Things are rarely simple with Gene Wolfe. Take his Castle of Days – there’s not one castle, there’s two of them. The first castle is a physical book – a compilation which reprints his second major short story collection (Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days), a rare pamphlet he put out about his process of writing The Book of the New Sun (The Castle of the Otter), and the second Castle of Days, this being a brace of essays on other topics.
What you get here, then, is a triptych, comprising one short story collection and two essay collections, each of which is a shade over half the length of the short story collection. It’s the sort of edifice you’d want a floorplan to navigate – so here goes…
Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days
As the title implies, this has a calendrical theme, with each short story being associated with a particular holiday, anniversary, or other annual occasion. There’s even a bit of microfiction in the introduction – a cautionary tale about the danger of misusing libraries – to mark “Date Due”, and to reward people who don’t skip author’s introductions.
Our first full story marks Lincoln’s birthday with How the Whip Came Back, a scathing bit of social commentary about a near-future UN conference which plans to reinstate slavery – specifically in the form of penal reform, so that convicted prisoners could be “leased” to paying members of the public. Originally published in 1970, this would have hailed from when Wolfe regarded himself as more of a doctrinaire libertarian, so there’s some cracks about how Church and charity have withered away because people have been happy for the state to take on those roles instead, though equally Wolfe doesn’t take the usual libertarian route of arguing that charity can step into the compassion gap – indeed, the main character is a woman who works for the charity sector for social clout, not because she sincerely cares about the causes in question.
The story can seem incongruous, because the US prison-industrial complex is an infamous Constitutional loophole which keeps a form of modern-day slavery going anyway – but on reading up on this I found out that prison labour in the US expanded massively after 1979 legislation created lots more opportunities to use it, and in particular removed restrictions on prison-manufactured products crossing state lines. To that extent, it’s hard to disagree with the central pillar of Wolfe’s position here – something not unlike what he was afraid of has in fact come to pass.
That said, I am not sure that the background details like expansive government welfare programs or the decline of religion necessarily point to the root cause of this evil; private corporations, a force notably absent in the story, seem to be the main beneficiaries of the US prison-industrial complex, and many hard-right US leaders have been able to resolve the contradiction between avowed Christian values and support for harsh treatment of convicts.
The depiction of a shabby, declining Catholic Church – where the last nun recently died, the priests have given up all their traditional trappings, and the Pope knocks about in a cheap suit smoking cheap cigarettes while trying to wake up people’s consciences – is perhaps something Wolfe legitimately worried about at the time (he strikes me as someone who’d have felt it was a shame that Vatican II gave up on the Latin Mass because Latin is pretty), but also incongruous given the Church’s apparent ability to keep the lights on and the bills paid despite an entire half-century of fiscal corruption and mass rape elapsing between the story’s composition and now. If that can’t crash the popularity of Rome, what can?
Whereas Werner Herzog was extremely busy in the 1970s – putting out early, formative works, his first major artistic successes, and many of the films his reputation would rest on going forwards – cinematically speaking, he was less prolific in the 1980s. Part of this is because in this period his endeavours diversified – for instance, in 1986 he began a long-running parallel career as an opera director.
There is, however, another reason – which is that at this point his feature film concepts became so elaborate, and so difficult to execute, that this combined with his insistence on making things as authentic as possible (along with some major additional production challenges not of his own making) made executing and completing them much more difficult. In fact, he would only finish three full-length movies in this decade – but one of them would overshadow all the rest.
In all three, Herzog tries to tackle the subject of colonialism, and yet the stories of these productions suggest that the mere process of trying to make a commercially viable movie – even one aimed at the arthouse market – can itself be an act of colonialism.
But before that, a few shorts…
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
This is a short piece, directed by Les Blank, essentially shot as publicity material for Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven, a documentary about the pet cemetery industry. Herzog had encouraged Morris to complete the project by saying he’d eat his shoe if it got finished and released; this depicts him making good on that. It has some interesting insights into Herzog’s mindset about filmmaking and his consciously anti-commercial approach, but the piece is most interesting for its role in bringing Les Blank into Herzog’s orbit – which, as we’ll see, will prove crucial later on.
Way back at the start of the pandemic I took a look at a cross-section of Werner Herzog’s earliest films and then didn’t follow up on it; now I’m going to correct that by taking a look at a slightly later phase of his career, including the moment when he turned from an earnest young arthouse director trying to prove himself into an earnest young arthouse director who had emphatically proved himself by producing his first classics. Along the way, we’re going to take a long hard look at disability, colonialism, abusive upbringings, and ski jumping…
Handicapped Future
Herzog would most infamously touch on the subject of disability in Even Dwarfs Started Small, and there’s certainly still room for debate as to whether the film represented an important opportunity for its little person actors or an act of exploitation. Herzog’s 1970 documentary Handicapped Future perhaps makes some amends for the possible missteps of Dwarfs. This has Herzog considering the treatment of children with physical disabilities in West Germany at the time, and in particular the cultural and institutional challenges they face.
Herzog not only makes sure to give the kids a chance to say their piece, but also allows their non-disabled peers to speak as well as their parents and teachers, in order to give a picture of these kids not as isolated individuals but as members of society – but society does not necessarily want them. The combination of ignorance, active cruelty, and misguided assumptions that they are better off being euthanised that they face is not only strikingly familiar (I have disabled friends in the UK in the modern day who speak of very similar treatment by others), but also troubling in the context of a country which three decades prior to the documentary had policies of extermination towards such kids.
Donna Kossy’s Kooks is the product of her long-term interest in, well, kooks. Kossy defines a “kook” for this purpose as someone who has ended up socially ostracised (or has ostracised much of the rest of society) as a result of unusual, bizarre, or socially unacceptable beliefs that underpin their entire existence. She is quick to note that this is not a synonym for mental illness or eccentricity, because plenty of people are very, very mentally ill without having any unusual beliefs and plenty of people entertain eccentric ideas – without these ideas becoming the overriding feature of their lives.
To further refine her definition, Kossy explains that kooks are not merely people who believe strange things – they are people who have taken that strange belief beyond the realm of personal opinion and idle fancy and made it a core aspect of their life. They are convinced that what they have hit upon is not a mere theory or speculation or a fun-to-think-about idea: it is an eternal truth, a “solution to the World Problem”, and they are intent on letting everyone else know about it.
In other words, QAnon types who occasionally share conspiracy theories online or air them at family gatherings but retain a wide range of other interests and can go through a day at work without getting into an argument with a colleague about Hillary Clinton’s adrenochrome habit are not in and of themselves kooks. A QAnon adherent who absolutely commits themselves to the cause, wraps their house in Trump flags, and can’t have a conversation without ranting about their latest conspiracy theory? They are a kook, even though they didn’t originate a lot of those ideas.
In fact, there is no need for a kook to be particularly individual in their beliefs – they just need to be far away from the status quo (and if they express those beliefs in a really strange way, that certainly helps). One thing Kossy clears up in her introduction is that, contrary to what you might expect, many kooks aren’t that original. When you first look into the subject, they all look like very original thinkers because they are expressing startling ideas not often encountered – but there are trends and patterns that become apparent (including, Kossy notes, a disturbingly frequent streak of antisemitism).
Often, a “kook’s” promotion of their particular idea is to their personal ruin, though the book profiles some kooks who become leaders of their own little communities and cults and do quite well out of promoting their particular schtick, though Kossy generally tries to limit herself to figures who are at least somewhat sincere about what they teach, rather than outright fraudsters and hucksters. Some of the figures profiled here ended up bilking followers out of money, or were caught in obvious fabrications, but even they have stuck their necks out in a way that someone acting solely out of personal self-interest perhaps wouldn’t have.
Over eight years ago, back when I was posting on Ferretbrain instead of here, I reviewed Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis – the edited compilation of his personal spiritual/philosophical diary/workbook/manifesto as worked on for the last years of his life. After people gave positive feedback for that and expressed an interest in more Dick, I began my glacial series of Dick reviews.
Beginning with his early writing, I then explored his refinement of his short story writing in 1953, leading into his mid-1950s shift from concentrating on short stories to primarily writing novels. This led into a late 1950s period dominated by failed attempt at writing mainstream novels, with Time Out of Joint a rare SF diamond in the rough from that era. Then, in the early 1960s, the runaway success of The Man In the High Castle prompted Dick to abandon mainstream writing again and to start producing his most celebrated science fiction novels.
