Nekrotopia and Necrotopia

2009-04-01T17:22:00.001-07:00

An Introduction

Nekrotopia, to use it in its original spelling, found its geographies first charted by a little boy seeking distraction from his loneliness, his helplessness, and his thwarted rage. That six year-old boy, Eadweard Booth Brood (1922-1985), began the work that we, his adult descendents, continue today.

Eadweard Brood was our grandfather. He was what contemporary critics might call an outsider artist, or at least a self-taught writer and artist — though of course all writers and artists are ultimately self-taught. He lacked formal training in any artistic or academic disciplines. His mentors were the books that crammed his library. Over the course of his strange, sickly life, he drew, wrote, sculpted, carved, even sang aloud of the histories and inhabitants in his mythic-gothic nightmare world.

His collected works went unpublished and undisplayed in his lifetime. After his death, these treasures were at once hoarded and neglected by a certain faction of our family, whose claim to their inheritance is, to put it mildly, controversial. Undeniably suspicious was the 1996 house-fire that consumed his collected works — notebooks, drawings, paintings, sculptures, sheet music scrawled in a system of notation of his own devising....A lifetime of visionary solitude, now all lost to us, save for scant fragmentary relics, and the even more scant and fragmentary memories from which we, his grandsons, are attempting our act of reconstruction.

We have modernized the spellings of certain words and names, the titular location first among them, to perhaps encourage some measure of accessibility to the modern reader, but more importantly as acknowledgment that ours is not, nor for the bitterest of reasons could ever be, the original Nekrotopia by Eadweard Brood. His testament can only become this our travesty, a patchwork of frayed fragments of threadbare shroud woven into the fabric of a gaudy and chaotic tapestry.

As always, we thank our editor Ms. Athena Corona: for her fearlessness as initiator/instigator, her conscientiousness and fairness as mediator, and her faith in the singularity of our grandfather’s vision— and perhaps even our own. While we must, in defeat, claim paternity when we merely hoped to serve as midwives; as architects where we only hoped to be archaelogists, we continue to make every effort to honor the memories .

We pray to the gods he created that old Eadward’s shade is able to forgive us our respective crudities, inadequacies and peculiarities even as we respect and strive to preserve his crudities, inadequacies, and peculiarities.

Alastair and Nathaniel Brood

If this graphic opera of luscious madness and swooning despair grants you even an evanescing diversion, please consider throwing even a humble donation into the hat of this pair of ragged buskers, as they are of meager means, and are ever so fond of trollops and laudanum.