I love Carl Jung (the bits of his work that I understand, which isn’t much), and one of my favorite Jung quotations is ” The creative mind plays with the objects it loves .”
This video clip is a perfect example—found on my friend Lev Grossman’s excellent blog, Nerd World . I love the fact that Jonathan McIntosh had the creative energy and interest to create this mash-up of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight :
[If you can’t see the video, the URL for “Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed)–OFFICIAL” is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwM3GvaTRM]
I connected with this remix on several levels:
— Take time for projects . Clearly Jonathan McIntosh is following that very important resolution.
— Though I’m not a historic Buffy fan, my TV-writer sister has worked a lot with Joss Whedon , so I always take an interest in his work.
— I love
Twilight
— There was a split-second clip from
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
— Even my former lawyerly self got engaged in considering the assertion at the end that “This transformative work constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright law.” Why didn’t a case like this come up when I was hanging around courthouses?
Perhaps I should make a new resolution, to “Play with the objects I love.” I’m already doing this with my passion for J.M. Barrie’s The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island . A friend and I are doing an homage to Barrie’s brilliant skeletal picture book—ours is called “Four to Llewelyn’s Edge.” This has turned out to be an enormous undertaking, and so much fun.
Along those lines, I wonder if I could use popular new tools (YouTube, as in the example above, or Twitter, or Facebook, as well as my blog) to shine a spotlight on my more obscure and more demanding passions. I want to highlight the things I love, and to try to entice others to follow me—just as this video made me want to watch old episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
One idea: I’m considering sending out daily Tweets that are quotations from one of my favorite books, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (bizarre: this book doesn’t seem to be for sale on Amazon). I would love doing this. I wonder if the book would be interesting to anyone else in that form—if the beautiful writing would be engaging out of context like that—or if it would be too reductive. Perhaps, as in the video mash-up above, new pleasures could be revealed in a work that is usually read in a different way.
Hmmmm.
* Very apt for this subject: Bricolage Life . Looking at this blog made me want to sit down and MAKE something.
* Follow me on Twitter . I may or may not be sending out Woolf quotations in the near future.
