Your favorite singer in liquid form

John Cleese remarked on an early influence: “We all loved The Goon Show in the Monty Python Team: it ignited some energy in us. It was more a spirit that was passed on, rather than any particular technique. The point is that once somebody has crossed a barrier and done something that has never been done before, it is terribly easy for everybody else to cross it.”

It sure crossed my barriers, and early on and in a way that ended up impinging on my own erotic consciousness decades later — showing up in the Apsinthion Protocol.

As it happens, The Goon Show (BBC show site here, U.S. fan site here, UK fan site here) was something which, by there merest chance, I had the good luck (?) to encounter in my own early adolescence. For no obvious reason, this 1950s absurdist British radio comedy was rebroadcast every week on a public radio station that I could just…barely…pick up, and I was hooked by it from the first time I heard an episode. Written by Spike Milligan, and acted largely by him, Peter Sellars, and Harry Secombe, it conjured up a fictional universe from which logic was ejected with such vigor that it made the Marx Brothers look like Betrand Russell.

Needless to say, they really were a central influence. I remember quite a lot of scenes, but the one that seems most apropos here was one right in the theme of “person in liquid form.”

A little quick background: the most common plot of a Goon Show involved some plan by a pair of impoverished aristocratic grifters named Hercules Grytpype-Thinne (voiced by Sellars) and Count Jim Moriarty (voiced by Milligan) to take advantage of the good-natured but surpassingly naive Neddie Seagoon (voiced by Secombe). In the episode “The Childe Harolde Rewarde,” which first aired on December 8, 1958, 37 year-old Neddie escapes from his decrepit and infantilizing parents Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister. Henry and Minnie offer a reward for his return, priced a 4 shillings a pound for their 16-stone child (!). Hearing this, Grytpype-Thinne and Moriarity engage in a convoluted scheme that involves stuffing Neddie with vast amounts of food (paging Molly Ren!) in order to claim a larger reward.

Things don’t work out quite as planned, as the transcript (mine is a hybrid of this one and this other one) shows.

Grytpype-Thynne

Here, Auntie Min, your child Harold. 613 stone at 4 shillings a pound equals, ah, skeltonfrunderklee pounds reward.

Bannister

He’s a fake, my boy only weighs 16 stone.

Grytpype-Thynne

Well, we shall reduce him. Into the steam bath with him, Moriarty!

Moriarty

Ah!

Seagoon

Oh, please, stop [screams]

Grytpype-Thynne

Get the steam on his knees, Moriarty! [laughs] That’s it. Look at that stomach vanish, Moriarty!

Seagoon screams.

Moriarty

That’s got him down, bring him down.

Seagoon

Oh, please, stop! I’m vaporizing with the heat! You can’t do this to me, I’m, I’m the King of 23 Pond Street! I’ll have you arrested by the royal policeman! [speeds up to inaudibility] My mother keeps a duck-farm in Kent! [screams, winds down]

Moriarty

Ah, he’s vaporized now, into this bottle with him. There!

Pop!

moriarty

Now, to the Palladium!

The scene: Harry Secombe’s dressing room.

Dance hall music, knock on door.

Agent

You want an autograph?

Eccles

Yeah, autographs.

Agent

In that cue over there, sonny.

Cash register

(arriving from a distance)

…dressing room

It’s hot in here.

Eccles

Yeah, like a drink from my bottle of water?

Bluebottle

No, thanks, Eccles. I’m training to be a desert.

Eccles

Oh.

Moriarty

Hands up, everybody! Drop everything!

Grytpype-Thynne

Yes! Now, listen, Secombe fans, this bottle contains your favorite singer in liquid form!

Secombe

(muffled through rest of show)

Hello, folks, don’t let me down!

Grytpype-Thynne

(aside)

Put a cork on it, Moriarty!

Pop!

Secombe

Oh!

Grytpype-Thynne

Now, we want 1,000 pounds, or we drink him!

Secombe

Don’t let him drink me, folks, I shall hate traveling by tube!

Agent

All right, all right, I’ll pay!

Clatter of money falling.

Agent

There, 1,000 pounds in big NAAFI spoon.

Two escaping whooshes

Agent

Harry! Harry! Speak to me! Say something, Harry!

Secombe

Help!

Agent

Hold this bottle while I get a doctor.

Eccles

Okay. [hums]

Bluebottle

Eccles, don’t get them bottles mixed up, Eccles.

Eccles

Oh?

Secombe

Can you see what’s coming, folks? If so, well, don’t spoil it for me!

Bagpipes and singing Scotsmen.

Eccles

Hello, doctor

Doc

Have no fear. This is the patient here, is it, aye?

pouring sound, more Scottish noises, bagpipes.

Doc

Aye, this is a genuine vintage Secombe and it tastes very ill.

Eccles laughs

Doc

What are you laughing at, what are you laughing at there?

Eccles

Well, I was just ready to in case anybody said something funny.

The Doc mumbles.

Secombe

Hurry up, I’m catching me death of cold in here. Me shiverings have gone to the bottom!

Eccles

Oh!

Doc

We’ve got no time to waste. The only way to restore Mr. Secombe to his normal self is to bring this to the boil, add a pound of leeks…

Water boiling.

Doc

Goats milk, a touch of sospan fach, my doons a spoon a world and…

Secombe

What about some brandy?

Doc

Steady Secombe, steady Secombe, I’m just going to add this bust of Sabrina to bring you to the boil.

(I cannot resist an editorial interruption at this point, since this last joke might be a little bit obscure to anyone not a Gooniac. Sabrina (Norma Ann Sykes) was an actress and model often referenced on the Goons.

The concepts both of “bust” and “bringing to a boil” seem readily applicable here. For those of you who like this sort of thing, there’s a whole site dedicated to Sabrina here.

We now return to our regularly-scheduled transcript. Thank you.)

Doc

That’s strange, nothing’s happening.

Eccles

Oh, I, I gave you the wrong bottle!

Doc

What, what, what? The other one then, hurry, it’s the payoff! Hurry.

Eccles

I… I drank it.

Doc

Say `ah’.

Eccles

Ah.

Secombe

(screams)

He’s had onions for tea!

Doc

Bring the stomach pump.

Eccles:

Oh no! [inaudible]

Greenslade

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the interests of hygiene, we end this show. Good night, all.

Eccles

Aoooh!

We’re supposed, of course, to be laughing at all the absurdity of it all, but I confess at the time the concept of being turned into a liquid — by a deliberate and even industrial-sounding process, set off a twinge of erotic feeling. I mean, maybe it was the proximity of the “bust of Sabrina” to the concept that did it, except that I don’t think I knew back then who Sabrina was. In any event, there’s a line of influence here to what I would write decades later, I feel sure…

Why liquid girl?

“You get warmer and warmer, and then you melt.”

If you had to come up with the genesis of the strange fantasy of Li Anwei and Nanetta Rector and eventually others orgasmically turning to liquid, a conceit on which The Apsinthion Protocol turns, you might do worse than that, a description of what orgasm felt like, given to 18 year-old me by a female companion.

But there’s doubtless some reason why this particular metaphor stuck so soundly in my mind. Could it be, perhaps, that liquids, and water especially are such erotic elements? Venus is intimately connected with the sea: she was neither gestated in a womb nor constructed as a piece of technology like Pandora, but emerged from the sea foam, the product of sea-water and the blood from the castrated genitals of Ouranos. Her emergence is commemorated in perhaps the greatest masterwork of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

It is a subject painters will return to again and again. Consider Odilon Redon’s twentieth-century symbolist version of the same, which I find particularly striking.

But the association of women and water and eros is not limited to Venus. Consider also, as just one example,Gustave Courbet’s Woman in the Waves.

Women, eros, liquid. So powerful an association that there’s even a genre of erotica (printed in water resistant volumes, like that depicted at the left) devoted to it. And if you survey photographic erotica, you’ll find that it’s a prominent theme — so much is shot in our around water — on beaches or in oceans or near waterfalls or ponds. Or in baths or showers or hot tubs. Surf over to a frequent poster of tasteful female nudes — GoodShit for example — on any day of the week and count the number of young lovelies who are in, or near, or covered with water.

And so I suppose it is hardly an accident also that some odd person like me might drive the metaphor into a more literal sort of fantasy…

A brief introduction to Gnosis College

Here is a bit of background on Gnosis College, the fictional setting in which The Apsinthion Protocol and its successor stories are set.

Gnosis College isn’t modeled after any particular place, but it is modeled after a type of institution that occupies a small but important place in American higher education: the liberal arts college and in particular the midwestern liberal arts college in a small city or large town. Institutions of this type typically have between a thousand and two thousand enrolled students at a time. There are no graduate students and therefore almost all the teaching is done by actual faculty, mostly in small classes. Colleges of this kind attract bright, highly-motivated students who would generally find the Ivy or major state university experience alienating. The courses of study at schools like these genuinely are one of liberal learning: you can major in something like philosophy or chemistry or comparative literature, but few if any courses of study are there to prepare you directly for a practical career.

