Fate

A cluster of sentences that sum up what "life" is in Lorrie Moore's short fiction, Referential:

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected twist in the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same way, regardless.Tenderness did not enter into it, except in a damaged way.

Fairy tales become grimmer

The trend--to recast old (timeless, rather) fairy tales into a contemporary mold--fascinates me.

In recent years, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and now, Snow White has been remade into three unique, and going by my personal experience of having seeing Red Riding Hood (she is "little" no more), eminently watchable films.

Snow White and the Huntsman reverses the assassin into the protector as the evil queen's hit man ends up becoming Snow's bodyguard. In Red Riding, the woodsman is also Red's lover and undergoes significant personal sacrifice, including giving up his human identity (he becomes the wolf he is appointed to slay) just so he can be her life-long lover during the day and protector at night.

The 21st century Sleeping Beauty undertakes to participate in a game of self-induced sleep, just so she can eke out a living and pay for college tuition. Beauty is bored with life and offers to put up her young body, if not for sale, then at least for voyeuristic pleasure of her clientele of ageing, wealthy males, who as the saying goes, cannot "get it up" anymore.

What binds the films together is the fact that none of the fairy tales are "fairy-like." They take us back to the older, bleaker moral and physical landscape of the original Grimms Brothers' tales. As A.O. Scott observes in his review of Snow White, these tales were told to scare children into sleep and/or submission, whereas Disney converted them into vehicles of consolation. The chocolate-velvet textures were Disney re-inventions.  

The darker sides of fairy tales have been suppressed by the lightening-up Disney machinery. Now its time for the darker side to come into full-fledged light.

The Internet cometh

The Spoiler by veteran British journalist Annalena McAfee is  a novel set in a London newsroom at the brink of the digital age.

A plot synopsis (peppered with mild judgement) from The New Yorker:

The plot consists of two tales of humiliation. Honor Tait, a war correspondent has been reduced to writing about her declining health--"the wearisome naming and shaming of parts." Her journalistic opposite is Tamara Sim, a tabloid hack who is stuck writing articles with titles like "Top-Ten TV Bad Hair Days." When Sim lands a prestigious assignment to profile Tait for a literary magazine, their paths cross, to disastrous effects for both. 

The novel does a novel turn on the usual "digital dystoipia" generated anxiety: Instead of feeding the anxiety further, she questions its premise and author pillories journalists for their mindless droning on about the "end" of journalism as we know it.

A review of the novel is available here.