Month: December 2017

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: The Case Against Reading Everything

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Some real talk: most writing isn’t worth consuming. That includes cereal boxes and New York Times wedding announcements. More real talk: most people urging you to read widely probably have a hard time ranging outside their comfort zones. There’s no doubt that, in the political realm, we need more connection with those we disagree with. But for the most part, “read widely” belongs to a class of expression that’s good to be heard saying (as in: we need “more dialogue” or we need “to have a national conversation about sheet cake”). In my experience, only a minority of writers like to chase their Leslie Jamison with some Conrad Black, or their Yvor Winters with some Roxane Gay. Many can barely metabolize a Stephen Marche tweet without declaring a stomach ache, and Marche is a reasonable guy who can write a good sentence.

The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s language, about steeping yourself in someone else’s style until your consciousness changes colour. It’s Tolkien phases and Plath crushes. It’s going embarrassingly, unfashionably all in. (And, eventually, all out.)

…

The call to “read widely” is a failure to make judgments. It disperses our attention across an ever-increasing black hole of mostly undeserving books. Whatever else you do, you should not be reading the many, many new releases of middling poetry and fiction that will be vying for your attention over the next year or so out of some obligation to submit your ear to a variety of voices. Leave that to the editors of Canada’s few newspaper book sections, which often resemble arm’s-length marketing departments for publishers. Leave that to the dubious figure of the “arts journalist.”

 

[Via]

‘How post-horror movies are taking over cinema’

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“I wanted to engage with the archetypes and iconography of ghost films and haunted house movies, without ever crossing over into actually being a horror film,” says writer-director David Lowery, who made A Ghost Story with the proceeds of his previous movie, a remake of Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. “Look at any horror film and you can trace it back to a particular social or personal anxiety, and this film is no different in that regard: I was having a big-picture existential crisis about my place in the universe, and at the same time I was having a very personal conflict with my wife about where we were going to move to. And wrapped up in all of that was my longstanding desire to make a movie with a guy in a sheet.”

[Via]

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: A Ghost Story film

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

A house is haunted. A ghost is haunted by his past. A man haunts himself.

So much was done with such a small budget. It’s poignant and laughable simultaneously. It also interweaves sheet lore and loop theory very well. Highly recommended for creativity and message. This is the kind of movie David Lowery should be making.

A Ghost Story is difficult to categorise: eerily beautiful, dreamily melancholic, earnestly sincere and patience-testingly slow (I watched it sitting next to a man who could barely contain his exasperated harrumphs). The film ranks low for scares – it’s more likely to keep you up at night fretting about the meaning of life than to make you terrified of a spirit under the bed. A recent article in this paper included it in cinema’s latest big thing: post-horror.

 

BookTuber Tuesday – Jenna Marbles is producing a web series of “James Patterson’s” Maximum Ride

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

For someone who doesn’t want to be controlled by the corporate world and protect her freedom, she’s participating in corporate publishing and stifling honest writers — promoting a book that James Patterson didn’t even write.  We feel like she can do better.

For more of our opinion on this, see this essay. 

‘The closer your category is to the shady, vague “animal,” the less you “matter.”’

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‘Caribbean scholar and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter notes that our current conception of the human/humanity is a Eurocentric invention. Although there have been countless ways of expressing human activity throughout history, the model we take for humankind is the one devised by colonial Western Europe. On this model, there is the human (white, Western male with the ideal human counterpart: the white, Western female) and “its human Others—that is, Indians, Negroes, Natives [and, I would add, Jews and Muslims].”

What separates the “human Others” from the Ideal Human and what distinguishes the human Others from each other is their ranking on the human–animal scale. In chapter 4, I pointed out that I don’t think it’s apparent to most of us that the notions of “human” and “animal” are racially constituted. The racial hierarchy tracks not just a color descent but also a species descent. At the top of the hierarchy sits the white male human and at the bottom sits the shady and necessarily opposite figure of “the animal.” These two poles signify two contrary moral statuses—the closer your category is to the white male human, the more you “matter.” The closer your category is to the shady, vague “animal,” the less you “matter.”

Whether or not we explicitly use this language or instead use code words that coincide with it, such as “subpersons,” “nonhumans,” “inhuman,” and so on, doesn’t matter. What is relevant here is that the organizing principle for racial logic lies in the human–animal divide, wherein the human and the animal are understood to be moral opposites.

That means that what gives rise to these racial categories and racial thinking is a particular understanding of what a human being is. A human being is fundamentally opposite to animals (with “animals” here being a gross reduction of a vast plurality of species, of course). With these poles set in place—the former as extreme superiority and the latter as extreme inferiority—those who authored this system placed themselves in the former position and from there divided humanity along a spectrum that went all the way “down” to “the animal.”

This model of the human is still in use today.

So, in black reappropriation movements, activists effectively begin to disrupt the modern, imperialistic understanding of humanity. But because they leave the foundation untouched, the dismantling can never be complete. We need to go beyond the racial categories and subvert their anchor: the human–animal divide.

In short, then, what condemns us to our inferior status, even before we can speak or act is not merely our racial category but that our racial category is marked the most by animality. Its proximity to animality signals inferiority. We certainly don’t want to affirm the current conception of humanity by trying to distance ourselves from animality. And we certainly don’t want to pretend these terms don’t exist. The best strategy is to reclaim in order to disrupt, and then to de-link from the narrative altogether.’

Aphro-Ism : Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. Lantern Books, 2017.