IAN: Don't you see the danger in what you're doing here? Entertainment is the most awesome force ever produced by man's historical progression, and you wield it like a kid who's found his dad's dictionary.
Gennero: It's hardly appropriate to start hurling generalizations before...
Ian: The problem with your entertainment is that it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge yourselves, so you didn't take any thought for the historical relevancy. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses and before you knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and then you sell it. You sell it.
Hammond: Give us our due credit! Post modern art has done things no one could do before.
Ian: People like Pyncheon were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think about whether they should!
Hammond: Epic poetry. Epic Poems are on the verge of extinction. If I was to create a flock of epic poems, you wouldn't have anything to say.
Ian: Hold on. This isn't some outdated poetic form obliterated by generational stasis or ironic meta-art. Writing had its shot. Nature selected it for extinction.
Hammond: I just don't understand this Luddite attitude, especially from a being who exists in space and time. How can we stand in the light of original creation and not act?
Ian: What's so great about orignality? It's a violent, penetrative thing. What you call originality, I call the rape of the natural world.
Settler: The question is, how much can you know about an extinct historical context and assume you can control it? You have books right here in this building that are poisonous. You wrote them because it looks pretty, but they are aggressive, living things that have no idea which century they're in and they'll defend themselves, violently if necessary.
Hammond: Dr. Grant, if there's one person who can appreciate what I'm trying to do...
Grant: Look. The world has changed so dramatically, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look: art and the narrative process have just been thrown back into the mix together. How can we have the faintest idea what to expect?
Hammond: I don't believe this. You were meant to come down here and defend me against these characters, and the only one I've got on my side is the blood sucking lawyer!
6/5/11
What if the lunch scene in Jurassic Park were a Post Modern critique of the writing process?
5/15/11
I have followers on Tumblr!
I do! Two of them, both beautiful human beings. One is a sleep-walking dog. So I suppose that one is a beautiful canine. To you, I dedicate this prophetic vision of the future. (When it comes true, you can come up to me and say, "hey, you were that guy who dedicated the future to me, and I would like a million dollars." You can say it, but I probably won't have it to give to you.)
The lyrics of the song Row! Row! Row Your Boat! were officially changed in 3191 to reflect a more aware view of the world, because, it was argued, repeating over and over that life was only a dream had caused an entire generation to grow up believing that actions had no consequences, and that actions were meaningless. The lyrics were rewritten by the recently revived Walt Disney, who had been frozen in cryostasis over 1000 years earlier, and read currently “Row, row, row your boat, however-you-want down the stream! Verily, verily, verily, verily, life is what it seems!” Some versions of the song have taken into account the change in syllable count for “however-you-want,” creating a nice harmony when sung as a round.
5/9/11
Sparks, you amaze me.
“I think you need a drink, sir.”
“Time is an illusion.”
“Lunch-time doubly so.”
“What?”
“I thought we were quoting Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?”
“And why would we be doing that, Sparks?”
“I don't know sir, you were asking me what time it was and I was avoiding the question. I thought you were being clever.”
“I don't have any time for unoriginality, Sparks.”
“Sorry sir.”
“Nor does the man in charge.”
“That'd be you, sir.”
“I mean the big guy upstairs.”
“I hate to be a smart-ass sir.”
“No, Sparks, you love it.”
“Can I make the joke then?”
“Did you think it up yourself?”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“Then go for it.”
“There's no one upstairs but leagues of water, sir.”
“Sparks.”
“Sir?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“What time is it?”
“Lunchtime, I think.”
“Are you being clever?”
“I would never do that.”
“Now here's what bugs me. You all know what time it is. Don't give me that face, Sparks. Yes, that face. Stop it.”
“It is lunchtime, though. I'm hungry.”
“I hereby forbid eating until someone gives me the time of day.”
“It might be night though, sir, and with all due respect I doubt you can enforce such an order.”
“Mutiny? Is that mutiny I hear?”
“If that's what you want.”
“What if I don't?”
“Then you can just call it insubordination. Or you could just call it happily obeying orders.”
“Wisely said, Sparks.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Sparks, look around. What if all of this were to be destroyed in four minutes?”
“Four minutes?”
“Yes, all of it.”
“The submarine?”
“No, everything. The entire world. The air raid sirens just blew your four minute warning.”
“I don't think we'd hear the air raid sirens down here.”
“Are you trying to mollify me, Sparks? Is that what you do in here every day when I ask you important questions?”
“No sir.”
“Well then, the world has four minutes left.”
“It does?”
“This is a hypothetical situation, here, Sparks. A game.”
“Well but considering what we have on this submarine, sir, you can understand my concern.”
“We have nothing on this submarine, Sparks, but we do have recording devices.”
“Of course, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Four minutes.”
“Why four minutes?”
“Because that's how long a warning you'd get if a nuclear missile were flying towards your head, Sparks. Play the damned game.”
“Alright.”
“What if: four minutes.”
“Well, is the world going to take four minutes to be destroyed, or does that mean the end of the world begins in four minutes.”
“I don't see how that matters, Sparks.”
“Of course it matters. Say the world was enveloped by Gray Goo, and it takes four minutes to eat everything away. In that case I wouldn't be thinking much other than AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH.”
“Sparks, you never cease to amaze me.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“We're getting off the subject here Sparks. There's none of this Gray Goo stuff. I don't even know what that is. Is it real?”
“Is what real?”
“Gray Goo?”
“What do you mean by real, sir?”
“Sparks, you know that if it weren't for the rule of law and our American government I'd punch you in the face until you bled from your eyes.”
“I'm thankful for that, sir.”
“For my wishing pain worse than death on you?”
“For the rule of law, sir. I'm not very strong; I wouldn't get very far without it.”
“You won't get very far with it, with your attitude. America is strong though, Sparks, and so by association you are too.”
“But the world is going to end?”
“In four minutes.”
“Because of Gray Goo?”
“No. Damn it Sparks, you don't listen.”
“I'm trying to, sir. Sorry.”
“It doesn't matter why it's ending, it's ending.”
“Maybe I'm getting an operation in four minutes, with a very low expectation of success.”
“Sparks, that's not the end of the world, that's just you dying.”
“I don't see the difference.”
“The end of the world, everyone dies. If you die, everyone survives.”
“So the end of the world is better, then.”
“Yes. I mean. No. I mean, Sparks, you make coffee nervous. It's like talking to a... to a... I don't even know. The end of the world is worse. More people die.”
“But then no one will be sad that I died.”
“Sparks, no one will... I mean. I suppose. You're missing the point. What would you do if you had four minutes?”
“Four minutes until what?”
“You know, maybe you're right.”
“About what?”
“I need a drink.”
5/1/11
Ennui? Malaise? You've come to the right place.
4/20/11
Spinning wildly out of control
"...Dreamt of Bees [is] a literary YA novel which is psychologically complex in the vein of Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime or A Separate Piece by John Knowles. It a is highly character driven story with a touch of the spiritual about coming of age with a psychological handicap, schizophrenia and aspergers, the state of modernity, and understanding homosexuality.
After Ian's friend dies under mysterious circumstances, Ian reconstructs his teenage years to discover not only how the death happened, but also to figure out himself in relation to a world that seems to him to be increasingly slipping into a state of unreality. His only other friend, a boy with the odd name Serata, is possibly implicated as a murderer. However, there is only one problem: Serata may not actually exist.
At times lighthearted and funny, and at times dramatic and melancholy, it is a moving tale with a bittersweet ending and a unique voice. Dreamt of Bees is full of childhood mistakes and love, religion, family hardship and the struggle for meaning in our modern times, loneliness and friendship. Ian must confront the reason for Serata's creation to redeem himself in his own eyes and to find his own voice."
Schizophrenia and Asperger's are difficult subjects, largely because they are completely unknown diseases. While the book is researched as well as I can, of course there are artistic choices I had to make. The addition of a "fake" (possibly fake, you'll have to read it to find out) character is inconsistent with the reality of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a socially driven disease - that is, it manifests itself as a cultural or social enemy attacking the diseased individual (for example, many report being under surveillance by machines; it is easy to draw the conclusion that our society's paranoia about machines is amplified in the mind of someone who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy). Its forms are as varied as the individuals who suffer from it, and the disease attacks the sufferer from a psychologically significant point. Thus actual split personalities, like in Fight Club, or sustained hallucinations of another person - these occurances are exceedingly rare and undocumented.
Similarly with Asperger's syndrome, the disease is a very personal one which varies from individual to individual, marked by an inability to read social situations or engage in social interactions. For example, I have a friend who thinks of nothing but numbers, they calm her down. Another friend just doesn't understand conversations, he rambles and insults, but plows ahead anyway because the feel of the conversation, the mood of the room, are not things that he grasps. Someone taking offense at him would likely catch him off guard, because he was not aware he was offending.
Regardless of how well known the diseases are, or how much I have bent them in telling the story, the main purpose of Dreamt of Bees is to show someone with severe troubles as a human being. Everyone has a unique experience of the world, and the individual representations of Aspergers and Schizophrenia really highlight this interesting feature of being human, that no two people are the same, that the world is a representation of unique psychological projections. That is - no two visions of reality are the same, and none are better, or more Real.
This calls into question Truth with a capital T. I don't condone relativism, there are inviolable truths. But these truths might take a form we aren't comfortable with, and never expected; truths that can't merely take a logical argumentative form. We can call it God, or Reality, or Psychology, or Magic, anything we capitalize with a letter to denote that the word is a stand-in for something Else, something Beyond, perhaps Everything, or Nothing at all.
3/18/11
2/25/11
A more polished writing sample.
A bit of Directrix Transgressive:
God had bestowed the power of Communication on Micheal when he was very young, that is, he could understand the word of God as it manifested itself in every day happenings, like the other day when he was buying another fifth of Stolie's, he had opened the bottle and drank like only a little bit and then had tripped over the sidewalk causing the bottle to shatter and spill the sweet smelling clear liquid all over the cement, and he had realized then that this was God telling him to sober up, being as he, Micheal, didn't have any money left and couldn't buy any more. Most people would call this chance, but Micheal had the power of Communication, and so he knew that this was the divine creator reaching out through the clouds and making it absolutely impossible for him to continue drinking, as if the Creator himself had a vested interest in his own recovery.
Micheal had always assumed that this vested interest was because his own parents had named him Micheal, as in God's right hand man, Micheal the arch-angel, whom his parents had told him had always had an eye out for him, Micheal the person, like a guardian angel. Micheal the person wasn't so sure about Micheal the arch-angel's protection sometimes, but whenever he was unsure there came the voice of God through the clouds like 'hey, actually he is looking out for you and he just had to cause you pain for you to get it through your thick skull.' Micheal often thought of his own skull as thick, as to why he didn't understand things some times. Especially the voice of God, even though he had Communication. Like when his mother had died, he hadn't gotten the reason through his thick skull for some time, and then he had finally understood, but then had forgotten moments later, why it was necessary, his mother's death. This forgetting, he knew, was probably more due to the high blood-alcohol level he had at the time of understanding, and so it was lost in a black haze of swirling memory.
But now he heard the Communication again, but he wasn't really sure what it was about, the Communication, just that this moment right here that had been going on for some time, was another one of those attempts from the Almighty to get something through his thick head. Micheal was seeing through what he called the “Haze,” you know that dizzy feeling when you're drunk but not really like spinning around in circles dizzy, more like, well, a haze, or a fog that's really an emotional fog and all confused like what's really going on? And what Micheal was seeing through the Haze with the Communication was a boy, probably like half his age (Micheal was good with numbers, even in a stupor) running at top speed through his own favorite alleyway in the Travestere area in Rome, where he, Micheal, sometimes liked to sleep. Micheal scratched his beard as the boy passed, trying to figure out what exactly this particular Communication was all about, like why a boy maybe 20 years old was here of all places and why was he running, not like what was he running from but what was the deep embedded symbolism God had placed there for him to find, is what he means. Maybe it was another request for sobriety, which it seemed like God was giving him a lot of those lately, ever since he had realized that he didn't even have enough money to buy food, because of all the bottles he was breaking on the sidewalk, which bottles he had gone back to replace. And then again, when he had found that garbage cans could actually be a decent source of food in a difficult time and that it was possible to dislocate your foot to make people feel bad for you and give you money the Communications from God had like tripled, and Micheal had no way to account for this sudden increase in interest in him from a God that usually didn't seem to Communicate all that much, to him, even though his life had been a kind of roller coaster of awful things, some worse than eating out of trash cans and so forth. And it was amazing what people threw out, trash cans could be a good source of vital foods. Once he even found a brand new saran-wrapped steak in the trash can of a Whole Foods back in America.
