Visual Artists of the OSR

This is another of my collection/discovery posts which always end up breeding massive degrees of resentment.

As always, if anyone wants to be taken off or have their entry changed then let me know.

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BE VAGUELY CONNECTED TO GAMING IN SOME WAY AND THE OSR HOPEFULLY

COMMENT WITH;

- NAME
- WEBSITES
- DOWNLOADABLE EXAMPLE IMAGE (PORTRAIT RECTANGLES ARE BETTER THAN LANDSCAPE)
- CONTACT DETAILS
- LINKS TO PRODUCTS

..........................................


Matthew Adams

http://thehauntedgasworks.tumblr.com/

Aaron Aelfrey

http://aeronalfrey.blogspot.co.uk/

http://aeronalfrey.storenvy.com/ (Aaron has also done a range of stuff for LotFP.)

http://monsterbrains.blogspot.co.uk/ (This is a site where Aaron catalogues largely historical artists whose work has passed into public domain. It's very good.)

Ian Baggley

"the artist of 1st edition AS&SH"

http://ianbaggley.deviantart.com/

Johnathan Bingham

http://www.johnathanbinghamart.com/blackandwhite.htm

John Blaszczyk

http://www.artofjohnblaze.com/

http://www.rpgnow.com/browse.php?x=0&y=0&artist=John%20Blaszczyk

Gennifer Bone

http://ladyredfingers.deviantart.com/gallery/

Her art featured in Lusus Naturae.

Yannick Bouchard

http://illusorydreams.com/

https://www.facebook.com/illusorydreams

http://yannickbouchard.deviantart.com/

https://www.designbyhumans.com/shop/moutchy/

https://www.threadless.com/@moutchy

http://www.teefury.com/moutchy

He's also done extensive work for LotFP, his art is all of their aesthetic.

See, this guy had all his links in one god. damn. PLACE. See how useful that is?

Sam Bosma

http://sbosma.tumblr.com/

"Probably doesn't identify with OSR but the style and content are there."

Moreven Brushwood

http://moreven.deviantart.com/

Recommended by Beloch Shrike; "probably doesn't consider herself an "OSR Artist," but she plays in OSR games, prefers OSR games over other types of games, and makes art for my OSR books. So I figure she qualifies."

Grax BW

"I juuuust started contributing to OSR books and zines (Blueholme Journeymanne, Fighting Fantazine, Alarums & Excursions), but am looking for more projects to work on! graxbw.deviantart.com or email graxbw at gmail dotcom. thanks!"

http://graxbw.deviantart.com/gallery/

Jeff Call

http://jeffisnotart.tumblr.com

Featured in Mortzengersturm, the Mad Manticore of Prismatic Peak

Courtney Campbell

http://etherealperdition.tumblr.com/

http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.co.uk/

He publishes here but I think mainly as an author rather than artist.

Luigi Castellani

"Did art for Small Niche Games, SineNomine Publishing, Geoffrey McKinney..."

http://artikid.altervista.org/

http://artikid.deviantart.com/

https://tabletoplibrary.com/vendor/artikid-arts/

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5943/Artikid-Arts

Thomas Denmark

http://originaleditionfantasy.blogspot.co.uk/

"Artist and writer on Warriors of the Red Planet, among other things"

Jeremy Duncan

http://dandy-in-the-underworld.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.jduncan-illustration.com/

Can be seen in Into the Odd, Chthonic Codex, and many more.

Amanda Franck

https://afranck.myportfolio.com/

https://twitter.com/annabelle_lee

https://www.instagram.com/amandaleefranck/

Gawki

http://www.gawki.net/

https://www.instagram.com/gaw.ki/

Tomasso Galmacci 

http://solidtom.deviantart.com/gallery/

Ellie Gill

http://www.elliegillillustration.bigcartel.com/store

Jez Gordon

https://jezgordon.myportfolio.com/projects

http://gibletblizzard.blogspot.co.uk/

https://gibletblizzard.tumblr.com/

Purchasable in Death Frost Doom and did layout work for Red and Pleasant Land, Veins of the Earth and many, many, many others.

Herror Grafico

http://heroru.com/

Kelvin Green

http://kelvingreen.blogspot.co.uk/

Can be purchased in Forgive Us.

John Grumph

http://legrumph.tumblr.com/

http://legrumph.org/Terrier/?Cartographie/ (Largely mapping)

Ian Hagen

http://www.playingwithelectronstomakestories.com/

Jeremy Hart

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5679/Jeremy-Hart

Chachi Hernandez

http://www.chachihernandez.com/fantasy.html

C Huth

http://www.chrishuth.com/

They're a pro so check their site for products.

Guillaume Jentey

Can be seen in Macchiato Monsters.

David Lewis Johnson

http://mutantsofgathox.blogspot.co.uk

Can be seen in Gathox Vertical Slum

Rachel Kahn

http://www.portablecity.net/

Ingrid Kallick

https://www.redbubble.com/people/IngridKallick/portfolio

https://www.redbubble.com/people/IngridKallick/shop

Mun Kao

https://www.patreon.com/athousandthousandislands

Logan Knight

http://www.lastgaspgrimoire.com/

Can be seen in Pernicious Albion but I think it's sold out? (it hasn't)

Doug Kovacs

http://dougkovacs.com/

Can be bought in a bunch of DCC modules.

Gus L

http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.co.uk/

Gus does everything from writing to layout to publishing, including art. You can seem more at his site.

Dirk Detweiler Leichty

https://www.instagram.com/dirkwithavengeance/

Jagoba Lekuona

https://jagobalekuona.com/

He did the cover afor theis Spanish Fanzine which you can buy here;
http://viejaescuela.nogarung.com

Wind Lothamer

http://gardamin.deviantart.com/

Rich Longmore

http://richlongmoreillustration.blogspot.co.uk/

Did illustrations for Carcosa, Quelong and a loooot of other stuff.

Evlyn M

(Who also published under the name of  Cédric. And yes I have had a conversation with her about this.)

http://chaudronchromatique.blogspot.co.uk/

Lulu

Jim Magnusson

No site that I could find but he looks good.

Did the cover for this.

Sam Mameli

http://betterlegends.tumblr.com/

Nicolo Maioli

http://satanisjoy.tumblr.com/

Nate Marcel

https://sites.google.com/site/fantasyillustrator/ (his shop is there)

Alex Mayo

http://penetraliapress.deviantart.com/

You can buy his stuff in a lot of places.

Denis McCarthy

https://gwythaintny.wordpress.com/

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?keywords=denis%20mccarthy&test_epoch=0

https://society6.com/gwythaint

Moses McDermott

http://orobolus.deviantart.com/

http://www.furthestlands.com/

Todd McGowan

www.holeinthetoad.blogspot.com

Peter Mullen

http://pmullenblog.blogspot.co.uk/

Russ Nicholson A young man who may go far

http://russnicholson.blogspot.co.uk/

Can be found in Wonder and Wickedness and a few other places over the years.

Diogo Nogueira

http://www.pontosdeexperiencia.com.br/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/diogonogueira/albums/

I think he made Sharp Swords and Sinister Spells and is in a bunch of other things.

Thomas Novosel

http://thomas-novosel.com/

Juan Carlos Ochoa

http://www.juanochoa.co/

Hes a pro so I think he's been in a bunch of stuff but try this.

Anxy P

I know hes in Vacant Ritual Assembly 6

Stefan Poag

https://stefanpoag.com/

His shop is here and he's going to be in Operation Unfathomable with Jason Sholtis (below).

Sean Poppe

http://beardedruckus.tumblr.com/

Featured in the Driftwood Verses and Wormskin.

Micheal Prescott

http://michaelprescott.deviantart.com/

Joel Priddy

http://www.joelpriddy.com

Scrap Princess

http://raggedyassmonstermanual.tumblr.com/

Co-creator of Veins of the Earth, Deep Carbon Observatory and Fire on the Velvet Horizon.

Daniel Puerta

http://dandibuja.blogspot.co.uk/

http://dandibuja.tumblr.com/

https://www.gofundme.com/criaturas-vacio-celeste

Alec S

https://twitter.com/Oddsbod

https://www.instagram.com/oddsbod/

Eric Quigley

https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/0h9A_

https://www.artstation.com/artist/quigleyer 

Matthew Ray

https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/UICXnB

Luka Rejec

www.wizardthieffighter.com

Seen in the Misty Isles of Eld, and a few other places I think.

