Category: general

And then…

It may or may not be apparent in reading my blog but there are very few things that have the power to make me genuinely happy to be alive.

That is not some confession of crippling depression on my part but a statement of fact — life, in general, is not something I have very strong feelings about.  Existence, as such, simply is.  DFW has that thing about the fish in the water — this is water, this is water, this is water — and he’s right when he says you have to make a concerted effort to realize, at every single moment of your life, that not only do you exist, but you are surrounded by other people that exist, and this in and of itself is pretty damn amazing.

Sometimes there are artists who help me realize this.  They are the ones who affect me the most strongly, the ones I feel the most affection for.  Shakespeare is one of them.  Satoshi Kon is another.

I am not saying Kon was Shakespeare’s equal or anything, but that for me, at least, he was a remarkably important storyteller.  When I heard he died today, I was upset — about as upset as you can be about the death of a person whom you’ve never met and can’t really make any sort of personal judgment on.  I didn’t cry or weep or anything, but I was disheartened in knowing that one of the few bright lights in the pantheon of pop culture I constantly ingest had gone out.

Kon liked fantasy.  He liked showing us how cool fantasy could be, but also how dangerous — how our fantasies can consume us.  When I was in high school, for various personal reasons, this became a very important idea to me.  For other reasons it still is, because I deal in fantasy.  I study fantasy for a living, in a sense, and my eventual desire is to teach it to others.  And our fantasies, the little stories we tell ourselves, can have incredibly important impacts on what constitutes real life.  Kon helped me realize this, and he helped me realize it without being some sort of materialist reactionary.

He knew, I think, that fantasies can be dangerous, but they are also humanizing.  His film Tokyo Godfathers is one of my favorites, and probably near the top on my list of “things that are important to me as a human being.”  I watch it every Christmas.  While it’s his least fantastical movie, I think it’s his best, because it’s the one where I think you see the painful beating heart of Kon’s humanism most clearly.  The fantasies of the characters are harmful, yes, but they’re also how they survive — and in the end the theme of the film seems to be an urge to be discriminating about our fantasies, to be critical of them, and to choose not the ones that simply make our pains and fears and jealousies go away, but the ones that tell us that everyone is subject to pains and fears and jealousies, and that it is only by reckoning our own existence and the existence of others with these inevitable disappointments that we can be healthy people.

We need fantasies that remind us, in DFW’s terms, that this is water.  We need fantasies that help us understand what it is to be alive.  We need fantasies that help us understand the connections we make with each other, and the kind of existence this fashions for us.  We need fantasies that help us understand the world, not hide from it.

There are very few things that make me genuinely happy to be alive.  Satoshi Kon’s films are one of those things.

The Slasher in the Rye

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what deformities I had, and how my parents didn’t help when the townspeople burned me alive in our house after what I did to those two little girls, and where I got my mask, and all that Jason Vorhees kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my fans would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything that made my backstory even more complicated and nonsensical than it already is.  They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially the fat ones.  They’re nice and all — fans generally don’t run away when they see me, at least until it’s too late — but they’re also touchy as hell.  Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything.  I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around that summer camp just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and lay low.   I mean that’s all I told J.C. about, and he’s my producer and all.  He’s in Hollywood.  That isn’t too far from this crumby place, and he comes over and visits me practically every weekend.  He’s going to drive me home when I go home next month maybe.  He just got a Hummer.  One of those retired army jobs that has chains and everything in the back for holding back bombs and junk, but I bet I could break them.  It cost him damn near an arm and a leg.  At least that’s what I would’ve paid.  He’s got a lot of dough, now.  He didn’t use to.  He used to be just a regular writer/director, he used to be small-time.  He made this terrific film, Dark Star, in case you never heard of him.  The best scene in it is with the alien.  It has this alien that looks like a beachball with feet and claws, it’s like a mascot, and the main character chases it around the spaceship and slaps it with a broom.  It killed me, which most things can’t really do, considering the number of sequels. Now he’s out in Hollywood, J.C., being a prostitute.  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies.  Don’t even mention them to me.

Three things.

1. I was on a sort of vacation last week and now I am moving back into the dorms this week so not much typing from me unfortunately.

2. I have friends who write blogs and a lot of the time the blogs they write are really really good.

3. Oedipiscopalianism.  This is the form of Christianity whose adherents want to kill God and have sex with the Virgin Mary.

My coffee warned me about this blog.

First, we know by now I like literary mashups.  I also like Bret Easton Ellis.  I therefore direct your attention here.

Read it?  Good, good.  Now, switching tracks, play the music below while you read the rest of this post.

Let’s talk about Deadly Premonition.  It’s old news, yeah, but I’m always behind on games anyway.  This saves me the trouble of recapping a lot of stuff about it, since it’s been covered extensively elsewhere.  Basically what you need to know is that this game looks horrible, sounds horrible, and plays horribly.

