Previous - 99. Absalom again
Not Absalom
I finally let the last post end and have moved on. It's hard to wind up a post about Absalom. Not sure why, aside from the chapters being so long.I don't recall my gym playing Christmas music at Christmas, but today, the eve of New Year's Eve, they were playing nothing but Christmas tunes. That's not quite true, I recall "Call Me Maybe" snuck in somehow, but it was mostly relatively obscure Christmas songs.
I'm at the closer of my regular pizzerias and they surprised me by having really good pizza today. Both the veggie topping and the crust were much better than normal. It's strange how inconsistent they are.
Charles Etienne
The infantilization of the not-that-young Charles Etienne as he is introduced to the cast in Chapter VI is interesting and important. What puzzles me is that they continue to refer to him as being 1/16th black (because, of course, we are not to know yet that his father was not "white" in the context of the American South at this time.)Charles Etienne is almost the mirror image of his father, Charles. Charles negotiated a white world that didn't notice, for the most part, that he wasn't "white." Charles Etienne negotiated a black world that for the most part was blind to his non-white status. They both seemed to go out of their way to seek out trouble. You can almost imagine them -- also similar people today either here, or especially in Brazil, I understand -- as being as hyper aware of racial shades as the Baron in In Search of Lost Time was of ancestry. Blood is everything.
Further along in the story of Charles Etienne, I'm now thinking that this novel, when you consider the biographies of Sutpen, Henry, Bon, and Charles Etienne, could have been titled "The Devils." Variations on a theme; or variations on a Daemon.
p206 ...the son of the man who had bereaved her [Bon] and a hereditary negro concubine, who had not resented his black blood so much as he had denied the white, and this with a curious and outrageous exaggeration in which was inherent its own irrevocability, almost exactly as the demon [Sutpen] himself might have done it.
p208 ...'Call me Aunt Judith, Charles'... [And the joke here being that she is in fact his aunt. As is Clytie.] ...to watch him walk back down the weedy lane between the deserted collapsed cabins toward the one where his wife waited, treading the thorny and flint-paved path toward the Gethsemane which he had decreed and created for himself, where he had crucified himself and come down from his cross for a moment and now returned to it.
p209 ...who lived like a hermit in the cabin which he rebuilt and where his son was presently born, who consorted with neither white nor black...
New year's Glee
Why am I watching Glee videos on New Years Eve? Drinking plays a part here, of course, but that still leaves the question, Why Glee? A large part of this is my fondness for Pop music of the many decades I've been alive. Glee crafts excellent covers of these songs which gives me the pleasure of hearing them again (as is also the case with Sid n Susie) with the bonus of having them performed by a new generation of (admittedly attractive) performers.Some of the music belongs to this generation or was at least popular while this generation was alive, and presumably listening to the radio. But many of the tunes they perform -- especially in the first season, I think -- were popular way before they were born. Journey's (an SF band!) "Don't Stop Believing" -- the quintessential Glee song -- came out five years before Lea Michele was born. And the Motown songs that are the trademark of the Unholy Trinity are, like, over a decade older than that. For that matter, the trademark song of Lea Michele's character (Rachel) is "Don't Rain on My Parade" from 1964.
I never really liked "West Side Story," but I'm thrilled that my online friend in Glasgow will go anywhere in the UK to see a performance -- in addition to performing it herself whenever she gets the opportunity. And Glee nails those songs, too. What percentage of the pleasure we get from the performance of older works (in particular the works of our youth, or that we loved in our youth) is from the fact that a younger generation cares enough to master those works?
Of course this doesn't explain why I love the Fun and Lady Gaga songs as much as I do.
Here's one (and an '80s song at that) I really can't explain (or why it cuts out in the middle) but I have to include it because the actor in the cape is currently playing Super Girl. There may have been an actual Cassandra reference behind the scenes somewhere.
Also, it's hilarious that most of the recent comments on the Glee videos featuring Melissa Beniost or Grant Gustin are DC Comic related.
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