Christina Hendricks and the Red Accordion
Oct. 1st, 2011 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastNo, I'm awake. I promise. I can even see. Almost. I have even managed to survive the severe upbraiding I have received from Spooky for having awakened her at dawn-thirty because I was awakened by Hubero at dawn-thirty. I don't know why I did it! He does crazy shit, okay?! Crazy-ass cat shit, and usually she knows how to scare him in to calming the hell down. Instead, no, I'm in trouble for waking her up – me, the victim.
But that's cool. No more saving her from sasquatches.
And here it is the First of Hallowe'en, which would be fine, if I hadn't lost the first third of summer to rain, and the second third to...a bunch of dumb shit.
Yesterday I wrote a mere 454 words on "Daughter Dear Desmodus." Then I realized, This isn't a vignette. Or even a "sudden" fiction, or a short short, or whatever the beatniks are saying these days. It's not a short story, and I think it's more than a novelette. Or even a novella. Gods fuck me sideways, I think it's the first few pages of a novel about a "bat girl" in a carnival sideshow and how she grows up to unwittingly become the center of a doomsday cult, and fall in love. You know, like Water for Elephants on LSD.* And that's when I typed, THE END, because if I stopped at the conclusion of the paragraph I was writing, the story would have a happy ending. Okay, not happy. But what Spooky pronounced "sweet." Look, I don't know if it's the pills they give me so I don't flop around on the floor and choke on my own spittle to die the ignominious death of Tchaikovsky, or if I'm just getting old...but I find myself, now and again, wanting to let a character with whom I have fallen in love off the hook just a little. IS THAT SO BAD? Anyway, this is the story Vince will be illustrating, instead of the other story.
Spooky's muttering about washing her hair.
Yesterday, the mail (which only works about half the time) brought me my comp copies of Paula Guran's Halloween (Prime Books), a volume with many fine authors (Ray Bradbury, Thomas Ligotti, Lovecraft, Peter Straub, me, and etcetera) that reprints my piece, "On the Reef" (I found two minor typos; my fault). Oddly, I appear only ever to have written two "Hallowe'en stories": "At the Reef" and "A Redress for Andromeda." More proof I'm not a "horror" writer. You know, people still get hung up on that shit, me refusing to be called a "horror" writer. They take it personally. Seriously. For my part, I look at writers I admire, who had a great influence on me growing up. Ray Bradbury (again), for example. Sure, he writes science fiction, and fantasy (sensu stricto and sensu lato), and scary stories, and non-fantastic lit. Italo Calvino? Ambrose Bierce? Or Harlan Ellison, for example. You could not find an author more impossible to categorize (okay, well maybe you could, but that's not the point). He writes...what he wants to write. Same with Shirley Jackson: ghost stories, insightful stories about insanity and the labyrinth of the American family, and she also wrote some very funny shit. And Lovecraft? You really think "The Colour Out of Space" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are "horror" stories? But...William Gibson's "Hinterlands," that's sceince fiction? Pffffft.
You know, there are an awful lot of quotation marks in the last paragraph.
Today I work on pulling Sirenia Digest #70 together, so that I can send it to be PDF'd as soon as I have Vince's illustration, then Spooky can send it out to all the subscribers (and if you are not one of those, it's NEVER too late...unless you die first).
Some really fine RP in Insilico last night. Thank you, Joah. You've helped to complete the building of the perfect beast. And I read Algernon Blackwood's sublime "The Wendigo" for the umpteenth time, but every time it amazes me all the more.
Anyway...you know what? I consider myself a connoisseur of fetishes. There are few of them with which I am not acquainted. And there are still fewer that don't get me off. Wait...never mind. This isn't about non-Euclidian geometry and larger and smaller infinities, Georg Cantor and his cardinalities, integers vs. whole numbers. Not that math can't be a fetish. It can. But...what was I saying? Oh! Yes! Every now and then I watch the creation of a new fetish right before my very eyes and I know - with perfect clarity - it was created just for me. To whit, Christina Hendricks and her red accordion. I would show you the clip, but YouTube has disabled embedding by request. You'll have to settle for a link to Christina Hendricks playing her red accordion. And really, it's all I need. I could just...sit...and watch...her and...that red accordion...for hours. Without breathing.
Stopping Before Someone Gets Hurt,
Aunt Beast
*A novel I might be able to write by 2014.
But that's cool. No more saving her from sasquatches.
And here it is the First of Hallowe'en, which would be fine, if I hadn't lost the first third of summer to rain, and the second third to...a bunch of dumb shit.
Yesterday I wrote a mere 454 words on "Daughter Dear Desmodus." Then I realized, This isn't a vignette. Or even a "sudden" fiction, or a short short, or whatever the beatniks are saying these days. It's not a short story, and I think it's more than a novelette. Or even a novella. Gods fuck me sideways, I think it's the first few pages of a novel about a "bat girl" in a carnival sideshow and how she grows up to unwittingly become the center of a doomsday cult, and fall in love. You know, like Water for Elephants on LSD.* And that's when I typed, THE END, because if I stopped at the conclusion of the paragraph I was writing, the story would have a happy ending. Okay, not happy. But what Spooky pronounced "sweet." Look, I don't know if it's the pills they give me so I don't flop around on the floor and choke on my own spittle to die the ignominious death of Tchaikovsky, or if I'm just getting old...but I find myself, now and again, wanting to let a character with whom I have fallen in love off the hook just a little. IS THAT SO BAD? Anyway, this is the story Vince will be illustrating, instead of the other story.
Spooky's muttering about washing her hair.
Yesterday, the mail (which only works about half the time) brought me my comp copies of Paula Guran's Halloween (Prime Books), a volume with many fine authors (Ray Bradbury, Thomas Ligotti, Lovecraft, Peter Straub, me, and etcetera) that reprints my piece, "On the Reef" (I found two minor typos; my fault). Oddly, I appear only ever to have written two "Hallowe'en stories": "At the Reef" and "A Redress for Andromeda." More proof I'm not a "horror" writer. You know, people still get hung up on that shit, me refusing to be called a "horror" writer. They take it personally. Seriously. For my part, I look at writers I admire, who had a great influence on me growing up. Ray Bradbury (again), for example. Sure, he writes science fiction, and fantasy (sensu stricto and sensu lato), and scary stories, and non-fantastic lit. Italo Calvino? Ambrose Bierce? Or Harlan Ellison, for example. You could not find an author more impossible to categorize (okay, well maybe you could, but that's not the point). He writes...what he wants to write. Same with Shirley Jackson: ghost stories, insightful stories about insanity and the labyrinth of the American family, and she also wrote some very funny shit. And Lovecraft? You really think "The Colour Out of Space" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are "horror" stories? But...William Gibson's "Hinterlands," that's sceince fiction? Pffffft.
You know, there are an awful lot of quotation marks in the last paragraph.
Today I work on pulling Sirenia Digest #70 together, so that I can send it to be PDF'd as soon as I have Vince's illustration, then Spooky can send it out to all the subscribers (and if you are not one of those, it's NEVER too late...unless you die first).
Some really fine RP in Insilico last night. Thank you, Joah. You've helped to complete the building of the perfect beast. And I read Algernon Blackwood's sublime "The Wendigo" for the umpteenth time, but every time it amazes me all the more.
Anyway...you know what? I consider myself a connoisseur of fetishes. There are few of them with which I am not acquainted. And there are still fewer that don't get me off. Wait...never mind. This isn't about non-Euclidian geometry and larger and smaller infinities, Georg Cantor and his cardinalities, integers vs. whole numbers. Not that math can't be a fetish. It can. But...what was I saying? Oh! Yes! Every now and then I watch the creation of a new fetish right before my very eyes and I know - with perfect clarity - it was created just for me. To whit, Christina Hendricks and her red accordion. I would show you the clip, but YouTube has disabled embedding by request. You'll have to settle for a link to Christina Hendricks playing her red accordion. And really, it's all I need. I could just...sit...and watch...her and...that red accordion...for hours. Without breathing.
Stopping Before Someone Gets Hurt,
Aunt Beast
*A novel I might be able to write by 2014.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 05:49 pm (UTC)a red accordion
played by christina hendricks
beside the white advertising executives
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 06:05 pm (UTC)beside the white advertising executives
Yeah, they could go bye bye. Especially her rapist-ass cocksucker of a fiancé.
Haiku!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 06:22 pm (UTC)Indeed.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 06:38 pm (UTC)The Wendigo is brilliant. Damned moss-eaters!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:17 pm (UTC)Damned moss-eaters!
That's one of the really nice touches.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 06:45 pm (UTC)Nope. But I got the impression that the more you loved a character, the shittier ride they got. (And even more shitty syntax, Ash.) Maybe I'm wrong there.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:18 pm (UTC)But I got the impression that the more you loved a character, the shittier ride they got.
That used to be the way of it, yes. For example, Narcissa Snow (who was partly based on me).
Though, I didn't like Sarah Crowe very much. Though she was based on me. But I love Imp, and she's based on me, too.
It's complicated.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:44 pm (UTC)So, yeah. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:46 pm (UTC)Thank you.
You are most welcome.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:53 pm (UTC)Wonderful. Thanks for sharing!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 07:55 pm (UTC)How can that not be shared?!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:31 pm (UTC)Whoa.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:00 pm (UTC)I actually met Christina Hendricks at a convention which must have been one of her first for Firefly but at the time I hadn't seen the show yet and didn't know who she was except the most astounding woman I had ever seen lol
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:32 pm (UTC)In the decade + I've been reading your work I don't think I have ever described you as "horror".
Thank you. You are in the minority.
I actually met Christina Hendricks at a convention
Neat.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:14 pm (UTC)That sounds like fun.
*A novel I might be able to write by 2014.
Dangit! Come on, 2014! Let's go! Snap it up, passage of time, we don't have all day here!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:33 pm (UTC)Snap it up, passage of time, we don't have all day here!
If you could see my schedule.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 10:31 pm (UTC)Please hold. All Time Lords are presently busy.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-01 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:22 pm (UTC)You are welcome. They rock, and anytime I inspire a new fetish, I rock.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 05:15 am (UTC)As my Mum says, if we were meant to pop out of bed in the morning, we'd sleep in the toaster.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:23 pm (UTC)That's brilliant. Tell your mum I said so.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 08:22 am (UTC)"The Wendigo" is BRILLIANT! I love Blackwood and that story creeped the HELL out of me. I believe it was also a major inspiration for King's "Pet Semetary."
I think a lot of contemporary reader/scholars have a narrow view of what constitutes "horror." A great deal of Harlan Ellison (especially his collection "Deathbird Stories") really scares me. Same with Shirley Jackson: especially "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." When I was a college freshman I made the mistake of reading Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" alone in a dorm room while my roommate was out at a club; she came home to find all the lights on and me sitting wide-eyed on my bed! I will concur that these are not "horror" in the same way that the never-ending "Saw" franchise is (for example), but are really deeply psychologically and mentally disturbing narratives. By the same token, I would not exactly call your work "horror," yet I would say that it possesses uncomfortable resonances that challenge the stereotypical genre idea of "horror."
(Yes, I use many quotation marks as well!)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:21 pm (UTC)To put it succinctly, horror is an emotion, not a genre.
(Yes, I use many quotation marks as well!)
This is not a bad thing.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:09 pm (UTC)Perhaps someday you will have to tell the story of The One Who Got Away from Caitlin. Your own personal Roadrunner.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-02 06:23 pm (UTC)Perhaps someday you will have to tell the story of The One Who Got Away from Caitlin. Your own personal Roadrunner.
Oh, that would be many stories.
Bat Girl
Date: 2011-10-03 07:17 am (UTC)I think of Margaret Brundage's cover to the October, 1933 issue of Weird Tales.
(Brundage's life itself is intriguing. She is said to have used her daughters as models for her provocative artwork, despite the fact that she never had any daughters.)
(There is no documented doomsday cult activity, though she was a Christian Scientist and was married to a former hobo/politician.)
Thank you for your story, "The Ammonite Violin".