16-Nov-91 18:34:43-GMT,17413;000000000001 Received: from athos.rutgers.edu by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA20943; Sat, 16 Nov 91 13:26:29 EST Received: by athos.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) id AA21728; Sat, 16 Nov 91 13:26:27 EST Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 13:26:27 EST Message-Id: <9111161826.AA21728@athos.rutgers.edu> Errors-To: owner-ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu From: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@athos.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #49 ecto, Number 49 Saturday, 16 November 1991 Today's Topics: *-----------------* lots misk Off to LA/Carrie like experiences ectopolis ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 2:36:57 EST From: jessica Subject: lots About Sarah McLachlan: the new album "Solace" *is* on nettwerk (sp?) in canada - I tihnk Arista is just who is supposed ot market it here in the US. I *am* jealous over the snow. i *love* snow, even when it causes inconveniences. inconveniences and harships are good for the soul. :) and i just don't live in a very good area for it. (the past couple of years, anyway!) I'm sorry about some of the recent digests having strange things like messages twice, and mistakes with From: ... With the list being so busy lately it's been all i can do to just send the digests out! I haven't had a chance to read the messages before sending them in a couple of days.. I don't mind at all, of course, this warm fuzzy blue list is just wonderful! Someone asked about archiving, ftp area, etc... I'm working on it.. the reason nothing's gone up there since september some time is just a lack of legitimate disk space on athos's ftp disk. I'm tihnking of alternatives.. I may end up having to have it all on another machine. greg "boomdidwanafootah"s. heh. vickie wonders if the peach is from the kate picture from The Sensual World, Kate holding a peach. yepyepyep. That's what made me decide on a peach, anyway. I knew it would be a fruit from the thing that gave me the idea of it being on my rear end in the first place. martin asks if i'll scan it in... well, you just never know, just two years ago a photocopy of my rear was posted on the walls of Hill Center... (don't ask.. if you do, i just might tell you) There's been a few posts about carrie.. After meredith's letter in response to my questions, I wrote a bit of a long response, but it wasn't something I could post - it was written from a completely different viewpoint, that of how my thought processes go, and why. A lot of the points i made that i *could* have posted have already been mentioned by various people here, but they've just made me want to post them all the more. So i'm going to attempt it... If you're not interested in the SK/Carrie talk, don't read on. first, alan said: > I didn't like carrie for many reasons, but one of them was that the > character sketches were so vivid and 'realistic' that they made me feel > physically ill at times. Ok, now lets see how i can hack up what i wrote...: (apologies for it not flowing very well. there's a lot missing.) [Meredith recounts the story told to her family by her aunt.] I react: anyway, firstly i woudln't put as much importance on the stories of other people's experience with a person. It's hard to explain why, but *I* don't do it in practice. I truly trust only the conclusions i've come to myself. [Her mother's reaction to Carrie (throwing it away)] though i admit it's natural to especially respect the opinions of one's parents, so the story of her mother throwing away "Carrie" - i can see how that'd be a harder one to get around. [The aunt asks the class why we write, SK responds "to make money"] I happen to think that's one of the best answers, and certainly a very valid one. At least every writer i've known personally who i take seriosuly, who i beleive takes _writing_ seriosuly, writes for many reasons, and one of them is certianly to make money, and that is to me no less valiant (or wahtever :) than doing anything else for a career. it's very intelligent, in a way, it shows to me a person who's thought a lot about life in general, about how it all works, about society, and the things he wants and how to get them. I'd imagine King's thoughts were along the lines of "I love writing, and I ithnk i'm good at it. I need to be able to make a living in order to live the way i've been raised to expect to live. A career is neccssary. I tihnk i'm a good enough writer to write as my carreer, and to make money doing it." It seems a very well-thought out sort of thought for a kid in the 11th grade. Even if he said it very flippantly!!! Especially a person in that situation might say such a thing with a bit of a goofy grin on his face, probably mainly because he knows the reaction it'll have and he finds it quite amusing, because he thinks he knows more about it all than the people who are reacting the way they are. [Neither she nor her mother gets past the beginning of Carrie because it's quite horrific. ] Stephen King did not become my favorite author after reading carrie. It wasn't at any one specific point but after having read a lot of his work and gaining a lot of respect for him. But one thing about carrie *did* make an impression on me, a very strong impression. It's the same tihng that i imagine horrified meredith and her mom. Only while it did horrify me, i was not offended by it, i was intrigued. in carrie, he writes about a girl who's mom is so entirely screwed up that the poor girl has some very strange and deep misunderstandings or lack of understandings, and simply very *different* undestandings than the rest of her classmates. When she gets her first period, she is in the shower at school and she is *terrified*. She thinks she may be bleeding to death. if not that, then she's being punished in a very severe way. King writes those scenes with an intense honesty about how she feels and what she's going through. and he shows us her mother and the relationshp between she and her mom and the beginning of an understanding of what has brought the girl to the situation she's in. *I* got the feeling from carrie that king is quesitoning us, the readers "do *you* know anyone who's grown up this way? do you tihnk abotu it? are you aware of it? do you hide it away? do you deny it? how can you when this is what happens to people, when other people do what you do?" that kind of direct affront can, well, offend people). there can be many reasons why they'd react the way they do. perhaps they find it offensive because they honeslty deeply beleive such things can't happen, or perhaps the denial is strong enough for them to beleive so. (it depends what they've been exposed to growing up i guess). perhaps it's offensive becuase the denial isn't *that* strong, and it makes them feel a bit guilty, a bit dirty, themselves. a lot of people when confronted by something that questions them that way will react by calling it "trash". maybe it's offensive because king takes it pretty far. carrie's mom is messed up because she's got some powers she doesn't understand. it's been a long process to get her to the state she's in. her own mother probably treated her exactly as she treats carrie. (you don't get to know all that right away of course) carrie herself also has them (telekenesis i guess it is) and she doesn't understand them any better. she's afraid of herself, she's afraid of her mom, she's afraid of the world. she's got all the problems a normal child woudl have to deal with growing up and an utterly insane mother, and she's on her way to the same insanity inside herself. maybe i relate to the story well because i have seen a mother and daughter far too similar to what's depicted in the story, and i do know such things are possible. (I don't *know* however, that telekenesis is possible, but i don't know that it isn't either, so my thoughts on that dn't go one way or the other). but i know the *emotions* of the characters depicted *are* possible, that it *does* happen. -- that's all i can include from the original, but i'll add: I too, could relate pretty well to the character of carrie. i was extremely shy, very much a nerd in a lot of ways. very introverted, very unhappy most of the time. Circumstance mroe than anything simply made me the easiest target as "outsider" for most (all?) of my grammar school experiences. in grades 1-3 i was so far ahead of the class my teachers didn't know what to do with me, and they felt i intimidated the rest of the class so i wasn't often allowed to study with them. grades 4,6,7 were at a parochial school. each grade had about 8-15 students. they skipped me over 5th grade because i was (again) too far ahead of the rest of the class and they felt it woudl be better for everyone to move me into the 6th grade where at least i'd be doing *some* classwork with the class. I was the only non-catholic. I think that was a HUGE problem but i won't go into it. lets just say the students weren't on average terribly open minded, and being 2 years younger (I had started kindergarten a year early too) didn't help *anything*! 8th grade was fabulous scholastically - private school (Brooke Shields was a senior there that year) - but miserable again socially, they were all very rich, and my family wasn't doing that well (especially with paying for me to go there that year). My social skill weren't developed *at*all*, and i was plopped into a society where social skills are important from the start. for high school, my parents sent me to the local public high school because it turned out to be pretty good academically. (I shoudl also note that since the 4th grade (age 9) i'd lived in a town of about 75 families (not many of whom had children still living at home).) the high school was regional - large groups of students from 4 towns, within each group the students having known each other for the past 8 years of school, at least. There were very few people who didn't already have a "group" of friends. the groups intimidated me, and the few randoms didn't interest me. (they were nerdier than me!!! scary but true) then sophomore year i went nuts, and everything has been just fine, if not great, since. :) coincidentally, i tihnk that's about the year i read carrie. But seriously, another way in which i could relate to the character is having a bit of a crazy mom.. the entirety of my senior year of high school she was in a mental hospital. (don't get the wrong idea, she's not insane, really :) she was in the re-hab part of the hospital, for alcoholism. (I'm happy to be able to say she just celebrated her 5th year being sober!!!)) *anyway*, i did warn you, if you did read this far. :) And I tihnk I'll go off to sleep now. jessica || jessica || It is this that || Don't try to tell me there's no reason for || || lawrence || brings us || any moment in time, every memory of mine. || || koeppel || together. || Those years are lines of color on my face, || || dembski || --Kate || the past is warpaint. --Happy Rhodes || ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 10:14:18 CST From: vishal@ra.csc.ti.com (Vishal Markandey) Subject: misk For The Happy Tape, Jo Anna and I are considering a cover of PG and Kate's "Don't give up". While Jo Anna is an accomplished singer, I certainly am not :), so we'll have to see how it goes. Failing that, I will contribute something Gothic, such as The Sisters of Mercy's "Black Planet" or Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead". She may like that, IMHO Happy's stuff verges on the Gothic, and I mean that as a compliment. Thanks for the album cover poll info Vickie. I sent in the following (ranking them was most difficult):- Artist Album 1) Dead Can Dance "Within the realm of a dying sun" 2) Happy Rhodes "Ecto" 3) Kate Bush "The Sensual World" 4) Lene Lovich "Stateless" 5) Kate Bush "The Dreaming" 6) Happy Rhodes "Rearmament" 7) Patti Smith "Easter" 8) Depeche Mode "A Broken Frame" 9) Dead Can Dance "The Serpent's Egg" 10) Peter Gabriel "Passion" - V ======================================================================== From: kyrlidis@athena.mit.edu Subject: Off to LA/Carrie like experiences Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 11:35:08 EST Hi there, Phew, catching up with Ecto is so much hard work...It makes me wonder how my poor athena account will handle the loads of mail during the next 9 days I will not have access to it...I do have a large quota on an other system (I am systems administrator for it, so I set the quotas... he he!!). So nobody liked my logo...:-( Anyway, here is my (slight) alienation story: I was born in Athens Greece, but had the great privilege to be raised in Zambia, which is just to the north of Zimbabwe (Hi there!) when it was still Rhodesia. I was 2 years old when we got there, and since my father was working on the development of a new city (Kafue) we were stuck in the middle of nowhere for 4 years...My mother is a school teacher, and she gave greek lessons to kids and had to carry me around since baby sitting wasn't available. Well, I heard the same stuff over and over and over, so by the time we returned to Greece I was 2 years ahead of the schooling system, and I managed to enroll directly to the third grade. That was it. I was consistently 2 years younger than anybody else through my University years... There were several occasions where I felt left out, because I was younger than every one else. Spending the summers in Nigeria, where my father was transfered after Zambia, was also I guess, an alienating step, because I didn't have the chance to keep the friendships I had made during the school year...except for Efi, who was always there and going through the exact same things I was going through. There goes the fuzzy-blue ecto feeling...:-) I think there should be an ecto-bio, ecto-birthday, ecto-trauma, ecto-sk, ecto-sf, etc categorization... just like the gaffa splitting Vickie suggested :-) :-) :-) Did you know that Ecto means sixth in greek? And that both components of the word ectoplasm are greek? Angelos +=====================================+ |'My ears have parasites'-hApPy RhOdEs| +=====================================+ ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 Nov 91 11:58:47 EST From: woj@remus.rutgers.edu (woj) Subject: ectopolis @cdp.igc.org:S.A..Ezust@p38.f1.n721.z5.Fidonet.Org (S.A. Ezust) sez: [re drukman and kaspell] >Ok... so it's not your fault. I still am eternally grateful to you for >the act, however, and nothing you say will ever make me forget it! :-) >Is Jon Drukman on this list? Why are you shifting the blame on him anyway? >Is he one of the gaffa-ites who ectonians can't stand or something? What's >going on? not shifting the blame - the decision was mine. i just thought it inter- esting that his comparison of edward and happy was the catalyst. you see, alan, jon was sent a tape of happy by vickie so that he would give it a try (at that time, happy-talk was making up a large chunk of the traffic in gaffa and people were getting antsy). jon basically was not impressed. he had a few things to say (the aforementioned comparison) and left it at that. it was a most interesting review as well (does anybody still have it online somewhere?). [sarah mclachlan] >So maybe it is just the US distribution deal that got cut, but not the >Canadian release of the cd...? Anyone in Canada able to confirm this? >Nettwerk is still alive and well, I think... as far as i have been able to tell, the american one is the hosed release. the canadian release has been out since sometime in, um, august, i think. i heard it over the summer when a friend of mine from canada visited. it's starker than the first. more minimalist, but her voice still carries the album. i'm waiting for the american release with baited breath. incidentially, sarah was asked to be the singer for moev once upon a time. that was back in 1985, i think, when moev was still on nettwerk. i think they settled on someone named kelly something,but i've forgotten her name. this was also before the band changed its sound. woj ======================================================================== To join ecto, please send electronic mail to the following address: ecto-request@athos.rutgers.edu To have your thoughts included in the next issue, send mail to: ecto@athos.rutgers.edu To subscribe to "Ecto", the printed fanzine, send $8 to: Ecto PO Box 11291 New Brunswick, NJ 08906 Ecto is issued 8 times/year, and will include photos and as much material from non-net members as we can get! Donations above the subscription cost are welcomed - all money goes to bringing you better issues! Your "humble pseudo-moderator" -- jessica (jessica@athos.rutgers.edu)