#Mythological Intertext

[power-chords]

i waiting for heat 2 confirmed with adam and oscar

As thrilled as I would be to see Oscar Isaac in the role of Vincent Hanna, I think he's engaged with other projects that conflict with the general timetable. Adam Driver is clearly Mann's top choice for Neil McCauley and I would put money on Austin Butler for Chris Shiherlis at this point.

I am desperately curious as to who is on Mann's list of potential candidates for Vincent Hanna. Heat faced off two legendary New Hollywood icons with complementary careers, at that point both securely “canonized” and in middle age, and so the narrative functions at that postmodern, meta-mythological level. Adam Driver’s connotative figuration in the industry thus makes him an ideal choice for the role of Neil, and I personally would guess this is a much more important criterion for Mann himself than any sort of immediate visual resemblance to De Niro (which I’ve seen some people gripe about on Twitter). That is, the most important quality for any actor who is going to play Neil – secondary only to competence, to be sure – is his ability to embody a certain respected, authoritative presence that resounds between text and intertext.

My theory is that the role of Vincent will go one of two ways. Option 1: Mann has an analogous up-and-coming “Pacino Presence” in mind, and wants a leading man with the right cultural credentials to continue the symbolic subtext put forth by the original story (Oscar Isaac would fit beautifully here, I admit).

Option 2: He will go with a “nobody” (or a “relative nobody,” like a working actor known primarily for his TV or stage roles), thereby advancing the subversive relationship the novel has with the film. To the extent that Heat 2 invites a kind of Fishian operation on the text vis-à-vis Paradise Lost/Surprised By Sin, Vincent very easily transforms into a metaphorical stand-in for us, the audience members, the reader-detectives charged with (re-)interpreting meaning and authorial intention by way of perceptual clues left at the cinematic crime scene. The book explicitly introduces this possibility in a way that the film does not, so it would be interesting to see if he goes with it. With that in mind, as I’ve mentioned before, I hope he’s got somebody like Michael Zegen in the running...

[aboutanancientenquiry]

Thomas Harrison on Herodotus, Homer and the character of the gods (VI)

"Finally, some brief remarks on ‘primordial religion’. If Homer and Hesiod first created a theogony, and gave to the gods their eponyms, their honours, skills, and forms, what did they have before that point? Scullion suggests reasonably that this ‘leaves a remainder we might identify as their essential, existent personalities, but it is difficult to see what this remainder might consist of, unless a sort of disembodied ethos.’ 46 Some kind of picture can be pieced together, however, with the help of pre-Socratic intertexts, accounts such as those of Prodicus, Democritus, and the Platonic Protagoras, as well as his own text. What one can discern is an evolutionary model in which an inchoate sense of the divine is gradually fleshed out with a more detailed recognition of the gods 47 and with the paraphernalia of worship. At 2.4.2, the Egyptians are credited with being the first to introduce altars, and images (ἀγάλµατα) and temples. Implicitly, then, there is a previous stage of development—one of which we can still gain glimpses in contemporary foreign contexts—before any people possessed such things. The Pelasgians of 2.52 strikingly appreciate the plurality of the gods; they then obtain a basic level of confirmation of the names of the gods they receive from abroad from Dodona. 48 Homer and Hesiod fill out that picture: with a mythological narrative, eponyms (leading to the specificity of cult), worked-out characterisations or forms, and the honours they receive. ‘The gods’, according to another fragment of Xenophanes, ‘have not indicated all things to mortals from the beginning. But in time, by searching, they find something more that is better’ (οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖσ’ ὑπέδειξαν, ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητοῦντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄµεινον). 49 We are all, like the Pelasgians, fumbling in the dark. And so we hold on to whatever points of reference we can find. Do as if.

46 Scullion (2006) 200.

47 Cf. 2.145–6 where Herodotus concludes that the Greeks dated the origin of Pan and Dionysus to the time at which they first gained knowledge of these gods. I attempt to flesh out Herodotus’ picture of the earliest human development in Harrison (forthcoming).

48 I will not explore here the vexed issue of the meaning of the gods’ names, discussed, e.g., by Harrison (2000) 251–64; Thomas (2000) 275–81; Roubeckas (2019) 134; Pirenne- Delforge (2020) 75–7.

49 Xenophanes D 53 L–M = 21 B 18 D–K, from Stob. 1.8.2; 3.29.41.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bayard, L. (2007) Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Paris).

Burkert, W. (1985) Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass. and London).

Currie, B. (2020) ‘The Birth of Literary Criticism (Herodotus 2.116–17) and the Roots of Homeric Neoanalysis’, in R. Zelnick-Abramovitz and J. J. Price, edd., Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama: Essays in Honor of Margalit Finkelberg (London) 147–70.

Derow, P. S. (1994) ‘Historical Explanation: Polybius and his Predecessors’, in S. Hornblower, ed., Greek Historiography (Oxford) 72–90.

Fowler, R. (2010) ‘Gods in Early Greek Historiography’, in J. N. Bremmer and A. Erskine, edd., The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh) 318–34.

François, G. (1957) Le Polytheisme et l’emploi au singulier des mots ΘΕΟΣ, ∆ΑΙΜΩΝ (Paris).

Gaifman, M. (2012) Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford).

Gould, J. (1994) ‘Herodotus and Religion’, in S. Hornblower, ed., Greek Historiography (Oxford) 91–106.

Graham, D. W. (2018) ‘Review of Laks–Most (2016)’, CW 111: 433–9.

Harrison, T. (2000) Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford).

—— (forthcoming) ‘Herodotus on the Evolution of Human Society’, in Truschnegg, et al. (forthcoming).

Hornblower, S. (2005) A Commentary on Thucydides Volume II: Books IV–V.24 (Oxford)

Hussey, E. (unpubl.) ‘The Religious Opinions of Herodotus’.

Irwin, E. (forthcoming) ‘The Histories in Context: some Reflections on Publication, Reception, and Interpretation’, in Truschnegg, et al. (forthcoming).

de Jong, I. (2012) ‘The Helen Logos and Herodotus’ Fingerprint’ in M. de Bakker and E. Baragwanath, edd., Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford) 127–42.

Lateiner, D. (1989) The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto).

Laks, A. and G. W. Most, edd. (2016) Early Greek Philosophy, 9 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London).

Lloyd, A. B. (1975–88) Herodotus, Book II, 3 vols (Leiden).

Mourelatos, A. P. D. (2018) ‘Review of Laks–Most (2016)’, BMCR 15 March 2018, https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.03.15 (last accessed 26 Jan. 2021).

Munson, R.V. (2001) Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor).

Pirenne-Delforge, V. (2020) Le Polythéisme grec à l’épreuve d’Hérodote (Paris).

Raaflaub, K. A. (2002) ‘Herodotus and the Intellectual Trends of his Time’, in E. Bakker, I. de Jong, and H. van Wees, edd., Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Leiden) 149–86.

Racine, F. (2016) ‘Herodotus’ Reception in Latin Literature from Cicero to the 12th century’, in J. Priestley and V. Zali, edd., Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden) 193–212.

Roubeckas, N. P. (2019) ‘Theorizing about (which?) Origins: Herodotus on the Gods’, in id., ed., Theorizing ‘Religion’ in Antiquity (Sheffield) 129–49.

Rudhardt, J. (1992a) Notions fondamentales de la pensée religieuse et actes constitutifs du culte dans la Grèce classique 2 (Paris).

—— (1992b) ‘Les attitudes des Grecs à l’égard des religions étrangères’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 209: 219–38; Eng. transl. by A. Nevill, ‘The Greek Attitude to Foreign Religions’, in T. Harrison, ed., Greeks and Barbarians (Edinburgh, 2002) 172–85.

Schwab, A. (2020) Fremde Religion in Herodots “Historien”: religiöse Mehrdimensionalität bei Persern und Ägypten (Stuttgart).

Scullion, S. (2006) ‘Herodotus and Greek Religion’, in C. Dewald and J. Marincola, edd., Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge) 192–208.

Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (2000) ‘What is Polis Religion?’, in R. Buxton, ed., Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (Oxford) 13–37; orig. in O. Murray and S. Price, edd., The Greek City from Homer to Alexander (Oxford, 1990) 295–322.

—— (2003) ‘Herodotus (and Others) on Pelasgians’, in P. Derow and R. Parker, edd., Herodotus and his World: Essays from a Conference in Memory of George Forrest (Oxford) 147–88.

Thomas, R. (2000) Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge).

Tor, S. (2017) Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology (Cambridge).

Truschnegg, B., R. Rollinger, J. Degen, H. Klinkott, and K. Ruffing, edd. (forthcoming) Herodotus’ World (Wiesbaden).

Versnel, H. S. (2011) Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden).

Whitmarsh, T. (2015) Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London)."

Thomas Harrison "Herodotus, Homer, and the Character of the Gods", in Ivan Matijasic (editor) Herodotus-The most Homeric Historian?, Histos Supplement 14, 2022.

Professor Thomas Harrison is Keeper of the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies.

[meirimerens]

Hi Meiri, I hope you have been well!!!

I'm way late asking this but I wanted to wait until I finished ASEFSW to ask:

Did you have any favorites parts and or any authors notes or details that didn't make it in?

I confess that my favorite thing about your fics where Farkhad makes an appearance is the way you describe him and his manner of speaking

TEEHEE THANK YOOOOUUU THEY'RE EASILY one of my favorite parts too..... i had such a blast writing him using early modern english in TA&AT even if it was taxing to have to drop everything and search for conjugations... we did its(sic). his fics are only truly the one i can/feel the narrative drive to go Balls To It with the intertext elements... for he is [his]story... for he is nothing but it... [his]story alive through word...

and funnily[?] enough there is not much in ASEFSW's draft that didn't make it into the finish story... in fact there is a lot that was Not In The Draft that i added. the story was supposed to be. way shorter. or at least i imagined it way shorter. had told myself it'd be less than 10k and Well. we've seen how it went. this happens to me everytime. there is One thing that was in the draft that didn't make it, & it's a french part:

that would have made it 2 french poetry parts in the whole text, but i did not find a satisfactory place to put it so... scraped. goodbybye. a shame because i did really like "Ville entière / Ville-terre / Ville-tare . [...] tôt ou tard" liked it.

as for my fave parts in it... hard to tell because i did have such a great time writing ASEFSW so much fun... i really do like the very first paragraph/the intro i think it sets the tone just right...

in general i loved putting the myths/mythologies in the text such as in here...

LOVED WRITING THE HOUSE GET WEIRDER WITH IT(self)...

loooooved writing the whole opiumpainting transformation scene. it was important to me that it happened to them. i'm really happy with how it turned out.

loved this...

hehe :3

loved the gay male house

hence why i wrote it really.

loved the evil house

hence why i wrote it really. :3

THANK YOU AGAIN... HAPPY TO HEAR YOU WIKED MY FARKHAD... i wike him too. consistently writing him get his skull bashed in. but he's fine. so. c'est de bonne guerre.

[bleachbleachbleach]

7/29 - 8/6/2023

I started last weekend really excited about writing Renji 2, and had a good time with that. And then proceeded to have no writing time past last weekend. =_= I just need to chill out and accept that life is going to be about driving and People and racecars and the Women's World Cup rn and not about my blorbos and stories. Not that I don't also like the aforementioned but also MY BLORBOS AND STORIES THO. ):

As excited as I am about this chapter I'm still not sure if it ~works because Renji is just infodumping about 79 different things, and the part I wrote was about written vs. actually-followed easement policy in West Rukongai and how long it takes to run places. Which on one hand, Renji Why, but on the other, Why Not, Renji.

Something I have done a lot of this week, though, is driving—more in the last 7 days than in the last 7 months, to be specific—and I got reacquainted with my nemesis, audiobooks. I still don’t think I actually like audiobooks, but all of the books I listened to were very enjoyable in spite of the format, and I recommend all of them! This is especially exciting because these choices were guided by "what is currently available at the library."

