The Slithering Shadow

 Pardon my indulgence while I wax autobiographical. But I think I've puzzled out something about myself that was hidden under the skin for many, many decades. In childhood, one tries to figure out who they are. Later in life, middle age, to be specific, one starts to ask: Well, how did I get here? And since I'm re-analoging my life, I have more time and headspace to think about such things. 

As I've stated many times before, I lived a part of my childhood in Brindisi, Italy. I lived there from 1976 to 1979. It was there that my passion for fantasy and science fiction was born. My father read a lot of science fiction and introduced me to many authors whose work I learned to love. But as far as fantasy, that was mostly something I discovered myself . . . on the magazine shelf of the Stars and Stripes Bookstore at San Vito AFB. 

It will strike the canny reader that it is extremely odd that a child of my age at that time was exposed to something as salacious as The Savage Sword of Conan. Those who are familiar with military life, though, will not be surprised when I say that I first discovered the magazine in a pile of comics at the base childcare facility one night when my parents left me there so they could go on a date to see Superman. 

As a child, I was an avid comic book reader. From Thor to Metal Men to Archie and Richie Rich, but Savage Sword of Conan was a shock to the system, a revelation. I won't go over what that magazine did to stir my young soul, but in hindsight, with many decades between then and now, I think I've finally discovered exactly why this horrifying, over-eroticized, violent "comic" resonated with me to the point that it set me on a wholly-new intellectual track that led to a lifelong obsession with roleplaying games, fantasy fiction, writing, visual art, and heavy metal, among other things. These obsessions are the reason this blog exists, after all.

The area I lived in while living in Italy is known for its aridity. It's basically an extension of the north African clime, separated from Algeria, Libya, et al, by a mere 87 miles at their closest points (Southern Sicily to Tunisia). Here the days are hot and dry and prickly pear cactus can easily be found along roads both in and out of the city. Near the apartments where we lived, a fig tree spontaneously grew in a ditch, and olive trees were everywhere. The area is known for its olive oil, in fact. There are also artichoke fields like corn fields in the US, spreading through vast expanses. I recall wandering through these fields and stumbling on small, stunted remains of Roman pillars - the artichoke farmers simply worked around them, the fields conforming to the contours of imperial architecture, an unavoidable echo from the time when Cesars ruled the land. 

When I opened the pages of The Slithering Shadow, I was immediately struck by the visuals of the desert. Conan and a buxom woman (they were always buxom, though I had no idea what that word meant at the time) are stranded in the desert and have just run out of water. They set out across the desert looking for water and stumble upon a seemingly-abandoned city.

One of the more commendable cultural norms in Italy is the siesta. Everyone, and I mean almost everyone, sits down and takes a nap in the afternoon. I learned this the hard way when I went across the street to buy candy (a cadbury chocolate egg with a metal soldier inside the egg) one hot afternoon. I approached the shop and saw the proprietor, an ancient lich of a lady, sitting in a wooden chair, back to the wall of the establishement, just to the left of the door. She was sound asleep. So, being young and reckless, I started to walk in, but then her arm shot out like a bolt of lightning, blocking the way. I was stunned, paralyzed, really. I looked at her and she opened one bloodshot eye to look at me and said, simply, but very firmly "NO!". What could I do but back down? I was defeated, and retreated. When I returned, about an hour later, she was quite nice and pleased to sell me a couple of those eggs. But I learned that Italians take their siestas very seriously! If you ever want to rob a bank in Italy, just do it during the siesta, and no one will stop you, I swear.

Given this history, when I progressed through The Slithering Shadow, what did I encounter, but an entire ancient city full of sleepers? 

I will forego spoiling the plot for you from that point. I outlined the plot in more detail in my review of the collected Savage Sword of Conan Volume 2, if you're interested. But I would suggest just getting yourself a copy and reading it yourself. 

These elements alone gave me very personal reasons to be drawn into the story. Again, I didn't realize the causal connections until very recently. I can link the reading of this magazine to the subsequent buying of more Savage Swords, to my later fascination with Dungeons and Dragons, Heavy Metal Magazine (along with the movie and the music), and Epic Illustrated. 

Also, with hindsight, I look back on that more-or-less innocent child and am grateful for who he was, as well as who he became. Like Conan in the story, I've come up battered and bruised by life, but I've replaced that innocence with stubbornness in hope. 

As Conan states: "You can't fight a devil out of hell . . . and come off with a whole skin . . .!"

But you keep on keeping on. Thanks, Conan!

