Two Wheels Short of a Civilised Vehicle

The Riddle of Steel
By Jason Stuart
May 2011 Smashwords



Mr Stuart’s prose wears a Stetson. It’s both staccato and languid. It’s cowboy style. He can write well. Very well.

And yet with The Riddle of Steel we find ourselves staring once again into the big empty space between the ears of the world.

In a mixture of anecdote and homespun reflection, Mr Stuart proposes that it is legitimate to love one’s motorbike more than most, or even all people, including spouses and offspring.

Which is a point of view, actually, I can sort of dig. As he points out, don’t machines generally do what they are meant to do? There’s no hidden agenda, no inexplicable behaviour, no equivocation, or downright perversity to vex or appal. You know where you are with pistons, et al.

The real riddle does not lie in the material world after all, but in the minds of human beings.

Which brings us to anecdote No. 2. A fully grown man (six foot five and weighing in at 300 lbs) who parks his "heavy iron" under a tree takes umbrage at a snake who innocently relieves itself from a sunlit branch onto the said "heavy iron". The man’s ire leads him to flush the snake out of the tree and throttle it barehanded.

To her credit, his mother upbraids him for killing a harmless animal. His reply?

"You don’t understand. Anything that pisses on my motorcycle HAS to die." (p. 5)

There are a couple of observations to make here.

First, if the biker dude had sublimated his rage, gone off and throttled a local criminal/hoodlum/terrorist/loan shark/lawyer/banker (each of whom presents more of a threat to his motorcycle – and society – than a snake) then he would have warranted the admiration that he is awarded in Mr Stuart’s book. But trying to kill something that either shoots back or will sue your ass isn’t so easy, is it?

Second – isn’t the whole of the argument undermined here? Does not a snake, or any animal – aside from the vexatious animal called Man – simply do what they do without evil intent, just like a machine would? Shouldn’t the biker man, of all people, have said, "Bad Mr Snake! Still, it’s better than being pissed on by a criminal/hoodlum/terrorist/loan shark/lawyer/banker, so I’ll go and get a Terry cloth, like someone with a brain twenty-thousand times bigger than yours ought to, and you can go in peace."

Warning: Animals were harmed in the production of this ebook.

The Curse of Cthulhu

The Works of H. P. Lovecraft

At Feedbooks



Borges’s observation – that Lovecraft is an unconscious parodist of Poe – is more clever than true. The question is, was Lovecraft more than the vehicle of an intricate and ultimately silly mythos?

Noticeably, one of his best stories, the novella Herbert West, Reanimator, has no reference (or none that I noticed) to Cthulhu and his friends. Perhaps it was written as a serial, because Lovecraft recapitulates the story at the beginning of each chapter. This emphasises and shows to best advantage one of his stylistic strengths – elegant variation. When the narrator casually mentions that he may well be mad, it is only too believable. There’s an undertone of dry comedy too which is either missing or inadvertent in most of his other work.

That said, Lovecraft is almost always entertaining, and he has the rare skill of remaining highly readable while using complex syntax.

Interestingly, and quite rarely for an American writer, he was an atheist. Even so, and like most of us, he was a child of the Book, and so his gods could scarcely go without supporting evidence in writing. Hence the Necronomicon. The close connection with this and the Bible is made explicit in The Haunter of the Dark, where the Necronomicon (and other infamous titles) lie in the vestry instead of the Good News.

He has some endearing tics. Like the way he warns the reader that the events of the story are far too horrible for mortals to bear hearing explicitly (some of his favourite words are "hint", "evasive" "whisper" and "nameless") and so the narrator will refrain from divulging everything for the sake of the reader’s sanity. Fortunately, the reader can always be assured at this point that the narrator won’t be leaving a single detail out. In fact, he’s going to tell us even more than he properly knows, and furthermore, he will repeat salient facts so often that they become hypnotic.

On the other hand, he takes a great delight in leading the reader up to a shattering climax of horror. The language must be heightened to achieve the effects of blasphemous and insanity-inducing terror. The actual result is often that the horror genre leads Lovecraft into some strange and truly wonderful stylistic places. For instance –

. . . we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them – looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss . . . (At the Mountains of Madness p109)

That shriek and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of haunted mountain – that focus of transcosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.(The Whisperer in the Dark p76)

For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern: where – God in heaven! – the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining . . . (The Call of Cthulhu p36)

From years ago, I knew Lovecraft only from the old Panther paperbacks, so the fact that he was a poet came as a surprise. Surprisingly, he is a highly competent writer of formal verse and, as always, fun to read. Sometimes, though, the real curse of Cthulhu reasserts itself and Lovecraft is abruptly transformed into an unconscious parodist of Edward Lear.

