A9.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.9.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
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In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
42.Fullmetal Alchemist.
43.Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
44.The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
45.The London Rocket Conspiracy.
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42.Fullmetal Alchemist.
Fullmetal Alchemist (Japanese: ?????? Hepburn: Hagane no Renkinjutsushi?, lit. "Alchemist of Steel") is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa. It was serialized in Square Enix's Monthly Sh?nen Gangan magazine between August 2001 and June 2010; the publisher later collected the individual chapters into twenty-seven tank?bon volumes. The world of Fullmetal Alchemist is styled after the European Industrial Revolution. Set in a fictional universe in which alchemy is one of the most advanced scientific techniques, the story follows the Elric brothers Edward and Alphonse, who are searching for a philosopher's stone to restore their bodies after a failed attempt to bring their mother back to life using alchemy.
The manga was published in English by Viz Media in North America, Madman Entertainment in Australasia, and Chuang Yi in South Korea. It has been adapted into two anime television series, two animated films?all animated by Bones studio?and light novels. Funimation dubbed both television series and films into English and released them for North America; these were distributed in other regions by several other companies. Viz Media localized the light novels, and Funimation and Destineer have localized the video games. Original video animations, video games, supplementary books, collectible card game and a variety of action figures and other merchandise have been based on the series' characters.
The Fullmetal Alchemist manga has sold approximately 64 million volumes as of 2014. The English release of the manga's first volume was the top-selling graphic novel during 2005. In two TV Asahi web polls, the anime was voted the most popular anime of all time in Japan. At the American Anime Awards in February 2007, it was eligible for eight awards, nominated for six, and won five. Reviewers from several media conglomerations had positive comments on the series, particularly for its character development.
Plot.
Edward and Alphonse Elric are alchemist brothers searching for the legendary catalyst called the Philosopher's Stone, a powerful object which would allow them to recover their bodies. The brothers were born in a village called Resembool in the country of Amestris (?????? Amesutorisu?), where they lived with their mother Trisha. Their father, Van Hohenheim, left home for unknown reasons and a year later, Trisha died of a terminal illness. After their mother's death, the brothers ask a woman named Izumi Curtis to teach them more alchemy, an advanced science in which objects can be created from raw materials, as Edward was determined to bring her back to life using alchemy. Edward and Alphonse research human transmutation?a taboo in which one attempts to create or modify a human being. Their attempt to bring back their mother fails and results in the loss of Edward's left leg and Alphonse's entire body. However, Edward manages to save his brother's soul by sacrificing his right arm to affix Alphonse's soul to a suit of armor. A few days later, an alchemist named Roy Mustang visits the Elric brothers and proposes that Edward become a member of the State Military of Amestris in exchange for more research materials to find a way to recover their bodies. After that, Edward's left leg and right arm are replaced with automail, a type of advanced prosthetic limb, built for him by his friend Winry Rockbell and her grandmother Pinako.
Edward then becomes a State Alchemist (?????? Kokka Renkinjutsushi?), an alchemist employed by the State Military of Amestris, which has annihilated most of the Ishbalan race in the past decade. Edward's role allows him to use the extensive resources available to other State Alchemists. The brothers set off in search of the philosopher's stone as a means to restore their bodies back to their original forms. Throughout their journey, they meet allies and enemies?including those who are desperate to obtain the philosopher's stone. The brothers meet Scar?one of the few surviving Ishbalans who seeks vengeance on the State Alchemists for the destruction of his race, and the homunculi?a group of human-like creatures whose core is a philosopher's stone and derive from it the ability to survive any harm until the stone runs out of souls.
As the story progresses, Edward and Alphonse discover that the vast expansion of Amestris was the result of the homunculi, who created and secretly control the State Military. The homunculi and many high-ranking military officers are commanded in secret by the creator of the homunculi, a man known as "Father." Father, who gained immortality through a philosopher's stone, plans to use Amestris as a gigantic transmutation circle to transmute the entire country. When Edward and Alphonse discover Father's plans, they and other members of the State Military set out to defeat him. The Northern "Briggs" Army invades Amestris's capital Central City, and comes into conflict with the Central forces.
As the forces collide, the remaining homunculi are defeated and Central City's troops learn the truth of the situation. Father tries to transmute Amestris to gain god-like powers but Hohenheim stops him. After Father is defeated by Edward with his original arm, which Alphonse has brought back by at the cost of his soul, Edward returns Alphonse to his original body, sacrificing his ability to use alchemy in the process. The Elrics return to Resembool, but two years later, they separate to repay the people who helped them during their journey.
Themes.
The series explores social problems. Scar's backstory and his hatred of the state military references the Ainu people, who had their land taken by other people. This includes the consequences of guerrilla warfare and the amount of violent soldiers a military can have. Some of the people who took the Ainu's land were originally Ainu; this irony is referenced in Scar's use of alchemy to kill alchemists even though it was forbidden in his own religion. The Elrics being orphans and adopted by Pinako Rockbell reflects Arakawa's beliefs about the ways society should treat orphans. The characters' dedication to their occupations reference the need to work for food. The series also explores the concept of equivalent exchange; to obtain something new, one must pay with something of the equal value. This is applied by alchemists when creating new materials and is also a belief the Elric brothers follow.
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43.Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
As part of the inaugural reread series on Reality Sandwich, Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis and Nomad Codes, spoke with me recently about the ?High Weirdness? of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern pink-gnosis of VALIS, a partly autobiographic scifi novel where Dick literally wrote himself into fiction, and, as it were, ?hacked the Hero?s Journey? (1). Erik tells us about how he first discovered Dick?s work when he was no pop culture icon but a pulp cult underground writer.
VALIS is loaded with half-fiction, half-truth narratives told by a multitude of personas. Philip K. Dick. Phil Dick. Horselover Fat. As Erik Davis will tell us, there is a method to this madness, PKD was always more than one author, and Dick may have ended up writing himself (2).
Just watch your step through the hallucinatory fiction this side of Chapel Perilous.
J: While doing some research myself, I noticed in this article you mention studying Philip K. Dick for your senior thesis. Your interest clearly goes way back.
How did you first come across Philip K. Dick?s work? What made it so compelling?
E: I was turned onto PKD by a very strange fellow I met in a place called Barrington Hall, which was by far and away the most notorious of the student-run co-operative apartments around the Berkeley campus in the mid-80s, when I briefly lived there. At the time, PKD was very much a cult author, and getting the handoff was like being handed a secret key to high weirdness. I didn?t start reading him in earnest for another year or so, back in New Haven, which had a bookstore called Book World that stocked his books alongside other arcana, like Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson and early cyberpunk. Back then most of his stuff was out of print, so you had to hunt for these marvels in used shops, like fragments of the True Cross.
