Ken’s Blog

Sometimes it comes as a surprise to realize that things we’d been thinking of as completely different are actually quite similar. In films we are used to this sort of revelation. After all, students of the films of Alfred Hitchcock have realized for years that most of his thrillers are actually somewhat disguised boy-meets-girl romances, in the sense that the romance (whether between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly or between Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll) is actually the engine that drives the audience’s interest.

Of course there are exceptions, but the Hitchcock films that are primarily romances at heart by far outnumber those that truly break the mold, such as “The Birds” and “Lifeboat”.

Similarly, many computer games are essentially variations on the same game, when boiled down to their essentials. One of the most popular of these “essential games” is what might be called the “maze with prizes and killer zombies” game, more popularly known as a “dungeon crawler”. In this game, exemplified by the games from Id Software such as the 1993 Doom and 1996 Quake, your avatar runs around in a claustrophobia-inducing labyrinth trying to collect treasure while hungry killer zombies continually appear from around the corner, wanting to eat you.

Like any sensible individual in such a situation, you are supposed to use your high powered futuristic weapon to blow these zombies to smithereens and spatter their undead blood-soaked body parts against floor and walls, before said zombies approach near enough to rip open your chest cavity like a bag of corn chips, noisily suck out your brains and feast with rabid hunger upon your still writhing flesh.

All good clean fun.

Many games have appeared in the intervening years that continue in this hallowed tradition, such as Half Life, Diablo, Demon’s Souls and many others. These games are largely thought to be inspired by Doom, with story elements taken from Tolkien by way of Dungeons and Dragons.

But in this past week I had a revelation: The gameplay of such games is actually derivative of a game generally thought to belong to a completely different genre. Think about it for a moment: Your avatar must navigate a labyrinth, picking up valuable prizes to accumulate points, while avoiding death at the hands of autonomous monsters that roam around in the maze with no purpose other than to kill you. The first game to follow this paradigm came out well before Doom – in 1981 to be exact.

I speak, of course, of Pacman.

The only essential difference, from a game-play perspective, is that you get to see the entire maze when you play Pacman. John Carmack’s innovation in Doom was to show only a small, ground-level view of the maze. This increased the level of paranoia, as well as incorporating the task of learning and remembering the dungeon’s layout into the game itself.

One could also argue that the true progenitor of the “deathmatch” multiplayer mode of Quake, in which participants play against each other within a maze-like dungeon, is even earlier – the 1973 Atari game “Gotcha”.

Over these last days I’ve been making more of a push on a new direction for this blog. For the first time I posted a complete original short story – “Farewell” – written just for you, dear readers, in “real time”, as it were. And of course I’ve also been sculpting the “Tea ceremony”, a sort of digital still life in words.

Given this backdrop, imagine my excitement and shock of recognition, upon perusing the weblog of my dear friend Kaelan, to come upon her reference to http://www.nanowrimo.org, a site devoted exclusively to promoting a simple idea – members of the great unwashed public write a complete novel in one month.

In a nutshell, November is novel month – in the form of a contest. Upon entering this contest, you have one month – from 00:00 on November 1 to 23:59 on November 30 – to create a complete 50,000 word novel. It’s ok to have devised plans/outlines/sketches beforehand – as well as any scene ideas conceived while playing with plastic toy dinosaurs or small household pets and kitchen utensils – but the actual prose itself must all be created within this thirty day window. This last requirement would rule out, for example, the “Scenes from the Novel” that have gradually emerged on these pages from time to time.

I’ve been thinking I might devote the month of November this year to taking up this challenge, flinging the gauntlet, taking a hefty bite from Euterpe’s apple, so to speak.

I suppose if I were truly invested in the cutting edge potential of this novel cybermedium, then I would go all the way and Twitter my way to the finish line. I’ve run the math: There are thirty days in the month of November, and just about fifteen words in the average Tweet. For a 50,000 word novel, that comes out to 111 Twitter posts per day, or somewhere between seven and eight Tweets per hour (or about 0.12 t.p.m.), assuming that (a) one sleeps an average of eight hours a day, and (b) one does not actually have a life.

OK, maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea.

But it might be interesting to take a monthlong detour from our regularly scheduled program in order to write a novel in these pages, and see where it all leads.

You are the readers, and I value your opinion on the subject. So, what do you say? I’d love to hear from you, to see what you think of this idea.

The young man awakens in the bed. At first he looks around wildly, as though at an unfamiliar place. Then he sits up on the bed, clad only in boxer shorts and a tee shirt, and his gaze systematically takes in the details – the silk lampshade, the alabaster flowered wallpaper, the Edwardian writing desk upon which an old silver tea service stands beside an empty bottle of champagne.

He stands up unsteadily in his bare feet, walks to the nearest door, opens it and peers through, seeming to realize only gradually that he is looking into a walk-in closet. He stares down at the row of women’s shoes, and a look of understanding crosses his face.

Silently he shuts the closet door.

He puts on his jeans and socks and pull-over sweater, which had been scattered on the floor off to one side of the bed, and walks out into the hallway, making his way silently as he carries his shoes in one hand.

He begins to descend the stairs, one by one. Halfway down, he peers furtively from the landing into the room below. Two figures sit upon the couch, a man and a woman. They do not appear to see him. He pulls back silently, until he is just out of sight. He stands stock still for a moment, his head bowed as though deep in thought, and then slowly he sits down upon the stairs.

From the back pocket of his jeans he pulls out a bedraggled drawing pad, opening it to a fresh and unmarked sheet. He reaches into his other pocket, rummaging around until his fingers emerge clutching an exceedingly old looking fountain pen.

He stares intently down at the blank paper, holding the pen absently between thumb and forefinger. Then quickly, with practiced strokes, he begins to sketch a picture.

She set out due north, making her way through the narrow streets, past the village outskirts where lone houses lay scattered like forgotten toys, until at last she reached open country. The sky was darkening by the minute, and she knew she needed to make haste. It had been many years since she had journeyed this way, but her feet knew the route as though they had walked it but yesterday. She felt the old spring coming back into her step, a lithe energy she had last felt as a young girl, climbing rocks with her brother.

Her brother.

She still blamed him, even after all these many years. Blame had grown, become hardened with time, until it was the only thing between them. Yesterday the thought of him would have brought nothing but a bitter dry taste to her mouth. And yet here she was, traveling north, along the very road she had forbidden herself, even in her thoughts.

The entire sky was now a dark and ominous purple, all traces of sunlight gone. She glanced up with apprehension. In this eerie light the stars seemed somehow menacing. It was not enough that they had devoured the sun. The meal had merely awakened in them a fiercer appetite, perhaps a taste for any mortal souls foolish enough to fall within their hungry gaze. She hurried onward.

The landscape seemed transformed. Dark purple shadows licked and danced around once familiar terrain, like drunken creatures risen up from hell. “He will not want to see me, even now,” she thought bitterly. “I am a fool – a fool on a fool’s errand.” Perhaps the end of the world was not reason enough to breach the wall that had come between them. Perhaps some walls are higher than such trifles as the fate of planets.

She realized she would not come even close to her destination in the short time that was left – she was still just halfway there, and the wind had already started to blow, the dark wind that the poets had foretold. She pulled her cloak more tightly around her.

Suddenly she felt lost. In that moment she realized it was no use – even had he wanted to see her, there was simply no time. Wearily she sat down upon a rock by the side of the road, to wait for the end. For the first time in many a year she could feel a tear trickle down her face. “At least I have this,” she thought with a bitter satisfaction, “I had lost my tears, and now one has come after all this time, to keep me company in my foolishness.”

Lost in her thoughts, she did not even realize she was not alone, until she felt a hand brush against her cheek, wiping away the tear. It was a familiar gesture. How many times had he wiped away her foolish tears, all those years ago?

“You came,” she said.

“So did you,” he replied, and then he smiled. She felt the years of bitterness fall away, as if a dream. Looking at his face, she saw he was different than she remembered, more careworn, and yet the same, just exactly the same. The light in his eyes was as it had always been.

“Farewell,” she said softly.

He laughed. “You were always so serious. What could possibly be so serious?”

She stared at him, appalled. For a moment she felt a stirring of the old anger. He had not changed at all. She opened her mouth to speak, a bitter retort already on her lips. But instead she found herself starting to laugh. “Yes, you’re right,” she said with a giggle. “I am too serious. Much, much too serious. I’ll change from now on, I promise.”

Suddenly they were both giggling together, like children, far too lost in laughter and sheer delight to pay any heed when the dark wind, cold and furious, rose up at last to usher in the endless night and sweep the world away.

One fine summer afternoon the stars came out.

A cool breeze was floating through all the villages, down from the mountains. A purple haze had settled over the horizon, and there was a moon slung low in the sky, hovering just above the treetops.

The people came out to look at the stars. They stood in clumps of two and three, on hilltops and village squares. Children climbed the trees and laughed, making bird noises until their parents told them to be quiet.

She had been cooking when the light had started to change. With a sigh she put out the fire beneath the pot, wiped off her hands and ventured outside, where a crowd of sky watchers was already gathered.

The poets had written of this day long ago, but nobody had really believed. It was a story from the old tales, from the time before time, and these days nobody paid much attention to such things. Until now.

She thought of her brother. It had been a long time since she had let herself think of him. She realized that she still saw his face in her mind’s eye the way he had been then. Surely he must look different by now. But perhaps not.

She went back inside, turning away from the flaming stars arrayed against the eerie darkness of the afternoon sky. Briskly, efficiently, she packed a sandwich, a pear and a small flask of wine – something to keep her belly fed, and something to keep her belly warm. She grabbed a shawl – the green one, the one she used only for traveling – from its place behind the door, and set out on her journey.

A dream – I’m pretty sure that’s when it first entered my head.

Sometimes you wake up from a dream with a phrase or sequence of words still reverberating around in your brain. It might even take a while to realize it’s been nestled there for hours, lurking somewhere in the back of your thoughts. Today I realized that for the entire day a little snatch of dialog from a play by Shakespeare had been rattling around in my mind, just ever so slightly out of conscious awareness, apparently a last remnant from a dream of the night before.

Now, in the quiet of the evening, after the hubbub of the day has subsided, I realize what it was – one of my favorite speeches from “The Tempest”, spoken by Prospero in the first scene of Act IV. It’s an odd – and oddly beautiful – little monologue. Ostensibly he is speaking about the artifice of the play we are watching, observing that what we have seen here is nothing but illusion, papier-mâché and greasepaint. And so he starts out:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:

But then Prospero continues, and the impact of his words carry far beyond the stage proscenium:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This is so much lovelier and deeper than the famous monologue in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” that begins “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. That passage speaks only to the tragicomic pageant of an individual life, whereas the speech from “The Tempest” is nearer to the Hindu concept of Maya – that this apparently solid world we perceive around us is in fact only an illusion. Shakespeare is suggesting that the very fabric of reality around us may itself be only a sort of fleeting and illusory performance. The sentiment reminds me quite a bit of this dourly playful excerpt from Fitzgerald’s translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (the original was written in 1120 in Persia):

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

It’s a profound idea, and yet one which many of us first encountered in early childhood:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

🙂

I’ve been giving some serious thought today to the points raised by Troy about achievement and personal responsibility. They were good points, even if he and I disagree on some of the particulars. As it happens, while I was thinking about this, the White House released a transcript of the speech the president will be giving to our nation’s school children in Virginia tomorrow morning, on the occasion of the first day of the new school year.

What strikes me about the speech is that President Obama makes exactly the same points that Troy does. The two of them are aligned on this issue to an eerily precise degree. Here is one excerpt from the President’s speech:

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

One thing that people who succeed seem to have in common is an early belief – starting back in childhood – that diving in and getting good at things is going to pay off for them. I think this is a quality shared by Troy, Barack Obama, myself, and all of the high achievers I know. Somehow there is the confidence – the certainty, you might say – that one is up to the task of attaining the level of mastery required. For me, for as far back as I could remember, there has always been a joy in mastering certain kinds of things (mainly things connected with art and words and music – and only later with math and technology).

This is a joy that perpetuates itself. You get those first modest successes, and it gives you even more confidence to try more ambitious things – to put in even more time, if necessary. But I think somewhere in your soul there needs to be that kernel to start with, that fierce belief that you’ve got what it takes, even when those around you do not yet have much reason to agree.

It’s clear to me that Troy and Barack and I share a goal of wishing to plant into the minds of young people that seed of self-confidence – of finding their own unique way of expressing their true potential.

Given this common cause, I find it disheartening that a weirdly hostile (and, I suspect, cynically dissembling) group of people in this country are trying to prevent their kids from hearing the speech – ostensibly in defense of some sort of right wing principles. The irony of this particularly inane form of political gamesmanship is that this president is about to give a speech to our nation’s children that is the very model of good old fashioned conservative principles: A fervent exhortation toward individual responsibility, hard work, and self-betterment.

This evening over dinner my friend Jon talked about the philosopher Jacques Rancière and his philosophy of the unspeakable. The essence is that in any particular society there are things that we do not and cannot talk about – they are literally unspeakable. These taboos limit our ability to discuss problems we might otherwise profitably discuss, such as the relations between rich and poor, parents and children, sexuality, domestic violence, and other topics that tear at the fabric of society.

This reminded me of my experience watching the 1983 Tony Scott film “The Hunger”. An early example of the now ubiquitous “glamorous vampire” genre, the film centered around a human/vampire romantic triangle, with the principals played by Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon.

In movies there are things that happen not because they inherently make sense but because they need to happen, for reasons that have to do with plot advancement and character development. In the case of “The Hunger”, one such development centers around the character of Alice, played by the fourteen year old child actress Beth Ehlers. In the story, Alice is being groomed by the powerful vampire played by Deneuve to replace her current companion, played by Bowie, who is nearing the end of his useful lifetime and is beginning to rapidly age and degenerate.

As we learn about the ways of this film’s vampires, we discover that they indoctrinate their new minions through sexual seduction – the movie contains a number of erotic scenes centered around this concept. But this presents a problem – Alice is only fourteen. Rancière’s theory is quite applicable here. By definition, no American commercial film may contain an actual erotic encounter between an adult and a child. After all, the innocence of a young girl must be protected at all costs. Anything else would be, indeed, unspeakable.

The writers solve the dilemma in a simple and ingenious way. Bowie’s character, as part of his vampiric degeneration, is consumed by a powerful and uncontrollable hunger (hence the film’s title). Finding himself alone with the unsuspecting young Alice, he eats her.

Notice the simple brilliance of this plot twist. In order to protect this innocent child, to shield her from something as harmful as the pleasure of sexual awakening, the filmmakers opt to turn her into lunch. By being brutally murdered by a ravenous monster, horrifically butchered and summarily devoured, this young character is spared the unspeakable – enjoying a few moments of sexual pleasure on-screen.

You might not think that this makes logical sense. But as Rancière points out, when faced with any topic defined as “unspeakable” (in this case the threat of a potential sexual encounter between an adult woman and a fifteen year old girl), logic goes out the window. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that our society has found no way to address some other uncomfortable topics, such as the plight of children guilty only of the unspeakable crime of being born into a poor American family.

Whose site this is I think I know.
His server’s overloaded though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch this download start to slow.

My browser’s cache must think it queer
To stop upon a page so clear
Of content, simply frozen here
The longest weekend of the year.

It’s been five minutes, give or take
I think there may be some mistake.
I hear my hard drive go to sleep
Whoever built this site’s a flake.

This page is lovely, blank and white.
But I don’t really have all night,
It’s time to find another site,
It’s time to find another site.

      with apologies to R.Frost

The afternoon light streams in through the kitchen window. As the hour passes, the light moves slowly across the counter, glinting brilliantly off the two champagne flutes that lay side by side where they have been left to dry. Then the light moves on, touching the petals of the red rose that lies wilting beside the drying rack.

When the man enters, carrying the empty cup and saucer in his large hands, his gaze first falls upon the rose, which is now bathed in sunlight. He puts the cup and saucer down upon the counter and reaches for the rose, lifts it to his lips, and plants a silent kiss upon its faded petals. At the moment the flower touches his lips, his gaze falls, for the first time, upon the two glasses laying side by side. He freezes, seemingly rooted to the spot, his lips still upon the rose.

Then he carefully places the rose down on the counter, in the exact position he had found it. He turns away, looks toward the hallway, his face now in shadow. For a moment he simply stands upon that spot, unmoving, silent. Then, with a resolute air, he walks from the kitchen back into the hall, looking neither right nor left, never once glancing at the woman who sits so quietly upon the drawing room couch. The man’s footsteps echo down the hallway, growing fainter with every step. He reaches the front entrance, and there is the sound of a door opening.

And then he is gone.