Month: February 2020 (Page 10 of 12)

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‘A Video-Enhanced Grave Marker (VEGM) is a Western-style tombstone equipped with weatherproofed video playback that is initiated by remote control. Through sound and video, VEGMs make visits to graveyards an interactive experience. The high tech tombstones are currently offered by FuneralOne, a company based in St. Clair, Michigan.

‘The VEGM, invented by Robert Barrows of San Mateo, California, allows its owner to record messages to be played to loved ones or to any visitor to the site with a remote control. The stones are equipped with weatherproofed video playback and recording devices plus memory systems and a television monitor placed within a weather-proofed, hollowed-out headstone. As of May 2005, Barrows estimated that the costs of the VEGMs started at about USD$8000 to $10,000.

‘Barrows commented soon after its invention: “I envision being able to walk through a cemetery using a remote control, clicking on graves and what all the people buried there have to say. They can say all
the things they didn’t have the opportunity or guts to say when they were alive.”

‘To overcome noise pollution objections, the audio can also be transmitted to wireless headsets, made available by the cemetery’s office. Commenting on the threat from thieves or vandals Barrows adds, “There are very strict laws against vandalizing tombstones, and if you are going to vandalize a tombstone, you’d better hope there are no such things as ghosts.”

‘The issue of censorship is a serious concern with VEGMs. How high a level of free speech can be offered to the eventually deceased is undecided.’ — Toronto Star

 

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The Family International was founded by claimed prophetic leader David Berg in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, USA. It sprang from the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s, with many of its early converts drawn from the hippie movement. Due to its unusual emphasis on total commitment, it triggered the first organized anticult group (FREECOG), and the unconventional sexual practices which soon followed within the Children of God solidified its place among the movements prompting the cult controversy of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe.

As The Family grew and expanded around the world, so did its message—salvation, apocalypticism, spiritual “revolution” against the outside world they called “the System”—and resultant controversy. During the early to mid 1970s, the group initiated several radical methods of evangelism, including Flirty Fishing—using sex to show God’s love and win converts and support.

Today, The Family’s leadership is headed by Berg’s widow Karen Zerby, under whom the group has both bowed to several reforms and initiated additional unconventional doctrines, including the “Loving Jesus revelation” which encourages members from the age of 14 to engage in a sexual relationship with Jesus. (cont.)

Cult Killer: The Rick Rodriguez Story

00:00
Text on screen: Cutting Edge
Rick Rodriguez: Well hey everyone, this is Rick and I am making this video.
Text on screen: January 7th, 2005
Text on screen: This is rick’s suicide note
Rick: I want there to be some record, my ideas, just who I was really
00:32
Text on screen: Rick was born into a religious cult
Rick: Hope I don’t fuck up and do something stupid and blow my nose off instead of my fucking head.

 

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Sad Russian porn stars

 

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‘Disco Design Ltd. (former name Pit Project Ltd.) was established in 2000 by Peter Yordanov, who has been the director and designer of our company. Before this time, Peter was a famous DJ in Bulgaria, and throughout Europe. During his journeys within the continent, he noticed that there is not much interior feeling in the Nightclubs. He has had a lot of ideas about designing clubs, and making people feel more comfortable.

‘With his profound experience of the nightclub industry, prosperous creativity, and sedulous thirst of knowledge, Peter has developed a unique policy of his company. After designing and renovating more than 100 clubs in unique full custom designs, he has experienced a constantly growing interest for his offers by potential clients.

‘Responding to this demand, he concentrated on the development of a new range of articles – SMART PRODUCTS for nightclub and bar design applications drawn by a stylish look – that has been registered community design by Peter Yordanov – but allowing an easy installation within a few days by any night club team usually leaded by an electrician. The appreciation by the public has been overwhelming!’ — disco-designer.com

 

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The Man Who Stopped Writing
by Andrew Gallix

Marc-Edouard Nabe has always relished playing with fire, but never more so than when he burned what would have been the fifth volume of his journal. His main motivation was to avoid being trapped in a Shandyesque race with time, ending up pigeonholed as a diarist. Nevertheless, he went on to describe this event in Alain Zannini (2002), a novel so blatantly autobiographical that it even bore his real name as its title (Nabe, short for “nabot” — midget — is a nom de plume). The implication was clear: having lived his life in order to narrate it, Zannini had gradually become Nabe’s creation. What, then, would happen if the writer were to stop writing?

This ontological question is raised in L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire (“The Man Who Stopped Writing”), which begins with the author-narrator’s paradoxical assertion — given the length of the book, let alone its very existence — that he has forsaken literature after being dropped by his publisher. “A publisher paying me to write books nobody reads,” he deadpans, “I thought this would go on for ever.”

For the best part of two decades, the real-life Nabe had received a monthly wage from Les Editions du Rocher, but this stipend was suddenly withdrawn when they were bought out in 2005. The novelist responded by taking legal action. Throughout the lengthy lawsuit, he expressed himself by means of posters, which his hardcore supporters pasted all over the walls of France’s major cities. He also maintained the fiction that his authorial days were over, so as to remain in character while secretly writing his novel about writing no more.

The appearance of L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire thus came as quite a surprise, not least because Nabe chose to go down the self-publishing, or rather “anti-publishing”, route. The minimalist jet-black cover has a whiff of piracy about it: no barcode, no ISBN, no publisher’s name or logo; the spine remains bare. On the front, the author’s name is reduced to “Nabe” as if it had become a brand, and on the back you only find a number, indicating that it is the author’s twenty-eighth published work (and seventh novel). The book is only available through an official website and a handful of highly unlikely retailers (a butcher’s, a florist’s, a hairdresser’s and three restaurants at the last count). By cutting out the middleman, Nabe claims to be able to make a 70% profit, instead of the usual 10%, on each copy sold. The initial print run — funded by the sale of paintings (Nabe is also an artist and jazz guitarist) — sold out within a month; there have been three more since. Last year, the novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Renaudot prize — a first for a self-published volume in France — and last month, the online platform morphed into a full-blown company.

This declaration of war on the publishing industry is in keeping with Nabe’s image as an écrivain maudit. “Great artists,” says the protagonist, as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil manuscript is auctioned off at Sotheby’s, “have but one purpose: to become moral alibis for the bastards of posterity”. Initially accused of being a crypto-fascist (partly because of his predilection for Céline and Lucien Rebatet), Nabe is now frequently depicted as a pro-Palestinian leftist (whose anti-Americanism, it must be said, borders on the pathological). His first television appearance, in 1985, proved so incendiary that he was beaten up by a leading anti-racist campaigner. Every day, he declared — looking every inch the provocative young fogey, complete with centre parting, bow tie and retro spectacles — I shoot up with a Montblanc pen full of “utter hatred of humanity”. A great admirer of Jacques Mesrine, Nabe famously befriended the flamboyant bankrobber Albert Spaggiari as well as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Following 9/11, he produced a pamphlet entitled Une Lueur d’espoir (“A Glimmer of Hope”) and argued repeatedly that bin Laden was only acting in self-defence. In 2003, he even travelled to Baghdad, where he protested against the invasion of Iraq in typically Gallic fashion: by writing a novel. These antics may have earned him a large cult following, but Mazarine Pingeot summed up the views of many when she declared that Nabe was “unfortunately” a great writer.

Despite running to almost 700 pages, L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire has no chapters or even paragraphs, as though it were shot in real time, like 24, the American TV series the narrator watches. If the dialogue is a little didactic — even Socratic — at times, there are far fewer purple passages than usual. This is the affectless, almost pedestrian, prose of someone who will not even allow himself to sign an autograph or compose a letter any more. The novel is meant to read as if it were unwritten. This tonal blankness (often reminiscent of Houellebecq’s) is marred on occasion by poor punning, but it can also be shot through with flashes of sheer poetry: a vintage sewing machine is likened to a “giant bee in mourning”; a brunette’s hair looks like it has been “soaked in liquid night”.

(cont.)

Marc-Édouard Nabe Website
Marc-Édouard Nabe Fansite
Marc-Édouard Nabe Video Playlist
Marc-Édouard Nabe @ goodreads

 

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‘Viewing Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party for the first time I was amazed. It came out of nowhere and with a stunning pace proceeded to race with a blistering pace towards a climax of frenzied editing and then come crashing down again united nothing more than by the lines of an old man with a bike. The images and story, if it can be called that, are definitely homo-erotic and simplistic, but they are irrelevant to appreciate what one website called a “micromontage” of furious sound and sight. Sissy Boy possesses the Guy Maddin trademark references to silent, obscure films and their makers. Visually it might be the equivalent of turning on a foreign language radio station or television program or turning off the subtitles of a film and finding yourself totally lost from a narrative perspective. It becomes a form of rhythm and the words and sounds take on their own quality quite apart from any meaning. But the early cinematic techniques don’t necessarily have the problem of reference that an unfamiliar language would have. The early film makers were trying to tell a story and invented many techniques to visually do so. Maddin is, then, like some Frankenstein who cuts them up, shocks them with electricity, and brings them back to life if only as echoey shadows.’ — Kuro5hin

 

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‘Susan Hiller’s Witness (2000) takes the form of a darkened room in which hundreds of loudspeakers hang, at various heights, some out of reach to all but the tallest of visitors, catching the light from a ring of lights at the centre of the work and beams directed into the centre from the edges (in the chapel the external light came from windows masked in blue). Entering the space, it’s immediately apparent that the cacophony of voices that fills the room emanates from the speakers. Getting closer it becomes clear that the voices speak in many languages and that each voice tells a story – a true story – of an encounter with a UFO or similarly unexplained phenomenon. At times the cacophony dies down and a single voice fills the room. Spookily, this always seems to be the voice you were already listening to. The stories are ones Hiller found on the internet; they are given voice for the installation, spoken in their original language. Some are recent, others decades old. Some are from named sources, others anonymous. Many start with a disclaimer indicating that the storyteller expects to be disbelieved.’ — Ann Jones, Mostly Film

 

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‘The novel wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace — shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a novel, the world rushes away at every point. The novel leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end — because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it. The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.’ — Steven Millhauser

 

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i am Richard Ziegler a 13 year old in New Zealand and i came across a video of someone who made there own roller coaster so i decided to make my own.
the track is 30 cm and 45 cm wide with 2 or 3 15 cm planks side by side
its 65 cm tall at the start and has already been extended to 18 meters and still has about 10 meters to go.
it goes over 10 kph at some points and will end up going up to twice this speed when complete.
it is still a work in progress and has had about 2-3 weeks of work on it
hope you like it
total cost FREE all wood and side rails came from under our house
YES IT IS A ROLLER COASTER AS IT ROLL’S AND COASTS
and its better than some people who make these like a skateboard on a drive way

 

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Evgeny Mokhorev

 

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‘One of France’s most original actresses, Bernadette Lafont embodies many of the contradictions of French film since the war. She is both sexy and rather plain, ditsy ebullient and quite serious, tremendously creative and yet limited by her very Frenchness in a world dominated by the Hollywood movie machine. Famously associated with New Wave directors, Lafont has in a tumultuous life done a bit of everything, from television movies to the stage, never quite the megastar but always a strong presence, smart and messed up all at the same time.’ — Katherine Knorr

 

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Piet Zwarte

 

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Rock

Hit absolute rock bottom
Are you there rock? No?

No rock on bottom

— Joanne Kyger

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‘Following the development of Total Audio Works for the award-winning theatre installation Hotel Gasten, Liseberg Park, Gotenberg (1999), I was commissioned to devise a sonic environment for a ‘walk and ride-through’ drama, Transdemonium, Parc Asterix. In most thematic applications audiences are pulsed through the score at predetermined intervals to synchronise with actors, animatronics and drama. Sound and music effects are triggered in isolation with no thematic thread between sequences. TAW is designed as 48 points of looped audio, each broadcast simultaneously and discretely mapped to 48 strategically positioned speakers. This uniquely enables an audience to explore a sonic environment in their own time, auditioning the sound as if travelling through a symphony – with the freedom to move forwards or backwards through the score – the drama unfolding in a more natural organic form.

‘TAW was developed using looped digital music samples (as generative music for games) but sequenced as a non-linear-through-score. One sequence required the power of prayer to be symbolised as aspiring to a higher and higher spiritual order manifested in the audience physically rising upwards through a 30m spiral. Conventional multi-point immersive audio confines listeners to exploring sound fields within the single horizontal plane. There are instances where sonic artists configure gallery installations in the vertical, but none has through-scored music.

‘The challenge was to create a soundtrack of multiple harmonic Gregorian phrases that rendered the sensation of journeying upwards through a choral work made up of multiple layers of sonic strata. The final sound installation combined the principals of TAW, reconfigured in a vertical form, with five separate surround systems stacked at 6m levels. Transdemonium was the first public thematic experience with scored music for vertical surround. The first thematic experience to use original music composed and designed for a multiple stacked surround in a vertical configuration.’ — Guillaume de Marchant

 

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‘On Nov. 5, a Chinese blogger posted three photos of a young man in spiky hair for his 1.6 million followers on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. “Caught a live shamate on the street today,” he wrote gleefully, adding that their hairstyles “look like the molecular structure of some virus.” Meanwhile, a music video called “Shamate Meets Wash-Cut-Blowdry,” a reference to the group’s often-maligned hairstyles, featuring leggy girls gyrating to the tune of Korean pop-singer Psy’s song “Gentleman,” has received more than 2.4 million views on Youku, China’s YouTube. (Predictably, comments to the video poked fun.) These shamate are the young migrants lost in China’s great urbanization push, a subculture whose numbers are unknown, but surely growing.

‘To hip Chinese sensibilities, shamate — named after a deliberately nonsensical transliteration of the English word “smart” — are anything but. Baidu Baike, China’s Wikipedia, describes a shamate as a young urban migrant from one of the tens of thousands of podunk towns scattered across China. These men and women are in their late teens or early 20s, often with middle-school educations and few marketable skills, working low-paying jobs in the big cities, like a barber, security guard, deliveryman, or waitress.

‘A shamate’s single most distinguishing (and derided) feature is his or her exaggerated hairstyle: curly perms, shaggy blow-outs, or spiky do’s, all held together with considerable abuse of hair coloring or wax. Clothing bought from a street market, some body piercing, and an off-brand cell phone often completes the look. Shamates usually linger in the social purgatory of small hair salons, smoky Internet cafes, or street market stalls in China’s big cities, not quite fitting into the world of shiny office buildings and expensive department stores that surrounds them.

‘Shamate’s outré fashion choices reflect something much deeper: collective alienation, a byproduct of China’s massive urban migration push and the country’s widening class divide. While roughly half of China’s 1.4 billion people live in cities, the consultancy McKinsey projects the number of urban residents to grow by more than 350 million in 2025; more than 240 million of those new additions will be migrants.’ — Tea Leaf Nation

 

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How to synchronize metronomes

 

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‘A New Zealand truck driver said he blew up like a balloon when he fell onto the fitting of a compressed air hose that pierced his buttock and forced air into his body at 100 pounds a square inch.

‘Steven McCormack was standing on his truck’s foot plate Saturday when he slipped and fell, breaking a compressed air hose off an air reservoir that powered the truck’s brakes. He fell hard onto the brass fitting, which pierced his left buttock and started pumping air into his body.

‘”I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he told local media from his hospital bed in the town of Whakatane, on North Island’s east coast. “I was blowing up like a football. I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon.”

‘McCormack’s workmates heard his screams and ran to him, quickly releasing a safety valve to stop the air flow, said Robbie Petersen, co-owner of the trucking company. He was rushed to the hospital with terrible swelling and fluid in one lung. Doctors said the air had separated fat from muscle in McCormack’s body, but had not entered his bloodstream. McCormack said his skin felt “like a pork roast” – crackling on the outside but soft underneath.’ — The New Zealander

 

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‘The internet is the only reality where one can copy a gravestone infinitely. Above is a architectural orphan as a framed area, as a gravestone ripped from my cyber-territorialized self elsewhere. Below I give its copied bits a resting place.

‘The process behind this work is a simplistic, non-obtrusive and intangible media technology hacking with an abstract artistic result. As in a petri dish one can culture microorganisms, these works are a culture of media. I have entitled this technology “architectural orphans:” abstractions of ubiquitous but ignored nooks, cracks or micro objects in otherwise often visited locales.

‘The photograph was taken in a guerrilla-styled low-profile manner. Error upon error, while not creating inferiority but rather establishing grounds for new creations; new artistic life. Their oddity of spacial sensation is abstractly and “organically” created by the deconstruction and recontextualization of the source (i.e ripping away granite and shadows into small contrasting strips of minute color and flattened texture) and the “hacking” of the media.

‘The source image was used as raw material within an organically following editorial process. From a linear techno-centric point of view this process evolved in an unorthodox manner; a manner unintended for the surface purposes of the used media (i.e. the standard software & hardware of the used mobile machinery). The unorthodoxy lies in the fact that this source was manipulated by using this 1 technology in a manner it was not supposed to be used (in this case the simple camera function within an iPhone).

‘I enjoy the tension between the image’s banal heritage (i.e a gravestone) and the mysterious abstraction it resulted into.’ — Jan Aminasuri

 

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4 from Game Art, unlimited.

GameScenes is your one-way ticket to the Game Artworld.
Background info: Originally, a videoludica’s channel, GameScenes.
A full-fledged blog (!) since 2009.
Written and edited by Matteo Bittanti.
Key contributor: Mathias Jansson.

1. Game Art: William Huber’s “Ludological dynamics of Fatal Frame 2” (2010)

William Huber visualizes the ludological interactions in Fatal Frame 2 (Tecmo, 2001). In his project, Huber applied “cultural analytic techniques to identify the transitions in modes of gameplay, in order to characterize the mechanics for generating suspense and uncanny aesthetic experience in a videogame.” Full description of the fascinating research project here.

Link: William Huber
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (via Software Studies)
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2. Game Art: William Huber and Lev Manovich “Kingdom Hearts Visualizations” ( 2009-2010)

“This project represents nearly 100 hours of playing two videogames as high resolution visualizations. This representation allows us to study the interplay of various elements of gameplay, and the relationship between the travel through game spaces and the passage of time in game play. […] The data are the game play sessions of the video games Kingdom Hearts (2002, Square Co., Ltd.) and Kingdom Hearts II (2005, Square-Enix, Inc.) Each game was played from the beginning to the end over a number of sessions. The video captured from all game sessions of each game were assembled into a singe sequence. The sequences were sampled at 6 frames per second. This resulted in 225,000 frames for Kingdom Hearts and 133,000 frames for Ki
ngdom Hearts II. The visualizations use only every 10th frame from the complete frame sets:Kingdom Hearts: 22,500 frames. Kingdom Hearts II: 13,300 frames.” (William Huber)

Link: William Huber and Lev Manovich’s Game Visualizations
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (via Software Studies)
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3. BOOK: Gracie Kendal’s “1000+ Avatars Vol. 1 and 2” (2011)

1000+ Avatars a self-Published book by Kristine Schomaker, 2011.
Edited by Nickola Martynov, With contributions by Garrett Cobarr and Patrick Millard
Design by Kristine Schomaker
English, 10” x 8”, 160 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-0-9836572-2-4

Gracie Kendal, aka Kristine Schomaker is a Los Angeles based new media and performance artist, painter, and art historian. He latest project is called 1000+ Avatars, “a contemporary anthropology of portraits of avatars in the virtual world of Second Life”. The portraits explore the idea of the avatar as a constructed online identity and deals with fluid notions of anonymity, personality, and diversity. This project is somehow reminiscent of Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators (2007).

Link: Gracie Kendal’s 1000+ Avatars
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
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4. Video: Nicholas Tilly’s reportage of the Atopic Machinima Festival 2011

Credits: Nicholas Tilly
Link: Atopic Film Festival 2011
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

 

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Sunday in the Storm Era

“these are extraordinary times”
—so we can do whatever we want ha ha

—the sky darkens
—stitching the white pillow cover

—If I had my way I’d sit and watch
—the grey and poundy waves all day …

—-The candle lights for Cypress
—must be down at the channel now
—where the tide rushes out
–from the lagoon and keeps on going out

way out … remember?

——now the evening sky
—looks pretty clear
——————that
—was a history
—just happened

— Joanne Kyger

 

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5 bitchin’ robots

Coughing Robot Spews ‘Flu Germs’

Yaskawa Motoman plays taiko drums

CB2 baby humanoid robot

Japanese Crawling Robot

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart

 

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‘Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain.’ — t.o.L

 

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‘In 1781, the scholar Friedrich Nicolai, luckier and more inquisitive than most, was permitted to examine the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s small workshop on the bank of the Danube, the entire furniture of which consisted of a bed, a flute, a tobacco-pipe, a water pitcher, an old Italian book about human proportions and the drawing of an armless Egyptian statue. Messerschmidt, once assistant professor of sculpture at the Imperial Academy of Vienna, now necromancer and recluse, was in his forty-fifth year.

