Christmas Music: My Ornery Opinions

Now that the annual period in which our ears are massaged/assaulted by Christmas music is over, I feel I should reflect upon it. I have quite a soft spot for some Christmas music, which I think dates to an annual Colorado family tradition we used to observe. We would travel to this little mountain town and partake of their Christmas festival. They always had a number of musical performances, including a bagpipe and drum troupe. Everything sounds much more awesome when played very loudly in a small space by pipers and drummers, but I digress.

The major problem with Christmas music is twofold: bad performances of good songs and just plain bad songs. The former can be experienced in your local hivernal place of commerce, where sappy versions of carols are played as a kind of aural homage to Torquemada. The second can be encountered anywhere on am radio.

In keeping with the late lamented season, I bring good news: what is my (obviously subjective) favourite Christmas song? I have a strong preference for minor key carols which reflect some of the natural pathos of the season. My choice would be “We Three Kings” which I find to be a remarkably subtle and effective musical drama. The first two verses in particular are quite marvelous:

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star

O Star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright
Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to thy Perfect Light

The opening verse is sung in a minor key, with a melody that sounds like a trudge. These monarchs have been walking a long way indeed, and their exhaustion comes through beautifully in the music. Then, boom! A major key turn for the second verse for the wonderful star that guides them onward. In an effective performance, you can hear the kings literally lifting their sagging heads skywards, to glimpse the little sign of transcendence they so desire.

The pain and drudgery of the journey and the promise of transcendence that leads them onward are, to my areligious mind, nearly universal experiences and desires, powerfully expressed. Do you have any favourate Christmas songs Florestan? Or do you (rather understandably) give the lot a bah humbug!?

The Skin I Live In

After traveling more than 7000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean accompanied by various delays and disasters, I am suffering the jet lag of all time. When experiencing jet lag, exposure to sunlight during the day is recommended in order for the body to adjust to the new time zone. Being close to the Arctic Circle late December, following this advice is certainly not easy! Even though I landed four days ago, I woke up today at 3 am feeling wide awake. Due to heavy storming, there has been power cut for some 50 000 households, and in my village there is still no electricity. In order not to get depressed in the dark, I spent early morning watching Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie ‘The Skin I Live In’. I love Almodóvar’s movies, and this beautiful thriller/drama is no exception.

The protagonist, surgeon Robert Ledgard, is played by Antonio Banderas. Banderas started his career acting for Almodóvar during the eighties in movies such as ‘Law of Desire’ and ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’. My impression, being far from an expert on the topic, is that Banderas since that time spent the last 20 years featuring in Hollywood productions of.. various qualities. It warms my heart he is back with Almodóvar.

The movie is set in contemporary Toledo. Dr Ledgard has been obsessed by skin ever since his wife suffered from severe burns and subsequently died as a result of a car crash. It is Ledgard’s belief that a person who experiences skin injuries needs a new skin, especially a new face, in order to maintain his or her identity. Identity is hence highly connected to looks, shaped by the way a person is seen by others. Ledgard has determinedly created an artificial skin resistant to exogenous injuries such as burns and insect bites. Unscrupulously, Ledgard uses a real human being as a guinea pig for his experiments. This person is kept prisoner in his fancy home, and the two have a complicated and interesting relationship of mutual attraction and hate.

As usual in movies by Almodóvar, there is a nice, unexpected intrigue, complex characters and transsexual undertones. Even though several of his movies are quite similar and it is easy to recognize the director’s style, I do not seem to get tired of it. Perhaps this is due to his unconventional style with lots of randomness that I find refreshing, stimulating and hopeful. Especially when it comes to the nature of sexuality, I think Almodóvar offers a nice contrast to the mainstream portrayal.

Have you seen any Almodóvar movies, Eusebius? If yes, did you like it/them?

Some Thoughts About Gifts

Given the recent passing of the Christmas season, my thoughts have been much filled with trying to systematize the gift giving traditions in my family. What? Me a nerd? Don’t be absurd.

I have canonized the following axioms:

-Women may give men clothing as a gift; men may give other men clothing; women may give other women clothing, but almost never do; men may never ever give women clothing.

-Men may give woman jewelry, the reverse virtually never happens unless the definition of jewelry is expanded to encompass pocket watches. This may mainly be an institutional or normative function of men not tending to wear jewelry.

-Hardware is a frequent gift for men, but housewares are not seen as good gifts for women unless they involve cooking. This one has become less fixed over time as traditional gendered divisions of labour have broken down.

Does your family observe any such unofficial traditions Florestan?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

After getting home for the holidays, I ran across The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz in my local library. Since it won the Pulitzer Prize (a fairly big deal in the States) I figured I’d read the first couple of chapters and see if I liked it. I would say the book is very good, though not without flaws.

In brief, the book centers around the life of the titular Oscar Wao, an obese, nerdy kid from a hardscrabble Dominican family. Oscar fails to fit well into society, and as the book progresses, the narrative reveals that Oscar’s family has a long history of being ‘cursed.’ Essentially, his forbears used to be quite wealthy and upstanding citizens before running afoul of the Trujillo dictatorship and being disowned. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how it manages to weave a good deal of 20th century Dominican history into the narrative of Oscar’s family. This grounds the book’s themes in a particularly strong sense of place,  Díaz is quite accomplished at scene setting in both New Jersey, where Oscar is born and lives, and the family background scenes set in the Dominican. Some of the material is quite stomach churning, as Oscar’s grandfather and mother suffer graphic depredations at the hands of the Dominican authorities.

