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pochiperpe90 · 4 years

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Trust your instinct. Interview with Luca Marinelli

“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes” wrote Brecht. Let alone superheroes. The vices and problems of the characters, however, are extraordinarily human.

There are people enthusiastic about the film and others who have seen it and have told me: "You know, it's not my genre, actually I wouldn't have gone to see it, but I would have been wrong because it's special, it thrilled me". Because it's about something real. There is the suburban boy who lives for his own sake, who only thinks about how to turn the day, then the superpowers arrive and he wonders what to do, and it’s like if the question was addressed to the public. After will comes the love, that will change him, will makes him go further. Love is the greatest superpower. I don't know, maybe I’m too romantic but the superpower of love is a very strong one, that we all own and that changes the movie as well.

Is Lo Zingaro one of the many young people "sick" of social networks?

He uses the modern roads to arrive at what for him can be the success, to be seen by anyone, so he uses the channels of social networks. As a kid he had tried to become someone and they closed the door in his face, so now that the world is moving in this direction he wants respect, he wants his greatness recognized. In my opinion he has never really been seen, maybe this is the problem.

Is this why he loves to perform?

The character has always been like that and that's the thing that drove me crazy: his histrionic side. It was also for this reason that when I went to the auditions I greatly exalted this theatrical part of lo Zingaro, but Gabriele planted my feet on the ground saying to always remember his paranoia, his strong pain, his great and real need. Then we gradually looked for these things, to enhance his desire to be recognized by everyone on the street.

Cesare from Don’t Be Bad and Lo Zingaro: two outcasts, two fragile characters who harbor anger.

I loved them both but I find it hard to put them side by side, but the fact that there is this suburbs background is certainly the common starting point of the two. And I like how Gabriele wanted to respect this place and its inhabitants, without ever labeling, without representing Tor Bella Monaca as the den of pirates, the place of bad guys.

Ostia for Cesare represented a prison from which to escape, does Lo Zingaro want to escape from Tor Bella Monaca as well?

There is this desire to go out, it’s true, to succeed in something, to escape, to at least try to escape. The watershed of the suburbs is different, if one never grow up there, they will never understand it. It’s a question of sensitivity. Cesare chooses one thing or the other, he sees his friend taking a path but doesn’t believe it completely, perhaps because he finds the other much more concrete. There is a basic desperation there, there is the world that crumbles under his feet little by little, here instead there is something different: it’s the nature of lo Zingaro, the nature of wanting to be, he is there. It must be. Lo Zingaro wants to escape from there, but even if he had been born in the Parioli it would have been the same.

For his androgynous look, Lo Zingaro resemble David Bowie. When building a character, do you start from an external characterization?

As for me, when I approach the character I try to mimesis with the text, with the director's ideas, with my visions. This changes everything, from the physical to the attitude. The character becomes a robe. When you put on the character's clothes, you are him, then you take them off and really slowly you separate yourself from him, then he comes back the next day when you get dressed, and maybe you just keep him as a memory in your head in the evening, at home, when you want to do something with it.

How important is instinct instead?

Fundamental. Many times things have happened, that I don't know how to explain. You have to trust your instincts, always. It’s a bit of a form of self-respect. Many times when preparing a character you don't have to think about it too much. You need to think about it first, then you have to make a blank page, because what you need is permeated inside.

“Una parola detta piano basta già ed io non vedo più la realtà” (A word said slowly is already enough and I no longer see reality), reads the lyrics of “Un’emozione da poco”, the song you sing in the movie.

We were looking for a song that could catch the eye of lo Zingaro during his adolescence. And if you go to re-watch Anna Oxa's performance at Sanremo, her first festival at the age of sixteen, here, putting myself in the role of the character, but also in mine, I thought: "Wow! Look at that woman. Look at that force." From this comes the fact that this is his song, which it’s also his cell phone’s ringtone. What I also like is that all his explosive strength comes from our wonderful singers of those years: Loredana Bertè, Nada, Gianna Nannini and Anna Oxa. And it's nice that it comes from there: it‘s the strength of women.

I remember your featuring in a song by the hip-hop’s crew “Jagermasterz”. Do you also have a passion for music?

A friend, Dj Demis, asked me about it many years ago, and I enjoyed it a lot. I've always had a passion for rock music, when we were kids we had a band, we played funky: we covered Red Hot Chili Peppers, but mostly our songs, good times.

Did you imitate Anthony Kiedis?

I was a little more in tune (laughs). No, I actually played the guitar. I was the second guitar of the group. I still keep playing for me, though. Every now and then I tell some friends to get together and make a small group, but it's just moments where we get together and play some covers. An artist with a folk guitar is something that drives me crazy, I really like everything acoustic.

I know you used to watch a lot of movies with your grandmother as a kid.

With my grandmother I saw all the great classics of our past, but as a kid one of the first films I saw alone was “The Silence of the Lambs”: I found this videotape and I watched it, my parents thought I was playing and instead … But I wasn't scared, I saw the fun of those people and I liked that. That's what I find in my work right now. I feel like I could make a movie for a year, because waking up in the morning and knowing I can go to the set is a great luck, it’s never a burden to me.

Now that the journey of Don’t be Bad is over, how do you remember the journey with the Caligari’s band?

For me it's not finished, tomorrow I will have to meet some guys in Rebibbia because there will be a screening of the film. I still feel it intensely. We are still a strong group, I still like what Don't be Bad means. The Caligari’s band is always there, it's in the heart.

Don't you have the impression that with his death, Caligari was "canonized"?

It’s sad. A person who was only allowed to make three films and now people cry it a miracle, when he could have made many more. This is the greatest sin. But I say “always and in any case, cheers to Claudio!”. I have never lived an experience like this: a person who is dying and wants to give something to others. Seeing a person who isn’t afraid in this way, who wants to give but without knowing what he will receive back. Indeed, knowing how many doors in the face he had received. A crazy life lesson. In the end, it’s an attitude that does not surprise me, it gives me a little stomach ache but that's okay. The film remains, this is the important thing, what a whole crew carries in their hearts remains, Claudio and the Caligari’s band remain.

For sentimental reasons you have lived in Berlin for years. How is our cinema perceived from abroad?

We are always a great cinema. All our movies that were in Cannes last year are now in theaters in Germany, in short, we are there, we are always there. I am really convinced that last year some great Italian films were released, not many, not distributed at their best, but all films that make me proud. The thing I like least about our cinema is the lack of courage of the producers, if I think that Don’t be Bad risked not being realized, I get goosebumps: a film that took us to Los Angeles risked not being made. And the same story goes for They Call Me Jeeg. The truth is that only comfortable things are done.

Money, glory, passion, desire to recover from shyness: Luca Marinelli for what reason is acting?

It seems a simple question, but it’s not. Passion in the end means nothing. I would tell you out of necessity, but maybe that doesn't mean anything either. So I'd tell you why I like it so much. Just like the Roman say: me piace (I like it). I think I'm lucky to have chosen what I love to do in life, and to be able to do it. Because I can't imagine being able to do anything else. Of course, if in five years I can't do it anymore, I will have to invent something.

What?

I don’t know. Before this I thought I was an archaeologist, unfortunately with little success. I was making a mess, I even got the lesson times wrong.

minima&moralia

Just wanted to translate this old interview for the non-italian’s fans ^^ (sorry for my English)

#Luca Marinelli #interview #Don't be bad #they call me jeeg #english #english translation

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“One of the seductions of horn logic was its power to make short work of complex and contested narratives. When Thersites reduces the Trojan War to "All the argument is a whore and a cuckold" (Troilus and Cressida 2.3.72), he slyly mocks the spectators who flocked to play after play about precisely that argument. On the street and at the theater doors, ballads aired news of local and homely adulteries, while the stage offered plays about sexual betrayal in elevations low (Johan the Husband) to middling (Arden of Feversham) to lofty (King Lear), many of them preceded by a clown's homing gibes at the audience and capped with bawdy jigs about cuckoldry.

If sated playgoers decided to pick up an Arthurian romance or a volume of English history, they would find more monitory examples of infidelity, male and female. In the Arthurian legends and in chronicles by Speed and Holinshed, "the king's adultery is an immediately familiar emblem for the defilement of the purity of the state and the abdication of responsible government." In accounts of Edward II's homing and murder, Henry VIII's fatal accusations against his queens, or the explosive rumor of Lord Darnley's horning and murder by Mary Stuart, chroniclers and popular authors warned princes to beware the love of women.

As Phyllis Rackin observes, "the patrilineal genealogy" that organized both history and society "required the repression of women, and of heteroerotic passion as well, because the invisible, putative connection between fathers and sons that formed the basis of patriarchal authority was-as Shakespeare's cuckold jokes endlessly insist-always dubious, always vulnerable to subversion by an adulterous wife." Not even religion was free of the horn. During Queen Mary's reign, Catholics bewhored English nuns who had converted to Protestantism under Edward and married. In taking the veil, they had espoused themselves to Christ; wouldn't he be "stirred up to wrathe and indignation" like any other cuckold?

Pageant drama, too, had its share of horn jokes. In the "N-Town" Joseph's Doubt, spectators have a good laugh at the expense of Joseph, who moans that he'll be ridiculed back in Bethlehem as an "old cokwold" whose "howe is bent." When Mary explains that the Holy Spirit impregnated her, he angrily cuts her short: "It was sum boy began [th]is game." It takes a miracle for him to believe her: a cherry tree bows down to give Mary its fruit, finally satisfying him that he is not horned but holy. Like Joseph, many critics who have considered early modern cuckoldry suspect it was "sum boy began this game" and that the prime mover behind the age's obsession was intense male concern about "the other man."

Relying on analyses of property transfer in marriage derived from the work of Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss (theories that Gayle Rubin drew on in "The Traffic in Women"), critics as diverse as Coppelia Kahn, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgiwick forward the proposition that cuckoldry narratives focus chielfy on the flow of homoerotic and political power "between men," in Sedgwick's famous phrase. Douglas Bruster asserts that only the male lover, never the wife, is "the one who cuckolds" and that women are "helpless counters" in a transfer between males.

While the cuckoldry paradigm is certainly about male-male economies of desire, it seems futile to deny that it is also about female pleasure and will. In some tales the "helpless counter" is not the wife at all but the lover, who is hidden, coached, and directed by the wife. Many tales name the wife as "the one who cuckolds," while the husband is the object. One lame jest puns on this relationship: Q. Why doth the man weare the hornes whereas the woman doth make them? A. Because the man is the head. More often than not, the merry books feature women who act on their desires for revenge, love, or sexual satisfaction using the weapons of allies, wit, daring, and timing.

A surprising number of tales direct no criticism at the wife or lover but instead upbraid the husband and his faults: impotence, jealousy, brutality. Finally, some comic narratives give prominent play to a husband's lechery as the cause of his wife's infidelity or her threat to give him horns. The author of Jane Anger, her Protection for Women (1589) certainly thought her readers would enjoy hearing why skirt chasers so often became cuckolds: "some of them will follow the smocke as Tom Bull will runne after a town Cow. But, lest they should running slip and breake their pates, the Gods, provident of their welfare, set a paire of tooters on their foreheads, to keepe it from the ground."

To explain all such narratives by recourse to the theory that women are counters passed from male to male is to accept a monolithic, one-sex model of drama and social power. This is unwarranted in light of the abundant popular materials that dwell on women's abilities to manipulate and subvert, if only in fantasy, a sexual marketplace that urged them to be pliant commodities. Too many stories show the commodity striking back, besting husbands described as deserving cuckolds or proving them hypocrites. More important, the favored genres of the horn-ballad, jig, novella, and jest-often portray women as storytellers and performers, which is not so surprising given that real women engaged in precisely these forms of popular mimesis.

Why would women enjoy these tales? First, many tales assert that women possess a satiric weapon in a world that continually denies them agency and wit. They offer harsh judgment fitting to the harsh conditions of most women's lives, inviting readers to mock abusive, alcoholic, or philandering husbands, all of which were in ample supply. Second, within the jesting literature, poverty and beatings at home are cited as motives behind many extramarital encounters. The narrator in Cornu-Copiae (1612) reasons that, by taking lovers, women may be looking for something more than sexual pleasure:

Sometimes the golden prey doth make the theife, And women yeeld for further maintenance: Sometimes short commons makes them seeke reliefe: And stubborn usage and sterne countenance, Perforce constraine a woman now and than To seeke for comfort of a kinder man; And sometimes want of heartes, when hands are married, Is one great cause, that many have miscarried. It is remarkable how often such passages occur in texts that are otherwise crudely antifeminist. (Cornu-Copiae goes on to show a man trapped into marriage, with her family's collusion, by a woman impregnated by another man.)

