friend of a friend: Mordicai Knode

Friend of a Friend spotlights people of interest to the greater AMR community: poets, rockers, artists, aesthetes, and assorted bon vivants. The series is called Friend of a Friend because all the interviewees are my friends, and hopefully you’ll be their friend too once I introduce them to you. – Nick Courage

DISCUSSED IN THIS INTERVIEW: something more nuanced than “archenemies”; the living room between solipsism and nihilism; Lion Pinball Player Productions; the epic of gilgamesh (and who is who therein); identity as illusion/psychoanalytics as identity; what one should do on Dinosaur Island with too many Bronte sisters; young love (and how to get married if you’re going to get married); transhumanism and the hive mind; the vagaries of hyperbolic geometry; mythmaking, zombies, and elaborate dice; “the new sincerity”; the eerie songs of the gill people vs. TOTO b-sides; Great American Novels; &c.

Nick Courage: Poseidon and Odysseus, Captain Hook and Peter Pan, Black Manta and Aquaman… You know what I’m doing here. We just met recently, lured together by friends and coworkers who thought we’d combust on impact. And we didn’t, of course. But from what little I know about you… we seem psychically similar enough to become Erzfeinde. (I use the Germanic for an increased sense of the sinister – maybe unfair, but effective). Do you think we’ll ever be able to put aside our differences and live peacefully in this wild and woolly world? Since we seem to be doing that already, is there a possibility that we’re something more nuanced than archenemies? Since I’m basically a Lacanian, for better or worse, I already have a suspicion that archenemies are more nuanced than I’m allowing for, anyway. But we can forget that I ever brought up Lacan if you prefer.

Mordicai Knode: If you’re going to bring up Lacan I’m going to invoke the anthropic bias! It is weird you bring up (in a round about way) subject-object/ same-other problem, since that is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I joke about being somewhere between solipsism & nihilism, & it isn’t entirely untrue– I’m pretty down with the notion of identity as illusion. Which leaves the other, or really rather, the Other. Wait, I’m going far off field on this question, & for someone who doesn’t acknowledge the Self, I sure am going on a narcissistic jag (though I suppose any interview ultimately is an exercise in reflection– there is your Lacan again…). Adversaries? Maybe, but I doubt against each other– I’m thinking more twin fiery swords that turn every which way? At least I expect to be a Third Party on the Meggedo fields. Unlikely allies, more like; Gilgamesh & Enkidu.

NC: And I’m Enkidu?

MK: I don’t even care who is who, lets just go mess up Humbaba & steal his magic auras, is what I’m saying.

NC: That’s the best possible answer, I think, in this scenario – and I needed to step out for some air anyway, so might as well…. But the reason I asked is: if Enkidu [ed: wildman sidekick to Gilgamesh, Sumerian king & conqueror] I would have tapped into my feral, Other’d core and said/roared: to hell with the anthropic bias! Also because: who wouldn’t want to be the one that lives (Gilgamesh)? But it’s interesting that you’re not interested in assignations… so far your anti-ego story checks out. Although, that’s not quite the right word for it, “anti-ego”, because as far as I know we both have deliberately constructed identities and creation myths to match.

And yet, people seem to have pretty visceral feelings that we’re somehow polarized. Is it because they intuit that you see identity as illusion and i see it as malleable but still very real? Is that a fair thing to say, and why would that leave people feeling we’d be perfect archenemies? Is everyone just feeling the heat of swords that are: AGENCY IN SELF-CONCEPTION!, however dulled? I don’t want to harp or bore anyone, but… let’s talk about the gestalt and the illusion of autonomy (psychic and… physical?) for maybe just one more minute. It’s going to predicate everything after that anyway.

MK: Well, from a pragmatic point of view, the creation of a Vehicular self– we’ll keep using Neo-Freud/Lacan & say Ego, sure– a personality is really handy. Translation framework, right? The hardware might be obscured, but we’ve got a shared language to run the software of persona, right? I want to be careful to not get too enmeshed in metaphor here, of course, but I think it serves; a holographic avatar for a holographic universe. Maybe people expect sparks to sizzle because we both have a point of view that– well, you said agency, I’d maybe say demiurge– puts us at the center of cosmology rather than subject to its vagaries? Acts of Will, that kind of thing? Then again, I’d argue that the only kind of being I’m interested in is the one with worlds inside of it.

Autonomy is one of those funny things– from a completely empirical level, you can go right off the bat & rule it out; a bunch of cells in a colony called a brain, in a system of organs called the Self? Pretty outrageous. Then you start getting into what got us here in the first place, the mind-body dilemma. I like the elegance of the skin as the demarcation of Self & Other, but, without resorting to mysticism & crystal waving, it really doesn’t serve. I suppose I am inclined to collapse it to a lower set of assumptions, rather than a higher set; I don’t want to invoke Occam’s Razor, but a model with less members– one, or none– seems more plausible than a populated spirit world of invisible faeries. Sorry, Tinkerbell. The real problem lies there, too– there isn’t a reasonable way to test whether everything is illusion or infinity. Not without waving a magical wand & saying post-humanity. Or well, destroying the universe.

Figure 1:

NC: Well said, and “demiurge” does make me feel a little bit more central; I’ll take it. As for Occam’s Razor (which was – significantly? – invoked in the negative): I’m with you at the beginning, but we couldn’t draw more oppositional conclusions. Just to sum it up in shorthand for the folks at home – and please correct me if I’m being overly reductive:

You feel that the easiest explanation for … let’s just be big about this and say Existence… is psychic and corporal illusion (I’m tempted to say mass hallucination, but that would imply deviation from a coherent normalcy that i don’t think exists in your ontology [ed: apologies all around for this sentence]); I think we’re psychically and even physically fragmented – atoms incorporating and recycling out – but that the smoke and mirrors of illusion (mass or personal, who knows) is too complicated an answer for human experience. For that, I think I’d put my money on happenstance.

But who cares about pell-mell human experience! We’re talking about Gods now, which changes the stakes. I dig your line about you liking the elegance of skin as the demarcation of Self, even though you don’t embrace it (and in fact discount it), because I think it’s telling on an emotional level. Getting back to french psychoanalytics: it seems to betray a shaky belief/hope in self-autonomy beyond the vehicular self (shudder!) against an all-encompassing Other… without accounting for the lack of being, or the desire for being – the Otherness, in this case – that should necessarily be a part of your human experience (illusory, demiurgic or otherwise). Which seems to me to be a normal, human response to feeling last-man-alive alone and maybe even non-existent…

Or maybe – and this is always the problem with french psychoanalytics – you’re just a sucker for a sexy turn of phrase?

MK: I think I’d actually be willing to deviate WAY away from…coherent normalcy, as you put it. I sort of veered away from talking about that just because no matter how surreal & off the wall any brainstorming of possible realities might get, it is still stuck in the truth-as-stranger-than-fiction cliche. Heck, I’d drop a samsara-bomb on it (as an aside, isn’t it amazingly disturbing that India calls its nuclear missiles “Agni“?) & say total illusion. If I was forced to guess– by like an interviewer point-blank asking me– I’d probably go with a closed-infinite Perfect Forms sort of metaverse (to throw an awkward neologism) almost utterly divorced from perceivable reality.

You mention cycling– which is the first occasion either of us have explicitly mentioned time; I work under the assumption that linear spacetime is a quirk of the “human experience” & a rather limiting approach to phenomena. You also use the term “fragmented”– I’ll see your fragmented, & raise you a…scattered? I think the most interesting part of alienation is the Alien, right? Because the Alien is you. Which, now we are addressing the real mix here, when the fifty-cent words, pop psychology, & philosophical mumbo jumbo start crashing together. You’ve got my number, but I’ll squirm a little bit under the entomologist’s pin: autonomy & self aren’t what I’m looking for, though I’ll cop to an expectation beyond annihilation. & we haven’t even talked about how the hive-mind, near & dear to my heart, plays into it. I mean– I sort of sniffed my nose at transhumanism earlier, but I’ll say it seems like a reasonable first step?

Oh language. It lets me control what other people are thinking!

NC: I definitely feel scattered, anyway; this interview is like the first time i watched Akira (less motorcycle gang rapes, though. So far).

[sip of water, washes hands and face]

NC: It’s funny that you mention the hive-mind & transhumanism because I’m simultaneously interviewing a Singulatarian who’s looking ever-forward to Utopic post-singularity humanity and trying to explain to me how we won’t – to latch on to the black hole analogy – have our component molecules ripped apart on the way there. I think we’re about to start talking about folded time as a possible explanation… to be honest, I’m really out of my depth there. But, since you brought it up, I’d like to hear your thoughts on transhumanism &c. as well.

Can you first explain what you mean by “closed-infinite Perfect Forms sort of metaverse”, though?

MK: What, “closed-infinite Perfect Forms sort of metaverse” isn’t self explanatory!?

NC: Depends on the Self, I guess. To awkwardly rephrase: I’m picturing an abstractly clusterfucking broom space ourobouros [ed: what?], but even then I have a lot of trouble really grasping that concept, much less understanding what it would mean to exist as a specter within it. If this is your metaphysical worldview in a sentence… I could pos-def. use a sort of remedial explication.

MK: Sometimes I just have to hear the stuff coming out of my mouth repeated back to me– “closed-infinite Perfect Forms metaverse!” Like I’m combing to form Voltron or something. I wasn’t really trying to be coy. I guess I’m saying that I think– again, we’re guessing here– shapes casting the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. There there is more than just random noise & no signal. I said close infinite– like the surface of a sphere; you can walk forever on it, but it still is a discrete body. So yeah, Euclid is just what I mean, at least, descriptively. I think that signal is hardly reflected; the shapes are, to go with the Plato metaphor, three- or four-dimensional, being explicated on a two-d scale.

What I’m punking out & not just admitting forthrightly is that I would place my bets on an objective reality, whose information is degraded, confused, mixed with chaff, taken out of context, & imperfectly translated here. I’m not saying that everything reflects a more complex-fundamental unit, but that some things do– that you can backward engineer from there.

NC: I can dig this. This was a hard road, but I am digging this. One point – I’m not sure if you’re familiar with hyperbolic geometry : it’s an alternate mathematics – graphed on a sphere instead of a plane – wherein parallel lines intersect. Now that I’ve got a better grasp of things, I see you as inhabiting that sort of completely non-Euclidean plane, your flaming Hrunting sword casting mostly indecipherable shadows on what we call walls (but only out of habit)….

And with that I think the hard part of the interview is mostly over. I hope everyone’s still with us… because I have some less ethereal questions on the docket that I want to get to before we jump back into transhumanism &c.

First up, and by request: Can you tell me about The New Sincerity?

MK: Yeah, I kind of figured the tick-tock-clock on the hoodoo was running out. Hyperbole? I’m the most familiar with hyperbole of anyone! Oh, Hyperbol-a…yeah, them too.

As far as New Sincerity goes, I can only claim marginal association with it. My wife is a listener of Jesse Thorn’s show “The Sound of Young America,” which is where I first heard it– from her, that is, not from him. Subcultures & mainstream have already chewed through irony, right? & some of it was great– think Adam West– & some of it was terrible– think trucker hats.

Mainstream is still on the reinvention phase– “Dark Knight” is basically the grim & gritty trying to make Batman “serious,” right? But subculture has gotten past that– kids too– & embraced things like “Batman: The Brave & the Bold” where Batman is just awesome. Just totally a guy who dressed up like a bat who fights crime. You don’t have to be sneering at Batman, or laughing at him, or trying desperately hard to be taken serious. You can just…do it. Like what you like.

I guess some punk kids in Keep-Austin-Weird invented it– Kudos to them. I suppose I’m still Old Sincerity; I’m enough of a bastard that I never had to cultivate feigned ironic detachment? I’ll tell you at any point along the timestream that giant fighting robots are awesome & then pull a d20 out of my pocket.

Mordicai & The Old Sincerity:

NC: One of my friends just had a sort of crisis because everyone was ironically interested in things she was actually interested in, at which point I had a similar realization to yours re: Old Sincerity (I hadn’t had much cause to think about it before): what’s the point of being interested in anything ironically anyway? Blue knock knock jokes outclass that business every day of the week. Dramatic irony’s another thing, though, and I guess we could somehow segue into your theater career… but you know what, fuck not talking about the hoodoo. I really want to hear your take on transhumanism and the hive mind.

MK: Not enough of the “There are angels & they should all rise up, storm the Gates of Heaven & depose the Dweller on the Threshold!” eh? Alright– transhumanism. Actually, I think we can do this without descending into too much heavy language. You mentioned the singularity– Singularity? — & I think it is a useful rubric. I don’t know if I agree with the “or” in “transformation or collapse” though; it strikes me that most likely post-humans have no reason to uplift everyone. Not necessarily, that is– viral bioengineering or nanotech replication could sweep up enough H. sapiens in the change to make the rest extinct I guess. Or after using up every available resource on Earth, abandon it to post-apocalyptic humanity. Then again, raw matter might be valuable enough (if say, you were building a Dyson sphere) that Earth itself is valuable resource…

If, if, if. The thing about the Singularity is that by definition, it obscures whatever is behind it. The Jupiter Brain intelligence with nanotech Von Neumann seed-selfs drawing power from a swarm-type Dyson Sphere? With replicating Selves that diverge, evolve, individualize, report back, & reintegrate? Well, that ought to get you you past the solar level & into the galactic level, but then you start running into what I call the God in the Fishbowl problem. The leap from Planetary to Solar civilization is pretty vast. The leap from Solar to Galactic is even rougher. But from Galactic to Universal? Yikes. Of course, I’m still working with random guesses. Guessing is fun though– I wonder about it.

Here is the thing– first, I see the dissolving of identity being taken for granted. So when I start drifting towards assuming posthumans will have a hivemind, you’ll know why. I also think, wow, golly gee, diversity is the best strategy for outrageous & banal circumstances, both. Under strict control, you can have “bests” but once that system alters in any way, you’re back to the selection phase. Whether that slip is small (say, a virus) or big (say the K-T extinction). So I call obvious shenanigans on the idea that post-humans are going to suddenly occur & be a “next step” unless it codes room for just as much diversity.

I’m wandering afield here; I’ll bring it home in a second. I like the meme description model for information, at least as a shorthand. My educational background was anthropology, & a the definition for “culture” that I’ve always offered when asked is “non-physical technology.” Of course, that includes making the physical technology, too. I guess what I’m getting around to saying is that human brains are on the cusp of hardcore information processing. We’ve already got governments & corporations, abstract entities who recognize each other as beings– right? How crazy is that. These idea-entities composed of workers & investors: intellectual flora. The whole thing seems very “Rise of Photosynthesis” to me, with consumers failing to organize in the same way. Sure, some are totally detrimental to their environment, short sighted & suicidal, but so are many biological species. & lets not forget– the biggest pollutant is toxic, corrosive oxygen, a by-product of reckless plant & algae proliferation.

So I’m seeing that continue. I’m seeing idea-beings co-mingling with corporeal beings in a way similar to how single cell beings fold into multicellular beings– intestinal flora & fauna, & motherfucking mitochondria. Talk of caste systems, cooperative thinking, loss of identity, cybernetic interfaces, all of that gets us back into wild guesses & dystopian language, but yeah, I’ll say hive-mind. The same way that human beings are sort of an Ur-human, with many different genomes & environments, I see that, but with more nuanced information than just the language of atcg [ed: nucleobases, e.g. cytosine, etc.]

NC: No follow-up questions – I’ll leave that for our Singulatarian commentariat (there’s at least one of you, right?). Instead, I took a hint from life as we live it and have been googling you:

In addition to having formal training in forensic anthropology, you liased for Shakespeare and Co. and most recently starred in Witch Prison, described in the playbill as: “[a] terrifying glimpse behind the hex-stained walls of the notorious Camp Cauldron! Can a private eye uncover the dread plans of the Wardlock (half warden, half warlock, all fiend!) before an innocent witch falls prey to the depraved appetites of…Witch Prison?”

You also showed up in Off Beat Bride (a website that, by some weird coincidence, I was browsing yesterday) and had what looks to be a very lovely wedding that I know, through hushed and excited conversations, featured both a reading from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and heavy metal – not the music – rings. Also, you took your wife’s name, which is making our lady readership smile.

So this isn’t a question so much as a two part biographical prompt: 1) fun theater; 2) fun theatrical wedding.

MK: Sorry if I’m sort of distracted– my friend & I just started exchanging mix cd’s & I’m kind of song-by-song reviewing it. Which I guess answers an earlier [ed: off record] question about music– I care about it enough to make mixes, but not much more past there. Mixes are weird, now– I mean, they have so much nostalgia from being used in courtship rituals, but now I’m married, you know? & my wife obviously knows all my music. Still, there are friends that I am just out of touch enough with but still close enough to that swapping sappy songs isn’t weird.

Getting married was awesome, from start to finish. We are a little bit over the top cheesy in our love story; met in our late teens, lost our virginity to each other, had long distance (Ohio to New York City, the Wastelands to Gotham) drama dating, breaking up, falling apart, lying down on ice rinks, all that. It wasn’t a smooth ride, but if you only highlight the tops of the peaks, it looks pretty amazingly faery tale, which is what memory is doing to it. I didn’t think we would get married ever– she’d mentioned not wanting to– so when she proposed to me on my birthday, it was a pretty big surprise. Of course, I ruined it by guessing? We were getting sushi at Blue Ribbon & when we were finished I asked for the check but she said no & ordered a bottle of champagne, to which I said “what, are you going to propose to me?” to which she said “yes, you jerk.”

Everyone Loves Young Love!:

Getting married– we basically knew we had to do it on our terms. I wasn’t walking into a church & having a bunch of weird patriarchy nonsense. Her mother did the officiating, & we were married in the Montauk Club which is frankly pretty beautiful– peacock feathers everywhere. The seat arrangements all had DnD miniatures glued to them– everone got their own little figure. “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”– Jenny wore a green ribbon, we read the story about the green ribbon, & I took it off her. We’d written our own vows– mine talked about me wandering in a haunted mid-world between the nihilism & solipsism, hers about being awesome & making a blood oath. We exited to “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig & the Angry Inch. & yes, my wedding ring is tungsten, hard as hell & black as sin. Her’s is silver with black enamal. We spent the night in a rose petal covered bed at the Ritz. Oh– & she’d folded 1001 cranes for the event.

As for taking her last name– I was initially in favor of making up a new clan name. She shot down “Godzilla” as a last name, & “Caeli,” which is part of an old internet alias. We actually did make a small compromise & change the spelling of her last name back to the pre-Ellis Island version. I’m not really attached to any of my biologicals, so I didn’t have any problem with it, but I did want to have the same last name as any future offspring. Plus yeah; feminism cred!

