A Brief Lipogram Exercise

Inspired by Peter Crates and written without the letter E. Reads a bit like something translated.

“That girl is a fucking idiot,” I say. Out of my mouth words pour without my thinking about what could soon pass. Thomas says it’s unfair. Alan says I’m myopic. I don’t know. Might just paint that saying on my car and allow thinking to go on without my input. In minds along this road who look upon my car and its words, what occurs? I would wish to cut into a brain for insight post-car-sighting. A man looks in my car, watching nothing but what this man wants. It’s all around now, his want in solid form. Stifling my body with willful cloying. That’s protocol today. First said by us in that first instant of cognition. This plan is not following with facility. Thomas can’t gasp aloud without phasing Alan’s volition. Alan can’t will without making us sick about it. It isn’t at all a point of clarity as it stands. No flow, no calm. Discuss, discuss, that’s final Alan might say that. In fact, Alan has said that on many occasions. It’s not, though.
I think aloud: “I know that girl. That girl is good at sports and school. Why did I say that?” My mind throbs. “Why do I say such things? Is it my soul longing for flight from my lungs? My spirit, my vapor not, wanting my warmth?”
“Your spirit is cold. That’s a fact, not my opinion,” Alan says. “But it wouldn’t work anyway. Spirits stick to your ribs. Don’t flow through your nostrils.”
Thomas, thoughtfully sitting on his stool, looks at us and says, “Do you know it, I concur with Alan. Your soul has no contact with this girl. What do you call this girl?”
“Cassandra,” I say.
“Cassandra can call out things abnormal in you,” Thomas says. “Cassandra might do just that. But still, a good girl and not a fucking idiot, as you said. Logic, you know? Cassandra’s using it right now as you and I and Alan sit arguing with our own words and your wrong thinking.”
“A quiz,” Alan says, “to catch a fool, if Cassandra is in fact a fool. Common topics, but not too common. Normal, I might add. But surprising.”
“Surprising to a fool?” I ask.
“Yah, that’s it.”
“What’s not surprising to a fool?”
“Folly.”
“That girl Cassandra thinks I’m dumb. Why quiz that girl’s stupidity and not my own?”
“For you also, okay. That, too.”
My apology, truly, to you all.

Searching for Weird

I'd like to make this blog a central stop for weirdness, not just of my own, but for any weirdness that may interest a chap like me. If anyone is there reading this, suggest something weird for me to check out and enjoy, possibly even suggest to others or review for my blog. But I only want REAL weirdness. I don't want a picture of a turd on the American flag or a sketch from Robot Chicken (no offense, just isn't WEIRD). Leave a comment with a name of or a link to something weird in the visual arts, music, fiction, entertainment, history, science, conspiracy theory or even your abdominal cavity. If you have weird within you, feel free to expose it.

How NOT to Write a Novel

Had to give a quick plug to this little gem, How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman --which, by the way, is worth reading even if you aren't planning on writing a novel. Several times I have laughed out loud at the examples of errors they use to illustrate what to avoid when writing a novel. There are lots of books on how to write, but this one is far more useful. The two authors write comic gold and never fail to give you insights into things you may not have thought in your own writing about or to reinforce points that you may academically know but have failed to put into practice.

Here's a brief sample:

The Redundant Tautology

Wherein the author repeats himself

An old man nowadays, with gray hair and wrinkles, Captain Smothers walked down the street to his weekly card game. Usually he would meet Katz on his way, and sure enough, coming down the street towards him he saw his old friend, Major Katz, who was as old as he was. It was the usual day they always arranged to meet for a game of chit with retired Rear Admiral Chortles. The three men, all former members of the armed forces, played chit, the card game known as "Priest's Delight" in Ireland, every Sunday. It was something they had never failed to do since they began the tradition. Katz joined Smothers and greeted him. "Hello," he welcomed Smothers.
"Hello," Smothers greeted him in return. The aged, decrepit, grandfatherly Katz was wearing a clean shirt and freshly ironed pants with shoes. He looked neat as usual. Smothers' shirt, however, was wrinkled and needed ironing; he had never been as neat as Katz, but rather untidy, though he too, like Katz, was formerly in the army, but no longer. You would have expected an Army man to develop a habbit of neatness, but Smothers somehow never had, and remained quite sloppy...

Another version of this is the "large gray elephant," or the "rectangular room with a floor, walls, and ceiling." While it is not absolutely a shooting offense to characterize an elephant with attributes that all elephants possess, it is a yawning offense. "An aroused and angry elephant" gives us a specific striking mental picture. "A large gray elephant" gives us two extra words.

Oh, and I just found out about Salad Fingers. Awesome stuff! I guess I slept through 2005, but if you did too, and you like creepy, weirdo flash cartoons, check it out here.

The Sounds of Inspiration

I've just made myself a playlist to listen as I work on my novel. For many people, it is way easier to write while listening to music that lacks vocals (something to do with processing language, but ask your local psychologist to be sure), so my list is mostly instrumental. I wanted stuff with an alien feel, so there's everything from stock French educational film scores of the early 80s to orchestral space pop of the early 60s to experimental electronic weirdness. Here is a list of a few of the albums I drew from, and links to where you can find out more about them. Because, I know people of the future are gonna want to know what G. Arthur Brown was listening to when he wrote The Belange (working title only).



Space Oddities Volumes 1 & 2
The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre
Luke Vibert’s Further Nuggets
Hyman & Mayo’s Space Pop LP “Moon Gas”
Man in Space (with Sounds)
Yu – Songs of Science
Informatic 2000 (Bizarre 80’s French Eletcronic Musique)
Nino Nardini’s “Musique Pour Le Futur”

The Strange Edge: Have I Stumbled upon a New Idear?