‘Since the onset of mental illness in 1771, Messerschmidt had neglected his work as a portraitist, though he still received and accepted occasional commissions, and had concentrated his great industry on the production of a series of heads of very strange aspect. Although he still received and accepted occasional commissions, he had concentrated his great industry on the production of a series of heads of very strange aspect.

‘Nicolai found him busy with the sixty-first of these heads. He observed that it, like all the rest, was a self-portrait. The sculptor worked in front of a mirror. Pinching himself from time to time under the lowest right rib, he would cut a terrifying grimace scrutinise his face in the mirror, sculpt, and after an interval of about half a minute repeat his grimace with remarkable precision.

‘When the courteous Nicolai asked him to explain his method, Messerschmidt, somewhat hesitatingly, gave him a confused account, the gist of which can be summed up as follows: although he had lived chastely since his youth, Messerschmidt was often visited by ghosts who caused him pains in the abdomen and thighs. Fortunately, he had managed to devise a system for warding off these tormentors.

‘This system was based on knowledge of universal proportions, learned through the study of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistos—of whose armless statue he always kept a drawing about him. His knowledge of proportion gave Messerschmidt the power to resist the spirits. For all things have their proper proportion, and all effects come from a sufficient cause; whoever can reproduce in himself the proportions of another being should be able to produce effects equal to the effects of the other.

‘All this, in Messerschmidt’s opinion, amounted to a momentous discovery which, not surprisingly, had aroused the envy of the Spirit of Proportion, the chief of his ghostly persecutors. Undaunted by the pains which the spirit inflicted on him, he resolved to delve deeper into the mystery of proportion, in order to be victorious in this contest. By observing the pains which he felt in his lower body as he worked on the faces of his busts, he came to the conclusion that if he pinched himself in different parts of the body and accompanied this with grimaces which bore the exact Egyptian proportion to the pinch, he would reach perfection in the matter of proportion. Pleased with his system, Messerschmidt resolved to pass it on to posterity by means of his sculpted heads, of which he planned to execute sixty-four, since there were sixty-four canonical grimaces.

‘The third and largest group of heads, comprising 54 busts at the time of Nicolai’s visit, consisted of the convulsively grimacing heads which are still the best known of the series. All seemed to be self-portraits. Nicolai noticed that in many of them the mouths were tightly shut and the lips drawn in so as to form a thin line. Messerschmidt explained this curious feature by pointing out that men should not show the red of their lips, since animals never showed theirs—and animals, as he reminded his visitor, were superior to men in their perception of the hidden aspects of nature.

‘Messerschmidt was neither in tune with his time, nor entirely alienated from it. His artistic personality was injured, but not debilitated, by sickness; the conflict within him irritated his imagination and concentrated his energies: it was the fortunate flaw which raised his later above his earlier works and above those of his more ordinary contemporaries. Messerschmidt was able to combine representation with rigid stylisation, expression with abstract pattern, and preserve, at the same time, both the anatomical structure and the character of portrait. To bring these divergent elements into harmony was the work of a powerful artistic intelligence.’ — Lorenz Eitner, The Grand Eccentrics

 

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‘A new messaging service called The Last Messages Club that will send your family and friends pre-written emails when you kick the bucket launched in the UK this week.

‘Members can write up to 100 emails that can be released once they die and at times of their choosing, such as when a loved one marries or has a child.

‘Each member gets a secure and private vault where they are able to create messages to be sent specifically to their chosen recipient.

‘The vault can also store photos, videos and documents for access by pre-selected family, friends or colleagues.

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Pierre Guyotat, the last of the great genius visionary French writers, old but tragically cut down when still in his prime. ** Milk, Hi, Milk, welcome! Did you? Did it hold up? ** JM, Hey Josiah. Ah, sleep issues, fuck, that can murderous, don’t I know it too. The script and proposal for the TV series is now on the desks of the ARTE honchos in Strasbourg, and we’re supposed to get a green or red light in mid-March. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be accepted or killed, it’s really hard to tell at this point. As I’m sure I’ve said, counselling helped me a strangely large amount back when I needed and did it, and I still can’t figure why it worked. Man, I hope everything that’s overly encroaching backs off as soon as possible. Luckily, they don’t call ‘rough patches’ patches for no reason. Oh, but new writing by you! I’m excited to read it! Thank you, and congrats. Everyone, the superb writer and more Josiah Morgan has a new shortish prose piece newly up online and fully readable. It’s always a 100% treat to read his work, so take a little time this weekend and do so, won’t you? Here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, I’m very looking forward to that film. Let me share your enthusiastic recommendation. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Ehrenstein with a passionate tip: ‘While it was put together a couple of years back The Times of Bill Cunningham is just being released theatrically now. Under no circumstances should it be missed. This documentary about the unique fashion observer-guru-photographer captures his sublime personality – part giddy teenager, part en Master Supreme — perfectly. There was a film made about him several years back before he passed away that showed him racing about on his bike taking pictures of New Yorkers both famous and unknown entirely for the clothes they wore. He firmly believd what we wore on the outside expressed what was on our inside. And he finds beauty and innovation in everyone from Mr. Astor (a she turned 100) to downtown drag artiste Kenny Kenny. He’s full of joy throughout save for one moment when he speaks mournfully of those he loved that he lost to AIDS . He bows his head and sobs. But only for a moment as he quickly bounces back to join the world. Bill Cunningham loved life and he loved people. He’s a very special hero of mine — right alongside the equally idiosyncratic — and joyous — Oliver Sacks.’ ** Sypha, Hi. That is a most strange and interesting reveal about the ancient Egyptians. Is there an explanation for why they seemed to be so fixated on their waste disposing? ** wolf, Wolf!!! Hm, okay, I see. I saw the doc about Lynch and wasn’t that excited by it. I saw him give a talk once, and that was quite exciting. Maybe that’s enough. What’s your weekend holding out for you or, I guess, what was in its grubby held out paws? Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Wow, it’s Generator Members Show time again? Time does fly. Scary. Those collage and performance snaps do look charismatic even in your lens. Fun. Have a sweet weekend. ** Steve Erickson, Oh, yes, I remember your Oskouei retrospective now. My head was out in space. I haven’t seen a Hal Hartley film in fucking forever. Interesting. Everyone, Steve E. interviews the American auteur filmmaker Hal Hartley, and it should be very interesting read, so … read up, yes? ** Bill, Hi. I didn’t realise that she was such a good interview. I read a few when making that post, and she’s relentlessly amusing. I’ll look out for the R.L. Cagle book. I’m reading the book of Tony Conrad’s writings, and it’s very excellent. ** Okay. This weekend I resurrect another of my old Varioso posts, which, as I’ve explained previously, consist of things that interested me but didn’t seem to warrant an entire post to themselves. Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff for you to pore over between and Monday if you feel like it. Enjoy stuff. See you on Monday.

 

‘In The Bloody Chamber we encounter some of the best-known stories in Western literature – fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and the Brothers Grimm – twisted into extraordinary new shapes. The collection, published in 1979, was Angela Carter’s ninth book of fiction, and while channels of fairy tales and myth run through her prior work, nowhere does she engage with those genres so directly and disruptively as here. The journalist and critic Lorna Sage, a close friend of Carter’s and an insightful reader of her work, describes how throughout the 1970s she became ‘more explicitly and systematically interested in narrative models that pre-date the novel: fairy tales, folktales, and other forms that develop by accretion and retelling’.

