POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

yoursecretary:

alexcornetto:

Having just finished (and enjoyed!) reading Underworld by Don DeLillo, starting a book like this is some kind of weird relief - stuff happens in this book! And it happens quickly!

I always feel like I should be snobby about Stephen King - y’know, since he’s super-popular, and I’m a snob - but based entirely on the two books of his I’ve read (including Misery), he’s a great, compelling writer. 2012 may just have to be the year I start reading without prejudice.

i can totally relate to these statements. in my late teens and early twenties i read a lot of early stephen king as a reprieve from what i felt were more serious novels. a riff on “easy listening” i would call king’s work “easy reading.” when people have compared my horror writing to his and i would be both flattered and angry. there is this idea that anything popular is obviously and inherently flawed. thinking about this (and specifically the popularity of  modern horror texts) made me refer to a review megan wrote on cormac mccarthy’s the road in which she said “this book would get five stars except everyone already knows and loves it. therefore it gets four.” we position ourselves as immensely self-satisfied when cutting off our noses to spite our well-read literary minded faces. does king deserve (or has he ever had) a second look? is good horror, in itself, always going to be popular because of our common fears or does it deserve and will it always be written off as innately low brow in a way we embrace (and excuse) other genres and formats such as comics, graphic novels,  and/or speculative fiction?

Hey! I hate talking about books because every book is patriarchy, every book oppresses you by alienating you from television and internet and creating a false consciousness that books are superior and will provide for you fairly, but

I agree with all of the above. I really think that Stephen King has, while not always written great female characters (or, for that matter, great books), consistently developed some of the most compelling non-male characters written by an American male writer, especially a popular writer. More importantly, though, he’s willing to publicly wrestle with his own abilities and inabilities in writing about women. And I think that’s good.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had over dinner last night. Blair described something they called “junk food television,” something that you consume but don’t think about.

People talk about this a lot, you know? That they watch things that they know are stupid just because they’re fun, that they “don’t think about” shows that are willfully vapid, that they “turn of their brains.” People say this a lot, and I always find it really alienating. I literally have no idea what that would feel like. As such, I’m always left wondering: are there people that don’t think about things? Or are there just people that say they don’t think about things because they are embarrassed that they enjoy How I Met Your Mother?

Emily agreed with me. She said, (I paraphrase), “I can’t even compartmentalize, either. I devote the same amount of thought and theory to Jersey Shore as I do to my schoolwork.” I watch television all the time. And I am never not doing this. I didn’t know there were people, more specifically people who are into theory especially, who don’t do this.

I don’t want to utilize a discourse of “pretentiousness” (which isn’t useful to me), but I will say that pretending like there is less to talk about in Stephen King than there is in Cormac McCarthy is not only conceptually weak (and socially shitty), but it just kind of shows that you’re bad at your job. You’re probably lazy and posturing, but you’re also willfully ignoring, like, at least the last twenty-five years of cultural theory and commentary. (Feminist thinkers have been writing critically about Stephen King since the eighties!) And, most likely, you don’t get it.