1734 – Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 by M. John Harrison (book 2020)

M. John Harrison (from Goodreads)

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.

review of the anthology by Gary K. Wolfe

Doe Lea (read here a free short story by M. John Harrison featured in this anthology)

blog of M. John Harrison

1505 – Vivarium (2020)

Director: Lorcan Finnegan

Lorcan Finnegan, an irish director is making quite a name for himself with such new and singular horrors as Without Name and his debut short Foxes.

“A young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical houses.”

Reviewers have been seeing the horror of domesticity, suburbia etc I will go another route allude to by friend Ion Dumitrescu “the home-grown alien”. I will also try to go into a more biological, even address the Neo-Darwinist frame. As such again, I am not trying to interpret, to tease out the various layers or let alone do a synopsis, analysis, but explore ideas, tendencies and directions where the Vivarium movie points at without any explicit references.

1. One would be to see how this movie fares in the post Covid-19 era, or how somebody already called it the BC and AC, Before Covid and After. Inside the ‘safe’ environment one is a (reproductive) reproducing target of societal mores, demographic fears & cultural conventions – at de same time the larger West (including Japan with loneliness on the increase) growing more & more oblivious to its aging & still vulnerable population, most of the care work done by invisible, robotic & imported others (especially from eastern Europe, Philippines but not only). Full surrogacy for all indeed, still surrogacy is still reserved for privileged few. Also this surrogacy seems to to be built on the most exposed to abuse, disenfranchised, most exploitable of grounds. The alien (virus) is kept outside while also keeping ones fears indoors, risking to become trapped into all sorts of OC behaviors and subroutines. There is a strong peformative power to Vivarium, the living is being played, the whole family is but a facade a stage play of caring & nurturing, in fact the nuclear family risks is becoming serialized, and each time of the day seems to get lost inside other same gestures, repeated tooth brush and morning rituals.
2. Vivarium is also about the lack of an outside, but only because the inside has been invaded, taken over completely and subverted by the outside. There is an incredible knot, where one lets in exactly what one does not want to. There have been always changeling creatures, entities that have switched children, that have swapped theirs for yours, within most fairy ((f)eerie) tale traditions (Irish, Scottish etc one especially I am pretty sure) and also within the classical Romantic canon the Erlkönig from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe poem steals the children or condemns them to an early grave. There is always the dark possibility that you are raising such a Wechselbalg being that ties in with subsistence farming and infanticide as A L Ashliman has been recording. The new gloss sa that child is only a way to be hooked into chains of debt & credit card ownership right after birth & ways to affect parent purchase patterns (see below).
3. The obvious references to Darwinist dark vitalism, cuckoos nesting habits early on is great. Cost benefit calculations have applied assiduously to biology and now have finally managed to cast offspring as parasitic, as utterly alien bodies both in the sense that the child is really competing for resources with the mother in the womb, but also from the pop science perspective of the “Selfish gene” replicator 80s stemming from R Dawkins. They are also utterly alien in the sense of being something else, with a language of their own, brain patterns, Net literacy even to their millennial parents not only their Boomer grandparents. The dream of helicopter parents breeds merciless if not only successful little competitors.

4. Capital as a real estate agent with a human face, as the ultimate alien parasite is using human caretakers so it can replicate itself, but only if it can maintain its integrity and mission to sell even more of its own. Only if it can learn to pretend it is human, to be able to find its next host, and only if it can maintain low mutation rates and keep redistributing the same encapsulated, self-contained creepy clean dream worlds, the same maze of pristine hoods and home ownership plans.

5. Enclosure of the commons has been a clear trademark of modernity, jump-starting the Industrial Revolution. The important thing is that it does not matter that the inhuman other breaks trough, that it is always showing & covering reality up the horizon. At the same time this normie uniformity has to be understood at another level that thethe suburbia model of the Fordist production line does not cover. Now the real uniformity does not lie anymore in the standardized units but in the standard of being sold and serialized difference, more of the same kind of newness, of showing one can avoid this 50s model that has been in a steady disrepute since both insider reactionaagainst company men & 60s counterculture has weirded it out and infused the mainstream with a steady stream of ready made otherness and non- similarity which in itself is neither good nor bad in itself but has come to signify stasis.

6. Same time, children have taken center stage in capitalism, the commodification of childhood has made them the principal port where the new desires, fears and commercial pressures jack in. Once you get to the children, the road is free to their parents pocket. Again not trying to pasre over, over interpret or look into what’s not there only trying to see why the movie is revealing in our current predicament.

7. What an incredible contrast between thus Vivarium (Mortuarium?), its closed systems (all food is introduced miraculously via outside delivery fro an unknown elsewhere – a pun on food home delivery/increasing Amazonification) and the self sufficiency of eco-technological Biospherics. One has to consider this contrast of two encapsulated models of living with pink self identic clouds(cloud computing?) – one that recreates (and reproduces) the desertification of the real (to take a Baudrillard phrase) a timeless unsustainable lifestyle, the earthly 50s golden age, by the way one that has been preserved even in the Scientological paradise myth & the search for a new possible life that takes into account all tbe synergistic & newly formed & evolving relationships within closed systems potentially on other planets and settlements elsewhere. One interesting absence are computers, desktops, thr internet per se even mobile phones are somehow absent, muted and only pre internet TV ëerieness is the favored medium.

imdb

1504 – UFOria (1985)

Director: John Binder

An incredible comedy movie that is available online, even if in a trashy VHS rip version – the medium perfectly fits the content. With some great actors such as late great Harry Dean Stanton, a phenomenal Cindy Williams and and incredibly likable macho-drifter Fred Ward.