It’s also probably the best game that will come out this year.  It’s my pick for GOTY, anyway.

Now of course there’s a lot of people going on about just HOW DAMN TERRIBLE this game is (I’m looking at you, Giant Bomb) and it’s pretty cool currently to play this game and be entirely ironic about it.  Hipster gaming, if you will.  And I’ll admit, when I bought the game I expected to be counted in this camp — the camp camp, if you will, the so-bad-it’s-good camp.  And I will also admit that this approach got me through the first hour or two of the game, with its clunky controls and awkward animation and basically excruciating gameplay.

Except at some point, some mysterious juncture, the game stopped being so-bad-it’s-good and became actually good.  I want to say that it’s due to the quality of the writing — which is odd, since the writing is usually pretty bizarre and awkward and the dialogue needs trimming.  But the characters are so vivid and, if you play long enough to get oriented, the storyline becomes unbelievably compelling.  The ridiculous elements of the game (the fact that the main character is talking constantly to an imaginary friend no one else can see, demonic dogs drop out of the sky at midnight, etc) together achieve some sort of weird gestalt where your disbelief is suspended almost indefinitely.  When the narrative actually picks up and that for all its peculiarities the game is internally logically consistent to a remarkable degree, you know you have something special on your hands.

It’s a mystery.  This is notable, because it’s hard to write good mysteries, and a lot of games that try to be mysteries (most things that try to be mysteries, even) tend to fall back on last-second details that basically tell you everything you need to know to solve a case.  DP is a good mystery; not only is it a good mystery, however, but it also gives you everything you need to solve it almost from the beginning.

And it’s not only a mystery, but a mystery populated with oddball yet recognizably human characters.  There’s a frustrated young aesthete stuck running a small-town diner, an old woman named Sigourney who is deathly afraid that the casserole dish she carries at all times will get cold, and a doctor named “Usha” who is obsessed with chess.  There’s no gruff space marine or evil dictator here; all of the stock-elements of modern gaming are pretty much completely absent.  One might think that the quirkiness of the characters might ring hollow, like Suda51’s takes often do, but it doesn’t.

You see, Deadly Premonition is probably the most sincere game to come out in a long, long time.  Irony is the completely wrong stance to take with it.  There’s more heart and feeling and humanity in this thing than the entirety of Gears of War 1 and 2; it is an example of what games can and should be, something not at all reproducible in another medium, and contains the sort of wild, nonsensical creativity that characterized games of another generation.  A plumber travels through giant green pipes to a subterranean kingdom of mushrooms and fights turtles to save a princess from a particularly nasty, fire-breathing turtle; an FBI agent with an imaginary friend travels to rural Washington to solve a murder case, but takes time out of his busy schedule to fish farm utensils out of a lake, predict the future with his coffee, check the Weather Channel 50 times a day, have tea with a crazy gas mask-wearing old man in a wheelchair and his manservant who speaks only in rhyme, peep through townspeople’s windows while they sleep, and discuss the Tremors movie franchise with the player/his imaginary friend.  And that’s only a fraction of the stuff that can happen.

Is the game fun to play?  Most of the time, no.  Does it look like ass?  Most of the time, yes.  But somehow it is more engrossing and compelling than any game I’ve played since Portal.  As gaming becomes more profitable and more homogeneous, more cinematic and more predictable, more focused on multiplayer capability and achievments than on storytelling, we need games like Deadly Premonition to remind us what we can do with the form.  It may not be the best it could, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  Hopefully its legacy is a rich one.

Brief Interludes with Invidious Muggles

For the past week or so I’ve been digging steadily deeper into the inimitable David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  I know, I know, last summer was the so-called Infinite Summer, but I missed out on that because I was recovering from wisdom tooth extraction and therefore reading something much lighter on the brain.

However, despite all this, I can’t help but feel that IJ is a bit overrated.  And by a bit, I mean a lot.  Seriously.  It’s far from DFW’s masterpiece — that spot, I would wager, is reserved for his never-for-legal-reasons-officially-published piece of Harry Potter ‘slash’ fanfiction, “Brief Interludes with Invidious Muggles (Draco/Harry, mm, teen, rom, dub!con)”.  For those of you unaware, slash fiction refers to fanfiction written for the purposes of tossing male characters who are either enemies or serious bromantic partners into sexual relationships.  Yes, it sounds low-brow, it sounds tacky, it sounds terrible, I admit!  But in the meager 100,000 words and 85 footnotes of BIw/IM, DFW manages to say everything he had to say in Infinite Jest and more, in addition to shedding new light on the intricacies of one of the greatest fantasy series of all time.  To prove it to you, reader, I provide here an excerpt of a single sentence from this magnum opus.  Enjoy.

