, in reference to his paid army:

I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them—I will lead them to Hull, seize on shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.

cover image by Taras Susak

(Fiction) The Thousand-Eyed Crocodile

After the war, every man who could read Nebuchadnezzar’s invented tongue was killed. But Etude and I knew that a book deciphered once could be deciphered again, and that it was only a matter of time, which was why we had settled in New York. While the new economy is global, the two largest stock exchanges in the world are still in Manhattan. Not only are the NYSE and NASDAQ larger than the next several markets combined, their tendrils reach round the globe into nearly all the activities of man. From their sanctum high above Wall Street, the warlocks could affect, or infect, the planet. And yet, despite our vigilance, they’d managed to sneak up on us all the same. Dr. Alexander appeared out of the blue talking about the mushrooms and Etude realized we were late to a battle that had already begun. We’d been playing catch-up ever since.

Etude had seemed too cautious to me. He was in some way afraid of losing us, Benjamin and I, and instead of fighting the enemy on his own terms, had attempted to force an open confrontation with the Lord of Shadows—not merely to beat him, I think, as much as to demonstrate that Etude himself could not be bested. But winning a war takes sacrifice. It takes people willing to make that sacrifice.  It was only by Cerise’s sacrifice that we had prevented them from securing the dagger. With two of their three holiest relics, they would’ve been unstoppable. Thinking we had the upper hand, we gathered our strength for a knockout, only to suffer the blow that scattered us.

As I left the community center, I wondered whether I had made a bold move or a reckless one, and if the mizzen, who sat under the world, laughing, would lift a finger to help us.

The name Annette Dunlop was now known to my enemies. Unfortunately, I didn’t have another identity, at least not one that wouldn’t cause more problems than it would solve if there was ever a run-in with the police, which is always likely when one is mucking about causing trouble. So upon my arrival to the city, I took precautions. I checked into a hotel under Annette’s name and removed everything I needed from of my old suitcase, which was less than I had brought, and transferred it to the one I had stolen. I left again wearing the amulet. Anyone checking that room would see my suitcase and some of my personal items and reasonably expect that I planned to return. And of course, if you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, you don’t keep looking, which left me the better part of the day to meet with Mr. Lucas.

But I had chosen that hotel, a high-rise, specifically. I paid cash for a second room at a different hotel across the street, one with a good view of the first, and so watched that night from cover of darkness, one observer in a tower of them, as men with flashlights searched my dummy lodging. I never saw them exit the building. I suspect they remained to wait for me somewhere inside. Still, I slept poorly. I had limited my use of the amulet, but it gave me horrible nightmares all the same. I saw Etude, who warned me inexplicably of a crocodile who visits all men at the dusk of the mind, just before sleep. It lays in the dark, he said, gray-scaled. The midnight sun, that dark star, flies high behind it, shining in bright black and leaving only the crocodile’s eyes to glow in the gloom. It has two, but also a thousand, and they penetrate the heart. The unfathomable slug sags like a giant under the weight of eons and moves not from its bed of sand, for all men come to it. It knows how petty and pointless we are, and we know that it knows, and there is no armor to our ego.

Then, as we quiver and bow, comes a rumble older than words.

I! I am the hunter of beasts, of birds and snakes and beetles and men. I am the devourer. I stalk the banks of the rivers of reason and swim the ocean of dreams. I am the first. I rode the floodwaters of the Nile to the shores of the Yangtze. I have dwelt in caves which are the ruins of great castles. I was hidden in dark towers at the murder of kings. I have been chased, jeered, mocked, feared. My bellow is the trumpet that calls men to war. My scales are the lies which doom them to more. My teeth are the truths they pretend not to see. And my slither . . . My slither is the urge that brings them to me.

When the ancient call ceases, we may each speak our pleasure and it will be granted, even as it consumes us.

I asked him why he was telling me this this, and he served me an omelet made from crocodile eggs.

I woke. I showered and left my hotel before the sun rose. A noisy train carried me impertinently to Gravesend, where I intended to barter with trolls for information. Although dim-witted, the under-dwellers have sharp and numerous eyes. But none of them remained. Their encampment, which had once filled a fenced lot under an overpass and had looked, from the window of a train or moving car, the same as any other homeless community. But now it was abandoned. I found a one-armed, one-eyed doll under the remains of a tarp—just the kind of disconcerting oddity a troll would squirrel away greedily with the rest of its pilfered treasures. I imagined it inside a packed shopping cart pushed about at the hands of a hunchbacked woman whose face was never quite visible under her mounds of filthy clothing and who muttered to herself as she went about collecting our cast-offs: blood-stained tissues, sprung clocks, locks of hair, shards of a mirror broken in anger—each too meager to be of interest to a mage but which, like wasted scraps of food, might in quantity sustain an underling of that ancient race. The doll winked at me persistently, as if it knew something I did not, and I dropped the tarp over it like a funeral shroud and spoke a rite taught to me by the mizzen so that whatever wicked enchantment it now carried would pass from this world unheeded.

From Gravesend, I risked a trip to The Barrows. It seemed certain that Anson’s shop, and indeed the entire remnants of the goblin market, more than any other place in the city, would be under surveillance. But then, if so, I had the means to skirt it. It had been some time since my last visit, however, and I took several wrong turns. Although I caught each error in no more than a handful of paces, I couldn’t shake the suspicion—from the minute stirring of the air around me perhaps, or else simply my own shadow-inspired imagination—that in turning back onto the path at that moment, I had narrowly avoided being lost.

It was Einstein, supposedly, who taught the world that space was not a featureless plain but rather a warped and crannied canyon distorted by the weight of the objects it contained. But the old sages, while they would not have described it that way, nor measured it precisely with mathematics, were aware of the effect. It had been known since ancient times, and later forgotten, that there were creases in the world whose insides could not be reached directly, simply by traversing a line between here and there; that certain clefts in the forest or under the sea would, if approached, say, from the east, deposit you back on the path, but if from the west, worm you someplace else entirely; that there existed entire kingdoms that, like heartbreak, you cannot find if you are looking for them but cannot avoid if you are not.

Like most modern theories, which tend to describe more than explain, Einstein’s was powerful but sterile, high in stature but short in reach. It imagines the universe curved and smooth like the legs of a well-polished table, or perhaps a record left too long in the sun. But peer closely—under a microscope, say—and you won’t see a flat surface. At the narrow scale there are mountains and valleys and ridges and wrinkles and gaps. Even holes. Entering such furrows requires more than just the proper trajectory. Thankfully, one can, through various methods of disorientation, open even the untrained mind—albeit briefly—to different structures of space than the one regarded by our senses, which is why the most peculiar destinations, the ones anyone cared to record in the time before writing, tended to be preceded by mazes and labyrinths, or were only reached through trance or meditation. The designers of modern cities, without ever intending it, have replicated this effect accidentally in, for example, the winding, branching paths of subway exits, which turn the traveler about without reference. Once we reach the street, we find the entire city has twisted on its axis, like the wild swing of a compass needle. Or else it’s its own a mirrored reflection, with north turned south and west east. If, like most people, you do nothing but stand and indulge a few befuddled blinks of your eyes, the wrinkle squeezes you out, the city returns to what it was, and you walk on. But if you can hold that state in your mind, ephemeral as laughter, and more importantly, if you can move against it, push on through, then you can step almost anywhere.

Wilm once told me of a wizard named Shahzere, with whom he had traveled as a young man, who was exceptionally skilled at this effect. According to Wilm, Shahzere’s mind had, over years of practice and experience, gradually become as warped as the spaces he invaded, and he appeared always discombobulated, like a man searching high and low for the glasses on his head. He would sometimes forget his name but remember tomorrow. When it came time to step from there to elsewhere, he would turn about confusedly and say “No, no! It’s all wrong!” and storm off to find some location more suitable to his inscrutable talent, there to walk to and fro, to turn and descend and climb and descend again, all with his poor befuddled ward clinging desperately to his cloak, and by that grip finally be pulled through to someplace else, whence Shahzere would appear very proud of himself, regardless of whether it was actually the place the two of them had wanted to go.

I stopped when I saw the front door of The Barrows—or rather when I didn’t see it, for it had been torn away. I took out the amulet and put it on immediately, albeit with some hesitation.

