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against character vapor

#s:bodies #s:writing #t:article/essay | If your character has a physical form, then the matrix of the story must act upon it just as the body must act upon the story. If a character breaks a leg at the start of a story. It is not enough for them to limp occasionally. The pain becomes part of the filter of the story. It becomes not just fact to document here or there. There will be blood. Pain that is sharp, pain that is deep, throbbing, ever running like a river. They will make a familiar move because they cannot help it and find themselves brought up to the sheer cliff face of pain. They will slowly, perhaps, have to remap and reinscribe the dimensions of their circumstance and their world.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
SFF’s Big Fat Problem

#s:fat #t:article/essay | I wasn’t kidding when I say this all blends to white noise. I don’t keep an inventory of all the places I met a little fatphobia and flinched at it and moved on. I remember the worst of my childhood reads, occasional clear flashes from the vast library of my teens, and what I’ve read in the last few months and discussed with fat friends and partners and colleagues. The hurt of most fatphobic moments remains as hypervigilance when a fat character appears, as tension waiting for the whip, not memory of every slight and injury.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
When a Houseplant Obsession Becomes a Nightmare

#s:plants #t:article/essay | Nepenthes collecting—as I’d eventually learn almost too well—is next-level stuff. There’s a lot more to these plants than fertilizer and YouTube how-tos. They’re botanical prima donnas, liable to walk out on life without notice if their specific needs aren’t met. And your new hobby will shove you into a strange world. There’s something dark in the pits of those pitchers, and it’s not the rotting bugs. If you fall in, you may land in an acidic soup of crime, addiction, and existential angst.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
BODY OF WORK

#s:bodies #s:disability #t:article/essay | In 2012, an MRI scan revealed a cerebellar lesion on Katie Lew’s brain; reflecting on the aftermath of the doctors’ diagnoses, she challenges the traditional narrative of recovery from disability

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Miles Vorkosigan and “Excellent Life Choices”: (Neuro)Divergence and Decision-Making in Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga

#f:vorkosigan #s:disability #t:article/essay | Making good life choices is hard. Making good life choices when you’re neurodivergent is damn hard. Perhaps the most relatable and engaging such struggle I’ve read is that of Miles Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Care without institutions

#s:disability #s:mutualaid #s:sowk #t:article/essay | Government programs, non-profit organizations, and institutions often fail to meet disabled peoples’ needs, especially undocumented migrants or those who haven’t been formally labelled as disabled. People frequently assume that disabled people can only get their needs met by institutions like long-term care facilities, hospitals, and clinics. But we can often meet our needs more directly outside of institutions through networks of care and mutual aid. This article explores four case studies of successful care for disabled people provided in the community.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
a little life is not your father

#s:books #s:litcrit #t:article/essay | The way we all cut our teeth chewing on the bones of those who made us. It is a natural part of growing up. But the key there is that one must grow up. One must set aside childish things. Because at their core, these essays are not really about aesthetics. Because what are they arguing against? The portrayal of pain in gay life? The portrayal of seriousness in gay life? The theme of sadness? Sex? Not enough sex? Like, those are not aesthetic arguments. Those are not real things that have anything to do with art. That is childish griping about books other people wrote while you yourself have not written a book. That is anxiety about your own future at work. It is fear.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
bobos in ikea

#s:books #s:litcrit #t:article/essay | There is this slowly congealing idea that it is morally and aesthetically sufficient to merely recreate the alienating torpor of having one’s life organized ruthlessly and brutally by capitalism. The adjunct novel, the novel of millennial precarity, the novel of racial animus, all of which are simply off-shots of naturalism, hew to this idea that the most harrowing thing one can do is simply recreate the effect of the brutal force shaping one’s life. There need not be a suggestion of alternative lives or alternative routes. One need only fire up the ol observational apparatus and nail a couple astute comments about what people say and do in offices and in bars and cafes and on the street, and there you have it, job done.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
I Should Be Able to Mute America

#s:americentrism #t:article/essay | America insists that you bear witness to it tripping on its dick and slamming its face into an uncountable row of scalding hot pies. You do more than bear witness, because American Twitter has the same kind of magnetic pull as a garbage disposal unit. A sick part of you wants to shove your hand in. You want to let the blades cut into your knuckles, if just to see if you can slow them down a little.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Rolling Stone

#f:eeaao #s:film #t:article/essay | To hear Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — the directorial duo known collectively as “Daniels” — tell their origin story, it was something like withering contempt at first sight.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Miracle Work: A Note from the Daniels

#f:eeaao #s:film #t:article/essay | Writing Everything Everywhere All At Once was a foolish prayer to a cold, indifferent universe. It was a dream about reconciling all of the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity. We wanted to stretch ourselves in every direction to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma. We scoffed at the false dichotomy of Scorsese Cinephiles vs Marvel Fanboys and instead asked "why not both?" It was an attempt to create the narrative equivalent of the Theory of Everything. A Big Data approach to myth-making. A post-genre deconstruction of traditional narrative. A maximalist's manifesto for surviving in the noise of modern life.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story

#s:writing #t:article/essay | Character and plot are fine, reliable engines. You can put them in your novel draft and, with a good amount of luck, drive it to the bestseller list. But they are only two ways of powering a story. In my own writing, I typically find that plot and character are not enough and that my stories are inert until I find a different kind of engine—a thematic engine perhaps or a structure engine or a linguistic engine—that makes the thing get up and running.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
the post about militarism and untouchable bodies in the mcu

#s:bodies #s:film #t:article/essay | + alfred molina's fat tits "it's Nea's appreciation for Molina's physicality, specifically the fond attention drawn to his visible paunch, that made me think of R.S. Benedict's essay "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny." it's a good read but also a long one, so I'll summarize: Benedict posits that current standards of American attractiveness stem from post-9/11 anxiety - "When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole," she writes - and has created a national mentality of bodies as commodities to be honed to perfection without indulging in any of the pleasure a body can bring, a vessel disjointed from any sense of self and meant only to be looked at with awe."

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Walk Away Like a Boss

#s:crypto #t:article/essay | How tragic, I thought, to reduce life to a procession of microtransactions or contracts. How naive to believe that some agreed-upon set of values could be formalized into code, or that the problems of politics could be made irrelevant by computation.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Love bombing, gaslighting, and the problem with pathologising dating talk

#s:abuse #t:article/essay | But if you think of yourself as a moral patient and anyone who hurts you as a moral agent, it means that anything you do to them becomes fair game, because you are constitutionally incapable of inflicting harm, and they are constitutionally incapable of experiencing it. I once read an account written by a woman who was essentially stalking her ex, while framing his refusal to see her as “a classic narcissistic trick.” Instigating a global vilification campaign becomes a legitimate response to someone sending you a playlist they made for someone else – because you are someone who bad things are done to, they are someone who does bad things, and these categories can’t change. I think that a lot of interpersonal cruelty stems from this inability to see oneself as anything other than the injured party.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
When Dickens met Dostoevsky: a literary mystery

#s:hoaxes #t:article/essay | When I presented my evidence of multiple hoaxing to the Editor of the Dickensian and informed him of A. D. Harvey’s address, he confirmed that it was the same one from which “Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion” had been sent. Much about that article reads differently in the light of knowledge about its author. Dostoevsky’s response to Dickens, especially, now acquires particular salience: 'There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. “Only two people?” I asked.'

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
INTERFACECRITIQUE

#s:indieweb #t:article/essay | The fact that the time of personal pages is over is self-evident. What is obfuscated by today’s early web nostalgia (netstalgia) trend, though, is the fact that there was never a time for them.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
McSWEENEY’S 64 - The Audio Issue

#s:disability #t:article/essay | The Audio Issue

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Box Office Blues

#s:film #t:article/essay | If this strikes you as a jim-dandy state of affairs, all right then. Someone, indeed huge numbers of someones, must like this arrangement, otherwise it wouldn’t keep going. The frustration, for those of us whose tastes do not run to Marvel or DC, young adult or children’s fare, is that we’re constantly told their obvious hegemony isn’t happening. Or if it is happening, it doesn’t matter, because there’s always TV—look at Mare of Easttown, that was great! What are you complaining about? Listen, I’m more than willing to “let people like things.” I’m less willing to sit still while I’m told, despite a mountain of evidence, that the great big corporate things aren’t crowding out other things.

2 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Against the Logic of the Guillotine

#s:anarchism #t:article/essay | Fetishizing the guillotine is like fetishizing the state: it means celebrating an instrument of murder that will always be used chiefly against us.

3 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny

#s:bodies #s:fat #t:article/essay | A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

3 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Social Media Is Not Self-Expression

#t:article/essay | If social media structure social behavior this way, just don’t use them, right? Problem solved. Paul Miller’s 2013 account at the Verge of his year without Internet use suggests it’s not so simple. Miller went searching for “meaning” offline, fearing that Internet use was reducing his attention span and preoccupying him with trivia. It turns out that, after a momentary shock of having his habits disrupted, Miller fell back into the same feelings of ambient discontent, only spiked with a more intense feeling of loneliness.

3 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
My Spirit Burns Through This Body

#s:disability #t:article/essay | This disability is invisible in me, pain clenched in my molars like a tight secret.

3 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
The Grace of Keanu Reeves

#t:article/essay | Keanu Reeves missed his calling as a silent film actor.

4 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Bret Easton Ellis Thinks You’re Overreacting to Donald Trump

#s:books #t:article/essay | Isaac Chotiner interviews the novelist Bret Easton Ellis—the author of “Less Than Zero,” “The Rules of Attraction,” “American Psycho,” and a new nonfiction book, “White”—about Donald Trump, Roseanne Barr, and more.

5 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Notes On "Camp"

#s:camp #t:article/essay | Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

5 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
IS “SHOW DON’T TELL” A UNIVERSAL TRUTH OR A COLONIAL RELIC?

#s:writing #t:article/essay | NAMRATA PODDAR ON THE WESTERN PREFERENCE FOR VISUAL OVER ORAL STORYTELLING

7 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
How to Write a Sex Scene

#s:writing #t:article/essay #t:meta | meta on how to write a good sex scene in fic

11 years ago | View Shared by zeiat
Zack Snyder Fetishizes Blood

#f:watchmen #t:article/essay | It's an alarmingly gory movie, and many of the bloodiest moments are actually places where Snyder and his screenwriters depart from the text they're otherwise following so faithfully.

13 years ago | View Shared by zeiat

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