tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70009152679796913972024-02-07T11:54:16.909-08:00Cosmic AntipodesA writer's musings about fantasy, style, symmetry, art, and life.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.comBlogger285125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-80661666247804344662018-11-07T10:24:00.000-08:002018-11-07T10:24:51.952-08:00"Raft of Conquistadors" at Heroic Fantasy QuarterlyMy latest Carvajal story, "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2602" target="_blank">Raft of Conquistadors</a>," is live at <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>. It takes place on <a href="https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rrp01" target="_blank">Padre Island</a> at an unspecified time before "Heart of Tashyas" and is a tasteful and historically accurate* account of the ill-fated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narv%C3%A1ez_expedition" target="_blank">Narváez expedition</a> featuring ancient aliens and semiaquatic slug men.<br />
<br />
In case you're confused, here's the chronology thus far:<br />
<ul>
<li>Raft of Conquistadors</li>
<li>Pink Gneiss **</li>
<li>Heart of Tashyas</li>
<li>White Rainbow, Brown Devil</li>
<li>I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds</li>
</ul>
Now go read "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2602" target="_blank">Raft of Conquistadors</a>"!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Not actually tasteful or historically accurate.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Coming soon! </span>Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-68120224984993924932018-08-28T09:15:00.000-07:002019-04-04T09:54:53.384-07:00Poison and Cigarette ButtsWhen I paint, I begin with a vision of a thing to be represented, but I find, as I really get down to business, that I take the picture as a plane surface covered with pigment. My task, as a painter, is to make as beautiful a carpet of color and form as my skill permits. Forms from the natural world are admitted and retained, just as colors are, but both, and the ideas that inspired the painting in the first place, are subordinate to the unity of the final product.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuTJDJIosSoBlZnyLvCbU_rAp9OEhlKxSo3aKuXNh1-vcwnm4d8KM607k_RhpSblfGR0_eYeB0aDFNYBHZ1tCnqzKbqgpjKOLXHHlQZAiwSpNpHnqU1LpKbmtQa316oUyWvEExLo4MsQ/s1600/Van+Gogh+Roulin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="861" data-original-width="667" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuTJDJIosSoBlZnyLvCbU_rAp9OEhlKxSo3aKuXNh1-vcwnm4d8KM607k_RhpSblfGR0_eYeB0aDFNYBHZ1tCnqzKbqgpjKOLXHHlQZAiwSpNpHnqU1LpKbmtQa316oUyWvEExLo4MsQ/s320/Van+Gogh+Roulin.jpg" width="247" /></a></div>
I have something of the same approach to writing stories. Whatever material elements may go into it, in the end I'm just trying to make an interesting pattern with the things I have at my disposal. Sometimes the things I have at my disposal are ugly, like Jackson Pollock's cigarette butts; sometimes they're poisonous, like the arsenic-containing emerald green used by Van Gogh. Well, you're not supposed to <i>eat </i>a painting, are you? Something similar might be said of a story.<br />
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I never set out to make a point in a story. That's not to say the things I think about and argue about don't find their way in there. It's just that they're like Jackson's cigarette butts. I do think the pursuit of truth important. I just don't care to do it in stories. Sometimes I even find it fun to seem to make a case for the opposite of what I believe to be the truth. That bugs people these days, because they want to know where you stand on all the important issues before they decide to like your work. I guess that's only natural, what with the Internet being overrun by pitchfork-waving mobs of one stripe or another. But it's also terribly boring.<br />
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Being an autistic Puerto Rican Greek mathematician in small-town borderland Texas, I have a skewed view of things. At least, I'm led to conclude so when I have conversations with other people. I'm like one of those strange side characters in Dostoevsky, like Ippolit in <i>The Idiot</i>, or Kirillov in <i>The Possessed</i>. My view comes out in weird and (to me) unpredictable ways.<br />
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*</div>
<br />
For a few years I've thinking about how "magical multiracial" fantasy (with elves and dwarves or whatever) reflects, distorts, or falsifies race issues in the real world. I mean, that type of fiction is read mainly by white people in the anglosphere, right? At its most commercial-generic, it represents a society consisting of discrete categories of beings that coexist without mixing, which reminds me of those modern celebrations of "diversity" that often amount to a kind of segregation.<br />
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The magical multirace paradigm was set by Tolkien, although Tolkien, to be fair, got it at least partially from the Poetic Edda and such things. There are various <i>human</i> races in Tolkien, such as the Easterlings and the Haradrim. Aside from Sam's musings, though, they're painted in broad strokes as scarcely-human hordes. There's much talk, too, of greater men intermarrying with lesser men, to the detriment of the former. Does Tolkien, within his own universe, think it a bad thing for higher races to mix with lower races? Given what he says elsewhere about the "sin" of the elves and the role of the hobbits, I'd be inclined to say that his view was nuanced, at the very least. Still, there's a lot to be looked into there, such as the fact that Tolkien came originally from South Africa, and that <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> was conceived and written during the first half of the twentieth century, when a lot of ugly ideas about race were coming to a head all over the world, not just in Germany.<br />
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I've mused a bit about <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2015/03/half-breeds-like-us.html">half-breeds in fantasy literature</a>, and half-breeds certainly figure in Tolkien, to an extent not often approached by writers of the commercial-generic fantasy that capitalizes on his work. He has mixtures of human races, such as the men and hobbits of Bree, but also, more memorably, mixtures of human and non-human races, such as the progeny of Beren and Luthien. Philosophically, those are a little different, as Tolkien makes it clear in his letters that the elves are not a distinct biological species, differing from men only in their spiritual constitution. It's interesting that such half-breeds are allowed to choose which race they'll belong to, a choice sadly denied to human half-breeds, who must inhabit both worlds, and therefore neither. The ill-favored squint-eyed Southerner at Bree, who appears to be part human, part orc, is not treated so sympathetically, and we are not told that he got a choice like Elrond Halfelven's. Actually, the way he's described reminds me of the descriptions of mulattoes and "Asiatic" half-breeds in some of G. K. Chesterton's more offensively racist stories, and I think a case could be made that Tolkien and the writers who came after him were merely transplanting those old fears of half-breeds into less overtly racist soil.<br />
<br />
That said, it's only by being great writers that Tolkien and Chesterton have the capacity to offend. The most your standard commercial-generic writer can aspire to is to be slightly irritating. And I do find discrete categorizations of races, magical or otherwise, to be slightly irritating. You don't just see it in fantasy. You see it whenever members of "other" races are given character traits stemming from race alone, offset, in cleverer works, by superficial differences.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicMhsnf-LeI89b-htLFDnxgQOfBRaa368JY4YBe0l8jmlMw3ZmNJ-Ty2U2p_xoI_IoxeTB6z0RZHxaoDvo1QCl9IcO4lrMi0LtzWXb83QVjY5dtVV181SXw7ji7rkQtqpobwCtHzpOnQ/s1600/Assault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="138" data-original-width="364" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicMhsnf-LeI89b-htLFDnxgQOfBRaa368JY4YBe0l8jmlMw3ZmNJ-Ty2U2p_xoI_IoxeTB6z0RZHxaoDvo1QCl9IcO4lrMi0LtzWXb83QVjY5dtVV181SXw7ji7rkQtqpobwCtHzpOnQ/s400/Assault.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scene from John Carpenter's <i>Assault on Precinct 13</i>, which I think is a sly<br />
reference to what I'm talking about. (Is that Cuervo Jones at the wheel???)<br />
<i></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In reaction to one of my Carvajal stories, a psychologist friend of mine, whose professional interests include evolutionary psychology, explained that, according to theory, it's natural (in the evolutionary sense) to have a mistrust of half-breeds, because it's unknown to whose tribe their loyalties belong. To that my reply was: perhaps it's natural or justifiable, perhaps not, but, as far as my story is concerned, I don't really care, because I'm not trying to make a point. My friend was trying to understand what I was getting at, but the truth is that I wasn't getting at anything at all. I was just making a pattern with things I've picked up here and there.<br />
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Religion makes an appearance in those Carvajal stories, too, though I'm not certain that the faith of Hispania corresponds to real-world Catholicism. Carvajal is, at any rate, an archetypal Bad Catholic, praying on the fishbone rosary mentioned somewhere by St. John of the Cross while doing his best to be a conquistador. Because I am myself Catholic, a faith it's increasingly hard to be proud of these days, I like to render the religion of the various tribes he encounters sympathetically, while I render his religion as worthy of contempt, incomprehension, or terror. The red demon-god at the end of "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is based on the seraph that gave St. Francis of Assisi the stigmata, and the institutional church appears as a literary cigarette butt in one of my forthcoming stories. But, again, I'm not really making a point. I'm just letting things come in where they want to.<br />
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* </div>
<br />
My professional and artistic and personal lives are beginning to converge in ways that I wouldn't have expected several years ago, and I feel the need to emphasize that my fiction really is art, that is, a set of patterns I've formed so as to make pleasing units, and not, say, a coded manifesto. That's not to say that my deeply-held beliefs and opinions wouldn't be offensive or incomprehensible to some of the people who might be interested in them. They're just not to be found in my stories or my rambling, contrarian blog posts.<br />
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That said, get ready for "Raft of Conquistadors," coming out in the November issue of <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>!Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-37183152304355458092018-07-20T11:13:00.002-07:002018-07-20T11:15:54.971-07:00Carload of ConquistadorsLife beyond art has become a perfect s**tstorm of late, which has left me some time and energy for said art, but none, alas, for blogging.<br />
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Just to give a fairly innocuous example, I took the fam on a two-week camping trip in June, only to collide with a majestic leaping bull elk in a national park, totaling our beloved Ordoñezmobile and leaving us (me, my wife, our three kids) stranded, first on the side of a mountain (with all our gear, the subjects of intense scrutiny by park police), then in a campsite, for days, with no way to get more food (fortunately we'd just stocked up), no rental car being available due to a massive hailstorm having struck the region, with black bears literally snuffling around our tents at night and leaving muddy paw prints on top of our bear box in the morning, in which we had thankfully thought to enclose our three-year-old's carseat, which is undoubtedly the most smellable thing we own, after all of which we were granted, not a minivan or an SUV as we had been promised by our insurance company, but, ironically, an Impala (another leaping ungulate!) in which we were amazingly able to fit our gear and dependents (as the Egyptians fit their blocks of stone into the pyramids) although we had to bestow our faithful roofbag upon a chance-met traveler at a hotel.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNjhVdntCnfXq-lyLLkK8e1t2DgI3B29fCQhnxlJIinEXcE-2joIbctPwUmvr9WCto0eyZWq9WuLFfk7GRx8gwzT5x6tdivagYfAqBuQ6Avc1KFleRyEGsX7-pBFYMVeok1-FO_AONnw/s1600/Grapes+of+Wrath.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="301" data-original-width="535" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNjhVdntCnfXq-lyLLkK8e1t2DgI3B29fCQhnxlJIinEXcE-2joIbctPwUmvr9WCto0eyZWq9WuLFfk7GRx8gwzT5x6tdivagYfAqBuQ6Avc1KFleRyEGsX7-pBFYMVeok1-FO_AONnw/s400/Grapes+of+Wrath.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Of course we continued our trip after securing our distant rental car through a devious use of shuttle buses and a laconic and somewhat unreliable taxi driver, because we Ordoñeces aren't quitters, although we were put to the test when we discovered a subsequent campsite, which we'd reserved months before, to have been inundated by a flash flood which had deposited a smooth, foot-deep sheet of white badlands silt, out of which the picnic table rose like something from <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2015/11/rites-of-spring.html"><i>The Drowned World</i></a>, which, in another dose of irony, I happened to be reading at the time; then, to take another page from <i>The Drowned World</i>, we arrived back at our home in south Texas, which this summer is like the point of heat focused by a magnifying lens, only to find our air conditioner broken.<br />
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And that was my <i>vacation</i>.<br />
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I am nevertheless happy to report that the newest installment in the Tashyas saga will grace the e-pages of <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i> this fall, in my story "Raft of Conquistadors," which relates the first fateful landfall of Francisco Carvajal y Lopez in what's now the Lone Star State. The action takes place on <a href="https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rrp01" target="_blank">Padre Island</a>, the bleak and strangely remote barrier island that has kept south Texas, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, sparsely inhabited for generations. The story will be illustrated by me.<br />
<br />
Although it may be of interest to no one but myself, these stories excite me because they let me evoke all the varied landscapes and climates that "Tashyas" has to offer; I've been making somewhat frequent trips to the Corpus Christi area since I was a little kid, when my dad would take me on collecting expeditions for his marine biology class. Right now I'm working on a Carvajal story set in central Texas, set in the vicinity of...no, I won't say it.<br />
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This summer I've also been working on the cover painting for <i>Ark of the Hexaemeron</i>, which is still in the process of being written, but which will, when complete, be the first heroic fantasy epic that I know of to feature three-dimensional manifold topology (sorry). I haven't done much else in the way of illustration or art-for-art's-sake lately, but I have been doing some mathematical sculptures for a little museum I've created at my college, inspired by the beautiful models and displays math departments used to curate around the year 1900, e.g., <a href="http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/history/model/index.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.math.harvard.edu/history/models/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Here, for instance, is the "dodecahedron family," printed on my 3D printer and subsequently painted:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGIkQOvkKFWTlrzgABACrU7JhS6LJ7tEyDjR2fsmw9qvPsskQETkHsIZUg1rSC1JycXUkXAgIl6ZFEFr9JgsIUjg1-spo4qs-TYFHbO5J6fKz78DYqGYZc5otcRlYp3JrjF-A4oHZE-A/s1600/Dodecahedron+family+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="885" data-original-width="1600" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGIkQOvkKFWTlrzgABACrU7JhS6LJ7tEyDjR2fsmw9qvPsskQETkHsIZUg1rSC1JycXUkXAgIl6ZFEFr9JgsIUjg1-spo4qs-TYFHbO5J6fKz78DYqGYZc5otcRlYp3JrjF-A4oHZE-A/s400/Dodecahedron+family+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Going from left to right, top to bottom, we have: the icosahedron, the dual icosahedron / dodecahedron, the <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/07/oodles-of-doodles.html">triacontahedron</a> (the convex hull of the dual pair, colored as the compound of five cubes), the dodecahedron, the icosidodecahedron (the quasiregular solid associated with the dual pair), the right-handed compound of five tetrahedra (colored as the triacontahedron), the compound of five cubes, and the skeletal compound of five tetrahedra.<br />
<br />
While painting these I listened to <i>Ride the Pink Horse</i> by Dorothy B. Hughes, an excellent noir set in a New Mexico town modeled partly on Santa Fe.<br />
<br />
I have also been experimenting with paper-folding techniques. What especially interest me are the algebraic aspects; theoretically, origami is quite similar to the compass-and-straightedge constructions you did in high school. I've been doing origami for a long time, having been introduced to it as a kid by a Japanese friend of the family, though I don't pretend to be proficient. Just recently, though, I've discovered "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusudama" target="_blank">kusudama</a>" (a term that gets thrown around rather loosely) or modular origami.<br />
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Here, for instance, is the compound of five tetrahedra, assembled, without glue, from 10 sheets of square origami paper cut into thirty 1:3 rectangles, using the instructions found <a href="http://mars.wne.edu/~thull/fit.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilsC_mWtVyyrWRhs0Iz0N7S95YTqJQUffrcvChxbPd6ZMQHMc2UxhXnKKDS5q5Qz2D2Ig8DSBaKX8Tw4ZWh39TbWsXbZ3ZwCZxRYN8R7iUF-kdeFGFKXFYLetnkRJ8ZDF9ft9XLMjwng/s1600/Compound+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1598" data-original-width="1600" height="398" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilsC_mWtVyyrWRhs0Iz0N7S95YTqJQUffrcvChxbPd6ZMQHMc2UxhXnKKDS5q5Qz2D2Ig8DSBaKX8Tw4ZWh39TbWsXbZ3ZwCZxRYN8R7iUF-kdeFGFKXFYLetnkRJ8ZDF9ft9XLMjwng/s400/Compound+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Each strut is one 1:3 rectangle; three struts fit into one another at each point.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEYJC7odHCqtuXU4cEtWMRp7GntRd8tV6WO7_5TNWqb5r763wYVKYDoRlsLsIxt6JL4CjDrBI5WP9SQ7g8rHNG5LpTPXhUCa37ayy3NtnQugGirKsXTLQGjdyaYsEUjAmyImOoB5s1mw/s1600/Compound+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1098" data-original-width="1242" height="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEYJC7odHCqtuXU4cEtWMRp7GntRd8tV6WO7_5TNWqb5r763wYVKYDoRlsLsIxt6JL4CjDrBI5WP9SQ7g8rHNG5LpTPXhUCa37ayy3NtnQugGirKsXTLQGjdyaYsEUjAmyImOoB5s1mw/s400/Compound+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The five tetrahedra are not connected to one another in any way. The tricky part was getting them to intersect correctly while connecting the struts at the vertices. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mIVuIlc9m8ZeJ2p1yaHN8lOqzTiY7sWTgF6ZI_olndSbDOPPAphBUNtABt1c3ySZyLP51mAip2EvB1sgp8QnmLoiDLqHiBMOPCztCGuHE98wg600QPOw7DOurYIeXcyoT2t4ugQQew/s1600/Compound+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1527" data-original-width="1600" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6mIVuIlc9m8ZeJ2p1yaHN8lOqzTiY7sWTgF6ZI_olndSbDOPPAphBUNtABt1c3ySZyLP51mAip2EvB1sgp8QnmLoiDLqHiBMOPCztCGuHE98wg600QPOw7DOurYIeXcyoT2t4ugQQew/s400/Compound+3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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There are some books on modular origami out there; the best I've found are by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ekaterina-Lukasheva/e/B00F14K230/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1532105939&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Ekaterina Lukasheva</a>, who apparently has a math background. Here's one I've made according to her instructions:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5pMH_aSbL3z0jxl52wjwD5iqkoF_VEMqykK_6GA-ilbeyAzDKPR_AQIL30-K9uG11lmW1r81ZLreDlpAacdd7-nySs6ux94ZLc5rq2IzxHwfW8fDTaYW59txuMJgNjYB1-p8Gb5zZnQ/s1600/Chameleon+eye+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1497" data-original-width="1600" height="373" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5pMH_aSbL3z0jxl52wjwD5iqkoF_VEMqykK_6GA-ilbeyAzDKPR_AQIL30-K9uG11lmW1r81ZLreDlpAacdd7-nySs6ux94ZLc5rq2IzxHwfW8fDTaYW59txuMJgNjYB1-p8Gb5zZnQ/s400/Chameleon+eye+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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It's assembled from 15 square sheets of origami paper cut into two 1:2 rectangles
apiece. The 30 rectangles are
all folded in exactly the same way and attached to one another without
glue. The patterns are chosen according to the compound of five cubes,
with six rectangles of each pattern, and one pattern for each of the
five cubes. In the end, the piece is roughly the same as a triacontahedron. </div>
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Blogging will continue to be light, but I'll probably soon post some thoughts about the things I've been reading and watching.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-62670820806897853102018-04-30T08:41:00.001-07:002018-04-30T08:48:41.791-07:00Ash Indomitable<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGDIuXTJ9RQB3aL32e36JH1wa-GtQ9DiOiJ5BVzOX6nRYm0jOmEfmDCjNL4EghF82ZEV_ChNxwKYCStfCLDfX4sqQmka36P8zs0KeNp-3fo-NwzmpWT1h1BufQKCZ-tOpU0xWt8OS5-w/s1600/Ash+Season+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGDIuXTJ9RQB3aL32e36JH1wa-GtQ9DiOiJ5BVzOX6nRYm0jOmEfmDCjNL4EghF82ZEV_ChNxwKYCStfCLDfX4sqQmka36P8zs0KeNp-3fo-NwzmpWT1h1BufQKCZ-tOpU0xWt8OS5-w/s320/Ash+Season+3.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
What did I do to get dropped into this sad alternate universe in which people apparently prefer interminable shambling zombie soap operas to the exploits of a chainsaw-armed, boomstick-toting deplorable from Michigan who battles Deadites all the way from the medieval past to the post-apocalyptic future?<br />
<br />
In other words, I just finished Season 3 of <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/05/ashes-to-ashes.html"><i>Ash vs Evil Dead</i></a>, which concludes with – I tell you, you wouldn't even believe it! only to find that the show has been <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/ash-vs-evil-dead-wont-return-for-season-4-bruce-campbell-is-ready-to-move-on-from-his-iconic-character-8880279" target="_blank">cancelled</a>, and that Bruce Campbell has decided to hang up his boomstick…<a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/bruce-campbell-ash-evil-dead-cancelled-1201956348/" target="_blank">forever</a>.<br />
<br />
So here I sit, all alone, while the rest of the world eagerly debates post-credits scenes and wonders what Robert Downey Jr. and Friends will do with their next billion dollars in the search for Infinity Whatsits, and possibly the most glorious slingshot ending in the history of humanity remains a tantalizing, unanswered what-if.<br />
<br />
I mean, geez, the show was scary, gory, disgusting, offensive, hilarious – everything a decent show should be – but, on top of all of that, it was kind of inspiring in a weird way, and even – dare I say it? – touching. In that face-meltingly awesome final episode, Ash, the lovable idiot feared by hordes of evil demons, actually…grows a little bit. I don't know. Maybe, in the divine scheme of things, that meant it really was the End. And that's to say nothing of the fact that he actually gave up his own life, descended to hell, released souls from bondage, and ascended on high to sit on his own throne as the "prophesized" savior of humanity. Where do you go from epic closure in the <a href="http://northropfrye-theanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/third-essay-archetypal-criticism-theory.html#TE-MSR" target="_blank">mythos of summer</a>? Narratively speaking, I mean.<br />
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Oh, who am I kidding? There are plenty of places to go from there, and the world is a lesser place because we don't get to see them.<br />
<br />
Well, at least we can say this. We got fifteen hours of unadulterated awesomeness that the world simply did not deserve. Plus, the show was made by people who care about their fans, and they made sure to bring the story to an emotionally satisfying if sadly truncated conclusion. Maybe in the long run it will be better this way. Maybe I'll find my way into that alternate timeline where <i>Evil Dead Beyond Thunderdome: Ash vs the Army of Dark Ones</i> is a thing. For now, though, I'm just a little sad to see El Jefe ride off into the sunset, and to bid Pablo and Kelly a fond farewell. (Although, to do them justice, "Pablo" and "Kelly" <a href="https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/bruce-campbell-retired-ash-but-ash-vs-evil-dead-finale-may-leave-hope-for-evil-dead-4/" target="_blank">are having none of it</a>.)<br />
<br />
I'll always remember you, Ash. Not for what you were, but for what you've become. You've completed your journey from zero to hero. You've become a king by your own hand. And you know what? If, at this point in my life, I do get back up, and continue to fight for what's right no matter what crazy s**t may happen to me, and go on living as though I have a destiny to fulfill even though 100% of the world around me thinks I'm an idiot, it will, in some part, be thanks to <i>Ash vs Evil Dead</i>. Crazy, isn't it?<br />
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Hail to the King, Baby.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8sAtGiNW-vnwGNiIm3OdA5MRE7TJIlZRsgF7vWHoTgXm15as_QN0YlzK9qgKRvkruvQJODtKfJol8Y4iZBXRVkd31s4dAGAfqDn9dmN-pcg8DumbUJf6vimlmGcWynlSd9c76oHdbYw/s1600/Ash+Finale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8sAtGiNW-vnwGNiIm3OdA5MRE7TJIlZRsgF7vWHoTgXm15as_QN0YlzK9qgKRvkruvQJODtKfJol8Y4iZBXRVkd31s4dAGAfqDn9dmN-pcg8DumbUJf6vimlmGcWynlSd9c76oHdbYw/s320/Ash+Finale.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Yes, that's a tank. We live in a world in which a show about<br />Ash battling giant demons with a tank wasn't renewed.</i></td></tr>
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Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-80847588928514092612018-04-19T08:00:00.000-07:002018-08-08T07:03:09.972-07:00The Neverending Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3Tj0vPdGA97BpCQtmELR6k2XincBWebjna11uV9-q4ZTZoZuFITVxL8hwbnCZlYYBPsdlA22iSh7fn2AVXrDhaoF8GRAkHzE92uMFf4L8mPeTzA5Aku5zVSJwO0T1ZQL7MGJt_T97A/s1600/Ende.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="257" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs3Tj0vPdGA97BpCQtmELR6k2XincBWebjna11uV9-q4ZTZoZuFITVxL8hwbnCZlYYBPsdlA22iSh7fn2AVXrDhaoF8GRAkHzE92uMFf4L8mPeTzA5Aku5zVSJwO0T1ZQL7MGJt_T97A/s400/Ende.jpg" width="265" /></a></div>
You know, one fantasy novel I never hear much talked about these days is <i>The Neverending Story</i>. Published originally in German as <i>Die Unendliche Geschichtein</i> in 1979, it became popular here in the United States in the eighties thanks to that terrible, terrible kids' movie of the same (except for a capitalized E) name. Of course I loved that movie (which is terrible) at the time, and especially that sweet theme song. But just read the book (which I did when I was a teenager) and you'll see what a hatchet job the movie is. The author, Michael Ende, would seem to have agreed with that assessment. Let's not even discuss the sequel.<br />
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I recently read the book to my kids. I'd forgotten what a mind-bending piece of meta it is. We read it as originally published, with the page-size capital letters at the beginnings of the chapters (from A for Chapter 1 to Z for Chapter 26) and the dual colors of ink (red and green) to help you navigate between metafictional modes. I'm not exactly sure what Ende was getting at with all those layers of self-reference, so here's where you get to see me puzzle that out.<br />
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If you haven't read <i>The Neverending Story</i>, watch out, because I'm about to spoil it all, though I don't think it's really the kind of book that gets spoiled by your knowing the plot ahead of time.<br />
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Bastian, a doughy, wimpy schoolboy with a deceased mother and an emotionally frigid father, steals a strange book from an enigmatic dealer, and holes up with it in the schoolhouse attic. In it reads the adventures of Atreyu the Greenskin, the chosen savior of Fantastica, which is being devoured by the Nothing while the Childlike Empress languishes from a mysterious illness. (Unlike in the movie, the Nothing literally looks like nothing, as though you'd gone blind.) (The clouds in the movie look pretty cool, though.) The Empress, it seems, must be given a new name by a human, but humans have stopped coming to Fantastica. We gradually learn that the purpose of Atreyu's quest and all his sufferings are solely to get Bastian, the human reader, interested in the book. At the Magic Mirror Gate, it's revealed that Bastian and Atreyu are, in some sense, the same person.<br />
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Bastian, in his reluctance to say the (slightly goofy) name he's thought up, forces the Childlike Empress to go to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and have the story told again from the beginning, within the story itself. Here (and elsewhere) I catch just a hint of both Nietzsche (the eternal return) and – just maybe! – <i>The Worm Ouroboros</i>. AURYN, the talisman borne by Atreyu and the symbol of the book as a whole, consists of two snakes biting one another's tails…<br />
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Once Bastian says the name (I'll let you read the book to find out what it is), he finds himself in Fantastica. In 100% green ink now, he cuts an impetuous and increasingly disturbing swath across a succession of bizarre landscapes in an adventure that reminds me a bit of <i>A Voyage to Arcturus</i>. The one command laid upon him is DO WHAT YOU WISH, which seems great at first. But it turns out that each wish costs him a memory. He starts to become insufferable as he forgets what he once was.<br />
<br />
What everyone tells him, though, is that he has to go right through Fantastica, making whatever wishes come to him and following wherever they lead. Whenever he stops wishing, he starts going in circles. He tries to make himself emperor (no one can see the Childlike Empress
twice), which doesn't go too well, and almost results in his becoming
the demented resident of a city of mad would-be emperors superintended
by a creepy monkey. Eventually the wishes divest him of everything – his very last memories – and leave him an empty shell. <br />
<br />
The strange thing about <i>The Neverending Story</i> is that, despite its
having more layers than a premium nacho plate, it's enjoyable as a story
in its own right. The world of Fantastica is convincingly portrayed,
and Ende's powers of invention are seemingly inexhaustible. One of the main pleasures in reading the book is experiencing all the surprising and beautiful things he comes up with. The story ends
with…well, with something heartwarming and sentimental. I won't knock it, but
if that were the point of the novel then it wouldn't have the power it has.<br />
<br />
To me a lot of it seems to be a parable about storytelling. Bastian is the one person in Fantastica who can tell stories. The stories he tells come true as the tells them, but there are always unintended consequences: dragons that cause suffering, clown-butterflies who vandalize. What's more, Bastian's path of wishes and growing lack of self-knowledge make him less and less capable of telling stories at all.<br />
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The Childlike Empress is portrayed as indifferent to good and evil, but her mandate, to go on wishing, while not exactly "good," is fitting, appropriate, right. It's what Bastian's got to do. Similarly, telling a story is a spiritually draining process, but the teller must go where it leads. If it's worth telling it's got a certain logic that has to be obeyed. In her indifference, I think the Empress is merely Story personified. Morality for the characters in a story is one thing; the "morality" of
the storyteller (which is neither more nor less than the virtue of good
craftsmanship) is another. Someone I follow online recently said something to the effect of, what kind of person takes pleasure in the misery inflected upon a character by a cruel author? I suppose it's possible to get a sadistic thrill in reading a novel, but for me it's really more the pleasure of seeing a pattern fall into place.<br />
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As I said, telling a story is a spiritually draining process. Literally, perhaps: it sucks something out of you. It's also fraught with peril. In setting yourself up as the emperor of your (invented) world, you may find yourself doing violence to your own conceits and being relegated at last to the city of demented might-have-beens.<br />
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But maybe I'm just saying all that because I've been going in circles myself lately…Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-71844059608401425932018-02-28T22:42:00.000-08:002018-08-08T07:09:35.249-07:00Reviews, Local Fame, Cosmogony, Crime, Etc.Charles Payseur of Quick Sips Reviews fame <a href="http://quicksipreviews.blogspot.com/2018/02/quick-sips-heroic-fantasy-quarterly-q35.html" target="_blank">has reviewed</a> <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i> Issue 35, and appears to have enjoyed "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2391" target="_blank">White Rainbow and Brown Devil</a>." There's no better feeling than knowing that you wrote something that gave someone pleasure, so, thanks, Charles!<br />
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On the other hand, there's no <i>worse</i> feeling than knowing that you wrote something that brought someone nothing but annoyance and impatience, so I won't link the <i>other</i> review I've gotten so far.<br />
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I haven't been posting here much lately, have I? That's partly because I got a monthly column (about STEM matters) in the local paper, and the samples for my pitch and the first installment have sucked up most of my light nonfiction-writing energy. But now I'm so famous that people tell me all over town that they enjoy my writing, so it's definitely worth it. This month I wrote about honeybees and melon-stacking. The next installment will be about the tesseract, because a movie based on a certain book is coming out in March and will undoubtedly be showing in the local theater. I have small hopes for the movie, alas.<br />
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I have revised the Eladogran Cosmogony a bit, bringing my translation more in line with the original texts. You can now find it under the <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_21.html">Library of Enoch</a> tab at the top of the page.<br />
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I've been reading quite a bit of crime fiction from the forties and fifties lately, mostly thanks to a Library of America collection I checked out at the library. I'm also still working through the correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and <i>The History of the Conquest of Mexico </i>and a few books about four-dimensional geometry. I recently read and greatly enjoyed several volumes of Hellboy <strike>comics</strike> graphic novels. I got into these through the excellent Guillermo del Toro movies. A big red devil with sawed-off horns battling Nazis, Rasputin, and evil gods out of H. P. Lovecraft: what's not to love? The art is wonderfully expressive and minimalistic; I find that I'm not a big fan of the hyper-realistic, cinematic presentation of superhero comics these days.<br />
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All matters that might get turned into full-fledged posts at some point, if I feel like it...<br />
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ADDED: And here's <a href="https://www.blackgate.com/2018/03/27/march-short-story-roundup-part-1/" target="_blank">an appreciative review</a> of "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" by Fletcher Vredenburgh. Thanks, Fletcher! Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-68133429510759722202018-02-05T08:34:00.000-08:002018-02-05T08:34:23.226-08:00"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" at HFQ<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOWZsoxedUE6yr6uPHVTIPt-LhDceHyJk0N8Oi0qAsJFMXli2fwKMzeL8kOCtzh9HHRiF5pRJLIvioeB0G0wyNV0XRKh_IwNHsx4pUh2VGOctcHCO0-brQgPz7vrB4yMvc2HZUuOjhMA/s1600/Carvajal+post+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="746" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOWZsoxedUE6yr6uPHVTIPt-LhDceHyJk0N8Oi0qAsJFMXli2fwKMzeL8kOCtzh9HHRiF5pRJLIvioeB0G0wyNV0XRKh_IwNHsx4pUh2VGOctcHCO0-brQgPz7vrB4yMvc2HZUuOjhMA/s400/Carvajal+post+1.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
The vagabond conquistador Francisco Carvajal y Lopez continues his grim, rapacious, and not-terribly-successful trek across southwest Texas in the latest installment of his exploits, "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2391" target="_blank">White Rainbow and Brown Devil</a>," a tale of high adventure and weird horror appearing in <a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2436" target="_blank">Issue 35</a> of <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>. Published out of chronological order because of the awesome Triple Crossover Event that, as the perspicacious reader may have noticed, took place at <i>HFQ</i> last year, it falls between "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2139" target="_blank">Heart of Tashyas</a>" and "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds</a>," being a sequel to the former but preceding the latter by an as-yet-undetermined-by-historians amount of time.<br />
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"White Rainbow and Brown Devil" takes place in a geographically telescoped version of what's now Val Verde County, following the Rio Grande and the route of U.S. 90, from Sycamore Creek in the east, past San Felipe Springs, across the Devil's River, and through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminole_Canyon_State_Park_and_Historic_Site" target="_blank">Seminole Canyon</a>, to the Pecos River in the west. As my bio states, I'm a circuit-riding professor; this is one of the circuits I ride. (In a pick-up truck, not a horse.) Past Del Rio, the country is desolate, torturously prickly, beautiful, and slightly sinister, with ruined stone buildings here and there, and abandoned bridges from the old highway paralleling the modern one. The bed of the Devil's River is under the Amistad Reservoir now; one wonders what other dark secrets those placid waters hide.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfd4LR_yo8cb009t2I8W_CZx-NXikLU5iOcI6zLvs-ZY09Kb8WAPAzh2Mq_ez177SFm_LgCNf_wpC-6gwUkv80T9YcrIX3Nt_gRPIxfqyakijytlyEuGT2ORZbueHuW5TdZt4P2GZ4Xg/s1600/Seminole+Canyon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="900" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfd4LR_yo8cb009t2I8W_CZx-NXikLU5iOcI6zLvs-ZY09Kb8WAPAzh2Mq_ez177SFm_LgCNf_wpC-6gwUkv80T9YcrIX3Nt_gRPIxfqyakijytlyEuGT2ORZbueHuW5TdZt4P2GZ4Xg/s400/Seminole+Canyon.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Fate Bell Shelter, Seminole Canyon</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Seminole Canyon, which is named after Black Seminole Scouts posted there by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century, was first inhabited something like 10,000 years ago, with paintings in Panther Cave and the Fate Bell Shelter dating back some 8,000 years, among the oldest in North America.<br />
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Other items of note appearing in <a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2436" target="_blank"><i>HFQ</i> Issue 35</a> include stories "That Sleep of Death" by Mary-Jean Harris and "Things of Shreds and Patches" by Norman Doeg, and poems "Washer at the Ford" by James Byers and "Dragon Mountain" by Mary Soon Lee. The issue also contains <i>HFQ</i>'s first foray into audio, with the poem "Fire Lover" written and narrated by Karen Bovenmeyer, who also narrates for the horror podcast <a href="http://pseudopod.org/" target="_blank">Pseudopod</a>. Please go check it out!<br />
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The picture that accompanies my own story is an original watercolor. <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2018/01/francisco-carvajal-y-lopez-self-portrait.html">You can read about it here.</a>Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-90886928003347484542018-01-29T14:21:00.000-08:002018-02-03T15:30:11.386-08:00The Four-Dimensional Lord of DanceI wrote two posts last year dealing with the fourth dimension:<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/05/views-of-tesseract.html">Views of a Tesseract</a></li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/08/arts-and-crafts-in-four-dimensions.html"> Arts and Crafts in Four Dimensions</a></li>
</ul>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-0-yLtiPq96DtCZ1W-PY_vijdkj-pY7pbaHL91JNTBKSQdbvBhIVvWTzKd0Q1x3vEyBzQLgsTMt5ltAaXQqLZeM49J1-cCXjdaiw0QrKp4yfPUhYnlmgzjkOZn4K6tIxsZYqS4GzxQ/s1600/Tessaract.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-0-yLtiPq96DtCZ1W-PY_vijdkj-pY7pbaHL91JNTBKSQdbvBhIVvWTzKd0Q1x3vEyBzQLgsTMt5ltAaXQqLZeM49J1-cCXjdaiw0QrKp4yfPUhYnlmgzjkOZn4K6tIxsZYqS4GzxQ/s320/Tessaract.jpg" width="274" /></a></div>
The focus was mathematical, but along the way I looked at how the fourth (spacial) dimension appears in the works of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, and, most memorably, Madeleine L'Engle, whose <i>A Wrinkle in Time</i> is about to appear as an uninspired-looking Disney movie in March (<i>sigh</i>). I also talked about mathematical visionaries and mystics like Paul S. Donchian and Charles Howard Hinton, both of whom made real contributions to the field, if only in the sense that they developed and humanized what the academics were saying in their inaccessible research articles, and both of whom might be labeled as cranks or crackpots.<br />
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Since then I've done a little research on Hinton, Donchian, et al., and have found a number of other links between the idea of a fourth spacial dimension and various forms of spirituality or mysticism. For instance, the German astronomer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Karl_Friedrich_Z%C3%B6llner" target="_blank">Friedrich Zöllner</a> (1834 – 1882) apparently tried to use the fourth dimension explain Spiritualist phenomena. In his eagerness, he was imposed upon by the medium Henry Slade in experiments that have since been debunked. Fantasy and horror authors in their turn used the claims of Spiritualism in their stories; some, like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, actually subscribed to its views. Hinton, who wrote a number of "scientific romances" himself, was a post-Christian altruist who speculated that spiritual agencies might work by means of the fourth dimension and believed in something like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return" target="_blank">eternal return</a>.<br />
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Some Christians of the late Victorian era, disconcerted by the advance of materialism, attempted to colonize the fourth dimension themselves. For other Christians, such as the liberal theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/02/flatland-romance-of-many-dimensions.html"><i>Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions</i></a>, a book much admired by Hinton), higher spacial dimensions were merely a metaphor for gradual way in which the human mind must approach divine truths. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3r5G76Mecg9T4w4RV_K2Qo87TZ2beAuVwjZtTGxvE0LgBi4WFzN0mrAHM35_bHaZTxSnVL-rVlNqdwynplExQe-QwBO4Dt2HrOMoeKAkq4kXBPXcFBckrB7j5J6yKAcxW7yF8fYrfFQ/s1600/Dali+Crucifixion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="319" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3r5G76Mecg9T4w4RV_K2Qo87TZ2beAuVwjZtTGxvE0LgBi4WFzN0mrAHM35_bHaZTxSnVL-rVlNqdwynplExQe-QwBO4Dt2HrOMoeKAkq4kXBPXcFBckrB7j5J6yKAcxW7yF8fYrfFQ/s400/Dali+Crucifixion.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dali_Crucifixion_hypercube.jpg" target="_blank"><i>source</i></a>]</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Salvador Dalí appears to have used the fourth dimension in a similar way, in his famous 1954 painting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_(Corpus_Hypercubus)" target="_blank"><i>Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)</i></a>, which portrays Christ crucified on the net of a tesseract / hypercube / 8-cell (Schläfli symbol {4,3,3}) hovering over a square grid (Schläfli symbol {4,4}), illustrating the incomprehensibility of God to man.<br />
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I have in my hands a Dover edition of <i>Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton</i>, which includes several of Hinton's scientific romances. It's edited and has an excellent introduction by Rudolph v.B. Rucker, also known as Rudy Rucker, author of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ware-Tetralogy-Rudy-Rucker/dp/1607012111" target="_blank">Ware Tetralogy</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spaceland-Fourth-Dimension-Doherty-Associates-ebook/dp/B000FBJD7A" target="_blank">a modern tribute to <i>Flatland</i></a> and all-around <a href="http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/" target="_blank">sci-fi author of note</a>. So no doubt I'll soon be posting about all of this yet again.<br />
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* </div>
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My post on <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/08/arts-and-crafts-in-four-dimensions.html">four-dimensional arts and crafts</a> includes an account of my building the sections and net of a 120-cell. More recently, I've printed and built the sections and net of a 24-cell, which is a regular four-dimensional polytope built from twenty-four octahedra.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYUbkxKpcF3G-_Q5dkcvE0Teora1FSKNDdb9L5i4AUCx_WzI8eMEeY0Bq_JYx7UaEaW9mGb0GHvml9T_SYPLSlVUkPTh012xbXivMSWTn9JblkxkQUVqDpU41vtTlNi-51eMkJs-qOqQ/s1600/Sections+and+Net+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1328" data-original-width="1600" height="331" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYUbkxKpcF3G-_Q5dkcvE0Teora1FSKNDdb9L5i4AUCx_WzI8eMEeY0Bq_JYx7UaEaW9mGb0GHvml9T_SYPLSlVUkPTh012xbXivMSWTn9JblkxkQUVqDpU41vtTlNi-51eMkJs-qOqQ/s400/Sections+and+Net+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The sections proceed as follows, with colors given as the craft paints I bought at Wal-Mart: (I) the octahedral cell at the "south pole" (<i>Parchment</i>); (II) the truncated octahedral section cut by a hyperplane through the midpoints of the edges "above" the south pole (<i>Parchment </i>and <i>Real Brown</i>); (III) the cuboctahedral equatorial section cut by a hyperplane through the set of vertices to which these edges connect (<i>Look At Me Blue</i> and <i>Real Brown</i>); (IV) the truncated octahedral section analogous to Section II but in the "northern hemisphere" (<i>Look At Me Blue</i> and <i>Real Brown</i>); and (V) the octahedral cell at the "north pole" (<i>Coffee Latte</i>). <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8fUiqhxebAwsScCA-ZXVXjTDOe2DajHFHoEmBkoDTJ2LXujNz-78tu3qhEMyBWI2lL57-v6928acLx4HV9Di-4Q6F4pHJA7sal5SywUGpgH6XFTXQ46GYhEDV9aKseYnPP96fF9RVQ/s1600/Net+8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1497" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY8fUiqhxebAwsScCA-ZXVXjTDOe2DajHFHoEmBkoDTJ2LXujNz-78tu3qhEMyBWI2lL57-v6928acLx4HV9Di-4Q6F4pHJA7sal5SywUGpgH6XFTXQ46GYhEDV9aKseYnPP96fF9RVQ/s400/Net+8.jpg" width="372" /></a></div>
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The net has the "south pole" at the center and the "north pole" at the base. For reasons fully known only to my subconscious, but partly inspired by Dalí's painting above, I decided to model it after traditional depictions of the Hindu god Shiva as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja" target="_blank"><i>Nataraja</i></a> or Lord of Dance, with three-fold rotational symmetry.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE5IOdLuLUNjfwn59SyZypi7SYCEFfwAVU52o2W_pzzdnOAjHC2w_krQGLTlzZEu0i6HyzFWDPrljQkMCuyUVzmeNSPq2ayDlyhr4fYdd4ZuM-XhAkbMM1ZVW5e9vck-cQKP3PARECBw/s1600/Shiva.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="739" data-original-width="576" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE5IOdLuLUNjfwn59SyZypi7SYCEFfwAVU52o2W_pzzdnOAjHC2w_krQGLTlzZEu0i6HyzFWDPrljQkMCuyUVzmeNSPq2ayDlyhr4fYdd4ZuM-XhAkbMM1ZVW5e9vck-cQKP3PARECBw/s400/Shiva.jpg" width="311" /></a></div>
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Shiva is the destroyer, and his dance is the cosmic dance of creation / destruction. That puts me in mind of the line from the <i>Bhagavad Gita</i>, uttered by Krishna, <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/06/land-of-enchantment-and-atom-bombs.html">quoted by Robert Oppenheimer</a>, and used by me in the title of a short story: "Now <a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I am become Death, destroyer of worlds</a>."Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-64167408073874090482018-01-25T07:08:00.000-08:002018-01-25T07:08:02.500-08:00Francisco Carvajal y Lopez: A (Self) PortraitMy story "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is set to appear in <a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/" target="_blank"><i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i></a> Issue #35 in February. It's a direct sequel to my first Carvajal story, "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2139" target="_blank">Heart of Tashyas</a>," coming between it and "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds</a>," and takes place in the Southwest Texas border region, which is where I live, beginning at Sycamore Creek and traveling up the Rio Grande across Devil's River and Seminole Canyon to the Pecos crossing. (The geography is somewhat telescoped.)<br />
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The story will be accompanied by an original watercolor painting of its protagonist, the vagabond conquistador Francisco Carvajal y Lopez:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwF6Op_N6UW96NDy23iGLV2CdrvzmO57RY6-tFbEU-yuhq3nA7s0aegjuHfWK5d9oldXBzKsNzai_Kmrx6NpBku8Ic2dp7Z4vrPkhDQa-6SUJdUi-WaX_d-9TWaq_8kucsAOS9uOrUzg/s1600/Carvajal+post+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="746" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwF6Op_N6UW96NDy23iGLV2CdrvzmO57RY6-tFbEU-yuhq3nA7s0aegjuHfWK5d9oldXBzKsNzai_Kmrx6NpBku8Ic2dp7Z4vrPkhDQa-6SUJdUi-WaX_d-9TWaq_8kucsAOS9uOrUzg/s400/Carvajal+post+2.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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That is, essentially, a self portrait, except that I don't have long hair, I don't wear earrings, I don't encourage birds of the American subtropics to perch on my shoulder, and I don't go about armed to the teeth. Ultimately it's just a picture of the guy in my story, but to me it also asks the question <i>To what extent do I identify with my protagonist?</i> without really answering it. I looked to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo" target="_blank">Frida Kahlo</a> for inspiration.<br />