Sarah "Doombringer" Richardson

http://www.scorcha.net/

Stuart Robertson

http://stuartrobertson.deviantart.com/

James Shields

http://jeshields.com/wp/

Jason Sholtis

http://roll1d12.blogspot.co.uk/

http://theystalktheunderworld.blogspot.co.uk/

He has the Dungeon Dozen book out and is releasing Operation Unfathomable at some point.

Wayne Snyder

http://goblinminimart.com/

You can buy his stuff online here.

His portfolio.

Robertson Sondoh Jr

http://experimentalplayground.blogspot.co.uk/

"he mainly draws for his own projects -minimalist d6 rpgs influenced by old school stuff:"

Karl Stjernberg

https://get.google.com/u/0/albumarchive/103342954014125100135/albums/photos-from-posts

Leanna TenEycke

http://www.leannateneycke.com/

Del Teigeler

mavfire.blogspot.com

mavfire.deviantart.com

http://delteigelerillustration.com/

Illustrator, Isometric designer

worked for North Wind Adventures AS&SH, Troll Lord Games, TSR (New), Blueholme, Expeditious Retreat Press, and many others.

Jethro Wall

http://www.jethrobot.com/

He's got zines and a store on his site.

Andrew Walter

http://www.andrewwalter.co.uk/

Did the cover for Crypts of Indormancy.

James V West

http://doomslakers.blogspot.co.uk/

Does the Black Pudding Zine.

Grey Wiz

http://breakrpg.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.breakrpg.com/

http://blog.mysteriouspath.com/

Steve Zieser

Steve is sadly no longer with us but friends and fans of his have asked for him to be included. I hope this won't be offensive to his wife or relatives.

His blog http://curmudgeonsdragons.blogspot.co.uk/

You can still buy his work here https://society6.com/stevezieser

Silent Titans of Wir-Heal

"The wilderness of Wirral,

few lived there

Who loved with a good heart

either God or man."

Even without its unearthly substrate of sleeping Titans, Wir-Heal would still be a strange eddy in the lands of the Wrecked Heptarchy. Named for the Wir by men of the North, the Myrtle, the Myrica gale that grows in the bogs and scents the air with sweet resin, Wir-Heal is made from swamp and hill with little in-between.

Rippling bogs and still meres wrap the land, the glasslike water broken only by the cry of birds. Tidal flats make up its margins, reaches of sand and reeds riddled with runnels and streams, invisible until you get close. Covered twice a day in the murmuring of surf. Its paths are pinned to the earth by bridges of mortared stone, crumbling concrete, pine planks, un-nailed adze-cut oak or the dessicated jaws of whales.

Walkers find faded images with disappearing glyphs, which seem to be maps. Greying fog-like letters and bare black signs, an argent arrow, pointing to a place. Men have gone mad studying these signs. Impossible to tell what comes from when in Wir-Heal, so twisted in time the place is. What’s unknown is best ignored.

Hidden in the wilderness like dim gems in a rusted crown, are small hamlets of low slumped stone painted white, piled in skeletons of black oak and topped with thatched roofs, surrounded by fields fenced with branching drystone walls. In the fields are wild woman and wild men who walk on all fours eating the grass, chewing on dandelions, vines and branches and leaves in their hair, green men, grotesqueries. The Woodwose.

Watching over them, farming them and eating them, are animals standing on hind legs wearing the masks of men. Sheep, pigs, bulls, boars, bears and wolves, hares, otters, cows and deer, all with voices and the minds of human beings.

Beyond is forest and the wrecks of time. Deciduous climax vegetation broken by rolling hills like whales shouldering waves, cut by red escarpments of sunset-red sand-stone that glows in summer light, crossed by ruins and the wrecks of rails and roads, riven remains of an imagined future. Thick with crumbling concrete pillars, rags of tattered plastic, shards of glass and shining half-rotted cans with undecipherable signs, chain-link fences rising from the undergrowth between brown walking-tracks of beaten earth that break into rivulets of indistinguishable trails.

