Thursday, November 27, 2008

Holmes behind the Hat -- Halloween and buying into Stereotypes

As many of you know, I was Sherlock Holmes for Halloween, which was a fun and exciting time, especially since everyone recognized me in my distinctive (and wonderfully inexpensive) costume. See? Don't I look wonderful?


But before I went out with my wonderful halloween crew of freinds, who had equally amazing and non-commercially produced costumes, I couldn't help thinking about the nature of the character I was playing. Holmes enthusiasts will probably be quick to tell you that my costume isn' t a thing like what Holmes was portrayed as in the books.



For starters, there's the pipe and the hat. The hat, the infamous Deerstalker that one cannot picture without putting Holmes' famous noggin underneath it, is never mentioned in the short stories -- reference is made to some type hunting cap, but not necessarily the deer stalker.

The pipe, also, is a mistake -- Holmes' drug of choice was opium, although he did smoke a little, and the distinctive calabash pipe, which I did not have, was introduced by one of the many actors to play Holmes because he wanted something that wouldn't interfere with his diction. My pipe (which I do not actually smoke) was borrowed from my grandfather, a relic of his father-in-law. Over the course of the night, I discovered that the pipe is a wonderfully expressive prop, and one that I will certainly use again if the owner does not ask for its return. Perhaps next Halloween I'll use it for JRR Tolkien or a Dead Poets Society Member or something. That would be fun.

The coat he probably would have worn, although mine is sans the capelet that characterized men's outwear of the period (the historical details I give up when I shop at thrift stores) and the shoes and pants, of course, were straight of my closet, and not a Saville row haberdashery.






It's interesting to see how images of popular culture figures evolve. IMDb tells me that no less than 40 actors have played Holmes, including Christopher Lee and Christoper Plummer, the latest of whom will be Robert Downey, Jr, with Jude Law standing in for the estimable Dr. John Watson --




(As a fangirly aside, I would let that duo investigate me any day of the week. Ditto to James D'Arcy's Holmes from the 2002 "Sherlock" regardless of how plotless the actual movie was...)



But 40 actors and 200 movies point to some kind of allure in Holmes' character. (I am going to fervantly deny the existence of whatever ridiculous hack job Will Farrell and Sasha Baron Cohen are going to make of everyone's favorite dective stories.) And certainly I cannot forget that my own favorite TV duo, House and Wilson, take no small influence from Conan-Doyle's works. What is it about Holmes that makes him so endearing? Is it the brilliant, aloof way he solves crime? The rapier sharp wit that is so quick to belittle anyone who doesn't understand him? Or is it just that misattributed hat and calabash pipe that has fixed him in our literary conciousness?



I think that's a question only Holmes himself could find the answer to. I'll stick to exploring the depths of unanswered questions in my fanfiction. And knowing me, that will probably involve Watson and some class of damsel in distress as soon as that movie comes out...

Monday, November 24, 2008

Jingo-Lingo: Doublespeak, Fanfiction Vocabulary, and the limits of language

Noam Chomsky is trying to take over my life.

No, I am completely serious! He has shown up in every single one of my classes this semester, and that is an accomplishment, considering every single class I'm taking is from a different department. He's a linguist, which meant we read his thoughts for Linguistics (duh) on how languages are structured, in my Human Development class on how children acquire language, and in my Communications class on how we use language in advertising. Today he came up in Peace Studies because he is a political activist and theorist as well and we were reading an article of his on terrorism.

But today in Peace Studies we discussed something else that Mr. Chomsky would probably have a few thoughts about-- doublespeak, or the particular brand of language used by the government and by other various bureaucracies to make whatever they intend to say unintelligible to the average joe. And of course, I thought back to linguistics and my research project, which is on another type of lingo -- the vocabulary of fanfiction.

Just like doublespeak or the less confusing academic language of, say, chemistry, fanfiction vocabulary is an attempt to make what we do as authors seem like legitimate discourse as well as create the same barrier as doublespeak does, veiling us in our own elite little world of Mary sues and crossovers and canon 'shipping. By using these terms, we establish our experience level and our authority within our discipline the same way a chemist uses terms like valence electrons, hydrogen bonds and heterogenous solutions to show that he, too, knows what he is talking about rather than referring vaguely to the structures of atoms or mixtures of liquids that have differing properties. And chemists and goverment officials aren't the only ones using confusing langauge -- English speakers employ euphemisms, those phrases that drive translators wild with annoyance, every day of the week.

This is from my introduction so far:


The scene is a familiar one to anyone who reads on a regular basis – it is the last page of the novel you’ve been dying for months to read since you heard your favorite author was publishing again, and as you finish the final words, you can’t help feeling a sense of disappointment. That wasn’t the way you wanted the book to end at all! The hero was flat, the love interest was transparent, and there were entire scenes that needed to be explained! If you were writing the book, you would have definitely included more, like a chapter explaining how all the characters met each other. Most people never follow up on these notions of re-writing or filling in their favorite novels, but for a small community of writers, that idea forms the basis of their entire creative output. It’s called fanfiction, and it’s been around for hundreds of years, almost since the printing press created a mass market for books. These authors use texts ranging from Jane Austen to the latest comic book series as their source material, and their aim is simple – to write stories based on characters people already connect with for the purpose of improving their own writing and filling in gaps in the original stories. Since the advent of the Internet and sites that allow readers and writers around the globe to establish communities, fanfiction has grown dramatically, and as this style has grown in popularity, it has developed its own unique language, a codified and agreed-upon set of terms and vocabulary to help connect within the community and establish legitimacy among its members. Fanfiction is written with the aim of creating agency, space, and identity for its writers, and these three motives help explain why the vocabulary of fanfiction exists as well as why it is structured the way it is.



As you can see, it's going to be a riveting paper. But one of the other things the movie we watched in Peace Studies today discussed was how language, as well as how people use language, significantly impacts how we view the world. Jacques Derrida discusses this in one of his writings, talking about how using our language to discuss the way we use language is by the very nature of the proposition a play doomed to failure. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that different languages formulate different trains of thought, that if a language has more than one word for snow the people speaking the language will, of course, be more aware of snow.

Certainly this could be true with doublespeak. By using a disconnected doublespeak, we in turn disconnect ourselves from war, rearrange our thought process and make war more palatable -- an enemy solidier is easier to kill if he remains nameless and becomes Jerry, Gook, or Victor Charlie, a manufactured propaganda face with a leering grin and beady little eyes set on destroying the American way of life. We're not fighting a war, we're peacekeeping, and don't even think about calling them casulties. Talk about the body count instead, or the butcher's bill, if you're fighting in the South Pacific on a 19th century ship of the line. Using doublespeak can hinder our ability to look objectively at war.

But fanfiction vocabulary does the opposite of doublespeak-- it seeks to open up and delve further into an artistic endeavor by making new words (or rearranging old ones) to better explain the unique animal of fanfiction writing. Mainstream writing doesn't need a word for the advocacy of a relationship between these two people or those two people, but fanfiction does, so we have shipping, a clipping of 'relationship' that's been turned into a verb, an appropriative vocab word for an appropriative art. My thought process is shaped by those words, but the very fact that they are new and that I have allowed them into my vocabulary speaks to my ability to influence by own thought process. It's not that we're more aware of snow becuase we have more words for it -- it's because we needed to be more aware that we came up with more words.

Fascinating world we live in, isn't it?

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Rocking the Regency

I have discovered a treasure.

Regency Dress Up Doll by *savivi on deviantART

This woman is AMAZING-- I have had far too much fun designing Fanny and Charlotte Aubrey--

And Georgiana, who is so much fun. I am by no means an Austen purist, and I am not ashamed to admit that I really liked Tamzin Merchant in Joe Wright's 2005 Version. She was very...impish, which is a quality that suited her, I thought.Those of you familiar with Thackeray will recognize Georgiana's title -- in my fanfic she's married to Marquess of Steyne, his second marriage and her first. I've also now only just realized that she should be a Marchioness. *shrug* The vagaries of rank and style.

I had fun doing myself, too...


But the fun didn't stop there-- she has one for our favorite heroes, too!

Regency Hero Dress Up Doll by *savivi on deviantART

Which meant, of course, that I had to do Richard Hornblower, George Darcy and Phil Norrington as well....Aren't they dashing? I gave George a dog, though he doesn't have one in my story... Perhaps he should get one now.

And you should all go read Husbands and Lovers now. It has so few reviews. Please, even unhappy reviews would be appreciated, too...

Husbands and Lovers, a Napoleonic Wars Crossover of Epic Proportions

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Updates!

And, after a nightmarish two weeks of school work piled on top of school work, piled on top of the Minnesota weather beginning to act like the minnesota weather and making it really hard for me to type some days, we have LE UPDATE.

We have, in no particular order,

New chapter from Mercury Gray,

Category: Kingdom of Heaven
Title: Song of a Peacebringer
Chapter: 13
Chapter Title: Chapter 13
Genre: Drama/Adventure
Rating: Fiction Rated: T
Summary: Trying to escape a life with no prospects, a young woman sets sail for the Holy Land not knowing what she will find there. Armed with her brother Gregory's advice and a modicum of courage, Audemande of Vinceaux tries to make the most of Jerusalem.

URL:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4400318/13/

and a new story! I've been working on this one for a while, and I finally finished it this weekend.

New story from Mercury Gray,

Category: Kingdom of Heaven
Title: Gardens of Paradise
Genre: Drama/Spiritual
Rating: Fiction Rated: K+
Summary: While in Jerusalem, Nasir Imad Al Din meets a fellow poet in the gardens of the Citadel of David, and has a lengthy discussion about gardening, poetry, and God.

URL:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4656923/1/

and another new story, too -- this one is a Grey's Anatomy fanfic -- new territory for me! check it out and see what you think!

New story from Mercury Gray,

Category: Grey's Anatomy
Title: The Small Matter of Teaching
Genre: Drama/Humor
Rating: Fiction Rated: K+
Summary: After Chief Webber notices Christina's non-existent teaching skills, everyone's favorite perfectionist gets a wake-up call from a patient of hers on how exactly to deal with the small matter of teaching.

URL: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4656438/1/

Now, after that massive outpouring of creative energy, I have to go work and attempt to write a four to five double spaced page essay on the impact the Bible and the Printing press have had on the evolution of English. Ah, Linguistics class, I love you so.

But really? Really?

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Long, Long Trail -- Thoughts on the Evolution of the Identity of Armistice Day

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head....
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

-The Dugout, by Siegfreid Sassoon, from The War Poems, 1919

First off, Happy Armistice Day, everyone! I know most Americans are probably thinking, "Merc, where has your head gone? It's Veteran's Day, you ninny!"

And you'd be right. Today is, technically, Veteran's Day. Has been since 1954. But in 1919, per an order from then-president Woodrow Wilson, today was Armistice Day, because on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, peace was declared between the allied powers of England, Russia, France, and Italy and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, people around the country would gather to celebrate the end of the war that was supposed to end all wars, the last gasp of a dying style of warfare and the first breath of the beginning of another.

Never again would the enemy be a man you could forget your differences with and play a game of soccer in no-man's land with, as with the Christmas Truce of 1914. Weapons could shoot further, more accurately, and with increased effect. You were removed from the man you were killing with shells and gas and later, napalm and missiles, weapons that would be fired from far off so that the effect was never seen by the man doing the firing. It became a common tactic to make your enemy into something less than human -- Jerry, gook, Victor Charlie -- so it was even easier to kill him.

Armistice Day used to be a day to celebrate peace -- that's what the original act to make it a national holiday stated. "A day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'."

In 1953, someone decided we needed a day to celebrate veterans, and another act of Congress changed Armistice Day into Veterans Day. I agree that veterans have a right to be celebrated, for the sacrifices they make are great and worthy of remembrance, but did they have to take the one day out of the year that was designated to remembering the cause of peace?

You're probably wondering why I'm writing about this on a blog dedicated to writing. World War One was the Great War -- it inspired a generation of writers, Fitzgerald, Remarque and Hemingway among them, and dozens of poets who brought to life in words that remain with us today the horrors of what war could do. Sassoon, Owen, Brooke, and other less famous names wrote about what they saw daily in the trenches, and told thier families it shouldn't happen again.

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin...
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
the old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori," Wilfred Owen wrote bitterly in one of the most famous war poems of that era, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," or "It is Sweet and Right." Owen could find nothing sweet and right about war, and neither could many of his comrades. World War One was supposed to end all wars because it was brutal and too many good, young man died uselessly, trying to move lines yards at a time instead of miles.

So today, while you are celebrating the men and women who gave their lives, their fortunes, and thier sacred honor, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, to the cause of America, please take a moment to remember the Armistice, and remember that the goal of all wars should ultimately be peace, and the removal of the need for more conflict.

I'm going to end this post with one of my favorite poems by my favorite hometown poet, Carl Sandberg. I think it deals very well with the cause of peace, and the necessity of it. It is entitled simply "Grass."

