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.
“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.
To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.
James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.
[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]
Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.
Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…
I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.
Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.
Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).
What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.
But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.
As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.
What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…
Really, consider space. Consider this:
Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.
The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.
The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.
In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.
We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.
Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.
Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.
I love bizarre groups of old things. So does, I take it, Joanna Ebenstein, who’s just launched a site for The Secret Museum, her “exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched, and curious collections from around the world.”
Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy, Astropop Productions) has an eye for the macabre-elegant and the hideous-awesome. Her blog and the events she puts together have several times blown my mind, and the Secret Museum is no exception. I especially give her props for aiming to capture the mystery and wonder of “liminal spaces.” (What is science, what art? What spectacle, what education? What grotesque, what natural, &c.)
The Secret Museum is on view free of charge, IRL, at Observatory Room in south Brooklyn through Sunday, June 6.
History never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret. This is a secret history of kept secrets.
For today, even as he finds “a lot to admire” in the Tea Party (his words, re: their pugnacious tenacity, or tenacious pugilistic rhetoric, or amiable backwardness, or something I don’t admire), conservative columnist and personal lit-nemesis Douthat admits that its most recent star has lost significant shine. Sayeth Douthat:
…it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Kentucky Republican and Tea Party boy-wonder Rand Paul] found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.
Rand Paul, son of Ron “Ross Perot Redux” Paul, is looking to win the Party of Chai’s first Senate seat. But now he’s waffled on civil rights. Would he have voted to desegregate America? He didn’t seem sure, fearing government intervention in private practices such as excluding minorities from business, until those biased scoundrels—the Media—pressured him into clarifying his position as a bona fide 9/10ths supporter of the O.G. Civil Rights Act.
Boo, hiss, Mr. Paul. Waffling on a complicated budget bill? Take your time, read the fine lines. Waffling on waffles? Sure, consider pancakes. But waffling on civil rights? That’s so… old school. And not in the good way.
Now, I’m just as terrified as the next man of the secret alien commune in the Mojave where the Liberal Illuminati force Elvis to play badminton with Walt Disney’s headless body for their own amusement, but… A NAFTA superhighway “the width of several football fields” running straight from Mexico to Canada, cutting America in half like a government-cheese sandwich? That’s just crazy-talk.
(Plus, everyone knows a NAFTA superhighway would have to divert through the Babyhating Blue-State Coasts, forming a hateful wishbone that could eventually cross both oceans and be connected, on the Commie side, to Tokyo, and, on the Frog side, to Space Paris, from which we liberals receive our command-signals.)
[Double-plus, we don't have nearly enough oil to support the super-massive car-traffic of a highway "several football fields" wide. Unless Paul fears an army of Mexican, Central American, and South American immigrants bicycling furiously toward Texas, ready to take his job from him.]
Rand Paul does have some positive visions of the future, however: “I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”
According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.
Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.
Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)
Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.
The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.
Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”
To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.
Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.
Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”
Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.
From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:
“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”
Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:
Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.
Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.
But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:
During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.
And are the Japanese Jewish?—asks this great Pink Tentacle post, from a series on Japanese urban legends. Even with the urban-legend disclaimer, the wording of the post repeatedly assumes that there really is (or was) an Ark of the Covenant.
I wonder why we feel the need even to speculate about “lost artifacts” and apocryphal heroes. Do we find it cathartic to imagine that there was a Seal of Sulayman, a Rod of Aaron, a Sword of Roland—at some point—and we’ve merely degenerated, been scattered in an ur-diaspora (courtesy Babel, the Deluge), losing our physical links back to the Divine?
That any one of us could find tomorrow our own Lost Tablet or Holy Horseshoe and so become the future Sulayman, Frodo, or Per-Ce-Val—”Through the Veil,” the vale of the shadow of mortality, through all the way to the gnostic-mysterious Origin of our very Being?
The Japanese talkshow clip is pure entertainment, of course, as is the first Indiana Jones. The whole Pink Tentacle post is entertainment. But the comments reveal how seriously and variously we take questions of national identity and religious ipseity.