NC: And the plays?

Listen Bitch, This Is Happening: WITCH PRISON!

MK: The plays! Ah, you caught me at a good time, since we had the first read through for the next play– Cocktails at the Center of the Earth– just last Sunday. I’ve done a few plays with these folks now. I am not a drama major or anything, but it is a hell of a good time & I do like contributing. The group calls itself the Lion Pinball Players, after a quirk of the first play we put on, where a young gentleman dressed as a pinball machine periodically shouted out “Roar! Lion Pinball!” We are gathered in the skirts of our playwright & director, one Simon Astor. The first play was “The Young Romance Play,” a send-up of romance comics from the 50′s, 60′, 70′s & 80′s. Four acts, one for each decade. I played Oh Johnny, the dreamy time travelling biker, & an office sex icon to boot. The next play was “Jungle Woman of the Jungle” which was more about old movie serials & pulp era stories; I was Bastion, the Prince of the Catfolk, the villain. Lots of sleeveless shirts & roaring to the heavens. “Witch Prison!” was off-Broadway, just one off! Growing bigger, right? I wore a claw on one hand & amused myself with cheesy jokes. It was a lot of fun to do– I’m weird? At the time, even though I’m enjoying myself, I hate it? Like, the stress of it! But finishing it is so cathartic.

& yeah! I’ve dissected dead people.

[braces himself for completely artless segue]

NC: You, your wife, and four Victorian personages have been airdropped onto Dinosaur Island (about which little is known, besides: DINOSAURS!). Each of your standard issue Jansport backpacks has: nothing of value. Cruelly, they’ve been re-appropriated from students on the mainland and contain mostly outdated textbooks, cinnamon gum, and various pencils, calculators, and other high school detritus. Yours also has a skull embossed zippo and a half pack of menthols. Your companions are the Bronte Sisters, Charles Darwin (expert marksman with a bionic eye), and Jack the Ripper (in the character of impressionist painter Walter Sickert, cosmopolitan gentleman and sometimes ladykiller).

Although you’re promised that there are sundry weapons planted around the environs, there is no set goal or gameplan as of yet. Rather: you’ve been assured that this is not a game. Taken as fact: there is no escape from Dinosaur Island; it’s on another plane of existence; re: self-destruction, there is no thanatos syndrome but instead a blazing will to live; the water is drinkable. Also: the Bronte Sisters are capable of rapid self-replication (c. 24-hour turnaround under quiet circumstances), but with progressive degradation. What that means in practice is as of yet unclear.

What do you do?

MK: I thought kids these days were supposed to have like, backpacks full of grenades & submachine guys & razor blades under the tongue? Betrayed by high schoolers once again! If it weren’t for those lousy kids…

First, everything I’ve studied renders me prone to assume dinosaurs are ripe for riding, training. First order of business is to get them docile & fighting for us; Darwin has the cybernetic skill & naturalism chops to go on that project. Jack the Ripper ought to be fine until we start any talk of breeding programs– then he has to go. For now lets put him on weapon retrieval? Since worst case scenario he finds a knife & pockets it, right? Any other swag benefits the group. I’m not interested in this Bronte replication; the first thing we need to do it keep out of subhuman domestic Brontes. I assume you are leaving out the third Bronte for a reason? The Brontes are on fortifications: they’ll design & construct some idealized manor house for our team.

You mentioned thanatos but left eros conspicuously absent. I figure, sure, we’ll have to come up with some chart on that regard. That will be tricky to negotiate, but I’m sure it can be done. Probably have to kill Jack at that point, which is probably for the best. We can feed him to our Deinonychus mounts. Who is interested in escape? I’m interested in IMPERIALISM. Plesisaur amphibous landings on Robot Complex Alpha brings them under my black banner, & cyborg dinosaurs are the shock troops in the raid on the Vampire Caverns…vampiric cybernetic dinosaurs move on to the Alien Hive (picking up the fountain of youth in a hat trick), & so on & so forth.

I’ll keep Jack’s knife as a keepsake. His blood greased the wheel for this war, after all.

NC: The third Bronte (Anne?) turned out to be a subhuman replication – obvious on re-reads of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

So – I bought a D&D starter set about three years ago and nobody would play with me. Was that – not the scenario, although it starts to tilt that way in the answer, but the general idea – sorta reminiscent of the D&D experience?

MK: Well, at this point with gaming, I’m in kind of high concept scene. I’m not sure I know what you mean by reminiscent of the experience? Are you a newbie to the action? I don’t know if anything in a box can really reflect the game– the game itself being primarily an oral tradition grown out of a literate backing? Kind of turning historical storytelling on its head. So I guess what I’m asking you is what elements are we looking to discuss? Barebones on up?

NC: Ah – confusion! I meant the Dino Island scenario, not the D&D starter box! But, yea, I’ve never played and am curious. The closest I’ve come is FURY OF DRACULA, which I bought because my friends agreed to play that – and only that – after they let me down on the D&D front… but that’s still essentially a board game. All my dice and figurines (which came with the starter set) ended up, sadly, in collages. I’m also interested in the Cthulu counterpart to FURY OF DRACULA, which seems similarly awesome – but that’s neither here nor there, really.

MK: Oh, okay, now we’re communicating, re: the Dinosaur Island experience. One of the things about gaming is the versatility in play– I said oral tradition, which is near the mark. Some people play it as more of a war game, very miniatures on a map, rolling dice to kill monsters. Some people play it as avaunt theater, practically, all method acting the whole time. With ranges & gradations in between– & like any subculture, heaps & heaps of snobbery & brinkmanship. Personally, I think a lot of different approaches can be fun? That being said, I am really exclusionary about it. Since it is a game made up of its players, one bad apple can really sink the whole batch.

To more directly get into your question, yeah. You are familiar with the major dichotomy of the entire RPG oeuvre? Which is that of Player versus Narrator; “Player Character” versus “Dungeon Master” or “Storyteller” or “Game Master” or whatever the role is called. Versus is really the wrong word; in some conceptions there is an antagonistic relationship, but really the idea is cooporation. The Players (each a real life person) all control a Character– control, act out, imagine into being. They are the stars of the show. The Narrator is everything else– quite literally everything else. He is the street vendor, the police officer, the serial killer– but he’s also the one who decides if it is raining, or sunny; or if down this alley way there is a skyscraper, or a hovel, or a…whatever, a cyborg vampire velociraptor.

So in your example, you’ve laid the scene– you were acting as the Narrator, the Dungeon Master, whatever. In most games, I’m only play one of those roles you laid out; maybe I’m Sniper Darwin. Usually I’d use the mechanics– the books, the agreed upon setting– to make a character suiting my whims, but it isn’t unheard of for the Narrator to lay out roles in advance. Then we’d have, you know, our friends, who played the Brontereplicators & Jack. The way I play it, we’d actually talk in-character voice– whether than means silly accents, so be it– & you’d react to our questions & explorations. So if I, as Sniper Darwin, decide I want to climb a tree & scope out the island, you, as the Narrator, would tell me what I see. Being the Narrator is equal parts preparation (You’d probably have drawn up a map in advance, for consistency) & ad-libbing (if the story is dragging, you play Chandler– a stegosaurus with a gun walks in the door).

NC: So do you usually play literal “dungeons and dragons” scenarios, or do you do more customized and fun (less claustrophobic?) campaigns… like Dinosaur Island?

MK: Right– you brought up the term campaign, which is one obvious point of distinction: there are short form games, like Dinosaur Island (you might call it an “adventure”) that run episodically; sometimes these stand alone, & sometimes they are strung together into arcs. Then there are of course longer form campaigns, & those often have customized or whole-cloth created settings. I am on that side– worldbuilding, we call it. I use a pretty simplified set of rules & run a story that is a mix between character driven pieces & setting picaresques. The setting I’ve been growing up would probably fall under the heading of “New Weird” I suppose? Post-Tolkien, you might say– I owe a debt to him, sure, but to Borges too. Blended up pieces of Grimm’s tales, & early 20th century pulp; the Mahabarata with Clockpunk cyborgs; the French Revolution happening in Pharonic Egypt. Simmered over so that the pieces don’t seem garish or incongruant.

NC: The aspect of RPGs that most impresses me is that you’re able to find enough amenable apples (or even a few baddish apples) to get down into it. It’s hard enough to get people to go to a party! or show! with drinks! and girls! in NYC! It feels like it’d be a herculean undertaking to get ‘em to block some time out in the name of worldbuilding…

MK: An old friend of mine once melodramatically declared that running a game was “an act of Will!” Which, for all its hyperbole, it kind of is. Starting a game is harder than continuing a game, first off– once people are in, & are invested, you’ve got a while before inertia tears you apart. Another key thing is that you aren’t trying to get all the people in the world to come (though I will say that many games have drinks! & girls!), but rather you want to get a core group & hold them there. Make standing Sunday, or every-other Sunday, plans. You don’t leave it up to chance– that will end you up in a cliche version of herding cats.

This is how it goes down when you’re for real:

NC: That’s a good idea for any endeavor, really. As a notorious, sometimes downtrodden, usually flibbertigibbet catherd, I’ll take that to heart. And as far as scheduled world building goes, I know – intuitively or by the grace of Facebook meme? – that you’re writing a novel. I want to hear all about it and… I don’t know, do you have a few teaser paragraphs you wouldn’t mind sharing? If not, we can just do a madlibs or something.

