The Fairy-Dog Years Part Three: How to use The Fairy-Dog Calendar

 

Welcome back, foolhardy wanderer!

Previously on The Fairy-Dog Years: In Part One we had a little biographical detail on the origins of the FDC, while in Part Two we delved in to some of the theory and history of calendars. In this final transmission we will explore just how FDC works, and what you can do with it.

If you are anything like me, you might find yourself scratching your head at various points during this section trying to recall studying geometry and maths in school, or some half-remembered occult idea. I’m going to keep this keep this post at a more general, if possibly reductive level. Whether this is because I want the post to be as accessible as possible or I don’t want to reveal my own poor grasp of those things I leave to the reader to decide (can’t it be both?). Suffice it say that once Peter had begun work on the FDC It became apparent that the calendar was becoming more complex as it progressed, both in form and function and in relation to Peter’s own magical studies and autobiography. There was maths and geometry in there, and I’m not famously good with numbers. There were magickal system I was only passingly familiar with, and some not at all. So, if it’s the real nitty-gritty you want, Peter can explain it better. But this isn’t an exam, take what you need, leave the rest for now, you’ll get the gist. Treat it like poetry, rather than prose. The FDC is for everyone and anyone to use, and like anything else- the more you put it, the more you’ll get out.

All of which is to say that the remainder of this piece is largely those discussions filtered through my own nervous system, systematised by own reality tunnel.

The Fairy-Dog Years Part Two: Calendars in Theory and Practice

“All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable” (William Burroughs)

In Part One of this series we discussed the origins and inspirations of the Fairy-Dog Calendar art-project/spell/LARPG commissioned by me and designed by Peter Duchemin. Peter has worked extensively designing and experimenting with magickal calendars since 2003.  His PhD thesis ”The Art of Hidden Causation: Magic as Deep Mediation” was an incubator for a  neo-calendrical theory –  theory which he has put into practice on social media. You can check his Instagram feed here: (https://www.instagram.com/tarotphilosopher/) and his Patreon account, here: (https://www.patreon.com/tarotphilosopher)

Part Three describes the actual mechanics of the calendar. In this part we will look at some of the philosophical implications of calendrics.

The Fairy-Dog Years: Part One

Minus 4 days until Day 0, Year One.

This is the story of the creation of The Fairy-Dog Calendar. Part Two will discuss some of the theory behind it and Part Three describes the mechanics of the calendar. In this section though I want to give a bit of biographical background and an introduction the project. A plateau to rest on before we go launching off on new lines of flight.

The date was 13/09/2019 AD. Location: Northampton, England, 52.23394° N, -0.89528° E.

I was returning to give a paper at the second Trans-States conference. Having been blessed enough to have delivered a paper at the first conference (write-up here), I had chanced my arm at the last minute for this one, submitting an abstract for a talk on the different approaches to magic, anarchism and the self in the comics of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  Given that I’d delivered a paper at the first (available here) I wasn’t holding out hope for it being accepted, but it was (and can be seen here). This was then followed, at the risk of biting the hand that feeds me, with the slow realisation that my employers were not going to be forthcoming with the funding needed to attend. All was lost. Until a long-negotiated for contract came into play, including back-pay that allowed me to fund the trip myself.

Most might call that a happy coincidence, I’m calling it synchronicity. The Universe wanted me to attend.

A bit of context here: despite my long-standing interest in magic and the occult, and the fact I’ll bang on about it endlessly if you get me drunk enough, I’ve never claimed to be been a particularly diligent practitioner.  Its something that’s been explored from a jumber of angles on this blog and I might (and do!) have several theories about the nature and effects of ritual but little in the way of practice. I’ve cast the odd sigil, had more than a few profoundly altering encounters with altered space,  one minor success with astral projection, intermittent phases of practicing regular banishing rituals, and staged an entire occult comedy revue called Mondo Occulto, I’d never been diligent enough in practice that I could call myself a magician as such.

