Angel Quote

This is one of my favorite quotes from a TV show of all time and I try to think of it when I feel like nothing I'm doing is amounting to anything and no one appreciates anything I do. (I know, Wah, wah, wah.)

In the greater scheme or the big plan, nothing we do matters. There's no grand
plan, no big win...all that matter is what we do, cause that's all there is.
What we do now, today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward,
finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it... I want to help because
people shouldn't suffer as they do. Because, if there isn't any bigger meaning,
then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

Spoken by Angel in "Epiphany" Angel

Trashy Vampire Novels

So last night I finished Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton. I had bought it several months ago at the request of BT, because he said that a particular relationship between characters mirrored something he wanted. I've had the book for months and haven't read it, mostly just because I haven't read anything. Last week I finished the first novel that I'd read since...... damn, I don't know when. Probably since I re-read Time Traveller's Wife so that I could highlight it and just refresh my mind before I sent it to BT, because it is one of my favorite novels of all time and because it reminded me of being without him. I guess lately I've been content to lay around and veg out in front of the TV, maybe catching a movie I want to see, though more likely just a movie that I'd already seen and kinda liked. (This is a very VERY good reason not to have a cable TV with all the HBOs in your bedroom. Damn you HBO, showing V for Vendetta a hundred times!!!!) But I digress......

So, especially now that BT and I are back together and working on all aspects of that, I read the book so that I could get an idea of what he was talking about. Now, I had read quite a few of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, series 4 years ago, when I was still living in the Bigger Midwestern City. At the time, I had read a review of the latest book in the series and my interest was piqued. But the series was already quite long at the time and I didn't want to have to buy all the books. I was in luck because a co-worker of mine at the time owned the first 5 or 6 of them and the first book of Hamilton's other series. I read them all, in succession, during a very depressing and boring winter break.

I guess I should go back a bit. I've always loved horror novels. When I was younger, I read way ahead of my age group. If I remember right, I was reading Christopher Pike's young adult horror books by the time I was in the 4th grade. (Dad had tried to get me into fantasy series, but it just didn't work. I think because we were too cheap to buy the series from the beginning and the YA section at our library didn't have them either. On the other hand, one of my good female friends had alot of Christopher Pike books and an older brother with more advanced tastes, Koontz, Rice, that he'd loan to us.) By 5th grade, I was starting to read the Stephen King and Dean Koontz, though my mom had to approve which books I read. I couldn't read King's Gerald's Game, for instance, because of it's sexual content. When I was in 6th grade, I bought Anne Rice's Witching Hour. It was widely known among my family that I couldn't read Rice's vampire series, but no one had said anything about the witch series. I loved the book. Sometime during 7th grade, I finally managed to get my friend's brother to let me borrow the vampire series. But, in my opinion, I've found that alot of genre writers (hell, writers in general) tend to tread over the same turf. The problem is that when a genre writer does it within that same genre, most especially within the same series, it gets old pretty fast. That's why I haven't read any of Anne Rice's latest work.

And it's why I haven't read any Hamilton books since my last go round. While reading Narcissus I noticed several places within the same book where she reuses the same phrases, etc. Also, she goes against the writer's rule that countless fiction writing teachers have drilled into my head: "Show don't tell." And, while I may be nitpicking about this, while Hamilton as a writer treats gay/bi men very well in the books, if not with a bit of airbrushing so that it's more sexy to female readers, Anita as a character gets on my last nerve because she won't accept homosexual activity from any of her lovers, though she continues to have several male lovers of her own. I guess because I've had bisexual male lovers in non-monogamous relationships and they've been with other men, with my knowledge and approval (hell, I've even gotten to watch!) her insistance that her male bi lovers be with only her (and I guess other women???) makes me kinda pissed off at her hypocrisy.

So why did I finish Narcissus in 3 sittings? Why did I buy the next one in the series while I was out tonight looking for the first novel in another vampire series? Why am I not reading "real" literature, great historical literature, non-genre literature? The most likely answer is that I'm just lazy. Narcissus was an easy read, the pages kept turning, and I really wanted to know what would happen at the end. Also, there was alot of sex. Granted, alot of what is now considered new classic literary novels (guess I'm thinking of novelists like Phillip Roth) have sex in them. Maybe even good sex. But this book...... well, maybe it was the combination of the supernatural with the sex, maybe it's just that I'm really horny right now, but the sex in this book was awesome!!!!!! Which kinda didn't help alleviate the horniness, but.... well, you can't ask for everything.

