"A modern dark fairytale." Or so I say... I realize it is considered in bad form to analyze your own work. In some ways we're furthest from it. But I'd like to make some crucial points about storytelling, especially within the framework of a modern fairytale. Why not a story I wrote?
Can't find artist info. I'd love to credit it if anyone knows.
This is the danger of tumblr.
What is this story really about? What is the nature of a fairytale but to use elements of the unreal to talk about dimensions of our psyche, or psychological experience that are quite real?
I wanted to create the first issue of a series told not by the protagonist but by someone else. And I wanted to make it an unreliable narrator, a narrator who gives us this protagonist almost like she is hidden in the shadow created by his projection. I spent about two months thinking about writing this seemingly simple short story, because this was a challenge.
Not that the initial semblance of who and what Nyssa was took very long to germinate. I got my initial concept in a few minutes, on a cold overcast morning sitting on the subway on my commute to work when I was working as a UI designer for TLA.
But I wanted to open up the opportunity for an ongoing series about a character, and I didn't want to introduce the character from the inside. So it took me a good two months of thinking to figure out the angle I wanted to take. We're talking about a 3000 fucking word story here. I almost never take so long on such a small amount of text.
As I said, we first meet Nyssa from a distorted perspective. The protagonist doesn't really know her, even though he is increasingly obsessed with her. In that same way you don't really know the barrista you have a crush on. They're like these far off symbols to us, that we dream of one day having a real relationship of some kind with. But generally, that never comes to be.
The mask is an idea, a symbol, we could look at from a million angles. It is, even at first glance, our double, a close relative of the mirror -- but it is something other than the mirror. The mirror shows us our double. A mask creates a second double atop us. It transforms rather than reveals.
At the same time, a lot of psych pop lit has been written about Batman. But I'd like to use Batman as the pop culture model of the role of the mask.
What is Batman, really?
Is is a story about how an emotionally disturbed, very rich young adult deals with psychological trauma that he cannot let go of. Some ideas, some emotions, are things that we hold onto, and they are done with us the moment we are done with them. But others have us in their clutches, and they are only done with us when they are ready. This becomes a subject of subconscious, and the only way to deal with such things is to try to find a way to speak the language of the subconscious. Not just the subconscious, but our subconscious. Every single one has a different symbolic and emotional makeup. Any therapeutic system that misses this will basically be a crapshoot, whether that system lines up well with the stories that are embedded inside of you.
This was actually the typewriter of demon frog "fame."
(This is a rough draft that mashes up some of my contributions to The Nervous Breakdown and other thoughts into what I hope to be the only piece I ever write 'On Writing,' for the next issue of Scree Magazine.)
Hello. I’ve got a problem and it’s about time I honed up to it.
It's hard to remember when my addiction started. I remember hammering awkwardly on an old-style typewriter about a demonic underworld that existed in the basement of a house we lived in. We had to go down into the basement in the cold and the dark and shovel coal to keep the house warm, and the story had something to do with the frog demons that lived down there and the boy that had to brave them every night to keep his family warm. Really deep stuff, clearly. I actually don't know if that is relevant to anything, but you've got to admit it's kind of cool I remember a story I wrote when I was eight or so.
I think it was my first time, but I could be wrong.
Freud call these "screen memories," which basically means they are picture-stories that we use as memories. They are like the seeds of the story that we construct about childhood, because, you see, memories are a form of story. Everything about us is based on stories. Our sense of identity, all our beliefs even, are narratives, and this is why politics demands narratives that draw us in, whether they act on our intellect or our emotions.
I guess I’m saying we’re all story junkies. Don’t judge lest ye judge yourself.
Redefining the Real: Metanarratives and collaborative fiction writing as a blueprint for social change.
By Dr.* Shackleford
(*this denotes honorary ordination and doctorate in metaphysics, College of Aetheric Sciences.
The following is an excerpt from a lecture series from the curriculum of the College of Aetheric Sciences.)
Good morning, class. Today we're going to be exploring the boundaries of what is termed "consensual reality".
The memetic structure in question, henceforth referred to throughout as "consensual reality", seems to be at a glance fairly self-explanatory. On the surface, anyway.
If you look at the world around you carefully, it shouldn't be difficult to spot the mass hallucination sold to all of us as "real." Make no mistakes,
this is by design. The people actively working to build your worldview for you are paid very well to do just that.
Millions of dollars are given to well paid and extremely intelligent social engineers every month, as they attempt to discover new methods
in which to propagate and to reproduce certain cultural norms, lifestyle decisions, elements of pop culture, fashion trends and other subtle
forms of manipulation. Perhaps one of the easiest ways in which to spot the crack at the seams of a mass manufactured take on reality is a well
rounded study of American politics. On this level of sociological study, most humans with even half a brain left to make free and autonomous decisions
for itself can readily spot the manipulation of language. American science fiction writer and Theological Prophet Philip K. Dick once said that "The basic
tool for the manipulation of reality is language. Control the words, and you can control the people who use them." Do you believe that?
I here pause to pull up "America Eats Its Young" by Funkadelic on my playlist and spark a small pipe of hashish...
Thoughts, one subway ride. It is always concerning to me how much the El in Philly smells like an electrical fire. When you're in a metal box hurtling at 50mph, it seems to me that you don't want it to smell like an electrical fire.