He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind, / And come back safely from the Ghooric Zone  (Alienation from Fungi from Yoggoth).

Carrots Get Everywhere

On Literature – Selected Journalism Vol. 1
by Mark Cantrell
2011 Smashwords

This is a collection of articles about Bradford’s (Yorkshire, UK) local creative writing scene and creative writing in general.

My attention was drawn first by the article, The Naked Verse, which begins,

In a fourth floor flat on a run down council estate in Bradford, the camera is watching two people strip and climb into a coffin. (p 8)

The author is quick to reassure the reader that,

This isn’t some kind of low-budget necrophiliac porn, but the photo-shoot for the cover art and illustrations of Love, Sex, Death and Carrots, the latest anthology of poetry and prose produced by the Interchange writers’ network. (Ibid)

But I wasn’t reassured, because what touched my heart with frigid horror was the reference to . . . a fourth floor flat on a run down council estate . . .

I suffered in the same way when encountering other words and phrases in Mr Cantrell’s collection – such as,

. . . with the aid of a grant . . . social poet . . . mildew-scented basement . . . Marx . . . the Government’s policy . . . supping beer . . . Chumbawumba . . . pubs . . . local writers . . . multimedia . . . action network . . .

You can’t fault people who rehearse in mildew-scented basements, sup beer and strive for world peace by listening to Chumbawumba and to fellow creative writers as they declaim into an open mic.

But come off it, this collection is called On Literature, and I would contend that creative writing and literature are most emphatically not the same thing.

Religion is a parallel case. The origin of religion lies in transcendence and tribalism, not feeding the poor and instituting universal justice. Modern religion is what the social worker/good committee member/activist has made out of transcendence and tribalism and that, no doubt, is for the best.

Likewise, but definitely not for the best, creative writing is what the social worker/good committee member/activist has made out of literature. People who are directed so thoroughly to practical outcomes can scarcely grasp something that exists for itself, and so they give literature a purpose – to serve worthy causes.

True art has something of the inhuman about it. At the very least, it plays by its own rules and the strictures and concerns of those who harbour good intentions – and subsist on them too – have never produced anything of artistic value. Moral value is another issue, perhaps. Hence the baffling instances of great artists who don’t turn out to be good socialists. Or even good.

Oddly enough, the author, consciously or not, presents evidence for this very argument by beginning his collection with quotes from Boroughs (drug addict, possible murderer), Kipling (stalwart imperialist) and Wilde (child abuser – see Neil McKenna‘s brilliant biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde).

But then, Mark Cantrell is not unaware of the irrational, non mundane source of art. In the third article, Type into the Altered State of Mind, he posits that writing can . . . open that mystical doorway to perception and otherworldliness . . . (p 7).

Well, maybe . . . except, when a writer uses phrases like . . . the limelight of history . . . (p 10) and . . . The dust has settled on the bones of the Soviet age . . . (p 11), I can’t help thinking that the author’s mystical doorway leads into a mildewed basement in Bradford.

It’s a big world – and if you live on the other side of the globe, Bradford may sound positively exotic. If so, this book is for you.

Quantum Antics

Edison's Very Rudimentary Explanation of Quantum Mechanics: Where Science and Spirituality Begin to Meet
by Edison Thomas 2011 at Smashwords


Here’s my very rudimentary explanation of quantum mechanics – it is a mathematical model developed to systematise the results of experiments using particle accelerators, amongst other machines. Beyond that, (which I just made up anyway) I don’t really have a clue.

Furthermore, I can add that after reading Mr Thomas’s intriguing work I’m no better informed.
      
However, where there is the cold, forbidding cold darkness of outer space, this monograph draws the drapes; where there is heartless subatomic madness and confusion, the reader is bathed in a warm, baffling prose style that lulls and diverts the fretful mind.

Ellipses are Mr Thomas’s prime instrument for communication. The number of dots on any page seems to underline the argument by dissolving it into dots – or electrons. This prose has more holes than a Swiss cheese. But like Swiss cheese, somehow the holes are as gratifying as the cheese itself. And then, forget pi, zeta, omega, etc. etc., the :) thingy is the author’s favourite symbol, indicating that we should be very happy indeed to swim together in the quantum world.

What is the argument? Well, Schrödinger’s cat is alive because we want it to be. All we have to do to maintain the good vibes is keep collapsing the electron into a particle – not a wave. Or it is the other way round, perhaps. String theory makes an appearance later, but one falls prey there to the usual suspicion that it doesn’t really amount to anything.

The thesis is rounded off with a one-sided conversation with Edison’s dad.

It’s an achievement for any text to convey so much positive emotion while containing only three instances of multiple exclamation marks. There are some multiple question marks too, with which the reader will sympathise.

Recommended.

Sci fi in Poor Elf

LRL Accelerators – The 184-inch Synchrocyclotron
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley, California
Download free from Gutenberg


Most science fiction nowadays is mere mechanised fantasy. All those pointy-eared aliens – they’re just cosmic elves, aren’t they? Tolkien’s wretched circus really is a kind of mental disease, and the infection has spread to the galaxy.

Someone these days can go through their entire life, surrounded and cosseted by technology yet know absolute nothing about the science behind it. Or, and this seems worse somehow, they can read science fiction and think they know something about science.

To counteract this pernicious transmission of supine ignorance, every science fiction novel should be appended by something like the LRL Accelerators – The 184-inch Synchrocyclotron.

This marvellous machine was constructed in 1940, and so it is ancient technology in some ways, except, of course, it could do things like validate the Theory of Relativity (in respect to the increase of mass at higher velocities), allow scientist so study and discover new sub atomic particles, provide treatment for patients with brain tumours and finally allow researchers to blast various chemical substances with super fast ions – just to see what happened.

This is, in a real sense, a truly important historical document. The information gathered from this machine alone has had easily as much impact on the lives of millions of people as the works of Tolkien and the intermidable Trekkie saga. And probably for the better too. Yet, the readership of LRL Accelerators – The 184-inch Synchrocyclotron, I suppose, is going to remain sadly limited.

Lavishly illustrated.

Bad Hair Day

Taco Fairy/Vidal Sasson -- 2Shot
By Hosho McCreesh
2011 Smashwords

Somewhere in America a husband and wife have had a row, now she’s on the phone to her girlfriend and he goes for a walk just to escape the noise of being badmouthed. It seems the marriage is over.

He finds himself traversing a rough area where: all the dogs (are) chained up in tiny, filthy yards – barking at their bone-grey cinderblock walls.

Strange how this could be almost any down-town area in the world.

Soon, he begins to get closer to the city: There was a rising din, a white noise of traffic as he got closer to the bigger, busier streets – a sound like sleeping on the couch with the TV on.

He buys some tacos at a stand and is served by employee of the month (i.e. she leaves her brains at home and does what the boss has told her to do – no more, no less).

Obviously it’s a disheartening encounter and, remember, his life is already falling apart. On the way back home, the hero stops to smile at a snarling backyard pit bull and throws it something to eat. This act arouses the ire of the owners – lets say they are not members of polite society. But at least they merely jeer and swear at him (an opportunity here for those of us learning Spanish to broaden our vocabulary). Finally, they christen him a Taco Fairy. That’s precisely the sort of joke that goes down particularly well in this end of town, and the hero duly listens to their hoots of derision as he continues on his way home.

And so we have it, a society made up of robotic employees and a thuggish underclass all glued together with a garish and soulless commercialism. If you try to question any of it, or do something not strictly in your own self interest, you’ll either get a look of incomprehension, or get called a Taco Fairy (but only if you’re lucky enough not to get beaten up instead).

When he gets home, his wife is still on the phone, still bad mouthing him, and that’s the climax of this tale.

But at least there’s a chance they’ll get a divorce -- there’s some hope. The marriage in Vidal Sassoon is far more depressing, because while they lead quite separate and virtually solitary lives, the husband and wife are stuck with each other, through apathy on her side, and superhuman parsimony on his.

Mr McCreesh wields an apt turn of phrase and captures the feel of modern life, making the reader wonder in the meantime whether it really can be as bad as all this.

That’s quite an achievement.