Cover Versions & Proustian Return 🎧💋

July’s round up is all about cover versions, gate crashing the archives, and Samhain plans.

In This Missive:

• Thinking about Cover Versions
• Reading—Lote by Shola von Reinhold
• Listening to Celebrity Skin Covers
• Re-watching Annette Høst’s video lecture series on Norse Seidr
• Planning a Samhain Subscriber Hang

I’m Thinking about Cover Versions

I’ve always been compelled by retellings. Most recently I read Jeanette Winterson’s version of Shakesepeare’s The Winter’s Tale titled A Gap in Time. In the novel she calls her version of the play a “cover version” riffing on the jazz club (I cringe) setting of the latter half of the novel. The verdict is still out on this one, but I loved the idea and it got me thinking about what’s possible.

I’m fascinated by the double-textuality of literary cover versions—where the reader and writer share a text in the telling. The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter’s retelling of fairy tales remains a favourite book of mine. I’ve been meaning to read Joy McCullough’s Enter the Body for a while now.  From the Enter the Body’s promotional page “In the room beneath a stage's trapdoor, Shakespeare’s dead teenage girls compare their experiences and retell the stories of their lives, their loves, and their fates in their own words.” Does that sound great or what? Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, a retelling of my favourite Shakespeare play, The Tempest, has levitated to the top of my TBR pile. What are your favourite retellings of Shakespeare, Fairytales, etc.? 

I’m Reading—Lote by Shola von Reinhold

I delighted in the subversive glamour of this novel about gate crashing white post-modernity. Lote manages to be funny as it raids the archives. At its heart it exposes white power in art institutions which exploit the artistic, cultural and soul work of people of colour to bolster their own agenda. It’s also a delightful satire. In von Reinhold’s accurate vision, the archives are not a neutral space. Myriad black artists and writers, historically erased by racist versions of art history, are secreted away in the text for readers to find amongst delightful invention (or are they inventions…?). I love this kind of literary sleight of hand, and I believe it serves the project of radical reclamation well. 

I’m Listening to Celebrity Skin Covers

Unwoman has just released her 8th volume of cover tunes—as usual I’m obsessed with her cello rock interpretations of myriad pop songs, one of which is Celebrity Skin— an anthem for me at the turn of the millennia when I was living in SoCal. I was navigating the perpetual twilight of my goth years, living in the white heat of the ambition of others. Celebrity Skin was Hole’s big hit and in it they return to the seething irony that made Live Through This such an explosive companion of mine in the mid-90s. SoCal was a place where I felt alien, used up—a pound (too many) of flesh. Hole’s original version from the eponymous album inspired by Los Angeles holds a Proustian return for me. I go back to those terrible years when I was also shiny with audacity. I just didn’t know it.

I found some other versions online. Weezer did an admirable version live. Others don’t cut it; let’s just forget about Doja Cat’s cover for her Superbowl Taco Bell commercial, and go instead straight to Unwoman’s measured version. It makes perfect sense to this fifty something riot grrrl.

 I’m Rewatching Annette Høst’s eight-part video lecture series on Norse Seidr.

Høst’s nuanced and practical approach to Seidr is rooted in decades of practice and extensive research. The live Q&As are now over, but all eight videos in the series are archived on YouTube, free to watch.

I’m Planning Another Subscriber Hang

Watch this space for details—I’m thinking about hosting our next subscriber hang in October, around Samhain. Maybe October 27th. These are always at 7pm GMT. Will post more details as the date approaches!