Tag: writing

And While I’m At It …

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I figured that this would be an appropriate place to put this. It is a little creative monologue sketch or vignette I made a year ago that reflects a lot on the nature of creativity. It is, fittingly enough, entitled “Creativity.” I hope you’ll enjoy it. I have one more old work to post on here–where more people can see it–before I move on. See you soon.

Creativity

“Sometimes I have to wonder about what people say about human genius,” he says, before leaning more heavily against the wall.

“Take Mozart for instance. Many claim that the composer wrote compositions completely free of error, blot and correction. He created his music ready-made and fully formed like Athene plunging right out of the temple of Zeus. If so, what a Metis he and others must have swallowed beforehand, if you will pardon the mythological digression.”

He chuckles, and then sighs, “It would sound wonderful to have this ability, wouldn’t it? If it existed, I mean. To be able to create perfection out of your own two hands, out of your very mind itself …” he pauses, “Or would it be so wonderful?

“For instance, imagine everything they said about Mozart was true. Think about making something everyday without making any mistakes in it whatsoever. Consider that you will have done this not just every day, but every year that you’ve been alive and first conscious of your gift. Then put the drive into consideration. Imagine feeling outside pressure and your own inner drive wanting you to make something better than the last time you created something. You always have to be better no matter what.

“But let’s just say you can tolerate — or perhaps even thrive — under these circumstances. You accomplish everything you set out to do and you finally approach the end of your life. Imagine slightly before this happens, you think about everything you’ve done up until this point. You have your old works and manuscripts in front of you and look through them to try and catch just a hint of the glimpse of that place you were in when you first made them so long ago. I don’t know about you, but as good as I would be, I wouldn’t be able to find it again.

“Instead I think that if Mozart really made all his works straight and unblemished from his mind, all he would see in front of him are the mistakes he never made or learned from, the absence of the rough drafts that could have made him wince with chagrin and sentiment, the non-existence of any chronicle of his progress and growth, and the lack of any seed that germinated his very ideas. If any of this is true, what he would have realized at that moment was that the only thing that ever made him worth anything was something outside and despite himself: something crystalline perfect and utterly sterile. And if this were the case, wouldn’t he have realized this much earlier than just at the end of his life?

“What would that have meant? Would there have been any meaning in it for him at all?”

He stares at the wall for a little while before considering his next words, “I would like to believe that this isn’t true at all. I’d like to think that not only is human genius potential in varying degrees, but that it is something that always has room to learn and change. Therefore, I do think Mozart had one or two corrections on his note sheets from time to time, or changed nuances to his music as he performed them for each audience he came in contact with.

“Of course, it’s also very possible that I’m wrong. Maybe he did make perfection and still learned anyway. Maybe there are people who are capable of this and better themselves only in making different and more complex works. But then where does that perfection ultimately come from?

“Maybe, in the end, it was no accident that I mentioned Athene in the head of Zeus. Daimons. Muses. After all, genius was once considered a spirit that made a human its vessel for a time. And if that’s true, just how much — if any  — creative responsibility belongs to its creator? Perhaps nothing Mozart ever made was ever original or his own. Maybe nothing we make belongs to us in any capacity. But would that provide a sobering blow to the human ego? Or tremendous sense of relief?

“I don’t know,” he finally shrugs, “As for me, I’ll take my good moments, my mistakes, a drink of whiskey and a listening to of Mozart’s Requiem any day.”

Ice-Nine Mornings and Vonnegut Nights

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’d only heard his name in passing as I read other works of fiction and science-fiction. I’m not even sure how my girlfriend got me to start reading Kurt Vonnegut: what the precise details of that moment were like but I remember other details.

It was summer of last year. I was still in the process of (procrastinating) writing my Master’s Thesis and driving myself crazy. I’d finished reading Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game–or Magister Ludi if you’d like–and I found that once I did I wasn’t really interested in reading anything else of his. But I was starving for reading material: so much so I didn’t even know that I was.

