Writing, story, film stuff

Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth.

The Art of Opposition by Courttia Newland review – piercing essays on culture and creativity  The Guardian

The Red Mouth by Sheila Armstrong review – profound exploration of Ireland’s deep time  The Guardian

This vivid lyricism calls to mind other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, echo Baume’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Looking farther afield, the reading experience resembles that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns are set against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we are not up in the heavens, but down in the dirt. Just as with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth might bemoan the lack of dialogue or explicit plot. There are no big epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; new losses are accrued; mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, comes to realise, such is life: “things happen, one after the other, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints … uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, such uncertainty, so exquisitely rendered, is more than enough to sustain us to the end.

Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’ | Fairytales | The Guardian

In the tradition of Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Emma Donoghue and Helen Oyeyemi, Blackie wants to reclaim these stories from the Disneyfication of the past century. Many of the heroines in her books would rather throw a frog at a wall than kiss one, and are “very much more likely to rescue than be rescued”. The heroine’s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.

Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the “wise old woman” to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – “raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men” – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. “I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,” she says. “Why does nobody know about them?”

Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach (“old woman” or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. “A very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,” she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller’s daughter, whose father cut off her hands and must regrow them, are rich metaphors for her own story and for female narratives in general. Rebirth, transformation and renewal – the message of Blackie’s books is clear: be ready for “the Call”, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.

‘Barn Cat Proliferation’ by Caitlin Woodford – The Hemlock Journal - lovely story.

Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence by Ed Simon 

 The Enduring Power of Bro Language 

But "dude," "man," and "bro" are a specific type of vocative known as "familiarizers." Familiarizers mark a relationship as casual and provide social nuance beyond their attention-getting function. Their true power lies in how they help perform interactional work like signaling closeness or commiseration, expressing or softening disagreement, and managing conversational turns. Consider the different relational messages being delivered by the "bro" used in "Bro, you ate my pizza!" versus the one in "I love you too, bro." 

David Thomson On Cinema And America - by Andrew Sullivan (podcast) 

sch 7/23