Trailing recent redshifts, a number of persons had seen white-clad figures in the sky, at night…or had thought they had seen, an alarming sight in the sky, at night: a vast number of astronomically informed cabals cavorting.  Then a dispatch from distances unknown— platoons of astronomical objects marching in the sky, white suits, helmets gleaming and sounds sounding.

Similar accounts that this appearance was a mirage, an optical telegram from phantom powers.  Or phantom phone-tag under the auspices of a red semaphore tower.

That there may be space-hobos, wandering workers, earthly transience and from which reflections or shadows or broken spectres are sometimes cast — a procession that crossed the sun: red pulsing forms that moved, or that marched,  or were flung; — things or beings that seemed to march and flicker and fade out.

All unfurling, as This Owl flies, but a short distance from Foster Burger.

Sample cases include: January 1859/Virginia/black dog-like creature chases man, July 1893/Russia/animal with long hair seen, July 1927/Illinois/cat-like object seen, May 1953/Nebraska/shrieks heard, cats seen, dogs and sheep eaten, December 2009/Elsewhere/assault and battery, wolf-like snout, April 2025/Argatha/lupine-like creatures are seen, denizens remember that lupine-like creatures exist

Methods have their limits of applicability and their are some phenomena that a given technique or approach cannot validly evaluate.  If a humanoid believes that lupine-like creatures are hostile, the humanoid might “see” reports clustering around military bases.  Pattern recognition is a strange bird, all told.

Redolent of the the iridescent spandex hovel from which they emanated, sputtering half-humanoid shape forms and assorted sensory blasts gave pause to passers by, inciting a hypnotic lull on the immediate populace

Transfixed by shape-forms that flabbily quivered in harmony with vidsonic debris from infernal machines, the spellbound onlookers meandered curiously about the ghastly nebula.   Like moths to a flame, glimpses of Weird Fiction’s scattered plasticity and glowering protrusions were swiftly consumed by the doomed surveyors.

Within this temporarily cavernous haunt,  a complex system of sound-forms seeped into existence. This aural presence was infinitely churning, subtly vibrant, and arguably danceable, but held a quality of surpassing wilderness which made its impact like a delicate torture on the fleshy minds of those mammals.

Humanoid-spinoffs of the obliterati emerged and disappeared in the wake of the Weird Fiction occurrence.  Figures leaving traces of footwear and mobile phones, whiskey and assorted belongings — laughable attempts at deleting the dead weight of their conspicuous info-corpses.

Of sightings and encounters, this particular ficto-quizzical milieu competes furiously with the visionary anecdotes relayed millenia ago from the caveman Zan.

Eager to interview the looming figures of this ficto-quizzical milieu, I set sights on Quagczar, self-proclaimed “lord of the bog.”  Difficult to pin down generally, but I lucked out this time by following a trail of cine-molecular and geological fault lines emanating from a wormhole rupture in space-time.  This portal—a gateway once dormant –was cracked open just the other day by the out-of-place activities of Lord Quag and colleagues in a subterranean locale in SE India, believe it or not –provided a makeshift uplink.  Through whatever mechanisms brought me into contact with Lord Quag,  I am grateful.  This entity was a bit of a curmudgeon, but we had a spirited exchange nonetheless…once things were rolling… Much of that can be evidenced in this generous excerpt:

Metaphortean Researcher (MR): paging quagczar

Lord Quagczar (LQ): Lord Quag, available for messaging from the beyond

MR: Excellent.  First off, thanks so much for taking time and space for me, a humble humanoid…there is much to discuss before our wormhole connection seals up and separates our worlds

LQ: Humbled you should be. Although not my choice, I have been commanded to protect you humanoids’ mindspace from invasions internal and external. So taking time out to clear up mythconceptions is only my job please, proceed.

MR: When do cyber/virtual appendages become flesh?  There’s the urban legend of man who never changed underwear and his skin grew over it…when do virtual extensions become as unconscious as this curious claim?

LQ: It depends on one’s point of view and one’s view of the point. One of my disciples  Gregory Bateson had much to say on this front…He spoke of a man with a cane, and asked where the man ended and the world began, the cane being an extension of his arm. Recent research has shown that the mind temporarily considers artifacts part of the body

MR: something like tangible computing, but home-grown?

LQ: Yes, but it becomes a bit more fuzzy and amorphous when the artifacts are largely informational, ephemeral, and existing in spectrums unseen or unperceived

MR: Speaking of ephemeral artifacts, how about dead vocabularies?  “Tekeli-li” was a term for rage and excitement expressed among savages in the lifeworld of Antartic Fiction (another outmoded genre)  Do you have wise words on this? I sense a parallel alongside oceanic metaphors—are there tracks to be uncovered, portals to the hollow earth theories of infoenvironmentalism?  Does retrograde remediation suit you in your iterative performances of  (data) abjection?

LQ: As far as I can surmise the earth always contains surprises. Science has to be revised with inspirations most mysterious and murky. For example, it was thought that all life forms draw their access to livingry from the sun, our planet’s solar income.  But it turns out that the interior of the earth provides sustenance after all.  Tubes from below the ocean bottom spew forth warmth and chemicals which sustain entire non-solar ecosystems.  So too is it with the information environment There are vast swaths of area unexplored, or which were explored with the wrong lens the first time around

MR: i.e. blobsquatches.

LQ: Exactly. Large bands of the information environment have now been shut to traditional broadcast, and narrowcasters and adventurers, other niche species can re-inhabit them. The blobsquatch might even be viewed as the narrowcaster interjecting their information in the broadcast spectrum…one must keep their eye out for digital artifacts out of place, that may be transmitted from the analog lands of yore, which have been driven underground. Pirate radio stations are like pirates of the high seas which is why I am sometimes considered a patron saint of both pirates and hackers…trying to make sense by putting themselves fully at drift in the most landless spaces.

MR: I see you as a siren more than a saint, reeling in the sea travelers, causing them to smash into rocks to perpetuate dangerous data debris….Time can be fragmented into micro-loops –reducing familiar forms into anomalous instances of vidsonic debris “new words” to gain power in splotches like the liquid metal modular Terminators –”blobsquatches” or “blobs” generally–things from other worlds — produce  asymmetrical others.  The audio-visual device, too, when turned to face itself, dematerializes into an amorphous other—it feeds back.

LQ: Certainly. As a quick aside, I should ask. Are you able to materialize this transmission? I feel that the ground (and groundless) spaces we are exploring would be useful for future followers of my path. Sadly, in my unsubstantiated form I am unable to ‘Save’ this dialogue for future transmissions.

MR: yes, i believe this is saved to my interdimensional account.  Though given the fact that you’re involved i’ll have to check my Spam folder

LQ: I approve of your humor, metaphortean researcher.

MR: Humor is way of tapping info-nerve cells, would you agree Lord?

LQ: Lord Quag at the very least, but yes humanoid, humor works because it points in the wrong direction, and makes our neurons fire in ways unexpected. It’s one of the best methods of opening access to unknown vistas and unexplored areas of problem spaces.  That is why the powerful have permitted it even though it is dangerous.  Mostly in a neutered form such as puppets or magicians

MR: Puppeteering reminds me of a suspicion or question for you: if you’ll allow me to set up a ‘feedback’ situation—why is it that other Weird Fictioneers such as the flighty space-time transients do not join into your own largess…why are there individuated entities rather than one writhing mutant quagmire?

LQ: As for your query into the concept engineering inherent in the media matrix I wonder if your human kinds need for Out of Body Experience is not to blame for this unexpected individuation. Before you can leave your body and join the hive mind you need a body to begin with.

MR: Nobody’s ‘blaming’  here.  Let me rephrase. There is much hyperactivity: hypermedia, hyperbole , etc admidst the WFT blogosphere, is this extended camo or is the presence of humanoids… in other words– a glitch that even you can not account for?

LQ: These flighty individuals (who sit somewhere between individuated humanoids, and the post-humanoid wisdom complex such as myself) are especially prone to pointing out of place artifacts and other abandoned technological apparatus back on themselves and fading into the bliss of white light…however this feedback can get out of control if not constrained

MR: exactly…feedback out of control…you need control (i.e. presence of humanoids?) to then escape from it with pizzaz?

LQ: All I can say on this question, is that, even I answer to a higher calling at times, and not all is within my control.  At times even I need to resist the escape velocity of the stories that are woven about me and my ways.  Someone other than myself has decided it is useful to have humans act as constraints and catalysts.  I only hope those that have followed my path off the deep end are not frightened frozen when and if they reach the sublime promise of the Singularity, the Mind Children, and the collective hive mind. These awesome images are even amorphous in my mind.  Perhaps the persnickity space time transients are just the messengers that are needed to make sure these images of unimagined horror and human obliteration into universality do not become dominant.

Without some disciplines, human or non-human actors to play out my tales, I cease to exist.  So these glitches are boon in my mind (TO be honest though I prefer the respect shown to me by Dolphins, Monkeys and Ants especially.  Their displays of affection are most humbling)

MR: A shocking admission, Lord Quag, but appreciated candidness.  The glitch is not a glitch unless it interrupts then?  That is not glitched which can eternally drone?

LQ: I am afraid I have to part ways with the both the cults of drone and glitch which have grown up around me. Both have their place, but their value needs to be kept in perspective, because their powers are so immense. As you say a glitch is an interruption it manifests unexpectedly in stream or a drone and demands attention precisely because it a difference that makes a difference .  However, in its interruption it can redivert but also break down cycles most complex.  Complexity requires occasional glitching to increase diversity and ensure the robustness of a system, but too much glitching leads to breakdown, destruction and if it becomes the dominant mode, ends in death.  Growth requires drone, the iterative playing out of the same space with minor shiftings that are path dependent.

MR: About ants, insects…you mentioned this insect just a minute ago. Ants have been inhabiting electronics near NASA in Texas… short-circuiting electronics.  Is this the sort of “glitch” activity you are keen on?

LQ: Ants inhabiting electronics is a perfect state of temporary glitch which calls for action and innovation, either to keep them out, or better yet to co-exist or co-evolve in a sort of symbiotic industrial-ecology-ecology …but if both the machine die and the ants are fried and humans or non-humans don’t intervene with innovation and then drone, we are left with fried electronics and a pile of fried ants…the necessary occasional sacrifice at my alter

MR: In interest of maximizing research during our temporary space-time rift, i’ll skip to another question…awhile back, before you went droning on about glitches   you mentioned “difference that makes a difference”… this is like a euphemism for the cult of celebrity? And speaking of cultish celebrities, I have to say you and your WFT crew strike me as a sort of inverted Howard Hughes experience, reclusive,  but germaphiliac not germaphobe… replete with weird trajectories intersecting from realms of cinema,  winged migration and engineering.  The feverish mechanics of conspiracy lead me to ask what you might know of Ice Station Zebra?  According to Wikipedia, Hughes ” became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra and had it running on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times.”

There may be something here for WFT to decode, to interrupt , cycles (and icicles) to break down into new complexities?!?

LQ: It is true, the weird WFT crew, which I should mention I am only loosely affiliated with, when it suits MY needs, is indeed Germaphillic, attempting to invade ours and other brainspaces with germs both biological and linguistic.  As for Hughes, there are indeed parallels, and he was clearly seeing something in the screening of this set of still images on a tape loop that evades the attention of most…it would most certainly be an information artifact worth a revisit.

MR: What other monikers do you keep Lord Quag?  With no disrepect, I’ve only been able to Google you in relation to Weird Fiction

LQ: While some  seek the limelight, I prefer to keep a low profile, but my fingerprints, and even aliases can be found all around the internets if one knows where to look

MR: Will Google street view take me to your humble abode?

LQ: My home is mobile, and anyways could not so easily be penetrated by such a pedestrian technology as a 360 camera strapped to a car.  However, because of my constant quest for glitch, dangerous data and anomalous information, you will find my presence in a number of places on google maps including street view

MR: Do you believe yourself in a tele-cocoon?  a barnacle that blogs? a semi-submersed thing at ALL times…do you sleep?

LQ: I have been called this and many more by the Digirati that attempt to navigate my nested loops of non(sense), but more than anything I am entity whose image springs forth late in the night, during day dreams most horrific, and now, increasingly, in moments of information overload, as the bloated humanoid corpus is overwhelmed with sugar, caffeine and the multitasking milieu takes over.

MR: again like seafaring adventurers on the info-oceanic drift, you are a mirage… a temporary salve, a picnoleptic’s picnic

LQ: Indeed, that captures an essence. I see you have spent much time exploring my slime trail across this planet.  Sadly it appears our connection is nearly nullified…You are a most honored servant. Please do spread my word, but in ways both concealed and mysterious.

MR: Always

LQ: Thank you.

End Transmission

Lord Quagczar here, groggy, soggy and as grumpy as Gaia during the 6th extinction.

I spent yesterday evening below ground, percolating with the souls of pedestrians past.

An abandoned underground corridor was activated electronically and collective memories reawakened.

As this vestigial organ of the urban apparatus was re-animated with industrial strength images and sounds both diegetic and non-, I was reminded of just how foolish you humans are. The site of one rat is cause for alarm and shrieking, while you all wander quite contently in the smog that gets passed off as breathing-air here, once called India’s garden city.

Let this be a lesson you can’t learn: rat’s don’t kill; air pollution does. Too bad your puny human brains are not wired to understand this simple fact. You are always looking for faces in clouds rather than looking for clouds in faces. If you had any sense you’d all be running around shrieking in fear until the air was cleared and the non-linear climate dynamics of spaceship earth were brought back from the edge of chaos.

I guess you humans had a pretty good run with rationality and the scientific method, but you are gonna get blindsided by the limits of this line of inquiry. As my minion Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago: the usefulness of a map is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness.

To be honest I am looking forward to the completion of your tale, for then I will be released from my duties protecting the fecundity of your information ecosystem, and I can get on to more interesting work in other, nicer, galaxies.

Well….I guess I have to return to my duties of churning your data smog and info-toxins into anomalous ideas. Try to open your third eye every once in a while, or at least try to see your head without a mirror, it might open pathways out of the local optima of rational processes and linear and into unexplored areas of the problem space your collective mind needs to survive another generation or two.

Or not. The faster you die-off, the faster I can move on to galaxies that are a little more hospitable to beings of wisdom such as myself.

Retrograde Remediation is a mode of moving backwards, or perhaps sideways, often (but not always) in the face of new media provocation. A medium re-framed in another form does not inherently necessitate a linear, forwards motion or mobilize, only, concerns of the market. Conceptual hacking of the remediation process can produce other hybrids, too. For instance database cinema, wherein computerization highlights valuable insight for the cinematic (in the hands of visionary cranks) Cinema subject to an identity crisis, realizing it is, and has always been, a database form– albeit one that has adhered to a stringent algorithm (or script). This hypermediacy in opposition to the dominant drive towards immediacy and efficiency in/of image production. Valid, convenient, these imperatives are—but denying so many parallel worlds and hybrid moments!

Exploded view diagrams isolate and arrest. A techno-taxidermy that sizes up perceived pathways for understanding of the complexities of so many mechanisms. A camera enters bullet time but does not reach escape velocity. Floating here, camera as carcass, a frozen fillet suspended for further analysis.

Weird Fiction operates on the innards of cinema, exploding narratives. A process not a product per se. Exploding narratives, then rummaging in real-time through the flotsam and flightpaths of hurtling audio-visual world/views. This is not guaranteed to produce novel forms of coherency or complexity but, as Irving Bleak claims “arational systems hold value,” too.

Imagine the mix as a live process of instantiating the cutting room floor, a perverse re-enactment of the discarding and refusal of data. Imagine any unnamed archivo-futurists, foraging this floor, thinking through their hands, piecing together dissociated knowledge. In any live milieu, ficto-quizzical or otherwise, music allows for more abstract associations while spoken words will fight for stubbornly literal visual returns. Words are not tied to their literal imaged counterparts, parallel worlds do exist! One can open up worlds by embracing the exploding view not as a finite map of known forms, of knowledge inventoried and complete. Instead as just that but also always a crisis ripe for re-viewing, an exploding ad infinitum, a gateway or nodal nook for z-access into on-going parallel processes. The logic of the loop, or stream of consciousness. At any rate, another procession of the damned

I will now go forward with my Metaphortean findings, putting audacity before caution as I spell out this tedious tome! Puzzling out this motley crew of the self-proclaimed “ficto-quizzical”, I offer up some jig-saw pieces, albeit floating in mild confusion:

Weird Fiction are multivisionaries, and I offer this term at once for its obsolescent and optimistic capacities. Multivision was at one point a term for high end multi-projection audiovisual presentations produced with an armada of slide projectors. Today, multitude (the network) is an everyday occurrence, audio-visual complexities are as concealed and commonplace as Powerpoints and iPhone apps. Multivision (via analog electronics) is obsolete, and the technologies affiliated are disappeared to storehouses and second-hand shops. Gone…but not forgotten, as outfits diverse as the Antiques Roadshow and Weird Fiction are a testament to, by the way! Yes, there are more uses than one for obsolete tech, more fates than e-waste, more possibilities than linear progressions, more weirdness in truth than fiction— as any follower of Metaphortean Space might sheepishly admit!

In tasking the Lovecraftian canon of nebulous sky-spawn and ancient curses, of forgotten cities and other dimensional entities a nerve is pinched techno-culturally. Weird Fiction tune in to telling tinglers:

Hertzian forces and Dead Media. Hertzian forces are intangible yet real, bombarding us always with information in the broadest sense…terrifying us with the promise that there is a weird world swirling just outside of human sensory awareness. Making one grateful for the sensory limitations of the human apparatus while, nonetheless, these limitations are continually reversed by way of new media!

Hertzian space is forgotten –but not gone! Taken for granted, lurking everywhere but out of sight, or at least seemingly out of range. The premise of probing a poetics of Hertzian space, is put forward in Anthony Dunnes’ Hertzian Tales circa 1999. Antecedents of both the “hertzian” and the “tale” are of course ample three quarters of century before with wireless radio and the debut of the publication Weird Tales. As noted in Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, “most media historians designate 1922 as the year radio exploded into national sensation,” (p.93) the USA afloat with DX fishing expeditions, giddy techno-adventurers patrolling the etheric depths!

Weird Tales, of course, was less mass phenomenon… yet now famous authors including notably H.P. Lovecraft and oddly enough Tennessee Williams made literary appearances in this magazine that launched in 1923. Point is these tales were often punctuated with Hertzian horrors, or what scholar Manuel Aguirre terms “Cosmic Terror”

In The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western Symbolism Aquirre trails a history of haunters, with “Cosmic Terror” as a reflection not of an isolated haunter but a systemic presence. Writes Aguirre of this terror:

“We do not have singular confrontations with our own personal Doubles, but glimpses of the near-impossible, of a something so vast as to be incomprehensible: not our individual mirror-images, but a mirror-image of the human world itself…the basic laws of nature are flaunted while new monstrous laws emanating from the mirror begin to bear upon its presumed original” (p.160)

Weird Fiction’s propensity towards the glitch, the visual noises, poor transmissions and malfunction, these murky intermixed components (details ascribed to the impish familiars –the space-time transients) constitute monstrous iterations of original source signals.

At once signifying unseen guests from some hideous “Other domain in our cosmos, lurking behind every gateway, seeking entrance into our world” (Aguirre, p163) and literally revealing the limitations of media technology

(i.e. the extended human sensory apparatus)

Weird Fiction is perhaps a database cinema, too, answering Manovich’s concern that “today we have too much information and too few narratives that can tie it all together.” (Language of New Media, p217.) Again the obsolete and discarded re-membered here, are also variants of Charles Fort’s “damned data” (See Fort’s Book of the Damned for more leads on this)

Weird Fiction’s perverse reply emerges as a handful of dark, irreverent, labyrinthine and, yes, metaphorical spatial environments. A minor-league mythos, with virtual plateaus populated, at times, with more recognizable haunters and “things that go bump in the night.”

In this regard, cinematic fiction like Monster Squad and sitcoms like The Munsters could also be argued as databases of the damned, yet it is what Manovich would call the “algorithms”, here– the nebulous and scattered plasticity— the “quizzical” not just the “ficto” that is a key distinction.

Synesthesia is not always a utopian vision, anesthesia is not always a numbing wasteland. The heterotopian haunting is a better title for the “ficto-quizzical milieu” embracing and prolonging what has been elsewhere bandied about as “picturing ambiguity” (Stafford), “imaging the abject” (King) and “applied blobsquatchery (Diehl)

I will give pause here for another series of analyses at a later date. Weird Fiction is a nutshell indeed, difficult to crack but still its inklings compel me onward towards continued research.

In the wake of last night’s weird milieu, I suspect that several mytho-trajectories were satisfactorily impressed upon the peaceably placated crowds gathered in the Northeastern Dunes. As much can be assessed from subsequent rumblings within the vlogosphere (see below).

Of the varied ficto-quizzical phenomena that was recombined and dispersed, a fleeting glance might have presumed mere chaos, or otherwise undue emphasis on the “quiz.” This is true so much as it is also incorrect. The ficto-quizzical is a fickle phenomena requiring attention to new signals in noise. No doubt this perversion of focus was aided in last night’s occurrences by libations including the much lauded “sound juice”

Between beginnings and endings it is quite possible that a non-euclidean narrative contingent not on A to B logistics but on unforseen “Z points,” or portals, was in action. Fluttering and teeming in the peripheries askew of dominant space-time imperatives. Traveling vector-like from A to B, one finds feelings of madness from the visual sea, realizing the possibilities are here glimpsed only at shin-level. Seizing upon the scattered plasticity of so many lurking polter(zeit)geists, the hideous realities of the Entropian were manifest towards the last…in the throes, let us note, of much furied and nebulous Pulse Emission. If it is too much of a brag to claim that the Weird Fiction crew was fit for puzzling such ficto-quizzicism by design, then perchance we’ll chalk it up presently to happy accident?