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Welcome back to DC’s Writers Workshop. This is the thirteenth in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog’s community present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don’t normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you’re able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I’m going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I’ll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, and this workshop series represents an opportunity to make that aspect more formal and explicit. This weekend’s workshop features a short fiction work by the writer and d.l. Hyrule Dungeon. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank him greatly for entrusting his work to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. — D.C.
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THE GRAVAMINA
Nothing to approach at first. Nothing here to guide, to trail behind or to follow. An assembly of pilgrims gnaws your boots. You dare not look down, in a hallway you awake to between remittent blackouts. A hallway to which light of a natural source finds no access, but whose arches glow endogenously. Lucky are you who have boots on your feet as you traverse the intestine that rounds the cloister. Lucky are you who have not had cut them from the rigid feet of a fellow adventurer, if adventuring is what this is.
The arcade turns at such an angle that you cannot sight what will be met in a mere moment. The rats around your ankles thicken into streams that run ahead a sound of dragging steps, of bundled spears jostled. The tip of a broadsword dragged through the grooves between stones. Forward, ever rounding. Anything that gives itself to sight and to appearing is also immanent. There is no distance. A skeleton glows endogenously, with cuirassed chest at rest against the glowing wall. It lifts its sword speculatively like a mallet above its head only to crumble under its dreamt defiance of you. Now you posses a broadsword and a cuirass.
Nothing here but darkness and the infrequent presence of skeletons which neither attack nor ignore, but who if approached do lunge without ambition, and if you watch them long enough the toppled bones attempt to regain footing, and if you are truly patient you will see them rise up. Watch their solemn backsides flail into the darkness.
Possibilities of windows emerge as webs of blind tracery, igniting the well-humored deceit of truly false windows and falsely true light. If those are panels of filth caked glass recessed behind the motif of the stone rose, what atmosphere, bright or dim, could drip if a rag could rub their surface?
Such is the angle, odd, relentless, suspiciously circular, and unlike the expected form of the more common quadrangle. Skeletons are toppled with the smallest effort. The ones in peasant’s rags slump as if to catch their breaths or organize discordant thoughts. The others, cuirassed or draped in the standard of the cross, gather themselves for uncoordinated lunges, trip over their own feet and fall in heaps, while in the air a whispered warning travels: beware a knight should find ye.
At its length the arcade terminates at a series of graduating ledges, too generous in width to be called steps, below an oak door that one could crawl up to, and on the frame of which a tiny blue goblin sits glowing like an impish lamp, legs dangling, boots tapping out the beats of a limerick. “Have you a flame?” it asks, “mine’s goon in the draft.” He offers a pipe in the right hand, hiding from view the left hand as it lifts from across its knees the goblin’s forked tool. If you are sluggish, acta est fabula. If you are quick, the goblin’s escape reveals a shadowed port.
“Beware a greater beast than I should find ye,” he taunts departing.
The port accesses a cloister unlike any other; a vault of inscrutable height secures the chamber against the sky, and though a blade of grass or audacious vines break through it, the lawn has long been deposed in favor of a floor mosaic. A plait of four intertwined stands frames the mosaic’s interior; a design of concentric circles, each one a plait alternating in increasing and decreasing intricacy: a single twisted weave conjoins and disentangles from a two way strand; two separate two way strands converge briefly into a four way pattern before disjoining again. A leaf and vine motif borders the elongated bodies of arched stags, hares, and hunting dogs in chase. Through open mouths the animals admit colorful tongues of flame that resolve in simple knots.
If followed, the exuberant four-way plait leads to the northernmost reach of the cloister, where you confront a door that does not open and on which an enameled plaque announces MERCY. Followed further, the plait leads to an equally intransigent door marked REFECTORY. This one lies directly across from the port access. Perpendicular to that line, across from MERCY, a southernmost door is the door to PARADISE, and it too will not be budged. Above this door a crescent moon shines its silver light from a ceiling so hidden and so high that it convincingly vanishes in the presence of the rind, opening the cloister to an illusory starless night. An iron shaft hangs suspended from the moon, which is in fact the gap between a circular vent and its coverlid.
A hand grip fashioned out of wood hangs as low as your chest. Above it a gearwheel’s diamond inlet awaits a hand crank. Where could it be? The key to resplendence. Opening the vent would be like opening your eyes after a life of bandaged vision.
Between PARADISE and MERCY a hall of mirrors has for an unknown purpose been erected, comprised of thirty identically proportioned sheets of glass, carefully angled to face each other almost directly, and mounted on modified banner stands of cruciform footing. The uninviting corridor, set evenly between the two extremities of the cloister, is alight with the foggy regress of the false moon’s tender light, captured among rows of reflective faces, and concentrated through a concave glass onto a single point on the door of PARADISE. An eye carved in rough relief surrounds this tiny glob of light, and the light itself, but for a slight misalignment, almost disappears entirely into the darkness of the pupil, which is a recess into the very door.
Across the room the door of MERCY is adorned with an identical carving, and an identically recessed pupil.
At the center of the cloister, where the fifteenth mirrors have been set face to face, lies the mosaic’s central ornament: the black wheel with its twelve radiant spokes. Or, to see it another way, it is the black sun issuing twelve defiant rays. A red square rests on the onyx circle, its four corners holding perfectly the lineament of the sun’s circumference. A folded note written on red velum; its message in black ink is addressed anonymously to Champion.
Champion,
Have you heard the bones speak? Their voices are intolerable, yet they say more than you suspect. They came here once to right the universe. Some sought to rescue a Madonna. Others came to drink her blood. Let the light of mercy guide your way with them. But beware, these grounds multiply violence. The hated will hasten to find ye. Evil returns evil.
Tumbled down the arcade by gales of wind spun by a phantom bat’s wing, your head rattles. Your sword is lost somewhere behind. You lie on your back and watch skull glide on feathered wings overhead. Spiraling in mid-transit, the skull sheds a sparkling dust over your eyes. You rub them, stumble half blind through the arcade. It still turns ahead of you at a cruel angle, hiding the future from your sight, seeming to narrow in dimension now as it had not before, as footfalls converge in directionless echoes. You force back your eyelids. A lone-legged skeleton uses its sorry broken spear as a cane with which it cannot truly right itself. It brandishes the tip of the half-spear as it hops past you on its lone foot, which wears a lone peasant’s boot. Its peasant’s rags are fragrant, surprisingly delicious, herbed and spiced like fine cuisine. You detect rosemary, caraway and mustard. Hooked by its scent, you follow a step behind, listening to its whispered gibberish, until single words have grown audible and fragments of queer nonsense catch your ear, “scary candle,” “poisonous worm,” half sentences teased out of murky prattle. Whole sentences to follow. “The noble’s only God is pride.” “Heia o-ho.” “On the castle roof let the red cock crow.”
