KOSMOCHLOR

2025-06-03T21:10:00.009+02:00

Stories out in 2025, so far

"Droid Boyd" - The Colored Lens (forthcoming)
"It Knows My Name" - Graveside Press Anthology (forthcoming - October 2025)
"Operation: Black Ice" - Bullet Point (forthcoming - October 2025)
"Phantom Loop" with S. L. Johnson - The Crosstimber (forthcoming - October 2025)
"A Very Small Green Woman" - Fractured Reverie Anthology (forthcoming - June 2025)

"Rewritten in Flesh" - Saros Speculative Fiction #3 (May 2025)
"What Slips Through" - Antler Velvet Magazine (April 2025)
"How to Erase a Brother" - KINPAURAK (March 2025)
"Familiar Things" - The Dark (February 2025)

To a Dead Friend, Just Because You Are on My Mind

2025-02-18T15:21:00.005+01:00

Yo, dead idiot,

You were a damn good writer, but did you ever share your work? Nope. Too proud, too stubborn, too wrapped up in your own head. “If I’m not Tolstoy, why bother?” you said. What kind of ridiculous logic is that? Since when did every writer need to be some literary god? Newsflash: most of us aren’t. We write anyway.

You hoarded your words like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold, but guess what? You can’t take them with you. Now they’re just sitting there, gathering dust, unread. And for what? Some perfect moment that never came? A world that would suddenly bow down and declare you a genius? Come on.

Writing isn’t about being great. It’s about doing the damn thing. About throwing your words out there and hoping they stick to something, someone. But you never did. And that pisses me off because your voice mattered. It still does.

I’m still writing. Maybe I suck. Maybe I don’t. Either way, I’m doing it. Unlike some people I could name.

Later,

Your very-much-alive-and-still-annoyed friend

One can be autistic and a fascist

2025-01-22T19:55:00.002+01:00

Dr. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, focused his work on children, distinguishing between “classic” autism and what he termed “Asperger’s syndrome.” This distinction wasn’t primarily about the level of support needed or autonomy but behavioral characteristics. Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome didn’t typically withdraw from social interactions as many with classic autism did. However, they shared challenges in social skills and often needed to consciously learn to understand others, as intuitive social behaviors didn’t come naturally to them.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association released the DSM-5, which removed Asperger’s syndrome as a separate diagnosis, consolidating it under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This change aimed to reflect the spectrum nature of autism and reduce rigid diagnostic categories. Despite this reclassification, it doesn’t negate the substantial differences in how autism manifests among individuals. The DSM-5’s approach encourages a more nuanced understanding of the diverse presentations of autism.

Similarly, when the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in December 1973, it didn’t imply to me and others that homosexuality was inherently a disorder until that point. Instead, the decision acknowledged the evolving understanding of human sexuality.

As my old psychopathology professor used to say, “On peut avoir la vérole et un bar-tabac,” meaning one can have syphilis and own a bar—highlighting that complex human experiences often defy simplistic categorization.

Also, one can be autistic and a fascist.

Forbidden Path

2020-08-11T17:42:00.008+02:00

Military vehicles carry coffins out of Bergamo as the local cemeteries are overrun.

Lecco, Italy (March 30 2020).

My son and his wife live in a village two miles away from me. We’re both near the hard-hit province of Bergamo, Lombardy. For only the third time in four weeks I’ve ventured outside, to buy necessities.

Now I stand at the foot of the low mountain separating me from the only family I have in Italy. Taking a bus, a train, or driving to him is forbidden. Police stop cars at roadblocks set on municipality borders, doling out fines and filing charges when trespassers cannot show legitimate reason for leaving their town. The whole country is on lockdown. Seeing one’s son is not considered a legitimate reason to travel.

But there is a path which starts here that takes me to my son’s home, at the expense of a three-hour trek. I’ve done it many times, in the summer, when my two younger children visit from Paris.

This morning I filled in a self-certification form, complete with my ID and phone number, in which I attest why I am leaving home. This is not China. Police controls, except for the roadblocks, constitute a form of psychological intimidation and coercion to prevent movement. It’s justified, in my view, as too many people aren’t abiding by the measures decreed. Phone cells providers were requested to release mass statistics to the Lombardy authorities. The results are dismal: 60% of the region’s population continue to move about as if this threat weren’t the direst since WWII.

Violators, in the main, are teenagers and grandparents. One sees the invincible youths hanging out wherever they can, denied their normal bars and pizzerias. As to the elderly, grizzled men play bocce in the parks while rebellious grannies line up at the bakery, chatting with friends, no thought to personal distance, heads together as if conspiring against this upstart plague.

Two weeks ago a 71-year-old man escaped from an isolation ward at Sant’Anna hospital in Como. The fugitive hopped on a taxi and went home in the Bergamo province. A few days later, an elderly married couple evaded from a cordoned-off town to go on a skiing holiday. They got sick, checked in a hospital, tested positive. Everyone has tales of reckless friends heroically spreading the virus around before the borders closed. When the Premier’s decree quarantining Lombardy was leaked, people crowded the railway stations to reunite with relatives in Southern Italy, carrying coronavirus presents for their aging parents. After a few days of compliance, people are starting to fill the streets again.

The virus is invisible. People fear the unknown, the unseen. Panic and denial are two sides of the same coin. Still, how can we blame citizens when we are bombarded with contradictory information? We have heard doctors on national television say there was no reason to be alarmed: the coronavirus was just a bad flu.

I isolated myself on February 19, when only the town of Codogno and its nearby villages had been sealed off. Most assumed the outbreak would be contained. Schools, bars, restaurants, gyms and cinemas remained open. Yet, I’d read news reports, and experts’ comments on the new Coronavirus danger and spread. There was suspicion the virus had been circulating for months. Lombardy is one of the most densely populated regions in Europe, highly industrialized. Milan, the capital, is a trading hub with extensive international exchanges. In my view, it was only a matter of time before the contagion spread.

As I already work from home, my habits haven’t changed much. But today, after four weeks of self-imposed seclusion, I hear the call of the wild, and a mother’s urge to check on her offspring. My hometown on the lake rests in the middle of a marvelous amphitheater of mountains. How to resist temptation?

Longingly, I gaze at the cobbled path, considering the interdiction against mountain excursions. Of course, I understand the Alpine Rescue doesn’t wish to mobilize helicopters to retrieve incautious and injudicious walkers and climbers. But I’m sensible, with proper gear and comprehensive knowledge of my route, and, how could they possibly watch all the trails?

The track turns to the right. Beyond this big hill on the left lie Bergamo’s valleys, the epicenter, with 4,035 cases. This area of industrial excellence usually exports products to the whole world. Now, coffins are stored in churches. Last week, a procession of military vehicles transported the deceased out of Bergamo, to be cremated elsewhere.

At my back, a church bell rings--the Covid-19 deaths are still few and far between in my hometown. I count nine strikes. The deceased is a man. For a dead woman, the strikes would be seven.

One last time I gaze with longing at the path to my son, then I turn my back to the mountain, and go home.

---

It's been so long. I wrote this entry when in the neighboring city of Bergamo (metro area population 883,000 in 2019) the COVID-19 daily death toll reached 200. The lockdown had made me a hermit. Not an unhappy hermit, but a misanthropic hermit nevertheless. Why I never posted it, I do not know.

The Auricle is a weird beast

2015-10-07T22:15:00.000+02:00

You will discover this creature, and all the others, in the forthcoming Centipede Press anthology Bestiary edited by Ann VanderMeer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Jeff VanderMeer

&: Ampersand by Karin Lowachee

A: The Auricle by Gio Clairval

B: Bartleby’s Typewriter by Corey Redekop

C: The Counsellor Crow by Karen Lord

D: Daydreamer by Proxy by Dexter Palmer

E: Enkantong-bato by Dean Francis Alfar

F: The Figmon by Michael Cisco

G: The Guest by Brian Conn

H: Hadrian’s Sparrikan by Stephen Graham Jones

I: Ible by Brian Evenson

J: Jason Bug by Joseph Nigg

K: The Karmantid by Karen Heuler

L: The Liwat’ang Yawa and the Litok-litok by Rochita Loenin-Ruiz

M: Mosquito Boy by Felix Gilman

N: Nothus Barathruma by Reza Negarestani

O: Orsinus Liborum by Catherynne M. Valente

P: Pyret by Karin Tidbeck

Q: Quintus by Michal Ajvaz

R: Rapacis X. Loco Signa by L.L. Hannett

S: Snafu by Micaela Morrissette

T: Tongues of Moon Toad by Cat Rambo

U: The Ugly-Nest Rat by Eric Schaller

V: The Vanga by Rikki Ducornet

W: Weialalaleia by Amal El-Mohtar

X: The Xaratan by Rhys Hughes

Y: Yakshantariksh by Vandana Singh

Z: Zee by Richard Howard

: China Miéville

Preorder at: amazon.com

Stories published in 2014

2015-01-21T10:04:00.000+01:00

Street art in Paris

Ze List of last year's publications:

-"Like Reeds in Summer" - Daily Science Fiction. (December 2014)

-"Playground" - Postscripts 32-33, PS Publishing. (November 2014)

-"Flossed in Love" - Jersey Devil Press. (October 2014)

"Cloven" - This Is Not an Anthology, an Oneiros Books anthology of surrealist stories edited by Chris Kelso. (August 2014)

-"Apples and Peaches" - A Darke Phantastique, anthology edited by Jason V Brock. Cicatrix Press. (August 2014)

-"Ambrotype" - Typehouse Literary Magazine. (July 2014)

-"The Writing Cembalo" - Kisses by Clockwork, a Ticonderoga Publications anthology edited by Liz Grzyb. (July 2014)

-"Intersection" - Galaxy's Edge #6 a print and online magazine edited by Mike Resnick. (January 2014).

Reprinted in the anthology The Best of Galaxy's Edge #1

-"Red Apple" - Infective Ink. (January 2014)

Like Reeds in Summer

2014-12-06T08:29:00.001+01:00

Angela Rozzoni - Adda River - Among the Reeds

Daily Science Fiction :: Like Reeds in Summer by Gio Clairval

punkPunk!

2014-11-17T15:12:00.001+01:00

I am particularly fond of "Punk up Your Road Blues," my story featured in the nifty anthology edited by Andrew Hook. This gathering of punk writings is coming out in January 2015 by Dog Horn Publishing.

Writing this one taught me to weave autobiographical elements into fiction. Unless it was about fictionalizing reality, transposing it to a different time and setting, all the while keeping it true. ("Assimilate this!" said the Klingon to the Borg :P). As Tim Jackson says: "Humor puts things together—in surprising and unexpected ways."

Here's the Table of Contents:

The Boys – L A Sykes and Mark Slade

Cowboys and Mohawkers – Alexei Kalinchuk

Blanknoir – Stephen Palmer

Breath of Fresh Air – P A Levy

Spinning Fast – Gary Couzens

The Rock Star – Richard Dellar

Punk up Your Road Blues – Gio Clairval

What Use Optimism? – Adam Craig

Starfire – Richard Mosses

Quantum Punk – Sarah Crabtree

Jester Punk Fuffery – Douglas J. Ogurek

Out Of The Box – Douglas Thompson

The God Fearing Crack Dealers' Songbook – Jude Sandelewski

Real Reggae – Joe Briggs

What It Is – Terry Grimwood

You Can Jump – Mat Coward

The Last Mohican - Andrew Hook

This is NOT an Anthology, edited by Chris Kelso

2014-07-15T19:47:00.001+02:00

Artwork by Terence-Jaiden David Wray, find him on deviantart

My stories are appearing in a few anthologies this year. So I'm delighted to announce that This is NOT an Anthology, and the dada thing is coming out through Oneiros Books. It is a gathering of surrealistic tales, poems and artwork edited by Chris Kelso.

Alongside the classics (William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ginger Eades, Gerard Malanga--with a photograph and poem about Tennessee Williams, Mary Beach, Charles Plymell and Claude Pelieu), we frolick, too, we, the new writers from all over Europe, the young, and pretty, yes, muchly pretty.

Table of Contents

(FRA) Seb Doubinsky – A SMALL PILE OF BONES

(SCO) Neil Williamson – ARRHYTHMIA

(DEN) Lee Kwo – THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES OF REASON

(NED) Mike Jansen – DEAD SKY RAT

(IRE) Joe Ambrose – INCIDENT AT OURIKA VALLEY

(GRE) Achilleas Kyriakidis - BONSAI

(SCO) John McNee – IN THE FLESH

(WAL) Rhys Hughes – THE QUIMS OF ITAPETINGA

(BELG) Raf De Bie – THE FIRST ROUND

(POL) Krsysztof Dabrowski – FATLAND

(SWE) Michael Faun - TWENTY THOUSAND FATHOMS UNDER THE SEA

(DEN) Poems by Ole Wesenberg Nielsen

(ENG) Adam Millard – THE GIRL WITH THE DOLPHIN TATTOO

(IRE) Michael McAloran – 3 SKETCHES

(FRA) A tribute to Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach (feat: Charles Plymell and William Burroughs)

(SWE) George Cotronis – THRONE

(SCO) Chris Kelso – FAMILY MAN

(SWE) Love Kolle – REASSEMBLED

(GRE) Mike Kazepis – TIME IN THE SHADOW OF THE THING TOO BIG TO SEE

(GRE) Konstantine Paradias – SCENES FROM A DINER

(SCO/SWE) Andrew Coulthard – A TABLE OF CONTENTS

(ITA) Gio Clairval – CLOVEN

(Spa) Gabino Englasias – DOWNTOWN? NEVERMORE!

(ENG) Charlotte Baker - ESREVER

(Germ) Preston Grassman – THE DEATHWORLD

(Eng) Rob Harris – THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US

(Gerard Malanga tribute to Tennessee Williams)

(Goodbye Anthology – Matt Bailer)

And the Cover sleeve by Terence-Jaiden David Wray (WAL)

Internal artwork/photography – Michael Faun, S.Clay Wilson, Wallace Berman, Scott Coubrough, Ginger Eades, Brion Gysin, Gerard Malanga, Ralph.W.Ackerman, Chris Kelso, Mary Beach, Darren Rae, Colin Dunsmuir and Joel Hubaut

BUY

A Darke Phantastique, anthology edited by Jason V Brock

2014-07-09T21:08:00.000+02:00

Here's the complete wraparound cover art by Samuel Araya for the new mammoth anthology of fiction and poetry at the crossroads of horror and magic realism A Darke Phantastique: Encounters with the Uncanny and Other Magical Things, edited by Jason V Brock, Cycatrix Press, 2014, with a previously unpublished foreword by the late Ray Bradbury.

A new story of mine, "Apples and Peaches," is featured in this milestone volume of 800 pages, along with names such as Greg Bear, Gary A. Braunbeck, Dennis Etchison, Richard Gavin, S. T. Joshi, Nancy Kilpatrick, Joe Lansdale, William F. Nolan, Melanie Tem, Steve Rasnick Tem, and many more.

