Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not adequate to the task. I look at this . . . monument to Existential philosophy, and I face a void of thought yawning wide in the dark depths beneath my skull. How could I ever capture the thoughts and feelings I experienced while immersed in this sea of emotional and intellectual self-realization? This book is a startling revelation, and I am no prophet. Still, I will try to relate the unrelatable.

Barrett starts with a section entitled "The Present Age," relating the present-history of the Existential movement as it existed in the late 1950s to early 1960s. I have little to say about that, except to point you to an excellent treatment of Chapter 3, on "The Testimony of Modern Art," by the sagacious Glenn Russell. It was, in fact, Glenn's review that pointed me to this profound book.

Section 2, "The Sources of Existentialism in the Western Tradition" is where things really started coming together for me. Here is where one finds the clearest statement about how existentialism differs from all the philosophy (grounded in Plato, more or less) before it:

Plato's is the classic and indeed archetypal expression of a philosophy which we may now call essentialism, which holds that essence is prior in reality to existence. Existentialism, by contrast, is the philosophy that holds existence to be prior to essence.

In other words, we are not dealing here with metaphysics. That doesn't mean that existentialism and belief in a higher being are incompatible - Kierkegaard belies this - but regardless of belief system, the existentialist sees that there is an inevitable end to existence as we know it. In Pascal's words:

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frighted, and am astonished being here rather than there, why now rather than then.

But please be clear that this is not nihilism we are talking about here. Utter hopelessness is not necessarily the end result of existentialism (though Nietzsche's philosophy prophesied future nihilism, as will be noted later). In fact, it is the realization of the inevitable end that provides us with an appreciation for life. In describing a scene from Dostoevski's The Idiot, Barrett notes that the feelings expressed by Myshkin likely reflect those of Dostoevski himself:

In this story, which describes Dostoevski's own reprieve after he had been condemned to be executed by a firing squad, is the ultimate affirmation: in the face of death life has an absolute value. The meaning of death is precisely its revelation of this value.

In section three, Barrett provides an overview of the four pillar-figures of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartres. Besides having the most difficult set of philosophic last names to pronounce, these four thinkers put forth complex, nuanced views on being (or, in the case of Heidegger, "Being") that comprise the canon of existentialist thought. Having no desire to rewrite Barrett's book in the for of a book review, I will just note a few items that I found thought-provoking and/or essential to the understanding of what existentialism is or what it is composed of, a 30,000 foot thought map, blurred by the high speed at which I pass overhead.

I was struck, again and again, by the simplicity of argument put forward by everyone except Sartres. Kierkegaard seems to be very much "of the earth" and balks between the lines at the academics, particularly the academic philosophers, who had gone before him. I don't have time to outline all the reasons for his feeling this way, but suffice it to say that his upbringing had much to do with it, as well as the broken heart he suffered when he gave up the opportunity of marriage to a woman named Regina. This choice that he had made comprised his existential crisis. He had given up love . . . for what? Philosophy?

Philosophers before Kierkegaard had speculated about the proposition "I exist," but it was he who observed the crucial fact they had forgotten: namely, that my own existence is not at all a matter of speculation to me, but a reality in which I am personally and passionately involved. I do not find this existence reflected in the mirror of the mind, I encounter it in life; it is my life, a current flowing invisibly around all my mental mirrors. But if existence is not mirrored as a concept in the mind, where then do we really come to grips with it? For Kierkegaard this decisive encounter with the Self lies in the Either/Or choice. When he gave up Regina, thus forever giving up the solaces of ordinary life for which he longed, Kierkegaard was encountering his own existence as a reality more potent and drastic than any concept. And so any man who chooses or is forced to choose decisively - for a lifetime, and therefore for eternity since only one life is given us - experiences his own existence as something beyond the mirror of thought. He encounters the Self that he is not in the detachment of thought, but in the involvement and pathos of choice.

Now, where Kierkegaard was a lover, Nietzsche was a fighter. Perhaps it was the progressive madness that slowly took hold of his mind toward the end of his life, but Nietzsche's thought was not simply that life should be examined through the existentialist lens, but that power, as expressed in his work Will to Power was something to be pursued in the face of the loss of God and the values reinforced by institutions that claim to worship God. In this way, Nietzsche becomes a prophet, in a way, for our day, predicting that future history (that which would come after Nietzsche) would be an ongoing struggle for the new value: Power. The end result of this struggle must inevitably end in hopelessness, which we can term "nihilism":

Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders in the void that lies beyond itself. The Will to Power begets the problem of nihilism. Here again Nietzsche stands as the philosopher of the period, for he prophesied remarkably that nihilism would be the shadow, in many guises and forms, that would haunt the twentieth century. Supposing man does not blow himself and his earth to bits, and that he really becomes the master of this planet. What then? He pushes off into interstellar space. And then? Power for power's sake, no matter how far the power is extended, leaves always the dread of the void beyond. The attempt to stand face to face with that void is the problem of nihilism.

Heidegger's existentialism proves to be much less fatalistic. In fact, one might propose that there is such a thing as existential optimism and, if so, Heidegger is its champion. At the least, one must view Heidegger as having a less-stark view of Being than Nietzsche. Rather than viewing the self as a "thing," Heidegger focuses on what it is to "be". This can be a difficult concept, but it is central to Heidegger's philosophy: We must not view our isolated ego as a thing that is within us, which is set up in contrast to the rest of the things in the world. Rather, we should think of ourselves as Being (I am using the verb-as-noun here, not simply the verb and not simply the noun) "spread over a field or region, which is the world of its care or concern." This Being, however, does not negate the self. In fact, Being our actual, true Self is the ultimate goal of anyone faced with the limits of their own mortality. Unfortunately, most of society chooses to bury itself in television, surrogate celebrity life, thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and any other sort of distraction that will numb the Self to the fear of facing its own inevitable annihilation:

Because it is less fearful to be "the One" than to be a Self, the modern world has wonderfully multiplied all the devices of self-evasion.

But, paradoxically, to gain one's Self, one must lose oneself. In this way, the true Self can become connected with Being:

To lose oneself in walking down a country lane is, literally, to lose the self that is split off from nature: to enter the region of Being where subject and object no longer confront each other in murderous division.

This is not to say that the experience of Being an existential person is something that comes on soft clouds on a comfortable spring day. No, it is quite the opposite. It is the prospect of death, the most stark and intimate of ends for each and every person, that opens the door to Being:

Only by taking my death into myself, according to Heidegger, does an authentic existence become possible for me. Touched by this interior angel of death, I cease to be the impersonal and social. One among many, as Ivan Ilyich was, and I am free to become myself. Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: it frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly our own. Heidegger calls this the condition of "freedom-toward-death" or "resoluteness".

Now while the name "Sartres" is that which is most closely associated with existentialism in the eyes of popular culture, I would argue that Sartres was the great pretender. Read his work carefully, and you will see that most of it, at its root, is mimetic: an echo of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and even Heidegger. I say "even" because, while Sartres does echo the notion of self posited by Heidegger, he pulls the concept of Being back into the camp of Cartesian dualism from which Heidegger hoped to banish it. Sartres divides being into two kinds: Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself. Being-in-itself re-introduces "thingness" (my own, inadequate term) to the existentialist discussion. Barrett uses the example of a stone: "A stone is a stone; it is what it is; and in being just what it is, no more and no less, the being of the thing always coincides with itself." Being-for-itself is conceptualized as consciousness of being beyond oneself, spatially, temporally, and in the realm of possibilities and potentials.

This notion of the For-itself may seem obscure, but we encounter it on the most ordinary occasions. I have been to a party; I come away, and with a momentary pang of sadness I say, "I am not myself." It is necessary to take this proposition quite literally as something that only man can have the feeling of coming to myself after having lost or estranged me from myself. This is the first and immediate level on which the term yields its meaning. But the next and deeper level of meaning occurs when the feeling of sadness leads me to think in a spirit of self-reproach that I am not myself in a still more fundamental sense: I have not realized so many of the plans or projects that make up my being; I am not myself because I do not measure up to myself. Beneath this level too there is still another and deeper meaning, rooted in the very nature of my being: I am not myself, and I can never be myself, because y being stretching out beyond itself at any given moment exceeds itself. I am always simultaneously more and less than I am.

