Forty Adjectives and a Noun

Behind the Times - My times, that is.

2011-11-11T01:24:00.001+08:00

I should've written this last week, 'cause last week's when I finished the novel. But then, today is the day I got my first feedback on the whole novel. Today, someone has actually read the whole thing, and it was apparently an enjoyable experience. The feedback was mostly positive, which isn't bad for a full 1st draft, & there's not that much work to do anyway.
Phew!
The illustrations went down well, and my supervisor can't see any reason why I shouldn't include them in the final submission - especially if I mention that people always love illustrating Lovecraft, & while the novel is by no means Lovecraftian, it sorta is. Of course, the subject of Lovecraftian-inspired artwork would be enough for a PhD in itself, it will be fun to explore. Of course, it's all to do with the fact everything's unspeakable & ineffable and that is such a temptation to go about cementing it with some kind of imagery.
So, I'm reasonably satisfied with the novel, though everything I left out is enough material for several novels more :-) Very tempting. There are some things not strong enough, one or two plot lines not neatly sewn up at the end, but it's strange they weren't mentioned. But strange. And one or two things that need strengthening weren't in the comments either.
Of course, a couple of things that I didn't realize were - though I was aware of one clumsy bit.

This was one of the attempts at a cover I did. Not finished as the pages of the book are blank, & I didn't do it to the correct size, but I still kinda like it.

Cover_1_unfinished

Pictures - it's not a kid's book. Will I be confusing the as-yet unknown markers? Will they fuss & complain if I include pictures? I'm going to! I'm intending to illustrate the exegesis as well, though will have to get someone to take really good photos of artwork down outside the computer as it were. The illustrations for the novel have been done on a graphics tablet so reproduction isn't a problem (though their longevity is - I don't think I can afford to get them printed on acid free paper and even that is not, apparently, a guarantee of longevity as far as digital print goes. Rather sad, that.).

It feels strange having finished the thing and knowing that, apart from polishing, it is in itself complete. I like that feeling, but in the week since, I've been keying in the bibliography for the exegesis, and isn't that a sobering thing to be doing. Not much time for celebrating.

But, that's it for the time being. & I think I'm only writing this entry 'cause it took me all night to get a thing to reset my password for Google. They weren't going to let me back into my account & it was pissing me off mightily.

And I'm doing the nanowrimo thing again this year. Not sure I should be, but I can't be spending all my time reading Kant! I'm up to 15000 words (the nanothing, not the exegesis - or even Kant, let alone Bakhtin, or Foucault....), and I'm entertaining myself. What else is it for :-)

A little thought on time in the novel

2011-10-17T12:11:00.000+08:00

Bizarre - lost the intro to this post.
No matter.

On the 'novel' front, finally have some feedback, & mostly positive. I feel as though I've been working in a vacuum for so long. It's a good thing. Very motivating actually, so why the prevarication?
Thinking, mostly. Thinking about timing and what it implies for characters, events and in a broader sense, what it's saying about the entire atmosphere of the novel. The implications of 'dead of night', 'the dark before dawn', 'half an hour before sunrise' are quite interesting in the novel's context.
Days & nights are divided into hours that are safe and not so safe, in a metaphysical sense. Dead of night is, in some ways, safer than the dark before dawn which implies a desperation the dead of night doesn't have. Half an hour before sunrise holds out way more hope than the dead of night which seems simply flat: darkness before & behind and no life anywhere. Of course it's the time of ghosties and ghoulies, but also of nothing else. No action because it's neither possible nor something you'd want to do. We might like staying up late, but without artificial light, there's not much you're going to get done.
The dark before dawn is where things start stirring, birds rustle and ruffle and let forth brief bursts of song which become fuller in the half hour before sunrise. Insects stirs, as does the wind, shuffling leaves and dust and branches. The world itself stirs and begins to shake itself ready for the day.
Things that happen in the dead of night are generally not good. 'Night, the eldest of things' (Milton, Paradise Lost) sees a damn sight more than most would want to know about - in this novel at least, implying transgression (because if someone hadn't seen them, there wouldn't be a novel to write, now, would there?), and the transgression, inadevertent, leads to everything else.
I have to wonder, though it's already written, will the novel end in the dark or in the morning.
Timing is important in a novel. The timing of life and death and the actions that bring them about.
This is what I've been thinking about this morning.

National November Writing Month

2011-10-16T15:02:00.000+08:00

Damn it, I've just registered for this year. I really don't have time, but on the other hand - it's like giving up smoking (stop putting it off 'cause there'll always be an excuse) only it's like there's no time - next year. Yeah, right. If I did it last year while teaching, marking, writing articles & attending conferences, I can do it this time. So, shall upate facebook & twitter & I guess google+, and here.
Shall either come up with something entirely new or take on one of my many projects, though I need one that requires 50,000 words. hmmm

2011-10-16T11:54:00.003+08:00

Mid October

No, not finished yet - the novel that is.
And the natural world outside the back door is perturbed and shocked at the blast of summer heat that came out of nowhere & will be gone tomorrow. Not for long though. The days are warming & after a coolish, hopefully more than damp week, we're back into the high twenties for next weekend. Summer approaches. Inexorable, not wanted, dreaded. Many of the plants are wilting. It is, perhaps, a little too soon for this sort of temperature & I'm just hoping it's not a repeat of last summer which started about now (though the rain had already disappeared) and didn't go down below 30 till at least mid May. It was still in the thirties in Mud April. An unpleasant summer. A harbinger of things to come. My novel in the flesh, so to speak.

Ah - the novel? Well, it progresses, though it will need cutting back. I tend to overwrite and prune later & not sure whether that's the best thing or whether a sketch is best first. But, although I love drawing, and always start with a sketch (as opposed to an outright plan - though in the oil paintings still in progress, I completed detailed drawings before even getting the brushes and tubes of paint out of storage), in writing I just go hell for leather as it were. Though, if I am doing a pencil drawing it's the same. Both start with the blank page which gets filled in, following the writing/drawing along its own logical plane without planing ahead. Obviously, conscious choices get made along the way, but it all seems to be done subliminally to that self-conciousness that can stuff up so much.

What a fascinating little realization: that my writing's like my pencil drawings :-D

Next time, I shall publish some photos

2011-10-01T12:21:00.000+08:00

OCTOBER? Oh No!

Hmm - & I was about to type September, but of course, it's actually October. OCTOBER!!! And yes - still finishing the novel that I was - actually, no. I finished the novel I was finishing in June. And submitted it to readers. And they enjoyed it. I hated it. So I'm now almost finished the reincarnation. Same characters, same setting, same problems, plot points - but it's all different. I've put fairy-tale back in the mix, with a sprinkle of mystery to top off the pie (SF base, spec fic filling with horror & fairy-tale for for spice and sprinkle of mystery for the topping and a garnish of folk tale when served).

So, that will be 3 novels written for the PhD. OK, one's been slightly cannabilised but will make an interesting addition to what is a growing pile around the central idea. It's more thriller and action than I wanted for the novel I was trying to get out. There will be room for it later.
What's interesting about this 'new' incarnation is that I've been able to really develop the bad guy. And he's really bad (laughs). He's plain not nice! Intriguing, but not nice. And I have been able to twist perspectives
so it's difficult to know which is right, which is wrong, apart from the really basic stuff. Life, in my novel's world, is an interesting mix of things and I've been exploring it in a more thorough way. Enjoyable for the most part, frustrating in other parts as I have this damned word limit for the PhD! Grrr.

Right, back returneth I to finishing the novel before October progresses too much further.
Come November, I hope to report on all the reading I've been doing on teh Sublime and the Grotesque - & Lovecraft. :-)

2011-06-13T12:37:00.000+08:00

A wee brown fairy - from the fun I've been having with the graphics tablet.

And here it is - June. Arrgh! The novel still not done, but I have been having 'fun' getting it to its final days - novel time, that is, not real time. Or rather - world time. Of course, as see from above, I've not entirely been engaged in writing. Playing with a new toy as well - which hasn't been entirely a distractive exercise (yes I know there's no such word, but I think there should be - it's exactly what I want there). It's enabled the brain time to chug through all the thoughts of the novel, to get towards the point where yes, there is an ending and what's more - it's a good path to the ending. The ending I had quite some time ago, but to get there? What's that saying about the journey being the thing, not the destination? Very very true in novel writing, I think. Sure, the ending is the pay-off. It must have that sense of satisfaction, of things properly sorted, not necessarily emotionally overwhelming, but certainly something that makes the reader sigh, smile with satisfaction and close the book, getting up to get a cup of coffee, or a fag, or whatever with a smile on their dial. They've invested time in this book - you gotta give something in return.
And I think I've found it.

Sigh - 'cause it's a couple of days later and I've realized some things work, but others don't so I've had to do profound and concentrated 'thinks', but had now 'found' another path to the ending!

There is something to be said to plotting out a book, chapter by chapter, but I doubt whether even that would work. Generally, I just start and go where the story takes me, then when I'm a certain way in, know the story in vague outline sketches. That's what's happened this time, but then, as it's for my PhD, therefore subject to whims and changes outside of my control, I find what I'd originally thought could happen no longer has the word space (big boo to supervisors who alter word lengths downwards when you are nearly finished the 1st draft!). So have had to change things and am now onto more drastic changes. Some will certainly be for the better, others not so - I'm saving those for the after-PhD-novel.
That's a project I am really looking forward to - the whole tapestry.

And no - I do *not* resemble the above brown fairy :-)

2011-05-01T10:34:00.000+08:00

Can't even remember when I last posted - & only spurred into it by someone being interested enough to join!
No - I haven't finished the novel. It's being difficult, but is now coming together, and once more, I'm astonished by the directions it's taken and the paths it's chosen. It's not the novel I thought I'd write. That novel (obviously with different characters, etc) will be written another time. This is the one for now.
But it's made me think about world creation.
World creation takes place because of the story and don't you just love that? Without the narrative, where is the world? But without the world, what happens to the narrative?I've now managed entire ecologies and how they interact to enable all life to survive. Others I've sat and thought about the astronomical position of a planet to have the details that popped in during the 'inspiration' phase, when you just write before research or thinking - just words popping out of the tips of your fingers to appear on the screen before you.
But perhaps the most thought-provoking is 'semi-creation': taking the 'now' and re-drawing what is contemporary in terms of unspecified futures and catastrophes.
In a chat with my supervisor, we got into details. She was really getting into the few chapters she's read so far and I was saying how some of the things like toothpaste in fact had to be rethought. There wouldn't be tubes of toothpaste: no plastic, very few metals, they'd either be glass or ceramic pots, and the paste? Perth geology, from my researches, doesn't support the manufacture of Bicarbonate of Soda. So I have to rethink it, because even if they were able to get it via trade with Java or Bali (who might procure it through trade with other areas), the likelihood is that it would be too expensive for most people to be able to afford. So, they'd use something else, mostly from personal gardens: crushed herbs (minty smelling/tasting), some woods, maybe some powdered rocks/salts. Each place would have a different type depending on whether it was home-made from grown ingredients or something obtained from city markets of local farm co-ops.
That's just one example. I have this image of a small population almost camping out in the ruins of a large city, making different use of spaces, similar to how the Saxons used to camp within large Roman structures - they apparently hated and were scared of Roman ruins, but things like ampitheatres they would camp in (so my brother tells me who ought to know, being an archeologist what digs holes in London for a living).
So I reformulate a city skyline and subtract the lights and height, add in bits that I've taken from what's on the drawing board and minds of city planners now, and some of those make for very interesting locations.
Killing the river, Taking into account the climate change projections and the problems that poses, changes in oceanic currents and wind currents, loss of rainfall and a river no longer replenished - the water becoming acid, the mud turning to toxic dust in the long summers. That's required a massive change. Not even the black water that results from the summer storms which are now (in this novel's world) the main source of water can help the river because there are rarely follow-up rains.
It's become a place rich enough in resources for survival but incredibly vulnerable to even minor disasters which all makes for an incredibly different world. I'm fascinated with the damage mining can do (the mud volcano in Indonesia) which makes me think of other things that can happen.
I've built the world from the ground up - the geology of a place, actual or my invented worlds, provides the 'groundwork' for any number of scenarios.
And all of that is just the start - then there's the story which is how all of this comes into being anyway.
Oh, I love writing!

2011-01-09T11:06:00.000+08:00

Changing a character's composition is harder than it would seem, well, in the context of my novel at least. He goes from being a witness to committing the cold-blooded murder he originally saw. He is no longer a witness. He has gone from ghostly presence to something more concrete - or corporeal would be the better word; from complete victim to something still victimised but also more involved and eventually proactive as well as reactive. He was never morally perfect, but now he descends into moral ambiguity. Yet there is no way I dislike this character. Perhaps because he dislikes himself. I am not yet sure whether he is aware of how his choices long ago have placed him in this position, but, although we all have choices, some choices are simple in their starkness. His choice was not so much to live but rather to have the chance of dying. Faced with ultimate and never ending horror and pain (one conception of hell, surely), he chooses life even with the almost intolerable burden of what he must do to retain it. Powerlessness personified. Perhaps that's what I'm about - exploring powerlessness, though I don't want to know what is behind all this, and I think it's more about choice and how the choices we make change the world, but I still don't want to know. That's for others to decide. But choices have ramifications that extend way, way beyond the personal sphere and this poor character's choices have left him in a place where his choices have lost all pretension to black and white - they all all grey, no matter which way he looks. As grey as his previous life, as grey as the life that stretches ahead of him and I don't know, for the moment, whether that life will be pleasant or terrible in its solitariness. I really feel for this character. He never had power in either a personal or a social sense, and yet, I also know he will make good use of a power lent to him for a specific purpose. He will 'abuse' it in that he will attempt to atone. Not sure whether he will manage it or not yet.
The only thing certain is that he is no longer a ghost and will commit cold-blooded murder. It's the latter that's going to be hard.