You can find the lettered and the trade editions at the online store of Jasunni Productions

Now look at the complete Table of Contents:

The Beginnings of Imagination by Ray Bradbury (Foreword)
An Abiding Darkness, A Phantastique Light by Jason V Brock (Introduction)

*SECTION ONE: Magical Realities*

Michael the Monster by Paul Kane
A Darke Phantastique by Jason V Brock
Charles Out of La-La Land by Bruce Taylor
The Wisest Stone and the Zoo by Nathaniel Lee
Out of the Blue, and Into the Black by Sunni K Brock
The Lizard Man Dispatches by Ray Garton
Real Live Lobsters by D.T. Kastn
Bittersweet Bedlam by Sam Marzioli
The Last Witch by William F. Nolan

*SECTION TWO: Lost Innocence*

The Claim by Erinn L. Kemper
Lovecraft’s Pillow by Don Webb
Forgetting by Misty Dahl (flash)
Birth of an Apocalypse by Lawrence Van Hoof
Descartar by S.J. Chambers
Apples and Peaches by Gio Clairval
La Joie de Vivre, or Picasso and the Satyr by Ralph Sevush
Immigrant by Andrew S. Fuller
Timbrel and Pipe by Melanie Tem

*SECTION THREE: Forbidden Knowledge*

Old Enough to Drink by Lois H. Gresh
Homo Suicidus by JG Faherty
“In Your Dark”: Differing Strategies in Subhuman Integration Through “Monster Academies”
[S. Armand & J. Miller, Unpublished Manuscript] by Jason Maurer
Transformations at the Inn of the Golden Pheasant by Gene O’Neill
Lords of Chaos by Wade German (poem)
The Squatters by Nicole Cushing
Tardigrade by Mike Allen
The Bat by Jan Vander Laenen
Dust Made of Words by Cody Goodfellow
Genius by Greg Bear (teleplay)

*SECTION FOUR: Hidden Truths*

Breakfast in Tasmania by Dennis Etchison
Darkness by Nancy Kilpatrick
Water over Stone by W. H. Pugmire (sonnet)
Redaction by Gary A. Braunbeck
Paper and Pencil, Skin and Ink by Chris Marrs
Buddha Circus by Derek Künsken
The Weight Los by Steve Rasnic Tem
The Case of the Four-Acre Haunt by Joe R. Lansdale
Creaking Earth by Richard Gavin
“You’ll Reach There in Time” by S. T. Joshi

*SECTION FIVE: Uncanny Encounters*

Three Fables: 1) The Fiction Lover, 2) In the Hood, 3) Krustallos by E.E. King
Down the Hatch by Jonathan Thomas
‘Selected Poems’ by Marge Simon (poems)
Outsiders by J.C. Koch
Promise to Nessie by Jerry Airth
Him by Ian Futter (poem)
Kudzu by Lucy A. Snyder
I Keep the Dark That is Your Pain by Wendy Rathbone
In the Wardrobe by Nickolas Furr
The Fine Art of Courage by Weston Ochse
Phoenix on the Orange River by Tom Conoboy

Kisses by Clockwork -- A Steampunk anthology edited by Liz Grzyb

2014-06-06T02:35:00.000+02:00

I'm very excited! Kisses by Clockwork, a Steampunk romance anthology edited by Liz Grzyb for Ticonderoga Publications, is out today. You can get the book through:

Indiebooksonline.com

My story, "The Writing Cembalo," is set on Lake Como, early 19th century, when Austria controls the North of Italy. In this alternative-reality Europe, dirigibles are the future, and nobody believes in trains but a handful of Italian insurgents; one of them, a scientific-minded young woman, is in love with the engineer who builds zeppelins for the enemy.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Marilag Angway, "Smuggler's Deal"
Cherith Baldry, "The Venetian Cat"
Gio Clairval, "The Writing Cembalo"
M L D Curelas, "Ironclad"
Ray Dean, "Practically Perfect"
Stephanie Gunn, "Escapement"
Richard Harland, "The Kiss of Reba Maul"
Rebecca Harwell, "Love in the Time of Clockwork Horses"
Faith Mudge, "Descension"
Nicole Murphy, "The Wild Colonial Clockwork Boy"
Katrina Nicholson, "Lady Presto Magnifico and the Disappearing Glass Ceiling"
Anthony Panegyres, "The Tic-Toc Boy of Constantinople"
Amanda Pillar, "A Clockwork Heart"
Angela Rega, "The Law of Love"
Carol Ryles, "Siri and the Chaos-Maker"
DC White, "South, to Glory"

Why the Benevolent Sexist Can Be My Friend

2014-06-02T22:39:00.000+02:00

Found at eugeniorecuenco.com

Today I received this nice thank-you note from a writer, for reviewing his, (outstanding, moving), short story, written from a woman's point of view. He did it very well; he could have fooled me.

When I told him that I was curious as to why he had chosen to write the story in the first person, as a woman, the writer answered:

"Guilty as charged - I am laden with a Y chromosome and all that it entails. I'd love to tell you specifically why I wrote this tale from a feminine POV, but I can't remember - it's just the way the story formed in my mind, as best I can remember. Sometimes the dynamic I want between characters requires a female protagonist, sometimes an LGBT protagonist, sometimes - but rarely - a straight white male protagonist. I don't feel like I write these things, I simply channel whatever idea has lodged in my brain and try my best to get out of the way of the words as they come out!

You'll get no argument from me that men are simpler to figure out, though. We're very straightforward creatures. Not a day goes by where I'm not thankful I was born into this gender, life is so much easier on every count.

Thank you for all the little notes as well - this was a first draft, and I thoroughly expected little details, (like the repetition of answer - good catch, tah), but was too close to the text to spot them myself. No-one else has been as thorough as you were, and it's marvellously useful

Thank you again, for the help and the kindness."

Thank you for thanking me. I am writing the following argumentation to break the news to you. Gently, I hope. As you think me kind, I would hate to disappoint you.

It seems difficult to me this state of being "laden with a Y chromosome," given that the Y is so much smaller than the X chromosome. The former, during human evolution, has been losing most of the genes it used to carry (biologists call it affectionately "the rotting Y"). The little Y's function is to cause genetically male fetuses to become phenotypically (visibly) males because the male fetus lacks the genetic material of a second X. Our bodies are all females by default: look at those tiny nipples of yours. Around the fourth week of gestation, a few little genes on a little Y bring about the differentiation into male. C'est la petite différence.

Things go differently with minds. As the theorist of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan said, the unconscious has no gender. Or, in other words, we are all both female and male in our minds. Still, boy (and girl) needs to define his (her) identity, and sexual orientation is a strong definer, in our societies anyway. Therefore you are a man, and you are thankful for being a man.

It makes me think of the lyrics of a song a friend wrote: "Thank you, Lord, for making me a white landowner instead of a penniless peasant."

Given that you're so happy to be male (and you should be: one should always embrace what one is), allow me to expose the following points:

Deep Unconscious, or Let the Archetype Speak

This is the easy part. Most writers will agree on this simple idea: when you write, parts of your unconscious take turns to come forward and speak.

Social unconscious, or the Woman in Ideology

Writing in a female's perspective may be more 'romantic' and believable because women are supposed to be more romantic than men. Of course you have not elected a feminine viewpoint because you would love to discover what it feels like.

Let me quote you (lamely edited for your anonymity):

"Barefoot across the hall, naked but for his shirt brushing against my breasts."

Come on. Look me in the eye. How can one resist writing about the sensation of a male shirt swishing against one's breasts? Putting oneself in the soft body of she who's wearing his shirt, usually after sex? What straight man has never dreamed of experiencing what it would feel to be on the receiving side?

But I digress.

As I noticed in the TV commercials I am seeing in Italy (I am staying on Lake Como and thinking of moving here), the plot always involves a man explaining something to a woman, even when the task is quintessentially feminine—the sole exception being tampons and hygienic napkins. I think Italy is more overtly paternalistic than other western countries (sad but true), but what Italian commercials do is display male fantasies in a more straightforward way.

Man knows. Man is in charge. Woman can only be in the position of the student, the apprentice.

I am not saying that it is a male conspiracy. The creative people in advertising companies sometimes are female, too, and so are the buyers of advertisements. I am talking about ideology, that distinctive way of seeing the world that we accept without questioning it, most of the time, and, thanks to general acceptance, this view upgrades from particular to universal. It is with good reason that we call this vision of the world the "dominant ideology." By definition, the dominated must adopt the ideology of the dominant. Without the underling's acceptance, there is no domination, not even in a dictatorship. I am thinking of the stereotype of the dark-skinned Nanny who frowns at a dark-skinned person being introduced into the mistress's drawing room. And, in the 60s, when the TV channel producing Star Trek showed a pilot to a panel of spectators, who voiced loudly the protest about a woman being Captain Kirk's Number One, the first officer, saying (literally):

"Who does she think she is?"?

The men?

Nah.

Now, from a mix of the Deep and the Ideological Unconscious, spring different types of men:

Haters and Lovers

There are women haters, and the are women lovers. Women haters, directly and outspokenly haters, are rare nowadays, especially among contemporary speculative fiction writers.

Now, about women lovers.

Those who think that women, in general, are more romantic, intuitive, sensitive in a charming way, even better than men in many circumstances, are called "benevolent sexists."

Benevolent, yes, but sexist all the same.

These are the men (quite a few among my fellow writers, I must say) who react with (sincere) wounded feelings when they are accused of being sexist. They are wounded because they honestly think that they love women. And they do.

When I worked as an international management consultant, most of my male clients were delighted to receive advice from a woman. Once the invisible ceiling broken--not an easy task, particularly in the twentieth century--men are happy to follow a woman's business recommendations, provided that she "thinks like a man" (sic). They used to tell me I was so much more effective than a man consultant. Because I reasoned like a man but "sensed" like a woman. Perfection! Completion!

Men know they are incomplete (as James Brown sings: It's a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl--Rolling Stone characterized those lyrics as "biblically chauvinistic"—and hey, guess who co-wrote them with James Brown? Betty Jean Newsome, a woman.)

So, this writerly friend of mine I was talking about mainly has women as business partners. His lawyer, his agent, his editor, his publisher—they're all women! For nothing in the world would he trade any of them for a man. Because women are more acute, intuitive, sensible, honest, helpful, available...

As a category. Women are better.

(Oh, gosh, why am I tempted to believe it is true?)

But it is not. Women can be obtuse, callous, dishonest, selfish... Just like men.

Understand, please, that my friend is a woman lover. He really is, and I entirely believe him when he says so. He is also a perfect gentleman, a man so agreeable to hang out with. And his wife is one of the strongest women I have ever met.

Now go tell this kind, generous, woman-loving man that he is a sexist. He will feel betrayed to the core, and in a way, he is, because he really likes women.

He is still a sexist, though. A kind, nice, Benevolent Sexist. One I love.

Is the Benevolent Sexist the Enemy?

I strongly disagree with those who would like to destroy the Benevolent Sexist. After all, I am a rosy-skinned, blue-eyed privileged woman, and I often surprise myself by being a Benevolent Racist. I know I am, despite all the street demonstrations for civil rights, and my sincere conviction that I would die to defend people that are discriminated because, besides skin color, discriminating a category of people serves some other category's interests.

Gio in June

I am, unconsciously, a racist. But I am trying hard not to be. When I'm told that I am making a racist mistake, I try to understand how and why, and, even if my unconscious is a damned (Benevolent?) Racist, my conscious mind holds the racist part back. I, too, am imbued with the dominant ideology, but I want to become better than my stupid unconscious. I want to be free, at least from the conditioning I am aware of.

Always the optimist, I believe in people's ability to improve. It is part of being human. Despite the fact that many men do not seem to think and act like normal human beings, please admit that they, too, have the spark. They can change.

This is why I will defend my Benevolent Sexist fellow men from any unjust assimilation with the Blatant Sexists. The Benevolent can be my friend because, if he becomes aware of his unconscious attitude toward women, he can grow into the Feminist Man and be an ally.

Caledonia Dreamin', anthology edited by Hal Duncan and Chris Kelso

2013-11-11T17:13:00.005+01:00

Published by Eibonvale Press. Cover art and design by David Rix

It's been a while since I announced that one of my stories was out (my publication list on this blog is up to date, though). But how can I let this anthology happen and say nothing? It's fiction as weird as can be. And the cover, ahhh, the cover...

It was there, sparkling new on Eibonvale Press' table in the (*evil laugh*) infamous Dealers' Room at World Fantasy Convention 2013 in Brighton. So I, chuffed to bits, grabbed a copy, pressed the artsy object to my chest and ran away. Hal Duncan and Chris Kelso's anthology (I've got a story in this one, but, if I didn't, I would still be raving about it--this is one of the cases in which you *should* judge a book by its cover) is available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

I am very excited to be in such company:

Table of Contents

Sweeter Than, Neil Williamson
Maw, Wendy Muzlanova
Maukit, Brian Milton
Fallen through a Giant’s Eyes, T.J. Berg
Newayr, Douglas Thompson
The Bouk Puppie Show, Preston Grassman
The Laird of Nagasaki, Tom Bradley
Palais 1930, Rob McClure Smith
The Losers, Angus McAllister
Drive the Warlike Angles into the Sea!!!, Nick Mamatas
Widows in the World, Gavin Grant
I am not (), Phil Raines
Studying Honeybloods With the Queen of Exotica, Kirsty Logan
Mary, Thomas and Joe, Stravaigin, David McGroarty
For Your Guising, Gio Clairval
Nae Greeance o’ Bane, Tim Jarvis
Bowfin Island, Anna Tambour

Hiroshima mon amour - Nuclear Deterrence and a Stylish French Film

2013-08-06T14:19:00.002+02:00

Hiroshima mon amour
Scenario and dialogues by
Marguerite Duras

Small mistakes are not possible with nuclear weapons.—Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Examining the Validity of Nuclear Deterrence*

If nuclear weapons are ready to be used at all times, no system of controls will prevent their use forever - particularly if a war comes in which nuclear states feel their vital interests threatened. In the whirlwind of war, when stakes are high, who can be sure that folly can be prevented?— Ibid.

Facts and Debate

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb killed an estimated 66,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. The destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of the era of nuclear deterrence.

The numbers of nuclear weapons have decreased. Nevertheless, governments continue to confer legitimacy on nuclear weapons. This legitimacy is the foremost reason why the public opinion is not asking for the nuclear armament to be outlawed.

Nuclear deterrence, which consists in exposing one's opponent to a risk of massive destruction, remains the main strategy of these countries.

Some argue that nuclear deterrence belongs to another era.

Regarding conflicts that take place beyond national frontiers, there is little historical proof that nuclear deterrence actually works:

Where is the evidence that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Pacific War in 1945? It appears today that the main factor was the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on 8th August.

