this is a very old story

[text ID: you dangle on the leash / of your own longing; your /  need grows teeth]

• i. the monster's body is a cultural body
• ii. the monster always escapes
• iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis
• iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference
• v. the monster polices the borders of the possible
• vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire
• vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming

• i. the monster's body is a cultural body - The monster is a work of fiction to be analyzed through tools of literary and sociological theory.
• ii. the monster always escapes - As long as the cultural fear from which the monster stems persists, the monster will reappear in retellings, reimaginings, and sequels.
• iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis - Monsters defy binaries and challenge easy comprehension or categorization.
• iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference - The monster represents the Other.
• v. the monster polices the borders of the possible - Tales of the monster exist to discourage unacceptable or taboo behaviors.
• vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire - Subjects can vicariously participate in the disruption of the social order through the monster.
• vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming - Within the monster we find information about the self.

“It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.”

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

• Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson (160 pages): a coming of age novel about a young man who is secretly a winged red monster. A wonderful, strange book that's also an ancient Greek myth retelling/translation.
• She of The Mountains - Vivek Shraya (128 pages): this book feels so much like Autobiography of Red I wondered if it was an inspiration. A lovely, tender, lyrical story of a bisexual boy's first love woven with a retelling of a Hindu myth.
• Loaded - Christos Tsiolkas (151 pages): another coming of age story - a young Greek-Australian man's 48-ish hours of nihilistic hedonism. Unrelentingly brutal prose style & a complicated, unlikeable protagonist. A little fucked up, very compelling.
• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins-Gilman (63 page short story): for the women trapped in rooms and/or the women slowly going crazy enjoyers. Iconic piece of early feminist horror and a 5 star read.
• The Vegetarian - Han Kang (208 pages): A woman having strange dreams about meat decides to become vegetarian. That's all I can tell you, this book is best read blind. Very fucked up (complimentary).
• Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin (159 pages): A claustrophobic story about love, shame, codependency, and the monster self-hatred can make of us.
• The Husband Stitch + Especially Heinous - Carmen Maria Machado (short stories): cheating bc I read her entire collection 'Her Body and Other Parties', but these were standouts and they're both available online. The first - feminist horror retelling of the Girl with the Green Ribbon folk tale, the second - weird fiction take on Law and Order SVU, problematizing the use of sexual assault victims' suffering as entertainment.
• We Had To Remove This Post - Hannah Bervoets (86 page short story): A social media moderator reflects on the effect constant exposure to violent/depraved/conspiratorial content had on her mental health and relationship with her girlfriend. I wasn't all the way sold until about 2/3rds in, but since it's only 80 pages that hardly matters. Cool use of an unreliable narrator.
• Lie With Me - Phillipe Besson (148 pages). A secret first love between two boys in the French countryside of the 80s, and the long years after they part. Sentimental and cinematic. If you love melodrama and tragedy you'll enjoy this.

“The spider Bourgeois repeatedly insisted was the image of her mother, whose work was repairing tapestries, resonates not only with Arachne in Greek myth but with the spider woman-mother-goddess figures in the myths of southwestern American Indian tribes and the formidable Teotihuacan Spider Woman of pre-Columbian Mexico, the goddess of creation itself. Robert Goldwater was an expert on what was then called "primitive art.” No one will convince me that the artist wasn’t aware of every one of these resonances. One myth is deftly woven into other myths.“

"This arachnoid maternal shape is of more than biographical interest. It bespeaks Bourgeois’s familial links with the arts of weaving, but its power as a representation of maternal ambivalence is also striking. Mother is both static and busy, many-limbed but imprisoned; she is ugly and useful, frightening and familiar, so competent that a kind of helplessness adheres to her emotional and spiritual being, atop the clever busy legs. The spider is benevolent and productive, a worker, a provider, but she is fundamentally unfree. She traps things in her web; she embroiders her tiny corner of the universe.”