2011-01-07T17:50:00.002+08:00

oJust a week into the New Year and I've done something momentous - I bought a pair of sheets! Yes, that's the first time in my entire life I have bought sheets. I have bought towels, pillows and pillow slips, but not sheets! How weird is that? What have I been using, you ask? Sheets that have been gifted - birthday & Christmas presents. But today - I bought a pair - one fitted & one flat for a king size bed in the most amazing glorious, non-soporific burgundy! They are out on the line drying after their 'pre-use' wash and against the green of the garden, in the sunlight, the colour is fantastic. The colour I love to use in painting and nail polish. It;s hte sort of colour that leaps out at you from an entire forest of beautiful autumn leaves (& I know, I dreaming, thinking of Autumn in the midst of the hottest, driest summer-end of the year on record in Perth). And I'm going to be sleeping on them - or trying to: sleeping in the weather we've been having (up to the last two days) is almost impossible. Tossing and turning and sweating (& not in a fun way either) isn't much fun, regardless of the sheets. I'll just have to hope any tendency for that stunning colour to run has been thrashed out in the washing machine. Otherwise I'll wake up as red as my hair - not a good look!

2011-01-03T19:53:00.000+08:00

2011. Who'd have thunk it. And it's almost a month since I posted. And in the meantime, there has been a great deal of work done: cards and writings, readings and thinkings. And it's been revoltingly hot and today (plus tomorrow) humid, all of which brings out the worst of the arthritis.
The cards this year were not in the slightest 'christmasey'. I drew plants from my garden and they seemed to be well received. My favourite though was one I only used as an email card:

A small quick sketch of my fluffy fat cat - she's black so it;s in the negative (& the pic's slightly cropped). But some of the others went well:

(this is the card I gave to my cousin) A herb garden with jasmine - all plants I have in my garden, though I make no claim to being a botanical artist! These are both done in coloured pencil & chinograph.

The writing is finally coming back into focus, though the weather doesn't help. I am disliking Perth more and more. So have started mentioning Tasmania to the wider world, though it would be a daunting thing - to move where I know only a few people and have no 'support' network. I have been in Perth for decades, and while I don't particularly like the place, many of my favourite people are here.
It's not something I have to worry about for at least one and half years - I do have this PhD to finish. Then it will be time to worry about it all - including what I would do with all the plants in my garden. How many would I be able to transport ot Tasmania? And would they thank me? It will be difficult enough for the cat - although she is finding the heat hard, she hates rain and there is more rain in Tasmania than there is here - particularly over the last few years.
And that's what I'm really missing. Rain. Green. The sense of things not folding up, drying up, dying. Maybe I have never got past my Anglo-Saxon roots and need the sense of winter around me somewhere. Winter with its time for the earth to breath and recoup itself with rain and silence. There is nothing of that here, and last year, not even winter rains.
This summer came early and hot and I suspect it will continue well into April and whether there is rain or not - that is just guesswork.
The rest of the country has had the wettest year on record, poor Queensland is underwater, but here? In this corner of the country? The rivers are dying, stifled into hypoxia by lack of water to flush them out. All the rich grazing and growth is going, farmers prohibited from taking water from the rivers for the first time since settlement. It;s not irrigation, it;s just water. But now, there isn't enough for dairy cows to drink.
Yet - YET - there is a bastard coal mining company that wants to drill through one of the precious aquifers for fucking coal! In Margaret River of all places.
I understand that the mining act is not related to any other, but surely the government can hear what everyone (bar the company in question) is saying - no-one wants it! Contaminated water when there is so little remaining?
I know there are similar problems in Tasmania with the timber and fucking Gunns (who are also in WA), but somehow, there is more willingness to protect the place. It hasn't been as spoiled and everyone is used to WA being the mining state. Perhaps that's it.
Coal should no longer be considered at all.
There should be enough awareness of the importance of ecological sensitive systems for it to not even be considered.
And how did I start on this? It just makes me angry! I'm going to make my dinner...

2010-12-11T16:11:00.001+08:00

Well - a first in many years - I've decorated, not the house, but the garden. I've hung baubles up against the greenery. I am also contemplating putting tinsel up around the bookshelves: I have blu-tack. Mind you, I also have a cat! Last year, I draped one piece of tinsel around some bookshelves and she was onto it in a trice, and proceeded to play with it all over the flat. Cute but a wee bit disheartening.

I don't have a Christmas tree and there wouldn't be room anyway. So shall stick with decorating those areas dear to me: garden and bookshelves :-)
Of course, this means I first have to clean the flat & with making cards, packing parcels, writing and so on - it will need days of cleaning before I can even contemplate any decorating. The garden, particularly that area, usually looks good. I just have to hope the empire-building spiders don't take it into their heads to colonise the little angel....

2010-12-08T12:48:00.000+08:00

I've been writing when I should be drawing, but the writing is becoming fascinating in an unexpected way: what is a soul? In Christianity & associated beliefs, the soul is the spiritual, the impersonal piece of being that returns to wherever it came from - Heaven or Hell. It's the bit that reaps the rewards for actions over the lifetime, karma and not. It's the part that doesn't belong to the individual but to the creator. The creator's breath of life. The spark of life, of divine life within the muddy clay of matter.
In my PhD novel, A Fabulist's Alternity, there is a world where souls are different - they have existences that are apart from their physical counterparts (so far there is no mention of mind, though it's obvious the entities have one). This autonomy goes as far as the soul being able to enter and remain with another being altogether, therefore consigning its previous physical counterpart to death - without a soul, the entity cannot survive. But the soul can. And does. However, these souls, unlike the human idea of soul, is mortal. It is probably very very long-lived, but nonetheless, can be killed, can die. And does. It has the powers of healing, of restoration, but not resurrection of the dead - as far as I'm aware.
I hadn't expected to encounter souls in this fashion. Souls are generally accepted but really, they are part of religious belief - the spiritual side of being that we generally don't interact with, not in any meaningful way in the 'real' world. It belongs to the realm of prayer.
I am encountering a different type of soul, one that apparently can and does interact with its physical environment. It is the spiritual side, but something that is both more and less than that. It is certainly the non-physical side of these beings, though their souls also have a physical presence.
It's intriguing.
Is it some 'divine' spark? The 'divine' breath? I don't get that sense from them, but I will have to wait and see what develops. And what do the souls bring their entities (unable to move one they reach maturity) that the younglings (who range freely and have their souls within them) can't bring them?
I'm going to be writing more on this.

2010-12-07T14:16:00.000+08:00

Well, that's half the day gone! Not much writing but a great deal of arsing about trying to set up another blog. Lost my profile pic & everything. Apparently you can't have a separate profile for each blog. Damn annoying that.
Still, it's done now.
Hopefully, I'll fill it up with snippets of the PhD project.

2010-12-07T00:28:00.000+08:00

A wasted Night
I'm having a shit of a time coming up with a design for Christmas cards this year - has to be effective & simple so it can be done quickly without looking like crap. It's so long since I've done any drawing. I have the same problem with writing if I haven't for a while. Takes the brain a while to catch onto what is required. I should just give u[ & go to bed. I've tried five so far and suddenly, I'm back drawing flowers. Then again, maybe that's not a bad thing. People must be getting sick of my cats. Flowers, though, are a bit more complex and difficult - realistic ones at least. Maybe I'll try a few and see how it goes - though I haven't got all that much time for the overseas and the interstate ones. I might have to resort to bought ones again.
It's another example of the the compartmentalisation of the brain - well, mine anyway. Both the drawing and the writing are 'creative' activities, but one is more purely from the imagination (writing) through a medium that requires a knowledge of rules that make it intelligible to everyone else. It's imaginative, but requires formalisation. The other is merely a translation of what is seen into another medium (drawing) and there is less adherence to rules. Pictorial requires less interpretation on the part of the perceiver - at least when it's illustration. The illustrator has done all the work in that instance and all the audience sees is the flat representation of someone's idea of - say, a flower. But writing of that flower is a very different exercise - all the words required to describe shape and shade - it's far simpler to draw it. The colours in a flower, when there is more than one, is no simple affair. Neither is writing it. I should add that drawing it's not all that simple, but the colour is already in the pencil, the dark or lighter hues are dependent either on another pencil or the thickness of the application.
And none of this is helping me get on with it. I think it's time for bed.
Might write more on this, just to tease myself.

2010-12-06T21:57:00.000+08:00

Two posts in one day!
I went for a walk in the early evening and the sky didn't look like summer, cloaked in those smooth pearled clouds and the air was filled with a light drizzle. I walked all the way down to Beaufort Street in this light misty rain and my hair was barely wet. But the dampness on the warm roads brought ut all the smells of sand, dust, eucalytpus leaves (which is beautiful), but also the stinks of old oil and god knows what from the gutters. It was a peculiar mixture. Very un-Perth-like. More akin to areas to the north, the tropics. I remember when I went to Indonesia (more than a decade ago), Phil & I got cauight in the massive thunderstorms that began the monsoons. It was amazing - never seen rain like it, and the silence afterwards was almost magical.
Tonight had something of that sense - none of the dramatics, none of the intensity, but yet there was something of it.
Watching the lights coming on against the misty air, the city blurred and softened by it, it looked like winter. The light wind had a gentle coolth that ameliorated the warm humidity, so it didn't feel like winter, but the grey waning light, headlights coming on, people hurrying with umbrellas and heads down - very wintry looking in its shades and shapes, sounds and movment. Only the temperature was wrong.
For the last few days, the light has been strange: less bright, less harsh and searing, even when the sun is out. Though, if you stand in the sun, it's incredibly hot. Thick as melted butter. All the dampness in the air. Still, it looks more like winter than summer.
This is a peculiar start to the season I dread, though we've already had our first heatwave. And I was in the middle of serious writing. It's really hard to write when it's over 35 and we had several days of it. This weekend will also be getting up to 35.
Just now, it's been raining lightly again, barely enough to dampen the ground, to tap lightly on the pergola roof and the skylight and fill the air with those smells and the sounds of car tyres on damp roads, nothing more.
The most amazing thing is the silence this weather brings, especialy at night. There is the traffic outside the door (it's not anywhere near cool enough to have doors and windows closed), but still, there is a silence beneath those superficial sounds that nothing can touch., A kind of immanence. As though there is heavy rain or a storm. There is neither. Just the sense of something coming.
I wonder if this is something like - a very pale approximation - the 'build-up' in the tropics, before the rains hit. There are no thunderstorms or anything dramatic, and the humidity is nowhere near as high, but that sense of immanence - I wonder.

2010-12-06T15:51:00.000+08:00

More Garden & Some Writing

So, today I mulched the front garden. While the rest of the country (almost literally) is getting profoundly sogged in a series of flooding rains and towns are being evacuated, here in the south west corner of the continent - no such luck! Almost no winter rains, barely any Spring rains and only lightest of light showers over the last few mornings - water is at a premium. So, mulching. It will hold any water that does happen to fall from the sky. And give the parched ground some solidity for the plants to hang onto.

With the writing I've been doing - the nano novel and thinking about the PhD novel, A Fabulist's Alternity, gardens, I have realized, are a major part of my being - not just activity, but everything I do. I love plants, love the green, teh shapes sounds and colours of them, teh height breadth, tall and small of them. The smell and silence of them - though silence is relative only to what the air is doing. The sounds of trees in the wind is something I really miss as there are no trees here. Not that close that I can listen. Out the front, yes, and I'm growing some more - though why? It's a rented place, this, and I'm bound to have to leave sooner or later. Most of my garden is in pots, but some - like the trees out the front and the lavender bush, are in the ground. You can't move lavender. It's a homebody, and trees will probably get too big to shift unless there is somewhere immediate to put them. And my state of finances? It'll be another rented space that I'll try to make mine despite the fact I won't be able to stay.

Gardens are part of the PhD novel in the strangest way in the PhD novel - a glimpse into a future in the unforeseeable is about plants.
A renter who loves gardens and gardening is not a happy person.
I have also edited a short story. It will need more editing as it's still too long, but definitely getting into shape.

I have just spent at least an hour trying to figure out how to get pics into this. All that wasted time uploading images to the web & I can do it a simpler way. I don't know why I couldn't upload from the web. Sigh. Something else for me to learn.
And now, coffee and more writing. Or Christmas cards. I have to get on with making Christmas cards. I think, having taken out a further 1000 words from the story 'A Night in the Ruins', I should leave it for another week.
The making of Christmas cards beckons...

2010-12-05T09:17:00.000+08:00

Writing and the Garden
Did I mention the NanoWriMo novel (herein referred to as the Nano -little- novel)? Not sure, and not sure why I did it either, except, despite everything else I had to do in November, and the fact I have a novel for the PhD to be getting on with, there was a story sitting in me - so I did it. 50K odd words in 2 weeks - because of my earlier commitments. The story itself is connected with the PhD novel, so there's no real problem - but mostly, it was for the writing itself. I haven't been able to write that intensely for years: getting up in the morning & falling onto the computer, staying all day (apart from breaks & dinner & such) and turning out between 5 and 10 thousand words.
My hands suffered for it, and possibly other things as well, 'cause there wasn't much exercise to be had, but it was brilliant!
The nano novel itself less than brilliant but certainly taught me a lot about the world of the PhD novel which I am itching to get into, though Christmas looms and things that have to be done there too. So, very intense writing is on hold for a while longer. And there's a paper & a proposal or two, and a short story to sort with deadlines ranging from the end of December to the end of January, neither of which are all that far away.
There are other things to do as well - the Garden! Yesterday I planted just one little tomato plant. Bunnings only had cherry tomatoes & I want big ones. I also mulched and today, shall plant rocket, coriander and silver beet. Shall clear some garden bed, dig & mulch and put out that snail bait that disintegrates into iron & stuff. I hope all the little critters that abound in my courtyard garden don't eat them all.
I'm letting the spinach and the chard go to seed and shall collect the seeds and plant elsewhere. Mulching against the lack of rain turned out to be a good thing because we actually got a measurable amount of rain early this morning - at least there was some water in the bin lids. Not much, but certainly enough to soak into those pots I had mulched. I feel almost virtuous.