To my mind the strongest part of the book is the character of Oscar. His hopeless nerdyness and inability to make human connections and resulting loneliness is deeply sympathetic and quite moving. The gradual historical reveal of his background is well handled, it was particularly fun to see the proto-nerdyness of his prosperous doctor grandfather reflected in Oscar’s personality. The book’s prose is quite striking, heavily spiced with Dominican Spanish, it generally proves quite readable. I also found the conclusion, where Oscar is killed while trying to prosecute a doomed romance with a ‘claimed’ Dominican woman quite moving.

As for faults, the book’s chronology is quite hard to follow. The author chooses to break Oscar’s story up with several asides into his family’s history, while these prove invaluable for understanding Oscar’s destiny, they also tend to interrupt the flow of the narrative and sometimes seem more like interruptions than organic developments. As well, the author’s decision to have the book narrated or authored by Oscar’s best (and really only friend) Yunior, a roommate, is an odd choice. Yunior comes to know Oscar in college while trying  to seduce his very attractive older sister, and eventually becomes somewhat obsessed by Oscar’s various peculiarities. Yunoir tends to spike his narrative with a number of nerdy references, perhaps by way of suggesting how much Oscar had influenced him. However, the casual reader who does not have a good knowledge of Watchmen, Dune, or the Lord of the Rings trilogy might find these features hard to comprehend.

In general, the book is an effective and readable narrative that I would easily recommend to others.

Merry Christmas!

Eusebius

Disgrace – The Book that Started It All

Florestan suggested I read J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace upon discovering my amateur interest in literature, having quite enjoyed it herself. Upon reading it and discussing my thoughts with learned colleague Florestan, I agree with her positive assessment of the book. Technically speaking, it is exceptionally well, written, fluent without being vapid, and detailed without being clotted. For the purposes of this review since we have both read the book, I will simply hit upon some aspects of it I found particularly appealing.

Given my academic pretensions, I often try to read book through my chosen field of political science (with some historical thought thrown in). Disgrace proves a particularly fruitful subject for political and historical analysis. Many of the themes explored in the book are rooted in various political or historical contexts and debates, some are universal, while others are more particular to Coetzee’s home country,South Africa. The first and perhaps most obvious of these are gender relationships. The protagonist, David Lurie, is a middle aged, divorced professor of literature whose problematic relationships with women set the plot in motion. Lurie satiates his sexual desires and masculine insecurities by purchasing sex; when the artificiality of this solution eventually proves unsatisfying, he pursues a relationship with one of his students. The unravelling of this affair and resulting disgrace (ta-dah) lead to his censure and dismissal. Lurie chooses to spend his exile with his daughter Lucy, who is trying to make a hardscrabble living in rural South Africa. Their relationship has a different component, while Lurie’s relationships with other women tend to largely be sexual; he is quite protective toward his daughter.

Lurie’s relationships cause him problems in two ways. First, by being unable have a reasonably fulfilling relationship, his unquenched desires tend to result in poor and ethically dubious decisions. Conversely, his coddling attitude towards Lucy reveals the essential hypocrisy of his earlier dalliances. When an act of horrific violence is perpetrated upon himself and Lucy, he is unable to comprehend the reasoning that motivated the perpetrators, despite the similar nature of his motivations earlier in the book and the likeness of the final result upon the family of the student he seduced.

To my mind, the book is a criticism of gender relations inSouth Africa. Lurie and Petrus, the other somewhat developed male character, tend to view women almost strictly as sexual objects or virtual property. When in the dénouement Petrus offers to ‘marry’ Lucy to gain her property, with the ancillary benefit of protecting her from future acts of physical and sexual harm, it is really no less disturbing than Lurie’s rather lurid patronage of prostitutes or perusal of barely post-pubescent paramours.

I’ve winged on long enough, but this is a very thought provoking book. Perhaps if time allows I’ll do follow-ups concerning the other themes I see in the work. In the meantime, what do you think about gender relations as portrayed in the book, Floristan? Or any other thoughts about big themes etc. you would like to bring up? I’d love to read your thoughts as always!

Hello again, world!

Welcome to Eusebius and Florestan’s blog.

Eusebius and Florestan?

On the Wikipedia page for the german composer Robert Schumann, one can read: “The Davidsbündlertänze, Op.6, (also published in 1837 despite the low opus number) literally “Dances of the League of David”, is an embodiment of the struggle between enlightened Romanticism and musical philistinism. Schumann credited the two sides of his character with the composition of the work (the more passionate numbers are signed F. (Florestan) and the more dreamy signed E. (Eusebius)).

Florestan, passionate. Eusebius, dreamy. Probably (hopefully!) all people are both passionate and dreamy, but to aviod confusion I am Florestan and Eusebius is the other person writing this blog. We went to grad school together. Truth is, we still do, but only for another week. Another week of paper writing and then an awaited christmas break.

Florestan

10 Rules for Good Blogging

I suggest we follow these rules except when we don’t feel like it!