I'll Get David Cronenberg to Mail You a Sexual Disease of Your Own Choosing

[moon_custafer]

Listened to an interview with handful_ofdust this morning, on the topics of her new novel, her life and stuff in general; at one point I kept wanting to shout at the device "Darmok -- the thing you're talking about is like the TNG episode 'Darmok,'" and of course she eventually did bring up the reference. Which I suppose is kind of meta.

I've been thinking a lot about magical systems of late; I think it started with reading handful_ofdust's review of Starry Eyes (which I still haven't seen), and the plot description pinging some nigredo/albedo notions about grotesquerie and decay being a necessary underpinning for glamour and power. Magic as sheer power isn't interesting; magic as cheat codes, workarounds, making the best of a bad situation, stone soup, the weapon of the weak, *is* interesting. This isn't just in supernatural stories, either -- I'm endlessly fascinated by what Peg Bracken, in the I Hate to Cook Book calls "shabby little secrets," mid-century recipes that claim that your guests will never guess the secret ingredient in your cake is... a can of tomato soup (and nope, that probably wouldn't occur to most people.) That just impresses me more, somehow, than all the stuff about locally-grown organic cooked with either exotic or minimal seasonings. I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it seems important to keep some record of what percolates through my skull these days.

Probably unrelated story: apparently Steve Martin is the only non-Canadian to have heard of the Group of Seven, but he's trying to change that. He's a big fan of Lawrence Harris and has helped to curate an exhibit of his classic works from the 'twenties and 'thirties, now showing at a gallery in Los Angeles. Harris' stuff is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could describe art without being flippant, because it's really very striking and grounded in his Theosophist beliefs and so on, but if you've never seen it the quickest way I can convey the look is "Caspar David Friedrich meets the backgrounds from What's Opera, Doc?" which sounds less respectful than I'd like to be (I'm a great admirer of the design of What's Opera, Doc?) Maybe I have to put things this way because Harris is the sheer-power, pure gourmet cooking school of thought that I just snubbed above. He was from the Harris side of the Massey-Harris company owners, and he could afford to go out to the Real True Canadian Wilderness and paint highly spiritual works. I don't want to bring him low, though, by comparing him to a cartoon; I don't think I even want to elevate the cartoon. I want to assert the existence of the cartoon, and the Road Runners that allow it to exist because they could be churned out to keep WB happy while the animators finished their crazy masterpieces.

Comments

[sovay]

Magic as sheer power isn't interesting; magic as cheat codes, workarounds, making the best of a bad situation, stone soup, the weapon of the weak, *is* interesting.

That's one of the oldest definitions of magic I ran into in fiction: talking the universe into being what you want. What you want is obviously not the way things normally are, or they would already be; so you convince it otherwise. It's in Le Guin, McKillip, even Diane Duane. Sometimes formal spells are important, sometimes just knowing the difference between what things are and what you want them to be. It must be older, but those were my first encounters.

the Massey-Harris company owners

Can I assume these are the same Masseys that eventually produced Raymond, Daniel, and Anna?

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Also Raymond's brother Vincent, who was our first homegrown Governer General.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Magic as rewriting the narrative: yeah. I like that.;)

Magicy, Whagicy stuff

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

Yes, Steve Martin is a major Patron Of The Arts and has kept that part (and most other parts) separate from his film carreer.

One of the things that I most enjoyed about the Science Fantasy "Matrix" series was that everyone's superpowers came from cheat codes.

Real life magic (stage, cult and otherwise) actually involves the manipulation of the observer and the observations rather than, as in science, the observations and the observed objects. It involves a detailed knowledge of about how most of us just get the Reader's Digest condensed summary of what's impinging upon our sensory apparatus. If you can present yourself as something that the compression system tends to handle badly (noisy compression) then you can be invisible. There's a species of spider that vibrates into vertabrate invisibility to deal with spider eating birds; but sadly cannot fool all of the eyes all of the time of Praying Manti or wasps. If you can present some small nugget of scenery that is usually decompressed into a something much bigger then you can generate all sorts of illusions. The human nervous system has all sorts of scanning and internal data transfer frequencies that can be sync'ed with or exceeded for all sorts of special effects. Indeed, Magic Lanterns of all sorts depend on the scanning ratio of your visual cortex.

Then there's the separate issue of Scientific thinking versus Magical Thinking. I like the stories where people apply proper scientific methodology to their magical universe where the magic works on the things as well as the people. Haven't seen much in fiction of the other way around although the newspapers are, often to horrific effect, full of it.

Re: Magicy, Whagicy stuff

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I sort of feel like a more realistic version of the Matrix would be a world where it's pretty much an open secret that everything's virtual, and people would buy cheat codes from each other to get ahead.