(Eric Basso in a lighter moment, and a different career…)

One of the great discoveries Ann and I made while editing The Weird compendium was the work of US author Eric Basso. His neo-Gothic, beautifully strange fiction, poetry, plays, and nonfiction are without a doubt essential reading for anyone who loves weird literature. He has had a cult following among avant-garde gothic writers since “The Beak Doctor” was first published by the Chicago Review in 1977. Since then he has published a novel, several plays, many poetry collections, and a book of nonfiction. In part, “The Beak Doctor” reads like a modern, more Joycean version of the first selection in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Alfred Kubin’s “The Other Side,” in that the nameless city is plagued by a strange sleeping sickness.

So we’re very happy to be hosting a week of appreciating the works of Eric Basso over at Weirdfictionreview.com. If you’ve never read Basso before, or read critical essays on his work, you’re in for a treat.

We’re running more material tomorrow and Friday, but for now here are the relevant links, with teasers…

Our managing editor, Adam Mills, provides his thoughts on Basso, and welcomes readers: His writing is marked by a quality I would label as simultaneity. Oftentimes within even the same paragraph, there are details and cues suggesting actions taking places at different levels of action, possibly even in different locations. It is left up to the reader to try and maintain the order of events while they read his writing. More often than not, typical conceptions of time and causality cannot be taken as givens.

Mills also interviews Basso: “I was a great admirer of the principles of Surrealism, the daring mind-experiments they performed on themselves, which really carries back to Rimbaud. So I began, at nineteen, to experiment on my own consciousness, particularly the process through which we pass from the conscious to the unconscious every time we fall asleep. What most would regard as an eccentricity became a discipline with me. I was able to remember and recount the bizarre and illogical journey that takes place, on a daily basis, in our heads. I learned to lie still, immediately after waking from a dream, so I could seize the memory of it before it slipped away.”

An exclusive excerpt from Basso’s most famous work, “The Beak Doctor”: Before the mask. I must at least go through the motions for as long as the antitoxin can keep me awake. An increase from 0.5ml. of a 2,000 million per ml. vaccine, given as the first dose. My eyelids are get¬ting heavy. A little while, and yet a while longer, to follow the tick of the clock (corner-of-the-eye hallucinations: livid specks that seem to jump out of the walls before a glance decomposes them), and I will have begun to dream. A window impossible to distance. Somewhere beyond the grimy panes there was, there is, another room, high above Promontory Wall, where he used to spend his time.

Larry Nolen’s 101 Weird Writers appreciation of Basso and “The Beak Doctor”: As the story unfolds and the narrator wanders through a city afflicted with a strange sleeping sickness, he encounters strange sights, such as a “headless shirt with no visible legs. One bare arm reaches slowly for the glass stem. Suddenly the hand draws back, as though a spark had passed from the smoky helix through the tip of one of its fingers.” There are even deeper, weirder mysteries to be encountered as he moves on through the city.

Weird fiction icon D.F. Lewis chronicles his real-time encounter with Basso’s Beak Doctor: Imagine the almost endless ‘sweep-shot’ of the Dunkirk madness in the film ‘Atonement’?–?here densely textured, bememorised, TS Eliot blended with Dickens, a cruelly fog-masked synaesthetica of a journey over variegated surfaces and amid befogged characters towards an inconclusive ‘Roundhouse’, a bookful journey by the I-Narrator doctor (interspersed, say, with a cat’s journey (Maybury’s cat?)), a stumbling rite-of-passage through a modern (post-holocaust?) world become Dickensian again as transcended by a discrete imagination that is granted you by the author as your imagination…

Part 1 of Basso’s own brilliant essay “Annihilation”: The human head may be taken as an ideal model for the contradictions inherent in animastic annihilation. Consider the case of a corpse newly dead and in full habit; that is, of one who has died without suffering the ravages of starvation or disease. The flesh lends itself readily to a close, pore by pore examination; its finest details gain an incredible sharpness by virtue of their immobility. Nostril hairs, commissures of tooth and gum, shallows between half-open lips where the tongue curls in the dry cavern of the mouth, these are subtleties that go far beyond even the most skillfully crafted waxworks effigy, though the skin, through the slow gravitation of blood to a lower depth, assumes the pallor of dulled candlewax. Often, as in litera¬ture, a physiognomy much troubled in life can ransom a few lost years from the brief repose preceding rigor mortis; fretlines may yield to a smooth, unaccustomed complexion as the eyes flatten under their lids, settling fast in the skull’s sockets.

Matthew Pridham’s excellent dissection of Basso’s work, from the Beak Doctor on to several other texts: Basso’s oeuvre is a challenging one, filled with odd states of consciousness and mutable, disorienting realities, as well as a referential, grimly poetic style. These pieces reward careful attention and a willingness to temporarily surrender some of one’s expectations. I hope that new trends in critical theory and genre tastes will bring his work the broader readership it deserves. Those who delve into it will come away with an enhanced sense of what is possible in fiction as well as the sensation of having briefly visited a strange new, yet oddly familiar, world.