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The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1

 

The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1 by Chris Lambert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was introduced to The Black Meadow Archive - Volume 1 through the album of the same name. After getting the digital copy and becoming enamored of it, I sought out the physical LP and paid a good clip of money for it. Sometimes I know what I want and I'm willing to spend what I need to in order to get it. I very rarely buy vinyl, so this tells you how much I like the strange, haunting sounds of this album. So, when I saw this book . . . well, I had to know the tales hidden behind the dulcet horror of these songs. And here they are.

"The Lair of the Coyle" is a great mythic story of a knight who is cursed to poverty all the days of his life. A good little tale, with a touch of the gruesome, as one should expect from medieval stories.

"The Legend of the White Horse" is a beautiful piece of folk-fabulism, mythic and banal at the same time. I could hear this being sung and spoken by a bard of old. Timeless and haunting.

I love blackberries. They are one of my favorite fruits. So, I wondered what the song "The Blackberry Ghost" was all about. Now that I've read the story of the same name, I know. But now I don't know if I want to know. Next time I eat blackberries . . . I shall be very, very careful.

The exquisite subversion of folkloric norms in "A Voice from the Heather" is a spectacularly positive, affirmative, yet ultimately horrific work of art. It simultaneously upends and reinforces the morality tale, surprising at every turn, and there are many turns. Possibly one of my favorite fables in recent memory. Calvino would have loved this, and I love Calvino, thus . . .

More blackberries: "The Blackberry Swim" is like something straight out of Der Struwwelpeter or Grimms' Fairy Tales (the uncensored versions) - gaudy in its gruesomeness. Imagine folk horror meets splatterpunk. I love blackberries, they really are one of my favorite things in the world. But after reading this story, I might hesitate, just momentarily, before eating the next one. But I'll get over it. I hope.

Even more blackberries: "The Heart of the Blackberry Field" is an exquisite example of Folk Horror. It hits all the right notes with careful timing, creating a perfectly sinister, yet innocent tone. We are one with the land, and the land is one with us. You, too, will become one with the land. Trust me, you will. When I think of the term "psychogeography," going forward, I shall think of this tale first and foremost, at least in a rural sense. Perhaps I'm mapping my own definition onto the term, as it was originally coined to describe exclusively urban applications, but this is how I choose to interpret it. Call it rewilding psychogeography.

The bardic poem "He Took Her Hand" betrays its oral storytelling origins by the clever use of mnemonic refrain. Structurally, it reminds me of some of the works I studied while a student of African History. But this is a very British volume. Still, the structures echo each other quite strongly. This is the sort of horrific tale one would hear in a dark pub just before closing. The series of permutations of this refrain render it effective and, yes, memorable.

"A Dead Man on the Moor" is atmospheric, but the lack of any real underlying motive and scant background make for a sparse story. Not a bad story, just not as rich and deep as the others.

A peasant morality tale, "The Ploughman's Wrath" illustrates the virtue of hard work and honesty and the punishment due to the lazy and dishonest. This is, however, just one possible story among many mythical explanations for strange features in the land. It makes one wonder how many unspoken tales might exist to explain otherwise unexplainable phenomena, all lost in the mists of time. Will we ever recapture them?

Okay, a little piece of dark poetry in the middle of the book. Okay. Seems a little weird that there isn't more poetry in here, but this book is all about weird. It's not that "The Song of the Meadow Bird" is out of place, it just seems slightly out of genre. Then again, a few of the stories have a poetic sensibility, if not true mechanical poesis, so maybe it does fit in.

"The Ticking Policeman" is a wonderfully weird story that is oh so very British: well-mannered and potentially violent, should one step out of line in the slightest. The understated humor is like something out of the more refined skits on Monty Python's Flying Circus (yes, there were some of those in the midst of all that insanity).

"March of the Meadow Hags" is my favorite piece in this volume. A diabolical pear tree and skinwalkers feature most prominently in this incredibly weird tale. It is told through a series of seemingly unrelated documents - one of my favorite ways to write and, yes, to read. Wonderfully dark and sinister! This is the sort of story I wish I would have written myself.

"The Maiden of the Mist" is bittersweet and tender. It might make you a little teary-eyed. It did that to me. A touching story.

"The Audire" is an unexpected (at least by me) story about Syd Barrett. The mystery of Radomes on the northern moors is explored. I don't even know what to say about this story. I enjoyed it. But it was strange, even for a man who loves strange stories. Truth be told, I'm a bit jealous that these ideas have been explored and I won't discover them in my own writing. But I'll take the gift.

"The Wretched Stranger" reads as if it had escaped from a deep trough of creepypasta. And I do mean escaped. This story will keep crawling out, smiling the whole time, no matter how many times you kill it. But trusting your hunches might just buy you some time before its inexorable arrival.

