[a website for the Editor and Narrator of the Circo del Herrero series]
“In all, Douglas is sillier than its predecessor, and even in the moments that feel legitimately angry or smugly self-satisfied (the kicker joke about Louis C.K. is a real back-patter), the show’s comparative goofiness is a welcome direction for Gadsby.”
[Via]
We particularly liked the lecture bits. Putting that art degree to work!
“The redemption narrative she pushes in both of her novels is strikingly similar to the story at the core of Fifty Shades, which, despite its provocative trappings, is prudish at heart. In the movie adaptation of the best-selling series, the phrase “normal people” recurs over and over. Christian, who is traumatized by the most boilerplate childhood abuse, initially rejects the conventions of romantic relationships. He doesn’t “make love,” he tells Anastasia, he “fucks.” He doesn’t have girlfriends, just submissives who sleep in the room down the hall. From the first, Anastasia devises to fix him: she yells that the pair should talk like “normal people,” that they should share a bed “like normal people.” If sadomasochism is a running theme in Normal People, Conversations with Friends and Fifty Shades of Grey, it is not because any of these novels evince the slightest interest in the transformative potential of subversive sex but rather because sexual quirks are readily legible as a form of deviance in want of normalization. We know that Christian has recovered as soon as he proposes to Anastasia and thereby catapults into a respectable, bourgeois marriage. Ah, the domesticating comforts of missionary sex with the lights on! Ah, normalcy, wholesome as a baby tooth!
Yet even as Rooney’s fiction valorizes the normalcy of its heroines, it also positions them as possessing extraordinary powers. In Fifty Shades, Anastasia is the only one who can soften the tyrannical tycoon’s hardened heart. In Twilight, Edward, the brooding vampire of everyone’s dreams, tells Bella her blood is uniquely delicious. For her part, Marianne is the “smartest person in school”; what Connell is blessed to share with her is “something he could never have with anyone else.” And Marianne and Anastasia are not only irresistible to their lovers but also to everyone else they meet. Every male character in the universe of Fifty Shades is inexplicably fascinated by Anastasia: her male friend lusts after her, her employer’s son asks her on dates whenever he’s back in town, and her boss commits a #MeToo-adjacent transgression when he confesses his adoration a little too forcefully. Marianne, too, is universally admired, and Rooney is not shy about emphasizing how much everyone in Normal People yearns for her. Connell often reflects that Marianne “is very popular and a lot of other men want to sleep with her.” She “has a lot of other romantic options, as everyone knows.” At one point, Connell tells her, “guys are constantly falling in love with you.”
So is she normal, or isn’t she? The truth is, the book fulfills a ubiquitous romantic fantasy precisely because it can’t decide. Who wouldn’t like to succeed in romance without really trying? Who hasn’t sometimes wished that their normalcy were exceptional? And who among the overeducated leftist set has not dreamed of surpassing their opponents without compromising their egalitarian virtue? The commercial and critical success of Rooney’s books is no mystery, for they give the comforting impression that, whoever you are, you too could make out with a preternaturally beautiful vampire or get handcuffed to a torture machine by a magnate with washboard abs. You too could publish the story or seduce the entire school. You too are different—and that is what makes you the same!”
[Via]
“The end of David Fincher’s 1999 provocation “Fight Club” and the end of this week’s Season 3 finale of “Westworld” are essentially the same moment, one mapped onto the other like a Dolores pearl dropped into another host’s body. After a revolution deliberately premised on bringing anarchy to a well-ordered, antiseptic world, a man and a woman can only watch helplessly as the bombs detonate in high rises and chaos engulfs the city.
…
In an up-and-down season where “Westworld” never quite found itself — and seemed to stop looking — Engerraund Serac’s scheme was the one consistent bit of intrigue because his intentions always complicated his villainy. He did all the terrible, manipulative things that villains are supposed to do, right up to a torture scene with Dolores that recalls the ever-so-slow laser beam in “Goldfinger.” And yet there’s no mustache-twirling malice to any of his decisions, even when he’s taking a life. Serac and his brother saw the apocalypse coming and took the necessary steps to keep it from happening — or at least to keep it from happening as soon as it projected. If that meant eliminating free will and the occasional troublemaker, then so be it.
