today's reading
Dec. 18th, 2006 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethDecided to read a book today. "The Plays of Caryl Churchill" by Amelia Howe Kritzer. Mostly I read the intro/conclusion of the chapters, maybe one play in each, and all the bits that I noticed mention Top Girls.
It's all about the plays, it doesn't have actual plays in. It's more of a "this means this" kind of thing.
That always rather bugs me. I mean, I think any claim to what it 'means' should be at least Janus faced, better yet chaos starred, or even more multiple. I mean, you look up any word in the dictionary, odds are it's going to have a whole bunch of meanings. So if every word is a whole bunch of things, how can any play be meaning one thing?
Texts are polysemic. Hugely and always.
And it's all very well saying that the character doesn't privilege a single voice, but then it picks out lines and says what they mean and that splats this writer voice over the top of them all, which is rather missing the point.
Anyways. It isn't horrible. Just... er, with a finite number of words? :-)
It had a bit in the intro about the difference between female and male sexuality and how that is reflected in play structure. That thing about how males build up to a single climax and have a single phallic focus. Masculine psychic seperateness and phallic unity. Feminine connectedness and relationality. And it has as some kind of opposites the phallus and unity and "the multiplicity and relatedness implied by breasts, clitoris, vulva, and vagina."
Thing of it is, if there is one thing gay porn has taught me, it is that men have more than one happy place too. Yes, they have a penis. But that's hardly the whole story.
Except in some stories it is. But that doesn't make it a male/female difference, it makes it a weird sort of story that got splodged over the top of biology, so suddenly sex is in these segregated packages of flesh and there's bits that are sex and bits that are not-sex and... How weird is that?
I mean, generally, people are people, not chunks.
Except in horror stories, possibly involving unfortunate zombie related accidents. I mean if you get zombie hands crawling around you can get zombie other bits too. Which would be gross.
But the reason it is horror is because it is all wrong. People happen as a whole.
It's like when someone on a message board was trying to find the best icon of CC's arse, which I admit is a subject worthy of art. But I had to say that I tend to find isolated body parts disturbing. Because I watch too much horror and start thinking of fridges and jars.
Which makes it weird that almost all my icons are, from a certain point of view, decapitated heads. Er, severed heads? Heads from bodies which aren't there on account of the head being somewhere else.
But generally speaking that doesn't bug me, because I tend to think of that as still looking at a person, even if they don't have all their bits showing. Hands too, mostly, except for if they are actually chopped off at the time. Hands seem more personal than random muscles or whatever. But still this is in fact kind of strange.
People are not meat. If people lose meat they don't lose person-ness. So people are not meat.
Looking at them as if they are meat would be a recurring theme in very much horror.
Also Great Expectations, weirdly enough. There's a whole cannibalism subtext.
Why things are horror, are frightning, is interesting of itself.
Says in the conclusion chapter of this book I read that Caryl Churchill uses the word 'frighten' in almost every play.
The wide range of subjects and styles in Churchill's plays converge upon a consistent and coherent thematic emphasis on the societal division between the powerful and powerless. A key to this division throughout the plays is the word frighten - the most significant single word in Churchill's lexicon and one used to identify the motivation of a major character in nearly every one of her plays[...]. The reference by a character to being frightened, which invariably occurs in a dramatically heightened context, marks the dividing line between the powerful, who are frightening, and the powerless, who are frightened. Th eline may be laid down by economic inequality, class privilege, race or sex discrimination, behavioural norms, or crippling of one's self. Insistently, Churchill suggests that the answer to powerlessness lies not in merely reversing the power equation but in dissolving it through [...] co-operation [...].
[I left out some specific examples from the plays]
So reading that what I wanted to do was go through Torchwood, or Urban Gothic, or whatever scary was around, and poke it to see power relationships and how they fit the keywords.
Jack and Owen have said they were scared so far. Interesting contexts?
Who else?
It's all about the plays, it doesn't have actual plays in. It's more of a "this means this" kind of thing.
That always rather bugs me. I mean, I think any claim to what it 'means' should be at least Janus faced, better yet chaos starred, or even more multiple. I mean, you look up any word in the dictionary, odds are it's going to have a whole bunch of meanings. So if every word is a whole bunch of things, how can any play be meaning one thing?
Texts are polysemic. Hugely and always.
And it's all very well saying that the character doesn't privilege a single voice, but then it picks out lines and says what they mean and that splats this writer voice over the top of them all, which is rather missing the point.
Anyways. It isn't horrible. Just... er, with a finite number of words? :-)
It had a bit in the intro about the difference between female and male sexuality and how that is reflected in play structure. That thing about how males build up to a single climax and have a single phallic focus. Masculine psychic seperateness and phallic unity. Feminine connectedness and relationality. And it has as some kind of opposites the phallus and unity and "the multiplicity and relatedness implied by breasts, clitoris, vulva, and vagina."
Thing of it is, if there is one thing gay porn has taught me, it is that men have more than one happy place too. Yes, they have a penis. But that's hardly the whole story.
Except in some stories it is. But that doesn't make it a male/female difference, it makes it a weird sort of story that got splodged over the top of biology, so suddenly sex is in these segregated packages of flesh and there's bits that are sex and bits that are not-sex and... How weird is that?
I mean, generally, people are people, not chunks.
Except in horror stories, possibly involving unfortunate zombie related accidents. I mean if you get zombie hands crawling around you can get zombie other bits too. Which would be gross.
But the reason it is horror is because it is all wrong. People happen as a whole.
It's like when someone on a message board was trying to find the best icon of CC's arse, which I admit is a subject worthy of art. But I had to say that I tend to find isolated body parts disturbing. Because I watch too much horror and start thinking of fridges and jars.
Which makes it weird that almost all my icons are, from a certain point of view, decapitated heads. Er, severed heads? Heads from bodies which aren't there on account of the head being somewhere else.
But generally speaking that doesn't bug me, because I tend to think of that as still looking at a person, even if they don't have all their bits showing. Hands too, mostly, except for if they are actually chopped off at the time. Hands seem more personal than random muscles or whatever. But still this is in fact kind of strange.
People are not meat. If people lose meat they don't lose person-ness. So people are not meat.
Looking at them as if they are meat would be a recurring theme in very much horror.
Also Great Expectations, weirdly enough. There's a whole cannibalism subtext.
Why things are horror, are frightning, is interesting of itself.
Says in the conclusion chapter of this book I read that Caryl Churchill uses the word 'frighten' in almost every play.
The wide range of subjects and styles in Churchill's plays converge upon a consistent and coherent thematic emphasis on the societal division between the powerful and powerless. A key to this division throughout the plays is the word frighten - the most significant single word in Churchill's lexicon and one used to identify the motivation of a major character in nearly every one of her plays[...]. The reference by a character to being frightened, which invariably occurs in a dramatically heightened context, marks the dividing line between the powerful, who are frightening, and the powerless, who are frightened. Th eline may be laid down by economic inequality, class privilege, race or sex discrimination, behavioural norms, or crippling of one's self. Insistently, Churchill suggests that the answer to powerlessness lies not in merely reversing the power equation but in dissolving it through [...] co-operation [...].
[I left out some specific examples from the plays]
So reading that what I wanted to do was go through Torchwood, or Urban Gothic, or whatever scary was around, and poke it to see power relationships and how they fit the keywords.
Jack and Owen have said they were scared so far. Interesting contexts?
Who else?