(A parenthetical note, which I can’t resist. To some readers, all this will standing out in The Apsinthion Protocol’s script right away. A friend of mine who once taught at an institution like this, which we’ll call Alpha College here, read the script and a few of its companions and immediately commented: “I enjoyed reading about the febrile antics of Gnosis’s students. Just like Alpha, if H.P. Lovecraft wrote the curriculum and Russ Meyer were in charge of the admissions office.” There are moments when one is happy to be an author.)

Gnosis in particular I imagine as an institution of about 1800 students, founded originally in the nineteenth century like so many of its real-world analogs to train ministers of religion for the country as it expanded westward, but long since turned secular and worldly in its orientation. Like some of its analogs, Gnosis is fairly elite: you would find students there who might have gone to Princeton or Stanford had they been so inclined. Unlike most of its real-world counterparts (but like a few) Gnosis has a lot of money, having had alumni who made fortunes in various technological endeavors, including money made off patents for “conceptives,” of which more discussion in a later post.

Gnosis is also rich in peculiar resources. For reasons no one can quite adequately explain, Gnosis has over the years produced an unusual number of explorers and collectors of antiquities, who have donated generously to both a college museum and to the college library. Gnosis’s library has an unusually large set of special reserved stacks.

Gnosis is located in a small city called Pleasant Prairie, population a few tens of thousands. It is a quiet and unassuming place, the sort of place where, if some prominent civic organization were to name it “America’s Most Ordinary Town,” the locals would display the award proudly in City Hall. Pleasant Prairie knew a measure of industrial prosperity in the past, having been a center of manufacturing and railroading. Gracious downtown buildings and a few elm-lined streets of elegant Victorian houses – as well as a fair number of now-derelict industrial structures – testify to this past. As manufacturing receded as a source of employment, the fortunes of Pleasant Prairie waned somewhat, although the wealth of the college helps keep the town afloat.

The Gnosis campus is bordered by another institution of higher education, St. Mary Magdalene College, a Catholic women’s college jokingly referred to as the Virgin Vault by some Gnosis people. SMMC is run by an order of nuns who keep alive the otherwise moribund tradition of colleges functioning in loco parentis toward their students. It is thus a much-favored school for families with traditional values and problematical daughters. The gates are locked tightly every night at nine. SMMC doesn’t appear in The Apsinthion Protocol, but will in a forthcoming script, Progress in Research.

On the outskirts of Pleasant Prairie we find another institution, a juvenile detention facility called the State Home for Wayward Girls, which is pretty much what it sounds like. (The state has given it another, nicer, name which no one can readily recall.) This place to will appear in a future script, most prominently in Invisible Girl, Heroine.

This is the beginning of the background. More will follow.

Welcome

Welcome to all and sundry. I am your host; kindly call me Dr. Faustus.

Do cheesy science fiction movies do something for you? Would you go (or have you ever gone) to see a midnight performance of Invasion of the Bee Girls? Have you ever shared the monster’s point of view in Creature from the Black Lagoon? Did you find it at least mildly titillating Virginia Bruce was (theoretically) running around without any clothes on in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman? Have you ever thought perhaps that H.P. Lovecraft might even cooler if he weren’t so damn sex-negative? Do you infer a line of artistic influence from Katsushika Hokusai to Toshio Maeda? Do you think it would be sexier to be Victor Frankenstein than Elvis?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then perhaps this site is for you.

This is the formal opening post at EroticMadScience.com, a site which I am intially opening as an experiment in the self-publication of some of my own fiction and my musings on a peculiar topic, to wit the topos of “mad science” or the “Mad Scientist”

as a source of kink.

If you want a detailed account of what this is and why I am doing it, I invite you to look at The Thaumatophile Manifesto, which I lay all this out in detail. And if you just want to jump in and see the kink in action, take a look at The Apsinthion Protocol, which is the first of seven long stories in my “Gnosis College” mad science series. It is written as a screenplay, because that’s the way things play out in my head.

More things will be coming here in the future: I’ll try to explain the various literary (?) antecedents of my fiction as well as provide people who find the erotic mad science thing appealing suggestions for future reading and viewing. In the future, I hope to offer a forum for people interested in what is going on here.

I feel great excitement at starting this site. As I was planning it, an aphorism of Nietzsche‘s from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind.

Die grossen Epochen unsres Lebens liegen dort, wo wir den Muthgewinnen, unser Böses als unser Bestes umzutaufen.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, #116

The great epochs in our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our our evil (this being Nietzsche, perhaps that should be implicitly read as our “evil”) as what is best in us. I guess today is just one of those days.

Comments on this an other posts will be welcome, subject of course to moderation (see the Manifesto for more detail on what might or might not be appropriate here).

So perhaps I shouldn’t say just welcome to all and sundry. Instead, welcome friends.