It feels as though I’ve consumed gallons of coffee and turned thousands of pages today, but alas, my Sunday has not been so fantastic. I finished reading Charlotte Temple–a cautionary tale about a young English girl who is carried off by a dashing soldier to America only to be abandoned and forsaken. The moral of the story? Don’t trust the French or let your heart be broken. You just might die. I wonder if women were so fragile during the eighteenth century. Perhaps if I lived in this time period, I would have been suffocated by my own sentiments. I’d hope to think that I would be an exception to the pre-Revolutionary rule. Who knows?
Following this uplifting read, I played a few Smiths songs on the guitar and I have been perusing the internet listening to a few new Xiu Xiu songs. I am looking forward to hearing Women As Lovers in its entirety when it comes out later this month. For starters, I’m gushing over the fact that the album’s namesake comes from an Elfriede Jellinek work. I doubt any of my acquaintances have ever read her. Thanks to an old German Expressionism course, I can say I have. Maybe I read parts of Women As Lovers, but I can’t remember seeing that it was in German and what not.
The only scene I can clearly remember surrounds a husband coming home from work, wishing to bed his uninterested wife. Jellinek serves as a commenter giving an almost journalistic account of his pursuit. Expounding the husband’s perspective, Jellinek reveals the man to think that what he gives his wife is simply a gift.
The irony of this all is that most male Xiu Xiu admirers–painfully awkward indie, art scene miscreants–will never fully understand the sensuality of the feminine form. Let alone the female herself.
You have to understand, this is all pouring forth after I read a novel about a girl who is used, impregnated and left in a foreign land all because some idiot thought she was pretty.
Ok, I’m putting down the cup of coffee.
In Search of Nessie 