THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/06/03 -- Vol. 21, No. 49
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
What a Carve-up (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (three books on Gothic films)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: What a Carve-up (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
At home I had to do something recently that frankly I have very
little experience for. I had to carve a chicken. (You usually
think of carving a turkey, I suppose, but this was a chicken.) At
home we tend to eat vegetarian. If we don't eat vegetarian we eat
fish. It is easy to carve a cooked fish, particularly because it
usually starts filleted the way we get it. If we don't eat
vegetarian or fish, we get chicken breast. At least when you get
a chicken breast you can tell yourself you are not getting a piece
of a living animal, you are getting a produced substance. You
know, something cultured like Chicken Little from Pohl and
Kornbluth's SPACE MERCHANTS in which large tracts of chicken meat
are produced in vats. Actually chicken meat production is not a
whole lot different from that in the United States these days.
The meat still comes in individual chicken units, but factory
chicken production is not so different from growing it like a
substance. These days "chicken in a basket" may have been that
way all its life. (Sorry, I'd rather not think about it.)
The truth is I don't like to be reminded that I am carving an
animal that walked around and had hopes and cares. That is true
even if they were hopes and cares as generated from the half-volt
chicken brain that could be hypnotized by drawing a line on the
ground in front of its eyes. It still bothers me to be reminded
that a chicken is an animal. This meal which I am eating and
which will probably be forgotten in two days I am getting in
exchange for a chicken giving up all that it had. When I have to
carve I start asking myself questions in comparative anatomy like,
"The ads talk about the rich meat juices in the chicken stock that
give it that 'hearty chicken flavor.' What fluids do these
correspond to in the human body? Would some other animal decide
that there is such a thing as a hearty human flavor?" The more I
think about such things, the more I consider becoming a
vegetarian. These thoughts come flooding back to me when I carve
an animal. But that is a digression. I promise to be good.
So I somehow have never gotten a lot of experience carving
poultry. Nor wanted it. Part of the problem is you always are
carving a bird freshly taken from the oven. That means it is hot.
You burn your hands in addition to running the risk of stabbing
yourself with that big knife or that vicious looking-looking meat
fork. I think that fork is an atavistic throwback to the nasty
forks that were used in the Middle Ages when they were frequently
used as murder weapons. But you burn yourself in addition to
everything else. I keep telling Evelyn that it makes more sense
to carve first and cook after that, but she will have none of it.
Some people are not ready for new ideas.
You should see me with a turkey. I do carve it, but when I am
done it looks like the process was not so much one of carving as
one of exploding. Guests at our house must think that it was cut
up with military precision. "At D-hour minus four minutes,
seventeen hours, fifty-six minutes, the turkey was detonated with
explosives." The truth is that carving is much like a military
attack, but even more like a fight to the death. It starts like a
knife-fight with a mean fork fight added on. I go in slashing and
stabbing, cutting and parrying. But this is a tough old bird and
refuses to say it's licked. (That's a figure of speech. No, I
don't lick it. I'm going to be serving it to guests. Pul-eeeze!)
Soon I throw away my weapons and it becomes a hand-to-hand
wrestling match. Using a process I inherited from my father I
sheathe my hands in plastic bags to keep things sanitary. Then I
start tearing meat off of bones and putting it onto the collection
plate. People who eat a carved bird in my house rare see the flat
straight cut of the carving knife showing in the result.
With grace and stamina I get the bird in a hammer lock. I grit my
teeth and twist. For a moment I feel the leg coming off in my
polyethylene-wrapped hand. Then when I look I realized the turkey
double-crossed me. There in my hand is just a bone. The meat is
still hanging onto the bird. That is why the bird looks
detonated. Eventually there is a pile of little pieces of meat
there, some with bones, most just flinders of meat. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Last year I read Jonathan Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF
HORROR CINEMA (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95). Then a
couple of weeks ago, I read NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES:
THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp,
$17.95). And when Mark saw me enjoying that, he said I should
also read Jeremy Dyson's BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE
SUPERNATURAL FILM (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown).
The first point worth noting is that only one of these are
British, which is surprising when one considers that when one
talks about "Gothic horror films" or "supernatural horror films,"
often the studio name that first comes to mind is Hammer Films.
Ironically, Dyson doesn't cover the Hammer era at all, but instead
concentrates on the Universal/RKO era of the 1930s and 1940s.
Wright, on the other hand, focuses on the Hammer period from 1957
to 1976 but covers American and Continental horror films as well
as British, while Rigby takes an approach orthogonal to both and
covers a century's worth of films, all English.
All three have one thing in common--they concentrate on the
"horror film" rather than the "terror film." Their goal is not to
write about slasher films, or stalker films, or psycho films, but
about "supernatural" horror--horror that is based on something
beyond the world we know. (Wright makes the distinction at the
end between Gothic and Grand Guignol styles, saying the latter
emphasizes our physical existence in this world, while the former
postulates a structure of good and evil in which we move.)
On to specifics. Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC is a very thorough
coverage of its topics, with particular value for the pre-Hammer
era which tends to be ignored or skimmed over in works of this
kind. Rigby does not cover every film in detail, but at least
references and puts in context the films for which he doesn't give
detailed plot synopses and analyses.
Wright's NIGHTWALKERS is much less thorough, even for the period
it covers, though he spends a bit more time on the films he does
cover in depth. And Dyson covers even fewer films, but each again
in yet more depth, with entire chapters devoted to "King Kong" and
"Cat People", for example.
The real problem with all of these, of course, is that after you
have finished reading about a film, you'll want to pull out the
DVD (or videotape) and watch it again. After reading about what
Wright called "the Cornish horrors" ("The Reptile" and "Plague of
the Zombies"), for example, I suggested to Mark that this would
make a good Sunday afternoon double feature. Luckily, he agreed,
and since it just happened to be Sunday afternoon, that was one
problem solved. :-)
All three books are somewhat difficult to find in stores, though
on-line booksellers have made it relatively easy on-line. If you
are going to get only one of the three, ENGLISH GOTHIC is probably
the best choice. BRIGHT DARKNESS is the most academic, with
NIGHTWALKERS being the most "pop culture" of the three, though
hardly a fluff coffee table book. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
As for me, I am rather often uneasy in my mind,
because I think that my life has not been calm
enough; all those bitter disappointments,
adversities, changes keep me from developing
fully and naturally in my artistic career."
-- Vincent van Gogh
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