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whileiamdying · 1 year ago

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“Kiss of the Spider Woman” ’s Voices in the Dark

The Argentinean writer Manuel Puig’s novel-in-dialogue forces the reader to be both director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken and searching each sentence for clues as to what is going on.

By Isaac Butler December 11, 2022

icki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

Puig would likely have objected to the idea that frivolity was opposed to truth. His sensibility was rooted in cursi, a word that lacks a direct English translation but is key to the consciousness that underlies his work. Cursi is the Blanche DuBois to machismo’s Stanley Kowalski, passionately insisting “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” Its closest equivalent in the United States is camp, but the two are not exactly the same. There’s a yearning to cursi, and a nostalgic fabulousness. Puig was the great twentieth-century writer of the cursi sensibility. He disdained the self-seriousness of many of his contemporaries in the Latin American Boom, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who he felt had been ruined by critical praise. “Every sentence pretends to be the maximum phrase of all of literature,” Puig griped, about the future Nobel Prize winner’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “and each one ends by weighing a ton.” Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized. As Puig himself put it once in a letter, “that’s the real me: Cursi and truthful.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” grew out of Puig’s frustrations with the politics of his era and his contemporaries. He eschewed explicit polemic in his work, which led to his being viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. His first novel was panned by the center-right magazine La Nacíon for using colloquial Argentinean Spanish and accused of having Peronist sympathies. Living among fellow exiled Argentinean intellectuals in Mexico City, Puig found that he “was still a reactionary for not having joined the movement. Worst of all my book had been banned by the right wing and the Argentinian left didn’t care.” From this pain, he began taking notes on a novel in which two men—one straight and one gay, who “doesn’t have much education, but a great fantasy life”—would “meet through a mediator—movies.”

Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre. According to “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” a biography of Puig by his translator and friend Suzanne Jill Levine, his home town of General Villegas, in the Argentine Pampas, had one movie house, which showed a different film every day. Beginning in 1936, his mother, Malé, with whom he would remain extremely close throughout his life, took him to see “mostly American stuff” almost daily, at 6 p.m. Staring at the screen, he fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others. “I understood . . . the moral world of movies, where goodness, patience, and sacrifice were rewarded,” he later said. “In real life, nothing like that happened. . . . I, at a certain moment, decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate—to live in that town—was a bad impromptu movie that was about to end.” Malé had initially only intended to stay in General Villegas for a year and passed her frustrated dreams of cosmopolitan life down to her son. “It was like living in exile,” he would later say, and, in his first two novels, he would create a thinly veiled version of his home town, called Colonel Vallejos, and treat it unkindly. As Clara, his fictionalized aunt in “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” puts it:

When I got off the train, my first impression was awful, there’s not a single tall building. They’re always having droughts there, so you don’t see many trees either. In the station there are no taxis, they still use the horse and buggy and the center of town is just two and a half blocks away. You can find a few trees that are hardly growing, but what you don’t see at all, anywhere, is real grass.

The Puigs left Villegas, moving to Buenos Aires by 1949, and it’s unclear whether Manuel ever returned to his home town, except in his imagination. Much of his life was lived in one form of exile or another, particularly after his novel “The Buenos Aires Affair” was suppressed in Argentina in 1974.

“Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” highlights again and again the contrast between the magic of cinema and the tawdry doldrums of everyday life. Puig preferred melodramas, which he called “the language in which the unconscious speaks,” along with screwball comedies and, once he got over the trauma of seeing “Bride of Frankenstein” at too young an age, cheap horror films. In his essay “Cinema and the Novel,” Puig wrote that the films of the thirties and forties had such lasting power because they “really were dreams displayed in images. . . . When I look at what survives in the history of cinema, I find increasing evidence of what little can be salvaged from all the attempts at realism.” He disliked much of Italian neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese (“so much pretension and slowness”), and called Meryl Streep, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, and Glenn Close “the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” for ushering in a more realistic femininity onscreen.

Escape into the dream world of cinema was an obsessive quest. Later in life, he would write his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante a long list of the authors of the Latin American Boom as Hollywood starlets. Borges was Norma Shearer (”Oh so refined!”), García Márquez was Elizabeth Taylor (“Beautiful face but such short legs”), Mario Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (“Oh so disciplined (and boring)”). Among the eighteen names was Puig’s own. He was to be played by Julie Christie, a “great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesn’t act anymore.” Years later, after his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes.

Popular culture at its most cursi undergirds Puig’s work. It’s there in his titles— “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Heartbreak Tango,” “The Buenos Aires Affair,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Pubis Angelical,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Tropical Night Falling”—which feel as if they could be printed in the most lurid of fonts, accompanied by the most sensational of exclamation points. His frustrated attempts to work as a screenwriter gave birth to his signature style, in which dialogue, stream of consciousness, and fake secondary sources like diary entries, surveillance reports, and newspaper articles bump up against one another. This marriage of high modernist experimentation with low cultural reference points and subject matter frequently led to his dismissal by Argentinean literati. He struggled for years to publish “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” and the accusation that he was a lightweight shadowed him even after his death. Reviewing Levine’s biography in the Times, Vargas Llosa wrote that “of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig,” before sniffing that “Puig’s work may be the best representative of what has been called light literature . . . an undemanding, pleasing literature that has no other purpose than to entertain.” Vargas Llosa’s estimation couldn’t be further off the mark. While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.

The novel in dialogue form is not new—authors from Diderot to Woolf and Gaddis have experimented with it—but there is something eternally transgressive in its austerity. To work only in dialogue is to limit or altogether renounce such pleasurable tools as point of view, description, free indirect discourse, and narration. Playwrights know that their dialogue will be mediated through a production, through the choices and interpretations of a director and actors, and they can leave instructions in the form of stage directions and notes explaining their intent. But the novel in dialogue forgoes all this. It forces the reader to be at once director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken, and searching each sentence for clues as to the basic facts of what is going on.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated. Even these clues are related briefly:

The next movie Molina swoons over is “Destino,” a Nazi film about the evils of the French Resistance. The movie, a composite invented by Puig, is an inversion of the Hollywood film “Paris Underground,” its female protagonist rather unsubtly named Leni. Molina knows that it’s Nazi propaganda but loves it, “because it’s well made, and besides it’s a work of art.” The stage appears to be set for an extended dialogue about the relationship between art and truth, aesthetics and politics, naïveté and logic, and so on. Yet Puig shifts gears again, introducing footnotes written in parodic academese that trace a post-Freudian theory of homosexuality. The footnotes grow so extensive that they take over the book, drowning out the prisoners for pages on end. These give way to stream-of-consciousness asides that take us into Molina and Valentín’s thoughts, the former self-pitying and sentimental, the latter obsessive and fevered. The text becomes marked with ellipses to denote physical actions that would normally be described, culminating in a sex scene composed solely of the words spoken by the two men:

I can’t see at all, not at all. . . . it’s so dark. . . . Slowly now . . . . . . No, that way it hurts a lot. . . . Wait . . . no, it’s better like this, let me lift my legs. . . . A little slower . . . please . . . . . . That’s better. . . .

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” moves from an avalanche of verbiage to a space where language is inadequate, and out again, with the two characters, having physically joined their bodies, finding new selves beyond the limits of their roles. It’s not entirely clear whether, were the book written today, Molina would even be described as a man. He often identifies as a woman throughout “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and at one point says, “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female. . . . We’re normal women; we sleep with men.” Here, Molina is contrasting his social circle with “the other kind [of gay men] who fall in love with one another.” The objects of Molina’s desires are straight men. “What we’re always waiting for,” he says—she says?—is “a friendship or something, with a more serious person . . . with a man, of course. And that can’t happen because a man . . . what he wants is a woman.” Molina is filled with self-loathing, and unable to form any kind of real community or engage in political action, because “you see yourself in the other ones like so many mirrors, and then you start running for your life.”

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell, a filthy space of isolation surrounded by the threat of torture and execution, becomes a nearly utopian arena where identity can be transcended. The two characters live, briefly, in a world beyond the self, beyond sexuality, beyond gender, beyond language. Molina describes this as feeling like “I’m someone else, who’s neither a man nor a woman” while Valentín describes the feeling as being “out of danger.” The novel that began as a series of oppositions—gay and straight, woman and man, naïve and political, dream and reality, cursi and honest—hasn’t resolved any of its conflicts so much as called into question whether these categories, and many of the others we use to organize our lives, aren’t arbitrary, as limited as they are limiting. Among the book’s many insoluble contradictions is how it demonstrates these categories being overcome but only in a prison cell and only through a near-total deconstruction of the self. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” refuses to neatly suit any kind of political program—Puig called gay readers offended by his portrait of Molina “Stalinist queens”—instead burrowing deeper and deeper into what its author called “the struggle for human dignity.”

As with Puig’s other novels, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” requires far more work on the reader’s part than we are accustomed to, but the result is a profound imaginative and emotional investment. We have, to an extent far greater than normal, created the world of the story we are reading. We are in that jail cell with Molina and Valentín, eavesdropping on their conversations, witnessing their slow transition from antagonistic cellmates to friends to lovers to something that cannot quite be put into language. Our struggle to piece together the action of their scenes together mirrors their struggle to understand each other and, perversely, the struggle of the secret police to determine what Valentín may know about the resistance unit he has until recently been leading.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” further confounds as it goes along. Just when you think you have a handle on it, it wriggles away and changes shape. The book begins with voices in the dark, as Molina relates the real-life 1942 film “Cat People” from memory, waxing rhapsodic in his micro-detailed descriptions of clothes, lighting, faces. Soon we learn that the two men have agreed to an experiment. To help pass the time after lights out in their cell, Molina will recount films to Valentín. These movies—there are six of them in all—form the book’s backbone. As he narrates the story of “Cat People,” Molina is expansive, romantic, and charming. Valentín is the opposite: terse, controlling, and analytical. When Molina describes the protagonist as “not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself,” Valentín responds, “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” (Later, Valentín establishes the rules of their talk, demanding that Molina’s stories contain “no food and no naked girls.”) Valentín only likes the movie once he is able to interpret it in Marxist and Freudian terms. The highest praise he can offer is “it’s all so logical, it’s fantastic.” Our sympathies are drawn toward Molina. He’s the dreamer, the romantic, the sincere one, and Valentín—who studies all day and cannot even tell his girlfriend that he loves her, because the resistance needs them both more than they need each other—feels almost inhuman in his discipline, incapable of recognizing that his dream of Marxist revolution is a romantic fantasy of its own.

It is no wonder, then, that the adaptations, which reduce the story to a romance between two seeming opposites amid a backdrop of degradation and fantasy, proved so much more successful. Ultimately, however, it is the book that will survive. The musical hasn’t been produced in New York since its hit Broadway run ended in 1995, and the film today feels painfully, at times hilariously, dated. William Hurt, an often wonderful actor, was miscast as Molina. Puig had objected to Hurt, responding to his signing on to the film with “in my bed maybe, but not as Molina!” And even though Hurt won an Oscar for his performance, Puig was right. Hurt, physically too large and obviously impersonating rather than inhabiting a fabulous gay character, somehow overacts and underplays at the same time. The director, Hector Babenco, primarily known for documentaries, lacks the sense of visual style the film demands, and the movie seems embarrassed by the two men’s sexual relationship. The screenplay reduces Molina and Valentín’s affair to a one-off favor that Valentín does for Molina, and the camera cannot even show us the titular kiss between the two characters, on which the ending hinges. The film is a work of compromise, between director and stars, between screenplay and Hollywood mores, and between Puig and his pocketbook—one that reinforces the very categories that the novel sought to break down.

Unlike the movie, which feels fixed in time, the novel of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” feels timeless, or perhaps newly relevant again and again. Its meaning has already shifted for me over the decades, from a moving insistence on gay personhood to a prescient and acutely felt dramatization of how the gender binary imprisons us all. Who knows what it will mean when I revisit it again in a decade—but it will be waiting, provocative, defiant, cursi, and ready to challenge whatever boundaries we put around ourselves. ♦

#The Kiss of the Spider Woman #Manuel Puig

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argoscity · 2 years ago

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ACTION COMICS (1938) #372 written by Leo Dorfman art by Kurt Schaffenberger ADVENTURE COMICS (1938) #391 written by Robert Kanigher art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson

#kara zor el #linda lee danvers #supergirl #comic: action comics (1938)#comic: adventure comics (1938)#panels #pre crisis

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driftwork · 2 years ago

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names, mostly surnames (1)

let me apologise for this partial list of names in the library, titles available on request...

