ghosts and horror
Mar. 17th, 2004 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonI'm reading exquisite ghost stories: The Two Sams, by Glen Hirschberg. Very scary, technically brilliant and morally gripping. I'm going to review them for Strange Horizons.com
I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.
I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-17 05:30 pm (UTC)Have you thought about fictionalizing? You could still examine the issues in a fiction format.
As someone who is NOT a writer I am always pushing the good ones to write stuff that I'm interested in! ;) I know exactly what you mean though. Making the art that you were born to do is such a fullfilling pursuit.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-17 06:24 pm (UTC)Well, I've written three novels and a chapbook of short essays and poetry that center on complex fat women, so I've definitely explored some of this stuff in my fiction. And I probably am going to be writing more short nonfiction pieces related to body size, politics, literature and all soon. I'll definitely post here as those pieces get published.
But one unexpected place that writing and thinking and talking hard about this stuff has taken me has been to the stories and theology of eighteenth century folks on the cusp between puritanism and revolutionary culture in New England. The intense things that these folks believed about the body, the natural world, god, emotion, depravity, light, family, life still seem to me to be powerful forces in so much US culture today -- so that's what I'm working with in fiction right now. It's almost overwhelming, like getting too close to an energy source that so many things draw power from -- something. It feels like a root place to me, another way to uncover how all of this stuff connects.