My Mind on My Money and My Money on My Mind*

I'm not poor. I'm not rich. I'm squarely in the American middle class, when it comes to my day-job income. For many years, though, we were living super-tight on our budget. Filling the tank with gas was a necessity, but it bordered on a luxury. We rarely went out for entertainment and we often had to tell the kids "no" when they asked for stuff that their friends might have just taken for granted. 

As a result, I get skittish about spending large amounts of money. I have an allowance each month that I can spend on whatever I like (a luxury, I know) that falls in the middle of the two-digit range. If I want to buy something for myself that costs $100, I'm going to have to wait a couple of months, maybe a little more. I'm not bitter about it, in fact, I think it's a very good practice (obviously, I've been living it for many years now), but when it comes to a big personal purchase, I have to bide my time and *really* discipline myself not to spend that money, but, rather, save it up for the big purchase. I can supplement that allowance with sales of my RPG materials, and I've buckled and started a ko-fi. Occasionally, I will sell stuff on Ebay or sell a short story to help with funding, or even sell some of my books direct to readers (which I actually love to do . . . until I run out of sellable copies!) but when I want to buy something significant, I really have to think about it and I really have to choose wisely. 

Often my money goes, as you can imagine, into books, whether fiction or roleplaying books. I'm pretty picky about both. And, lately, I've bought more music in physical formats. Again, though, I am very finicky about my purchases. I really don't make "impulse" buys. I just don't operate that way. This is one reason I love Goodreads so much: when I see a cover I love or hear about a potentially cool book, I go to Goodreads and try to read a few reviews from people whose opinions I respect. This hasn't always saved me from unfortunate purchases, but it's done a pretty good job of making me think through by book-buying choices. 

Not long ago, I wrote a post about downsizing and upscaling my collection of . . ., well, stuff. My sentiments then still apply now, and probably even more so.

I've decided what I want from this.

Well, at least a few things:

1. A typewriter. An honest to goodness old-fashioned non-electric manual typewriter. Why? Maybe I hate myself, I don't know. Seriously, I am a kinesthetic and visual learner and writer. I always hand-write my first drafts. I can be as sloppy as I need to or want to, with no regard to anything except my ability to spew forth thoughts on paper. Then I edit as I'm typing into the computer. But what if I wanted to do a more careful edit? I think that typing on a typewriter will cause me to actually physically stop and think more, to focus. At least that's what I remember from typing as a kid (before home PCs were readily available). If you made a mistake, you had to get out corrector tape and fix it, which was a royal pain in the butt. Just like Goodreads reviews cause me to stop and think about what I'm buying, this should help me to stop and think about what I'm writing. I have several typewriters that I could live with , but there's one in particular that is *VERY* expensive and that I am absolutely lusting after. I'm not going to jinx things by linking to it, or even to the site it's being sold at because, like Highlander, there can be only one. Well, there really is only one. It will cost more than my computer. A lot more, in fact. There's only one out there (I think it's a custom job), but I really, really want that typewriter. I need to save up for this one first, which is going to mean no buying new books or LPs for a year or more. I'm hoping that no one else snatches it up in the meantime. And, no, I'm not interested in using credit to buy it. I've been in credit trouble before and, never again. This one I'll just have to scrimp and save for, and I'm willing to do it. Besides, this dovetails nicely with my desire to have more analog in my life and my desire to re-read many of the books I already own (c.f., my post on downsizing and upscaling - link above). Again, if you want to help, here's my ko-fi link, or if you want to buy a copy of my novel Heraclix and Pomp, comment below.

2. A new LP player. I love my old record player, the one I rediscovered after my parents died. But this old machine is about to give up the ghost itself. I'll probably buy something in the cheap range, so far as stereo systems go, but something that I can trust to play well and last, as well. Probably something along the lines of the 1 by one stereo system. Simple, but elegant, and hopefully built to last. 

3. This one might just seem silly, but I have an antiqued mirror that I love. By antiqued, I mean burned, abused, acid-etched, artificially aged. I love it. I want another. maybe two more. This will be the least expensive of my buys and also the most frivolous. But I just love the one I have and want to surround myself with more of them. There's something darkly beautiful about the odd distortion they give to everything caught in their reflective rays. Logically speaking, I should buy these first because they are the cheapest of the three things I am saving for, but who said I play by logic? No, really, I need to discipline myself to get that typewriter (presuming it doesn't sell to someone with similar tastes and more money than me).

And there you have it, all my most recent money-grubbing desires. Now that I've committed this on the blog, I feel a stronger resolve to carry through with it (barring some financial emergency, of course). 