Many believe that nuclear weapons kept the peace during the Cold War. Here, again, there is no evidence that this belief is true.

Nuclear threats do not prevent conventional, chemical or biological weapons attacks (nuclear deterrence has no impact on belligerence in general).

Historical records suggest that weapons of mass destruction tend to strengthen resistance instead of coercing the victims of the strike.

(For further discussion, see Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Examining the Validity of Nuclear Deterrence- (*The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies Monterey Institute of International Studies - Ken Berry, Patricia Lewis, Benoît Pélopidas, Nikolai Sokov and Ward Wilson)

Hiroshima mon amour
(1959 drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais,
with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras)

A book born as a screenplay

Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern filmmaker of the sound film.—Eric Rohmer (1920-2010 French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter)

It all began with French film director Alain Resnais asking novelist Marguerite Duras if she was interested in writing the scenario of a documentary that, instead of offering a historical angle, would explore the topic through the lenses of modernism in cinema and literature.

The project was abandoned, but Resnais and Duras materialized the idea of creating a love-story film on the ruins of Hiroshima. The film recounts a romance between a young French woman and her Japanese lover. The woman reminisces the disaster of her passion for a German soldier in her hometown, Nevers. Two cities, two times, two reveries entangle, fourteen years after the nuclear destruction, as memories remain written in the protagonists' bodies--the film's main theme of connecting through traumatic experiences.

If the world is in ruins, cinema and literature must adapt. Narration, time, plot are deconstructed and shattered.

"It’s possible that Hiroshima mon amour is the first modern sound film in every aspect of its conception and execution—construction, rhythm, dialogue, performance style, philosophical outlook, and even musical score." Kent Jones Blog Criterion: Hiroshima Mon Amour Time Indefinite

Writing strategies

The writers may find this article interesting:

The published scnario et dialogues (Duras 1960) of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) feature precise technical specifications of sound and image and more novelistic passages, all of which create an emotional resonance that has been left to the director to translate into images.--Screenwriting strategies in Marguerite Duras's script for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960)

Frédéric et les étoiles

2013-02-10T18:15:00.000+01:00

Big Militaire - from the website of Frédéric Mouly, Artiste

Cher Frédéric,

I haven’t seen you in a long time, and now you are gone. I’m sorry you thought you had to leave. They said it was some internal waterfall of blood, but you know how it goes.

Today, as soon as I received the email about you, gone, I googled you because I wanted to upload a few of your paintings, to pay my respects. (In English it’s almost the same as “to pay a visit,” only the currency is different). There was nothing at all on line. A secret artist, you were. Or a shy one. While I remember you as a painter, I discovered you were a photographer, too, but your website was down, or closed, or something. Nevertheless, I did find the ghost of your domain (forgive the pun.) And here it is, one of your photographs: “Le Big Militaire,” which I love.
. . .

For me you will always be twenty-one. Where were we? In Deauville, at Le Casino de Deauville. Your brother announced that he was going to win so much money he would buy "une rivière de diamants." We didn't win, but I was happy because I had never set foot in a game parlor. I must have told everyone about the family tale of my grandfather losing a streetful of buildings (or maybe it was just one big building full of paying tenants? My dad, le conteur, had that famous dramatic fiber...), so--I was saying--Granddad lost a fortune the night before he got married, and he had to work for the rest of his life. The incident, surely told and retold as a ward against the Devil of Poker, scared my father out of all kinds of card games. The scare was handed over to me, and I was never able to play cards, not even a slot machine in a bar. Imagine visiting a casino!

So you were twenty-one. And that night I slid my arm under yours. En tout bien tout honneur, and HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE, but you were an artist of the shy persuasion, and you untangled your arm from mine. There, embarrassing thirty-year-old person (me)!

I seldom saw you in the following years. My impression is that you disentangled your arm from many arms that would have liked to stay entangled with yours.

You had such freckled charm. I think you didn't know.

La vie dans les étoiles, Mouly 1987 (from my private collection)

I'm looking at La vie dans les étoiles (Life among the Stars), right now, and I would like to thank you for letting me have this painting, a long time ago. I can see you there among the twinklers, like the shy heart that you are. I didn't know you that much, but I will miss you.

See you around, Frédéric.

Georg Heym, The Poet Who Dreamed in Light Blue

2012-12-03T17:15:00.001+01:00

Juggler (The Surface and Beneath) by
Heather Wilcoxon, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

In cities strange and yet weirdly familiar, women watched by monstrous demons give birth to headless infants, vast gods straddle apartment blocks and gaze balefully out on an urban hell, and the savage giant War dances wildly on the mountains while a mighty city sinks into an abyss. (in Georg Heym’s Poems, bilingual edition, translated from the German by Anthony Hasler, 2006, Northwestern University Press.)

First published in Weird Fiction Review May 9 2012

PART ONE – The Author

Georg Heym’s works are an enthralling mixture of classical German lyricism and arresting visions of urban dysplastic images à la Metropolis. The city of Berlin, under the domination of the City God (Der Gott der Stadt), is the theater of Gothic horrors — visions of war and death where the romantic macabre walks hand in hand with images taken from Greek myths. Heym is also known for the formal beauty of his sonnets, which place him amongst the greatest poets of the German tradition. Heym was saluted as the first expressionistic poet, a decade before Expressionism became the dominant artistic trend in post-WWI Germany.

I translated the short-short story “Die Dissektion” — in fact a poem of six hundred words packed with images so strong they hurt — for The Weird, (read it here : Weird Fiction Review) and I fell in love with the author.

Two (very different) innovative authors and their similar upbringing

I recently translated one of Gustave Flaubert’s juvenile short stories, “Quidquid volueris”[1]. As I was trying to establish the first publication date, I found an uncanny resemblance between Flaubert and Heym’s formative years. There is no similarity between the two authors’ works in terms of the aesthetic of their writing, but both Flaubert and Heym tackled themes ahead of their times.
Flaubert unleashed a storm of criticism after the publication of his scandalous (for the time) novel Madame Bovary. The public outrage dragged him to court, and the author was condemned for describing the antics of a young housewife in search of evasion. A long, suggestive scene was censored (a case of too much showing instead of telling). As for Heym, his works were less known outside the literary circles, but had the larger public read about his headless infants and monstrous demons, he would have surely been branded unhinged and dangerous.
Heym was born in 1887, a year before Flaubert died; nevertheless, his family context – upper middle class – resembles Flaubert’s, and both authors received a classical education (high school classical teaching remained consistently the same across Europe until the late twentieth century). I wondered whether these ingredients were needed to obtain an individual who would later bring new themes to literature, breaking with the past.

Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner

Recipe for a Modern Poet (or “Bake Your Own Georg Heym”)

Take a well-to-do but sine nobilitate family and mix with lackluster results in school. Add an authoritarian and irascible father and a loving, sentimental mother. Sprinkle with blank, monochord verses later labeled as “juvenilia.” Encourage the subject to marinate in passionless high-education studies, preferably Law.

Your Heym-dough will seek solace in epic deeds (drinking, dueling, whoring and getting kicked out of several schools), and he will chant the fearless protagonists of past revolutions, thus cutting his poetic teeth on grand plays imbued with classical German lyricism.
Despite the stiff theatrical production produced in this early period, it is crucial that you do not skip this step: later on your poet will have to express his internal turmoil in perfectly formed verses.
At some point, your poet-dough may be exposed to the influence of the Nietzsche yeast. He may write in his diary that he longs to realize the Übermensch ideal in his own person (1906). Do not panic and do not take the dough out of the oven; a story will spurt from this idea: “The Madman,” in which madness is depicted as a form of ultimate salvation. Because madmen are above ordinary laws, insanity entails the most perfect form of freedom, as illustrated by the final image: the madman soaring like a bird high above reality.

If the previous procedure is correctly applied, the blooming author, disappointed with his contemporaries, will join a club of think-alike youths (it will be Der Neue Club, The New Club, in Berlin, 1910). Inspiring meetings will simmer in a café that should preferably sport an ironic name (the Neopathetische Cabaret or Neo-Pathetic Music-Hall). If you keep the fire going, the group leader, Kurt Hiller, will salute your artist as an expressionistic poet, which will brand him a true precursor; Expressionism — a creative movement in pre-WWI Germany fostering the idea that art’s purpose is to express the subjective feelings of artists — will be at its zenith during the 20s.
The baking is going well. You should now be satisfied to see the subject’s first poems appear (the same year, 1910) in the radical magazine Der Demokrat, and the first collection, Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day), will be published in 1911, to be favorably reviewed by the famous poet Ernst Stadler. Given the positive critiques, your lyrical dough will decide to abandon his career in Law.
Meanwhile, let a resonant, clichéd tragedy, Atalanta, find its way into print (1911) and do not despair but look at your creation through the oven glass: the dough is now golden.
Take your poet out of the oven, for he is baked.

Portrait of Georg Heym

And from now on things become very, very serious, albeit for a very short time.
The new poet displays both an exquisite sensibility and a tormented spirit. A few poems, like his tragedies, are inspired by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, but with more elegant results; others are haunted by classical myths and Gothic tropes; others still, from his later years, are widely considered some of the finest love poems ever written in the German language.
You have in fact created one of the most characteristic voices of German literature.

Too soon did he go

In contrast with his morbid visions, Georg Heym is known for his exuberant good health and stocky appearance. A friend says Georg makes him think of a butcher boy, and everyone thinks our romantic author a force of nature. But Heym dies young, at twenty-four years of age. In 1910, he had noted down a dream in which he advanced hesitantly across a kind of thin “stone slab,” which turned out to be a sheet of ice (Hasler, op. cit.). Uncannily, Heym drowns during a skating expedition on the ice of the Havel River, in 1912. At his funeral, friends dance around his casket, declaiming Hölderlin (a major German poet, 1770 – 1843).

I do not know which verses were chosen to bid the young poet adieu, but here is a poem Georg wrote in 1905, in memory of Hölderlin:

To Hölderlin

And you, too, you are dead, son of the springtime
You, whose life only resembled
blazes shining in the night’s basements
where men forever look for
conclusion and liberty.
You are dead. For they have foolishly reached
for your pure flame
to put it out. For these beasts have always
hated the sublime.
And, as the Moirai
plunged into infinite pain
your spirit which faintly trembled,
God wrapped into a cloth of darkness
his virtuous son’s tortured head.

One of Hölderin’s poems that influenced Heym:

From “In Lovely Blue” (In lieblicher Blaue)

Translated by by George Kalogeris

Like the stamen inside a flower
The steeple stands in lovely blue
And the day unfolds around its needle;

The flock of swallows that circles the steeple
Flies there each day through the same blue air
That carries their cries from me to you;

We know how high the sun is now
As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;

Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
Turning the vane of the weathercock,
The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

Hölderlin’s style is more descriptive, more classical, compared with Heym’s verses, but we can recognize the theme that will find an echo in Heym’s formal sonnet “Reverie in Light Blue,” which you will find below, with the original text and my translation.

A collection of poems, Umbra Vitae, is published posthumously (1912), followed by a collection of short stories, Der Dieb (The Thief, 1913, English translation by Susan Bennet: The Thief and Other Stories, 1994, Libris, first published April 1985), and a collection of sonnets, Marathon (1914).

In 1924, Kurt Wolff publishes the collection of poems compiled by Heym’s literary group Der Neue Club: Umbra Vitae, including forty-seven xylographs by Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner.

After the poet’s untimely death, enthusiastic readers will find echoes of cataclysmic prophecies in his work, as in “Mit weissem Haar in den verrufnen Orten” (With White Hair, on Barren Plains), which foreshadows 1917. The poem describes the suffering of the enslaved working class in the mines of cold Russia. When night comes, the slaves dream of a head perched on top of a pole, riding the agitated waters of a “rebellious sea,” and it is the Czar’s head…

The City’s God

Georg Heym expressed the despair and solitude of urban life.

Fascinated by death, he was obsessed with the modern phenomenon of the metropolis: in his view the triumph of technology was destined to explode and unravel into apocalyptic involution. Nothing will change the city’s fate. Living in the city is unnatural.

In “Der Gott der Stadt” (The God of the City), sprawling cities kneel to Baal, who straddles blocks of buildings, his belly glowing red in the setting sun, and millions cower in the streets, booming their music made of praises and terror, while factory fumes and grime of smokestacks rise in the air towards the giant’s feet. And the elements themselves, perverted by the god, stare at the crushed humanity, sending tempests and seas of fire cracking on the asphalt.

We can read here the influence of a Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren (1855 – 1916), one of the founders of Symbolism. In “L’âme des Ville” (The City’s Soul, in Les villes tentaculaires, Tentacular Cities, 1895), Verhaeren writes:

Un air de soufre et de naphte s’ exhale,
un soleil trouble et monstrueux s’ étale;
l’ esprit soudainement s’ effare
vers l’ impossible et le bizarre;
crime ou vertu, voit-il encor
ce qui se meut en ces décors,
où, devant lui, sur les places, s’ élève
le dressement tout en brouillards
d’ un pilier d’ or ou d’ un fronton blafard
pour il ne sait quel géant rêve?

An air of sulfur and naphtha exhales,
a hazy and monstrous sun expands;
the mind suddenly staggers
towards the impossible and the weird;
crime or virtue, can one still glimpse
something that moves in this decor,
where, right ahead, in each plaza, soars
the blurred height
of a golden pillar or a bleary pediment
for who knows what gigantic dream.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis

Verhaeren’s verses — rhymed in the original French — strike me as overwrought and melodramatic. Still, these images inflamed the imaginations and influenced many artists of the time.
In Heym’s poems, however (and it is the difference between mere imagination and genius), the chill, perfectly stylized form frames and contains the vivid images, distancing the reader. The distance and “monumentality”, in John Holfson’s words, quoted by Hasler (ib.) make, by contrast, the excesses of Heym’s apocalyptic visions even more horrific.

Heym was a unique figure in the pre-war poetic landscape. His aggressive images set him apart as more than a mere harbinger of Expressionism. Georg Heym was the first poet to use the stylistic epitomes that would later become the movement’s most characteristic tropes.

Blood Red and Powdery Blue

On one side, the bleeding images of apocalyptic cities, on the other, soft landscapes of waters blending with the sky. Nature, when left to her own devices, embroiders the world with harmony.

Träumerei in Hellblau (Reverie in Light Blue)

Alle Landschaften haben
Sich mit Blau gefüllt.
Alle Büsche und Bäume des Stromes,
Der weit in den Norden schwillt.

Blaue Länder der Wolken,
Weiße Segel dicht,
Die Gestade des Himmels in Fernen
Zergehen in Wind und Licht.

Wenn die Abende sinken
Und wir schlafen ein,
Gehen die Träume, die schönen,
Mit leichten Füßen herein.

Zymbeln lassen sie klingen
In den Händen licht.
Manche flüstern, und halten
Kerzen vor ihr Gesicht.