We?re starting our ReRead series with VALIS. One of the first things we notice about this book is that it disregards any clear distinction between fiction and autobiography. The effect, to me anyway, is a very intense sympathetic connection both with Horselover Fat, and thus by extension, Philip K. Dick (or later in the book, Phil Dick). In some regard this could be P.K.D.?s attempt, intentional or not, to make the reader slip into multiple worlds. Multiple realities, as it were. You become Horselover Fat, phasing in and out of hypothesis as to what happened, and what is happening to him (and just who he actually is). You become Phil Dick and Philip K. Dick, without a clear sense of where you can lean for objectivity. The book loses you in it in a non-traditional sense. Could you speak to this a little?
Part of the effect of the book is formal, as you say, not just thematic. I mean that its messages or meanings are conveyed to you through the unusual formal structure of the book as well as its dialogue and plot events. So even though it is a very readable work, it confuses you about where to draw the line between reality and fiction, brutal autobiography and crazy fantasy, religion and satire. The more you know about PKD?s ?real? life, the more confused in some ways you are about how to take it. It uses the criss-cross and confusion between different genres to create a kind of reading event in the reader (or some readers anyway) that would be impossible with more straight story-telling. One of the trickiest things is that you can?t tell or infer what the author Dick?s attitude towards his two alter egos. Is he trying to exorcise Horselover Fat by giving him a fictional home, or is he rather trying to communicate the vibrations of Valis directly to the reader by framing the story as a hallucinatory fiction rather than a religious or New Age tract? The question is unresolvable, because ?Philip K. Dick? was always more than one author?a multiplicity that is reflected in the novel?s formal structure.
What interests you about this book, VALIS, of all of P.K.D.?s work? What stands out about it? Does it have more relevance today than 1981? Does it shed any light ? perhaps even missing perspectives ? on contemporary ?transformational culture??
VALIS is a masterpiece whose power partly lies in its ability to disorient and enchant the reader. I suspect that for readers today it continues to resonate, as our world in many ways has simply become more PhilDickean. I am reminded of Robert Anton Wilson?s idea of ?Chapel Perilous?. Wilson had somewhat similar experiences in 1974?cosmic conspiracies, syncronicities, blasts of insight?and he suggested that there was a stage of the path, a kind of dark night of the soul, where the seeker can?t tell what?s paranoia and what?s reality. There is a surfeit of meaning?after all, there is definitely something like too many synchronicities. Valis is Dick?s Chapel Perilous, and he brings readers along for the ride. Some of them never quite get off. But Chapel Perilous is a place to pass through, not to call home.
Is there a particular chapter in VALIS you?d be interested in taking on ? if briefly ? to comment on? Something that really struck you about it that seemed to speak to the thematics of the novel and Dick?s core philosophy?
Part of the challenge or creative trial of VALIS is not about extracting a message or core philosophy, but about watching it reflect your own desire and strategies to find or extract such a message. So what reference are you going to look up on wikipedia? What parts do you want to accept or reject? It?s a reflexive book, in other words, which is partly how you open the doors to Chapel Perilous. Along these lines, one of the most important chapters is chapter 9, which is the hinge in the book between the more-or-less autobiographical section and the more-or-less SF-fantasy section. And what does Dick and his pals do there? They go to see a trashy SciFi movie and they look for hidden messages, just like you are doing with the book VALIS. Read that chapter closely, think about how they interpret the film, and more importantly, how they interpret it together, in an enthusiastic conversation between turned-on pals. These kinds of far-ranging, critical, and speculative conversations are a key part of the path, though they can lead in wayward directions. And they also hold out the sense that popular culture can be the vehicle of gnosis.
Professor Richard Doyle, who recently held a class on Synchcast for P.K.D., warned his students that reading Dick?s novels could induce what he calls an ?involutionary? affect ? meaning one?s life might start getting taken up by synchronicities and uncanny moments. I know you?ve mentioned in some previous presentations that you have experienced these moments (we might call them P.K.D. moments) where the book seems to become a divinizing tool for bibliomancy.
What do you think is happening here, if anything? And secondly: isn?t it interesting that this phenomenon seems to occur regardless of the perceived value of the text? It seems to happen as readily to a pulp scifi novel as the Bible.
The specific ?occult? practice of bibliomancy is key to PKD. The first time I gave a talk on him, which was my first public lecture back in 1990 or something, I realized I hadn?t prepared an adequate definition of ?Gnosticism.? With five minutes to go, people already sitting down, I panicked, and opened the book randomly and my eyes fell precisely on Dick?s pithy definition: ?This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not).? These sorts of gestures are also made by the characters in many Dick novels, a number of which feature oracular books that are opened to any page, or accessed with other random processes, like the I Ching in The Man in the High Castle. Researchers and scholars know these synchronicities well, however you might think about them, and Dick was very interested in seeding those sorts of connections in his novels. Reading, drawing connections, in a sense is invoking these kinds of uncanny links. For Dick, writing itself is alive.
You?re currently doing a dissertation on Philip K. Dick through Rice University. It would be excellent to hear a little about that, and how your interest in Dick?s work has evolved as a result of an academic approach. How does one approach the life and work of P.K.D. from a religious studies perspective?
My project has actually expanded beyond Phil Dick into a study of ?High Weirdness? in the early 70s. I?ll be looking at other figures?Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, etc? who also had strange and strong ?gnostic? experiences in the period that involved cosmic downloads, cybernetic mysticism, and hosts of synchronicities. I am actually very happy to be approaching these topics in a scholarly format. Although the book that eventually results will be written for a wider audience, writing in academic terms can help restrain the temptation to plunge down the rabbit hole?and with PKD and VALIS, you are really talking about a matrix of rabbit holes. As I mentioned above, there is such a thing as too many synchronicities! Plus I also wanted to locate PKD in his time and place, and realized that it was a time and place shared with these other fascinating characters. So it?s pretty much of a blast. I am getting a PhD in high weirdness.
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44.The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein?s monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction ? the vampire ? a creation of Lord Byron?s personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the tale, with Byron himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar with today.
Detail from F.G. Gainsford?s portrait of John Polidori, ca. 1816, the year he would accompany Lord Byron to his Lake Geneva villa.
A vampire is a thirsty thing, spreading metaphors like antigens through its victim?s blood. It is a rare situation that is not revealingly defamiliarized by the introduction of a vampiric motif, whether it be migration and industrial change in Dracula, adolescent sexuality in Twilight, or racism in True Blood. Beyond undead life and the knack of becoming a bat, the vampire?s true power is its ability to induce intense paranoia about the nature of social relations to ask, ?who are the real bloodsuckers??
This is certainly the case with the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William Polidori?s 1819 story, ?The Vampyre.? It is Polidori?s text that establishes the vampire as we know it via a reimagining of the feral mud-caked creatures of southeastern European legend as the elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms.
