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Book learning November 19, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, childhood, fangirl, memories.
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The only wars my family waged were with pen and paper.

Madhur Jaffrey, Seasons of Splendour.

As someone who lives a little too vicariously through books (and the occasional film or television series), the idea that a person might fight his or her battles on the page really resonates with me. For me, books have always provided if not guidance then at least aspirations. For almost as long as I can remember reading, I have latched on to particular characters and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to emulate them. There have been a lot of articles and posts recently about female role-models in literature (prompted in part by the upcoming release of the New Moon film and the inevitable bout of hand-wringing about the message Bella Swan sends to impressionable young women) and this post is prompted, in part, by these articles. I’ll do a links round-up over at Livejournal so you can see the sorts of things that are being said, if you’re interested.

I’m quite proud of my literary role models, on the whole.

The first character I can remember pretending to be, was, fittingly, Sara Crewe from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. (I had spent many years pretending to be fairytale princesses before that, but I choose to ignore that as I feel my identification with these princesses was more due to the fact that they wore pretty dresses and jewellery.) For those of you not familiar with the character, Sara is the daughter of an English soldier who lives in India as part of the colonial administration. She grows up pampered in a London boarding school run by the cartoonishly vile Miss Minchin, until her father’s death, which leaves her penniless. Miss Minchin, who spoiled Sara because she hoped to get rewarded by the wealthy Captain Crewe, finds herself responsible for a girl she detests. Overnight, Sara’s life changes. Instead of being the favoured student at the school, she is now a drudge teaching the younger students. She has to move out of her luxurious rooms into a cold attic, eating scraps where before she had dined on delicacies.

What I loved about Sara was not so much the grace with which she endured this change in circumstances but the way she chose to endure them. You see, Sara was a reader. (‘She doesn’t just read books, Miss Minchin, she devours them,’ her father says.) More importantly, she was a storyteller. The thing that kept me covering wooden crates with red crepe paper (to make them look like Sara’s ‘battered red footstool’) and drawing fireplaces on bits of paper in order to stick them on my wall to recreate Sara’s attic bedroom was the power of Sara’s imagination. ‘Suppose,’, she would say, meaning, ‘Imagine something better than here’.

A Little Princess was an early lesson for me in the power of the imagination to overcome the most horrendous circumstances. The book articulated something I’d only just begun to understand: that books offered readers another, infinitely more wonderful world.

The next book to set my imagination on fire to such an extent was Adèle Geras’ wonderful The Girls in the Velvet Frame. What, you might ask, did a story about five Jewish sisters growing up poor in pre-Israel Jerusalem have to do with a seven-year-old middle-class Canberran in the early 90s? For me, it was two things: the warmth of the sisters’ relationship (and their relationships with their widowed mother Sarah and unmarried, ageing aunt Mimi), and the perfection of Geras’ characterisation.

I loved the matriarchal world of the Bernstein sisters, as I saw (and valued) a similar quality in my own family (which is made up of very strong women with very close relationships). And I loved, in particular, two of the sisters: dreamy Naomi, who saw the world through rose-coloured glasses and used storytelling to occupy her two younger sisters, and practical, cynical Chava (‘I always expect bad things to happen, because then bad things don’t disappoint me and the good things come as a nice surprise’). There’s a lot of Naomi and Chava in me, and there is a lot of stubborn, determined Dvora in my younger sister Mimi. I recognised this even then, and I identified passionately with Geras’ characters.

When I was ten, along came one character who would blow them all away with sheer awesomeness. I’m referring, of course, to Pagan Kidrouk, from Catherine Jinks’ Pagan Chronicles. I read these books initially as I was invited to a talk given by Jinks at the sadly now defunct Griffith Library, and I fell in love with the snarky, sarcastic, scarily intelligent hero. It’s been a life-long love affair: if Pagan were to walk out of the pages of the books today, I would follow him to the ends of the earth, even if all he did was make disparaging remarks about my intelligence and rage at the stupidity of mankind.

Part of the appeal of Pagan lay in his identity as a literate intellectual in a largely illiterate, anti-intellectual world (the books are set during the Third Crusades). He was irresolutely bookish, with a rich, if angry, intellectual life going on in his head. He has always appealed to my book snobbery, which in my preteen days was even more fierce than it is today. I read, therefore I am would’ve been my motto if I’d heard of Descartes. Pagan made even the illiterate characters recognise the value of reading: Lord Roland, the knight whom Pagan serves, remarks (giving me a quote that has always resonated with me), ‘People who read are always like you. You can’t just tell them, you have to tell them why.’ I swooned, and I’m still swooning today.

The Tomorrow series by John Marsden also provided me with a set of inspirational characters. After briefly cheating on Pagan with Lee (haha), I settled down into a more sedate appreciation of this classic Australian series. I honestly think it was one of the most important cultural artefacts of my generation. For about five years, everyone was reading these books. When a new one came out, we’d all be discussing them on the playground, speculating about who would live and who would die. They were, for my generation, bigger than Harry Potter, and for that they’ll always have a special place in my heart: although I loved being a reader because it set me apart, I also enjoyed it when my classmates and friends read so that we could discuss books.

I also adored the characters because they rang so true. Not one of them is a stereotype or a cardboard cut-out placed in the book as a mouthpiece for Marsden’s views (which happens so often in so many YA books). Oh, sure, it was very clear what Marsden’s views were, but he let them seep through organically, whispering at the margins of one of the most gripping plots I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. Marsden’s teenage characters, from Ellie the tomboyish, self-reliant narrator to Fi the sheltered princess, from Robyn the pacifist Christian to Lee the depressed, revenge-obsessed artist, taught me how to be brave. They taught me that war was hell and that I had a moral obligation to do all that I could to prevent it, and they taught me that teenagers were the most powerful, most adaptable, most resilient and most resourceful creatures on the planet.

The next author to play such a significant role in my moral and intellectual development was the wonderful, eloquent, word-weaving Philip Pullman. He gave me such great gifts: the character Lyra, from his His Dark Materials series, who is probably my favourite fictional heroine, and is definitely the most heartbreakingly human character ever to stalk the pages of a book, and the book The Tiger In the Well, which gave me a speech which has informed my political beliefs to this day. These books didn’t exactly change my beliefs (I was an atheist already, I was in favour of knowledge and consciousness and life, I was a social democrat, I was appalled by unchecked capitalism) so much as confirm them and articulate them in a way that I could not have done myself. No books have ever meant more to me than His Dark Materials and nothing has ever had, or will ever have, such a profound effect on my life.

In His Dark Materials, the idea that a very small event has the potential to create millions and millions of universes is a crucial theme. Well, the fact that my sister overheard me complaining about lack of books (I was put off by the cover of Northern Lights, which had animals on it: I’ve never been particularly interested in stories about animals) and forced Northern Lights into my hands utterly changed my life. I would not be at Cambridge without Philip Pullman.

