michael arnzen

Happy Holidays!

I’ve been extremely busy on many fronts, personal and professional — and now that I’m on a brief holiday break, I’m catching up with obligations and promises.  I plan to get the next issue of The Goreletter out soon, but for now I thought I’d give everyone a quick round-up of what’s happening in Arnzenland lately:

• Big news:  The Gorelets Omnibus is scheduled for a January 2012 release!  If you preorder a copy directly from Raw Dog Screaming Press (publisher of my other books, 100 Jolts & Play Dead), you’ll get a free collector’s item! Get the hardcover — it’s got a lot of bonus material and is so worth it.
• I started keeping a journal at the innovative creative non-fiction site, cowbird.com.  I’m trying to keep it focused on authentic observations, but with an emphasis on the weird, uncanny, and overlooked as much as I can. Drop by, encourage me, and I’ll keep it up.
• A new overview page that lists all the social networking sites I’m a part of is now up at michaelarnzen.com  Please feel free to friend and follow in a frenzy.
• This website was injected with a malicious code last month and I’ve been quite busy rebuilding much it from scratch.  It was time to purge and renew anyway, and I like how it’s turning out.  But several links — especially to material from my gallery and bibliography pages — are now broken and I’m still recreating a page dedicated to my books and other horror creations.  If you’re here shopping or researching horror, please head on over to my profile page on amazon.com for the time being.
• If you’re a writer, don’t overlook the book I c0-edited that was released a few months back: Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction.  It was listed by The Writer magazine as one of the top ten “terrific writing books of 2011″ and also was a finalist in the USA Best Books Awards.  Read the MGOC blog to learn more.

My latest book is now available for pre-order.  And I’m very proud to share it with you, because it’s the result of a decade of work right here on gorelets.com.  It’s a big honking book of dreadful little things called THE GORELETS OMNIBUS.

I’ll paste the publisher’s description below, but if you want to jump right to their catalog, Raw Dog Screaming Press (publisher of my other books, 100 Jolts and Play Dead) are now accepting pre-orders on their website. 

PREORDERS WILL GET A FREE SIGNED BROADSIDE AS A COLLECTIBLE BONUS.

The book will likely ship in late January 2012.  I’ll keep posting news and info as it breaks. You might even get sick of hearing about it. But I won’t. I hope you’ll buy a copy and enjoy the look back over a decade of decay.

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THE GORELETS OMNIBUS
Collected Poems, 2001-2011
by Michael A. Arnzen
ISBN 978-1-935738-20-6 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-935738-21-3 (pbk)

$29.95 Hardcover | $13.95 Paperback

TERRIFYINGLY TINY.  DEVILISHLY DEEP.

The Gorelets Omnibus collects all the bloody little bits of Michael Arnzen’s poetry written in the past 10 years into one big volume. From the contents of the original Gorelets chapbook and his classic “refrigerator of the damned” online magnetic poetry experiment, to Arnzen’s latest flash fiction and brand new Zombie Haikruel series, this collection chronicles his revolutionary vision for the horror short form. He even received a Bram Stoker Award for Alternative Forms for some of the work included in this book. As one of the first writers to recognize the creative capacity of handheld devices, Arnzen’s pioneering work to deliver gory entertainment in as few characters as possible is still eminently relevant today. Thus, a “casebook of criticism”—a collection of scholarly analyses of Arnzen’s unique approach to the genre—is included alongside the poetry.

While The Gorelets Omnibus is available in both paperback and hardcover versions, the hardcover edition contains more than 50 pages of must-have bonus material, including:  the hard-to-find Martha Stewart parody, “Michael Arnzen Dying,” additional haikruel you won’t find elsewhere, unfinished poems and pieces no longer available on his website, the “Borelets” parody, and an impressive “horror poetry workshop” of instructional essays by Arnzen on crafting terrifying verse, alongside over 300 “twisted” writing prompts specifically intended to instigate weirdness.

Arnzen’s other books with Raw Dog Screaming include 100 Jolts and Play Dead—soon to be rereleased in paperback and ebook format.