You are patient. The skull has turned face, its jaw shivers, presses black corks against your neck; expulsive emptiness of toothless sockets; quickens your heart with a voice suddenly speaking more than gibberish.
“A bleeding king took refuge here, locked himself away with his knights, his princess and pride. We are four hundred terrifying men, to the last prepared to die. In pursuit of such prizes, after all, the gift of death is also ours to bestow. The captain rallies us with mad cries, but in my heart the king is kind. It was a long time ago…wasn’t it? He would meet our terms when the heads of crooked bailiffs and tax collectors who abuse us were removed, I am sure of it. So sure that I compose a personal complaint and sneak it with his Ritter through the abbey’s gate. My claim the we rustici have borne the burden of keeping his Iscariots fed, tunes to a high pitch the tenor of the king’s cruel irony, for I am told to rejoice; my letter has made its way to the king’s very hands, and the king has decided that I should sustain only the king’s monumental metabolism. In the refectory which has become his lordship’s private hall I was sat down at the table. The room is empty but for the thug who clubbed me on the head. I awake to see the king tearing with his teeth strips of flesh from an object of perishable meat that I have no reason to believe has ever been appended to me, in terrible pain, as if trampled by horses. The king offers his own wine, which I admit is splendid, says I can have my fill for as long as my disappearing body will sustain a presence at the table. He laughs, describing how he’ll soon spoon-feed me duck soup once my arms are cut off, but infection from the first amputation has left me delirious, feverish and unfit for my lordship’s company. Death is absolution from the labor which has occupied nearly all of my life, yes, I die knowing that the king has ingested the hatred I had reserved for his court, that my blood is his poison, my bones lodged in his throat, that hatred cannot sustain the king but will burn and ulcerate his lordship…the scar spiraling like a fat worm with a taste for health…ah…my name is Fedor and…I fear I’ve lost my other boot. Where could it be? Where? Where?”
A winged skull bashes through the REFECTORY door.
You hurry to the cloister, avoiding yet another leaping goblin in the arcade, reach through the hole the skull has made and turn the lock. In this modest dining hall a full complement of crockery awaits a final service. A blood stained Bundschuh lies discarded beneath the table’s lengthy slab of stone. You drop down, pick up the boot, kneeling as if before the noble king who took his meals here, wondering if he perished here as well, speared by a fleshless peon. At its two extremities the hall opens on a kitchen and on quarters.
In the kitchen an evil butcher splits a head of rotten lettuce and evaporates. An ensemble of blackened herring, fallen dead over its score and instruments, projects a sustained and sour note; a pile of their eyeballs stares out, in all a compound eye. Dunes of pepper spread across the butcher’s slab where rigid hares display half eaten guts beside stale bread soaked in vinegar. A feast continues here, for someone whom this unwholesome fare does not sicken, whom the redolent air does not nauseate.
A painting layered with dust and grime rests on the stove. There are no markings on the wall to suggest it has hung here, nor are there any in the refectory. The scene is of a celebration of one of those festivals which happen in this region at the end of April, when people will stand on a hill under animal pelts blowing horns to keep foxes and wolves from ravaging their livestock. Below them peasants have gathered for a dance that joins them all in circles that are at once merry and macabre.
Under the painted canvass a folded note has been slipped into the frame. You yank out the red velum and read:
Champion,
How could they have known that this would be prohibited? Something so useful denounced by men of God and banished as a kind of superstition, when even royals act according to their own set of signs and portents. For example, it is said that as he crossed his territory, the king noted how tongues and dialects changed slowly. Never did they shift abruptly at a border and always did they grade and overlap. So convinced was he of his radiant divinity that just as hungry stars consume planets whose earth and atmosphere are purified through their passage; just as language ends in unknown syncretic smatterings at the borders of the civilized world, where only scavengers haunt abandoned ruinations; just as these things change the closer or further they move from perfection, so too would anything brought closer to his lordship for consumption be assimilated into his purity. Not even the flesh of disloyal subjects could vitiate his intellect.
-~~+*^*+~~-
A trail of misheard words brings you back through the refectory, to the sleeping quarters from where the words are broadcast, where twenty beds line up in rows of five, an infirmary for the dreaming, dormitory for the dead. On the furthest cot a pile of rags bemoans existence in a private language. Only its emotive register communicates. A pile of rags, mannequin or doll, puts into the air a more repellent odor than any that the kitchen had to offer, making that part of the room impossible to approach. You stand at the door holding the boot.
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p.s. Hey. So, I basically explained things up above. I’ll just add that I really hope you’ll put some time aside this weekend to read HD’s work, and I’ll ask you to please offer him your feedback, if you don’t mind. Even a simple acknowledgement that you took the time to read his work would mean a lot, and any opinions or ideas you can offer, from a sentence-worth to a lengthier, thoughtful take will obviously mean a great deal to him. I really appreciate your time and brain-power. As I said, I’ll chime in with my thoughts at the end of the weekend. Thank you so very much, HD, for entrusting your work to the blog. It’s an honor. ** Misanthrope, Oh, boo-hoo about the Westboro people. I’m basically a pacifist, but if there were ever a more deserving target … Well, I agree with you about putting that on the ballot. Too many Americans have long since proven themselves to be the suckers of $$$ and propaganda. I don’t like things that taste like sugar, but they’re often the best looking sweets. It doesn’t get much more charismatic than cotton candy, but it’s Medusa. ** Lee, Hey. Gary Webb vibe, ha ha, nice. So, yeah, I’ll talk to you lickety-split, I guess. I’ll get on there and put my finger on the trigger. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. I forget what an endoscopy is. Something not fun. That’s all I know. Yeah, I just got one of those little broken blue things when I clicked the ass link. Talk about needing a crowbar! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Thank you, great! ‘Missing Men’, wow. I can’t really remember what’s in that booklet. I’m sure I was trying for the double meaning of ‘missing’ in the title, probably not very successfully given how long ago I wrote whatever is in there. Mm, extremely interesting: your thoughts on my mechanisms for disappearance and loss. It’s true. There’s this emotional area that I seem doomed to work within. Or sometimes it feels like being doomed. I so love and admire the cleansed and cleansing mechanisms of Blanchot, and Mallarme too. I aim that high, and then I accept how far I can reach or something. I’m so inarticulate about these things, and I guess that’s why I write so much about and towards the inarticulate. That doll you’re getting sounds really cool. Yes, I saw your email! Thank you so much! I’m going to open it this weekend. I’m very excited. Thank you so, so much, my friend! ** Allesfliesst, I had this feeling I might get you in here with that post. Cool. I know, crazy number of them, right? And there were tons more, I just got blurry-eyed at a certain point. Haven’t seen ‘Zebraman’, no. I have heard of it, and, of course, I liike Miike very much, and the trailer will get me there. Thanks. Oh, fuck, it’s raining cats and dogs, and I lost my umbrella. I’m fucked. (Sorry, I just looked out the window). Uh, maybe think of your heaps the way I’m going to have think about the rain in between the supermarket and me? ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for that, David. As you well know, I’m all I have of George, and that is so very much not enough. But what can one do? That is a very funny cartoon. Gracias! ** Wolf, Thank you, good bud. That cloud monster was my favorite. Ooh. I heard something about the ‘District 9’ sequel. I can’t remember. Some problem, hm, and then problem solved maybe, hm, and maybe it’s being made now? Setting up the WifFi thing is pretty easy, at least with a Mac, if you can sort out the language thing. You just open ‘System Preferences’, choose ‘Sharing’ and then turn on ‘Internet sharing’. That should do it. I just quickly read through a bit of that Polanyi thing, and, yeah, really interesting. This is cool: you’re opening this whole area for me that I think is going to really useful, not with the George book maybe, but in general/afterwards. This is great! Thank you, pal! There is an essay called ‘The Semiotics of Disneyland’. It’s too short, but it’s tasty. I’d write it into a book, but I’m too stuck in my meta-teenage demotic world. Oh, cool. Oh, drat, sold out. I like the Maroquinerie. Let me check my schedule or whatever, and I’ll see. I still have to get my Death Grips ticket. Damn. ** Sypha, So glad you liked it, James! Thanks! That’s an awesome Godzilla scene, totally. Mm, I’ve considered trying unusual ways to make contact with George. You know, I’m a big skeptic, although I’m as open to the idea as I have ever been. Someone is going to do a Tarot reading for me early next week to try to contact him. I decided to go for it out of a combo of desperation and thinking I can do something with it in the novel. I’m not sure about a seance. That idea is really hard for me to swallow, I think because I’ve seen about 99% reports that such things are total fakery, and, hm, I don’t know how/where you would do something like that. Maybe. I’ll see how the Tarot thing goes first, I guess. ** Tosh, Great Kappa stuff, Tosh, thanks! Have you seen the Yonemotos’ ‘Kappa’ video work from the ’80s? I had a still from it at the top of the Kappa part of the post. It has Mike Kelley as the Kappa and a very young Eddie Ruscha as his victim. It’s pretty great. ** Cobaltfram, You’re getting into coffee connoisseurship. Cool. I would do that too, if I had the patience. When I wake up, I just want a thick, bitter gulpfest of caffeine asap. Strange, but cream or milk in coffee makes me slightly nauseous. A Cappuccino looks like one of those Japanese monsters to me. I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ films. I think he’s kind of a genius, but I’ve never read his books, and I want to. ‘Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control’ is in my top 10 favorite films. December, soon, nice, and cool about the Little Brown interest. I would say just remember that it’s usually much harder than you think it’s going to be. Have hope, but be very patient. ** 5STRINGS, Probably. Tube socks are hot, it’s true. The Japanese know that one. When I think of skater feet, I don’t think of clean feet. I like clothes, I think. On other people. Loose, saggy jeans, man. Or even black stove pipe ones. Sizzle. My house, which is not a house, has not a single piece of Halloween clothes on it. I have to find something in Paris. Good luck with that, Dennis. Yeah, I know, right? ** Oriol Rovira Grañen, Hi! Good to see you! Another appropriate Miike film. And another one that I’ve never seen and need to see. So, no, I haven’t seen it, but I think I’ll go see if I can find it somewhere. Man, that sounds really good. Thank you a lot! ** Frank Jaffe, So, did he have especially good legs and feet? And, if so, how and why? And, by the way, what was a nice young man like you doing on Xtube!?! ** James, Hey. Fuck polite company. Polite company reads Paul Auster novels. Fuck ’em. Pasadena! Why there? My old stomping grounds! Oh, gosh, I won’t know exactly when I’m free during those days probably until I get there, or probably not until the ‘Them’ gang arrives and Ishmael makes our schedule. But there’ll be a time, and we’ll figure it out easily. I have my car there, but thanks. Can’t wait to see my car. I miss my car. ** Steevee, Hey. Well, of course it’s going to depend on what your friend’s short story is like since different sites have different aesthetics and tastes. There are really a lot of very good lit. mag sites out there now. If I were to pick one to start with, I think I would recommend Metazen. I think that might be my favorite of them. The editors include some really excellent writers/people like Frank Hinton, Janey, Smith, DJ Berndt, and others. So, there’s one idea, but I’m happy to think of others if she or you want. Ugh about all the outstanding pitches. Here’s to a swift breakthrough. No, ‘Argo’ hasn’t opened here yet. It sure is getting the raves/hype, but it’s that kind of ‘Oscar worthy’ hype that so often leads to ‘quality’ meh-type films. Your take is the first reasonable one I’ve read. Thank you for that. Anyway, next up here is ‘Looper’, which I really do want to see, and the next film I’ll probably see is ‘Damsels in Distress’, which just opened here. ** Chris Cochrane, I know, it’s crazy close. Especially for me, since I’m going out there on the 3rd, I think. Very happy that the Rico thing got figured out. Yes, please do drop box it to me, man. Yes, please. Great weekend! ** Rewritedept, I liked the two songs a lot! Excellent, man! I like traveling sort of. Not all the time, for sure. But going home to LA is always a dream come true. I will endeavor to find some ‘Spaced’. Cool! Take care. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, I was just telling somebody up above. It’s a short video by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Mike as the Kappa. Very worth seeing. It’s great. Mike is crazed and awesome in it. ** Okay, Now, please, lock down some reading time with Hyrule Dungeon’s piece, and report back to him in the comments arena this weekend in whatever manner you can. Thank you very, very much! See you in the comments arena on Sunday night, and I’ll see you back in this spot on Monday.
Now available in North America 
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Hyrule Dungeon: wow, “The Gravamina” looks interesting (the title alone!). I love that it feels like a video game. Let me read again and get back to you with more tomorrow, man.
Hi Dennis: quick “Princess” up-date. First week of rehearsals over. Peter (director) and Johnny and Stevie (actors) have done a five-day week, 10-6 pm,I've been there every second day. We're rehearsing up the West End in a big room in a flat belonging to a friend of the Oran Mor (venue) people: “Oran Mor” apparently means 'big song' in Gaelic, which in itself expands out to mean 'the great melody of life'. Great rehearsal space – a kitchen to make coffee in, a nice bog and next week's production rehearsing through the wall in another room.
Things seem to be going well: I say 'seem' cos I find it hard to tell, but Peter's confident and I trust him: he and I are very different writers but he 'gets' me, I think.
Most of the problems are staging related – we only have one rehearsal in the space itself – and the logistics of marrying dialogue with action. Like, yesterday we spent all afternoon working out the mechanics of Johnny and Stevie shooting up while passing a sleeping baby between them. The venue is very intimate, with the audience really close to the stage – and having their lunch as they watch the play – and the tone of the action's been pretty jokey up til this point, so this is our big impact scene and we need to get it just right.
