Apologies for the break in service folks. It's been a hell of a couple of weeks: exam boards, marking, a funeral over in Ireland, individual casework for the 19 professors faced with redundancy, meetings with management and so on and so on. Last and (in management's eyes, least), I have an hour-long conference paper to write, for delivery in two days' time. In those two days: long, long department meetings and what's set to be a very confrontational meeting of the board of governors. Panic is of course setting in. I'm starting to feel like poor old Doctor Faustus, though at least he had some fun before payback time:
O gentlemen, hear me with patience, and tremble not at my speeches!
Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years,
O, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!
God forbade it, indeed; but Faustus hath done it: for
the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost
eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a bill with mine own blood:
the date is expired; this is the time, and he will fetch me.
O Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
The appropriate music, of course, is Madder Rose's Panic On. Not that I ever need an excuse to play unjustly-forgotten indie.
I want to recommend Lev Grossman's The Magicians as a thumping good read with a great line in sly satire. It's basically about a disaffected young man with a poor relationship with his parents who gets sent to wizard school, which should sound very familiar. He's also an avid reader of some rather poor but entrancing children's books, about some posh English siblings who keep having adventures in a magical land in which they become kings/queens, consort with talking animals and get bossed around by a godlike animal.
Yes, Grossman keeps having large and unsubtle but very good digs at Harry Potter and the Narnia stories. But it's a good book because it's fast-paced, very good on late teen emotion, he knows how to structure a fantasy novel even while he's deconstructing it, and it's packed with sex (not always heterosexual, either: gays and centaur/horse relations get a look in) to annoy parents.
You can't satirise a genre without knowing it very well, and having a considerable degree of empathy with it - Grossman knows his stuff, and knows what the genre lacks. The Magicians isn't so much anti-Potter as post-Potter, and even C S Lewis (though his fictional equivalent, Mr Plover, is a child molester) isn't entirely dismissed.
Meanwhile, with what music shall I torture you today?
It's Billy Coté and Mary Lorson's Piano Creeps. One of those indefinable albums, really. These two used to be Madder Rose, one of my favourite bands, though never a group you hear people rave about - introspective, melancholy, thoughtful American indiepop from the 90s, carried on in Lorson's albums as Saint Low (she was booked to play in The Dark Place a few years ago but it never came off - one of life's disappointments). I'll talk about these records when I get to them, in about three years!
PianoCreeps (love the ambiguous title) is odd because you just don't hear many (mostly) instrumental indie albums other than Mogwai's mumbleSHOUT stuff. It's all about piano-led textures - you could put this on as background music, but you'd soon find the oddness demanding your attention.
It definitely pays to obsessively collect stuff by splinter groups and band spinoffs!
