Five Things about Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes”

Posted on February 6, 2019September 14, 2020 in Blog Tagged Mina Loy, modernist pedagogy, Songs to Joannes

Maker of poems, paintings and assemblages, designer of household objects, Mina Loy is a fitting figure to bring into my seminar Modernist Studies & Pedagogy. Her creations are magnets of modernity. And their futuristic forays anticipate Digital Humanities, fueling DH projects such as Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Mina Loy is not the poster woman of modernist studies; she is its digital platform.

And so I choose this blog post for my seminar postscript to Loy’s 34-poem sequence “Songs to Joannes.” The Loy Chronology on MAPS informs us that the first four poems first appeared in Others: A Magazine of New Verse (1915); the full sequence appeared in the magazine in 1917. The titular “Joannes” is code for Giovanni Papini, one of Loy’s fraught relationships and Futurist forays. Think of my Five Things as a handful of cards. Play them as you like.

Anti-Romantic Love Poems. The poem’s title is a wild card. If someone composes songs for a first-name basis someone, we might expect rhapsodic tributes to a lover or beloved friend. When Poem 1 plays its Cupid image, we don’t expect a Pig Cupid…Rooting in erotic garbage. Instead of romantic transcendence, these poems are rooted in the ground, the everyday, the animal. The cosmic is carnal.
STEMbending. If Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot invoked the sciences to harden Romantic conceptions of poets and poetry, Loy’s “Songs to Johannes” puts love in the laboratory. Instead of strapping on STEM, these poems shape it to avant-garde poetics. In Poem 14 physical love is pure physics: the impact of lighted bodies / Knocking sparks off each other / In chaos. Generating from the scientific term nucleus, Poem 33 proclaims that Proto-plasm was raving mad / Evolving us. In Poem 23, the stock romantic image of the moon will Bleach / To the pure white / Wickedness of pain. Love is chemical.
Body Mechanics. When love isn’t animal or chemical, it’s often mechanical in these poems. Loy trafficked in Futurism and Surrealism. Her Aphorisms on Futurism reflects only part of her vexed relationship with F. T. Marinetti. In Poem 13, her pun Where two or three are welded together plays on religious rituals of marriage (welded/wedded) and worship. In Poem 25, the lovers turn into machines in the light of an erotic sunrise (little rosy / tongue of Dawn), staring out with steel eyes.
Mind the Gaps. Many of Loy’s lines bear rifts, apt gaps reflecting fractured relationships, formal rupture, even atomic fission (Nucleus Nothing). If Gertrude Stein disrupted legibility with syntax, Loy opens fissures and apertures in her poetics. In the opening to Poem 12, Loy breaks down the confines of passion to its fractious elements: Desire Suspicion Man Woman. Deflating romance, Poem 15 breaks up its address to the you:
But you alone
Superhuman apparently
If her foremother Emily Dickinson deployed dashes, Loy forms dashed phalanxes within and between her lines of words. In Poem 28, for example:
Unthinkable that white over there
— — — Is smoke from your house
Aleatoric Form. With “Songs” in the title, music is in play in Loy’s poetic sequence. Poems 1 and 33 function as endpoints, framing a shifting spectrum of discourses on love and passion. The Pig Cupid in Poem 1 uproots allusions to fairy tales (“Once upon a time“) and youthful promiscuity (wild oats). Poem 34 declares Love as the preeminent litterateur. Loy’s sequence reclaims the love poem, revising and remixing it. Aleatoric compositions allow for randomness and improvisation. In “Songs for Joannes,” poems 2-33 can be moving parts. The numbered sequence is not linear. –MB

Tidying Up with Gertrude Stein

Posted on January 22, 2019January 26, 2019 in Blog Tagged domesticity, Gertrude Stein, housekeeping, Marie Kondo, Tidying Up

Tidiness is not a delicacy… Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

What serendipity teaching Tender Buttons again during a week I’m also watching the Netflix sensation Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Doyennes of domesticity, Stein and Kondo make the home and its objects come alive in unexpected ways. Their revolutionary household manuals are 100 years apart. To tidy up our households, Kondo tells us, we must make a bigger mess of them. To establish her household, Stein counters the establishment. Both women disrupt standard thinking about housekeeping.

Animation

The house and all things within it come alive in Kondo’s and Stein’s visions of domesticity. If you’ve seen Kondo’s show, you’ve seen her ritual of greeting the client’s home. When tidying clothes we must touch each item–and thank those we don’t keep. When tidying books, she instructs, we must tap each stack to wake them up. Kondo’s book insists that your possessions want to help you. Stein also has a singular way of perceiving clothes and accessories. ‘A Long Dress’ acquires the serene length that renders it an object of meditation. Animating ‘Colored Hats’ and transforming their textures, Stein writes: A large hat is tall and me and custard whole. The hat becomes her.

Repurposing

Thinking outside the box with boxes, Stein and Kondo repurpose these ordinary household objects into ordering strategies. Kondo uses small boxes as drawer dividers that suit tidied items such as neckties and socks. The boxes your iphones and MacBooks came in are perfect for storing writing tools, while shoeboxes have infinite uses. Did you know that the lid of a shoebox is shallow and can be used like a tray? Stein would agree that a box is never just a box: A custom which is necessary when a box is used and taken is that a large part of the time there are three which have different connections. Like Kondo’s drawer dividers, Stein uses boxes to partition a whole. Parts of Tender Buttons are divided into labeled text boxes, including ‘A Plate,’ ‘A Chair,’ ‘A Box’–tools for writing about the house.

Results

Tidying up yields domestic delights and new ways of living. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo declares that a dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. That reanimating perspective starts with reenvisioning everyday objects and household relationships. Tender Buttons responded to Stein’s dramatic reorganization of her expatriate life in Paris. With her brother out of the apartment, Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas set up a household where Stein could pursue her experimental writing within a liberating domesticity.

Toward the end of her book, Stein writes: Tidiness is not a delicacy, it does not destroy the whole piece, certainly not it has been measured and nothing has been cut off and even if that has been lost there is a name, no name is signed and left over, not any space is fitted so that moving about is plentiful. Moving freely across normative syntax, Stein’s words reflect the transformative abundance of her home. –MB

SOURCES
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)
Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014)
Stein photo: The New Yorker; Kondo photo: BestLife

West or Bust: Culture Clash in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Posted on December 3, 2018November 30, 2020 in Blog Tagged The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

I’m two-thirds through the Coen Brothers’ latest take on the Wild West, their Netflix production The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (see the trailer here.) And thus far, the image that sticks with me is its living bust of Anglo-American poetry and oratory: the limbless character Harrison (stage-named the Wingless Thrush). In the “Meal Ticket” chapter, he sounds William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Abraham Lincoln from a kitschy stage compartment in his employer’s wagon.

Smithsonian Bust of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Percy Bysshe Shelley

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Four score and seven years ago…

This culture mashup clashes with the show’s remote locations and hard-knock listeners. The thespian’s soaring voice and heightened lines seem out of place in such wide open spaces–cinematic spaces where we expect stage coaches and gunfire. His lofty stage name recalls Romantic bird poems from another time. Like Shelley’s ruined statue in the desert, the Wingless Thrush is a pedestaled voice that sounds out to passersby. Like both cultural signifiers, the Western prototype for Poet (Orpheus) was dismembered. Watching these scenes in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, we remember (re-member) these lines or we don’t. If we do, we might anticipate the tale’s turn.

There are other culture clashes at work in this chapter. If you saw the Harry Potter movies, there’s the incongruity of an older Harry Melling (then Dudley Dursley) playing a character higher up the culture chain. Still, the Winged Thrush’s elocutionary culture is literally propped up in a wagon train of one.

Wild West shows aren’t the only emblems of the thespian West. The TV show Have Gun – Will Travel aired an episode titled “The Ballad of Oscar Wilde” (1958), in which the gentlemanly hired gun Paladin takes to reciting Wilde’s witticisms. The Coen brothers’ singing cowboys can be eloquent in their everyday speech. (O, the webs that Buster Scruggs himself can weave with his diction!) But they don’t practice elocution, and Buster carries more than one gun. The prospector addresses “Mr. Pocket” in apostrophe, even looking skyward. But we can’t say he waxes poetically as he seeks to stake his claim in the West.