Ironically, I also feel that way about my academic identity so perhaps this is esoteric imposter syndrome. Trans-States is in some ways the perfect storm of anxiety – full of people I would consider both better academics and ‘proper’ occultists, whose work and practice I admire. For this reason, my usual social anxiety is worth battling for the enormous inspiration and mind-bending encounters, conversations and ideas one experiences there. And my own bullshit aside, both conferences have proven incredibly welcoming. As I wrote at the time of 2019:

Arguably, this year’s Trans-States conference (held 13th-14th September) lived up to its title even more that the original conference in 2016. With its eclectic and interdisciplinary mix of academics, artists and occult practitioners (often all three), here was something genuinely liminal; somewhere between a colloquium and a gathering of the tribe, between a ritual and an academic exercise.”

Among the tribe was Peter Duchemin, there to perform my one-man show “The Castle of Birds.” The description follows below , and you can watch it on the Trans-states YouTube channel here.

The Castle of Birds is an oral poem/story about language, order, and transformation. It is about the rise and fall of towers, and about power and its modalities. An agitated wizard, by tampering with the world-words, unleashes a monstrous social order.  Subsequent generations are left to recover from ruination by means of a restorative bird-magic.  It is a fable about societal metamorphoses that resonates with Gebser’s Ever Present Origin. The extended, mediated world is ever so fragile, ever so fragmented: let us build a Castle out of Birds.

n addition to building The Fairy-Dog Calendar, Peter has worked extensively designing and experimenting with magickal calendars since 2003. His PhD thesis ”The Art of Hidden Causation: Magic as Deep Mediation” was an incubator for a neo-calendrical theory – theory which he has put into practice on social media. You can check his Instagram feed here and his Patreon account, here  Follow him to learn more.

I got to hanging out with Peter and talking about calendrics, magic, philosophy. You know, the usual. His mind is a quicksilver flow of ideas and connections; Frankenstein memetics. Many concepts were either things I was not well-versed in (astrology and astronomy) or just downright ignorant of (the process of creating calendars).  On the other hand, I’ve sometimes been told the same thing of myself so its fun to be on other side of that experience. Anyway, Peter said he made calendars. Different ways of measuring and experiencing time.

At the end of day two, I was overcome by a notion, powerful in its insistence- it felt like a thing I was there to do- that I would commission Peter to make me a calendar. I assure you, dear reader, that this is not a thing I do often. Point of fact, I’ve never done it before, but something was in the air at that conference and it seemed to be that just as things had fallen into place to get me there, things were falling into place in other ways. Short version: I’d given a lot of thought to what the conference represented to me and what I wanted to get out of it if I could broadly overcome my usual anxieties and, you know, actually talk to folk. Have eyes to see and ears to listen.

In the final post we will look at the actual mechanics of the calendar and how different magical systems map on it. Instead, this post will finish by describing some of the mythology embedded in the calendar. To do this it is simplest to unpack its name.

The Fairy-Dog Calendar refers to two elements, each of which plays a role in Peter and I’s personal “cosmologies”. I will leave it to Peter to tell of his encounter with the Fae (among other flora and fauna of the Immateria), but suffice it say that the creation of the calendar proved to be deeper and more autobiographical experience for its maker than originally assumed. Which leaves the “dog” part, and my own idle fancies.

Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. In this instance count is marked by the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A. This takes orbit 50 years, and the year’s start day will be marked by the rising of Sirius alongside the sun, seen from the top of Mount Schiehallion*. This works out roughly as from the Summer Solstice, 1994, the last time B and A were at their closest point.

The wide variety of mythologies and associations around Sirius are too much to enumerate here, and really deserve a post of their own at some later date, but I hope this brief discussion gives a flavour

When I was a child, I was obsessed with a show called Children of the Dog Star. I only found out that the name, date (1984) and country (New Zealand) of that show when I was researching this! What I do remember is 6/7/8-year-old me (? I couldn’t find out when it was broadcast in the UK) searching up “the dog star Sirius” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica my parents had purchased (remember those?!). From this I discovered that Sirius, AKA Alpha Canis Majoris, is the brightest star in the sky and also part of a binary star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common centre of mass. This second star is a white dwarf, Sirius B. Such systems may appear to the naked eye as a single point of light, until revealed as multiple by other instruments of observation.

From these two sources I also pieced together the story of the Dogon tribe. Much of the anthropological account is disputed, as such things are, but I will let Wikipedia summarise this part:

From 1931 to 1956, Griaule studied the Dogon in field missions ranging from several days to two months in 1931, 1935, 1937 and 1938[36] and then annually from 1946 until 1956. In late 1946, Griaule spent a consecutive thirty-three days in conversations with the Dogon wiseman Ogotemmêli, the source of much of Griaule and Dieterlen’s future publications. They reported that the Dogon believe that the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius (sigi tolo or “star of the Sigui”), has two companion stars, pō tolo (the Digitaria star), and ęmmę ya tolo, (the female Sorghum star), respectively the first and second companions of Sirius A. Sirius, in the Dogon system, formed one of the foci for the orbit of a tiny star, the companionate Digitaria star. When Digitaria is closest to Sirius, that star brightens: when it is farthest from Sirius, it gives off a twinkling effect that suggests to the observer several stars. The orbit cycle takes 50 years.

 Griaule and Dieterlen were puzzled by this Sudanese star system, and prefaced their analysis with the disclaimer, “The problem of knowing how, with no instruments at their disposal, men could know the movements and certain characteristics of virtually invisible stars has not been settled, nor even posed.”

These ideas found their way into Robert temple’s The Sirius Mysteries (1976), which was itself part of a glut of alien-gods contacting ancient civilisation literature found everywhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Which then fed into the Children of the Dog Star among the other hauntological artefacts that that made up the deeply weird background noise of that generation’s youth. I would carry that memory of Sirius with me for years, as both a half-remembered fun fact and some indicator of a deeper, stranger type of reality that became more difficult to access the older I became.

Then in my early twenties, at university in Aberystwyth, Wales (local saying: “the train stops here, everyone has to get off”) my dealer, the middle-aged son of an Iranian diplomat who claimed to be a Sufi and who had fled to Wales in his teens to take enough acid in the forests that he perhaps fried his brains, introduced me to  both LSD and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Many regarded him as a borderline lunatic, I still fondly see him as a trickster-god. Illuminatus led to Cosmic Trigger and there were those pesky Sirians again, beaming information into Robert Anton Wilson’s brain during the Dog Days following the 23^rd July 1973. Of course, Cosmic Trigger also notes that, independently of Wilson’s brain-change experiments, Timothy Leary was receiving his ‘starseed’ signals at Folsom prison. Later, I would Phillip K Dick’s VALIS and have my mind blown further by both the book and the knowledge that Dick had had his own, again independent, Sirius encounter at around the same time.

(Side-note: Shortly after asking Peter to make the calendar and agreeing that the years would be measured by the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A, another dealer offered me a strain of weed called Star Dog. A coincidence, of course, of course)

To conclude for now then:  the dice had been rolled. I had commissioned a calendar based on the Sirius system. In the following posts we will discuss some of the philosophical implications of creating a new calendar, and in the final post see how it actually works.

Read Part Two here and Part Three here.

 

*Schiehallion is situated about an hour and half’s drive from me, and, I discovered later, also plays an important role in Peter’s own magical life.

 

Trans-States 2019 (and remembering Trans-States 2016)

Hello humans (and otherwise). Haven’t written here for ages so this is cheating a bit but I’m very excited about attending the Trans-States conference in just over a week. This year I am presenting a paper on the presentation of magic and anarchism in the works of Alan moore and Grant Morrison. You know, the usual stuff. All going well I’ll get that written up as ana rticle soon and it will form a part of the next book (should it ever be finished) which explores occultism and ‘politics’ (small ‘p’ intended) through the lens of Deleuze and guattari’s concept of the war-machine. More on that to come as I’m hoping to start posting more on here again. In the meantime some of the Moore and Morrison stuff I’ve covered elsewhere in my Comics are Magic series.

Here, however, I want to present a write-up of the previous Trans-States conference back in 2016. It should become pretty clear why I’m so excited about returning again this year (seriously, check out the line-up at the link above). This write-up originally appeared in the British Association for the Study of Religions Bulletin, which is well worth the time for readers of this blog I suspect.  If the summary below stirs your curiousity then be sure to check out the Trans-States Youtube channel which features audio and video recordings from the 2016 conference.

