• And what might the backrooms imply about the (memory) spaces we inhabit?

[I] (Partially) Skipped:The product of these weird expressions of place is not knowledge, as in the case of science or naturalistic writing, but rather attunement, a straining after or intensified awareness of the presence of others that also relate, beyond our perceptions and cognitions, amongst themselves, and so form places. (Page 4)

• my thoughts: Skipped:This (incl. the bullet below) is why the backrooms works so well!

[I] Skipped: VanderMeer, explores more profoundly the interest of weird writing for thinking about and living in the increasingly horrifying and uncanny age that is the Anthropocene. (Page 4) //

[I] Skipped: The dread that pervades the narrator is not presented as a dream or delusion, but precisely as an encounter with reality. (Page 5) //

[I] Skipped: there are “combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth” (Page 5) //

• How would this example apply to the backrooms?

• Look this up!

[I] Skipped: not so much a world haunted by human ghosts, but a world in which rocks and stones have a kind of “sentience,” a certain spontaneity that allows them to act outside of the conditioning of natural law, just as humans conceived as ethical agents are supposedly capable of doing. (Page 7) //

[I] Skipped: Lovecraft, (Non)locality, and Madness.

[I] Skipped: dedicated to disrupting our normal sense of being at home in the world (Page 7) //

[I] Skipped: the mind is here introduced in such a way as to render the real all the more horrifying, since the mind is seen as blocking us from seeing what is actually there (Page 7-8) //

[I] Skipped: the conundrum of whether Walter Gilman’s dreams cause the fever or the fever the dreams, but we are then told that both alternatives are insignificant (Page 8) //

[I] Skipped: Moreover, as an animate being, the place is unaccountable, granted will, spontaneity, and the capacity to be acknowledged and to demand acknowledgment. (Page 8) //

[I] Skipped: erroneously familiar (Page 8) //

[I] Skipped: As a means of expressing place, then, Lovecraft constantly steps over the boundaries of our perception, vaguely hinting to us the details of an outside or ultimate reality, while at the same time rendering us acutely aware of the finitude of our grasp on the real. In Lovecraft’s early work, such as for instance in “The Music of Erich Zann,” the relationship between mind and world, text and real, is articulated through a confounding of our sense of place and time. (Page 8) //

[I] Skipped: “street at the threshold” (Rue d’Au Seuil), a name which perfectly corresponds to the metaphysical status of the place named both in terms of what it suggests and what it does not confirm, namely the real status of the Rue d’Au Seuil as a liminal place, something that hovers between being simply unreal and the impossible coming-to-presence of the ultimately-extensionless real. (Page 9) //

[I] Skipped: a place on the threshold of being on the threshold (Page 9) //

• my thoughts: Liminal ^ 2

[I] Skipped: “the geometry of the place was all wrong,” (Page 9) //

[I] Skipped: we find references to non-Euclidean geometry and space-time, weird theories explaining: “possible freakish curvatures in space, and of Theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum.” (363) (Page 9) //

• my thoughts: Non-intuitive geometry.

[I] Skipped: Weird fiction must always go beyond the logical and the known, and that is to say beyond mathematics and science.4 (Miranda, Page 9) // (Page 9)

[I] it is easy to feel lulled into thinking that we know this place, that we are actually travelling through the New England that we know, a world with which we are familiar and at home. But as the description goes on, we seem to cross over a threshold (Page 10) //

[I] Example: Skipped: “The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness” (Page 10) //

[I] Skipped: Here what is stretched is not so much language—it is possible to imagine mountains as rounded—but precisely our pretension to know the world (Page 10) //

[I] Example: Skipped: as absurd as would be a field of quintessentially identical dandelions, perfectly similar maple leaves, or ontologically indifferent cattle (Page 10) //

[I] Skipped: Therein is expressed one of the terrors of our current situation, … our awareness of the ways in which the limits of our minds hinder our every attempt to master or rationally model the world around us. (Page 10) //

[I] Skipped: Some types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings. One journal, half-destroyed by the damp, focused solely on the qualities of a kind of thistle with a lavender blossom that grew in the hinterlands between forest and swamp. Page after page described encountering first one specimen of this thistle and then another, along with minute details about the insects and other creatures that occupied that microhabitat. In no instance did the observer stray more than a foot or two from a particular plant, and at no point, either, did the observer pull back to provide a glimpse of base camp or their own life. After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. - (VanderMeer 2014 b, 114) (Page 11) //

• my thoughts: Distracting ourselves from the looming horrors by preoccupying ourselves with the familiar.