One of the paradoxes of the season is that Dolores intended to free the human world, not destroy it, but there may be no actual difference between the two. The thin shred of hope is that anomalies like Caleb will lead mankind to the anomalous destiny of survival, but those final shots are not optimistic. “Change is messy, difficult,” Dolores tells Caleb as they sidle through violent street clashes, but she never seems to be looking ahead to where that change might lead. That’s the privilege of being an immortal android: The planet doesn’t have to be inhabitable for her to inhabit it, so it costs her nothing to roll the dice for humanity. Serac may have been a snooty trillionaire, but he knew the stakes.”
[Via]
It was not until I took a class on Tolkien in the third year of my undergrad studies that I started thinking about this more seriously. My professor pointed out the distinct lack of female characters in The Hobbit, as well as the lack of a love story in it, and asked us what we thought. Aside from the implication that a woman would necessarily act as a love interest (an infuriating assumption that my professor didn’t intend, but that is another conversation) there was the subject of romance brought into the open, and its absence noted. I do wish that there had been more women in Tolkien’s work, not least because I love those that he did write as fully fledged characters. The lack of a love story, though, did not (and does not) bother me.
By that point I was past the age of pretending to be above such things as romance: I’d realised that I did like it, I liked reading about it, I was a little uncertain about myself in regards to it, and I wasn’t keen on the notion of sex. It was nice that other people liked it so much, but I wavered between thinking that I was too young for it (I was perhaps 21 at the time of the course) and thinking that I was too busy (I was, as mentioned, a third-year undergrad and one of those who was constantly overwhelmed by something or other). The fact that there was no love story in The Hobbit had frankly gone over my head.
Bilbo never seems inclined toward romance, certainly. From the beginning, he lives comfortably alone, welcoming visitors—the consummate host, and probably an excellent friend. Following his adventure, he settles down again to enjoy his newly increased wealth and later adopts Frodo, finding familial fulfilment in the role of cousin and guardian. There is none of the emptiness or brokenness that accompany stereotypes of single people, and though the neighbourhood thinks him eccentric, Bilbo remains confident and popular right up to his famous disappearance on his eleventy-first birthday.
[Via]
Joking aside. There’s a part of this novel, spoiler-alert I guess, where a man magics the unicorn into a girl-shape to protect her. She fucking hates it, is horrified by it, tears at her body and laments that being a girl feels like dying. The man assures her that she’s still a hot questing beast, so it will be okay. And after a while, it almost is. The girl-shape naturalizes. It lets her fall in love, which is nice. She almost believes that the girl-shape fits her, forgets it’s even a shape at all. Something goes flat behind her eyes. Then she’s a unicorn again and nobody ever sees her again, because she’s saved the unicorns and now is off in her woods (not?) dealing with the fact that she has feelings now.
Lots of people gave me, and continue to give me, my girl-shape. I am almost used to it now. Despite the soul-grinding banality of misplaced assumed girlhood, commonly associated pronouns and all, one acclimates to it after a lifetime of living under its banner. For clarity, until recently, I was a being with long blond hair. My eyes aren’t purple, because I am not an anime character, but outside of that, unicorn-as-girl and I had comparable forms. We were deemed beautiful, and valuable, for similar reasons—we were absent-minded half-feral bony little white girl wisps, a phenotypical categorization that Disney and other overlords have aesthetically lofted for rancid reasons for some time now. I was raised by a culture that designated me a good questing beast. Unicorn-as-girl and I have that in common. Perhaps because of this book, I have a thing about my gender perils and being hunted, which maybe explains some of the deer stuff in my novel, The Scrapegracers.
Girlness is tricky. The unicorn has a vexed relationship with her girlness, but she remains tethered to it because girlness allowed her to access and comprehend certain kinds of love and affection. Likewise, I am deeply fond of the word ‘lesbian’ because of the ways that word flags affinity, even and especially because of how people like me complicate its definition. I love women and associates. I am an associate. No boys allowed. It is a productively incomplete and partial word, but it also is the best one I’ve found to illustrate the sort of love I’m interested in seeking out. It gestures toward the sort of yearning I tend to undergo. Yearning’s the name of the game.
Thank you, Peter Beagle, for the yearning. This book is nothing if not a crash course in how to miss people you haven’t met yet and long for doomed affection, which is a lesbian pastime if ever there was one. This book is all about desperately reaching for alike strangers, because you have some marrow-deep understanding that your existence is tied with the existence of people like you. You’re not the only damn lesbian in rural Ohio. Actually, there are lots of them, and also there are places that aren’t Ohio. Maybe go to those places. You might have to undergo some narrative tomfoolery in pursuit of these other lesbians, but it is a worthy pursuit if ever there was one.
[Via]