On IntroComp 2011

Now that the IntroComp 2011 voting period has finished, I have some notes on all the entries. They’re not evaluative reviews with numerical scores, mind you, but general impressions. There will, however, be spoilers. But first I have some business.

Since high school I’ve been using the pseudonym Kazuki Mishima for a few things. Well, that’s going to stop now. My real name is Dominic Delabruere and I’m sticking to it.

That brings me to the second item on my agenda. I entered IntroComp 2011. That’s why I couldn’t publish my thoughts about the competition entries earlier.

I think it might be a little unorthodox for a competition author to write about other folks’ entries at all, but I think IntroComp authors enter largely for feedback, so I’m having a go anyway.

So here are my notes on the entries, in no particular order, starting with my own.

Stalling for Time

I have prepared a post-IntroComp version of this intro that fixes the most embarrassing bugs, and will publish this version as soon as I can. If ClubFloyd plays the IntroComp entries as they have in the past, I hope they’ll play this updated version. Not that it adds much to the story, as I went on hiatus during the competition.

I had big plans for this one. Still do. I have vague but grand plans to turn the story on its head. But the intro something of a train wreck, as I made two major mistakes with it:

1. Entering IntroComp. I had only just started the project after releasing my previous game “Pale Blue Light” at the end of May, and didn’t give myself the time I needed to really get a solid introduction going. I know some authors write excellent games in only two hours, but I can barely cobble something together in two months. I spent a whole lot of that time just trying to work out the myriad implementation problems with the barely implemented car that appears in the game. At one point there was a bug — the cause of which is still uncertain — that resulted in the car driving away without the player if the player entered the car and typed GO EAST.
2. Last-minute bug-fixes. I made some last-minute bug-fixes to my entry without running them by my testers, and the result was that I created more bugs — nasty, obvious, embarrassing ones. Complicating matters, my copy of the Inform 7 IDE has been crashing lately whenever I enter a few commands into the game. This makes testing a bit difficult.

My entry was very flawed and somewhat insubstantial, so any criticism I make of the others is meant only as friendly peer advice and not some sort of self-justifying comparison to my own work, I swear.

That said, my favorite review of the “Stalling for Time” intro is on Leandro Ribeiro’s blog Fourty Two Hooks.

Bender, by Katz (Colleen Boye)

When I first saw the title of this one, I thought of my second favorite Futurama character. However, the word Bender and the supernatural abilities of both this game’s player characters are apparently lifted more-or-less directly from the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender. But the game itself is set in modern-day Utah. The first interactive scene in the game features a Sokoban-like map with moveable walls, but the player still enters commands with the parser. The game than switches to a new player character driving alone through the desert when she stumbles upon the first player character. Some emergency medicine and plot exposition follow.

The plot so far may be brazenly derivative, and the implementation somewhat narrow, but I hope this one gets finished. I can imagine having fun with it, especially if that Sokoban style mechanism is improved and put to further use. But I suggest to the author she consider re-implementing the graphics using Erik Temple’s Glimmr extensions for Glulx Inform 7 games, instead of using this Z-code status-line hackery, which has a more variable appearance from interpreter to interpreter than Glulx graphics would.

Of Pots and Mushrooms, by Devi and Maya

This was the first ChoiceScript entry I played. I like that its title doesn’t begin with Choice of, like most most ChoiceScript titles seem to do. The authors include a link to a Fullmetal Alchemist-Bleach crossover story they posted on FanFiction.net, and the game reads like fan fiction, with that peculiar style of comedy puctuated by CAPS LOCK antics. Also, the opening sentence (“You’re a Chinese samurai imprisoned in Japan.”) is rather hard to swallow, even given the authors’ warning of “historical and geographical inaccuracies.” There are a number of typographical errors. I imagine the game was coded in a text editor with no built-in spelling correction mechanism.

The game forced a couple of character-building decisions on me at one point, outright asking me whether I was defined more by charisma or independence, and whether I valued my wits or my swordsmanship more. This broke my engagement with the story.

The protagonist’s name is either Amber Tombslayer, Ice Banedread, Cult Midnighthuner, or something the player types in. I played as Joe. I sometimes found that none of the options at a decision point was quite what I wanted. At one point, another character turns out to be some sort of young political activist opposing the policies of sakoku, but I was never very well convinced of the game’s setting, especially because this is supposed to be Japan during its period of national isolation, and yet the country is apparently teeming with foreigners. At least four of the characters mentioned are from other lands.

At the end of the game I had a sense that its story could go just about anywhere. There is a larger objective — to make enough money for boat fare to mainland Asia — but there’s very little foreshadowing about the sort of places the player character will visit on his journey.