Desperately Draco pulls Harry to him, and their boyish lips and surprisingly rough tongues — like a group of old friends, like army buddies who haven’t seen each other in a while, presuming these old army buddies are covered in papillae and maybe suffer from a condition that causes them to sweat constantly, thus explaining the saliva, and maybe like maybe one of them wears spearmint aftershave or something — these theoretical guys, they embrace in the same way Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter’s mouths lock into a passionate and, once the gestalt of the whole thing sets in for the kids, emotional oral bear-hug, Harry’s gold-flecked green eyes widening in surprise, his pale hands, Harry P.’s pale hands, scrabbling for purchase outside the vicinity of his (Draco’s) shimmering silk Slytherin robes, which are honestly and awkwardly the closest things within reach at the moment, and if you think old D.M.’s not realized there’s nothing but his lonesome self within reach for H.P. to grasp then you certainly are not an astute judge of character, no sir.

No good news this chapter.

Daniel Lau finished up Hellstar Remina a few weeks ago, and while the finished product does a mad tapdance between hysterically funny/cheesy and a lackluster execution of intriguing ideas, the volume’s bonus story is pretty damn cool.  You may remember that I have highfalutin ideas about Ito, and I think here we see him approaching something like Uzumaki‘s levels of subtle commentary after Remina‘s madcap frenzy of cultural pseudocriticism.  (An aside: it occurs to me that it might be more profitable to read Remina as Ito’s rebuttal to the sort of glamorous, humanistic futurism hypothesized by Osamu Tezuka, but that would require more research on my part.)

Anyway, “Army of One” is doing some interesting things with the idea of hikikomori and the competing individual/collective social demands currently playing out in postmodern Japan.  I don’t think the story is as good as Uzumaki but it strikes the right balance of creeping despair and ridiculous, almost comic grotesquery, the sort of metaphysical unease that I like the best about Ito’s work and about horror and/or art in general.

Hey speaking of metaphysical unease, my friend Ross wrote some words about Haruki Murakami, the most widely read Japanese novelist in the West since probably Mishima.  They are good words!  You should read them.  And if you haven’t read Murakami, you should read him too.

Back when I was a lowly scrub who knew he liked English but didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, I considered going into Japanese and doing some comparative lit stuff, mostly on the strength of what Murakami I’d read.  This was foolish for a couple reasons, the most obvious one being that Murakami plays with Western writers a lot more (and a lot more openly) than other Japanese writers.  This was also before I decided that he somewhat infuriates me with his method — which is to say, that he makes it all up as he goes along.

This is something Stephen King recommends.  I don’t truck with it, personally, but it has the ability to turn out some good work.  However, you see the same sort of problems in both King and Murakami’s work, namely, that the motherfuckers can’t end a book in any reasonable fashion.  The difference is that King makes up monsters and spooks that dramatize or abstract certain American middle class malaises, the sort of things you’d get in John Updike; Murakami does this to some degree, but he also plays more subtly and loosely with his (technical literary term incoming) weird-ass shit, so you can read in a veneer of literary pretension (ie, magical realism) and often skew it as speaking more broadly about Japanese society in a very profound way.

What a day

So shortly after I posted that last entry about Uzumaki, there was a tornado.  (This is intensely ironic if you’ve read the manga.)  Anyway, don’t worry, I’m okay!

But I also just got word that the first short story I’ve sold to the fine folks at Dark Recesses has gone live!  Yes, I sold a story, that was the big news I mentioned a few weeks back.  It is called “Empty Houses” and you can read it here.  It is a story about a robot, and some other things.

Anyone who’s wandered this way from Dark Recesses — hello!  Uh.  If this were me welcoming you into my house, at this point I’d offer tea or lemonade or something, but as it is I’ll just say feel free to poke around and see what sort of inane stuff I ramble about.  If this were me welcoming you into my house, this would be like you going into all the rooms and digging through my stuff — that would be bad, but since this is the internet it’s the way we have to do things.  Read some of my essays I’ve written or follow me on Twitter or something.  Okay?  Cool.

dark deeds, darkly answered

The Measure for Measure research project has begun and continues apace.  It’s shaping up to be interesting.  In my readings I’ve learned some interesting facts, like that outside of the great tragedies, M4M is Harold Bloom’s favorite Shakespeare play.  What.

I suppose I can afford to link a few things I’ve found that I think are cool or noteworthy.  First, Neil Gaiman has a wonderful piece on Ray Bradbury in the Times Online, one with which I agree wholeheartedly.  I tend to think of myself pretty strongly as a Midwestern writer — so in a more canonical sense my lineage would consist of people like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and their stories of small-town grotesqueries.  And while I’ve read those writers and they’re indeed good, none of them has affected me more than Bradbury — also their literary child, but in addition to petty rural politics, he also wrote about monsters and spaceships.

