Links of Import

Some things swirling around my brain right now:

 

1. The gothic on the internet.

– Creepypasta (what is it? How about some examples?)

– A book review tinted by grief (it’s gothic really because the site is)

– I never grow bored of funereal food rituals

– That gum you like is going to come back in style

 

2. Gothic in real life

– The Feminist Book Club meets on the 18th of next month in Glasgow to discuss all manner of gothic tomes (and films I think)

– I mean, park district in general providing the perfect gothic background to life

 

3. This assured, clear-eyed, excellent essay on issues of abuse and consent (hugely relevant to the online literary community at the moment, and to the wider world always, always)

 

4. Finishing Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – on the trap of being an upper-class spinster and expected to be an unpaid reliable type with no needs or private life of ones own and how one woman escapes this by becoming a witch, and, in the most politely English of ways, selling her soul to Satan. Really quite odd in its structure heavily weighted towards the background of becoming trapped by society’s expectations, slowly being ground down, then all at the end in a flurry Satan and awkward dance party black Sabbaths and gentle hikes through calm rural landscapes rather than action.

 

5. A month of watch ghost films (which I post about on Twitter). I am trying to be spooked, to see where that takes my imagination for the next project.

Of love, death, and squirming under the gaps

 

A little while ago, writer and noted Twilight aficionado Ashley Ford and I had a conversation for The Female Gaze on the topic of the first three Twilight movies and later, the end of the series with Breaking Dawn 1 and 2.  TL;DR links are here and here.

 

If you’d like to ask WHY were were tackling the bloodless vampire loreless loveswoon, not particularly a sentence I imagined myself writing – this is it.  It’s a question of wishing to be open to a predominantly female-build and powered romance that seems, from the outside, incredibly problematic and creepy. I’m much more of not-too-gory horror film fan (Hausu, The Shining, Don’t Look Now, Ringu, that sort of thing). And yet – Twilight. Is. Unsettling. Not for the ways it wants (perhaps?) Our chat was mostly light-hearted, but with a look at the racism, classism and internalised misogyny in the series – not to mention the incredible awkward sponginess of the whole thing, a romantic core that in my opinion, festers as much as it tries to perfume.

 

Here is a little taste:

 

HM: Oh, that’s another thing I wanted to discuss. It’s been bugging me – the vampire lore of these films. Okay, so vampires don’t have to be invited inside?

AF: Nope.

HM: They can just go in whenever they want?!  It makes them so much more of a threat. Annihilation at any time is possible.

AF: Girl, let me just say, as far as vampire lore goes…these books and movies give zero shits about history.

HM: TISK!

AF: Stephanie Meyer MAYBE did some research on vampire lore, but when it was time to put it in the stories she said, “LOL NO.”

HM: I think if you give up on the key one of boundaries then you give up a lot of the tension, which is weird for me, since it’s all about tension, abstinence, being held back.

AF: That’s what it should be! Can you imagine if Edward had actually had to win her over? If he’d sat in the tree outside her home asking to be let in?

HM: Ahahaha, no. It would be a very different movie.

 

BUT there was even more of Twilight to poke at with a psuedo-analytic claw! Ashley and I tackled Breaking Dawn 1 and 2 – and, well. The honeymoon scene and following were deemed worthy of note (and laughter) but after that I began to be mired in the freakish question of Reneesmee (I refuse to double check the spelling – and I am presuming some knowledge of the vampire-human cutie pie, but don’t feel pressure to read up if you don’t want too).

 

My main wish is should (when, definitely when, sadly) Reneesmee happens to return, it will be under the directorship of a female David Lynch with a glint in her eye and a nice diner stage set in Forks, Washington.

 

Read More Here and Here.

 

Have you seen any of the films? Read the books? All of them?

Why?

(I ask both in puzzlement and in kindness)