Bored Gwynn is bored. Since tomorrow is the 29th of February, and therefore an odd, magical sort of day, Gwynn has asked me to open the door in my head and invite communication. You can talk to him, get to other people via him, fight him, feed him cake, etc. He might be very much the guy he is in TEC, or he might be rather different, since the character in the book was basically a role played by the character in my head. He knows everything I do, but his opinions aren’t always the same as mine. If you ask him about things I don’t know, he might ask for more information or might give an instinctive response.

You can physically engage with him. His reactions might be not what an ordinary person’s would be. After all, he’s an astral entity. Text input can be as full or as perfunctory as you like, e.g. “I try to examine the sword” and “examine sword” would both work. If you don’t want to write conversation, general topics can be initiated with “talk about” or “ask about”, e.g. “talk about weather”, “ask about bananas”. You can assume that you know each other, or that you don’t; you can be yourself, or someone else. It’s entirely up to you. He really just wants to throw a door open and see if anything walks through.

You can also examine the room and venture outside. What’s out there might always be the same, or it might not.

The situation:

Caught between trains with a long wait, you step off the platform and enter the station cafeteria. A large, crowded room meets your eyes. Hot afternoon sun breaks through mullioned windows facing the platform and the station garden. Although the town is in the middle of nowhere, the station is a handsome brick building with iron lace verandas and a tall clocktower. The cafeteria boasts an elaborate cornice and a pressed tin ceiling. Advertising posters cover the walls above a dado rail. A long glass counter contains sandwiches and commercial-looking cakes. The tables are full of passengers waiting for trains onward. You can see a free seat by a window looking onto the garden. The other person at the small table is a man in a black hat, with long black hair, drinking tea and smoking a cigarette. A sword is propped against the dado, its hilt partly obscuring a sign advertising Pemberton’s Cola. The man’s gaze roams the room slowly in a manner suggesting habitual vigilance joined to idle curiosity.

(ok, if anyone wants to play, go ahead! If this works and people have fun I might try it with other characters and critters.)

(This place and some characters associated with it have been in my head for years. I thought I would write down a few things about them. I don’t think this is going to be a story so much as just a series of descriptions — though you never know what they might breed.)

—-

One of the happiest periods of my life was the interlude of two years that I spent in Bom Pastor, the last physical remnant of Atlantis. The island, which has a single large town that shares its name, is found in the warm seas of the South Pacific, “east of Nocturnalis and west of Alicornia” as the local saying goes. There is no airport or deep water port; one must come by small boat.

The town is built around a lagoon and on islands within, which guaranteed its European appellation “the Venice of the South Seas”. Its architecture displays Atlantean, Polynesian, Chinese, Portuguese and French elements, attesting to a history of multicultural occupation, not always peaceful, including a period as a colonial football in the 19th and 20th centuries that ended with independence from France in 1970. Of the Atlanteans nothing remains save their monumental ruins, which bear a resemblance to Victorian wardrobes, and the influences of these in the town, which possesses facades and porticoes that rival those of Petra for size and outdo them in elaboration. (The Victorian era appears to have an eternal establishment on the island, as Rosaleen Norton, “the Witch of Kings Cross” noted on a visit in 1963, an opinion echoed by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, frequent visitors, in their travel memoir-cum-guidebook The Decadent World.)

I was sent to Bom Pastor at the age of eleven to fulfil my parents’ wish that I should learn something of the worlds beyond the ordinary one. I was to stay with my mother’s uncles, Valentine and Veliath Carnegie, who owned a small hotel on one of the islands. Passage through the canals of the lagoon was by punted canoe. I had been met at the port by my uncles and a woman and a man who were, I gathered, their companions. This coterie in the canoe was much more interesting than I had supposed adults capable of being, and certainly not what I had expected. In fact, these four people in whose household I was to live were remarkable enough to distract me from the exotic scenery (for which I had in any case a child’s normal disrespect; I was impressed mostly by gaudy details such as I saw on the occasional Chinese roofs, the colourful bougainvilleas that decorated balconies, and above all by the parrots, which my parents had told me I would see and were, to my delight, as common in Bom Pastor as pigeons and blackbirds were at home.)

