Version Control: Mac the Knife

I am unashamed about the fact that I loathe and detest Bobby Darin's version of Mack The Knife.

Why? Well, it's a - well, what is it? He's singing about this murderer guy and he's all peppy and finger-pointy and winky? Like there's something cosy about being a killer? Ugh, I hate that song!

Initially, say for a decade or so, I thought I hated Mack The Knife itself. But then I discovered that Mack The Knife by Kurt Weill is an amazing and breathtaking song with creepy and disturbing lyrics that send a shiver up my spine.

F'r instance, the Bobby Darin version seems to not have this verse:

And the child bride, in her nighty

Whose assailant's still at large

Violated in her slumbers

Macky, how much did you charge?

Creepy and disturbing indeed. And Weill's music, with its circling relentness underlines the disturbing lyrics. The music and lyrics together really communicate to me this idea of a random psychopath.

I'm not sure at all how the above verse relates to the original German but I'm betting it's closer in spirit to the original that Bobby Darin's version. I heard that verse for the first time on a CD of Weill's songs sung by Robyn Archer. Mr Tumperkin hates this CD with a passion, and I love it. Particuarly the gloriously overwrought version of Surabaya Johnny which I have tendancy to sing along to loudly while imagining myself draped over a grand piano. (Such is my love of this absurd song I may have post on it separately)

But back to the rather better-known Mack The Knife. My very very best version is this one by Lotte Lenya, Weill's one-time wife (who played Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love). I love the organ-grinding music at the start; it makes me think of sinister clowns.

Heroes, heroines, winners and losers

I've just started reading Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer which Janet Webb very kindly sent me. (Thanks Janet!). This seems to be a much-loved book in romanceland and so I've been looking forward to it greatly. I am only a few chapters in so it's early days and this is not a review of MG. I mention MG only to explain how I started on the particular train of thought that this post will now try to organise into something semi-linear and comprehensible.

MG surprised me as soon as I picked it up - it starts with a hero and heroine who are both powerless. The heroine, Elly, is living in isolation, the derided crazy widow on the hill and the hero, Will, has just got out of prison where he has suffered both physical deprivation and mental torment. I literally can't think of another romance in which both hero and heroine find themselves so powerless.

Contrast that with a book like Devilish by Jo Beverley where the hero and heroine are both endowed with a lot of personal power. And then contrast both of those with a book like To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney where one character is very powerful and the other is very weak. Historicals, in particular, teem with this latter type of story. Usually, though not always, the powerful character is the hero and the powerless character the heroine, a phenomenon I've posted on before.

I find myself having quite distinct emotional reactions to what each of these books are offering me as a reader. The most alluring type of story to me is where there is a power differential between the H/H. Why do I find that trope so endlessly alluring?

It's trite that the vast majority of romance heroes are 'winners': billionaires, dukes, sports stars, leaders of men, men of action. This is often popularly taken to denote that romance readers see that type of 'alpha' male as the perfect partner. That's not how I see it at all. I really don't have secret fantasies about being swept of my feet by a big stwong man.

No, really.

So what's it all about?

Theory the first: convention

It's convention. Literary and cultural. We expect heroes to be extraordinary/world-changing and heroines to be ordinary/domestic and the genre obliges us. Consider these contrasting definitions of hero and heroine from the online Webster-Merriam dictionary:

Hero

(1)(a) : a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability (b) : an illustrious warrior (c) : a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities (d) : one that shows great courage
(2)(a) : the principal male character in a literary or dramatic work (b) : the central figure in an event, period, or movement....
...(4) : an object of extreme admiration and devotion

Heroine

(1)(a) : a mythological or legendary woman having the qualities of a hero (b) : a woman admired and emulated for her achievements and qualities
(2)(a) : the principal female character in a literary or dramatic work (b) : the central female figure in an event or period

Ok, so you can argue that definition (1) of heroine subsumes the whole of definition (1) for hero, but I think it's telling that the heroine definition seems to be regarded as completely stated with, effectively, "see 'hero'".

When I thought about this point myself (before looking up definitions) I realised that my internal definition for 'hero' was a male of extraordinary courage/daring/achievement and that my internal definition of heroine was merely main female protagonist.

Hmmmm.

Theory the second: the reader's desire/fantasy

This is my preferred explanation.

My feeling is that it's a mistake to focus too much upon what specifically the hero and heroine *are*. Do readers like books with Duke-heroes because they think hereditary peers are intrinsically *good*? Of course not; it's nothing to the point - for me anyway. The point is that the heroine will, in the course of that story, move from a position of weakness to a position of strength; the hero is her destination. She is going to win. I've mentioned my feeling that romance is about women winning before.

And it's all very coherent and satisfying, a neat explanation that suits me very well.

And then along comes Morning Glory and disrupts it.

