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

_____________________________________

"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. 

Why You Can Never Know Anything From The Images Of THAT AFTERNOON!

Why you can never know anything from the images of  THAT AFTERNOON
Reading THAT AFTERNOON Through Cosmopolis and Lacan and Foucault

Las Meninas - Diego Valazquez

Cronenberg has gone for the literal by using DeLillo's exact words in his Cosmopolis dialogue. But then strangely Cronenberg eliminates Yen (Japanese currency), replacing it with Yuan (Chinese currency), destroying the Lacanian resonance with yen: a whim for something; an innocuous wanting; and when, "He didn't know what he wanted, then he knew,  he wanted a haircut." Actually this is not a want is it? Is it a yen turning into a want as he persists with his plan? And he will keep his Appointment in Samarra to get it. A yen. Packer then begins to yen (want?) for yen, a play on the verb and the noun.

Then Packer wants all the yen - yenning? - that there is, he wants to want, he wants to Desire, but having no Lack, cannot. He wants all the Rothkos (does he want the sudden break, the cut in his life as Rothko had?), in fact the entire chapel, a religious setting these paintings were painted for. He wants all the volts the stun gun has. "Make me feel something I don't know." Then he wants to LOSE all Elise's heritage. 

Rob has said, "I think he was searching for something. He wanted something."  Cronenberg shuts him up once again. The first time being "....the world will die" the resonating quote of Ayn Rand. Is this the time Cronenberg pats Rob on the head? Good boy.  Does Cronenberg just want to touch Rob's hair like all his fangirls want to? Is this why Cronenberg gave him a slicked down 1950's hairdo (an armoured helmet of hair as Diane Rubenstein might say), perfectly groomed, not looking at all as if he might want, have a yen for, a haircut? What is Cronenberg thinking here?

In a literal recognition of the present economic world prominence of China over Japan, Cronenberg replaces the Japanese currency of the yen with the Chinese currency of the yuan, thus revealing his complete ignorance of the importance in our thinking about our world given us by Lacan that DeLillo has mirrored. (This is an auteur filmmaker?)

Ah, but a Lacanian reading still triumphs. The word yuan in the mouth of a native English speaker does not have the same resonance as spoken by a Chinese. Yuan. Roll it in your mouth. Feel its sound. Feel all the resonance of yearning in the sound of this word, the yawning longing it draws from the native English speaking mouth. Cronenberg has concealed and revealed from himself, concealed and revealed himself to us. In wishing to dispose of yen, a very very mild and almost invisible want, he has substituted yuan, a yearning, a longing. For what Mr. Cronenberg? What are you masking  with this  "floating sign" to escape knowing something you don't want to know that you feel? What if we consider Zizek's terminology of  unknown knowns at this point? Is it Death?

"Money has lost its narrative. Money talks only to itself," says Vija Kinski.

"The New York City skyline of skyscrapers has lost its narrative," says Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism. The Twin Towers of totalitarian monolithic proportions faced each other saying that although we appear to be two, we really are one. They are mirror images reflecting each other into infinity saying, "There is no outside." How clairvoyant do you think DeLillo is now?

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," sahe said. "I grew up comfortably. took me awhile to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt instensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C 29)

Didi Fancher is talking about the loss of representation; the concrete feel of money. The signifier and the signified. Vija Kinski is talking about cyber-capital, Virtual Reality Capital, money as "floating sign", the signified and the signifier parted forever, money floating free as CODE (just air as Packer says)  in Virtual Reality.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Benno Levin:

"But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.....Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. (C 55)
_____________________________________________________

The loss of representation so carefully elucidated by Foucault in The Order of Things in chapter one with Valasquez's Las Meninas. In the painting among the royal family of Philip IV,                                                                                                                                                               is the painter. The painter is looking at you. The canvas he is painting you cannot see, only its back. At the far end of the painting, among the shadowy paintings on the wall, a figure midway on stairs appears to be lit by the invisible source of the light that allows you to see the royal family and the painter himself  But it is not another painting, it is a mirror,  "It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied us, not only by the distant paintings but also by the light in the foreground with its ironic canvas." (TOT 7)

And in this way Foucault gives us THE CUT with representation in the Dominating Discourse of painting paving the way to the modernist era with its lack of representation.

I attended Leo Steinberg's seminar on Valazquez and he spent an evening on this painting. He did not mention the faraway "painting" that upon a closer look betrayed itself as a mirror. In Barcelona at the Picasso Museum there are all the studies of Las Meninas that Picasso did. I wish I could take another look.

You are in the light that is lighting the painting. You are the invisible subject Velazquez is gazing at. Foucault then discusses the royal family in this painting that is a portrait of them.

These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visual, they prove superably inadequate. 
_______________________________________
_______________________________________Neither can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.( TOT 9)
_______________________________________And Rob Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have been tortured because you don't understand this _______________________________________