Gaming Gaming Everywhere

This is reposted from a little facebook survey that was going around about fifteen video-games that stuck with me. I normally disdain such things but it got me thinking and I ended up with some nice fodder for my trash blog.

1. Final Fantasy IV- Perhaps my all time favorite game (or at leas the one I have the nost nostalgic connection to). Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called at the time of it's original US Release, was a point of origin for my understanding of fantasy and my involvement with involving narrative. There were many important books I read as a kid, but this ranks up there with any of them for sheer engrossing pleasure of narrative. It's story, now from the perspective of an English PhD candidate with more than a few loose and baggy monsters under his belt, is simple and laughably poorly translated. But I think it was the simplicity that incited my imagination. Later final fantasies were played and enjoyed (VI, VII and IX especially were beloved) but in becoming more graphically advanced they lost a lot of their charm. Something about seeing a vaguely amorphous outline of a little girl with green hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, excited my imagination so much more than if she had been fully rendered and spectacularly realized. These characters were much more real to me, because they were so crudely drawn and narrated. Their tawdry demises chilled me to the bone. A game full of wanton self-sacrifice.

2. Actraiser- Very few games can I call my own. I remember that Duck Tales was the first game I ever beat, but Actraiser will always be my game. A charming side-scrolling platformer checkered with a building Sim, Actraiser was, for me, the ultimate antidote to my insatiable lust for mythology. I think what I liked most about it (other than it's truly epic soundtrack-- think: a poorly synthesized Gustav Horst) was it's clear inspiration from readable mythology but divorced from any of its real tropes. Fighting the so-called Arctic Wyvern atop the world tree, was very clearly somehow inspired by Norse Mythology but it was hard to pin down how precisely. Covering a wide variety of world mythological tropes (Greco-Roman, Medieval Catholic, Egyptian, Japanese, Hindu and Norse) and weaving them effortlessly into a pseudo-Christian narrative about bringing light and order back to a world plagued by chaos, was the best thing a bookish 10 year old dreamer could hope for. Incidentally, the game took me precisely one year to beat. I received it for my 10th birthday, and beat it one day shy of my 11th.

3. Super Castlevania IV- I distinctly remember making up silly names for each of the bosses in this game, with my step-sister, Kristen: Dr. Dominatrix, Mr. Nickels, Sir Reads-a-lot. I was recently informed that I was not alone in this process. The writer of the English game manual presented some obvious silliness (the dancing spectres are referred to as Paula Abghoul and Fed Ascare), along with jokes I only got in the last week: Puwexil, the long tongued skull boss of level four, is merely Lixewup (Licks You Up) backwards. Similarly, Koranot, the stone golem, is a phonetic anagram for Ton o' Rock. A great, operatic metal soundtrack alongside traditional gothic horror tropes and ridiculously charming videogame conventions (whipping repeatedly at a stariwell to receive a roast chicken dinner) made Super Castlevania IV a constant source of amusement.

4. Dragon Age: Origins- DA:O, Bioware's recent masterpiece, more than any other game of my adulthood, seems to be in sync with my desires as a writer. It is a sweeping historical epic that integrates historical notes (Just post-crusades Christendom and Byzantium) with traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy tropes. In the case of this latter obsession, it seeks to play an interesting twist on well-worn fantasy conventions. It's elves live as second class citizens (fulfilling the role of European Jews), sticking tightly to their lost and fragmentary culture. Dwarves live underground but have built a fascinating proto-Objectivist meritocracy out of a rigid caste system. Dark and evil powers gather beneath the surface of the earth, but are treated as a real race with actual political designs and ambitions. All this is a fantastic spin on the typical fantasy epic, but I especially laud it's treatment of homosexual relationships. It manages to not pull any punches in allowing your avatar to be gay, bisexual or otherwise questioning heteronormative identity. It does so flawlessly, not only offering the complete freedom to make those choices but slotting it in to a world that is not always accepting. In a dialogue with pan-sexual, ethical slu/elven assassin, Zevran Arianai about my avatar's choice to ultimately pursue a heteronormative relationship, he sighs sadly, saying that, when it comes down to it, people usually choose the less difficult path. Hooray for frank and honest assessments of interpersonal relations, even in the most highly wrought and intricate fantasies.

