Summer reading: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Well, that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Just part of one day. I listened to my book and cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen and worked on my knitting and had a very pleasant Saturday in the process.

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a story about two young women who, along with their elderly uncle, have locked themselves away in their ancestral mansion for six years after their parents, brother, and aunt had all been murdered in the house with arsenic (mixed in with the sugar they sprinkled over blackberries). The older sister, Constance, had been tried for the murders but was acquitted and now takes care of her uncle and the younger sister, Mary Katherine (or Merricat), who was only 12 at the time of the deaths.

flapjacks, research, libraries, blogs, loos, anti-fashion, and horror (or, just a normal wednesday)

Did you know the British Library has the tastiest apple crisp bars in the entire world?  They're inexplicably called "apple blackberry flapjacks." There aren't any blackberries in them, and they definitely aren't flapjacks. I don't know if the British know what a flapjack is. 

Yes, I am in the British Library.  Again.  I live here, I can't escape it, even when I try it lures me back with its delicious apple crisp bars (and its books).  

I bought a really expensive notebook today and decided that I would do some research in the BL the old fashioned way, just me and a book and an expensive notebook, oh and a pencil.  I read the book and took notes without the use of my computer.  It was tricky at first.  My hand was definitely unsure of itself as it tried to write words, constantly skipping letters and forgetting how to form certain shapes.  It's true, I don't do much handwriting these days, and it took a while to get back into it.  

Before coming to the library I worked all morning. Like, proper work.  If you know me, you know I have an aversion to work.  But, as much as I hate working, my aversion to authority is even greater, and if I don't work hard on the business my sister and I are starting, then I'll have to work for someone else some day, which sounds like the worst thing imaginable.  So I started a new blog for archediting.com. We want it to be a writing resource, covering everything from proper grammar to getting published.  We'll review books and blogs and write our own handy little articles.  I am excited for it, but I know it's going to be SO much work.  

Also, this is brilliant. http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2011/03/02/a-map-of-londons-public-toilets/  This guy has mapped out all of the public toilets in London!  Apparently there's more than 800 here, which is awesome considering there's 3 in Rome.  It's handy to know where to find them. What a clever idea.   

Oh, and I did this to my hair the other day.  

I felt the need to dye it, and I initially wanted to do bright pink streaks, but I decided to be a little more conservative and go for the red.  But there is an old lady who I see at the BL and she has the exact same hair as me, so I'm thinking I will do the pink as soon as I find some good hair dye.  I didn't do it try to be cool or anything...in fact I feel like it's probably really uncool for a 27 year old to dye her hair pink.  I did it because I don't really care.  My hair doesn't need to be perfect, and I don't need to try to preserve its pristine state and color.  It can look like crap, which it definitely does today.  I've probably been reading too much about punk anti-fashion.  Or maybe it's because I've realized none of it really matters: clothes, hair, make up. It doesn't matter and I don't care.  There, you can believe that or not.  I'm not sure if I do completely, I just know that the easiest thing for me to do is dye my hair, wear lots of black eye shadow and start making my own clothes because I can't buy the things I like anyway because i'm broke and nothing I like fits.  When I go home in April I'm going to go through all my old clothes, or go to the charity shops, and make skirts out of anything I think will work.  I'm excited about this.  I also have some sweaters I've worn all winter that could very easily be turned into summer skirts.  

Finally, I'm going to admit this, I started reading Crash by J.G. Ballard.  Woah. I don't know if I can make it through the whole book...I'm surprised I got through the first chapter.  It is definitely disturbing and painful to look at, on so so many levels, but there's something intensely compelling about how it's written that makes me want to finish it.  It reminds me of watching a really awful horror movie where you can't get into the horror, you just float above it, paying more attention to how it is all crafted than to the actual terrible things that are happening.  That's how I watch horror movies anyway, and probably why I love them so much.  I haven't seen a good horror movie in months, and I really need to sit down and watch something soon. I miss Susperia and The Shining and The Omen and all of those wonderful movies I used to watch all of the time.  It's time to get back into that.  Remember how I wrote my Masters thesis on zombies?  yeah, those were good times.  

And there you have it.  That's my random blog for the day.  thanks for enduring, if you did. 

kisses! 

won't you please please help me?