Of course, all this has me thinking about my own writing. While all my fiction teachers look down on genre fiction and push the "show don't tell" rule, Hamilton has published 10 times as many books as they have combined and probably makes quite a comfortable living off of her "little" "genre" books. In my last fiction writing class, I think I wrote two of the best stories that I ever have. Because I know that fiction teachers frown on genre fiction, so I wrote stories of everyday people in slightly more than ordinary situations. On the other hand, several of my fellow students wrote stories with aspects of genre fiction in them- apocolypse, vampires, murder. These stories stood on their own merit as a piece of fiction, not as a piece of genre fiction. Which begs the question of how I should write and what I should write. Do I want to approach my writing based on what I can write decently and what will sell the most? Or do I approach it based on higher literary fiction principles? Is there maybe something wrong with looking down on genre fiction while propping up "literary" fiction? And what separates the two? Is it maybe a class thing? That genres are supposed to be for the lower class who don't want to think as much about the literature that they are reading? Wait- doesn't that describe how Charles Dicken's novels were first read? On the other hand, just how many radical ideas could you put into a literary novel, since most of them are set in a real world context? Even with all of what I see as Anita's hypocrisy, the books still have fairly non-mainstream views on sex, sexual relationships, and non-monogamy. And, while this isn't literature, I remember how shocked I was the first couple times I heard the characters in (SciFi channel's) Battlestar Galactica refer to their female superiors as "Sir". Just that little word used to refer to females as well as males went a long way to show the ways in which this society had more equality between the sexes. When you take your story out of the real world, you can do quite a few things that you couldn't get away with in a real world context- whether that be having an alternate universe where the vampire district is Laclede's Landing (the area just around the Arch) or having one in which males and females are so equal that they all use the same bathrooms and shower areas. So should a writer just cut themselves off to that, if that is a way in which they would like to write?

So, what do you all think?

You Used To Love To Dance- Melissa Ethridge

You Used to Love to Dance- Melissa Ethridge
Lying in a city night
A million fingers tingling my skin
Out there in the sea tonight
I thought I saw you clutching your sin
You rolled me over long ago
And told me you were strong enough to go
You needed more than this lover's dream
You need the steel and the concrete beams in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

They told me you have found your love
You moved in locked up and put out your blues
Well all God's children got to grow up
And play house make vows to hang up their shoes
Do you sit and talk over coffee cups
Do headline mornings satisfy and fill you up
I kept your eyes and your cigarette kiss
You couldn't keep the lies the adrenalin bliss in your life
In your life

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Oh it felt so right
Well ecstasy ain't free
But compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

I'm gonna go out tonight
I'm gonna drive up to the hill
I'm gonna dive on into those city lights
And I'm gonna dance, dance
Dance till I get my fill

We laughed and drank in the jukebox light
And we tore the rug in that downtown dive
Every Saturday night
For fifty cents we'd dance all night long
And each new tune we said that's our song
Lord it felt so right
But ecstasy ain't free
And compromise is chance
I remember how
You used to love to dance

As anyone who knows me knows, I tend to live my life in a weird parellel to the art I consume, though I'm going to be using the word "art" quite loosely here. While I'm not quite sure if this is the real reason, I'm going to blame it on being a relatviely smart kid with lots of ideas and more access to books, movies, music, and televison than I even did my peers. While in some ways the art I consume does tend to mirror my views on life, it also tends to point out to me and make more concrete in me ideas that were only half-formed before. And I have to credit this art with sometimes getting me out of funks and leaving me with that nugget of inspiration to help with later funks as well.

This song is one of my favorite songs by Melissa Ethridge. I was not quite a teenager when she came out of the closet and it was quite a big deal at the time. For a young, rock-loving, wanna-be musician like myself, who was also starting to realize that she might be not-straight as well, she was a huge inspiration. I remember taping her MTV Unplugged when I was 12 on the spare tv and our beta VCR. (When we sold our 3 bedroom house before we bought another home, we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Because my mother didn't allow me to have a television in my bedroom, I could only watch something other than what my parents did on a different tv in our living room. Needless to say, it cut down drastically on me watching things I shouldn't.) I was reading a couple books on Bruce Springsteen and his early career at the time for a school project and I was overjoyed when he was on her Unplugged special, singing "Born To Run" with her. Within the next year, I bought all her CDs prior to Yes I Am, which I already had.