Here is my take (as usual, not so literal):

All the expanses of land
Are filled with blue as are
All the bushes and trees of the river
That swells in the north afar.

Blue countries of clouds,
Sails scattered white,
The shore of the sky in the distance
Sprinkled in wind and light.

When the evening falls
And we close our eyes,
Lovely dreams tiptoe
With winged feet inside.

The cymbals they let clink
In their hands that glimmer.
Many whispers, and then shadows
Before your face they flicker.

PART II: Translating the Untranslatable

The hardest part of doing this translation

German is such a romantic language. Reading German authors like Heym or Rainer Maria Rilke (although the latter was Bohemian-Austrian), I often wonder if Romanticism, and particularly expressionism as a literary style, could only be invented by author who wrote in that particular language of Gothic ascent. In English, at least contemporary English, an ornate style can easily teeter on the banks of the purple sea, but the best romantic style flows so beautifully in German. As I translated “The Dissection,” I faced the difficulty of dealing with a prose that was so formally perfect in the original that the mere idea of “transporting” it into another system of references seemed iconoclastic to me.

Translating is making decisions, and sometimes the text lures the translator into the easy path, which is the most obvious translation of a word with multiple meanings. It is particularly difficult with German, which is a highly polysemous language. Still, the translator should resist the sirens of “first-level” or “most-common” meaning.

The strongest example of the above, and the most difficult translation decision in this text was the passage:

Die Ärzte traten ein. Ein paar freundliche Männer in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen und goldenen Zwickern.

The most obvious translation is:

The doctors entered. Several amicable men in white gowns with duelling-scars and gold-rimmed pince-nez.[2]

But I wondered, why the duelling-scars ?

The translator explains in the footnote #5: ‘”Schmiss”: “duelling-scar”. Traditionally, many male university students belonged to fraternities known as “Studentenverbin– dungen”. The members of a fraternity usually drink together and engage in duelling. The scars resulting from the wounds received were considered a sign of bravery and boldness.’

This translation is plausible, given that Heym himself engaged in duels during his university years. Moreover, in one of his diary entries, he used “Schmissen” in a figurative way, referring to his heart with dueling scars.

On the other hand, the structure of the phrase in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen indicates that “Schmissen” may refer back to “Kitteln” (gown, which I rendered with the more modern “coat”). How did the doctors’ white coats sport dueling scars? Did the frat boys carry out their dueling deeds in their surgeons’ gowns? It seemed more logical, and simpler, to me, to use the other meaning of “Schmiss”: rent, a hole in fabric.

I translated the sentence:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in white coats with rents and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Suddenly, the passage made more sense, even though the explanation based on duels was more romantic.

And the final version became:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in frayed white coats and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Those who have haunted hospitals wearing white, like I have, will recognize the much-washed coats that fray at the cuffs and hems…

But then again, the author may have wanted to imply both meanings: the down-to-earth frayed coats, and the remainders of ancient duels on the faces of the doctors, now older and wiser (because they wear glasses for near vision).

A short-short, a poem in prose

Translating a very short story is more difficult, given the relative weight of the words. Georg Heym was a poet above everything else, and the first expressionistic poet, at that: the use of images, and particularly colors, as vehicles of emotions is the foundation of the story itself. Colors serve to create similitudes and transitions from the gritty reality of the dissection table to the dream that forms in the dead man’s head, as a resonance of the doctors’ hammering on his skull.

“Splendid reds and blues” sprout on the dead man’s body. Why “splendid”? The colors of decomposing flesh announce new life more than decay, and the wonderful colors foreshadow the explosion of reds in the second part of the story, the memory of a past love in summer: poppy fields; the man’s lover “a flower of flames;” and a billowing dress as a “wave of fire in the setting sun.”
The contrast between the doctors, who were “friendly” a minute before, but now resemble “hideous torturers, blood flowing on their hands as they” dig “ever more deeply into the frigid corpse and” pull “out its innards, like white cooks gutting a goose.”

It is a poem, and every word carries a strong meaning.

Repetition as a style

To get across the author’s intent, I had to keep certain repetitions: in a six-hundred-fifty-seven-word story (a little more than two standard-manuscript pages), there are ten occurrences of the word “white.” It is typical of Heym’s style, as you can see in the poem “Reverie in Pale Blue.” In my translation of the poem I did not keep the repeated words as they did not have the same effect in English, the words being in too close proximity. In “The Dissection,” though, repetition could and was used to render as much as possible of the original style.

In Heym’s work, repetition serves two purposes: first, it creates a contrast, as the same word is used in a gruesome and then a lyrical context; second, repeating a word accentuates the rhythm of a sentence with an obsessive insistence.

In other places, in a variation around the sentence structure, the same word is found in a different position. A paragraph begins with Die Ärzte traten ein. And, in the next paragraph, the beginning is Sie traten an den Toten.

The word “traten” is a counter-example, as I made the decision of using two different translations because the repetition added little in English:

Die Ärzte traten ein. (“Traten” means, generically, “to join,” but the meaning changes in different contexts. The most logical translation was “The doctors entered.”)
Sie traten an den Toten (They stepped up to the dead man.)

How this story influenced me personally
“The Dissection” influenced my writing directly. It was one of those famous multiple repetitions that inspired me:

In front of the large window, opened a wide sky filled with small white clouds that swam in the light, in the silent afternoon, like small white gods.

I liked the sound of this sentence so much I used a similar repetition as I was largely rewriting a story that was published in the magazine of my high school when I was fourteen (my first published story ever). And the restyled story, “The Hand,” appeared in the #358 issue of Weird Tales (August 2011), edited by Ann VanderMeer.

[1] For the anthology edited by Rick Claw, The Apes of Wrath, forthcoming in March 2013 from Tachyon Publications.

[2] Arlene Elizabeth Sture, Georg Heym’s Der Dieh: Ein Novellenbuch. Five Short Stories in English Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, 1-1-1979, McMasters University.

Dino Buzzati - The Colomber and Other Stories

2012-05-07T10:37:00.000+02:00

The Colomber, I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

Article first published in Weird Fiction Review on Feb. 12, 2012

When I die, I want to remember that I used to be Dino Buzzati. Becoming a carefree, happy soul, unaware of my previous life, would be a total swindle. (quoted by Domenico Porzio, I Primi Piani, 1973)
Every real pain is written on slabs of a mysterious substance, compared to which granite is butter. And eternity cannot erase it. Dino Buzzati, “I due autisti” (The Two Drivers, in Il colombre e altri racconti, 1966)

Mental Ants
I discovered Buzzati’s art when I was eighteen years old. On my birthday, a friend gifted me with a strange book comprised mainly of drawings. It was not exactly one of those illustrated volumes with speech bubbles which the critics have baptised graphic novels (because comic books have little artistic pretension in their eyes). I would have called it a picture book for grownups. The cover displayed a gigantic grey werecat poised to devour a woman dressed in harem-fashion flowing attire. The title read I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971), and it was Buzzati’s last, iconic work, published a year before his death.

Unlike most of my books, which lurk, still unpacked, in my basement (my apartment cannot host them all), this book is on a shelf, beside other works penned by Buzzati. Each drawing displays the acronym “PGR” (Per Grazia Ricevuta: For a Received Grace). The Miracles of Val Morel illustrates the victories of a nun with a halo, Saint Rita da Cascia, who deflects dangers ranging from “foul deeds,” stacked in the overflowing drawer chests of a girls’ boarding school, to “volcanic cats” threatening a village, not to forget “mental ants.” I will get to these curious insects soon.

Back then, on my eighteenth birthday, I clutched the little book, thinking that it was a weird gift indeed. I studied those surreal drawings for hours. I found the naïve style surprising, and the theme unexpected. Why had Buzzati — who was an agnostic — drawn images in the Catholic tradition of the ex voto? But here they were, thirty-nine thanksgiving plaques donated to a church by the imaginary recipients of ad hoc miracles, votive offerings to the regiments of Heaven for personalized services. Because, you see, saints are not supposed to act like demigods. Forgetting that the people of the shining haloes can only intercede with the superior powers on behalf of the faithful, and working miracles is not part of their job description, the popular religion has inspired formulae like “Santa Rita (Sant’Antonio, San Nicolo’…) fammi la grazia” (do me a favor).
Back to the mental ants.

Le formiche mentali (The Mental Ants), I Miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

It would seem that actually in Longarone and in the Zoldo Valley, in the year 1871, there was a brief invasion of mental ants, apparently from the Balkan region. Tiny, almost imperceptible in their normal state, they grew dramatically once installed within the cerebral convolutions, which the insects reached through the ears. The victims, however, were very few. The infected were gradually transferred to the province’s asylum, and all traces of the patients vanished.
Mental ants, with their mere presence, loosen the ontological solidity of the everyday world, insinuating the doubt about the very existence of the infected person. Dino Buzzati, I Miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

In the book, Buzzati recounts how he found a chapel in Val Morel during an excursion in the mountains of Belluno, a town located fifty miles to the north of Venice. Several reference articles, both online and in print, cite Val Morel as a real place, but it is not. Not in the Dolomites, at any rate. A “Valmorel” does exist: it is a renowned ski resort on the other end of the Alpine arc, in the French region of Savoy. In reality, Buzzati took inspiration from the Sanctuary of Madonna di Parè in Limana, Belluno province.

The creation of an imaginary place is important, as it characterizes the story itself as “out of this world” and in this case adds to the ironical, iconoclastic angle. The irony, by the way, eluded young anticlerical-me as I leafed through the pages that very first time. I found the whole endeavor, with a saint super-nun dispensing graces, utterly disturbing — well, although today I love this booklet with no reservations, I still find it disturbing even now.

Once the first shock was overcome, I saw the irony on each page. But then again, why such insistence on temptation and redemption in the mind and heart of an artist who had no religious faith?
I wondered if a man of his time could forget about his Catholic upbringing entirely. The idea of sin is particularly present in Buzzati’s artistic production as a painter, in the form of a tormented dramatization of carnality, the mise en scène of its irresistible attraction, and the subsequent punishment, however ironic. Buzzati believed the only way to overcome one’s inner demons was to rise above one’s instincts. The Miracles of Val Morel (1971) illustrates the monsters’ constant attacks, and a rescue by the better part of the tempted person in the nick of time.

After all, the cathedral builders raised stone spires to escape the netherworld demons’ bites, although the demons reappeared in the gutters, which became gargoyles. The elongated body of the gutters/gargoyles had a purpose: to throw the water as far as possible from the wall. Still, the builders could have made the gutters in the shape of angels, but no. Everything that altered the purity of the elevation had to be monstrous. For what are all these grotesques if not the externalisation of the inner demons? Half expelled, the dark impulsions are now under control and ready to battle the evil spirits that come from the external, secular world (the “century,” in the Church’s language).

Buzzati was not a religious man, and even on his deathbed he saw no priest (a bishop hovered about, but Buzzati never invited him in). There was a nurse, a discreet nun who, twenty-five years later remembered the writer as a quiet, undemanding patient “who never ringed the bell” to call her.

Maybe the earth is tired, too, and is drooping in God’s lap – Dino Buzzati, Poema a fumetti, (Poem Strip, 1969)

Towards the end, Buzzati told the nun “You’re lucky, because you have your faith,” to which she replied, “You have your quest, and it is a beginning of faith.” The exchange ended there.
The quest haunted his writing. In a short story published when he was a war correspondent for the Corriere della Sera (one of the foremost Italian newspapers), Buzzati wrote about a prince who leaves his palace and his old life to devote himself to seeking the boundary of his father’s kingdom, a boundary he may never find. On his quest, he is accompanied by seven men whose task it is to go back home, one at a time, to gather news and deliver the information back to him, wherever he is.
The protagonist of the story symbolizes a man who severs all ties with his origins, to do some soul-searching, and becomes separated from what he believed to be his identity. The seven messengers, who in turn face an increasingly long journey to reach the hometown and then to go back to the prince, symbolize the fading memories of a world that used to be the only accepted reality.
After much wandering, it appears that

There is no frontier, I suspect, at least not in the sense we are accustomed to. There are neither valleys nor mountains closing the way. Probably I will cross the threshold unawares, and I will continue to go on, oblivious. “I sette messaggeri” (The Seven Messengers, Mondadori, 1942).

The prince realizes that he will never give up his quest until his dying day. The initial fear of the unknown is transformed into the restless desire to find out what lies ahead, farther and farther away.
Here is a passage from a literary article (an “elzeviro[i]” in the Italian press jargon) written more than twenty years after “The Seven Messengers”:

There is a world, still unexplored, where energy flows, a world of correspondences that escapes our control. One could say that a visible barrier surrounds it, separating it from us. Through this hermetic border echoes and messages reach us nevertheless, with such evidence, even physical, that doubt is no longer possible. There lie secrets that will surely be decrypted in the future, facts of such magnitude to outshine all the great discoveries of this century. ” Ma la scienza dice di no” (But Science Says No, Corriere della Sera, 9/11/1966).

To live is to wait for something that never comes
Fifteen years after Buzzati’s first novel was published, in 1933, recognition came with a new edition of the widely acclaimed Il deserto dei tartari, (The Tartar Steppe, Milan, 1940), the metaphor of a life spent on the brink of salvation or damnation, courage and cowardice, and, above everything else, a life spent waiting. In an interview for the new edition, which marked the definitive consecration of the book as a best seller, Buzzati told a fellow journalist, Alberico Sala, how he felt when he was writing the novel, every single night after work, for years:

… months passed, years passed, and I wondered if it would always continue this way, if the wishes, the dreams of my youth would atrophy little by little, and fade, if the big opportunity would come or not, and around me I was seeing other men, some of my age, others much older, who let themselves be carried away by the same slow river. (Interview by fellow journalist Alberico Sala, Introduction to the 1966 Oscar Mondadori edition.

This passage epitomizes the fundamental theme in Buzzati’s literary works: life is a series of unmatched expectations, and as you live, you can only wait and then renounce your expectations. And human beings, despite their common lot, face their fate alone, in eternal solitude.

The man

Dino Buzzati Traverso (1906 – 1972) was born in San Pellegrino, Belluno (Veneto region), in his family’s ancestral villa at the foot of the Dolomite Mountains. His mother, with whom he lived until she died in 1961, descended from a patrician family that had given seven doxi (supreme magistrates) to the Serenissime Republic of Venice; his father, who belonged to an ancient Bellunese family, was a professor of international law at the prestigious University of Pavia and the recently born Bocconi University of Milan.

The Buzzatis lived in Milan and spent their holidays in their villa near Belluno. All his life, Dino Buzzati loved the Alps, which inspired both his first novel and his very last work. His father died of pancreas cancer when Buzzati was fourteen. Dino was convinced that he would die from the same cause. And he did.

