(If you think that’s the geekiest thing I’m going to say in this post, you just could not be more wrong.)

I have realized it is no good to research fairy tales right now. The books of Warner, Zipes, and Tatar, as well as the Mirror, Mirror on the Wall that y’all recommended to me, are at my public library at home. I paid a fortune for my damn library card to this terrifying university library, and I’m going to use it to read books I couldn’t get at home. I shall be researching South Indian temple dancers, devadasis, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I read From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute on Saturday. This book, which was way too in love with its alliterative title, is an overview of the legal status of devadasis in this time period, mainly in Bombay and Madras. I am not as interested in their changing legal status (although that is interesting) as I am in their social status, but never mind, I learned lots of useful things. (I wrote down the names of a bunch of other books to track down after this.)

My most favorite thing that I learned from this book: When national and local laws removed the economic incentive for families to dedicate their daughters to deities, and finally outlawed the dedications altogether, a bunch of the devadasis went away and become stars of the stage and screen.

I also checked out a bunch of books about television. I read a book of articles about The West Wing and gained immense satisfaction from reading about its political bents, relation to truth, and implications of audience demographics. Then I read a book full of articles about Angel, which was better to the exact degree that I love Angel better than The West Wing (which is a degree that is quite considerable). It would be difficult to convey to you using only my words how much I enjoyed reading these articles about Angel. There was this one that talked about the musical themes used for the different characters, and the way the show uses them to convey the way the characters are changing – this is the kind of thing that fascinates me but I don’t tend to notice it when I’m watching a film or TV show. Another article explored the problematic racial dynamics in the show which, y’all, can get quite cringe-inducing (oh, God, that episode where Cordelia’s determined to save Gunn from himself makes me want to shrivel up and die).

Tale of woe: J. August Richards, the actor who plays Gunn on Angel, was a huge Star Wars fan when he was a kid, and he totally loved Han Solo. But whenever he and his friends would play Star Wars, they made him be Lando Calrissian because he was black.

I sometimes joke with my family that my calling in life is finding articles about things. I am constantly going on the internet to find informative and authoritative articles about whatever I am currently interested in sounding knowledgeable about. I am constantly reporting information that I have learned from reading random articles from MetaFilter, Arts and Letters Daily, The Browser, Salon, and Slate. I do not know that finding articles is actually my calling, but I certainly do enjoy it. When they are articles about topics that enthrall me, such as wonderful books or wonderful films or wonderful TV shows, I enjoy it even more. For an English major who passionately hated every history of criticism class I took at university, I am mad for actual criticism.

I have several other books full of scholarly articles about other beloved TV shows: Doctor Who, Buffy, Firefly, and The Wire. If the library had had books about other TV shows I love, you know I’d have checked them out too. I will be reading them in due course because I have adjudged this to be a worthwhile use of the money I have spent on this library card and the terror I experience every time I set foot in the library stacks. I may or may not have plans to curl up on my sofa tonight with cheesy fries and Investigating Firefly and Serenity.

(Don’t judge. Memory understands me. I think. (You do, don’t you, Memory?))

Part of this pop culture scholarship rampage is down to sadness that all my long-anticipated things have happened. Enchanted Glass came out, and The White Road came out. I read ARCs of Curse of the Werewolf Girl and Monsters of Men, and now Doctor Who is finished and over. It’s sad, dude, I’m sad about it, sad in my heart. Of course there is always The Guild, whose fourth season starts in a few weeks, and then a while after that there will be fall TV, which is fun to look forward to. So you can see how a girl would require some scholarly consideration of Wesley’s comedic timing.

Y’all, am I alone in this? Is my pleasure in close readings and feminist interrogations of my best-beloved books and shows indicative of serious mental disturbance? Tell me the truth. I can take it. Also, have you ever been in a scary library? Do you feel (as I slightly do) that the scariness is instilling you with a healthy respect and awe for knowledge?

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