Happy Halloween!

 

Imajica

 

 

© 1991 by Clive Barker

 

When I was a young lad I devoured a lot of horror literature.

 

In high school I mostly read Stephen King. I had a friend who had all of King’s books in paperback, and he’d feed them to me one by one. By the time I graduated I read every one from Carrie to the Bachman books, including his short story anthologies. The following year I read It, and the year after that, The Tommyknockers. I stopped reading Stephen King around the year 2001. I think Dreamcatcher was the last one of his I read.

 

In the late 80s I shifted to Dean R. Koontz. Within three or four years I put away something like 18 of his novels. Though somewhat formulaic, they all were quick, fun reads, always with a dash of horror, a lot of suspense, and usually a happy ending. The thing I liked best about his stories was the fact that you could never predict what the solution to the existential threat was. If Koontz wrote Dracula instead of Bram Stoker, the monster would be revealed at the end not to be a vampire of the traditional sort but a secret government black ops scientific experiment mixing human, bat, and alien DNA gone terribly awry. With some form of time or interdimensional travel tossed in. That kinda thing.

 

A few years ago I read on a message board that, broadly speaking, King could be regarded as the Rolling Stones of horror and Koontz, the Beatles. I agree.

 

I also read a smattering of other horror writers in my teens and twenties. Peter Straub, John Saul, Whitley Strieber, William Peter Blatty, Peter Benchley, Thomas Harris. And, of course, Clive Barker.

 

I moved on to Clive Barker roughly after reading through most of Koontz: Cabal, Weaveworld, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, The Thief of Always, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, and, lastly, Imajica. Barker is quite different from the aforementioned horror writers. His stories are more fantastical, more occult-ish, populated by various forms of magic and myriads of strange, grotesque creatures, both good and evil. There is a sexual amorality (“anti-morality” I initially wrote) that is quite in vogue now but wasn’t so much 30, 35 years ago. While not on the same equivalence of, say, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Barker seems to be well acquainted or aspires to such dark things.

 

Anyway, my Halloween reading back in 2019 was a re-read of Weaveworld. The next year, during the Summer of Wu Flu, I re-read The Great and Secret Show. The first took me 12 days but I burned through the latter in 5. In other words, both fun reads. The stories were weird and out there – in Weaveworld, a magic carpet that unfurls in our world and grows to enormous dimensions releasing warring factions that includes an all-powerful but psychotic angel and a salesman who’s jacket can cause anyone to do anything, and in The Great and Secret Show the inter-generational struggle of two men trying to master a form of sorcery known as “The Art” and control a mythical dream sea and the evil beings that inhabit it. Whew. Heavy and heady stuff. I read most of Barker’s works originally at my parents’ weekend house at Lake George in upstate New York, so a lot of that imagery was mixed in with Barker’s. I enjoyed the re-reads.

 

So it was with anticipation I cracked open Imajica on October 1. If I kept to a brisk schedule, I could finish the 827-page novel on Halloween night.

 

Alas, I set it aside three weeks in. I couldn’t finish it.

 

Now, I remember having difficulties wading through Imagica way back in the early 90s when I last wrestled with it. Recall a giant push for the last 150 or 200 pages to finish it. The memory’s very hazy. It seems, however, that the same thing happened to me this time around, thirty years later. Now I’m much, much more careful with how I spend my time as I’m getting up there a bit in years, and I just didn’t think a 150 or 200 page push to get the novel done was worth it.

 

Now, YMMV, as they used to say here on the internet a few decades back.

 

I don’t feel like rehashing the plot; perhaps a quick summary like the ones above might suffice. “Imajica” consists the five dominions, of which Earth is the fifth. The main characters meet other characters who know how to travel between the dominions. There are your typical Barkian malformed monsters and semi-human sub-species, there’s magic, there’s war between the forces of magic and those that want to eradicate it. There is an evil sorcerer Autarch who rules the four dominions (not Earth, the fifth, though that’s on his plate) from his palace in the first dominion. There are shapeshifters, dopplegangers, and lots of Catholic piety twisted slightly askew in that Barkish way.

 

 

I may not have enjoyed Imajica, but Charlie wants to give it a go

 

On paper this seemed to be an enjoyable read. A whole new worldview is developed for the novel with its accompanying landscapes, much more so than his prior works, even Weaveworld. I originally compared it to a warped version of Middle-earth. But it didn’t work for me, and I think, having ten days or so to reflect on it, I think its because the main goal and the main threat of the novel wasn’t fully developed or communicated to me, the reader. I didn’t feel the “ticking time bomb”, though there is one. The stakes didn’t keep me turning the pages. The characters kept having emotional crises and there are loads of indecisions and 180-degree turns that motivations did not seem to make sense to me. The main twist in the plot, which I saw early on during the first read and never forgot this second read, didn’t glue me to the pages in anticipation but just felt like another dreary task I had to wade through to get to the last page. And there was also one scene which, as a father of daughters, truly turned my stomach, a scene I did not remember first time around.

 

I dunno. Mixed feelings are still washing over me. I wanted to like it, truly. But I’m a different man than that young lad of 30 years ago. Horror is no longer an upfront interest for me, and Catholic piety is much more so in my daily life (or at least the struggle to attain it). I do seek out new literary worlds, but I need something more enlightening, more expansive, something I can take with me, possibly, beyond the grave. Not sure if this makes any sense, to you or to me. But these are my mixed feelings over Clive Barker’s Imajica.

 

What is the Midway Point?

 

Here’s a neat mathematical riddle to use on your friends to prove your genius bona fides. It sounds unsolvable until, well, you hear the solution.

 

Question:

 

What is the exact middle point between zero and infinity?

 

In other words, on this number line from negative infinity to positive infinity, what is the halfway point between zero and positive infinity on the right?

 

Any guesses?

 

Hmm?

 

Seems kinda impossible to figure out, right? At first I thought so, because infinity, that sideways-number-eight, is not really a number, like 3, 17/50, or π^cubed is a number. Yeah, 3 and 17/50 have exact locations on the number line, and even though π^cubed, like pi itself, is not an exactly defined number (it is an irrational number whose decimal expression goes on, it has been proven, forever), it pretty much has an exact location on the number line. But infinity is not a specific number but an idea. A mathematical concept. So it really doesn’t have a location on the number line, except a vague neighborhood that lives ever, ever, ever rightward as you heading that way down the number line.

 

Hint #1 (minor):

 

So the trick is not to think of the question spatially. Not as in the case of 18 inches being the midway point of a yard, or 500 meters the halfway point of a kilometer.

 

Think of numbers themselves, as in types of numbers.

 

Any guesses?

 

Hmm?

 

Hint #2 (major):

 

Every number on the number line can be expressed as a reciprocal. A reciprocal of a number is one-over-that-number. The reciprocal of x is 1/x. The reciprocal of 3 is 1/3. The reciprocal of 17/50 is 50/17. The reciprocal of π^cubed is 1/π^cubed.

 

So what’s the halfway point between zero and infinity?

 

Answer: 1

 

The reciprocal of 1 is 1/1, or 1. 1 is its own reciprocal. But for every single number greater than 1, from 1.0000000000000001 to a googolplex (10 raised to the power of 1 with 100 zeros following it), there is a corresponding reciprocal. Every single one. And that reciprocal is LESS than 1. Every number greater than 1 has a reciprocal less than 1. Therefore, 1 is the midway point between zero and infinity. Not physically, as in a spatial distance sense, but in the number of actual numbers that occupy the intellectual space between 0 and 1 and 1 and infinity.

 

Q.E.D., as they say.

 

Now go and riddle your most intelligent friend.

Fall Comes to Texas

 

With a week of 70-degree day weather – dropping down to the low 50s at night! 

 

But that was last week. Now we’re back in the mid-to-upper 80s. True, that’s about 10 degrees above average for this time of year down here. Still, the leaves are starting to color, and some are even falling. The sky’s dark at 7:30 and the nights are longer, colder, windier. The grass has stopped growing as nature seems to be rummaging through her closet looking for some heavier, more comfortable, clothes to wear.

 

Me, I’m still in the thick of my Kennedy book. I decided to set Clive Barker aside (and that’s a post for later in the week) and have moved on into more existential horror for the season. For music, I’m currently enjoying the tone poems of Richard Strauss on vinyl, an area I’ve always been aware of but never really dug until now. Timing is everything, even in music, I guess.

 

More posts on the horizon …

 

Pagetrotting

 

 

October thus far has been quite the busy month. Aside from the usual ephemera, otherwise known as the daily grind, and other interesting but not blog-appropriate adventures, I have been delving into two thick, hefty worlds of literature, each reminiscent of the adobe bricks found in the Chama Valley of New Mexico. Both laid on a scale would rival the poundage of a newborn.

 

It’s not just the physicality of the two books that are thick, hefty, and brick-like. The subject matter is just as impressive. The word “worlds” used above is not just a metaphor, as each conjures an entire sociosphere and a globe-sized universe of culture, character, and plot. One is of a time now long past, the early 1960s; the other is of a time that’s never been save for within the mind of the author himself.

 

The first book is A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, a 1964-biography-of-sort by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a liberal historian who served as a Special Assistant to the President during the 1961-1963 Kennedy administration. A darling of and expert in the history of the American left, Schlesinger won a second Pulitzer Prize for this work. Taken with a grain of salt (i.e., one must wear hagiography-repellant glasses when reading), this is a deep immersion into those hectic, heady days of the ’60s prior to what you thought were the hectic, heady days of the ’60s. Back door politicking, the Cold War, Cuba, Khruschev, and a changing culture pushed in large part by the sainted Massachusetts president.

 

The second is Imajica, which I can best describe, for better or worse, as horror maestro Clive Barker’s go at a Lord of the Rings. He conjures up his particular brand of gory, somewhat-occultic fantasy, a journey through five worlds or “dominions” to set free the lands from an evil sorcerer Autarch. There are macabre and freakish races of creatures as a substitute to the well-worn tropes of Elves and Dwarves etc. There’s magic, dreams, societies, and a half-dozen detailed plot lines racing with the characters to the Autarch’s palace. Plus heavy doses of Barker’s subversive sexually-tinged horror.

 

Each has its strong points and weak points. I plan on writing reviews on both upon completion. Each is an investment in time.  A Thousand Days is 1,031 pages and Imajica is 827. With a par of 20 pages a day I should finish the Kennedy book just before the 61st anniversary of his assassination in Dallas. In the past I always read something JFK-related in November, so this is a throwback to that. The pace is doable and I am on schedule. Imajica, however, is more a challenge. It’s this year’s “Halloween” reading, and in order to finish that I need to reach 26.7 pages a day. I am slightly behind schedule at page 390. But I’m up for the challenge.

 

After these two books I think I’m going to spend the last two months of the year deep-diving into Dean R. Koontz. I so enjoyed my retro-reading of Tom Clancy this past March to August that a return to Koontz strikes me as a fun way to end these twelve months. Back from, say, 1989 to 1991, I believe I read 15 of his books. There are five which I’m interested in checking out again: Midnight, The Bad Place, Twilight Eyes, Cold Fire, and Dragon Tears. This might be a bit much for two months, especially with Christmas festivities and all, so it might extend into early 2025. We’ll see. I’m up for the challenge.

 

Anyway, happy readings, all!

Neil Floyd or Pink Young

 

Forgive me a cliché, but –

 

I was today years old when I found out –

 

The song “Breathe,” the first sung song on Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, has the exact same chordal structure as Neil Young’s song “Down by the River,” the side one closing tune on his 1969 record, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 

Well, almost exactly.

 

Down by the River:

   Em7 to A (four times)

   Cmaj7 to Bm (four times, ending with a D on the fourth)

   G to D to A (three times for the chorus)

 

Breathe:

   Em to A7 (four times)

   Cmaj7 to Bm to Fmaj7 to D9

 

Well, it sounds more similar on my guitar than it looks like on the electronic page here.

 

Man, I wish I knew this back in the day. I was familiar with both songs, but just never made the connection. The guys I hung out with way back then were more into Neil Young than Pink Floyd, though we did manage to see both live the summer of 1988:

 

   Pink Floyd at Giants Stadium, June 4, 1988

   Neil Young and the Blue Notes at Pier 84 in NYC, August 30, 1988

 

As a side note, that was a great summer for concerts. I also saw AC/DC that May at the Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands and the famous Guns N’ Roses / Deep Purple / Aerosmith concert at Giants Stadium two weeks before Neil Young at the Pier. That was the concert where they filmed the video for “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Though I was probably already sick of the omnipresent overrepresentation of GNR on the radio by then, let me tell you, the vast majority of the crowd was there to see them, not the two dinosaurs of 70s rock.

 

Oh well. Let’s see … what else can I play on my guitar …