James Joyce is a Linguistic Genius and I Want In.

Friends, I have looked in the face of a genius that can only be taken in small doses, and its name is Finnegans Wake by Mister James Joyce. I can't stand any of his other writing, but we read a section of the eighth chapter of the first part, the famous chapter where Joyce works in, by hook or by crook, the name of every major river in the world, and I'm in love. But only in small doses, mind you. FW, I think, is a work best taken by the shot glass and not by the tankard. (I'll take my Tolkien by the tankard and my P'OB by the pint glass, thankyouverymuch.)

When Max Eastman asked James Joyce why he had written Finnegan's wake in such a difficult, flummoxing manner, he replied (and I would here insert the adverbs 'unconcernedly' or 'confidently', as they seem to fit) "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years."

Well, he succeeded. It would probably be impossible on a physical as well as an intellectual scale to create a copy of Finnigans Wake with a complete gloss to this man's created words, mainly becuase you don't know where to stop glossing his words. Do I give him credit for managing to work in the Samoan for "What's new?" here? Does "your rere gait's creakorheuman bitts" translate to 'crake (monster) or human, creak (merely a noise made by your joints) or human, creak or rheum(atic) or creek (reference to ALP being river Liffey) or human? Why does he use the word 'beyant' here; is he trying to work in a reference to bezants or make the poolbeg flasher (who may be a man or a boat, you decide) more animalistic?

My point is, this book's insane, and people spend thier whole lives playing Joyce's ridiculous lingustic game. I jumped in with gusto and my copy of these five pages is marked high to heaven with notes that the glosses left out. And then -- And then! -- I decided we'd play a little bit of this game ourselves here at the Village Wordsmithy. I'm going to give you a sentence, done in Joycian style, and you're going to Guess the Gloss. Have you got your paper ready? Your pencil sharp and your dictionary flipping finger sharper?

Okay, GO!

Deyew kene, my eerie Ann, the thyme when t'bhoys of Gullwaye and Poolbleckt were gonne for schilders?

Are you working?
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Are you still working?

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Okay, now you can see the answers.

deyew -- i.e 'do you' or the dew (ref to foggy dew, irish rebel song) or yew, very poisonous tree that in irish mythology is either a symbol of long life or death, often planted in church yards. Yew is also used for english strongbows -- ref to Strongbow as conqueror of Ireland

kene -- ken, scots, 'to understand or remember' or keen, irish, to mourn

my eerie Ann -- Ireland as Eirann

thyme -- do you remember the thyme (we ate) when this happened or do you remember the time this happened, thyme as an herb used in death rituals in ancient egypt and middle ages "Thyme was also used as incense and placed on coffins during funerals as it was supposed to assure passage into the next life." (wikipedia)

t'bhoys -- i.e 'the boys' or 'the bhoys' (a slang term for a young irish american during the 1850s, specifically one from the Bowery in New York) or the hoys, "a small vessel, usually rigged as a sloop, and employed in carrying passengers and goods, particularly in short distances on the sea-coast." or "a strong but clumsy person"(OED)

Gullwaye -- Galway or the gull-way, the sea

Poolbleckt -- Poolbeg, a river near dublin, or pool-black, the meaning of Dublin, dubh-lin, or Blackpool, city in Lancashire, or poblacht, irish for republic

Gonne -- Maude Gonne, famous for her revolutionary activities during the twenties and being the subject of a series of poems by WB Yeats

schilders --soldiers, or children, or a reference to Robert Erskine Childers, an Irish Anti-Treatyite; 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go die for the dream of a free ireland?' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go fight a war' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go pursue childish dreams'


See, wasn't that fun? Did anyone come up with anything else?


Now, the fun part about this game is this -- when I wrote that sentence, I had one message in mind: Do you remember, Ireland, the time when the boys of galway and dublin were gone for soldiers? While I was making my gloss and playing around with the way words were spelled I found out that whole buisness about thyme as a symbol of death (it fits, but it wasn't intentional) and the significance of the yew tree (also a symbol of death; appropriate!) I'd forgotten who Childers was, but he worked out, too, and then when I realised I could swap Maude Gonne into the mix, in she went!

The point of this exercise, boys and girls, is merely fun, and also a kind reminder that Joyce could be a genius, or, like me, he could just be one extremely lucky bugger.

For Want of Words -- A few notes on Language and Identity

I know you are the Muskos' regiment:
And I shall lose my life for want of language;
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me; I'll
Discover that which shall undo the Florentine.
-Parolles, All’s Well that Ends Well, William Shakespeare

I must be an English major or something – I seem to be seeing patterns of the linguistic variety in more places than I ought. Consider this blog post a musing on language as well as a movie review.

Last weekend was a weekend for entertainments of the cinematic variety, and since the LOTR marathon got culled owing to many primary participants being in Cork at the time, we settled down to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A clever and violent little film, but very good; I recommend it to those of you have a strong constitution when it comes to your history being challenged and your usual dose of movie gore tripled in true Tarantino style.

The film, whilst it is being an inglorious bastard to many of its characters, is also making fun of a number of its own elements, including the genre of American war films in general. (This much most everyone who saw the trailer knew.) Here we have heroes doing unheroic things in an unheroic fashion, the momentum of this coming to a head in Hugo Stiglitz, the mass-murderer roped in by the Basterds who gets a superhero-esque title fly-in when his name is mentioned. The film industry gets another well-timed baseball bat to the knees with the premise of the film within the film, the propagandist Nation’s Pride (which, if you’ve been living where I have for two months, sounds a lot like a company that bakes bread.)


