Prologue #1: 'Wind / Pinball' by Haruki Murakami

For a long time, Haruki Murakami's first two novels seemed to me like peculiar enigmas fitting of the novelist's idiosyncratic style. For decades since their original publications (in the late '70s and early '80s), they were only available in the English language as rare handbooks aimed at Japanese students of English as a second language.

Until these two novels – Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 – were compiled recently as Wind / Pinball (in two new translations by Ted Goossen), A Wild Sheep Chase was the earliest of Murakami's novels commercially available to English-speaking readers, and was, most curiously, the only part (unless you're counting the related novel Dance Dance Dance) of Murakami's “Trilogy of the Rat” available outside of Japan. Sort of appropriately – given A Wild Sheep Chase's playful pastiche of detective fiction – this context adds another layer of mystery to that third part of the trilogy: how, exactly, do the first two “missing novels” relate to this absurdist story about an elusive, otherworldly sheep? Why is Murakami seemingly opposed to these novels receiving international exposure? Who is the Rat, outside of his distant role in A Wild Sheep Chase? And who is the protagonist for that matter, who remains nameless throughout?

So many questions. Too many for a couple of skimpy Wikipedia stubs to be able to satisfactorily answer, right?

To expect these two short novels to provide huge revelations is probably to ask too much of them, however. This isn't a criticism, by any means. In fact, what is done within the relatively small scale of these two novels is a large part of what makes them such a joy to read; and, as with the rest of Murakami's work, the appeal lies primarily in the singular atmosphere that he is able to evoke. Even as his narratives have become more sophisticated and mature over the years, dealing with such diverse themes as personal trauma (Kafka on the Shore), the dark spaces of Japanese history (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and one's ownership of their own mind and identity (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), Murakami's strengths have resided to a great extent within his ability to convey a vivid and highly resonant imaginary space to his readers.

I was quite surprised to see that this 'Murakami feeling' was so present even in these early works. It's not a hundred percent there, but it's undeniably present. Even though Hear the Wind Sing is more or less a series of breezily comic and whimsically contemplative episodes in the life of a university student who spends most of his Summer drinking with his downbeat university dropout friend, the Rat; Murakami proves himself to be a writer with an almost supernatural ability to richly evoke nostalgia, melancholy, and solitude on the page. What struck me most was how comparatively innocent this novel feels: it's certainly not without its dark moments, but they tend more to deliberately juxtapose the self-deprecating humour and chilled-out introspection that characterises much of the book; like dark clouds on the horizon of a bright blue sky.

As Summer gives way to Autumn in Pinball 1973, so too does the general mood begin to grow colder and more depressed. In this novel, the things that once brought comfort and warmth start to become vaguely oppressive to its main characters. For example, as the novel progresses, the protagonist's tendency towards nostalgia leads to a series of bizarre emotional connections with inanimate objects: he holds a funeral for his old telephone switch board, and searches obsessively for an old pinball machine that he used to play in more innocent times. As for the Rat, he becomes besieged by anxieties, vague feelings of emptiness, and a worry that he's become trapped in a town that holds nothing for him. These themes of alienation – like the novel's more overt surreal elements, such as the twin girls who, one morning, appear inexplicably in the protagonist's apartment – would, of course, become a cornerstone of Murakami's writing.

Though Murakami has distanced himself somewhat from his first two works, and states that A Wild Sheep Chase is his “true” beginning as a writer, anybody with a love of the writer's work will relish this opportunity to see how the seeds of his literary world are sewn over the course of these two short novels. I'd even contest Murakami's claim that A Wild Sheep Chase was the novel that truly inspired his decision to go from writing to becoming a writer... all I can say to back that up is that the process of writing one particular staggeringly dreamlike episode towards the end of Pinball 1973 would certainly have inspired me to dedicate my life to writing fiction.

I'm looking forward now to soon returning again to A Wild Sheep Chase, and reading it with a new set of eyes... to see see it as the treacherous existential Winter to the nostalgic, lazy Summer of Hear the Wind Sing and to the anxious, depressed Autumn of Pinball 1973...

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Further Reading / Watching...

• Blog about Let's Meet In A Dream on Yomuka!
• This blogger has written about (and kindly translated some of) this early curio; a book of short pieces written by both Murakami and Shigesato Itoi (possibly best-known for his work on the cult Super Nintendo RPG Earthbound). The translated parts highlight Murakami's lighter side: there are some goofy short poems, and a (hopefully true) story about Murakami's own pinball habit.
  
• A 1981 film adaptation of Hear the Wind Sing
• I've not actually watched this yet, but it certainly seems interesting. It's a film adaptation of Hear the Wind Sing, directed by Kazuki Ōmori. Given how the novel's pacing and style can be compared to films by - for example - Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater, and Yasujirō Ozu, it should be interesting to see how the novel actually translates to the cinematic form in Ōmori's adaptation
  
• The BBC documentary Haruki Murakami: In Search of This Elusive Writer
  • A documentary made for the BBC's Imagine strand. It's actually a really good introduction for the uninitiated, which goes into some interesting analysis of Murakami's personal philosophies as a writer, how his own life and the world around him has influenced his work, and why this work resonates with so many readers around the world. Last but certainly not least, there's a bit where Alan Yentob has a natter with a cat.
    
    

I'm Back!

It's been a while. There's been no huge single reason why I haven't updated in such a long time, though I've been happily immersed in other projects since then (I'll come to that in a bit) and I definitely found that 'Epilogue' was a lot easier to manage when not in full-time employment and all the jazz.

The main reason I've decided to start this back up again is simply that I was reading through some of the old posts and remembered how this blog was a fun sort of "practice ground" for writing. Also I had a few ideas for posts that I quite liked... and, of course, a series of careful and lengthy ruminations led me to the conclusion that was the Internet really needs right now is more content.

Speaking of content (and let's stop using that word in that way, even ironically)... one of the projects I've been immersed in since this blog ceased posting to you, my non-existent reader, has been the album released under my noise-making moniker Mute Branches that was kindly put out by the Bricolage Collective -- a Glasgow-based collective gathering talented musicians from around the world. It's called Fake Real Warm, and can be checked out below!


One new feature I'm going to be starting up is called 'Prologue', in which I'll look at debuts / early works that I find are overlooked, unique, or maybe simply interesting to write about and examine in the context of an artist's later work. The first of these will be up very shortly!

Epilogue #9

Revenge
Yoko Ogawa
(translated by Stephen Snyder)



As a rule, I've decided generally not to cover short story compilations (a decision I came to after reading Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes) on the basis that there's often a lot more difficulty analysing and writing about them as a unified piece of work.

Having read Yoko Ogawa's Revenge (subtitled 'Eleven Dark Tales'), I'm unsure as to whether or not I can confidently describe it as a short story compilation. Though the said tales are all self-contained to some extent, a major characteristic of Revenge is how all the stories are linked in a number of ways.

The more overt, surface connections between stories are very skilfully incorporated, in my view. Rather than opting for making these short vignettes explicitly the sum of a larger, singular piece; Ogawa connects them more in order to illustrate how the insular lives lived by their protagonists can subtly impact on one another (events in the background of one story will be central or, at least, extended upon in a later story), and, through this, she is able to paint detailed portraits of her characters and settings without compromising the Kafka-esque minimalism of her writing style.