, Adorno, horkheimer, anderson, aristotle, greta adorno, marcuse, agamben, acampora and acampora, althussar, lajac kovacic, eric alliez, marc auge, attali, francis bacon (16th c), aries, aries and bejin, alain badiou, beckett, hallward, barnes, bachelard, bahktin, volshinov, baudrillard, barthes, john beattie, medvedev, henri bergson, Jacques Bidet, berkman, zybmunt bauman, burgin, baugh, sam butler, ulrich beck, andrew benjamin and peter osbourne, walter benjamin, ernest bloch, blanchot, bruzins, bonnet, karin bojs, bourdieu, j.d. bernal, goldsmith, benveniste, braidotti, brecht, burch, victor serge, andre breton, judith butler, malcolm bull, stanley cohen, john berger, etienne balibar, david bohm, gans blumenberg, martin buber, christopher caudwell, micel callon, albert camus, agnes callard, castoridis, claudio celis bueno, carchedi and roberts, Marisol de la cadena, mario blaser, nancy cartwright, manual castells, mark currie, collingwood, canguilhem, mario corti, stuart hall, 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may, machiavelli, richard mabey, john mullzrkey, meyerhold, edward braun, magri, murray, nathanial lichfield, noelle mcafee, hans meyer, ouspensky, lucretius, asa briggs, william morris, christian metz, laura mulvey, len masterman, karl mannheim, louis marin, alaister reynolds, antonio munoz molina, FRAZER, arno schmidt, dinae waldman, mark rothko, cornwall, micheal snow, sophie henaff, scarlett thomas, matuszewski, lillya brik, rosamond lehman , morris and o’conner, nina bawden, cora sandel, delafield, storm jameson, lovi , rachel ferguson, stevie smith, pat barker, miles franklin, fay weldon, crista wolff, grace paley, v. woolf, naomi mitchinson, sheila rowbotham, e, somerville and v ross, sander marai, jose saramago, strugatsky, jean echenoz, mark robso, vladimir Vernadsky, chris marker, Kim Stanley Robinson, mario leverdo, r.a. lafferty, martin bax, mcaulay, tatyana tolstaya, colinn kapp, jonathan meades, franco fortini, sam delany, philip e high, h.g. adler, feng menglong, adam thorpe, peeter nadas, sam butler, narnold silver, deren, joanna moorhead, leonara carrington, de waal, hartt, botticelli, charbonneau, casco pratolini, murakami, aldiss, guidomorselli, ludmilla petrushevskaya, ,schulz, de andrade, yasushi. inoue, renoir, amelie nothomb, ken liu, prynne, ANTIONE VOLODINE, luc brasso, angela greene, dorothea tanning, eric chevillard, margot bennett w.e. johns, conan doyle, samuel johnson, herge, coutine-denamy, sterling, roubaud, sloan, meiville, delarivier manley, andre norton, perec, edward upward, tom mcCarthy, magrinya, stross, eco, godden, malcolm lowry, derekmiller, ismail kadare, scott lynch, chris fowler, perter newman, suzzana clarke, paretky, juliscz balicki, stanislaw maykowski, rajaniemi, william morris, c.k. crow, ueys, oldenburg, mssrc chwmot, will pryce, munroe, brnabas and kindersley, tromans, lem, zelazny, mitchinson, harry Harrison, konstantin tsiolkovsky, flammerion, harrison, arthur c clarke, carpenter, john brunner, anhony powell, ted white, sheckley, kristof, kempowski, shingo, angelica groodischer, rolin, galeanom dobin, richard holloway, pohl and kornbulth, e.r. eddison, ken macleodm aldiss, dave hutchinson, alfred bester, budrys, pynchon, kurkov, wisniewski_snerg, , kenji miyazawa, dante, laidlaw, paek nam_nyong, maspero, colohouquon, hernandez, christina hesselholdt, claude simon, bulgaakov, simak, verissimo, sorokin, sarraute, prevert, celan, bachmann, mervin peake, olaf stapledon, sa rohmer, robert musil, le clezio, jeremy cooper, zambra, giorgio de chirico, mjax frisch, gawron, daumal, tomzza, canetti, framcois maspero, de quincy, defoe, green,, greene, marani, bellatin, khury, tapinar,, richmal crompton, durrenmat, fritz, quintane, volponi, nanni balestrini, herrera, robert walser, duras, peter stamm, m foster, lan wright, their theotokism agustn de rojas, paul eluard, sturgeon, hiromi kawakomi, sayaka murata, wolfgang hilbig, hmilton, z zivkovic, gersson, mallo, bird, chaudrey, Toussaint, Can Xue, Lewis Mumford, neitzsche, popper, zizek, scott westerfield, rousseau, lewis munford, tod may, penelope maddy, elaine marks, isabelle courtivron, leroi, massumi, david sterritt, godard, millican and clark, macabe, negri, mauss, maiimon, patrica maccormack, moretti, courtney humphries, monad, moyn, malina, picasso, goldman, dambisa moyo, merleau-ponty, Nicholson, knobe and nichols, poinciore, morris, ovid, ming, nail, thomas more, richard mabey, macfarlane, piscator, louis-stempal, negrastini, moore, jacquline rose, rose and rose, ryle, roszick, rosenburg, ravisson, paul ricoer, rossler, chantl mouffe, david reiff, plato, slater, rowlands, rosa, john roberts, rhan, dubios and rousseau, ronell, jacques ranciere, mallarme, quinodoz, peterpelbert, mary poovey, mackenzie, andrew price, opopper, roger penrose, lu cino parisi, gavin rae, parker and pollack, mirowoski, perniola, postman, panofsky, propp, paschke and rodel, andre pickering, massabuau, lars svenddsen, rosenberg and whyte, t.l.s. sprigger, nancy armstrong, sallis, dale spender, stanislavski, vanessa schwartz, shapin and shaeffer, sally sedgewick, signs, gabriel tarde, charles singer, adam smith, simondon, pascal chablt, combes, jon roffee, edward said, sen, nik farrell fox, sartre, fred emery, scholes, herbert spencer, ruth saw, spinoza, raphael sassower, henry sidgewick, peter singer, katarznya de lazari-radek, piaget, podach, van der post, on fire, one press, melossi and pavarini, pearl and mackenzie, theirry paquot, tanizaki, RHS, stone, richard sennett, graham priest, osborn and pagnell, substance, pedrag cicovacki, schilthuizen, susan sontag, gillian rose, nikolas rose, g rattery taylor, rose, rajan, stuart sim, max raphael, media culture and society, heller- roazen, rid, root, rossi, gramsci, showstack sasson, david roden, adrew ross, rosenvallion, pauliina remes, pkato, peter sloterdijk, tamsin shaw, george simmel, bullock and trombley, mark francis, alain supiot, suvin, mullen and suvin, stroma, maimonides, van vogt, the clouds on unknowing, enclotic, thesis 11, spivack, kate raworth, h.w. richardson, hillial schwartz, stern, rebecca solnit, rowland parker, pickering, lukacs, epicriud, epicetus, lucrtious, aurelies, w.j.oates, thor Hanson, thompson, mabey, sheldrake, eatherley, plato, jeffries, dorothy richardson, arno schmidt, earl derr biggersm mary borden, birrel, arno schmidt, o.a. henty, berhard steigler, victor serge, smith, joyce salisbury, pauer-studer, timpanaro, s helling, schlor, norman and welchman, searle, emanuele severarimo, tomasello, sklar, judith singer, walmisley, thomas malthus, quentin meilassoux, alberto meelucchi, mingione, rurnbull, said, spufford and uglow, zone, j.j.c. smartt, sandel, skater, songe-moller, strawson, strawson, strawson, raymond tallis, toscano, turkle, tiqquin, diggins, j.s. ogilivy, w.w. hutchings, rackgam, deiter roth, dowell, red notes, campbell and pryce,osip brik, lilya brik, mayakovsky, zone, alvin toffker, st exupery, freya stark, warson, walsh, wooley, tiles and oberdick, timofeeva, richardson, marcuse, marder, wright, ushenko, tolson, albebers and moholy- nagy, alyce mahon, gablik, burnett, barry, hill, fontaine, sanuel johnson,justin, block, taylor, peter handke, jacques rivette, william sansom, bunuel and dali, tom bullough, aldius huxley, philip robinson, spendor, tzara, wajcman, peter wohlleben, prigogini, paolo virno, jeremy tunstall, theweliet, taussig, tricker, vince, thomss, williams, vogl, new german critique, e.p. thompson, jean wahl, paul virilio, lotringer, christy wampole, verhaeghe, janet wolff, anna kavan, vergara, uexkull, couze venn, barry smart, vico, vatimo, vernant, raoul vaneigem, ibn warraq, vertov, williams, meiksins wood, norbert weiner, peter wollen, h.g. wells, michelle walker, , jeanne waelit walters, shaw and darlen, whorf, ward and dubois, john wright, weinart, wolff, willis, wark, cosima wagner, j. weeks, judith williamson, welzbacher, erik olin wright, wittgenstein, kenny, zeldin, wenders, henry miller, wenkler, arrighi, banks, innes, ushereood, kristeva, john cage, quignard, t.f. powys, siri hustveldt, lem, zelazny, mitchonson, tsilolkovsky, toussaint, heppenstall, garrigasait, de kerangal, haine fenn, jean bloch, geoff ryman, reve, corey, asemkulov, ernaux, gareth powell, cory, deleuze and guattari studies, cse, allain and souvestre, apolinaire, jane austen, john arden, aitmatov, elizabth von arnim, paul auster, abish, ackroyd, tom gunn, lorca, akhmatov, artuad, simon armatige, albahari, felipe alfau, audem auden and soendor, varicco, barrico, bainbridge, asturias, ronan bennett, beckett, paul bowles, jane bowles, celine, bukowski, wu ming, blissert, kay boyle, andrei bely, hugo barnacle, BOLL, isak dineson, karen blikson, brodsky, richmel crompton, berry, barthleme, mary butts, leonora carrington, cage, chevhillard, canetti, cendres, butor, cortazar, danielewski, bertha damon, dyer, havier cercas, micheal dibden, marguerite duras, john donne, duras, durrell, dorrie, Fredric durrenmatt, heppenstahl, eco, enzensberger, evanovich, fruentes, farrell, alison fell, alisdair gray, hollinhurst, andre gide, jean giono, gadda, henry green, grass, andre gorz, william gibson, joyce, gombrowitz, alex laishley, murakami, herve guibert, franz kafka, juenger, junker, kapuscinski, laurie king, kundera, mcewan, ken macleod, ian macdonald, moers, meades, vonda macintyre, nalmstom, maillert, havier marias, jeff noon, anaus nin, david nobbs, peter nadas, nabokov, iakley, oates, raymond queneau, cesare pavese, paterson, ponge, perte, perec, chinery, ovid, genette, kandinsky, robert pinget, richard piwers, rouvaud, sloan, surrralist poetry, ilya troyanov, paul,raabe, julien rios, arne dahl, pierre sollers, rodrigruez, chris ross, renate rasp, ruiz, rulfo, tove jannsson, cabre, vladislavic, tokarczuk, pessoa, jane bowles, calvino, lispector, lydia davis, can xue, sebald, peter tripp, hertzberg, virginia woolf, zozola, sorrentino, higgins, v.w. straka, cogman, freud, jung, klein, winnecot, lacan, fordham, samuels, jung, freud, appignesai, bjp, pullman, magnam, sybil marshall, mccarten, galbraith, jewell, lehmann, levy, levin, jung, spinoza, fairburn, jung, sandler, lacan, laplanche, pontalis, can, xue, klein, cavelli, hawkins, stevens, hanna segal, bollas, welldon, williams, sutherland, buon, symington, morrison, brittain, sidoli, sidoli, holmes, bowlby, winnecott, bollas, kalschiid, malan, patrick casement, anna frued, wittenburg, liz wright, fordham, fairburn, symington, sandler, jung, balint, coltart, west, steiner, van der post, stern, green, roustang, adrew samuels, d.l. sayers, salom, krassner, swain, rame and fo, storr, cogman, hessen, penelope fitzgerald, cummings, richard holloway, juhea kim, glenville, heyer, cartland, kim, cho, atkinson, james, king, audten, hartley, du maurier, bronte, thomas, plath, leon, camillairi, kaussar, fred fargas, boyd, sjowall and wahloo, pheby, morenno-garcia, perrsson, herron, nicola barker, arronovitch, karen lord, stephen frosh, ernest jones, flamm o’brien, shin, mishra, chin jin-young and so on to the warm horizon