We are distributed networks within distributed networks within... Ad infinitum. The network runs across each scale as a slice but also between all scales. That's how it works. "Real" was an enlightenment era misnomer, which sought to stake out an unmoving point or common ground (axis mundi) within that everchanging mess, or even the hope of emergence.
Maybe real can mean many other things too, depending on the context. But the point at which real had any sense, any, er... real sense... died with the Enlightenment. (See also The Immanence of Myth if you care about this line of thought because I'm about to drop it.)
Why? Because, that's beside the point, I don't want to totally miss my train of thought -- or my stop -- but yet so is this. There was an asian girl sitting across from me that made my heart skip a beat, and the homeless man behind me smelled of mouldy old cheese. Talk about cognitive dissonance. I see so many beautiful people every day in this city, so beautiful that I just want to cry. And so many broken, twisted things that exist purely on pity or hate. It's all so confusing. And the electric system was messed up as usual so the stop announcements were all reversed. 15th street... 30th street... Was time going backwards? The signs not lining up with the actual stations was weird to me too, though no one else in the car seemed phased. It happens all the time. It shouldn't be weird. It just felt significant somehow but I pinched myself, no I mean I really did, and reminded myself that this was all a red herring. Don't lose the original thought.
Is the emergent consciousness (in the case of the distributed networks of our bodies, the "I") centralized, or is it an autonomous illusion required at a certain level of complexity to apply a will to that one network node?
Let's bring it back to ourselves again though. See...The hard part is, remember when that cell in your lip died? Me either. That's what we are, as a node in the distributed network within network within network.
The flip side is this. Any node can, theoretically, access from the others. As we evolve, if we evolve, we can call on the greater organism more, and more. That is the main optimism I hold for the future, though it feels to me that the challenges we face in the next century we just aren't prepared for.
Still, if humanity has a future, that is it: understanding the true power of distributed networks, and recognizing both our power and relative insignificance. And I won't even begin to conjecture what that would need, aside from the thought that the NWO myth of it occurring through fascism and control have already been proven false a million different ways. Look instead to ant colonies, and to bee hives.* When will humanity act, for the most part, toward the common good of the hive? If never, then it truly will be 404. File not found.
I reached my stop, and scattered out and about like all the other little ants, doing our important unimportant chores, having evolved to the point where we can see a top-down view if we see fit to do so. But then I think about all the torture we inflict upon one another, sucking our planet dry so that we can kill one another -- and my mind goes blank.
On a lark I thought some people might like it if I chose which of the Mythos ebooks to send them. So at some ungodly hour I posted on Facebook:
Alright, bitches. Look. Got like 8 counterculture books here that aren't going to read themselves. Think of them as quasi-informational drugs that they probably won't put you away for owning.
The deal: if you paypal me $2+ I will pick which book to send you.
jamescurcio at gmail is the account to paypal, and do alert me here or otherwherez cause paypal doesn't always actually email me.
I can promise with absolute assurance that it is better than a starbucks latte. Though obviously they have you more addicted.
To my surprise, it turns out that some people would rather I make the decision of which of our books to read. Weird. I guess more choices are not always better. So, instead of making it a one day offer as I previously planned, I will continue to do so until the end of the month.
Donate $2 or more (see above)
And get a book.
Please include your preferred format (PDF, mobi, epub), and either some of your favorite books, or something completely random and unrelated to books.
Look. I was a child once. People that were once children should be given money via Paypal.
In the labyrinth built by Daedalus there are mirrors by the thousands, which make its 28 U-turns seem more complex than they are. Truly, there would seem to be no way through or out of it, and no direction other than to go the way you came. At its dead heart, he has placed the Minotaur, a product of recombinant engineering, who, due to several haywire genes, is said to only be able to survive on a diet of human flesh. There seems no way to escape from the Minotaur’s surveillance. His gaze is cold. His remote eyes zero in on anything with a pulse.
Beast-men march like clockwork from every imaginable angle, chanting, their hands shaping balls of primordial energy that they are able to turn into weapons.
Your heart is beating from your chest, and can be heard from across the galaxy. Your own mind turns against you. It betrays you with practiced ease, like a democratic leader, as if it did not know to whom its loyalty was due.
So yes, be afraid; be very afraid. With head bowed, let his agents see the deference in your stance, and the lack of intuitive certainty in your movements. There are few that you can trust. Even they tend to assume that they know where the Minotaur is. By closing their eyes, they believe that they have removed the barcodes on their foreheads. They do not know that they serve him.
"He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself." — Susanna Clarke
As I've said previously, language is malleable. It can be pounded, melted and smelted into shapes that have meaning One does not need to go as far as to create a new word to control it. Meaning can be assigned and changed if the will or desire is strong enough. One point my mother tried to reinforce to me as a child was, "You cannot change the meaning of a word." What she actually meant was, "You can, but you shouldn't." Altering meaning changes intent, opens doors of mixed blessings-- depending on one's ultimate goal.
If you've ever had an academic debate (or any serious sort of debate) with an English Major, at some point it will degenerate the literal meaning of one's word choices, their relative position in a sentence and their juxtaposition to other words one said or wrote previously. At this point, you will both be required to pull out the agreed-upon standard for language, generally the Merriam-Webster English Dictionary, and start defining each word by what it actually means.