This passage shows the way in which Barrett has taken some complex ideas and boiled them down to their simple essence existence (!) and made them more easily digestible to the untrained armchair philosopher (I am looking at myself my Self). Barrett's synthesis of the preceding work takes place in his essay "The Place of the Furies," which, outside of some less-accessible appendices, wraps up the book. He notes that while some balk at the idea of irrationality as a viable philosophy, putting the idea of rationality up on an indestructible pedestal to be worshiped as some kind of god, that "despite the increase in the rational ordering of life in modern times, men have not become the least bit more reasonable in the human sense of the word. A perfect rationality might not even be incompatible with psychosis; it might in fact, even lead to the latter." But he does not negate the need for rationality, only that it should be put in its proper place alongside the irrational, both of them acknowledged as necessary to life. But he does warn that, without the irrational, as symbolized by the Greek Furies, humanity will lose the edge necessary to achieve full satisfaction of being.

The Furies are really to be revered and not simply bought off; in fact, they cannot be bought off (not even by our modern tranquilizers and sleeping pills) but are to be placated only through being given their just and due respect. They are the darker side of life, but in their own way as holy as the rest. Indeed, without the there would be no experience of the holy at all. Without the shudder of fear or the trembling of dread man would never be brought to stand face to face with himself or his life; he would only drift aimlessly off into the insubstantial realm of Laputa.

And, in order to remind myself of what I have learned here, I will return to this book again, perhaps many times. This one, while not a life changer per se (thought it would have been, had I read and understood it as a teenager), it is definitely a life informer. I can't fully express the rush of synaptical connections and emotional response that I felt while reading, no, studying this book.

Again, I am totally inadequate to the task.

I am Me!

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Art & Existentialism

Art & Existentialism by Arturo B. Fallico
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Equal parts frustrating and fascinating. I admit that I am not entirely up to the task of a comprehensive review of the book, and am left with impressions born of a partial understanding. If you want a careful reading of some of the deeper details, check out Glenn Russell's outstanding review.

Much of the book, to be honest, was a grind. The reputation that philosophy has of being just so much navel-gazing is reinforced here in abundance. That's not to say that Fallico's insights are wrong, just that they are very difficult to follow without an extremely slow, highly concentrated read, re-read, re-read, and another re-read. I don't think my brain has been taxed this hard to follow along in a text since I read Hofstadter. Perhaps some more grounding in philosophical literature overall would help. Fallico dearly wants to write this so that anyone can understand, but the very nature of the subject matter - the act of art creation, the art of reaction to art, and the relationship between both and the drive to exist as a being of freedom - mitigate against an easy common understanding.

For example, Fallico states early on:

Only in art do we find experience which endures, not by substitution and displacement, but by the kind of self-identical re-positing which keeps self-identity in being.

At first blush, the thought of art as experience is counter-intuitive. Art is stuff, right? But Fallico makes a careful distinction between the act of art and the art-thing. The artist, during the act of art, experiences being (or existing, hence "existential" experience). But the observer, because of their interaction with the art-thing (which results from the act of art) can have a moment or moments of being as they react to it. And every instance of this individual reaction is unique to the person experiencing it. Furthermore, art critics, who publicly respond to the art-thing, have their own "act of art" (my quotes) when they write or speak their critique. Then further observers down the chain must react to the critique, re-positing both the critique itself and the original object of critique, the art-thing itself.

The art-thing itself, in the existentialist critique, should not be thought of as a representation of anything, but as a presentation. The existent one (the viewer of the art-thing) should not, in Fallico's estimation, worry about what the art is meant to represent, but should only focus on the art-thing itself as an entity unto itself:

The peculiar composure and independence of the art-object come into clearer view when we see that it is in the order of a presentation, rather than a re-presentation. A representation, as the very word seems to say, presupposes another thing, somehow made to reappear under the guise of the art-object. A representation is un-original by definition. The essential characteristic of the art-object is precisely that it is an original - a first presentation of a possibility truly felt and imagined. It can remind us, really, only of itself, even if, in the process, we may remind ourselves of non-aesthetic things and events extraneous to it.

Here begins a sort of philosophical machismo that permeates throughout the work. One wonders if this attitude isn't at the heart of existentialism, but my personal feelings are that a person's realization of their vulnerability to the inevitability of death tends to engender more humility than hubris. Fallico seems to favor the view that a true existentialist faces existential angst with bravado, and that this attitude can be found in art itself:

. . . the order of the art-object is one in which everything is preserved in its being, everything achieves actual presence together with everything else, and everything relates and refers to an existent. Everything in the art-object stands fully realized, unchanging, and in full view. Nothing is inessential, everything is required. A single line, a dab of color, a sound - all are constitutive and uneliminable from the whole. Their relationship to other lines, colors, or sounds as well as to the whole is never one of mere adjacency, correlation, or probability.

This sense of bravado becomes more than a little tedious as one progresses through the book. By the end, the chest thumping gets a little ridiculous. I'll spare you the details, but not without warning you that Fallico's ideal existential man is an intellectual he-man proudly displaying his statuesque breast to the world, defying the cosmos to the bitter end.

One aspect of Art & Existentialism that really spoke to me, was Fallico's acknowledgement that:

. . . art has traditionally come to be associated with beauty. The beautiful, in turn, is associated with whatever pleases and suggests itself as ideal and perfection - and object of desire. Identification of art with the beautiful in this sense has ever been a pervasive error in aesthetics. And this is surprising, considering that so much of the great and respected art in every culture has to do, not with the pleasant and desirable, but with the ugly and the forbidding. Michelangelo's Pieta is not beautiful in the sense that it is pleasurable, nor are Picasso's Guernica or Guitarist. As such, pleasing, desirable, and attractive define the objects and objectives of action, not of aesthetic contemplation. This is not to say that the aesthetic necessarily concerns itself with the unpleasant and the unattractive, of course, but simply that it is utterly indifferent to such categories.

Huzzah! Someone finally said it! Art is not a beauty pageant! I've held to this for a long time. And while one can use the old soft argument that "beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder," that argument is sometimes used as a way for those who have a certain, preconceived notion of what is "good" art to hand-wave the whole question about art that is not beautiful, but worthy of praise (and preservation). I readily admit that much of the music and art I love is considered ugly or awkward or just plain unpleasant by many. But does that mean that it has no worth? I'd argue that sometimes it has more worth because of it's ugliness. Take one of my favorite examples: Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a particularly noisome piece of music. The evocation of feeling as one listens to this piece can be incredibly strong. I remember being literally moved to tears in college while listening to this piece and seriously contemplating what it must have been like to be present for this horrific event: the sounds of the air raid sirens, the droning of a single bomber flying overhead, the concussive blast, the flesh-melting heat, the thousands of structures shattered into splinters and blown to the wind, the roaring fires and burning bodies, the cries and moans of the survivors. Not a pleasant thing. Not beautiful at all. But evocative and, dare I say, necessary? Here, Fallico allows us to embrace the necessity of such a piece.

The fact that Daumier's court scenes, or Goya's prints about the horrors of war are not direct incentives to action (great art never is) must not mislead us into thinking that they have not latent in them the power to remodel human purposing with respect to how humans feel about injustice, or about the obscenity which is war . . . there is not a single work of art, not a single first utterance, which does not, in its own way, present us with at least a possibility of novel outlook and global perspective. What counts here is that this - if it is truly aesthetic, and if we truly are able to enact it - is a concrete and actual possibility, one that is tasted, fused with one's very being in the enactment. No man who really encounters Cezanne's apples ever sees apples again in the same way, just as no man who really reads Sartre's The Wall or CamusThe Stranger can look upon death and our contemporary values as he did before the encounters. It is true that a great majority of gallery- and theater-goers, no less than readers of novels, seem to be little transformed by their experiences - but if they have any ind of aesthetic sensitivity, who can measure the degree of transformation they truly have undergone by such experiences?