?The Vampyre? is a product of 1816, the ?year without summer,? in which Lord Byron left England in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and rumours of incest, sodomy and madness, to travel to the banks of Lake Geneva and there loiter with Percy and Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin). Polidori served as Byron?s travelling physician, and played an active role in the summer?s tensions and rivalries, as well as participating in the famous night of ghost stories that produced Mary Shelley?s ?hideous progeny,? Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Like Frankenstein, ?The Vampyre? draws extensively on the mood at Byron?s Villa Diodati. But whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein?s struggles, Polidori?s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially the humiliations he suffered at Byron?s hand.
Detail from a hand-colored engraving of Villa Diodati, by Edward Francis Finden, ca. 1833, after a drawing by William Purser ? Source.
John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in Soho, the eldest son of an English mother and an Italian writer, translator, and literary jack-of-all-trades. Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine.
Medical education in the early nineteenth century was largely based around the study of ?antiphlogistics?? learning how to master the various ways of ridding the body of noxious substances in the quickest way possible ? and so John became skilled in blood-letting, vomiting, enemas, blistering, and plunge-baths. But Polidori hated medicine. A restless loner, he rejected his classmates as ?automatons,? while he himself dreamt of achieving glory, first on the battlefield fighting on behalf of Italy as it sought to repel the invading armies of Napoleon, and then through a growing attachment to literature. Thanks to the success Byron had achieved with the publication of his poem Childe Harold in 1812, it was only natural that young men in the early nineteenth century should conceive of poetry as not only a creative outlet, but as an avenue to fame, riches and sexual plenty. Under the long-distance mentorship of William Taylor of Norwich, a once notable, but now near-derelict essayist who was attracted to John?s remarkable good looks, Polidori began to dabble in literature. His father, who knew the more likely privations of a literary life, ordered him to stick to his studies, and John obeyed, fulfilling a family dynamic that remained unchanged throughout his life ? bowing to his father?s wishes while inwardly caviling at the restraints they placed upon him.
Where most students wrote dissertations on the circulation of the blood or assorted fevers, John concluded his education by writing a dissertation on the uncanny phenomenon of sleep-walking that was heavily influenced by the French encyclopedists, before returning to London a newly-minted doctor at the tender age of twenty. Unfortunately, in order to practice in the capital it was necessary to be at least twenty six years old. It was while contemplating this stalling impediment that John was offered the job of physician to Lord Byron. John?s father, who had once been the secretary to the vain and splenetic Italian tragedian, Vittorio Alfieri, ordered him not to take the position, while across town, Byron?s friend John Cam Hobhouse counseled the poet against employing the vain young man with the funny name. Neither warning was sufficient, and together Byron and Polidori left for the Continent on St. George?s Day, 1816.
Lord Byron in traditional Albanian dress, a replica painted by Thomas Phillips (in 1835) of his original painting of 1813 ? Source.
Their relationship got off to an uneasy start in Dover as they awaited a convivial tide. Over dinner, John had invited Byron to read from a play he had written, and Byron obliged, but in the company of garrulous friends who had come to see him off, found it impossible to resist the urge to make them laugh one last time. Polidori, an outsider, an employee, was forced to sit and listen as Byron lampooned his sophomoric efforts and reduced the table to fits of giggles. Furious, John stormed off to pace the streets of Dover.
Away from Byron?s friends, things improved a little, with John writing to his sister from Brussels to say that ?I am with him on the footing of an equal.? The democratic idyll did not last long, however, with Byron quickly losing patience with his doctor?s bouts of travel sickness, and John resenting his employer?s undemocratic arrogance. ?Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?? John asked Byron while stopped at an inn overlooking the Rhine. ?There were three things, answered Byron, calmly. ?First,? he said, ?I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door ? Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point ? and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.??
These feelings of resentment only grew, as John felt increasingly overshadowed in the famous man?s company, with those they met instantly gravitating towards celebrity while he remained ?like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.? At the same time, the doctor?s petulance provoked Byron, whose wit was often cruel and rarely let an opportunity pass to mock his employee or put him in his place. In time, John began to feel that his own sense of self was being drained by his proximity to the poet. Increasingly, he sought to distance himself and in mid-June, made a half-hearted attempt at suicide.
It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities. Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having ?such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,? a mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas Jones de Powis, ?the facility of?bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.?
But the most overt example of Byron as the devourer of souls was a novel John read over the course of the summer ? Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron and Lamb had enjoyed a brief and transgressive affair until he, somewhat rattled by the vivid expanse of her erotic imagination, had called it off. The novel is a thinly veiled portrait of the relationship set in a lonely castle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, that interweaves breathless Gothic fiction with the wayward love of Calantha for the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is a brooding anti-hero who dresses as a monk, stalks ruined priories, and howls like a wolf at the moon. His face glowers ?as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature,? possessing the ability to enslave her. ?Weep,? he cries, binding her ever tighter to him, ?I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.? Calantha is powerless. ?My love is death.?
Lady Caroline Lamb, painted by Eliza H. Trotter, ca. 1811 ? Source.
That Polidori took inspiration from Lamb is revealed in the name he gives his villain ? Lord Ruthven, one of Glenarvon?s various ancestral titles. Polidori?s Ruthven also inhabits Glenarvon?s aristocratic milieu as a member of the bon ton. He is a pale and fascinating nobleman who appears in London ?more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank,? and who incites awe amongst the ranks of fashionable ladies by virtue of his melancholy air and ?reputation of a winning tongue.?
In ?The Vampyre,? Ruthven befriends a young gentleman named Aubrey, whom he invites to accompany him on a journey to Greece. Once there, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful peasant girl who recounts the legend of the vampire but is brutally murdered soon after. Aubrey comes to suspect Ruthven, but the mysterious aristocrat is shot by bandits before the truth can be revealed. As Ruthven lays dying, he manages to extract a promise from the young man, asking him not to announce his death in England for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and Ruthven literally dies laughing.
After a long and meandering journey home, the sad and raddled Aubrey is finally able to return to society, where he is horrified to discover Ruthven alive and well. ?Remember your oath,? whispers the man who has died in his arms, thus driving Aubrey so far from his wits that he succumbs to a protracted illness. In the meantime, Aubrey?s sister is engaged to be married, and though he has yet to meet the groom, it slowly dawns on him that it must be Ruthven. Impatient for his oath to expire and growing weaker by the day, he finally sends his assistants to her rescue only to discover they are too late: ?Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey?s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!?
Knowing the context of Polidori?s story, it is hard not to read ?The Vampyre? as an allegory of the doctor?s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it rewrites the well-known story of Byron?s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame.
