"Pockets full of stones."
Nov. 20th, 2011 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastI'm sitting here composing, in my head, a Tom Waits song that Tom Waits will never compose, much less record. But it's about not sending "wish you were here" postcards to nightmares.
Someone said something. I won't say who or where the comment was made. The "You're a horror writer" thing. No, I'm not. But. If you insist, maybe it's simply that my definition of "horror" and yours are so vastly different that we possess incommensurable worldviews and can't actually communicate on the subject in any mutually intelligible way (by the way, if you grew up without phonetics/phonics, you're screwed; then again, I guess that's why we have "l33t," "texting," and online dictionaries).
Why no, I'm not in a good mood. Not at all. Not after those dream worlds. And given the fact that there's no way for me to conclusively demonstrate to myself that they're any less objectively "real" than this waking world wherein I'm typing this LJ entry (never mind the world wherein you're reading it; I'll not open that can of worms). Still, this mood has to be bent far enough in that direction that I can get "Sexing the Weird" finished today. I have to be productive. No option, even if there's a hypothetical option.
Problem is, I have this thing I thought would take me two days to write, and today will be day four...I think. I spent yesterday navigating my way through the original and expurgated texts of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then it was Machen's "The Great God Pan," and finally that got me to the central focus of Part One of the introduction, which is simply that Lovecraft wrote a LOT about fucking. I began with "The Dunwich Horror," a lamentably silly, sprawling tale that I sincerely wish were not thought of as one of HPL's best. But, nonetheless, it is a tale of interspecies and interdimensional sex, and therefore serves my purposes. Today, onward. The thesis statement is remarkably simple: sex (and especially "deviant" sex) has often been at the heart of weird fiction, all the way back to the Gothics. Though...I only go as far back Le Fanu, and if anyone wants to go farther back, well...the path is marked. And yeah, I see the repetitive nature of two of those sentences. Let's pretend I did it on purpose.
---
Today is the 13th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. The whole thing is explained here, for those who need an explanation. I'd like to think that no one does need an explanation. Transgender people live with the constant threat of physical and psychological violence, and even death, every single hour of our lives. No matter who you become, that threat, and the fear it engenders, never goes away. Even when you might actually be genuinely safe. Because too many times you haven't been, and you know what might happen if you're not careful and can't figure out how to cheat all the immutable pink and blue rules of a cisgendered world (and you can't). Me, I have about a hundred tales. Someday, maybe I'll tell one of the closest calls I ever had, which concerns three drunken Athens, GA frat boys bearing down on me as I gripped a can of pepper spray. Playing chicken with hate, as it were. No one can count the dead, but we can remember a few who must serve, in these grim mathematics, as the symbols for an unknown (and unknowable) number.
---
Last night a new episode of Fringe, "And Those We Leave Behind," and it was so good I cannot imagine how this series is still on the air. It just keeps going to stranger places. We all do this at our own risk, going weird places, if we expect anyone to follow. And storytellers tend to have to wish for followers. Elsewise, we're only talking to ourselves. Not that there's anything wrong with talking to ourselves. Me to myself. You to yourself. Unless you need to make a living telling stories (an awful, awful situation). Anyway, a fine episode, and I think they finally made me care about Peter Bishop, who has almost always felt like a great slab of nothing interesting. I just hope that the series either a) wraps things up this season or b) doesn't lose it's following and is permitted another season. Were it me, I'd have taken this season to end the story, especially considering how this season almost didn't happen.
The platypus shakes the word basket, and I reach inside, hoping this isn't one of those days the platypus is being cute and has slipped in a few razorblades just for shits and giggles.
Remembering,
Aunt Beast
Someone said something. I won't say who or where the comment was made. The "You're a horror writer" thing. No, I'm not. But. If you insist, maybe it's simply that my definition of "horror" and yours are so vastly different that we possess incommensurable worldviews and can't actually communicate on the subject in any mutually intelligible way (by the way, if you grew up without phonetics/phonics, you're screwed; then again, I guess that's why we have "l33t," "texting," and online dictionaries).
Why no, I'm not in a good mood. Not at all. Not after those dream worlds. And given the fact that there's no way for me to conclusively demonstrate to myself that they're any less objectively "real" than this waking world wherein I'm typing this LJ entry (never mind the world wherein you're reading it; I'll not open that can of worms). Still, this mood has to be bent far enough in that direction that I can get "Sexing the Weird" finished today. I have to be productive. No option, even if there's a hypothetical option.
Problem is, I have this thing I thought would take me two days to write, and today will be day four...I think. I spent yesterday navigating my way through the original and expurgated texts of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then it was Machen's "The Great God Pan," and finally that got me to the central focus of Part One of the introduction, which is simply that Lovecraft wrote a LOT about fucking. I began with "The Dunwich Horror," a lamentably silly, sprawling tale that I sincerely wish were not thought of as one of HPL's best. But, nonetheless, it is a tale of interspecies and interdimensional sex, and therefore serves my purposes. Today, onward. The thesis statement is remarkably simple: sex (and especially "deviant" sex) has often been at the heart of weird fiction, all the way back to the Gothics. Though...I only go as far back Le Fanu, and if anyone wants to go farther back, well...the path is marked. And yeah, I see the repetitive nature of two of those sentences. Let's pretend I did it on purpose.
---
Today is the 13th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. The whole thing is explained here, for those who need an explanation. I'd like to think that no one does need an explanation. Transgender people live with the constant threat of physical and psychological violence, and even death, every single hour of our lives. No matter who you become, that threat, and the fear it engenders, never goes away. Even when you might actually be genuinely safe. Because too many times you haven't been, and you know what might happen if you're not careful and can't figure out how to cheat all the immutable pink and blue rules of a cisgendered world (and you can't). Me, I have about a hundred tales. Someday, maybe I'll tell one of the closest calls I ever had, which concerns three drunken Athens, GA frat boys bearing down on me as I gripped a can of pepper spray. Playing chicken with hate, as it were. No one can count the dead, but we can remember a few who must serve, in these grim mathematics, as the symbols for an unknown (and unknowable) number.
---
Last night a new episode of Fringe, "And Those We Leave Behind," and it was so good I cannot imagine how this series is still on the air. It just keeps going to stranger places. We all do this at our own risk, going weird places, if we expect anyone to follow. And storytellers tend to have to wish for followers. Elsewise, we're only talking to ourselves. Not that there's anything wrong with talking to ourselves. Me to myself. You to yourself. Unless you need to make a living telling stories (an awful, awful situation). Anyway, a fine episode, and I think they finally made me care about Peter Bishop, who has almost always felt like a great slab of nothing interesting. I just hope that the series either a) wraps things up this season or b) doesn't lose it's following and is permitted another season. Were it me, I'd have taken this season to end the story, especially considering how this season almost didn't happen.
The platypus shakes the word basket, and I reach inside, hoping this isn't one of those days the platypus is being cute and has slipped in a few razorblades just for shits and giggles.
Remembering,
Aunt Beast
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:01 pm (UTC)At first, I thought this season was going to be about re-integrating Peter into "this world," but I now think that it will be about getting Peter back to his world. He's not making any effort to reform "this world" into the one that he knew. It isn't where he's supposed to be. Ultimately, I think the world of this season won't matter, except to show how things might have been if one event from the past was different. Peter will get back and we'll never see this version of reality again, I think.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:06 pm (UTC)and they usually resolve that concept by the end of the season.
Hmmmmm. Last season...not sure I can say there was any resolution. But it would have made a good ending to the series.
but I now think that it will be about getting Peter back to his world. He's not making any effort to reform "this world" into the one that he knew. It isn't where he's supposed to be. Ultimately, I think the world of this season won't matter, except to show how things might have been if one event from the past was different.
Yes! It's the beauty of demonstrating the infinity of realities.
Peter will get back and we'll never see this version of reality again, I think.
Maybe. If one can be returned, once one has been removed. Myself, I imagine a different and more bizarre fate....
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:22 pm (UTC)There are so many possibilities, and I think there is reason to hope for one of them over a return to status quo. I did not want to be as taken in by Fringe as I am, but here we are.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:25 pm (UTC)and I think there is reason to hope for one of them over a return to status quo.
But...it would require such a precise reinsertion, and still, a new worldtime/timeline would be created.
Ah...fun with cosmology and quantum physics.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:35 pm (UTC)It is, apparently earlier in the day for my poor brain than I thought.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 05:57 pm (UTC)I was also stunned by the intensity of the "And Those We've Left Behind" episode. One of the finest.
Gradually, Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist) has directed a good chunk of my favorite episodes of Fringe. It's a case of finding someone who could legitimately improve on what they already had. I love when the right creator gets paired with the right material.
[Oh, and it appears that this was the lowest rated episode in the show's history, so we may have a case of this one being so good that people had to change the channel...]
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 06:41 pm (UTC)Peter would look about right in an Observer outfit.
Bingo. There's no other place to put him, without creating a temporal paradox.
[Oh, and it appears that this was the lowest rated episode in the show's history, so we may have a case of this one being so good that people had to change the channel...]
Evidence of the veracity of my fears.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 06:22 pm (UTC)Good luck with Sexing. And yeah, Dunwich is pretty bloody daft - I can enjoy it superficially, but it's too easy to laugh at. Innsmouth is far better for interspecies sex. Plus, I like the ending, which I find *almost* upbeat.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 06:43 pm (UTC)And yeah, Dunwich is pretty bloody daft - I can enjoy it superficially, but it's too easy to laugh at.
It is redeemed only by being better than the 1970 film adaptation.
Plus, I like the ending, which I find *almost* upbeat.
Ah, now there's a take on it I like.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 08:37 pm (UTC)Florence + the Machine
Date: 2011-11-20 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-20 11:53 pm (UTC)Perhaps you should. Or at least write it down.
I have to watch Fringe.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 05:28 am (UTC)I kind of love the first 15 levels... What class did you choose?
Added you to my FL, so I can get you into the guild if I happen to see you on.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 08:47 am (UTC)I tried to figure out the finding people thing, I just ended up killing lots of critters and scurrying about. As one does. I like the little rifts & tears, and a fair number of respawns last night can be chalked up to my fondness for taking them on single-handed & getting all One Woman Army on that crap... and then having to spend the next three or respawns wading out of the Insta-Death >.>
Harlakai is a Kelari Rogue. It was only after I committed to the character creation that I realised she looks like Lady GaGa. I love GaGa (controversial of me, I know) so this makes me happy ^_^
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 01:39 am (UTC)It breaks my heart that people who simply want to be who they really are are subject to hate attacks for going through the difficult and expensive steps of becoming themselves. I suppose the human animal (or some of them, at least) will never have anything better to do than feel threatened (by what? who knows) and attack anyone they don't understand. It's always seemed to me to just be easier to leave folks the hell alone if you don't like them, rather than go way out of your way to cause harm.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-21 02:23 am (UTC)