The week’s roadtrip audiobook selections:

H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald (2014)

Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers (2021)

Orange World, Karen Russell (2019)

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (2019)

H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald (2014) I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time, but I’m glad I didn’t get a chance to until now, because coming off of condor!Tobiume this book was especially exciting. I didn’t realize until listening that it drew so heavily on The Once and Future King (and TH White’s biography in general) as intertext, which has really made me want to re-read that book, since I haven’t read it since the summer after I graduated high school. H is for Hawk is a falconry memoir, and it is quite a bit about birds—the goshawk Mabel in particular—which I figured would be a good time, from a creative nonfiction, ecology writing POV, two genres I generally like. But oh my god it is so much better than I already thought it was going to be! MacDonald has such strong analysis of masculinist, neoliberal cultures past and present, and the kinds of mythologies falconry comes from with regard to class and gender (and sexuality, re: TH White), and her own parsing of these things as she grows up. I want to read this book again.

Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers (2021) I am OBSESSED with this book and I keep recommending it to everyone I see. It’s about a tea monk on a future moon where, in the distant past, robots developed to work in human factories gained sapience and left the human places to go live freely and separate in the wilds. Yearning for something missing from their life, the tea monk sets off into the wilds and encounters a robot who has been sent out to check in on the humans, and to answer the question, “What do humans need?” I don’t know that I am usually a robot person—but I am a traveling tea monk person haha—but I love these robots so, so much. They name themselves for the first things they see, so they all have plant/animal names. They hyperfixate on watching stalagmites grow, for centuries. This book is so soft and thoughtful and incredibly thought-provoking. It’s about a future that doesn’t rely on post-apocalypse; nothing overtly dramatic happens but everything is gripping.

Orange World, Karen Russell (2019) This is collection of short stories—I was able to pay attention to some far more than others, but Russell had the most interesting prose for me. There were lines where I was like, man, I wish I were reading this so I could copy this down.” Really strong sense of region and place in each story, and the world building (as one might hope of a book titled Orange World) is superb. I was familiar with Russell conceptually but hadn’t read anything by her before. My favorites were the story about Plains State/Midwestern storm farmers, who captured, husbanded, and rented out storms of various stripes—and now their industry was being affected by climate change. And the story about four sisters who are gondoliers, and use echolocation (of a sort) to navigate the span of a short story.

WIP-wise, I guess LOL I’d love to write as beautifully as Karen Russell does!! But more seriously I guess it’s about being bold about the mechanics of a world and how much it is possible to accomplish even in the span of a short story.

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (2019) I’m only halfway through this one, but it’s historical fiction about a reform school in the South during Brown v Board of Education, and the false promises experienced while attempting to integrate the South.

As far as where this could be WIP research, Whitehead does a great job of minor timeskips across the parts of the novel, including skips of actually writing out major precipitating events, which makes me feel more embolden about how I’ve structured some of this WIP.

[msclaritea]

~Irene, The Baker St. Venus~

 I wanted to post this, a long time ago, but one of the main fandom friends that I used to talk to about the inter-weaving of Myths and Astrology in BBC Sherlock left ( I miss you @longsnowmoon5!), so I shelved it. Previously, I toyed with the idea of Mycroft as Saturn. That was fun. In A Scandal In Belgravia, Aphrodite Venus, the Empress Tarot, herself, is reincarnated as Irene, who really lived up to the myth, not only coming between Sherlock and John, but also being a strong catalyst for attempting to bring their romantic relationship to the surface. Venus, the planetary body, representative of Love, is known by certain motifs: I will go through them here.

"What are you going to wear?" asks Kate. "My Battle Dress." answers Irene. "Lucky Boy!" Irene then ask for a lip color in the shade of Blood.

Venus was known to always be ready for battle, and besides usually being unabashedly nude, she is represented by the color Red, for Passion. But Red was also the ancient color for War.

The Tarot card for Aphrodite/Venus, called The Empress, describes her sitting on a luxurious seat, with cushions, in a wooded area, next to a stream, and sometimes a waterfall, which shows her abundance, and connection to the earth:

  Here is Irene, on her throne, with cushions, in the woods, next to a stream, and I believe a small waterfall, in the background.

"The astrological symbol for the planet Venus—named for the Roman’s goddess of love, Venus, who was often identified with the Greek Aphrodite—is the same symbol as that used for the biological female: a circle with a small cross beneath (as seen in the above tarot card, on her shield) In alchemy, the Venus symbol also stands for the metal copper, and this provides an interesting link between copper, females and mirrors – in antiquity, polished copper or bronze was used in mirrors. The Venus symbol is also thought to represent the very mirror of Venus or Aphrodite: therefore the connection between Aphrodite and mirrors becomes ever more pronounced...Further symbolism of the mirror shows a connection to secrets...and, as such, to the intense, secret-shattering aspects of light." (At last count, there were at least 5-6 mirrors in Irene's bedroom). 

So, let's see here. What secret is Irene hiding behind her Shield Mirror? That's right: Her Heart Phone. "The shield is a paradox...the paradox is that where there is love there is instant protection, yet to love also requires our vulnerabilities." X 

Also, don't forget Sherlock's words, before attempting to figure out the safe code: "I really hope you don't have a baby in here."

The Empress tarot is often shown as pregnant, symbolizing that "the situation is pregnant with promise! ( Read Sonnet 59 meta, where Sherlock makes John a promise) - full of opportunity. Along with the symbolism of pregnancy holding promise, comes the waiting period. Just as there is an incubation time until the child comes forth, so too is there a time of waiting until our desires become manifest." So we wait. As Sherlock says, that's what targets do.

"(All) of this links back to the planet Venus, which in Ancient Greece was ruled by two gods, one of which was named Eôsphoros (bringer of dawn) or Phôsphoros (bringer of light); identifying Aphrodite’s sacred planet, Venus, as a bringer of light...The mirror also, in turn, symbolises revelation and truth: the mirror often shows the face, and the eyes, as shown in the painting Venus At Her Mirror by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, in which the goddess gazes into the mirror with only her face revealed."

Here, her hair is even similar to Irene's, as are the color found in Irene's home; Red, Black, and White.

"The eyes, in turn, are the paths to truth: they are the “window to the soul”, or, ever-more interestingly, the “mirror of the soul.” Aphrodite, in gazing into the mirror, is therefore not merely enjoying the sight of her own beauty, but is acknowledging the truth of all that resides within her..." X

As our story's mirror to Irene, Sherlock appears to go looking for his own truth. If the popular LSIT theory holds true, that The Hiker & the Backfire are indeed about John's failed Romantic getaway with Sarah, it would seem that Sherlock is again, solving multiple mysteries, rolled into one.

The cherry for me in this tale, came from the excellent Art meta by @sagestreet cleopatras-leg-the-sexy-tapestries-in-asib,

"...we get a depiction of the Goddess Aphrodite (Venus) standing behind the couple, her hand outstretched above their heads in benediction. Yes, the Goddess of Love is literally blessing (!) the two lovers just as they’re turning their faces towards each other, about to kiss, absorbed in whatever this little sex game of theirs is.;)"

(OMG...these two. And it HAD to happen within close proximity to Venus.)  

But to continue, we get this other bit from Sage's meta: "At the height of the feast, Plutarch tells us, Cleopatra made an entrance dressed as the Goddess Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love." So, in a fun bit of the writers' affinity for inverting, they had Aphrodite Irene, take and dress in Cleopatra Sherlock's clothes....

...here, as she brandishes a phallic symbol, her scepter whip, another Empress motif. She did this, not just once...

...but twice. Irene brought Truth into John and Sherlock's relationship, never swaying from her purpose, even as she played her game of War.

And why not? Venus is known in Ancient times as being the Patron Saint of Homosexual Love between men. Sappho's poetry holds her also as a Saint for Lesbians.  X  Aphrodite Ourania, the celestial Aphrodite, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus...also inspired homosexual male desire or, more specifically, ephebic eros." X  "In one context, she is a goddess of prostitutes; in another, she turns the hearts of men and women from sexual vice to virtue." X This could be the possible reason for her chosen profession in Sherlock. She inspires, tempers, and balances, seduces, but more importantly, communicates openly, with her own heart. She knows quite well, the secret wishes made by the hearts of Man. Well...she knows what they like.

Venus Rising by Sandro Botticelli

Meta inspired, as usual, by a little talk with my friends X . Also, by Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward, in which he theorizes that the children in Narnia were each given the personalities of the Seven Ancient Astrological bodies. This book is spotted behind John's chair, in A Study In Pink. The 7th chronical is titled The Final Battle.                                                                                      

@ebaeschnbliah @darlingtonsubstitution @gosherlocked @love-in-mind-palace @loveismyrevolution @kajaono @let-bijohns-be-bi-johns @rominatrix @theragesniff @rinkagaminesstuff @johnnytik @sagestreet @monikakrasnorada @delurkingdetective @221bloodnun @impossibleleaf @tjlcisthenewsexy @devoursjohnlock @roadswewalk @marta-bee​​​ @may-shepard @fleurdelisandbees @madzither

[jewfrogs]

Sorry for the dumb question, but should I prioritize Greek texts or Roman texts? Like, when it comes to stories and everything that Romans took from the Greeks, is the Greek version of X myth, for example, the one I should be reading? I've been seriously considering learning either Latin or Ancient Greek, so this is going to be the deciding factor. Thanks!

not a dumb question, but not an easy one to answer either! i don't think there's a right answer to this or one you "should be reading" or would be better off prioritizing.

i'd like to take a moment to poke at your framing: the thought that the romans "took from the greeks" is widespread, but while it's not entirely inaccurate, it's not the whole truth. the nature of both greek & roman religions is that they are adaptable and by no means singular. rather than it being a theft, the adaptation of greek figures into a roman context is the result of syncretism between greek religion brought to italy & autochthonous italian religion. because of the malleability of these religions, greek deities & mythologies could be brought to rome, incorporated in, and made roman without a problem. both civilizations tended to see foreign deities (not only each other's, but egyptian, sumerian, gallic, &c.) as the same gods under different names (see interpretatio graeca & interpretatio romana); as pliny says (nat. 2.5): itaque nomina alia aliis gentibus et numina in iisdem innumerabilia invenimus (thus we find other names [for the gods] among other peoples and countless gods among the same [peoples]).

in many cases, we don't have both A Greek Version & A Roman Version of a myth—it's one or the other (either because no such story existed in the other culture or because what once existed no longer does). when we do have both, the roman is often deeply conscious of the greek (both in similarities/parallels & deliberate differences); the syncretic nature of the mythology lends itself well to intertext! because of this, it can be difficult to draw a neat line dividing "the greek version" & "the roman version." (not to mention that neither tradition is a monolith. what we consider the respective corpora for greek & roman mythology contradict each other! often & enthusiastically!)

as for which one is better (more worth prioritizing), either in a specific instance or overall... that's not a question i, or anyone else, can answer with any authority or objectivity, unfortunately. i prefer rome to greece, so i would err on the side of roman. many classicists would disagree (and some would be mortally offended)! the truth is, neither of them is better or truer or more worthwhile or correct—they're different. that's the only answer i can give you.

now, for advice that you did not, strictly speaking, "ask for" but which i will provide anyway, on the topic of learning latin or ancient greek: i wouldn't stake it on mythological tradition, unless there's something you really want to read in the original (e.g. if you're really interested in the house of atreus, ancient greek will take you much further than latin). if you want to learn about mythology, english translations exist! many of them are even good! what i would weigh more heavily are questions like: what is my goal here? what do i want to get from this language? what am i interested in? which authors & texts speak to me? are there genres or literary traditions that i prefer? does one culture interest me more? what will make me happier?

that being said: learn latin. it's more fun.

[girlbosstom]

12 17 22 for the ask meme!

I almost forgot this one and I still have takes so here we go <3

12. favorite succ fanfiction/fanart/fanvid/uquiz?

how am I supposed to PICK?!?!! I've noted I've struggled with Fic because its really had to get the characters down. And I have this weird thing with like, Serious fanvids where they make me cringe? I don't know what it is! I really don't. But any Fanvid that takes itself seriously shivers me timbers. I've been this way all my life IDK why it is no hate to fanvid makers I'm just weird.

That being said it's a dead tie between the Togan fan vid and the Logan Roy Rolling with the LGBT fanvid.

17. funniest scene

Fuck bro that's so hard. The dead cat scene had me fucking yelling. The chaos of Retired Janitors... I love how the episode subverted expectations so much and the cat scene was peak.

22. favorite literary allusions or intertexts

This question is too smart for me I'm not gonna lie. There are some obvious ones like Oedipus and Odysseus and a shit load of greek and roman mythological and historical illusions but I can't think of a specific, personal fave.

[incarnateirony]

Well, now we know why Pagan Deities were created and by whom, but I still need to see why God created Fairies.

This is an old ask that’s been floating in my inbox as thinksauce. I didn’t have anything meaningful to add but it made a nice little landing pad.

After rewatching Hammer of the Gods (Dabb & Loflin), and comparing it to The Gamblers (Glynn & Perez but, y’know, Dabb era), I’ve got Thoughts.

God made gods in reflection of Man’s wishes, but gods were here first and there’s billions of them, but “we were here first” fails to clarify much. 

But chicken or the egg being a major theme, and a question lingering from Hammer of the Gods: How are there Billions of “us”, as Kali? How was it that Lucifer spoke of the gods surrendering the world to the current divine structure?

This is the Garden. Man’s beginning. The crossroads of divinity and mortality. 

Even going biblical, “Man is like Us” after eating the fruit of knowledge.

Starve thou the mind of the world, brother; an old thelemic line that’s been plaguing me. If man Began in the garden, is it not the first place of thought? It’s where man was ejected from when eating the fruit that let him realize a bunch of shit, right? So then they were thrown out of this inner place into worlds that we summarily know are Chuck’s cages.

This isn’t even too dissimilar from The Architect in the Matrix. I recently asked Bobo, “Baudrillard or DeLillo?” to whence he said, Baudrillard is a useful form of address for a bulk of ideas, but he prefers the writing style of DeLillo, even if he hasn’t read White Noise since college. 

I’m not gonna get into the full depth, in an old ask, about Baudrillard or DeLillo’s sum of concepts or how exactly they’re all applicable but let me just shorthand this with -- they are. Painfully so.

Many of you watched the Matrix while you were younger. It, too, used Baudrillard (which has a long cycle of hermetic lines of thinking.). In shorthand it botched the structure somewhat, though SPN is poised to avoid similar failings, but I’m going to point everyone to these two videos again, which I posted previously in february.

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Watch both. 100% and absolutely. You’ll find familiarities. Ignoring that Chuck overtly called them “The One,” even ignoring the million TVs (although really, don’t ignore those, hell--they’re even relevant in the intertext and philosophy involved), you’ll find some things that just ping your radar over and over and over about our current structure.

Please be mindful that as many Matrixes as there are, they are made by a form of AI. Humans are the power cells. Cells. Souls. They run, power the matrix. In SPN, he who has the most souls is god. But the souls predate the matrix, even if from another world. 

The first Matrix was perfect. Sublime even. And yet it did not take into account the “flawed” nature of man who rejected the control within it. Man ate the fruit, if you will, and caused a cataclysmic system collapse.

If man can make gods within the simulacrum and thus be assigned them by God in deferment, why then do we not presume outside of the simulacrum the primitive or protoman also did not, if only to construct the matrix in which we live?

The pagans were here first, and yet were created by God at the will of man. Fandom is quick to scream plotholes, but I’m looking to think a little more deeply on this. Because if Dabb can be credited by Adams as the maestro that even remembers details like Garth having gone to dental school (8.06 Southern Comfort, Adam Glass), are we really just going to be so arrogant as a fandom to think first impulse or lack of consideration warrants a plothole and Dabb forgot his own shit?

Because Dabb’s shit in Hammer of the Gods is poignant. There are. Billions of “us.” We were here first. Yes, it was the pagan gods speaking, but what makes a pagan god? They... think they’re better than humans and demons, so they can’t be human? Right, because demons were never human either? Why are there billions of gods when even if we were to combine world mythologies from the dawn of time we’d be lucky to pull together several thousand? That’s quite a number to choose to drop. Billions. Not even millions. Billions. What are there billions of? Hm.

God created what we know as pagan gods to deflect the blame. What did he create them from, I wonder?

Who are we? What are we billions strong in? 

Thinkity think thinking.

[mid0nz-archive]

The Cannibal & the Consulting Criminal: How Silence and Sherlock Taught Me to Read

(I’m writing a series of autobiographical essays. This meta is a messy. messy warm up…)  

PART I:  TSotL The Odd Flash of Contextual Intelligence

Know your intertexts (and the limits of their influence)

I’ve spent a LOT of time writing about the influence of Harris on Mark Gatiss in particular. We have Harris to thank for Sherlock’s mind palace for starters. Moriarty and Dr. Lecter share many traits. Then again so do the psychiatrist and Sherlock. I’ll come back to these obvious connections between Sherlock and TSotL in a later part of this meta. (The connections are actually quite superficial.) For now I want to return to my first obsession: the genius cannibal who taught me how to read and the fandom that saved me from him.

Do your research.

Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, choses every word with great care. How many people, for example, do you know called Hannibal? Clarice is more common I suppose, but it’s certainly not a run-of-the-mill monicker. While starlings are the most common of birds have you ever met someone with that surname? Have you ever met a Lecter?  What if I told you there is an extremely obscure historical figure called Hannibal the Starling? (You’ll find the reference in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology if you seek.) Would you think that Harris must have heard of that man? Possibly. Possibly. If I told you that Harris makes most of his characters’ names up– that they sound plausible enough, but unless you’re an everyman like a Jack Crawford or a Will Graham you’re a Francis Dolarhyde or an Ardelia Mapp.

Ardelia Mapp? In the novel Ardelia is Clarice Starling’s roommate at the FBI academy. When exams roll around and Clarice has been too busy hunting Buffalo Bill to read her textbooks, it’s Ardelia who makes sure that Clarice knows all about search and seizures. Adelia Mapp. Ardeila Mapp. What kind of name is that? It helps if we cram along with Clarice:

Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), was a landmark case in criminal procedure, in which the United States Supreme Court decided that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures”, may not be used in criminal prosecutions in state [or] federal courts. (x)

Hey Thomas Harris!

Recognize when there’s a joke and you’re not getting it.

Thomas Harris amuses himself with language. Clarice comes from the Latin root clar and the words related to pertain to brilliance and light and the illustrative. And Lecter? So many people have tried to trace its origins but all becomes clear when you think about its etymology. In Latin lector means reader.

Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford, likes to quote impressive sounding things out of context. Dr. Lecter mocks him for picking and choosing passages of the Meditations of the Roman Emperor, Stoic philosopher, and persecutor of Christians, Marcus Aurelius.

“I’ve read the cases, Clarice, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there [in the case files], if you’re paying attention. Even Inspector Emeritus, Crawford should have figured it out. Incidentally, did you read Crawford’s stupefying speech last year to the National Police academy? Spouting Marcus Aurelius on duty and honor and fortitude— we’ll see what kind of a Stoic Crawford is when Bella [his wife] bites the big one. He copies his philosophy out of Bartlett’s Familiar, I think. If he understood Marcus Aurelius, he might solve this case.”   “Tell me how.”   “When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice. The Emperor councils simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?”   “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”   “What does he do, the man you want?”

I could go on and on about how Harris allows Dr. Lecter to reference Stoicism and all kinds of other ideas for his own amusement. I say amusement because the reader need not understand Dr. Lecter’s jokes to enjoy Harris’ books. Clarice doesn’t and she doesn’t pretend to. Oh how Dr. Lecter fancies his student! I could go on and on because the entire fucking book is a compendium of in-jokes. That in itself is Stoic food for thought. Diogenes Laertius recounts a Stoic idea that Harris likes to chew on.

“Some appearances are expert (technikai), others are inexpert; at any rate a picture is observed differently by an expert and the inexpert person.”

Julia Annas explains:

A non-expert will just see figures; the expert will see figures that represent gods.  The expert is right— there really is that significance- and the non-expert is missing something. What is more surprising to us is the claim that the appearance is itself “expert.” The expert is not seeing anything that is not there for the ignoramus to see.  It is the fault of the ignoramus that he fails to see what is to be seen, because he fails to understand the content of what is presents to him. (82) - Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind by Julia Annas

Lecter, the consummate reader, is the expert. Clarice, who’s not more than one generation from the mines, is the ignoramus.  Yet she shows the odd flash of contextual intelligence.

Discern clues from NOISE.

Though their relationship was weird, close, and lasting Clarice would never realize that Dr. Lecter gave her everything she needed to know to catch Buffalo Bill the first time they met!

On that fateful day, with instructions from Jack Crawford to note anything and everything she sees, Clarice shows enough intelligence to asks Dr. Lecter about the drawings in his cell. Dr. Lecter replies:

It’s Florence. That’s the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, seen from the Belvedere. Do you know Florence?“

If Clarice were prepared "to read” Dr. Lecter’s work, she might have understood the significance of the image. She’s the very model of the Stoic ignoramus.

Clarice finds Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb by recognizing his personal acquaintance with the first victim he skinned, Fredrica Bimmel. They both lived in Belvedere, Ohio where Clarice finds Gumb while Crawford’s teams go all SWAT on John Grant’s last known address. We find out later in the novel that Dr. Lecter knew Gumb lived in Belvedere, Ohio.  Perhaps he was musing on the facts of the case while composing his sketches.

Jack Crawford, of all people, should have noticed the name “Belvedere” and made the connection.  His dying wife’s name is Phyllis but he’s called her Bella for most of their entire relationship. Phyllis and Jack were both stationed in Italy and during one of their outings, a man called Phyllis “Bella,” or beauty.  Bella is the feminine form; “bel” is the masculine form, as in bel vedere, or beautiful view.  We learn later that Clarice has to work hard to trick herself into seeing any beauty in Belvedere, Ohio.  

Now you’ve got the facts. Theorize with them.

There is another explanation as to why Crawford might have missed the clue in Dr. Lecter’s drawing from Clarice’s notes.  Clarice does not know Italian. How would she have written the sketch’s title in her report? Dr. Lecter does not say, when she asks about the sketch, that is is the Old Plaza and the Dome seen from the Belvedere (pronounced in English, be-vuh-deer as in Belvedere, Ohio). Dr. Lecter says all the proper names in Italian except “Florence.” Florence is the English name for the city Italians call Firenze.  Clarice’s ear would catch “Florence” and it may be that her report stated that the sketch was of Florence, but no further details.  She doesn’t, after all, ask Dr. Lecter how to spell the names of the places with which she is unfamiliar.  Crawford, reading a reasonably detailed report from Clarice, might have only noted that Dr. Lecter was sketching Florence– enough detail for a report if you don’t know what you’re looking at.  Clarice, while an ignoramus in the Stoic sense, shows potential.  Dr. Lecter is polite when he surmises that she is “innocent of the Gospel of St. John.” He calls her innocent, not ignorant.  She’s simply not an expert in iconography. She sees all she can see in the image.  Crawford, however, is experienced enough with Dr. Lecter to know how important images are to him.  Will Graham captured Dr. Lecter in Red Dragon by recognizing that one of his victims was posed in a tableau of a Wound Man in one of Dr. Lecter’s books.  Graham was an expert. We can’t be sure from simply reading the text that Dr. Lecter isn’t making the epiphany of “Belvedere” especially difficult to decode even if Clarice were to have written a verbatim transcript of their discussion. In speech Dr. Lecter may be pronouncing the proper names as an American would, or, alternately, with an Italian accent.  He could be pronouncing the incidental proper names (Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo) in an Italian accent and “Belvedere” in an American accent to dare Clarice and Jack to take notice. Or, he could be pronouncing all the names in an Italian accent, a fact could be lost in translation between Clarice, innocent of Italian, and Crawford, who knows just enough to have had an epiphany. Each scenario is possible and each reveals a slightly different interpretation of Dr. Lecter’s motives. If we take Thomas Harris himself as the final authority, in the audiobook Harris reads Dr. Lecter’s part. Harris says all proper nouns including “Belvedere” with an Italian accent (albeit with a Mississippi drawl.)

Yeah ok SO WHAT?! And what about Sherlock?!

In Part II I’ll talk about TSotL as an intertext to Sherlock and the limits of this influence. I’ll compare Dr. Lecter’s method of reading to James Moriarty’s. I’ll talk about why & how I crawled out of the cannibal’s skull and into the consulting criminal’s and where I am going next… Or I just might try to revamp this to make more sense. I dunno…

[dillydedalus]

what i read in march

several antigones & some other stuff

call me zebra, azareen van der vliet oloomi

oh boy. i really wanted to like this one, but uh. nah. so this book is about zebra, a young iranian-american from a lineage of ‘autodidacts, anarchists and atheists’, still traumatised by her childhood experience as a refugee (incl. her mother’s death on route). when her father dies years later, zebra decides to retrace the route of her exile thru barcelona, turkey, and back to iran. this sounds great! the beginning is good! but zebra is a quixotic figure (don quixote is unsubtly flagged as THE intertext several times), delusional about her own importance, obsessed with some kind of great literary mission and obnoxious & condescending & egotistic as all fuck (she looks down on students but treats her realisation that like, intertextuality is a thing, as this grand revelation when like..... we been knew since Lit. Theory 101) - and this is intentional & part of the quixotic thing & in general i approve of abrasive & bristly & difficult female characters BUT i expected there to be a gradual process of realisation where she sees that a) maybe her entirely male lineage of geniuses ain’t all that, c) her mission is uh.... incomprehensible. instead, once she reaches spain, she gets bogged down in endless pretentious bullshit and a #toxic relationship that takes up way too much space. knowing that all of that is likely intentional doesn’t.... make it good. also the writing is pretty overwrought for the most part & not even your narrator’s voice being Like That excuses plain bad writing, like the  absurd overuse of ‘intone’ and ‘pose’ as dialogue tags. i see the potential and i see the point & i liked some of it but uh. not good. 2/5, regretfully, generously

in the distance, hernan diaz

i don’t really go for westerns or man vs wilderness stories but damn i’m impressed. despite the violence & deprivation and sheer amount of gross shit, this story of a swedish immigrant getting lost in the american west for decades remains at its core so human, so tender, so sad (honestly this book is SO SAD, yet sometimes oddly hopeful), so evocative of isolation, loneliness, and the desire for human connection. 4/5

notes on a thesis, tiphaine rivière (tr. from french)

god, if i ever considered doing a phd i sure don’t anymore. this is a short graphic novel about a young woman’s descent into academic hell while writing her dissertation about labyrinths in kafka. it’s funny, the art is expressive and fanciful, and it is incredibly relateable if you’ve ever tried to actually write your brilliant, glorious, intricately constructed argument down, battled uni administration or had a panic attack over how to phrase a harmless email to a prof. Academia: Not Even Once. 3.5/5

red mars, kim stanley robinson

this is a very long hard sci-fi novel about mars colonisation & terraforming, discussing the ethics of terraforming, the potentials of a truly ‘martian’ culture, and how capitalism will inevitably fuck everything up, including outer space. all of this is up my alley and i did really like the first half (early colonisation efforts), but the 2nd half (beginning of terraforming, lots of politicking) was a slog - i liked reading about how terraforming was going, but the rest was just bloated, scattered and confusing. also there’s a tedious love triangle the whole time. 2/5

dragon keeper (rain wild chronicles #1), robin hobb

i love robin hobb she really can write a whole 500+ page book of set-up, characterisation and politicking and make it WORK. anyway, this has disabled dragons, a quest for mystical city, lots of rain wilds weirdness, a dragon scholar in an unhappy marriage, liveships, a sweet dummy romance, and uh... a lil penpalship between two messenger bird keepers? not much happens but it’s so NICE & so much is going to happen. also althea & brashen & malta turned up & i screamed. 3.5/5

season of migration to the north, tayeb salih (tr. from arabic)

this is a seminal work of post-colonial arabic literature, a haunting tale of the impact of colonialisation, especially of cultural hegemony in the education system, the disturbing dynamics of orientalism and sex, and village life in a modernising post-colonial sudan. it’s important, it’s well-written, it’ll make you think, but fair warning, there is a lot of violence against women - it has a point but still uh... wow. 3.5/5

dune, frank herbert

SOMETIMES.... BOOKS THAT ARE CONSIDERED MASTERWORKS OF THEIR GENRE.... ARE WORSE. so much worse. the writing in this is atrocious (”his voice was charged with unspeakable adjectives”), herbert somehow manages to make court intrigue and plotting UNBELIEVABLY DULL and sure, it was the 60s, but i’m p sure people knew imperialism was bad in the 60s! the main character, the eugenically-engineered chosen one or whatever, literally spends years among the oppressed & resisting natives of a planet ruled by a space!empire and at the end he’s like ‘i own this planet bc imperialism is Good Actually’. emotionally neglecting/abusing your wife, who you (!!!) decided (!!!) to marry for political reasons bc you’d rather marry your gf is also Good Actually (cosigned by the protag’s mother....) the worldbuilding is influential for the genre, sure w/e, but mainly notable for there just.... being a lot of it, the whole mythology-science makes No Goddamn Sense, all around this is just Bad. Bad. 0.5/5 i hope the Really Big Worms eat everyone 

dragon haven (rain wild chronicles #2), robin hobb

this healed my soul after toxic exposure to dune. anyway w/o spoilers: everyone is very much In Their Feelings (including me) and there’s a lot of Romance and Internal Conflict and Feelings Drama and Complicated Relationships and Group Dynamics and also dragons, which are really like very big, very haughty cats who can speak, and a flood and a living river barge with a mind of his own (love u tarman!). it’s still slow and languid but so so good. also: several people in this have to be told that People Are Gay, Steven, including Sedric, who is himself Gay People. 4/5

an unkindness of ghosts, solomon rivers

super interesting scifi story set on a generation ship with a radically stratified society in which the predominantly black lowerdeckers are oppressed and exploited by the predominantly white upperdeckers, mixed in with a lot of Gender Stuff (the lowerdeckers seem to have a much less stable and binary gender system than the upperdeckers) and neuroatypicality. it’s conceptually rich and full of potential, but just doesn’t quite stick the landing when it comes to the plot. 3/5

sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, bruno schulz (tr. from polish)

more dreamy surreal short stories (ish?). i didn’t like this collection quite as much as the amazing street of crocodiles, but they are still really good, even tho you never quite know what is going on. featuring flights of birds, people turning into insects, thoughts about seasons and time, fireman pupae stuck in the chimney, and the continuing weird fixation on adela the maid. 3.5/5

angela merkel ist hitlers tocher, christian alt & christian schiffer

a fun & accessible guide to conspiracy theories, focusing on the current situation in germany and the current boom in conspiracy theories, but also including some historical notes. i wish it had been a bit less fun & flippant and more in-depth and detailed bc it really is quite shallow at points, but oh well. also yes the title does indeed translate to ‘angela merkel is hitler’s daughter’ so. yes. 2.5/5

the midwich cuckoos, john wyndham

fun lil scifi story in which almost all women in sleepy village midwich are suddenly pregnant, all at the same time. the resulting children, predictably, are strange, creepy, and possibly a threat to humanity. i get that it was written in the 50s but it is strange to read a book where almost all women, and only women, are affected by A Thing, but all the main characters are men & no one tells the women ‘hey we think it’s xenogenesis’ -  like realistically 80% of women affected went to the Neighbourhood Lady Who Takes Care of These Things like ‘hello, one (1) abortion please’ and the plot just ended there. i still liked it tho! 3/5

antigone project

antigone, the original bitch, by sophocles (tr. by fagles)

god antigone really is That Bitch. that’s all i have to say. 4.5/5

antigone, That Bitch but in french, jean anouilh

the Nazi-occupied france antigone. loved the meta commentary on what tragedy is and how antigone has to step into the Role of Antigone, which will kill her “but there’s nothing she can do. her name is antigone and she will have to play her part through to the end”. i didn’t really like (esp. given the ~historical context) the choice to make creon much more sympathetic, trying to save antigone’s life from the beginning. hmm. 3.5/5

antigonick, anne carson

look, antigone really is That Bitch and you know what? so is anne carson. best thing i’ve read so far this year, don’t ask me about it or i’ll yell the task of the translator of antigone at you. 5/5

home fire, kamila shamsie

honestly i really wanted to like this bc politically it’s on point and an anti-islamophobia antigone sounds amazing, but it just doesn’t succeed as a book/adaption. it spends way too much time in build-up/backstory (the play’s plot only starts in the second half of the book!), waaayyy to much time on the weirdly fetishistic antigone/haimon romance, and even the most interesting characters (ismene & creon) don’t fully work out. sad. 2/5

currently reading: the magic mountain by thomas mann, but i should be done in a week or so! also: the paper menagerie by ken liu, a collection of sff short stories

[inevitableandinventivestylistss]

Session 4

Mythologies and Intertexts

[topmixtrends]

THE LONG AND VARIED career of Robert Silverberg can almost be viewed as a microcosm of the SF genre’s development over the past six decades. Starting out in the world of fandom, Silverberg edited a popular zine in the early 1950s, then turned to professional writing during the SF boom of the mid-’50s, producing hundreds of stories — under his own name and numerous pseudonyms — for the pulp and digest magazines of that time. Most of this material was clearly apprentice work, though estimable enough to earn him a 1956 Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author. When the boom went bust in the late ’50s, and most of the magazine markets folded or retrenched, Silverberg, like many of the decade’s authors, moved on to other literary endeavors — mostly young adult nonfiction and soft-core pornography, two disparate fields in which he produced well over 100 titles during the early 1960s.

The mid-1960s paperback boom, coinciding with the advent of the New Wave, lured the author back into the genre full-time, and soon he was producing some of the most ambitious SF of the period — novels like Thorns (1967) and The Book of Skulls (1972), stories like “Sundance” (1969) and “Born with the Dead” (1974) — as well as editing a major anthology series, New Dimensions (1971–’81). When the serial novel with quest-fantasy elements became popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Silverberg emerged from a brief hiatus with his Majipoor series. For two decades thereafter, he continued to publish steadily, producing roughly one book per year, up until his retirement from novel-writing in the mid-2000s. His work during this period often reflected, even while complicating, contemporary trends, such as an emphasis on mythic intertexts (e.g., 1984’s Gilgamesh the King), evolutionary speculation (e.g., 1988’s At Winter’s End), and religious allegory (e.g., 1992’s Kingdoms of the Wall).

But throughout his career, Silverberg returned obsessively to one of the genre’s key motifs — time travel — upon which he spun elaborate and strikingly original variations. During his New Wave heyday, when he was one of the preeminent American SF writers, he produced six novels dealing centrally with themes of temporal transit or displacement — The Time Hoppers (1967), Hawksbill Station (1968), The Masks of Time (1968), Up the Line (1969), Son of Man (1971), and The Stochastic Man (1975) — his treatment of the topic ranging from straightforward adventure stories to heady philosophical disquisitions. The new collection Time and Time Again: Sixteen Trips in Time (Three Rooms Press, 2018), which gathers 16 stories published between 1956 and 2007, provides a robust — and very welcome — conspectus of Silverberg’s short fiction on the subject. (This is the third book Silverberg has edited for Three Rooms Press, all thematically organized, following 2016’s This Way to the End Times, an anthology of apocalyptic fiction, and 2017’s First Person Singularities, a collection of the author’s most innovative first-person narratives.)

