In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado

Date: 2022-04-05
| In those months, hazy from lack of sleep and raw with anxiety,
| I felt like a calculator with someone’s finger over the solar
| panel—fading in and out, threatening to shut off altogether. Joel,
| though, seemed to run on his own hunger. I wanted to be like that
Chapter: Dream House as Bildungsroman


Date: 2022-04-06
| Don’t talk to me like that,” you say. Then, horrifyingly, you
| start to cry. “I had to make a decision, and I feel confident
| that I made the right decision.” She unbuckles her seat belt,
| and leans very close to your ear. “You’re not allowed to write
| about this,” she says. “Don’t you ever write about this. Do
| you fucking understand me?” You don’t know if she means the
| woman or her, but you nod.  Fear makes liars of us all.10
Chapter: Dream House as Omen


Date: 2022-04-06
| House as Noir
Chapter: Dream House as Noir


Date: 2022-04-06
| Dames, right?
Chapter: Dream House as Noir


Date: 2022-04-06
| I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and
| audacity of them.  I know I should have a very specific political
| response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by
| Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar),
| sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated,
| man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be
| furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s
| controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about
| Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and
| All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish,
| conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual
| on the large and small screen.  And yet, while I recognize the
| problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and
| queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help
| but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of
| their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness,
| their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most
| interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a
| world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to
| conceal themselves. They’ve survived.
Chapter: Dream House as Queer Villainy


Date: 2022-04-06
| There is a question of representation tied up in the anguish around
| the queer villain; when so few gay characters appear on-screen,
| their disproportionate villainy is—obviously—suspect. It tells
| a single story, to paraphrase Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and creates
| real-life associations of evil and depravity. It is not incorrect
| to tell an artist that there is responsibility tangled up in whom
| you choose to make villains, but it is also not a simple matter
Chapter: Dream House as Queer Villainy


Date: 2022-04-06
| We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism,
| because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of
| people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life
| ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because
| they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those
| things because they are human beings, and that is enough
Chapter: Dream House as Queer Villainy


Date: 2022-04-06
| if a gay murderer targets only gay men, is that gay murderer himself
| homophobic? This question is something of a snake eating its own
| tail, and I cannot dig myself out.
Chapter: Dream House as Queer Villainy


Date: 2022-04-06
| It is July. Iowa in July is nothing but drama: wet heat, tornado
| warnings, thunderstorms so violent you have to pull the car
| over. Mosquitoes flock to you; your legs are swollen with their needs
Chapter: Dream House as Road Trip to Everywhere


Date: 2022-04-06
| When she kisses you in a McDonald’s parking lot in Indiana,
| you both look up to see a group of men—a risk of men, a murder
| of men—standing there watching, laughing, pointing
Chapter: Dream House as Road Trip to Everywhere


Date: 2022-04-06
| The next day, after you say good-bye to your friends, you sit in
| the car in the parking lot as she talks at you—your friends hate
| me, they’re jealous. An hour later you are still there, your
| head bent tearily against the window. The new bride walks by and
| notices you in your car. You see her slow down, her face crimped
| with puzzlement and concern. You shake your head ever so slightly,
| and she looks uncertain but mercifully she keeps walking so you can
| endure your punishment in peace. By the time you’ve wound out of
| the mountains and gotten back to a freeway, the bite of the fight
| has sweetened; whiskey unraveled by ice.
Chapter: Dream House as Here Comes the Bride


Date: 2022-04-06
| Bluebeard’s greatest lie was that there was only one rule: the
| newest wife could do anything she wanted—anything—as long as
| she didn’t do that (single, arbitrary) thing; didn’t stick that
| tiny, inconsequential key into that tiny, inconsequential lock
Chapter: Dream House as Bluebeard


Date: 2022-04-06
| Like Angela Carter’s Beast in “The Tiger’s Bride,” “The
| palace was dismantled, as if its owner were about to move house
| or had never properly moved in; The Beast had chosen to live in an
| uninhabited place.
Chapter: Dream House as Set Design


Date: 2022-04-07
| Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.”
| Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the
| person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid
Chapter: Dream House as Idiom


Date: 2022-04-07
| A what?” “A statue,” you say. “Just a statue.”20
Chapter: Dream House as House in Iowa


Date: 2022-04-07
| Then one day you learned that rapture could also mean “blissful
| happiness,” and you understood, fully: that it is important to
| live in unyielding fear with a smile on your face
Chapter: Dream House as Rapture


Date: 2022-04-07
| She is always trying to win.  You want to say to her: We cannot
| advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost;
| a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners,
| paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with
| each other.  Instead you say: Why don’t you understand? Don’t
| you understand? You do understand? Then what don’t I understand
Chapter: Dream House as Tragedy of the Commons


Date: 2022-04-07
| Dream House as Epiphany Most types of domestic abuse are completely
| legal
Chapter: Dream House as Epiphany


Date: 2022-04-07
| You know,” she says, her voice leaking through the receiver like
| gas, “if you’re not turned on by me, you can say so
Chapter: Dream House as Legacy


Date: 2022-04-07
| Félix González-Torres
Chapter: Dream House as Modern Art


Date: 2022-04-08
| On that night, the gun is set upon the mantlepiece. The metaphorical
| gun, of course. If there were a literal gun, you’d probably
| be dead.
Chapter: Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun


Date: 2022-04-08
| This is not to say that you seriously consider demonic
| possession. You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in
| God or any accompanying mythologies. But isn’t the best part
| of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific
| things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the
| next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on
| a priest?”
Chapter: Dream House as Demonic Possession


Date: 2022-04-08
| 1921 the British Parliament voted against a bill that would have
| made illegal “acts of gross indecency between females.” Why
| would an early twentieth-century government be so progressive? “The
| interpretation of this outcome offered by modern history,” writes
| academic Janice L. Ristock, “is that lesbianism was not only
| unspeakable but ‘legally unimaginable.’”
Chapter: Dream House as Ambiguity


Date: 2022-04-08
| I had a crush on her. That’s it. It wasn’t complicated. But I
| didn’t realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early
| 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable
| internet connection. I didn’t know any queers. I did not understand
| myself. I didn’t know what it meant to want to kiss another woman.
| Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know
| what it meant to be afraid of another woman.  Do you see now? Do
| you understand?
Chapter: Dream House as Ambiguity


Date: 2022-04-09
| Lipogram
Chapter: Traumhaus as Lipogram


Date: 2022-04-09
| The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless.
Chapter: Dream House as Hypochondria


Date: 2022-04-09
| unctuous
Chapter: Dream House as Five Lights


Date: 2022-04-09
| Later, safe on the Enterprise, Picard talks with Counselor Troi about
| his experience. “What I didn’t put in the report,” he tells
| her, “was that, at the end, he gave me a choice between a life of
| comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see
| five lights when, in fact, there were only four.” “You didn’t
| say it?” Troi asks.  “No. No,” he says. “But I was going
| to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than
| that, I believed that I could see five lights.” His gaze rests,
| lost, in the middle distance
Chapter: Dream House as Five Lights


Date: 2022-04-09
| Evil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad:
| metallic, false. But what other word can you use for a person who
| makes you feel so powerless?
Chapter: Dream House as Cosmic Horror


Date: 2022-04-09
| Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just
| broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the
| dam, and you begin to bawl.  “Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You
| are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart
| is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way
Chapter: Dream House as Unexpected Kindness


Date: 2022-04-10
| It’s as if one scientist spent decades developing a downward-facing
| propulsion system to get an apple to descend to the ground and
| another one just used gravity. Same result, entirely different
| levels of effort.
Chapter: Dream House at Newton’s Apple


Date: 2022-04-10
| When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people
| listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind
| their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness
| or an encyclopedia peddler
Chapter: Dream House as Myth