last transmit, halls of vira co

… saying, once those outsiders get in your tortured halls … I’m saying we didn’t have command of the vast fictions of the day … The city wasn’t, in the end, where those of us who lived there thought it was. We had already lost it in all senses of that word … All we knew of this place was the news … preferring the past’s acknowledgment of humanity, we remained uninterested by the watertightness of the plot … the halls are aware that–in the end–they can never know what, exactly, the plot was. It’s only silence after that. Back at the beginning there’s the tapping sound, like metal on stone … then the call signs, several of them, very amplified and confused … cries in the halls … a cruel few words and then, “We no longer know which way to face.” The halls are still aware … What if nothing “fell”? Nothing was lost but existed just alongside everything else, fifty years later in the rubble by a farm at the flat end of Shropshire … who could write this … everyone has a different story to sell … call signatures in rooks, fresh plough, old silence: “We don’t know what to do. Everything is the alongside of something else.”

post industrial zones

Dubious & formalised, as in Bilbao’s ex-docks or Sheffield reinvented as an apres-steel boutique: from industry to heritage industry. Wreckage needs to be real. It needs to be free. The central, inevitable & useful thing about a bent & rusty girder sticking up out of an overgrown cooling pond is that it’s a bent & rusty girder sticking up out of an overgrown cooling pond. Anything else is so pathetic: cleaned up, saved from itself (separated from the entropic processes it was always part of) & fit for a place on the mantelpiece in a nice front room. That teaches us something about the sublime in general: ie, really, it’s the Black Spot, the beginning of the end. So try & avoid capturing, recapturing or–especially– “celebrating” it. The urge to convey the authentic glee & terror of the post industrial wasteland is the beginning of the processes of romanticisation, postmodernisation & domestication. From the raw horror of a working blast furnace, through the uncanny of that much rust, to the kitsch. We need to live in the ruins; forget them; then live through them all over again, as whatever the landscape makes of them. Anything else is the media souvenir.

perhaps if I could see you

I can recover nothing. The city is already an endlessly fragmenting dream, endlessly reconstructing itself. The lime cliff of Minnet Saba crumbles into the side-streets of tall pastel-coloured apartments around Chenaniaguine. The waters of the Aqualate Pond lap about the base of Cold Walls, while at the same time–or at least in a continuous instant–the Entreflex, that beautifully-drawn but meaningless white symbol, stands in the distance above the city asking a question in a language we are forgetting even as we look. Churches of all denominations form themselves suddenly out of the fountains by an open air cafe. Old machines are discovered trembling with attention & anxiety in a toy wood between major avenues. As for you & me, we were bitten by insects somewhere between Uranium Street & the Horse Museum; you bought a yellow notebook which you never wrote in. For years I’ve kept these fragments floating around one another–it’s such an effort–attracted into patterns less by the order in which they occurred or by any “story” I can make about them than by gravity or animal magnetism. But I have no memory at all of the experience as it fell out. Perhaps if I could see you, I’d remember more.

ceremonies

Though on a good night you could still hear the breathy whisper of ten thousand voices wash across the roofs of Montrouge like a kind of invisible firework, the arena by then was really little more than a great big outdoor circus, & all the old burnings and quarterings had given place to history pageants, drumming, amateur choirs, acrobatics, trapeze acts &c. The New Men liked exotic animals. They did not seem to execute their political opponents–or each other–in public, though some of the aerial acts looked like murder. Every night there was a big, stupid lizard or a megatherium brought in to blink harmlessly & even a bit sadly up at the crowd until they had convinced themselves of its rapacity. & there were more fireworks than ever: to a blast of maroons full of magnesium & a broad falling curtain of cerium rain, the clowns would erupt bounding & cartwheeling into the circular sandy space–jumping up, falling down, building unsteady pyramids, standing nine or ten on each other’s shoulders, active & erratic as grasshoppers in the sun, while the massed bands played the popular music of a decade or two ago. They fought, with rubber knives and whitewash. They wore huge shoes. Everyone loved them. [From "The Dancer from the Dance", 1983.]

on the street in Viriconium

Balker came down from the north and lived on the street.

He was young for his age. He started in the station where the train emptied him out, then moved out into a doorway near a bus stop. It was all right for a while. Then he met Verdigris and they went up to the High City together. Verdigris wasn’t that much older than Balker. They were about the same height, but Verdigris knew more. He came from somewhere in the city, he had always lived in Viriconium. He had bright red hair, an alcohol tan and a personalised way of walking. He could get a laugh out of anything. For a while Balker and Veridigris did well out of the tourists in the High City. But Verdigris’ lifestyle-choices moved him along quickly and he started to limp up and down the Terrace of the Fallen Leaves saying, “’I’m in bits, me!’” and showing people the big sore on his neck.

“Hey, look mate, I’m in bits!”

After Verdigris died, Balker stayed away from the other street people. They had a language all their own he never learned to speak, but he knew the same thing was happening to them as to him.

He knew the same thing was happening to everyone.

There were new rules in. New rules had come in, and everyone in Viriconium was in the same position. If you couldn’t look after yourself there was a new way to pay.

Sleeping on the street is hard, all the reasons for that are obvious. It’s never quiet. The police move you about, the mutual associations won’t leave you alone: everyone thinks the boroughs belong to them. You’re hungry, you’ve got a cough, there’s other stuff, it’s an endless list. No one sleeps well in a doorway. You get fragments of sleep, you get the little enticing flakes of it that fall off the big warm central mass. Wake up, and everything seems to have fallen sideways. You guess it’s four in the morning in November, somewhere at the foot of the Ghabelline Stair; but you could be wrong. Are you awake ? Are you asleep ? Rain swirls in the doorway. You’ve got a bit of fever and you can’t quite remember who you are. It’s your own fault of course. You wake up and he’s there in front of you, with his nice overcoat, or sometimes a nice leather jacket, to protect him from the weather. You never really hear his name, though he tells you more than once. He seems to know yours from the beginning.

“Your health’s going,” he says. “You want to start now, before it goes too far.”

So he leaned into Balker’s doorway–maybe it was the night, maybe it wasn’t–and took Balker’s chin in his hand. He turned Balker’s face one way then the other. He was gentle, he even looked a bit puzzled, as if he was wondering why anyone would choose to live that way, what bad choices they must have made made to find themselves in a doorway at the foot of the Ghabelline Stair.

“You want to start now,” he repeated.

So Balker started. They took him to the place in the maze of streets below Mynned Saba. You’d get a meal afterwards, they said. You could expect your head to swim a bit, but come on: somebody in Balker’s condition was going to notice that ? In the end it was easy and it was a bit of money in your hand. It was a way of being responsible for yourself. It could be a beginning, they told him; or you could just leave it at that. But what Balker liked most was the warmth and the calm of the place. It was worth it just to lie down and not think about what to do next. Balker looked around and fell asleep. That was how it started for him, really. That was how his whole life started.

revisionary

The second part of John Coulhart’s look at the packaging of Viriconium is now up at {feuilleton}. Go there & enjoy John’s gorgeous intelligent choices, then come back here & say what you like best. I could eat them all with a mug of tea, but I’m telling you now that for me it has to be Detail from the Red Flow, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Along with the simple design qualities of the faux-Penguin cover, it seems to have everything I asked for yesterday. I spent much of my time until the late 80s in rage & misery at how deliberately Viriconium seemed to be mispackaged, as if the text were being punished for going against the grain. John’s articles have reminded me how unpleasant that felt (I think the low point was the Timescape package, including the retitle, for In Viriconium) but also to what degree, given the improved covers of recent years, I’ve become reconciled to all of it. He also shows what possibilities might open up as f/sf covering policies broaden.

in viriconium

At {feuilleton} John Coulthart considers forty years of attempts to cover & market Viriconium, most of which failed because the publishers couldn’t or wouldn’t face the actual content of the books. To celebrate, here’s a shot of the barrel proof stock–

The houses up here, warm and cheerful as they are in summer, become in the first week of September cold and damp. Ordinary vigorous houseflies, which have crawled all August over the unripe lupine pods beneath the window, pour in and cluster on any warm surface, but especially on the floor near the electric fire, and the dusty grid at the back of the fridge; they cling to the side of the kettle as it cools. That year you couldn’t leave food out for a moment. When I sat down to read in the morning, flies ran over my outstretched legs.

