We must theorize horror. (We must horrify theory.) * …instead of arriving at a clear grip on what kind of entity is horrifying, we are confronted with the feeling that there is this something that must harm us according to its very essence. Horror retains this character of indefinite something […]
The following is of very niche interest. It began as an email, but then blossomed (metastasized!), because I was annoyed … and nothing propels me toward obsessive productivity quite as much as annoyance does. In summary: The selection of critical essays and, especially, the bibliography in the last two editions […]
1. In September 1986, Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) put on high heels, painted a hammer & sickle over half his face, and walked into a meeting of communists and leftists in Santiago, Chile to speak one of his earliest pieces of writing, a manifesto of being and difference: I need no […]
Before we are aware of it, we all of us find we are talking about Shakespeare. —Lytton Strachey, “Words and Poetry” Yet Shakespeare is a very queer case. —Virginia Woolf, “Personalities” 1. Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury and Will Tosh’s Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, I […]
1. In both F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 reimagining of it, the lasting beauty for me lies in the films’ presentation of love as something momentary and evanescent, and the way that real love ends up being strengthened by sacrifice — even when, as in Herzog’s film, […]
On Facebook, the wonderful writer Marlon James made a quick post about the difference between American and British book covers, noting, “As my British publisher once said ‘over here darling we try to sell books.’” The best example was this: Let’s just say that even though I have no interest in […]
Pride Month feels more important than ever because attacks on queer people in the United States and around the world feel more virulent than ever. The historian in me (I keep him in a chamber near my liver) has a lot of footnotes to offer to that statement, nuances and […]
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond […]
Since writing my previous post about loneliness and horror, I’ve had cause to think a lot about varieties of loneliness, lostness, violence (physical and especially psychological), and intimacy. Some has been purely theoretical, trying to continue to tease out some ideas I explored in that post, some has been more immediate, […]
At the end of February, my favorite critic of horror cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay, wrote a piece for her Patreon titled “The Aesthetic of Loneliness in Horror”. It’s subscribers-only, so I won’t quote much from it here, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first read it, and […]
Last week, I attended the annual Modern Language Association Convention, this year in Philadelphia. While in general I am still skeptical of the amount of resources that academic conventions require (money, time, stress), I enjoy MLA — it’s an opportunity to hear about things I don’t get much opportunity to […]
The most famous line in Harold Pinter’s script for the 1971 film The Go-Between is also the most famous line from the L.P. Hartley novel it adapted — its first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” In his beguiling and unsettling new film May December, Todd Haynes […]