The third of four children, in 1924 he enrolled in the law school of Milan, not for inclination but because his other brothers had chosen different paths, and Dino was expected to take up the paternal torch. Even before graduation (he wrote a thesis on the legal aspects of the Concordat between the Catholic Church and the Italian state), he was hired at the age of twenty-two by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death. He began at the copy-editing department, was promoted to the important job of “titolista,” the person who writes the titles of all the articles, and then became a reporter, a war correspondent, a critic and an essayist.

During World War II, Buzzati served in Africa as a journalist attached to the Regia Marina. After the end of the war, Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) brought critical acclaim and fame to the author. He was fifty-four when he married young Almerina Antoniazzi in 1966, three years after the release of his partially autobiographical last novel, Un amore (A Love Affair), which is thought to have been inspired by his relationship with Almerina.

In 1950, following the death of his dog Diabolik, named after a popular comic book hero, he published “In quel preciso momento” (In That Precise Moment), a diary and collection of notes on the apprehension of passing and the mysterious void on the other side.

On December 8, 1971, Buzzati left his home for the hospital, knowing he would not come back. He made the tour of the rooms, and in his study he took a sheet of paper and made a pencil sketch of his armchair. Empty.

Surely we will live for a long time. But what about fifty years, let’s say, a hundred years from now? What will become of us? Who will remember us? In one hundred and fifty years his sublime verses will live on, the words will fall in place, their truly exact place, like crystal blocks, and concentric waves will still expand across the world to crash against the cliffs of darkness. In quel preciso momento (In That Precise Moment, a collection of notes, 1950).

Works Summary

A journalist, writer, poet, playwright, librettist, stage costume designer, painter, and graphic artist, Dino Buzzati wrote five novels, nine collections of short stories and poetry, and many theatre and radio plays. He wrote four librettos for operas composed by Luciano Chailly and a libretto for Giulio Viozzi’s La giacca stregata (The Cursed Jacket, also a short story).
His paintings and drawings have been shown in many exhibitions. Buzzati used to say that he saw himself as a painter that had a day job as a journalist. His artistic and writerly sensibilities are combined in a comic book, the hallucinatory contemporary version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip, 1969), and his last work, I miracoli di Val Morel (op. cit.).

Selected Bibliography

Bàrnabo delle montagne (Barnabo of the Mountains, a novel, 1933)
Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Forest, a novel, 1935)
Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, a novel, 1940)
I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers, collection of short stories, 1942)
La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, children’s book, 1945)
Il grande ritratto (The Great Portrait, a novel, 1960)
Un amore (A Love Affair, a novel, 1963)
Il capitano Pic e altre poesie (Captain Pic and Other Poems, poetry, 1965)
Il colombre (The Colomber, collection of short stories, 1966)
Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip, graphic novel, 1969)
I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, commented drawings, 1971)

His children’s book La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia was translated by Frances Lobb into English as The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.

The Tartar Steppe, the novel that earned him international fame, was completed in 1939 and first published in 1940. The novel tells the story of a military outpost that awaits a Tartar invasion, a poignant depiction of the passing of life. An American edition (Boston, Davin R. Godine) was published in 2005, in the translation of Stuart C. Hood.

Il deserto dei Tartari was made into a film in 1976, directed by Valerio Zurlini and starring Vittorio Gassman, Philippe Noiret, Max von Sydow, and Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Other works inspired films: Un amore, directed by Gianni Vernuccio (1965); Il fischio al naso, by Ugo Tognazzi (1967); Il segreto del bosco vecchio, by Ermanno Olmi (1993); and Bàrnabo delle montagne, by Mario Brenta (1994).

Buzzati also wrote short stories featuring fantastic animals such as the bogeyman and, his own invention, the Colomber (il colombre). In 1991 Mondadori published Il bestiario (The Bestiary).
He is considered the Italian Kafka by many. His stories, even the most fantastical ones, are grounded in reality, and for this reason a few critics list his work as magic realism. I think Buzzati’s sensibility resonates with the most typical elements of the Weird. The fantastical events may appear to be grounded in reality, yet the way he approached mysterious phenomena conveys anxiety — and attraction — towards the unknown that stirs ominously under the apparent banality of the everyday world.

Commentators have said that Buzzati always used ordinary settings because he was, above everything else, a reporter. It may be so, but, without wanting to compare two forms of art that vibrate on different dimensions, let us look at Buzzati’s graphic works, to get a glimpse of the man’s heart (for did he not say of himself “I am the victim of a cruel misunderstanding: I am a painter who, for a rather long period, has taken up the hobby of writing, and was known as a writer and a journalist as well”?). In his art, we can see the Uncanny punch out of the fragile envelope that keeps everything together, until reality itself is destroyed.

Il Duomo di Milano (The Cathedral of Milan, 1952) in La boutique del mistero (The Mystery Boutique, 1968)

The Colomber, a Tendril-Animal?

The story I have translated for The Weird,“Il colombre,” was first published in the collection Il colombre e altri cinquanta racconti, Mondadori, 1966) —

Stefano Lazzarin , in his essay “Il Vipistrello”[ii]—how shall I translate this appellation? It’s a concertinaed word from the Italian “pipistrello” (bat) and the Latin name of the bat “vespertilium,” of the evening; it could be a Vesperbat — Lazzarin, I was saying, considers Kafka’s Odradek, Cortázar’s Adbekunkus, and Buzzati’s Colombre “living creatures even more disturbing because they can be captured only through the sound of a literally impossible word.”

Tommaso Landolfi, a twentieth-century master of the Italian Weird, invented the concept of the tendril-word. A tendril-word curls up around itself and comes away completely unmoored from reality:

We all have, either voluntarily or by accident, done the experiment of tossing and turning a word in our heads until all meaning leaks out, living the word empty. At this point the word seems to detach itself, not only from the object to which it is normally tied, but from every possible object or foothold or support. The word starts to curl up, and twine around itself within the mind. At first it resembles the tips of a branch, which the fire in the fireplace twists and shrivels before burning them, and then the emptied word resembles only itself.

We could call these words that have no conceivable relationship with the world of phenomena “tendril-words.”

Now, what are they?

Are they unrecognizable objects or actual standalone words? And, in the latter case, where are they and what do they symbolize? And we ourselves — what are we supposed to do with them, in which space, in which abyss of the soul should we let them swarm? Once again we cannot but feel overcome by them; nor, dismayed, do we find anything better than to retreat hastily from that world of shadows and threatening words and return the words to their trite, tentative meaning. Tommaso Landolfi, Des mois (A Few Months) 1967, in Id., Opere. II. edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan. 1960 – 1971 (my translation).

Lazzarin explores the universe of the tendril-animals: “The tendril-word is (almost) always a tendril animal, maybe thanks to that phantasmal power Italo Calvino attributes to animals:”

The animal, real or imaginary, has a special place in the dimension of the fantastic: as soon as it is named, it assumes a phantasmal power; becomes allegory, symbol, emblem. Italo Calvino, “Il cielo, l’uomo, l’elefante” (Sky, Man, Elephant, on Pline the Elder), 1982, in Saggi. 1945 – 1985, quoted by Lazzarin, my translation.

Let us meet the Vipistrello as it enters one of Landolfi’s novels:

A vesperbat, not a bat, but very precisely a big vesperbat, has entered — I can’t see how — and is fluttering about. Am I saying that it entered my cabin, and it’s fluttering around me? No, not at all, I mean it is exactly within the walls of my skull. First it was trapped in the strong cobwebs, and then, after ripping them with its wriggling, it has started banging obstinately against my forehead, like a big fly against the windowpane: he got in, somehow, and it doesn’t know how to get out. Of course, sneezing with all my might, I have popped it out, grabbed it, flattened it with my hands and an iron bar; then I have folded it eight times, I have smoothed it out some more and I have slipped it into the usual tube of carbonic culidrid, where it has joined the others. Tommaso Landolfi, Cancroregina, 1950 (my translation).

There is a fundamental difference, Lazzarin says, between the fantastic animal in the literature of the previous centuries and the weird inventions of the twentieth century: Landolfi’s Vipistrello is an animal that actually exists, at least for the narrator. “We cannot neutralize the Uncanny[iii] by confining it to the repertoire of allegories: that allegory is flesh; it is not just a symbol; that ghost is solid and scary. As another great twentieth-century writer in some ways close to Landolfi, Buzzati, would say, it is not, or not only, a symbol; and from that comes the terror” (Lazzarin, op. cit.).

So – they insist – would it be by any chance an allegory? Would it, so to speak, symbolize death? or some danger? or years that pass? Nothing at all, gentlemen: it is simply a drop of water, only it climbs the stairs. […] No, I tell you, it’s not a joke, there’s no double entendre, alas, it’s just a drop of water, but apparently, at night it goes up the stairs. Tick, tick, mysteriously, step after step. And that’s why we’re scared. Dino Buzzati, “Una goccia” (One Drop of Water, in Terrore alla Scala (Terror at La Scala, 1949.) (my translation).

After Borges, Buzzati is another taxonomist of imaginary animals and a great inventor of names. At first glance, this big shark of ill repute looks like an ordinary monster; one would think that it is little more than a rewrite of Melville’s white whale: a huge mythological beast, but not a tendril-animal. Buzzati, in his conversations with Panafieu[iv] confessed to not having known the sea enough to “absorb its beauty.” So maybe he was wishing to bridge the gap by using as models the great nineteenth-century texts that spoke of cursed ships and ocean monsters, and in particular, he would have thought of Moby Dick (Lazzarin, ibid.). In a letter written March 29, 1935, Buzzati confirmed that Melville was one of his favourite authors: “Moby Dick. There’s an endless, long-winded, baroque novel, and some more, but it is indisputably extraordinarily brilliant.”[v]

Nevertheless, we do not seem to need to collect further biographical documents to answer the question about the relationship between the Colomber and Moby Dick. In the table of Miracles of Val Morel of same title, which Lazzarin considers the figurative version of the Colomber, it appears in fact an ironic distancing that is, at the same time, an admission. In the caption we read:

I know that certain closed circles of scholars entertain the belief that the Colomber is nothing more than an arbitrary plagiarism of the great White Whale immortalized by Melville. But I know equally well that they are wrong. Too many times was the Colomber spotted and described by witnesses too serious to be rejected, and one cannot doubt its existence. Every time, the monster — which we must call so because it is a marvel, not because it is the harbinger of woes — was seen of a greenish or green color, or blue greenish. Never white. Dino Buzzati, The Miracles of Val Morel (my translation).

Dino Buzzati, La balena volante, (The Flying Whale, 1957) in La boutique del mistero (The Mystery Boutique, 1968)

In other words, tendril-animals have nothing to do with the merveilleux of the previous centuries. This category of imaginary monsters is made possible by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious mind. These inventions are not mythical and their universality can only be found in a tentative symbolic analysis. But at the end of the night (the night of the conscious mind, or Calderòn de la Barca’s slumber of reason, the condition that produces monsters[vi]) the tendril-animal springs from the unconscious, and is psychologically real.

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstrous, 1797

The name

Marco Perale[vii], quoted by Lazzarin, investigates on the Spanish consonance of “colombre” (original spelling), by comparing it to culebra and culebrón (‘snake’ and ‘big snake’), as well as the slang word colombres (‘eyes’: Buzzati’s colombre has four in the 1971 table) and its derivatives columbrar (‘to peek’) and columbrón (‘the glance’).

Fact is, Buzzati was not familiar with Spanish, even though both the Spanish culebra and French couleuvre ‘snake’ derive from the same Latin base coluber-colubri ‘snake ‘, which is also the origin of the Italian aesculapian colubro ‘snake ‘ (and more specifically: ‘snake of the family of Colubrid snakes’).

So what is the connection with the tendril-animals? Is the colomber a version in chiaroscuro of Moby Dick or is it a species of overgrown water snake, a waterhorse, a cousin of another animal of Buzzati’s Bestiary, the Serpenton? We are still in the field of myths, legends, the realm of the merveilleux. But Buzzati himself reveals that the idea from which his short story was born was a bizarre and a bit obsessive word:

“Il colombre” […] was born from a [distorted English] noun: […] A friend of mine […] told me that her American friend, instead of saying ‘ How many kilometers? ‘ said ‘ “How many colombers?”… She said that the Americans butchered the word. I liked this «colombers» word. Then I imagined a beast, a monster, and so this is where this story comes from […]. Yves Panafieu, quoted by Lazzarin, pp. 153 – 154, my translation.

Il serpenton dei mari (The Big Sea Snake, in I miracoli di Val Morel, 1971)

Is “colomber” a tendril-word? A word that designates a non-existent reality, but which we cannot get rid of – unless we fictionalize it by writing a story? A confirmation could come from an interesting feature of the monster, a feature that differentiates the Colomber from the legendary marvels like sea snakes or the White Whale: that of not being perceptible by anyone but the predestined (“And the strange thing is that nobody can see him but the victim himself”).

So who is right, Stefano Roi, the protagonist, who spots the menacing shape of his persecutor on the horizon of all the seas on which he ventures, or the other sailors, who see, inexorably, nothing: “He sailed and sailed, and in the wake of his ship, day and night, in dead calm and in choppy waters, trailed along the colomber […] And no one on board could see the monster, except for him.”
Lazzarin thinks that this passage casts doubt on the existence of the beast; it is an obsession — the marine, externalized version of Mental Ants, which Stefano and his father can see:

The colomber is a huge fish, terrifying to behold, extremely rare.
Depending on the sea, and the people living by its shores, it is also called kolomber, kahloubrha, kalonge, kalu-balu, chalung-gra. Naturalists strangely ignore it. Some even maintain that it does not exist.

Another possible interpretation is that the author wanted to make sure that the doubt on the creature’s existence was caused by the scientists’ obstinacy vis-à-vis phenomena they cannot explain. I think that Buzzati, like Landolfi, subtly conveys that the Uncanny, or “the Unfamiliar”, (l’inquiétante étrangeté as Marie Bonaparte translated Freud’s die Unheimliche) is real, because it is real for the psyche.

I, Angelo Dal Pont, typographer at Polpet’s, was severely disturbed by mental ants, which said to me: You know you don’t exist, don’t you?[viii]

First published by Weird Fiction Review

[i] The “elzeviro” is a neat and elegant typographic font created in the XVIth century by the engraver Christoffel van Dyck for the Dutch family of typographers Elzevir, who published classical works (particularly Latin and Greek) in accurate scholarly editions. This publishing house is the ancestor of Elsevier (Amsterdam), today’s leader in the scientific and medical publishing world. In the XIXth century’s Italian press, “elzeviro” became the term used to designate the opening article on the third page of a newspaper. It was usually a piece of literary or theatrical critique, or an erudite reflection on a topical or cultural theme.

[ii] Stefano Lazzarin, “Il Vipistrello, colombre, animale giglio : vampiri linguistici del Novecento italiano” (The Vesperbat, Colomber, Lily Beast: Linguistic Vampires of the Italian Twentieth Century), in Arches de Noé, 2006.