In my reading, my searching out what's going on in fiction, I've run across a lot of unusual subgenres/movements/effects. Two in particular have caught my eye: Slipstream and New Weird.

For those who are unfamiliar, my brief overview. Slipstream is a style or effect in fiction that relies on cognitive dissonance to make the reader feel strange. This can come in the form of unreliable narrators who seem to give contradictory accounts of events or in the inability of a reader to distinguish whether the events in a story are real and magical or imaginary and mundane. Slipstream stories normally occur in a world not entirely distinct from our own. That is, typically only the events in the story itself--or those elements central to the story--are impossible, and the normal rules of existence seemingly apply to every other aspect of life. Slipstream may also use textual subversion while also relating surreal perceptions or events that operate on dream-logic. Slipstream generally deals more with epistemic, ontological or metaphysical uncertainty than social or political ideology. When it is social, it leans toward the psycho-social. You won't find many morality tales in this style.

New Weird, on the other hand, is almost always set in a secondary world, a world very much unlike our own. In this way, it is more accessible to core Fantasy fans than may be Slipstream. New Weird relies on the grotesque (in somewhat the same way Horror does) to give a feeling of wrongness to the reader. There is a tendency toward darkness in theme and the stories tend to contain very gritty social themes squirming below the surface. As these stories are set in a secondary world, many of the creatures, races, venues and customs of that world can be seen as symbols. Unlike your shelf-stable, run-of-the-mill heroic fantasy, you won't see many recognizable tropes (no Elves, Dragons, Vampires, Wizards) in New Weird. You will instead see Lovecraftian variations on those themes.

Though both of these types of story appeal greatly to me, and I'd wager they appeal to a very large common intersection of the Venn diagram of genre readers, they can be contrasted in this way (if somewhat oversimplified for sake of my point): Slipstream features strange events in a typical world whereas New Weird features typical events in a strange world. There is a perfectly good reason why these two conventions have arisen so. In Slipstream, the reader attempts tell what events are real while trying to interpret them in light of the physics of the known world. If those tales were set in a strange and alien world where the reader has yet to be shown an established physics, the reader could easily become overwhelmed with the task. That is to say, when a boy turns invisible in the real world, we know something out of the ordinary has occurred. But when a twarb turns invisible on planet Tandrel, we don't have a basis to decide if that is an unusual event or something that happens all the time. If all elements of the tale are very strange, it takes a lot of work for the writer to expose the necessary information to his reader and gain the reader's trust while enticing the reader to read on. It is much easier to fall into the New Weird conventions of a very strange setting with a fairly typical adventure, romance, drama, or intrigue plot. Or a very normal setting with an entirely unbelievable, confusing, atypical, post-modern plot.

Harder work, maybe. But interesting work? I think so. Here are a few stories I was reading that gave me some ideas about where to begin (and collections where you can find them for your own personal enjoyment):

Brian Evenson - "The Progenitor," "Body" (The Wavering Knife), "Watson's Boy (The New Weird)

Thomas Ligotti - "My Case for Retributive Action," "Our Temporary Supervisor," "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" (Teatro Grottesco)

Kelly Link - "Catskin" (Magic for Beginners), "The Wizards of Perfil," "The Constable of Abal" (Pretty Monsters)

Phillip Raines and Harvey Welles - "The Fishie" (Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet)

Veronica Schanoes - "Serpents" (Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet)

All of the above stories have radically different styles and feels. Evenson plays with bleakness and insanity and alienation. Ligotti combines just about every form of horror ranging from the psychological to the financial to the supernatural. The stories from Link have an off-kilter fairy tale feel, the Raines and Welles collaboration feels like a psychedelic folk tale, and Schanoes' story happens in a non-child-safe Wonderland. But they all have elements in common. They take place in worlds that we are unfamiliar with. They are not in simple Fantasy Land templates ala Tolkien or Terry Brooks. But more than that, they all contain a plot that makes us question the underlying reality of what seems to be the surface reality. Where is this story really taking place? What is really happening to the character? What is the true nature of the characters? Do the characters know what the nature of their reality truly is? Can we the reader be sure of what the reality of the tale is? In one way or another, all these stories create this unified feeling of strangeness. Not just in locale but in action and theme.

So, in short, I want to create successful stories that capitalize on the full spectrum of strangeness. I want to create worlds and plots that are equally bizarre, and fill them characters that don't fall apart under the pressure of being completely and utterly uncanny. I want to entertain, but I also want to encourage my readers to challenge assumptions, which means subverting conventions, but not so much as to become pure experimentalism. Secondary world fiction with plots that induce cognitive dissonance. Let's call it The Strange Edge. Because it will never be a core of any genre. It will always be a frontier region that scares people on all its borders, be they literary, fantasy, mystery, science fiction or horror.

Need to Write More Stories

So, via Duotrope's Digest I've found many, many, many publications who may or may not ever want to publish a story by me, G. Arthur Brown. I've found many magazines and e-zines that I never knew existed, plus many that probably shouldn't exist. The stumbling block I've hit now is that a lot of the ones that really seem worthwhile won't accept simultaneous submissions (industry jargon for they don't want to consider my shit for publication at the same time I've submitted to anybody else). So I need more stories. And I need to go back and revise a bunch of my old ones to get them publishable. This is going to take an awful lot of tea and make my girlfriend very lonely. Writing... it's a bitch.

Dream People 32 Now Online

The whole issue seems really tight. And through accident of alphabet I am at the top of the list. Be sure to tell the team at The Dream People that you really think they did a good job in choosing A Public Luncheon. Tell them that G. Arthur Brown is the coolest dude writing. Draw funny mustaches on their faces while they aren't looking.