FANFIC Review: Substance Clad In Shadows

Rodin The Kiss Wrapped in 1 Mile of Twine by Cornelia Parker
"Rodin's 'The Kiss,' re-imagined," the curator closest to me explains in reverent tones. "Tate Britain is exhibiting it as a piece by Cornelia Parker. The artist wrapped Rodin's sculpture in one mile of string to represent the 'claustrophobia of relationships.' You'll notice the contrast of the two materials: the high culture of the marble, and the low culture of the twine." 
ch 19
Fanfiction: Substance Clad In Shadows

Nietzsche - Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche: The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

The first time I lay eyes on him that night, I think of the desires of Nietzsche's true man. ch 10

He thinks I don't notice the looks he receives as we make our way to the roof. Women watch him, wistful or lustful or smug, their memories or fantasies playing out in an unsubtle panoply of desire across their features. And then their gazes inevitably catch me walking behind him, after which they occupy themselves either by glaring at me openly or looking down and away.

Look at yourselves, I want to sneer. Waiting for me to leave his side so you can simper at his every word, laugh at his inane jokes as you surreptitiously ask the universe for a way to master your gag reflex so you can suck him off in a back room well enough to warrant a quick fuck and a phone call the next day.

There are blondes and brunettes and redheads of all different shapes and sizes, but the vacancies in their eyes make them all look the same. They part unwillingly for us.

I'm sure their panties are wet already. Small wonder that he's bored.

For now. chapt 9

First, that the burly man does not appreciate Armani-clad barflys attempting to seduce his girl. "He kissed her!" he yells. ch 10

I see him, I think. I see him. ch 10

 This is a man of hidden wants, buried needs, and I'm going to leave him sated, satisfied but first comes the extraction of his longings and I'll dig, god I'll dig right into him until he's free and mine. ch 11

"I see you," I whisper, and his mouth opens to form words he doesn't yet know. ch 11

Mapplethorpe

Akhmotova - Modigliani

"Your women are too easy, Edward Cullen," I whisper in his ear, nipping at the lobe. "They're so happy just to have you look twice at them, do you know why?"ch 11

"Those women take what they can get from you because they don't know their place. They don't know how bland they are, how bored you are." ch 11

 "'We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.'" ch 19

"I am your danger and your play," I hiss. "And I'm going to make you work for it." ch 11

"Bella, Bella, Bella," he breathes, and I'm one fantasy closer to owning him. ch 11

He is everything right now, my prey and my prayer and my captive, my spoils of war, my conquered city and my friendly fire. He is the thief of my skin,

my monster in the maze,

my sun god, grounded.

He is mine. ch 25

I sink down even further and stare as he comes apart, panting and chanting my name and fuck, fuck, fuck. ch 11

"Edward," I grind out, the sound trial and triumph. "You have to know… I'm the best you're ever going to have." ch 11

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"The Blacks are being more than accommodating right now, especially in light of this… indiscretion, Isabella," he says sternly. "Make sure you remember that when making new friends." ch 11

"Have you found her?" a man asks nearby.

"I've got her. I think she was stuck in the maze." ch 12

____________________________________

Warm us on his skin, my fingers cry plaintively. We are frozen. ch 12

He blinks. Stares. Breathes in, breathes out, and then: "Who are you?"

"I'm the only one in this building who knows what you are," I answer quietly.

He frowns. "What am I?"

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound...

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

[Anna Akhmatova, "Lot's Wife"]

+.+.+.++.+.+.+

"You already know what you are. I've already told you. You're bored. You're bored and you're lazy and you're mine. You think I don't know what it's like? To be surrounded by people who don't know, who can't know. ch 12

He is stone-still beneath my hand, his eyes hard. "Will you ever want more?"

I am silent for a moment, a series of moving images flashing across my mind's eye: domesticity, predictability, two-sink bathrooms, tragically tight smiles, a home in the

Hamptons, a ring on my finger, a swell in my belly, a staff to clean the penthouse and put a roast in the oven each night. Dinners in the city with his colleagues, his former fucks. Cold brunches spent staring at one another with open resentment. And boredom.

