Wednesday Reading Meme - November 29 2023
Nov. 29th, 2023 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishWhat I’ve Read:
(Technically I finished Camp Damascus on the 24th, so I log it here, but last week was where I really went into it.)
What I’m Reading:
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress! We will get into the second half of the book next week, but I really do enjoy the mystery element of these books.
Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros – Fun with Necromancy book club - <
On the reading of the book: This reads like fanfic. I love fanfic, but it commonly relies on the source material to establish the world building and rules, and then plays with characterization and relationships inside those rules. This book, as original work, has not actually built the world before filling it with characters. It also has not actually built the characters as real people. It is 500+ pages of “Man, this could be good with some major edits and about ten years of therapy.”
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections in Horror - Joe Vallese (Editor) – SPN Seminar –
-Short essays where queer authors talk about horror cinema’s impact on them, with a focus on particular movies.
This week’s essay, “The Girl, The Well, the Ring” by Zefyr Lisowski, talked about The Ring and Pet Sematary. This essay is, unfortunately, the low point of this book so far. I had some longer thoughts but I’ll trim it down here: Lisowski is just kind of careless – at first I thought she was just finding things in the movies that I had missed, but in closer reading with a friend, it became clear that she just made a bunch of kind of careless mistakes to support her argument better.
Sidebar: I am reminded of an English teacher in high school, who had the class reading short stories and churning out papers about them every three days. It was an exercise in learning to read analytically and write about it quickly – he was quite clear that he was choosing to teach New Criticism because it was a good toolset for that situation. One of the things he stressed was using quotations and evidence from the readings in good faith. If the story has an elegant lady “perfuming herself at her toilet,” it’s disingenuous to take that quote and write that the author “said her perfume smells like a ‘toilet’” – you’d be twisting the quotation out of its context to make your point rather than actually engaging the text in good faith. I should look that teacher up.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson - I was lured in by the absolute prettiness of the Picador Modern Classic pocket version of this book. I have not read Jackson before, and had intended to – the smallness of this book has allowed me to pick up and read a few stories here and there and they are BANGERS so far. “The Intoxicated” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse” are both short stories about adults interacting with children and finding it deeply unsettling to realize they live in vastly different worlds than the adults.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
(Technically I finished Camp Damascus on the 24th, so I log it here, but last week was where I really went into it.)
What I’m Reading:
House of Leaves – Robobook Club – Haven’t touched it since I started it.
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett - Xing Book Club – Steady progress! We will get into the second half of the book next week, but I really do enjoy the mystery element of these books.
Fourth Wing – Rebecca Yarros – Fun with Necromancy book club - <
I am hate reading this. I am not enjoying it. There is, perhaps, a secret good book inside this bad one, but ooof, I shan’t go digging. The author is a Mormon Army wife with six kids. It shows. There is a lot of deeply weird things she’s doing that never really get explained without a more full characterization, and most of them jive really specifically with Mormons and/or military families(insularity, obligatory heterosexual desire, parental authority as a physical threat, a person raised in a horrifying closed society, eroticism of controlling behavior from men, thinking that who you’re paired up with defines who you are as a person, young people being forbidden from contacting their families for a year, modern army structure is applied in a fantasy medieval setting for no good reason, uniform kink, sexual attraction to violence, disregarding the moral weight of violence or witnessing violence, treating sentient beings as weapons). It felt like Twilight all over again – like, just a pervasive sense of “This is a deeply weird thing that you are including This Weird Thing for no reason, what’s the fantasy backstory behind this choice?” and then, well, there’s no fantasy backstory, she’s just including things that she thinks are normal, and she has a view of the world that makes me want to flee to the sea and live as a mollusk.
On the reading of the book: This reads like fanfic. I love fanfic, but it commonly relies on the source material to establish the world building and rules, and then plays with characterization and relationships inside those rules. This book, as original work, has not actually built the world before filling it with characters. It also has not actually built the characters as real people. It is 500+ pages of “Man, this could be good with some major edits and about ten years of therapy.”
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections in Horror - Joe Vallese (Editor) – SPN Seminar –
-Short essays where queer authors talk about horror cinema’s impact on them, with a focus on particular movies.
This week’s essay, “The Girl, The Well, the Ring” by Zefyr Lisowski, talked about The Ring and Pet Sematary. This essay is, unfortunately, the low point of this book so far. I had some longer thoughts but I’ll trim it down here: Lisowski is just kind of careless – at first I thought she was just finding things in the movies that I had missed, but in closer reading with a friend, it became clear that she just made a bunch of kind of careless mistakes to support her argument better.
It undermines her essay pretty badly.
Her essay is about how these two horror films were damaging to her, growing up as chronically ill trans girl, and I’m actually quite sure she *could* make a good essay about that experience with these two movies – just not this one.
I tried to read it generously, but she’s quite messy about the actual evidence she uses from the film to make the points about them being damaging. There’s a quote she attributes to Pet Sematary that isn’t in the film (a version is, maybe, in the book, but in a different context that undermines her point.), she describes a scene from The Ring II as being in The Ring (two different movies, with really different takes on the same character), and she just… kind of misreads some major elements of The Ring. She argued that The Ring is unsympathetic to Samara, the ghost of a psychic child murdered by her mother and neglected by her surviving father, and says the film depicts the characters as being correct in their mistreatment/neglect of Samara - but that is plainly a misreading of the film, which is sympathetic to the life of pain thatled to Samara’s ghost becoming violent. It is a horror film; Samara does hurt people! But the film is also about uncovering the pain she suffered and deciphering the tape she left as her last message to the world.
I went looking with my friend for other writing by Lisowski to see what else she has written, and, well, it seemed to me that she had done similar things with other poems and writing that she was commenting on – and that she had predicted critics saying that she was not being “objective” enough. I guess I have to agree with the critics here; while I like to read a lot of different interpretations of horror films because interpretation is creative and new points of view are often fascinating insights into movies, you do have agree that what happens in the film is important, and you can’t alter the films to fit your argument better. Lisowski claims things are in the films that are literally not there. If it’s a mistake, then she should go and fix it; if it’s part of her way of creating an argument, then I think she’s not someone I will read in the future.
Her essay is about how these two horror films were damaging to her, growing up as chronically ill trans girl, and I’m actually quite sure she *could* make a good essay about that experience with these two movies – just not this one.
I tried to read it generously, but she’s quite messy about the actual evidence she uses from the film to make the points about them being damaging. There’s a quote she attributes to Pet Sematary that isn’t in the film (a version is, maybe, in the book, but in a different context that undermines her point.), she describes a scene from The Ring II as being in The Ring (two different movies, with really different takes on the same character), and she just… kind of misreads some major elements of The Ring. She argued that The Ring is unsympathetic to Samara, the ghost of a psychic child murdered by her mother and neglected by her surviving father, and says the film depicts the characters as being correct in their mistreatment/neglect of Samara - but that is plainly a misreading of the film, which is sympathetic to the life of pain thatled to Samara’s ghost becoming violent. It is a horror film; Samara does hurt people! But the film is also about uncovering the pain she suffered and deciphering the tape she left as her last message to the world.
I went looking with my friend for other writing by Lisowski to see what else she has written, and, well, it seemed to me that she had done similar things with other poems and writing that she was commenting on – and that she had predicted critics saying that she was not being “objective” enough. I guess I have to agree with the critics here; while I like to read a lot of different interpretations of horror films because interpretation is creative and new points of view are often fascinating insights into movies, you do have agree that what happens in the film is important, and you can’t alter the films to fit your argument better. Lisowski claims things are in the films that are literally not there. If it’s a mistake, then she should go and fix it; if it’s part of her way of creating an argument, then I think she’s not someone I will read in the future.
Sidebar: I am reminded of an English teacher in high school, who had the class reading short stories and churning out papers about them every three days. It was an exercise in learning to read analytically and write about it quickly – he was quite clear that he was choosing to teach New Criticism because it was a good toolset for that situation. One of the things he stressed was using quotations and evidence from the readings in good faith. If the story has an elegant lady “perfuming herself at her toilet,” it’s disingenuous to take that quote and write that the author “said her perfume smells like a ‘toilet’” – you’d be twisting the quotation out of its context to make your point rather than actually engaging the text in good faith. I should look that teacher up.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson - I was lured in by the absolute prettiness of the Picador Modern Classic pocket version of this book. I have not read Jackson before, and had intended to – the smallness of this book has allowed me to pick up and read a few stories here and there and they are BANGERS so far. “The Intoxicated” and “After You, My Dear Alphonse” are both short stories about adults interacting with children and finding it deeply unsettling to realize they live in vastly different worlds than the adults.
What I’ll Read Next:
Dark Rise – CS Pacat – re-read before the next book comes out.
Dark Heir – New book!
Ninefox Gambit – Xing Book Club
When Women Were Dragons - Xing Book Club
Owned and need to read: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe
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Date: 2023-11-29 06:47 pm (UTC)