What does all this mean? Is all culture bust, or just some kinds of culture? How is culture a kind of disability in this highly stylized Wild West at odds with high style? And how do the various characters stake their claims to culture? In short, West or Bust? I’ll have to stay tuned to find out. –MB

SOURCES:
Joel and Ethan Cohen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix, 2018)
William Shakespeare, Puck’s Epilogue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Oxymandias” (1818)
Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address” (1863)
William Ordway Partridge, Bust of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1899. Smithsonian Museum
Monument Valley shot from The Vintage News

What If my Students Don’t Like a Text?

Posted on November 16, 2018November 30, 2020 in Blog Tagged pedagogy, teaching tips

As my unit’s Director of Graduate Student Teaching, I write an advice column for my staff. I generate my topics from their questions and my own experience. Here’s this week’s post. –MB

At this point in the semester, many of us are hitting the outlier, experimental, or difficult text on our syllabus. We’ve built our students’ interpretive skills, and we’re now taking on a literary, critical, or visual text that pushes the boundaries in some way. Something that augments our students’ perspective on our course topic. I typically do this very thing, but sometimes my outlier text falls flat. This week’s topic is What if my students don’t like a text I’ve assigned?

At some point, we’ll all hit a week like that. Here are some strategies I’ve used when it happens to me:

Do a Poll Call and ask students to give a 1-word reaction to the text; don’t let them repeat what’s already been said. OR you could ask them for a 2-word response, and have them submit it to Canvas or a Google Doc so they can see the results come in. Tap this energy and map the results; discuss.
Negative reviews tend to be the ones we most enjoy reading. Give students 5 minutes to write “3 Things I Hate about this Text,” and let them share one with the class. Ask if anyone didn’t hate (or even liked) some of those things.
Ask students to describe how reading/viewing this particular text requires a different process, and talk about it. Shift their focus from what happens to how it happens.
Ask students to consider the risks/benefits of the writer/creator’s choice to make the text that way. Then consider which outweighs which, and why.
Tap one of the text’s outlier aspects, and discuss it. For example, if the text has an atypical protagonist or speaker (or a collective protagonist), talk about how that maker choice affords a different perspective than what we usually get. Does the text take us indoors when we expect more outdoor scenes (or vice versa)? Does the text present more everyday life than dramatic moments? Is the text disjunctive instead of linear? Does it defy genre categories? Use such differences to consider what things we miss when we read/view a text with typical choices.

Remember that it’s not our job to get students to like everything we assign. We all have texts we love to hate. Thumbs down needn’t shut down our class discussions; it often opens them up. –MB

ArchiTextures: Stories and Stanzas

Posted on November 11, 2018February 7, 2021 in Blog Tagged modernism, MSA 2018; architecture, pedagogy, Wallace Stevens

When a building stands complete and in use, it seems to want to tell you about the adventure of its making. – Louis I. Kahn

What manner of building shall we build? –Wallace Stevens, “Architecture”

I’m in my nine-windowed room in downtown Columbus, OH, where this year’s Modernist Studies Association conference just wrapped. It’s a generative space for thinking about the poetics of architecture and my opening conference session: the Modern Architecture & Narrative seminar co-organized by Katherine Fama and Anne Fogarty of University College Dublin. (They formed the Architecture and Narrative research group).

In these times of STEM-driven models of higher education, Humanities work tends to signify as narrative-based knowledge that brings stories to data. Architecture reminds us that stories are also material levels of a building. And like poems, architecture also manifests in discrete units called stanzas: a mode of making that includes yet moves beyond narrative structures.

The seminar’s papers expanded the word narrative to include fiction, urban and cultural history, and the history of architecture as a discipline. Some of the seminar participants were educated as architects; invited speaker Kirin Makkar teaches in a department of Architectural Studies. (Co-organizers Fogarty & Fama appear here in the center, flanked by invitees Victoria Rosner & Makkar.) We brainstormed the powers & limits of collaboration, “the architectural Humanities,” domesticity, iconoclasm, functionalism, city planning, fabrication, flanerie, spatiality. We went beyond architecture as metaphor. I told the story of my recent undergraduate course Modern American Poetry & Design, which linked to a Design Studio course in UF’s School of Architecture. (I brainstormed this parallel pedagogy with Charlie Hailey.)

For me, entering UF’s Architecture Teaching Gallery is like entering a modernist poem in the process of its own making. I recall Wallace Stevens’s phrase stanza my stone in “The Man on the Dump”–a modernist rendition of repurposing and Makerspace platforms. And so I offer these ArchiTextural building blocks toward new concepts, new structures, new pedagogies:

* The narrative of modernist writing and architecture is modular, not linear.
* For modernism and design manifest process; architecture becomes a verb.
* A building is a structure and a making.
* The city’s physical, social, and mythic spaces generate modernist writing and architecture.
* The route of modernist poetry and architecture is repurposing.
* The ethics of modernist poetry and architecture is sustainability.
* For the domicile and the junkyard are generative spaces for dreaming and design.
* Poets, architects, and new modernist pedagogies create Maker Spaces.
* ArchiTextures generate designs for future Humanities.

SOURCES:
Louis I. Kahn, “Silence and Light.” 1970.
Wallace Stevens, “Architecture.” 1918.
Window scene, Hilton Columbus Downtown. 2018
Architecture and Narrative seminar at MSA 2018
Steven Ramirez, “Distortion of Light.” 2018. (Assembly Matters, Mediation of Light and Mediation on Matter. UF Advanced Graduate Studio 1, taught by Lisa Huang)
Lissandra Dyer, “Door Hinge.” 2018. (Modern American Poetry & Design, taught by MB)

–MB

Frankenstein Mandemonium Quiz

Posted on October 30, 2018October 25, 2020 in Blog Tagged Frankenstein, Mandemonium Quiz, Mary Shelley, masculinity

I vowed to myself that I would read Frankenstein by Halloween this year, the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s debut novel. (The only Shelley my college professors assigned was Percy Bysshe.) I’m glad I read the book on my own; its discourses on creation and monstrosity are compelling. But it’s full of paining men! A map of masculinities as well as a prototype for science fiction, Frankenstein was ahead of its time. If you haven’t already read it, you should. Then take this Mandemonium Quiz. Can you match the profiles to the characters below?

The Callous Captain. What are the feelings of his ice-trapped, failing crew compared to those of his newfound friend who speaks of noble purpose? Yet it is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through me. If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause. He also writes mansplaining letters to his sister: You will anxiously await my return. Years will pass, and you will have visitings of despair and be tortured by hope. Sheesh.

Daddy Dearest. Can guilt-tripping mothers hold a candle to this guy? I know that while you are pleased with yourself you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected. Ouch.

The Peevish Professor. When a new student travels to study with him, this character asks the young man what he’s read–then berates him for his academic pursuits. Every minute…every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. Calling him my dear sir adds insult to injury.

The Bromancer. His best friend considers this character a being formed in the ‘very poetry of nature,’ a man whose very soul overflowed with ardent affections. The Bromancer succors his friend during illness and despair; they travel together. His own words bespeak an abiding love: I had rather be with you in your solitary rambles, than with these Scotch people. Awww.

The Outcast Vegan. He’s got a point about deserving some love for his DIY sustainable diet. I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. Hell hath no fury like a vegan scorned.

The Orientalist. Falls in love with a Turkish woman who professes Christianity. She lifts her veil to reveal hair of a shining raven black, and curiously braided; her eyes were dark, but gentle, although animated; her features of a regular proportion, and her complexion wondrously fair, each cheek tinged with a lovely pink. Of course.

The Privileged Victim. He has all the suffering that leisure, family jewels, and a seemingly endless supply of cash can afford him. What better cellmate for one’s execution eve: The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the awful boundary between life and death, felt not, as I did, such deep and bitter agony. I gnashed my teeth and ground them together; uttering a groan that came from my inmost soul. The Privileged Victim will manspread his misery for miles around.

