Burroughs’ Nightmare Geography

Though the autobiographical Junky and Queer were written before it (and Junky was published substantially prior to it and made a small splash), there’s no question that Naked Lunch and the Nova Trilogy were the works which made William Burroughs truly infamous, particularly since they involved the debut of his bizarre form of prose surrealism. Likewise, though he’d put out a few pieces after it, a case can be made that the Red Night Trilogy is Burroughs’ final work of significant substance. Released over the course of the 1980s, as the HIV epidemic impacted multiple subcultures that Burroughs had long had a foot in (most particularly the gay community and the world of intravenous drug users), it’s not really about AIDS (even though a plague is featured in Cities of the Red Night) so much as it’s setting a capstone on his experimental fiction.

As much progress had been made in the intervening decades, society was still relentlessly unsympathetic towards drug users and homosexuals alike (let alone homosexual drug users); Burroughs, for his part, remained unwilling to compromise. Merely rehashing the tools and techniques developed in his glory days would just be going over old ground; for this last charge, Burroughs changed his angle of attack, bringing back more stretches of comparatively straightforward and intelligible narrative whilst reserving his more bizarre tools for when they would be most effective.

Cities of the Red Night

Burroughs introduces this opening novel of the trilogy by explaining his inspiration: reading about the pirate republics of the 17th and 18th Centuries, particularly the “Libertatia” colony supposedly founded by Captain Mission (though this one may be apocryphal), as examples of communities working on a voluntarist philosophy in stark contrast to the hierarchical societies of the time.

This prompts Burroughs to speculate as to what could have been had the pirate republics made common cause with the colonised peoples in the regions they established themselves (rather than acting as, in effect, unlicensed colonisers) as well as each other, so as to provide a disparate source of resistance against the authoritarian powers of the time. Burroughs posits that the US defeat in Vietnam indicates that the empires of the age would not have been able to root out such an insurgency any more than the US was able to defeat the Viet Cong – especially when by Burroughs’ estimate the technological gap between the pirate republics and the Spanish or British would have been significantly less than that between the US and the Vietnamese insurgents.

What unfolds after this statement of intent is, in its own way, just as bizarre as anything from the Nova Trilogy, but the methodology taken is rather different. Burroughs’ arsenal of occult obsessions (improvised chaos magic proliferates), sexual fetishes (boners and jizz everywhere), and surreal/morbid imagery (many, many nooses and hangings) is still very much in place, but this time he doesn’t turn all the dials up to 11 and deploy everything at once.

Ballard’s Millennial Legends

Myths of the Near Future is the first of J.G. Ballard’s two major late-career short story collections. In terms of the chronology of when the stories emerged, the anthology spans 1976-1982 – a narrower span of years than any Ballard collection since The Terminal Beach – and so covers much of Ballard’s late flowering of short story output from this period. From 1984 onwards, his short story output would be more sporadic, but as in Low-Flying Aircraft we find Ballard here using his well-matured talents to provide both somewhat more refined takes on earlier ideas and toying with a few new ones.

The title story is a phantasmagoric blend of a massive number of distinctive Ballard themes and images from across his entire career, combined together in a single narrative that reaches a Messianic culmination. Light aircraft… abandoned beachside resorts occupied by transients and hangers on… a long-decommissioned Cape Kennedy… the failure of the Space Age… empty swimming pools… people on the verge of turning into birds… new life forms emerging in a zone where the future is just a little closer than elsewhere… jeweled animals… obsessive blends of pornography and geometry… strange ritualistic behaviour… a world winding down into slow disaster, or perhaps preparing for a massive evolutionary leap… accreted time… a man chasing his wife, who may be dead… a renegade neurosurgeon… a strange sort of time-sickness which may be a transformation of how we see perceive the universe itself…

All these Ballard ideas and more besides crop up in the story, making it a sort of Platonic ideal of his writing and the keystone through which everything fits together. Look through it in this direction and you can see The Crystal World; rotate it a little, like a multifaceted gemstone, and you might see glimpses of The Cage of Sand, The Atrocity Exhibition, The Dead Astronaut, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Voices of Time, Storm-Bird, Storm Dreamer, and more besides.

What’s startling is just how well all these ideas blend together; it’s like this is the story which Ballard has been working towards, and he needed to master all the individual ideas in it before he could bring them all together in one bizarre vision. Whereas one of Ballard’s earliest stories, Passport To Eternity, fell down because it was trying to do too many things at once and Ballard was still honing his skills, here Ballard is able to throw in even more at once and make it all work beautifully.

