I have a serious problem; I can't stop listening to 'In the Heat of the Moment' by Asia. I downloaded it the day after I saw 'The Matador', which must have been sometime in February, and I have probably listened to it at least once a day since then, and sometimes several times in a row. This is longer than my song obsessions usually last, which is a bit worrisome; while I would say that 'In the Heat of the Moment' is a better song than, say, 'Die Another Day', the Asia song was also released when I was less than a year old, and so it's funny that it's become such a major part of my musical experience twenty-three years later.
So, the weekend. I'm sorry that I didn't write last night, but I ended up reading in bed until dawn, and by the time I was done with my book, I felt more like sleeping than blogging. Granted, dawn comes early here (around 4:30am), but I probably should have been asleep for a bit more of the nighttime hours. I had picked up a copy of 'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova yesterday afternoon, and I proceeded to read all 700+ pages while enjoying lunch near Grafton St., lounging on my couch with the brilliant late-afternoon sunshine streaming in, and later curled up in bed with the lights turned on and my bedroom door firmly shut. I remembered reading some promising one-line reviews of 'The Historian', without actually remembering anything about the book's plot, and so I was surprised to discover that it was a reworking of the 'Dracula' storyline (which explains why my bedroom door was firmly shut; vast swathes of darkness outside the door are not particularly comforting at 3am when one is reading a vampire book). I would recommend it rather highly if you are into, say, anthropology, history, or literature (I know some of my devoted readers fall into those categories).
This was Kostova's first novel (a fact that always throws me into some vague panic about whether or not I will ever be described as a 'first-time novelist' and whether that description will be an amazed expression that a first-time novelist could produce something so wonderful, or a patronizing explanation of why the book should never see the light of day). I think that what I enjoyed about the book was that she researched it so carefully; this was a reminder to me that it is possible to do serious historical research and then produce a work of literature, rather than a dry academic paper. Granted, this made the narrative drag a bit towards the middle, and there were times when I could have done with more actual vampire sightings and fewer discussions of the sociohistorical implications of the Ottoman conquest of Southeastern Europe. On the whole, though, I am intrigued by historical research, I like the Ottomans, I enjoy vampire tales, and I adore the Eastern Europeans, so this book was perfectly suited to my sensibilities.
I think that I gravitate towards stories of vampires and Eastern Europeans because those stories tend to explore a type of enveloping, claustrophobia-inducing darkness that is rooted in the collective subconscious of the Slavic world, and that doesn't come out in proper British mysteries, for example. The fairy tales are darker, the folk songs are bleaker, and the history of the entire region is full of descriptions of unbelievable cruelty and strife, alleviated by brief spans of quiet desperation. All of this is far more interesting to me than why the Yorks and Lancasters didn't get along, or who Louis XIV was and why he was called 'the Sun King', or what and with whom the Dutch guilds were trading. It is sometimes clear to me that I should just give up my own personal struggle against the lure of graduate school, learn Russian and Old Church Slavonic, and flee into the stacks of higher education, never to be seen again. The very fact that I knew of Old Church Slavonic and had once contemplated studying it, even before it made an appearance in 'The Historian', indicates that I have a more-than-passing interest in Slavic studies, but I've been avoiding it thus far.
I think that I turned away from history and towards literature while I was making the final (okay, only) push on my honors thesis. I've always been more interested in the turbulent parts of history--in elementary school, it was the ancient Egyptians; in fifth grade, it was the Greek city-states; in sixth grade, it was the American Civil War; in high school, it was some mixed-up combination of the Crusades, the Norman invasion of England, the Vikings, communism, and the colonization of the New World; and in college, it was totalitarianism in all of its forms, particularly Hitler and Stalin. I think that I reached a point during my honors thesis where I recognized the point of no return: to go any further would be to spend the rest of my life studying the darkness that humans are capable of and have continually perpetrated on each other, and I made the conscious decision to step off that path and pursue something that would allow me to a live a life somewhat more free of those awful, mindnumbing truths.
