Friday 9 November 2012

Mindset Cafe: 2012-11-09

On this week's menu, the woman who broke into a house and cleaned it, women's literary awards, literary horror and a strange story of a man-eating leopard.


Stories for stories

This is too good for words... a woman broke into a house, cleaned it and left a bill. All this story needs is a dead body or a ghost. Perhaps the woman could have a pair of wings and a pink tutu. According to a report, thousands need housing in NY state. What happens to ghosts that inhabit homes damaged in disasters? The workplace regularly shows up in horror shorts and dystopian stories of various lengths. Normally, the subtexts are inability to keep up with the workload, stress and colleagues who are stranger than they normally are. Don't worry, help is at hand with a range of pharmaceuticals and technology although it has scientists worried.

Reading and writing

Organisations in Canada and Australia are launching women's literary awards, noting that women don't rank equally in numbers of winners. The intent is worthy, but here's something to think about. Awards are granted by judges, so to change the substance of the awards, change the judges. Sometimes awards follow a rigorous decision template that may be biased. That can be changed as well. The awards seem to do both of these.

On a related strand, literary writing offers the activity of unravelling the interior monologue. It's a thing for highly skilled readers (and sometimes a way for people to demonstrate their intellectual credibility). Some of them are more difficult than others.

Aaaaannnnd sttttiiiiiiiilllll in the li-li-li-literararary strand

On the topic of a post shared by RJ Cavender, someone by the name of Stuart Kelly blogs on the Guardian that horror needs literary upliftment.  (Judging by the tenor of the article he isn't talking about 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'.)

I quite like horror because of its lack of affectation and its focus on the commercial plot rather than the literary plot. The thought of a stream-of-consciousness horror novel in the style of Joyce fills me with unstructured thoughts in advance of its arrival. Goodness knows what Sartre would do with the monster under the bed... take it to a cafe and talk it into submission with an endless discourse about the impermanence of everything including the bed, over a bottle of wine cadged from Simone de Beauvoir?

Good commercial fiction pays the bills for literary fiction in the traditional publishing model. Great yarns need to be preserved without the ravages of intellectual exclusivity or critics will be out of jobs faster than Lehman Brothers filing clerks were. Think about that. Still don't get it? It's probably a reader choice thing. "Just frighten the sh*t out of me or at least put in an honest effort. I'll pay for that."

There is also unrecognised merit in the speculation of the new genres of fairy punk, mythpunk, magic realism, new weird (where China Mieville actually belongs) and others. Where did this stupid 'genre fiction' term come from anyway? It's speculative fiction, not Louis L'Amour or Barbara Cartland.

While we're here, I recognise the disturbance caused by racism and prejudice that is mentioned in the blog post. Lovecraft is singled out as a culprit. It's a difficult thing. Was it an attitude that was allowed in the context of the period and what would his attitude have been today? I'm currently reading Umberto Eco's 'Prague Cemetery'  which is troubling in its portrayal of naked antisemitism although it is necessary to convey a fictionalised account of the forging of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. How also should I approach Othello and the Merchant of Venice? Do they escape that ugly stain on the basis of literary merit? Difficult.

Aaaarghh! If I really need self-improvement, ennoblement and upliftment, I'll watch 'Fight Club' again.

And very last in this section, yet another paper apologist asks the question with the predictable answer of whether paper should survive?  Sorry buddy, it just can't unless you are as rich as these celebrities with really lustworthy library space. Unfortunately, in my house we're running out of space for double rows now. E-readers save space.

Mother Nature and other terrifying things

Human impact on the environment is normally seen as a current thing or in the near future. An interesting BBC series takes this a step further with looks at what will be left of our cities and fossils of the future.

And finally...

A leopard is suspected of eating 15 people.  This story defies belief. In Namibia, the normal way to get attacked by a leopard is to play with a tame one or to catch a wild one, tie it down and shove your hand down its throat.


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