The subterranean interior was dark, with dim, pale light reflected off shards of broken glass from some unknown source. By it, I could see little more than that everything was twisted and broken. The entire shop had been wrung like a wet rag. The cracked cabinets and hardwood slats turned over each other in a spiral, as if the ends of the room had been twisted in opposite directions by giant hands. There were shards of broken glass everywhere, and several of the splintered planks and shelf boards were turned up like defensive spikes. After stepping wide to avoid one such snaggled tooth, my foot fell on something hard and flat and unforgiving and I stopped suddenly and nearly lost my balance, as one does when fumbling for the light switch in the middle of the night. I knelt to examine the object, which caused the amulet’s collar to shift slightly, and I grimaced as it spokes slid across my skin. The object was hard and flat—cast iron, it seemed—and cool to the touch. I ran my hand around it and found square edges. I tried to lift it, but it was heavy and I had to shift my stance before I could try again. With a grunt, I heaved it up such that the faint light caught the letters.

a rough cut from Bright Black, the fifth and final course of my full-course occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS.

cover image by Te Hu

If I ever write a sequel to FANTASMAGORIA…“The Crawling ...

If I ever write a sequel to FANTASMAGORIA…

“The Crawling Eye” from Josh Guglielmo’s Age of the Atom project.

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(Feature) You’re probably not really an author

I realize this is unpopular, but if you have to force yourself to write, then I’m not sure you really want to be an author.

I don’t say this to be mean, just that if you’re busy hacking yourself into authorhood (using “tips and tricks” found all over the internet), then you won’t be out discovering your true passion, which is whatever will fulfill you spontaneously.

That’s not to say there aren’t days when an author would rather be lazy. And of course I’m speaking here of would-be novelists, not marketing copyists or paid content producers. Those are occupations. They pay the rent and put food on the table.

Content production is to novel writing what house painting is to the other kind. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but you better believe there’s a difference.

I suspect there are so many would-be authors because almost everyone possesses the basic raw materials. The state not only compels us to learn how to read and write, it also forces a rudimentary literary education in the form of English class.

The state does not compel everyone to learn how to read and write music, let alone force rudimentary music theory. If it did, literally everyone you meet would be “working on an album” (versus the mere millions who say it now).

Unlike math and music, we all make words and sentences every day, which seems like practice. We write emails and texts and stupid posts like this. We even think in language.

And we all enjoy stories. Stories are popular — TV, movies, comics, books are the most popular forms of entertainment, so writing good ones brings high social status, and who doesn’t want that?

More than that, we all daydream. (Thank heavens!) Our brains are spontaneous story-making machines that forge entire narratives out of any odd collection of facts and experience.

So if we make words and sentences every day, and we make up stories everyday, surely we can put the two together and make authors of ourselves.

Writing feels easier than other potential pastimes. Rock climbing, for example, is physically demanding. You don’t come out of high school with the raw materials necessary (unless you pursued them yourself), which means those who do it well are afforded no special status. They do it for fun.

Indeed, the sport is replete with the mantra of self-improvement. The mountain is not “defeated” for having been climbed. Rather, what’s defeated is the climber’s own weakness and limitation. It’s an act of self-improvement completed without an audience.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t write a book. People climb mountains and run marathons every year simply for the challenge, not because they want to be professional athletes. And I believe in the indie revolution, which gives everyone a voice independent of the gatekeepers.

But writing a book as an act of self-discovery, like playing golf for fun, is entirely different than doing it on the expectation that people will pay you for the pleasure of watching.

On the numbers, you are about as likely to make a living from writing books as climbing rocks. No one accepts that — or rather, we each think we’re the exception — but it’s the truth.

So it is people are busy right now setting writing goals for the year and sharing clever hacks to trick their brain into doing something it patently doesn’t want to do on its own, all on the hopes that that forced effort will nevertheless produce something people will enjoy enough to pay money for.

I try to trick myself into exercising, but then, the health benefits of exercise are virtually guaranteed. The same is true of reading. You at least learn something, if not see the world from a different perspective. So if you’re going to force yourself to do something with your state-sponsored literacy, read more books!

If, on the other hand, you find yourself perusing articles on writing hacks and motivations, if you regularly suffer “writer’s block,” if you don’t read as much as you write, I’m sorry to say being an author probably isn’t your passion. It’s a dream.

You’re free to pursue it anyway, of course. But I would suggest instead that the very best thing you can do for yourself and your long-term happiness is to spend that time discovering what your true passion is.