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

[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.)