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.