Wish me luck! Or, better yet, buy me a ko-fi!

*Apologies to Snoop D-o-g-g, but the song I'm referring to in the title of this post is this version (which I'm guessing Snoop appreciates in his own smoove way). 

Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales

 

Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales by Mark Beech
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthologies are a hard sell. Meaning they hardly sell. I know a bit about this, having edited several volumes myself. Heck, I even won an award for editing one, a long time ago. Note that it's been a long time since I've edited a fiction anthology. I love short fiction, but editing a short fiction anthology is hard work, if you're doing it right. And it's often thankless. I remember speaking with author Stepan Chapman years ago about editing anthologies and his comment was "something for everybody to hate"! Truth.

A great anthology is one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A careful balance has to be maintained for this to work. A theme needs to be strong, but not overwhelming. And there needs to be a variety of voices, but not so varied that they all become a choir of chaos.

Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales is an anthology that could easily fall out of balance in this regard. But it largely (though not completely) succeeds. Mark Beech, the editor, thankfully took a broad approach to the theme, though there is a preponderance of stories about "poison gardens". Of course, it might be difficult to winnow down the the absolute best stories about poison gardens, but that is an editor's job - to build a collection, then hack it down to the best of the best.

The presentation is nothing short of amazing. This is a book you want to have in your collection to show off to your friends. It is beautiful, well-built, and smartly-designed. This is typical of Egaeus Press books. You know you're getting a quality artifact when buying an Egaeus volume.

Some of the stories herein are outstanding. I guessed this would be the case after looking at the table of contents. Many of my favorite contemporary authors had stories in here, and they did not disappoint. There were other authors unknown to me (which is, actually, something I always look for in an anthology - including "unknown" authors was something I prided myself on while editing), some of whose stories succeeded, some of whose didn't quite. If you're on Goodreads, you'll note I gave the anthology a four-star rating. Not because most of the stories were four-star stories, but because many were five-star stories, and a not-insignificant amount were three-star stories. With that, here are my notes on the stories:

"A Night at the Ministry" is as crisp and decadent as one should expect from
Putting the "decay" back in "decadence," the story "The Blissful Tinctires," by Jonathan Wood, marries the grinding post-grandeur of Peake's novels or Wilde's Dorian Gray with the banality of Great War England (and France, for a critical few short moments). It is a grueling, lustrous, dirty, pathetic, and triumphal read, all at once. This is Wood at his hollow, beautiful finest, mixing glory and defeat. It's a tricky story, one that you think you have figured out in the split-second before you figure out you were completely (and delightfully) wrong. I like being tricked in this way.

"Delightful" isn't the first word one would use for a story about poisoning, but Rose Biggin's "The Tartest of Flavours" is light-hearted. This tale, set in the universe of Alice in wonderland (in a slightly different guise) is, shall we say, "frivolous"? I didn't dislike it, but, at times, it seemed to be trying too hard to be cute (in a grim sort of way). Still a nice change of pace, but the weakest story to this point of the book.

Timothy Jarvis' "The Devil's Snare" is everything I would expect from his pen: carefully-crafted mythic storytelling with a limning of dry-humor and dark beauty. What I was not expecting was the ending. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming - but should the townsfolk. Alas, they are in for a big surprise. I love the mix of rather ordinary people moved to extraordinary visions here.

Rosanne Rabinowitz hits a simultaneously melancholic and celebratory mood here with "The Poison Girls". It's a long story, grazing over many years, and the main character, Marla is a complex and interesting person. The story blurs the line between the nostalgic and the imaginal, "breaking" chronological constraints in an emotionally-satisfying story of joy and grief, healing and pain. Beautiful.

I greatly enjoyed "The Invisible Worm" by Ron Weighell (if one can call cringing discomfort brought on by masterful writing "enjoyment"), but I fail to see how it fits, thematically, with the rest of the volume. I suppose it is, loosely speaking, a "poisonous" tale, but it involves no poisonous substance outside of religious fanaticism. Still, it's a great story, though it reads like an introduction to a novel.

A nice, evocative poem with a deeper story between the lines in "Chatterton, Euston, 2018" by Nina Antonia.

"Out at the Shillingate Isles" is a tragic story of a socially-rejected woman named Gert making a living in a harbor fishing village. She meets a new friend, "Low-key," who has compassion for her and her plight. He has a flair for performing strange tricks of magic. They go together on a scheme to give Gert the upper hand against her enemies, and things seem to be going great. Seem to. Four stars to Lisa L. Hannett.

When George Berguño is at the top of his game - and he is at the top of his game in "The Other Prague" - there are very few who can match his writerly voice. Calvino, Borges, Schwob . . . he stands in good company. And this story is polysemic, not content to settle on one meaning . . . or the other. All is one. And none is all.

I don't know that I've read Sheryl Humphrey's work before, but if "The Jewelled Necropolis" is an indicator of the quality of her writing, I will read her work again. This is part of the joy of reading an anthology: discovering a new (to me) author whose work I can continue to explore. I love the framing piece of an anonymous manuscript found as a result of the Federal Writer's Project, and the way Humphrey leverages it is more than just clever. It's a dreamlike tale of searching and finding a glimmer of paradise.

"Not to be Taken," by Kathleen Jennings begs the question "who is who's victim"? Or, more properly "who is the real perpetrator"? It's a story of disturbed individuals who happen to meet and orbit around each other, further disturbing the universe around them. It's a touching piece, in Its own perverse way, with very distant echoes from the decadent tradition. Four stars.

With a writerly voice reminiscent of Sarban, yet with a cuttingly-clever humor very unlike the staid Sarban, Louis Marvick, in his uniquely Marvickian way, immerses the reader in a sea of poisonous plants with "The Garden of Dr Montorio". But he takes it a step further, not only trapping the protagonist in a presumably lethal maze, but by trapping readers in a deadly story within a story. Marvick continues to amaze.

I've been effusive in my praise of Stephen J. Clark's writing. "Of Mandrake and Henbane" does nothing to quell my enthusiasm. Here the triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone are tied to The Green Man (under a slightly different guise) by a "sacred unguent" that binds them all together. This is a beautiful story of loam, love, and loathing that blossoms under Clark's deft pen.

There's a kernel of what could be a good story in Joseph Dawson's "Beyond Seeing," but it appears to me that this is a rough draft in need of serious revision. I was willing to cut some slack, but with an awkward writerly voice that is too terse and too verbose in all the wrong places, I had little patience with such a predictable plot. This is harsh, but the anthology would have been stronger without this story.

For some reason, I sometimes greatly enjoy stories that obliquely or peripherally toy with the theme of an anthology (though I do like some connection). Such is the case with Yarrow Paisley's excellent "I in the Eye". Poison plays a part, but only a small part in the larger narrative of dissociation with self and family. The writing here is fantastic, and this is one of the darkest stories in the volume. Five stars.

Jason E. Rfe's "Canned Heat" was quaint, in a disturbing way. It feels like there could have been so much more to this story; should have been more. It felt like a pedestrian effort to me.

Alison Littlewood's "Words" is a weak story, strongly told. But I'm afraid that the eloquence, in this case, doesn't outweigh the inevitability of the plot. There may be something to "tried and true" stories (I'm certain I've written a few myself), but when one can determine what's to happen when one is only a quarter of the way through the story, no amount of good writing can save it, ultimately (and unfortunately).

The tone of Carina Bissett's story "An Embrace of Poisonous Intent" is strikingly different from the rest of the book. This is high sorcerous fantasy replete with unicorns and griffins. The mythic element here is powerful, and the story excellent. It stands on its own strength, meaning it contrasts, somewhat jarringly, with the rest of the volume. But I can't fault the story itself. Viva la difference!

So overall, an excellent anthology. It has it's weaknesses, but every anthology does. The strongest stories (Murphy, Wood, Jarvis, Berguño, Humphrey, Marvick, Clark, Paisley) will infiltrate your veins and seize your brain, just as one would expect from the theme. Cheers and bottoms up!

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Reading: The Longue Durée

 Admittedly, I am not using the term "long durée" as Fernand Braudel did. I'm coopting the term and twisting it to my own ends (as any good author and historian will do), redefining and, more importantly for the present post, re-scaling it to reflect my love of reading and the puissance of certain texts in my mind (and sometimes my life, truth be told, as I have taken life lessons from some of these works). 

In a previous post, I had mentioned my goal of reading what is on my shelves currently, then re-reading some works alongside one another for the purposes of cranial cross-pollination, if you will. I think that many synergies lurk within certain pairings of books (or even triads) that multiply and expand single ideas with one another to create thought structures that are more than the sum of their parts. This is one thing I miss about graduate school (probably the thing I miss about graduate school): being able to devote time to a syllabus of study that allows me, in a concentrated amount of time, to bash ideas up against each other to see what sticks and what structures emerge from the "chaos". This might explain why I like some of the music I like.