Human Enhancement in Theory, Practice and Superhero Comics 2: Nanotechnology

Welcome to the second in this series of posts about Transhuman technologies in theory, practice and in comic books. Part One, all about human head transplants is here. This time round: nanotechnology.

A brief history of nanotechnology

Perhaps more than any other nanotechnology is the most diverse and may prove the most central to achieving some of Transhumanism’s most far out aims.

The term “nano-technology” was first used by Norio Taniguchi in 1974, though it was not widely known until it was popularised by Eric Drexler’s book  Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986). The theoretical groundwork however, was laid in 1959 by physicist Richard Feynman in his talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, in which he described the possibility of  the direct manipulation of atoms. Inspired by these ideas, Drexler would introduce the concept of nanoscale ‘assemblers’, which would be able to build copies of themselves and other items through the manipulating material at an atomic level.

Though atomic-level self-replicating robots appears the stuff of the wildest speculative fiction the 1980s witnessed two major break-troughs.

1981’s invention of the scanning tunneling microscope allowed unprecedented visualization of individual atoms and bonds, and in 1989 it was successfully used to manipulate individual atoms. Second, the discovery of Fullerenes in 1985 pointed towards new potential application for nanaoscale devices and electronics. Though the buckyball, (named for Buckminster Fuller) was not originally descroibed as nanotechnology, research into the fullerene family of carbon structures has fallen under the umbrella of nanotechnological research, playing a major part in related work with carbon nanotubes.

Governments began fund research into nanotechnology, beginning in the U.S. with the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which was announced under President Clinton in a 2000 White House press release entitled “Leading to the Next Industrial Revolution”. As Schummer puts it, “the visionary powerbox has largely been reduced to economic promises”. nanotechnological research moved towards more practical and commercial applications. In 2001, Toyota started using nanocomposites to make a bumper 60% lighter and twice as resistant to denting and scratching; Khakis that use nanoparticles as stain-repellant; suncreams containing nanoparticulate zinc oxide; nanaoclays and nanocomposites used to make me beer bottles lighter and thinner; and carbon nanotubes are currently being used in wind-turbines, surfboards, bicycle components and even as scaffolding for growing bone (see here for more current applications). The use of nanaotechnology has also been of great interest in the world of medicine with ongoing research into the use of anoparticles to deliver drugs, heat or light directly to cells, nanosponges that absorb toxins to remove them from the bloodstream, and there is much talk of one day using nano-bots to repair damaged cells (more medical applications here).

Despite these advances we still seem some way away from the more dramatic implications of this technology. For now there are no nanobots,no assemblers, no molecular-scale machines diligently scraping the cholesterol from your arteries or networking between the nervous system and computer so that you can experience virtual reality as a truly physical one. No instantaneous bodily mutation based purely on whim. No ‘grey goo‘. For now anyway.

Nanotechnology in Comic Books

Given that the discourse around nanotechnology has been premised on the Amazing Transformations To Come rather than the more prosaic Eventually After We Figure Out All This Really Technical Shit, it is little wonder that most works utilising nanotechnology use it in a way that emphasizes the former rather than the latter. Just as in the 1950s and ’60s radiation was to blame for all manner of mutants and giant insects, so too the portrayal of nanotechnology in popular culture (what Johansson calls ‘nanoculture‘) has produced many works where Nano is “competing and sometimes replacing radiation as the prime explainer and transformer in many popular contexts”. For example, in Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk, Bruce Banner’s transformation is due to both the traditional gamma radiation AND nanomaccines, though this is not elaborated upon in any way. Nano simply becomes a shorthand for ‘crazy science stuff’.

According to the Encyclopedia of Nanosicence and Society, explicit language relating to nanotechnology only began to appear in comic books in the 1990s, although the ability to manipulate matter at a molecular level has been a recurring power throughout the history of superhero comics (e.g. the tellingly named Molecule Man). As a general rule the use of nanotechnology in comics follows the same schema outlined by Johanssen, as a catch-all modern technological explanation for a character’s super-powers. The most recent iteration of DC Comics’ Mr Terrific, for example, has nanotechnology woven into his costume and mask.