What little we see of the film is full of hammy, overdramatic acting at its finest, and from the reactions of the audience you’d think it was Oscar award-winning material. It is here that we find the angelic, pristinely uniformed, bring-him-home-to-your-mother-for-tea-and-scones hero we’re used to seeing in war films. Beside the Basterds, Private Fredrick Zoller (a very cute Daniel Brühl) is nothing more than a fop. And how we hate him!


The Basterds, headed up by their ridiculously other-end-of-the-war-movie-stereotype leader, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt in a flash of comic genius) are the absolute parody of the World War two action hero. These guys aren’t fighting for nationalism – they’re just out to, as Raine succinently puts it, “Kill us some Natzis.” The Americans are counterbalanced by a brilliant cast playing the Europeans, and here Tarantino gets out the baseball bat again, this time taking a wack at American identity in the world today.

This is where the bit on language comes in – I told you I’d get there eventually! All the other characters in this film speak at least two languages – Colonel Landa, the German head honcho in France regarding the jewish problem, converses easily in French, German, Italian, and English, and I’m pretty sure if there had been a few Red Guards wandering in and out we would have found he speaks Russian, too. (The actor portraying Landa, Christoph Waltz, apparently had to study really hard to get his English as good as it is in this film. Lemme tell you, he nailed it. This man is AWESOME.) But the Americans only speak one language – English. This, of course, lands them into trouble when their more culturally competent allies (including a deliciously British, upper-crust, toffee-nosed-and-useless army officer/film critic played by Michael Fassbender) all get shot in an underground barroom brawl, leaving only one maimed moviestar (the always gorgeous Diane Kruger) to help carry out their plans.


The point is obvious – If the Americans really want their finger in every pie and their ear at every door like Landa is, they’d better make sure the ears at the doors know what’s being said about them and their average citizens can at least converse in something other than their mother tongue.

Language is always a great way to show intercultural competency (and I use that term only because it seems to be a concept being feted in the academic administrative world at the moment.) In Literature class now, we’ve just finished reading Brien Friel’s Translations, a wonderful little play about the land survey of the 1830s that went around ‘standardizing’ Irish placenames by Anglicizing them. The play is written and performed under the understanding that, while all the characters are delivering their lines in English, some are really speaking in Gaelic. The two British officers sent in to conduct this survey (only one of the many translations of the title) take two opposing roles, one the man willing to learn the language of the place he is in, and the other the consummate imperialist ready to let translators do his job for him even if some of his meaning is lost in the process.

Several of the characters speak in Latin and Greek as well as Gaelic and English, and Friel’s message with these characters is the same as Tarantino’s – the more languages you know, the more perceptive you are to the world around you and the more open you are to change.

Studying as I am now in the Gaeltacht region of Ireland (essentially a linguistic heritage zone) I’m seeing and studying the importance of language as men like Douglas Hyde and Franz Fanon see it – as a tool for revolution and change. The language you use shapes the world you see – more languages, bigger world. Different language, different world, different identity. The gaelic speakers around here order their thoughts differently, becuase thier language is structured in a slightly different way. Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League (a community effort to revive the old pre-English Irish culture) and the first president of Ireland, postulated in his “Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” speaks along the same lines regarding language as Fanon does later in Les Damnés de la Terre regarding culture as a whole: “We must teach ourselves to be less sensitive, we must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because the Gaelic people can never produce its best before the world as long as it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another island, waiting for it to move before it will venture to take any step itself…I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best … to set his face against this constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics -- for this is no political matter -- to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines, even at the risk of encouraging national aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore -- one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe.”

Language is powerful. Language shapes our thinking, and our identity. In my own writing, I love pulling in language phrases distinct from my own English base, though it’s often said that writers should avoid doing this. I believe the criticism comes from the manga fanfiction community where those fans with Japanese cultural jealousy (for a complete explanation of what that is, see my Galway Rover Blog) throw in their unnecessary token words with wild abandon to somehow prove they are worthy of writing Japanese characters in a Japanese context. There, the usage is to prove inclusion in a group – I use my foreign words to prove difference, because of that removal from the text that they create. If my readers don’t understand it, good. Now they know how it feels talking to my trilingual poet in real life. (I also find linguistics a good way to show off your research skills, but this doesn’t work all the time and sometimes it’s just plain annoying – see Kate Horsely’s Confessions of a Pagan Nun for token words at their translation foot-noted best.)

I shall lose my life for want of language, Parolles laments in All’s Well That Ends Well. I hope that doesn’t happen to me any time soon. Judging from the length of this blog post, I’ll probably lose my life for surfeit of it.

Where There's Smoke

I just finished reading Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and like far too many books I read, where there is written word, there are ideas for fanfiction. These are my inspiration photocollages, the first one currently serving time as my desktop background.

Images used include:

Francesco Hayez, Portrait of a Venetian Woman

Sir Henry Raeburn, Francis Horner

Guillaume Caillebotte, Jeune homme à la fenêtre (Young man at the window)

Eva Gonzalès, La Toilette

and other various and sundry ephemera images -- a map of the Manchester workhouse, a bell scheduale for the Lowell Mills, engravings of mill yards and, in photocollage number two, several stills from the BBC adaptation of North and South featuring Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe.

In Over My Head

When I said I wanted a doodle, I really, really hope I didn't sound like I was saying "Drop everything and imperil your academic stability to draw me something!" Because that's what I seem to have done, and now I feel really, really awful about it.