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Here's the slightly modified version that will accompany the story:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghfYAqNO-D5XDia7d0DvQlZ8lnzNrrjU6ZttqbVEr4LuSZqS9FGYeZDXAC27xwNpUT8Kak_eFVVbqQ5jmxLTZ_K1rH1zSGv9vILFnaMXFb7rxzuiEHyLB-pQZiH7ZRE06wsMArBkm3Mw/s1600/Carvajal+post+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="746" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghfYAqNO-D5XDia7d0DvQlZ8lnzNrrjU6ZttqbVEr4LuSZqS9FGYeZDXAC27xwNpUT8Kak_eFVVbqQ5jmxLTZ_K1rH1zSGv9vILFnaMXFb7rxzuiEHyLB-pQZiH7ZRE06wsMArBkm3Mw/s400/Carvajal+post+1.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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That's a green jay on his/my shoulder, incidentally. In the United States, green jays are found only in South Texas. The sewage treatment plant outside the town I live in is pretty much the northern limit of their range. I sometimes go there to bird-watch, and the jays are my favorite thing to see. A magnificent, lime green bird with a dark blue head. Much of the adjoining nature reserve occupies an old landfill covered with thickets of prickly pear; Carvajal's first adventure in "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2139" target="_blank">Heart of Tashyas</a>" began at the foot of the small extinct volcano just across the highway, on a site now occupied by trailer homes and the ruins of a fort.<br />
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Here's the initial sketch:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMaY0JB1kTwQYNsAbgaP2wU0GJajmu0EzarPpAgZTsCP_6C2IIZbMJYW4vvRQrUV6O56LjG7Ns7M2RlDLWrje1zfqdl_KewW1iPBX2Yvt1_N0bVtueiY6hFf0q62X0Uh111c2KoPpUQ/s1600/Carvajal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="756" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaMaY0JB1kTwQYNsAbgaP2wU0GJajmu0EzarPpAgZTsCP_6C2IIZbMJYW4vvRQrUV6O56LjG7Ns7M2RlDLWrje1zfqdl_KewW1iPBX2Yvt1_N0bVtueiY6hFf0q62X0Uh111c2KoPpUQ/s400/Carvajal.jpg" width="287" /></a></div>
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The background is a prickly pear cactus wallpaper design of my own devising:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCsH5o0YV4F6qFR_hX9ZHkd1NNB7xoUp1v6Utj7vfDGvSnSoikA-3Sc1pRss_1K9PRH0CNDlwEDe6aRyyutD_gkcE-af_ZGijM0-wTMO62XNujOLo-RW5NMVKFl9gs8Fgl8VM6yk2Mkw/s1600/Cactus+wallpaper+post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="750" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCsH5o0YV4F6qFR_hX9ZHkd1NNB7xoUp1v6Utj7vfDGvSnSoikA-3Sc1pRss_1K9PRH0CNDlwEDe6aRyyutD_gkcE-af_ZGijM0-wTMO62XNujOLo-RW5NMVKFl9gs8Fgl8VM6yk2Mkw/s400/Cactus+wallpaper+post.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>
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There are exactly seventeen types of wallpaper symmetry. My design is described by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group" target="_blank">the group known as <b>pg</b></a> in the IUC (International Union of Crystallography) notation. I created it by drawing a single prickly pear image and copying it via translations and glide reflections.<br />
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I cast this wallpaper upon the Internet for noncommercial use, but I urge the reader to employ it in papering a room <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20387/20387-h/20387-h.htm#Page_49" target="_blank">only with extreme caution</a>.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-35828628826916721252018-01-11T07:29:00.002-08:002018-01-11T07:41:57.180-08:00Nightmare Alley<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXKZ-2Qz79nG2gwME2YmUayaVkYWRizLEkLXVZtY_PrS-tlloQBtQzjIWKeBmsamakUmnAERl5WqZ9X3hDaTsvctHXG55F_5hBCWEchH_vyX5vyzz3Y4oqADm4DlYVz07h3lWm85rdVw/s1600/Nightmare+Alley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="358" data-original-width="241" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXKZ-2Qz79nG2gwME2YmUayaVkYWRizLEkLXVZtY_PrS-tlloQBtQzjIWKeBmsamakUmnAERl5WqZ9X3hDaTsvctHXG55F_5hBCWEchH_vyX5vyzz3Y4oqADm4DlYVz07h3lWm85rdVw/s320/Nightmare+Alley.jpg" width="215" /></a>Question: What does William Lindsay Gresham, the American author of <i>Nightmare Alley</i>, a bitingly vitriolic, pessimistic, cynical novel about the rise and fall of a carnie conman, have in common with C. S. Lewis, the popular apologist and beloved writer of children's fantasy books?<br />
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Answer: They were both married to Joy Davidman.<br />
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I first learned of <i>Nightmare Alley</i>, which came out in 1946, when I watched the <i>film noir</i> of the same name starring Tyrone Power. After being rather difficult to find for a long time, it was available for streaming through Amazon for a brief period last fall, but has now mysteriously vanished again. It's an excellent film, a true gem among noirs. I must be getting worldly-wise, because I could tell exactly where the film was glossing over seedy details or pulling its punches. Most importantly, I could tell exactly how the story was <i>supposed </i>to end. I don't want to spoil it, but it's hard to think of a darker ending.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIHZla8evyIJTxMApiGdJUQoMwkIYazXyvBVBtVOGcLxAdo4F_5GVibhfNQGzqPC2_bvDnAEI4RZv7DYAlP3z51tpg61djOgrz8WNvDdZUVy8fR4wzlWRqcnD9D0W8cRjKTYkHa0rOPA/s1600/Nightmare+Alley+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="242" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIHZla8evyIJTxMApiGdJUQoMwkIYazXyvBVBtVOGcLxAdo4F_5GVibhfNQGzqPC2_bvDnAEI4RZv7DYAlP3z51tpg61djOgrz8WNvDdZUVy8fR4wzlWRqcnD9D0W8cRjKTYkHa0rOPA/s320/Nightmare+Alley+2.jpg" width="211" /></a>If the film is excellent, the novel is only that much better, a detached, merciless dissection of a man destroyed by his own small-mindedness and lack of self-understanding. Stanton Carlisle, the protagonist, uses what he learns at the carnival to start a big-time mentalist act, then reinvents himself as a spiritualist minister in a bid for money, lots of money. I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that it all blows up in his face. He shows no mercy to marks and gets none when it's his turn to be the prey. The last line of the novel is so cold it burns.<br />
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And yet it's impossible not to pity Stan. There are several flashbacks to his childhood: you can't really look at a well-portrayed kid and say, yeah, he gets what's coming to him. As the pieces of his backstory fall into place, you see the picture of a child warped by selfish parents whose dysfunctional marriage pushes him into the adult world of fear, lies, compromise, manipulation, frustration, and abuse. The novel leans heavily (though not explicitly) on certain well-known Freudian theories, but its examination of Stan's psychology is no less incisive for all that.<br />
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<i>Nightmare Alley</i> is a grotesque but beautiful kaleidoscope of twisted humanity, in which the only freaks, inside the carnival or out, are those who aren't freaks. It's aptly named, because you can see the monstrous ending from far off in the very first pages, then proceed to step slowly toward it with the inevitability of a nightmare. <i>Nightmare Alley</i> is a masterpiece of noir.<br />
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A brief but detailed account of Gresham's life can be found <a href="https://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/archives/200007/0019.html" target="_blank">here</a>. He got to know the ins and outs of the carny world through a fellow volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Shortly after the war his first marriage ended in divorce. He began drinking heavily and attempted suicide, after which he turned to writing and editing, marrying Davidman, his second wife, in 1942. They had two sons. His abiding interest in sideshows, spiritualism, magic acts, and debunking molded his literary career as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction.<br />
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In an account I can't seem to locate right now, I read that he and his wife both became interested in Christianity and the works of C. S. Lewis; he ultimately moved on to other things (like Spiritualism and Scientology, strangely enough), but Davidman, who was a Jewish atheist, became a Christian and traveled to England to meet Lewis. Gresham had an affair with Davidman's cousin, Renee Rodriguez, while she was away. He had also become abusive toward her and their children, and their marriage ended in divorce, after which he married Rodriguez. Davidman's subsequent marriage to Lewis was made famous by his writings, most notably by <i>A Grief Observed</i>, written after her death in 1960. Gresham's sons remained with Lewis.<br />
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Gresham committed suicide at a Manhattan hotel in 1962 after being diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. In his pockets they found business cards that read: <i>No Address. No Phone. No Business. No Money. Retired.</i>Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-55527681218534613442018-01-08T15:45:00.000-08:002018-02-23T08:39:43.958-08:00Metapost 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Tpy3ZNBj9Q3m1plMV1Mte7_GGQRRM5-URgRa5mIV3fKQjynSa4-OXu43OWhU8AG5wWu8PJc7H6nbfHaC5GBmZnr-KcbWDHDNCJ3ZA4lyMOb9zrN7d2D5DoSWs2bOZ-uIaE2F2upo6g/s1600/Vulcan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="578" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Tpy3ZNBj9Q3m1plMV1Mte7_GGQRRM5-URgRa5mIV3fKQjynSa4-OXu43OWhU8AG5wWu8PJc7H6nbfHaC5GBmZnr-KcbWDHDNCJ3ZA4lyMOb9zrN7d2D5DoSWs2bOZ-uIaE2F2upo6g/s320/Vulcan.jpg" width="192" /></a></div>
The year 2017 has come and gone. Time for a year-end retrospective metapost!<br />
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First, and most importantly to me, the list of books I read in 2017, in reverse chronological order:<br />
<ul>
<li><i>The Aztecs: People of the Sun</i> by Alfonso Caso<i> </i></li>
<li><i>Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said</i> by Philip K. Dick</li>
<li><i>Story of a Soul</i> by Therese of Lisieux *</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/12/haunted-mesa-by-louis-lamour.html"><i>The Haunted Mesa</i> by Louis L'Amour</a></li>
<li><i>The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren</i> by Nelson Algren</li>
<li><i>The Haunting of Hill House</i> by Shirley Jackson *</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/11/world-fantasy-convention-2017.html"><i>Now Wait For Last Year</i> by Philip K. Dick</a></li>
<li><i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i> by Lewis Carroll *</li>
<li><i>Kiss Me, Deadly</i> by Mickey Spillane</li>
<li><i>Mona Lisa Overdrive</i> by William Gibson</li>
<li><i>The Return of the King</i> by J. R. R. Tolkien *</li>
<li><i>The Big Kill</i> by Mickey Spillane</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/10/warbles-and-bots-out-of-hive.html"><i>The Godwhale</i> by T. J. Bass</a></li>
<li><i>One Lonely Night</i> by Mickey Spillane</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/10/warbles-and-bots-out-of-hive.html"><i>Half Past Human</i> by T. J. Bass</a></li>
<li><i>The Stars My Destination</i> by Alfred Bester</li>
<li><i>Count Zero</i> by William Gibson</li>
<li><i>King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved
Geometry</i> by Siobhan Roberts</li>
<li><i>The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 3</i> by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn</li>
<li><i>The Two Towers</i> by J. R. R. Tolkien *</li>
<li><i>The Ministry of Fear</i> by Graham Greene</li>
<li><i>David Copperfield</i> by Charles Dickens</li>
<li><i>Necronomicon</i> by H. P. Lovecraft</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/06/vulcans-glory-and-other-relics.html"><i>Vulcan's Glory</i> by D. C. Fontana</a></li>
<li><i>The House on the Borderland</i> by William Hope Hodgson</li>
<li><i>Cugel's Saga</i> by Jack Vance</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/05/views-of-tesseract.html">The Preparation of the Child for Science by Mary EverestBoole</a></li>
<li><i>The Russia House</i> by John le Carré</li>
<li><i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> by J. R. R. Tolkien *</li>
<li><i>Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest</i> by Earle R.
Forrest</li>
<li><i>The Summer Stargazer</i> by Robert Claiborne</li>
<li><i>Life of William Blake</i> by Alexander Gilchrist</li>
<li><i>The Gulag Archipelago: Volume 2</i> by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn</li>
<li><i>Regular Polytopes</i> by H. S. M. Coxeter</li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/04/april-is-cruelest-month.html"><i>A Storm of Wings</i> by M. John Harrison</a></li>
<li><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/04/april-is-cruelest-month.html"><i>The Pastel City</i> by M. John Harrison</a></li>
<li><i>The Pueblo Revolt</i> by David Roberts</li>
<li><i>Pueblo Gods and Myths</i> by Hamilton A. Tyler</li>
<li><i>The Conquering Sword of Conan</i> by Robert E. Howard</li>
<li><i>Life in the Pueblos</i> by Ruth Underhill</li>
<li><i>Hell House</i> by Richard Matheson</li>
<li><i>A Wizard of Earthsea</i> by Ursula K. LeGuin *</li>
<li><i>Vengeance is Mine!</i> by Mickey Spillane</li>
</ul>
Isn't it sad how I only read old stuff? What's the matter with me? I do actually have a few newer things on my list of to-reads; my immanent venture into the world of e-books will hopefully help with that. (I'm not a complete luddite, just ten years behind the times. I do have a cell phone now. That is, my wife does.)<br />
<br />
Asterixes denote works read aloud to my children. I read aloud to them for half an hour to an hour every night. Because they begged me to, I read them <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> this year. I'd been reluctant, thinking them a bit young (seven and nine) and reflecting that, after all, you can only read a book for the first time once. But they were starting to read it without me, so I figured I'd better take the opportunity while I still had it.<br />
<br />
It was a long project: we went in something like real time, from Frodo's departure from Bag End to his awakening on the Field of Cormallen, and decided that we'd have to start it on September 22 next time around. This is my third time to read <i>LOTR</i> aloud, but...I still cry at certain parts. I'm not ashamed, dammit. <br />
<br />
My literary high point for the year is probably my completion of <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i>. My low point would be those four Mickey Spillane novels, none of which I can clearly remember now, although I do seem to recall one whose resolution involved a baby blowing a woman's brains out with a handgun. I began <i>Kiss Me, Deadly</i> while standing in line at Wal-Mart, waiting to score a Super NES Classic when it became available at midnight of its release date, if that gives you any idea of the luridness of my daily life.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8d5uYSobCquF7_KAFXu1qqKIhPVQMppkbNKrTJlLtvLMbli8JgwDDqQzLlD_OSVCsgYSIXbcq-PjUk2azCpMeTWvJ8LVaZ1dAB2VV3s6XeDplOwKB_XrQAjGQf4cZ41ouL-oovplvA/s1600/Spillane+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="952" data-original-width="713" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb8d5uYSobCquF7_KAFXu1qqKIhPVQMppkbNKrTJlLtvLMbli8JgwDDqQzLlD_OSVCsgYSIXbcq-PjUk2azCpMeTWvJ8LVaZ1dAB2VV3s6XeDplOwKB_XrQAjGQf4cZ41ouL-oovplvA/s320/Spillane+1.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
But here's an amusing Mickey Spillane story I heard at Thanksgiving. My godfather, who, like Spillane, lived in South Carolina, used to know a bar or some such place also frequented by Spillane. He went out one night with someone from out of town, and they saw Spillane. "Hey, want to meet Mickey Spillane?" my godfather asked. They went over and, like an old buddy, my godfather said, "Mickey, I'd like you to meet so-and-so." Spillane gave them both a hearty handshake and hello. It isn't known whether he realized he'd never met <i>either </i>of the two.<br />
<br />
My 2017 reading completion rate is a bit of a falling-off from previous years, but in my defense I should list the works I'm in the middle of:<br />
<ul>
<li><i>History of the Conquest of Mexico</i> by William H. Prescott</li>
<li><i>The Habit of Being</i> by Flannery O'Connor</li>
<li><i>Summa Theologica</i> by Thomas Aquinas</li>
</ul>
Not exactly light reading! There are also bits and pieces by writers like Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Descartes, Nietzsche, and others. I've also read a bunch of <strike>comic books</strike> graphic novels and manga, including <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/01/superman-comics.html">four superman comics</a>, the first omnibus edition of Wonder Woman comics by George Perez<i>, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind</i>, and <i>Akira</i>. I meant to write a post about Wonder Woman comics, but seeing the movie (which everyone seemed to like so much but which I found depressingly stupid) sort of took the wind out of my sails. Sometime soon, perhaps.<br />
<br />
As for stuff <i>I</i> produced this year, I had two Carvajal novelettes appear in the august e-pages of <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8aMfZ0e5WEr_C6vB1nr3E67Fq7z1IF5gmaRj3laAS3U18yefwnLW5vnn69qb8kZp7vrBjDykyPIXOr59eGqKGd1sAfub_rli800x4WITgJTSlO21a3KJhj8MuW_6iCINhOe5hshxwbQ/s1600/Carvajal+paint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1134" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8aMfZ0e5WEr_C6vB1nr3E67Fq7z1IF5gmaRj3laAS3U18yefwnLW5vnn69qb8kZp7vrBjDykyPIXOr59eGqKGd1sAfub_rli800x4WITgJTSlO21a3KJhj8MuW_6iCINhOe5hshxwbQ/s400/Carvajal+paint.jpg" width="282" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2139" target="_blank">Heart of Tashyas, <i>HFQ</i> #31</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I've got a couple more sitting in the trunk, to be produced in the future if there seems to be interest in more. One day I'd like to see a collection of Carvajal stories published in some way, shape, or form.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjguKoL-wjlERmnHx9jihJAnJbugeI-haE7qiBieFCw0EmCayDAy1e5nwmMW39R4f7bk5rwFFd0qspGhIia0KYA5F5dW-IaFIebw9pK3j5hZIAGf77t7c_YHljn7tCFUtmLVhqW3KEUSg/s1600/Death+Destroyer+post+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1085" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjguKoL-wjlERmnHx9jihJAnJbugeI-haE7qiBieFCw0EmCayDAy1e5nwmMW39R4f7bk5rwFFd0qspGhIia0KYA5F5dW-IaFIebw9pK3j5hZIAGf77t7c_YHljn7tCFUtmLVhqW3KEUSg/s400/Death+Destroyer+post+2.jpg" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds, <i>HFQ</i> #33</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The third installment of my Carvajal narrative will appear in <i>HFQ</i> next month. Here's the sketch for the accompanying illustration:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKCrMkxXEQq7JA3IgG6U1Vq0MtPgrRDYhJ7uhCi85PYJDSNNa0XMUSgPeBvhMNaYUmr32ZP8RynN8y66wW2wbGuYGTKToLxnk44dVO-MzyqqVPTpkykRSEnqcO-ffFQ4ElQtqjS9Kh-w/s1600/Carvajal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="756" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKCrMkxXEQq7JA3IgG6U1Vq0MtPgrRDYhJ7uhCi85PYJDSNNa0XMUSgPeBvhMNaYUmr32ZP8RynN8y66wW2wbGuYGTKToLxnk44dVO-MzyqqVPTpkykRSEnqcO-ffFQ4ElQtqjS9Kh-w/s400/Carvajal.jpg" width="287" /></a></div>
<br />
That's based on a self-portrait, incidentally, though I don't have a pirate earring, and I don't let my hair grow that long these days. (I do like to go around with a sword in each hand, however.) The prickly pear wallpaper pattern, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group#Group_pg_(%C3%97%C3%97)" target="_blank">which is of type <b>pg</b></a>, is my own invention. I'll include the pattern itself in a future post.<br />
<br />
All of which reminds me: one high point of 2017 was my attendance at the <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/11/world-fantasy-convention-2017.html">World Fantasy Convention</a> in San Antonio, where I got to meet assorted heroes, villains, and rogues of the fantasy publication world in person, and had the heady experience of encountering some of my very own writing and illustration in the dealers' room.<br />
<br />
I also showed my art in a one-man exhibition on the Sul Ross State University campus in Alpine, Texas. I sold a few pieces, gave a talk about art, math, and writing, ate some tasty snacks, and in general had a good time.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHi4l1YsSLlFjd31C8CPidU8BCxzW6Rd-v1Onwq7V-331Ce_siAOVvpwF-bWQUL0i0JI-oMJyX0gbDgIr_wIyUk3M5zWod4B0meSWo5F0-CkIrtI-O1WMB3NB0M3uKLTDWvOlakllC6w/s1600/alpine+art+post+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHi4l1YsSLlFjd31C8CPidU8BCxzW6Rd-v1Onwq7V-331Ce_siAOVvpwF-bWQUL0i0JI-oMJyX0gbDgIr_wIyUk3M5zWod4B0meSWo5F0-CkIrtI-O1WMB3NB0M3uKLTDWvOlakllC6w/s400/alpine+art+post+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to get any pictures during the closing reception. Some of the pictures will be familiar to readers of my books.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJO_DhcgHS5ntyjQJaEdAJg7M9-fQHymOl3T8890RS4IFQgBdo9pMStz2KmxM7U4njGEaOmTatqkHd637cU8y7HUqv_YtA9vR1em1-igKzIaniQhvmi7leczMoDpQbvrbyxYCb70RssA/s1600/alpine+art+post+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJO_DhcgHS5ntyjQJaEdAJg7M9-fQHymOl3T8890RS4IFQgBdo9pMStz2KmxM7U4njGEaOmTatqkHd637cU8y7HUqv_YtA9vR1em1-igKzIaniQhvmi7leczMoDpQbvrbyxYCb70RssA/s400/alpine+art+post+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
Speaking of Alpine, Nelson Algren, an author I discovered this year, has an interesting connection to Sul Ross. A college-educated would-be journalist from Chicago, he wound up in Alpine as a drifter / hobo during the Great Depression, where he began working on a novel on a typewriter at Sul Ross, which was then just a normal college. Upon leaving town by train, he decided to take the typewriter with him. The authorities caught up with him further down the line. He was arrested and thrown into the Brewster County jail, where he languished for months until a judge was in the area to hear his case. His lawyer compared him with Jean Valjean during the trial; although convicted, he was released and given twenty-four hours to leave the state. His imprisonment was a harrowing experience that colored his fiction for the rest of his life. He was a proletarian writer whose work petered out in the forties or fifties, though one of his best stories appeared in <i>Playboy</i> in the seventies. I encountered him in Flannery O'Connor's correspondence; O'Connor didn't have a high opinion of his work.<br />
<br />
But back to me. I also showed some painting, drawings, and mathematical sculptures at a gallery in the town where I live. The <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/08/arts-and-crafts-in-four-dimensions.html">120-cell sections and net</a> in the foreground are mine; the painting in the background is not.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsq0pHNUbNiryjAlA1W83TGH8HzA9uLnVOR49p6aaQp9-T5P1jEy3o37oomdRR5hKxxAQYQRb5K6RgBoQaZSlCCS2qe7qeWGh7gSROQpy7Q9ee4JXHpdPe0qOjD68Nejo4z00vVofZ7Q/s1600/local+art+post+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsq0pHNUbNiryjAlA1W83TGH8HzA9uLnVOR49p6aaQp9-T5P1jEy3o37oomdRR5hKxxAQYQRb5K6RgBoQaZSlCCS2qe7qeWGh7gSROQpy7Q9ee4JXHpdPe0qOjD68Nejo4z00vVofZ7Q/s400/local+art+post+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
My sections and net of the 24-cell were also on display, though not shown in this picture. I'll dedicate a post to them in the near future.<br />
<br />
Lately I've mostly been working on <i>Ark of the Hexaemeron</i>, the third installment in my Enoch series. One of my 2018 resolutions is to get it finished and published this year. For various reasons my work speed has slowed down somewhat of late, which is why my blogging continues to be light. But I do plan to continue with <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/search/label/noireviews">reviewing noir films</a>; the next one on my list is, I believe, <i>The Killers</i>.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2FJjO-zi7SkXjPBrBLhnwqvDmidqGDZDM_XcbRLBjRbvulWzE-hzaJ5BwLWWaOJEFQJlhHq6jgZamyzLjPy7QvxLS7mUNhxQkurVEGOowzJdSpI1DbUKCmxkzDSrDY4jciGLcmpmuTw/s1600/White+Worm+post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="963" data-original-width="665" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2FJjO-zi7SkXjPBrBLhnwqvDmidqGDZDM_XcbRLBjRbvulWzE-hzaJ5BwLWWaOJEFQJlhHq6jgZamyzLjPy7QvxLS7mUNhxQkurVEGOowzJdSpI1DbUKCmxkzDSrDY4jciGLcmpmuTw/s400/White+Worm+post.jpg" width="275" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/06/two-deicides-and-church.html">The Coming of the White Worm</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This year I'm also going to <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/02/strangling-behemoth-in-full-color.html">continue tinkering with techniques for digital illustration</a>, as I'd really like to tell a story in pictures some day. I think of my various <i>HFQ</i> illustrations as playful exercises. I've played with doing colors solely on the computer, mainly because it's so difficult to ensure accurate color transitions from watercolor to digital files. In the end I suspect I'll try to compromise somehow.<br />
<br />
Well, that about wraps it up. Let's send 2017 off on a high note!<br />