[iii] In the Freudian sense of the Uncanny (“die Unheimliche,” literally, the Unfamiliar).

[iv] Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto (Dino Buzzati: an Autoportrait) Milan, Mondadori, 1973, p. 48.

[v] Dino Buzzati, Lettere a Brambilla (Letters to Brambilla), edited by Luciano Simonelli, Novara, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1985, p. 228.

[vi] “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Pedro Calderòn de la Barca, Life Is a Dream. Madrid, 1635.

[vii] Cfr. Marco Perale, Buzzati e lo sciamano. Fonti iconografiche e tematiche del ‘Colombre’, Studi Buzzatiani, IX, 2004, pp. 37 – 46. Quoted by Lazzarin.

[viii] Dino Buzzati, op. cit.

The Colomber, I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

Dino Buzzati, Poema a fumetti, (Poem Strip, 1969)

Adieu, Paris

2012-05-02T19:41:00.002+02:00

Like Plato's Philosophers' City

Adieu, Paris!

Me voilà dans le lounge d'Air France, where I'm pitting Campari against Martini, and Campari is winning.

Told an attendant she had wonderful hair. She said her secret was olive oil. She is from Saint Domingo, and they have special olive oil beauty products there. She said "You're so beautiful"—which isn't true but so nice to hear.

So, Dear Blawg, I haven't written to you (since December 31!) because I was scared. I was terrified that you would want to talk me into staying.

I don't want to stay.

I mean. Paris is great, but I know her like my pockets. All novelty is gone. I need something new.

For a few days, I caressed the idea (as the French would say) of migrating to New Zealand. But I'm going back to school, to add another peau d'âne (ass' skin, well, I know that it sounds awful in Anglish, but this French expression means exactly what it means: a donkey's hide: a new university degree). And the old agreement between New Zealand and France has expired: now French students pay as much as international students do, c'est à dire about $20,000… No. I don't want to pay that much for my fifth master's degree. And maybe I should get serious and prepare a Ph. D.

Because.

I would be like the vampire in 'The Vampire's Diaries," which puts his immortality to good use by stacking university degrees. Studying so much easier than living. Getting a new degree is like learning a new language when you already know a few.

Living is another kettle of snakes, tho'.

I'm so excited, guys. I swore to myself that my next blawg post would be while I neared the beautiful Athens of the North, and here I am, waiting for a flight that will take me to another segment of my long, long life. Oh, yes. I've changed peaux d'ânes so much I have kept the ability to be astonished by change.

The French call it: le compte-rendu d'étonnement (the "astonishment report").

Flight's calling. More soon.

Adieu 2011, Hello 2012

2011-12-31T01:06:00.000+01:00

Dear 2011,

You've been a bitch.

You've been wonderful (right in the middle of all that rubbish, like an exotic flower growing out of hydroponic sputum).

You brought me to the edge of the cliff and you caught me by the hair in the nick of time. That was cool.

You tricked a neighbour into coming to my rescue and together we killed the Spirit of Gio's Apartment (she bought him off). Supercool.

When I had nothing to eat, you inspired another well-to-do neighbour to give me all her dried tomato soup because she could not digest it, and also half a box of pasta (I think it was Penne). Cool, too. I can digest lyophilized soup, and I've got no problem eating gluten.

I haven't written many stories, but that 's not your fault. I was busy building magical glass-brick walls impervious to tickling.

And I tiled a few walls.

(Let's not forget the tiling.)

And you, Paris, the song was lying: you're not a blonde. You're an angry biker. That's why I stayed out of the traffic.

Fireworks are shooting up. Fire fighters have opened their high-ceilinged halls to dance with the Parisians. They dance a lot. I can hear no car foghorns.

Hey, Tour Eiffel, I've never liked you. Here's to you.

The War of the Worlds, 1953

Hello, New Year,

I'm so excited.

All these photographs (but the image from The War of the Worlds, naturellement) were taken on the way from Rue des Pyrénées to Bercy Village (à Paris, sur la Terre, la Terre qui est un astre--Jacques Prévert)

Essay on Michel Bernanos: The Mountain Dead from Life (The Other Side of the Mountain)

2011-11-21T15:30:00.001+01:00

The Other Side of the Mountain is the strange, horrific, unforgettable story of two sailors, the young and innocent narrator and his unlikely friend, a seasoned ship cook who has seen it all until the two are stranded on an island surrounded by a sea of blood, where a mysterious mountain looms, dead and deadly.

When I was offered the opportunity to translate this novella for The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories, I said to myself: "Oh, oh, it will be quite an experience," as rendering the author's style in English wasn't the easiest of tasks. This masterpiece of French literature of the fantastic fascinated and scared me...

The following essay has appeared in Weird Fiction Review (Essay: Michel Bernanos' The Mountain Dead from Life) along with critiques by Jeffrey Ford and Edward Gauvin.

The story

In a story written in first person, the narrator always survives, but the beginning of this novella doesn’t bode well. Our young narrator, after an evening awash with wine, wakes up on a ship (the period is undetermined: the narration flows outside of time). He somehow signed up to become a ship boy. After a few days in which the narrator survives a rough welcome onboard, the boat is caught in dead calm. The sailors run out of food and become barbarians who swallow gallons of rum and end up devouring one another. It is in these appalling circumstances that a friendship is born, that of the young narrator with Toine, the ship cook. From now on, their fate is sealed. The unleashed elements create a cyclone that gobbles up the ship in an end-of-the-world atmosphere.

The two survivors find themselves on an island surrounded by a sea of blood, under a red sun. The island is a strange place, with unimaginable carnivorous flowers, a place where the human figure appears only engraved in horrible statues of striking realism. All the villages are deserted. No animal life can be found, only hostile flora. A persistent drumming resonates in the ground, as if the heart of a gigantic beast beat under the mountain. What secrets does this island conceal?

The unnamed protagonist and Toine come to believe that their survival depends on what awaits them on top of the formidable mountain visible on the horizon.
As the horrific situation unfolds, I try to reassure myself by thinking that the story cannot end with the narrator’s demise…

A poet with a painter’s palette

La montagne rouge, painting by Brigitte Bergeret

No summary can render the poetic tone of the writing. As Stéphane Aldeguy points out in his preface to the latest French edition (La Table Ronde, Paris, 2008), Michel Bernanos, through his brief and intense work, dreamed of “serving poetry”. He had no desire to develop an allegory or suggest any hidden meaning. He wanted to gift us with the beauty of an enigma that would find its raison d’être in itself. His intent was to move us by the terrible beauty of his images, without rational explanation, only following the inspiration of an author who wrote as a visual artist would have painted.

Poetry, yes, but not so much in the choice of words or the music of sentences: the interest of this novella is not on the paragraph level; it rather lies in the author’s ability to create an atmosphere of staggering landscapes, unearthly storms and constant psychological disquiet.
This story is a brilliant and peculiar narrative that borrows from the adventure novels in the vein of Stevenson to switch to the fantastic as our two sailors move from one world to another, passing through the mirror, and the writing becomes labyrinthine, baroque, challenging the translator.

La montagne morte de la vie (literally: The Mountain Dead from Life): What does this strange title mean?

Translating the title was the first challenge, and it soon became clear that it was an impossible task. Even for French natives, it takes some effort to seize the author’s intention.
La montagne morte de la vie does not mean “the dead mountain.” Bernanos’ red mountain died from life as the ivy on my balcony died last summer from the drought (all right, I forgot to water it).
The French title summarizes the central theme of the novella: the idea of death caused by an excess of life and energy: ‘This place is as green as can be.’ The French original reads ‘vert à en mourir,’ meaning ‘green to death.’ The story depicts an unrestrained adoration of Nature by a nature dying from its own thirst for life: It was a world full of life moving towards death. (p. 396 of The Weird)

The man, his life, his works

Michel Bernanos, born in 1923, was the fourth of six children, and the third son of Christian writer Georges Bernanos, an icon of French literature.
Michel wrote under pseudonyms in genres that the literary community considered as minor, small streams compared to the powerful, romantic works written by his father. He told about his father in a confidence to Dominique le Roux that “he felt his paw on his shoulder.” Dominique Le Roux wrote that Michel told him that “his father crushed him.”

One day, in the summer of 1964, Michel left his home of Gentilly in the Parisian suburbs. Three days later, he was found dead in the forest of Fontainebleau. He was forty-one years old. Michel Bernanos had made two suicide attempts the previous year. In his preface to La montagne morte de la vie (La Table Ronde, 2008), Stéphane Audeguy recalls that scouts had found his body, his torn identity card and a travel bag empty at his side. “We have the right to regret,” the commentator adds, “that his body was found at all”. There is indeed a sort of legend that begged to be born, an aura of tragedy that would have matched Michel Bernanos’s intent as an author pacing the land of confusion between reality and imagination.

Most of Michel Bernanos’ works of the fantastic were published posthumously. La montagne morte de la vie was published for the first time by Pauvert in 1967 (three years after the author’s suicide). It is the only work signed by the author with his real name, as if he had wanted to exist in the literary world under his true identity just before walking to the other side.

La montagne morte de la vie became an instant success and was regarded as one of the masterpieces of the fantasy genre in contemporary French literature.
All the other books written by Michel Bernanos, poems and novels, were published in his lifetime under the pseudo of Michel Talbert (crime novels published by Marabout and by Le Fleuve Noir) and Michel Drowin for other novels or genre short stories (now also in the catalogues of Le Castor Astral and La Table Ronde).

All of Bernanos’ fantastical novels are set in a tropical forest, poisonous and deadly, reminiscent of the author’s Brazilian experience. We can draw a parallel with the French forest where the author ended his existence.

The author’s father, Georges Bernanos, exasperated by his experience of the Spanish civil war and disappointed by politics in France, had left the country with his family in 1937. He wrote in his diary: “I went first to Paraguay, and then Brazil.” “I lived the year before the war [WWII] in a solitary fazenda with my wife and children, away from railways and roads, without any company outside our horses and cows” (but later, we learn from the diary that they also bred zebus). George Bernanos will return to France after the war, to die in 1948.
Michel Bernanos begins to write poems as early as 1938 (at fifteen years of age). In 1939 his brother Yves almost dies from malaria in a risky expedition with a missionary, a slightly lunatic Indian priest. In 1942 Michel, nineteen years old, leaves Brazil for London, where he joins the organisation of the external resistance “France Libre” in 1943. He serves as a submariner until late 1944. After the war, he returns to Brazil in 1946 and creates an rubber plantation in the Amazonian forest, which will provide the setting of his first fantasy novel and the inspiration for the imaginary forests of the stories published after his death, like the cycle of the Montagne morte de la vie (The Other Side of the Mountain).
In 1948, the year of Georges Bernanos’ death, Michel Bernanos moves permanently to Gentilly, in the Parisian suburbs. In 1953 he marries, has a daughter, and works in the film and publishing industries.

In 1956 he makes a short appearance in a film written by Robert Bresson, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Condemned to Death Breaks Free).

In 1960, his mother’s death affects him deeply. In the same year, he writes The Murmur of the Gods, his first fantasy novel.

Bernanos’ short novels, novellas and short stories written in the fantastical vein are:

▪ Le Murmure des dieux (The Murmur of the Gods), 1960, as Michel Drowin.
▪ L’envers de l’Eperon ( 1961) (The Back of the Sporn), 1961, published posthumously.
▪ La montagne morte de la vie (The mountain Dead from Life), 1063, written in nineteen day and published posthumously by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1967. Latest edition by La Table Ronde, 2008 (editorial line La petite vermillon). Both the previous English translation, by Elaine P. Halperin, and the latest by yours faithfully, are titled The Other Side of the Mountain.

2008 edition, La Table Ronde
▪ Ils ont déchiré Son image. (They Have Destroyed His Image), 1963, a tale of the fantastic, published posthumously. This short story can be read as a complement to The Other Side of the Mountain.

Le Castor Astral, a publishing house in Bordeaux, published in 1987, La forêt complice, a collection of short stories including:

La forêt complice (The Colluding Forest), first published in 1964, as Michel Drowin;

La parole donnée (The Given Word), 1963, as Michel Talbert, previously published only in 1982 by La Pensée Universelle);

Ils ont déchiré Son image. (They Have Destroyed His Image), first published 1963.

Only The Murmur of the Gods was published during the author’s lifetime, under the pseudonym of Michel Drowin.

The immutable forest

Bernanos’ favourite settings, forests, swamps and arid mountains, are the background of characters that walk the threshold between life and death.

As Toine, a father figure, tells the young narrator:

“I’m so sorry, son, that you’ve got to be stuck with me in my waking nightmare. But let’s not lose our heads, or we will never come out of this. Here, everything is a mystery. Don’t expect to find answers. Here, like everywhere else, death prowls alongside of life, only it’s more visible here.” . The Other side of the Mountain, p. 396 of The Weird.

The story is an initiation journey where the characters are little by little seized by a fascination for the unthinkable; their experience of the unknown in this vegetable world that has absorbed all animal flesh, among the chatoyant colours of exotic fruits, the encounters with carnivorous plants that know how to deploy every seductive charm to attract and kill their prey; the poisonous sap from the fruits the two sailors are forced to eat for lack of other food; strange moans; a penumbra suffused with a red glow – all of which gradually displaces them into what they sometimes call ‘another world,’ ‘another life,’ or yet an ‘upside down world.’

Still, Bernanos’ fantasy is strictly “natural,” without ever staging the supernatural, and the mystery remains the context of real life. The phobic representations are ephemeral and dissolve in panic fear.

Gaston Bachelard speaks of the “forest as before me, before us… it reigns in the antecedent,” (my translation) and, for Max Ernst “[the forests of Oceania] “are, it seems… impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow.” (Translation by Elizabeth B. Childs).
“Timeless childhood” is cited as a trope of the fantasy genre by Todorov; as Freud would say ” beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” returning in the impression of uncanny, which brings back an once-familiar memory altered and translated into something else.

Characters lost in sensory strangeness

Throughout The Other Side of the Mountain, in an insistent, repetitive manner, the characters hear a thumping sound that seems to come from the depths of the earth:

One would think that a giant’s heart is beating under our feet.

The two friends hear a squeaking, a crackling of trees, and someone or something wailing.
After a few pages, colours appear as a counterpoint to this panic atmosphere:

My gaze was captured by the highest mountain far away. The mountain rose as red as a forge fire. And the beating, which had calmed in the meantime, resumed its thumping with diabolic intensity. A long sigh sounded and the pale light dimmed. The forest retook his place, the black leaves stroking the dark sky…

Alone, the mountain kept its red glow against the shadows for a moment before fading into darkness. The unfamiliar stars resumed their diamond-like twinkling.

‘It’s over,’ Toine said. He lay down on the ground. I stretched out beside him.

‘We can sleep now,’ he said. (p. 397)

The visual illusion is brought back to the level of a natural phenomenon and, as Jules Verne would say, sensible, rational knowledge often manages to “demystify the sensory illusion.”
But the visions continue:

Minuscule beads of blood covered the place where the vine had hugged my wrist. Overcome by disgust, I tried to chase away the horrid idea that the plant was carnivorous. On the ground, the vine continued to writhe like a reptile. (p. 393)

Hideous beauty

Later on, there is a “hideous crust” a petrifying mortar (p. 402). The mineral world triumphs.

A gigantic arc of red sand like talcum powder bordered a thick red wall that rose toward the sky, flaunting the wounds of time. These furrows traced grimacing masks resembling mineral giants petrified during uncountable centuries.

No plant life was discernable on the vertical wall. The atmosphere reminded me of a sepulchre but without the odour of decomposition, as if time had consumed the compost. (p. 390)

The dead mountain is an agent of entropy. Nothing can reconcile Man with Nature. The universe is hostile. Life contains the germs of destruction, and all living beings of flesh and blood are bound to encounter the void. Redemption and salvation do not exist. Michel’s pessimistic view contrasts strikingly with his father’s Christian faith.

The moving vines gave us no quarter and we had to alter our path to avoid them. If life multiplied its forms in the plant world, the forest remained void of animal life. Not the smallest mosquitoes dancing in the patches of light. We humans were somehow suspended between the mineral and the vegetable. The gift of life was available only for the creatures that wore no flesh, as if no incarnated god had ever visited this place. (p. 400)

What can possibly happen to the narrator in such a place?

An initiation journey

Bernanos takes us on a journey to the end. There is the struggle for survival, the will to face the unknown, the quest for salvation. But there are especially – and here undoubtedly lies Michel Bernanos’ talent – sumptuous, scary, fascinating images. If the first part of the novella is evidence of a certain narrative effectiveness and contains a few strong moments of horror, the second part offers surreal and absurd visions that are more original and convincing. Images and mysterious phenomena threaten to ensnare the characters, without the slightest respite. The horror takes on wondrous features; nature is never what it appears to be. And a reddish light drowns everything in the ultimate disruption of a lush and wild life.

This novella, utterly original, may superficially remind you of Lovecraft but William Hope Hodgson is perhaps more appropriate a comparison. You could also think of Jean Ray. Still, Bernanos’s view is utterly pessimistic, and the tone of all his fantasy stories (I have not read his noir and mystery novels to this day) is horrific, as distant as can be from Ray’s sly humour.

Reading The Other Side of the Mountain was an unsettling experience (and the depth of the narration appeared to me more strongly on my second reading). Translating it, trying to preserve every single passage of the original, the tone, the meaning, knowing that rendering the author’s tormented style in a language that — besides the influence of French after Hastings — remains proto-Germanic in essence (the debate, if you wish, is open on this point); oh, well, it was a stimulating enterprise.

Gio Clairval, Weird Fiction Review, November 21 2011

THE WEIRD: I have participated in one of the largest thematic anthology projects of all time, and I'm still alive!

2011-10-31T14:51:00.000+01:00

The Weird is out! Amazon.com

How It All Began

The day was Sunday, the month April, the year 2010, and I didn't know it would be the first day of a several-month-long captivity in the VanderMeers' Donjons (they have virtual oubliettes in their basement; the Dragon is Jeff himself). To put together this mammoth anthology, Ann and Jeff themselves lived like recluses. I suppose they needed a European correspondent to bring a dose of international suffering to the project.

Jeff sent me an email saying "For the big book of weird there is a small chance we might need a re-translation of a short novel of 30k. Is this the kind of thing you could do? From the French to English?

I also have a need for some research on copyright on a book in France."

The short novel was La montagne morte de la vie, (translated in English as "The Other Side of the Mountain"), written by Michel Bernanos, the son of the much more famous Georges Bernanos. The copyright research turned out to be for the same book.

I hadn't read anything written by Bernanos Jr. (when Jeff asked about his short stories, I thought he was asking about Georges' short fiction, and I answered that he had written none). I researched the author and learned that he had published under various pseudonyms, to avoid using the name made famous by his illustrious father. When I read La montagne... (I will comment on this incredible story soon).

As I've been living in France for a longer time than in Italy (where I was born), I enquired about the French and Italian authors who would be in this landmark anthology.

I asked Jeff if he had thought of that great Belgian horror author, Jean Ray. (He had.) And what about Claude Seignolle (a springy ninety-five-year-old French author), an authority in the French literature of the fantastic? Which Italian author? Dino Buzzati, who was a master of the uncanny.

The Rights Acquisition Lottery

And then I plunged into the dangerous world of Translation Rights. My job consisted in finding who owned the rights, negotiating the acquisition and conducting a ballet between Florida (where the VanderMeers' Donjons loom) and Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, ... Jeff, and the Atlantic Corvus people negotiated most rights, but I had the unique pleasure of dealing with the owners of the stories I translated, and a few others, some of which consisted simply in finding who owned what, and who was the right person to call, which surely is a torment invented in some special hell designed for anthologists.

I remember with fondness the hunt across the Netherlands for a lady who had bought from her daughter the rights to all the works of a deceased author. I found her attorney, and he promised to get back to me with news soon. The announced day passed, and still no news (Jeff NEVER put pressure on me. Never ever. He only suggested to tell the attorney that they probably shared common ancestors). I called again, and again, but the attorney didn't have an answer. So I tried to contact the owner over the phone. The nice old lady said, "Listen, I have to go, and I'm late. Why don't you tell me what you're selling, instead of asking if I can sell you something?"

Followed more months spent hunting down contacts, sending emails, calling people on the phone—which made the difference in the end.

Most heirs are represented by agents. If the agency is small, the process is swift. Not so with bigger organisations. Once you get a print or electronic-edition permission, the battle isn't won concerning a new translation, as separate department deal with the estates and the translation permissions. Agents or their assistants steered me through the process. They told me who to contact and volunteered to speak to their colleagues, supporting my demand.

I discovered why a few major pieces written by illustrious (and still copyrighted) deceased authors are still known to the Anglophone audience through translations done fifty years ago, written in a style that doesn't appeal to contemporary readers, and even sporting a few mistakes! In spite of this, the old translation is bought over and over, by anthologists and school textbook editors. Fact is, it is TOO difficult to obtain the permission for a new translation, particularly when your request concerns a single story! In one case (Cortazar's "Axolotl"), I had to convince the heir, via the agent, that the existing translation didn't do justice to the original. The heir and the agent went through my translation, word for word. When the Estate gave the imprimatur, I felt as if I'd conquered a mountain.

I translated for this anthology:

Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 ( Argentina)
Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” (Il colombre), 1966 (Italy)
Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” (La montagne morte de la vie) 1967 (France)
Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” (Le hupeur) 1967 (France)
Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” (Die Dissektion) 1913 (Germany)

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Amazon.com

Foreword: Michael Moorcock
Introduction by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Afterword: China Mieville

Table of Contents

Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 (translation, Austria)
F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908
Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907
Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910
M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911
Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912
Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 (translation, Austria)
Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Germany)
Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 (translation, Germany)
Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 (India)
Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 (new translation by Anna and Brendan Connell, Italy; first-ever translation into English)
A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 (new translation, Japan)
Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 (translation, German/Czech)
Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 (translation, Poland)
H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929
Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930
Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 (translation, Belgium)
Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 (translation, Belgium)
Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933
Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 (translation, Japan)
Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936
Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 (translation, Poland)
Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939
Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941
Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941
Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942
Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943
William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 (translation, Argentina)
Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 (Benin)
Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950
Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951
Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951
Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 (new translation by Larry Nolen, Guatemala)
Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 (Nigeria)
Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 1953
Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Argentina)
William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956
Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959
Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963
Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Italy)
Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967 (translation, Catalan)
Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967

Daphne Du Maurier, “Don’t Look Now,” 1971
Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975
Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976
Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977
Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 (Antigua and Barbuda/US)
George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979
Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980
Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980
Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980
William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981
M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981
Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982
M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982
Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 (translation, India)
F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984
Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984
Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984
Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 (translation, Finland)
Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987
Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987
Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988
Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 (Nigeria)
Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989
Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989
Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990
Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 (translation, Czech)
Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991
Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991
Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)
Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992
Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993
Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993
William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994
Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994
Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994
Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994
Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995
Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996
Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997
Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998
Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998
Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000
Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001
China Mieville, “Details,” 2002
Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002
Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002
Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002
Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003
Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003
Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003
Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003
Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004
Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 (Australia)
T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005
Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007
Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007
Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 (Iran)
Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009
Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009
Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009

K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010 (Australia)

How I met Tina Aumont—a mythic actress and an anti-diva

2011-10-29T17:13:00.000+02:00

Tina Aumont, born in Hollywood to film star Maria Montez and French icon Jean-Pierre Aumont. Jean Cocteau wrote a poem for her birth and Marlene Dietrich sang lullabies while cradling her. (From Romanhattan website)

It was some time around the turn of the millennium. Film producer and actor Ivan Galietti, an Italian friend transplanted in New York, had come to Paris for one of his frequent visits to Tina, who was fifty-four or fifty-five and looked ten years younger.

She was one of the kindest persons I'd ever met. How, I wondered, can this woman be a myth of the twentieth century, and be so easy-going, so approachable, like the girl next door.

The first thing that struck me was her eyes, immense, dark, soulful. Age tarnishes most beauties, but her face, dominated by those incredible eyes, remained unlined. Her youthful looks weren't the result of the surgeon's scalpel. Even if she had needed to negotiate with time, which she did not, she couldn't have afforded the cost.

A photograph of Tina, taken
a couple of years before I met her

She could afford pretty much ... nothing. After her glory days, her father's heritage in the hands of her stepmother, an Italian actress, she was reduced to living in a minuscule apartment located in a modest Parisian quarter full of penniless immigrants, and the rent was paid by the city's social services. Tina's flamboyant career had taken a downturn in the late seventies, when she was banned from Italy, her country of adoption, for drug possession. Leaving Italy had broken her heart.

Tina worked with great directors like Fellini, scandalous directors like Tinto Brass, who said she was the most beautiful woman with whom he'd ever worked, and many others. Several among the films in which she starred were intellectual and elegant, other fell into the category of B movies. To all her films, she brought her magnetic, compelling presence.

But Tina loved the needle, and little by little her contracts dwindled to nothing. The French television tried to lure her back into acting, but she seldom kept up with the schedule, and when the dressers prepared her for a scene, they could see the needle holes constellating her arms.

The day I met Tina, Ivan, my boyfriend Pierre and I set off with her for a promenade in the forest of Fontainebleau, half an hour or so to the south of Paris. Before leaving, we had a couple of beers in a café. She had water, an entire bottle. At the time, she was already treated for respiratory problems, but she rolled joints in full sight on the café table, and she smoke the first in a taxi, to the driver's despair. Unabashed, she rolled down the window and puffed on.

The second time I saw her, it was at her funeral in Paris, Cimetière du Montparnasse, on the 18th of November 2006.

Paris had gifted us with one of those wonderful autumn days, sunny and warm. I arrived early, and Ivan was nowhere in sight. Tina's friends had gathered in front of the entrance. Knowing nobody, I waited on the opposite side of the street. The crowd stared at me, a few heads put together, whispering. What crosses your mind when, during a ceremony, a bunch of strangers can't pull their gazes off you? I wondered whether I had picked the right clothes for a funeral. I tugged uncomfortably at my black sweater, glanced down at my long skirt, grey with black arabesques, and light-brown leather boots, but could find nothing wrong with my attire, and tossed my grey shawl over my shoulder, to give myself a countenance.

Ivan arrived at last, in time for the crowd to move over to the grave. As these gatherings go, a few friends recounted their memories of the deceased. Ivan read a poem he'd written for Tina.

I remember the anecdote told by Nadine Trintignant (sister of Tina's first husband, Christian Marquand). In a scene, Tina, standing before the camera, was supposed to start walking to the right. During the first take, she walked off to the left. "Cut!" director Lina Wertmuller ordered. "Tina, you know you should walk to the right." Tina nodded. "Okay." The camera rolled, and Tina walked to the left. "To the right, Tina, please!" Tina smiled. "To the right. No problem." And off to the left she went. Take after take, there was no way to convince her to walk as the script demanded. It's not that she refused to comply, but some daydream held her in a firm grasp. Finally, one of the grips lay down on the floor, out of the camera's view, and gently turned Tina's feet to the right, and she stepped in that direction.

After the funeral, Ivan and I followed Tina's friends to a bistrot. Someone showed me one of her last photographs, taken in the hospital. Despite the oxygen tubes, she hadn't changed a bit. At sixty, she still looked young.

Now was the moment to enquire about the strange gazes pinned on me when I arrived at the cemetery. So I put the question to the woman sitting next to me.

She answered: "You looked so much like her, we thought Tina had found the way to attend her own funeral. It would have been typical of her."

"I look nothing like her." I was going through one of my dark-hair phases, when I dye my reddish-brown hair dark brown or black, with a long fringe (or bangs, my American friends would say), and I'd hidden my eyes behind large sunglasses. But still.

"I can see it now," the woman said. "But the silhouette and the hair were so similar we really thought her ghost had come to say goodbye."

Goodbye, Tina. You aren't forgotten. Walk free, in the direction of your desire. Maybe I'll see you around Paris, some day.

Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: How it charms, tricks and scrambles your mind

2011-10-24T01:24:00.005+02:00

Wax model for eye surgery, Musée Orfila, Paris

I gave my daughter one of my contributor's copies of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities as a birthday present. It was the first time I presented her with a book. Ever.

She's a compulsive reader, but books are not her kind of birthday present. For her, books are things to borrow from Mum and to give back worn and torn. I am her personal library. Only, libraries charge you when the book comes back in a pitiful state. Mum's library is a forgiving institution. Still, each time my daughter hands me a tattered paperback, I can't help feeling a pang of sorrow to my bookworm's heart. She prefers borrowing paperbacks because she can fold the book backwards, breaking the spine in the process. (She's a barbarian.) This volume was a hardcover, though. And I had my own copy anyway. Ha. So... .... on her birthday, I gave her this thing of beauty:

==> ==> ==> ==> ==> ==>

She looked at me askance. "A book."

"There's a story of mine in it," I said defensively.

"Oh, thank you, Mum!" What else could she say?

The following day, she told me, "This cabinet des curiosités must be splendid."

"It is."

"It would be great to visit."

"You can't. They made it up."

(And by the way, I set fire to that place of evil.

Well, it wasn't me. The governess did it. Oh, buy the book and you'll know the truth.)

Back to the book: my daughter had only read the introduction, which had tricked her into believing that the good doctor's Wunderkammer was a real place.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have put a rather unbelievable doctor, and the (mostly) deranged people who knew him when he was alive, in an impossible cabinet of curiosities, and they have made it all so real in the introduction that someone who has not read about the current anthology and knows nothing about the previous book (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases) has no reason to question the reality of characters and place.

Take a look at the gallery of artworks illustrating the horrible, amazing, odd story behind the stories of Thackery T. Lambshead.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinetof Curiosities is fiction disguised in non-fiction. To paraphrase Borges, Dr. Lambshead has passed away, but his cabinet of curiosities will perdure, bright, solitaire and infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious items, incorruptible, secret . . .

Julian, a novel by Gore Vidal (and Christians, pagans, Amenabar's Agora, freedom of thought, and lions)

2011-10-15T17:41:00.020+02:00

OMG...

Libanius to Priscus

Antioch, March [A.D.] 380

Yesterday morning, as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, "Have you heard about the Emperor Theodosius?"

I cleared my throat, ready to investigate the nature of this question, but he was too quick for me. "He has been baptised a Christian."

I was noncommittal. Nowadays, one never knows who is a secret agent.

This passage is the beginning of Julian by Gore Vidal. I devoured the novel in a couple of days, but when I got to the point where the protagonist was murdered, and one of his teachers ferreted out the assassin, it saddened me so I set the book aside for a few weeks. I didn't want to meet the man who had killed such an interesting and endearing character.

Then my daughter dropped by, asking as usual for a good read, and I put the book under her nose. She grabbed it.

"What? A historical novel?" she protested after flipping through the first pages. "A book published in 1962? I want something NEW, like the last one! [The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi], or something published a couple of years ago at most, like the one before. [Robert Palmer's Debatable Space]. This Vidal guy isn't even a classic, or I would know [she's a student of modern English literature]"

"Just read it."

She called the day after. "I can't put it down."

I finished reading the last pages since, and I can say it is one of the best historical novels I've ever read.

The novel

Witty, extraordinarily accurate and beautifully written, this best-selling novel retraces the life of Roman Emperor Julian, narrated in first person. Two of his mentors, renowned pagan philosophers, exchange letters on Julian's manuscript, adding first-hand accounts that are both dispassionate and tongue in cheek. The result is a multifaceted and often contradictory portrait of the protagonist.

Julian (331-363) was Emperor Constantine's nephew. After his ascension to the title of Emperor, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity and died at the age of thirty-two during a military campaign in Persia.

Remembered only as "the Apostate" in the following centuries, Julian was a philosopher, a fine essayist and had a charming personality. He tried to preserve the Hellenistic culture and the ancient religious eclecticism crushed by the violence of the New Religion.

In the novel, the characters are penned with all their humanity and flaws. Despite the complexity of the themes, Vidal handles the ideas of the time in a simple and effective way. The novel captures the religious and political ferment of a brutal age and restores the legacy of a ruler who wanted to preserve the ancient tolerance.

This historical reconstruction provides, as all historiography should, a picture of the past that serves the contingencies of the present.

I asked my accomplice and friend Daniel Pasetti, historian specialising in ancient Rome, to chat with me about the book, the protagonist, and his time.

A Roman Emperor speaking in broken Latin?

Gio. What's different about this emperor, Julian?

Daniel. Julian was a Greek-speaking emperor. He spoke Latin, of course, but with a strong accent. He was the first non-Latin emperor in history. There had been an African and Eastern emperors, born in Latin families, though, but Julian is the first about whom we know with certainty that his first language was not Latin.

G. Still, if tradition has left more information about him, it must mean something, that he was more important than others.

Sources sources sources

D. Yes and no. The abundance of sources is based on two fundamental reasons: the importance of the person who wrote about something, and the importance of the contents, which gave the documents greater chances of survival.

Concerning Julian, we have Ammianos Markellinos (Ammianus Marcellinus), the most important historian of the 4th century A.D. Ammianus, born in Syria to a Greek-speaking family (but he wrote in Latin, the language of history) was an officer of medium-high level in Constantius II's and later Julian's army. He was personally present in many of the events later recounted in his Res Gestae, and got out of a few tight spots, barely saving his life, as in the Persian siege of the Roman city of Amida during the reign of Constantius. He was also present in the Persian campaign that cost Julian his life.

Above everything else, in addition to being a witness, Ammianus had a great intellectual honesty. In his narration, Julian emerges as the ideal emperor, for his culture, dedication to public interests, courage, tolerance. Practically a Titan, but not without flaws. Although Ammianus was a pagan, like Julian, and shared his religious views, he criticized a few of Julian's ideas as demagogic. And indeed, they were.

If he did not hold back about Julian's flaws, there is no reason to suspect that he was exaggerating his merits. We must be grateful to Ammianus and Fate, too, which let us get some of his work. Without Ammianus, we would know much less about the 4th century, and Gore Vidal wouldn't have written about Julian with the same historical exactitude.

Religious freedom

G. Ok, but what about the question of religious freedom?

D. It strikes me that the not-so-Christian Gore Vidal was attracted to Julian, who is remembered as "the Apostate." Nor is it without significance that an emperor who remained in office for just two years has been remembered with such hatred for centuries. Sure, he was Caesar (in the late Empire, "Caesar" was the title of the emperor's representative in charge of a few areas; in Julian's case: Gaul, Britain and Spain) and lived in Gaul for six years, but his religion policy was implemented for only two years, when he became Augustus, the emperor's title.

Being Augustus is cooler than being Caesar

G. And why isn't Vidal's interest surprising?

D. Because Julian's action against Christians was not a "real" persecution. It was a clever (from his point of view) attempt to pull the carpet from under their feet. He did not forbid Christians to practise their faith. In fact, Christians have never really been forbidden to worship their God, if not in very few occasions and for a short time.

And the thing about Christians eaten by lions? Medieval propaganda!

G. Hold on. What about persecutions? Christians thrown to the lions?

D. The story of persecutions is very different from what it is commonly believed, and in fact, we can say that Christianity triumphed not despite the persecution, but maybe just because it was not persecuted systematically. The only documented episode of Christians thrown into the arena occurred not far from your home, in Lyon, under the reign of the "good" Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Then nothing... We don't hear about lions eating Christians if not from medieval sources, which are entirely unreliable. It could have happened a few more times, but it is rather unlikely.

A beautiful icon of Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr

Ancient civilisations were violent, and certainly had a taste for blood, but not the way we think today. Where's the fun in watching ordinary people, shaking and shrieking, being devoured by beasts? And how long would the show last? One minute? And then what? Would you sit in the traffic across the city for two hours straight just to watch a thirty-second show? Imagine going to Madison Square Garden to see a boxing match between Mike Tyson and a convicted shoplifter. What fun. What you want to see is a combat, not a severed head flying off over the ropes after two seconds. The ancient audience wanted a good fight not just blood.

G. They weren't afraid of blood, I suspect.

D. They were not, but blood was simply the outcome of action. Action was fun, not blood.

G. All right, but there was persecution, even without lions.

D. Well, it's complicated.

G. It's always complicated with you.

D. No persecution occurred in the way we all imagine, no Christian hunt as such, systematic and over the centuries. There were episodic moments of intolerance, sometimes violent. And laws. Mostly not reinforced, though. In short, we can say that today's widely accepted scenario is that there was a long period of tolerance interrupted by intermittent persecution, limited in time and space.

All this bad reputation... for what?

G. Hold on. This is what you think.

D. No, that's what you can read in any good ancient history handbook published in the last thirty years. Or you can hear about it in a college class in Roman history or history of Christianity. The most severe persecution and perhaps the only deserving the name, happened under Diocletian and the tetrarchs, which included among other things the confiscation of holy books and actions against the clergy (less against the faithful, who were nevertheless forbidden to meet). And the law was applied in leopard spots, so to speak, harsh in some places, moderate in others, and nothing at all in most. Then came Constantine, and things changed.

Julian's campaign to restore religious eclecticism

G. And then Julian arrived, and things changed again.

D. Well, between Constantine and Julian came Constantius. In reality, Julian, though hostile to Christianity, wasn't interested in violent persecution à la Diocletian. He adopted Constantine's policy, but in an opposite way. Constantine, with the edict of tolerance in A.D. 311—actually issued by Galerius (a Caesar) had put all religions on an equal footing; i.e. he had stressed the right to worship all faiths, including Christianity. However, Constantine had clearly favoured Christianity, both giving precedence to Christians in prominent positions around him, and increasing tax exemptions in favour of the clergy. Julian did the same thing, but in favour of the pagans. His was not a persecution with condemnations and executions, but the attempt to push Christianity back within the limits that other religions had, surreptitiously more or less favouring all other cults. Even non-Roman cults . . .

G. Now you're saying Christians were bad . . .

D. Christians weren't bad, but they weren't good either. They were men of their time, neither the best nor the worst. Nevertheless, Christianity carried a virus for which classical societies had no antibodies, a bit like the European diseases brought to America by the Spaniards. The idea that there was a "real" religion, with a real god, one's own (and that the other gods were false and such faiths had to be eradicated) was surreal for the ancient societies.

In this light, your typical uneducated pagan was hostile to Christianity because he believed that "all" gods were real, including the Biblical God. Diocletian, a slave's nephew and a shepherd's son, materialised this sentiment with his persecutory policy against Christians. Just because he was a traditionalist—he was a traditionalist even in the typical pagan's eye.

It is no coincidence that especially the emperors that we could define "progressive" were hostile to Christianity, according to the accepted historical canons. The implications of the Christians' dogmatic conception of religion were clear to these emperors, who were "liberal" in their time. Some practices that have become recurring scourges in the history of Western civilisation were introduced by the Christian Churches. Anti-Semitism? Introduced by the Christians— as in a Freudian Oedipal conflict, where the sons want to kill the father. The burning of books deemed blasphemous? Another Christian novelty. Also, things worsened considerably for women.

One of the first female scientists, victim to Christian fundamentalists

G. I'm thinking of Hypatia, a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy in Alexandria.

D. Yes. She was slaughtered by a mob of Christians—shredded to pieces, literally. Her crime was freedom of thought, with the aggravating circumstance of having the wrong reproductive organs. Her public execution illustrates a new climate, but, as always, one must put the episode in its context. Christian "Taliban" teemed in Egypt and in the East. They were less strong and less violent in the West. Nevertheless, they shared the same ideology.

G. Off topic: Is the Amenabar film a correct historical reconstruction?

D. It is surprisingly correct. I've seen two minor errors only: dust in the street (the streets of Alexandria were all paved: Alexandria was the Los Angeles of the Roman Empire); and the Roman soldiers' uniforms, which had changed by the fourth century (we've seen the same uniforms since the first historical film of all time).

So why did Christianity prevail?

G. Still, it is unthinkable that a religion would become prominent only through the boost of a political leader. There must be deeper reasons.

D. True. In effect, Christianity grew thanks to complex factors. Generally speaking, it was the winning religion in a universal tide of monotheism. At this point, the various traditional cults were looked upon with affection, but few really believed in the gods of ancient time, Jupiter & Co. Monotheism, in its various forms, was prevailing. Christianity however was the best organized and—how should I put it?—the simplest, least -intellectualised religion, more suited to the poorest among the urban strata. A neat opposition between right and wrong gets into the popular mindset easily. And then Christians had a great advantage: a Jesus certainly lived in Palestine.

We know little about him. He was one of several prophets/sages/rebels/mages the East produced steadily. Christianity coalesced around the figure of a Rabbi (teacher), perhaps a rebellious political and religious reformer, and syncretised a universe of elements coming from Judaism, Sol Invictus' cult (Mithraism), other solar deities of Hellenistic tradition, and also from Zoroastrianism. Christianity triumphed, but it could have been some other cult, if a few elements of the jigsaw had come together in a different way. Who knows—a cult with Simon Magus or the God Sol? Or the Aryan version of Christianity.

However, political power has a weight in effecting a push, perhaps not the ultimate push, but one important enough. In fact, Christianity—from which derive the Greek Orthodox Church, closer to the first Christian roots, and the Catholic Church, and the subsequent Protestant variants—is based on the Nicene Creed.

Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, followed by the
Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381
(Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed)

Christians fought over Jesus' nature: is he one with the Father or separate?

G. You mean the dogma of Jesus genitum non factum (generated, not created): "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father."

D. Exactly. It would have been enough at the time to give a strong political thrust in the opposite direction, in favour of the Aryans, and today Jesus would be considered Factum non genitum (created, not generated).

G. I think that today most people would find the debate on Jesus single or double nature strange.

D. After fifteen centuries of monotheism, yes. But at the time, the world was polytheist, although it was changing into monotheist. In the Nicaens' view, admitting that Jesus had been created (a real physical son, a separate person) meant to admit that there wasn't a unique god, that there were other divine entities. In other words, polytheism, kicked out of the door, would come back through the window! The reasoning was correct, in a way. Why was the Aryan Creed adopted by German tribes more easily than the Nicene Creed? Because Aryans believed Jesus was a separate person. Aryanism was a monotheism with a polytheistic angle . . .

Power relations and dogma

G. In other words, behind the clouds of incense, there are often, though not always, power relations—politics.

D. Exactly. In the Church, as the faithful listen to the Pope, the priest or the minister, this past, the Council of Nicaea (which constitutes the foundation of that personal spiritual relationship with the divine) is not apparent, but it happened. Nothing comes from nothing.

G. Are you saying that one should force lessons on the history of Christianity on little old ladies in church?

D. Of course not, but beliefs may be forced on people through the force of habit. Critical thinking is a necessity, to grant an individual the freedom of refusing or accepting these beliefs. I am for freedom of worship but even more for freedom of culture.

The Fire of Alexandria, Berlin, XIX-century woodcuts by Hermann Göll, 1876.

(In fact, we do not know with certainty that the Library was burned,

but the city's main temple, the Serapeum, containing a library,

was destroyed by the Coptic Pope Theophilus in A.D. 391.)

Like the best wines

G. What else have you read of Gore Vidal?

D. I have read various collections of articles, and I very much liked The Golden Age, set during the Roosevelt presidency. I'm curious about Duluth and I've seen enthusiastic critiques of The City and the Pillar, his controversial debut. If the quality standards of Vidal's other novels are half as high as those of Julian, all his work deserves to be read. I am keeping his books on my shelves, to be savoured slowly, as one does with the best wines.

G. I see a problem with your strategy: once you start reading one, you'll devour the rest in no time.

ODD? The oddest of anthologies is out to get you!

2011-10-11T23:55:00.009+02:00

Odd: The sense of "strange, peculiar" is first attested in 1580s from the notion of "odd one out, unpaired one of three" (attested earlier, in the fifteenth century, as "singular" in a positive sense of "renowned, rare, choice"). From the Online Etymology Dictionary

The unique Myster Odd shows one of the possible ways in which your life is going to be oddified (WARNING: includes perverted bubbles, hanged fish and someone who loses his footing):

Today sees the release of the first ODD? anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
The first? Yes. It's a series.

Each 70-80k volume will contain reprints, previously unpublished stories, and new translations of classic and hard-to-find stories.

Among a wealth of great, great stuff (see the full table of contents here), you will find a new translation of "The Head" by Karl Hans Strobl, concocted by yours faithfully.

See all the uncanny details here: odd odd anthology odd video odd subscriptions odd contest on Jeff VanderMeer's blog.

You can buy the oddity at: