#poetry by Patricia Harris

[faecorpspublishing]

More April News

So, April is National Poetry Month. It’s a busy one here at Fae Corps Publishing. The blog is going to be doing a Pad Challenge – Daily creative prompts to incite creative ideas. Jennifer Elliott is releasing State of Mind Patricia Harris is releasing Internal Battlefields Nk Xero is releasing Valley of Thoughts (watch here for a cover reveal) Our newsletter will have a second edition of…

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#April #countdown to release #Jennifer Elliott #National Poetry Month #NK Xero #PAD Challenge #Patricia Harris #upcoming

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of january

christian wiman hard night: "the ice storm"

timothy donnelly hymn to life

randall jarrell the complete poems: "the lost world"

dana levin the living teaching

stuart dybeck brass knuckles: "the knife-sharpener's daughter"

kofi awoonor the promise of hope: new and selected poems: "lament of the silent sisters"

bruce snider ode to a dolly parton drag queen

jon pineda birthmark: "translation"

brenda shaughnessy interior with sudden joy: "dear gonglya"

franny choi hangul abecedarian

atsuro riley hutch

clark moore strikes and gutters

jenny xie eye level: "rootless"

alberto ríos the smallest muscle in the human body: "rabbits and fire"

tim seibles mosaic

anthony hecht an offering for patricia

harry matthews cool gales shall fan the glades

robert glück the word in us: lesbian and gay poetry of the next wave: "burroughs"

albert goldbarth the poem of the little house at the corner of misapprehension and marvel

george seferis collected poems (george seferis): "spring a.d."

alberto ríos a small story about the sky

sharmila voorakkara for the tattooed man

robin blaser the holy forest: collected poems of robin blaser: "the truth is laughter 10"

robert pinsky gulf music: "antique"

henri cole blackbird and wolf: "twilight"

paul violi likewise: "in praise of idleness"

ron padgett collected poems: "what are you on?"

meena alexander birthplace with buried stones: "lychees"

sara borjas decolonial self-portrait

valerie martínez absence, luminescent: "the reliquaries"

kathryn simmonds the visitations: "in the woods"

kofi

#tbr #tbr list #poetry #poet #poets #poem #poems #to read #poetry recs #christiam wiman #timothy donnell #randall jarrell #the complete poems #the lost world #hymn to life #the ice storm #hard night #stuart dybeck #the knife-sharpener's daughter #brass knuckles #dana levin #the living teaching #kofi awoonor #the promise of hope #the promise of hope: new and selected poems #lament of the silent sisters #january #bruce snider #ode to a dolly parton drag queen #jon pineda

[thelonecalzone]

At long last, here is the official reading list for There'll Be Some Changes Made, and a few recommendations from some of the readers! It's long, so hopefully there's a little something for everyone.

Thank you again to the wonderful readers, both for your encouragement, and for helping me compile this list <3

Recommendations (Named Throughout TBSCM)

The Pearl - John Steinbeck The House in the Cerulean Sea - TJ Klune The Great Alone - Kristin Hannah The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde Upon the Blue Couch - Laurie Kolp In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith Paradise Rot - Jenny Hval Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters Fingersmith - Sarah Waters Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown Under the Udala Trees - Chinelo Okparanta In at the Deep End - Kate Davies Some Girls Do - Jennifer Dugan This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone  The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid Lavender House - Lev AC Rosen My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe - Fannie Flagg Straight Jacket Winter - Esther DuQuette and Gilles Poulin-Denis

Source Books (Referenced, but not named)

The Odyssey - Homer The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams Hamlet - William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald Come Along with Me - Shirley Jackson (unfinished novel) We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson A Certain Hunger - Chelsea G. Summers The Poison Garden - AJ Banner

Honorable Mentions:

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson Different Class - Joanne Harris The Lost Girls of Ireland (Book 1) - Susanne O’Leary The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum The Broken Girls - Simone St. James Dear Fahrenheit 451 - Annie Spence The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde One Last Stop - Casey McQuiston Ash - Malinda Lo Everything Leads to You - Nina LaCour Camp Slaughter - Sergio Gomez The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka A Slow Fire Burning - Paula Hawkins The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Emily M. Danforth Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Banished (Under the Coffee Table) Books - DO NOT READ:

Ulysses - James Joyce Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara The Hunting Party - Lucy Foley My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult The Book Thief - Markus Zusak In the Darkroom - Susan Faludi Marley & Me - John Grogan

Recs from Fellow Readers

Things We Lost in the Fire - Marina Enriquez Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg Mouthful of Birds - Samantha Schweblin  The Safety of Objects - A.M. Homes Crush - Richard Siken The Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare I’ve Got a Time Bomb - Sybil Lamb The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Last Night at the Telegraph Club - Malinda Lo Sadie - Courtney Summers The Messy Lives of Book People - Phaedra Patrick The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix The Final Girl Support Group - Grady Hendrix The Lying Lives of Adults - Elena Ferrante They Were Here Before Us - Eric LaRocca The Patience Stone - Atiq Rahimi Agamemnon - Aeschylus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poetry - (start with "You Foolish Men") The poems of Sappho - (“Anactoria”, the book of fragments, and “Goatherd” specifically)

#kcfh #kevin can fuck himself #kcfh fanfic #there'll be some changes made #tbscm #pattison #allison x patty #reading list

[germansierra]

The CEO finally launches its biggest project yet, with a whopping 500+ pages and experimental formatting, it presents our biggest step in making this a viable venue for more robust projects beyond the journal. This is volume I out of III, with volume II already finished as well. A multi-continental babe.

Interstitial Artelligence finds two writers circling around ideations of theory-fiction, poetry, the labyrinth, the semi-organic, and more. In the lineage of the tete-beche, both march towards the center of the book-object, crossing the thresholds of the paratext to find what is at the nodal point–the center of the zone–the bibliomantic fetish.

Featuring essays by Emanuel Magno, German Sierra, Patricia McCormack, Amy Ireland, and Mike Corrao. Artwork by Mia-Jane Harris, axolotl and Gabriel Magno.

https://centreforexperimentalontology.com/2022/05/05/interstitial-artelligence-vol-i/

[vendettaspretentious-p]

Hello, I am V (like Vee or even Bee), my pronouns are they/them, my main account and AO3 handle is @vendettasfanfictioning, I am but a silly little goose who occasionally writes about the characters I like, and this is my side blog for anything poetry adjacent from the fandoms I'm in, be it my own or by others. This space is what I like to call pretty pictures + pretty words stacked with my favorite things.

I am always open for poetry recommendations (specifically queer romances and SEA authors!) as well as tips and/or criticism! But also please don't be mean to me or I'll shut down (threat).

My destiel poems.

Fandoms! AKA the things I like to read fanfics about...

Anime/Manga: BNHA, BSD, HQ, YNM, YOI, etc.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Genshin Impact (I have not played since 2.6 lmao)

Good Omens (+ The MS/DT Extended Universe)

Harry Potter

Heartstopper

The MCU (up until TFATWS)

MXTX: SVSSS, MDZS, TGCF

NBC Hannibal (+ The MM/HD Extended Universe)

Supernatural (I've just started on S10 lmao help)

Valorant (The lore is just *chef's kiss*)

The Witcher

Here are some tropes(?) I will never get tired of (lmao can you tell I'm trying to fill out the alphabet)

Angst in an "oh they don't love me (even though they actually do)" way, not the "everything in my life is going bad" way

Bodyguard 😳

Coffee shop AUs

(Domestic) FLUFF

Fuck buddies falling in love

Hurt/Comfort

Literature-centric jobs i.e. professors, writers, etc. because lit is hot!!!!

Mutual pining

Oblivious x pining

Tattoo artist (bonus points for either a florist or a person interested in getting a tattoo as the love interest)

Urban fantasy

Authors I read a lot of poetry from!

Emily Dickinson

Carol Ann Duffy

Allen Ginsberg

Patricia Kirkpatrick

Joseph O. Legaspi

Shakespeare

Richard Siken

May Swenson

Ocean Vuong

*Favorites

#pinned intro #v says important things #updating this as i go #I like to alphabetize my lists I've realized

[cppsheffield]

Centre for Poetry and Poetics: Remembering the Logoclast - Alan Halsey; - a special memorial event hosted by Agnes Lehoczky and the Centre for Poetry and Poetics: a night of tributes paid by fellow writers, artists, publishers - gathering together for the evening to remember & celebrate the poet, friend, artist, bookseller and logoclast Alan Halsey, his life and his work.

A fond farewell to the beloved poet, artist, composer, publisher, editor, bibliophile, logoclast, scholar, humourist and staunch toper Alan Halsey (1949-2022). Alan Halsey ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye for almost twenty years before marrying fellow poet Geraldine Monk and moving to Sheffield where he continued to work as a specialist bookseller. Collections of his poetry include Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989), Wittgenstein’s Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006), Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada 2009) and Even if only out of (Veer 2011). From 1979-97 he ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye and edited West House Books 1995-2011. Five Seasons also published The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995) and Lives of the Poets (2009). As poet and graphic artist he published collaborations with Karen Mac Cormack (Fit To Print, Coach House 1998), Gavin Selerie (Days of ’49, West House 1999), Kelvin Corcoran (Your Thinking Tracts or Nations, West House 2001, and Into the Interior, Shearsman, 2022), Steve McCaffery (Paradigm of the Tinctures, Granary 2007) and others. He edited Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ Death’s Jest-Book for West House in 2003 and The Ivory Gate, a collection of Beddoes’ later work, for ReScript Books in 2011. He later edited Bill Griffiths’ collected poems in three volumes for Reality Street. His text-graphic work included Memory Screen, shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005, and In White Writing (Xexoxial 2012). He co-directed the antichoir Juxtavoices with Martin Archer and the group’s album Juxtanother antichoir from Sheffield appeared on Discus Records in 2013. His final full-length publication was Remarks of Uncertain Consequence (Five Seasons Press, 2022) shortly before his death. Other recent publications included Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman and Winterreisen, a collaboration with Kelvin Corcoran, Knives Forks  & Spoons. He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics.

Contributors:

Tim Allen Martin Archer Andrew Brewerton Kelvin Corcoran Ian Davidson Dan Eltringham Patricia Farrell Allen Fisher Tony Frazer Harry Gilonis Jeff Hilson   Elizabeth James Juxtavoices Ágnes Lehóczky Tony Lopez Geraldine Monk Simon Perril Adam Piette Frances Presley Gavin Selerie Robert Sheppard Simon Smith   Glenn Storhaug Harriet Tarlo Scott Thurston 

Reading Schedule:

Intro and welcome by Agnes Lehoczky

Adam Piette’s tribute

Juxtavoices: ‘White Persimmon’ ‘ONEVERLASTARTLETTERMINALIENDLESSONG’

Geraldine Monk’s welcome and reading: ‘Dear Geraldine’ from Blackbox Manifold 29, Monk Collective, 2023, and Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’

Further readings:

Tim Allen: parts 22 & 23 from A Robin Hood Book, West House Books 1996, repr in Marginalien, Five Seasons Press 2005

Andrew Brewerton: '55 Texts for the Journey' from Perspectives on the Reach, Galloping Dog Pess 1981, repr in Wittgensteins’s Devil, Stride 2000 and Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006

  Kelvin Corcoran & Adam Piette: from Winterreisen by Alan Halsey & Kelvin Corcoran, The Knives Forks And Spoons Press 2019, repr in Wittgensteins’s Devil, Stride 2000

Ian Davidson: ‘Noughts and Quandaries’, Blackbox Manifold 29, University of Sheffield

  Dan Eltringham: ‘Letters on Change & Exchange’ / in ‘Six Letters of Change & Exchange’, Perspectives on the Reach, Galloping Dog Pess 1981, repr in Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006

Patricia Farrell: Martial translations from Some Versions Of Martial, Gargoyle 2010, Even if only out of, Veer Books 2011, Versions of Martial, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2015

Allen Fisher:  An Alphabet of Emblems, Tern Press 1987; repr in Five Years Out, Galloping Dog Press 1989 and in Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006; Song of the Rowan, Five Seasons Press 1979; and from ’Spells Against Green Field Development’, West House Books 1994, repr in Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006

  Tony Frazer: ‘Dear Roy’ and ‘Lee Harwood had a thing about pangolins’ from Remarks of Uncertain Consequence, Five Seasons Press 2022

Harry Gilonis: ‘Albion’s Policy’ from Perspectives on the Reach, Galloping Dog Pess 1981; ‘Benefit of Hindrance’ from Auto Dada Café, Five Seasons Press 1987, repr in Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006;  selection from Table Talk, Privately 1989, repr in Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017; ‘Summer 1990: An Eclogue’, from Reasonable Distance, Equipage 1992

Jeff Hilson: ‘The Art of Memory in Hay-on-Wye’, Textual Instability 1995, repr in Marginalien, Five Seasons Press 2005

Elizabeth James: ‘Eleatic Alert’ from Marginalien, Five Seasons Press 2005, repr Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017

Ágnes Lehóczky: from A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts in Term as in Aftermath, Ahadada 2009, repr in Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017 and from So Far As To : for Ágnes Lehóczky. [Sheffield]: Gargoyle 2013, repr in Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017

Tony Lopez: Visions of the Western Railways, Gratton Street Irregulars 1996, repr in Wittgensteins’s Devil, Stride 2000

  Simon Perril: ‘Lizard Abstract' Short Run 1995 and The Hunting of the Lizopard, Gargoyle 2001, both repr in Marginalien, Five Seasons Press 2005

  Frances Presley: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’ and ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’ from Lives of the Poets, Five Seasons Press 2009

  Gavin Selerie: ‘Bardo Panavision 1949’ (extract), from Days of ’49, West House Books 1999; ‘William Blake’ and ‘Caroline Norton’ from Lives of the Poets, Five Seasons Press 2009

Robert Sheppard: 'After Spicer' from Wittgenstein's Devil, Stride 2000, Not Everything Remotely, Salt 2006 and Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017

Simon Smith: Martial translations from Some Versions Of Martial, Gargoyle 2010, Even if only out of, Veer Books 2011, Versions of Martial, The Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2015

  Glenn Storhaug: ‘The Calligraphy of Madman Chang’ from an edition-of-one compiled by AH, 1979; In Sight of Carnllidi, Five Seasons Press 1979; ‘November Song’ from Another Loop In our Days (1980); first 3 lines of ‘Five Accounts of the Arrest of English Poetry’ from Auto Dada Café, Five Seasons Press 1987, repr in Wittgensteins’s Devil, Stride 2000 ; ‘He kept bad company . . .’ from Remarks of Uncertain Consequence, Five Seasons Press 2022                                            

Harriet Tarlo: ‘Greenhouse Effects: a Calendar’ from Reasonable Distance, Equipage 1992, repr in Marginalien 2005

Scott Thurston: ‘Beginning to End’ in E.ratio echap Beginning to End & Other Alphabet Poems 2011, repr in Even if only out of, Veer Books 2011 and ‘Skips & Charms against Recession’, Even if only out of, Veer Books 2011 and Selected Poems 1988-2016, Shearsman 2017

Closing reading: Alan Halsey (from Remarks of Uncertain Consequence, Five Seasons Press 2022), Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, 2020.

Alan Halsey visuals, drawing from the following graphic projects: Self-Portraits for Removal from an Exhibition, Miss Punch Live at the London Charivari 1884, Shew-Screen Scenarios, Selected UV Docs, In White Writing, Winterreisen, Typographical Poems, Steel City Presents, Paradigm of the Tinctures, At Last The Pictures Told Some Sort of Story.

 West House Books in Sheffield:

Next Chapter Books 

David Bartholomew

7 Rustlings Road, S11 7AA

https://westhousebooks.co.uk/

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week - #82

My first film with actor Tom Hardy - a movie about cement. Locke is a character piece that features only one person, and takes place exclusively inside a BMW driving from Birmingham to London at night. Like the Danish thriller ‘The Guilty’, its power comes from the gripping roller-coaster story that unfolds in stages. It tells of a responsible construction foreman whose life unravels as he drives to be present for the birth of a child conceived during a one-night stand. Highly recommended!

The unique film of the week!

🍿

2 Peak Jack Nicholson Roles:

🍿 ...”I’m tired of what’s right and wrong”…

Re-watch: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981 version). Peak Jessica Lange and another depression-era Jack Nicholson drifter in a hard-core, sadomasochistic and “steamy” affair. The first hour of their sexual attraction was sensational, and their plan to kill her husband riveting. The second hour, from the moment the husband was dead, was very weak.

RIP, Bob Rafelson!

🍿 The Pledge, the third film directed by Sean Penn, and one of Nicholson’s last great roles. And what an ensemble cast: Benicio del Toro, Sam Shepard, Harry Dean Stanton, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, Helen Mirren,  Patricia Clarkson, Robin Wright Penn (with a chipped front tooth), Lois Smith and Aaron Eckhart. Also, a terrific Hans Zimmer score. 7/10.

🍿

A newer Werner Herzog thriller with Michael Shannon I never heard of? With a hostage taking plot against an ecological disaster on the salt flats in Bolivia? Sign me up. However, Salt and Fire, written by Herzog in only 5 days, was BAD! Stilted dialogue, terrible acting, meaningless story. The only positive was the lovely score. 2/10.

🍿

2 Older Korean women protecting their difficult sons/grandsons:

🍿 Poetry, my 4th lyrical masterpiece by Lee Chang-dong, (After ‘Burning’. ‘Peppermint Candy’ and ‘A girl at my door’). He is now one of my all-time favorite directors. Another 100% “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, and deservedly so.

A 66-year-old grandmother discovers that her growing memory loss is caused by early-onset Alzheimer, but the story is not about how her life deteriorates. Instead, it tells about her enrolling in a poetry class, and her dealing with her rebellious grandson. Wistful, poetic and moving. 10/10.

🍿I thought that the story of Bong Joon-ho’s Mother would be similar, as the write up sounded somehow similar. But it didn’t compare. Here, the mother of an intellectually-challanged boy accused of murder, becomes an investigator in order to clear his name. But there was no depth to the story, and no ‘poetry’ to the film-making. 3/10.

🍿 

In the last year I saw 5 of Roy Andersson’s 6 Feature films (I can’t find ‘Gilliap’ anywhere!), but I had to watch A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence again today. (Photo Above).

It’s so Swedish, so funny and so sad.

🍿

My first two by Takashi Miike:

🍿 Audition - Sammy challenged me to see it, “one of the most fucked up movies that he ever saw”, and I was apprehensive for quite a while because I won’t watch horror films. But it wasn’t straight ‘torture-porn’. Before it turns into a sadistic revenge-shocker at the third act, the story of a widower producer who uses a false casting audition to find a woman to marry was nuanced and well-done. The ‘normal’ psychology of the first half, felt extra unsettling at the end. 7/10.

🍿 His completely different The Happiness of the Katakuris. A bizarre genre-bender: A surrealist and lovely comedy about a family of six (plus their dog Pochi) who buys a bed & breakfast out in the country, but nobody visits it, and the few that do, end up dying. The Macabre and insane story is broken up with stylistic anomalies: Wild Claymation and dream sequences, a karaoke-style sing-alongs, and every few minutes over-the-top song and dance numbers, like ‘The feeling of love’, and ‘That’s happiness’. Unique and delightful. 8/10.

🍿  

The milk of sorrow, my first award-winning film from Peru about violence and trauma, directed by Claudia Llosa (the daughter of Mario Vargas Llosa). Magaly Solier, who was also wonderful at ‘Lina from Lima’, stars as a impoverished woman tormented. The suffering of the local women has passed from one generation to the next in fears which paralyze their lives. Tragic magical realism, troubling and transcendental. 8/10.

🍿

How to make a masterpiece with a near-zero budget - Where Is My Friend's House? My 4th film by Abbas Kiarostami, and again, like ‘Homework’, about ordinary first graders at a poor Iranian village. An 8-year-old boy have to return his friend's notebook that he took by mistake, or the friend will be punished. One of Kurosawa's favorite films and one of the greatest films about childhood I’ve ever seen. The final shot is heart-stopping. 10/10.

🍿

Laugh or Die, a strange comedy from Finland, about a a group of theater actors in a prison camp, who must stage a comedy play for the camp commandant - or be executed. This is during the Finnish civil war of 1918, on which I knew very little beforehand. 🍿 

”… The horse blew first…”

Between the two verifiable masterpieces ‘The Gold Rush’ and ‘City Lights’, Chaplin directed The Circus. The sentimental, melancholy story of a selfless clown, who can only be funny unintentionally. Also, I never realized how much makeup he used for his eyes. Re-watch.

🍿  

Making It Big: The History of Gay Adult Film, a feature-length documentary (or rather a YouTube video essay, made and narrated by one guy) about the history of gay porn in America. Not XXX-explicit, but about hard-core gay porn. "I did not know that!..."

🍿 

Picnic, about a no-good vagrant who comes to a small Kansas town and messes up wherever he goes. A cheesy drama of 1955 social and sexual morals, that rings fake and cringy today. With young Kim Novak and Cliff Robertson, and starring 37-year-old William Holden, who looked 47, and was wooing in the movie Novak’s high-school little sister.

I could only finish this stagey, artificial Oh shucks Mid-America Mid-century hokum with gritted teeth and by giving myself small hits on the head.

🍿

Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman X 2:

🍿 As much as I didn’t like the movie, Paul Newman made his Broadway theater debut in the original 1953 production of ‘Picnic'.

I learnt that in Ethan Hawke’s new 6-part series The Last Movie Stars, a double biography of the classy, handsome Hollywood couple, who were super successful actors, as well as a loving husband and wife for 50 years.

The self-indulgent framing of the project as a Covid / Zoom interviews was unnecessary, but the bulk of the documentary was fascinating and absorbing. I binged it all in one day - 8/10.

(Also, I didn’t realize that Joanne Woodward was diagnosed with Alzheimer in 2008, just as her husband died, and is still alive today at 92).

🍿 So I’m going to go through as many of their films as I can find, the 16 films they did together, as well as the many others they played separately.

Unfortunately, my first random pick, Paris Blues, was disappointing. A Martin Ritt romantic melodrama of expat jazz cats Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman who fall in love with two American fans, one black and one Joanne Woodward. All the cliches of 1961 bohemian Paris were there, from the snapping of the fingers to the groovy beat, and the cocaine-addict gypsy guitarist, to the loaves of baguettes sticking out of paper shopping bags. Two scenes with Louis Armstrong and the Duke Ellington score elevated this banal soap opera a bit. 3/10.

🍿

Before becoming an irreverent critic of right-wing hypocrisy (and more recently, an old man shouting at ‘woke’ kids to get off his libertarian lawn), Bill Maher was a youngish actor wannabe, trying his luck in Hollywood B-movies. His 'greatest’ success was in the ridiculous ‘comedy’ Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, a soft-porn fantasy written by a 14-year-old for an audience of 11-year-olds. But even his piggish guide “Jim” was not the stupidest part of this moronic, childish story. Even though it was obviously shot at the University of Riverside, the ditzy, scantly-clad bimbo joining the mission, had never been to San Bernardino ‘on the edge of the California avocado belt’. 1/10. 

- - - - -

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

[faecorpspublishing]

Book Birthday!

Ethereal Dreams by Patricia Harris releases today. It is a volume of poetry with a almost emphyreally disconnected feel. Do you own a copy yet?

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#book birthday #indie poets #Patricia Harris #Poetry #poetry community

[pinselwurm]

2020 reading late round-up

i promised myself i’d read more last year and i did!  but i had no time to write this because 2021 has been too busy.  i read a book every 2 weeks last year and so far in 3 months i’ve only re-read 1 single book.  i meant to read more nonfiction but it’s almost all fiction lmao.  so much for reading theory.

34 finished, 37 attempts, 26 are Lesbian Interest, only 4 written by men.  so i had a very female and lesbian book year, but sadly very few were worth the read! i read a lot but i read a lot of absolute garbage! i can only recommend a paltry 6 books i read despite trying to read stuff i though i’d like.

highlighted “LI” stands for “lesbian interest,” as in, has a lesbian author or has lesbian/bisexual woman characters and themes.  some LI books have bisexual authors but les/bi f/f romance so they get counted.

100% WOULD RECOMMEND:

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (LI) fiction

Land of Lost Borders by Kate Harris (LI) travel memoir

Aspen in Moonlight by Kelly Wacker (LI) romance

Sister of the Earth, ed Lorraine Anderson, nature anthology, didn’t finish yet but it’s really good

Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, mystery

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith, mystery

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Painted Moon by Karin Kallmaker (LI) romance, beginning was wonderful ending was weird

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, fiction, depressing black intergenerational trauma

Grave Silence by Rose Beecham (LI) mystery, romance is disappointing but the protag was very authentically lesbian

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas, memoir, should have just been a long essay

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, fiction, too heterosexual and not enough nature but ending made up for it all.  goodforher.jpg

WOULD NOT RECOMMEND

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (LI) fiction, depressing and too many damn men

If Not, Winter: Sappho translated by Anne Carson (LI) poetry, i got nothing from this

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera, fiction, movie is better/more female-forward

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue (LI) fiction, terrible story but SO SO well written i flew through it

Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule (LI) romance, movie is way better and not steeped in depressing psychology

Of Witches by Janet Thompson, spirituality, not helpful or interesting

Poems by Rita Mae Brown (LI) bad bad poetry

The Weaver by Emmi Itäranta (LI) dystopia fiction, had potential but tedious

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony (LI) family, boring and trite

The Left Hand of Justice by Jess Faraday (LI) romance, had potential but the author just fucking gave up towards the end

Uncharted by Robyn Nyx (LI) romance

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho (technically LI) fantasy, i cannot for the life of me understand why it was written other than to appease her publisher

Not Your Average Love Spell by Barbara Ann Wright (LI) fantasy romance, boring

Month of Sundays by Yolanda Wallace (LI) romance, boring

Comrade Cowgirl by Yolanda Wallace (LI) romance, okayish

Sequestered Hearts by Erin Dutton (LI) romance, boring

Fever by VK Powell (LI) romance, awful

Whispers in the Wind by Frankie J Jones (LI) romance, boring

Treasured Past by Linda Hill (LI) romance, boring

Claire of the Moon by Nicole Conn (LI) romance, pretentious

Racing Towards Providence by Laurel Mills (LI) romance, awfulboring

Real Love by Jeanne McCann (LI) godawful romance, racist

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink (LI) HATED THIS

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, gay depressing fiction

SO BAD I COULDN’T FINISH IT

Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown (LI) fiction, WHAT THE FUCK THIS WAS SO HOMOPHOBIC AND MISOGYNISTIC BROWN WAS REALLY SHOWING HER TRUE HOMOPHOBIC-BISEXUAL FEELINGS IN THIS SHIT

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, YA, style is impossible to read as an adult, either the author is very skilled or very bad at how juvenile this read

[ashtrayfloors]

2020 Book List

An incomplete list of books I read in 2020 (not counting books I started but haven’t finished yet, or books I reread only sections of, or zines), divided into fiction, non-fiction, and poetry categories. Some of these books are hybrid works, in which case I put them into the category I felt they best fit into. An asterisk means it was a reread. I’ve bolded the ones I particularly loved. I’ve also included links to quotations/excerpts from some of them.

Fiction

Shine of the Ever, by Claire Rudy Foster

A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, by Kat Howard

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe

We Had No Rules, by Corinne Manning

The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson

In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes

And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories & Other Revenges, by Amber Sparks

The Necrophiliac, by Gabrielle Wittkop

Before and Afterlives, by Christopher Barzak

Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse, by Jane Yolen

Wild Milk, by Sabrina Orah Mark

Nonfiction

Aim and Wish, by A.L. Staveley

Make It Scream, Make It Burn, by Leslie Jamison

After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham

The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, edited by Jason Shinder

Boss Broad, by Megan Volpert

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, by Hanif Abdurraqib

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit*

100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism, by Chavisa Woods

Recollections of My Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado

Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams

The Thorn Necklace: Healing Through Writing and the Creative Process, by Francesca Lia Block

Tracing the Desire Line: A Memoir in Essays, by Melissa Mathewson

What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, by Mark Doty

Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic, by Alicia Ostriker

Censorship Now!!, by Ian F. Svenonius

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, by Olivia Laing

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, by Mary Ruefle

The Wet Collection, by Joni Tevis

Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetee, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour, by Carol Mavor

In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations, by Marianne Boruch

Jane: A Murder, by Maggie Nelson

Mean, by Myriam Gurba

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, by Michelle McNamara

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, by Charles Simic

Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, by Pam Grossman

The Art of Recklessness, by Dean Young

Poetry

An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo

Stay, by Tanya Olson

Be Recorder, by Carmen Giménez Smith

Soft Targets, by Deborah Landau

No Matter, by Jana Prikryl

The Obliterations, by Matt Hart

Made in Detroit, by Marge Piercy 

Walking Distance, by Debra Allbery

Exploding Chippewas, by Mark Turcotte

Neon Vernacular, by Yusef Komunyakaa

The Jazz Poetry Anthology, edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa

Black Milk, by Tory Dent

A Fortune for Your Disaster, by Hanif Abdurraqib

Witch, by Rebecca Tamás

The Carrying, by Ada Limón

Homie, by Danez Smith

The Wendys, by Allison Benis White

Babel, by Patti Smith*

Alive Together, by Lisel Mueller

Night Sky with Exit Wounds, by Ocean Vuong

Advice from the Lights, by Stephanie Burt

This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, by Alan Chazaro

Blood on Blood, by Devin Kelly

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, by Terrance Hayes

Teahouse of the Almighty, by Patricia Smith

Fantasia for the Man in Blue, by Tommye Blount

Louise in Love, by Mary Jo Bang

Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod, by Traci Brimhall

The Queer Body Anthology, edited by Yes, Poetry

Wolf Face, by Matt Hart

Living Room, by June Jordan

Trickster Feminism, by Anne Waldman

Here is the Sweet Hand, by Francine J. Harris

Dead Girls, by Francesca Lia Block

Inside the Wolf, by Niamh Boyce

I live in the country & other dirty poems, by Arielle Greenberg

The Death Metal Pastorals, by Ryan Patrick Smith

Bestiary of Gall, by Emilia Phillips

Toxicon and Arachne, by Joyelle McSweeney

Blood Box, by Zefyr Lisowski

Indictus, by Natalie Eilbert

This Is Still Life, by Tracy Mishkin

The Time Unraveller’s Travel Journal, by Upfromsumdirt

Love Poems, by Pablo Neruda

Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy, by Joanna Klink

Sorry for Your Troubles, by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Saranac Lake Ghost Poems, by Maurice Kenny

Light-Headed, by Matt Hart

The Tiny Jukebox, by Nate Slawson

Sham City, by Evan Harrison

Modern and Normal, by Karen Solie

My Tall Handsome, by Emily Corwin

When My Brother Was an Aztec, by Natalie Diaz

Guidebooks for the Dead, by Cynthia Cruz

Dandarians, by Lee Ann Roripaugh

Her book, by Éireann Lorsung

44 Poems for You, by Sarah Ruhl

Imaginary Menagerie, by Ailbhe Darcy

The Girl Aquarium, by Jen Campbell

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, by Diane Seuss*

War of the Foxes, by Richard Siken

#nomanborn #list #books #2020 #jessie lynn mcmains #things i read

[heartmagician]

book recs pls? 💓

wow i am very excited that i have an excuse to make this list but please know it is going to be a LIST 

but that being said: 

POETRY

Hard Damage by Aria Aber Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman Wilder by Claire Wahmanholm  WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier  Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith  blud by Rachel McKibbens Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky  The Trailhead by Kerri Webster  Patricide by Dave Harris 

FICTION

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong  Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips Idaho by Emily Ruskovich Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro  The Girls by Emma Cline  Pachinko by Min Jin Lee  There There by Tommy Orange  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson 

NONFICTION

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe  A Bestiary by Lily Hoang  Madness, Rack and Honey by Mary Ruefle The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich (**there are some pretty graphic descriptions of murder & CSA in this) In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (**this is about an abusive relationship)

also, i haven’t read these yet, but here are some books that are currently in my to-read pile that i’m very excited to dive into: 

Bandit by Molly Brodak (nonfiction)

Indictus by Natalie Eilbert (poetry)

When Death Takes Something you Give it Back by Naja Marie Aidt (nonfiction)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (fiction) 

Normal People by Sally Rooney (fiction) 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (fiction) 

Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (poetry)

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior by Caroline Ebeid (poetry)

i hope this helps!! i’ve been reading a lot since i started isolating so i’m always down to talk books (or anything else, bc i’m very lonely lmao)

#answers #books #Anonymous

[bluewatsons]

Brian Jarvis, Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture, 3 Crime Media Cult 326 (2007)

Abstract

Serial killing has become big business. Over the past 15 years, popular culture has been flooded by true-life crime stories, biographies, best-selling fiction, video games and television documentaries devoted to this subject. Cinema is the cultural space in which this phenomenon is perhaps most conspicuous. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of the contributions to this sub-genre have been made since 1990. This article examines seminal examples of serial killer fiction and film including Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1991 and 2000) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself. Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed, this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In ‘Monsters Inc.’, the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

But the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize . . . monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. (Derrida, 1995: 386)

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin (1999a) memorably proclaimed that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (p. 248). In contemporary US culture Benjamin’s chilling axiom is turned on its head: it seems there is now no act of barbarism which fails to become a document of civilization. Serial killing, to take one important example of this trend, has become big business within the culture industry. In his cult documentary, Collectors (2000), Julian Hobbs both explores and contributes to the explosive proliferation of art and artefacts associated with serial killers. Hobbs investigates the burgeoning market for ‘murderabilia’ and follows enthusiasts in this field who avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandi of collecting fetish objects.

Murderabilia ranges from serial killer art (paintings, drawings, sculpture, letters, poetry), to body parts (a lock of hair or nail clippings) from crime scene materials to kitsch merchandising that includes serial killer T-Shirts, calendars, trading cards, board games, Halloween masks and even action figures of ‘superstars’ like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Although it might be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority, murderabilia is merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer. Following negative publicity, trading in murderabilia was banned on eBay in 2001. However, it is still possible to purchase a vast array of legitimate serial killer merchandise online and elsewhere. A keyword search for ‘serial killer’ at Amazon, for example, produces hundreds of links to gruesome biographies, true-life crime stories and best-selling fiction by Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwall, Caleb Carr and others. A search for ‘Jack the Ripper’ uncovers 248 books, 24 DVDs, 15 links to popular music, a video game and a 10’ action figure. The Jack the Ripper video game invites players to solve the Whitechapel murders, but a large number of its competitors profit by encouraging ‘recreational killing’. In some of the most commercially successful video games, one’s cyber-self may be a detective, a soldier or a Jedi Knight, but the raw materials of fantasy are constant: an endless series of killings.

In Christopher Priest’s novel, The Extremes (1998), FBI agent Teresa Simons becomes dangerously addicted to a Virtual Reality (VR) training programme which recreates infamous serial killings. It might be argued that other elements in Priest’s novel are ‘re- creations’: the focus on a female FBI agent seems indebted to the Silence of the Lambs and the VR game, known as ‘ExEx’ (Extreme Experience), recalls the SID 6.7 software in Virtuosity (1995). In Brett Leonard’s science fiction film, SID 6.7 is a computer pro- gramme which synthesizes the personalities of 183 serial killers and mass murderers including Ted Bundy, Vlad the Impaler, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler. Somewhat inevitably, SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent and Dangerous) escapes virtuality and is hunted down by a detective played by Denzel Washington. Shortly after he starred in Virtuosity, Washington appeared in a supernatural serial killer film (Fallen, 1998) and a forensic serial killer film (The Bone Collector, 1999). Three serial killer films in four years is less a signature of Washington’s star persona than a symptom of the recent growth spurt experienced by this sub-genre. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of them have been made in the past 15 years. Serial killer cinema has many faces: there are serial killer crime dramas (Manhunter, 1986; Se7en, 1995; Hannibal, 2001; Saw, 2004), supernatural serial killers (Halloween, 1978; Friday the 13th, 1980; Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984), serial killer science fiction (Virtuosity, 1995; Jason X, 2001), serial killer road movies (Kalifornia, 1993; Natural Born Killers, 1994), true-life crime dramas (Ted Bundy, 2002; Monster, 2003), documentaries (John Wayne Gacy: Buried Secrets (1996) and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994)), post-modern pastiche (Scream, 1996; I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) and even serial killer comedies (So I Married an Axe Murderer, 1993; Serial Mom, 1994; Scary Movie, 2000). The expansion of this diverse sub-genre is facilitated by the fact that films about serial killing often appear as part of a series (Saw 1, Saw 2, Saw 3). The serial killer has also become a staple ingredient in TV cop shows (like CSI and Law and Order) and cult series (for example, Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Millennium).

According to Robert Conrath (1996: 156), ‘when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in 1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour’. Over the next few years, Dahmer was the subject of numerous documentaries (including An American Nightmare (1993) and The Monster Within (1996)), films (The Secret Life (1993) and Dahmer (2002)), several biographies and Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized Zombie (1996), a comic strip (by Derf, a cartoonist and coincidentally Dahmer’s childhood acquaintance) and a concept album by a heavy metal band called Macabre. The extensive media coverage of Dahmer’s exploits in 1991 coincided with the release of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which won the Best Picture Oscar and grossed US$272,700,000 in worldwide box-office) as well as the controversial and commercially successful Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho (1991). Since the early 1990s, the translation of serial killer shock value into surplus value has become an increasingly profitable venture. This market both reflects and produces an apparently insatiable desire for images and stories of serial killing in a gothic hall of mirrors. According to case histories and psychological profiles, serial killers themselves are often avid consumers of films and books about serial killing. At the same time, the fictional monstrous murderers in popular culture, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, are often modelled on historical figures. In this context, Philip Jenkins (1994) proposes that, at least in the popular imaginary, the distinction between historical serial killers and their cinematic counterparts is dis- solving. In fact, even the label of ‘serial killer’ indirectly belongs to cinema. This term was coined by Robert Ressler, an FBI agent who named the killers he pursued after the ‘serial adventures’ he watched as a child in US cinemas. In his study of serial killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 129) has offered a compelling critique of the virtualization of violence: ‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularized bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’. The engine which drives this process is primarily economic. The commodification of violence is inseparable from the violence of commodification. In this article I wish to build on the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed towards the less transparent links that exist between consumerism itself and violence. A range of serial killer texts will be examined with the aim of uncovering unexpected intimacies between monstrous violence and the normal desires that circulate within consumer society. The serial killer will be unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

JUST DO IT: Killers, Consumers and Violence

Most people could confidently identify a serial killer, but definitions are more elusive. How many murders does it take to make a serial killer? Do these homicides need to involve a specific MO, in particular locations and within a prescribed time frame? Do serial killers have a characteristic relationship to their victim? Do they have to be motivated by sexual fantasy rather than material gain? And how exactly do serial killers differ from mass murderers and spree killers? There are competing definitions of the serial killer inside and outside the academic world. I have neither the space nor the skill to offer an authoritative classification, and so for the purpose of this article my working definition will of necessity be expansive. My focal point here will be fictional representations of the serial killer in film and fiction, but I will include reference to historical counterparts and supernatural metaphors (specifically, the vampire and zombie as figurative practitioners of serial homicide). The number of murders committed, the individual MOs, the timing and setting of the crimes, the connection to the victim and the motivation will be wildly divergent, but, in each instance, I hope to reveal covert affinities between the ‘monstrous’ serial killer and the ‘normal’ consumer.

While precise defintions prove elusive, the clichés are unavoidable. One of the most conspicuous commonplaces in the popular discourses of serial killing concerns the terrifying normality of the murderer. Rather than appearing monstrously different, the serial killer displays a likeness that disturbs the dominant culture. The violence of consumerism is similarly hidden beneath a façade of healthy normality. The glossy phantasmagoria of youth and beauty, freedom and pleasure, obscures widespread devastation and suffering. Etymology is instructive in this regard: to ‘consume’ is to devour and destroy, to waste and obliterate. With this definition in mind, Baudrillard (1998: 43) has traced a provocative genealogy between contemporary capitalism and tribal potlatch: ‘consumerism may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction’. The consumation of contemporary consumer capitalism assumes multiple forms: pollution, waste and the ravaging of non-renewable resources, bio-diversity and endangered species; the slaughter of animals for food, clothing and medicine; countless acts of violence against the consumer’s body that range from spectacular accidents to slow tortures and poisonings. At the national level the consumer economy produces radical inequalities that encourage violent crime. At the international level, consumer capitalism depends heavily on a ‘new slavery’ for millions in the developing world who are incarcerated in dangerous factories and sweatshops and subjected to the repetitive violence of Fordist production. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford calculated that the manufacture of a Model T required 7882 distinct operations but only 949 of these required ‘able-bodied’ workers: ‘670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed and ten by blind men’ (cited in Seltzer, 1998: 69). Third-world workers trapped in this Fordist fantasy to serve the needs of first-world consumers undergo dismemberments (figurative and sometimes literal) which echo the violent tortures practised by serial killers in post-Fordist cinema. And the violence of consumerism is not restricted to the factories and sweatshops. In The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Michael Renner (2002) explores links between first-world shopping malls and third-world war zones. Insatiable consumer demand fuels conflicts over resources in the developing world – from tropical forests to diamonds and coltan deposits (a mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones and other electronic devices). Renner estimates that these conflicts have displaced over 20 million people and raised at least US$12 billion per year for rebels, warlords and totalitarian governments: ‘most consumers don’t know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence’ (p. 53). Recent conflicts in the Gulf are fuelled by the needs of western car cultures. In the 20th century the development of a consumer economy was twice kick-started by global war and the roots of 19th-century consumerism were terminally entangled in colonialism and slavery.

The violence of consumerism is structural and universal rather than being an incidental and localized side effect of the system. For many in the over-developed world this violence remains largely unseen, or, when visible, apparently unconnected to consumerism. In cultural representations of the serial killer, however, consumerism and violence are often extravagantly integrated. In fact, the leading ‘brand names’ in the genre are typically depicted as über-consumers. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the eponymous Patrick Bateman embodies a merger between ultra- violence and compulsive consumerism. A catalogue of obscene and barbaric atrocities (serial murder, rape and torture) is interwoven with endless shopping lists of designer clothes and fashionable furniture, beauty products and audiovisual equipment, videos and CDs alongside multiple purchases at restaurants, gyms, health spas, concerts and clubs. As James Annesley (1998: 16) notes, ‘In American Psycho the word “consume” is used in all of its possible meanings: purchasing, eating and destroying’. Each brand of consumption is described in the same flat, affectless tone to underscore Bateman’s perception of everything in the world as a series of consumables arranged for his delectation.

Patrick Bateman thus represents a gothic projection of consumer pathology. In this respect, although his name echoes Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bateman can be seen as a Yuppie analogue to the aristocratic Hannibal Lecter. Both killers coolly collect and consume body parts and can boast an intimate familiarity with fashionable commodities. In Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon and Hannibal, Lecter offers a connoisseur’s commentary on designer suits and Gucci shoes (a present for Clarice), handbags, perfume and aftershave. Lecter himself has become a voguish icon in millennial popular culture although his name alludes to mid-19th-century French verse. Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ (1998 : 5) concludes with the following apostrophe:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!

[You know him, reader, that fastidious monster, You hypocritical reader, – my double, – my brother!]

If we follow Harris’s allusion, Lecter can be read, like Bateman, as the dark double of the monstrous consumer. The serial killer’s perverse charisma might be attributed in part to their function as allegorical embodiments of consumer drives and desires. According to this reading, the serial killer’s cannibalism is less a barbaric transgression of the norm and more a Neitzschean distillation of reification (in its simplest terms the tendency, central to consumerism, to treat people as objects and objects as people).

In Silence of the Lambs, the casting of serial killer as predatory über-consumer is underscored by animal and insect imagery. Clarice Starling is haunted by traumatic childhood memories of witnessing the hidden violence of animal slaughter. Dr Lecter diagnoses her devotion to the law as an attempt to silence the ‘screaming of the lambs’. Perhaps Lecter’s cannibalism might be diagnosed as an alternate response to that ‘screaming’, one which reverses power relations by putting consumers on the menu. Alongside the lambs, moths are a second key symbol that hint at the widespread though often invisible violence of consumerism:

Some [moths] are [destructive], a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do . . . The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too . . . Is this what you do all the time – hunt Buffalo Bill? . . . Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine? (Harris, 1990: 102)

The second serial killer in Silence of the Lambs is similarly doubled with the consumer and associated with animal imagery. While Lecter hunts for food, the predatory Buffalo Bill hunts for clothing. After the chase, Buffalo Bill deprives his prey of subjectivity and treats them like livestock: victims are penned, fed and then flayed for their skins. The nickname given to Jame Gumb by the media is suggestive. As a professional hunter, Buffalo Bill Cody was one of those responsible for reducing the bison population in North America from approximately 60 million to around 300 by 1893. After the near extinction of his prey, Buffalo Bill moved from animal slaughter to entertainment with his travelling ‘Wild West’ show. Thomas Harris’s ‘Buffalo Bill’, with his own serial killer trade marks, combines an identical mixture of hunting, slaughter and flaying with spectacle and entertainment. Buffalo Bill, alongside Francis Dolarhyde (the name of the killer in Harris’s Red Dragon again links money, skins and a doppelganger monster, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde) and above all the iconic Hannibal Lecter, have established Harris as a brand market leader in the commodification of serial killing.

The roots of the brand – the repeated logo or symbol that identifies a product – lie in cattle ranching. At the first crime scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, a morbidly obese murder victim is discovered after being forced to eat himself to death. (This MO is repeated in Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) when a serial killer force-feeds obese women and broadcasts their demise on the Internet). When the detectives in Se7en investigate the crime scene they discover the word ‘Gluttony’ scrawled in grease behind the victim’s refrigerator beside a neat pile of cans with the ‘Campbell’s Soup’ brand clearly visible. The repetition of the Campbell’s brand of course alludes to Warhol’s series of paintings on the subject of consumer seriality. If, like the detectives in Se7en, we are prepared to ‘look behind’ objects in serial killer texts we may discover further clues to the hidden violence of serial consumerism.

Discover A New You: Killers, Consumers, and the Dream of ‘Becoming’

His product should already have changed its skin and stripped off its original form . . . a capitalist in larval form . . . His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation, (Marx, 1990: 204, 269)

Although the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en justifies his murders with pseudo-religious rhetoric, the victims he chooses also exemplify some of the capital vices and anxieties exploited by consumerism: the ‘Gluttony’ victim is guilty of over-eating; the ‘Pride’ victim is a fashion model guilty of acute narcissism; the ‘Sloth’ victim, according to Richard Dyer (1999: 40), is a case study in the dangers of under-exercising; the ‘Lust’ victim embodies a hardcore version of mainstream desires and fetishes. By foregrounding ‘sins’ that are central to consumerism and by naming the murderer ‘John Doe’, Se7en hints at the hyper-normality of serial killer pathology. Key aspects of consumer sensibility intersect with the trademark features of serial killer psychology: anxious and aggressive narcissism, the compulsive collection of fetish objects and fantasies of self-transformation.

In Silence of the Lambs, the epiphanic moment in Starling’s search for Jame Gumb comes in the bedroom of the killer’s first victim: Frederika Bimmel. As a Point Of View (POV) shot surveys the dead woman’s possessions the spectator sees the following: a romantic novel (entitled Silken Threads) beside a diet book, wallpaper with a butterfly motif, a tailor’s dummy and paper diamonds in the closet. Starling intuitively connects the paper diamonds to the cuts made by Gumb in the bodies of his victims. The spect- ator, however, might make additional connections. Demme’s mise-en-scene offers a symbolic suturing of the normal girl’s bedroom and the serial killer’s lair. Both spaces house dreams of romantic metamorphosis driven by self-dissatisfaction: the moths in Gumb’s basement are linked to the Silken Threads and butterflies in Bimmel’s bedroom while the diet book suggests the young woman shared the serial killer’s anxiety about body image. Clarice Starling, the young woman figuratively donning the traditional male garb of law enforcement (a woman trying to make it in a man’s world) is perhaps too preoccupied with tracking down a man who wants to wear a ‘woman suit’ to pursue these leads. Silence of the Lambs extravagantly foregrounds the importance of gender to subject formation. At the start of the film we are introduced to Clarice Starling in androgynous sweaty sportswear while training on an obstacle course. When the spectator subsequently arrives at the serial killer’s house, we see Jame Gumb sewing, pampering his poodle and parading before the camera like a catwalk model.

Jame may be symbolically feminized, but in Demme’s film, as in Harris’ novels, Se7en, American Psycho and the vast majority of serial killer texts, the murderer is biologically male. There are variations in the statistics (roughly between 88–95%), but the vast majority of serial killers are male (Vronsky, 2004). From a feminist perspective it could be argued that serial killing is not so much a radical departure from normal codes of civilized behaviour as it is an intensification of hegemonic masculine ideals. For the serial killer the murder is a means to an end and that end intersects in places with socially sanctioned definitions of masculine identity in institutions such as the military, many working places and the sports industry. The serial killer is driven by the desire to achieve mastery, virility and control: his objective is to dominate and possess the body and the mind of his victims. According to the binary logic of patriarchy, the killer/victim dyad produces a polarization of gender norms: the killer embodies an über-masculinity while the victim who is dominated, opened and entered personifies a hyper-femininity (irrespective of biology). The gendered power relations of serial homicide climax but do not end with the act of murder. Post-mortem the murderer will often take fetish objects from his victim. These totems function as testimony to his continuing domination of a dead body which exhibits an extreme form of the passivity which patriarchy seeks to assign to the feminine.

While serial killing is both literally and symbolically a male affair, the paradigmatic consumer is of course female. According to patriarchal folklore men are the primary producers and unenthusiastic shoppers while most women are devoted consumers and typically figure in the family as the person with overall responsibility for decision making with regard to most domestic purchases. Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) might be mentioned here as a particularly pure example of this stereotypical dichotomy between the male serial murderer and the female consumer (the victims in the film are ‘Gainers’ who are fed to death). However, since the 1980s and throughout the period which has seen a dramatic rise in serial killer art, the consumer sphere has witnessed a withering of gender polarities. From the late 19th and for much of the 20thcentury, women were the primary target of advertising, particularly in the fields of beauty and fashion. The female consumer was relentlessly bombarded by images and messages in magazines, on billboards, and then through radio, cinema and TV, that encouraged physical self-obsession. Beneath the patina of positivity, this bomb- ardment aimed to promote an anxious policing of the female body – how the body looked and felt, what went over, into and came out of it. The covert imperative of this advertising was to manufacture that sense of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction which is the essential psychological prerequisite for luxury purchases. Since the 1980s, the beauty and fashion industries, recognizing the potential of a relatively untapped market, began to target the male consumer in a similar manner. Subsequently, there has been a massive worldwide increase in sales of male fashion accessories, cosmetics and related products.

In the context of this erosion of gender polarities within consumer culture, it is noticeable that representations of the serial killer often involve androgyny and gender crisis. The killer is typically feminized by association with consumer subjectivity. He is obsessed with different forms of consumption and collecting and driven by dreams of ‘becoming’ (the key phrase in Harris’ Red Dragon), of radically refiguring his appear- ance and thus his identity. The killer’s violence might be read both as complicity with and rebellion against feminization through a reassertion of primitive masculinity. According to Baudrillard (1996: 69), in consumer culture there is a ‘general tendency to feminize objects . . . All objects . . . become women in order to be bought’. The feminization of the commodity is structurally integrated with the commodification of the feminine and the serial killer aims to assert mastery over both spheres. The violence of serial homicide might even be diagnosed as a nostalgic mode of production (of corpses and fetish objects) for the anxious male subject.

In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter offers the following diagnosis of Gumb’s pathology: ‘He’s tried to be a lot of things . . . [But] he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill’ (Harris, 1990: 159, 165). The killer is driven by a profound sense of lack to ‘covet’ (Lecter’s term) what he sees everyday and then to hunt for the new skin that would enable a radical self-transformation. In this respect Gumb constitutes a psychotic off-shoot of normal consumer psychology: his violent response to lack is deviant, but the desires which move him are mainstream. Gumb succumbs to mass media fantasy and advertising which have trained him to feel incomplete and anxious while promising magical metamorphoses on consumption of the ideal (feminized) commodity. The dreams of the serial killer and the serial consumer converge: reinvent- ing the self through bodily transformation and transcendence. Buffalo Bill, we might say, is merely fleshing out the advertising fantasy of a ‘new you’. This is the same dream of ‘becoming’ pursued by Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon/Manhunter. It is also the dream of Patrick Bateman, known by his acquaintances as ‘total GQ’ (Ellis, 1991: 90) but who, like Jame Gumb, experiences himself as ‘total lack’: ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory . . . I simply am not there’ (pp. 376–7). Bateman attempts to fill the void with an endless procession of commodities and logos: designer clothes and cuisine, male grooming products and technological gadgets, Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Giorgio Armani. Bateman is a cut-up (like his victims) of commodity signs. He talks in the language of advertising and incessantly imagines himself in commercials, sit-coms, chat shows, action movies and porn films. Bateman’s ultra-violence gives physical expression to the acute feelings of anxiety and incompletion which accompany the consumer society’s unachievable fantasy of perfect bodies living perfect lives.

Silence of the Lambs similarly articulates the complex integration of violence, fantasy, gender identity and consumer subjectivity. The first clue that Lecter gives to Starling is the cryptic, ‘Look deep within yourself’. Subsequently, Starling discovers that ‘Your Self’ is in fact a storage facility in downtown Baltimore. Closer investigation uncovers a dead body in a car crammed alongside hoarded possessions. Forcing her way into ‘Your Self’, Starling discovers a decapitated man’s head placed on top of a mannequin wearing a dress. This tableau captures the dark underside of consumer psychology: erotics, fetishism, fantasy and death. The victim’s cross-dressing signifies the same yearning for self-transformation witnessed in Buffalo Bill and Frederika Bimmel. For the killer, the victim and the consumer, fantasy is the exoskeleton of the commodity. The murder, the dressing-up, the purchase; each is driven by dreams of metamorphosis. Consumption, Baudrillard (1998: 31) reminds us, ‘is governed by a form of magical thinking’. Numerous case studies have concluded that serial killers are prone to hyperactive fantasy lives (see Seltzer, 1998; Vronsky, 2004). It would be a mistake to dismiss these fantasies as merely the overture to violence; rather, the violence is a means of sustaining the fantasy. By the same token, the practice and pathology of serial consumerism are driven by fantasies that cannot be fulfilled and so are compulsively repeated. We consume not products, but dream-images from a collective phantasmagoria.

These fantasies are fuelled by capitalism’s official art form: advertising. Perhaps in part the serial killer’s crime is taking the promises of advertising too literally – acting out the fantasy of a world ready-made for our consumption. The serial killer is both a millennial vogue and perhaps the ultimate fashion victim. Every aspect of Patrick Bateman’s lifestyle – clothing, diet, gadgetry, interior design and leisure time – is dictated by fashion. In his basement, Jame Gumb adopts glamour poses before a camera and struts like a catwalk model. The Death’s Head moths in his garment sweatshop symbolically suture the fashion industry with fetishism, hidden suffering and death. In his critique of the French arcades, the first cathedrals of consumer capital and forerunners of the department store and mall, Benjamin (1999b: 62–3) argued that fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse . . . fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between women and ware – between carnal pleasure and corpse . . . For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: Killers, Consumers, and Mannequins

The sexual impulse-excitations are exceptionally plastic. (Freud, 1981: 389)

According to Benjamin (1999b), a key fetish object in the phantasmagorical arcades was the mannequin:

the fashion mannequin is a token from the realm of the dead . . . the model for imitation . . . Just as the much-admired mannequin has detachable parts, so fashion encourages the fetishist fragmentation of the living body . . . the woman mimics the mannequin and enters history as a dead object. (p. 78)

One of Benjamin’s German contemporaries, Hans Bellmer, explored the deathly sensuality of the mannequin through the lens of surrealist photography. Eroticized dolls were dressed in veils and underwear or covered in flowers. The mannequin was shot both as whole and dismembered, sometimes posed coyly and at other times torturously convoluted and bound in a perverse meeting of the shop window and the S&M dungeon.

In the 80s and 90s, the photographer Cindy Sherman developed a more explicit and grisly mode of mannequin pornography. In her ‘Disaster’, ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Sex’ series, Sherman deploys dolls and prosthetic body parts in tableau that combine eroticism, violence and abjection. Sherman’s photographs recall Lacan’s (1989) work on ‘imagos of the fragmented body’:

These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body . . . One has only to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. (p. 179)

Imagos of the deconstructed body are everywhere in the infantile fantasies of consumer culture: perfect legs, perfect breasts, perfect hair, perfect teeth, bodies endlessly dismembered in the ceaseless strafing of advertising imagery. Sherman’s photography foregrounds the rhetoric of advertising: the dissection of the body by fashion, fitness and beauty industries into fragmentary fetishes. At the same time these images stage a spectacular return of the repressed for those anxieties (about filth, aging, illness and death) covertly fuelled by consumerism’s representational regime.

In 1997, Sherman attempted to import her ‘imagos of the fragmented body’ into the mainstream in the film Office Killer. Dorine Douglas, a female serial killer, murders her co-workers at Constant Consumer magazine and takes the corpses home to her cellar where she plays with them as life-size dolls. Douglas’s hobby echoes Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession that his ‘experimentation’ with the human form began with the theft of a mannequin from a store: ‘I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it’ (cited in Tithecott, 1999: 46). The mannequin enjoys a peculiar prominence in serial killer texts. In Maniac (1980), Frank Zito scalps his victims and places his trophies on the fashion mannequins that decorate his apartment. In Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, Benjamin Raspail’s decapitated head is placed on a shop dummy and mannequins are conspicuous in Jame Gumb’s garment sweatshop. Similarly, in Ed Gein (2000), the eponymous killer’s ‘woman suit’ is draped over a mannequin in his workshop. The climactic scenes in the serial killer road movie Kalifornia (1993) take place in mock suburban dwellings (part of a nuclear test site) occupied exclusively by mannequins. In House of Wax (2005) the serial killer trans- forms his victims into living dolls by encasing them in wax and a similar MO is evident in The Cell where the killer bleaches his female victim’s bodies in imitation of the dolls he played with as a child.

Although mannequins are less conspicuous in Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) than in Glamorama (in which they function as a key motif signifying the millennial merger of fashion with terrorism), they still perform a crucial symbolic function. Mannequins epitomize the ideal of 80s body fascism: tall, youthful, slim, impervious to wrinkles, scars and blemishes, untouched by illness and aging. Bateman’s obsession with the designer clothing worn by others in his social circle underlines their status (and his own) as mobile mannequins. Bateman’s fetishistic fascination with ‘hard bodies’ – both the muscular torso built in the gym and the stiff and frozen body parts he collects – similarly attests to the prevalence of a mannequin ideal in contemporary consumer culture. In ironic affirmation of this aesthetic, the film adaptation of Ellis’s novel was accompanied by the marketing of an ‘American Psycho Action Figure’ – an 18’ inch mini-mannequin equipped with fake Armani suit and knife.

In pursuit of the hegemonic fantasy of the hard body, in the gym and in his daily fitness regime, Bateman remorselessly punishes himself. The über-consumer is narcissistically fixated on his abdominal muscles, his face, his skin tone, how his body is adorned, what goes into it (dietary obsessions) and comes out (especially blood). The violence that Bateman inflicts on his victims appears as an extension of his own masochistic self-objectification:

Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn, my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favourite. (Ellis, 1991: 370)

In Bateman’s locker we witness the gender confusion of the male killer and the latent violence of consumer body culture writ large. Bateman’s attempt to transform himself into an anthropomorphosized phallus is partly offset by the accessories (a hair clasp and ribbon) and pathologies gendered ‘feminine’ by patriarchy (vanity and masochism). According to Baudrillard (1998: 129), the consumer is ultimately encouraged to consume themselves: ‘in the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other . . . That object is the BODY’. For Patrick Bateman, serial killing is a mode of extreme make-over: a refashioning of bodies, including his own, into trophies. In Demme’s Se7en, John Doe’s body terrorism (force-feeding a fat man, cutting off a female model’s nose) mirrors, albeit in grotesque distortions, the mania of millennial consumer society. Similarly, the serial killers in Thomas Harris are fixated on bodily transformation: Buffalo Bill attempts to put him- self inside a new body while Lecter puts others’ bodies inside himself. The horrific practices of these fictional killers find their everyday analogue in the slow serial torture of the consumer’s body by capital: the injections and invasions of cosmetic surgery, the poisonings, pollutions and detoxifications, the over-consumption and dieting, the leisure rituals and compulsive exercise.

In an early scene from Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho we witness Patrick Bateman’s morning exercise and beauty regime: crunches and push-ups are followed by ‘deep-pore cleanser lotion . . . water-activated gel cleanser . . . honey- almond body scrub’. As Bateman admires himself in the bathroom mirror his face is sheathed in a ‘herbal mint facial masque’ that lends the skin a mannequin sheen. When Bateman peels off his synthetic second skin the gesture echoes the gothic facials practised in Silence of the Lambs. Lecter, who, at their first meeting, identifies Clarice by her skin cream, escapes his captors by performing an improvised plastic surgery – he removes a guard’s face and places it over his own. This act is the prelude to a subsequent ‘official’ plastic surgery performed to disguise his identity. Jame Gumb’s needlepoint with human flesh might be traced back to Norman Bates’s taxidermy. Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s movie) was loosely based on Ed Gein’s flaying and preserving of human flesh. Gein’s ghost also haunts the exploits of the Sawyer family in the series of Texas Chainsaw films: throughout the original (1973), the sequels (1986, 1990), the Next Generation (1994), the remake (2003), and the Beginning (2006) flesh is flayed, cut, tanned, sewed, worn, displayed and consumed. Mark Seltzer (1998) has noted the prevalence of ‘skin games’ in serial killer cinema and fiction. Beneath these ‘games’ we might catch glimpses of a profound skin disease promoted by the mannequin aesthetics of the beauty industry. As Judith Halberstam (1995: 163) has commented, ‘We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’.

OBEY YOUR THIRST: Compulsive Seriality

The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process . . . the endless series . . . the series of its [the commodity’s] representations never comes to an end. (Marx, 1990: 156, 210–11)

The structure of repetition which is the economy of death. (Blau, 1987: 70)

Baudrillard (1998) proposes that the models and mannequins conspicuous in consumer culture are ‘simultaneously [a] negation of the flesh and the exaltation of fashion’ (p. 141). Conversely, it might be argued that contemporary consumerism entails a massive extension and eroticisation of epidermises. The bioeconomics of consumerism involves ceaseless and intimate miscegenation between capital, commodity and the corporeal. This results in both an objectification of the body and a somatization of the commodity. In his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Haug (1986) explores ‘the generalized sexualization of commodities . . . the commodity’s skin and body’ as it penetrates the ‘pores of human sensuality’ (pp. 42, 76). The passion for commodities, their pursuit and possession by consumers might be diagnosed as a socially-sanctioned fetishism. The collection of shoes and the collection of human feet of course involve radically different fetishistic (not to mention ethical) intensities, but these activities share psychodynamic similarities.

For Baudrillard (1996: 87) there is a ‘manifest connection between collecting and sexuality . . . it constitutes a regression to the anal stage, which is characterised by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention’. Case studies suggest that serial killers are often devoted collectors (see Vronsky, 2004). Their histories typically begin with killing and collecting dead animals and when they progress to human prey the murder is accompanied by the taking of a trophy. In Collectors, Julian Hobbs offers an uncomfortable analogy between this trophy-taking, the hoarding practised by the cult followers of serial killers and the collection of images by the documentary film-maker. This practice is similarly conspicuous in fictional representations of the serial killer from Norman Bates’s collection of stuffed birds, to his namesake, Patrick Bateman, who compulsively collects (and seemingly without distinction) clothes, gadgets, music CDs, body parts and serial killer biographies: ‘Bateman reads these biographies all the time: Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and Fatal Vision and Charlie Manson. All of them’ (Ellis, 1991: 92). In Silence of the Lambs, Gumb collects flayed flesh while the more refined (at least while incarcerated) Lecter ‘collect[s] church collapses, recreationally’ alongside fine art prints (Harris, 1990: 21). The killer in Kiss the Girls (1997), like Jame Gumb, collects his victims and hordes them underground. Similarly, in The Cell, the killer locks his victims in underground storage before using them to build a collection of human dolls. Although the killer in The Bone Collector is only interested in accumulating skeletal fragments, his activities similarly require subterranean investigations. Digging beneath the psychological surface of the collector and his system of ‘sequestered objects’, Baudrillard (1996) detects a ‘powerful anal-sadistic impulse’:

The system may even enter a destructive phase, implying the self-destruction of the subject. Maurice Rheims evokes the ritualised ‘execution’ of objects – a kind of suicide based on the impossibility of ever circumscribing death. It is not rare . . . for the subject eventually to destroy the sequestered object or being out of a feeling that he can never completely rid himself of the adversity of the world, and of his own sexuality. (pp. 98–9)

Irrespective of the object, ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ (Baudrillard, 1996: 91). Serial killing, like consumerism, is driven by a sense of lack. Psychological profiles of serial killers typically diagnose the cause of the subject’s compulsive behaviour as a profound sense of incompletion (see Seltzer, 1998). Although of a different order, comparable dynamics are evident in what Haug (1986) calls the ‘commodity-craving’ of consumer sensibility. Estimates vary (from 1 to 25%) but an increasing number of studies agree that compulsive shopping is a recognizable and burgeoning problem (Hartson and Koran, 2002). American Psycho offers an extended parallelism between compulsive consumerism and compulsive violence. Attempting to describe the sensations he experiences after his first documented attack Bateman relies on consumerist tropes: ‘I feel ravenous, pumped up, as if I’d just worked out . . . or just embraced the first line of cocaine, inhaled the first puff of a fine cigar, sipped the first glass of Cristal. I’m starving and need something to eat’ (Ellis, 1991: 132).

Ellis juxtaposes exhaustive catalogues of commodities with exhaustive catalogues of sexual violence and proposes that the frenzy of consumer desire climaxes, for Bateman, not with fulfillment, but increasing boredom and acute anxiety.

In Serial Killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 64) proposes that

The question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection and counting conspicuous in consumer society . . . and the forms of fetishism – the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies – that traverse it.

Every aspect of Bateman’s existence is structured by the compulsively circular logics of capitalist reproduction. Bateman (Norman Bates’s yuppie double) has seen the film Body Double 37 times. When he is not watching Body Double over and over, Bateman compulsively consumes other examples of serialized mass culture: daily episodes and reruns of The Patty Winters Show (a parodic double of the Oprah Winfrey Show); restaurant reviews and fashion tips in weekly magazines; crime stories in the newspapers and on TV, endlessly repeated video footage of plane crashes. On a shopping expedition, Bateman finds himself mesmerized while ‘looking at the rows, the endless rows of ties’ (Ellis, 1991: 296). On the run from the police he is similarly paralysed by rows of luxury cars (BMW 3, 5, 7 series, Jaguar, Lexus) and thus unable to choose a getaway vehicle. Bateman collects clothes in series (matching suits, shirts, shoes), beauty products, music CDs, varieties of mineral water, recipes and menus. Despite the advertising promises of unique purchases that offer instant fulfilment, there are no singular only serial objects in consumer society and ‘each commodity fills one gap while opening up another: each commodity and sale entails a further one’ (Haug, 1986: 91).

The pullulation of serial objects is accompanied by the expansion of serialized spaces. Throughout American Psycho, Bateman is continually lost and unable to distinguish between identical office buildings, restaurants, nightclubs and apartment buildings. This confusing interchangeability extends to people. Although clothing is instantly recognizable (everyone identifies everyone else by labels) people repeatedly misidentify each other. Thus, American Psycho underscores Jeffrey Nealon’s (1998: 112) disturbing contention that, in contemporary consumer society, ‘identity, for both commodity and human, is an effect rather than a cause of serial iteration’. The killer in Se7en, the anonymously named John Doe, attempts to build a distinctive identity by performing a series of grisly murders. At the first crime scene, as noted earlier, Doe’s arrangement of Campbell’s soup cans clearly alludes to Warhol’s work on the seriality and compulsive repetition of consumerism. Manhunter (1986), the first of the Hannibal Lecter films, makes a similar point in more comic fashion. A shot-reverse-shot sequence in a supermarket is littered with glaring continuity errors as father and son remain motionless while the products lined up in neat rows on the shelves behind them change (and the sequence ends with the detective framed by the cereals aisle). In Manhunter, Dollarhyde’s repetitive violence is partly inspired by Hannibal Lecter. This repetition is repeated in Red Dragon, the remake of Manhunter. Serial killers are often copycats and serial killer cinema repeats this trait: in Copycat the killer repeats famous murders and in Virtuosity a virtual criminal is manufactured from a serial killer database. Serial killer films themselves become series, spawning sequel after sequel. Although these narratives typically conclude with the murder of the killer, the audience is reassured that he will return in a vicious circle that begs the question: can seriality itself be killed?

DARK SATANIC MALLS: Killers, Consumers, and the Living Dead

We suffer not only from the living, but the dead. (Marx, 1990: 91)

[Bateman] moved like a zombie towards Bloomingdale’s. (Ellis, 1991: 179)

Serial representations of serial killers are often haunted by suggestions of the supernatural. In Silence of the Lambs, for example, one of Lecter’s guards nervously inquires whether he is ‘some kind of vampire’. This question echoes the nicknames given to serial killer Richard Trenton Chase (‘Dracula’ and the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’). In Psycho Paths, Philip Simpson (2000) tracks the ways in which ‘fictional representations of contemporary serial killers obviously plunder the vampire narratives of the past century and a half’ (p. 4). Simpson also proposes that many of the supernatural monsters that have evolved from folklore (vampires, werewolves, zombies etc.) may have been inspired by historical serial killers avant la lettre. Historical and fictional serial killers are often traced through a supernatural stencil and in this concluding section, I shall consider the supernatural monsters of contemporary popular culture as metaphorical serial killers/consumers.

Since the 80s, cinema and video audiences have consumed a succession of successful horror franchises founded on supernatural serial killers: for example, Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street (parts 1–8), Jason in Friday the 13th (parts 1–13) and Michael Myers in Halloween (parts 1–8). The popularity of this sub-genre has grown alongside the increased media coverage of serial killing and might be interpreted as a form of displaced engagement with the urgent reality of violent crime. Within this gallery of celebrity monsters the vampire continues to be a conspicuous presence. Dracula, for example, continues to appear in fiction and film, comics and cartoons, children’s culture (Count Quackula) and breakfast cereals (‘Count Chocula’). The publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in 1976 was the prelude to a renaissance in vampire film and fiction: Rice’s own highly successful Vampire Chronicles (including Tale of the Body Thief in which an angst-ridden vampire assuages his conscience by preying on serial killers) have been augmented by Blade and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Underworld and Van Helsing. These gothic incarnations of the predatory serial killer have never been so legion. In criticism of this oeuvre it has become almost compulsory to read vampirism as a metaphor for capitalism. This trend can be traced to Marx’s (1990) own penchant for vampiric tropes: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (p. 342). Perhaps Marx, an avid reader of horror fiction, was inspired here by the serialization, in 1847, of James Malcolm Ryner’s Varney the Vampire. Despite his aspirations to scientific objectivity, a gothic lexicon is employed repeatedly in Marx’s work: Capital is crowded with references to vampires, the Wallachian Boyar (a.k.a Vlad Tepes, the historical inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula), werewolves, witchcraft, spells, magic and the occult and Marx claimed repeatedly to have detected ‘necromancy’ at the heart of the commodity form. In the work of Walter Benjamin, similarly packed with gothic tropes, ‘necromancy’ elides with necrophilia. For Benjamin, the sensual engagement between consumers and the products of dead labour blurs the lines between lust (appetites) and leiche (the corpse). Precisely this disturbing entangle- ment of death and eroticism is at the core of the predatory vampire’s charisma. The vampire has fascinated consumers and Marxist critics alike – the latter as an allegorical embodiment of the monstrous and mesmerising energies of capital.

A far less seductive version of the living dead, one who has received relatively little critical attention alongside the aristocratic vampire, is the zombie. The MO of the zombie – cannibalism – is also practised by many historical and fictional serial killers. In fact, the consumption of human flesh, blood and organs is the most transgressive taboo performed by historical and fictional serial killers from Jeffry Dahmner (subject of Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie) to Hannibal Lecter, from Armin Meiwes to Patrick Bateman and Leatherface. Cannibal studies has become a burgeoning field in contemporary critical theory and one of its most contentious assertions is that modern consumerism constitutes a mode of neocannibalism. For example, Crystal Bartolovich (1998) proposes that consumerism embodies the cultural logic of ‘late cannibalism’, Deborah Root (1996) detects a ‘cannibal culture’ in contemporary consumerism, art, popular culture and tourism while Dean MacCannell (1992) has similarly called for a reinterpretation of western tourism and other aspects of consumerism in terms of cannibalism. In a variety of fields, from ecology and tourism to sexuality and organ transplants, from business take-overs to pop culture intertextuality, critics in various disciplines have uncovered intricate intersections between cannibalist and consumerist modes of incorporation. Although contemporary capitalism is of course founded on a figurative rather than literal practice, with its relentless consumption of land and labour, resources and spectacles, cannibalism without necrophagy still mirrors the modes of desire and domination, the obsessive violence, wastefulness and irrational excesses that under- pinned classical cannibal practices. According to Deborah Root (1996: 3), one might detect in the endless hunger of late capitalism a ‘pervasive cannibal unconscious’.

The past few years have seen a dramatic upsurge in films that focus on flesh-eaters: Land of the Dead (2005) and Return of the Living Dead 5 (2005), Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) (based on a hugely successful survival horror video game franchise), 28 Days Later (2002), Children of the Living Dead (2001) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). US popular culture began its colonization of Haitian folklore in 1932 with Bela Lugosi starring in White Zombie. The setting of Victor Halperin’s film on a Caribbean sugar plantation offered a suggestive analogy between zombification and slavery. Although most see the zombie as sheer superstition others have read it, like vampirism, as political metaphor. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre used the metaphor of colonial subjects as zombies. On occasion zombification could be more than mere metaphor. In 1918, in Haiti, newspapers reported that most of the employees of the American sugar corporation who worked on the cane plantations were zombies. Conspiracy theorists proposed that US chemists had finally caught up with voodoo medicine and had started poisoning the workforce to produce docile and submissive labourers.

George Romero’s seminal zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), overturned the tradition of offering zombies as symbols of oppressed colonial labour and instead offered a gothic caricature of consumers as the living dead. Dawn of the Dead is set largely in Monroeville, a shopping mall in Cleveland, some time after a zombie epidemic has swept the nation. Four human survivors seek refuge at the mall but their respite is interrupted by the arrival of hordes of zombies. One of the characters explains their presence thus: ‘some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives . . . It’s not us they’re after, it’s the place. They remember that they want to be here’. The zombies seem like slapstick shoppers: they are hypnotized by the mannequins, they fall over on the escalators or into fountains while looking at glistening coins. Initially, the humans have no trouble in trapping and killing the zombie-shoppers using muzak, PA announcements and by posing in shop windows as consumable bait. Gradually, however, the threat increases and Romero progressively collapses the distance and differences between the human characters and the zombie mob.

How pertinent is Romero’s carnivalesque parody of mindless consumerism? In The Malling of America, William Kowinski (2002) describes the psychology of shopping in malls as a ‘zombie effect’. The architectural design of malls induces consumers to wander for hours in an endless pursuit of goods and services. In ‘Islands of the Living Dead: the Social Geography of McDonaldisation’, George Ritzer (2003) focuses on the devivifying influence of commodification. In accordance with a socioeconomic and psychological design perfected by McDonalds, the landscapes of consumerism are so structured, standardized and disciplined that the subjects moving through them are, he contests, simultaneously alive and dead. Ritzer borrows a phrase from Baudrillard to describe this as a world that resembles ‘the smile of a corpse in a funeral home’ (p. 127). Sometimes shoppers shuffle numbly by instinct between aisles and shops (like Romero zombies), but sometimes they can get nasty (like Romero zombies). Rhonda Lieberman (1993) and other analysts of shopping disorders have commented on increases in violence in consumer spaces: mall hysteria, sales frenzy and even full- blown riots. For example, when IKEA opened a new store in Edmonton, North London, in 2005, a riot involving 7000 people and multiple stabbings ensued (Oliver, 2005). The zombie desires to consume all the time and when it is prevented from consuming it becomes violent. An emergency broadcast in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead explains why the zombie plague has spread so quickly across the country. The living dead only consume around 5 per cent of their victims before moving on in search of the next meal. The violence, wastefulness and instinctive serial consumption of the zombie makes it, like the serial killer, a gothic projection of the commodifying fury of late capitalism. Monsters Inc. is a booming business. The spectacular increase in images and narratives of serial killing in millennial western culture, from the media coverage of historical homicide to the proliferation of fictional and supernatural fantasies of serial homicide, ultimately embodies the consumption of consumption in a necrocapitalist order.

References

Annesley, James (1998) Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto.

Bartolovich, Crystal (1998) ‘Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism’, in Barker, Hulme and Iversen (eds) Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 204–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baudelaire, Charles (1998) The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: SAGE Publications.

Benjamin, Walter (1999a) Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Benjamin, Walter (1999b) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blau, Herbert (1987) The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Burroughs, William (1965) ‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review 35: 1–37.

Conrath, Robert (1996) ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption’, in John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (eds) European Readings of American Popular Culture, pp. 147–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . .: Interviews, 1979–1994. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1999) Se7en. London: BFI.

Easton Ellis, Bret (1991) American Psycho. London: Picador.

Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

Freud, Sigmund (1981) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Halberstam, Judith (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harris, Thomas (1990) Silence of the Lambs. London: Mandarin.

Hartson, H. J. and Koran, L. M (2002) ‘Impulsive Behaviour in a Consumer Culture’, International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice 6(2): 65–8.

Haug, W. F. (1986) Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Advertising and Sexuality in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Jenkins, Philip (1994) Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kowinski, William (2002) The Malling of America. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris.

Lacan, Jacques (1989) Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.

Lieberman, Rhonda (1993) ‘Shopping Disorders’, in B. Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear, pp. 245–68. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

MacCannell, Dean (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: Tourist Papers Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998) Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliver, Mark (2005) ‘Slowly but Steadily, Madness Descended’, Guardian, 10 February.

Priest, Christopher (1998) The Extremes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Renner, Michael (2002) The Anatomy of Resource Wars. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.

Ritzer, George (2003) ‘Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization’, American Behavioral Scientist 47(2): 119–36.

Root, Deborah (1996) Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Seltzer, Mark (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London: Routledge.

Simpson, Philip (2000) Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Tithecott, Richard (1999) Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vronsky, Peter (2004) Serial Killers: The Methods and Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkley Books.

#deviance #commodification #Consumerism #popular culture #serial killers #violence #true crime #serial murder #hannibal lecter #spectacle #consumption #media consumption #murderabilia #violence of commodification #deviance studies

[princess-of-lions]

For International Women’s Day, several feminist book recommendations! By feminist, I mean both books about feminism, and books about strong, complex, nuanced female characters created by female authors. (This is a pretty long list. Took a while to put together.)

Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can find her way right to the heart of the issues that confront women every day. This advice can apply to women in all cultural contexts, and in my opinion is a must-read for all feminists. There Are Girls Like Lions: Poems About Being a Woman by Cole Swensen   A short poetry anthology about the moments of growing up as a girl and a woman. Circe by Madeline Miller Madeline Miller’s Circe is a triumph of storytelling and a triumph for feminism. In the Odyssey, Circe is treated as the selfish witch that Odysseus subdues. Here, she is given agency, life. She feels real and her desires and her courage and her fears will become your own. Madeline Miller has a true talent for epic prose. The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish An aging historian in London growing close to retiring as her body begins to betray her is given a chance to discover significant truths when papers come to light that tell an unusual tale. That of a young Jewish woman far in the past who longs to study and learn, to question philosophy and faith, and does so in secret while dreading the prospect of marriage. This book takes an unerring view of courage, personal truth, faith, philosophy, and what it means to be a woman. Flight of Dreams by Ariel Lawhon Emilie is not what she seems. And on the Hindenburg, it seems that everyone has something to hide. Suspenseful and enthralling, Ariel Lawhon’s imagining of the tale of the doomed airship flight is nothing less than a masterpiece.

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi Tomi Adeyemi has created a high fantasy book that draws its inspiration from African cultures and legends. Her characters and setting are refreshing and compelling, and the words will settle in your heart and blood. The people love fiercely and deeply, and the losses are wounding. The parallels drawn to racial violence in America are at once heart-breaking and enraging. A necessary read.

The Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian Her home was invaded. Her family murdered, and her paraded about as a trophy. Princess Theodosia struggles to reclaim who she is and what she stands for in a world that has beaten her and her people to the ground. If she is to free herself and her people, she must remember what she truly is. A queen. The Chosen Maiden by Eva Stachniak   In the early 20th century, the world of ballet experiences a revolution. Vaslav Njinsky, hailed as a prodigy, provokes confusion and outrage with choreography that is strange, halting, jarring – to many, ugly. This is the tale of his sister, Bronia, also an extraordinary ballet dancer. As revolution sparks in Russia and war begins in Europe, she learns to chart her own path and defy expectations. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate Harris Kate Harris loved to read. She wanted to explore. To see the frontiers of everything. So, she decided to become an astronaut. But exploration can come in many forms, and she chooses to bike the Silk Road on her own journey of exploration. Told with candor, wit, and sweeping prose, this is my favorite travel book. Sold by Patricia McCormick A young girl in Nepal believes she has the chance to have a job, to help provide for her family. But when she arrives, she finds that the ‘work’ is not what she expected. Trapped in a brothel, she is forced into sex slavery. This is a difficult and emotional read, but an important one. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley A retelling of the Arthurian legends from the point of view of Morgan Le Fey, Ygraine of Cornwall, Guinevere, Viviane, Morgause, and others. It’s a very good read with very human characters and a heart of tragedy. The women in this book are wholly women and wholly human, with flaws and love and fear and difficult choices. Though I have one important note: I discovered this after I read the book, but later in life the author was revealed to have sexually abused her daughter and other children. Because of this, I wasn’t sure whether to include this one. I decided to because of the book’s merits and its influence on feminism in the nineties. I leave it to your judgement. Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard Mary Beard is a historian with penetrating understanding of the place women occupy in society. Her manifesto addresses the power imbalances women have faced throughout history and in the present. My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg A collection of the writings of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Accessible, logical, and wryly amusing, she provides insight into the workings of the Supreme Court, law, women’s rights, and many other topics. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah During World War II, two sisters are separated in occupied France. They find their own ways to survive and rebel against the German presence in their land. A well-written tale of sisterly and familial love, loss, courage, and endurance. The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson A fantasy story about a princess chosen by a prophecy. Her journey to find, understand, and accept the power within herself is as poetic as the book’s title. The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro Two women, separated by a generation, bonded by memory. This book is captivating – and makes you wish you had some perfume of your own! Memory and scent, love and resentment, mystery, and fearless choices twine together in this story. A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland Poems honoring black women who have been held back and trapped and chained throughout America’s history. This is not a comfortable read. But it is a worthwhile one. I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai This one doesn’t really need any explanation. It’s definitely a must-read though. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II The meticulously researched story of the girls who broke codes in World War II. While their husbands and brothers and sons went off to fight, they went to Washington and learned to do work that greatly impacted the course of the war. Since they were all sworn to secrecy, their stories were almost lost. But not anymore. The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict Mileva Maric was a brilliant physicist and mathematician from Serbia. She attended the University of Zurich and was the only woman in her classes. After university, she married her former classmate: Albert Einstein. Her husband’s shadow is very long, but this woman deserves to step into the light. This is a rich portrait of a woman who was far more than merely Albert Einstein’s wife. Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky This one’s pretty self-explanatory too. It’s an awesome book with gorgeous illustrations and many awesome and brilliantly smart women. Wonder Woman: Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo Well, Wonder Woman, obviously. In this novel, Diana is finding her place as an Amazon, a warrior, and a teenage girl. Her confidence, courage, and loyalty is extraordinarily compelling. The book tackles the difficult issues she must face, involving war, peace, and the true meaning of strength. A Secret History of Witches by Louisa Morgan I always pay attention when I see the word “witch” on the cover of a book. In history, witches have been the women who were feared for their differences – for their knowledge, their beauty, their independence, etc. It’s a powerful word with a powerful meaning. In this book, witchcraft is real, and the women are too. It follows five generations of the same family of witches, examining and celebrating the bonds between mothers and daughters while telling a tale fraught with tension and courage. Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano An examination of the perception of beauty and its effects in women’s lives today, touching upon insecurity, image, idealization, and numerous other things. The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar Another tale about two girls in different time periods (I love these). Here’s the blurb: “- a modern day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker – places today’s headlines in the sweep of history, where the pain of exile and the triumph of courage echo again and again.” The prose is lyrically beautiful and the story is richly crafted. An incredible read. Double Bind: Women on Ambition edited by Robin Romm Ambition can be a complicated thing for women. What we want to do can be altered by how we want to see ourselves – or more accurately, how we are socialized to see ourselves. An ambitious woman may seem aggressive and overconfident to others – while an ambitious man may seem dominant and just the right amount of confident. This book is worth a look. Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore A collection of her own writings tied together by the biographical work of Jill Lepore. In this portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s younger sister, Jane Franklin emerges as a shrewd, resilient, and confident woman. Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas by Laura Sook Duncombe This book is so awesome. It just is. Badass women from all over the world who wanted their freedom and took it. Need I say more? Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki ‘"Many say I was the best geisha of my generation," writes Mineko Iwasaki. "And yet, it was a life that I found too constricting to continue. And one that I ultimately had to leave." Trained to become a geisha from the age of five, Iwasaki would live among the other "women of art" in Kyoto's Gion Kobu district and practice the ancient customs of Japanese entertainment. She was loved by kings, princes, military heroes, and wealthy statesmen alike. But even though she became one of the most prized geishas in Japan's history, Iwasaki wanted more: her own life. And by the time she retired at age twenty-nine, Iwasaki was finally on her way toward a new beginning.” A tale of courage. the princess saves herself in this one by Amanda Lovelace A story told in four collections of poetry. The story of the princess in the tower, and the story of you. The Diplomat’s Daughter by Karin Tanabe After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Emi Kato is imprisoned in an American internment camp. Later, she and her family are sent home to Japan, where war threatens everything. This is a tale of love, sacrifice, resilience and hope in the middle of a war told in elegant and touching prose. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker A retelling of the Iliad (The Trojan War) from the point of view of the women – primarily Briseis. The wars of ancient times are often thought of as glorious. The picture this book paints of the siege on Troy shows the other side of war. It’s illuminating, intricately detailed and bluntly told. Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee A difficult story of family, mental illness, sisterhood, immigration, and fulfillment in life. Every word rings true, sometimes painfully. Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo This one was a really difficult read for me. It’s heart-rending. The love, jealousy, commitment to family, completely different cultural context… A difficult read, but worth it in the end, for the exact reasons that made it hard. The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff Another World War II spy story! But this one is less about code-breaking and more about the feet on the ground in Paris. A fictionalized version of a true story. Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots by Nancy Bazelon Goldstone “Brilliantly researched and captivatingly written, filled with danger, treachery, and adventure but also love, courage, and humor, Daughters of the Winter Queen follows the lives of five remarkable women who, by refusing to surrender to adversity, changed the course of history.” Pretty self-explanatory. An awesome and engaging book. Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird Based loosely on a true story. Cathy Williams is a slave. But she is also the daughter of a daughter of a queen, and her mother never lets her forget it. In this daring tale, Cathy rebels against her constraints as a black person and a woman and joins the army disguised as a man during the Civil War. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly I’m sure a lot of you have seen the movie based on this book. The untold story of three of NASA’s brilliant black female scientists during the Space Race. The book came before the movie and is just as satisfying in print as on the big screen. There’s also more exposition and nuance to the story. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King Sherlock Holmes has retired to keep bees in Sussex. Then, he meets Mary Russell, a young woman with a mind to rival his own. What adventures shall they encounter? It stays true to the tone and spirit of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, but Mary provides a fresh perspective. Wonderfully done. She Explores by Gale Straub These stories are so inspiring. I want to go out there and travel the world and explore the wild and live on the road every time I read them. All Hail the Queen: Twenty Women Who Ruled by Jennifer Orkin Lewis Ruling throughout history has not been only the domain of men. There have been multiple women that have ruled with strength, cleverness, and sheer daring. These are the stories of twenty of them from all over the world. 

#books #book rec #feminism #international women's day #feminist books #chimamanda ngozi adichie #madeline miller #circe #children of blood and bone #queen #world war ii #code breaker #historical fiction #commentary #intersectional feminism #science #politics #kate harris #mists of avalon #mary beard #witch #wonder woman #leigh bardugo #einstein #beauty #pirate #sherlock holmes #geisha #malala #kristin hannah

[snailmailworldwide]

Hello! My name is Bailey, and I am 19 years old (I'm a Gemini). I live in California, U.S.A. I really enjoy getting to know people and miss writing letters like I used to, so I'd like to have a pen-pal to send letters to, preferably in the US or within the Americas due to postage. Ages 17-21 or close to that would be preferred^^

🌵 I'm currently in college, and pursuing a degree in archaeology with a minor in English literature.

🌵 My favorite shows are The Twilight Zone (the original), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, New Girl, and a few others here and there.

🌵 My favorite movies are Dead Poets Society, Brother Bear, The Dark Crystal, and the Indiana Jones movies.

🌵 My music taste is quite eclectic, and I have an extremely wide variety in what I'll listen to. My favorite bands/artists are David Bowie, The Cure, and The Smiths. I have other bands that I also enjoy however, like Day6 or Hozier.

🌵 I do calligraphy, writing (horror stories), I really like hiking even though I never have the chance to do it, reading (mostly classics, but I'm also re-reading Harry Potter and The Mercy Thompson Series by Patricia Briggs), and poetry.

🌵 I'm looking for someone to be able to send small things to each other along with letters such as stickers or tea packets, small things like that. 

Feel free to DM me at toyota-honda, or email me at baileydude65 @ gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from someone :)