Zachary Gillan

A Bluesky post reading William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social Follow are there any works of art that have nothing like substantively wrong with them (as in they aren't like, or 'Birth of a nation' or any shit like that), that you dislike so strongly you can't get over it, despite it being fully aware that your objections are 100% aesthetic or even petty? March 6, 2026 at 11:44 PM & Everybody can reply

Isn’t this like… the point of art

I had missed @melikhovo.bsky.social’s essay on horror theory, an incredible treasure trove of thoughts, critiques, branchings-out, and readings; really gets at my frustration with/disinterest in “why do people like horror” as a research question, particularly as the perpetual default approach

Spoiler alert!!!

Think you’d really appreciate that one (it’s in the new Undertow best weird anthology if you have that lying around)

Last promo today, just popping this up again. Online a few more weeks. Very kind of Undertow to make it available temporarily. If it it intrigues you, you can support the indie publisher and maybe grab a book (any book! they're all killer. so many killer collections). Ty.

undertowpublications.com

“A Woman’s Place Is In The Haunted Home” (@charlieratpig.bsky.social, 2024)

In other words:

The Brackish Pool: Towards a Critical Practice of Reading Weird Fiction The ideal reader of the weird has to embrace a kind of wilful suspension of foreknowledge or generic expectation.

(I promise I was unswayed by his very, very gratifying and insightful read of “The Brackish Pool”)

It’s percolating, it’s percolating

I’d love, at some point When There Is Time, to do a series of close readings on the moments a sense that something is Wrong is introduced in weird texts

All weird fiction is meta fiction about weird fiction, after all

(This is strike two for you this week alone on my “no thinking about ideas for new pieces until I finish the current works” enemies list……..)

I wasn’t sure that I had the academic bona fides or a non-niche enough subject for that one, but now that i think about it again, a close read of the Something Is Off moments in Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People”, ahha, hmm…

Get in, losers, we're feeling sad (listening to the new Miserere Luminis record that's out today)

Ingenting Forblir, by Rosa Faenskap 7 track album

I would imagine you'd enjoy this hardcore-inflected queer Norwegian black metal: rosafaenskap.bandcamp.com/album/ingent...

To Resist the Enemies of the Sun (EP), by Zalaam 2 track album

this one knocked my socks clean off

It's @casella.bsky.social who's omniscient, I'm just riding on his coattails

Agreed!

The Brackish Pool: Towards a Critical Practice of Reading Weird Fiction The ideal reader of the weird has to embrace a kind of wilful suspension of foreknowledge or generic expectation.

(I promise I was unswayed by his very, very gratifying and insightful read of “The Brackish Pool”)

In other words:

I had missed @melikhovo.bsky.social’s essay on horror theory, an incredible treasure trove of thoughts, critiques, branchings-out, and readings; really gets at my frustration with/disinterest in “why do people like horror” as a research question, particularly as the perpetual default approach

A whole stack to add to the backlog, even better!

ON MORRISON 26 the novel's aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison's justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it's about, why you wrote it is no more important than its effects (how we experience it). Trying to write the novel from the black female child's point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: "The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void." Morrison's "solution break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader" —was a formal one, too: "an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it." As she put it in a later essay, she wanted to construct "the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life." This led her to realize that "the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye." Whether historical, biographical, or literary, all of these reasons for writing the novel have in common a response to absence: "I couldn't find it anywhere"; we were going to "skip over something», "female black children, who have never held center stage"; "a narrative void"; an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it"; "there is really nothing more to say." This emphasis on absence the void, the vacuum, the vanished; the failed, the silenced, the missingis precisely why The Bluest Eye is not just another identitarian sob story but a work of art. Morrison's form in the novel, her how, operates through negation: she takes things away; she leaves things out; she embeds absence at every level of form, from the novel's structure to its tropes and images, down to the most minute elements of its prose style. And this, I'll sug-gest, is a black aesthetic, part of her effort, as she puts it in her foreword, "to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture."

She goes on to deconstruct the way that Morrison, having tossed out the whole plot of the book, can really emphasize the voids left behind when you know the story’s shape but the main character is largely absent from the telling of it

BBanned as it’s been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That’s not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn’t care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” The gossipy tone and the mystery of the missing marigolds divert attention from those six key words: “Pecola was having her father’s baby.” But these are in fact the book’s shocking revelations: incest, rape, child pregnancy. And as yet more spoilers in these early pages go on to tell us—

“Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too”—stillbirth and death are coming, too. This preface concludes: “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” Deliberate spoilers like these force the reader to shift their expectations away from narrative suspense and plot resolution. In other words, if we already already know that the marigolds didn’t grow, that the ill-begotten baby died, then we must focus our attention not on what happened or why, but on how it happened, how it felt. Spoilers are a confidence trick, so to speak: a writer must have faith that a mere series of events is less interesting than how it is told.

I'm well on my way to making this book my entire personality but Namwali Serpell's first chapter in On Morrison opens thusly and makes my point better than I ever could:

No, but now I’m dying to!

We're Toni-Morrison-maxxing, people, it's the wave of the future

Dan.......... read this book

In a word: yes.

ON MORRISON 26 the novel's aesthetic design in favor of its subject matter. To rephrase Morrison's justification for her spoilers, the inspiration for a novel (what it's about, why you wrote it is no more important than its effects (how we experience it). Trying to write the novel from the black female child's point of view had in fact posed an interesting formal problem: "The main character could not stand alone since her passivity made her a narrative void." Morrison's "solution break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader" —was a formal one, too: "an attempt to shape a silence while breaking it." As she put it in a later essay, she wanted to construct "the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life." This led her to realize that "the visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context in The Bluest Eye." Whether historical, biographical, or literary, all of these reasons for writing the novel have in common a response to absence: "I couldn't find it anywhere"; we were going to "skip over something», "female black children, who have never held center stage"; "a narrative void"; an "attempt to shape a silence while breaking it"; "there is really nothing more to say." This emphasis on absence the void, the vacuum, the vanished; the failed, the silenced, the missingis precisely why The Bluest Eye is not just another identitarian sob story but a work of art. Morrison's form in the novel, her how, operates through negation: she takes things away; she leaves things out; she embeds absence at every level of form, from the novel's structure to its tropes and images, down to the most minute elements of its prose style. And this, I'll sug-gest, is a black aesthetic, part of her effort, as she puts it in her foreword, "to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture."

She goes on to deconstruct the way that Morrison, having tossed out the whole plot of the book, can really emphasize the voids left behind when you know the story’s shape but the main character is largely absent from the telling of it

Nobody Knows “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison’s debut novel might be her most misunderstood.

(excerpted at www.thenation.com/article/cult...)