Month: June 2004

Grant Morrison: I collect ’em like ceramic doilies

Interview with Grant Morrison:

The world?s current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see ? everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we?ll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.

the state of the pasta or the pasta of the state

just this side of everything. i’ve got knots and curlicues to throw, dashing grins and spotless champions to the ground. gourds of righteous, yes and no, blue the lines of and between these precious days. falling down and rolling slow down the shortside of the summer sun. intrigues and catchall phrases that leave wastrels in their nets, quivering with some unconsuming fear.

omens and flat prophecies–uttered in the wallowing ululation of some feisty crone–converge, sending up a spray of tribulation or maybe just some irritation, a chance to scratch that offending itch. drawing scribbles in the dirt, scraping away the muck that’s grown on glass and floor. it’s become treacherous, navigating these shoals of discovery, no? unc’s gotten some pages sorted. dirty newsprint, smeared and smoky, fetched out of some dull attic or storage closet. be careful, now, those pages, yellowed and cracked, won’t stand for anything more strenuous than one or two longslow glances. get yer filthy paws off, monkey!

there’s more knowledge lost in cracks and flaws then we’ve even breath to speak of. or even just lost in plain site of all the traipsers strolling by.

….

with what strange tools might we excavate, tear out the hollows that muck about underneath the pipes and wires and caves withal? carve out some little corner of pasted together collage or mosaic. hell, i’d even settle for a tapestry, pointing to some old story half-forgot.

like: the bloodshot scorpion crawling out of the woodwork. ghastly shrieks all ’round. “there’s a tasty dish”. colgrave the accountant fumbles for his pinata. if you know what i mean. but i don’t think you do. vermilion shoes and wreaths of sangria sloshing about in the old clawfoot tub.

like: zykeephone dreamers plopping down their wet cash, their clams or sawbones or whathaveyou, for great gooms of greamed gooses. clothespinning those flooded dolors to the fishing line papoose. drip drip drip.

like: howitzer? howitzat? i fear for the peaceful sleeping all the world round. when i think of… when i dream of… when i… it’s all the screaming sound now, the dashing of all the innocent thoughts and hopes. i find myself transmogrified into some leering villain, twirling that black, whale-waxed, blood-caked mustachio. guilt-by-association, methinks.

like: juice for the gristmill. feeding those bones and pulpy limbs into that gapping hellmouth (“mind the gap. please. mind the gap.”) watch those fires burning up. all that brainmatter strung out along the poles.

like: the dreamer failing to imagine something, anything, more useful. settling into some kind of drear mundanity, past flaw. who wants the junk marked down to sell? they can’t give that shit away!

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

One of the more unique books I’ve read recently is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, utilizing the first-person in a truly fantastic fashion. It’s a narrative which is stripped almost entirely of emotional content/context. This has to do with the narrator’s condition–autism or asperger’s syndrome, though it is never explicitly labelled as such in the book proper. (The book jacket, on the other hand, feels no such qualms.) As a result of this, other people represent terrifyingly unpredictable ciphers, with their bewildering array of figurative phrases and startling gestures, because he is incapable of creating mental models of what other people are thinking or feeling, something most people do without even really thinking about. Basically, it seems that he has difficulty differentiating between what is important to pay attention to and what can be safely ignored. As such, his memory recall is astounding, a kind of eidetic memory, down to the number and shape of the spots on a cow that he sees on an afternoon outing. Christopher occasionally blacks out, or becomes incapacitated, because of a kind of informational or emotional overload. He describes it as the way a computer needs to be rebooted when it crashes.

The text of the novel is represented, fictionally, as a detective journal which Christopher starts to write in response to finding his neighbor’s dog dead, with a pitchfork stuck through it–the “curious incident” of the title.

In the fiction that I read, I tend to prefer the fantastic, the speculative, those works which veer into some kind of strange newness. For the most part, I’d rather not read about punks in suburbia or some other thing. If I want reality, as such, I’ll pick up some non-fiction. So, the most amazing thing to me about this book is that, through the voice of Christopher, English suburbia becomes a strange and fantastic place. Something as simple as catching a train to London becomes a nearly epic ordeal.

So, what I’m saying is, this is a pretty fantabulous book.

Read it.

[Errata:

*A good interview with Mark Haddon.

*Some biographical information on the old fellow.

*If you haven’t had enough of Amazon by now…]

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