Can Sophie of the Unsellables Save the World?

Sophie Allsop, Host of the Unsellables

Yesterday was weird because I wanted very much to stay on task and be productive but it was really hard. Every little thing took tremendous effort. 

I suspect this struggle is due to situational depression, caused by the behavior of people who continue to contest the election, the bungled vaccine roll-out, and the general awfulness of life right now. It didn't help that my long-awaited dental appointment was canceled because two people in the office tested positive for COVID.

I had hoped that there would be more people vaccinated by now, and that we'd be progressing towards our new normal, whatever that might be. Instead we're in the middle of a cluster-fuck with more transmissible variants of the virus emerging. Thank you, Donald Trump.

But anger and grief don't actually serve us well in a crisis, do they? On TV, emotions motivate the hero to take decisive and successful action. In real life, emotional turmoil just seems to cause decision paralysis or bad choices. 

Hoarding: Buried Alive disappeared from Prime Video for a few days, and in the time that it was missing, I started watching The Unsellables on YouTube. My husband hates reality TV but I like it – there's a predictable structure which always has a positive outcome (at least in the shows I watch). Sophie the real estate expert looks at the outside of the unsold house, says, "The problem must be inside, and I'm going to find out what it is." She walks through the house and comes up with solutions, which her team then implements, and hey, the house is either sold or they expect it will sell soon. Everyone's happy.

The other thing I love about that show right now is that everybody appears to be doing normal things in a normal economy. Nobody is unemployed, nobody is sick, nobody is wearing masks. It's life the way it used to be, a happy little glimpse of the past where families work together to make change happen and success is possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Pandemic Sophie to guide us to a happier ending? I don't think Joe Biden and his team will be able to function as our guides, not because they are incompetent, but because they will face fierce opposition from people who don't understand science or the necessity of working together to save lives. It's Proud Boys and conspiracy theorists and short-sighted Republicans who stand in the way of the next administration, not peeling wallpaper or purple paint on the walls.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 says that God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy to people who are good in His sight. Right now, we desperately need all three, and perseverance to get us through the next few months.

The End of Shelley and "The Indian Serenade"

Seriously, I am done. I have accumulated an embarrassingly large stack of notes about this poem, and have written my own ghazal; it is time to move on. But first, let me share with some highlights about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his famous poem.

Not everybody liked this poem (I wonder why?):

The absence of concrete imagery in 'The Indian Serenade' has been adversely criticized. The poem's natural world verges on the impalpable: the soft winds, vague perfumes, song of the nightingale, the invisible inaudible stream, faint, die, fall, just as the serenader does in his half-waking ecstasy. It is as if he had awakened from dreams of his lady into a world even more dream-like and indistinct (Park 11).

"In certain critical circles, 'The Indian Serenade' seems to have attained an eminence second only to Kilmer's 'Trees' as a favorite whipping poem" (Levin 305). The New Critics in particular condemned the line, "I die, I faint, I fail" for its "vagueness of description and the direct statement of feeling in poetry" (Abrams and Harpham) – they, as Spock himself might have done, much preferred the Vulcan purity of the objective correlative to all that sloppy, vague emotional verbiage.

Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: Cultural Appropriation, or Cross Pollination? (1)

In the 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley found inspiration for his famous poem, “The Indian Serenade,” in Middle Eastern poetry.  There was actually a movement or school of poetry known as the English Orientalists, whose work Shelley greatly admired.

The Turkish Patrol, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436116

To Europeans, the Middle East was a mysterious place.  Until Napoleon’s army occupied Egypt in 1801, not many Europeans had actually been to the Middle East (Meagher). Even after 1801, many creatives were inspired, not by real-life visits to this exotic destination, but by artwork and descriptions provided by others. (Meagher).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artwork created by the Orientalists was biased in favor of European culture and against Middle Eastern peoples and their cultures. In fact, it was so biased that today, some have defined Orientalism as a form of racism:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous (Arab American National Museum).

Given that some artists deliberately created “propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule” (Meagher), it’s not surprising that there were exaggerations and distortions; nor is it surprising that many Europeans readily accepted this interpretation of Middle Eastern culture. It fit handily into their preconceived notions, reinforced their Eurocentric world view and justified the exploitation of those nations.

Nevertheless, many British Orientalists studied Middle Eastern culture with a more open mind, and genuinely admired the literature and artwork of these exciting foreign places.

Works Cited

Meagher, Jennifer. “Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/euor/hd_euor.htm (October 2004).

Arab American National Museum. “What Is Orientalism?” What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, Arab American National Museum, 2011, arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.