Seasons, by Poster

This one’s got me a bit stumped. I’ve wandered all over the (considerably large) map and done all the actions that seem obvious to me, but I haven’t found the end to the entry. Maybe there just isn’t one yet, not even a temporary one. If that’s so, I don’t particularly mind, except inasmuch as I wasn’t at all sure I’d “finished” when I quit. But maybe I’m just a terrible player and missed the ending. Also, I encountered a library error that, once it appeared, recurred every time I walked to another location. Not that I didn’t quickly get used to it. One reviewer says that he encountered another bug that drastically altered the game’s map, opening up previously inaccessible locations, which seem to be unfinished. I was unable to replicate that bug, so I missed out on all the extra rooms. There are a couple of NPCs that don’t yet seem to have very large knowledge bases, but are open to conversation.

What really makes the IntroComp version of Seasons worth playing is its room descriptions. This game just oozes atmosphere; it’s set in a forest so richly described that I envisioned it all in dazzling color as I read. Also interesting are the dream fragments that are remembered and appear unexpectedly in various locations. Some of these are pretty darn spooky, and all of them capture the elusive qualities of dream experiences.

Don’t ask me why, but I have a feeling this one is going to turn into some sort of Christian allegory, though nothing in the game explicitly marks it as such.

I’m pretty hopeful that Seasons will be finished. Poster, who submitted this entry as MT, is a veteran author of interactive fiction and seems to have a pretty good idea where he’s going with this.

Choice of the Petal Throne, by Danielle Goudeau

This ChoiceScript entry has as its setting a fantasy world called Tékumel, created by one M.A.R. Barker and borrowed with his permission. Most of the choices seem subtly engineered to establish the player character’s personality and various characteristics, and the game introduction seems to end at about the point when the player has established the basics of his or her character. I found the range of options at most decision points impressive. Several decisions in, the game even uses the introduction of a past lover to slip in a rather inconspicuous choice of gender and sexual orientation, with the options boiling down to male or female and heterosexual or homosexual. This would be a rather limiting set of options for a social network profile, but I find it very open-ended for a multiple choice game. It seems you can also choose how ambitious or shy your character is, how easily he or she angers, how long he or she holds a grudge, and even his or her tastes in art. And all of this is very neatly integrated into the narrative; the decisions the player must make never feel contrived.

The writing is competent and polished overall, if a bit exposition-heavy. It feels very much bound to the fantasy genre, but it is pleasant enough to read that once I got past all the invented-language terms and imagined textiles I tend to find off-putting, I found myself caught up in the establishment of my character and the exploration of the elaborate and deep setting. What there is of the plot so far follows stock fantasy tropes, but the end of the introduction left me hopeful that some genuinely interesting developments are forthcoming.

Chunky Blues, by Scott Hammack and Jessamin Yu

In their “intro to the intro,” the authors say that “the reception to this will likely determine whether [they] actually finish the game.” Authors, please finish the game.

The protagonist is a private eye, and the game uses a mental association mechanism called chunking to form theories about the game’s mystery. I think I enjoyed using this mechanism a lot more than some of the reviewers did, especially because it gets around that age-old mystery game problem of the frustration caused when the player just can’t get the player character to make certain theoretical connections. A quirk in the chunking system kept me trapped in dank alley during my second and third playthroughs, but I’m nonetheless quite enthusiastic about the potential here.

A few times I tried to undo a turn, and thus crashed the game. I think this is a bug in my Gargoyle Glulx interpreter.

Unfortunately, I didn’t reach the ending of the intro in my first few playthroughs due to some quirks in the chunking system and my neglecting to explore a certain conversation topic with a certain hamburger joint owner. Sometimes the order in which I chunked things seemed to matter in ways I didn’t expect. For example, CHUNK ADDRESS AND NAME didn’t achieve anything, but CHUNK NAME AND ADDRESS did.

Apart from that little difficulty, though, I was so charmed by this game, and intrigued enough by the mystery at hand, that I really want more. I’m not really sure why, but I dug the quirky humor, the noir trappings, the mystery, and the chunking more than other folks seem to have done.

Exile, by Simon

Sorry, but I only played this one once, so this review is based on a single branch of the story. The setting for this one is a fantasy world, though, unlike the world of, say Choice of the Petal Throne, this one is light fantasy more likely inspired by the works of the late Diana Wynne Jones than by Tolkein’s Middle Earth.

Decision points in this ChoiceScript game often appear only to provide choices that don’t have clear significance or don’t seem significantly different. Sometimes there’s only one choice for a given decision point. Sometimes the protagonist makes a few choices without any input from the player at all. Once I made what I thought was a rational decision, and the game effectively ignored me, saying that I felt mysteriously pulled to do something else instead. So I didn’t really feel like I was an active agent in the storytelling process.

The writing is often overstated, but harmless.

A clear conflict and an obvious motive for the player character were established by the end. The main problem with the story is that the characters often seemed shallow and cartoonish, especially the main villain I encountered. Also, making the player character an amnesiac blank slate with little personality really didn’t help me find a reason to care about him. Still, I’d like to see how things play out.

