Lost Girls! Livejournal! Together again -- for the first time!

2) Livejournal lets your discussions be exactly as free-to-everyone-in-the-world or talking-to-my-teddybears as you'd want them to be. Good points: building communities. Bad points: see good points.

3) It isn't even slightly child-porn though, is it? I thought all the ladies involved are everywhere legal, but fixed in the public's mind as much younger.

The best thing is this comes on the heels of describing a splash page of the two of them duelling with teh cockx. Yes, clearly no homoerotic overtones there. He's totally ducking the issue!

Lost Girls just seems deathly dull to me, I've got to say. And cock-fighting was banned over 120 years ago.

it is like he saw that 60s cartoon of mickey mouse shagging minnie mouse and never got over its awesome potential

The only thing that really grates about that Livejournal article is constantly referring to Moore as 'The Hack'. It's the kind of self-important little touch I've come to associate with really shit criticism, and it just destracts from any arguments the critic might make.

OTM.

OTM.

OTM OTM.

a subject for another thread, but the answer to your question is fundamentally YES.

That's OK cuz in Britain the age of consent is 16.

(HANGED! IT'S FUCKING HANGED!)

we know peter pan b/c of disney, we know wizard b/c of judy (and even revisionary texts like wicked rely on the film even more), we know alice because of parodies and paratexts.

but all of these books are about the liminal space b/w adulthood and childhood sexuality, and its one of those incredibly strong cultural taboos that has begun to devolp ritual behaviour against it, and i think that its impt to figure out why...

(fucking kids is wrong, but what does it mean that texts about fucking kids are so central to who we are as a culture?)

i dont think that its fair to call moore on this, and i havent read the book, but i do think that his attempt to reculturalise the text is vital and brave

Not rly.

I'd say that 1- those three sources have been less eclipsed by their Disneyfication/hollywoodization than most, and 2- the disneyfication/hollywoodizations didn't actually defang the child sexuality subtexts to any great extent when it comes to "Peter Pan" and "Alice" (never read "The Wizard Of Oz"); certainly the costumes as made by Disney have been adopted as sexual signifiers (c.f. "What Lies Beneath", that one site that Scott Seward linked to once.)

I also think that "(fucking kids is wrong, but what does it mean that texts about fucking kids are so central to who we are as a culture?)" is overstating things a bit, and don't really know if the subtext in "Alice In Wonderland" for instance is all that significant, especially when compared to, say, "Little Red Riding Hood" (which admitidely has also become somewhat of a total cliché when you talk about fairytales and sexuality), despite Carrol's possible predilections.

not possible. real. have you seen the nudes that Co has taken?

i dont think i am over stating it, paedphillia is not only the favourite boogieman in the closet, but also v. popular in our collective sexuality (off the top of my head) the olsen twins, britney spears, lindsey lohan, jessica simpson and thats just the women (one could also argue about tom welling, frankie muniz, jamie bell, etc or works like (off the top of my head) larry clarke's photos, la mama tombien, yaoi, large chunks of slash fiction, certain mtv reality shows, and christopher hitchens illustrating an essay about blojobs with the sue lyon lolita in this months vanity fair.)

i dont think that the alice in wonderland disney movie is really central to the understanding, but the other movie versions, the illustrations, the theater, and every other paratext that has swamped carrolls orignal book (though i agree that alice in wonderland is the only book of those three that we have that would last w/o others)

i think that the wizard of oz is about an adult woman, who was never allowed to be a child, the film is a metatext about being in/outside the authority to act as an interperter....salman rushdie wrote about those ideas in his essay on the movie, and its the reason why fags like it so much, and its completely the opposite of baums intention--i havent read the book, but in other examples of Moores corpus, its v. much one of his themes (the one that comes immediately to mind is rupert, monsterous and nightmaric.)

i think (as the bbc radio 4 interview w. moore says) that peter pan is much more isolating, filthy, strange, and frightening, a lot more quee r and alot more about terror then we give it permission to be, its telling that we assumed tinkerbelle was marylin monroe, because marylin was one of those safe conflations of childlike innoncene and adultlike sexual decadence that has its own kind of hypocrisy. we are still living edwardian sexual ethics, and i think that lost girls is a way of playing those games

not to deny the psychological potency of alice, but as i noted on an ile thread the other day, LC's "pedophilia" was pretty much made up by his biographers. were his nude photos really that weird by victorian standards?

Quote from another board's thread (which R!ch!e J0hnst0n!ngt0n links to in this week's Gutter column):

"Has anyone given any thought to how a pedophile could use Lost Girls to seduce their victims?"

Besides using the collection as a bludgeon?

I suspect Moore was given some very, very bad legal advice."

"As already noted by someone other than myself, the one who is "sticking his nose into other people's business" is Alan Moore. There was no great clamor for a pornographic treatment of these characters.

(And don't think this comes from my "moral belief system". I have no problem with pornography per se. What I dispute is the right of Alan Moore (or anyone else) to use children's book material owned by someone other than himself for pornographic purposes. What next? Christopher Robin sodomizes Kanga? Wouldn't that be an interesting study of a Victorian boy experimenting with bestiality?)"

I'm buying this for sure.

YOU ARE BANNED

"I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful. It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place—quite hardcore pornography—but they do not have anywhere the incidence of sex crimes."

I read that Top Shelf had a bunch of copies at San Diego -- did anybody here see one there?

He does use the word "might" twice.

There sure are a lot of sex scenes in it!

Alan Moore has mentioned that this work is encyclopedic in the same way that LOEG was; I've caught most of the obvious stuff of course (Wilde, Colette), but I'm sure there's tons I'm missing, too. I wonder what the chances of this thing finding its own Jess Nevins?

I suspect I may start it tonight.

Big though, innit?

I stayed to finish the first volume last night. It does get rather intense towards the end, probably from once the girls tell their own stories onwards.So far, the only part I've thought was superfluous is the Dorothy/Rolf chapter although I'm prepared it may be foreshadowing something else important later (hopefully more meaningful than just making a Wendyhusband analogue). It is really beautiful though.

On a purely creative level I really don't like Alice's backstory was much as the other's. Absurdism can be made to look like a metaphor for just about anything you want very easily, so Moore's erotic reinvention of the original just feels a lot less impressive than it does with the other two's stories. It's also the only story that ends up feeling downright *mundane* compared to the original. I mean, Wendy and Dorothy's adventures are totally *exciting*: Peter Pan's world still feels mysterious, Hook is still scary, and Dorothy's account of the hurricane is still gripping. Alice becomes jaded very early on (which I guess had to be, for character's sake), and so the sense of *bewilderment* from the original vanishes completley, and it becomes just yer average european skinflick really. By the time the tea party rolled around it felt like the paralellism with the books was being done out of obligation more than anything else really.

http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alicepic/people/liddell2.jpg

(w/i the frame of victorian aesthetics, it wasnt that unusal, at all, but there was something that made people feel uncomfortable)

(its an amazing image, and the carroll photos of liddell are really important aesthetic objects, partially i think because they cannot be read by anyone outside that time and place---i think that one of my problems with lost girlz might be that, the wrenching away from context)

alice is the least ambigous when it comes to the source texts, no?

I don't really understand what you mean by that: "Alice In Wonderland" is less ambigous than "Peter Pan" or "The Wizard Of Oz"? Or the way Alice's story is transformed in "Lost Girls" is less ambigous than Wendy's or Dorothy's?

am willing to revise this opinon...

-- J.D. (aubade8...), June 24th, 2006

and i hate to be all mr smash-the-myth here, but oz being a populist political parable (silver shoes as silver standard et al) was pretty much made up too. baum's later oz books do have some interesting stuff in them, like the one where general jinjur (best name ever) leads an army of women against the emerald city.

I'm really enjoying this, the recontextualisation of specific events and characters in the books is working really well (although I think the Alice material is more forced than the other two). Although after the Stravinsky riot and the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand, I'm not wure what the cataclysm at the end of Book 3 will be (although I suspect it will be the outbreak of WWI and the men in the hotel being called into service).

In parts (specifically the final stories of the trio) this is great. 'Gull confronting Zabulon' great. 'Synaesthesia arresting Ultima when she realises her perfume is called Joy' great. 'Selma's already decided she doesn't want the lawnchairs' great. 'Valerie' great. "Do you really think I'd tell you if you could do anything about it? I did it half an hour ago." great.

The only thing I think lets volume three down is the framing story, which is beginning to get kind of played out by then (not to mention the notion of forcing the truth out of people through sexual violence).

Douglas very OTM about the formalist fetischism of the book - a big part of why I enjoyed it. The "not sexy" thing is a bit more complicated - I remember Roger Ebert once said that humor and sexyness are the two only things in movies that you can't/shouldn't argue about, since you can't explain away a boner or a laugh. There's parts of the book that I thought were pretty hawt, and parts that grossed me out a bit/gave me pause. I imagine it'd work like that for most ppl, the mixed blessing of the "encyclopedic" aspect I think.

SPOILERS:

The only thing I think lets volume three down is the framing story, which is beginning to get kind of played out by then (not to mention the notion of forcing the truth out of people through sexual violence).

Do you think that, towards the end, Monsieur Rogeur is speaking the truth? One of the simpler messages of the book is "it's ok to fantasisze about things that you shouldn't actually do", but the book complicates these matters considerably by rarely letting you know whose stories are actually true, who bears some real guilt. Of course in the end it's ALL fantasy, "Lost Girls" being as innocent as the dirty stories Rogeur praises. But within the story?

But then why does Alice remain skeptical about Rogeur's stories? I mean, she's easily the smartest person in the book, so if she's doubtful I figure we're supposed to be, too. Is she just doing it because if she accepted the story as truth, she'd have to think more about whether being pally with Roguer is really as kosher as all that? Or is she just doing it because that way she can continue to fuck him in the ass ?_?

Also, a negative review. I stumbled upon this guy's blog the other day, and he seems like a pretty cool/thoughtful dude (reminds me of ilxor gypsy mothra, for some reason); haven't had a chance to give this particular post a thorough reading yet, but it oughta be interesting.

But then why does Alice remain skeptical about Rogeur's stories? I mean, she's easily the smartest person in the book, so if she's doubtful I figure we're supposed to be, too. Is she just doing it because if she accepted the story as truth, she'd have to think more about whether being pally with Roguer is really as kosher as all that? Or is she just doing it because that way she can continue to fuck him in the ass ?_?

Also, a negative review. I stumbled upon this guy's blog the other day, and he seems like a pretty cool/thoughtful dude (reminds me of ilxor gypsy mothra, for some reason); haven't had a chance to give this particular post a thorough reading yet, but it oughta be interesting.

The lawnchair thing is spoken by Jason Blood (THE DEMON).

I shd finally be getting my copy of this today. Fucking mailman needs to lift more weights.

Will lost Girls ever get a reasonably priced release, do you reckon? I'm very interested to see what the fuss is about, but not £30 interested.

― chap who would dare to be a nerd, not a geek (chap),

Saw a newer edition for $40 in Books-A-Million last week; Amazon price is $25. Though I figure everyone who wants a copy has one by now.

I think the single-book volume is well worth its price. It costs about the amount of two TPBs, but it's Euro-sized, hardcover, and bound, and even if you don't like the story the art is gorgeous.