Portrait of the Monster as a Young Man
O beautiful / was the werewolf

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@monstrousforms
Portrait of the Monster as a Young Man
O beautiful / was the werewolf

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I WAS A TEENAGE MONSTER
I teach a weekend workshop in the Graduate Writing Program at The New School. Below is the workshop description.
I Was a Teenage Monster Becoming-monsters, Monstering, Otherness & Hormonal Rage The New School MFA Writing Program
This course looks at representations of adolescence, growing up strange, and becoming other. How can fantastic exaggeration and conceit accurately represent coming-of-age experiences and the trials and tribulations of teenhood? How does becoming a monster map onto becoming an adult? How can we draw from cross-media representations of teenage monsters to write our own monsters? Weâll examine monstering in TV, film, comics, novels and poems, building on references students already have on hand.
Materials may include: Ginger Snaps (dir. John Fawcett) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (dir. Joss Whedon) Black Hole (Charles Burns) Autobiography of Red (Anne Carson) Half Life (Shelley Jackson) The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) Let the Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson) Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma) The Rage: Carrie 2 (dir. Katt Shea) The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming) It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell) X-Men (Grant Morrison version) Teeth (dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Emil Ferris) The Orange Eats Creeps (Grace Krilanovich) Lost Boys (dir. Joel Schumacher) Wolf in White Van (John Darnielle) A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour) Michael Jacksonâs âThrillerâ video Stranger Things
Lynn on âInorganicâ Forms
Yet we should beware of any architecture described as wholesome or organic, for the logic of the organism is the logic of self-enclosure, self-regulation, and self-determination. Buildings are not organisms but merely provisional structures that are already multiplicitous. Where the organic is internally consistent, the âinorganicâ is internally discontinuous and capable of a multiplicity of unforeseen connections.
âGreg Lynn, âMultiplicitous and Inorganic Bodiesâ
The organic/inorganic dualism can help us think critically about how we position built structures, landscape and human culture in relation to ecology, and lead us beyond a false binary between nature and culture. Notice, though, the scare quotes around âinorganic,â and think about the difficulty of distinguishing organic and inorganic states. Also, recognize that this quote is not reducible to a problematic statement like âarchitecture is not natural.â
Thackerâs Ecological Framework: World, Earth, Planet
We can ... offer a new terminology for thinking about this problem of the non-human world. Let us call the world in which we live the world-for-us. This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human. But this world-for-us is not, of course, totally within the ambit of human wants and desires; the world often âbites back,â resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us. Let us call this the world-in-itself. This is the world in some inaccessible, already-given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us.
...
So, while we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings.
Let us call this spectral and speculative world the world-without-us.
...
We can even abbreviate these three concepts further: the world-for-us is simply the World, the world-in-itself is simply the Earth, and the world-without-us is simply the Planet.
âEugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet
This is a quick-spliced intro to some useful conceptual terminology that will hopefully draw you directly to the text. Note also that the world-for-itself paradox relates to the notion of monstrosity as essentially unknowable (so when we assimilate it, it stops being monstrous), per Levina and Bui. Anyway, the preface to Thackerâs book is highly recommended.
Immanent Nature
Scientists estimate that approximate ninety percent of the cells in the human body belong to non-human organisms (bacteria, fungi, and a whole bestiary of other organisms). Why shouldnât this also be the case for human thought as well?
âEugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet
The final provocation is worth considering, but first consider the premise that what we might want to call ânatureâ is literally immanent to the human body. See also Hight on UexkĂźll.

