![]() ![]() ![]() Which brings me to Death Road to Canada, a pixelated zombie story blended with The Legend of Zelda (1986), and other top-down adventure games. For such work to carry weight requires something beyond the mere delight of strange new word combinations or surprising juxtapositions that lose their lustre after the first reading. Like the exquisite corpse, the majority of flarf is at best a springboard for further creative expression and, at worst, a pile of rancid unreadable garbage-no more meaningful than if the complete works of Emily Dickinson were electronically encrypted, but the key lost to the ravages of our upcoming zombie dystopia. Flarf poetry allows a poet to backhoe the richest soil of language, reaching new depths of linguistic inspiration that might never have been approached otherwise. There is something to be said for escaping the preconceptions of your mind to approach a greater truth, or at least a different perspective. In the early 2000s, the lingering memory of these nutrient-packed exquisite corpses fed the growth of avant garde Flarf poetry, a collaboration between writer and computational machine in order to disrupt one’s own habits of thought. Death road to canada skeleton full#This usually results in awkward, terrifying, ribald verse that draws giggles that can’t be replicated in successive readings because you really “had to be there” to get the full effect.Ī meaningless morass of putrefied symbolism Like all the finest early 20th century salon entertainment, exquisite corpse often carries house rules, but the basic idea involves a group of creative-adjacent revelers building a poem line by line without reading what the previous person wrote. When surrealist poets realized they were in a similar situation, they took to randomization and games to reinvigorate their work, most notably in the parlour game (appropriately titled) Exquisite Corpse. This isn’t to say that there might not still be marrow to be found in the bones of zombie fiction, but rather the messages have been subsumed by the medium-the undead have cannibalized themselves into a meaningless morass of putrefied symbolism. The iteration of the zombie these days is merely to render flesh more viscerally on screen, or to further debate the minute rules of viral infection, zombie land speed, time between bite and transformation, etc. The subtlety of any pertinent commentary on race, morality, or the depths and heights of the human spirit in the face of such an insurmountable threat has long ago been cast aside. The zombie-a thinly-veiled metaphor for the monstrosity of humanity, and even more translucent excuse to commit acts of violence on human-shaped targets “guilt-free”-is worn past the point of darning. And yet, like a skeleton draped with liquified cold cuts wandering through the chapped streets of Any City, USA, here I shamble. The only things moldier than a zombie’s jeans are complaints about the ubiquity of zombie-themed media. ![]()
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