RETROFUTUROLOGY
“How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future”

A group show of visual art at Observatory, Brooklyn,
curated by the Hollow Earth Society,
Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels

The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.  —Kant

To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past.

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and complicated-looking wires: It’s a modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age—our new computer chips and LED lights and cars with doors that open upright like a space pod—can puncture the time barrier, with the right old-fashioned mad scientist at the steering wheel! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s, wherein a white kid can invent rock and roll? A steampunk 1800s? A future wherein the promises of kaleidoscopic, holographic advertising from the late 1980s come to fruition—a world with yet another layer of retrofuturist dreaming added onto the small-town diner…?

Our visions of the future are nested.

Our conception of time is hyperreal. In explaining the visual gimmicks of a single cultural artifact such as the Buggles’s “Video Killed The Radio Star,” we must refer to the heyday of radio; the future promised by television executives in synthesizer advertisements; science fiction pulp covers from the 1950s; the neon-on-black-and-white aesthetic of MTV in its early years, not to mention the gallery scene that birthed that aesthetic; 1950s diner-decor futurism; the late-1970s body-posturing and dystopic styling of Devo; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, looking forward to 2026; the garb of mad scientists in movies from the 1940s;—and the sigh that comes with opening a magazine and seeing all of this, compressed down into an ad for sunglasses for hipsters.

Or not even for hipsters: The retrocamp fashion exemplified by an irritating blend of past and future has been recompressed and sold in shopping malls internationally. This isn’t marginal pulp—

This is the process on which the present runs.

You are invited to join us for a group show

The Hollow Earth Society seeks artists working in drawing, printmaking, and painting, and possibly sculpture and video/multimedia art (space is limited) for RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show focused on past- and present-futures, to be up from January 29 to March 5, 2011, at Observatory. Submissions are due January 8, 2011.

How to submit:
Include all information listed below. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered unless they are mind-staggeringly fantastic and presented with great humility.

1. Send us up to five images. Digital submissions will be accepted via email. Files must be in JPEG or PDF format. Please number your image files to correspond to your image list.
2. Send an image list. Double check that the numbers on your list correspond to the numbers in the names of your actual files.
3. In your list, include for each image: an image number, the work’s title, the date of work, the medium, and its size and price.
4. Along with the list, please include a brief description of each image.
5. Send a three-line bio, your contact information and an email address. You may also submit a résumé.
6. If you like, send an optional artist’s statement, no longer than 300 words.

THERE IS NO FEE TO ENTER.

Deadline: All email submissions must be received no later than January 8, 2011. (All accepted work should be physically received at Observatory no later than January 24, 2011.)

Return of submitted materials: Include a SASE and make sure there is sufficient postage, or pay for shipping and we will ship your work back to you. If work is two-dimensional, the Hollow Earth Society is more than happy to have it on file for future shows and keep it exhibited for sale on our website. The same 30% commission for art sold will apply.

Drop-Off: If you have been accepted into the show and are in the NYC area, you may wish to drop off your art at the gallery. Email us (gallery@hollowearthsociety.com) to schedule a date and time.

Pick-Up: Return of mailed artwork with return postage will begin on March 12, 2011.

Email submissions to:
gallery@hollowearthsociety.com

By post:
Observatory
543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215

To find out more, click here.

First, inhale this Surreal vision of Full House-era “fun,” ritualistic/orgiastic mastication, overconsumption, and, uh, mozzarella:

Tasty.

Now—with no pants on but plenty of flow, Die Antwoord are everyone’s favorite post-genre quasi-hip hop sex-obsessed musical… act? Are they an act a la bunraku? (The “real man” behind the Ninja is visibly, ironically puppet-mastering the Ninja—floppy cartoon penis, mullet/fade, and all?) Or are they more like Andy Kaufmann? (The “real” comedy act will begin as soon as I’m done reading the entire Great Gatsby out loud; the “real” Die Antwoord are always at the edges of themselves, of being-what-you-thought-they-would-be?) Who knows. The end result is fokken rad music, not to mention the awesome, wild, aesthetics-defying, sexuality-trumping, eye-bombing video:

Just as the erotic flees into the unknown, the obscured, and the secret, so does it return like a flood (”of what,” he asks, with a wink) at the call of the maximal and the cartoonishly intimate (sexy with a wink, “sexy,” the Robert Coover version of sex, sex as joke, as game). This maximal return is elegantly and hilariously incarnated (pun intended) in “Evil Boy.” Good show. Or, should I say, good “show?”—

The erotic, like the violent, like the gastro-orgiastic, defies simulation: Cartoonish, silly, ironic/self-aware “sex” or “pizza orgy” still produces in us the desire for sex, for pizza. No matter how silly the pizza obliteration party becomes, the pizza cannot be obliterated and in fact expands, conceptually, to consume the song, the obliteration. Or:

The Pizza Song (original and screwed) always effectively generates hunger, especially for junk food. It obliterates not “pizza,” some noble Italian culinary art, but “the obliteration of pizza.” It negates its own joke, the way that “sex” in “Evil Boy” negates the idea that “we’re going to have a larf with all these wooden cocks and this eyelash-less bird in a silly fur coat.” These videos are both so maximal, they overcome themselves.

