Rarely does your bedroom simply serve as a bedroom. It can become your office, your garden, your gym, your rehearsal space, your library, and your art studio all throughout the course of a day. It becomes whatever you need it to be while trying to keep your spirits up amid the loneliness of sheltering in place.
Tumblr Creatr Thoka Maer (@thokamaer) illustrates how keeping occupied with your interests and hobbies helps the hours pass when isolation makes time feel like it’s standing still.
Korean Artist Paints Tranquil Surrealist Illustrations of Books
Korean Illustrator Jungho Lee produces surreal art that embraces the subtle beauty of magic. Books are where dreams begin and the artist gently guides his viewer through a narrative treading this path.
Weird Fiction pioneer HP Lovecraft had a habit of describing the indescribable horrors that invaded the reality of his work and reliably broke the minds of those who looked upon them as... well... "indescribable." The same way that the names of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones challenged one's tongue, so too did their appearance apparently exacerbate one's language.
Jeff VanderMeer, the current figurehead of what's been termed the New Weird genre -- with much thanks to his editing, along with his wife Anne, an anthology of New Weird fiction -- might have inherited Lovecraft's interest in dark impossibilities ransacking our reality, but not in the slightest does he suffer from any ancestral tongue-tiedness.
VanderMeer's new novel -- the first following his break-out Southern Reach trilogy -- features, for instance, a gigantic flying bear. The "de facto ruler" of the fallen city in which Borne is set, building-sized Mord marauds though the urban rubble with typical ursine movements and behaviours, but he also takes to the sky to hunt, "a murderer as light as a dandelion seed." Emerging as perhaps one of the most adroit and fun prose-stylists of current genre fiction, VanderMeer's language launches Mord into the air so convincingly that I couldn't stop imagining an adjustment to the tagline of Richard Donner's revolutionary Superman: You'll Believe a Bear Can Fly.
Getting a big bear convincingly aloft is not the extent of Borne's success, however; it's just the beginning. Literally. Mord is so large as to be a sort of ecosystem unto himself. It's while scavenging on Mord for "all kinds of treasures [that] became tangled in that ropy, dirt-bathed fur, foul with carrion and chemicals" that Borne's narrator, twenty-eight-year-old Rachel, discovers the book's namesake: a "hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers."
What Borne is, and what it can do and become, is the descriptive triumph of the book, is the impossible thing brought to lucid light. To fully laud VanderMeer's success with Borne would risk spoiling it. It's enough to say that VanderMeer's ability to present the distractingly fantastic as ordinary creates an opening big enough that just about anyone can get into this book. Once you're convinced of a bear in the air and an anemone-like blob that's not sure if it's a person or a weapon, then you can enter the world of the book, a post-catastrophe future earth brought down in concert by both natural and unnatural circumstances.
If Lovecraft thrived in barely-glimpsed horrors that left room for the reader's imagination to invent, VanderMeer thrives in tactile specifics. In Borne, the gore and aberrations are what's laid bare and it's the human horrors -- "the mysteries of existence and why we did the things we did, to each other and to animals" -- that are occulted, maybe too horrible to look at straight on.
Review: What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
It took me a while to get through Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut collection of stories, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The problem was I kept rereading the first story.
"The Future Looks Good" begins: "Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn't see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother's affection." It took me a while to get beyond that first sentence and that first image, even. I read it out loud, wrote it out for myself. There's a seemingly inexhaustible sort of art and magic to this very first image of the story, of the book, that was just hard to get over.
Enzinma's entire family history pools in that sustained moment of fumbling, like gathering water that more and more challenges and stresses the dam of the present. The way Arimah fills this small vessel of a moment with such a wealth of time brought most immediately Ambrose Bierce's classic time-defying "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" to mind and, with any luck, Arimah's story will achieve as similarly comparable prominence.
"The Future Looks Good" is wonderful on its own, but also serves as a perfect introduction and instruction for the rest of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. Arimah's stories span the spectrum from lucid reality (as in "Wild", in which a hardly-at-risk American teen is sent to be straightened out by her Nigerian relatives) to rich fantasy (as in "Who Will Greet You at Home", where children are assembled of any available materials), but all share the first story's nearly fantastical, almost ghostly generational presence.
In essence, family, place, and culture are always coming in behind the characters of What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky as they fumble with access to a new place. Once you get your breath back enough to get past the opening story, you'll find each subsequent one just as rich and stunning.
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