That's not to say that I intend to stop looking into that darkness; historical lessons are vital, I love learning about what has happened before, and research is something I have a pure passion for. But, I suppose that in many ways I would prefer to examine that darkness through literature, rather than history. The darkness of the imagination is just as compelling as the darkness of history, particularly since imagination is required before most of the more inventive aspects of human evil can come to pass. Vlad the Impaler (Dracula's real-life counterpart) may have been evil--but it takes some imagination to decide to impale thousands of your subjects in your garden so that you have an entertaining spectacle to watch whilst eating your dinner. I just reached the point where I could no longer look at pictures of pits filled with naked corpses, where I could no longer read accounts of the millions of people who starved to death while Stalin occupied himself with purging the Soviet populace of any opposition, where I could no longer handle all of the vagaries of war and genocide, all of the people who died for terrible reasons, all of the people who lived off of others' sufferings.
Sometimes I'm ashamed of myself for my cowardice; I have the ability to research all of this, and I am fairly confident that I could write grand articles and books illuminating some of the darknesses of this world. Instead, I prefer to read romance novels, even though this contradicts the lesson that I learned when I was researching the Holocaust. The apathy and avoidance that leads me to read stories about the Brangelina baby rather than the Iraq war is the same apathy and avoidance that keeps people from getting involved in politics and democracy, the same apathy and avoidance that keeps people from saying anything when someone makes a racist remark on a bus, the same apathy and avoidance that turns into fear and makes someone pretend not to see the police taking away their neighbors. Which, in the end, is what makes my conduct inexcusable; I *know*, probably as well as one can possibly know without actually living through a catastrophe themselves, what the consequences of inaction are, and yet I continue with my inaction despite all of that knowledge.
I'm possibly being a bit melodramatic. Or, perhaps I've inherited a bit too much of the 'darkness of the Slavic subconsciousness' from the biological grandfather I never knew. Perhaps I'm in a heightened state of awareness of history's darkness because I'm going to Berlin tomorrow. Berlin is no longer the capital of the Third Reich, and I can see the modern Berlin, with its fancy shops and its biergartens and its temples to consumerism and finance; but I can't forget the older Berlin, with its bombings and its military parades and its meathook-and-piano-wire executions, all vividly laid out in black and white across the photo album of my imagination. Granted, it will be easy not to see any of the latter visions this week, since I will likely spend the entire time either listening to keynote speakers or drinking, but that doesn't mean that those images will disappear. I don't know where I'm going with this, other than that I am once again infatuated with Eastern Europe, and that I should start pursuing a writing career before my infatuation forces me back into graduate school, against my better judgment and despite my apparent inability to handle a lifetime spent reading about atrocities.
Okay, let's change subjects, since I clearly went off the deep end in my previous paragraphs. My weekend was lovely; I saw 'X-Men III' yesterday, and I really enjoyed it. Then, I engaged in some retail therapy, even going so far as to buy some skincare products from a company that avoids animal testing and uses weird medieval recipes to create cleansers that are perishable and only have a three-month shelf life. I'm happy to report that their medieval cleanser still allows one to bathe every day, rather than once a year, and does not seem to contain any cow dung. I don't know what came over me, but I went into the store and everything smelled lovely, and so I got lured in before realizing they were all a bunch of hippie freaks. And, the skin products seem amazing; however, if I start displaying a strange desire to wear Birkenstocks and protest the unethical treatment of chickens, please hit me over the head and take my cleanser away, okay?
As I said before, I spent the rest of the day and almost the entire night reading 'The Historian', and so today I slept until 1pm. I've spent the afternoon doing laundry, cleaning my room, and taking care of various and sundry tasks. Now I'm going to find some dinner, do a little work (sigh), and pack for Berlin--I leave tomorrow morning! I probably won't blog while I'm there, but hopefully I'll have some pictures when I get back. Take care!
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