Thanks, The Last Fat Lady Sang, I’ll Be Wearing Robes Tomorrow, and Other Tales

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

First of all, let me thank everyone from yesterday and today who “liked” and liked my articles on horror. It was the most “Likes” I’d ever gotten on here–in one day and ever–and I more than appreciate it and the new readers that I have Following me. I just love writing about subject matters as though I am some kind of expert, though I tend to expand on just a few thoughts I have rolling around in my head and fill in the blanks with Internet and whatever books or other people I have access to. I also notice that there are some topics and themes that can really strike at the heart of the matter when you write about them or when they are even seen: some human universals if you’d like and I woud definitely like to write about more of them. But let me thank you all again: you are all awesome and I hope to make many more things here that will be worthy of further entertainment.

Well, I didn’t make it to the Finalists on ENO’s Mini-Opera Contest, however they are all pretty bad ass from what little I’ve skimmed through. I’m not surprised I didn’t make it–what with it being my first attempt and being done more or less at the last minute–however, it left me with quite a few ideas that I want to work on in other ways, shapes, and forms. And I also get to say that I dabbled briefly with librettos at one time too. For those of you just tuning in now, you can find my works through my “mini-operas” tag because linking to them apparently makes WordPress believe that I am actually commenting on the post directly and that just plain feels weird.

But speaking of standing ovations and conclusions, I’m going to be Graduating tomorrow. It is my Convocation Ceremony at York University at the Rexall Centre at 10:30 in the morning (I do wish my section had been given the afternoon time-slot and was closer to campus–I’m not used to as early mornings these days though I am working on it). Of course, I will have to be there much earler to wear a bunch of rental robes and then help my guests get their seats and all the fun that entails because I was only able to get three tickets in advance: again making something that should have been simple into rocket-science. So I want to get some writing of various kinds today while my time is still my own. I am kind of nervous, but it is one day and I will get through it. And I get to wear robes and a strange hat legitimately too.

What else can I tell you? I am very proud of finally getting my Master’s. But I also very proud of the Master’s Thesis that got to this point: a paper that used Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Herodotus, and their works as its basis. I finished off my first year of Undergrad reading American Gods for the first time and there is some symmetry in ending my Graduate Program with a paper on a good portion of my favourite author’s work as well. There is something really satisfying in that that I can’t explain except to say it is. I think of all the books and articles I used as old friends or collaborators. We all came together, sometimes procrastinating, sometimes arguing, and constantly moving around to make this paper. We’ve been together for a long time, some of us, but we really worked together for two and half years: perhaps even longer. Now some of them are back in the libraries, others still roaming on the Internet and quite a few more back on their respective shelves having said goodbye to one another. We don’t know when we will meet again, but I know that even if I don’t always hold them in my hands, they will always be with me: them and the work that I did.

It’s been a long ride and I am glad I got to tell a little of the story.

Horror as a Universal Power: The Function of a Creepypasta

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

So in my previous Blog entry, “Horror as a Universal Power,” I talked about how I believe horror is a slow-growing epiphany or realization of just how beautiful and terrifying the seemingly normal reality around us truly is: how it is a feeling we are both repulsed by and attracted to in a kind of feedback loop. It’s this kind of perverse fascination with something very strange and uncanny right in front of us.

After something of a Blogging dry-spell, I was watching a few horror movies such as Insidious and Don’t be Afraid of the Dark: you can, in part, blame these films for today’s horror craze on “Mythic Bios,” but it was also due to finding a unique “creepypasta” that I also began this.

When I first saw the term “creepypasta,” I had no idea what the hell it even meant. What first came to mind was a strange of twisted pasta with a pale hollow-eyed doll’s face on the end of it, or a malignant white spiral-worm with a single blood-shot eye. So after I really read a definition of what a creepypasta is, I realized it is derived from a term called “copypasta”  in which someone supposedly copy and pastes a body of text over and over again onto different websites and message-boards. So basically, the pasta is taken from the word “paste,” while the “creepy” part is pretty self-explanatory.

The link I provided above pretty much lists different kinds of formulas or tropes that creepypastas fall under, but that is not why I want to write this article about. I want to look at just how the creepypasta is such an effective medium of communicating the essence of the horror genre.

My first experience with a creepypasta was when I was sent the “message-board transcript” Candle Cove. I actually didn’t know that this was a work of fiction because the person who created it, Kris Straub, did a superb job in crafting the narrative aesthetic. It actually looked like a message board conversation would: complete with screen names and typos in discussion. He also tapped into that place of barely recalled memory and nostalgia–into the zeitgeist or spirit–of 70s children shows to great effect: along with an incredibly effective sense of pacing and different voices for each “poster.” The element of television static and white noise within the story was even more inspired because it plays on the depths of the imagination and just how far someone–particularly a child–can fall into it.

I really liked “Candle Cove” because you don’t know that it is a story and it is written that way. It is also written in a way which taps hard on that collective unconsciousness we all have and actually in some ways made it real. And that is the thing right there. Candle Cove, though fiction, made itself real.

This is what I really want to talk about. Other creepypastas have managed to do something similar based on the characteristics I listed above from “Candle Cove.” The thing that actually influenced me to write these two recent Blog entries was a creepypasta called Ben (or the Haunted Majora’s Mask Game). I came across an account of it on Youtube purely by coincidence. You can read a very long written account of it here or watch the video “footage” that the creator made to complement it here. What we have here is a mixed-media story: a combination of message board posts, a text file, a Nintendo 64 game-hack and video recordings by a user named Jadusable. But look at what he does here.

First, he turns a game made twelve years ago–a Nintendo work firmly entrenched into this generation’s or at least this gaming generation’s collective unconscious–into a medium for his story. He purposefully glitches parts of this hacked game and uses elements of the game itself to add to this story. Bear in mind, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a very unsettling but wonderful game to begin with taking place in an alternate dimension from the usual world of Hyrule with various characters and elements to work with: not the least of which being the graphics, soundtrack and some of the dialogue.

