Anger, Zombies and Male Sexual Terror, and Poor Ol’ David Denby Does It Again

I’m in one of those zones I veer into periodically where there are two or three things making me really disproportionately angry and I just keep obsessively thinking about them all day and at night while I’m trying to sleep. Some of the things are global in nature and some are literally just a thing a friend said that is pissing me off or something really small like that. The state of education vs. this one poorly spelled sign at the bus stop. Sometimes I feel like I empathize with the mom in Infinite Jest, clearly intended to be a maniac, who lobbies local grocery stores to get them to change “15 items or less” to “15 items or fewer.” My personality is very solution-oriented and goal-oriented, in spite of (because of?) the fact that a lot of my scholarly work is explicitly concerned with pointing out how goal-oriented thinking is dumb. If I have anger I can’t do anything with or about it makes me crazy. I prefer to work through my anger either via a big fight or argument, through making whatever changes in my personal life will alleviate the situation causing my anger, or such like. But when you’re mad at, like, Rick Perry or something, there’s not much you can do about it except go stand sobbing in the rain outside his mansion or whatever and lets be real, that’s not gonna happen, plus you’d probably go to jail. Remember how Rick Perry has a ranch called N WORD HEAD RANCH???? Still can’t believe that is a real thing. Totally usurped Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face in my personal “it’s a crazy world/somebody oughtta sell tickets” canon

Anyway, on the flipside I am working on my new chapter and having fun. I resisted this chapter for so long. I mean, for years. Years! For years I thought, oh hell, I don’t want to do that, let me just try to publish a book that’s like 20 pages long instead. Why was I so resistant? It’s a chapter about one of my favorite pieces of music, and, as I just finally got through my thick skull, it means I get to write about JOKES. It’s really transforming the way I’m thinking about myself in the world. You can’t even imagine how resistant to jokes my discipline is. I mean, to composers having made them (jokes). Even though Mozart for example wrote a song called “KISS MY ASS” we are still like “ah yes MOZART, so divine, etc.” I am very excited to try to really dig into why this stuff is funny. Especially since its funniness is mainly the first thing that drew me to it.

So I get to read awesome quotations and like letters where Felix Mendelssohn is just raging about how “indescribably horrible” this piece is and stuff. Mendelssohn! What a bore. There I said it.

We painted our problem areas with fancy mold-resistant paint in a lovely blue shade and we got a dehumidifier. We feel really good about these two things. Also my parents moved back to Colorado and gave us all their plants, so we are busting out with delightful living things, cleaning our air and excreting joy. We went to my family reunion and it was awesome. So much whiffle ball. More whiffle ball than you would think people would want to play, really. That side of the family is almost 100% high school sports coaches. They are very good at whiffle ball.

Also, I am reading a really horrible book of zombie fiction published in 1985. [TRIGGER WARNING: sexual violence and grossness] Almost every story involves some version of a zombie raping a woman (although one story flips it and depicts men raping zombie women in post-apocalyptic honky-tonk dancing cages), and the ones that don’t are still so blatantly consumed with sexual terror, it makes me want to find all these poor little boy authors and just pat them on the back while they sob for their mommies. Like there’s one where aliens take over your body and pop your head off and then your vagina turns into their mouth and they stick your own head up there and suck all the skin off it and out pops your skull. That is a real thing published by a human person. Or there’s another one where a girl is fucking her boyfriend when a serial killer shoots him in the head and then kidnaps her and ties her up in a field and takes all her clothes off and is getting ready to torture her to death when all the zombie versions of all the girls he’s killed come out of the woods and horrifically mangle him to death. But fully 80% of the story is concerned with describing all the physical damage each zombie manifests–all the ways this guy tortured these girls, now become horrifying undead naked demon corpses! Also thus far I have counted three stories where a zombie rips off a woman’s breast. Oh, and there’s a humorous story about a zombie who only eats vaginas.

The only story that doesn’t involve explicitly sexual zombie/human stuff is by Stephen King, and is about a woman post zombie-apocalypse who realizes she’s going to have to give birth to her baby at home. Then her zombie husband shows up and she kills him and is empowered. And it’s like, it’s a grim short story collection that causes you to give feminist kudos to STEPHEN KING, who, god bless the man he’s one of my primal influences and I love him to pieces, but he is not what you would call “tapped in” to anything like a female consciousness or experience.

So, anyway, now tell me again that our zombie fiction has nothing to do with culture. LOL!

I’m sorry for telling you about these horrible things I am interested in.

My new life motto.

Then we re-watched Night of the Living Dead. It’s interesting that so many people–even experts, even film reviewers–remember the man and woman who open that movie as being lovers. They’re brother and sister! They’re putting flowers on their father’s grave, and the brother is teasing the sister and she’s yelling at him, but everyone remembers it as a makeout scene. That goes to show you something about genre and generic expectations/parameters, so far as I’m concerned. What a great movie. Remember how she’s trying to get him to stop making fun of the first zombie because they think he’s an old drunk bum

What I really need to read is World War Z, but the bad taste left by the movie is still just ruining my appetite. Did everyone notice how much David Denby loved it? He’s like “then I realized, the zombies are people! This movie is about being afraid of PEOPLE!” Oh man. When David Denby has a grand realization about the artistic media he’s supposed to be a world-renowned scholar of it’s so painful, like watching that kid in “the Box” fall out of the bathtub and grope around on the floor after the alien makes him suddenly blind and deaf.

In still other news, I actually sobbed reading that Jill Lepore article about her mom and Ben Franklin’s sister. SOBBED. I had to put my face in ice water. That is the most tragic thing I have ever read, on a certain level. Did you read it? Oh my god. Women in this world of pain.

I’m gonna go eat noodles, as is my woman’s right

Then I’m gonna terrorize some poor man with my horrible vagina. Just by having one, I mean.