[February 22nd ] Weird Wednesday, Project Hiatus & Blogging Changes

I hope this sets the tone nicely

There’s been no Weird Wednesday for awhile. Oh, you noticed? How nice! I feel special and cuddly just by thinking about you guys. First, there were exams. Then, there was fatigue and chronic lack of sleep. Now, a very nasty back pain is responsible for the delays in updates in the Weird Wednesday feature.

Well, since we have gone down this thorny road, why not get with the program and expect to see something [anything really] by the mid-goddamn-summer. Cause guess what? Weird Wednesday is going in a wee bit of a hiatus, until after June. Why, you might ask?

The question is a rather simple one to answer. Because my university runs on a campaign of complete misinformation, I had to receive primary information through the rumor mill about what I as a student had to do in order to apply to work on a thesis. Mind you, I already knew what I would be writing about and have it all worked out.

However, the university set the bar higher for those, who want to apply, from 4.50 overall grade to 5.25. Of course, I’m not a straight A [6.00 in Bulgaria] student, but a firm B student [meaning my overall grade sits at 5.00 firmly]. This means that I’m not qualified to apply for thesis, which is the considerably easier way to go about graduating. The rumor mill had been going Charlie Sheen crazy about what the new qualifications were going to be. The university conveniently leaked no information about any of the guidelines for thesis, which should be so high on their priority list. The consensus among everyone is that the new head appointed in our department wants to read a lot less than previous years. It suits him to give out as less as possible information and ruin it even for those, who are eligible to apply.   

Anyway, I finally had to check for myself, whether the rumor mill was correct and honestly, since I’ve found no official information on the website, I hoped that it was all nonsense. Well, it wasn’t. So now, I’m going to be one of the misfortunate ones revising material from two years ago. I have confirmed nine disciplines I’ll have to freshen up on and five, which I’m not that sure of.

So you see why I can’t really continue with my regular, big projects, but instead of complete hiatus and going off the grid, I will just blog shorter. More snippy, snappy comments and less snore-fests of posts.

Well, dearies. Let the torturous study begin.        

[February 1st, Weird Wednesday] “The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford

As with Alfred Kubin, I have no prior experience with the author other than seeing Crawford and “The Screaming Skull” pop up in some conversations on Twitter. I think the premise to be interesting, though the execution is peculiar enough to interrupt my reading and throw me out of the story. Therefore, I’m left with a bittersweet aftertaste.

“The Screaming Skull” is at its core a very simple story, perhaps unsettling at best, though far removed from horror. Retired captain Charles Braddock has inherited the estate of his late and dear cousin Luke and his wife, Mrs. Pratt. However, Braddock learns of a rather unusual and quite vocal resident, a smooth human skull, which engages in nightly screaming sessions. The story encapsules Braddock’s coexistence with this screaming skull to an unidentified friend of the captain, starting from the early signs of habitation and catching up to now.  

Crawford presents this story of denied habitation [for Braddock vehemently rejects the idea of ghosts and vengeful spirits] as a one-sided dialogue. As soon as I got through the first page it was evident that Braddock conversed with someone, though I had access to Braddock’s words only. Although Crawford is a silver-tongued storyteller and I enjoyed Braddock’s voice as a narrator and a person, I encountered several difficulties as I read “The Screaming Skull”. The shifts from first person point of view to second person and back demanded I shift gears as to how I perceived the world inside the story. Was I to act as Braddock’s collocutor or was I to hide in his head and hear his thoughts?

At times, Braddock steers the narration off course to recount stories connected to his servants or his past as a captain. I think it’s clever how Crawford used the story-within-the-story to add substance to the world of “The Screaming Skull”. Braddock and his wordy descriptions also help flesh out the surrounding, adding texture to a monologue, which borders on a stream of consciousness narrative style. This narrative technique’s main drawback manifests, when you look at the overall structure of the story. The main story concerns the skull and Braddock, but at the same time you focus on these interludes to make sense of background. My need to shift from one POV to another coupled with the story’s demand to switch focus from the interludes to the overall story arc complicated my reading process.   

Two overall themes dominate “The Screaming Skull”, disbelief and guilt. Braddock struggles to rationalize the skull’s nature and why it screams. There is a strong rejection towards all that not known and metaphysical, which borders to blind and desperate ignorance of what the skull is and why it screams. Through denial of the obvious truth [as to the identity of the skull, then about the cause of its owner’s death] Braddock seeks to absolve his guilt towards Mrs. Pratt [I will not comment any further on the connection between those two; that is for you the reader to discover]. Guilt makes sense of the story.

