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Over twenty years ago, I signed up for a Yahoo! account because there was no site for Houyhnhnms. To this day, I remain married to it due to various other things I signed up for with the e-mail and friends and family members who can't remember my g-mail address. That doesn't stop me from forgetting to check it for weeks or months at a stretch which has produced no shortage of ire and inconveniently missed notifications. Now there's a new wrinkle--Yahoo has been chucking genuine e-mails into the spam folder while dumping piles of spam into my regular inbox. A couple days ago, I discovered an e-mail from my friend Tim from a year ago and the new Sirenia Digest from last month.

So to-day I read the story contained therein, "UNTITLED 47". It's a nice vignette, deliberately blurring the distinctions between dream, art, and memory. I particularly liked a moment where the narrator views an eel-like creature in the depths of a remarkably clear body of water. That's a story by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

In her blog to-day, or from a couple days ago actually, Caitlin mentioned David Lynch's recent announcement that he has emphysema. That really fucking sucks. There goes the last, slim hope for another season of Twin Peaks, or a proper one, at any rate. Lynch says he won't retire though his condition keeps him from going very far from his home.

I've been watching the third season of Twin Peaks again this summer, the 18 episode "Return" that came out over the summer of 2017. I still remember how marvellous it was to get another piece of a David Lynch movie every week. Seeing episode 11 premiere at Comic Con remains one of my best Comic Con memories. It's become inextricably bound up with my idea of what a great summer should be. Watching Twin Peaks season three is a more reliable boost for my spiritual and mental mood than any chemical I've ever encountered.

Last night I watched episode seven in which Gordon Cole, the character played by Lynch, meets with Diane in her home. He mentions in this scene that he gave up smoking. If only that had mirrored real life. But I really don't want to take Lynch to task. He does describe smoking rather beautifully:

I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco -- the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them -- but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.

Of course that's why he liked smoking. The man's art really is his life. It fits with his aesthetic. Think of the shot of Darya's head with the smoke coming from it. Of Pete after the mill fire, describing how he felt like his lips were glued to a tailpipe of a bus. Or the sooty woodsmen.

Oh, well. Maybe he'll film some cool vignettes from his home over the next few years.



X Sonnet #1869

Rebuttal time rebuffed the bouncy brain.
Tremendous force returned the god to space.
Intrinsic life imbues the daily grain.
But something more creates the human face.
Persona swaps attend the table change.
Impressive clouds contain the nightly heat.
Tortilla talk distorts the flour range.
Awareness rouged the Queen's albino beet.
Decaying orbit brings the ball in view.
Diverting questions keep the metal safe.
Convulsing human figures filled the pew.
Above the altar sits a wingéd wraith.
Suspicious sludge is seeping out the grill.
Computer blue was spiked with sour will.

I read the new Sirenia Digest on the train to-day, a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called "Discord in Anthracite". It's exciting to see Caitlin combine her love of HP Lovecraft with her palaeontology expertise.

The point of view character discusses childhood memories with a figure who shifts between a psychiatrist and a dead girl. It has the quality of an internal dialogue, the sort of thing we do when we try to explain things to ourselves by imagining a friend, family member, or authority figure to whom we're delivering the explanation. In those cases, we may well switch out the identity of the listener/interrogator mid-explanation. The people we choose can be indicative of our priorities and perspectives, as it is for the narrator of Caitlin's story.

This all, like the personalities of Lovecraft's narrators, helps establish an emotional reality for the fantastically horrific. It's a nice piece of work, it gets under your skin, or your scalp.

It's spider season here again in Kashihara.

This morning I finally had time to read the latest Sirenia Digest, number 200. For this issue, Caitlin R. Kiernan created a story about stories. Not an unusual matter for her but it's particularly appropriate for a commemorative issue of a monthly digest of stories.

One scene of the protagonist dreamer glimpsing a variety of fish reminded me of Salman Rushdie, in one of his own famous postmodernist commentaries. Other parts of the new story from Caitlin, "A Travelogue for Oneironautics", reinforce the impression of a story commenting on stories. The dreamer and another character, a naked woman in a sailcloth, traverse a sea of red water, and both are unable to access their identities or motivations. The dreamer seems more interested in making the attempt than the woman, who seems content or resigned to her own ambiguity. This dynamic is repeated as the scene shifts to different locations and time periods, with the woman being replaced in separate occasions by a sort of werewolf and then a talking dog. And always, as is so often the case in Caitlin's fiction, the protagonist seeks answers from a conversation partner unwilling and/or uninterested in providing them. That in one case this is symbolically portrayed as a kind of violence to the dreamer, in the case of the werewolf, has an intriguing implication of how the refusal to divulge information may be a kind of harm. It brings to mind the lyrics to The Beatles' "I'm So Tired".

It's another nice and haunting story for the Digest. May there be many more.

Twitter Sonnet #1634

A case was tossed beside the road for beer.
Some extra paint would never catch the eye.
A park contained a bloody mob of deer.
The offered cookie fell beneath the sky.
The cans of ships were fresh as evening grapes.
A morning stew was fit to shave a beard.
Remembered treks could fill the ancient tapes.
There's something strange to see but never weird.
The peaks of Peck were dark above the glare.
A devil boy detained the sternest man.
A Doctor told the captain, take the stare.
The empty words combined to feed from Pan.
A faceless man has stumbled 'pon a mug.
The tangled brain was used to weave a rug.

Another two issues of Caitlin R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest were in my inbox yesterday, issues 185 and 191. They're both good but 191 is by far the superior.

191 features a story called "Metamorphosis D (Imago)" and it's about a couple who have conflicting memories about a possibly extraterrestrial encounter in the woods. The interesting thing is how this leads to an argument between the two and it becomes a nice illustration of how two people can be misled down paths of reasoning by invoking knowledge and experience that aren't precisely appropriate. But they may be imprecisely appropriate, or related on some fundamental level of human conception. Which makes misunderstanding more likely--because they're compelling rabbit holes.

One character says something in her sleep which the other misinterprets. The first interprets anger in the other as the prelude to physical violence. It may not be, or maybe she's picking up on a frequency in itself that is as irrational as physical violence. This is part of a story that also includes the narrator's perception of physical transformation and two distinct recollections for the same period of time. It's great--it's one thing to have a story about conflicting perceptions, it's another thing to have one that makes it so intimate.

185 featured another of Caitlin's stories with a narrator using futuristic dialect, another nice, poetic experiment in language craft. The story about sinister mannequins is not bad, though maybe not the most interesting one I've ever seen in the Digest.

To-day I read the Sirenia Digests 176 and 181 by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Both are very good but I liked 181 much more.

176 features a story called L'homme et la femme terribles which is an unnamed narrator's intriguing observations of a strange couple they saw regularly in a bar. The couple is described in detail, both having a quality of middle America, 80s goths. A man and a woman, the woman in particular, described as an albino wearing big black sweaters, black leggings, and ballet slippers, sounds like she comes from an alternate, weirder version of Flashdance. Both of them have distinctive, interesting style.

181 is a nice thing to read after watching the new Evangelion movie yesterday. It, too, features many dreamlike juxtapositions, and I really like the American gangsters discussing 16th century literature and 17th century wars. This story seems to have more of a heart, too--despite being called "HEART-SHAPED HOLE"--and ends with a sad and lovely image supporting that title.

A new Sirenia Digest a few days ago brought the beginning of a new alphabet from Caitlin R. Kiernan, "The Cerulean Alphabet". This is a series of vignettes, one for each letter of the English alphabet. Caitlin has used this format before to good result and the latest is no exception.

Covering letters A through M, vignettes like "G is for Gephyrophobia" and "L is for Listen" feature Caitlin's familiar second person dialogue format in which the narrator speaks to a "you" and discussion involves an argument about perception of the strange. I like how these stories aren't about the elusiveness of a shared reality but the dread of confronting the undeniable, whether it's merely a strange sound in "Listen" or a bridge in "Gephyrophobia".

I think my favourite of this group is probably "I is for Indolent", which sort of reminds me of "The Lazy Sunbathers" by Morrissey, though Caitlin's vignette is not so much a condemnation of idle bystanders as an eerie portrait of immobilising torpidity barely interrupted by a strange vision of subtle horror.

By the way, in yesterday's post I talked about the lack of mood and atmosphere in Sunday's Doctor Who. In the past the show has excelled in these things, often doing much more for effect than any pouncing monster. A good example is the Second Doctor serial The Web of Fear.

Despite the Halloween season being over, I've kept up reading H.P. Lovecraft Selects, a collection of stories drawn from Lovecraft's famous essay on supernatural horror. To-day I read Rudyard Kipling's "The Phantom 'Rickshaw". Lovecraft describes Kipling as approaching greatness despite "omnipresent mannerisms". These may be the pervasive bits of local colour Kipling is famous for and it is a great and subtle addition to the story of a man seeing his dead lover stalking him in a 'rickshaw. That one element of strangeness is made the more striking for the abundant evidence of the author's casual familiarity with the reality of the place.

This piece of window dressing even comes to the fore as the story's narrator tries to use it as a tool to keep himself sane;

Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud: “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t forget that—I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So’s horses—anything, in fact, that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses.

As for the story itself, the poetic justice of a man undone by the ghost of a woman he so cruelly spurned isn't as satisfying as it is horrific. There's a surface of a basic, functioning morality--man does wrong, man gets punished--but the strangeness of it against the authenticity of the location emphasises a dreamlike quality in the proceedings. She may indeed be a manifestation of the narrator's conscious or self-loathing. It's an effective story at any rate.

Caitlin R. Kiernan fans got a special treat in to-day's new Sirenia Digest--a previously unpublished story called "Chevy Swamp" from 1987, from well before Kiernan had become an established name in weird fiction. In the introduction to this month's Digest, Kiernan talks about how the story reflects her inexperience at that point in her life as a writer and expresses dislike for the story's obvious resemblance to Stephen King's It, which had been published not long before "Chevy Swamp" was written. This might seem a strange thing to complain about to-day when Stranger Things has garnered so much praise for its obvious modelling on It and other fantasy and horror fiction from the 1980s centred on groups of kids. For anyone looking for more stories like that now, "Chevy Swamp" is certain to satisfy, particularly for anyone looking for such a story told from the perspective of a female character.

A first person narrative told by a character named Mary, the story concerns her and her two friends, Arnie and Rusty, and their relationship with the swamp of the title. All of them are around eleven years old and there's a nice description of a biology class project followed by an encounter with a bully named Ellroy. There's some allusion to the psychological causes of bullying behaviour, of cycles of abuse, but the story takes it in a weird direction as Mary and her two friends form a nicely understated, weird love/hate bond with the swamp and a strange creature that may or may not exist within. In a very effective creative decision, Kiernan avoids bringing the creature explicitly into the story--it manifests in dreams, suspicions, and mutilated bodies. This makes the creature menacing and mysterious while also providing a tortuous ambiguity for the protagonists who are compelled to wonder how much responsibility their bear for the creature's behaviour.

The resemblance to It is certainly clear but Kiernan creates characters who are very much her own, particularly Mary, to inhabit this It pastiche world. It's a nice addition to what is becoming a vibrant genre again.

This is the famous Wall Drug Dinosaur in Wall, South Dakota, and it features in "THE DINOSAUR TOURIST", a lovely new Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the Sirenia Digest. It may be the story in the Digest to feature the least amount of weirdness, being a simple tale of a man who picks up a guileless young hitch-hiker who's on his way to meet his internet boyfriend. A subtle chemistry develops between the driver and the hitch-hiker with interesting exchanges based on differences in breadth and kind of experience. It showcases Caitlin's fine ability to create the sensory elements of an experience and has the slow, nice pace of all good road stories, which this one is.

I've been reading a lot lately, maybe because I'm in a Japanese class now I suddenly have a contrary urge to read a lot of English. I'm still re-reading The Lord of the Rings and on Saturday or Sunday I reached chapter 4 from Book Four, or the second book in The Two Towers, "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit". And speaking of a slow and easy atmosphere, this is a wonderful chapter which Peter Jackson's film version really doesn't attempt to capture. Most of the basic elements of the chapter are present in the extended version of the film--Gollum fetches some rabbits and Sam decides to cook them, much to Gollum's indignation, who prefers raw meat. Gollum's "What's taters. precious?" line is even reproduced in the film. But there are many differences that completely change the tone and purpose of the scene.



Because Jackson was so focused on creating a film with constant momentum, it's easy to see why he reinterpreted it. But in the book, it's one of the moments that most clearly reminded me that Tolkien was a World War I veteran. After the Dead Marshes and grey, featureless lands of Mordor, the Hobbits and Gollum come to a place that's strangely beautiful.

So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams.

It's easy to imagine soldiers, accustomed to the hellish landscape surrounding trenches, suddenly coming across areas not yet spoiled by the war.

Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tanmarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green . . .

It's after Frodo has fallen asleep that Sam slowly starts to remember the cookware and formulates his plan to make a decent meal for his master. The wonderful thing about the scene, and the reason Sam quickly takes over the narrative, is that we see him, much more than simply cooking a meal, single-handedly creating a familiar domestic atmosphere, motived both for himself and for the love he feels for Frodo watching him sleep.

Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the sharping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face had not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.'

After all the time Tolkien spends describing their slow, grim, and hopeless journey, it's wonderful that Sam instinctively wants to spend a lot of time and energy cooking and in the process he even turns Gollum into a familiar domestic figure, the lazy and surly servant lad.

'Smeagol'll get into real true hot water, when this water boils, if he don't do as he's asked,' growled Sam. 'Sam'll put his head in it, yes precious. And I'd make him look for turnips and carrots, and taters too, if it was the time o' the year. I'll bet there's all sorts of good things running wild in this country. I'd give a lot for half a dozen taters.'

The beauty in this scene is an interesting contrast to the impatience Frodo expresses regarding Hobbit culture at the beginning. It's easy to think again of men itching for glorious and worthy battle and then finding something horribly different in the first World War and suddenly foolish homebodies don't seem so foolish after all.