Today is officially the last day of winter break. Although it never really felt like the end of a semester around here because it really wasn't. Right now the libraries are packed full of kids studying for their finals, because finals come after winter break. I have been staring at my computer all week trying to write a paper due on Tuesday. So that wonderful feeling of everything being done and being able to relax over the break never really happened for most of us.

I'm glad life is starting back up anyway. Next week will be busy and wonderful. I'll have turned this horrid paper in, classes and new projects will begin. Then it will feel like a new year.

Oh this paper. It really is killing me. I feel that it is rife with problems, that it is convoluted and uncertain of itself and I'm being stubborn and refuse to scrap it and start over. If I've learned anything from all the massive amounts of television I consume, starting over never worked in Project Runway, not this late in the game, and I have Tim Gunn in my head right now telling me to "make it work". I'm 1/4 way through my word count and I have 4 more days before it's due, so I think that's plenty of time to make it work.

One of the main problems is that I'm kind of not so much in to the topic as I thought I was at first. I tend to go with my gut on topics, and if something catches my interest and I think about it more than twice then that's what I go for. Typically that involves something with horror or gothic stories and movies, and that's what happened this time. We were talking about science in the nineteenth centuries and I kept thinking about Poe and his interest in science, and about Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft and it just seemed to me that so much of the horror genre was born out of this anxiety with science that existed in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and I wanted to explore how and why these authors used science as a theme in their horror novels.

I think one of my biggest problems is terminology. Even though they are so obviously connected it's hard to bring these three people into one 4000 word paper, mostly because of annoying differences in labels. I hate to have to categorize them all. Is Shelley a Romantic or a Gothic? Is Poe a Gothic? I don't think so, but everyone says he is. Lovecraft surely isn't Gothic, but he kind of is? Some people say they all wrote science fiction, while technically science fiction isn't supposed to be a genre until the 1920s. They certainly didn't write horror stories, right? Even though they are the predecessors to modern horror. They all come from very different social backgrounds and all have very different experiences with science, whatever category someone puts them in. I guess labels don't matter in the end. What matters is how I connect them and what conclusions I can draw from the connection. The connection I've chosen is the poles, meaning the arctic and antarctic poles. They all have moments of discovery in the poles. That's the key point I think.

I hope it comes together and I can make it work. Part of me really doesn't like the fact that my life consists of me agonizing about a paper, but at the same time nothing is more satisfying than finishing a paper and feeling proud of the work I've done. I'm going to try to keep doing this, and maybe, just maybe, someone someday will pay me for it.

If they don't pay me to write papers, maybe they'll pay me to read them. My sister started an editing boutique recently and I've joined up. We're a two lady operation now and hoping beyond hope that we can get some fishies to bite. The thing is, I've been reading/editing/grading papers now for the last 7 years. I started grading papers before I even knew how to write papers. And after all of these years of writing/reading/editing/grading papers I think I've finally grasped the elusive beauty of the academic essay. I don't mean to boast, but it's basically the ONLY thing I am good at.

What we're doing is offering a whole range of editing options, from Global and Substantive Edits (content and rhetoric) to Copy Edits (grammar and punctuation) to Proofreading (cleaning up typos and making the format pretty). Anything any student or writer could need. And we both have years of experience and we are both really really smart people.

So, I'm asking all of my 3 readers to help me get the word out about our editing boutique. It's called Arch Editing, and you can find us on Twitter and Facebook under that name, and here is the lovely link to our lovely website: http://archediting.wordpress.com/

abject

I love horror films, and I love talking about and writing about horror films. You would think this would desensitize me a little bit so that when faced with mildly gross or distasteful things in real life, I wouldn't be bothered as much. In fact, the opposite is true. I think it has sensitized me. I know the stuff on screen is fake, which makes stuff in real life that much more real and intense for me. I saw a dead duck today on the way to campus. Someone had tried to cover it up with a piece of cardboard, but with its little head peeking out, the cardboard only made it that much more abject. I don't like seeing dead animals like that. Then a block later I crossed the street and there was blood on the road. Blood. It must have been real blood. Probably from an animal getting run over. It made me sick. I almost couldn't go to campus. Now, this is ridiculous. That dead duck was not the first time I've seen a dead duck. I grew up on a ranch where we killed ducks (and chickens and geese and turkeys) all the time. I've seen blood; I've participated in slaughtering animals. So why was what I saw today so abject? Probably because it's out of a context of the farm. It's a dead duck and blood on the street in the city where I live. Definitely not expected. About an hour later some girls came to class late saying they had seen a girl get hit by a car, right where I saw the blood apparently. Freaky.

halloween zombie fresh

One of my favorite times of the year is Halloween, and this year I tried really hard to get into the spirit of it. I partly love the season because it gives me an excuse to do one of the things I love doing the most: watching horror films. I watch horror films regularly throughout the year, but this is the time when its easiest to get people to join me, especially if they too are in the Halloween spirit. I also put in the time, money and effort to make my own costume. I decided I would make a dress from a film I love, True Stories. If you go to 1:45 in the video below you'll see the big blue poofy dress.



I couldnt find blue tulle, so I chose red. 35 yards and a week worth of sewing, this is what I ended up with:


When people asked I told them I was a giant shower loofah. The costume was a big hit. A lot of people expected me to be a zombie, but instead of me being a zombie, my friend Brittany had the pleasure of me dressing her up as one. We bought a cheap prom dress at the thrift store, tore it to shreds and dirtied it up, then I made some wounds out of tissue, latex and marshmallows and made her into one disgustingly lovely prom queen zombie. Her costume was also a hit, and I am very proud of my work.





It was so much fun to make my friend a gory zombie mess that another friend and I started thinking it would be a really interesting project to make up as many people as I can as zombies and take photos of them. I'm hoping I can build up quite a collection.

I also wanted to add these wonderful things I found: some terrifying vintage Halloween costumes. The paper masks give me the creeps, especially this one:

Scary, no?

old pregnant hags, love and life

I am becoming an expert in zombie culture, and horror is my thing. I can work with horror. I can read it and I know a lot about it. Sometimes I forget that I know it so well and I feel like I don't have any particular knowledge with anything else, and sometimes I think "Great job, Jasie. You've become a horror expert. Now people will take you seriously"--all thought in quite a sarcastic and cutting tone. There's so much to learn and know and I feel like I'll never get it all. But that is why I have also been trained as an expert student. I don't have to know everything; I just have to be able to understand what other people say and know and be able to use their knowledge to support my theories.

I kind of like being an expert in horror films because now when I watch them they are so much more enjoyable. I've been trying to verse myself in all the antecedents of Shaun of the Dead because it is a film that takes cues not only from Romero's films, but also from movies like Evil Dead II, American Werewolf in London, Reanimator, and Dead Alive (aka Braindead). The Halloween season is my favorite because it makes watching all of these wonderful horror films feel a little more appropriate. I've watched Dead Alive twice in the last two days. It was done by Peter Jackson in 1992, and it makes me have an immense amount more respect for the guy who did Lord of the Rings (a series that I have to admit bored me to tears). The man is clearly a visionary.

Dead Alive is a film about a boy who lives with his mother and who falls in love with a girl and has difficulty cutting the apron strings, even after his mother has turned into a zombie, even after his zombie mother has tried to kill him and his girlfriend, even after his zombie mother has turned the entire town into zombies. The film is a melodramatic slap stick love story that becomes more and more believable as the two lovers become more and more drenched in blood and viscera. I kept thinking of Buster Keaton being attacked by zombies. There is one point when our hero, Lionel, is trying to run from a horde of zombies. Only, the tile floor is drenched in blood and he simply runs in place as he slips on the blood. This lasts for a good long minute and is hilarious.

I also kept thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin and his theory of the grotesque and the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin the medieval carnival was an opportunity for order to be restored to communities through the state sanctioned disorder of a carnival where social hierarchies would be undermined and people would be free to express their most carnal drives. After the big party people would go home feeling satisfied and regenerated and continue life without any thoughts of rebellion nor any bit of mistrust or dissatisfaction for the state. All would be back into its proper order. The grotesque played a big role in this because the carnival was about the body and physical desires and it was also about rebirth. Thefore, the lower parts of the body were emphasized: the loins, the stomach, the womb; sex, consumption and defecation, and menstration, birth and death. When we think of grotesque we usually think of one or more of these elements. Because so much of the essentials of life are focused in this area and carnival was about all of these elements we find that grotesque language and imagery is essential in the regenerative effects of carnival. For instance, Bakhtin points out that one of the images often seen were little carved figurines of an old, pregnant hag. She represented pregnant death; the opportunity for birth and life to come out of something old and dead; life not yet formed but promised.