I think I always liked this song because it spoke to something I had always felt. I never wanted to "settle down". I wanted to be wild and crazy and live an unexpected life. At the time when I got this CD, we had just moved to the suburbs of this Small City and I was surrounded by this suburban dream of a nice house and nice job and nice family. While I knew several girls in high school who had big career-oriented dreams and ambitions for their lives, I didn't know any of these girls, or at least was not aquainted with them and their dreams, in the middle school where I started out. This was the place where, in the first class of my first day, my partner on a class exercise said that she was happy that we were done with it with time to spare to talk about the really important things like guys and make-up. Needless to say, even though I knew we had moved here so that i would get a better education and live in a better neighborhood, I despised it. In fact, I dreamed of the day when I turned 16 and got my first car so that I could disappear again into the Big City we had previously lived in, where I would live a precarious existence, having to finish high school and work enough to live on my own. But even in high school, where I knew some very ambitious college and career-oriented girls, I don't think I ever really knew anyone, male or female, who wanted to embrace the messy, not well-off but comfortable, and full of artistic integrity life that I wanted. That I still want to this day, though I knew now more of how hard it is to have that.

I also liked this song so much because I already felt betrayed by this time by people in my life who I thought would want that kind of life but didn't. I guess you grow up assuming that the people who instill certain values in you are consciously instilling those values in you and that they themselves will live by those values. Also that you assume that the way of life that you adore when you see it in someone else and that you aspire to in the future really makes the person living it happy and will always make them happy. None of that is really true and I think now that feeling that way largely comes from being a kid and not realize that the people you put on a pedestal are up their because you put them there not because they should be. Because really no one should be as we are all human, with all the messy, illogical, contridictory desires, flaws, hopes, dreams, and mind-changing that comes along with that. But at the time, I felt betrayed by this. (To be honest, still do sometimes.) For so much of my life, my godfather, who was one of the closest males to me during my young life, lived in the city proper and dated multiple women at the same time. I loved his freedom and the life that he had. When I was 8 though, he met and fell in love with a woman who he would marry and settle down with over the next 2 years or so. It probably didn't help that she had a daughter who was just a year older than me. When they started living together, he moved into her house in the suburbs. After a disasterous vacation two family vacation, we all kinda lost touch. So, at 13, even though I knew Ethridge probably wrote this song about a female lover who left Ethridge to settle down properly with a man, I felt like it was about my godfather settling down, giving up what I thought of as a privileged life just to settle down and have a family. I kinda had similar feelings in regard to my uncle marrying and staying in the same town as my grandparents over the course of my high school years.

Recently, as I've been trying to decide how to proceed in my life, I 'rediscovered' this song while listening to an MP3 disk with lots of different albums on it. It still strikes a cord with me, though for different reasons.

I guess it was the love of that non-settled down lifestyle that made me agree to marry BT, the fact that being with him seemed to promise that I wouldn't be "settling" or "settling down." While it was that craziness and chaos that led to so many of our problems, I have to admit that it was also what brought us together. And, to compliment what my grandmother said about how he and I are both dreamers and don't always live in the real world, I never felt like I would have to "grow up, play house, make vows to hang up [my] shoes" with him. In addition to just having an open relationship, I felt like I had found someone who I could share all my dreams and fantasies with, that I wouldn't have to compromise who I really was, even though I knew we'd both have to compromise on other things. While he wasn't the first to want to marry me (or the last, as it's turned out), every other man who wanted to marry me wanted to "settle down", to have that sort of very stable household and family. And, in some ways, I know now that played a role in BT wanting to get married as well. But he was happy with the ways in which it would be crazy and messy and unstable, if for no other reason than I am all those things. But I think he was, and still is, one of the few guys who didn't see me as a project, as something to be fixed, even though, on the other hand, he never thought I'd be "like this" forever. And when he was around, I wasn't, which only reminds me of another song lyric, "Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good so I never tried." (Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat")

I think that "settling down" part was probably a large part of why I couldn't have stayed with TyRoy. MP recently said to me that he thought TyRoy had been giving me something which he thought he had to give me in order to keep me but that, in truth, I wasn't ready for at all. I think that's probably true. There was this big house and this comfortable life there but, whether this is true or not, I always felt like that came hand in hand with being a dutiful wife, even if we weren't married at the time. As TyRoy pointed out to me last week when I said that I never felt like he chose me but just chose to be with someone, I wasn't the only woman who wanted to live in that house. That might be true. But I would have been just as happy to not live in that house, to have stayed with my folks'. I only moved in for the period of time I was there because it was easier for us to see each other and because I thought he wanted, needed, a person living there with him. And though I might not have conveyed this as much as I wanted to, I wasn't trying to get with him, wasn't trying to be his girlfriend/wife, wasn't trying to get a commitment out of him, though I was happy, if hesitant because of experience, to take it when he offered, when the "other women who wanted to move in there" were actively working to get a commitment out of him and were actively trying to move in there. And I guess, in the begginning when things are all shiny, and after my ordeals with lies and ommision with BT, I thought I had found someone with whom I wouldn't have to "hang up my shoes" either because he wanted the openness but wasn't jealous and had shown himself not to be a liar (even by ommission), so I ignored the trade-off. "Compromise is chance", right?

And the final thing about this song, right now, that gets me, is about the jukebox. Even though I'm quite a horrible dancer and have yet to be broken of the tendency to lead, I still love to do it and don't get to do it often enough. But I love the image of two people dancing. And two people dancing to a jukebox just seems to be this terribly romantic image that I can never get out of my head. The kinda messed up thing is that I can only think of a handful of times that I've danced with my male romantic partners or a person I had a romantic interest in of either sex. I know that I've probably danced more with my uncle than I have all my romantic partners or potentials combined. I actually can't think of a single time I danced with BT. And while I'll never forget the night I met BT just because it was the night I met him, I'd always remember it for another reason if he and I had never gotten together. As in the song, the place was a dive, a little bar overlooking the highway and the river, where you had to be buzzed in. And they had a jukebox, though I doubt you probably got 3 songs out of fifty cents. But someone, probably my uncle or his boyfriend, did put some money in it and played some songs. And I danced with my uncle to Patsy Cline, who both he and my mother love. And whenever I see a couple dancing to a jukebox, I think of that.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World by Sherman Alexie

This was the poem of the week on another blog a while ago. Fuck, I just realized that I hope I didn't post this before. Oh, well. If I did, then you should all read it again because that's how fucking amazing it is and how much it speaks to me. I have tons of moments like this with my Grandfather now. There are more moments like this the longer he's been gone, I guess because we tend to forget and then we remember that we've forgotten and we feel kinda terrible. But I guess at least we are remember that we've forgotten rather than never remembering at all. And I hope that Ms. Kee sees this because 1)because of her father and 2) because it's by the writer of The Art of Fancy Dancing.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
by Sherman Alexie

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"I say.
"I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?" "It’s okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Conservatives and the French

Today after class, I was running errands for my family, listening to Rush Limbaugh (I know, I know, that was my first mistake, right?). A female caller, responding to something another called said about the French Presidential election effecting the US Pres Election in 2008, said that the election shows that 85% (don't know where she got this number since I think the guy won with only 54% of the vote, out of 84% turnout) that 85% of the French people didn't want to vote any more socialists into office and that didn't surprise her because most of the people in France, especially those living in the countryside, are basically decent people. (I should note, as a disclaimer, that I'm not absolutely sure this is what she said and that I'm not taking this from any transcripts, just what I remember hearing. I am probably wrong. I usually am. Maybe she was just saying that 85% of people voted and most of those were decent people who didn't want socialism and thus voted for the other guy.) Either way, I think she seems to be saying that no decent people could be for socialism and that the people in the country are both definately decent and against socialism, as opposed to those who live in the cities and the suburbs, many of whom might not be decent and might want socialism. Mmmmm....

Today was my first day of my intersession film class- Radical Changes Since 1945. It's three hours a day, five days a week for three weeks at the art house theater in Westport. Yea! Three weeks of non-stop films. And I get out early in the afternoon so I have the rest of the day to run errands and do whatever, unlike if I didn't have to be up for this class, in which case I'd be sleeping all day. But, to my point. our first reading was the introduction to Esslin's 1969 book Theater of the Absurd. When discussing why artists from all over the globe (meaning from all over European countries and America) came to Paris to work on their art, he writes that Paris isn't a French center for art but an international center for art, and that it is a magnet for people seeking the freedom to like an unconformist life and produce their art in an environment where they wouldn't have to be looking over their shoulder all the time to judge what their neighbors might think of them.

Is there something wrong with me that I appreciate the second description of France much more than the turn away from "socialism" that all the American conservatives are hoping will happen with this new president as expressed by the first paragraph?