throbbing light machine

Disney Princess Recovery, a fascinating (and well-written!) blog by a progressive educated mother trying to extricate her little girl from the clutches of the Princess-Industrial Complex. I've been reading it all afternoon.

I heard A.S. Byatt speak at the University this afternoon, which was just unspeakbly lovely - she's absolutely charming, and from the excerpt that she read, I think her new novel The Children's Book sounds fantastic.

The following is something she said at the Q&A preceding the reading, which I liked so much that I recorded it on my little camera and then transcribed:

When I was a child it was the fairy stories I liked reading, it was the stories about things that were not real but were more real than real. And so it gives you in a sense the possibility of telling - I don't like the word spiritual but cosmic - truths, or truths about the nature of things which is harder to do when you're writing about men and women cooking lunch for each other - or even making love to each other. It's a different world; I like that. I like the rules that there are to fairy story worlds.

The English Writer Angela Carter said in the 1970s that she'd been trying to write realist novels about social behaviors for years and suddenly realized that actually she wrote because she had lived in this other world of fairy stories. And what I've found is that I'm happy putting the one world into the other world and juxtaposing them, because that's how you actually live - the things that you read are both more real and more unreal than your daily life. And there was a point particularly when I got to writing possession when I couldn't go on writing and then he sat down at the table and took up his knife and fork without also writing there were two little girls who went through the forest like Hansel and Gretel. But if I combine them, for me, I can make the knife and fork look more interesting because it's next to the forest, if you see what I mean.

le sigh. Now I am off to make spinach and feta pie for dinner. Maybe with a little bit of pesto?

So I'm pretty deep in work on my Honors thesis on the stories in the Donkeyskin tale-type. It's been much easier since I swallowed my doubts last week and committed myself to a feminist analysis. I have a tendency to get very anxious about my feminist readings, and to want to hedge, but the truth of the matter is that I really do experience Shakespeare and fairy tales as feminist pieces, albeit ones with problems sometimes. It's so much easier to tear down than to build up - I think my life would be simpler if I could just bully myself into buying the "Princess stories as tools of negative gender socialization" line, but it's just not how I feel, and I can't go against my gut like that. Princess stories were important to me as a little girl, and are important to me now, and that's not brainwashing and I can prove it!

Actually, I'm still sort of riding the high of figuring out that I can use Mary Wollstonecraft, and her analysis of the oppression of upper-class women through brutal, infantilizing "protection." Because I've got a Princess who runs away to become a scullery maid, and Wollstonecraft allows me to read that as a narrative of finding strength. And I like strength in my Princesses.

The little cat really, really wants to sleep on my laptop. Right now we've compromised on him laying his chin over the upper right hand corner, so that I have to reach under him every time I want to get to the delete button. It makes typing fairly interesting.

I sort of can't believe that Supernatural starts up again in two days. I'm excited, and a little bit terrified. I have no idea where we're going now, and I love it, but oh boys. I get very nervy on their behalf. Also, Sammy had better still be psychic, because I get off on powers!Sam embarrassingly hard.

Cat now covering half the keyboard. Must sign off. I love you all, fandom.

A meme, from emei
Drop me a comment and I will give you 3 interests on your list, and 3 of your icons, for you to explain. Here are mine.

Interests:

litslash - I feel like something of a fannish oddity at times, because my dearest-loved fandoms are textual, closed, and old. If I could find a fan community for Prydain or the Secret Garden or LeGuin that was as active as media fandoms, I'd be there in a flash. (The slash part of this interest has moved omnisexual in recent months. Don't care if they're boys or girls, just want the fic and the meta and the community)

acafan - I got into fandom young, and started hanging around the big girls' journals, the ones who were in grad school and who talked about Derrida. Which meant that I learned literary theory as a kid, from fen, in reference to hobbit sex. It's a great way to go.

donkeyskin - a fairy tale about a Princess whose father wants to marry her. She asks for three gowns as radiant as the moon, as shining as the stars, and as golden as the sun, and then puts on an animal skin to make her escape. She flees to a neighboring kingdom where she lives as an animal-girl, working in the palace scullery. The prince gives three balls: he's looking for a wife. She goes each night, but then flees back to her animal skin. He finds her out by a ring she gave him, and marries her. I'm doing my senior honors work on it next year - it's unique. A girl takes on an animal disguise in order to find positive sexuality and freedom. I don't know what's going on, but I love it.

And icons:



Tia Dalma was my favorite thing in Dead Man's Chest. She's a wonderful combination of things that I find fascinting, love and ships and fortune and foresight and the sea. She's so beautiful that I can't breathe whenever she's on the screen. So there was no way I wasn't going to have Tia Dalma icons. The text is Emily Dickinson, Nor noticed that the Ebbing Day Flowed silver to the West -- Nor noticed Night did soft descend -- Nor Constellation burn -- Intent upon the vision Of latitudes unknown.



Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia in Twelfth Night. I frelling love Twelfth Night, for many reasons. They never really leave the greenworld, just step off even further into Illyria. Olivia is a unique character in the corpus - she's not the soubrette or the Best Friend or any of the other usual second fiddle parts. She's a sorrowful, loving, determined, sexual woman. I caught this cap by chance, and in looking through my set later I found that it somehow seemed to encapsulate all of those things. The text is Anne Carson, who is dreamy and literary and harsh and weird, and somehow fits up nicely against Shakespeare's girls. I read her for class this past fall, and jotted down lines in my notebook.



River is the best textual/deconstructionist toy that could ever be dropped into a show. She's a walking, dancing knot of literary theory. I wanted a River icon, and also something that I could use for theory posts or school-related stuff. Text from Anne Carson again. This was such an easy icon to make - it all just fell into place. Didn't take me more than ten minutes. I love it when that happens.

So there’s this DVD in the school library of an old tv show called “Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.” They ordered it for the fairy tale class I took last year, some of you might have heard of it. For those who haven’t, it’s a set of nine half-hour fairy tales, produced, designed, and in a few cases directed by Jim Henson. Labyrinth? Dark Crystal? That Jim Henson.

( cut for rambling and images )</lj-cut