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THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR HAVING ME. I AM DEEPLY HONORED TO BE A GUEST at ICFA.
The program describes this talk as being called "On Monsters." I'd like as is traditional to fiddle with and fossick around that title, and to append to it the phrase "Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies."
This talk itself is two monsters. Like ICFA, it is a chimera, a scholarly body with the head of a 12-year-old monster nerd, squeeing over the Monster Manual. Or vice versa.
The second monster it is I must explain by way of apology. Some of what follows may be familiar to some of you: this presentation comes out of a conversation with Theodora Goss, who persuaded me there might be some value in a return (but who is of course blameless for what follows). So I have hacked bits from various things I have said about monsters and the like over the last few years, added some newly scavenged thoughts, and stitched them together into a new ghastly form, through which I shall now run current.
It's alive.
We are here because we love the fantastic. We are obsessed with what makes the strange; with how it does what it does; and in particular, with those figures that shamble out of that strangeness still sodden and dripping with it, called monsters. We sort-of-know what brings them forth: the Sleep of Reason. To get at their quiddity, which is what we are here to do, we cannot not start with soi-disant reason itself, with the opposite of what we love, with the un-be-monstered, the not-strange, the fantasticless mundane. The canny.
These days in English English, "canny" means shrewd, but it comes to us circuitously via the Anglo-Saxon "ken"-roughly, knowledge, understanding. Our ken is the known. And out of the unknown shamble monsters. From Beyond Our Ken.
(I had a joke here about monstrous bodies and Ken and Barbie and grotesquerie and the deformations of patriarchy, but it was a bit of a gimme. I will leave you to fill in the details.) (See fig. 1.)
So-what about the opposite of the kenned, the canny? The canny is at by far its most interesting when it comes under strain, as it does, sustainedly, under...