We now have most of our props: a pram, a crutch, a public phone, a baby, injecting-paraphrenalia. Next week we do a tour of charity shops to outfit our two junkies. Then there's a meeting with the venue's tech-guy to find out about sounbd-effects, back-drops and scene changes:there are only two locations in the piece and we're hoping to project impressionistic 'park' and 'urban' onto a piece of fabric hanging at the back of the stage (I was sent out to photograph a variety of grubby walls and leafy green vistas, for this purpose).
One thing I'm really pleased with is that we plan to end the performance with the playing of Frank and Nancy Sinatra's duet of 'Somethin' Stupid' – which, for me, really pulls everything in the play together.
Press photo session for Stevie and Johnny in costume on Wednesday, rehearsal for the exec-producers on Thursday: I'm already exhausted and I'm not even really doing much (no Facebook page as yet,man I gotta get onto that this weekend!)
It's interesting to be at rehearsals and be involved in this part of the process,but I'm kinda torn between wanting to take over and not wanting to be there at all – know what I mean? Not really nervous yet, though: do you get nervous with your co-ventures with Giselle?
So that's you up to date. In the middle of the chaos of it all (I am so not used to being away from my base all day), I found out there's a rehearsed reading of my ten-min play 'An Angel on My Shoulder' as part of 'Any Objections' at this year's 'Glasgay' festival of all things queer tonight.
http://www.glasgay.co.uk/event/id/531
Ten short plays from around the world, so if anyone's anywhere near the “Rose and Grant” deli-cafe on Glasgow's Trongate tonight at 7.30 pm, it £5 to get in, which includes a glass of wine and sugared almonds…mmmms…sugared almonds..
Oh, you're doing a blog day on Mallarme??I've just put Debussy's 'L'apres midi d'un faun' on my mp3 player, so kismet there, pal!
First, let me start with the only “complaint” which is perhaps, my own annoyance and something I prescribe to my own writing, but here it is, nonetheless. “Endogenously”, an unusual and unique word is used twice in the first two paragraphs. Such an uncommon word should maybe be used only once in the entire piece. Same with “cuirassed.” It “stands out” (for me) and gets in the way of my reading. Choose some synonyms for the second appearances and let the first impact of those unique and beautiful words stand alone.
Again, that might just be something that always bugs me, but DC asked for honesty and this is mine.
Onward.
I enjoyed the journey of this piece. I could feel/see myself there, along the way. Here are some lines/sections that I loved:
“The rats around your ankles thicken into streams that run ahead a sound of dragging steps, of bundled spears jostled”
“A skeleton glows endogenously, with cuirassed chest at rest against the glowing wall. It lifts its sword speculatively like a mallet above its head only to crumble under its dreamt defiance of you.”
“If those are panels of filth caked glass recessed behind the motif of the stone rose, what atmosphere, bright or dim, could drip if a rag could rub their surface?”
“The ones in peasant’s rags slump as if to catch their breaths or organize discordant thoughts. “
Love this: “At its length the arcade terminates at a series of graduating ledges, too generous in width to be called steps, below an oak door that one could crawl up to, and on the frame of which a tiny blue goblin sits glowing like an impish lamp, legs dangling, boots tapping out the beats of a limerick. “Have you a flame?” it asks, “mine’s goon in the draft.” He offers a pipe in the right hand, hiding from view the left hand as it lifts from across its knees the goblin’s forked tool. If you are sluggish, acta est fabula. If you are quick, the goblin’s escape reveals a shadowed port.
“Beware a greater beast than I should find ye,” he taunts departing.”
Love this too: “In the kitchen an evil butcher splits a head of rotten lettuce and evaporates. An ensemble of blackened herring, fallen dead over its score and instruments, projects a sustained and sour note; a pile of their eyeballs stares out, in all a compound eye. Dunes of pepper spread across the butcher’s slab where rigid hares display half eaten guts beside stale bread soaked in vinegar. A feast continues here, for someone whom this unwholesome fare does not sicken, whom the redolent air does not nauseate.”
Overall, great language, wonderful imagery. A nice heavy threat-vibe that makes me want to keep turning the pages. Good job. Good luck!
Most appropirate for Haloween, Hyrule. A nice combination of H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Roussel.
Tube socks are fantastic. You know, I'm not particularly attracted to Asian boys. I think if there were 3 races or whatever, then they would come in 3rd. Mix a little white in there and you've got gold. I used to have a thing where I thought black women were really hot but didn't like the looks of black dudes. Tagging some darkness sounds mighty delicious. Anyway, I'm blabbering. Skater feet, are like chop 'em off and keep 'em feet. If it skates, it rocks. I know what you mean. I don't understand how to wear clothes. I don't believe in labels, stripes, patterns, etc. and besides all that I am hesitant to fit into the symbolic order or something, oh, and I'm a wanna be skinny-ass. Some hot boys/girls look hotter in clothes than naked. Loose, saggy, jeans, you said it, I remember when a flash of skater/indie boxers was masturbating material for days. LOL I think the skinny jeans craze is the greatest thing. So seldom is it perfect, but it's oh so good. When they got it, it's off the chain! How's Yury's fashions coming? I have this idea that the Russians are the masters of fashion? That's funny, I don't like houses. I want a small but yoga-friendly flat. I'm kind of into a sort of efficiency or two-room idea. My house is not a house either, "No, there's no one home, in my house of pain." I was thinking, maybe you could do purple flicker candles in the windows and a black light? It's Paris, you'll think of something fun. Like Devils, here's some. Awesome, gonna check Hyrule's new stuff right away. Hope to have a story posted in the next few days.
Saggy jeans were never my thing. I wanted them skin tight in my day — and strategically ripped, if you get my drift.
Hyrule Dungeon: I'm very, very impressed with how you've scratched out the pathos that lurks between the mirrored structures of the design document of DEMONS' SOULS and the draw of the short story. That's what the piece feels like to me: two very powerful stories, both of which tell themselves in two very different ways, caught in each other's gravity wells. Does that make any sense? All of which should say, I love it.
Dennis: I'm very hesitant about jumping too deeply into coffee connoisseurship: if you're not too careful, you'll get just completely overwhelmed, or spend lots of money or something, and I get sort of panicky when I'm endlessly thinking "I could make this cup better if I just did…". I'm pretty with you: I need quick caffeine. I'm the opposite on cream and sugar; black coffee, at least as strong as I make it, gives me a really distinct, sharp headache right between the eyes.
Have you watched the Gangnam Style video yet? It's a work of art. It doesn't top this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzC4hFK5P3g) as the best music video evar (I mean, really, the previous is one of the most well-crafted, ingenious assaults on the senses ever), but it's pretty great. I may do you a day of trippy Asian music videos; I know I promised you an Arvo Part day, and I want to do one, but I'll probably just wind up writing a lot about the guy and all he means to me and all that, and your day and that article will be born simultaneously, methinks.
