The 80s

I was born in the 80s, and, I mean, early in the 80s, so you might think I would be used to 80s aesthetics.  Nevertheless, I just really don't like them.  I mean, after having watched the Blade Runner sequel, I remarked to multiple people that my main memory of watching the original is just how off-putting I found the actresses' haircuts.

I was just reminded of this again by watching a whole bunch of Bowie videos and performances spanning decades.  I don't always find the aesthetics of Bowie's appearances in the 70s attractive (not a mullet fan), but they are consistently appealingly bizarre.  Conversely, while in the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s Bowie's aesthetics were more normal, they were consistently pretty attractive.  However, the aesthetics of Bowie's 80s appearances were a thoroughly unappealing mix of conventional and unattractive.  Sigh.  The only partial exception is Bowie in the Screaming Lord Byron role in the "Blue Jean" video, but:

1. this is presumably meant as a parody of Bowie's own 70s personae.
2. it is literally a Byron reference.
3. although presumably unintentionally, it reminds me strongly of Torquil.

Certainly I don't find anything else about the aesthetics of the video particularly appealing.

Sometime this year I am intending to watch the "Love Cats" video again, and hopefully that will remind me that there are at least some 80s aesthetics out there that I quite like!

_Crimson Peak_

I saw Crimson Peak today (I don't have any very strong opinion about it - it wasn't boring, but it wasn't all that memorable for me either, although it might appeal more to those with more visual interest than me.), and. . . well, it was obviously meant to be deliberately reminiscent of Rebecca.  It was obviously meant to be deliberately reminiscent of Rebecca because my friend sitting next to me whispered at one point that it was just like Rebecca, and because, look, it's a story about a young woman who marries a more experienced man who takes her back to his creepy mansion (among other elements that are also reminiscent of Rebecca).  Rebecca is a fairly well-known story (my friend has never even read the book or seen the movie, but he still recognized the references), so I do think that references to it are pretty clearly intended to be picked up on by viewers.

However, I couldn't really focus while watching on the similarities to Rebecca, because the story was just so reminiscent of The Portrait of a Lady.  The protagonist is a young woman with some money from upstate New York (albeit Buffalo instead of Albany).  Four of the characters match up pretty clearly to specific characters in The Portrait of a Lady (there was one character whom I just spent the entire movie thinking of as Caspar Goodwood).  There's even one specific scene where a character is introduced playing the piano which really must be a deliberate reference to the introduction of a certain character in The Portrait of a Lady.

I was, therefore, glad to find this interview with Del Toro where he specifically says, "One of the guys that I love and revere is Henry James."  Although of course he explicitly mentions Turn of the Screw, he says enough that I'm pretty convinced that the references to Portrait of a Lady are entirely deliberate.  Good to see my intertextual recognition skills are still on-target!

_A Handful of Dust_

I am working as a teacher of English in a context where I do not, generally, have much say over what texts I teach.  This can make for awkward situations, as, obviously, being unable to make my own selections about my content can lead to confusion or a lack of focus in my teaching, if I myself don't understand the rationale behind the choice of a specific text (and, believe me, most often very little effort is made to convey the rationale behind text choices at my institution).  A case in point would be that, this year, I was told to teach Evelyn Waugh's novel, A Handful of Dust.  Now, naturally, I've heard of Evelyn Waugh before, and even saw Bright Young Things, the movie version of his Vile Bodies, although I've never read even Brideshead Revisited, let alone any of his less famous books.  But I'd never even heard of A Handful of Dust prior to starting work at this school, so it was certainly somewhat intimidating to be asked to teach a book I knew almost nothing about.  And when I read it, frankly I was mildly confused by it and had to skim a bunch of articles that were shared documents from the department in order to get even the barest sense of what to think about the book.

