Rolling In The Deep

Or, to quote the legendary Queen of Nastiness, comedienne Joan Rivers in her riff on Adele, "Rolling in the deep-fried chicken"  Ah yes, Liz Taylor has died and gone to her reward so the Duchess of Cosmetic Enhancement has to find someone to publicly mock for being fat.  Except Adele isn't what I would call fat but perhaps, Rubenesque?  Not that any of these women interest me really except in passing and perhaps when I am desperate for finding material to blog about as I am tonight.
     These are of course all very famous and very notable and talented women.  Liz for her beauty, her acting prowess, Richard Burton and her other seven husbands, her yo-yo dieting, and later in life, her chronic and disabling illness and her campaigning on behalf of AIDS sufferers.  I saw her recently in the movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", while flying home from Mexico and I have to say this film has aged really well.  I also recall reading the satire in Mad Magazine when I must have been, say, eleven years old?  It was titled "Who In Heck Is Virginia Woolf."
  Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the parody:

Mad Magazine published a spoof of the film, entitled Who in Heck is Virginia Woolf?! At one point, it is remarked "This is an art film, so the censors have to let us talk dirty!" Most of the swearing is replaced with grawlixes: when Martha asks George "%$?" and he replies "What kind of profanity is that, Liz?!", she says "I was just asking what percentage of the gross we're getting!" Their son turns out to be real, and to George and Martha's dismay, a clean-cut non-dysfunctional bore, in keeping with Mad's tradition of altering the endings of the films that they parody.

As an eleven year old I was fascinated if mystified by the many references in the satire and really more than anything wanted to know more about this enigmatic Virginia Woolf.  Then, when I was just nineteen and leading a very different manner of life, the paramour of a paramour who was writing his thesis on William Blake blamed his ennui de jour on having read too much Virginia Woolf today.  When I was twenty I bought one of her later novels, "The Waves", and was immediately hooked.  To this day there remains always in my personal library a copy of this sadly underrated tome which deals with, in her inimitable stream of consciousness poetic prose the lives of six childhood friends over the decades in the first half of the twentieth century.  I have heard this book called unreadable or difficult and that one is advised to stick to the legendary Ms. Woolf's more "accessible" works such as "The Voyage Out", or "Mrs. Dalloway", or "Orlando", all of which I have also read and none of them hold a candle to The Waves in my humble opinion.

Adele first appeared on my radar in the spring of 2011, when it seemed that almost every radio station was playing her platinum hit "Rolling In The Deep".  I was transfixed from the beginning, which says something for someone who is ordinarily indifferent towards pop music.  Her voice, the music, the beat, the vibe, I had never heard the like.  At first I thought she was black and had questions about her gender given her rich and robust contralto, and was shocked to learn that she was still only twenty-two when she made the recording, is white and English.  To me she clearly suggested as she still does a young Aretha Franklin, but still a lightweight by comparison.

Rolling In The Deep became for me my soundtrack and for me added to this sublime sense of seamlessness that I seemed to experience throughout that year and into the next.  It was as though, even if it wasn't always an easy, and sometimes a downright challenging and complex time, that in a deep way all my ducks seemed to be in a row and then some big fat cosmic bowling ball came rolling in to scatter them to the far corners of the universe.  This I think occurred when I was in Chiapas in Southern Mexico, and became severely ill.  It was as though I went through a kind of spiritual death and that it has taken since then two years for the aftermath to sort itself out.  It feels now as though my ducks are once again getting all lined up and even if my last couple of weeks since returning from Mexico have been difficult and even traumatic I am looking at this as a rite of passage as I eagerly anticipate the blessings ahead.