Oh look, it’s the train again… The site was down for a couple of days after my webhost decided to repair the server without giving any advance warning. My apologies. Everything should now be back to normal.
Category: {miscellaneous}
Miscellaneous
The Weird Questionnaire
A peacock. Photograph by Vidhya Narayanan.
Posted at the Weird Fiction Review in the past week, The Weird (or Étrange) Questionnaire is Éric Poindron’s Weird (or Étrange) riposte to the Proust Questionnaire. I’d read the post, and seen Jeff VanderMeer’s answers to the questions, but wasn’t planning on answering it myself until Neddal Ayad wrote asking whether I’d be willing to do so for a future WFR assembly of responses. So here we are. The rules are as follows:
…there are sixty questions (twice as many as most versions of the Proust Questionnaire). Spend no more than a minute on each, and an hour in total. However, don’t keep checking your watch: “let writing define time.”
In the end I took longer than an hour but the time limit is a good idea, otherwise I’d have spent far too long pondering, revising, qualifying remarks, unqualifying the qualifications, and so on. Deadlines have their uses.
The Weird Questionnaire
1: Write the first sentence of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.
The first night of winter moonlight revealed a pattern of tiny runic figures etched inside the window glass.
2: Without looking at your watch: what time is it?
01:15
3: Look at your watch. What time is it?
01:20
4: How do you explain this—or these—discrepancy(ies) in time?
It’s always later than you think.
5: Do you believe in meteorological predictions?
“Believe” seems the wrong word in this context since the question concerns a conjecture based on scientific study. Short-range forecasts are fine, long-range ones seldom seem to be.
6: Do you believe in astrological predictions?
If this refers to newspaper columns, they’re always so vague they may as well be computer-generated. Maybe they are.
7: Do you gaze at the sky and stars by night?
Yes, when I’m out of the city.
8: What do you think of the sky and stars by night?
My bad eyesight (the stars are always a blur), the length of time the light has taken to reach us, how the familiarity of the few stars we do manage to see shields us from the true immensity of the stellar gulfs.
9: What were you looking at before starting this questionnaire?
A guest post by Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Kathe Koja’s blog.
10: What do cathedrals, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and other religious monuments inspire in you?
Further appreciation of the values of art, architecture and related crafts. In the case of cathedrals: astonishment at the feats of labour required to build them in a pre-industrial age; their presence as sites of accumulated history.
Hiatus
With my on-again/off-again phone problem persisting it’s getting impossible to post anything substantial here so I may as well take a break for a few days while I try and get the line fixed. I’m hoping this won’t take too long but given the failures of the phone company on previous occasions nothing is certain. In the meantime I’ll activate the archive feature to turn up posts from the past. See you on the other side.
Update: I now have a new phone line so things should be better from now on.
Anatomy of Norbiton
I nearly called this post “Topology of a phantom city” after Alain Robbe-Grillet (and Paul Schütze) but was concerned that might confuse matters. On the other hand, such a title is probably pompous, elitist and obscure enough for the subject in question. Today’s post is necessarily brief since the trouble I keep having with my net connection has recurred this week (rain in the wires) so doing anything at all online is difficult.
Toby Ferris was in touch recently to alert me to the existence of Anatomy of Norbiton which he describes as “a website/work in progress dedicated to the propagation of what can only be described as the (fairly unsuccessful) cult of the Failed Life.” I’d already been pointed to this by Mr BibliOdyssey, and having enjoyed what I saw was surprised it hasn’t been receiving more notice elsewhere. As to the question of what Norbiton is, the inhabitants provide their own description:
The citizens of NORBITON: IDEAL CITY are lazy, idle, negligent, feckless, unrepentant, useless, parasitical. We are false. We are pompous, elitist, obscure, self-indulgent, fat, ugly and old. We are not living life to the full, not making the most of ourselves, not going the extra mile, not putting ourselves on the line. In the great Factory of the World, we are the muck in the kiln, the impurity in the ore, the pollution in the earth, the by-product, the waste, the clutter, the extended tea break, the poor working practice. We are the enemy of self-reliance, productivity, efficiency; of the rewards of labour, the solidarity of the working poor, and the communion of saints.
Sounds to me like Blackpool if it was moved fifty miles inland and deprived of its Pleasure Beach. Or is that merely a description of Blackburn? If you read one of the growing number of Norbiton essays you can decide for yourself how much the place resembles (or doesn’t) somewhere you know but try not to think about. It’s witty and it’s clever and it will reward your attention.
02011
Life magazine for March 2nd, 1911, with cover art by Orson Lowell. The Peacock Number, eh? Can’t help but wonder what the rest of this issue was like.
02011? Read this.
Happy new year!