Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Old, weird Dogtown

Dogtown "gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any given moment and renew an ageless rite there"

A new book describes a Gothic landscape in New England.  It's called Dogtown, and Bill Kaufman does a fine job in sketching out its dark contours:

compris[ing] 3,000 acres outside Gloucester, Mass., on Cape Ann, a peninsula about 25 miles northeast of Boston. It is a forested, primeval patch of land—its hills, as Henry David Thoreau noted, "strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down." This Dogtown has attracted artists, witches, nature lovers, creeps—and even darker spirits.

and

in February 1839, Dogtown's last resident, an ex-slave named Cornelius Finson, was carried off to the poorhouse. "All that was left," writes Ms. East, were ruins, lore and "a haunted reputation."

The author voyaged to the place,

convinced that it contained "part of the hidden America I had wondered about since childhood"—that old, weird America of unhanged witches and unhinged seers.

Joyce Carol Oates, America's queen of the Gothic, also offered a review:

East soon finds herself, like the protagonist of a mystery, ever more deeply involved with the colonial ruin—is it a place of mystical wonder, or is it an accursed landscape? In colonial times, Dogtown was a marginal area of Gloucester said to be a “haven” for former slaves, prostitutes and witches; in the 20th century, it was largely abandoned and became a sort of uncharted place where, in a notorious 1984 incident, a mentally deranged sex offender murdered a young woman teacher in the woods.

I'll keep an eye out for a copy.  Anyone looked into it yet?  And how accessible is the place?  It would make a fine escape from Boston's horrors.

Meanwhile, I'll close the laptop and walk out onto the mountainside, to haul wood amidst chilly morning fogs and the cries of animals.

(via Jesse Walker)

Voynich is anagrams?

Has the mysterious Voynich Manuscript been decoded at last? Maybe so.

A new theory holds that the text consists of anagrams, an elegant solution, if it bears out.

Previous Voynich Infocult posts.

(via Slashdot)

Another book bound in human skin

Another case of anthropodermic bibliopegy:

"HOLBEIN (Hans). Dance of Death, illustrated with Old Borders engraved on wood, with Latin Sentences and English Quatrains selected by Anatole de Montaiglon. Paris, Tross, 1856, PRINTED THROUGHOUT ON CHINA PAPER, post 8vo, appropriately bound in HUMAN SKIN, with a double of maroon morocco, enriched with three MOST WEIRD DESIGNS, executed in MOSAIC COLOURED LEATHERS, the binding specially designed and executed by the celebrated RAPARLIER. £31 10s

...The front cover of the binding, in human skin, is inlaid in orange, red, brown, white, green, yellow, and purple leathers; the back cover, in human skin, is in red, brown, green, white, yellow and pink inlay; and the double in dark brown morocco shews a crimson inlaid Gallic devil, with a ghastly grin on its white skull, dancing and beating a yellow and white tambourine."

Three gorgeous covers, as far as can be made out from the black and white.

Here at Infocult, we've peen paging through books bound in human skin for some time.

(thanks to ever-vigilant browser Steve Burnett)

Stories of Gene Wolfe

A fine appreciation of Gene Wolfe's short stories comes from John Clute.  Clute's reviewing a new collection, which I don't yet have, but it's all stuff that's already out there.  And it's magnificent material.  Wolfe's one of the greatest writers of our time.  Think Calvino, or Melville, or Angela Carter.

Clute assembles a list of his preferred Wolfe stories, both in that book and otherwise, and it's a grand syllabus.  I've put them together in chronological order, and you are in for dreams, mysteries, and exhilaration:

"'A Story,' by John V. Marsch" (1972)
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (1972)
"The Death of Dr. Island" (1973)
"Forlesen" (1974)
"Tracking Song" (1975)
"The Hero as Werewolf" (1975)
"The Eyeflash Miracles" (1976)
"Seven American Nights" (1978)
"The Doctor of Death Island" (1978)
"The Detective of Dreams" (1980)
"A Cabin on the Coast" (1981)
Empires of Foliage and Flower (1987)
"The Ziggurat" (1995)
"The Tree Is My Hat" (1999)
"Memorare" (2007)

I will post about Wolfe at greater length another time.  For now, starting to reread these stories and novellas reminds me of the sheer weirdness and surprise of each Wolfe narrative.  He throws me back to a line by line intensity like that of poetry, or the very best short story writers.  I never know what genre or trope to expect.