Micheal suddenly noticed that the boy was gone, like a lot had happened while he was just sitting there thinking and he hadn't even noticed it happen. And by this point Micheal's brain was so addled that the only thing for it was another sip of industrial strength vodka, like real European high proof vodka, and that didn't really make him feel better but it at least made him stop wanting another sip, which was one less concern for his addled brain. One of the other concerns that refused to go away was this really weird memory about American football, like being in the crowd at a game in December with the freezing winds and the snow that was really almost just really cold rain, and the guys on the field pummeling each other, and the ball flying out from the huddle like some kind of magical force compelled it, and like he, Micheal, had no idea why this memory decided to embed itself so firmly in his mind especially right now when he was supposed to be trying to decode God's message to him about the boy who had run through his alleyway. Like as in, this seemed to him a strange diversion from God's message, like maybe his brain didn't want to really come to terms with what the running boy Meant, deep down, like some kind of Freudian shit, you know, which 'shit' Micheal had studied once, in school, back in America, only now the memories were faded like a night of boozed up celebrations, and Micheal thought maybe if he were only sober the memories would come right back and then things would start to make sense. But it seemed like whenever he tried, to be sober that is, he would somehow end up with the bottle in his hand and say well just one sip and then the bottle would be gone after that one little sip and maybe he'd think the bottle had like smashed on the sidewalk but there it'd be still in his hands and God would be telegraphing him all sorts of messages but by that point he'd be blacked out and not understanding much of anything, let alone cryptic Communications from God.
And so then there was the incident of this boy running away, and no one chasing him, Micheal suddenly realized, like he was maybe running from something that was more hypothetical in nature, like as in, not physical. And suddenly from only God knew where, a black nightmare feeling rose up in Micheal and totally consumed him and he stared up in wide eyed terror that he couldn't express, and that was what made it so terrifying, was that he couldn't Communicate it, and it was like he was entirely trapped inside, and it all had something to do with this boy who had run through his alleyway, running from something that wasn't really there, like he, the boy, hadn't really been caught in the act of theft but he thought he had been, and here was Micheal, trying to speak aloud what the real terror was but finding himself mute, like a dream he had once had where there was a monster trying to swallow his youthful naked body painfully and slowly (the monster's throat had been lined with teeth) and all he had to do was call out for help but what came out was a series of pathetic baby noises and whimpers, and what he was feeling now was like that only it was in real life and not in his dreams, and that made it all the more horrifying because dreams weren't supposed to come true, and where was Micheal, the arch-angel? and he felt the tears in his side from the monster's teeth, just enough to cause unbearable and inexpressible pain (made more painful for the whimpers) but not enough to kill. The stars were out though, he noticed.
2/21/11
If you think this is over, then you're wrong.
Well the big news of the week in my life is the sudden release of Radiohead's album, King of Limbs. Like most people I'm sure, I felt totally blindsided by this, especially since I was resigned to never hearing another Radiohead release after Thom Yorke told Pitchfork that the recording industry was dead, it took too much energy to write a studio length album, and that he'd rather try his hand at writing classical music.
What?
I don't know either, but luckily that was all lies, possibly at the expense of one of the most powerful music websites on the internet. When you remember Thom Yorke is a jerk, it all makes sense. When he had said that instantly my mind went to the abysmal "symphony" at the end of Muse's latest attempt at trying to bench more then their own weight, The Resistance. I imagined in horror Thom Yorke directing the sappiest symphony ever written. Though if anyone could do it, it'd be
So a few days ago, Waste.co.uk sends me this cryptic message: Preorder the album today! At first I think it's spam, since Waste has been pretty silent since In Rainbows toured. But then I read it again.
What album, I ask?
Radiohead?
Where the #*%@ have I been?