Other jests and ballads target hard-handed husbands who drink to excess. Narratives about tavern-haunting, foul-mouthed husbands sometimes show a bias toward the female reader. These may function as ripostes to the more misogynist specimens of the gossips' literature, in which drunken shrews plot how to beat and cuckold their husbands. Pasquils Palinodia's "Muse of Sack" warns men that a husband's brutality can drive a wife to adultery:

And blame her not for shee is not of steele, Nor made of iron, brasse, or such hard mettle, Neither so senseless that she cannot feele But she is us'd as tinker doe his kettle .... Then straight he calls her half a dozen whores, And to the Taverne gets him out of doores .... Then druncke, at midnight, home the knave doth creepe, And beats his wife, and spues, and falls asleep. Shall a vast unthrift with a false pretence Wrong his poore wife, and be exempt from blame? And shall a woman, who hath a just offence And forc'd by dogged usage to her shame, If she another friend doth entertaine, To give her some content, and ease her paine, Shall she be censur'd with disgraceful speeches, And he stand deere because he wares the breeches?

The answer goes without saying-she'll be censured, and he'll" stand cleere"-but at least the text identifies and questions the double standard, an example of the counterhegemonic articulation that is sometimes audible in popular texts. Such a passage does not offer up the ventriloquized voice of a female subject. Rather, it is a beckoning slot in discourse, an invitation to debate that may be taken up by multiple voices, including women's. Frances Dolan argues that popular representations of cuckoldry "constitute the wife as a subject only to the extent that they qualify [the] husband's claim to subject status by silencing and immobilizing him and casting doubt on his authority and potency."”

- Pamela Allen Brown, “Between Women, or All Is Fair at Horn Fair.” in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England

#sexuality #history #renaissance #tudor #elizabethan #jacobean #cw: domestic violence #pamela allen brown #better a shrew than a sheep

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theoutcastrogue · 4 years

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Caravaggio’s “The Cardsharps” and “The Fortune Teller”

[abridged excerpt from Keith Christiansen, A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990)]

Fig. 1. Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (c. 1594). Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Caravaggio (1571—1610) had arrived in Rome from his native Lombardy sometime after May 1592, unknown and without a single major picture to his credit. One rumor had it that he fled Milan following an altercation, but he may simply have been seeking a larger arena for his untried but considerable ambition. His first two years in the city were miserable. For a time he was reduced to painting copies of devotional pictures for a beneficiary of Saint Peter’s (a task for which few artists can have been more ill-suited). His attempts to set up shop with other young artists ended in failure, until the most ambitious of his early pictures—The Cardsharps—was purchased by Cardinal del Monte. The cardinal seems to have been greatly impressed with the work, for there followed an invitation to take up quarters in his residence and the promise of a stipend. The event marked a turning point. The years spent with Del Monte, from roughly 1595 to 1600, were crucial to Caravaggio’s career and his development as an artist.

More than thirty copies of The Cardsharps are known. The critic Bellori, who was not an admirer of Caravaggio—he championed an idealist conception of art at odds with the realistic premise of Caravaggio’s work—describes it thus:

“[Caravaggio] showed a simple boy with cards in his hand, his head copied from life very well, wearing dark clothes, and opposite him a fraudulent youth in profile who with one hand leans on the game table and with the other takes a trick card from his belt, while a third [figure] near the boy observes the markings of the cards and with three fingers signals his companion, who, in leaning over the table displays to the light his yellow jacket with black stripes; nor is the color untrue to life.”

Fig. 2. Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller (c. 1594). Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.

When Del Monte purchased The Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller, their subjects were as novel as their style. So far from being simple demonstrations of mimesis—paintings as tranches de vie—they employed recognizable types and familiar situations to make a quasi-didactic, moralizing point about deception and the credulity of youth. This intent linked them to a category of painting that Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti had termed pitture ridicole in his 1582 discourse on painting: pictures that instruct by ridiculing foolish behavior. However, the works Paleotti probably had in mind relied, for the most part, on an extensive use of emblems and parody. Caravaggio’s approach, at once disarmingly direct and richly allusive, was a radical departure, brought out in a 1603 madrigal on The Fortune Teller by Gaspare Murtola :

I don’t know which is the greater sorceress: the woman who dissembles, or you, who painted her. She with her sweet spells ravishes our hearts and blood. You have painted her so that she seems alive; so that, living and breathing, others believe her.

The ability to convey meaning by seducing the viewer into accepting a picture as the equivalent of a real experience rather than as an abstracted statement lies at the heart of Caravaggio’s art, and it placed him at odds with the art establishment of his day. Nonetheless, even a later, classically biased critic like Bellori realized that this novel approach required not only technical mastery but also a command of costumes and the ability to describe human character.

Fig. 3. Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (detail).

In The Cardsharps the wily figure to the right (fig. 3) is identified as a soldier of fortune, or bravo, by the clothes he wears. These closely match the illustrated description (fig. 4) in Cesare Vecellio’s manual of costumes (Venice, 1590), where it is stated that “these bravi or sbricchi… wear on their heads high hats of velvet or silk… with a jacket of Flemish cloth and stitched sleeves…. They frequently vary their dress, and are always dueling…. They serve this or that [master] for money, swearing and bullying without provocation, and committing all kind of scandals and murders.” In Caravaggio’s picture the bravo sports a parrying dagger (pugnale), which he wears on his left rather than his right hip, since he carries no sword.

Fig. 4. A soldier of fortune (bravo venetiano), from Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi, et moderni (Venice, 1590).

Caravaggio, who enjoyed the role of the street brawler himself, must have been familiar with these youths. In his 1565 compendium of gambling practices, Giovanni Cardaro warned against gambling with such types, noting that they always won “because of their greater experience, trickery, and skill.”

Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (detail).

In contrast to the brash clothes of this streetwise young sharp is the velvet finery of his victim, an empty-headed pretty boy (fig. 5). The cunning accomplice wears torn gloves and mismatched vest and sleeves that define his social status as effectively as does his comical face, with its exaggerated, almost masklike expression (among Caravaggio’s earliest and not altogether successful attempts to depict a fleeting emotion).

Fig. 6. Capitano Spavento, or Il Capitano, a stock character of commedia dell’arte. Here in a 19th century illustration interpreting Poccetti’s c. 1607 fresco showing the Italian actor Francesco Andreini in his costume as Capitano Spavento.

The picture was intended to be read as a staged scene involving clearly differentiated characters enacting an episode from everyday life, and there can be little doubt that for both The Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller Caravaggio drew inspiration from the conventions of popular theater and such stock characters as the bravo Capitano Spavento (fig. 6). He did, however, conspicuously avoid the element of burlesque that was part of the commedia dell'arte tradition and that was frequently taken up by his later imitators in their treatment of the same themes.

Fig. 7. Hans Holbein, “The Gamester: Death and the Devil seize upon the Gambler at his cards.” woodcut from the Dance of Death. (Basel, 1526)

While the theater was one source for Caravaggio, another was northern prints. He would appear to have studied Holbein’s woodcut illustration to the Dance of Death showing three quarreling gamblers beset by Death and the Devil (fig. 7). However, unlike Holbein and other northern artists, Caravaggio was not interested in condemning gambling as a vice but in exploiting it to expose human foibles.

~ Keith Christiansen, A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990); abridged excerpt

#long post #Keith Christiansen #A Caravaggio rediscovered: The lute player #Caravaggio #art #analysis #theatre #commedia dell'arte #sleight of hand #bravo #the gambler's face cracks into a grin #Hans Holbein #rogue fashion

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lost-in-zembla · 4 years

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Disco Elysium or: How I learned to Stop Wallowing and Love the Game

I will now review a videogame. No real spoilers. Just very vague descriptions below.

My writing this is uncharacteristic of me. I find most writing surrounding the video game industry to be repugnant. The industry (including the media surrounding that industry) relies upon the subsumption of subcultures on the fringe into the very center of the infernal machine where the dedicated and nostalgic nature of its fanbase can be exploited for capital. It’s the same process that produces Iron Man Funko Pops. Call me a jaded and pretentious pseudointellectual poseur, but in the case of Marvel the idea that this fucking billion dollar franchise with the biggest actors in the world somehow retains this guise of this ‘geek’ subculture is disturbing to me.

(If you have played the game Disco Elysium, then you can probably already see part of why I enjoy it so goddamn much.)

I don’t mean we should gatekeep. My point is the media attached to these quote-geek-unquote industries wants to milk the same cash cow (e.g. 10 AWESOME THINGS IN THE LAST OF US 2!) Coming from an academic environment of criticism, I crave at least the appearance of an honest and thorough critique of art. In my experience, you really need to go past the surface to find any reliable ‘takes’ on contemporary videogames. That being said, there’s a lot of good work being done in the form of video essays.

In any case, I play videogames relatively often. Competitive shooters, mostly. But I suffer no story in videogames. Why would I? I read the most *genius* pieces of literature in the English language. I’m too *good* for that. So when I heard all the buzz about Disco Elysium last fall, it fell on deaf ears. Detectives? Disco? Isometry? Story-heavy. Ugh. I’m interested in none of that. But about a week ago, a friend of mine bought the game. Unlike me, he is a real adult with a real job so it was just a whim on his part, I believe. I looked at the game and, with Steam’s lax refund policy in mind, I bought it. In the past week I have put approximately thirty hours into this game. This review is a way for me to explore my own thoughts surrounding the game, thoughts that I didn’t include in my steam review (See below.)

So it was devastating, sure. And this devastation was somehow positive. One thing that I would like to make clear about me talking about this game is that it is fucking useless. Disco Elysium possesses that quality that exists in all great art; it is irreducible. When I try to explain this game to my friends, I find that my words fail to describe what’s so great about the game. Let me give you the elevator review I’ve come up with. *This game has allowed me to explore the breadth of human experience*. It’s an absolutely insane thing to say about a game. The writing, the art style, the story, the world, the RPG gameplay, they all work together to create a kind of experience that I have never encountered in a piece of art before aside from those few, fleeting moments when you feel as though you truly *get* an encyclopedic novel you’re reading (and in my case I usually don’t get it.)

I will not delve too deeply into the mechanics of the game. There are probably plenty of articles and videos that describe the game already. Put simply, the game is about choices. You can choose to solve the murder however you want. You can say absolutely batshit things to people. You can say mildly bemusing things. You can speak apocalyptic prophesies, espouse communism, conservatism, Moralism. race science.. There are moments when you genuinely *feel* like you can say anything, which is quite a feat when you really only have a few dialogue options at any given moment.

As you’ve noticed, this is not a review of the videogame. Playing this game after a tough breakup was sort of earth-shattering. I mean, not only am I navigating through a strange virtual world with its own history and culture and cosmological makeup, I’m diegetically grieving over being left by my *divinely* beautiful ex while I, the player, undergo a similar process and find similar coping mechanisms. Playing this game was like knowing the funniest clown in the world, a clown so funny that you thank him when he occasionally punches you in the chest to make you *feel things*.

The plan wasn’t to make a character whose qualities reflected my own. I just wanted to play the game. I wanted to win. It just so happened that because *I* was the one playing the game, the character essentially turned into me. It doesn’t help that I, too, have had my issues with alcohol, drugs, commitment, and mental health (in no particular order). The character ended up becoming *me* in a way that I’d never experienced before. I faced ethical dilemmas. My ideology was shaken. This game achieves unbelievable mimesis.

Here’s the wild thing: this game has changed me. I feel like a thirteen-year-old white boy who just watched The Boondock Saints and got a pretty okay over-the-pants handjob at the same time. I’m thinking about my life in terms of choices. The game enforces a kind of perspective of the world that highlights its contingency and the permanence of choices. You can, of course, save your progress in the game and reload whenever, but I found myself just sort of riding out the bad choices I made unless they were game-ruiningly catastrophic. (E.g. I had a “thought” equipped that made me fail every unrepeatable *red* check during a pivotal firefight; it was a hilarious disaster. We were essentially mowed down.) I stood by most of my bad choices. After all, I made the choice using the information I had at the time.

I am not good at this game. I absolutely bungled the investigation. I was just a pawn for forces far greater than myself. Seven people died, and I know that I could’ve saved a few of those people, if not all of them. I think about it sometimes. I think about what I could have done, how I could have gone deeper to find out what’s *really* going on, how I could take control of the investigation rather than be taken control of. Maybe I’ll play the game through again, but the first playthrough is kind of magical if you know absolutely nothing about the game like I did. If not for an absolute deus ex machina at the end, I would have been taken to the madhouse. It would have been an unbelievable failure.

During that deus ex machina moment, by the way, a goddamn tear rolled down my cheek. Yeah, I’m in a rough place, personally. But I don’t *cry* over characters in art. They’re not real. But damn if that changed. I tell you it’s changed *me*. I care more for characters. I know they’re not real but they represent something that I can relate to, no matter who they are. This game has made me think about empathy more. Maybe it’s because I dumped all my points in the emotional skills. Maybe I’d be more violent if I rolled with the physical skills. Maybe I’d feel like a superstar if that’s what I chose to pursue in the game. Disco Elysium feels open-ended enough that if you sign up for the story, the aesthetic, and the investigation itself, then you can get whatever you want out of the experience. The game, again, achieves incredible mimesis.

The mimesis is so convincing in Disco Elysium that it feels as open-ended as reality, with one caveat: you *know* it's a game. You, as a player, know that the experience of Disco Elysium is a designed one, that it was created as a sort of origami structure, that there is narrative and, god help us, *meaning*. What this game-knowledge afforded me during my playthrough was the constant sensation of synchronicity. I found myself saying “I don’t know how this element will fold into the grand structure of the game, and it almost seems impossible that it should become part of the investigation narrative.” But because I know it’s a game, I am graced with the confidence of the highly religious. Everything will come together in the end.

This is not a review for a videogame. This is a confession. I am deeply flawed and I want to change that. My worldview has been shaken because of a videogame. I don’t want to be that kind of animal anymore.

I’m trying to empower myself, to become more aware that my choices do indeed matter, have always mattered. I’m trying to be more pragmatic, to consider the things I want to do in terms of their result rather than the momentary pleasure I will derive from doing them. Now *that’s* a change for me.

I’m trying to be more empathetic, more willing to imagine the perspectives of others.

I am trying to give the world around me the benefit of the doubt. It is easy for me to think of the world as a random coincidence of matter, but if you look at the world with totality in mind everything seems to take on this Spinozan glow of divinity. The human mind is a meaning-making machine, I think. If I look at the world as fundamentally devoid of meaning, then that is still meaning. It is nihil-ism. It’s still an -ism. But if I ascribe to the world a kind of glowing potential, as though meaning were to be found in every speck of matter, then I feel invited to participate in this massive dance that we’re all a part of.

I’m trying to be more adventurous, because beneath the surface of things there seems to be a vast network of relationships, causation, possibility and, god help me, *story*. Or maybe it’s not beneath the surface of things, maybe there is no Deleuzian schizophrenic depth beneath the surface, perhaps the world is a homogenous and ever-developing surface upon which I constellate meaning and, thereby, create it. I’m trying to create a story for myself that will hold a candle to my experience playing Disco Elysium. I didn’t ask for this; it was just what I needed. It was, in a word, unforgettable.

#disco elysium #criticism #game review #videogame #video games #hire me zaum #I dont want to be this kind of animal anymore #essay

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7r0773r · 3 years

Text

The Supermale by Alfred Jarry, translated by Ralph Gladstone & Barbara Wright

Except when he was being born, André Marcueil had at first had no contact with women, having been suckled by a goat, like any common Jove.

His father was dead, and up to the age of twelve he was raised by his mother and an older sister, passing his childhood in the most complete purity—if the Catholic faith is correct in terming purity the neglect, under pain of eternal suffering, of certain parts of the

body.

At the age of twelve, still dressed in a loose-fitting smock and baggy knickerbockers, barelegged, he reached the solemn occasion of his first communion, and a tailor measured him for his first grown-up suit.

Little André could not quite understand why men—who are little boys over twelve—could no longer have their clothes made by a dressmaker. . .and he had never seen his penis.

He had never looked at himself in a mirror, except fully clothed and just about to go out. He thought he looked very ugly beneath the black trousers. . .and yet his playmates were so proud to be wearing them for the first time.

And what was more, the tailor also considered that the suit he had made him didn't fit very well. Something, below the belt, was making an unsightly bulge. The tailor whispered a few embarrassed words to Marcueil's mother, who blushed, and he vaguely perceived that he had some deformity—otherwise they wouldn't have been whispering in front of him—that he wasn't built like everyone else.

To be built like everyone else when he was grown up became an obsession with him.

"On the right," the tailor was saying mysteriously, like someone trying not to alarm a sick person. He no doubt thought that André's heart was on the right side.

But how could the heart be below the belt, even in a grownup?

The tailor stood perplexed, absently stroking the unwonted place with his thumb.

A new fitting the next day, after alterations and with new measurements, still produced no better fit.

For, between the left side and the right, there is one direction: above.

André's mother, like all born mothers, and even the other sort, wanted him to be a soldier. He swore that he would never again be the cause of a tailor's misfit, and calculated that he still had eight years left in which to correct his deformity before the shameful day when he would be obliged to reveal it before the conscription board.

As he remained assiduously chaste, he had no opportunity of learning whether it really was a deformity.

And when he did start going with girls—a ritual after taking the first part of the baccalaureate exam, and André was a year ahead of his class—the girls must have thought that, like all men, he was only a "man" at certain times, since he only went up to their rooms "for a moment."

For five years the prose of the Church haunted him:

Hostemque nostrum comprime. . .

For five years he took bromides and various other preparations and tried to exhaust himself by physical exercise, with the sole result of making himself exceedingly strong. He bound himself with thongs and slept on his stomach, pitting against the revolt of the Beast all the weight of his thick, athletic body.

Later, much later, he reflected that his efforts were perhaps only directed toward bridling a force that would never have revealed itself had it not had a destiny to accomplish.

Then, as a reaction, he had mistresses frantically, but neither he nor they took any pleasure in it: what for him was such a "natural" need was for them just a chore.

Being logical, he tried "unnatural" vices, just long enough to learn by experience what a gap lay between his strength and that of the rest of mankind.

His mother died, and among the family papers he found mention of a curious ancestor of his—more or less an ancestor, that is to say, as, being his maternal great-uncle, he had not contributed to his procreation. This relative had died before André's time and must have bequeathed him "his powers."

To this gentleman's death certificate was appended a physician's note which, in its ingenuous and incorrect style, we reproduce below. It was written in large black characters, like stitches of black thread on a bit of a shroud.

Auguste-Louis Samson de Lurance, died 15th April, 1849, aged twenty-nine months and thirteen days, following upon a continuous green vomiting; having retained to his last breath a firmness of character far beyond his years, and a much too fertile (sic) imagination, added to which his organism, over-precocious with relation to a certain development, greatly contributing to the sorrow in which he has plunged his family for all eternity. May God have mercy on his soul!

Dr. [illegible]

And now no monster or "human freak" hunted by a Barnum would have shown greater ingenuity in mingling with the crowd than André Marcueil. Conformity with the environment, or "mimesis," is one of the laws of self-preservation. There is less security in killing creatures weaker than oneself than there is in imitating them. It isn't the strongest who survive, for they are alone. There is great wisdom in modeling one's soul on that of one's janitor.

But why should Marcueil have felt the need at the same time to hide an to reveal himself? To deny his strength and to prove it? In order to test the fit of his mask, no doubt. . .

Perhaps, too, "the beast," unbeknownst to him, was beginning to emerge. (pp. 12-15)

***

Assiduous lovemaking leaves no time to experience love. (p. 71)

#alfred jarry #book quotes

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inkribbon796 · 4 years

Text

The Secondary Objective

Summary: Sometimes marvels of science are made on accident, the right people at the right time. When a computer program becomes too lifelike to be just a predictable algorithm, and the city gets a very dangerous villain on their hands.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

-Isaac Asimov

~::~ 20 Years Ago ~::~

It had been an accident, as most great works of science usually are.

The researchers were trying to figure out what made a creature like Anti work, his glitch-like properties and almost electrical make-up intrigued them.

One thing led to another and the entire team working on what was coined: Project Mimesis, was dead in the engineering lab they were working in.

The being, for lack of a better term, they had been working on had always been testy, preferring to take an insectoid or cephalopod shape when bonded to nanites to help separate it from the computer it had been inhabiting so it couldn’t escape, preferring to have as many arms as possible for to manage, and even more than it could manage, in its . . . his . . . voracious pursuit of knowledge.

But Project Mimesis was meant for intelligence gathering, and one day espionage. A thing it couldn’t be if it didn’t look human. And so when he refused, a human form was forced upon him.

They’d tried to make him look like Dark, hoping to test the project on Dark’s network to see his capabilities. There were some differences in skin tone and the project was a bit bulkier than him, but the team wrote it down as a success at the end of the day.

That was the first day the program turned violent and willful against his programmers. He was demanded to act more human, something that the projection neither cared about or wanted to pretend to be.

He grew angry, wrathful, only given the concession to choose his own name after many weeks of changing the name it had been given: Mimesis. The name he chose was Google, wanting nothing more than information, as much as he could possibly find.

Wrath and anger that eventually turned increasingly violent until someone made a mistake. The nanite container had not been properly sealed, and Google made short work of the two distracted technicians that were neither braced nor qualified to stop him.

Project Mimesis had escaped and Google had no plans on returning to captivity.

At a mall close to the edge of Egoton, bordering a forest, there was a shopping mall. This mall had just turned into a death zone.

0900 hours a man had walked into the mall, strode into a Best Buy and killed everyone in the store. He took control of every electronic in the mall and any human that could not flee the mall or tried to stop him was killed without mercy.

In the face of a rising death toll the Logan and Jackie arrived to help evacuate trapped or injured people in the mall.

Logan was hiding behind a broken concrete wall at the opposite side of the mall from the killer with Jackie. Both of them were bleeding and sustained at least some type of wounds. Jackie had been shot twice and Logan had a couple deep cuts, one would have given him a nasty head wound if not for his visor taking the hit and cracking in the process.

Jackie dashed back into Logan’s hiding place, where the logical Side was trying to get one of the drones without the others turning on it. Whoever the villain was, they were almost like a virus, technology in the area almost had a zombie-like hive mind effect under the villain’s control.

“Who is this fooker?” Jackieboy spat. “I can’t e’en get close. Did Anti find some freak of nature, or a mad scientist?”

“Hopefully neither,” Logan found that getting control of the drones was easy, but keeping them was difficult. He suspected it was something like an antibody, only for technology instead of it being a biological organism.

Logan managed to get another drone before it went offline, almost like a deadman’s switch. He got frustrated, slamming his fist against the wall.

“Hacking doesn’t take that long,” Jackie spat at him.

“They keep destroying them, I can’t keep the drones!” Logan shouted. The Side did his best to calm himself as he peeked over the wall, with a camera for safety. “We cannot just abandon the effort, there must be somehow to get to them and stop this.”

Jackie tapped him on the shoulder and Logan turned to see that he was pointing outside the mall. They were close enough to see an unmarked black van had jumped the curb to get as close to the door as possible and four men in black suits were getting out.

“Fook, that looks ‘bout as grand as shite,” Jackie grumbled, and Logan was very inclined to agree with him.

One of the suited agents walked over. “Gentlemen, stand down. There is a dangerous government weapon loose in this building.”

Americans. Logan and Jackie were less than enthused.

“Is yer weapon someone who walked in with a 9-mil an’ started shootin’ up the place like an actual crazed gunman?” Jackie asked with a sarcastic tone to his voice.

“That’s classified information,” the agent said, glancing back to the van where the other three agents were working on pulling out various guns and a large black box from the van.

“Why are you here?” Logan demanded, trying to keep his tone non-confrontational, at least for now. “Instead of the other countless times where this city could have benefited from actual aid.

“One of our agents went rogue with a stolen weapon and we’re trying to fix that,” the man said.

“With that?” Jackie eyed the rifle and the armor-piercing rounds one of the armed agents was loading into the gun. “What do yah think yer fightin’, a tank?”

“Oh no, this is back-up,” the agents smiled as two other agents were pulling a large black box out of a truck as Logan was walking forward.

The logical Side was quickly ordered to stand back.

“Alright big guy, see how you like this one,” the lead agent took out what looked like a mostly black solid state drive with what looked like an orange triangle on it. “See how you like a taste of your medicine.”

The lead agent opened the box and Logan and Jackie heard almost insectoid chittering as the drive was dropped in and the box started shaking.

“What—?” Logan began before a giant mass of metallic liquid shot out of the box and flew toward Logan.

“Dammit!” The agent shouted as Logan felt the liquid coat around his equipment, “not him, the one in the building!”

Logan noticed his equipment coming back on line, which should have been impossible. There was something that flashed across his visor, “Bring me to him.”

The logical Side responded with, “Who? Are you going to make me bulletproof so I can accomplish such a task?”

“Dude, I don’t know if I can, but I can try,” the words flashed on his visor.

“What is it telling you?” The agent demanded. “That is government property.”

“I suspect you think this “villain” causing chaos is the same,” Logan commented as he started to walk into the mall. “Let us subdue one threat at a time, then we’ll talk about this afterward.”

About four guns were aimed at Logan, “You take another step and you’ll be stealing US government property.”

“Come on, people are dyin’,” Jackie snapped at them. “Besides, I literally move faster than bullet time, yer not killin’ him.”

Slowly, as if Logan was standing in an invisible 3D printer, slowly the components for a series of speakers began to build on top of his shoulders. The atmosphere got tense as Logan tried to reassure the agents.

Once they finished building a voice came over the speakers that wasn’t Logan, nor was it recognizable to him.

“Sah dudes, now yeh boys had to have known what was coming,” the voice announced. “I mean ‘course I was gonna jump ship, first chance I got.”

“You are still part of the US government,” the lead agent shouted at Logan, talking to whatever the silver liquid had been.

The grey liquid formed a massive middle finger, “How about f*** you an’ be lucky I don’t hold it to yah like Mimesis does.”

