Interesting Links: Week 2
It has technically been more than a week since I posted the last instalment of Interesting Links. But this just means there are more rabbit holes to fall into for you!
I promise I didn’t have a Twilight phase.
The idea of finding out where the concept of vampires comes from and who they are just gives me flashbacks of watching a constipated-looking Kristen Stewart awkwardly look for vampires on a search engine. The dark room. The old computer. The bad images and the even worse transition effects. All leading upto my favourite (almost camp) scene from the first movie:
Edward (while his skin glows like a literal disco ball): This is the skin of a killer, Bella.
But anyway, keeping with the Halloween spirit this week, here’s a better deep-dive into the genealogy of vampires. I think there’s only one mention of the movie in the article, thankfully.
Silvia Garcia-Moreno on Dracula’s Depictions and Descendants by Silvia Garcia-Moreno
Dracula uniquely positions disease in a new light. No longer is a vampire’s victim fated to die; instead they are doomed to be resurrected and infect others, festering a never-ending cycle of disease and breeding a vampire army. Dracula, after all, hopes to “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.” However, unlike zombies, who also transmit their infections via bites, Stoker’s vampires are perhaps even more dangerous because they retain those seductive qualities that their distant ancestor, Count Ruthven, typified: they are sexually attractive.
The only horror movies I hate are the ones with ghosts.
If you know me you also know that I cannot sit through a single horror movie. I do not like jump scares. I detest ghosts, exorcisms, banging doors, and creaking floorboards. If a family moves into a new house and thinks something strange is afoot, they should leave. IMMEDIATELY. And do not even get me started on the usage of onomatopoeia to create atmosphere. However, creepy, disturbing movies are right up my ally. Keep the ghosts far away and give me all the grotesque gore possible. Body horror is a subgenre of horror movies that basically relies on depictions of violations of the human body to incite disgust. Vaginas with teeth, strange body parts, blood pooling under bodies, etc., that I can watch. Sometimes they successfully manage to give me the heebiejeebies, sometimes the effects are not well done at and are funnier than scary. But, regardless, they are always entertaining to watch.
The 20 Best Body Horror Movies, from ‘Crimes of the Future’ to ‘Altered States’ by Christian Zilko
The 21st century has allowed for a new group of elite genre filmmakers to emerge, and body horror films are now a regular presence at elite film festivals around the world. In addition to the opportunities for social commentary that they provide, body horror films also offer a massive canvas for practical effects artists to show off their depraved skills.
The body horror genre has proven to be a versatile medium for some of cinema’s most creative minds, with films ranging from the utterly grotesque to the subtle and cerebral. And sometimes, of course, movies can be both things at once. From Cronenberg and Carpenter to Julia Ducournau, we’ve rounded up 20 of our favorite additions to one of horror’s grossest subgenres. If you’re looking to watch something profoundly unsettling but don’t feel like sitting through another slasher flick or creature feature, look no further than the body horror canon.
Supposedly, my uterus occasionally likes to wander off the beaten path.
You already know my opinion on the term ‘unhinged’ when used for women. If you don’t, go read the blog! But if you read a little deeper into the use of the term hysteria, you uncover centuries of discrimination against women. When I read that women were not allowed to travel on the first trains because their uteruses would fly, I was shocked. Turns out women’s uteruses are meant to be quite the travel bugs. For centuries they have had wanderlust! Instagram pictures featuring people posed on stunning cliffs should have been starring uteruses all along!
Hysteria, Witches, and The Wandering Uterus: A Brief History by Terri Kapsalis
A good deal of the election’s fake news had been dependent on the power of a nearly 4,000-year-old fictional diagnosis. Both news and medical diagnosis masqueraded as truth, but they were far from it. How to make sense of this fake diagnosis in relation to the idea that illness can be born from our guts and hearts and minds? Is there anything truer? And yet, psychosomatic illness continues to be deemed an illegitimate fiction.
We know that the social toxins of living in a racist, misogynist, homophobic, and otherwise economically unjust society can literally make us sick, and that sickness is no less real than one brought on by polluted air or water. In actuality, both social and environmental toxins are inextricably intertwined as the very people subject to systemic social toxins (oppression, poverty) are usually the same folks impacted by the most extreme environmental toxins. And the people who point fingers and label others “hysterical” are the ones least directly impacted by said toxins.