Last week I got a chance to go visit my good friend and writing buddy (We could almost say 'partner-in-crime' in place of 'writing buddy') Helen. We had a grand time, doing the things normal university students do when they have free time -- watching movies, discussing boys, baking -- and it was lovely. Quite a change from life in the cottages, and life the previous week with my mom, sightseeing in London. Helen and her roommates were incredibly gracious hosts, but it wasn't until after I left that I realized how much time they had devoted to me when they could have (should have, probably) been working on their own schoolwork.



I was a terribly distracting individual even after I left -- I mentioned that I would love one of Helen's famous sketches and I would tempt her with a North and South fanfic I had been inspired to write, I sent Helen recipes for lemon bars and then she not only baked the bars but also produced not one, but two doodles! And I have no North and South fanfic to praise her efforts with. Well, only the vague shadow of one, a few sketchy scenes and no plot whatsoever, or the very frailest of outlines slightly resembling what I remember of Wives and Daughters, something about one girl always getting the guys and a misunderstanding with her friend about her intentions on one of them. It's very confusing to me.



I'm finding, as I've mentioned before, that this trip is leaving me little time to, well, be me. Sit in a room with no one but myself and write something that has nothing to do with class, or read a book that I don't have to take notes on for discussion. I'm always around other people, and while that's fun (We spent the better part of four hours last night sitting around drinking and talking with some of the guys last night in a series of events that involved us making dinner and them making dinner and everyone eating and then just staying) I find I long for silence. I miss being alone.



So I get up at six in the morning to write my blog and upload pictures and try and shoehorn in some writing that isn't about the Northern Troubles or my understanding of Ireland or anything graded at all. I suppose it doesn't help that my brand of writing is sometimes so terribly academic -- I love to research, to read about what it is I'm writing, and I can't do that here. I have no resources to read and more importantly, I have no time. And I cannot, repeat cannot, produce well-informed, historically based fanfiction without research. It wounds me to the core to even contemplate it -- Books were broken and authors' work disrespected with such carelessly constructed houses. (Recall, reader, the Twilight/Austen crossover abomination. Seriously uninformed, a serious breach of the unspoken trust a writer should form with her Canon.)



After this weekend our excursions end, and I'll have some room to breath again. Or at least, I hope that happens, as we have also been threatened with increased academic rigor given our change in cirumstances. I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm kind of looking forward to being home, and being able to crawl back into my hermitage again. That's who I am. I can't very well change that over three months.



So, Helen, mea culpa. I offer what little I have close to finished on that dreadful story in payment of my debt.



Opening Scene, John and Margret over breakfast, two years married, discussing the contents of the morning's post.

Scene.
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“You shall have to tell me what is in that letter, John,” Margaret Thornton declared across a very full breakfast table, watching her husband’s normally stern face contort into a pleased smile. “The outer wrapping declares it cannot be full of business and that grin of yours betrays it is far too amusing to keep to yourself.”

“Am I allowed nothing to myself?” John Thornton asked mockingly, smiling at his wife over the top of the decidedly feminine stationary, edged in a silvery blue gilt that could only have appealed to a lady. “It is from a cousin of mine, in America. She wishes to visit and begs our hospitality. I laugh because I have not seen her in nearly eight years and yet I can still hear her voice when I read her words,” her husband replied.


“A cousin? I did not know you had any cousins in America. I thought I had been introduced to your family entire,” Margaret remarked, laying aside her napkin to hear what could only be an enlightening piece of what her husband’s life had consisted of before he had met her. Nearly four years ago now, that would have been, and she found she was still uncovering little secrets. It was not that John Thornton was a secretive man, or that he felt he had something to hide, for if Margaret asked a question, he always answered with the strictest honesty. It was rather more that he never thought things worth mentioning.



“Forgive me, she is not a cousin in the strictest sense,” Thornton amended. “Her father, Mr. Grant, was a friend of my father’s, and his father a financier. My father borrowed heavily against the elder Grant’s bank; it was… that family who helped to repay our debts,” the industrialist finished carefully, looking up from his plate to see that his wife’s face was filled with fond sympathy.


Her husband’s words caused Margaret to pause, thinking back to that day, so many days – nay, even years -- ago now, when she had first heard this tale from her father. Bits and pieces returned now, from the depths of her memory and the time when she had not, to her great shame, esteemed the man who would later be her husband as much as she ought to have. Returned to Milton…. went quietly round to each creditor…and all was paid at last… helped on materially by the circumstance of one of the creditors, a crabbed old fellow… taking in Mr. Thornton as a kind of partner. “It must be a trial, then, to think about them. I know you do not often discuss that,” the wife told her husband very gently.



“The Grants were – are -- wonderful people, and I should be very remiss if I did not sometimes remember them and their kindness to me,” John said strongly. “Besides, I cannot refuse cousin Phoebe’s request – she begs to meet you, and I would not deny that to anyone in the world,” he added with a fond smile for his wife, a gesture that made her color even after two years of marriage.


“Is that her name, Phoebe?” Margaret asked, curious to learn more about this cousin who was not a cousin on the other side of the world, a relation that might at any minute descend on her house.


“It is. A Boston name, I think it. At any rate it would not go in Milton, as Mother would say.”

Seamus Heaney Reading

I finished this little project a little while ago, and I just realized I never shared it. It's from the Seamus Heaney Reading we went to in Clifden; I recorded the Nobel Laureate and then subtitled the poem he was reading.

Over the Hills and Far Away (In Ireland)

One of the first things my history professor iterated in his class was that Ireland has been a land for poets since time immemorial, and that the Aes Dana, the learned class of druid-bards who kept the traditions and stories and brehon laws alive, were some of the most important people in Irish society. Poets are still highly valued today, as seen by the tremendous turnout at at Seamus Heaney reading I recently attended.

I've been writing like a fool since I've gotten here, poetry mostly, but I haven't for the most part been working on my fanfiction. Mostly because I have no time, partially because I have no space in which to write and be alone, and partially because I can't bring myself to devote time.

But something's been nagging me since I got into Galway and saw several times the great Anglo-Norman names of the founders of the city, merchants and such who must have come over with Strongbow and set up shop on the River Corrib because it's a fantastic place for boats. One prominent name is D'arcy, and the other is De Burgo, or De Bourgh.

Yes, there is a Pride and Prejudice fanfic lurking in this city, waiting to be written about the Darcy family's Irish cousins. But it fits! It does! It fits so well I'm surprised no one's thought of writing it yet. I can see it now -- Elizabeth and Darcy's quiet, genteel demense in London is tumbled head over heels when Irish relations of Darcy's come to stay for the season. Are they proud of these relations? Of course not, they're Irish, one can hear Lady de Bourgh saying distastefully. They run practically wild in that country, you know. And they were in trade.

Never mind that it was back in the 12th century, Lady de Bourgh. You're titled because you married well, you twit.

What would then be done with these cousins I have yet to determine. But it'll come to me.

A bit of Irish Poetry

As I posted on my Galway Rover blog today, the last few days have been about poetry a lot, and I've been thinking a lot about other people's poetry (WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney in particular) as well as writing my own.

I wrote a rhyming poem over breakfast my first day in Ireland called Recipe for a Perfect Irish Morning which you can read at the Galway Rover, I wrote a song this morning after visiting Thorr Ballylee (Yeats' house/16th century Norman tower), and I wrote another poem tonight after I peeled a pile of potatoes for dinner. It's a cheeky little thing I came up with musing on the relationship between pototoes, vegetable peelers, and life in general, and I think it sounds a bit like Seamus Heaney. I was thinking of Blackberry Picking while I was writing it.

Like an anxious lover

stripping off the clothes of his beloved

or rather like a teenage boy too overexcited for a taste of a girl's white thighs

so my potato peeler sloughs off the dirt-rich clothes of the potatoes,

revealingthe white flesh underneath,

so like a woman's, strong and firm and full of life,

brim-full with nourishment.

Leaves bits of skin behind, it does, the broken straps and bursted seams

of the hurried coupling. I'll clean those up later, l

eaving the flesh white mounds to sit on the counter

whilst the peeler goes on to make love to another potato,

strip off another set of clothes

and lay the same age-old waste.

We'll all go the same way some time,

flesh forgotten, set aside to boil into oblivion,

whiteness forgotten, the virgin days of youth spent,

finally eaten up by death and the Almighty

with a side of onions that were cut with grief-tears

and a pat of butter that could have once been the milk of kindness.

Nose to the Grindstone

Wrong grindstone for this blog, though. I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to be right now (although my latest Harry Potter fanfiction effort did inspire my freind DarkKnight to write a rather puzzled post on his "As Iron Sharpens Iron" blog, which is a strange kind of compliment, I think; you can read the blog post here)

Most of my time at present is consumed with preparations for my trip to Ireland and my little ten day excursion to London. I've been filled with budget concerns, travel time tables, and more emails from my trip director than I'd probably care to ever read, as most of them are giving me an ulcer about this trip.

Oh, and I turned twenty on Tuesday. So there was much cake being eaten. Good for my sweet tooth, bad for the developing ulcer.

So that's what's new. In leiu of a real post today, I'm going to post a poem that I think I have not shared with anyone. I found it on my computer the other day and decided it was good enough to share.

It's called "The Man I Killed."

The man I killed wore tattered blue --
he had a wife and children, too.
The uniform I wear is green --
and it is whole and somewhat clean.

The man I killed had hair of red--
he had a hearth, a home, a bed.
The hair upon my head is brown --
I have no family in my town.

The man I killed had farmer's hands,
streaked with the dirt from distant lands.
My hands are also streaked with toil
but not from dust, and not with soil.

The gun is resting in my hands, its barrel hot and black
His breath has left his body now, he is not coming back.

I don't know why I could not see --
The man I killed was just like me.

Galway Bay, by Mary Pat Kelly

'Tis far away I am today from scenes I roamed a boy, And long ago the hour I know I first saw Illinois; But time nor tide nor waters wide can wean my heart away, For ever true it flies to you, my dear old Galway Bay. -F.A. Fahey, Galway Bay

Too often when I pick up a book at school nowadays, I'm picking it up because if it's fiction I need to read it for class or if it's non-fiction I'm reading it for research. I've advanced into reading non-fiction books for fun, which is probably a bad thing, so it's not often that I read fiction books I don't have to take notes on and annotate copiously.

Over the summer I've had a chance to change that and read a little bit more fiction, probably because the selection of fiction at the three libraries I frequent when I'm at home is a lot better than the selection at school. A friend of my mother's recommended Galway Bay to her when she found out I was soon to be studying there, and like the good bookworm I am, I borrowed the book from Mom before she had a chance to read it.