Sane time sets with the sun. With night, unbidden futures rise and the land dreams. What’s true in day may not be in the dark; suburban mazeways with trimmed lawns and light-emitting empty homes, parks of gogmagogic industry, vast box-buildings holding unknown processes, surrounded by trimmed lawns and labyrinths of waste ground, gigantic trash-Tors covering plutonic reserves for future wars, abandoned concrete docks on empty shores, servicing nothing, libraries of unreadable knowledge.

Why? The song tells it;

"Chronos called them then,

As his endeavour failed.

Theign of time who's thralls are tides,

He who spins back star-paths,

Or seems to.

Even those unalterable ones.

He called them from the ebbing tides of time,

The fretted sands of life upon this world when,

After mans decay,

As just before his rise,

Giants Ruled.

Titans of the end and of the worlds last breath.

Titans of the fall.

Titans mechanical, broken and cool,

Mighty-minded world-shapers made from mans last craft.

Abandoned thinkers in an empty world.

Kaos-children,

Knowing all,

The dark behind the setting sun.

They came,

And failed, and fell.

And Chronos fell, and falls.

And time began, begins, and is.

Clocks spring into life,

Seasons dance in regular time,

Winter follows summer out of fear,

(Never forgetting its hate,

always resenting its chains).

Sun circles earth,

Men age and die,

The dead stay in their place,

(For the most part),

Reality is being born;

Calmest of children,

Clearest of created things.”

Chronos and his kin became the earth, the seas the sky and the stars, fire and flint, bone and bark, dreams and dust. But those Titans of the future could not die, for they had not been born. Paradox was banished from this world, order ruled. They must wait, wait and sleep. Wait till waking when time would allow them to be. Wait and dream of worlds unborn. Under the earth but not of it, sleeping just under the turf, oak roots tangled in their hair, bogs in their nostrils, rabbit warrens just beneath their finger-nails.

Sleeping and dreaming and turning just under the grass, their dreams escaping, staining the air, transforming the land, filling it with memories of millennia to be, dreams of industry, dreams of long decay, mechanical, indifferent and absolute. Long sorrows and the wash of dark forgotten wars, scars before the wound.

They lie tangled with each other like drugged men. Their entwined and sleeping limbs make the bedrock of the peninsula. It was there the powers dumped their somnolent forms, piling one upon another, hurling them into the sea between the Rood-Die and the Afon-Mor. Sleeping in Wir-Heal where the myrtle springs up from the bog, salmon nosing wisely in its root, the Ouzel, bird most knowing, in its branch. A peninsula bounded by the rivers of the gods, fronted by cold seas, a place where few would wish to go, and from which few return.

Yet men do go to Wir-Heal, for the minds of those Titans are labyrinths of gems and gold. And men know greed above all things.

Who is the Unbalanced Creator?

So some time in 2014 somebody created "Unbalanced Dice Games" as a publisher on RPG.NOW, made some adventures and a bunch of rather unique products for Labyrinth Lord, then apparently disappeared, then came back this year with a new adventure and some new things.

I found out about this publisher from Bryce's review of "Broken Gods Pain", so good work for him for his long toiling in the nerd mines.

They have popped back up in 2017 to extend their adventure sequence with the new epic "Perfectorium of The Golden Tentacle".

The Adventures so far are;

Broken Gods Pain - for low levels, 64 pages, note its not "The Broken Gods Pain", just "Broken Gods Pain", just like "Ud" is simply "Ud". This starts with the PCs 'cursed' in a dream to find the Broken God and transported by a magical wave to a quiet village.


Ud - for mid levels, 46 pages. The PCs receive a request from an unknown woman to find her stolen family.


Perfectorium of The Golden Tentacle - for higher levels, 166 pages, a true epic. A hot new cult, the Receivers of the Golden Tentacle is doling out utterly free and beneficial magic powers to whoever for no extra cost, buuuuuut;

"Behind the Receivers is a terrible force. Some bizarre entity manipulates everything with its tentacles. What seems wonderful becomes terrible as the months roll by."

If you enjoyed the construction of that sentence, read on.



ODD

Its difficult to describe just how odd these adventures are, not just in conception and content but in presentation, text and delivery. The only way I can describe them is its like someone was given a copy of Labyrinth Lord and no other information, just kept in a cube, and asked to invent new monsters, adventures and ideas.

Or its like a really smart 14 year old with mild Aspergers.

Or its someone, maybe they live on an island in Alaska and they just crank these things out to last through the winter when they get back from the fishing fleets.

Or its like Joesky.

"Unbalanced Dice Games" is such a common phrase that it returns a whole lot of nothing on Google. I can't find a blog or anything else to let us know who this person is.

Bryce posits a possible 'art-crime' thing with someone writing in a faux-naive voice. I hope I'm not being taken for a ride here but it seems really unlikely that is the case. As my prime exhibit I present you with this product - "Wheelies for Labyrinth Lord Players", presented with this cover image;

What is a 'Wheelie'? Well, as the text itself informs you (I have tried to maintain the spacing and sentence construction);

"Wheelies are round charts that contain game information a Labyrinth Lord player, or even the Labyrinth Lord, might like in front of him/her. Usually this information is in an attack chart, saving throw matrix or written on a character sheet. Now you can just print up a Wheelie that matches your character's class and level. Forget about writing that stuff down! The Wheelies are divided into 3 parts: the outer ring, the first inner ring and the center circle.

The center circle:
Top: Class
Middle: Saving throws based on the class level.
Bottom: Class level

The first two rings from outside in:
The outer ring: AC
First inner ring: the 20 sided dice roll needed to hit the AC in the cell adjacent to it. This corresponds to the class level in the combat matrix of the Labyrinth Lord book.

The following pages contains Wheelies for Cleric, Thief, Elf, Dwarf, Halflling, Magic-User and Fighter. 1 page for each level. Dwarf, Elf and Halfling races stop where the Labyrinth Lord game stops them. All the numbers are based off of what's in that book.

Enjoy!"

Wheelies are pretty darn remarkable. There are 115 individual Wheelies in this document, one per page. Forget about writing that stuff down!

I can't believe that the person who would individually type out 115 Wheelies and arrange them in a pdf could be faking. I think they are the real deal.



BUT HOW?

Ok, firstly the layout is manic.

It's a word doc just pdf'd pretty much. Everything is one big column (I know I have done this SHUT UP), all the paragraphs are indented and the sentences have double spaces in them. All of this remains exactly the same from section to section. The titles likewise are larger bold versions of the main text.

The pdf's do have bookmarks with a reasonable informational hierarchy and the latest adventure, Golden Tentacle, is in TWO COLUMNS.

Room or encounter descriptions commonly drift over onto other pages, sometimes just a sentence, stats or a single word will be drifting lonely on the next page.

Within the descriptions the informational transmission is deeply linear. What I mean here is that a room or encounter description is more like a story about what will happen if the PCs interact with it than it is a series of tools and prompts to help you run it.

Different creators have a number of ways of breaking down descriptions into informational chunks. Usually an overview comes first, often base on what PCs will see when they enter a space, then objects or elements that might interact or respond to investigation, then, perhaps separated into sections, deeper consequences and more info about interaction, with stat blocks for living elements. Then at the end we usually get treasure or persistent effects.

The Unbalanced creator tells the reader about an encounter as if they were simply discussing it. This is probably terrible from a gameplay perspective, or at least imperfect, but I do find it rather charming, as an aesthetic impulse to run the game it could be said to add something and, once you do comprehend the information, the elements of play are usually good. If the DM comprehends and arranges the described elements in the fictional space, they should work.

This paragraph from the starting section of 'Ud' should hopefully provide a reasonable example;


"The beavers are simple group that once resided in the area where the smoke fog is now. They don't speak human or any such language, just beaver. The Game Master should position their home somewhere close but outside of the smoke fog. If someone is able to communicate with them they will tell them of the day when Ud's fort came into being. The ground shook one bright morning and out of it a large rock like thing came out of the ground. For the first day nothing else happened then the smoke started to pour out of it. This forced the beavers to leave their home and move out of the smoke. On their way out they ran into many strange things. Pig men running around with nets and spears. Humans that walked funny and groaned for the most part. At one point something strange and golden flew through the air like a swarm of large flies. They will also tell the party that the fort resides in the center of the smoke fog. See Smoke Fog section below for more information the Beavers will tell the party about protecting themselves from the smoke fog."