Guilt explains why the captain talks as fast as he does and why he launches into these mini-stories, to escape talking about the skull. The guilt is evident in Braddock’s emotional attachment and interaction with the skull. He tries to please the spirit inside, despite his failure to name it as such. He enters a state of contradiction with himself, both trying to humor the skull and appease through his care and manners. Since Braddock rationalizes every event connected with the skull, he overlooks the true danger of his predicament. In this well-mannered panic “The Screaming Skull” resembles Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” as both of the stories share the motif of the narrator’s guilty conscious as a means to their demise. While Poe straddles the gothic genre tropes, Crawford head off to uncharted waters and leaves a lot open for discussion.

In the end, I consider “The Screaming Skull” a peculiar story. It possesses rich texture, but is a spoken monologue distilled from a conversation. The buildup doesn’t surprise or frighten, but the promised resolution is quite satisfactory to keep going, until you reach the ending.      

[January 18th, Weird Wednesday] "The Other Side" by Alfred Kubin

The opening story in “The Weird” is an excerpt from “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin, first published in 1908. I have no knowledge of the traditions in European literature at the time of its publication and this is the first time I’ve encountered Alfred Kubin as a writer. I opted for an open interpretation of this text without any prior research, which might have helped me say something accurate as to the meaning of his work. The only text discussing “The Other Side” that I have read is Maureen Kincaid Speller’sexcellent take on the excerpt.

Weird Wednesday’s purpose as a feature is to allow the stories to speak to me and “The Other Side” has proven to be vocal. After the initial reading, I willingly accepted the reality that had befallen the city of Pearl, where an epidemic of sleep knocked out the city’s whole population for several days. However, the mysterious and highly contagious disease functions as a means to set the stage for an inevitable rebellion, instigated and flawlessly executed by all members of the animal kingdom.

In a grandiose and all-devouring display of dominance, the city of Pearl wakes to swarms and herds and prides and packs and flocks of beastly conquerors, who have overthrown humans. At his stage “The Other Side” reads as an environmentalist's wish fulfillment fantasy come to life, yet, reading this excerpt as nothing more than the literal would be insulting to the potency of the prose and its latter direction.  

The 'weird' in this tale has rooted itself within the nameless protagonist's delivery, who serves as a vessel for the reader’s senses. This man collects 'slices of life' encounters between the old and the new citizens of Pearl, neatly chaining one with the other complete with observations. What causes surprise here is not so much the abrupt uprising of the natural world, but the still, calm 'matter-of-fact' reception of these apocalyptic events by the population. It is this peculiar juxtaposition between the dangerous outside world, where one might become prey no matter the hiding place, and the pacified calmness displayed by the citizens, who insist on keeping up with appearances no matter what, that tilts the reader’s perception of how reality functions in the Dream Realm.

This tilted reality can be likened to the absurd logic, on which dreams run. In this direct sense, I'm reminded of Paul Jessup's stories in his collection “Glass Coffin Girls”, where our reality rots and transforms into a reflection from a carnival mirror. Certainly, the sickness that affects manmade objects supports the idea of how reality erodes. Perhaps the denizens of Pearl and the Dream Realm haven't woken from their slumber, but have only achieved consciousness in a never-ending shared dream.

The possibilities for interpretation are countless, because Kubin didn't intend to rationalize the bizarre fate to befall Pearl. However, the strongest association I make with everything that has transpired within the excerpt concerns themes in Bulgarian literature and models in behavior during the centuries of enslavement by the Turks and then decades under the communism. I’m rather surprised how well “The Other Side” is in dialogue with the peculiarities in works by a great number of revolutionary writers and poets as well as the psychological survival tactics the Bulgarian society had to adopt in order for its identity to withstand the occupation during those two periods.

For instance, the concept of sleep on a mass scale, such as Kubin’s sleep epidemic, has a rich history in Bulgarian literary traditions as willful surrender of the conscious mind. During the centuries under Ottoman rule, Bulgarian writers and poets used the 'sleep' to criticize society for their complacency and slave mentality, even though Kubin’s sleep epidemic doesn’t serve as such within the context in the excerpt. Further touching points between Bulgaria and Kubin can be found within the need to maintain normalcy under any and all conditions, even if that is impossible. This persistence to keep a semblance of what Pearl used to be while under the constant animal attacks and demolition can be compared to the same efforts Bulgarians had to make during the Ottoman occupation. The animals represent not only the fear of the citizens, but serves as masks that show the true nature of the human oppressors. For me this association is easy to make, because anthropomorphism has its place in our literary traditions and is still practiced today [even though we use it to bring diversity to our swear language]. Last on the list here is the narrator's psychological breakdown near the excerpt's end. It neatly embodies the inner discord of a person, who hopes and thinks and tries to resist a status quo, even if that desire is expressed through his heart's true intentions.

I will conclude by saying that “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin is an extremely potent story, mainly because it's represented not in its entirety. There is no clear way to define the proper dimensions of this story, which I don’t mind, because it allows for the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. As an excerpt “The Other Side” remains limitless, irreal and opulent as a dream. In short, a fine way to open a compendium dedicated to the all-encompassing weird.       

[January 11th, Weird Wednesday] "Foreweird" by Michael Moorcock and "Introduction" by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

I would like to start the first analysis [or something close to an analysis] of “The Weird” with a side note. Today I've spotted that Through A Forest of Ideas received traffic from Tor.com. After some googling kung fu, I discovered that Tor.com have linked “Weird Wednesday” under their Of Interest section on the site. Needless to say, I'm ecstatic about the development for numerous reasons. It's all rather personal, but mainly, I'm happy to have come up with an idea that is met with interest. Thank you Tor.com. 

Now, with this out of the way, I'll proceed with my thoughts on “Foreweird” by Michael Moorcock and the “Introduction” by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. For the purposes of the analysis, I have switched the texts as the VanderMeers deliver a clearer and conciser definition of the weird tale without an actual textbook definition of the genre being presented. That is where the weird tale's charm lies. No man, no reader or scholar can name something that has no name to begin with. 

After I completed both introductory texts, I felt rather than understood that the 'weird' is much like a literary version of the primordial goo of life. It's full of potency. No measurement can weigh, count or calculate the dimensions of the weird. It constantly evolves. It searches for new ways to adapt to its cultural habitat, which in itself is a complex, growing system. The weird is more than the sum of its parts though it's not as simple as to be compared to ordinary synergy. Sometimes it can be best understood as the tropes it's not as the VanderMeers explain before assuming roles of evolutionists and tracking its historical roots in stories from beyond generations. 

I'm still fascinated after having reread the historical breakdown of the development and countless 'weird sightings' in world literature over the decades. Here is where I reach the conclusion that you can't understand the weird as you might [think you] understand a scientific phenomenon. The best you can do is observe it in the context of a specific era and the literary traditions that dominate it. It is here where “Foreweird” by Michael Moorcock makes much more sense to me. Moorcock adopts a different approach to the presentation of the weird to the readers. 

His writing flows from paragraph to paragraph, acquires the quality of a river's delta. Every sentence swerves and takes you into a new direction. Moorcock switches from his understanding of the weird tale to cardinal misconceptions, the stigmata behind the lack of rationalism, the weird tale's multifaceted nature and how shapeless it can be. 

The weird tale's main 'fault', according to Moorcock, is its inability to fit in a package, stay still and allow itself to be marketed to the masses. And yes, I have not heard about the 'weird' before, because it hasn't popped on the mainstream's radar. Thinking about both texts, I think that the answer as to why the 'weird' can't be defined [though I'm of the opinion that connoisseurs of the weird tale do not see it as an outstanding issue] is because the weird leaves more questions asked than answered. Moorcock states such is 'a superior kind of fiction' and I agree with him, because presenting readers with all the answers acts as a prerequisite for lazy reading. Now, engaging the reader to solve mysteries in an environment, where the rational is excluded from the equation, begets creativity; encourages to take the dark, unexplored route; keep the primordial goo healthy and expanding; allow for later works and writers to take charge and evolve as well. 

Here I'd like to detour and share my experience with the 'absence of rationalism' in animation, both in the West and in the East. The examples are children's TV shows, which I think are inherent carriers of the idea that you don't need rationalization. I think the weird tale has found a host that succeeded in entering the mainstream as children are much more adept at accepting the weird, the strange and the fantastic without prejudice and demands for explanations, at least as far as my experience and memory of being a child are concerned. Ample examples are “Totally Spice”, a French cartoon series, and “Sailor Moon”, a Japanese anime and the most famous representative of the magic girl genre. 

“Sailor Moon” featured a trio of the Sailor Starlights [bear with me on this one], who perplexed me. If you're aware of magic girls, then you know that from a normal, human state, a female character undergoes a magical transformation, which is signified by a change of outfit. The Sailor Starlights, in their depowered states were male pop stars before transforming into powerful female warriors. The curious thing about this magical gender switch is that it's not explained. 

There's no evidence to support any theory as to whether the character truly change their gender or are just dressing as male. I'm mentioning “Totally Spice” because the premise is about a teen version of Charlie's Angels look-alikes with outrageous James Bond gadgets and a penchant for fighting super villains. I am also referring to this series, because of the sudden body transmogrifications. 