Here the erotic finds and joins the gastro-orgiastic (and the violent—see: Tarantino, Oliver Stone…) and becomes simply the Beyond, that which lies beyond our ability to taxonomize, be really aware of, hold in our thoughts abstractly.

For to truly contemplate desire or hunger is to feel horny or want to eat: Any other “knowledge” of this animal non-knowledge is exactly what it wants least to be, a joke. The joke in supra-maximal art is that it is both actually funny and “funny,” or deadly serious—the last laugh of the corpse; the pizza-stuffed buffoon, off to a nap; the mid-coitus man and woman who have traded the sign of sex for sex, and then traded sex for the ultimate erotic (the unknown), which leaves them with nothing else, only laughter…

Anti-philosopher, literary critic, and erotica-obsessed overall word-genius Georges Bataille is a shadow-name, a name at the edges of theory. For every twenty references to a Derrida or a Foucault, there is but one to Bataille… I’m trying to read everything he wrote this year, and it’s going swimmingly. He immediately earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

Here a few early highlights:

In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element, which is of no consequence for itself—a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.

As one can see, I have placed the tool and the manufactured object on the same plane, the reason being that the tool is first of all a manufactured object and, conversely, a manufactured object is in a certain sense a tool.  The only means of freeing the manufactured object from the servility of the tool is art, understood as a true end.  But art itself does not as a rule prevent the object it embellishes from being used for this or that: a house, a table, or a garment are no less useful than a hammer.  Few indeed are the objects that have the virtue of serving no function in the cycle of useful activity.

—Theory of Religion.

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature.  Literature is either the essential or nothing.  I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us.  But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.’

Literature is communication.  Communication requires loyalty.  A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

—Literature and Evil.

The man, looking all Nosferatu-esque. Probably thinking about “unknowledge,” the sovereign, animality, his own particular take on Marx, or—far more likely—about sex. Another possibility, given the content of his books: eating eggs. Dude must have loved him some eggs in the morning…

Extra points for the creepy child-with-cane oil in the background!

I wrote this post ages ago but never published it. Presumably it is unfinished. Presumably, however, all small meditations are the comprehensible unfinished eggs of longer meditations, the “compleat” meditations that dwell in our heads and keep us up at night. When I finally have time to write them all down, I will either be not working or dead, or possibly both. In any event, here is one egg, born of an old pop rock song and a train ride:

One night, I heard a very young couple on the train arguing about the lyrics of an Oasis song I had not heard since middle school. Like Proust’s tea-soggy Madeleine, the words of the song brought me back in time and space as I sat perfectly still. I smelled the mosquito-thickened, pine-scented air of Atlanta. (I wondered, what the fuck is a wonderwall?)

Later, on a gloomy N train back from Queens, listening to Outkast and Akrobatik and Elliott Smith in my head, I thought I understood something of that early feeling of love for a love song, or belief that a love song can change your life, or even that it can say anything about your life; that a song can serve as a precis of all you hold in your secret heart.

The internal architecture (the dream-bones) of the song persist not because they have the life-stuff of an essay, a love letter, or a good honest fuck-you phone call, or even a fuck-off offering online (status update, profile deletion), but because they tend to make sense of out of nonsense, and to comfort us exactly when and where no comfort’s due—and to do so all on their own magical terms.

In this way, the song is always dishonest, a black magic, a dream magic—or at least the under-practiced hedge-cantrip of a matchmaker, favorite aunt, former best friend, advice columnist, or other romantically unworthy vizier.

The song’s bones persist because they call into play their own persistence; they are un-humble, selfish things, songs—like hungry beetles or hungrier, beetle-seeking spiders.

When it’s really raining out, you can see the run-off from abandoned ballads running down Ocean Avenue. The loose words (”angel,” “custard,” brands of liquor, units of time, rubble from the palaces of lost memory) get stuck under tires, like fluttering moths.

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…)

(But really—we’ll GET you, you hovertrucker…)

The CIA has a page for kids (thanks to Chris T. for pointing this out) that hilariously misuses (or, should i say, “misuses”) quotation marks:

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is an independent US government agency that provides national security “intelligence” to key US leaders so they can make important, informed decisions. CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Italicizing or bolding these words would have worked better… I think they think the quotation marks are “clarifying” because they “highlight” key spy “lingo.”

