Welcome to the Gothic: Mystery, Exploration, and the Supernatural Science

Though I'm not big on announcing what my personal pet projects are at any given moment, I do want to give some context of my recent dive into the Gothic genre. I have spent the last few months writing Gothic style poetry. I currently have 15 poems with more likely on the way.

What will I do with this collection?

My hope to is publish it at some point. I might even include some illustrations or maybe a few performance videos. I haven't really decided. I don't know if I'll try to go the traditional route of publishing or self publish through Amazon. 

What I do know is that I like writing within the Gothic genre and there's a good possibility I might try to do similar themed collections in the future.

As I wrote last week, the Gothic genre is littered with the dark, tragic, and macabre. The stuff I'm writing isn't exactly happy. It's brooding, a little gory, a touch cliche (for good reason), and often "messed up" as one person put it. I think the poems would fit in well with the Addams Family or Beetlejuice.

Even Harry Potter had a touch of the Gothic

A few nights ago, I shared a few of the poems with my sister. Her first response was to ask if I "was doing okay?". Which is a fair question (especially since it's not a secret that I suffer from depression). 

The thing is, I wrote a lot of these poems while in a really good mood. I just happen to like the Gothic aesthetic and find it appealing regardless of my emotional state at the time. I mean, there's a reason I enjoy reading creepy fiction in general.

So what makes the Gothic genre appealing, or at least why do I find it attractive? Is it just the darkness and gore that I like? 

Not entirely. For the record I don't enjoy gore at all. I prefer atmospheric and psychological horror to slasher any day of the week. Don't get me wrong, though, I do enjoy the fine line of darkness, madness, and macabre the Gothic genre treads.

However, these aren't the traits I want to look at today.

I think it comes down to one major story device that I am attracted to in the stories I consume: a good mystery that is inevitably resolved.

Humans have this uncanny need for resolution. We, as a species, like things to make sense. It's why we try to explain the explainable. Religion, science, philosophy, and stories all have deep ties to this need. 

Going along with that need to resolve any mystery placed before us, we also feel really good when we're the ones solving that mystery. I know I feel extraordinarily special when I've solved a uniquely challenging puzzle that my peers continue to be stumped by. It feels even better if that solution has to be kept a secret, like I'm part of some elite club for figuring it out and not sharing it.

Gothic literature is full of this type of mystery and resolution. As soon as the protagonist is dumped into the plot, the questions begin and you can't have a mystery without questions. Layer by layer the protagonist is spoon fed answers, while being bombarded with more questions until everything starts to fit together like the internal structure of a clock. 

The mystery solving process often leads to fulfilling another human need: exploring and confronting the unknown. 

Have you ever wanted to explore a secret passage in an old house? Or find a map that leads to a lost treasure? Maybe crawl through a cave you never knew existed near your house?

Humans love to explore. The Gothic genre often includes exploring old castles full of forgotten rooms, manors with the occasional secret passageway, or dark forests with overgrown paths. The exploration is exhilarating and exciting. Plus reading about exploring is a lot safer than actually doing it ourselves.

Finally, one of the biggest reasons I am drawn to Gothic literature, is how the genre balances natural science with the supernatural. There are a lot of fairy tale qualities while incorporating early modern science in Gothic literature. Dracula mixes vampire folklore with the (at the time) new science of blood fusion. Phantom of the Opera shows how easy it can be to take advantage of the superstitious using optical illusions and stage magic.

What makes me feel that the supernatural so much more real in the Gothic genre is how alien that culture is to me. I don't know anyone who lived during the Victorian or Edwardian era. I can only try to piece together the culture based on what I've seen in the media, researched in old newspapers, or learned from other researchers. It seems perfectly plausible to meet a ghost or ghoul in 1890 England, but not so much in 2018 New York. The heyday of the Gothic genre seems much more fantastical and unreal than my modern world.

That's not to say that the supernatural doesn't still have a presence in modern times.