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Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-4409054554539661032017-12-04T22:00:00.000-08:002017-12-05T08:08:01.888-08:00Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_HrrF0ddM2whtw3hHCu0Ix7StlizHymnQ7m9fNjqiHGdTvq_d9oxUlh3hqMsqCWrX_TMKkVL7NMQU-Q6O_OYyPGLv-dHF2X7p8eKFWX7pVfAmi39jOlCMQbiB93dDdWMMFVZzfzQ5IA/s1600/haunted+mesa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="270" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_HrrF0ddM2whtw3hHCu0Ix7StlizHymnQ7m9fNjqiHGdTvq_d9oxUlh3hqMsqCWrX_TMKkVL7NMQU-Q6O_OYyPGLv-dHF2X7p8eKFWX7pVfAmi39jOlCMQbiB93dDdWMMFVZzfzQ5IA/s320/haunted+mesa.jpg" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Though the cover features a katchina<br />dancer, they never really come up in the<br />book. I've read that the katchina cult,<br />which seems strongest among the modern<br />Hopi, is something of an innovation. At<br />any rate, it has its own complicated and<br />little-known history.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I just did something I thought I'd never do: I read a Louis L'Amour novel.<br />
<br />
Louis L'Amour, if you don't know, is arguably the all-time most popular writer of westerns. He wrote 89 novels in all, a number of which were turned into films and television shows. His presence, though increasingly tattered and faded, was inescapable for someone growing up in Texas in the eighties and nineties, which I did. But I've had an aversion to westerns as long as I can remember, and I was never tempted to crack open one of the zillions of L'Amour paperbacks underfoot back then.<br />
<br />
(Perhaps my aversion dates from the time we got free 3D movie glasses from the county courthouse to watch a 3D John Wayne movie on the local UHF station. I think it was <i>Hondo</i>, which is based on a L'Amour story. Our county seat happened to be called Hondo as well...! Anyway, I remember looking over at my family, all gaping at the TV screen with big grins on their faces, and silently removing my own glasses, content to watch the movie in overlapping red-and-blue, which gave me a headache. But did I really need John Wayne's horse's nose popping out of the screen at me?)<br />
<br />
Anyway, recent events have conspired to soften my old contempt, the primary one being my ill-considered decision to begin writing "Weird Westerns" myself. So I'd already been toying with the idea of picking up a L'Amour novel or two when I learned that L'Amour himself had written a science fiction novel set in the Four Corners area!<br />
<br />
<i>Haunted Mesa</i>, which came out in 1987 and appears to have been the author's last novel, combines the parallel universe conceit with elements of modern Puebloan and ancient Mayan mythology to explicate the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi<sup>1</sup> from cultural centers like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Since I've taken my own stab at that sort of thing, and have driven and camped around the Four Corners region too many times to count<sup>2</sup>, I headed over to our beloved county library and checked it out.<br />
<br />
The novel tells the story of Mike Raglan, a middle-aged professional debunker-of-mysterious-claims, who's called to a remote mesa in Navajo country by the frantic summons of his friend Erik Hokart, an eccentric but wealthy inventor. Hokart has been living on the mesa with the intent of building a house there, but the discovery of mysterious ruins, including a well-preserved kiva with a strange window, has precipitated events resulting in his disappearance. It gradually unfolds that he's held prisoner in a parallel universe, the Third World from which the ancient Anasazi emerged into our world, the Fourth World, and to which they subsequently returned. Raglan spends the first two thirds of the novel investigating the disappearance on this side of the veil, and the last third in his rescue attempt on the Other Side.<br />
<br />
All in all, <i>Haunted Mesa</i> was an enjoyable novel that kept me turning the pages. Unfortunately, it has more plot holes than interdimensional portals, and more loose ends than desert jeep trails. I won't bore you with the details, but if you're someone who notices things like that, they'll jump out at you on every page. Just one example: the story begins with Raglan reading Hokart's journal, which takes him right up to the very instant Hokart was abducted from a cafe<i>.</i> If we pause to reflect on this, we're forced to picture Hokart leaning over the cashier's counter, writing, while shadowy forces are seizing him and firebombing the building.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, the novel's opening chapters remind me strongly of William Hope Hodgson's <i>The House on the Borderland</i>. Come to think of it, the discovered journal in <i>Borderland</i> also ends with an absurd account of the writer's last minutes. Here's to dedicated diarists! In <i>Haunted</i>, though, the atmosphere of mystery and doom is quickly dissipated by a night at a resort condo.<br />
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L'Amour was a veteran writer, and I assume that issues like the ones I describe above don't represent his best work. Did he have a hard time transitioning from westerns to something set in the modern world? That can't be it. After all, he also wrote plenty of well-regarded crime stories. He died of lung cancer the very next year, so perhaps he was simply suffering from ill health. It's possible that the bulk of the book was drafted much earlier, and that he simply put together what he had to get it out there while he still could. That's just speculation, of course.<br />
<br />
There's a lot of historical exposition, mostly consisting of the kinds of things you might have heard from a Mesa Verde park ranger circa 1987. (I camped at Mesa Verde in 1991, 2001, and 2017, and the ranger talks were different every time. Not so much in <i>facts</i> as in <i>assertions</i> and <i>interpretations</i>.<sup>3</sup>) These digressions are fairly repetitive and sometimes last through multiple pages. They often begin, for no discernible reason, right in the middle of the action. It struck me that a little critical editing could have made the narrative considerably tighter.<br />
<br />
One thing I appreciate about <i>Haunted Mesa</i> is how conscious it is of <i>place</i>. Settings are described with vivid, concrete details. The plot unfolds, not against some vague southwestern backdrop, but at specific geographical locations. Actually, most of it reads like L'Amour took a trip to the area, stayed at a certain resort near Cortez, Colorado, drove (or had himself driven) up and down certain roads, and plotted his story around what he saw, which...I'm pretty sure is exactly what he did. Still, it's not a bad effect.<br />
<br />
I took the contour map inside the back cover and (because I'm old-school like that) compared it to my folding AAA Indian Country Map, locating all the roads and landmarks mentioned in the text. Then, because I'm not an absolute luddite, I found it all on Google Earth. In case you're curious, the novel begins on a disused dirt road paralleling No Man's Mesa and passing through 37° 10' 1" N, 110° 29' 27" W; the coordinates of the haunted mesa itself are 37° 14' 30" N, 110° 31' 58" W, though I think L'Amour conflates it with the neighboring Nokai Dome when it suits him. Are all his novels that specific, I wonder? Maybe I'll find out. Or maybe not.<br />
<br />
Without a doubt, the best part of the novel is the last third, when Raglan finally ventures into the Third World. I don't mind a bit that L'Amour took so long to get him there, because I think these things are best when nicely built up. There he teams up with a female Anasazi leader, a grizzled but genteel old cowboy trapped in the Third World for decades, and various other characters, encountering unknown technologies, a "modern" Chacoan city, a mysterious, giant-lizard-infested ruined city more ancient than Egypt or Babylon, a vast labyrinth / government palace / temple complex / library filled with traps and armed enemies, and an impending "spacequake." Pretty awesome.<br />
<br />
So, yeah, despite the issues which a bit of good editing could have taken care of, I'm going to give <i>Haunted Mesa</i> a two-thumbs-up.<br />
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*</div>
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But hey, since we're on the topic of the Four Corners region, how about some pictures from my latest vacation??? We made a big counterclockwise loop, beginning with Chaco Culture National Historic Park, which lies at the end of thirty miles of rough washboard road. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNacHv80U47gIfFsQa-aQF9lwiORkaOnZJiycz2we6rfNhKY7UoBzVars2GZCYhyNHrt1nMSRunBl7DK4RZY760rdLZNXf7EWL7BB0MZlMriVgRc5ijU9l-MJQzGseSVteGApANJJvMA/s1600/FC415.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNacHv80U47gIfFsQa-aQF9lwiORkaOnZJiycz2we6rfNhKY7UoBzVars2GZCYhyNHrt1nMSRunBl7DK4RZY760rdLZNXf7EWL7BB0MZlMriVgRc5ijU9l-MJQzGseSVteGApANJJvMA/s400/FC415.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">
<i>Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. It's famous for the its "sun dagger"<br />petroglyph, </i><i>which appears to have been used by ancestral Puebloans to</i></div>
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<i>mark the </i><i><i>equinoxes and solstices. The site has shifted due to hordes of<br />people tramping</i></i><i> up there to see it, and is now closed to visitors. </i><i><i>Another<br />casualty of the Cultural Uncertainty Principle.</i></i></div>
<i></i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHPZrhl92sfhhRcKzRTGTfhE5VcS02JH-M9lfC-3b8PvFfxpYoY2Dfaz5BltBxKX0W4YufEt85Ne63wdJEMu11Ywh2zmFekLp9ExwVpBaVhsMvj-046Vn73LsnJZVQyAJAy1fa6RVPw/s1600/FC407.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAHPZrhl92sfhhRcKzRTGTfhE5VcS02JH-M9lfC-3b8PvFfxpYoY2Dfaz5BltBxKX0W4YufEt85Ne63wdJEMu11Ywh2zmFekLp9ExwVpBaVhsMvj-046Vn73LsnJZVQyAJAy1fa6RVPw/s400/FC407.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>A great kiva in the Casa Rinconada complex in Chaco Canyon. Nowadays it's<br />theorized that the canyon served as a kind of center for ceremony and trade.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlgTnHmRuy1BHROui7nOY7KXTCIAj_OQsIZPHOJrXfrit1Ha_xTLDIknvWMMuJU-L6NiNrbN8Kiv4fcCNFfeCuO1e7F4SMEJvKCtn7EqUP-a_2D3ENI3j8LU0lKYh5_EA2IPVsxv7AA/s1600/FC409.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlgTnHmRuy1BHROui7nOY7KXTCIAj_OQsIZPHOJrXfrit1Ha_xTLDIknvWMMuJU-L6NiNrbN8Kiv4fcCNFfeCuO1e7F4SMEJvKCtn7EqUP-a_2D3ENI3j8LU0lKYh5_EA2IPVsxv7AA/s400/FC409.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>A famous view in the Pueblo Bonito complex, the largest and most intricate<br />of the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. It was inhabited for about 300 years<br />before being abandoned in the twelfth century.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyrE0TJP-fgpEYTL-So_-zr4cXN0yQrt1ucLOs1PYZcGF-nNq4iQxYf4Mo9HvCl2fJUJIfQkfYECZbc1F_1KNC4NFe9P10CwHLl6YJd0w02_r24ExVfhRsxswZKI58thw4q_H7IFDdNQ/s1600/FC410.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyrE0TJP-fgpEYTL-So_-zr4cXN0yQrt1ucLOs1PYZcGF-nNq4iQxYf4Mo9HvCl2fJUJIfQkfYECZbc1F_1KNC4NFe9P10CwHLl6YJd0w02_r24ExVfhRsxswZKI58thw4q_H7IFDdNQ/s400/FC410.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>I've read that Pueblo Bonito was carefully oriented according to the solar<br />cycle. You can get a better idea of the grandeur of the structure from this<br /> <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Pueblo_Bonito_Aerial.JPG" target="_blank">aerial view</a>.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLAIestywoaeKSDv_rpbXLFYkyMvrg5k5gdUqj8AVS2p7SgAHJHAHgw3xzUXb-p1N-dko3blaYLNGAWg4cq-hnMFOtfJk1vIx6AlQNErL6QrO0H7wg2yMvUwE44nB18-BbXyNV6L7OEg/s1600/FC414.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLAIestywoaeKSDv_rpbXLFYkyMvrg5k5gdUqj8AVS2p7SgAHJHAHgw3xzUXb-p1N-dko3blaYLNGAWg4cq-hnMFOtfJk1vIx6AlQNErL6QrO0H7wg2yMvUwE44nB18-BbXyNV6L7OEg/s400/FC414.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Chaco Canyon at sunset, looking toward Pueblo Bonito from Pueblo del<br />Arroyo.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijigkRcUUQXk1pPQoD5LH3Lq81ZbCk6KfOKnCbRMaJ4IyGvEFrO6jw-F24URVR-3iUMRrrGGkJ_L4X6l0Av8jrlLy0QBec7H6WfpPIUV-t6lBDx9VrIghJ7v3GcZ99Pe8tO5qpOazdpw/s1600/FC501.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijigkRcUUQXk1pPQoD5LH3Lq81ZbCk6KfOKnCbRMaJ4IyGvEFrO6jw-F24URVR-3iUMRrrGGkJ_L4X6l0Av8jrlLy0QBec7H6WfpPIUV-t6lBDx9VrIghJ7v3GcZ99Pe8tO5qpOazdpw/s400/FC501.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>A reconstructed great kiva at the incorrectly named Aztec Ruins National<br />Historic Site, which lies between Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. This is<br />something like what the ruined kiva above might have resembled.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsglnh3hSP7OYblvcbybkPiI5oMRy1PCZAapSxIOR1krDCmleobcoxLblwG8FoFufXHAJCL1OOWrNX3eoJSojQes5snBD63RV69k4r9XgI3KSkhkpsLjn_OPnDLRLkXiRnZZZKxXqsiA/s1600/FC605.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsglnh3hSP7OYblvcbybkPiI5oMRy1PCZAapSxIOR1krDCmleobcoxLblwG8FoFufXHAJCL1OOWrNX3eoJSojQes5snBD63RV69k4r9XgI3KSkhkpsLjn_OPnDLRLkXiRnZZZKxXqsiA/s400/FC605.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Mesa Verde from Balcony House. Though mostly famous for its cliff dwellings,<br />Mesa Verde is just as remarkable for its geology. It's a giant table of rock,<br />tilted toward the south, with immense cliffs along its western edge, where it<br />towers over the desert. From its highest point you can see Shiprock in New<br />Mexico.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghxWhqpljszel4eVCmU8MXAcPkyd9vRs7DMSEVw4crxtJ24xsxud2OoF_5S3squny6iyHceD5ipnaTueN7Q02TaOskQ_qx94PYcgdWj3DMGU25H4r0ncT7J4p-KGYYI3bmNLZ-e8s2gg/s1600/FC704.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghxWhqpljszel4eVCmU8MXAcPkyd9vRs7DMSEVw4crxtJ24xsxud2OoF_5S3squny6iyHceD5ipnaTueN7Q02TaOskQ_qx94PYcgdWj3DMGU25H4r0ncT7J4p-KGYYI3bmNLZ-e8s2gg/s400/FC704.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Cliff Palace, the most famous of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, abandoned<br />sometime before 1300.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIr58N30kmfT9uR8q_nxM3Lw-PEnNez3hofhLT8sh4TFO7x0BaDRNNZMj8T52HVVEF7iXOXYP4Y7jRoZlIV50m-Hz-5gmhk6s34rdWdF1rC45Qr3azZMRwxr6yNtQoQPl8yCSdIGvjvg/s1600/FC607.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIr58N30kmfT9uR8q_nxM3Lw-PEnNez3hofhLT8sh4TFO7x0BaDRNNZMj8T52HVVEF7iXOXYP4Y7jRoZlIV50m-Hz-5gmhk6s34rdWdF1rC45Qr3azZMRwxr6yNtQoQPl8yCSdIGvjvg/s400/FC607.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Mesa Verde, looking south along Navajo Canyon.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5YH1YqrzYo1I40Q4aYuc7axUAfQR8mh1TcBi5NI9ObDbuIPabTK9CnKP2F_qNs-1TNJ29wj4lnJe8ml1qk_aBovIMEDR-z8m8K0lSKlaVc3Z7s9wqPLoBclVKP2v6Cdoh3go1w6-_zw/s1600/FC801.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5YH1YqrzYo1I40Q4aYuc7axUAfQR8mh1TcBi5NI9ObDbuIPabTK9CnKP2F_qNs-1TNJ29wj4lnJe8ml1qk_aBovIMEDR-z8m8K0lSKlaVc3Z7s9wqPLoBclVKP2v6Cdoh3go1w6-_zw/s400/FC801.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Canyon de Chelly, which is in the Navajo Nation, in Arizona. The Navajo<br />still farm and herd at the bottom of the canyon, which is mostly closed<br />to visitors. The cliffs are sheer and tower 600 to 700 feet.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtn4Ly-XdOLOUL8Jq4FAwntMxifH5Az72spZAM2G8aRLibhxDkI1kIvq99mPd4-0eg6i8-WKdZ1SgQU4lYRBxokRsIpb-EqeLF2_LF1TOwrsN85J71hQS1-L_Qksd1laHRBfbfOvQBzw/s1600/FC802.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtn4Ly-XdOLOUL8Jq4FAwntMxifH5Az72spZAM2G8aRLibhxDkI1kIvq99mPd4-0eg6i8-WKdZ1SgQU4lYRBxokRsIpb-EqeLF2_LF1TOwrsN85J71hQS1-L_Qksd1laHRBfbfOvQBzw/s400/FC802.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. The canyon was home to ancestral<br />Puebloans before the coming of the Navajo.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-VGNzlMyjsBPvb2a8-QN5koB6xsM9Wj2LIOMnDG2Dgk9po3Iu6kH4oNHs5HF_YkWsOb5QlTqPQHzOSsrsaNvbcwHM8wmDHVpC-HJlKShgatw8mMJnI1K-NYcn5q7DwBrXiYXBajtxjg/s1600/FCX02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-VGNzlMyjsBPvb2a8-QN5koB6xsM9Wj2LIOMnDG2Dgk9po3Iu6kH4oNHs5HF_YkWsOb5QlTqPQHzOSsrsaNvbcwHM8wmDHVpC-HJlKShgatw8mMJnI1K-NYcn5q7DwBrXiYXBajtxjg/s400/FCX02.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>El Morro, a site frequented by travelers in northwestern New Mexico since<br />prehistoric times. Visitors came for the water, but left records of their passage<br />in the form of inscriptions on the walls. The ruins of a pueblo occupy the top,<br />and the Ancestral Puebloans left the earliest petroglyphs.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVgQJbWkZ-8lhyphenhyphenzGaliwGeHff9FWTNDJc72iTH64ewYN6gmffesMNRgg1fRaK7U-2dTVckOjbE-KWSQ4oW4CtLdzcrydK2_2456kYdumBqAvVjfXHjlBg_GE_nOx_g8CaD2WtNAe4_FA/s1600/FCX02%2527.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVgQJbWkZ-8lhyphenhyphenzGaliwGeHff9FWTNDJc72iTH64ewYN6gmffesMNRgg1fRaK7U-2dTVckOjbE-KWSQ4oW4CtLdzcrydK2_2456kYdumBqAvVjfXHjlBg_GE_nOx_g8CaD2WtNAe4_FA/s400/FCX02%2527.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>The waters of El Morro.</i></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfSQ_RO4ZlVKdxJA0d7RutM2y14w_DiAnUe_yPwlh42nCTSivA3nObkIRzUn7E6N8eGud86DVU4uY84xcfcNFoWgcbTkqlgQOVguK8cz8-DSchZ2dKn0NGNcrMUL57Ob35G23BE7ar9g/s1600/FCX05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfSQ_RO4ZlVKdxJA0d7RutM2y14w_DiAnUe_yPwlh42nCTSivA3nObkIRzUn7E6N8eGud86DVU4uY84xcfcNFoWgcbTkqlgQOVguK8cz8-DSchZ2dKn0NGNcrMUL57Ob35G23BE7ar9g/s400/FCX05.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption"><i>The oldest Spanish inscription, left by Juan de Oñate, conquistador and first<br />governor of New Mexico, in 1605. He's famous mostly for his massacre of<br />Acoma Pueblo, in which 800 Acoma were killed, and after which all male<br />prisoners over the age of twenty-five were sentenced to have their right foot<br />cut off. </i><i><i>Oñate was later banished from New Mexico and exiled from Mexico<br />City for his use of excessive force.</i></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Modern pueblos I've visited include Taos, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, Jemez, Zuñi, and Shongopavi (on the Hopi Reservation). The first and last mentioned are among the oldest continuously inhabited dwellings in the United States. Someone I talked to on the Hopi Reservation told me that, according to their traditions, their villages existed contemporaneously with the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, and that they absorbed some of the subsequent diaspora. Their kivas are square-shaped.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>1</sup> Nowadays the term <i>ancestral Puebloan</i> seems preferable to <i>Anasazi</i>, which is a Navajo term. The "disappearance" L'Amour talks so much about, and which was mentioned quite often when I toured the area in 1991, is now typically ascribed to migration. The modern pueblos are held to be at least partially descended from the "Anasazi" cultures, an explanation that seemingly wasn't taken seriously back then, but is now.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>2</sup> Actually, it's not too many times to count. I think it's eight.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><sup>3</sup> Listen, everyone! Tour guides are not experts! I repeat, tour guides are not experts! They are friendly people who've memorized a number of facts and know how to answer silly questions while keeping tourists from climbing over things. That applies to most park rangers!</span> Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-69538217701569985892017-11-10T07:01:00.000-08:002017-11-10T07:01:08.880-08:00World Fantasy Convention 2017I attended the <a href="http://wfc2017.org/wfc2017/" target="_blank">World Fantasy Convention</a> last week. It was held in San Antonio, my hometown, which I still live not <i>too</i> far from. I didn't stay at the hotel, being too cheap/poor, but fortunately a good old friend of mine had a spare bedroom to offer in the next town over. He was out of town most of the time, but me and his house rabbit (he has a house rabbit) kept each other company.<br />
<br />
The convention got off to a bad start for me when, like the moron I am, I saw the picture of the Lila Cockrell Theater on the web page and just assumed, without further inquiry, that the convention was thereabouts, that is, somewhere on the grounds of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. (Henry B. Gonzalez himself once visited my Cub Scout meeting once when I was a kid. When he was leaving, I shouted, "See you later, navigator!", having just seen <i>Flight of the Navigator</i>. Not that you wanted to know that.) Despite not having much common sense, I know downtown S.A. pretty well, and drove straight there and parked and wandered around the empty, enormous, terrifyingly silent corridors of the convention center like Keftu in the Tower of Bel before I figured out my mistake. Why do I always do stupid things like that? I hated to waste my parking fee, so I walked all the way across downtown to where the convention actually was, passing along the way the spot outside the Gunter Hotel where my grandpa had his picture taken when he ran away from home as a teenager. It was <i>Dia de los Muertos</i>, too. By that time I was all steamed up, because November in Texas.<br />
<br />
I went to the convention with pretty low expectations, not because I thought the programming would be lacking (and it wasn't), but because I know people go to these things to network, and I'm not exactly good at that. However, although I expected (dreaded) something like the various conferences I've attended in academia, I was pleasantly surprised. The format was similar, sure, but the atmosphere was completely different. Constructive and collaborative rather than competitive. There were lots of writers of various stripes, both obscure people like me and Big Names, people I've rubbed elbows with on the Internet, artists and illustrators, scholars, librarians, and knowledgeable readers. Not a bad mix.<br />
<br />
Because I'm vain, the first high point was running into Adrian Simmons in the dealers' room, and seeing the new <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Best-Heroic-Fantasy-Quarterly-2011-2013/dp/197794681X" target="_blank"><i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i> anthology</a> for sale, with two awesome illustrations by Yours Truly, including the following depiction of a naked warrior astride a giant lamprey, which I could imagine gracing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, if Michelangelo had painted naked warriors sitting astride giant lampreys.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHS416mO4bawhzJoyOdJ-rNg5Uq_-AC7AcWicHwVPLtVy1IVPxzm5WjjiTBkYtz4YQPGlOR42WhKn5qExcTrsMlCgPr8q278im-UoabseCt5sl3cHyZQ4V2lxtaOAWjsJ2xicAgXeExw/s1600/HFQ+Lord+of+the+Estuary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1082" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHS416mO4bawhzJoyOdJ-rNg5Uq_-AC7AcWicHwVPLtVy1IVPxzm5WjjiTBkYtz4YQPGlOR42WhKn5qExcTrsMlCgPr8q278im-UoabseCt5sl3cHyZQ4V2lxtaOAWjsJ2xicAgXeExw/s640/HFQ+Lord+of+the+Estuary.jpg" width="432" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From "The Worship of the Lord of the Estuary" by James Frederick William Rowe.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Actually, I was going for a "fannish" look when I drew this, having enjoyed pictures from some of the old fanzines I've seen floating around the Web. I also picked up a copy of <a href="http://skelospress.com/" target="_blank"><i>Skelos</i> #3</a>, which has a cool story by my friend Scott Cupp, who stopped by my art show in September and encouraged me to go to the convention; he also has a story in Issue 1, a fact I'd somehow overlooked before now. Small world. The Robert E. Howard Foundation had a table, too, with copies of the good new REH biography <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Thunder-Life-Robert-Howard/dp/1304031527" target="_blank"><i>Blood and Thunder</i></a> by Mark Finn, who was also at the convention.<br />
<br />
Panel discussions I especially enjoyed included ones about keeping Texas weird (and it is a very, very weird place, and not in the ways you might think if you only know it from afar), westerns and fantasy (which touched on many of the themes that have come up in my Tashyas stories), pulp-era influences (before now, how many times in my life have I heard someone who wasn't myself refer to A. E. van Vogt? answer: none), the writings of Lord Dunsany (with three excellent readings by professional narrators), and, best of all, the secret history of the Hyborian Age (secret from L. Sprague de Camp, that is).<br />
<br />
Looking back on the convention, I kind of see two sort-of distinct populations. One includes people who game a little, read things like Black Gate, <i>Skelos</i>, and <i>HFQ</i>, and think Robert E. Howard is a masterful writer and aren't afraid to say it. The other, well, I won't go into detail because I don't want to seem like I'm throwing rocks. I went to panels across the spectrum, though, and I found that in some I was like, what are you people even <i>talking</i> about? Actually, it was kind of surprising that there were so many sessions on things I dig. Is that always the case at these?<br />
<br />
There were also some really good art talks, the best of which was Gregory Manchess's account of his own long career in illustrating. He went into detail on technique, which I really appreciated. He's recently written and illustrated his own book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Above-Timberline-Gregory-Manchess/dp/1481459236" target="_blank"><i>Above the Timberline</i></a>. Another panel featured Manchess and a few other writer-illustrators who are experimenting with telling their own stories instead of illustrating others'. That put a few ideas in my head...<br />
<br />
In the dealers' room I picked up an old copy of Philip K. Dick's <i>Now Wait For Last Year</i>. I read it a long time ago and somehow lost my copy.
It's not Dick's most well-known novel but it's always stuck with me.
It's got a kind of slow sad haplessness that I like, and a stomach-churningly awful marital relationship, and a flatulent dimension-spanning world dictator fighting a grudge-match against stuck-up humans from another solar system. A good book for bad times. I
spent a lot of my free time reading it.<br />
<br />
All in all I'm definitely glad I went. Let's end on a high note, with my other <i>HFQ</i> illustration (apologies to Gustave Dore).<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieAiRJBN30M59mrZaAhZbj9zna-1rS8dO07kwr-WNr_mtYpnLN8eevYuLMFYLdAcgy9DNAgl87eC1px0BZEE7k4W5UPpeXPQlhycylIvGcoOpevHcnUCV_SCTYuGLtaoQZ1DO3s_1UUw/s1600/HFQ+Crown+of+Sorrows.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1079" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieAiRJBN30M59mrZaAhZbj9zna-1rS8dO07kwr-WNr_mtYpnLN8eevYuLMFYLdAcgy9DNAgl87eC1px0BZEE7k4W5UPpeXPQlhycylIvGcoOpevHcnUCV_SCTYuGLtaoQZ1DO3s_1UUw/s640/HFQ+Crown+of+Sorrows.jpg" width="428" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From "Crown of Sorrows" by Sean Patrick Kelley</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-68350875795169631182017-10-23T08:29:00.001-07:002017-10-23T08:33:12.553-07:00Noir Reviews: The Big Sleep, August 1946<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhdkQrc7Lz6J5HoDQZAOlmUMAzpWAem4L6Cc5Io_MeLNdpsFUGuAcNE2-kwhlU8v52Qjft3Oqa855g_Kt6KAjeJTgUpLjIi9AScAcxv8DlHOHgGYWA2o7DmuQZcuAtCJdl75kVi7m8g/s1600/Big+Sleep.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="301" data-original-width="380" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhdkQrc7Lz6J5HoDQZAOlmUMAzpWAem4L6Cc5Io_MeLNdpsFUGuAcNE2-kwhlU8v52Qjft3Oqa855g_Kt6KAjeJTgUpLjIi9AScAcxv8DlHOHgGYWA2o7DmuQZcuAtCJdl75kVi7m8g/s320/Big+Sleep.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I've been stalling in my rain-soaked, smoke-stained traipse through <i>film noir</i> because I've gotten to what's probably the second most well-known noir (after <i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, of course): <i>The Big Sleep</i>. In short, <i>The Big Sleep</i> is simply too big for me to cover. I mean, it's a Chandler adaptation, written by Leigh Brackett (!) and William Faulkner (!!), directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Bogart & Bacall! So, instead of "reviewing" it, I'll just pontificate on what's struck me about the movie down through the years.<br />
<br />
<i>The Big Sleep</i> was one of the first noirs I ever saw. This was long before I read the novel, which I've now read many times. Reading the book has, unfortunately, diminished my enjoyment of the movie considerably, but I'll come back to that in a moment. Back when I first saw <i>The Big Sleep</i> I became obsessed with it. I watched it numerous times, trying to capture something that eluded me. That something was an understanding of the plot. To put it simply, I loved the movie, but found it incomprehensible at the same time.<br />
<br />
Now, I can be a little slow on the uptake when it comes to the humans and their motivations, but I've come gradually to realize that my lack of comprehension wasn't altogether my fault. This is for two related reasons:<br />
<ol>
<li><i>The Big Sleep</i> speaks in what we might call "Hays code," a language I didn't understand at the time.</li>
<li><i>The Big Sleep</i> does not, in fact, make a great deal of sense.</li>
</ol>
Let's look at each in turn.<br />
<br />
I remember reading the description of <i>The Big Sleep</i> on the back of the box before watching it for the first time. Pornographers were mentioned. Pornographers! Imagine my disappointment when I got to the Bogie-and-Bacall cigarettes smoldering in their shared ashtray at the end with nary a hint of these sleazy, soulless pornographers having passed before my eyes. I watched and rewatched the movie. I even asked third parties. Nothing. In the end (I'm embarrassed to admit this now) I concluded that the "pornographers" were just a figment of marketing hyperbole.<br />
<br />
And <i>then </i>I read the novel, and I was like, <i>O-o-o-o-oh</i>.<br />
<br />
But listen. I grew up in the eighties and nineties. If a director wanted to show us something, they showed it. None of this implicit stuff. But so much that goes on in noir isn't stated explicitly. It has to be inferred. I can think of a reference to abortion in <i>They Live by Night</i>, for instance, or to make-up sex in <i>Criss Cross</i>. In a way, movies these days, with all their box-checking and point-counting for MPAA ratings, might go far beyond Hays code films in isolated F-bombs and nipples, but never come near the alienation, the raw cynicism, and the savage moralism of <i>film noir</i>.<br />
<br />
All that said, <i>The Big Sleep</i> leaves so much to inference that the plot suffers. Carmen Sternwood, instead of being stark naked when Geiger is killed, is fully clothed, as she is when Marlowe finds her in his apartment. If the games Geiger plays with Carmen amount to taking pictures with a weird Buddha head while she's high on laudanum, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. There's the whole play with the books, of course, but so much is removed from the narrative that there's hardly even a hint left. (Though perhaps a part of the problem is that I've grown up in an era when porn is a lot easier to come by.)<br />
<br />
A few other plot elements that get washed out for one reason or another include Carol Lundgren's characterization as Geiger's young male lover, the transformation of the novel's Vivian Regan (the wife of the man whose murder Marlowe is unwittingly investigating) into the Vivian Rutledge of the movie, and Carmen's almost terrifying depravity.<br />
<br />
The film's incoherence doesn't end with all that, however. The dialogue goes in circles from scene to scene. Clues mysteriously appear and disappear. For instance, in one scene, Vivian brings up Eddie Mars voluntarily, telling Marlowe that Shawn Regan ran off with Mars's wife. Later, during that famous horse-race sexytalk scene (which is delightful), Marlowe asks Vivian whether she knows that Shawn Regan ran off with Eddie Mars's wife. "Who doesn't?" she nervously replies, apparently forgetting that <i>she's</i> the one who told <i>him</i>.<br />
<br />
Immediately after that conversation ends, Marlowe telephones Mars from the restaurant and makes plans to meet him at his gambling house. Mars tells him to come on up at once, and he does. When he arrrives, he finds that Vivian has somehow beaten him there, despite (apparently) having stopped somewhere to change into a completely new outfit, and is now ensconced with the band as though she's been there all night. (It's a little sad that the gambling house is everything Chandler mocks in Hollywood gambling houses.) And then he goes and talks to Mars and starts making perceptive guesses about...Mrs. Mars and Shawn Regan! After which a scene is staged to convince Marlowe that Mars and Vivian have no connection, although she's the one who told him about the "bond between Eddie Mars and the Sternwoods" in the first place!<br />
<br />
To be fair, the horse-race scene, and, to some extent, the resulting incoherence, is the result of a re-shoot aimed at emphasizing the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall. And some confusion comes straight from a plot hole in Chandler's novel. But I think that what really mixes the movie up is the fact that someone, somewhere, decided that Vivian <strike>Regan</strike> Rutledge had to be the damsel in distress, whereas the novel makes it clear that <i>Carmen </i>is the princess who must be rescued – Carmen, the vicious, unintelligent little-girl-in-a-woman's-body who poses for high-class smut and pulls the wings off of flies. In contriving to have Vivian become central to the plot, the script is forced to minimize Carmen's role and have Vivian continually pop up where she doesn't belong. I mean, why on earth would she be hanging out at a hot car drop with Mona Mars?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizC61wWbNXJxnQxZEaKGqQakmNDlKVJR1oBKF9jGZKIUnrMj08RZhN7aqACqm0cuO4nY5r5BH2LB5k5xdiOLxrzJdfn6_-7lrYoP4ToZpL5azYLFOZwFFmV1jHQg5YoJX9mdG0JY91KQ/s1600/dead+men+marlowe+quote+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="532" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizC61wWbNXJxnQxZEaKGqQakmNDlKVJR1oBKF9jGZKIUnrMj08RZhN7aqACqm0cuO4nY5r5BH2LB5k5xdiOLxrzJdfn6_-7lrYoP4ToZpL5azYLFOZwFFmV1jHQg5YoJX9mdG0JY91KQ/s400/dead+men+marlowe+quote+4.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Obligatory <i>Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid</i> reference. Carl Reiner gets it.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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So the displacement of Carmen spoils the plot's dark irony and violates Chandler's maxim that the private investigator loses his integrity by settling down with a love interest. Somehow, though, the ending remains undeniably cool, comparable in a way to the dynamic and uncertain ending of <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/10/blade-runner-2049.html"><i>Blade Runner</i></a> (in the director's and "final" cuts, of course).<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * * </div>
<br />
I give <i>The Big Sleep</i> a grade of <b>A for awesome </b>on the following scale: <br />
<ul>
<li>A: <b><i>awesome </i></b>noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized</li>
<li>B: good (<b><i>bueno</i></b>) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion</li>
<li>C: fairly <b><i>commonplace </i></b>noir film, to be watched once or twice</li>
<li>D: <b><i>dud </i></b>of a noir film, to be avoided if possible</li>
</ul>
Yes, it's nonsensical, which just goes to show you that movies don't have to make sense to be awesome. High points include pretty much every moment of dialogue, but perhaps especially the hothouse scene, the horse-race sexytalk scene, and the tough-guy scene with Elisha Cook, Jr., plus the two cigarettes at the end.<br />
<br />
Takeaway quote from <i>The Big Sleep</i>:
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
"Get up, angel, you look like a Pekingese."</h3>
</blockquote>
*** If you've enjoyed this review, maybe you'd enjoy my reviews of other noir films: <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-introduction.html">Introduction</a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-phantom-lady-january-1944.html"><i>Phantom Lady</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-double-indemnity-april-1944.html"><i>Double Indemnity</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/01/noir-reviews-murder-my-sweet-december.html"><i>Murder, My Sweet</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/02/noir-reviews-detour-november-1945.html"><i>Detour</i></a> – <i><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/noir-reviews-scarlet-street-december.html">Scarlet Street</a> </i>– <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html"><i>The Blue Dahlia</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-lost-weekend-november-1945.html"><i>The Lost Weekend</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/07/gilda-and-lady-from-shanghai.html"><i>Gilda</i> and <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/08/noir-reviews-stranger-july-1946.html"><i>The Stranger</i></a> ***Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-34989473902296226262017-10-15T22:01:00.001-07:002017-10-15T22:04:45.430-07:00Blade Runner 2049<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMqXWiWdKKOMdbHhOJtf876nCYjcdJG19WaL5Fnyh5PT5GThoZEaCbHQ27DpvQjyCXH19XL1uRs11KOYs12nX9uhMLr2D8VjNJD-MEmFvrnz5Ie37yQk7rn5boklwZQDLAyIF4yh-Sew/s1600/Blade+Runner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="297" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMqXWiWdKKOMdbHhOJtf876nCYjcdJG19WaL5Fnyh5PT5GThoZEaCbHQ27DpvQjyCXH19XL1uRs11KOYs12nX9uhMLr2D8VjNJD-MEmFvrnz5Ie37yQk7rn5boklwZQDLAyIF4yh-Sew/s320/Blade+Runner.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
The original <i>Blade Runner</i> is what first got me into <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/search/label/noireviews"><i>film noir</i></a>. It evokes noir's guilty heart where other attempts at "future noir" only get the trappings right. Rick Deckard isn't what you'd call a hero: compelled by self-interest, he's hunting down escaped replicant-slaves whose only crime (so far as he's concerned) is their presence on earth. Though he tries to hide it from himself, he's fully conscious of their humanity and fear as he blows them away, as in that slow, sad scene where he shoots a terrified female replicant in the back as she flees into a department store. It's Roy who "earns" his soul at the end, who, with his crucified hand, saves Deckard's life and possibly his soul; we're never quite sure whether Deckard is even really human.<br />
<br />
<i>Blade Runner</i> also has a poignant but seriously messed-up love affair, another noir element ratcheted up almost to the intensity of myth. The vast dark urban abysses (reminiscent of night scenes in <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-phantom-lady-january-1944.html"><i>Phantom Lady</i></a> and others) and mountainous decayed buildings (like the Bradbury, where the classic noir <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/07/doa.html"><i>D.O.A.</i></a> also ends) meld seamlessly with the iconic score and the plot's moral grayness and lack of resolution.<br />
<br />
And, as with noir, I've somehow also found <i>Blade Runner</i> a solace when going through bad times. I can remember one period in my life when I watched it once or twice a week. I think a lot of people would say something similar. And there's not all that much to the plot. It's more of an immersive audiovisual mood experience than a movie. So there's probably a lot of other people who think it's okay but kind of dull. They're mystified by people like me, to whom it means so much.<br />
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All of which is to say, <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> has a lot to live up to. Well, I went and saw it at the $4.00 matinee this weekend, and I...think it kind of succeeds. For me, at any rate. Not quite, of course. How could it? But it continues the story, adds to the background, and deepens the world without doing any violence to the thrust of the original, all while maintaining its own narrative independence. <br />
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I have to say, I went into it with pretty low expectations. I've been less than impressed with Ridley Scott's attempts to rekindle the <i>Alien</i> magic, and as for Harrison Ford's reprising the roles that made him famous, well, um, yeah, <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-force-awakens-belated-non-review.html">same thing</a>. So I'm very excited that <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> proved so much better than I'd expected.<br />
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I don't want to say too much, because it's got a good plot with plenty to spoil. But I will say that it's another true noir, with a written-off protagonist, a bizarre love story, and an ambiguous ending. What we see of Deckard (not much, thankfully) does little to explain or humanize him. Like the original, it's elliptical and rather sad. The city is the same, down to the now-retro-futuristic Atari signs. The texture is as rich, too, though perhaps a bit contrived in places, and not <i>quite </i>as authentic feeling. We get to see the world outside L.A., including a protein farm and a humongous waste dump, and it's a beautifully unlovely place. The CGI is some of the best I've seen, though, for me, nothing could ever quite equal the practical effects of the original.<br />
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There are some interesting allusions. The protagonist, a replicant Blade Runner, is called K, seemingly a reference to Kafka's bewildered protagonists. One of the short "prequel" films that came out in advance (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9Os8cP_gg" target="_blank"><i>Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run</i></a>) centers on a copy of Graham Greene's <i>The Power and the Glory</i>, a novel about a hunted priest – a broken "whisky" priest – in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. The parallel is obvious, and, given the film's preoccupation with the nature of the soul, fitting. Other religious and mythological allusions abound.<br />
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In the end, I think it's movie that I'll have to rewatch once or twice to decide what to make of it, but it's passed the first test so far.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-8586058028879772932017-10-03T13:21:00.001-07:002017-10-04T09:21:15.417-07:00Warbles and Bots: Out of the Hive<h3 style="text-align: center;">
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<h3 style="text-align: center;">
SHE WAS A CYBORG: PART-ORGANIC WHALE, PART-MECHANIZED SHIP</h3>
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What happens to humanity when it "adjusts" to hive living? </h3>
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Some writers write to earn a living. Others write because they've got to get something out of their system. When it comes to science fiction, I've learned to be leery of successful commercial writers. Not because they're bad, necessarily, but because I'm almost sure to be bored by them. My favorite authors tend to be the ones who wrote themselves out fairly quickly, expending their visions in an explosive spurt, leaving behind rich mines for more conventional writers to exploit. Their work might be naive or outre, but to me that's just part of their charm.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">It was a different time. A time when sci-fi<br />still brought terror, wonder, and arresting<br />strangeness to the reader. A time when a<br />publishing company could proudly decorate<br />its books with Magritte-esque parades of</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"></span></i><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">schlubby </span></i>naked nebishes, and people would,<br />apparently, still buy them.</span></i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
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I'd say that Thomas J. Bassler, M.D., who wrote under the pen name T. J. Bass, sits squarely in that category. I was recently reminded of his work by Fletcher Vredenburgh's <a href="https://www.blackgate.com/2017/06/20/half-past-human-by-t-j-bass/" target="_blank">review</a> of <i>Half Past Human</i> over at Black Gate. I'd never that novel before, but I had enjoyed <i>The Godwhale</i> a long time ago.<br />
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Bass's career spanned only six years, lasting from 1968, when he sold his first story, until 1974, when <i>The Godwhale</i> was published. He wrote only the two novels I've mentioned. Both take place in a far-future earth in which the vast majority of humankind's teeming trillions live in a global subterranean society called the Hive. I can't really compete with Fletcher's review, which I think captures the spirit of the books perfectly, and I urge the reader to go take a look at that if interested. Instead, as usual, I'll just natter on about what strikes me about them.<br />
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Part of what makes Bass unique / bizarre is his habit of describing everything, from sex to warfare, in medical terms.<br />
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When he flashed his helmet light down, vertigo gripped his cardio-esophageal junction. (<i>Half Past Human</i>, p. 96)</blockquote>
Perhaps this is just a reflection of his day job, but it has the effect of making his characters seem like rats in a gigantic, not-very-ethical experiment. Overall, Bass writes with the air of a physician conducting the examination of a patient, gently squeezing pustules and prodding necrotic tissues with a cool detachment. His outlook isn't grim or moralistic, and the weird, disgusting scenes he describes are often quietly amusing as well. In general, Bass isn't so much sounding an alarm as saying, more or less
cheerfully, "Hey! Let's see what happens if we extrapolate <i>this</i> trend in our society!" Which, in a way, ends up being much more disturbing than the hysteria of other entries in eco-science fiction.<br />
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It's hard to select a favorite passage. Many stand out in one way or another. So let's just look at the scene quoted above, in which a Hive inhabitant goes "ratting" in the dark, dusty world of 'tween walls, hoping to score some extra "flavored calories."<br />
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He dust-waded along the top of a large pipe. It was hollow. Voices and and shuffling vibrated. It was a crawlway. The larger rats became more numerous – and bolder. They remained stubbornly in his path until he nudged them with his toe. They wouldn't be too tasty. The sweet stink of the nests hit him. Moist and dripping, the huge cool sphere of the membrane filters loomed ahead. The city's sweat condensed and trickled down the sphere's outer sphere – providing drops of drinking water for the rodents. [...]</blockquote>
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Selecting a large nest he thrust in his hand. Expecting mother-with-food, the soft young rats swarmed onto the glove. He pulled out three handfulls and squeezed them through the sphincter of the anoxic bag. Their squirming and squeaking ceased. (<i>Half Past Human</i>, p. 97)</blockquote>
The hunter goes on to have his catch pressed into moist wafers. He shares them with a friend, who savors "the salty fluids, tangy viscera, and iron-rich muscle and blood" (<i>HPH</i>, p. 99). They go on to discuss his friend's devotion to Dabbing ("'Dirt, adobe, and bamboo – DAB'"), a stress-reducing quasi-religious practice.<br />
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"The most important thing [...] DAB protects you from is suicide. That is the number one killer. Inappropriate Activity – old I.A. Without DAB your ectodermal debris sensitizes you. All your skin scales, hair and skin oils get into the house dust and feed the mite, <i>Dermatophagoides</i>. The mite acquires ectodermal protein antigens. As you live with the mite and breath [<i>sic</i>] in dust – mite fragments – you build up antibodies against them. Antibodies against your own ectodermal antigens. When the titre gets high enough the antibody cross reacts with your own neuroectoderm – your brain. Hence the logarithmic correlation between crowding and I.A. Between house dust sensitivity and suicide. Humans who nest with rugs, drapes and stuffed furniture have the highest suicide rate. Humans who live with dirt, adobe and bamboo the lowest." (<i>Half Past Human</i>, p. 97)</blockquote>
The "erotic" scenes retain a certain tenderness, despite being described in the same oddly technical terms.<br />
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"I am going to enjoy living with a man who is good with his hands," she said. Taking his wrists she moved his trembling hands over her tunic. Her soft erogenous zones radiated warmly. His autonomic synapses struggled with the increasing excitement. Passion flared somewhat erratically, and then, abruptly, faded. While he stood there, the heat in his loins faded away – leaving fatigue. [...]</blockquote>
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"You have just recently polarized," she consoled. "Your meld reflexes need time to synchronize. We will work on it, and it will improve." (<i>Half Past Human</i>, p. 18)</blockquote>
<i>Half Past Human</i> takes place in and above the Hive's vast subterranean network of shafts, tubes, and cubicles, following the intersecting lives of large class of characters: artificially prepubescent nebishes, polarized males and females, paleolithic warriors and wizards, ageless wanderers, earnest mecks, and, of course, G.I.T.A.R. and Olga. <i>The Godwhale</i>, on the other hand, takes place mostly in the ocean. The main character, if it has one, is <i>Rorqual Maru</i>, a lone cyborg whale-ship plankton harvester bent on aiding humanity.<br />
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But the story begins much earlier in time, following the adventures of the hapless hemihuman Larry Dever, who starts his career by getting cut in half in a singularly stupid accident. Thanks to medical advances, he doesn't die, but his quality of life isn't what it was.<br />
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Larry turned on his refresher and grasped a ceiling rung of his horizontal ladder. The mannequin walked away slowly, pulling flexible tubing out of his various surgical stoma. Sucking sounds. Drops of urine and feces soiled the meck's breastplates with yellow and granular brown. Larry progressed across the monkey bars to the hot shower, where he emptied his visceral sacs down the drain. (<i>The Godwhale</i>, p. 23)</blockquote>
Life isn't so pleasant for Larry without his lower half, despite his talking prosthesis.<br />
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"This is great! It feels like I am really running. It's the lactate you're putting in my Blood Scrubber. Now if you can just give me back my sex life." </blockquote>
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Mannequin shared and updated with distant Library. "That too can be arranged; a mechanical penis for me and midbrain electrodes for you. Meck sex can be pleasant with a wired reticular system."</blockquote>
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Larry grinned, assuming that he was the object of a very funny robot joke. (<i>The Godwhale</i>, p. 16)</blockquote>
Larry eventually enters suspended animation, hoping for a future "cure" that doesn't involve raising and harvesting a clone of himself. He awakens instead in the decidedly unpleasant world of the Hive. He escapes, coming into contact with <i>Rorqual Maru</i>, a spunky little meck named Trilobite, and a race of humans adapted to life underwater, teaming up with his latter-day genetic progeny: a gargoyle Tweenwaller named Big Har, and a bio-engineered superman known as A.R.N.O.L.D. (Augmented Renal Nucleus Of Larry Dever) who becomes King of the ocean and sometimes thinks of himself as a chicken.<br />
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"BACK OFF!!" shouted ARNOLD, riled to the point of hearing "cluck, cluck" in his subconscious. (<i>The Godwhale</i>, p. 167)</blockquote>
I read <i>The Godwhale</i> back when I was in college. Then I went to grad school and purged my shelves of such oddities. But now it's back. Rereading it has been a bit strange, because I'm realizing that I must have internalized more of it than I'd thought. Taken together, <i>Half Past Human</i> and <i>The Godwhale</i> amount to the most bizarre, disgusting, wonderful stuff I've read in quite a while.<br />
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A hundred miles up-sump the sewer conduits sang with pneumatic belches of dead city gases: incoles, skatoles, methane, ozone, and carbon monoxide. [...] </blockquote>
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Their mold-flecked dinghy drifted sideways, its bow wedged into a raft of nondescript, floating debris. Hemihuman Larry hunkered down, swatting flies. The blackness and echoes told them nothing. Their progress was marked by aerial mycelia which swept across the boat's wet ribs and snagged in their hair. Persistent swarms of sucking botflies hovered over them. Their throbbing backs sponged-out with bots and warbles – the cutaneous abscesses that contained the vigorous fly larvae. </blockquote>
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"The damned itching is getting worse," complained Larry. "A new crop must be maturing." He wiped his hand across his scaly, lumpy back, breaking open pus pockets and catching the wriggling, bristly maggots as they emerged. "Damn!" He rubbed at the pasty crusts of pupa cases, wings, legs, and dermal scales. (<i>The Godwhale</i>, p. 78)</blockquote>
They're both a bit hard to follow, partly because they bristle (sorry, bad word choice) with technical terms, but partly also because the action jumps around a lot, leaping across years in fits and starts, hopping from character to character without any kind of clear direction. But, that comes with the territory. And they certainly don't shy away from questions of human sexuality, bioethics, philosophy, and religion, posing quandaries without providing solutions. What is humanity? What is the individual's meaning and worth? You could say that the books are a prolonged and poignant evocation of the anxiety of anonymous, post-religious Man and the terrifying, faceless masses that surround him.<br />
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The little I can find about T. J. Bass himself raises more questions than it answers. Who was he, really? What was he trying to do with these novels? Did he accomplish it? How did his writing fit in with the rest of his life? He died in 2011, having written nothing else but a diet and exercise book, and that was in 1979. That's a long time ago! Did he try and fail to get published again? Or did he just move on with his life? For that matter, can you imagine a scientist, mathematician, engineer, or physician in our own time, with little or no experience in fiction, penning an eccentric novel laden with precise technical knowledge and <i>actually getting it published</i>? Such a thing would be relegated to an online discussion board somewhere, to be skimmed by a few people and then forgotten.<br />
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Times have changed.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-75730696276054673912017-08-31T16:34:00.001-07:002017-08-31T16:34:58.460-07:00"Death, Destroyer of Worlds"...Reviewed!My most recent story, "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds</a>," or IABDDOW for short, was <a href="https://www.blackgate.com/2017/08/22/august-short-story-roundup-3/" target="_blank">favorably reviewed</a> by Fletcher Vredenburgh over at Black Gate last week!<br />
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As can be expected from an Ordoñez story, what follows is a fusion of swords & sorcery, poetry, and mad visions. His version of the Southwest, a collision of the mythical, historical, and invented, is equally forbidding and enchanting. He is one of the truly original voices writing fantasy today, and I’m glad HFQ has provided a berth for these stories.</blockquote>
Charles Payseur of Quick Sip Reviews fame also <a href="http://quicksipreviews.blogspot.com/2017/08/quick-sips-heroic-fantasty-quarterly-q33.html" target="_blank">gave it favorable mention</a>.
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[Carvajal] is an outsider, which means that he is an invader himself. I like how the story faces that, regardless of how benign he might seem, any foreign intrusion into these lands changes them... The action is intense, the tone a mix of horror, fantasy, and humor, and the ending a bit muted and gray. Things change, but that doesn’t mean that everything is destroyed. Another great read!</blockquote>
Both reviewers mention <b>a very special Easter egg</b> contained in this issue of <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>, which I think is more fun to discover for yourself. Mr. Vredenburgh is elliptical, but you should wait to read Mr. Payseur's review if you want to enjoy the full effects of your resultant nerd-out. <br />
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Please make sure also to check out <a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2320" target="_blank">the other <i>HFQ</i> offerings this month</a>, including Evan Dicken's "Between Sea and Flame," a sequel to his Central American tale "Mouth of the Jaguar." Obviously I'm not the first one who decided that What the World Needs Now is Pre-Columbian / Mesoamerican / Spanish American sword-and-sorcery, and that's not a bad thing! Other delights in the issue include "Rakefire" by Jason Carney and three cool poems.<br />
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I'd also like to point out an excellent <a href="https://www.blackgate.com/2017/08/25/the-opportunity-for-awe-an-interview-with-scott-andrews/" target="_blank">Black Gate interview</a> with Scott Andrews, editor of <i>Beneath Ceaseless Skies</i>, which has published many of my stories. I've been working with <i>HFQ</i> on my Carvajal stories because I've gotten the impression that it's everyone's favorite go-to for the old-school S&S you feel kind of guilty for reading, but <i>BCS</i> is, I think, unique and irreplaceable, and it's interesting to learn about what goes on behind the scenes, both practically and philosophically.<br />
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And while you're at it, don't forget <a href="https://www.blackgate.com/2017/06/04/discussing-all-things-fantasy-past-present-and-future-an-interview-with-adrian-simmons-and-david-farney-of-heroic-fantasy-quarterly/" target="_blank">this interview</a> with Adrian Simmons and David Farney of <i>HFQ</i>. Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-1782714415162738492017-08-12T15:36:00.001-07:002017-08-12T15:41:05.504-07:00Arts and Crafts in Four Dimensions<blockquote class="tr_bq">
She returned the smile, then looked across the room to her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and to their father, who were deep in concentration, bent over the model they were building of a tesseract: the square squared, and squared again: a construction of the dimension of time. It was a beautiful and complicated creation of steel wires and ball bearings and Lucite, parts of it revolving, parts of it swinging like pendulums.*</blockquote>
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<i>–</i> Madeleine L'Engle, <i>A Swiftly Tilting Planet</i> </div>
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I wrote a couple of months ago about <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/05/views-of-tesseract.html">four-dimensional geometry</a>. Today I'd like to continue our progress through transdimensional gulfs and sinister alien geometries by discussing the 120-cell in some detail, and also describing the workflow I used to print the three-dimensional sections and net shown below.<br />
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As usual when trying to understand the fourth dimension, it's easiest to proceed by way of analogy with lower dimensions. Imagine a two-dimensional creature, like <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Flatland_(second_edition)" target="_blank">A. Square of <i>Flatland</i></a>, existing in a planar universe. Such a creature would have an essentially one-dimensional field of vision, much as our field of vision is essentially two-dimensional (like a painting or a television screen). How would we describe a dodecahedron, that is, a polyhedron formed from twelve regular pentagons, to such a creature?<br />
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(Click to read more; I've got a lot going on in this post.)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>One possibility would be to show the creature the flattened net from which the dodecahedron is folded.<br />
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The creature would see a collection of pentagons, not all of which would be visible at once, since it can only perceive the outside edges, just as you would only see the edge of a penny on a table if you knelt with your eyes on a level with the surface.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmsFDLKv4u14K66E6pcKXj8wYzZ4cPvYasUL0bV1piRBeakkqFiyDgY4uc62k3tHBTiJjiIT5SROHeLjIO_WV7rzf_zCudBaK30aNKWVCFO0e7R2elAWmaim5odkw4iHf6t8TO6tF98g/s1600/Net+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="514" data-original-width="658" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmsFDLKv4u14K66E6pcKXj8wYzZ4cPvYasUL0bV1piRBeakkqFiyDgY4uc62k3tHBTiJjiIT5SROHeLjIO_WV7rzf_zCudBaK30aNKWVCFO0e7R2elAWmaim5odkw4iHf6t8TO6tF98g/s400/Net+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Another possibility would be to pass a dodecahedron through the two-dimensional universe as <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Flatland_(second_edition)/Section_16" target="_blank">the Sphere passed before the astounded gaze of A. Square</a>. Just as A. Square perceived the Sphere as a sequence of circular sections, our creature would perceive the dodecahedron as a sequence of polygonal sections, but the sequence would depend on whether the solid proceeded face first, edge first, or vertex first.<br />
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In each of the following animated gifs (don't you miss animated gifs?), the orange polygon represents the section cut by the two-dimensional universe. Just remember that our creature is only able to perceive the outside of the polygon, and can't take it in all in one glance as we can.<br />
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Here's the face-first passage, which proceeds from a pentagon to a decagon to an upside-down pentagon:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5hrE674sUeiVsoD9-_NEzldLZ3pUPpT-DucLe_dpoWi3zHPbcHlpWchi75-031z-CATzuIVz4Iej5lyKJaQTIp1xlPfcowfBig_k1CPvS48OHfc3ex7bHKqeHGbnsEzJ-A1XxoIOKtQ/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+3+post.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="253" data-original-width="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5hrE674sUeiVsoD9-_NEzldLZ3pUPpT-DucLe_dpoWi3zHPbcHlpWchi75-031z-CATzuIVz4Iej5lyKJaQTIp1xlPfcowfBig_k1CPvS48OHfc3ex7bHKqeHGbnsEzJ-A1XxoIOKtQ/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+3+post.gif" /></a></div>
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Now for the edge-first passage, which proceeds from a line segment to a square to a hexagon and back:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaGdxZjWGWlMtc6s-7mT6ZZDHOBejBlBFfpjnyRMCgrxDMSeSSCjKeXPT9EkSet3KMgeqEBasZWsWOpjOskpPfStotrB2A5rYtQY7wJndLOeZLObcaBSHHGW71AOAkebrCBLnBB6W8w/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+2+post.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAaGdxZjWGWlMtc6s-7mT6ZZDHOBejBlBFfpjnyRMCgrxDMSeSSCjKeXPT9EkSet3KMgeqEBasZWsWOpjOskpPfStotrB2A5rYtQY7wJndLOeZLObcaBSHHGW71AOAkebrCBLnBB6W8w/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+2+post.gif" /></a></div>
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Lastly, the vertex-first passage, which proceeds from a point to a triangle to a hexagon to an upside-down triangle and so to a point again:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsrLXrq8AawUZ1f5loEGIJVFdRnLTf0rbbTx9a78Xmt1EaM01zj-aV2o8TIcimlJw2XiKyjP-gMiIEc1qxgXPbdwDMfWAxD8JMZgrUmZJPGzgHqJx0ecW5WHfWn8tlEGZZOyqlWbC1ow/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+4+post.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsrLXrq8AawUZ1f5loEGIJVFdRnLTf0rbbTx9a78Xmt1EaM01zj-aV2o8TIcimlJw2XiKyjP-gMiIEc1qxgXPbdwDMfWAxD8JMZgrUmZJPGzgHqJx0ecW5WHfWn8tlEGZZOyqlWbC1ow/s1600/Dodecahedron+slices+4+post.gif" /></a></div>
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In this way, A. Square can conceive of the dodecahedron as being folded from a net (though in a direction he cannot visualize) or as a sequence of polygonal sections.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
* </div>
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Much as the dodecahedron is formed by joining twelve pentagons along their edges, the 120-cell is formed by joining 120 dodecahedra along their <i>faces</i>. Each edge is shared by three dodecahedra.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_9xmjP0YX5a1r_oCG3SLP7bmTNxdTPsn3cceQEzJTMNd6NLRom0rcrVQok1Lftcwtj21ZYsoD6tVDZ7aCokLPF-EyAZe2rxfhsZzX_e90OMub168KsOKhrZQdEEiAmmA-VPXZsb7U7A/s1600/Net+6.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="454" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_9xmjP0YX5a1r_oCG3SLP7bmTNxdTPsn3cceQEzJTMNd6NLRom0rcrVQok1Lftcwtj21ZYsoD6tVDZ7aCokLPF-EyAZe2rxfhsZzX_e90OMub168KsOKhrZQdEEiAmmA-VPXZsb7U7A/s200/Net+6.JPG" width="195" /></a></div>
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Of course, three dodecahedra joined face-to-face and face-to-face around a common edge don't quite meet at their third pair of faces, but if we bend them around the edge, lifting them in a direction perpendicular to our own three dimensions, we can <i>make </i>them meet.<br />
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Since we are three dimensional beings, we have just as much trouble picturing such an object as our two-dimensional creature has in imagining a dodecahedron. So let's make it easy on ourselves as we did for A. Square. We could, for instance, build a net of dodecahedra.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSzvKHLeG5Y-uH75nUQYFDHojsOO05OQlffuDENNNrbxQQPvjV5niROCD4fRlHjETtnYOgETOustVKNTdtRZfix8lNjYmtksXBon2yiXXH-DGsglIp7eLd6tWVx9Z9OU1iRSxAR6ytyA/s1600/Net+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="602" data-original-width="629" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSzvKHLeG5Y-uH75nUQYFDHojsOO05OQlffuDENNNrbxQQPvjV5niROCD4fRlHjETtnYOgETOustVKNTdtRZfix8lNjYmtksXBon2yiXXH-DGsglIp7eLd6tWVx9Z9OU1iRSxAR6ytyA/s400/Net+3.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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In this virtual model (which I constructed with GeoGebra, the free educational software I use to teach) we see the "bottom" half of the net. It's sort of like the one red and five orange pentagons in our flat dodecahedral net above. But, limited to motion in three dimensions as we are, we'd have to ask an obliging fourth-dimensional creature to fold it up for us. The "bottom" cell is at
the center, and invisible to our three-dimensional eyes, though our fourth-dimensional friend can see it plainly enough just by looking "down" on it. The red
dodecahedra around the periphery represent the "equator" of the 120-cell. The "upper"
half would be folded from an identical net, minus the equator, and
fitted around this half.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
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We could also visualize the 120-cell by passing one through our three-dimensional space. If we do this in a cell-first manner, we see a sequence of polyhedra, starting with the dodecahedral cell itself. Alicia Boole Stott, whom we discussed in the <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/05/views-of-tesseract.html">previous post</a>, built beautiful models of such sections and others. You can find <a href="http://www.math.yorku.ca/dcoxeter/chap3photos.html" target="_blank">pictures of them online</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibaO_Y4mGkRinrgtobL8bdwWVD8baION4Jtv2ZSNiuJS4huK9K9kF4A-3FNcX4YSBpgeT1T77nUT9QJdNyJ2trutkrW-l72yRMR6WgUHzQeaAI1KRoE5qQ_jTvkGUctMHmb4qNpRZS-A/s1600/Stott+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="1571" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibaO_Y4mGkRinrgtobL8bdwWVD8baION4Jtv2ZSNiuJS4huK9K9kF4A-3FNcX4YSBpgeT1T77nUT9QJdNyJ2trutkrW-l72yRMR6WgUHzQeaAI1KRoE5qQ_jTvkGUctMHmb4qNpRZS-A/s400/Stott+4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I'm a visual person, and most of the math I'm interested in has to do with decorative arts, models, or constructions in one way or another. Actually, when I was in college, I switched my major from drawing-and-painting to math after seeing a geometry film in a 3D design class. (I'm also a capricious and superficial person.) So seeing beautiful models like these motivate me to <i>understand</i> and to <i>make</i>.<br />
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I began with looking up Stott's 1900 paper, "On Certain Series of Sections of the Regular Four-Dimensional Hypersolids," and reading it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO3WiHxaFTekddxLN6A0cdACpRQpJavEYu1_JvDJtQCn_rk48jvrDP7dqAykMlsrw0vZH-jHJMc5cYyF4cFCm5oghMVyyzRJHydtVrdPkeLjduHcSAkAwnVglw2_bl33hewyhbO96fDQ/s1600/Stott+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="883" data-original-width="617" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO3WiHxaFTekddxLN6A0cdACpRQpJavEYu1_JvDJtQCn_rk48jvrDP7dqAykMlsrw0vZH-jHJMc5cYyF4cFCm5oghMVyyzRJHydtVrdPkeLjduHcSAkAwnVglw2_bl33hewyhbO96fDQ/s400/Stott+1.JPG" width="278" /></a></div>
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Actually, to be honest, I only read the first few pages, and then looked at the pictures.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXBOfFwPCAWu9eR_2zA7BTCz8xbbCvc3p7sfgWR2c1y9IJ-2UjIMdGlpP4qKI4Yi9tg4jtvNlgVfV-GugkUGyOJLzN0B-u2cY4LicrOGrEx6tNRXOwd-YL9MjddWm57tv6Gxq2gdADsQ/s1600/Stott+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="849" data-original-width="1426" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXBOfFwPCAWu9eR_2zA7BTCz8xbbCvc3p7sfgWR2c1y9IJ-2UjIMdGlpP4qKI4Yi9tg4jtvNlgVfV-GugkUGyOJLzN0B-u2cY4LicrOGrEx6tNRXOwd-YL9MjddWm57tv6Gxq2gdADsQ/s400/Stott+3.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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The following shows partial nets for the sequence of sections of the 120-cell. Note that the shapes are all sections of the dodecahedron as shown in the animated gifs above.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtu58K0cbt3gJnhN6_cJjJkPKU1CzZRYpvF8RBty_Mw9ew9M8R4Lk4l_UzGZosdoWrKk4esmtHPHZZ1d-iVaA9D0y6o6ktqwjdKJblu7j86LaIpiWBimWq_vJfBb-HYh1i1EjZOXbWjw/s1600/Stott+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="859" data-original-width="1154" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtu58K0cbt3gJnhN6_cJjJkPKU1CzZRYpvF8RBty_Mw9ew9M8R4Lk4l_UzGZosdoWrKk4esmtHPHZZ1d-iVaA9D0y6o6ktqwjdKJblu7j86LaIpiWBimWq_vJfBb-HYh1i1EjZOXbWjw/s400/Stott+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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These excellent diagrams have actually been used to <a href="http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-boole" target="_blank">reconstruct her models from card stock</a>. However, I wanted to <i>print</i> them. Like most things in math, you pretty much have to rediscover what's known about the 120-cell in order to really understand it yourself. So I set about doing that, first by messing around on GeoGebra. I created something like a net, but with the dodecahedral symmetry of the "base" cell at the center.<br />
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Staring really hard at this construction helped me understand where Stott got her Figures VIII through XIV. One by one, I used transformations to construct the sections as concentric polyhedra. To get the scale correct, it's easiest to regard each as constructed from two-dimensional sections of a single dodecahedron the same size as the polytope's cells.<br />
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For each section (labeled VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, and XIV, after Stott), I generated a set of vertices.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4h4Fa79SWKnQms2rZGviZ6shCCn6RVrrswV7xEZ0JiBpiS90hhPoMgFdBZXiHpilb78Eq_zcaH82CAwGS2Q79AwcSPIu_Llz_2x0Lsz8dklUm3By5PSjwg_xBetzMHwnZGxK6N-BZdA/s1600/Workflow+5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1027" data-original-width="1212" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4h4Fa79SWKnQms2rZGviZ6shCCn6RVrrswV7xEZ0JiBpiS90hhPoMgFdBZXiHpilb78Eq_zcaH82CAwGS2Q79AwcSPIu_Llz_2x0Lsz8dklUm3By5PSjwg_xBetzMHwnZGxK6N-BZdA/s400/Workflow+5.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Alas, GeoGebra does not at present export in the .stl format, which is what I need to print. On the other hand, 3D rendering programs don't typically lend themselves to the kind of geometric constructions we need. No doubt someone better with computers than I am would be able to write some code to bridge the gap. Here's what I did instead.<br />
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First, I put the list of vertices in the wonky GeoGebra spreadsheet, copied and pasted into Word, used the replace function to change the delimiters to tabs and returns, and copied into Excel.<br />
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Then I copied each set of vertices into Notepad using the .obj (object) file format and saved as an .obj file, which you can do, apparently.<br />
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Then I went into Blender, which I use for my print projects, and imported the .obj file, creating a set of vertices. I applied the convex hull tool and obtained the desired solid, which I then exported as an .stl file.<br />
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<span id="goog_692245363"></span><span id="goog_692245364"></span><br />
At long last it was time to prepare the print file. I'm using an NWA3D A31, which has a 12" x 12" bed.<br />
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Each of the sections took a few hours to print. I've discovered that the printer takes about 120% of the projected time to actually complete the job. Either the PLA is of lower quality than what I started with when we got the printer, or I've changed some setting that I shouldn't have, but the jobs come out a bit messier than I'd like, and generally require significant sanding. I suspect it's the plastic, but I'll be getting a new spool soon, so we'll see.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDAjVmWhyaQ7KJAcgDudq2W_3C4GufZ8nM-K90D6WU9eA-ff_rsX6Lod8I90cZWshQJmlxTZZcjPG3aaBZSg7ZyShop3BCyo9LMIrO0GxrfBaSktjse0c8GLNEcYGWw73c8RtOR89HVA/s1600/Workflow+10a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDAjVmWhyaQ7KJAcgDudq2W_3C4GufZ8nM-K90D6WU9eA-ff_rsX6Lod8I90cZWshQJmlxTZZcjPG3aaBZSg7ZyShop3BCyo9LMIrO0GxrfBaSktjse0c8GLNEcYGWw73c8RtOR89HVA/s400/Workflow+10a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I next painted the sections with Folk-Art brand acrylic craft paint from Wal-Mart. I used the multi-surface stuff, which seems to adhere to the PLA pretty well. Each solid got two to three coats. I finished them with semigloss Polycrylic.<br />
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The final product is quite handsome, I think.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-dozvdO7CqAXFN1jfrWsGmdJ7fjtRbM45vGO7U8RmCLMzlABqJx9JeZYpacHHkDq2dRIpJoZ30IBTFwLqaf0t9ww4kLYepijHKS8cdzgBRyGoAjmZ_OUKIY-0ElCVUEe9WCiJCXjJIg/s1600/Sections+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-dozvdO7CqAXFN1jfrWsGmdJ7fjtRbM45vGO7U8RmCLMzlABqJx9JeZYpacHHkDq2dRIpJoZ30IBTFwLqaf0t9ww4kLYepijHKS8cdzgBRyGoAjmZ_OUKIY-0ElCVUEe9WCiJCXjJIg/s400/Sections+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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The seven sections are shown in order below, from the base cell on the left to the equatorial section on the right, each cut by a three-dimensional space parallel to the base cell and passing through a set of vertices. These are only half of the sections; to complete the collection, we would need to go through the first six sections again, but in reverse order, with another copy of the small dodecahedron to represent the "north pole."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj03mqDC3_nt0nE8nDWSxVIIJjUNIpQq6UsAdo88E3vQflSeDrjEB3AjKEgujLbXpG91Ag8WlbDOltDxtOnDeV1F3PUNjWDZSRP5dqMq0ysAChXeuD44Mrg6hPwTP4AILLh_B1WxqGbjw/s1600/Sections+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj03mqDC3_nt0nE8nDWSxVIIJjUNIpQq6UsAdo88E3vQflSeDrjEB3AjKEgujLbXpG91Ag8WlbDOltDxtOnDeV1F3PUNjWDZSRP5dqMq0ysAChXeuD44Mrg6hPwTP4AILLh_B1WxqGbjw/s400/Sections+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I also made the partial net shown above from 75 printed dodecahedra. I had planned to do the "upper" half and connect them, but I don't have the energy right now. I'm getting ready for an art show, and it takes a long time to print, paint, finish, and glue that many dodecahedra.<br />
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And here's a top view:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8TlKr293jO-p-y4mhPzAUeszfSb2c3tsRdv5qZSSJceju7xT_-pfBSDEVFWei0J8xWxpA0vQaZVlvgFmVYrFK1VsrRFIHIn3B6zSkxuthBfBxlkfUYO8gEoFWcABi8ajrt86OQ4fvtg/s1600/Net+5a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1425" height="392" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8TlKr293jO-p-y4mhPzAUeszfSb2c3tsRdv5qZSSJceju7xT_-pfBSDEVFWei0J8xWxpA0vQaZVlvgFmVYrFK1VsrRFIHIn3B6zSkxuthBfBxlkfUYO8gEoFWcABi8ajrt86OQ4fvtg/s400/Net+5a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I may try to repeat all of this for the 24-cell or the 600-cell in the not-so-distant future, if time allows.<br />
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*</div>
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For various reasons, I like coming up with ways of making sophisticated models using the most inexpensive of materials acquired from places like Wal-Mart, Dollar General, or Family Dollar. My 120-cell sections may have been produced on an expensive piece of equipment, but both the local public library and the junior college have printers that are available for pretty much anyone to use, and the paint and stuff all came from Wal-Mart.<br />
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Last week I made a two-dimensional model of the 24-cell (a four-dimensional figure formed from 24 octahedra) using dress pins, thread, a wooden plaque, stain, and varnish all from Wal-Mart.<br />
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The vertices are projected from four dimensional space onto the xy-plane using the coordinates described by Coxeter in <i>Regular Polytopes</i>. I used a single piece of string, double-covering the edges to achieve an even appearance.<br />
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I plan on making the 600-cell in the same way, but I haven't found a piece of wood the right size and shape yet.<br />
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And here's a tensegrity icosahedron built using empty ballpoint pen tubes, rubber bands, and paper clips.<br />
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The tension in the rubber bands keeps the structure in its icosahedral shape; no glue is required, and in fact the struts don't even touch each other. The idea is adapted from <a href="http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/straw-tensegrity.html" target="_blank">George Hart's instructions for the dodecahedron</a>, but I use pen tubes instead of soda straws because they're stiffer. (One of my students came up with that. And anyway, the generic ballpoint pens they sell in big bags at Wal-Mart aren't much good for writing, so it seems appropriate to give them a better use.) The term "tensegrity" was coined by Buckminster Fuller, who used the idea in architecture.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Quotation provided for dramatic purposes only. Ignore any mathematical or scientific implications. </span>Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-84539673426594737892017-08-09T23:07:00.000-07:002017-08-09T23:07:07.608-07:00"I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" at HFQMy most recent Tashyas story, "<a href="http://www.heroicfantasyquarterly.com/?p=2296" target="_blank">I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds</a>," is live at <i>Heroic Fantasy Quarterly</i>. You might call it a story version of my <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/06/land-of-enchantment-and-atom-bombs.html">New Mexico musings</a>. It features an illustration by yours truly (profuse apologies to Georgia O'Keeffe):<br />
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Though I've continued to work on the third installment of my Enoch books, I've felt it necessary to slow down and step back a bit so that I can see the lie of the land with fresh eyes. Hence my excursion into sixteenth-century Tashyas, a region broadly defined as the land between the Rio Grande and the southern Mississippi. This most recent story takes place among the pueblos near modern-day Santa Fe.<br />
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There's been a lot of talk lately about cultural appropriation. I guess these stories are my contribution to the debate / exacerbation of the problem. I can understand why a people would object to seeing part of their culture crassly replicated and accessorized, even in a well-meaning way. Then again, maybe not everything labeled as cultural appropriation actually does that. The world is a strange, confusing, and sometimes horrible place. We're all in it for a limited amount of time. We have to get through it as best we can, using whatever tools come to hand. <br />
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The Greek part of my family immigrated to America through Ellis Island. My great-grandfather, a baker from Mykonos, continued to ply his trade in Illinois. I'm told that the sourdough culture he brought with him still thrives in a bakery owned by some relatives. Families tell you lots of things like that. Maybe it isn't true. It would be cool if it were. Seems like a good metaphor, at any rate. I'll leave it as an exercise to draw the application.<br />
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(My mother's cousin also tells me that Mary Robeson, a.k.a. "<a href="http://www.peoriahistoricalsociety.org/!/Exhibits-PenicillinMoldyMary" target="_blank">Moldy Mary</a>," acquired the moldy cantaloupe from which researchers cultivated the first strain of penicillin for mass production at a grocery owned by another branch of the family in Peoria. There's a bad pun here somewhere, but I'm not going to make it.)<br />
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Being one of my well-rounded readers, you know about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Basically, what you can know about a particle's motion is inversely proportional to what you can know about its position. There's no way to observe a system without altering the system. And the smaller the system is, the more true this is.<br />
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I went camping in New Mexico and Arizona a while back. As usual, I visited a few pueblos, mostly looking to buy pottery. At one point I spent an hour talking to a shop owner on Second Mesa in Hopi. His wife sold my boy an arrowhead and a leather pouch (at a discount, because he's an ingenuous kid) and filled it with blessed cornmeal. I bought a kachina doll. It's in my living room now. Maybe it's just the way our floorboards bounce, but the doll always mysteriously rotates to face the northwest, no matter how many times we put it back in its original position...<br />
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The Hopi pueblos have been inhabited for a thousand years. They were too far out of the way to be troubled by explorers and missionaries much, and their culture shows fewer marks of outside influence. The people seem friendly but reserved, and not too keen on strangers poking around. Not the kind of place you take <i>pictures</i>.<br />
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It's the Cultural Uncertainty Principle. You can't observe a system without perturbing it. They're well aware of that fact. So by what right do I go there? By no right, maybe. I try to be respectful. I contribute to the economy. But perhaps it would be better to just mind my own business. I'm writing this because I don't know the answer. Probably I'll just keep doing what I've been doing.<br />
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If you were to look back in my own family tree, you'd find Bohemian farmers, Greek islanders, Berbers from the Canaries, Spanish colonists in Puerto Rico, West African slaves, and Taino Indians. I'm descended from both conquerors and conquered. Should I be apologetic, or resentful? Clearly it would be silly for me to be either.<br />
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So, I guess I'll just try to lighten the burden of living, for myself and hopefully for others as well, by writing a few more Carvajal stories with blithe unconcern.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-7968355582236420432017-08-04T07:47:00.000-07:002017-08-04T07:47:09.601-07:00Noir Reviews: The Stranger, July 1946<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYcpssigm4CQDtqyw1iiLpuvKJch3dqsWwD1PKl_7-7Q9NMzkr4-CQwNMRK9U7BjO1OWfTr5xNp46XX_7BtBAS0PwnR52cNyQOIHQ2WVVSrmFN30UIjD9zu0RxuVwAHugWgShp0bRyw/s1600/Stranger+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="236" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYcpssigm4CQDtqyw1iiLpuvKJch3dqsWwD1PKl_7-7Q9NMzkr4-CQwNMRK9U7BjO1OWfTr5xNp46XX_7BtBAS0PwnR52cNyQOIHQ2WVVSrmFN30UIjD9zu0RxuVwAHugWgShp0bRyw/s320/Stranger+2.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
Our last noir review took in a 1947 Orson Welles film; moving back in time, let's look at his lesser-known movie <i>The Stranger</i>.<br />
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Welles himself plays the villainous main character, Franz Kindler, a clockwork-obsessed high-ranking Nazi fugitive who has somehow already gotten himself a job as a prep school teacher (alias Charles Rankin) in one of those irritatingly picturesque New England towns you see in movies. What's more, he's engaged to be married to the daughter of a Supreme Court justice! Their wedding takes place in the first few minutes of the movie, right after he murders his former right-hand man Meinike and buries his body in the woods.<br />
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Edward G. Robinson plays the investigator who tails Meinike into town, hoping the little fish will lead him to a bigger fish. Loretta Young plays the wife who gradually discovers that she's married to a monster. <br />
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The plot is fairly suspenseful. For someone like me, though, who enjoys noirs for their skewed morality, there's not a lot going on here. The villain is indubitably wicked and portrayed without an ounce of sympathy. He's not even interesting. The investigator is a stolid, righteous man bent on bringing an evildoer to justice. The wife is good and kind, and carefully absolved of psychological collusion. Her deadly coolness at the end does a lot to redeem the movie. For the most part, though, it's unworthy of its director.<br />
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Still, <i>The Stranger</i> does have some nice touches. The garrulous checkers-playing drugstore owner (Billy House) steals every scene he's in, even when he shares it with Edward G. Robinson. A couple of scenes move fluidly from the street into the drugstore, and there are some other subtle long takes.<br />
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Apart from a bizarre, impassioned anti-German speech intended to throw the investigator off the scent, Kindler's ideology doesn't play a big role – he could have been any kind of criminal, really – but the film does make use of some actual death camp footage, which is a bit shocking even at this distance and must have been much more so at the time. Now <i>that's</i> moral grayness for you: using one of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known as fodder for a trite thriller not two years after Auschwitz closed.<br />
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Nietzsche isn't mentioned by name, but I suspect that Welles tried to make his character resemble the famous photo portrait of the philosopher.<br />
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Nietzsche has been widely blamed (somewhat unjustly, I believe) for having inspired the Nazis. He adulated Frederick the Great, as the Nazis also did, and Kindler is shown delivering a lecture on Frederick to his prep school students.<br />
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<i>The Stranger</i> is in the public domain; you can watch it <a href="https://archive.org/details/TheStranger720p" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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* * * </div>
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I give <i>The Stranger</i> a grade of <b>C for commonplace </b>on the following scale: <br />
<ul>
<li>A: <b><i>awesome </i></b>noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized</li>
<li>B: good (<b><i>bueno</i></b>) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion</li>
<li>C: fairly <b><i>commonplace </i></b>noir film, to be watched once or twice</li>
<li>D: <b><i>dud </i></b>of a noir film, to be avoided if possible</li>
</ul>
It's not a bad movie, but it's more of a Hitchcock-style thriller than a true noir. <i>Film noir</i> is about good, ordinary, decent people being guilty, not about evil monsters being guilty. High points in <i>The Stranger</i> include the strangulation scene, the drugstore checkers games, and the clock tower confrontation.<br />
<br />
Takeaway quote from <i>The Stranger</i>:
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
"Good night, Mary. Pleasant dreams."</h3>
</blockquote>
*** If you've enjoyed this review, maybe you'd enjoy my reviews of other noir films: <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-introduction.html">Introduction</a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-phantom-lady-january-1944.html"><i>Phantom Lady</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-double-indemnity-april-1944.html"><i>Double Indemnity</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/01/noir-reviews-murder-my-sweet-december.html"><i>Murder, My Sweet</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/02/noir-reviews-detour-november-1945.html"><i>Detour</i></a> – <i><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/noir-reviews-scarlet-street-december.html">Scarlet Street</a> </i>– <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html"><i>The Blue Dahlia</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-lost-weekend-november-1945.html"><i>The Lost Weekend</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/07/gilda-and-lady-from-shanghai.html"><i>Gilda</i> and <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i></a> ***
Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-69958525976249245962017-07-31T23:47:00.004-07:002017-10-23T09:16:45.267-07:00Noir Reviews: Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg_TpWIL5vcVyXYG8bCRyTj48dpkNcqW6yp2XunSfYLtNKL1O-a9hs1BWq4T4q6HaLcctybNW9kqkXUKVYIRap8fVsZ-66zmEuc3NfhxHnBlysX5HLC-PgHHQbmEbZyyPHAN3azNIINA/s1600/Gilda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg_TpWIL5vcVyXYG8bCRyTj48dpkNcqW6yp2XunSfYLtNKL1O-a9hs1BWq4T4q6HaLcctybNW9kqkXUKVYIRap8fVsZ-66zmEuc3NfhxHnBlysX5HLC-PgHHQbmEbZyyPHAN3azNIINA/s320/Gilda.jpg" width="213" /></a>The first was released in February 1946; the second, in December 1947 (France) and June 1948 (United States). Both star the unbearably sexy Rita Hayworth with a singing voice dubbed by Anita Kert Ellis. Both take place at least partly in exotic locales. In each, a rich and powerful but impotent older man hires a virile younger man to watch over his seductive younger wife, leading to trouble of the <i>femme fatale</i> variety. I'm therefore going to take the liberty of reviewing them together. A little compare-and-contrast.<br />
<br />
In <i>Gilda</i>, Glenn Ford plays small-time gambler Johnny Farrell, who uses cleverness, knavery, and machismo to become the right-hand-man of swordstick-toting Buenos Aires nightclub owner Ballin Mundson (George Macready). Mundson likes to talk about his "little friend" (the swordstick):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mundson: It is a most faithful and obedient friend: it is silent when I want it to be silent, but talks when I want to talk.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Johnny: Is it that your idea of a friend?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mundson: That is my idea of a friend.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Johnny: You must lead a gay life.</blockquote>
There's a certain...undertone...to their relationship. How intentional it is I don't know. But it's definitely there.<br />
<br />
Before long, though, Mundson acquires a trophy wife, a nightclub performer named Gilda (Hayworth) with whom Johnny happens already to be acquainted. Hayworth's kittenish head-toss must be one of the most memorable entrances in movie history. When I first saw <i>Gilda</i>, I racked my brain to remember where I'd seen it before, and then it came to me: it's the shot used in <i>The Shawshank Redemption</i>, which is a movie a lot of people like and I hate.<br />
<br />
Johnny and Gilda very clearly still love one another, but it's a sick kind of love that expresses itself in hate. They're obsessed with punishing and destroying each other. There are some rather improbable happenings involving tungsten mines and plane crashes. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say [spoiler alert!] that the movie stabs the viewer in the back by letting the principals off with a sentimental <i>happy ending</i> when they clearly should have killed each other or something. Hey! Didn't someone tell me this was a <i>film noir</i>?<br />
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Now, if the plot of <i>Gilda</i> is improbable, then the plot of <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i> is utterly bonkers. This seems to be at least partly an editing issue. It was directed by Orson Welles, who ran into the production problems that plagued his entire career. What we have of <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i> is magnificent, if bizarre and nonsensical; I don't suppose we'll ever know what it might have been.<br />
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The sturdy young man, Michael O'Hara, is played by Welles himself. He's hired by a disabled defense attorney named Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) to serve aboard his yacht and keep his wife Elsa (Hayworth) company as they sail from New York to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. Bannister's weird, slightly unhinged partner Grisby comes aboard partway through the journey.<br />
<br />
Michael finds himself increasingly entangled in the Bannisters' depraved, world-weary emotional intrigues. An atmosphere of fever, madness, and apocalyptic gloom hangs over it all. Even apart from Grisby's ravings, there's an overarching sense that things are coming apart, that the world is ceasing to cohere. Soon bombs are going to start falling; already men are feeding on men. At a grim picnic on a torrid tropical beach Michael observes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Once, off the hump of Brazil I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black and the sun fainting away over the lip of the sky. We'd put in at Fortaleza, and a few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishing. It was me had the first strike. A shark it was. Then there was another, and another shark again, till all about, the sea was made of sharks and more sharks still, and no water at all. My shark had torn himself from the hook, and the scent, or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away drove the rest of them mad. Then the beasts to to eating each other.In their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes, and you could smell the death, reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse...until this little picnic tonight. And you know, there wasn't one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived.</blockquote>
That monologue, incidentally, appears to be based on a chapter of <i>Moby-Dick</i>, a book that fascinated Welles throughout his career; he later explored it with a play, and himself played Father Mapple in John Huston's film.<br />
<br />
What a beautiful, unsettling movie <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i> is. True, I've never been able to make head or tail of the murder plot. Who was supposed to shoot whom and why? Who was fooled and by whom and for what purpose? I'm still not certain. Maybe the film was just cut too deeply in the editing process. On the other hand, it does end in a surreal empty funhouse, which happens to be a perfect metaphor for the movie as a whole. It's crazy, so you just have to surrender yourself to it and gaze at what you see in wonder.<br />
<br />
So, if you want a decent, reliable movie with a happy ending, watch <i>Gilda</i>; if you want the deeply flawed yet enigmatically beautiful work of a genius, watch <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i>.<br />
<br />
Wait, what's that? You just want to look at Rita Hayworth for an hour or so? Well, my lowbrow friend, if you want to see the long red hair she's famous for, watch <i>Gilda</i>. If you settle for <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i>, be prepared to see her locks cut short and bleached blonde. Welles and Hayworth were going through a divorce at the time. <br />
<br />
Me? I'll take <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i> on both counts.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
* * * </div>
<br />
I give <i>Gilda</i> a grade of <b>C for commonplace </b>and<i> The Lady from Shanghai </i>a grade of <b>B for Bueno </b>on the following scale: <br />
<ul>
<li>A: <b><i>awesome </i></b>noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized</li>
<li>B: good (<b><i>bueno</i></b>) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion</li>
<li>C: fairly <b><i>commonplace </i></b>noir film, to be watched once or twice</li>
<li>D: <b><i>dud </i></b>of a noir film, to be avoided if possible</li>
</ul>
High points in <i>Gilda</i>
include Hayworth's entrance and her "Put the Blame on Mame" performance (which is dubbed over, though she sings it on her own later in the movie). High points in <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i> include the dreary tropical picnic, the hall of mirrors shoot-out, and every time Grisby says "<i>tarrrrrr-get</i> practice."<br />
<br />
Takeaway quote from <i>Gilda</i>:
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
"Hate is a very exciting emotion. Haven't you noticed?"</h3>
</blockquote>
From <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
"It's a bright, guilty world."</h3>
</blockquote>
*** If you've enjoyed this review, maybe you'd enjoy my reviews of other noir films: <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-introduction.html">Introduction</a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-phantom-lady-january-1944.html"><i>Phantom Lady</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-double-indemnity-april-1944.html"><i>Double Indemnity</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/01/noir-reviews-murder-my-sweet-december.html"><i>Murder, My Sweet</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/02/noir-reviews-detour-november-1945.html"><i>Detour</i></a> – <i><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/noir-reviews-scarlet-street-december.html">Scarlet Street</a> </i>– <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html"><i>The Blue Dahlia</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-lost-weekend-november-1945.html"><i>The Lost Weekend</i></a> ***
Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-54380104676509921512017-06-24T23:18:00.000-07:002017-06-24T23:18:52.624-07:00Two Deicides and a ChurchMy latest painting, <i>El Santuario de Chimayó</i>, a 5" x 4" watercolor, depicts a church located in the western foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. It's a curious site with possible links to Precolumbian religion; I wrote about it <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/06/land-of-enchantment-and-atom-bombs.html">last year</a>.<br />
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Amusingly, I happened to listen to H. P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" as I finished it. It'll appear in my exhibition on the university campus in Alpine during
August and September. I'm trying to do a number of small, fairly spontaneous pieces to round out the show. The scan is not terribly faithful, unfortunately; I
think I need a new scanner.<br />
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I've also continued to attempt pen-and-ink illustration. Here we have an illustration to Clark Ashton Smith's "<a href="http://eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/29/the-coming-of-the-white-worm-%28abridged%29" target="_blank">The Coming of the White Worm</a>," which forms part of his Hyperborea cycle:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdkSeNlozToYYRMGI-YznfDYH86CG4E8fYsdoLlb7WAhJiwDm1YXpb000eE0Ag8Tq1Q9eWjeQeZ39v4MUSCqnVQvq2iPL5O_HbbQMQn5MXEgM4Bf8fgybz_ATi0Kbc-1nMTd0DyNYwOw/s1600/White+Worm+post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="963" data-original-width="665" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdkSeNlozToYYRMGI-YznfDYH86CG4E8fYsdoLlb7WAhJiwDm1YXpb000eE0Ag8Tq1Q9eWjeQeZ39v4MUSCqnVQvq2iPL5O_HbbQMQn5MXEgM4Bf8fgybz_ATi0Kbc-1nMTd0DyNYwOw/s640/White+Worm+post.jpg" width="440" /></a></div>
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Of course this depicts the moment Evagh the warlock plunges his bronze sword into the unclean worm, releasing "a sudden torrent of black liquescent matter" which ends his life and melts the iceberg wherein the worm resides. Note the heaps of eyeballs, which drip from the worm's empty sockets to form "two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore," upon the ice-floor.<br />
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Finally, an image from what may be my very favorite Klarkash-Ton tale: "<a href="http://eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/41/the-demon-of-the-flower" target="_blank">The Demon of the Flower</a>."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwEYuj-q2NY33Apfdg7KaPb0dISl4apC267obtkCRtJxmlO0tcYWBEyEMW06gJYHrXHGaMz9bgEqRZw-BEKiqesEK2G0fpOgYzxH64DvIJw-dxQ4fFcDNfRYnv0kU3_REhXzFqJFB0JA/s1600/Demon+Flower+post.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="968" data-original-width="666" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwEYuj-q2NY33Apfdg7KaPb0dISl4apC267obtkCRtJxmlO0tcYWBEyEMW06gJYHrXHGaMz9bgEqRZw-BEKiqesEK2G0fpOgYzxH64DvIJw-dxQ4fFcDNfRYnv0kU3_REhXzFqJFB0JA/s640/Demon+Flower+post.jpg" width="440" /></a></div>
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Here Lunithi the priest-king attempts to end the Voorqual's tyranny with a poisoned blood-offering. I've been working on a digitally-colored version, and will post it here if I ever have the patience to finish.<br />
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You know, it hadn't occurred to me before now, but the two illustrations have a common theme, don't they? Both depict attempted assassinations of weird Klarkash-Tonian gods.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-35211002378249068612017-06-22T23:55:00.000-07:002017-06-23T00:00:02.241-07:00Vulcan's Glory and Other Relics<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP2cEhp8wfp-zstafsoUcYbkKZ_jQJXxbDigtJgQqTtX4roKQ5LXFA03HYO7II_t-hvuIoeb-dtOdxYczBfgm6_iNCk33WzKzGFweLdIvrCf5n6wL9fxUa1csMJMi3DGY-JMw9dTPv6Q/s1600/Vulcan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="578" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP2cEhp8wfp-zstafsoUcYbkKZ_jQJXxbDigtJgQqTtX4roKQ5LXFA03HYO7II_t-hvuIoeb-dtOdxYczBfgm6_iNCk33WzKzGFweLdIvrCf5n6wL9fxUa1csMJMi3DGY-JMw9dTPv6Q/s320/Vulcan.jpg" width="192" /></a>When I was nine or ten, the local UHF station showed <i>Star Trek</i> every night at 6:00. I never missed it. Willingly, that is, as dinner often interfered.<br />
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My two best friends and I sometimes assumed Star Trek roles while playing together. Our parts were permanently assigned: they were Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, respectively, and I was Mr. Spock. We had a cloaked starship in a corner of the schoolyard, a la <i>Star Trek IV</i>, and amused ourselves by telling incredulous fellow students about it.<br />
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When we exchanged gifts at the great Christmas sleepover of 1989, one of my friends gave me several Star Trek novels, which in those days could be acquired via the rotating rack in our small-town grocery store. Stop a moment and reflect on that. In 1989, you could walk into a tiny Super S Foods in rural South Texas and buy a stack of novels based on the series canceled in 1969. Hard to imagine, isn't it?<br />
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But I digress. The Christmas gift included <i>Vulcan's Glory</i> by D. C. Fontana, one of the best writers of the original series. I still have it in my possession, a bit tattered from riding around in my backpack for weeks, perhaps, but intact nonetheless.<br />
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I reread <i>Vulcan's Glory</i> this week, having gotten it out to show my kids. That's a scan of my copy above. We had just watched "Amok Time" and "Journey to Babel," two of my favorite episodes; <i>Vulcan's Glory</i> is in some ways a prequel to both.<br />
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The book isn't what you'd call high literature or original science fiction, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable. It takes place during Christopher Pike's tenure as captain of the <i>Enterprise</i> and fills in some of Spock's backstory. Fontana is credited as the writer for "Journey to Babel" and numerous other episodes, and contributed to many more; she seems responsible for much of the subtlety of character and cultural depth in the original series, especially in Mr. Spock, for whom she appears to have harbored considerable affection.<br />
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I've always been drawn to Spock. He's supremely logical but also deeply contemplative, and his character makes clear how naturally the two qualities go together. He's straightforward to the point of awkwardness, sternly self-disciplined, reserved but full of deep feeling, capable of love and self-sacrifice, and, despite his Vulcan gravity, possessed of a dry sense of humor. He's a person of mixed <strike>race</strike> species, accepted neither on Vulcan nor among humans, at home only in Starfleet. Though acutely conscious of propriety and tradition, he rebelled against his father by joining Starfleet, yet deliberately pushes himself to be more Vulcan than full-blooded Vulcans. In a way, Spock <i>is</i> Star Trek. And we owe him largely to Dorothy Christine Fontana.<br />
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The trouble with reading a Star Trek novel is that the narrative liberties and cost-saving shortcuts taken by a fifty-minute show become glaringly obvious in a long written work. It's a little odd, for instance, to encounter a carefully written, meditative novel premised on the ludicrous notion that persons of different species, from different <i>planets</i>, could have a child together. They don't even have the same <i>anatomy</i>, for crying out loud! And then there's teleportation. The plot hinges on a lost Vulcan relic which is discovered on a desert planet and taken aboard the <i>Enterprise</i>. Maybe this is just the Catholic in me talking, but I suspect that a real Vulcan would find the the notion of "beaming up" a relic deeply repugnant. It would disrupt the object's physical continuity, which is what makes a relic a relic in the first place. And that only makes me start thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the philosophical implications of teleporting <i>persons</i>.<br />
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Fortunately I read the book in about three sittings, so these misgivings didn't have time to lessen my joy.<br />
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*</div>
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Part of what sparked our renewed interest in things Star Trek was our visit several weeks ago to the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, where we whiled away the afternoon after White Sands got too hot. They had a lot of model rockets and whatnot, and that was all great, I guess, but what really delighted us was their collection of Star Trek memorabilia.<br />
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Here, for example, we have the spears used in "The Galileo Seven":<br />
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And here's the original letter from producer Robert H. Justman regarding the donation:<br />
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Next we have what <i>appears</i> to be Donald Trump's hairpiece:<br />
<br />
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<br />
But guess again! It's a tribble!!!<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy48MoeRHLEWjG16dOHmNjLNqdrgiGPPDSRNh_8afu0VoxDPA-sFDP9GofzaYgDw9DZdHq2si_5_h8TiSsp2GjkL-BDyV8AVyhgbmwx7SmmB4WAVc-2FK2XeBXJOYtCs4aSrNURv7erQ/s1600/FCX20%2527.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1053" data-original-width="789" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy48MoeRHLEWjG16dOHmNjLNqdrgiGPPDSRNh_8afu0VoxDPA-sFDP9GofzaYgDw9DZdHq2si_5_h8TiSsp2GjkL-BDyV8AVyhgbmwx7SmmB4WAVc-2FK2XeBXJOYtCs4aSrNURv7erQ/s320/FCX20%2527.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
<br />
They also had the model of the <i>Enterprise</i> used in "Catspaw":<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn0iQ01MxpYHUu35ZlPF7ZnyYadNp1slodcVIY_fe32IPPt-6Oht_W5ZI_K19dM2YbdcbUVpr5UI33NgFtidrX45nB7Gwmpxbv5ssnn5_fW9jsQfAJbTM8tj5nWKixzukwFz-04-SgFA/s1600/FCX21.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1260" data-original-width="945" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn0iQ01MxpYHUu35ZlPF7ZnyYadNp1slodcVIY_fe32IPPt-6Oht_W5ZI_K19dM2YbdcbUVpr5UI33NgFtidrX45nB7Gwmpxbv5ssnn5_fW9jsQfAJbTM8tj5nWKixzukwFz-04-SgFA/s320/FCX21.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<br />
Not something I'd go out of my way for, I think, but it was fun to see some (unbeamed) relics in such an unexpected place. I'm also happy to report that my <strike>horde of brainwashed Trekkies whom I shall one day release upon the unsuspecting world</strike> beloved children recognized most of the episodes on display.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnW1jK1WEGZfWzmge0vlkwx7OhQcCtBwe6Ufo9CyeSiCysMQfGmh-03EKMa6ZRNhBzzv8Ajw6Vfp6snEB1tcBDhE0gQj_bY4wJvkRzLVxAr_JnPBTMm6UU1XvKwed44knRn01HKoDcGg/s1600/Universe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="585" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnW1jK1WEGZfWzmge0vlkwx7OhQcCtBwe6Ufo9CyeSiCysMQfGmh-03EKMa6ZRNhBzzv8Ajw6Vfp6snEB1tcBDhE0gQj_bY4wJvkRzLVxAr_JnPBTMm6UU1XvKwed44knRn01HKoDcGg/s320/Universe.jpg" width="195" /></a></div>
Among my old books I also found <i>The Three-Minute Universe</i>, another Christmas gift. It was my very favorite thing to read for a while, as you can tell from the tattered quality of my copy to the right. I used to have more original series books bought with my own money, but I suppose I just kept these two for sentimental value and discarded the rest long ago.<br />
<br />
My buddy also gave me a <i>Next Generation</i> novel, but I naturally got rid of <i>that</i> thing long ago. Ugh! I just never did hold with that upstart series. My other buddy now speaks highly of <i>Deep Space 9</i>. Back when it came out I found it profoundly boring, but maybe I'd enjoy it now. <br />
<br />
Anyway, I'll probably try reading <i>The Three-Minute Universe</i> again sometime soon. I look forward to the pleasurable mix of guilt and enjoyment.Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-24344829924546962392017-06-06T15:19:00.000-07:002017-10-23T09:06:19.263-07:00Noir Reviews: The Lost Weekend, November 1945<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNsdx_Xk-zkmSrEiGxGEBXB_c2iWaup8wxePedrpbbRWQ77LAgJoIzfYjEs619-UnZfsRofUGd9dV6fEsCX3dpmQsgvsfIfqUpjWk-NHljPAixtj1oueZEJlNf5wPSWUmaKOWiWH5BtQ/s1600/Weekend.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNsdx_Xk-zkmSrEiGxGEBXB_c2iWaup8wxePedrpbbRWQ77LAgJoIzfYjEs619-UnZfsRofUGd9dV6fEsCX3dpmQsgvsfIfqUpjWk-NHljPAixtj1oueZEJlNf5wPSWUmaKOWiWH5BtQ/s320/Weekend.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>
Billy Wilder, the director responsible for three of the best noirs (<i>Double Indemnity</i>, <i>Sunset Boulevard</i>, and <i>Ace in the Hole</i>), claimed that he made <i>The Lost Weekend</i> in order to explain <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html">Raymond Chandler</a> to himself. Portraying the anatomy of an alcoholic's binge in excruciating psychological detail, it's regarded as one of the best depictions of addiction in film.<br />
<br />
Ray Milland plays a washed-up writer named Don Birnam who, despite the best efforts of his long-suffering brother and girlfriend, remains a hopeless, self-loathing drunk. The film follows him over the course of the titular weekend, from the ebullience of his first drinks down through an inferno of desperation and humiliation to the uttermost nadir, the horror of <i>delerium tremens</i>. His backstory is told in flashbacks, portraying him, not as a promising writer who fell prey to alcohol, but as a precocious hack who turned to booze as a crutch for his inadequacies. He's painfully honest with himself about who he is, roasting perpetually in shame and self-hatred.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning. </blockquote>
Playing the faithful girlfriend Helen St. James, is Jane Wyman, who went on to become Ronald Reagan's first wife. (Did you remember that he was divorced?) Don treats her like dirt, of course, and her almost maniacally bright and hopeful face as she forcefully <i>cares</i> for him and <i>forgives </i>him again and again almost gives me the creeps. Am I just a cynic, or is this intentional? You almost want to take her by the shoulders and shout, "What are you thinking? Get out while you still can!"<br />
<br />
More to my warped taste is Gloria, a barfly and "escort" who has a liking for Don. She's a relatively minor character, but I like the way she's drawn. The half-fascinated, half-disgusted bartender Nat is another nice touch. The two actors (Doris Dowling and Howard Da Silva) also appeared in <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html"><i>The Blue Dahlia</i></a>.<br />
<br />
The film ends [spoiler alert!] on a hopeful note that I find a bit jarring. Don's binge is portrayed as just the latest in a series, but it resolves itself with the promise of a new beginning. In fact, Don appears to have been "cured" by Helen (who never finds out about his dalliance with Gloria, fortunately). He plans triumphantly to tell his inspirational story in print and thus become a true writer at last. The thing is, I don't think it's ever as easy as that.<br />
<br />
Maybe Wilder intends us to imagine this happy ending as just another false hope, the final act in a drama that repeats itself endlessly, and will replay in about two weeks, when Don is once again mischievously hiding bottles from his brother while promising that he's still on the wagon. That would certainly make <i>The Lost Weekend</i> the perfect noir. And yet I don't get the feeling that this is what Wilder intends. Which, alas, forces me to view <i>The Lost Weekend</i> as lying somewhere on the periphery of <i>film noir</i>.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * * </div>
<br />
I give <i>The Lost Weekend</i> a grade of <b>B for bueno </b>on the following scale: <br />
<ul>
<li>A: <b><i>awesome </i></b>noir film, to be owned and watched a zillion times or until you have it memorized</li>
<li>B: good (<b><i>bueno</i></b>) noir film with excellent passages but significant flaws, to be watched on occasion</li>
<li>C: fairly <b><i>commonplace </i></b>noir film, to be watched once or twice</li>
<li>D: <b><i>dud </i></b>of a noir film, to be avoided if possible</li>
</ul>
Remember, I'm rating films as <i>films noir</i>, not as films. A great film may be a lousy noir. Despite being a gritty, realistic, psychologically grueling depiction of
addiction, and an excellent movie in its own right,
<i>The Lost Weekend</i> ends in a way that keeps it out of the dark, guilt-sodden heart of true <i>film noir</i>.<br />
<br />
High points in <i>The Lost Weekend</i>
include the dancing coats and the horrid bat-attack. Takeaway quote:
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
"Delirium is a disease of the night. Good night."</h3>
</blockquote>
*** If you've enjoyed this review, maybe you'd enjoy my reviews of other noir films: <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-introduction.html">Introduction</a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-phantom-lady-january-1944.html"><i>Phantom Lady</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/12/noir-reviews-double-indemnity-april-1944.html"><i>Double Indemnity</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/01/noir-reviews-murder-my-sweet-december.html"><i>Murder, My Sweet</i></a> – <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/02/noir-reviews-detour-november-1945.html"><i>Detour</i></a> – <i><a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/noir-reviews-scarlet-street-december.html">Scarlet Street</a> </i>– <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-blue-dahlia-april-1946.html"><i>The Blue Dahlia</i></a> ***
Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7000915267979691397.post-72713581546975221112017-05-17T12:19:00.002-07:002017-05-17T12:33:20.047-07:00Views of a Tesseract<blockquote class="tr_bq">
…the breadth, and length, and depth, and height… </blockquote>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
– Ephesians 3:18 </blockquote>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. </blockquote>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
– Revelation 21:16-18 </blockquote>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Un homme qui y consacrerait son existence arriverait peut-être à se peindre la quatrième dimension. [A man who devoted his life to it could perhaps succeed in picturing to himself the fourth dimension.] </blockquote>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
– Henri Poincaré </blockquote>
</div>
This spring I have scaled the awful, sanity-threatening Unknown Kadaths of the fourth dimension in a desperate, god-provoking quest to visualize the six regular polytopes.<br />
<br />
What is a polytope, you ask? The word <i>polytope</i> is the general term in the sequence whose first terms are the line segment (dimension one), the polygon (dimension two), and the polyhedron (dimension three). A <i>regular</i> polytope is a polytope which is "completely symmetric."<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfT3sz8b7jQCJPY2bxFchioEj0yaXVZrMHdqAZgagTTqm3Y8LTR4sszBdrMhGwrtoNS6nyBTR38REAeheUL0LpnPVuphrg9wktLYk_Zpz7Oc-1BvC6uZ63XfQBAmmUYDFdtZn9cbQqxg/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfT3sz8b7jQCJPY2bxFchioEj0yaXVZrMHdqAZgagTTqm3Y8LTR4sszBdrMhGwrtoNS6nyBTR38REAeheUL0LpnPVuphrg9wktLYk_Zpz7Oc-1BvC6uZ63XfQBAmmUYDFdtZn9cbQqxg/s320/Untitled.png" width="288" /></a></div>
Theatetus, a contemporary of Plato, proved that there are exactly five regular polyhedra: the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron, the cube, and the dodecahedron. They are called the Platonic solids because Plato identified each of the first four with a material element (fire, air, water, earth), and the fifth with "the delineation of the universe" [<i>Timaeus</i>]. Their construction is the crowning achievement of Euclid's <i>Elements</i>, written in about 300 BC. But the world had to wait more than two thousand years for the "discovery" of their analogues in the fourth dimension.<br />
<br />
Fourth-dimensional geometry, thought it might seem mysterious to the uninitiated, is defined axiomatically, just like Euclid's three-dimensional geometry, and has an intuitive basis. It was first described by Ludwig Schläfli, a Swiss mathematician, in the
1850s, but his work remained relatively inaccessible and unknown. Then,
between 1880 and 1900, the geometry of higher dimensions was
rediscovered in <i>nine different publications </i>written independently of each other. The time, it seems, was ripe. It was the dawn of a new era.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFysSLJ0qE-GhjjArEUxXAY7h8Vfa-aGZYoHSJSC_uU9DHQIwJl_jhzQJQEK2cVfx0l92dKG1MAlp6lwzjUSGtMardGxuimY9BpjXP3_gRaZjfZfjkUxEI0QZq_9mivczwqCMzpgG0cA/s1600/5th+dimension.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFysSLJ0qE-GhjjArEUxXAY7h8Vfa-aGZYoHSJSC_uU9DHQIwJl_jhzQJQEK2cVfx0l92dKG1MAlp6lwzjUSGtMardGxuimY9BpjXP3_gRaZjfZfjkUxEI0QZq_9mivczwqCMzpgG0cA/s1600/5th+dimension.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Not <i>that</i> era. [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_5th_Dimension_-_The_Age_of_Aquarius.jpg" target="_blank">source</a>]</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This phenomenon of numerous researchers all suddenly reaching the same conclusion at the same time, though surprising when it happens, isn't all that uncommon in the history of math, science, and technology. What's striking is the way four-dimensional geometry fired the popular imagination, which seems in some cases to have outstripped academia.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDnzndRiAZgbdRLDkvTOM19hZQNkWFu3CIGoJIvuk7IxjiuuNjqlcfr9qDlhujn3GN-I8BPT0bmFE_IBNMs4WFH0iEiAFJRdALEePeCZ3Xd-eYBWb2MRd2O9rnK8sfX_VJ_y6qZLr6aw/s1600/Flatland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDnzndRiAZgbdRLDkvTOM19hZQNkWFu3CIGoJIvuk7IxjiuuNjqlcfr9qDlhujn3GN-I8BPT0bmFE_IBNMs4WFH0iEiAFJRdALEePeCZ3Xd-eYBWb2MRd2O9rnK8sfX_VJ_y6qZLr6aw/s320/Flatland.jpg" width="262" /></a>Last year <a href="http://raphordo.blogspot.com/2016/02/flatland-romance-of-many-dimensions.html">I blogged about <i>Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions</i></a>, a strange geometrical fantasy written by the English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott (1838-1926) and published in 1884. In it, Abbott gives what must be the first popular description of the <i>tesseract</i>, or four-dimensional <i>hypercube</i>, by way of analogy.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In One Dimension, did not a moving Point produce a Line with TWO terminal points? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In Two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square with FOUR terminal points? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In
Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce – did not this eye of
mine behold it – that blessed Being, a Cube, with EIGHT terminal
points? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And in Four
Dimensions shall not a moving Cube – alas, for Analogy, and alas for the
Progress of Truth, if it be not so – shall not, I say, the motion of a
divine Cube result in a still more divine Organization with SIXTEEN
terminal points? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Behold
the infallible confirmation of the Series, 2, 4, 8, 16: is not this a
Geometrical Progression? Is not this – if I might quote my Lord's own
words – "strictly according to Analogy"? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Again,
was I not taught by my Lord that as in a Line there are TWO bounding
Points, and in a Square there are FOUR bounding Lines, so in a Cube
there must be SIX bounding Squares? Behold once more the confirming
Series, 2, 4, 6: is not this an Arithmetical Progression? And
consequently does it not of necessity follow that the more divine
offspring of the divine Cube in the Land of Four Dimensions, must have 8
bounding Cubes: and is not this also, as my Lord has taught me to
believe, "strictly according to Analogy"?</blockquote>
How much exactly did Abbott know of contemporary research? One imagines he must have encountered <i>something</i>, but I can't seem to find anything definite. A matter for further research, I suppose.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPPR7Kx7nnm2iKR4t72FDkQc76Q88Anugny6jj9aCzxPiSavvUm5DOdzsjzPaSFM6w3_7_pTyUCrKUuhJwKT_5z_jI1CbyRzoUrhmoGpo1ggXUpvo2Y5EKAwvdwIPeCjF73HbWWQC5IA/s1600/Tessaract.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPPR7Kx7nnm2iKR4t72FDkQc76Q88Anugny6jj9aCzxPiSavvUm5DOdzsjzPaSFM6w3_7_pTyUCrKUuhJwKT_5z_jI1CbyRzoUrhmoGpo1ggXUpvo2Y5EKAwvdwIPeCjF73HbWWQC5IA/s320/Tessaract.jpg" width="274" /></a>Inspired by Abbott, a high school teacher and amateur mathematician by the name of Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) wrote a number of "scientific romances" exploring higher dimensions. It was Hinton who coined the term <i>tesseract</i>, and his book <i>A New Era of Thought</i>, published in 1888, provides a detailed account of the hypercube's structure. It also offers a mystical interpretation of
the fourth dimension, following to some extent in Abbott's footsteps,
but with considerably greater gravity and self-importance.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We have been subject to a limitation of the most absurd character. Let us open our eyes and see the facts. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now,
it requires some training to open the eyes. For many years I worked at
the subject without the slightest success. All was mere formalism. But
by adopting the simplest means, and by a more thorough knowledge of
space, the whole flashed clear. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Space
shapes can only be symbolical of four-dimensional shapes; and if we do
not deal with space shapes directly, but only treat them by symbols on
the plane – as in analytical geometry – we are trying to get a
perception of higher space through symbols of symbols, and the task is
hopeless. But a direct study of space leads us to the knowledge of
higher space. And with the knowledge of higher space there come into our
ken boundless possibilities. All those things may be real, whereof
saints and philosophers have dreamed.</blockquote>
Hinton was read by Jorge Luis Borges, and his book is mentioned "<span class="_mh6 _wsc" id="cch_f2634a05e19eb7"><span class="_3oh- _58nk">Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."</span></span><br />
<br />
Through his father, described by some as a religious crank, Hinton came to know the family of the late George Boole, the father of algebraic logic, whose untimely death had left his wife, Mary Everest* Boole, with their five daughters to raise. Mrs. Boole's interests ranged from mathematics to mysticism to politics; she wrote a number of pedagogical works, organized controversial discussion groups, and hobnobbed with the denizens of the fringes. Among these were the polygamy advocate James Hinton and his son Howard.<br />
<br />
Howard married the eldest daughter, Mary Ellen Boole, in 1880, and they had four children together. A few later, he married a second woman under an assumed name, <span class="_mh6 _wsc" id="cch_f2634a05e19eb7"><span class="_3oh- _58nk">had two children with her, was
convicted of bigamy, spent a few days in jail, lost his job, and moved to
the United States with his (first) wife to become a university professor. He died
unexpectedly in 1907, and Mary Ellen committed suicide the next year. </span></span><br />
<br />
H. S. M. Coxeter's <i>Regular Polytopes</i>,
published (in its second edition)
in 1963, remains the main authority on its subject. I've entertained myself by constructing the various solids he describes in it.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4l7_U0Q5a8zW7TvvRmvZpWkQBhDsH6h1VmjgtGMBi_iO4ik_uVnWQSvv-KRk30zrPvPbd16nGhJJY_Jt6IFQQTQZvBkRLDHEbnwA3U-kI2vkv5Tr_31_l4FAeO30bZ3dutMqFf111Pw/s1600/Dual+stars.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4l7_U0Q5a8zW7TvvRmvZpWkQBhDsH6h1VmjgtGMBi_iO4ik_uVnWQSvv-KRk30zrPvPbd16nGhJJY_Jt6IFQQTQZvBkRLDHEbnwA3U-kI2vkv5Tr_31_l4FAeO30bZ3dutMqFf111Pw/s400/Dual+stars.JPG" width="385" /></a></div>
<br />
More importantly for us, each
chapter concludes with historical notes. There Coxeter discusses Alicia
Boole Stott
(1860-1940), another of George Boole's daughters, with whom he was personally acquainted in her later years. Curiously, though he mentions both Hinton and his book (in deprecatory terms), he says nothing about
the family connection or about the fact that Stott assisted in finishing and publishing <i>A New Era in Human Thought</i> when Hinton left the country. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When Alice was
about thirteen the five girls were reunited with their mother (whose
books reveal her as one of the pioneers of modern pedagogy) in a poor,
dark, dirty, and uncomfortable lodging in London. There was no
possibility of education in the ordinary sense, but Mrs. Boole's
friendship with James Hinton attracted to the house a continual stream
of social crusaders and cranks. It was during those years that Hinton's
son Howard brought a lot of small wooden cubes, and set the youngest
three girls the task of memorizing the arbitrary list of Latin words by
which he named them, and piling them into shapes. To Ethel, and possibly
Lucy too, this was a meaningless bore; but it inspired Alice (at the
age of about eighteen) to an extraordinarily intimate grasp of
four-dimensional geometry. Howard Hinton wrote several books on higher
space, including a considerable amount of mystical interpretation. His
disciple did not care to follow him along these other lines of thought,
but soon surpassed him in geometrical knowledge.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHH5FBR8bGgKn7IKH-lBnlZMvD4_N0Z8xcAmLl7QQV_EYKUJIpWewymOBz_32VAvEXQ_bkH6T0I87ZqExkiSHgGN2IwNEvtt043VacGe7OnVeFc0LBUZEHxgVUtxJKyZUUorqEkuODRw/s1600/Stott.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHH5FBR8bGgKn7IKH-lBnlZMvD4_N0Z8xcAmLl7QQV_EYKUJIpWewymOBz_32VAvEXQ_bkH6T0I87ZqExkiSHgGN2IwNEvtt043VacGe7OnVeFc0LBUZEHxgVUtxJKyZUUorqEkuODRw/s200/Stott.jpg" width="164" /></a></div>
In 1890, she married an actuary and "led a
life of drudgery" [Coxeter] as a wife and mother with a small income. But she continued to explore the fourth dimension as a kind of hobby, building cardboard models of three-dimensional "slices" of four-dimensional figures. Somehow her husband came across the work of the Dutch mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute, whose published diagrams mirrored her models. She contacted Schoute and the two began a long and fruitful collaboration. As Coxeter puts it,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mrs. Stott's
power of geometrical visualization supplemented Schoute's more orthodox
methods, so they were an ideal team.</blockquote>
It was she
who coined the term <i>polytope</i>.<br />
<br />
Among other "enthusiasts" (as opposed to academicians) who contributed to four-dimensional geometry, Coxeter mentions Paul S. Donchian, an Armenian American.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
His
great-grandfather was a jeweller at the court of the Sultan of Turkey,
and many of his other ancestors were oriental jewellers and
handicraftsmen. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1895. His
mathematical training ended with high school geometry and algebra, but
he was always interested in scientific subjects. He inherited the rug
business established by his father, and operated it for forty years. At
about the age of thirty he suddenly began to experience a number of
startling and challenging dreams of the previsionary type soon to be
described by Dunne in 'An Experiment with Time'. In an attempt to solve
the problems thus presented, he determined to make a thorough analysis
of the geometry of hyper-space.</blockquote>
Donchian built delicate
<a href="http://www.georgehart.com/hyperspace/hart-120-cell.html" target="_blank">three-dimensional models</a> of four-dimensional polytopes which were
displayed at expositions in Chicago and Pittsburgh, several pictures of
which appear in Coxeter's book.<br />
<br />
I built a wire-solder model of the hypercube many years ago, using what I suppose are the same principles, though I didn't know it at the time. It remains in good shape, but it's in my parents' possession, and I don't have a picture of it handy.<br />
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<br />
These days I'm working on a set of 3D printer files reproducing
Stott's model of the 120-cell, a polytope composed of 120 dodecahedral
cells. From her 1900 paper "On Certain Series of Sections of the
Regular Four-dimensional Hypersolids," I've created the virtual
constructions from which I'll derive the vertex coordinates.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsFhFv6823jE1bc5J7ukBRlZzphJvMXDub0l_5Nuf4ySKP0aQhlSa85pHlDiksOW4NwajArP-TO6P049GaKfzWUIANBQmhjyW_Kh46PPRyvn2ffTyKTEKYb-9j5JkY_Lbw1ng46G4VEQ/s1600/Stott+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsFhFv6823jE1bc5J7ukBRlZzphJvMXDub0l_5Nuf4ySKP0aQhlSa85pHlDiksOW4NwajArP-TO6P049GaKfzWUIANBQmhjyW_Kh46PPRyvn2ffTyKTEKYb-9j5JkY_Lbw1ng46G4VEQ/s400/Stott+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The
following image represents a series of slices slices cut by hyperplanes
parallel to a dodecahedral cell, starting with the cell itself (at the
center of the image) and ending with the "equatorial" slice midway up
the polytope (at the outside of the image). In my file the layers are numbered from VIII to XIV, in accord with the partial nets illustrated in her paper shown above.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqc8Mn1C352-u1au0uewDEwn8J0eBgq7NAakfd7i8IND-n9Jwx-l0JIfBNb1_3SOZWHEnUJcyAgXrDrczWjCAanRzYV9Ci1JQFIHdhgSuXOdH037Um51bQM15f7mgeWPqxhJsj0578eQ/s1600/Stott+120.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqc8Mn1C352-u1au0uewDEwn8J0eBgq7NAakfd7i8IND-n9Jwx-l0JIfBNb1_3SOZWHEnUJcyAgXrDrczWjCAanRzYV9Ci1JQFIHdhgSuXOdH037Um51bQM15f7mgeWPqxhJsj0578eQ/s400/Stott+120.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
And
here is part of the "net" from which the 120-cell can be "folded." The
"equatorial" layer of dodecahedra (not shown) fits in the interstices,
with one for each edge of the dodecahedral cell forming the "base." A
second set identical to the one shown then "caps" the 120-cell above the
equator.<br />
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<br />
However, I find that I'm <a href="http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-boole" target="_blank">not the first</a> to attempt reconstructing Stott's fascinating models. Well, I'll do the 600-cell as well, and <i>that</i> will be impressive. Here is my projection of the 600-cell to the plane. <br />
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<br />
I hope to recreate it in string art, the use of which in teaching
children was pioneered by Mary Everest Boole.<br />
<br />
Here are some of my printed polyhedra, which I built myself in Blender: we have a compound of five tetrahedra, a compound of five cubes, a compound of five tetrahedra (edges only), a great dodecahedron, and four rhombic dodecahedra, but no hypersolids yet. (Chessboard chosen advisedly: see below.)<br />
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<br />
The geometry of the fourth dimension has made appearances in a number of imaginative works. Aside from <i>Flatland</i>, the earliest instance is probably <i>The Time Machine</i> by H. G. Wells, published in 1898. Unfortunately, he makes the rather common mistake of conflating <i>temporal extension</i> with a fourth <i>spacial </i>dimension.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well,
I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of
Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For
instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at
fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All
these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional
representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and
unalterable thing. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Scientific
people," proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the
proper assimilation of this, "know very well that Time is only a kind
of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This
line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer.
Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it
rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not
trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognized?
But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must
conclude was along the Time-Dimension."</blockquote>
H. P. Lovecraft gives a much better account of the fourth dimension
in "The Dreams in the Witch House," published in 1933 and described by
its <i>Weird Tales</i> tagline as "a story of mathematics, witchcraft
and Walpurgis Night, in which the horror creeps and grows." Whatever you think of Lovecraft as a writer, one thing you can say is this: he knows when to be explicit and when to be vague and ominous. It serves him well here.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Toward the end
of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the other
studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for
solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his
comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored
all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of
possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of
approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various
other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic
gulfs themselves – or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively
conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time
continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with
admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an
increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary
eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober
theory that a man might – given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond
all likelihood of human acquirement – step deliberately from the earth
to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of
specific points in the cosmic pattern.</blockquote>
Reminds me
of my own college days! Ha ha, actually, it doesn't. I spent an entire
year of my life working a problem of 10- and 26-dimensional geometry, got stuck
on a minus sign for most of its duration, and finally had to give up and
start a new problem. My dissertation advisor may very well have
wondered about my nervous and solitary eccentricity, and my fellow
students may have shaken their heads at my theories, but not for the
reasons Gilman found himself the source of such disturbance…<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrIChbJGMSKmBkSQvvFPOX_qLo-Fj_K5iUjPwKFoi-ibDWHHFHZ-cXQwSSWy_5e67buyBOKGpCPzPlcB0RoRN35WS_ulLBkT6FJPGj4_OolpDQFo26YWdEn9sT61qbReQt67K6Suu9-w/s1600/Wrinkle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrIChbJGMSKmBkSQvvFPOX_qLo-Fj_K5iUjPwKFoi-ibDWHHFHZ-cXQwSSWy_5e67buyBOKGpCPzPlcB0RoRN35WS_ulLBkT6FJPGj4_OolpDQFo26YWdEn9sT61qbReQt67K6Suu9-w/s320/Wrinkle.jpg" width="238" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wrinkle_In_Time_Cover.jpg" target="_blank">source</a>]</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The net of a tesseract figures in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 story "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22%E2%80%94And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House%E2%80%94%22" target="_blank">And He Built a Crooked House</a>,"
in which an architect builds a house in the shape of the three-dimensional "net" of a
tesseract (from which the polytope can be "folded" much as a cube is
folded from a two-dimensional cruciform net); an earthquake causes it to collapse into an actual tesseract from which other worlds can be reached. The story was anthologized in <i>Fantasia Mathematica</i> in 1958.<br />
<br />
Madeleine L'Engle's <i>A Wrinkle in Time</i>, which contains the most well-known tesseract (and verbs the word as <i>tesser</i>), was published five years later, in 1963. I wonder if L'Engle got her idea (which is rather garbled) from the Heinlein story?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Meg sighed. "Just explain it to me." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Okay," Charles said. "What is the first dimension?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well, a line." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Okay. And the second dimension?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well, you'd square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"And the third?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well,
you'd square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn't be flat any
more. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"And the fourth?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well,
I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms, you'd square the
square. But you can't take a pencil and draw it the way you can the
first three. I know it's got something to do with Einstein and time. I
guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"That's right," Charles said. "Good girl. Okay, then, for the fifth dimension you'd square the fourth, wouldn't you?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I guess so." </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Well
the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four
dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the
long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned
plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between
two points."</blockquote>
Terrible! Just imagine an
inhabitant of Flatland speaking like that: "The third dimension is
Time. The fourth dimension's a cube. You add that to the three
dimensions and you can travel through the plane without having to go the
long way around. In other words, to put it into linear terms, a
straight line is not the shortest distance between two points." Ugh! A novel is not a math textbook, it is true, but, for me, it's
harder to overlook such nonsense than scientific speculation. There's
nothing like 1 + 1 = 3 to break the suspension of disbelief. (Not that it's a bad book mind you.)<br />
<br />
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<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOIb1BnusTVzw7AB67kJDm0lcnwn5asNUD7_2TMZEs-D9asjxNECKZvq-PUiMcRPzxHOtlEQffeN8JexHnH_Cvtu47Ipc5LEqJrieKGPj2T3MlXKnontLtp2C8lzUrVHbZrsuHMkmR-w/s1600/Dali+Crucifixion.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOIb1BnusTVzw7AB67kJDm0lcnwn5asNUD7_2TMZEs-D9asjxNECKZvq-PUiMcRPzxHOtlEQffeN8JexHnH_Cvtu47Ipc5LEqJrieKGPj2T3MlXKnontLtp2C8lzUrVHbZrsuHMkmR-w/s320/Dali+Crucifixion.jpg" width="204" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dali_Crucifixion_hypercube.jpg" target="_blank">source</a>]</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Higher-dimensional geometry appears in art as well. Cubism is an oft-cited example, but geometry
figures more directly in Salvador Dali's <i>Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)</i>, which depicts Christ crucified on the net of a tesseract. Just as the net permits us to approach what lies beyond our comprehension, in God, so does the Incarnation provides a "picture" of God comprehensible to humankind. That's how the picture usually seems to be interpreted.<br />
<br />
Well, somehow this has turned into one of those posts of mine in which I draw connections between whatever unrelated topics I happen to be interested in. Here it's higher-dimensional geometry, science fiction and fantasy, the early twentieth century, and art. I do still want to describe the catalog of regular polytopes, but that will have to wait for a subsequent post. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* The mountain was named after her uncle. Quite a dynasty!</span> <br />
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Raphael Ordoñezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17991011024942623986noreply@blogger.com1