It was a wonderful read. I plowed through it in three days, which is a testament to both my ability to plow through books (already aptly demonstrated) and M.P. Kelly's ability to tell a story. And what a story! It starts in a very small village in Ireland before the Great Famine, with a young woman named Honora who is thinking about becoming a nun until she meets Michael Kelly, a very charming young man with a gorgeous horse, a knack for telling stories, and dreams that are just as big as Honora's. Kelly then follows her heroine through the famine, five children, and immigrating to Chicago, a place whose history I know and love well.

This book comes highly recommended by me as well as a slew of much more famous voices, including Frank McCourt's, and it's not terribly difficult to follow or keep track of Honora's many family members. Historically interested types may want to take note of this novel as an interesting way to experience family history -- Mary Pat Kelly based the story on her own family's experience as Honora herself told it to her granddaughter, Agnella Kelly. I also loved the stories within the story told by Honora and her grandmother and the way those stories had such a centrality in thier lives.

But this book was interesting to me for another reason; Honora came from Galway and went to Chicago, and here I am, twelve days away from leaving Chicago and going to Galway. She went on foot and by boat, while I'll go by plane and bus and automobile. I'll probably see many towns that were once like Honora Kelly's, and that makes me really happy inside. I feel, in a very small way, that I'm adding to that story even though I'm not Irish and my people never had to flee a country because their crops were rotting and their government wasn't helpful and their landlords wanted them gone.

Who knows? Maybe this will inspire me to find out what the great-grandcesters of Mercury Gray were doing way back in the day in France and Germany and wherever else we came from!

Busy, Busy, Busy Bee

That's me! Since starting my job at the beginning of August I haven't had much time for...well, for anything other than checking people out at the bookstore and explaining our return policy and financial aid stuff. And when the only thing you say all day long is a five minute speech on repeat --

HelloFindeverythingyouwerelookingfortodayOhthat'sgoodweliketohearthat
IsthatcreditordebitCanIhaveyouwaittoswipeyourcardTherethat'sfine
YouhaveuntilSeptember8thtoreturnthatItstillhastobeintheplasticwrapCanIget youabag?Haveagreatday!

Well, let's just say you don't have too many brain cells at the end of the day left for being creative. Despite this, somehow I managed to get the second chapter of the Rose Rewrite posted on FF.net yesterday before I went to work, and then managed to stay at work from ten in the morning till nine at night. Which was bad, because I ride my bike to work. Note to self: Riding bike home in the dark is a BAD IDEA.

I've also been doing some reading (on lunch breaks, mostly, and at home before I get to work) and I've finished the first two books in George Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, a novel by Guy Gavriel Kay called the Song for Arbonne, and Mary Pat Kelly's Galway Bay as some further study abroad prep. Speaking of study abroad, I have to order my reading books for Doctor D's seminar class. Hooboy.

The Song for Arbonne was really awesome -- Kay's writing style is part historical fiction and part fantasy, which is something I would use if I could get away with it. It was interesting; I picked it up thinking to find something of Song of a Peacebringer in it and I did, traveling troubadour types and songsingers being a key part of the story. Audemande would like it there.

One thing I've also learned -- being employed nearly full time doesn't leave much time for writing. Who knew?

Why Rewrites are Bad News

So, the MaMotR rewrite steamrollers along at close to 50 pages now (and Boromir hasn't even left Gondor yet, which is a good sign for the narrative pace, I think.) I had a discussion with my sister about whether a rewrite was against FF.net rules, and we agreed as long as it gets a new title, I should be okay. I've decided on "A Rose Among the Briars", a twist on a line from the Christina Rossetti poem "The Rose":

The lily has a smooth stalk,

Will never hurt your hand;

But the rose upon her brier

Is lady of the land.

But something about this story is really starting to worry me. I actually had a discussion with myself the other day that went a little something like this:

Muse: You had Rhoswen get a dog for New Year's in the original. You still want to go through with that? I think getting a hawk would be so much cooler.

Me: A hawk would be cool. But the dog would have to be a hunting dog, and I think the original had greyhounds, which I still think would be appropriate.

Muse: But dogs and hawks are symbols of the hunt, and I don't think they're big on the hunting scene in the Tower of Guard. I mean, you've already established that the Pelannor Fields are townlands.

Me: Damn, you're right. They wouldn't have time for stuff like that in Gondor. Hunting is a replacement for fighting, and they fight all the time. Nix on that. Still want Rhoswen to get a hawk, though. Maybe it could just be an elite status symbol, a throwback to a time when they did have the time.

Muse: Now, wait. She's good with small children and gardening. And she sings later. You can't have her be good with animals too!

Me: Damn, hadn't thought of that either. Gonna have to think of something else for a present.

Yes, I had this conversation! I am so afraid New!Rhoswen is turning into a Sue after reading Why Bella is a Mary Sue by whitedog1 on DeviantArt. The MarySue Litmus test gives me a 20, which still isn't very reassuring, but I checked some canon character boxes that only get checked because I took her dad's name from the list of lords that ride into Minas Tirith before the Battle for the Pelannor Fields.

And on top of all that, I guess I'm afraid no one's going to want to read it. All in all, not good prognosis here.

Master And Commander 2?

If this goes through and happens I would be one happy POB fan.

Master And Commander 2?

