Discuss: The Great God Pan

Content Warning:  Wacky Fictionalization of Mental Illness.
I recently had occasion to read a short story from the late 19th century, which has an air of legend among horror heads.  Stephen King called it, “one of the best horror stories ever written.  Maybe the best in the English language.”  The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen, is about a scary lady with connection to Something Man Was Not Meant to Know.  It leans heavily on implication and suffers a bit for having been written serially, but is still an interesting read.  I didn’t find this thing for myself.  As usual, it was my husband that brought it to my attention.
Beast from Seattle, where did you find out about this story?
drawing of the Beast from Seattle, a blue devilBfS:  I’m not sure which story we had been reading before, but I found it in the wikipedia page as being similar, a way I’ve found a lot of great stories.  Thanks wiki editors!
GAS:  That is pretty cool of them. What initially intrigued you about it?
BfS:  The concept was interesting, and the superlatives by folks like Steve up there were enticing.  I think we might have been reading Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and it was mentioned as being in that sort of eco-horror meets cosmic-horror type vein.
GAS:  Trewly it is.  In the setup these Victorian dudes are enthusiasts of the occult, one of them being a physician as well, with big Dr. Pretorius energy.  He develops a brain operation to allow a person a larger view of reality, which to him is personified by the pagan god Pan.  He does this surgery on a street urchin that he groomed for the purpose, and hijinks ensue.  So there’s the rustic horror of pagan goatboyism and the cosmic horror of awareness.
BfS:  It is funny that the ‘Pan’ in the story doesn’t seem to be a faun creature, like you would imagine.  The focus is on seeing ‘another world’ and then having a Lovecraftian breakdown into madness™.  I liked the idea of the ‘Pan’ in question being ‘everything’ as the word would imply.  The people are seeing some vision of everything all at once, that is too much to bear.  If anything was going to get you gibbering, I think it would be an extreme overload of information.  Really putting the pan in panic.
GAS:  At the same time, the “Everything” is personified as masculine, or masculine within the feminine, in the course of the story. It’s not as queer as I imagined with all the hype, but it’s queer enough one could run with that interpretation.  I originally wrote a juvenile joke here but had to delete it because too spoilery.
BfS:  That seemed to be a big source of all the shock and horror.  Sexual ambiguity as a real yikes for victorians.  I really wish the story went into more depth, but I suppose if they couldn’t even handle this much…
GAS:  That gets into a problem we had in a previous book club meeting with some other folks, while reading Turn of the Screw.  A story from a different time leaning on implication so hard you could, as a modern reader, feel like it was an endless tease, or too obscure to get.
BfS:  I didn’t get that impression as much with James, as just by its length and continuity, I could effectively get into the world.  This story is a bit more scattered with its timeline and hopping about so it was maybe harder to get into that mind state.  I believe he wrote the first chapter and third chapters as standalone stories, then tied them together with only a few more chapters between, which couldn’t have been easy.
GAS:  I actually love looking at literary classics and seeing their flaws, because as a creator it makes me feel more like I could write something that ranks well with the greats.  There are flawless stories, like the works of Kafka we’ve read, but even some really strong ones have issues.  This story is real cool, but weaker than most of the classics we’ve read, and probably for that exact reason.
BfS:  One thing I appreciated is that it actually gets more into the emotions of the characters feeling the cosmic terror.  Many of Lovecraft’s stories, even if I like them a lot, use the ‘and then I went crazy’ moment as a thought-terminating cliché.  Likewise with the ‘indescribable’ horrors.  Yeah, it’s real bad, but couldn’t you get into it a little more?  This still didn’t get as into it as I would like, but I felt going cuckoo was a little more justified.
GAS:  I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it’s true.  The emotions of those who get the Bad Knowledge are not well described in most stories with that subject.  But what is the Bad Knowledge here?  The lack of description reached a hilarious peak when a guy is reading an account of the forbidden experience, and he gives up, can’t go on any longer, sweating and freaking out.  Sounds dry here…  I guess my enjoyment was this: It’s the moment which comes closest to saying what is going on -the thing so horrible- but it can’t.  The story itself is falling on the fainting couch.
BfS:  It sounded like he read one sentence of people enjoying a sexytime and lost his shit.
GAS:  Unintended humor for us, but… this implication was enough to inspire a very outsized public reaction.  You told me about this…
BfS:  Yeah there’s a very amusingly overblown freakout from some lame critic you can find on the wiki.
GAS:  Lemme see…  “Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain? … If the Press was so disposed it could stamp out such art and fiction in a few months: And that disposition must be acquired, must even be enforced.”  That reaction, once you’ve read the story, seems wild as hell.
And also from the wiki, one publisher declined to print it because it was “a clever story that … shrink[s] …from the central idea.”  So even at the time, some readers found the self-censorship over the top, while more conservative ones thought it didn’t go far enough.
BfS:  Something funny there, even the critic who hated this story so much was willing to call it ‘art’.
GAS:  Maybe dismissing art you don’t like as “not actually art” was more popular in the 20th century.  OK.  What did you find strong about it?  To the extent you can say without spoilers.  What moved your imagination?
BfS:  The premise is very strong, probably why so many people have done interpretations and offshoots.  Makes you want to see more done with it.  The author is said to have been inspired by a real life ruin he visited, and was trying to get at the feeling it gave him.  I think that’s a good thing to aspire toward, the sense of awe and mystery you can get, even if it’s better done in stories like the Willows.
GAS:  Agreed.  I think about eyeshine, about animals in the dark.  Not something he mentioned but it’s an image I come back to in my imagination of the world before electricity.  There is something looking at you, aware of you but beyond your understanding, supremely indifferent, possibly malevolent, and powerful because it has all the darkness of the universe behind it.  Appealing.
BfS:  There’s a great description of the look of one of the cursed dudes in that story that got spooked before his untimely demise.  “I could never have supposed that such an infernal medley of passions could have glared out of any human eyes; I almost fainted as I looked.  I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man’s outward form remained, but all hell was within it.  Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair.”
GAS:  That’s why I was thinking of eyeshine, that part.  I remember now.  Good shit.  I had a thought that this story has something in common with the song Gloomy Sunday.  That song was about suicide, which was and is very taboo.  Back when it came out, it was credited with causing many suicides.  I have no doubt it was quoted by the suicidal, but causative?  No.  And it’s pretty tame.  The song ends with “I was only dreaming.”  Looks quaint to modern eyes, doesn’t live up to its infamy.  So with The Great God Pan.  I can’t imagine it corrupting the masses with its sexy ways, but the idea was there.
BfS:  Yeah in terms of horror, it was very tame compared to what Poe was doing decades earlier, or contemporary French writers.  The French were doing much sexier things as well, but I suppose that’s not too surprising.
GAS:  Sexy sexy sexy.  I’m into it.  The Great God Pan everybody, check it out.
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Addendum:  One observation about The Notorious GGP that I forgot to mention here, but I noticed as I read.  It was clearly a direct inspiration to Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, so much so that I feel his book was intended both as a sequel and as an exploration and expansion of the things in the original which were left unsaid.  The movie adaptation of Ghost Story ignored and changed the true nature of the monster from the novel, which was more similar to Pan.
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You Had the Surgery? Paper Doll Edition

I had a consciousness-raising experience about transgender people shortly after age thirty.  I don’t think I was a complete shit before that, but did have a few embarrassing missteps along the path.  I’ve always watched people around me more than I should, and during that time I started noticing whenever a person was androgynous or trans, and wondering, what’s that person got in their pants*?  Classic wildly offensive goof, which mostly had the self-awareness to stay unspoken.

But this instinct was reawakened in me by an image set on tumblr, from an anime called Oniisama E…, or Dear Brother….  For some reason, there are girls in that show drawn with the proportions of androgenized bods.  Broad shoulders, narrow hips, tall faces that make a forehead look short, strong chin, no visible breasts most of the time…  These are the idolized glamorous older girls too, not shunned weirdos.  And in the haze of this creepy terfesque genital obsession, I asked these paper dolls if they’d had, you know, the surgery..?

The answer is no, near as I can tell without watching the whole series and translating Japanese fan wikis.  One of them gets breast cancer in high school (u got spoiled!  as if you care lol).  They’re cis-girls, in that universe.  If somebody felt like watching the whole thing with the assumption they are trans in mind and doing the queer critical lens thing, that might be a diverting experiment.

I asked chat j’ai pété about it, and it said the original manga writer was inspired by the Takarazuka Revue, which seemed the opposite of what I’d expect to be the reason.  Also, the drawings from the original comic did not seem as fully masculine as the ones in the animated adaptation.  So, a hallucination, it seems.

Do any of you know if there’s a cultural reason why these anime cis girls look so non-passingly trans?  I don’t get the impression my comment section is bubbling with otaku energies, but I might as well crowd-source my curiosity.  This article isn’t the best showcase for it, but the cartoon looks very beautiful, which may be why it gripped me.  One of the less manly girls looks like Sean Young in Bladerunner, but they’re all very cute.  Never dubbed or subbed in English, so it slips away.

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*I think the vast majority of trans people will never, very seldom, or only situationally pass as cis, so the idea of passing as the singular goal of transition – the only fix for dysphoria – is harmful, even if it’s understandable that many of us are obsessed with it.

But still, even pretty hip people can be fooled hard by human androgyny.  I had a high school teacher with no breasts, an adam’s apple, and a deep cleft chin – who got pregnant and carried that baby to term.  Intersex but still functional, or just nature flexing on us?  I dunno.  Likewise, during my creepy shifty-eyed time, I had taken a skinny lady with an angular face as probably trans, and a few years later saw the same lady pregnant.

Most of the time you aren’t going to get a big tell like that, so you gotta learn to quell that curiosity when it arises.  I did it; you can too.

Sexy Pew Pew

You ever hear Sex Shooter, by Apollonia 6?  No?  I’m sorry, but now we must all experience it together.

This is profoundly unsexy and awkward.  I fucking love it.  It’s so funny to me.

These aren’t outfits, they’re underwear.  They’re wearing panty hose under their lingerie.  The side girls look like office ladies.

OK, I’ve got a bit of an “everyday people fetish” so the office ladies are a little hot, but still.  This whole production is embarrassing.  I like how lead girl is aiming for Marilyn Monroe but just coming out like she’s got a respiratory abnormality and needs to see an ENT.

She exhorts us to sing along.  Can you fucking imagine?  What crowd anywhere in the world would want to sing these lyrics back to the girls?  The fail, the cringe.  It’s adorable.  It feels like Rebecca Black trying to be cool.  I love you, pathetic girls.  I hope you’re in a better place now.

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EDIT:  Found out a little more.  Apparently these people were all wildly successful for being sexy and cool.  Who knew?  Lead singer there dated David Lee Roth and Prince, and starred in Purple Rain.  Skinny girl dated Prince and other famous dudes.  They are actually all singers, not just dancers or models…  This production really hinders the glamor, that’s for sure.

Incidentally, the song was written by Prince and he recorded a version of it, haha.  They can’t all be winners.

The Lover Speaks About the Monsters

Note:  I’ve been queuing serious posts as part of my Hope Series for 6:30 AM Eastern time, and a frivolous one like this for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-today, whereupon the series ends.  Check ’em out.

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my husband turned me onto this weird neglected 80s band.  they got on the label of that eurhythmics dude, got as much promotion as anybody could hope for at that level, but never got anywhere.  they probably made a bank full of money when annie lennox covered this one tho.  the whole album this one is on, it’s kind of a ride.  a concept album?  i just love the pretentious dracula weirdness.  i really like it a lot, i don’t know how to express the feeling.  also, a bare booty ass on yewchoob, because sufficiently film grained.  enjoy.

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musicas, those nerds again

remember when i posted about lovage?  here’s a video by them, in kinda wretched quality, but it’s what we have.  jennifer charles is the singer here, in this video about being a bisectional gal on the hunt.  look at her hairstyle, her whole presentation.  it’s designed to look like she just got out of bed after orgy night.  she’s greasy in a way lesbians seem to love.  fantastic.

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Good Scares

Horror content.  As opposed to horrible things.  Horror movies are so diverse, like movies writ more broadly, and can have so many different good qualities.  Humor, wit, suspense, thrills, and… art.  On the cinematically sophisticated end, observe the movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  He does a good job of transcending international boundaries, I’m not sure how.  Maybe it’s the focus on modern life and anxieties, which Asia and the West do have in common.

I just feel like much of the time when I watch Japanese TV or movies, it’s too Japanese to connect with, and the exact opposite happens with this Kurosawa.  It’s not like he’s making American-style movies either, tho maybe he has a big influence from the more realistic end of film noir, or some cinema I’m not even familiar with, from France or whatever.  He did do at least one French movie.

So, Sakebi (叫) aka Retribution.  The spooky ghost ladies you expect from J-Horror, but in this one, they’re in the bright light of day.  This movie isn’t considered one of his classics, but it’s got layers.  And humor.  And horror.  And an artist’s meditation on the creation and destruction of the urban realm.  The funniest scene is feminist revenge fantasy.  I’d probably ruin the joke to say more.

And the ending is sad and horrible and could make one feel big something.

This is where I got the ghost meme from yesterday’s article.  The trailer, content warning for a moment of convincing dead woman:

Find it with subtitles somewhere and watch it.

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You Dig on Multiverses?

Did you catch that reference?  Apologies if you did.  I finished all the Elric I’m going to be able to find, and have returned with my accursed demon blade Stormbringer to feast upon thy souls.  Or tell you about it.

I kid, I kid.  I really don’t have a lot to say about it.  There were elements that aged very poorly in terms of cultural mores, and elements that aged poorly because the march of fiction has rendered them quaint and pedestrian, but nothing wholly outrageous on either count.

Moorcock may have coined the word multiverse.  I could probably find out with a little googling but I don’t care enough to.  While now it’s in service of bloating and bleeding film franchises, it once was a very literal homage to joseph campbell’s ideas.  A victim of time, I don’t find those elements at all interesting.

Oddly, fiction from the 19th century doesn’t hit me like that.  Maybe recency produces something like the uncanny valley in writing, I don’t know.

I don’t think I ever reached the end of the story, assuming it was ever written, but that’s alright.  Tho it had more continuity than sherlock holmes, it was always written to be short stories for sff pulp mags, it seems.

In looking up interesting things about it, I discovered that Wendy Pini of Elfquest comic fame had attempted to get an animated adaptation done, and failed.

That info loops back on itself because Chaosium once did an Elfquest rpg with basically the same rules as Call of Cthulhu, and also for a time had Moorcock’s license to Elric rpg.  Did that also use the same system?  If so, it would make for an amusing combination…

Alright, I gotta jet.  Tired as hell.  Zzz.

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Elric Report

So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

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Elric of Melnidrone

I don’t listen to audiobooks, usually music, but I had an annoying task to do, of the type where more mentally engaging material was useful.  Because I don’t have the pirate skillz and am not paying for services I’d rarely use, I sought an audiobook for free on yewchoob.  I’d had some idle curiosities about Celtic mythology and listened to a bit of that, but the people reading it were too cringe for me.

I remembered I have some interest in writing a dark fantasy or two in the future and so could use some education on the subject, so I looked up Elric of Melniboné.  Despite still being under copyright, there it was, and the reader was a fairly skilled thespian type.  But the production was a lil low-budget.

You ever hear a wheezing breath and realize it’s you?  I assumed that’s what was happening to me, but I came to realize this thespian is acting his lil ass off while his partner is snoring near at hand.  It’s funking hilarious.  I do find it just tolerable enough to keep on.  Maybe I’ll get through the whole thing eventually.

First impressions: The prose is more bare-bones than I would have imagined.  The simplicity is intentional, I think, to evoke mythology.  Sometimes it’s all edgy dark majesty, sometimes it’s wish fulfillment power fantasies just this side of My Immortal.  Elric is the specialest boy.  I’m mildly entertained.

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U Can’t Say Fanny on Telly

I’ve heard “fanny” is a dirtier word in the UK than in the US, but don’t care enough to google it.  There was a US band called Fanny back in the days of yore, which I’d never heard of, but popped up on my yewchoob recs.  The four ladies in the band were all great rock musicians, but I also think it’s especially cool that there were some biracial filipinas in the mix – the sisters on guitar and bass, June and Jean Millington.  Drummer Alice de Buhr is super cool (and now married to a woman, aww*), pianist Nickey Barclay was on some extra Ray Manzarek shit.  They really looked like a group of characters, as rockers should.  If this video plays for you, observe:

The whole playlist of that performance on some German show is available as well.  You’ll recognize some cool covers, I don’t know what of their originals were hits or how big they were at all.  I got curious and hunted down a performance by the sisters in a more recent year.  Check this out too:

Nice funky bass there.  Guitar sister can shred.  The end of the German show is the song “Special Care” (flashing light warning) which they really build to an intense climax without overstaying their welcome.  Good times and great oldies, as my extinct local oldies station used to say.

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*on the rainbow representation, seems like jean-june-alice-nickey would be nope-L-L-B, if i got that right, if it matters.