This verse is not about the spider marrying the deer.
That verse is to the left and then inside the chamber.
Nor is this verse about the Quizno’s burned down by
an evil story, which is still hovering in the smoke.
(The verse is hovering in the smoke.)
No verse about goose grease haunts this verse;
nothing comes easy. There is a glove compartment
trapped somewhere inside that verse. What,
an owner’s manual? There is a verse about the Taliban
of Atlantis, mumbling quite close undersea,
but this verse is not it by a long mile. The moon
holds a knife to the night’s throat, saying: …or else.
Which could be a verse but this is getting nowhere.
There’s something else in this verse, an interactive
sequence that is not verse at all, but akin to verse,
in that it searches out in all directions for similarities
not its own, likenesses which hide in the shadows
that verses cast.
But still, it’s close. Glancing up
and into the corner of the eye, the flawless
factory of verses comes to purchase this color
and that weight. This
is not the right order. But what do the verses
care? They are not each other’s friends
on the line. (The local anesthesia is
wearing off.) This is not the foxglove
dissassembled paw by paw by lamplight, and
these are not the heartbeats pressed into the dull
bestiary of a minor garden. There is something
else entirely inside: the naturally
dead, the worm of henhouse cocaine,
the desolation of nothing to eat but the
garlands of friends.

N.B.: I actually do think in many recent instances, social media (though it’s a wonderful thing, I use it all the time) has made this crank-turning worse. I don’t care much about the good writers who are good at promotion, or the bad writers who are bad at promotion. I do care about the good writers who suck at promotion who get overshadowed by the bad writers who are great at promotion.

Long have I been dormant on this matter, and indeed, I had harbored the secret hope that the transmissions of this nefarious document were a thing of the past. However, look at me, a fool! How could I conclude that the Palinomicon’s logorrheic THIRST could not be vanquished? For what is the span of a year, a decade–indeed, any unit of time known to man and woman–in the clockwork mind of an Infernal Being? Less than a blink. The patience, reader, is NOT HUMAN.

However, with that said, I nevertheless feel compelled to share these findings, in hope that one person, perhaps not in my lifetime, will be able to find the elixir to unwrite this diabolical tome.

I do have to admit that this particular fresh entry, sent to me once again from Alaska, is unlike any of the others. Do not think me sensational, but it is a photocopy of a creature’s hands–long-fingered, enclawed, yet smooth-skinned, upon which this incantation was written with a fine-tipped “magic marker.” I cannot imagine how the arms, the torso, the head of this creature could be envisaged, but with trembling hand I transcribed the words. The palmistry must be left to your imagination.
____________________________

A Makeshift Form of Diplomacy that Falls Upon Me

Hello everyone I’ve made it to the Kyoto accords!

I come with a message of peace from the Underwater Institute of Lacanian Sorcery, a non-governmental gang strike force.

Here is the message:

“Heated motorcycle storage during the winter of your endless desires.”

Also, my child soldier choir has put together this bad-ass PowerPoint of their illegal
dumping exploits and there are
no resources within this Holiday Inn that can contain it.

No mercury, no soot, no anomalous clouds cuz that would be embarrassing.

Note that are all in the “Lacuna” conference room, but in opposite corners
for purposes of water rationing.

Then there will be a recital. Hands will be held. Be it resolved that.

What the fuck? The restaurant downstairs, The Jenkem Grille, has been bombed by ecoterrorists
and twenty are dead, including a team of mercenary climatologists! Fuuuuck, now

our hands are really tied.

Those plushie polar bears on the ice floe, drifting from Juneau stuffed with Acapulco Gold
toward our melting minds?

Talk about fucked.

The nsfw Bible is very soft on this matter

like the pillow that conforms to the red assassin’s face.

Next, a panel: Strangling Whatever Instills a Lifelong Love of Reading “the Data”
(Which Must Not Be Named).

Focus on my projector.

Hello, ozone mother!

1. In nominating works for awards, is it ethical to do so with friends? In what instances?

2. Is it ethical to do so consciously, deliberately, and in a block?

3. Is it ethical to do so with members of your writing group?

4. Where is the dividing line between expressing genuine interest and excitement about the work of one’s peers and compatriots; and expressing one’s ambitions for publicity within, and upon, the field at all costs?

5. What should be the feeling behind navigating through all these questions? What are we trying to accomplish? (OK, that’s two questions.)

6. What are our responsibilities as writers to the field as opposed to our peers? Are they one and the same? Do we have a responsibility to history? Or is it delusional to think that ye olden Grand Masters were anything more noble? (OK, that’s a lot of questions.)

7. And yet the field is very different than it was in 1959, isn’t it?

(OK, not really a question.)

Everyone have a good night!

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played. Now, this is also the first Silent Hill game I’ve ever played, and so I don’t really have an appreciation of the “canon” of the world. All I can go on is what I see–which, come to think of it, is one of the keystones of the game itself. As Harry Mason, in a car accident and left with nothing but a trusty flashlight and (later) a jack-of-all-trades cellphone, much of the game is spent with said flashlight peering into dusty corners of the near-abandoned town.

One of the things that makes this game so compelling is that your responses–your input; that is, what you choose to see and say–alters the playing experience. If not in gameplay then in characterization. Drastically, I might add. At certain intervals in the game (including the beginning), you find yourself in a first person view in a therapist’s office, and he asks you penetrating questions about your life, as well as provides opportunities for (mind) games of a sort, in order to probe your moral values. I played the game twice (which is almost a necessity to catch all the different nuances and story trails of the game), answering the questions the second time around the opposite way than the first, and the game changed with an accumulation of subtle cues that was both striking and unsettling. Different people encountered treated Harry very differently. Certain rooms were blocked off and others opened up. There was a scene in which I had to call a security guard (one of the delightfully mysterious things about this game is that the walls throughout the city are peppered with random phone numbers, which you, of course, can call). The first time he didn’t believe I existed and thought it was a prank. The second time he said he “had my back.” And the end…well, the end.

I guess I won’t reveal the MAJOR spoiler to this game after all. It’s that good and it’s that worth playing. Not in a “gotcha” sense, but in a way it reorients how one played the entire game that went before. And thus the very gameplay mechanics took on a totally new light.

Let me try to explain in a certain way that won’t SPOIL everything.

At certain intervals of the game, the world of Silent Hill freezes over, encasing everything in surreal ice. Geography becomes twisted. And what you traversed before becomes devilishly hard to navigate. These are the times of “the nightmare”, which you must escape. Creatures, called “raw shocks” (which mutate as well throughout the course of the game), chase you in very clever fashion. And you have no way to kill or hurt them as they hunt you down. At best you can shake them off and slow them, and keep them away for a time with a flare, maybe two, that you might find in the maze of the inverted town. It can be frustrating, as you bang through corridor after corridor, only to end up where you started out, but this is where the retroactive kicker has the most paydirt after finishing the game. And the lack of combat — no zombies to blow the heads off here, not that there’s anything wrong with that — becomes utter genius. Thinking back to the title, you as Harry Mason find yourself in a field of “frozen memories”. But what is the trauma that the raw shocks don’t want you to find? That is the unreal, fluttering heart of the game.

Total Oblivion got a great review from the LA Times.

I also partook in the Big Idea out in John Scalzi’s blogosphere, where I delved into some of the ideas of oblivion that informed the book. Very fun.

The novel also made the 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List!

I updated my reading itinerary; coming to quite a few places, so check out the Appearances above.

Music-wise, go download the new album by Colombian musical collective Systema Solar–it’s free from their site. But if that’s not enough, their video will force you to fall in love with them!

I’m absolutely in love with the Reebok Basquiat shoes. It’s just good to know they’re out there:

Be well, everyone.

Wishing you all a safe and happy new year.

The Watcher’s Journal

[note: journal entries of Imperial signal corps vision-engineer Nike Proclus, stationed in Transocean gulf watchtower (ex-Shell coat-of-arms), equidistant from Lafayette to Nueva Roma. Nike's journal, written on palm-sized scrolls, was transmitted to Nueva Roma via carrier kingfisher to the Emperor himself.]

Dolphin’s Month 2
Bats chase seagulls. I don’t know where the bats have come from. Is there a cave that I don’t know about in the vicinity? No. I am two days sail from Nueva Roma. And north of me… I look for islands and signs, but I haven’t found them yet.

The bats are white.

Dolphin’s Month 4
I do have a little garden, with vegetables I have brought from the swamps of Orlando, on the aft of my platform. The red squash and kelp do well in this climate. I had wanted to bring chickens to the watchtower—for companionship besides the ethereal gulls, but it was vetoed by the signal corps. Perhaps it’s just as well. The bats have taken to harassing the gulls, and I can only dare to think what they would have done with flightless birds. This evening, I found a gull in my garden with one of its wings gnawed off, presumably by the bats. I suspect that they are hiding somewhere in the watchtower.

Dolphin’s Month 7
Am I only imagining the bats? I haven’t seen them since I had found the one-winged gull.

Cool wind. Then rain that lashes the platform. The tower rocks. I hear the groaning of the sea and imagine serpents coiling around the foundations of my lonely post.

Dolphin’s Month 9
Bats are back, like they have never left. I think they are watching me when they think I’m not looking.

Fewer gulls.

I leave a plate of succotash for the bats on the opposite end of the platform from the garden. They are uninterested.

Dolphin’s Month 10
Perform a full inventory of my storehouses and quarters. They have been undisturbed. I miss land for the first time in a year.

How many days until the supply boat? Five.

At sunset, witness gull and bat spar. Gull loses and drops into the sea. I’m tempted to fish the carcass out, but it would require unfurling the ladder and readying the raft, and I’m too tired. The gull sinks soon enough anyway.

Dolphin’s Month 11
Sore throat. Mist. I can’t see the bats, though I can hear their wings, and the gull shrieks. I keep to my bed, only taking to the watchtower twice for the customary reconnaissance. Which is futile anyway.

The sea is phosphorescent as I write this. The mist hasn’t cleared, either. All I can see is gray and green.

Dolphin’s Month 12
Mist’s cleared. The platform is littered with gulls, in various forms of severance. All is quiet. I take the morning to clean their carcasses and the blood.

When night comes, in a fit of inspiration (or madness?), I do, in fact, drop the raft into the water and roll the ladder down. I row underneath the platform. It’s shadowy. Hanging underneath the platform on the beams are scores of the white bats. They are not the same as the bats I have known on land–they seem to hunt only in day and sleep at night, like any person would.

Dolphin’s Month 14
Black speck on the horizon. Is it really there? I check again with my lens, calculate the distance. Impossible to tell without knowing the size of the craft. So it’s pointless.

Perhaps a whale?

I make a trap for the bats, involving canned meat, box and string. But they don’t trigger it. Smart.

Dolphin’s Month 15
Supply boat arrives late in twilight. Crew of two seems none too pleased. They bring a lordly kingfisher. Wine. More succotash. Bundle of letters from my wife.
(My Emperor, if you read this, don’t think that these details have no use to the Empire. I stand vigilant here to protect her, and those like her.)

I tell them about the speck, but they have no use for it. They think the vision-engineers are strange on account of their exceeding loneliness. Yes, well.

The kingfisher is caged and is agitated.

Dolphin’s Month 16
The sailors seem eager to go. They eye the swooping bats with great apprehension. I tell them they haven’t harassed me, but they are suspicious, as if I’m colluding with them. I don’t tell them about the bats’ resting place. The sky is empty of gulls.

The speck remains the same.

I consider telling the about the speck, but the evidence is still too inconclusive.

They leave, sullenly.

I miss them, and yet I’m glad when the bats, two leagues out, swarm on them. I watch.

Dolphin’s Month 17
It’s too much.

Dolphin’s Month 18
The speck grows larger.

Dolphin’s Month 22
Bats are in the kitchen.

The speck has turned into a boat.

Why haven’t they killed me.

Dolphin’s Month 23
So, the trap. I have set it every day but it remains unsprung. The bait, I realize, has been insufficient. I realize that now.

My wife, I say to myself, I hope you forgive me, that you’ll be able to kiss my missing finger, my ghost digit and make it better.

The trap works. I’ve listened to a bat screech for five hours inside the box. The ship hasn’t revealed its heraldry.
The kingfisher looks ashamedly at my mutilation. I’ve named him Rufus.

Dolphin’s Month 24
Right before dawn, I extract the bat and dissect the bat in my quarters.

Only it’s not a bat.

At least it’s not the kind that I have been familiar with.

The fur is like a whale’s bristles. The eyes are covered by a membrane. Tiny webs along the legs.

I toss it back.

[The next page's script is blurred beyond recognition. Whether this occurred during the kingfisher's transit or beforehand is impossible to say.]

Egret’s Month 2
I see twenty-two craft now.

Gave them many signals, in every code I know.

Rufus is restless.

Egret’s Month 3
Have watched their first volley with a deck-side trebuchet. Two hundred yards shy. They are testing me. It won’t be long. I extinguish the tower fire. I’m writing this at my own perch, the kingfisher beside me. When I am finished writing this, I tie the scrolls around Rufus’ leg. And I will wait. Rufus will speed past the bats–I know this. Its heart racing as he makes his way to Nueva Roma.

He has a head start.

The question should be seriously asked, how do [cognitive sciences] compel us to redefine the most basic notions of human dignity, freedom? That is to say, what we experience as dignity and freedom is it all just an illusion, as they put it in computer user terms, a user’s illusion. Meaning, for example, when you write a text on a computer, you have this user’s illusion scrolling up or down that there is text above or below. There is no text there. Is our freedom the same as a user’s illusion or is there a freedom? –Zizek

I saw Avatar in 3D tonight. Avatar is a great movie, a groundbreaking movie in many ways (conventional in others, but let’s stick to the groundbreaking for now), and more complicated and tricksy than some of its critics, I think, are giving it credit for.

Warning, serious spoilers! Ok, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

Avatar can’t be separated from the technology used to create it, and this push and pull of the wonders and devastation of technology ripples throughout the entire movie. It’s the Avatar Project, after all, that allows the movie to come into being in the first place (okay, and a lack of single payer health care for our hero–but that’s a different story!). And it’s the death of the Avatar Project at the end that brings about Jakesully’s rebirth. But, more than that, the audience is continually reminded of this dynamic by the fact that we are all sitting in the darkened theater wearing this funny little glasses, which allow strange creatures and landscapes to uncannily “pop” out of the screen. As a matter of sheer worldbuilding bravado (if not plausibility–though I love me some Magritte floating mountains, it was a lot of handwaving to describe them as buoyed by flux. But hey, whatever, it was cool), we are plunged into ethereal heights and soar through phosphorescent forest canopies. Or is it the other way around? No matter–that synesthesia is an intentional byproduct of having a world come out at you all at once, in all its inviting glory. There has been, of course, unadulterated land that needs protecting before in film, but never has the argument been made for it more beautifully and convincingly than in this 3D.

With new applications of mediums comes new forms of storytelling, and so it would be a disservice to the movie to call it “Dances with Wolves in Space,” or whatever. The movie is as much about scientific malfeasance as it is about brash imperialism as it is about love.

It’s the ambiguity of the Avatar Project that drives the story forward. The linchpin character in the whole film is Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver, who has a chain-smoking Helena Bonham Carter as botanist thing going). As a diplomatic and scientific mission, the Avatar Project is something of a failure. Sure Grace and her protege collect their samples at one point, but there’s a disconnect between that mission and the, uh, mining of unobtainium (which actually has a wider use as a term than I had thought possible). The science (whether soft or hard) is continually triangulating with the military and the privateers. The latter two, naturally, are slavishly intertwined–with the continual reference to mercenaries being the entire fighting force, this is hard to ignore–but this doesn’t mean that the scientists’ relationship with the two opposing forces are the same. With the military, it’s entirely antagonistic. Not so with the Resource Development Administration’s commercial arm. Its liaison on Pandora is not unconcerned with Na’vi casualties, mentioning the possibility of “bad press.” So are the scientists, and although there is some vague mentioning of a mission school that met some untimely end, Grace’s ultimate mission to convince the Na’vi to move. The movie is as much of a critique of neoliberalism as conservatism (or neo-conservatism, I guess)–having a “human rights” apparatus being wielded as a weapon to achieve some material gain.

Something happens, though. Closer to the climactic battle, Grace tries to explain to the peckerhead Colonel and the asshole mining manager about the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. Rather than being a pure impassioned Gaia-tastic plea, however, there’s something unsettling on Grace’s face. She can’t help but see the wealth in this. Screw the minerals, she’s saying, what we have here is bigger than raw materials. In a way, it’s similar to the utilitarian arguments made to “save the rainforest”: who knows how many cures to natural diseases are in those weird plants and funny little frogs that we don’t even know about yet–that is, until they are run over by clear-cutting bulldozers!

You can see Grace calculating, even then. And as she’s brought, wounded, to the Na’vi’s ancestral home, she jokes (paraphrasing): “I wish I could be taking samples of this.” The tribe tries to save her, by transferring her fully into her avatar. They take off her mask, and she dies; the transfer (going through the “Eye of Eyra”) didn’t take because she was “too weak.”

But what does this weakness mean? Weakness from the bullet wound? Or weakness because she couldn’t, in the end, fully let go of her own sense of scientific identity to fully become one of the Na’vi? (And yet, even still, she doesn’t entirely dissipate–more on that a bit later.) It’s truly unclear.

This is driven home perhaps even more forcefully at the very end of the movie. Simply put–Jake dies at the end. There is no exact equivalence between Jake and Jakesully. The human is dead, though the memories of Jake are uploaded into the planet. Witness, at one earlier point before the final battle, how our hero actually requests to Eyra to access Grace Augustine’s memories of earth and the human species. Who, or what, is in Eyra, then? Information. Code. The world, through this information management, has an Avatar Project of its own. That, at last, is what’s so fascinating about this movie–not the simple clash of cultures but the variances in the relationships the cultures have to their own bodies, and how they retrieve information about those bodies. It’s telling that the last shot of the movie is Jakesully opening his eyes, with his corpse laying beside him.

He will certainly not be what he used to be.

We, too, have more opportunities to plug in, and leave ourselves behind. The flow is two-way. Even the Avatar action figures–long the hallmark of the science fiction blockbuster!–replicate the uplink and downlink movement of the movie. With a webcam, one can scan in the I-TAG of an action figure to receive downloadable content. Not on the screen–on the toy itself. Encased in their plastic casings on toy-store shelves, much like the living caskets that the human bodies in Avatar rest within, the toys become cybernetic apparati of the imagination.

All of this isn’t to say that the toy marketing of the film is somehow necessary for understanding and enjoying the film (though I’m sure the interactivity was part of some strategic planner’s “creative brief”). It’s more of a sense that–this is the world we find ourselves in. Not only one of environmental devastation, but one of identity slippage. This isn’t Kevin Costner sleepwalking through being Kevin Costner, but rather a grandiose adventure with two world-interfaces, and how a broken soldier rejects the one and embraces the other.

We’ve begun with Zizek; let’s end with him:

Catherine Malabou wrote a wonderful book called What to Do With the Human Brain. She develops, in a very nice way, that plasticity can have two meanings. One meaning is this neoliberal plasticity. Basically, it’s an accommodating plasticity: how to succeed on the market, how to adopt new identity. But there is a more radical plasticity, where the point is not just an adaptive plasticity. It’s a plasticity that not only adapts itself to existing circumstances but also tries to form a margin of freedom to intervene, to change the circumstances.

Cameron has developed a $300 million franchise–a full world, really–to explore that second type of plasticity, and to let the audience become participants in it, to dream about it, just for a few hours.

Go see it.

Although I’m not intimately familiar with the publishing vagrancies of the genre, it had seemed like the form went into something of a decline in the 90s, but lately there have been some interesting applications of the gamebook online–which might be the natural home for such a storytelling medium after all. There are two particular examples online that I found striking–one a new, rather wild creation that pushed a lot of my “fiction buttons”, and another a “port” from a rather remarkable older series.

Age of Fable

Age of Fable by James Hutchings is quite literally the trip, a metafictional romp through all sorts of storytelling conventions. The art–usually gathered from paintings from the surreal to the macabre to the whimsical–adds to the sense of story-as-emblem (which might not get at exactly what’s going on here). It’s extremely fast and loose, but it works. There are twelve attributes to your character, and this panoply of various ability scores adds to the fierce sense of play to the work, especially when traversing the land with a randomly generated character named: Be-Steadfast Owl-Waits-For-The-Moon, an assassin.

Yes sometimes the puns don’t quite work, and the recursiveness of some of the quests becomes repetitive, but on the whole Age of Fable succeeds resoundingly as a new way to approach storytelling; it has that sense of a concocted world that one can only see small but bright glimpses of when playing.

The Fabled Lands

The Fabled Lands is a far sturdier proposition, one with more traditional high-fantasy underpinnings, but no less exciting and with even more depth of play. The interface was obviously created with a great deal of passion and care. It’s truly the greatest example of a “sandbox novel” that I’ve ever seen. One can literally traverse between the six novels–represented by different geographic areas–and in the downloadable App version, this is done seamlessly. Much like Age of Fable, there is no real overarching quest–although there are many quests to be had–but the level of what one can “do” in the novel is far deeper: there’s exploration, of course, but also trade, owning property in cities, sailing, and much more. It’s truly a lived-in experience, one in which the second person POV is given a panoply of sensations–perhaps most importantly, the sense that one really doesn’t know what’s behind any unknown corner.

If one of the purposes of a gamebook (or any work of interactive fiction, really) is to increase the player/reader’s agency, then these two projects are some of the strongest and most interesting examples around of giving authorship to the reader, in a way that is entirely different yet as utterly beguiling as the best of parser-based interactive fiction.