(tbc)

—–

Rosaleen Norton
more of her art (some links broken)

Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray at Amazon.com

Ok, it only took me 5 years, but I think I’ve worked out what the significance of the deformed fetuses in TEC was. Raule is on the right track when she says they’re Gwynn and Elm and everyone like them, but it isn’t much of an explanation. I just couldn’t work it out any better at the time. Now I think I know what they are, both in terms of the magical world in the book and their metaphorical significance. I think I can work it into the doujin, so I won’t try to explain it here yet, but –

I think I also know why the Rev has to succeed in saving Gwynn, apart from I Love Gwynn ™ and the Rev needing redemption. I figured it out on the way to tai chi this morning:

Gwynn works for the military-industrial complex, symbolised by Elm and his gun-running, slave-trading shady business. Elm stands for what I would call the Rule of War, or the Rule of Crime. It starts off in early societies when war becomes the principal economic activity. A tribe derives income from booty and captives (slaves); it creates the warrior myth, and, because of the well-nigh unavoidable biological division of labour and role along gender lines in materially primitive cultures, makes men more important than women. It also establishes an abusive patriarchy which makes cannon fodder of its sons (those that survive continue to administer the Rule of Crime) and confines its daughters to the reproductive role. Its mottos are “might is right” and “you are mine”.

Gwynn is a son of this kind of culture. The fact that he possibly comes from a matriarchy is irrelevant; it is still a Rule of Crime kind of culture. Both Raule and the Rev wish Gwynn would choose a different lifestyle, but he doesn’t. He likes the Rule of Crime. He chooses Elm, the bad father. The Rev, on the other hand, is a good father (and Gwynn literally calls him “Father”, when he doesn’t have to, not being of the faith). Not a perfect man by any means, but essentially a good paternal figure to Gwynn. Gwynn’s association with the bad father Elm leads to him destroying Marriott and finally to a sticky end of his own. But it’s the good father’s prerogative to try to undo the bad father’s influence and try to put the screwed-up son to rights. In the epilogue, Gwynn seems to have acquired a rudimentary sense of justice and compassion, albeit within a primitive theatre of violence where might is still right. Amirite? I think I am. (Ok, only 2.5 readers of this blog actually care, but I’ve been puzzling over some of the things in that book on and off since I wrote it. I’m happy that I figured something out to my own satisfaction.)

Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that the Rule of Crime is everywhere in the real world. It’s probably the natural behaviour of social, organised predators, but I’m wondering what an alternative might look like.

I’ve been deeply immersed in writing, therefore bad art ahoy!

(Note to Mum and Dad, if you’re reading this, you should probably..ah…not read it.)
*names changed to protect the perverted

This actually happened a while ago, but I’ve only got around to writing it up now. We went back to the gay bar with the sex show, this time with our Australian friend Joe and his Thai wife Lek. Lek is about 4′8″, very pretty, very smart, mischievous and, as far as I can tell, entirely shockproof. Joe met her when she was working in a bar disguised as a boy (not a gay bar, as far as I know). Anyway, after hearing about the bar with the gay sex show, Lek wanted to go and check it out, so back we trundled for another serve of muscle, butts and knobs.

We took a front table again. Our two blokes sat together, then Lek and me. Next to me was an empty seat. The elderly transvestite classical dancer again opened the show, followed by short skits that crossed the Hellfire Club with school camp variety night.

Most of the guys at this bar are too muscly for my taste, but one of them had a cute face and caught my eye. I seemed to have caught his, too, and eventually I nodded at the seat next to mine. He came down off the stage and sat there. I bought him a drink. He abstemiously ordered a Diet Coke, telling me in a mix of Thai, English and mime that alcohol was no good for his physique. Via the internet, I found out later that I probably should just have tipped him rather than buying the drink. Meanwhile, Lek had attracted the attention of the biggest man there, a friendly-looking fellow; this gentle giant came and wedged himself on bended knee between Lek and the table and spoke to her at epic length whilst holding her hand. Another guy attempted to get friendly with Joe. (Stu didn’t seem to attract much male attention; perhaps his long hair, full lips and thick eyelashes marked him as blatantly heterosexual.)

I got talking with my new acquaintance as much as our limited ability in each other’s language allowed (his English being much better than my Thai, mind you). He told me that a lot of the men working in that particular bar aren’t gay; they’re just bodybuilders who work in a boy bar for the money, and most of them like girls. “Me most of all,” he said, sounding wistful. Of course, you never know how much is the truth and how much is an act. He eventually wandered back to the stage and was called to another table.

Then came the live sex show. This culminated with two big guys fucking two slender, small, pretty guys, who presumably were gay, wearing Beardsleyesque black glitter-covered masks. One couple wandered around the room while in the act, the top more or less carrying the bottom. Spying the vacant seat next to me, the muscle man brought his masked uke over there and fucked him energetically. A moment later it became apparent that the only place for the young man to put his front half was my lap. He looked up at me, gave a little shrug and lay face down on my thighs. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Would he want to be touched by a woman, or left alone? I settled for saying “Hi,” since it seemed rude not to say anything at all, and stroked his spiky hair, forgetting that in Thai culture the head is the most important part of the body and to touch a stranger’s head is offensive. On the other hand, is a person being buggered across one’s lap exactly a stranger? The etiquette section in my guidebook offers no advice for this particular situation. At any rate, I hope he wasn’t deeply offended.

