In a way, we were like brothers, he and I. Rascally brothers who spend eternity chasing and fleeing each other. Sometimes he leads. Sometimes I lead. Sometimes he leads. Sometimes I. Sometimes we fight, sometimes we talk, sometimes we waltz as mere phantom abstractions in the blogosphere mist. If I arrested him, I would have no one.
So I adjusted my hat and left for the city outside. The city that is sometimes a lady. When I'm feeling particularly metaphorical. Which sometimes I'm not. But sometimes I am. And that kind of balance can be nice.
These words, taken from the end of The Blog Without a Face (2013-2015), could be said to summarize a significant philosophy in the works of Christoph Magreat, few may they be: Balance of blogging.
Influenced by the works of Writerer and Joyce, Magreat himself entered the Fear Mythos like a 'phantom abstraction in the blogosphere mist.' The rambling mysteries of Slender man were our first foray into his mind, a baffling one taking concepts and tropes from Fearblog of Fear (Everyblogger, 2012-2015) (what others would surely call one of the worst blogs ever written) and following them down whatever dreamlike paths they suggested. Magreat's operandi seemed one of deconstruction, of taking the badly written and basking in their incompleteness-- an operandi perhaps demonstrated best by his exegesis of Slender Won't Back Down (2015, nottobereblogged). No one knew what to think of his work, whether he was serious or laughing behind all our backs. When he and Jesus Archangard released their collaborative and abstract Fear series, critical reception only became more mixed. Was he a troll or a mad genius?
One thing was certain: Magreat was transfixed, like many others, by the first great myth of the internet. The Slender Man has appeared in every one of his blogs (except for the Fear series, which were just as much about Fears as my own OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING is about pottery). This even bled into the works of his contemporary Archangard, whose I am Not Who I Am and Slender Ran stretched boundaries of how blogs should work and, more importantly, what the Slender Man's role in the blogosphere should be. Letters of correspondence between Magreat and Archangard suggest that Christoph had as much a role in the Slender-centricity of those blogs as Jesus had. But at the time, no one minded. The Slender Man was popular for a reason. These two artists fit right in with the trend of the times. That is, until word spread about a new project, one tentatively titled Work in Blogress.
I was asked, back in January or February 2015, to manage the promotional campaign for this new project. To prepare me for it, Magreat invited me to discuss details up at Mevagissey's controversially-named Hitler's Walk. There, he would elucidate for me his interest in The Slender Man, in our Fear Mythos, and in the blogosphere. He told me of an idea he had, an idea for a blog he was struck by and that for which the Fear series was nothing more than an abstract, a proof of concept: A blog that is no more a story than it is architecture. A blog labyrinth (a blogyrinth). With it came another idea, one that at first was completely unrelated: A character study on the mythos, a reverse-chronology of canon-- and thus an exploration of the paradox that is a canon in the Fear Mythos, where canons can only come to die. In time, Magreat would combine all of these ideas into one. He would spend the next several months shut away from the rest of the world, only surfacing from his seaside cottage to visit the local bookstore and walk out carrying armfuls of paperbacks, hardbacks, and everything in between. The few times he would invite me to his house (mostly to keep me updated on how much information I can impart in my promotional campaign), I would see his walls plastered with scraps of paper whose inkstained faces beckoned wordlessly to me, betraying the words they advertised. Mazes of graphite almost led to his bed, where I would find him surrounded with-- enprisoned by-- pillars of books. His few words to me that weren't instructions were non-sequiters of whatever obscure philosophy nugget from linguistic history he was studying at the time. I was a little concerned for him, but at the same time I was marvelled. Whatever tomb he was building, he was its one true Daedalus.
At last he told me the name of his project: Viceking's Graab. The title came from some ancient public domain necronomicon; its meaning, while unknown to me at the time, was irrelevant. He then led me to his computer, an alien monolith on its screen: "Here is Viceking's Graab."
My first "reading" confirmed my suspicions: Magreat's new project was a masterwork. It did not read like any blog I knew (with the one exception of some old alliterator blog time had since forgotten, but even then the resemblance felt more like an expansion of a concept of which alliterator's blog, too, was proof); its posts were symbiotic with their blog designs, its text was only texture, its commentary faint yet.. more visceral than anything else. Yes, that was the word: "Visceral." This was a visceral blog. Its design, primarily, is that of electronic drama and pastiche-- though the flow of the thing turns pastiche into, too, texture. Its content, as much as one can define the content of architecture, is that of the faded-- vandalized-- remains of a massive societal network. "Absurdity" comes to mind, though never said. Many things within are never said yet still come to mind. This was a zeitgeist, a microcosm of the Fear Mythos as presented through a trip down the many layers of a dese-sacred cata-tomb.
The Graab, as Magreat told me, still needed work. For starters, its skeleton wasn't even complete at the time. But I was sold. I knew all I needed to know. And I was more than happy to manage the promotional campaign.
The finished product is almost complete, almost ready for public access. I hope you will accept it, even in its sprawling abstractions and baffling complexity, as one single project well deserving of the title "Fearblog." Some parts intellectual, some parts ridiculous-- this, like many of Magreat's projects before, is balance. In the words of Peter Gabriel, "If you think that it's pretentious, you've been taken for a ride."
