Various Items

Something wonderful I meant to link to way back when everyone else was linking to it: The Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, As Drawn By Children

Chad Helder's latest Scary Fairy Tale:  Agnes and the Tree House Ripper.  That probably sounds more like an urban legend than a fairy tale, and with its more contemporary setting and sensibility, it does seem to lean that way at times.  I think a few elements do give it the ring of a fairy tale, though--when "The tree houses of America fell into disrepair," it's reminiscent of some curse affecting everything in a whole kingdom, or rather, a curse affecting every something-or-other (like spinning wheels) in a whole kingdom.  Helder also tries to hew to the simple cadences of fairy tale storytelling, and the simple characterization--with occasionally mixed results in both cases (in particular, some contemporary terms jar a bit too incongruously against those rhythms), but on the whole I think these devices work for him here more often than they don't.  The Ripper himself is quite something.  It's pretty short--why not check it out, and then leave a comment there or here?

Speaking of scary fairy tales, Karswell presents Little Red Riding Hood and the Werewolf from Eerie Publications.

Hard to believe that in my post about great fights in superhero comics, I neglected to mention Sinestro Corps War, which is just stuffed to overflowing with awesome superfight action.  And although what stands out most in my mind about Blackest Night is what I called, "one of the most poorly paced and orchestrated fights I've ever seen in superhero comics," and other assorted fights that could and should have been much better, this event really did contribute a few damn fine fight scenes to the genre; I try to sort the good from the bad and the ugly in this final overview.

Michael May and Gene Phillips (Pt. 1, Pt. 2) respond to my post, Why Fans Love Crap.  May objects:

It's true that whenever we're reading or watching a story for the first time, we haven't already made up our minds about whether or not we like it. It's also true that any alert, critical reader or viewer will be turned off by weak, crappy storytelling. It's hard to imagine such a reader's being redirected (even subconsciously) by the sheer existence of crap to a greater emphasis on the good parts.

Well, different people will react differently--which is why some people can love something lots of other people consider crap.  I didn't mean to make it sound like the process I described kicks in every time anyone reads a book or comic that's a little good and a little bad.  First, someone needs to be strongly predisposed to find a certain kind of experience rewarding; not everyone will be, and in fact some readers may be inclined by temperament or training to regard the experience in question with suspicion (a lot of critics look askance at direct attempts to provoke strong emotions as manipulative, tacky, appealing to the "lowest common denominator," etc.).  Then, a text needs to provide that experience intensely and plentifully; most texts won't, at least not to the degree required to stimulate this attentional narrowing.  Finally, everyone will have different attentional thresholds; some people may be too sensitive to flaws (again, by temperament or training) to ever experience the full effect of this immersion.  I think fans and critics can develop attentional "habits" and "styles" that make it easier or harder for them to experience such immersion. 

Phillips objects:

First, when he speaks of some of the objectional elements that the brain is screening out, this presupposes that the perceiver has full cognizance as to how the formal narrative elements actually SHOULD be executed. This is dubious with regard to juvenile readers, such as the majority of the TWILIGHT fans.

The process I describe presupposes semantic memories by which the "smart filter" could recognize some elements as flaws that need to be screened in order to avoid distraction from the rewarding experience.  Presumably, children and other aesthetically unsophisticated readers haven't formed the semantic memories necessary to recognize very many kinds of flaws.  That's a fair point, and I need to consider it further.  But even if the process I described isn't operative in such cases, that wouldn't necessarily mean it never is.

Then:

My second is that Purcell's idea of a reader being "immersed" in a text and thus blind to its failings in other departments could be applied just as easily to those readers who ARE supposedly reading works of formal excellence.

I'm not sure why Phillips considers this an objection.  Maybe, with this talk of recognizing flaws and such, I've made it sound too much like I think the smart filter is doing literary criticism.  In fact, I think it's basically following an algorithm.  Does this element support or enhance the rewarding experience?  If semantic memory says yes, then allocate it more attention.  If semantic memory says no, then does this element detract from the rewarding experience?  If semantic memory says yes (perhaps because the element meets the definition of a flaw), then allocate it no attention.  Or something like that (like I said, I'm not an expert). That someone might find something rewarding enough, in a text regarded as excellent according to established canons of taste, to trigger this response, hardly strikes me as an objection.

"Finally," Phillips says, "I don't agree that the process of "filtering" takes place in the passive manner Purcell describes."  By "passive," I think he mainly means nonconscious.  He concludes: "*If* they are experienced enough to be aware of the flaws, then they ignore the flaws in an *intentional* manner because they seek something in the reading-experience that transcends the flaws."  I don't think it's either/or.  As I responded to another commenter, "it's also pretty common, in organic systems generally and the brain specifically, for more complex mechanisms to be modeled on simpler ones."  I've tried to make that point in much more detail here.  The idea is that simple, fixed mechanisms can give rise to increasingly complex and flexible mechanisms that conserve a formal similarity.  In that previous discussion, the perceptual filling-in of the optic nerve "blind spot" is an example of an entirely nonconscious, simple, fixed mechanism; the conceptual closure that permits us to follow panel-to-panel transitions in comics is much more of a conscious, complex, flexible development.  Similarly, I think we have simple, nonconscious, "passive" filtering mechanisms of the sort Phillips denies, and that from them have evolved more complex mechanisms, up to and including our capacity to intentionally ignore things in the way Phillips advocates for.

Walking Dead ep. 5 tonight--I'll be back in a few hours with my thoughts about it!