2010-12-04T20:21:00.000+08:00

So, today I found some ostrich eggs. In my greengrocers, in an arcade in Mt Lawley, Perth. What are ostrich eggs doing here? I am intrigued. OK, I've seen ostriches - on the television, in books, maybe at the zoo (though not totally sure of that), but never seen an ostrich egg. Emu eggs, yes. Emus, yes. Emus are part of this dry continent. But ostriches? I swear, it's globalization gone bananas - well, not bananas though they're not native, cropped here - maybe ostriches are as well.
I am guessing they weren't 'locally' grown though! I've not seen any ostriches wandering round the joint. OK, haven't actually seen any emus wandering up the road either, but I'm still more likely to see an emu than an ostrich!

2010-12-02T08:15:00.000+08:00

And once more, it's been a while. November was a hellishly busy month and yet - I got it all done: an article on Reality Horror for an Italian film magazine, a conference paper written & presented, taking students up to their exams, then exam marking - & to top it all off, a short novel written. Of it all, I loved the last 2 weeks which is when I did the bulk (I think 40Kwords) and I loved the intensity. It's how I used to write. Fall out of bed & onto the computer, not ceasing except for stretching breaks, a meal or two and sleep. It really is a brilliant way to exist.
Sadly, my arthritis doesn't think so. I really can't do that without repercussions anymore, yet here I am, halfway through the PhD and that's what I'm facing. It's going to be an intense, pain-filled year and a bit. Yet, there is nothing like it. Writing, re-writing, studying, wrestling with concepts and finding ways to express them in original, thought-provoking language.
Ahead of me, for the next month or two, I have 'tweaking' of conference paper, proposal for another conference paper and a novel for the PhD to get stuck into, and hopefully (should the proposal be accepted) another conference paper. All directly related to the PhD.
But now? Right now? Have to wash the henna out of my hair. The little car is in the garage having her underneaths looked at 'cause her muffler sounds like it's made of lace (there are so many holes and patched holes that it probably looks like it too) but it's not a matter of merely replacing it - they have to see which bit needs replacing. Ooo! Scary! Particularly scary as a friend is possibly going to be doing the replacing, not the garage, and I don't know how they will feel about that. Though, at this time of year, I do need a car.
Always around December, the little car throws some kind of mechanical fit. I swear the little tin box on wheels has, over her many years (she's not a young car) developed that kind of sentience that sf authors love to play around with.
Shall attempt to continue with this blog on a more regular basis. It's good for me to write to myself like this (laughs at self)

2010-11-23T11:56:00.000+08:00

It's been a long time since I was here. I've even posted on Twitter! Though no-one's gonna notice (laughs quietly to self).
But, I've been tutoring - philosophy & academic writing, and that's a load for anyone let alone me. Very valuable if totally time consuming. But marking's done and I'm back to writing which I haven't been able to do for almost a year! Also wrote an article on Reality Horror - not sure whether it's accepted yet - and a conference paper, which no needs to be (severely) 'tweaked' if it's going to be considered for inclusion in the Conference Proceedings (this was teh Curtin PostGrad conference: Voicing the Unseen).
Now it's onto writing and reading - Baudrillard & Bakhtin, Zizek & Kant, Freud and Hegel (& I suppose there ought to be a Heidegger in there as well!), Derrida & Foucault. Sigh. And writing.
I'm into NanowriMo as well and of course, am soooo far behind! Still, from under 10,000 words the day before yesterday, I'm now over 5,000. In the Nano stats, they say at 'my average' it'll take me to Jan 14 to get to 50,000. But - 5,000 words in one day ain't too bad. Shall do more than that today & tomorrow...

2010-08-26T13:48:00.000+08:00

I've been thinking about zombies again - and no, I'm not really that into zombies (I heard a review of Wolf Creek that made me glad I never saw it: torture porn is not my thing), but circumstances demand it, and I have been working on the 28 films. OK, they're no longer the latest and maybe I should've caught Zombieland, but I didn't so don't hassle me, but I've just been considering the argument about whether the screamies that run round Britain are zombies our not. think they are. Cogito ergo sum. Zombies, whether Romero or Boyle will not fit into the Cartesian mould - they do not think, therefore they are not (the logic in that sentence is skewed somewhat but you know what I mean). This is important when considering the 28 monsters. An 'infected' - zombie infected with the 'rage' virus - will either kill or infect you. Once you're infected, you are more or less dead and should really lose all the personal pronouns. Running dead,but still dead. Infected. Once infected, all that remains is rage and the urge to kill humans. While there are enough humans to eat, running, killing/eating continues, but when the supply of uninfected humans runs out, that's it. The 'infected' finally dies.
The dead don't rise in the 28 films. There is no opening of the earth to release the buried. Dead is dead. But the infected are already dead in a very important way when considering what the 'zombie apocalypse' is all about - they are mindless raging monsters. They interact with nothing but humanity and in the most destructive of ways.I know there's attempts here and there to make zombies characters, make them part of the story, but to me, that defeats the purpose. They have lost all their personality, their minds, their abilities of reason. Can you think of how a zombie would read Kant, or Stephen Hawking? Shakespeare? No. They're dead in every important aspect of humanity save the grossly physical. And in that sense, the 28 zombies are just that: dead.
Now?
Now I think I'd much rather get out into the garden, but there's a conference paper to think about and something else - oh yes, a PhD...

2010-08-22T23:24:00.000+08:00

Monsters have been with us since we first dreamed, first painted on cave walls, hunted in forests filled with strange shadows. As we evolved societies, our monsters evolved along with us, revealed in the creation myths and the bonds that kept societies together, expressed in all shapes, sizes and raisons d’etres. Monsters are part of the historical fabric of civilizations, they are from before, they are the threat of civilization’s end, they instruct, either by their very existence or by their actions. They instruct in morals and social structures, in where to go and where not to go, instruct society on just who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’.

We breathe monsters in and breathe them out, create them in projected images of the powerful, the wrathful and the horrific sides of human nature. Monsters take on the flaws, become them, they are revenged upon for humanity’s sins by becoming those sins. Generally, they come when required, and when that requirement is fulfilled, whether it is by defeating the monster, or solving a particular problem of social transgression, they go. Some monsters are remnants of humanity’s creation; they rage on the sidelines of humanity’s histories and histrionics until they are called into metaphorical play at the end of time: Fenrir and the Midgard Serpent at Ragnarok from Norse mythology, and Behemoth and Leviathan from the Judaic creation myths for the biblical apocalypse are two generally known examples. Monsters allow us to identify with the terrible, allow us to place all our anger and fear in the one gargantuan repository and see it vanquished and provide a great catharsis when they’re done.

Then there are those monsters hiding in the still unknown areas of the shrinking world: Nessie, the Yeti, Bigfoot. They remain either as relics of the past or pieces of the active imagination still wary of the boundaries that define existence and the possibilities of existence, defining the hidden forbidden places. Monsters are reminders of the past, horrific presentiments of the future, part of the historical fabric of current social constructs. They are not time keepers or markers except in the manner of lessons learned and marked off on a society’s journey to maturity or prosperity. Neither living nor dead, monsters exist somewhere in between, forever the same, never changing. Godzilla might become more flexible in his rubber suit, King Kong may be more visually exciting with better film techniques and make-up, but the monster doesn’t change. Neither do the stories.

This is evident in the modern monster’s prime habitat: entertainment where, populating our dreams and nightmares, they also populate the entertainment factory of games and films and books. Science Fiction takes us into realms where monsters can, and usually do, involve new forms, new paradigms of existence which previously hadn’t entered the human sphere. With the advent of science fiction, monsters are created by humans in an ongoing creation myth that expands the boundaries of existence. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster, Ridley Scott’s Alien, HG Wells’ Martians in War of the Worlds, King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera, Cloverfield and Nigel Kneale’s horrors from ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, are just a few examples. Yet there is always something familiar about them. These new monsters are always representative of the fragmented, territorial, predatory, viciously maternal, boundary-crossing psyche that humanity takes with it wherever it goes. So the alien in Ridley Scott’s seminal film is mother and predator and deathless terror all in the one goo-dripping, metallic, insectile, hideous package. The Shadows and the Vorlons of the TV series Babylon 5 battling through all the races of the galaxy are simply humanity’s own demons and angels. The cylons of BattleStar Galactica are human engendered monsters (the cyclons return to kick humanity’s arse – and don’t they do it with style and panache!), and the monsters of the ‘50’s science fiction films are communists in weird prosthetics and make-up (two examples are the giant ants of Gordon Douglas’ 1954 film, Them!, or the cabbage patch dolls of Don Seigel’s 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Many science fiction monsters are encountered when a boundary of some type is crossed, be it gaining too much knowledge and not knowing how to apply it, or carelessness, especially in regards the natural environment: The Host, the 2007 Korean film, is a wonderfully explicit example, as is the original 1954 version of Godzilla and the original 1965 version of Gamera. Occasionally, the boundary crosses us as in the 2008 film Cloverfield where suddenly, apropos of nothing, there is a monster in Manhattan! Ridley Scott’s Alien involved humans crossing a boundary carefully set up by other humans and when the alien eventuates into human space, once more terror, death and disaster, though this time, the monster is defeated. This is the case in all the sequels as well, including the human set-up, with the exception of David Fincher’s 1993 Alien 3 where the monster is defeated at the expense of the heroine’s life. In fact, monsters represent crossed boundaries by their very appearance. They are “generally disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration.” (Chen, Jeffery Jerome, Monster Theory: Reading Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p 6 )

But not all monsters are created equal.

Next, it'll be Lovecraft's monstrous creations: liminal certainly, hybridised, defying categorization? You bet. But monsters? That will be the debate.

2010-08-22T16:15:00.000+08:00

My technical woes continue. The car is fixed, the new printer is wonderful, but internet is still intermittent. and now email has gone. Sigh.
Today I'm trying to ignore it and concentrate on zombies. Monsters. I like monsters as a rule, but zombies are my least favourite. They have no personality, and while there is generally humour in zombie films, they can at times be pretty downbeat. 'They are us', says the character Peter in Dawn of the Dead, and indeed they are. Ourselves reflected back at us in all our physical glory: reality looking at us and then biting - but by then it's too late to stop and think of all the things a person is, but zombies are nothing more than the perceived physicality. Merely the materialistic side of existence that must consume to remain. Which is why the zombies remain - consuming and creating more and more on an endless treadmill of mindless manufacture.
Zombies can be read as so much - so much encased in the skin bags that is all we are in one sense. Although, talking of the material, of matter, that's a different thing altogether. Paul Davies territory. It'd be fascinating to go into, matter being a slippery subject in itself would be an intriguing addition to the thoughts on zombies. But not yet.
Robin Wood in Hollywood, from Vietnam to Reagan ... and beyond (2003) sees Romero's zombies as constructs to reflect and 'destruct' the structures of Western (or American) society. And so they are, reflections of the purely material concerns. These terrible relentless monsters devour us: us devouring ourselves, like the worm swallowing its own tail, begetting ourselves at the same time.
I wonder if that's why I don't like zombies.
Despite the hope in some of the films, the spots of encouragement that humanity survives, perhaps it only survives to continue the horror. Zombie Apocalypse it's called, but it seems less revelation than total damnation into a land of the dead with no hope of being lifted up to some other realm.
And what do atheists make make of such a thought? Perhaps zombies are the perfect 'afterlife' - though before I go any further, should add that I'm no rusted-on religious anything, still - an afterlife, if it exists, is hopefully something more than the eternal round of growing up, being bitten by zombie to exist in a nether world of non-person. But, to some extent, that's what being a zombie is, and that's what being dead is: non-person. That's it. No new chapter, the story goes on without you. Unless you rise as a zombie, but then, it's not you anymore. The zombie is an animated corpse driven by its need to consume. And yes, Romero's opinion does stare at you in the face when put like that, but since his films, that's mostly how they're portrayed.
But what about reincarnation? Rising as a zombie is either a really nasty reincarnation and a joke in poor taste, or it stops the cycle in its tracks. If that's the case, then hell might have been too full so the dead have to return here, but there's also nothing to continue reincarnation either, and that brings me to Haitian Voodoo - its two souls: the ti bon ange and the gros bon ange, the former being the spiritual, personal soul, the latter being the phsyical, and if that physical soul is not returned to the earth to enrich it and bring forth more, then all suffer.
So zombies deplete even as they increase. Not a good thought at all, but we're certainly back to the problems of endless, mindless consumption of everything the earth has to offer.
Think I'll go watch Shaun of the Dead again - it was at least funny.
On the other hand, I really am getting tired of zombies. Maybe I won't.

2010-08-21T18:29:00.000+08:00

Ah - it was Lovecraft's birthday yesterday.
Sigh.
So beset with technical problems I forgot the important things in life. Or death. Or memory.

Belated happy birthday, Mr Lovecraft. You are an inspiration, frustration and a source of continual wonder to me. May you long continue to be so.

