From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #83 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Tuesday, April 18 2000 Volume 02 : Number 083 Today's Subjects: ----------------- theodicy & suburban stuff ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] Re: theodicy & suburban stuff [Todd Huff ] Re: b/comments4/16 [meredith ] b/spiritguides ["Donald G. Keller" ] Re: b/spiritguides [GHighPine@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 09:33:04 -0500 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: theodicy & suburban stuff Don writes, > I wanted to make clear to Jennifer that my pique on the question of > "suburban fantasy" was not directed at her (or Ken, really, either); > though she agreed with some of the points that were made, she > defended herself ably and made some interesting points (to which I > will return). But this issue is a sore point for me, and here's why. No offense taken. None given I hope. Honestly, theodicy is a question I can't relate to. Not reared in a society with royalty. Not even with upper class. In my home town we had people with money and people without money, but none of us had any class. The "real" lower classes, by which I suppose I would have meant (as a child) the two latino and one black families (both quite middle-class in income!) who passed almost invisibly through our community, didn't really exist for me. I had to go to New Haven to put hubby through Yale Drama School to meet someone from the upper class. Major surprise for me. > Jennifer: Before I start agreeing with you, let me ask you one > question: why does Crowley get a pass for writing Nice about the > City of Dreadful Night while Emma Bull does not? (Apart from the > fact that Crowley's a much greater writer.) I hope I'm not passing or failing anybody, but I realize I've got more patience for Crowley than for Bull in this department. (I'm reading Daemonomania in galley as we speak, and wow.) Briefly, his characters IMO suffer more. Fewer "tea parties." Tea parties is a term I would have inserted into the Clute encyclopedia: it means "points where all the good characters stop fighting evil for a while and sit around drinking tea and being nice to each other." Clute touches on this in his general term, "phatic fantasy." This happens in =Bone Dance= worse than =WftO=. The flavor of tea party pervades WftO, for me, whereas there are dark moments in =Little, Big= that stay with me as dark. That's my excuse for "giving Crowley a pass" anyway. I think the definition of the term "phatic fantasy", as it was described to me somewhat by third parties, is a little unkind. High modernist novels are also phatic in the sense that they reinforce and privilege an emotional tone and value system that the author fancies--merely, they indulge a different set of emotional postures. (See my rant below on modernism, Nicholas Freeling, and the "real".) > Oh, also: Lin Carter??? City of Dreadful Night. Or, oh shit, am I thinking of Fritz Leiber? Fafhard & the Grey Mauser. (god the conflations and mistakes in that sentence.) Anyway, people you don't know trying to kill you for trivial reasons. This doesn't happen in suburbia, not even in suburban horror. > And it makes sense to me that "suburban" is about a group of buddies > and "urban" is about strangers. (Though in some urban environments-- > New York is a particular case--groups of buddies do cohere. What's a > group of mobsters, after all?) Interesting question. Pack of wolves? Speaking of which, I would say that tho it takes place in some "second tier" city like Pittsburgh or somewhere, and even has one or two important scenes in wildnerness, =Wilding= is urban not suburban. > I think we can safely refer to this anti-theodicy, Feeley/Clute > attitude as "Leavisite." Not sure if I know exactly where Leavis stands, honestly. Is he kidding or isn't he? I've read many an impassioned diatribe from a young turk in black leather, denouncing "middle class mores" in a similar tone. I have to respond to this, proving possibly that I'm missing the whole point (per above): > The trouble with =Winnie- > the-Pooh= is that it constitutes a vast betrayal of Life...there is > not a single element in =Winnie-the-Pooh= that touches on real Life. > Not one character is from the Midlands, not one is of working-class > origin; and there is not even a coal-mine on the ideal landscape > where they jump and play...simply, there is no art but Life, and > there is no Life without Midland coal-mines... This is a guy who has the Modernist Disease. One of its primary symptoms is the assertion that all the things of his childhood, including lots of nice people growing up happily in relative safety, comfort, and even privilege, are not real. What's real for him is =solely= that which he learned for himself when he left home, and, reductively, =solely= that which contradicts the =emotional tone= of his childhood. Nicholas Freeling, in =Wolf Night=, writes a scene in which a multinational-corporation-owning aristocrat is held hostage in her own chateau cellar in company with a crippled ex-dancer and I think her husband. (Oh hell, I knew this would happen. I gave all those books away two weeks ago and can't find the quote now.) Anyway the ex-dancer is handling the situation much better than her hostess, and the aristocrat asks her why this is. The dancer replies with a short autobiography: raised poor but honest and happy, trained and succeeded as a dancer, got her foot stuck in a Nazi event of some kind (metaphorically and literally) and was crippled by it, escaped to find peace, love, and marriage with her husband and her children. The aristocrat reflects that she, who has been fancying herself a wolf among the sheep of the middle and lower classes, making and breaking kings and manipulating the world, is less than a parasite to someone like this. The dancer is one of the real wolves, she thinks; a real person with a life whose power and meaning make the machinations of pocket machiavellis totally irrelevant. What has happened is that the dancer is an optimist, someone who knows that for every headline about teens turning guns on their classmates there are thousands and thousands of schools where there are no gunmen--nor demons. The soccer mom world can absorb a lot of pain and still function, still be strong, even powerful. That world =is also real=. Just because there are no headlines about it doesn't make it disappear. Thus proving that I haven't much sense of humor about it either--in the other direction. One of the things I think is so interesting about Crowley's work is that, unlike your true dyed-in-the-wool modernist who believes that only unhappy childhoods are real, he shows us the great power in happy childhood too, indeed in all childhood. In other words he takes the focus =off= the abusers and monsters who make the childhood miserable and puts it back on the child himself, herself: the original magician, and the most successful. > Children and the insane imagine themselves > frequently as of higher station than they are. Fantasy about the > upper class thus has =nothing to do= with real-world class systems; > and attempting to deconstruct it along class-analysis lines is > really kind of irrelevant. Okay I'm on the same page with you here. As you say, fantasy and IMO horror too "are about the inner life" and what happens about power and authority and rank there is not social commentary but about the struggle of the self to find a place to stand. I've got a whole riff about serial killer novels being a kind of "mid- or pre-recovery" jungle gym for PTSS survivors, in which every part of the story--the killer, the many victims, the detective-hero--is a part of the reader/author, who is using the serial killer novel =unconsciously= to work the trauma out of its ingrown and festering hiding place. Later tho. If anybody cares. BTW Donald have you heard of Ute Lemper? She's knocking 'em dead in Chicago now. - -Jennifer ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 08:01:36 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: Re: theodicy & suburban stuff Jennifer, Speaking of Leiber, I'm wondering just how his "Mater Tenebrarum" might be categorized in this system. Don, Fascinating idea about Little Sister. We haven't seen mystical warnings from specific, previously unseen characters before, have we? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send online invitations with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:22:49 -0400 From: meredith Subject: Re: b/comments4/16 Hi! Don commented: >(Memo to Meredith: saw a bit of the =Xena= rerun last night with >Callisto-the-Angel. Certainly if we can buy Callisto Redeemed we can buy >Faith Redeemed, should it happen.) Well, there are plenty of people in the Xenaverse who *aren't* buying "Callisto Redeemed", but I get your point. :) >The point being that Faith has >enough respect for Giles to try and fool him.) Hmmm. I never would consider trying to lie to someone a mark of respect. Quite the opposite, in fact. If she really respected Giles, shouldn't she have realized that he would see right through it? Shouldn't she have had some qualms about trying to pull one over on him? >Found an amusing typo the other day. I was reading Otto Rank's =The >Myth of the Birth of the Hero= (Rank being another associate of >Freud's who broke away and followed his own theoretical bent, about >the same time as Jung did, though at a much younger age). In this >early work he frequently cites Freud's =The Interpretation of >Dreams= under its original German title =Traumdeutung=. Only one >footnote prints it as =Tramdeutung=. =The Interpretation of >Trolleys=, I love it. (Might be an even juicier pun in German; >Meredith?) Alas, no "Tram" word in German, at least not that I've heard nor that I find in my dictionary. I almost wish there were, though! >Then there's the mytheme about the hero's father the god trying to >kill him (which is why he's spirited away to foster-parents). To veer away from Buffy for a moment, this brings to mind something interesting WRT Xena: we find in the third-season opener that the real reason Xena grew up without a father was because her mother took him out with an axe. The reason? He was trying to kill Xena. Interesting... Anyway. >Remember the young girl chanting the nursery rhyme about the Gentlemen >(and holding their box) in the dream in "Hush"? > >Could she be Little Sister/Little Miss Muffett? (She =looks= like she >could be Buffy's little sister...) And the fact that she "visited" "in >person" with the information Buffy needed to stop the Gentlemen would then >be an initial hint of the sort of entity she might be. > >Certainly no more outlandish a theory than some things that have proved >true. Y'know, if it hadn't been so long since "Band Candy", one could really wonder about this. Joyce and Giles *did* have an, erm, Tryst. Now THAT would be a plot twist!!! >(P.S. Anyone else seen Robia La Morte's dialogueless McDonald's >commercial?) No!!! Is it one of those weird Monopoly ones? Gayle expounded: >Discovering Marvel back then was a shock and a revelation, >and I will necessarily talk about things as they were then, when Marvel was >unique unto itself, and before its influence started to permeate other comic >book publishers. ... and before Stan Lee went to DC Comics. :) (Now _there's_ something I thought we'd never see!!!) Thanks for that explanation, though. My time with Marvel Comics was in the early 80's, when I and my junior high geek friends were seriously into the X-Men and the New Mutants. (Then came college, and that damned Tori Amos lyric which led me straight to the Sandman, and then it was all DC (well, really Vertigo), all the time for me...) My knowledge of the history of the whole genre is embarrassingly small. +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 22:39:13 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/spiritguides (Start again...) I had another interesting thought about Riley, and started to write it out; almost instantly I found myself (recognizing the need to explain the "backstory" to myself--and anyone brave enough to read it) embarked upon the Augean task of explicating the whole mechanism of doubles/shadows in =Buffy=, going =all the way back= to the premiere and trying to outline the Celtic-interlace complication of the way the main characters, as they are introduced, each act as shadow and spirit-guide. Here was the first paragraph: "The role of the shadow in the hero-narrative is that of a liminal being, of a double nature, to guide the hero (conscious) to the underworld (unconscious)." But half a page in, I realized I had began writing a piece of considerable length, a major section at least of what is beginning to seem like a monograph-length essay called "Buffy's Shadows." It's worth doing; in just that half-page I came across a startling insight (which I'll add at the end here), and I suspect there are more. But it would take me =weeks=, even months, to work my way up to the thought I had started with; so I'm going to try and talk about that thought =briefly= (already I've gone on too long). On three occasions Buffy has had a dream where the "Second Slayer" has served as her spirit-guide, to direct her to the unconscious where she can find out something she needs to know. The second is the clearest: the dream in "Graduation Day II" where Faith (the new "Second Slayer") leads Buffy to realize that "Human weakness. It never goes away. Even his [the Mayor's]." While also delivering what we now know to =also= be a message, "Little Miss Muffett counting down from 730." The first features not Kendra (the "Second Slayer" who was such an ephemeral character she had only a little symbolic impact on the show), but Angel ("Second Slayer" in that he was Buffy's fellow-warrior on many occasions): the dream in "Innocence" where he tells Buffy "You have to know what to see," i.e. Jenny Calendar who has the clue to what was going on. And the third is the opening dream from "Hush," where Riley (the new "Second Slayer") tells Buffy, "When I kiss you, it'll make the sun go down." In fundamental symbology, sun/day = conscious, moon/night = unconscious; so Riley's pronouncement pretty clearly states "Follow me to the unconscious." And as in the other two dreams, Buffy gets a message (again, she turns/goes around a corner to see a female figure who holds the key to the situation she's about to face). But here's the twist. By "Innocence" Angel, Buffy's former comrade-in-arms, has turned evil; by "Graduation Day" Faith, Buffy's former comrade-at-arms, has turned evil. By "Hush," however, Riley was not yet Buffy's comrade-at-arms (or her lover either), and as far as we could tell he was as good a guy as could be. Could we expect, nonetheless, that the parallel might follow through? Well, consider what I pointed out last night, Adam's exposition about how he and Riley are "brothers" in some carefully-unexplained way; note the still not-fully-specified effect of the "vitamins." Is it possible that Riley in some fashion will "turn on" Buffy? Remember how the "Hush" dream ends (how it wakes Buffy up): =Riley turns into a Gentleman=. 'Nuff said. I wait for the future. P.S. Each of the main characters attempts to "guide" Buffy when she meets them in "Welcome to the Hellmouth." =Which= character is it that actually "persuades" her to take up her Slayer duties? (My previous answer was Willow; not quite true.) Cordelia. It's a peculiar moment; Cordelia comes up to Buffy who is surrounded by Willow and Xander and Jessie, tacitly assumes that this means Buffy has "rejected" her "guidance," and explicitly removes herself from the role...meanwhile delivering the news about "the extreme dead guy in the locker." And Buffy feels compelled to "descend to the underworld" (the locker room) and discover that the dead guy was killed by a vampire...and that's the first straw towards weakening her resolve against being the Slayer. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 23:09:49 EDT From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: b/spiritguides In a message dated 4/17/00 7:40:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, dgk@panix.com writes: << And the third is the opening dream from "Hush," where Riley (the new "Second Slayer") tells Buffy, "When I kiss you, it'll make the sun go down." In fundamental symbology, sun/day = conscious, moon/night = unconscious; so Riley's pronouncement pretty clearly states "Follow me to the unconscious." And as in the other two dreams, Buffy gets a message (again, she turns/goes around a corner to see a female figure who holds the key to the situation she's about to face). >> That does sound like a viable interpretation of that cryptic line; however, consider the fact that the kiss itself was a dream, Buffy's subconscious was already in operation, and Riley had not really kissed her except in her own dream... kind of twists around like the snake that eats its tail. Gayle ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #83 ****************************