 

One of the earliest appearances of nanotech in comics was the Technovore from Iron Man 294 (July 1993). Because Technovore’s body is made entirely of nanobots it was able to disassemble itself into a stream of nanites, allowing it to squeeze into and travel through through extremely small spaces. Each nanite carries a copy of the entire viral personality, implying that the Technovore can reconstruct itself from a single unit. Moreover, the Technovore can assimilate technology into itself, as well as adapt its form to become immune to different types of weapons. In short, the Technovore is the most Dystopian possibilities offered by Drexler’s Engines of Creation writ large, its desire to assimilate everything around it a clear precursor to Drexler’s infamous ‘grey goo’ scenario, whereby self-replicating machines run out of control, building more of themselves by consuming all the matter around them until the entire Earth is destroyed.

Nanotechnology made another notable appearance in Iron Man  during Warren Ellis’s Extremis story-line (which served as the basis for the third Iron Man movie). In this story the Extremis virus can be injected, giving users powers akin to Iron Man but with the technology contained within the body (as in the panel at the top of this post). Iron Man himself uses a modified version of the nanite virus to improve the neural interface between him and his armour, a conceit also found in recent iterations of DC’s Cyborg, whereby Victor Stone’s brain and nervous are linked by nanites to his robotic prosthetic grafts. This idea is not entirely absurd. The US Air Force is currently backing a project  “involving nanoparticles that can amplify optical-detection sensitivity by 10 to the 14th fold.”

More outlandish is another Ellis creation, The Engineer from The Authority. Angela Spica is, as he team captain describes it, “the woman who distilled an incalculable number of intelligent devices into nine pints of liquid machinery…and exchanged your blood for it“.  The nanoload works like blood for The Engineer while also covering her entire body, allowing it to morph into new shapes and weaponry. In one issue she is able to defeat a group of bad guys by “extruding the machinery out into a web of knives small enough to slip between atoms“, effectively slicing them into smithereens. Which is amazing and also deeply unsettling if you think about it. Elsewhere, the Engineer is able to use the nanites to survive on the surface of the moon, and to interface with the Authority’s sentient, dimension hopping vessel The Carrier.

Outwith the comic book page, the link between superheroes and nanotechnology has a fairly ignoble history. In 2002, the U.S. Army awarded $50 million to a proposal submitted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). The proposal’s cover image, which featured a futuristic soldier in mechanical armour, presented, in visual shorthand, the scientific possibilities outlined in more technical detail within the proposal. The image was later removed from ISN websites when two comic book creators alleged that it was simply a reworked version of the cover image of their Radix issue one.

For Milburn this is because both the discourse of nanotechnology and militaristic visions of the super soldier, “rely on cultural familiarity with comic book myths…to suggest that nanotechnology, in replicating or materializing these myths at the site of the soldier’s body, can create “real” superheroes”.The comic book image serves to create a gap between a written account of science yet-to-occur and the image of what a futuristic soldier might look like. What happens within this gap is the slow, complicated business of the science itself. It is worth noting that even prior to the introduction of nanotech to superhero comics, heroes such as The Atom, or regular jaunts to realms such as the Microverse, also played with issues of scale and molecular engineering. Are the actual mechanics technically any clearer in the bottom image from Yale Scientific than they are in the panels from the Atom or Supergirl?

 

As Johanssen noted above, nanotechnology largely performs the same role any techno-scientific ‘explanation’ plays in comics- the ability to achieve the impossible; science as magic. And in some respects the scientific literature around nanotechnology, at least at the more speculative end of the spectrum, is engaged in that same kind of bombast as the superhero genre. What Milburn calls ‘nanowriting’- “that genre of scientific text in which the already inevitable nanotech revolution can be glimpsed” is characterised by an ‘operatic excess’, whereby writers:

frame their scientific arguments with vivid tales of potential applications,which are firmly the stuff of the golden age of science fiction. Matter compilers, molecular surgeons, spaceships, space colonies,cryonics, smart utility fogs, extraterrestrial technological civilizations,
and utopias abound in these papers, borrowing unabashedly from the
repertoire of the twentieth-century science-fictional imagination

