"The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates." --Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970)
"...when SF author John Sladek wrote a couple of enjoyable and traditionally intricate detective puzzles in the seventies (Black Aura and Invisible Green), he found that...
'I was turning out a product the supermarkets didn't need any more -- stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap. One could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries now. SF has much more glamour and glitter attached to it, in these high-tech days.' "
"I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center." --Joan Didion
Gray, sultry morning. As if about to rain: gusty, but not in our location, it is told. Anticipation, with cars rushing, to do things until no doing again. That light, half lost, but carrying sounds of what is on its way. And all our asking will not hold it back. This light blossoming into storm.
"Until sympoiesis with the dead could be acknowledged, sympoiesis with the living was radically incomplete." --Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2015)
"The art looks as if disasters have passed through it, but it also looks as if it had survived those disasters and as if the strewn pieces of it could be assembled into something quite superior." --R A Lafferty
Haraway and Jarmusch on my mind. What does it mean, all these mythical places, except that we have none--and our fragmentary epics furnish them? (R'lyeh.) And micro-genres as filaments of that Cthulhu. Precarity: dementation. Buddhism without beliefs. Like the Devil's Tower vision in Close Encounters, we pre-enact apocalypses that are other than material. Something we do not yet have words for (=nomquab).
They are rooted in connoisseurship, not collections. They know they cannot use many of the consensus words for what they need to say. Private languages, necessarily (i call this "Eigengrau voyageurs"). Creatures of other mythologies (African, Asian, Native American, Caribbean) for when we exhaust ours. The Greenish black discoloration of "Nethescurial." If a blog entry (already borderline obsolete) of pics & quotes & links is emblematic, what does its ephemerality say? Imagine an art movement like Performance Art/ Self-Destroying Machines: protest against Museum Culture & the hierarchies of Art-celebrity, but also signifying the New Precariat.
"Children with two shadows did not grow up happy." --Kelly Link
Neologisms for an abortive subculture (Clockwork Orange). Reading forgotten epics on pdf. The fact that new books, live concerts, as much as owning a house--as exorbitant. Not knowing how far this government will expand its persecutions. Going back to Conlanging: cairns first, but also a new kind of refusal, the refusal to be part of a canon. Ironic relation, say, to successful Langpo (how can it not be, but of course it cannot be acknowledged as such, like a royal bastard everyone knows about).
The song at the beginning (of OLLA) seems to be a vintage 45 but it's actually contemporary. To think of one's work as that song (they really don't release new 45s anymore, do they?)--skeuomorph not actualized (probably!) & its placement in a mythic (but NOT mythical) City. And: Animated Egg never really existed as a group, & its one good song--isn't representative of its one record.
"He who would write a book that would last for ever must learn to use invisible ink." --Cyril Connolly
Things we do so as to not be overwhelmed. The Dragonfly as (ohaeng) symbol of perseverance. Old movies long unavailable on DVD, suddenly now to become new touchstones. Gadsby when no one could read it (& the 2 palindromic novels still: Dr Awkward & Satire Veritas). Refugee camps, always (how do we know we will not? why do we not write for them?). There is only one office: to witness.
Vallejo: "What if the words don't survive?" Blue fires anyway. Urban CamoCubist architecture--grisaille. Ghayb. When i destroyed half my paintings, it was just putting a larger percentage into the Invisible.
the earth will sweeten this spot
with the years, with the years
forgetting all our spite
the earth will sweeten this spot
the things we did for sport
& what the faith requires
the earth will sweeten this spot
with the years, with the years
Mallarmé & catasterism. (Not 707?) In Nonnos."I half suspect that the whole note is one of Poe's inventions." (Certainly corresponding to nothing so specific in the Quran...) Also, in "Ligeia": "...a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine --in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven --(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra)..." I always thought he meant Sheliak (a star strangeenough even for E A Poe)--but it's fourth magnitude: could it be Epsilon instead? Not variable, AFAIK. Zeta? Who knows? For me, now, Beta Lyrae will always be associated in my mind with the planet Cathedonia. (Of course, I also think Umayma is Zeta Aurigae--as painted by David Hardy...) Then there's scifi about planets that really exist (a genre started by Hal Clement). I still hope one day to contribute something along those lines. But then, i am someone who would have liked the author of A Voyage to Arcturus to have known some astronomy.
"THOU art the star for which all evening waits--
O star of peace, come tenderly and soon
Nor heed the drowsy and enchanted moon,
Who dreams in silver at the eastern gates
Ere yet she brim with light the blue estates
Abandoned by the eagles of the noon.
But shine thou swiftly on the darkling dune
And woodlands where the twilight hesitates.
Above that wide and ruby lake to-West,
Wherein the sunset waits reluctantly,
Stir silently the purple wings of Night.
She stands afar, upholding to her breast,
As mighty murmurs reach her from the sea.
Thy lone and everlasting rose of light."