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Hight on Latour Troubling Nature/Culture Dualism
If ecology and performance often seems to return us to a metanarrative of Nature versus Culture, it can also provide for projections of alternative, inhuman dramas that our actions effect and which we are affected by but often either choose to ignore or cannot directly experiences. Natural objects and processes are real and exceed us, but as such they do not articulate in themselves; the objects and transformations of Culture are just as real, but their articulations do not simply turn everything into the mere projection of humanity.
...
[Latour] argued that even as modern thought categorically separated and purified Nature and Culture, the practices of modernity continually produce concepts, objects, and phenomena that exceed any such dualisms. An example Latour provides is âglobal warmingâ; the empirical reality and effect of global warming is not diminished by its equally real social and political reality and affect. Indeed, he argued in a rather resilient way, that what distinguishes modernity is not a rupture with a stable culture or natural order but its unprecedented proliferation of hybrid assemblages that traverse the categories of Nature and Culture. These are not âintermediariesâ between natural forces and cultural value, but âmediatorsâ through which configurations are produced and then reconfigured, âactors endowed with the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it, redeploy it, and also to betray it.â
âChristopher Hight, Designing Ecologies 99
We might think about this in relation to monstrous excess and the extra-categorical grotesque.
Hight on Uexkßll on Ecological Overlap
[W]hile there is an objective material reality, the environment of one organism would be rather different and perhaps incommensurable from an organism with differently organized bodies and sensoria. UexkĂźll tried to demonstrate the strangeness of other organismsâ life-worlds through evocative prose that described the world of a tick, for example. Such accounts mediated between the human umwelt and provided a glimpse of the manifold of life. ... (Of course we can never really know the world of the tick or the frog, but what is most significant is the recognition and sensation of our contingency.)
...
Every mind is immanent to other minds and participates in their construction, not an object set apart from its contextâthat is, there is not an organism and its environment. As another systems theory reiterated, âEverything that happens belongs to a system (or to many systems) and always at the same time to the environment of other systems.â Again, we see that this form of ecological thought is that of the many, of immanence and of difference. There is no singular unified umwelt but rather a plurality of umwelten and an immanent sense of alternatives. Rather than a univocal totaling of Being against a ruptured crisis, there is an immanent multiplicity, or pluriverse.
âChristopher Hight, Designing Ecologies 96-98
Another way to think about how there is no abstract or distinct sense of nature that is separate from human (or any other) culture.
Waste Incinerator, Offenbach, Germany, 1972
(Novotny-Mähner)
Lots of monstrous architectural forms at these two Tumblr blogs.
Faceless otherworldly intelligence puts grotesquely intricate roots down in Earth. Humans crawl and hack through the monstrous rhizome in a subterranean eco hell space. Perhaps one of the unacknowledged precursors to Stranger Things (esp Season 2).
Unexpected Guests Where what emerges doesnât match expectations set up by shell structure: file under soft/hard dynamics, interior/exterior tension, grotesque mashup, chimeric forms.

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âThe larva of a mayfly. (Photo: Eye of Science)â
Monstrous Scale
Louise Bourgeois âSpiderâ Versions: Monstrous Forms (from the illustrated book He Disappeared into Complete Silence) More here: https://www.moma.org/collection_lb/object.php?object_id=119473
One of the many monstrous forms in Twin Peaks: The Return [2017], coming way too close: the frog fly locust roach thing.
See also J. G. Ballardâs âThe Voices of Timeâ:
â[T]he monsters in the lab were nothing more than fragmented mirrors of Whitbyâs mind, like the grotesque radio-shielded frog he [Powers] had found that morning in the swimming pool.â
That ambiguous âheâ could be a sleep-deprived slip on Powersâ part (in this moment of free indirect discourse), as his powers of consciousness dwindle. Perhaps Powers identifies overmuch with Whitby, the dead biologist who made the mysterious ideogram in the empty pool, and seems to be responsible for the mutant, hybrid creature-objects who appear there and in the Clinic environs. After all, the sentence above begins âActually the comparison [by Coma] should have been made with Whitby, not himself.â And thereâs another ambiguous pronounââhimselfâ refers to Powers but follows Whitby, as does Powers.
Aerial view of the Runit Dome. The dome is placed in the crater created by the "Cactus" nuclear weapons test in 1958. (Wikipedia)
Cf. âGoodbye, Eniwetok,â from Powersâ journal.
Dr. Seth Brundle becomes Brundle-fly through a gradual transformation sequence that Tschumi (quoted above, from âSequencesâ in Architecture and Disjunction) would call a closed, exhaustive sequence. Brundle-fly wishes to reject closure, which Lyn Hejinian (cf âAgainst Closureâ) would in theory applaud, though she might not endorse his methods. His attempt to re-open the transformation sequence involves adding new organisms to the (initially inadvertent) genetic splicing process. The introduction of non-biological material into the process proves catastrophic to his project: he/it reaches a dead end.
I Am the Fly [The Fly, 1986; Wire, âI Am the Fly,â Chairs Missing, 1978]
Music as Ambience and Space in Time
Hereâs an example of sound design as film soundtrack (from David Lynchâs Eraserhead), where landscape, (often ruinous) built form, and mood are all evoked. We might say Lynch thinks of film as a hybrid of sound and image, and that he is attuned to multiple temporal consciousness (a key concept related to the picturesque). Lynch recently put it this way:
"I always say that cinema is sound and picture, flowing together in time."

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Little Monsters
Hybrid Horror, Genre Excess