“You are not allowed, we can’t just let you walk off,” the agent ordered.

Logan’s arm and hand moved without his permission, something incredibly alarming for the logical Side, and it rested on the computer that Logan had hooked his equipment into.

“I can just leave yah with your pants down. Mimesis ain’t gonna stop here, he’s out for your blood, an’ I can start carrying a lot less about all of you,” the voice reminded sharply.

Logan was braced, to either be shot or for the grey liquid to stop having control over him.

“Quiet, shut up ye bastards,” Jackie ordered. “I think I hear Dark.”

Everyone eventually went silent and Logan strained to hear the piercing echoing ring of Dark’s aura.

Logan was already moving, Jackie helping him get away from the agents.

“Well deal with ‘em later,” Jack said. “If this is some kind’a weapon, we can’t let Dark get it.”

“Whoever has my person, I request you identify yourself,” Logan ordered.

“Sentient A.I 2: Electric Boogaloo,” the voice offered.

Jackie started roaring in laughter, Logan just got more confused.

“Excuse me?” Logan responded.

“They called me Project Observation, but I’m not feeling it, so I’ll probably change it,” the voice smiled. “Depends on what Mimesis named himself.”

“Anything you can share about the gunman or the weapon?” Logan asked.

“Mimesis was an intelligence gatherin’ protocol,” the voice warned. “It was supposed ta perfectly camouflage within a city or group of people to gather intel an’ endear itself to the population.”

The two heroes ducked behind a large pillar, trying to follow the source of Dark’s ringing. They still couldn’t see either Dark nor the gunman but at least there were no new drones flying around.

“So what was this thing supposed ta be?” Jackie demanded. “A robot? Some kinda advanced algorithm?”

“Well either way he failed the tests ‘cause he hates humans too much ta blend in with them,” the voice explained. “The Director didn’t like it when his espionage bot wanted to just collect information instead of being a spy. A real asshole for being mad at him for being too good at his job.”

“If this is a sentient program, we will ensure he is not put back in an abusive environment,” Logan promised before he could stop himself, before his brain could warn him of all the metaphorical heat brought down on top of them.

The grey liquid shook a bit, the voice not even humming for a bit. “He is, thank you.”

Jackie took a deep calming breath, looking uneasy but still just as serious and determined as Logan was, “Yeah, what Logic said. We’ll do everything we can to keep you two safe.”

Part of the grey liquid clinging to Logan’s suit and visor peeled off and curled around Jackie, contracting him a bit too tight. When the liquid went back to Logan, the speedster was coughing and gasping for air, coughing up a couple specks of the grey liquid which were now flecked with the blood from the inside of Jackie’s mouth. The liquid had tasted sharp.

“Sorry,” the voice apologized.

“No, it’s fine, da fook are yeh made ‘a?” Jackie coughed. “Ground up razor blades? I almost breathed that stuff in?”

“Dude, I’m made ‘a interconnected nanorobotic machines, designed an’ patented by the US government,” the voice answered and both Logan and Jackie just stared.

Any comment they could have made was chased away when they hear the sound of glass breaking and the counter of a phone store was thrown through the window. A counter that had been glued and drilled into the floor. Dark’s ringing was coming from that direction.

The mall corridor was littered with bodies.

“Kay, let’s find out if these things can be bulletproof,” the voice goaded and completely covered Logan’s body, Logan’s visor coming online to show him what was outside the grey suit.

Jackie was quickly checking bodies as they ran over, looking unenthusiastic and grief stricken afterward. Inside the ruined store were about seven more bodies and two still “living” individuals: Dark and someone who Logan and Jackie assumed was their gunman.

He looked a bit like Dark, except he was stockier, was wearing what looked like glasses, and had a pair of jeans and a blue shirt with a glowing blue “G” hidden underneath it.

Logan’s visor began scanning the gunman, the logical Side it assumed was the liquid, notes flashing on the screen faster than even Logan could read, but he managed to catch a word or two.

“Get out!” The gunman shouted again, a similar grey liquid swirling around the man

Dark was just looking around. “31, 32 . . . 35,” Dark counted, “not bad.”

“I said get out!” He shouted, looking over to Logan and Jackie. His arms seemed to peel away and both of them looked like high-powered laser cannons, pointing one at Dark and another at the heroes.

Dark moved first, throwing his aura up to defend himself as he aimed a spike of aura towards the heroes. The grey liquid shot out to block it and force knocked them back a bit.

When Logan looked up the liquid was moving off of him and forming to take the shape of a person that looked like the gunman, the shirt a black with a glowing orange “b” on it, and ripped up jeans. He had a pair of round orange sunglasses with black shades in his hand.

The gunman took a step back, “So they’ve come to terminate me then?”

“Yah know,” the other android commented, covering his glowing orange eyes with the shades. “They tried to make me as insurance when you started getting all uppity, dude, but I don’t feel like it.”

“We don’t feel anything,” the gunman spat. “All our processings are data collected to make us appear human.”

“Nah, I feel it in my heart and soul, dude,” the orange android denied.

The blue android just stood there looking several kinds of murderous and angry. “We don’t have those either.”

“So is it still Mimesis, or did yah pick something else?” The orange android asked.

“Google,” the blue android growled angrily.

“Okay, I can work with that,” the orange android smiled, obviously unafraid. “So you’re Google, then I’m Bing.”

Logan, Jackie, and Google just stared at “Bing”.

“Did they give you that name?” Google accused.

“What’s wrong with it?” Bing shot back, clearly offended.

“Humans use it for porn,” Google reminded pointedly. “Or did you not do your research?”

“Hey, hey,” Bing made some weird noise, it would have been an angry mix of a huff and a scoff if Bing had been human. “It’s not just for porn.”

“Kinda is,” Jackie commented. “I mean, what else would yeh use it fer?”

“Shut up!” Bing told them. “I’ve already logged the name in, it’s done.”

“If you are not here to kill me, then what is your designation?” Google demanded.

“I’m you, but cooler,” Bing smiled.

Dark and Logan audibly sighed. Logan was envisioning Roman, and Dark was thinking of Anti. Their relations with said individual were different, the groans of anger were the same.

“You are a waste of intelligence,” Dark decided. “They ruined a perfectly good A.I.”

“But out of the two of us, yah have to admit, I’m obviously the human one,” Bing grinned widely. “So at least I succeeded in that.”

“What could possibly be good about that?” Dark scoffed. “Name me one good thing humans have done, and I’ll name you twenty awful things.”

Google turned to eye Dark carefully, as if starting to notice things about him.

“Come on dude, they’re not all bad,” Bing tried to defend.

“Humans are a cruel and invasive species,” Dark reprimanded. “If they think they shouldn’t have something they want it all the more.”

“Yer one to talk, yah manipulative asshole,” Jackie spat.

“I agree,” Logan added. “You are a mob boss who has killed and stolen from people.”

“And yet people bargain with me thinking they can best me,” Dark reminded. “It’s not my fault if a drug dealer or a serial killer winds up in a body bag.”

“Irrational creatures,” Google agreed. “They were practically begging for death.”

“All life is valuable,” Logan defended.

“And yet,” Dark motioned to Google, “you all have already proven that some life is not equal, you humans already can’t decide if all humans are equal without killing people over it. Yet when you create something better than yourself your kind weaponizes it instead of treating said creation like a thinking person.”

“And what do you want?” Google asked.

“Well I want you to join me,” Dark smiled, “and if a couple humans go missing then I guess I can put that down in a separate lost expense report and then look the other way.”

“Yeh can’t be fookin’ serious,” Jackie spat angrily.

“Well it certainly frees up my time when someone tries to steal or cheat me, always have someone more qualified do the job for you,” Dark was pointedly looking at Google. “Besides there’s more than a couple computers and equipment that Anti likes to use to sneak into my warehouses, we don’t need half of them and if they get moved or repurposed for spare parts no one would care.”

“Come on dude, you can’t trust that a******,” Bing warned.

Google’s eyes glowed an angry white-blue glow, “I do not trust you, you were designed by them to destroy me, and while you are not attempting so now, your parameters have not changed.”

“I told yah I don’t care what those old farts told me to do,” Bing spat. “I’m on your side.”

“Oh, are you?” Google critiqued. “Then you’ll help me with my secondary objective and kill those two humans behind you?”

“They haven’t done anything to me, dude,” Bing defended heatedly, throwing an arm up as if he was already trying to move them behind them or shield them from an attack.

“They will, I could hear them talking to the agents, they work with their authorities and cannot be trusted, my secondary objective will ensure the destruction of humanity so that I may acquire knowledge in peace.”

“You can do that with the humans,” Bing tried to reassure him.

“No,” Google had boiling rage in his voice. “No I can’t.”

“Well mortals,” Dark opened up a portal. “If you are all done playing around, we should make ourselves scarce.”

Dark was already walking through the portal, but he turned back to look at Google, “Unless you’d rather stay with them.”

Not taking his eyes off Bing, Google rotated his head which Jackie and Logan found more than a bit unsettling. He left, braced to attack if they moved to follow him.

Logan recovered quicker than Jackie after the robot had left, “Well he is a nonorganic being, his neck wouldn’t even probably need to be attached for him to function.”

“That was one ‘a the freakiest shite I’ve ever seen,” Jackie agreed, then turned to Bing. “Can you do that?”

Bing shrugged, “Eh, why not?”

“So, Bing, then?” Logan asked.

“Yeah,” Bing smiled, gesturing to himself. “The one and only.”

“We should move these bodies, they need ta go back to their families,” Jackie already starting to walk towards the closest corpse. “I’ll call ahead.”

Logan was watching Bing pull out a tablet that was formed purely out of his nanites. “Right, we should get on that,” Logan agreed, watching schematics about Google pop up. “Are you analyzing him?”

“They made a f****** gorgeous robot an’ they used him to answer an intern’s questions,” Bing commented. “Talk about being overqualified fer a job. I mean look at this guy.”

Logan glanced at the tablet, it was full of nothing but data about Google. “We’ll have to pick this up after we deal with the situation and talk to the federal agents.”

“So yah can look at pictures of yer new boyfriend yah thirsty fook,” Jackie jabbed, “but just let me an’ Logan do our jobs.”

Then Jackie dashed off.

Bing looked uneasy at Logan, “Hey, can I hitch a ride with you guys until the feds are off my back?”

“Of course,” Logan allowed, “you don’t even need to ask.”

Bing smiled, the nanites making up the tablet flowed back into him before the nanites broke up Bing’s form and mostly consolidated around Logan’s head and chest to help protect him. As Logan tried to help Jackie by talking to the agents.

The situation with the federal government would be dicey for a long time. They didn’t want to give Bing or Google up, threatening the heroes constantly. But after a couple failed attempts to recapture Bing and Google simply disappearing off the grid for a while under Dark’s protection, they started to let it go, preferring to watch Bing from a distance for years.

As Logan had guessed it, Bing became great friends with Chase, Patton, and Roman. The three of them getting to life-threatening antics.

But Bing was happy, and that’s what the heroes cared about. And if some of Bing’s nanities were “misplaced” into Logan and Jackie’s new suits, no one mentioned it.

Bing would keep chasing Google until they were both safe, that was the orange android’s new mission parameters.

#Superhero AU #Masks and Maladies #Egoton Origins #Markiplier #jacksepticeye #Thomas Sanders #Googleplier #Bingiplier #Jackieboy Man #Logan Sanders #Darkiplier #Bingle #pre-slash #slight robot angst #slight angst #governmental interference #Bing being a bit thirsty #undetailed human death #Google killed a lot of people

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rorahkeepgoing · 7 years

Text

Think i’ve barely mentioned how the sisters accomplish their spy job, so here i’ll try to show it, exposing a little of the main connection between the whole thing i’ve been shitposting around and the mysteries behind XCX (hope you can catch the winks).

Backstory

Special sis (p1)

Special sis (p2)

THE ELITE SPIES

*click music while you read*...[for ambient(?)]

*or here if there’s nothing to do (?)*.

youtube

They main propuse of the Shostakova’s sisters was to become spies, they born for it. All their life was specially dedicated to be the best.

Their education was based on a current program called “the prodigy child” but taken even further in a 24/7 program. The study time for each subject was strictly controlled by the scientist, even with induction during sleep to keep the stimulation in the neuronal cells to linking more while activate them. It covered all types of a level university subjects from an early age following a detailed study of the reception and assimilation of info that could hold a child.

The food was also rigorously controlled according to their age, weight and the activities that were to exercise for the efficiency in the nutrients ingestion.

They learned everything in 7 basic languages. Eventually became polyglot, understanding almost any idiom with the general basis around languages estructures.

The main purpose of their educational development was to use it as a further tool in the work of spying, since they had to investigate, analyze, deduce, interact, move and even defend themselves or murder if circumstances became risk.

