A 
confused 
teenage 
girl 
sighs, “I think I might be 
broken.” Dr. Jean Milburn 
(Gillian 
Anderson, 
“The 
X-Files”) replies, “Sex doesn’t 
make us whole. So how could 
you be broken?” Though Dr. 
Milburn is speaking to one of 
the many students at Moordale 
Secondary School who comes 
to ask her advice, she’s really 
talking to you. This therapy 
session isn’t just for the sake 
of fiction. The message is clear 
and it’s meant for the viewing 
audience.
In the second season of 
Netflix’s 
“Sex 
Education,” 
sixteen-year-old 
Otis 
(Asa 
Butterfield, 
“The 
Space 
Between Us”) reopens his ‘sex 
advice clinic’ at his high school 
with his best friends Eric 
(Ncuti Gatwa, “Stonemouth”) 
and Maeve (Emma Mackey, 
“Badger Lane”). Business is 
booming, as an outbreak of 
chlamydia-based hysteria has 
wreaked havoc on the student 
population 
of 
Moordale. 
Despite 
the 
business’ 
success, Otis’ personal life 
is in shambles: Now dating 
classmate Ola (Patricia Allison, 
“Moving On”), Otis learns that 
his mother, Dr. Milburn, also 
happens to be dating Ola’s 
father. Realizing the poor sex-
ed curriculum is the culprit 
behind 
the 
community’s 
descent into chaos, the board 
hires Dr. Milburn to interview 
the student body in hopes of 
revising lessons to actually 

answer their most pressing 
questions. 
These first few episodes 
of the season capture what 
makes 
“Sex 
Education” 
so 
remarkable — sexuality has 
been ignored for so long by 
so many institutions that a 
whole town goes mad. In a high 
school that needs not one, but 
two 
relationship 
therapists, 
the 
deep-seated 
cultural 
issues surrounding sex are 

more present than ever. Every 
student that consults Otis or 
Dr. Milburn considers them a 
godsend, and with the school’s 
limited curriculum, it’s not 
hard to see why.
“Sex 
Education” 
takes 
place in a slightly fantastical 
midway between America and 
Britain and represents the 
most potent aspects of each 

country’s pop culture. A wide 
variety of races, ethnicities, 
genders, sexual orientations, 
religions, 
abilities 
and 
lifestyles are represented and 
united by their collective lack 
of representation in education 
and public awareness. Students 
struggle 
with 
unwanted 
pregnancies, confusion over 
sexual orientation, personal 
trauma and all the complex 
emotions 
that 
accompany 
the universal experience of 
growing up in 2020. 
Despite addressing mature 
topics and including explicit 
love scenes, “Sex Education” 
may be the most wholesome 
show on TV right now. Based 
entirely on the idea that talking 
about your problems will help 
you feel better, the show has 
become therapeutic for not 
only its characters but its 
audience as well. The conflicts 
of the story are resolved with 
honesty, empathy and clear 
communication. In a culture 
that emphasizes silence and 
shame in matters of sexuality, 
the 
refreshing 
notion 
that 
kindness and understanding 
can make a difference feels 
groundbreaking.
Of all the advice given in 
“Sex Education,” none of it 
is meant solely for the high 
school 
students 
or 
their 
clueless parents and teachers. 
Every second of the show is 
crafted to teach its audience 
that they’re okay. No one is 
truly abnormal. No one is truly 
broken. Sexuality is nothing to 
be afraid or ashamed of, and 
“Sex Education” is begging you 
to realize it. This education is 
for you, so you better take some 
good notes.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 — 5A

‘Sex Education’ Season 2: 
the show that 2020 needs

NETFLIX

ANYA SOLLER
Daily Arts Writer

“David died yesterday.”
This is the opening declaration 
of First Aid Kit’s single “Strange 
Beauty.” 
Whispered 
in 
soft, 
lilting 
undertones, as if a word spoken too 
harshly will break it, the opening 
of the song lulls the listener into 
hypnosis. The world keeps turning, 
the song keeps playing and First 
Aid Kit keeps singing. Then the 
dam breaks and reality crashes 
through –– “It’s left me gasping at 
the wheel.” One question lingers 
in the turbulence: “Oh, how can I 
explain the colossal loss I feel?” A 
line that hangs all at once heavy 
as a stone and light as a feather, 
suspended perpetually in the 
intangible cavern of song. It is only 
in the second verse that reality 
sets in –– Death has finally come 
to call. A parallel to the numbing 
shock of mourning, First Aid 
Kit’s “Strange Beauty” is a heart-
breaking, morbid tribute to loss.
The mysterious “David” whom 
First Aid Kit mourns in “Strange 
Beauty” and “Random Rules” is 
late musician David Berman, who 
passed away in August of 2019. 
“I think a lot of people were as 

shocked as I was upon hearing the 
news of David Berman’s passing,” 
Klara Söderberg, one of the 
Söderberg sisters, noted in a public 
statement. “It didn’t seem real. It 
left me completely devastated. So I 
wrote the song ‘Strange Beauty’ to 
try to make sense of my feelings.” 
There is something that rings 
fresh and raw in the crooning of 
First Aid Kit’s songs; something 
that, months later, still wears that 
stain of mourning. 
The two-track release functions 
as its own call and response. 
“Random Rules,” a cover from 
Berman’s band Silver Jews, is 
honest and vulnerable, a tribute 
to 
Berman’s 
memory. 
Where 
“Random Rules” looks for comfort 
in the past, “Strange Beauty” 
tackles the bleakness of the present 
and future. While each song can 
stand comfortably on its own, it 
feels like a betrayal to indulge 
in the grief of “Strange Beauty” 
in divorce with the heartfelt 
celebration of “Random Rules.”
“In 1984, I was hospitalized 
for approaching perfection,” First 
Aid Kit echoes in the opening 
lines of “Random Rules.” There 
is something painful, aching, in 
the chorus of “Strange Beauty”: 
“And when you are gone, the 
world it moves on / But it’s lost its 
strange beauty,” for the absence 

of 
Bernam’s 
self-proclaimed 
“perfection” has dulled the colors 
of the world –– at least, in the eyes 
of First Aid Kit.
But why do I feel the urge to 
return to the grim, rainy day of 
“Strange Beauty”? In part, it is 
the lingering resonance of grief, 
mourning and infantile blindness 
that permeates the song, and which 
strikes the heart so thoroughly. It is 
hard to forget the aching rhetoric 
of the Söderberg sisters. More so, 
it is the lack of acknowledgement 
for the track’s novelty that drives 
me to write about this single. The 
coverage of First Aid Kit’s tribute 
has been unforgivably shallow, 
concise and breezed over. In its 
coverage, “Strange Beauty” simply 
nods to an artist of obscurity, 
David Bernam; a quiet affirmation 
that First Aid Kit remains relevant 
and active in their music making, 
that they have not faded into the 
swirling pot of unknown names 
and inconsequential bands.
“Strange Beauty,” however, is 
more than Bernam, more than 
First Aid Kit and more than any 
throw-away filler piece to meet a 
deadline. “Strange Beauty” is grief 
put to words –– a miraculous feat, 
when grief so often loss robs us of 
our speech, cruelly infantilizing its 
victims with the crippling isolation 
of heartbreak. First Aid Kit offers 

us the gift of comprehension. 
Those familiar with mourning 
will recognize the solemn truth in 
these lyrics. Those that have never 
grieved have the chance to open 
a rare window into a soul at war 
with itself. 
The song is deceptive in its 
complexity. There is no overt 
ingenuity. No exotic metaphors, 
or winding prose. The words 
are simple, but the meaning is 
significant. “David died yesterday 
/ Today it’s raining,” the song 
begins with first steps, when grief 
descends and the world narrows to 
simple facts and straightforward 
acknowledgements of existence. 
This is the “drowning hour,” as 
poet Marian Lineaweaver writes 
in “My Son: Leavetaking.” Time 
suspends, and everything is new 
and unsure –– you reach for what 
you know. 
To be honest, my affection for 

this song comes from the striking 
parallel it holds with my own 
encounters with loss. “Oh it comes 
in waves, or a single tear,” the 
struggle to cope is a battle waged 
endlessly, hopelessly, and one I 
know all too well. The pain doesn’t 
fade, but there is something 
unquestionably validating in the 
words murmured in song that go 
straight to my heart. 
First Aid Kit is not the first to 
pen an open letter to grief, nor will 
they be the last. I could very well 
be deluding myself, too, that this 
song is any more special than the 
hundreds that have come before. 
Grief is a funny thing, found in 
strange places and things. For 
some, it might be a memory, a 
penny, a picture, an old shirt, or a 
song. But while “Strange Beauty” 
resonates with my own experience, 
I do not hold steadfast to its words 
because it holds a fading piece of 

who I’ve lost. Rather, because –– as 
I said before –- there is validation 
nestled within the chords, the 
sharp breaths and the lulls of 
this song. A validation in shared 
understanding. 
I will not strike of the pretence 
of defining another’s grief –– it 
is far too personal a journey for 
something so audacious. If nothing 
else, I hope that whoever reads this 
will come away with affirmation 
and recognition of their own 
grief, as I have. But I will be bold 
enough to argue that First Aid Kit 
got one thing soul-shatteringly 
right. When asked to explain what 
is most painful about grief, it is 
without doubt that “the world it’s 
lost its strange beauty.” From First 
Aid Kit I gained a sense of ease.

First Aid Kit’s ‘Strange 
Beauty’: grief put to words

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
MUSIC NOTEBOOK

MADELEINE GANNON
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIPEDIA

I think I heard about Joan 
Murray via an article in The New 
Yorker by Dan Chiasson. What 
jumped out at me was a poem short 
enough for him to quote in full: 
Three mountains high,
O you are a deep and marvelous 
blue.
It was with my palms
That I rounded out your slopes;
There was an easy calmness,
An irrelevant ease that touched me
And I stretched my arms and 
smoothed
Three mountains high.
I rarely remember in detail 
anything I read on the internet, 
but this poem stuck with me: it has 
a sort of slant symmetry to it, an 
incantatory quality, a mysterious 
momentum. I love that the word 
“irrelevant” is used instead of 
“irreverent,” 
and 
I 
love 
that 
calmness is modified with “easy.” 
The poem’s design is small even as 
its scale expands so that the speaker 
can hold mountains in her arms. It 
expanded in my mind after I read it, 
acquired a prismatic quality. I found 
a collection of her poems shortly 
after that.
She had a short, strange life. She 
was born in 1917 and died before 
her 25th birthday, leaving behind 
a body of work largely incomplete 
and 
fragmentary. 
Toward 
the 
end of her wayward, largely self-
directed education, Murray took a 
few classes in poetry from Auden 
at The New School and sought out 
his feedback. Before then, she had 
studied acting and dance, but it 
was her encounter with Auden that 
prompted her to focus on poetry 
and to produce most of her extant 
written work. Her mother blamed 
her death (from the heart condition 
she had since youth) on Auden, who 
had prompted her compositional 
mania. Grant Code, the editor who 
prepared her poems for posthumous 
publication, described her papers as 
“a confusion: pages of prose mixed 
with pages of verse and scarcely 
two pages of anything together 
that belonged together.” Her poetry 
existed at the time of her death in 
a stage of complete disarray, as it 
was largely all still in the process of 
being written and edited. 
The exuberance of this brief 
period of composition is palpable in 
the writing. There’s an unschooled 
sincerity, an absence of being 
weighed down by what came before 
her. It feels like she is perpetually 
stumbling on her own ability to 
send sparks flying. Her poetry finds 
unexpected connections between 

images, juxtapositions that have 
a mysterious, incantatory energy. 
It’s unsparingly sharp, with little 
connective tissue, jumping from 
vague impressions to deep feeling 
and back again. The strength of 
her images insists on meaning 
that must be disentangled from 
the surface texture, which is often 
grammatically 
ambiguous 
and 
sparsely punctuated. Take this 
untitled poem, which opens as 
follows: 
Instinct and sleep you are two 
passages that converge 
Two faces that stare and reflect 
back one vision 
The sea and the night both stir 
their profound surge 
Each shouldering the boundary of 
their prison.
A man who has raised the inhibited 
line of off horizon
Will stretch his thought to the 
beach where two converge.
The poem begins by setting 
up an opposition that wanders 
into a metaphor and runs with it, 
then introduces an inexplicable 
character, creating convolutions in 
its structures of meaning that aren’t 
entirely clear on the surface. It’s also 
possible that this first stanza is just 
the product of a wandering mind — 
the image of the sea simply letting 
sleep reverberate through it. She has 
this way of remaining declarative 
and knotty all at once, delivering 
ambiguities emphatically. 
She writes with themes in mind, 
though, themes that become more 
apparent the more one reads her. 
Her repository of images is more 
schematic than it appears at first, 
tending toward the Classic and 
pastoral. She frequently uses the 
image of small, insular groups of 
people, marriage, heady admiration 
and longing (which can bring 
Sappho to mind — she gets a 
mention in the poem “Ascetic: Time 
Misplaced”). She finds in water 
(especially the ocean) a metaphor 
for instinct and indeterminacy. The 
sea appears as a kind of Dionysian 
force, 
symbolizing 
intuition 
and 
sensuality 
alongside 
the 
immateriality and uncertainty of 
the mind. Just as frequently, the 
built environment stands in for 
human agency and ambition and 
all we want to accomplish in the 
world. These two opposing poles 
are frequently played off each other. 
In one of her only titled poems, “The 
Builder,” “the young of the people” 
insist that “it is the action of water 
that is the nearest thing to man.” 
They are rejoined to remain at 
their task — “We’re building towers 
of Babel that will crumble down 
before dawn.” The striking fourth 
stanza of the builder recounts an 
intense desire: “If there is sea I want 

to pack it up in my arms / And let 
the blue globe of all that water fill 
in my mouth / Rill up my head, my 
chest, burst out of the sullen seed of 
my loin.”
The built environment is a central 
concern of hers more generally. 
Buildings are the product of the 
mind that change their meaning 
by being lived in, a canny metaphor 
for cultural production and the 
weight of history. She has multiple 
poems that use an architect as 
a sort of archetypal figure. She 
frequently imagines her architect 
as “unemployed,” dreaming about 
possibility without being able to 
act. To me, this misses according 
with Ayn Rand if only because she 
devotes pages and pages of poetry 
to the lives of workers. She has 
poems that examine the builders 
who enact the designs of architects 
and devotes special attention to 
the small country houses she saw 
in Vermont. More anecdotally, 
Farnoosh Fathi, in her introduction 
to the 2017 NYRB edition of her 
poems, quotes her as once self-
describing as a “labor-unionist or 
communist” Joan of Arc, which 
is the kind of image that would 
sound ridiculous from anyone else 
but just about fits her. She makes a 
convincing mystic and has the same 
fervor.
Like Joan of Arc, Murray has a 
kind of lowercase “q” queerness 
about her, intimations that never 
really rise to the surface. She 
describes husbands hypothetically 
in her pastoral poems, but her 
own devotions, both in poetry 
and prose, are to other women. 
She has two poems, “Ego Alter 
Ego” and “On Dit!” that recount 
extended gazes on women, the 
former close by the sea (again), 
and the latter during a candlelit 
night. Fathi opens her selection of 
Murray’s correspondance with a 
jaw-dropping letter to the novelist 
Helen Anderson that opens with 
something that feels like erotic 
worship. “Dear Helen, I am held 
speechless in the hands of some 
spirit indefinite and prostrate. Oh, 
believe me, the nights slip an endless 
chain of thought to where the curve 
of your body and the subtle uplift of 
the neck and head are pillowed, and 
I may only dream that perhaps there 
is a traced loveliness that is your 
thought, lingering for a moment in 
the vacuum of a moment’s shadow 
or a moment’s life.” It’s possible that 
she means this in what is ultimately 
a chaste way, but it’s also undeniable 
that this breathless sentence speaks 
for itself. 

Declarative and knotty, all 
at once: On Joan Murray

EMILY YANG
Daily Literature Columnist

Sex Education

Season 2, Ep. 1-4

Netflix

Now Streaming

TV REVIEW
TV REVIEW

DAILY LITERATURE COLUMN

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com