Wednesday Reading Meme - October 9 2024
Oct. 9th, 2024 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfish (October 9 2024
What I’ve Read:
Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews –
A bit of navel gazing: I am a proponent of direct experience of a piece of art. (Under the cut - Spoilers for Flowers in the Attic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Brokeback Mountain)
Sometime during the lockdown portion of the pandemic, I started watching horror movies. And I repeatedly had the experience of Knowing About A Movie, basically knowing a movie’s position in pop culture, only to watch the movie and have a wildly different experience with The Thing Itself.
Sometimes what you know about a piece of art is just not going to be the most important part of the experience to you! Sometimes the pop culture reputation of a work is just not paying attention to what the movie is about!
Examples from movies, one horror and one more mainstream:
I walked into Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) knowing about a spoiler for the last 20 minutes of the movie – the revelation that there is not just one horrible killer murdering people for spite, but a whole family who murder and cannibalize strangers and process their bodies into meat for sale. It’s a big deal revelation! It reshapes the whole movie, it’s worth remembering! But almost nothing else in the movie was something I had heard about, and the experience was so so much better and more engaging than I expected. The shock and horror of the film was clearly intended to be both about the brutality of the innocent victims’ deaths, and the callous cruelty of this family’s dehumanization of strangers. The movie could be about a lone killer and instead its about systematically turning people into meat. I was very jealous of the people who got to see that movie without the spoiler!
The mainstream one: Brokeback Mountain and this one happened kind of in real time for me. I watched the movie pretty much as soon as I could, and its absolutely beautiful and joyful and tender - young love and its death inside one story. The performances were astoundingly personal. And then I watched pop culture make a joke of it: The Gay Cowboy Movie. Made “I wish I knew how to quit you” a punchline, removed from the wrenching context of its original writing. And about a month ago, in the year of 2024, I saw someone joyfully freaking out on social media when they actually watched it and realized it was Actually Gay – not just ‘a bromance,’ not just a punchline– that Brokeback Mountain was actually love story between two men, and the joy and sorrow of that relationship was the core of the film. The art was much much better than the reputation of the art.
To my point: The thing I ‘Knew About’ VC Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic was about some kind of incest.
I truly did not have a single clue about how structurally central to Flowers in The Attic the incest is. It’s not just a book where incest happens to occur, it is a book entirely focused on how two closely related people would choose a willing romantic relationship with each other, and the kind of family and external circumstances that would drive them to that. The book is so much more about a family that has cultivated repression and authoritarian exclusion of all un-approved outside contact, that people become trapped in it and adapt in awful ways. These kids are not just trapped in an attic together for years during puberty, they are literally the product of a marriage between an uncle and niece.
My read of the book also has a LOT to do with patriarchy – the way that a watchful and judging God is conflated with the absent grandfather. His demands are ever present and his will is enacted even after his death by people too afraid to live without his support and approval – to the detriment of all the women around him. And yet, he’s on the page only once, and some of the most cruel parts of the books are committed by the kids’ mom.
I decided to read it after a youtuber I liked exhorted people to read the books directly before watching her four hour discussion of the book series and the adaptations of the books. And this book was honestly delightful. It’s entirely melodramatic, in that it is wholly uninterested in how realistic it would be for a family to lock four children in a room for years on end, but the emotional impact of that choice is lovingly laid out in microscopic detail.
that’s Biz’s video https://youtu.be/RykXvaMi-ic?si=xNh6GOWNfxtvA1Ep – I think there are some things I would do differently in this analysis (her discussion of the history of the Gothic before the literary meaning of the word is thin) but I found it a fun watch and I’m interested in reading the rest of the books.
Network Effect by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #5) – a re-read! Actually, a multiple re-read, Storygraph tells me I have read this four times, once per year since its been out. This is indeed one of my favorite books! If you have read All Systems Red or any of the other Murderbot Diaries, you’d get a novella that’s absolutely packed with an anxious construct trying to figure out its personal wants and also keep some people alive – but it’s a bit light on how those relationships shape Muderbot’s life going forward. This book’s is longer and it has room enough to do some deep digging into the relationships that Murderbot has made and how those don’t all have to be defined by utility. I love the element of multiple viewpoint this book gives – Murderbot’s friendships and work really do create a network effect that defines this story and shapes the future.
What I’m Reading
Oh, nothing actively, I'll figure it out
Back Burner
He Who Drowned the World
Conflict is Not Abuse
Ash: A Secret History –
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broker – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
Petals on the Wind
The Archive Undying
What I’ve Read:
Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews –
A bit of navel gazing: I am a proponent of direct experience of a piece of art. (Under the cut - Spoilers for Flowers in the Attic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Brokeback Mountain)
Sometime during the lockdown portion of the pandemic, I started watching horror movies. And I repeatedly had the experience of Knowing About A Movie, basically knowing a movie’s position in pop culture, only to watch the movie and have a wildly different experience with The Thing Itself.
Sometimes what you know about a piece of art is just not going to be the most important part of the experience to you! Sometimes the pop culture reputation of a work is just not paying attention to what the movie is about!
Examples from movies, one horror and one more mainstream:
I walked into Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) knowing about a spoiler for the last 20 minutes of the movie – the revelation that there is not just one horrible killer murdering people for spite, but a whole family who murder and cannibalize strangers and process their bodies into meat for sale. It’s a big deal revelation! It reshapes the whole movie, it’s worth remembering! But almost nothing else in the movie was something I had heard about, and the experience was so so much better and more engaging than I expected. The shock and horror of the film was clearly intended to be both about the brutality of the innocent victims’ deaths, and the callous cruelty of this family’s dehumanization of strangers. The movie could be about a lone killer and instead its about systematically turning people into meat. I was very jealous of the people who got to see that movie without the spoiler!
The mainstream one: Brokeback Mountain and this one happened kind of in real time for me. I watched the movie pretty much as soon as I could, and its absolutely beautiful and joyful and tender - young love and its death inside one story. The performances were astoundingly personal. And then I watched pop culture make a joke of it: The Gay Cowboy Movie. Made “I wish I knew how to quit you” a punchline, removed from the wrenching context of its original writing. And about a month ago, in the year of 2024, I saw someone joyfully freaking out on social media when they actually watched it and realized it was Actually Gay – not just ‘a bromance,’ not just a punchline– that Brokeback Mountain was actually love story between two men, and the joy and sorrow of that relationship was the core of the film. The art was much much better than the reputation of the art.
To my point: The thing I ‘Knew About’ VC Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic was about some kind of incest.
I truly did not have a single clue about how structurally central to Flowers in The Attic the incest is. It’s not just a book where incest happens to occur, it is a book entirely focused on how two closely related people would choose a willing romantic relationship with each other, and the kind of family and external circumstances that would drive them to that. The book is so much more about a family that has cultivated repression and authoritarian exclusion of all un-approved outside contact, that people become trapped in it and adapt in awful ways. These kids are not just trapped in an attic together for years during puberty, they are literally the product of a marriage between an uncle and niece.
My read of the book also has a LOT to do with patriarchy – the way that a watchful and judging God is conflated with the absent grandfather. His demands are ever present and his will is enacted even after his death by people too afraid to live without his support and approval – to the detriment of all the women around him. And yet, he’s on the page only once, and some of the most cruel parts of the books are committed by the kids’ mom.
I decided to read it after a youtuber I liked exhorted people to read the books directly before watching her four hour discussion of the book series and the adaptations of the books. And this book was honestly delightful. It’s entirely melodramatic, in that it is wholly uninterested in how realistic it would be for a family to lock four children in a room for years on end, but the emotional impact of that choice is lovingly laid out in microscopic detail.
that’s Biz’s video https://youtu.be/RykXvaMi-ic?si=xNh6GOWNfxtvA1Ep – I think there are some things I would do differently in this analysis (her discussion of the history of the Gothic before the literary meaning of the word is thin) but I found it a fun watch and I’m interested in reading the rest of the books.
Network Effect by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #5) – a re-read! Actually, a multiple re-read, Storygraph tells me I have read this four times, once per year since its been out. This is indeed one of my favorite books! If you have read All Systems Red or any of the other Murderbot Diaries, you’d get a novella that’s absolutely packed with an anxious construct trying to figure out its personal wants and also keep some people alive – but it’s a bit light on how those relationships shape Muderbot’s life going forward. This book’s is longer and it has room enough to do some deep digging into the relationships that Murderbot has made and how those don’t all have to be defined by utility. I love the element of multiple viewpoint this book gives – Murderbot’s friendships and work really do create a network effect that defines this story and shapes the future.
What I’m Reading
Oh, nothing actively, I'll figure it out
Back Burner
He Who Drowned the World
Conflict is Not Abuse
Ash: A Secret History –
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broker – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet
What I’ll Read Next
Petals on the Wind
The Archive Undying
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Date: 2024-10-09 08:43 pm (UTC)