One of my favourite photos.
About Me
- M. F. McAuliffe
- Portland, Oregon, United States
- Co-founder, co-editor of Gobshite Quarterly and Reprobate/GobQ Books
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
After Smilla's Sense of Snow
I gave up reading Scandinavian mysteries a while ago, after the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, after some Kurt Wallender, after some Edward Åke, after opening and closing a Nesbø, after reading a couple more I have very much forgotten; and the reason I stopped was that I could no longer read descriptions of tortured and dismembered women.
At first it seemed to me a tic, a trope, lazy shorthand for this criminal is a real badass, you can see how much of a badass he is from page one, if not paragraph one, and how anything the detective might do in the detecting of him is absolvable because he is such as badass badass.
But the repetition was striking me like a blow.
After assuming that it was an overworked and self-absolving trope, and after ignoring it for several years, I found the news from the news sources beginning to filter through to some other level of my awareness.
In the light of voter suppression, rape culture, fundamentalist patriarchal religions of all theologies (including the armed forces of the first world) becoming more heavily armed, more insistent, and bloodier in their insistence; in the light of global warming and its causes, I came to see that Thomas Harris and Michael Connolly and the Scandinavians are right. The torture and dismemberment of the feminine is the signature crime of the age.
At first it seemed to me a tic, a trope, lazy shorthand for this criminal is a real badass, you can see how much of a badass he is from page one, if not paragraph one, and how anything the detective might do in the detecting of him is absolvable because he is such as badass badass.
But the repetition was striking me like a blow.
After assuming that it was an overworked and self-absolving trope, and after ignoring it for several years, I found the news from the news sources beginning to filter through to some other level of my awareness.
In the light of voter suppression, rape culture, fundamentalist patriarchal religions of all theologies (including the armed forces of the first world) becoming more heavily armed, more insistent, and bloodier in their insistence; in the light of global warming and its causes, I came to see that Thomas Harris and Michael Connolly and the Scandinavians are right. The torture and dismemberment of the feminine is the signature crime of the age.
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