Author: nadia bulkin

The Best Story I Have Read This Year

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Well, it’s from 2005.  In my defense, I was graduating high school then and definitely not reading The New Yorker.  But I digress: “Commcomm” by George Saunders.  It won the World Fantasy Award.  You will laugh and you will cry.  It’s like Catch-22, but with ghosts.  It’s the future, and our future.  Just read it.  It’s perfect.

I turn on Tape 9, “Omission/Partial Omission.” When sadness-inducing events occur, the guy says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream. Your D.S.T. might be a man falling off a cliff but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of steaming soup, if one likes soup. It might be something as distractive/mechanical as walking along a row of cans, kicking them down… My D.S.T. is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath. When that wall cracks, there’s another underneath.

Recommended Essay

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“Man vs. Corpse,” by Zadie Smith, at New York Review of Books:

It’s argued that the gap between this local care and distant indifference is a natural instinct. Natural or not, the indifference grows, until we approach a point at which the conceptual gap between the local and the distant corpse is almost as large as the one that exists between the living and the dead.

 

Oddest of all is the unequal distribution of corpses. We seem to come from a land where people, generally speaking, live. But those other people (often brown, often poor) come from a death-dealing place. What a misfortune to have been born in such a place! Why did they choose it?

Speaking personally, I think my relationship to the idea of corpses changed when I was around 10-11, when my father and then my grandfather died.  Both times, I was urged by distant relatives to look upon their dead faces, and both times, my mother stopped me.  But I remember finding a photograph in our basement that I put away so quickly I don’t even remember the photo except that there was a body in a white bed.  I also never went looking through photographs in the basement ever again.  

After this, I became obsessed with speaking truth to power about death: death is real, death will come for you, death is eternal.  The body you think is infallible will fail.  I deeply resented stories that tried to mask this truth with Heavenly Ever Afters.  It (further) soured me on religion.  Reading graphic novels that dwelled on bodily injury intensified this crusade, since the sanitized bloodless versions really annoyed me.  But I’m still very, very averse to looking at real death.  And I think that comes from a fear of disrespecting the concluded life and the disembodied soul, not a failure of memento mori.  

bait and bleed

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Inspired by Paul Tremblay’s revised post on his blog, and just in time for Halloween: a list of some of my favorite scary scenes from horror movies.  Not all of my favorite movies made the cut – some, like Paranormal Activity, didn’t leave me with one defining scene, and others, like Lake Mungo, Paul already mentioned (and he’s right!).

CREEPYPASTA
Named after the formulaic, viral, irresistible little “copy+paste” stories, these scenes have that friend-of-a-friend, urban legend overtone.  Mostly occur early in the movie.  They elicit that sinking feeling of “oh no” because you know exactly where this is going, and it’s nowhere good.  See also: jump scares.

Candyman: The Babysitter
Just like “don’t go in the attic,” “don’t say his name five times!” (go to 1:00)

The Ring: First Death
The opening sequence of The Ring is a master class of the urban legend.

Paranormal Activity 3: Sheet Ghost
The babysitter dressed up as a sheet ghost before putting the girls to bed.  Then she went to do her homework.
 

NIGHTMARE
Long psychedelic scenes where you, and the helpless protagonist, get thrown into elaborate nightmarish and bizarre worlds and you’re like, “yes, this is scary,” and then five minutes later, “why isn’t this goddamn over yet, are you serious right now?!”

Silent Hill: Bathroom
Rose is relieved that the HazMat squad hasn’t found her hiding in the bathroom with a corpse in the last stall.  Then the screaming starts.

The Night Flier: Dwight Renfield
Dees has been chasing a serial killer that flies around in a Cessna killing people at small airports.  Then he catches up to the guy at an “empty” airport.

MONSTERS IN YOUR HEAD
Pseudo-hallucinatory, dreamy, and deeply personal.  Something Evil’s coming for you, just you.  I noticed after the fact that almost all these are Stephen King movies: dude knows how to tap into the twisted, ugly little thoughts/memories we all have and can’t stop picking at.

Pet Sematary: Zelda
Like most Americans, Rachel can’t handle talking about death, having been traumatized by the death of her sister Zelda.  Well, guess who shows up when shit goes down.

Twin Peaks: Bob
No introduction necessary (or provided).
 

HARD EVIDENCE
Found footage is probably my favorite type of horror movie, because it’s so naturalistic, chock-filled with creepy details, and a great slow-build.  The best found footage scenes are like the Fatal Frame video game – you’re playing detective, “trying” to find the ghost even though you don’t want to, and armed only with your ability to stand witness.  Like the world’s worst “Where’s Waldo.”

The Descent: Night Vision
The cave spelunkers are lost, people are seeing things out of the corner of their eyes, and now they’ve found a lot of bones.  So turn on the night vision goggles.

Noroi: The Woods
The premise of the brilliant movie Noroi: The Curse is an investigation into a series of mysterious, cult-related deaths.  The entire thing deserves to be watched and savored, but here’s an incomprehensible taste.

Inland Empire: Laura Dern
Is that her?  What is she doing?  Why is she running?  Oh she’s coming closer— I must warn that it took me about a week to burn this image out of my head.

NO EXIT
These, for me, are the scariest types of scenes of all.  They are happening now; they are happening to you, in waking life; you cannot snap out of it, you cannot put the photo down.  You think it’s over; it’s not.  And you’re reminded of this fact constantly.  These usually come after the movie’s shaken your hand and introduced itself and the stakes (usually with a CREEPYPASTA).  By the time you get to these scenes, you know: This is it.  Welcome to your new reality.

The Sixth Sense: Tent
Cole sees dead people, and he has coping mechanisms.  For example, he’s got his tent.  His tent keeps him safe.

The Eye: Elevator
Blind violinist Mun gets a corneal transplant that unfortunately lets her see dead people.  This movie’s got two great early jump scares, but this is the famous scene that stopped people from taking elevators.

Kairo: Forbidden Room
So scary, it’s been written about by the A.V. club, twice.

Ju-on: Security Camera
When asked for the scariest scene of the original Grudge, I could easily just post the entire movie.  But I’ll pick this one because the first time I saw it, I only watched about 10% of it (I had my eyes closed starting with the opening credits).  This is a scene I actually did watch, and my best friend told me later she thought it was one of the scariest parts.  Ironic!

Mulholland Drive: Diner
This is David Lynch as a Horror Director at his finest.  It’s daytime.  A guy’s sitting at a diner, telling his friend about a nightmare he had… about someone behind the diner.

Revolution is a Process, Not an Event

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Image

From The Awl’s advice column:

I have several friends (mostly unemployed writers) who talk about the same thing over and over: namely, that they’re not successful and don’t know people who will help them, and yet don’t do anything to change it… they go on and on about how rude it is for people not to respond to them or they are scared to send out their material too soon or since high school they’ve had insecurity complexes. 

The reply: 

Dude, I hear you. I listen to more people going on and on about the frustrations of being a writer than I listen to anything else…

So this is something you’ll want to tell these writer friends in order to shut down their sad donkey eyes and their quiet mewling. You’ll want to tell them to take full responsibility for themselves and move the fuck forward. You’ll want to say that no big break is going to make it easier to get up in the morning and write. What makes it easier is trusting your own instincts and noticing that you have giant ideas percolating in that herd-animal brain of yours, you just have to dig in and find them. After you find them, you have to write something terrible that eventually, through a lot of editing, over and over and over, becomes something great… 

Put the phone down and ask myself who in the whole wide world is supposed to take responsibility for what I write if I won’t do it myself. And sometimes, in order to take total, true creative responsibility, you have to shut people out for a while. You have to stop walking around like a giant fucking question mark. You have to stop looking for reassurance from half-interested friends, and you have to stop asking other people to help you shape your work from start to finish. Calm the fuck down and get back to work. 

This is how you get a writer to shut up: You say “Shut up.” Anything less than that, and the writer will keep talking until the sun falls out of the sky. Say, “Shut up. Go finish your shit and then edit it again and again and again until it’s great. When you’re done, then we can talk some more.”