Rather than providing a creative outlet for Polidori, the publication of ?The Vampyre? only served to compound his humiliation. Although the text was similarly prompted by the ghost story competition that inspired Mary Shelley so ably, John only completed his story for the pleasure of a friend outside of the Byron-Shelley circle. The manuscript lay forgotten for three years until finally coming into the hands of the disreputable journalist Henry Colburn, who published it in his New Monthly Magazine under the title ?The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.?
Title-page from the fourth state of the first edition published by Sherwood, Neeley and Jones in 1819. Although this version of the title-page was reset to remove Lord Byron?s name as author, someone has re-written it in by hand ? Source.
The response was predictably lively. Goethe proclaimed it Byron?s greatest ever work, and popular hardback editions went through numerous reprintings, leaving Polidori scrambling to assert his rights as its author in the face of accusations that he was either a plagiarist or misusing Byron?s name to further his own reputation. John tried to take control by preparing his own edition, but the public was not interested, and disgusted with the literary life, he attempted to rejoin Ampleforth and train as a monk. Still ?The Vampyre? plagued him as his application was denied because of ?certain publications which I have seen,? wrote the Prior, ?and of which I must tell [you] as a friend, I wish you had not been the author.? Polidori enrolled to study law using his mother?s maiden name, but, finding no appetite for it, fell into gambling. With the shadow of Byron making everything he did seem paltry and derivative, and the weight of rejection impressing itself on him like a judgment on his being, John Polidori took his own life at the age of twenty five by drinking a beaker of cyanide.
?Poor Polidori,? wrote Byron when he heard the news, ?it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.?
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45.The London Rocket Conspiracy.
The London Rocket Conspiracy.
Seventy years ago, on 8 September 1944, a gas main exploded in London. Well, that?s what the newspapers said the next day, but can you believe everything you read in the press? Not many Londoners did. For one thing, it wasn?t an isolated incident. The papers went on to report a whole series of ?gas main explosions? ? dozens of them ? over the course of the next two months.
What was causing the sudden spate of explosions? Britain had been at war for five years, but there were no longer any German bombers in the skies over London ? the Royal Air Force had total air supremacy. A few months earlier the city had suffered a flurry of ?flying-bomb? attacks ? essentially small unmanned kamikaze aircraft ? but these had stopped when the French coast was controlled by the advancing Allies.
The war was coming to an end, and the British government wanted to get that message across to the public. Newspapers only printed good news. London life was returning to normal; blackout restrictions had been lifted and evacuees were being told to return to the city. Two or three ?gas main explosions? per day was no cause for alarm.
Few people believed the ?exploding gas main? stories. The British often boast about their wartime spirit ? whereby everyone feels they are on the same side against a common enemy ? but for Londoners in September 1944 the wartime spirit became distinctly frayed. It was replaced by something far more cynical and familiar ? a conspiracy theory. The government knew perfectly well what was causing all these explosions, and so did anyone who had seen the aftermath of one.
In the bottom of each smoking crater was the tangled wreckage of a rocket.
The first V-2 rocket landed in London on 8 September 1944, a few hours after a similar weapon had been fired at Paris. In the course of the next six months, some 3,170 V-2s were launched from sites in German-held territory. Almost half of them were targeted at London, with the remainder aimed at allied targets on the continent. The V-2 caused far more fatalities than a similar tonnage of conventional bombs, partly because of its enormous kinetic energy and partly because it struck without any warning. Falling from the edge of space at several times the speed of sound, the first thing anyone on the ground heard was the warhead exploding. This was followed by the long drawn-out rumble of the rocket falling through the air, long after it had already hit the ground.
Londoners knew they were being attacked by long-range rockets, and they resented the way the government persistently denied the truth. The ridiculous notion that the city was suffering from a sudden epidemic of spontaneously exploding gas mains was an insult to the public?s intelligence.
As is so often the case with ?disinformation?, the government?s excuse ? when it finally came out ? was that the deception was aimed not at the general public but at the enemy. As Prime Minister Winston Churchill said on 10 November 1944, in the government?s first public acknowledgement of the rocket attacks:
No official statement about the attack has hitherto been issued because it might have given information useful to the enemy, who may well have been uncertain as to whether any of these missiles had actually struck this island. No doubt by now he has acquired some information, and in any case the Government do not feel they should any longer withhold all information from the public.
There?s an obvious analogy here with the official attitude toward UFOs ? with the difference that everyone today knows that the V-2 rockets were real. They weren?t exploding gas mains. As far as the authorities are concerned, though, UFOs are still weather balloons, swamp gas, the planet Venus, etc.
There?s another parallel between the V-2s and ufology. One of the commonest reasons scientists give for refusing to believe in UFOs is that they are ?a physical impossibility.? In exactly the same way, British scientists maintained that long-range liquid-fuelled rockets were ?a physical impossibility?? right up until the moment they started to rain down on London.
To British scientists, the idea of a powerful liquid-fuelled rocket was the stuff of science fiction and nothing more. To produce the required thrust from the available volume of fuel, enormous pressures would be needed ? far more than could be contained by any conceivable fuel tank. If the Germans claimed they were developing liquid-fuelled rockets, then it must be a bluff that could safely be ignored. If intelligence operatives claimed to have seen rocket production facilities, they must have been mistaken. You can?t argue with the laws of physics.
The scientists were right to some extent. It?s true that you can?t break the laws of physics, and that a rocket exhaust requires an enormous pressure. But who said the fuel had to be stored at that pressure? The Germans used a turbopump, similar to a car?s turbocharger, to vastly increase the pressure at the nozzle of the rocket. The laws of physics were right ? it was just the British scientists, who couldn?t think ?out of the box?, who were wrong.
The German V-2 campaign saw long-range rockets used as weapons of war for the first time in history, and it all started seventy years ago.
*
Inglish Site.9.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
42.Fullmetal Alchemist.
43.Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
44.The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
45.The London Rocket Conspiracy.
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42.Fullmetal Alchemist.
Fullmetal Alchemist (Japanese: ?????? Hepburn: Hagane no Renkinjutsushi?, lit. "Alchemist of Steel") is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa. It was serialized in Square Enix's Monthly Sh?nen Gangan magazine between August 2001 and June 2010; the publisher later collected the individual chapters into twenty-seven tank?bon volumes. The world of Fullmetal Alchemist is styled after the European Industrial Revolution. Set in a fictional universe in which alchemy is one of the most advanced scientific techniques, the story follows the Elric brothers Edward and Alphonse, who are searching for a philosopher's stone to restore their bodies after a failed attempt to bring their mother back to life using alchemy.
The manga was published in English by Viz Media in North America, Madman Entertainment in Australasia, and Chuang Yi in South Korea. It has been adapted into two anime television series, two animated films?all animated by Bones studio?and light novels. Funimation dubbed both television series and films into English and released them for North America; these were distributed in other regions by several other companies. Viz Media localized the light novels, and Funimation and Destineer have localized the video games. Original video animations, video games, supplementary books, collectible card game and a variety of action figures and other merchandise have been based on the series' characters.