And be sure to visit the website responsible for it all at http://gorelets.com

Praise for Arnzen’s Poetry

“Bored with sleeping? Read this book at night. Michael Arnzen’s poems are absolutely terrifying. His writing makes me uncomfortable for all the right reasons. If you enjoy the things that go bump in the night, Arnzen’s poems might change your mind. Arnzen is disturbingly, madly, brilliant and I pray for those close to him.” —Ryan Mecum, author of Zombie Haiku and Dawn of Zombie Haiku

“Horror and poetry very rarely mix well—if at all—but with Gorelets, Michael Arnzen has produced something of minor miracle; not only does every piece in this marvelous collection stand up to the rules applicable to poetry, but each piece—like the best horror story—provides the reader with chills—no small feat. If, on occasion, Mr. Arnzen’s tongue is obviously pushed toward his cheek, it’s all in fun—albeit intelligent, well-crafted fun. These pieces, and this collection, will not disappoint.” —Gary A. Braunbeck

“SCARY. Achieves in your face, punching rhythmical effects. Coupled with Arnzen’s vivid visuals…these rhythms are confrontational, leaving readers no place to run and hide.” —Sidereality

“Tight and succinct…visionary fragments, sharp little pictures that make your stomach squirm…in regular English, avoiding the pretense that consume so many other poets.” —Feomante.com

“Like one of those stubborn and painful scabs, only Arnzen could pull this one off. Served up with humor both vitreous and gut-wrenching, Gorelets delivers its tasty mind-morsels in palatable portions both raw and rare. If you haven’t tried one yet, grab a plate and dig in.” —Kurt Newton

“…the cumulative effect of the entire book of gory horrific teeny poems is a lot of fun.” —Ellen Datlow, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror

“It’s no wonder Arnzen has built up such a cult following with his Gorelets.com website—read one thing by him and you’re hooked.” —Matt Schwartz, Shocklines.com

“Gorelets is an example of horror’s rebirth.” —Pittsburgh City Paper

“Scary, gory, horrifying little demons that float around in the sinister mind of a very talented writer…these teensy poems are larger-than-life! Arnzen’s technique is brutally artistic with a blood-streaked flair.” —Brutal Dreamer Reviews

“wild…the product of Arnzen’s fevered and inventive brain.” —alt.press

“Gorelets doesn’t read like a bunch of tiny poems were quickly trotted off on a PDA. They are tiny experiments as to what a poet can do with a minuscule amount of space, and even with only a tiny amount of space, Arnzen’s possibilities are limitless.” —Damned Critic

“Michael A. Arnzen has a knack for balancing dark themes with wit and surprise. By mastering short, thought-provoking poetry, Arnzen creates works that are perfect for a quick fix of horror during the day or to be read from the screen of my Blackberry.” —Heidi Ruby Miller, author of Ambasadora

“In a little over a decade, Michael A. Arnzen has achieved what few writers manage in a lifetime. He has become the master of a brand of literature that is uniquely his own, and I do not doubt that his approach to horror will soon (if not already) be referred to as ‘Arnzenian’… Horrifying, captivating, ironic—Arnzenian!—the works of Michael A. Arnzen are in a class all their own. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride!” — Lawrence C. Connolly, author of Veins

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Preorder today from Raw Dog Screaming Press to be the first to read it and get your hands on the collectible free signed broadside.

The Vampire Squid:
“Like many deep-sea cephalopods, Vampire Squid lack ink sacs. If threatened, instead of ink, a sticky cloud of bioluminescent mucus containing innumerable orbs of blue light is ejected from the arm tips. This luminous barrage, which may last nearly 10 minutes, is presumably meant to daze would-be predators and allow the Vampire Squid to disappear into the blackness without the need to swim far.” — wikipedia entry on Vampire Squid from Hell

The Vampire Bat:
“…The furry, bean-shaped bat with its rodent-like face resembles a rat with wings, but bats are actually more closely related in evolution to dogs and horses. In fact, vampire bats in the wild will gallop and leap across the ground much in the same way that horses do.
In South America where they are common, vampire bats approach their prey on the ground, galloping quickly and quietly as they sneak up on, bite, and drink the blood from sleeping cows, goats and birds.” — “What Steers Vampires to Blood,” UCSF Research

The Vampire Finch:
“…Their most important source of food during the extended droughts is blood. The finches begin by landing on the tail of a seabird. They peck at the base of its wing feathers, breaking the skin and causing it to bleed. As the blood oozes out, the finches sip it every few seconds. Other finches line up behind the booby like a queue at a blood bank and as soon as one leaves its blood-sucking perch another takes its place.” — “Islands of the Vampire Birds”

[Read about Oxpeckers and more at The Evolution of Vampires]

Happy official Halloween day.  I have a lot of work to do this afternoon.  But I’m going to personally challenge myself to write at least one horror haiku poem an hour (at minimum) and post it on my twitter page all day long…till midnight.