Quiz Characters in alphabetical order: Henry Clerval, the Creature, Felix de Lacey, Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, M. Krempe, Robert Walton

–MB

SOURCES:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
stills from Frankenstein (1931), Dir. James Whale
another Imminent Ned meme

Tetrameter Verse Against Pumpkin Spice

Posted on October 23, 2018November 30, 2020 in Blog Tagged iambic tetrameter, pumpkin spice

It’s that time of year when Pumpkin Spice flavor invades our beverages. What’s a professor of poetry studies to do? Write iambic tetrameter couplets against these intrusions, of course. Enjoy.

I will not drink the Pumpkin Spice.
Although so many find it nice,
I do not like it in my drinks.
Tis better in baked goods, methinks.
O do not put it in my beer!
That drink should taste like grains, my dear.
In a martini? Heavens, no;
Don’t give my vodka pumpkin glow!
Not in my coffee! ‘Twould be mean
To ruin faultless hot caffeine.
Keep Pumpkin Spice away from me!
Don’t wreck my Fall festivity.

Recognize the rhythm? It’s iambic tetrameter, the same meter in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” But I did mine in couplets. Enjoy your preferred tastes (and rhythms) of Fall season. I’m off to enjoy my coffee-that-tastes-like-coffee now. — MB

Puck Talk: The +/- Factor

Posted on October 6, 2018May 31, 2021 in Blog Tagged +/-, future humanities, NHL, plus-minus, Tampa Bay Lightning, Yanni Gourde

It’s opening night for my hockey club, the Tampa Bay Lightning; my preferred sports season has begun. What’s not to love about NHL hockey? It’s fast. It flows. It’s equal parts grit and grace. And the refs don’t have to stop the game so much to figure out what just happened. All those sticks clacking on ice sound a furious rhythm. And seeing that big sheet of ice makes you feel cool on a subtropical night.

One of the cool things about hockey is my favorite statistic: the +/- factor. The NHL defines it this way:

Plus-Minus
A player is awarded a “plus” each time he is on the ice when his Club scores an even-strength or shorthanded goal. He receives a “minus” if he is on the ice for an even-strength or shorthanded goal scored by the opposing Club. The difference in these numbers is considered the player’s “plus-minus” statistic.

Put another way, the team is better when top +/- players are on the ice. You don’t have to be shooting or hitting

or assisting to accrue a +. Your +/- stat could be significantly higher (or lower) than your Points (Goals + Assists). Less visible than Assists, a good +/- stat marks a mojo for energizing, steadying, or otherwise improving your team’s performance. Last season the Lightning’s top +/- player was Center Yanni Gourde, followed by Defenseman Victor Hedman.

What if our workplaces kept +/- stats? Mine tallies several stats for individual faculty: number of publications, number of Honors students directed, number of graduate students directed (Goals). Faculty in STEM fields usually list a lead author (or Principle Investigator) in publications and grants, followed by other contributors (Goals, Assists). I think future Humanities will need new stats to mark (and value) the synergies of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multi-modal work. We also need to account for Musing and mentoring our coworkers, our team. We need to account for the plus-minus factor. -MB

P.S. My beloved Bolts just won tonight’s game. #letsgoLightning and #goGators

SOURCES:
NHL.com (Go Figure)
Photo of Yanni Gourde by Chris O’Meara/AP from SN

Athena / Mentor

Posted on August 25, 2018November 30, 2020 in Blog Tagged Athena, mentoring

Counting back from August to April: I hooded another PhD student, I attended my son’s college Commencement, and I received a Faculty Doctoral Mentoring award. So I’m thinking about mentoring as I’m kicking off a new academic year. The ancient Greeks saw a divine component in such guidance. Indeed, the word mentor comes from Athena’s alter ego (Mentor) in The Odyssey–a genderbending guise she assumes to guide Telemachus toward his father and his own maturation.

As mere humans, we cannot approach the mythic proportions of Athena’s arts of mentoring. We can’t even come close. The ancient goddess of wisdom, war, and handicraft was denizen of Olympus, not a college or university. Still, we earthly academic mentors can fathom a few things from the epic account of Athena’s role as Mentor. It can inspire us to fulfill our parts in bringing our students and their work into their future incarnations.

