2008-03-15 6:11 p.m.
Ghost of a Rose
^Such a pretty song.
I chose that video for it because I happen to love Gothic-style art. It's one of my few "guilty pleasures". I think it's because I have such a preference for things that are overly dramatic and show stark contrast between what is and what could be.
Ironically, considering how much I hate experiencing the darker emotions, I think they tend to lead to the creation fo the most beautiful and visionary art. As someone once told me, "You have to pay your dues to sing the blues; why else would there be so many tortured-soul artists?"
I guess it makes sense.
After all, stories about fluffy kittens, sunshine, and rainbows don't exactly inspire anyone on any level. The best art, stories, whatever, accepts that life is not all sunshine and rainbows, that pain and suffering happen, but that they can be overcome and in the end be only steps toward greater happiness and fulfillment.
Why else would nearly every fairytale invariably begin with its hero/heroine in seemingly insurmountably bad conditions, only to have them rise above it all?
Then again, even fairytale also ends with a wedding, but that's a different issue.
I've gotten back to working on my novel in a major way, hence my pondering of art and what makes for a good story. I've been pirating quite a bit from mythology. Stories/references you might be familiar with that I've commandeered, whether in whole or in part:
*Hades and Persephone
*Arawn and Pwyll
*Tristan and Isolde
*Romeo and Juliet
*Beauty and the Beast, in several variations
*Sleeping Beauty
*Cinderella
*Pinocchio
*The Mayan Hero Twins
*Ragnarok
*Yggdrasil (the Norse world tree), Hel, Asgard, and Valhalla
*The Kalevala
*Jason and the Argonauts
*Theseus and Ariadne
*Freya and the Valkyries
*Xena
*Hercules
*The Norse gods
*The Fates/Norns
*Rhiannon
*Arianrhod and Llew Llaw Gyffes
and a whole bunch of others.
And I'm still including plots and "original" characters of my own. Needless to say, it's a sprawling mess.
I even have a handful of Bible references to pitch in, just for convenience.
Every single reference, though, is being twisted beyond easy recognition, with few exceptions. And actually what's really happening, is that legends are being combined: like Hades/Persephone being combined with the story of Arawn/Pwyll, or Orpheus and Eurydice being mutated into a weird variation on the story of Lot and his wife from the Bible. One of my favorites, though, has to be Sleeping Beauty as a super-powerful witch queen who is Snow White's stepmother..just because I can. Probably the weirdest is King Arthur meets Jonah in the belly of the whale, but that's up for debate.
I also like having Hercules as a grandfather. It just amuses me.
It's all crazy. But I love it.
I'm probably going to scrap everything I wrote in November, though. I was looking back on it, and it's utter crap, so I'm going to take the elements of plot that I liked from it, and keep those. Everything else is going to go, though.
All hail the noveling madness.
I really like the idea in the song I posted of someone asking someone else to remember them every time they see a rose...I may borrow that and twist and morph it somehow.
Woot.
My flu is almost gone, so that's yay.
I have to ace my finals, though, if I'm going to pass my classes well enough to keep my GPA where it needs to be to go to England. I'm still waiting to find out where I get to go to, though it will most likely be the University of Sussex, which is down on the south coast in the city of Brighton. Irony: Brighton is the UK's version of San Francisco and Santa Cruz mutated together; basically, it's their version of where I currently go to school anyway. Haha.
Spanish is really the final I'm mostly worried about, though. I've blown off so much work in that class that I may have actually shot myself in the ass, metaphorically of course. Fortunately, the professor is super chill. And I was just calculating my grade, and unless I've done a lot worse on the stuff I've turned in than I thought I did, I should be able to pass if I get an 80% on the final. Thank God I opted to have that class graded pass/no pass - even if I don't pass, my GPA shouldn't be affected - though I may be placed on Academic Warning, which is essentially suicide so far as going abroad is concerned. I have to remain in Good Academic Standing or I'm in BIG trouble...so cross your fingers for me. :)
Syntax and Semantics should be fine, so I'm not even worried about those. I've been doing consistently really well in the classes, so I should do just as fine on the take-home midterms.
My internship/job is kind of driving me crazy. My boss is pregnant and cranky, so I have to tread carefully, and to be honest, I've been kind of blowing the whole thing off so that's not helping. Still, I'll make it work somehow.
I went for coffee with my friend today, and got a couple of new books. One's Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology. He was one of the States' most famous mythologists, and studied the similarities that occur across the world's belief systems. So that's really interesting.
I also got the Oxford Dictionary of Superstitious beliefs...AMAZING. I've been laughing at so many of the things in there.
I also got a map of England to put up on my wall, because it's a nifty looking map. I've decided that maps make for really good wall posters, since I put one up of Fairyland the other day, and now I have England to add to the collection. My wall poster collection is quite random: I have the maps of Fairyland and England, a storm fairy, Miranda from Shakespeare's The Tempest watching a shipwreck, four different Pirates of the Caribbean posters that were gifts, and an art nouveau-style poster for National Novel Writing Month. I also have photographs up all over the walls, and cool artsy cards - a peacock, some tropical parrots, the dragon of Wales in Celtic knotwork style, and some of the cards by the Bohemian-art outlet Papaya. In short, my wall is awesome.
When I go to England next year, I plan on putting butcher paper up on the walls and having my friends there draw on the paper so that my walls are illustrated by my friends (and me, of course). I'll probably attach a bunch of maps and put photos of my adventures in those places, too, because it seems like kind of a cool art project to do. Nice and distracting. :-D
I'm so easily amused.
Well, I'd better go study for my Spanish final, and get to work on stuff for my internship. Bleargh. I'd rather be reading or writing...or both.