Dead Alive is a grotesque carival. There is a strong emphasis on the oozing, bleeding, and consumptive parts of the body. Blood and viscera abound; zombies have sex (which in all of my zombie research I have never seen before) and and procreate, actually making a zombie baby. Then of course the zombies eat human flesh. The most grotesque and fascinating part of the film, however, is when Lionel's mother actually turns into Bakhtin's old, pregnant hag. She mutates into a 20 foot tall version of these carvings with sagging breasts and overaly stated tummy and thies. She is the grotesque mother goddess, and she literally consumes her son back into her grotesque womb. He has to break through her flesh and become in a very literal sense reborn, and it is in this rebirth that Lionel becomes a new man and can finally let go of his mother.

With the comedy, the grotesque images and the love story I found that the carnival in Dead Alive accomplished just what Bakhtin said it would. I felt good after the film, regenerated, happy and better for watching it. This is why I believe horror films are not evil and are worth looking in to and experiencing. Life is tied up in death. Life begins with blood and viscera and pain and often times it ends that way. I think its important to remember this and try to see what lessons we can learn from experiencing it again through the medium of art. We may just become better people.

one of my summer goals.

I emailed a friend I met at the Popular Culture Association conference who is the chair of the horror section and asked him what horror films he would suggest I should watch, given the fact that I feel less versed on horror than I should be. He responded with a pretty huge list. I'm going to highlight in red which ones I have actually seen, and see how I'm coming along on my road to horror scholarship awesomeness.

1900s: Watch Thomas Edison's 1910 version of Frankenstein.

1920s: John S. Robertson's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu; Carl Dreyer's Vampyr; Luis Bunuel's and Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher; Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

1930s: Jame's Whale's Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man (you must see all of these!); Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong; Tod Browning's Dracula and Freaks; Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Carl Freund's Mad Love; Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat.

1940s: All of the Val Lewton films, but especially Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim and Isle of the Dead (in that order, please!); Lewis Allen's The Uninvited; Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard; Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past.

1950s: Hitchcock's Vertigo; Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks's The Thing (from Another World); Hammer Studios' Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein; Gordon Douglas's Them!; Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man; Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter; Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (also called Curse of the Demon); also check out The Blob and The Fly; Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone television series; Mario Bava's Black Sabath.

1960s: Michael Powell's Peeping Tom; Hitchcock's Psycho; William Castle's The Tingler and Mr. Sardonicus; Roger Corman's House of Usher, The Haunted Palace, and Masque of the Red Death; Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls; Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby; Romero's Night of the Living Dead; the televsion series, The Outer Limits

1970s: Hammer Studios' Taste the Blood of Dracula; Polanski's The Tenant; Brian DePalma's Carrie and Sisters; Romero's Dawn of the Dead; Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now; Peter Wier's Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave; Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre; John Carpenter's Halloween; Ridley Scott's Alien; Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno; William Friedkin's The Exorcist; David Cronenberg's Rabid and Shivers; Larry Cohen's It's Alive, God Told Me To (aka Demon), and Q: The Winged Serpent; William Crain's Blacula and/or Bob Kelljan's Scream, Blacula, Scream!; Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (aka Twitch of the Death Nerve)

1980s: Larry Clark's Deathdream; Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell); Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn; Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys; Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist; David Cronenberg's Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly; Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street; Steve Miner's Friday the 13th, Part II; the televison series, Hammer House of Horror; Stuart Gordon's Dolls and Reanimator; Joe Dante's The Howling; John Carpenter's The Thing; Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead)

1990s: The Silence of the Lambs, The Ring, Se7en, Scream, Scary Movie I or III, The Blair Witch Project

2000s: The Others, Saw and Saw III, Eli Roth's Hostel and Cabin Fever, The Orphanage, Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Rejects, The Descent, Hansel and Gretel (Korea 2009), The Strangers, Tarantino's and Rodriguez's Grindhouse.

From the looks of it, I have a long ways to go. This weekend I watched Land of the Dead, John Carpenter's The Thing, The Exorcist, Candy Man, Hellraiser, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So it looks like I'm well on my way. Next up I want to watch Silence of the Lambs, Suspiria and Reanimator. I need to see Reanimator because I'm writing about Lovecraft's contribution to the zombie genre. This summer is definitely going to be the summer of horror films.