fear, transcendence, praise
Sep. 28th, 2003 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanstinsonRain and bills. Oatmeal and the habits of turning towards the surfaces and depths of ordinary life, relying on habits of work in anxious times.
Was reading last night a little bit of Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty by Will H. Rockett. He says that Aldous Huxley identified three kinds of transcendence: upwards, sideways (or social -- in the direction of the common good of people), and downward. Of the last, he says of horror films, "The terror that the best of these films provoke can convince audiences to grant for a time that supernatural and supranatural forces possess a reality normally denied them by a rationalistic culture, thus affirming for the audience the existence of a sublime world and the possibility of their own transcendence."
I've never been a fan of horror films -- in fact, they scare me too much, make me too uneasy -- but I'm at a moment of trying to explore large forces in my work, and looking at fear is a part of that. For me, it's most interesting in combination with the insistent power of routine beauty -- and I mean the soul-drenching, life-sustaining radiance of a beloved's aging, specific face, or the way traffic on a wet street sounds like the ocean, and how powerfully that suggests the great waves of human motion and our varying roles as pieces of nature. I've been a little heartsore lately, and afraid in so many small moments, but also so aware of the indelible comfort of picking up a small, rounded white rock and tracing its shape with my thumb, of being graced with regular acts of kindness by people around me (and those who send it over distance), the relief of finding ways to praise the things that sustain me.
And, still, working the public and private edges around getting ready for Venus of Chalk to come out, doing new work, struggling with livelihood. More wonderful writers have said that they'd do blurbs for the book.
Elizabeth McCracken, whose writing I love with enormous respect and pleasure and sense of kinship, wrote The Giant's House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry; and Nancy Folbre, an amazingly broad thinker and persistent feminist economist, writer and MacArthur Fellow, who wrote The Invisible Heart, have already written lovely things about the book and my work in general.
Here they are:
I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no-one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with intelligence and generosity and a wild imagination. Her second novel, Martha Moody, is simply one of my favorite books--let me put it this way, I've read it three times, both for its reliable pleasures and for new revelations.
Elizabeth McCracken
A deliciously thoughtful account of an odyssey in honor of the goddess of generous love. Read this book, and Carline will come to mind every time you ride a bus.
Nancy Folbre
And other great folks -- Alison Bechdel, of Dykes To Watch Out For (talk about persistence and brilliance and bringing complexity and risk into such a tight form as a comic strip), Sondra Solovay (she wrote Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination, and she's a playwright, actress, lawyer and activist, too) and Hanne Blank (who wrote Big, Big Love, among other books, and has wide-ranging interests that include serious explorations of sexuality) said they would, too.
Was reading last night a little bit of Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty by Will H. Rockett. He says that Aldous Huxley identified three kinds of transcendence: upwards, sideways (or social -- in the direction of the common good of people), and downward. Of the last, he says of horror films, "The terror that the best of these films provoke can convince audiences to grant for a time that supernatural and supranatural forces possess a reality normally denied them by a rationalistic culture, thus affirming for the audience the existence of a sublime world and the possibility of their own transcendence."
I've never been a fan of horror films -- in fact, they scare me too much, make me too uneasy -- but I'm at a moment of trying to explore large forces in my work, and looking at fear is a part of that. For me, it's most interesting in combination with the insistent power of routine beauty -- and I mean the soul-drenching, life-sustaining radiance of a beloved's aging, specific face, or the way traffic on a wet street sounds like the ocean, and how powerfully that suggests the great waves of human motion and our varying roles as pieces of nature. I've been a little heartsore lately, and afraid in so many small moments, but also so aware of the indelible comfort of picking up a small, rounded white rock and tracing its shape with my thumb, of being graced with regular acts of kindness by people around me (and those who send it over distance), the relief of finding ways to praise the things that sustain me.
And, still, working the public and private edges around getting ready for Venus of Chalk to come out, doing new work, struggling with livelihood. More wonderful writers have said that they'd do blurbs for the book.
Elizabeth McCracken, whose writing I love with enormous respect and pleasure and sense of kinship, wrote The Giant's House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry; and Nancy Folbre, an amazingly broad thinker and persistent feminist economist, writer and MacArthur Fellow, who wrote The Invisible Heart, have already written lovely things about the book and my work in general.
Here they are:
I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no-one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with intelligence and generosity and a wild imagination. Her second novel, Martha Moody, is simply one of my favorite books--let me put it this way, I've read it three times, both for its reliable pleasures and for new revelations.
Elizabeth McCracken
A deliciously thoughtful account of an odyssey in honor of the goddess of generous love. Read this book, and Carline will come to mind every time you ride a bus.
Nancy Folbre
And other great folks -- Alison Bechdel, of Dykes To Watch Out For (talk about persistence and brilliance and bringing complexity and risk into such a tight form as a comic strip), Sondra Solovay (she wrote Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination, and she's a playwright, actress, lawyer and activist, too) and Hanne Blank (who wrote Big, Big Love, among other books, and has wide-ranging interests that include serious explorations of sexuality) said they would, too.