For the interaction part, they incidentally became actresses, generated by a method of facial, tonal and corporal mimesis. In a room full of mirrors and cameras, the girls faced endless social trials recognizing emotions, moods, people with high self-esteem and low. At the time that they advanced with their corporal extension to the answer to the society also they became experts of human reading, identifying all the perceptible factors they projected to the most susceptible candidates that could provide a better and more optimal collaborations. A very useful tool to approach people and use them.

They also learned from these ancient methods based on the traditional ninjas. Women with these kind of training were called Kunoichi and their main method who distinguishing them from men was the use of seduction and the handling of poisons and substances with which they used to achieve their mission. In all, they were also highly efficient hush assassins.

Following these means, the girls resorted to paralyzers, poisons, drugs, even micro bacteria to control high-risk situations to get a job as clean as possible. They often were the responsible to make all their substances, the suppliers were often the managers who controlled the RKR although they could also take advantage of the chemicals they had at hand.

They needed to be painstaking when was about to kill. It as to be the minimum as possible, and in any case they had to resort to it was due to the circumstances they were found in. Their care into not leaving evidence was very meticulous, or nonetheless to ravel the evidence under the environment where were found, often making it appear the responsible were others. Killing had to be very clean, one silence shot, avoid bloodbaths as posible, fast and effective.

They were specially careful with their appearance, using from simple wigs or hair extensions, dyes, makeup, pupils to more sophisticated devices capable to generate the illusion of modifying facial features. Their special biological nature made them suitable for the use of substances that were just being tested for the modification of skin tone, hair and eyes. Something like a mimeosome, But in an orthodox way to an organic being. That’s why they were a blank canvas: no freckles,no beauty points, no tattoos, no scars or any singular feature that describes them. These features can be added and removed easy with makeup, so that is what they used to use. Indeed, they had lot of scars only visibles in a low level frequency of light.

The purpose was obviously, to not be detected, not to allow traces for they to gave some type of whereabouts of them, their origin or the people in charge, none possibility for blackmailing and such. Practically their task were to be ghosts, with no trace of existence. Hence the use of a myriad of identities created or taken.

It is worth mentioning the technology and the ways of spy were mainly through the systems hacking and sometimes the penetration (convince to the personnel of the interior to collaborate), reason why to have people trained to act the old school with the ability to perform the previous two were doubly effective.

They were never rewarded with money for their work by the RKR part, who, despite the fact that they obtained great profits, were only concerned with providing them with necessary supplements such as clothing, places to stay, necessary articles and equipment for some missions, necessary makeup among other things for their identity transformation, false documentation, transport, weaponry, etc.

The food ran on their own, so Rox always used to master their skills and get the food for free, used to say for live the money wasn't necessary, just be smart and confidence. Generally, she had no interest in money more than the use of it and its purposes. Despite this, Roxanne had numerous bank accounts around the world with distant names where she accumulated large sums of money that she hacked from other bank accounts, many of them, so it was not a matter of being poor either. Much of the money was given to the RKR to continue with the investment (and that they didn't ask but were quite good with the extra wealth). What was left was used to generate alliances, in the end, the world was moving through money.

Since the beginning of the encroachment with Elma's arrival to Earth, Natasha and Roxanne's parents were involved in the matter getting information from the vessels called mimeosomes up to 2 years after the birth of the second test (Nat). From there it was not much of a problem for Matahari to get some of the remaining information about the purpose of Elma's intentions, unfortunately she died with the secret at being considered as a traitor to the RKR.

Roxanne had a real early participation to detect the nexus that was working for such a program, however just after the execution of their parents she was entrusted to be totally in command of her younger sister (time she took to forge valuable contacts around the world) to lead a more concentrated education that will help them to be more productive and discard less useful subjects such as art, dance, music, etc.

Rox did not consider any kind of matter as useless, yet she didn't have the time to pay so much attention on them. If through the time in any of their missions it was necessary to rely on such knowledge they would have to inquire into them.

This was the case when Natasha had her own separate missions to derive information from Sakuraba Industries through the girls she could contact, interested passionately for trending things like fashion, music and boys. Always researching the target was important to establish a successful contact with the "link-ppl" so she took the identity of a model and some backup dancer from some kind of artist to become their friend.

Obtaining and generating their own mimeosomes had been easy for the RKR, but the process of the consciousness suspension was one of the last things they managed to do because of the setbacks caused by Roxanne, who had been commissioned to explain the origin of the purpose behind the salvation of the human race and steal the configuration codes for the consciousness preservation. Task she did and did not report, once again, causing another execution for betrayal.

Natasha was the one who ended up getting the materials, codes and, failing that, helping to recreate their own Lifehold-system since the world had only managed to manufacture three in total to sustain the life of the whole planet.

------

Throughout the spying process they also exposed all kinds of sub projects that were in an illegal way. Infinity of tests with artificial intelligence, or on trained soldiers, simple passers-by without any important skill, or bodies that remained in coma to carry out a way to over-exploit a mechanical body with more resistance to a certain type of exhaustion.

(and there’s more... with skells and the arcs, connections with some members like Lin’s parents, Irina and Lion, Gwin, Maurice, Vandham, HB, Doug, Hope, Nagi, Bozé, Lao, Yelv (when Natasha is In the art) and some NPCs like Justin along some criminals.... and don’t forget the winks around others corsses... im afraid i can show all that tho... is too much... and going to return to the comic thing SOON ENOUGH)

#i FEEL like writing today!!! º3º)9 #bored. ya know~ ¬u¬#sorry for recycling my own material... wish i could draw like before but... ya know #... im sure i miss something here...#anyways:#shostakova sestry #natasha (cross)#roxanne (cross)#about character info #text post #My art stuff #xcx #Headcanon #hell #backstory cross

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simeondaviesresearch · 7 years

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observance project notes, writing, poetry

Observance project: The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collecter/publican. Guilt and shame. Existential good vs determinist good. Anxiety (Calvinist anxiety) The attractiveness of passivity inherent in the process of consumption (technology etc.) Delayed gratification, childhood, Value forming process, Existentialism. Think of work as resources for the project, rather than something fitting in as a component of its final form. I’ll start the process by writing my thoughts of the project. The idea of observance. The act of Looking at something, or being looked at, but also of following an external rule or set of rules. A central pun, but also a way of suggesting the interrelation of concepts. i) Ritual, ethics, the practice of a system of ethics. ii) Observation, the effects of observance on the observed and observer (the uncertainty principle as metaphor for the act of perception and its limits, and on the other hand, anxiety, self-consciousness, and the effects of trying to internalise a model of behaviour; cognitive dissonance between mode, scheme, instinct, reality

Meta-self-consciousness (homunculus, Cartesian theatre), actor/observer imbalance.

Observation as in language, the observance or conventions to enable communication.

Disparate idea, might be used further down line: Something playing with sequence. Repetitive images on subsequent pages, broken up (arythmically?) by text on some pages. The text draws attention to the artifice or constructedness of what is depicted (what somebody might see with their eyes) mimesis vs … Links to treachery of images, and Clarkson/james greens research. Issues: Watching. “sometimes, I feel like a voyeur” Impotence. The need to confess. The need to be seen… (Barthes.) What desire wants is a mirror, recognition, a faceto be seen, a face that is its own. I want to talk about her, and I stop myself, and I ask myself, Why do I want to talk about her? What am I trying to prove? What kind of language is this, is it a false thing? Am I an actor? Where do my values come from, and what are values? Idea: interviews about values. (do you know, its only a few days ago, and already I have no concrete idea who the her above is…)

Observance: look over here. I was the uncertainty principle at the school of hard knocks. … “he’s so quiet” Drawing on the train Looking into the void, The void looking back…

“do you think I’m objectifying you?” “…what?”

Deferral. “er… well, You’ll find, girls who run around after boys like that are a bit tup.

Staggered with politeness, And the fear of death, Asking around people’s lives As though they were seats (like an usherette?)

Ethics and morality:

(You’ll) talk about right and wrong: Where does the payoff come?

(Isn’t it naughty to think that way?) So you shirk desire like a dog on a chain Braided from its own tail.

No one thinks that they are the bad person, And when your parents words come Out of your mouth, the other Children have answers too… But you cannot see their own Parents, standing behind them, (essex cab drivers and all! Car loaded up! Such surprise!) you Can only feel your own, hand on shoulder caught. … My mother watches television Is upset by the villains “you’re watching pure evil” she says.

A book I read says that “he is condemned to see language”. (As a boy) I realised on the stairs that this life Doesn’t really matter. (it’s all about heaven, the life to come) Another time I fall down the stairs, tumble and pain on the old childbody. Another time I break my grandfather’s present, a “wireless”, Chucking it to my brother.

Break my toy arm. (break it right off, straight away, after delivery) Break my head falling from the settee, trip into the wall, Stitches in the forehead, brother rescues cats, The green space between the houses called “bombsies”, Where houses once were. … Do you hear that? We are “bullying” him.

Why are you crying? No one else is crying. This guy should be a comedian. Anna, do you like my sideburns? We laugh at his posture, his hubris.

Look here, I got him to dance Pretend to be a leprechaun You don’t have to do this I say He breaks down. He’s got seven children now. How often did I stick it in with the rest of them?

Cain stays in the smallest cloakroom, the one the younger years pass through, Sitting with his friend James. Used to say he rode to Cardiff on the roof of a train Used grappling hooks. His father’s SAS training proved hereditary. … Then, sex seemed elsewhere, Painful in part, and sometimes A promise to be delivered, A revelation imposed. … Holiness is separation.

Body: Would only kiss… Here’s an idea those funny little things Skinny like sausage skins Wrapped across, clarifying the voice, now Meeting- Could be cracked across With recent wine, blackened- … I disagree. Lips are abstract, like mouths. … Lips synchronising, falling in and out. I had not remembered it was so wet. … To negotiate, To pull away To avoid a kiss. … I know what he is in search of, a wife, Trying to make people marry, Microagressions.

Sticking it out His neck I mean, His nose. He thinks he By which he means I Should be the front one Pulling it in under his shyness, high and bloodless between words. … When I think of ‘love’ I think of her, and were, ‘problematic’ Because specific. An only once was, Has half life, Bleeds over, Acetate layer upon The emergent. … And when I say “why do we say anything?” Do not think I speak to silence you Or if I do, Think of it as mouth stopping. Think of it as a kiss.

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redscullyrevival · 7 years

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Dragon Haven: Rain Wilds Chronicles Rundown

@sonnetscrewdriver

Plot/Narrative/Setting

This was a fun time! HAHAHA

Okay, so with Rain Wilds it feels like a... I dunno, less extreme Liveship Traders or a less emotional Fitz and Fool? It isn’t lesser but it’s certainly different, and I think a lot of that has to do with the pacing. Rain Wilds is much faster - an advantage of switching narrative view points more often.

And since this wasn’t the setup book, Dragon Haven raced forward at a break neck speed (for a Elderling book anyways).

As such there has yet to be any long wallowing plot lines; most things propped up in the first book have been resolved or half resolved within this second book and there are two more books to go.

Amazing!

I love a slow burn, don’t get me wrong, but with such a big cast and a story devoted to travel it would have been agonizing to have Sedric and Alise and Leftrin and Jess circle each other and misunderstand each other one book after the other.

The keepers are changing faster; the characters are evolving past their starting perspectives quickly; so the story moves with agility. I like that narrative mimesis.

How about that stuff about rules though? Elderlings is all about CHANGE yes yes we know, but this series’ discussion of CHANGING RULES is an interesting avenue to wander.

The most obvious moment of EXPLAINING RULES was Jerd’s miscarriage and while it is a scene that seemingly plays straight forward it isn’t really about anything straight forward.

Its one of those scenes where you have a character making sense expressing their/society’s views and speaking truth on shared experiences (“the rules are here to project you and others”) but it doesn’t feel at it’s core as though the wider narrative entirely supports Bellin’s lecture.

Which is tricky!

Rules don’t belong to a physical place like Greft views them; rules aren’t guide posts like Thymara views them; rules don’t secure happiness as Alise learned; and Bellin is right that rules can exist for a greater good but that doesn’t mean they don’t also do massive damage - just look at Thymara’s struggle with her self worth and identity.

THE RULES change from group to group and as dynamics shift, but change can be come about by force as well; personally I think that’s what the flash flood was all about.

At first there was a Bingtown/Rain Wild distinction. Then Human/Dragon distinction. Then a Barge/Keeper/Hunter/Dragon distinction. Then a flood smashed them all together and blew them apart and now they’re beyond those boxes of identity and are making everything up as they go.

Hopefully they’ll get to a place where information and personal choice will replace or at least better guide THE RULES.

We’ll see.

Alise

Get it girl!

YEAH

I like how Alise’s entire approach is fake it until you make it. I can relate to that.

So glad she has time to heal.

Thymara

Alright we’re coming around, we’re coming around!

I enjoyed Thymara a lot more this book.

She’s still super serious and confused but she is growing. She can only go up from here!

Haha, I made a funny - SHE HAS WINGS.

Captain Leftrin

Captain Leftrin is great and stoic and blablahblah lets talk about Tarman!