Selected poetry from Basso:

what I could feel on my eyes
blank spatulate tips of stone
cold against the heaviness of the lids
hands caked with coal slivers and dust
and no ointment to salve the horror
of the haunting ground below

And, finally, Larry Nolen’s “Caught in a Moment,” providing some insightful thoughts into Basso’s poetry: Throughout “Villa of the Mysteries,” references to “dreams” and “blindness” abound. There are references to dreams that foretell horror and doom, dreams of separation. Blindness lurks in the dark caverns, in the personified monster, in fates that are unseen by others. Both are bound together in the person of Tiresias, whose own fate figures in several Greek poems and myths. “Villa of the Mysteries” grabs attention quickly because it cuts straight to the heart of the matter: we often enter labyrinths that confuse us, upset us, and make us turn our heads away in shame and eagerness to forget what we have just encountered.

Tomorrow we’re running part 2 of Basso’s essay “Annihilation” and a great appreciation by John H. Stevens…

Cheryl Morgan notes that her fund drive for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards is entering its last day or so. You can easily donate by clicking the paypal button on this post. We’ve contributed some cool stuff to the cause, but there’s a ton of great material. Help them reach their goal!

This week on Weirdfictionreview.com, I want to direct your attention to Adam Mills’ editorial about taking over as managing editor, Ann VanderMeer on Weird Tales, a great interview with Steve Duffy, and “The Liberators” by Kali Wallace, a new story from a rising star.

A trace of road skirted the dead city, the same road the platoon had followed months ago on the last days of their desert march. Bloody blisters had made every step agony, and the soldiers had passed nervous nights beneath the city’s walls and windows as aimless wind moaned through its streets. And during the day the sun, the blinding, inescapable sun had quivered from dawn to dusk, throbbing in Francisco’s eyes, peeling the skin from his neck and melding the scaled armor to his body like a carapace. When they rested, stinking of sweat and blood, the soldiers shared stories of what they might find in the city. Alien riches and encampments, enslaved colonists and mountains of human bones, every possibility more outlandish than the last.

Wallace was part of the Clarion San Diego 2010 class, during which Ann and I were lucky enough to be the instructors for the last two weeks. She has already had short fiction appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with a story workshopped at Clarion, the stunning “Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls,” and you can read an interview with her about that story at F&SF’s website.

In the comments on that interview writer Carolyn Ives Gilman rightly notes that “This was an awesome story. Creepy, yes, but really original. I’d never read anything like it, and that’s getting harder and harder to say. I want more.” We really love her fiction—it’s sharp, unique, always has depth, and it consistently surprises. She also has stories forthcoming this year in Lightspeed and Asimov’s SF Magazine, and made a cameo with a short entry in our Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities antho.

The 2010 Clarion class was incredibly talented, and as far as we’re concerned any or all of them could go on to have major careers— already readers are discovering writers from that class like Karin Tidbeck (Weird Tales, Unstuck), John Chu (The Boston Review), Tom Underberg (Weird Tales), Jennifer Hsyu ( Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress XXVI), Gregory Bossert (already published in Asimov’s before Clarion), and Tamsyn Muir (Fantasy Magazine and Weird Tales), to name just a very few.

We really count it a blessing to have encountered their work at Clarion and thus to be on the look out for all of the great writing they’re doing. I’ll be blogging about more writers from this class as the year progresses, I’m sure.

John H. Stevens has a wonderful contemplative piece on reading our THE WEIRD compendium up on SF Signal. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Understanding is not knowledge, but revelation: What’s the difference? Knowledge is “the name of that thing is Ook.” Revelation is “there are creatures like Ook in the world!” Weird fiction is about the recognition of what I discuss in #2 above. It is about coming into contact with things that are difficult, contentious, or impossible to know. It about prophecy, divulgence, consequence, afflatus. It is coming to terms with powerlessness, lack of vision, the cosmic smallness of humanity. It is learning the true costs of living, feeling it deep inside you, as in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “The Hell Screen.” It is what eats us from the inside out and impels us inevitably towards death, even as we struggle to come to terms with life.

Also, Stephen Graham Jones is teaching a class using THE WEIRD, and he’s had his students do flow charts about the reading experience. Here’s a teaser of Jones’ own flow chart. We hope to feature some of these at Weird Fiction Review later on.

You can buy THE WEIRD here in ebook form, with the US print edition out in May.

Omnivoracious has posted my profile of first novelist Ayize Jama-Everett, whose The Liminal People is out from Small Beer Press. It’s a great book, and the author was a great interview subject (unless the jerk in the post directly below this one.) Go check it out!

Later, in college, he would hone his talent for dialogue by taking screenwriting classes, while a job at a comic book store after college gave him new insight into the possibilities of graphic novels. “God Bless Comic Relief in Berkeley California. It was the first place that introduced me to a higher level of graphic novels. Somewhere I still have a copy of William S. Burrrough’s Tornado Alley illustrated by S.Clay Wilson. I read Paul Aster’s City of Glass graphic novel illustrated by Dave Mazzucchelli, and Watchmen. I drooled over early Paul Pope work at the same time I discovered an amazing old series called Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. I saw the medium as a vehicle and not a genre and knew that what I wanted to write would always be influenced by the literary culture I grew up in. So I stopped trying to find an artist to draw my scripts and started writing stories that I loved.”