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Five Years Time

Oh
Five years time
I might not know you
Five years time
We might not speak
Oh
In five years time
We might not get along
In five years time
You might just prove me wrong

-- Five Years Time, Noah and The Whale (Here at YOUTUBE)


Today I started my re-write of Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, and I use the word re-write exactly the way it means. I tried to remember the original plot line and started over with a clean slate. Glanced at the original copy after I'd written about ten pages, but that was it. And boy, was I glad. I couldn't even bring myself to re-use anything in the original. It was just...terrible.

But then I glanced at the date I published it. October of 2004. Nearly FIVE YEARS AGO. And this taught me something. In five years, I have learned something about writing. I have improved. And that made me feel really good.

I wrote the exact same scene two different ways, and I have to say, the second version reads in a much more fluent fashion. The original first chapter of MaMotR (Ha, I just realized that rhymes with LotR; are my acronyms good or what?) was so busy, so hectic. I changed scenes about six different times in four pages. Obviously I wanted to get to the good stuff. In this new draft, we spend at least a page with each character before moving somewhere else. Also the transistions between those scenes are a little more fluid.

You can read the old copy here. I'm trying to figure out some place to archive the new text so you can compare it with the old one and laugh along with me at how gung-ho I was about my writing at the age of fifteen.

Frank McCourt

It seems I only mention famous writers on this blog when they die, which is sad and unfortunate, really, because Frank McCourt was a writer who probably deserved to be mentioned more.

The recent streak of celebrity deaths has taught me a lot about what we value in America in terms of celebrity. Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" got the entire first section of the Chicago Tribune (about six pages of newsprint) dedicated to coverage of fallout from his death and wall-to-wall coverage for the next twentyfour hours on every major news network. However, Walter Cronkite, the man who brought us the news for I don't know how many years, got a very nice write up on the front page of the Trib and a mention on the nightly news. I realize, of course, that Cronkite's death was more eminent than Jackson's, but why should an entertainer get more coverage than a broadcaster?

I know that McCourt may not even make the nightly news, even though he won a Pulitzer and, more amazing to me, he taught in public schools for a great deal of his life and then went back to write his three amazing auto-biographical works on his life as an Irish American. He wrote at the beginning of Teacher Man, my favorite of the three books, that you go into teaching hoping that some day you'll write your memoirs and you'll win prizes and someone will decide to make your life into a movie and you'll be famous for teaching, and that inevitably that doesn't happen. Interestingly, his first novel, Angela's Ashes, was made into a movie with Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson and it was nominated for an Oscar. Still Mr. McCourt went on injecting his realism.

He was very realistic about the whole process of teaching, but even amidst the sandwich throwing incidents and the kids who just wouldn't behave in class and explaining the structure of a sentence through the anatomy of a pen and the many, many times he nearly got fired for doing something or another, he always showed a certain humor and humanity in the classroom. That's why I loved his books. He was a great educator and a great story-teller, and I hope someday I can be the same.

Rest in peace, Mr. McCourt. My hat's off to you, sir.

I come bearing pictures!

Well, my summer classes are almost over. No longer will I have to muddle over french translations or worry about what type of volcanic texture the rocks in my backyard have. Needless to say it's been an interesting past few days. I helped my sister re-paint her room blue, and now sitting in there feels a bit like sitting in a box made out of sky.

Over the past week I've been re-reading and re-watching The Lord of the Rings and remembering a lot things in the original text and in the movie that made me want to be a storyteller and fanfiction writer in the first place. One of the other things this project has made me want to do is re-write my first large fanfiction piece, the Meaning and Mystery of the Rose. I'm sure if I were to revisit the concept now (and in my mind, this is not taking the shape of a mere edit, but a whole overhaul of the whole story) Rhoswen would turn into a much, much different woman than she is in the first draft. For starters, I wrote her when I was fourteen or fifteen, and the grand age of 19 seemed so far off. Now I am 19, and it doesn't seem so old anymore. I know she'd take a different shape, and I'd flush out why she was chosen to be Boromir's bride above other more powerful and pretty candidates. In my mind this new version of Rhoswen is strong and forceful and a young woman who knows that she's a pawn and won't allow herself to be completely used like one for the betterment of the House of Hurin.

But something in my mind also tells me that no one cares for such stories anymore, and a rewrite wouldn't attract any readers. So I think it'll have to be shelved for another time.

Another thing that might be shelved is this Cranford fic I posted last time. No matter how many books I read on Victorian England Mary Marshland and Harry Gregson refuse to budge into any more scenes than the ones I've already written. But I did find pictures for the upcoming Christmas special! A link was posted on the Enchanted Serenity of Period Films blog, here. It almost makes me want to write again. Alas, the writer is willing and the fandom is weak.

Another source of inspiration for some doubtless awesome future shenanigans came by way of the Lights, Camera, History! blog here, when they posted in their "Upcoming Period Dramas" scrolling picture box a spoiler pic of Ridley Scott's upcoming Robin Hood movie! Then, of course, I had to go find it for myself...


And I couldn't help being reminded of someone else...











Well, I think there's kind of a resemblance there. Maybe it's just the surcoats. At any rate, the movies are directed by the same person and set in the same era and by some accounts were meant to be a sort of prequel-sequel deal, so I'm excited nonetheless.

Finishing

Say, I haven't put any updates on here in a while, have I? I think it's time to rectify that.

Song of a Peacebringer -- FINISHED, finally. People died, people got married, people generally reflected on the whole story. It was interesting. Now I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself. You can read the whole thing, all 33 chapters, HERE.