2010-08-21T18:11:00.000+08:00

Well, a new Saturday (almost over) and I have not merely a new printer, but a networked printer! Such technological advancement for this little person. I didn't enter the twentieth century till the beginning of the 21st and now I'm catching up in leaps and bounds - though there are more cables to trip over!
It will be interesting to see the changes this makes - not necessarily to my life, but most certainly to the look of the flat. More furniture shifting in the short term future, and the possibility of needing another table/desk. I really didn't think that would be possible, but it will be.
And now, back to work - zombies and other things. At least I will be able to print things out now which is so much easier than working from the screen. That has slowed me down sooooo much.
Phew!

2010-08-19T22:03:00.000+08:00

Almost the end of the week, and won't that be a relief. Not much writing done - not much of anything at all done! Technical difficulties - internet dropping out, broken printer, broken car and software behaving ina decidedly dodgy fashion. And that was just the 1st half of the week, and really, I have to get on with finishing the changes to this essay and send it off for proofing. Otherwise it will miss the non-negotiable deadline. And I haven't really sorted out this blogging stuff either.
I'm feeling miserable and frustrated that nothing works when you really need it to.
It really makes me feel like going back to quill and ink, though that would be impossible to email. And email is the only way I have to deliver some things. But even me, so long resistant to technology, finds myself emeshed in the world-wide techy web. Most of the time, I have no complaints, and everything works well and smoothly and it certianly makes some aspects of life easier. I mean - it's taking no time at all to write this (though I might give it a once over, just a swift polish), but to write with a dip pen? It would certainly give me more pleasure, because I enjoy even the physical act of writing, but who is going to sit around and wait for me to physically pen 7,000 words - so that it's readable? I can think of quite a few who wouldn't be bothered, and not sure I really blame 'em.
What I find fascinating is the diametrical opposing facts: Dickens wrote his stuff - reading Hard Times at the moment - with a pen such as I practice calligrpahy with: a pen dipped in ink, with a nib that wears out. The forming of the words, taking care of each letter, which is what you have to do using a dip pen, is such an intense way of making the most of every word. Haven't yet formed an opinion on whether Dickens did make the most of every word, but writing that way, you establish a different relationship with letters to the words, words to the sentences and so on. You acutally have to think about layout as you write rather than it all being set up automatically on a template. It's interesting to think that these guys, who write beofre the advent of even typewriters, generally wrote rather long books, whereas we, with all these amazing things at our literal fingertips, want more and more brevity. Hence this rather verbose (& probably rather prosaic) post.
I'm going now.

RainyMood.com

2010-08-14T17:00:00.000+08:00

RainyMood.com

2010-08-14T14:34:00.000+08:00

Saturdays. What is it about Saturdays? There is a distinct lack of will to get on with anything remotely connected with what I should be doing. Washing? Yes. Cleaning? Some. Writing? Oh it is soooo hard! Deadlines are doing more than nudging - they are hitting me over the head. Yet, can I get on with it?
And the piles of reading increase exponentially each week: tutorials, PhD - philosophy mostly - and the fiction reading I should be doing, not to mention current affairs and its ilk. I can't afford to get any shorter yet all these things are pushing down on me.
Sigh.
What is it about Saturdays?

2010-08-13T21:55:00.000+08:00

It's a long time since I've been here, and really, I should be straightening up my essay on zombies - there is a looming deadline, yet here I ma, muttering about on here and no-one will probably ever read it. Ah well., it's kind of fun. And there's a letter I should be finishing to my Aunt in Melbourne. Putting it on here won't help her read it - she's computer-averse, my dear aunt is. And there's heaps of pilosophy I should be reading, getting more comfortable with formal logic and all that, yet here I am, mucking about on my ancient blog. And the man on the tv has just said, "but you didn't kill your father, someone else did. Who was it?" Wouldn't that be a weird thing to discover after so many years? Almost as weird as thinking I might have a blog, but I really don't know how long this will last. Still, might give it a go. I tried aother format last year (I think) but that went wrong and couldn't remember the password and that was that. It will linger in cyberspace, becoming less and less relevant (not that it was all that relevant anyway) with each passing month.
I can't figure out the way this operates either. Sometimes it doens't do returns and doesn't like backspacing. Isn't it weird how something like a keyboard operates influences the way the thoughts flow? Well, I think it is anyway.
I was reading Carol Ryles blog Egaboo and she was talking about words. Words are my fun and horror as well, and writing about words as well as horror is what my PhD is all about. So I hope I can eventually comment on Carol's post and maybe, one days, she'll comment on mine.
I think that's enough time wasting for this evening. Back to zombies for me - it is, after all, going to be published in a book, so I really should have excellent motivaton for getting on with it. Yet somehow, because it was first submitted over a year ago, and I've moved on to monsters and Lovecraft, it really feels quite strange.
Well, too bad, Ms McKenzie! On with it!

