school – My Life, or Something Like It

Phoning it In

It’s hard to believe that we’re already at the end of term and tying things up. It feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of this content, and maybe that’s kind of the point? As I talked about last week, there’s so much potential with pulp magazines to uncover. Maybe that’s why my head is spinning. There’s so much I want to talk about, so much to explore. I am still incredibly curious about the ties between videogame representations of the pulp era (mostly in exaggeration) as compared to the real deal, especially with BioShock Infinite as a direct timestamp game, but also thematic futurism of Fallout 3 or Fallout 4. I’ve discussed BioShock Infinite, and to a lesser extend the BioShock series more broadly throughout this series, but I think there’s something to be said about either series as an extension of digitization and adaptation — something I’d like to explore, at least a little bit, at the end of my final paper.

However, for now, I think one of the lingering things sticking with me is just how much a study of pulp magazines continues to draw through to contemporary analyses — especially after surveying half of the class’s rough drafts last week. Pulp magazines are alive and well, in some way or another. While I focused on SF two weeks ago, many genres were adapted and created through pulp experimentation (although it is perhaps unsurprising that there were a great number of flops too *cough* looking at you Basketball Stories *cough*). In general, it was a really innovative time, seemingly filled with possibility and growth (which unfortunately would be burst through the Great Depression). New and exciting futures were on the horizon, or at least that was the message being sent. Sound like anything else you know?

In considering the start of pulp magazines, including its boom and its bubble burst, I can’t help but think of the early days of the internet.

Although we don’t refer to it as the “World Wide Web” anymore (at least, I don’t think we do), I remember when the internet was TheInternetTM. This hugely new and innovative medium, taking households by storm. Inspiring movies (You’ve Got Mail, anyone?), connecting people all over the world, spreading information, allowing for user-generated engagement…The more I talk about it, the more I wish I had written a paper comparing the history of pulp magazines with the history of the internet, up to and including a general lack of support and academic interest to its “low brow” elements. Oh well, another paper (or blog post) for another time. Suffice to say, once the parallel is made, it’s hard to shake off.

I remember being excited for our first dial-up connection. I was lucky that my parents were always particularly technologically advanced and I had ICQ from a very early time (I’m pretty sure circa 1998). I built webpages on GeoCities through code I learned from UW’s Arts Computer Camp (while stylishly pulling off my own play-performance of Sailor Venus at the end of the summer). I practically learned how to type (at least as fast as I do now) by spending far too many hours typing out conversations on Yahoo chatrooms and games. I mean, I was there, I was invested, and my life was forever changed because of it. I can only imagine, in some way, that this is how the boom of pulp magazines felt. A rush of new technology, new and readily available information, connection, engagement.

It’s all there (and now I wish I had chosen to write a pulp history story version of the dawn of the internet…so many ideas, so little course time left), and it’s astonishing. I’m sure even in some way, people felt like this at the early years of the telephone, the printing press–at all major technological changes. So I wonder how much of our study of pulp magazines is about the technology as well. Not that we haven’t discussed this in class, but I think it’s an area we haven’t explored as much as we could (again, only so many hours!). Even the act of digitization, of bringing pulps to the internet, is another link in that chain, tying it all together (brainblown.gif).

In the end I think, people just keep looking for a way to connect with one another. From cave paintings, to Snapchat, and everything in between. Pulp magazines were a way to convey culture, to control culture, and to express counter culture. They were what people made them to be. As the internet is now, and as something new and distant in the future will replace, they are equally important as part of human history and communication.

In archaeology we’ve come to learn to treat peoples of the past as just that, people. “People have always been people” as it were, and their cultural artifacts reflect the agency of once living and breathing people. If we take that to be important, as we take anything we do today to be important (except maybe fidget spinners), pulp magazine’s value should be clear.

Where there are artifacts, they are fossilized evidence of peoples’ action in trying to intervene in history…Artifacts are a testimony of context, not resolved social structures. (Wobst 47)

What will our legacy be? What will our cultural artifacts have to say about us? Maybe future scholars will academically analyze the importance of our memes. Or maybe, it’ll be something altogether different.