‘Carter’s approach wasn’t new. Robert Coover rewrote ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in his 1969 collection Pricksongs and Descants; two years later the poet Anne Sexton published her revisionist take on fairy tales, Transformations; and in 1976 came Bruno Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment. Earlier in the century, meanwhile, the Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) had written a sequence of complex gothic variants on northern European folk models, stories that should rightly be considered forerunners to The Bloody Chamber. But if Carter’s point of origin was far from unique, her destination would prove to be.

‘In 1977 she published her own translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. By retelling these tales, writes Sage, Carter was ‘deliberately drawing them out of shape … The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines’. Carter’s variations on three of these stories – ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ – usefully demonstrate the variations in tone that exist between what Carter called her ‘reformulations’. Her ‘Bluebeard’, entitled ‘The Bloody Chamber’, is an elaborate, disturbing tale of sexual predation and victimhood, the lush descriptiveness and mounting tension of which threatens to make the reader complicit in the exploitative, pornography-inspired lust of the sadistic Marquis. ‘Puss-in-Boots’, contrastingly, is a screwball sex comedy, while, in the stranger reaches of the book, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ splits itself into three stories that, as in a hall of mirrors, accentuate different parts of the original (or ‘develop by accretion and retelling’, to remind ourselves of Sage’s phrase). In ‘The Werewolf’, the heroine’s granny turns out to be the wolf; in ‘The Company of Wolves’ (later filmed by Neil Jordan, with a script co-written by Carter) Red Riding Hood bats away the wolf’s threatening advances and willingly takes him to bed (‘The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’); and in ‘Wolf-Alice’ a girl raised by wolves is taken in by a lycanthropic duke. In this loose trilogy we see the different strategies Carter employs when deconstructing these old stories: sometimes tweaking the familiar into oddness, sometimes reaching back to earlier versions that pre-date Perrault or Grimm, and sometimes letting her own inventiveness seize the reins.

‘One thing common to all the stories in The Bloody Chamber, however, is the centrality of gender politics: ‘I was using the latent content of those traditional stories’, she said in a 1985 interview, ‘and that latent content is violently sexual.’ Carter published another book in 1979, an extended essay on pornography and the Marquis de Sade called The Sadeian Woman, that has been described as ‘a parallel text, or polemical preface’ to The Bloody Chamber. In it, she argues that despite Sade’s evident misogyny, he was nevertheless correct to treat ‘all sexual reality as political reality’. She is particularly interested in two of Sade’s female characters, Justine and Juliette. The former is a sexual stereotype: meek, collusive in her own victimisation at the hands of predatory males. Juliette, meanwhile, is as sexually domineering as any man. While she states that separately these types are ‘both … without hope’, nevertheless they ‘mutually reflect and complement one another, like a pair of mirrors’.

‘Perhaps one of the reasons why The Bloody Chamber was such a controversial work, and remains a contested one today, is because it doesn’t conform to a single position, for example orthodox feminism, but shape-shifts from story to story. So some critics attack Carter’s reduction of all men to predatory sadists, while others regret that her heroines, however resourceful and independent, still mostly want to bag a man. But Carter was an artist, not an ideologue; she told the stories she wanted to tell, and they are not stories that make a single point, or follow a specific ideology. She said that ‘provoking unease’ is the only moral purpose of a tale, and she was always more interested in confounding beliefs than confirming them. Like the fairy tales she transmuted, and the folktales that came before them, there are all sorts of spaces in her stories – a maze of chambers – into which interpretation can flow.’ — Chris Power

 

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Manuscript pages

 

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Further

Angela Carter Site
ANGELA CARTER SOCIETY
Get Angela Carter
Angela Carter: Far from the fairytale
Angela Carter: Glam rock feminist
Your favorite writer Angela Carter was a socialist too!
A Conversation with Angela Carter By Anna Katsavos
The Thrill and Pain of Inventing Angela Carter
Conjuring the Curse of Repetition or “ Sleeping Beauty ” Revamped
‘Sugar Daddy’, by Angela Carter
Radical writing: Was Angela Carter ahead of her time?
ANGELA CARTER: POSTCARDS FROM AMERICA
On Angela Carter by Sharlene Teo
Rereading Angela Carter
Finding Angela Carter: An Interview with Biographer Edmund Gordon
Breaking the Spell
Marina Warner on why Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber still bites
Angela Carter: a seminal novelist who changed writing and the world
The Lives, and Fictions, of Angela Carter
Angela Carter’s taste for the fantastic
Fairytales Punish the Curious
Belle Dame Sans Merci: On Angela Carter

 

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Extras

Angela Carter talks to Lisa Appignanesi

Angela Carter Of Wolves & Women (2018)

Angela Carter and Neil Jordan discuss ‘A Company of Wolves’

 

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Interview
from BOMB

 

Rosemary Carroll I have been wanting to ask you whether you liked Neil Jordan’s film version of your story The Company of Wolves?

Angela Carter Well, I wrote the script, you know.

RC You and he collaborated on the script, didn’t you? I imagine the collaborative process would be very difficult. It reminds me of something William Burroughs once said to the effect that to collaborate is to lie.

AC Oh no, we got along very well. We are good friends and I enjoyed doing it. I’m just sorry for Neil’s sake that the movie didn’t do better commercially. I was afraid that would really hurt his chance to make future films. But his new movie, Mona Lisa, is doing very well, so he’s hitting the high spots.

RC But the end of the film Company of Wolves is so different from the story.

AC I was furious about the ending. It wasn’t scripted that way at all. I was out of the country — in Australia when he shot the ending and he told me that it varied somewhat from the script. When I went to the screening I sat with Neil and I was enjoying the film very much and thinking that it had turned out so well — just as I had hoped. Until the ending which I couldn’t believe — I was so upset, I said, “You’ve ruined it.” He was apologetic.

RC How had the ending originally been scripted?

AC After she encounters the wolf at her grandmother’s house and what has happened becomes apparent she wakes up. Her body elongates beautifully and she does a perfect swan dive into the floorboards which turn into the surface of a body of water that swallows her. But that proved impossible to film. They tried covering the floor with water, but that didn’t work and she couldn’t just dive into the floor.

But even if it wasn’t possible to end the film as planned, I wish he had ended it right after the part where the white rose turns red.

RC I prefer the way your story ends—with her lying in grandmother’s bed between the wolf’s paws.

AC I do, too. Neil kept trying to convince me that his ending was potentially more ambiguous than it seemed. He maintains that her screams when the camera is panning the outside of the house are screams of pleasure, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way to me.

RC I think men frequently have the mistaken belief that women are screaming in pleasure rather than in terror.

AC True. Perhaps the problem is that Sarah Peterson is not a very explicit screamer. In any case, I really did like the movie as a whole. I try to think that the falsity of the ending won’t even be noticed—everybody in the audience will be looking for their shoes and it will go right by.