[I] Skipped: to look too closely at things, to discover their weirdness and terror, not their familiarity and presence (Page 11) //

• my thoughts: Much like the people in the backrooms.

[I] Skipped: the notion of erasure, that cultivates omissions and allusions ; writing that reminds us of dimensions of place that are absent from both the setting and from ordinary perception, and which yet constitute something like the dark presences so powerfully evoked by Lovecraft. (Page 11) //

[I] Skipped: But this absence of the tower from the map does not annul the mystery of the object, but rather heightens it, prompting us to wonder why and how the tower was not included on maps beforehand. (Page 12) //

[I] Skipped: cumulative confusion (Page 12)

[I] Skipped: only that our versions of it are somehow pale reflections of its reality (Page 12) //

[I] Skipped: from a failure of the categories that structure and order our perceptions to bring the objects into full phenomenal presence (Page 12) //

[I] Skipped: She notes that the entities that they are composed of “would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss” but she quickly makes clear that to her trainedview they are “in fact” “probably” something else, “a type of fungi or other eukaryoticorganism” (24). (Page 12)

[i] Skipped: the Age of Asymmetry (Page 16)

[I] Skipped: …the changes in the seasons and the normal variability of weather in any particular location. Yet global climate is not something that we can see, and we indeed have a very difficult time placing ourselves, and placing where we find ourselves within global climate change. It is too weird, too dissonant with our perceptions, not to feel lost when acknowledging that the incredible volume of snow that fell on the East Coast of the United States during the winter of 2013-14 was a function of global warming. Climate change, to be precise, is a black box phenomenon in that our access to it is mediated through complicated computer models, like so much of science, according to Bruno Latour. (Page 16) //

[I] Skipped: The Age of Asymmetry comes after the end of the world. That is to say that we who live in the Anthropocene no longer find ourselves capable of believing in the innocence of the sensual world that surrounds us. Our world has become weird, our reality horrifying. (Page 16) //

• my thoughts: jaded by cosmic horror

[I] Skipped: We are too aware that the apparent nothing that comes out of our cars when we start them is accumulating in infinitely minute particles in the atmosphere. Unlike the soot and smog that threatened our major cities as far back as the 19th century, prompting cries of alarm from William Blake and other Romantic Poets, carbon dioxide is invisible. We cannot see the upwards of 400 ppm of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that currently exist in our atmosphere. Nor can we situate this pollution, for the global climate is just as threatened by those invisible particles in the most pristine regions of the Canadian North as it is in the visibly smoggy streets of Shanghai. Yet even where air pollution is concerned, weirder, deeper realities intrude into our awareness. According to scientists, it is not the larger, visible pollutants that are the most carcinogenic, but rather the infinitesimally small nanoparticles. Thus our cities may seem to be visibly less polluted than in the past, but they may actually be just as dangerous to our health while simultaneously seeming cleaner. A similar worldshattering tension between apparent health and purity versus death-dealing reality is present in many ordinary household objects. Consider the case of BPA, a form of plastic widely used in the 20th century for the fabrication of items such as baby bottle nipples. Originally considered ideal for this application because of its translucency (a signal of purity according to our senses), this material was later discovered to be a potent endocrine disruptor (Cicolella 1963). Today, tests show that 93 % of the population have traces of BPA in their systems, and because of this our societies are seeing an augmentation of the number cases of breast and prostate cancer, a decline of male sperm quality, early pubescence in girls, metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity, and behavioral disorders such as hyperactivity and ADHD. (Page 16-17) //

• my thoughts: “translucency” → A great example of how the invisible threats posed in cosmic horror lead us to gradually trust and rely on our senses & faculties because they are deceptive in this weird world