What it's Come To

So here I am, a good two months having passed by and my brain running all cylinders firing and I. Can't. Stop. Thinking.

A bit of decompression is therefore in order.

The thing about the literature of Ralph Ellison is that it fully embraces the culture of the south while at the same time regretting that transplanting it to the north will result in someone getting shot or going crazy or even turning into Anansi the trickster god in the flesh.  If we look into the idea of a picture of the north, what sort of culture do we get?  Jazz culture, white man's culture, something like that.  The south is black culture, blues culture, and regrettably unable to find peace of any kind that doesn't involve fear and lynching.  This is the world that Ellison's novels are operating in, and he had such a time trying to find a solution that he never even finished his second novel.  It's posthumous, constructed from over two thousand pages of notes and narrative that never went anywhere.

The thing about posthumanism (or transhumanism) is how much I am tickled by the thought of existing as a being inside and outside my head.  If there's one thing I want, it's the ability to go on living after my cellular processes stop working properly.  Mind you I don't think it will work out that well--and anyway the only relevant bits of transhumanism for me are the technological bits that change the way we tell stories.  Storytelling is, you must understand (absolutely must come to terms with), the only thing we've got that's really special.  And the way we tell those stories is running into problems, because there's limits and advantages to all the mediums.

One medium cannot copy another, although you'll notice that hasn't stopped people from trying.  But if you want the reason that people still prefer books to kindles, it's because nobody's written something specifically for an e-book reader yet.  The medium's there but nobody has seen fit to take advantage of its peculiarities.  Computers don't have this problem, we've got cybertexts, hyptertexts, posthypercyberelectrotexts and god knows what else all taking advantage of the computer's ability to display words and sounds and links to everywhere else.  The internet itself is becoming a storytelling medium which we've started to take advantage of but it's not quite there (MUDs fired the first shots but it's not quite there yet.  We're building worlds but not telling stories in them, not really, not yet).  There will, perhaps, be literature written for the iPad or whatever the next new thing is.  Who knows?  I just want to write a phd and get funding to play video games.

Ah, but there are so many other ways to tell stories, old analog ways, card games and pen and paper.  It's all out there in a jumbled mass, and who draws the line between what is a story and what is not a story?  Is it enough to create a world after all?  This is the sort of thing that I can envision fueling debates across university departments across the world, if we can just get over our rather childish rejection of video games as a legitimate form.  I mean come on, we're past that now, aren't we?  There's books, MIT funds the hell out of electronic game studies, we have even come up with our own diametrically opposed camps to snipe at one another with (oh, you ludics!  Oh, you narratologists!)!  There is a middle path, of course, but everyone knows you have to have those two sides or you'll never get anywhere.

My brain has become incapable of really focusing on one project for any length of time, it demands multiple problems to chew on in parallel processes, and while it gives me a hell of a headache from time to time it also makes sure that I sleep like a log at night due to the oversaturating overstimulation of it all.

Proto-Proposal

The Container in Contemporary Postmodern Metafiction

It has been said by those who know what they're talking about that metafiction is a response to a worry that the world of literary fiction has grown stale—and one might be tempted to point to some of the books of the last decade as evidence that this has occurred. One could further say (if one were so inclined) that if books grow stale as a platform for narratives, then Amazon.com president Jeff Bezos will be happy to see we have become a paperless society; the container does not matter, according to Bezos, provided the narrative survives¹. This is of course completely untrue: the container can (and does) provide crucial interpretive information that can hinge upon the shape of the book itself. In other words, the shape of the book and the shape of the text² can influence the meaning of a text. The shape of the text can be replicated in other forms, but the shape of the book is something else altogether. Using the works of Mark Z Danielewski (House of Leaves, Only Revolutions), the following questions will be addressed: What is the relationship between the structure of a text and its meaning and how does Danielewski address this relationship in his novels (or in other words, why is the container important)? What role has emerging technology played in the experiments seen in contemporary metafictional novels? Finally, why is any of this important?

There are a few ways to tackle these questions, but as metafictional authors are notorious for allowing their texts to tell stories while commenting on the act of storytelling I see no better method than allowing the books to speak for themselves. After laying down a firm critical framework—describing just what sort of literature Danielewski has been writing, for example,³ as well as explaining the sorts of theories that he is working off of in the creation of these novels—the real analysis of the texts can begin. A close reading of the texts will not only reveal the theories of the relationship between structure and meaning, but are themselves examples of that very same relationship. In the case of Only Revolutions, for example, the book's structure not only emphasizes the circular nature of the narrative, but it gives the two protagonists something to struggle against—a structure without which they could not be free in the first place. House of Leaves mimics the labyrinthine nature of the house on Ash Tree Lane through the very way in which the text is presented, a dizzying maze of footnotes that lead to dead ends, contradictory evidence, and voices arguing for dominance. Most importantly, both books allow the reader to approach the text in multiple ways.