MK: I wish the rumors you’d heard were true! I’ve written a few NaNoWriMo novels, once collaboratively, once abortively, & once on my lonesome. The last one was the one up at my Lulu page called Wil O’ Wisps– which is what you might have seen. For something that I pounded out in thirty days, it isn’t too shabby a skeleton. The problem is that I apparently lack the guts to make subsequent swipes at it– I claimed I would this November, but then I got a new job & decided it would probably be better to pay attention to that than an admittedly arbitrary month of writing. I guess I’m still stuck in the doldrums of authorship– I’ve got ideas? But actually DOING the thing, actually WRITING, that is a foreign shore from this lazy sargasso I’m in. Not to mention that I have other creative & communicative outlets (gaming, bloggin, so forth), so my drive to give birth, Athena-like, to a better version of Wil O’ Wisps (which I’d probably call MONOMYTH)….

NC: I’m impressed that you’ve actually finished books during NaNoWriMo – I don’t have the lungs for that kind of sprinting so know to not even try. But this was my source:

“I was taking notes a few years ago to write my Great American Novel– or the Great New York Novel really– & in the process of creating Theodore Roosevelt Who Is Called Apollyon & the like, I hit upon genius– Captain Gregory Edward Rasputin Teach. Like Rasputin & Blackbeard are the SAME GUY.”

I was thinking I’d like to read that, so was hoping you had a draft somewhere. Someday!

As for editing and rewrites, that’s one of the many reasons i choose the short form. Rearranging a couple of lines/stanzas is far more doable than editing a long ranging novel wherein the person who authored the first chapter is noticeably different than the one who authored the last (psychologically and otherwise, but I suppose that’s one of those tricks you master – consistency). I don’t know… the doldrums of authorship are something widely felt around these parts, I think.

MK: Oh I think about the Great America Novel (all about a fat man & a little boy…) sometimes. I might return to it, or chunk the guts for something else– in a fit of ambition a few weeks ago I started something but it fell by the wayside. I really do need a good kick in the pants! Anyhow, I know I’m hardly alone in being full up of great ideas (or well, that I think are great) but not actually…well, doing it. The proverb about showing up being 90% of the work is really true; great ideas are well & good, but sitting down & doing the writing is what makes you a writer & not a daydreamer. I haven’t quite given up on myself yet though– heartened by my ability to do NaNoWriMo as you say– & somewhere along the line one of these lotus buds will bloom.

NC: At the risk of re-arming the metaphysical m-80s from earlier: I think it’s funny – not haha, really, but interesting – that you believe in the Great American Novel, at least conversationally, and are more cavalier about reality as we experience it while I, as much as I love them, have zero faith in the former – The G. American Novel and literature/arts/etc. might as well be doubly mixed signals from a closed-infinite Perfect Forms metaverse – but am really dedicated to living deliberately in an epistemologically sound world. Is that our X, our chiasmus… Is it possible that we’re inverted parallels?! Or maybe there’s an easier way of saying that. Without valuation: you’re a world builder and I’m a builder within a world?

MK: Well, first before I go into the dark on this, let me just say– I think I assume a pretty high degree of…I don’t want to say irony, given our earlier conversation, & disdain makes it sound more sneering than I mean it…lets say bemused detachment. When I say Great American Novel in all caps I’m more referring to spoofing the social construct. The ideas I’ve got are pretty Mythohistorical, too, so we start sinking into quicksand there. We’re spinning our engines talking about it; language is an amazing magic spell, but it limits the discussion at hand to what we can share. Still, I’m comfortable working at…lets say the mesosphere? If philosophical reduction is the microsphere & big ideas are the macrosphere. Work on whatever level I feel comfortable with. Your exposition– builder in a world against world builder– isn’t a bad one, though. I’ve gone off on people with worlds within them versus those without; I freely acknowledge it isn’t two poles. The Builder! It is interesting. Suddenly I’m back to being interested in wanting to make Major Arcana out of anyone with quality; The Builder! The Adversary! Etc.

NC: I knew I was inching out onto a ledge there… but maybe we can also accept as given that within a Great American Novel leaning canon the Real Great American Novel would necessarily be a sardonic take on the Great American Novel written by someone completely disaffected by a canon that’s geared towards Great American Novels &c. ad nauseum. right? Or are we already past that and into The New Sincerity, waiting for some sad-as-fuck Joan Didion BS (clearly the only G.A.N. under the old rubric). I don’t know anymore – like I said, for me… well, once I *got* it, now I don’t even care all that much; am ready for The New Textuality, whatever that might be.

Anyway, sometimes the world is so wild and woolly that i feel comfortable with cognizant reduction as good starting place… it’s also the reason we met (see: first question)! But I’m not going to give you a chance to get into the dark on this one – we’ve already done that enough, I think. Instead, a postapocalyptic question!:

One minute you’re in park slope with some of your theater buddies, eating edamame appetizers and halfway through the second bottle of sake. the next: chaos, nuclear fallout, zombies (fast or slow, remains to be seen). You pass a downed US army contingent, most of whom’ve been variously eviscerated. There are some guns, backpacks full of the usual rations/supplies, and a walkie-talkie with a direct line to the pentagon. You learn that there’s a helicopter pickup scheduled in T-78 hours at the Cloisters (a fortified Medieval museum – with both a spice garden and antique swords/armor – in the 190s). Brooklyn is quarantined, but your rag tag group of neo-pioneers seem largely uninfected.

Facts of interest: military bases are in disarray, having suffered targeted explosions (from points unknown). The streets – of course – seem mostly empty. For some reason, all of the radio stations in post apocalyptia are playing “rosanna” by toto. Whether steve lukather, toto keyboardist/founding member, has anything to do with the state of things never crosses anyone’s mind (he doesn’t). congestion has rendered most vehicles non-usable, and the rivers are suffocating in belly up filth. Some of your party are developing gills, but this is accepted as par for the course. Also: you realize that the pentagon may be behind this entire SNAFU.

What do you do? and, corollary: as a sometimes DM, how would you amp up this scenario?

SeeqPod – Playable Search

MK: Alright, I’ve got a few drinks in me, so now is the time to strike! First off; this entire Cloister’s situation (I’m familiar with the layout; Bayoux Tapestry “FTW” & Fort Tryon is my favorite park in the city) is besides the point; I’m not gathering up. The problem– zombie infection– grows exponentially, right? The basic math on this tells you that fragmenting is the only viable survival plan. In other words, forget civilization, it is time to go tribal. Second caveat: I’m not going to get into my real life zombie survival plans, at least not too deeply. Suffice to be said: we rally at the Chrysler Building. Caveat the third: I will not “touch the rains down in Africa.” Toto will not lure me to the dark continent…Sirens! Sirens on the rocks! I AM THE LIGHTHOUSE!

I’ll milk the walkie-talkie for info, but we’re talking one way exchange– I’m not having the folks on the other end decide we’re the only unaffected breeding population, or resistant, or what have you. Any hint of that & plunk, in the drink. USgov has proven their value– destroyed & ruined– I’m not investing any further. I was on this team before I read any of this business about gills & Pentagon culpability. That world has fallen before the whirlwind.

Gills! Okay, my operating assumption is that the disease we’re seeing here has been incorporated into the biology of everyone. If we’ve got massive casulties, massive undead uprisings– okay– then the gills, & some without? I’m going to sit down & do Punnet Squares & mind my p’s & q’s to see if we’re got some kind of hybrid genome situation. Even if the math doesn’t work out– dominance is a weird situation, & still my first guess. I’ll hold off on exectuing anyone bit or scratched; see how that plays out. Note: I’ve already transfered my loyalty to my tribe, at this point: all outsiders should worry about me, at this point.

As to spice– see, like any dish, too much spice can ruin it. I’d go the opposite direction & anchor it with details, probably mixing the morbid & the beautiful. The swarms of dragonflies gone to carrion, feasting & breeding in the choked rivers; each season growing larger, as plant life soars, oceans fill will algea, oxygen levels rise. The swim through dark, flooded subway tunnels, hoping to come up in an air pocket & finding that air pocket glowing with biolumenscent fungi. Sleeping in the short beds of monarchs while taking refuge in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eerie songs of the Gill People fighting for dominance on the airwaves with Toto. The strange cubs birthed by the zombies. The shape of rubble, drawn in Nazca lines, seen from the peak of skyscrapers. The lines in the sky, visible between stars like spiderwebs at night, mirroring those below.

It isn’t a world to flee from– where can you flee to? The new world is a world to live in. Guns blazing.

NC: Forever and ever, Amen. Hey, thanks Mordicai… for subjecting yourself to this and talking to the greater AMR community about love & zombies & epistemology & reality &c! This was B-A-N-A-N-A-S, this was meant to be. I just hope it was as fun for the world as it was for me. (For the record, that rhyme is unintentional).

Everyone else: If he’ll have you, you can friend or follow Mordicai in the following forums: facebook, livejournal, and on the streets. If not, at least keep an ear out for upcoming Lion Pinball Player Productions!

NEXT UP: EDWIN T. MERRICK V – “THE GOVERNOR!”

• Friend of a Friend: S.C.O.T.T. L.E.R.C.H.
• Friend of a Friend: Mark Fullmer
• friend of a friend: Edwin T Merrick V, “The Gov”