Now, however, I must say I'm really re-evaluating my initial reaction towards the book and even feel like it was a very good choice.  On a professional level, I'm finding this text much more exciting to teach than the other texts I taught last year.  My school has an odd way of teaching literature to high-school-aged students - we are expected not only to teach texts and close reading but to explicitly teach "theory."  However, because these are high-school-aged students without much background in literary studies, we are teaching them relatively simple theories, which ultimately boils down to teaching them a few theories of tragedy in their first year (Aristotle's, A. C. Bradley's theory of Shakespearean tragedy, Arthur Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man") and teaching them about different forms of comedy in their second year.  When we were doing tragedy last year, I found this remarkably frustrating.  I didn't see that teaching them A. C. Bradley really added much to their study of Macbeth, and in fact it may have detracted from it, since they became more focused on using the theory as a way to simplify the text than actually putting any effort into reading Macbeth.  Similarly, although "Tragedy and the Common Man" is useful for establishing Arthur Miller's intentions in writing his plays, reducing Death of a Salesman to the theory again seems to close down inquiry or take what could be a relatively accessible play on its own merit and reduce it to an example of a broader theory.  I don't think studying the theory along with the play adds very much, and it was frustrating in that it seemed to be a way of protecting the students from having to think on their own.

A Handful of Dust, which we are explicitly teaching as a satire, is a different matter.  The text has a nice mix of being stylistically fairly accessible, so that the majority of my students are able to understand the prose, while at the same time being rather difficult to grasp as a gestalt.  Without understanding specifically that it is a satire, what satire means, and what the purposes of Waugh's satire were, it is difficult to grasp the text fully.  Thus, in teaching the students about the nature of satire and exploring the specific ways in which the theory of satire applies to the text, I feel that I am genuinely doing something useful, helping them to appreciate and get value out of a text which would, without the theoretical elements, be very opaque to them.  Moreover, the discussion of the students' confusions about the text and how the concept of satire may explain them intellectually even as their emotional responses to the text may conflict with what the satirical purpose would gesture towards is interesting and educational for both me and the students; I feel like in our class sessions they're actually learning and doing more thinking because they have to process their emotions and see how they interplay with the actual text (perhaps because the students read the text before they had much idea of what satire was, or because the targets of the satire may seem rather distant to them, they are much more emotionally involved in the text than I was when I read it).  Teaching it, then, becomes educational for me to as the process of dealing with student reactions and squaring them with the theory helps to give me passages into the text and articulate my own intellectual understanding of it.  So it's really enjoyable.

But that's not all.  I can't say I enjoyed the book that much when I read it, as much as I enjoyed coming to a better understanding of it via the process of teaching.  However, on a personal level, teaching this text has also been really rewarding to me because it's brought me to a very Eliot-centric moment in my life.  Of course, A Handful of Dust is named after the line from "The Waste Land" (quoted in an epigram).  There are also key thematic and symbolic resonances between the texts (eg, the use of fortune tellers in both, the travel over the course of both from urban London to a non-Western wilderness landscape) that help to ground my understanding of A Handful of Dust (since, contrary to my expectations when I first read "The Waste Land" back in college, I now have a fairly tolerable understanding of the poem, without, bizarrely, having any clear idea of how I developed it, since I don't remember ever either discussing it in class or reading much analysis of it, and I certainly had no idea what was going on with it when I first read it).  I had an amazing experience privately meeting one of the more passionate and dedicated students in my class, who had finished the text long before the rest of the class had, to discuss the poem with him as a way into the novel, and we ended up spending a couple of hours texting each other that night in order to continue the discussion - it was very rewarding and reminded me of how much Eliot meant to me.  Then this led to me being inspired to think about Eliot in an exciting conversation with reader Abangaku, which was also very inspirational and exciting for both of us, I think, and led me to read "Ash Wednesday" in more depth than I ever have before, which was also very meaningful for me.  In addition, I'm currently on a committee that's working on setting up a program for especially talented middle-school-aged students in English, and so far the most likely name for the program would be the "Eliot Program," although admittedly part of the reason for this is that we're mostly pretty leery of using the name of a white male, and Eliot is nicely ambiguous - which is a shame because, as much as I too am leery of using the name of a white male, I really do actively dislike George Eliot.  But it's probably made up for by the T. S. aspect.

