driftwood

anthony. he/him. born 1995

[anthonymire]

My name is Anthony. My pronouns are he/him. This is my writing blog where I post about my original fiction. I write queer scifi and fantasy. I also post book reviews occasionally.

If you would like to read my short stories, you can subscribe to my patreon for free here. Paid subscribers also get a newsletter where I talk about my inspirations and writing process, although when I am not doing much writing there is accordingly no newsletter.

If you are looking for an editor for your own writing, I have a rebloggable flyer here.

I also have a bluesky here but I don't really use it and am more holding the handle in case I ever need it.

[hetchdrive]

"Written in a fever-dream by Joachim, a disciple hiding on the Greek island of Patmos, the Book of Revelation focuses in on binary cities of good and evil. One city named Babylon, but suspiciously like the superpower Rome of the day, would try to dominant mankind through an urbane Antichrist and would, after a period of ascendancy, be punished by cataclysms culminating in a visitation by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It would eventually fall in a battle at Armageddon, vanquished by the jewelled City of the Just. It was a revenge tale written by a runaway in an obscure outpost and it was vague, destructive and malleable enough for every generation since to find relevance in it. They've been creating Antichrists ever since.

The reassuring dichotomy of the tale gained particular currency during the Cold War with the American Christian Right and its supposed antithesis the godless Evil Empire of the Soviets. In dozens of posters, publications and sermons, it was asserted again and again that the Atomic bomb was not just God's gift to America, it was 'the spirit of God'. Few but the incurably credulous actually believed this but it proved valuable to televisual preachers up to and including President Reagan, who restored America's faith in itself, having been shaken by the hard cold realities of Viet Nam, JFK and Watergate, by telling the nation pleasant Manichean bedtime stories. They are Babylon so we are the just City. They are the damned, we are the chosen. For the first time it was conceivable for humanity to bring about the apocalypse through technology. Despite not a single mention of an atom in Revelation, it seemed certain the Rapture predicted there was coming.

Embarrassingly, it failed, as it has done for each generation, to arrive but it will not be long before the Just and Damned Cities require rebuilding again. The end of the world will come eventually, and until then the end of the world prophecy industry will remain a busy one. Every generation, once safely out of its youth, sees the end of days beginning in younger generations: "Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges! It is startling to think how slight the traces that would be left of our civilisation did it pass through the throes that have accompanied the decline of every previous civilisation. Paper Will not last like parchment, nor are our most massive buildings and monuments to be compared in solidity with the rock-hewn temples and titanic edifices of old civilisations.” (Henry George, 1897)

…The reassuring thing is the barbarians are always here for we are they, endlessly rehearsing the end of the world, just as we have always done.” --Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

"The incinerated occupants of Sodom are so damned that even sympathising with them is to be punished; the Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel depicts Lot's wife being transformed into a pillar of salt for looking back at the massacre. As Sodom is destroyed completely, she is turned into architecture and left there as a reminder, punished for the inquisitiveness and empathy that has taken us from the caves to the cities.

In real life, Rome's arch-rival Carthage was destroyed and the very land sown with salt. It was to be damned from memory (Damnatio memoriae), except that it survived through literature; in a twist on Victor Hugo's assertion that the printing press would usurp architecture, the book saves the memory of what was once built. The problem with censorship, for the censors, is that it inadvertently points out where our attentions should go; the banned book is the one we wish to read most, the veiled Black Doge Marin Faliero in the Venetian Palace is the one, above all others, to which we are drawn. There is much to learn from following the heroics of Lot's wife." --Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“Inferno is of course, as all hells are, man-made. It was a poet's creation, a shadow city to the Florence he was exiled from, populated by those who had crossed him (to the extent his enemies were to be found there even before they'd died). It spoke of Dante's heartbreak, vengeance and impotence. Denied the possibility of home, he designed the worst of all possible homes for his enemies.” --Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

"Binaries are dangerous not just because they are reductive deceptions or destructive by nature, but because they are useful. They alienate you not only from 'the Other' but, in the process, from yourself, leaving those who wholeheartedly believe in them vulnerable to cynics in power." --Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“We must factor into every paradise the desire to be left alone and to opt out. The lack of space to do so is, in itself, a nightmare. Escape from the visions of others and even ourselves must be possible or it is no paradise.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“Buildings that outlast their designer and original purpose could become a husk, a mausoleum or a tyranny of space. The Futurists, for all their kamikaze bravado and assertions to the contrary, only feigned to accept their own obliteration when time deemed them redundant; Price encouraged the eventual destruction and reconstruction of his own buildings by others, even heroically joining the National Institute of Demolition Contractors.

'Why should cities and buildings stay the same? seems a reasonable questionable. A more apt question, 'What hubris makes us believe that they would?' Or rather, on what scale of time and influence are we thinking? Everything changes eventually. In the film Dark City, buildings grow and contract like living organisms, an idea the director Alex Proyas had from watching sets of scale model cities be moved around on earlier films. The architectural genre of Blobism often looks as if paused mid-metamorphosis; chrysalis buildings frozen in a state of becoming.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“More interesting is the view of architecture that exists for a period of time, an architectural happening that then disappears physically but is retained perfect and vast in myth and memory. This explains the lingering appeal of the World's Fairs and indeed all unbuilt or once-built buildings; they become canvases onto which we project limitless aspirations, which in all but exceptional cases would diminish with their building.

The ephemeral somehow weighs more than the permanent.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“The genius of Star Wars is that it seems futuristic but it is set long long ago with tales from long long ago; the pauper who becomes prince, the fallen knight, the antihero made good. It's easy to be cynical but the collage approach works and such archetypes find their way into unlikely places; Travis Bickle in Scorcese's Taxi Driver is the hick naif struggling in the big smoke, Virgil in The Inferno, the cowboy Shane and Dostoevsky's Underground Man, driving through a city that would for several generations form the backdrops of side-strolling video game beat-em-ups and justify the biblical purging that is Zero Tolerance.

All stories, however contemporary, have already been told long ago and far away. We transpose our own experiences onto other planets as we did islands and exotic capitals before them.

The problems are the problems we’ve faced on terra-firma; hard-working proletarians or maverick individuals versus aloof oligarchs and out of control Machiavellian technocrats for example (from the novels of Ursula Le Guin to Red Faction to Dark Star). There's always the temptation to categorise, invent tourist planets, mining planets, prison planets, plutocrat planets, slave planets when most likely new worlds, like the old one, will be an ever-changing mix of them all. One of the few certainties we have is that such certainties do not last.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“The future nevertheless will be built from fragments of the present rearranged, reconditioned, reimagined. The success of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is significantly down to this; i's a future that looks ancient, a reminder that all cities are built from earlier cities….

Utopia here is to be healthy, lucky and rich, and to escape off-world, as much an incentivised trap as the gold-seeking conquistadors faced: 'A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!

The old new world had failed to escape the weight of history, greed and waste, and now it too had to be fled. William Blake saw in America: A Prophecy the return of the terrible angels, with the prodigal replicant Roy Batty recounting, 'Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shoulders... burning with the fires of Orc! Through the chaos that remains on earth, there are fragments of the past, not held as cultural or historical treasures but mouldering as flotsam in an earth abandoned.

This is the end of days, as the line from the Noh play booming from the advert says, 'The setting sun sinks down' and yet life does not know when to cease.

Ridley Scott built up a world of layers, an approach that many futurists forget. The future will be not only three but four dimensional, and a composite of junk.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“The problem with building the mythic city of health was that it encouraged a temptation to conceal or purge the very people afflicted most by the cities of plague. Malthusian horror comes hand-in-hand with a puritanical repulsion towards the wrong kinds of people breeding (namely not' me and my kind'), from slums to housing estates. This occurs partly because of neurosis and partly because assuming the role of moral arbiter is a power play.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“The links between architecture and who we are goes beyond childhood scrawls and melodrama. You cannot divorce man and space, Heidegger wrote, Space is neither an external object nor an internal experience. We don't have man and space beside.

The buildings we inhabit become part of who we are. They are the settings for experiences and absences. They are wound into our conceptions of privacy, safety, comfort or the lack thereof.

We are conceived in rooms and die in them. We live and dream in them. We begin relationships in raucous bars and clubs and end them in stations and airports. We remember the rooms of childhood and adolescence, the sound of rain like an imitation of infinity on skylight windows, the bedrooms of different lovers. The past is gone forever even though we can see and walk its rooms in our mind's eye. 'One need not be a chamber to be haunted, Emily Dickinson wrote, 'One need not be a house;/ The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.’

There are no ghosts in fact. It is the living who are haunted and these hauntings require an architecture, just as dreams do. ‘How many people live inside each of us? One on the top floor, one in the middle, and one in the cellar?' Experience seeps into setting and setting seeps into experience and both become memory. Rooms inhabit us as we inhabit them.

‘I am the product of long corridors' C.S. Lewis wrote, 'empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. This juxtaposing of home with books is no coincidence; we can read interiors and the cities beyond them. Rooms are invariably cabinets of curiosity, mimetic armouries, sometimes sacred, sometimes dreaded. In Paddy Jolley's short film The Drowning Room all the burdens of upbringing in the Troubles are given physical form in living rooms filled with water, where the inhabitants eat in slow motion and sit in oppressive silence. In Dickens's Bleak House, Miss Havisham, with her mouldering room of stopped clocks, has made peace with stagnation: 'whoever had this house, could want nothing else.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“The second reason for the appeal of lost mythical cities is a curious retrogressive nostalgia; the seductive deceptive idea that there was a golden age that requires resurrecting (often the purveyor's youth or their time-misted view of it). The problem with the past is that we are still living in its wake yet it is unreachable. We survey it with the torment of Tantalus; it is there but just out of reach. Times which never really existed are elevated, as gilded eras of impossible exacting perfection, often to justify fundamentalisms in the present.

Even conservatives are utopian. To reconstruct a lost world requires an element of fiction, if only in the selective processes of editing or exaggeration (the paintings of Norman Rockwell or the florid phantasias of Louis Jean Desprez for example). The exquisite woodcuts of Katsuyuki Nishijima remove the vestiges of the contemporary world for a Japan nestled in the elements, untouched by modernity. His woodcuts only work as silent empty pristine set designs.

Though they may seem arbitrary, like fairytales, past utopias have functions to serve. The memory of Roman rule in Britain and the loss of technologies when they left (concrete, sewers and aqueducts) evolved into Arthurian legends and 'many-towered Camelot’. This in turn justified chivalric hierarchies and acted as propaganda for the Crusades. Many regimes harked back to sleeping giants and make-believe battalions to aid them but so too did rebels; for every comatose Barbarossa on Kyffhäuser Mountain with his red beard grown through the stone table, there was a usurper like Owen Lawgoch in a deep mine biding his time. In a Viennese classroom where the glory of Ancient Rome was exalted alongside the Hapsburg Empire, a marginalised Jewish boy by the name of Sigmund Freud swore an affinity with Hannibal, marching against Rome on elephants across the Alps. The future may well contain what we put into it, as the May '68 Left Bank graffiti put it, but so too does the past.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“It must be added that the surviving accounts of the Tower of Babel come to us from forces resentful of city-dwellers. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all took root among nomads who had recently settled, and all three characterise nomadic traits - the shepherd, the pilgrim, the wanderer in the wilderness - as godly, and the life of the city as degenerate…. The real reason monotheistic religions feign to loathe the city is the city's inherent polyphony. It has many voices from many angles and they multiply. By its very nature, this is a threat to any creed that has established itself as the one truth. It is the Babel and not just the tower that is the threat.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“A genius engineer as well as draughtsman, Leonardo da Vinci's sketches for an Ideal City revolved around perfecting a sewage system before focusing on flamboyant artifice. In fact, the urge for space, cleanliness and order are there in almost all these types of designs from the time, most of which decorate religious paintings when you brush past the archangels and virgins. The artists may not have understood bacteria or viruses but they knew that cramped unclean environs encouraged diseases. Every Ideal City was thus the light to real shadow cities.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

“During the Renaissance, the concept of an Ideal City emerged from the shadows of Campenalla's dungeon. It developed from the humanistic elements of the City of the Sun, whilst largely abandoning the esoteric. It would be built according to a new faith in reason rather than superstition. Aside from advances in technology, there were two factors which propelled the polymaths who undertook plans of Ideal Cities. One was the development of perspective in drawing, whereby the two-dimensional ikons and Giottos of lore were gradually overtaken by paintings of three dimensional geometric depth. Buildings and indeed cities could be convincingly replicated in paint. They could also be designed from scratch. We owe a great deal to the first unknown artist to discover vanishing points.” —Imaginary Cities

[hetchdrive]

"In 1296, the middle-aged Marco Polo found himself inconveniently in prison. He had been captured in the Eastern Mediterranean at the helm of a Venetian galley by rival sailors from the Most Serene Republic of Genoa. Given that the two republics were locked in the War of Saint Sabas, this was inopportune, especially given he had a siege catapult onboard. Polo's fortunes improved however when he discovered his cellmate was a writer, Rustichello of Pisa, who was an enthusiastic listener to Polo's tall-tales of voyages in the mysterious Orient. This was good luck as it made Polo's fame. It was bad luck for the very same reason. Initially written as a guide for budding merchants, the asides and tangents that made up the quartet of books Description of the World' were fascinating yet scarcely believable. They quickly became immensely popular yet they earned Polo the cruel nickname 'Il Millione' ('the man of a million lies). It was doubted by some that he'd even travelled at all except around his own vast imagination...

When a book leaves the protective custody of its creator, it is rightly at the mercy of its readers but also, if prominent enough, at the hands of those who have not read it. In the age before the printing press, Polo's tales spread largely through word of mouth, with cumulative error compounded by jealousies and speculations. The stories, already partially there, metamorphosed further into myth. To accuse Polo of inventing fictions is to assume that perception and memory are not partially fictional to begin with. I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, the narrator in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil acknowledges, 'which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten! Fragments of the real are retained, though they evolve with time to fit the wisdom or fallacy of hindsight and are juxtaposed with memories of dreams and thoughts and memories of memories. We are unreliable narrators even to ourselves....

On Bloomsday, Dublin celebrates its fictional recreation in a text dedicated to the day and the city in which Joyce had first courted his wife. City begets text begets city. Despite writing in continental exile for years, Joyce claimed, 'I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.' Perhaps it could be but it would be as much Joyce as Dublin. Joyce's father once remarked of his son, 'If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he'd sit, be-God, and make a map of it. The mapmaker would be partial myth-maker. Would such a place, with its semi-fictional characters, selective editing and bias of perspectives) be accurate, a deception or simply how we subjectively inhabit all our cities? The truth is refracted through many prisms and our reflections are as true and as distorted as a hall of mirrors. All cities are subject to the Rashomon effect. Even the assumption that cities are simply settings falls short when considering architecture as narrative....

In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Frollo claims the book will kill the building 'Small things overcome great ones'; an intriguing idea but one disproved by the fact that all cities can, and should, be read. It would be foolish to deny the value of lying. Marco Polo was always destined to be accused because it's what the audience was prepared for. When faced with the blank space on the map, we turn to the fantastical. Consider not simply the sea serpents and 'here be dragons' on archaic maps but the casts of extraterrestrials with which we have populated distant planets in our age of reason. The creator of arguably the earliest surviving science fiction text (True History), Lucian of Samosata justified the honesty of dishonesty, a quality he shared with Polo (with a nod to Epimenides), 'Many others, with the same intent, have written about imaginary travels and journeys of theirs, telling of huge beasts, cruel men and strange ways of living... my Lying is far more honest than theirs, for though I tell the truth in nothing else, I shall at least be truthful in saying that I am a liar.'"" —Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson