Words by Frances Rowat
I am going on a trip! In fact, I am currently in the airport. There was a short and very polite delay at security. It might have been the soap.
(Bar soap, not liquid, in case you were wondering.)
I had most of a post written about how I felt about the upcoming travel, but it seems redundant now that I am actually on it.
Hope you’re all well, will be alternating between checking in and napping while I spend the day in transit.
(In a weirdly light-hearted counterpoint, I have “Don’t Push That Button” by Duane Elms running through my head.)
I’d have said something about this earlier, but Saturday was for unwinding and Sunday involved poking my computer with sticks until it stopped giving me kernel errors.
September 26th was Stanislav Petrov Day, which is an entirely unofficial holiday. Short version: 28 years ago, Stanislav Petrov did not push The Button. The systems he was dealing with told him he should, because the Americans had very definitely fired missiles, and he didn’t.
(Twenty-eight years ago, it was 1983. If you were talking about The Button being pushed, you were talking about nuclear war.)
It’s a day I notice for several reasons, which are in no particular order
I’ve rambled about the last a bit; as I’ve said before, I don’t think I can get it, although I think I can understand it.
Anyway. The weekend involved a slightly higher consumption of post-apocalyptic fiction than usual, and a general state of not being radioactive smithereens. It’s occasionally nice to pause and appreciate the little things.
It’s kind of interesting, how many times black canids show up associated with death, and specifically the transition/boundary of death.
Off the top of my head, you’ve got Anubis who embalmed the dead and guided souls to the afterlife. You’ve also got Cerberus, guarding the gates of the land of the dead.[1] But my favourite image in this regard–where my brain goes quickest, and what makes me smile–is Black Shuck. Black Shuck is an East Anglian creature of folklore; he’s a harbinger of death, and seeing him means you’re probably going to die soon.
Surprisingly enough, despite the less-than-friendly demeanour depicted in the image above, the stories mostly don’t seem to mean “soon” as in “as soon as he chews your leg off”. More of a “as soon as you have time for the full horror to sink in and to tell a few people” thing.
(That picture, by the way, is one I ran across around age six. I think I promptly adopted Black Shuck as the most awesome imaginary friend ever. You can do that kind of thing, when you’re six.)
To tangent briefly: the term Black Dog to refer to depression–as in the Black Dog Institute, or the “I had a black dog” animated video–was drawn from Churchill’s references to his bad moods as “a black dog on my back” (something akin to “getting up on the wrong side of the bed”), a colloquialism that also refers back to the black dogs of folklore.
I suspect black dogs have mostly been on my mind, however, because I recently reread Bob Leman’s “Loob“–in which the Goster County dogs are not friendly, not approachable, but ultimately a signifier that things may return to an idealised order, and are described as follows:
…almost a distinct breed, huge rangy dogs with blunt muzzles and smooth black pelts, who stood baleful guard over the farms of the county and patrolled the streets of the town with a forbidding, proprietary air.
It kinda fits.
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[1] As to Norse mythology: I’m honestly not sure if Fenrir fits this mould or not. Canid, yes; associated with death, yes if you count the end of the world as a death; black, I really could not tell you. Garmr is a blood-stained watchdog that guards the gates of Hel, but again: could be lilac for all I know.[2]
[2] Probably isn’t lilac.
I don’t generally talk about writing on here (on the general theory that (1) lots of people have already done that, (2) I’m not exactly in a position of particular thoughtfulness or authority, and (3) there is only so much that can be said about adjectives).
But I have noticed something recently. I haven’t been writing much over the last fortnight, due to some very bad sleep and some unrelated stress (not knitting for the immediate foreseeable; if you don’t knit or know knitters, you are unlikely to believe how much freakin’ yarn I have to find a place to store), and it feels bad in a rather distinctive way.
When I don’t do other things I ‘should’ do, I feel bad for not doing them, but I feel good about getting to do something else. (Cf.: housework Fallout.)
When I don’t write, I feel bad for not doing it.
So I’m probably doing something right. With this penscratch-keyboard thing. Probably. (And I’ve managed to get back into the words-on-paper habit, so there’s that.)
I went to knitting last night, and I cast on a new project, and I knit–slowly and carefully–until my elbow politely went ping and I decided I should stop.
It did that after a hundred stitches.
For the non-knitters among you: this is not a lot. I ended up producing a swatch of fabric about as long and slightly wider than my index finger.
This is after a month of treatment and a lot of not-knitting. So I think knitting needs to get put away again. At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get back to it in two months, six months, or ever.
The “not ever” option makes me a little sad, but since there’s not much I can do beyond waiting and seeing if treatment and exercise make it better, oh well.
(The number of UFOs I have hanging around will irk me a bit, though.)
On a lighter note, I got the executed contract back for my story “The Gannet Girl”, so that has a home! Expecting it to be out 2016-ish.
I have only ever read three Bob Leman stories.
I read “Instructions” long long ago; looking at ISFDB, it would either have been in the September ’84 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction or the ’85 Year’s Best Science Fiction, years after it was published.
I read “Window” in The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction collection. That was years after it was published, too. It stuck with me; I didn’t remember the author’s name at the time, though.
I read “Loob” in January of 2012. It was online at Weird Fiction Review, and I was sitting in an emergency room with a friend. It was very late and we were both zoney and tired, and I was reading the story on my phone. The language seemed like it could have felt stilted, but somehow it wasn’t, and the story pulled me along, and then I hit one of the lines and it chimed.