Above all, boredom.

Every bit of that life seems a shackle, another lock to keep me in a different kind of cage.

"Peter Ustinov thought it was true... 'through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.'" ch 18

 I'm not complaining – I have a good life. But it's rare to be around someone real."

"Am I real, then?"

His eyes find mine, unreadable. "I think so. And I think... you may have ruined me for others who aren't," he confesses quietly. ch 16

Hamlet and Ophelia - Louise Bourgeois

This Bella is a Nietzschean strategist. We see her like in Dominique Francon in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, a woman who is determined to destroy Howard Roark. Dominique has been interpreted for almost 70 years in the psychological swamp of interpretation as a masochist, rather than a Nietzschean strategist. 

We are married by a French clerk, and I wear red dress. ch 28 

Dominique wore black.

In DeLillo's Cosmopolis the Foucauldian character of Vija Kinski tells Eric Packer in a quote from Foucault, "There is no outside." She adds that money no longer refers to anything at all except itself. Money talks only to money. Foucault in discussing the end of representation in language argues that Cervantes Don Quixote is the first novel in the western world to leave the fetters of representation, Quixote refers only to literature. Substance Clad In Shadows is fanfiction and the first one to make clear that the Edward/Bella/Twilight fanfic refers only to other to itself. SCIS refers to Twilight both the books and the films, to other fanfic, and to Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson in their personal lives and their tabloid lives. All these resonate within SCIS as well as the poetry of Akhmatova whose language has been absorbed by hollelujah along with a multitude of quotes from literature past and present, classic and pop. It is a joy to read, and an erotic joy.

DUSTY: A Review - A Fanfic by YellowBella

DUSTY A Fanfic by YellowBella 

The postmodern way of reading has changed the way we read. The text is no longer expected to contain all the TRUTH that the author intended. The claim that if the author said it that's what s/he meant, or if the author did not say it then it was not meant. All that is gone.

It is the reader who brings meaning to the text. The deeper the reader has read, experienced, contemplated etc enriches the text. Authorial style is no longer the important component. We are following Nietzsche now: the style must be even more so than what the text is revealing and concealing; and it must have music to our listening ears.

To explain: Anyone can read 50 Shades and like it. Reading Twilight first and seeing the movies is not a necessity for its enjoyment  - or purchase. 

BUT: IF you have read Twilight - carefully and lovingly - and seen the movies over and over, 50 Shades will be a different book for you than it is for the woman - or man - buying it over the counter. I don't think there is a fan of Twilight who will disagree with me. It's probably the only one thing they can agree on BTW.

Yes, you can read DUSTY without having read Twilight. BUT you will have a different reading experience than the Twilight afficianado. And by precession - another post modern term - you will now reread or remember Twilight with added resonance. So bringing yourself to the text resonates both forward and backward.

YellowBella have taken (there are 2 authors) have taken Twilight and owned it. DUSTY has created resonances in Twilight that were concealed and revealed them to us. 

1. We meet a Renee who might have been, had she stayed in Forks and remained married to Charlie. A charming, lovely mother with bourgeois aesthetic tastes instilled by a sophisticated advertising milieu that is total. Bella herself is a product of it. Renee is in a symbiotic attachment with her daughter. She infantilizes her as a means of controlling her. Renee and Charlie are authoritarian parents as befits the Chief of Police of Forks. We surmise they vote conservative and have drawn hard limits and boundaries for behavior that their daughter must conform to. They are the family microcosm of one aspect of our larger political spectrum.

2. We first meet a Bella who is striving to conform to those boundaries set for her. Many Twilight fans have expressed over and over how important this is in parenting. How very necessary, and Kristen Stewart is openly and covertly criticized for not adhering to these ladylike expectations of proper normal behavior. Bella is securely caught in the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/normality Foucault so painstakingly draws in his 1974-75 Lectures on Abnormal at the College de France and in his books: Madness and Civilization and in Discipline and Punish. 

Agnes Martin Grid Painting

This Grid is inescapable and DUSTY fictionalizes it so beautifully that anyone of any age reading DUSTY can immediately understand a profound, graduate level world wide, original contribution all of human behavior - that of the relation of power/knowledge. Power and knowledge are not separate, cannot be separated, cannot exist separately as they are always in a relation. Power cannot be given, taken, traded,or any other verb used. There is no Big Power, Big Other over us. Power seeps through the Foucauldian Grid through the interstices of that Grid. When we meet Bella she has assumed the responsibility of being perfect in order to adhere to those requirements. She looks perfect, dresses perfect, acts perfect, behaves perfectly. She is an alive, lovely, charming Barbie doll that her mother has created and we can imagine what might have been her fate had she never met the Cullens, and far more so than in Twilight. This is why DUSTY is an exceptional example of fanfiction that stands on its own merits, inverts Meyer's Twilight and rips into our hearts in a real way that Twilight never attempts. 

Michel Foucault

I am hesitating here because I see that one blog post is not going to do it. So I will stop and continue in manageable fragments  as you read it, read through me, and then carry my reading back to DUSTY. 

Just as DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a far richer book if read through:Moby Dick; James Joyce: Lacan: Freud; Baudrillard; Nietzsche; Foucault; Gradiva; Greek Mythology; Ayn Rand; etc than if you read it just as a story on its own as women are reading 50 Shades without a clue of Twilight or other fanfic. 

What you bring to DUSTY will determine the depth of your reading of DUSTY, as aspects of Kristen and Rob fold in as well as the characters of Bella and Edward. And fans are going to bring going on 5 years of obsessive contemplation and observing. Now it is time for DUSTY to reveal some hidden secrets to you. And in doing so, introduce you to cutting edge philosophical and political thinking for our damned times. You do not need a graduate education to understand it. Kristen already understands it and acts on it unknowingly but surely, adroitly, and in an absolutely original way. 

Can you keep up with her? Bella in DUSTY  can. 

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon  late 1700's - Design for a Prison

   SURVEILLANCE is the most effective means of controlling human behavior and Foucault has said it is our most dangerous situation now, so it must be resisted. See how Ai WeiWei has resisted in Nietzschean, Baudrillardian style.

Panopticon Jeremy Bentham

Now Dusty is out as a book - Innocents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19214578-innocents

To Love Truly Is To Want The Other Free

LOCKS representing true love forever on Paris bridges

From l'mmoraliste

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

 The entire article here

So please tell me where is the grey, boring, monotonous 

thought of "cheating" coming from?

The French Know

 Yet, instead of sharing the naïve joy of the world’s 

Romeos and Juliets, some Parisians have felt 

increasingly irritated. Walking on those bridges 

has become almost insufferable for them. The pain 

doesn’t come only from the fact that some bridges, 

like Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont des Arts, now 

feel as if they could collapse under the weight of 

tourists’ undying love but also from the idea 

that a lock could represent love. Such an 

idea is abhorrent to many French people.

“The fools! They haven’t understood a thing about love, have they?” 

.......Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously never married and 

never lived together and, although a couple in the absolute sense of the term, 

they had lasting and meaningful relationships with strings of brilliant minds 

and pretty faces. They deemed jealousy bourgeois and 

banal.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love. But don’t 

ever 

dream of locks and throwing keys overboard, 

especially not 

in Paris.

DeLillo's Elise in Cosmopolis:

No he (Cronenberg) didn't keep the relationship between Elise and Packer the same as in the book:

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.

For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.

Cronenberg thought this part was a fantasy because Cronenberg thinks love is a fantasy.

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.” - Judith Butler

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes (and I have quoted this many times), “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love.”

In Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes writes (he is speaking of emotional intelligence), “…intelligence is everything that permits us to live superlatively with another person.”

This is where knowing how to treat someone well and wanting to treat someone well converge.

From Masha Tupitsyn: 

http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/post/36858226254/untitled-28

And So The Lion Fell In Love With The Lamb - Isaiah, Twilight

The Lion In Love - Aesop

And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

Only PRAISE for Kristen Stewart: She has Torn the Veil of Illusion from their eyes

Such a brave and courageous act this girl has accomplished. And in one afternoon!

