Philosopher Eugene Thacker (In the Dust of this Planet, The Global Genome, After Life, Biomedia, Tentacles Longer Than Night and many more) wrote in 2016 for The Japan Times a series of Black Illumination introductory (5 min) texts. They are behind a paywall, but saving them in Pocket you can actually read them all. His investigation of Japanese modernist estrangement, inhumanism and existential & cosmic (both somehow gazing into each other) pessimism is both brief, synthetic without spoiling the potential of these Japanese authors mangakas, philosophers, mad suicidal writers (Junji Ito, Keiji Nishitani, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato) for limitless collapse and vacuousness. In the words of my friend Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu – Junji Ito won’t probably topple this one manga, it goes into regions far darker than those populated by Spirals and ambling arthropod sharks.
A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
In January of this year, Saudi Arabia announced an immense new development project, that is supposed to set a blueprint for the future of the country and the world. The country will build a city, that stretches along a single 100 mile long line
Throughout his career, M. John Harrison’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else. This selection of stories, drawn from 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.
in Praise for his writing:
‘The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraint of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity.’ Ursula K. Le Guin
‘One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English.’ Robert Macfarlane
As a Fantasy writer he has no peer – inheritor of Mervyn Peake’s crown, he is, in the opinion of many critics, the originator of what is now known as ‘The New Weird’, his superb “Viriconium” stories and novels subverting Sword & Sorcery and Dying Earth motifs peopled with strange characters trapped in a strange world they never made.
His mainstream novel ‘Climbers’ is the only novel to ever win the Boardman Tasker climbing literature prize, expressing his interest in the interactions between character and landscape (he has long been a dedicated rock climber).
Harrison’s short stories run the gamut: from observational comedy to subtle ghost stories, from tales of cosmic entropy, their evocative settings and realistic charcters entrance – readers in Bath are still talking about the magnificent reading he gave of “Egnaro” at the Bath store in 1989.
Iain M. Banks described the first volume of his ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy as “Brilliant.” Like Banks, his work is admired by readers of both general fiction and genre fiction.
M. John Harrison is also one of The Guardian’s preeminent critics and reviewers. Come along to hear M. John read from his new collection, You Should Come With Me Now, which will be published by Comma Press in October.
At some point in the early 2010s, variations of a pop-science news story about bird sexuality began to circulate online. study says pollution makes birds gay and gay by mercury, read the headlines. The story was about the fact that pollutants leaking into the environment are changing the hormone systems of animals and leading to new traits and behaviors. In the case that has gotten the most attention, high levels of mercury in wetland habitats are altering the ‘pairing behavior and reproductive success’ of a species of white ibis. Scientists observe that, rather than heterosexual coupling and reproduction, some white ibises now prefer same-sex relationships. One image accompanying a news item shows a pair of male ibises strolling together along a shoreline, looking very gay indeed.”
Steven Ellison has been a long time admirer of Japanese extreme directors Takashi Miike, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi Kitano, as well as lots of anime such as Cowboy Bepop, Evangelion, Dragon Ball, that he openly mentions in his interviews. But instead of mentioning Tokyo Gore Police of Meatball Machine Kodoku one should go see it without any list of references or any direct references.
Probably one of the most over the top, original, gory, splattery significant movies of the early 21st century. It abounds in the resplendent hideous and the manically scatological, lavishes in all things festering, pustulant, always brimming on the ecstatic, experimental and transformative also due to its music video affiliations. There were mass walkouts at its release at Sundance festival. It has been all too easy to hail it as the ‘grossest movie ever made’. It is definitely a superb example of WEIRD AESTHETICS and slime dynamics nowadays and it is relentless. It definitely does not settle into the old sublime/beautiful binome, but ventures into the territory of new aesthetic categories such as the icky or the ‘zany’ explored by Sianne Ngai in her seminal text (Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting 2015). This is also an afro-body horror that makes clear what are the stakes here – full hybridization, exploding all the codes of racial science and white fear, those panic buttons of asepsis and so-called ‘miscegenation’ that did seek to actively separate, contain, incarcerate and experiment upon non-white bodies.
It also makes clear there can allow for incredible pockets of abstractness even in the midst of all things squishy, oozing, overwhelming thingness, overripe wetware imagery. There are dozens of scenes that are filled with incredible tenderness, nonhuman, and inhuman eroticism, beauty and exuberance for the unruliness of matter and information, the normality and mundanity of the strange and at the same time does not cease to take one by surprise, to be completely unpredictable. A relentless channel surfing seems to transect the whole movie and tap into the virality of pay-per-view ads, broadcasting enormities and deformities, diving into an attention ecology modulated by the appetite for mindless violence and remorseless voyeurism.
An increasing portion of current media abounds in the biohazardous, the panic-stricken, horrifying, the untouchable, impure, the dirty, repulsive or what was even considered previously as evolutionary blasphemic and maladaptive – here cherished in its most unruly and in your face forms. It also draws on avant-garde Berlin Dada photomontage artists such as Hannah Höch(see her Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic 1919 for example) seeking to upend and agglutinate existing dichotomies and gender roles.
There is no way one can summarize this movie and this is its best proof of not bowing to matters of taste, plotline narrative rule or formal rigeur. There are incredible collage animations as well as tableaux vivants – real outer world (exo biological?) ecosystems, mutant dioramas and curious and explorative human -non human relationships. Meanwhile, all the body fluids run their course.
On TV or in a bedroom reality welcomes the bubonic, the chronic carrier state of patient zero becomes the rule. There is no quarantine for the realness of constant touch, smear, sporulation. The epidemic is somehow a state of matter, it is as it is, nothing can hide it, disinfect it or banish it to the pathological. There is always a sort of teratogenesis as world-building going on. There are interdimensional furries stoners on a couch, there are alien jungles with anal flesh flowers and sentient sphincters.
Openings are important in KUSO and lead to revisiting what we have considered a final story – the evo-devo metanarrative of why we bipedal vertebrates are here, why we have an up and down or a clear separation btw the excretory and all the plurivocal portals of bodies that have multiple backs and unknown forwards, not just an up mouth and a down mouth.
Cast: Iesha Coston, Oumi Zumi, Zack Fox, The Buttress (Bethany Schmitt), Tim Heidecker, Hannibal Buress, Regan Farquhar, Shane Carpenter, David Firth
Here’s what IMDB has: “Events unfold after a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles.” Events indeed. The movie is broken up into three segments. The biggest segment, “Mr. Quiggle,” is the story of couple Kenneth and Missy, who have their active love life interrupted by Missy’s secret shame. Also, Manuel is scared of breasts, so he enlists the help of Dr. Clinton (George Clinton); his treatment involves singing into Dr. Clinton’s butthole and…I won’t spoil it for you. Further also, The Buttress and her alien buddies deal with her situation of being impregnated by a crazy stalker guy.
Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” By Roger Luckhurst
(…) “You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. It might once have been quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and all those arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.
Fisher’s guide to this terrain is an excellent place to start your orientation. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical. Somehow, Fisher magically renders post-Lacanian, post-ŽižekianMarxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old QuatermassTV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. With typical disdain for cultural boundaries, Fisher moves crab-wise from Lovecraft and H. G. Wells to the impenetrable mumblings of punk band The Fall; obscure Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV shows from Germany; Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Andrei Tarkovsky films; NigelKneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy Division; The Shining; the unclassifiable fiction of Alan Garner and Christopher Priest; Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary avant-garde SF film Under the Skin; and surprising appearances of Margaret Atwood’s early fiction Surfacingand Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar(which receives a great defense).” (read morehere)
(…) “In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.
Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.”
“What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is “a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present”. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses.”
“Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of capital. Keiller’s Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatley’s deserters rapaciously extract “treasure” from the soil, by means of enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient entity, developing Marx’s implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild.” / see: 771-robinson-in-ruins-2010
TimeSpace Warps 