25 August 04
What’s Goth?
One of the more interesting (used here as a synonym for frustrating) things about my burgeoning logocentric connection with my mother is her awareness that she lost twenty-five years of American popular culture and language by living in Spain and came back to find that her mother tongue was no longer, well, current. And she assumes mine is. (Even though I lost almost the same amount of time and didn’t even grow up here!)
So, for instance, on Sunday when we had lunch on a figged patio in Sonoma, she asked what “goth” was.
The answer to this question is different now than it would have been ten years ago. I flounder. Do I describe the former or the latter? I try and explain as best I can, but she’s never even really seen one (I decide we should start with the noun goth rather than the adjective). So I’m reduced to selecting body parts like some demented early Renaissance poet, when it would be so much easier just to point one out in the street. They are thin on the ground in Sonoma, though, upscale chichi pseudo-Tuscan hamlet that it is. Goths, even their latest watered-down suburban incarnation, tend to be “urban.” Dressedinblack. Edgy. Or edgy-wannabes. (I gave up trying to explain what edgy was a couple of years ago.)
She tries so, so hard to find all this out on her own, surrounding herself with reference books and, when she gets really daring, online resources. There’s just one problem: all the definitions use words that themselves need defining in relation to the culture. She feels at sea in the country whose passport she carries, an immigrant from a past where words meant what you thought they meant. I’m sympathetic but ultimately can’t really help her; she tends to listen hard and then decide this, too, will elude her.
It was much easier when she asked me later on to remember specific sweeties from my grandmother’s sweetshop in Lancashire from the early sixties for a story she was working on. That was easy: Smarties. Sherbet fountains. Jelly babies. Dolly Mixtures. Gobstoppers. Liquorice Allsorts. Toffee. The smell of that wood-panelled paradise came flooding back, mint mixed with tobacco mixed with citrus sugar, along with assorted memories of inedible things in the boarding house where we were staying, such as blancmange in the shape of a bunnyrabbit (poor bunny, said my four-year-old Californian self, refusing dessert). Memories of double-decker buses filled with the warm fug of cheap cigarette smoke and wet umbrellas, everyone going somewhere in the rain that never stopped. Memories of grandma in her hospital bed, breathing, breathing…
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But I agree with Maria – it’s a beautiful post. I love the idea of being an anthropologist in one’s own country, too. You might have lost something in the time you’ve spent away, but you’ve gained a certain persepctive as well. It’s sometimes nice to have that distance.
I think I know what a Goth is, but I could be wrong. I’m sure I don’t know what “edgy” means, often as I have heard the term. I’d guess it derives from “cutting edge,” maybe. Or is the idea that it’s something that sets one’s teeth on edge? Or something dancing on the edge of a precipice? Oy.
“Edgy” means snide, as far as I can tell. With perhaps a bit of an overtone of “keeping up with the latest microtrends so that you can deride them.”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/goth.htm