Mantichore 10

MANTICHOR E 3, No 2

(WN10)

A Contribution by Leigh Blackmore for the Sword & Sorcery & Weird Fiction Terminus (June 1 mailing), & Esoteric Order of Dagon (Aug 2 mailing) amateur press associations (2008) Leigh Blackmore, 78 Rowland Ave, Wollongong, NSW 2500. Australia. Email: [email protected] Official Website: Blackmausoleum – http://members.optusnet.com.au/l vxnox/

Mantic

Notes

(Pronunciation:'man-tik.

Etymology: Greek mantikos, from mantis : of or relating to the faculty of divination :prophetic).

Cartoon Rotsler

by

the

late

William

Hmmm…where have the last three months gone? University work has been intense. I had five subjects this semester – two journalism, two creative writing, and one web design. Kept me pretty flat out. I’ve just knocked off for the mid-semester break (but have two assignments still to complete this week). I only had one manuscript to assess from my agencies in the last quarter – had to knock back a couple through sheer lack of time to do them, due to my heavy university load. The main thing that occupied my ‘extracurricular’ time was that Danny Lovecraft decided to assemble a collection of my weird verse which is to be called ‘Spores from Sharnoth and other Madnesses’. This involved a lot of editorial work done by Danny and his wife Margaret, and I also needed to rewrite and revise some less than satisfactory poems from the past – though I ended up writing a couple of new ones as well. The most exciting part for me is that Danny has

secured an introduction to the proposed collection by S.T. Joshi – and blurbs from leading lights such as Darrell Schweitzer and Richard L. Tierney, plus a cover illo by Gavin L. O’Keefe. I am immensely flattered by their comments! I must also extend thanks here to my partner Margi who made some valuable suggestions for some of the poems. Spores from Sharnoth will probably appear in July or August this year under the imprint of Danny Lovecraft’s P’rea Press. Family news…We finally signed papers on our house after the estate of Margi’s mother was sorted out between her and her sister, and are now the proud payers of a mortgage. Pictured below: me, Margi and Graham at the housewarming party celebration we held in April.

graduated from her TAFE Certificate III Library Technician’s course. Graham and I took time off from study and work respectively to attend her graduation ceremony last week. And recently we went to see a production of the musical Godspell directed by my brother Kent for the Normanhurst Musical Society. It brought back good memories for Margi and Graham as they first met a production of the same show about twenty years ago. My parents celebrated their 50th wedding Anniversary in April, which involved us travelling to Sydney a couple of times to have dinner with them and celebrating.

My stepson Rohan has been working in Sydney and still hasn’t officially moved out of our Wollongong house, though there are signs he may find a permanent place of residence in Sydney shortly. The big event for Margi since

I’m thinking of undertaking Honours in my Creative Writing degree next year, so consequently I’ll probably defer the third year of my Journalism degree. I am angling for tutorial work on campus as a way into permanent work in an academic capacity there, but this won’t pan out until the next two or three years go by. I may return to Journalism in 2010.

last issue was that she has

A few literary things of interest have happened recently. Margi and I have been invited to contribute a column on occult matters to the new magazine Black, to be published as a newsstanddistributed magazine nationwide in Australia as from July. It’s being published by Angela Challis and Shayne

Jiraiya Cummings of Brimstone Press. Our column will be called “Dark Cauldron’ and it will replace the column we contributed for a while to Spellcraft magazine. Spellcraft didn’t pay, Black do, so we’re a little better off! I’ve also been invited by the Australian Horror Writers’ Association to guest-edit an issue of their new magazine Midnight Echo, but it seems that won’t happen for up to a year. And it looks as though Henrik Harksen has accepted my previously published Lovecraftian tale “The Return of Zoth-Ommog” in his forthcoming English-language Cthulhu Mythos anthology (to appear through lulu.com) (Anthology as-yet-untitled). I’ve seen endless cheesy 70’s horror films, for which I have an unending appetite, in the last three months. I love the films with which I grew up – the films starred in by Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee for instance – and the ‘’omnibus’ movies produced by Amicus. So I’ve redevoured stuff like Tales from the Crypt, From Beyond the Grave, Dr Phibes Rises Again, At the Earth’s Core, and so on. They just

don’t

make

‘em

like

that.

Apart from that, the usual – moderating too many groups on Facebook, helping co-facilitate MoonsKin with Margi, and running Aurora Australis Thelemic Temple. Oh yeah, occasionally I sleep.

and

Books Bedside.

