Friends

Masato Harada’s 2001 film Inugami tells the story of Akira, a young teacher who rides into a remote village on his motorcycle one day. The village is in the mountains of the Japanese island of Shikoku. He becomes involved in the strange beliefs of the villagers, but in reality he was involved long before he ever set eyes on this village. He meets, and falls in love with, Miki, who runs a small traditional paper-making business. Miki belongs to the Bonomiya family. The family is believed to be linked to dog spirits and they become scapegoats whenever someone meets their death in an unexpected manner.

The film is beautifully photographed, and is perhaps more art film than horror film. The lesson of the movie is that no matter what country you’re in, you should never ever leave the safety of the big city. Akira certainly had reason to wish he’d stayed in Tokyo. It’s a movie about the clash of cultures between old beliefs and modern rationalism, and about the appalling price that is paid by those forced to adhere to tradition. In this case the price is particularly high for the women of the Bonomiya family.

It’s not a great film, but it is a beautiful one and it’s worth a look.

The release of three John Brahm movies in the Fox Horror Classics Collection caused quite a bit of excitement a couple of years ago. Brahm, born in Germany in 1893, was hailed as one of the great forgotten horror auteurs. Having now seen two of the three films included in the set, my own feeling is that Brahm has been highly overrated.

The Undying Monster, made at 20th Century Fox in 1942, is very much a B-movie. Of course there are B-movies and B-movies, but if you’re expecting something of the quality of Val Lewton’s RKO horror films you’re going to be very disappointed. It has reasonably production values, and Lucien Ballard’s cinematography is impressively Expressionist. The weaknesses, as in Hangover Square, are the script and the acting. The script is corny and obvious, and contrived. The acting is unfortunately all too reminiscent of that in the Universal horror movies of this period, with totally unnecessary and annoying attempts at providing comic relief.

The Hammond family, or at least the last surviving members of this ancient family, live in one of the oldest inhabited houses in England. There is a curse on the family, the curse of the Hammond monster. When the last male member of the family is found on a ledge below a cliff-top, along with an unconscious young woman, and both show signs of having been attacked by a large creature of unknown species, it seems the curse has struck again.

A scientific officer and his female assistant are sent by Scotland Yard to investigate these strange events. There’s a mysterious butler who knows more than he admits to, and there’s the family doctor, who also appears to know more than he’s prepared to reveal. The plot is no worse than your typical horror B-movie plot, but it fails to develop the necessary dramatic tension. And while Brahm has a good visual sense, and there’s an abundance of fog and shadows, the atmosphere of menace and foreboding doesn’t quite come off.

That’s not to say The Undying Monster isn’t worth seeing, If you treat it as just another 1940s American horror B-film, and if you enjoy that type of movie, then it’s entertaining enough. Just don’t expect a neglected masterpiece.

Warrior and Witch
Writer: Marie Brennan
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 420

It's been a while since I read the first book of this duology, Doppelganger (or now titled Warrior thanks to the re-release), but I'm glad I finally got around the conclusion (also titled, thanks to the re-release, as Witch). Brennan's prose has improved with this second book, and the problems I had with Doppelganger I don't have with Warrior and Witch, which made me quite a happy camper. And I will add that I feel these books are best read back-to-back. Doppelganger stands on its own, but really, these two books make up a whole, and it's important to read them in order to get the whole story.

The premise: when a witch is born, a doppelganger is created. In order for that witch to achieve her full powers, the doppelganger MUST be killed, or the witch's magic will spin out of control and kill them both. Only Mirei has found a way out of this bloody tradition, and not everyone is so accepting of the change of rules. The witching community has divided, one side determined to embrace Mirei and her new magic, and the other side determined to destroy not only Mirei, but all the other doppelgangers as well. Mirei must protect these girls while trying to help mend the rift between the two camps, and stay alive in the process. Because her new magic is killing her.

The full review, with spoilers, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.

REVIEW: Marie Brennan's WARRIOR AND WITCH

Happy Reading! :)

I read a short story quite some time ago about two men in an underground military site who would each have to push a button (or turn a key, or something) in order to activate some sort of retalitory airstrike. They debate whether or not to do this. That's all I remember, other than that I thought it was incredible. Anybody know the title and/or author?

Another short story had to do with a man who goes to eat in a Chinese reastaurant and opens his fortune cookie, which reads "You are dead." Anyone know this one


I am teaching a science fiction class in my high school and plan to do a short story unit. I'd be interested to know what great short stories you all could recommend. I plan to include Clarke's "The Nine Million Names of God" and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," and I have some others, but I do not by any means know all the best ones that are out there. But I know YOU do. So, whaddayasay...what are some of the best science fiction short stories you have read?

Gamers attending last weekend's GenCon in Indianapolis found a surprise waiting for them at the Dark Sword Miniatures booth -- a half dozen new figures in the "George R.R. Martin Masterworks" range, being rolled out for the first time as special convention pre-release.





The talented Jeff Grace sculpted these new additions to the Dark Sword range, six wildings from beyond the Wall, to face off against the Night's Watch figures featured in the first wave.







Two are spearwives, the women warriors of the far north, but don't look for ludicrous chainmail bikinis on these gals. Fur and leather are a lot more practical in the wild.






The wildlings were a special GenCon run, available for purchase only at the convention, but Dark Sword expects to make them available for mail-order in another month or two, as soon as the rest of "wave 1.5" is ready. Gencon attendees also got a glimpse at prototypes of some of the other figures in the iopeline, including a court lady, two gold cloak guardsmen, and a stunning 54mm sculpt of Daenerys and her newborn dragons, fresh from the fires of Khal Drogo's funeral pyre, all from Tom Meier. Watch this space for pictures for those figures, when they are available.

We'll also have pictures of the winning entries in the painting contest. My friends at Dark Sword tell me that some of them were truly spectacular. I look forward to seeing them.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2008/08/notes-on-strange-fiction-postmodernism.html

In response to my last post on pataphysics, Matt asks, what would I consider "an explicitly postmodern text using pataphysics, as opposed to a modernist like Davenport?"

A short answer would be BUFFET FROID; I think this does read as a postmodern text in most respects. The long answer is a bit more complicated, because the idea of explicitness raises an interesting point here, I think, a flake of paint that I want to peel away -- scratch at the implications to see what's revealed underneath. A self-evidently or even apparently postmodern text is one thing; an explicitly postmodern text is another -- one, surely, which asserts a singular nature for itself as "postmodern". To me that means it's not just postmodern but postmodernist. What I mean is that, articulable in either that modifier "explicitly" or in the suffix "-ism", there's an important distinction to be made in terms of mode and agenda.

To try and clarify this a little, the idea that a text's philosophy is explicit in that text for me implies that when we read the narrative what we find is that the author's intent is stated, that a particular reading is invited. An explicitly postmodern text, I mean, would be one which articulates its nature, says, "I am a postmodern text: I was written as a postmodern text; I am to be read as a postmodern text." Read in a certain way, knowing that they come from a certain context, exhibit certain features, we could happily label many texts postmodern. If we buy into the idea of postmodernity as a condition we're living in (versus modernity), then we have texts born of this era, texts which exemplify it, texts which are postmodern in the same way that earlier texts were modern. If we're treating postmodernism as an aesthetic project, that's a different story; we're looking for texts which are part of that project, texts which are postmodernist in the same way Joyce's ULYSSES is modernist.

Hang on though. What do I mean by postmodern(ism) anyway?

OK...

Postmodernism, in the wikipedia definition, is "a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself." Clearly the pataphysical quirks I was talking about in the previous entry -- which I hereby dub suturae, btw -- are a key literary technique in any text which is articulating that state; they create that sense of heterodoxy and disjunction, an aesthetics of anarchy. If you buy into the idea of postmodernity as an era, you might well argue that the conflation of pataphysics and postmodernism is only natural: those sutura are signs of the times; texts adopt them because they're addressing this postmodern era; it's only sensible to see these sutured texts as essentially postmodern. But postmodernism is more than this, I'd say; defined in opposition to modernism (as negation, inversion, successor,) it's not just a state -- that state is (or would be) postmodernity -- but a project.

To understand precisely what that project entails requires putting it in the context of modernism.

So...

For me, modernism is pataphysics applied as a method for generating coherence out of confusion, a stitching-of-songs into a grand rhapsodic tapestry. (The Greek term, rhapsody, literally translates as "stitching-of-songs"; I would argue that the modernist project is, in fact, the project of literature from the get-go, evidenced in the stitched-together narrative structures of everything from GILGAMESH up, through Apuleius's THE GOLDEN ASS, through Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE, to Joyce's ULYSSES. But that's another argument...) Stitching together variant forms -- comedic, tragic, satiric, mythic, mimetic, literary, paraliterary -- it seeks to create a Big Picture from the juxtapositions, in the contrasts and congruities born of the seamed structure. (On the crudest, most literal level, the story-arcs that emerge in the seasons of series such as BUFFY or ANGEL can be understood as Big Pictures; in ANGEL particularly, the entire series has a key moment when that Big Picture resolves into clarity, when Angel demands to meet the ultimate Big Bad, whoever is in charge of Hell, and is presented with the streets of LA, the human race, as the ultimate Powers-That-Be.)

Postmodernism, then, emerges out of a sense that such a Big Picture is neither palatable nor, in truth, possible, where it pretends to truth as an objective assertion about the nature of things, a grand statement of the human condition. These are Lyotard's "meta-narratives", theories of history that project an underlying universalist organisation upon an inherently meaningless jumble of events and experiences. Such meta-narratives are considered suspect because they provide authoritative readings of reality. Postmodernism rejects that authority. The author is dead, according to Barthes; there is no unifying objective "truth" to be found; the multiplicity of conflicting subjective readings must be recognised.

Where BUFFET FROID hints -- in an exceedingly liminal manner -- at one reading in which the narrative is the Depardieu character's dream, but equally at an alternative reading in which the narrative is the Depardieu character's Hell, it does not resolve into either. Each reading is equally valid, and authorial intent is irrelevant. The point is not for the reader to decipher, from the clues, a latent but more legitimate "reality". In this respect the film is clearly open to reading as a postmodern(ist) text, one which embodies that state of contradiction and, crucially, accepts it, one which recognises the multiplicity of interpretations.

We can take this idea of postmodernity a little deeper though, overlay Baudrillard's notion of "simulacra", his post-structuralist position that language itself simply doesn't sustain such authoritative readings. The thing is, we relate to the world indirectly, through the dynamic matrix of signifiers, our understanding of actual objects (dogs and cats, say) mediated by our ideation/signification of them (as "dogs" or "cats"); and with the meaning of each sign determined by its relationships to others, the whole system of language is too fluid to allow for the total understanding(s) we desire. The attempt to artifice a Big Picture, in fact, seduces us into simulacra of reality. Where Baudrillard develops this to relate to society as a whole, I don't want to offer a crude reduction of ideas I might be misunderstanding, but a postmodernist position rooted in that view might be that, to all intents and purposes, reality has been usurped, that we live now in a realm of symbols rather than objects. If the meta-narratives are false, the reality they claim to refer to is lost to us; all we have left is an incoherent collage of conflicting stories.

Again, we might well relate this to BUFFET FROID where the narrative offers semiosis rather than mimesis -- the symbols of characters, places and actions working through relationships to each other that are ultimately divorced from the objective reality we would expect them to be related to, gaining their meanings not from referential connections with real-world objects but from their interactions with each other. The "dream" and "afterlife" interpretations, in fact, might be traced to this dislocation of narrative into the symbolic realm, our reading of the setting as dreamscape or netherworld understood as attempts to rationalise the symbolic realm/system, integrate it into our idea of reality as a metaphoric/metaphysical inner or outer sphere of action with connecting bridges across which meaning can be imported. Rejecting the autotelic meaning offered in the narrative in and of itself, these readings become attempts to bind it to an "objective reality" which, in a postmodernist view, does not exist.

Blowing up those bridges then, considering the film as a purely autotelic artwork, it is quite possible, I'd argue, to read the work as dealing wholly with symbols and the relationships between them: a deserted Metro station; a flick-knife; a murder; a deserted tower-block; a wife; a police commissioner; a strangler; and so on. We can read it as a performance in the Theatre of the Absurd, more mockery than mimicry. The indifference of its characters to the cruelty of their own actions and those of others, the general lack of any emotionally sensible reaction in the face of strangeness after strangeness -- much of the film can be seen as indicative of postmodernism's rejection of any pretence that we can know reality. The symbols dance and, in that dance, adopt postures and positions toward each other; we read meaning into the pattern of narrative built up in this way; but ultimately what we are confronted with is a simulacra.

From this, in turn, the postmodernist notion of "play" emerges. The autotelic text is a game of symbols, an artifice of ironic detachment, ludic or cynical, embodying an intellectual delight in the game for its own sake or an emotional disaffection in the absence of certainty. Viewed as a "black comedy", BUFFET FROID embodies both: it functions as a farce, offering the fun of the game, in its comical narrative of confusions and complications; it is also bleakly existentialist/nihilist in its brutalist excision of any sense of empathic relationships between in its characters.

This is where a niggling problem with the whole idea of postmodernism kicks in for me though. As much as I'm sympathetic to many of the concerns that postmodernism is rooted in -- the interrogation of meta-narrative's universalism, the model of meaning as dynamic system of shifting relationships rather than mechanical structure of concrete connections, the focus on semiotic systems as simulacra that have long since achieved independence from any objective reality -- and as much as I have a sometimes ludic and sometimes cynical outlook myself, this is where I find myself suspicious of postmodernism as a project within art and as a philosophy in its own right, not least of all in its assertion of postmodernity as the era we are now living in.

Partly this suspicion rests in a critique of postmodernism as ultimately a nihilist/existentialist flavour of modernism, one in which the destruction of meta-narrative, the death of the author, the democratisation of reading, the recognition of heterodoxy, the extirpation of absolutism from systems of language and thought, can all be viewed as modernism that takes, as its universal meta-narrative, only the illegitimacy of essentialism. Rather than a successor to modernism, this is only one (central and crucial) subtype at the heart of it, evidenced in the work of Nietszche and Sartre.

For me, as a nihilist/existentialist of sorts, this is not perhaps an invalidation of postmodernism in and of itself, simply a rearticulation that brings into question the idea of modernity and postmodernity as distinct historic states; for me the recognition of the vacuum at the heart of absolutist/essentialist systems is a core feature of modernity wherever it is to be found. That so characteristically postmodern response to that vacuum, however, the response of ironic detachment, is one that I have less sympathy for, in so far as it consitutes, I think, an admission of defeat. What I mean is, if we take that ludic/cynical irony as an articulation of the postmodernist worldview, the text becomes a statement-by-negation about the potentialities of narrative and about reality as a dead zone for meaning, an assertion that narrative can be no more than a game, to be played for its own sake, that sincerity is untenable in this postmodern era of simulacra.

This brings us back to the question of postmodernism as an explicit project of a text, a position adopted by the narrative. If we read BUFFET FROID as a postmodern text, we have three (or more) possible readings: it takes place in a dream; it takes place in Hell; it takes place in the realm of symbols. If we read it simply as a pataphysical narrative, a fourth reading is possible, a reading that is not metaphysical but not entirely autotelic -- one in which, regardless of the context we project onto the events, it is understood as having something relevant to say as regards actual human relationships, about empathy and the lack thereof, about alienation and our capacity for cruelty. If our postmodernism is consistent in its rejection of authority, in fact, it should hardly refuse the validity of such a reading, a reading in which the patterning of the simulacra is stubbornly taken as a commentary upon objective reality. Whether the characters are dead, in a dream of death, or stuck in a simulacra of death... well... there's a fairly consistent theme here; there's little that's more objectively real, I'd say, more universally relevant, than death.

People die. Is that a meta-narrative? What can I say? I'm a modernist. I'm an existentialist modernist, holding to the idea that existence precedes essence; but I don't think it's a contradiction-in-terms to also hold to the idea that existence ends.

From a nihilist/existentialist position then, reading BUFFET FROID as a comment on the objective reality of death -- if only as a comment on a (post)modern state of confusion where we're pretty much divorced from that objective reality -- is valid, I'd say. Any narrative can be seen as a purely strategic creative action, a crafting of symbolic commentary which entails an adoption of the rhetorical tricks of essentialism, but does so on the understanding that any "statement" made is just that -- the existential act of an existential agent. A rejection of the idea that life has any inherent meaning doesn't preclude us from trying to make sense of it. The conscious fabrication of meaning in this way is not "bad faith", the expectation being that the reader will create their own meaning from the articulation on offer. It's fiction, after all, not religion; you're not meant to believe it.

Reading BUFFET FROID as an explicitly postmodern text however, I think, risks projecting onto that ironic detachment an an intentional impetus that is at odds with the very philosophy we're taking it to espouse. In this philosophy where the author is dead we are, paradoxically, fabricating an authoritative reading in which the meaning of the narrative is sourced back to Bertrand Blier's agenda. Depardieu is not dreaming. Depardieu is not dead. Nor are we to read this as a symbolic critique of the human condition; this is postmodernism, and in the postmodernist view the realm of symbols is mere simulacra, irresolvably divorced from an "objective reality" that "no longer exists". By reading BUFFET FROID as part of the postmodernist project, it seems to me, we close off these "totalising" interpretations and leave only one valid reading of the text: as an autotelic artefact of darkly comic absurdity, the ironic distance of its vision the only tenable response in a postmodern era.

That explicitly postmodernist texts do exist and function in exactly this way is, I think, a problem for the philosophy of postmodernism -- or for me at least. This may be a failure of imagination on my part, I admit, but in the idea of an explicitly postmodernist narrative with irony as a necessary trait I sense that particular form of bad faith which is endemic enough to nihilism and existentialism to give them both bad reps as philosophies of fatalism and angst. What manifests in failed nihilism or existentialism as an essentialist projection of meaning onto the void, a pathetic fallacy that the value-neutral disinterest of the universe is a value-negative hostility, manifests in postmodernism as an essentialising (and totalising) negative valuation that treats the absence of authenticity with the disaffection of the cynic. I'm not convinced, in fact, that the disengagement inherent in the more playful irony of postmodernism which treats the text as game isn't equally dubious, a defensive distancing.

It is nice and safe, after all, to read BUFFET FROID as ironic. And it is a black comedy, after all. The events are farcical even at their darkest, artificed to an utter irrealism. Is it an explicitly postmodern text? Well, if the shoe fits, as they say... But at the same time, I can't help but relate its title to Burroughs' THE NAKED LUNCH, and parse it as an image of confrontation with reality, an image of that moment of recognition that the "simulacra" of a meal is actually the "objective reality" of a dead animal.

Another old review. In 1970 and 1971 Hammer Films turned out a series of remarkably interesting horror films. Countess Dracula is an interesting account of the career of the infamous Elizabeth Bathory, and it’s a reasonably good film. The Vampire Lovers, based on Sheridan le Fanu’s novella Carmilla is a very fine film indeed. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb is one of the more intriguing of Hammer’s Mummy movies. Twins of Evil is an immensely entertaining vampire yarn. And Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is perhaps the most interesting of the lot, and original and offbeat and very effective reworking of Stevenson’s classic novella.

Yet another noteworthy 1971 Hammer movie is Hands of the Ripper, directed by Peter Sasdy. It’s another fascinatingly original reworking of a clichéd idea, this time Jack the Ripper. It has a strong cast, headed by Eric Porter as a turn-of-the-century medico who is an early disciple of Freud and wants to use Freud’s ideas to cure violent criminals. Derek Godfrey is very good as a slightly sinister Member of Parliament who may or may not have some involvement in a violent murder. Angharad Rees plays Anna, a somewhat disturbed young woman who may also be involved somehow.

The plot is intelligent, the story moves along at a good pace, the acting is good, and there’s some excellent cinematography which towards the end even gets a bit arty and gets away with it. This is a clever and original horror movie.

Title: World Made By Hand
Author: Kunstler, James Howard
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
336 pages

My partner and I both have a small infatuation with post-apocalyptic dystopia. Despite that, I've been experiencing some frustration with the prevalence of writers who are more interested in military history than they are in figuring out how that world would come about and what it would look like if we ever get there. We both enjoyed this book, both for it's description of a world that has little to do with military tactics and weapons and more to do with how people would live and die.

Kunstler is better known for his critique of post-modern suburban life and peak-oil policy in non-fiction work like The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. This book takes place in a world where there is no more oil or large-scale commerce and communities have turned in-ward, focusing on smaller, more local modes of production.

The main story follows a man named Robert Earle, a former software marketing executive turned carpenter and musician, and what happens over the course of one summer when an eccentric religious sect settles in his small up-state New York town. What follows is a somewhat Huckleberry Finn-esque survey of what that world looks like, the kinds of communities that would form, and how they might disagree and learn how to get along.

The parts that we really enjoyed were the descriptions of what life actually looks like; back-yard gardening, and small scale bartering. It's like a 19th century frontier world where everyone has seen Mad Max.

For people who are sensitive to violence, there is at least one scene that could have been ripped right from The Stand. But other than that, we both thought this story was well-told and very moving. Other reviewers have commented that it made them think about alot of the things that we take for granted in modern life, as well as contemplate what we might have lost.

More repostings of brief pieces previously posted elsewhere, but quite a while ago.

Roger Corman’s Tower of London is based loosely on the life of King Richard III of England, and when I say loosely I mean loosely. Surprisingly, given that it was made in 1962, it’s in black-and-white. It also looks even more low-budget than the average Corman picture. You’d expect Vincent Price to have great fun camping it up as Richard III, but somehow it just doesn’t come off. The movie as a whole doesn’t really work. I’m a huge fan of Roger Corman’s work, but this one isn’t up to the standard of his wonderful Edgar Allan Poe movies.

The Last Colony
Writer: John Scalzi
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 320

Finally got around to reading the third in John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, a book that takes place after the events of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. I wouldn't recommend reading this book if you haven't yet read the other two. If you HAVE read them, and enjoyed them, don't miss out on this story. It concludes John Perry's and Jane Sagan's adventures, and it's a far deeper book than meets the eye. It challenges the truths behind loyalty, peace and war, and well worth the read.

The premise: John Perry and Jane Sagan have retired, only to be called up for duty once more: this time to lead the seed colony world of Roanoke. It's a media-circus, as it's the first colony that's been populated by other colonized planets rather than Earth, but John and Jane soon discover that the Roanoke colony is much more sinister than that: it's a pawn in a brewing war between the Colonial Union and the allied alien forces of the Conclave, and unfortunately, Roanoke and its colonists are stuck right in the middle.

The full review, which does include spoilers, may be found in my journal. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.

REVIEW: John Scalzi's THE LAST COLONY

Happy Reading! :)

Series: The Obernewtyn Chronicles
Publisher: Tor, 1999
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-genre: Post-apocalyptic



Isobelle Carmody is an Australian author who primarily writes fantasy for children and teens. In fact, even though the version of Obernewtyn I have here is marketed as adult fantasy, it's being reprinted by Random House as YA later this year. Carmody has done very well down under, but it's only been relatively recently that her books have become available in North America. Which is a shame, because if this book is any indication, we've been missing out on a lot.

Post-apocalyptic fantasy is awesome.

I have to say, I loved Carmody's prose. Some books are about the story they tell, and some books are about the telling. Obernewtyn is one of the latter, and as a result, even when the plot was slow moving, I couldn't stop reading. The world is well drawn, with just the kind of dark intensity that draws me, and the simple beauty of the language had me devouring the book like Cookie Monster with, well, cookies.

So what are the flaws? Actually, Elspeth covers them pretty much all on her own. I never did get much of a feel for her personality, in spite of the first person narrative. I'm not sure if that was perhaps a conscious choice on Carmody's part, providing a convenient place for reader insertion, but it bugged me a little that even the animals seemed to have more definite personalities than the protagonist. (I adored Maruman, the slightly insane cat, but that comes as no surprise to anyone.)

My issues with the protagonist aside, I really enjoyed the book, which goes to show you just how awesome the writing really is. Obernewtyn kickstarts a series of 6 books, which I'm now going to have to get my paws on.

As it’s been a little quiet here I’m going to repost some brief pieces that I posted in other places quite some time ago.

The director of the 1971 movie Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, Seth Holt, died before the movie was completed. Which is a great pity, because judging by this movie he had plenty of promise. Although I’d heard some fairly bad things about this one, I thought it was extremely good. It has more a feeling of the uncanny and the forbidden, of things that should not be, rather than out-and-out horror. 

The plot involves an attempt by Tera, a long-dead sorcerous queen, to return to life in the body of Margaret Fuchs, daughter of the leader of the expedition who uncovered Tera’s tomb. Although you might suspect that Valerie Leon was cast more for her cleavage rather than her acting her performance as Margaret and Tera is actually rather good. Andrew Keir as her father is excellent, James Villiers is suavely villainous, Aubrey Morris as Dr Putnam is delightfully and eccentrically creepy. Mark Edwards as the boyfriend is a little on the bland side – the most amusing thing about the character is his name – Tod Browning. Overall though the acting is exceptionally good.

As you expect from Hammer Films, the movie looks good. There’s some nicely atmospheric cinematography, the pacing is excellent, and the ending extremely good. By modern standards there’s very little gore, although there’s certainly more than in earlier Hammer movies. Personally I can happily do without gore. Overall a highly entertaining movie.

According to Amazon.co.uk, Pan Macmillan is republishing King Rat, PSS, The Scar, Iron Council and Un Lun Dun all in hardcover on the 4th of September. Could this mean there's a new book coming out soon too? Publishers usually renew an author's back catalogue whenever there's a new book coming out, in order to cope with an influx of new readers interested in the author's old works.

This popped up today - another great film for  nowt!

Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss.

