Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

 

Lately I’ve taken to reading turn of the century literature (Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, etc.) and I’m quite proud of myself, to be frankly honest. The kids of stories such as those that I just listed above are often hard to read for most people, such as my father, because of how the dialect and sentence structure has changed in the last one hundred years or so. Myself, I can read them and enjoy them.

But one common thing I’ve noticed in almost all of the stories is that, if these stories can be taken as an indicator of how people were back then, I’m honestly surprised that the human race survived from all the damn fainting that’s in them. Currently, I’m reading Dracula and thus far I have counted a minimum of around seven people fainting or coming close to it. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I had read, a woman (Watson’s future wife) fainted after hearing that Holmes and Watson were shot at.

In these stories people faint over things which, in this day and age, would merit a pair of wide eyes. And the cure-all for a faint or near faint? BRANDY! I wonder, did it ever occur that people might have been fainting because they were loaded up on the brandy as a cure for nearly fainting? Like I said, I’m surprised the human race survived all the fainting. I’m pretty sure more than a few people must’ve cracked their heads open after hearing about that really bad hangnail Mary got that evening.

One of the problems I have with the novel Dracula isn’t so much the fainting, but more how Bram Stoker, when referring to a child, would use either the words “child” or “it” rather than “the boy,” “the girl,” “he,” or “she.” Is that how kids were viewed to Mr. Stoker? As an “It”?

Other than that, these are good books, which I shall have to return to. I just wanted to do a mini-rant.

~ Damen

I was looking around on the Apple Quicktime video site today, and came across an album entitled, My Brightest Diamond – Bring Me The Workhorse

Albums these days tend to have titles that boil down to babble. Lyrics too. It’s as if the musicians know that the songs need a human voice, but don’t really have much to say, just a bunch of chords and notes that sound cool together, so they create the equivalent of lorem ipsum.

The sad thing is that the music itself from My Brightest Diamond wasn’t really that interested. It just kind of wandered around, never getting any place.

Yet, here’s how the musician described the meaning of the album: “Reconciling all the complex emotions found in each of us.” Reconciling ALL the complex emotions found in each of us?!? Nothing could do that, except if the sun exploded and ended all life on Earth. This phrase represents the ultimate in pretense.

It reminded me of a review of Bob Dylan’s new album that I heard a few days ago on NPR. The reviewer seemed to think that the album was a work of genius, with wonderful music combined with poetic lyrics. I was interested. Then, they played a song from the album. The music was boring and unoriginal, and the lyrics were superficial, without much meaning.

If the music hadn’t been produced by Bob Dylan, nobody would bother to give it a second look. There’s too much in the music industry these days of the worshipping of legends, babbling praise without consideration for the real value of what’s being said.