Without the power differential, it's a very different story, isn't it? More, you and me against The World, babe? Winning together?

On discipline and wiggle room

Thank you all for your comments on my histrionic wobble of last week. Really, they helped me no end.

The questions you posed were particularly helpful, making me think about what it was that was really bothering me. I had characterised this in my post quite vaguely as a feeling that effort-in was not proportionate to the rewards earned. Interestingly, however, when I reflected on this, I realised that the time I spent actually blogging on this blog was not a huge part of the frustration. Much of the negative feelings were related to the time I spent generally surfing around, commenting and sometimes (very time-consumingly) not commenting on other blogs.

Much of that time felt like a waste - and was partly down to a chronic lack of discipline. In all my time of blogging, I've not been using any kind of feeder. I've always just added blogs to favourites and surfed around in an ad hoc way, visiting blogs only to find no new content etc. Not very efficient, particularly given how disorganised my sidebar is.

So here is my all-new self-disciplined approach to blogging and blog reading:

1. I'm going to take the advice of Maili and have a fixed day for blogging - both posting here and visiting other blogs. This means that I can get the benefits that I still enjoy (a soapbox of my very own, a 'stake' in the community, the ability to exchange ideas with like-minded - and sometimes very non-like-minded people) without allowing it to be the time-drain it's developed into; and

2. I spent lots of time last night adding the blogs I visit on my sidebar to Google reader, and that is how I am going to organise my blog visiting from now on.

Hopefully, this will work out and be a big improvement. My work-life is such that I may not be able to be entirely fixed about what my 'blogging' day is going to be, but probably it will be mid-week.

I am also - crucially - going to allow myself a little bit of *wiggle room* for exceptional situations, such as Laura Vivanco's fantastic series of posts on Georgette Heyer which I am reading as they come up. But a series of posts like that only comes along once in while. I urge you to check them out if you haven't already done so.

As I mentioned in that last post, I have some more questions about certain blogging issues and I've put up a second poll dealing with the next one - it's about Twitter and how you view it. Again, if any voters would like to expand in the comments, please do so. I'd be fascinated to hear what you have to say. My own answer is that I'm not really interested in Twitter, given the potential for more of my time draining away.

One last thing. The results of the last post were highly reflective of my own feelings: the most popular result was that blogging can feel like an opportunity or a chore, but more of the former than the latter. Which is why - in a nutshell - I think it's worth continuing with. For now.

Yet more observations about blogging

It's become something of an obsession with me, hasn't it? What is blogging? Why do I do it? Who am I when I do it?

Well, I am slightly obsessed. Which makes this article a very interesting read. I urge you to look at it. Does it ring any bells with you? I hate to admit this (denial, you see) but it does with me.

I also read a very interesting last week about how we react to email; how it's quite like gambling in terms of the amount of effort people put in and the types of 'reward' it gives them.

This is all very timeous, because I find myself feeling very disenchanted with blogging recently and much of that feeling is centred around the relationship between the effort expended and the rewards it brings, not to mention a general feeling of ... dissatisfaction.

In short, I am thinking about stopping blogging. And genuinely, this is not a plea for reassurance. It is just - well, where else am I going to express this view? I won't go into all my reasons just now. Instead, I have some questions re blogging that I'd like to put to anyone visiting by way of (in true blogger fashion!) a poll. The first one is up now and I'll leave it up till this time Wednesday. I'd appreciate it if you voted - and feel free to expand on your thoughts in the comments.

Reader creativity and the spaces between moments

I have this double CD of Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. The first CD was recorded in 1955 when his career had just started, the second in 1981 a year or two before he died. It's amazing how very different they are. The 1955 version is all quickfire brilliance, brimming with confidence and bright technique. The 1981 version is quieter, more reflective. More melancholy. More beautiful.

One of the things that is interesting is the time difference. Take the first movement, the Aria. The first version lasts for 1 min 51 seconds and the second version at 3 mins 4 secs. I've posted a video giving both versions below at the end of this post and there's an interesting discussion between Gould and Tim Page after the music. Gould is critical of that earlier version - he says when he listened to it again he recognised the 'fingerprints' - the mechanical aspects of playing the piano - but he couldn't recognise the spirit of the person who made the earlier recording.

What's fascinating to me is that arguably the most beautiful parts of that 1981 recording happen in the tiny, almost imperceptible silences between the notes. In between the very deliberate notes, are very deliberate silences. And it makes you 'hear' the silence; it makes you realise that things happen in silences, however brief they may be. The silences draw attention to the notes that follow. They inform the notes. In short, they are part of the music.

A similar thing happens with comic books. I don't know much about them, but my brother is into them in a big way. Here is a snippet of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which I bought him for Christmas one year and keep meaning to borrow back:

Don't you just LOVE that explanation? And the intoxicating idea that in that 3 or 4 millimetres of white space, your brain is filling in story, is creating as you read?