I’m giving them all a zombie theme, partially inspired by the recent release of the sequel to Ryan Mecum’s great Zombie Haiku book from a few years ago:  Dawn of Zombie Haiku and all the great #zombiehaiku he’s been publishing on twitter himself over the past few days.

To read the zombie haiku, you can subscribe to my twitter profile or just run a search on twitter for the hashtag #zombiehaiku.  If you’re on twitter, come join the party — Ryan Mecum started it, and it’s open to anyone.

Non-twitter-users can also track updates via The Nest or on michaelarnzen.com

And just for dropping by gorelets.com, here’s an audio treat for you: a zombie poetry excerpt from Audiovile (originally appearing in my chapbook, Rigormarole: Zombie Poetry), from back in 2005-7:

WHY ZOMBIES LUMBER
by Michael A. Arnzen (1.41 mins)

DOWNLOAD .mp3(1.58 mb)

Thank you, Tim Nudd at AdWeek, for posting the 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011. Some of them were quite disturbing (I think the anti-child abuse PSA from Ireland hit me hardest (literally). And some are freaky in the way they just push the boundaries of what is taboo. But many are prime examples of the popularization of tropes of the uncanny in a way that is so orthodox, it’s a little mind boggling. In my review of this annual top thirty list, it seems to me that the ads that take the symbolism from their slogans or product names the most literally are the ones who generate the strangest of all ads.

Note how Freudian these ads are in their symbolism. The number one pick is literally a series of dream scenarios offered up for viewer interpretation. The truth is, ALL ads are dream scenarios to begin with, so Nudd’s selectio of this one — while being the most “freakiest” — is also at the same time the most honest.

I am always interested in advertisements for chewing gum (the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny focuses on the history of gum advertising in fact), because they must go out of their way to grab our attention and “sell us” on buying something akin to food — that is, something we chew but never swallow, in a simulacra of consumption.

Here’s one from the list that is the most audaciously Freudian I’ve seen in quite awhile: a video from the “Unexpected Turn” campaign for Vivident Gum:

Another uncanny ad that struck me from the “freakiest” list is the giant ear that moves of its own accord, in ESPN’s Sports for Your Ears advertisement. An obvious example of animism, with an ambulatory body part taking on all the characteristics of a sports fan, but it’s more like a wacky dream than an advertisement. I find it telling that in the opening of the ad, the ear is shopping, and when it is at work it is a psychologist (subtly recalling (if not directly referencing) the faux radio host Frasier from TV: “I’m listening”).

Some in the list are hilarious. Some are disturbing. Some are not safe for work. Most employ the uncanny to sell a product. See them all at AdWeek.

Leave a post if you want to tell us which ones you’d put in your top two.

Here’s a fun form of culture jamming — a very soft and cuddly act of public defacement not unlike smiley face graffiti — that’s picking up attention online this month: “Eyebombing.”

“Eyebombing” is the art of sticking “googly eyes” (a.k.a. “wiggly eyes” — the glue-on sort of craft store kind) onto an inanimate object in the public sphere in a way that cleverly lends the object the appearance of a living creature.

The purpose? According to eyebombing.com, it’s “humanizing the world, one googly eye at a time.” A wee bit subversive in nature, like drawing a mustache on a billboard celebrity.  Take a snapshot of this public (de-?)facement, post it to eyebombing.com, link to it on a facebook group or flickr group or some other social network, and you have a mounting trend that — while nothing new, really — is emerging as a cute internet “meme.”  We could possibly also call this meme an instance of the popular uncanny.  But maybe not in the way you might, at first, suspect.

Sure, it’s just anthropomorphizing. Such gestures — which give the attributes of life to an inorganic object — often are “uncanny” because they confuse the assumed boundary between what makes something an object and what makes something — anything — a subject, capable of “returning the gaze.” We might feel an aura of weirdness for just the first moment we look at the object and see that it is “looking back” when it’s not supposed to. This reaction harkens back to what Freud once termed the “surmounted” childhood beliefs in an animistic world, in this case rendering everyday urban life as fantastic as the trees that talk in fairy tales or the Muppets of television childhood. Only now Oscar the Grouch doesn’t live a trashcan — he IS the trashcan. From guard rails to postal boxes, as the result of eyebombing, the objects of everyday life become doll-like with those cheap stick-on “googly” eyes so familiar to us from craft stores.

But googly eyes are plastic simulacra to begin with.  They do not “move of their own accord” per se — in fact, it would probably be far more uncanny and disturbing to see human beings with plastic eyes like these on their faces instead.  In other words, this is a representation of the gaze, a plastic staging of the uncanny, rather than a genuinely haunting act of defamiliarization.

Yet it is still — at least at first glance — a little uncanny.  Indeed, it is the eyes themselves, far more than the objects they transform, which I would say are the harbingers of the popular uncanny.  Is it not the familiarity of the googly eyes — not of the defamiliarized postal box, but the plastic eyes themselves — used in such a strange way, that makes them seem so odd, if not haunting? The googly eyes themselves are displaced from the faces of dolls and other crafts and are now potentially looking at us from anywhere, especially places where we would not expect to encounter them.  The “bombed” site — a guard rail, a trash can, a light switch — is surprisingly looking at us when we turn around, precisely like those eyes on the GEICO dollar bill stack from advertising (“I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”)

Of course, this is not really scaring anyone.  Disturbing a few, momentarily, perhaps. But we remain “surmounted” because we are not fooled by the eyes — they are not realistic the way that, say, fantastically  customized contact lenses or the eyeballs from a “reborn doll” are.  No — these “craft” items are virtually two-dimensional in all their clitter-clatter spinning disc glory, and are located more in the realm of concepts than animals.  Indeed, they seem to make a statement more than talk for themselves.  The subversive act of rendering a public, hard object as a personalized and personified object is still potent; it can defamiliarize in a very palpable manner, like all good art — but it does so in a way that is not felt as threatening.  Its unreality is domesticated — which, while seemingly lacking in the haunting power of the uncanny is nonetheless a a defining element of many items of the “popular” uncanny, which sublimates but never entirely buries repressed desire in its attempt to make the unfamiliar more familiar — often by employing the tactics of childhood fantasy. 

Eyebombing is the Fozzie-Bearification of the community property — the Jim Hensoning of the public square.  There is a return of the repressed invoked here, but it very well may a repressed belief in the power of folk art, which has been increasingly “surmounted” by technology — or even just a psychological reawakening of some relationship to a children’s puppet from days gone by — which here returns with a twinge of uncanny recognition.

Bombs away.

Wired magazine recently posted a clever infographic: “Where Celebrities Fall in the Uncanny Valley.”

I don’t want to take this one too seriously, and really just wanted to share it. It’s pretty funny…and also accurate. I think it’s really just an inside-joke at the expense of the Wired editor who is included on the chart. But in the larger view, the conceit, of course, is that actors are non-human constructs — and that their plastic surgery makes Joan Rivers and Mickey Roarke akin to zombies. The chart is really flawed, however, because it mixes up the idea of a “character” and an “actor.” These are two very different things, and I believe only “actors” really constitute celebrities.

Perhaps this ambiguity is related to their uncanny affect. How often do we confuse the symbol (actor) for what it symbolizes (character)? This comes right out Freud’s essay on the Uncanny.

I have to admit, I found the names listed on the OTHER SIDE of the valley more interesting than those dumped into the valley itself. They are examples of actors who are approaching the transhuman, I suppose.

Moreover, I had to note that the use of Star*Wars figures made the Wired chart feel a little too much like the chart Tracy Jordan crafted in an episode of 30 Rock (discussed in depth here back in Oct 2008). The whole chart is an uncanny echo in a way, of both Mori’s theory and that episode of 30 Rock.

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Note to regular readers of this blog: I’ve begun a “stack” of links at delicious.com/arnzen where I will tag things I spot online relevant to The Popular Uncanny.

I have to laugh whenever I see this snowglobe of Sigmund Freud, which is on a shelf in my campus office. This came to me from my old friend from graduate school, Bill Hamilton, who picked it up during a trip to Vienna last year, when he visited the Sigmund Freud Museum among other things.

What an odd choice for a kitschy ball of faux-snow! The figure inside is hard to determine as Freud, but I like to imagine it is Freud wearing ski goggles. Or a character from Futurama.

A colleague once asked me if that was cocaine swirling around his head.

The snowglobe is hilarious, as all snowglobes are.

The other day I took the above photo because the look of it got me thinking about snowglobes themselves — balls of glass that swirl powder in a watery shell to create a three-dimensional snowfall scenario. It’s impossible not to think of Citizen Kane or childhood or giftshops. To me they seem to imply a moment “frozen in time” — much like a photograph — yet not still… in persistent motion. The snowfall effect, when it works correctly, and sustains a well-balanced drift over time, aligns the device with the “automaton.” Yet we must shake them to stir them to life — these are not robots with on-off switches.

Indeed, the snowglobe is unerringly physical in nature…seemingly alive, in that it is a globular, fragile vessel that contains liquid, despite its hard glass shell. It is fascinating to watch people make this odd gesture — the shaking of a snowball — and to see the change that momentarily comes across their features — the frustration or fear or desire on their faces. Some shake them violently. Some gently disturb the glass for fear of dropping it. Some swish them like brandy; others twist them upside down and up again with violent abandon. There is something going on there, some kind of wish fulfillment and dread, in that strange moment when they grasp and disturb the contents of the globe, followed by the look of hope in their eyes as they hold it up to the light.

I always want the snow to keep moving, so I never have to shake the globe again. But gravity always wins.

The snowglobe is always reminiscent of death until it is shaken into life. In this way it has the aura of the uncanny.

It is no wonder, then, that they are objects of kitsch commodity fetishism in popular culture. Every gift shop sells them, even when the objects in the globe have absolutely nothing to do with snow, winter, or white powder in any way. Their “liveliness” promises for a price to allow you to magically bring a memory back to life, through this fetish object that stands in for the memory. We just think of them as toys, but they are deceptively more like dreams. Nay, they are more akin to crystal balls than toys.

Thinking of all this, I went hunting for interesting snowglobes online. Check out the snowglobe artwork of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, called “Travellers”. “Like fairy tales or dreams, the tiny tableaus work as psychological metaphors,” Ken Johnson wrote for the NY Times. “Specifically, a stage everyone is bound to enter when life has lost its warmth and promise, at which point finding a new way becomes desperately urgent.” The globes contain an un-home-like moment, destabilized. And they are morbidly hilarious, too.

Stephanie Lay is researching the uncanny valley and is looking for participants to take a survey that rates the eerieness and humanness of an array of faces. The survey takes less than 20 minutes and will likely get you thinking about your own perceptions of what is and is not uncanny.

Sign up at http://bit.ly/FaceExperiment.

And be sure to peruse Stephanie’s Research Journal for her Open University Project on the Uncanny Valley online.

The above schematic is an extension of the “uncanny valley” theory that futurist Jamais Cascio proposed in 2008: a “second uncanny valley” that occurs after culture moves into “transhuman” territory.

I like this because it causes us to rethink the structure of “uncanny valley” theory through — uncannily — its mirror reflection, or double image. As an alternate model, it’s quite clever.

The idea also seems sensible, assuming that technology can surmount the (by definition?) impossible hurdle of making a simulacra 100% identical to a healthy person and enter into radical posthumanity.

But the problem I’m having with it is the symmetricality of the model, which seems to simply split along the Y axis in the very “center” of the graph — at the “healthy person” peak.  That peak, however, should be the terminus because it is the point where the Other becomes a “mirror image” of the perceiving Self — i.e. an automaton, doll, robot or other animated object that looks (or is otherwise perceived to be) identical to a human being and therefore has surmounted the so-called “uncanny valley” (that sinking feeling in our emotional reaction to the unfamiliar).

The idea in Cascio’s theory is that once we move beyond the pinnacle of the “healthy person” we then ping backwards again, coming “down” from the pinnacle of complete identification into something radically posthuman.  If it were moving in the direction of transhuman, would it not rise ABOVE the pinnacle of health in the center of the model? Perhaps transhumanism would be something of a “sublime mountain” instead of an uncanny valley — a reaction in the perceiving subject of awe and wonder about the transcendent human.

And because the transhuman is still a version of the human, I am not so sure that transhumanity would be perceived as Other in the first place. Another way to think of this is this way:  What would a posthuman subject apprehend as uncanny?  The humanity that it has surmounted?  Or something beyond the beyond?

Indeed, the very act of perception would likely be quite different for the transhuman subject and require an altogether post-binary model.

Even so: I love encountering an alternate model that approaches this from a futurist perspective. In The Popular Uncanny, one of my arguments is that the uncanny in postmodernity is really an echo effect of modernist culture — that yesterday’s “automatons” are today’s “cyborgs” — and that the emotional affect of these things is still present, despite the familiarity of such doppelgangers in popular culture. To think of the transhuman is to think beyond the human, and to think of a post-uncanny.

Read the article and the interesting comments about it in Casio’s “Open the Future” blog.