Temple of the Captive God

With quarantine and all, I've been spending a lot of my time messing around with all my old Legos. Here's what I came up with so far.

I've got a little mythology built around it. It's from some kind of science-fantasy world where there were once immortal beings who have long since fled the mortal world. But one of them was left behind, trapped in rock (as a punishment? An accident? Not sure). Thousands of years later, some high-tech empire found him and built this structure to contain and study him.

They've mostly given up on studying him scientifically (he tends to eat anyone who gets close), but they can still ask him questions, and sometimes he responds. Mostly because he's bored by thousands of years alone and likes using humans as his personal entertainment. To that end, he tends to give the answer that will lead to respond to the most entertaining outcome (for him) rather than anything truthful.

I've been doing system and Bionicle build separately for a long time now, but this is my first time ever really trying to combine them. I think it turned out alright.

The staircase is the first part of it I built. That thing is just full of illegal building techniques).

Ever since I started with Bionicles (i.e. when I was three years old) I was fascinated with how they'd look interacting with minifigures, since even the tiniest ones are from minifig scale. Guess this is the answer.

Some Junk From the Basement

I’m running kind of low on ideas these days, so here’s some old junk I dug up from the basement.

For those of you who can’t read disgraphic, this says “Medieval Reality Game.” I think it was a mock-up for a knight-themed virtual-reality game I wanted to make. Note that the tag on the circle says “choking hazard.” 

Next we have a list of things I wanted to do over the summer. I think my mom encouraged me to make them academic goals, but that fell apart pretty quickly. I’m also pretty sure my mom wrote this too. 

And finally we have my petition to bring back Galidor, perhaps the worst Lego theme of all time. These things were hardly even Lego at all, made out of these enormous pieces that were so specialized you couldn’t dream of making anything decent of your own out of them. They also had a TV show, though I didn’t watch that, I just got obsessed over the awful toys for some reason. I remember passing these forms around to random people leaving church one Sunday, which is where most of the signatures come from. Probably, most people were just being polite. 

Incoherent Stories

Since everyone is stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, it’s only natural that Facebook chain posts are spawning at an unprecedented rate. And, since I’m stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, I’ve seen a lot of them. One that caught my attention the other day was “10 Things Everyone Else Likes But I Don’t.” I don’t think I’ll do that one, it just seems too contrarian, but I can definitely relate to the sentiment it picks up on: the alienation of everyone else being in love with something, especially some piece of storytelling, that you just can’t relate to. The two times I’ve felt that most acutely have been with the sorts of smart, artsy media that English majors like me are supposed to adore: David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive and Don DeLilo’s White Noise. And, if you’ll excuse me for being a contrarian for a little bit, I’d like to rag on them a little.

The problem with each of them is that they’re not really stories. Sure, they’ve each got characters and something resembling a plot, but you get the sense that the creator isn’t so interested in telling a story as they are in expressing some kind of idea, layered so deeply in abstraction that it’s incomprehensible to anyone’s lived experience. Which is cool, if you’re into that kind of thing, but not really what people read or watch stories for.

My disappointment with Mulholland Drive is actually sort of context dependent, and sort of own damn my fault: I watched it over a series of three nights, in forty minute segments, which meant that I got all excited by the straightforward story of a lesbian couple in Hollywood chasing lost memories, then felt enormously disappointed when the whole thing fell apart into dream logic that broke characterization and came off as both heavy-handed and incomprehensible at once. I’ve talked to real fans of the movie about its meaning, and now I can kind of see the appeal of putting together what actually happened, and there are some scenes that are perfectly beautiful. But I can’t imagine ever walking away from that movie satisfied, much less happy.

While Mulholland Drive might have made me begrudgingly respect David Lynch, White Noise got me irate at Don DeLilo. It has more consistent characters than Mulholland Drive, and a narrative that doesn’t leave you quite as perplexed, but it’s pretty clear that the author doesn’t really care much about any of it, not even the most emotional parts. What he does care about is making some kind of point (probably something about capitalism) through loads and loads of random details that are a little bit interesting, and clearly meant to be funny, but really don’t make up for the lack of story. The prose was so elegant that I had to finish the book, but I wasn’t very happy about it.

For a time, I took these two examples (and a couple other plotless, characterless, seemingly meaningless bits of media I’d seen) and formed them into a general hypothesis for storytelling: in order for a story to be worth anything at all, it needs to be coherent, direct, and human-centric. But then I found Petscop, which breaks every rule I’d just set out for what makes good art. And I also loved it.

Petscop is a youtube series recording someone playing through an obscure, low-budget Playstation game, using cheat codes to reveal disturbing hidden content about childhood abuse. The game doesn’t actually exist, the recordings are actually just animations, but it feels so authentic to that late 90s-early 00s game style that it gives a nostalgia rush to anyone who grew up with those games, like me. And then it corrupts that nostalgia with reminders that the pain and trauma existed, even, or perhaps especially, in that idyllic time. That feeling is so complex and powerful that I don’t really care that the narrative is incoherent, nonexistent, or inconsequential. Maybe it doesn’t make any linear sort of sense, but I still appreciate it immensely as an experience. 

Searching for some answers for Mulholland Drive after I’d first watched it, I found Roger Ebert’s five star review, where he wrote “Think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development.” At the time, I thought it was a total abandonment of a critic’s duty to actually work out what’s going on, but now I can’t think of a better way to explain how I feel about Petscop.

What separates my take on Petscop from Mulholland Drive or White Noise? I think it all comes down to experience. Mulholland Drive drew on nostalgia for an idealized Hollywood much in the same way Petscop drew on nostalgia for an idealized childhood cyberworld*. The difference is that I had the nostalgia necessary to feel what Petscop wanted me to feel, but not so much for Mulholland Drive. Plotlines and characters are so powerful in part because they give the reader someone to empathize with, and in doing so understand the emotions of the story and its author. When an author forgoes that, it’s a risky move, because there’s no guarantee that readers will be able to decipher it on their own. That doesn’t make the story bad, it turns out, just risky. 

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* Still not sure what, if anything, White Noise was drawing on, but sure, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Reading

A couple weeks ago, back when I was still at college, my girlfriend asked what I was writing about in my notebook, and I said, “I’m writing about how I need to write more about the things I read to improve my writing.” I had no idea why she broke down laughing at first, but pretty soon I realized that the whole thing was pretty convoluted and had at least four levels of meta (writing about writing about other people’s writing for my own writing). Ridiculous as it sounds, though, it was important for me to make a written commitment to writing about writing, because reading has never come easily to me.

I always feel jealous when people talk about how much they read as kids. It’s the kind of boasting you see a lot, especially in literary circles, the kind you can get away with because there’s a certain self-deprecation attached (“You can bet I didn’t get out much!” or something like that). My older sister and younger brother were both that kind of voracious and natural readers, my sister read widely and early, and my brother jumped straight from near-illiteracy to the entire Little House on the Prairie series when he was bored one summer. For me, on the other hand, I had the idea that reading was hard, and anything hard must also be dangerous somehow, so I treated thick books like radioactive material and stuck to a narrow set of mid-length books from series that I knew were safe, mostly Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the secret series by Pseudonymous Bosch. I became a sort of junior scholar of these books, reading the same chapters over and over again, rarely stepping outside the texts where I felt comfortable. 

Aside from school assigned books and a couple young adult fantasy series, my reading went through a dormant period in middle and high school, which lasted until I went to the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio and felt like such an imposter among all these accomplished, well read people that I knew that I needed to read as much as I could as fast as I could. That started an era, which lasted up until recently, when I spent every break from college reading quickly and poorly, trying my best to make up for lost time. I took the opposite approach as I had as a kid, choosing the longest, hardest, densest  books that I could reasonably finish. When the story lost my interest, the furious desire to be the kind of serious writer who reads serious books carried me through however many pages there were to the finish. I don’t want to undersell this time, I read a lot of books that I enjoyed and that inspire me to this day. But, looking back at the shelves of books I’ve finished since then, there are so many that I only recollect hazily. There were so many subtle turns of phrase and nuances of the plot that I missed in my rush to get on to the next book. 

An English teacher quoted Kurt Vonnegut at my class once, to reprimand us for complaining about some reader-response assignment: “Reading without writing is like eating without digesting.” At the time I thought that out teacher, and Vonnegut, were setting hopelessly high expectations. I’m not sure what’s changed in me since then, but now the expectation seems reasonable, and the alternative terribly wasteful. I’ll teach plenty of English classes after I graduate, but I’ll never be a student in one again, I’ll never have this designated time to unpack what I read. So my only option, really, is to set aside a notebook and a little bit of time after each book to think through what was going on, how the author said what they said and what it all meant.

During study breaks between my newly online classes these days, I’ve set up my own system of studying my favorite books from the past few years. This week I’m looking at descriptions of landscapes, reading them and writing little notes about how the authors do what they do and what it all means. Next week it’ll be character introductions, and after that dialogue. There’s so much that I missed in these books, so much power in the language that I skimmed, already looking forward to the next thing. It’s almost disgusting, how I wasted these books. But that’s okay. I’ve got plenty of time left in my life, and a lot of it’s free now since I’m stuck inside to dodge the coronavirus. I can catch up.