The thing is, science fiction didn’t pay well back then, so to pay the bills Dick needed to turn out a lot of product. He turned to amphetamines to fuel the process, and submitted an explosion of material in 1963. He was similarly prolific in 1964, and even though he scaled back his pace in 1965-1966 he was still producing an extraordinary amount of work.
Something had to give – especially given his tenuous mental health and the mayhem that was happening in his personal life – and by the late 1960s and early 1970s Dick would be in freefall. His flow of writing was drastically curtailed as his drug use – and the community of drug users around Dick – finally made his life too chaotic to meaningfully work, and a break-in of his home, yet another marital disintegration, and a suicide attempt in Vancouver followed by a stint in a Synanon-affiliated clinic preceded his final migration to Orange County. (Some – including Dick himself – have noted how appropriate it is that a writer known for his exploration of fake and artificial worlds should have ended up living so close to Disneyland.)
What happened next is legendary, in part because of Dick’s role in recording and promoting that legend. In February of 1974, Dick was recovering from a wisdom tooth extraction, and answered the door to accept a delivery of painkillers. In a brief exchange, he asked the pretty, dark-haired delivery girl (yes, Dick very much had a type) about the fish-shaped necklace she was wearing, and she explained that it was a symbol used by the early Christians. Sunlight glinted off it; a pink light was reflected into Dick’s eye.
Under normal circumstances, that would be it.
However, that’s not how it happened with Dick. Instead, the pink light kicked off what was either a significant paranormal or spiritual incident or a major neurological freakout. Dick felt that the light had dumped a mass of information in his mind in an instant, and for the coming month would experience intense visions, a sense of another mind existing in his body, an impression that all time since the first century AD was an illusion, and a conviction that he actually a covert Christian working to destroy Roman persecution. He also became convinced that something was badly wrong with his infant son Christopher; when Dick and his then-wife Tessa took Christopher to hospital, he was diagnosed with an inguinal hernia which needed urgent intervention. Dick would occasionally receive instructions or reassurance in his mind, typically expressed in the calm, neutral, HAL-like tones of what he called “the AI Voice”.
Dick attributed this information – and a range of other phenomena, which would continue intermittently well after the February and March 1974 peak of the incident – to the beam, and began his Exegesis as a process of thinking through on paper what had happened to him, what it might mean, and what broader conclusions about the nature of reality could be drawn from it. Almost all of his work – essays, speeches, short stories, and novels – written after 2-3-74 either directly deals with the insights he believed he gained during the experience or at the very least weaves in strong allusions to it.
This would continue more or less until his death in March 1982, so to put this in context: imagine if, right from my 2012 review of the Exegesis to this point, rather than producing the varied articles on here and on my other blogs I’d just been solely writing about Dick, and imagine further than a lot of my writing about Dick would involve going back to the same material and coming back with completely different takes on it, so for instance one week I put out the version of my article on his late 1950s work where I shit all over his mainstream novels and regard Time Out of Joint as the lone oasis in that particular desert and the next week I put out a different version where I regard the mainstream novels as the truly important part of his writing. That would reflect both the intensity of concentration Dick applied to 2-3-74 and also the sheer variety of angles he tried to analyse it from.
That being the case, it is easy to see 2-3-74 as a unique, life-changing experience for Dick, and certainly that’s how he tended to think of it. However, I think it would be too simplistic to interpret it that way. For one thing, it isn’t even the first time that Dick had visions or felt that information was being fed into his mind. There was his late 1960s breakdown where he felt is daughter Isa had become an inhuman thing. There was the time in 1963 when he was out strolling to the little shack he used to write in when the sky transformed into a terrifying metal face, which he would later adopt as the face of the maltheistic entity in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or another incident where he described seeing a sort of tear or rip passing across the sky.
Perhaps most significantly, in the Exegesis Dick makes passing mention to having heard the AI Voice giving him the answers during a high school physics exam in 1947. This is, of course, Dick writing after 2-3-74, so the chances of him reframing past incidents in his life through the lens of that are high. Nonetheless, the fact remains that throughout his life Dick seems to have experienced incidents which are at least similar enough to important elements of 2-3-74 that he could regard them as forerunners to it after the fact.