For me, the convergence of entertainment and serious give-a-shit-ness is where fiction comes in. These “fabled lost somethingerother of Ancientplace!” para-connections between remote peoples and times make for great fiction, unless Dan Brown hears about them. (My favorite consequence of the search for the [Japanese] Ark: The government named the supposed Ark-locus “Tsurugi-san Quasi-National Park.”)
And, yes, if some lost Middle Eastern influence did end up all the way on the remote slopes of Tsurugi-san in Shikoku—if the Ark did indeed cometh out of Israel or Babylon, then somehow into Japan—I would want to know more, as a historian—a conscientious fabulist, playing around with a limited set of signs-of-things-that-supposedly-happened, drawn from certain sets of texts.
But I wonder just how many other schizoid theories there are out there—of the secret still-attainable flat earth/lost tribe/Dead Sea Powerscroll/ancient biblical ninja powersword/lost Powerthirst flavor (Ark Lite), and so on—floating around, begging to be entertained, like Tourette’s-afflicted children, in Japan and here in New York—and especially on the internet. The number must be staggering.
Eventually, we must all be the “lost tribe” of some other tribe, one not lost to itself.
Hilarious. My man Kool Keith—AKA Doctor Octagon AKA Master of Robots AKA a host of other names I elide here due to both space and mental health concerns—schools us all on how to rock the perfect fridge. The answer? Seltzer water. What the…
The foodstuffs Mr. Keith suggests we stock up on comprise a list that is not mad and is not an example of a Chinese Encyclopedia; the list makes perfect sense; it includes healthy shit and excludes sugary shit with mass appeal.
The madness of this list comes from Mr. Keith’s simulation of a preference for healthy food. Mr. Keith suggests that the only reason he likes healthy shit is a pragmatic fridge-protecting function. He has simulated himself a sort of Great Wall of China for his fridge, by which it cannot be effectively looted by his sugary-shit craving homeboys. He does not, “in reality,” like healthy shit, and yet he likes it in effect, pragmatically.
One day, I will co-teach a course on Kool Keith and simulation (with the ghost of Gilles Deleuze, who wears a backwards hat made from other hats, each of which is facing forwards).
What an alien-sounding sentence. Yet it’s true, according to this random site I found on the internet. I love all the names of “groups of critters.” Here’s my all-time Excellent Eight:
A group of turtledoves is called a pitying.
A group of ferrets is called a business.
A group of magpies is called a tiding.
A group of mallards is called a sord. (Ducks have their own term.)
A group of snipes is called a wisp.
A group of starlings is called a murmuration. (Say word!)
A group of toads is called a knot.
A group of trout is called a hover.
Even more awesome—if this list of olden-schoole names of groups of animals can get more awesome, which it can’t—these are terms from venery, meaning the hunting of game animals. Venery was what rich dudes did in olden times. (The poor just scraped coach-flattened squirrel off the country lanes and begged the nearest squire for enough dough and suet to make squirrelmince pie.)
Venery also means sexual pleasure, indulgence, the pursuit of desire—the human hunt. These minor semiotic synchronies, homologies, and sly metaphors (paradefinitions, slang-making grunts of extra-meaning) cheer the dude up almost as much as the names of groups of critters—which are, inf act, paradefinitional. Ferrets must have struck some olden dude as looking business-y at some point. And a group of toads, bumpy and knuckling everywhere over itself, calls to mind a knot.
I just don’t get how a confederation of trouts is supposed to hover…
Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.
If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.
Here’s the party line:
Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.
A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.
If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining:
Some people are funny intentionally, some accidentally, and some somnambulantly, totally without “getting it.” The Room, for example, is today billed as a “dark comedy,” thought it was obviously a very serious investigation of romance (I guess?) and, uh, cancer (?) when it first sloughed dreadfully out of the mental womb of its creator, auteur Tommy Wiseau.