Cosmopolis: He didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. A haircut.

Kristen Stewart: She didn't know what she wanted. Then she knew. A meeting with her SWATH director.

And in one afternoon she accomplished what it took Eric Packer the entire day to do. 

I have consistently said that Eric Packer is a visionary, not a self-destructive loser. I say the same about Kristen Stewart. What links the character Packer with Kristen Stewart/Snow White that none of them consciously had  premeditatively set out to do this. I include Jesus here. Jesus in his Passion throwing the money changers out of the Temple (for financial dealings).

A meeting in the afternoon, such as every high school girl has had. Only she never did because she didn't go to high school. She was home schooled with a correspondence course. Almost all of her girlfans had had this at one time, but she never did.

She is the princess - say Snow White - NOT  waiting in a deep unconscious deep freeze for the prince to come wake her up and make her his queen. Nor is she slobbering over images of her fantasy prince on the internet everyday. But It happened anyway. The prince arrived in Catherine Hardwicke's bedroom one day and kissed her awake. 

She got her castle as one fangirl said. Became the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Had the adoring love of the most wanted man on the planet. She has her own fortune in her own hands. Well, she has everything doesn't she? Eric Packer had everything didn't he? But neither of them knew what they wanted. Neither has any desire because desire is in a non separable relation with lack. No lack/ no desire. 

A yen maybe?  A yen for yen?  A yen for a haircut? A yen for an afternoon with her SWATH director? 

Think about Rupert Sanders for a minute. "Happily" married to a beautiful wife who tweets about him. Ahem. A filmmaker who does slick sleek advertisement videos is then given a 170 million budget to direct his first film. They wouldn't even give The Truman Show to its writer Andrew Niccol because he had never directed before, so he has had to work his way up or rather down, since he started at the top with his Truman screenplay. Sanders life has just changed because SWATH is a financial success. And the sequel has a go ahead, or it did until the other day. And he has guided "Snow White" to be a Woman Who Runs With The Wolves. Pinkola Estes deconstructs Fairy Tales for the TRIAL inherent in each of them. 

What is Snow White's trial? She can stay passively asleep and wait for the prince. But SW can be inverted to read Snow White can actively defeat her wicked stepmother, regain her kingdom and find her prince. 

At an award for Twilight Robert Pattinson in accepting his surfboard thanked Catherine Hardwicke for everything he now had in his life. "And Especially for Kristen." The assumption of his utterance was that it all was "given" to him. Even Kristen was given to him by the big Other as Zizek and Lacan would say. To "give" Kristen, then someone must have had her in order to give her to him. If someone gave her to him, then she could be taken away. This is Dominique Francon's dilemma in Fountainhead. Someone somewhere and you don't know who or how or when or why waits to take it from you - meaning Roark. So Dominique must destroy him. Dominique is not a self-destructive masochist either BTW, as all the psychological interpretations have reviewed and written for 70 fucking years. She is a Nietzschean strategist. So is Kristen. 

Kristen's "Prince" has been given to her "by magic". He and everything else can be taken from her "by magic". At any moment and she knows there are grasping hands all over waiting to take her career, her prince, her very world away from her. Eric Packer has put himself in this position by speculating on the yen in the dialectic where what goes up must come down. When he sees Burning Man he sees what the market cannot absorb, what will disprove Vija's theory and he implodes the currency market feeling one with the radical energy of the demonstrators all around. 

There is no transcendence without transgression. Nietzsche says you must lose it all. Only then can you find out who you are meant to be. Packer in his last moments imagines building it up all over again but he doesn't want that, the Eternal Return.  Kristen could have broken up with Rob, begun her life alone the way her fans have authoritatively said she "should" have done. They are recommending she enter the Order of Production, to follow a normal way of freeing herself. Ha! 

Kristen has followed Women Who Run With The Wolves. She has made a huge "CUT" in her life.

She has jumped over the abyss. She has destroyed it all. There is no going back and saying sorry now. She has freed herself from the Legend of Tristan and Iseult and she has freed all of her girl and women fans from the legend of Tristan and Iseult. The princess imprisoned in the castle, For her bubble was like the castle. Watched and connived everywhere. Spied on, gossiped about, seemingly a liberated woman who was not free. 

The only bit of "reality" she could find was an afternoon meeting with a director who had given her Joan of Arc to read. To inspire her to lead her army in the movie. But Joan of Arc has many other resonances. Victory and Success almost immediately. Then failures, adoration turning to  hatred, betrayal, until only her faith in god was left to her as she burned at the stake. 

Kristen is burning now. Bella Swan is burning, the Fairy Tale is burning. Her courtiers have turned on her. Her prince has abandoned her. Her director is groveling to his wife. She is alone. So now she knows what she always knew, that it was all make believe, all fake, all a veil of illusion. All that was "given" to her is now being taken away. Only she didn't wait for them to do it in homeopathic doses over years and years, she did it herself.

I think you have disappointed more than one fan these days; you shattered the dreams of so many in the fandom that I am not sure we will ever be the same. It is our mistake, too, naïve, weak human beings, mostly women who had our share of unhappiness over loss of trust, and sadness over lost love: we loved to see you on screen, “living the dream of true love forever” and we thought that your true love off screen was the same. - Just one bereaved fan. A fan who has been given a great gift and doesn't know it. The Fairy Tale, which Anais Nin has said has poisoned women's lives, is like the Lottery. You can win because you see someone on TV who just won it.

The Dark Knight Rises:

When all is lies, then truth becomes a weapon.

The truth is that the romantic fantasy of "true love" is just that. A fantasy, a nice word for a lie you have bought and paid dear for.  Only maybe it just didn't come true for you. But it did for Bella Swan (I don't think so BTW) and for Kristen Stewart. The Poor Little Rich Girl who had it all eh? This is what every girl has been carefully prepared to want, to desire (lacking it), along with the "castle" to turn it into your very own art museum. 

Stewart has said "fuck it"! And gone off for an afternoon session of REALITY (she thinks.)

Having been given the "gift" of everything, she must return the "counter-gift" or suicide, the same as Eric Packer. The counter-gift must be greater than the gift. (Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Death) So she has just as Packer did.

Now we will see just how well Rob Pattinson understands his character of Eric Packer. We know Cronenberg did not and smothered Rob's attempt at understanding the character and interpreting him.  Kristen has freed Rob also. From Cronenberg and all other misreading directors. Does he know it? Will he know it? 
_________________________________________________________________________

Postscript 7-26-12

".....The gesture had touched him but it was necessary to resist, of course, or die in his soul. But this wasn't the only reason to piss away her birthright. He was making a gesture of his own, a sign of ironic final binding. Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn. <b>This was the individual's revenge on the mythical couple............Let them see each other clean, in killing light."(C. p. 123-24)

Can he do anything worse than disappear her entire inheritance?

So Kristen tools off in the afternoon, picks Rupert up and they go to more or less secluded places, but not really. There is no such place for Kristen. And now we have over 49 photos of kissing, dry humping is it?, body kissing, no penetration it seems, but suggestive as hell eh. Now what could she do to crash everything? Only to be explicit sexually and be photographed  an infinite number of times with another, when she has the most desirable man on the planet at home. Could she have done anything worse than to appear to betray him sexually with another man?

This is Kristen's revenge on the mythical couple.

"Let them see each other clean, in killing light."(C. p. 124)
_______________________________________________________________________

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: 

how else could you become new, if you had not first 

become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra

_______________________________________________

Postscript 10-29-12

It’s only when the heart begins to beat wildly and without pattern — when it begins to realize its boundlessness — that its newly adamant pulse bangs on the walls of its cage and is bruised by its enclosure.

To feel the heart pound is only the beginning. Next is to feel the hurt — the tearing of the psyche — the prelude of entry into the place one has always feared. One fears that place because of being drawn to it, loving it, and wanting to be taught by it. Without the need to be taught, who would feel the psyche rip?…. Without the bruise, who would know where the walls are?

Kay Larson in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists