From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #103 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Monday, May 8 2000 Volume 02 : Number 103 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: b/burroughs(william) ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley [Dori ] New Joss interview. Minor, minor spoilers [Todd Huff ] b/stereotypes ["Donald G. Keller" ] Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley [Dori ] Re: b/truthtelling ["David S. Bratman" ] Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley ["David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/burroughs(william) On Sun, 7 May 2000, Donald G. Keller wrote: > William Burroughs ... was famous for his avante-garde "cutup" > technique, where he'd take a stretch of prose and literally cut the > page in pieces and reassemble the phrases in a different order (kind > of like Hilary's post the other day--what happened there, Hilary?). > > Hence Xander's line. Perhaps also hence Buffy's. Perhaps she intended to cut him up into little pieces and fling him around the room. I knew that Burroughs did that; I did not know the "William Tell" story; but even if there were universal agreement that this, rather than that, is what Buffy meant, I would still have needed the joke explained. Buffy implies she learned whatever she was referring to in English class. I would hope that her English prof preferred to spend time on Burrough's prose technique rather than his lurid private life, especially something that happened before he even became a writer (unless, perhaps, that obviously influenced his writing). > Anyway, that's the Burroughs joke. (Had to explain it to my daughter > as well.) So is it still funny? No. Is this the only reference to schoolwork since "Hush"? School impeded on Buffy's life a lot more when she was in high school. True, college students have a lot more flexibility in their use of time, but I wouldn't want to see _Buffy_ fall victim to Guy Gavriel Kay Disease, which is when "students" is merely a euphemism for "people with no constraints on their time, leaving authors free to send them to secondary worlds, have them fight demons all day, or whatever, without any mundane repercussions". ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 13:16:18 -0400 From: Dori Subject: Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley David said: > bad literature is that which tends to be read in the non-literary ways > I'm describing. And worst _as literature_ (getting one's jollies is a > whole different matter, as I said, and a perfectly legitimate thing to > do) ... worst as literature is that which is deliberately written to > target that. If you mean that the sock to the hindbrain is all there is and there's no underlying illumination of character or plot, yeah. (PWP smut just annoys me for this reason.) But what I'm getting from the rest of your post is that it's not possible to have that kick to the hindbrain =and= an emotional or intellectual response from the forebrain =at the same time=. Are you saying that, for instance, fiction dealing with sexual matters is only artistically valid as long as you don't get a hard-on? Because that makes no sense to me. > I suspected that it was written as a cheap appeal to fans of > hurt/comfort, and your reaction confirmed that. And which reaction was that, please? If my sole comment had been, "Gosh, don't he bruise NIIIICE?" then you might have a point, but I don't believe I said that. Do you mean the fact that I saw an underlying reason for the torture scene from a storytelling POV and thought it illuminated Wesley's character development? >> > This scenario seems to have a sexual/romantic appeal. >> >> No, not "seems to." >> >> "Does." But not, of course, to =everyone=. If we all likeId the same >> kinks...well, think what a shortage of whipped cream there'd be. > >I wrote "seems to" because I know little of this and understand its >appeal not at all. I was reporting what I'd been told. Well, this is my >reward for being cautious. Yes, that was snarky. I apologize. - -- Dori cleindor@cfw.com - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Torture first. It's better that way. Troll maxim - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 12:05:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: New Joss interview. Minor, minor spoilers http://websites.cable.ntl.com/%7Efraxis/the_ww/features/whedon.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 12:07:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: Ignore previous post. New Joss interview. Minor, minor spoilers Sorry about the double post. Hit the wrong button. http://websites.cable.ntl.com/%7Efraxis/the_ww/features/whedon.html There's a few very minor spoilers for what's to come (mostly peripheral stuff) and some DVD news. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 21:46:29 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley On Sun, 7 May 2000, Dori wrote: > If you mean that the sock to the hindbrain is all there is and > there's no underlying illumination of character or plot, yeah. (PWP > smut just annoys me for this reason.) But what I'm getting from the > rest of your post is that it's not possible to have that kick to the > hindbrain =and= an emotional or intellectual response from the > forebrain =at the same time=. Are you saying that, for instance, > fiction dealing with sexual matters is only artistically valid as > long as you don't get a hard-on? Because that makes no sense to me. That wasn't my main point, but yes. If I get sexually excited by literature, bang goes any possibility of a sober literary response. The hindbrain pre-empts the forebrain: the only solution is to find the hindbrain with hindbrain stuff, and keep it out of the forebrain stuff. This can be the reader's problem alone, and often is, but if most readers respond to a work in only a hindbrain way, and few if any have forebrain responses, then it _is_ a hindbrain work, and it hardly matters if it was written for that purpose or not. This observation is the genius of Lewis's analysis. Thank goodness this is all much too vague to be useful to censors. > > I suspected that it was written as a cheap appeal to fans of > > hurt/comfort, and your reaction confirmed that. > > And which reaction was that, please? If my sole comment had been, > "Gosh, don't he bruise NIIIICE?" then you might have a point, but I > don't believe I said that. Do you mean the fact that I saw an > underlying reason for the torture scene from a storytelling POV and > thought it illuminated Wesley's character development? No, I mean the place where you wrote "one man's gratitous is another woman's foreplay ... it's no secret that I'm a big fan of charactertorture" ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 22:13:03 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/truthtelling Following up, in a roundabout way, on Berni's comment about how it was Faith who first figured out what was going on between Willow and Tara: The NYC WB station seems to run =The Silence of the Lambs= every other month as the weekend late movie, and they did it again last night; so I sat down and watched some of it (according to my tradition, quitting right after Lecter's escape). One little thing I noticed was an elevator scene where a spear-carrier character asks Starling if Lecter is "some kind of vampire." But the main thing that I was noticing was the way Lecter dealt with everybody, most particularly Clarice Starling, digging around to find their most painful truths for his perverse pleasure. (And note that he =guessed= a lot of Clarice's secrets.) By coincidence, the other first-rate movie I saw part of again last night (running on PBS) was =The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie=, featuring Maggie Smith's Oscar-winning lead performance. But nearly as memorable is Pamela Franklin as one of Miss Brodie's students, who is kind of the Cordelia (or Faith) of the story, and has several striking scenes where she tells adults not only what she thinks of them, but what she sees clearly as their nature. (Franklin made very few films after that, and it's a great pity: she seemed to be a major talent.) Anyway, the major characteristics of these two figures are as follows: 1) High intelligence (emphasized several times in both films) 2) Absolutely no compunction or conventional restraint against voicing painful truths. The way this trope plays out in =Buffy= is with more emphasis on 2) than 1). Note that it's the "dark" characters that have this characteristic, not only the clearly evil (Spike, Angelus, the Mayor), but also Cordelia and Anya--and Faith. And also note, in =all= these cases, the painful truths voiced =are= true, however much the "light" characters targeted refuse to admit it. Specifically about the scene: remember, by the way, that Willow had been keeping Tara to herself, and =Buffy hadn't met her yet=. Nor Xander or anyone else. And also that, particularly in sexual matters, Faith is the kind of person who always thinks the "worst" first. My take on the rest of them is that Xander has no idea what's going on (busy with Anya or barely knowing Tara are both plausible explanations), and the likely way his conversation with Oz went was Oz =asked= him if Willow had a new guy and Xander simply said no. And Buffy, even after she met Tara, was too busy as usual with her own issues and would assume that Tara was simply a spell-buddy. Or so I surmise. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 22:14:57 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/stereotypes "The mistake we make as adolescent readers is to assume a story is exciting because of its strange happenings and exotic surfaces, when actually a story is exciting exactly to the extent that its structure is familiar. 'Plot twists' and 'gimmicks' aside (which, like 'wisecracks,' only distract our conscious mind from the structure so we can respond subconsciously to its familiarity with that ever sought-for 'gut response'), excitement in reading invariably comes from the anticipation of (and the anticipation rewarded by) the inevitable/expected. "This inevitability--without which there simply is no reader gut- participation--is also what holds fiction to all the political cliches of sexism, racism, and classism that mar it as an art. To write fiction without such structural inevitibilities, however (as practically every artist has discovered), is to write fiction without an audience." - --Samuel R. Delany, "Shadows" Ran across this again yesterday and found it food for thought in our general discussion. Because he's right, of course; to state it in a more positive manner, what he is calling "familiar structure" I would refer to as "myth-pattern." I think suspense occurs, not only when you think "=are= they going to fulfill the myth-pattern they set up?" but also in "=which= myth-pattern are they working with? Oh, =that= one! Yay!" And it operates on an unconscious level for the most part. The quote also has something to say about stereotypes and why they persist. Some excellent points being made in our discussion of stereotypes, especially the sometimes-necessity of using them as storytelling shorthand, and the way to combat them is not to protest but to propose positive models. A few thoughts I've been having on the subject. Not only is the Christian woman a stereotype, but as Gayle hints the military guys are stereotypes as well. And what must lawyers think about Wolfram and Hart? Not to mention the Council agents... It strikes me that one of the ways we know these are stereotypes is this: =they have no self-doubt=. They =always= know what the "right" thing to do is (even when it's the "wrong" thing), and simply (note "simply") do it. This contrasts sharply with characters like Buffy and Angel and Riley, who can get (sometimes annoyingly) angst-ridden about what to do. Faith is a special case. Superficially she seems to be a stereotype of the juvenile delinquent (a type more common in the 50s than now, and more often male), always doing what will cause the most trouble; but we know right from her first episode that her attitude is mostly a front. And notice by the way that sometimes when Buffy is =most= sure she knows what to do (end of "Graduation Day I," "Sanctuary) she is most likely to be wrong. The usefulness of stereotypes is that you can't have =every= character seized by moral doubt; there's only room in any one story for so many "rounded" characters. (David Hartwell has argued--I =strongly= disagree--that some forms like hard science fiction can get by with =no= rounded characters whatever.) And note that =Buffy= and =Angel= have large enough casts that they can focus on "rounding" one or two characters at a time and give everyone a chance; when they're not being focused on they tend to be closer to "stereotype" level. (As I hinted above is true of Buffy in "Sanctuary.") David: =Ab=solutely agree that the "bad guys who can't shoot straight" is one of the =stupidest= fiction tropes of our time. (One of many reasons I don't like action movies.) It's a bit dispiriting to see it on =Angel=. (And if they really intended to capture and rehabilitate Faith, =what= were they doing pulling out machine guns anyway?? "Oh, it'll look cool"?? I hope that's not the answer.) What are those lines from =Macbeth=? It is a hail Shot by an idiot, full of sound and fury Simply hitting nothing. Something like that. Or like the ancient joke: Q: Who fired the shot that killed [famous assassination victim]? A: Five hundred [ethnic epithet] sharpshooters. (Giddiness passing.) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 23:30:24 -0400 From: Dori Subject: Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley >That wasn't my main point, but yes. If I get sexually excited by >literature, bang goes any possibility of a sober literary response. I was sort of being facetious, there, David, thinking that I must have misinterpreted, because it seemed like such a preposterous statement. No wonder I get the impression that my liking chartorture totally invalidates any insights the chartorture might give me into the work. My immediate reaction to this theory is that it's extremely narrow, and was thought up by men, but my knowledge of LitCrit theory is, obviously, practically nil, and I see that I must do a great huge amount of research before I feel comfortable in continuing this discussion. - -- Dori cleindor@cfw.com - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Suffer. Or suffer not. There is no... "only a flesh wound." Karen Miller - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 00:50:05 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/truthtelling On Sun, 7 May 2000, Donald G. Keller wrote: > Note that it's the "dark" characters that have this characteristic, > not only the clearly evil (Spike, Angelus, the Mayor), but also Cordelia > and Anya--and Faith. And also note, in =all= these cases, the painful > truths voiced =are= true, however much the "light" characters targeted > refuse to admit it. I fear that it's habitual in serious fiction that painful truths are always true. It would make more interesting indirection if they aren't. (When characters are mistaken about each other, it's usually not handled this way.) This attitude spills over into life, also. If one is confronted with a "painful truth" about oneself that isn't true, attempts to say so are met with the unanswerable statement that you're in denial. This scenario, though, creeps up a lot in satire. Much the same is true of legends and old wives' tales, particularly in fantasy. One of the reasons I admire Tolkien so is that his work is full of rumors and old wives' tales that aren't true. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 01:10:39 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/The DeJoxerfication of Wesley On Sun, 7 May 2000, Dori wrote: > >That wasn't my main point, but yes. If I get sexually excited by > >literature, bang goes any possibility of a sober literary response. > > I was sort of being facetious, there, David, thinking that > I must have misinterpreted, because it seemed like such a > preposterous statement. Let me see if I can find some more extreme examples that show the problem more clearly. What about, say, gratuitous nude scenes in movies? The kind that are out of character for the character and add nothing to the plot. If one were not distracted by nudity, one would say the scene was merely a waste of time at best, and that it clashed with the story at worst. To respond to such a complaint with "Yeah, but X sure looked great naked" is not a response to the work as literature, but only to its pornographic effect. A restaurant review written by a person who was starving when they got there is going to be produced on a different basis than one written by a gourmet there for the third meal of the day. > No wonder I get the impression that my liking chartorture totally > invalidates any insights the chartorture might give me into the work. That depends on what the insights are for. Your remarks have given great insight as to why this gratuitous scene was there. > My immediate reaction to this theory is that it's extremely narrow, > and was thought up by men, Sorry, but that's a real cheap shot. Most literary theories were thought up by men, men having had a famous near-monopoly on such work for a long time. And women are equally capable of coming up with stupid ideas. As for narrow, it's deliberately narrow in one sense. In another sense, it's much wider than most theories. It judges litature by its effect, not by prejudiced categories of "good" and "bad". > but my knowledge of LitCrit theory is, > obviously, practically nil, and I see that I must do a great huge > amount of research before I feel comfortable in continuing this > discussion. Start, as I suggested before, with C.S. Lewis's _An Experiment in Criticism_. If the way I expressed it makes no sense (I feared from the start that it might not), he expresses it a lot better. I'll throw in one more example. Does it have any effect on your enjoyment of _Buffy_ that Buffy is fighting vampires? If they were just human thugs, would you like the show just as much? If not, then the "vampireness" of the danger is part of your enjoyment, and you're having a literary response. If so -- if any old fight scene would do just as well -- then you're just responding to the fighting, and you're having a non-literary response. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #103 *****************************