i love my homework
For once, I'm being serious: the past two days of reading have been utterly wonderful and downright exciting.
First, there's Where The Girls Are, a look at pop culture of the past 50-odd years and how it's shaped American girls. We've finally come to the "history of rock music" section of American Media History, and while I've given up on doing most of the reading for that class, I'm a fan of Susan J. Douglas for her politics and writing style.
The first chapter was about 1960s "girl groups" -- the Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Supremes, etc. -- and the ways their songs permitted (relatively) safe exploration of new social roles for girls. I had a blast because I could sing (sizeable portions of) most of the songs Douglas mentions, notably "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," but also "He's a Rebel", "Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby," and a host of other songs that I just should not know 75% of the words to, but I do anyway and was then, of course, required to sing the song as it came up. Douglas' discussion of the rise in male falsetto voices (heh), and how they allowed girls to sing along and "act" the male role, was really cool, because it totally makes sense, only I never thought of it that way before, because I was too busy scrambling for the dial the instant I heard "Big Girls Don't Cry."
And then. And then came the Beatlemania chapter, all about the way that the lads from Liverpool served to help liberate American lasses and encourage them to question authority, gender and sexuality, and what makes really, really good music all at once. (Yes, newredshoes, this is mainly why I was waaaaay too excited about your new mood theme.) By a fortunate coincidence, I already had the Beatles CDs out and playing, and it was just entirely too much fun. The subsequent chapter, about TV's various reactions to the rise of feminism, was also a great read -- but not as much fun as the Beatles.
Tonight, then, I had to finish re-reading The Invention of Love for my Stoppard seminar. This convinced me that I really need to start reading every play twice, because they're so dense (in a good way), and I noticed so many more details. More references to Wilde, who overlapped Housman by a year at Oxford, and more about Aesthetes. More about the usefulness and purpose of art, the longevity of artistic works, and all sorts of other things that I wrote my paper about last week. Then the professor-provided links to bonus material yielded more Stoppardian goodness, including this most excellent quote on theater and playwriting:
"Theater is indeed a physical event, and the words are not enough without everything else, but everything else is nothing without the words, and in the extravagant complex equation of sound and light, it’s certain words in a certain order that - often mysteriously - turn our hearts over."
-- Tom Stoppard, "Pragmatic Theater," New York Review of Books, September 23, 1999
This confirms it: at the very least, I need to convince mjsalter to be my advisor for a Stoppard independent study next fall; if not going all the way into a thesis in the spring. I love this man, and there's still so much to get to that just won't fit into our already-ginormous seminar reading list, like the movies. I could try to actually get to the reading I didn't do, like Waiting for Godot to go with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and it would just be entirely too much fun.
I'm trying to get excited about the rest of my fall schedule as well, but it's just not as good. Why do all the cool classes have to meet at the same time?
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First, there's Where The Girls Are, a look at pop culture of the past 50-odd years and how it's shaped American girls. We've finally come to the "history of rock music" section of American Media History, and while I've given up on doing most of the reading for that class, I'm a fan of Susan J. Douglas for her politics and writing style.
The first chapter was about 1960s "girl groups" -- the Ronettes, the Shirelles, the Supremes, etc. -- and the ways their songs permitted (relatively) safe exploration of new social roles for girls. I had a blast because I could sing (sizeable portions of) most of the songs Douglas mentions, notably "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," but also "He's a Rebel", "Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby," and a host of other songs that I just should not know 75% of the words to, but I do anyway and was then, of course, required to sing the song as it came up. Douglas' discussion of the rise in male falsetto voices (heh), and how they allowed girls to sing along and "act" the male role, was really cool, because it totally makes sense, only I never thought of it that way before, because I was too busy scrambling for the dial the instant I heard "Big Girls Don't Cry."
And then. And then came the Beatlemania chapter, all about the way that the lads from Liverpool served to help liberate American lasses and encourage them to question authority, gender and sexuality, and what makes really, really good music all at once. (Yes, newredshoes, this is mainly why I was waaaaay too excited about your new mood theme.) By a fortunate coincidence, I already had the Beatles CDs out and playing, and it was just entirely too much fun. The subsequent chapter, about TV's various reactions to the rise of feminism, was also a great read -- but not as much fun as the Beatles.
Tonight, then, I had to finish re-reading The Invention of Love for my Stoppard seminar. This convinced me that I really need to start reading every play twice, because they're so dense (in a good way), and I noticed so many more details. More references to Wilde, who overlapped Housman by a year at Oxford, and more about Aesthetes. More about the usefulness and purpose of art, the longevity of artistic works, and all sorts of other things that I wrote my paper about last week. Then the professor-provided links to bonus material yielded more Stoppardian goodness, including this most excellent quote on theater and playwriting:
"Theater is indeed a physical event, and the words are not enough without everything else, but everything else is nothing without the words, and in the extravagant complex equation of sound and light, it’s certain words in a certain order that - often mysteriously - turn our hearts over."
-- Tom Stoppard, "Pragmatic Theater," New York Review of Books, September 23, 1999
This confirms it: at the very least, I need to convince mjsalter to be my advisor for a Stoppard independent study next fall; if not going all the way into a thesis in the spring. I love this man, and there's still so much to get to that just won't fit into our already-ginormous seminar reading list, like the movies. I could try to actually get to the reading I didn't do, like Waiting for Godot to go with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and it would just be entirely too much fun.
I'm trying to get excited about the rest of my fall schedule as well, but it's just not as good. Why do all the cool classes have to meet at the same time?
-