Late Night Blog Post

Walking an old beat here - having spent an embarrassingly prolonged portion of my day procrastinating, I find myself in a fit of stubbornness working out in a park near my Sandy Hill apartment at an ungodly hour of the night (caught an old couple making out under a streetlight on the way back - they were adorably bashful about the incident) and now find myself unable to sleep. Part of this stems from one of those creative epiphanies which often strike me as I meander through those creative low-points when considering my fantasy world. I was sitting on the porcelain throne and cracked open David Day's A-Z of Tolkien, a deliciously antiquated old Middle-Earth compendium grotesquely illustrated in bold, black ink. The sketches are the stuff of nightmares and fantastic, Scandinavian dreams. In any case, from now until my limbs realize how weary they are I'm furiously going to type out a ramblings' worth of considerations.

When I think of Middle-Earth, there are two worlds which come to mind. The Hobbit was one of the first books I read as a pre-teen, before Peter Jackson's re-imagining and before contemporary popular culture had slapped a new coat of paint on an old series of cultural icons. The edition of The Hobbit I read was a gold-bound Bible of a tome cob-webbed with emerald-colored Elvish script and whose yellowed pages were lined with gold-paint the way those old King James' are in the drawers of hotel bedside tables (hence the reference). The book itself slipped out of a kind of stiff sheath. It was a marvelous thing - it looked and felt like a spell-book in my hand, so weathered and ancient (it was given to me by my grandparents and was probably one of the earliest published editions) that it read - to my juvenile mind - like an authentic history of ancient Britain. It seems bizarre and almost self-serving to say I believed Hobbits existed (or had once existed) when I read that book, but then again I also waited up all night for an owl to cordially invite me to attend Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on my eleventh birthday despite better judgement. Kids are impressionable. I have been accused of being a very practical man but in hindsight my household growing up was... well, pretty magical. My mom and dad went out of their way to make us believe in Santa Claus and my dad terrorized us into our beds on Christmas morning with a misshapen magical Christmas potato which he claimed would turned into some kind of Troll if we crept downstairs before my parents got out of bed.

Yeah that last one seems really fucked up, but I am shitting you not.

In Pitchfork's Chrono Trigger Retrospective he claims that 16-bit pixel art acted as a kind of visual poetry in the medium - that the constraints of the graphics gave the worlds we were interpreting almost more depth and realism than the gorgeous vistas and landscapes of, say, The Witcher 2. Part of this probably owes more to the impressionable nature of youth, but the same way the horror genre works best when there is no monster behind the door (and no zipper to give it away) I think the fantasy genre works best when its aesthetics are skewed through a lens of bizarre surrealism.

I know it seems like I'm digressing here but when I speak of Middle-Earth existing as two worlds I am differentiating between the artwork of its earliest inception and, say, the Hollywood franchise in which it exists now. Disclaimer - I am in no way criticizing Jackson's portrayal of Tolkien's universe, the man had his own vision. I am merely making an observation. Look at the weirdness of The Neverending Story and and note the similarities between its and the super deformed early Hobbit-artwork. Flipping through A-Z of Tolkien I am amazed at the violently stark contrast between earlier interpretations of Tolkien staples and their nowaday mainstream.

But there something to be said for that - something rustic and authentic about the deformity of Tolkien's personal cartography and marginal doodling. The same way Goblinoid's Labyrinth Lord sings an ode to Gygax's flimsy Creature Compendium.

When Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos he drew sketches of the new animal life he discovered there. When the Great Explorers plundered the fertile depths of the Americas, they drew their own maps. And when Tolkien drew his first map of the Shire, there wasn't a doubt in your mind that it was somewhere between Sussex and Brighton (or had been, long ago). 