After some quick research, I discovered that the entire industry had been smacked in the face with this, and I didn't have to worry too much about me becoming a erudite Luddite, lost under a rock of work while up in the clouds of writerly fantasy. There was indeed a Radiohead album, and I was one of the many confused by its sudden appearance.
Though Radiohead can do no wrong in my heart (and you should know I'm coming 
from there before reading any more I have to say), I have a feeling that these gimmicks are going to get old real fast. Not to mention how distracting they are from the music itself, which is where all the attention ought to be. With In Rainbows, the big splash was that you could name your price for the music, a commentary on illegal downloading yadda yadda, and what was a solid-but-not-their-best album got lost under a slew of commentary on the marketing gimmick. I buy all my own music, or get it via Microsoft subscription, because I respect artists and the hardships of creation. I feel anyway that the theft of music has died down considerably, which makes the message of the gimmick all that much more transient and paranoid.
Certainly more music is out there than is bought, but what music hasn't been bought a high percentage of that is music that wouldn't have been bought anyway, and so the illegal downloading has merely served to allow consumers to take risks on things they wouldn't shell out cash for, causing many more artists than ever to rise to stardom. If there's a problem with the industry, it's not the lack of fancy DRM tricks, it's the poor quality of the industry, overall. The big acts that struggling corporations like Warner are pushing, for example the Black Eyed Peas, are terrible excuses for mechanical production. People are paying what they think it is worth, that is, nothing. So Radiohead's social commentary in the form of marketing strategy is distracting at best, at worst completely unaware of the industry, pretentious, and self-absorbed.
So enter their latest ploy, announcing the album one week before releasing it. The true reasons behind this are still totally a mystery to me, the best reason I can come up with is that they're avoiding leaks and giving the criticism industry a big knee in the balls. They even told the industry that they were releasing a day after they actually did release, so that everyone was playing catch-up yet again when the album finally did surface. Of course the net was still flooded with everyone having their own say the moment the album hit the waves, but with a divisive band like Radiohead, that's inevitable. Here I give my pennies too, I haven't read anyone else's review so probably I offer nothing new, but I like to make my own conclusions and then read others to see how I stack up to the general opinion.
Now all this would probably be forgivable if the album was truly a match for Kid A, a culture-defining rock album for the next generation, now that they've already defined our own. So with my heart racing and my wallet aching, I threw down my 50 bucks and with great celebration, ready to have my mind blown for like the seventh time by this band of misfits and assholes, I hit the play button.
Bloom comes on sounding like 15 Step run through a meat-grinder, and I think, yeah, it's different, I could get into it. I look through the playlist. What the hell? Good Morning Mr. Magpie? There's a little nod to the hardcore fans. Now I'm excited.
I'm into the music, I'm singing along to Mr. Magpie, and then I look again.
What?
I'm on the last song? What the...
The album clocks in at 38 minutes, making it their shortest LP to date. Which isn't the weirdest bit. I felt like I'd only heard about 10 minutes of actual music, and maybe 3 different songs. As if time had been compressed, and I'd lost about 28 minutes somewhere. Did Radiohead invent the worst time machine ever?
This album is probably Radiohead's ennui at its highest peak. In Rainbows began to 
Possibly out of a love for the band, possibly out of some need to validate all the money I'd just payed them, I listened to it several more times, realizing that I liked every song on the album, but just somehow it wasn't exciting. Kid A left me dazed when I first heard it, as if I had seen something bigger than the 50 minutes of music that the disk held. OK Computer was a little more intellectual in reward, but I felt it was time well spent. King of Limbs just left me feeling like I hadn't actually listened to it, and needed to hear it again to make sure it wasn't an illusion.
Then yesterday I give it another listen, because now the songs are stuck in my head, and suddenly it all snaps together. It's still sadly not the dance music of Kid A, but the crystaline beauty of "Codex" just suddenly glimmered in the right way, "Feral" ticked all the right experimental buttons, and "Separator's" hook finally worked for me. Perhaps its temporary insanity from my fears of Radiohead's steady decline into mediocrity, or the buyer's remorse kicking back, but suddenly I heard something beautiful, that might be considered one of Radiohead's best albums. After knocking at the door until my hand was bloody, a nice butler opened up and said, "would you like to sit at the fireplace?"
