- Thursday, June 21, 2007
- Pulp Fact!
- Posted by Zach in News Stories
-
Pardon me as I revisit the emotionally hot, vs. emotionally cold discussion. Ballads are emotionally cool things for me. Adventure Pulps, by contrast, rock the emotionally hot category. The thing about Adventure Pulps is that they have both feet firmly planted in the modernist era. In a Pulp Adventure story, it’s possible to be on the right side of an issue. There exists no widespread mistrust of authority. Possessing technology in order to subdue creation is nothing to be ashamed of, and travel doesn’t make the world smaller. It merely shows the largeness of the world. Apart from that, heroes are typically patriotic pragmatists that know what to do when life gives you lemons—use those lemons to blind your enemies and scram…with the girl! Rock on! In the spirit of 1940 Saturday Serials and campy Pulp, I am posting a link to the first scripted installment of Spank Williamson, oceanographic explorer and ladies’ man.
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3 Responses to “Pulp Fact!”
Your previous hot/cold discussion centered on the hot/cold properties of certain media and methods. Your point here seems to be that Adventure Pulps are “hot” because of their specific content, not because of the properties of the media itself. Following this argument, a ballad could be emotionally hot for you if it promoted a no-apologies-macho-conservative climate, a crazy adventure, and a girl.
Contradicting your previous post, I wonder if you find radio drama “hot” NOT because of the media itself, but because it generally conveyed an action-heavy, popular story with an implicit political conservativism (given the era). To test my theory, I’m curious . . . do you listen to Prairie Home Companion? Seems to be the opposite of your political views and story interests, but yet it is about as close to radio drama as we get these days. Do you still find the good old Keillor “hot” when he so blatantly promotes a philosophy antithetical to yours?
Yes I listen to Prarie Home Companion. No, it’s not the opposite of my story interests. Yes, Keillor’s hot.
Also, I absolutely agree that a ballad could be emotionally hot for me if it promoted a no-apologies-macho-conservative climate, a crazy adventure, and a girl…with a hey nonny, nonny. Actually, I think that kind of ballad is called country music, which I do consider emotionally hot, but I don’t unfortunately enjoy—something about the twanginess and preoccupation with Ford trucks.
I meant to suggest above that if you rob an Adventure Pulp from it’s modernist leanings, it ceases to be an adventure pulp, and if you like the genre, it has to retain it’s modernism.
Emotional responses are governed by the sum of the elements rather than one particular element. It’s possible for someone to think Hamlet a sad play, laugh at the grave digger scene, and still escape a charge of hypocrisy. I think it might also be possible to label radio a “hot” medium, but think the total experience of a radio play “cold” (I imagine a radio play of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would strike me as emotionally cool). In my estimation, when it comes to emotinal response, an “either/or” between media and content is a false dilemma.
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