[ SECRET POST #2147 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2147 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 100 secrets from Secret Submission Post #307.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 2 - vader trolls and probably more later ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've just read Catch-22 and now I'm heartbroken about the way Kid Sampson and McWatt died. It surprises me that there's no fandom. At least I could drown my sorrow in some good fanfiction.

Still, my IRL headcanon about Americans got confirmed yet another time - they don't like (or can't) to produce anything really pessimistic and full of horror. I absolutely expected the ending to be depressing and terrifying, got my shock blankets ready and was basically close to giving up this stereotype of mine, while BADABUM some happiness and hope finally ensued.

I'm deeply in love with Joe Heller and I'm going to read "Closing Time" now (yeah, I know, everybody thinks that it's not as great as Catch, but I couldn't care less". Even wrote a hurt/comfort one shot, but one's own fanfic doesn't exactly work the way somebody else's does, you know.

Catch-22

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, it should've been the subject of the main thread. Forgot to enter it.

[intrigueing]

Us Americans don't take to pessimism well because tbh, we've never experienced it in a mass-cultural way. We're new. We were never a global empire that fell, we were never conquered, we were never subjugated, we never lost anything big, we never experienced anything on the scale of what Europe experienced in WWI and WWII, etc, etc. If someone else gave us horror and pessimism, we'd think it was cool, a lot of individual people would understand and like it, but it's hard to have any mass-media-esque culturally-rooted shared understanding of or resonance with the concept. We literally don't know how to be pessimistic, because every idea that has come into our heads for the past couple of centuries has been so full of possibilities and we've gotten into the habit of glomming onto all those possibilities and all that optimism instead of poking around with super-bleak stuff that no one really relates to, until it's become second nature and isn't really marketable.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? I don't think it's a bad thing. It's just different than the ideas of some other cultures. I don't think it's better or worse than pessimism and horror and bleakness, or it makes us better or worse than culture who can produce works with it, just different.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh no, it's not a bad thing. Other folks have peculiarities of their own, and they're sometimes not as harmless as this American thing. In fact, this one rather cheers me up, because whenever I'm in a bad mood I can simply read/watch something American :)

[intrigueing]

Yeah, I get the feeling that Americans have a hard time even thinking up, let alone actually executing, sincerely morbid stuff, as though people's minds have been trained to not go near dark thoughts or something, so on the flip side, I also know that when I'm the mood for something chilling and raw, to try something that's not American ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Then, for those kind of days, I would recommend anything by any Russian ever ;)

[(Anonymous)]

F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin's works were mostly pessimistic. (Note: if you want to read depressing American literature, look through the works of authors who either lived miserable personal lives or were members of an oppressed group.) Edgar Allen Poe is our most famous writer of horror, and I can't remember a single ending in any of his short stories (barring his earlier comedic pieces) where happiness and hope prevailed.

Also, um, H.P. Lovecraft was an American.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. For some weird reason I was sure that Poe was British. Ignorant anon is ignorant.

Thank you! Not that I crave for depressing literature, either Americah or not, but it's good to have something in mind that doesn't quite fit into the stereotype.

Yeah, Lovecraft has probably written the creepiest books I've ever read)

[(Anonymous)]

It's okay -- I'm actually American, but for some reason I always forget that H.P. Lovecraft wasn't British. (I think it's because I associate him mentally with Aleister Crowley.)

[childings.livejournal.com]

Read Gravity's Rainbow? It was pretty dark

[blueonblue]

Have you read Slaughterhouse Five? It's full of horror, yet warm and humane. It's one of the books I think of as very American and a good thing to read after (or before) Catch-22.

In general, I think English-language literature tends to move away from darkness and pessimism. I'm having trouble thinking of a novel in English with an ending as bleak as Madame Bovary, but I can think of many that have endings similar to The Pickwick Papers.

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens' first ending for Great Expectations was very bleak -- uncharacteristically so. I thought the ending of A Tale of Two Cities was tragic, too, but I guess that's because I didn't care about the protagonists who managed to escape France.

Aren't Tess of the D'Urbervilles and most of John Hardy's novels supposed to have tragic endings?

[blueonblue]

It ends unhappily for Tess, but Hardy definitely ends on a hopeful note for some other characters.

Oh, the 19th century when serious authors could give their characters names like "Angel".

[tabaqui]

Try Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle'. Yeesh.

[(Anonymous)]

On that note, try Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Main Street.

[blueonblue]

Elmer Gantry is also fabulous - Lewis has so much contempt for his characters