Some parts of this creepypasta are, however, somewhat stereotypical and cliche: such as the protagonist and creator Jadusable buying “a haunted bootleg” from a “creepy old man” but that is a trope part and parcel with urban legends in general. Most people would have a lot of trouble suspending disbelief for this–especially gamers–but it does have some very creepy moments: especially for me given that one of the text messages on one of the videos associated with the piece referred directly to a person named “Matt.”

I think the reason I find this creepypasta fascinating is because it uses elements of our generation–specifically video games and the medium of the Internet–to attempt to relate to us in a way might not have affected other generations. Other creepypastas that have utilized Nintendo such as Pokemon Black and Pokemon Lost Silver really tap into that shared popular cultural consciousness, but they do more than that. You’ll find that if you Google or even click on the above links (pardon the unintentional pun), that after these stories became memes–cultural information that spreads to different people–people started creating works based on these pastas to make them more real. Candle Cove now has surviving televised scenes on Youtube. The haunted Majora’s Mask game has many imitators and parodies. Even the Pokemon games I mentioned have been made into actual bootleg games by readers of the things. Basically, they are not only Internet memes, but they become living stories. They become alive inside the people that want them, and I think that is an incredibly bad-ass concept.

It makes me really want to create a creepypasta of my own. I’ve had ideas for some, but I never really followed through with them. You have to get that mixture of intentional typos that look unintentional, a compelling and readable but realistic-looking narrative aesthetic and revealing the horror but not revealing the full origin of the horror down pat because not only do you have to contend with a reader’s disbelief, but also the myriad of other creepypastas out there that share so many–and in some ways too many–characteristics to make yours unique. I tend to get very elaborate in my works and that would definitely count against me in creating such a potent literary hoax.

Still, I know I can’t help thinking about it. It is no coincidence that a loved one chose to give me the strange and wonderful gift of an old newspaper article talking about the effects of the legendary War of the Worlds radio broadcast on its audience at the time.

A creepypasta functions as a horror story pretending to be real and yet even when revealed as fiction, readers make it real by believing in it and paying homage to it. In other words, we make our nightmares real and we actually seem to enjoy doing so which leads me back to my original question of why?

The Internet allows creepypastas to exist: to replicate and spread across not merely servers, message boards, and chat-rooms but imaginations as well. Where is that line between the machine and the human mind these days? What happens when we interact with an increasing body of knowledge that we can manipulate and shape to our whims (technology permitting)? I believe that, in the end, creepypastas exist for three reasons: the first being entertainment, the second being that they are a form of oral storytelling around a pixelated campfire, and the third because we want to believe and make real and manifest the idea that the wondrous and the terrifying can exist in a world where we all live: where something like the Internet exists and not only contains the growing sum of all knowledge and information of what we think exists in our supposed certainty, but also human experience and its less concrete intuitions as well.

I also believe that in light of all of this creepypastas–along with their verbal and written urban legend and folktale predecessors–demonstrate that horror is not only the fear of the unknown. Rather, horror is the love for the unknown–for an unknown–and the sheer limits of human understanding.

Horror as a Universal Power

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

What is it about horror that is so incredibly powerful? It’s something that many like to avoid, but is attracts people as well: and oftentimes it does both. In part I think it is linked to fear. Fear is a healthy and necessary human emotion: a “danger-sense” to let you know that something isn’t right and that you might want to watch yourself before doing anything foolish: or not doing anything at all. Many old cautionary folktales derive themselves from this ancient impulse: utilizing archetypal images and story-elements to make their points.

This is me basically writing as though I know exactly what I’m talking about. Because I know horror is more than merely fear and it has more than a cautionary function. Aristotle would most likely posit that a story or play created from horror brings out pity and fear in the audience, but that isn’t completely true either because horror doesn’t always bring catharsis: it doesn’t always drain out the pity and the fear. Sometimes it plays with these feelings, increases them and leaves them inside you like a hollow, dark cold spot as you leave the theatre.

Among others, Clive Barker in his short story “Dread” looks at another other aspect of horror. Dread as an emotion is knowing something bad is coming for you, or lurking just over your shoulder and feeling powerless to do anything about it but writhe in a corner. You try to avoid it and it only makes it stronger in you. Dread is fear so internalized into a loop inside a human being that it cannot be resolved: or at least not without considerable effort and willpower.

Yet none of these explanations are enough. Horror is more than just a cautionary genre. It is more than leaving people traumatized and afraid. It is definitely more than embodying something that people try to avoid in vain: only to give it more power over them. Horror has all of these elements to an extent, but I think there is much more to it and I think this is why it has such powerful through its narratives: particularly its universal narratives.

I think horror is a part of the human psyche that is both repulsed by and attracted to what Freud would call “the uncanny.” I also think the uncanny is very much linked to Romanticism and the Gothic’s worship of Nature as a terrifying form of beauty far beyond human understanding. You can argue that when one feels horror–true horror–they blow beyond the limits of their comfort, cultural, and even conscious boundaries into something so weird and still so unknown that it can be positively overwhelming. It uses fear and dread as building blocks to off-set or play with the rational mind enough to connect the animal mind with the infinite darkness that is already there connected to them. Horror is the darkness in us all. The bloody plays of Seneca, the gruesome feast of Thyestes, the ancient dithyrambs of Dionysus and his Maenads all play with this power and instead of providing catharsis–as Aristotle believed tragedy does–it alters the mind by showing the wonders and the terrors of a much greater world.

That above paragraph is a lot of poetic license, I know, but given the nature of this Blog and the subject, I’d like to think it’s at least somewhat appropriate. After writing this and mentioning Clive Barker, I realize why the former’s stories are so effective: in that they really play on the attractive and repulsive aspects of horror. Books of Blood make the very thing the characters fear or dread, or what the reader finds disturbing, attractive in a perverse but natural way. I loved those two books when I read them and I have never looked at the horror genre in the same way again since I did.

Attraction and repulsion towards the uncanny is why we like horror stories. We also like them because they tap into truly universal elements and archetypes inside all of us: the very places some people want to deny the very existence of. Short stories, novels, and films structure horror in a very symmetrical way but before the existences of any of these–before even the ancient rituals of the divine that led to theatre–there were tales and stories told around campfires spreading to other campfires like the wildfire they already were. They are called folktales and horror stories, and in our time now they are called urban legends.

Then there are the stories that exist on the Internet. They are called “creepypastas” and I think this post has gone on long enough and I will write about creepypastas in the next one. I tend to write a lot and I just want to make sure that people will want to read my points this time and not give up because of the length. But soon, I promise, we will talk about creepypastas.

Wrong Genius, Music, and Another Thank You

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

These past two days and Sarah Howell have been very kind to this Blog. In these past two days I’ve had a lot of traffic, new Followers, and a whole lot of “Likes” for my “Onus of Creativity” and “Ice-Nine Days and Vonnegut Nights” posts. I want to thank you–all of you–once again for finding what I have to say interesting.

This Blog is evolving in ways I didn’t actually anticipate. Like I keep saying, it was supposed to be a Writing or Writer’s Blog with more stories than criticism and opinion. But you know, I really like my opinions. I like taking my experiences and knowledge and making new shapes with them: strange, weird little baubles that really just reveal what I think. Really, my Blog seems random–kind of like me–but I’d like to say there’s some underlying pattern that’s still in the process of making itself known here.

And you know, while I’d really like to think that at least I bring a writer’s sensitivities or sensibilities to my opinions here, in the end I just like to state them no matter what they might be.

There is one thing I’ve been thinking about lately. If you read my “Onus” entry, you’ll know that I referenced a TED Lecture by a writer named Elizabeth Gilbert called “On Genius” or “On Nurturing Creativity” in which she talks about the ancient Mediterranean conception of genius as being a spirit that passes through someone: that may or may not give them inspiration. Gilbert talks about treating modern genius like this: that–as opposed to purely being centred within a particular tormented individual–it can be a force that you can accept or reject on your terms to make your life more balanced.

Yet here is a question that has been plaguing me: what happens when you get the wrong genius?

Let me explain. A few times in my life, but one time in particular, I was asleep and dreaming. And within that dream I heard music. Now, I tend to write my dreams down whenever I’m not lazy enough and it was a very compelling, detailed dream. But here is the thing. I am not a musician. I was not trained as a musician. I do not have many–if any–of the tools to record, pattern, or create music.

So why did I get this sound? I tried copying it down in terms of rhythm. I will admit that I had some background playing the drums in elementary school and I even learned how to sing in a religious capacity. My family is a family of singers too. I also tend to listen to a lot of epic music: Classical, modern, Electric Body Music, video game soundtrack and just very eclectic things. So it doesn’t surprise me that some music has rubbed off in my head. I also admit that I am inspired by music and I collect certain tunes I like on Youtube.

But if we go by the hypothesis of the genius, why would it choose me–a non-musician–to make music in? I mean, seriously, the closest I can get is lyrical poetry which, while not completely removed, is really not ideal for its preservation. So do I tell it to go away when it happens? Do I adapt it somehow?

Today on the subway, I was continuing to plod through Lesley Chamberlain’s book Nietzsche in Turin. At one point she goes into some length about Nietzeche’s influence from Wagner: particularly how his form of opera informed the structure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. From what I understand, Chamberlain seems to argue that Zarathustra is a philosophical opera in written poetic form. Nietzsche also had musical background and attempted to write music and–I believe–librettos as well. Wagner even called him a “failed musician.” I personally think that Nietzsche was one of the most irreverent but paradoxically serious artistic philosophers that we have in the Western tradition.

But did Nietzsche make something new? Did his attention to archetypes, to written leitmotifs and human cycles, and lyrical turns of phrase and conventions make what some have called “bad poetry disguised as philosophy” or did he make something else entirely: something unique in the nineteenth century? Did he make some kind of prototypical medium just as Wagner changed the operatic one: that branches out over several mediums to make something else entirely?

I suppose that is one way to interpret how a genius of music can influence a writer, but I don’t know. Maybe it was the wrong genius. But then I feel music inside of me too. I think it’s in all of us. ln fact, I think one of the most beautiful things about Musicals is that they are art forms that bring to the surfaces the rhythms and sounds that we hear and feel inside of us. They are tonal equivalents of words or brush strokes that can use to mimic our external and internal environments: and only a few people can capture and manipulate these tones well. I am not one of these: unless you count poetry which I don’t do often.

Still … music, by it’s very name is associated with the muses, the daimon, the genius. Music is also structured by symbols: by written notes that are very eerily similar to how mathematic symbols are structured. They are said to have a very similar rhythm. While I have considerable difficulty with math, at the same time I know that it is a construction of ancient symbolic logic and understanding while music utilizes it but has great intuitive and creative aspects.

I guess I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe it was my left-brain trying to tell me something in my sleep, or my right and left brain-parts trying to tell me a story in a slightly different way. Or maybe I should have more musician friends who can record down something that I can at least hum before I forget it. It’s just really fascinating and I hope that if that genius didn’t find what it needed from me, it went on to someone else he could … or maybe, it did find what it was looking for. I’ll never really know, but maybe I have yet to see.

Ray Bradbury Enters the Pantheon of the Book-People

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

No doubt by now there are–and there will be–a whole bunch of articles dealing with the recent death–and long life–of Ray Bradbury. I feel strange writing about him. The fact is, I didn’t read very many of his works, and I was not a fanatical fan. When I first saw news of his death today, I was originally going to just leave a sad Facebook status message and leave it to better writers and fans than I to write the obituaries that he deserved.

But something stopped me. It was in high school. I was in a dystopian mindset, if not reading a lot of the fiction and literature around it. I don’t remember what Grade I was in or what class it was–I will assume English–but one of our required readings was the book Fahrenheit 451. I didn’t know what to think of it until I read the first sentence that started the entire story off. They tell you when you begin writing that you should always start strong–create a powerful or striking first sentence–and finish strong as well.

The protagonist Guy Montag was a fireman: in that he didn’t fire, but he fought with fire … on books. I never realized until now just how that works on so many different levels. It was a story set in a futuristic political dystopia where people were encouraged to watch television, medicate themselves, and never to read again. Books were burned when found and people possessing them were arrested and executed for having them. The slogan “fighting fire with fire” gains a whole other kind of horror when you think about it in the context of this cautionary tale: when you look at even the cultural resonance of what book-burning represents.

A lot of things happened in the course of that book, but two things stayed with me. The first was Captain Beatty, the Chief of Firemen and Montag’s boss. He was the antagonist of the story, but there were details about him that struck me. Beatty used to love books, but eventually got disillusioned by the realities they revealed. He became a fireman to destroy them and “protect others” from that disillusionment, from having their perfect ignorance destroyed yet when confronting a rebellious Montag he used that same knowledge he gained from his books to persuade the other. What struck me about that character was just how sad he really was: that despite his bitterness, he still loved those books and–in the end–he didn’t even stop Montag from burning him. He died the contradictory way he lived. Beatty was a tragic figure: representing ideals verses reality and the contradictions between them and that kind of character stuck with me for the rest of my life as a writer and as a human being.

The other element of the novel that really stuck with me was the idea of “the Book-People” memorizing and representing lost books: until society stopped burning them, or society itself ceased to exist. Think about it: each person has inside of their minds a book that they chose to memorize for the duty of maintaining the knowledge within it and restoring it one day. I can’t think of anything more noble or sacred than a duty like that. It made me think: if books were outlawed, which one would I want to embody and preserve? I think with me it would be Homer’s Odyssey: if only because I have read it several times over. I do wonder though who the “book-keeper” of Fahrenheit 451 would be and I hope that he, or she, would be a strong one.

Ray Bradbury was the one who made me ask myself that question. He brought me to that kind of dystopian world and presented me with something complex, yet when exposed to the temperature at which paper burns, very essential. I can summarize how he was one of the last Golden Age science-fiction writers still living, that he kept writing on for years, and that he had himself become a cultural icon, but the truth is, Ray Bradbury was important to me because if he had never written Fahrenheit 451, or I never read it, I would not be the same person or writer that I am today.

Rest in peace, Ray Bradbury. It was a pleasure to burn.

After the Zombie

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So what I can tell you about the story I wrote in the previous post? Well, for starters, I thought it would be a lot shorter than it actually turned out to be. I made a deal a little while ago to write 250-words a day–to keep myself writing–and I’ve exceeded that. I really exceeded it with this piece here. I remember an author–I think, yes it was Neil again–stating that if you wrote 300-words a day you would eventually have a novel. And while I haven’t written a novel in a long time, sometimes I feel dangerously close to do that again.

But let us deal with the danger of zombies first. While the walking dead in themselves are terrifying, you have to consider that in a zombie apocalypse there are other terrifying aspects to consider as well. For instance, imagine you have mostly been acclimated to living indoors and your job deals almost solely with paperwork or writing. You may have a really powerful imagination, but imagination doesn’t equal exercise, discipline and hard physical work. Those things can be additional, but they are not automatic.

You have to also consider: just how many people have actual survivalist skills? Who camps without at least one convenience or modern washroom? Where will you get your food? It takes a while to grow it and you will need something immediate. Do you have combat abilities and reflexes? Do you have skills that can be implemented for immediate survival? These are some of the questions and issues I’ve encountered in zombie apocalypse stories and that I went through when I wrote this.

Strangely, I often write these from the perspectives of the zombies themselves, so this was different for me in that I was trying to go for realism. But there is more. You see, imagine all that above stuff and then think of a person dependent on anti-anxiety medication, or who is a “shut-in” or has medical issues of organic or psychological dimensions. Imagine the social modern world of streets and cars being stressful enough for them and then take that all away and have them try to survive being eaten by zombies and surviving in disparate groups of people who are just trying to make it through the insanity.

Some of these people might take a while to adjust. Most would probably not make it. It would be very difficult for someone on medication, for instance, if they couldn’t access any new batches and went into a powerful kind of withdrawal: especially from the anti-anxiety medication that our modern culture likes to espouse. Some might see it in some ways as a kind of liberation. I imagine you wouldn’t stand on too much ceremony in a place without what is considered modern civilization anymore. With a character like Malcolm Ecker, I see a very intelligent but inexperienced person who in a rebuilding period and even for entertainment purposes would be crucial for spiritual and psychological survival. But the problem is that his group is not in that period. They are in the hiding and hoarding period where people need to hone their practical skills: skills he is bad it. It also doesn’t help that the leader of his group is abusive to him and the others do in some ways see him as dead weight.

Being rejected and humiliated by a group would be even more devastating in a zombie apocalypse because–honestly–where can you go? You can fight back, it’s true and claim your place, and potentially cause strife. But when you are a person who is mostly shut-in and quiet and you have only written papers and gamed–when you are cripplingly shy–that is a lot against you right there. The cold hard fact of the matter is that the group in a survivalist situation will leave whatever dead weight is behind them and Malcolm is intelligent enough to realize that: to know that right now and in a future where the future is immediate survival he is just dragging people down: if only with his low self-esteem being exacerbated by all the horror and stress around him.

With actual encouragement and more time, who knows what could have happened to him. But that is not how the world always works: even now during our non-apocalyptic time. Yet in the end he does make an affirmative choice. He considers the group’s well-being over his own. I won’t say he’s altruistic, because he’s not and he is being motivated by emotion, but the group does play a part in his decision.

The setting for this story was a little difficult too to create, but I decided to make my creatures similar to the ones in Max Brooks’ world and a great cemetery park was a perfect place for survivors to camp in: with few freshly dead around and those that were, buried deep underneath the earth. I also made it clear how that would change too as more survivors got infected or were tracked by the creatures there.

The motivation for this entire story was that in most zombie stories I’ve seen, we see strong individuals or people who overcome adversity, or keep hiding, or have a last few moments of glory. We also see ridiculous teenagers and people doing dumb things and are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. I wanted to write a character who was inept in this environment, had some humiliating disabilities, and was afraid but not stupid. I wanted to show an actual person and how an actual person would deal with all of this: how he or she might just tag along with the group to survive but get in the way and deal with the psychological consequences of “not fitting in.” I wanted to show that the “Other” is not just the zombie, but how the zombie’s mere existence or presence is symbolic of how one person in a time of stress can be their own worst enemy.

I wanted to write a story about a realistic person in a zombie apocalypse and what they might do. It does look grim at the end but, who knows: maybe Malcolm Ecker’s story isn’t done yet. That is entirely up to me.

Death by Zombie

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It was almost too late this time. Malcolm Ecker’s bowels rumbled painfully, yet he managed to get his pants off before soiling himself. Again. He squatted down, feeling ridiculous in the middle of the snow with his pants down and a deep earthy stench–his own–filled his nostrils as it dispersed into the frosted air.

Malcolm was glad that no one was there to see him, though they’d seen him do much worse. Something snapped in the distant trees: perhaps a broken twig or an animal on a branch. His bowels clenched again and he winced at the movement: distantly wondering if it was the result of his body or fear and not really caring so long as it passed and he could move on. He already felt cold enough out here and the memory of bloated, distended shapes coming through the windows of his old flat came at him …

He bit back a grunt of considerable discomfort, but eventually he felt his bowels–even as irritated by stress as they were–uncoil like a snake. After he cleaned himself, he pushed as much snow on the refuse he created as he could. His ears strained for groans in the distance, but he heard nothing. That didn’t mean anything, however. Some of the things out there didn’t have what one would consider proper mouths anymore or vocal cords.

Malcolm piled as much snow as he could: his hands shaking and clumsy. He knew by now that Rob–the leader of the people who’d found him at his apartment two weeks ago–would have been hissing at him: telling him how incompetent he was. Malcolm had never camped before and if he didn’t know that his wilderness survival skills were lacking, Rob and most of the others took enough time to make that fact very clear to him.

It was just as well too. Malcolm knew that he’d left enough tracks for the others to follow him. But it was night and they wouldn’t waste the energy–flashlight battery or otherwise–to track him yet even when they found the gun missing. Malcolm’s only other consolation, as he pulled up his pants–scrubbed a few times by snow and ice this week or so–was that he was far enough that if something happened to him before he … did what he had to do, he would not get traced back to the camp.

So Malcolm put his heavy mitts back on and narrowly avoided colliding his foot into another partially submerged headstone. A part of him still felt bad about defecating in the large cemetery park they found as their refuge. But then he remembered Sara and her observations about the things: that they had reanimated only after recent death. Therefore during this time, a graveyard was one of the safer places to be. The truly dead would not mind someone of the living needing to relieve their biological need, he figured, and those that weren’t would settle it with him one way or another.

Malcolm thought of them then, though he didn’t really want to, as he came to a stop near a tree. His hands gripped tightly around the Kali sticks he brought with him. His damned Kali sticks. He’d just started training at that dojo before the insanity broke out all over the world. His therapist told him to take up a martial art to deal with his irritable bowel which, up until now, kept him at home or near a toilet for a good portion of his adult life. Some people might have thought that pretty funny, but Malcolm was not one of them. It wasn’t funny to be in discomfort and not be able to deal with the slightest anxiety without a bathroom nearby. It really wasn’t funny when other people thought it so funny that he wanted to avoid them and stay home as much as possible.

That was until his martial arts classes and the clacking of the wooden Kali sticks against each other changed the burning anxiety in his stomach into something calmer, cleaner, and slightly more focused.

Malcolm now stared out at the distant trees and wondered just how memories of his humiliations managed to comfort him against the images of the swollen dead breaking into his apartment. There had been just two of them. It was like they had died from some kind of allergic reaction to distend and swell their body parts so much: which he supposed, in retrospect, they did. He’d just been working on his PhD at the time: a dissertation on role-playing games as a relatively new sub-genre of oral storytelling tradition. The advantage to that was that he’d barely had to leave his apartment as he was funded and submitted most of his work to his Professor online.

Perhaps the other advantage was that he’d had a brief shelter against the creatures as they started to come back to life. He’d known something was wrong. There’d been Internet reports all over the place. He even kept his door locked and barricaded with furniture. Malcolm remembered sitting in that small room with his sticks even as he ran out of food. The plumbing was still working then and he still hadn’t even taken a shower. He’d been too on edge and rightfully paranoid.

When the two creatures found him, he’d barely been upright from lack of food and sleep. Even at the best of times, he lacked upper body strength. The first Kali strike only burst a blood vessel in the creature’s cheek. The second stick attack was a clumsy switch that got grabbed by the other creature. He’d hit the other creature’s face to the side again: but not nearly enough to do that damage that was necessary.

Malcolm’s last thoughts at the time were that there was big difference between fighting these things with dice and trying to feebly hit them with–for all intents and purposes–blunt instruments. Colin, who was an actual martial fighter in the group, told him about this and actually got angry at him when they encountered a group of the things that had moved into the cemetery park. He’d berated him about getting himself killed. Malcolm felt really bad then as Colin and Jen had saved his life from those creatures and since then, Colin had tried to train him to fight as much as possible.

During the two weeks they’d been together, he’d managed to nearly stab himself with the knife and machete that Colin gave him to train with. That was not counting the time he nearly tripped over himself to let Sara and Jen get away from one of the creatures that attacked them here with disturbing frequency. The creature … nearly bit him, just like they did back in his old apartment before Colin and the others made short work of them. The sound of bullets were nothing like the television shows he used to watch. They were loud and piercing and the very sound of them cracked through his very being.

They’d shot the creatures the night they found him too–close-range–and Malcolm could still hear the shots like thunder in his eardrums. He wondered somehow if he’d been made deaf by some of that. Certainly Rob seemed to think so. He always asked Malcolm if he had a hearing problem in addition to incontinence. Rob had led them to the cemetery after raiding Malcolm’s apartment for what little resources there were: which–as Rob said a few times–had been one of Malcolm’s few redeeming features and not much else.

The memories were all jumbling together now, yet it seemed appropriate to Malcolm as he put his Kali sticks down–almost reverently–into the snow: ashamed that someone more worthy hadn’t taken them instead. He reached a hand into his coat pocket. It didn’t take an idiot to figure out that Malcolm wasn’t particularly wanted and that the only reason he was there was out of common human decency: a decency that had a certain patience expiry date. He had already almost gotten them killed a few times trying to raid some nearby variety stores and bungling: making too much noise, or not hitting a creature hard enough with a machete. He didn’t like to think about that blade embedded in that creature’s chest, lost forever as swarms of them began to mass and they had to run.

Malcolm also really didn’t want to think about the incident with the gun … the same gun he held in his hand right now, how he missed the creature with it, how it went past it and .. into Jen’s shoulder instead. After they’d run, after Rob began to beat him, after they hauled him away, Colin had said it was an accident and that he just needed more time to learn. Malcolm didn’t even blame Rob for getting that angry and almost wished Jen hadn’t interceded. He’d never been good at First-Person Shooters, but this had been different and he could have …

Sara kept telling Malcolm–in a cold, detached manner–that if and when civilization needed to be rebuilt, his own skills would come in handy. It was a cold comfort. It was hard to even maintain a tent near a crypt and get food never mind write or record anything. And Malcolm spent a good few years writing about table-top RPGs that he’d barely even played. None of the group were interested in his theories–and he couldn’t tell stories without stuttering and the zombie story he made earned him a punch to the shoulder from Rob.

And the creatures were massing. Some other survivors must have had the same idea they did and carried the infection to the cemetery. After what happened with Jen, few of the party were even talking to him now. Malcolm was smart enough to realize he’d become dead weight.

Malcolm turned the safety of the gun off. Although Colin had failed to teach him how to use a blade or a gun properly, he remembered this much: that and loading it. He looked down at the barrel. There was one bullet in there. The way Malcolm figured it, they would have had to use it on him eventually. There was no way he’d be able to avoid being bitten or scratched forever and he was too much of a coward to let the creatures devour him unarmed and alone. So he felt a little bit better about taking the gun and wasting one bullet. Besides, even if that didn’t happen and he didn’t accidentally kill one of the team, he knew he would easily get sick and use Sara’s medical supplies up, and Rob probably didn’t consider him worth the penicillin.

He was doing them all a favour, he told himself. But in reality, he was doing the favour for himself.

They’d find him here. The creatures didn’t eat the dead and even if another human group found him, the gun would benefit them instead. Anyone would certainly use it better than he had. His only regret, as he put the barrel into his mouth–where even he could not miss this shot–was that Jen would be sad. Although the others hadn’t really hated him, except for her boyfriend Rob, they’d not nearly been as nice or compassionate to him as she had.

Malcolm felt his bowels begin to tighten again. And although he knew that once he did this, he would definitely soil himself, for the first time in his whole life he was okay with that. A smile came onto his face as he pulled the trigger of the gun.

This Land Like a Mirror Where I Met Gwendolyn MacEwen

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I met Gwendolyn MacEwen after she died in 1987. In fact, it was many years later in the early twenty-first century at York University back when I was in its Creative Writing Program. My teacher read us–and then had us read–some of her poems. She chose Dark Pines Under Water and it really left a powerful impression on me.

I recall trying to talk with my teacher about that at the time and I wasn’t even able to remember the poem’s name. I was so ashamed of that fact that when we had to memorize a poem for an assignment, I choose the above. Over the following years, I read all of Gwendolyn’s poems that I could find: though reading poetry is quite different from prose and sometimes difficult to read never mind even explain.

Gwendolyn was a poet deeply concerned with her craft and the power of mythology and the mythopoeic. She approached matters of mysticism along with darkness, sensuality, and a profound sense of psycho-geography: of history and the echoes of all people in the land they used to–and still-live in. Gwendolyn wrote many books of poetry and two published novels: Julian the Magician and King of Egypt, King of Dreams: both of which are dense but incredibly charged and multi-layered stories. An ex-girlfriend of mine bought me the last book as well as two of her selected poetic readings.

What really gets to me, however, is that this woman–who was shy, quiet, small and sleight with a round face, dark hair, and kohl-lined intensely dreamy blue eyes in her youth–was born and lived in Toronto. I think about it sometimes: that she once walked and biked to many of the places I’ve walked or drove on the bus past. She lived in the places that I visited and somehow made poetry and art there. From the sixties to the eighties she did this: learning Kabbalah, a multitude of languages, and she read her poems a loud. And while she did travel from time to time: to Israel, Egypt, Greece and England she tried to find herself–and find–Toronto’s spirit. Her series of short stories in Noman and Noman’s Land are some of the best Canadian literature I’ve ever wanted to read. I remember my time taking those books out of York and the Toronto Public Library fondly: especially since they meshed so well with the mythological writing I was doing, developing and planning on doing.

She was a complex character in herself, something that Rosemary Sullivan explores with a certain creative flair in her Shadow-Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen: a book that I liked for the most part, though there were some psychological intimations on some of Gwendolyn’s behaviour on Sullivan’s part that I found to be very reductionist and necessarily the result of simply one particular potential trauma. Nevertheless, I really liked how she incorporated Gwendolyn’s life and works together into her narrative and it gave me another glimpse of the emerging literary scene and talent in Toronto at that time.

I won’t lie. Gwendolyn MacEwen and I have a lot of similarities, and despite years and death I sometimes felt close to her in a way. We both really like Star Wars and, as she knew it, the Marvel Family: though I wonder what she would have thought of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman’s interpretations of the latter. She even wrote a poem about it called Fragments From a Childhood: a superhero poem which I found online and fell totally in love with. It is also no coincidence that I wrote a glosa in undergrad of her poem Shadow-Maker: something I won’t show here … at least not for some time.

I wanted to write a story somehow from all I learned about her. I still have that idea. I spent a significant amount of time at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto going through the collection of manuscripts and notes that she left open to the public: including an unpublished novel about a female musician’s life growing up in the early years and turmoil of modern Israel called Gabriela. It was so strange to see someone writing about a culture that I grew up in, something that she did not grow up in, and yet get many of the nuances that were there along with some insights I’m not sure even I knew about.

When the Fisher was open until the evenings on Thursdays, I would spend many a time holding the very pages she did when creating her own works as the light of the afternoon sun turned into evening. It was some of the most peaceful and exciting times I had traveling to St. George campus to take a look at her works and hold them in my hands.

I wish I could have met her. I think we would have had a lot to talk about. I also know that she was a genius and she deserved to be acknowledged as such. She did a tremendous amount of research for her second published novel King of Egypt, she wrote prolifically and she did and learned to do so many things having not even been a high school graduate. Although she gained praise from her peers, I feel she deserved much more than she got. Gwendolyn MacEwen, as far as I am concerned, is one of the best Canadian and Torontonian creators we ever had and it is a shame that she’s gone and her work is not that well-known outside Canadian writer and academic circles.

Sometimes I thought about visiting her in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, but I’ve never gotten around to it and I’m not sure I ever will. I am glad that I looked through her Fonds at the Fisher however. I wish I could convey how it felt to look through the notes, drafts, and unpublished manuscripts of a writer and person that I respect: who influenced me so much and came into my life long after her own had ended so unexpectedly and easily like she was always there without it sounding creepy and ridiculous. But there it is. People come into your life for a reason and I believe she made my life richer for it.

In case you are interested, Gwendolyn’s collection can be accessed by anyone with a registration card at the Fisher. You just need to go and provide an address and ID and you are all set. I really recommend Gabriela because it is still very relevant and timely to today: especially with continued Israeli-Palestinian and Arabic relations being as they are. I wish it had been published, but I also loved reading it in that lovely Reading Room with the miles-high levels of bookshelves that the Fisher possesses.

I also want to link you to a review I did on Julian the Magician–Gwendolyn’s first published novel–on my Goodreads profile. It does get full of a bit of literary jargon, but I am pretty proud of it and what I got out of it. Sometimes I wonder if Neil read Gwendolyn, and if he hasn’t he definitely should.

Finally, I would add that Gwendolyn loved to read her poems aloud and at gatherings such as those at the Bohemian Embassy Club. There is a documentary made about her called Shadowmaker: The Life and Times of Gwendolyn MacEwen by Brenda Longfellow that has some filmed shots of her giving interviews and reading her poems. She has a melodic, resonant voice. It is worth seeing and listening to because her works make up a land that does, in the end, turn you inward.

How to Turn a Medium into a Genre: 8 to 16-Bit Video Games

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 3 Comments

So, I am not a programmer. I am not someone who games regularly–online or otherwise on computer and console–and as such I have not played many of the modern games that exist out there. I played all the way to the 64-bit and then the wii era. For all I haven’t played in a while or even having never been an expert player I am–like many children from the 80s–a Nintendo child.

I watched video games evolve into more or less what they are now. I know that there are some older than me who grew up in the 70s that saw what video games were like before and I have watched enough–and read enough–to see that they have come a long way in a lot of ways. I remember the day I saw my first Super Nintendo. It was at a friend’s house and the graphics looked like they were from a cartoon. They were lusher than the 8-bit pixels that existed before and possessed more expression. The music sounded less transparently synthetic and more … fuller in a lot of ways. I am not knocking or putting down 8-bit video game music however: after all, 8-bit tracks sound very expressive in how synthetic they are with clear beats, beeps and keening noises.

But when I saw the Super Nintendo I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. My brother and I scraped together everything we had to buy one. And we weren’t disappointed. The Super Nintendo and many of the games that followed on that console had excellent game-play, good graphics, wonderful sound, and in some cases some brilliant story-lines and expressive characters. There was a lot of innovation for gameplay and mechanics then as well. 8-bit was functional and fun but it was seriously like going from the second to third dimension. At the time, I thought that video games would improve and keep going up and up: that more realistic graphics symbolized this advancement.

There was a point where I actually stopped playing old games because I began to believe that they had become old-fashioned and obsolete: that something that didn’t look as realistic as it could be couldn’t be taken seriously anymore. Yes, back in the day when all one could do was make 8 to 16-bit games, it was all very well and good. But in a more modern age with newer games, I got into the habit of thinking there was no excuse to go back to those and that one had to advance with the times.

I was obviously wrong.

I found Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger long after their console was obsolete. Chrono Trigger in particular was one of those Super Nintendo games made towards the end of that system and it was so sophisticated and its pixels were made in such intimate detail along with its unique choice of game play that it made me happy to see it. There is something very archetypal about the pixel cartoon that others like Scott McCloud (at least with regards to comics) that to some degree one can relate to and emphasize with much more than the gritty and the realistic. They made me start to replay old games and instead of them making me depressed in that they were from the past and a time that didn’t exist, I just wanted to have fun with them.

If you ask me, I would say that my golden age of video-gaming was the Super Nintendo age. Even Sega’s competition added to that. Now fast forward a few decades. Now you have independent game makers and programmers, as well as those working on Internet and cellphone games, going back to those exact 8 to 16-bit forms. They do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that what was once a medium–the only way of expressing and symbolizing interactive programming in a game–has become a visual-audio aesthetic. In other words, an old medium has become a genre: it has become a creative choice and I think that is wonderful.

I mentioned that a month ago I went to the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and one thing that I made sure to see there was an exhibit called Comics Vs. Games: the result of collaborations between comics artists and independent video game programmers. I will admit that I have more than a passing interest in writing scripts for video games–and writing for video games–and what I saw and even played at TCAF was excellent.

One of the games that I actually played was The Yawhg: which was basically a game where you had to improve your skill-set before a cataclysm so you can help civilization rebuild itself. It had static screens with expressive backgrounds and artwork and a skill modifier number system: for example you got +3 if you completed a task you selected on a menu. It’s reminiscent of the Math Wizard game on the old computers at school, but it was so much fun because it made you use your imagination and the game mechanics were dynamic enough to make you want to play quite a few more times.

Then you had We’re No Angels where you play these 16-bit music celebrity sprites trying to escape from God and Heaven to go back to the real world and party. I didn’t really get to play the other two games, but as you can from the link they are very interesting. For example, The Mysterious Ambroditus is like an intricately illustrated Victorian Mortal Kombat game using a rock, paper, scissors method of card combat.

I’ll let you in on a secret. I actually enjoy watching people play certain kinds of video games. Often, you’ll find me watching Let’s Play videos on Youtube: particularly those of Boltage McGammar and HcBailly. But I haven’t played many video games myself in a long time. You can even ask my friends who had been trying like crazy to get me to play Knights of the Old Republic. But I played these games. They were even two-player and I played with them along with some random person I met at the Festival.

I know this entry seems a little random considering the other things I write about here, but I think it relates a lot to my mindset as a creator and as someone that enjoys interactive stories. I find it amazing what our time is doing with old games and cartoons from the 80s and onward: things that were once the present day of many of us and I like how there is new life in them. Old mediums are being made into new genres and new mediums and, you know what? I am glad to be here: just for that.

Without Words: Sarah Howell’s Untitled Squishface Booklet

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 5 Comments

I know that’s an ironic title considering that this is a writing blog, but it is also about a comic and I rarely use graphics on here anyway. The comic I want to talk about–created by Australian artist and cartoonist Sarah Howell–is challenging in this way to say the least.

In fact, I will be honest and say I never heard of Sarah Howell or the group she co-founded Squishface Studio, but I’m glad that I did. I didn’t actually run into Sarah or her work until after the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (or TCAF) a month ago. I’d finished my Volunteer shift there–mostly moving, taking apart boxes, and cleaning stuff up or what I really like to call the Teardown Shift–and after some dinner that was way too expensive I went to Lee’s Palace (which some of you might know from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, or just by living in Toronto in general) for the post-volunteering celebration.

It was actually Sarah who started talking to me first when she saw my rather bright sort of orange-pink TCAF shirt. She introduced me to her husband and collaborator David Bluemenstein and the rest of her team. They had apparently been on the Caravan of Comics Tour: an event in which Australian cartoonists traveled to comics events throughout the North-Eastern USA and Canada. So then over some very loud conversation and music we somehow managed to cover a wide area of subject matter. And yes, Neil Gaiman did come up. In fact, the ideas that formed my earlier Blog post about Jeff Smith and Bill Watterson came–in part–from our conversation at Lee’s Palace. Really, it was the most I’d talked with anyone at the Festival: before or after.

But at one point myself and another Volunteer asked her about her work (at least I think so over the noise, err music) and she placed in front of me this small chapbook. And now here is where the challenge really begins. Basically, Sarah’s comic is about a 16-paged booklet–double-spaced–with a scene on each page. It has no title and in fact it is a wordless sequential story: a wordless comic.

This is a concept that has fascinated me. I have seen really old woodcuts and copies of said woodcuts that do something very similar in just telling a story in pictures and little or nothing else. In fact, the only words in it were “The End” and Sarah’s professional email addresses on the very back of the booklet. Also, the way each sequential image is on its own page–instead of on different panels on one–is reminiscent of an illustrated book: except without words.

The figures in the book are drawn like glyphs. There is something very elemental and–if I had to choose another word–essential about them. I really wish I could find more bibliographic information on this untitled, wordless comic or even post a link to the comic itself because I feel that by describing it in words, I’m really not doing it justice. I feel also feel like Nevin Martell and his Looking for Calvin and Hobbes book that has no illustrations from the comic strips whatsoever, only even worse because I don’t have anything to really show here from it. It does figure these two characters–these snippets taken from Sarah Howell’s website–in the first and third pictures. There is also another picture in the Gallery of her site, but I don’t want to link to that because I don’t want to create any intentional spoilers. I will say though that the character resembles a well-known comics super-villain but it is not that being.

Sarah Howell’s comic was about two beings that meet and get to know each other: but when one seems to unwittingly overreach everything changes and it takes the third character to step in and change things some more. And he does not change things in the way that you may think he does when you first see him. That is all I can really say: that and even in the relative darkness of the Club, from what I could see then the story was touching enough to still make me cry a little.

It was a beautiful silent comic. Of course the term “silent comic” is a misnomer or a bit of wordplay in itself. After all, even written words do not have sounds unless they spoken verbally. I said something similar in an earlier review I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Signal to Noise. In a lot of ways, and I’m sure Scott McCloud has said this to some extent, comics is a silent art: as is writing in a lot of ways, but works like Sarah Howell’s here are all the more so.

Sarah Howell let me keep this sample of her work after she showed it to me and I will treasure it always. I’m not sure how or if you can order some of them, but I imagine if you query her on her website she will let you know, or have some kind of FAQ that might deal with it. I wish I could be more helpful. In a lot of ways, this comic is one of the most simplified but mysterious ones I’ve come across. If anyone has more direct information, you are more than welcome in posting it here. Also, you should definitely check out Sarah Howell’s works–and works in progress–at her above website.

Whatever the details, I’m glad I have it. I learned new things, met new people and got a comic. It was one of the highlights of my time at–and after–TCAF.