It is important to understand the meaning of a word in its truest form. It prevents it from being corrupted by emotion or influence. When a group of people accept a definition it becomes common. It also gives the word its power. If one does not know the true essence of a word, it can be co-opted and corrupted. This is especially true for words based on intellectual or political concepts. For example, the word "feminism", which Merriam-Webster defines under the first definition as "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes" has been associated with images of man-hating bra burners. This association has altered the meaning of the words substantially from its true essence, one of acceptance, to one of conflict.
Once I told a friend "You're wrong" and he pointed out there was nothing wrong with him. However, there was something wrong with my contextual usage of the word "wrong" and it is always wrong to use "I think you're wrong" as an opening statement of a disquisition.
"I invented colors for the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. - I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator."
-Arthur Rimbaud ("Season in Hell" Delirium II: Alchemy of the Word)
In order to make the unknowable tangible, significance must be assigned. As Kant said, "Ding an sich"; thing-in-itself. We name what we do not know in order to master its properties. Since language is malleable, one can create new words to describe a technological shift and these words enter into our lexicon. One can see examples of this in verbs such as "tweeting" or "Xeroxing" and proper nouns that are actually brands like "Band-Aids" and "Kleenex." It is the hope of every marketing team that the trademark name of the product surpasses the definition ensuring its superiority about all others. "Scotch Tape" conjures a very specific image of type of tape, where the word "tape" itself can make one think of anything from cassette to adhesive. If one was to say, "I brought the tape," the listener must have a previous known context in order to understand which type of tape the speaker has with him or her.
But what if you can get to world to co-opt your own language? What influence would you have as the creator? The company Apple has essentially branded language in their own way with the popularization of the letter "i" before products such as the "iPod" or "iMac." Aurorally, it puts emphasis on the individual and the product. However, visually the product has more weight than the individual by capitol letter emphasis. As an alphabetic sigil, it serves to establish who is in control. There are very few people who have said the word "iPhone" and have not seen it written in Apple's shiny font face. This "i" trend has become so popular that other companies have been co-opting the "i" for their own products unrelated to Apple, ensuring Apple's linguistic endurance as well as the individual as a secondary consideration to the product.
It is also possible to re-invigorate old language and repurpose it. Snoop Dogg brought the use of izz-speak from the 1970s jive back into popular lexicon (coincidentally, few years after asking the question "What's my name?") and made it his own.
If you create a word, you control it. It is your word. You can alter and change the meaning as you see fit. You alone are the translator, dictating its pronunciation. You create the sigil the represents it. The intention behind the word is yours alone and therein lies your jurisdiction. The creation of words and "smithing" of language is a powerful tool and it's applications range from building community to outright mind control.
More of this in Part III: Loading Language
[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]
Part 1: A Brief and Incomplete Mythology of Naming
By Aubrey Zich
"Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power." Jeanette Winterson (Oranges are not the Only Fruit)
There are many ways to tell this story, but this is variation I know best. In Israel, there was a temple gate guarded by barking dogs. These animals would sound at the passer-bys, jarring their thoughts and causing a temporary mind lapse. Anyone who knew the ineffable name of God would soon forget it as they passed. Jesus, who was not so much a prophet as a magician in this tale, performed miracles using the name of God. Knowing the perils of passing the temple, Jesus took the ineffable name placed in a note under the skin of his arm. (ie: a tattoo.) When Jesus passed the temple the barking startled him, as he knew it would, and forgot the ineffable name. However, since the name of God was tattooed on Jesus' arm, he was able to recall it and continue to perform miracles.
Qabalists claim ineffable name of has 72 parts and whomever can master the correct pronunciation can alter reality as he or she sees fit. However, mispronunciation can also cause instantaneous death. Words are the living, reality-altering magic. Each character is a sigil within itself containing its own meaning. When combined with other sigils, the characters creates two stories: the obvious path of language and the hidden path of pictographs.
The significance of knowing a true name crosses cultures: from the miller's daughter getting out of a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to the Youruba myth of Orunmila only being permitted to marry Oxum once he discovered Oxum's true name. Not only is the precedent set in our myths and fairytales, but also in popular literature and Tv programming. (For those interested, wikipedia has a list of a few examples.)
Modern music places great significance on not only knowing a name but on a magical "alter ego" name. Marshal Mathers performs under two monikers which represent his different manifestations: his light side, Eminem, and his id-driven primitive side, Slim Shady. Marshall Mathers is not the only one. In order to make a directional change, Beyonce Knowles developed her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Later, Beyonce claimed to have "killed" Sasha Fierce, absorbing Sasha's powers for her own.
One of the most interesting examples of name alchemy is David Bowie. Over decades he has been able to keep current by changing his personae and naming its essence. After the album "Hunky Dory", David Bowie declared that his next release would be huge. He distilled the essence of a rockstar and magnified it to ridiculous proportions, almost beyond recognition. Then Bowie named his concoction "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." As Bowie predicted, it was his break-out album. (Editor's note: There is an extensive exploration of this topic in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized) and some follow-up consideration in a series of articles in Apocalyptic Imaginary (Mythos Media).)
Can one really control your environment and the things around you by the act of naming? Well, yes and no. Let me put it to you this way: one may come to understand the true essence of a stray dog, even enough to give it a name. One may even tame the dog enough to make it a pet. But if one angers the dog, no matter what one calls it, the dog will still bite.
More about this in Part II: Wordsmith
[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]
Alright, there is far too much that could be said on this topic for one blog post. It would fill twenty books. So please don't mistake brevity for lack of consideration.
Geekology has presented us a great example to look not just at some of the newest trends in body modification today, but also to make a point about latent or mainstream standards of beauty, and the backlash it can cause.
I'd like to provide for you exhibit A, a Ukranian girl who has surgically modified herself to look like a barbie:
Note the tone of the post:
This is 21-going-on-6-year-old Valeria Lukyanova (links to her Ukranian Facebook-y thing with LITERALLY 10,000 more photos of Little Ms. Vain). Valeria always dreamed of being a real life Barbie doll. And now, after numerous surgeries, she's finally realized her dream AND CAN HOPEFULLY MOVE ON TO ACTUALLY DREAMING ABOUT SOMETHING WORTHWHILE. Wow, of all the dreams in the world to come true of course it's squandered on the girl who wants to look like Barbie and not everybody hoping for a cure for cancer. "That little bitch." *pointing* That girl said it, not me!
Can someone please point me to the place where this sort of body modification differs from cat man?
Or even our resident Satanic freakazioid, Rex Church.
(Tangent alert: I met him at Esozone, a sort of "alternate culture convention" where a lot of totally freakish knowledge was done dropped. I was on a panel with him about ritual magick and artistic creation or something and he leaned over and said "you smell nice." Ookay. So yeah, that's not relevant to this post but it's my one personal interaction with the guy. I really can't figure out if my smelling nice is a good or bad thing in this context.)
Look, don't get me wrong. I think Barbie girl is creepy too. And I'm not entirely sure it isn't a hoax and those are all actually photos of RealDolls. (Did you know they used to make Dark Elf RealDolls? I can't seem to find them on Google anymore so that must mean they don't anymore.)
But I think we need to be incredibly vigilant about our bias about these kind of judgements. All of these are cases of people modifying their physical body to in some way match some internal mental image. Whether you think you should physically appear as a dragon or a dark elf or a barbie doesn't matter, it's just that
Barbie is mainstream and has a lot of associated cultural baggage. Like the fact that part of Barbie's marketing programming has been about making little girls want to look like fucking Barbie. That is how a lot of marketing psychology works, because companies want to figure out how to sell and the best way to do that is to reverse engineer the psychology of your market. Surprise! Your little daughters brains are being scoped out by corporations as living breathing targets for their product development. That's just life in the world / society we live in.
We totally. TOTALLY support Obama's right to
turn himself into....whatever the fuck this is.
(Photo by Photoshopaganda.
USED WITH EXTREME PREDJUDICE.
I mean permission. Permission.)
So if we want to change that we can change what sort of messages we're broadcasting to our youth to you know, sell different products, because every little girl wants to be genetically modified to look like a robot with arms made out of carrots or something, right?, no actually most marketing is based on the biological predelection of humans living at a particular place and time, so there's actually a reason that Barbie looks like she did when marketing to the youth of 1960s America rather than a vampire squid with rotating tentacle biolumanescent arm attachments. But that's subject for another article!
[As is any discussion of the fat / thin issue.]
So, point is, accept that your judgement of Barbie girl as freakish is the same as calling cat-man freakish, I mean, hey, it's OK to think they're freaks but at least own it across the board so you're not a damn hypocrite, right? Because there is something culturally abnormal about actually going through with it and doing something like this, or else everyone would be doing it and it wouldn't be abnormal anymore.
[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]
I know that if we were a site like others, we might spend today's posting on the mythic underpinnings of The Avengers, because is "hot shit" right now - or at least, that's what we've all been told to think is hot shit right now.
But I have this affliction. Maybe it is incurable. I can't seem to care about what I'm supposed to care about. I just care about whatever it is that has me by the - what do you call it? Balls? Nethers? It's what IT is, and until it has been worked out, the thing will keep me up nights and drive me totally mad. No matter what time of day or night it is, no matter what other tasks seem like they should be more pressing, some weird inner voice determines what the topic of the day must be, and that voice must be heeded or else everything else - and I do mean everything - be damned.
Sometimes, by some grand convergence, it so happens that the topic du jour is the same as what has me in such a way, and on those days, the traffic just rolls in. On those days, I can pretend I am some kind of SEO wizard. But the truth is that traffic is totally meaningless. None of those people stay, because none of them actually care about anything. They are, like so many people these days, just trend chasers. And they will keep trend chasing day after day, and unless if your life is spent defining and chasing trends yourself, you're nothing to them.
What has me today is actually just a continuation of the thread that has developed over the past month or so. If you recall, I mean if you are actually one of the regulars around here, you may have noticed that we first covered storytelling of the past, and why storytelling is so important. We also covered the possibilities afforded by new technologies for storytelling - and the links I'm sharing here are just a few of the many that the writers on this site let loose on those topics. We have covered how storytelling has changed over time, and how it hasn't, and this has even spread over to Odd Duck where I discuss the important topic of how storytelling is relevant to brands.
Quite a virtual classroom to begin with, and we have only really begun! Yet at the same time, I reached a crisis point in my own life, which I have discussed only somewhat here, and I considered walking the plank and ending it all, but I came around the other side thinking that instead the answer was a re-appraisal of my identity. I thought that maybe the world would treat me differently, the way I wanted to be treated, if I came to it as someone different. (My issue has been and remains not myself but rather the world I live in.)
However, we come finally to the crux of this post. I know this is not how you are supposed to write blog posts, everything is supposed to be tiny little bite-sized-nuggets of bullshitty nothingness that people can digest, shit out and move on to the next thing in their mcnugget lives. I just can't do it. If that makes us all a failure than so fucking be it. I can't do it.
The past 24 hours have made me rethink the approach of rebirthing identity. Some of it is technological. Google will quite simply not allow my to disown my identity and start anew without turning my back on on the real friends along with the troublesome or poseur ones, and more to the point, it forces me to use all their services linked to the same identity, so if I don't intent to kill my web business, which is tied to my digital identity, my only option is to create a virtual or digital doppelganger.
This is something that most of you have already done years ago, and it is something that I have fought tooth and fucking nail. For years I have refused to compartmentalize, slice up, or censor one iota of who I am digitally or otherwise based on what some future corporation, organization, or government entity might think of my honest feelings right now. Even if they are in bad taste. Even if I change my mind in five minutes. Is the schizophrenia of identity the new normal? Am I some holdover of a bygone era that years for the Jungian ideal of synthesis and union, and which seeks to bring all thoughts - no matter how questionable to the society at large - into the light of consciousness? For - most of all - transparency and honesty are virtues to me even if what shines through isn't always pretty. My partners and friends and lovers know me, they really know me, as much as anyone can know another, and it is because I have no veils, I have no compartmentalization or post-modern schizophrenia of the sort which seems to be forced on us at every turn, and I am wondering now if what I had seen as a solution to my existential dilemma to in fact be a trick, a trap to lure me into precisely what I have always sought to avoid.
I don't know. But I do know this: I will create a second identity simply as an experiment in this "new normal" with the hunch that I am so hooked on the honesty and consistency of my own moody identity that, though moods may create the illusion of difference, the truth is that my doppelganger and I will actually be one and the same. It is, in my opinion, quite possible that I cannot be vivisected. This is a question that we raised in Citizen Y, and it is one that I think I am finding the answer to in my own life. (Which is good because, how many of you actually read let alone mentally experienced Citizen Y? Come on, be honest.)
I would like to leave you with this disquieting question, and I really hope that you have read this far because I consider this a fairly important post, as articles on this site go:
When you see a friend losing everything, but they are an "internet friend only," how does this differ from entertainment that we pay for on TV? What if in five years I told you that Sascha Idakaar (my doppelganger), had been the "real" me all along, and Jamie Curcio was a character I have been playing as part of a long running reality art project?
Would you feel cheated? Would you have the right to be? We are all living digital lives now. Those that fight for that life to be honest rather than a lie, like myself, may be in a new class: the transmedia entertainers who are living lives based around entertaining the passive audience. (Again, read Citizen Y. John and I entertained just this possibility for the future, and I think it is far more real than we may have even realized.) Tragedy is art, and art is cathartic entertainment.
We have laid out the puzzle-pieces of a past life - many lives - all over the internet, in book stores, in peoples homes, in people's pockets and in their minds and hearts - in albums - in performances - and they are as real as any "reality" you have ever tasted, touched, or felt.
Seek out these realities, there are many more out there, just waiting for you to unlock - and please do not hate the entertainer for their joy and suffering, and call us "unreal" or "actor" or "fakes." We did it all for you. We have just been playing the roles gives us since sui generis, and we play them until the end. And there is so much more more to come. The possibilities are only just beginning to show themselves...
Welcome to the show...
[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]
This is a continuation of sorts of Nate's posts, maybe a partial palimpsest written atop the previous post (you've read them, right?), and most importantly, it is a story about how I got from "there" to "here." It is a personal letter from one of the primary creators of this site, and diverges from our normal format in a pretty massive way.
Anyway. I'm taking a lot of risks in being this open with the public but with all I've already risked and all I've already been through, I don't really give a damn. You're here with me, or you've already run for the hills.
From "there" to "here." So... Where was "there"?
Given the entry immediately preceding mine, I'm not entirely quite sure how to help begin anew. Do we begin anew? Do we shift through the wreckage of our pasts, futilely scraping the pieces back together in order to reassemble the form we have voluntarily disintegrated or do we, as a good friend of mine once said, "turn a blind eye upon our past when we embrace the future?"
From my end, I find myself working through whatever channels I can to keep "us" afloat- not only due to my vested interest in preserving such clearly... professional journalistic endeavors of my own, but also out of love for the whole of the Work undergone at this point and to all of Modern Mythology's contributers.
It is May 2012, the year of the personal apocalypse, and we may ask ourselves at this point: What have we collectively learned so far from where we have come?
It may have been the 120 oxycodone. It may have been being punched in the throat by a total stranger. It may have been being told by someone I respected that my approach to start my dream could never work. It may have been the day I was raped by 10 15 year old boys that laughed when I shit blood. It may have been a thousand other things. But I died yesterday. And I am never coming back.
Is that what it takes for you to find who I was? To kill myself and ask for you to re-assemble me in the pieces? Please let that life mean something ... but who i was today died today and like all deaths he is not ever coming back no matter how much you wish otherwise. there is nothing more to create here. all the pieces are for you to find in those places. and if you care you will find them there and become one of the children of the new aeon. but this, here, ends right now.
I don't know who comes next. And this flesh may be reborn in new forms. Life is amazing like that. But who I was is no more. So search for him in the pieces I've left for you.
GOODBYE.
ISH. BECAUSE sadly the way Google is set up it is almost impossible to kill a digital persona without destroying all these connected services Google now owns. So all we can do is create splinter personas. GOD. Damnit. So this is so much less dramatic. But you can all say hello to Sascha, he is going to be my inner, inner self that is just as honest as James was/is, but who can feel comfortable in being as gentle as he wants to be without anyone trying to beat him for being a "fag" (which he is not) or else they will be flayed alive.
P.S. For the douchebags who keep trying to send me messages saying "this is a joke right?" No. I could not be more serious. There will be someone stuck with some of the same memories, and he will have a new phone, a new name, new profiles - if he writes books it will be under a new name. James Curcio is fucking DEAD. OK?
Humor, for what it is worth, is almost impossible to fully explain (though the confusion of expectation seems a regular part of the humor - cognitive dissonance, in other words.) And so often it manages to strike a nerve. If the joke "works," it strikes the nerve and calls the object to mind without causing true offense, we may act offended for the sake of social pretense, but we aren't actually hurt.
But equally possible, it could hurt. It could bring to mind something, possibly something it didn't even aim at, and cause little more than trauma. The fact is, we don't fully know the contents, or more to the point, the history of most other people's minds, and it is almost inevitable that any joke that hits close to home will in fact not so much hit too close to home, as hit a bunker somewhere in the back, full of munitions.
There's nothing to be done, really, in such cases but state ones actual intent, and for the person to realize that you may have still paid an unintentional favor: pain, when it serves its evolutionary purpose, is there to alert us to a problem. It can say, "hey! Look, something else for you to work with your damn analyist on!"
But seriously folks, the point ultimately is not that we should stop joking. It is that we should have compassion for one another at the same time. When joking makes us lose our compassion, when it becomes a front for coldness and allows us to distance from others, then it really is just a prelude for rape, even if it is just rape of an emotional kind.
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Before you continue on to what I have to say here, I very much suggest you check out the articles that I've linked here, because what I am about to say, if misinterpreted, is likely to get a lot of hate directed at me. Even if you do understand what I am saying, I think it is quite possible a lot of hate will be directed my way. But I think it is something that needs to be said.
To my surprise, there was very little reaction from the students. They got involved in the conversation, but none of them turned beet read or screamed at me. I was, quite frankly, rather surprised. Because not only did I support rape jokes, but the underlying premise of the piece, if you understand what it is saying, is that for healing to occur, jokes about rape, jokes about genocide, jokes about racism, are quite often essential.
To understand why this is the case, you need to understand both the function of the subconscious, at least in Freudian terms, and the function of jokes in the terms laid out by Allan Dundes. I discuss these elements at length in The Immanence of Myth, but all without coming out and saying what I am saying here, because I was quite frankly afraid of the backlash.
When you take the sentiment analysis of Beacon and run it on feminist forums, the software lights up like a christmas tree with hate when the conversation turns to rape jokes. My point being that if you ignore whether you agree with an ideology or not, there are certain topics that will turn the members of that ideology toward hateful speech.
The reason I support rape jokes of a certain nature is the same reason that support black comedians like Chapelle making jokes like the nigger family, or the skit he does with the blind White Supremecist who is, in fact, a black man.
It is the same point I made in the classroom, which I recorded for your enjoyment, edification, or fury. Jokes are often the only way that we can bring awful things into our consciousness and approach them, it is the only way that we can get close enough with them to begin to deal with them. It is a way that we can discuss things in society that we would otherwise not discuss at all.
The solution to these social problems of hate is not, ever, to hide from them. Never. It is not to pretend they are isolated incidents. It is not to "don't ask, don't tell." No. No. No.
And please, as a final note before I open this up to having hate spewed in my general direction: there is a huge difference between jokes about the holocaust or jokes about rape, and jokes that make fun OF the victims of sexual assault or the holocaust. Anyone who makes fun of rape survivors, those that call them weak, or belittle them as whiners, deserves things that I don't have words for. That's not a joke, it's a just another form of bullying.
I am, myself, a survivor of sexual assualt and a great deal of bullying and physical abuse for being "different," as you know if you read the articles linked above. I know this does not give me some kind of carte blanche, but I do think that it gives me a little more of a sense of what can allow for healing for some of us than those who haven't experienced these things, but want to make assumptions about what is or isn't appropriate. You know what I say? Fuck appropriate.
For me, at least, talking about these things in public is a part of how I am able to heal. My writing on this site is a part of how I work toward healing. Being completely honest about my feelings is a part of how I heal. And sometimes making jokes about really "inappopriate" things is a part of it too. So, though it may not be how you heal - and in that case you certainly have the right to go somewhere else - but for me, I find it incredibly offensive to be told that jokes about sexual assault are offensive to survivors of sexual assault. I will make that decision for my self, thank you very much.
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Some of us at Modern Mythology have started a small transmedia agency, Odd Duck Media, LLC. Here are some of the posts that've run on the blog there so far:
At first glance, things look rather grim for storytellers—or authors, as they are commonly referred to today. Bookstores are going bankrupt; traditional publishers are at war with their online rivals; pirated e-books are sailing the digital seas in record numbers; and of course, there are the widespread rumors of an impending reading apocalypse…
"Paper or Plastic?" (Which side of the publishing war are you on?) -Photo by Peter Usagi
But even more disturbing than the current conflicts in the sale and distribution of published works, is a shift in how writing is viewed as a career. According to author Seth Godin, if you're a writer, you have no right to make money anymore. It's a little harsh, but he does have a very good point:
“Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word — over.”
Blogs are dethroning journalists, reality TV and YouTube are turning the everyman into celebrities, and thanks to Amazon and Lulu, now anyone can publish a book. With so much freedom, and so few gatekeepers, publishing is starting to look a lot like cable TV: thousands of choices, but nothing worth reading.
Something happened to me recently, or rather something happened around me the other night that I can't shake. Maybe it is because my past of bullying, abuse and sexual assault is so much on my mind lately. Maybe it's because for the umpteenth time in my life I was fired from a job not for doing a bad job, but rather for being me. And the message the bullies beat in sinks deeper: you don't belong here and you never will. Just kill yourself already.
Yet this is worse, because by not acting last night, no matter the risk I avoided, I joined my abusers, as I did one other time in the past. You know the saying: those who do not act, when they see wrongdoing being perpetrated, may as well be doing it themselves.
I don't know. Maybe, but it's not so fucking simple as that.
I guess I should tell you what happened. I was on the subway i'm Philly on the way home from a science week event with my wife. And the two of us became aware of a group of boys in their teens bullying a girl who was sitting with her head in her hands. This was intense bullying. I'm not talking about a little name-calling. I'm talking about full-out depersonalization and hatred. They were calling her "IT" and saying things like "oh look, IT is crying. It thinks it has feelings! It's not even a person! Just wait til it sees what we do IT later..."
My wife interjected that they needed a new hobby but of course, after pausing and contemplating starting up with us, they just went back to it. As is often the case, there was a group of girls nearby who were giggling uncomfortably, half goading it on and half saying, "come on guys, that's enough."
I could feel the girl that was being bullied reaching a breaking point. It's a feeling in the air. You know it, just like I could tell when I was a kid when my moms girlfriend was going to launch a plate across the room or when the kids were about to jump me from behind. You get an adrenaline sense for this stuff but you lose the sense of safety. You lose the sense of safety forever. To this day I find myself sizing up every situation, calmly waiting for the weather to turn on a dime. It's often preferable to be alone because at least then you're not in a constant war with adrenaline.
But I did nothing. I did nothing. I had a bottle in my hand and was fighting with all my energy the feral urge to break it over one of their heads and user the sharp remaining head as a shiv right to the jugular of the other. But then I'd be a murderer, with a subway full of witnesses.
And as a bearer of life long rage, I have no middle ground on this. If I don't shove it all down, I become a murderer. I would not do well in prison. Plus let's be honest, do you think they would stop if I said "Hey you, stop!" Give me a break.
I also know how these things escalate. Pretty soon, the girl fled the cabin in tears and they followed her. I could tell this was no singular or isolated incident. She would be like me, if she wasn't already. She had been dehumanized by them and likely would be raped, if she hadn't already.
peter calleson
And still...I did nothing. Like the homeless on street that paw at you asking for money, like the desperate girls standing on the sidewalk corners willing to do anything for a bit of drugs or food or whatever their fix is, like the armless veteran-- after a while they all blend together and all you want is for them to leave you alone. We repeat the mantra: not my fucking problem.
And I am quite sure that some of you, especially the city dwellers amongst you, are probably judging me right now as being weak or too thin-skinned.
Who knows, maybe you're right. Maybe we should all lose the capacity to have empathy for one another. It certainly would make life easier. But I apparently can't. I couldn't sleep most of that night. I cried all night. And yeah, a lot of that crying was about me, not her. I didn't know that girl, after all. She has a whole life to live, but to me, she was just a symbol and a flash on the screen. The brief intersection of our lives brought back to mind so many things that I had buried so far in the past that I thought they could never possibly resurface. Thinking about it now I just feel a hollow spot in my chest. This is what humans do to one another on a daily basis. This society is deeply sick. These cases are not the exception, they are the rule.
Before you get high and mighty remember that it is often young teens doing the killing in this city. By stepping in you run the risk of being stabbed or shot. I have had friends in their thirties beaten and mugged by groups of 14 year olds. I've seen kids that couldn't be over 15 riding around with MAC-10s. I don't have any solutions, but I feel awful to know some small part of what is in that girls future.
Well. Some of you know the work I'm doing with Beacon Initiative now, and some of that is to try to right this problem. And I'd like to think the work I do with my writing and here does too. But it's really preaching to the choir. It feels like a drop in the bucket, so to speak. I really don't know if I'm accomplishing anything at all. But I'm starting, at least, by trying to heal myself and hoping I can do that at a faster rate than I accumulate new damage.
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In this class we discuss many topics raised in The Immanence of Myth: Pornography and the theatre of cruelty Abu Ghraib and the subconscious of the United States School shootings and the psychology of vicariousness
This is just the second in a series of classroom recordings from SUNY Binghamton in conjunction with this digital humanities project.
Class with St Stephen and James Curcio.
Background recording by James Curcio, P. Emerson Williams, and Scott Landes. Interlude track is from Bradley the Buyer's Used Using People.
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Do me a favour and think about beginnings, would you?
Specifically, think about that moment, that gap before you start something new - the moment; that breath you take before you begin to speak, when you're moving thought into speech.or idea into movement.
Think about reaching out to grasp something, maybe picking up that mug of tea or coffee, or perhaps closing your hand around something and lifting it. Moving it from one place to another. Most of us us don't think about such things, which is why I ask it of you as a favour.
After all, there's a lot that you do without thinking, and I don't know if for you, the reader, it's simply habit or muscle memory that carries you through life. I don't know how you move when you walk, how the weight of your body feels as you plant one foot in front of the other, how it shifts as you're increasing speed, as you're avoiding obstacles.
I don't know what kind of joy you take in getting to where you want to go, and I certainly couldn't guess how you'll feel after a day on your feet, doing all that you need to, day after day, minute after minute, hour after hour.
More to the point, I don't know what it's like to begin to walk, while your mind is on other things - to just blithely amble along. You probably didn't know either, until I asked you to think about it, as a beginning.
I asked you this favour because I don't know any of that, and nor will I ever do so. I can't go for a stroll, for a jog, for a run - there's no sidling, no sashaying; no hopping, skipping and jumping. No hopscotch, no tag, no home runs, no tries, no touchdowns.
I'm curious, you see. So do me a favour and think about beginnings, about the transition between not walking, and walking. Between silence and speech, and thought and action.
I don't usually post article stubs on Modern Mythology - normally this site features originally written content, which is why posts tend to come in flurries and then dry up for a while - but this article is really worth reading. I have little to add other than my agreement, as an independent artist living and working (sometimes with any pay) in the US.
Of course, those who continue to work in the creative class are the lucky ones. Employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show just how badly the press and media have missed the story. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession. Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – the bureau’s phrasing indicates that it is looking at all of the jobs within a field, including the people who, say, answer the phone at a design studio – all peaked before the market crash and and fell, 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design, 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years. “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – this includes everything from Celine Dion’s Vegas shows to groups that put on Pinter plays – down 21.9 percent over five years. Other fields show how the recession aggravated existing trends, but reveal that an implosion arrived before the market crash and has continued through our supposed recovery. “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011. “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later; jobs among “periodical publishers” fell by 31.6 percent during the same period. So why aren’t we talking about it? Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’smemoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever. Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith. And yes, there have been success stories on Kickstarter, as well — but even Kickstarter accepts just 60 percent of all proposals, and only about 43 percent of those end up being crowd-funded. Our image of the creative class comes from a strange mix of sources, among them faux-populist politics, changing values, technological rewiring, and the media’s relationship to culture – as well as good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism.
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(Note: Section 3 of this essay has been revised and reposted.)
4
Danny and I had lost touch several times before, only to have our friendship spring mysteriously to life again. I thought back to a reunion that occurred in 1977, when Danny and I had been out of touch for most of the five years since high school, which had about it an uncanny aura of fatality.
During the year of our engagement, Lisa was living in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in a small house by the ocean. The house had a large window that looked out on a bay. At sunset the bay would be transmuted into gold—a rippling sheet of it. The bay was wide but only a few feet deep, so that fishermen with their fly rods would sometimes appear to walk on water. The year was enchanted. It was a time of everyday wonders. Allowing ourselves to be blindly led, we put our faith in coincidence. That something did happen was sufficient proof that it was also meant to happen. If, during a stroll to gather sea shells, we came across a piece of aluminum on the shore, scorched and twisted, then it was no doubt a scrap of “Skylab”; it had fallen there for us to find it, and was asking to be transmuted into art. If we sat down at a table in an out of the way café, then the person sitting next to us would, almost certainly, be the friend of a friend of a person that we knew in Boston.
The movie Bully is hitting theaters on Friday, and it is making quite a stir.
The issue of bullying in schools has taken a surprisingly long time to reach a mainstream tipping point, considering its link to many of the school shootings that have destroyed countless people's lives, not to mention its presence in many of psychological makeups as adults. Some people are challenging its narrative as being too simplistic, overlooking all of the other ways in which bullying occurs in our society.
Be that as it may, it is here now. However, the public discussion on the topic has just begun.
Bullying is not just an issue facing schoolchildren, although in many cases the problem starts there. It is in our homes, our work-places. It is in our language.
That may come as a surprise to some. We all think we can recognize bullying, and certainly sometimes it is obvious: "I'm going to beat you until you can't walk."
Few would question that is an instance of bullying. But what about "I'm against abortion 100% . . but I hate to tell you what I think about these people ever being born"?
Or, "I'm not homophobic but I don't think being gay is right. But I know some of the SWEETEST gay people. Dang."
So much of our understanding of the sentiment behind language comes from inflection, context, and a variety of other cues that are stripped out of communication when it is just text.
Or are they? Plenty of bullying, harassment, or outright hate-speech occurs on Facebook, on Twitter, or in text messages. The sheer shrill volume of hate on the internet makes it seem that early detection of the sentiment behind such statements would be a valuable tool in the public discussion of bullying that is finally underway, if not a method to combat it directly.
There is, in fact, such a tool. There is a great deal of research being done in this direction in many domains, but the Beacon Initiative is putting it to use to track down bullying. What is amazing is that in their on-going beta testing, Beacon's software has detected all of the previous statements as instances of bullying. To do so, the software had to learn, and to go a great deal beyond simple keyword analysis.
It does this through sentiment analysis. Without getting too technical, your feelings can be “read” through the language that you use.
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