June, 1979 by Alex Colville (1920-2013)
…I can say with all truthfulness that for me the moment of greatest understanding in which I knew spiritual reality at last came in connection with emergency root-canal irrigation, two hours in the dentist chair. And twelve hours drinking bourbon-bad bourbon at that-and simply reading Dante without listening to the stereo or eating-there was no way I could eat-and suffering, and it was all worth it; I will never forget it. I am no different, then, from Timothy Archer. To me, too, books are real and alive; the voices of human beings issue forth from them and compel my assent, the way God compels our assent to world, as Tim said. When you have been in that much distress, you are not going to forget what you did and saw and thought and read that night; I did nothing, saw nothing, thought nothing; I read and I remember; I did not read Howard the Duck or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers or Snatch Comix that night; I read Dante’s Commedia, from Inferno through Purgatorio, until at last I arrived in the three colored rings of light … and the time was nine A.M. and I could get into my fucking car and shoot out into traffic and Dr. Davidson’s office, crying and cursing the whole way, with no breakfast, not even coffee, and stinking of sweat and bourbon, a sorry mess indeed, much gaped at by the dentist’s receptionist.
So for me in a certain unusual way-for certain unusual reasons-books and reality are fused; they join through one incident, one night of my life: my intellectual life and my practical life came together-nothing is more real than a badly infected tooth-and having done so they never completely came apart again. If I believed in God, I would say that he showed me something that night; he showed me the totality: pain, physical pain, drop by drop, and then, this being his dreadful grace, there came understanding … and what did I understand? That it is all real; the abscessed tooth and the root-canal irrigation, and, no less and no more…
From Philip K. Dick’s 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk’d much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.
La Monomane de l’envie (Monomania: Portrait of an Excessively Jealous Woman), c. 1819–22 by Theodore Géricault (1791-1824)
Wounded Man in a Bed-Sitting Room, 1951 by Robin Ironside (1912-1965)
Mike Watt and Adam Harvey adapted the “Shem the Penman” episode of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for the Waywords and Meansigns project. Raymond Pettibon provided an illustration.
Aberrant is the début novel by Czech author Marek Šindelka. It’s new in English translation by Nathan Fields from Twisted Spoon Press, and features artwork by Petr Nikl. It’s pretty far out stuff. First pages:
The remarkable debut novel from Marek Šindelka, already the recipient of his country’s major literary awards for poetry (Jiří Orten Prize) and prose (Magnesia Litera), Aberrant is a multifaceted work that mixes and mashes together a variety of genres and styles to create a heady concoction of crime story, horror story (inspired by the Japanese tradition of kaidan), ecological revenge fantasy, and Siberian shamanism. Nothing is what it seems. What appears to be human is actually a shell occupied by an alien spirit, or demon, and what appears to be an unassuming plant is an aggressive parasite that harbors a poisonous substance within, or manifests itself as an assassin, a phantom with no real substance who pursues his victims across Europe and through a post-apocalyptic Prague ravaged by floods. The blind see, and the seeing are blind. Plants behave like animals, and animals are symbionts with plants. Through these devices, Šindelka weaves a tale of three childhood friends, the errant paths their lives take, and the world of rare plant smuggling — and the consequences of taking the wrong plant — to show the rickety foundation of illusions on which our relationship to the environment, and to one another, rests. It is a world of aberrations, anomalies, and mistake
The Finding of Medusa, 1888-1892 by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)
Medusa, 1900 by Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929)
The Blood of Medusa, 1898 by Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)
Quería ser Pájaro (I Wanted to Be a Bird), 1960 by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
“Dead Dick” by Art Spiegelman, 1989. From The Best Comics of the Decade: 1980-1990, Vol. 1, Fantagraphics Books, 1990. Originally published in RAW vol. 2, #1, 1989.
It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.
From Philip K. Dick’s 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
for years the scenes bustledthrough him as he dreamed he wasalive. then he felt real, and slammedawake in the wet sheets screamingtoo fast, everything movestoo fast, and the edges of thingsare gone. four blocks awaya baseball was a dot againstthe sky, and he thought, myglove is too big, i willdrop the ball and it will bea home run. the snow fallstoo fast from the clouds,and night is dropped andsnatched back like a hugejoke. is that the ball, or isit just a bird, and the ball issomewhere else, and i willmiss it? and the edges are gone, myhands melt into the walls, myhands do not end where the wallbegins. should i moveforward, or back, or will the ballcome right to me? i know i willmiss, because i always miss when ittakes so long. the wall has nosurface, no edge, the wallfades into the air and the air ismy hand, and i am the wall. myarm is the syringe and thus ibecome the nurse, i am you,nurse. if he getsaround the bases before theball comes down, is it a homerun, even if i catch it? if we couldslow down, and stop, wewould be one fused mass careeningat too great a speed throughthe emptiness. if i catchthe ball, our side willbe up, and i will have to bat,and i might strike out.
L’esiliato (The Exiled), 1928 by Arturo Nathan (1891-1944)
Biblioklept 