A book is not a piece of music or a series of drawings, but it has its silence, its gutter. It has those spaces between moments that are not really empty or silent at all but the place where the reader's brain engineers whatever it is that is not said.

I blogged recently about the reader-writer transaction and quoted Margaret Atwood: the act of reading is just as singular - always - as the act of writing. And I think this is why. Because the reader is engaged - in a small way - in a creative act, negotiating the silence and gutters between the moments reported by the author.

My Animal Crackers view of America

When I was wee, we had this Melanie album - vinyl, natch. This was late 70s/early 80s.

I loved Animal Crackers, and was also sort of fascinated by it; that intriguing line: if you eat your animal crackers, the children in Europe won't starve anymore. Children in Europe? Starving? Surely not! My mum explained to me that Melanie would have been a little girl just after the Second World War and that was what she was talking about.

What was fascinating too though was that Melanie's world was not mine. We didn't have animal crackers in Britain. We had those Cadbury's chocolate covered animal biscuits, but I felt sure that these were not the same thing. No-one would urge a child to eat chocolate biscuits using the image of starving children as an incentive...

The world this song evoked - a sort of white-picket-fence place (though I didn't think of it in those specific terms at the time) - was one I saw on TV and in films too. America was this place of unimaginable wealth and privilege, so unlike Britain. It was a place where people went to restaurants for breakfast and to places called 'drugstores' to drink milkshakes and the children didn't seem to wear uniforms to school.

Sometimes it seemed a scary place where people carried guns and lived in strange nowhere towns that looked like they'd been dropped in the middle of a desert. But it didn't sound like that in Animal Crackers. In Animal Crackers everyone cared about the starving children in Europe and went to Alice's restaurant and thought that fatties were nice.

She made it sound like a really nice place.

Author Life Cycles, or Hitting Your Stride

I've been reading a lot of Shana Abe lately. In the last few weeks: The Smoke Thief (2005), The Dream Thief (2006) and most recently Queen of Dragons (2007). I also saw a copy of The Truelove Bride (1999) in a second hand bookshop a few weeks ago and am halfway through that. Before this little lot, I'd only read one Shana Abe, The Secret Swan (2001).

This little cache is a perfect illustration of a somewhat typical 'author life cycle'. I read Swan first. I liked it but it didn't blow me away. I was aware though of the author having potential for me as a reader and had been keeping her in mind as someone whose books I may try again. I had liked the prose, and the way she used the story. It had a shape that appealed to me.

A couple of years passed before I recently picked up Smoke in Waterstones with a book token that had been sitting unused in my purse for months. I absolutely loved it. I haven't reviewed it partly because I suspected it would just have been an incoherent paean. Similarly Dream. I've just finished Queen: this time, very good but not quite as good as the other two. Which brings me to Truelove. If I'd read this one first, I might never have picked up another book by Abe. Which is not to say that it's precisely bad, just that I couldn't have detected any potential in that book for me as a reader.

For me, Truelove is the caterpillar book, Swan is the pupa (potential) book and the drakon series is the fullblown butterfly.

The analogy holds true for certain other authors. Kresley Cole springs to mind. Her first couple of books Captain of All Pleasures and The Price of Pleasure are ok, but I wouldn't have felt bound to read any more of Cole if I'd picked them up first. The McCarrick brothers trilogy for me though showed a great deal more promise and then Cole really hit her stride with the Immortals series.

Another example is Jennifer Ashley. I loved The Madness of Lord Ian MacKenzie and decided to give one of her older books a try. I could hardly believe The Mad Bad Duke was written by the same author. It was a DNF for me - but I can't wait to read the next of the MacKenzie books.

I hope Abe, Cole and Ashley can keep it up with the rest of their respective series. We've all had authors who stop working for us. Katiebabs recently blogged about how she'd fallen out of love with Gabaldon and when Tracy recently reviewed a Lynne Graham category, I reflected sadly that I haven't enjoyed a Graham for some years now but from the early 1990s to the early 2000s she wrote some absolutely fantastic romances.

The life cycle analogy doesn't work for every author. There are some authors whose debut novels have been very far from caterpillar books. But even the best authors tend to show improvement after book one. Ivory's first novel was Angel in a Red Dress (aka Starlit Surrender), a very good book that nevertheless isn't in the same league as her later works. Patrica Gaffney's Fortune's Lady is no To Have and To Hold. In fact, for my money, she only really started hitting her stride with Another Eden, her fifth book.

For me, all of this demonstrates that writers learn through writing. Some things can't be learned theoretically, only through the doing of them. There's a temptation to write off authors after one bad (or not very good) book. But that author may take a few books to reach the butterfly stage. And this is where blogland comes into its own, providing those word of mouth recommendations that can make you pick up a book by an author you thought you'd never try.