I need to watch 'Fast, Cheap…'.
You're very right about things never being that easy. Right now, I'm just letting the fact that there is positive energy building be what helps me work my through the overwhelming panic the book is shooting up in me. I don't know if anxiety or panic are what you're dealing with right now, so much as agony and oppressive melancholy, but this book, even just the short piece I'm working on now, makes me very, very nervous pretty much perpetually right now. When I'm working on it, I literally have to tell myself, "Just write one sentence then you can quit," so that I can make myself sit down. I've never focused so – very – much on each individual sentence.
I can understand why writers are such substance abusers.
But, anyway, it's progressing. You're getting your Tarot read? Goodness. Obviously, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, if you're willing to share them sometime down the road.
I think that's all for this weekend; enjoy your Sunday! Hope you didn't get too waterlogged
JF
Hyrule Dungeon:I could imagine this read aloud over creepy music. The archaic language, as others have said, is very Lovecraft and for me adds to the atmosphere. You're conjuring pictures in my head. I love 'acta est fabula' – no idea what it means but do I need to? This is maybe all about scene-setting. I also really like that there's no protagonist in any conventional way. You're talking directly to the reader, in present tense so this is very immediate, it's happening now. Where you break off really works, that standing holding the boot bit. Really reminded me of this old text-based video game with incredibly basic graphics I played decades ago where you had to pick up stuff in order to move on – and it wasn't just expected stuff like sword and keys etc. Okay, maybe there wasn't a 'boot' to be picked up exactly, but similarly random objects seemed necessary. I wanted to read more – I wanted to know what I was gonna find next.
Is this is start of something longer, Hyrule? I'm intrigued as to where it's going. I looked up 'Gravamina' cos it's a great word and that intrigued me further. Do tell!
Hyrule, thanks so much for sharing your story. I've just finished it.
Like others, I really love your language and how you use it. I started to read a bit out loud and the words sound great and the rhythm is driving. I loved the sounds.
I was interested by your decision to go with the second person, addressing it to "you." Ordinarily I find that POV can be ironically alienating as there is always a disconnect because it puts a block up in suspending the disbelief, because it is not me at all. However, in your story I really felt it worked because the character seems as confused about this strange, foreign place as I am. The deeper we go in, the more the questions and confusion. Which way to turn? The 'you' of the story really is me, transported courtesy of your vision.
Your powerful language and vivid images are staying with me. Thanks again – totally enjoyed going inside your world. I wish you the best with this and everything else you're working on.
Grant
The Tuxedo Theater
Hyrule Dungeon –
I think this is a really beautiful piece – I'm halfway through a second reading but I thought I'd put down my thoughts now while they're reasonably fresh. It's particularly inspiring to me when artists work within, or in relation to, what I guess you can loosely call 'genre' (fantasy / horror obviously in this case) and use the given tropes and framework as bases for making something really experimental and formally thrilling. But maybe that's too dry or analytical a reflection on what you're doing here cos the writing succeeds on so many levels for me, both as a genuinely atmospheric and evocative fiction (I think the combination of the second person address and relentless descriptive detail work some kind of magic), and as rich / poetic sustained prose. I really like the way you've rendered the arcane tone into something stylistically completely contemporary, and I find the rhythm, spacing and formal layout of the piece all pretty much exquisite.
So a big thumbs up from me! I would echo xTx though in picking up on the repeated use of the word endogenously – that struck me as a slip in the flow of the piece immediately. There are are a couple of things I noticed that could be typos – eg should "who have not had cut them" be "who have not had to cut them"? – or could be deliberate stylistic omissions, but those are minor quibbles.
I liked David E's odd couple comparison of Lovecraft and Raymond Roussel – mine would be Beckett and Tolkien! Anyway thanks so much for sharing this, I got a lot out of it and look forward to reading more of your work
Dennis!
good to hear you're at a less emotionally taxing point in the writing at the moment. And glad that the Serpentine reading went well by the sound of it – did you catch Lynch's thing too, or see anything else interesting? Cool that you're feeling at least a bit warmer to London as ell – I'm enjoying it a lot here at the moment, so that was nice to hear. Shame we didn't manage to hook up on the Sunday – I did try your phone – but it sounds like even if it had been working we were all on slightly different schedules anyway. True what you say about the near impossibility of looking at work in art fairs, but there is something interesting I find about the context being so unflattering to work… in so far as I'm curious about pieces that manage to survive it. There's also the intense editing the context necessitates to zoom in on what's personally interesting for me: walking round with Thomas was cool actually as he was looking out for different things than me, and, as I was a bit spaced out and tired that Sunday, I decided to go with his flow. So I ended looking closely at some very strong work I might have otherwise given less time to.
Anyway, hope you're weekend's been good…
M x
Hyrule, I loved it ! It has the grim geography and general attitude of Hell about it and that's a very good thing. I agree with xTx on using those unique, yet essential words, more sparringly. Like Cormac McCarthy's horsetack and livery terms, and Patrick O'Brian's 18th century sailing terms, they go a long way to set atmosphere and mood. If words contained within a rich story drive one to a glossary that's a win / win. You're entertained and you learn something.
Dennis, man, it's all fall-like and Halloweeny here in Atlanta, and I'm loving it. On my daily walk, which I change up fairly often, I get to see lots of decorations. That would include the little self-cannibalizing Hannibel Lector baby seen on here. Next to it was a zombie baby, Frankenstein green, reaching up in a piteous bid to suckle at the rancid tittie of…hmmm, I was going to say life, but, obviously not. I've greatly enjoyed the Hallowee'n images you've collected thus far, especially the Japanese monsters, some so comical and wierd as to be the stuff of acid trips. They remind me of late nights when I was twelve, camped in front of the t.v., eating greasy snacks from a bag, and slugging one vile bellywasher or another. Trash film = trash food.
I remember my brother Kerry and I staying up one night to watch a Godzilla film. Mom had made some sort of really huge Boston creme pie, in a square pan, and even though we were told to stay out of it, it proved too much of a temptation. Inspired by Godzilla crunching buildings underfoot, we cut building-sized chunks out of the pan, at irregular levels, and gorged on yellow cake, vanilla pudding between layers, and chocolate pudding on top. Then, we stuck my Godzilla model in the midst of the ruins, and put the pan back in the fridge. Mom didn't see the humor, dragged us out of bed at the crack of day, made us go into our own allowence savings, walk to the store, barefooted ( and, it was uphill both ways ), and replace the ingredients she needed to make a new one. We had to help her, too. We went about it grim and sullen until Mom took the ruined cake out of the fridge and asked, "Okay, who wants to lick Godzilla's butt ?" I think we got our youngest brother, Bob, to do the deed. Much laughter, not to mention the insane sugar high.