Though it could be due to overactive imaginations or fraudulent trickery, the supernatural continues to fascinate and captivate those drawn to the mysteriously unexplainable. People will try to explain or rationalize away supernatural activity, but occasionally the explanation given isn't satisfying. I mean the early 2000s saw a huge uptick in the Reality Ghost Hunting TV genre.

Since I live in a world with even more advanced scientific knowledge and technology, the science in these stories feels outdated and at times ancient. A Pepper's Ghost illusion, such as the one used in the ballroom dancing scene at most of the Disney Haunted Mansions, seems even less real now that holograms and virtual reality technologies are slowly being incorporated into our entertainment. Though it scares the characters in the stories, if I saw it I don't think I'd be scared.

An example of Pepper's Ghost

Then again, some of the early science used can be truly terrifying. The blood transfusions disregarding blood types in Dracula is super cringe worthy to read today.

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy the Gothic genre that have nothing to do with darkness and gore. Mystery solving, exploration, and confronting the unknown are a part of the human experience, one that the Gothic genre excels at.

However, I do still want to address the dark elements in the Gothic genre. How does that sound for next week?

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week!

Welcome to the Gothic: A Quick Intro To The Classic

Every year I try to include some "classic literature" into my summer reading schedule. This started back in college when I picked up Treasure Island, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, and Dracula. I loved these books and I would recommend them to anyone who wants to check out.

There were also the books that I never managed to get through. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are two books that I don't think I'll ever be able to finish, though I've tried. Sometimes "classic literature" isn't to my taste (i.e. I find it boring). Other times, I find that the text hasn't been updated enough into the modern lexicon that I can't figure out what's going on at all.

I'm using quotes around the word "classic" because the term and status has primarily been determined by academia (who are typically of the demographics: wealthy, white, and male). Authors such as Agatha Christie and Stephen King have largely gained "classic" status through their fans and shifts in pop culture attitude. The Phantom of the Opera would have likely been forgotten about if the 1925 silent film starting Lon Chaney and the many remakes hadn't been such a huge success.

One of the oldest genres of "classic" literature that I'm quite fond of is the Gothic novel. Spanning nearly two centuries, Gothic literature was cultivated during late 18th century. Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) is largely considered to be the first published work in the Gothic genre.

There's more to the Gothic genre than horror (though there are a lot of horror elements to it). Considered to be the darker, edgier side of the Romantic arts movement, and largely inspired by the actual Gothic ruins found throughout Europe (but mostly the British Isles) are the key inspirations for the Gothic genre. British writers predominately shaped the Gothic style, though they weren't the only ones. French and American writers also heavily contributed to the literary genre, especially the great-granddaddy of modern western horror, Edgar Allan Poe.

But what exactly makes something worthy of the title Gothic?

A Gothic story might start out in a place like this...

Well, TV Tropes has an entire page dedicated to the genre, with even more links for hours of reading until you've fallen so far down the rabbit hole that even the Red Queen can't find you. In the simplest and most broad terms, I consider something Gothic if it meets any of the following:

• There's a creepy big house
• There's a creepy cemetery
• Creepy religious symbolism everywhere
• Dark and stormy nights
• Mist and/or fog
• Someone mentions the moors of England, Scotland, or Wales
• There's a ghost
• A dark and tragic past that one character can't get away from
• Secret passages
• Did I mention a ghost or two?
• There's the possibility of a curse causing mayhem
• Werewolves, vampires, and/or evil fairies
• Women fainting
• Someone - likely a beautiful young woman - has tuberculosis (also known as consumption)
• Did I freaking mention a ghost?
• There are creepy people around - a butler, caretaker, gardener, etc.
• Someone is brutally murdered

This list doesn't contain every possible trope that makes up the Gothic genre (in fact it seems to have a lot of the Gothic horror genre in it), but it's what I've noticed in the Gothic media I consume. It's not a genre full of sunshine and rainbows. It's dark and full of deep emotions that need to be expressed in the most dramatic way possible, with several chapters in a row dedicated to that character's tragic past.

