I’ve been pondering all things meta lately.
Well, not all things. But definitely many things meta-related-to-the-arts.
I’ve been playing a game inside my head as I’ve done the dishes or driven people to swim practice or tried to get back to sleep in the middle of the night after an owl waking me up.
(It’s just one of the many crazy games I play all alone, another being “List all the adjectives with the suffix ‘-id.’”)
The game is this: list all the films about film. Now all the songs about songs. Now all the poems about poetry. Now all the theater about theater. And now (my favorite part) all the fiction about fiction.
Ready? Go.
Films About Film
(or TV About TV)
The Player
Singin’ in the Rain
The Truman Show
30 Rock
Hitchcock
Studio 60
Be Kind Rewind
The Simpsons
Stranger than Fiction (borderline: a film about fiction writing)
Songs About Songs, Singers, and/or Singing
“Hey, Mister Tambourine Man” (The Byrds)
“Thank You for the Music” (ABBA)
“Sing a Song” (Earth, Wind, and Fire)
“I Write the Songs” (Barry Manilow)
“I Love Rock and Roll” (Joan Jett)
“If Music Be the Food of Love” (Shakespeare/Purcell)
“Piano Man” (Billy Joel)
“Your Song” (Elton John)
“Sir Duke” (Stevie Wonder)
“Rock and Roll Band” (Boston)
“Magic Power” (Triumph)
“Killing Me Softly” (Roberta Flack)
“The Day the Music Died” (Don McLean)
“This is Not a Love Song” (Public Image, Ltd.)
“How Can I Keep From Singing?” (Folk song)
“Uptown Funk” (Mark Ronson/Bruno Mars)
Poems About Poetry
“Essay on Criticism” (Alexander Pope)
“Don Juan” (parts of it; Lord Byron)
“Ars Poetica” (Archibald MacLeish)
“The Uses of Poetry” (William Carlos Williams)
“There is no frigate like a book” (Emily Dickinson)
“The High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (Wallace Stevens)
Theater About Theater
All That Jazz (Well, okay. It’s a film about theater.)
Kiss Me, Kate
The Taming of the Shrew
The Producers
A Chorus Line
42nd Street
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet
Picasso at the Lapin Agile
The Mousetrap
Fiction About Fiction (And this would be my wheelhouse.)
The Princess Bride (William Goldman)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
Little, Big (John Crowley)
Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
The Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
If on a winter’s night a traveler (Italo Calvino)
Most books by Jasper Fforde
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende)
English Music (Peter Ackroyd)
The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
An awful lot of Kurt Vonnegut
And a whole bunch of Terry Pratchett
Leaf by Niggle (J.R.R. Tolkien)
A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket)
Atonement (Ian MacEwan)
The Dark Tower, etc. (Stephen King)
Possession (A.S. Byatt)
The Book of Three (Lloyd Alexander)
A Princess of Roumania, etc. (Paul Park)
What about you? Can you add to my meta lists?