Assuming the appearance of Odysseus’s male friend Mentor, Athena reminds us that mentoring means crossing boundaries. When we mentor, we cross over into the role of offering professional guidance–assuming a level of authority we grow into as we learn from our students and recall our own mentors’ counsel. Sometimes this authority can feel more guise than credential, but it becomes more natural the more we take on this role.
As a goddess of warfare as well as good counsel, Athena reminds us that mentoring is sometimes a struggle that both parties must pursue. Some mentees will thrive on their mentors’ feedback, while others will resist it. Some students will do both. Each student forms a unique relationship with mentor, work, and goal. The mentor must deploy an arsenal of tactics to help the mentee battle through obstacles. A mentee may leave a mentor, but a true mentor will never leave a mentee.
Time and time again, Athena in her role as Mentor “urged him on with winging words” so that Telemachus had the confidence and courage to embark and succeed. As Gregory Nagy put it, Athena as Mentor “intervenes in his life, which is very misdirected at the time, when he’s not sure about anything.” A mentor intervenes by transforming doubt into action. A mentor intervenes by opening possibilities. A mentor intervenes through advocacy.
A mentor must be strong, offering seasoned shoulders to those who will come after. A mentor does not detour the mentee’s path by reversing the relationship, by asking the mentee to lend support to the mentor’s own struggles. Standing on the shoulders that lifted them, true mentors offer “winging words” that propel mentees into their futures.The next epics belong to them.
-MB

Sources:
Notepad design drawn from “The Pensive Athena” (Acropolis Museum, Athens)
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Viking, 1996)
Marsha Bryant, “Graduate Mentoring: A Poetics” (2009).
B.R.J. O’Donnell. “The Millennia-Old Model of Mentorship.” The Atlantic (Oct. 13, 2017)

How to Talk to Punks at Parties

Posted on July 3, 2018November 22, 2021 in Blog Tagged Derek Jarman, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Jubilee, punk

My favorite movie so far this summer? How to Talk to Girls at Parties, released in the U.S. in late May. I teach a “PostPunk Cultures” course on the British 1980s, so of course I had to see a film set on the fringes of punk culture in 1977 (the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee). Directed by John Cameron Mitchell, my favorite summer movie generated from Neil Gaiman’s short story and graphic novel of the same name. Extraterrestrial aliens launch a stealth invasion of suburban London, hiding out in a house and donning Union Jack rain slickers to blend in with the public. Reviewing the film, Anthony Lane notes its nods to Stanley Kubrick’s pre-punk A Clockwork Orange (1971). I find a fitting predecessor in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), widely considered the first punk film.

Jarman features alienated English punks who emerge from their London house to make mayhem in public. In both films the emerging generation walks through derelict spaces of decaying buildings and Britishness. How to Talk to Girls at Parties imports beings from a technological future beyond London’s reach. Jarman’s menacing punk characters cry “No Future!” as they firebomb a house.

Without giving too much away, I’ll quickly note some punk parallels:

Historical sense. In How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Nicole Kidman plays the punk maven Queen Boadicea. In Jubilee, Jenny Runacre plays Bod, the punk tribe’s queen (she also plays a time-traveling Queen Elizabeth I). Kidman fashions armor in her workshop and rules her nightclub. In Jubilee, Jordan dons a helmet and wields a trident to punk up Rule, Britannia!
Fetishistic scenes. In HtTtGaP, aliens lure unsuspecting local teens behind closed doors for disturbingly perverse pleasures. In Jubilee, punk girls lure a lad to their house for more sadistic pursuits. Garish plastic covers bodies for both occasions.
Remediation. In self-reflexive fashion, HtTtGaP acknowledges its prior forms by flash-forwarding its comic-drawing protagonist to a bookstore. Jarman incorporates his Super-8 short “Jordan’s Dance” into Jubilee, flashing back to the film’s beginnings before Jordan became Amyl Nitrate.
Consuming the young. In the alien elder’s vision of No Future in HtTtGaP, the young go first. In Jubilee, music mogul Borgia Ginz squeezes profits from young punk singers like Adam Ant and The Slits: I don’t create it. I own it. I suck and suck and suck.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks back at punk, so nostalgia and the comic romance plot put a safety cap on its edginess. Still, it’s satisfying to see cosmic punk encounters begetting a multicultural future for this reimagined 1977. The film is now available online, and will be released to DVD next month. –MB