There are several other book, film and television characters who are important to me: Amelie from the movie Amelie (who gave me unrealistic expectations about life, but introduced me to the joys of quirkiness and serendipity), Sulien ap Gwien from Jo Walton’s Tir Tanagiri Saga (who showed me that one could have a fulfilled life without romantic realitionships), Una from Jo Walton’s Romanitas series (whose intense introversion and observation of other people is something with which I identity strongly) and the characters in Joss Whedon’s television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly (who taught me that the family that you choose for yourself, united, can never be defeated, and that misfits can save the world).

These characters are in some ways more important to me than the themes of the texts in which they appear. As I took on all these characters and integrated them into my identity, they ceased to be the creations of their respective authors and became something different. I hesitate to say that they taught me how to be, since of course I am not as stoic as Sara Crewe, as resilient as Naomi and Dvora Bernstein, as intelligent as Pagan Kidrouk, as brave as the teenagers in the Tomorrow series or as all-around awesome as Lyra. I don’t have the courage of my convictions of Dan Goldberg and Sally Lockhart, I don’t brighten the lives of those around me as much as Amelie Poulain, I’m not as loyal as Sulien, I’m not as determined as Una and I’m not as good a friend as the characters in Joss Whedon’s shows. But all these characters taught me who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to live. Although I do not live up to their standards, that I value these standards says something essential about my identity.

Middle-class army October 28, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, fangirl, reviews.
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You may recall that quite some time ago, I complained about the way fantasy writers tend to be very dismissive of, and even hostile towards, the middle class. If you’re reading a book set in a pre-industrial, medieval-Europe-inspired world, you’ll often find cowardly, money-grubbing merchants who reject their ‘rightful’ rulers – and, by extension, the heroism which these rulers represent – out of sheer avarice.

As I wrote,

[W]hy do these city-dwellers have to be presented as uniformly effete, grasping, power-hungry and degenerate? Why must all epic fantasy worlds be peopled with steadfast, humble, loyal peasants just waiting for their lost kings to return and save them from the Big Brewing Evil? It’s so juvenile, and it makes me want to fling things at the wall.

I’m pleased to report that in Kate Elliott’s latest series, the Crossroads trilogy, this convention has been somewhat turned on its head.

Spirit Gate

I’ve read the first two books, Spirit Gate and Shadow Gate, and while there are many wonderful things about these books (not least that they’re set in an alternative version of what appear to be China, Mongolia, India, the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia, rather than the usual vaguely medieval European mishmash you tend to find in much fantasy), what I’d like to applaud is their positive presentation of the middle class. At this point, I should let you know that there may be spoilers.

The books are, for the most part, set in ‘The Hundred’, a Chinese-inflected country which was once governed by supernatural, supposedly immortal ‘Guardians’. The Guardians’ justice was enforced by eagle-riding reeves, who are all that remains of the governing structure of the Hundred, since the Guardians have disappeared. The Hundred is undergoing a great deal of chaos and upheaval, as various factions seek to establish control, or at least access to trade routes and wealth. Into this chaos step Anji and Mai, who are fugitives from the neighboring Sirnarkian empire. Anji is one of many rival heirs to the Sirnarkian throne – a throne which is always won by slaughtering one’s rivals. He is also half-Qin. Despite what the name might suggest, the Qin are probably closest to nomadic Mongol culture, and are currently enjoying rule over several neighboring regions. Mai is Anji’s wife, and she comes from a wealthy merchant family from one of these Qin-controlled regions. The pair of them become inadvertently caught up in the struggles within the Hundred.

What is so fantastic is that although Anji and his Qin mercenaries play a major role in saving the forces of good in the Hundred, Mai plays an equally significant part. This is amazing, as Mai has been set up as a consummate merchant: she worked on her family’s fruit stall back home, and her combination of hard bargaining and an accurate understanding of human nature meant that she contributed greatly to her family’s wealth. Throughout the series, her negotiating skills mean that she, Anji and their followers constantly enjoy favourable conditions and, ultimately, a privileged position in the Hundred. But her merchant skills achieve far more than that: they actually save the Hundred on more than one occasion.

Shadow Gate

It’s so refreshing to see the medieval equivalent of the middle class presented in this way. It shows that Elliott really did her research – it reflects a more accurate understanding of how mercantile societies operated, and how such societies might’ve reacted to conflict and war. Mai is a fabulous character, principled yet pragmatic, outwardly restrained but gifted at speaking persuasively when the need arises. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a character in a fantasy novel who appealed to me so much, and it’s been an even longer time since I’ve read a fantasy novel where all elements of the imagined society rang so true. I cannot wait to read the final book in the series.

Same, same but different October 28, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in life, memories, university.
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My first PhD year has begun not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a series of small volcanoes. It seems everything that could go wrong went wrong.

First up was a housing crisis. As I was not sure until mid-August that I had the funding to continue with my PhD, I had given up my old lease, thinking to save money. This, of course, required me to flit between London and Cambridge, from friends’ couch to spare bedroom to floor, in a rather chaotic, peripatetic manner. This caused all kinds of problems, ranging from living out of a suitcase, wearing the same four outfits over and over again, to getting on the bad side of college and being woken in the middle of the night by angry porters.

Almost as soon as I had my own roof over my head, I had a computer crisis. My college, until last year, did not require Mac users to run a virus scan in order to use the college network. This year, all that changed, and I was forced to suffer the indignity of installing McAfee antivirus software on my poor computer. Bernard, my computer, liked it no better than I did. The internet slowed to a dial-up speed crawl, and constantly froze. After several hysterical conversations with both my college tutor and my supervisor (who was so outraged she considered forcing college to pay for a new computer), I got one of the local tech-heads to fix Bernard for me. Everything’s working fine now, but if you know anything about me, you’ll know that depriving me of internet for two weeks will not be a pretty sight.

Once that was sorted out, I got a cold of epic proportions. My old doctor used to prescribe me with seretide, taken through an asthma puffer. If I used it twice a day in the few days when my throat started to feel scratchy, the worst symptoms of the cold would normally pass me by. She did this because until the age of 23, I got colds so badly that they’d last for months, causing me to get a hacking cough that would continue ceaselessly, giving me sleepless nights and aching muscles. So when I got the Cold From Hell, I went to my Cambridge doctor, hoping to get a new prescription. No such luck. ‘That’s a steroid’, he said, when I showed him my seretide puffer. ‘You’ll become dependent on it if you use it too much.’ As my friend said to me when I complained about this, ‘You’re kind of dependent on breathing, too.’ Well, no breathing for Ronni, apparently.

I’m finally better from the cold, and all healthy and ready to face whatever disaster Cambridge next throws at me.

I’m enjoying my first PhD year so far. After struggling to write for ages, I did what I always do when I’m getting writers’ (and researchers’) block: schedule a meeting with my supervisor, which tends to scare me into getting back to work. It worked: I’ve now written nearly 2000 words in two days! Only 78,000 to go!

I’m sitting in on a lot of undergrad classes. My favourite is probably Medieval Irish, where we whip through texts at a much greater speed than we did last year. We’re currently translating Audacht Morainn (‘The Testament of Morann’), which is part legal text, part wisdom literature. It’s all about how to be a good ruler. I’m also taking second-year Latin, where we’re translating St Patrick’s rather idiosyncratic Confessio, and Welsh, where we’re translating the seriously baffling Canu Urien (‘Songs of Urien’). Finally, I’m taking beginners’ Modern Irish, which I love.

As far as life goes, I’m happy, but it’s a happiness tinged with nostalgic melancholy. Last year was just so perfect that it was always going to be impossible to top. I think part of the reason I loved 2008-2009 was because I’d been so miserable for so long before that. It was not going to be hard to have a better year than 2007! And so my friends in my department were kindred spirits, both in their love of all things obscurely medieval and in their love of the pub. My housemates were perfect (aside from the inability of some of them to do the washing up), and they became not merely the people I lived with, but good friends. I have to try hard not to make unfair comparisons, but it’s difficult. I’m in the same house, but with entirely different people, and the dynamic of the house has changed. None of my close MPhil friends continued on for the PhD, and to make matters worse, many of my good undergrad and postgrad friends also graduated.

Last academic year was so good in so many ways. It gave me the confidence I’d always been lacking. It gave me the sense of place for which I’d always been searching. It gave me the sense of purpose for which I’d always yearned. It was always going to be a hard act to follow, but I never imagined it would be this hard. Up until last year, I always looked back with nostalgia at previous stages in my life, wishing I could do them again. I did not do so last academic year, and imagined myself to have broken the cycle. Apparently I have not.

‘Said the crow to the raven…’ October 5, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, fangirl, reviews.
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(Vaguely spoilery for A Song of Ice and Fire.) I’m always on the lookout for new fantasy series, preferably of books that go beyond the usual cliches. I’ve read enough about elves, dwarves, swords, sorcery and dragons to last me a lifetime, and gritty, urban vampire-werewolf crime-fighting only held my attention for a few months before I realised how appalling most of the writing was and how difficult it was to find ‘urban fantasy’ that wasn’t Anita Blake-style paranormal romance. I still hold a great deal of affection for Celtic and historical fantasy, but it’s usually so sweet-natured (unless written by Sara Douglass) that after a while I feel like I’ve overdosed on toffee and caramel.

So this summer I thought I’d try out George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I’m surprised it took me so long. I first became aware of ASoIaF (there’s a clunky abbreviation!) when Jo Walton linked to a series of redesigned fantasy book covers, supposedly with titles that accurately described the books. ASoIaF was retitled ‘Knights Who Say Fuck’. This made me giggle a bit, but then I forgot the series again until Neil Gaiman made his infamous blog post berating a Martin fan who was getting impatient at Martin’s seeming inability to complete the series: ‘Look,’ wrote Gaiman, ‘George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.’ Martin was clearly a writer who aroused strong reactions (and, apparently, caused me to swear twice on this blog, something I try not to do). Then one of my friends on TRoH started reading the series and posting about it, and I knew it was time to do the same myself.

I adored it. So much so that I devoured all five books in about a week (and they devoured my bank account). I joined the legion of impatient fans desperate for Martin to overcome the writer’s block he’s been suffering while struggling to complete the sixth book, A Dance With Dragons, although, as a fan of Isobelle Carmody (who began her Obernewtyn series in the 80s and is yet to complete it) I’m a little more understanding than most.

But what is so special about ASoIaF? Isn’t it just another vaguely historical, swords and sorcery epic fantasy? There are dragons and a ‘dark power brewing in the North’, after all, but there the resemblance to paint-by-numbers epic fantasy ends. ASoIaF is loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, one of the most violent, fratricidal, betrayal-filled periods of English history. The thing that has always struck me about the Wars of the Roses was their pointlessness. It was as if the country went insane for 100 years, experienced an orgy of killing, intrigue and backstabbing until all of the original combatants were dead, and then a victor who had sat back and enjoyed the show climbed over the corpses to get the prize. The struggles left the country reeling, ruined and disoriented, although the deaths of so many of the nobility would lead to great social mobility and change.

In ASoIaF, however, we haven’t got to the end of the battles yet. Martin appears to be wrapping up one of his main arcs (involving his versions of the Yorkists and Lancastrians, the Starks and Lannisters) and moving on to another arc involving Daenerys Targaryen, the Henry Tudor figure. Readers who have stuck with the series for the first five books have been treated to thousands of pages of death, battle, torment and brutality. ASoIaF is certainly not for the faint-hearted or the weak-stomached. A friend of mine warned me before I began reading that Martin was not averse to killing off main characters, and that no character was safe. There were moments where I was on the verge of tearing the book up, I was so angry with the injustice of what Martin was putting his characters through.

But at the same time, that injustice and emotional manipulation is what makes the series so refreshing. Martin has broken one of the cardinal rules of epic fantasy: moral uprightness does not protect a character from death. In most other fantasy series of this style, if a character’s cause is just and he or she is a good person, he or she survives. At worst, a character might die heroically, knowing he or she has ushered in a newer, better order. Martin doesn’t treat his readers like escapist idiots. Good women are abused and murdered, protective mothers see their sons die before their eyes and even children travel across the country, tortured, taken advantage of, emotionally abused, only to have their every hope and dream dashed before their eyes. Most importantly, people who put honour and morality and compassion before reason suffer the logical consequences of a dishonourable, immoral and cruel world.

This is the absolute opposite of what normally happens in fantasy novels, where such people are rewarded for their positive qualities. Martin also doesn’t shy away from depicting the brutality of war. Every battle he describes is followed by pages of narrative outlining the suffering meted out to the unfortunate peasants who happen to live nearby the site of the battle. Martin’s choices show great respect for fantasy readers, who are often dismissed as soft-hearted, dreamy fantasists, people who read speculative fiction for ‘escapism’.

There’s no escape here. Readers looking for a nice story about elves and dragons, with black and white morality and glorious heroism will be sadly disappointed. Those who like their fantasy to provide a window into reality will feel right at home.

I don’t go to parties, baby August 29, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in fangirl, music.
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Any street cred this blog ever had is going to go out the window, because I am about to write about Regurgitator. That’s right, you read that correctly. Regurgitator. My non-Australian readers are probably scratching their heads right now, befuddled. If you don’t want to read about a rather popular 1990s Australian electronic rock band who sang about apathy, agoraphobia and video games, I give you leave to tune out. My Australian readers are probably scratching their heads in befuddlement for a different reason. Why would I want to write about Regurgitator?

Quite simply because I think they were one of the best bands in Australia in the 90s. Their music, in particular in the albums Unit and …Art was a sign of the times as much as the adolescent shrieks of Silverchair and the melodic, barely suppressed anger of the Whitlams. These three young nerds from Brisbane (and why is it that so much of the best Australian bands came out of Brisbane? I can’t for the life of me think of anything else to recommend the place) captured something essential about the experience of teenagers and twentysomethings in the Howard years.

Our esteemed former prime minister claimed when he came to power in 1996 that he wanted Australians to feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’, not angsty about our past and frightened about our future. The burning debates of his predecessor, Paul Keating, about reconciliation with the Stolen Generation of indigenous Australians, about Australia’s relationship with Asia, about the environment, about the importance of the arts and intellectual life in Australian culture, were swept under the rug, out of sight but certainly not out of mind. And people were not happy.

One of the big differences between my generation and previous generations (aside from Gen X, whose attitudes and tastes did much to shape the tastes of us Gen Y types, much as both generations would prefer to deny it) is that we reacted to unhappiness and dissatisfaction not with protest and action, but with despair, withdrawal and ennui. Not for nothing are we known as the ‘whatever’ generation. We certainly weren’t relaxed and comfortable – in many cases we were simmering with rage, but we preferred a quieter, less public, form of revolution. We retreated inside. And for the first time, we had the technology to help us.

Regurgitator tapped into all of this. They were, now that I think about it, one of the first bands to recognising the potential for the internet and video games to exacerbate depression and disconnect. Take the lyrics for the song ‘Virtual Life’, the final song on …Art. It’s about a television, but it might as well be about the internet:

I’ve got everything
That I could ever need
It’s under lock and key
Just survive all alone me and my screens

(I hasten to add that this is only one way the internet might affect you. For me, the internet has been nothing but a joy, a source of many fantastic new circles of friends and a place that has taught me so much.)

What about ‘Everyday Formula’ and ‘Black Bugs’, which riff on the same theme, but in relation to video games? Again we find this same emphasis on raising the drawbridge, dropping the portcullis and closing the curtains as a reaction to profound fear of, and disgust at, society:

I got killed by black bugs on my video game
And although to myself it doesn’t mean too much
I keep dying and dying over and over again
But I feel I’m alive so I’ll just pretend

People think that because Regurgitator’s music is full of cheesy electronic notes that wouldn’t be out of place in an old school video game, because they recorded an album in a plastic bubble in the middle of Federation Square and because they pepper their albums with silly, scatological songs, that they are incapable of being serious. But they’re deadly serious when they’re talking about the plastic, fakeness of celebrity and society, as in ‘Polyester Girl’, ‘Happiness’ and ‘Freshmint!. Right when they’re at their most humorous, they’re at their most cutting:

I love pointless effluent
It seems to love me
It’s sticking to my heart like polythene glue
Making everything seem so sweet

Big wide world of bitterness baby
Poisoning up this tongue
Giving this life its sweet respite
Let’s rip that packet of fun

Rotting my brain once again
It’s always the same and never ends (x2)

Love me lovely cathode-ray
Mother me in your glow
I’ll do anything you say
If you tell me I’ll never be alone

Touch me shiny magazine
Touch me way down there
I can’t help but imagining
That you really care

Powerful stuff.

Regurgitator’s appeal always lay in the fact that we knew they were a trio of basement-dwelling nerds. But they were basement-dwelling nerds with something to say, deeply worried about what was going on in society, able to sum up the fears, passivity and neuroses of a generation which had collectively decided that what was going on in the world outside was intolerable, unendurable, and impossible to change. They never spoke about our dreams, because how could such a generation possibly dream? They were deeply, deeply daggy, and revelled in their dagginess. How could one forget ‘The Song Formerly Known As’, a riot of rejection, door-closing and denial?

As the song progresses, the singer rejects parties (‘I don’t go to parties baby/ ‘Cos people tend to freak me out’), discos (‘Won’t see me down the disco mama/ Bright lights really hurt my eyes’), concerts (‘I don’t go to concerts baby/ The music’s always up too loud’) and raving (‘Won’t see me tribal raving/ Cos I won’t ever look that good/ Rather dance in ugly pants/ in the comfort of a loungeroom in surburbia’). It’s the petulant whine, ‘no, no, no, I don’t do that, I don’t do anything, everything is too scary, it’s too much, it’s unendurable’ dressed up as a rousing nerd anthem.

Or is it? ‘The Song Formerly Known As’ is also a nerdy chat up line. (‘Things don’t get no better/ better than you and me’, after all.) It’s a rejection of all the meaningless externalities that get in the way of real relationships. Let’s raise the drawbridge, drop the portcullis and shut the curtains against all those vacuous discos, concerts and parties and stay at home, rejecting the world together. Everything out there is meaningless. Whatever. I don’t go to parties, baby.

I leave you with the video clip for ‘The Song Formerly Known As’. Enjoy!

Time heals all wounds August 29, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in books, fangirl, reviews.
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4 comments

An appropriate sub-heading to this might be ‘Time heals all wounds, Tide causes them’. This is a post that has been at the back of my mind since about February, when I finally read The Chaos Crystal, the fourth and final book of Jennifer Fallon’s Tide Lords series. But the ideas have been with me since 2006, when I read two series that I found extraordinarily influential: Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (yes, point and laugh now) and Sara Douglass’s Troy Game series. It’s probably fair to point out here that this post will be liberally sprinkled with spoilers for all three series.

What these books have in common is an emphasis on the theme of immortality, and its moral and ethical implications. In Anne Rice’s series, this immortality is the result of vampirism, and is an imperfect immortality – her undead can die, although, as the series goes on, you might be forgiven for thinking that all vampires are undead, but some are more undead than others. In Douglass’s series, the main characters are immortal through reincarnation. They all become bound up in the ‘Troy Game’, a labyrinthine weaving pattern that is linked to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the fall of Troy, and, eventually, the history of London. The characters screw up so epically in their first lives that they keep getting reincarnated (picking up various divine and semi-divine qualities along the way) in order to fix things up in their next lives. But Douglass’s immortals can – and do – die, provided enough supernatural firepower is thrown at them.

Fallon’s immortals are different. They really, really, really cannot die. Some of them have lived for millions of years. One of them, Cayal, has lived for several thousand, and is starting to get anxious. He becomes suicidal because he’s worried that one day he’ll get bored. (Fallon originally wanted to name the first book of the series ‘The Suicidal Immortal’, which gives you some idea of what she thought the focus would be.)

But whether the immortals of these books get their everlasting life from an exchange of blood, a malevolent, city-destroying Game or by walking through a fire (as in the Tide Lords), they share a concern with the way immortality affects people (and I use the term loosely, as you shall see below). Immortality does two things, not quite simultaneously.

