ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

I thought that I had managed to escape the deluge of silly videos doing the rounds on social media where lots of my lovely friends have been dousing themselves with freezing cold water to raise awareness of Motor-Neurone Disease. Motor-Neurone Disease (also known as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis hence the name in the title) seems like a horrible condition and, touch wood, no one I know is affected by it. I am still glad however that there are people working on finding treatments for this disease. Anything that adds to the amount of suffering in the world is something that a civilised society should try and eradicate. For this reason I'm glad that people are doing something to raise funds to assist in this research. I'm less glad about the six figure salary all the top bods at the charity that's receiving the money pay themselves but that's for another blog post.

Anyway, last night I logged into Facebook and saw that the wonderful Marc of Archaeosoup Productions had tagged me in his Ice Bucket Challenge video. Wonderful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbqzuIIS4k

Absolutely wonderful. Thanks for that Marc! ;)

When I saw that he had tagged me I did chuckle and start planning making the video - I was rather in my cups it has to be said - and wondering who I would tag. In the clear light of day however... ok, who am I kidding? In the fuzzy murk of the mother of all stinking evil hangovers this morning the thought of dousing myself in ice cold water was, for some reason, less appealing. Not for the obvious reason as, to be perfectly honest, it probably would have done me the world of good the way I felt as I wept quietly into my morning coffee. No, it was for far more convoluted reasons than mere self interest and the fact that I have a face for radio(and a voice for print, especially after the amount of fags I smoked last night.*)

The reason that I won't be doing the Ice Bucket Challenge is that I really don't like clicktivism and the challenge, as it has been explained to me, is most definitely clicktivism. Now I don't want to denigrate anyone who takes part in the challenge. If anything it gladdens my blackened suppurating heart to see so many people taking part in this because they genuinely want to do something to help others less fortunate than themselves. Marc himself is very careful in his video to outline exactly why he is taking part and to raise awareness of other issues such as depression and cancer support. All very worthy causes and as Marc is one of those archaeologists with a keen social conscience and does a lot of outreach work via his Youtube channel and has been very active in campaigns to protect our shared heritage on this wee island I figured I wouldn't just ignore the challenge as I may otherwise have done.

So, if I'm not going to film myself being doused in freezing cold water what am I going to do? Well, the standard default to not doing the challenge is to donate money to The ALS Association, the American charity that fund research into treatments for ALS. Well as they have had a few swimming pools full of money donated to them already - and the fact that their top bods earn more than I would earn in a decade** I'll consider my donation to them as coming out of the tax breaks they are enjoying for being so wealthy. I could donate money to one of the other charities that Marc links to below his video, MIND, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, or Cancer Research UK. Well, I haven't looked it up but I'm pretty sure that the CEOs of these charities will be earning a mint too(whilst expecting pensioners and the unemployed to work for them for free) so I'll be giving them a miss too. There's also the fact that I'm a bit of a cause and effect guy in that I like to see the results of my intervention in something directly. Or at least to know that my contribution to a cause has had a direct effect.

What, then, am I going to do? I'm going to do absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for me anyway. I'm going to continue giving money to the homeless, not to charities, chuggers***, or can shakers, but directly to homeless people so that they can spend my hard earned money on whatever the hell they like. I don't care if they spend it on drink, on drugs, or on collectible 1980s Panini football stickers. It's none of my business. If someone is on their arse to the point where they need to ask for money from strangers on the street then it is my responsibility, when I can afford it, to help them out. This isn't charity. This is basic human solidarity and this solidarity is the cement that holds society and civilisation together. I will continue to support people in struggle, I will continue to take part in the struggle for a sane society that will put its resources into things like curing ALS, cancer, and supporting people with depression and other mental health issues. A world that prioritises human health and happiness over profit and power.

Now this may make me seem like some weird commie Scrooge type of character lambasting the kids for wasting their time on something that's not the class struggle. I do have to admit that there is an element of that to this post but that's not what I want people to take away from this post. No, I want people to take away the idea that changing the world isn't done one viral video at a time. We aren't merely 1,000 Facebook likes and re-tweets away from a world where the things that actually matter are prioritised. No, that world is a world we have to actually make ourselves and it will take a lot of effort. A lot more effort than a moment of fun raising awareness for a charity and things that are a lot of effort can be daunting, they can be scary. The thing is though, there are a hell of a lot of us and when we stand together, when we work together we can do amazing, wonderful, impossible things. In fact all of the amazing, wonderful, impossible things that have ever happened on this planet have been done by people working together.