 

 

in a revisionist state

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It’s been a long time, but I’m finally nearly done with my M.A. program and I’m hoping against hope that I’ll be able to devote more time to fiction.  I have a few updates to report:

  • My story “The Tiger The Dove” is in the Stone Skin Press anthology The Lion and the Aardvark.  It’s an extremely handsome book with some excellent writers included, and I was delighted to see that my story got an illustration by Rachel Kahn.  “The Tiger The Dove” is based on the pacifist political parties that emerged in Japan after World War II, primarily the DPJ – having grown up in two prideful countries that would never have surrendered their arms, I’ve always been intrigued by Japan’s support for Article 9.  For an academic take on this, check out “Japan: The Power That Dares Not Speak Its Name?” in The New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific, ed. Connors, Remy, and Dosch.
  • My story “Every Heart is Cold Dark Matter,” will appear in the Belladonna anthology Black Apples, which will feature a line-up of gothic/dark princesses.  “Every Heart is Cold Dark Matter” was inspired by my winter break at home, during which I watched a lot – a lot – of the Showtime soap opera The Tudors as well as astronomy shows on science channels.  I tried very hard to understand Hermeticism for the purpose of this story.
  • My story “Red Goat Black Goat” will be reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s anthology Lovecraft’s Monsters.  “Red Goat Black Goat” was initially published in Innsmouth Free Press for their multi-ethnic issue.  I have realized recently that Lovecraft goes together perfectly with my thesis subject, nationalism – the nation as a god, a sleeping god that needs to be awakened, and all that – but this is not that story.  “Red Goat Black Goat” comes from a scary story I was told as a child and couldn’t wrap my head around.  It’s also semi-inspired by the Death in June song, “Red Dog Black Dog.”

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing in the past couple years, but I’ve been taking notes on story ideas and checking them twice.  I’ve also been plotting a rewrite of a series of political novels that I originally wrote when I was in junior high, and finally put down the first chapter and a half in the last couple weeks.  I owe a lot of my sanity to writing – it’s the one thing I can do, especially in this city, that is just for me, that has nothing to do with my business card or my LinkedIn profile.  It’s a relief.  After college I was very worried that I not use writing to shut out the world, and I don’t think that’ll be a problem now, but just having a little refuge where I feel like I can to mine own self be true is a privilege.

postbellum

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“Lucky You” is up at Ideomancer.  Editor Leah Bobet’s description of the story is very generous and totally apropos to what I was trying to do – regardless of whether or not I succeeded: “breaks the world and then draws us through to the other side.”  Basically, this is my post-apocalyptic vision.

I want to share the music I wrote this story to, because both songs are generally excellent – both have particular “moments” where I hear them in the story, but that’s just me:

I got the new world in my view
On my journey I pursue
I said I’m running, running for the city
I got the new world in my view

photo by Roy Toft

spatial concentration

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My story “Pugelbone,” which won the recent ChiZine Short Story Contest, is now live as part of the October-December issue.  As I said before, this was the story based on a dream I had in China.  Here’s the beginning:

I was born in the Warren, and the Warren was all I knew. Both my mother and father were Meers. We go back to the founders. My father was very proud of our ancestry, but he was also very ill. He talked about forging tunnels and building walls and digging rooms for more families, more, when of course the Warren was already finished, and there was no more concrete to dig a new space out of. The rooms had been split as small as they could go without forcing adults to stoop, without making stretching out to sleep completely impossible. Babies were being suffocated, usually under older children, sometimes under their parents. The tunnels had become so narrow that we could only pass through one by one, and even then we had to dodge laundry from the overhead apartments, and falling garbage bags, and other things that people decided they just didn’t have room for. I guess before Warrens get finished – get carved up into this Swiss cheese honeycomb as far and as dense as they can go – people have high expectations of how it will turn out. I’ve seen my father’s sketches. There is an order there that is inhuman, it is so exacting. My mother used to say that in a Warren, you eventually lose control. I don’t just mean the jealous lovers that beat each other’s heads against the floor, or the men we kids used to call trenchcoat nasties. I mean you lose control of the Warren.

What ended up tying it together was the concept of the Kowloon Walled City.

good news

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I’m very happy to say that I’ve won ChiZine’s 15th Short Story Contest.  Much thanks to the judges and to ChiZine for hosting the contest.  I entered it thinking basically “why the hell not,” so this was a really pleasant surprise.

My story, “Pugelbone,” was based on a dream I had while I was on a train to Chengdu in China earlier this year.  Not sure if any of that has come out in the story, but perhaps.  Like my other ChiZine story, “Intertropical Convergence Zone,” this is kind of sociopolitico-horror.  ChiZine will publish it in the October-December issue.