I don’t exactly remember when my girlfriend and I started talking about Cat’s Cradle, but we did and I really wanted to read it. But as I write this I remember that it had to do with her introducing me to Vonnegut’s made-up religion of Bokononism–of the concept of a karass as a strange unification of people under God or divine influence, and especially a granfalloon: the creation of a forced or “false” group of people who really have nothing in common whatsoever but–again–something forced or artificial. I’d had some personal experiences with both–and it is hilarious and fitting just how fictional concepts make human nature and interaction easier to understand–and I wanted to know more about the book from where it all came from.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find her copy. So I gave in and borrowed it from York’s library. As I was reading it and making commentary on the way as I usually do, all my girlfriend really told me at the time was that she found it “cute” that I thought I could predict how a Kurt Vonnegut novel would end or even continue.

She was right.

What can I tell you? That summer, Kurt Vonnegut–or “Grandpa” as my girlfriend likes to call him–exposed me to a world of black, black humour and rendered spectacularly the banal frailty and stupidity of the human race in such a way that was immensely entertaining. His “what-the-fuck” moments were plenty and awfully true to the strangeness of life. I started Cat’s Cradle slow. It was a deceptive little bugger: with each chapter little more than a few pages for the most part. Then as I got towards the middle I consumed each page with voraciousness and a notable lack of mercy or pity.

After that there was an old, tattered, and well-loved copy of Mother Night for my consideration: where what we consider war crimes and human atrocity, stupidity, and uniqueness essentially and cunningly “fuck you the fuck up” and your preconceptions too. The best lesson I got out of the thing that I read as I took the bus to school, lay in our bed, and even rode with my friends to a table-top role-playing game session with Lego is to be careful of what you pretend to be, because you might become it.

I remember mornings where my girlfriend forced me to go meet my friends for gaming weekends and those books accompanied me with lunch. I didn’t think about my looming school project, but I learned from Grandpa Vonnegut instead–my cynical, grumpy, literary grandfather–about life. I don’t remember the last Vonnegut book I read. It was about a man who was a former soldier and he taught at a college close to a prison. I never got farther than the chapter with him and his class looking at old and failed perpetual motion machines found in an attic.

I remember that part well. I was riding by myself back down two buses from York Region back downtown from said gaming session and the serious work around it  :). It was the bus I took on Bloor in the late warm summer night: under the amber artificial lighting of the bus, the ambiance of the passing streetlights outside, the fading blue darkness in the sky. and a metal framed red-purple seat. I put that book on hold to read A Song of Ice and Fire–based on my friends’ constant pestering that I needed to–and I never picked it up again. I wish I had.

My Vonnegut education is not complete. I didn’t finish that book and my girlfriend doesn’t have Slaughterhouse Five. I hear Vonnegut likes to break the fourth wall so much after a while that he just gets fed up and it is less a spectacle and more a matter of a “I don’t give a damn” course. I can sympathize with that. I think I will be a grumpy old man like that when I’m old. I’m already half-way there with the grumpy part. Or maybe that’s crazy I’m thinking about.

I do think that you need to have time between readings of Vonnegut: just like you don’t want to eat bitter-sweet chocolate all the time: just occasionally and when the summer times come, and when you have a long bus ride far past two in the morning and you need some black therapeutic entertainment on the TTC … all the way home.

The Onus of Creativity

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

First, let me again thank all of my new readers for reading as well as “Liking” my posts and “Following” my Blog. I very much appreciate it and it encourages me to keep writing on here: influencing me to believe I have things that are worth saying about what I do.

A question that writers almost always get asked at some point or another–so I’m told–is where do you get your inspiration from?

It’s a similar question to the infamous where do you get your ideas from, and I might get into that as this Blog entry unfolds a bit more. I can be a real smart-ass and say that I get my inspiration and my ideas from inside of the strange, convoluted thing that is my mind. I can even be literal and say that I get them from reading, from watching movies and television, from my time at school, from long walks talking to myself, and from basically experiencing life. I even say as much in this Blog: which was founded on those very principles.

There was a TED Lecture created by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert called On Genius in which she discusses the Western view of what an artist and a creator is. Specifically, Gilbert looks at the symbol of the tormented artist: of the person or “genius” who is the sole producer of all the art and knowledge and expression that comes to them. She contests the view that it is somehow “natural” for a creator to suffer from depression, alcoholism, to be genuinely unhappy a good portion of their lives.

Even though she tries to debunk this, there is something very … seductive about the idea. I mean, look at the very nature of a piece of literature for instance. There is no novel, or short story that doesn’t have a conflict of some kind inherent in the plot or the theme of the thing. Without conflict, there is no story. Not really. Utopias get very boring to talk about after a while, but we love to hear about how they go wrong. Just like nightmares can seem more compelling to write and read about than dreams. So if these traits existence in the makeup of fiction, why shouldn’t they be in the nature of its creators?

Sometimes unhappiness, or tremendous passions fuels a writer. And in some of my darker moments, I believe that true joy is finite, while unhappiness is limitless. Sometimes, I don’t even believe I’m wrong and it is no secret I tend to write about some dark, violent, and sad things. Imagine writing about a world around you that was perfect and always full of joy. Imagine just how hard that would be to hold anyone’s interest for longer than a few minutes. Neil Gaiman managed to do something like this in his run of Marvelman/Miracleman, but even then he had to bring human nature and its inherently conflictive nature towards a paradise that was imposed on it.

When I’m feeling really negative, I feel like my negativity is what makes my writing immensely powerful: hence my above statement. I also know it is not always the case. Passion and conflict are not necessarily inherently unhappy, but necessary things. If anything I’d venture to say that stasis is also a tremendous unhappiness because nothing grows in it. That can be a form of struggle itself for a writer: the struggle against stasis.

In her TED lecture, Gilbert attempts to look at how earlier cultures dealt with the concept of human genius. She talks about how the Greeks believed that each person occasionally meets a daimon–a spirit or muse–that gives them ideas outside of themselves. The Romans also adopted this notion and called this spirit a genius. It’s all a conceptual framework. If anything, I understand that one advantage to this paradigm is that it takes the personal onus or burden of creativity from inside the individual and places on something “outside” of them. Alan Moore, in his Voice of the Fire, even states that he placed the building of said novel on the town of Northampton which he was writing about in a mythological way.

I think that it is a question of cultural and personal attitude towards the creative process and your own life too. I know that I also have a responsibility to write and express myself, but my experiences and knowledge also informs that. Sometimes I do feel a strange energy in me when I write something. Even when I write something with personal emotion, it overlays a kind of calm as well as I feel myself “getting the job done.”

I will tell you now: I almost didn’t post this here because I thought it would potentially be too personal and I want to just make this about writing. At the same time, my writing is powered by my emotions and experiences. It is a dichotomy I have to navigate a lot.

I’d like to finish off this post by quoting from the last eight lines of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water,” in which she states:

Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

Despite what happened to Gwendolyn in her own life, and towards the end of her life these wise words are a gentle admonition to remember and I have to remember them everyday. If you haven’t, you should definitely check out Gilbert’s TED Lecture and the other TED Creativity Lectures as well. I hope that you can all find what suits and works for you as well.

Comics Review: Chester Brown’s Paying For It

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

One weakness I have as a writer, that I always have to work on, is that once I start talking about really abstract concepts–like my last post on Craig Thompson’s Habibi–it can become very unrelatable. And if something cannot be related to, a reader will be less inclined to want to unless they are part of a specialized reader-audience: and even then readability is important. It is key. There are very few things more asinine than talking about how elitist some knowledge-bases are while at same time bandying about its jargon like it is a matter of course and not even bothering to explain what it means in context.

For me, a dialectic is a structure where two or more concepts are pitted against each other: or at the very least a structure of, or narrative argument. I also think it can be more complicated than the above and can say more than one thing at the same time. So, really, mentioning all of that in this review is appropriate given that the book I want to look at is called Paying For It.

Chester Brown is a fascinating cartoonist. He and Craig Thompson have a few things in common: in that they came from some relatively religious backgrounds and have delved into some esoteric subject matter from time to time. Brown himself really likes to make “weird stories” in addition to the esoteric stuff and examines human relationships in a very analytic, detached, but thoroughly detailed way. If you want to look at a wide variety of Brown’s work, I would suggest reading his collection The Little Man.

As for Paying For It, I came across it a year ago when I went to the previous session of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I bought the book and had Brown sign it whereupon I was exposed to another very fascinating dialectic with some interesting implications. First of all, it is an autobiographical work. This is no new thing given that Brown has drawn autobiographical comics before, but this time he gets honest: sometimes brutally honest. You know, that kind of honesty where you show yourself in wide natural human spectrums of intelligence, decency, and ugliness.

Chester Brown essentially creates a comic about his experiences with prostitution: with sex-workers. However, he doesn’t stop there. No, Brown doesn’t really defend his actions–or his depicted thoughts–so much as advocate prostitution as a natural form of human monetary, social, and personal interaction. He depicts this through interactions with his friends as well as the women that he makes sessions with and a very long Appendices of actual information and figures at the back of the book.

Like I always like to say as a catch-phrase, this is no new idea. Prostitution has been called the oldest profession in the world for a reason. The aesthetics of Brown’s graphic narrative definitely affects how his argument: and story because the argument is merely one facet of the thing. It is flat background with simple small square panels on which the characters are small. The sexual acts are quick and to the point and almost clinical. The sex-workers’ faces are never seen at all–which Brown explains is to protect even the hint of their identities–and he even admits that has changed their names. Some other reviewers have commented on this and I can see different interpretations of how this can be perceived by the reader.

One might say that he is objectifying these women by what he does with them, and by depicting them in his story, yet you can also make the argument that by reducing everyone–including himself–into these small caricatures he shows that the issue is either bigger than all of them or it is something that in the grand scheme of things the universe doesn’t really care about. I myself really feel a little unsettled about sex and the body being treated as a very clear commodity: which is even reflected in Brown’s internal monologues. At the same time, there are also depictions of humanity: of affection, and warmth, and questions. He shows, despite their lack of faces and names that these women are human beings who notice if someone hasn’t been around, who are curious about a person, who sometimes forget to take money, who at times will let it known that they are uncomfortable, have their own loves and insecurities, and, understand that fear can go both ways between client and employee.

Brown makes it clear that for all money is involved, as long as human beings are involved feelings of some kind–even something ideal like basic common courtesy–can always be there. Those little touches are what make this book and what add to the strong themes inherent within it. Paying For It also makes you ask some questions about what relationships actually are.

I think the crux of it for me is when Brown talks about how he hates romantic relationships and how romantic love is a faulty concept that we have built our society around. He goes on to state that romantic relationships breed jealousy and a fear of loneliness that is the price to have emotional and sexual needs gratified. When Brown talked about these romantic relationships, as a few people in society will say, he tends to refer to exclusively monogamous ones: as if the romantic somehow automatically equals monogamy.

The concept of what is “the romantic” is a very fascinating subject that scholars and people have always debated amongst themselves. Brown himself depicts himself as reading a book by Denis de Rougemont called Love in the Western World: an account of how the early “courtly-love” ballads–arguably integral to a conception of romantic love–may have been secret Cathar messages created to symbolize “a particular love for the divine” instead of for a particular individual. Notice how Brown–like Thompson in Habibi–brings in an esoteric element with regards to this dialectic of what love is: something that I’d only realized they both had in common today. Brown himself posits the idea that people did not grasp the hidden message and went with the overt love message of “love with one person in an established relationship” instead.

Like I have been saying a lot throughout this post, it is a fascinating idea but I think one that is not unchallengeable. First of all, Western culture is not a monolith. There are–and there have been–different cultures in its structure. The fact that something like the Cathar movement, though problematic because they were exterminated as heretics–is proof of that. Also, you have to look at how the word “romantic” has evolved: from the sublime and terrifying in Nature, to love between two people, and really love itself. I myself  don’t believe that romantic love is “evil” and that it can be interpreted in many different ways by our era: just as it has changed over the centuries.

It is true that love in a marriage and an established relationship is a relatively new (by some centuries) ideal. Also think about like this: in ancient times, only marriage was seen as a legitimate and lawful sexual relationship where property and political alliances were the key. It is only later that relationships outside of marriage, even those with the proviso of potentially leading to one–became more accepted and mainstream. I won’t even go into the different conceptions of what love is because that is a whole other subject matter.

Brown even admits later that perhaps romantic love isn’t so bad and can be adapted. I do find it very intriguing–however–that Brown and Thompson in talking about two only somewhat-related subjects ultimately go into a dialectic or meditation of what love actually is. One might think that talking about prostitution would exclude any mention of the word “love,” yet Brown manages not only to dissect himself and his own motivations in Paying For It, but he also critiques societal norms with regards to love and sex. Brown seems to ask the question what a society would be like if prostitution was commonplace and fully accepted. I think that such a society would have to have a very radically different idea and attitude towards sex, the body, and love. I don’t think our society is at that stage–and I’m not sure if it ever will be–but it is definitely something to think about.

I also wonder what another account of prostitution would be like from a sex-worker’s perspective: even as a comic. I think that, whatever people may say about Chester Brown and this work, that this was definitely a work of art and meditation. It is probably not for everyone and I can imagine some people having an adverse reaction to it, but to anyone else it is definitely worth pondering over. I myself am still not sure what to think of it, but I would definitely give it a five out of five: for making me think.

Addendum: Someone should definitely do a paper on Plato’s Symposium, Chester Brown’s Paying For It and Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Habibi with regards to love, but that person probably won’t be me.

Habibi and Thompson: A Dialectic of Love

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I know, it’s a little irregular for me to add more to a previous review, but after reading another book I realized I’d be greatly remiss in explaining another reservation that I had about the narrative

One thing that I really forgot to mention about Habibi was its emphasis–at least with regards to its characters and their experiences growing up–on the negativity of sex. Physical intimacy, passion, and sex are depicted as tools of degradation against which the purer esoteric love that is breath, unity, and wholeness must struggle against. It is your basic Zoroastrian or binary opposition of the physical as something base–being in the realm of Ahriman or the God of the Earth–and the spiritual love of Ahura Mazda and the God of the Heavens being pure and the real thing to strive for.

It is a theme that is identified with Zoroastrianism that is credited with influencing the Essenes, the Manichean Heresy and Kabbalism as well as Judeo-Christian theology. It is also something I don’t really agree with: though there is an immaculate order to the logic being employed.

I also realized something else. This is not the first time I have seen this. I know, I just made a whole bunch of religious and cultural references earlier that say that I did, but I’m talking about Craig Thompson in particular. Because now I remember a little more of Thompson’s other graphic novel Blankets. Thompson depicts himself with his first love in a more spiritual and emotional way. Even though there are moments of very clear physical and auto-erotic interaction, I recall the illustration around them seemed more airy, as though those moments were less to do with Earth than with the idea of clouds and the Heavens. I also remembered Blankets was just as much in some ways Thompson’s meditation and debate with the fundamentalist Christianity he was forced to grow in as much as it was a first love story.

For some reason, I feel as though Thompson was more successful placing that dialectic or narrative model in Blankets than in Habibi. I mean to say, he was very successful in creating stories around this theme, but in Blankets it seemed more subtle and seamless, whereas I feel in Habibi it was … awkward somehow. Perhaps the autobiographical narrative of the first graphic novel suited the theme more because it was about Thompson, while with the second it wasn’t about him–perhaps–it felt as though it were applied to something outside of himself that he wasn’t as sure about?

The idea of two kinds of love: manifesting in physical passion and then divine adoration is not a new one, but it wasn’t until–pretty much now–that I really see just how far this goes as a narrative and how it echoes other works. I just find this–and how it functions differently from autobiography to fiction–very fascinating: especially with regards to the graphic novel that I am about to review next: Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

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.

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.