2002-09-11T23:23:00.000+08:00

I should apologize. I've been distracted for a while, and one of the things that distracted me was a presentation I had to give. I've given it & it's below for your 'edification & amusement'. There is no bibliography as the presentation is taken from a work in progress (namely, my dissertation), though it does not fully resemble this work - er - in progress.
I am also upset to discover that I cannot copy the footnotes from Word to this entry. There are 'thousands' of them!! From attrbvuting quotes & paraphrasing, including page numbers, to thoughts further delineating comments made in the body of the text. My next entry will be those footnotes as I labouriously copy them.
In the meantime, if there are any questions at all, please feel free.
see ya.
ps: remember, the whole thing was written to be read aloud. And it was. So, if the sentence construction's a bit whimsical, allow for it.
THE USE OF MYTH IN HORROR 1st 3 Seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer & short stories of HP Lovecraft.
Let’s start in the dark, when the “knell that summons thee to heaven or hell” begins it all. So much horror starts in the dark, as it should, for the dark realizes the mythic potential in any landscape, be it external or within the hearts & souls of men! In the dark, anything is real: the thing under the bed, the horror in the closet, the noise outside the window, and the myths that bind those terrors into us have the space to play, to replay, endlessly yet without trite repetition. Campbell, in Creative Mythology, says: “I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still – in new relationships indeed, but ever the same motifs,” and that is certainly true of both Buffy & Lovecraft, not to mention much of horror.
“Terror,” writes Stephen King, “often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.” It’s the other side of ecstasy, the result of the incursion of the Divine into the norm, reminding us there’s more to life than humdrum routine. Anthropologist, Durkheim, described a duality within the universe, the Sacred or Divine - transcendental and idealised, and the Profane or mundane - everything else, the material world. Within this duality horror, fantasy’s darker half, can – and does – occur, for when the Sacred intersects with the Profane, when the Divine erupts into the everyday, then horror generally ensues, ‘cause you can bet that the Divine manifestation will usually be of the less pleasant persuasion.
This is obvious in Lovecraft, his tales drenched in the terror of the imminent appearance of occult beings that hail from out of time, the province of the Divine ; and not only is “Buffy” the ongoing cosmic battle between good and evil, Buffy’s very self is a dynamic example of the collision of sacred with the profane, like her world where the natural order of things is somewhat skewed. Both works refer frequently to ‘the demon dimension’, or in illio tempore – archetypal time, going back beyond the primal to those seething, chaotic aeons before creation from whence come the monsters, the demons, the magic of creation, the miscegenation resulting in the heroes, the last of whom was born two thousand odd years ago. This particular myth remains thematic in Western culture, including popular icons like “Buffy” and the writings of Lovecraft, drawing from: the Sacred - where the myths live.
Myth, like life, seems defiant to definition, but if we take it to mean those stories from ‘the beginning’, when we needed ‘stories’ to contain, to explain existence within the known universe, be it in the mountains or by the sea, then there is one explanation. They explained little, these stories, gave few answers, but provided all important context: rules, rituals to be followed to achieve the desired result in whatever area: moral, spiritual or physical. As such, it’s concerned with first things, both activities & individuals setting patterns and authority or structure. In both Buffy and Lovecraft, characters time & time again face those first things, or individuals who strive to reprise a Sacred beginning into a contemporary focus. Robert Graves says (& I paraphrase), behind every great story, you’ll find a myth (a good example is The Terminator), and myths still underlie the institutions forming the social fabric of this twenty-first century.
With the Earth now surrounded by darkness & vacuum instead of heavens & hells, no longer considered the centre of the universe let alone the solar system, we still remain fascinated by the paradox of myth, horror residing in harmony with the ethereal epiphanies of a multi-faceted Divine. Both “Buffy” and Lovecraft’s stories, appearing at opposite ends of the twentieth century, employing different media, speaking from different ages and to different audiences, portray the chaos and horror implicit and explicit in the collision between the Sacred and the Profane, in that eternal battle between good and evil. They utilize universally mythic themes and reinforce the common property of all ages: death, birth, fear of the unknown, acknowledging the mystery that still fills our neon lit, multi-media enhanced nights and our very private dreams.
“Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” concerns the adventures of a Vampire Slayer named Buffy - absurd name befitting an absurd concept, and to cap it all, Buffy is all her name implies: small, cute and teenaged blonde, wrestling common-place teenaged angst over boys, academic uncertainty and bad hair days, all of which contrasts with her supernatural powers of strength, speed, healing and dexterity. Superficially, “Buffy” is nothing more than it appears: iconoclastic, trivial, entertainment for young adults in the older teenage bracket, complete with the focus on clothes and the dating rituals of American High Schools. But (and there must always be one of those) we’re also confronted by Vampires and all sorts of other terrifying occurrences both supernatural and not particularly thanks to the ominous sounding presence of the Hellmouth. A wonderful plot device that allows for just about anything – mythic even in its name. Each episode presents eschatological as opposed to teenaged angst as the characters face some type of apocalyptic venture or Armageddon-type showdown. Fortunately, Buffy’s the quintessential, very active, if somewhat reluctant hero embodying most of the heroic traits we so admire in Gilgamesh, Hercules, Indiana Jones and Xena. Like all heroes, Buffy’s essentially good with that most necessary streak of stubborn willfulness without which the story just wouldn’t be half as entertaining. She does what every hero does: she saves the world, several times per season.
Lovecraft’s works are an entirely different matter. There is no soft, blue televisual light in the nights of Lovecraft’s dark tales, no whimsical dialogue, no supernaturally endowed hero secure in centuries’ old traditions to save mankind from a folly not entirely of its own devising. Lovecraft’s horrors occur mostly in the eastern states of America where winters are longer, colder, darker than in sunny, quirky, over-the-top California; he wrote in a time when the mountains were still thickly forested, when the land’s non-white history still loomed with an almost prehistoric presence in the wilderness remaining around the growing cities of Boston and New York. While “Buffy” takes the horror in Sunnydale for granted and manages to ‘deal’ – if not in a time honoured, a nonetheless successful and entertaining fashion, in Lovecraft’s tales, humans always pay the grim consequences of running into the sacred zone, the realm of monsters and demons, the unritualized encounters with gods and their minions.
The unremitting awareness of the fragility of humanity in Lovecraft is not merely of that individual lives, but of the entire species, its hopes and achievements rendered insubstantial and unremarkable against the massive chaos of an infinite universe lurking just beyond our perceptions. His focus is introspective, fascinated by our helplessness against the onslaught of, or encounters with the ‘Sacred’. Unlike in Buffy where Giles – the ‘book guy’ – defends our Slayer & the gang from total ignorance, madness is Lovecraft’s reward for the curious, the delvers into lore and tomes of musty, ancient books. Knowledge in his universe becomes a very dangerous thing. The chances of surviving an encounter with something of the ‘Divine’ in Lovecraft’s world is minuscule, even if the ‘Divine’ encountered is not necessarily evil as such, sometimes it’s too different to be comprehended.
Lovecraft’s characters are also enmeshed in that eschatological angst, which when placed alongside the equally eschatological awareness of the early decades of the Twentieth Century, makes a great work table for both wonder and horror. He concentrates on mankind in general (and I use the word advisedly in this context), its place in, not just the planetary, but the cosmic realm, and he finds it wanting. His myths neither comfort, attempt to sustain nor explain, he just has fun illustrating humanity’s inability to deal with things beyond its ken, whether ahead of us in time, or far back in a dreadful, brutal past, playing with a non-linear sense of history in comparison with “Buffy’s” more straightforward use of time. Time past & time future point to one end which is always present, as TS Eliot says. The cosmic scale of Lovecraft’s horror brings the Sacred and the Profane into very sharp focus, equally as sharp as that found in “Buffy” where, on one side of the street, normalcy is all the go, and on the other is that truly terrifying collision between the dual states of reality. And in the middle? There we sit, mouths agape, wondering how humanity got this far at all, especially when considering Lovecraft’s perception of the cosmos, spawning inconceivable beings of overwhelming and incomprehensible proportions.
“Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth,” says Campbell, and as the horror genre frequently involves some form of the cosmic conflict between good and evil, it cannot help but have mythic echoes. Characters in ‘horror’ scenarios are generally placed in situations bigger than themselves, facing threats or enemies far outranking the norm, so, inevitably a mythic quality is invoked as the outcome generally speaks to the continued survival and safety of humanity in toto, where the natural order of things needs to be restored, where the wasteland of life needs rejuvenating. The wasteland’s an excellent partner to darkness and is found in many a horror tale. Joseph Campbell describes the ‘wasteland’ as “the land where myth is patterned by authority, not emergent from life . . . where all is set forever and ever . . . where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task it is only to repeat , enforce and elucidate cliches.” . This is the land of “Whispering Corridors”, Korean Horror film, where conforming and competing becomes an almost inhuman requirement, in “The Matrix” where reality is portrayed as a program fed into the imprisoned humanity lining massive chambers. It’s the land of “The Terminator” where humans are kept to work or are otherwise disposed of in an orderly fashion, and is what human civilization would become if the alien in Alien was successful. It’s also represented in Lovecraft and Buffydom, the latter with Synder’s yearning desire for order, the vampires’ hierarchical societies (with the exception of Spike & Dru,), and – well, vampires are not entirely in the natural run of things. In Lovecraft, the wasteland’s represented by his very use of landscape, his depictions of evil cults, not to mention what would happen if the Old Ones ever returned.
With darkness and the wasteland as its aides, horror is uniquely placed to tap into the universality of myth in a more abrupt fashion than its lighter fantasy siblings. It is the “nearness of ultimate things”, as Peter Straub describes it , and holds within its plots and themes an apocalyptic awareness, the uncovering and covering of the sacred, the mythic, the divine.
Darkness is the beginning of the mythic story, the creation story: “God . . . created heaven and earth . . . and darkness hung over the deep.” Genesis, of both the Torah and the Christian Bible, and in a similar vein occur many other creation myths – light comes over the darkness of chaos, even if not always so peacefully. This first darkness is echoed every night, in the remorseless sight of the sun setting behind a cityscape, red and swollen as it diffuses into the haze of pollution, be it London, New York, or the hills surrounding Sunnydale, California. Wherever this occurs, we are left in darkness, perilously aware of “black zones of shadow close to our own daily paths,” as Lovecraft writes and further observes that “now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.”
But just as not every horror film or story is completely reliant on darkness, those “black zones of shadow” are even more striking and powerful in the mundane light of normal day. An excellent example is the Korean horror film Whispering Corridors, exceedingly disturbing despite most of it occurring during the day, revealing the social horror of an institution governed by competition & prejudice, with a sprinkling of ancient Korean belief systems that allows space for the supernatural. F Paul Wilson’s novel, The Keep, builds its uneasy atmosphere during daylit hours, though, as it concerns the eternal battle between good and evil in the form of a vampiric being, darkness is a prerequisite; as in many a horror tale, exposition of the real horror takes place in the dark, where nothing can be seen and what is heard – well, you don’t want it to make sense. Ultraviolet, the English vampire series, uses the dark to obvious effect, though, being set in London, bright sunlight’s the exception rather than the rule. Ultraviolet’s awfully British. A quieter, more sober use of vampires than “Buffy” presents, even if it’s not BBC, it should’ve been. It compares the darkness of vampires to the darkness of the human spirit, & there’s no sense of play as in “Buffy”. Cameron’s The Terminator uses darkness to underline the horror of the human condition, much as The Matrix’s use of grey and dark tones indicates the horror of reality in contrast with the virtual world which disguises the bleak utilitarianism of humanity’s true role. And Ridley Scott’s Alien? It’s completely situated in the dark, in outer space, beyond the outer rim of the galaxy. Not a lot of laughs in that film.
Where darkness establishes the mythic potential of a landscape, the landscape will have mythic echoes on its own. Sunnydale’s an excellent example of how the use of myth can be either subtle or right in your face - or in your neck as in the opening scenes of “Buffy”. The series opens at night, in the school and within a couple of minutes, there’s a vampire sinking her teeth into the neck of her companion in the darkened halls of the deserted school. Horror’s excellent for immediately establishing the out of the ordinary, the unnatural disorder of things. While we’re aware the killer is a vampire, that’s not exactly what you except to find in a small town American High School dallying with a student in the halls after dark. But then, this is Sunnydale High.
A fascinating place, Sunnydale. Situated in Southern California, famed for its sunlight as opposed to its shadow, it’s as unlike Lovecraft’s dark, bewintered locales as is possible. There’s nothing degenerate, biologically or sociologically amiss with either the town or the inhabitants of Sunnydale; it’s not disintegrating, doesn’t appear consumed by human corruption or the petty evil you find in Lovecraft’s tales (a trait picked up by Stephen King amongst others), but both “Buffy” with its Sunnydale, and Lovecraft’s various settings illustrate how locale, as well as the dark, can foster King’s “sense of disestablishment’, of something definitely amiss, directing you towards those “black zones of shadow” where, by the pricking of your thumbs, something evil this way comes.
Supposedly a ‘one Starbucks town’ , Sunnydale, California, boasts a major high school, a college, a large hospital, airport, docks where freighters leave at least once a week, bus depot; 43 churches, 13 gothic graveyards - complete with ancient, moldering mausoleums - umpteen miles of sewers and to further complicate things , is built on land crisscrossed with fissures and cave complexes. A most peculiar place, only 100 years old, so quite how we get the gothic graveyards, I’m not sure, but they certainly add style and atmosphere for vampires arising from their graves to terrorize the local populace. There’s even a zoo and a museum. Compared with Lovecraft’s rustic hamlets and villages of quaint and ancient architecture, filled with rotting gambrels and the like, Sunnydale is a self-contained environment with its own apocalyptic making monsters already ensconced. There are deserted mansions which grant wounded vampires grand accommodations, though abandoned factories also provide such housing, along with the crypts which make do as bedsits for your lonely single vampire. There are no closely grown forests, no domed hills crowned with ancient standing pillars and other evocative remains as in Lovecraft’s tales, and in Sunnydale, it generally only gets dark at night – unless the current apocalyptic making monster has ordered up an eclipse. Where Lovecraft uses the natural environment to stimulate the imagination and create an ineffable atmosphere, Sunnydale is an environment according to the requirements of the current episode. Despite the obviously televisual adaptability, there’s no mistaking that Sunnydale, California, fits the description of a ‘sacred’ place to a ‘T’.
The town appears part of the everyday world, complete with cinemas, factories, shops, malls and so on, but its roots are in the Hellmouth, the doorway to the demon dimension, which kinda signifies the realm of the Divine. As Mircea Eliade says in Myth Of The Eternal Return: “because of its situation at the centre of the cosmos, the temple or the sacred city is always the meeting point of the three cosmic regions – heaven, earth and hell ” He gives several examples from Babylon, from Jeruslaem, and the Romans. Romans have the mundus. “When the mundus is open it is as if the gates of the gloomy, infernal gods were open.” The last certainly is a very apt description of the Hellmouth! Sunnydale is the epitome of the sacred city. It has myth built into its very structure, for reasons that become apparent in the third season, when we meet the evil mayor of Sunnydale who had built the town over the Hellmouth precisely for its links to the other realms, & provides excuse for just about every piece of weirdness that occurs throughout the series from the coming apocalypse to robot killers. Handy little device!
Lovecraft’s works have influenced almost a century’s worth of horror, be it written or filmed, and that influence is plain in “Buffy”. Indeed, in the 2nd episode of the series, Giles explains to dumbfounded Willow, Xander & Buffy that “This world’s older than you know. Contrary to popular mythology, this world did not begin as a paradise. For untold aeons, demons walked the earth. They made it their home, their hell. And in time, they lost their purchase on this reality. The way was made for mortal animals, for man. All that remains of the Old Ones are vestiges, certain magics, certain creatures.”
“And vampires?” says Buffy.
Obviously the answer’s yes, but apart that, it all sounds like a quote from Lovecraft! When I thought about of “Buffy” & Lovecraft for me essay, I didn’t know about this particular influence, so am fascinated. The hellbeast released when the Hellmouth is opened is kinda Lovecraftian, with the slime & the tentacles & all. Otherwise it might be a Hydra. However, I digress (which is why I’m taking so long to do the essay!). Another point while I’m talking beasties here is the genesis of the demons on Earth. As Giles explains, “The books tell of the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the demon’s soul. He bit another and another and so they walk the earth, feeding, killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind, waiting for the animals to die out and the old Ones to return.” While this continues the Lovecraft theme, it does bring something else you’ll find in many myths, though they generally refer to humans: that man himself comes from the diluted or tainted blood of gods, demons or heroes. Reading closely through all the begots in Genesis, you’ll see we’re more or less descended from Cain who, being marked by God for killing his brother, is in the Sacred realm himself. Or we’re all descended from Adam who was made Sacred anwyay. So we are - sacred. This is a point marked by Buffy herself, containing the sacred and the profane within her own person, imbued with superpowers that, alas, don’t help in the dating routine or the care of one’s hair.
This isn’t as evident in Lovecraft’s work, but let’s get back to the original point. Landscape. Lovecraft not only uses the natural aspects of the local environment, he also uses the human effects on that landscape to foster an atmosphere suitable for – er - Divine intervention.
Carfax Priory from “Rats In The Walls” is a good example of this. Built over generations of monuments to something obviously unspeakable – not to mention Welsh – the building remains haunted by something which runs back through the narrator’s lineage down to before recorded time, down through Romans, Saxons, Celts, Druids and beyond, back to those favoured demon dimensions, the seething ages of chaos and primal terrors when Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth walked the earth, when Shub Niggurath, the goat of a thousand young brought devastation and chaos to anything and everything.. And you thought we all came from apes!!! There are hints of the sacred in all Lovecraft’s locales, either because of their geographical locations, or the way humanity is unable to make real definition on the land, both of which invite comparison with the wasteland (an excellent example of this blight is Colour Out Of Space). Carfax Priory is a such a place. Built on sacred ground, the malign influences (especially if they appear in Lovecraft) exert a continuing power undiminished from its very beginnings. The place has a rather mysterious history – more a matter of legend than anything else. The final owner, who narrates the story, right up to its frightful conclusion, is as solitary as any outsider, as Buffy herself, and as Marie Lou von Franz observes “. . . loneliness invites the powers of the Beyond, either evil or good.”
The description of the rural landscape where the town Dunwich, of dubious Dunwich Horror fame, is certainly unnerving. “When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Alyesbury Pike…he comes upon a lonely and curious country . . . Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.” There is always something subtly wrong with the settings Lovecraft uses, no matter that they are rural, wild, or cities. In Dunwich, the feeling is profound, with a “faint, malign odour” that lingers in the small village of decrepit houses, and human influence has been so unsuccessful in the surrounding countryside the area is made even more sinister. In Shadow over Innsmouth, that faint malign odour becomes an overwhelming stench and the place is – well - not right! The middle of the Pacific, that enormous watery (to us land dwellers) wasteland becomes terrifying when great Cthullu rises from watery R’yleh. Life and death themselves become uncertain in this context: “That is not dead which can eternal lie/ And with strange aeons even death may die”
The threat of the wasteland, the inversion of the natural order – all are implied by these landscapes and what they infer. But there’s more to it than this. The Dunwich Horror, Shadow over Innsmouth, Rats in the Walls – in each and many others, Lovecraft employs a theme common to myth and fairytale alike: the wrong turn. Off the beaten track; somewhere unusual, not of the everyday world, in other words. “Never stray from the path,” warns Grandmother in Angela Carter’s “A Company of Wolves” (the film).” The narrator of “Shadow Over Innsmouth” discovers this for himself, straying off the beaten track; he originally had no plans to visit that “ill-rumoured and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality.” After he’s crossed the marshy wasteland that separates the town from the rest of the world, what he learns damns him to humanity forever. A return to Carfax Priory of “Rats in the Walls” was not in that narrator’s life plans, nor would he have ever ended up there, facing his horrendous lineage, if it weren’t for unhappy accidents of war. An aside concerning these last two stories – unlike most of Lovecraft’s tales, the narrators in these two are also examples, like Buffy, of the Sacred colliding with the Profane in their own persons. Demons? Read the stories. Dunwich is reached only by taking a wrong turn. In other stories, places visited the once are never found again. Most towns in Lovecraft’s world are actively avoided because of either rumour and legend, or simply because the places have an ‘unwholesome’ aspect, so the device of straying, of becoming lost, of changing plans on a whim, is the only way anyone gets to see them.
As myth could be said to be fairy tale globalized, this ‘straying from the path’ is very common in horror. In Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula, though the naive Jonathan Harker goes to the ‘wilds’ of Transylvannia deliberately, he’s ignorant of what he’s getting into; he learns “that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some imaginative whirlpool.” which should’ve prepared him, but it didn’t, anymore than Lovecraft’s characters are ever prepared to face the Divine, even if they have studied occult matters all their lives as in the case of Robert Blake, protagonist of ‘Haunter Of The Dark’, who also strayed off the path, both literally & metaphorically.
Lovecraft also uses cities, and their almost organic growth in his tales become filled with as much mythic potential as any landscape. He portrays the isolation of the human soul, in the loneliness that can thrive when surrounded by teeming millions. It creates very disturbing atmosphere, especially as, like “Buffy”, authority figures wielding real power are notably absent, or at most, dreadfully ineffectual. “Haunter of the Dark” uses this mix very well, combing Boston’s history with Blake’s obsessions to create a powerful and uneasy atmosphere. New York is given strange and horrific soul in “The Horror At Red Hook”, as in “The Music of Erich Zhan”, “Pickman’s Model”, and numerous others. Many are set in his home area of Boston, a place more steeped in history than anywhere else in the United States, history several centuries old compared with Sunnydale’s mere century old lifetime.
Sunnydale in “Buffy” becomes the mundus of small town America, Los Angeles the present and future wasteland in ‘The Terminator’, a nameless city is the same in ‘The Matrix’, Regan’s body and mind become the ground for the eternal cosmic battle in The Exorcist, the various locales Lovecraft uses are so imbued with history and past horrors that everything reeks of it, it leaches into the inhabitants as happens with most horror. London is used to great effect in “Ultraviolet”, where anything can be read as the signs of vampiric ‘infection’. The Keep employs the human horror of World War II to set the scene for the supernatural terror going on within it. When the Sacred and the Profane collide, everything within the blast radius is affect in some way, and the darkness that is part of the human spirit is likewise affected and called into play.
“The hero does not choose his path. It is fated.” They’re not usually controlled by a bunch of tea drinking, tweed wearing, wanna-be Oxford dons, as in Buffy’s case, but the Watcher’s Council aside, fate seems to be the case with all heroes, from Gilgamesh onwards. It’s one of the most pervasive of myths, even redefined by television and film, and like all mythical signifiers, is too fluid for hidebound definition, so can be trickster, guide, action man figure – whatever, it is the hero. Of course, it’s going to be a powerful motif in horror. Lovecraft’s tales present a notable exception, he has less female protagonists than he does heroes, which is to say, almost none which makes everything more horrifying, because there’s absolutely no hope. That anything is averted at all in Lovecraft often seems to be more blind stumbling luck and desperation than a cool recognition of the nature of the evil, knowledge of strategy or even how to use a stake. Lovecraft’s characters, even those that do manage to survive their brush with the Sacred, are, at most witnesses to the horror; generally, their central role in the story is as witnessing or being witness to the reason for their grisly end (an exception being The Dunwich Horror).
Yet, for even the fated hero, there are choices. In Lovecraft, the characters become enmeshed in their terrors through lifestyle choices. Buffy’s Angel says it one way: “There’s moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who you’re gonna be. Sometimes, they’re little, subtle moments. Sometimes, they’re not.” Buffy and Angel make a choice halfway through Season 2 and set in motion terrible and painful events which last for the remainder of the 3 seasons, and it’s an excellent example. Their choice was not what you’d call a little, subtle moment.
In the horror tale, choice is a major thing. One need only look at Buffy herself to know that while a heroic stance isn’t always a personal choice, what you do with it is. As the demon Whistler says at the conclusion of the second season: “Bottom line is, even if you see ‘em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No-one asks for their life to change. Not really. But it does. So what are we? Helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That when you find out who you are.” Buffy makes all her choices, though conversely has no choice because she knows. In Prophecy Girl, the final episode of season 1 she makes her choice to face death willingly – but for others, not personal gain. It’s her Garden of Gethsemane, if you like, and as such, is surprisingly powerful and profound, as is the double episode Becoming. Choice is a major thing in “Buffy”.
To further illustrate this, think about vampires. To become a vampire, you have to choose to do so (nicely explained in Interview With a Vampire – film, I couldn’t read the book). Angel did and so became a demon. He didn’t choose to get cursed by the reintegration of his soul, but then, who does? Choice is one major contrast between the 2 works. While the characters in Lovecraft’s tales may show great courage in actually seeking out and facing their horrors, their heroic natures are never fully engaged. The motivations between the two works differ greatly, basically because while Buffy’s tales are told from her position of being within and part of the Sacred realm, Lovecraft’s stories are mostly told from the profane side of things, as none of his characters have a real right to be where they’ve found themselves, which might explain why everything in Lovecraft is not merely inexplicable, it’s incomprehensible, not to mention unnameable. The one exception might be in The Dunwich Horror, but Haunter of the Dark, Rats in the Walls and Shadow Over Innsmouth express the indescribable problem wonderfully.
While Lovecraft’s characters aren’t even anti-heroes, each of the characters in the stories I’ve mentioned (as well as the ones I don’t) do, to some extent, follow the ‘heroic path’ of separation through to reintegration, though they rarely make it. The exceptions are The Dunwich Horror and, to some extent, Shadow Over Innsmouth, though the reintegration presented in that story is a different thing altogether. Reading Haunter of the Dark in line with Campbell’s The Hero of 1000 Faces is an exercise indeed. Not only do you laugh a lot, but realize the protagonist, Robert Blake, makes every mistake possible. Sure, he achieves separation from society, crosses the threshold and is ready to begin the journey, his beginning through that sense of separation was via dreams and scholarly study, but the obsession with the church steeple wasn’t the right way to go, and from then on, he ignores every signal that he’s taking the path to doom. He certainly gains knowledge and the attention of the – um – gods, but who really wants that type of attention? He’s disintegrated rather than reintegrated, never completes the journey.
This happens with many of Lovecraft’s characters. In true hero fashion, Robert Blake is drawn to the unknown, to occult possibilities in half seen things. But as in some fairy tales, as in Alien and the character Kane, Blake doesn’t have the requisite knowledge or protectors; as a result, must face the consequences of his extreme foolhardiness. All Lovecraft’s characters take steps on the first part of the journey, the separation is complete, it’s just not followed through. Even Wilbur in The Dunwich Horror, of which he was actually a part, doesn’t get to complete his journey. In my readings on the subject of horror, I came across a great book: Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, by a Jesuit of all things: Edward J Ingebretsen. He has a fascinating take on The Dunwich Horror: reinterpreting it as the birth of Christ, and not only does it work – it’s very disturbing. Like Christ, Wilbur is the result of miscegenation, of what was quaintly termed commerce between gods and women. So Wilbur and his brother are thwarted and the world saved by a librarian. Sound familiar?
Buffy? She never gets to reintegrate either, ‘cause as far as I’m aware, the series as a whole isn’t over. But then again, her separation was never quite complete, she remains part of society; though an outsider, she manages to be both hero as well as schoolgirl. She even graduates, gets excellent marks and is accepted into numerous colleges. It’s an interesting divergence from the straightforward hero myth. But unlike Lovecraft’s characters and their lifestyle choices, in contrast with the vampires she slays, Buffy had no choice – she is the Chosen One, though, thankfully, has almost nothing in common with The Matrix’s ‘the One’, which, though it has its good points, is mostly a fairly inept use of myth and fairy tale (& I’m being polite).
Buffy as hero is pretty straightforward. Even Mom calls her a ‘superhero’, which she sort of is. During the day, she’s like any other superhero – mild mannered (well, not always), sweet tempered (rarely), concentrating on every day productive things (tell that to her teachers!), but at night, a different Buffy emerges – well, not really. She does succeed in her duty, frequently without breaking a sweat (though does break the occasional fingernail) and usually while preoccupied with boys, dating, schoolwork, where her life’s going, what her mother’s doing to restrict her activities, her friends’ woes – still, she’ll slay the vampire/demon/whatever, sometimes in the middle of a discussion, studying or a kiss. Girls are good at multitasking. She’s a superhero, but very human. Delightfully so, as are most of her companions – the Scoobie Gang, and even here, she fits with the archetypal hero pattern: companions that assist her in accomplishing her tasks, even if it that very basic task of staying alive. Very few examples of that in Lovecraft! But Buffy’s the hero. She’s the one with the special powers, apart from Angel who presents some very interesting problems, and of course, she leads. “Seize the moment,” she tells the nerdy Willow in the very first episode of the series, “’cause tomorrow you might be dead.” So Willow does, and with her first choice, plunges them all into the ongoing adventure that is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Buffy is the ‘every (can’t say man here) person’ that our stories are supposed to be full of, and her stories represent the great ‘coming of age’ tradition as she & the gang face the unavoidable Armageddon, that ‘end of days’: entrance into the adult world. Buffy might be even representative of a massive strata of society: western, and definitely ‘Hollywooded’ society perhaps, but recognizable nonetheless - broken home, money problems, school problems, some delinquency, some loneliness, the outsider - a whole list of problems common to many, but that’s where the similarity ends, ‘cause Buffy’s part of the Divine, the Sacred. Heroes of that stature are completely lacking in Lovecraft.
But let’s not forget the other heroes of Buffy: Angel, all members of the Scoobie Gang, and the occasional disruptive force in the person of Spike. Spike and Angel are a fascinating pair. Angel is both Buffy’s lover and nemesis, solution and problem, a real trickster figure – neither one thing nor not, something you can’t take for granted, ‘cause if you do – well, just remember Giles’ words on the subject: “Last time you became complacent about your presence here, things became very black.” Even his name is confounding - Angel, but he’s a demon, the word from the Greek daemon, meaning ‘Divinity, intermediary between gods & men’, and Divine is something we associate with Angels. Then again, he’s a fallen angel, Lucifer lord of light who’s turned into Satan, a major demon. But Angels’ cursed with a soul which grants him humanity if not breath and heartbeat. There’s a lot in a name sometimes.
Spike? Ah – the archetypal trickster. He creates chaos and leaves, but through his very chaos, solves the problems be it dissing whatever Synder said to Buffy’s mom, or helping to defeat the evil Angel in Becoming. Of course he causes as many problems as he solves, but what’s the point of a trickster if he’s all sweetness and light? Through Loki through to Judas and onto Faith, the trickster, the seemingly dark force for chaos, has its place and nothing really works without it.
The Scoobie gang themselves are within the ‘sacred’ – “Yesterday my world was uh oh – pop quiz. Today it’s ‘reign of toads” says a bewildered Xander. Buffy saved their lives, they owe her their allegiance though Xander’s smitten anyway, so would do anything, even if she makes him feel “inadequate – less than a man” It’s all about friendship – they get pulled in through care and concern for each other., though Xander does qualify it ‘cause the first rescue gets him out of chemistry class. Here we find echoes of not only many fairytales, who have heroes with companions, human and otherwise who help the hero achieve his or her goals, but also one of the major heroic archetypes: Gilgamesh (not to mention Jason & the Argonauts). It’s friendship that propels Gilgamesh on his final journey to find the meaning of life is because of the death of his great friend, Enkidu. Buffy has those traits – her great decisions are for her friends, for them she is willing to sacrifice her life. She is the archetypal hero, complete with Christ-like edges that all the critics of this very popular show seem to bypass or in fact, not see at all, as in Prophecy Girl where she goes through a garden of Gethsemane, dies and is resurrected (OK – revived!), does descend into hell in the 1st episode of the 3rd season, and even says to Angel, ‘drink me’, meaning her blood, in the concluding episode of the 3rd season.
I’m not meaning to be overtly Christian here, but the Judeao-Christian myth is dominant in Western society. Our social structure is built around it and everything in Buffy’s life, in Lovecraft’s tales, is based on the infrastructure of that myth. But while I’ve mentioned Christianity, there is another point I wouldn’t mind making. Think about vampires and Christianity – both talk of blood as life, the source of life eternal. Both offer eternal life only after death. OK – drinking Christ’s blood is metaphorical (‘cept for the transubstantiation thingy) whereas vampires need the actual stuff in all its coppery tasting freshness. To become a vampire, you must drink the blood of a vampire. To become ‘saved’ you must drink of the blood of Christ.
Vampires deny the natural order, reject the fact of death, and feed on life, or life’s blood to survive in this twilit world of “neither death nor deathless.” By drinking Christ’s transformed blood, you also manage, apparently, to cheat death, to attain eternal life. Sure, that you don’t have to feed on the living to attain this goal is a difference, but the similarities remain striking. And is one type of proselytism different to another? The Christian belief system has been promulgated through an equal amount of suffering and bloodletting to any told in vampire legends. It lacks the sensuality, the sometimes blatant sexuality of the vampire’s feeding lust, but more than makes up for it in savagery.
A professor in the US considers “Buffy” to be basically group therapy for teenagers, vampires being metaphors for the outsider, I don’t agree. Maybe that’s what they’ve become (& in the episode “Lie To Me”, this is what’s addressed), but the myth of the vampire has been around a helluva lot longer than “Buffy”, Anne Rice, Hollywood or America itself. Gilgamesh’s father was reputed to be a demon of the vampire kind and we’re talking 3rd millennium BC here. Vampires are found in almost every mythology in one form or another. In Asian mythologies, ghosts have what we in the west would have to call vampiric traits – bloodsucking demons who need the blood to survive. Vampires are more than metaphor for a misguided, misjudged western urban youth, they’re a complex metaphor for the Sacred, for the eruption of the Divine into the mundane world of everyday existence.
There’s one more point I want to make here (actually, there’s millions, but I don’t have time) – evil. Or the nature of the Divine, the Sacred in human activities. Lovecraft, and many horror stories present evil as having either a human genesis or facilitator. When Buffy & the gang come across a murder perpetrated by a human, their horror sense is fully engaged. They are truly appalled. “In the moment when someone commits a murder he is identical with the Godhead and is not human.” “You can’t just give and take lives like that. It’s not your job,” says a furious Buffy, something expounded in fairytale, myth & Lord of the Rings! It proves her growing status as not only hero but moral guardian of the inhabitants of Sunnydale.
As pugilistic as it seems, filled with violence of one sort or another, “Buffy’s” not only socially moralistic (if it’s smoking a cigarette, it’s bound to be bad) but the undertone of the mythic is a different morality; it’s OK to go out and slay anything not human, but when a human slays a human – ew! As Cordelia, Willow and Buffy herself would say. Frequently in Lovecraft, more often in “Buffy”, human horror is the real horror. It’s an actual human attaining supernatural and truly demonic dimensions when the evil mayor of Sunnydale ascends that causes the last great battle of the “Buffy’s” 3rd season. His Ascension is truly terrible, though an odd term for it, as Ascension is what happens to Christ after he rose from the grave, though, unlike the local vampires, Christ didn’t, well, not that any legends mention, go around drinking blood.
As you’ll also find in Lovecraft’s tales, the monsters in Buffy are not merely out of myth and legend, such as vampires and concocted demons, they are also out of minds, like the ‘ugly man’ from Nightmares, the Invisible Girl , or the witch who felt trapped by her own life so overtook her daughter’s . These monsters are difficult to separate out from the heroes, from the landscape. They are both part of the dark and what shows the characters the light, like Faith did for Buffy. Despite the collision of the Sacred & the Profane, with monsters coming from the sacred zone, it’s humans who are sacred in this world. Humans are the be all and end all, human life is sacred, so when Faith, Buffy’s dark slayer sister, kills one, then everything goes to pot, including Faith herself.
In horror, evil is mostly, and starkly defined as the ‘divine’; rarely is good also cast as a ‘divine’ force (an eg is The Keep). Evil generally has the starring role (more than one person has observed that Satan gets all the best lines in Milton ) and it’s the powerless humans left to represent the good, fighting off the vastly superior forces of darkness ranged against them. I’m making a massive generalization, but such battles wouldn’t be half as much fun if both sides were depicted as equally matched as they undoubtedly are. It’s the “divine and cosmic drama” . ‘Cause though humans either cause or facilitate the evil by one method or another, they are also the means of solving it, whether that be as Vampire Slayer or a librarian.
As the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s “Legend” says at the end of his battle with Jack: “”What is light without dark? … What are you without me? I am part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal.” The duality intrinsic to life, the cosmic battle, the collision between the sacred and the profane, are all a part of the mythic landscape, and so are we. William Blake says it best: Terror, the Human Form Divine.

2002-08-11T01:03:00.000+08:00

Looking at "The Matrix" - Part 1
I must admit to not being too impressed with ”The Matrix”. It’s neither one thing nor another, a hybrid of a piece that left me feeling more than vaguely dissatisfied. It has its good points, but they don’t rack up enough merit points to make up for the bad. In terms of mythic content, mythic patterning of story and character, it’s the same – good and bad, and nothing particularly consistent: SF tropes and fantasy themes mixing uneasily, and while its mythic content is interesting, that’s only because it’s not done very well.
In terms of the ‘heroic’ myth, “The Matrix” does OK, especially as journey of the hero - Keneau Reeves’ Neo – is outlined, then it’s mostly consistent. Our hero accepts the call, somewhat reluctantly, but his own curiosity, despite his fears and terrors, despite one failure that also serves to demonstrate that his world contains things beyond his ken. Once he’s really on the road, his acceptance of his abilities, his role in this ‘new’ perception of the world in all its grim reality - he’s on his way. It’s not badly done (I’ll leave comments about acting etc. aside), but his eventual success is spoiled by the way it’s achieved, and this is my major gripe. It’s not that he has help – that’s no bad thing. There’s many a hero who, without assistance at the end, would fail in the ultimate success of his task. It’s the way that the assistance is delivered, offered and the reason that seems to sum up all the previous mistakes in the film.
After a titanic battle, Neo’s slammed into apparent death, that endless sleep, only to be revived by your typical fairy tale kiss accompanied by a declaration of undying love that hasn’t been particularly evident within the body of the film. This abrupt appearance of this ‘fairy tale’ motif at the conclusion of the film to bolster the use of the mythic hero character is so out of place and the character of the film that it’s utterly ridiculous. Fairy tales are generally considered to be localised myth, the myth written in the local language and traditions of a specific place and time. This doesn’t work in “The Matrix”. Not at all. Not only have the characters failed to engage sufficiently for this life-giving kiss to work, there’s been no ‘romance’ within the tale, and there’s no background to Trinity’s story - she’s merely taking it all on someone else’s sayso anyway. Prophecy – but I’ll get back to that.
This is what, for me, makes the film a composite failure. Merging Neo’s story with the other major characters: Morpheus and Trinity just doesn’t happen well, particularly in regards to Trinity’s character. I could draw references to the wasteland, the reversing roles of sleeping princess and prince and the reviving kiss that wakes everything and redeems it all, but because there is no ‘romantic’ involvement to start with (& I don’t count the normal interest of a young male for an attractive female), it just doesn’t work. And Neo’s so bewildered and stunned by what’s happened that he doesn’t have time to think beyond his own confusion, probably due in part to the lack of real characterisation in the film.
So, what does work in “The Matrix”? Not sure, really. The film plays games with the difference between illusion and reality, the profane and the Sacred, or the mundane and the ‘Divine’ if you prefer. It’s written on the ‘grand’ scale, using individual characters to examine the reemergent humanity that will come about with Neo’s acceptance of his role as ‘the one’ – or the new, as his name also implies. This is where the film has something in common with both Alien and The Terminator, but unlike The Terminator, “The Matrix” presents no mother of the future – unless it’s going to be Trinity, but while the kiss might signal something beginning as the film ends, it’s so barely implicit that it doesn’t really have enough power to give that hope.
The crew tell Neo with great affection and reverence of Zion. Zion? A place with fairly profound historical and religious connotations which have nothing to do with what is a superficial layer of eastern/Buddhist philosophy glossing the whole 'playing with reality' that "The Matrix" takes on - a mind over matter thing, the notion that there is no reality, just illusion (which doesn't really have enough strength to grant the film even that level of superficiality), which shouldn't have space for a Zionist mentality.
All hope in the film is pinned on Neo – who apparently will grow into something of a ‘supernatural’ hero, someone to really kick digital butt. Sets the scene I guess for some interesting fight scenes in the upcoming sequel if you get into air hanging kung fu type action and slowed down bullets. All very pretty re special effects, but what else? What is Neo? A new type of hero?
Ah, where to go form here. Well, as I'm stuck in the wasteland from my previous post, I'll have a look at that. Here, the film sets the scene quite well, with the hero descending into the wasteland, the underworld (literally the case in The Matrix) as Neo's flushed out of the system into the unknown where the normal rules no longer apply. But, while he’s left one wasteland of existence (remember Campbell’s definition where it’s all rules and there’s no creativity?), and the terror in facing his adventure is well sketched out, everything else seems to be forgotten. He has exchanged one wasteland for another, because there’s not much creativity in this nether region either. Where is the life to be lived?
OK, they are in the wasteland which, by very definition would seem to inhibit a creative life, but look again at The Terminator – at Reece and Sarah. They lived life to the full in that short time. Both heroes, engaging with each other and taking it all one, regardles of fear. That's how you defeat the wasteland. “The Matrix”? It – well, if you’ll excuse me saying so – wastes the wasteland. They don't even begin to engage with the real problems, just chase about the monitoring agents. And the people that are the hero's guides and companions? Ooo. Morpheus, the name, is that of the god of dreams (Ovid), so what’s going on here? OK, suits the fact we have an Oracle who delivers prophecy and checks people out for – well, whatever – but in the film? Peculiar (I could go all Jungian on you, and maybe I'll take a look at that later). The other names are equally confusing, or interesting, depending on your point of view. Trinity? Bit of Christianity in the midst of it all? Maybe it partners Zion! Cipher? Depending on the context, it’s either code (for betrayal, I gather) or someone or something of no intrinsic value, or to calculate numerically. All meanings there seem applicable to the role the character played. And Neo? Well, as I’ve already mentioned, the new, the revived, the modified. The new man? One can only speculate. Maybe the names were chosen 'cause they sound serious, add a little gravitas, as they say.
Well, I'll leave that.
This wasteland has no king, just the amorphous AI bad guys who control everything and use nasty little gadgets (OK – sometimes nasty big gadgets) to do the destroying part of things. Even "The Terminator" had a 'personality' in the terminator. But there's nothing like that in "The Matrix". Not even the agents work in that regard - they're too amorphous, too person-less. Maybe that suits the Buddhist overlay, Buddhism having no god. 'There is no external refuge, therefore be a refuge unto theyself' is a Buddhist saying that has some application here, and it's true that when Neo does believe in himself, he does achieve, but again, it's not strong enough. And, if we take that on board, we still have a problem with Zion and prophecy and Oracles, not to mention fairy tale endings and wastelands.
Zion is where free humans are born. Have been. Are being. There's a couple of 'em on Morpheus' ship, so how come it takes someone from ‘the jacked in batteries of humans’ to fix everything? Someone from the world of illusion?
Nothing fits, see? The myths are not used with enough consistency to grant them strength, despite the fact the story and characters rely on them. A real problem, beautifully illustrated by the fairy tale kiss almost at the end.
Hopefully, in my next section, I’ll sort out some of my questions, but I doubt it – I doubt the film will have any of the answers.
Part 2 coming soon.

2002-08-07T20:15:00.000+08:00

Cameron's The Terminator surprised me
One of the most surprising things I discovered while researching horror films etc. for my Masters dissertation was The Terminator. OK, I always knew it existed, don’t get me wrong, had even seen it once, but hadn’t thought it important. So, there I was, probably munching a vegemite sandwich, when a promo for later programs that night mentioned "The Terminator". My furry little brain swiftly reviewed the plot of the film and, well, I had to acknowledge it as having something worth looking at, and fairly seriously, because of its mythic content.
Yeah, I know - Terminator & mythic content? Surely mutually exclusive? Not at all. Certainly I have more respect for the original than its flashier, more special-effective sequel, which has little or no mythic underpinning and completely tramples all over the story of the 1st film and its intent. In his intro to “The Greek Myths”, Robert Graves says "genuine mythic elements may be found in the least promising of stories" (pg 12, Vol 1, Penguin ed.)) and this is certainly true of "The Terminator". Certainly least promising (which is also true of “Buffy” and Lovecraft's stories, but I'll save that for th'essay) and there are genuine mythic elements in it.
The most obvious to me (& the one I originally thought made the film worthy of note for my dissertation) was that Sarah Connors is a ‘classic’ female hero – a somewhat passive, but ultimately very powerful figure. It’s a very common portrayal of the female hero-type (yes, yes, I know all about Xena, and she’s another type but we aren’t discussing her) but classic nonetheless: the mother of the future. I had always been encouraged to see Cameron as 'not particularly amazing', and after "Titanic", I was only too happy to agree. I hadn't really had experience of "The Terminator" (in a visual sense, I hasten to add) – I’d seen the sequel more 'cause it was on television more and I have the television on as background. So, I dutifully hired the film from my local video store and watched it -again & again & again. Surprisingly, it’s no where near as bad as rewatching "The Matrix" does (boy, does that one have sad pretensions, but I'll save that for another time). However, in this film (not sure about any of his others), Cameron does something found in much of popular culture (like “Buffy”) – he uses myth which underpins an otherwise absurd story, giving it strength, meaning and resonance.
The other major myth involved is that of the ‘wasteland’. That desolate area of mind or matter where nothing happens to change anything. Campbell describes the wasteland as: “the land where myth is patterned by authority, not emergent from life; where there is no poet’s eye to see, no adventure to be lived, where all is set for all and forever. . . it is the land where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task it is only to repeat, enforce and elucidate clichés.” A “blight of the soul” (Creative Mythology pg 373). While both Reece and Sarah are engaged in the greatest adventure of their lives, nothing else around them is part of it. They’ve been pushed out of the mundane run of their lives and into another, wholly terrifying reality (which has some similarities with "The Matrix". I might have to get to that next). They’re alone in the wasteland and within it, they engage with their heroic natures - not to mention each other - fulfilling a future only partially realized in Reece’s time: the redemption of the wasteland and the humanity that subsists within it.
Sarah’s unborn son will be the driving force behind a reemergent humanity, and Reece, the father, sacrifices himself so that it can be born. He could be read as the old king who must die to ensure the fertility of the next generation, though the terminator itself (Arnie and then the metal skellie) can also be seen in this context, in the same way. Another type of king – a real king of the wasteland, more lifeless than living, with no concern for anything living whatsoever, only intent on containing and building a new and crushing order, setting everything into fixed patterns that will have no creative deviations. I can see similarities with the alien from ‘Alien”, but the alien was self motivated, no a part of any society except the one it wanted to create. The terminator itself is an ‘arm’ of the ‘lifeless’ society of the wasteland Reece comes from, like Ash in ‘Alien’, but not as autonomous. The terminator’s program cannot be deviated from, it is ‘rule’ incarnate. It starts out as looking human, as Ash does, but the rot starts on the outside, flesh slowly rotting away on its metal skeleton, till all flesh and pretense is charred off and the reality is seen for what it is: this king of the wasteland epitomises it. It is a shiny, soulless construct whose perfection allows no change and change, as the Taoists say, is the essence of life.
Before Reece also dies, he – er – plants the seed for eventual redemption. Refertilising the wasteland so it will become fertile again. That only Reece out of the 2 ‘kings’ is able to do this further enhances his status as the king who dies so that life may be renewed. This is an old, old myth: death and renewal, death of the king to refertilise the world so it can all continue. Refined and redefined down through millennia of social and evolutionary change: part agrarian, part earlier awareness that only death allows the continuity of life, from the very act of sustaining the individual to the defense of territory and ideals. It’s all implicit in this death of 2 kings and the survival of Sarah to nurture the future.
Reece’s final act, to return to the time of the unknown, unborn hero’s conception ensures the redemption of humanity. Sarah Connors, becoming the mother of the future, is the key element. Without her, nothing would be achieved. In this role, Sarah is at first – and through the major part of the film - passive, reactive; she takes very little on without prompting. She has to learn everything from scratch, but she is also ready to learn, and learns fast, absorbing everything she needs for her survival. She is also in the wasteland of modern (well, 1984) Los Angeles. A city often depicted as soulless, as empty, thriving on ambition and the superficiality of celluloid dreams. She lives a more or less solitary life with little or no real personal engagement in the beginning. She lives how all of society lives.
When the shit hits the fan, Sarah is shocked out of her complacent existence and faces the reality of her society: the emptiness, the fragility of all social structures. Not even the police and a police station with all its firepower protects her, no infrastructure exists within the society to protect her from something determined to annihilate her. No laws, no morals – nothing. The only one who can save her is Reece, which he does violently, further terrifying her. But as with Ripley – it is not success at any cost. He is not indiscriminate in his violence, merely implacable. He acts with total knowledge, regardless of how it affects anyone else's sensibilities. His knowledge is that of the wasteland and its mode of existence, not this soft, complacent roll through life that modern society can offer. And his reason for ultimately succeeding in both goals – one known to him, the other not, is his ability to focus on what matters. His physical courage. A real hero, in every sense of the word.
But, despite all this, he fails to kill the terminator. That’s left to Sarah and, armed with experience, with her belief in Reece and in the rightness of his and her own actions, she succeeds, the same as Ripley does. She has everything required to do what must be done, it’s just that such strength of will and purpose, such clarity of vision, was never required of her before.
Sarah has stepped outside – or is that shoved – all the normal frames and references of existence, landing in the Sacred zone, where nothing of the mundane world applies. She is outside of law, only her own morals will keep her going, and they do. The film ends on both a positive and a negative note: that she is driving into a storm. The immediate reading is that of the devastating nuclear war that will decimate the human population and bring on the rule of the terminators, the machines. The other way of looking at it is that storms themselves enhance life by bringing in change – on many different levels. Nothing immediate, but all there. Sarah willingly goes into the storm, taking humanity’s ultimate survival with her. A quieter, more powerful hero figure whose courage is that or humanity itself.
All very surprising, but well worth, for me, the exploration. I’m aware I’ve left a few things out, but maybe I’ll get back to them another time.