My

by

My reading of late has been sporadic. I’ve gotten back into reading hardboiled crime – finished two by Donald Westlake (361 and The Mercenaries) which I really enjoyed, and Dan Simmon’s Hard Case, which was awesome! I’ve always been a big fan of Simmons’ sf and horror work, but hadn’t caught up with his crime until now. If you like

hardboiled, these are a must read. I’m now looking for the others in the Simmons series. In addition, I read Calvin Beck’s Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors, Katherine Neville’s The Eight (great historical thriller about chess amongst other things). I also got hold of Dorothy Litersky’s Derleth biography, Derleth: Hawk and Dove. (I didn’t realise this was published nearly ten years ago!) I agree with the mixed reviews I have read of this; it’s far from scholarly (although it has footnotes, many of them are incomplete) but at the same time has inside information from sources not otherwise easy to access, including Litersky’s own memories of Derleth. It’s a curious item – the only real biography of Derleth so far, but perhaps somewhat comparable to de Camp’s biography of Lovecraft – in a word, largely inadequate. It is to be hoped that a better biography will be undertaken some time. On the occult front I have read only three books - Anger: The Unauthorised Biography of Kenneth Anger by Bill Landis; Hugh Urban’s Magia

Sexualis (an excellent scholarly study of sex magic currents in the 19th and 20th centuries) and a new edition limited (limited to 500 copies) of The Legend of Aleister Crowley, P. R. Stephenson’s famous defence of Crowley’s reputation. This edition has a new long intro by Stephen J. King, my initiator and Lodge Master in the Ordo Templi Orientis; and reprints of several obscure newspaper columns by Crowley. Well worth checking out if you are interested in Crowley. Copies are available from Weiser Antiquarian Books at http://www.weiserantiquarian.c om

MANTICHORUS: MAILING NOTES

Found this item of Lovecraftian merchandise on a site that has Lovecraftian stuff for sale. The ‘Elder Sign thong’. Lovecraft would turn in his grave!

SSWFT Mailing #29

Quill (Ben Szumsky): How did your mission trip to the Phillipines go? I hope it was successful. Good luck with Bachelor of Theology. I’m sure you’ll acquit yourself remarkably, as you have with all your other studies. I enjoyed seeing your bibliography (as you know I am a biblio nut from way back) and will have to track down a few items in there. Do you have material of Tierney’s from that abandoned project Candles by Typewriter? I hope it can still appear somewhere, sometime. Danny Lovecraft apparently is preparing a collection of previously unpublished Tierney poetry. Hey, I’ll try to stick a pic or two of rarities from my library in here to pique your interest. [late note: didn’t happen]. Hyperborean (Martin Andersson): Ah, those books! Can never get over how much you read! Of the movies you mention, I haven’t seen any yet. Iron Man is the only movie we’ve been out to see lately. How sad is that? I want to see The Golden Compass especially. There was a good episode of a British series called The Sally Lockhart Mysteries recently, written by Phillip Pullman, and I like his take on Victoriana. Yes, curious that Arkham House published no new books in 2007. But that’s OK – I am two books behind on obtaining their publications. Can’t afford it, but don’t want to break my record of having every AH book published. I’ll definitely

get the last two before they go out of print. Freya, enjoyed your review of the Alien vs Predator movie. I think that franchise is pretty much exhausted now. Martin, the article about the possible Dunsanian influence on Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth” was interesting, though the evidence seems relatively slight – the similarity of the shepherd’s and Zadok Allen’s fondness for whiskey being the strongest link between the two. Thanks for the John Hay link – will have to check out those Farnese letters. Change-Winds (John Howard): Interesting look at Gunter Eich, a writer of whom I previously knew nothing. Elegant Amusement (Phil Ellis): Phillip, I enjoyed your essay on Lovecraft’s poetry. It’s important, especially as little work has been done on his verse. It’s also important, as you do, to examine his output with a critical eye, giving praise where it’s due, and questioning the poorer output where it’s warranted. Your knowledge of the traditional poetic forms gives you a decided ability to comment. Dalriadic (Scott Sheaffer).: More on The Twilight Zone. Cool! I know nothing about football, so I can’t comment on the rest! Opharion VI (Mark Valentine):. Funny, I was reading about Denton Welch

recently – William Burroughs much admired him as a writer. I still haven’t gotten it together to rejoin friends of Arthur Machen – but I will. Congrats on the intro to the Saki collection! I greatly enjoyed the piece on James Elroy Flecker. You write about writers that are mainly unfamiliar to me, but this makes me want to check out Flecker’s work. Koshtra Belorn (Mike Barrett): I’m a big Mary Elizabeth Counselman fan. Danny Lovecraft recently got us both a copy of her poetry collection The Face of fear and Other Poems (1984). Nice getting that 1st of Worm Ourobouros! Coin-Op (Michael Garrett): Nice to have you in the apa, Mike. I’m intrigued to know anyone can do a full-time master’s in graphic novels! I found the Steven Piziks interview very interesting. Sercon (Fred Phillips): Interesting stuff about the fan groups you’ve been in. Enjoyed your poem too (would be nice if you could give it a title.) You got me with your piece on “Dr John Blaisesdell” and the Necronomicon. At first I thought I was reading a story but on page 5 you seemed to be talking fact about stuff that happened to you, which made me think maybe the Blaisdell stuff was for real. Eventually I had the bright idea of Googling Blaisedell, and found http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/

Monster/Monster15-61.html, revealing that your Blaisdell piece had appeared many years ago in No-Eyed Monster No 15, Spring 1969. Maybe you could have put a line under the last line of the story to set it off from the factual material which followed – or was it your way of confusing the truth of matters by leading us (like Lovecraft) through a pseudo-authentic account in which some invented ‘facts’ are given reality by the verifiable data around them? Hmmm….