The latest instalment of Des Lewis's 'megazanthus' (magazine/anthology) Nemonymous, which prints its stories without author credits (instead, they'll be given in the next volume) -- though the writers are listed on the back cover. The anonymity didn't actually make much difference to me, because only one writer's work was familiar to me -- John Grant (

realthog), and I think I've guessed which story is his -- and it doesn't really matter anyway, because Cone Zero is an excellent selection of stories. There are sentient domestic appliances on the run from humans; strange artworks, one depicting an orphan's mother and a large metal cone, the other incorporating a cone whose dimensions are zero (most of the stories reference the book's title in some way); mysterious houses, even entire worlds that aren't what they seem to be. With only a few missteps, I'm as sure as I can be that this will be one of the best anthologies of the year.

 

That shout you all heard last week was me, reacting to the news that Brett Favre had been traded to the Jets.

Yes, he's old. Yes, he can drive you crazy with that now-I'm-retired, now-I'm-not stuff. But he's still Brett Favre. This year should be a lot more exciting in the AFC East.

Could this be the year I get my Subway Superbowl?

Well, probably not. But a boy can dream.

(I am sorry to lose Chad Pennington. Chad's taken a lot of crap from fair-weather fans, but he was a smart, tough, gutsy guy who played his heart out, and when healthy, one of the best quarterbacks in the league. All those injuries took their toll, sad to say, but I will always cherish the memory of his first year, and that 41-0 playoff win over the Colts. I hated to see him go to the Dolphins, he's too dangerous a competitor to have in the division, but I will always wish him well... at least when he's not playing the Jets).

Back from Denvention, and this time I get to stay home for a while.

Worldcon is always one of the highlights of my year. (I am still sorry I missed Japan last summer). This one had some problems, admittedly. We were scattered over seven different hotels spread out across most of downtown Denver, we had to share the cavernous convention center with several other conventions, the con was way too early (worldcons should be held on Labor Day weekend, the traditional date, not the first weekend of bloody August), and the party hotel (the Sheraton) really sucked. Even so, I had a great time. Hey, it was worldcon. There are good worldcons and not-so-good worldcons, but the worst worldcon is still great.

For me, the highlight of the weekend was getting to go up and accept Michael Chabon's Hugo for THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION. A great book, and a great honor, and the comments Michael made in the acceptance speech he sent me were very gracious. Calling him afterward to tell him that he'd won was also great. He really did not expect it; his surprise and delight were palpable, even across a couple of thousand miles.

Melbourne won the right to host the 2010 worldcon (not unexpectedly, since they had no competition), so for all my Australian readers who have been emailing me to come visit Down Under, please circle the dates on your calendars. The Aussies always give great con. Visit the Aussiecon IV website and sign up now; memberships will never be cheaper than they are today.

We had a great time -- and a good crowd -- at the Wild Cards panel as well. At my reading, I read the first third of "The Mystery Knight," my new Dunk & Egg novella, and that seemed to go over well. Did the usual round of power breakfasts, editorial lunches, and publisher dinners, had lots of good meetings on lots of projects... and, of course, there were the parties. As usual, the Brotherhood Without Banners threw the best parties at the cons. My thanks to Stego, Mr & Mrs X, Kate, Queen Julie the First, Yags, Skylark, Daj, Vanessa, and the rest of the crew, and my congratulations to the new Knights of the Tomato Pie. And a shout out to Pod and Lodey, who were missed.

Only one more trip this year (Calgary, for the World Fantasy Convention), so for all you folks who are worried that I'm having too much fun, relax. My assistant Ty is getting the grindstone back up to speed, and I am about to press my nose to it once more.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2008/08/notes-on-strange-fiction-pataphysical.html

The story so far:

Strange fiction is built from quirks -- words or phrases reading as images or image-combinations that breach the base-line subjunctivity level of "could have happened" attaching to any sentence read with a suspension-of-disbelief. Quirks come in different flavours according to (amongst othet things) the type of impossibility they embody, temporal or nomological. Dividing temporal impossibility into technical and historical, we get the hypothetical novum and the counterfactual erratum. Understanding nomological impossibility as a transgression of the laws of nature, we get the metaphysical (supernatural or extra-natural) chimera.

OK. So...

There's a third level of possibility identified by philosophers. While this is sometimes equated with the nomological/metaphysical (where the laws of nature are considered a priori truths -- essential and necessary in and of themselves,) a more useful distinction can be made (where we allow for the laws of nature to be considered a posteriori truths). The third level of impossibility is, in this schema, the logical. A dilating door is a novum, and a Nazi US president is an erratum; these are temporal impossibilities (one technical, the other historical). A crescent sun is a chimera, a nomological impossibility. A word or phrase reading as an image or image-combination that is a contradiction-in-terms is a different flavour of quirk altogether. (It would be useful to have a name for these quirks of illogic, I have to say, but nothing springs to mind right now. Suggestions are welcome.)

So how do these quirks of illogic feature in strange fiction?

Left turn, Clyde.

Illogic in literature is one of my interests, including that which arises from narrative discontinuities, jarring juxtapositions of apparently unrelated scenes, cut-up and fold-in threads of story that are irresolvable into a coherent causality. Delany's DHALGREN does this effectively on a number of levels, from the circularity of its structure (the half-sentence that begins the book completing the unfinished half-sentence which ends it, a la FINNEGANS WAKE) to the upside-down journal entries spliced into the narrative towards the end. A different but comparable type of discontinuity is to be found in the story that climaxes his Neveryon sequence, "A Tale of Plagues and Carnivals", where events in his invented elsewhen are intercut with events in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Right turn. Clyde.

Delany's reference, in one of the appendices to the Neveryon books, to the writer Guy Davenport was enough to intrigue me enough that, coming across a copy of Davenport's collection of short stories, ECLOGUES, in a bookshop, I picked it up out of curiosity. In that collection there's a story called "Idyll" which I've referenced on numerous occassions as a core influence on my own work.

The story begins in ancient Greece with a contest of insults between a shepherd and a goatherd. (Like much of Davenport's work it is imbued with a Fourieresque utopianism and homoerotic sensualism that is both deeply appealing in its relish of the world's intellectual and sensational richness and deeply unsettling in its openness to critique as pederastic apologia.) The story pivots radically, however, when a dialogue exchange between the characters becomes a transition from ancient Greece to the American Civil War. Without quite being able to point to precisely where in the narrative this happens, the reader realises they have crossed a seam in reality. The two characters have morphed into soldiers in the mud and misery of a more modern conflict. The name of the story and the juxtaposition of Arcadian pastoral with modern warfare make for a fairly obvious meaning in the bold contrast -- the reader is not left utterly baffled -- but the shift is a deeply strange structuring. If a surface "message" seems self-evident in the juxtaposition, a deeper, more liminal meaning is coded in the congruities of the two spliced-together scenes (the seam of more abstract continuity between them) and in the negative space between them (the seam defined by their spatio-temporal incongruity). I find this story endlessly fascinating.

On the back cover of this Davenport collection I came across the term "pataphysics"* for the first time, in a blurb describing Davenport as one of the world's foremost pataphysicians. At the time I remember finding that strange term also quite intriguing. What the fuck, one asks oneself, is pataphysics?

Left turn, Clyde.

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The Wikipedia entry is not entirely unhelpful but the characterisation it offers is by no means instantly comprehensible. Roughly speaking, it describes pataphysics as the study of what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. The term coined by Alfred Jarry, it was defined by him as "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments". The wikipedia entry also offers Raymond Queneau's description of pataphysics as founded "on the truth of contradictions and exceptions."

Here's my own take on it, a suggested interpretation of pataphysics which might be a little less opaque:

As metaphysics is to physics, so pataphysics is to metaphysics. If this seems like gibberish, we can understand the relationship in terms of levels of possibility. Where physics deals with (the limits of) temporal possibilities, and metaphysics with (the limits of) nomological possibilities, pataphysics deals with (the limits of) logical possibilities. Physics examines our world for its temporal structure of material cause-and-effect. Metaphysics steps outside the domain of physics in order to build models of nomological substructure that might (theoretically) allow for apparent circumventions of material cause-and-effect. Pataphysicis is the next step, necessary because metaphysics accepts the limitations imposed by logic. Where metaphysics creates models of systems that are (or are meant to be) coherent and comprehensive (because consisent and complete, as Godel tells us, is too much to ask), pataphysics creates diagrams of systems that focus on the contradictions and exceptions as significant in their own right.

Pataphysics is the study of logical impossibilities. Where temporal and nomological impossibility is artificed into narrative in the form of hypothetical / counterfactual and metaphysical quirks, logical impossibility is artificed into narrative in the form of pataphysical quirks.

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But what does that mean in practical terms? What does a pataphysical quirk actually look like?

Just as it's not that difficult to situate novae, errata and chimerae in textual specifics ("The door dilated," "President Himmler sat in the Oval Office," "The crescent sun was high, the moon low,") pataphysical quirks are not so hard to pin down, I think, as it may at first seem. Understanding that the basic unit of illogic is the contradiction-in-terms, we can define the pataphysical quirk as a use of words or phrases (reading as images or image-combinations) that generates an inherent self-contradiction in the narrative, something that renders a sentence literal nonsense. Chomsky offers one possible example in the sentence "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," which is actually a self-contradiction in a number of ways: anything green cannot be colourless; the quality of colour is not an attribute of ideas; ideas cannot sleep; sleep cannot be done furiously. The definitions of the terms make them incompatible.

In its simplest form then, the pataphysical quirk is an oxymoron like Chomsky's nonsense sentence. In practice, however, the basic oxymoron is not a very common form of the pataphysical quirk, possibly because we're often able to apply simple transformations to these sort of oxymorons, reinterpret them as metaphoric sense or bad writing rather than nonsense. An oxymoron like "The silence was deafening," can be read figuratively. An oxymoron like "He froze, turning his head slowly to look," can be understood as simply sloppy prose. (It's a sentence like this in the first few pages of THE DA VINCI CODE that made me stop reading.) And in strange fiction particularly the tendency to concretise metaphor in the form of conceits makes us prone to reading pataphysical quirks as metaphysical quirks. One can imagine a strange fiction narrative in which Chomsky's sentence makes sense:

In the metaphysical elsewhen of Morphologyland, ideas are living creatures, gelatinous and transparent like amoeba when newborn. Into this elsewhen are born two new ideas -- Modernity and Postmodernity. Dismissed by their elders as too green to deal with the world, these naive young ideas resent their low status, but not on a conscious level. The ideas of Morphologyland, you see, are so emotionally repressed they can only really experience their anger while dreaming. By day, Modernity and Postmodernity frolic in the fields, blithely unaware of the ire building within them. At night however, under a gibbous moon, these colourless green ideas sleep furiously, twitching and snarling in their fitful slumber.

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If we're looking for pataphysical quirks then, we have to look beyond the simple oxymoron. The oxymoron does however point us in the direction we need to look. The underlying illogic of the oxymoron resides in the fact that it consitutes a simultaneous negation of the very assertion it is making. It is a breach of coherence, a violation of the cardinal rules of composition that apply within a linguistic system, a statement which paradoxically denies its own validity, flaunting its self-evident artifice. If we treat this violation of the system as the core feature of the pataphysical quirk, then we might begin to see, I think, how they can be constructed from far more sophisticated mechanisms.

The wikipedia article on pataphysics offers an interesting avenue for investigation in the idea of the "pataphor", a figure of speech that is to the metaphor as the metaphor is to the literal representation, one that creates an additional degree of separation between the narrative and its context. So if a literal representation of the context would have a character "make it clear exactly where they stand," and a metaphor would have them "lay their cards on the table," a pataphor would transform the metaphor into a new context, have the character "lay their cards on the table, then pick them up and start building a house of cards". While concretised metaphors may be written into the strange fiction of novae, errata and chimerae, and this sort of fantastication therefore quite familiar, the pataphor is noticeably distinct in the fact that it concretises the metaphor, in this example, as it occurs, violating convention in the most fundamental way, rendering the whole narrative as unpredictable and metamorphic as a dream. We might easily follow that pataphor with another, a description of the character "unlocking the door of that house of cards, picking up the mail from the mat as they walk in."

The pataphor is not all there is to it however. The typographical tricks of concrete poetry can also be understood as pataphysical quirks, as can those of books like Danielewski's HOUSE OF LEAVES, or Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION or THE DEMOLISHED MAN, violating the sequential structure of prose. The portmanteau puns of FINNEGANS WAKEare pataphysical quirks, every single one of them, from riverun onwards, violating the structural integrity of the words themselves. The interpolated, upside-down journal entries in Delany's DHALGREN are pataphysical quirks, as is the sentence split between end and beginning, fusing the narrative into a (logically impossible) loop. The collaging of narratives in "A Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" makes each section and each interstice between them a pataphysical quirk. Wherever we find such collage, in fact -- in the elegantly structured order of Guy Davenport's "On Some Lines of Virgil" or the cut-up and fold-in chaos of William Burroughs' THE NAKED LUNCH -- what we are dealing with is pataphysical quirks.

In short, any such disruption, anything which fucks with the conventions of the system, ruptures the linear continuity of the text, breaks it up into pieces and puts it back together in non-consecutive patterns, collapses it into itself or splays it out into reality in a metafictional breaking of the "fourth wall", any violation of the integrity of the narrative.-- can be considered a pataphysical quirk. If novae, errata and chimerae can be said to dislocate the narrative, in fact, shift it in one of three "temporal dimensions" -- the "forwards" of the hypothetical, the "sideways" of the counterfactual, the "up/down" of the metaphysical -- then the "fourth dimension" of potential dislocation can be said to be the pataphysical, that dislocation which breachs the "inner/outer" boundary between narrative and context.

The pataphysical quirk is not new. One very good reason, in fact, for gathering these variant techniques together under an umbrella term, understanding them all as pataphysical quirks, is that it's well past time we ceased referring to techniques that have been around in Western literature for over a century (and possibly much longer) as "experimental". These techniques are no longer experimental, and the writers that utilise them are no longer experimentalists. The pataphysical quirk is tried-and-tested, it has specific effects, and the writers that use it as are as often as not entirely aware of what they're trying to achieve with it.

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So, what are the effects of the pataphysical quirk then?

Let's look at a very simple form of the pataphysical quirk as a starting-point. We can scale up an oxymoron such as "He froze, turning his head slowly to look," into the more complex sort of narrative non sequiturs we get in absurdist or surrealist fiction, the discontinuities that give these works their oneiric quality, the discombobulation engendered where the sentences don't build up into a sensible sequence. The pataphor outlined above may result in this, but the effect can also be achieved by straightforward self-contradiction. To take a visual example, in Bertrand Blier's film BUFFET FROID there are two such pataphysical quirks right at the start of the film, strangenesses which serve to establish its agenda.

In the opening scene, a commuter waiting in an otherwise empty Metro station is disconcerted by a conversation with a character played by Gerard Depardieu, in which the latter talks of his dreams of murder and displays a potential weapon -- a flick-knife. The setting is uncannily deserted but for these two and the conversation rich with non sequiturs, but the real quirk comes when the flick-knife is laid down on a seat behind them only to have disappeared when they next turn to look for it. One might, at a stretch, imagine that one of the characters has surreptitiously pocketed it, or that someone has snuck in and across the large empty space of the platform to steal it, staying out of shot at all times; neither of these fancies is remotely plausible however. The knife is simply there one moment, gone the next.

The second quirk seals the deal, in fact. After being kept out of a train by the alarmed commuter, Depardieu is seen walking through a tunnel of the station -- where he finds the commuter who we've seen leave on that train just seconds ago. Depardieu's flick-knife is stuck in his stomach, and the dying man's description of his attacker is pointedly applicable to Depardieu. Again there is a strangeness to the presentation -- an absence of blood, a casual acceptance in the way both respond to the situation -- but it is the discontinuity that is the core of the strangeness. The narrative simply does not make sequential sense. The implicit cause-and-effect connections of the shots (like that which binds the sentences of written fiction) renders the whole series of events an inherent self-contradiction.

Pataphysical quirks such as these often invite a reading of the narrative as oneiric, the discontinuities modeled on those of dreams, the whole narrative as a representation of a dream even. This is, I'd say, one potential reading of BUFFET FROID, suggested right at the start by the unreal quality of the deserted station, the casual attitude of the characters to the strange situation, perhaps even specifically hinted at in Depardeiu's casual disclosure that he dreams of murdering strangers. In Michel Gondry's THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP similar pataphysical quirks of narrative non sequitur are explicitly sourced to dreams. The narrative is comprehensible as a night-time recombination and fancification of a day-time situation that can be at least partially reconstructed. Likewise, we might read BUFFET FROID as a dream of the day-time counterpart of Depardieu's character, reconstructing some of his reality from the alienation and existentialism articulated as much in the setting as anything else. His loveless relationship with his wife, their home in an otherwise empty tower-block in La Defense, her eventual murder -- these could be read as pointers to an external reality.

With BUFFET FROID this reading remains largely a projection of the viewer however, with little more than Depardieu's early mention of dreams to suggest it. An equally viable (and equally suppositional) reading is possible in which the grim desolation is that of some sort of existentialist Hell. The films sits easily within that mode of strange fiction which represents the afterlife as an amnesiac reiteration of the bleak misery of reality. The depopulation of the cityscape, the casualness with which murder is committed throughout the film, the fact that most characters seem entirely willing to despatch others without regret, the fact that Depardieu's murdered wife's corpse has an expression of relief -- much of the strangeness of the film makes perfect sense if we simply imagine that this is a murderer's circle of hell. So, Depardieu, having committed some murder in reality, has been damned to a cold inferno inhabited by characters with as little empathy as himself, spiritless souls whose only course in their empty afterlives is to repeat their crimes upon each other until they themselves are (presumably) sent to oblivion through murder. The murder of the commuter at the start of the movie is, in this reading, a presentation of his own culpability to him. While Depardieu buries this in his amnesiac denial, editing his action out of the incident, he remains sufficiently aware of this guilt to question, wondering aloud to his wife and others as to whether it's possible that he did actually murder the commuter.

This reading of the film is, of course, just as much a projection, a rationalisation which is ultimately unneccessary and reductive. In this type of narrative, the point is not to find a "solution" to the strangeness, the underlying "actual truth" which makes everything sensible. In THE BIRTHDAY PARTY by Harold Pinter, it's not really relevant what "organisation" Stanley might or might not have left. In THE PRISONER it doesn't really matter whether the Village is run by the British, Russian, American or Ruritanian secret service. To look for such literal reductions is, as often as not, to miss the entire point. The pataphysical quirk is there to disrupt this process of rationalisation, to strip away the self-serving logic of cause-and-effect, to disjoint our stories of self and world, present us with the bare bones of the dynamics that our relationships with self and world are based on, the meat of isolated actions and situations. BUFFET FROID translates from the French (for anyone that doesn't know this) as COLD CUTS. It is the same image that underlies the title of William Burroughs seminal work of cut-up and fold-in narrative non sequitur: THE NAKED LUNCH. Burroughs explained his title as representing the moment of realisation that comes when one looks down at the dead meat on one's plate and understands exactly what it is.

This is pataphysics.

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As Guy Davenport demonstrates, though, this is not all that pataphysics is, not all it can be. The illogic is not necessarily used to expose brutality, the bleakness of an amoral universe empty of intrinsic meaning. This is certainly a tendency in pataphysical writing, in which the absurd and the cruel often go hand in hand, but the technique of the pataphysical quirk is simply a technique. Like any technique it can be used with quite different objectives in mind.

Michael Winterbottom's movie NINE SONGS is a narrative which utilises pataphysical quirks to great effect (as I've blathered on about at great length previously). To be fair, the disruption of the system is subtle and restrained, the narrative of a relationship told through largely dialogue-free sex scenes separated by nine gig scenes (the nine songs of the title), emphasising the artifice of the cut-between-scenes as a mild quirk in its own right but maintaining the linear order; the intercutting of this structure with a diegetic framing narrative -- shots of Antartica from the sky with a voice-over by the protagonist as he arrives -- is the only substantial breach of continuity. Nevertheless, this formalism reveals a purposeful and powerful pataphysics in action.

By stripping away all conversational melodrama and pseudo-meaningful story, Winterbottom presents the course of an entire relationship through these wafer-thin slices of scenes which consist almost entirely of two people fucking. What he understands and articulates masterfully is the degree to which people relate without language, simply through the way they behave to and with each other. Infatuation, resentment, forgiveness, pity -- every act of sex in the film is an act of communication, a dynamic exchange composed of actions and reactions which speak volumes about the characters and their relationship. Even at its most artificed -- through this artifice, in fact -- NINE SONGS achieves a realism that makes the staged conversations of most realist cinema look as phony as the insufferable babbling of Dawson's Creek. Each snapshot moment encapsulates a state, every congruity and interstice between them suggests a transformation, and -- assuming the viewer actually gets it -- the film resolves into an excruciatingly tender and poignant portrayal of a relationship. As far from affectation as one can get, it becomes an incredibly natural and sincere representations of a relationship.

The result was, of course, criminally misrepresented by reviewers who seemed to just miss the point entirely for the most part, focusing on the reality of the penetrative sex acts filmed by the camera. Interrogating the film for some grand controversialist statement on the relationship pornography and art, most reviewers apparently failed to glean the fact that the actuality of the intercourse was only a means to an end -- a rendering of sex at the level of detail necessary for it to function as a visual language. If NINE SONGS implictly asserts, by example, that the filming of actual intercourse normally associated with pornography is valid as a technique in art, that assertion bears as much relevance to a reading of the film as if one were to read SNOW WHITE as a movie about the relationship between animation and feature-length cinema. As the first full-length animated feature, SNOW WHITE does make an implicit assertion, by example, about the validity of animation as a technique in feature-length moving pictures. Disney were, in fact, quite concerned as to the audience's response, whether viewers would accept a movie-length cartoon. While this may be of interest to a historian of cinema, it is hardly an incisive comment on the movie as a work of art.

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There's clearly a relationship between pataphysics and postmodernism, but that relationship is not one of identity. The conflation of the techniques and one project that utilises them is another good reason for rearticulating the discourse; all too often any work that uses these sort of systemic ruptures is glossed as postmodernist (or postmodern experimentalist, in a combination of the two glib labels) when it may be far from this. Where postmodernism plays in the ruins of modernism, its ludic gamings of narrative safely couched in archness and irony as often than not, and as often as not refusing the whole notion of meaning, defiantly irrelevant, where it fragments the narrative with quirks of illogic in order to make it abundantly clear to the reader that all of this is mere artifice (because God forbid we take the strangeness seriously) this is only one application of the technique.

That technique, we shouldn't forget, was inherited by postmodernism from the modernists whoo came before them. Hell, it's arguable, I'd say, that postmodernism can be seen as simply a sort of nihilist/existentialist modernism. If modernism sought to craft grand meta-narratives that could explicate the Big Picture of the human condition, fusing rationalism and romaticism, modern science and ancient myth, the postmodernism which claims to reject all such grand meta-narratives sounds suspiciously like a meta-narrative in its own right. The end of history? Yeah, OK, whatever.

Davenport was, I'd say, about as modernist a writer as you can get. Pataphysics in his hands was all about the restoration of the archaic in modernity. It's no accident, I think, that he writes of the death of Picasso in one story and, in another, of the discovery of the cave-paintings of Lascaux that resonate so deeply with the imagery of the bull that dominates much of that painter's work. Or that the dog in that story of discovery is called Robot. In Davenport, the fragmentation of story born of a pataphysical approach is not a declawing of the narrative. It does not reduce everything to a ludic artifice, an ironic game to be enjoyed on a largely intellectual level. Enthusiasm is as much a key word in terms of his fiction as is elegance, and in its most ancient sense -- en-thusiasmos... having the god within.

To put this in the context of the last entry on seams, with much pataphysical fiction, it seems to me, the very point of the fragmentation is not to show how really all we have is this multiverse of idios kosmoi [sp.?] -- realms of individual subjective reality; rather it is to refocus the reader on the seams, not just as the boundaries between these realms but as the interstitial spaces we travel and, in fact, in which much of the real action takes place.

So, yeah, that -- as far as I'm concerned -- is what the "pataphysical quirk" is all about. Now if only I could think of a name for it. As I say, suggestions welcome.

*Jarry called it 'pataphysics, but I'm dropping his apostrophe here cause pataphysics is poncy enough in its own right without making it more so. Sue me.

Even by the standards of Russ Meyer films Common-Law Cabin is a strange one. It’s a kind of transitionary film, between the dark and violent weirdness of movies like Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the more colourful and rather lighter surreal sex comedies like Vixen.

Dewey Hoople runs a tourist resort on the Colorado River. It’s actually not really a resort; more a tourist trap. In fact it’s just a cabin in the middle of nowhere! Unsuspecting travellers are lured there to be fleeced by his partner, a drunken old sailor. Once there they are sold over-priced booze, and treated to some truly bizarre entertainment - there’s a kind of wild woman act by his scantily clad and very well-endowed housekeeper Babette, and a floor show provided by his equally well-endowed daughter Coral.

Coral’s go go dancing is proving increasingly disturbing for her father given that she’s a rather well-developed girl, and her go go dancing costume leaves little of her charms to the imagination. His housekeeper certainly thinks he takes far much too much interest in those very womanly charms!

A fairly unhealthy situation gets a lot more unhealthy when the latest party of suckers arrives. There’s a slightly sinister individual who for some inexplicable reason decides to wants to buy Hoople’s place, and there’s an obviously not very happily married doctor and his very well-endowed wife (yes, this is a Russ Meyer movie, and there are the usual outrageously ample bosoms).

As usual in a Meyer movie, the mood gradually darkens as it emerges that one of the tourists is most definitely up to no good, and events build towards a violent and bizarre climax. But again as usual in a Meyer movie, the violence is very much cartoon-style and is much too outlandish to be offensive or really disturbing.

This movie also marks a change away from the black-and-white cinematography of the film that preceded it, and the colour photography has the bright vibrant feel of his later movies.

Common-Law Cabin may be Meyer’s most underrated movie. Definitely not his best, but it’s most emphatically worth a look if you’re a Meyer fan