Today I read the
next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet
Dell. In this section, we follow Emily Thornhill as she journeys to Iowa to
meet Harry Powers’ father. We learn Power’s real name (Harm Drenth) and the
fact that although he came from good people (horny-handed sons of the soil, no
less) he seems to have been a bad seed (surprise, surprise). We then go to
Chicago with Emily to see the auction of the Eichers’ possessions, which allows
Emily/Phillips to feel some righteous indignation at the ghoulish nature of
people, before going back to Quiet Dell to witness a lynch mob trying to break
into the local jail and deliver summary justice to Powers. Sounds quite
eventful and interesting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, appearances can be
deceiving. The irony of continuing to keep Powers in the background of the
story is that we yearn for him even more.
I also finished
Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and
Other Pieces, which includes the following pieces: “Robert Antelme or the
Truth of Literature,” “A Scientific and Literary Friendship,” “The Winter
Journey,” and some examples of Perec’s word games. The most interesting piece
for me was the essay on Antelme, which comes from a much earlier stage of
Perec’s career (1962). Sturrock’s footnote describes Perec’s attitude as ‘more
political’ at this stage of his career than he subsequently became, but this is
not a very helpful observation. It’s true that this essay does have a very
different tone from the other pieces in this volume, resembling much more
closely the traditional engagé type
of French intellectual, rather than the playful tone of later Perec, but there
are still important similarities. For example, in the context of discussing how
various writers have treated the concentration camp experience, Perec singles
out Antelme for praise because, rather than emphasizing the emotive,
apocalyptic, or spectacular, Antelme is instead governed by “a desire for
simplicity, for a previously unknown everydayness.” Even at this early stage of
his career, Perec appreciated the possibilities of an examination of the
ordinary, an examination he would pursue in so many different ways for the rest
of his career.
Did I mention
that my choice of films for discussion in this blog will be eclectic and not
governed by whether or not they are ‘good’ films? If not, I think this point
will be made by the fact that today I watched A Haunted House (2013), a parody of the Paranormal Activity films directed by Michael Tiddes and co-written
by and starring Marlon Wayans. I’d like to say that I don’t enjoy toilet humor,
constant swearing, and comedic stereotypes, but that would be a lie. I love the
Scary Movie franchise, and this film
is very much in that vein. Casting Cedric the Entertainer as a trainee exorcist
recently released from jail is a stroke of genius and Marlon Wayans is an
underrated physical comedian. For all its crassness, this film is valuable not
primarily as a parody but rather as a critique of the assumed whiteness of too
many examples of the horror genre. What happens when you take the threatened-suburban-white-couple
that is the staple of films like Paranormal
Activity and make them black? This film may not have very interesting
answers to that question, but the question is still worth asking.
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