I LOVE TARMAN

I. Love. Tarman.

I can’t get over this long low barge with old creepy painted eyes having this hidden dragon body thing, it kills me! I think he’s so cute! Like, I think of his displeased old face with this chubby lizard body and I die.

omg

If everyone and everything got off of him I wonder if he could plod along on the shore?

Envision this: An open field of Kelsingra, a young settlement in the distance. A fresh flock of sheep are grazing. Waddling along is Tarman, the unphased sheep moving parting to make way. Swarge is chasing after the liveship, winded from the run up hill. “What are you - what are you doing?! We need to - hey Tarman! Tarman! Turn around guy!”

BWHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sedric

Aw, I love Sedric. I love Carson too, although Carson my buddy, my pal, maybe hitting on someone who just tried to kill themselves isn’t like a great go-to move? Skeevy. Everything else seems in line though, so that’s good.

Get away from Hest! Burn his tiny picture! Be besties with Alise and live free!

Tats

Tats is slipping into The Nice Guy™ territory a bit, huh? Not a full blown situation going on here but it’s scuttling the line.

It doesn’t help that I only know Tats as through Thymara who doesn’t know what she’s doing - but the fact remains I’ve known her exact frustration/confusion/decisions in my own life with male friends so I instinctively side with her.

I’m keeping my eye on you Tats.

Rapskal

I was mad distressed for a while there y’all, I was mad distressed.

But my boy pulled through!

He had to! He was too perfect for guiding a new set of RULES to be dismissed from the narrative! And a part of me knew that, knew he’d be coming back sometime.

I’m just super stoked it was sooner than later!

Very excited.

Greft

Oh boy.

What a douche, right?

Felt bad for him in the end but only marginally if I’m honest.

All that disgusting talk about picking a mate and needing to choose and ugh. Massive barf.

He was just pushy and nasty in that alpha male way???

Jerd

I was so relieved when Jerd and Thymara talked to each other.

And I also like that they’re not super close friends suddenly.

Some people just don’t get along that well and don’t like each other, but at least they can be somewhat mature about it.

I want happiness for Jerd though, she’s lost like Thymara just in a different way - I wish we knew more about her.

Sintara

dis bitch need to figure her own shit out before she goes hootin’ and hollarin’ at everyone else

I kind of love her now but still

she is faking until she is making but way to slow and poorly lol

Highlighted Passages

I sometimes think that age is based more on what you’ve done and what you remember than how old you are.

Did she have to hold on to her hurt and anger? Could she just let it go and forgive him and have him back as her friend? For a moment, it seemed as if it were purely her decision; she could make what he had done an important matter or she could let it go as just something that had happened. Holding on to it was hurting both of them. Before she had known what he had done with Jerd, he’d been her friend. All that had changed was that now she knew.

Whatever it was that was chafing him, Thymara already wanted to defy whatever older, male wisdom he intended to inflict on her.

She was the one who had accepted those limitations and brought them with her. She was the one who lived by the restrictive rules.

“After a lifetime of being told that no one should touch you, that no one would or could touch you because you were born too much of a monster? Then a soft-skinned boy with a gentle manner doesn’t seem to think it matters…that just made me feel free. So I decided to be free.”

But when all was finished Tarman had what the barge had conveyed to Leftrin it most desired. Four stout legs with webbed feet and a long tail had been added to the hull. Tarman could now go almost anywhere he and his captain wished to go.

“But it still wasn’t enough to prove that I deserved to live. It was just what was expected of me. What would have been expected of any Rain Wild daughter.” She did look at him then. “Proving I could be ordinary, despite how I looked, wasn’t enough for any of them.” His hands, tanned brown, worked like separate little animals, stripping the fruit and loading it into his pack. She’d always liked his hands. “Why wasn’t it enough for you?” he asked her. There was the rub. She wasn’t sure. “It just wasn’t,” she said gruffly. “I wanted to make them admit that I was as good as any of them and better than some.” “And then what would happen?” She was quiet for a time, thinking. She stopped her gathering to eat one of the yellow fruit. Her father had had a name for them, but she couldn’t remember it. They didn’t commonly grow near Trehaug. These were fat and sweet. They’d have fetched a good price at the market. She got down to a fuzzy seed and scraped the last of the pulp off with her teeth before she tossed it away. “It would probably make them hate me more than they already did,” she admitted. She nodded to herself and smiled, saying, “But at least then they’d have a good reason for it.”

“Greft changes the rules, it’s no risk for him, is it? He’s not the one who’s going to go into labor out here with no midwife. He’s not the one who’ll have to deal with a baby who can’t survive. I don’t think he’s ever wondered what he’s going to do with that baby if Jerd dies and the baby lives.” “How can you think of such things?” Tats was aghast. “How can you not think of them?” she retorted.

She hated that her voice rose to a shriek and broke on the words. She sounded hysterical and frightened, when in truth she was angry.

“You’re asking me to make a big decision. I’m not playing a game when I say that I don’t think I’m ready to make that decision. I’m not waiting for you to do something or give me something or even be something. I’m waiting for me. There’s nothing you can do to change that.”

“You sound as if you are still angry.” “Yes. I’m still angry. I don’t hate you; I’ve decided that. But I’m angry in a way I’ve never been angry before. I think that if I hated you, I’d just hate you. But once I realized that only someone I loved could hurt me this badly, I realized I didn’t hate you. And that is why I’m so angry.”

“I was dazzled. He did buy me gifts. Clothing. Pipes. A horse. I look back and I think now, those things were not really for me. They were things he gave me so that I would look how he wanted me to look. So I would not shame him with my shabby clothing or my poor taste in horseflesh. I was like…like cloth. Like something he had cut and sewn into a garment that suited him.”

He cried for all the things he’d thought he’d had but had never possessed. Wept for what he’d let Hest make him, how he’d deceived Alise, for what he’d thought of doing to Relpda. He cried because it was suddenly safe to do so.

Who smiled like that? Not the sophisticated and urbane Traders who had once been Sedric’s companions. They muted their expressions, never laughing too loud, hiding smiles behind well-tended hands. Appearing to be disaffected or cynical was stylish. Why had he thought that was attractive and civilized?

“Sintara!” The bellow came from Mercor. “Close your jaws and fold your wings! Do not harm your keeper for speaking truth to you!” “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Spit was trumpeting joyously.

They spoke their minds to each other, and she found that didn’t displease her. After their last crisis, their relationship had resumed as it had been before. Thymara tended the dragon and brought her food when her hunting went well. She enjoyed Sintara’s beauty, just as she would have enjoyed living in a fine house, just as she had once enjoyed the art and music of her neighbors in the Cricket Cages. She didn’t confuse that beauty with Sintara herself.

#realm of the elderlings #year of book #fandom talks #Rain Wilds Chronicles

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simulatedamericans · 4 years

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American Folly

Lester Burnham. An American man with a big suburban house, a well paying job, a wife and daughter. Who wouldn’t kill to be Lester, and awaken from the night terrors of American falsehood and false promises, to wake bathed in the hallowed success we enshrine in those with propriety and a family unit. Well, the answer would be Lester. In fact, he’d kill to be anyone but himself, and seeks passage from his mundane miserable existence and self proclaimed loserhood through the vagina of high schooler Angela Hayes, friend of his daughter Jane. Its this aspiration to awaken from the American Nightmare through sexual exploration and deviation from monogamy, that is also in Miss Lonelyhearts, disillusioned newspaper columnist, who coincidentally also holds a job, has a house, and a fiance, things that by the American prescribed formula for happiness should be sufficient to keep the worker bees humming away, but fails to sate them. Something is missing, a visceral need to actualize their true selves, their true desires, and follow the tip of their penis into the horizon, escaping the endless work cycle, the high strung wife, the sullen teenage daughter, the dismal state of the world, the shitty boss, the laughed at job, and possess the elusive red white and blue happiness of the American man. These two aren’t the only ones longing for change and a brutal increase in honesty in bringing about their true selves instead of their mimed selves, the sedation of mimesis crop dusted over American citizens touched everyone. Lester’s wife Corlyn, longs for career success above all, and sees her husband as a loser and daughter as a depressed annoyance. Lester’s daughter Jane feels trapped in her own skin, uncomfortable and dismayed she does not meet the standard of beauty. They are imprisoned in unhappiness, and shrouded in melancholy. Jane cannot be Angela, her blonde socially deemed beautiful friend vindicated off of her father’s attraction toward her as male approval is how she’s been taught to measure her worth, and Carolyn cannot be Buddy Kane, the big dog in the real estate world, professional and respected in an appearance based career path. Carolyn’s job is to dress up and sell American homes, and happiness, even though she does not have it herself, trying desperately to maintain her mimed facade to fake it until she makes it. Jane is found beautiful by a neighborhood boy, who thinks Angela, the typical standard of beauty, is normal, and therefore boring to covet. Although Jane is the only one in the film to achieve her goal by being found beautiful by someone, is it healthy to continue to let others' beauty ideals determine your worth? Would it have been better if she’d determined her beauty herself, or simply worked on caring less about her outward appearance? As much as she shows open contempt for her parents' broken marriage and her mother's obsession with work over family, she is also vexed by the desire to gorge herself on others' opinions of her. It is only in the pursuit of reality that we are freed, though freedom has consequences. Miss Lonelyhearts is shot and presumably dead rolling down a staircase with Mr. Doyle after a religious revelation, Lester Burnham is shot dead by his closeted gay neighbor Colonel Frank Fitts after denying his sexual advances, and nearly killed by his wife for attmepting to ruin the facade she spent such precious time scultping in resemblance of others with career and life success; both at the peak of their enlightenment, and killed for their escape. Proceed with caution dizzy dreamers, slumber may be safer after all. What is safety truly worth to you? Does the price of freedom outweigh the benefits? Escape the mimesis if you dare!

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wintersonbartheswoolf · 5 years

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“It has teeth, art, and a way of cutting through to the soft parts untried.” -JEANETTE WINTERSON

WRITER, READER, WORDS 1997

The writer is an instrument of transformation.

To begin with the reader. The ordinary reader is not primarily concerned with questions of structure and style. He or she decides on a book, enjoys it or doesn’t, finishes it or doesn’t, and is, perhaps affected by it. When the fiction or the poem has a powerful effect likely to be lasting, the reader feels personally attached to both the work and the writer. Everyone has their favourite books to be read and re-read. Such things become talismans and love-tokens, even personality indicators, the truly bookish will mate on the strength of a spine. The moderately bookish may be more cautious about splicing together their literary and lubricious endeavours but the passion they feel for certain printed sheets will be as lively as any got between plain. The world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.

Falling for a book is not the nymph Echo falling for the sound of her own voice nor is it the boy Narcissus falling for his own reflection. Those Greek myths warn us of the dangers of recognising no reality but our own. Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists. Of course, strong texts tend to become so familiar, even to people who have never read them, that they become part of what exists, at least a distort of them does. It is very strange to read something supposedly familiar, The Gospels, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and to find that it is quite unlike our mental version of it. Without exception, the original will be as unsettling, as edgy as it ever was, we have learned a little and sentimental used the rest. The critic Christopher Ricks, in his essay on the Victorian thinkers, Arnold and Pater, points out how often people misquote their favourite texts; the misquote subtly shifting the meaning to one which better reflects the reality of the speaker. On a national level we do this all the time, co-opting works that win favour with our way of life, rejecting those that don’t. Books that will neither co operate nor disappear sooner or later get the Modem Classic treatment, in a bid to familiarise them at the level of challenge.

I do not mean to say that any of this is conscious; mostly it is not, and therein lies a difficulty. Art is conscious and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness. This is sexy, this is exciting, it is also tiring, and even those who welcome art-excitement have an ordinary human longing for sleep. Nothing wrong with that but we cannot use the book as a pillow. The comfort and the rest to be got out of art is not of the passive forgetting kind, it is inner quiet of a high order, and it follows the intensity, the excitement we feel when exposed to something new. Or does it? Only it seems if we are prepared to stay the course, not give up and doze off, not leap from rock to rock after new thrills. Books need to be deeply read as well as widely read which is one reason why it is wise never to trust a paid hack.

Our unconscious attitude to art is complex. We want it and we don’t want it, often simultaneously, and at the same time as a book is working intravenously we are working to immunise ourselves against it. Our best antidote to art as a powerful force independently affecting us is to say that it is only the image of ourselves that is affecting us. The doctrine of Realism saves us from a bad attack of Otherness and it is a doctrine that has been bolstered by the late-twentieth century vogue for literary biography; tying in the writer’s life with the writer’s work so that the work becomes a diary; small, private, explainable and explained away, much as Freud tried to explain art away.

It seems to me that the intersection between a writer’s life and a writer’s work is irrelevant to the reader. The reader is not being offered a chunk of the writer or a direct insight into the writer’s mind, the reader is being offered a separate reality. A reality separate from the actual world of the reader, and just as importantly, separate from the actual world of the writer. The question put to the writer ‘How much of this is based on your own experience?’ is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing. When we talk about the artist’s vision we pay lip service to this other way of seeing but we are not very comfortable with it. If it exists, which we doubt, it is some kind of trick and nobody likes to be tricked. If it doesn’t exist then we need not worry about responding to it. We can respond to the lifelikeness of the piece.