RC I read an interview with Neil Jordan recently in which he asked what prompted his transition from writing fiction to making films. He said it was related to an increasing awareness on his part of the extent to which his prose had always been affected by cinema. He became more and more obsessed with the look and shape of things and began to feel that prose was an inadequate method of conveying these concerns. Is that a feeling you share? Do you have any desire to do more writing for film?

AC I enjoyed working on Company of Wolves with Neil. And I have done some other work on scripts. When I do it I like it but I have no great desire to seek it out. Right now, Granada Television is making a film based on another work of mine, my second novel, The Magic Toyshop. I’m quite pleased with it actually. It will be a television movie, at least initially, and so, of course, the budget is much lower than it was for Company of Wolves. The cast includes this wonderful English actor, Tom Bell, have you ever heard of him?

RC No, is he going to play Finn?

AC No. He is cast as the uncle. He specializes in heavies—gangsters, Nazis and so on. He has a fantastic knack for portraying motiveless malignity, he will be just right. The director, David Wheatley, has worked mostly for British television — what drew us together was a film he made ages ago about the Brothers Grimm, that was full of terrific imagery and invention. David started out as a sculptor, oddly enough. We had a lovely time inventing imagery for The Magic Toyshop. He has a real feel for the book.

RC I love that book—it is such a stunning evocation of adolescence. The scene in which Melanie is trapped while climbing the tree in her mother’s wedding gown is perfect—it completely captures that feeling of uncertain anticipation. This is an underconnectedness of events and you don’t know which one is dependent on the other but you know that there is an incredibly important relation between them and it is all very wonderful and frightening at the same time.

AC You liked that? I’m glad. I am hopeful about the movie. I don’t think it will suffer from the small budget, because that story shouldn’t really require so much money to realize on film.

RC I think that is true. Besides, a lower budget doesn’t always translate into a good movie; in fact, the inverse is sometimes true. Do you feel that your prose is affected by cinema?

AC Since I’ve become a mother, I don’t go to the movies much. But certainly the way I view the world has been influenced by them. I think that must be true for most writers. The early Godard films had a very strong effect on the way I observe and see the world. They are extraordinary. And not just Godard. For example, I think of Barbara Stanwyck’s descent down the stairs in Double Indemnity. First, you see the stiletto-heeled shoe then the ankle with the chain around it, then the legs and the full, rich shine of her stockings. You know she is going to be a femme fatale long before you even see her face.

RC Have you seen Hail Mary?

AC No, I refuse to. I could hardly believe Godard would do such a thing. I’ve read about it and I saw clips from it on television and all I could think of was “Jean Luc, you have crapped upon an entire generation.”

RC What is your favorite movie?

AC You mean my favorite movie ever, of all time.

RC Yes.

AC I would have to say that it is Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis, with a script by Jacques Prévert and extraordinary performances by just about everyone who was anybody in the French cinema: Jean-Louis Barrault, Arletty, Maria Cesarés… It is the definitive film about romanticism; and about the impossibility of happy endings; and also about the nature of monochromept by Jacques Prévert and extraordinary performances by just about everyone who was anybody in the French cinema: Jean-Louis Barrault, Arletty, Maria Cesarés… It is the definitive film about romanticism; and about the impossibility of happy endings; and also about the nature of monochrome photography, and the character of Pierrot in the Comedia del Arte and lots of things. It is an enormous, cumbersome, comprehensive world of a movie, and one in which it always seems possible to me, I might be able to jump through the screen into, and live there, in a state of luminous anguish, just like everybody else in the movie.

RC Much of your work seems to exist in the borderline area between consciousness and dreams. The stories are dreamlike in structure and share other qualities with dreams—symbolic transformations, ritualistic, referent use of name and language, and the fulfillment of unexpressed, or even denied, desire. Do you keep a journal of your dreams?

AC I don’t dream. Rather, I never remember my dreams and on the rare occasions when I do, they are completely banal. Last night, for example, I dreamed that I woke up and went to the bathroom.

But this resemblance to dreams is deliberate, conscious as it were. I have studied dreams extensively and I know about their structure and symbolism. I think dreams are a way of the mind telling itself stories. I use free association and dream imagery when I write. I like to think I have a hot line to my subconscious.

RC One of the themes that recurs is concerned with a sort of cataclysmic upheaval in childhood. Were you uprooted when you were a child?

AC All English children in my generation were, at least all those living in London. I was born in 1940. My mother left London carrying me in her arms with my 12-year-old brother. Almost no one remained actually living in London at that time. We went south to Sussex and stayed there for a while. Then we went to live with my grandmother in the country in the North. My mother would stay with my grandmother and I for a few weeks and then commute to London to be with my father and then return to us. But I remember this as a happy time somehow.

RC That is interesting to me—that you grew up essentially as an only child in a house full of women. The aspect of your work that I most appreciate is this unique sense of real love for, and protectiveness towards, other women. It is something that I look for in women writers and almost never find.

AC What you say about the feeling toward women makes me happy—because it is very important to me. But I don’t understand your comparison to other women writers. What do you mean?

RC Women writers frequently adopt a tone or an attitude toward their female characters which is somewhat negative and ungenerous. It comes across as either whining self-indulgence or congratulatory, stolid self-reliance. There is so little compassion.

AC To whom do you refer?

RC Let’s say, Joan Didion, for example.

AC Yah, boo, sucks. Although I am a card-carrying and committed feminist, what I would like to see happen to Joan Didion’s female characters is that a particularly hairy and repulsive chapter of Hells Angels descend upon their therapy group with a squeal of brakes and sweep these anorexic nutters behind them despite their squeaks of protest. Like a version, dare I say it, of the rape of the Sabine women. And bear them off to hard labour in the grease pits. Or else ten years compulsory re-education in the coffee plantations of Nicaragua might do the trick, make those girls feel there are worse things in life than running out of valium. Except what lousy fun it would be for the Angels. And the Nicaraguans might feel with justice it was a particularly foul CIA plot.

Actually, I think Joan Didion is an alien from another planet. Can we talk about a real novelist?

RC To take a somewhat less obviously despicable example, then—Doris Lessing.

AC She is quite an odd one, too. But as far as her feelings toward women or women characters go, they don’t seem objectionable.

RC She seems incapable of finding sustenance or delight in the company of women. There is such an absence of joy.

AC I wouldn’t limit it to her women characters, though. Some people think life is worth living and others really don’t see the point of the whole thing. She is one of the latter—it is her entire view of the world,

RC The only woman I can think of, off hand, who is different in this respect is Jane Bowles.

AC Now you’re talking. She is wonderful, extraordinary. But what a tragically sad end she met—it is, I suppose, a particularly poignant example of the terrifying fatality of being a woman.

 

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Book

Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
Penguin Books

‘She writes a prose that lends itself to magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality … dreams, myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly unconscious, epic journeys, and a highly sensual celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous and darkest manifestations.’ — Ian McEwan

‘Carter not only switches her narrative into the wholly explicit but turns the passive predicament of the heroine into one in which the convention of female role-playing seems to have no part, only brisk and derisisve common sense, the best feminine tactic in a tight corner. The tales are retold by Angla Carter with all her supple and intoxicating bravura.’ — The New York Review of Books

‘She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque styleist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber – her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.’ — Margaret Atwood

 

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Excerpt

The Company of Wolves

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.

The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.

At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you–red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still.

But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you go through the wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long, wavering howl … an aria of fear made audible.

The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.

It is winter and cold weather. In this region of mountain and forest, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat. Goats and sheep are locked up in the byre, the deer departed for the remaining pasturage on the southern slopes–wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pounced. Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops–of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is worst for he cannot listen to reason.

You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy branches tangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller in nets as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends–step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague.

The grave-eyed children of the sparse villages always carry knives with them when they go out to tend the little flocks of goats that provide the homesteads with acrid milk and rank, maggoty cheeses. Their knives are half as big as they are, the blades are sharpened daily.

But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out. There is no winter’s night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey, famished snout questing under the door, and there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni.

Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems.

There was a hunter once, near here, that trapped a wolf in a pit. This wolf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who used to live by himself in a hut halfway up the mountain and sing to Jesus all day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep, but she made such a commotion that men came with rifles and scared him away and tried to track him into the forest but he was cunning and easily gave them the slip. So this hunter dug a pit and put a duck in it, for bait, all alive-oh; and he covered the pit with straw smeared with wolf dung. Quack, quack! went the duck and a wolf came slinking out of the forest, a big one, a heavy one, he weighed as much as a grown man and the straw gave way beneath him–into the pit he tumbled. The hunter jumped down after him, slit his throat, cut off all his paws for a trophy.

And then no wolf at all lay in front of the hunter but the bloody trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead.

A witch from up the valley once turned an entire wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on another girl. She used to order them to visit her, at night, from spite, and they would sit and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery.

Not so very long ago, a young woman in our village married a man who vanished clean away on her wedding night. The bed was made with new sheets and the bride lay down in it; the groom said, he was going out to relieve himself, insisted on it, for the sake of decency, and she drew the coverlet up to her chin and she lay there. And she waited and she waited and then she waited again–surely he’s been gone a long time? Until she jumps up in bed and shrieks to hear a howling, coming on the wind from the forest.

That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition. There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that dispatches him.

The young woman’s brothers searched the outhouses and the haystacks but never found any remains so the sensible girl dried her eyes and found herself another husband not too shy to piss into a pot who spent the nights indoors. She gave him a pair of bonny babies and all went right as a trivet until, one freezing night, the night of the solstice, the hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should, the longest night, her first good man came home again.

A great thump on the door announced him as she was stirring the soup for the father of her children and she knew him the moment she lifted the latch to him although it was years since she’d worn black for him and now he was in rags and his hair hung down his back and never saw a comb, alive with lice.

‘Here I am again, missus,’ he said.’ Get me my bowl of cabbage and be quick about it.’

Then her second husband came in with wood for the fire and when the first one saw she’d slept with another man and, worse, clapped his red eyes on her little children who’d crept into the kitchen to see what all the din was about, he shouted: ‘I wish I were a wolf again, to teach this whore a lesson!’ So a wolf he instantly became and tore off the eldest boy’s left foot before he was chopped up with the hatchet they used for chopping logs. But when the wolf lay bleeding and gasping its last, the pelt peeled off again and he was just as he had been, years ago, when he ran away from his marriage bed, so that she wept and her second husband beat her.

They say there’s an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on. Or, that he was born feet first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a man’s but his legs and genitals are a wolf’s. And he has a wolf’s heart.

Seven years is a werewolf’s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabouts think it some protection to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf, as if clothes made the man. Yet by the eyes, those phosphorescent eyes, you know him in all his shapes; the eyes alone unchanged by metamorphosis.

Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.

It is midwinter and the robin, the friend of man, sits on the handle of the gardener’s spade and sings. It is the worst time in all the year for wolves but this strong-minded child insists she will go off through the wood. She is quite sure the wild beasts cannot harm her although, well-warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses. There is a bottle of harsh liquor distilled from brambles; a batch of flat oatcakes baked on the hearthstone; a pot or two of jam. The flaxen-haired girl will take these delicious gifts to a reclusive grandmother so old the burden of her years is crushing her to death. Granny lives two hours’ trudge through the winter woods; the child wraps herself up in her thick shawl, draws it over her head. She steps into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas Eve. The malign door of the solstice still swings upon its hinges but she has been too much loved ever to feel scared.

Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise but this one, so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little late-comer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who’d knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.

Her father might forbid her, if he were home, but he is away in the forest, gathering wood, and her mother cannot deny her.

The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws.

There is always something to look at in the forest, even in the middle of winter–the huddled mounds of birds, succumbed to the lethargy of the season, heaped on the creaking boughs and too forlorn to sing; the bright frills of the winter fungi on the blotched trunks of the trees; the cuneiform slots of rabbits and deer, the herringbone tracks of the birds, a hare as lean as a rasher of bacon streaking across the path where the thin sunlight dapples the russet brakes of last year’s bracken.

When she heard the freezing howl of a distant wolf, her practised hand sprang to the handle of her knife, but she saw no sign of a wolf at all, nor of a naked man, neither, but then she heard a clattering among the brushwood and there sprang on to the path a fully clothed one, a very handsome young one, in the green coat and wideawake hat of a hunter, laden with carcasses of game birds. She had her hand on her knife at the first rustle of twigs but he laughed with a flash of white teeth when he saw her and made her a comic yet flattering little bow; she’d never seen such a fine fellow before, not among the rustic clowns of her native village. So on they went together, through the thickening light of the afternoon.

Soon they were laughing and joking like old friends. When he offered to carry her basket, she gave it to him although her knife was in it because he told her his rifle would protect them. As the day darkened, it began to snow again; she felt the first flakes settle on her eyelashes but now there was only half a mile to go and there would be a fire, and hot tea, and a welcome, a warm one, surely, for the dashing huntsman as well as for herself.

This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket. It was a compass. She looked at the little round glass face in the palm of his hand and watched the wavering needle with a vague wonder. He assured her this compass had taken him safely through the wood on his hunting trip because the needle always told him with perfect accuracy where the north was. She did not believe it; she knew she should never leave the path on the way through the wood or else she would be lost instantly. He laughed at her again; gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth. He said, if he plunged off the path into the forest that surrounded them, he could guarantee to arrive at her grandmother’s house a good quarter of an hour before she did, plotting his way through the undergrowth with his compass, while she trudged the long way, along the winding path.

I don’t believe you. Besides, aren’t you afraid of the wolves?

He only tapped the gleaming butt of his rifle and grinned.

Is it a bet? he asked her. Shall we make a game of it? What will you give me if I get to your grandmother’s house before you?

What would you like? she asked disingenuously.

A kiss.

Commonplaces of a rustic seduction; she lowered her eyes and blushed.

He went through the undergrowth and took her basket with him but she forgot to be afraid of the beasts, although now the moon was rising, for she wanted to dawdle on her way to make sure the handsome gentleman would win his wager.