Gargoyle, by Simon (again)

Another ChoiceScript entry by Simon. The setting here is light medieval fantasy. The protagonist is a gargoyle. I named my gargoyle Kenji.

The game began with a summary of Kenji’s childhood. The problem of meaningless choices that plagued Exile didn’t appear in Gargoyle. As in Choice of the Petal Throne, there was a summary of the protagonist’s childhood, with player decisions that shaped the development of the character. Interestingly, Gargoyle lets the player choose male, female, or “neither nor” as the gender of the protagonist, though sexual preference is never brought up. I wonder if choosing “neither nor” will cause his or her-type pronoun awkwardness later in the story. The setting and events are given only a very shallow description, and it seems that the whole game is meant to serve the battle and statistics mechanics that are established throughout. The personality of the player character doesn’t really seem to enter into it much. The narrative implies the alienation of a gargoyle that “[has] yet to meet another of [his or her] kind,” but tosses aside that plot point to focus on whether the protagonist will learn “life magic” or combat skills, etc.

At one decision point in this game what seemed to me the only reasonable course of action was disabled, and bore a note reading “NOT IMPLEMENTED YET.” At the next decision point, in which I was supposed to choose the Kenji’s side in battle, the game proceeded to coral him into aiding a violent invasion of his home castle, as the other option was similarly disabled. After this, I stopped caring about the Kenji, though I had named and raised him. I no longer understood his motivations. Not long afterward, the intro ended.

Parthenon, by Charles Wickersham

Most of this intro focuses on the player character wandering about various rooms that are meant to represent the interior of the Parthenon. The rooms are described according to an awkward mechanism whereby entering a room for the first time results only in a sentence or two from an unimplemented tour-guide, and subsequent iterations of the room description replace this with a somewhat more detailed inventory of mostly unimplemented features of the location and a list of available exits. The player character is followed about by a “significant other” named Cameron, who doesn’t seem very interested in conversation. An attempt to make the player character kiss Cameron results in a stock response: “Keep your mind on the game.” The intro ends with a long, not-at-all foreshadowed cutscene which drastically changes the apparent narrative direction. The concluding text is a cryptic, rhyming tagline about a door which is apparently supposed to serve as a clue to solving the rest of game.

Given that most of the intro seems to be irrelevant to the direction the story takes at the end, it’s hard to know just what to expect from this one.

Speculative Fiction, by Diane Christoforo and Thomas Mack

Like Chunky Blues, this one’s got a quirky sense of humor that tickled me the right way. It’s also got a very strong narrator character, and a peculiarly well-defined relationship between the narrator, who actually carries out the player’s commands, and the player character. The narrator is a character with an interesting set of physical characteristics and a strong personality. The comic mischief he (or she?) must carry out to solve the intro’s main puzzle is clever, funny stuff. At first I had some minor trouble figuring out where the exits were, but then I noticed the map distributed with the game. I do definitely look forward to more of this.

The Despondency Index, by Ed Blair

Oh, wow! Over already? This entry is about as short as mine. This looks to be a combination of the horror, mystery, and police procedural genres. Sounds like a good time. There’s some appropriately creepy atmosphere, some very long stretches of static text, and an opening sequence narrated in the third person, in which a hapless journalism student is murdered in the woods and there’s nothing you can do about it except type GO SOUTH in vain until it happens. Why south, you may well ask? Well, this is all happening “north of San Francisco,” so I figure it’s best to run toward civilization. Like the Parthenon intro, this one ends with a sudden and spectacular event that comes out of nowhere, though in this case it feels appropriately foreshadowed.

Please do continue, Mr. Blair. I’ll play this.

Choice of Zombies, by Heather Albano

This zombie survival ChoiceScript entry is infused with zany humor — take this passage, for example:

He rises from his crouch, teeth bared, leg in hand. Some of the zombie herd move towards him. (Herd? Is that the right word? Maybe a flock? A decomposition of zombies or an infestation perhaps? ANYWAY…)

And yet the prose generally displays a certain level of refinement as well:

In search of ideas, you switch on the radio. “. . . have upgraded the Zombie Watch to a Zombie Warning for the following counties,” the radio says, and then the announcer rattles off a long list. The announcer seems pretty rattled herself.

This is Jeremy Freese-grade stuff. Come to think of it, weren’t there lots of zombies in Violet? Chunking these facts together, I’ve formulated the Nom de Plume Theory. I’m onto you, “Heather Albano!” And yet the prose generally displays a certain level of refinement as well. It’d yet the prose generally displays a certain level of refinement as well.

The plot itself is stock Romero-style zombie stuff. The gameplay is a satisfying blend of anti-zombie combat tactics and character-building.

May I please have some more?