But I'm not here to write about music. I want to write about reading, if only briefly. 

I read extensively, in a fairly broad range of styles, genres, and topics. I love reading. But, to be honest, I love reading writing that makes me have to meditate, to contemplate. If I'm not reaching for a dictionary, at least occasionally, I am usually dis-satisfied. I read to both be entertained and to learn. I read to stoke the fires of my own imagination and creativity. I read for the magic of it all. 

Currently, on Goodreads (still my favorite social media and maybe, someday, my only social media), I show 1035 books read. This is probably a hundred or more too short, as I can't remember or record all the books I enjoyed as a young person. These are books I've read through in all but a handful of cases (where my loathing for the work in question was so strong that I had to record that I hated it). I supposed that the works I did hate served some sort of utilitarian purpose, even if it was simply to hone my disdain for certain styles of writing or, more properly, to sharpen my sense of righteous indignation towards writers who "cheated" me with a dis-satisfactory bait-and-switch or Deus ex Machina. 

Other works, however, stuck with me. Even if they didn't strike me as I finished them, they haunted me, over time. I could not get them out of my head. When I have an idle moment and can think upon things, these books come back into my mind, unbidden. They are alive in my mind, as it were. They have an enduring presence that I cannot shake. They may not be my favorite works - indeed some of them I found excruciating to read (I'm looking at you, Joyce) - but they have stuck with me and they just won't get out of my head. This is what I mean by The Longue Durée. These works have impressed me in the long term enough that they crowd the literary memory spaces of my brain. For whatever reason, to me, they are important and lasting. When my thoughts fall slack to their lowest ebb, these are the books that seem to almost accidentally slip into my head. They form the base of my intellect; they are the undergirding to how I think. 

This list could be very, very long, but I'm trying to keep it very short for the sake of brevity and concision. I am inevitably excluding a lot of important books and I will, no doubt, regret the inevitable omissions. In passing, I note how few of these books are actually fiction (which I write). In all honesty, there is little fiction that sticks in my mind enough to be considered Longue Durée, so if you see a fictional work below, do note that it must have made a huge impression on me. Again, I cannot necessarily pinpoint exactly why that is. But here is my very short list, which I will amend after my grand experiment of re-reading concludes (hopefully in early to mid-2023) - in no particular order:

Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana

Enchanted Night, Steven Millhauser

Searching for Memory Daniel L. Schacter

The Roots of Civilization: the Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation, Alexander Marshack

Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

The Voice of the Air, John Howard

Ulysses, James Joyce

Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology, Valerie Ahl

Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, William Barrett

Stealing Cthulhu, Graham Walmsley

Sub Rosa, Robert Aickman

The White Goddess, Robert Graves

The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt, Damian Murphy

What are your Longue Durée books? Post them in the comments!

If you'd like to lend a hand to my creative endeavors, here's your chance! 

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The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt

 

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt by Lotte H. Eisner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know where or when my fascination with silent movies began. Definitely not as a child. I couldn't stand the things back then. I think it might have been after I discovered The Dark Side of the Rainbow and realized that the same technique of watching one piece of visual media while listening to another piece of aural media could easily be applied to silent movies. Suddenly, these often-campy, over-acted films could become something sublime or something sinister, with the right music. Eisner's book was grist for that mill in enough volume to last me the rest of my life. Though I was very familiar with a few of these films and had already tried the trick of using two tabs of Youtube in a web-browser - one (the film) set on mute and the other (the music) with volume UP - I found several other good combinations and a couple of great ones. I will continue exploring this way.

If you'd like to give it a try, look up The Student of Prague (1913) or Waxworks on Youtube. Mute that tab. Now open another tab, go to Youtube, then play something like Ligeti's "Lontano" or Penderecki's "Symphony No. 1" (or, for real ambience, play it on vinyl!) with the volume UP. Or, perhaps you'd like to go another route and listen to some more . . . modern music? I have a few suggestions linked here.

I suggest watching without subtitles turned on, if you can. just enjoy the visual and auditory experience. It's a stark contrast from watching the movie alone, even when, or especially when, someone has attached an old-timey organ soundtrack to the movie. It's your experience - make it yours!

Incidentally, because of this book, I understand why sub-titles are called sub-titles. Only took 52 years to be enlightened. "Titles" was the term originally used in silent movies for the words that flashed up on the screen, in the absence of spoken dialogue. "Subtitles" appear, as the name implies beneath the titles. These are, as you know, most often translations from the original language into another.

52 years.

