I said we'd talk about some of the pastiches. So, in the interest of having some sort of plan, let's follow the "Curiosity" path. The posts leading from this path split give us at least one allusion to Dante's Divine Comedy, though what significance there could possibly be to a title, I dunno.
The puzzle here is rather simple. I'll let you figure it out.
A Verdant Landscape Ravaged by Whar?
onthateggtenticalspot.tumblr.com
Welcome to the pastiches. There's lots of these. This one is a passing imitation of Hexillith's A Verdant Landscape Ravaged by War, though the "Whar?" in the title isn't just a play on words: Aside from the title and the fact that the blog's vignette is formatted in a creative manner, the resemblance is only slight. But we can find another acknowledgement, in fact an explanation, of this in the blog description:
Does the actual Tumblr theme for this blog even exist anymore? Not quite.
The theme for A Verdant Landscape is called "Not Quite."
As for the vignette-- that's another thing, the Graab is filled with vignettes among its pastiches-- "Feathered Captain" is a vague tale of how the eponymous captain met "Shem." I won't explain the meaning to anything, but I will gladly elucidate some allusions.
"sages of Ivory" refers to The Ivory Woman (appropriate, considering A Verdant Landscape dealt with that Fear), as does the general theme of accidents (which presents itself in many ways and will continue to throughout the maze, even in paths that do not cross with this blog).
"before the mountain of Angst" refers to my own short story "The Duel of Shaman Kullermes and Migrant O-Thorde," which related a piece of Fear Mythos history (the "rivalry" between my Rapture and Omega's Mephi) in grander faux-poetic terms. Elements of this story, too, will recur throughout the maze, implying a relation between the Graab and actual mythos history as one of its many faces.
The whole "kish of brogues" thing is Gaelic but in particular it's another reference to Finnegans Wake, in this case to a scene from chapter 1:
566 A.D. On Baalfire's night of this year after deluge a crone that hadde a wickered Kish for to hale dead turves from the bog lookit under the blay of her Kish as she ran for to sothisfeige her cowrieosity and be me sawl but she found hersell sackvulle of swart goody quickenshoon and small illigant brogues, so rich in sweat. Blurry works at Hurdlesford.There, that's all the allusions. Apparently, the feathered captain's accident was meeting Shem-- there's our first real look into the self-deprecation of this tomb. Shem, of course, is another Wake reference, as Shem the Penman was one of the many archetypal entities of that book, in particular a rather blatant source of self-deprecation and self-deconstruction on Joyce's part. And the name will be one of the more crucial parts of this thing too!
Plus the url, which for clarification is "on that eggtentical spot," is from the Mutt and Jute dialogue in chapter 1 of the Wake-- from a quote of Mutt pointing out where the mighty oppressor had died.
So what do we click on now? "Where the hell are you?" or "Where is there to go?" Both imply different things. How about we start with figuring out where we actually are?
Fear Night
parallelipedhomoplatts.blogspot
I'll be honest, I've got no clue what the url means. But Leherengin's Fear Night was a particularly obscure relic of mythos history-- it came out two and a half years before A Verdant Landscape (so timeline-wise, we're heading backwards) and stood as our very first blog of genuine pornography! So that's where we are. Whoa.
The Graab's rendition of Fear Night is a genuine pastiche, as the blog design is identical, even having the same gadgets in the same order. (Note the About Me box telling us about Butt and Taff, complete with extensive quote from the Mutt and Jute dialogue. Note also the Follower box, which if clicked on gives us some significantly-titled ambience to the maze.)
Content-wise, we're in a sex closet, one usually used for self-pleasuring rather than anything else. All those who used this closet prior are now dead, but their story-- one of obsession and betrayal-- is written all over the walls, probably in bodily fluids.
I'll let the writing speak for itself here.