Of course, that does not mean the Transhuman dreams of nanotechnology may not someday be realised (though the process may be more laborious than some might like), but if the superhero comic book is playing into the nanotechnological imagination it is worth asking, “in what way?” For, on the one hand, the words of Edwin Thomas from MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies describing, “the psychological impact upon a foe when encountering squads of seemingly invincible warriors protected by armour and endowed with superhuman capabilities” seem, to me at least, fairly terrifying and at odds with the real ethos of the superhero. Nice to know then that at least one Nano scientist has advocated a nanotech-ethics based on Spider-Man’s dictum, “with great power comes great responsibility”. After all, it’s not the technology that separates hero from villain, but how they choose to use it.

 

 

New posts are coming! (this isn’t it though)

Hello humans.

Nth Mind has been a bit quiet lately, but new posts are coming, I promise. A couple of fresh Comics are Magic entries are percolating nicely and some other stuff is ready to boil over, so stay tuned. In the meantime here are a bunch of things that have been dragging the Scott Jeffery Machine away from Nth Mind and into the meat-world. It’s been busy.

Comics are Magic Part 8: Warren Ellis, Language as Code and Technology as Magic

Planetary Issue 7

It is little surprise that this Comics are Magic series has regularly returned to the works of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, both being prominent and vocal practitioners of magic. In this installment and the next I want to focus on two other members of the “British Invasion“, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis, whose work often touches upon the subject of magic but without either creator claiming any explicitly magical intent. At first glance Warren Ellis might seem an odd choice for this series. His work most often displays a science-fiction bent, as in his epic Transmetropolitan, and even his superhero work is marked by hard sci-fi tendencies. Magic is not a prominent theme in his work, but nor, as we shall see, is it entirely absent either. One particularly interesting example is the short graphic novel Frankenstein’s Womb, in which Mary Shelley encounters her own creation (or her creation’s creation?) prior to her actually having written the book. This story presents an elegaic meditation on time , memory, art, science and magic that is arguably as close as Ellis has come to occupying a similar magic territory to Moore or Morrison, who generally allow their magic to “BE” magic. As a rule though, Ellis makes a point of repeatedly inverting Clarke’s Third Law, that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“. In Ellis’s work, instead, magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology.

A Whole Bunch of Exploitation/Grindhouse Film Documentaries

Below is a list of documentaries about exploitation/grindhouse/b-movies and, where possible, links to where you can find them on-line. Consider it a public service. So feel free to skip this intro and scroll down to the links instead…

Lately, and by lately I mean my entire life, I’ve been watching a lot of cheap, cheerful exploitation movies. Don’t get me wrong, I love cinema full-stop. I’m happy to watch a respectable, Oscar winner or an art-house film. For me, as for so many others (you know who you are), film is a drug. All of my movie-watching has always been about dragging myself through the celluloid streets for one more angry fix; an attempt to recapture that first high of watching a King Kong/The Day the Earth Stood Still double-bill when I was three or four. Exact details are obscured by time. Only traces remain. I was in the spare room, not my bedroom. Put there for a nap maybe? There was a small TV in there, old enough (this would have been 1981/82) that it had a dial for changing the channels. Certain images are seared into my brain. Kong pushing the trees aside, light emanating from Gort’s visor. These visions changed me as fully as any later, more clearly remembered, more ‘real’, life experience.

Film as drug: If a classy, prestige Hollywood picture is an expensive bottle of wine, exploitation and B-movies are cheap amphetamine. A quick sleazy, scuzzy buzz compared to the mellow high of the prestige picture.  Not that it is simply a question of budget. Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce was one of the most expensive movies of it’s day, but has B-Movie spirit coursing through every frame. Indeed, we might argue that post-Star Wars (or even post-Jaws) the vast majority of Hollywood’s output has actually just been big budget B-movies. For the true film junkie, however, there is no real distinction. Example: Scorsese’s love of 1953’s cheap, sci-fi quickie Invaders from Mars (particularly it’s set design and use of colour) is made manifest by in the opening scene of his own, far more “respectable” Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

At this point I should point out that I am aware that there are proper distinctions between the terms ‘exploitation movie‘, ‘grindhouse‘ and ‘B-Movie‘, but this is a blog post people, not a Film Studies journal article so let’s just agree to use them in an interchangeable, somewhat colloquial sense. It’s true that no actual B-movie has existed for decades, while most of the grindhouse theaters and drive-ins that showed exploitation movies have long since closed down and been replaced by the vanilla spectacle of the multiplex. So let’s treat it like the definition of obscenity: we’re not sure what it is but we know it when we see it. No-one has ever mistaken Maniac Cop for Driving Miss Daisy, dig?