Eliot for me, unusually, is not a school poet.  Most of the poems and poetry I care about are those that I studied in school - even Shelley I took a course on.  I think Blake and Eliot are the only real exceptions to that rule.  With Blake it's obvious that it's the Gnosticism that draws me in.  With Eliot, I have to say, it's Diana Wynne Jones.  Just as Shelley was, Eliot was a huge personal influence on DWJ and was something she drew on in her books - I've mentioned previously my speculations about the Dalemark series.  I think that I was indoctrinated in Eliot's concepts and ideas at a very early age by reading DWJ without even having needed to read Eliot - I really do see Eliot's ideas as being presented and discussed in DWJ's work such that, as rushthatspeaks once wrote, "the emotional logic felt strangely familiar."  Read rushthatspeak's essay on this point for more details.  So, given that I've been reading and loving DWJ since I was eight and the way she thinks has become a fundamental part of my worldview, having this Eliot moment this past month has been a great experience for me - it's one of those moments where my conceptual understanding of the world seems justified, to see Eliot come up everywhere.  But of course it's all a coincidence, a resurgence of a mode of thinking sparked off by a particular text - so I really have to pay tribute to that text and the person who is forcing me to teach it, because it has added a lot of value to my students' and my own lives.

Sometimes I Know Things about Obscure Music

I saw The Wolf of Wall Street the other day.  I was leery, because my father had previously said that he had found it tedious and because my previous, somewhat limited experience of Scorsese had not prepared me to look forward to a three-hour Scorsese movie.  As it happened, I hadn't realized it was a comedy and found that to be a pleasant surprise, and, in addition, I went to see it with friends who quite liked it, which led me to be positively inclined towards it as well.  It was very long, but I found my interest picking up again towards the end for the oddest reason - because of the soundtrack - and not even because it was playing songs I am particularly fond of but because it played, in two scenes directly in a row, one after the other, two songs that are related to songs I'm particularly fond of.  First, the original Italian version of "Gloria" - I had not known there was an original Italian version of "Gloria," but I had been aware of the English version as an influence on "Disco 2000" (it is a pretty clear influence, even if I like the latter better because Pulp).  And then, following on that immediately, right in the next scene,"Ça Plane Pour Moi", which for some complicated reason has the exact same backing track as "Jet Boy Jet Girl" (ummm. . . NSFW).  Considering that they're musically almost identical, I sometimes wonder if I prefer "Jet Boy Jet Girl" for purely purient reasons - I mean, it's awesome to be barely able to resist screaming out, "He gave me head," because the song is just stuck in your head so badly - but it is the one I heard first (on Internet radio).  At any rate, it's an amazingly catchy backing track, and when "Ca Plane Pour Moi" came on, nearly at the end of the three hour marathon, I started literally bouncing around and dancing in my seat, I was so excited.  Good musical choices, Scorsese, or whoever else is in charge of that.

David Levithan's _Every Day_ and the Contingency of Morality

NB: This post is redolent of spoilers for the book, in case anyone reading this ever intends to read it.  OTOH, if you don't intend to read it, I think I'm fairly clear in what I'm talking about for once?

Being the YA genre fangirl that I am, I have of course known about David Levithan (I keep on wanting to call him David Leviathan) for a while, as he is kind of a big deal.  That having been said, I never particularly wanted to read his books because they seemed to mostly fall into the sub-genre of YA realistic romance, which is not a sub-genre I like all that much.  I consider myself a YA genre fangirl because I love quite a lot of YA subgenres, including speculative fiction, stuff with no technically fantastic elements that nonetheless is far too trashy to portray a convincing sense of reality, and genuinely realistic novels that deal with teens in unpleasant situations and how they live through them.  But I've never really enjoyed the kind of books that focus on relatively normal kids in relatively realistically-portrayed romantic relationships; I tend to find them more alienating and offputting than anything else, so I don't really feel drawn to read them.

I read Every Day because of the recent controversy over this article on "YA Fiction and the End of Boys".  The article and controversy weren't actually all that interesting to me in-and-of-themselves, but the article included the following paragraph on Every Day:

"If books like these reward boys who give up men’s social power, more provocative still are books that imagine erasing men’s physical power. That’s the case in David Levithan’s just-released Every Day, which tells the story of A, a spirit who wakes every day in a different body: sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes trans, sometimes this race or that. Levithan, known for his suggestive work about queer sexuality, uses his central conceit to artfully suggest the complexity of gender and embodiment. But even so, Every Day is haunted by a negative idea of manhood. When A falls in love with a girl, Rhiannon, he does so while inhabiting the body of Rhiannon’s crass, emotionally manipulative boyfriend. The novel’s antagonist, the character who offers A the ability to kill a host body’s spirit and thereby stay with Rhiannon forever, is coded male too. And what these experiences teach A is that being the kind of partner this beautiful, sensitive girl deserves means not being a man. At least, not being her man. It means finding a sweet, artsy, outsider for Rhiannon, and A heading off into a future perpetually separated from ownership of the body’s strength — the ultimate sacrifice of male power."


So what I got out of that was - book about bodiless spirit that possesses a different person each day!  Naturally I wanted to read that book.  It fits in perfectly with my well-documented obsession with fiction about fluid identities, not to mention my well-documented obsession with fiction about possessing spirits.


I did read Every Day, and, as usual, I'm not that interested in reviewing it.  What I can say briefly is that I found it entertaining enough.  It wasn't a boring book, and, what's more, it wasn't interesting simply because it was irritating (as, say, that damned movie Crash was).  It had good parts that were appealing.  But the day after I finished it, I keep on coming back to how irritating I found it, despite my general feeling that I was engaged in the book.  And that seems like something you might write about.  You can't write much about boring stories - it's very hard to say why something just doesn't grab you.  But when something actively pushes you away, that's interesting, and that's why I thought I should try to write about Every Day - because I can't stop thinking to myself, why did I find it that irritating?  

Well, there's a lot of reasons, some of which come down to subjective issues that are hard to break down again -  there's this character who appears on, like, three pages, named Amelia, who I felt had much more personality than any of the main characters in the entire book; I kept on thinking that it would have been a much better book if A had fallen in love with Amelia instead of with Rhiannon since Amelia seemed to actually have an identity, but I suppose this kind of reaction is very personal since different people have very different ideas about what makes for well-developed characterization - but I want to get into one issue I have in particular with the book that I think I can express more clearly.

I'm going to start by recounting the basic plot of Every Day, although, of course, I'm going to do that from the standpoint of what I'm interested in, so this may be limited or biased rather than a thorough, accurate summary.  This entity A possesses a new body every day and has been doing so for as long as they can remember (a sidenote: as annoyed as I was by the book, I am also annoyed by reviews that insist on referring to A as "he" even though it is explicitly stated in the text that "when it came to gender" A is "both and neither."  Insofar as I can tell, the main reason why reviewers are referring to A as male is because they spend most of the book in love with a girl and therefore "sounds male," which makes this even more annoying than it would be if they were just misgendering the character.  Of course, A doesn't tell us which pronouns they prefer, but I have to feel that "they" is more accurate than "he.").  They don't have any idea of why this happens or of anyone else in the world in the same position as them.  There are various rules behind this switch, including that they switch bodies at midnight every day whether awake or asleep, never possess the same body twice, have access to the body's memories (although it takes some effort) and are influenced by its hormones but cannot feel the possessed person's emotions, always possess bodies of a certain age (which they therefore think of as their own age - it is sixteen at the time of the book), can only geographically travel in the spirit between bodies within a limited radius (about four hours by car, it would seem), although if the body travels to Hawaii that day then A will be stuck in Hawaii in their next body, etc.  It's important to note that, on the whole, with only one exception in the entire book (and that one is under extenuating circumstances), those who are possessed don't really remember the possession as a possession, so A doesn't leave any particular trace in the minds of those they have possessed.   A thinks of themself as human, just a rather odd one.  A realized that other people were not like them at the age of five or six or so and was very upset about it at first, but eventually came to terms with it.  At the time of the book's start, as a sixteen-year-old, A realizes that other people have lots of benefits that they do not, all of the advantages of rootedness, connection, lasting relationships, and so on, but they also see the positive side of their own life - they are free of the pressure of relationships, are able to get a wide perspective on the world and thus be wiser than those of us blinded by our own perspectives, are a good observer, and know how to enjoy living in the moment.  A is a fundamentally moral person, as well, if still a sixteen-year-old kid, and has set up rules for themself so as to avoid damaging the lives of those they possess.  Although accessing memories, as stated above, seems to take a lot of effort, such that A avoids doing it more than necessary, and although in order to remain emotionally stable A feels the need to detach somewhat from the lives of the people they possess, A does enough accessing and uses their keen observational skills to try their best to make sure no one notices anything odd in the person's life and that they don't screw things up for the person too much.  A does this purely out of a basic sense of morality and the fact that they feel guilt when they do cause lasting problems for others, since, being untraceable, there are no real potential external consequences for them were they to do anything very terrible.  The same basic sense of morality, of course, means that they don't do anything drastically out-of-character even when it might theoretically help the person; when A winds up possessing the body of an extremely selfish girl, for instance, they muse about how it wouldn't do much good to sign her up to work at the soup kitchen because that's her decision to make, even if she would normally make the wrong decision, and she would just abandon the decision if A made it for her.


