DECEMBER 2003

MONDAY, 1 DECEMBER 2003

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Monday 17, October 2003. Tunnel at Fort Vechten.

Perhaps the most disturbing story ever: Sartre's The Wall.

THURSDAY, 11 DECEMBER 2003

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The Writer

"The writer is a phobic who succeeds in metamorphizing in order to keep from being frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs." Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

As a writer Robert Coover isn't known for his horror. But I find his short story The Marker truly horrific (not so much for the degradation of the corpse but for the spatial and temporal lapses).

(Sometimes I even scare myself with the uncanniness by which I find things that I already have.)

FRIDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2003

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Apropos Coover's 'The Marker' mentioned yesterday. Walking towards his wife in bed Jason is walking in a straight line (Borges -- according to Deleuze -- once wrote: "a more frightening labyrinth than a circular labyrinth is one in a straight line").

SATURDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2003

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Immobilized

Searching for background on the two versions of Fuseli's Nightmare (Detroit and Frankfurt) I stumble across this page connected to some interesting research on Sleep Paralysis at the University of Waterloo.

From the Sleep Paralysis page discussing western and non-western myths:

In Laos, (Lemoine & Mounge, 1983) da chor is described as follows: "You want to listen, you can't hear; you want to speak, you are dumb; you want to call out, you cannot; you feel you are dying, dying; you want to run away. You piss with fear in your sleep."

SUNDAY, 14 DECEMBER 2003

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Dig We Must

As I delve deeper into the world of Lovecraft and other writers of the 19th and early 20th century I'm becoming more and more impressed by the role of the mythos -- the fact that various authors set their works in "shared worlds" referencing the same names for gods, locations, and artificts. I can't help but think that such intellectual promiscuity does the work good -- so why don't we see more of it amongst contemporary writers? Sure there are examples -- Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis springs to mind -- but why do they appear to be rare?

The Official Cthulhu FAQ

Pseudobiblia

I've just finished reading The Yellow Sign by Robert Chambers.

Simplier than the Chulhu mythos the 'King in Yellow' mythos is based upon a single piece of pseudobiblia, a fictious play published as a fictious book (entitled 'The King in Yellow'). This artifact appears in a number of Chambers' stories and is evil for whoever reads it goes mad.

There have been a number of recent attempts to reconstruct The King in Yellow. I like this one for its Jacobean flavor (though I wonder - given its current existence -- if it is still correct to use the term pseudobiblia?)

MONDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2003

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Philosophy of Horror

Three titles which look promising:

Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart

Cynthia A. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead

Ken Gelder (Editor), The Horror Reader

TUESDAY, 16 DECEMBER 2003

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Rorschach

It seems impossible (unbelievable considering how you can find almost everything online these days) to find facsimiles of the Rorschach/Exner inkblots online. The closest I've come is this page (debunking the test) which provides outlines of the 10 figures and the following index (showing all 10 plates).

No blots but on the other hand it is amazing what you do find: Probing Linus Pauling's Personality with the Rorschach Ink Blot Test.

WEDNESDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2003

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The Prodigious Sentence

Has a longer (or more labyrinthine) sentence ever been written?

Garcia Marquez's book (The Autumn of the Patriarch), let it be said, is among the most difficult and forbidding of novels to face an uninitiated reader, consisting as it does of six unnumbered chapters, each a single paragraph, with syntax growing ever more sinous and serpentine as the book progesses. By way of illustration, the first chapter of the novel has thirty-one sentences, the third ninteen, the fifth only fifteen, the sixth and final one being made up of a single 1,852-line sentence (in the Sudamericana edition). Within any of those extended units the speaker and even the pronoun-subject can shift routinely and more than once, and with no quotation marks, dashes, indentations, or other handy guideposts. In fact the period and the comma are about the only punctuation signs employed throughout the text, the sole exception being 'aha!' uttered by the dictator in chapter I, at the moment he catches the oposition red-handed on the day of his false 'death.' Garcia Marquez actually spent an entire session of proofreading of galleys that was dedicated exclusively to watching and correcting commas! (Gene H. Bell-Villada, Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work)

THURSDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2003

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Forget Mindstorms

After looking at it for years I finally broke down and ordered myself a couple of boxes of what is known as the betamax of construction sets: Fischertechnik. Made in Germany. The Construction Toys website calls it "the most technically advanced building toy there is" (and they sell Lego). There is an industrial line of kits for modelling factory robots and assembly lines. I'm not that interested in building robots -- I'm much more interested in building a mechanical theater and time pieces.

FRIDAY, 19 DECEMBER 2003

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Last night N. and I watched a video and film program of 4 pieces put together by Florian Wüst including Bruce Connor's Report (1963-1967) and a rarely seen Godard, Ici et ailleurs (1974). Excellent stuff but what really knocked me out was the John Smith film which Florian screened two weeks ago: The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). As a study of will (in the big sense as in: 'I am willing everything that happens before me at this moment.') it is not to be missed.

SATURDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2003

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Schizophrenia Mea Culpa

20.12.03: Mask in window (Groningen)

SUNDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2003

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The Sound of Horror

A recording of one of Stanley Milgram's obedience tests.

Rod Dickinson's Milgram Re-enactment.

MONDAY, 22 DECEMBER 2003

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My Fischertechnik kits were delivered Saturday while I was in Groningen. Yesterday I spent the whole day sorting pieces. Today I began building and became so engrossed with the task that I spent the entire day offline. This in itself is a good thing.

Things Hungarian

Two Hungarian names which I've heard just enough about to make me want to know more:

1. Geza Csath
2. Attila Sassy

Csath is dead (committed suicide at 31). Not sure about Sassy.

TUESDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2003

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Mechanical wonder: The South Pointing Chariot.

WEDNESDAY, 24 DECEMBER 2003

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Vertrek Rotterdam CS 10:37 Aankomst Bensheim (D) 16:06

THURSDAY, 25 DECEMBER 2003

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Real candles in Christmas trees!

FRIDAY, 26 DECEMBER 2003

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Schloss Heidelberg

SATURDAY, 27 DECEMBER 2003

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The Psychopathology of the Double

Another patient of Dr Brugger's woke in the morning with a dizzy feeling, on turning around he saw himself still lying in bed; he got angry about the man he knew was himself and who would be late for work. He tried to wake the reclining body first by shouting at it, then by trying to shake it and finally by repeatedly jumping on his alter ego in the bed. But the lying body did not react. Only then did he begin to be puzzled about his double existence and became more and more scared by the fact that he could no longer tell which of the two he really was. Several times his bodily awareness switched from the one standing upright to the one still lying in bed; in the latter case he would feel quite awake but paralysed and scared by the figure of himself bending over and beating him. His only intention was to become one person again and looking out of the window from where he could still see his body lying in bed, he suddenly decided to jump out "in order to stop the intolerable feeling of being divided in two". At the same time he hoped that "this really desperate action would frighten the one in bed and thus urge him to merge with me again". The next thing he remembered was the painful awakening in the hospital having suffered multiple fractures from having jumped out of a high window. Raj Persaud: How You Could Meet Yourself

Rossetti: How They Met Themselves

November 2003

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