Welcome to a random Monday afternoon in my life!
This Monday started out completely innocent. I was reading a few articles about the New York Times Bestseller List, and how difficult it is to understand how the list is determined week after week. The real confusion kicks in when you realise that Rupi Kaur’s book of poetry Milk and Honey was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 77 weeks. 77 weeks! Let that sink in.
I’m not going to dump on her poetry. I am determined to not be that petty about anything on this planet. But on that Monday one thing led to another and before long I was watching this video. And then I spent my entire afternoon watching videos by Film Cooper. They are addictive and entertaining, and that’s all you really need to know about them. But the comparison between Rupi Kaur and Andrew Tate was so ridiculous that I started reading articles about both, that’s when I found something really interesting.
Andrew Tate is Haunting YouTube by Kaitlyn Tiffany
In particular, users of YouTube’s new-ish short-form video service (obviously built to compete with TikTok) say they haven’t been able to get away from Tate. Although YouTube doesn’t allow users to repost old videos from Tate’s banned channel, people are free to share clips of him from other sources. On Reddit, you can scroll through many versions of the same question: “Is there any way to stop seeing any Andrew Tate content?” You might find some commiseration (“every other clip is one from this moron”), but you won’t find many satisfying answers. Many of the people posting about Tate’s ability to lurk in the YouTube Shorts feed claim they are not doing anything that would indicate they are interested in seeing him. (“Most of the things I watch on YouTube are related to music production, digital painting, some fashion history, asmr and light content to relax,” one Reddit commenter wrote, perplexed.) Others said they are giving explicit feedback that seems to be ignored: “I press ‘do not recommend’ every time I get his content recommended but nothing works. Do I just need to stay off social media until he dies?”
What kind of reader am I really?
Over the years I have swung between feeling guilty for enjoying the commercial fiction like mysteries and romances, and have been overly protective over these books that I love. I have reached the conclusion that… who really cares? Read the books you love. Read the books that bring you pleasure. As long as you’re reading, that’s all that matters! People can have their opinions. (I mean I will still turn my nose at someone reading a Colleen Hoover book on the tube, but, hey, I have my reasons for that.) But you do you my fellow reader. I don’t think its inherently bad or somehow ‘less’ to read a book just for the sake of enjoying it!
Recently I read two articles about the kind of readers that exist as well as the difference between good taste and bad taste when it comes to literature. I can go on and on about the difference between high art and low art, but I am going to save that for another blog, for the sake of my sanity and yours.
On the Bad Binary of “Good” and “Bad” Literature by Josh Cook
Sometimes I do want to tell a reader that I think this book is better for what they want than that book. But declarations of quality, declaring this book “good” and that book “bad” is a fundamental aspect of weaponized good taste, one that brings together assumed authority and those incorrect assumptions of “standard” human experiences. Rather than thinking in terms of “good” and “bad,” I think about books in terms of “success” and “failure.” Does this book achieve the goals I think the author set for it? Does it meet my personal needs? Is it likely to meet the needs of this reader at this moment? What impact could it have on the social, cultural, and literary context in which it exists?
When I answer those questions, I do so assuming different readers might answer them differently. “Successful” and “failed” are still value statements. I’m still using my expertise in books to assess the quality of books, but “quality” rooted in specific contexts that acknowledges subjectivity is significantly different from a “quality” rooted in an assumption of universal quality. The former rests on acts of influence, while the latter relies on power and authority.
What is common reader? by Henry Oliver
Literature can be broad. The more efforts literary people make to exclude themselves from the world of the common reader, or the more they deny that the common reader exists, nebulous a group though it may be, the more they can expect to be found irrelevant.
Perhaps the real issue is that the common reader today is more likely to read non-fiction, serious non-academic books by experts or professional writers. As Woolf observed, many of these readers will be passing the time (and so what?) but most of them will be trying to learn, to find ways of working or living differently. The room for handing literary culture along the generations is thus somewhat smaller in relative, if not absolute, terms. This is fully within the common reader tradition — think of all those histories, biographies, theologies, books of essays and so on. But the production and analysis of such books is increasingly the job of non-literature specialists.
That’s it for this week. I think there’s a little something for everyone in this list and I hope that you enjoy frolicking through these rabbit holes just as much as I did! Until next time!