One episode paid a strange homage to Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”, while another sees humans mutate into human-vegetable hybrids [perhaps a subconscious tribute to “The Vegetable Man”]. There is no science to explain why these mutations have occurred other than the drop of the words 'chemicals' and 'machine'. What do I intend with all of this? Nothing in particular, other than to illustrate that the 'weird' is alive and well in different mediums, perhaps even connected to its literary sibling. 

Anyway, let's conclude. Although a grand statement, I do believe the 'weird' [based on the historical background provided by the VanderMeers and Moorcock] to be one of the strongest forces to keep the wheel in speculative fiction turning.

[January 4th] Announcing "Weird Wednesday"

 It’s the first Wednesday in the year and the first Wednesday of my “Weird Wednesday” feature dedicated to the analysis of “The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories” edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Initially, I decided to launch this feature with the rather longish discourse I have for “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin, but then held back on the idea as I think that this compendium deserves a fair and true beginning.

Inspired by this notion to do a proper analysis and ensure that there is a certain amount of the grandeur and drama I enjoy [so much] to this feature, I will start at the very beginning. First, I want to announce the rules of the game [it’s a game, because nothing planned to run for the span of a year is allowed to be too serious] and the goals I am after.

Rules:

1. “The Weird Wednesday” will run every Wednesday from January 4^th until December 27^th with each post being dedicated to a single work. I have done the math and know that I have around 52 weeks to work with and over 100 short stories to work with. One of the solutions to this predicament is multiple posts per Wednesday. I will have to see whether another strategy won’t be more interesting for the readers.

2. Each analysis will be based on some research on the author, the work itself and the links it shares with previous works. I’m saying some, because I’m far from assuming that I will have the necessary time and investigation skills to reach to a groundbreaking conclusions about any given work. Context matters, true, but so does sleeping at some point.

3. There will be a proper schedule for each month as well as update posts and a page on this blog, where all links from previous reviews will be gathered. I plan on linking an icon of the book to the feed for the category in my blog for the sake of easy navigation.  

Goals:

1. I’ve abandoned all delusions that I command the English language. Don’t misunderstand, I do think I’m doing an admirable attempt to do it justice, but it’s still mostly an attempt. I wish to level up as they say, improve how I express myself and how I carry myself with my words.  

2. I avoid reviewing anthologies without internally connecting each work with a different one. With “The Weird” and it’s thousand pages, hundred stories and decades of genre history, it’s neither physically possible nor appropriate to do. I intend to experience the evolution of this genre chronologically, through the stories and through my reflections.

Hopes:

1. I hope that I finish this within the year of 2012. On paper, this feature might look easy to do and stick to, but life is unpredictable. There will be setbacks. I will get in my way. Others will get in my way. The hope is to make it through the year with a successful conclusion and what I hope to be a better grasp over the English language.

2. I hope I create a dialogue the way I have always failed to do on Temple Library Reviews. I hope to lead discussions about the different points in the stories that I present in this space and learn more than I have on my own.

The Schedule:

Here is the initial schedule for the rest of January. Since this is exam month at the moment, I will have to limit myself with one work per week.  

[January 11^th] Thoughts on “Foreweird” by Michael Moorcock and “Introduction” by Anne and Jeff VanderMeer

[January 18^th] “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin

[January 25^th] “The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford

Last [far from least] I wish to thank Maureen Kincaid Speller, who inspired me by reviewing the compendium story by story. Check her analyses on The Paper Knife.   

       

[December 11th] From Reactive to Proactive Reading or How I changed My Reading Patterns

I'm sexy and I'm reading

In my preparation for the Weird Wednesday feature, whose launch date remains as January 4^th 2012, I have encountered something about my reading I have not paid much attention to and I assume is private due to the nature of my language situation. I know enough English to write, read and express myself on an above average level among my peers, who have had the same educational profile and have not studied English at university level. Reading books has never been challenging, apart from those written in an intentionally modified English [“The Color Purple”] or older books [“The Vampyre”]. Being a native benefits the reading experience in such cases, but otherwise I’m doing fine with literature.

Or so I would think. Until recently, I’ve been ignoring a trend in my reading, exemplifying an interest in quantity of reading rather than quality. Back in my school years, when I studied in a private group every weekend on top of my school studies, my teacher used to make us read everything and anything. Newspaper articles, magazine articles, book passage, passages from a more scientific text, from and outside our textbooks. Eventually we moved to books and we had to read a book over the summer, mark down all the new words and add those to our own vocabulary, so that when the time came to talk about the books, a barrier has been lifted and I understood more about the book. This continued during high school, where I studied typical US/UK classics such as The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Scarlet Letter, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Ayre. While I enjoyed all these books, I can’t say the same about the reading, notes with new words, bringing out the dictionary, spending afternoons writing the new words and pronouncing them and then returning to the text. This killed the joy in reading and at the time I had grown to be an avid, if a bit slow a reader.

You have to understand that for a teenager, studying causes an allergic reaction, which brings out chronic postponing of any kind of academic activities. At the time, I felt like studying will never end for me and I tried to avoid anything to do with studying. So when I graduated and took up reviewing, I took to reading for pleasure, which is to say that I only read. Never tried to engage with the text in another way. If there was something that I didn’t understand then I would use the context and go on with the story. Sometimes this helped me get through some books easier with minor communication breakdowns between me and the text. Other times I had lucked out and did need a dictionary to help me along the way. “A Book of Tongues” is a perfect example of how the prose acted against me, no matter how much I loved reading this twisted tale. This time around I did try to get out some of the words, translate, then assemble all the fragments of understanding and confusion into a coherent narrative, but seeing as how I fell behind on my schedule and diminished chances of reading more books, writing more of the self-serving reviews I did back then, fighting to come ahead the bloggers who read more and faster, I rushed the process and never returned to it.

It’s complicated to explain what I mean by ‘passive’ or ‘reactive’ reading, but it deals with a preoccupancy with number of books read, the act of having read something, stating that you have completed a novel everyone else has, modeling choices of books based on trends in the blogging circles [where the ‘new shiny’ rules, not that I have anything against it]. It’s easier to blame external forces for this behavior, but that’s not quite true, because I made all decisions when it came to my own reviews and blogging. Subsequently, I took stories with dragons and magic to be simple stories about magic and dragons without thinking further. A friend of mine once told me that SFF literature is the most potent of all kinds of genres, because it has layers upon layers to utilize and comment upon our own reality, better than other genres have. I’m quite proud to say that the man is a psychologist, erudite and has serious, always active views on everything.

Yesterday, as I started to read The Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer I faced a rather winding and ornate foreword by Michael Moorcock. I had difficulties catching on to some of his thoughts and felt lost in the general purpose of the text. The language barrier rose high as it had back during my school years and I had a choice. Read it once and try to decipher it on my own in the privacy of the back of my mind or surrender, grab the dictionary and return to where I began all those years before in reading in English.

I grabbed the dictionary. Read the “Foreweird” by Michael Moorcock and the introduction by the VanderMeers, sat down with a journal for my thoughts, a notebook for the words that I did not know and Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English and studied. Contrary to what I expected, studying this time around brought immense pleasure. For obvious reasons, doing anything because you so choose is pleasing in itself as opposed to forced practice from any educational institution. But there is more than that. The fact that I chose to return to this text and re-read with the new words in my mind stimulated my thought process, pushed me to add something from myself into my opening post for the Weird Wednesday feature based on the words of Moorcock and the VanderMeers rather than summarize as I usually happen to do. I think that this is what pro-active reading is all about, opening to the text and working on how the words can influence me. Needless to say, this process for me has to be more conscious and I can’t say for certain if anyone can relate to me. Language is not a tough barrier to remove. You think you know it, but then it surprises you.  

In short, I’m leveling up, which is quite due, seeing as I’m in my twenties already and time is not waiting for anyone.

I think I went overboard with this post and I doubt anyone has hung long enough to make any comments, but I’d like to hear from you about your adventures in reading. How has your act of reading changed given any given circumstances?

[December 3rd] The Weird in its Cephalopod Beauty

After rave reviews, heightened publicity covering and Weird Fiction Review, a website launched with regular material provided, all in the name of the weird movement in literature, I ordered my copy of the VanderMeers' latest monstrosity bound by ink and paper The Weird.

I've been captivated by the dedication the VanderMeers have placed in their promotion of different, peculiar fiction [often with a mad glint its glassy eye and a smile that carries the charm of an inter-dimensional morgue chamber] that is yet to claw its way to the spotlight [or maybe it has, but people are too afraid to admit it]. "The Weird" will be my indoctrination into this cult so openly led by two prophets of the tasteful bizarre. Inspired by the in-depth coverage provided by Maureen Kincaid Speller over at her blog Paper Knife, I'm tasking myself with the idea to read and place my thoughts on each of the more than hundred stories on this blog come 2012.

This will be one of the directions I'll be heading in for Through a Forest of Ideas next year. "The Weird" and all subsequent release of non-fiction connected to this anthology is of great interest to me and my writing.