Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

Wild Lot
October 26, 2017

The air is toxic. Floating, ashy bits of debris swirl around like particles in a snow globe. They flicker through flashlight beams and gather on canvas bodysuits, yet never amass on the dark, uneven ground. Voices echo, stunted, through the murk: “Willllll!” The mix of sickly green and flat marine-blue hues lends an aquatic quality to the atmosphere, a quality made even more pronounced by the submerged, undead condition of the ubiquitous trees. It’s a place to look for and find the lost, dead or tucked away in an incubation chamber. A place to listen for the bipedal flower-headed beast that hunts, scenting blood across dimensions. Forever night, it’s a place on the other side of the routine, the normal, the safe. It’s the Upside Down. But what is the Upside Down? Where does it end? And what does it mean?

The Wild Lot in Schulz’s Pan

Sonja Crafts
March 6, 2017

With our early posts on Wild Lot, we thought we could attempt to illustrate our personal interest in the topics we hope to explore on this blog, namely, the role natural setting plays in forming and inspiring creative writers, and how our favorite authors, in recognition that we, through our fragile civilization, are only one small and superficial step removed from being wild ourselves, often use nature as an apt symbol for humanity. So, in the spirit of this, my first post will be a bit autobiographical…

I was in a creative writing class my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh, early 2000s. We each had to bring in a short story that was important to us as fledgling writers. I don’t remember what I brought in. But one student (Jared, I think?) brought in a photocopied excerpt of Polish author, Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles/Cinnamon Shops entitled “Pan.”

Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock

Jeremy Hauck
February 14, 2017

When I first saw Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), I must have been somewhere between 17 and 21 years old, living in rural Southwest Ohio, where I was born and raised and which was, like Weir’s 1900 south Australia, an ostensibly free yet inwardly straightjacketed province. I recall being excited by the subtext that Sara’s affection for Miranda, and then Mademoiselle de Poitier’s appreciation of Miranda’s beauty, suggested, not to mention the visuals of the key scenes that I get into here shortly. Above this impact, though, something haunting embedded in the film has made me ever since consider Hanging Rock part of my personal worldview, across multiple phases of my life, despite having seen it only once or twice until recently, when I brought it into the classroom as a case study of the Gothic.

The film is subversive, defiant, confounding, haunting, and impressionistic, which is probably why I liked it. What makes it even more appealing to me now, after reading the scholarship on the film, is seeing how the veinery circulating these impressions is the pagan god Pan—god of the Wild, and inspiration of the horror/sublime sensations brought on by finding oneself in the grip of the unthinkable mysteriousness of the universe, beyond the walls of normal experience.

wild lot

Category: Mythology

Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

The Wild Lot in Schulz’s Pan

Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock