Vacation Necronomicon School, summer 2010 reading assignment for 3rd August 2010: “Other media”.
“Your assignment today is to delineate your favourite modern writer, musician, or other artist whose work includes a true […] sense of ‘Otherness’.”
TASK EIGHT: 3rd August 2010.
Premable: I read everything worth reading in literary science-fiction and fantasy (pre-1985), plus the old Heavy Metal comics. But I no longer have the books, and my memory is hazy about all but the classics. In the last couple of years I’ve only read Charles Stross, Richard Calder, Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, and re-read Kipling and Tolkien. I’m now re-reading Lovecraft. I was never really into outright horror literature, other than Lovecraft, so I can’t really write about that side of the literary experience either.
I can suggest that Lovecraft enthusiasts might enjoy the surrealist New York poems of Lorca, written in the years 1929/30. His attitude to ‘the other’ in New York contrasts starkly with that of Lovecraft. The poems can be found in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Poet in New York
. Similarly Ayn Rand’s atheist libertarian philosophy — as expressed in the monumental novel Atlas Shrugged
(1957) — is certainly ‘other’ to the prevailing consensus, and still provokes irrationally visceral antagonistic responses. The novel may also interest Lovecraftians because it is deeply informed by the experience of New York in the 1930s. Rand’s writing and plotting is very tight compared to Lovecraft, but casual readers may be tempted to skip chunks and so the most sensible approach to Atlas Shrugged is probably via the unabridged audio book.
In fantasy film Mr. Miyazaki would be a good candidate. His construction of believably ‘othered’ places in animation is unsurpassed — the best starting point is his Spirited Away
(2001), seen on a big crisp LCD screen in a darkened room. The film certainly doesn’t lack for monsters, either.
In film candidates might also be drawn from the best examples of the 20th century ‘art film’. Such as the short animations of Jan Svankmajer; Stalker
(1979) by Tarkovsky; Color of Pomegranates
(1968) although it’s a little tedious in places; some of the films of Derek Jarman (ditto).
There are, of course, far too many names to mention in painting, illustration and photography. In photomontage photography alone there are hundreds one could mention. But perhaps Lovecraft’s New York contemporary Joseph Cornell is a stand-out name among the artists, creating both a sense of the cosmic and a sense of the ‘otherness’ of history.
Of theatre and dance — I’ve seen so little other than Shakespeare ‘in the flesh’ (rather than on DVD) that I’m not really not qualified to suggest much. But I did once see DV8’s “Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” live, which was very impressive in its understanding for the ‘othered other’. As to music, only early Gary Numan albums and some David Bowie tracks really come to mind.
Morrowind: But in keeping with the Lovecraft tradition of cherishing ‘pulp’ media, the work I’ve chosen to recommend is a popular videogame. The game is called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
(2002), and it was made by Ken Rolston and his team at Bethesda between 1997 and 2003 (when the final ‘Game of the Year’ edition and expansion packs were released). Morrowind is a single-player first-person-view PC RPG game, and one of the first successful completely free-roaming “go anywhere, any time” game-worlds. Here is a fantastical world that (more or less) successfully convinces the player they are playing in a really alien world, even complete with real-time night-day and weather cycles. Like some of Lovecraft’s fiction, the game is a successful blending of different sub-genres — a blending that shouldn’t work, but does. It has some familiar medieval RPG visual elements, touches of the Roman army are dotted about, and there are vampires, yet those elements are the just the ‘anchors’ for the RPG-fanboys — the world as a whole feels deliciously and magically alien once you start to inhabit it. Throw in a terrific main-quest story, and many carefully-applied details of world-design, and you have a deeply-immersive storytelling experience in a strange ‘other’ world. As with Lovecraft, the game has benefited immeasurably from a permissive attitude to fan works and modifications. Bethesda shipped a very powerful free world editor / mod-creator with the game, and for the last 12 years the fans have continued to create mods (i.e.: free add-ons and tweaks). At 2010 more or less all the rough-edges — inevitable in a commercial PC game — have been smoothed down or removed by the fans. Morrowind is possibly the most fan-modded game in gaming history, and there is a still a large and vibrant modding community.
Further reading and links:
My Morrowind bibliography.
My step-by-step guide to modding Morrowind and making it playable for contemporary players.
