Platy’s Web Excursions

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Web Excursions 2022-06-21
platylinks.substack.com

Web Excursions 2022-06-21

Platy Hsu
Jun 22
Share this post
Web Excursions 2022-06-21
platylinks.substack.com

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.

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Web Excursions 2022-06-21
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