(no subject)
Coming home from work has it's many relaxing pleasures, including spending time to hoop, communing with my neighbors, playing fetch with my cat, and having sex with my husband.
I think something that easily tops all except one of those (for about five minutes, anyways), is getting on LJ and seeing the pixelated evidence of the most wonderful people on earth. (I'm not biased.)
When we all comment on one story, or post more than twice in a week, or even emerge suddenly out of a prosaic drought, I get to hear the voices of the friends I hold so dear who seem so far away. I pride myself in having chosen friends whose writing I look forward to when I come home at night. Even if I haven't been writing recently, I can lay claim to having monumentally talented friends. Mmm, praise the simple pleasures that not only fill my appetite for the written word but also boost my ego at the same time!
Now, on another topic...
As you all know, I spent the better part of a year, many many hours in a library, a few (hundred) tears, and over thirty pages of original writing comparing and contrasting magical realist and Gothic literature for an undergraduate thesis. These two genres feature the three thingsabout life that I like to indulge in (but try to avoid): the dramatic, the melancholy, and the preternatural.
The two genres have fundamental differences in tone. Historically, the Gothic was sensational, even trashy writing, represented by dime store-novels published in England during the late 18th century to titillate young women and cause delectable scandal. In many ways, it has taken a more academic turn with the advent of American Gothic-- well known writers that are dutifully canonized such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, and more modernly, Toni Morrison. (Nevermind the ever present Twilights and True Bloods that are technically in the genre, and continue the tradition of catering to the lowest common denominator of literary entertainment. I'm sure someone like me will study those too in a century or so.)
The stories are eerie and fantastic. They relish the uncanny, featuring spirits and lore, women with serpentine curls, effeminate, backwards men, ghosts and horror and deep cracks in the veneer of society. The Gothic is about the liminal--the space between that terrifies and fascinates humans. It tells a different history than the linear, comfortable, progressive view we as society like to take. The histories in Gothic lit fold in upon themselves in endless cycles, often cruel, sometimes menacing, always mocking.
These cycles are where I found the intersection between magical realist and Gothic. Whereas the Gothic is more meant to be disbelieved, magical realism is a genre where supernatural stories are told in a most matter-of-fact tone, such that the reader is never entirely sure where the supernatural begins and the earthly ends (or if there is a separation at all). The same rules apply as I mentioned above--the liminality, the cracks, the voids of space where boundaries begin to disappear and we are challenged, even dared, to be comfortable with ideas that cannot be named, feelings that cannot be defined, occurrences that defy explanation by either the religious or the scientific. But where Gothic incites fear, magical realism invites acceptance. Yes, history is only an everlasting repetition of the bizarre occurrences we've already seen, but there is no malice in it. It is what it is, and it's rather beautiful, actually.
There is years more I could explain about these two subjects. They are near and dear to my core because they molded my view of history; of how history is fluid and subject to the whims of capricious memory. What kept most enthralled as I read were the circles, cycles, and spirals that peered around and around the pages of my books and reverberated in my mind as I slept.
It is mere coincidence, I'm sure, that the one art I have ever pursued with passion, the one art I have allowed to define and create my mind and body, is embodied in a circular instrument. Most of the time, I would feel ridiculous to imagine the symbols from my undergraduate literary obsession as some mystical prophesy.
But this week, while reading a particularly magical novel, after a wonderfully uncanny dream, the day after spending two hours in the Fire Groove studio spinning and cycling and hooping and circling and having a blast in Latin heels combining my previous self with my new...
mystical prophecies seem just about right.
I think something that easily tops all except one of those (for about five minutes, anyways), is getting on LJ and seeing the pixelated evidence of the most wonderful people on earth. (I'm not biased.)
When we all comment on one story, or post more than twice in a week, or even emerge suddenly out of a prosaic drought, I get to hear the voices of the friends I hold so dear who seem so far away. I pride myself in having chosen friends whose writing I look forward to when I come home at night. Even if I haven't been writing recently, I can lay claim to having monumentally talented friends. Mmm, praise the simple pleasures that not only fill my appetite for the written word but also boost my ego at the same time!
Now, on another topic...
As you all know, I spent the better part of a year, many many hours in a library, a few (hundred) tears, and over thirty pages of original writing comparing and contrasting magical realist and Gothic literature for an undergraduate thesis. These two genres feature the three thingsabout life that I like to indulge in (but try to avoid): the dramatic, the melancholy, and the preternatural.
The two genres have fundamental differences in tone. Historically, the Gothic was sensational, even trashy writing, represented by dime store-novels published in England during the late 18th century to titillate young women and cause delectable scandal. In many ways, it has taken a more academic turn with the advent of American Gothic-- well known writers that are dutifully canonized such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, and more modernly, Toni Morrison. (Nevermind the ever present Twilights and True Bloods that are technically in the genre, and continue the tradition of catering to the lowest common denominator of literary entertainment. I'm sure someone like me will study those too in a century or so.)
The stories are eerie and fantastic. They relish the uncanny, featuring spirits and lore, women with serpentine curls, effeminate, backwards men, ghosts and horror and deep cracks in the veneer of society. The Gothic is about the liminal--the space between that terrifies and fascinates humans. It tells a different history than the linear, comfortable, progressive view we as society like to take. The histories in Gothic lit fold in upon themselves in endless cycles, often cruel, sometimes menacing, always mocking.
These cycles are where I found the intersection between magical realist and Gothic. Whereas the Gothic is more meant to be disbelieved, magical realism is a genre where supernatural stories are told in a most matter-of-fact tone, such that the reader is never entirely sure where the supernatural begins and the earthly ends (or if there is a separation at all). The same rules apply as I mentioned above--the liminality, the cracks, the voids of space where boundaries begin to disappear and we are challenged, even dared, to be comfortable with ideas that cannot be named, feelings that cannot be defined, occurrences that defy explanation by either the religious or the scientific. But where Gothic incites fear, magical realism invites acceptance. Yes, history is only an everlasting repetition of the bizarre occurrences we've already seen, but there is no malice in it. It is what it is, and it's rather beautiful, actually.
There is years more I could explain about these two subjects. They are near and dear to my core because they molded my view of history; of how history is fluid and subject to the whims of capricious memory. What kept most enthralled as I read were the circles, cycles, and spirals that peered around and around the pages of my books and reverberated in my mind as I slept.
It is mere coincidence, I'm sure, that the one art I have ever pursued with passion, the one art I have allowed to define and create my mind and body, is embodied in a circular instrument. Most of the time, I would feel ridiculous to imagine the symbols from my undergraduate literary obsession as some mystical prophesy.
But this week, while reading a particularly magical novel, after a wonderfully uncanny dream, the day after spending two hours in the Fire Groove studio spinning and cycling and hooping and circling and having a blast in Latin heels combining my previous self with my new...
mystical prophecies seem just about right.