But given, oh, you know, critical US “intelligence” “failures”—9/11, Saddam’s not having WMDs after all, the Afghanis not welcoming us (surprise!) as liberators and bearers of heroic Freedom Fries, &c.—the marks come off as “ironic” and “mocking,” or rather “sadly hilaaarious.”

The creepiest rhetoric bon-mot here is the final admonition to the youth that yes, the CIA have real movie-quality spies, not no bullshit rent-a-spy fools in cheap tuxedos, but real laser-watch carrying badasses.

In fact, the Company’s brilliantest “intelligencers” may be right behind you, spying after all—watching you Google naughty pictures of Megan Fox and the Avatar pseudo-ladies…

Little wonder we can smuggle sensitive “intelligence” out of critical installations in Central Asia by pretending the classified info is a Lady Gaga album. Hilaaaaaaaaarious…

The spy urinal. (?) No idea. This is what came up when I Googled “spy Wikimedia” in hopes of getting an old, rights-expired photo of a Russian guy hatcheting an anarchist or something.

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.

Finishing up where I left off (literature-as-fractal, literature-as-rainbow), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

Combining the ideas in the last two posts in this series—with attention to literature (artful verse; the continuum of texts figuratively documenting the human experience) and to the play of signs, myths, archetypes, and words—I end up with a theme for my class and a larger thesis to mull over and refine:

Literature is a fractal in form, in shape. It is made of feedback based on recursion. It evolves as it recurs, as it is iterated, as more of it is made. Literature evolves over time.

Literature has a fine structure, scaled arbitrarily. It can be analyzed at all levels: macro (genre or movement), meso (text), micro (sentence), and nano (sign). Each level is revealing. It is not enough to look only at the macro (as in a Wikipedia entry). It is not enough to look only at a text, to skim it.

It is not enough to dwell upon a few choice sentences. It is not enough to obsess over an image, a word choice, a myth recalled by an off-hand adjective. It is our job as critical readers to read at all levels—not all the time (that would be impossible), but as much as possible. This may require rereading, and it certainly helps conversation: You and I may have read the same text, but we may have understood it differently. We help each other as we combine levels.

Literature is too irregular to be easily described in traditional semiotic language. An epic such as Moby-Dick or Beloved is not just an advertisement, or a stop sign on the road. To talk about a literary text at all requires some level of appreciation of its otherness from other texts. If every text was literature, we wouldn’t still be reading Homer. We’d only read the Post. It is its irregularity—in literature’s case, its artfulness, its ability to affect human consciousness—that makes it both awesome (literally, fear-/religious love-inspiring) and difficult to pin down, at times.

This is not meant to diss the Post or comix or stop signs, BUT: Literature is the artful craft of verse, the manipulation of signs in a certain realm in which many big ideas—the whole of history and mythology and individual human consciousness and the stream of life that surrounds us and the abstract melting down of all of this, its reduction and manipulation and re-manipulation—construct a single text (and, because literature is a rainbow, that text is only one cell within the titanic body of literature).

Literature is self-similar, stochastically. A) What is similarity? Texts are not all the same. Duh. But they share similarities: They are non-arbitrary groups of signs. This sentence, for instance, did not come out of a monkey’s typewriter. Literature is also self-similar. We know it when we see it. We know why Moby-Dick is not the Post. It’s similar. But… not every literary text is the same. Moby-Dick is not the same as The Crying of Lot 49. Similar, generically, categorically. But different, specifically… (Literature is like the sign in this way.)

B) What is self-similarity? A literary text shows itself at each level of investigation to be itself. Moby-Dick is about whales, in summary; it’s also about whales, in every sentence. Self-similar. Many levels to view. Each level similar. Power through this self-similarity. Similar across the form: We recognize it as literature. Similar across itself: We recognize it as itself. But each level is distinct, each chapter is distinct. The literary text is a fractal. To the degree it is a fractal, it is literary.

To the degree it feels truly random (monkey typewriter nonsense), it is “bad” writing. To the degree its supra-claims (A NEWSPAPER OF IMPORT!) do not match its sentences, it is hypocrisy, popular or “genre” work, mere journalism. (It is, in any case, not literature, in the highest meaning of the word. Literature doesn’t have to be hoity-toity or exclusive. But it must have a definition we can at least kinda-sorta agree upon, as scholars, as writers, as critical readers.) The literary text must resemble itself, artfully, as a whole (an idea) and in each sentence.