Bibliography

Aarseth, Espen, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, (London: Johns Hopkins University Press) 1997

Benzon, Kiki, 'Revolution 2: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,' Electronic Book Review, (03-20-2007), <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/regulated> [accessed 03 December 2009]

Brick, Martin, 'Blueprint(s): Rubric for a Deconstructed Age in House of Leaves,' Philament 2 (Jan 2004), <http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue2_Critique_Brick.htm>, [accessed 03 December 2009]

Danielewski, Mark Z, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000)

• Only Revolutions (New York: Pantheon, 2006)
  

Derrida, Jaques, Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge) 2001

Hamilton, Natalie, 'The A-Mazing House: The Labyrinth as Theme and Form in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves,' Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1, (Fall 2008) 3-15

Hanson, Mark, 'The Digital Topography of Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves,' Contemporary Literature 45:4 (Winter 2004) 597-636

Hayles, N. Katherine, 'Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves,' American Literature 74:4 (2002) 779-806

• Writing Machines, (London: MIT Press) 2002
  

McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory, 'Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,' Critique 44:2 (Winter 2003) 99-135

Rapatzikou, Tatiani. 'Print Novels and the Mark of the Digital: Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006) and Media Convergence,' Interdisciplinary.net, <http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/rapatzikou-paper.pdf> [accessed 3 December 2009]

Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction, (London: Routledge) 2003

1 'Outbooking the Book: Jeff Bezos, Chairman, President and CEO, Amazon.com' All Things Digital, (28 May 2008), <http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/bezos/> [accessed 28 November 2009]

2Font choice and font size

3It has been described as both a work of ergodic fiction and a post-textual novel, two terms which are not, perhaps, mutually exclusive.

What is Language and Why does it Matter?

  Language, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is difficult to pin down.  Even this concept has multiple meanings; “The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure,” “the vocal sounds by which mammals and birds communicate,” “A means of communicating other than by the use of words,” (emphasis mine) and even “The style of a literary composition; (also) the wording of a document, statute, etc.”  There are more meanings to the word, which is perhaps the problem in a nutshell: Language cannot be described without the use of itself.  That is to say, one must use language in order to describe language.  Any discussion of the use language must, therefore, begin with the acknowledgement that language is itself as nebulous as any other term.

  It is not the intention of this essay to gaze too deeply into the abyss that lurks behind the assigned meaning(s) of a word, but it illustrates an inherent instability in the practice of language that has been noted by other writers and will continue to be noticed and commented upon; it will be the case that writers and indeed anyone who speaks (any) language(s) will forever have to wrestle with language in order to convey the meaning they want to convey, or at least a meaning that can be called close enough for comfort (or government work, or your own phrase of choice).  This still does not come any closer to saying what language is, though it does come closer to saying why it's important; language is perhaps the best possible (though imperfect) method for transmission of thoughts short of telepathy.

  Language allows the world to if nothing else make slightly more sense than it would otherwise, and allows the people of the world to make a kind of sense of one another.  Language makes sense of things, categorizes things, expresses what could not be otherwise expressed.  This is the importance of language, this is why language matters.  Language's rather nebulous nature, however, means that using language to communicate complex ideas takes a special amount of care and precision.  True mastery of language comes from being able to communicate one's ideas clearly and effectively.  To say what needs to be said in a way that the meaning is left to little doubt, to utilize all the tools which have been created for the management of language over centuries of practice (metaphor, allegory, etc.), to use the rules of style and form that had been agreed upon for forms of fiction and essay and poetry—that is what separates a writing novice from a true craftsman, so to speak.  In the beginning, anyway...

Strange Happenings

I have, of late, become rather discontented with Barry Macsweeny.  We didn't get along from the get-go, and I find his poetry trite and boring.  It is small wonder to me that his book is out of print, because he sucks.  But what use is my opinion?  You won't have to read him unless you happen to be taking postmodern poetics as well, which you aren't.  Probably.

But I am, and it has made me hate the man.  Well, not the man, but certainly I don't like his poetry very much.  There's no playing around in it!  It's all the same sort of images and themes we've seen before, or maybe I'm just getting cynical.  Which is possible.  Of course.

And now I am in a strange place, brain-wise.  I find myself reading him and thinking that I want to be reading something else, something that isn't Macsweeny's poetry.  So I turn to my shelf, and consider it closely, and (instead of a novel) I take down a collection of Bernstein's poetry I got from the library and haven't had the chance to read, and I think what the fuck just happened here?

I wanted a break from work, so I pulled down a book of poetry?  I am reading this poetry for pleasure, rather than to feed any sort of research, or because I have to, or anything so strange as that.  I pulled the book down because I enjoy reading Charles 'motherfucking' Bernstein and no other reason.

At some point, I became
incredibly
fucking
pretentious.

Oh Come ON.

It's been some time now, and I hate that fact.  I hate the fact that things can only be kept going while I'm more or less depressed or bored or exhausted.  Why do I have to be good at complaining but absolutely lousy at explaining why things are awesome and, I should add, are likely to remain awesome for the foreseeable future?

The hell of it is, I love a happy ending.  I want everyone to get at least one story that ends happily, but for whatever reason every time I end happily I have this voice saying "it didn't last, you know.  Snow White got old or her people realized how brutal she'd been to the previous queen and threw her out on her ass; the prince got poisoned by a bad bit of fish and died, and life was nasty, brutish, and short.  Which is an outright lie, of course.  The bit of me that enjoys writing, that secretly hopes that something happens in 2012 (not the end of the world, but I'm quite partial to the thought that magic will return and we'll have wizards and dragons again) and is generally happy in the world wants to tell a story, goddammit, and it will probably never get the chance because I come up with happy endings when I'm happy, and when I'm happy I tend not to be able to write.

Until today, which finds me not thrilled but certainly less angry than usual, making a post about not being able to write.  Writing about writer's block.  Confessing, here and now, that I need very badly to stop reading so much poetry because every time I do I get the urge to try writing it again.

I'm not a fan of the poems I write.  I resist the urge whenever possible, but the Language poets seem to have their hooks in me, if only because I cannot help but like the idea of just throwing words together because they sound neat rather than because of any great meaning they may have.  That's the sort of thing that makes me think strange thoughts, and having never (at least not in recent memory) written anything that rhymes consistently or at all it's got me rather intrigued.  We'll see what happens, but I warn you that it could all come to nothing.  In fact; it probably will come to nothing, and that ain't just the cynicism talking.  That's good old fashioned common sense.

Fucking Charles Bernstein and his Klupzy Girls.

Zombies, in Theory

I have a big confession to make.

I don't really like zombie films all that much.  The few zombie films I do like are either patently ridiculous (Army of Darkness, for example, which stretches the definition of what makes a zombie in the first place and what makes a reanimated skeletal army... at what point do you lose just enough flesh to be considered "skeleton warrior" instead of zombie anyway?) or contain zombies that are barely zombies at all (28 Days Later's zombies were not 'true' zombies because they didn't reanimate the dead, they just made you FUCKING CRAZY AND ANGRY).  I would venture to say the only 'true' zombie film I've watched and enjoyed was Sean of the Dead, and I only watched that because of Simon Pegg's presence and the bit where they throw the Batman soundtrack at a zombie.

In short, I like zombies in theory but not so much in practice; or at least not in cinematic practice.  I can read about zombies in books, or look at comics of them, and some of my favorite games involve the killing of zombies—but put a zombie on the silver screen and I'm likely to tune out completely.  I appear to have a very low threshold of icky things, and dudes chewing on  other dudes is apparently where I draw the line.  Zombie movies are almost too real for me, or maybe I just get tired of watching people get bitten and torn apart by ravening hordes of undead.  It doesn't help that most zombie movies are fucking boring, either.

I mean let's face it:  the vast majority of zombie movies fall into one of two categories:  AHH THE DEAD ARE RISING WHAT DO WE DO OH NO THE HIGH PRESSURE SITUATION HAS CAUSED US TO TURN ON ONE ANOTHER or WE ARE THE MILITARY AND WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM OH WAIT NO WE WERE NOT PREPARED THIS HIGH PRESSURE SITUATION HAS CAUSED US TO TURN ON ONE ANOTHER.  You can only see that so many times before it gets old (and very few people can really do it as well as Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which did the first one and did it well enough that it really doesn't bear re-doing over and over again).  I still remember trying to watch... I think it was Day of the Living Dead or something.  I don't remember clearly, just that this guy who I knew kept telling me it was a great zombie movie and I should see it.

The dead started popping out of graves, and ate some young punk rockers who were fucking in the graveyard, and grabbed some poor bastard in an ambulance.  By the end of that scene (which was probably like a half hour into the film) I turned the thing off.  It wasn't that I was particularly disturbed; this was late 70s/early 80s film, after all, and the only thing disturbing were the haircuts.  But the film was boring, and in such a visceral way that I almost would have rather been subjected to another viewing of Goodfellas (okay, let's not be too over the top.  Half of Goodfellas, maybe) than endure another second of the film.  Whenever I sit down to watch a zombie movie, it always winds up causing the same sort of visceral ennui, which is a paradoxical feeling I didn't know one could be capable of feeling.

So here I am, a dude who enjoys hunting zombies in Resident Evil even though it makes me wet myself in terror from time to time, and adores Left 4 Dead even though I no longer have the ability to play it, and who did a lot (and I mean a lot) of running around in Urban Dead before I forgot my login information (in fact, I will probably roll up a new Urban Dead account now that it's on my mind).

I am following the development of DoubleBear's ZRPG with the sort of rabid attention that normal people reserve for the development of their own children, and have already decided that if my computer cannot run it upon its release I will just have to get a new one, won't I?  Because it's a zombie RPG that focuses on the actual survival part of the scenario and not just killing zombies (which is enjoyable but to take that extra survival element and add it to the proceedings is just...  I mean come on, I'm a fucking English major specializing in postmodernism.  Yes I do want you to put extra thought into the societal concerns of a zombie outbreak, please).  I spend most of my free time fiddling around with my own zombie world, trying to think of the sort of things that Thomas Pynchon would put into his zombie books if he wrote them.  But put me in front of a zombie movie and my immediate response will be either "fuck this movie" or "seriously I don't need to see that many livers and shit guys cut it out."

So I guess what I am trying to say is that when I see trailers for a movie like Zombieland, which is apparently all about killing zombies in creative/hilarious ways, I feel entirely too conflicted for my own good.  On the one hand, it's about zombies!  And killing them in creative/hilarious ways!  On the other hand, I'm just not a zombie movie fan. I've tried.

But something deep down tells me  that I'm going to wind up seeing that damned movie one way or another.  Maybe it'll be pirated (I do not wish to spend time rotting in an English prison, however, so probably not), or maybe I'll rent it, or maybe I will actually drag my ass to a movie theatre and watch it on the screen.  And more than likely, I'll be disappointed.  But I'll go, because it's zombies, and I keep waiting for the zombie movie that actually holds my attention for more than like thirty minutes and doesn't do so because I have a man crush on Simon Pegg.

Problematic

It seemed like such a simple process, at first glance.  Buy the ticket, take the flight, find a train, and arrive in one piece.  I should have known that it would wind up being far more complicated than just a quick trip.

I plan for failure, most of the time.  It's just one of those things that keeps me from being too surprised by the various things that happen to me from day to day.  So when I bought the ticket, I immediately assumed that I wouldn't get clearance.  And when I got clearance, I immediately assumed that I would have forgotten some important paperwork that would cause me to get kicked out before I even got there.  That also failed to happen, or at the least it hasn't happened yet.  It could still be waiting in the wings for me, breathing heavily and holding an unpleasantly large stick.

That I might have to find a place to stay for the first five nights, well.  I didn't expect that.  But that's the sort of thing that makes this whole process enjoyable, in a weird way.  Will I arrive in the city and find myself wandering the streets aimlessly?  Maybe I'll get directions to a hostel, or maybe someone will take pity on me and let me sleep on their couch or in their pub.  Or will I get mugged and lose everything I'll be taking with me?  What if I take up residence squatting in the ruins of a castle?  There are ruins there, I've been to them and I've seen them and I've found places where you could, in theory, hole up for a night if you were desperate.

Maybe people already do; I shall wind up fighting a vicious turf war with the local vagrants until one of us gets arrested or killed or one followed by the other.  Maybe.  It's all possibilities, right now, and that's terrifying and exciting all at once.  I'm terrible at making plans, yet I find that it always is slightly more relaxing to at least have an idea of what's coming next.  I could make a plan right now; look up a hostel, send pleading emails to the administration begging to be let in early, actively hunt down acquaintances and ask to stay on their couches...

But would that be any fun?  As terrifying as it is to contemplate arriving in a city turned suddenly unfriendly by the whims of fate, lost and wandering until the police pick me up and throw me out of the country, I can't help thinking that it would make for a hell of a story.  And stories are kind of my thing.  We'll see.  After the other problems I've had to deal with in preparation for this trip, finding a place to sleep seems like a pretty easy one.