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass;
I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Tinged with Thought of Suicide -- National Novel Writing Month

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." - William Somerset Maugham



Ah, W.S. Maugham. How witty you were. Are. Continue to be. It's always a funny thing to try and refer to an author or an author's work, becuase while they may be dead, as is the case with the author of "The Painted Veil" and "Of Human Bondage," their works are still very much living, attaining a new life every time thier covers are cracked open. In that way, writers seem to be immortal, continuously in the present tense.



And that immortality is what many participents are probably striving for as NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, begins. I applaud the intrepid souls who are starting out on this suicidally tinged quest for greatness -- I once tried in the 9th grade, got 8 thousand words in and decided it was hopeless. Now I have my heart set on being a teacher, a much more marketable use for an English Degree. If that falls through, I plan on becoming a librarian, in the hopes that I may someday help a handsome ex-pat break out of jail, go gallivanting through the desert in search of buried treasure, and be able to explain, while in a somewhat inebriated state, "Mr. O'Connell, I may not be an adventurer, or...or an explorer...but I am proud of what I am! I...am a Librarian."

Additonal props to anyone who knows what movie that's from.



For those of you not familiar with NaNo, let me elaborate -- NaNoWriMo is a contest, of sorts, in which aspiring novelists across the country commit themselves to writing 50,000 words in one month. 30 days.



As I mentioned before, tinged with thoughts of suicide. Especially if you're a full time student like me. Which is why I am staying far, far away from it and contenting myself with one small, insignificant fanfic at a time.



Props to all of you crazy people, though. I hope W.S. Maugham's three rules occur to you some time in the midst of your word churning. Who knows -- perhaps this time someone may actually write them down.

Monday, November 3, 2008

On a Stack of Bibles

I've just returned from my Linguistics class field trip, and I am nothing short of flabbergasted. You who sit in front of your computer screens reading this post are probably wondering a) what was so exciting about linguistics or b) why a college class was going on a field trip.

Allow me to elaborate. My professor, who is an august and amazing man, takes our class for little excursions around Saint Ben's and Saint John's to show off what an amazing school we go to and introduce us to cool and nifty people around our campuses. Our field trip today was to the Hill Museum and Manuscript library, which I've talked about before on this blog ("Paperback Swap Status, September 10th")

Specfically, we were going to the HMML to hear a presentation about the Saint John's Bible Project, the nearly 13 year project to script, illustrate, and illuminate a bible, in English, using midieval techniques. I'm telling you people, it is a thing awesome to behold. The books (there are going to be seven volumes to this behemoth when it's completed) are going to be about 14 inches wide by two and a half feet tall, a size appropriate to our Abbey Church, which is huge inside --

That honeycomb you see behind what we call the Banner -- that's also the largest stained glass window in Minnesota, possibly the world, I don't remember. The structure is also entirely poured concrete, which is just amazing when you think about how big it is. You can't see this by looking at the picture, but the Abbey church is right on the top of a hill, and it's one of the first things you see when you get off the highway and start approaching Saint John's. It's really cool -- and the guy who designed the church, Marcel Bruer, he's world famous.


But back to the Bible and the HMML. Donald Jackson (who is apparently a BIG DEAL in the world of calligraphy) expressed an interest in writing a 20th century bible and asked the monks of Saint John's if they would like to be associated with the project. They said yes, and the Saint John's Bible was born.

If you are ever in Collegeville, Minnesota, or if you hear that it will be touring near you, go see it. It's beautiful. In fact, it's so amazing the Pope has a copy. That's right. The Pope. Brother Dietrich, the President of Saint John's, traveled to Rome in April of this year and presented it to him. This book is so important the Vatican Library gets a copy. I think that's all seven kinds of awesome, right there.

But I also learned something else today. I learned that the HMML, which resides right underneath the library where I do my homework on Tuesday afternoons, across the lawn from that Abbey Church, is one of the largest collections of medieval manuscripts from across the world, some THREE MILLION pages on microfilm, comprising about one-hundred thousand volumes, most of them from the Middle East.

Are you all jealous yet? Because you should be.

I go to school at two colleges comprised of some four thousand students, in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, and we have a collection of old books that is so unique scholars from all over the world come to study them. I wrote about one of them in that previous blog post I mentioned earlier.

I think that's something to be proud of. My school is famous the world over for preserving books, books that now, in addition to microfilm, can also be accessed online through the Vivarium, here. For the one hundred and fifty years that Saint John's Abbey and the Monastery of Saint Benedict have been in Minnesota, we've been focused on teaching, learning, and preserving heritage, things that are all still alive in our traditions today.

And I am. I am very, very proud of that.