May 2020 – no shrinking violet

gratitude

May 30, 2020 ray brantley

I got married seven months ago. (Give or take a couple of days, but what is a couple of days in pandemic time anyway?)

“if your man won’t do your wedding makeup for you, is he even worth marrying?” and other extremely queer takes by me. A thousand thanks to Maxwell Giffen for the beautiful photographs.

Prior to the lockdown I made the seemingly inconsequential decision to make my computer desktop background a randomized slideshow of our wedding photos. In retrospect I think I did this a little before Halloween in anticipation of a small family get-together, and figured it would be a nice surprise for my in-laws, who hadn’t seen the polished versions of the photos yet. The slideshow had the desired effect, of course, and everyone enjoyed gushing over the pictures while chatting about how much fun both the ceremony and the reception had been.

(Pro-tip to anyone out there planning a wedding in the somewhat near future: go small. Go to the courthouse. Wear comfortable shoes. You will be handsome/beautiful regardless, and complete strangers will cheer for you. That is a magical experience.)

Anyway, this post isn’t really about my wedding, or my wedding photos. It’s about how now in this time of social and physical distancing, one completely absent-minded decision I made in preparation for a holiday party last October now reminds me daily, hourly, every time I minimize an application or lock my laptop screen, that I am loved by so many people. The people in those photos crossed continents and international borders and, in one instance, even the Atlantic Ocean, out of love for us, for me.

And that love has nourished the shit out me these last three months while I’ve struggled to claw my way up and out of the black pit of despair known as Depression(™).

It’s an ongoing struggle, for the record, and not one that I anticipate definitively ‘defeating’. But I’m going to make time to talk more candidly about my experiences here because the instinct to play one’s cards so closely to one’s chest when depressed is precisely the opposite of what one needs to do to heal.

recommendations

recommendation: “new model astronauts,” by alasdair stuart

May 29, 2020 ray brantley

This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid . If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Five years ago, I wrote a piece about Interstellar and the death of the astronaut myth. […]
New Model Astronauts — The Man of Words

Presented without additional commentary because when it comes to Alasdair’s writing, it truthfully doesn’t require any.

I somehow managed to miss this post about the evolution of the astronaut mythos in book and film when it was originally posted last month, but for all NASA kids who grew up in the shadow of the Saturn V, the Marshall Spaceflight Center, who know their grandparents laid hands on the science that got us to the stars, it’s required reading.

quick picks, recommendations

just my two cents: “vincent’s penny,” by chris barnham

May 28, 2020May 28, 2020 ray brantley

(see what I did there? /finger guns)

Listen at Podcastle 628: Vincent’s Penny, May 26, 2020. Audio recording by Escape Artists Inc. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The car gathers speed. The sirens fall away and another sound comes; a strengthening growl high above. I can picture the swollen metal bellies of the Heinkel bombers, stuffed with high explosives. With the motion of the car, I feel the ancient metal disc move on its chain beneath my shirt. Vincent’s penny; maybe it can bring me luck again.
“You can let me go. Who will ever know?”
“Why would we do that?”
“If you let Vincent do this, who will stop him doing worse in the future?”
The car stops, doors open and close. As they lead me away from the car a succession of explosions in the distance makes me flinch. A sound like a giant striding towards us, wading through houses and shops.
The hood is snatched away, revealing a large empty space, an abandoned warehouse. A table and three chairs in the centre of the room.
I know I will never leave this place.

~~famous last words~~

Anyway, in summary:

What’s it about?
Sebastian is a boy plucked from a life of poverty and abuse by Vincent, a mysterious and powerful stranger, and is groomed for the sort of greatness that powerful men seek to pass on to their proteges. (Greatness in this context comes in such exciting flavours as ‘murder with impunity,’ ‘body-snatching,’ and ‘immortality.’) Over the centuries, Sebastian reaps the rewards of being within Vincent’s inner circle, but cannot escape his own conscience. A confrontation as well as a reckoning is inevitable.

What’s so good about it?
You know what “they” say about bad pennies, but what is Chris Barnham saying about them? Possibly that there’s more than one, and whether or not that penny is ‘bad’ or or ‘good’ or bound to turn up again is entirely up to the reader. Sebastian is the lens through which we experience both the horror of a child’s abuse by his father, his serendipitous rescue by a stranger, and his gradual transformation into a man with more in common with his monstrous mentor than he is prepared to admit to himself.

I enjoy any story that makes me struggle to find an appropriate genre label for it. This one spans genres, being equal parts historical fiction and fantasy (hence its appearance on PodCastle), but I’d stretch it further and categorize it as a piece of horror fiction, too. The horror is slow to approach, and subtly written, but it will slam into you like a freight train if you pick the story up for a second time and re-read it from the beginning.

Where can I find it?
You can find the full text of “Vincent’s Penny” over here at PodCastle, and I would strongly recommend reading along with the story as you listen to Matt Dovey’s A+ narration. It’s well worth your time.

Happy listening!

constructive deconstruction, recommendations

along came a literary device: ‘a guest for mr. spider’ and the magnus archives, part 1

May 26, 2020 ray brantley

Some spiders sneak when stealth is moot, 
Slipping into unsuspecting boot, 
Settling in without a care, 
Comfort found in sweaty lair

Post-it Poetry – Spider Sense — Dim But Bright Poetry

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please be mindful that, while episode 81 of the Magnus Archives, “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” is the focus of this article, I may reference specific events or information from later episodes in passing. This is not a spoiler-free zone, apologies!

I will gamely admit that I currently view all creative works I encounter through a Magnus Archives conversion lens, as I’ve spent the last three months thoroughly marinating myself in all existing episodes and as much sweet, sweet fan-created content as I can get my greedy little hands on.[1] My obsession also means that I’m spotting connections and parallels to the show’s motifs everywhere, including innocent bystander blog posts that turn up on WordPress Reader. Which is where I spotted Dim But Bright Poetry‘s charmingly illustrated “Spider Sense,” now featured at the top of this post. Almost immediately after reading it I thought of “A Guest for Mr. Spider,” and could not stop thinking about it.

A quick note before I get started: spiders in the Magnusverse serve several specific narrative functions, and I have every intention of giving discussing these functions and plotty labyrinths in more detail at a later date–but, I’m not going to get into them in detail today. Today I just want to write about spiders, I guess.

Just a friendly drawing of a friendly arachnid who means you no harm at all, probably.
Art by lunarsmith on DeviantArt

Is there enough collective cultural knowledge behind the verse, “along came a spider,” to transform it into a literary conceit? I think there must be, otherwise spiders and their webs and the sorts of spidery characters who crouch at their centres–or find themselves tangled up within them–wouldn’t be such a mainstay of literature. Specifically children’s literature, where the spider as a character is nearly always sly and clever and unambiguously up to no good, and therefore a reliable source of dramatic tension in a story or poem. When the spider comes along in a children’s tale, its arrival signals to a young reader that someone in the story is in danger, whether that someone is Mary Howitt’s Fly or, as is probably the case in “Spider Sense,” some unknown person’s socked foot. (Or the spider itself. One small spider vs. one large foot? Odds aren’t looking good for you, little spider.)

This brings us to The Magnus Archives, an audio drama horror podcast produced by The Rusty Quill that is intended for older audiences and so lacks on its surface anything to do with children’s literature. But Episode 81 is transparently about childhood, grounded in the recollection of narrator and central protagonist Jonathan Sims’ childhood trauma as he records his statement for the Magnus Institute.[2]

The object at the centre of his trauma is a book–a children’s book, at first blush–called “A Guest for Mr. Spider.” And this book, more than any of the other nightmarish tomes in the series–which are all capable of scarring minds, ruining lives, and dispensing horror after horror upon anyone unlucky enough to stumble upon one–is the one book that feels the most fundamentally evil to me as a listener. I suspect it feels that way because it is the only one whose very design preys upon the trust of children and their engagement with stories.

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