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.
One really should confess ones shortcomings, both to others and to oneself, so here goes: The other day I discovered a cache of longer versions of Glee covers (with lyrics) on YouTube. I finally made it to Santana's (Naya Rivera's) cover of Taylor's Mine and it was a revelation. I've heard Taylor Swift's version of her song many times and there are some great parts, but Naya's version was so much stronger. Mine is a classic Country song. This tune is from earlier in Taylor's career when she was still in Nashville, and it shows. But I never noticed just how good, and Country good, the song was until hearing Naya's version. Now, the virtue of Glee is that they most often framed their covers in an emotional context -- in this case the troubled relationship between Santana and Brittney -- so some of that rubs off on my reaction to Naya's singing. But I really don't think that's the key ingredient. It could also be that I'm just hearing the song with fresher ears in this new version. But, again, I doubt it. On We Found Love, Naya does an amazing job of capturing the little vocal things that Rhianna does that makes that song so memorable. I can't speak to her cover of I Love You Like a Love Song, because I don't know the original version, but Naya's cover, in its long form, is now one of my favorite Glee songs. Here's Naya's Glee version of Mine for your consideration:
Faust
Really, Doctor Faustus. I'm re-reading my blogging of this book from February of last year. This is the first time I've reviewed this material since reading The Brothers Karamazov, and especially Ivan's dream sequence. I might as well say that it's the first time I've re-read it since the last time I read it, as you always bring that to a re-reading as well. I envy my friend who is into the double digits of her re-readings of Proust, both because she started before me, and so can recall what it was like to first encounter this world as a quite young woman, but mostly because she can read it in French. Am I at four readings? I'm not entirely certain. But I can't imagine getting into it again for at least a decade. I'm much more likely to re-read Parade's End (almost certain, in fact) and even The Magic Mountain. I was thinking, after Doctor Faustus, that I didn't need to go back to TMM, but now I'm thinking it would be interesting. That was the original plan after all -- to tackle Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy before blogging TMM. And instead Doctor Faustus and The Brothers Karamazov turned out to be even more important. I just realized I haven't blogged Parade's End, either. And that would be especially challenging as I would want to talk about Tom Stoppard's screenplay as well as Ford Madox Ford's original text. Just the other day I was thinking about some of the things Ford did in his final book that revised or undercut assumptions from the earlier books. And as wonderful as I think Stoppard's screenplay is, it couldn't capture the literary marvels of the text. What's compelling about Parade's End is both the story and the way it is told. My aunt, who passed away last year at 94, never read a book twice. She saw it as a waste of reading time. I could see going the other way and only reading books I had read before. Not that I would, there are still too many important books I've yet to read. But I do think that would be a reasonable plan. For one thing it would guarantee that you weren't wasting your time on books you wouldn't end up liking. And, as long as I'm reflecting back on earlier blogs, a friend is traveling around the south of England and today posted photos of Exeter cathedral on Facebook. I immediately thought of the fictional Henry Ryecroft and his snug cottage not that far from Exeter. I really should go back and add links to my later posts about disease and genius in Doctor Faustus (what I was reading last night) and autism and genius in Thinking In Pictures. George Gissing and Mann, I suspect, would have gotten along just fine, but it's hard to imagine what Gissing would make of Temple Grandin, in her Western outfits, designing more efficient (and more humane) slaughterhouses in America. Would either Gissing or Mann have been receptive to her science based interpretation of her world? That is hard to imagine.
Tiny
After attending my only boat show, in the mid-1960s, I became enamored of sailboat interiors. I still look at mid-size boat tours on YouTube, but have added RV tours and, more recently, Tiny Houses. I think what appeals to me, beside the intimacy and efficiency of these spaces, is the attention to detail. In larger spaces you can waste space or not pay much attention to entire walls or even rooms. In a tiny space every cubic inch has to justify itself. Of course I've also argued that often these spaces I see on YouTube are in fact over-designed. Intensely planned and crafted fixtures often mean that there is only one way to use the space. A Lamborghini is a thing of beauty and perfectly designed for its purpose, but if you need to pick-up a purchase or take friends to dinner, a Tesla X is far more flexible and -- dare I say it -- practical. If I ever had the opportunity to design a tiny space (I forgot to mention container conversions, which may be my favorite) I would start by subtracting as many of the features you commonly see as possible. I would try to introduce functional minimalism as well as aesthetic minimalism (the decorative details of many of these designs would make the Victorians blush.) I could even demonstrate this concept in my own tiny apartment except that making marginal improvements in such an awkwardly small space simply isn't worth the bother. And so I read Dwell magazine instead.
I'm willing to go so far as to admit that I'm a fan of both Abba and Ace of Base. Happy? (I'm still working on the next section of The Sunflower and my planned half bottle of organic Chardonnay has expanded to the full bottle. (Seismic retrofitting is to blame!) For whatever reason (bottle of Chardonnay) I'm watching THIS and I blame Glee because I had no interest in Britney prior to Brittany S. Pierce. Carpool Karaoke is so amazing.