Several previous Infocult nibbles on Wolfe's corpus: one award, one great novel.

"The option to override the destruct sequence has expired."

Killer pastiche: two fine JG Ballard mixes.  Both are projected novelizations.  One is of the movie Alien (as if filmed by David Cronenberg!), the other of a classic American tv series.

At dusk Starsky was still sitting in the cockpit of the Grand Torino like the pilot of an alien spacecraft. Unconcerned by the shifting tide of traffic advancing toward him across the blackened beach of this urban nightmare, he watched the luminous sun melt into the metalloid dreams of Bay City.

Hutch walked out of the shadows of the glass city like a new Apollo of the marketplace, flames sparking from his spectral torso as if the sun in one last desperate attempt to attain eternity had suddenly found in this strange flesh the perfected incarnation of a delirious thought.

(via MetaFilter)

Into the most recent Jack O'Connell

I'm enjoying Jack O'Connell's latest, The Resurrectionist.  I love this imagination of Worcester, rust belt pulp Gothic:

[T]he factory on Grenada, in the heart of Bangkok Park, a classic red brick mill, six stories tall and a full block wide.  It had once employed two shifts of three hundred men each, and its smokestacks loomed over all of Bangkok like crosses on the road to Rome, spewing the plumed black smudge of rubber and plastic by-product seven days each week.  Since then, most of the smokestacks had half fallen, leaving battered towers crumbling lazily beneath Quinsigamond's toxic rains.

It goes on:

And the mill beneath the stacks was a mausoleum of fiberglass hands and silicon palates, ousing the typical urban scavangers - rats, pigeons, cockroaches, and, of late, a pack of nomadic bikers known as he Abominations. (80)

(thanks, Steven!)

Books bound in human skin, a Harvard update

Today's nice bit of Gothic bibliography from Harper's: (Scroll down for the surrealism of what the Index deems to be "Similar")

We at Infocult are followers of anthropodermic bibliopegy, of course. Previous posts here, here, here, and here.

Kindle fear arrives at last: don't carry one to Thebes

It's a sign that the Kindle has achieved some sort of cultural status, when the New York Times can run editorials about how scary it is.  Roy Blount Jr., whom I admire as a comedian, offers a very strange sort of take on why the Kindle is bad.

One idea is the copyright infringement argument.  This refers to the text reading function which appears in the new Kindle: "Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights."  The Authors Guild, of which Blount is president, has already taken issue.

Others have already offered counterarguments, namely that the feature isn't likely to appeal widely enough to create noticeable royalties.  Or, if it does boost sales, it boosts sales.  But it is noteworthy for fearsome digital technology studies to see this new front open up.

Listen, too, to the odd, sad opening line:

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me. But now I am president of the Authors Guild, whose mission is to sustain book-writing as a viable occupation...

What a grim way to begin the piece.  And what an Oedipal, parricidal theme to evoke.  Blount even returns to it at the end, in a way that's charming, sweet, and somewhat scary:

no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

The death of a father, plus children's stories - these go together very deeply.

This isn't to say Blount's piece isn't (intentionally) funny.  I love this idea:

the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

Sf's great schism

Here's a fascinating thought: is there a religious divide within American sf? It's not religious versus secular, as one might think:

The main SF line is ‘Protestant’ in its imaginings, with Catholic impulses providing important counterpoint. Roughly, Protestantism is all about the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and Catholicism is about magic and sacralization. So SF is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic, and the fact that SF is often hard to distinguish from fantasy just goes to show that Protestant and Catholic imaginative impulses can intertwine and do complicated stuff.

“If I am asked to condense into a single sentence, my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between ‘deism’ and ‘magical pantheism’) that emerges out of the seventeenth century” (p. xi-ii).

I wonder (among other things!) about non-western Christian sf, namely coming from the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

Lovecraftian kids book

Best idea for a children's book:

From one site:

After greedily yelling for more fish, young Bobby is sent to his bedroom without any supper at all. But Bobby escapes when the Manuxet River runs right through his room, carrying an old boat that takes him to a magical town full of fish and slimier things ... the town of Innsmouth. Will Bobby join the wild rumpus under the sea, and be crowned the most Deep One of all?

(via Monster Brains)