The Hunting of the Sue -- Up and running at FF.net, and receiving generally complimentary reviews. You can read it HERE. The Summary:

Harry's stories may be over, but his adventures continue, no longer as leader in the fight against the Dark Lord, but as a Jurisfiction agent fighting alongside Thursday Next to defeat one of the most terrifying demons known to the BookWorld -The MarySue. A Thursday Next/ Harry Potter Crossover, produced in conjunction with the BookWorld in storycode WebBook1.0

I found out after posting this that Jasper Fforde does not condone fanfiction in any genre or style, so I assume that's the reason there's so precious little of it floating about the 'net. I wrote this because I wish he'd hurry up and finish One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and I'm not making any profit off of it at all, so there. And I combined it with Harry Potter, so his absolute dislike of fanfiction and Rowling's acceptence of it should make it only mildly bad, I think.

The Untitled Cranford Fic -- As yet unpublished Cranford fic (not a whole lot of them floating around, either) I thought I would post here to get some initial feedback from my Cranford fans in the crowd. (Mom, Dad, Helen, this means you.)


Imagine, if you think you can, a small village in Cheshire preparing, as it always does, for the end of summer. Carts of laborers going out to the fields, the market lane bustling with the comings and goings of the village folk. They are a simple people, unconcerned with the wars that fill their newspapers or the gossip about Queen and crown that is filling everyone else’s heads. If you are imagining, pray do not trouble yourself any longer, for the people and the town they inhabit are very real, and their comings and goings are much the same as yours or mine. The town is Cranford, and the year is 1854. If you are acquainted with the place (as I know some are) it is probably ten years since you have seen the place, but fear not; in its usual Cranfordian fashion nothing much has changed. True, some of the less colorful inhabitants have died or moved on to better climes (though what climate could be better or more healthful than Cranford’s the town’s greatest minds are still undecided) but some who have left are returning, names and faces who were once long associated with the town and the niceties of manner and speech that are still practiced here though they have quite left the rest of England.

See, here is one of them now – that young man there, in the lane, astride the bay mare. Do you see him? Topcoat tails soiled as if from a lengthy journey, trousers tucked inside equally stained riding boots, his body is well-formed and his seat on his mare is good, though he does not carry off the air of having ridden his whole life. His clothes are tailored by a professional hand and everything about him, from the shoes of his horse to the slight jauntiness in his top hat, suggests a young gentlemen home from school. This is of course the case, and the school (or rather the college, he is quite older than school) is Saint John’s College in Cambridge, a long way off in Cranford terms. Yes, this is Harry Gregson, once nothing more than a poacher’s son and sometime street urchin, now come back to his hometown a scholar of serious repertoire, well versed in Latin, Greek, the smallest of smatterings in Hebrew and of course his mother-tongue, which he speaks now with an upper-class city air.

He has learned mathematics, economics, and a hint of law, and – though he never admits to this – some of the other vices common to boys of a certain class: a regard for good company and a fine face, and a desire, however latent, to marry such a face and perhaps retain such comfortable circumstances as permit the fine face to shine even finer...

The Summer of the Re-Read

I think I'm going to call this summer "The Summer of the Re-Read." Being too lazy to find new books to read at the library, too cheap to buy new ones and too lazy, again, to write the books I'd want to read, I'm re-reading many of the better books that have passed through my hands in the past several years. I plowed through the rest of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books at the end of May, demolished all seven Harry Potter books in a scant weekend (even that one impresses me) and am now working through Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series with my sister in tow.








Let me be frank with you -- Fforde's books are book-reader's books. You know how you have actor's actors? Yeah, well, these are books designed for biblophiles. They're complex, they're filled with jokes and characters pulled from other famous books, and in books two, three, and four, Fforde actually takes you inside the BookWorld where books are supposedly created.

Yes, I know, it's awesome. If I could die and become anyone I wanted to be, living or dead, I'd vote to come back as Jasper Fforde. I can't express how much of a genius I think this man is.

So, while I wait for the fourth Next book to come via Interlibrary loan (I don't own Four or Five, more's the pity) I whipped out a Thursday Next fanfic, because I'm ambitious and slightly suicidal like that. I'm calling it The Hunting of the Sue. It deals with how I think fanfiction might be impacting the BookWorld, which is governed by very specific rules with which the fanfiction world kind of interferes. Coming soon to a Fanfiction Site near you or wherever Archontic Literature is distributed.

Beware the Mary-Sue, my son,
the hands that catch, the eyes that burn
Beware her pretty looks and shun
T’desire to return!

– doggerel attributed to Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire) after finding a MarySue version of Alice snooping around inside the Looking Glass

The First Rule of Fight Club is...

...you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is -- You DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we're not supposed to talk about Fight Club.But I watched this movie for the first time last night while I was trying to work off a coffee cooler I drank around seven pm and I realized something after the movie was over.

SPOILER ALERT!!! If you've never seen Fight Club, don't read the rest of this post! It will spoil the movie and this is not a movie you want spoiled for you. Stop reading this and GO WATCH THE FILM.







----






Are you gone yet? Good.






Brad Pitt's character (We'll call him TylerSurreal for the purposes of this blog post) is a Mary Sue. Why do I say this?

"You could not do this on your own,"TylerSurreal tells TylerReal (Edward Norton) towards the end of the film. "All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am smart, capable and, most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not."

Like MarySues, TylerSurreal was created by TylerReal for the purposes of personifying everything he's not, everything he wishes he could be. He uses TylerSurreal to do things he otherwise wouldn't have done, just as writers use MarySue to sleep with their favorite character (Something most younger female writers wouldn't do in real life if they had the chance) be brave and commit deeds of daring do (another thing we don't have the chance to act on in real life) and probably most importantly, realize our desires for physical perfection. (If TylerReal wanted to be Brad Pitt, I think MarySue wants to be Angelina Jolie or Megan Fox, or some other Hollywood dazzler, someone who stops traffic and makes cameras stare.)

Like MarySue, TylerSurreal is destructive. TylerSurreal destroys by blowing up buildings and created an army around his cultish personality becuase he's a disconnected half of one person, trying to become fully realized, taking over the whole brain. MarySue destroys because she too is disconnected. She is aloof from her creator, who neglects to put essential humanity, essential imperfection, into the way she interacts with other characters. And we hate her because of it, just as we hate TylerSurreal for making TylerReal shoot himself. But in the end, we have to metaphorically shoot ourselves to make MarySue go away. Earlier in the movie, we remember TylerSurreal putting a gun to Raymond K. Hessel's head and asking him what he wants to be. At the end of that interchange Raymond runs off screaming, and Tyler Surreal calmly reminds TylerReal, "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted."

By shooting himself, TylerReal recognizes the same thing. The next day of his life will be the most beautiful day he has ever experienced. His breakfast will taste better. Why?

Because he knows he's not perfect, he knows he never will be, and he's glad of that fact, because perfection is dangerous, and the only thing that makes life worth living is getting to fix the mistakes we make.

Now You Understand Me

Let me begin this post by saying there is nothing I enjoy more than sharing with others a story that I have already taken pleasure in reading , and in turn having them delight in it as much as I have. These past two weeks I've been watching the BBC drama Cranford with my parents, and I think that they've enjoyed watching it as much as I've enjoyed sharing it with them.

How do I know this? Well, for starters both of them were righteously indignant on Frank Harrison's behalf at the end of episode four (He's wrongfully accused of proposing to three different women and the rest of the town begins shunning him) which amused me to no end. And the second thing was that tonight, after we finished watching the fifth and final episode, we had a rather curious exchange about the ending. I said something to the effect of "See, it ended rather well, didn't it?"refering, of course, to the fact that Frank does indeed get to marry the girl he intended to, long lost brothers are returned home, and most everyone ends the story a little happier than they began it. But my parents weren't satisfied with this. "No," my mother said. " Mr. --- died. That wasn't very happy. And there were lots of unresolved things. What happens to Harry? Does he get to go to school? And what about Miss Pole and Peter Jenkins?"

"Yeah!" My father said. "Where's the fanfic?"

Yes, readers, my dad used fanfic in a sentence. I have trained my parents well. Finally they understand why I write what I write -- to tie up the loose ends and tell parts of the story I think should have been told. I assured him I would attempt to find some or, if I did not find any that suited, I would endeavor to write one myself. (I was thinking of doing that anyway.)

And of course, I reminded them that the BBC will be making another Cranford series to air this Christmas. I don't know when it will be on PBS in the US, but they're fairly good about putting things on at about the same time.

(I've also convinced my mother that next week we should start watching "Jane Eyre." Huzzah!)

Remarks on reaching One Hundred Posts

Well, who'd have thought that I'd ever get this far? 100 posts. Some frivolous, some serious, and most of them retaining the original purpose of this blog, to reflect on new knowledge, and the acts of writing and reading. Professor Steve, hats off to you -- you're the one who started this great adventure and here I am, still going strong.

I had the interesting (and let us not forget somewhat harrowing) experience of eating dinner with my sister's French Club at a little frenchstyle bistro several miles away from school. (I had to drive there, hence the harrowing part.)If you're ever in the neighborhood and you feel like spending a bit much for dinner, Mon Ami Gabi. Very good food, especially the steak frites.

Anyway, little did I know that a seemingly inncuous conversation starter (Who among the six freshmen liked the Twilight books?) would lead me to use my linguistics research in context! I had brought up the now famous Steven King interview and asked the girls if they agreed with him, if they thought that JK Rowling is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. One of the girls disagreed with King, supporting my second answer option, that both are good for different reasons. (I don't agree with this option, but I put it out there anyway for the purposes of coversation. I'm not a total dunce when it comes to teenage girls) She pointed out that both are books about relationships, and she reads Twilight for the fluffy romance. "Besides," she said, "I stopped reading Harry Potter after the fifth book becuase I didn't like what she was doing with it. And the end of Seven...See, I think Harry and Hermione should have ended up together," she explained.

"Ah, an H/H shipper!" I exclaimed. She nodded.

Wait. I just used the word shipper and she understood me! We then got to talking about fanfiction, I shared a little bit of my 'language as an identity marker' research, and I subsequently found out that she writes fanfiction, has been writing for two years now. But unlike me, who tells the whole world what I write, and frequently, she seemed rather ashamed of her work. She didn't want to share her address with me and she didn't even want to say what genre she wrote for. Perhaps this was because I intimidated her, (I had been talking the whole evening about anything and everything I could think of, including the history of Alsace after it appeared on a wine-menu) but I think it was something more than that -- I think she was genuinely ashamed of her fanfiction. She doesn't tell her friends about it, doesn't tell anyone!

So my question is this -- why keep doing something you're ashamed of? Why continue producing product that you don't want other people to read and posting it on the online community? I always write to entertain or make the people I know, as well as people I don't know, think and reflect on something. If you're going to create, why keep it anonymous? It's why artists sign paintings, isn't it?