#fictionality

[obliviarxyale]

You believe characters have free will? Like, exist outside of our consciousness?

You exist outside of this one's consciousness, why wouldn't everything else, too~?

[gloriousmonsters]

I would love to be friends with a monster, any tips on how to befriend one?

go to a location that people tell you not to go. like the woods, or behind the abandoned movie theater. you know your locale best. absolutely go in the dark, that's when most of them come out.*

really conspicuously open some snacks. this will net at least some voices, coming from the darkness, asking if you're going to eat all of that. fairy food rules are not fully accurate, but if a monster eats some of your food they DO have to hang out for a bit, that's supernatural etiquette. share the snacks**

don't stare.

be quiet. silence demands to be filled.

when they talk, listen to them, not to the hundred and one stories in your head telling you to kill something that looks like this.

if they live in a labyrinth, ask them if it's comfortable or if they just live there because they've always lived there.

answer when they ask the same question back.

by the time you've finished the snacks, you should have figured out if you have compatible personalities. if you don't, go your separate ways without anger. if you do, suggest a regular meeting spot, like the back aisle of the gas station store where there's a broken light or your basement at 1am

they'll eventually become easier to see in the light. that's how being a friend to someone works.

go looking in the dark again.***

*for legal purposes, this is not genuine advice

**you can eat fairy food it's literally fine. this message paid for by the high fae court

***I don't need a lot of friends and maybe neither do you, but it's absolutely essential that you keep going and finding new monsters to listen to. it's easy to grow complacent, very tempting to create a dichotomy between the good ones that you know and the bad ones that scare you. you never have to be a friend to the ones you find, but it's necessary to keep your skill of listening in the dark.

[not-that-good-at-breathing-in]

me figuring out my feelings about inside in real time

The first time i saw inside (by bo burnham obviously), i watched it like it was a gritty documentary about someone losing their mind, trying to be creative in total isolation. I saw other people react to to the special with concern for bo’s mental health and i thought about it for a moment and realized he actually wasnt isolated (he has a dog and a girlfriend) and he was also doing promo for promising young woman. After realizing this, I thought the whole thing was a fictional movie he made with a team, and i was annoyed by my own need for “authenticity” - why would i feel differently if the special was still the same thing. Now, I think its probably a mix of truth and fiction, but idk i still feel weird about people talking about it like it’s anything other than a movie. 

I also fear I am alone in thinking it’s not the best of his specials. Maybe it’s also the fact that i was an enormous fan of his like seven years ago, watching literally everything he’d ever done. I lowkey feel like his demographic has shifted away from fifteen year old girls (something i was when I discovered him). 

I also didn;t think it was as dark or depressing as people are saying it was ...? It also wasn’t uplifting in the way i found his other specials and his movie to be, but idk i could relate to a lot of the mental stuff in it but it didn’t neccesarily take me deeper into my anxiety or feelings of worthlessness. and i was envious of the private space he had, and the equipment, and the fact that he could just take longer on a project if he wanted without getting shit for it. 

As time ripens my opinion of it, I’m starting to get into the different songs more. One thing I can’t stop thinking about is a line in 30 where he says “your phones are poisoning you!” “When you develop a dissociative mental disorder in your late twenties, don’t come crawling back to me”. Like, he says it in a way where he’s playing up the fact that he sounds old and out of touch, but it also clearly is something he has experienced to some extent (if we are to believe the contents of inside of course). And I read Patricia Lockwood’s No one is talking about this this year which is also about the internet, and obviously i watched 8th grade and idk i am just obsessed with formal art about the internet and all of the ways it’s horrible and all of the ways its mezmerizing and the way you cannot talk about it only describe yourself in it, for the brief periods in which you do feel like you exist. That and the speech he did on the 92nd street y interview about 8th grade, where he basically says it’s no waonder we’re so glued to our phone when the world we have to look up at is this fucking hostile and terrifying

[literary-structures]

As far as I can see, talent has two sides. The first side is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism. (And, yes, that means criticism of the writer’s own texts as well as the criticism of others.) Nothing else affects it. To know such models and what novels, stories, or sentences employ them certainly doesn’t hurt. Generally speaking, however, the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the buck of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and not in another.

Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (1999)

[ellekess]

Happy Valentine's Day, Elle. Thank you for being my guiding star. -Kylo

Ahhhhhh THANK YOU ANON!!! 💜💜💜

[literary-structures]

Macherey does not mean to suggest that literary works of art stand magically aloof from the histories that give birth to them. On the contrary, they are the product of a great many historical factors: genre, language, history, ideology, semiotic codes, unconscious desires, institutional norms, everyday experience, literary modes of production, other literary works and the like. It is rather that these factors are combined in a way that allows the work to evolve according to its own internal logic. To call a piece of art self-determining is not to claim, absurdly, that it is free of determinations, but that it makes use of these determinations to fashion its own logic and give birth to itself. They provide the material for its self-making. The work of art does not simply reflect or reproduce the materials which go into its manufacture; instead, it actively reworks them, in the process of doing which it produces itself. Fiction is about the world by virtue of adhering to its own internal logic. Or – to change the terms round – it is about itself in a way that projects a world. Its inside and outside are reversible.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 139–40)

[literary-structures]

In this sense, all fiction is fundamentally about itself. Yet because it draws the materials for this self-fashioning from the world around it, the paradox of fiction is that it refers to reality in the act of referring to itself. Like Wittgenstein’s forms of life, fictions are self-founding; but this is not to deny that they incorporate aspects of the world around them into their self-making, just as forms of life do. They could not be self-fashioning otherwise. Fredric Jameson remarks in The Prison-House of Language that for the Formalists and structuralists the literary work ‘speaks only of its own coming into being, of its own construction’, but Terence Hawkes rightly adds that ‘a work of fiction can only speak of its own coming into being against a background of speaking of something else’.

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (p. 138)