So I’ve been going through the blog archives of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and have been finding some awesome stuff. Awesome, in this case, means funny. Also, horrifying. See below:
The reason I showed you that was to show you this:
Which I think is a perfect example of how to interpret, analyze, and reformat a genre to one’s own ends.
Also, it’s funny.
As I’ve just warned Megan, my new form of exclamation from now until eternity will be Blammity blam!
Okay, picture this.
It’s called THE SCARLET SCHOOL FOR PROSTITUTES.
I’ve got you hooked right there, right? Right. But wait, there’s more.
In a world different from our own, either the future or the past, or on another planet entirely, there has been a disaster. The population has been reduced to the bare minimum. And so–
Wait, I’m going about this all wrong.
In a world where no one can love who they want, one girl rises up! Um…
Okay, so here’s the situation: In this world (or city — we’re not picky), we’ll call it Plantagenet, only a very few people have true rights. If you are a girl, then there is a chance — a very small chance, mind you — that when you grow up you’ll be chosen by a man of means to be his wife. If you’re a boy, you are pretty much out of luck. As soon as you are old enough to leave school, fully trained and in the flush of your youth, you are sent to tame the wilderness, or to complete menial, dangerous jobs, and you will probably die in a few years. Though their are rumors that not all the boys who disappear die…
In The Scarlet School for Prostitutes, the girls are taught everything they might need to know in life if they are chosen to marry, i.e. how to be a lady. But they are also taught the skills necessary to living in the Scarlet Schools, because that is where most of them will end up: first aid, diplomacy, self-defense, and midwifery, especially. Because there is no birth control, the Scarlet School become baby factories.
But one girl (who doesn’t have a name yet, because I haven’t gotten that far — okay, let’s call her Johanna) doesn’t want the life she’s been born to. She’s made friends with a boy, and when he’s sent away to the wilds or to clear the sewers of ravenous beasts, she begins to plan. She’ll seduce a man into choosing her for a wife, because then she’ll have the power to save her friend, but she ruins everything by getting pregnant, because if you become pregnant than you and your baby become property of the Scarlet School.
And that’s as far as I’ve gotten. What happens next? I don’t know except that it’s the end of the world as Johanna knows it.
Would you read it?
of saying anything really important anymore on this blog. If I think too much about it — whether “it” is writing, thoughts about a book, movie, etc., or people (you know who you are) — then I write nothing.
Instead, here is this:
Which is to say that I mostly pretty much love the Scissor Sisters. Their videos end up (again, mostly) being strange and expressive and experimental and interesting. It doesn’t hurt that they often have good hooks (or that the band members, when in the video, are awesome to watch).
This video interests me because it is pretty much clearly defined to be uncomfortable (in a way that the song it’s illustrating was never meant to be). Who are these kids, where is this school, and who thought this would be a good idea? (The answer: Clearly the woman playing the piano.) Of course, I say that, but I would’ve loved to be in a school where this is the sort of theatrical presentation that was put on. And I say that partly because the whole exercise is so overtly theatrical. Look at that blood! The car! We’re watching anti-realism! Brecht and Artaud are alive and well and in elementary school.
Lastly, even though a large part of what charms me about this video is the clear awkwardness of the kids (and the clear fun they are having) that one kid in the back near the end clearly knows how to dance.
That is the title I’ve given to this picture (actual title unknown):
Hannes Bok
I found out about the writer (and artist, see above) Hannes Bok through Lin Carter’s book on the history of fantasy Imaginary Worlds. I’d bought that book to read during my seclusion in Wyoming last year because I was trying to enhance my “academic” background for all the SF&F reading that I do.
No, that’s not it. The reason I was reading it was because I am fascinated with critical studies and reviews, especially of genres that are typically on the fringe of those being critically studied and reviewed. Even more so, I’m fascinated by such studies and reviews that are written by authors in said genres (such as the glorious The Jewel-Hinged Jaw by Samuel R. Delany, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder, James Blish’s criticism written under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr., and the book I have yet to read (having just received it) by Michael Moorcock titled Wizardy & Wild Romance).
Lin Carter’s book is not a very rigorous or even very critical study of fantasy, history or otherwise. And yet it is a wonderful resource for fantasy that you may have never heard of from the late 19th c. through the early 20th c. Some of that fantasy is deservedly unknown — the writing is poor and the characters weak and etc., etc. — but all of it is interesting when taken as a history, of each novel being a step in the evolution of the genre (evolution in this case meaning transformation rather than a “getter-better-ness”). For example, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land is amazing in so many ways — even if reading through the central part of the novel is a struggle — partly because of the way it is told, and partly because of the world Hodgson creates, so mysterious and epic and, well, reading just past the first chapter will show you why Lovecraft admired the book so much.
Hannes Bok’s The Sorcerer’s Ship is not a greatly written novel, but it has a lot that a student of fantasy can take from it. The world that Bok creates is deliberately small, almost minor in both scope and creative breadth (especially when he gets into describing the cities), but the way he approaches that world is what makes the book interesting. At various points he ends up trying to explicate what is going on, but the explanations provided simply make the story all the stranger.
Maybe that’s evident in his artistic work, such as the drawing above. The human sailor grounds the picture in some sort of reality, but what reality? Everything that is recognizable about the drawing makes the story its telling as a whole less comprehensible. And is that what I want out of writing? Incomprehension?
No, I want the wonder. I mean, how can you not look at the expressions on the man and the cat and not wonder? And that wonder, more so than any answer Bok could give us as to what they’re discussing, that’s what makes a story live.
There’s a show called Off the Air. You should watch it. Watching it is quite easy. All the episodes are available in ten-minute chunks on YouTube. Ten-minute chunks because that is how long they are. The episodes.
I’m not sure why I’m talking like this. Perhaps it is because I am in need of a soul.
Anyway. This show on YouTube that is also on TV somewhere. I don’t know where because I don’t have TV. I have a TV. Somehow, it isn’t the same.
Anyway. This show is strange. It is many different elements stitched together by a madman. Or a scientist. Or a brilliant child. Watching Off the Air is mind-threatening.
On that show there was a clip of a music video. That music video was so arresting that I was compelled to search it out. The results of that search are below. Watch them. Watch it. Realize that you are both the consumer and the consumed.
I am a producer of things to be consumed. I am trapped in an infinite loop. I do not like the beach. There is no hope for me.
Every time I watch this video, it makes me cry.
The question I ask myself, I suppose, is why. What is it about the broken-up timeline that makes the video so effective? Why would it not be as effective if told in a straightforward fashion?
I think the answer has to do with our ideas of narrative. The truth is that even in a situation like theDead Island trailer, even when the timeline is broken, we (i.e. viewers & readers & well, just human beings) can’t help seeing a narrative. We can’t help seeing each segment in the order its given to us and making that into a coherent story.
Look at it this way, if the trickery with time was taken out, strictly, for the whole mini-movie what you would see are a few shots of the family as they arrive (what happens at the very end of the video), then the daughter running from zombies, the parents trying to save her, the daughter turning, attacking the father, and everyone overrun with the final shot being the zombified daughter falling to the ground. What would that leave us with? The futility of life? A short story replaying events we’ve seen nigh a thousand times in zombie narratives? What’s theactual story?
But the way that the movie plays out now, there’s a clear story, a clear focus. Sure, zombie stories pretty much always end the same way (excepting outliers like Shaun of the Dead): everyone dies. This is no surprise. But what the trailer highlights is the humanity we watch zombie movies for — the struggle against the inevitable, and the love (and humanity) that drives that struggle forward. What’s the last shot? Where are both timelines coming together? The father and the daughter reaching out for one another, in hope and love.
Most of my stories (and novels) don’t have what you (or I, for that matter) would call happy endings. That’s because I don’t care about the ending. The ending doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens along the way, both the struggle to overcome and the struggle to hold onto our humanity while doing so.
But horror is only interesting to me for the beauty it reveals. And beauty is only as interesting as the world it stands out against.