2/14/11
Deerhoof
If you ever get a chance to see Deerhoof perform live, it's not really something you ought to think about: just go. Between Satomi's inexplicable sign language and joyful jumping about, Greg Saunier's frantic spazzing and incomprehensible speeches into the mic, and the band's comical chemistry, they're just a lot of fun to watch. I have to admit, I was expecting it to be more goofy than it was, after watching clips of them playing Perfect Me with Satomi waving around banana leaves and Greg just hitting things, but they still managed to bring across thier personality without compromising what's already great about thier music. They're just up there having a great time, and inviting you to join in. At some point Satomi came out and danced in the crowd, and I thought to myself - that's what Deerhoof is all about: they're aware of thier audience, willing to break the fourth wall that many bands would rather not.
The highlight of the show surprisingly came at the end, the first encore, when they played something that might have been a totally broken cover of Wilco's Kingpin, it was truly difficult to tell what the original song was. But it made me stop and think - maybe it's sad that the best song of the set isn't thier song at all, but a cover. And then I thought again, maybe it's great that they're willing to let a cover end thier set, because they just want to rock out and have a good time. Not only was it a cover (the only other cover I've ever heard them do was Let's Dance the Jet, which sounds like a Deerhoof song anyway so it's easy to forget it's a cover in the first place) but they gave the guitarist the mic and he f'ing stole the whole show. Where has this guy been? Why isn't he recording tracks? Man, it was so awesome. Then they finished up with Basketball Get Your Groove Back, of course, which was impressive - I hate that song, but seeing them perform it was something else. I squeezed my way up to the front and Satomi gave me bunny ears. Almost like recognition from one of my heroes.
The lackluster Deerhoof vs. Evil worried me, because it was just so joyless. But seeing them live has revived my love for them, reminding me of thier better days (Apple O, Revielle, Friend Opportunity, Milk Man), and making me wish I had gotten off my butt sooner and seen them when they were at the top of thier game. Maybe they're not a band of the past - maybe they have more eclectic awesomeness ahead - thier live show renewed my hopes.
2/11/11
Survival Horror and the Art of Storytelling
When I'm not writing or trying to make living wages, I am an aficionado of Survival Horror games. In my wee years, I was introduced to the classic Resident Evil series, at which point my desire to play FPS' and RPG's vanished, to be replaced by the thrill of zombie invasions and ghostly terrors. Resident Evil stunned me with the most unique monsters (the first Hunter in the game still gives me nightmares, with its glowing eyes and lurching gait) and the puzzle solving elements tickled my intellectual side without overtaxing me. But what really interested me were the stories integrated into game-play, something that no other genre managed to capture. FPS' at that time tended to be pure gameplay with minimal plot to create motivation, whereas RPG's tended to be nothing but a story that you occasionally got to press a button or two (and while FPS' have made significant strides forward, Square is still marketing 40 hour movies).
Now the Resident Evil storyline was never very complex, every game essentially amounted to "Who's the bad-guy? Oh, it's Wesker;" or "Wesker's done something evil again, go screw his plans up;" but what made the games unique were a mixture of intense action and characters who you might actually care about doing the action. It makes a zombie all the more frightening if you're invested in who it bites - unlike Doom, where the cardboard Flynn Taggart is just an excuse to have you running around a martian space station. Which is not to say Doom is a bad game, though if it hadn't been first to make FPS accessible, it may have been forgettable.
After Resident Evil, my entry drug, I switched over to the more addictive substances, like Silent Hill and System Shock, grittier in tone but infinitely more rewarding. In fact recently I had returned to Resident Evil II, my favorite of the original trilogy, and found it to be nearly unplayable. It has not aged well, I'm afraid, with the pixelated zombies, 16-bit sound and the wax paper-thin story that doesn't well back up the terribly paced gameplay. Silent Hill II, however, despite massive improvements to the genre over the years still manages to stop the heart cold - when you're running down a staircase that grows as you run, and suddenly you hear a low blast on an ethereal horn and moans from what is increasingly looking to be a prison beneath you, you ask why am I going down this way, but you can't turn back because the need to discover how your wife died drives you deeper into hell and your own subconscious...