So no, I won't be donating to charity nor will I be dousing myself with water. However, to mark the fact that I was tagged to do so I shall, next time I'm in Glasgow, give the lad who begs outside Greggs near Central Station a tenner to do with as he wishes. I will also give some extra money to the Unity Centre towards paying their rent and bills when I next get paid. I hope that makes up for my lack of of being sat sopping wet in my back garden right now. I'm also not going to deride people for taking part in the challenge, a good heart is a good heart after all. I just really want people to engage with the idea that we need to make another, better world and that it is the desire to do this which is the driving force behind them pouring buckets of water over their heads. It is that desire that can make the world a better place. It is that desire that will make the world a better place.

 

Rant over. :)

Regardless. This is absolutely adorable. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuKL2etytnk

 

*

For my US readers that doesn't mean I killed a large number of homosexuals last night. I merely smoked a lot of cigarettes on account of the aforementioned heavy drinking.

**

Jane H. Gilbert – President and CEO – $339,475.00

Daniel M. Reznikov – Chief Financial Officer – $201,260.00

Steve Gibson – Chief Public Policy Officer – $182,862.00

Kimberly Maginnis - Chief of Care Services Officer – $160,646.00

Lance Slaughter - Chief Chapter Relations and Development Officer – $152,692.00

Michelle Keegan – Chief Development Officer – $178,744.00

John Applegate – Association Finance Officer – $118.726.00

David Moses – Director of Planned Giving – $112,509.00

Carrie Munk – Chief Communications and Marketing Officer – $142,875.00

Patrick Wildman – Director of Public Policy – $112,358.00

Kathi Kromer – Director of State Advocacy – $110,661.00

***

Chuggers = Charity Muggers. Those incessantly perky people that try and get you to set up a Direct Debit to pay the wages of the CEO of War on Want or whoever.

 

Lovecraft Ezine on WFA Brouhaha

Inevitably the recent discussion over the WFA bust came up on the Saturday chat with the Lovecraft Ezine panel. The discussion starts about 50 minutes in but you should watch the whole thing anyway. I am constantly impressed with the way that many people within the community of The Weird are able to discuss things in a calm and rational manner. Compared to a lot of the internet that is. Got to love this lot. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlX2Bpj2xGk

Lovecraft's Bust (fnar fnar)

It seems that the issue of the World Fantasy Award being a bust of H.P. Lovecraft is continuing to weave its way across the magical interwebs of the Fantasy/SF/Horror communities. Tor.com have an article about the discussion, and indeed there are 80+ comments on that article alone, and the discussion continues on Facebook and elsewhere (Tor.com are also having a re-read of HPL which will be running for months to come, you should definitely check it out). I recently commented on the blog of Daniel José Older who started the petition to have the award changed to a bust of Octavia Butler and blogged about this myself a couple of weeks ago. Whilst I can understand the reaction of some of HPLs fans, among whom I count myself, to the idea of changing the award to something else. It must seem to some that changing the award's physical form would be somehow stripping HPL of his well deserved status as a giant in the world of fantastic literature. I don't, personally, feel that this is the case. I do however think that changing the form of the award is rather important for a number of reasons. Primarily I don't think that it is right that an author who would have been despised by HPL, be they Black, Jewish, Portuguese, Eastern European, or any of the other non-WASPs that Lovecraft expressed contempt for - both in his writing and in his personal communications, that they should be offered a likeness of him as an award. This goes beyond a lack of sensitivity and into seemingly mocking these great authors who are bestowed with the award. Secondly Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a white middle class American man. He is not representative of either the creators nor fans of fantastic literature as a whole. Equally Octavia Butler, as a black American working class woman, isn't representative of the community. No individual author could be as the community is, despite protestations to the contrary, extremely diverse. This is the World Fantasy Award that we are talking about here remember. Not the American Fantasy Award. To be honest I think that it is a bit of a joke calling it the World Fantasy Award as it would be better named the 'English Speaking World' Fantasy Award but that's for another blog post.

One of the points that I have seen raised recently against the changing of the bust was that, with regards Lovecraft's racism, he was 'of his time' and that his opinions were the norm. As I have pointed out in my earlier post about his racism this is simply not the case. In my earlier post I point out that the radical worker's organisation the Industrial Workers of the World were busy organising against racists like the Ku Klux Klan and breaking down the barriers of racism (for a good example of this see the film Matewan which is based on actual events). I would like to add to this that it wasn't just groups like the IWW that weren't racists, and that actively combated racism, but also writers - Lovecraft's literary peers, who were not racist. At least not to the extent that HPL was. John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller were both strident anti-racists. As was George Orwell - to the point that he took up arms against fascism in Spain during the 1930s. I'm sure that, were I to take a short amount of time, I could probably name a hell of a lot more writers who expressed views completely counter to HPL who were living and writing at the same time and in the same, or a similar, culture.

