Reading Wednesday

[troisoiseaux]

Recently read

I finished Little Women! Not to rehash the entire debate I had about this point with my best friend last week, but on the whole question of Jo/Bhaer vs. Jo/Laurie vs. Laurie/Amy, I'm even more solidly on Team The Way It Worked Out In Canon for having re-read the actual storyline.

Something I noticed in the second half of the book was that both Amy and Laurie had scenes where they declared themselves finished with art and music, respectively, for a lack of natural genius.* Then, in the last chapter, it's shown that they've both returned to art/music on a casual (hobby?) basis— Laurie composes a song for Marmee's birthday, and Amy discusses a sculpture she's making of her baby daughter. I feel like there's a capital-O Opinion on Art in there somewhere, but I'm not entirely sure what it is...?

* Interestingly, Jo was the only one who didn't have a moment like this— the couple of times she steps back from writing (i.e. to preserve the Integrity of her Art because the only stories she was able to sell were ~sensational~ ones, and then at the end of the book, there's a line about how she still wants to write a great novel but for the moment, her priority is telling stories for the entertainment of her boys) are unrelated to the debate of talent vs. genius. I suppose you could read in this that Jo does have a natural genius for writing, which is amusing in the context of Jo as Alcott's self-insert character. 

Based off reviews by skygiants and rachelmanija, I checked out Elizabeth Hand's Wyldling Hall: in 1972, the frontman of a British folk-rock band mysteriously disappears from the ancient manor in the English countryside where they've decamped to record their second album. The story is told in the form of transcripts of interviews with the rest of the band and various involved parties - the band's manager, a music journalist and a girlfriend who had visited the band at Wylding Hall, a local who took photographs of the band's infamous last recording session - for a documentary investigating what happened that fateful summer, forty years before. Was it drugs? Ghosts? Ghosts on drugs?

For me, the spookiest parts were when the one guy stumbles into a room full of dead birds, and when Lesley goes into Julian's room after no one has heard from him in three days, to find an impossibly small spatter of blood and a bird thrashing itself to death against the locked window. I found the scene with the photographs, and the girl with too many teeth, less scary than I would have had I read it, say, at night before trying to fall asleep, as opposed to in the morning, over breakfast. It's hard to be properly creeped out when it's 7 am and you're shoving a bagel in your mouth, you know?

I also discovered that Libby has comic books/graphic novels, so I read Noelle Stevenson's Nimona and an adaption of The Adventure Zone podcast's "Here There Be Gerblins" arc. Both were very cute! I'd read Nimona back when it was a webcomic, so that made me super nostalgic for all the webcomics I followed in high school, and then I ended up listening to the entirety of TAZ's "Murder on the Rockport Express" arc while home sick on Monday.

Currently reading

The Trials of the King of Hampshire: Madness, Secrecy, and Betrayal in Georgian England by Elizabeth Foyster, non-fiction about John Charles Wollop, the 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, who in 1823 became the subject of "the longest, costliest, and most controversial insanity trial in British history."

To read next

In keeping with the theme of Weird Shit Goes Down In Rural England, my next-available hold on Libby is Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.

Comments

[sovay]

Not to rehash the entire debate I had about this point with my best friend last week, but on the whole question of Jo/Bhaer vs. Jo/Laurie vs. Laurie/Amy, I'm even more solidly on Team The Way It Worked Out In Canon for having re-read the actual storyline.

That's neat.

Then, in the last chapter, it's shown that they've both returned to art/music on a casual (hobby?) basis— Laurie composes a song for Marmee's birthday, and Amy discusses a sculpture she's making of her baby daughter.

I have not re-read the novel recently, but that sounds to me like a recognition that being a professional artist is not the only way to do art—and that you shouldn't stop making art just because it doesn't come with naturally gifted ease, whatever that means. It's not a Romantic view of art, but it feels in keeping with your point that Jo never agonizes over whether she has the talent to tell the kinds of story that she wants to, just whether she has the opportunity and the time. There's a lot more to art than being good at the thing.

[troisoiseaux]

There's a lot more to art than being good at the thing.

Yeah, that!

I actually spent a good chunk of the novel under the impression that she was actually arguing the opposite - Be A Natural Genius or GTFO - which I was really confused by because it didn't really seem to mesh with Alcott's other opinions (i.e. Jo's storyline) or the broader context of what I knew about her life, so by the time she gets around to resolving the "artistic endeavors of Amy (and Laurie)" storyline I was like, but what does it mean???

[kore]

It's really interesting because Alcott herself was surrounded by Natural Geniuses (Genii?) -- all male and supported by women mostly (Bronson, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, &c &c) -- and she was surrounded by women who fiercely wanted to Work and also had to work to support their genius men (in fact one of her first novels is called Work). She writes about Jo's (and her own) Gothic moneymakers with kind of tender mocking affection. But then later on she had to grind out sequels and collections to keep making money to support several extended families -- a lot like L.M. Montgomery a bit later on who had to keep writing and writing about Anne and then churn out other series. I've seen dozens of articles about how omg Terrible it was than Melville was condemned by poverty and non-recognition of his genius, but few tears are shed over however many women writers didn't have the privilege of sitting in a room along with their mss. while someone else ran the house and paid the bills. -- Anyway, so in her framework, if someone has actually put in time and work and concluded they don't have enough natural talent, turning their abilities to something else productive that can help other people only makes sense, with that particular New England work ethic.

(I've always found it kind of really touching that Louisa paid for May to study art abroad. Altho then of course May has to DIE, thank you 19th century male doctor hygiene standards.)

[slashmarks]

Yeah, I also was somewhat underwhelmed by the teeth moment in Wylding Hall vs. say the moment when.. was it Will?... was trapped on the stairs and something was being dragged up after him. Then I made the mistake of thinking about it while I was walking the dog alone in the middle of the night and it rapidly became several times creepier.

[troisoiseaux]

Oooh, yeah, that was spooky! That was one of the few moments where I felt like it was actually ambiguous if it was supposed to be supernatural or just, like, Drugs Are A Hell Of A Drug. (The sound of something dragging itself up the stairs behind him, though.... full body chills!!)

ETA: Also, for me, the descriptions of the girl in the photographs just felt too creepypasta-ish to be really effective... the guy who stepped on what he thought was a splinter or exposed nail and turned out to be A DISEMBODIED BIRD BEAK, though?? I physically recoiled in horror!

[kore]

Yeah, the photographs and teeth thing didn't work for me. There were very scary moments, but I kept thinking the story was too short for everything that happened in it.

[slashmarks]

Yeah, I actually got to the big moment when Julian vanishes and kept expecting something else to happen based on how much foreshadowing there is, so the end of the book came as a surprise. I wanted the book to be about twice as long and have about 2-3 times as much consequence and reaction and explanation for every creepy incident.

I just felt like they didn't coalesce into enough of a narrative for me to feel much about the story as a whole? Like, normally this genre of horror does benefit from not seeing the monster directly, but the glimpses we got all seemed to point in totally different directions and I wanted some sense of how they fit together.

[kore]

I wanted the book to be about twice as long and have about 2-3 times as much consequence and reaction and explanation for every creepy incident.

I just felt like they didn't coalesce into enough of a narrative for me to feel much about the story as a whole?

Yes! It felt very....sketched in, in a way. And I get that it was meant to be evocative and using the "never let the audience see the monster directly" technique, but sometimes that also leads to an all sizzle, no steak feeling. Like, Shirley Jackson can give me the screaming heebie jeebies by barely describing a supernatural picnic? (mostly by writing extremely evocatively about the sheer terror of the people fleeing from it). But she's a mistress of technique. -- It wasn't bad at all, just kind of underdone.

[slashmarks]

Creepypasta is a very good description of it? It felt like it was supposed to be this huge gotcha moment but there was so much set up for such a little thing that it just didn't work for me.

TBH I was also underwhelmed by the dead bird scene - I have dogs that like to pick up dead animals outside so my first thought ws more "Oh, god, cleaning that up would be so exhausting," and then I just couldn't get into it. I was really interested in the wren hunt photos though and a little frustrated by how little we found out about what the villagers knew.

[troisoiseaux]

It felt like it was supposed to be this huge gotcha moment but there was so much set up for such a little thing that it just didn't work for me.

I also feel like it kind of came out of nowhere, because there had been a very specific theme to all the creepy moments up until that point? In retrospect, I'm confused about where the story was even going with the bird theme, considering we got all these pieces of that particular puzzle - the song! the photographs in the pub! the walls carved with feathers and room full of dead birds! - but they didn't seem to fit in with either of the hints as to what happened to Julian (the wristwatch; the alleged sighting) at the end.

ARGH. I feel like this is one of those books that isn't necessarily frustrating while you read it, but then the more you think about it afterwards, the more confusing it becomes.

TBH I was also underwhelmed by the dead bird scene

Obviously, I know that not every reader will react to a book in the same way, but it's been cool to actually see that play out in the comments!

[slashmarks]

Yeah, the hints went in too many different directions to come without some kind of resolution putting them together. I guess the fact that I keep thinking about it and gnashing my teeth ("hunting birds out of season," WTF???) is certainly a kind of success, in that I can't stop thinking about it, buuut.

What did you think was going on in the sighting scene? I had NO clue.

TBF I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty horrified by stepping into a closet full of birds, this is just one of those moments when eg. the fact that my childhood best friend had a yard full of deer carcasses because her dogs dragged them in and played with them and ripped them apart becomes influential.

[troisoiseaux]

What did you think was going on in the sighting scene? I had NO clue.

........................vampire, maybe??? Vampires that turn into birds instead of bats?

TBF I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty horrified by stepping into a closet full of birds

Honestly, the part that made that scene stick-in-my-brain horrifying was less the actual room/discovery of it than the part where the guy thinks he's stepped on a nail or gotten a splinter, only to pull a tiny broken-off bird break oUT OF HIS FOOT. It's, like, the feeling of when you see something out of the corner of your eye that causes your fight-or-flight reaction to kick in even as your brain is processing that it's some mundane and harmless inanimate object.... but worse, because it's a thing you assume is mundane but is in fact creepy!!

[skygiants]

Aside from the photographs this was the other creepiest scene for me buuut that's also partly because the idea of endlessly running up stairs makes me recoil in physical horror, as in 'don't make me do it, i'm too tired, i'll just let myself be eaten and save everyone the trouble'

[rachelmanija]

Now I want to read a book about ghosts on drugs.

[skygiants]

I knew this phrase sounded familiar: https://ghostondrugs.com/Book.htm

[maplemood]

Nimona!! I read it a couple years back (in book form; I knew it'd started out as a webcomic but hadn't read it then) and liked it a lot. The story and characters both felt really poignant to me, and the art's beautiful, of course.

[troisoiseaux]

I remember having read it back when it was a webcomic on Tumblr (2012-13?) but going into this re-read, my memory of the actual storyline was hazy enough that the cover art led me to believe it would end in Sometimes A Family Can Be A Bad Guy, A Good Guy, And Their Half-Dragon Daughter found-family shenanigans. This... was not the case, but the story as it does turn out is so good that I can't be mad about it. :P

On a rather cheesy note: reading this both at... somewhere in the 15-17 range and then again at 23, Nimona's character design gave this moment of delighted recognition, like, she's shaped like me!! I do not have nearly as cool a haircut, though.

[maplemood]

They come so close to being a found family. So close!! And I mean, I guess in some ways they are, but not in the all-living-under-one-roof, tooth-rotting-fluff way I was totally prepping for when I read it. And Nimona's character design is so great; when I read the book I wasn't super familiar with graphic novels at all, and it was (I think) the first time I'd seen a girl character drawn with a body even remotely close to mine.