The late round-up with mothwrites
Today's links feel like Sci-fi, Tech Horror, and the Olympics. Obviously.
outdated tweet that was relevant when I had 1 (one) impulse to update
A long read
1. Americans are like “let’s watch a whorrr movie”
The horror genre and I have never got along. But I have had to reassess recently because of my adoration of The Haunting of Bly Manor.
Horror tends to horrify because of the way it prods at the boundaries of social order. The same thing happens in sci-fi. Vampires are scary because they’re dead but they’re not dead. How do we deal with someone on the edge of death but that has also overcome it? Same with zombies. The people who become vampires and zombies suddenly become evil, not just because they take on characteristics that make them non-human, and because of this it’s now US vs THEM.
From link 5 below:
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).
If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.
It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
I’ve written previously about how main-character energy or over-individualisation affects the selves we put on social media. This identity anxiety makes for good whorrr writing from real life mag:
Technology encourages the expression of multiple selves in multiple contexts, while also seeming to make their coexistence impossible (I am thinking, for example, of the 2020 meme-format popularized by Dolly Parton juxtaposing the LinkedIn Dolly with the Instagram, Facebook and Tinder). In a piece for Real Life from 2017, Rob Horning cites R.D. Laing, writing: “the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a ‘self partially forced from the body.’ You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you.”
The anxiety of films like Host, then, is twofold: They concern themselves not only with how the self’s natural multiplicity has been heightened and exaggerated by digital extension, but by how this allows for “back-flow” from the digital realm — so that it’s not clear precisely which fragments of the self are “natural” and which are a result of contamination by technology. The portal works both ways.
A quick read
2. Nothin is anythin. Everythin is a lie.
A medium read
3. I didn’t play netball bc of the skirts
Women’s dress codes in sport are determined by “traditions” that are both outdated and gendered. Their outfits have long tried to reconcile notions of “femininity” with those of “athleticism”, but this process has turned women into objects to be admired rather than being valued for their sporting skills.
However, there is recent rebellion in the ranks. Slowly, female athletes are pushing back on outdated uniform regulations and demanding that athleticism be prioritised over aesthetics.
A brilliant medium read
4. PLz click, fun.
A medium read
5. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
There is so much to say about how the world is and how it should be. There is a lot to say about what you can hope for when there isn't ever a utopia, like, you need balance. You need the hurt in the happiness, the risk in love, the silliness in the serious, and the serious in the silly.
This is what I think about when I see this kind of theory: the carrier bag theory of fiction. What do I need this revisionist history for: to actually get at the science of what tools came first, or to give me an abstract ideal to aspire to when writing. As usual, it’s both, it’s neither, it’s somewhere in the middle. I don’t need this to be true. It matters anyway. But I also do, in a way. Because that helps me justify what I do, to myself.
Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.
This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.