morbid much?
Jan. 29th, 2011 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySo I've figured out why American history always bored me stupid in school. It's because I could care less about the Narrative of Progress which is how American history is generally taught. I'm fascinated by the disasters.
(There's a reason one of my tags is clusterfucks of the old west.)
And something reminded me this morning--I can't even tell you what--of what may be the first of these obsessions with morbid Americana: the terrible death of Floyd Collins. I first learned about Floyd Collins on a Girl Scout trip to Mammoth Cave when I was fourteen or so, and I've had a sort of aversion/compulsion complex about him ever since. Someday, I am going to figure out the story that wants to be written around him and write the damn thing.
But in the meantime--yes, what interests me is the underbelly2 of the American Dream.
---
1On the other side of the Atlantic, I was fascinated by Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which is of the same morbid genre.
2Like Shelob's: "Her vast belly was above him with its putrid light, and the stench of it almost smote him down" (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers 428).
(There's a reason one of my tags is clusterfucks of the old west.)
- the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
- murders like those of Mary Rogers and Helen Jewett1
And something reminded me this morning--I can't even tell you what--of what may be the first of these obsessions with morbid Americana: the terrible death of Floyd Collins. I first learned about Floyd Collins on a Girl Scout trip to Mammoth Cave when I was fourteen or so, and I've had a sort of aversion/compulsion complex about him ever since. Someday, I am going to figure out the story that wants to be written around him and write the damn thing.
But in the meantime--yes, what interests me is the underbelly2 of the American Dream.
---
1On the other side of the Atlantic, I was fascinated by Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which is of the same morbid genre.
2Like Shelob's: "Her vast belly was above him with its putrid light, and the stench of it almost smote him down" (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers 428).