Weird Fiction Review had an article about Bob Leman, and I looked at that too. The description of “Window” pinged a memory, and I went to look at the Best Horror Stories collection and that was when I connected “Window” to Bob Leman.
I don’t remember when I connected “Instructions” to the story I’d read. I know it was before 2014, because when I was at the Tachyon Publications table at LonCon, I interrupted myself with “You have ‘Instructions‘ by Bob Leman? Wait, the Bob Leman?” and the gentleman manning the table very kindly told me that I was well-read, and then introduced me to The Boss in the Wall by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis, who I hadn’t heard of at that point.
(LonCon was a bit rough on my bookshelf space.)
Anyway! I have been sadly poking around the Internet to see if there’s a copy of Feesters in the Lake that by some minor miracle is going for less than $250, and it turns out that while there isn’t, his daughter is hoping to put his complete fanzine online. So that will be something to look at and read through, as it goes.
In the meantime, I will sleep well, and dream of Goster County dogs.
I have rhymes in my head this morning; a little bit of Poe, a little bit of lyrics from the Traveling Wilburys[1], the perpetual stressed-silver-and-dust chime of Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm”.
I didn’t get as much done as I’d like to have gotten done over the last few days, but on the flipside, it was actually really relaxing. The weekend felt like it was a weekend, not just a recovery period.
Possibly related to this: the light of my life has set up his controller in my office, and I got to play video games again for the first time in a while. There is a bit of a learning curve with the new controls, but it’s definitely a workable solution. At least for Fallout: New Vegas, which is what I have especially been craving lately.
(Also, I cleaned off everything which had slowly accumulated on my desk. Currently my desk is much neater, and I hope to finish sorting the accumulata by the end of the week.)
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[1] I am constantly astounded that I never heard of them until this year. First, I am really fond of at least two of their songs, and second, their lineup is the kind of thing I would expect to have heard of.
It’s been a long week; heavy on the editing, light on the writing, with Thursday being a sick day.
I’ve started reading The Thousand Names, by Django Wexler. I’ve also started putting more of a dent in my magazine backlog, which is kind of huge. And it’s going to get bigger in the next five days, when September’s issues come in. And I have a copy of Fran Wilde’s Updraft on pre-order.
(…and I look at all this and I think oh, goodness.)
My morning glory has continued growing enthusiastically despite the fact that its stem has been broken clear through. It’s put out six flowers in the last week, and grown at least a foot of vines. I’m somewhat bewildered by this, but really, it can’t keep doing this for much longer, can it?
The flowers are getting smaller, at any rate. And paler. But the stem below the break is putting out new leaves, and I’m hoping that I’ll get some new climbing vines before it stops growing. It’s odd to think that it’s nearly September, and October’s just around the corner. I need to start looking up what to do to take care of the garden plants over the winter. (The foxgloves haven’t flowered this year, but I’m hopeful for 2016.)
I am thinking I might need to add a gardening tag, if I keep struggling with the plants.
(Yes, nearly three weeks since I’ve posted. That said, I find sennight to be a rather lovely word.)
A quick roundup, definitely not in order;
So those are all things.
Prompter attempts to update will be forthcoming. The Swiss cheese issue needs addressing first, though.
I have (probably not very surprising) a kind of abiding fascination with the King in Yellow. An imaginary play created by Robert W. Chambers in 1895, it’s one of the go-to examples of the motif of harmful sensation; the sound or sight or text so horrible that it damages the one who experiences it.
(Incidentally, yellow appears as a colour associated with horror rather more often than I’d expect. Red and black are easy and obvious associations, and you can get a lot of mileage out of an eerie green light[1], but yellow… there’s the King in Yellow, Gilman’s famous yellow wallpaper, the sickening yellow haze in King’s room 1408, and another one just at the tip of my memory. It is a very unwell colour, I suppose.)
I am not the only one. (I own two anthologies devoted specifically to King in Yellow stories, and another one is coming out late this year.) There are stories which frame the King in Yellow as a play (Brian Keene’s “The King, in Yellow” is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, and several which frame it as a text, but several (including two of my favourites[3]) frame it as a movie. I can’t think of any other mediums of expression; I’ve never read a story about a King in Yellow video game, or dance performance. I can’t call to mind treatments of it as a story, either (that is, a work of prose fiction, rather than a script or a performance produced from a script).
That said, I do know that John Horner Jacobs’ Southern Gods features a detective looking for the recording artist Ramblin’ John Hastur. I have my suspicions about that, but I haven’t actually been able to lay hands on a physical copy of the book. (It’s on my to-do list.) It’d be interesting if there are King in Yellow references in there, particularly as Ramblin’ John is a blues musician; it’s an art form much more strongly associated with improvisation than scripted plays, and I’d be curious to see how the interpretation differs as a result.
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[1] Or a regular light and a green skirt.[2]
[2] Kind of curious to see if I have tied this post into obscure knots, or if that reference actually makes sense.
[3] Those would by Orrin Grey’s “The Seventh Picture” and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame”. “The Seventh Picture” is in Candle in the Attic Window and Never Bet the Devil and Other Warnings, and “Flash Frame” is in Cthulhurotica, The Book of Cthulhu, and This Strange Way of Dying, and is in audio at Tales To Terrify No 9 David Thomas Lord. For the record.
