Shoes of Wrath

I'm not a big fan of super expensive fashion and general parading around. But these Alexander McQueen shoes sing to me in the language of the grotesque.





My favourite is the pair that resemble a misshapen skull. I imagine they are the kind of heels a malignant villainess might wear as she sweeps through her castle - every step crushing the bones of her enemies:


Sweet. I suspect McQueen had this image in his head also...






The thought process behind this is a little harder to ascertain:


Models are skinny. I can't tell if that's an arm or a leg. Lets assume its a leg, and those are shoes. Perhaps these will soon feature on the 'get the look for less' page of some fashion mag, showing step by step how to recreate the same effect by wrapping ones feet in brown paper. That's some authentic grotesque stylin.

(pics via style rookie and Fashionising)

Strange Bodies

The term 'grotesque' was coined in reference to a style of ornamental design that usually occurred around the edges of larger artistic works. What made this marginalia unique, and worthy of its special new title, was the way in which the style blended plants, animals, humans and objects into intricate patterns. These panels are an example of what I'm talking about. They are from Seer aerdige grotissen dienstich, a series of 12 engravings by Johan Bara after Nicasius Roussel's (1623) 'De Grotesco Per utilis ... Liber' (from the British Museum Print Database).

Click to have a closer look.












Heads grow from stalks and pedestals, delicately farting buttocks perch on ostrich legs, combination bodies erupt from all directions and twist together. Such ontological mangling was something of a shock to the principles of God and nature in the 17th century. It was also very exciting and daring, and soon everyone wanted their own grotesque decorations.

I'm very interested in how this theme of combination bodies has translated into today's pop culture. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere. For example, I was reading Swamp Thing comics the other day (what, it was for research) and this cover image really caught my attention:

(Series 2, #52. If you want more swamp - go here)

Swamp Thing is simultaneously man and plant, animal and mineral. And here his swampy body merges with the Gothic architecture: the dome of his head takes the place of the roof, the peak of his nose forms the pointed arch while his gaping mouth acts as the window. The intricate tangling of the vines running down and around the walls are also reminiscent of the intermingling vines of the traditional 'grotesque' style. The Swamp Thing comics also feature characters called the 'Un-Men,' and spend a lot of time examining the line between human and 'un'-human.

On another note, I bought this game today:


It seems the human/object/plant/animal figure not only remains a significant presence in contemporary culture, but has grown even more complicated. I like how the arm merges veins/roots/wires into the giant crab-claw blade: the man is simultaneously mechanical and organic. (No, I didn't buy it for the cover. How could you even suggest such a thing.) I'm promised "deadly shape shifting action." It's a whole two months before BioShock 2 comes out... I have to entertain myself somehow. Thanks to modern media I don't just have to sit like a lady and look at shapes shifting on pages, I can do it myself.

Did you know Swamp Thing had his very own TV show?
Also, a lovely theme tune:

Grotext II: you can read it

A while ago I posted about the new 'Grotext' font and how disappointingly mundane it is. Well, apparently the universe heard my plea and kindly provided me with more font-like misery in the form of Fred and Sharon:



Yeah. I really don't know what this is. But... I think I like it.

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)

Hello, Ladies

"Exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style."

"Of all the features of the human face, the nose and mouth play the most important part in the grotesque image of the body; the head, ears, and nose also acquire a grotesque character when they adopt the animal form or that of inanimate objects... [The grotesque] is looking for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the body's confines. Special attention is given to the shoots and branches, to all that prolongs the body and links it to other bodies or to the world outside... But the most important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss."

(Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, pp316-17)



(Major Lazer ft. Nina Sky & Ricky Blaze, Keep It Goin' Louder. http://majorlazer.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.

Tales of the Truly Grotesque

I am looking forward to reading this book sometime soon: Tales of the Truly Grotesque: The Stench of Sulphur Swamp (book 1) by the magnificently named Odysseus Malodorus.



The author's blog, trulygrotesque.com, is most excellent. Book 2, Tales of the Truly Grotesque: Hook Lion, and Stinker, is also on my list. Once again, the idea of the grotesque is linked to children. My first impressions are that these books are part of what I like to call the 'morbid kid' genre, Gothic stories full of melodrama, dire predicaments, and sweaty, hairy adults with unsightly facial moles. I would put Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in this category also.


Vile indeed. The market for unpleasantness is immense. Roald Dahl was one of my childhood favourites. Who could forget the heinous Miss Trunchbull throwing little school children out the window? There were only a choice few to choose from back then. R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series was another good one. I still remember the horror of Say Cheese and Die.


Sure, it leans more towards cheesy horror (oh, snap), but I think these books could still be included in my 'morbid kid' category.