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bloodygranuaileAfter reading a whole serious history book I figured the next item of business on my spooky szn reading was going to be Jillian Venters’ Gothic Charm School: An Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them. This book was published over 10 years ago now and has been sitting on my shelf for at least the last two of them, mostly just looking pretty (which is, admittedly, the main job of gothic things that sit on shelves) while I then proceeded to get all my goth advice from the website and Venters’ social media accounts.
While I therefore cannot say that any of the content of this book was earth-shatteringly new to me--I am, after all, old enough that people have started coming to me for goth advice, and I’m not even involved in whatever local goth “scene” Boston has--it was still both a delightful and useful read: delightful, because it’s nice to revisit a whole lot of Goth Content at once and remind myself that there’s more fun and active parts of the subculture than just dropping all my disposable income on candles at Hauswitch (although I certainly do love buying candles at Hauswitch), and useful, because (like a lot of folks) I have turned into something of an even-more-than-usual feral weirdo over the course of this whole pandemic thing, and I have to re-teach myself how to do… everything, really.
Because Goths are, in their own way, still normal people (or… we’re people, at any rate), the advice in this book runs the gamut from extremely Goth-specific (“common pitfalls of deciding to dress up as The Crow”) to general life advice (roommate agreements, not being a dick when you don’t like your friend’s shitty boyfriend). It’s also a nice mix of concrete, practical sorts of advice (step one in assembling a gothy wardrobe: buy some lint rollers. No, more lint rollers than that) to more attitudinal/theoretical stuff about the importance of being polite (especially for long-haired freaky people) and the pitfalls of gatekeeping. Honestly, a lot of the stuff about gatekeeping and general bad-attitude-ery is valuable advice across a wide range of social categories (looking at you, anyone who has ever complained about “fake geek girls”). The dating advice seems solid but I must admit that it amuses me (because the other option is having it annoy me) that normal people think that “fancying other people” is so normal that the idea of not doing so strikes them as so weird as to be impossible, and yet every group of self-styled freaks and radicals I’ve ever run across is completely convinced that “fancying other people” is, in fact, the freaky and radical thing that separates them from the normies (at least, until I won’t go out with them, in which case it’s back to being Scientifically Impossible not to). To be clear, I am, here, annoyed at these subcultures generally, not at Venters, whose advice does include such sadly necessary gems as “don’t assume all Goths are bisexual” (yes, even in Boston, which is apparently the most bisexual county in the U.S.).
Overall this book is lovely and has started to put me in the mood for doing gothy things in the leadup to Halloween. I have dug out my Halloween playlist and at some point next week may even drag myself to Michael’s to get frames for the Addams Family playing cards I picked up at Brimfield so I can put them on the wall where they’re supposed to be. If anyone else wants a short, readable bit of Gothy inspiration this Halloween season, I’m happy to lend out my copy.
While I therefore cannot say that any of the content of this book was earth-shatteringly new to me--I am, after all, old enough that people have started coming to me for goth advice, and I’m not even involved in whatever local goth “scene” Boston has--it was still both a delightful and useful read: delightful, because it’s nice to revisit a whole lot of Goth Content at once and remind myself that there’s more fun and active parts of the subculture than just dropping all my disposable income on candles at Hauswitch (although I certainly do love buying candles at Hauswitch), and useful, because (like a lot of folks) I have turned into something of an even-more-than-usual feral weirdo over the course of this whole pandemic thing, and I have to re-teach myself how to do… everything, really.
Because Goths are, in their own way, still normal people (or… we’re people, at any rate), the advice in this book runs the gamut from extremely Goth-specific (“common pitfalls of deciding to dress up as The Crow”) to general life advice (roommate agreements, not being a dick when you don’t like your friend’s shitty boyfriend). It’s also a nice mix of concrete, practical sorts of advice (step one in assembling a gothy wardrobe: buy some lint rollers. No, more lint rollers than that) to more attitudinal/theoretical stuff about the importance of being polite (especially for long-haired freaky people) and the pitfalls of gatekeeping. Honestly, a lot of the stuff about gatekeeping and general bad-attitude-ery is valuable advice across a wide range of social categories (looking at you, anyone who has ever complained about “fake geek girls”). The dating advice seems solid but I must admit that it amuses me (because the other option is having it annoy me) that normal people think that “fancying other people” is so normal that the idea of not doing so strikes them as so weird as to be impossible, and yet every group of self-styled freaks and radicals I’ve ever run across is completely convinced that “fancying other people” is, in fact, the freaky and radical thing that separates them from the normies (at least, until I won’t go out with them, in which case it’s back to being Scientifically Impossible not to). To be clear, I am, here, annoyed at these subcultures generally, not at Venters, whose advice does include such sadly necessary gems as “don’t assume all Goths are bisexual” (yes, even in Boston, which is apparently the most bisexual county in the U.S.).
Overall this book is lovely and has started to put me in the mood for doing gothy things in the leadup to Halloween. I have dug out my Halloween playlist and at some point next week may even drag myself to Michael’s to get frames for the Addams Family playing cards I picked up at Brimfield so I can put them on the wall where they’re supposed to be. If anyone else wants a short, readable bit of Gothy inspiration this Halloween season, I’m happy to lend out my copy.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-17 08:15 pm (UTC)that normal people think that “fancying other people” is so normal that the idea of not doing so strikes them as so weird as to be impossible, and yet every group of self-styled freaks and radicals I’ve ever run across is completely convinced that “fancying other people” is, in fact, the freaky and radical thing that separates them from the normies
Yeah, there are some things I'd love to be able to rewrite around that, because there's so much more information around attraction etc. that I just wasn't aware of back then!
no subject
Date: 2021-10-05 11:40 pm (UTC)