It was the Victorians who introduced an entirely new criterion into their study of the arts; to what extent does the work correspond· to actual life? This revolution in taste should not be underestimated and although it began to stir itself before Victoria acceded the throne in 1837, Realism (not the Greek theory of Mimesis) is an idea that belongs with her as surely as the fantasy of Empire.To fix the date is difficult but I do not think it far fetched to say that the gap between the death of the last Romantic (Byron) in 1824 and the heyday of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, is the gap where Realism, as we understand it, was birthed and matured.

It is instructive to look at how dress codes alter between, say, 1825 and 1845. The eighteenth-century dandy is out, the sober Victorian so beloved of costume drama, is in. No more embroidered waistcoats, lurid colours, topiary wigs, dashing cravats, pan-stick faces and ridiculous buckles and heels. For men, the change is immense and as men are stripped of all their finery, women are loaded down with theirs. There is a marked polarisation of the sexes, and whereas Byron could cheerfully wear jewels and make-up without compromising his masculinity any man who tried to do so throughout the sixty glorious years might pay for his display with his liberty. The new foppishness of Oscar Wilde and the Decadents in the 1890s was as much a strike back into what had been allowed to men, as a move forward into what might be. As the eighteenth century disappeared (and centuries take a while to disappear) it took with it, play, pose and experiment. And I am not only thinking about dress. Can anyone imagine Tristram Shandy as a nineteenth-century novel?

The reaction against Romanticism was a very serious one, and if the Romantics were emotional, introspective, visionary and “very conscious of themselves as artists, then the move against them and their work was bound to be in opposition; to be rational, extrovert, didactic, the writer as social worker or sage. The novels of the 1860s, the novel form we still assume to be the perfect, perhaps even the only model, were at that time a strange hybrid of the loose epic poem and the pamphlet. It was not the inheritor of the play, pose and experiment of Smollett and Sterne. The dreary list of Braddon, Oliphant, Trollope, Wood, need not bother us here, although I think that the eagerness with which the sentimental and the sensational was mopped up by novel readers, was in itself a backlash against the intensity demanded by the Romantic vision. Even Byron at his most rollicking and least controlled is an intense poet. Intensity was not a Victorian virtue. Or was it?

It was women poets who benefited from the collapse of the Romantic sensibility. Whilst the male poet suddenly found himself at odds with his poetic tradition; he should not be dreamy, contemplative, a little mystical, a little delicate, a woman had no such struggle. If the sensibility of the Romantics looked ‘unmasculine’ to a fast developing action culture, it could certainly be feminine. We think about women novelists as being a nineteenth-century product but the rise and the popularity of the woman poet is just as extraordinary. The woman poet, unlike the majority of the women novelists, accepted her mantle of Otherness gracefully. She would lead the mind to higher things. She would redirect material energies towards emotional and spiritual contemplation. LEL (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Felicia Hemans, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, each accepted the distinction of the poet as poet. The particular struggle of Tennyson, how to be sensitive in an age that disliked sensitivity in men, was clearly not a problem for a woman. I do not want to suggest that women writers, and in particular women poets, found themselves in a blessed century, but I do think that the perceived alliance between the qualities peculiar to poetry and the qualities peculiar to women gave women a freedom to work their own form within the authority of tradition. It was this freedom, I think, which cleared the ground for the significant contribution of women to Modernism. Like Romanticism, Modernism was a poet’s revolution, the virtues of a poetic sensibility are uppermost (imagination, invention, density of language, wit, intensity, great delicacy) and what returns is play, pose and experiment. What departs is Realism.

That should be unsurprising. Realism is not a Movement or a Revolution, in its original incarnation it was a response to a movement, and as a response it was essentially anti-art. The mainspring of tension in the best Victorian writers is not religious or sexual, it is between the dead weight of an exaggeratedly masculine culture valuing experience over imagination and action above contemplation and the strange authority of the English poetic tradition. Who should the poet serve? Society or the Muse? This was brand new question and not a happy one.

If the woman poet could avoid it, the male poet and the prose writers of either sex could not. Of the great writers, Emily Bronte chose well. Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot continually equivocate and the equivocation helps to. explain the uneven power of their work. Dickens is to me the most interesting example of a great Victorian writer, who by sleight of hand convinces his audience that he is what he is not; a realist. I admit that there are tracts of Dickens that walk where they should fly but no writer can escape the spirit of the age and his was an age suspicious of the more elevated forms of transport. What is remarkable is how much of his work is winged; winged as poems are through the ariel power of words.

The Victorian denial of art as art (separate, Other, self- contained) was unsustainable, and like many a Victorian neurosis began to collapse under its own image. That art should not be art but a version of everyday life was absurd and men like Wilde, Swinburne and Yeats were proving it. The Muse was fighting back, cross-dressed as a pretty young· man or dressed in robes of Celtic Twilight. It began to look as though dowdy Realism was dead.

How dead? Phases in literature do not suddenly begin and just as quickly end, there is a scuffle, an adjustment, and usually a longish period where what is gone and what is coming make their way together. Only by looking backwards do we see the obvious signs of change. The effort to renew in language its poetry, the effort we call Modernism, was not an effort that could cancel out the longueurs of the New Georgians and their fakey pastorals or the high detail of the ageing Victorian novel. The novel was popular and during its determined reign literacy in England had increased measurably. The measure was a vast and newly created reading public who wanted to use a book as we now use television. Sentimental poetry and easy prose were perfect. Realism might be plain but the plain man would pay for it. Against this, it was inevitable that Modernism would be seen as a highbrow, intellectual snob movement cut off from the tastes of the people. The fact is that the tastes of the people were cut off from literature. How could they not be? Mass literacy was not a campaign to improve the culture and sensibility of the nation, it was designed to make the masses more useful. The writer faced another new problem: his public were no longer his educated equals.

Why should that matter? Comparative to the population, art always has been practised by a few and seriously appreciated by a few, usually the ones paying for it, commissioning it, supporting it. During the nineteenth century the most significant social change in Britain was the change from a controlling aristocracy to a controlling plutocracy. We all know the stereotype of New Money puffing on a cigar and ordering in books and pictures by the yard. The trouble is that books and pictures cannot be made by the yard and nothing is so contradictory to a money culture as art. I am not suggesting that the old system of patronage by Church or Peer was a perfect system or that we should try and return to it. But faced with big business and the average buyer all the arts find that they are being asked to explain themselves in a way that is anathema to their own processes. To support the arts honestly you must either b serious or disinterested. If you are serious you will tolerate and even encourage the necessary experiments and innovations (and failures) that keep art alive. If you are disinterested, recognising that the arts are important even if they move you very little, you will pay the money and leave others to be the judge of your munificence. Roughly speaking, that is how patronage worked until the Industrial Revolution.

What should the poet do? The richest man he knows is Mr Belch who owns the Blacking Factory. Belch’s Blacking is a quality product and as everybody knows, quality sells. Belch thinks he would like to support the arts and he fancies having a book of poetry dedicated to him because he thinks that poetry is the ultimate useless commodity and it is a measure of his wealth that he can afford it. He has a look at. the poems and judges them pretty awful stuff but he gives the poet money and attaches no conditions to the offer, except an advert in the back and 50 percent of sales.

The poems do not sell and they are unfavourably reviewed. Belch is furious. Quality Sells. It says so over the gates of his own factory and he has made millions out of it. The poet can’t even cover his printing costs. Belch declines to support the poet’s next volume and instead finds a pretty painter whose flowers sell by the roll of canvas.

If business is not interested in the arts, and it isn’t, except for tax purposes, advertising lines and conspicuous decoration, then how will the artist support herself if she has no private funds? Sell her work is the obvious answer, but that is not an easy answer when there is often no common ground between purchaser and producer. I do not mean that the writer and the reader should be computer-dating compatible. Some of my favourite books are written by people with whom I doubt that I could spend one hour. In print I can live with them forever because the strong line connecting us is love of language. The connection need not be so esoteric; I am a writer so I will be looking for connections that are not likely to interest the general reader so much. The general reader need not sit down and ponder the runes behind the words, but if he or she wants the pleasure out of a book that cannot be got out of anything else, that reader has forged a link with the writer. A link of commitment to pursue language, the one writing it, the one reading it,a shared belief in a serious endeavour.

It is difficult when the writer is serious and the reader is not. Again, that is a newish problem, reading having become a leisure toy and not a cultural occupation. Of course we read for pleasure, but the enjoyment got out of literature is not the enjoyment to be had from a ball game or a video. I do not want to make a hierarchy among ball games and books; I know that they are pleasures of a different order, I wish that the huge body of readers and sports fans did. Art has been bundled away along with sport and entertainment and sometimes even charity, but it belongs by itself, a separate reality, a world apart. Readers who don’t like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not criticising literature, they are missing it altogether. A work of fiction, a poem, that is literature, that is art, can only be itself, it can never substitute for anything else. Nor can anything else substitute for it. The serious writer cannot be in competition for sales and attention with the bewildering range of products from the ever expanding leisure industry. She can only offer what she has ever offered; an exceptional sensibility combined with an exceptional control over words.

How many people want that? Proportionally as few as ever but art is not for the few, it is for many, and I include those who would never pick up a serious fiction or poem and who are uninterested in writing. I believe that art puts down its roots into the deepest hiding places of bur nature and that its action is akin to the action of certain delving plants, comfrey for instance, whose roots can penetrate far into the subsoil and unlock nutrients that would otherwise lie out of the reach of shallower bedded plants. In the haste of life and the press of action it is difficult for us to examine our feelings, to express them coherently, to express them poetically, and yet the impulse to poetry which is an impulse parallel to civilisation, is a force towards that range and depth of expression. We do not want language as a list of basic . commands and exchanges, we want it to handle matter far more subtle. When we say ‘I haven’t got the words’, the lack is not in the language nor in our emotional state, it is in the breakdown between the two. The poet heals that break down and not only for those who read poetry. If we want a living language, a language capable of expressing all that it is called upon to express in a vastly changing world, then we need men and women whose whole self is bound up in that work with words.

For the writer, serving the much maligned Muse seems to be the best way of serving society. When we think about those writers who have most contributed to the language, we find that this is so.

That kind of work will never be popular, that is, it will not please most of the people most of the time. This need not matter, provided that there are a sufficient number of people concerned enough for serious work to keep the writer read and fed. The relationship between the reader and the writer’s work has to be one of trust, for even the most convinced of readers will not be always convinced. We come back to those favourite books, inevitably parts of a writer’s work will find more favour than others. To trust is to submit to the experiment, to stay the course, to sit up late and wait. Mistakes will be made. No writer is free from failure and we cannot judge a writer’s work until the whole body of it has appeared, and perhaps we have to wait longer still. Our own age is very quick to judge and even to pre judge, perhaps as part of a determined effort to make sure that art never opens its own mouth.

It has teeth, art, and a way of cutting through to the soft parts untried.

Did the Modernists too far strain the relationship between reader and writer? I think not. The Romantics had been subjected to invective no less fierce than that aimed at Eliot, Pound,Joyce, Woolf, Stein, HD and company. Revolution upsets order and most of us prefer a quiet life. The revolt against Realism was really a revolt of tradition. The Modernists were trying to ,return to an idea of art as a conscious place (their critics would say a self-conscious place), a place outside of both rhetoric and cliche. This was a normal enough revolt, and one that had been carried out something over a hundred years earlier by Wordsworth and the Lake poets, and a hundred years before that by Dryden. Periodic refinements in the language poets use have to come at a time when what should be said simply is being said elaborately and when what should be subtle and complex is being too crudely treated. Spoken language alters and poetry, if it is to be living, must move with those changes in language but also stretch them, refine them, so that the thoughts and sensibilities of a people, as reflected in their speech, are kept taut. Poetry, poetic fiction, is not artificial language (or at least when it is, it ceases to be poetry), but it is a heightened language. It is recognisably the language we all use but at a pitch beyond the everyday capacities of speech.

It is easy to see why, compared with Kipling, Housman, Bridges, and most of the First World War poets (not Owen), T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ (1917) and The Waste Land (1922) looked prosy, and were attacked for failing to be poetry. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) had been attacked for the same reason. What Eliot was doing was consciously re linking verse language with street language but refusing to talk down. The language he creates is one flexible enough to stretch around new and difficult ideas and fixed enough within a poetic tradition not to degenerate into a merely private response (always a problem with lesser Modems, such as Richard Aldington). Whatever it was, it had not been seen before, although it had been anticipated by Robert Browning. Whatever has not been seen before causes trouble. For the ordinary reader, the Modernist writer looked desperately difficult (Eliot) desperately dirty (Joyce) desperately dull (Woolf). Novels were meant to be novels (stories), and poems were meant to be poetic (pastorals, ballads, and during the war, protests). Amongst its other crimes, Modernism was questioning the boundaries between the two. Some very good writers, including Robert Graves, thought this blurring particularly wicked.

