
Advertisement

John Darnielle: I played video games from early on and can probably break down my Ages of Video Game life like this:I. Pinball enthusiast skeptical about and fearful of the new machines (Asteroids, Space Invaders) in the arcadeII. Reality-accepting pinball enthusiast spending half his arcade time at the video games (Centipede, Qix, Missile Command)III. Guy whose friends had an NES but who, himself, didn't. This means I didn't get into first-generation cartridge stuff until they cut the price on the NES because they were making room for the SNES, which I've still never played. This era for me is defined by Ninja Gaiden III, which is a masterpiece.IV. Guy who bought a Nintendo 64: The hype around this machine was huge, and we couldn't really afford it but we got it anyway. For ages there were only four games you could get in the US to play on this system and one of them was fucking Goldeneye. A lot of people loved fucking Goldeneye, but I could not give a shit about that so I played Mario 64 until I'd gotten every star twice and found Yoshi on top of the castle and then a friend at work loaned me Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, which was huge, because it was such an immersive world with such clear good/evil boundaries, which are something I like: not always, I also like—you know—other configurations, but I respond pretty viscerally to evil villains who seek to punish the innocent sheerly for the sake of magnifying their own evil. I hadn't, prior to this game, even with Mario 64, felt that total-narrative-immersion thing that became the norm in video games for quite a while. The first time I arrived at the Temple of Time, the quiet in there, the echo of the footsteps… it's still pretty vivid.
Advertisement

You are absolutely right on about me and the glow that certain words and phrases, mainly phrases, have for me. It's the joy of giving things titles—when I was a young music obsessive, I sort of had this hierarchy of coolness in my mind. Albums whose titles did not come from one of the songs were almost always way cooler than albums that took their titles from the names of one of the songs. Albums whose titles came from within one of the songs but not from one of the song's titles, that was pretty cool, because it pointed you specifically at that one song without being super-obvious about it—it was like a clue on how to read the album. Self-titled albums that weren't debuts, this was a weird grammar that I later learned within the record business is basically an admission of defeat and/or a marketing strategy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
I listen to music sometimes when I write, but I'm always having to stop, because I read everything I write out loud. That's the test of whether it works or not, for me: how it sounds out loud. But when I'm just sitting down for the morning, or when it's a little loud out in the house beyond my office room, I'll listen either to classical music (I listened to a lot of Scriabin while writing Wolf) or metal: usually death metal, usually older stuff. In part "usually older" because if I'm listening to something I'm not super-familiar with, it'll probably distract me. Music is great both for feeding the mood of the writing but also for staying out of the way while providing a sort of conscious-mind minor distraction for me. So, like, I know the first two Mercyful Fate albums backward and forward, so I listened to those a lot. And the Warfare Noise comp of Brazilian thrash. And this band called Moss, a fair bit of slow doomy stuff really lets me write while being slow enough to not distract me. If things get real active and up-tempo, it's too much and I have to choose between either the music or the writing.And finally I listened to a lot of ambient, which is so useful, because you can sort of assign a mood to it—even the cheery stuff—if you say: "This is ambient music for funerals" in your mind, you can get a pretty funereal vibe from it. This podcast called Ultima Thule is kind of my first-look listening when I sit down to write. It's pretty perfect.
Advertisement

I have to get all cute and 90s-college with this: I do "believe" in "ghosts." That is, I think ghostliness is a thing and there are ghosts in everybody's lives and the idea of ghosts is something that's going to inform how I or anybody else relates to the world whether we think of them as existing outside our consciousness or not. Like, objectively, do I believe that the spirits of the dead exist outside of the consciousness of the living? No. But that's not the same as nonexistence. I think of ghosts as something you have, like a cold. And, like a cold, you're probably always going to have it again.You're right that Sean is pretty ghostly, especially because he's been reborn: the Sean people knew (the only one people knew; hardly anybody knows the rebuilt Sean) is a ghost haunting the lives of the people who knew him. But because he survived, he gets to see what that's like—to have been a person who now haunts others.I would prefer to believe in a world beyond this one—I always liked the teaching that this world is not illusory but sort of play-acting while the spiritual world is the actual, absolute reality—I used to read a lot of Vaisnava texts about this stuff. But honestly, no. At the same time, there's so much that's illusory that we buy into just for the sake of getting along daily that I like to sort of hold ideas of other worlds as possibilities in my mind, in that internal yes-and-no space, which is also where fiction lives. For instance: I read about a murder, and it's gruesome as fuck, and it's so vivid and I knew the killed character well enough that it feels very real, and is real in this space in my head, but nowhere else.That's what ghosts are like for me: real, but probably only for me.Follow Blake Butler on Twitter
