Class notes: Music
Luna's soundtrack is really eclectic; some of these songs are from her life, and some of them were inspiration for me as I wrote about her. For example:
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"Burning Down the House" by the Talking Heads is a reference to Luna's "House of Memory Loss" that her family built, and how Lu must tear down the house in order to remember who she is.
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John Mellencamp's "Crumbling Walls" serves a similar purpose, and also calls back to the crumbling rock walls that line her walk home from campus every day. There's something about those walls...
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"You're the Devil in Disguise" is from Luna's crazy elevator tour in Deals with the Devil.
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"Hungry Like the Wolf", the title of Chapter 19 in Devil's in the Details, is of course from the AWESOME Duran Duran song (come on, you know you love it), but it's also a reference from Dante's The Inferno, in which Dante travels through the nine circles of hell guided by the Roman poet Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, the story of the founding of Rome after the fall of Troy).
In The Inferno, Dante is terrorized in the first canto by...
...a she-wolf, that with all hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagerness, And many folk has caused to live forlorn! (in other words: a hungry wolf from hell!)
Abandon All Hope!
MH
LF
What does this have to do with Luna's story?
In Devil's in the Details, Luna goes on a hunt, just like Dante's (and Duran Duran's) wolf (chasing the boys on campus), and another one in the woods
(chasing Dionysus), and finally she hunts Marlowe at the end. The three hunts build on each other.
A slightly bigger stretch, but cool to know: Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, abandoned twins who were nursed by a she-wolf,
putting that she-wolf at the moment in time between the destruction of one world (Troy) and the beginning of another (Rome). And that is a hint about what's coming up in the series.
*Also: we learn in Speak of the Devil that Rome stole Latin from the Hells!