This particular story of obsession and betrayal dates itself as about the fourth epoch under the Viceking's rule (or has the Viceking already died even then?): Orgies unheard of in the streets, public displays of affection, private affairs with feared eyes, driving the insane sane and then again insane, ripping rights from the wronged ones left and right, consensual and privately without consent, or was that one only fiction? Were they all fictional? Unreal? Unspoken? Obscene, or only unseen because undone? Untrue? Copulation in Copenhagen and the rest of them agrog with Gods and Magods, struck by the notion that the underlying ocean paradise existed in the word alone."The fourth epoch" gives us a frame of reference. It doesn't mean much to us now, but trust me, dates in the Graab have a weird sort of consistency to them.
Or could it be that the ravishing lady is another myth, sealed with a kiss, indulging no one but the wicked as they just defy all reason in the treason of others? She's a muse until you lose control. Then she's a burden and your mind wins the Olympic gymnastics event, furthering your pride, your prize all over the walls, splattering your coffin as you're buried alive in all you contrive.
You rend your end, the end.
"Copulation in Copenhagen and the rest of them agrog with Gods and Magods" has a sort of Revelation-y notion to it.
"the underlying ocean paradise existed in the word alone," or basically this controversial ideal spread that told us happiness wasn't real, at least not to this culture. All that was real was words. But if that's the case, what does that imply about sexual pleasure? Or even just the act of sex itself? There's much muddled thematics going on under the surface here, and I insist that they come together eventually (we're only on our second pastiche!), but already there's a lot of significant motifs being introduced.
"the ravishing lady" refers to the eponymous "Fear" from Fear Night.
"just defy" or justify?
This wordy passage concludes with an even wordier description of masturbation. Make of that, and the entire pastiche, what you will.
All in all, this blog is a sort of dead-end; it goes nowhere. That's where we are now. How about we look at where we will go?
11,320 minutes of absolute bullshit and bastardry
teateatoooo.blogspot
This one's a pastiche of Squeek's 525,600 minutes of absolute bullshit and bastardry, which was half a year after Fear Night (so we're still earlier than A Verdant Landscape but not as far back as Fear Night). The difference in the title can be chalked up to the importance of 1132 as an Arc Number in Finnegans Wake (and the url is from the beginning of chapter II.2, otherwise known as "the densest chapter in the densest book--" the url in particular comes from a declaration of utter confusion as to where the hell we are in the story, though it's likely also a reference to Squeek's Tea Time with the Traitor).
Let's take a close look at the About Me box.
Supposed to wander it on out here, aren't I?
James Norris/dmab/32/kinkier than a bunch of buddies in a field and they hate fields/Internetian/postpregrad in architecture
"wander it on out here" as opposed to the original's "hug it out here" gives us a slight difference in tone and important point of comparison.
"James Norris" is one of the more obscure inside jokes of Fear Mythos apocrypha. His full name, James Luis Norris, is a combination of three "father figures" for the mythos (James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Owen Norris), and he himself was created to stand in as the ultimate father of the mythos, an all-American dad who likes to sit on his porch drinking beer and looking out into the sunset.
He was, in fact, designated male at birth.
32 is as good a guess at his age as any (but is also an instance of 32 as an Arc Number, as Magreat spends much of the Graab focused on my role within the mythos).
"kinkier than a bunch of buddies in a field and they hate fields" is.. well, it's a reference to Edgar Wright's The World's End, of all things-- a film about mid-life crises, self-deconstruction, regret, and change.
"Internetian" is James Norris's nationality, and perhaps the nationality of every character we'll meet in this maze-- we're not dealing with physical-world things here but the land of words and images.
And then "postpregrad in architecture" gives us a demonstration of a "post-" motif and an architectural one.
All that being said, what about the content of the blog?
"To Ireland a disgrace" is a quote of (I believe) Shem's in chapter II.2, a description of his father HCE. And the post itself actually begins with the full context for the url, the complete opening paragraph to the chapter:
Are we there are where are we are we here haltagain. By recourse, of course, recoursing from Tomtittot to Teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo.
In particular, this is taken from the 2012 Revised Edition.
"We begin this fancy diatribe (again? really?)" gives us a solid indication that, to the writer of this blog, we're about to hear a story that has been told again and again. And, really, it's a story we've already heard, a story that we will continue to hear until probably the end of time.
