BtZ42/12 - Acronyms, Pudding's recipes, and a projective test

[Joseph Tracy]

I recently watched a few episodes of x-files, which I largely missed. Too much inane violence for my taste and I decided to stop watching more.  But there is something generally intriguing about how outward structures which come from inward fears morph from modern neutrality and sleekness to the grotesquely  gothic with just a few alterations of circumstance. The Montauk scene may be urban myth but so was MK ultra until it was brought to light. Perfectly legit for fiction writer to take something like that myth and reify it for the purpose of the novel. What is not legit IMO is to say that such a scene is a product of Maxine’s imagination. In the story P wants her to see things that she is not supposed to see and thus be required to have a response to knowing something that is not common knowledge or part of mainstream consensus.


  
> On Jun 5, 2016, at 2:55 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> 
> The Gothic is in there, always. I once proposed to read BE in part as a technological/internet Gothic novel. The deep web/Montauk Project/cold war/child assassin scenario in particular I read as an updated Gothic horror story. Significantly, P refuses to frame this as fantasy, although he cannot possibly believe the Montauk urban myth (I think) even if the Montauk myth references the proven and documented MK-Ultra efforts to create the programmed assassin...
> 
> Yes, this is important.
> 
>> ...if we read this as a Gothic horror novel, here is an
>> objective correlative.
>> and one of P's classic coded tropes that last through BLEEDING
>> EDGE...(have the early readers and
>> scholars read BE as a gothic horror novel. yet?)
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