Don’t know about you but I find this trashy cult movie a revelation in many senses. First it depicts the whole playa of fringe culture, high weirdness and faith hybridization, after the whole 1970s drift of the counterculture waking up in the midst of Reagan era (movie was finished in 1981 but released in 1985). Take it as a goofy, zany heart felt retro comedy, and it is still ok. It also combines the most unlikely bed fellows in an alternate reality US, almost as if the local mid west hicks would finally join the Rajneesh commune. The line is so blurry thats we can see all the shifts, radical possibilities & liabilities of charisma. Or it makes one consider an even more radical possibility, that an agnostic even cynical car smuggling atheist might lend himself to a mad and bumpy vision quest. By the 70s various subcultures, be it activist or hippie Fists or Heads had been intermingling or fusing as thr the term ‘freak’ started being used both by anti-drug Jesus Freaks or by hybrid experimenting /performative eco-technical living such as the Synergia commune and its later outpost Biosphere 2 (also in asemi desert setting).

What I like most is how the whole phenomenology of faith healers, quacks, abductee, miracle peddlers of the worst kind is being tackled. In a comic, parodic, screwball comedy, utterly unsophisticated way it gives credence to the whole Ufological transcendent drive. Ufo cults are easy to dismiss or to ridicule, but this movie takes it into another plane. It shows what is the genuine core behind it, its modern importance and the way it has incorporated so many other, older and more orthodox apparently outlooks (Jesus is an Alien) abducting them into outer space. They are basically a living phenomenon mapping out a new territory of contact and extra planetary revelation out of a very terrestrial setting. It has abducted & taken common feelings into a different dimension, while becoming such a waste basket hodge podge of bizarre witnessings from the most unexpected quarters, age groups and backgrounds. It also almost shows the glimpses of a rich quantum foam and sleeze that gave birth to the Burning Man and all the other desert happenings. To be sure the 2012 Mayan calendar was on, Terence and Dennis McKenna already launched their eschatological visions into the 80s America.

It is also a great example of James Williams approach on faith, and his experiential, interior lived contact, his still valuable take on extreme religious vision quests and nearly psychotic episodes. While non-dissmissive, it is one of the most irreverent movies in regard to all sorts of beliefs, even the most sincere one while it keeps an open mind, it never shows any preferences and always regards traditions as multiform and shape-shifting, often hype oriented and capital driven in the form of revivals and charismatic churches that pick on the newest trend or the most outrageous message. It also shows how much one is not in control, but under the spell or open to an outside that is mediated by the most unlikely messengers, hitchhiking the most bland or unspectacular of carriers & transmitters, even if that outside is constantly being subsumed into capitalism, circuits of profit and consumption, always fragile & liable to became the next attraction and the next way to bring a quick buck on the back of gullible congregations that are always never quite so lost or gullible. It shows what it might mean to be stranded in the universe’s backyard, washed out on the cosmic shore.

imdb

1493 – PLUTONICS: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory (2020)

Plutonics: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory is an open-access, sporadically published journal of contemporary theory. Coming from the geological term “plutonic” (which is, in turn, derived from the Roman God of the underworld, Pluto), meaning igneous rocks formed from deep geologic trauma and left to cool for thousands of years, often with traces of rare and weird metals, Plutonics aims to publish cutting edge theory that has no place within the ‘academy.’ With no real guiding thread but the Weird, we accept submissions from all disciplines (see more information) and actively encourage mixtures of philosophy, ‘hard’ science, poetry, visual arts, and other less-than standard forms of thought.

Vol XIII Contents

Vol XIII Contents

While there have been 12 published volumes of Plutonics, they have, sadly, been lost since The Event and although we are working on reconstructing them, this most recent run was started at the numeracilogically significant 13th volume. If you have any details regarding the existence of previous volumes, please contact us immediately.

Our review board is made up of geo-physicalists, philosophers, anorganic semoticians, structural bi0logists, and authors of the Weird and strange. When necessary, we commune with the ghosts of thinkers past to ask for guidance.

Following the general theme, or rather lack thereof, the journal accepts all types of submissions ranging from hard-nosed philosophic ramblings, to poetic musings on what it’s like to live without a spine. For those wanting concrete suggestions of what to submit, here is what one former editor suggested:

• ‘Serious’ engagement with the CCRU
• Deleuzian Beat Poetry
• Dolorous meditations on the anthropocene
• First-person accounts of philosophical epiphanies
• Self-help/Esoteric works
• Visual depictions of your communion with the Outside
• Meldings of Deleuze and Guattari with contemporary astro-physics
• Revivals of ‘disproven’ scientific theories
• Esoteric Posadism
• Etc.

From their submission page:

We welcome any and all submissions ranging from ‘rigorous’ theoretical thinking to erotic short stories to video games to artwork to anything else. 

General Guidelines:

• Written works should be somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words, but this is a malleable rule.
• To aid in editing, we prefer that citations be formatted in Chicago Notes style (with an optional bibliography if notes do not contain complete information).
• Ideal file formats are .doc(x), .png., .jpg, but if you have alternative ideas, we can integrate those.
• Please include a 1-100 word biography (can include social media links, blogs, etc.).