It may be raised that Lovecraft felt himself a man out of time, that he was born into the wrong generation and, given his racist views, I would probably agree. However I was recently reading a collection of short stories by Ambrose Bierce and I encountered none of the racism that can be easily detected in HPLs works. Bierce may use words that shock today - references to niggers or negroes, casual references to slaves and so on. But with Bierce we can say that he most definitely was a man of his time, he was writing in the mid-1800s. His language may have been racist but in it we detect none of the viciousness that comes through in HPL's work. This is the rub for me. When I encounter certain sections of his writing the shock at what he has just said can drop me out of the story in a way that it doesn't in the writing of someone like Bierce.

“ He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life - but the world holds many ugly things. ”

HPL describing the body of an African American man in Herbert West - Reanimator

“the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.”

Description of the "mongrel" cultists in The Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu is one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, it is a masterful piece of modernist pulp writing and his narrative style in the piece is utterly fantastic, as is his prose. Which is probably why the pieces of the text such as the one quoted above are so jarring. It's like reading a work by Virginia Woolf only to have her all of a sudden have a paragraph long rant about the darkies before getting back to telling her tale. It may be true that HPL's bigotry lessened as he got older, this is certainly the case according to Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, and so it is a real shame that he died early. It is a shame as we will never see how he would have developed his mythos and I really do think that his writing, for a modern reader at least, would certainly have benefited from a softening of his views on race and genetics.

If you want a more in depth look at the 'man-of-his-time' defence of Lovecraft you should head over to Nicole Cushing's blog and read this piece which goes into much greater detail than I am willing to here. (And while you're there you should pick up her novellas Children of No One and I am the New God. They're frickin awesome.)

HP's racism then was not of its time and it does stand in the way of him gaining wider appreciation for the genius that he was in his fashioning of tales of the fantastic. That, to me, is reason enough for the World Fantasy Award to be changed. If we add to that the fact that the bust of any writer is not going to be representative of either the current community or the tradition of fantastical tale telling then there is really no way that it can not be changed.

PS: I don't think that I really have to state that I am a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft and regard him as a ground breaking genius, a giant in the world of the fantastic and macabre. I don't want to run him down or sully his name. I just think that the World Fantasy Award should be inclusive of everyone within the weird and wonderful community of fantastical and speculative literature.

ETA: David Nickle has also written about this today.

The Spectral Link - Thomas Ligotti

To be at odds with the status quo of one's world can be frustrating to the point of madness. Fear, hate, and desperation are just a few of the mental states that fall to those who would have things other than they are. To become unhinged from the majority is to lose that vital link that keeps one complacently within the fold. Set adrift within the forbidden, the outsider remains on a steady course towards utter doom.

So opens the preface to The Spectral Link - the first release of new Ligottian fiction since 2006's collection Teatro Grottesco. I received my copy in the post last week and the wait for its delivery brought about an impatience that I've not experienced since I was a child waiting for Christmas.

The book itself is a very slim volume, only 94 pages, and only contains two stories - Metaphysica Morum and The Small People. Only 94 pages but it is a truly beautiful wee volume. Everything from the quality of the paper through to the silk smooth dust jacket screams quality and we really should expect no less for a work that has been so anticipated since its surprise announcement last year(if I remember right). This is the first book that I've ordered from Subterranean Press, due mostly to the price, but if their releases are all to this standard I can see myself buying many more in the future. Bibliophilia is an expensive habit...

In the, very brief, preface Ligotti outlines the core theme of much of his work. That of the outsider who does not merely find himself at odds with society but with reality itself and of the only salvation being insanity.

Of course, the situation is hopeless for those who wish an alteration in affairs that by their very nature are fixed and define the world in which we are all chained. Their dispute is with reality itself, or what passes for reality.

Metaphysica Morum

The first of the two stories in this collection is told from the perspective of a person who seeks nothing more than to be "euthanized by anesthesia", a phrase repeated often throughout the tale. This repetition reinforcing the fragile mindset of the protagonist as he experiences strange phantasmagoric dreams involving a 'dealer' who offers him a "all-new-context" and tries to relate these dreams to his therapist come meditation guru; a Doctor O.

