Hello, hello!

Hello, hello!  Welcome to "Notes from the Villa Straylight."  I'm starting this blog based on the urgings of my sister, who keeps telling me I need to write down some of our conversations about popular culture, film, tv, literature, and all things in between.  The aim of the blog is to get a conversation going about things we may not get to talk about on a regular basis.  These posts will most likely question the use of melodrama in Downton Abbey versus Mad Men or tackle why Mad Men is such an intriguing example of postmodernism.  I may figure out why I just can't bring myself to love Beasts of the Southern Wild, even though, by most criteria, I really should.  Or maybe I'll simply discuss what I'm reading this week and why it should (or shouldn't) be on everyone's reading list.  Any way one looks at it, I want this blog to be a catch-all place where discussions on all sorts of levels, from popular to academic and wacky to serious, meet.  Hence the title "Notes from the Villa Straylight."  As some of you may know, I'm a bit of a William Gibson fan, and Neuromancer is one of my favorite novels.  The Villa Straylight is one of the most interesting settings in the novel, a "Gothic folly," as one inhabitant calls it, an elite family estate shoved into the narrow, concrete terminus of a spindle-shaped space station (Gibson 172).  Straylight is a infinitely complex series of passages and rooms, each filled to the brim with artifacts and antiques, piled up with no specific order or purpose.  As one characters states, "Straylight was crazy [...] but is wasn't a craziness he understood" (202).  This is what I want to get at... I want to see if we can work our way through popular culture the way one wanders about in the Villa Straylight.  See if what we watch or read has been cut down to fit our expectations or freed from its original purpose in some way.  Straylight presents a simulation of what our civilization could have been, but then cuts all the doors to fit the space: "rectangle[s] amid smooth curves of polished concrete" (179).  Neuromancer therefore presents our dreams of progress and enterprise and culture as "a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space" (179).  So let's rummage around in that space and see what catches our eye.  Let's wander the corridors of the Villa Straylight and perhaps find something to write home about.

* Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1984. Print.