Thursday, October 31, 2024
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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.
Sunday, October 27, 2024
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?
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.