Either way, I’m left with a lot to think about.

That feel when…

You receive your 1936 Sci-Fi pulp fiction magazine in the mail at last.

With only minor (and careful) flipping through of the issue, I’m very excited to get engaged with it. I think we made a good choice.

Also, there’s a literal story about “gaslighting.” However, it’s quite literally about the history of Gas Lighters (by the looks of things). And let’s not forget the existence of a circa 1930’s science questionnaire. I’m hyped.

Breaking into Pulp Reading

I have always been a fan of detective fiction, mystery, and sci-fi novels. This has extended to movies and video games that delve into these topics from a variety of levels. For me, pulp fiction magazines highlight some ways in which these genres came to be developed in a different, more easily digestible, way.

BioShock Infinite Ad — Advertisement from *BioShock* Infinite

In particular, some of my favourite games feature art, themes, and graphical styles based on the same styles seen in pulp magazines (BioShock series, Fallout, etc.), and there’s a

real movement towards narration or satire based on the themes originated in pulp. I would love to trace how some of these things are enacted and developed in pulp magazines, versus how they are manifest in video game contexts. I am curious to see if the tropes and imagery are blatantly pulled from these precursors, or if they are used and adapted to fit the motivations of the game. I know in many cases the themes are adapted, but I am sure there are places that are near recreations of pulp-styles. It’s also interesting to consider how pulp motifs play out in a video game setting, that is often the opposite of quick and digestible.

In considering this possibility, I spent a great deal of time pouring over various magazine covers from the Pulp Magazine Project (PMP), and doing a visual overview of various art and media messages found in the BioShock and Fallout series. It was of no surprise that there were a lot of similarities in advertising and message. There are a ton of background advertising stills, videos, and audio clips played throughout both the BioShock and Fallout universes–aimed at creating a very specific type of atmosphere. It is at once ‘nostalgic’ but also a little surreal as they both take what’s familiar (Art Deco, 1950’s suburbia, etc.) and twist them to fit the worlds they want to represent. We buy in because we recognize these cultural markers, but we are carried along by how those markers are shifted and inverted to show us entirely new and often self-reflexive perspectives.

One of the things that I enjoy so much about these worlds, and why I find them so important for informing my study of pulp magazines, is that the visual motifs used from these video games are derived quite deliberately from the eras that pulps come from. Not only do they play on nostalgia, but they outright present alternative history representations of the same visual style.

“[Developers] also [make] use of a game’s atmosphere to support narrative–the architecture of the cities, the ambient conversations of the citizens, the advertising of the time period” (Fast Company).

In developing BioShock Infinite, the third BioShock in the series, creator Ken Levine “…was drawn to the time between the Civil War and World War I, a time of scientific progress that saw the development of electricity and the telephone but also religious belief and nationalism. Specifically, he cited, ‘Devil in the White City, which is a great book about the 1893 World’s Fair, and then certain movies give you a feel–There Will Be Blood gave me the weird vibe of revivalism and frontierism'” (Fast Company). As Levine highlights, movies like There Will Be Blood or tv shows like Downton Abbey sensationalize and stylize the eras these pulp magazines represent. They create a feeling–a feeling that I experience simply by looking at the real covers in the PMP. I’m curious if that feeling is because of the pre-conceived cultural understandings I have of those eras, or if any impression is at all factual.

From a more technical angle, I’ve always been interested in typography and layout in magazines, print media, and advertising of all kinds. I would also be interested in exploring how pulp developed their genre visually and typographically. What threads exist between sub-genres, and how do those tie into larger visual symbols.

While we ultimately discussed in class that advertising could not necessarily be tied to a sub-genre of pulp magazine due to mass-sales of advertising space across a publishing company, it remains interesting to see what kinds of advertising entered into pulps at all. What did companies think the readers of pulp wanted to buy? What did they want them to buy? What can we learn from their sales attempts (including how advertisements are placed throughout a magazine, etc.).

I’m excited to find out.