An Interesting Essay by Matthew Cheney

The Rats in Our Walls: An Essay

Reterritorialization first requires deterritorialization — uprooting. To uproot, we must dig in the soil, the mud, the muck. (With Lovecraft and some of the associated topics here, there is plenty of muck.) But we’ve got to find the roots so we can see which ones are, despite rocks and rot, healthy and which need to be cut away.

This will be a journey.

Lovecraft, history of eugenics, Faulkner, links to other interesting articles (which my college doesn’t have a jstor subscription to, sob), and the discussion of a book with the great title of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

La Folie Baudelaire by Calasso

Art by Arthur Zaidenberg from A Rebours by Huysmans

‘All in all,’ Sainte-Beuve continues, ‘M. Baudelaire has found a way to construct, at the extremities of a strip of land held to be uninhabitable and beyond the confines of known Romanticism, a bizarre pavilion, a folly, highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious, where people read the books of Edgar Allan Poe, where they recite exquisite sonnets, intoxicate themselves with hashish to ponder about it afterward, where they take opium and thousands of other abominable drugs in cups of the finest porcelain. This singular folly, with its marquetry inlays, of a planned and composite originality, which for some time has drawn the eye toward the extreme point of the Romantic Kamchatka, I call Baudelaire’s folly. The author is content to have done something impossible, in a place where it was thought that no one could go.’

Quote

Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce.
-Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Review: The Monster Of Elendhaven

Johann the Monster joins up with Florian the Sorcerer in the decaying industrial town of Elendhaven. Wacky hijinks ensue. If by wacky one means murder and lust and revenge and disease. That’s pretty much what I mean. Nicely decadent. Good emphasis on clothes and food; can’t have a decadent fantasy novel without descriptions of food and clothes. The setting is delightfully grimy and cold and smelly. The author made a great choice in setting the story in the Arctic, makes for a striking change of setting. Not many decadent novels have this setting. A very impressive first novel.

If you like: The Paradys stories by Tanith Lee or The Etched City by KJ Bishop.

Another success in the Tor novella line. They’re doing a fantastic job in their choice of publications.

Thanks to Jack Guignol at Tales of the Grotesque and Duneonesque for the recommendation

Such a Sexy Beast!

Great article on a great film.


Geezer films are dogs on chains, thumpings in back alleys, Ray Winstone, Cockney rage, Marlboro reds. These hallmarks are present in Sexy Beast, but they’re strangely askew. Almost every character is as emblematic of London as jellied eels, but most of the action takes place in Spain. The setup – a retired thief is pressured into doing one last job – is as familiar as they come, but this is no common or garden heist film.

https://thequietus.com/articles/27676-sexy-beast-20-anniversary

Also, watch this film if you’ve ever wanted to see Ghandi be a vicious thug. Ben Kingsley’s performance is a thing of awful beauty.

I had no idea that Jonathan Glazer had directed it. No wonder the surrealism. I highly recommend Under The Skin by him. Top notch surreal SF starring ScarJo.