Appendix Stone
Inspired by Havoc’s Appendix ❤️🔥, the following are the sources that inspire HANDS OF STONE, a novel I am working on.
As the novel is currently on the ideation stage, anything written here is subject to change and is also quite vague. Still, I’ve been thinking about this story for nearly a year, and it feels good to share some of that process, which also lets me develop my thinking around the story.
For some context, HANDS OF STONE is about a city which has been destroyed by an invading army, and the journey of an enslaved prize fighter, freed in the process of the city’s destruction, as he struggles to leave the only place he’s known in his life. The book itself is planned to follow a physical and temporal journey through the city, as he travels through ruined streets and has various encounters that enmesh past and present.
CARTOONS & MANGA
Texhnolyze is the single biggest inspiration. Look, HANDS OF STONE is about a prize fighter with powerful prosthetics who ends up involved in a power struggle over the fate of a dystopic city. The high level summary is nearly identical. However, the inspiration comes primarily from the first few episodes: Ichise’s exploitation, both as a fighter and as a victim of sexual abuse, acts as my starting point. HANDS OF STONE explores the allure of a willing alienation—the protagonist chooses to become a prize fighter and accrues a debt that effectively renders him a slave—as a form of spiritual suicide, then asks what one is to do once they are given another chance to live.
Megalo Box comes as a close second. Where in Megalo Box boxers use external machinery to augment their fighting prowess, in HANDS OF STONE they are modified by biotechnology. Beyond this superficial resemblance, Megalo Box as a series explores memory, the changing bodies of athletes (crippling, pain, brain damage, pain killers, etc), and home. The story’s resolution involves the need to walk away, which is key in my own story—the rebirth in letting go of a dream. Megalo Box is one of my all time favourites!
The works of Naoki Urusawa understand humanity within despair. I think of the character Martin Reest in Monster, who dies for the worst woman in the world solely because she reminds him of an abusive ex-girlfriend he couldn’t let go, and all of this is rendered with deep sympathy for a terribly hurt man; where other authors would make villains of these characters or show Reest’s actions as flawed, Urusawa respects the choices that people make.
Only Yesterday by Isao Takahata seems probably out of place, but has two key inputs: 1) an effective use of flashback in the structure of the film and 2) its lack of ideas, despite the film’s nostalgia and moralism. By the latter I mean that the film presents its content without recourse to positing anything in particular, which, like the films of Ozu, makes it honest, its weight borne primarily by emotion, the realm of art. I’ve talked about this movie quite a few times with a buddy of mine, and while I think Takahata has better films, Only Yesterday is quietly compelling.
I do not think I have the confidence to write a book without ideas; I do think I can edit the ideas out of a completed draft.
FILM
Gregg Araki - The Doom Generation is awesome. I’ll just share my Letterboxd review:
In spite of the schlock and nihilism on the surface, this is a deeply beautiful movie. A kind of pure love is enabled by the futility of the trio's ride to nowhere; the constraints of heteronormativity are generative of tension, which means desire; the inability to communicate, demonstrated by the corniest of lines possible, creates a grasping and reaching for connection that is the core of intimacy, not connection in itself. This film is a masterclass in portraying sex and sexuality, and, more than any film I can think of, understands how limits are constitutive of sexual desire, and vice versa—to the extent that the fulfilment of desire creates its own limits.
The apocalyptic modernity portrayed in the film and the potential for liberatory transgression in the wake of that destruction is something I hope to capture. This movie is like the most romantic shit in the world to a crazy beast like me.
Bi Gan - Resurrection presents an epic concerning the course of modern China “through the senses and emotions, rather than particular historical fact.” (Quote from me, hehe) It is this sense of “place in feeling” that I hope to capture; of course, the techniques by which this is done are very different in literature than in film—still, the paranoid war-time urbanity of the film’s second vignette and the red-light hedonic excess of its final vignette have loomed in my mind since seeing the film. It’s also worth noting that early 20th century China creates the basis for the political situation in HANDS OF STONE.
POEMS & LITERATURE
T. S. Eliot is the basis for the way I imagine a “20th century secondary world fantasy.” If the film Resurrection has given me a goal of “feeling in place,” then Eliot presents an answer. While Tolkien used Celtic imagery as much of the basis of Lord of the Rings, my intention is to draw on Eliot, Pound, and other modernist poets to serve as myth. In my (currently almost complete!) Arthurian novel, the poems of Tennyson served a similar function: even as that influence has been reduced in subsequent drafts, there were times when stuck that I’d look at a random line in a random Tennyson poem to find a way forward.
The Wasteland in particular is instructive, as it follows the movement of the River Thames through the city and out beyond; it’s Dante’s Inferno type-shit, and therefore it’s Orpheus type-shit.
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun you already fuckin knew this was going to be here. Wolfe’s use of completely alien terminology to describe commonplace modern commodities is brilliant, and an important technique that I’d like to use. Unlike Vance’s Dying Earth, the fantastic elements in New Sun would not be out of place in an early 20th century setting. The Botanic Gardens, for instance, are a perfect modern fantasy location, and would work basically unaltered on a not-dying Earth.
