Cozette’s Corner, LMST 345 Fall 2020

  Total Points: 106 Classes attended:  15 Points: 15 Extra Credit completed:  Week 1: The Gothic A Lecture, by David Punter, Week 1: Frankenstein 1931 film, Week 2: Nosferatu 1922 film, Week 3: Best Lecture Series: Godzilla and the Making of a Global Icon, by Dr. William Tsuitusi, Week 4: Cabin in the Woods (2011), directed by Drew Goddard, Week 5: The Witches (audiobook), by Roald Dahl, Week 6: Three Tolkien short stories; Week 12: Bloodchild, by Octavia Butler. Points: 12 Books read:   The Picture of Dorian Gray  by Oscar Wilde,  Dracula  by Bram Stoker,  Perdido Street Station  by China Mieville,  The Golden Compass  by Philip Pullman,  Akata Witch  by Nnedi Okorafor,  Lud-in-the-Mist  by Hope Mirrlees,  Trail of Lightning  by Rebecca Roanhorse,  Kwaiden  by Lafcadio Hearn,  Sirens of Titan  by Kurt Vonnegut,  The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  ...

 My reaction to this story is that it is somehow familiar. Not in the way that Butler stole from someone else her idea, or that this story has been rewritten ad nauseum. I mean it in that Gan's story is something that is very familiar to the average consumer of period romance, and maybe even at some level, the female-hindbrain. This is an arranged marriage between Gan and T'Gatoi, something that was practiced for a majority of human history, across culture and era. T'Gatoi being a literal alien isn't even that strange in this context - humans use that word to describe 'foreigners' after all, and cross culture marriage for the consolidation of power and resources was an extremely prevalent reason for arranged marriages.  Gan's equivocation over accepting T'Gatoi before ultimately accepting is interesting to me. He doesn't care as much as he thinks he does about becoming T'Gatoi's 'bride,' but he is afraid of hosting her young. He's...

Some of the moments in Herland  are absolutely hilarious - the boys being asked if virgin is a word applied to men as well is a double standard that still rings true to this day. But Gilman, though visionary, is very much a product of her time, and her 'utopia' reflects that. For starters, that's not actually a utopia - its a monoculture, much like Japan. Everything is homogenous and stable, with no member thereof actually acting under her own agency; it's a fragile culture, where everyone only acts to the benefits of society as a whole and not for themselves. There is no 'individual,' which obviously comes from Gilman's infatuation with socialism as a concept, and her disillusionment with the gender roles of her time. That's fine and all, but not the solution example she actually thinks it is.  Sometimes when fighting for survival, you're no longer fighting for a right to live but other people who just want to make ends meet. Other people who strugg...

 This book is hilarious when you stop and think about it. The plot is less a story and more a complete dissection of communication and it's plasticity, but it's a book that's carrying the discussion. Thinking about it, the sparsity of Babel-17  is probably a deliberate echo of the apparent epigrammatic language itself. Like, we get only glimpses of the geo-galactic-socio-political background, and absolutely nothing about the 'Invaders' beyond all the connotations behind the word itself. Language is really fascinating, especially when you need to describe  it and its mechanics, because it's like having a mirror try and reflect itself, which gets complicated. Too complicated for the average level of linguistic understanding most people have, which is sad, because the more you understand it, the less you have to use. It compacts on itself even as the meaning behind it expands - paradoxically logical.  English is pretty much one of the most complicated to learn lang...

Total Points: 86 Classes attended: 7 Points: 7 Extra Credit completed: Week 1: The Gothic A Lecture, by David Punter, Week 1: Frankenstein 1931 film, Week 2: Nosferatu 1922 film, Week 3: Best Lecture Series: Godzilla and the Making of a Global Icon, by Dr. William Tsuitusi, Week 4: Cabin in the Woods (2011), directed by Drew Goddard, Week 5: The Witches (audiobook), by Roald Dahl, Week 6: Three Tolkien short stories. Points: 10 Books read: The Picture of Dorian Gray  by Oscar Wilde, Dracula  by Bram Stoker, Perdido Street Station  by China Mieville, The Golden Compass  by Philip Pullman, Akata Witch  by Nnedi Okorafor, Lud-in-the-Mist  by Hope Mirrlees, Trail of Lightning  by Rebecca Roanhorse, Kwaiden  by Lafcadio Hearn, Sirens of Titan  by Kurt Vonnegut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  by N.K. Jemison, Warbreaker  by Brandon Sanderson, Soulless by Gail Carriger, and Dune  by Frank Herbert. Poin...

 The past becomes the future is I guess the idea here. And Rebecca Roanhorse brings in a perspective I've never considered and am the better for reading. I actually found it extremely reassuring that the end of the world is a natural process that's happened before. Sure it's chaotic and violent, but that's what change is as it's happening all at once; it eventually settles. Peace returns. People adapt, and stories are passed down. And that's basically why we tell stories, write books and watch movies. We have things we can learn about ourselves and our lives from the experiences of those before us and those different from us. The current market of port-apocalypse young and new adult fiction is distinctly lacking the tradition and pathos of Trail of Lightning. The best  post-apocalypse story I've ever read was Station 11  by Emily St. John Mandel, and it is the other kind of return to tradition. It follows the intersection of lives as touched by art and liter...

 Herbert obviously had a lot of thoughts when he wrote Dune , and now I have a lot of thoughts as well. And it's not really like he did anything new per-say, just extrapolated and taken to their extreme. In the strangeness of prophetic reclamation and centuries of eugenic cultivation under intergalactic imperialism, the humanity of the characters lends us readers a foothold to place ourselves in as we journey through Dune . I kind of get the feeling that Herbert mixed past present and future ideas in creating his world. Feudalism and religious centrism, the natural gas fuel crisis, space travel. Everything stretching and growing into a singularity that can no longer sustain itself and where even in subverting is reinforced. Dune  reads half like a traditional novel and half like a history book, which I feel is fitting for the purposes of this novel. Dune  could have easily been a satire in how it exposes this flawed organization of human priority, but it's not, because th...

Leaf by Niggle: Fascinating that the narrator addresses themselves in the story of the painter, Niggle. He seems to be some sort of entity beyond life and beyond death, and it is very obviously Tolkien’s voice. The trees rather give it away. This story somehow manages to talk about several very important ideas very neatly, and that wouldn’t have been possible without Tolkien’s own eloquence and experience. What is the value of art? Unless you’ve ever been by the need to make something and actually done it, your answer is likely Tompkins’s equivocation of “Of course, painting has uses.” Not everything that has value is useful, and subjective emotional responses are not ubiquitous. The world people like Tompkins imagine sounds stifling - they aren’t able to extrapolate. Appreciate. Understand the leaf is the tree is the forest is the foothills is the mountains. And even when a creator manages to explain themselves, non-creators are quick to brush it off. Sometimes they come around, but ...

 It's fascinating how cavalier the people are about the Witches and what they do. And the logic behind everything, from the witches' plans to how not taking a bath ever is the best solution to avoiding witches, is very much childlike in its simplicity, but that lends it a special credence from the perspective of a child.  And while the witches are scary, and you would definitely not like to run afoul of one, they don't actually harm the children? The transformation into a mouse is so painless our main character almost doesn't notice he's been changed - the other child needs to have it pointed out to him. They technically leave the rest up to nature. And it's not really the motivation  to harm and or torture children - it's to do something to stop them from being horrifically offensive to their noses. And that's it, that's the sum total of their plans with all the power of magic at their disposal, that we know of. Why they don't just all go into ...

 So I'd heard tons of good things about this movie before watching, and I'm glad to say that it lived up to the hype, despite me not going in blind. Sigourney Weaver making an appearance at the last minute is a really sweet cherry on top too, especially since it seemed like they had every monstrous nightmare under the sun except the xenomorph, likely due to copyright issues. But Cabin in the Woods  is an amazing love letter to the horror genre.  I was actually really pleased that we start the movie with the people running the ritual instead of the group they sacrifice, as it at first gives us a mystery of 'oh who are these people and how are they going to be involved with the college kids?' that morphs into genuine interest in both groups, as we see both of them as people in high stakes situations in conflict, rather than clear-cut villains and victims despite that being exactly their respective, technical roles. Honestly, I was also reminded a lot of the SCP Foundation...

 Not sure what to make of the information that film makers in the porn industry were employed to keep audience attention during the Godzilla  movie, but this franchise is so old, its bound to have a colored history. Also interesting is that Godzilla  went form an open wound of post-war trauma to a symbol of 'good' change. He's like a manifestation of Japan's current mood, a sort of barometer of cultural opinions for a culture that is very reserved and recalcitrant in public. There was one story in Kwaiden  actually that kind of captures the catharsis-by-proxy aspect of Godzilla , the story with the bell and the mirror. You put all your thoughts, feelings, and intent onto a scapegoat for the actual thing and come away feeling better for it. As far as emotional outlets go, Godzilla  is pretty world-famous one.

 This reminded me a lot of the European Colored Fairy Books , or basically the Brothers Grimm  fairy tale compendium. Which is fitting, since this is basically the same analogous process. Its really fascinating from an anthropological perspective how cultures from entirely opposite sides of the planet tell stories with similar moral tales, with supernatural forces that don't bother explaining themselves. And the majority of these are moral tales - Yuki-Onna and O-Sanna 's stories are basically about keeping your promises, though they give different reasons for needing to do so. Which makes sense, since people need to modify behavior for given context. Different stories providing a nuanced look into a part of the culture is really cool. What's interesting is that these stories don't all necessarily inspire fear. They don't incite recipients into moral behavior through terror like modern ghost stories do, but they do all contain some kernel of a lesson. But then agai...

 I was expecting this to be more of a social intrigue, Sherlock-Holmes-and-Watson type book than the near bodice ripper it actually was, but Soulless  was still such a fun read, and Alexia a great leading character. Alexia utilizing her hat/hair pins as weapons is a great nod to the actual Hat-Pin-Panic that ended up getting the fashion banned, because women  did  use them for self defense. Don't think people took it so far as to modify a parasol with buckshot for extra safety, however. Carriger definitely captured the atmosphere of Victorian England - a time of both great conservatism and great progress. I feel like the idea of steampunk comes from that sort of dichotomy in Victorian culture, actually, and I wish Carriger had given us more world building and less (or at least, less prominent) romance.  Alexia is in a great place to explore all aspects of this alternate version of Victorian London society, and I wonder if the next book in the series will fo...

 This movie is basically a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula , just under a different name. That, is more than I can say for the 1931  Frankenstein  movie. The acting is at times melodramatic and silly, and the film lacks a good set-up and pay-off system that takes Orlok for 'unnerving and weird ' to 'horrifying and evil,' but the last scene, where he's trying to hypnotize Ellen and the camera cuts between her fighting his control and him staring out the window are genuinely scary. And then the sun rises and he just, dies without the characters being actually responsible. Otherwise, my problem with Nosferatu  are the same that I had with Dracula ; it drags on through the plot at a glacial pace as all the information neatly falls into place. In Dracula  though, Mina's investigative compiling of information that is the novel itself makes that interesting. On the topic of Mina, Nosferatu  completely ruined all that Mina does for the story of Dracula...

This book is almost like the antithesis of gothic literature while still containing many of the beats there of. It's kind of strange - the time period is ambiguous but obviously antiquated, there is a great social change happening behind the scenes of the otherwise placid Lud-in-the-Mist, the supernatural is for all intents and purposes kicking in the door of the Ludites' 'pious' culture, and there is an extreme emphasis on the splendor of the natural world. However, while these are typical beats indicative of gothic literature, they are played in the exact opposite way. Nature is glorious and golden and even the suspicious darkness of night is portrayed as mischievous and playful; the people of Lud learn to understand and then embrace the supernatural fairy fruit rather than spurn it; and the past is the benefit of the present and future, and not a deadweight preventing progress. And that's just the framing for allegorical tale within Lud-in-the-Mist . The characte...

 Literally from the opening credits we get a hint of the gothic interest - a still image of eyes in the dark, rotating around the screen, like a visual representation of our instinctive fear of what lurks in the dark. Also aligned with gothic interests is the inclusion of several women attending what is supposed to be a high level medical course, and how Elizabeth now adopts something of an active role in the beginning of the film in order to, understandably, abridge the narrative. This movie's depiction of the monster's situation is vastly  different to the point of it probably being worse. The relationship between Victor an the Creation in the book is that of God and humans, in as much that God abandons his creations to figure things out on their own. The movie just literally has the Creation being punished just for being created, despite Victor being proud of creating it just moments before, until he finds out he used a criminal brain instead of the average-man brain. Witho...

 His opening is correct: 'Gothic' is definitely a difficult topic to pin down. But that, to me, is part of what makes it so enticing a genre. It's nebulous, flexible, and something adaptable to the modern sense. The idea of the double or doppelgänger being prominent in Gothic literature sort of tickles me, because the genre itself is  the 'evil twin' of our senses. To me, that's because Gothic is sort of the 'original'  Black Mirror . It's a reflection of us at our most exposed and natural, reacting to things unknown with no immediate explanation. In the Romantic, Gothic literature, we are the trespasser, the victim, and the witness all at once, because we have all at one point been one of those things, and the blatant handling of such mundane things as feelings juxtaposed with the extraordinary supernatural events allows us the ability better perceive both. To be simultaneously repulsed and entranced seems to be the staple of Gothic literature, with...

Oh I really liked this one. Also, I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  back to back with Sirens of Titan , so the intersection of religion and culture and all it’s tragic glories were fresh in my mind. I personally feel like either of these two books could comfortably fit onto the ‘Narrative of Spiritual Eduction’ list, in all fairness. Questioning and challenging religious teachings and religious authorities isn’t anything new, either in fiction or in reality, as exemplified nicely by the roughly fifty years between when Sirens of Titan  and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms ’ publications. But what I especially appreciate about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  is that it’s religion is something more flexible than we find in our Judeo-Christian tomes, and is, uniquely, still a story being told. Take Norse mythology, for example - the Nordic gods know, as they are living and creating the world, how the world will end, and what will happen afterwards. Their story is completed b...

 Before Sirens of Titan , the only other Vonnegut book I’d read was the story of Billy Pilgrim, Slaughter House Five . The fact that Sirens of Titan  has a central coherent narrative, comparatively, actually threw me for a loop at first. But Vonnegut’s unapologetically batshit creativity and meticulous dissection of social constructs and the human condition is a unifying element throughout his work, and if anything his total disdain for war is more hilariously satirical in Sirens of Titan , though that might have to do with the focus of the book being more on organized religion and it’s Gordian Knot of recursive implications than the bleak horrors of glorified conflict. For the longest time, I was sure that Malachi Constant was our main character, but by the end it became clear that it was actually Rumfoord. This is because it isn’t like Malachi doesn’t have an arc we can sympathize with throughout the story, but that he’s not particularly someone who fights for his freedom of...

 So I really liked the magic system and how Sanderson built the world of Warbreaker , and the political machinations between amnesiac deities was as interesting as it was hilarious. Lightsong, Stennimar, was a delight every time he made an appearance, Siri and Susebron were complete sweethearts, and I enjoyed the banter and common sense checks of Denth.  Vivenna, however, I could not stand  for the majority of this novel. She was the literal definition of sanctimonious and dependent. Which makes sense, since her journey is one of over coming arrogance, hypocrisy, and selfishness, but it was very frustrating to watch her have her bad behavior explained to her very clearly and then watch her deliberately twist it so that she’s not in the wrong. That’s a great setup for a character arc, even if Vivenna is insufferable in the meanwhile. She’s twenty-two, trained to be consort to a foreign king, basically taught how to navigate a treacherous, hostile environment with minimal s...