"The Village Under the Lake" is convoluted and requires some amateur mental gymnastics to understand. The confusion adds to the intrigue, however. The narrator is restrained in imparting information because the way that the information was imparted was piecemeal and confused. Besides, you don't really want to know everything about the village under the lake! Trust me, you really don't want to know.

I like the story of the "Ghost Planes" as much as the haunting song on the album (if it can be called a "song" proper - it's more like a soundscape). A wonderfully cryptic sewing together of various patches of accounts of Ghost Planes flying above the moors from throughout history.

I also have a digital copy of the album "The Black Meadow Archive: The Lost Tapes". It covers some of the stories in this book that were not covered in the first album. It is equally as moody and grey. Unfortunately, there never was a physical LP done of this one. At least . . . not in this reality.

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Art Deco

Art Deco by Camilla de la Bedoyere
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wouldn't have wanted to live in the 1920s or '30s, but the art and architecture of that period are sublime. This is a sumptuous little book. Beautiful photos and excellent contextual explanations. I would recommend Arie van de Lemme's Art Deco: An Illustrated Guide to the Decorative Style, 1920-40 as a companion piece, as van de Lemme's work provides a more coherent chronology and a little wider view of the context in which the art arose. However, de la Bedoyere's work does an excellent job of tracing the two tracks of Art Deco: The upper-class-fueled (mostly French) school of "High Art Deco," and the (Bauhaus-influenced) mass-produced Art Deco works, whose primary consumer was the middle class. The main differences, at least early on in the movement, were craftsmanship and production, both of which seem fairly tight-knit factors in the "split" (my quotes). "High Art Deco" typically used more expensive materials such as exotic woods (ebony seemed to be a favorite) and ivory wrought by expert craftsmen by hand (and when I say "men," I also mean women - this was the era when women began to come into their own, in regards to being publicly recognized as artists), whereas the bulk of Art Deco pieces were designed by excellent designers, but after the initial model was created, these designs were mass-produced, much more inexpensively, for the mass market. Later, a sort of Hegelian synthesis occurred, in which expert artists designed the work, the body of the work was mass-produced using such modern materials as bakelite, chrome, and aluminum, then the finishing touches were hand-crafted by the initial designer. Either way, Art Deco had a strong impact on society, as items of convenience and ornamentation, such as bakeware, furniture, radios, and hood ornaments, were the focal point of much of Art Deco's style. Since such items were ubiquitous and often cheap, the movement had a lasting effect on the material culture of the years to follow. What would a '57 Chevy be without Art Deco coming before it? A box on wheels.

Art Deco was also a product of colonialism. I am amazed by the influence of the arts of Africa, Asia, and South and Central America on the art of that time. You can argue whether colonialism robbed the artistic traditions of these areas or paid homage to them, but you can't argue that European and American artists were not heavily influenced by those traditions at that time. Art Deco brought "World Art" to the western world's popular consciousness, changing it forever.

Even now, some Art Deco is highly sought after. If I had a fortune, I would buy some of Dimitri Chiparus' bronze and ivory statuettes in a heart-beat. But after looking up the prices of these works, I realize that I will never own one. Even the copies run into the tens of thousands of dollars each!

I happen to live about 40-minutes drive from Taliesen, so I was really glad to see Frank Lloyd Wright's work featured in this book. It baffles me when books examine the Art Deco movement and don't include his work. This is likely because of the euro-centric view of some publishers, but it is a shame that his work should not be front and center, as some of Wright's work epitomizes the style and function of Art Deco design. I'm lucky in that there are several of his buildings in the city where I live. They are beautiful, in person, and speak to a time when architecture on the smaller scale was art. Those days are, I'm afraid, over.

There is much more to this book, with too many examples of art and artists to truly do it justice in a review. It is a good, deep dive into the art and design of the era. I would recommend it as a part of your study of Art Deco. My biggest complaint about the book is the font in which the copy is typed - it is very small and very faint, not good for your eyes. Perhaps this was done to accentuate the beautiful full-page pictures, avoiding the distraction of dark text. But for those of us who actually read art books, having to read these (again, very faint) paragraphs under a strong artificial light actually takes something away from the beauty of the photos. The publishers might have benefited from heeding the Art Deco mantra "form AND function".

But these are the times we live in.

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Africa

Well, James Raggi made it official in an announcement sent out to those subscribed to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess E-mail list: I have been working for a good two years on a supplement for a developing line of historical books usable with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG. I won't give the title out until James does, but suffice it to say that I'm finally using my Master's Degree for something directly related to my grad school studies back in the day.

