A Taste of Magick
19 Saturday May 2012
Posted in Epiphany
Review: Infinite Jest
01 Tuesday May 2012
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The tumult of this book, its fractal pulse, its erratic streams of conscious that hide depths so vast that we drown trying to find the bottom.
Hyperbolic metaphor aside this book is a work of genius. Far beyond anything I have ever encountered before besides House of Leaves. The very act of undertaking to read the book is in itself like trench warfare. Moving the line forward feet at a time without ever feeling like any progression is really a victory. Its slow, plodding and at the same time devastating. You get taken by a point of view or a sentence or an idea and you carry it like an olympic torch through pages of what the shallow minded might call monotony.
But that’s its beauty. That monotony is actually the soul of the book. Passages that in other books would be read through without thought need to be pored over, analyzed.
I’m not explaining this well because there is no way to explain Infinite Jest well. Entire books have been written to do just what I am trying to accomplish here with only a few paragraphs. To capture the elegance and magick of this man’s way with words.
I’m not ashamed to say that even after it was done I had to look up critical essays, blogs, interviews, and articles spending hours poring over this information to understand everything about the book I couldn’t quite grasp.
The rest I’ll leave for you to review for yourself. Nothing I say will ever make this book anything but a personal experience, different in texture to each adventurer.
That is all…
Synaesthesia and the Drummer
20 Friday Apr 2012
Posted in Spilled Ink
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He could taste cerulean on stormy days. It was the thing he liked best about the stark grey of rain, the accompanying syrupy sweet flavor of hex code 1DACD6.
Meteorological phenomenon always elicited a synaesthetic reaction. Hot humid days were a beer-bitter hex code E6A8D7 (orchid). Whereas still winter nights with light snow tasted like a dull waxy hex code CD9575 (Antique Brass.) The worst was when the leaves changed in Autumn. That first color shift of leaves had him on the toilet for days with the Durian-esque nauseousness of hex code 979AAA (Manatee).
On stormy days he put less sugar in his coffee. Coffee made him see Germanic opera, which always calmed him.
Today was special. He could feel corduroy where sweat dried on his skin.
Today “she” had agreed to meet him. The Drummer.
He had met her at a concert a few weeks back. He didn’t go to concerts but his brother was in town for one night so he psyched himself up knowing he would have swirling neon shapes swimming across his vision all night. A small price to pay to be out with the only family he had left.
He hadn’t seen his brother since he became a perfumer for a start up in Chile.
The Drummer had dreads and a tattoo of swallow on her shoulder. She had blue eyes. (Hex code 1F75FE). Her music made the normally random shapes that came with dirty basement rock into beautiful fractals that spun outward and inward defining an event horizon of purity in all his senses.
It was love at first solo.
His brother helped him find her in the crowd after the band, Arete Erotica, left the stage.
They talked for a minute or two while she packed up her equipment. She seemed completely uninterested. Distracted. Rockstar. Out of his league. But he pressed for her number and got it.
The feel of the pen on his skin as she wrote her digits was antiquated, visceral, exquisite. Hex Code FFCF48 (Sunglow) and the taste of cinnamon that went all the way to the back of his brain.
He called and left her a message. Twice. He got depressed and hadn’t showered for a few days. (Hex code CDA4DE – Wisteria and the distinct taste of unsalted tortilla.) Then she called him back.
Apparently his brother had said something to someone in the band. His brother went back to his hotel that night with the bassist, a youngish metal head named Gerard. They stayed in touch despite his brother’s penchant for one night stands. His brother must have put in a good word or any word because she called and sounded almost excited to talk to him.
Her voice made Neon Carrot (FFA343) non-Euclidian shapes flower in the vast periphery of his vision.
She knew about his synaesthesia from Gerard and by extension his brother. To her it sounded like “the lotus of all pain and pleasure, the neural nexus from which the beat of enlightenment is derived.”
He couldn’t speak to that but his paintings were becoming pretty popular.
She wanted to try coffee and see where it went.
She said she didn’t date. It was synchronous instant connection or nothing. She said it would take her seconds to decide if they had a future or were just going to be friends. He said he wanted to take that chance.
So he got there a little early because of the rain and sat down at a corner booth while the coffee shop played some Robert Johnson.
She didn’t have an umbrella. She wore a hood that she pulled back when she entered. Her T-Shirt was some pop culture reference to a video game he had never played. Video Games made him too euphoric unless he took some special meds which made him feel dull.
She caught his eye and for the first time he felt nothing. He just waited in the void of her gaze.
She smiled a little or a lot, he couldn’t tell and adjusted her wet denim jacket as she came over.
“Hi.”
She burst inside him like a tidal wave of hope he knew would drown him.
“Hi. Do you want to sit?” He lamely motioned to the chair.
“First things first I think. You and me right?”
The lump in his throat tasted like the powdery chocolate of hex code BAB86C (Olive Green.)
“I don’t how you feel but I could see myself spending the rest of my life with you.”
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song…
18 Sunday Mar 2012
Posted in Epiphany
Taken at The Airship – The Apocalypse Vanguard
“How did the Game start?”
16 Friday Mar 2012
Posted in Spilled Ink
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This was asked by one of the asylum’s many psychiatrists. A woman with the stylized moniker of Corazon. She asked it for the 47th time and like everything with the Game the numbers mattered. To my family using numerical compulsion to delay gratification was an art, surreal, terrible, and as layered as a Flemish portrait.
My number had been 47 for too long, as long as I had worn the bleach smelling white shirts with the buckles in the back to keep me restrained.
They didn’t understand. To the uninitiated the Game was a horror, a madness, or as the Judge had called it, a cult.
Such arbitrary labels failed to encompass the great surges of genius and control the Game had given his family. Even his sister, the Outlier, the Abomination, the flesh eater had used the Game to unmask the subterranean torrent of corruption that bubbled beneath the surface of her city.
Others in the family felt she went to far. It was not the family’s place to correct only understand or control.
Dr. Corazon, who always smelled like oranges and antiseptic wipes, was smiling at him patiently. They were all so patient. Patience is a number, a measurement, a way to understand how far we will travel before we say it’s too much. He had yet to reach her hidden calculation for patience.
Psychiatrists, by the systemic virtues necessary for their work, needed to be as mad as those they treated. Patience is a type of madness. Anything that must be honed, trained, or fixed is an abomination, a madness.
He could see inside her to the color of her crazy. The mottled teal of compassion, the pulsating pulp of sun melted butterscotch as she dreamed of saner worlds than these. And at the heart of Corazon was the scintillating shit brown ichor of arrogance, the normalized superiority of education, wealth, or health.
The Game abhorred arrogance. And today he would watch the fragile faith of Dr. Heart shatter like the mirror he had used to cut 47 lines into his own leg.
“How did the Game start? It started with the death of a child.”
The Cheshire Cat Inn, Santa Barbara
05 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in Epiphany
The Old Mission, Santa Barbara
05 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in Epiphany
Review: Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter
07 Tuesday Feb 2012
Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter by Edward M. Erdelac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Herein lies the plot:
A Jewish cowboy battles demons while chasing his former master across the Wild West.
That should really say it all. But if it doesn’t then you should understand this is the Dark Tower + the “Dollars Trilogy” + Lovecraft + Ceremonial Kabbalism.
I love this book like nothing else I have read in awhile. It is ripe with great moral lessons, action scenes and blood, magick, an easy synergy between Jewish lore and the West plus a peppering of the “Great Old Ones” to keep you wondering what comes before our hero heads off into the sunset.
On top of all that the ease in which you become enamored of the character and his path is frightening. It is like those other stories laid the ground work for this story to exist as opposed to this being simply an offspring of their content.
It stands alone as a great but quick read and I look forward to parts two and three.
That is all..
Related articles
- Edward M. Erdelac Interview : Merkabah Rider (weirdwesterns.wordpress.com)
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Review: That Which Should Not Be
06 Monday Feb 2012
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That Which Should Not Be by Brett J. Talley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was enchanted by this book, tangled in eldritch tentacles too thick to thwart. More than halfway through the book it had remained at a 5 star rating but a few nagging notions and arcs plummeted back to down to a more grounded 3 and a half.
First and foremost this book could be likened to a Lovecraft Primer, opening the door for newer readers into the Mythos of the Old Ones. It reads with familiar sounding names and locations like a Mapquest map of the pantheon, correct but off just enough to be the long way around. I loved that about it. The tenuous distortion from the canon as the author explored other connections and possibilities. Also the visage of the narration. I won’t delve into it as I don’t wish to spoil it but the method by which the story(s) is told is engaging.
But after awhile the book became repetitive and all too modern as the Old Ones became likened to Judaeo-Christian entities rather than as stand alone monsters from our deepest imaginings.
The conclusion, rather than evoking horror or that cold shiver of dreaming despair, was empty and trite. It was forced, I feel. We are given a thick wellspring of hope that has no bearing or place in the world of Lovecraft.
Please don’t let that dissuade you from reading it however. This book is still better written than the bulk of trash and tripe we are made to believe is good literature. It still was mostly well told and stands among some of my favorite books. If you are a fan of Lovecraft or simply like horror let my final words in this regard stand as your instruction:
“Read it for yourself and judge it based on its own merits.”
That is all…
“Lick the blood off the blade and lets be done with this.”
04 Saturday Feb 2012
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“Lick the blood off the blade and lets be done with this.”
This place was stygian dark, as if unrefined oil had become a vacuous mist. It played and danced around us, the altar, through the millennia old forest. It wasn’t home, but nothing was anymore. Home burned to the ground years ago. Now I walked a path that tripped over shattered pieces of the past every once in awhile. Jagged mirrors that reflected all the pain and lies and shotgun blasts of righteous action.
Getting this far the Walker and I had taken cuts, scrapes, gunfire, and bites. All for the power on that blade. A decades old quest and he wanted me to just drag my tongue over it like it was the last bit of peanut butter on the knife. No, sir. I wanted to relish just a few more moments of it. Its not everyday you sacrifice recovered Nazi war criminals to awaken the abyss and funnel its greasy power into your veins. Not everyday, not every century.
How many of those holocaust poster kids did we bleed dry to make our little Philosopher Stone? More than most people thought were still roaming the halls of decent society I’ll tell you that.
It takes a lot of evil blood to be righteous.
Sheparding those bastards here had actually been the easier task in this whole debacle. It was the lycanthropes that were the real problem. Over sized tree pissers littered this forest like dead leaves in autumn. Crunch, crunch, wolf, Crunch, crunch, howl. Crunch, crunch, pack of savage beasties trying to eat our skin.
That’s how the Dealer went. Luck only gets you to the altar, after that you need more than an ace up your sleeve. I liked the Dealer though. He smelled like orchids and peppermint. He always had a joke. He called them Joe-kus. Jokes in haiku form. Lost art he said. Dead art now. I don’t think I can remember even one of those little gems.
The blade glistened. Never the way you think it will though. It was the glyphs. Left overs from the First Tongue, that universal language Babel had made famous. They turned the blood a weird eldritch color. Like will o’ the wisp white painted with baby vomit. A sickly glowing, haunted green in which you could easily get lost.
Appetizing only because of what it represented. It smelled like some ancient abomination had crapped on the steel. Not pleasant.
My tongue, pierced with a salted silver barbell, ran up one side and then the other. The liquid, thick like sludge, coated the inside of my mouth and throat as I swallowed. I went back and forth to get every drop. All these dead bad guys and after the distillation process there is actually very little useable blood left over. I had to take advantage of every molecule.
“Drink up,” said the part of my mind I had been ignoring for the past few days.
I called it Hector and Hector was part of my problem. He had been around for a few years now. Split personality gone wyrd. Under normal circumstances it would have been a simple case of disassociative identity and I would have seen a shrink and called it a day. But magick cracks the top off normal and lets in all the wyld ways of the world beyond the veil. So instead of some archetypal personality to represent some repressed part of my mind I have Hector, a full grown asshole lurking around my neural net like a stinky hobo on the bus that sits too close and talks to you about his bunions and the government the whole time.
I drank or licked or slurped the blood down as fast as my gag reflex would let me. More than one significant other has remarked on the endless panorama of my swallowing capacity but even I have limits.
I was caked in drying Nazi blood, the rising smell of death thick, and the taste of immortality was curdling like sour milk in my stomach.
And despite appearances this isn’t the end of the story, its just the beginning.
Posted by Archmage | Filed under Spilled Ink
