Web Excursions 2022-06-21
You Need a Horror Movie Friend for a More Frightening, Less Lonely Life
Horror is a natural companion to the experimental fiction that I love
in the sense of its belief that beneath ordinary reality lies a second and darker layer of existence.
In these films, mood is not subservient to message:
The mood is the message, working to disperse the sedative haze of the everyday
It wasn’t a natural pick for a friend date:
huddling together in the dark and watching the story of a child-size vampire ensnaring a young boy into emotional slavery
Horror deniers often claim there’s nothing emotionally valuable in the experience of being frightened.
I disagree. The existence of horror is inevitably proximate to the existence of wondrous possibility.
There is a shiver of recognition, a sense of immediate union.
Of course, I can watch horror movies by myself — and I frequently do, because my husband doesn’t like them —
but choosing to be scared with another person means choosing to be vulnerable together,
which creates a bond that can’t be replicated any other way.
Horror movies articulate that the world is horrible and that the most horrible thing of all is simply that we are alive and fragile and bound for death.
There is no protection from this, no other way out of this life.
People you love will get sick — maybe you will.
Violence will be done by charismatic strangers and,
worse still, by lovers and friends.
But sharing that understanding with someone makes the world, perhaps paradoxically, less scary.
You can’t undo what is terrible about the universe,
but you can stand against it together.
Accent Shame — Matt Gemmell
There’s a particular English accent that’s probably best known via exported television;
it’s seen as upper-class, and refined, and probably the product of wealth and/or some sort of lineage-maintaining breeding.
It’s probably how a lot of foreign-to-the-UK people think that all English people speak.
In that accent or cluster of accents,
bear would be something like beah, with the r vanishing into the rear of an open mouth, unresolved and virtually unvoiced.
By contrast, in much of Scotland,
bear is rendered with a strong and rolling r, more like bayrr, which is a more physically taxing vocalisation.
As my son has developed, his pronunciation abilities have shifted from the former to the latter.
I found myself delighted at the change.
The UK today is an English construct, and anything English is a London-centric construct itself.
The three additional countries besides England that comprise the UK — Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland — have always held a secondary position, and
in the period of my own upbringing there was very little positive representation beyond tokenism or entertainment, for those three nations.
From politicians and power-brokers, to celebrities and news anchors,
there was a strong sense that an “English” accent (within the London-cluster of middle/upper class examples) is proper, and polite, and seemly, and that
my own country’s various Scottish accents are lower-class, uneducated, rough, inelegant, and undesirable
Now, I crave the character and the warmth and the delight and the fascination of the non-default.
I deeply question the sketchy motivations behind cultural — as opposed to social, and societal — unification, because they’re usually just the acceptable mask for erasure.
I love how my accent sounds, and I derive great enjoyment and satisfaction from listening to my fellow countryfolk.
They’re probably a victim of the same thing, but
there are also those who will consciously try to manipulate you into sharing their prejudice against you for their own ends.