J.G. Ballard’s Ultimate Resort

I’ve been looking forward to this one. Over the course of my coverage of Ballard’s short stories – working through his Collected Short Stories based on the contents of individual short story collections (so far: The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever), I’ve hit the point where I have now covered the majority of his short stories of his first decade or so as a writer, from 1956 to 1966. (A few odds and sods remain, but they’ll end up covered when I tackle The Venus Hunters.)

There is, however, a really major exception, and it’s not any of the component stories which went into The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1966-1969, and arguably a novel originally issued as a scattered cloud of short stories before Ballard drew them all together to reveal the hideous pattern lurking underneath). So far, I have not covered any of Ballard’s stories about the strange artistic enclave of Vermilion Sands. This means so that I’ve not talked about an entire dimension of Ballard’s early writing which was extraordinarily important – there’s a particular atmosphere to the Vermilion Sands stories that is unique to them and which, at least at this phase of his career, he largely restricted to them, and so isn’t really reflected in his larger body of work from the era.

The reason I’ve not looked at them yet is that they live in their own collection, Vermilion Sands, originally emerging in a slightly truncated US version in 1971 before Jonathan Cape put out the full version in the UK in 1973. It was subsequent to this that his early UK collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare – later retitled the much more appropriate The Voices of Time – was revised to remove the two Vermilion Sands stories from it and insert two other tales, and for good reason: Vermilion Sands is something special, and the stories gain something from being read together.

Clarke Emerges From the Labyrinth

After her mammoth 2004 debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a monster hit, and her 2006 short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu received a positive but more muted reception, we have not had much from the pen of Susanna Clarke. This long quiet period has not solely been down to her own choice; she has made it known that she’s had struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome which have hampered her creative process. Now, however, the logjam might have cleared, yielding the short (under 250 pages) novel Piranesi. Which may well be not just the best thing she has ever written, but the best fantasy novel in quite some time.

In a vast House of many Vestibules and Halls, filled with various Statues and an ocean which sloshes around the Lower Rooms and sometimes arises in great Tides, our narrator exists and records his existence in a journal. This is the only world he knows – or believes he knows, since he sometimes uses (and does not – yet – recognise that he uses) idioms which could not possibly have arisen from here. Indeed, he’s aware of concepts like gardens and kings and popes and mothers and foxes and fauns and so on and so forth, despite the fact that no such things exist in here, largely because he is able to empathetically infer their existence from relevant Statues – so the statue of the Gardener implies gardens, he recognises the Faun as a faun and the Gorilla as a gorilla when he sees their statues, and so on and so forth.

Other ideas not existing in the House also appear here and there in his writing. He mentions that in his early Journals he used an odd dating system, based on weird names for the months like “January” or “November” for “first month” or “eleventh month” and a bizarre number like 2012. He has abandoned this and for the past six years or so has given years designations based on significant events that happen in them, which strikes him as more reasonable.

The narrator is almost entirely alone except for the Statues, the sea life in the oceans, and the birds who feed on the sea life. (This makes 2020 a particularly apt year for the book to come out.) He is not, however, totally alone. There is the Other, who calls our narrator “Piranesi” (though the narrator suspects this is not really his name) and comes and goes mysteriously. The Other believes that there is a magnificent secret knowledge to be discovered somewhere in the House, and since he is the narrator’s only friend in the world and the narrator recognises him as a fellow man of reason, the narrator goes along with it when the Other cajoles him into helping out.

However, in the process of helping, the narrator becomes convinced that the Other is wrong – that there is no big magical power to be uncovered in the House, that the House is not a means to an end, it is just itself. Once he starts questioning the Other, the narrator’s Journal entries start showing more cracks – some of which are evident to him, some of which will only be picked up by attentive readers. Why doesn’t the passage of time quite match for the narrator and the Other? Is there really a new person who has come into this area of the House, and what do they want? Who left these notes elsewhere in the House, and why are there entries in the Journals that the narrator does not remember writing? Is there really a Battersea, and if there is what happened there that the Other doesn’t want the narrator to remember?

Seeking Goblins, They Find the Beast

My favourite televisual junk food recently has been Hellier, produced by the gang at the Planet Weird website and available on Amazon Prime, the Planet Weird YouTube channel, and the show’s dedicated website. It’s centred on Greg and Dana Newkirk, the co-founders of Planet Weird, and their team of fellow researchers as they delve into a paranormal mystery centred on the small Kentucky town of Hellier… or at least, they try to find a mystery.