Driving Miss Daisy

Maniac Cop

 

Comics are Magic Part 7: The Book of Vishanti

Fictional books have a special sort of attraction. Who wouldn’t want to peruse Borgesian infinite libraries, or wander through the halls of unwritten books stored in the library of the Sandman (Alice’s Journey Behind the Moon by Lewis Carroll, anyone?). Perhaps the most mysterious of such book is the Necronomicon.. It’s a truism to note that much of H. P. Lovecraft’s lasting influence is the deep mythology woven into his work. The Cthulhu mythos has outlived its creator (or  medium? host-body?!), becoming a source of inspiration for numerous other writers as well as practising magicians. Chaos magicians such as Phil Hine have worked the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu mythos into their magickal rituals, while Kenneth Grant, former secretary of Alisteir Crowley, argued for a fundamental magical reality to Lovecraft’s fictions that even the author himself was unaware of.

At the heart of the Cthulu mythos lies the Necronomicon, a magical grimoire written by  the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, a worshipper of Cthulhu and Yog-Shoggoth.  Containing an account of the Old Ones, their history, and various  means for summoning them, the Necronomicon had a complex history, as outlined by Lovecraft himself in the History of the Necronomicon. Despite Lovecraft’s private protestations that the book was a product of his imagination alone, the Necronomicon has been remarkably persistent in manifesting itself in the “real world” too. If you were to visit the University Library of Tromsø, Norway, for instance, you would find listed a 1994 version of the Necronomicon, attributed to one Petrus de Dacia, although the document is ominously listed as “unavailable”. Or you might be able to track down one of the 348 editions published by Owlswick Press in 1973, written in the  indecipherable, apparently fictional language known as “Duriac”. More easily available is what has become known as the “Simon Necronomicon”, a translation of the “real” Necronomicon by the pseudonymous Simon. The blurb rightly warns the reader that this is indeed, “potentially, the most dangerous Black Book known to the Western World“. Also easily available is 1979 Necronomicon edited by George Hay, with an introduction by noted occult scholar Colin Wilson.

The Necronomicon is not above intruding on universes other than our own either, having made several appearances in both the Marvel and DC Universes. There is even a comic book about how the Necronomicon came to be written. But while the Necronomicon is perhaps the most legendary fictional (OR IS IT?!) book in Western literature, there is only one book of true magical power and import in the world superhero comics; The Book of Vishanti!

Human Enhancement in Theory, Practice and Superhero Comics 1: Human Head Transplants

Hello humans.

Welcome to the first of new series of posts where I highlight how some specific human enhancement technologies have been developed, their real world applications, their philosophical implications and how these have played out in the pages of the superhero comic book. So if what you really want to see are pictures comic book characters who have had their heads transplanted then scroll on down, because there is going to be plenty of it.

For those of you hanging around still, here’s a bit of context. If you follow this blog then you’ll already know that my name is Dr Scott Jeffery and that my PhD thesis was on the posthuman body in superhero comics (for a condensed version of the main ideas click here). Anyway, a book that draws on the thesis but is less painfully academic (I want to say it’s ‘accessible’, but that I suppose, is a question of taste) is on its way in early 2016 (more details as and when). In the meantime, as I was editing and rewriting it occurred to me that the book doesn’t really focus on specific technologies as such. So for this new series I want to go into more detail about specific technologies and how they have been presented in posthuman theory, practice and superhero comics. Saying that, this is still the blog, so the depth and breadth of each of these articles will probably vary somewhat.

We start with one that is not mentioned at all in the book but has recently been making its rounds on the hive-mind of social media: human head transplants.