As this collection makes abundantly clear, Silverberg is a master of virtually every subgenre of the time travel story, his mastery increasing as his career developed and he became confident enough to depart from ready formulas. Take, for example, the “time loop” narrative, in which a character becomes stuck in a recursive temporal coil, doomed to repeat the same cycle of events. The first story in Time and Time Again, “Absolutely Inflexible” (1956), is a clever but unambitious treatment, in which a bureaucrat whose job involves exiling time-travelers to the moon winds up, by some technological sleight-of-hand, confronting and banishing himself. By contrast with this tale’s easy ironies, the later “Many Mansions” (1973) — written during the zenith of Silverberg’s New Wave renaissance — is a delirious, multiply forking mind-fuck of a story, which begins with a fairly standard premise (traveling into the past to have sex with and/or kill an ancestor) but quickly morphs into a puzzle box of circular paradoxes impossible to resolve into linear coherence. In his introduction to the story, Silverberg reveals that he modeled his approach on Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1969), “in which a narrative situation is dissected and refracted in an almost Cubist fashion.” The result is brilliantly metafictional, the time-loop story as cut-up farce.

Another New Wave–era story, “Breckenridge and the Continuum” (1973), is an even more wildly experimental variant. Silverberg’s inspiration this time was structuralist theory, in particular the mythological schemas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which are applied to the experiences of the eponymous stockbroker as he shifts back and forth between a mundane present of business meetings and cocktail parties and a chimerical far future, where he has become a nomadic bard dispensing garbled versions of classic myths. As he travels over the blighted landscape, Breckinridge develops “structural hypotheses” to account for his predicament, “the outlines of a master myth” of cyclical degeneration and rebirth. Here, the time loop functions as a potent metaphor for midlife crisis, loss of faith, and striving for renewal — a theme Silverberg suggests was central to his own life at the time. Having just moved to California,

[e]verything was still an experiment for me […] so it was not surprising that my fiction would take an experimental turn […] The early 1970s were, as you may have heard, a pretty freaky time in Western culture, especially in California, and when I wasn’t writing I was investigating a lot of odd corners of intellectual life.

The ethos of the California counterculture hovers over several of these stories, none more so than the haunting (and significantly titled) “Trips,” from 1974. While narratively similar, this is not a time-loop tale but rather one of parallel time-tracks, “alternative universe[s]” — as the author explains — that “tak[e] the voyager sidewise in time to other possible contemporary worlds.” The sojourner here is a San Francisco hipster on the run from a marriage grown stale, tracking his familiar partner through unfamiliar worlds — worlds that “have undergone a slight shift along the spectrum of events” and in which it might be possible to re-experience “that jolting gift of novelty which his Elizabeth can never again offer him.” With its psychedelic scene-shifting, its restless eroticism, and its deliquescent sense of personal identity — not to mention its portentous epigraph by Carlos Castaneda — this is at once a classic example of counterculture fiction and a brilliant satire of countercultural mores, of a lifestyle driven by an urgent, almost pathological quest for change. The passages narrated in the second person implicate the reader uneasily in the amorphous yearnings of the rather feckless protagonist: “It’s all trips, this universe. What else is there? There isn’t anything but trips. Just trips. So here you are, friend. New frameworks! New patterns! New!”

Silverberg always had a somewhat distanced, ironic appreciation for the experimental impulses of the 1960s, even as he pursued them himself, at least in his fiction. His most overtly countercultural novel, Son of Man, propels a 20th-century man into an unhinged far future where the endless possibilities of self-invention available to its denizens subject his philosophical and sexual certitudes to a hallucinatory, mind-expanding deconstruction. As Silverberg comments in his introduction to “Dancers in the Time-Flux” (1983), a story set in the same universe as Son of Man, his goal was “to reproduce in prose form some of the visionary aspects of life in that heady era [the 1960s] and pass off the result as a portrait of the far, far future.” The novel is a phantasmagoric masterpiece, but the story is a more mundane affair, a rather plodding sequel that attempts to recapture the unearthly radicalism of the counterculture but only manages to show that sometimes, even if you have a time machine, you can’t get there from here. (“Dancers” is the only sequel in Time and Time Again, though the volume also contains the novella that seeded Silverberg’s 1968 novel Hawksbill Station, about a penal colony in the primordial past where the political prisoners of a future dystopia are temporally exiled.)

Another key theme of “Trips” is the brittle contingency of intimate relationships, as revealed by alternative timelines in which lovers never met, or just missed meeting, or met in some ambivalent or rancorous way. “Jennifer’s Lover” (1982), in which a man loses his wife to an incestuous, time-tripping descendant, and “The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve” (1982), whose protagonist seeks to eliminate an erotic rival by temporally out-maneuvering him, are entertaining if lightweight variants on the theme, but “Needle in the Timestack” (1983) is considerably more substantial and affecting. The plot is similar to “Bell-Shaped Curve” — a loving couple finds their marriage under siege at the hands of a jilted ex who, by traveling to and selectively editing the past, hopes to “phase” their relationship out of existence — but the treatment is much richer and more satisfying. “Needle” is both a thoughtfully worked-out SF scenario — as Silverberg extrapolates the psychological nuances of having one’s memories involuntarily reordered — and a compelling human story, as the couple struggle to hold on to an emotional bond that is being retroactively erased out from under them. Stories like this — and “Trips” and “Breckenridge” — display Silverberg’s admirable ability to take a hallowed SF premise in provocative new directions.

Most of the remaining stories can be grouped into two other subgenres of the time travel narrative: tales of “time tourism,” in which voyagers leisurely sample different epochs of history, and tales of anachronism, in which a person or artifact from the past or future arrives and disrupts the present day. In the latter category, the most effective example is “What We Learned from this Morning’s Newspaper” (1972), wherein neighbors on a suburban block are first puzzled, then excited, and finally undone by the bizarre appearance on their doorsteps of next week’s newspaper. Their scheme to game the stock market based on this lucky preview of future prices is undermined by an “entropic creep” that blurs out the paper’s pages and, eventually, everyday life itself. “Gianni” (1982) is a more predictable, though quite funny, story in which an 18th-century composer, time-slipped into near-future Los Angeles, decides to join a pop band.

Silverberg’s classic treatment of time tourism is his 1969 novel Up the Line, where guides ferry paying customers into the past, nimbly dodging paradoxes and the multiplying versions of their future selves. The weakest effort in the collection fits into this category — “Hunters in the Forest” (1991), a pedestrian tale (despite the clever final twist) of sportsmen stalking dinosaurs — but so too does the strongest: the gorgeously elegiac, Nebula-winning novella Sailing to Byzantium (1985). Set in a decadent far future, where simulacra of historical metropolises are built and then demolished for the pleasure of jaded immortals, the story focuses on the geographic and erotic wanderings of a 20th-century man inexplicably awakened there. This is a New Wave story in the filmic sense: the narrative has the mesmerizing pace and dreamlike intensity of Alain Resnais or Michelangelo Antonioni, and the characters are straight out of La Dolce Vita: a languidly beautiful jet set, “wandering with the wind, moving from city to city as the whim took them,” alternately bemused and irritated by the protagonist’s archaic stabs of conscience and angsty self-questioning.

In Up the Line, Silverberg featured ancient Byzantium — a seemingly timeless city, in which the Roman Empire survived for a millennium after its demise in the West — as the main site of touristic jaunts, reconstructing the city’s famous events and monuments via meticulous historical research. (Silverberg has written some important works of history that remain classic studies of their topics — e.g., The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado [1967] and The Realm of Prester John [1972].) But the city of Sailing to Byzantium is, as its allusive title suggests, closer to the beguiling Empyrean of Yeats, a promise of ageless beauty and wonder that Silverberg, at the end, translates into pure science fiction: “[I]t isn’t necessary to be mortal […] [W]e can allow ourselves to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, […] we can be transformed, […] we can move beyond the flesh” — quite literally. It is a moving and unforgettable story.

But it is a well-known — indeed, as noted, a highly celebrated — work, and one that I had read before. The real revelation of the book, for me, was its capstone, the most recently published tale, “Against the Current” (2007). One of the most prolific authors in SF history, who at the height of his powers could generate a million words of publishable prose annually, Silverberg has, during the last two decades, produced only around two dozen stories. He frankly admits that he is financially comfortable and creatively content with his career, but “even an aging writer who feels he has said just about all he wants to say […] still does occasionally feel the irresistible pull of a story that demands to be written.” The idea for “Against the Current,” he says, just popped into his head and wouldn’t let go until he set it down on paper. As readers, we can only be grateful, because the story is astonishingly good — polished, ingenious, and heartbreaking.

The premise is simple: a Bay Area used-car dealer, after experiencing a sudden bout of dizziness, decides to leave work early; as he drives from his Oakland lot to his San Francisco home, it slowly dawns on him that he is moving steadily into his own past. Architectural landmarks shift and disappear, newspaper headlines scroll backward, years melt away in hours, yet he still seems to be traveling at normal pace from event to event. His wife, after a time, is no longer (or not yet?) his wife, not even someone he can identify or locate. He does track down his college roommate, a Berkeley hippie who listens goggle-eyed to his incredible story, while the protagonist gapes at an era reborn:

It all was like a movie set, a careful, loving reconstruction of [the 1960s] […] He had lost Jenny, he had lost his nice condominium, he had lost his car dealership, but other things that he thought were lost, like this Day-Glo tie-dyed world of his youth, were coming back to him. Only they weren’t coming for long, he knew. One by one they would present themselves, tantalizing flashes of a returning past, and then they’d go streaming onward, lost to him like everything else, lost for a second and terribly final time.

The affective charge is a kind of reverse nostalgia, literally restoring the past and then consigning it to oblivion. Silverberg makes no attempt to explain — to rationalize in science-fictional terms — this temporal turnabout; like his protagonist, he just goes with the flow. The tale reminds me a bit of John Cheever’s classic 1964 story “The Swimmer,” a similarly arresting mix of surrealism and mundanity, wherein the protagonist bleakly regresses through a palimpsest of past selves. But whereas Cheever’s hero was oblivious, in denial, Silverberg’s is serenely accepting, having “entered some realm beyond all possibility of surprise.” At the end (in a deliberate Gatsby-esque echo evoked by the story’s title), he seems prepared to “just go endlessly onward […] a perpetual journey backward, backward, ever backward.” “Against the Current” was published in a SF magazine, but it is, as Silverberg acknowledges, an “out-of-genre” story — one that could, I think, have fit comfortably into the pages of Harper’s or The New Yorker.

This leads me to my final point — Silverberg’s scandalous lack of crossover success in the literary mainstream. Other New Wave–era writers — J. G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany — have enjoyed such success (in Dick’s case, posthumously): they are, in essence, now viewed as major contemporary novelists who happen to deploy the themes and forms of science fiction. Yet Silverberg was (and is) at least their equal, and novels like Dying Inside (1972), The Book of Skulls, and The Stochastic Man are so ideationally and emotionally rich that there is no reason that discerning non-genre readers shouldn’t warmly embrace them. Happily, most of the author’s major novels are available cheaply on Kindle, as is a nine-volume compendium of his “Collected Stories,” with illuminating headnotes. In the meantime, Time and Time Again serves as a solid and engaging introduction.

¤

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings (Bloomsbury, 2017).

The post Temporal Turmoil: The Time Travel Stories of Robert Silverberg appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[how2to18]

I liked the idea of a story in episodes that would go on for a long time.

— David Lynch (1997)

¤

DAVID LYNCH AGES GRACEFULLY. Proof is in footage from the making of Eraserhead, confirming that Lynch was not born with his silver, pomaded hairstyle, and that the lines of maturity make him look less goofy than he did in his post-college years. Almost unfaltering critical success and international fame have made the concept of Lynch plausible: his once curious, shambolic persona has been a brand since the 1990s. In “Part 14” of the much-awaited — and one-year overdue — return of Twin Peaks, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (David Lynch) retells a fresh “Monica Bellucci dream,” in which Cole and Bellucci (as herself) have a terrace coffee in a Paris street. Asking who is “the dreamer [who dreams and then lives inside the dream],” Bellucci makes a sign for Cole to look over his shoulder. The dream cuts to a shot from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), showing Cole at his FBI headquarters desk, 25-odd years previous, brown-haired, full-cheeked, with an air of concern on his face. Present-day Cole recounts: “I saw myself. I saw myself from … long ago. In the old Philadelphia offices.” Philadelphia holds significance in Lynch’s personal mythology. It is the city where Lynch, as an art student, first started experimenting with animation and, soon after, film. The dreamer who Bellucci referenced a moment before, he who lives within his own dream, might very well be David Lynch looking back on himself as a cultural subject — one for whom thinking creatively accounts for such a great part in biography and idiosyncrasy.

From the moment he was given a platform to talk about his journey into cinema and television, Lynch has talked about life in Philadelphia — where he attended art school, got married, became a father — as a source of dread and inspiration in and of itself. The influence of his college education on his artistic development seems to pale in comparison to that of the city itself, and it has been suggested, whether in good faith or not, that Lynch’s primary sources are rooted in his perception of the physical and social environment rather than in aesthetic and theoretical teachings he received. Candidly, in a BBC documentary on the history of the Surrealists in film that he was asked to host in 1987, Lynch talked about Philadelphia as “one of the sickest, most corrupt, decadent, fear-ridden cities that exists.” The dramatic quote has followed him everywhere, but he has not, to my knowledge, nuanced it since. The memories from Philadelphia are so strong partly because they are always interpreted in contrast with an earlier, idyllic past in Lynch’s Midwestern childhood. Against this comparatively happy, easy, wholesome time and place, urban societies have always seemed — if only at first sight — toxic. (This is with the exception perhaps of Los Angeles, a city where the sun shines and where, Lynch claims, there is “something in the air.”) However, as his manifest attachment to past selves and identities suggests (see the persistence of his birthplace, Missoula, Montana, and of his Eagle Scout ranking on his Twitter bio), a preserved naïveté is an integral part of his mature artistic persona.

In the opening sequence of last year’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, a montage of Super 8 family film footage gives a glimpse of this “simple” and elated postwar American childhood. The film director’s voice retells fragments from a happy early life among a loving mother, father, brother, and sister, and each memory sounds sensorily close and relevant. On a hot summer day in Idaho, Lynch remembers having been placed in a man-made pool of muddied water in the garden of his parents’ house in the company of Dickie Smith, another toddler from the neighborhood who was his friend. The two boys had been sent there together for protection against the scorching heat, and Lynch remembers how this simple arrangement enabled him to enjoy the garden, the pleasantness of the mud forming under his fingers, and the proximity of a friend who was sharing in his excitement. The memory of this scene, today, is so palpable that it becomes a bit overwhelming: “Forget it,” Lynch concludes with a smile.

Much of Lynch’s artistic coming of age, as he retells it in the documentary, involves the thematic elements of this happy anecdote: the immediate excitement of creative experimentation and the joy of sharing this work, this lifestyle — the “art life.” Through the rest of the film, the director is pictured handling rust-colored paint, which he smears onto the flat surface of a canvas in his current Los Angeles studio. Though his hands are clad in surgical gloves, the idea of the mud of the opening memory is not distant. Viewers may feel far removed from the clean and remote technicality of film, the medium with which Lynch’s work is predominantly associated. Yet the documentary closely examines this other, enduring side of Lynch’s artistic process, one that relies on primary, unmediated experimentation with matter and texture. Lula, Lynch’s two-year-old daughter, is walking around the studio, grasping the look and feel of various objects from her own perspective. There is a shot of a furry gray moth fluttering against a window pane. Later, Lynch comments on the amazing textures hidden within the body of the smallest organic creatures: insects, fish, small animals.

The life and death of organic matter can be as curious and spectacular in Lynch’s aesthetic as the workings of technology. Such curiosity brings his work to tread a fine line between the sheer beauty of changing organic forms and the abject horror that bodies conventionally represent when they are subject to death and decay. Lynch recounts that as an art student in Philadelphia he kept a special room in his building’s basement for artistic “experimentations,” which consisted in gathering organic matter, animal or vegetal, and leaving it to rot while recording all the successive physical changes of these transformations. This experimental preoccupation anticipates the dead cat in Eraserhead, the ear in Blue Velvet, or even the fantastic “Children’s Fish Kit” Lynch assembled in a 1979 photo-based art piece, giving instructions to assemble a (dead) mackerel he had chopped up into three pieces, like the parts of a mechanic toy. The bloody mess around the pieces of this gory puzzle testified to either the idiocy or malevolence of the maker of the “kit.” As Lynch remembered it, his father’s reaction when he showed him the experimental basement room was, unsurprisingly perhaps, one of palpable sadness and concern. This impression was confirmed to him when his father advised him a moment later, à propos de rien, never to have any children.

There is, and always has been, a sustained critical interest in discovering, as David Foster Wallace once put it, “what David Lynch is really like.” A question that arises, for example, is whether the concept of Lynch as a sui generis figure in cinema is fair, or even plausible. Film critic Peter Bradshaw, in his review of The Art Life, notes that the documentary gives little to no indication that Lynch is aware of an experimental film tradition happening before him, and concomitantly with him, as he describes the way he came to the realization that there could be such a thing as a “moving painting.” This realization, which led him to apply for and obtain a grant from the American Film Institute, is presented by Lynch, like many of his artistic decisions, as a purely intuitive move. “What is so extraordinary about this film,” Bradshaw writes, “is that it doesn’t show Lynch as the cinephile or the movie brat or even someone with any great interest in art history […] It is as if Lynch was in a state of innocent primitivism, without ever knowing about anyone else doing the same thing.” In Chris Rodley’s book of interviews, Lynch on Lynch, the names of Fellini, Kubrick, or Wilder occasionally come up, but the comments that they inspire are always succinct and superficial. “Sunset Boulevard is in my top five movies for sure,” says Lynch, before claiming he is not sure it has anything to do with Eraserhead beyond perhaps the “experience of a certain mood.” Watching or reading any interview with Lynch since the release of Eraserhead leaves open the question of whether the director performs his innocent remoteness to such a film tradition, or whether this lack of awareness, which amounts to a form of phenomenal self-involvement, is genuine.

Wallace, among others, believes it is. The concept of a “primitive” or “infantile” approach to filmmaking has marked much of Lynch Studies since its ignition in the 1990s. Both Surrealism and the Freudian Uncanny, important intertexts for Lynch’s interpreters, identify regression into infantile or primitive states as a condition of their existence. The primitive self, or the child-like self, is the only aspect of human life that André Breton sees as artistically promising and liberating, and his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto promoted Surrealism as no less than a “second chance” to experience the freedom of childhood — free from the constraints of rational language and self-presentation. Though he readily admitted the limitations of his own tentative, preliminary theories on the subject, Freud, meanwhile, insisted on this notion of infantile primitivism as the return of animistic beliefs that should have been bypassed in psycho-sexual development, but which nonetheless return to create the specific experience of the uncanny. My favorite moment in the Art Life involves Lynch’s retelling of a hazy, ominous memory, of saying goodbye to a male neighbor named Mr. Smith (Dickie’s father?) before his family set off to leave Boise, Idaho. It is unclear whether the man, almost a stranger to the young boy, represents the loss of a happy past or, on the contrary, some kind of threat. Lynch pauses; his voice wavers; and the story is never completed. Trying to define that special brand of creepiness that would come to define the term “Lynchian,” Wallace suggested that Lynch seemed to be “one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious,” suggesting that if these unconscious fixations are often too much for words, Lynch’s lack of emotional distance from them allows for their comparatively unfiltered expressions in his visual art and film.

Despite his unrelenting aesthetic interest in making the unconscious visible, Lynch claims to be ignorant of psychoanalytic theory, and Peter Bradshaw is not the first critic to have drawn a parallel between his quasi-contempt for theoretical knowledge and his seemingly innocent, unadulterated creative persona. His own contributions to interpretations of his work rarely take us further than autobiographical sources. For example, while hosting the history of Surrealism in film, he only admitted to feeling an affinity with “people who are interested in cinema as a means of experimentation,” whomever these people might be after the Surrealists. Jeff Johnson even identifies “an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism” in Lynch’s films, evident from the early shorts The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970), where the movement from the intuitive to the symbolic, from pre-verbal freedom to the constraints of language, is represented as a trauma. Johnson thus interprets the streak of happy naïveté in Lynch’s work as the expression of intrinsically American values, pointing that the rationalist approach always fails in Twin Peaks, and that Voltaire, in Lynch’s work generally speaking, “always loses to Rousseau.” Agent Cooper, the iconic hero of the TV series, is one of the clearest and most sophisticated expressions of Lynch’s postlapsarian American ideal. Wholesome, empathetic, spontaneous, trusting in his own intuitions and honest appetites, nevertheless hard-working and ever-respectful of social hierarchy, Cooper is the alter ego of the “naïve genius” Pauline Kael saw in Lynch upon the release of Blue Velvet: a childish, solipsistic, albeit clairvoyant, man.

¤

The return of Twin Peaks has given new life to Lynch’s “naïve genius” persona, which has lived through a number of variations in Lynch’s work, from awkward Henry in Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive’s ingénue heroine, Betty. In Season Three of Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper, already known as a naïve prodigy, is subjected to an interminably stretched-out “return” via catatonic Dougie Jones, a somewhat radical new incarnation in this genealogy of naïveté. Fifteen episodes into the much awaited Return of the 1990s cult TV show, Cooper, the hermeneutic force and spirit of Twin Peaks, had yet to recover the capacity to form sentences, or make willing decisions, a state that had led TV reviewers worldwide to compare the new Coop, or “Dougie,” with a robot, a simulacrum of himself, or even the eponymous Sims of the once-widely popular life-simulation video game (see, for example, Dougie’s helpless reaction when he needs to go to the toilet in “Part 5,” clasping his crotch with both hands, unable to relieve himself unless told to do so). Cooper’s 25-year sojourn in the remote time of the Black Lodge — a place where language is spoken backward but where even deceased people, like Laura Palmer, go on living and aging — comes to an end no sooner than three episodes into the new series. Even after this phenomenally delayed return, the transmission fails to restore Cooper to his terrestrial self. Perhaps as a result of his extended absence in between worlds, or as a consequence of the trauma for changing from one substance to another in his passage back from nowhere to Earth, Agent Cooper has then to go through a long and directionless process of restoration to the character he once was. I call it a process, but it is one that shows hardly encouraging, almost imperceptible, progress — an impossibly elongated delivery that will have resigned many viewers to accepting that perhaps this catatonic state was what the character Cooper was supposed to be for the whole series, that there would be no further “return” than this innocent, familiar body in a suit.

In line with Coop in the original series, the Cooper who has infiltrated the life of Dougie Jones in The Return is responsive to the simple, almost invariably sweet, food that his wife, Janey-E (Naomi Watts), feeds him as she would a child. The new, temporary Coop doesn’t dream, but he is guided by a good intuition (a.k.a. the Black Lodge) that helps him dodge the traps that his now almost nonexistent rational logic would fail to discern. Finally, Coop is still pure at heart to the point of taking an embarrassingly innocent approach to heterosexual relationships, which leads him to engage in a disturbing sex scene with Janey-E without previously having shown signs of consent. This is, up to this point, the only sex scene the show will put Cooper through, as if the character had to be stripped of agency to support — and perhaps accidentally enjoy — this less-than-pure experience of adult physicality. Coop, however, renews along with his old sensory memories. Through the comical, aphasic demands for coffee of Coop-as-Dougie-Jones, the longtime viewer can satisfy their knowledge that, doppelgängers and mind-bending dimension-crossing aside, this is the “real” Coop, in essence. In fact, Cooper’s initial rediscovery of coffee in “Part 4,” and of cherry pie in “Part 11,” tease the audience’s longing to see Cooper restored to his true self while failing to produce a suitable “trigger” for his return. So Coop, for the most part of The Return is reduced to a sort of Faulknerian man-child, but with added magic: he may be slowed down, incapacitated, limited to the feel of simple emotions and easily satiated hungers, but he is never angered by this condition, or shown to have become selfish in this disposition. He is fully dependent on the care of others but also flourishes under this care, seemingly blind to danger but actually blessed by protective intuition, good reflexes (as when attacked by Ike the Spike, the hitman sent to kill him), and the unfaltering guidance of mysterious protective forces.