"Mostart's fifth" = Mozart. Probably obvious. Or so the torches seem to suggest to us, can we read the writing on the walls? The torches are what, in the maze, allow us to read the text without having to highlight the text on the page. However, nothing new appears upon highlighting the post, so apparently the torches are still working. That was yet another example of the misdirection of this tomb-- for what labyrinthine tomb would be complete without traps and tricks?
We're told a story about "sickness and disease" because the original blog dealt with The Plague Doctor.
The tale in question (a limerick) introduces us to another recurring and significant name: Buckley. But it also combines the Wakean tale of Buckley with the tale of the cad in the park. ..here, let me just tell you what both of those tales were in the book.
HOW BUCKLEY SHOT THE RUSSIAN GENERAL
Buckley was a soldier in the Crimean War who happened upon an enemy general on the field. He had a perfect shot, but he held off because the general was taking a shit, and this universal act of humanity united the two in Buckley's heart. I mean, who the hell would kill another person when they're taking a shit? But then the general finished and, lacking toilet paper, wiped his ass with a patch of grass. This sheer disrespect for nature convinced Buckley to take his shot.
THE CAD IN THE PARK
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker was taking a walk in the park when he encountered a cad with a pipe who asked, in Gaelic, for the time. Not understanding his language, Humphrey mistook this as an accusation of.. sexual misconduct, and he fervently denied any claims upon his person before walking away. The cad went home and told this weird anecdote to his wife, who told it to her priest, who told it to a friend, and eventually everyone in town suspected Humphrey of the exact crimes he denied, resulting in one poverty-stricken bard to write a very insulting ballad about him and rise to fame.
Both stories, of course, are taken to extreme levels of symbolism and meaning in the Wake (they're also treated as fascinating parallels to each other, as well as both being points of convergence for practically all the vignettes in the book), but we won't get into that here.
We're then linked to "the Russian General incident." Let's see what the maze has to reveal about this.
OH GOD THE VICEKING IS GRAAB
cockroachfinnegan.tumblr
One of the rare instances of a non-Wake quote url (though it's still a reference to the book-- a combination of the Rapture logs' "Cockroach Person Of Mythical Importance" motif and of Finnegan himself). The blog itself is, of course, a pastiche of the Rapture Tumblr, which had its origins in May 2011 but will appear in many different forms in this maze-- let's assume, time-wise, we're somewhere between 525,600 and the next blog to be pastiched, High School Never Ends. (So we're heading forwards in time?)
"See the monster, hear the monster, speak the monster, do the monster." gives us our sexual motif again.
We're heading downward in the maze-- a direction stated at the beginning of the Curiosity path. This might be a clear indicator that we're heading towards the centre, where the Viceking's corpse will surely lie.
Here, the writing on the walls is attributed not just to the architect but to every person who stepped into this tomb. A group of people who left a written record of their descent into terror.
"mathematicians, carpenter’s wives," is a paraphrase of a line from Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," a fragmented story of love and separation.
"Further down you go. The quality suffers. The texture of the walls grow rough. Some of the earth juts out and harms you, should you come and touch it. It’s almost as if the architect didn’t care." The earlier in Rapture's history you go, the rougher the quality becomes. It certainly began as a shaky story.
"He lifted his lifewand and the dumb spoke. The Russian General was dead. Buckley was hailed a victor, at least until the cad with the pipe told all what he had heard. Then the truth was out. And so was Buckley." Continuing in the previous pastiche's line of combining Buckley with the story of the cad, though this time the cad is described as a different person.
"Down. Down."
Let's see what the other wanderers left on the walls.
High Canon Never Ends
coachwiththesixinsides.blogspot
Omega's High School Never Ends was an influential piece of Fear Mythos comedy from February 2013. (From this, some of you might be able to deduce exactly when the previous pastiche took place-- a significant date in mythos history whose presence in this maze implies many dark things.)
This blog's Follower gadget is "broken," instead linking us to the original blog. In place of an About Me box is Logic's portrait of James Joyce, a figure of much importance to this maze.
"Open Your Textblogs" relates blogs to textbooks. ...of course. We're shown a teacher teaching his students about the same narrative we're slowly piecing together. Apparently, Shem and ham murdered the canon. "Shem" may come from the Wake, but ultimately these two names are Biblical in origin-- they were two of Noah's sons, the firstborn and lastborn of almost polar fate.