Above are some of Ian Miller's interpretations of Tolkien creations, from Ents to a dragon that looks more at home in Brian Lumley's nightmares. I picked up a book once, never read it, a bad case of judging one by its cover, which had a grotesque menagerie of orcish monsters - all with deformed, oversized heads that were equal parts bird and equal parts Komodo dragon, adorned with Mordorian armour and weaponry storming the gates of some Medieval castle - that blew my mind with the horrible notion of how terrifying these abberations would be in real-life - mouths large enough to gobble a man like a leg of chicken. Like the Wild Things. Crazy, alien creatures.

Anyway, moving on - the Foreword to Day's A-Z is really what got me going earlier. I was not unaware of this fact, but it lit my brain like a halogen lantern either way. When Tolkien created Middle-Earth, he was driven by a need to create a mythology that he felt Britain sorely lacked. This may even contribute to why The Hobbit felt so damn authentic at first read. I have a book, The Stoneholding, written by a pair of Canadian authors who sought to do a similar thing with our nations geography (and I believe J. V. Jones, and hell, every fantasy author has attempted to do - think of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and why The Good, The Bad & The Ugly had such a stormy influence). So why not me? Instead of attempting to establish a moppish series of European provinces battling for political supremacy... why not establish a fantasy period-piece set to replicate the Colonization of the Americas? Why not have my Black & Green Jackets act as a mercenary rogues gallery of hunter-trackers in a largely unexplored land? Why not have elves - only draw strongly from Native American and Scandinavian Poetic Edda to morph a kind of unique elemental progenitor race of my own? Dwarves? Ents? When I dabbled (a while ago) into Inuit mythology the notion that an entire ethnic sub-culture lived in fear of the ghosts (or anima) of living things seeking horrible vengeance against them for mistreatment romanced me insensible. Why not have a race of elfish aborigines worship a god that is essentially the entire arctic circle? No, not worship. Fear. The "white", an elemental Zeus or Gaia of their own pantheon, as indifferent and ruthless as Howard's Crom of the cruel god of Afghan religion. I could likewise turn East, in select tales, and flesh out Kaja-Rang and his armour of dragon's teeth, and of the colonist Europeans and their own pantheons...

Getting a little big for my britches here, but I think I'll be cooling the embers into something workable in due time. The language of magic will still be pre-eminent, and the Fae, although now I have a whole other series of perspective which would warp its surreal landscape - the way Alan Moore's Immateria is warped by the collective consciousness of the human race in his Promethea series (if you haven't read it, fucking read it).

A whimsical blend of sword and sorcery, and flintlock rifles - of the Metis-like Tenes and the war between nations fought in overseas theatres... it makes for a rather tasty concept, no?

Melkor/Morgoth of Middle-Earth, mind you, is cemented in badassness as the Father of Monsters in Tolkien's mythos. he is to faux-British mythology what Typhon and the Titans were to Ancient Greece. Reading this nifty little encyclopedia I am learning just how bad a mother he is, and how many terrible monsters he wrought into creation from flame and shadow. There is something primordial about the concept of a spider-god as terrible as Ungoliant living in the dark of the American jungles in this new, unplundered territory that I think i may put into use. A kind of horrid goliath, as much as a spider as a dragon, a monster, so guttonous it would eat itself. I seethe with possibility!

I owe in no small fashion my overarching motivation to do this to my current employment as a Researcher for the War of 1812 by the Ottawa Arts Commission. I genuinely do enjoy trolling journal archives for primary-source evidence of older time periods, and the early 19th and latter 18th Centuries are just of seriousness coolness to me. My Modern Brit Lit class has me studying the proverbial works on Empire by Kipling, Orwell and Conrad, and fucking seafaring tales of Victorian derring-do and ivory poaching have given me a boner for Alan Quatermain and his imperialist ilk. Ho, boy!