There is an unrelenting bleakness to this story that readers of Ligotti will find most familiar but which others may find rather disturbing. Even someone familiar with Ligotti's previous work may find that this tale really ramps up the horrifying ennui, pessimism and depression that permeates works like My Work is Not Yet Done and Nethescurial. The narrator describes his fragile mental state as being the result of a demoralization he feels when confronted with the world as it is and the strange connection between his dreams and what he perceives as reality.

You could attribute my psychological instability to this fact as well as to the dream occasions that so suspiciously bled into my quotidian life that sometimes I could not tell one from the other, which hypothetically might be attributed to there being no actual distinction between them.

Something that is, no doubt, reinforced by the revelation of his somewhat insalubrious origins as revealed in a partial letter from an estranged family member.

As with Ligotti's other work; the text drips with a very concisely manifested bleakness and philosophical rejection of all that that others take for granted as being of value.

The Small People

Then I saw the sign just off the right side of the road. It had one of those simple faces on it, and written below were the words: SMALL COUNTRY. My whole body tightened, as it always did when I saw one of those road signs.

The second offering in the volume concerns a young person's hatred of,  and obsession with, the eponymous 'Small People'. As with Metaphysica Morum the tale involves a doctor which is of note, I feel, as these stories were penned following a brush with death that lead to the author's hospitalisation. In this story the narrator is directly addressing a doctor as the tale of their childhood unfolds.

The narrator is obsessed with a group of people who live apart from normal, 'real' being the distinction the narrator makes, human society. This story is very open to multiple readings and interpretations. The Small People with which the protagonist is obsessed could be read as a representation of a society from which the narrator is alienated or as a section of our society, especially of groups marginalised by race/ethnicity or lifestyle.

Until then, I scarcely had a glimpse of any small people. My strange fear of them originated mostly from the simple face on the road signs that alerted people, real people, of their impending entry into small country. The mere idea of the smalls was enough to make me anxious about something I couldn't name. And looking into that red plastic toy, I was sorry I hadn't thrown myself onto the floor of our car, even knowing that my parents would have called me a shameful little bigot for the rest of the vacation.

Again this story is typically Ligottian with it's focus on things which mimic humanity - in earlier stories marionettes/puppets/clowns all feature heavily. Yet I think that the fear/anxiety elicited in the narrator by the existence of the smalls is a step beyond similar stories by Ligotti which I have read as it is so easily read as a reflection of real world bigotry. Something which, I feel, gives the story a greater depth than it otherwise may reach. It is similar in this manner to my personal favourite Ligotti story Our Temporary Supervisor in the collection Teatro Grottesco which plays with the horrific alienation of work in a capitalist society.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="447"] Thomas Ligotti - Teatro Grottesco by SergiyKrykun[/caption]

The book, in hardback, is still available via Amazon UK though the Subterranean Press website is listing it as sold out. I would highly recommend picking this up before it disappears into the realms of the overpriced Ligotti collectibles market.

Ligotti Online has an interview with the author where he discusses the background to his writing of the stories and the tales themselves. You can read it here.

Job Interview

One day maybe people who work in HR will understand this.



From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

World Fantasy Award Brouhaha(ish)

It seems that the brouhaha over the form of the World Fantasy Award has arisen again. Many people believe that having a bust of  H.P. Lovecraft, who is somewhat notorious for his highly conservative, racist and Antisemitic opinions isn't really a sign of the world of Fantasy fandom being as  inclusive as it is/should be. Which, to be perfectly honest, is true.

Nnedi Okafur, who won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death, posted a couple of years ago about the unsettling feeling of having someone like HPL's bust presented to them as an award. She has suggested that Octavia Butler replace HPL. Some hack called Neil Gaiman has also suggested Mary Shelley. Others have suggested a palantir, a magical device from Lord of the Rings, be used instead of a person.

I quite like the idea of using Butler as a) she has made a massive contribution towards genre fiction and b) she will seriously upset the racist/sexist douche bags of fandom. Both very good thing in my opinion. However, Octavia Butler is primarily known for her work in science fiction rather than fantasy. It is true that the WFA isn't strictly for fantasy fiction but can be awarded to any speculative fiction author/artist but she is too SF in my opinion. Mary Shelley is another nice idea, though she is unlikely to upset the douche bags too much. One thing that is in favour of Shelley is that her writing precedes the development of genre in fiction and so she, by default, spans the genres the same way that HPL does. The main reason that guy, whatshisname, suggested using Shelley was because she goes right back to the beginnings of the modern fantastic.

I realise that for the people who run the WFA the idea of pissing off the racist/sexist/homophobic douches may not be too appealing as it will just create unwanted drama around the awards. For this reason having the award be an object rather than a representation of an individual seems ideal. I'm not too keen on the idea of the palantir however. JRRT may be the biggest name in fantasy but he is, in his fiction, a specifically fantasy author. His work defines the genre for many people. As the WFA isn't rigidly a fantasy award I don't think a palantir could represent the breadth of speculative fiction. For this reason I have my own suggestion for the form the award should take.

The World Fantasy Award should be a replica clay tablet featuring the opening verses of The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The award would then symbolise the thousands of years of the tradition of people telling fantastical stories to one another. It is an object and so the personality of the author, who's identity is lost to the sands of time anyway, is irrelevant and (for bonus points) it was composed in the middle east which would hopefully(for me) get up the noses of the racists who get all upset when anyone who isn't a straight white dude tries to play in the sandpit that they think is theirs. So it would be a win win situation so far as I'm concerned. :)

Watch This: Black Goat by Joseph Nanni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4iOHPIlIQc

Website

Uzumaki - The Spiral

I posted about the Uzumaki manga by Junji Ito earlier this year and how I was hoping it would act as a kind of gateway drug for young Ms. X into the wider world of the weird. Well, that hasn't worked as well as I had hoped, though she does adore the manga I still haven't persuaded her to read HPL or Chambers. I don't think this will be long coming though, I recently spotted that The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe is missing from our shelves. :)

Anyways! A little while ago we discovered that there was a live action version of the manga directed by Higuchinsky and last night we finally got around to watching it and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. Which surprise me as the film has a very dated look and Young Ms. X has been known to scoff at anything infected with the old. Uzumaki has something of the 1960/70s Hammer Horror feel to it both in the way that the colours look both vivid and washed out simultaneously and the disjointed and hallucinogenic sensations elicited from the use of strange camera angles.

The film is, for the most part, true to the manga though in a fairly truncated form and X did say she felt let down by the  ending as it was completely different to the ending in the manga. That is a relatively minor quibble as - whilst the omitted final sections of the original manga are absolutely spectacular - the ending of the film is suitably creepy and horrific.

If you're a fan of the weird in either literature or film then I can heartily recommend this film.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r1_ZoQmqxM

True Douche... I Mean Detective

I loved True Detective when it aired earlier this year. As I squee'd at the time it was heavily influenced by some of my favourite weird fiction -the works of RW Chambers and Thomas Ligotti- which elevated it from being a mere buddy cop drama into something rather unique in the world of television. Whilst I was aware of the Ligottian and Chambersian influences going into the show, what I only recently discovered was the extent to which the show's writer and creator, Nic Pizzolatto, had directly lifted dialogue from Thomas Ligotti. Nor had I realised how assiduously he has avoided mentioning Ligotti in his interviews or elsewhere - to the point that there isn't a single mention of Ligotti or Conspiracy Against the Human Race(US-UK)(the work from which Pizzolatto drew his most notable dialogue) in the commentaries on the DVD release of the series.

Thankfully Jon Padgett, of Thomas Ligotti Online, did the leg work and has pulled together some pretty damning evidence which shows how True Detective was less homage to Ligotti than it was blatant plagiarism. Over at the esteemed Lovecraft eZine Mike Davis interviews Padgett and presents the evidence for all to see.

I, personally, have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards plagiarism. I don't see an inherent problem with plagiarising work so long as one acknowledges where one has taken it from. All culture is, after all, built upon remixing and rewriting themes and tropes that date back to when we first became a species that creates. What I take especial umbrage with here is that Pizzolatto has wholesale lifted the work of an obscure author and made himself rich with it. If he had at least promoted the work of Ligotti in his interviews and in the show, it would not have been difficult to have CAtHR sat atop a pile of books in Rust Cohl's apartment, so that some light may be shone upon Ligotti's obscurity allowing him too to benefit from the show's success.

To add insult to injury Pizzolatto has been nominated for an Emmy for writing True Detective.

Oh well, that's me not enthusiastically promoting season two. Unless Pizzolatto comes clean and gives Ligotti, the true genius behind the show, some credit I shall remain completely silent about his next show. I hope that others will do the same and so deny Pizzolatto the free publicity we so generously give to creations and creators we admire. I also hope that many people will not watch the show on HBO/Sky Atlantic but will download it from pirate sites and so also deny him our patronage.