I think I’ll work a bit more on the novel today, some­thing I haven’t done in prob­ably a couple months. I always kind of knew, but it’s become increas­ingly obvi­ous that the core of the novel isn’t so much a story as an explor­a­tion of human­ity, the defin­i­tion of human­ity and espe­cially the rela­tion­ship between human­ity and lan­guage. In a nut­shell, it’s a story thread­ing a col­lec­tion of things humans do. I hope it works.

One thing that’s always bothered me about human­ity, and in par­tic­u­lar lan­guage, is the nature of love. Poetry, and art in gen­eral, deal­ing with love tends to be pretty unin­ter­est­ing in my view, more an exer­cise in one-​​upmanship to describe the intens­it­ies of love, focus­ing more on the effects of love than the bare mech­an­isms. There are excep­tions, of course, but rare. We have an embar­rass­ment of words avail­able to use to describe shades of the col­our red but have an awk­ward strait­jacket when it comes to some­thing more com­plex and import­ant, like love. It’s not just Eng­lish that’s the prob­lem, either.

Enter Alizée. She’s not a fant­astic musi­cian and, as one red­dit com­menter so elo­quently put it: “I wish my teeth were as white as her dance moves.” The lyr­ics are fairly asin­ine and for once I’m grate­ful that my French is bad enough that I can only pick out a few bits and pieces of it. For those who are curi­ous, as best I’ve been able to garner, the entirety of the song is about tak­ing a bubble­bath, describ­ing the bubble­bath and how it relates to the exper­i­ence of tak­ing bubble­baths and being lazy.

None of that really mat­ters, though. It’s some­what fit­ting that she’s French as she strikes me as a modern-​​day Nana come to life. Well, except­ing that Alizée’s not a whore. Another extremely, in my opin­ion, insight­ful red­dit com­ment on the topic of how hot Alizée is:

Not just fap hot either. This is exactly what would make me lose in /b/‘s “You fall in love you lose” threads.

That pretty much sums her up. It doesn’t mat­ter what she’s doing oth­er­wise or what she’s singing. Once the spot­light is on her, all it takes is one know­ing smile and a cock of her head and before you’ve even regained cog­niz­ance you’ve fallen in love with her.

It’s not love, of course; I don’t know what it is. I can’t bring myself to call it “love at first sight” since that describes some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent to me. The effect doesn’t dimin­ish know­ing it’s just a per­form­ance, but it’s not lust either. But it’s a real exper­i­ence; it’s a spell in a very real sense. The last time I watched one of Alizée’s songs — she’s def­in­itely the sort of musi­cian you watch, not listen to — I think she was all of about fif­teen years old and even at that young age she had the abil­ity to com­mand an entire audi­ence. It seems she’s only become more power­ful since then.

The crown jewel of Nana, in my opin­ion, is the open­ing chapter where she’s first per­form­ing in the opera and where she first wins her ador­a­tion. Even when I was first read­ing it I wished the entire novel could have been the first chapter or two. The destruc­tion of the men around her dom­in­ated the rest of the novel, but the secret of her magic was never really revealed in any sub­stan­tial detail.

The spells of Nana and Alizée are cast every day and I sup­pose it can be taken as noth­ing spe­cial, but that doesn’t sat­isfy me. I’ve never found a nice reduc­tion­ist explor­a­tion of the phenomenon.

I’ve got a bit of a back­log of oddit­ies to write about so I don’t know if I’ll get to it today, but there’ll prob­ably end up being at least a chapter about this.

I think I'll work a bit more on the novel today, something I haven't done in probably a couple months. I always kind of knew, but it's become increasingly obvious that the core of the novel isn't so much a story as an exploration of humanity, the definition of humanity and especially the relationship ...