2002-08-06T02:03:00.000+08:00

Ooops
I've just noticed an appalling amount of typos in me last post. Hope it all makes sense, at least in a nonsensical way. Sincere apologies.
My little black cat has just reminded me it's time for bed. She can't tell me the name of Veronica Cartwright's character in Alien either. Damn.

2002-08-06T00:18:00.000+08:00

Reposted, corrected: Thinking about Alien
Here I was, thinking about writing of the use of myth & fairy tale in Ridley Scott's Alien, but can't get my mind off the 4 Corners presentation of the BBC doco: Kill 'Em All, about American war crimes during the early stages of the Korean War.
What have fantasy genre horror films got to 'offer' us in comparison with that? Only that they place in a more comfortable context the horrific realities of now and the present, where there is no great and loving deity to oversee it and eventually make it right. The pain, in this realtime context, just goes on and on. And never mind that 'we are really sorry' might go some way towards mending and helping end the nightmares and grief the participants on both sides of those Korean tragedies still suffer - the US government couldn't bear the red face that would imply. Cowards.
However, it's this type of real horror that's often addressed in horror tales - whether written or filmed, of this, last, or several centuries ago. It mightn't have vampires, mightn't contain any gods at all, but the monsters will be there. Both in the flesh and disguised beneath human desires, greed and - of course, cowardice. Lack of compassion, of empathy, all these things that we call inhumane behaviour and in individuals add up to tags like psychopath and sociopath are more acceptable in organizations. 'Alien' works well here - just think of Mother: crew are expendable. Mother's autonomous arm Ash - and didn't he end up being creepy! Despite it being the wonderful Ian Holm (try watching Alien after seeing Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring). In Ridley Scott's Alien, the sociopathic Company is behind all the horror. That's a different type of horror - social; nothing we'd think of as particularly weird, nothing unprecedented (just look at the US war crimes in Korea) - but from that carelessness comes everything else, and it's so insidious. But this is a subject I'll look at another time.
In my essay, I mention how horror is just that for many reasons: themes, subject matter and landscape, and a major component of the horror tale is the dark. Alien? Well, you gotta laugh - it's completely set in the dark. The dark of outer space. An environment somewhat inimical to sustaining life. Everything that happens is contained within the towing ship the Nostromo, except for the all important discoveries. And this is where we really start getting into mythic terrirtory.
The planet's almost as hostile as outer space, but has all the ingredients to build life. Awfully exciting stuff if you're of the same mind as Ash. Kane (played by John Hurt) is undeterred. He's the adventurous one, the outgoing type, and that he's the first human in the film itself prefigures him to be just that: the hero. He's the one who leads the walk through the weird landscape of the planet to find the beacon that drew the ship there in the first place. He's the one filled with excitement of the discovery of the ship, its fossilsed inhabitant, the great caverns filled with eggs. He volunteers for everything, but there are fairy tales when being the hero type doesn't get you the hero treatment. Sometimes its gets you in the shit and gets you killed. Sometimes, the boon this particular hero brings back isn't something that society in general will ever thank him for. Society, even as it is on the Nostromo, doesn't thank him either. All things considered, they probably reckon he was lucky - if they had a chance to think at all.
After Kane's death, its payback time for all the mistakes that Kane has released. Dallas, who really should've been the 'heroic' character, fails completely in his duty (letting Kane back onto the ship and therefore the boon - the alien into the enclosed 'society'). Sure, you could say he was influenced by compassion for a fellow crew member, or his & Veronica Cartwright's character's welfare, or maybe influenced further and then abetted by Ash, but we all know Ash isn't even human and his agenda remains entirely hidden for this little while. Dallas, being the Captain, shoulda known better. So, his life is forfeit and he seems to know it. He seems to face his death with some type of stoic fortitide. Parker fights to his inevitable death, Veronica Cartwight's character (why in hades can't I remember the name?) is a shivering wreck, Brett is just too startled to do anything much, despite Jonesy warning him. Ash? Ash doesn't have a death, just a destruction. He is the face of the Company's betrayal and therefore not worth really thinking about, and as each of the characters die, the others are forced out of grief to a more honed awareness of the reality of their true situation. Not that it does them any good, mind. And this, in some ways, is fairy tale tradition as well. The scene, the stage is set, and all the rules are in play. Whether they live or die is now up to their actions and their intentions. So where did they all go wrong?
In some ways, it's the Company that makes them go wrong. At first, there are too many of them to go in the shuttle, so they are forced to remain and outface the monster. But they are not properly coordinated and therefore faltering. It's not until there aren't many of them left that they really get into the swing of survival, but with at least one character (Lambert) freezing in panic, the unity is destroyed.
Ripley is the true hero, albeit reluctant. Her choices are not only for her own survival, but the survival of as many others as possible, and while it's survival not at any cost, while she won't kill anyone to save her own skin, she will defeat the monster, the Alien. Even when 'society' has been reduced to her, Jonesy, and the uncaring, unhuman 'mother' of a society that sent her and the crew out here, Ripley fights on. Tenacious, pinning her luck and bravado on a small snatch of chilhood song rather than any deity or sense of intelligence in the greater cosmos. It's herself she believes in. And it pays off. The boon she brings back to society is her survival & the knowledge inherent in her survival is perhaps something that should've been paid attention to in the other films, but was ignored.
The alien itself is another interesting feature. It is so out of the norm, out of the known, that it becomes an aspect of the 'divine'. A demon in any other century (demon from the Greek: of the divine), the alien is pure killing machine. It has no use for human life in this film, apart from gestationary (oo - is there such a word??) objects and this in itself is worthy of note, though it's kinda obvious - we are the monsters, give birth to and nurture them to their full potential - to hell with the so-called 'better angels of our nature' (can't remember who said that, but - forgive?). In the context of the film, the truly monstrous nature of the Alien is impressive: molecular acid for blood, sheds its exoskeleton (thus having something on common with many terrestrial creatures that are - er - were thought to have divine properties of one kind of another, usually immortality because they shed their skins & were thus 'reborn'), and is, when fully grown, the size of a man. It's huge, says Parker. But no 'huger' than anyone else. In fact, all things considered, the alien has as much a mythic proportion as Ripley herself. It's as tough and tenacious and if we think it's hard to kill - wonder what the alien thought of Ripley? Of course she defeats it, and she & the cat sink back into dreamless sleep. She killed the monster in herself, and in the Company - well, for this film anyway. Because it's the Corporation - Mother - who's the real bastard in all this. All the knowledge is held by the Company before they arrived on the planet, and the Company has the death of millions on its sociopathic, conglomerate mind. Ripley defeats the lot of them.
'Aliens' ignores much of the mythic nature of 'Alien'. I didn't like it all that much, though if you have a lot of ironing to do - it's great!!!! Horror became gung-ho action SF, a real 'boy's' movie, and while there is merit to the film, to the continuing betrayal of Ripley by the Company that caused all the problems in the 1st film, it lacks those 'mythic resonances' - for me at least.
The 3rd film, on the other hand, like the 1st, plays in the 'sacred' realm especially in its setting: utterly deserted and forsaken by all other members of human society, far out in some godforsaken (well, considering the religious nature of the 'brothers', maybe godforsaken isn't fair) part of the galaxy, it's outside normal boundaries, and the confrontations with the 'divine' in the form of the alien itself are well suited to this environment. Hostile and unfriendly to most forms of life, the milieu suits the monstrous, the alien, perfectly. In this film, Ripley becomes the mother of terror, becoming both indifferent to, and part of the entire problem/solution, and rises above it all as she falls to her own sacrifical death. The knowledge she has, of the hideous face of the Divine, the Horror, dies with her. As TS Eliot says: "Mankind was not meant for too much reality (woeful paraphrase, but it's from the 4 Quartets).
In this, the 3rd film, the monster is born of a dog. Considering the religious frame of the film, the religious society Ripley falls into, what else can you do but read it as the 'sign of the beast': that the child of Satan will be born from an animal rather than a human. Kinda cool, and Ripley holding a queen alien? Well, she's obviously sterling material, our Ripley - she wouldn't 'give birth' to anything other than the top type of monster. And it is born, only to die with her. But of course, in this film, Ripley's the one who brings in the terror. It's just that there was more than one. The beast attendant on its nascent queen. The hero doesn't always come through unscathed and sometimes, despite winning all the trials, still must die, because even heroes are human. In fact, if they aren't human, in some ways, they aren't heroes. I'm not really saying heroes have to be human, but they have to be part human, just as Ripley ended up being part monster. Like we all are.
Lack of understanding always complicates the problem that Ripley continues to face, no-one ever believing her, and the Company always on her back regardless of where she ends up. Even when she's believed, it's too late. Everyone else is frequently dead. She only gets clear of it all with her own death.
Bit like life really, and that of course is the point.
I am, of course, ignoring the dreadful 4th film. That should've remained as stillborn as Ripley's little baby queen ends up being.

2002-08-04T02:08:00.000+08:00

How does one start someting like this? G'day? Well, it's actually after midnight, so it's definitely not day, so maybe not an appropriate beginning at all. And I can't even figure out how to get a title so neatly in bold. Bugger! Enough to put you off before 5 seconds have elapsed.
"While the Holy may not presume the Horrible, nonetheless the Horrible affirms the Holy...Lovecraft ... denies the Holy any context whatsoever except in a rhetoric of negation."
Sorry - got diverted. I just came across that while reading "Maps of Heaven/Maps of Hell" by Edward J Ingebresten, S.J. (& it's on pg 106) which is not only relelvant to HP Lovecraft's writings (very interesting when considering The Dunwich Horror, which I am, for me Masters dissertation & his chapter on The Dunwich Horror is really fascinating), it also reminds me of something said in the last episode of Ultraviolet, that 'awfully' British vampire series - when the captured vampire reminds the priest that they - the vampires - are the reason for his faith in his Christian God, that the reason for his belief was proof of the negative, not the postive. Can't help thinking what a 'western' attitude that is, when more than one culture expresses and decribes its belief systems by what It - their diety/ies is/are not. Apophetic, I think that's called. Yet, despite the fact that the myths of all cultures treat all gods, demons, heroes and so on alike, nonetheless, while much of horror fiction, written or filmed, seems reliant on its cultural settings to be effective in its horror, it also doesn't. The 'divine' aspect would be horrific regardless of the culture. Yet, in "Ultraviolet", in "Buffy", in Lovecraft's stories, some of the major strengths are those very 'western' settings (frequently American), the contrasts that those settings allow for. This seems to be the same in many of the recent Japanese horror films like the excellent "Ring" or even "Hypnosis" which display something similiar which, I guess, could also imply something of the 'cultural imperalism' that the US is so often accused of (particularly by teh French!). European films like "Possessed" (Besat) present something more chaotic and often more universal, which I find a fascinating difference. In so many of our favourite horror films, books and television shows, it's all western horror. Western, meaning European and Anglo-Saxon based, though Lovecraft frequently refers back to Egyptian, Tibetan and anything that would seem esoteric to his day and age. I must look further into this.
All very interesting.
Now, should I apologize - it was rather a digression. I was actually meaning to introduce this - er - 'blog, the reason for its name and what I am thinking of writing, though perhaps the above gives you some ideas. The name is Jonathan Strahan's idea & probably accurately describes my writing (& I'll continue blaming him). Have to admit, it's my writing that's got me into all sorts of trouble with my Masters. Writing a dissertation of a specific wordlength, and then choosing a subject like the use of Myth in horror & fantasy, and then (attempting) to narrow it down to the 1st three seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" & the short stories of HP Lovecraft as examples is kinda ridiculous. I find I have been woefully, delightfully and entertainingly diverted in my researches and, well, as a result the word count has blown out enough to make up 5 full PhD's. A problem when I'm only doing a Masters in Creative Writing (should get me a job, that one!!!).
So, I was thinking about sharing my decidedly peculiar ideas on popular culture, and being new to popular culture (had a weird childhood - all I did was read books), I'm open to many suggestions.
I guess I'll be back at some stage, but I really must get into the essay. Writing up the second chapter at the moment, all about heroes, which "Buffy" has in both the main and surrounding characters and Lovecraft lacks severely. A wonderful contrast and again, testing the word limit severely.
See ya

2002-08-03T18:43:00.000+08:00

And another
Another sample post.

2002-08-03T12:03:00.000+08:00

This is a sample post
This is a sample post.