setsuled

I read the newest Sirenia Digest to-day, which contains a new series of vignettes by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "THE ULTRAVIOLET ALPHABET". Each vignette corresponds to a letter, from A to M. A few of them are just like nice miniature lectures from a palaeontologist, which Caitlin indeed happens to be. I particularly liked "K is for Komodo Dragon" which discusses the komodo dragon's effect on the human imagination since its relatively recent discovery in 1910. Caitlin also goes into detail about an Australian ancestor of the komodo dragon, a much larger lizard that coexisted with aboriginal humans. I hadn't heard about it and it was interesting.

Other vignettes harken back to the Digest's original purpose, as a showcase of Caitlin's weird erotica. "C is for Clit" is an affectionate rumination on that renowned female body part while "J is for Journey" ponders a strange and exceedingly beautiful naked woman. All the vignettes have good qualities though I was a little puzzled by a reference to An American in Paris paired with a reference to Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Was Caitlin thinking of Funny Face? I enjoyed the vignettes in any case.

I walked along a river to work yesterday and got this song stuck in my head:

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.

To-day I read what I think is the newest Sirenia Digest, number 214, containing "Night Fishing", a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story. It's a nice blurring of the line between a multiverse story and an unreliable memory story, centring on a narrator menaced by some entity that shifts shape and temporal location in his recollections. It put me in mind of Lost Highway, especially when the narrator talks about whether or not he's a murderer.

Last night I fell asleep watching To Kill a Mockingbird. It's included free on Japanese Amazon Prime with Japanese subtitles I can't turn off. The film's Japanese title is アラバマ物語, literally "Alabama Story". After lousy translated titles for Ghibli movies like "Spirited Away" and "The Boy and the Heron", I guess it's nice to see it cuts both ways. I was sorry I slept through Atticus' closing statement so I went back and watched the last half of the film this morning. I seem to be really sensitive lately because all of the strongest moments in the film hit me really hard. I almost cried when Scout first sees Boo Radley.

There's a movie about perspective. You have two instances of community taking justice into its own hands, first when the racist jury condemns the innocent Tom Robinson, then when the sheriff and Atticus decide they're going to protect Boo Radley. The truth was concealed, some might argue changed, first for a bad reason and then for a good reason.

While I was reading the Sirenia Digest story, I was surprised to find myself thinking of this lecture on Dragons from Gresham College I was also watching this morning. The lecturer, Ronald Hutton, discusses the possibility that some tales of dragons could have been based on actual encounters with snakes, crocodiles, or extraordinarily fearsome people. Perhaps it was the dragons that became snakes, crocodiles, and people?

A lot of the subtitles on To Kill a Mockingbird were wrong, I noticed. Unsurprisingly, there's no translation for "Nigger". "Nigger", "Negro", "Coloured", "Black", are all translated as "黒人", literally "black person". This renders totally different the dialogue in the scene where Atticus tells Scout, "Don't say 'niggers', Scout." This line is translated as "何て言い方だ", which roughly translates as "How can you talk that way?" There are two reasons I can see for this. One is to discourage the dissemination of bad English, the other is the fact that Japanese has no swear words, therefore, no Japanese viewer would understand why Atticus wouldn't want Scout to use any particular word. What the translator ought to have done is rendered the word faithfully and offered a brief note. Or they could have simply translated it directly. An intelligent viewer should be able to glean the cultural meaning from context. A willful mistranslation is symptomatic of the kind of cultural insulation that I believe more and more is at the heart of Japan's failure to learn English. Whatever the motive, though, poor translations like this help create a fantasy "Japanese America" that exists only in the Japanese collective imagination.

Last night I read "Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea", the Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the new Sirenia Digest. It's a particularly nice one.

An art journalist takes an assignment to attend an exhibition of some kind. The story is told in first person and the journalist is established with a credible, down-to-earth, tone that makes the weird stuff effective for the contrast. It's another especially Lovecraftian story and yet also not. There are suggestions of a blurring between human and sealife but there's something more ethereal about it than typical for Lovecraft. It's a Sirenia Digest story that possibly references an actual siren. Caitlin even mentions This Mortal Coil's famous cover of "Song to the Siren", which happens to have been much on my mind lately. It's a nice, haunting little story.

Last night I read the new Sirenia Digest which contained "PASSAGE OF VENUS IN FRONT OF THE SUN", a new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's good, beginning with sort of a drowsy mood and becoming a story about a very gentle alien invasion of Earth.

The aliens are primarily concerned with stories, their society somehow not being able to generate such things. The discussion then becomes about censorship and the destruction of works of fiction. It's a timely topic when people from both political sides these days have started to endorse the destruction of texts. Caitlin makes reference to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Francois Truffaut's film adaptation of the book. I think the two great works to read on the topic are that and Milton's Areopagitica. Milton gives the devil his due (as usual) and famously describes books as living things, capable of exerting real influence on people's minds. But he just as famously said that he cannot praise a "cloistered virtue", a person whose virtue is due entirely to never having been exposed to challenging ideas. The fact that people are so quick to fear works of fiction these days is surely a sign of rampant cowardice, cowardice being something that used to be regarded as a negative trait.

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary." - John Milton

Another box of my old books arrived a few days ago, this one a very small box containing just a few of my Caitlin R. Kiernan, Poppy Z. Brite, and Neil Gaiman books as well as a book about Dahomey. There were also fragments of another box in the box as well as a stamp indicated the item had been received in a damaged state in Nevada. I suspect the original box somehow fell apart and my books were scattered. I also suspect some of my books were lost considering I received only about twenty pages of Caitlin's Low Red Moon. I remember that book fell apart while I was reading it but I'd had it carefully packed between a couple other books. Who knows when I'll ever know what books I lost? I kept no record of what books went in what box.

Anyway, speaking of Caitlin R. Kiernan, I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day, containing a portion of a novella she'd started a few years ago. It's about the world after a plague has devastated the planet, doing something sinister to human women that somehow prevents or distorts natural birth. It's an interesting story brought to life with Caitlin's colourful use a colloquial fantasy dialect. It begins with a bit of rumination on the Garden of Eden, the sort of thing I'm always bound to find interesting after years of studying Milton.

It's supposed to finally be a bit warmer here to-day in Kashihara, Japan, so I think I might go for a walk. Here's a little sign of spring I spotted a few days ago:



Twitter Sonnet #1526

As fish, we drank the water fast and full.
But now the desert sells a house for song.
So mix an apple, big and sauced and cool.
The core is short but who's-your-friends're long.
The swinging bat's a quiet switch to wind.
Before the shaking pitcher, mitts were cold.
The score to-day has edged around the bend.
Before the second inning, hope was old.
A certain time restricts the sacred wrist.
The arm's distraction fit the panty bill.
Explain to vapour all the air you missed.
We stuffed a day's supply beneath the gill.
The scattered pages rode Pacific winds.
Across the marsh, a sickly lantern wends.

I finally had a chance to read one of the new Sirenia Digests from last month. It contained a new story, "Untitled 45", but Caitlin R. Kiernan that starts off with a wonderfully eerie and desolate sequence of descriptions. The unnamed narrator traverses a beach and contemplates a sinister forest nearby. The imagery is so interesting and carefully described it's impossible not to picture it.

Dialogue happens when a figure emerges from the forest and it becomes a rumination on the narrator's feelings of guilt, or lack of guilt, or guilt at not feeling guilty. This section also has striking imagery its psychological suggestions are lovely and grim.

Twitter Sonnet #1445

The citrus clouds obscured the creamy field.
The trees and fruit invoked the fancy land.
The carpenter constructs a sign to yield.
He said the beach was still too full of sand.
The tyre sand obscured the twisting car.
A sudden drink began a lakeless night.
A mighty leg traversed the jelly bar.
A frightened thought requests another light.
Relinquished streams invest the growing pond.
As light dissolves in dust we push the shade.
Of lower clouds the short are passing fond.
With endless green the sod is strictly paid.
A chance replaced the station near the rock.
A foot contorts the black and purple sock.

To-day I read one of the two new Sirenia Digests this month, a short story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called simply "UNTITLED PSYCHIATRIST #5". It features, as many other stories for the Digest have, a patient talking to a psychiatrist. In this case, the patient gives a beautiful description of a sort of post apocalyptic city.

There are descriptions of strange, pervasive cold and weird gaunt, grey people. At the centre of the story is a visit to a museum and I loved the sadness underlying it. It seemed all too pertinent to current events, to a society whose vigorous impulse to change the world means forgetting the past, or what the past means. This story is a good and, appropriately, sad song for our times.

The newest Sirenia Digest brings Caitlin R. Kiernan's conclusion to her Cerulean Alphabet, an intriguing set of vignettes covering the letters N through Z. Many of these vignettes may remind the reader of her Agents of Dreamland books as cops, investigations, and strange violent crime come up quite a bit.

The sequence begins with "N is for Nude" which, in its contemplation of a deeper kind of nudity than "unclothed", kind of reminded me of Mike Leigh's Naked but turns out to have more to do with weird murder than that film. Several of the stories deal with phenomena that covey a sense of amorphous threat, including "O is for Ogre", which is a very nice variation on the standard childhood nightmare about a monster in the closet. "R is for Red", meanwhile, makes respectable strides towards rivalling H.G. Wells' "The Red Room" in terms of horror and menace.

Twitter Sonnet #1336

The finless fish returned with questions asked.
Tormented tips advance the fingers west.
The fire sprites have ever entered masked.
The entry route was ranked as seventh best.
Afforded captains blot the check with ink
A stack of wood is books to open eyes.
A healthy rinse defrosts the frozen sink.
And all we sought and wanted, lots of pies.
Reversing steps announced the constant air.
In fleets of gloves the hands could pilot home.
Convenience starts behind the eyeless bear.
An ostrich lamp decides to slowly roam.
A puzzle sleeps, it's draped across a truck.
Entire skies reside inside the duck.

The first Sirenia Digest of the new year is one of the best I've ever read. Caitlin R. Kiernan's new story included in the Digest, "Seven Dreams", is another vehicle for dialogues but the unnamed narrator's communication with different dream characters in different dream scenarios takes on an extraordinary sense of personae eternally bound together and in conflict in ways both subtle and clear.

The story is also set in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands and the narrator shifts between a dialogue with a woman named Sarah in Ulthar and a dialogue with a mysterious girl with whom the narrator's trudging through a sandstorm. Both Sarah and the girl talk about the other in ways that suggest the other is a dream while also insisting on the importance of dreams. Each one, in a sense, delegitimises the other while also focusing on her in a way that suggests extreme importance. There are other shifts in shape and persona once the narrator and the girl reach Dylath-leen that bring the story to other fascinating, lovely heights. I felt the tale crystallises some preoccupations evident in earlier Sirenia Digests. A really nice piece of work.