Recent Publications

This summer, I have mostly stayed away from writing and instead focused on replenishing myself with reading — and, to further that replenishment, letting go of any feeling of obligation that I write about that reading. So I’m not even going to mention it here!

But a couple of pieces of writing have been published recently, and may be of interest.

First, a weird short story about abandoned space stations and spiritualism, “Into a Distant Ocean”, has been published by the venerable small press zine Kaleidotrope. I’ve been reading Kaleidotrope since their first issue many years ago, and it’s an honor to be published there. This is an odd story, basically about yearning and seeking and grief. I wrote it a couple years ago, didn’t really know what to do with it, and am glad it’s found truly the perfect home.

My biggest writing project of the last six months has now been published: an academic article, “Decadent Echoes: Arthur Machen, M. John Harrison, K.J. Bishop, and the Ends of Mystery”, published open access by the journal Humanities as part of a forthcoming special issue on “The Use and Misuse of Fin-De-Siècle Decadence and Its Imagination”. If you’ve followed any of my ranting about academic publishing, you know I think true Open Access (no fees to authors, no paywalls for readers) is essential — indeed, in the fascist environment we live in, it’s mandatory. This publisher apparently sometimes uses fees to authors, but for this issue of Humanities waived all fees, making it a truly OA publication, at least in this instance.¹I was annoyed to discover late in the publishing process that the publisher has some AI agreements, but I was able to avoid any direct AI involvement, though inevitably, since the article is openly available and has only a CC-BY license on it, it will be gobbled up by all the monstrous “AI” tools destroying our planet and making the worst people on it even richer.

Here’s the abstract for that article, to give a sense of what it’s about:

Although he first published fiction during the fin de siècle with John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book, Arthur Machen denied a Decadent heritage for his work; nonetheless, echoes of Decadent interests and imagery carried through his fiction long after the 1890s, through to his final novel, The Green Round. Decades later, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series of novels and stories nodded to and wrestled with the Decadent legacy, while his interest in Machen became explicit with the short story “The Great God Pan” (the title taken from one of Machen’s most famous tales) and the novel The Course of the Heart, built from the earlier story. Harrison was an initiator of the New Weird literary tendency at the turn of the millennium, and one of the books central to that tendency is K.J. Bishop’s 2003 novel The Etched City, which openly drew on Decadent writings and on Harrison’s own use of Decadent material. Attending to writings by Machen, Harrison, and Bishop, we can see ways that Decadent aesthetics and imagery carried forward, finding a home a century later, not in the literary mainstream but in an experimental corner of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

I did my best to avoid any discussion of what The New Weird is, was, or might be, since I find the topic completely uninteresting, but there was no avoiding that The New Weird was/is something, given my focus on M. John Harrison and K.J. Bishop. For a bit of a time warp back to the days when people were still arguing about The New Weird, here’s my 2004 Mumpsimus post about The Etched City and, from the same year, an interview I did with K.J. Bishop.

This article is one of the most heterosexual works of nonfiction I’ve ever published, which is odd, given the subject is the legacies of the 1890s (think Oscar Wilde). One of the peer reviewers asked if there oughtn’t to be some mention of queerness — how, after all, can anybody talk about Decadence without queerness?! — and I replied to the editor that as somebody whose real academic devotion is to queer modernism, I certainly wanted to raise the violet spectre wherever I could, but in this case there just isn’t anything notably queer about the works in discussion, so… (Peer review, by the way, was a joy with this article: thoughtful, thorough [4 reviewers!], supportive, probing. All that peer review is supposed to be and so often is not.)

The great pleasure for me in writing this article was the opportunity to revisit the works of Harrison and Bishop, some of which I had not reread in 20 years. In the same month I interviewed Bishop in 2004, I wrote about the Nightshade Books reissue of Harrison’s The Course of the Heart. (Coincidentally, now that I have written about it again, it’s been reissued by Serpent’s Tail.) It’s a very different book for me now, since in 2004 I had not read much, if any, Machen or Gnostic writings or, well, much of anything the novel is drawing from, riffing off of, critiquing. To its credit, though, I think my earlier post shows that the novel does not require knowledge of that material for it to achieve its various effects. What I wrote 21 years ago seems to me still accurate: “Harrison is one of the few writers who is so determinedly, yet subtly, original that we must read him to learn how to read him. Rereading his novels, I’m finding, reveals them to be somewhat different than I perceived them to be on a first reading — they feel less cruel a second time, more ordered, but somehow more ethereal.”

It’s taken me much longer to learn to read Machen, a writer I’ve really only developed an appreciation of in the last 5 years or so (see my essays on his story “The White People” and his novel The Secret Glory). Of his novels, The Green Round (his last) is the one that has attracted the least attention, and it is one he himself disparaged from the beginning. It’s better than its reputation, but that’s not saying much. A much more celebrated story that Machen wrote around the same time, “N”, provides everything The Green Round does in a more coherent, compelling, and efficient way. Nonetheless, it seemed to me worthwhile to position Machen’s last novel in relationship to the 1890s and then the end of the 20th century — especially given Alan Moore’s recent revitalization of Machen’s idea of perichoresis in his Long London series of novels.

Finally, a publication about which I will have more to say soon: On August 19, Third Man Books will release Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, with a foreword by Kelly Link. I edited the book and it was one of the great honors of my life to do so. Initial reviews (none yet online) have been wonderfully positive.

-----

• 1
  I was annoyed to discover late in the publishing process that the publisher has some AI agreements, but I was able to avoid any direct AI involvement, though inevitably, since the article is openly available and has only a CC-BY license on it, it will be gobbled up by all the monstrous “AI” tools destroying our planet and making the worst people on it even richer. ↩︎