The Fullmetal Alchemist manga has sold approximately 64 million volumes as of 2014. The English release of the manga's first volume was the top-selling graphic novel during 2005. In two TV Asahi web polls, the anime was voted the most popular anime of all time in Japan. At the American Anime Awards in February 2007, it was eligible for eight awards, nominated for six, and won five. Reviewers from several media conglomerations had positive comments on the series, particularly for its character development.
Plot.
Edward and Alphonse Elric are alchemist brothers searching for the legendary catalyst called the Philosopher's Stone, a powerful object which would allow them to recover their bodies. The brothers were born in a village called Resembool in the country of Amestris (?????? Amesutorisu?), where they lived with their mother Trisha. Their father, Van Hohenheim, left home for unknown reasons and a year later, Trisha died of a terminal illness. After their mother's death, the brothers ask a woman named Izumi Curtis to teach them more alchemy, an advanced science in which objects can be created from raw materials, as Edward was determined to bring her back to life using alchemy. Edward and Alphonse research human transmutation?a taboo in which one attempts to create or modify a human being. Their attempt to bring back their mother fails and results in the loss of Edward's left leg and Alphonse's entire body. However, Edward manages to save his brother's soul by sacrificing his right arm to affix Alphonse's soul to a suit of armor. A few days later, an alchemist named Roy Mustang visits the Elric brothers and proposes that Edward become a member of the State Military of Amestris in exchange for more research materials to find a way to recover their bodies. After that, Edward's left leg and right arm are replaced with automail, a type of advanced prosthetic limb, built for him by his friend Winry Rockbell and her grandmother Pinako.
Edward then becomes a State Alchemist (?????? Kokka Renkinjutsushi?), an alchemist employed by the State Military of Amestris, which has annihilated most of the Ishbalan race in the past decade. Edward's role allows him to use the extensive resources available to other State Alchemists. The brothers set off in search of the philosopher's stone as a means to restore their bodies back to their original forms. Throughout their journey, they meet allies and enemies?including those who are desperate to obtain the philosopher's stone. The brothers meet Scar?one of the few surviving Ishbalans who seeks vengeance on the State Alchemists for the destruction of his race, and the homunculi?a group of human-like creatures whose core is a philosopher's stone and derive from it the ability to survive any harm until the stone runs out of souls.
As the story progresses, Edward and Alphonse discover that the vast expansion of Amestris was the result of the homunculi, who created and secretly control the State Military. The homunculi and many high-ranking military officers are commanded in secret by the creator of the homunculi, a man known as "Father." Father, who gained immortality through a philosopher's stone, plans to use Amestris as a gigantic transmutation circle to transmute the entire country. When Edward and Alphonse discover Father's plans, they and other members of the State Military set out to defeat him. The Northern "Briggs" Army invades Amestris's capital Central City, and comes into conflict with the Central forces.
As the forces collide, the remaining homunculi are defeated and Central City's troops learn the truth of the situation. Father tries to transmute Amestris to gain god-like powers but Hohenheim stops him. After Father is defeated by Edward with his original arm, which Alphonse has brought back by at the cost of his soul, Edward returns Alphonse to his original body, sacrificing his ability to use alchemy in the process. The Elrics return to Resembool, but two years later, they separate to repay the people who helped them during their journey.
Themes.
The series explores social problems. Scar's backstory and his hatred of the state military references the Ainu people, who had their land taken by other people. This includes the consequences of guerrilla warfare and the amount of violent soldiers a military can have. Some of the people who took the Ainu's land were originally Ainu; this irony is referenced in Scar's use of alchemy to kill alchemists even though it was forbidden in his own religion. The Elrics being orphans and adopted by Pinako Rockbell reflects Arakawa's beliefs about the ways society should treat orphans. The characters' dedication to their occupations reference the need to work for food. The series also explores the concept of equivalent exchange; to obtain something new, one must pay with something of the equal value. This is applied by alchemists when creating new materials and is also a belief the Elric brothers follow.
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43.Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness.
As part of the inaugural reread series on Reality Sandwich, Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis and Nomad Codes, spoke with me recently about the ?High Weirdness? of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern pink-gnosis of VALIS, a partly autobiographic scifi novel where Dick literally wrote himself into fiction, and, as it were, ?hacked the Hero?s Journey? (1). Erik tells us about how he first discovered Dick?s work when he was no pop culture icon but a pulp cult underground writer.
VALIS is loaded with half-fiction, half-truth narratives told by a multitude of personas. Philip K. Dick. Phil Dick. Horselover Fat. As Erik Davis will tell us, there is a method to this madness, PKD was always more than one author, and Dick may have ended up writing himself (2).
Just watch your step through the hallucinatory fiction this side of Chapel Perilous.
J: While doing some research myself, I noticed in this article you mention studying Philip K. Dick for your senior thesis. Your interest clearly goes way back.
How did you first come across Philip K. Dick?s work? What made it so compelling?
E: I was turned onto PKD by a very strange fellow I met in a place called Barrington Hall, which was by far and away the most notorious of the student-run co-operative apartments around the Berkeley campus in the mid-80s, when I briefly lived there. At the time, PKD was very much a cult author, and getting the handoff was like being handed a secret key to high weirdness. I didn?t start reading him in earnest for another year or so, back in New Haven, which had a bookstore called Book World that stocked his books alongside other arcana, like Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson and early cyberpunk. Back then most of his stuff was out of print, so you had to hunt for these marvels in used shops, like fragments of the True Cross.
We?re starting our ReRead series with VALIS. One of the first things we notice about this book is that it disregards any clear distinction between fiction and autobiography. The effect, to me anyway, is a very intense sympathetic connection both with Horselover Fat, and thus by extension, Philip K. Dick (or later in the book, Phil Dick). In some regard this could be P.K.D.?s attempt, intentional or not, to make the reader slip into multiple worlds. Multiple realities, as it were. You become Horselover Fat, phasing in and out of hypothesis as to what happened, and what is happening to him (and just who he actually is). You become Phil Dick and Philip K. Dick, without a clear sense of where you can lean for objectivity. The book loses you in it in a non-traditional sense. Could you speak to this a little?
Part of the effect of the book is formal, as you say, not just thematic. I mean that its messages or meanings are conveyed to you through the unusual formal structure of the book as well as its dialogue and plot events. So even though it is a very readable work, it confuses you about where to draw the line between reality and fiction, brutal autobiography and crazy fantasy, religion and satire. The more you know about PKD?s ?real? life, the more confused in some ways you are about how to take it. It uses the criss-cross and confusion between different genres to create a kind of reading event in the reader (or some readers anyway) that would be impossible with more straight story-telling. One of the trickiest things is that you can?t tell or infer what the author Dick?s attitude towards his two alter egos. Is he trying to exorcise Horselover Fat by giving him a fictional home, or is he rather trying to communicate the vibrations of Valis directly to the reader by framing the story as a hallucinatory fiction rather than a religious or New Age tract? The question is unresolvable, because ?Philip K. Dick? was always more than one author?a multiplicity that is reflected in the novel?s formal structure.
What interests you about this book, VALIS, of all of P.K.D.?s work? What stands out about it? Does it have more relevance today than 1981? Does it shed any light ? perhaps even missing perspectives ? on contemporary ?transformational culture??
VALIS is a masterpiece whose power partly lies in its ability to disorient and enchant the reader. I suspect that for readers today it continues to resonate, as our world in many ways has simply become more PhilDickean. I am reminded of Robert Anton Wilson?s idea of ?Chapel Perilous?. Wilson had somewhat similar experiences in 1974?cosmic conspiracies, syncronicities, blasts of insight?and he suggested that there was a stage of the path, a kind of dark night of the soul, where the seeker can?t tell what?s paranoia and what?s reality. There is a surfeit of meaning?after all, there is definitely something like too many synchronicities. Valis is Dick?s Chapel Perilous, and he brings readers along for the ride. Some of them never quite get off. But Chapel Perilous is a place to pass through, not to call home.
Is there a particular chapter in VALIS you?d be interested in taking on ? if briefly ? to comment on? Something that really struck you about it that seemed to speak to the thematics of the novel and Dick?s core philosophy?
Part of the challenge or creative trial of VALIS is not about extracting a message or core philosophy, but about watching it reflect your own desire and strategies to find or extract such a message. So what reference are you going to look up on wikipedia? What parts do you want to accept or reject? It?s a reflexive book, in other words, which is partly how you open the doors to Chapel Perilous. Along these lines, one of the most important chapters is chapter 9, which is the hinge in the book between the more-or-less autobiographical section and the more-or-less SF-fantasy section. And what does Dick and his pals do there? They go to see a trashy SciFi movie and they look for hidden messages, just like you are doing with the book VALIS. Read that chapter closely, think about how they interpret the film, and more importantly, how they interpret it together, in an enthusiastic conversation between turned-on pals. These kinds of far-ranging, critical, and speculative conversations are a key part of the path, though they can lead in wayward directions. And they also hold out the sense that popular culture can be the vehicle of gnosis.
Professor Richard Doyle, who recently held a class on Synchcast for P.K.D., warned his students that reading Dick?s novels could induce what he calls an ?involutionary? affect ? meaning one?s life might start getting taken up by synchronicities and uncanny moments. I know you?ve mentioned in some previous presentations that you have experienced these moments (we might call them P.K.D. moments) where the book seems to become a divinizing tool for bibliomancy.
What do you think is happening here, if anything? And secondly: isn?t it interesting that this phenomenon seems to occur regardless of the perceived value of the text? It seems to happen as readily to a pulp scifi novel as the Bible.
The specific ?occult? practice of bibliomancy is key to PKD. The first time I gave a talk on him, which was my first public lecture back in 1990 or something, I realized I hadn?t prepared an adequate definition of ?Gnosticism.? With five minutes to go, people already sitting down, I panicked, and opened the book randomly and my eyes fell precisely on Dick?s pithy definition: ?This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not).? These sorts of gestures are also made by the characters in many Dick novels, a number of which feature oracular books that are opened to any page, or accessed with other random processes, like the I Ching in The Man in the High Castle. Researchers and scholars know these synchronicities well, however you might think about them, and Dick was very interested in seeding those sorts of connections in his novels. Reading, drawing connections, in a sense is invoking these kinds of uncanny links. For Dick, writing itself is alive.
You?re currently doing a dissertation on Philip K. Dick through Rice University. It would be excellent to hear a little about that, and how your interest in Dick?s work has evolved as a result of an academic approach. How does one approach the life and work of P.K.D. from a religious studies perspective?
My project has actually expanded beyond Phil Dick into a study of ?High Weirdness? in the early 70s. I?ll be looking at other figures?Robert Anton Wilson, Terence McKenna, etc? who also had strange and strong ?gnostic? experiences in the period that involved cosmic downloads, cybernetic mysticism, and hosts of synchronicities. I am actually very happy to be approaching these topics in a scholarly format. Although the book that eventually results will be written for a wider audience, writing in academic terms can help restrain the temptation to plunge down the rabbit hole?and with PKD and VALIS, you are really talking about a matrix of rabbit holes. As I mentioned above, there is such a thing as too many synchronicities! Plus I also wanted to locate PKD in his time and place, and realized that it was a time and place shared with these other fascinating characters. So it?s pretty much of a blast. I am getting a PhD in high weirdness.
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44.The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire.
From that famed night of ghost-stories in a Lake Geneva villa in 1816, as well as Frankenstein?s monster, there arose that other great figure of 19th-century gothic fiction ? the vampire ? a creation of Lord Byron?s personal physician John Polidori. Andrew McConnell Stott explores how a fractious relationship between Polidori and his poet employer lies behind the tale, with Byron himself providing a model for the blood-sucking aristocratic figure of the legend we are familiar with today.
Detail from F.G. Gainsford?s portrait of John Polidori, ca. 1816, the year he would accompany Lord Byron to his Lake Geneva villa.
A vampire is a thirsty thing, spreading metaphors like antigens through its victim?s blood. It is a rare situation that is not revealingly defamiliarized by the introduction of a vampiric motif, whether it be migration and industrial change in Dracula, adolescent sexuality in Twilight, or racism in True Blood. Beyond undead life and the knack of becoming a bat, the vampire?s true power is its ability to induce intense paranoia about the nature of social relations to ask, ?who are the real bloodsuckers??
This is certainly the case with the first fully realized vampire story in English, John William Polidori?s 1819 story, ?The Vampyre.? It is Polidori?s text that establishes the vampire as we know it via a reimagining of the feral mud-caked creatures of southeastern European legend as the elegant and magnetic denizens of cosmopolitan assemblies and polite drawing rooms.
?The Vampyre? is a product of 1816, the ?year without summer,? in which Lord Byron left England in the wake of a disintegrating marriage and rumours of incest, sodomy and madness, to travel to the banks of Lake Geneva and there loiter with Percy and Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin). Polidori served as Byron?s travelling physician, and played an active role in the summer?s tensions and rivalries, as well as participating in the famous night of ghost stories that produced Mary Shelley?s ?hideous progeny,? Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Like Frankenstein, ?The Vampyre? draws extensively on the mood at Byron?s Villa Diodati. But whereas Mary Shelley incorporated the orchestral thunderstorms that illuminated the lake and the sublime mountain scenery that served as a backdrop to Victor Frankenstein?s struggles, Polidori?s text is woven from the invisible dynamics of the Byron-Shelley circle, and especially the humiliations he suffered at Byron?s hand.
Detail from a hand-colored engraving of Villa Diodati, by Edward Francis Finden, ca. 1833, after a drawing by William Purser ? Source.
John Polidori (1795-1821) was born in Soho, the eldest son of an English mother and an Italian writer, translator, and literary jack-of-all-trades. Raised to great precocity in a multi-lingual and hyper-literate home, he was sent to board at the Catholic Ampleforth College at the age of eight. Then just a remote and drafty lodge housing twelve boys and twenty-four Benedictine monks, Ampleforth provided instruction in history, languages, and the minutiae of Catholic devotion. Given this intense and closeted environment, it is no wonder that John should dream of entering the priesthood, but his father had chosen a different path for his son, pulling him from school at the age of fifteen to attend the university of Edinburgh to study medicine.
Medical education in the early nineteenth century was largely based around the study of ?antiphlogistics?? learning how to master the various ways of ridding the body of noxious substances in the quickest way possible ? and so John became skilled in blood-letting, vomiting, enemas, blistering, and plunge-baths. But Polidori hated medicine. A restless loner, he rejected his classmates as ?automatons,? while he himself dreamt of achieving glory, first on the battlefield fighting on behalf of Italy as it sought to repel the invading armies of Napoleon, and then through a growing attachment to literature. Thanks to the success Byron had achieved with the publication of his poem Childe Harold in 1812, it was only natural that young men in the early nineteenth century should conceive of poetry as not only a creative outlet, but as an avenue to fame, riches and sexual plenty. Under the long-distance mentorship of William Taylor of Norwich, a once notable, but now near-derelict essayist who was attracted to John?s remarkable good looks, Polidori began to dabble in literature. His father, who knew the more likely privations of a literary life, ordered him to stick to his studies, and John obeyed, fulfilling a family dynamic that remained unchanged throughout his life ? bowing to his father?s wishes while inwardly caviling at the restraints they placed upon him.
Where most students wrote dissertations on the circulation of the blood or assorted fevers, John concluded his education by writing a dissertation on the uncanny phenomenon of sleep-walking that was heavily influenced by the French encyclopedists, before returning to London a newly-minted doctor at the tender age of twenty. Unfortunately, in order to practice in the capital it was necessary to be at least twenty six years old. It was while contemplating this stalling impediment that John was offered the job of physician to Lord Byron. John?s father, who had once been the secretary to the vain and splenetic Italian tragedian, Vittorio Alfieri, ordered him not to take the position, while across town, Byron?s friend John Cam Hobhouse counseled the poet against employing the vain young man with the funny name. Neither warning was sufficient, and together Byron and Polidori left for the Continent on St. George?s Day, 1816.
Lord Byron in traditional Albanian dress, a replica painted by Thomas Phillips (in 1835) of his original painting of 1813 ? Source.
Their relationship got off to an uneasy start in Dover as they awaited a convivial tide. Over dinner, John had invited Byron to read from a play he had written, and Byron obliged, but in the company of garrulous friends who had come to see him off, found it impossible to resist the urge to make them laugh one last time. Polidori, an outsider, an employee, was forced to sit and listen as Byron lampooned his sophomoric efforts and reduced the table to fits of giggles. Furious, John stormed off to pace the streets of Dover.
Away from Byron?s friends, things improved a little, with John writing to his sister from Brussels to say that ?I am with him on the footing of an equal.? The democratic idyll did not last long, however, with Byron quickly losing patience with his doctor?s bouts of travel sickness, and John resenting his employer?s undemocratic arrogance. ?Pray, what is there excepting writing that I cannot do better than you?? John asked Byron while stopped at an inn overlooking the Rhine. ?There were three things, answered Byron, calmly. ?First,? he said, ?I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door ? Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point ? and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.??
These feelings of resentment only grew, as John felt increasingly overshadowed in the famous man?s company, with those they met instantly gravitating towards celebrity while he remained ?like a star in the halo of the moon, invisible.? At the same time, the doctor?s petulance provoked Byron, whose wit was often cruel and rarely let an opportunity pass to mock his employee or put him in his place. In time, John began to feel that his own sense of self was being drained by his proximity to the poet. Increasingly, he sought to distance himself and in mid-June, made a half-hearted attempt at suicide.
It was no great leap for Polidori to believe that Byron was sucking the life from him, just as others had accused Byron of possessing a charismatic power that eclipsed their own identities. Amelia Opie, one of the many women Byron had charmed, described him as having ?such a voice as the devil tempted Eve with; you feared its fascination the moment you heard it,? a mesmeric quality that critics also found in his verse, which had, according to the critic Thomas Jones de Powis, ?the facility of?bringing the minds of his readers into a state of vassalage or subjection.?
But the most overt example of Byron as the devourer of souls was a novel John read over the course of the summer ? Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron and Lamb had enjoyed a brief and transgressive affair until he, somewhat rattled by the vivid expanse of her erotic imagination, had called it off. The novel is a thinly veiled portrait of the relationship set in a lonely castle during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, that interweaves breathless Gothic fiction with the wayward love of Calantha for the Irish rebel Lord Glenarvon. Glenarvon is a brooding anti-hero who dresses as a monk, stalks ruined priories, and howls like a wolf at the moon. His face glowers ?as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature,? possessing the ability to enslave her. ?Weep,? he cries, binding her ever tighter to him, ?I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue. Henceforward you will shed no more.? Calantha is powerless. ?My love is death.?
Lady Caroline Lamb, painted by Eliza H. Trotter, ca. 1811 ? Source.
That Polidori took inspiration from Lamb is revealed in the name he gives his villain ? Lord Ruthven, one of Glenarvon?s various ancestral titles. Polidori?s Ruthven also inhabits Glenarvon?s aristocratic milieu as a member of the bon ton. He is a pale and fascinating nobleman who appears in London ?more remarkable for his singularities, than for his rank,? and who incites awe amongst the ranks of fashionable ladies by virtue of his melancholy air and ?reputation of a winning tongue.?
In ?The Vampyre,? Ruthven befriends a young gentleman named Aubrey, whom he invites to accompany him on a journey to Greece. Once there, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful peasant girl who recounts the legend of the vampire but is brutally murdered soon after. Aubrey comes to suspect Ruthven, but the mysterious aristocrat is shot by bandits before the truth can be revealed. As Ruthven lays dying, he manages to extract a promise from the young man, asking him not to announce his death in England for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and Ruthven literally dies laughing.
After a long and meandering journey home, the sad and raddled Aubrey is finally able to return to society, where he is horrified to discover Ruthven alive and well. ?Remember your oath,? whispers the man who has died in his arms, thus driving Aubrey so far from his wits that he succumbs to a protracted illness. In the meantime, Aubrey?s sister is engaged to be married, and though he has yet to meet the groom, it slowly dawns on him that it must be Ruthven. Impatient for his oath to expire and growing weaker by the day, he finally sends his assistants to her rescue only to discover they are too late: ?Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey?s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!?
