RETROFUTUROLOGY

How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future

Steam Piano image courtesy Adrian Agredo.

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 28, 8 PM
ON VIEW: Friday, January 28 – Friday, March 5, 2011
HOURS: Thursdays & Fridays 3–6 PM, Saturdays & Sundays 12–6 PM

Observatory is pleased to announce our new exhibition, RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show of visual art, curated by the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels).

Join us for the opening, Friday, January 28, at 8 PM.

About the show: To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past…

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and wires: A modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age can puncture the time barrier! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s? A steampunk 1890s?

Our visions of the future are nested. Our conception of time is hyperreal.

This is the process on which the present runs.

Come see contemporary art that investigates futures-past, futures-possible, and other nestings.

Featuring paintings, sculptures, and other works by many artists, including: Adrian Agredo, Tracey Atkinson, Emi Brady, Bunny M, Jon Burgerman, Chiezo, Devon Clapp, Jesse Corinella, Rachel Debuque, Derrick Dent, Matt Duffin, Ethan Gould, Andrea Hendrickson, Richard Herzog, Andy Hunter, Patti Jordan, John Lee, Haydex Li, Benjamin Mayock, Marianne McCarthy, Megan Murtha, George Pfau, Nick Raynolds, Matthew Robinson, Sean Star Wars, Tom Sarno, Rachel Schragis, Joelle Shallon, Greg Shelnutt, Niko Silvester, Melissa Stern, Lisa Temple-Cox, and Robin Treadwell.

Check out this short essay on the question of self as posed by V. S. Ramachandran, one of my favorite writer–scientists (along with, recently, Carl Elliott). In the post: morality and dystopia.

Some Rama-sentences I admire:

…Maybe the solution to the problem of the self won’t be a straightforward empirical one. It may instead require a radical shift in perspective, the sort of thing that Einstein did when he rejected the assumption that things can move at arbitrarily high velocities.

When we finally achieve such a shift in perspective, we may be in for a big surprise and find that the answer was staring at us all along…

There are curious parallels between this idea and the Hindu philosophical view that there is no essential difference between self and others or that the self is an illusion.

Read them today! Or whenever!

The poems concern:

1. The minotaur, a poetical figure combining the bull (Bos taurus) and the man (Homo sapiens sapiens).
2. Extinct animals we have only recently discovered. And now must mourn.

I wrote these poems in the spring and sat on them for a while, meditating on loss and the building-up of life, the psychic hermit-crabbing we attempt and must sometimes backtrack out of. Many thanks to Offcourse and its editors.

Read the review on The Outlet.

Part of my ongoing series on novellas (thanks as ever to New Directions and NYRB). In this review:

• Nazis
• Scooby-Doo
• The amazing Jakov Lind
• Cannibalism
• Ahab
• “Chronotrope: All of Europe’s madness… unleashed in a half-decade, the monster slouching out of modernity, not just towards Bethlehem but towards every quiet holy place.” [The woods.]
• Paralysis and becoming-deer

Lind, smoking a pipe, bout to get back to writing like a bad-ass, thinking about some deep shit.

Read the review on The Outlet.

The most terrifying aspect of The Murderess—Alexandros Papadiamantis’s famous psychological terror-fable—is the calm and lyrical nature of its prose. As others have said, Modern evil is rational: “Murder [or some other evil] simply must be committed; there is no other logical option [according to my limited human worldview]. Let me tell you why…”

The second-most terrifying aspect of the short, episodic book is its description of a bad-ass Greek sea-eagle:

…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…

WTF. Remind me not to mess with a bird that eats seals and sea-snakes. (Or, per the rest of the book, killer grandmamas…)

Read the review on The Outlet. Denon’s masterful long short story is translated by Lydia Davis and introduced by Peter Brooks, who hints at the mystery of the novella.

On my own ongoing investigation into the novella, for Electric Literature:

What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.

Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.

By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain:

Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—

Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.

Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.

The man’s (invented) name was V.D., and he wrote about sex. Lulz.

The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

For the “World’s Longest Literary Remix,” I translated a portion of Horatio Alger’s Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake (p. 127-8) into the universe of Great Cthulhu—of Shub-Niggurath, and the fungoid crab-miners from Yuggoth (which we call “Pluto”), which crab-miners so indelicately iced poor Mr. Henry W. Akeley of the hills north of Brattleboro, VT—at least as far as “The Whisperer In Darkness” would have us believe…

Where Alger writes of bears, I confound said lumbering pickinick-basket loving mammals with/into Lovecraft’s shoggoths, which are surely some of his more signature (and more terrifying) beasts—great expandable pools of eyes, hyper-intelligent, driven insane by millions of years of servitude to other inhuman races, then by millennia of demi-torpor in the pits of Antarctica, or forgotten New England barns…

I can almost write that I’m not sure whether Alger’s libertarian vision for America or Lovecraft’s materialist/maltheist vision for the cosmos is the more terrifying—but Lovecraft, neurotic and evil as he was, always wins. There’s something in his fiction that is enduringly disturbing, no matter how often it’s tackled and lauded and dismissed and revived, the way Sappho is enduringly romantic, or A Tribe Called Quest enduringly playful–relaxing.

I just finished the masterful Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (pron. “well-beck;” the linked PDF is an old draft, to give the uninitiated a taste; I strongly recommend buying the Believer edition), which should be read and reread by anyone interested in instilling fiction with terror, esp. that Lovecraftian ur-terror, gnostic madness, that matches, then entirely out-does the vicissitudes of real life.

(Houellebecq on the ethic of the master terror-teller: “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time.”)

Props to the GalleyCat crew for organizing the remix.

A shoggoth, more cuddly than the stories would have us imagine, and with far fewer eyes…

Read the review on The Outlet (Electric Literature’s blog).

Bad Nature, a novella about translating for Elvis in a Mexico City dive bars, is mesmerizing. Javier Marías is a force of compact, darkly humor. I wish I’d known about him earlier, and I wish I could read his work in Spanish.

Self-grievance aside, I’m happy Electric has both introduced me to Marías and offered to publish my thoughts on novellas, novella-writing, and novella-tasting on their blog. Channeling the spirits of Deleuze and Guattari, I approach a novella as a meditation on an incident (”What happened?”), a freeing-out-of short story which strays into philosophy while reining itself in enough to prevent a freezing-into novel.

My list of novellas and quasi-novellas is already too long to tear through before the summer’s out. My mood is, in a word, psychednessitude.

Potentially up next for the Outlet series: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain; a long short story about sex, lies, innuendo, and levels of counter-innuendo), The Murderess (a brutal meditation on women, money, aging, and—naturally—murderizing), The Chrysalids (a post-apocalyptic American tale—perhaps too long to qualify, but too tempting to put down, now that I’ve started it—or really now that I’ve seen its future-primitive rainbow cover), and a “classic” classic by James.

In the mean time, pick up Marías (who is the king of Redonda) on the King (of whatever he was “the King” of). If so inspired, do a dance:

The folks at the Hand Drawn Map Association have been kind enough to publish my map of Our Hollow Planet Earth, which we live upon (potentially, unconfirmed).

I suppose now I have to write a story that relates back to the items on the map, none of which directly relate to the places mentioned in my one-sixth finished novel of similar name (The Hollow Earth). A sampling of the places mentioned in the novel thus far:

• New Orleans* (*actual place)
• Bechuanaland* (*actual place)
• Z’quoz
• Barrels Bridge* (*actual place? I don’t remember)
• The civilized Central Philosopher-Kingdom, or Hollow Kingdom, as it is commonly known
• The duplexiverse
• The Garden of Sulayman
• The Academy Of The Humay
• Mictlan^† (^†the Mayan underworld, may be cut)

For more pseudo-maps, monsters, inspirational hip hop posters, and geometric designs by the untrained by constantly doodling Author, visit the Author’s humble doodle-blog, Ill-Luminations—now with commentary by professional illustrator and collaborator Ethan Gould.

Or aqueducts. Whatever. Check it out! Wonders from history. Booyakah.

I will now be publishing quotations to a tumblr blog (they didn’t have the venture capital for an E?), florillegium. The metaplasmus (intentional misspellingg) of the title = ill + florilegium. (So it matches ill-luminations.) [Plus the one-L domain was taken. Dang.] A florilegium is a book of ill shit you found out there, such as quotations, flower petals, doodles, whathaveyou: a Renaissance blog…

Time passes even in the past—things seem to become more obvious and understandable than they were in the present…

—Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House.

…In which I imagine how ancient persons might have experienced the sort of wonder that we at the Atlas attempt to catalogue.

My column’s first, eponymical iteration concerns the Pharos, or great Lighthouse, of Alexandria. Read it today and let me know what you think.