5. Mass Effect 2- Arguably, Bioware's best game to date. I don't go in for shooters. I don't go in for sci-fi. But I unabashedly love this game. I love it for the reasons that most people cite: it's open-ended plot based off of impossible moral decisions, it's extremely well-written and voice acted characters, it's adherence to a grim plot about Lovecraftian horror. But the standout thing to me was its ability to integrate a very traditional set of quest-based tropes into a plot that made sense. The main thrust of the game revolves around recruiting a team of top operatives, outlaws and oracles to combat impossible odds, outside the strictly legal domain of civilized space. In securing the loyalty of your companions you must perform a variety of mundane tasks to resolve their own psychological issues. Presented to you by a shipboard psychiatric evaluator, who knows that with a team as unstable and self-involved as yours, distraction and unresolved issues could mean the difference between success and failure. This all comes together in a final mission where each and every relationship forged is tested and utilized in the achievement of a greater goal. The game rewards not just your strength and agility, but your interpersonal acumen and understanding as well. As a final note, Jack, the hard-living, batshit crazy, cyberpunk heroine, might be one of the greatest characetrs ever created.

6. Musya: The Classic Tale of Japanese Horror- I played this game over a weekend when I rented it for the SNES from the now defunct Blockbuster. It's a repetitive, little platformer with a really lousy interface and control system. But it was the first time I had any experience with the Japanese Gothic. The new exposure to giant, badger-like monstrosities in conical, rice padyd hats, tortoises with the face of infants, and living, bronze-age figures, possessed by ectoplasmic organs, oozing from its eyes was so startlingly frightening that I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. As a Gothic scholar, I think I will always consider Japanese Horror to be several steps beyond me, unfathomably strange and far far more creepy than the western tropes I am used to.

7. Super Metroid- This was the game I played with my dad and sister. Years earlier we played Super Mario Brothers III (after being literally awe-struck by its pressence in The Wizard, a film we went to see because it starred one of my mom's ex-students). While the trials of the angry sun and the novelty of Hammer Brothers Suits held our attention for many weeks, it was Super Metroid (a gift for my 13th birthday) that really brought us together as a family. I won't easily forget the moment we came home from Junior High to find my dad triumphantly declaring his victory over the Mother Brain then watching eagerly as we beat it for ourselves. More than it being a family experience, we really fell in love with the aesthetics of the game as well as its novel gameplay. I marveled at seeing the suggested, flooded ruins of Meridia, or the Alien-esque gothic terror of a Wrecked Ship, while my dad meticulously used the X-ray Scope to hunt down each and every missile upgrade, increasing our overall completion record to 96% (never could find that last Super Missile pack). A game of shocking moments, and clever tricks, based upon an intriguing system of opening up new places by finding upgrades to physically power yourself there, Super Metroid might be (for my money) the greatest platformer of its time, and one unequaled by modern attempts.

8. Secret of Evermore- One of the first American games I ever played, Secret of Evermore was a strange, aiming-for-funny mishmash of 50's B-movie sci-fi tropes and classic, sword and sandal epics, wherein a Boy and his Dog explore the temporally replete world of Evermore in an attempt to get back to Podunk, USA. With a dog companion that transforms with your environs (from hulking Cave-Dog to Egyptian Pharaoh Hound to Fluffy Pink Poodle, to Flying, Dog-faced Laser Toaster) and a variety of alchemical formula that require diligent resource management (Three Parts Water to One Part Ash gets you an acid-rain storm), the travails of toe-headed cinema buff Isaac (always named Isaac in my games--not sure why) was a staple of my young life. I predictably loved the Ancient and Medieval portions of the world, alive with gothic castles, temples full of minotaurs, and Stargate-esque alien invaders.

9. Donkey Kong Country II: Diddy's Kong Quest- Pirate themed with steampunk underpinnings, a surprisingly rocking soundtrack and demeaningly cute animal companions, DKC2 was everything I wanted in a light-hearted platformer. It struck the perfect tone and introduced me to thematic biomes. Sunken, ,muck covered pirate ships crashed in the bayou, oddly zen andscapes of twisted brambles, and intense sequences in which rhinos had to smash their way through the honeycomb labyrinths of malevolent bees. As anarchic and tongue-in-cheek as it was genuinely pretty, DKC2 really changed the way I looked at Apes and Crocodiles, and made me believe, if only for a moment, that Snakes could coil tightly into a spring and bounce to great heights.

10. Grim Fandango- Scott McCloud in his briefly lived Computer Game Blog Comic described Grim Fandango as the closest game to Art he had ever played. I have to agree. Video Games are moving towards high art, and the debate can rage on as to which have actually achieved that status or if it yet to be conquered, but for my money, Grim Fandango is already there. I grew up playing Tim Schaffer Lucas Arts adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, The Dig), but Grim Fandango seemed designed for me. A truly organic vision combining Aztec and Mayan mythology with Golden Age of Cinema Film Noir, Grim Fandango followed the exploits of spun-sugar skeleton, Manny Calavera, a hapless travel agent caught up in a twisting labyrinth of insurance fraud, beatnik poetry and blood-sacrifice. It got me in touch with my Mexican roots while reminding me of the greatness of Chandler-Bogart films. You really don't know what you are missing until a tiny, talking skull with Peter Lorre's voice tells you about his trek to the 9th Underworld.

11. 7th Saga- The Enix adventure game had the highest disparity between integrity of musical composition and quality of synthesizer I have ever seen. I still will get some of the music stuck in my head and any of my grad school friends can tell you that I obsessively play certain tracks on endless repeat while I write my papers. The game had an incredibly difficult learning curve and was plagued by a panoply of random encounters. It also had a fantastic central conceit of being able to play one of seven mercenary types competing for a set of seven ancient runes. Each of the seven played slightly differently (though I always played as Lejes Rimul, the magic-savvy demon prince) and allowed for a large number of strategic combinations by allowing you to team up with another one of the playable options.

12. Sanitarium- It's hard choosing one serious Adventure game for this list. Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi archeology epic, The Dig certainly was a close runner up. But there is something about Sanitarium's central conceit of a character trapped in his own paranoid fantasies that made me shiver. Very few games have given me literal nightmares but this was one of them. It was also one of the last games my step-dad and I played together, making it especially important. It's hazy dream-logic where nightmare sequences involving Midwestern children slowly rotting away into plant matter, unspeakable Aztec curses, terrifying circus sideshows and insectoid invaders from outer space, contained the seeds of a real life tale of corruption and betrayal. It was a game about horrifying mysteries where the mundane and bureaucratic turned out to be the most horrifying prospect of all.

13. Shining Force- My friend Casey first introduced me to Shining Force in the form of a pen and paper roleplaying game, meticulously based on the Turn Based Strategy game. There were certainly other games I enjoyed. But Shining Force was the reason I needed a Sega. The game, like Final Fantasy IV, was one of those situations where less was more. Casey and I not only played a few rounds of the pen and paper strategy game, we ended up making intricate back stories for its 30+ playable characters in the hopes of writing a novel. There was just enough personality in the portraits of each character to suggest a real history and a corresponding fondness for each of them. To this day I have a lot of trouble remembering what was fact and what was my own imagination.

14. Arcanum- My friends have labeled this game a triumph of style over substance. An amazingly story well-told, with pitch perfect Victorian social mores, in a frustratingly (and sometimes hilariously) buggy game engine whose learning curve was butterfly knife sharp. Alongside my step-dad's Victorian roleplaying game and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Arcanum formed the trifecta that would lead me into Victorian Literature Scholarship. It's a little bit embarassing to admit that my career was inspired by comics, DnD and video games and not, say, by reading Middlemarch for the first time. Coming back years later though, its amazing how much of the 19th century they really capture: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell-- with a healthy dose of Darwin and Faraday thrown in for good measure. Everything from a misguided faith in electro-magnetism to a supernatural recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, Arcanum created a world that was essentialized Victorian. Obviously it copped to some Steampunk influences along the way, but unlike Steampunk, it first and foremost loved the society and aesthetic of the era it amulated, not just the technology. I wish the Steampunk movement were more like Arcanum. And whatever its bugs, Arcanum was, and is, my vision of my field and my life, in private, indulgent moments.

15. Sword of Vermillion- The first real role-playing game I ever played. Its instruction manual (a monstrous 100 page guide) served as a major source of inspiration, and I spent hours trying to illustrate the strangely named weapons and armor (graphite sword? carmine shield?). Monsters grunted with now-comical exuberance. The endless expanse of brightly colored yellow pillars that was apparently supposed to be mountainous terrain is still comforting to me. I still have the muscle memory of the difference in feel between cutting through a giant floating eyeball, and a serpentine Medusa-ling. Probably invented. Definitely affective.

The Somnambulists Diary II

A dream:

I'm in my apartment and the year is 1977 though that hasnt changed anything save that I am wearing a paisley print silk shirt. I am rearranging my closet, pushing my dresser back into the wall and opening up much more space. I am relieved that I am done with the task and that it has put my room back in order. But as I wander around I start to notice horrible creatures have invaded the house: inch wide centipedes, spiders with death's heads on their backs the size of my fist, roaches... hundreds of roaches.

I get a call from my landlady telling me that there has been a breach in the apartment complex. She shows up at my door, suspecting my unit to be the one compromised. Looking into my closet she sees what I notice for the first time: a small strip, no taller than the moulding on the floor, is missing from the side of my closet. The insects are pouring out from that aperture. Beyond it I can see an alleyway... filthy with dappled sunlight filtering down from an old greenhouse style skylight. For some reason it feels like the worst place imaginable.

I run to free my roommate. Its impossible to wake her even as centipedes are crawling in and out of her mouth and nostrils. I run back to my room where my landlady, an elderly woman now dressed in plumber gear, complete with utility belt, is working hard to board up the breach.

Gargamel, my beloved pug, runs into the room and jumps into my arms. I am cradling him against my chest like a child. He speaks to me, whispering into my ear, with a voice not unlike Linda Hunt's. "I'm scared." he says.

"Of what?" I ask.

"Death." It is perfectly horrible to me that a dog should contemplate its own mortality. I am chilled by I try to calm myself.

"Why are you scared of death?" I ask. Gargamel is ancient by dog standards.

"It's the 70's. Every dog I know has died in their seventies." He leans closer conspiratorially, "It wasn't just Boston. It was my mother as well."

I want to explain to him that just because its the 1970s doesn't mean he is in his 70s. But this is coupled with the wretched awareness that even so, by dog reckoning, Gargamel is over 100. I settle on a white lie, "You're not 70, you're 50." That seems to pacify him.

I leave Martha to her work and stand outside my apartment, insects still flooding out the door, cradling the dog in my arms and suddenly very very sad.

Scenes from Another World

I spent the other day walking around Downtown LA with my roommate. She's writing an article on the LA subway and the tourism possibilities therein. I lived in Downtown LA for my lost year between college and grad school, crashing on my dad's couch at the Brewery. I know my way around Downtown pretty well so I came along to navigate. The night before we talked about various ways in which we might tackle the trip; how we might balance well known monuments and attractions with more obscure delights. In mapping out the route, I realized we'd be passing pretty close to 7th and Broadway in the Jewelry district and its singularly bizarre local eatery: Clifton's Cafeteria.

Founded by a man named Clifford Clinton whose personal portmanteau lends the restaurant its name, Clifton's is the closest I have gotten to wandering into David Lynch film.

Imagine a world built in the same mode as Disneyland: 50's clean cut, white washed optimism with a stern but caring religious undertone, delighted by the endless possibilities of the human imagination. Only, instead of the expensive flagship of an entertainment empire, its a red-headed stepchild of a backwater, underfunded, unable to keep up with changing aesthetics and dilapidated. I'm sure at some point Clifton's was the place of wonder and hope it now mockingly reflects. Those days are long past, however.

What remains is a strange kind of shell. It's dilapidation is not so much haunting as pitiable. It I've been to run down amusement parks and off-brand Chuck E Cheese's where the failure of its animatronics and the general decay of its decor made the experience as eerie as a Diane Arbus photo. Clifton's real appeal however, is in the strange pathos it seems to generate. It's hollowed out interior is still remarkably earnest. And its this earnestness that makes it so very upsetting.

Supposedly modeled after the Brookdale Lodge, a family friendly vacation resort nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, the interior seeks to present itself as a welcoming sylvan escape from the hectic world of wholesale jewelry just outside its doors. A poorly carved, faux-fur covered moose leers out of an awning just past the main entrance. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, carved to look like tree trunks. A neon cross crackles atop a tiny "chapel" seemingly built into the impressive mountain rocks.

The upstairs is paneled with a series of yellowing, backlit, window-sized photos depicting the African Savannah, the Grand Canyon, Haight-Ashbury. Sitting by those lucigraphed pictures is meant to transport a diner to the faraway land it depicts. One really might be eating in the middle of the Madagascar Jungle or on Pennsylvania Avenue just down the street from the White House.

Entering the aforementioned chapel, a claustrophobic camera obscura-- too small to stand up in fully with a diorama of a woodland scene built into a glass tank set in one wall-- one can, with the push of a button hear the voice of a man long dead, with the slightest hint of a Tennessee Ernie Ford twang, read poetry praising both Jesus and the woods while canned birdsong plays, deafened by the whispering of ancient static. There's nothing sinister in the message, just the honest naivete that one could have a profound religious moment, not just by observing the majesty of the woods, but by observing its facsimile in the confines of a theme restaurant, while listening to the cheerful droning of sub par poetry being read aloud. A sign on the door cautions you to close and latch the door so that you can have more privacy in the chapel.

So it's not so much that Clifton's perverts and distorts its original intentions. It just falls magnificently short, while failing to appear hollow in the process. My mother, who first introduced me to Clifton's as a teenager, told me that her own mother used to bring her and her twin sister to the place after a day of shopping downtown. I can imagine that, in the mid 50s, as a seven or eight year old, one might be enchanted by it. But now, years past its heyday and nonetheless undaunted in its message it invokes the kind of nostalgia that is thoroughly painful: the return to a childhood favorite and realization that it would never again fulfill that same needful desire.

Clifton's was never my childhood joy. It was barely my mother's. It doesn't make me personally nostalgic. Instead it's a kind of nostalgia for the world at large. Here is a place that has fallen through the cracks of modernization. It's a portal into a world that the world has forgotten but still yearns for. It cannot fulfill the promise of its credo, but it makes one keenly aware of the lack.

Doubling Down

I promised trash culture. I deliver trash culture.

The other night, my friend and I went down to the KFC/Taco Bell near the University where I teach in order to participate in a cultural phenomenon: The Double Down.

The link I've provided here is a pretty decent explanation of the actual experience of eating it, and I would rather not paraphrase food critics more pithy and accurate than I, but I would like to talk about some of its existential horror and appeal.

My old roommate coined the term "intercourse meals" to describe food masquerading as other food. I am deeply entranced by this. Every year for my birthday I make "meatcake" a layered meatloaf glazed with Worcestershire-Ketchup and "frosted" with garlic mashed potatoes. Its surprisingly tasty if never precisely convincing as a desert. Similarly, I love making melba toasts topped with vanilla and orange creme in the shape of a fried egg. In short, I'm a sucker for visual ruses. So fried chicken pretending at bundom would seem to be right in culinary sweet spot.

On a bit of a side note, I think I can trace this obsession wit mimicry back to my dad's Time-Life nature books, one of which was devoted to clever ruses in nature. The cover showed a kind of aphid-like beastie masquerading as a thorn on a branch. It was both fascinating and terrifying. Creatures could be lurking in any everyday objects: a knot on a tree might be a spider, the broken capitol of an ionic column might be the shell of a hermit crab. It was a world that, more than deceptive, drew delightfully uneasy comparisons

In the culinary world, the gap between fried chicken and bun is not so very great as the gap between meat and cake (or stick and insect), but it nonetheless appeals to that part of me that thrives on indeterminacy. But that is ultimately my problem with the double down. Its not a real sandwich. The chicken is strangely mismatched. One would think that in this modern era of vacuu-formed meats, where McRibs can mimic the non-existent bones in their interior, that you could at least have a piece of fried chicken that resembles a bun, or at the very very rock bottom minimum resembles its sister piece so as to form a grippable, cohesive unit. The interior of this sandwich claims to be a bacon and cheese melt. Sadly it is a single piece of plastic cheese and two meager strips of bacon which would embarrass even a pauper sandwich artist. The chicken is far too thick, the interior is off center. Were it a traditional bread sandwich it would be mocked as an chaotically constructed, abstract joke on sandwichdom. It would be a DaDa sandwich, recognizable only in its obtuse mockery.

I guess what I'm driving at is that I don't need the Double Down to be a successful meal, I just need it to be a successful mimic. Content is irrelevant. Form is all. Let's gloss over the fact that the thing tasted terrible. Let us set aside that for all its weight in my hand, it was unsatisfying in my stomach. We shall not stoop to dwell on the fact that its greasy presence in my stomach gave me all manner of unsettling nightmares. It looked nothing like a sandwich.

I was promised mimicry, all I got was chicken.

The Somnambulists' Diary

Dream: 4/14/10, while napping in the early afternoon

I am having dinner with Apu and his wife from the Simpsons. I am not animated but they are. While their home is also not animated it is painted in blocks of color making everything look distorted and unreal. I have been eating a yellow curry dish served over rice.

Apu’s wife has been stirring the communal bowl with a wooden spoon over and over and buried in the curry I can see a glint of gold, for some reason the glimpses fill me with dread. She rolls up her sleeve and reaches into the pot which has suddenly become much deeper. Glutinous yellow curry oozes over the edges of the pot to join crusty dried refuse from previous meals.

Her hand emerges unscathed and she is holding a simple golden band: a wedding ring. She hands it to her husband then turns to me saying “There’s shit in this curry. You’ve been eating shit.”

A wave of nausea rushes over me and I bolt down the hall to the bathroom where I start drinking copiously from the sink faucet, trying to wash the excrement from my mouth. That’s when I start noticing grit in my mouth. I spit out what looks like grainy carbon grit and my mouth feels as though its been lined with sand.

My mouth feels like its starting to fill up with the stuff and I realize that its actually growing inside it. I begin to chew to try and break it down. I notice that there are small insect like creatures, black and mermecolic. Hundreds of them are falling out of the sink, drowning in the frothy, white water. Whatever they are, they’re in my mouth.

I spit the ground up insect into the bathtub next to me. One of them has escaped my teeth intact. I lean in to examine it. It curls up its legs and its scorpion-like stinger tail. Then it pulses, shivers and grows slightly larger. This happens several times and the insect is now the size of a lap dog, I keep having to chew, grind the infant beings into grit, horrified now that my lack of vigilance will result in one of these monsters in mouth.

Suddenly I am in my home, watching a tv report. A man who appears to be Jeff Bridges, dressed in faded, weathered khakis, like a great white hunter, is giving a report. His gray hair is drawn into a long ponytail and his face is powdered and he’s wearing big circular spots of rouge on his cheeks. He’s talking about how the city has been overrun by giant insects. The only way to kill them is to stab them through an eye with a flaming spear.

I open my door and the outside world is in tatters. Prim suburban neighborhood, SUVs in the driveway, on fire, overturned. Everywhere are giant insectoid creatures. Armored beetles mostly, massive like rhinos. Jeff Bridges voice continues, describing species as I drive around in a jeep.

At last I recognize the beast that was pouring out of my mouth from earlier. It looks nothing like it did in the bathtub. Now it’s a towering, elephantine creature with four trunk like legs, an iridescent scarab’s shell and a bony crest worthy of a brontotherium. It glances at me with one of its six eyes, which rolls back in its head with lazy annoyance. It snaps its parrot beak at me, bored.

And it dawns on me. I did this.

Beginnings are Overrated

Clearly. I've never really understood the exact role of blogging and I suppose that's because it doesn't have a particularly narrow one. I kept a regular blog through blogspot in college that was basically a space to rant. Before that I had a livejournal which was more or less a private diary that was somehow comfortably open to the public. As to what this is? Who knows.

Mostly this is a forum to write casually. Its a luxury I haven't had much in the past four years or so. My graduate program keeps me on my toes for formal writing. I'm limited by my subject matter (English) and my areas of expertise (Victorian and Gothic 19th century literature) and my academic interests (the Gothic valence of children). I suppose this blog is a liberation from that.

Don't get me wrong, I love Academia. In many ways, I prefer the formal writing to the casual: I like speaking from a place of authority; I like contributing new ideas to a community rather than rehashing the arguments of others; most of all, I like the things I write formally about. But every once in a while I get the urge to break with formality and research and expertise in order to write thoughtfully and thoroughly from a place of speculation, relative ignorance and on subjects I know little about. I suppose, in that way, this is a pretty standard blog.

But I guess its appropriate to write about the title and theme of the blog in a first entry, not that this blog has a particular theme. Harold Skimpole, in my estimation, is the greatest villain in literary history. In Dickens' novel Bleak House, he's a grown man, masquerading as an eternal child and banking off of his wit and feigned innocence to charm his way into the pockets of many innocent philanthropists. The quote that serves as my header refers to his perverse justification of his notions of charity. By being a charity case, he allows those with generous hearts an object on which to lavish their gifts.

I'm not into mooching, per se (though the budget of a grad student does make the lifestyle tempting), but I am into the perversity of his inversions. He manages to deftly reverse expectations and remain the beneficiary of his friend's naive charity with nothing more than the suggestion that his poverty isn't a state but a service.

I love low culture. Through Skimpole I see a world in which the base becomes exalted and worthy of our attention: a world where trashy TV is the window to our psyche, where fast food becomes a kind of postmodern art and where I can ramble about both with some semblance of insight. This blog is my informal, uninformed and formulaic attempt at perversely reveling in my cultural bottom-feeding. Its a blog of gilded refuse.

So please, don't show me any vulgar gratitude. I rather think you ought to be thanking me.