Newsletter #112
You may have noticed…an absence around these parts last week. Without being entirely too detailed, I spent 90% of last week in bed with a virus that made that one scene in The Exorcist - you know the scene - look like a mellow day at the water park. In a word, the whole experience was gnarly. Ultimately, though, I think that the illness itself was valuable because it forced me to slow down and take some time for myself; ultimately, it felt like a lesson in how bad burnout can get. I’m just glad it wasn’t any worse.
That all being said, I’ve missed you all and I certainly missed sharing my writing with you. All I managed for most of the week was watching a lot of Seinfeld and reading a lot of Moorcock, with the Corum stories at the forefront of those selections. Despite his most well-known and oft-imitated character being Elric of Melniboné, I prefer other incarnations of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. There’s the aforementioned Prince in the Scarlet Robe, Corum, but then there’s also Duke Dorian Hawkmoon, the von Beks, Michael Kane of Old Mars, and literally dozens others. Much of the writer’s oeuvre fits into his larger cosmology which itself is the greater sum that emerges from some of its lesser parts. This isn’t an insult to Moorcock, but instead an acknowledgement of his literary proliferation, an extensive bibliography that includes everything from historical fiction to high fantasy to thinly-veiled pulp homage.
For me, I think Moorcock’s appeal lies in a few facets of his work. Foremost, he’s writing fantasy much closer to the work of Cabell or even Peake than Tolkien or Lewis; no slight to that dynamic duo, but it’s imperative and fruitful to explore fantasy intentionally written afield of their influence. Much has been made of Moorcock’s poor (and maybe even poorly-informed) opinion of Tolkien, so I won’t cover that here, but Moorcock counts amongst his influences many of my own, both in genre writing and in literary writing at large, writers like Fritz Lieber, Edith Nesbit, William S. Burroughs, Robert Howard, Anton Chekhov, and more, all craftspeople of the highest order in their chosen genre.
Another reason I enjoy Moorcock so much is that he’s just so damn weird, and the further you wander from Elric, the stranger characters you seem to find. I suppose these stories may seem to lack novelty to the modern reader; so much of what Moorcock did first has since been done a million times, and so few people know that much of the lineage of current fantasy traces back to an entirely different Englishman than the professor from Merton College. Moorcock isn’t always the most hopeful read, and his heroes rarely have a victory that isn’t pyrrhic, but - I’m going to be honest - that sort of matched the mood around the plague quarter that was our house last week. The whole week was certainly as graphic and disturbingly Cronenbergian as some of Moorcock’s more horrifying descriptions of the courts of the Lords of Chaos.
Take care of yourselves this week; don’t be afraid to rest or the universe will make you rest in the most dramatic fashion possible, then you’ll have to ramble about it at length in a newsletter. Don’t be like me. Definitely be you. Definitely come back Wednesday for some poetry and Friday as we return to MetroMem for more Neon Tempest! Have a good week!
Wado!