As evidence, I present a few of the piles of books I have researched as I've worked on the project:

Now, this is barely the tip of the iceberg. I pored over literally dozens of volumes researching this. I spent days - DAYS, full 8 hour days, and many of them, in the University of Wisconsin's awesome Memorial Library doing the research for a supplement on West Africa in the 1630's. This is a fairly exhaustive survey of the lands, peoples, and customs of the region ranging east-to-west from the Atlantic coast to present-day Cameroon and north to south from the edge of the Sahara Desert down to the Ivory Coast/Gold Coast/Slave Coast.

My studies in grad school focused mostly on precolonial and early colonial East Africa (though my Master's Thesis was on later colonialism in East Africa), but we were trained to be broadly conversant in African history all the way around the region and for all historical time periods. So I had several courses and wrote several papers on West African history back in the late '90s. Nevertheless, I hit the books hard for this project and poured a great deal of effort into the research, construction, and writing of this survey. I wanted to do something that could go well beyond role-playing games, while retaining RPG use as the primary thrust of the writing.

The initial draft is done, edited, and submitted. I am awaiting another, related project, which I need to leverage, in order to complete my work. This will require a thorough rewrite of one particular section of the book, which I'm actually very excited about. Then, it's on to working with the cartographer for maps, working on the book design, etc. I can't give away the secrets yet, but this projected line of books that James has just announced will be an awesome addition to your LotFP library, your RPG library, or just your plain old library (for those who are history buffs).

I've written the book I wish I had in grad school, at least the one with a focus on early 17th-century West Africa. A huge amount of effort has gone into this - about the same amount of effort that went into writing my Master's Thesis itself, which was an incredible undertaking. I haven't poured this much effort into a book since my novel. And writing this might actually have been more difficult. Actually, yes, it definitely was more difficult. Writing non-fiction is a lot like real work!

More news as it happens and I'm allowed to share it!

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Out of Africa

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

For better or worse, this opening sentence rekindled my love affair with literature. Granted, I never lost my love of reading, but from my late teens to my early-twenties, the relationship was rather shallow, mostly maintained through movies about books, comic books/graphic novels (still a great love for me), and role-playing game books and modules, all interspersed with one-night-stands with real books that I loved for a night, then left on the bedside. I still engage in some these dalliances, but Out of Africa, from its first sentence, grabbed me by the lapels and ripped my shirt apart. I was smitten. It was the new beginning to a lifelong love of the written word.

The book isn't without its issues, not the least of which are deeply embedded assumptions about "The Native". Thankfully, Blixen challenges and refutes some of her own assumptions about Africa and Africans while acknowledging her inevitable cultural distance from those around her. Of course, she has brushes with condescension, as any European colonial of the time would have had. But any analysis of the book that doesn't acknowledge that Blixen and her attitude are a product of the time is unashamedly disingenuous.

Blixen is careful to observe that she is also being observed. She is in Africa, but not of Africa:

If I know a song of Africa,-I thought,-of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?

Throughout the book, Blixen seems to want to be a part of this place in which she finds herself. But even her separation from the spiritual ideal of full integration serves its own utilitarian purposes. For instance, when the locals ask her to judge between them in their disputes, it is precisely this distance that allows them to trust her impartiality:

It is likely that the Kikuyu of the farm saw my greatness as a judge in the fact that I knew nothing whatever of the laws according to which I judged.

But the heart of Out of Africa is not about intellectual stances or empty academic discussions about signifiers and signified. It is about the people, African and European, that Karen Blixen interacts with. On this level, I connected with the author and wanted to know more about those she interacted with. I don't think it's an accident, then, that four years after reading this book, I undertook graduate studies in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To say this book had an effect on my life would be a gross understatement. That first sentence shattered a number of possible futures and, eventually, opened up windows on vistas I might never have otherwise imagined.

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Matigari

Matigari by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To the common reader Ngugi's Matigari sounds like a naive, almost quaint sort of fable. But those who have studied the history of colonial Kenya, particularly the Mau Mau rebellion and it suppression by British Authorities, will recognize a bitter critique of post-colonial Kenya from the viewpoint of those who fought and suffered for the country's independence. Matigari is a sort of "everyman" representing the Mau Mau guerrillas and their displacement in an independent Kenya where the players have changed, but the structures of power have not, despite the freedom fighters' efforts and sacrifice. The book was outlawed in Kenya because it was thought to be a literary provocation to violence. This might be true. The main character, returning from war, attempts to use peaceful means to unite his family (representative of the country) but finds that, in order to survive, he must return to the violence that he had previously buried with his weapons of war. It is a beautifully-realized work that doesn't get due credit, largely because most readers are unfamiliar with the historical context from which the book was born. I would recommend reading some of the accounts of Mau Mau fighters (several have been published) before tackling Matigari, since one's appreciation of the themes and the emotional landscape of the book are dependent on some familiarity with the suffering and idealism of the Mau Mau fighters.

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