Likewise, I thought, I thought—Insane Clown Posse must be an in-joke that has no out. How can they possibly “get it,” I asked, and still be or do “it,” whatever it is?
The answer finally came when ICP’s hilarious new video about miracles crossed that invisible, difficult-to-pinpoint memetic threshhold and became a megahit on the internet, which is to say, a true megahit, not one manufactured by advertising. (Remember Chinese Democracy, anyone? I don’t.)
ICP had to face up to their essential paradox: A. Are they so counter-culture and, well, insane that they deny that “it” (their steez) is all some bizarre joke? B. Or are they aware of the joke—in on the joke? C. Or can they have it both ways?
This Dave Itzkoff article in the New York Times pretty much answers this in favor of C. I never paid much attention to ICP (I’m not a big goofy clown rap enthusiast, personally), but damn, I do like magnets and giraffes… (My emphasis.)
SHAGGY 2 DOPE, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: In 1999 we made a movie called “Big Money Hu$tla$,” and that went over great. Then we started kicking around the idea we should make a prequel: “Big Money Rustlas.” It’s the main characters’ ancestors in the Wild West. It’s a satire.
VIOLENT J, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: When we’re talking to the Juggalos, it’s not always about chop-chop, kill-’em-up, you know? I guess some of it might come from having kids over the last five years, looking at everything from that perspective. I mean, a rainbow can be explained. But who doesn’t say, “Wow, look at the rainbow?”
SHAGGY 2 DOPE: If Celine Dion would have come out with that song, people would have been, like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful song.” But because it’s coming out of our mouths, all of a sudden, we’re retards.
VIOLENT: J I think we might have misused the word miracle. These things we mentioned in the song, they can all be explained. But what we’re doing is appreciating them. Even the infamous line “Magnets, how do they work?” I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it.
SHAGGY 2 DOPE: Come on, man. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy.
VIOLENT J: I grew up in Detroit. We don’t have pelicans on every corner. We don’t have giraffes walking down the street. I’d rather be the dumbed-down guy appreciating everything than the guy who knows everything and doesn’t appreciate [anything].
[But...]
VIOLENT J: Two clowns floating around in space, swearing, rapping about wonderful things. I get that that’s funny to an outsider.
VIOLENT J: I know this sounds crazy, but I’m being as honest as I can: We planned all this out. Our tour starts in May. And then we have our nuclear weapon, which is the movie “Big Money Rustlas.” That comes out in August. This is all happening so perfectly for us.
As a friend of mine pointed out, they are funny not because they are stupid, but because their list of miracles is incongruous. Magnetsare cool. But how do you filter your list of miracles down to a few aspects of science and some animals uncommon to Detroit? I love this song because it spins the miraculous in a totally unexpected direction. Miracles are now neither religious nor scientific, human nor divine. They’re… insane.
So how does this miraculous incongruity work, literarily? ICP’s list of wonders is what Borges terms a Chinese encyclopedia—a list that cannot ever be coordinated, made sense of, or indexed, as a totality, even if each component makes total sense. So, yes, those things are all dope as fuck. Magnets, seabirds, long-necked mammals, optical effects, a pet cat (?), etc. But they can never really live on the same plane, in our minds. Hence hilarity.
The song is also an ultra-dope example of systrophe, or indirect definition, such as definition by an exhaustive list rather than by… a definition. This technique works, every time. People don’t respond as well to logical definitions (such as I just gave of 2 literary terms); people like examples, especially hilarious, exhaustive examples given to them by clowns with mental health concerns.
A miracle. Photograph by Keven Law.
What This Site Be Being
My name is Wythe Marschall (human, writer, would-be historian, hirsute gamboler), and this is my website.
Take a look-see around this site and email me if you subsequently want to pay me buckets of ducats to write for you.
Types of writing I will attempt for money:
Stories about aquatic werewolves
Feature films (esp. feature films with castles)
Anagrammatic sestinas
Your memoir (true/"juiced up")
Self-help cookbooks for underachieving children (sandwich-only)
