Alien-ation

By: Eeleen Lee on 8:54 pm

I could buy aliens, but not aliens that
look  like  Fifties’ comic art.  They’re  semiotic  phantoms, bits  of  deep
cultural imagery that have split off and taken  on a life of their own

          from ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, William Gibson (1981)

Eeleen’s blog, stardate 29/05/10: My attempts to people (hah!) my science-fiction narratives with workable aliens have resulted in unusual abdominal pains. A xenomorph, or the green curry I had for dinner last night, could emerge from my stomach at any time.

You, sitting there and reading this blog, what comes to mind when you hear the word, ‘alien’ ?(and I don’t mean for immigration purposes..) Little green men waving ray-guns? Thin bug-eyed grey men wielding rectal probes? Colourful outlaw folk that frequent the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars? Those beings in Star Trek uniform with bizarre facial markings? (Oh sorry, those happen to be Star Trek fans …) Some of you may recall HR Giger’s Alien and the Predator with a shudder. How deeply these images have permeated our popular culture. Now, GET THEM OUT OF YOUR HEAD!!!

Finished? When you have banished the last pop culture alien from the orbit of your intellect, sit down with your preferred poison (An ice-blended sencha, Diet Coke and Nutrasweet in my case…) and ponder on alien possibilities.

Notice that I didn’t say, ‘possible aliens’. Then the usual stock questions would emerge, "What if they have six eyes, no mouth and communicate by telepathy? What if they look like giant praying mantids?". Cutting and pasting from a bizarre Identikit does not help your cause.

The most plausible alien possibility is that mankind will find an alien artefact. Only because humans have jettisoned so much rubbish into space, we do stand a chance of chancing upon some debris, even if it is the interstellar equivalent of a soft-drink can. We haven’t actually seen aliens upfront (despite accounts from hillbilly truck drivers) so your story become more credible when it rests on evidence of aliens.

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Elvis and Ellis

By: Eeleen Lee on 10:17 am

Declan McManus aka Elvis Costello. At first glance, an unlikely musical colossus who started out as a knock-kneed punk rocker with Buddy Holly glasses, since long established and straddling all genres. With Elvis Costello, I experienced the unique instance of a book introducing me to the music of a singer-songwriter. Normally, it is vice versa.

'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis, takes its title from an Elvis Costello song. Unlike Ellis' other novels, 'American Psycho' and 'Glamorama', Costello does not appear in the novel as a celebrity or a name-drop, he is represented as this poster image on the bedroom wall of the protagonist (above).

I wrote an essay on 'Less Than Zero' and bought the album 'Trust' as part of my research. However, most people on my MA programme did not share my enthusiasm and disregarded the book as nilhlistic and dated. Back then I viewed it as a period piece like 'The Catcher In The Rye'. But rereading it now, I realise that the youth culture explored in the book is not so removed from the present.  MTV back in the 1980s has exploded into the easy access of Youtube. 1980s amoralism and early 21st century paranoia induce the same political apathy and numbness. Answering machine messages are now text messages, tweets and status updates. Teenagers will always be the outsiders. Or perhaps we are all teenagers now, ensnared in a technological web of our own making.

I contributed three more flash fiction pieces for City of Shared Stories KL, both inspired by Ellis and Elvis:  'Clubland' is gathered from a series of late nights (not all experienced by me), 'Less Than Kosong' ('kosong' is Malay for zero) and 'Malaysian Psycho' were written as  parodies nine years ago. I was unaware at the time that the parodies were to become  observations of Malaysian society. The Patrick Bateman character in 'Malaysian Psycho' was originally called Patrick Budirman.

For the uninitiated, check out this online Bret Easton Ellis resource http://notanexit.net/

For Elvis Costello uninitiates, listen to,  'The Very Best Of'.

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