Is a vampire as old as he looks or as he feels?

John and Hank Green are the most delightful video bloggers ever to grace the extremely-small screen, a fact that I had forgotten in my year-and-a-half of blog absence.  This year-and-a-half was, coincidentally, also the time period in which I devoured the Twilight series, and then spent months and months hungover, trying to purge my soul of the bitter ideological aftertaste of my days of fevered vampire-werewolf enthrallment.

So suffice it to say that I fundamentally agree with every single word that John Green utters in the following video review of the Twilight phenomenon:



I am especially glad to hear someone else give voice to the misgivings that I so often feel in paranormal, YA-ish tales (Buffy and Twilight among them): why is this not statutory rape??? Why are we not at all troubled by the difference in maturity between the sixteen-year-old heroine and her ancient vampire/werewolf/godly lover?  Does this just go back to the romance trope of the experienced older man who brings a broad skill set and empowering expertise to care for the innocent maiden he wants? (Message: men's value = competent love- and decisionmaking, women's value = indecisive ignorance that guarantees their biddability and, shall we say, sexual focus.)  

Just put the age old reversal test to yourself: if the genders were inverted in these romantic relationships, and a century-old vampiress began to pursue a teenage boy, how would we as readers feel about that? (Careful now: we know how the teenage boy would feel - blessed by the gods.  But how would we feel about watching it happen?)

Ah Twilight, you've done it again.  Will you never stop turning me into a wizened old curmudgeon?

Sunday Salon: Calypso in January



Greetings, fellow Sunday Saloners!  This week has seen a colossal effort on my part to step up my blogging pace, a feat which is easier to manage during the part of the week in which I am not actually teaching.

What have I been up to all week long?

Well, there have been a few posts:
I have been embroiled in a marathon continuous reading of Homer's Odyssey, as I explained in "The Tears of Odysseus." In the end, this event was every bit as delightful as I hoped it would be. My group, ominously dubbed "Buck Naked on a Plank," was on from 11 p.m. to midnight on Friday, performing for a select crowd no doubt drawn in by the promise of our name.  And boy, did we deliver.  (Not, I hasten to add, to the point of total nudity.)

I had never realized how profoundly funny Book 5 is. It is the book in which Athena complains to the council of the gods that the immortal Calypso has hijacked Odysseus' fated homecoming, and is holding him in sexual captivity on her island Ogygia. (Calypso's named has all sorts of connotations of devouring concealment - she is generally assumed to represent the alluring danger of femininity and sexual thrall for Odysseus).  Zeus sends Hermes off to wrest Odysseus back from the loving arms of the nymph, who only gives him up after giving Hermes a thorough tongue-lashing for the gods' double-standard on mortal/godly relationships (A-OK for male gods, forbidden for goddesses).  Odysseus sets forth with Calypso's "help" and "blessing," only to be discovered by the vengeful Poseidon (still pissed about the blinding of his son, the Cyclops), who batters him with a storm until the sympathetic nymph Ino gives him a magical scarf that takes him safely to shore.  There he hides himself in the brush - like a coal burning overnight amidst a safe covering of ashes - and gets some much needed rest.

I was cast as the three immortal women who come to Odysseus' aid - Athena, Calypso, and Ino.  By the time he gets help from Ino at the end of the book, of course, he is thoroughly mistrustful of the reliability of divine aid.  After all, you never know when some too-perfectly timed assistance may end in years of sexual enthrallment on an island paradise.  It is only when Poseidon's storm destroys his ships and all of "divine Calypso's [other] gifts" (including the clothes that are weighing him down and drowning him, as Calypso's love has a tendency to do), that he makes use of Ino's hints.

I played Athena as a politician, carefully working the eternal senatorial negotiations of Olympos; Calypso as a conniving two-faced wretch who chokes on the word "wife" every time she talks about how glad she is to help Odysseus get back home; and Ino the Nymph as a eager dolphin who bobs gleefully at the edge of the hero's raft (this last improvised at the last moment in response to my colleague's dolphin-like chirping when I first popped buoyantly up at the periphery of his naval suffering).

Odysseus was a Newfie old-timer who spent more time discoursing on the harshness of fate with his tormented soul (played by a sock puppet in the shape of a friendly dragon) than talking to the goddesses who are trying to help him. Hermes did calisthenics and careful stretches before running about the auditorium, casting chairs this way and that.  Our chorus tossed lines back and forth between themselves with increasing urgency while describing the storm that Poseidon sends for Odysseus.

We left no entendre undoubled in Fagles's really profoundly sexual description of the storm (Odysseus rides the waves like a horse, stroking vigorously, and then rejoices to reach the land where men love their long oars. No, really.) At the point where Ino encourages Odysseus to cast aside Calypso's gifts (of clothing) and wear only her own magic scarf (of buoyancy?), our Odysseus ripped off his breakaway pants while the chorus sang a strip-club melody.

At the end, the MC said to the audience, "Well, I think a new standard has been set for us."

Then she said to us, "That was amazing! Gone is this idea that Homer is some work of high literature."

"That's our goal at the English Department" I replied. "Deflating high literature, one work at a time."

As a reward for our labors in the service of literature, we got this wonderful shirt, a shirt so implicitly troubling I am not sure I will ever be able to wear it out of the house.  But I will delight in it nonetheless:




What am I reading today?
  • My most vital task involves reading the first book in Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, for a blogalogue with my friend JP.  He is reading them for his comp exams, and I have promised with delight to read it along with him and engage in a blog dialogue.  Then, as always, my true indolence shone through, and I fell terribly behind.  But now my blogalogue partner has posted his first entry on the trilogy, and advertised Molloy to me as "the greatest novel I have ever read," significantly increasing my eagerness to read it.
  • I am in the midst of Amanda McCabe's historical romance, The Winter Queen, which takes my romance reading out of the 19th century for once and into the court of Elizabeth I.  To be honest, this is one of my favorite places to be.  It is a period I was obsessed with as a child, when (and I hope you appreciate how embarrassing this revelation is to me) I could recite the entirety of Elizabeth's "I have the heart of a king, and a king of England too" speech.  Yup.  Sure could.
  • I am within forty pages of the end of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equitorial Pacific, so I anticipate the delightful contrast of cycling between the Beckett, The Winter Queen and the tales of remote Kiribati that make up this non-fiction book.
Apart from this, I want to finish my rereads of The Bacchae and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for class this week.  We are having a great discussion of tragedy as a species of ritual sacrifice in my Intro to Drama class, and of how game play relates to ideas about providence/fate, luck, moral choice, and probability in my post-56 British drama class.  Is it possible to enjoy games of luck, I asked them, if you don't believe that an otherworldly providence shapes them?  Surely then it is just an exercise in tedious randomness?

Then I made them divide into groups of two and play the question game from Rosguil until they wailed in despair.

Why is this a fitting game for this play?  Because it is a world in which there are no answers, only further questions, and more than two minutes of this leaves you sunk in existential frustration.  That's my teaching strategy: a pedagogy of irritation.

Last, but not least, I am hoping to get a review of Tomorrow, When the War Began written some time in the near future, and to watch one of the DVDs I have out of Zip.ca (my Canadian Netflix equivalent): The Warrior, Kinsey, and Rescue Dawn.  Oh, and the pilot episode of Caprica is lurking on my Tivo, casting alluring, Calypsonian glances my way.

A busy day, I now realize.  Wish me luck...



(To find out more about the Sunday Salon, or to join, visit its webpage.)

Teaching Diasporas, Mummy Relics, and the Future of the Serial: an Enthusiasm of Links

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Grim news: foreign language education in American public schools is in sharp decline, largely because No Child Left Behind has drawn resources away from any subject it does not directly test.  This troubles me. If there is anything I would want my (utterly hypothetical) children to study from a very young age, it is language (foreign and, well, domestic).  Acquisition is so much easier in childhood than in later years, and it is a skill set that is both profoundly useful and tremendously marketable.  Furthermore, (and perhaps this is why language study is proving unpopular in much of America) it acknowledges the multicultural reality of our nation while preparing us to be active citizens within that culture of pluralism, and it combats American isolationism (and thus allows us to engage more fruitfully in global diplomacy, the world economic market, and the free exchange of artistic, academic, and scientific ideas across national boundaries.).

Sigh.

But an odd silver lining: the teaching of Chinese is way up, largely because the Chinese government is partially funding a teaching diaspora.

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As it turns out, Joan of Arc's bones are actually fragments of mummified Egyptian remains, some of them feline.  No kidding.  More details are coming out in the glare of modern technological examination, but when the feline remains were first identified a few years ago, academics speculated that perhaps someone threw a demonic familiar into the flames after St. Jeanne.  Except the remains all predate the Maid of Orleans by hundreds of years.

I trust you are on top of this story, Dan Brown.

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I have quite a thing for the serial format: in television, in novels, in blogs. In fact, I once proposed the idea that HBO (or a similarly ambitious network) should give a group of TV auteurs a series of fixed-length serial format macro-series contracts: a show that would be on the air for 30 or 40 episodes, for instance. It would have a larger arc, of course, unlike most TV series, which aren't teleological in their orientation, but wouldn't be fully mapped out like most mini-series, so it would be allowed to develop like a longer series.  Most of all, the creators would be safe from cancellation during this limited-but-not-short run.  And they could pace the show accordingly.  Because this is the major problem with television as a serial medium: pacing, which fluctuates wildly according to the threat of cancellation and various prognostications about the likelihood and length of renewal.

I also have an equivalent fondness for the nineteenth-century serial novel as a format, and a curiosity about how new media can adapt these conventions.  The Guardian speculates about the form here, and much of the debate in the comments sections seems to be taken up with issues of pacing and its ties to questions of melodrama and taste.


Righto.  Time to get on with my day of chores and Beckett reading.  More later, perhaps...