So A already has a relatively healthy attitude to what is obviously a fairly difficult situation at the start of the book - as aware as A is of the compensations of their state, it's hard for them to fully appreciate the benefits when the benefits of everyone else's lives are so visible, but A is managing.  The plot of the novel deals with A's steadily decreasing ability to cope after they fall in love (at first sight!  I found this pretty annoying too.) with Rhiannon while possessing Justin.  At first, A starts doing out-of-character things in the bodies they're possessing in order to sneak away and spend time with Rhiannon.  Later on, A actually confesses their true identity to Rhiannon; when she does not automatically reject them and shows some understanding of them (and, depending on what body they possess, some physical attraction, although A really fails to understand or show any sympathy for the fact that Rhiannon's attraction clearly depends on what body A is possessing), their behavior only becomes worse as they genuinely start to imagine that the two could find a way to make the relationship work.  A stops doing a very good job of being a guest in other people's lives and devotes more and more of their time to their own agenda, most significantly when they possess a boy who is supposed to be on a plane trip to Hawaii and actually completely blows off the trip and runs away in order to stay in the Maryland area because they can't stand the thought of not being near Rhiannon (and if they went to Hawaii they would be stuck there).  The subplot which winds up with A being introduced to the character who claims that A is not alone and that there would be a way for them to possess a body for a longer period of time (which A clearly thinks amounts to murder of the original identity) is meant to parallel this general decline in A's sense of responsibility; it's when A, possessing the "sweet, artsy outsider" (although I don't particularly see evidence of the character being an outsider) Alexander, is tempted to murder him to stay in the body forever, precisely because Alexander is such a genuinely kind and good person that his life, friends, and existence are all appealing, that they realize that their love for Rhiannon is getting them to break their own reasonably moral code of rules and that they decide they must get as far away from Rhiannon and the murderer as possible so as to avoid the temptation and go back to their life as an outsider.  And yes, this is obviously necessary in large part because Rhiannon cannot accept A as a disembodied, ever-changing spirit - if Rhiannon were willing to commit herself to A as they are A would probably not have ever come to the realization of their moral issues - but Rhiannon's problems with A are not just about the changing bodies but also with the seeming iffiness of A's behaviour - is what A does fair to the people whose bodies they are possessing?  She isn't sure.  So the arc of the book, oddly enough, is actually somewhat limiting of A's character development; they end up in more or less the same place they started out with in the beginning, only, I suppose, with a greater understanding of both the temptations of being a less virtuous person and also a greater awareness of the consequences of falling prey to such temptations (A starts out the book having no idea that such a murder would be possible).

The premise, then, is one that instinctively appeals to me, but I don't particularly feel that what Levithan found potentially interesting about the premise is the same as what I did.  I suppose one angle to come at this from is that of A as the basically good person - in the context of the book, it makes sense that A would see themself this way, of course.  A may not, in fact, be human, although A certainly thinks of themself as human, but A has never, until the confrontation with the antagonist, interacted with a sentient non-human before, and has been treated by a human by everyone they have ever met until the age of sixteen.  So it's not that surprising that A doesn't perceive themself as different on some elemental level from the species that makes up all of their interactive opportunities, and that they take on a fairly conventional morality from within that species (since, presumably, A has been socialized as much to that morality as anyone raised as human would have been).  This is a perfectly logical and reasonable choice, and it's what makes the central internal conflict possible - well, basically A's desire to be human, both in terms of the relationships with other humans that they can't have but want and in terms of the fundamental moral code that they can have, is what drives the whole possible.  To the degree that we see that level of responsibility to other people that A eventually decides to sacrifice their relationship with Rhiannon to as a measure of humanity, the plot affirms A's decision to consider themself as human; we too can see them as making a fundamentally human decision and to be admired in doing so.