The Z-Machine Matter, by Zack Urlocker

The characters in this murder mystery are classic noir personalities, and the allusions to the history of interactive fiction and its community are completely over top. There’s a whole lot to investigate, and plenty of topics to discuss with each of the seven non-player characters. The author has gone out of his way to provide things to talk about. The only real problem with NPC interaction is that conversations sometimes come out sounding disjointed in tone and subject.

At one point in the first act, I had to get a femme fatale named Monica to leave the player character’s motel room. It took me quite a while to try the obvious — one kiss and she was gone! That made me smile.

The objective of the second act is announced thus:

There’s a quick flash of lightning and a slow, loud rumble of thunder and you realize you’ve got a deadline of midnight to gather evidence and testimony and report back to the police.

This seemed like a particularly arbitrary sort of timer, so I felt a good deal of trepidation at this point. But maybe this is some sort of oblique reference to the two-hour judging limit for IFComp games. And anyway, two hours means 240 turns in this game. I went about the mansion in which the bulk of the intro is set, digging up all sorts of interesting clues, and then someone died before I even noticed he existed, so I decided to start over. Then my operating system hit a kernel panic and I decided to call it a night. The next day I resorted to the walkthrough, which turns out to be actually a full transcript, and thus discovered some clues I’d missed at first. I also found out the point where I had quit earlier was just a turn or two away from the end of the intro!

The gameplay here is highly reminiscent of the Infocom era, with all sorts of timed events happening all over the map, a wealth of particularly important objects, and a clear mission to accomplish. Whilst playing I often had the feeling I was missing something important. Yet the game takes full advantage of Inform 7 and its extensions, incorporating a keyword interface and automatic spelling correction. And it’s all rather more polished than one might expect from a first-time author like Mr. Urlocker.

What’s here is rather more than an intro — Urlocker has called it an alpha release — yet purportedly it represents only about 28% of the planned game. Anyway, it’s already quite an achievement, and obviously a labor of love.

Well, that’s all the IntroComp entries. This sure was an eventful competition, with the most entries it’s ever had and unprecedented participation from the ChoiceScript community.

Tune in sometime soon for a brief analysis of multiple choice games systems.

P.S. Heather Albano, I realize you’re probably not Jeremy Freese in disguise. Probably.

Also, thanks to Jacqueline for hosting IntroComp.

On “Pale Blue Light”

So here I am, about a year after I last wrote on this blog. I’ve decided to resurrect the old thing and give it a new purpose. See, I used to use it to keep the family back home updated on school life, but now I do that mostly through the nominally more private venue provided by social networking. Since this blog used to be mostly for my family, I tended to refrain from making posts about one of my favorite pastimes — interactive fiction. By interactive fiction, I mean a very specific genre of textual video games. Or maybe it’s “computer-mediated storytelling.” Anyway, from now on I’ll be writing mostly for people who already know what interactive fiction is, so I’ll set aside the task of defining it.

This post is mainly to say, “Hey, I’ll be blogging about interactive fiction now!” But while I’m at it I may as well plug my latest game.

Back in May, as I was wrapping up my spring semester, I released the smallish Inform 7 project I’d been tinkering with on-and-off since 2008 — “Pale Blue Light” — mostly because I’d reached the point where I’d started to hate the damn thing. I’ve just uploaded a bug-fix release of the game which should replace the older version on the IF Archive soon. So far the game has but one review at the IFDB — but I don’t mind so much, as it’s a rather flattering one written by Emily Short.

With “Pale Blue Light” I attempted to use different methods of player interaction — the standard command parser, an “interactive poetry” style based on keywords, and even a touch of Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks — to draw the player into a dramatization of the relationship between character, reader, and author. Or at least, I think that’s what I was trying to do. I didn’t have much of a plan while I was actually writing the thing.

The release of “Pale Blue Light” made me realize how alone I am in my passion for interactive fiction. I tried testing the game out on a few of my friends, and they were for the most part pretty turned off. Reactions ranged from “What do I do with this greater-than sign?” to “‘GO HOME’ doesn’t work!” I’m thinking I should have made them play some of Andrew Plotkin’s excellent game for beginners, Dreamhold, before I showed them my work.

Actually, my friend who tried “GO HOME” was rather distressed by the stock response: “It says, ‘She couldn’t see any such thing.’ That’s so sad!”

Expect a few words on my new work-in-progress and some IntroComp 2011 analysis at the end of the month, or thereabouts.

Now I have to figure out whether I’ll have to delete all my previous posts. Some of them are so embarrassing.

On my favorite Chick tracts

God depicted in Jack T. Chick's "This Was Your Life!"