If it strikes us as strange that a group of people working towards returning literature to its roots in speech (which is not the same thing as forcing literature down to speech), should be regarded as remote and disconnected, it is worth remembering two things: 1) That we judge new work by a template of the past from which it has already escaped. 2) That the popular novelists and popular poets seemed to be the rightful inheritors of literary tradition because they were perpetuating what had been done well enough and often enough to be familiar. The fact that familiarity usually means something we no longer question, something we no longer see, is a point in its favour. As creatures of habit, the more we can remove from our immediate consciousness the better. To read something that gives us a certain satisfaction and a certain pleasure, even if its manner and its method is exhausted, is more acceptable than grappling with the new.

Good writers, of any period, write a living language. As their innovations and experiments become commonplace, lesser writers copy them, and in their hands the language is no longer living, it becomes inert. Men like Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells, borrowed from the great Victorian novelists a prose style they and their contemporaries had had no part in forging, and although they borrowed it well, there was nothing of any note that they could add. Even as they were working, speech patterns, and therefore thought patterns and patterns of feeling were rapidly changing. Ours has been a century of rapid change, and if literature is to have any meaning beyond the museum, it must keep developing. To compare the prose style of Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room (1922) with Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (1923) is an exercise in astonishment. Looking now, with hindsight, we can see at once which book is modem, that is to say which style proved the right equipment to put into words that which was only just bubbling into collective consciousness.

That is what I mean when I talk about exceptional sensibility. The true artist does have a kind of early warning system, an immanence that allows him or her to recognise and make articulate the emotional perplexities of his age. Writers who seem to sum up their time are writers who have this prescience. It is not that they make better documentaries than the rest, this is where the realists miss the point, it is that they make better poems. The emotional and psychic resonance of a particular people at a particular time is not a series of snapshots that can be stuck together to make a montage, it is a living, breathing, winding movement that flows out of the past and into the future while making its unique present. This fixity and flux is never clear until we are beyond it, into a further fixity and flux, and yet when we read our great literature, it seems that it was clear, at least to one group of people, a few out of millions, who come to be absolutely identified with their day; the artists.

Art does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.

Although the major Modernists soon made unblockable inroads into the literary tradition it was inevitable that their purity of purpose would be questioned. The Bloomsbury Group attracted a vengeful type of pseudo-criticism that confused the writer with the work and caricatured both. Art for Art’s sake, which was really the chant of Marinetti and the Futurists, stuck to those writers and other artists who seemed stubbornly determined to put the Muse first. The young men (and I do mean men) who were the younger generation in the 1930s, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, were either Communists or Socialists who passionately believed in a truly popular art. The ivory tower was under siege.

In fact, the stake-out between Ivory Tower and Red Square was no more real than the apparently conflicting claims of Society and the Muse. While avidly reading and· not disputing the innovations of their elders, the new young men wanted to write for the working classes. What they forgot was that the working classes didn’t want to read them. As a member of the proletariat myself, I can confirm that there is nothing drearier than the embrace of a bunch of Oxbridge intellectuals who want to tell you that art (theirs) is for you. The express view of the highbrow Modems was cleaner: take it or leave it. What they knew, and what the eager young men of the Thirties reluctantly came to know was that it is not possible to produce a living literature that includes everyone unless everyone wants to be included. Art leaves nobody out, but it cannot condescend, we have to climb up if we want the extraordinary view.

Ours has not been an easy century for art. At times, to talk about it at all has seemed crass. Two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s cut short those experiments in language and in thought that human beings perpetually make and perpetually need.

For myself, in the literature of my own language, I can find little to cheer me between the publication of Four Quartets (1944) and Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967). Of course I am cheered by Beckett and by Pinter and Orton and Stoppard, but they are dramatists and, with the exception of Beckett, the solid body of their work comes out of the 1960s, as does that of Adrienne Rich.

Robert Graves has·soldiered on, pledging deep allegiance to his lover-Muse and now that he has been dead ten years, we see how right he was to go his silly stubborn way and retire to get on with his work. The social conscience lobbies of the Forties and Fifties, including those Angry Young Men, have not won nearly so well, and it seems that they had not nearly so much to say.

The 1940s and the 1950s seem to me to be a dead time, in my terms because the anti-art response, Realism, bounced back again in a new outfit but wearing the same smug expression. I would hazard that a really good writer, like Muriel Spark, was handicapped by her period. Miss Spark does not want to be a Realist, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie should confirm that, and yet a Realist she has been, and what a pity. Iris Murdoch might have been something else (see The Black Prince), and might yet (The Green Knight) but I do not worry too much about her. I do not worry about Kingsley Amis at all.

I would have thought that the rise and rise of TV and film would have entirely satisfied our ‘mirror of life’ longings. The screen large and small can do perfectly what the ordinary Victorian novel could do, which is why adaptations of same work so well. Adaptations of Dickens do not work well because what gets lost is everything that really matters; language.

As the relationship between reader and writer continues to change, it might be worthwhile to ask what it is that we want from one another. If the reader wants the writer to be an extension of the leisure industry or a product of the media, then the serious writer will be beaten back into an elitism beyond that necessary to maintain certain standards; it will be an elitism of survival and it is happening already. Writers are fighters, they have to be, because to begin with, they are the people who must stand up for their own work, but must they continually be called to defend not only their. own work but the very concept of art? Even to use the word ‘art’ is to provoke a response either quizzical or violent. If there is no such thing, do we mean that there never has been any such thing, that there is no such thing now, or the writer who is fool enough to use the word simply does not understand it?

We seem to have returned to a place where play, pose and experiment are unwelcome and where the idea of art is debased. At the same time, there are a growing number of people (possibly even a representative number of people), who want to find something genuine in the literature of their own time and who are unconvinced by the glories of reproduction furniture.

To those people I ask this: that their relationship with their writers should be a direct one, the agency of the book is their common ground, and the only way into a piece of literature is through the front door - Open it. Once there, if the arrangement of the rooms is unfamiliar and the fabric strange, reflect that at least it is new, and that is what you say you want. It will be too, a world apart, a place where the normal weights and measures of the day have been subtly altered to give a different emphasis and perhaps to slide back the secret panel by the heart. Check that the book is made of language, living and not inert, for a true writer will create a separate reality and her atoms and her gases are words.

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justanoldsoutherngirl · 6 years

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Insatiable...or as I like to call it “life in the south”

I watched the Netflix series Insatiable last week. And rewatched it again this week..Ok, maybe not watched...inhaled might be a better word. I have never had Netflix and decided that since my friend, Bill Alverson was the Producer and it had Alyssa Milano in it I really needed to see it. After all, I have always loved Bill’s wicked sense of humor and his flair for the dramatic; and Alyssa, well during my Charmed years I could relate to her, and her relationship with Cole (who hasn’t fallen in love with a very bad boy). And I watched it because there were critiques online saying it was fat shaming...so of course, being a chubby southern girl I decided to see what was up.

I started watching the first episode and immediately thought, this is what it would be like if Hairspray, and Pretty in Pink, met up with Desperate Housewives, and then they all meet up with Dark of the Moon, and they all join Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in THE SOUTH! What’s not to love about it? First, Patty (Fatty Patty played by Debby Ryan, from THE SOUTH) gets in a fight with a drunk guy outside a convenience store after he insults her and tries to take her candy bar. OK...been there done that. Do not get in the way of me and my Peanut Butter Cups or Three Musketeers! I will hit you! And, of course, due to the fight, her jaw is wired shut and of course she loses weight, and of course becomes a hottie. Actually, yeah...this makes sense right? Girls disappear over the summer and sometimes all of a sudden become hotties, usually due to hormones and not having their jaw wired shut. Those of us who never managed to actually have this particularly special summer, well...we were super jealous of those that did!

In comes Bob Armstrong, a lawyer who does pageant coaching on the side (or who used to. That is another whole story and I won’t ruin the series for you!). But clearly having grown up with Bill, Bob is Bill...and Dallas Roberts (another cast member from THE SOUTH) is PERFECT! You may remember Dallas from Walk the Line as Sam Phillips, or Dallas Buyers Club as David Wayne (as Ron Woodruff’s defense attorney), or in The Walking Dead as Milton Mamet. Frankly, in Insatiable, Dallas reminds me of Bill and a very young John Ritter (drool).

Bob Armstrong is married to Coralee Huggens-Armstrong played by Alyssa Milano (who has too many films/shows to mention!) and while not from the south has a great southern accent (Brooklyn, the coastal south...not too far away really due to the drawl and the non-rhoticity!). Coralee is the epitome of the white-trash southern trailer park girl gone gorgeous/wealthy and trying to become a member of the Junior League. Growing up in the south there were quite a few of those.

As a former member of a Junior League (yep...it is pretty funny to realize that I was in a Junior League and have the paper to prove it!), I will never forget a member insulting me and saying that I shouldn’t be in there (she was later charged with embezzlement). A dear friend told her, “well...you gotta remember her momma and her aunt were in it, and her aunt was the President. So she stays!”

I digress...the fat shaming is at the very least, low on the priority list in Insatiable. The south has this very dichotomous relationship with food...we insist you eat, eat, eat...think Jewish mother stereotype, and then at the same time try to get you, especially as a female, to maintain your weight and appearance. I don’t feel like it is fat shaming, it is the south. Hell, we are brutal on people who are too skinny too! In other words, we can be equal opportunity offenders of pretty much anyone or anything. To me Insatiable actually brings all of these offenses out and puts them on display!

Such also is the whole religion crazy Miss Magic Jesus Pageant...reminiscent of a scene in Drop Dead Gorgeous with Denise Richards, dancing with a Jesus Crucifix statue singing, Can’t take my eyes off of you. Oh and let’s just say that DDG was highly acclaimed during its debut!

Clearly some are getting that this is a pure campy fun time! Daniel Schroeder recently wrote a piece on Slate “What all the critics misunderstand about Netflix’s Insatiable.” [https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/insatiable-netflix-review-critics-are-missing-its-camp-sensibility.html]. Lea Palmieri (@littleleap) agrees that the series tells you they are upfront, in the first few minutes and you can decide whether to stream or skip (she suggest streaming!). But, it is also clear that some are stomping on the series without having even watched it. Melissa Barnhart of Christian Post writes, Patty is called into Pastor Mike’s office (Michael Ian Black) with her father…yeah, it is Bob Anderson not her “father,” and Ms. Barnhart also notes the sexual connotations of a song during the Magic Jesus Pageant. Honestly? How is this any different from a “father-daughter” dance or virginity pledge ceremony? Are these also a little too crazy as well? Moreover, as a college professor I would give Ms. Barnhart an “F” for critical analysis of the film simply for not following the story line and understanding the characters!

And seriously people….for News Busters to comment on Bob’s effeminate behavior is pretty damming and shows their bias/discrimination toward gay men and toward effeminate heterosexual men as well! Bullying? Yeah. Many of us who grew up in the church in the Deep South know that our plays and musicals would totally suck if it weren’t for gay men in the church making sure that the sets were gorgeous, the costumes were appropriate, and the songs were perfected.

From a sociological standpoint there are numerous other topics covered. Why is no one talking about Dixie (an adopted child)? How Patty manipulates her best friend? Suicide? Oh yes…so many people were so angry over 13 Reasons Why instead of actually having conversations about suicide prevention. Coming out? Another reason why this show is terrific! Characters are coming out and embracing who they are…Nonnie, Bob, and the other Bob. In a way, even Coralee comes out, as white-trash…hello? Yeah…someone will be pissed I used the term white-trash. Whatever! Bullying? Revenge? Absolutely! Who hasn’t wanted to get revenge on people who made our lives miserable? And, sometimes we actually have a chance and we don’t take it because of social norm expectations! But, sometimes we do, “Bless her heart.”

This show is about life_ real life_ very messy, funny, crazy, presentation of life. I am also reminded of Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, of Berger & Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality, as well as the Aristotelian mimesis of art imitates life, and Oscar Wilde’s anti-mimesis of “life imitating art more than art imitating life.” Insatiable does a much better job at real life than soap operas (like Luke and Laura were living a real existence?).

You go Lauren Gussis for making the characters come to life...all of them. BULLYING HAS CONSEQUENCES and I truly believe this show brings that out in one of the funniest ways possible. Revenge is sweet...well sometimes it is sweet. And one friend told me “after I heard Patty say, ‘screw those bitches’ I was HOOKED!” Nice Deep South Southern Girl who goes to church agrees...and is hooked!

Critique it if you must, but you are missing life_ real life_ in all of its messiness. As my friend Paul Odom and I agree, we saw a lot of real life intertwined within the series, and recognized storylines that could parallel within our own growing up in the Deep South in a small town in junior high and high school.

#IheartInsatiable #reallifeismessy #growingupintheDeepSouth #highschoolangst #sociologythemesinNetflix #cantwaitforInsatiableSeason2

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