in my real life now i'm the facilitator for three book clubs, all reading wildly different things but still mostly about girls and horror. One is reading
Lolita, one is reading
Her Body & Other Parties and one is reading the biography of Oriana Fallici, which is turning out to be more unpleasant than I thought.
Lolita is a great group read because 1) its a group of all women and 2) all young women, so the feedback i'm getting from them is amazing. But
her body!!
i'm having nightmares trying to write up questions for the discussion on this book tomorrow. it's horror filled and queer and sexy and disgusting, which is all i want in a book woman life wonder.
it's like part of angela carter and also not. it's definitely one of the most queer books i've ever read, men and women and neither. the sex is believable which makes it even more horrifying. the book focuses on women, and the violence that is visited upon their minds and bodies, just out of their sheer existence as female forms. angela likes writing stories where there
is a conclusion, be it a faerie tale or a novel, none of these stories end well, if they end at all. even more unsettling. a story of angela's appears several times (in passing or directly) in
her body and that's
wolf alice, a story "based on an obscure variant of little red riding hood" (ok?!). a feral wolf girl child is 'rescued' from a wolf pack when she is injured, and nuns and others try and get her to "behave" wear clothes etc. she will not be tamed, so she sent off to the home of a terrifying, daemonic vampire Duke. with him she discovers something more human (in the monster // all of us are monster) and i'm going to go see wolf alice next weekend. i need to make a flow chart to really explain what i'm getting at here, but it's all together and all one, all one monster girl child.
even the wolf alice album covers look so angela carter. in
the magic toyshop, melanie climbs a tree in a beautiful dress and kills her mother by orgasming and bleeding all over it in the middle of the night.
all girls are the monster and all girls are lethal, as made by god.
everyone had such big dreams in this thread. hydro and publishing, joe abandoning the desert. and what became of those dreams? are you working on them? the wheel is turning.