Freckles & Doubt

My car is jerking my chain. I got into it yesterday at lunchtime preparatory to going out for a lunch date, turned the key, and it made a sort of throaty, angsty coughing noise, like Darth Vadar choking on a bread roll, and refused to start. Repeats, threats, sobs, curses and hitting the battery with my shoe had no effect. I staggered back inside (very Sidded again, not quite functional) and cancelled the lunch date in a fit of aargh-can't-deal. This morning I got into the car in a sort of last-ditch attempt to prove conclusively that I wasn't hallucinating before phoning the tow truck, turned the key, and the engine leaped merrily into life with what I can only describe as callous insouciance. It started fine after work today. It remains to be seen whether it will continue to start (a) when I try to go out to my game in about ten minutes, (b) when I try to go home at the end of my game, or (c) in time for work tomorrow. News at 11. I just hope it holds out until I'm on leave on Thursday and Friday, when I can sling it at my tame mechanic without the need to also wend my way campuswards.

In other news, the backlash from two months of insane productivity and absurd hours has raised its inevitable head. (I see a backlash as a sort of purple feline thing with a long tail and an attitude, and a lot of very sharp teeth. It grins.) I did very little at work on Friday, bar the weird politics, and nothing today except for a very dull timetable meeting. Today, I have to be fair, was because I incautiously discovered Questionable Content, and have been trotting through its back archive in a state of high glee and frequent giggling. It's pleasingly off-the-wall, with considerably more of a dark and ironic edge than other favourites like Scary-Go-Round, and I deeply love its hipsterishness and flights of insane fancy. I am also slightly staggered to discover that I probably know the music of approximately half of the bands he references. I think I'm technically too old for indie music cred. On the other hand the writer shares my conviction that Bowie's Outside is a highly underrated album and actually one of his best, so possibly it's an inevitable confluence and I should just relax and go with it.

Now I shall go and spend the evening being a steampunky lady disguised as an actress as part of her plot to become a Pirate Queen. Last session someone gave me a parrot. I have high hopes for tonight.

Week still noxious, and that's quite enough of that. Otherwise I'm going to rant about last-minute venue changes, at length, with profanity and invocations to strange, disagreeable gods, and you'll all leave in entirely understandable disgust. (Except for those weirdos among you who are mildly entertained by profanity and strange, disagreeable gods. I know you're out there, but I refuse to pander to you.)

Instead, I shall randomly disseminate random links which have randomly kept me sane in the last few days.

Superheroes! Superheroes always make me feel better. This picture is beautiful because of the story which attaches to it, which may or may not be apocryphal but is perfect anyway.



Small boy loses parents at a comics convention, panics, approaches the Flash for help because he knows and trusts the character, presumably from comics or cartoons. That's the ideal essence of the superhero right there, that is - the symbol is about trust and agency and the simple, essentially childlike belief that someone out there has the power and is both willing and able to help. The emblem transcends all other concerns, all boundaries between real and imagined. That's as it should be.

And, weirdly enough, Joy Division. Joy Division might not leap to the eye as the perfect pick-me-up, but by gum it's cheery when played by a Caribbean steel band.



They also do Love Will Tear Us Apart, but it's a much shorter and lower quality clip.

There's a new OK Go music video. I disseminate it mostly for stv, because it's full of incredibly cute, happy and well-trained dogs. And a goat. Watch out for the goat. (The goat's for schedule5).

I love OK Go.



In other news, I am eating strawberries and cream for breakfast. Half of this is to content my mother's desire for me to eat more fruit in the pursuit of not having a body that is scratched more often than not. The other half is sheer decadence.

It's been a noxious few days. I'm still sick. I am so grumpy at still being sick that sore-headed bears I meet accidentally in the street are shuffling out of my way without making eye contact. I am clumsy, useless, brainless and exhausted: in the last few days I've bumped the back of someone else's car in traffic owing to stuffed reflexes, broken the Evil Landlord's coffee plunger through sheer stupidity, and bumbled through phil&jo's lovely braai thing as a sort of snuffling, ambulatory corpse with no conversation. Today I gave quite the worst tut I've ever given, on Lewis Carroll, for which there is no excuse, and involved myself in a deeply silly and pointless argument with our marketing person, who thinks my reservations about Facebook are naive and that giving up personal information is just "the risk you take" with social networks. (She doesn't believe in net neutrality, either, and my current brain is insufficient to the task of zorching her where she stands as her viewpoint so richly deserves). And this evening I had to field one of those, "So, your poor sick dad, how's he doing?" phone calls from one of his far-flung friends who slipped through the notification net in March. Also, Wesley Crusher has left Star Trek, and he was becoming something of a personal crusade (The Fans Done Him Wrong!), so I'm miffed.

On the upside, and thank you, virtualkathy, for fulfilling the public-spirited function of keeping me sane, Rachmaninov had big hands.

My late papa was always very fond of reciting that deliberately pretentious and jargonistic version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" which goes as follows:

Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific,
How do I ponder thy nature specific,
Poised up above in the ether capacious,
Closely resembling a gem carbonaceous.

As a child I always heard "ether capacious" as one word, and had a vague but wonderful sense of the "ethakapacious" as a sort of expansive, magical, spacious realm up there somewhere. It was something of a let-down when I realised what was actually meant, although in fact "ether capacious" has its own slightly dignified and Victorian sense of enchantment. It almost certainly contains steampunky skyships.

In other news, NPR are streaming the entirety of the new Arcade Fire album. It's luvverly. Large chunks of it sound like someone else entirely, or possibly someone else entirely pretending to be Arcade Fire.

I also forgot to mention that my latest Microfic is up. They incautiously gave me a fairy-tale topic. Oh, deary, deary me. I suspect it'll only fully make sense to anyone who's read as many "Sleeping Beauty" variants as I have (the Arabian Nights one is my favourite, the girl actually gets a say), but hopefully it will be enjoyable, in a slightly pretentious feminist postmodern way, nonetheless.

So, vampires. I teach 'em. (And, may I add, for the record, that no fewer than three members of my flist did yesterday start their posts with "So, ...", which is probably expressive of something important, I'm not sure what.) I hasten to add, before you all obligingly imagine rows of little five-year-olds with pasty complexions and pointy teeth sitting attentively in a midnight classroom while I hold forth, I teach undergrad students about vampires rather than trying to teach vampires anything. (A bit difficult to maintain teacherly distance and mystique when pardon me, your teeth are in my neck). Also, I teach vampires and the erotic to strictly third-years, who presumably by this stage of their development are capable of reacting sensibly and without giggling, or at least without too much giggling, to explicit discussions of sex and phallic imagery and Freudian what have you. In the course of this epic teaching quest, currently filed under Department of Things That Keep Me Sane, I naturally get to be very, very rude about Twilight, and yesterday came to a quite sizzling and spontaneous insight which added about fifteen minutes to the lecture by way of digression and interesting debate. I shall now inflict it upon you, whether you like it or not.

See, in a broadly narrative sense vampires morph. They mutate. They are as all symbolic as all get-out, and thus are quite beautifully dense and layered reflections of their context - social, moral, historical, cultural. What vampires have mostly done for about two hundred years is provide us with powerful myths through which we can talk about sex, because the act of biting is a particularly explicit metaphor for sexual penetration, but the nature of the sex has changed over time. They fill, if you want to keep with the Freudian imagery, gaps - they're about desire, and desire is about something missing. Victorian vampires explore sex and seduction and intimacy, in a relatively simple way, because sex and seduction and intimacy were not OK as topics of ordinary literary representation, but were OK when you slithered them off sideways into the symbolic. They were particularly powerful as a vehicle for women to vicariously experience sex, and for men to vicariously work through all their anxieties about homo-eroticism, or women nicking phallic authority. Victorian vampires rock some serious repression.

These are not the concerns of the late twentieth century, which got progressively more open-minded about representing sex; post the sexual revolution of the 60s and the feminist movement, simple sexual freedom or women with fangs were not the major source of anxiety. Which isn't to say there weren't anxieties, and the last few decades of the 1900s saw a huge upsurge in the popularity of vampires - often angsty, interior, half-sympathetic monsters of maximum attractiveness. They kept the vampire power, though, the qualities of strength, mind control, shapeshifting, and were thus a beautiful vehicle to talk about the aspect of sexuality which wasn't OK in these particular times, namely the pleasures of submission. In a feminist and post-feminist age it's somewhat frowned upon, other than in the fringe of BDSM, to enjoy the jolly old stereotypes of an explicitly heterosexual dominance/submission relationship: gosh your fangs are so big, I'll just relax and enjoy it, shall I? So more modern vampires are powerful, dominant, with a swing towards violence (Buffy, Blade), but a subtext of seduction and desirability nonetheless. They're deeply non-PC in all sorts of ways, and we lap them up, hence the ridiculous success of Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton and the rest of the heaving bosoms.

Twilight, though, Twilight is something different. Of course its attitude to sex is all up the pole, being as how it's a thinly-disguised (and badly-written) Mormon abstinence tract; Edward is all desirable but horribly dangerous because SEX! is DANGEROUS! and you SHOULDN'T HAVE IT! no matter how much you want it, cue yearning, repression and smouldering stalker behaviour. He could snap you like a twig, you know, and you're only allowed to get off on the idea because he's not actually touching you.

But I realised yesterday that that's only half of it. Meyer is plugging straight into the American zeitgeist, namely the religious right's frothing hypocricies about sex, but she's also allowing her vampires to morph yet again into another reflection of their context: celebrity culture. Edward glitters. He's a beautiful, powerful, distant, shiny object that you desire hopelessly but can't have. Bella's response, and the response of any screaming Twihard who wants him, is identical to their response to poor Robert Pattinson - it's a fan relationship of the more obsessive kind, desire for a distant ideal which is always unattainable. The first three novels are emotional porn for exactly this kind of relationship, spiced up with the unbelievable, wish-fulfilling fact that the iconic object of affection, in all his unreal beauty, actually reciprocates. Meyer's also not alone in exploiting this fact of modern media life: if you look at the fang-bangers in True Blood or the Sookie novels, they're basically groupies to the celebrity cult of vampires in general. Dracula had his gypsies, but in this day and age he has hordes of teen and post-teen idiots conditioned by media cultures into slavish and often self-destructive devotion to a powerful object of desire.

We get, in short, the vampires we deserve. I can only hope to goodness we grow out of them soon. I also have to say, I didn't realise how incredibly overt with all this Annie Lennox is in Love Song for a Vampire. I should totally have shown that to the class, if only for its lovely concentration of vampire symbolism. Also, does anyone have The Vampire Diaries? Half my class seems to be obsessed with the show, which means I should probably watch it. Sigh.

There's a mysterious LCD Soundsystem two-disk album lurking in my CD collection, brought blinking into the light in the process of arranging all my CDs onto their new shelves. (Fact! The letter B takes up almost one whole shelf out of five, on account of the David Bowie/Belle & Sebastian alphabetical confluence. It must be Fate.) I wot nothing of LCD Soundsystem, nor why such a disk might end up in my collection. Did someone lend it to me? if so, why? It really doesn't look like my kind of thing, although I have to admit that to date I haven't fired it up in the player, owing to (a) the fact that it declines to play unless I download files, which always narks me off, and (b) fear of the unknown. The Wikipedia article specifies a "dirty electronic beat", which is so not me. Also, I've been watching altogether too much Fringe and there's a good chance that unspecified disks will employ highly manipulated sound-waves to turn my brain to jelly or mutate me into a hedgehog or something, owing to all the weird science.

I'd randomly suspect maxbarners, man in my immediate social circle most likely to be associated with "electronic beat", but he denies all knowledge. Suspicious.

If you're responsible for the above, please own up, and also, more importantly, explain why?

I keep vaguely telling people about this, and not being able to remember any of the artists involved, so let's make it real by blogging it. Shane MacGowan, Nick Cave, Chrissie Hynde, Johnny Depp, Mick Jones (on fire extinguisher) and others cover "I Put a Spell on You" in aid of Haiti relief. It's a snarly, growly, bluesy, ballsy rendition which makes the horrible self-congratulatory celebrity pap of "We Are The World" and its noxious ilk look like the flaccid, saccharine syrup they are.

I love blogging. Yesterday I post a deliriously happy-making video featuring Jane Austen movie parody and Darcy espousing the cause of free-style disco, and what happens? a flurry of comments based entirely on a throw-away footnote about tiles. The unpredictability of blog responses is curiously pleasing to me.

Today is the last day of Hell, in the sense of the most difficult month in my year, and I'm in that slightly reeling state of realisation: I survived, I didn't kill anyone, I haven't actually dislocated any limbs. (Yet). From here on, it can only improve. Yay! Of course, there's still a bunch of admin left, and I'm running late orientation tomorrow morning, but my sanity is slowly being restored by the fact that I can actually spend more than ten minutes at a time alone in my office, catching up, cruising the internet and otherwise recharging. While I enjoy interacting with students and making their lives better, it's also continuous and incredibly draining, and I am firmly an introvert in the sense that I need time alone to recover my energy.

The home front is also on the up: have resolved tile argument with EL¹, the ADSL has miraculously started working again, and apparently the plumber installed the bath backwards for good and sufficient reason which makes actual practical sense. Also, I really like all the paint colours.

This weekend my Princely Hosts are buggering off to Knysna, leaving me to water the cats, pet the garden and play incredible quantities of Zelda, so score. Tonight I have supper with wolverine_nun, which is another chance to see starmadeshadow, so double score.

And, in the Department of Brass Bands Make Me Cry, the new OK Go music video is simply delightful. Notre Dame marching band. Silly uniforms. Trumpeters camouflaged in fields. The whole song recorded live in the open air while they were performing, which is rather impressive and gives it a particularly rough and plausible edge. (Context: OK Go were the people who did that amazing video with the treadmills).



Memo to self, must acquire some OK Go, the music is also muchly fun.

---

¹ Well, we've agreed that glass-finished mosaic tiles in a much calmer colour than the bronzy green ones we're using for edging will work, since we are united in liking none of the varying shades of oatmeal offered by the larger stock. The EL has degenerated into threatening to choose tiles in electric blue, which usually signals that he's run out of viable arguments. Since habituation has granted me a +10 saving throw vs. Electric Blue Attack, I shrug and move on.

Hah! knew it. Administration is clearly bad for the dream-life, I need another job, stat. Not even a full week of leave, and last night I dreamed I was cuddling one of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger's musclebound gun-toting characters on a mattress on the floor of a hotel room in the French Riviera. (Which is odd, as I seriously don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Possibly because I can't spell him). Later I stopped off at the run-down petrol station in the middle of nowhere in order to fill up my scooter with milk and also to decline, definitively, to make an emergency bridge fourth for a tournament. Even in the dreamscape my absolute hatred of bridge and all its ilk shone forth very clearly.

I have been listening to the Magnetic Fields for the last week or so, the three new albums I've just acquired - Get Lost, Holiday and The Charm of the Highway Strip. This is earlier Fields, the few before I, which is the one before 69 Love Songs. I was all ready to be all "meh" about them - they aren't doing to me what 69 Love Songs did, which was to charm me utterly and instantly with a sort of wicked, louche genre-bending (and man, am I ever a slut for genre) and insane levels of tunefulness and zan (which is the noun for "zany" I just made up). All three of these earlier albums lack the vibrate-your-teeth catchiness of 69 Love Songs, but after the third listen or so I've realised that in fact they've been sneakily climbing up my spine while I wasn't looking to coil affectionately around my cerebellum. I have a sort of vague impression that the songs are all boring and uniform - possibly as much because of Stephin Merritt's mournful baritone as anything else - but I realise that any particular song I happen to be listening to at a given moment is neither boring nor uniform, but quirky, recognisable and subtly catchy. 69 Love Songs is almost an intensification of the qualities of the earlier albums, but its roots are definitely here, and digging deeper into my consciousness by the minute. Magnetic Fields, voted Band Most Likely To Turn Out To Be An Alien Brain Parasite. Fact.