The many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century
October 26, 2024 11:10 AM   Subscribe

I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece. from Weird Nonfiction by Clayton Purdom [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet (13 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
So much going on in this essay!
One quick note: I love how it ends in the Gothic:

I realize as I am dragged into the darkness that Sebald was wrong in his final moments. The past flows into a formless and indistinct void but it is not silent. From the basement I hear it begin to speak.
posted by doctornemo at 11:59 AM on October 26 [1 favorite]


I am built almost exclusively to write; everything else is ornamentation. When I lost my marketing job in 2022, I began evaluating the market value of different types of words

The plaintive lament of a marketer, content manager, and SEO optimizer who longs to be an artist. Where’s the mirror, buddy? You do realize that advertising *is* the insertion of compelling or terrifying fictions into reality in order to change the course of actual human lives for profit, don’t you?
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:06 PM on October 26 [11 favorites]


More thoughts:

I love the dreaming, brooding nature of the prose.

Lots of fun stuff to check out.

I wonder about other examples of weird nonfiction. Surely alternative reality games count?
posted by doctornemo at 12:10 PM on October 26 [1 favorite]


Basilisk collection:
The basilisk collection (also known as the basilisk file or basilisk.txt) is a collection of over 125 million partial hash inversions of the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function. Assuming state-of-the art methods were used to compute the inversions, the entries in the collection collectively represent a proof-of-work far exceeding the computational capacity of the human race.
posted by genpfault at 1:14 PM on October 26 [5 favorites]


Isn't "weird nonfiction" a pretty bizarre name given he discusses fiction here? At least all the examples look like fiction, maybe I missed something? I suppose unfiction describes some, but not all, and unfiction is fiction.

Appears rrrrrrrrrt seemingly answered my question there: It's some marketing guy who cannot distinguish fiction from non-fiction anyways. I'm unsurprised some marketing guy replaces fiction or unfiction by nonfiction.

"I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change, but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves."

At this point, hard sci-fi must address climate, or else de facto be fantasy. If otoh you discuss climate seriously then it'd often overwhelms your story, so authors like Cixin Liu and William Gibson skip over climate change through time jumps. Cixin Liu merely hint towards "the great ravine" being mass cannibalism.

As for nonfiction, real scientists have navigated existential concerns for years, presumably Lovecraft noticed this. We've massively sped up the clock by violating planetary boundaries like climate, while our sciences progressively rule out more & more possible escape hatches. Yet we should really not be surprised that all things die, including civilizations and species.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:37 PM on October 26 [3 favorites]


I kept expecting some mention of magical realism and why it is or isn't the same as weird nonfiction.
posted by Avelwood at 1:58 PM on October 26 [4 favorites]


Yes, magical realism maybe what he means here. Adult Swim's Yule Log sounds like straight up campy horror though, not magical realism, but marketing addled minds often misscategorize. Anyways I hope the term "weird nonfiction" dies, or else gets claimed by something that's actually nonfiction.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:43 PM on October 26 [2 favorites]


Okay slummer*.

Like, I understand what he's saying, but that's play when telling stories and dicking about with your audience. I've done it in chat rooms, smartphone instant messaging, social networks. There's ideas brought together in your text and some of it can be nonsense and silliness to keep your readers on their toes, or to stretch reality to include the wishful parts that inspire the nonsense -- or, insofar as the description of the thing defines the thing, you have agency and authority.

I think the GenX lad would know about messing with your audience to control them.

*: GenX and therefore slumming it.
posted by k3ninho at 3:00 PM on October 26


this looks like a good enough genre-descriptor for kane pixels' the oldest view (previously on mefi), which hit me in a different way because i not only knew that texas mall well before it was demolished, i worked in a small bookstore during its last decline & demolition. i'm glad it found a place in art because i sure didn't know what to do with it. just taking pictures e.g. of its outside mosaic, or in-progress demolition stages, just didn't seem to do justice to the enormity of what it felt like. so i can at last agree there's a need for this sort of new/old approach, even if we can't agree on the definition or boundaries of what it is.
posted by graywyvern at 3:27 PM on October 26 [1 favorite]


I kept waiting the whole essay for him to reveal that he knows the difference between fiction and nonfiction, but it never came up. He seems to be gesturing at fiction that presents itself as real, that perhaps doesn't realize it's fiction, but that's just...like...fiction. That's what it does. The first move of fiction is to tell you something false as though it is true. It's the whole point.
posted by mittens at 5:45 PM on October 26 [3 favorites]


Agreed that this is about something that is not nonfiction. I saw the title of the essay and expected it to be about a... genre? Subgenre? Convention? Hacky methodology? that I've been working in for a while, that of a fictional world presented using the language and presentation of nonfiction to give it a sort of built-in verisimilitude. Notable examples include Cyclonopedia, which presents as a work of Critical Theory but also contains a footnote "I don't know how long I've been in this hotel room".
posted by mediapathic at 7:09 PM on October 26 [3 favorites]


Weird nonfiction is my life, not... whatever he's going for here. This sounds like "making up crap."
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:47 PM on October 26 [1 favorite]


An article about “weird nonfiction” and no reference to Gonzo Journalism.
posted by my-username at 6:34 AM on October 27 [4 favorites]


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