C) “Stochastic” means “random,” but “stochastic” is a more musical term; it means “not-metered,” “non-metric;” it is therefore a less random way of saying “random.” Literature, verse, is a kind of music, after all; it is the metering of signs, trapped in language sounds, themselves trapped in squiggles on screen or on paper; literature, whether prose or verse poetry or unmetered poetry can be said to have a meter; that meter may of course be non-meter, but non-meter is still a kind of meter. (Prose has a relationship to meter.) All literature has meter. Very little literature, these days, outside rap lyrics, has “metrical” meter. Prose mostly has a stochastic meter.

D) So what is stochastic self-similarity? Literature does not consist, with a few exceptions, of the same exact words or sentences or even ideas repeated over and over again. Therefore, while it is self-similar at each level, it is self-similar in some other way than simple stamping, or copying and pasting. It is stochastically self-similar. Moby-Dick is not the same sentence about whales; it is delightfully new sentence after delightfully new sentence about whales set out in a non-arbitrary pattern.

Literature has a simple and/but recursive definition. We know it when we see it. But we sometimes have a hard time defining it or putting a name to it. We rely on jargon (”sign”); jargon is not universally intelligible. Yet literature is literature (a recursive definition): The problem is not in calling literature a spectrum of texts crafted artfully, but in doing so without resorting to language.

Literature has been with us since we first wrote down language; before that, proto-literature was with us in a different, oral form. We cannot imagine literature “from the outside;” our every phrase draws upon or alludes to or is shaped unconsciously by texts, and—especially in a world of text messaging, email, and the infinite superfast free flatness of the internet—we think textually. We are part of literature, living, and it is a part of us.

What the hell is this? It’s some literature, fools—deal with it. (Actually, I think this image relates to sign language, but I like it in general. Signs raining down, from the concavity of the umbrella. And those weird-ass smiley faces with double eyes… Already, a story is implied.)

I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:

That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…

Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—

Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—

“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:

Or you could simply be amazed by the—

“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)

We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…

Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.

Picking up where I left off (literature-as-fractal), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

What is a rainbow? To paraphrase Wikipedia:

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicolored arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; the discrete bands are an artifact of human colour vision. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton’s sevenfold: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, popularly memorized the mnemonic ROY G BIV.

Rainbows inspire metaphor. Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

The Newtonian deconstruction of the rainbow is said to have provoked John Keats to lament in his 1820 poem “Lamia:”

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow

In contrast to this, here’s Richard Dawkins talking about his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder:

My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view, towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry.

For my part, literature is a rainbow in composition, in content. Literature is a continuous spectrum of texts (non-arbitrary groups of signs). The discrete genres and movements within the spectrum are artifacts of human vision. Genre distinctions exist for us when we look for them. They are information we put into texts. Without us, the texts are simply texts.

The point here is: We read the texts. Reading is a verb. We compose texts by reading. Reading is not about taking information out. The information never leaves the text. You put your reading into the text, classifying it, applauding or despising it. You are in control.

But regardless of how you or I read at this moment, literature is out there, a continuous, ongoing emergence of complexity from the arbitrary world of signs—things we say, things we mean, pictures we draw, ideas we have, sounds, feelings.

These signs emerge, writer by writer, into texts that emerge, year by year and day by day, into broader bands whose total complexity is history, literature, science, language, our ability to think these thoughts, in English.

The point is: Literature is something big that we make, all the time, by reading and by writing.

Lamia, by Draper.

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…

Rap covers, more than rock covers, allow for the voice to take full prominence. The music is the same, pure karaoke. The orchestra is empty, and the great singer alone prevails. Or, in this case, the highly adaptive Mighty Mos Def brings his inexplicable magnetism—his jazzy nonchalance? his smiley-ness in the face of everything?—to the masked world of DOOM and Danger Mouse, two stars both less street and less pop than Def, but perhaps more engaging, at least for me.

DOOM raps the way Lovecraft writes: Both could give a fuck who’s paying attention. Both deny the real, without reason, without ideology, and proceed from there to construct a new, iller real—Sur-real. Imagination somehow frees these writers to face real terrors, to use the lingo of science to question our reliance on it, our devotion toward futurity in the face of an amazingly fucked up past.

Still, it’s nice to see Mos bring DOOM back to planet earth here. The silly mask, the faux-Asian smock, the unpracticed eliding of a few key DOOM throwaways (which elision only heightens the effect of the great couplets like “[caesura] Slip like Freudian, / you first and last step to playin yourself like accordion”)—all these only add to the mystery of the original.

DOOM, like Lovecraft, creates the basis of a new mythology within his medium, a new blend or mode of story, bravado, self-deprecation, Gothic body-signs (”This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick”), and scathing material objectivity about, well, the human predicament—doom.

Well-written as well as immaculately said…