A Love Letter to the Girls Who Die First in Horror Films
When I recently read Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls, I didn’t realize that the final girl, the last girl left standing, is a standard trope of slasher movies. In this article Lindsay King-Miller talks about “a film’s Final Girl, a term coined by Carol Clover in her brilliant work of horror theory Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” But what she’s more interested in all the other girls who die first, before the Final Girl is left to face down the enemy.
There’s a morality play element to this, as countless film writers have explored: girls in horror movies are punished for doing things girls aren’t supposed to do, especially for having sex.
From the Battlefield to ‘Little Women’
Jennifer Wilson describes how serving in military hospitals shaped the story Louisa May Alcott later wrote as Little Women. The basis for the article is the letters Alcott wrote home during her war experiences, published in 1863 as Hospital Sketches.
The Cult Books That Lost Their Cool
The definition of the term cult books that Hephzibah Anderson uses in this essay is pretty amorphous:
the cult classic inspires passionate devotion among its fans, who frequently weave their own myths around the texts. But another, underexamined, feature of the cult book is this: . . . it can sometimes age really badly.
You can pull together your own definition of the term from Anderson’s discussions of the following cult classics:
- The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, 1951
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1957
- The Beach by Alex Garland, 1996
- Iron John by Robert Bly, 1990
- The Outsider by Colin Wilson, 1956
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1952
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
- The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, 1995
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, 1970
- Little Red Book by Mao Zedong, 1964
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 1996
It’s a Fact: Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
In the past year alone, errors in books by several high-profile authors — including Naomi Wolf, the former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, the historian Jared Diamond, the behavioral scientist and “happiness expert” Paul Dolan and the journalist Michael Wolff — have ignited a debate over whether publishers should take more responsibility for the accuracy of their books.
Writing in The New York Times, Alexandra Alter looks at the question of who should be responsible for fact checking: authors or publishers?
The Temporary Memory Lapse of Transient Global Amnesia
Amnesia is a standard trope of mysteries and psychological thrillers, which I read a lot of. This article describes a very real phenomenon, transient global amnesia:
Transient global amnesia, often called T.G.A. It is a temporary lapse in memory that can never be retrieved. “It’s as if the brain is on overload and takes a break to recharge,” Dr. [Carolyn] Brockington [a vascular neurologist] said in an interview. She likened it to rebooting a computer to eradicate an unexplainable glitch. Those with T.G.A. do not experience any alteration in consciousness or abnormal movements. Only the ability to lay down memories is affected. All other parts of the brain appear to be working normally.
T.G.A. is relatively rare, though it appears to occur more frequently in people over age 50 than in younger people, with men and women affected about equally. It leaves no lasting effects except for the lack of memories during its occurrence. It typically lasts for one to eight hours and usually clears up within a day. Its cause or causes have not been established, and there is no treatment. The condition occurs a second time in only 4% or 5% of patients.
© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown
