Little Girls Should Be Seen and Heard

Well, I had to stop eventually...

Over at the League

I have a post up over at the Women's League of Ale Drinkers today on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It's a fascinating book on why people who can synthesize information across borders of various kinds, find the narrative hooks and figure out what people really want and need in their lives will thrive in the new information-saturation world.

I woke up this morning dreaming I was walking in Lady Gaga's shoes. As if! You will recall how badly I inured myself on perfectly flat shoes and a very small hill; imagine me actually trying to clomp around in these. Even Gaga took a spill in the middle of Heathrow.

Grading this morning; revising this afternoon. I got my contract for Craft Critique Culture at U Iowa. Now I have to decide some things about next summer: what do you reckon? Iceland or New Zealand? Iceland could be combined with England (the Great Writing conference will be in London this year), but I've never been to New Zealand. Of course it's a lot more money too, unless I can get someone else to foot the bill (when's that grant deadline?). Hmmm.

UPDATE: Part 7 of La Ronde over at Eric Beetner's blog.

My Students: Full of Awesome

Two grad students who are doing independent studies with me also made music videos to go with their projects. I don't think I can link to Kira's video on Facebook (a mash-up of Tipping the Velvet and the Brandi Carlile song "I Was Made for You"), but I can link to Caitlin's video for Lady Gaga's "Teeth" that encapsulates the argument for her paper on the appeal of much-maligned series like Twilight and Flowers in the Attic for young female readers.



They inspired another student to make a fan vid (go, Annie!). Now I'm itching to make a book trailer for me! I've made some for a friend, but haven't got around to my own yet.

Punch Magazine predicts Lady Gaga... in 1929!

Yes, now it can be told! My tireless research has turned up a fascinating artifact from the past. Okay, when I say "tireless research," I actually mean "something I stumbled across because I have weird reading habits." Over Xmas break, I wrote a story set in Jazz Age London. I thought I should do a little research on those wild times beyond movies and Waugh, so I got Bright Young People out of the library and read a bit in it. However, I discovered that once the story was finished, I was less engaged with the research and the book languished. Finding it was due back, I hurriedly flipped through to get a sense of what else might be there, should I revisit the period for another story (quite possible).

Imagine my surprise when the name "Lady Gaga" arrested my vision. Tyler refers to a spoof of the wild parties in Punch, called "The Dull Young People" (of course!) where an intrepid journo tries to get the inside story on the fabled bon vivantes. After looking in vain on the web, I managed to get a copy of the April 24, 1929 article via interlibrary loan (I ♥ ILL!):

"It was terribly difficult to get you a card," said Lady Gaga as she steered me dexterously in her pink two-seater through the mazes of the after-theatre traffic; "but, my dear, I got away with it. I told them you write for the papers."

The narrator has been promised the chance to meet up with Bright Young luminaries like "Bobo and Bats" otherwise known as the Honourable Batsine Belfry and her husband. It's a wild night of cross-dressing ("a massive maiden in a cavalry officer's mess-kit, whom everybody addressed as 'Colonel,' and next to her a fresh-faced lad dressed as a bride"), drinking rum and calling everything, "simply super!"

Predictably, the narrator is not impressed by Lady Gaga's demi-monde, which includes the requisite "obese American" as well as a jazz band. He fails to join in with the escapades and the bright young things give him the cold shoulder, which he returns, having "not observed any indication of brilliance or originality" in their "mild dare-devilry and self-conscious dissipation." He last glimpses Lady Gaga "sitting on the floor (strewn with cigarette-ends), her arm round the waist of a young heavy-weight in horn-rims, dressed as a baby...listening to a hollow-eyed girl in a ballet-skirt and a man's opera hat who was singing a mournful song with the refrain, 'It's terribly thrill-ing to be wicked...'"

Sounds like a perfect plan for the next Lady Gaga video!

Meanwhile, I'm busy busy busy. Off to St. Louis next week for PCA with Miss Wendy (and a couple of my grad students) and then down to New Mexico to see my folks. Already in planning stages for promoting this summer when the new edition of Pelzmantel comes out from Immanion. Look at the nifty giant cover for Unikirja: it's actually a lawn sign from Vistaprint, home of promo printing materials (thanks, Stella, my genius cheap-PR guru). I can't wait to get one for Pelz -- the first draft of the new cover is gorgeous!

Punch Prognostication of Lady Gaga

Cited on page 147 of D. J. Taylor's Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Ageis mention of a Punch Magazinepiece from April 1929 called "The Dull Young People" which Taylor calls a "labored parody" of the sparkling folk. But the description made me laugh out loud:

Here Punch's correspondent is escorted by "Lady Gaga" to an entertainment hosted by "the Honorable Batsin Belfry" and her husband "Bobo." Arriving at "a little house in Bloomsbury" ablaze with light, the couple fight their way to the dining room, over whose door hangs a sign reading WE'RE ALONE. RUN IN FOR YOUR RUM. Here Bobo, in maritime gear, dispenses drinks to a "perspiring mob of boys and girls in rather too elaborate fancy-dress, most of the latter showing a curiously unoriginal preference for trousers."

"For all its heavy-handedness, this is a rather accurate take on the Bright Young People's ambience," Taylor asserts.

But what of Lady Gaga?! Punch predicted it, eh? Having a nice private chuckle about it, too. I'm trying to get a copy of the piece via ILL. We shall see how much Lady Gaga there is...

Of course the book's due tomorrow; I haven't had time to read much of it. I got it after I was inspired by writing a story set in Jazz Age London, but I didn't ever quite get caught up in it. I found this passage by accident as I flipped through the remainder. Luck, eh?