...for leaving this blog so long between updates at the moment. Life has been getting overly manic, what with two short fiction projects (which I'll tell you about once they're announced) due in at the end of next month. I'm quite pleased with what's come out of my head so far, but I'm not progressing as fast as I'd wish, and the two-week Easter break was altogether a bit of a panic.
I'm not going to get any more chatty in the short term, I'm afraid, but once those stories (and, with luck, the various other things that are busying me so incessantly at present) are out of the way, I should be able to waste your bandwidth with drivelly musings and book reviews once more. I have, at the very least, another good idea for an Invisible City to regale you with.
Sadly, real life (or, more accurately, fiction) will also be getting in the way of updating last year's Doctor Who viewing blog, Parrinium Mines, with my opinions on this year's series... at least for the moment. I'm still hoping I can come back to them later in the year, reviewing The Christmas Invasion through to Doomsday in time for this year's Christmas special. (I'm afraid my thoughts on The Christmas Invasion and New Earth are not entirely complimentary, but with any luck that will change as the season progresses and, erm, K-9 returns. Yes, that's probably likely.) I've also been watching, for research purposes, more episodes of very early Doctor Who than the human brain was designed to withstand, so hopefully I can also update those of you who choose to read Parrinium Mines on those at some stage.
Meanwhile I'm not getting a lot of time to read, but About Time 1 and The Dream Archipelago are keeping me entertained between them. And Season 5 of Buffy, while messy and overplotted, still makes me cry at the end, even though I've seen it four or five times already.
More anon. But, you know, possibly not very anon.
Showing posts with label invisible cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label invisible cities. Show all posts
19 April 2006
05 April 2006
Scribonia
Scribonia, known to poets as the Tattooed City, is indistinguishable in most respects from any other provincial city. It has its business and its retail districts, its blocks of flats and townhouses, churches and mosques, its libraries and City Hall, in which its citizens talk and shop and sleep and go about their business. Examining the city from the air, or from a satellite, one would perceive little of note.
Close up, however, is a different story. For every building of Scribonia – each wall and windowsill, each slate and steeple – is covered with writing. Loops and curlicues and upstrokes smother every shopfront, every station and tenement. Fountains and statuary, pavements and rooftops: each surface, from the bridges’ lowest foundations to the steeple of the tallest church, is etched with curled, reticulated characters – the arcane alphabet used only by Scribonia’s Guild of Graffitists.
Scribonia’s public services department tries its best, but even with some thousands of the population in its direct employ, scrubbing and cleaning at the bricks and flagstones every day, they cannot keep pace with the assiduous encroachments of the Guild.
Nobody knows who runs the Guild, or if it even exists. Everyone assumes that the artful vandalism must be co-ordinated: the only sane alternative is that every citizen, municipal cleaners included, secretly carries around a can of paint or marker pen to fill in any gaps they find in the all-pervading script. It may be that – as one dissident politician has concluded – the city itself is generating the inscriptions, dreaming the writing into existence every night through the subconscious workings of its fevered citizens.
Nonetheless, many Scribonians yearn to join the hypothetical Guild, and aspiring graffitists often overlay the dense designs with their own crude scrawlings.
Others – the majority – have become obsessed with understanding what the graffiti says. Its alphabet bears no resemblance to any others known: and yet its students have detected patterns, repetition, dialogue – even the work of individual hands. Many have tried to learn the language: if any have succeeded, they do not acknowledge the fact. It may be that success confers de facto membership of the Guild, with all the burden of secrecy that implies.
One school of interpretation, known as the Esotericists, believes that the graffiti is a blueprint: a detailed description, complete with architectural measurements and outlines, of another city. This city coexists with Scribonia, pervading it in this encoded form. Parts of the written city are demolished daily by the tireless sponges of the scrubbers, yet they can be rebuilt, or new structures created to take their place, with a few flicks of a Guildmember’s pen.
What is this city like? The Esotericists agree that it must be a far more elevated, purer place than grimy, dull Scribonia: a city of pure thought, of inspiration, where style is given life, unhampered by the demands of substance.
One day, they say, this city will not merely deface the present Scribonia: one day, its sheer weight of information will come to overwrite the mundane city, and Scribonia’s dull matter will give way to the immaterial design. A new age of enlightenment will follow, and the citizens will exist in an eternal harmony of intellect.
There will be no place for graffiti then, of course.
--
Visit the Gazetteer of Invisible Cities at Blind Atlas
Close up, however, is a different story. For every building of Scribonia – each wall and windowsill, each slate and steeple – is covered with writing. Loops and curlicues and upstrokes smother every shopfront, every station and tenement. Fountains and statuary, pavements and rooftops: each surface, from the bridges’ lowest foundations to the steeple of the tallest church, is etched with curled, reticulated characters – the arcane alphabet used only by Scribonia’s Guild of Graffitists.
Scribonia’s public services department tries its best, but even with some thousands of the population in its direct employ, scrubbing and cleaning at the bricks and flagstones every day, they cannot keep pace with the assiduous encroachments of the Guild.
Nobody knows who runs the Guild, or if it even exists. Everyone assumes that the artful vandalism must be co-ordinated: the only sane alternative is that every citizen, municipal cleaners included, secretly carries around a can of paint or marker pen to fill in any gaps they find in the all-pervading script. It may be that – as one dissident politician has concluded – the city itself is generating the inscriptions, dreaming the writing into existence every night through the subconscious workings of its fevered citizens.
Nonetheless, many Scribonians yearn to join the hypothetical Guild, and aspiring graffitists often overlay the dense designs with their own crude scrawlings.
Others – the majority – have become obsessed with understanding what the graffiti says. Its alphabet bears no resemblance to any others known: and yet its students have detected patterns, repetition, dialogue – even the work of individual hands. Many have tried to learn the language: if any have succeeded, they do not acknowledge the fact. It may be that success confers de facto membership of the Guild, with all the burden of secrecy that implies.
One school of interpretation, known as the Esotericists, believes that the graffiti is a blueprint: a detailed description, complete with architectural measurements and outlines, of another city. This city coexists with Scribonia, pervading it in this encoded form. Parts of the written city are demolished daily by the tireless sponges of the scrubbers, yet they can be rebuilt, or new structures created to take their place, with a few flicks of a Guildmember’s pen.
What is this city like? The Esotericists agree that it must be a far more elevated, purer place than grimy, dull Scribonia: a city of pure thought, of inspiration, where style is given life, unhampered by the demands of substance.
One day, they say, this city will not merely deface the present Scribonia: one day, its sheer weight of information will come to overwrite the mundane city, and Scribonia’s dull matter will give way to the immaterial design. A new age of enlightenment will follow, and the citizens will exist in an eternal harmony of intellect.
There will be no place for graffiti then, of course.
--
Visit the Gazetteer of Invisible Cities at Blind Atlas
24 March 2006
Quickie
Just a brief post, to confirm that I haven't forgotten about this blog's existence. I've got an action-packed (well, pub-packed) weekend in the offing, so I probably won't get time to update it again until next week now.
In the meantime, and following on from the Invisible Cities meme, allow me somewhat belatedly to commend to you the blog of the incredibly gifted Simon Bucher-Jones, complete with songs, poetry and his own entry in that same pseudocartographic canon. Some good people -- nominally including myself -- are also attempting to collect, index and create material of this general ilk at Blind Atlas. There should be more exciting stuff arriving there at some point soon.
In the meantime, and following on from the Invisible Cities meme, allow me somewhat belatedly to commend to you the blog of the incredibly gifted Simon Bucher-Jones, complete with songs, poetry and his own entry in that same pseudocartographic canon. Some good people -- nominally including myself -- are also attempting to collect, index and create material of this general ilk at Blind Atlas. There should be more exciting stuff arriving there at some point soon.
11 March 2006
Neath
You get a better class of meme with Mr Chapman. I don't know where Neath is in relation to Polopolis, Spindlemarch or Velocester (and I can't remember whether Calvino already did this one). Nevertheless...
Neath is a mining town, a city build by those who toil in the ground. Beneath the surface of the plain where it lies, broad thoroughfares and narrow back-alleys warren the earth, thronged by people and vehicles. Manholes above them provide access to the upper world: during the last century, ventilation holes were also added, fitted with powerful fans, to draw away the fumes of cars and motorcycles.
Houses and shops are bricked-off caverns next to these thoroughfares, each with its windows to the surface letting in the sun: from the air, Neath is a variegated tabletop of earth and glass.
The grander, more imposing structures burrow further beneath the city. The cathedral is a vast, vaulted cellar, hundreds of metres deep, its steeple a spike thrust far down into the earth. Tenement slums and office blocks, artificially lit and ventilated, delve many stories downward, the grimiest apartments and most prestigious meeting-rooms down in the depths. The mining magnates lounge, bloated and pallid, deep down in their geothermal penthouse suites.
The city’s squares and plazas are roofed with earth and stone, held up with many pillars. Civic statuary in Neath tends to be modest in stature, and Atlas a common subject for sculptors. Along the boulevards and avenues flap stunted pigeons, flashing in and out of lightwells, avoiding obstacles.
The few significant regional roads which run through Neath plunge down ramps as they reach the city’s outlying suburbs, buses and lorries entering these subterranean streets to drop off or pick up their loads. Popular goods in Neath include televisions, fans and light, airy clothes: there is little market for heaters, scarves or rotary washing-lines. The city’s major exports are iron and root vegetables.
Neath is a city in reflection, a city flipped head-to-toe. Above the ground, electric cables, water-pipes and phone-lines mesh and interlink: broad channels carry sewage down to the lake. Municipal workers, dressed in waterproof coveralls, blink myopically as they wade the length of them. Here and there wine-racks and storage-cellars stand exposed to the air.
Overground stations, accessed by escalators from the streets below, send trains hurtling along specially-constructed superterranean rail-lines from city-block to city-block. Inside them, the passengers huddle, agoraphobic and exposed. Neath’s inhabitants are diminutive, timid and nervous with prominent ears. Their noses twitch compulsively, as they inhale the unfamiliar scents of the outside.
Neath is a mining town, a city build by those who toil in the ground. Beneath the surface of the plain where it lies, broad thoroughfares and narrow back-alleys warren the earth, thronged by people and vehicles. Manholes above them provide access to the upper world: during the last century, ventilation holes were also added, fitted with powerful fans, to draw away the fumes of cars and motorcycles.
Houses and shops are bricked-off caverns next to these thoroughfares, each with its windows to the surface letting in the sun: from the air, Neath is a variegated tabletop of earth and glass.
The grander, more imposing structures burrow further beneath the city. The cathedral is a vast, vaulted cellar, hundreds of metres deep, its steeple a spike thrust far down into the earth. Tenement slums and office blocks, artificially lit and ventilated, delve many stories downward, the grimiest apartments and most prestigious meeting-rooms down in the depths. The mining magnates lounge, bloated and pallid, deep down in their geothermal penthouse suites.
The city’s squares and plazas are roofed with earth and stone, held up with many pillars. Civic statuary in Neath tends to be modest in stature, and Atlas a common subject for sculptors. Along the boulevards and avenues flap stunted pigeons, flashing in and out of lightwells, avoiding obstacles.
The few significant regional roads which run through Neath plunge down ramps as they reach the city’s outlying suburbs, buses and lorries entering these subterranean streets to drop off or pick up their loads. Popular goods in Neath include televisions, fans and light, airy clothes: there is little market for heaters, scarves or rotary washing-lines. The city’s major exports are iron and root vegetables.
Neath is a city in reflection, a city flipped head-to-toe. Above the ground, electric cables, water-pipes and phone-lines mesh and interlink: broad channels carry sewage down to the lake. Municipal workers, dressed in waterproof coveralls, blink myopically as they wade the length of them. Here and there wine-racks and storage-cellars stand exposed to the air.
Overground stations, accessed by escalators from the streets below, send trains hurtling along specially-constructed superterranean rail-lines from city-block to city-block. Inside them, the passengers huddle, agoraphobic and exposed. Neath’s inhabitants are diminutive, timid and nervous with prominent ears. Their noses twitch compulsively, as they inhale the unfamiliar scents of the outside.
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