And yet in the episode aired a week before the two-part finale, the show got Cooper back. Indulging in this subversive timeline, Lynch forces his audience to experience the world of Twin Peaks — which now comprises many more locations than the town of Twin Peaks itself and many new characters that draw, more or less closely, on the original series — beyond or before its movement toward narrative resolution. The “spirit” of this irresponsible timeline occasionally crystalizes through the wide, innocent, experimental eyes of Cooper-as-Dougie-Jones.

Twin Peaks has always affected a great innocence over the way it managed time and the release of information, a process that always privileged environmental components such as food, nature, technology, weather, and time. As Michel Chion noted in the mid-1990s, Twin Peaks was the first television series where the characters were seen interrupting the action altogether to enjoy simple physical gratifications such as fresh air, the taste of a good cup of coffee with a slice of pie, a “notion of ease” that was so completely new to the time-tight world of television series. Lynch was famously forced by ABC to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer early on in Season Two out of concern for the general longing for narrative resolution, a move that went against Lynch and Mark Frost’s initial plan to let the murder plot recede to the background, while savoring all the minor sub-narratives of the various characters and the atmosphere, in a word, of the show. This decision, he realized immediately, would “kill” the show, and it did, at least for a time.

The decision to make Fire Walk With Me in 1992 was, for Lynch, an opportunity to reexperience the world of the show, a universe that he had become obsessed with. Yet one of the reasons why the film was initially so badly received was that, due to new time constraints, the more light-hearted tone of the TV series had to be stripped away from the prequel narrative, leaving us with only the bleakest elements of the plot. It seems clear now that the show has taken complete liberty over the deliverance — and delivery — of Cooper, and therefore of time. It made the return of the hero not the beginning but almost the end of the Return’s plot and through this device, restored the show’s initial pace of suspended action, fruitful confusion, and slow, all-too-frequently pausing, dialogue. A bit like Gordon Cole’s deafness or Andy and Lucy’s heightened emotional sincerity, this is also a device to submit character interactions to a certain kind of experimental pace.

The extreme delay in restoring Cooper has enabled some of the greatest comedy the show has delivered yet, such as the gloriously incongruous casino scenes, the insurance company scenes in which Dougie behaves in a less-than-office-appropriate manner and gets away with it, and the desert rendezvous scene in which Dougie evades the Mitchum brothers’ plan to kill him by delivering them a $30 million check from his boss with a complementary cherry pie in a cardboard box. All of these scenes offer comically providential outcomes to seemingly desperate situations, deploying money and professional resources with a simplicity that only a child at play could come up with. Paradoxically then, the delayed recovery of Coop has enabled the return of the Twin Peaks spirit: a goofiness restored, rebooted. In Rodley’s book of interviews, to this day the most substantial collection of published words from the filmmaker, Lynch points out that he generally looks back to an era when filmmaking could take its time.

Things go so fast when you’re making a movie now that you’re not able to give the world enough — what it deserves. It wants to be lived in a little bit, it’s got so much to offer, and you’re going just a little too fast. It’s just sad.

In pure Lynch fashion, this statement fails to say whether it is referring to an actual era in film history or to Lynch’s own early experience of feature-filmmaking, a period when, for lack of funds, he stretched the making of Eraserhead over more than five years, a time that allowed him to create a vision and feel time within it — to explore it and believe in its reality. “Everything should be looked at,” is Lynch’s overall message. “There could be clues in it.” This is what the format of the television series certainly allowed him to do, which he found attractive from the beginning, in spite of the initial losses that TV would imply in terms of sound and image quality back in the 1990s.

A paradox remains in this scenario. For all its impossible delay, The Return is incredibly contemporary in its handling of media and sensitive to their evolution in time — from the ubiquitous radio in the enigmatic 1940s flashbacks of “Part 8,” to the new present day’s use of Skype, video blogging channels, smart phones, and geolocation. Many of these illustrations of hyper-connectivity are topped with representations of metaphorical and actual screens, at times futuristic or retro or both, as in the case of the mysterious glass box seen in “Part 1.” Only Sarah Palmer’s viewing of nature television programs and a boxing match seem resolutely from another time, the latter actually stuck in a terrifying time loop: a nod to the death of television as we once knew it. This, and a Roadhouse music listing that feels up-to-date, save for a few fan-serving callbacks (James Hurley, Audrey Horne’s ever-haunting dead-to-the-world dance, and to an extent, Rebekah Del Rio’s timely return), makes you think David Lynch is very much in tune with a contemporary cultural moment, which he consciously haunts. Meanwhile, the rarely interrupted continuum of an authorial vision is a place of indiscriminate duration, an elongated present moment prone to uncanny returns: mud, heat, hit songs, nuclear explosions, places where personal recollections eventually form the substance of the collective past.

¤

Elsa Court’s monograph Émigré Representations of the American Roadside 1955-85: Explorations in Literature, Film, and Photography is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Court researches expat cultures for the Financial Times and reads fiction for Granta magazine.

The post Return of the Naïve Genius: “David Lynch: The Art Life” and “Twin Peaks: The Return” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[incarnateirony]

Re: Primordial or Universal Concepts in Supernatural

Let it be said I’m going to try to cover this as... unilaterally and streamlined as I can. I’ve just come to realize, recently, that ideas like void, oblivion, or godhood tend to sit in an area of abstract that people haven’t really sat down and thought about. Most people remember their parents reading the bible about god splitting the waters and making light and darkness, and that’s it, that’s their comprehension of mythology on nothingness. Which is... fair. 

But as Supernatural delves deeper and deeper into the primordial: God, Amara, The Shadow, The Empty, and Beyond -- so much as what seemed like a perfectly Reasonable(TM) statement from me about Dreaming In Nothing really seemed to blow out a valve on some people and I had to step back and go, Why Is That? I mean, our show already covers universes that aren’t even remotely attached to our center one (French Mistake vs MainVerse, as opposed to Endverse or AUverse which are timeline divergent), but I think people have had a hard time stacking up some mythological concepts our team is employing.

And it’s not just Random Speculation Of Intertext I Like that they’re employing. Some are in name, some are in direct concept, some are in... episode titles. Be it directly in “Ouroboros”, or more abstractly in Optimism vs Nihilism. 

I may employ a few reference visuals and will definitely pull corresponding quotes from dogma(s), but let it be said -- these ideas are not even necessarily unique. I am not going to deep dive into the specifics of these beyond what is needed, because while I’d love to say “it’s obvious they’re using pure hermetics” from my angle, as a hermeticist, with recent titles and themes -- they might not be. They might be mixing and matching and just employing sweeping Omnimyth structure, such as The Hero With 1000 Faces but in mytharc form rather than just hero journey. (Also, read Campbell’s work, cuz reasons.)

THAT SAID.

I’ll carry away immediately into an aside that it was once kinda the swaggy thing to consider Hermeticism as “optimism” and gnosticism as “pessimism,” and they were parallel but not identical philosophies to discussing the origins of the universe. Both philosophies basically go on that the soul can only escape material bondage through deep and special, personal intuitive knowledge. There’s no one path through any of these, they both have respective denominations -- they are more philosophy than hard dogma and are designed for debate and, in some facets, scientific testing and comparison. That said, there’s some paradoxes, which is why I’m not gonna sit here needling any specific vein. 

And you know, they touch on other ideas -- Qabbalism, for example; a great many creator myths, and so forth. Most of these resonate from an idea. Once there was nothing, and now there’s something, so we have to figure out how the fuck we got to all this Something out of Nothing. And I mean even if you say “big bang,” a related question in this philosophy is okay, but why was there the infinitely compressed boomy dot and why did it bang, because if there was nothing, how did nothing bang.

You see the catch-22. 

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT NOTHING.

I’m going to use the Qabbalistic concepts, but these are in heavy discussion, only slightly divergent, in a variety of these discussions. Change the label as you will, there’s really only so many ways to discuss Nothing.

When we see The Empty in the show, we see black space. Which is fair. We, the viewers, are in a three dimensional world viewing light pouring out of our TV screen, and not in an indefinable void of any concepts, much less space.

Both of these fields use the Qabbalistic tree of life as their way to sort of like, grok how things go from nothing to everything, but even the tree means Something is there. We’ll get to the tree in a bit.

Before it all though, there is Ain. It’s negative existence, an absolute nothingness, sometimes called The Prime Cause or the Originless Origin of all manifestation. It’s not knowable or describable and anything you can say about it is not. In fact, that word pasta is itself still too defined. You feel me?

But once you creep past that, you talk about the Ain Soph. Ain means “Not.” Soph means “End.” Ain Soph is nothing but it’s an infinite nothing, infinite space, and eternity. That is to say, it’s gained some sort of cohesive definition while still being nothing. It’s called the Old One Of All Old Ones and is a total absolute primal darkness. Darkness being relative, of course, because we haven’t comprehended actual things like dark and light, but we’re getting close enough it applies. But it’s sort of a unified form of nothing-everything.

After that you hit the Ain Soph Aur. Aur just means “Light.” And once you hit the Aur, you’ve hit infinite light.

Once we start breaking free of the infinite-nothing-never-was-always-void-never, we discuss Ain Soph Aur as retracted into a point. There’s somehow substance in the nothing. This brings forth the Crown of the Tree of Life, where pretty much all other points in the universe descend. 

Here, it splits off into pillars. To the left, the female form, judgment. The negative. Not negative like evil; negative like... magnetism. Atomic structure. Then you have Mercy, the male form, on the right, or the “atomic positive”. Between them is a neutral pillar of mildness and balance, and this makes the cap of your tree. There’s a hidden, or if you will, “unofficial” point called the abyss, which is a realm of ideals. Beneath the abyss is what starts to be considered “reality.” It’s the universe coming together and taking form in its many dimensions, thoughts, feelings, experiences, shapes and forms. Above that, you’re in sort of... primitive state of Ideas(TM).

Now, again, I’m using Qabbalism as a base, I’m not saying this is like... specifically nail on head what the powers that be used. 

Now, Qabbalism or not, general creation myth or not, I really don’t believe they’ve hardily stuck through and through top to bottom of running Supernatural on a tree of life path. That would be insanity to suggest in retrograde. A good deal of its existing concepts before inclusion of these primal ideas, in our show, plug well INTO it in retcon or retrograde, but we know pretty much for a fact that when Kripke threw down his little draft about two dudes and a car, he wasn’t really thinking about The Concept Of True God And Oblivion. So I’m going to spare that waterfall of fuckery, perhaps for another day.

But we do know several things about SPNVerse:

There is a definite point of Empty/Nothing

There is a point that Empty starts getting feisty, but is itself separate from the creator

There is a creator represented by light and a “destroyer” represented by darkness, each gendered to these old ideologies.

 I mean, we can banter sexism and the ilk, but that actually comes with a very human perspective understanding and a bit of a struggle of understanding that destruction is not necessarily evil and creation is not necessarily good, but both are necessary forces. Now how well Supernatural handled that in execution is another thing entirely, but I’m not here to cover the social aspect of that in this meta -- I’m just here to sort of help with a confusion I’ve witnessed in recent commentary I’ve dropped.

There are many ways this gets listed depending on what... ideology you’re applying to this tree. Hell, there’s Egyptian versions.

Tumblr’s probably gonna shrink that illegibly but if you can’t squint it out, you’ll notice the top is the concealed, source of power, infinite potential and subjective realm, and so on. And that’s already being past the respective Ain Soph of nothing and into the Realm of Light.

TL, DR, basically, the rules of operation that you know in your material, living existence or within your universe are not necessarily employed in the above. Height, depth, width, emotion, feeling, these are all thoughts of this universe. And in theory, there may be other nodes of light that have their own outpouring.

This, in example, might be employed in concepts like The French Mistakeverse which, even according to the angel there, lacked heaven, god, or any of the rules within the SPNverse. It came from another, slightly shittier cascade of light and thought its own thinkie thoughts until it reached that point in an otherwise atheistic universe wherein Sam was something named a Padaleski when he got thrown into it. The rules and terms and conditions of that universe have, in the very least, not followed down the same path on the tree. On the other hand, the tree has shadows, parallels, or different spheres that have different levels of or parallel existences; or of course divergences in timeline in what is otherwise the same cascade of reality.

Again, to not diverge too heavily into a singular train of thought I’m going to cut that off there, but hopefully the concept I’m trying to deliver is clear:

Endverse and AUverse in theory are very likely on a similar waterfall of existence but

French Mistake and Scoobynatural and others like it are likely not.

It is reasonably arguable that Scoobynatural is almost a node within that plane, similar to Gabriel creating a sphere of his own when doing his trickster fuckery. In which case, I point to French Mistake, which was a universe unto itself.

PEDANTICS ASIDE, 

I bring you to why I’m talking about this to begin with.

Now, it was a conversation of headcanons and potential-canon thoughts that brought this up, but something that seems to hold fairly canonically sound, if in subtext: The Dream.

When Chuck was mortally wounded by Amara, the universe started... dying. Now, the real question is, if there is a world without god within it, why can it exist while another will fade if its god dies?

Well, first of all, that depends on the concept of an incarnate god; is the French Mistake’s god more of an abstract? Was there an early dream wherein the universe is only vaguely conscious, similar to ours which quantum scientists are testing its reactability as we speak, wherein it behaves differently while observed than not but doesn’t necessarily have angels in togas and trenchcoats popping around in direct view as much as our wavelengths being literal like, forces of the universe most of the time? And what defines consciousness? BIG question in both science and a lot of philosophy.

Before we digress into that, however, let’s talk about the concept of the incarnate god -- I’ll do so in shorthand as to not turn this into some sort of Initiation Class(TM) but essentially, considering it’s canonically sound that Chuck probably wasn’t walkin’ around like a Dude before there were humans for his angels to possess, and we’ve heard the rise of humans over neanderthals, what does that leave us but the awareness that this is an incarnate, and more directly engaged concept monitoring its realm?

And of course, the idea of the dream. 

To give some context, I had posted this as an “endgame potential thought,”

“The Everybody Dies BUT” Ending:

The Empty eventually comes for Cas. Also, so as to not auto-revive him, they’ve also killed off Jack, and the Empty claimed him anyway. Be it by battle or long life, Sam and Dean also perish, and are also escorted to the Empty by Billie. However, due to their strong connections, nephilim, profound bond or whatever else, they find each other in oblivion – in this liminal space before God and Amara and Creation – and create their own dream among each other. No angels, no god, or at least none without their version of doing it Right™. A new world – a better one – paradise.

This, I realized, confused people -- and as above, rightfully so to people not really realizing the concept of Nothing is completely outside of the universal construct. I had tried to shorthand it in that blurb, but it kinda whiffed over heads and really, I get why.  I’m actually going to use this exchange to see if, now with some context, I can better trade off and fill it out without top-to-bottom trying to Qabbalah through the whole SPNverse:

Other questions came shortly after in asks: 

In your "Everybody dies BUT" Ending, when you say TFW 2.0 creates their own paradise, do you mean like they create a dream, like a collective heaven of their own, concious design, where they can be in peace together? Or do you mean it as they go cosmic entity mode, and create a version of the world that they consider perfect, basically becoming God(s)?

To which I replied,

Perhaps people aren’t used to abstract thought wherein the question is, what’s the difference?

What makes a cosmic being beyond being the one to have a thought to create a thing? By nature it is their dream, it is their world and it is thus both subject to them and dependent on them, so chicken or the egg, ouroboros and full cycle, legitimately, what is the difference of one dream or the other?

But again, curse of knowledge/perspective, I realize I kind of missed the mark on that explanation, as was further evidenced by this follow-up ask:

I guess even in abstract terms the definition and perspective between what's real or what's not varies,just like the concept of perfection.I think everyone sees aspects that would represent differences between dream and reality in a some way,but it's always different. For instance,for me the SPN heaven is real in terms of it's existence,but it's also a dream,because it's a reflection of what a individual wanted to be real.It's real,but also a dream,it all varies on the layer you're analysing. 

Fair, of course, but as we were addressing this conceptual point, which is -- as shown above, difficult to detail, I replied:

You’re still thinking within the universe.

Heaven, and hell, exist within the universe.

Other universes exist. Some are parallel but varied timelines. Some are French Mistakes with different rules. Some are cartoons. These do not all function under the same rule set.

Heaven is part of the universe that Chuck made. At one point, he existed in oblivion, for whatever reason; we do not know whence he and Amara or even Death among them (chicken or the egg as Death put it) came. They simply were, as far as we can comprehend, as they predate time within the universe. Because Chuck created the universe. Ergo they all existed before the universe.

It requires a form of nonlinear thinking to parse it. But at some point, Chuck Made Everything When There Was Only Nothing. That world can fade out if Chuck dies, even inside the world. Just like, if someone was to die while dreaming, their dream would end as well. Many parts of your dream imagine themselves from your subconscious. Other parts you can become lucid in and start to control and take command of. Many elements run simply on what you know, or the depths of your mind manifests. Such is the nature of a dream.

Heaven isn’t to be treated as separate because it’s within that universe. Now, what Sam and Dean and Cas and maybe Jack might dream of as paradise might not be what Heaven is. Heaven, after all, was only part of Chuck’s vision of creation.

That first primordial spark that made Chuck’s early intangible dream that blossomed into everything he wanted above and below, that’s the universe.

If, as per The Post In Question, TFW started from that same oblivion point… what divides them from Chuck? “Power”? What is power when it is a dream reliant on YOU? You are the power.

And then came this follow-up ask:

I think I see your point.But just to understand your stand on this better,when you say suggest that power would be irrelevant in a situation were power is basically the ability to dream,that makes sense if that's the true source,or at least the initial source,of Gods powers.But what if there was something else,if he, Amara and Death had,for wathever reason,came into being with more power than just creativity?Could a being that came into existence without those powers obtain them,in your opinion?

This is the point in which I dug in my heels, but I now recognize did so unclearly:

I think this opinion requires that the authors are completely bypassing any and all myth regarding the concept of oblivion in multiple legends, and that people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around what ideas like Nothingness actually mean. Black Space is ironically too much. The idea of void predates… I dunno, time, space, height, depth, width, light, dark, that’s why it’s actually void. Most creation principles dawn from the idea that somehow, some way, a spark of thought dawned. What that spark is called, how it manifests, that’s where everybody bickers. But things like “uber power scale” are completely irrelevant when you’re talking about starting points of literal nothing, and that’s ironically the concept of things like the Ouroboros.

You see, the reason I dug my heels in, however, is not pure stubbornness. If we are operating outside of the laws of any mechanical or existing universe in which presence and power is defined, the power and presence within that universe is moot. Once a creature enters that universe it brings with it the weight of its general principle, but within the Empty, all things are relative. If this were not true, the Empty “would have thrown Cas so deep into the Empty that you can’t bother me,” but “except you can’t, or you would have already.”

“Pretty smart, pretty smart, tough guy.”

What we have is the Ain having something from the Aur thrown in and essentially becoming the Ain Soph, there is now Something in the Nothing and the Nothing just wants it to fuck off and leave it alone so it can resume being Nothing. It’s now vaguely aware again, of Things(TM). Of worlds and dreams and people and things, when everything else was just so peaceful Not Existing. 

If we defer back to Qabbalah again, this is a breech of something called the Tzimtzum. The tzimtzum is basically the act of when “God” “contracted” into the infinite point of light to barf out space and made its polar parts, it was considered creating “conceptual space” in which these finite and seemingly independent realms could like. Exist. But it made a bunch of empty space around it. Again, space being relative, when talking about Nothing, but doing it in a way we can discuss it. But here we are, putzing around in this place that doesn’t even exists and thus wants to be left the fuck alone. God is even called “Ha Makom” or “The place” in this structure. So there’s The Nothing and The Place. The Place is God’s universe basically. 

God, in this structure of naming, actually wouldn’t be Chuck as we know it. Chuck would quite-likely be the male pole with Amara the female, but again, we can’t swear up and down how closely they held to this. It would more be whatever thought hiccupped and made the PrimordialTwins that had their bickering match in season 11, which kind of made the non-space they started having their slap fight in. 

Also, realistically, there seems to be a level of retcon in this, as in theory “sealing out the darkness” could also correspond to this idea itself, and there’s a variety of terms one could sling around in treating Amara as herself conceptually outside of this space. The original intent/application could genuinely be either/or, and that’s the fun part of dealing in this level of philosophical fuckery. And the Tzimtzum did lots of cool things, like made not just spiritual and physical worlds but yes, even the very concept of Free Will is on the list of things it made space to exist.

One could also argue no retcon needed, as even if the primordial aspect of Amara was sealed away, the Mark used to do so still waterfalled her concepts and impact through the rest of the known universe via Lucifer, Cain, Dean, and whatever else that shifted along the way. Without the mark, Lucifer wouldn’t have fallen and made demons, and hell wouldn’t exist, still realizing “destruction” or “severity” into the universe. Wherein if she were ironically imprisoned within the realm of light, as it is more metaphorical light at that point, somewhere in the area of Ideas rather than Physical Reality And The Known Universe, it all applies and once that Abyss is crossed is where the Mark instead impacted reality in her stead.

The hermetic God is really Both Of These, not to be confused with the idea of the Christian God, more easily directly encapsulated in Chuck. One simply does not exist without the other. And there’s a billion reads on these in philosophy, some weirder than others and really, the application of these is light enough we need to ask if there were even retcons, much less trying to badly staple over our Favored Denomination Of Thought(TM). Supernatural handled it as brother and sister, one egg if you will. Many versions treat it as a hermaphroditic concept that split in two somehow. Others... get even weirder, we’re not gonna go there because frankly, the show didn’t even really try. We got brother and sister. It is what it is.

So while this post is somewhat in explanation of what I realized sounded like a madhouse theory to people not used to thinking abstractly over what is admittedly a headcanon/hopeful ending concept, it is also -- perhaps oddly to some people -- how I’ve taken to compute most of the ongoing mythology within the Dabb era, naturally as per my base... like... life? And study and teachings?

And frankly probably adds up a hell of a lot better than just assuming it’s a leveled-up power-game, which while from the bottom it looks like such, in the full scale, the top and the bottom are not so unlevel from each other, for -- “as above, so below,” the cardinal concept of the Ouroboros (14.14).

If the Nothing did not Become Infinite, nothing might Be. But if the Infinite Nothing did not then retract itself into a point, then Nothing Could Exist. In retracting to a Point, something existed. That Point births an origin, and all attributes that become the recognized universe and reality, to which there are poles and balance of arguable levels of sentience, and from which all things flow, including -- in this essay-ass meta thing -- Chuck’s creation(s). 

Heaven, hell, probably even purgatory, those are all parts of Chuck’s respective dream, that moment Something In Nothing pulled its shit together and started having Thinkie Thoughts. Maybe in French Mistakeverse it became a Big Bang. Maybe it even was in SPNVerse considering the mention of evolution. But the simple fact is, it all came from Somewhere In Nothing.

Which does, yes, roll back to my little idea about a possible ending I’d like to see on a list of a few, but also might help recognize what I mean when I say things like “power scales are pretty relative and abstract at these points” and so forth. 

Hindsight edit: @drsilverfish may enjoy.