In this case, 2-3-74 is not so much a unique and unprecedented incident in Dick’s life, so much as it is the most significant of a series of such experiences. It certainly didn’t represent an abrupt end to Dick’s previous worldview and way of life; many of his philosophical preoccupations, unfortunate biases, and recurring problems continued after it.
The major change in Dick’s life arising from 2-3-74 is the way he was fixated on it to an extent he doesn’t appear to have been fixated on previous incidents. Whilst it’s entirely possible that Dick had other philosophical diaries that have either not survived or not been recognised as precursors to the Exegesis, Dick would take up 2-3-74 as a primary focus of his writing for an extended period of time. Of course, he’d had other long-standing themes and ideas he’d been exploring in his fiction – his questioning of reality, humanity, and artificiality went back to the 1950s. But 2-3-74 set all of this into a pattern that would be adhered to for his last eight years of work.
Over the course of this series of articles I have kept half an eye on the details of Philip K. Dick’s life, because autobiographical elements bled into a lot of his work and the texts lose something when prised away from that context. This approach becomes even more significant in this last phase of his writing, when autobiographical elements would become even more prominent, to the extent that several books from the era verge on fictionalised memoirs. The first the public would see of this approach, and of the 2-3-74 material, would not be the much-celebrated VALIS trilogy, but A Scanner Darkly.
One of the interesting developments in rock music as the 1960s gave way into the 1970s was the diversification of styles. The loosely connected genres of folk rock and psychedelic rock had made a case for popular music in general and rock in particular to be a medium for genuine, grown-up artistic expression, rather than disposable entertainment for teens; but once you say “this doesn’t have to be like that“, you invite people to imagine all sorts of different ways it could be.
Folk rock and country rock singer-songwriters used the medium to examine tradition or social roots, critically or uncritically. Glam rock took the popular acclaim and youth appeal of earlier years, teased out the sexuality, and made it a bit more ambiguous. Blues rock gave way to hard rock if it still cared about being sexy, metal in slow and fast flavours if it went for other moods. Progressive rock groups explored just how far you could stretch the rock format, cramming in tools from classical or jazz as necessary to broaden the field available to them.
In a decades-early preview of the musical fragmentation we see today in this Bandcamp age (where nobody has to listen to exactly what everyone else is listening to and it sometimes seems there’s more microgenres than musicians), the experimental wings of rock music ended up spawning bands with astonishingly distinctive personalities. Oh, sure, you could sort them under one broad umbrella or another, and there were plenty of me-too groups out there inspired by others’ sounds, but within prog (for example) you’d never mistake Jethro Tull for Yes or King Crimson for Genesis.
I’d previously been quite impressed with issue 1 of Hellebore, an attempt to do a graphically appealing folk horror periodical in print, and I’m glad to see that it’s survived to produce a second issue, even in the midst of this strange springtime. Issue 2 is the Wild Gods issue, and as the title implies it concerns itself in various ways with the concept of deities living in or presiding over untamed nature.
Katy Soar offers an overview of the latter-day British fascination with Pan, from 18th Century libertines of the Hellfire Club ilk adopting him as a patron of hedonism to Crowley and Victor Neuburg’s occult experiments to the Findhorn collective and all sorts of other revivals besides. She seems to miss Pan’s strange, incongruous appearance in The Wind In the Willows in the chapter The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, which Pink Floyd would later take as the title of their debut album (which, due to Syd Barrett being the band’s leader at the time, is arguably the most Dionysian and Pan-aligned of their releases).
I’d also be interested in Soar’s thoughts on Pan’s emergence in Hellier as a major figure, though this goes beyond the British shores she’d initially restricted her survey to; the way the team there end up resorting to Pan worship puts me in mind of how Soar argues that, precisely because Pan was a loose, easy-going mythological figure who tended not to have much of an intricate dogma associated with him, he’s more available for revivalists to try and experiment with than deities associated with more involved and difficult forms of worship to replicate.
Similarly informative articles come from Melissa Edmundson and Anna Milon. Edmundson gives an overview of womens’ writing about Pan and Pan-like figures from the late 19th and early 20th Century, identifying as she does so a small-scale movement to recontextualise Pan away from being just some rude dude who terrorises and rapes women and into a figure who represents a more nuanced engagement with the world, nature, and sexuality. Milon provides a fascinating anecdote about how a prehistoric cave painting which may or may not have antlers – depends on the photo you’re looking at – might have influenced Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult In Western Europe theories.
John Reppion makes two contributions. His first is an interview with Alan Moore in which Moore seems to buck against the very notion of folk horror – opining that the Wild Gods might instead walk in urban areas, because only urbanised people regard the rustic and rural as being frightening or special. It’s a fun read, but mostly for how Moore steers the conversation towards his particular areas of interest and refuses to engage with Reppion’s thoughts. Reppion has a bit more success with an article about the Wild Hunt and the history of that particular folkloric idea. Reppion’s other article is a piece on the Wild Hunt, a decent overview of the different forms this legend has taken that takes an unfortunate turn into overt neopagan proselytising which is about as gratingly unwelcome as any other form of proselytising.
Other less successful articles include Kate Laity’s musings on the fairy folk which doesn’t seem to construct much of an argument or have much of a point to it, and Ruth Heholt’s examination of Hammer’s Cornish duology, which is hamstrung by arguing that it’s one of the few zombie movies which follow the Haitian folkloric concept of the zombie being raised and directed at the will of a sorcerer rather than just getting up and chowing down on people in an uncontrolled manner.
This is either a clumsy misrepresentation of the history of the genre or exposes a gap in Heholt’s knowledge: before George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the pop culture concept of the zombie was “mind-controlled undead slave directed by wizard”, and zombie movies tended to depict them as such going back at least as far as White Zombie from 1932. It might just be a misstatement on Heholt’s part, but if so it’s a pretty serious one since it puts no caveats suggesting she really means “zombie movies from 1966 onwards” or whatever. As it stands, the text of the article reads like Heholt doesn’t understand the history of the subgenre she’s talking about, which is a problem when she is making sweeping statements about where Plague of the Zombies stands in the world of zombie movies as a whole.
On the whole, this issue was thicker than issue one by about 20 pages or so, tended towards more substantive articles, and generally improved on the weak points of the previous issue and maintained its strengths. Hopefully we’ll see an issue 3 this coming autumn…
From latter-day hits like Grizzly Man to the occasional surprise acting role in The Mandalorian or Rick & Morty, it seems like Werner Herzog has never been more widely known. This is pretty astonishing considering the bizarre arthouse material which he first made his name with, but on the other hand is a welcome outcome of a long career in cinema in which Herzog was pushing the bounds of the medium from an early stage. With significant blu-ray boxed sets released in both Region A and Region B (and a handy Region-Free blu-ray player), I’ve been able to sample a cross-section of his earliest work.
The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz
In this 1966 short film a group of young men undertake a bit of urban exploration, as a narrator muses on their adventures. We are told that the titular “fortress” has fallen into disrepair; before World War II it was a mental hospital, but after the Russians swept through and took everything valuable it was left deserted. The local authorities can find nothing useful to do with it, and are struggling to sell it.
Autumn, especially that part where it begins turning into winter and the hours of darkness seriously start closing in, feels to me like the natural season for horror, especially folk horror and its neighbours. Even after the festivities of Halloween itself, it feels like the dark powers of the universe haven’t so much been banished as appeased, and that cold night is still on the upswing.
It’s good timing, then, that some interesting new offerings have come out at just the right time to be savoured – whether that’s the full-throated folk horror of Hellebore, or the more retro-suburban twist offered by Scarfolk, as explored on the blog of the same name and the previously-released novelisation.
“Folk horror” as a subgenre has gained increasing recognition of late, in part because of the efforts of Facebook groups like Folk Horror Revival. The major players in that community operate, among various other projects, Wyrd Harvest Press, a self-publishing umbrella for various folk horror-relevant materials; Wyrd Harvest’s repertoire includes the Folk Horror Revival journal series, of which Field Studies represents the first entry.
Now in its second edition and edited by a cross-section of members of the Facebook group, Field Studies offers a range of essays, interviews, and other snippets on the general subject of the folk horror subgenre, coming across much like a genre-specific take on Strange Attractor.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 