Gothic literature eventually morphed into the pulp horror fiction of the early 1900s. H.P. Lovecraft has a lot of Gothic elements in his short stories. I would also argue that elements of the genre have managed to stick around, though they are not as frequent as I would like. Genres such as Steampunk and Neo-Victorian all have some elements of the Gothic style.

Movies are far more likely to play with updated versions of the Gothic genre. Hammer Horror, the horrible CGI monster movies of the 2000s, and pretty much everything Tim Burton has ever made has elements of the Gothic aesthetic. Sleepy Hollow is one of my all time favorite Halloween movies and it just oozes Gothic atmosphere. Guillermo Del Toro also released a Gothic style movie, Crimson Peak, that heavily draws on Gothic tropes.

I somewhat blindly stumbled into Gothic literature when I first picked up Dracula. I knew it was a classic Gothic horror story, but I didn't really understand what that meant. In fact, it takes a lot of liberties with Gothic tropes and in many cases subverts them. One example of the subversion comes when the horror that is Dracula follows the character Jonathan Harker home. In most Gothic horror stories of the time, once a character leaves a creepy location, they were safe from it.

I would totally live in that castle!

The Gothic genre wasn't without parodies. The Canterville Ghost contains the bones of a Gothic tale, but Oscar Wilde chose to take a much more comedic tone by having a very British ghost meet a very  American family. While Jane Austen poked fun  at the genre in her novel Northanger Abbey as early as 1803 (though the novel wasn't published until after her death in 1817). 

This year, I picked up The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I recently saw it on Broadway and loved it. The music is amazing, the story is interesting, and it has a feel that's reminiscent of a fairy tale. The play also made a lot more sense than the 2004 movie (though I love that too).

I brought this book

I've only just started the book and it's sucking me in. It's quite a bit different from the play or movie, but I can see how they adapted the story. Now, the book itself wasn't all the rage back when it was first serialized (that was a gimmick early news papers did to try and keep sales high), but it has since risen to be considered one of the lesser "classic" Gothic tales.

Next week, I'll continue my dive into the Gothic side of literature. Hopefully, The Phantom of the Opera continues to be as entertaining as it so far has been. Until next week!

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to Dog Days of Summer

If you're anywhere in the northern hemisphere right now, you've probably noticed that it's hot, like Satan-decided-to-build-a-sauna hot. It feels like we haven't had any relief from the heat since June. We've entered the Dog Days of Summer.

Except, what are the Dog Days of Summer? Why do we refer to the extreme hot weather that occurs between July and August as Dog Days? I know dogs can be cute and fluffy, but unholy hot?

Look at this face!!!

This question popped up while I was at work last week (or I think it was last week - time seems to be melting together as I age). I'd always heard the phrase Dog Days of Summer, in fact I can recall several songs that feature the phrase. Florence + The Machine have the song "Dog Days are Over" and I remember Fear Factor's cover version of "Dog Day Sunrise" (originally by  Head of David) from the mid-nineties. However, I never actually knew what exactly a Dog Day of Summer was.

I'm not entirely sure how the topic was brought up, but I think it had something to do with our office building sponsoring an adopt-a-dog day while it was unbearably hot outside. One of my coworkers explained that it had to do with astronomy, specifically when the star Sirius (not the Harry Potter character) is spotted at sunrise during the summer months. This astronomical occurrence always occurs in a 40 day period after the summer solstice - typically July to August. The star Sirius is part of the dog consultation and literally means the dog star.

Hear that guys, you have a star named for you.

For the Harry Potter fans out there, this is there is a character that turns into a big black dog called Sirius Black,

This cycle has been known and recorded since as early as the ancient Egyptians. For the Egyptians, the rising of the star Sirius signaled the fortuitous time of the year when the Nile River flooded, bringing life to the desert. According to The Old Farmer's Almanac the new moon after the first siting of Sirius also signaled the Egyptian new year.