The narrative begins simply enough: back in 2012, Greg had been contacted by an individual called David Christie, who e-mailed him about small alien creatures allegedly besieging his rural home. The initial e-mails sound a lot like a riff on the letters in The Whisperer In Darkness to me; to Greg, they seemed to be riffing on the decades-old case of the Kentucky Goblins. (Though the term “goblin” wasn’t used in the e-mails, the description of the creatures matched the earlier incident uncannily well.)

At around the same time Greg also got some e-mails from someone calling himself “Terry Wriste”, who seemed to know something about the situation, which made Greg think that there was probably enough to it to be worth looking into – but David didn’t respond to followup e-mails (much as you wouldn’t follow up, say, if you’d just written the original e-mail as a pisstake and were wrong-footed by being taken seriously), and Greg let the matter lie.

Years later, filmmaker Karl Pfieffer found himself drawn into the case through a series of curious synchronicities, prompting the Newkirks to take a second look at the case. Filling out the party with a few other trusted colleagues, the Newkirks would lead the group on an expedition to Hellier itself, where depending on your point of view they find absolutely nothing or absolutely everything.

Mini-Review: A Bit of a Fixer-Upper…

Gene Wolfe didn’t spend much time in the here and now in his novels. A clear majority of them are set in other worlds or other time periods, and if you asked a Wolfe cultist to recommend you some of his work they’d probably cite Latro In the Mist, The Book of the New Sun or The Fifth Head of Cerberus (and maybe The Wizard Knight) over any of his rare modern-day books, with the possible exception of his early career highlight Peace. The present didn’t really seem to be one of his interests; until The Sorcerer’s House, he hadn’t set a novel in the current era since 1990’s Pandora By Holly Hollander, and most of his modern-day novels were published in short breaks between major projects.

Just such a break presented itself in 2010, a point when Wolfe had completed The Wizard Knight and tacked another volume onto the Latro series, and sure enough he’s paid a brief visit to the present day in the form of The Sorcerer’s House, which has the worst cover I’ve ever seen on a Wolfe novel but might be the best novel he’s ever done in a contemporary setting since Peace.

Valley of Destin(y/a)

Dorothea Tanning is not primarily known as a novelist; her main claim to fame is as an artist, one of the original generation of surrealists who managed to keep her work fresher, develop her ideas further, and continue working for much longer than many of her peers. After initially making a splash in the 1930s, she kept producing artwork into the 1990s; if you hurry, you can still catch the excellent exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern.

In parallel with her artistic career, she had a less widely-appreciated literary career, and once her paintings and sculptures stopped flowing she spent the last decade or two of her life concentrating on poetry and prose, with an emphasis on the former. Chasm, her sole novel, came out in 2004, but it had a long germination, being as it is an expansion and extensive revision of the earlier short story Abyss, which originally appeared in 1949 before appearing in a revised version in 1977.

The Arizona desert which had such a great aesthetic impact on Tanning herself when she and Max Ernst went to live there provides the setting of the novel. Deep in the desert lies the mansion called Windcote, a bizarre architectural excess built by Raoul Meridian, a powerful, patriarchal manipulator with a fetish for women’s hair and a “laboratory” in which he constructs his personal homegrown brand of fetish equipment. Meridian has, over his lifetime, embroiled himself in the life of multiple generations of what you could call the “Destina dynasty” – a line of women all called Destina, ever since in the 1680s a forefather declared that all daughters of the line would be called “Destina”. There are currently two Destinas at Windcote; the elderly Baroness and a small child, looked after by her governess Nelly.

The tedium of life at Windcote is about to be disrupted; over the course of a weekend Meridian expects to greet various guests, among which are Albert Exodus and his fiancée, Nadine Coussay. In a decidedly Rocky Horror Show move, Nadine is 100% fine with coming up to the lab to see what’s on the slab (implication: her, with various sex toys of Meridian’s design interfacing with various parts of her anatomy), which leaves Albert at a bit of a loose end. Rattling about the house, he has a little tea party with Destina, with whom he gains a creepy fixation even as he falls out of love with Nadine, and who shows him various gruesome trophies brought to her by a “friend” out there in the desert.

Albert becomes fixated on the idea that Destina’s friend is, in fact, a mountain lion, and persuades Nadine to give Meridian’s hand-crafted dildos a miss, just this evening, so that they can go creeping into the desert chasm where Destina meets with the lion and see the lion. The two of them should watch out – bad things happen in the desert at night, particularly to a pair of individuals who aren’t communicating well with each other. Meanwhile, back in the house, Nelly finally gets Meridian alone…

Agent Cooper, You Are Far Away

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The news of a third season of Twin Peaks, coming 25 years or so after we last visited it via the weird hybrid prequel-sequel movie Fire Walk With Me, felt both like a glorious opportunity and an enormous creative risk. Not only had plot elements from the original’s ending suggested that a comeback in 25 years might be possible, but also the spectre of network interference that was widely held to have scuppered the original was banished. Written solely by creative leads Mark Frost and David Lynch, and directed from start to end by David Lynch, the whole prospect gave the series creators far more control than they ever had (or could have dreamed of receiving) during the show’s original run. Early on in the production process there was a risk that Lynch would walk away due to not being given the budget to tell the story he wanted; Showtime buckled, gave him a free hand, and later took pride in promising viewers the “pure heroin David Lynch”. That in itself is testimony of how the original Twin Peaks changed the television landscape. The major question was whether the magic of the original could be recaptured.

I’m not going to get into a spoilerful analysis in this review (and will thank commenters for using spoiler tags liberally in the comments), but in short: no, to a large extent they didn’t recapture the old formula. They did not try to, and in retrospect they would have been fools to attempt it; in the past quarter of a century what was fresh and different about so much of Twin Peaks has become part of the standard toolkit of serial television. That “pure heroin David Lynch” line is apt, because more or less the only aspect of Twin Peaks that hasn’t been successfully imitated is the distinctive aesthetic vision and apt for utter weirdness that Lynch brings to the table. (Wild Palms largely sabotaged itself trying to go faux-Lynchian, and it generally hasn’t been a recipe for success since then either.)

It becomes apparent very early on in this third season (sometimes dubbed Twin Peaks: the Return) that Frost and Lynch know full well that their unique selling point lies in letting David be David; the big question was whether you could do that over 18 episodes of a TV series and not allow it to become frustrating and stale. Incredibly, they more or less manage it, and they do it by once again refusing to be bound by the accepted wisdom of how television works.

“There Are Things Happening In This House…”

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Jacques Rivette was a director and film critic in the French New Wave movement whose style I would compare to a sort of cinematic equivalent of the magical realism strand in literature. You have the same combination of a real world, usually contemporary setting with hints of more unusual things going on and occasional overt lapses into supernaturalism, and a sort of enigmatic, reticent style of direction which, much like the narrative style of the magical realism authors, means that the story tends to keep its secrets close to its chest.

One factor which has made Rivette’s material hard for newcomers to appreciate is the extreme length of some of it. Whilst Rivette would make films of a more usual running time, his most famous work, Out 1, is a truly daunting prospect. There’s an abridged version entitled Out 1: Spectre, which goes at over 4 hours, but the full experience – Out 1: Noli Me Tangere is an epic of almost 13 hours long. That’s naturally a barrier both to home media release and for cinematic revivals.

However, Arrow Academy have blessed us with an expansive boxed set, encompassing both versions of Out 1 and several subsequent projects in a similar magical realist vein, allowing for perhaps the easiest entry point to this difficult body of work ever offered to the public. Though they were filmed after, I will tackle the subsequent movies first, before moving on to a detailed analysis of Out 1.

It Is Happening… Again

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

I’ve got good news: that gum you like is going to come back in style. Twin Peaks is returning for a new season after a 25 year gap that seems strangely planned, and I’m tremendously excited about the whole thing. One thing which is particularly gratifying is that show masterminds David Lynch and Mark Frost have remembered that Twin Peaks was an early example of a multimedia event, with tie-in media offering non-essential but sometimes fascinating supplementary material to enrich the experience.

One of the nice things about these items is that they were diegetic to the series, presented as artifacts from its world – sometimes representing significant plot points. Murder victim Laura Palmer’s secret diary, for instance, was a significant clue – and was actually published for us to read. Thus, ahead of the new series, Mark Frost has put out The Secret History of Twin Peaks, representing one supporting character’s idiosyncratic take on the subject that provides a few tantalising hints of what might be coming up, but focuses more on contextualising some of what has come before.

So, how best to catch up with Twin Peaks? The first port of call should probably be the now ironically-named Entire Mystery blu-ray set of the show’s original run, which includes all the episodes of both seasons, extensive extras, the prequel-sequel movie Fire Walk With Me, and – to the great delight of fans – a fat stack of cut scenes from Fire Walk With Me, spliced together by Lynch into what almost qualifies as a supplemental movie.