I think Book of the New Sun is probably the best fantasy story I’ve read, so obviously its influence is immense.
Tennyson - The Kraken:
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
While most magic present in HANDS OF STONE will be via biomagical surgery or the horrid machines of the Millennium Army, I’ve thought about what magic looks like on a more ontological level, like the magic of the Sea of Flowers. Tennyson’s poem presents a deep power in repose, there is always the subjectivity of retreat and its inherent sensitivity: nature swirls around the kraken as if in its orbit, and his death is presented as more tragic than horror. This is a kind of magic fitting a modern fantasy.
Ovid - Metamorphoses death is a change, the same as all others. The Metamorphoses has changed how I think about literature and metaphor in ways that are hard to place, but I am confident in saying it is the most important thing I’ve read this year. It has been a central occupation in my Arthurian story, and will continue to loom large.
Sophocles presents characters with an incredible force in extreme brevity, with highly limited stage directions. He gives immense dignity to his characters in the midst of the worst circumstances you can imagine. I don’t generally love reading plays, but Ajax is one of the best things I’ve read this year, and I’ve overall enjoyed Sophocles more than Shakespeare, even if Shakespeare is really really funny. Like Ovid, the inspiration here is fairly non-specific, but I can’t help but consider his plays as significant to my thoughts on art.
MUSIC
Weyes Blood - God Turn Me Into A Flower was first introduced to me by Havoc, and the album it is a part of features prominently in the inspiration for his current RPG campaign. There’s a line I deeply love:
It always takes me, such a curse to be so hard
Indeed, as the most masculine and muscular man you probably know I strongly feel this line alongside a deep seated respect for my feminine brothers and sisters who live more like a flower. I often wonder what weakness feels like, what being in a soft body means; I’m in a strange position where I’ve been stronger than most living people at times, and at others unable to live on my own from my disease. Furthermore, an inversion of this line is operative in the central metaphor of HANDS OF STONE: the unfeeling, unmoving hands of the protagonist—a metonymy for his person—are themselves a curse that forecloses softness and contact with others.
Natalie herself explains:
The rigidity of wanting everything to constantly stay the same, wanting the life we thought we should have, won’t serve anybody well in the future.
And this is the central conflict I’d like to explore, hands squeezed tight and unable to let go.
This song has also inspired the importance of flowers as a symbol in my thinking more broadly, as well as the Sea of Flowers which stretches north of the city in HANDS OF STONE.
My Chemical Romance - Drowning Lessons expresses the mixed desire and hate that defines abusive relationships, the sense of comraderie in returning to the person who hurts you and who you hurt:
These hands, stained red
From the times that I've killed you and then
We can wash down this engagement ring
With poison and kerosene
We'll laugh as we die
And we'll celebrate the end of things
With cheap champagne
The protagonist's relationship to his owner who was also his lover will feature prominently in the story, and there's lots of music (as well as my own life experience) that informs how I think of this sort of abusive yet desperately loving relationship. At the opening of the story his owner is already dead—oh no! what will he do?
More importantly, when I imagine selling 10 million copies of my book and then Science Saru makes an anime adaptation the opening theme is a knock-off of this song.
Viagra Boys - Worms; Medicine for Horses death yo. All stories about letting go are also stories about dying, and the fear of being in a body that lives then dies then becomes dust. Both songs fucking rock, too; I’m always listening to them.
David Sylvain - Orpheus is one of my favourite songs. The lyrics are equal to great poetry in imagery, which is incredibly rare. The line that ends the course is my favourite:
I will hear the promise of my Orpheus sing
And it is the fact that the “promise” of Orpheus that must sing, not himself; the positioning of the singer as Eurydice; the hope in that promise twinned with impossibility, later implied by the line “As Orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring.” The moment of the promise never comes, underscored by the long silence in the song’s middle.
Anyway, I just listen to this song and think of the story I’d like to write, the connection here is oblique.
It’s Gonna Be (Alright) - Ween is the ultimate breakup song; and breakups are a kind of dying, in that there’s always a sort of survivor’s guilt and irrevocable change. Most important, is that even the people who have hurt us we love.
FRIENDS!
the bad doctor - Stolen World provided the initial kernel for the biomagical surgery in HANDS OF STONE. This process can do fucking anything you can imagine, and Stolen World’s commitment to the range of changes that a body can undergo was what made me start to play around with some of the core ideas, and then themes, that I’d like to explore.
Havoc is my constant companion, and always challenges me to expand the horizons of my thinking and engage honestly with others, myself, and art. I wouldn’t have started writing seriously without him.
Weird Writer has been developing her Lost Girls project through exploratory writing, which has inspired me to do the same. While worldbuilding is important for secondary world fantasy, it’s something I’ve really struggled with in the past. The common encyclopedic approach simply does not work for me, my thinking tends to be very non-linear and, basically, stupid. By working through poetic and narrative fragments I can get to the sensuality of the world without being inhibited by the obligation presented by lists (puke), and I can also feel free to let go of controlling the direction of the world and instead let it naturally shift without my interests until I consolidate it after finishing an initial draft. A fictional “world” is not meant to be a tangible thing, but a kind of dream and network of associative meaning.