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Chiarascuro Void

CHIAROSCURO VOID by Rhys Hughes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chiaroscuro Void (Goyesquean Fictions and Visions)”, Raphus Press’ newest offering, is a dark delight, oddly bound (I am no expert on binding, so I can’t name the style, but it is unlike any book I’ve held before), wonderfully designed, and teeming with a physical character of its own. A variety of fiction, poetry, and prose-poetry by some of the best contemporary authors now writing fills the pages like a grey mist. I am reticent to use the “weird” label here because while some of the stories do contain weird, supernatural elements, some work just fine without any interpretations lying outside our daily perceptions. But where the weird or eerie elements are there, they add to the backbone of each specific work in which they appear, and the collection as a whole. Without further ado, here are my thoughts on each:

Rhys Hughes' "The Distant Critics" is everything I've come to expect of Hughes’ work: dark and erudite, but with a sense of humor that is infectious. You'll never view Goya's painting of Saturn devouring his son the same again.

D.P. Watts' "Quinta del Sordo" is a boiling churn of darkness, as one would expect from a story named after the residence where Goya created his (in)famous Black paintings. The story is a poetic, baroque depiction of depravity and, ultimately, collapse under the weight of fate. The plot is thin, the atmosphere thick.

Karim Ghahwagi, you have broken my heart. "Dandelion Spring" has shattered me. Never have I thought that a piece of existential hard science fiction could hold so much emotion. I literally had tears in my eyes when I finished this story. The emptiness and beauty of the story are absolutely gut-wrenching. I've rarely felt so deeply reading a work of science fiction, let alone hard sci-fi. This was an unexpected surprise, to say the least, full of melancholy.

Jonathan Wood is at his most transgressive (and that is saying something) in "The Face That is Not There". Eros and Thanatos entwine in the shadows, twisting together until both are shaded impressions of one another. I can think of no greater words to describe this enthralling, poetic story than "Chiaroscuro" and "Void". The sum is greater than the obfuscated parts.

I have not read a Brian Evenson story I haven't liked. "The Devouring" is no exception. The rule stands. Though "like" might not be the right word. Can one really like such a bleak, hopeless story that makes you feel like you are suffocating while reading it, that robs you of any good feeling? Maybe "admire" is a better word. Or "respect". In any case, I prefer to read it.

Wade German's "I, Goya" – is a short, powerful poem. Evocative in few words, this packs a punch.

Colin Insole digs into the grotesqueries of marriage - the realizations that your spouse is far from perfect - in the ghost story "Memories of the Bone People". Emotional distortion and the realization of the potential shallowness of a loved ones' devotion act as a prise between husband and wife. They will never be the same, their vision of one another and of themselves forever corrupted.

Stephan Friedman's short tale, "The Fiery Serpent," I found iridescent, but too blunt. The prose is excellent, but the story unrefined, perhaps intentionally so. His two poems, though, "The Dog Night" and "The Full Moon," I found more rewarding. Though they were, at points, also forward in their transgressiveness, the weaving of the poetic voice here with such starkness, works exceedingly well.

The title of Fernando Naporano's poem "Whims of Goya, Nagoya In Paranoia" seems to be nearly as long as the poem itself, but upon examination, the poem's layers unpeel and reveal treasures of carefully obfuscated insight. A dark delight to see these stanzas unfold into the intellect.

In "Soplones!", Alcebiades Diniz Miguel takes the readers' delight - a story about purchasing rare books - and turns it into something horrific. That musty mold-tinted smell of old bookstores is a warning that is best heeded before the bookseller approaches you! Buyer beware!

"Futility and Wonder," a long series of verses by poet Joseph Dawson, plums the depths of existential hopelessness and heretical thought better than anything I've read since Jonathan Wood's poetry; to the point where the poet admits even the futility of fully capturing such despair in the poem itself. It is a black hole of a poem from which nothing, including its own hopeless creation, escapes. A poetic mobius strip, wonderfully realized!

I did not expect the strong emotional response I had to Fabio Waki's story "Lessons by Candlelight". I am a grandfather, and any proud grandfather who reads this story should be ready to feel the tears well up. This was an unexpectedly powerful story that cut deep. A "dark" piece, in many ways, yet so very full of light shining in the darkness. Any grandfather worth his salt that does not get wet eyes from this story needs to have his pulse checked.

The quote on the back cover of the book, "There is only light and shadow," aptly captures Thassio Capranera's "Dithyrambs in Ancient Cantabria," a sumptuous pleasure shattered by abject horrors. One does not know where reality ends and fantasy/horror begins, because the terror one wakes to may be as horrid as the worst of nightmares preceding that awakening. Exquisitely written, for pleasantry and pain.

Jean Du Bois' "A Thing of Nature" is rich in sumptuous detail, but poor on movement. The idea is to show the overlap of past and present, the ghosts of the old infecting the new in an ever-repeating pattern. While I enjoy the hauntological idea greatly, the execution is too staid and static for my tastes. A quiet, a too quiet experiment that passes the theoretical test, but is a bit too cold.

"Sad Presentiments of a Proud Monster" by Timothy J. Jarvis provides the apocryphal story about what happened to Goya's skull after his death. A wondrous tale featuring painter Rosario Weiss Zorrilla, who may or may not have been Goya's daughter (but was definitely his God-Daughter), a strange diviner, several prints of the deceased Goya's work, and an uncanny divination ritual. This was the perfect tale with which to end the anthology.

In summation, Chiarascuro Void is a complete artifact. From the font to the book’s tones (both hue and literary tone), the varied looks at Goya’s work and his life, this volume hangs together, framed perfectly as a celebration and a warning. I would love to see similar books around the works of such artists as Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Felicien Rops, to name a few. I could see an entire series emerging via this model, something which I would gladly subscribe to.

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A Short Stay in Hell

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Angst is not a mere intellectual exercise. Existentialism is not just a philosophical movement. Steven L. Peck's A Short Stay in Hell drives this into the heart of the reader like no other existentialist work.

I've been eyeball-deep in readings on existentialism lately (research for a novel and for my own despair edification), including William Barrett's outstanding Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy and Sartre's play No Exit, among others. But while I've enjoyed Barrett's study, it is just that, a study in existential philosophy. And Sartre's play seems just a touch contrived (I mean just a touch, too - it did not spoil the play).

But this . . . this little novella kicked my emotional depths right in the crotch. What could have been a work buried in academic gymnastics turns the rational boundaries by which one anesthetizes ones real self completely inside out. And it hurts. Oh, Ahura Mazda, it hurts! This is a novella which, if you have ever been in love and have then been involuntarily separated from the one you love, will tear your heart apart! If you are sensitive to the injustice of the world, your short stay in hell with Soren Johannson is going to be rather unpleasant.

This isn't your typical conception of Hell. Hell here is modeled after, or at least pays homage to, Borges' "Library of Babel". And unlike the Christian hell, from which there is no escape (without a guide's help, at least), there is a way out. You merely need to peruse the 7.16^1,297,369 light year wide and deep library and find the one book that contains the complete story of your life, from beginning to end. How long can it take, really? Really . . . wrap your brain around that number. This is the size of the library that contains the books through which you must look to find your escape from Hell. This might take a while.

The upside is that you live forever! And you can never die! Or, rather, you can die, but you always come back the next day. This is not without pain, however, and Johannson experiences pain in spades, especially when he finds himself (view spoiler)[murdered as a human sacrifice every morning for a number of months by followers of a nihilistic cult led by the religious fanatic Dire Dan (hide spoiler)].

But physical death, painful as it is, is nothing compared to the emotional pain of falling deeply in love and losing your lover (not that hard in a place as vast as this). You know that the one you love is there, somewhere, because they can't die, either. But, once lost, what hope do you have of finding that one person again, really?

"Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hopes finest expression. In hope's loss, however, is the greatest despair."

Taken out of context, this quote seems hyperbolic or even pithy. But in the context of the story, I can think of no more gut-wrenching, heart-twisting distillation of existentialism than this. It physically took my breath away when I read it. I gasped aloud and had to remind myself, for a split second, to breathe. It is that emotionally-charged, and a reminder of angst really feels like. A Short Stay in Hell won't give you the intellectual finesse of an examination such as Barrett's or the breadth of understanding that comes with a critical analysis of the philosophy and its history, but it will plunge you face-first down the heartbreaking abyss of what it means, what it feels like, to lose all hope.

Dante's Inferno (which I love, by the way, so don't take this as too derogatory) is a childrens' amusement park, in comparison. No need to abandon hope while entering Peck's Hell: It will be stripped from you whether you want it to be or not; just give it time. You've got all of eternity. Or, rather, all of eternity has you!

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Black Sun Deathcrawl

Black Sun Deathcrawl by James MacGeorge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Timing is everything . . .

I began reading William Barrett's masterpiece Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist Philosophy while on vacation in Indianapolis, IN. This was about two weeks before Gencon, the world's largest gaming convention, came to Indy. Now, I've wanted to go to Gencon since I was a child-geek, back when it was in Lake Geneva, WI (though I've discovered a local convention that many are calling "one of the top three gaming conventions in the US"), so I was a little forlorn that I wouldn't be in town for the fabled convention. I did, however, read of many other gamer's preparations to go, including a bevy of small game publishers who were rushing to print their wares for sale at the con. This is how I discovered "Black Sun Deathcrawl". Man, have I been lucky in finding good modules lately!

Now that I'm eyeball and cerebral-cortex deep within Barrett's book, I seem to have hit a lucky stride with several books that I've just read or am currently reading. This wasn't by design - the gods of existentialism (har, har) are smiling on me . . . or is it scowling at me? Whatever the case, I feel as if I've been led by some higher cosmic power to a bunch of great books in the existentialist vein, but from disparate points of the literary spectrum, from non-fiction to modern fiction to post-modern fiction to gaming . . . SKRRRCH . . .

"Did he say 'gaming'?"

"Yeah . . . existentialist gaming? Like . . . Call of Cthulhu RPG. . .?"

(Cue evil laughter, then a booming voice from below) "Cthulhu? Bwahahahaha!!! Scary? Yes. Gross? A little. Existential? Not on the same level as Black Sun Deathcrawl," (the last phrase is said as if your jaw is spontaneously falling off and you are trying to keep the mandible attached by exaggerating all motion in your mouth - stick that tongue waaaay out) "not even close"!

Yes, Black Sun Deathcrawl (don't forget that exaggerated pronunciation!) is as existential a setting as you will ever see in role playing. It is illustrated throughout with Gustave Dore's drawings of Dante's Inferno, which gives the piece a somber, dark tone that artistically reflects the game mechanics included in the supplement.

Here, all is hopeless. Rather, you have "hope" as an attribute score, but it burns down as the influence of the Black Sun burns through the rock through which you are digging, twisting your body and mind and chipping away at your will to live as you chip through the rock that you hope will protect you (note: it won't). The Black Sun is relentless, and you are not. Death by the influence of the Black Sun's baleful rays isn't even a sure way of escape from its torment. Characters brought to zero hit points die and are then restored to full hit points one round later. There is only one way out. And only you can provide the way out. When your hope drops to zero (a long and painful process, to be sure), you are considered to have committed suicide and finally found relief from the incessant despair of the Black Sun.

The book is divided into several sections, beginning with an introduction to the world and its inhabitants, of which your character - nameless and raceless, known only as the Cursed - is one.The world is described in four short pages, which is all you need or want to know. Monsters, including "Black Thoughts" and "Terrible Thoughts" are described and statistics given, and the effects of the Black Sun are elucidated in the "Black Light Exposure Corruption Chart," which shows the horrific results of being exposed to the harmful rays. For example, one of the fifteen effects (and not one of the worst, by any means) is known as "Liquid Brain":

"A part of the character's brain liquefies and runs from their nose and mouth, -1d8 intelligence. If the liquid can be collected and ingested, regain the Intelligence, but only until it is passed from the system via urine, at which point it may be collected again, ad infinitum."

The next section consists of "Truths," including such gems as: "Identity is Irrelevant in the Face of Oblivion," "If There Is a Higher Power, It Does Not Care," "Life is Endless Conflict," "Existence is Random and Without Meaningful Purpose,"Everyone Digs Their Own Grave," "Only We Can Choose When the Suffering Ends," and others of a similar, somber nature. Each has a game mechanic or rule attached and while the intent is to apply these rule modifications to the Dungeon Crawl Classics gaming system, they can be easily applied to most old school role-playing games with a little work.

The final section is a series of encounters, which might be played in a single gaming session . . . played to its inevitable end, that is!

James MacGeorge has invoked such a mournful tone that this supplement will likely infect your own campaign in some way. This isn't the sort of place that characters from another campaign will want to visit, however. If they do, they will be subsumed into it and consumed by it. Best used for a series of one-shots (with new characters every time because who the heck can survive more than one session under these circumstances?).

The first edition sold out very quickly! If you want a copy of the second printing, you can order it here. But get it fast . . . then prepare for a slow, agonizing crawl!

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Addendum: Eric Diaz of Methods and Madness curated another review of BSD here. Enjoy!


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The Graphologist and Other Stories

 

When Rhys Hughes is on a roll, nothing can stop him. Of the four stories in this short collection, two are good, two are outstanding, and the stand outs were not the ones I was expecting to shine. I went into "The Puppet Show" thinking, oh no, here we go with a Jon Padgett copycat. But this story twisted in unexpected ways and unfolded a unique tale of existential dread that proved every bit as effective as anything Padgett, Ligotti, etc., have produced, while remaining true to its own vision of cosmic horror. The second standout story, "The Filtered Ones," about ghost-pirates with a psychogeographic layer, flips from existential dread to enduring hope. Yes, I know, ghost-pirates. I was very skeptical going into this one, ready to be disappointed. But the story turned out to be a delight! The other two tales, "The Tipping Point" and "The Graphologist" are both good, but they are very much overshadowed by the greatness of "The Puppet Show" and "The Filtered Ones". Nothing disappoints, and Hughes excels here at taking the reader's expectations and fully flipping them on their head.Strongly recommended, especially for the two standout stories!

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Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison.

 

My first forays into "experimental" film were courtesy of the International Cinema at BYU when I was an undergrad. Though not as highly-experimental as Morrison's Decasia, my early exposure to such films as Svankmajer's Faust and Wender's Wings of Desire whetted my appetite for more. When a friend of mine, who shared a shift as a security worker at night on campus, invited me and a few others over to watch Lynch's Eraserhead, I was hooked. 

I stumbled on Morrison's work while searching for clips from my favorite directors, The Brothers Quay (if you don't know how much of a Quay fanboy I am, you obviously have not been reading my blog for long). Morrison's Light is Calling came up in my search, and my interest was piqued. I watched it and was entirely blown away. 

Now, while Light is Calling is done in a warm sepia-tone, Decasia is purely black-and-white, which suits my (very mild) hue blindness just fine. Like any experimental cinematic work, this one takes patience and, in places, pure endurance. I admit to nearly shutting the whole thing off during a sequence in which an anonymous diver is climbing a ladder up to a high diving board (at least that's what I think was happening). Everything is in fairly slow-motion. Not super slowmo, but slow nonetheless. Morrison is willing to make you work for your insights. 

What we're given is a series of black-and-white films damaged by time either by smeared development fluid or outright disintegration of the cellulose acetate medium. The images are often difficult to discern, sometimes inscrutable. At other times, there are moments of relative clarity - the many cuts of whirling dervishes that seem to thread the sparse motifs together are decidedly old and far from perfect, but they offer the eyes a bit of a rest from the more challenging segments. 

I find it interesting that so much of Decasia is set in, well, Asia, whether Asia Minor or the Far East. Though Morrison has said nothing of colonialism that I can find in his interviews, a fair amount of footage is taken from documentary film of the middle east and Japan, among other locales. One of the more haunting segments is that of a pair of Catholic nuns standing as sentinels as a group of young uniformed schoolgirls, likely Vietnamese, if I am correct in my surmisings, marching past into what I presume must be a Catholic mission-school, probably in French Indochina. In one particularly attention-grabbing moment, one of the girls looks back at the camera and we see her full face for the first time. There is a strong look of suspicion in her eyes. It's probably just childhood curiosity for seeing a film camera for the first time, but I like to think of her as telepathically saying "I will be freed from this. If not me, then my children, or my children's children. We won't tolerate this forever."

Other segments are mostly banal documentary pieces, with a few bits from dramatized silent movies scattered throughout. I didn't recognize any of them, but my silent movie mental catalog is quite minimal. When such dramatized performances were presented, there was, for me, a mixed tale of the wonder of acting with th tragedy that, while these images survive, the actors clearly did not. It didn't help that there were, in close proximity to these sections, film of underground miners' bodies being dragged out from mines. A strange contrast. 

The music for the film was originally the film for the music. The initial performance of Michael Gordon's composition was the occasion for which the film was initially created. The music came first, then the film came as a reaction to that music. It's obvious that Gordon and Morrison played off of each other, though, to produce the "final" version that appears in Decasia. Gordon's atonal, intentionally de-tuned avant-classical orchestral piece and Morrison's abstract, surreal imagery play well of of each other.

A PRI interview on the DVD provides some insight into both Morrison's motivations for creating the movie and Gordon's thought process behind the music. Though the interview claims that you can't have one without the other, I'm willing to accept that as a challenge and watch Decasia muted with, let's say SunnO))) playing as musical accompanyment. Actually, I can think of a number of bands whose work would compliment the visuals. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble jumps right out front. Much of Wagner Ӧdegard's work would work, as well.

Morrison claims that the work is both existential and life-affirming. There is no doubt about the former. The film throughout evokes an existential dread through a two-fold process of obscuring and revealing, forming a sort of pulsating rhythm between the eerie and the weird. The viewer often feels trapped between several worlds at once: The world from which they are viewing the movie, the world in which the film was initially captured, and the world that some of the captured film is trying to portray (this is particularly true of pieces that show actors from the 1920s or '30s portraying scenes in historical costume).  Decasia is not only a film, it is a place, its own strange world of mixed up timelines bubbling in and out of perception. Needless to say, it is a very strange place to inhabit, even if only momentarily, a discomfiting space that reminds one of one's mortality in the strongest of ways. 

On the flipside, there is a strange element of hope throughout, as well, that maybe something of us can survive that change called death and still affect the world. It's not an overtly spiritual plea by Morrison, but a little whisper of what might possibly be. Just maybe. Time will truly tell, right?

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The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am becoming convinced that Mark Samuels is incapable of writing a bad story. No writer is perfect, and there are a couple of "misses" in this collection, but none of the stories are bad. And while I didn't find The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales to be as strong as The White Hands and Other Weird Tales, it is still essential reading for lovers of "weird" fiction (whatever that means).

Unfortunately, this collection got off on the wrong foot for me. Thankfully, it recovered gracefully and continued on in a remarkable manner. The opening story, "Losenof Express" is a predictable, pedestrian effort for a writer of Samuels' caliber. I expected much better. I can only give this story 3 stars. I'll be honest, this was an inauspicious start that caused me to put my guard up with repeated chantings of "please don't suck, please don't suck, please don't suck".

The title story soon resolved my concerns, and in a very powerful way. I thought that Samuels had stumbled again when I read the rather abrupt, and particularly jarring phrase: I had the bizarre notion of having entered into occult territory, a phrase that seemed to artificially "push" the story in a self-aware way that smacked of railroading the reader. But while this sentence seems to tear the narrative structure asunder, it also serves as a segue into a very different voice that ultimately resolves in a most satisfactory way. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a literary Hegelian dialectic. I am not certain if Samuels did this with intent or not, but either way, it is extremely effective in pulling the reader down the rabbit hole, shedding disbelief the whole way down and transforming the mindscape in such a way that one feels fully immersed in strangeness. I had wondered why this story was used as the title for the collection, but after feeling the sheer muscle of this story, I now know why this 5 star tale should lend its name to the whole collection.

Of course, stories after the titular tale are always disappointments, right? Wrong. In fact, "Thyxxolqu" is a perfectly-paced story about language and its corruption. It is a dark revelation, a creepy peek into forbidden enlightenment. You speak into the abyss until the abyss speaks back and you come to a full understanding of its words. This reminds me of the game mechanic in the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, in which a character sees dreadful things or is given unholy revelations that drive her sanity over the edge. If she sees too much at once, the game dictates that she must do what is called an "idea" roll. Usually, you want to pass your idea roll, as it gives you insights into things you might not otherwise realize. Unfortunately, when faced with cosmic horrors, you want to fail your idea roll so that you do not come to the full realization of how awful the universe and its shadowy denizens are, in reality. You want to fail that roll so that you do not come to that full realization, saving you from potentially permanent insanity. To put it in these terms, the protagonist of "Thyxxolqu" . . . well, you'll see. 5 dreadful stars.

"The Black Mould" is the most "Lovecraftian" story I've read by Mark Samuels. Or, maybe that's "Ligottian". In any case, it's a baroque non-story of existential, even nihilistic dread. Beautifully written, yet it tries so hard to be significant that it becomes insignificant. I'm still giving it 4 stars for the writing, though. The writing is amazing, and if there were a bit of plot, it would have received 5 stars.

It seems like every horror short-fiction author just has to write a scary story about Mexico and strange old cults. They can't help it. Simon Strantzas' collection Burnt Black Sons has a couple, I believe the collection The Gods of HP Lovecraft has one, and I could probably point to a few more with little effort. "Xapalpa" is Samuels', and it's very, very good. 5 stars.

Once in a while, an author seems to be trying to mimic another author's style (note I said "seems" - this is not to say that this is intentional) when the other author has already done something so perfectly as to ward off all pretenders. I got this feeling while reading "Glickman the Bibliophile". While it is a good piece of conspiracy literature with a philosophical bent, it isn't up to snuff with Brian Evenson's works (whom it seems Samuels might be imitating, though I don't really think he was intentionally doing so) in the same vein. Here, Samuels' work is a shadow of Evenson's, I am sorry to admit. Still, a good story, well written, if a little rushed and somewhat hollow. 3 stars.

"A Question of Obeying Orders" finishes with a nice O'Henry ending. And while that twist can get old, if overused, it hit all the right spots for me here. Prussian soldiers and seances, a sense of twisted cosmic justice, and abominable things-that-should-not-be. Vampyres? Fah!!! 5 stars.

"Nor Unto Death Utterly by Edmund Bertrand," despite it's somewhat overwrought prose, is an existential tale worth the read. It pulls primarily from the 19th-century decadent tradition interwoven with threads of very modern cosmic horror. If you can stomach the first few treacle-smothered instances of narrative extravagance, the read is extremely rewarding in the end. 4 stars.

"A Contaminated Text" is a simultaneous ode to and metatextual subversion of Lovecraft, Borges, and Bierce. It is a story that invades the reader's brain, but only once one is finished reading it. I think this one bears a few re-readings. It is, structurally and thematically, a labyrinth. One doesn't realize where he is in the trap until it is far too late. 5 stars and my favorite story of this collection.

"The Age of Decayed Futurity" is a pop-culture conspiracy-cum-contagious-paranoid-fantasy that provides a peek "behind the curtain," a'la The Matrix, but with an even more sinister antagonist: the spirits of the dead from the future who work through Hollywood celebrity to create a world of TV-entranced zombies. Now, I'm not a big TV watcher to begin with, as I'd much rather be reading and writing and playing games than watching TV most of the time. And I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to knowing everything about celebrity lives, who was in what movie, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I couldn't care less, for the most part (there are exceptions). But I don't know that I've ever felt that the Illuminati have infiltrated Hollywood. But now I wonder. Suddenly, late night TV static has a much more sinister connotation. 5 stars.

While I typically love stories with strong philosophical underpinnings, particularly those of existentialism, I felt that "The Tower" might work better if stripped altogether of any pretense of "plot" or "story", rather than being a mass of philosophical muscle hung on an etiolated skeleton of prose fiction. Still, it is a solid piece with great eerie moments that warrants 4 stars.

While the average star rating of the stories, collectively, is 4.45, I have to round up based on the strength of a couple of the stories. The title story and "A Contaminated Text" alone give reason to push this one up into 5 star territory. If you haven't read Samuel's work before, I'd recommend going with the stronger collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales first, then take in The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales.




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In Delirium's Circle

In Delirium's Circle by Stephen J. Clark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the surface of it, this is merely a very creepy tale, extremely well told. But, like the plot itself, this is a multilayered artifact. The cover itself has a beautiful burgundy floral design embossed with a sinuous abstraction of theatrical masks that swirls in a . . . well, a delirious circle. In fact, the novel is illustrated throughout with sinister, ghostly drawings by the author himself, making the artifact a lavish affair worth the high asking-price. The cover is indicative of the story itself - a whirlwind of shadows that leaves the reader wondering who is good and who is evil, or even what is "good" and what is "evil", in the philosophical sense of the words. The effect on me has had one benefit: I've been studying existentialism lately, and this book makes it *really* easy to slip right into existential mode.

But this is so much more than just another straight-faced Ligotti-esque foray into darkness. Stephen J. Clark has crafted some dark playfulness into the text. Take this sentence, for instance:

"In short, the author playfully alluded to the identifiable characteristics of the lives of bookish people as though in essence all are monsters, pariah and exiles."

Clark here gives a sharp elbow to the reader, breaking the fourth wall, while maintaining the character of the book. This sort of metafictional playfulness is not something you'll find in most horror literature, at least not done with this kind of subtlety.

As the borders between dream and reality fray, it's easy to go into a kind of opiate slumber as one is reading. Then, all of a sudden, Clark pulls out a chase scene worthy of Alfred Hitchcock that grabs the reader by the shirt collars and shakes one into wakefulness. It's a sharp slap in the face, but rather than throwing the reader out of their suspension of disbelief, it draws the reader further in, enveloping one just as Mr. Fetch, the main character (or is he, really?) is folded into layers of uncertainty and psychic vertigo.

As Fetch is thrust under the dark, roiling waters of doubt and deceit, he, along with the reader, becomes aware that he is being used by The House of Sleep, a mysterious cabal of . . . well, that is a mystery.

"I was entering another circle, where the world seemed suddenly caught in amber, where the inhabitants of nightmares lingered just out of sight in the wings."

And later . . .

"I had acted as if hypnotized, finding the paint and brush, following the instructions to the letter, all the while with a sense that I was completing an inevitable action. The game played me."

One of the tropes that is hinted at throughout, but never made explicit (nothing is made explicit In Delirium's Circle, which is part of the awful wonder of it all), is the idea that doppelgangers may or may not have replaced one's friends, one's enemies, or one's self, at any time.

"Sooner or later your own shadow will rise up and join you as a guest at your table."

In context, this is one of the most horrifying lines of the book. But I can't, unfortunately, contextualize it without relating the book in its entirety. The haunting effect of this novel is far more than the sum of its parts. Clark and Egaeus Press has created one for the ages, the dark, unsure ages when even solipsism itself must be questioned. Is there really a "self" at all? Mr. Fetch, for one, has his doubts . . . and these doubts are about all that he can claim as his own. All else is distorted by the gyrations of delirium's circle.

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Dark Property

Dark Property by Brian Evenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even those brave readers familiar with Brian Evenson's often-macabre work will discover new depths of shadow in the pages of Dark Property. This may well be his most chilling book to date - not in the sense of stock horror, but as a more sophisticated frisson, an existential mix of confusion, anticipation, and stark cruelty.

The narrative follows a cadre of ruthless loners across a post-apocalyptic wasteland as they seek to possess and dominate one another's most cherished properties: their bodies. Evenson takes his notoriously clinical approach to brutality one step further into the experimental realm by employing a Lewis Carroll-esque mutation of the English tongue. He twists adjectives into verbs (and vice-versa), for example, injecting layers of meaning into single, loaded words. The result evokes a Dr. Seuss caught in the grip of some penumbral nightmare.

Not only is Dark Property a carefully stirred stew of language, but the plot also churns, boiling back in on itself as a series of rough characters chase, capture, abuse, kill, and sometimes resurrect one another in a seemingly endless factory line of violence. the main character, Kline, is an unemotional brute of a man who kills with as much passion as one might feel when doing the laundry or taking out the trash. Only Eckels, who refuses to stay dead for any length of time, effectively acts as Kline's foil. Eckels is a peaceful antagonist (one might argue that he is actually the protagonist, but this would be a moral decision, not a literary edict) whose purpose is to come back from the dead and question the murderer on his lack of conscience. The many deaths and returns of Eckels make the tale a clockwork of brutality, forgiving, fall, and redemption - wheels of words within wheels of character within wheels of plot. Indeed, Evenson may have been influenced by James Joyce in writing this novel; one might, in the tradition of Finnegans Wake, open Dark Property to any page and begin reading until the story loops back in on itself.

Simultaneously confusing, vivid, surreal, and clear, Dark Property is a challenging work - but one that, for readers who can lose themselves in its world and then pay careful attention to the surroundings once therein, yields a melange of beautifully stark, never-ending terror.

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The Spectacle of the Void

The Spectacle of the Void by David Peak
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is philosophy the way I like it: succinct, less jargon-ridden than many philosophical treatises I’ve read, and the referent examples are things I am either familiar with, can easily find online, or contextualized in such a way that I can fill in gaps in my own knowledge/experience.

The Spectacle of the Void is a short work, with only 96 pages of actual text. Its vocabulary is only as complex as it has to be, yet Peak gets his points across with exactitude. You don’t need a PhD to understand it, but a Bachelor’s degree helps. And I love that the examples used are from such things as the work of Brian Evenson, John Carpenter movies, and Junji Ito manga. Laymen’s sources? Sure. Well, except Evenson, who is a thinking man’s writer. But you’ll occasionally need to dip into the dictionary, as Peak doesn’t water down his thoughts, either.

I’d like to ask the question “what is the gist of the book?”, but there are several sub-theses going on here. Peak poses, as his primary thesis, that horror, at its heart, is about communication, or lack thereof. Whether it is our inability to communicate what we know, see, and feel properly or the fact that language simply cannot encompass the breadths of what we experience, particularly in those numinous moments when we sense something “beyond” what is communicable, we all suffer when communication is cut off, whether by us, by another, or by our circumstances. It’s an interesting take that plays out quite well through Peak’s facile use of examples that we either all know or can easily access with a little effort.

The examination of the thesis and corollary sub-theses was great. But what I drew the most from this was a number of notes in my writer’s notebook that got me thinking about how I construct stories and the thematic elements that make them ring or make them fail. I believe that, as a result of reading and understanding this work, I can be more engaging to potential readers. I can now more deliberately examine what aspect(s) of horror (internal or external, for example) affect my characters and determine, much more clearly, why they are affected by them. This is one of the best books about writing (that is not about writing) that I’ve ever read.

The section on extra-dimensionality is outstanding and makes clear something that has been in the back of my mind (in a pocket dimension?) for some time, but Peak makes it explicit. I'm surprised, though, that he did not reference House of Leaves as an example.

I love the idea, briefly touched on in relation to the movie Blowup, that the closer we try to examine something from a distance, the blurrier it gets. That is good insight that one must keep in mind when constructing horror.

The section on "Transformers" (no, not those Transformers) draws upon my favorite Junji Ito story "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" to demonstrate how this content hole can be extrapolated into the general frisson of one's experience of time's passage, where we are constricted and reshaped in our inevitable journey toward death. Peak’s examples are extremely helpful, in that they are scalable – one can extrapolate a larger meaning from the specifics of a story, and Peak is very good at showing the reader the way.

I will have to revisit this book again and again and set it near my dictionary, thesaurus, and other reference books I use for writing. Like any good philosophical text, it has caused me to think deeper about the subject. While the existential (and sometimes nihilistic) focus of the book can sometimes be draining, overall, I have been energized by the read and return to this one again and again.


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Sacrum Regnum II

 

Sacrum Regnum II by Daniel Corrick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After being entirely blown away by Sacrum Regnum I, I was excited, but a touch guarded, when approaching this second volume in the series. While I saw a lot of names that I normally love, I was wary of the sequel, worried that it would either fall flat or "jump the shark".

My fears were completely unfounded. This second volume absolutely lives up to the promise of the first. My only disappointment is that a volume three was never compiled.

But why focus on what might have been, when we can focus on what is? And this volume is absolutely brilliant! By that, I don't mean bright and shiny, oh no, this volume is dark, in places very dark. I mean smart, intelligent, dignified, and, dare I say it: literary? It is, with the first volume, a Symbolist master stroke, and a worthy bow to the Symbolist and Decadent literature of the past, without being enslaved to it.

My praise for Sacrum Regnum II does not, however, mean that I felt entirely comfortable with it. Not by a long shot.

For example, I feel, as the kids say these days, "seen" after reading John Howard's tale of a slightly neurotic numismatist, "Into An Empire". Yes, I saw myself in the protagonist on several levels. John, how did you get into my head? This hits too close to home for this mildly neurotic wannabe numismatist. I even restrict myself to pre-1776 Germanic state silver coins in a similar manner to the story's main character, Payton. Seriously, I feel naked before your pen. That is to say, I could completely immerse myself in Payton.

Next, "The Human Cosmos" is Charles Wilkinson at his best. Strong echoes of Italo Calvino ring throughout, and that is some of the highest praise I can give a story. An ambiguous story (in the best way possible) of fabulism that ends poised on the knifes' edge of dark and light. I am reminded of my favorite quote by Calvino: I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses. Wilkinson hits both sides of that balance at the same time.

Colin Insole's "Dreams from the Apple Orchards" (which I have read before) is an excellent example of psychogeography, where the landscape itself pulses with the negative energy of those who lived their before. The setting is the character, the setting that has seen so much of corruption and baleful intent. A thin veneer separates the trappings of civilization from the base layer of chaos beneath.

I had wanted to read Thomas Strømsholt's fiction before, but this was my first chance to do so. "Szépassony-völgy" packs an unexpected gut punch. Strømsholt layers a seed of utterly mindless random brutality under a veneer of mythic legend and romantic nostalgia and longing for past love. The contrast is striking and invokes a strong existential response in the reader, leaving one's head reeling. Powerful.

An entire section about author Quentin S. Crisp, replete with an interview with the author and a piece of short fiction, entitled Crispiana opens a window into the brain of the author, at least what he's willing and able to share about his brain. An interesting peek at an author whose work I quite like. As with the first volume of Sacrum Regnum, I love the collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetics, and reviews. An eclectic selection, but with it's own firm voice.

The Poetics section in this volume contains work by Mark Valentine, Loha Connell, and Bethany van Rijswijk, along with a translation of Stefan Grabinski's "Red Magda".

Ah, kids. Can't live with them, can't bury a fire hatchet in their forehead when they are possessed by fiery arson demons without feeling some degree of guilt. Watcha gonna do with "Red Magna"? This brilliant (pardon the pun) translation will lodge itself in your brain, just like an axe. The effect is no less painful. I did warn that some of these works go to very dark places.

Mark Valentine turns his always-keen critical eye on novelist Claude Houghton in his article "The Stranger Who Opens the Door - The Novels of Claude Houghton". As is usual, the reader is sent off scurrying to find the work of another forgotten author. Valentine is an archaeologist of literary treasures that need to again see the light of day. This essay is no exception!

Martin Echter's essay on the aesthetic principles espoused and practiced by Hanns Heinz Ewers is an exemplary examination of not only the writer's oeuvre, but of the undergirding philosophy that drove Ewers' work. A marvelous examination of an incredibly underrated author.

I had read, with interest, Mark Valentine's essay on Mary Butts from his collection Haunted by Books, whom I had not heard of to that point, with interest. Now, with Nigel Jackson's essay "Obscene Ikons: Desacralization & Counter-Tradition in the Work of Mary Butts," I have felt compelled to add her complete short fiction to my To-Be-Read list. For those who know me well, you know I don't add things to my TBR list lightly. I curate it a great deal (and am often chided for how few books I have on my TBR list on Goodreads). So, yes, I expect something special from Mary Butts' work.

. . . and the review of Georg Trakl's The Last Gold of Expired Stars in the book review section cements my decision to buy that book, as well. Thankfully, it was already on my TBR list.

There is some high praise for The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tessler by D.P. Watt. But isn't Watt always deserving of high praise? Yes. Absolutely.

A critically-constructive eye is placed upon Alex Miles' debut weird fiction collection The Glory and the Splendour. I haven't read said collection, but the assessment here seems fair, yet firm: there's potential here, but it needs work. It's strangely refreshing to see a review that is measured and doesn't overstate the work being reviewed, but sees raw potential.

Another balanced, insightful review, this time of Quentin S. Crisp's All God's Angels, Beware! clearly explains what it is that makes Crisp's work tick. I have yet to see a clearer explanation of how he does what he does when he writes. It is unique, quirky, weird, and charming at the same time. It has heart and this essay shows how and why this is done. An important essay on Crisp's fiction, to say the least!

When I read through the list of forthcoming books here, I am reminded of how good of a year 2013 was for literary fiction of the sort that I love. Halcyon days, to be sure. Hopefully, they'll return. In some small way that's happening, but we need an updated equivalent to Sacrum Regnum or an outright resurrection of the same to really seal the deal, as far as I'm concerned. Where is our Sacrum Regnum? And here I go again, pining for the past by longing for the future. I'm tempted to try to make it happen myself. It's been a while since I've edited . . . hmm . . .

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Waiting for the Dog to Sleep

 

Waiting for the Dog to Sleep by Jerzy Ficowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It should come as no surprise that Jerzy Ficowski is possibly the world's leading biographer of the great Bruno Schulz. Not only did Ficowski write the definitive Schulz biography, Regions of the Great Heresy, but one can hear echoes of Schulz's distinctive voice bordering the edges of Ficowski's short fiction, collected here in Waiting for the Dog to Sleep. Throughout my reading of the 28(!) stories in this volume, I found myself drawing frequent comparisons to Schulz, Kafka, and Calvino, and some of these stories should be spoken in the same breath as these greats.

That is not to say that Ficowski does not have his own voice; he does. But in order to entice readers to this book, I can't avoid the comparison. This work will sit comfortably - on its own - amidst works by the authors heretofore mentioned. Alas, this comprises all of the short fiction Ficowski ever wrote. He is much more well-known as a poet, and his poetic stance is reflected quite strongly in a few of these stories. At other times, his work is extremely straightforward and unadorned, which suits the stories in which ornamentation was not only un-necessary, but inimical to the goals of the narrative. Ficowski allows the form to follow the story, not allowing his own predilections to smother the necessary work that his words perform.

There is a wide variety here ("Something for everyone to hate," as Stepan Chapman used to say), and a lot to love. These pieces are all short and easily digestible, but some of them leave a long-lasting aftereffect, a lingering literary flavor that "sits well on the tongue," as they say. Here are my thoughts on each of the morsels:

The first story, "The Artificial Hen, or the Gravedigger's Lover" hovers somewhere between magic realism and surrealism. It's a strange, uncomfortable space. Most of the stories in this volume, I've found, fall into this strange liminal space between strange liminal spaces. Sometimes hewing toward more stark surrealism and at other times toward a warm magic realism a'la Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"The Passing Settlement" is about what's right there in the title. But what's there is not quite what you think. A charming little bit about one of those "blink and you'll miss it" places in the middle of nowhere (which may well be the middle of everywhere).

"Old-World Entomology" is a short, concise gut-punch about moths, ancestors, memory, and futility. A three page long existential masterstroke.

Daydream? Ghost story? Liminal magic realism? It doesn't matter. "Recreation with the Paralytics" is a numinous tale, in any case. It will lull you into its own sacral reality, chestnuts, wheelchairs, and all.

"Proof of the Existence of Saint Eulalia" is, as the academics are wont to say "transgressive". Equal parts wicked and clever, this tiny tale packs a lot. Almost a prose poem, though without so much filigree. The sort of story about which a writer (this writer in particular) would say "I wish I had written it myself". And I do.

"The Pink House, or the Desert Sentries" is the sort of story that sends literature majors scrambling for hidden meanings and symbolism when maybe, just maybe, the author was simply telling a story with no meaning . . . which, of course, carries hidden meanings. It is, in this way, a tricksterish story. Ficowski channels Kafka herein, and the academics start sprinting for their podiums . . .

It's funny, when I read the next tale, I had just had a conversation with my wife about the traces we do and don't leave behind when we die. This story, "Chorzeluk," is about making a memory mountain out of a molehill and the proposition that it's sometimes best to let silence speak for itself.

"Before the Wall Collapses" is a small slice of a small slice of the world, an urban trap, of sorts, as much psychological as physical, inhabited by the narrator's grandfather.

Ever wonder what it might feel like to be a victim of the Dungeons & Dragons spell "Otto's Irresistible Dance"? I have. The answer might be found in "Tango Milonga," a tale of magic realism that evokes Italy Calvino in all the best ways. That really is the highest praise I can give to a story. I am hoping there are more like this in Ficowski's collection, but this could carry the whole book! The price of admission is worth it for this story alone.

"Window to the World" is a window on frozen hope and the helplessness one faces in the face of cold, strong winters, and the inevitability of death. This could easily be a short Brothers Quay film. I might add that the Quays (my favorite directors) are, not surprisingly, mentioned in the translator's notes.

"The Sweet Smell of Wild Animals" is magical realism par excellence. This story would rank up among Millhauser and Calvino's best. A fantastic fantastical story (replete with obligatory clown) of an unexpected train ride to a zone of liminality between city and circus, mechanics and magic. An amazing tale of tails.

I keep using referents to magic realists most readers know. It can't be helped. "An Escape" brushes against Kafka's territory or that of a very, very restrained Solzhenitsyn. I wasn't as enamored of this story as others, but it is still well-realized, with a Rod Serling-esque cliffhanger ending.

Existentialism by way of an attempt to fade into non-existence is the theme of "Mimesis". Where best to hide? Or, rather, best to hide as what? What happens when one disappears into . . . a piece of architecture, for example? And what of the pull of such an act on others. One must be strong or dissolve.

"An Attempt at a Dialogue" is a psychogeographical dreamscape of a story with a strange hauntological twist that teases the edges of time-travel, questioning both past and present and the (false?) notion of selfhood. It leaves philosophical quandaries far beyond the limits of the ink on the page and even beyond the strangeness that the story infers.

To call "The Joy of Dead Things" a "nice" story gives the wrong connotation. Maybe "comfortable" is the word I'm looking for, but only to those of us who love to walk through sleepy, dilapidated towns, unkempt ruins, dirty side streets, and ancient overgrown cemeteries, physically-realized dreamscapes. If that's you, then you, like me, will feel comfortable with this story, "soothed" even.

In "Outskirts on the Sands," we find a narrator who constantly, stubbornly, thrusts himself into the past, intentionally avoiding the present until a girl, an amalgam of all his pasts, gently compels him into the present. But the pull of nostalgia is too powerful, and he loses his present, ironically, to a new future. Another strongly psychogeographic work.

A weirdly- beautiful story, the imagery of "My Forest" is going to stay in my head for a long, long time, particularly the fantastically gorgeous apocalyptic closing scene. I would love to quote it, but I don't want to spoil the dark beauty of it all, one of the most simultaneously moving and disturbing images I've seen painted with words. So many hints and implications . . . I can't get over how "ripe" this little tale is. I think I'm in love with it.

"Aunt Fruzia" can be killed off by a salacious story involving a nun, we learn. A domestic dinner story gone wrong (because the narrator just can't help himself from provoking his aunt). The analogies of dinner were so good, I'd prefer to take them literally. But that's cannibalism, and cannibalism is a no-no, kids.

The one disappointing story in the collection for me was "An Alliance". Is the alliance in "An Alliance" really an alliance at all? Or is it just spousal spitefulness? There's probably an analogy in this story, but I'm not seeing it.

"Gorissia" (as the Romans named it) is a village in which the people embrace the final embrace, that of the grave. It's a story as old as time, as discovered by the narrator, an archeologist noted for his previous Neolithic discoveries. And the story will continue on in perpetuity. The archeologist is, in essence, robbed of the fruits of his profession.

"Intermission" is a story of war, during which the line demarcation living and dead is all but erased and only fear can save you. It is an autobiographical tale of Ficowski's participation in the Warsaw uprising.

By the end of "They Don't Ring at the Bernadines'," Ficowski slips into, or rather ascends into full surrealist mode. This story of religious figures versus their adherents approaches, but doesn't quite cross the threshold into all-out absurdity. The restraint is apropos, given the story itself.

I was waiting for a story that would touch directly on the holocaust, and in "'Cause He's Stupid and 'Cause He's Abram," I begrudgingly found it. As you can imagine, it doesn't end well. In this sad case, ignorance truly is bliss. The story begins with the following paragraph, just to give you a taste of Ficowski's writing ability:

He had a molting beard the color of hempen harl, his frayed canvas clothes were made up of holes and cracks painstakingly sewn together. Niemira from Lesne claimed that Abram had stolen those rags from his field scarecrow and was now parading about in them. Possible, but if so, Stupid Abram hadn't taken them to make himself frightening only so that he would have something to wear: without them he was already fairly frightening, though more naked.

You can probably gather that Ficowski shows a wry humor, even in his portrayal of the most horrific of circumstances. I thought of the masks of comedy and tragedy strapped to each other often as I read this book. Sometimes the wires get crossed, and it makes for a heady mixture of emotions.

"Post-patrimony" is a deep dive into psychogeography, how the inhabitant is tied to the habitation and the fragile relationship between the two. When one dies, the other decays, and yet there is something irreducable at the heart of place, a kernel of immortal being that persists, a Genius loci that may take a familiar form.

"Stumps" is one of those strange stories whose strangeness resides, coiled up like a snake waiting to strike, in its utter banality. An ordinary day with one out of the ordinary element (in this case a beggar) that sends everything sideways, forcing the narrator to look at the world in an even more strange way: loaded with meaning amidst the ordinariness of living.

"Signs of the Times, or Diction" is too slight. While I can appreciate stories that only hint and infer, I'd like at least a thread to follow. Yes, this narrator has no thread, that's the point of it all. So, while clever, this story only pans out as average because it's too brief to take full hold.

"Spinning Circles" may be close to perfect, the fabled perfect circle sought after by the Greeks. A wanderer who hopes to reach The City, despite the entries awaiting him, follows his spinning hoop, the last holdover from his distant childhood, only to learn that the circle, which has a mind of its own, will never take him back to where he wants to go. Or will it? Where does the circle end, if it ends at all?

And here the collection ends. I must note that Twisted Spoon Press is starting to impress me. I only have two data points at this time, but what I see is very promising, indeed. I strongly recommend picking up this collection as a start, especially if you are partial to Central and Eastern European authors in translation. I am becoming more and more enamored of this niche, and Ficowski's collection is a very strong example of the sort of writing I've been finding from that corner of the world. Go get yourself a copy!



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If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!