Grandmother’s house stood by itself a little way out of the village. The freshly falling snow blew in eddies about the kitchen garden and the young man stepped delicately up the snowy path to the door as if he were reluctant to get his feet wet, swinging his bundle of game and the girl’s basket and humming a little tune to himself.

There is a faint trace of blood on his chin; he has been snacking on his catch.

He rapped upon the panels with his knuckles.

Aged and frail, granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises her and almost ready to give in entirely. A boy came out from the village to build up her hearth for the night an hour ago and the kitchen crackles with busy firelight. She has her Bible for company, she is a pious old woman. She is propped up on several pillows in the bed set into the wall peasant-fashion, wrapped up in the patchwork quilt she made before she was married, more years ago than she cares to remember. Two china spaniels with liver-coloured blotches on their coats and black noses sit on either side of the fireplace. There is a bright rug of woven rags on the pantiles. The grandfather clock ticks away her eroding time.

We keep the wolves outside by living well.

He rapped upon the panels with his hairy knuckles.

It is your granddaughter, he mimicked in a high soprano:

Lift up the latch and walk in, my darling.

You can tell them by their eyes, eyes of a beast of prey, nocturnal, devastating eyes as red as a wound; you can hurl your Bible at him and your apron after, granny, you thought that was a sure prophylactic against these infernal vermin … now call on Christ and his mother and all the angels in heaven to protect you but it won’t do you any good.

His feral muzzle is sharp as a knife; he drops his golden burden of gnawed pheasant on the table and puts down your dear girl’s basket, too. Oh, my God, what have you done with her?

Off with his disguise, that coat of forest-coloured cloth, the hat with the feather tucked into the ribbon; his matted hair streams down his white shirt and she can see the lice moving in it. The sticks in the hearth shift and hiss; night and the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair.

He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and texture of vellum. A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit but he’s so thin you could count the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time. He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.

The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed.

The wolf is carnivore incarnate.

When he had finished with her, he licked his chops and quickly dressed himself again, until he was just as he had been when he came through her door. He burned the inedible hair in the fireplace and wrapped the bones up in a napkin that he hid away under the bed in the wooden chest in which he found a clean pair of sheets. These he carefully put on the bed instead of the tell-tale stained ones he stowed away in the laundry basket. He plumped up the pillows and shook out the patchwork quilt, he picked up the Bible from the floor, closed it and laid it on the table. All was as it had been before except that grandmother was gone. The sticks twitched in the grate, the clock ticked and the young man sat patiently, deceitfully beside the bed in granny’s nightcap.

Rat-a-tap-tap.

Who’s there, he quavers in granny’s antique falsetto.

Only your granddaughter.

So she came in, bringing with her a flurry of snow that melted in tears on the tiles, and perhaps she was a little disappointed to see only her grandmother sitting beside the fire. But then he flung off the blanket and sprang to the door, pressing his back against it so that she could not get out again.

The girl looked round the room and saw there was not even the indentation of a head on the smooth cheek of the pillow and how, for the first time she’d seen it so, the Bible lay closed on the table. The tick of the clock cracked like a whip. She wanted her knife from her basket but she did not dare reach for it because his eyes were fixed upon her–huge eyes that now seemed to shine with a unique, interior light, eyes the size of saucers, saucers full of Greek fire, diabolic phosphorescence.

What big eyes you have.

All the better to see you with.

No trace at all of the old woman except for a tuft of white hair that had caught in the bark of an unburned log. When the girl saw that, she knew she was in danger of death.

Where is my grandmother?

There’s nobody here but we two, my darling.

Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves; she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill.

Who has come to sing us carols, she said.

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves. Look out of the window and you’ll see them.

Snow half-caked the lattice and she opened it to look into the garden. It was a white night of moon and snow; the blizzard whirled round the gaunt, grey beasts who squatted on their haunches among the rows of winter cabbage, pointing their sharp snouts to the moon and howling as if their hearts would break. Ten wolves; twenty wolves–so many wolves she could not count them, howling in concert as if demented or deranged. Their eyes reflected the light from the kitchen and shone like a hundred candles.

It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl so.

She closed the window on the wolves’ threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid.

What shall I do with my shawl?

Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it again.

She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it. Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room.

What shall I do with my blouse?

Into the fire with it, too, my pet.

The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird and now off came her skirt, her woollen stockings, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, and were gone for good. The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh. This dazzling, naked she combed out her hair with her fingers; her hair looked white as the snow outside. Then went directly to the man with red eyes in whose unkempt mane the lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.

What big arms you have.

All the better to hug you with.

Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave the kiss she owed him.

What big teeth you have!

She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered:

All the better to eat you with.

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.

Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.

She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

The blizzard will die down.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.

All silent, all still.

Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide open; let them all sink through.

See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

 

 

*

p.s. RIP F.X. Feeney. ** JM, Hi, Josiah. Yep, agreed, very cogent about Mr. Champagne’s gifts. I’m doing okay, working, seeing cool stuff, some anxiety provoking stuff, the usual, I suppose. I’m happy that things are good with you materially, and I hope whatever’s strange and unusual is fueling you. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, the Owsley days, sigh. JX Williams is almost certainly a hoax, but the films are cleverly devised and quite fun. ** Sypha, My great pleasure and much more, James! Thank you! ** Bill, Hi, B. Cool, about the radio gig. Yes, I’ll be very, very dead asleep when it’s 8:30 pm your time, so when they archive it, please give me a shout as I’d really like to hear that. And I hope it goes greatly. That microscopic footage stuff does look very enticing. I’ll let it roll when I’m free of here. Thank you, bud! ** Wolf, It’s Wolf, yass! I hear you. Man, 2020 is wreaking havoc on those of us who thrive in a non-assaultive reality. Eyes on the prize, whatever that is, I guess. Cool about the Lynch bio. Hm, I should pick it up? I have to say that whenever I’ve met or become friendly with my fellow ‘extremist’ artists, they’ve all been sweet as pie, the more extreme on the page or canvas or celluloid, the sweeter, in fact. And I’ve also met a bunch of artists whose work is charm central who are complete pricks, so, yes, I think your theory holds an enormous amount of water. Ace about you coming to Paris! Let’s definitely hang when you’re here. I need some Wolf! Yay! ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick, good to see you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha, so true. Excellent news about the short story writing class! Make your arse fully available for its kick, as it were. ** cap´m, Well, hey there, cap´m! Wow, it’s been a while. Very nice to see you! Now that is a fine and fruitful coincidence you laid out right there. Thank for doing so. You good? What else is the haps? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. The films were very charming and entertaining. They have hoax written all over them and are way too ironically toned to be actual period documents. Heavy on faux-Kenneth Anger. But they’re quite extravagantly if low-budget-ly done. If I’ve seen Mehrdad Oskouei’s films, I’m blanking. I will check them out by what means I can find. Thanks! ** Barkley, Hi! It’s terrific! Your talent is like a headlight. Do share stuff when you feel like the time is right and when you’re ready. Sadly, I don’t think the GIF books work very well on phones. A real drawback, but oh well. Have a great day! ** Right. I thought I would see happened if I directed the blog’s spotlight at Angela Carter. See you tomorrow.