Later on I had to go to the bathroom. It was a single unisex room, which is not uncommon in Thai bars. When I came out of the cubicle I found several of the muscle guys waiting outside–for me, apparently. One of them handed me a steamed towel, and they all started talking to me in a way that made it pretty clear that yes, indeed, they liked girls. Then one who had come in to use the urinal, and was stark naked, turned around and indicated his penis with a smile. “No thanks,” I said randomly, “I’ve already got one.” The conversation had no chance to go any further, as I felt a hand slide down the front of my pants (perhaps to check whether I was telling the truth). As the fingers reached my pubic hair I removed it and then the other hands which had attached themselves to my breasts and were probing the foamy contours of my padded made-in-Thailand bra. Escaping the bathroom, I made it back to our table. Lek’s friend had left at last and I couldn’t see the one I’d been talking to (who wasn’t amongst the posse in the loo, I had been glad to see).

W e left soon after, and Lek’s admirer reappeared to see her off, hoisting her in the air like King Kong lifting Fay Wray. My guy reappeared. He shook my hand and kissed it. I was sorry that I didn’t speak better Thai. Our very brief acquaintance had been one of the stranger fleeting contacts I’ve had with another human being (#1 strangest still being the Syrian philosophy student on a train who begged me to marry him, I think). Intimate in one way, since he was virtually naked, but otherwise opaque.

Oddly, I didn’t feel upset about the incident in the toilet. Maybe it was just the molasses-thick atmosphere of eros in the bar, and the fact that normal barriers of intimacy had already been well and truly broken, negating my inhibitions. Maybe was simply that they were all good-looking, not very tall, and naked or near-naked, so that they looked vulnerable and almost otherworldly, like male versions of celestial nymphs. Or maybe it was something I’m not to proud to consider as possibly being true, namely that social and language barriers caused my brain to register their attentions as being, if not quite the same as a dog humping my leg, not quite either those of human beings who ought to have better manners.

One can imagine, in a world without mortality, a world without consequences, having very different sexual mores. I can actually imagine a world saturated with sexuality, where free love is a real thing–the world of Beardsley’s Venusberg in Under the Hill. But as far as I know, social experiments in free love have never worked. They end in women being coerced. For it to work, everyone would have to find everyone else very lovable indeed. It really would be a world of angels, or devils, or Care Bears or something, but not humans.

…alive and well and living over at Laurie’s place.

(Warning from Andre Breton: Surrealism “tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” )

Item #2: Check out these cyborg taxiderms by Lisa Black. To me, these somehow redeem taxidermy, outfitting those macabre and pathetic ex-animals with the life of art. (I wonder if she’ll do a parrot?)

Item#3: The universe is full of dark mozzarella, though I prefer to think of it as half-baked cookie dough.

You sometimes just have to go RAAAAGHR..or…something.
Seriously, I love this guy. Wonder if that bedroom’s in Ladbroke Grove.

And a very cute video to the same song.

(None of the above will make much sense if you haven’t read some of Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga, btw.)

I don’t know if any of you are avid readers of the Discovery Channel news, but I go there a lot to check out the marvels and wonders of the natural world. Today’s star is a clear animal that looks like a glassblower’s experiment, living in the Antarctic Ocean:

AP Photo/Australian Antarctic Division, Martin Riddle (image links to article)

As I’ve said before, if there’s a god who made all this, then that god is odd.

Ok, that was scary. I’ve taken down that post from yesterday. Will reply to the last comments privately.

It was a full moon, and I think last time my hormones had a run-in with the full moon it was a bit of a crash too. Honestly, I don’t usually feel like that -I do worry about things, but not to the point of meltdown - it was just that for a few hours yesterday morning I couldn’t remember ever having felt any different. I always thought that the idea of the moon having an effect on women was an old wives’ tale, but now I’m curious. I’m going to keep track of this: My Rag vs The Moon.

But I think it’s funny I said I was having a Munch day, because the obvious interpretation of The Scream is that the figure’s round white head is the moon and all that streaky red…isn’t bacon.

Again, thanks, everyone, for the kind hand-holding and pep talk.

Pic I drew yesterday, with a couple of colour variations:
(I really need to find paper I like that doesn’t wrinkle…)