Fairy Tale Adaptations (April 2018 Literary Meeting)

Posted on August 24, 2018 at 7:32 pm by Rachel Banka

Welcome to the April 2018 Literary Meeting!

At the insistence of guest host Rachel Banka, our most recent literary theme was folk lore and fairy tale adaptations – particularly adaptations that maintained the spooky, scary, horrific, fantastic, and/or violent elements of the original stories.

As per usual, we have made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end.

Aromatic Accompaniment: Midsummer’s Night by Yankee Candle.

Wine: La Cuvée. Imported by Vinadeis. Languedoc: Mythique, 2015. Red Blend.

            Ancient Vines. Contra Costa Country: Cline Family Cellars, 2015. Zinfandel.

            Winemaker’s Blend. Modesto, CA: Apothic White, 2016. White Blend.

Guest host Rachel has always been interested in “traditional” speculative stories – myths, folk lore, legends, fairy tales, and the like. The intention of this meeting was to investigate how the themes, figures, and tropes from such stories have been adapted in modern short stories.

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Theorizing the Spooky: Strange Allusions to Referents Unknown

Posted on July 26, 2018 at 10:01 am by Joshua Tuttle

One of my projects is to theorize the Spooky. This series explores small pieces of that work, organized around some ephemeral observation from literature, film, (other media), and life. This time we’re looking at the Spooky power present in Strange stylistic allusions. Today we’ll find this Spooky power in… THE CROSSING ZONE.

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Podcast Preview: Spookypasta Progenitors of “The Last Movie,” a new Podcast from Public Radio Alliance

Posted on March 26, 2018 at 9:08 am by Joshua Tuttle

Public Radio Alliance’s new podcast, The Last Movie, drops tomorrow (on a Tuesday). The premise looks promising:

Tanis podcast host Nic Silver and regular contributor MK, explore the possible existence of “The Last Movie,” an infamous underground feature film, reputed to drive you insane. Legend has it that every screening of this film was surrounded by bloodshed and controversy: one reviewer actually described slipping on blood in the aisle, as he ran through dozens of people trying to tear him apart.

Though I’ve had mixed feelings about PRA in the past, I’m hoping The Last Movie will be good. They plan to release all 6 episodes simultaneously this time, which won’t give them any time to react to feedback, so for better or for worse they’ll be committed to their original vision.

I’m hopeful that in a shorter season they’ll avoid the biggest mistakes of The Black Tapes, Tanis, and Rabbits, in which the episodes eventually devolved into endless filler, to the point that the conspiracy became so convoluted that each episode of The Black Tapes felt like it was simply re-explaining who we were talking to — and Tanis would often skip that step, making the experience less-than-stellar.

Anyway, the concept of a movie that produces horrifying effects in its audiences is awesome. How do I know? Because other projects with the premise have come before, and they were awesome. Continue reading →

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Bridging the Gothic (October 2017 Literary Meeting)

Posted on January 16, 2018 at 2:30 pm by Joshua Tuttle

Welcome to the October 2017 Literary Meeting!

The most recent literary theme was an attempt to discover what it is about the Gothic that bridges works that so little resemble each other under the same heading of “Gothic.”

As always, I’ve made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end.

Aromatic Accompaniment: Midsummer’s Night by Yankee Candle.

It has always struck me that the descriptor “Gothic” is applied almost indiscriminately, yet always seems to be justified. What on earth links 18th century British works based on a philosophy articulated by John and Anna Aikin with a publication like Midwestern Gothic?
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[Book Review] An Unsystematic Articulation of the Weird and the Eerie: A Beautiful, Insightful Collection of Readings by Mark Fisher

Posted on January 16, 2018 at 12:16 pm by Joshua Tuttle

 

An Unsystematic Articulation of the Weird and the Eerie: A Beautiful, Insightful Collection of Readings by Mark Fisher

Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2017. 134 pages. US $14.95. Includes bibliography but no in-text citations.

In The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher sets out to describe what it is about certain kinds of literature and films that create “a certain kind of disquiet” (9). Toward that end, he argues for two affective categories (which can also be narrative modes)—the weird and the eerie—related to but distinct from the uncanny. After a brief discussion of what constitutes the uncanny—Fisher follows Freud, attributing to the uncanny the “strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange” (10, emphasis in original)—Fisher provides an exploratory hypothesis of where the weird and the eerie are located. He writes, “the major cultural examples of the weird and the eerie are to be found at the edges of genres such as horror and science fiction, and these genre associations have obscured what is specific to the weird and the eerie” (8). His project, then, is to re-situate the weird and the eerie as apart from genre, as modes that can attach to anything, and then to articulate what distinguishes those modes, how they operate, and what they can do.
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