Hyrule – Hey, wow, pretty crazy stuff there!
Right, first the things that got in my way – mostly purely technical linguistic elements. Like xTx, i found the repetitions of obscure vocabulary a bit awkward, although i suspect they might not be intended… I saw a lot of "Glow(ing)" in there… I also noticed a few syntactically askew segments, and because i'm so sensitive to stuff like that it took me right out of the story, but it might be just fine to a less anal reader, haha!
The "…who … if you watch them long enough the toppled bones attempt to regain footing " bit made my grammar-red light, uh, Glow, hehe.
Otherwise, although i love Lovecraft, i'm not such a big fan of relentlessly complex words woven into relentlessly complex causal structures, but, well, that's a very personal hit-or-miss thing, and i guess you were going for that slightly alienating effect anyway, so well done regardless.
I wasn't sure about the second person use, another stylistic device that tends to annoy me more than pull me in, but after a while a realized that it made the whole thing feel like a very slow (s)troll along a video-game, screen-grabbing and decoding everything in a crazy, poetic flourish, and in the end i think it worked really well in creating a surreal, fantastic atmosphere. I wonder if that was what you intended? The different doors and messages to the "Champion" really made the video-game feeling, and there was something about the hyper-precise descriptions of every element in the room that also made the world unreal, like HDR photography or really sharp CGI that becomes too detailed to look real, or something… Do you know what i mean?
Anyway, i found myself liking the whole piece more after i'd read it than i did while reading it, if that makes sense… The uncanny precision of everything somehow sunk in the text and then emerged in the end like a three-dimensional set.
All in all, a really interesting piece, and fun, and crafty as hell. Pat yourself on the back for me!
Dennis, hey! Really good to talk to you yesterday, more of that soon! Hope that crazyass seance of your goes well, or, well, as well as something like that can; i'm not sure of the criteria here!
My friend Aimee, the chef at the place i was working in, who is absolutely awesome, AND the best veggie chef in the world, is going to Paris in a few weeks, so i told her about that Soya place you keep making me drool over. Any other recommends for her?
Hey!
H.D. Your piece is tight. I might be beating the soiled pony but I agree with the obscure word repetition suggestion. Some of the language was so off my lexicon (I cut, pasted and Goggled “cuirassed”) it pointed my attention to its duplication. Solid, I could not offer a stretch in its membrane.
@ Hyrule Dungeon, I was never familiar with the language of fantasy fiction, so reading this was like being lost in a labyrinth. Which is no bad thing and I get the feeling that disorientation was partly what you were aiming for. "In the kitchen an evil butcher…" was my favourite passage. The whole piece was hallucinatory and fun.
Hyrule Dungeon,
Hey. I love this piece. I was really enraptured by it. There's this weird dichotomy in the prose that I found myself concentrating on, or, rather, a kind of trippy but exacting middle ground, or more like middle haze, between what felt like two wedded polarities, one being a kind of terse, almost Beckett-like skeleton to the writing that felt especially forefronted in the sentence lengths and in their kind of deliberate, blunt intentions, and the other being a rich, arcane, fleshy quality to the language itself that seemed to increasingly bury and weird-out the sentences as they lengthened. I'm not sure how clear that characterization is, but I was taken with the mixture.
My read might be off and too interfered with by a particular interest of mine, but I was very impressed because I see this piece as accomplishing something I've actually wanted to try to do and have failed at trying to do for a long time. That is, take the form of the video game strategy guide/walkthrough, which is a form I really love and find really seductive and full of possibilities that its usage as a game-related function won't allow, and make it into something more exalted in a literary sense that can stand alone even as it retains some kind of almost-status as a dependent.
Whether I'm off or on track there, I'm pretty blown away by how you managed to create a piece that offers hints and gives advice about how to maneuver through the story's setting while, in the same breaths, creating and illustrating the setting itself. So, it's kind of like the directives address the "you" and occasion that intrigue, but they melt away into self-fulfilling prophecies as "you" try to solve them. And I really like how the prose is stiff and utilitarian a la the "walk-through" style/tradition, on the one hand, but, as David E. pointed out, Roussel-ian in its artifice-filled surface.
I really like the breakages and your use of the 'Champion' notes to create and hide characters in the setting/fabric and to give the piece a general feeling of unavailable depths. A bit of an elderly reference, but the way you used them reminded me of how the found notes functioned within the deserted settings of the early 'Myst' games, a very positive reminder/quality for me. The piece ends beautifully. Is it a section from a larger work? It certainly needn't be. I'm just curious as to whether the "level" that the piece creates is intentionally resonant due to its unknown, lonely location. I'm also curious as to how, if it is part of something longer, you're working to sustain the piece's tone and quality, which is heady but could be potentially limited and fragile? I'm not sure.
Anyway, really a terrific piece, HD. I not only got the pleasure of the read, but I also had that great feeling that I was learning something new from it. Oh, for what it's worth, that odd word repetition in the first two paragraphs that xTx and others pointed out did stop and bother me slightly too. Thank you a lot, man, and much respect.
Hey everyone, I guess I should explain a little bit about the piece. The section I've presented here is part of a novel that I'm currently at work on. The book is about a video game designer, and the section you've read is the first third of the section which presents his game, a sort of Castlevania/Dark souls styled adventure. The conceit of the game is that the typical kind of monsters and ghouls encountered during game play will explain their own presence in the cursed castle if the player can resist hacking them to bits at the first opportunity. It's an idea that seemed potent to me as one of the things that excites be about both video games and literature is the ability to question what/who gets to speak in a sort of animistic way.
Now, the biggest question raised here seems to be about the use of unusual or exotic language, in the particular the word's "endogenous" and "cuirass." In the case of endogenous, its presence is owed to an interest in investigating the phenomenology of the game environment and the peculiar conditions under which it becomes possible to see or not to see. In general, the failure of vision is particular interest of mine and a kind of strategy for rehabilitating both the seer and the image. Endogenous was right word to me because it pointed to way in which the virtual environments of games are full of architecture and objects which seem to generate their own light and are thus self-illuminating. The double use of it was, however, a point of great anxiety for me. On the one hand, the word isn't as foreign to me as it might be to the reader, and it's difficult for me to know how distanced a reader might feel to it given that my writing develops in direct relationship to what I research and maybe in that way I loose perspective. I decided consciously to use it twice as a way of perhaps asserting it's own naturalness in my own world, but to be honest, I did so knowing that I would probably change it later upon encountering a reasonable objection to it's repetition. In the case of cuirass(ed), well I guess I assume a kind of familiarity or interest with these kind of game scenarios on behalf of the reader, in which case, a cuirass becomes an object that you literally find everywhere. I remember the that the first time I played a castlevania game one of the greatest sources of pleasure was in discovering the inventory list and its endless array of objects, all shining with some sort of strange mytho/historic resonance. But again, sometimes I lose perspective.
