A Book With Me In It

Taking a quick intermission from my ecstatic trip into ye olde grotesquerie; here is an update of a more contemporary flavour.

Yes, I have a chapter in this book ... and I would like you to read it.

The book, that is. You don't have to read my chapter if you don't want to. This stuff is optional.

Why bother with a book at all - why not just Google all the things?

A) because it has an amazing title; B) because it's a really interesting and timely collection focused on a neglected (and somewhat reviled) genre; and C) because... games! They're brilliant!

Plus - if you have an interest in hybrid bodies, genetic mutations, and grotesqueness in general - my chapter is on BioShock, and explores the kinds of ontological fusions and boundary crossings made possible by the game's unique weapons system. It's all connected... oh yes...

The end.

P.S. I am also in this book. Talking about zombies. Buy it for your grandmother!

P.P.S. Dylan Moran is fantastic.

Zombie Boy

This advertisement is positively hypnotic.




It stars Rick Genest, aka Zombie Boy, a freak show performer who recently found fame in a Lady Gaga music video. [<--- Warning, that Gaga video may put you off giving birth. Ever.]

Yes, that is his real skin under there.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

My reading binge continues apace this month.

This book is my latest find.



I always think of vampires, werewolves and zombies as the 'big three' of Gothic monstrosity. Sure, ghosts and spirits have their place, and mummies can be scary, but there is something visceral about these creatures.

[Lycaon by Hendrik Goltzius. From Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I. Via]

[Varney the Vampire (1847). Artist Unknown. Via]

I've read more vampire books than I can count, plus a smaller but still respectable number of werewolf tales. The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan might be the first zombie story I've ever read. This says more about me than it does about the state of zombie literature. I've realised that I get my zombie fix from films, and have neglected to look for them on the library shelves.

No longer shall this travesty continue. I have seen the light. Or rather, the darkness. Forest is aimed at YA readers, but it's quite exciting and gross enough to entertain anyone. It is resolutely contemporary, featuring a post-apocalyptic setting and a biomedical origin story (zombies are infected with a virus, rather than possessed). The heroine is sometimes irritating, but you have to cut her some slack. She lives in sea of undead, after all:

"I have seen such horror and such grotesqueness that it never occurred to me that I would feel light-headed and weak-kneed when I saw Travis's injury. One couldn't grow up surrounded by the Forest and not see the most dreadful sights - the Unconsecrated with their hollow skin ripped and gaping from the wounds that caused the infection, their fingers cracked and broken from clawing at the fences, limbs attached by nothing more than gristle" (40-41).

I see my favourite word in there.

[Via]

On a related note: if you are interested in zombies, Gothic monsters, science fiction or this movie you can read my thoughts on all these things in Gothic Science Fiction: 1980-2010, edited by Sara Wasson and Emily Alder. In addition to my zombie chapter, this collection includes a whole bunch of essays looking at the intersection of Gothic and science fiction in film, comics, literature and more. I think the book is coming out later this year, but meanwhile you can admire the lovely cover here.

Shameless plug over...



Sweet dreams.

Sheepish

I recently discovered Cyriak Harris, a freelance multimedia artist and animator from the UK. His work has a delirious yet strangely compelling 'Monty Python meets Escher' vibe, as exemplified by this video:





Cyriak is very interesting to me, because his surreal work is ideally suited to the internet. It reflects the viewpoint of someone very familiar with online memes and themes. But it also draws on older artistic traditions, remodeling them in the context of contemporary media forms.





The artist comments that:

"Like some kind of animated stew, the ingredients of this video simmered and bubbled for about 2 years before I tipped it steaming onto the internet. The screams echo to this day."

Check out lots more of Cyriak's music, comics, paintings, gifs and videos at his website here. I especially like this video, in which the cast of 'Eastenders' become zombies and eat brains. So great.

Head Full of Zombie

"Land Down Under" by Men At Work is not the Australian national anthem. But it may as well be.

The lyrics are apocalyptic gold:

Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said,

"Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover."


The lyrics are humerous, but also a little bit sinister. Feels somewhat appropriate, given the conflicting feelings many Australians have about the date of today's celebration.





Happy Australia Day.

Dead Classics

I probably shouldn't be thinking about zombies right now, but check out these brilliant posters by Matt Busch.

"As opposed to just taking the original posters and altering them digitally in PhotoShop, Busch has painstakingly hand-painted every detail with traditional mixed media, before slaughtering them with a zombified treatment."

“It’s an ironic twist,” says Busch, “to take these beautiful master-works and attempt to recreate every detail, while at the same time, shredding them to bloody pulps. Literally. Nothing here is sacred, but it’s all in good fun and out of the utmost respect to the original posters that had such an impact on my life.”

My favourite:


Find a whole lot more "Hollywood is Dead" posters here.

[Via]

The Red Masque

[Via]

Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned in discussions of the grotesque, in particular his short story The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The full text is available here, and I would definitely recommend reading it. So short, yet so incredibly suspenseful and evocative.

Although Poe's work is of great interest in general, this tale is a special favourite because he actually uses the word 'grotesque.'

The story begins with an horrific disease; the Red Death.

"The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men."

Bloodsplosion. This would be a classic zombie apocalypse if the infected didn't die so very quickly.

The smug Prince Prospero ("happy and dauntless and sagacious") takes a thousand of his closest non-dead or bloody friends and locks himself away in a reinforced Abbey to wait out the ordeal. After about six months, and probably slightly bored, he organises a masquerade. Everyone gets dressed up and makes a spectacle of themselves, all the more horrible if you imagine the gory devastation happening outside.

This is how Poe describes the revelers:

"Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm -- much of what has been seen in "Hernani." There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust."

In the middle of all the dancing, a mysterious figure appears.

"And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, of horror, and of disgust."

Who is this out-grotesqueing the grotesques?

"The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood -- and his broad brow, with all the features of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror."

Uh-oh. What happens next? You will have to read the story for yourself.

There have been a few film adaptations, of course, although this Roger Corman effort doesn't seem to have much to do with the original story.




I don't recall any Devil worshiping.


A band called Stormwitch composed a song in honour of The Masque of the Red Death. In fact, they dedicated a whole album (Tales of Terror) to Poe in 1985. Rock on.





Just in case all this blood stuff makes you uncomfortable, check out this "Little Gothic Library" print by Aussie artist Martin Harris:

He also did one for another of my favourites: The Fall of the House of Usher.


Charming. And menacing. But mostly charming.

The Bleeding Tree

I walk past this tree all the time.

(Yes, I do leave the house on occasion. I 'take the air' like a gentlewoman in a Jane Austen Novel. Minus the long skirt, as it makes hurdling kangaroos difficult.)

Anyway, this tree. It is unique.









The whole trunk and upper branches are covered in weeping sores.









I'm sure there is some scientific explanation...






But I know a zombie when I see one.

Your Brain Looks Great Tonight

What do you get when you mix zombies with pinups? You get the My Zombie Pinup calendar by Robyn Malter & Shalaco Sching:

"A bi-product of the photographer’s sick sense of humor and ability to know how to run too far with a bad joke."

The images were all inspired by scenes from horror movies or classic pinups, and I love how they subvert both genres. Considering how often women are forced to scream and flee in horror/zombie films, it seems right that they should have their revenge.

[Via Monster Land]

Living Dead Blog

I've heard Rob Zombie songs many times over the years, but somehow never realised how incredible his music videos are. Consider me chastised, because they are a Gothic wonderland.










Love. It.

Can you tell I'm writing on zombies right now?

Juxtapose My Zombie

At the Gothic conference last July I was lucky enough to be in the audience for Elisabeth Bronfen's plenary presentation, titled Gothic Wars - Media's Lust. This was particularly interesting to me as it involved one of my favourite pop cultural figures: the zombie. Bronfen drew together two seemingly disparate texts, Rupert Brooke's war poem 1914 and George Romero's zombie film Diary of the Dead, to argue that the figure of the zombie is deeply implicated by the politics and imagery of war. She explains the process by which the soldier and the zombie came together in her mind:

"I began to think about the dead soldier Brooke's invokes precisely along the line of a zombie, dislocating the boundary between the living and the death. I saw him as part of an invading army, come to contaminate a country, whose boundary this force has also crossed."


And further:

"[Brooke's poem] invokes a body, left to rot in a foreign field that will, by virtue of physically merging with the soil, impregnate this foreign site with English culture. While I am fully aware that this was not Rupert Brooke's intention, one can, by cross-mapping his lyricism with the lore of voodoo zombies, see an uncanny infestation being anticipated. The foreign field will forever be a double, hybrid cultural site, conjoining over the dead body of the English soldier two cultures that were at war with each other."

The dead are not gone, they rise. Killing is not the solution to invasion, for the bodies of your enemies embed themselves within the physical and ideological landscape, never to be erased. In turn, the survivors of war also experience a kind of living death. They have witnessed horrific carnage and performed outrageous acts: "those who return from the war are revenants of themselves, and their visions are monstrous spectacles."

Bronfen also spoke of the racial politics of the zombie as an image of the 'other.' In the context of American military strategies, "the zombie proved useful to a crude propaganda of the occupation forces; he became the emblem for anxieties and fantasies about the other 'black' body of the Caribbean people." This point reminds me of the controversy surrounding this trailer of Resident Evil 5. RE5 is an installment of the popular first person shooter series Resident Evil, which chronicles the spread of an infection that turns normal citizens into hoards of highly contagious, flesh eating undead. It is the player's task to kill as many as possible, a task that becomes more disturbing as the location of the disease shifts from white America to African shanty towns.

One of the first to comment on the trailer in question was Kym Platt from the Black Looks blog: "This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages [and] the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing."



Gamers violently denied the game was racist, and game developers quickly made new trailers that focused upon other game elements and a new African heroine.




Bronfen's work helped me to observe the historical connection between zombies and war in this controversy. It is not 'simply' racist imagery that informs the trailer, but a specific relationship between violence, boundary crossing and zombie 'others.' The juxtaposition of zombie/soldier made me consider both figures in a new light.

You can read Bronfen's paper here. I highly recommend it.

(pics from MapIt1418 and ign.com)

Plain English

Last Wednesday I presented a paper at the 5th Annual Graduate Conference at UWA. The conference theme was "New Approaches/ New Understandings" - great for me since much of my research is concerned with shiny new things. I had a very nice time with my fellow hermits, who are all very clever and accomplished.

The conference made me think about what makes a good paper, and how much a paper differs from a chapter or an article. Is it preferable to have powerpoint? How much theory is too much? If 90% of my audience is not from the English department, how much context do I need to supply for my comments? Given the infinitesimal number of people actually involved with/ interested in the Grotesque as a topic, how much do I need to say about what the word means/ has meant historically and culturally?

The thing about papers is that they force you to cut the fat. The whole history of the Grotesque has to be trimmed down into three or four sentences. My love of quotes, florid phrases and magical tangents is sharply curtailed. Like one of those 'in Plain English' YouTube tutorials.



I'm thinking of doing one of these videos, just for myself. 'The Grotesque in Plain English.'

Each paper is a balance between trying to communicate clearly and concisely, while also trying to express complex ideas in the form of an argument. I try to include things that I know I like to see when I'm watching a presentation. I am an easily bored visual person, so I like colourful pictures and things that go boom. Powerpoint or video clips add an element of danger, however. You must be ready for the sudden but inevitable betrayal of your technology. I'm very impressed by people who manage to be magnetic and informative without the use of technology. Also without notes. I am not one of these people. Without a script my mouth starts pontificating on a variety of topics without consulting my brain. This is barely manageable in real life; and a big mistake in front of an audience.



I read Stephen King's memoir On Writing yesterday. He has a lot of opinions on writing clearly and efficiently. His hatred of adverbs has made me rethink my love of them. Or, at least, I now notice that I love them. And feel shame.

Even though he is writing about fiction, it still applies to academic writing I think. On the use of adverbs and passive tense he says: "When I do it, it's usually for the same reason any writer does it: because I'm afraid the reader won't understand me if I don't. I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild... If, however, one is working under a deadline... that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather: you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him" (p97).

(I was going to include a Disney 'Dumbo with feather' clip to illustrate the point, but damn that movie freaks me out.)

Truly, it is hard to avoid fear when writing in the academic context. Fear of being thought ignorant, fear of sounding foolish, missing the obvious, or missing the point entirely. This fear can cause you to write badly, or paralyze you entirely. The effect is magnified when you are writing something to perform in public: where you are at the mercy of your audience. I will try to remember Stephen King's wise words as I write my next chapter.

Grotext

Did you know the grotesque had its very own font? When I heard the name 'Grotext' I assumed it would be something a bit wild, maybe like this...

No, this is Hirsute Futura. Surely a grotesque font would be a little controversial or thrilling? Something like this...


BloodFeast. Perfect for university assignments, resumes and party invitations. What about a creepy monster font?



Oh yeah. At the very least something wacky and weird. How about Tim Yarzhombeck's typography of beards!

So many options. So what is the grotesque font?


According to the Karsten Luecke Type Foundry: "Grotext preserves a human touch. And history. Whereas most contemporary typefaces assimilate lowercase and uppercase, Grotext does the opposite and emphasizes the difference: Its narrow lowercase make it a space-saver. Its uppercase are wide & classically proportioned... its shapes give it a technical flair."

Um, well. I guess it's... tidy. At least it has technical flair. Right?