So I found the solicitation under the cut to be more than a little odd, and given the references to “brutal” and “rude” and “pressures” I’m under (?!), I thought I would respond as if I were a complete a-hole—take the offensive as it were and turn the tables. Only seven answers were posted to the On the Rack feature, but you can read the full interview below.

Note that the direct link to their On the Rack feature on me does not include anything about “brutal” or “rude”…thus making me look simply brutal and rude, I suppose….but I answered completely in the spirit of the context as I saw it, because what author worth their salt is going to just go along with the idea as presented?

(more…)

Madras Press, run by Sumanth Prabhaker, is one of my two favorite new publishers (the second being the Dorothy Project). Madras produces these absolutely perfect little editions of stories in book form. In the case of the one above, a special edition of Kelly Link’s great story “Stone Animals” with illustrations by, among others, Lev Grossman, Daniel Handler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Laura Miller, and Audrey Niffenegger. Wow. It’s a gem.

As with all Madras Press editions, including the three pictured directly below, the proceeds go to charities, a different one for each book. Go check out their website and buy, buy, buy!

Also in the mail today—it was a truly bountiful day—were lit mags, a novel by a new writer, from Small Beer, a Small Beer collection by Nancy Kress (one of my Clarion instructors), nonfiction by Michael Moorcock, a novel by Matt Bell, and an intriguing-looking novel from Angry Robot, all pictured below the cut.

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Going to start posting brief quotes from research for various projects, stuff I find either interesting, provocative, or nuts…

Excerpt:

“I should like to say a few words anent one or two point which P. Schuyler Miller raises in his interesting letter in the June Wonder Stories…Personally, I cannot see that science fiction is, as he puts it, ‘unfortunately limited’ in its range of expression. At least, I do not think that a type of literature so avowedly imaginative would benefit materially by invading, as so much modern fiction has done, the field of clinical analysis and sex-physiology. That sort of thing has been done ad infinitum and ad nauseum by non-imaginative writers, such as are favored by the professional ‘intelligentsia’ of our sex-demented republic; and one of the most refreshing things about science fiction, and fantastic fiction in general, is the avoidance of such triteness.”

–Discovered in “On Garbage-Mongering,” from Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith (edited by Charles K. Wolfe), reprinted therein from WONDER STORIES, “The Reader Speaks” column, August 1932, p. 281.

(looking for the weird)

I’ve been a bit silent on the blog the last couple of weeks, mostly because I’ve been struck by a novel idea that’s working through my thoughts quite a bit, and onto the page as well. One of the pivotal images is of the main character leaning on a sea wall made of coquina in a seaside city somewhat like a larger St. Augustine, Florida. It’s the character’s safe place, in a sense, where a sense of calm settles over him and an idea that came to me when Tessa Kum was visiting us and we took a ghost tour in St. Augustine that included the old fort. It’s from there that the character became more than satirical or a cardboard cut-out to prove a point.

The sea wall is a potent image for me, too, because the ocean and the beach have always had a powerful effect on me, and leaning on the sea wall, looking out over the marsh flats and the water of the bay is as calming for me as for the character. It gives me an affinity for the character, a way in to understanding by transference of my own emotion to the character, and then, in a sense, back again.

Standing there that night, too, I was thinking of the ways in which I’m in transition. There is before Ambergris (the setting of my three main novels) and after Ambergris, and there is also before The Weird and after The Weird, in terms of anthologies edited. On the other side of this sea wall there’s another and different world. It may share similarities to the old world, but only a few, I think.

Today, we went to a different part of Florida, Apalachicola, with our friend Cat Sparks, and had a lovely time on the coast, enjoying an oyster festival, a walk around the shops, and then a meal by the beach. The coastline along the way is beautiful but often also with a sense of starkness or desolation, in part due to the enduring signs of wreckage from hurricanes. Whole towns here have become unpopulated and been returned to the vegetation. The ruins of old time attractions made irrelevant by Disney are also hidden here and there. Wildlife is in abundance, thriving due to a unique ecosystem and quite frankly the recession, which killed the murderous real estate deals that might have threatened them. It’s called the “forgotten coast” but it’s not really forgotten, it’s just more mysterious and in some ways more full of life than other places in Florida.

There was no sea wall, but it felt as if there were in a strange way, and in talking about writing and publishing and editing, about finding commonalities with people and about, really, the idea of being passionate and engaged in what you do, I’m seeing more and more clearly the course for new novels, more outreach, more teaching, and more work with translations.

I’ll be posting sporadically for the next week, because we are definitely in transition, with new projects in the works but not yet at the point where they can be announced, and a lot of fiction to write.

(Ann’s photo of me and Cat Sparks on the coast today.)

Omnivoracious just posted my interview with Murakami, which was fun, especially asking him this question:

Time Magazine recently provided a list of your novels ranked by the number of cat appearances in them. When you were a beginning writer, is this one of the future realities you anticipated, and do you find it funny or odd that someone was tasked with counting Murakami cats?

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