David Live, Lazarus, T.E. Lawrence
May. 6th, 2023 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1Roommate and I watched a Stephen Sondheim documentary and listened to "David Live" last night -- one of the Bowie interviews I was reading mentioned that he "found his voice" while making this live album, so the vocals are richer, more complex, more skilled, than his original album versions of classic songs. My parents loved live albums when I was a kid because they got to go to so many concerts for free (thanks to my aunt, she was a DJ) -- Joan Jett, Metallica... (I paused here to ask Mom for her Top 3 bands she saw live, because I know it impressed me as a kid, but she must be asleep!)
ETA: She said her Top 3 are Motley Crue, Faster Pussy Cats, and Hank Williams Jr.
They never had "David Live" though! I used to pour through their music: a whole spinning rack of cassettes, another of CDs, the old turntable with shelf after shelf of vinyl ... but iirc they only had a handful of Bowie albums. "Aladdin Sane" and "Diamond Dogs" I remember for sure. But for the most part they were metalheads and rock-n-rollers.
Anyway, the album was great! XD I also read "Lazarus" finally -- Bowie's musical that he wrote before he died. I think it was the next year that I went to NYC, and by then the production was over. I thought I'd missed my chance to ever see it or learn the story. Had no idea until just this week that the book was published.
It was great: in typical Bowie-fashion it was opaque, off-kilter, stylized, with a mixture of glaringly-obvious metaphors and dense, hard-to-unpack ones. I love "The Man Who Fell to Earth," and "Lazarus" is a sequel to it, but as Enda Walsh says in the foreword, it's in many ways an autobiographical send-off for Bowie himself, and it's especially heart-wrenching to read this, knowing that HE knew he was dying, as he wrote it.
(So my roommate and I also spent a lot of time listening to the cast album, then comparing it with various Bowie versions and other people's covers)
Side note, I've heard that you can tell a writer's gender by certain conventions that men commonly use vs. women. When I first read about it, I wasn't exactly convinced. I popped my writing into it, my dreamwidth entries, and it switched my gender up for every new post XD (then again, maybe that's accurate!). But I did notice, for example, that one of my online friends "talks like a Reddit atheist" and is frequently assumed to be a straight cis male as a result, but is actually a bisexual cis female. Anyway, my point is that whatever stock I MIGHT have put into that has been severely shaken over the past few books, because I could've sworn Enda Walsh was a woman, and the author of "Machete Season" too. Meanwhile I thought Golfo Alexopoulos, of "Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag," was a dude. The other books I guessed correctly, but only because I made note of their authors before reading XD It's harder to fuck it up when you just read a whole Wikipedia article stuffed with pictures and pronouns.
I'm up to 12K in my novella now. I paused last night and sent it to a friend for advice: "Do I write this next scene, or do I cut it entirely?" and they said, "Write it, and make it WORSE!" XD Exactly the type of writer friend I need in my life. Then I had a dream they sent me a box full of LSD, and I woke up touched...
Today, I should be getting some T.E. Lawrence books in the mail. A book of literary critique, the 60th anniversary making of the movie, and a coffee table book of the museum exhibit from a few years back. If the weather stays cloudy and cool, I'll go to the library and walk my roommate home (and return my overdue books...)
ETA: She said her Top 3 are Motley Crue, Faster Pussy Cats, and Hank Williams Jr.
They never had "David Live" though! I used to pour through their music: a whole spinning rack of cassettes, another of CDs, the old turntable with shelf after shelf of vinyl ... but iirc they only had a handful of Bowie albums. "Aladdin Sane" and "Diamond Dogs" I remember for sure. But for the most part they were metalheads and rock-n-rollers.
Anyway, the album was great! XD I also read "Lazarus" finally -- Bowie's musical that he wrote before he died. I think it was the next year that I went to NYC, and by then the production was over. I thought I'd missed my chance to ever see it or learn the story. Had no idea until just this week that the book was published.
It was great: in typical Bowie-fashion it was opaque, off-kilter, stylized, with a mixture of glaringly-obvious metaphors and dense, hard-to-unpack ones. I love "The Man Who Fell to Earth," and "Lazarus" is a sequel to it, but as Enda Walsh says in the foreword, it's in many ways an autobiographical send-off for Bowie himself, and it's especially heart-wrenching to read this, knowing that HE knew he was dying, as he wrote it.
(So my roommate and I also spent a lot of time listening to the cast album, then comparing it with various Bowie versions and other people's covers)
Side note, I've heard that you can tell a writer's gender by certain conventions that men commonly use vs. women. When I first read about it, I wasn't exactly convinced. I popped my writing into it, my dreamwidth entries, and it switched my gender up for every new post XD (then again, maybe that's accurate!). But I did notice, for example, that one of my online friends "talks like a Reddit atheist" and is frequently assumed to be a straight cis male as a result, but is actually a bisexual cis female. Anyway, my point is that whatever stock I MIGHT have put into that has been severely shaken over the past few books, because I could've sworn Enda Walsh was a woman, and the author of "Machete Season" too. Meanwhile I thought Golfo Alexopoulos, of "Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag," was a dude. The other books I guessed correctly, but only because I made note of their authors before reading XD It's harder to fuck it up when you just read a whole Wikipedia article stuffed with pictures and pronouns.
I'm up to 12K in my novella now. I paused last night and sent it to a friend for advice: "Do I write this next scene, or do I cut it entirely?" and they said, "Write it, and make it WORSE!" XD Exactly the type of writer friend I need in my life. Then I had a dream they sent me a box full of LSD, and I woke up touched...
Today, I should be getting some T.E. Lawrence books in the mail. A book of literary critique, the 60th anniversary making of the movie, and a coffee table book of the museum exhibit from a few years back. If the weather stays cloudy and cool, I'll go to the library and walk my roommate home (and return my overdue books...)
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 05:21 pm (UTC)Even if we were to accept this theory as plausible, wouldn't it be targeted towards native speakers? Cause a non-native one like me wouldn't be able to tell whether a convention's more commonly used by men or women - I'd just use the ones I've been exposed to the most.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 08:22 pm (UTC)The gendered writing would definitely get fucked up with non-native speakers. IDK if you know beebee76 in the Thrawn fandom but they often come across as a cis dude because English is their second language AND they've spent so much time in the military. Aoitennyo often gets mistaken for a dude as well, but English is her first language. IDK, it's hard to put a finger on what even makes someone "sound male", too. I've heard people say that men center their sentences around themselves: "I went to the bakery. I got a discount." whereas women might say, "There was a sale at the bakery today, so all the bread was on discount!"
No clue how true that actually is, or if the difference is strong enough to accurately tell.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 09:18 pm (UTC)The whole thing about males centering their sentences around themselves...honestly I've only heard this in English! I mean, in Bulgarian you can tell the gender of the speaker pretty damn easily, cause most words are gendered, so for example a woman would say "Уморена съм" and a man would say "Уморен съм" when they both wanna say they're tired.
And another thing is that as a non-native speaker your level of fluency does "fluctuate" sometimes. For example, the male way is how I'd phrase myself when I'm tired, or in between translating languages, and the female one is closer to how I'd try to word it under normal circumstances. Though my online conversations have mostly shown that, regardless of how I phrase myself, people usually take me for...
A semi-conservative man in his 20s!!! ;-;
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 08:14 pm (UTC)There's always something REALLY intriguing about male writers who write real, grounded, intriguing female characters; and something equally intriguing about female writers like LeGuin who handle male characters deftly but leave their female characters one-dimensional and background.
My roommate has transitioned from female to male over the past year, and I've been familiar with his writing for years -- it hasn't changed one bit, but it's always struck me as somehow "male", even when he was writing feminist stories in a sort of Margaret Atwood vein. But another friend from high school transitioned from male to female and I've noticed this really touching, sort of emotional awakening in her stories, as if she was stifling herself, or wearing a mask before.
One of my friends is a pro writer and they recently came out as genderfluid at the age of 72. They were telling me yesterday that writers can't help but reveal their souls when they write. Maybe that has something to do with my friend from high school -- her writing changed because she no longer had to worry about it giving her away. Or maybe she just felt happier, so her writing became more rich as a result.