"page 337" may not make sense here, but if we were to take a shot in the dark we can assume that opening Finnegans Wake to the same page will give us something noteworthy. (And it does. It's the page on which "How Buckley Shot the Russian General" begins.)
We're then given a long quote from Butt and Taff's dialogue in the aforementioned vignette. Butt is telling Taff about a dream he had where he saw the Russian General in a most terrifying, traumatic, and thunderous form. "But da. But dada" will be another recurring motif, just you wait and see.
"over and over and over and over / like a monkey with a miniature cymbal" is a lyric from Hot Chip's "Over and Over." We're hearing about cycles.
The other post, "Mirror," gives us more original content to work with. The teacher (Mister Proxiehunter, a character from Omega's comedy and reference to blog The Most Dangerous Game) discusses what we just read with his students.
"It seems very pretty, but it's rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas-- only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate--" is an exact quote, word-for-word, from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Specifically, it's Alice's reaction to reading "Jabberwocky." Since a looking-glass is an archaic term for a mirror, we have a definite motif here.
Mister Proxiehunter asks his students to name the first time that the mirror motif was used in the Fear Mythos. The discussion is worth quoting in full.
"Wasn't it The Shower Scene?"What can we take from this? Well, other than the fact that Christoph Magreat has an interesting way of approaching our mythos. We can figure out that post-structuralism is important in parsing the ambiguous passages of this maze, and that Barthes's essay might be relevant too. We can also figure out, though this one was already apparent from our taking note of blog dates, that chronology and origins in our specific blogosphere are being kept track of.
"Ah! Why do you say that, Snakes?"
"Well, 'cause Grey is a mirror twin of Owen."
"Very good, I'm proud of you for catching onto what I'm getting at. But no. The Shower Scene had that motif and handled it well. But the first blog, at least according to consensus at Oxford these days, was Eccentrically Bored. The principal antagonists, locked in eldritch war, were perfect foils of each other-- a glazen mirror in black and white."
"But did the author intend that, sir?"
"...who said that? Intrusion. See me after class. I will tell you all about deconstruction and differance until you properly understand what it means to experience Death Of The Author."
Now let's take a look at what the maze has to say about Death Of The Author.
B-Blog Monsters
poreolejoe.blogspot
We have gone back in time again, this time by half a year, to a pastiche of alliterator's B-Movie Monsters. Just as the previous pastiche discussed CuteWithoutThe's The Shower Scene, so the header image for this pastiche is an edit of a sketch of all his original Fears I made him for a birthday. Just as B-Movie Monsters discussed B-movies real and fictional, so this blog discusses blogs it considers to be lesser in quality than others. That is, it talks about my blogs. It summarizes Where My Eyes Remain, Moonlit Whispers, and Built For Two in frank terms, and then it talks about Viceking's Graab itself (using the second promotional poster). The Graab post is, naturally, the important one.
It begins with a reference to Pink Floyd's "In the Flesh," announcing its narrator as a surrogate reviewer.
I'll quote the bulk of the post and then start pointing out the references.
Don't let that poster fool you; this is actually a blog with no characters (or not immediately, anyway). I guess there's a "character" in the sense of audience surrogate, but they have no personality. You're basically a reader browsing a matrix of mini-blogs-- a body, you could say. These mini-blogs are presented as if you're wandering a pyramid, complete with Book Of The Dead-esque writing on the walls, except these myths aren't intended for any Pharaoh's soul on the way to the afterlife but are instead written for.. well, whoever finds their way into this cave. If anything, it seems the afterlife has already happened-- everyone in this big civilization has died, and you are the only one "after" their "lives." Your role in this decrepit crypt is almost that of a Charles Grant, spelunking the dormant remains of some ancient god, making your way through every nook and cranny and hiking bend until the river of lifeless life drops you somewhere that satisfies your desire for"Book Of The Dead" as in the hieroglyphs written on the walls of pyramids (a notable comparison to the Graab's own writing on the walls).
Never mind me. The point is this likely isn't the blog for you. It's filled with strange fruit hanging from ash trees. Your choice is whether to bite the apple or split the Adam metaphor and leave this disgusting reticule ridiculed in the waste land-- do you hear the thunder? Da, da, jo? Why start at the finish line when you can eliminate all races with the push of a button? Drone on, drone in. And breathe in, and breathe out. You are the oxygen in the body, I am the cancer that kills every miner. Cut it out, Shem. You're not the bald gnome Error, ultimate god of poetry. You are not Hermes, nor are you Hermaphroditus. The closest myth to your birth is Kullervo. Untamo gave you away, you failed Seppo Ilmarinen, you shot the Russian General-- did you even know him before you pointed that gun? Wait before you send them to the lighthouse-- wait before you search for lost time-- wait before you wake. That gun you pointed is turning on you. Da, dadarazzi (it's what the thunder said). Are you a postman or a penman?
"Your role in this decrepit crypt is almost that of a Charles Grant" refers to the protagonist from Fantastic Voyage, who had to enter someone else's body. This is an instance of a somewhat less-frequent motif, that of the Graab as an anatomical body.
"until the river of lifeless life drops you somewhere that satisfies your desire for" cuts off, essentially, before giving us a definite answer as to what our actual goal is in this maze.
"It's filled with strange fruit hanging from ash trees" takes the famous "Strange Fruit" poem and combines it with Yggdrasil-- implying the strange fruit, then, to be Odin himself.
"bite the apple or split the Adam metaphor" From Genesis to the atomic bomb, framed in a self-awareness of wordplay. Arguably an apt summary of Finnegans Wake.
"reticule ridiculed in the waste land-- do you hear the thunder? Da, da, jo?" From T. S. Eliot back to the Wake (recall "But da. But dada."). "Jo" is the Finnish for "yeah," which leads into the next line.
"Why start at the finish line when you can eliminate all races with the push of a button?" Finnish to finish, finish line to race, race to races ("Strange Fruit"), races to genocide and mass destruction (the atomic bomb?).
"Drone on, drone in. And breathe in, and breathe out. You are the oxygen in the body, I am the cancer that kills every miner." Mass destruction to anatomy (Charles Grant), to something about mining? Interestingly, my grandfather was a miner, and he died of lung cancer as a result. Not sure if that's what Magreat meant.
"Cut it out, Shem." Cut out the wordplay, or cut out the cancer?
"You're not the bald gnome Error, ultimate god of poetry. You are not Hermes" brings us to a passage from Danielewski's House of Leaves that stumps many but is likely a reference to a very obscure myth where Hermes becomes Error, a sort of god of death.
"The closest myth to your birth is Kullervo." This bit feels very much like a message to me, since Hermes and Hermaphroditus parallels are very much stuff I wrote in Rapture, as well as the final declaration that the true parallel is Kullervo, Finnish myth figure whose life was a terrible cycle of abuse, incest, and murder. Did I know the Russian General before I pointed the gun? Who knows.
"Wait before you send them to the lighthouse/search for lost time/wake." Three modernist classics here, references thrown around like child's play.
"Da, dadarazzi (it's what the thunder said)." But da. But dada. Paparazzi too. The Waste Land, and even a deeper allusion to Vico's New Science (the thunder said "PA," the early humans repeated "PAPA" in fear-- the name of their God).
"Are you a postman or a penman?" Shaun the Post, or Shem the penman? Two characters of unfathomable complexity and significance. Again and again, we are asked where we fit into this recurring story, but we still don't have enough context to understand the question.
This entire post is a particularly angry one, perhaps angry at me for the role I've played in shaping our mythos's history, a post that one-ups any attempt I've made at writing by giving something truly complex and permeable, something weighted in much context yet striking through it all as if to say that even this method isn't the way the architect wants to pose its question to us.
We are given two more links here, but I'm going to end this post. I've given you a pretty in-depth demonstration of how you can approach Viceking's Graab, and I don't want to spoil any of the bigger surprises of the maze.
Next time, we might look into the blogs of another path. Or we might look at something else altogether.
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