welcome to the velvet
3/14/2005 @ 12:00 am Comments (9)scrawled on the mirror above the sink, in brown lipstick, are five words. The velvet warms and binds.
velvet.
the trouble is I don’t know the frame of reference, the context.
velvet.
Jude always loved the word. she tossed it around like spare change and for her the word had more than one meaning. in friendly conversation, the velvet may be simply defined as twilight. the gloaming. the velvet was telephone code for heroin, and I had more than once heard Jude refer to her pussy as the velvet. And the velvet was used metaphysically in reference to the subconscious, to childhood memories. for Jude, the velvet was the lost time of alien abductions. velvet was euphoria and dread. velvet was a perfectly good word, but one that always troubled me. because to my mind, the velvet was best translated as the sleep that resembles death.
the velvet is the sleep that becomes death.
-from Hell’s Half Acre
This site came to life fewer than nine months ago, screaming and bloody, the result of countless days and nights of intense work and lost sleep, and no doubt a goodly helping of euphoria and dread on the part of those who did all the real and blinding work, the fearless codemonkeys and bladerunners taking a sabbatical from the cult. by now you know who they are, and it’s not my purpose to name names just yet.
within a few weeks of going live, there seemed sufficient interest to warrant a discussion forum, which we set up first as phineaspoe.com, and pretty soon the scattered Poe faithful and tormented daysleepers and other likeminded travelers had set up camp and christened the place “the Velvet.” twenty members blossomed to fifty, and the threads began to spin in all directions. soon there were a hundred souls lost and found calling the Velvet a home away. some of them seemed literally to be living in the dark soft pockets of the place, or at least ghosting the blood red boards when they were no doubt supposed to be working on their t.p.s. reports. and the velvet travelers got extra busy in those cold dark hours when their less obsessive compulsive neighbors were chasing the good sleep. and while it may have been Phineas, or more likely Jude, that drew them here, it was the place itself that kept them. the velvet warms and binds, after all. the hundred swelled to two and three and turned the corner toward four and by then the Velvet was hub and headquarters for all manner of discussion, from horror movies to the bill of rights, but mainly it was a place for writers and story junkies to not just talk about books but take them apart slowly and carefully as they would corpses on the slab, to weigh and ponder their vital parts and taste and sniff their fluids, and when appropriate, to rip into them teeth first.
along about christmas of last year, I came to the conclusion that the Velvet needed more raw flesh to sustain it than the Phineas books and the scattered river’s edge stories could provide alone, that the daysleepers and hunger artists living and sleeping here would be best served if the Velvet were the official discussion site of not one but three writers. partly because good things roll in threes as often as bad, and partly because even numbers are unlucky.
Craig Clevenger , author of The Contortionist’s Handbook, was an easy and obvious choice, as he’s been my shadow brother in the velvet since the beginning, and because we have been linked for good or ill since stumbling into each other two years ago. and since that meeting we have been like two drunks searching for the the same nonexistent streetcorner in a city laced with terrible fog, kicking and dragging each other along whenever the other faltered. It doesn’t hurt that we tend to appeal to the same disturbed demographic, but more to the point, Craig is a sickeningly good writer with all the necessarry voodoo to skate that razorwire blend of the visceral and the pretty that Nabokov was fond of talking about, the bend sinister. Clevenger can make phantom bugs race beneath your skin as easily as he fills your head with heartbreaking memories of lost love and damaged childhood so real they might be your own.. his stories push you out onto the ledge and blow your hair back, you hear the pigeons screeching and in no time you are contemplating the silence of freefall .. The Contortionist faithful are flung far and wide already, and when his second book, Dermaphoria, is released next fall, the church of Clevenger will be like the methadone clinic on Monday morning in a small town.
Stephen Graham Jones, author of Fast Red Road- A Plainsong and All the Beautiful Sinners, among others, was until recently unknown to me, and I am convinced this is only true because the gods, for reasons of their own, had been waiting for the right and proper time to reveal him to me. put simply, Beautiful Sinners is unlike any thriller I’ve ever come across, the kind of book I’ve been looking for forever. reading it, you feel like you’re standing in a pool of your own blood with a mouthful of locusts, and I mean that in the best possible way. Stephen zeroes in on details so raw they feel violent.. he spins hallucinations so intense they linger like the smell of rotten fruit and cross over into your dreams, where you don’t want them. Stephen doesn’t just write himself into corners, he writes himself into labyrinths and drags your unsuspecting ass in there with him. and rumor is I have yet to lay my eyes on his best work. Due out in july of this year is Bleed into Me, a collection of shorts that will alternately soothe and terrify you, and his recently wrapped novel Demon Theory, slated for publication spring ‘06, is said to be a masterwork horror story that doesn’t just blow the doors off the genre, it burns the house down.
let it be known that without the help of Dennis, mirka, Kareem, sparq and Roland, ‘noose, logan frost, writerswrite and naked Dan, none of this would be possible… the Velvet would not thrive. without them, and without the sprawling Velvet family, stephen and craig and I would be as near and removed from you as three apocalypse junkies camped on a freeway exit ramp with ghost eyes and pockets full of dust, screaming at traffic outside your passenger window as birds ripped at our hair. so pray the gods their souls to keep.
welcome back to the new Velvet. come inside and have a nice long explore, and fight off the sleep that becomes death for one more night.
as ever, to the good.
-wcb
Bestiary
3/6/2005 @ 9:30 pm Comments (10)the following was borrowed from the desk of stephen graham jones, for your pleasure and mine.
to the good,
I grew up in a land shaped by animals. The first bird I shot, I shot in a buffalo wallow. There would be countless more- owls and ducks, flying away with my pellet gun pellets lodged in them, doves I wouldn’t learn to clean and eat for years, the blood on their yellow breasts like a dab of jelly on butter toast. Quail that were beautiful and pliant in my hand, scissortails that fell in looping arcs, their tails disappointing up close. Mounds of red and white and black woodpeckers my grandmother would point out for me, that, even with their bodies full of birdshot, still needed to be chased down in the tall grass. Once, on accident, a mockingbird that wanted to put me in jail, take away my gun. The hole I dug to hide it in was deep. There would be more. A bullbat, just to see if I could. A compact little hawk of a kind I’ve never seen again. I buried it too, then took three steps away, found a pair of rattlesnakes mating, and watched them until they saw me and tried to break apart, couldn’t. Hours later, skinless, headless, no guts, they still rose from the pan of grease I was cooking them in, struck at me with their blunt necks. Another time I walked onto a pair of sand rattlers, never knew how purple and pink their belly skin was until they were dead. That same year a normal rattler pulled at my pantsleg but couldn’t get through. I killed it for so long that the venom got in my arm, swelled it from wrist to elbow. Days after that, just to see if it was a thing I could do, or to see if it was something I shouldn’t do, maybe, I got down on my knees before a rattler and we stared at each other for half an hour, until it started striking, and I started trying to tap it on the head with my ballpeen hammer. I buried it in a deep, deep hole with an owl I’d killed that same day, then, to keep them there, upended a fifty-five barrel drum, drove it down around the owl and the snake until it was level with the ground, told myself it was over, now- me, them. That I was sorry and it was over. I was wrong. Later that year I would stand in the brakelights of a pickup truck and help beat rabbits’ heads against the bumper, because they weren’t dead enough yet, then throw them into the pile already spilling over the bed rails. Because it was summer, we couldn’t eat the rabbits, had to throw them into a pit for the coyotes. Later, in the snow, with slide action rifles that felt so much like the air-pumps on my pellet guns, I would run down elk and mule deer and whitetail from the dancing beds of trucks, shoot prairie dogs to sight my gun in. Look through my scope one afternoon at what should have been a cow moose thirty yards out, broadside, but instead stood into a cinnamon grizzly, her two cubs tumbling into view. That time, my uncle guided the barrel of my gun down for me, and kept it there, and I looked over the top of my scope at the mother bear and wondered where my uncle had been three years ago in my buffalo wallow, when, out of birds but not daylight, I’d aimed for too long straight up, into a power line, and hit it, then felt the small slug immediately in the ground by my left foot, instead of the bones of my face. I dug the slug out. It was shaped like a mushroom, still hugging the power line, and I did any of a thousand things with it then, I suppose. None of them right.
-sgj