Jax – The ability to pick up and collect random objects in games is one of those things that seems half potentially profound to me in the way that it mirrors something real but mostly undone in real life, and also half random and meaningless. I think that the space between what might be profound or meaningless is one that I like. The Elder scrolls series is famous for putting tons of random junk in the game world that you can weigh your character down with, and of course, pickpocketing.
I'm glad you like Gravamina. Obviously I love strange words that sound like incantations. My last book was titled Thighmotaxis.
The present tense thing is another one of those high anxiety inducing decisions that I make, so I'm really glad it worked for you. and like I said above, its part of a larger project.
XTX – Yeah, like I explained above, using that word twice was always something I knew would probably not work. It makes perfect sense to point it out. Thanks alot, and I'm glad those parts felt up to par for you.
David Ehrenstein – I dont know Roussel, but I will now.
Cobaltfram – It is a design document. In the novel its the document he presents to the publisher, Eidos. I love the idea of the twin gravity wells so much that I might incorporate it into the novel's internal dialogue. i hope you don't mind.
Grant Scicluna – The you of the address is meant to replicate the self-conscious presence that the player will have in the game. One of those things that separates the medium of games from any other. Would you believe that the Rhyming happened totally by accident. I guess the setting is in some semantic way synonymous with a certain era of poetics. So the rhyming was as much of a pleasant surprise for me as it appears to have been for you.
I'm doing an essay for the blog Press Play which promises to be interesting. It's about my ambivalence towards James Bond films, especially the Sean Connery-era films. I find '60s Connery really attractive, and his performances of that period have a lot of charm and sex appeal, but films like GOLDFINGER and THUNDERBALL are so loaded with machismo and misogyny that they become unpleasant. They strike me as the '60s white British equivalent of a Rick Ross video. I quite like CASINO ROYALE, and I think it was a breakthrough for the series in objectifying Bond (I'll never forget its bizarrely homoerotic genital torture sequence, which pushed the boundaries of the PG-13 rating) at least as much as the "Bond girls." UNfortunately, the subsequent films in the series haven't done much to explore this. I'll be seeing SKYFALL before writing the article, although I'm not sure how relevant it will be to it, and revisiting some of the '60s films.
Incidentally, the blog is also running a piece from an opposing POV. It's a video essay by a feminist critic arguing that the "Bond girls" are empowering images.
Tender prey – I too find it exciting when genre exceeds in formal and stylistic innovation. The relentless descriptive bit is my attempt to incorporate some of the displacing magic that I find in Robbe-grillet. And to provoke the general sense that any particular part or dimension of the work, spatial or even syntactical, is a clue that by it's presence shifts the work to the mind-space of a puzzle. That one sentence was a typo! Dang, I thought I'd gotten all of those!
Lovecraft is a definite touchstone for me. To date I think I have never failed to include a clear reference to his story "The Outsider" in anything I've written. Later on in this piece the "you" addressed climbs up a seemingly endless tower, and of course, the rats.
Pilgarlic – Yes. Grimm geography. I like that. I guess to me Brian Evanson serves as an example of someone who uses these archaic and specific terms liberally in his fiction. Of course his mastery is such that he can do it just so…
Wolf – For me one of the greatest challenges lies in imagining the pleasure that the reader takes, or at least should, in balance with my own pleasure as the craftsman. I think the alienating tone is the kind of strangeness that I pursue consciously, and the poetic flourish has something to do with a subconscious desire to assure that pleasure has been provided to the reader. Like I've said above, the feeling of being pulled through a strange game is intentional, and the the evocation of tone and atmosphere is possibly, for me, everything.
The idea of the whole thing coalescing into some hyper-real hologram is just the sort of effect I'm looking for. Again, it's an effect I've been trying to borrow from Robbe-grillet for years. I'm glad it came across that way to you. Thank you for sharing such honest criticism.
Flit – Thanks for reading. Like I said, when you play alot of these games a cuirass becomes as common as a t-shirt.
Black acrylic – The piece is hallucinatory to me too. And was fun to write for that reason!
Dennis – Perhaps this dichotomy is like the two gravity wells Cobaltfram suggested, except you're focusing on the flesh of language and skeleton of design as opposed to the flesh of story. But yeah, the piece was a total experiment on my part, and the balance between the dayglo vocabulary and the cold flatness of it's spatial quality is part of why I think it might be successful.
It's funny that you mention walkthroughs, because really it's a walkthrough written by the designer, who wants you to see and feel the poetic dimension of the events in his sequence, and not of the fan/completist who is actually in a position to discover what the work is in reality.
I've read so many walkthroughs that the sparseness and influence of them absolutely had to be there, but I honestly resisted doing things like going into inventory lists or HP lists or boss strategies or anything of that sort out of a need to engage the reader something like a literate experience that he/she might expect.
The idea of the game as a self fulfilling prophesy is interesting, after all, the way you play games has everything to do with the expectation that everything you encounter is leading toward some meta-question by which passage will be allowed or disallowed by the special attention paid to the preceding events. I think this is a style of reading that is in many ways foreign to literature, except maybe in mysteries, but even then, you read with the expectation that the puzzle will be solved for you, rather than in the habit of forming the puzzle your self, apprehensively, as you progress.
Like I said, the piece represents one third (the first) of the game as it is presented in the novel. The biggest challenge after writing the in-game section was figuring out how to write the out-games sections of the book, something I'm only beginning to scratch the surface of. The tone there in the "real world" is different but also, like Wolf suggested, Hyper-Real. I keep reminding myself as I go that the sun in the sky of the narrative is like this hot red jewel that you would have encountered in Mickey mouse's castle of Illusion (an old Sega Genesis classic) and so far the prose has these constant semi-lucid references to characters and things becoming crystallized in some sense. The helpful thing is that the third and final section of the novel, as I have it planned, is completely strange, rule-less, and even wilder than this in-game section, as it doesn't even follow something a systematic as a game logic. So as I write I remind myself that I'm writing toward a place where the center of gravity is shifting so much that it might as well be absent, and in this way the prose is guided by a commitment to alert the reader that the only guard rail to trust is the poetic tone.
Thank you to everyone! This has been a great weekend. your reactions have helped me identify certain dynamics in how the book is going to shape in the minds of intelligent readers. Dennis, thank you so much.
Oh, and "Acta est Fabula" means "The Play is Over."
Raymond Roussel 101
Hyrule, a wondrous journey, Merci! So he totally scored right? This story starts me perfectly in a tower staircase, looking out at a blue sky, pondering the strength and reliance of blond erection. A waiting, breathing habred, becomes the broadsword of fraught justice. What magic has created this wanton and abandon, forward like a canon ball, the sword point sticks. I think of London and the video-games of childhood. Inside the trees of Ghosts & Goblins, the stairs doth wind. Like Friday the 13th doors open and close. Like a boss fight in Contra or Doom, the knight to be knighted clears the asps to his crowning. With response and repose, without horse, galloping through an enchanted darkness, the geometry of signs leads astray into memory and desire, and defeat. A wizard upon the rack, remembers the futility of his quest as the bones of centuries stretch his soul to truth. The story starts out with a beautiful tone, the scene is set, the energy instilled. With the magic signs, direction and space are made abundant. There is an incredible density of signs and a wealth of lavish language for feast. The hero's fortitude is intimatable. What fate in the bones and spells of this castle will make away with the surety of the boot and the raised sword. Fucking awesome work, the envionmentals, the tone, the feel, the style, the signs, wondrous. The only thing I could suggest is less is more, and more when and why. Thanks! Rock on
David Ehrenstein – Wow, that book sounds formidable. And yes, It reminded me that I actually bought a copy of Locus Solus on Ebay a year ago and it never arrived. I can feel through the computer how important his work is destined to be for me.
5String – A wizard upon the rack..how about a pope sentenced to retrieve a hot stone from the bottom of a boiling cauldron…and to fail repeatedly at this task for all eternity…away in some tower of time.
Your response was beautiful. Thank you.
Hyrule Dungeon, I can't say I'm familiar with this genre at all, so I've nothing to compare it to, which is probably for the best, eh? I mean, comparisons can be so condescending and unfair and just plain silly most of the time.
I read it as a prose poem. A prose poem based on an intricate video game, a sort of Zelda at a higher intensity. A prose poem that uses such a conceit to talk about life and death and how we live our lives.
I really like that the language, especially when it goes oft-kilter a bit, totally supports the tone, tenor, and circuitousness of the story itself.
Frankly, I still really don't know what was going on, but I liked what was going on, if that makes sense. There was this sort of push to get to the next sentence to see what macabre thing -or not- would pop up next. I especially liked the King-dinner-disappearing guy scene and the scene with the butcher cutting skulls. Which probably isn't a surprise.
There was some Biblical or Medieval (and even Alighieri-esque) about it too. A sort of strangeness that pops one out of his comfort zone. To me, that's great, and I wouldn't change a thing. But what the hell do I know? I just read things and either like them or I don't. I liked this. 😀
Dennis, Hmm, I've always wondered how pacifism works. Especially in the face of unspeakable evil. For example, you see people being marched off into the ovens to be burned to ash, then have to the chance to kill those marching them off (as opposed to merely arresting them, trying them, and hanging them). Do you say, "Nah, I'm a pacifist, I don't believe in violence or confrontation of any sort" and just let them keep at it?
I know that's simplistic, but I just have never gotten not acting when you kind of have to, you know? Like, I understand violence as a last resort, but when you're pushed to that last resort, do you cave in, so to speak, or just let it work itself out while doing nothing?
Maybe I'm just a deep down violent guy or something.
Sugar really tears me up. I eat something sugary -like I do several times a day every day- and I just feel terrible. Almost as if it's eating a hole in my stomach or something. Black coffee's so much better. 😀
Back in the 60's there was a little mag called "Locu Solus" that Frank O'Hara John Asbury and the gang wrote for. Wish to hell still had a copy.
Dragon: This is really cool, I enjoyed reading it…I liked some of the esoteric language and unfamiliar words…I like reading a lot of medieval romances stuff, and some of this story put me in mind of writers like Malory, or Romance of the Rose, very nice…or like those Gothic romances like Vathek…
It also got me thinking about video games, like DOOM or Duke Nukem…skeletons in the corners…
I think my favorite part was the language…I think my literary tastes usually tend to extend toward the verbose and baroque, so I enjoyed just reading certain paragraphs aloud to myself, like the paragraph that starts: “A bleeding king took refuge here…” and the paragraph that starts: “Champion,
How could they have known…”
The prose just sounds very authorial, I really like bookish prose like that. I’m able to enjoy a book a long time based on the language and nothing else. The plot seemed puzzle-like and abstract, which is totally fine with me… The language was enough to hold my attention, although the sentences didn’t confuse me or anything.
The story also seemed very verbal, and seemed visual only in certain places… A sentence like this:
“A plait of four intertwined stands frames the mosaic’s interior; a design of concentric circles, each one a plait alternating in increasing and decreasing intricacy: a single twisted weave conjoins and disentangles from a two way strand; two separate two way strands converge briefly into a four way pattern before disjoining again.”
Sounds so beautiful, I really like to read that sentence out loud. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to picture what you’re describing…but that’s okay with me. I like Lovecraft best when I can’t picture what he’s describing.
In any case, thanks for sharing this with us! Nice job, really cool
Dennis: Hey Dennis! Things have been kind of busy lately, haven't been online as much…getting caught up on the last couple days of the blog, which rocks as always
Monster day was the best ever!
Writing is good, I've mostly been working on longer projects although there's some new videos on the blog…
http://dankland.blogspot.com/
I think I'm also going to start making web comics, idk
How's the novel coming? Is it getting any easier as it goes along, or is it getting more difficult? I know it will probably be awhile before I have the next book in my hands, but I'm excited to read it…
Are you still thinking this might be the last novel? Do you think you'll mostly stop writing fiction altogether? Maybe focus on other kinds of writing? Might be way too early to tell, just curious how you feel about that right now. Do you think you'll miss writing novels?
Take care, talk to you later…
Hyrule Dungeon,
Actually, I thought the story not only had a Lovecraft vibe but also Clark Ashton Smith. I have nothing to really add that no one else has already mentioned (sorry I'm so late), but I agree that "The Gravamina" is an interesting title. I'm glad to hear you finished Thighmotaxis. I recall you sent me some of the chapters a few years back and I enjoyed them. Are you seeking a publisher for it?
Hyrule Dungeon: Very nice work. I should say, I usually approach these Workshops so that I read the piece, then read it again a while later. This weekend, it ends up that I'm reading at midnight Sunday. So I apologize for what might be missing from my comments. If it matters, I'm posting this w/o reading what anyone else said yet.
The reader gets to feel like he's in some different place and time almost immediately and effortlessly, and that's a feat, since I don't know exactly where and when that is. It's all really dreamy in tone. I like the sense that the reality is surrounded by at least one other that is forming and dissolving. You go from wide lends to microscope and back very smoothly, and that's what pulled me right along. That said, I'm not sure if I knew exactly what was going on. It felt like part of a much larger work, actually. If you're using 'Gravamina' to mean the most serious part of an accusation – which is 17th century ecclesiastical terminology – then I missed what that was. But, as I say, I would normally have read the piece at least twice before commenting. I will read it again because I want to figure it out more. Very smooth and intriguing.
Dennis: Hey, man. I definitely have stuff to say, but my meter is almost at zzz, so I'll be back after refueling.
Njr