A SEMIOTIC READING OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE PURLOINED LETTER”. [The following is a brief essay I wrote for my 3rd-year class in literary theory). “The Purloined Letter” is open to various interpretations via semiotics. Let us examine some structures and devices which make meaning possible in this story. A fundamental assumption of semiotics is that “the word” does not equal “the world”. An arbitrary connection exists between signifier (the form of word or phrase uttered) and signified (the mental concept) in Saussure’s sense; we ourselves select the meaning we impose on things, since all

language and perception are constructed systems. In other words, “the map is not the territory” (a dictum of Alfred Korzybksi’s theory of General Semantics). 1 Poe’s story centres on a letter an object in which meaning is communicated from person to person. In the story the letter’s theft poses potentially dire consequences to the Queen if its contents are revealed. The plot is almost entirely concerned with “sign chains” and inquiry. We as readers are never given privileged access of knowing exactly what the letter says. In this sense, the letter is a cipher that we are unable to decode or read. Thus our ability to extract “meaning” from it is problematized. The letter is hidden or displaced – it is a pure signifier. One could posit that the letter at the tale’s heart is Poe’s way of embodying the problem of signifier and signified. The reader of any letter must be aware of a set of social conventions around such a transmission of “meaning” – the conventions of reading English, of understanding the social ‘code’ around correspondence, and so on. Because the letter’s exact contents are unknown, decoding its meaning demands a non-referential approach which takes semiotic theory into account. The police’s search for the literal letter

could be seen as a search for the case’s “meaning”. Concealment (the Queen’s concealment of the truth, as well as the literal concealment of the letter) and revelation can be seen to relate to “meaning” just as much as they relate in this story to plot points. Meaning is “revealed” or “concealed” in a literary dance performed by Poe as the work’s author. Dupin must locate the missing letter via a deductive process. He does so by realising that the Prefect’s police take for granted that the thief will think as they do – that is, that only one “meaning” can be extracted from the fact the letter is missing (i.e. that the thief has hidden it in his rooms). But Dupin realises that meanings are “constructed”; he demonstrates this with his musings on the schoolboy game where a boy is able to guess ‘odds’ or ‘evens’ and thus win all the marbles; and on the difference between mathematics and poetry, and his reasoning that the Minister D--(the thief) is both mathematician and a poet. By this process Dupin deduces the letter must be ‘hidden’ in plain sight. Dupin is able to “read” D—‘s thinking, thus demonstrating his superiority over police methods. Unhindered by their literal and conventional thought, he is able to conceive that “the map is not the territory”.

Dupin replaces the real letter by a facsimile. This is, in a sense, an “absence of meaning”. (It is also a duplication, or multiplication, of D—‘s action in substituting an earlier facsimile onto the Queen’s dressing table). A ‘facsimile’ is an exact copy or likeness of something. It could be said that Poe is suggesting that since objects can be like each other, so too “ideas” or “signs” can be alike; or like to an original referent, without being identical to that referent. Also, just as the letter is hidden but disguised, Dupin’s green spectacles disguise his eyes as he searches D—‘s room for the letter – another facsimile or “double”. This doubling is a species of sequentiality in the story. There is a multiplication of absences in the story, for the original letter is missing (until Dupin locates it) and the police search concentrates on their idea that it must be concealed within invisible or concealed spaces such as in chair-legs, books and hidden compartments. Semiotic theories of absence vs presence abound and there is fertile ground for a full semiotic examination of absence in the story. In semiotic terms, Dupin realises that reality itself is a presentation, and is not discouraged by the police’s apparent failure. The reality, the real meaning of where the letter is hidden, is only revealed to the mind capable

of comprehending the relation between paradigm and syntagm. Dupin instinctively knows the letter is not just a physical object (a referent) but a conceptual apparatus with both denotative meaning (e.g. an indiscression on the part of the ‘exalted personage’) and connotative meaning (a value to the Minister D—who hopes to exploit the letter for personal gain). The connotative value of the letter is slippery in that it has different meanings to the Queen and to D- . Such contextual differences in meaning defeat the police but Dupin, able to taking account of both signifier and signified, works backwards to determine the hiding place – to reveal, in fact, that what appeared to be “hidden” or “absent” was in plain sight. Dupin demonstrates that the meaning of things is not merely in their superficial or apparent aspects, but in what qualities we choose to attribute to them. Footnotes 1. The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931 Bibliography. Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” at: http://chaucer.library.emory.edu/c arroll/lacn_pages/lacan_text.html. (Accessed on 4 April 2008).

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter” in Poetry and Tales. NY: Library of America, 1984.

Well since I’m doing this issue right up to the line, and Ben has put out a call, I’m going to curtail it here although I had more in mind. I’d like it to go out with the mailing instead of me having to mail it to everyone individually as I’ve had to do on a few occasions. I’m sure you SSWFT members won’t mind missing out on emcees for the last EOD mailing. Hopefully a more substantial issue next time (the cry of the Blackmore!)