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.

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.