I recently saw the fascinating documentary God’s Cartoonist, a look at perhaps the most widely-read comics creator in America today, Jack T. Chick of Chick Publications. Chick inspires extreme reactions in his readers because his cheaply printed, mass-produced comics, which are freely distributed by those who agree with his theology, tend to express extreme and uncompromising opinions. He takes every opportunity to remind his readers, for example, that most people are going to burn for eternity in hell. He’s also convinced that the Roman Catholic Church secretly runs most religions and national governments, acting on the orders of Satan to deceive the world. He even had the gall to call one of his little comics “The Death Cookie.” Chick’s motivation may be to convert all us unsaved people, but he’ll have, um, a hell of a time trying to win the confidence of most Catholics I know if he keeps calling the Eucharistic wafer a “cookie.”

Steering clear of conspiracy in Jack T. Chick's "Birds and the Bees."

So why the fascination with Chick’s works, apart from their campy style? Well, in some ways they’re everything one could ask for in comics: they’re cheap, they’re genuine, and they’re everywhere (or so I’m told).

Chick Publications sells the comics at only 16¢ a piece, and in bulk orders, because Mr. Chick is a true believer on a mission – to let us all know we’re going to burn in hell unless we do as he says.

Here’s a list of important Chick literature:

• 

  A Chinese Communist spies on American children in Jack T. Chick's "Who, Me?"

  “Who, Me?“: In this mission statement of sorts, Mr. Chick encourages Christians to leave copies of his tracts in conspicuous public places – and even admits that he got the idea from the Communist Party of China. (Incidentally, Communism is a Vatican plot – according to Mr. Chick.) This one makes the list for explaining what Chick tracts are all about.

• “This Was Your Life!“: This tract, one of Chick’s first, is his most advertised and most widely disseminated. It demonstrates his views on the afterlife by showing two versions of an ordinary man’s life – one that leads to hell, and another that leads to heaven. This one makes the list for its ubiquity, and for introducing the world to that classic Chick tract formula involving a giant, throned, faceless, and glowing God, the Book of Life, and somebody getting tossed into the Lake of Fire.
• “Birds and the Bees“: In this awkward tract for children, Mr. Chick alleges that all homosexuals are not only evil, but also part of a conspiracy for world domination. Bizarrely, he seems to think their plan for mass mind-control involves legislation requiring ugly elementary school teachers to display random demon-infested homosexual dentist couples to their pupils for no obvious reason. This one makes the list for its hard-to-swallow charicatures and conspiracy theories.
• “The Traitor“: In this tract, which proclaims itself “a true story,” but seems to draw elements from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as well as Richard Lester’s Help!, a Hindu priest whose primary duty is to procure human sacrifices for the goddess Kali has a conversion experience after the goddess herself appears and mounts a physical attack upon him. Luckily for the aforementioned priest, some random Caucasian Christian shows up to save him from all the Hindu “demons” and an afterlife of everlasting torment. This one makes the list because Mr. Chick makes Kali scary as, um, hell.
  

  Final panel of Jack T. Chick's "Trust Me!"

• “Trust Me!“: This tract relies much more on detailed cartooning than most of the other tracts, favoring expressive imagery over words. In tear-jerking camp value it falls just short of “Somebody Loves Me,” but the art is much better. The story is about a kid who gets hooked on drugs, steals and deals to support his addiction, sells cocaine to an undercover policeman, gets raped in prison, and dies of AIDS. But it’s alright, ’cause somebody tosses him a Chick tract just before he dies, and he has a big, goofy smile on his face as an angel flies him to heaven. This one makes the list for the aforementioned goofy smile.
• “Moving On Up!“:This tract, the most well-executed, well-drawn one I’ve read so far, blames all sorts of evil – including Nazi ideology – on the theory of evolution by natural selection. Chick doesn’t merely ask that “intelligent design” or somesuch be taught in public schools alongside evolutionary theory, but implies that by teaching evolution by natural selection, schools are sending children straight to hell. The art makes this one my favorite, and it makes the list because it ends with a cute little kid dropping dead for no apparent reason and being thrown into hell for everlasting torment because he believed in evolutionary theory.
  

  Final panel of Jack T. Chick's "Moving On Up!"

“So,” I can hear you all asking me, “have all these tracts worked? Have you been saved?”

Well, no. Haw, haw, haw.

On Persona

This weekend I saw Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, which the director considered one of his two greatest films. I even put together a little trailer for it:

Persona is good fun. It’s bold, ethereal, shocking, and playful. It’s a film about how we respond to our humanness – our  longing for others, our pain, our love, and our anger – and at times it’s a film about its own making. Persona references itself as an example of the sort of human expression it catalogs. And somehow all this arises from an engaging story of two women whose closeness opens them up to communicate their deepest fears and desires.

There are moments of intense visual beauty, of slow, gently choreographed movement. There are also moments when Bergman seems to literally allow the film to fall apart, using disintegrating and non-diegetic images to illuminate the inner turmoil of its characters. It’s like a poem that alternates between rhyming meter and free verse. It’s devious and wonderful.

On the democratic republic

With senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts preparing to take his seat, I think I’ve finally seen just how the democratic republic can function as an effective government. I knew the mechanics of it already, of course, but I hadn’t realized just how powerful it can be in practice: when enough people are angry about a particular policy, anyone espousing that policy has a poor chance of getting elected, even when her party has dominated the political arena in question for decades.

Well, if Scott Brown doesn’t work out, don’t blame me. I voted for Joe Kennedy.

Due to an unexpected twist of fate, I saw Natraj at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston yesterday. They were amazing, hypnotic. I was sitting about a meter from the soprano saxophonist. He’s like a snake charmer.

And I ran into a guy with connections to the One Laptop Per Child program. He was carrying an XO-1 laptop, and I got a peek at it. It’s pretty darn cool. Cooler than my laptop.

On “Figueres in my Basement”

The other day I threw together a little interactive poem I call “Figueres in my Basement”. It works as a computer program. When you start it up, it displays the first two lines of the poem. Then you (the reader) must enter a word of significance from the most recent line of the poem, and the next line or two will be printed, their content depending on which word you choose. You can try it out here. To make this I used Inform 7 with Michael R. Bacon’s Interactive Poetry extension. Let me know what you think.

It’s been a long time since I last blogged. I’ve experienced a lot since then, and some of that experience has made me want to hide away. But I’m back to blogging now. I’m chilling out for the month of January, then I’ve got a new semester of classes starting February 1^st. I’ll be taking Psychology 102 (which has a very biological focus), Introduction to Creative Writing I, Religion and Psychology, Writing 102, and Introduction to Film and Video.

On Where the Wild Things Are

In a fantasy world created by his imagination, child Max strolls through a vast desert with a monstrous companion. Max looks worried. “Did you know,” he asks, “that the Sun was going to die?”

As a child I found myself preoccupied with the mortality of the Sun. I knew it wasn’t going to happen for a good long while, but the very fact that it would eventually happen suggested that the world I knew was fundamentally unstable, and that deeply bothered me. I found that much of Where the Wild Things Are captured the often secret joys and anxieties of childhood that were very familiar to me. Spike Jones’s film shows the story of a boy who is learning that his world lies un deeply unsteady foundations – that the people he loves will not always return his affections, unpredictable and sometimes menacing forces much greater than him are at work in every facet of his life, just as the monstrous Wild Things determine his fate in fantasy.

Maurice Sendak’s picture-book Where the Wild Things Are enthralled me as a child. It was the beautiful landscapes that really struck me: the vast sea and the far-away jungle of the mind. But there was also a hint of savegery that puzzled me and drew my attention then. The wild things were, after all, wild – and a bit menacing. Spike Jonze’s new film develops the savagery of the wild things much further. I must confess that as a film Where the Wild Things Are scared me silly, though I’m supposed to be an adult now. And I was teary through much of it.

When the Wild Things threaten to eat Max in this film, they are clearly not joking. Max even stumbles across a disturbing pile of bones that indicates such. Yet there is plenty of affection. All the Wild Things, in fact, seem desperate to love and be loved. But sometimes in trying to express their love they hurt each other; rowdy play or a friendly joke can cause unexpected harm. And when the Wild Things feel threatened or unloved, they are prone to fits of rage and violence. Their outbursts may seem extreme, but I think to a child the emotional outbursts of an adult can seem just as wild. The whole film, in fact, is an extremely authentic portrait of life painted from the view of a child. And it’s the only film I’ve ever seen that comes close to expressing what it was like for me to grow up.

On spinning glass

Last weekend I went home to find that my family had replaced me with a foreign exchange student. I had a good time nevertheless; I spent some time with my girlfriend (when we saw The Invention of Lying), enjoyed lunch with a bunch of my high school friends, and had something like a paranormal experience. The Tenney Gatehouse of Methuen, Massachusetts is home to the Methuen Historical Society and hosted a fundraising psychic investigation event, which I and the aforementioned exchange student attended. I’d like to say I felt some sort of presence, but everything I felt was vague and familiar, so I’ve nothing definite to say, except that I saw plenty of photographic anomalies and a very intense glass divination.

The glass divination was very simple. A Coca-Cola glass was placed upside-down upon a smooth tabletop, and a group of people each placed a fingertip lightly on the rim of the glass. People with knowledge of the house’s history asked questions of whatever spirits might be present in the room, first asking them to spin the glass clockwise to indicate an affirmative answer or counter-clockwise to indicate a negative.I could hear the glass spinning a lot, and we all found it easy to interpret its motions as strong answers. It was all very dramatic. Later the head of the historical society wanted to try it one last time and had the exchange student and I join him. This was the first time I actually joined in to touch the glass. It did the wild spinning again. I wondered whether I was moving the glass unintentionally. I reduced the pressure of my finger on the glass several times to find that the glass would leave my finger behind in its movements. The historical society man asked whether we were intentionally moving the glass. Both the exchange student and I denied the charge, but I secretly wondered whether this exchange student was actually leading us on. I didn’t really get to know him, so I don’t really know whether it’s in his character to do that.