“I suppose you’ve got the same problem,” I said to Mr Ambrayses. “I poison them,” I said, “but they don’t seem to take much notice.” I held up the Vapona, with its picture of a huge fly. “Might as well try again.”

Mr Ambrayses nodded. “Two explanations are commonly offered for this,” he said:

“In the first we are asked to imagine certain sites in the world–a crack in the concrete in Chicago or New Delhi, a twist in the air in an empty suburb of Prague, a clotted milk bottle on a Bradford tip–from which all flies issue in a constant stream, a smoke exhaled from some fundamental level of things. This is what people are asking–though they do not usually know it–when they say exasperatedly, “Where are all these flies coming from ?” Such locations are like the holes in the side of a new house where insulation has been pumped in: something left over from the constructional phase of the world.

“This is an adequate, even an appealing model of the process. But it is not modern; and I prefer the alternative, in which it is assumed that as Viriconium grinds past us, dragging its enormous bulk against the bulk of the world, the energy generated is expressed in the form of these insects, which are like the sparks shooting from between two flywheels that have momentarily brushed each other.” –A Young Man’s Journey.

More from John Coulthart on Viriconium tomorrow.

later the same day…

…he sat by his window and looked out over the waste lots, hoping to recognise something, or place himself on his night’s travels. But as usual what could be seen from the window bore no resemblance to what was endured on the ground.

making the mari

Fascinated by the Mari Lwyd, the traditional horse-skull figure which patrols at the edge of the Viriconium stories & as “the Shrander” represents death (among other things) in Light, Jefferson Brassfield decided, “I figured I’d understand her better if I made her myself and got acquainted.” I was struck by the calm practicality of this as much as by his photograph of her, so I asked him to describe the process. Here’s what he wrote–

Making Mari Lwyd

The most difficult part of making Mari was waiting to find the right skull on eBay.

I didn’t want one that was too broken or decayed or cracked or missing too many teeth. Neither did I want a bleached-white museum-quality specimen. A fine skull turned up after several weeks of watching and waiting; worn and greyed, a few teeth gone, those remaining browned and yellowed, evidence of dirt and detritus still in the nooks and crannies of the whole. I think it cost me around $80, but I don’t recall if that included shipping.

Once it was in my possession, I cleaned and scraped out the dirt and grass and dried tissue as best as I could with an awl, long tweezers, and a can of compressed air. Then with some Elmer’s wood glue, I filled in the gaps between the teeth and the bones so that they were all seated securely and wouldn’t rattle or fall out.

I’m not much of an engineer, but I drew up several ideas for how to connect the jaw to the skull, mount them both on a pole, and enable the jaw to hinge but be closed at rest. I wanted to come up with an elegant contraption that would have accomplished everything in a mechanical unity, but I had neither the materials nor the knowledge to see that through. Instead I came up with individual solutions for each problem that would not get in the way of one another.

Without my fantastical contraption, the jaw had to be affixed to the skull, and the skull had to be affixed to the pole.

Skull to pole was simple and easy: Bore a hole through the crown of the skull and out the bottom of the brain cage. Put a thick-gauge threaded bolt of about 18 inches in length (forgive my metric ignorance) through the holes with large rubber and metal washers on both top and bottom. Bore a hole into one end of a 5 foot long, inch-and-a-half diameter wooden dowel, and gently thread the bolt into the pole until it is good and tight. I generally have to tighten it a tad after I’ve mucked about with it, but it stays just fine. Simple to remove for ease of transportation or storage.

The jaw was tricky. I wanted it to be spring-loaded so that it would pull open with some resistance and clamp back shut when released. I drilled some holes into the skull behind the eye sockets and into the jaw near the natural hinge. I put eyelet screws into the holes, and then hooked a tight spring between them that would extend when the jaw opened. It wasn’t enough. The jaw is so long and heavy the springs were insufficient to counter the lever on them. I thought I’d try another pair of eyelets at the top wing of the jaw bone; the farthest point in opposition of the tip of the jaw, that would connect via more springs to more eyelets farther back along the skull. The first attempt to bore through the narrower part of the top of the jaw broke it. I was afraid I would have to get a new skull, but some epoxyish goo seems to be holding it all together well enough. Anyhow, so much for that second screw. A stronger spring between the eyelets already in place was another option, but the tension on the screws proved too great and it was starting to pull them out of the bone. I could have adjusted the eyelet positions to compensate, but at this point I was hesitant to do any more drilling.

Not wanting to further damage her, I submitted to a less aesthetically pleasing, but effective solution: I screwed an eyelet inside the front of the jaw, another in the bottom of the skull in the roof of her mouth, another at the back of the roof of her mouth. Tied twine to the jaw eyelet, ran it through the eyes of the others, tied off the far end to a metal ring for a bit of a pulley. Screwed a hook into the side of the pole she’s mounted on at such a level that when the twine & ring is hooked onto it, the jaw is held mostly shut, with a bit of help from the springs (though only a bit). Unhook the ring, pull tight and release, and her jaw clacks open and shut satisfactorily.

Additionally, I tied twine over the skull between opposing pairs of spring eyelets, both front and back. If the jaw pulley-twine breaks as it eventually must from the constant tension it is under, these other twine bridges will keep the jaw from potentially ripping one of the spring eyelets out and falling off entirely.

Twine.

Not the elements-be-damned, nigh-invisible, indestructible mechanism I had hoped for, but it’ll do.

bought an old braided leather belt and screwed it into the pole for a shoulder strap since she’s so heavy. I screwed a couple sticks of knotty wood perpendicular together and wedged one end into the spinal hole at the back of the skull to give her shroud some more structure to hang back on and disguise the shape of her custodian underneath.

Her decorations are simple: Ribbon from the local craft store, matching tassels, brassy metal rings of various sizes, belt buckles, old scissors, bells and a bit of chain to festoon her with. As much from my grandfather’s garage and secondhand shops as I could find, the rest from the craft store. An old metal starburst screwed into her brow gives the appearance of clamping down most of the ribbons which are actually affixed to tabs of velcro. As before, easy to take apart if needed. The eyes are a pair of plastic refrigerator magnets that look like halved Christmas bulbs. They’re glued into the sockets with wood glue. Small red gems from the craft store (bedazzle!!!) are glued variously on the eyes for a glinty faceted appearance. The shroud is a sheet velcroed to the crown of the skull behind the metal starburst and tacked to the piece of wood behind the skull. I ran some wire through the seam of the shroud to make a loop beneath the skull that will keep its shape and allow her bearer to see forward. Some white mesh hung inside that to obscure her bearer from those without.

And that’s about it.

I’d be happier with a hardier mechanism and some older, sturdier material for the ribbons and I want to get a skeleton key or two and some more antique scissors to hang from her, but overall I am quite pleased with the result. She’s quite lovely and what I set out to make.

Jefferson O.S. Brassfield

Making Mari Lwyd by Jefferson Brassfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

the constant imago

This Christmas, why not give Viriconium, city of sex, syphillis & consubstantiation ? “When he first fell in love with Vera Ghillera, my uncle had the walls of his room painted a heavy sealing-wax red; at the window there were thick velvet curtains the same colour, pulled shut. Pictures of the ballerina were everywhere–on the walls, the tables, the mantelpiece–posing in costumes she had worn for La chatte, The fire last Wednesday at Lowth, and The little hump-backed horse. The woman herself, or her effigy made in a kind of yellow wax, lay on a catafalque in the centre of the room, her strange, compact dancer’s body naked, the legs parted in invitation, the arms raised imploringly, her head replaced by the stripped and polished brown skull of a horse.”

Now in audiobook.