Anyways, as predicted my eyes are getting heavy and my full-body cardio routine has taken its enormous toll on my constitution. I'm going to leave on an administrative note and state that I plan on segregating my blog-writing into multiple blogs; one I think I will dedicate to fitness, in that I plan to at some point within the next few months, attempt to cycle through every WOD in the crossfit WOD-book by category and chart the results; another, I will dedicate to my fantasy; another, I will dedicate to the creation of my Camerons-in-Afghanistan collection of narratives; and finally, this one as a kind of reviews and ramblings pertaining to writing and possibly schoolwork in general. I think blogging has become a pre-eminent medium in the literary world and overlooking it as an instrument of notoriety... may be unwise. 

I leave you with a sexy, sexy, heavy groove by Tame Impala from their new album Lonerism. For some reason I imagine chicks shakin-ass to that beat and it boils my blood with lust. 

The Darkness Comes!

'Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the swords, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.' - Joseph Conrad

Figure it's about time I start talking about the Souls games. The franchise which started with Demons' Souls has as of late reached what may be its pinnacle, and, to me, alot of it comes down to subtext, theming, and minimalism.

Some retro-activists in the tabletop gaming community (most notably those folks at Goblinoid) have been rattling the fences in adhering to the age old rule - keeping it fucking simple. The problem (as paraphrased by me) lies with too many people seeking to add epic scope to their fantasy worlds, drowning themselves in details and world-building, and possibly overlooking the whole point of escapism in general. In example, the absurd complexity of the Star Wars universe is entirely fan-generated. The original three movies were minimalistic and to the point. What exact role Jedi had played in the 'Clone Wars', and what role they played in general, became a subject of fanfiction and eventually - ironically - became cannon. But if you were to take only the three original films as valid source material... the entire Expanded Universe falls apart. The same can be said of the D&D empire, with its rules and regulations and mythos, which - though encouraging players to generate their own content - burden creativity with the wealth of pre-existing dogma, simultaneously making the game as accessible to just any Joe Blow off the street. If anybody can DM, then what makes a good DM?

The plot and scope of Dark Souls is barely explainable. You play a faceless adventurer. What you learn about the world, you learn by playing the game and actively seeking out that information. What little you do learn has birthed an online community of theorists attempting to make plot-ends meet. What you do know is this - you are a torch-bearer, in a dark, dark world.

In Dark Souls, you light bonfires - which act as way-points and rest areas. The further you progress through the game, the more light you have brought into the world, all the while being manipulated by primordial deities. You absorb information, and choose your path, as ambiguous a decision as it may be - and even the consequences have no event horizon between right and wrong. It is an open-world, whose magnificent vistas and bizarre landscapes beg to be explored - your quest is only restricted by its ruthless difficulty.

This game is hard. You will die. It markets itself as being hard. It has no qualms about its difficulty, seeking to fire the nostalgia of the Nintendo-core and provide an experience much removed from the contemporary mainstream. You stand alone against monstrous beings of exaggerated ferociousness, will stand in awe at the scope of them while furiously attempting to survive their onslaughts. You travel in a world made-up of dungeons, without refuge, one more perilous and beautiful than the last.

When Robert E. Howard wrote his stories, when Fritz Lieber and Arthur C. Clarke and Burroughs penned their pulp adventures - those adventures which D&D is based off of - there was no time for world-building or character mapping, only the furious maelstrom of creation, of putting pen to paper. Star Wars, three of the greatest films ever created, never bothered to answer questions about its world - only presented it to you for the sole purpose of telling a great story. I think the worship of J. R. R. Tolkien has grown too big for its own boots. Its created a market, in the fantasy genres, that look away from stories to sell worlds. Earthsea was once a single novella about some wizard fighting a dragon. 

I think there is something to learn in minimalism.

Anyway, I've accrued and have been reading (inside and outside school) several novels deems Works on Empire, notably The Man Who Would Be King, Heart of Darkness, and Orwell's Burmese Days (the latter being spectacularly written). There's something romantic (in a misguided sort of way I suppose) to me about British Imperialism. Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian soldier and haven't shaken entirely free of traditional sentimentality. I know I'm not the only one who occasionally sees the world in that light. Looking back to pulp fiction and British Colonialism in general, some parallels can easily be drawn between the concept of 'points of light'(that civilizations exists only as isolated outposts bearing torch against great tides of chaos and darkness) and the spread of Empire to the savage 'third-world' of the 18-19th Century. 

Hm.

  

Luminous beams are we...

"Inside a titanic hollow tree we approached a solitary grave & a badass ghost showed up to sing us a mad rhyme."

- The Scythian

Well, it's been a while since the last few updates. In that time I have crammed a great deal of books and media down my throat, as ever is tradition. I am flipping through Tides of War, another Pressfield narrative, whilst simultaneously rereading my beloved Afghan Campaign. Pressfield has this wacky ability to step into antiquity with a pair of Nikes - his prose and dialogue reverberate with the elegance of their respective eras but is chopped up and mucked down with slang and vulgarities to make it accessible to the modern reader. When Pressfield writes about a Macedonian phalanx it takes everything in your power not to reach up and make sure your not wearing a konos yourself. It gives me a taste of the verbiage I want to use if I write my own dusty memoirs.

The benefits of being an English student usually reside in the exposure you get to new, exotic, experimental, or even classical literature you might have overlooked. This year isn't the case for me, as I'm currently swamped with compulsory-credit courses suffocating me with pre-1700 Western literature and have been forced to look elsewhere for inspiration. I do, mercifully, have a Modern Brit course, so for every Kubla Kahn I get to read The Waste Land or a In A Station of the Metro. Tanith Lee's Red As Blood, a collection of grim fairy-tale re-writes, ticks back and forth between the marginally interesting and the creatively profound (although none come close to Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples). Picked up Hadleman's The Forever War, finally - finally - a book I've been after for years, a book I confused with The Last Starfighter because I suppose on some subconscious level I'm retarded and should be writing on a circle of paper. It is as spectacular as Starship Troopers was on first reading, ahead of its time and still relevant today as a metaphor for post-war blues. The time dilation and relativistic physics and hard sci-fi are all bells and whistles for the depth of the themes, and they mesh together stupendously.



Moving away from the military and historical fiction to fantasy, I finally got together the rest of Marvel's The Gunslinger, and it was a great experience. Maybe I'm the only one who's noticed the significant difference between contemporary King and the coke-addled, alcoholic wreck who first penned 'The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.' on sheefs of green paper, but the graphic novels illustrated by Jae Lee have brought new life to the fantasy series I fell in love with and that had since gone yellowed around the edges like an old photograph. King's weird "if it please ya" way of scripting is still prominent (so much less economic than "Life for yer crop"), but Lee brings visually to the Dark Tower universe what King's blistering prose did in the first four volumes - when he was discovering as much about his world as we all were. I also finished Lankhmar Vol. 2, Swords Against Death, a collection of Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. Nothing like a little High Adventure to set one's literary perspectives straight. I spend night hours hammering away at the worlds of men and magic I've drummed up, stoking the details like metal in a forge. It's nice to read and put a book down thinking "I should just write a fucking story man, talking books and kingdoms of clouds, whatever man". Another break of fresh air with Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away, a dark fantasy yarn about a fellowship of dying warlocks (and one dead, but somehow still living mage who only exists as a talking skull where magic is plentiful) trying to restore magic to the world by bringing the moon down from the sky. In a world where magic is as finite as fossil fuel, and when the wells dry up - castles start falling from the sky, dragons start disappearing, and the sword-wielding hordes start howling at gates unopposed. An almost unimaginative depiction of magic which becomes charming and fresh in its simplicity. Drawing the natural magic out from cloud formations to fly over mountain-ranges... excellent stuff. Actually, going back to simplicity's sake - watched The Neverending Story in all of its 1980s goodness for the first time since I was capable of critical thought. What a bleak, Scandinavian child's fantasy, where the world of Fantasia is being broken up by the Nothing and dying from the inside out, where characters go off on nihilistic tangents and heroes drown in bogs brought low by their own sorrow... somehow the idea of a horse dying of sadness is upsetting. A colourful cast of characters beset by horrors, the rock giant so tormented by guilt at his own weakness in face of global catastrophe he sits on his hands and lets the Nothing take him... and the Gmork, the Wolf, the avatar of a child's fear, who exists only as a foil to the forces of good and who takes on a fitting lupine form as man's oldest adversary.

Robert E. Howard's Conan, a book in leather-binding and gold-lettering and heavy and ponderous as a Catholic bible still sits on my shelf. To read through it all will be an undertaking, but at some point I will make that journey. Speaking of journeys (and the sword and sorcery genre), I finally ended my woeful errand at the climax of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, whisking the rainbow-loathing Scythian through the mountain land of the Caucausus to the lofty heights of Mingi Taw. What a fucking experience this game is; audio-visual, tongue-in-cheek, genre-crossing beauty. Jim Guthrie's soundtrack does for the RPG what Heavy Metal did for animated films, a prog-rock dark fantasy adventure game that is becoming a social-networking obsession and keeps playing you even after you've finished playing it. The moving back and forth between waking and dream, guided by the compass of the moon cycle and your sworcerous songs has does quite a bit for my own imagination. I talked (in other blogs) about navigation Night by Winter into the Fae, while nurturing the growth of my own cosmos. The waking world and the world of magic severed from each other, not neatly either but like two pieces of buttered toast being forcibly pulled apart - taking clots of the other's dimensional fabric with it in places, birthing some twisted landscapes. The death throes of a slain god digging out subterranean underworlds stained and warped with the stink of its magic. A party of rogues stepping up a mystic mountain path to the clouds, to Olympus, abandoned. Some grim imagery there, bro. Grim and fantastic.


"Scythia, Cimmeria, Assyria & Persia - these are all kingdoms of men. Mingi Taw is The Kingdom of the Cloud."

The issue I currently face with my own writing (at least in terms of my fantasy stories), is that I have a world and characters but quite a bit of the latter. Too many to reasonably mash together. And I just need to accept this and start decided which stories I want which characters to star in. Which chain of short stories. The rogues gallery of the Black & Green Jackets, the intrepid highlanders of the Winged-Isles, a mercenary band of fortune-seekers left adrift after a decade of warfare trying to make their own in a dark country. Robin Hood's merry men meet Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, flintlock pistols and magic crystals, monsters hunters for the buck. I sympathize with the characters on a personal level and their world comes alive to me - Tuck, the amputee alchemist and physick; Alain-a-dayle, songwriter and swordsman (these two tend to foil each other); Black Tom, a ponderous rifleman and wizard; Robb Scarlett, a savage bowman and fusilier; Tam Two-Trees, a blue-bearded lusty strongman; and Six-Penny John, a rogue favored by the gods of chance and game. Their stories at war and at home, midst political turmoil and outlawry in trying economic times. And where to? Hired by a dragon to slay another, perhaps - the worm eating through the apple of the world perched over the frozen god-graveyard of Non.





And the other cast; the mute swordsman who wields a wooden cane, who knows the name of steel and can break and bend it with a word; the dauntless half-fae girl whose voices brings heroes together; the bawling sailor whose songs bring storms; the boy who paints spells into being out of thin air; the Methuselah whose word is God; the red-haired Lleu walking between two worlds...

These who would climb a mountain floating over the earth and walk the shattered streets of city, built for gods, and slay their ghosts.

I can bind this shit together, yo.

Below are enclosed the words of Yoda - because Empire is one of the greatest examples of storytelling in humanity's history and it should be consulted if one is seriously expected to write stories. On that note, I'm reading Fraser's The Golden Bough, Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces and his Occidental and Oriental Mythology. I will let you know what I think. Out.




“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.”

- Yoda