Backing this sense of connectivity up further is a strong thematic consistency. Broadly speaking, each story examines the strange darkness that lies just beneath everyday lives and interactions (she has warranted much comparison with David Lynch in this regard); something that is effectively presented, for example, in 'The Museum of Torture''s examination of how violence manifests itself within the everyday. The titular museum displays used implements of torture and violence alongside the completely ordinary artefacts of an otherwise normal, everyday, functioning home. As well as this, we follow the story's first-person narrator's growing feelings of anger towards her boyfriend as they spiral into contemplations of violence.

For all their dwelling on the strange, dark, and uncomfortable aspects of real life; Revenge's 11 vignettes are very accessible and - along with some short stories published in The New Yorker(equally fascinating and similarly evocative of a strange sort of eerie calm) - have made me want to explore more of Yoko Ogawa's work and, furthermore, to expand my knowledge of Japanese literature.

Epilogue #8

Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon



There are some things you can pretty safely expect to come across in a Thomas Pynchon novel -- hilarious character names, irreverent songs, staggering levels of research, perhaps a reference or two to 'magenta and green'... the list goes on. One could say, though, that there's a lot about the content of each work that's nevertheless pretty distinctive and unique amongst his canon. For example, debut novel V. intersperses a satire on New York bohemia with one character's obsessive search for an elusive historical constant known as 'V'; Mason & Dixon takes the real historical figures of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon and places them within a beautifully strange ghost story about the growth and development of the Age of Reason; and Vineland deals, broadly speaking, with its protagonist's complicated relationship with his estranged wife, his daughter, and the federal government.

At first, then, it may seem quite strange that Inherent Vice seems - in many ways - to be very similar to 1990's Vineland. Both novels explore the end of the ''60s dream' at the hands of an ever-growing and restrictive regime of authoritarianism; and they both present a drugged-up, surf-rock-soundtracked California as perceived by stoner protagonists. But, where Vineland flicked channels through tones and themes as diverse as political satire, melancholy nostalgia, eclectic cultural referencing, apparent zombies, and Godzilla; Inherent Vice sticks more-or-less to being a weed-reeking mystery novel reminiscent to varying extents both of the Coen Brothers' slacker-noir classic The Big Lebowski and the chaotic, atmospherically rich hardboiled crime novels of someone like Raymond Chandler (himself, of course, a huge influence on the Coens' film). That's certainly not to say, though, that Inherent Vice is - as some critics have argued - a depthless pulp detective pastiche.

The story - of private detective Doc Sportello being hired by his ex-girlfriend and subsequently finding himself dragged into the middle of a Chandler-esque mess of criminals, corrupt police / feds, and shadowy organisations - is presented to the reader in a way that will certainly be familiar to anyone who's read Pynchon before (and if you've not; then this is a great starting point).

The way Pynchon portrays the time period (beginning of the '70s), particularly, is in keeping with his post-modern brand of 'historiographic metafiction' (what a term): he, as ever, acknowledges that history is always constructed from the artefacts of the past through eclectic references to contemporary television, film, and music. Most interesting, though, is how Pynchon once again uses a historical setting to engage with the present day: the ubiquitous problems posed by gentrification are approached in a similar way to those of the colonialism that haunts his more sprawling historical works; the World Wide Web (and issues of privacy and censorship) is explored through its academic / government research-based precursor, ARPANET; and parallels can be drawn between Pynchon's representation of a paranoid post-Manson rise in restrictive authoritarianism and the post-9/11 'War on Terror'...

... Which would seem to lead quite nicely onto Pynchon's most recent novel Bleeding Edge (expect a post about it at some point). Anyway: overall, I found that - for a novel that's received some derision for being 'Pynchon-lite' - Inherent Vice was still rich in the detail, the silliness, and the seriousness that one can expect from one of Pynchon's works. It may be his most accessibly written, and it may not scale the same dizzying heights of ambition as Mason & Dixon or Gravity's Rainbow, but it's no less worthy of a place within the canon of one of the most unique and brilliant writers still working today.

Epilogue #7

Raising Steam
Terry Pratchett




I'd been thinking recently about how Terry Pratchett was probably the author who first got me really interested in literature, and also about how good a 'first author' Pratchett is: as well as just being in tune with the fantasy genre that's often favoured by younger readers, the knowing sense of humour and tendency towards satire and social commentary take it a bit further, Pratchett's use of parody and pastiche opens up a wealth of further reading (for example, the City Watch novels could lead one to the works of Raymond Chandler; allusions to the Dungeon Dimensions can lead to H. P. Lovecraft, etc.), and -- overall -- through adding more and more depth to the settings and characters of his Discworld novels over the years, he's created a universe that encompasses the influence of so much literature, while itself being no less unique and overflowing with originality.

It had been a while since I'd read something from Pratchett, and - having not read any of the most recent Discworld novels - I went into Raising Steam curious about how the fictional world had changed and developed (especially seeing as how many of the recent novels seem to be about the Disc's increasing technological developments and slide towards industrialisation).

I feel like, having read the novel now, there's definitely been some change to the world -- Ankh-Morpork isn't as comically drowning in its own squalor, and this novel dwells less on the fantastical elements of a fantasy world and more on those of a more recognisably 'real' and constantly developing one. Raising Steam is, generally speaking, about progress: when a young, enthusiastic, Northern (or Discworld-Northern, anyway) autodidact engineer invents the first functional steam engine, the reader witnesses how - around the Disc - various groups react to both the perceived wonders and the perceived dangers posed by the innovation. In dealing with this theme, Pratchett clearly still possesses the ability to balance real-world issues and satire within a fantasy setting (a reminder here that I should really re-read Small Gods at some point); something visible in how one of the key themes of the novel centres around an extremist reaction by a faction of dwarves against technological advancement and explores effectively how those with power will exploit the fears and anxieties of ordinary people in order to further their own pursuits for further power and control.

If there's any fault with Raising Steam, I'd say it lies to some extent with the structuring of the novel. The early parts of the novel -- in which Pratchett is introducing and gradually bringing together the various characters -- sometimes feel somewhat disjointed: I'm wondering whether this is to do with the fact that Pratchett is, sadly, only able to write now via the use of voice-recognition software. I can definitely see how such a situation would effect how one is able to compose something as structurally complex as a novel (especially one like this that is set in a multitude of locations scattered across what is a seemingly constantly growing fictional world); and something that I feel is redeemed by the fact that Pratchett's style of writing and characteristic sense of humour is highly conversational in tone anyway, as well as by the fact that - as the characters come together and the plot finds its focus - the novel becomes ever more enjoyable and readable.

Raising Steam may not hit the heights of Pratchett's best work; but it's nonetheless a very readable novel displaying not only Pratchett's ability to effortlessly balance rich imagination and humour with contrastingly serious themes, but also that he - like his character, Dick Simnell - has immeasurable passion, pride, and care for what he has put so much time and effort into creating over the years.

Epilogue #6

The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton




In my 'Epilogue' about Eleanor Catton's interesting (and highly recommended) first novel, The Rehearsal, I wondered how (and, I suppose, if) her style in that novel -- one characterised by experimentation in a modernist / post-modernist style existing closely alongside, I thought, a strong interest in relatively accessible, 'gripping', storytelling -- would translate from that book's relative brevity to the oft-stated immensity of her second novel, The Luminaries.

It was definitely something that I kept close in my mind throughout my time reading The Luminaries; especially given that it's during the opening part of the novel that I thought the ghost of The Rehearsal lingered most strongly.

This part -- centred around the character of Walter Moody wandering into a meeting of twelve men connected by a recent cataclysmic event in the gold rush town of Hokitika, New Zealand and eventually gradually piecing the twelve's individual stories together -- is similar to The Rehearsal clearly in formal and technical terms. Much like with that novel, the reader is thrown into the immediate aftermath of an event (in that case it was a sex scandal between a teacher and a student; and in this case, it's a particularly eventful night that ended with a comatose prostitute, a dead old timer, and a disappeared young man) that is delved into further through a series of interconnected subjective narratives, detailing the wider settings, characters, backstories and events that are explored further in the later parts.

What The Luminaries does differently, though, to The Rehearsal is examine that theme on a larger scale: both literally in the fact that a mining community is larger than a high school, and in a more figurative sense in its exploration of themes of how greed, exploitation and violence branches from the (then) emergent capitalism that is now a central part of contemporary life. Overall, I found the novel a highly engaging work that effectively balances a gripping, interestingly told period mystery with an intriguing exploration of - amongst others - themes like the unreliability of the historical narrative / the illusion that is objective truth; and the wider consequences of capitalism on social communities.

If I had any problem with The Luminaries, it's that I thought it lost steam a bit towards the very end; as the novel becomes more about simply describing events that have already been established. Though there were some moments of beauty there and though it was interesting to see some of these events through a new perspective, it felt to me like the one time where Catton seemed to become a slave to her ambitious and very careful astrologically-centred narrative structure. Overall though, I'd highly recommend the novel to anyone after a thrilling story with a bit more going on underneath.

Epilogue #5

The Castle
Franz Kafka



The final novel in the Vintage-released collection of Kafka's complete novels, The Castle, is one that's left me with a mixture of opinions and thoughts hanging in the ether -- much like, unfortunately, the story set up by Kafka in this unfinished work.

Out of the three novels, this is probably the strangest and most striking -- it's more strongly surreal than its predecessors, darker and also more absurdly humorous. We - like the protagonist, K. the land surveyor - are introduced to an odd small village that's seemingly in permanent Winter and ruled over by bureaucrats in the castle that overshadows it; we see the people who live there and their relationships with one another, we experience K.'s difficulty to do his job in this village (or even to figure out what it is) and the difficulties posed by the increasingly elaborate and deranged bureaucracy, as well as by the two comically incompetent and uncannily strange assistants assigned to him... and then...

Yeah. Unfortunately -- as well as being, in my view, the most atmospherically well-realised and gripping of Kafka's three novels -- it's also the most incomplete. Like the other two novels in the Vintage collection, this novel ends with a section put together posthumously from fragments and drafts... unlike with those two, though, this only serves to make The Castle end abruptly a little bit later than it originally would have done.

Nonetheless, it's worth reading for many reasons. The wintry, remote and peculiar atmosphere of the village is one of my favourite settings from Kafka's three novels; and the paranoia- and anxiety-inducing sense of bureaucracy that characterised The Trial is heightened with the seemingly incomprehensible system of government that oversees the village, while the novel also encompasses the more in-depth characterisation that could be seen in Amerika.

It's just a shame that it all ends so

New Storytelling: Gone Home / Kentucky Route Zero

Games telling stories is nothing new.

Within the ever-burgeoning indie scene though, there have been a spate of studios pushing the boundaries of how stories can be told within this medium. The two games I've played most recently -- The Fullbright Company's highly-detailed exploration experience Gone Home, and (what is available of) Cardboard Computer's intriguing, episodic magical realist adventure Kentucky Route Zero -- are two games that I've found particularly interesting in how - in very different ways - they pull the focus away from traditional game elements like strategy or reflex-testing and push it more totally towards narrative; crucially, without compromising the interactivity that separates the medium of games from film and (most of) literature.

Even though, as I said, games telling stories is nothing new; and though there are undoubtedly plenty of great games with brilliantly-executed narratives (to name a few, Grim Fandango, Bioshock Infinite, and the - for my money, unsurpassed - Deus Ex), the medium can run into unfortunate issues when trying to balance a well-crafted story with the crucial elements of interactivity offered uniquely by games. Especially if said game has a story that doesn't lend itself so much to gaming's traditional propensity for frequent violence.

I think the best example of this is Rockstar Games' 2011 game, L.A. Noire. An overall very good and ambitious game, with a complex and engrossing story and a highly commendable setting in the form of its beautiful recreation of 1950s LA; my only real problem with the game was with the unfortunate flaws in the gameplay. The interrogation mechanic was an admirable experiment, but suffered from overuse; and the more traditional gameplay styles on show -- shooting sections, car chases, quick time events, arbitrary collectibles, etc. -- sometimes felt kind of shoe-horned in for the purposes of adding some interactivity, in a way that limited the sense of immersion that is crucial to any story.

How, then, do my two examples deal with this problem? Especially given that, I should note, neither of them feature violence, puzzles, competition, or strategic elements to propel their stories.

What Gone Home does is take the attention to detail and focus on independent exploration that games like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock --- (fun fact 1: Fullbright is formed from members of the Bioshock 2 team, making them sort of Looking Glass alumni by proxy; which is, fun fact 2: partly why my brain is hardwired to like their game so much) --- used to flesh out story and character details, and makes this the primary backbone of its narrative structure.

As Katie Greenbriar having returned from travelling around Europe, you piece together the whole story through what artefacts you find in the house -- letters, journals, books, photographs, amongst many others. This mechanic, though highly simple, contributes a hell of a lot to the game.

Relying on this mechanic -- in a way, a sort of reincorporation of gothic 'found' narratives for contemporary consumerist societies -- rather than on exposition or cut-scenes, allows the player to be told a linear story in a non-linear fashion without it in any way messing up the game (contrasting with my experience of the very open Fallout 3, where I travelled to Rivet City too early and ended up missing out an entire mission path); making this a truly and commendably interactive narrative, where there's the literal interactivity of playing the game merges with that of piecing together the story in your mind from the various objects and clues you find in whatever order you choose to find them.

It goes without saying as well that a major share of the game's appeal lies also within the most traditional aspect of it: the content of the story itself. I don't want to spoil it (this is really the sort of thing that's most rewarding to go into relatively blind), but I want to praise the Fullbright Company for their telling of an emotionally resonant and touchingly personal story, and in a way that frequently and intelligently plays on and with our expectations of what stories the medium of video games is capable of telling.

This experimental shifting around of boundaries where storytelling in games is concerned is one of few things that Kentucky Route Zero has in common with Gone Home.

At first glimpse, the game behind Cardboard Computer's dreamy story, which revolves around a truck driver named Conway's journey to make a delivery through an America that echoes the worlds created by the likes of David Lynch, Haruki Murakami and Franz Kafka in its juxtaposition of the highly surreal and the highly mundane, looks more traditional than Gone Home. In appearance and general gameplay, it strongly resembles a point-and-click adventure game; and in how its story is relayed to the player, there are clear cues taken from one of gaming's oldest genres: interactive fiction (or the 'text adventure').

As you play the game though, it becomes apparent that Cardboard Computer are dedicated to experimenting with and reshaping how video games can tell stories.

This will first become apparent in how decision-making works in the game; differing as it does from what we see in many games - whether it be the 'single-handedly-build-an-orphanage-from-twigs-and-your-own-hair-or-kick-a-sentient-being's-head-in-and-then-nuke-everything-in-the-universe'-style big morality of, for example, Mass Effect, or even the more nuanced, pessimistic approach of something like Deus Ex. The decisions the player makes in this game (what Conway might say to his dog about the current situation, for example, or whether to listen to a tape or have a conversation with the person who is playing the tape) are often curiously mundane, or even humbling; but they serve strangely (yet very effectively) to really increase your personal engagement within the interactive world. As KR0's creators said themselves in this highly-recommended feature on the game on Polygon.com, "[it results in] a more human experience, a more empathetic experience. Or also more kind of mysterious experience where they don't feel like they're in control. It's not a power-trip fantasy".

As you progress through the game, Cardboard Computer subtly introduce more and more formally unorthodox elements such as the very minimalist moments when the game presents the player with narrative vignettes reliant basically only on an evocative duo of prose and atmospheric, seemingly implemented with almost surgical care and precision, sound. Most impressive of these though is the playing with narrative perspective; something that first makes an appearance when you find yourself assuming control over the character of Shannon, making specifically the decision as to how she reacts to meeting Conway for the first time. This escalates as the game progresses and has reached its (thus far) apex with my personal favourite scene of the game: a scene that I won't spoil other than to say that it takes place in a characteristically surreal museum and is comparable in style to literary modernism.

It remains to be seen how Kentucky Route Zero is going to continue with its innovations in future episodes, but the recent 'interlude' piece - 'The Entertainment' - and some claims in this recent progress statement from the game's creators suggest that they don't plan on sticking to a formula.

*

Both of these games have very good implications for the future of games as a medium for interactive storytelling as a whole; the independent scene, helped significantly by the increased availability of sophisticated production and distribution tools, is forever flourishing as a site for creativity and experimentation. There are tons of indie studios like Cardboard Computer and the Fullbright Company excitingly subverting and playing with gaming's traditional tropes and characteristics (for more of that, incidentally, see here), as well as those with ambitions geared more towards the unfamiliar and the avant-garde.

It'll be doubly interesting, too, to see how the mass of creativity within the independent scene will exert its influence on the bigger developers and the bigger games.

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Some further reading:

'Gaming and Fiction: Telling the Story to a Whole New Audience'. Lucy Prebble, 'The Guardian'

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/lucy-prebble-gaming-fiction-books

'On videogame debate, misunderstandings and the importance of keeping an open mind'. Tadhg Kelly, 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/on-videogame-debate-misunderstandings-and-the-importance-of-keeping-an-open-mind/

'From Bioshock Infinite to Gone Home: The Story of the Fullbright Company'. 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/from-bioshock-infinite-to-gone-home-the-story-of-the-fullbright-company/

'Breathe In The Road: Cardboard Computer and Kentucky Route Zero'. Charlie Hall, 'Polygon'

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/4/11/4158338/breathe-in-the-road-kentucky-route-zero

'The Making Of: Kentucky Route Zero'. 'Edge'

http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-kentucky-route-zero/

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Gone Home is available for £14.99 from Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/232430/

Kentucky Route Zero's season pass is available for £18.99 from Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/231200 

Epilogue #4

The Rehearsal
Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton has received plenty of attention this year for her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries. It was an interest in this novel -- seemingly written in a historiographic metafiction-esque style, and compared by some to the much-beloved-by-me series Twin Peaks -- that led me to check out first (as I'll be reading The Luminaries at some point in the new year) Catton's comparatively short debut novel, The Rehearsal.

Funnily enough, The Rehearsal's small-scale, yet ambitiously and originally presented, narrative brought to mind Twin Peaks -- though presumably in a different way to how The Luminaries' story of murder and greed did to its critics. I say this because The Rehearsal's story - largely about how the discovery of an affair between a teacher and his student has a 'rippling effect' across a small community of people - echoes, in a way, how David Lynch and Mark Frost's series presented the cataclysmic aftermath of Laura Palmer's death; as well as in how such an aftermath reveals and explores in some depth the strange 'micro-culture' of secondary school-age teenagers, to which adults are (against their wishes) excluded.

Though Catton's experimentation -- a chronologically fragmented non-linear narrative, elements of metafictional play, an modernist / expressionist favouring of heightened subjectivity -- may initially seem daunting and off-putting to some, I personally felt that these elements were used very effectively. Catton has praised the ever-evolving narrative form of the 'box set' TV series, and I think it shows in this novel in how - like with series like The Sopranos or Lost - narrative complexity and unorthodox devices are utilised in a more accessible fashion; in a way that is intended more to propel the reader's interest and engagement with the story than to shock or subvert.

Overall, I highly enjoyed The Rehearsal's effortlessly ambitious and brilliantly observed microscope-view of its small-scale settings and characters -- managing even, with its sort of ironic punchline of an ending, to conclude the novel in a satisfying way and without compromising this dedication to its understated and grounded setting -- and I look forward to seeing how The Luminaries will present such exciting originality on a contrastingly larger scale.

Epilogue #3

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Franz Kafka

Before I started reading from the compilation of Franz Kafka's three (unfortunately all unfinished) novels, Amerika was the one I had the least knowledge of. Little bits of information that I gained from the acclaimed literary journal Wikipedia had formed some expectations in my mind -- the description of the novel as more realistic and humorous in tone and the stated influence of Charles Dickens had me expecting something slightly different to what we may traditionally think of Kafka-esque.

As it happened, I was right in some ways and wrong in others. Though Amerika is less surrealist / absurdist in tone to some of Kafka's other works and is, in a way, more overt in its social commentary, there's still a lot about it that is unmistakeably from the mind of the Franz Kafka we all know, love, and credit for our profound feelings of anxiety about the contemporary, post-Twentieth Century age. His representation of the real nation of America, for example, is noticeably expressionistic rather than deliberately accurate in a realist sense (famously, Kafka never visited America in his lifetime, basing his novel largely on acquaintance's accounts and books about travel): it is presented as a sort of exaggeration of America in many ways -- sprawling, relentlessly fast-paced, modern and highly industrialised, bureaucratic, capitalist, and rife with social injustice.

From the very first chapter (which is also, under the name of 'The Stoker' published as a short story in many collections of Kafka's fiction) we are introduced to this portrayal of America -- the first sight of protagonist Karl Rossmann's new life in America is the Statue of Liberty holding a sword (a factual error viewed by many as deliberate symbolism), and as this first chapter develops, the reader - without even being taken off of the boat that Karl comes in on - gains a small, yet highly detailed (and, in some ways, foreshadowing) glimpse of America, its brutally hierarchical nature, and the simultaneous wealth of fascinating opportunities and terrifying perils that this nation has to offer to Kafka's protagonist.

As with The Trial, the ending of Amerika is of particular note. Once again, the novel's ending is a fragment chronologically removed from the previous chapter -- this is particularly noticeable in Rossmann's delight at re-meeting a character that was never present in the completed sections of Amerika -- and, again like The Trial, this lends an even stronger Kafka-esque sense of dreamlike strangeness and sinister surrealism to what would already have been a dreamy, strange, sinister, and surreal closing chapter. Though, in many ways, detached from the rest of the novel; I nonetheless felt that this ending fragment did serve as a very fitting conclusion to the novel, especially as I read its blend of optimism and off-kilter strangeness as a sort of warped mirror of the novel's opening chapter's curious blend of optimism and melancholy bleakness; raising the interesting closing question as to whether this new beginning will just end up like Rossmann's other less well-fated 'new beginnings' during his time in America.

Although Amerika isn't considered to be as influential or canonical as works like 'Metamorphosis' or The Trial, its nonetheless another fascinating, if tragically unfinished, novel from a fascinating, unique writer; and, with its social commentary and questioning of aspirational, individualistic American values and of the idea of 'the American Dream', undoubtedly is a novel that invites comparison with a multitude of later more widely-acclaimed works of fiction that have trodden that ever-fertile thematic ground.

Expect a final Kafka Epilogue on The Castle soon, once I've read that (which I'll likely get to after reading Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal).

A bit of news

I originally meant to announce this as the final Hallo Halloween II post; but, as the week's been pretty busy, I lately announce a new release from my music project Mute Branches.


Lodge / Saint Helena is a collection of two tracks that are tangentially based around Halloween-related things and that attempt to evoke those sort of atmospheres.

And, on another note, fellow Soundcloud user xciv produced a great remix of my track, Sol Delay, too.


To close this post, I'll say that I'm hopefully going to sort out a belated Hallo Halloween II post about Ti West's film, The Innkeepers.

Hallo Halloween II: Beelzebub Gets His Groove Back / Slow Walkers - 'Slow Walkers'

I'm currently typing this sentence for the first time on a bleak-looking grey, rainy day. Definitely a fitting time to listen to and write about Slow Walkers -- the collaborative release on LA-based label Peak Oil of experimental musicians / sonic artists Liz Harris (better known under the name Grouper) and Lawrence English.

The collaborative project (also named Slow Walkers) was described on Pitchfork in 2011 as being "a multi-media project about zombies [taking] the form of an album, video installations and a live audio-visual concert". Listening to the album, the conceptual links to zombies and to the genre of horror and horror cinema are not explicit, as such -- certainly not in the same way as, for example, Boards of Canada's more overt references to horror cinema by way of the soundtrack work of John Carpenter on this year's Tomorrow's Harvest -- but this overriding concept is something ever-present in the music and in the atmosphere of the music.

English and Harris' slow, crumbling, minimalist compositions make perfect use of noise and lo-fi drones to establish a bleak, cold, lonely mood and to create the impression of a wide, sparse, empty and abandoned space. Listening to these six tracks (which, for the most part, segue into one another) made me feel, in my head, as if I was Cillian Murphy's character in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (I know it technically isn't a zombie film, but - come on - it really is) walking through the vast and deserted streets of London: the once bustling, functional environment having collapsed completely within a very short period of time.

It's by no means a particularly 'easy' listen (if you're looking for a place to 'start' with both of these artists, this probably isn't it); but Slow Walkers is a conceptually rich and sonically detailed 40-ish minutes of dark, uncompromising atmosphere that is stopped throughout from seeping into the background (a potential risk when working within such abstract 'ambient' territory) through the compelling snatches of more kind of traditional melodic structures that we hear as degraded and broken (akin, significantly, to the structures of society / urban environments after a zombie epidemic), as well as through the fact that these deep and detailed tones and sound manipulations are all strongly characteristic of Harris and English's own distinctive artistic styles.

It'd certainly be interesting to see how well the album synced with the beautifully bleak shots of deserted London from Danny Boyle's 2001 film, 28 Days Later.
(image from The Phoenix)

With those distinctive styles in mind -- here are two recommended tracks from Harris' and English's
discography:

Lawrence English - 'Coda for a Fading Timeline'
I'll be honest; I'm much more familiar with Harris' work than with English's; but this, from Headphone Commute's excellent 87-track ambient / post-classical compilation, ...and darkness came, probably tells me that I should rectify that. Much in the vein of the work on this collaboration, the track is an short texturally-based work of broken-sounding ambient music in the vein of people like William Basinski and Fieldhead.
 
Mirrorring - 'Drowning the Call'
This is from Mirrorring: another collaboration of Harris', this time with Jesy Fortino (who performs under the name of Tiny Vipers). I reviewed their album, Foreign Body,  for BeardRock here, and talked about how effectively (in a way similar to that that can be heard on Slow Walkers) Harris' unique vision crossed and mingled with that of Fortino to create something that sounded unique and special to their collaboration. As well as that, I'd say that Mirrorring's album would be an excellent recommendation for someone interested in introducing themselves to Grouper's discography -- Foreign Body's dreamy, drone-folk showcases Grouper's distinctive approach to recording and production albeit within a more accessible context that borrows from Fortino's slightly more traditional singer-songwriter-esque approach.

* * *

Slow Walkers was available on vinyl from http://www.thisispeakoil.com/
and is still available for download (£7.99) from iTunes.

Check out the video for 'Wake', below...

'Wake' from Slow Walkers - Lawrence English / Liz Harris from ROOM40 on Vimeo.

Hallo Halloween II: Son of Hallo Halloween / A Small Assortment of Things That Terrified Me As A Kid

After the 'haunted childhood artefact' feel of Anodyne I wrote about; I thought that, in this bit of the run-up to Halloween, I'd write about an assortment of things that harrowed me as a young'un. An interesting subject, because I don't think - in adulthood - that we ever really experience in the same way that particular thrill of really feeling scared of a safe, constructed work of fiction.

Given the nature of childhood, some things I was scared of then are kind of dumb things to relate with fear (case in point: I remember an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters freaking me right out), but this list is mainly consistent of some legitimate (primarily) '90s-based recommendations (though, I'll warn you now, one of them is borderline impossible to find (save maybe through torrents or eBay or something)).

* * *

The Black Riders in BBC Radio 4's 1981 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings

I think the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, is my favourite part of J.R.R. Tolkein's influential fantasy saga; there's a smaller-scale mystery and creepiness to it all that, when contrasted with the cosy rural idyll of the Shire, creates a tone that I prefer to the later volumes' huge, epic-scale battles and quests.

One major reason for me having this opinion is probably down to my first exposure to the story being through the 1981 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings -- which incidentally I had no idea was from 1981, having listened to it as a kid in the '90s (usually around Christmas time; and in the dark for extra atmosphere), thanks to them having been released on about a billion cassette tapes. I remember particularly my infant mind being creeped out by the Black Riders -- who really represent more than anything else this sense of the cosy warmth of the Shire being broken by the mysterious, evil goings-on in the outside world.

Part of it, I think, was the fact that, with this radio version, I had only the atmospherically rich sounds - the creepy voices of the Black Riders, the scared responses from the innocents they encountered in their search - to use in constructing an image in my head; in a way giving these characters this really effective sense of 'formlessness' in my imagination (the sort that's well-trodden ground in horror: think Lovecraft's descriptions of monstrosities impossible for the human mind to comprehend, and how Ridley Scott hides his own Lovecraftian horror creation from the audience throughout much of his 1979 classic Alien).

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clip on YouTube -- but here's the theme music from the radio series (which is probably available in more contemporary formats than tape).



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Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII

Playing Final Fantasy VII as a kid in the age where the Internet wasn't such a big deal (the slow-loading forest of GeoCities sites that it was) is - despite how utterly tediously nerdish a topic it looks on paper - something that I do find quite interesting.

To my eyes, Final Fantasy VII wasn't just a game. It was a three-disc enigma; a hugely immersive world filled to the brim with fascinating secrets, amongst them the creepily elusive Emerald WEAPON (I could write a thing about that, but it'd just be pretty much "saw a creepy-looking monster in the underwater depths, went up to it, died instantly, learned to respect the boundaries of this madly ominous beast") and the - to my childhood self, especially - mindblowingly deep layers of hidden backstory (I once got really excited because I thought I'd discovered a cut-scene that no-one else had found; I think I remember feeling very slightly offended at the juxtaposing ambivalence of my parents when I told them the world-changing news).

One mysterious enigma that really got to me when I first played it though, is actually one of the most major parts of Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth.

I knew virtually nothing of the game or its settings and characters when I first picked it up and, reading the character list in the manual, I noticed Sephiroth's entry and how it's ridiculously vague - no picture, no age, a brief description of him having disappeared, and virtually nothing else. Then, gradually, this mysterious character sneaks into the story - bringing with him this huge sense of dread, frighteningly competent displays of violence, and twisted, tormented, borderline batshit motives for his world-threatening evildoing - and had me scared, as well as enthralled and immersed into the world of the game.

The extent to which I found Sephiroth scary can be seen in the instance when I woke up in a frightened jolt having, in my dream, come across what seemed to be Sephiroth's driving licence (or some standard form of identification, anyway).

Now, what the hell is that all about?



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Assorted episodes of The X-Files

I remember that I impressed someone at school with the revelation that I'd been allowed to stay up and watch The X-Files. My Fonz-level veil of coolness at that point would have smashed into a billion pieces if I had revealed that I had resultantly been unable to sleep (more like refused to for fear of alien abduction / a Jersey Devil mauling) and that my parents decided I probably shouldn't stay up and watch The X-Files again.

For all the show's wit and humour, I think the main thing I got from it was the threat of imminent attack by paranormal entities. In the West Midlands. It turns out I may have had a point (though I probably didn't).

Not much else I need to say about The X-Files; stick to the early seasons for guaranteed quality.


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The Realms of the Haunting

I think it's borderline impossible to find nowadays, but if you ever get the opportunity (getting past the whole DOS compatibility issues, etc.), I'd definitely recommend at least having a look at Gremlin Interactive's 1996 game The Realms of the Haunting.

The game is a first-person-shooter / horror adventure that puts you in the shoes of Adam Randall, who must explore an abandoned mansion in order to investigate the mysterious (and, as we find out, supernatural) circumstances surrounding the death of his estranged father.

There's a lot about Realms that's rather dated now - most notably the full-motion video cut-scenes (actually used a lot more effectively than many of its contemporaries) and the early 3D; but there's equally lots about it that stands up today and, in some cases, was ahead of its time. For example, there's the then-novel blending of the action-orientated first-person-shooter genre with the narrative elements and puzzling of the graphic adventure (this is two years before Half-Life received considerable acclaim for imbuing its first-person action with more sophisticated narrative elements); and the fact that the player has this expansive, haunting, excellently-realised environment of the house (and of the myriad strange places it leads you to) to explore, which is only really hindered by the fact that the player is required to switch between the four CDs irritatingly frequently in order to so.

My memories of playing it as a small child aren't exactly expansive, because I refused to exit one of the rooms out of sheer terror at the fact that I would be confronted with the game's first enemy; but, as I got older, I mustered up the psychological strength to soldier on and I can safely recommend this as a great, underrated and, unfortunately, largely forgotten game. Ideal if you're interested in seeing a relatively early example of an action game having the ambition to ramp up the atmosphere and story.



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Dr. Fred's voice from Day of the Tentacle

Messed me right up.

Hallo Halloween II: The Bloodening / 'Anodyne'

Once again, Halloween's on the way -- and I'll be providing, in the run-up, some examples of seasonally relevant culture-y stuff that you can make use of to keep yourself entertained while hiding from trick-or-treaters and their inhuman demands. Kicking off this week with independent developer Analgesic Productions' surreal action-adventure game Anodyne.

Looking at Sean Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka's 2012 game, Anodyne, there are quite a few aspects of it that that don't necessarily make it look like the most obvious choice of game to be looked at in relation to Halloween. The game's got a relatively prominent sense of humour; on the surface, it draws comparisons more to an old Legend of Zelda game than to, say, Silent Hill or Forbidden Siren; and there are plenty of moments that could be seen as lightly whimsical: for example, the girl with a bike called Wares, and a bear called James who asks you not to defecate on his berries.

Of course, in talking about how Anodyne contrastingly has many other elements that create a sense of unease (and in a way, too, that makes these aforementioned lighter aspects contribute to this dark atmosphere), I'll make a little reference to a compelling old online urban myth I read about a few years ago about a haunted Majora's Mask cartridge.What interested me about that (to get quite wanky about it) was how, like any good ghost story, there were depths to it that, through the supernatural elements, had some resonance with real life -- this idea of someone, in adulthood, revisiting something representative of the carefree innocence of his childhood and finding it tainted with the death and sadness that people grow to realise is an inherent part of existence.

I have no idea whether Hogan and Kittaka are aware of this particular 'Creepy Pasta' (there's nothing that conjures up fear and dread like a famous and widely-appreciated staple food), but I definitely think that their game shares, to some extent, this same vibe of 'corrupted childhood artefact'.

To gamers of a certain age (i.e. my age, and a bit older), aspects of the game's presentation and gameplay will likely evoke nostalgia. Probably bringing back memories of playing old Super Nintendo games, or maybe - if you're closer to my age - of playing something like the old Pokemon games on the Game Boy.

Further comparisons with such games (specifically something like Zelda) can be seen in the premise and storyline of Anodyne: travelling and puzzling through a variety of dungeons and environments, with the objective being the seemingly simplistic one of having to "save the Briar from the Evil Darkness". It is here, in the unfolding of this storyline, though, where a player will also first notice the 'haunting' in all the nostalgia and apparent traditionalism.

Emerging from the apparently simple and traditional 'fight the evil force' storyline are an array of fascinating, cryptic mysteries. You'll come to play through increasingly strange and imaginative settings (I don't want to spoil these -- though the monochrome world alone makes the game very suitable for Halloween playing); meet a cast of eccentric, bizarre characters and enemies who serve to compellingly complicate any search for clarity with regards to what's going on; encounter commendably nuanced suggestions of heavy narrative themes that include murder, loneliness and suicide; and, after the credits roll, you have the chance to experience the game world in a thrillingly innovative new way.

All of this (coupled with the excellent soundtrack by Seagaia) serves to create and maintain this really effective atmosphere of melancholy, unease and deliberate 'brokenness' throughout the entire game; emphasising the creeping surrealism of its darkest moments, and skilfully undercutting the moments of lightness, humour and naivety. Is the ever-shifting world of Anodyne its (with this in mind, perhaps aptly named?) protagonist's attempt to escape the pressures and stresses of the adult world by trying to retreat into a dreamlike fantasy representative of the 16-bit video games of his more carefree childhood days?

I, frankly, don't know... and it doesn't really matter whether or not you 'figure it out', because the challenging, yet addictive, classically-styled gameplay is accessible, entertaining, and never alienates; helping to form a complete piece in which the player is able to experience, analyse, and - importantly - enjoy Anodyne's unique complexities at his/her own pace.

Great stuff.

Anodyne (Analgesic Games, 2012)

http://www.anodynegame.com/

Available for £6.99 from Steam here -- http://store.steampowered.com/app/234900

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On a similar note...

Lone Survivor

(Superflat Games, 2012)

Jasper Byrne's 2012 independent survival horror game, Lone Survivor, is - like Anodyne - a fever-dream-esque experience that similarly works a constant air of unease and danger through Silent Hill-esque dilapidated environments, a relentlessly surreal and bleak storyline, and experimental survival-based gameplay mechanics.

Available for £6.99 from Steam -- http://store.steampowered.com/app/209830/

Label to Keep Your Ears On: Sparkwood Records

A while ago I wrote a piece about some tracks released by Above, Convenience Store! on their Soundcloud page; in this piece I'm going to recommend the independent label started by the duo, which is named Sparkwood Records.



At the time of writing, the label is home to three releases -- Above, Convenience Store!'s own full-length album Building in Search of the Sun; and self-titled EPs from the Elephant Frame and Eyesix.

* * *




Building in Search of the Sun continues the promise of the duo's earlier work; relevantly enough, I first listened to this from start-to-finish on a day that had kicked off with lightning, thunder, and lashings of rain. This is an album that reflects the storminess and the turbulence of the natural environment -- something that can be heard in the samples of rain on a track like 'Boneyard Stray Dog', and atmospherically throughout the album in the windiness evoked by the lo-fi drones and layers of distortion that can be heard in tracks like 'Mask of Mammon' and the aptly-titled 'Shaken from Earth'.

Also interesting is that this album shows the duo nicely branching out and showing a bit more of themselves in their music: while twanging guitars like those on 'Hierosheva', and the synth textures of 'Dusk Encryption' still sonically bring to mind the influential collaborative efforts of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, I can hear them using these sounds to explore different themes and ideas. For example, I get from this album -- from the storminess of the sounds, from the interesting title, and from the cover art's towering pylon against a sinister grey sky -- a sense of the duality and conflict between humanity and nature.

From a label that can be seen to (as you'll see from the other release) specialise in highly nuanced, almost 'visual', sounds, it's this full-length release from the label's founders that I feel really sets the standards.






With this self-titled EP, Oslo's The Elephant Frame certainly fits well alongside Sparkwood's founding artists. The five tracks on this EP have the same evocatively mysterious 'outdoorsy' feel of the tracks on Building in Search of the Sun, albeit with less use of distortion, which serves to lend the Elephant Frame's work a general sense more of grey-skied cloudy melancholy than the stormy turbulence of Above, Convenience Store!. As a sense of greater threat is introduced in EP closer, 'A Day to Remember' - as distortion and noise begin to take on a greater role against a contrastingly gentle guitar line - I can visualise a storm beginning to emerge from the melancholy, and I find myself anticipating what lies in store for future releases from the Elephant Frame.






Offering a different sound altogether is eyesix. In keeping with the general style of the label, this is music fascinated with and deliberately evocative of nature and the outdoors -- something that can be seen in the similar artwork, and that can be heard in the continued utilisation of field recordings / samples of field recordings on this release. Crucially different though is the mood evoked: where Building in Search of the Sun and The Elephant Frame explore dark clouds and storms, eyesix brings to my mind's eye a greater sense of a brighter atmosphere; something more like a clear, blue-skied Winter's day.

The Boards of Canada-esque synthesizer textures give the EP an unmistakably nostalgic, almost 'hauntological' sound (implied also through track titles like 'Nuclear Family' and 'Soylent Green'); and are coupled with a good ear for melody that helps the music act as more than just a vehicle for nostalgia -- something that I find can sometimes be a downfall with many artists working with this similar sonic palette -- as the music evokes a feeling not dissimilar to going for a carefree walk in a fresh, cool Winter breeze, as the sun retreats behind hills. Especially on the excellent 'Soylent Green'.



* * *

Definitely a label I'd recommend -- not just for the music (as in tune with my taste for music that blurs the lines between 'organic' and 'electronic' as it is) -- but also for this ambitious sense of almost continuity that runs through the work they've released to date: this sense that Sparkwood are a label who aim to reflect, through music, the various faces and characteristics of the outside world and how people can interact with it.

Details from where you can hear their music on Soundcloud, and stream / download (pay-what-you-want) from Bandcamp are...
Soundcloud -- https://soundcloud.com/sparkwood-records
Bandcamp -- http://sparkwoodrecords.bandcamp.com/

Epilogue #2

The Trial

Franz Kafka

It seems like there's not a great deal that I can say about Franz Kafka that's not already been said. But having read, for the first time, what is (except maybe for the short story 'The Metamorphosis') probably his best-known work, The Trial (as part of Vintage's The Complete Novels collection), I feel the urge to say all that stuff anyway.

For a number of reasons, reading this novel rarely gave me the feeling of one written in the early 20th-Century: obviously, there's the fact that the contemporary reader can most likely empathise with Josef K.'s frustrating dealings with a satirically absurd bureaucracy (I shamefully admit that I drew parallels between K.'s anguish and the time when I got a bit annoyed because I had to keep sending documents to the Student Finance Company). But there's a lot in Kafka's general world view that I think is very interestingly more in line with later writers and with the contemporary age in general -- the shadowy dystopian setting of The Trial, the depiction of a society controlled by unknown and un-knowable forces that exert their power elusively from a space seemingly towering above even the most elaborate hierarchies is something more akin to the culture and thinking of the post-modern age: the conspirators so frequently rambled about by Thomas Pynchon protagonists, for example, the vast conglomerates of cyberpunk fiction, or the almost alien figures behind the scenes of Mulholland Drive's film-within-a-film The Sylvia North Story.

Furthermore, there's been much notice from others regarding the fact that what - at the time - may have been read primarily as a darkly surreal satire on the bureaucracy of modernity gained a much more sinister sense of relevance in the wake of the totalitarian, fascist regimes that would contribute to the shift from modernity's world of order and categorisation into post-modernity's (rather Kafka-esque) age of increased uncertainty, distrust, and paranoia (hello GCHQ / the NSA!). This is definitely something I picked up on throughout my reading of The Trial: in the aforementioned elusiveness of its dystopian power structure, I noted that - far from being an Orwellian portrait of an oppressed 'Big Brother' state - it was (even though the whole novel is given a dreamy, surreal tone by Kafka's focus on the insular figure of K., and his effectively blunt and straight-forward prose) a more hauntingly recognisable dystopia: one where the governing systems' corruption and unhealthy disconnection from ordinary people doesn't make itself apparent (or maybe just doesn't matter to you) until, like K., you find that your fate is in its hands.

Though the novel does have a final chapter that ends K.'s story, it's a shame that Kafka died before writing what leads up to it, as The Trial resultantly concludes with an abrupt time shift. Though that said, it is quite fitting with K.'s constant state of profoundly not knowing what's going on that the novel ends so very strikingly and with such a crucial lack of supporting context as to be possibly even more powerfully Kafkaesque than Kafka himself ever intended.

I definitely look forward to progressing onto Amerika (and then, The Castle soon after) in the near future.

Epilogue #1

Epilogue is a new section where I aim to write a little bit about a book that I've recently read... Just so you know.
I'm back after my slight absence with my brows facing more towards the moon than ever before; and I aim to break new ground by blogging about literature without at any point making reference to tea or gin.
Like what some sort of enterprising pioneer of the form would do.


Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon

Around this time probably about two years ago, Thomas Pynchon was one of those writers whose work I thought I would be eternally intending to read without ever getting round to it. Since then (partly due to deciding to write a chapter of my undergraduate dissertation on Gravity's Rainbow), I've now read his first five novels -- as well as some of the hilarious bits of Pynchon miscellany that have been archived on the line (see: http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cohen.html / http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_dailyshow.html).

Most recently - as you can probably tell from the massive picture and heading above - I've read his 1997 novel, Mason & Dixon. After 1990's Vineland - smaller-scale, and more low-key in its thematic complexity than typically associated with a Pynchon novel - this novel represents more of a return to the sprawling, dense and tonally eclectic fictions of V. and Gravity's Rainbow.

The striking difference here is that - unlike with his previous works - Mason & Dixon's primary setting is far-removed from the recognisable 20th Century, modern / post-modern age to which Pynchon is so strongly linked. The novel follows a lengthy period in the 18th century, centred around the lives of astronomer / surveyor team Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, best-known for charting the Mason-Dixon line to establish the correct boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Despite this, it's definitely worth noting that Pynchon's historical narrative is firmly connected to the 20th / 21st century age of late / post-modernity... and it's this that leads me to talk about what I feel makes Mason & Dixon really fit with its aforementioned encyclopaedic predecessors. From his work, Pynchon's general aesthetic attitude towards history is (and for more about this, by the way, read up about Linda Hutcheon's ideas about 'historiographic metafiction') one that argues the importance of the outsider and the 'preterite': leaving us with novels that highlight how the present moment is always essentially the culmination of the chaotic mess of all events of the past (including, crucially of course, events 'forgotten' by or 'rejected' from the grand narrative of history).

This aesthetic approach to history and historiography can be seen in by the bucket-load throughout this novel: Mason and Dixon's tale is framed as a story told by the unreliably subjective and human narrator Wicks Cherrycoke to members of his extended family; the novel blends impeccably researched historical fact with obvious fiction (e.g. a talking dog, ghosts, a super-intelligent mechanical duck); a focus on the 'preterite' throughout history (the stories of slaves, indigenous cultures, etc.). Most significantly, almost everywhere is this idea of the many events of the past leading unquestionably to the present moment: it is as present in the largest aspects -- primarily, I refer the ever-looming theme throughout the book of how the innocence and naivety of superstition and religion / folklore gives way to the 'experience' of rationality and science in modernity and of commerce and consumerism in post-modernity -- as it is in the tiniest details -- the presence of Pig Bodine's similarly drunken ancestor, for example, and even a paragraph describing a grandfather clock that I feel can be read both as an extremely subtle allusion to the sort of shadowy almost-fascism that features so heavily in Vineland, and as an even more subtle reference to George Orwell's 1984 (for which Pynchon wrote a foreword, fact fans).

As is no doubt evident, there really is a hell of a lot in Mason & Dixon. Though it may seem a bit slow to begin with, and maybe not quite as detailed and intense as some of Pynchon's other work; if you persevere, it becomes apparent just how filled to the brim with detail, warmth, character, ambition, insight, and wonder this fascinating novel's 700-plus pages are.

Above, Convenience Store! - Tūndâr / Arvedálki Beaivvada (Foundcloud #7: A Set Review)

This month's Foundcloud thing is - unlike the previous instalments - going to be a look at one specific set. I think it's good to keep my possibly non-existent readers on their possibly non-existent feet.

What attracted me to write about this set was that I'd been particularly taken by some of Above, Convenience Store!'s earlier work that they had released on their page; in particular, the track 'Up to Jack's for No Good' -- a brilliantly atmospheric Twin Peaks-sampling piece that incorporates the uniquely eerie tone of that aforementioned show into an appropriately smoky almost trip-hop context.

This sense of the eerie and the pastoral is something that runs through much of the Norwegian duo's work: their hazy, dream-like sounds often sound lo-fi, but they never sound restricted to within the confines of a bedroom studio. Like fellow lo-fi experimentalists Grouper and Fieldhead - Above, Convenience Store!'s droning lo-fi compositions often sound as if heard somewhere in the vast expanse of the outdoors, from a distant clearing beyond oppressively tall hills and trees.




This set - Tūndâr / Arvedálki Beaivvada - is no exception. Tūndâr begins with murky reverberating guitar chords that gradually come to be accompanied by further meticulously-placed layers of distorted guitar and synth drones. All of this melds together to fuse into one huge, spacious sound that sonically recreates the feeling of harsh winds forcing themselves through the trees and chilling the skin.

Second track Arvedálki Beaivvada pretty much starts straight away with the dense wind-like drones, underneath which are snatches of melodies hidden and buried beneath the chaos. Breaking this is a guitar passage that, as well as being evocatively haunting, also serves effectively to calm the storm: giving structure to the thick layers of noise as they shape themselves to fit the guitarwork in a way that sounds appropriately organic and natural. All of this - in a way somewhat reminiscent of the work of Flying Saucer Attack or of Mirrorring's excellent Foreign Body - establishes a very effective dichotomy between subdued calm and stormy chaos.

While writing this, I also found that the duo operate a Bandcamp page -- http://aboveconveniencestore.bandcamp.com/ -- where you can stream and download two of their EPs - the brilliant Gasfarming EP, which contains the aforementioned 'Up to Jack's for No Good'; and the Planetary Exiles EP, which I have yet to listen to.

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While I'm here, I'd also like to take the opportunity to share the fourth instalment in Body in the Thames' series of mixes showcasing the music of the Drowned in Sound community, on which is contained a track of mine, 'The Almost Harp', as well as eleven other tracks by the freakishly talented members of the DiS forums.



Tracklist:
1. Ghosting Season - Time Without Question (alternate version) (DiS user worrier1)
2. Evangelink88 - Shok Shok (DiS user evangelink)

3. J Howes - TD-W700 (DiS user Howes)

4. Moth Effect - Toggy Dubness (DiS user bongodeldrongo)

5. Aquatic Slime - Howling (DiS user wasted_opportunity)

6. Cementimental - . Strangely Enough, There Was Also Electricity in Ataru's House (DiS user cementimental)

7. Internet Forever - White Light Collision Course (DiS users alcxxk, laura_wolf, & hrtbps)

8. Neon Highwire - Just Suppose (DiS user maosm)

9. oh-dude - 120 to 30, delayed and filtered (DiS user chris-budget)

10. Go Faster - When the last note sounds (DiS user dead_fred)

11. Falling Stacks - View of a lake (DiS users moribund & JimmyHuntspill)

12. Mute Branches - The Almost Harp (DiS user mute-branches)