Since I returned to New York the weather has been pretty consistently cold, windy, and rainy. I hear it’s snowing back in my hometown. It’s been a cold year for me in general. I tracked down the Obelisk in Central Park in the rain. It was hard to find, but impressive. I also saw the museum of natural history with some friends; we had free tickets. There was an absolutely mind-boggling exhibit on scale, comparing the size of various objects from a quark all the way to the observable universe.

Today I saw Where the Wild Things Are. I’ll write a review on that tonight, but for now I’ll just say that it’s brilliant, and also that it scared me silly. I saw two very interesting trailers for other films. One, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, is a stop-motion animation project by director Wes Anderson. It seems to be inspired by a Roald Dahl novel and aimed squarely at adults. There’s also Terry Gilliam’s newest film, The Imagination of Doctor Parnassus. Gilliam (a former Monty Python director) has a reputation for taking risks, so I’m excited.

Here are some journal excerpts in which I contemplate recent experiences:

October 13, 2009: Lights in the Darkness

A Dutch candy – licorice, complex. Leaves falling, fallen leaves decaying sweetly, the aroma. The stone church stands silent, as does my first playground. Flashes of light inside the Gatehouse greeting us from the windows. We enter with caution. The door closes too quickly, too loudly.

White noise droning, cameras flashing. Listening for voices, looking for orbs. Dowsing rods bend towards me. Small cookies, a bit of coffee. The former children’s room stripped of carpet and wallpaper. My companion says he may have seen the woman in the mirror, so I approach it alone in the darkness. It seems to have a character of its own, but the only things I see for certain are the mannequin in the corner and fully physical people stopping for a quiet chat. A large and ghostly figure – mine, uncertain and cautious.

Quiet in the room with the fireplace. Questions posed into the air. A quiet scratching becomes a persistent throbbing, scraping of glass spinning at worrisome speeds.

“So you don’t believe in any of this, then,” he says. That’s not it, really. I just don’t know. I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Up and down the hill, to and from the ruins of ruins of Greycourt Castle. This is where I nearly fell into the stream, where I stood frantically surveying the snow and rocks one day, searching for a pair of glasses and finding only more flecks of blood. Glowing spheres of light – two of them, strategically placed to ensure that we do not fall off the edge of the land as I once did, clinging desperately tot he sparse undergrowth.

Back home. More lights in the darkness. That’s home and family. That’s humanity.

October 15, 2009: Cleopatra’s Needle

Skyscrapers cluttered on the border. Beyond it – grass, trees. Enter the greener world. Stroll in just enough to get lost and stumble upon a set of stairs. Look up to where they lead: a spire, a monument hewn of desert stone that stood a full millennium and longer in its arid home before someone decided to bring it into the green world under the rainclouds. Acid rain beating again and again into the names of pharaohs, and the stone drinks.

On The Invention of Lying

On Sunday, during a weekend trip home, I saw The Invention of Lying with my girlfriend. My girlfriend said she had expected the picture to be funnier, but I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I laughed. I cried. I smiled with simple joy.

Something I had read before I even saw the film is that it was shot in Lowell, Massachusetts, near my hometown. For this reason most of the locations felt very familiar, and I even recognized a specific landmark – the headquarters of The Sun.

Ricky Gervais, co-creator and star of the BBC sitcom The Office co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in The Invention of Lying. But although Gervais’s character remains the most compelling throughout the story (and manages to make both himself and Gervais look like a genius), the film features stars left and right in a variety of roles, from Tina Fey playing a disgruntled office assistant to Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Bartender. And somehow they all seem to belong together.

The film takes place in a parallel universe where nobody has ever told a lie or created a fiction of any kind. Then our protagonist, in a desparate crisis, tells a blatant lie – the world’s first – and discovers a newfound ability to change his world. But he doesn’t stop at lying. In fact, the film could have been titled The Invention of Lying, Fiction, Thinking Beyond Appearances, Spirituality, and Other Fun Stuff. But that would be an absurdly long title.

The film manages to tackle skillfully several tough topics: suicide, the loneliness of elderly people (who in the film inhabit a place called A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People), death, religious debate, and ulterior motives in marriage. Most of the time it’s funny, occasionally it’s very sad, and sometimes it’s simply cheerful. But it’s always compelling. As a viewer I give this movie my approval.

On the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Saturday morning I visited the Cloisters, a very special museum of medieval art in Manhattan. I failed to realize until my arrival at Fort Tryon Park (in which the Cloisters can be found) just how removed the place is from the business of the city. The park and the museum sit high on a hill, and when I left the subway station by elevator I was shocked to find that I was surrounded by trees and could not hear throb of the streets. I found a place where I could look down upon northern Manhattan. I found the park serene, quite large, and neither crowded nor lacking in passers-by. The museum itself was supremely surreal, and the building was designed to showcase medieval architecture and even incorporate pieces of genuine medieval buildings.

My next stop was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There I got very lost in their massive and labyrinthine European classics gallery. The feeling was akin to being trapped alone in a windowless Victorian house with some very famous artwork. I also saw some of the main museum’s medieval art, a temporary exhibit on Dutch masters including Vermeer’s Milkmaid, the roof of a Jain meeting hall, some Korean art, some Chinese art, a nifty classical Chinese courtyard, and the Japanese art section. I waited in a very long line to pick up my backpack as I left the museum, only to find that I was in the wrong coat check; there are two!

Inspired by my trip to the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wrote some thoughts in my journal that I later broke into lines and submitted to my school’s literary publication as a poem. I plan to be involved in that publication, and attended a meeting about it yesterday. Here are some other bits from my journals, not including the bit I submitted to the school publication:

October 3, 2009: Going to the Cloisters

From my lofty loft I descend into the deep depths of the city’s underworld, coming up for air only when my train has shuttled me to the autumn-clad park at Fort Tryon. I take stairs downward through a hole in man-made ground, an escalator further downward still, another escalator up to a great lobby, a flight of stairs downward once more, and a final escalator upward to reach the tunnel by which I shall be conveyed far from where I stand.

The shuttle to Times Square should be thought of not merely as a train, but as a motley collection of citizens, their faces displaying varying degrees of (forced?) solemnity, one of them suspiciously eyeing me as I sweat and scribble in my heavy sweater down here in the hot world underground. It may have been the bulky vintage headphones over my ears that communicated to her my oddness, and the other features that begged her gaze to settle upon me for some moments – until I glanced upward, so that our blank affects became uncomfortably acquainted.

To make my life more interesting, the Transit Authority has suspended downtown E service ate my station, and so I find myself running through corridor after corridor until at last, with damp hair and sweat in my sweater, I board the A and go express.

Now I am in a train full of dreamers. One of them seems for a time to be truly dreaming, his head resting gently on his raised knuckles, the passing lights highlighting his stillness and caressing his hair. When he awakes the peace of sleep does not leave his face.

I wonder to what visionary we owe the calming, thoughtful blue of these lights we encounter as we bore our way uptown. That and the constant swaying that makes everything amorphous melt my preconceptions, even my memories.

A group of gray-haired foreign tourists, wearing backpacks as I do, share my destination. When we at last ascend from the station – Oh! We have entered a domain of trees and stone.

October 8, 2009: Sleeping Wood

I am lost for a time in a dusty-hued apple orchard. The air just cold enough to bite at my skin, I steal furtive glimpses of the blue backdrop. Lanes identical, stretching into trees and more trees. Cracked wooden instruments of human labor napping gently among their natural cousins. Who says it’s in the American nature to busy oneself without thought of leisure? Am I un-American, transfixed as I am by the warm scents of earth carried on frigid breezes of a dying sun? Hidden somewhere among theses threes, my father and aunts zealously gather hanging apples while I, wandering the halls of a living museum, stop occasionally in wonder and carefully lay hold of an outstanding work of art. Faint fragments of sound surface on waves of chill air: my brothers gleefully collecting great armfuls of crisp apples. I would not mind stopping here to sleep, except that they would wonder where I was and worry, and so I seek to follow incomplete vibrations to their source beneath the openly outstretched limbs of a steady giant who holds Michael firmly in place some feet above the ground.

Back in the car, meandering along the lesser-traveled state highways, electron-tunneling through the wind-swept dormancy of wooden elders, I wonder why we never inhabited one of these places – these Sleepy Hollows all around us – and whether I – a better-fed Ichabod Crane – would ever find myself called back to this land of specters and witchcraft – of the coziest churches and heaviest libraries, of apples and honey distilled from acres of orchards like that where my intrepid, half-deaf aunt wanders rows in an autumn harvest for supplemental income – or maybe more for the joy of sleeping trees, for their crisp, rounded treasures filled with dew and rainwater. I admire here carefully cultivated lifestyle – her shelves of old volumes like the tales of Scheherazade or The Little Prince, The Saturday Evening Post and Vermont landscapes on her walls, well-worn toys from the age of Flower Power resting in the corners. A long dinner table and fresh salad, fresh pie, stales jokes – a masterpiece in the art of building a family home.

The family itself is just as much a masterpiece: the active and well-traveled mother, the skiing, diving army nutritionist, the happy children – one of them becoming an architect, another called “Doctor” and just married, all of them pursuing dreams they seem destined to reach. Their glowing smiles and flowing conversation echo in the places they inhabit. Yes, there is envy buried in the admiration, but also genuine delight. It is written in the stars, I think, that I shall never dwell blithely in a Sleepy Hollow, but shall always find myself pursued by the headless horseman of my own disquiet.