And with that, my second link.  Jeffrey Anderson, a blogger over at Cinematical, asks if sci-fi as a genre has surpassed horror.  Of particular interest is this bit:

At its best, horror is capable of — and even expert at — taking the temperature of a time and mood in very subtle ways. But, like comedies and erotic films, it will always be an embarrassment, something one enjoys inwardly but does not celebrate outwardly (at awards ceremonies). But there’s also no denying that science fiction has struck a chord with audiences.

Now, this is a film site talking about films and blah blah blah.  You know what I’m going to say: he’s wrong, at least partly.  Yes, horror does its best during times of social and economic duress (the sf/horror boom in the 50s, the satanic horror boom in the 70s leading to the general horror explosion in the 80s, the post 9-11 J-horror boom, and so on).  But to say that a piece of horror fiction is always going to be an embarrassment because it is the product of a certain time — well, absolutely not.

I’ll hedge my bets to begin with.  Let’s look at Dracula: now, this book absolutely takes “the temperature” of Victorian Britain.  Vampires operate entirely by means of metaphors for (repressed) sexual activity.  Quite titillating!  And is it dated?  Yes.  Do people seem to care?  Not particularly — the architecture Stoker established for his vampires is still in use today.  I mean, Twilight, goddamn.

I could also talk about a film that’s both sf and horror — Alien.  It’s a bit harder to make this one relate to its time-period — perhaps you could say it relates to fears of increasing corporate control of society at the end of the 70s.  Anderson seems to assume that a film cannot be tense and foreboding (horror) but also quiet and thoughtful (sf).  Well, Alien is both, and it’s damn good.

Now for straight horror fiction, I could talk about The Shining — the book and the movie.  The book is probably one of the best things King has written, and the film is Kubrick, so you know it’s good.  Unless you want to tie both of them to a particular social event (eg, an increasing number of divorces in the 70s) then they’re both very thoughtful (in their respective ways) and also very tense and frightening.  King’s novel is a meditation on fatherhood, family, abuse, and self-determination; Kubrick’s film is… well, take your pick.

But Anderson does raise a valid point in that horror is simply not as popular as sf (or even fantasy) these days.  Part of this is Peter Jackson’s LotR films being so damn good — fantasy is suddenly respectable, and sf is closer aesthetically to fantasy and therefore easier to digest.  Not to mention sf has a cultural pedigree already in Star Wars and similar things.  Horror’s cultural icons — the old Universal monsters, which aren’t so scary anymore, or Kubrick’s The Shining — are plenty respectable, too, but, as Anderson points out, the ‘modern classics’ of Shaun of the Dead and Let the Right One In haven’t had as great an impact on the culture as either of those.

Well, I guess two reasons as to why, the first being that those films weren’t American.  Before you call me xenophobic, understand: I loved them both.  But that’s because I’m a horror fan and I’m willing to search for good horror.  I’m willing to read the subtitles for LtROI.  The American films Anderson cites (Drag Me to Hell and The House of the Devil) are, mutually, absolutely goddamn terrible and uninteresting.  The second reason is that horror isn’t attuned to zeitgeist at the moment — we’re looking for feel-good escapism, which is what something like Avatar offers, and horror (usually at its best and even sometimes at its worst) is noble for not allowing that.  Horror can have a happy ending, but it exists only to remind us of the dangers and uncertainties of existence, and at the moment, we’d rather fawn over sparkling non-horrific vampires or pretend to be peaceful blue catpeople living on a planet with a ridiculously impractical and unbelievable ecosystem.  I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to figure out why that is.

In other news: I might have exciting news about something or I might not.  It depends on when I get confirmation of details.  Watch this here space.

DO YOU REVERSE?

The summer lull begins.

I find myself wasting a remarkable amount of time in the hopes that I will feel relaxed once my summer obligations come to bear.  In a little over a week I’ll be back on campus, working on a small research project about Measure for Measure.  It’s common knowledge (more or less) that Shakes lifted the plot from Machiavelli, but I think it’s worth investigating exactly how he’s dealing with Machiavellian politics in the play.  (If I manage to get something useful out of this, I also suspect there are variations on this theme in Coriolanus and The Tempest, and maybe that will also be a profitable area for further research.)  Anyway, that’s boring.

After I finish that up I’ll be a teaching assistant for a two-week course for high school students, during which they’ll hopefully read Hamlet and come to like it.  I’ve taught high school kids before, but that was Anglo-Saxon lit, so they were understandably not very receptive.  Hamlet, at least, can be related to by most teens in ways of differing profundity; the riddles from the Book of Exeter, not so much.

There are a few other things I could talk about here.  For instance, how less than a week after I leave London the country is so lost without me that they just cocked things up royally.  But again, that’s boring.

Instead I’ll leave off with a delightful glimpse into the past, when a little girl named Mary O’Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards.  She also became one of the greatest American writers of the past century and probably my single favorite writer of all time (which is obviously saying something), but that all happened much later.