#names #ideology and discourse #everyday practices

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lavenderandlaurel · 2 years ago

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@bogbodyanon tagged me to share 23 books I'm excited to read in 2023! in no particular order:

place and placelessness by e.c. relph

speaking of jews: rabbis, intellectuals, and the creation of an american public identity by lila corwin berman

planting the world: joseph banks and his collectors: an adventurous history of botany by jordan goodman

the way spring arrives edited by yu chen

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin

the future of natural history museums edited by eric dorfman

the dream of the red chamber by cao xueqin

the great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable by amitav ghosh

the domestic revolution by ruth goodman

great american city: chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect by robert j. sampson

zakhor: jewish history and jewish memory by yosef hayim yerushalmi

urban forests: a natural history of trees in the american cityscape by jill jones

a natural history of the senses by diane ackerman

the reach of rome: a journey through the lands of the ancient empire, following a coin by alberto angela

the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred by chanda prescod-weinstein

no logo by naomi klein

giovanni's room by james baldwin

the reckless decade: america in the 1890s by h.w. brands

the city and the city by china mieville

identity and the museum visitor experience by john h. falk

the radical bookstore: counterspace for social movements by kimberley kinder

literati storytelling in late medieval china by luo maling

the green new deal and beyond: the road from climate emergency to ecological reality by stan cox

yeah okay this is a pretty good snapshot of who I am as a person right now lol

tagging (if you want to!) @carlodivarga-s @blysse-and-blunder @sleepanon @ohk4te

#bookposting #2023 tag

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unproduciblesmackdown · 5 months ago

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guthrie theater tiktok full of choreography: "In the rehearsal room for LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS! 🌱 Fun is being had, songs are being sung, human eating plants are being grown."

#lsoh #some fight choreo like orin dentist role doesn't sing at any point before he does surely but i'm only so familiar in various ways #enough to go well this isn't a lsoh song but from there i wouldn't have a clue. told us in their tags though like oh okay then #the unenthusiastic backup he's getting lol #guessing that's a plant standing Objet. thought someone was standing in for it even more but think they're standing right Behind it #go actor robert dorfman....#will roland #seymour krelborn

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brookstonalmanac · 6 months ago

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Birthdays 5.6

Beer Birthdays

Bernard "Toots" Shor; saloonkeeper (1903)

Five Favorite Birthdays

George Clooney; actor (1961)

John Flansburgh; pop musician, "TMBG" (1960)

Willie Mays; San Francisco Giants CF (1931)

Anne Parillaud; actor (1960)

Orson Welles; film director, actor (1915)

Famous Birthdays

Paul Alverdes; German writer (1897)

Nestor Basterretxea; Spanish artist (1924)

Charles Batteux; French philosopher (1713)

Raymond Bailey; actor (1904)

Tom Bergeron; television host (1955)

Tony Blair; British politician (1953)

Susan Brown; English actor (1946)

Geneva Carr; actor (1971)

Jeffery Deaver; writer (1950)

Willem de Sitter; Dutch scientist (1872)

Robert H. Dicke; physicist and astronomer (1916)

Ariel Dorfman; Argentinian writer (1942)

Roma Downey; actor (1960)

Sigmund Freud; psychiatrist (1856)

Jimmie Dale Gilmore; country singer (1945)

Stewart Granger; English-American actor (1906)

Dana Hill; actor (1964)

Amy Hunter; actor and model (1966)

Ross Hunter; actor (1926)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; German-Swiss artist (1880)

Paul Lauterbur; chemist (1929)

Kal Mann; songwriter (1917)

Harry Martinson; Swedish writer (1904)

Lars Mikkelsen; Danish actor (1964)

Christian Morgenstern; German writer (1871)

Motilal Nehru; Indian politician (1861)

Martha Nussbaum; philosopher (1947)

Michael O'Hare; actor (1952)

Adrianne Palicki; actor (1983)

Robert Peary; arctic explorer (1856)

Marguerite Piazza; actor (1920)

Gina Riley; Australian actor (1961)

Maximilian Robespierre; French revolutionary (1758)

Tony Scalzo; pop singer (1964)

Bob Seger; rock musician (1945)

Rolf Maximilian Sievert; Swedish physicist (1906)

Randall Stout; architect (1958)

Jean-Baptiste Stuck; Italian-French composer (1680)

Rabindranath Tagore; Indian writer (1861)

James Turrell; artist (1943)

Rudolph Valentino; actor (1895)

Adrienne Warren; actor (1987)

Andre Weil; French mathematician (1906)

Theodore H. White; historian and writer (1915)

Lynn Whitfield; actor (1953)

Wally Wingert; actor (1961)

Jaime Winstone; English actor (1985)

Denny Wright; English guitarist (1924)

Raquel Zimmermann; Brazilian model (1983)

#Birthdays

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vudinhlam · 9 months ago

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Week 7: Digital Citizenship and Health Education: Body Modification on Visual Social Media

Recently social media started to grow more and more, creating lots of platforms to serve as a dynamic space for self-expression, creating a connection between users and sharing tons of information. Thanks to the emergence of social media and digital technology has been associated with a shift in the nature of labor, as well as the popularization of pornography and the "porn chic" look (Drenten, 2020). In addition, body modification also started to rise up among influencers and celebrities to improve their appearance on social media, gain more view and popularity. Furthermore, according to the 2017 data provided by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 42% of surgeons said that their patients are pursuing aesthetic surgery to enhance their image on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other networks (Dorfman, 2018). Beside that, body modification and pornography by sexualizing self-looking is a way marketing utilize to promote product. Celebrity and influencers apply the body modification and expose themselves to their social media to gain more following and potentially attract some advertisement. Influencer labor based on affiliation aims to attract and retain the interest of an external business by engaging in fun and sexually provocative interactions with followers on social media who are activated by increasingly subtle digital affordances (Drenten, 2020). In addition, with body modification, change their appearance and look to create an image that boosts more popularity to the influencer and brand advertise. However, by over doing plastic surgery, modification to the body can create some long-term harmful effects to health and therefore it’s a risky beauty treatment to gain popularity. As social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook continue to rise more, influencers and celebrities from around the will continue to pornified and show their body modification to gain attention and attract advertisers. It is important to remind people to educate themselves more about what is the long-term impact of body modification to avoid any unfortunate.

Reference:

Drenten, J, Gurrieri, L & Tyler, M 2020, “Sexualized labour in digital culture: Instagram influencers, porn chic and the monetization of attention,” Gender, work, and organization, vol. 27, no. 1, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, pp. 41–66.

Robert G Dorfman, Elbert E Vaca, Eitezaz Mahmood, Neil A Fine and Clark F Schierle, ‘Plastic Surgery-Related Hashtag Utilization on Instagram: Implications for Education and Marketing’, Aesthetic Surgery Journal, Volume 38, Issue 3, March 2018, pp 332–338

#mda20009

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adamwatchesmovies · 1 year ago

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Animal House (1978)

National Lampoon’s Animal House is an important movie. You can see its influence in the many raunchy and gross-out comedies that attempted to ride on its coattails after its release. Countless films have either imitated its style or attempted to one-up its hijinks. It’s unapologetically vulgar and crass, memorable and often hilarious. It’s also horribly dated - we’re talking Breakfast at Tiffany’s dated - which makes it hard to recommend unless you’re from a certain era, or watching it for academic reasons.

In 1962, Faber College’s Dean Vernon Wormer (John Vernon) is fed up with the Delta Tau Chi "Animal House" Fraternity. It isn’t hard to see why. Its members are nothing but hard-partying, womanizing delinquents with low grade point averages and a knack for disobedience - unlike the prestigious, snooty, elitist Omega Theta Pi house, who hate them just as much as the Dean does.

Animal House doesn't have much of a plot. For 109 minutes, we follow various members of the fraternity as they go wild. New pledges Larry Kroger (Tom Hulce) and Kent Dorfman (Stephen Furst), the legendary John "Bluto" Blutarsky, motorcyclist/mechanic Daniel Simpson "D-Day" Day (Bruce McGill), chapter president Robert Hoover (James Widdoes), ladies’ man Eric "Otter" Stratton (Tim Matheson), and the only one with a steady girlfriend, Donald "Boon" Schoenstein (Peter Riegert) all go on the kind of adventures that you can’t believe someone committed to film in 1978. It’s essentially a series of sketches, many of which you see once and never forget. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I just need to say “the horse” and you start to crack up.

While the film doesn’t contain the kind of rampant misogyny many of its imitators attempted to mine for comedy (such as Porky’s)… it’s still got a problematic attitude towards women. If it were just one scene of Bluto peeking through a window to see ladies changing, it might be ok. The college students we see are all parading in their underwear while having a pillow fight, which is so outlandish it's funny. The problem is how many moments of this nature we see. Animal House has a scene in which a character has to seriously consider why having sex with an unconscious woman is a bad idea. It’s one rape joke too many but then there's another not too far away. Yikes.

I can’t blame anyone who gets offended at the homophobic jokes - all I can say is that’s just the way things were back then - or the racist jokes - times were different but things have changed, I swear. Even if you overlook them, the picture’s general attitude just doesn’t sit well today. You might not like the snobs in Omega Theta Pi but at least they’re good students. Animal House is filled with cheaters who take nothing seriously and then complain when the administration holds them accountable. Maybe fraternities mean a different thing in the United States than they do in Canada, or they were a bigger deal back in the day but it's hard to figure out why you should like the hooligans from Animal House at the end of the day.

If you’re curious and undeterred by the dated humor, there are plenty of funny gags and several of them produce big laughs. I just don’t know who this movie is for anymore. You’d have a difficult time looking at your female friends in the face after watching this film with them. With your kids? They’d be appalled. Even among your buddies, I suspect you’d find a larger-than-expected number of them who’d go “Hey man, this isn’t cool”. I'm glad I saw Animal House. Now that I have, I understand why the film was as influential as it was but I doubt I'll feel the need to revisit it. This makes me unsure if I recommend it or not. I suppose I do, if you know what you're getting into, at least so you can "get it" too. (On Blu-ray, July 23, 2021)

#Animal House #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #John Landis #Harold Ramis #Douglas Kenney #Chris Miller #John Belushi #Tim Matheson #John Vernon #Verna Bloom #Thomas Hulce #Donald Sutherland #1978 movies #1978 films

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pimpkinpieee · 1 year ago

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Week 9 – Digital Citizenship and Health Education: Body Modification on Visual Social Media

What a fun topic to talk about! This was the topic that I presented in class this week and it was by far the most interesting topics I’ve talked about. It is on Body Modification on Visual Social Media!

I am sure the first thing that comes into your head is “photoshop edits” or “cosmetic surgery”. Well, yes. Those are all part of this week’s topic. Before we dive deeper into this topic, here is a brief introduction of what the topic actually means.

Body modification on visual social media refers to the practice of sharing and showcasing various alterations made to the human body on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. It encompasses a wide range of intentional modifications, including but not limited to tattoos, piercings, scarification, hair dyeing, body painting, cosmetic surgeries, and even more extreme alterations like implants or extreme body modifications. In addition, body modification can also be done digitally through Photoshop apps. One can alter their appearance which includes modifying body shape, size, skin tone, facial features, or adding elements like tattoos, piercings, all through an app.

Plastic surgery is one of the most well-known and widely practiced methods of body modification. Plastic surgery involves surgical procedures that alter or enhance a person's physical appearance. It can be performed for various reasons, including reconstructive purposes to correct deformities or injuries, or for aesthetic purposes to enhance specific features or achieve a desired look. Some popular procedures of plastic surgery include breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, liposuction, facelifts, tummy tucks, and buttock augmentation, among others. The realm of plastic surgery is now completely surrounded by the Internet and social media (Robert 2018). According to a study conducted by Vardanian et al (2013) more than half of American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) members who participated in a survey reported using social media for either personal or professional reasons. Furthermore, 42% of surgeons claim that their patients want aesthetic surgery to enhance their looks on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media platforms (American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 2017).

Through this data, it illustrates the extent to which social media can cause someone to feel self-conscious or insecure about their appearance and to desire plastic surgery. Social media platforms often promote and perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards through edited and filtered images. Seeing flawless and heavily edited photos can create a sense of inadequacy and make individuals feel that their natural appearance is not good enough. I can relate to this statement too because I used to go through something similar. In addition to this, Instagram has established itself as a leading platform for businesses seeking to promote to millennials, and its use in cosmetic surgery is on the rise. Many surgeons used Instagram as a tool for patient education and company growth quickly, and as a result, many now have sizable (Falzone 2016). In my opinion, this can be classified as social media misuse as it is causing plastic surgery to become more widespread as society advances. People may become more self-conscious about their appearance as a result and undergo plastic surgery right away with easy access.

All in all, the decision to undergo plastic surgery should be a personal one, driven by a genuine desire for self-improvement and an understanding of the potential risks and benefits involved. Loving the way we look involves a combination of self-acceptance, self-care, and making choices that align with our personal values and well-being. My advice would be to love yourself because you are perfectly imperfect just the way you are. You are YOU and that is what makes you special <3

References

Dorfman, RG, Vaca, EE, Mahmood, E, Fine, NA and Schierle, CF 2018, ‘Plastic Surgery-Related Hashtag Utilization on Instagram: Implications for Education and Marketing’, Aesthetic Surgery Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 332–338.

Falzone, D 2016, Plastic surgery docs use Instagram stars to boost their practices, Fox News, viewed 12 June, <https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/plastic-surgery-docs-use-instagram-stars-to-boost-their-practices>.

Vardanian, AJ, Kusnezov, N, Im, DD, Lee, JC and Jarrahy, R 2013, ‘Social Media Use and Impact on Plastic Surgery Practice’, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, vol. 131, no. 5, pp. 1184–1193

#mda20009 #body modification #plastic surgery #love yourself #self love #social media

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