It gives people freedom – that is, it releases them completely from the morality and constraints of society. On one level this means that immortals are free to be outrageous (the vampire Lestat becomes a rock star, swaps bodies with a human being to re-experience human frailty and mortality and goes on a Dante-esque journey through heaven and hell all within a few years; one of Douglass’s immortals is reincarnated as Charles II, surely the very definition of outrageous excess). On another, it means they’re free to outrage (Asterion/Weyland, the reincarnated Minotaur, plants an imp in the womb of Cornelia/Caela/Noah/Eaving which causes her constant pain and eventually rips its way out – and, being Douglass, this is the start of a beautiful relationship. That I also end up viewing this relationship as beautiful is either testament to Douglass’s talents as a writer, or a marker of my own insanity). Fallon’s immortals tend to be more of the second type – mad, bad and dangerous to know. The common thread is that all of them behave like the gods of Greek mythology: not omnipotent, not omnipresent, and certainly not omniscient, more interested in their own amusement and gratification, no matter how many human veins they have to drain, cities they have to flatten, or, in the case of the Tide Lords, worlds they have to destroy, to achieve it. This kind of immortality is at once intensely human – childishly destructive – and utterly inhuman – id incarnate. They see the world as their playground, even if the playground is built out of bones. When they notice human beings at all, they might as well be looking at an alien species, they are so divorced from what it means to be human. You see, human morality is utterly bound up in human mortality, the threat of death. Take that away, and the morality has to change.

(Oddly enough, to segue briefly away, this is how I’ve always viewed Cathy and Heathcliff. They’re so utterly, completely bound up in themselves that they cease to resemble human beings at all.)

This has other implications for the morality of immortality. You’d think the by removing the threat of death, immortals would be more compassionate to their fellow ever-living living ones, but no. Think of your Greek myths. Immortals love to hurt one another, but without death to restrain them, their torment eventually takes on the characteristics of a game. Oh, sure, the hatred might be vitriolic and caused by real grievances, but eventually it falls away due to the sheer weight of accumulated time. Life is too long to hold grudges. Just as siblings tend to be more forgiving of one anothers’ faults out of a kind of respect at having grown up in the same circumstances, immortals in this type of literature will eventually forgive and even love their deadly enemies out of a kind of respect for their shared existence.

Time heals all wounds, you see, and time stretches on awfully long if you don’t have an Asterion with whom to share it.

Timeless August 8, 2009

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This morning, I tucked myself away in a corner of the University Library’s West Room, and read Michael Ende’s glorious, gem of a fable, Momo (spoilers in the link and in my review). You might think it odd that I had not read this book as a child, but my youthful reading list, A Little Princess aside, was remarkably Australian, now that I think about it. The edition I read was translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn.

Ende is the author of The Neverending Story, which is certainly next on my reading list!

The eponymous heroine of Momo is a wise little girl who, in the tradition of fairytale heroines everywhere, knows how to see the heart of things. She lives in a ruined amphitheatre on the outskirts of a city never named, but which is probably Rome. Momo has a remarkable talent for listening and hearing the stories that everyone, even the most mundane, boring people, have inside them. She has a startling imagination and always makes the games of other children more entrancing. In short, she gulps life down with relish.

That’s a threat to the grey, sinister members of the ‘Timesaving Bank’, who are out to convince people to live life at a rushed, manic pace. In their opinion, the small joys of life – chatting to customers, singing with friends, lingering over a meal, and even dreaming – are time-wasting distractions. They convince most of the members of Momo’s neighbourhood to sign over their ‘free’ time. When Momo objects to this, they target her friends in an attempt to frighten her.

But Momo has an ally in Professor Secundus Minutus Hora, a benevolent, disinterested god (in the ‘clockmaker’ model; why is it that gods and imagery of time seem so perfectly wedded?), who helps Momo see time for what it is – life in all its wonder. With this knowledge, Momo is able to save her friends from a miserable existence of fast food, regimented activities and toys that sap creativity and imagination (in one scene, Ende parodies Barbie dolls with broad brushstrokes – Momo comes upon a doll with which she cannot play, that only asks for more and more consumer products).

It’s hard to tell if Ende’s story, which was written in 1973, is anti-communist (Karl Marx is all but named as the ‘architect’ of the world in which Momo and her friends live), anti-capitalist (the aforementioned diatribe against toys which encourage consumerism supports this reading) or simply anti-twentieth-century values. In the end, Ende’s ideological position is irrelevant. He’s for the storytellers, the stories, and the small moments needed to listen to them, and that is all that matters.

‘If I heed your words, that is all I that I shall ever have’ August 3, 2009

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I’ve been wanting to do a post of quotes for a while, and now seems the right time to do it. I’ve been keeping a little notebook of quotes for about 10 years now, adding to it whenever I read or hear a particularly well-phrased set of words, and I’m almost at the end of the book, so today seems a particularly appropriate era-ending date for committing the words to cyberspace. I’ll try to keep things vaguely chronological.

‘People who read are always a little bit like you. You can’t just tell them. You have to tell them why.’ – Catherine Jinks, Pagan’s Crusade.

‘Tell them stories.’ – Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass.

‘Many different lamentations came to pierce me like arrows
Whose shafts were barbed with pity.’ – Dante Alighieri, Inferno, XXIX, 43-44.

‘She held the spindle as she sat
Erinna with the thick-coiled mat
Of raven hair and deepest agate eyes
Gazing with a sad surprise
At surging visions of her destiny
To spin the byssus drearily
In insect-labour, while the throng
Of goods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song.’ – George Eliot, chapter-heading poem to Daniel Deronda, chapter 51.

‘A man who cannot draw strength from himself but only from litanies and anthems, is far more dangerous than one who after reading a handbook thinks he can drive a car or plane.’ – Lajos Zihaly, The Angry Angel.

The entirety of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories ‘The Witness’ and ‘Everything and Nothing’.

‘If I heed your words that is all
that I shall ever have.
If I have no sword
where then shall I seek peace?

A sword might win a Peace’s time from tumult;
no peace have the hungry,
and so the Peace is made from the work of gathered days
the many’s many choices.’ – Graydon Saunders and Jo Walton, ‘Theodwyn’s Rede’.

‘I have been a prize in a game
I have been a queen on a hill
From far and far they flocked to see me.

White I am, amongst the shadows,
My shoulder is noted for its fairness
The two best men in all the world have loved me.

My crown is of apple, bough and blossom.
They wear my favour but my arms are empty.
The boat drifts heedless down the dark stream.’ – Jo Walton, ‘The Three Great Queens of the Island of Tir Tanagiri’.

‘ “There is only one good reason for fighting – and that is, if the other man started it. You see, wars are a wickedness of a wicked people. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop him.”

“But both sides always say that the other side started them.”

“Of course they do, and it is a good thing that it should be so. At least, it shows that both sides are conscious, inside themselves, that the wicked thing about a war is its beginning.” ‘ – T. H. White, The Witch In The Wood.

‘Begone from me, oh mortals who are pure of heart. Be gone from my thoughts, oh souls who dream great dreams. Be gone from me, all hymns of glory. I am the magnet for the damned. At least for a little while. And then my heart cries out, my heart will not be still, my heart will not give up, my heart will not give in – the blood that teaches life does not teach lies, and love becomes again my reprimand, my goad, my song.’ – Anne Rice, Blood Canticle.

‘Let the young sing songs of death. They are stupid. The finest thing under the sun and the moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition and despair. I marvel at human endurance.’ – Anne Rice, Pandora.

‘No one can get in
Our world.
It has a wall twenty feet high
and adults
have only ten foot ladders.’ – Ross Falconer.

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth (V, v, 17-28).

‘These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep.’ – William Shakespeare, The Tempest, (IV: i).

‘ “I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might’ve been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.” ‘ – Ursula Le Guin, The Other Wind.

‘Novii, novissimi – newer, newest. “The new” … “The newer newest. The newly come, no Novian but one. The newer branch of the Novian stem. No Novian but another comes to ruin you. Save yourself from that, if you think you can.” ‘ – Sophia McDougall, Rome Burning.

‘ “Are you Asterion?” “You flatter me, child, if you think me that malevolent”’ – Sara Douglass, Hades’ Daughter.

‘I have made Asterion “like”. I am a witch indeed.’ – Sara Douglass, Darkwitch Rising.

‘He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognised the names by which it called itself.’ – Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

‘Other countries have stories of kings who will return at times of great need. Only in England is it written in the constitution.’ – Ibid.

‘There are few things on earth that couldn’t be improved by adding vampires to them.’ – Scott Westerfeld.

‘The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise.’ – G. K. Chesterton, ‘Lepanto’.

‘Nine things about oracles
Let me try to be clear.
The first thing is that nobody wants to know,
and yet you can’t stop asking.
The second is you all want reassurance:
be better off with a fortune cookie.
The third is that I don’t owe you anything,
you’re not what it’s about.
I see the tiles, sideways, sometimes,
tessera, tesserae, the way the pattern
plays out in fifths, the beat falling
unchangedly, a glimpse, a resposte in sixte,
and what will be set, sept, set down in stone,
the colours always ambiguous
even in the moment the threads part,
the owls crying in the october meadow
gods and time and weight, wait,
that one instant of vision, the curtain falling, parting,
there is a whole ocean
crashing toward
that ninth wave.’ – Jo Walton, ‘Nine Things About Oracles’.

‘Rushing down every path; that is the great madness.’ – Buile Shuibne, translated by J. G. O’Keefe.

‘Without foray with a king,
I am alone in my home,
without glorious reavings,
without friends, without music…
Without a house right full,
without the converse of generous men,
without the title of a king,
without drink, without food.
Alas that I have been parted here
from my mighty, armed host…
Though I be as I am tonight,
there was a time
when my strength was not feeble
over a land that was not bad…
in my auspicious kingship
I was a good, great king.’ – Ibid.

‘My transgression has come against me
whatsoever way I flee;
’tis manifest to me from the pity shown me
that I am a sheep without a fold.’ – Ibid.

‘Sad this expedition;
would that I had not come!
Far from my home
is the country I have reached.’ – Ibid.

There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel Claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged claws: alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy, the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart
Thine eyes grow full of tender care,
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.’ – W. B. Yeats, ‘The Two Trees’.

‘In America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas.’ – Neil Gaiman.

These are all literary (as opposed to quotes from cinema, TV or music) but I think that’s enough to be going on with for now.

‘All’s there to love/ Only love’ August 3, 2009

Posted by dolorosa12 in fangirl, life, memories, music, reviews.
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This is not the post I intended to write. This is the post that came to me in an opium-induced dream…er, no. This is the post that popped into my head as I was wandering back from Mill Road, trying to think of ways to avoid packing my belongings up in preparation for moving house. The idea, however, has been bubbling around in my mind since Raphael came to visit in April. We were talking about music, and about the first band, song or album that caused us to really listen to music in a different way.

For me, that band was Massive Attack. The album was Mezzanine. The song was ‘Risingson’. The year was 2001.

When you are a child or young teenager, you listen to music in a rather undiscriminating way (I use ‘you’ to mean ‘me’, of course). The first people to inform your tastes are your parents, and you listen to their music in a rather passive way. You might end up preferring several bands over others, but you do not yet have the tools to articulate why. Thus, I liked The Pogues, Paul Simon, Deborah Conway, Steeleye Span and Annie Lennox, but didn’t really have any reason for doing so beyond a vague sense of liking the sound.

The same goes for when you get a little older and begin to be influenced more by your friends, the radio and music videos (well, if you’re a 90s child who grew up watching Rage and Video Hits or their equivalents). You like certain songs and bands because the people around you like them. Hence, Savage Garden, Hanson, Regurgitator, Backstreet Boys, Silverchair, Aqua and a truly bizarre parade of one-hit wonders (The Mavises? Eiffel 65? Shanks and Bigfoot?). But again these are the tastes of other people and not your own.

So what changes? Well, for me at least (a person who loves to reduce life to a series of ‘She turned a corner and everything changed’ moments), I listened to one song, and then one album, by one band, and it totally changed the way I listened to music, to the extent to which I believe that nothing I did before that moment can truly be called ‘listening to music’.

When I was 16, in early 2001, I went around to an acquaintance’s house with a bunch of other friends. We were meant to be preparing for a group oral presentation on Oedipus Rex for our English class, but, as in so many cases, we abandoned work in favour of socialising. One of my friends put on a CD. It was Mezzanine by Massive Attack.

I had heard their song ‘Teardrop’ before; it had been all over the airwaves in 2000, and I had enjoyed it and been seriously creeped out by its video clip. But I hadn’t thought about the band beyond that. As the scratchy, sinister notes of ‘Angel’ melded with Horace Andy’s silky singing, I pricked up my ears, and began to really listen. By the time we’d got to the next track, ‘Risingson’, I had begun to do something I’d never done before when listening to music: listening with half my ear attuned to the lyrics (which I was analysing like a literary text) and half my ear attuned to the way the lyrics and sound were perfectly fused:

‘Where have all those flowers gone?
Long time passing
Why you keep me tsk and keep me tasking
You keep on asking.’

Before the year was out, I’d bought Mezzanine and Massive Attack’s two other albums, Blue Lines and Protection (Hundredth Window had not been released at that stage). Although Mezzanine remained my favourite (and is, in fact, my favourite album still), I adored the earlier albums too. But why? Why would albums about race relations, immigration and the transformed culture of early 90s Britain (Blue Lines and Protection) and about disgust with the hedonism of the Bristol scene (Mezzanine, which is also meant to be the best album to get high to) have anything to say to a nerdy, middle-class, shy Canberran teenager?

Well, it was the twofold nature of Massive Attack’s lyrics that appealed. On the one hand, they were highly specific, tied to trip-hop, Bristol, Britain, the 90s. On the other, they reached out for the universal with literary and musical allusions. They were at once intensely self-absorbed and personal and overwhelmingly communicative and broadly-focused.

Take ‘Five Man Army’, the fifth track from Blue Lines. The song is packed with internal references to the band (‘Wild Bunch crew at large’) and its history (‘When I was a child I played subbuteo on/ My table then I graduate to studio one/ ’Cos D’s my nom de plume you know but 3’s my pseudonym’). At the same time, it manages to squeeze in a selection of pop-cultural shout-outs (‘I take a small step now it’s a giant stride/ People say I’m loud why should I hide’; ‘See we’re rockin’ in your area rock beneath your balcony/ My baby just cares for me well that’s funny/ Her touch tickles especially on my tummy’; ‘It’s started by Marconi resumed by Sony/ A summary by wireless history and only’; and, arguably, ‘Money money money/ Root of all evil’). There are a series of thematic riffs running through the song, melded coherently, dropped and picked up again at exactly the right place but emphasised in a slightly different way (‘I quietly observe/ Though it’s not my space’ subtly reworks the opening lyrics of ‘I quietly observe/ Standing in my space’, for example). This is a rap song, the type of rap song that is all about talking oneself up, but it’s posturing via literary allusion rather than the usual bragging about one’s car, posse and sexual prowess.

Aside from the lines ‘I quietly observe standing in my space/ Daydreaming’, which has become a kind of personal mantra, ‘Five Man Army didn’t really speak to me in any kind of meaningful way (although I gained great pleasure unpicking the lyrics and musing on the way they fitted together). But there are many Massive Attack songs that seemed to be written especially for me.

‘Protection’ spoke directly to my teenage loneliness, my (misplaced, as it turns out) sense of grief and my desire to be cared for. It sounds pathetic now, but when I was 17, and entering my second year of unrequited love, hearing the beautiful voice of Tracy Thorn singing

This girl I know needs some shelter
She don’t believe anyone can help her
She’s doing so much harm, doing so much damage
But you don’t want to get involved
You tell her she can manage
And you can’t change the way she feels
But you could put your arms around her

I know you want to live yourself
But could you forgive yourself
If you left her just the way
You found her

meant so much. Every time I hear that song, I remember all my wasted emotion on a guy I referred to in my diaries as ‘You’ (with the capital Y) and stared at in what I thought was a wanly plaintive expression across classrooms.

All teenagers have a misguided sense of the significance of their own suffering, but I’m grateful that my personal emo soundtrack was ‘Protection’ and not ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’.

If I was an emo, I was also a wannabe hippie. I kid you not when I say that as a teenager I truly intended to live out my adult days as an environmental protester. And, would you believe it, Massive Attack have a hippie, ‘everyone hold hands together and sing kumbaya’ song. It’s called ‘The Hymn of the Big Wheel’, and it is sung by the incomparable Horace Andy, and it is beautiful.

I’d like to feel that you could be free
Look up at the blue skies beneath a new tree
Sometime again
You’ll turn green and the sea turns red
My son I said the power of axis over my head
The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line day by day
The earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes

We sang about the sun and danced among the trees
And we listened to the whisper of the city on the breeze
Will you cry in the most in a lead-free zone
Down within the shadows where the factories drone
On the surface of the wheel they build another town
And so the green come tumbling down
Yes close your eyes and hold me tight
And I’ll show you sunset sometime again

I challenge you to listen to this and not be moved. It has an innocence and purity, and a knowing cynicism all at once. It could only have been written in the 90s, with the environmental movement hovering in the background, and the potential of the internet as a tool of both distance and closeness hovering beyond the comprehension of most people. The song makes you want to dance barefoot in the mud and watch the clouds, and then burst into tears at the thought of the butchered Tasmanian rainforests.

Then there’s the truly bizarre ‘Sly’. ‘I already know my children’s children’s faces/ Voices that I’ve heard before’. What the hell is that all about? And then we come to:

I feel like a thousand years have passed
I’m younger than I used to be
I feel like the world is my home at last
I know everyone that I meet [...]

Wondering is this there all there is
Since I was since I began to be
Wondering, wandering
Where we can do what we please
Wondering

If you think about those lyrics, you know all you’ll ever need to know to understand me as I was then, as I am now, and as I will always be. ‘Sly’ expresses a mindset of mine that is expressed in a similar way by Jo Walton in The King’s Peace, the first volume of her two-part Arthurian alt-history series:

What it is to be old is to remember things that nobody else alive can remember. I always say that when people ask me about my remarkable long life. Now they can hear me when I say it. Now, when I am ninety-three and remember so many things that are to them nothing but bright legends long ago and far away. I do not tell them that I said that first when I was seventeen, and felt it too…So I have been old by my own terms since I was seventeen.

- Jo Walton, The King’s Peace, Penguin, p ix.

I haven’t even got on to Mezzanine yet. In my mind, no one will ever make a more perfect album. (I know this is a controversial opinion among Massive Attack fans, since this was the album that caused serious fractures in the bands and marked a departure from Massive Attack’s original sound.) It is a brilliant, coherent unity of words, sound and theme. The songs can be paired to give a broader, more complex understanding of their writers’ ideas.

For example, ‘Inertia Creeps’ is a record of a destructive, unsatisfying relationship from the guy’s perspective. He knows there’s something not quite right going on (‘Will you take a string/ Say you string me along’), but he chooses to ignore it, so he can get some action, essentially. Two songs later (and it’s significant that the song between is called ‘Exchange’, since we exchange points of view) is ‘Dissolved Girl’, the same story told from the perspective of the girl. Only now do we have the complete story. She doesn’t love him, and he knows it, but says nothing. She stays because the alternative is worse, and says nothing. He can feel the inertia creeping, moving up slowly, and says nothing. She stays, despite the fact that the relationship is destroying her sense of self (‘Shame, such a shame/ I think I kind of lost myself again’). We’re meant to lose ourselves in love, but surely staying in a loveless relationship and allowing whatever happens to happen causes an equal loss of identity. A dissolution. It’s seriously powerful stuff, and I wish I could say that I appreciate it solely on an intellectual level.

Moving along, we come to what are in my opinion the ‘Big Three’ of the album (I adore ‘Teardrop’ to bits, but it’s so overplayed, and I will limit myself to saying that its lines ‘Love, love is a verb/ Love is a doing word’ are among my favourite song lyrics ever, and Liz Fraser’s vocals are incredible) – ‘Black Milk’, ‘Mezzanine’ and ‘Group Four’.

‘Black Milk’ has an illusion of simplicity. Its lines are short, brief, and almost curt. But a closer look reveals hidden depths. The hovering, dark notes of the music evokes the watery, dark corners of the ocean floor, and I almost picture a series of bizarre marine creatures, the lights on their bodies illuminating the gloom in the higher points of the music. Liz Fraser’s voice is incredible, cutting through the sinister music with shimmering clarity. The sound is amazingly cold, and amazingly pure. And what of the words themselves? They are beautiful, but kind of creepy at the same time:

Eat me
In the space
Within my heart

Unlike ‘Inertia Creeps’ and ‘Dissolved Girl’, which are about being lost in the lack of love, ‘Black Milk’ is about being lost in love:

All’s there to love
Only love

Next up is ‘Mezzanine’, in my opinion the most perfect song ever written (it could only be more perfect if it had a female singer soaring in above 3D and Daddy G). What can I say about it that I haven’t said already? I associate it with the SPOILER WARNING FOR THE ‘TROY GAME’ BOOKS relationship between Asterion/Weyland and Cornelia/Eaving/Noah in Sara Douglass’ Troy Game series, which is my model for Great Love And Its Power To Save The World And All People. Even as the lyrics allude to something I believe deeply (that true love is the instigator of personal improvement, and if it doesn’t change you, it’s not love), they are playfully punning:

I could be yours
We can unwind
All these other flaws
All these other flaws
All these other flaws
Will lead to mine

We can unwind
All these other flaws
All these other flaws
Will lead to mine
Will see to
All these other flaws
All these other flaws
Will see to
All these other flaws
Will lead to mine
We can unwind all our flaws
We can unwind all our flaws

Flaws-floors. The song’s called ‘Mezzanine’. Get it? It’s glorious stuff. (By the way, you might’ve noticed that I changed the lyrics from ‘All these have flaws’ as the lyrics website has to ‘All these other flaws’. I may be wrong, but I think that the lyrics should read ‘All these other flaws’. It makes more sense if the song is punning on flaws-floors.)

Finally we have ‘Group Four’, which acts as a counterpoint to the bleakness of ‘Inertia Creeps’ and ‘Dissolved Girl’. This song is sung by a man (3D) and a woman (Liz Fraser), unlike ‘Inertia Creeps’ and ‘Dissolved Girl’, which each have only one singer. They are in harmony. They are not lost and dissolved and inert. They are found. She is a person again, with a sense of self (‘See through me little glazed lane/ A world in myself/ Ready to sing’). He has lost his apathy and inertia (‘Flickering I roam’ and ‘I see to bolts/ Put keys to locks/ No boat are rocked/ I’m free to roam’). All is right with the world.

I could go on, but this post is now longer than some of the essays I’ve had to write for uni, and I don’t know how short your attention spans are. I’ve put a lot of myself into this post, and it is more personal than anything I would normally write on this particular blog, but it had to be said. Massive Attack absolutely changed the world for me. They made me listen to music in a different way, and have had an extraordinary influence on the way I appreciated both my old favourite bands and every new song I heard. Never before had music shown me both the world, and myself, more clearly.

The past is always tense July 24, 2009

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I’ve been told that this is necessary: SPOILER WARNING FOR THE ENTIRE HARRY POTTER SERIES. Sorry to anyone who might’ve been inadvertently been spoiled.

When shall I be dead and rid
Of the wrong my father did?
How long, how long, till spade and hearse
Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

This quote comes from A. E. Housman’s ‘The Welsh Marches’, and also serves as the epigraph to The Witch In The Wood, the second book in T. H. White’s Arthurian cycle The Once And Future King. But it could just as easily serve as an epigraph to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

I sense confusion may be emanating from my readers at this point, so I will elaborate. I’ve been participating in a bit of discussion on the Republic of Heaven since the Half-Blood Prince film came out, and one conclusion that I reached was that, for me at least, the Harry Potter books ceased to be about the magic a long time ago.

We all take different things from books, and for me, Harry Potter is above all a story not about magic, not about growing up, and certainly not about the Campbellian hero’s journey. It’s about family and history.

When Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban came out, focusing as it did on Sirius Black, I decided that Rowling was a genius. She’d taken a ‘throwaway reference’ to a ‘minor character’ in Book 1 and woven a whole new strand of the story around him. By the time we’d got to Book 5, however, I realised that the reference was not quite as ‘throwaway’ as it might’ve seemed. No, Rowling had planned, right from the beginning, to write a story about (for matters of simplicity) three generations. The ‘grandparent generation’ (Dumbledore, Grindelwald and Tom Riddle, whom I’m including in this generation although he doesn’t fit into it perfectly) caused the problems. The ‘parent generation’ (Harry’s parents, Sirius, Remus Lupin, the extended Black family, and, above all, Severus Snape) were unable to make common cause in the face of the problems and thus exacerbated them. The ‘present generation’ (Harry and his friends and nemeses from Hogwarts) is thus forced to deal with conflicts and problems that have been accumulating and intensifying for more than two generations.

What’s interesting, though, is that none of this is revealed at the beginning of the series. In fact, it really takes five books for readers to gain this information (although clever readers with a talent for riddles might’ve picked up more from earlier books), and it is not until the seventh book that the extent and scope of this theme becomes completely clear. There have certainly been countless fantasy books written about young characters having to overcome the traumas and difficulties of the past, but the difference is that such traumas are explicit from the beginning. A young boy’s father was a traitor: how does he convince everyone that he is loyal? A teenage girl wants to be a seer, but her mother burnt down the seer school: can the girl be trusted? Nothing in Harry Potter is so clear.

Rowling has said that the series is ‘all about death’, but in fact it is all about families: the family we are born into (and burdened with) and the family that we find, choose and make for ourselves. This is reinforced by the wizarding world’s preoccupation with matters of purity of the blood, and the incestuous, tangled family trees that result from many old wizarding families’ racism. Dumbledore and Sirius are born into just such ‘pureblood’ families, and spend their lifetimes trying to repent for this (Dumbledore after a youthful flirtation with a belief in pureblood superiority, Sirius after entering Hogwarts and choosing to rebel from his family in the way most calculated to horrify them). Tom Riddle, Snape and Harry are all, essentially, half-bloods (I’m aware Harry’s mother was a witch, but she came from a Muggle background, and the parallels between these three characters are obvious), and all orphans, and it is their reaction to this that really drives the narrative of the series. Riddle clings to half-remembered tales of his wizarding ancestors’ glories, and in the process becomes inhuman, Snape succumbs to self-hatred, choosing bigotry because it’s easier than examining his soul (except when he has a change of heart, but I’m getting to that), and Harry, in a sense, is left to clean up the mess caused by the choices of these other two half-blooded wizards.

The point Rowling is making is that in life, we all have to make choices, and when we make the crucial choices, we are bound by our families both blood and chosen. We have an upbringing we can accept or reject in making such choices, but any outcome will be influenced by our upbringing (and the beliefs it instills). Dumbledore chooses Grindelwald, and then spends a lifetime making up for it. Tom Riddle chooses, and becomes Lord Voldemort. Sirius chooses, and spends a lifetime extending his middle finger to the Black family. Lily Evans chooses James Potter, and then chooses to sacrifice herself for her son. Snape chooses, and chooses bigotry before Lily, only to be unable to accept the ultimate outcome of this choice – and so he does something odd for characters in this book: he chooses again. He chooses to change sides, hated by all, trusted by none (save Dumbledore), alone. His redemption is not entirely convincing. He does not become a nice person. He does not really renounce his objectionable beliefs. He lives beset by contradictions: he did the right thing to save a dead woman, and ends up sacrificing everything in order to save her son (whom he despises).

Ultimately, it’s this struggle to escape the sins of the past that makes the series so powerful. Rowling’s is a world where history is heavy, constraining and ever-present. To quote Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, ‘the past is always tense’ in the Potterverse. The sins of the father (and the mother, and the grandfather, and the second cousin once-removed) are repeated and passed on, and never properly dealt with. It is only when several characters make incredibly difficult choices that they take responsibility for this history and things are made right.