Knowing the context of Polidori?s story, it is hard not to read ?The Vampyre? as an allegory of the doctor?s relationship with Byron, a text that is seamed with the mocking laughter of a man possessed of the power to debilitate through the force of personality alone. Furthermore, it rewrites the well-known story of Byron?s success since the publication of Childe Harold, wherein a young nobleman goes abroad and returns filled with capacious understanding of himself and the world, by showing that his melancholy air is a deceit, a mendacious con perpetuated on a gullible claque of fools for the purpose of their exploitation. As a meditation on the degeneracy of a society that has encouraged the excesses of celebrity to such an extent that it has been allowed to dwarf the higher values and enable the abuse of the virtuous and the innocent, it damns absolutely the superficial lure of fame.
Rather than providing a creative outlet for Polidori, the publication of ?The Vampyre? only served to compound his humiliation. Although the text was similarly prompted by the ghost story competition that inspired Mary Shelley so ably, John only completed his story for the pleasure of a friend outside of the Byron-Shelley circle. The manuscript lay forgotten for three years until finally coming into the hands of the disreputable journalist Henry Colburn, who published it in his New Monthly Magazine under the title ?The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron.?
Title-page from the fourth state of the first edition published by Sherwood, Neeley and Jones in 1819. Although this version of the title-page was reset to remove Lord Byron?s name as author, someone has re-written it in by hand ? Source.
The response was predictably lively. Goethe proclaimed it Byron?s greatest ever work, and popular hardback editions went through numerous reprintings, leaving Polidori scrambling to assert his rights as its author in the face of accusations that he was either a plagiarist or misusing Byron?s name to further his own reputation. John tried to take control by preparing his own edition, but the public was not interested, and disgusted with the literary life, he attempted to rejoin Ampleforth and train as a monk. Still ?The Vampyre? plagued him as his application was denied because of ?certain publications which I have seen,? wrote the Prior, ?and of which I must tell [you] as a friend, I wish you had not been the author.? Polidori enrolled to study law using his mother?s maiden name, but, finding no appetite for it, fell into gambling. With the shadow of Byron making everything he did seem paltry and derivative, and the weight of rejection impressing itself on him like a judgment on his being, John Polidori took his own life at the age of twenty five by drinking a beaker of cyanide.
?Poor Polidori,? wrote Byron when he heard the news, ?it seems that disappointment was the cause of this rash act. He had entertained too sanguine hopes of literary fame.?
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45.The London Rocket Conspiracy.
The London Rocket Conspiracy.
Seventy years ago, on 8 September 1944, a gas main exploded in London. Well, that?s what the newspapers said the next day, but can you believe everything you read in the press? Not many Londoners did. For one thing, it wasn?t an isolated incident. The papers went on to report a whole series of ?gas main explosions? ? dozens of them ? over the course of the next two months.
What was causing the sudden spate of explosions? Britain had been at war for five years, but there were no longer any German bombers in the skies over London ? the Royal Air Force had total air supremacy. A few months earlier the city had suffered a flurry of ?flying-bomb? attacks ? essentially small unmanned kamikaze aircraft ? but these had stopped when the French coast was controlled by the advancing Allies.
The war was coming to an end, and the British government wanted to get that message across to the public. Newspapers only printed good news. London life was returning to normal; blackout restrictions had been lifted and evacuees were being told to return to the city. Two or three ?gas main explosions? per day was no cause for alarm.
Few people believed the ?exploding gas main? stories. The British often boast about their wartime spirit ? whereby everyone feels they are on the same side against a common enemy ? but for Londoners in September 1944 the wartime spirit became distinctly frayed. It was replaced by something far more cynical and familiar ? a conspiracy theory. The government knew perfectly well what was causing all these explosions, and so did anyone who had seen the aftermath of one.
In the bottom of each smoking crater was the tangled wreckage of a rocket.
The first V-2 rocket landed in London on 8 September 1944, a few hours after a similar weapon had been fired at Paris. In the course of the next six months, some 3,170 V-2s were launched from sites in German-held territory. Almost half of them were targeted at London, with the remainder aimed at allied targets on the continent. The V-2 caused far more fatalities than a similar tonnage of conventional bombs, partly because of its enormous kinetic energy and partly because it struck without any warning. Falling from the edge of space at several times the speed of sound, the first thing anyone on the ground heard was the warhead exploding. This was followed by the long drawn-out rumble of the rocket falling through the air, long after it had already hit the ground.
Londoners knew they were being attacked by long-range rockets, and they resented the way the government persistently denied the truth. The ridiculous notion that the city was suffering from a sudden epidemic of spontaneously exploding gas mains was an insult to the public?s intelligence.
As is so often the case with ?disinformation?, the government?s excuse ? when it finally came out ? was that the deception was aimed not at the general public but at the enemy. As Prime Minister Winston Churchill said on 10 November 1944, in the government?s first public acknowledgement of the rocket attacks:
No official statement about the attack has hitherto been issued because it might have given information useful to the enemy, who may well have been uncertain as to whether any of these missiles had actually struck this island. No doubt by now he has acquired some information, and in any case the Government do not feel they should any longer withhold all information from the public.
There?s an obvious analogy here with the official attitude toward UFOs ? with the difference that everyone today knows that the V-2 rockets were real. They weren?t exploding gas mains. As far as the authorities are concerned, though, UFOs are still weather balloons, swamp gas, the planet Venus, etc.
There?s another parallel between the V-2s and ufology. One of the commonest reasons scientists give for refusing to believe in UFOs is that they are ?a physical impossibility.? In exactly the same way, British scientists maintained that long-range liquid-fuelled rockets were ?a physical impossibility?? right up until the moment they started to rain down on London.
To British scientists, the idea of a powerful liquid-fuelled rocket was the stuff of science fiction and nothing more. To produce the required thrust from the available volume of fuel, enormous pressures would be needed ? far more than could be contained by any conceivable fuel tank. If the Germans claimed they were developing liquid-fuelled rockets, then it must be a bluff that could safely be ignored. If intelligence operatives claimed to have seen rocket production facilities, they must have been mistaken. You can?t argue with the laws of physics.
The scientists were right to some extent. It?s true that you can?t break the laws of physics, and that a rocket exhaust requires an enormous pressure. But who said the fuel had to be stored at that pressure? The Germans used a turbopump, similar to a car?s turbocharger, to vastly increase the pressure at the nozzle of the rocket. The laws of physics were right ? it was just the British scientists, who couldn?t think ?out of the box?, who were wrong.
The German V-2 campaign saw long-range rockets used as weapons of war for the first time in history, and it all started seventy years ago.
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