On the other hand, there's another side to that story, as both A and the implied author behind A recognize that there are some distinctions between A and humanity.  A's inability to understand the embodiedness of Rhiannon's affections and their genuine fondness for the advantages of detachment speak to elements of A which are not commonly shared among humans.  The fact that the book ends with A making the decision to reject love and connection in the name of morality also shows that on some level A is rejecting quintessentially human traits; we do not normally expect of your average, ordinary human being that the ability to make lasting connections with other people would come into conflict with the possibility of living morally, and so A, in having to make this decision, is rejecting the chance to be human in that sense even if it is in the name of alignment with the human in another sense.  What is more, the hint of a larger plot in the antagonist being another of A's kind who does not adhere to A's human morality, and who contacts A via a boy A possessed who is convinced that A is the devil, demonstrates that whatever A's kind is, A does have a choice; A is not purely a human in very weird circumstances but is an entity who, for whatever reasons, has actively chosen to construct themself as human in a situation where other alternatives could be proposed with equal validity.

And, yes, I would be more interested in that story.  Although as a matter of credibility I find A's way of interpreting their existence to be believable, it makes for a story that engages with concerns I don't find particularly gripping.  The question of how to balance love and morality is of course a valid one, even one I care about quite deeply at times, but in this story it seems to be passing up so much potential to deal with the more fascinating to me concern of what it means to be human in contexts where that is ambiguous.  An A who had not aligned themselves quite so clearly with humanity and that character's struggles with morality and responsibility would be a more interesting character to me than a character who basically starts out with a very mainstream, uncomplicated view of morality and never goes beyond that intellectually even when they are emotionally tempted away from their beliefs.  I think that is where I come down to being annoyed by the story - because it promises some philosophical depth to me, but that is dragged away.  What the story ends up being about thematically is the importance of both the universal truths that we all share as humans and also the individual idiosyncrasies that make us all unique.  I think this is problematic on the whole because, as mentioned above, Levithan doesn't really do a very good job with the second part - I don't find his characters all that convincing as different people who are each internally unique even as he runs through a large number of external differences - but even if Levithan were a Diana Wynne Jones or Henry James of characterization, I think that this theme is just less interesting to me that one that really grapples with questions of morality and why we adhere to it.  It is never called into question that A owes the kindness of their respect for people's lives to these people simply because A is a good person who is equal to the humans whose lives they inhabit; when A challenges these restraints it is not because A has any philosophical justification whatsoever to do so but merely because love is great and you care less about morality when you're in love.  A's self-justifications as they fall into the abyss are minimal; the story does not engage with the philosophical issues but remains on the level of pointing out that love is sometimes selfish.  This isn't something that comes as revelatory to me, and for me, the more interesting themes would have dealt with what was selfish in the first place, whether a being whose life differs in fundamental ways from humans really does have to live in a way that is morally spotless for humans even at disadvantage to themselves, what alternative lives A could build that would be less infringed on by human norms (keep in mind that A, despite all of the body shifting, does not know how to speak Portuguese, play the clarinet, or do gymnastics, even if they body they're in does, which is fine for a sixteen year-old but is going to be a huge problem when they're 36), and what morality really involves.  So, while I think it's believable that some characters in A's position might react like A, on a personal level I think that's not what I find appealing about the premise, and that's one major reason why this turned out not to be the book I wanted it to be.

The Universe Loathes Me, and It Is Destroying Me Always

No, seriously, I am not even kidding. This is just not fair. This is really the product of active malevolence. There isn't any other explanation. There is something out there that just wants me to die. It's not okay. There is a vast and intricate design out there, and its objective is an end to Grace.

Except of course I should note that my choice of pseudonym is also not particularly helping right now, hello!?!?!!?

Only One Coin

The Neverending Story was my favorite movie as a kid, and I still quite enjoy both the movie and the book version. That having been said, it occurred to me while watching the movie today that the relationship between creativity and the void presented by the film is one that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Trying to think of an alternative model, I realized that, perhaps unsurprisingly, I find it best expressed in Fire and Hemlock:

"Two sides to Nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the void that lay before you when you were making up something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before."

The Workers Move to the Suburbs

Belle & Sebastian's new album is apparently out now, not that I'm going to hear it for a while yet, and they produced a video in order to promote it. The video is a slightly odd one; about half of it is promotional material for the album, with performances of a few songs, songs running over photo and video clips, fans asking the band questions and having the band answer - and then another half of it is about the future of the music business, with a parody of a marketing executive (who, as a fierce Scottish man in business attire talking about media relations, reminds me awkwardly of Malcolm Tucker from In the Loop, such that I kept on waiting for him to curse more), questions in the interview about what young aspiring musicians should do, a whole conversation between members of various different about the changes that the industry is undergoing. The parody of the marketing executive even involves the mention of making a promotional video (which is on a list of things that will completely fail to help sell the album).

Although it did strike me as an odd topic for your promotional video to cover, I suppose that Belle & Sebastian were interested in discussing because as successful recording artists it's certainly something they must think about with at least moderate frequency - and something, I suppose, that all fans of music might legitimately be interested in. It's interesting for me at least in part because I've also been reading news and commentary lately about the future of the academic humanities - musicians are worried about their future, so are humanities scholars. The rhetoric on both topics even has a certain amount of similarity between it - take a look at the similarities between Mick Jagger's comments here and the point (which I can't seem to find a citation for now, but which I promise you I have seen today) that the academic study of modern languages is in fact a relatively new phenomenon in itself.

It makes me wonder what it's like to be old - to have more experience. There are aspects of the way things are that are so new that they've arisen within my own lifetime; I know that it's only very recently that it ever would have occurred to me to have a blog. But some things, like recorded music and academic humanities, have been around since well before I was born and seem pretty standard and normal. Thus, it's weird to think of them as relatively recent and ephemeral. I wonder if this is a fallacy that one ever grows out of, or if it's something that remains, no matter how old you get - well, I suppose it probably wouldn't remain if you were magical and consequently significantly longer-lived than non-magical people, but this doesn't really seem like a salient qualification ;-). I also wonder if there was always an issue. I have my own stereotype of the very normalization of rapid change in society and technology as being a relatively recent phenomenon, especially as a global phenomenon. And I think this is a very standard stereotype. But even if quantitatively this is true, I wonder about how my own ancestors, dating back for tens of thousands of years, actually experienced their lives - whether had a core sense of stability that I really don't possess thanks to being raised with a different set of expectations, or whether even when technological change was much slower than it is today, there was still a sense of the basic instability of society, because cultural changes that would seem minuscule to us seemed far more significant to them.

One thing I love about myself is the way I am nearly always able to find an extremely apt title for a blog post. Thank you, self!

I'll Dream a Nation of Me, and We'll All Live in It

From my dream journal, October 11, 2007: ". . .the actor who had played Peter in the Narnia movie was up ahead in the museum. I guess his name is William Moseley. Anyway, I was very excited, not because he had played an important character in the unmemorable movie version of one of my favorite childhood books but because, in the dream world, the Franz Ferdinand song "Outsiders" was apparently about this actor."

From the official lyrics to the album version of Franz Ferdinand's "Lucid Dreams," as written in the liner notes of Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, released in the US today and in the UK yesterday: "I'll dream a nation of me / another Narnia where we can live it."

As I like to say in these kinds of situations, be warned that the world may be destroyed at some time in the near future! But don't worry, if it is, I will save us all by effectively dreaming us into a new and better (if only slightly so) world. Then I will get abused by a misguided psychologist who wants to turn everyone grey. Won't that be fun? You should be greatful.

About Me

Now that I've introduced the blog, it's time to introduce myself.

I am in fact female, but I'm ethnically Ashkenazi, not Irish. I'm far closer in age to Bryce Dallas Howard than to Nicole Kidman. I've lived most of my life in the American northeast, which is where I live now, although I've spent half a year in Scotland and a year in China. At the time of writing, I work at an extremely menial job in publishing; I'm hoping to be an English teacher next year. I have an MA in English. I am pretty far left, politically, for an American. I have been in love with many works of art and the city of Edinburgh but never with a human being.

The rest of this post is just a list of art that is very important to me now or has been in the past:

Authors: Diana Wynne Jones, Henry James, Jenna Moran, Dave Duncan, Theodore Sturgeon

Books (by other authors): Please Save My Earth, Angel Sanctuary, Valis, A Scanner Darkly, Absalom, Absalom!, Giles Goat Boy, The Great Gatsby, "Death in Venice"

Bands: Pulp, Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts, Belle and Sebastian, of Montreal

TV Shows: Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Mulberry, Trigun, Buffy, Angel, House, Lost

Webcomic: College Roomies from Hell!!!

Movies: Dogville, Badlands

Video Games: Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears

Poems: "The Second Coming," "The Book of Thel," Prometheus Unbound

I guess that's it for now - anyway, hopefully that gives you at least some kind of guide.