Your Mid-Week Art Break: Philippa Rice

Philippa Rice's illustrations are goooorgeous and totally charming. You can check them out over on her website here.

Friday Finds

Tom Hanks performing slam poetry on 90s sitcom 'Full House' might be the best thing I've seen all week.

- Bethanie Blanchard of Lit-icism has written a great article on literary prizes and their importance.

- Speaking of writerly things, this is an excellent post on goals, conflicts and stakes. Super, super handy stuff if you're thinking or working on a project.

- Lastly today, these illustrated throws are beautiful.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Rachael Hunt

Go and devour Rachael Hunt's awesome portfolio. It is the best kind of whimsy explosion.

Sunday Short: Hotels by Josephine Rowe

I normally try to get these to you much earlier in the day, but this one escaped me unfortunately. My weekend's been a little explosive. I've recommended Josephine Rowe before, but she's stilll fresh in my head after NYWF so you can have another one. It's Rowe's prose, more than anything else, that makes her such an exquisite read.  Her ability to swell up intense bouts of emotion in such short pieces of writing is a skill I admire so, so much.

They drink steadily in the first few days. Glasses stationed around the room with dried half-moons of lime in the bottom. So hot out that the tint is blistering off the windows of cars in the street. But that is out in the great, dusty world that they are not a part of for the moment. The insides of the hotels are cool and stark, and there is nothing to remind them of themselves. Their luggage lost in the mirrored halls of wardrobes. The bed a vast white plane where nothing terrible has ever happened, where they lie naked on the bright sheets and he tries to lift the bruise from her face with remedies he has heard or read about. Butter, honey, kaffir lime. And although she knows none of it will work, she smiles and lets him. The bruise remains and blackens, but they wake each morning to clean light with only the slightest recollection of the dreams they have climbed out of.

Hotels is a lovely short, and one you can check out over at the Meanjin website.

Friday Finds

The teaser for the newest season of Misfits came out over the week, and whilst it's a bit of a nothing-trailer, it's still a good glimpse at a few of the shiny new faces on the show. People seem to be in two-minds about the new characters, but I'm excited for some fresh faces, especially given my not-so-secret love for Rudy and Joseph Gilgun's face generally, and his introduction to the show last season was so great. I'm also excited to see more powers because they've been pretty inspired on Misfits, and that fact along with all the other tropes that the series owns (time travel! star crossed lovers! daddy issues!) push most of my TV buttons.

- This is a great article on the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women.

- I'm a half in-love with these photos of abandoned mid-century modern homes. There's something both creepy and whimsical about houses that have been so lived-in and are now just so empty, like echoes of the lives spent there previously.

- Ra Ra Superstar, a local boutique over at Paddington, has recently started utilising their blog in some pretty awesome ways. Their Tuesday post was all on Japanese Fashion and it is so, so great.

I'm in the process of frantically getting my novella ready for Seizure's Viva la Novella competition, so my posts may be a little lax the next two weeks. The regulars are all teed up though, so you can expect those guys to resurface. Happy weekend, everyone.

Your Mid-Week Art Break: Holly Leonardson

Holly Leonardson is a Tasmanian artist specialising in collage based prints, and man, she outputs some beautiful stuff. Her re-purposing of vintage photographs are entirely charming and really, genuinely lovely. You can check out more of her stuff over at her blog or buy some of it on etsy.

The Horror, The Horror: On the Hunt for Feminist-Friendly Horror Films

My housemate, Emma and I tend to hack and slash (ha) our way through the horror section of any video store with a sort of reverence that normal people reserve for political debates or reality shows. This surprises a lot of people, I imagine partially given I’m 5’2 and have a passion for  fuzzy animals and pink kitchen utensils, but mostly due to the fact that I am a raging feminist and the horror genre doesn’t really lend itself to feminist values. Or, you know, any woman-not-as-meat-bag-values - you gotta keep in mind that one of the most popular subgenres in recent times is torture porn. Which brings up a good point, because horror isn't simply a genre that glorifies sexism and misogyny by language, character or tone, but by punishment and overtly sexualised violence. From Rosemary's Baby to Hostel, an enormous portion of horror relies on getting their lady characters naked, covering them in bodily fluids and generally putting something inside them, whether that be human/ghostly/devil penis (this is occasionally consensual, usually dubcon, frequently explicitly non-consensually) or knife or some other horrifying phallic device.

Joey Comeau of A Softer World fame recently compiled a list of good, rape-free, trigger-free horrors and it really is an interesting exploration of a minority field of the genre. Emma and I are in the process of getting our hands on the ones we haven't seen, but I find myself disagreeing with quite a few of the ones on the list that I have watched already. Let the Right One In for instance, (which after a few comments akin to mine has been removed from the list) I believe has heavily implied sexualised violence. I also argue whether or not The Ruins can be considered a good film (Spoiler alert: it's not). 

The list is a good one though, and it's been making me think a lot if I can name any sort of addition, can supply some sort of alternative in time for Halloween. I could name a dozen Hitchcock films for sure (A Shadow of a Doubt, people, watch it), but I'm not sure if they classify as horror as much as they do thriller, even if they deal with horrific themes. 
I also always want to include Scream, The Last House on the Left and the original Nightmare on Elm Street in any horror list of recommendation I make, but whilst I certainly think all three have compelling female characters and even some feminist-friendly values, they're all definitively about the effect sexualised violence has had on a protagonist. The Others, which is included in Comeau's list, is certainly a good one that escapes the rape-trap, involving a pretty awesome lady lead. Likewise with the first Paranormal Activity (that said, there is certainly rapey-implications in this one, and definitely all-out rape in movie 3). Comeau's post certainly inspired some thought into the genre though, and Emma and I are going to be on the hunt for some better feminist-friendly horror. Do you know of any yourself?