On the flip side, the ancient Greeks and Romans weren't as fond of this period of summer as the Egyptians. In fact the Greeks thought that Sirius brought heat and drought to the land as well as lethargy and fever to humans. This belief continued until the modern age of science and medicine took over. Apparently purging through vomiting and blood letting was frowned upon during "Dogge daies" of summer because "the Sunne is in Leo" and "then is nature burnt vp & made weake" (from the 1564 English medical book "Hope of Health").

So the next time the Dog Days of Summer are referenced, remember it's not our best furry friends that are being blamed for the heat. It's just an extremely bright star in the sky.

Also while we're on the subject of our furry friends, please remember that the heat does affect doggies too. Keep your dog well hydrated and try to keep their paws off of the pavement while the sun is directly shining down on it. We wear shoes, dogs don't.

Stay cool until next week!

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to the Merit of Stunt Journalism

Last week, I wrote about yellow journalism and how "fake news" has been around a long time. This week, I want to focus on another type of journalism, one that is both important and controversial.

Before the advent of yellow journalism of the early 1900s, the mid-Victorian era newspapers would use stunt journalism to sell controversial headlines and bring to light stories of the oppressed, underrepresented, and the often forgotten about. Consisting of people immersing themselves in a situation or lifestyle in the attempt to better write a graphic description of the experience, these journalists would dive head first into their assignments to write emotional first person narratives and sway their readers into empathizing with their narrative.

Not to mention some of the best Victorian era stunt journalists were women.

Nellie Bly

One of the most famous stunt journalists (well journalists period) was a woman who went by the pen name Nellie Bly (real name: Elizabeth Jane Cochran). Her most famous story helped lead to changing America's perceptions on how to treat mentally ill people.

Bly agreed to do an undercover expose on the treatment of patients at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York. For ten days, Bly pretended to be "insane" (at least by the time's standards) to shed light on the reports of brutality and neglect at the asylum. She described the asylum as "a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out."

Her story went viral.

It directly lead to reforming the asylum and an increase in awareness of what life was like for those who had been committed there. Nearly a month after the story ran, improvements for the patients had been made and a budget increase passed.

She wasn't the only reporter to try to make life better for an underrepresented group of people.

Another stunt reporter, Nell Nelson (real name Helen Cusack) wrote about working conditions in the city of Chicago. Her story brought awareness of the extremely unsafe working conditions for women and girls in factories and raised public sympathy. This lead to new laws being passed favoring workers' rights to humane working conditions and child labor laws.

(You can read more about Nellie Bly by clicking here to see a biography or here for her wiki page. For more on Nell Nelson click here for a description of her work - she's a little harder to find information on).

Today, stunt journalism is known as immersion or immersive journalism.

It's a controversial style to say the least. On the one hand, these journalists are bringing attention to a critical issue which more often than not affects a group of people whom society tends to overlook. On the other, the journalists aren't actually a part of the group being affected overall. At the end of the assignment they get to go back to their regular lives, while the people being written about don't have that luxury.

I first learned about immersive journalism from a subplot from the movie "Get A Clue". In the subplot, there's a homeless man who continues to pop up in relation to a missing teacher. It's first thought that he might be related to the teacher's disappearance since he has the teacher's coat for an unknown reason. It isn't until the climax of the movie that it's learned that the homeless man was actually a journalist posing as a homeless man for a set amount of time to write a story on how homeless people are treated. Also, the reason he has the missing teacher's coat is because the teacher gave it to him.

In case you didn't see last week's post. Here's the Disney Channel Original movie "Get a Clue"

I had mixed feelings on how this subplot was used. On the one hand, the journalist pretending to be homeless helped solve the case of the missing teacher. He helped the kids solve the mystery and gave their story credibility to the authorities.

On the other hand, why didn't the newspaper hire an actual homeless person to tell their story? Clearly there were plenty of homeless people around that they could interview or ask to write the article. Why did someone with no prior experience as a homeless person have to live through the experience to make it creditable?

These are questions I don't have answers to.

I mean I can take a guess that it has to do with money and name recognition. It could be the ridiculous idea that people being pulled from their more mainstream life to experience what a marginalized person or people in extreme danger (such as those in a war zone) are going through somehow gives the story more "credit".

Regardless of the controversy surrounding this style of journalism, these writers are still exposing problems that need to be solved. They are writing these stories to get readers to empathize with those most affected. They are inspiring their readers to seek a solution to a problem, not cover it up.

We need journalists who are willing to go the extra mile to inspire change for the better.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to the Unoriginal History of "Fake News"

There was a time in my life where I wanted to be a journalist. Well, more specifically I wanted to be an investigative journalist. I loved the movie "His Girl Friday" and read as many books in the "Cat Who" series as I could find. Both prominently featured journalists who sought to discover the truth and inform their readers. I thought that reporters often worked with the police, not only to get the latest scoop, but also to help catch the villain in these stories.

Even Disney had a made-for-TV movie that falls in this genre

I used to watch the news all the time as a kid. It was hard not to when so much of the national news took place right in my backyard (that being Washington D.C.). I tried to stay as informed as possible.

As I got older, I began to understand there were types of journalism that were less "Get a Clue" and more "Harriet the Spy". Though journalists can't print anything they want, libel laws don't stop hidden agendas, gossip, and bias from seeping into the stories journalists report on. There have been some graphics of how informative and biased certain news organizations are floating around the internet as of late. I didn't post any graphics here as I wasn't sure about the original source for them.

An interesting take on the pitfalls of spying on your friends and classmates

Needless to say, after doing several research papers on the subject and even studying journalism for a bit in high school, I lost interest. When I went back re-watch "His Girl Friday" and it's predecessor "The Front Page", I also noticed more of the nasty and sometimes unethical things the journalists portrayed would do to get their story. One journalist (and head of his news paper) sort of kidnapped someone so his chance at the big scoop wouldn't be ruined.

(I wrote another blog post on seeing the play "The Front Page" about a year and a half ago. You can click here to read it.)

In high school we learned about yellow journalism (journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration). It was a term coined in the 1890s and was tossed around into early 1900s to describe news papers with misleading headlines, scare tactic stories, and sensational pictures or illustrations of events. Basically what we call click-bait and "fake news" stories today. These tactics could be used to sway the public on different topics and mobilize them into action.

To say that "fake news" and click-bait are new problems for the world of journalists is to disregard that the history of the journalism industry is littered with first person narratives that were meant to incite extreme reactions from readers. The purpose of all stories is to cause an emotional reaction with the reader, even in non-fiction pieces found in new reports.

I've heard some people lament that idea that journalist standards have sunk to a new low in recent years, but I disagree.

Journalism, like most writing platforms, is currently going through the biggest revolution seen since the introduction of the television. People are no longer limited to getting their news from a few local news papers, television stations, or radio programs. We can share information from anywhere in the world in milliseconds. We are more aware of what is going on in the world than ever before.

That's awesome.

But it also leads to new problems. Fact checking still needs to be done and misinformation continues to be spread faster and faster. There's also the emerging problem of bias confirmation and echo chambers that litter social media and forum websites such as Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. We can't only read and share stories that align with their view points and call people names when they post stories with the opposite view. We might miss out on other view points and facts that could help us better understand the situation.

Journalism and the free press are a right of the American people. It's in the very first amendment to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was important to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. It's a right that should continue to be important now.

And anyone can be a journalist. We all have phones in our pockets. We can take pictures, record events, and share them hundreds upon thousands of times on any social media site. Though, that doesn't mean we can take everything at face value. Under every narrative is a grain of truth.

Even my writing isn't without it's narrative bias.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.