From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #73 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Tuesday, April 4 2000 Volume 02 : Number 073 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: stillpt-digest V2 #72 ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] Re: stillpt-digest V2 #72 ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] Re: b/Upcoming New Episodes (mild spoilers) (now W/T) [allenw ] Brendon Live! [Greg Cox <104076.2724@compuserve.com>] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 09:27:25 -0500 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: Re: stillpt-digest V2 #72 Don writes, > Let's perform a thought experiment. Suppose there were a fantasy set > in New York City (setting aside the fantasy element for the nonce) > where the scenes take place 1) in the Russian Tea Room 2) on > Celebrity Row at a Knicks game 3) on the set of the new Woody Allen > movie 4) in the club where Allen plays clarinet every week. > > Urban fantasy? Suburban fantasy? Something else entirely? It's "glam". Or "glitz." This is a recognized market already well-defined. If it contains a fantasy element, then it's possibly urban fantasy, but unless I see some grit in here I'd say it's really just "glitz with fantasy." > (And what =about= =Dhalgren=? Again, it represents the lifestyle of > people who exist, although again a very small number.) You're on your own there, Ken. I couldn't get forty pages into =Dhalgren=. > Let's also note here that it is possible to write "urban pastoral," > looking no further than Peter Beagle's =A Fine and Private Place=; > not to mention the New York scenes in Crowley's =Little, Big= which > are at times =literally= pastoral. No, they're not. Crowley's city is still the city of dreadful night, it's just Niced up for the purposes of his narrative, because he was writing a Nice book. It's the city of dreadful night as reported for the sensibilities of a suburbanite fairy tale. Tried to read -Fine and Private Place- and never finished it. It didn't grab me. Ken? Comment? > Jennifer: If you set a fantasy in your backyard (about crows, say) > is that urban fantasy or suburban fantasy? How would you describe > the genre of =Trash, Sex, Magic= for that matter? A fantasy in my real back yard with my crows might be suburban fantasy, depending on the TONE. The crows themselves don't set the tone, unless I endow them with human emotions and keep the humans out. The back yard is totally suburban. If the TONE of the story is gritty, asphalt-jungly, and the humans display the manners of city people toward strangers, then it's urban fantasy. Think Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler with fantasy elements; Lin Carter. If =all= the characters are close buddies, then it belongs to a suburban genre, or more likely whatever genre title they give to chick-flick novels about girlfriends in Manhattan. Olivia Goldsmith writes those, and they're "women's fiction" plus "glitz" (since her characters are fashion designers and movie stars lunching at the Russian Tea Room etc.). Putting fantasy in doesn't make it gritty. Christopher Moore's =Bloodsucking Fiends= is urban fantasy because it's about the things about the city that are scary, chaotic, indifferent human cruelty in a densely populated area. Even his funniest bits in that book--the ones with the night stockboys in the grocery--are urban because they can't be imagined happening in a suburban grocery. (Even if those things DO happen here, we suburbanites deny it!) =Trash= is in the "regional" genre; that is, Faulkner that happens to take place by accident near Chicago. > What bothers me about this line of reasoning, in the end, is that > legislating degrees of "grit" =as a delegitimizing move= smacks > uncomfortably to me of the kind of reverse class snobbery Greg > Feeley is so prone to [if you don't know who Greg Feeley is, never > mind]: the idea that only the working class has a true grasp of > reality. I ain't legitimizing or delegitimizing nothin'. I'm talking about market niche. How you sell the book to the person who will love it the most. Letham's =Gun W/Occasional Music= was urban fantasy. =War for the Oaks= was not. > This approach, it seems to me, would lead quite logically to an assessment > of =Buffy= as "suburban" as well; after all, quite contrary to some > observers' claim that it's the "most realistic" depiction of teens on TV, > the fact that it doesn't really deal with, oh, drugs or racism or AIDS or > teen pregnancy makes it distinctly less "urban" or "gritty" or "where it's > at" than, say, =NYPD Blue=...or even =Bevery Hills 90210=. Yes. That's what makes Buffy BRILLIANT. She's suburban. Her town (school) is big enough that all the "main" people are known--the important people, the cool people, the movers and shakers--and yet there's always some new demon-kid coming in who makes the team, some nerd off in a corner building Frankenstein's monster. The wonderful message from Buffy for the =suburban= audience is: Suburbia is hell! High school in suburbia is hell! Affluent adolescence sucks! Semipastoral plastic safety is unsafe! > Which seems like specious reasoning to me. We're talking about =fantasy= > here, which is =primarily= about =inner= experience; outer experience, > especially specific details of outer experience, are of much lesser > importance (not no importance, admittedly). Nonsense. The function of fantasy, science fiction, and especially horror, is to externalize and shew literal metaphors of inner experience. What I'm complaining about is "bland" stuff, so-called urban fantasy with no bite. > =Buffy= deals honorably and > responsibly with themes like love and death and heroism and loyalty, and > that's quite "real" enough for me, thank you. No argument. But Buffy without monsters wouldn't be Buffy, would it. > One is perfectly welcome to not take an interest in upper-class (my > hypothetical example above), middle-class (=War for the Oaks=, =Buffy=), > or homeless-class (=Dhalgren=) fantasy...but one's lack of interest in > them doesn't =automatically= mean they're worthless. Of course they're not worthless. > If someone would care to come up with a =positive= definition of what > "suburban fantasy" might mean and what it might have to say, I'm glad to > listen; but as far as I can see the term is purely negative and > exclusionary, and therefore (to me) as an argument about the genre it > tells us little of value. (Don's pissed off! I'm writing this in my diary.) I think Buffy is a fine example of suburban horror. (Not suburban fantasy.) =War for the Oaks= is suburban in tone--like a children's book, nothing too bad happens, and all the mean people are sent away. David Prill's =Serial Killer Days= is suburban horror. Diana Wynne Jones is always doing suburban fantasy--=The Ogre Downstairs=, =Eight Days of Luke=, =Archer's Goon=. Pinwater does a lot of it, =Alan Mendelssohn= and so forth. You'll notice that in Pinkwater the kids have to =leave= suburbia to have their coolest adventures. Pinkwater's =Snarkout Boys & the Avocado of Doom= is urban. His =Snarkout Boys & The Baconburg Horror= is sliding toward suburban. (I'm asking myself why...) ...I think I'm narrowing it down. o In suburban fantasy, you know almost everybody; all the players anyway, though there's sometimes a surprise villain or subhero who arises from the ranks of the "people we know but ignore" list. o In urban fantasy, the list of players is a lot smaller, and everybody else is coated with a light film that obscures them, like the filter urbanites put on one another: "prey" "predator" "bystander" "pod people filling up my subway car". o The tone of suburban fantasy is, Something bizarre is happening in my cozy little town. o The tone of urban fantasy is, This fucking city drives me crazy, and on top of that, today we got vampires! In =Avocado=, the weirdnesses of real city life mingle inextricawobble with actual fantasy elements. Also the heroes get several "native guides" --Rat and her uncle, the wrestler-uncle, the great detective--who startle them and upset them as much as they help. In =Baconburg= those guides have become scooby-gangers; there's not as much conflict --or as much -strangeness-. =Baconburg= is cuddlier somehow. I dunno if this helps. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 09:29:35 -0500 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: Re: stillpt-digest V2 #72 Cool stuff about the Maltese Falcon. I've always preferred =Red Harvest=. It's more experimental or something. Everybody dies, and by the protagonist's manipulation. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 10:18:41 -0500 (CDT) From: allenw Subject: Re: b/Upcoming New Episodes (mild spoilers) (now W/T) Long Post Warning: On Sun, 2 Apr 2000, meredith wrote: > Gail commented: >> allenw said: > ><< m > > o > > r > > e > > > > s > > p > > o > > i > > l > > e > > r > > s > > > > b > > e > > l > > o > > w > >> "New Moon Rising" is the big Tara/Willow/Oz episode. > > > > Moon suggests female energy (certainly has that symbolism in Wicca). > New > >suggests new. Willow's new romance seems to be rising. > > Right. I have also seen tidbits out there which say that Tara and Willow's > romance will become mainstage maintext in this one. (I'm already arming > myself for the uproar that's gonna cause on the Xena list when that happens!) Here's hoping. Strong rumor has Tara returning next season, which would imply further development; on the other hand, Joss' recent comments make me wonder if they'll have to maintain plausible deniability. An example, taken from the Bronze VIP Posting Board Archives (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~hsiao/media/tv/buffy/bronze/archives/): joss says: (Fri Mar 24 19:29:30 2000 152.163.197.64) Gettin' towards bailage time. Scarlettharlett, you think we've been tiptoeing? Sounded more like clogdancing to me. Did you see that spell? Do i have to "Spell" it out for you? (jokes like that, no wonder i'm a FAMOUS TELEVISION PERSONALITY). They're sweeties, no way around it. (unless you're little, and not ready for that concept, in which case they're BESTEST friends.) Joss to the contrary, I think that the key W/T scene in "Who Are You", the point where the dorsal fin of subtext first broke the surface into text, wasn't the orgasmic spell, but rather the "I am, you know" scene. Which, for anybody without a tape, but with a fast web connection, you can download (as a 3+ megabyte zipped MPEG file) from http://psycho.simplenet.com/fanfiction/browser.mv?video+way (and by the way, you can get complete transcripts for most Buffy and Angel episodes at http://www.psyche.kn-bremen.de/ ). Consider the scene: Cut to Tara's dimly lit room. Willow is laying on the bed, hands folded across her stomach. Tara is sitting on the other side of the bed reading tarot cards. Willow: I wonder where she is? Tara: Who? Faith? Willow: Yeah. I wish she would make a move. She's making my stomachall acidy. Tara: But you think Buffy can handle her? Willow sits up to face her. Willow: I think so. (worried) But that doesn't mean Faith won't hurt someone else. Tara: Well, you should be safe. Nobody knows you're here. I mean . . . they don't even know I exist, right? I know all about them, but. . . Willow: Hey. Willow puts a gentle hand on Tara's knee. Tara continues in a no big deal tone. Tara: I mean, I mean, th-that's totally cool. I mean, it-it's good. It's . . . it's better. But Willow can see through this. Willow: Tara, it's not like I don't want my friends to know you. It's just . . . well, Buffy's like my best friend, and she's really special. And . . there's this whole bunch of us, and-and we sort of have this group thing that revolves around the slaying, and-and I-I really want you to meet them. But I-I just kinda like having something that's just, you know . . . mine. Tara regards her silently for a moment. Willow: And I-I usually don't use so many words to say stuff that little, but (laughs softly) do you get it at all? Tara: I do. Willow takes a deep breath. Willow: I should check in with Giles, get a situation update. She gets up and rounds the bed to the other side of the room behindTara. Tara: I am, you know. Willow stops to face her. Willow: What? Tara looks over her shoulder at her. Tara: (meaningfully) Yours. Willow just smiles at this. Even shorn of the emotional nuances of Alyson Hannigan's and Amber Benson's performances, I'm hard pressed to call that scene anything other than 'text'. -Allen W. p.s. Grad Day 2 tonight! I can finally get an off-the-air tape! Superstar Tuesday! ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:17:18 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/suburban? As a person with a long-standing interest in the classification of literature ... First of, of course, books are what they are. All we're discussing is the boxes we keep them in. Those boxes must be labeled on the basis of how we sort the books: it's no good labeling the boxes first and then seeing if anything fits. (The technical term for the concept I'm trying to put across here is "literary warrant".) And, of course, the boxes have to be relabeled from time to time, even retroactively. There was no such thing as "genre fantasy" when Tolkien wrote _The Lord of the Rings_, for instance, but there sure is now, and that book sure is it. I'd maintain that, in the same sense, there was no such thing as "urban fantasy" over 20 years ago (though there were some books that would later be called that). So I have no theoretical problem with a developing distinction between "urban" and "suburban" fantasy. But I am not at all convinced that Jennifer and Ken have proven their case. The problem is that I see the gritty/non-gritty distinction as forced. Suburban _horror_ (as distinct from suburban fantasy) is out to prove that the suburbs can be just as gritty as the inner city, and a lot of urban fantasies have the warm enveloping quality to them that Jennifer finds characteristic of suburban fantasies: _War for the Oaks_ for one (don't tell me that's suburban: Minneapolis is a city, not a suburb, and the heroine is a street kid with the wariness of the pooka that you'd expect of such; she's not a suburban mall rat); _Wizard of the Pigeons_ for another (and if anyone says that's suburban, I give up). The books I would call suburban fantasies, if there is a difference, are ones like Linda Haldeman's, or Pamela Dean's. But actually I don't think the difference is significant. The important characteristic of what are generally called "contemporary urban fantasies" is the combination of their otherworld-fantasy attitude towards faerie with their contemporary, often _specifically identifiable_ locales. When they were new, what was most striking was setting that kind of a story (as opposed to a dark fantasy/horror story) in a locale with paved streets and cars and sometimes multi-story buildings and such: thus "urban". But that aspect of the locale wasn't the significant part, and many such books actually have rural settings (some of de Lint's, for instance, like _The Little Country_, not to mention Crowley's _Little Big_, which is a special case). But while otherworld fantasies, by contrast, _usually_ have rural settings, the rurality isn't the important part any more than the urbanness is the important part of the other. What's important is that the setting is (putatively) primary world, and how it's treated. Thus, I've been leaning more towards the term "indigenous fantasy" for all of this. If anyone wants to write about the comparative styles of various types of setting in indigenous fantasy, that could be interesting, but as of now I don't think that makes for subcategories. None of this is, I think, too relevant to _Buffy_. For one, _Buffy_ is horror, a different genre, and one with a well-established and very different way of dealing with the supernatural from what fantasy does. For another, the correspondence between Sunnydale and Santa Barbara isn't close enough in the roman a clef way to be at all like how indigenous fantasy usually deals with imaginary place-names. PS: Don, in a literary context, I would call the "working classes contain all wisdom" fallacy the D.H. Lawrence syndrome, rather than the Greg Feeley one: it has been around a lot longer than Greg. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 00:28:00 -0400 From: Greg Cox <104076.2724@compuserve.com> Subject: Brendon Live! Nicholas Brendon was a guest at I-Con this weekend, where he spent an hour onstage answering questions from the audience. Below are some vague spoilers gleaned from his performance..... / / / / / / / / / / Okay, according to Brendon himself.... 1) Xander will "grow up" a bit next season, becoming less aimless and whiny. 2) Seth Green will be returning for an episode or two, but that's it; he's not coming back to the show permanently. 3) At present, there are no plans for Xander to appear on "Angel" anytime soon, mainly because "Angel" is doing well enough that it doesn't need "Buffy" crossovers to boost ratings. 4) As far as Brendon is concerned, the Xander-Cordelia story has run its course and achieved closure. 5) There will be no cliffhanger this season, but the last batch of episodes will resolve the Adam storyline, with a final epilogue written and directed by Joss Whedon. 6) Joss hates the original movie, and is inclined to ignore it as much as possible (in response to a question about whether any characters from the movie--most notably, Pike--would ever make an appearance on the tv show). 7) He understands why the WB pulled "Earshot" the first time around, but thought that postponing "Graduation 2" was overreacting and could have been handled better. 8) And, yes, he knows all about the Giles/Xander slash fiction out there on the web..... Greg ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #73 ****************************