And so on - but the point is that the atmospheric and gloomy story pushes you down this corridor, and it is strong enough to force you through things that you'd rather not encounter. This is a perfect metaphor for the art of story in general - any story is essentially a staircase (or a dark labyrinth, if you're Danielewski) which you, the reader, are being forced to walk down. When you begin to hear the moans at the bottom, you have to ask yourself why you ought to continue onward, and the answer depends on whether or not the driving force is strong enough. The beauty of the staircase itself is secondary to the need to reach the end of it.
Here's an idea: When you play Silent Hill II, and reach the Historical Society, and 
Melodramatic? Perhaps. But in the writing trade this is called the "hook," a vicious and bloody image for a vicious and bloody concept. You, the reader, are caught like a fish, your mouth punctured, and dragged along until you are deep within the fisherman's net, where the hook is pried from your gasping mouth and you are dropped to your inevitable fate. Perhaps this fate is an aquarium with other lovely fish, like a love story, or perhaps it's a terrible grinding realization that it was you who killed your wife, after all, the bottom dropping out of the false world you had constructed for yourself, where you find all the memories you had dammed in to a subconscious you had tricked yourself into believing did not exist. And suddenly you're the fish on the way to the butcher, realizing that the control, grace and dignity you thought you had is suddenly evaporated like water turning to ice, and then it is too late, you are encased in IT, the sail of darkness, the mathematical necessity of it all, and your last breath quivers in fear -
The hook need not be complicated. In Silent Hill II, your character James finds a letter in his mailbox one day signed by his wife that says come meet me in Silent Hill. Only thing is, his wife is already dead. So what the hell, you think, I'll bite. James only goes to reclaim his honeymoon, driven by nostalgia into the fog of his past, not even really seeming to care that his wife is already dead, only trying to reconstruct his best years. And so the letter may be allegorical as well, perhaps there was no letter, and it's more a message from James's memory to mourn his wife once more, a calling from a past place to return. This is Identifying: we pour ourselves into James because he is like us, he is like anyone who has loved and lost, who is aging and weary of the new, who wants stability and finds it in his memories.
This identifying lets us communicate with James mentally. He need not express himself, and so when he is dragged forward, so is the player. When he starts seeing the signs of insidious trouble, we ignore it, James and us both, because what is ahead is vital.
Then there is the disconnect: James is different from us too, or else he would not be captivating. He is on the fence of sanity, teetering back and forth like a drunk trying to prove his sobriety. His mind is the other staircase in the story, and progressing forward uncovers not just the physical landscape but the mental one as well. We associate with him, enter his mind, but then find this box labeled DO NOT OPEN, and we must give into the pressure because we are hooked, because we like James and are concerned for his well-being, and because we are like James and worry about the same box in ourselves. It is surely no accident that Like and Are Like are the same verb - we appreciate those to whom we are similar, but it is that unequal sign that interests us, the knowledge that 1+1=2--and a bit, our minds must account for that bit.
So we are driven to the climax of the story in spite of our better judgment, or now because of our better judgment, because we care about James, and then the staircase bottoms out, and the true horror of the moans is made evident. And here is where the story either becomes memorable or forgettable - in the reveal - whether the bottom of the staircase merits the journey down it, whether we feel we have eaten a worm only to get suckered onto a hook that can't be removed, or whether we're in the hands of a skilled fisherman. And as the curtain drops down on the story, the question is whether the curtain really fell? Whether at the end, we are joined by a ghost as we sit down later for a midnight snack, and we shiver because we identified with James, and it went so horribly wrong for us. We asked, what is it about James that doesn't add up? and we found that it wasn't so easy as an X in an equation, that the X = 0 all along, and that when the story breathed its last it promised that we too would be next, it would see to that.
If a hallway within a story can mirror the story, then it's not so farfetched that a story can mirror life itself, and not as a commentary but a true mirror: when it opens, the story is born, and the characters addict themselves to life, to the hook, which drags them, viciously to their own fatal end, and that end is the only suitable one, the masterstroke from the great being that created all - the absolute nothing, darkness without blackness, death? - the only meaningful story, the only meaningful life, is the one that looks towards Nothing, races towards it, and drops its content into it, like James's Revelation, spiraling into the abyss, making a parabolic arch, into infinity, into nothing, and then - ends.