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

Speaking of new tricks, the early years of cinema were a sort of wild west, when it came to creative innovation, especially when constraints brought on by conflict interfered with the procurement of some materials. Interestingly, the lack of materials in the last years of World War I led to playwrights and cinematic directors using light and shadow, rather than elaborate sets, as they used to use, to give depth to the settings and to indicate the passage of time. A happy accident for early German movies.

The recollections of Carl Boese on how the special effects were done for Der Golem (1920) were absolutely fascinating. These practical effects were very dangerous, so volunteers were asked to try them out. The first stunt-men, perhaps. Knowing this has given me an excuse to watch the movie again. Of course, I will also have to reread Gustav Meyrinks novel, which has little to do with the movie, but hey, a good excuse is okay. After all, the book and the movie were both highly influential on one of my own creative works.

And, speaking of old dogs . . .

Eisner has a fixation on the melancholy and gloom inherit in the German soul, as he sees it. I tend to agree to some extent, but when I see this was first published in 1952, I wonder if some of the hyperbole isn't post-holocaust apologetics or manifestations of guilt. There's a bit too much of "Germans are brooding, dark-minded people as a whole" for me. It's overstated and I wonder why?

It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.

These generalizations of German people as a brooding bunch keep coming up again and again. I don't fully disagree, but frankly (and I don't mean "in the manner of the French"), it got a little, well, old.

But if you can ignore the repeated caricature of an entire nation as, well, goths, there is much to be enjoyed about this work. I would also recommend (whether you read the book or not) following the Pagan Hollywood instagram or twitter account. Sometimes NSFW, you'll want to maneuver carefully, but if you want to catch the glamor of early cinema (and much more) in still photos, that's a great place to start. There's also a great interview with Pagan Hollywood's founder, Charles Lieurance over on Youtube, while you're at it.

I must note that the early text on Doctor Caligari instructed "see frontispiece". I turned to the front of the book, and noted the ragged edges where that key marker had been torn out of the book.

Was that a sign that I should not have entered the realm of the torn page?

Maybe I should have heeded it.

But I'm glad I didn't.



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A Winter in Chains

 

A Winter of Chains by Jason R. Koivu


(Disclaimer: I edited this, so I'll forego the star rating. You can probably guess what I would rate it, anyway, seeing that I edited it. Duh.)

A Winter of Chains is every bit as grueling a journey as one would expect from the title. This is the third in the "Beyond Barlow" series, and it presents a depth of emotional connection that is often missing from "sword and sorcery". Now, I must state that you will find few swords and little sorcery in this volume. Ford Barlow, the "hero" of the novel, is a seriously-flawed, yet so humn human being. You will likely see something of yourself in Ford's stumbling, bungling attempts to return to freedom from a state of utter subservience. As I said, this is a grueling journey. Ford is used and abused by others, makes critical mistakes in dealing with people and situations, is embarrassed, scared, and experiences cases of imposter syndrome that will make you squirm in discomfort, because you've "been there". This is where you will connect with Ford Barlow. One cannot read of his (mis)adventures without finding sympathy and possibly even empathy for him.

But Ford is not hopeless. Not by a long shot. If Ford has anything, it's just enough courage to hope and, even more importantly, vast reserves of perseverance. He is stubborn and impatient, and these become, in the end, both his worst curses and his greatest assets. He is subjected to one suffering after another. At times, one wonders why he carries on. But he seeks, above all else, freedom.

In his quest for freedom, Ford endures captivity, shame, bitter cold, frustration, abandonment, betrayal, embarrassment, hunger, and more. Yet, he perseveres. He conquers himself, but also learns the power of forgiveness, trust, and friendship in a way, again, much more deeply than one feels (or doesn't feel) in sword and sorcery.

That is not to say that Koivu has missed any beats of the genre. There is plenty of intrigue in a detailed and internally-consistent fantastical setting quite unlike many other fantasy settings. We experience Ford Barlow's world from the trenches and are exposed to cultures and places that seem fantastical even to Ford himself. Koivu is an able historian and an able anthropologist, but avoids the academic tone of the professor. Rather, this is a working-man's view of the world, which is appropriate, given both Ford's personality and experiences. Because of the way he makes do in the world, we get to see the unveiling of this rich world in a way that feels natural and surprising.

Even though we are led on a strange, exceedingly-difficult journey through a world with cultures and peoples that will seem bizarre to us, we connect with Ford Barlow on a deep-seated, human level, in ways that you won't soon forget. This novel will impress upon your heart and mind in powerful ways and leave its mark.

Recommended.

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