(unchained melody: 9:23am)

"the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present

the radically provisional or divided nature of the self

the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or 'other'

the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased...

Gothic has become so pervasive precisely because it is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns...

we should perhaps be careful of assuming that the Gothic simply reflects social anxieties in a straightforward manner - as a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror and unease, it plays to audience expectations and therefor is rather too self-conscious to illuminate our most secret fears..."

"There is no 'original' Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else."

Catherine Spooner

- Gothic as 'the passionate overthrow of reason' coming from 5th century Goths' overthrow of Rome

- Gothic as a retrospective architectural term for medieval structures embellished with pointed arches, grotesque angles, gargoyles, stiff elongated figures and elaborate detail... ignoring the clean lines and proportional curves of Classical styles.

"[A Gothic text should comprise] a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration..."

Chris Baldick

(etymological/historical tensions between definitions: gothic as transcendent spiritualism or corporeal horror?)

:Gothic text: past as a site of terror, injustice that must be resolved, evil that must exorcised. 'the past chokes the present, prevents progress...'

:Gothic (Revival) architecture: the past is imbued and invested with nostalgia and idealism.

Perhaps it is only secure cultures that produce Gothic texts...

it is only a society that has stopped believing in ghosts that is able to turn them into the stuff of entertainment.

quilting

also, it makes me really want to finish the quilt. so much of what
you wrote about so far has gone through my head (without reference to
academics) while cutting up k's clothes and piecing them back
together. it always makes me think of some essay i read in school, i
think it was in spanish actually about how in all elegies the mourner
disassembles what has been lost and recomposes or refashions it with a
new form and new representative function. metamorphosis and all. this
was talking about poetry, how objects and imagery forms around the
lack, but my quilt and your work are the same. i am close to putting
all the bigger pieces together, and then it just needs to be quilted.
[i am so in love with metaphor...i am pretty sure that the ability to
recognize and create metaphor is what most people mean when they say
god.]

-mara reynolds (oct. 4, email)