This is all if you speak Beaver.

As you can see, the Unbalanced creator has a rather distinctive way with language, and candence.




ADVENTURE CONCEPTS AND ARRANGEMENT

The ideas of the Unbalanced creator operate very closely within the classic Rientsien idea space, much more than the pseudo-literary ideaspace. But within that space they are very original. Nothing is re-used from 'standard' D&D, there are no references I can find. Everything seems very pure and un-performed, and very playful and very charming.

In 'Ud', the random encounters (in the area of 'smoke fog') on the way to the adventure include (amongst many others);

- a pile of dead zombies

- mindless zombies

- mutated attack zombies

The 'dead zombies' are zombies that have 'died?' so dead bodies. This does make sense in the adventure but this strange grouping of words, like 'smoke fog', which is also accurate, and also strange, is typical of the Unbalanced creator. The mindless zombies just wander past in the fog without doing anything, the family of the woman who hooks you the quest are amongst these. The mutated attack zombies are a really cool, strange encounter, made from the simplest of materials;


"Mutated from Mindless Zombies these things appear as warped undead. Their heads are larger, the eyes are dark holes and the mouths are much larger than a humans."

And the encounter text;

"Suddenly the party starts to hear roaring coming from all sides of them. It seems they are surrounded. If they look closely they can see shadows that are people like coming towards them from all directions. It takes one round for them to reach the party, 8-12 Mutated Attack Zombies attack!"

That's a good encounter. Roaring surrounding you, then the shadows, then the zombies pelting out of the mist from every direction, then the eyes like dark holes and the mouths "much larger than a normal humans." It's made from only the simplest imaginative pieces but it has life, vigour and originality and as we read through the adventure, it makes coherent sense for the world described.

I'll break off briefly to look at the art.  It's these simple, small, scratchy little black and white glyphs, pretty obviously all done by one person. Here are the two 'Mutated Attack Zombies'

I mean, it fits perfectly. You can clearly see the mind of the creator, can you not?

The whole thing is like that, with these sparks and flares of what seems like entirely unforced originality and imaginative flair.

The bad guys fort in 'Ud' looks like a giant treasure chest, the doorway is a big keyhole with a portcullis, in the final rooms he sleeps on a bed that is also shaped like a big treasure chest, but with spikes. That's how much he likes treasure, and how evil he is.

Everything is slightly bonkers and disconnected, but, within the conceptual space created by the adventures, things generally do make internal sense. That is, once you understand the rules of the world, both the imagined world considered as a pseudo-real space, and the world-construction as considered as the product of a particular mind, players (and PCs) should be able to make reasonable decisions based on their discoveries.

Here's another example. As you work through Uds fortress, you encounter Pig Men who serve him, and Dwarf-like creatures that do magic for him and perform wierd magic/science experiments. Then you find this;


"10 Pig Man Cow Experiment

In the center of this room on top of a straw bed rests an odd creature. It has the body of a large cow but with three pig heads. Its tail is very long and appears to have a spear head attached to it. It will look at the party and two of its heads will start to laugh. The non laughing head's eyes will glow red and it will say “You are the Old generation, we will take over your duties for you. Die, die die...”. The Pig Man Cow Thing will then attack the party. If it hits a character it will shout out “The Pig Men are through!”. Once the party kills it the heads and the tail will fall off. If the party looks into the neck they will see all these gears and tubes. A bleeping noise will be audible for a few rounds and then die off.

Pig Man Cow Experiment
(HD: 5, HP: 19, AC: 4[15], Attacks: Tail Spear(1d8),
Saving Throw: 12, Move: 12, CL/XP: 5/240)"


Is anyone else getting this or am I totally out on a limb? We have a mystery here people! Who is the Unbalanced Creator?

A Review of Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

This is another very-good book from everyone's favourite lefty-Oakshott* (Oaknot?). The last book of his I read was ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’ and this is just as good.

'Seeing Like a State' re-tells the story of some of the 20th centuries biggest mass-fuckups and links them together as examples of 'high modernism', an aesthetic of hyper-rational centrally planned large-scale change driven by city-based  bureaucracies and authoritarian powers which claims to be directed towards improving and enhancing the systems it interacts with but, Scott argues, is much more about making those systems accessible to and measurable by, central power, even it vastly reduces their effectiveness.

When the thing being changed is the agricultural system of an entire nation, 'vastly reducing its effectiveness' means death.

Scott’s primary case studies are what he calls the 'High-Modernist City', based mainly around the ideas and designs of Le Corbusier, Soviet Communism, especially forced collectivisation, and Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania, which is basically the less-systematically-headfucked version of Soviet Collectivisation with a lower bodycount.

It’s a long but light, dense but clear, intricately-written but rationally arranged, deeply researched and calmly delivered book. Scott can write.

One of the most persuasive elements of Scott’s book is his criticism of the invisible madness of hyper-rationalism. A perfectly logical and superficially clear and 'scientific' aesthetic and doctrine which is perfectly accurate, within its own self-contained abstraction of the world, and totally, utterly unaware of how that abstraction is going to smash into reality like a glass meteorite.

It reminded me a lot of Ian McGilchrist’s "The Master and His Emissary" which I think Scott would probably like a lot. His description of the logic of cities almost fades into neuroscience or philosophy. This is Scott on High-Modernism;

The Dark Twin

"The planned city, the planned village, and the planned language (not to mention the command economy) are, we have emphasized, likely to be thin cities, villages and languages. They are thin in the sense that they cannot reasonably plan for anything more than the few schematic aspects of the inexhaustibly complex activates that characterize "thick" cities and villages. one all-but-guaranteed consequence of such thin planning is that the planned institution generates an unofficial reality - a "dark twin" - that arises to perform many of the various needs that the planned institution fails to fulfil. Brasilia, as Holston showed, engendered an "unplanned Brasilia" of construction workers, migrants, and those whose housing and activities were necessary but were not foreseen or were precluded by the plan. Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment of its official structures, given rise to another, far more "disorderly" and complex city that makes the official city work - that is virtually a condition of its existence. That is, the dark twin is not just an anomaly, an "outlaw reality"; it represents the activity and life without which the official city would cease to function. The outlaw city bears the same relation to the official city as the Parisian taxi driver's actual practices bear to the Code routine."



And this is McGilchrist on brain hemispheres;

"The right hemisphere needs not to know what the left hemisphere knows, for that would destroy its ability to understand the whole; at the same time the left hemisphere cannot know what the right hemisphere knows. From inside its own system, from its own point of view, what it believes it has 'created' appears complete. Just because what it produces is in focus and at the centre of the field of vision, it is more easily seen. This is one reason we are so much more aware of what it contributes to our knowledge of the world.

The left hemisphere cannot deliver anything new direct from 'outside', but it can unfold, or 'unpack' what it is given Its very strength - and it contains enormous strength, as the history of civilisation demonstrates - lies in the fact that it can render explicit what the right hemisphere has to leave implicit, leave folded in. Yet that it also its weakness. The clarifying explicitness needs to be reintegrated with the sense of the whole, the now unpacked or unfolded whatever-it-may-be being handed back to the domain of the right hemisphere, where it once more lives. This turns out to be a problem,..."

That isn’t a perfect quote to explain the similarity I’m seeing but McGilchrists book is huge so that’s the best you are getting right now.

Scott’s 'dark twin' also reminds me a lot of his views on the relationship between the agrarian state and the Zomia in 'The Art of Not being Governed', two spaces which oppose each other, on ordered and 'transparent', one 'opaque' and (apparently) disordered, yet both linked and almost requiring the other to define themselves and shape their identity.

As with 'Not Being Governed' Scott delivers another tribute to the crafty intelligence of the Peasant. The Parable of the Ants is a good example;

"Growing in the compound of the house in which I lived was a locally famous mango tree. Relatives and acquaintances would visit when the fruit was ripe in the hope of being given a few fruits and, more important, the chance to save and plant the seeds next to their own house. Shortly before my arrival, however, the tree had become infested with large red ants, which destroyed most of the fruit before it could ripen. It seemed nothing could be done short of bagging each fruit. Several times I noticed the elderly head of household, Mat Isa, brining dried nipah palm fronds to the base of the mango tree and checking on them. When I finally got around to asking what he was up to, he explained it to me, albeit reluctantly, as for him this was pretty humdrum stuff compared to our usual gossip. He knew that the small black ants, which had a number of colonies at the rear of the compound, were the enemies of the large red ants. He also knew that the thin, lancelike leaves of the nipah palm curled into long, tight tubes when they fell from the tree and died. (In fact, the local people used the tubes to roll their cigarettes.) Such tubes would also, he knew, be ideal places for the queens of the black ant colonies to lay their eggs. Over several weeks he placed dried nipah fronds in strategic places until he had masses of black-ant eggs beginning to hatch. He then placed the egg-infested fronds against the mango tree and observed the ensuing week-long Armageddon. Several neighbours, many of them skeptical, and their children followed the fortunes of the ant war closely. Although smaller by half or more, the black ants finally had the weight of numbers to prevail against the red ants and gain possession of the ground at the base of the mango tree. As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or fruits while the fruits were still on the tree, the crop was saved."

I could make a very slight criticism that in Scotts books the Peasant is _always_ a near super-heroic figure bursting straight from the black earth imbued with tricks and courageous wisdom with which to fool the dumb authoritarian bureaucrat sent to requisition grain for the parasitical city-dwellers, but that would be a little unfair.

Only a little though. Scott does mention some of the situations which provoked the lust for redeeming high-modernism but he never actually states outright that sometimes poor people can be fucking dumb. Sometimes they are dumb.

For particular interest for my RPG-culture readers is one of Scotts final chapters on what he calls 'Metis'. I would recommend that anyone into what's called the 'Old School' scene should pick up the book even if just to read this chapter alone;

"Metis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring a quick and practiced adaptation that becomes almost second nature to the practitioner. The skills of metis may well involve rules of thumb, but such rules are largely acquired through practice (often in formal apprenticeship) and a developed feel or knack for strategy. Metis resists simplification into deductive principals which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply. In a sense, metis lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge, which can be learned by rote."

This quote in particular pleased me because it brings in the necessary anarchism of people who deal with fire, which matches with what I read in 'Fire on the Rim' by Stephen Pyne;

"Red Adair's team, which has been hired worldwide to cap well-head fires, was a striking and diagnostic case. before the Gulf War of 1990, his was the only team with any appreciable "clinical" experience, and he could set his own price. Each fire presented new problems and required an inspired mixture of experience and improvisation. We can imagine, at almost opposite ends of a spectrum, Adair on one hand and a minor clerk performing highly repetitive steps on the other. Adair's job cannot, by definition, be reduced to a routine. he must begin with the unpredictable - an accident, a fire - and then devise the techniques and equipment (from an existing repertoire, to be sure, but one invented largely by him) required to extinguish that fire and cap that well. The clerk, by contrast, deals with a predictable, routinized environment that can often be ordered in advance and down to the smallest detail. Adair cannot simplify his environment in order to apply a cookie-cutter solution."

We could go a lot deeper into this, the idea of metis and the glass cage in particular would be interesting to me. Does the creation of a large, efficient, bureaucratic state necessarily shape a population who will be poor citizens?

Obedient, authoritarian, excellent at rationalising the excise of power but rarely questioning it, more closely related to the state than to each other, more interested in the state than each other (quite reasonably since it has the larger effect on their lives), lonely, alienated, since the state cannot provide the means of de-alienation and good at keeping out of trouble.

Does the state destroy the capacity of its subjects to be citizens?

Anyway, this is a fragment, go read the book.




*The man himself gets a little bit of a sly stab right at the end of the page notes;

"It is in fact impossible for most modern readers to take in the vast complacency with which Oakshott regards what the past has bequeathed to him in its habits, practices, and morals without wondering if Jews, women, the Irish, and the working class in general might not feel as blessed by the deposit of history as did this oxford don."