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?

Tech-word origins: stranger than science | csmonitor.com

I love the Internet. Let's just put that on the table. I love the intertext I can create between the news stories I read on the Christian Science Monitor's website and my Facebook Page. (Or between...well, anything and my FaceBook page, really. I'm surprised no one else I know uses this functionality more.)I love that with the click of my mouse, I can send a recipe to my sister for her to look over. And now I've found a new functionality that I'm pretty psyched about -- any page with a ShareThis logo can now be posted to Blogger in link form!

Tech-word origins: stranger than science | csmonitor.com
Posted using ShareThis

People who read this blog on a regular basis know that I'm really getting into etymology, the study of where words come from. I wrote a term paper about fanfiction etymology, one of my favorite authors routinely borrows words from other languages in his work, and I even went so far as to write an entire fanfic based ariound the linguistic origin of the word checkmate. I am in so deep I have the OED on my bookmarks bar!

So it should come as no surprise that I looked at this article and immediately went "Wow, I should read that!!" But really, works like this do spark my interest, both because I like to learn where certain words come from and because I read science fiction. It's incredible to think that some of the words we use every day were once just a phrase someone made up to fill a void in a story or a conversation.

Like, for instance, this one:

Internet, n. -- [Shortened <INTERNETWORK n., perhaps influenced by similar words in -net (as Catenet (1972), Satnet (1973), Telenet (1973), etc.) after ARPAnet (a wide area network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, attested from 1971). In subsequent use denoting the global network, probably greatly reinforced by use in the compound Internet Protocol.

Originally (in form internet): a computer network consisting of or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol; spec. such a network (called ARPAnet) operated by the U.S. Defense Department. In later use (usu. the Internet): the global computer network (which evolved out of ARPAnet) providing a variety of information and communication facilities to its users, and consisting of a loose confederation of interconnected networks which use standardized communication protocols; (also) the information available on this network.

(Internet etymolgy courtesy of the OED Online -- no copyright infringement intended.)

The Created Nature of History

Coming home after being up at school for three months has taught me something I have never previously noticed-- I can't stand public libraries.

It's not the general work environment, or the people who work there, or the noise level. It's nothing anyone else would notice, but in going inside four different public libraries in the past week I've realized that I can't stand the lack of academic history books in the general collection. I wanted another book on the history of Persia, and all I found were coffee table, New York Times best seller list, highly readable but heavily slanted quasi history books about why the middle east is the way it is and the history of modern Iran. I didn't want modern Iran, I wanted classical Iran!

And this lead me back to a subject that we talked a lot about in Post-Colonial Literature, about the created nature of history. The powerful always decide how to slant a story, what words to use to make them appear in a favorable light. I didn't have to read the books on the shelf to know what values the librarians at these libraries were holding up -- it was the absence of books about other subjects, like Arabic poetry or the history of the medieval middle east, that told me a lot about what these people consider valuable. Never mind that there was a whole bookcase of volumes on the medieval European world. Apparently nothing west of the Caucus mattered until the Europeans got there and 'discovered' it.

My friend and co-conspirator on MechKnight, Simon, had an interesting request for me several weeks ago, one that ties very much in with this 'created history' subject. He was beginning a new story in the MechKnight canon and wanted a saint to be a filler character that the main narrator, Monica, could write letters to:

Initially, I was going to pick a saint pretty much at random - I fancied using the name "Catherine" and having Monica not really remember WHICH Catherine. Or, maybe Saint Monica herself - but that might have been confusing. And then I had a very cool idea.

Saint Audemande of Vinceaux.

The impression I got from Jane's words was that she was a woman who might appeal to a young girl as a suitable role model [ed-- I included Aude as a random self-referential bit in This Blessed Plot]
The questions (finally!) I had were;

i) Is she the sort of person who would be canonized by the Church? That is, is her life an example of holiness? She doesn't have to be perfect or an uber example of it in Song of a Peacebringer - because that story is the REAL tale and, as both you and I know, the pious traditions and the actual truth of the lives of Saints are often at odds. But is she a good woman trying to do good things and be holy?

I told him, of course, that Aude doesn't turn out to be a very holy person, or at least the sort of person that the church is in the habit of canonizing (getting married to Muslim, forsaking her faith and all that) but I brought this created history bit into the story. Depending on who's telling her story she can be different things to different people -- One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

"What will we be remembered as, do you think? As great lovers? Lalya and Majun come again?" Aude proposed, wondering aloud.

"No...though we will have been so," her husband promised in a mischievous, promissory tone. Aude decided then and there she loved that tone. "History seldom stops to take such details down. I have written much of history -- nothing was ever exactly as I wrote it. You... you will be remembered as a great beauty -- which you were, of course,” he added. Aude chuckled. “And I will be remembered as a poet, a historian, a leader of men. But our stories will never be told together exactly as they were. Among your people yours will be a tragic, cautionary tale, a beautiful maiden stolen away by a vicious Saracen lord to be his concubine. Captured in battle, perhaps -- a spoil of war until your death.”

“Of grief, of course,” she added. “When I was too young to die.”

"Of course. And my people...” Nasir considered this closely. “To the Muslims you will be a wicked enchantress, who used her magic to ensnare me, and unman the great leader of armies. You will steal me away from my duties in stories, lead me astray...and then perhaps poison me in my sleep. Or stab me in the heart after I attempt to rebel; the authors are still deciding," he said with a smile. Aude gave him a playful jab in the ribs, smiling herself.

Aude and Nasir, being the historians and storytellers that they are, realize and recognize the created nature of history, and also recognize that their story will be different from the actual events regardless of who's telling it.

I hadn't written this last part when Simon asked me this question, so, theoretically, Aude could be the saint Monica wants to write to. She could be the martyred Christian maiden carried off by the vicious and lacivious Arabs that makes such a great Church story.

I guess it all depends on what book you're reading. And clearly, my library doesn't have a copy of the text that reads the story the opposite way.

SHERLOCK HOLMES!

The trailer is UP!




And am I excited! As an aside, isn't it cool that the titles in the trailer appear as rotating typeface? The historic printer in my soul thought that was very, very cool.

As a caveat to the wildly squeeing part of my fangirly heart, I'm posting more pictures. Because I can.

Wow, two bogus posts in one day. Clearly I am losing my touch.

A Bone to Pick

This weekend was fantastic. On Saturday my mom and I took the train downtown to go to the Green Festival on Chicago's Navy Pier and hang out with all our liberal, lefty freinds and discuss climate change and look at bags made out of recycled everything (tires, sailboat sails, construction fencing, feed bags) and walk around. And then on Sunday, my dad and I took the train down to the Art Institute to look at their new Modern Wing. (Very cool -- and FREE this week!) All in all, I felt very cultured and I probably put five miles on my shoes. It's not every weekend I spend not one, but TWO days in Chicago.

I know that so far this post doesn't have anything to do with reading, writing, or books, but I feel that all these topics have to do with a general sense of culture, and that's what I'm here to talk about. Specifically, I'm here to talk to the mother who decided bringing her three year old son to the Art Institute was a good idea.

Now I am all for giving your kids a healthy appreciation for art (music, literature, painting) early in life. I understand that admission is free this weekend. I get that you want to show your kids some really, really nifty stuff they might not otherwise see. But when your offspring is running around the classical art wing and going behind the safety railings, (see picture) threatening to touch and quite possibly destroy a five hundred year old piece of irreplaceable art, I have only three words for you -- CONTROL YOUR YOUNG. The security people can't do it for you. I realize you have two older children you'd love to explain the methods of Reuben and Van Eyck to, but your three year old either needs to be sat down in the stroller you obviously brought for this purpose, or you need to pay more attention to him, because he's three, and he's not going to remember this anyway.

So that's my bone to pick. Parents of small children, please feel free to comment.

Welcome to the Time Capsule: Spring Cleaning and a Trip Down Amnesia Lane.

"Thank you, gentlemen, for that trip down Amnesia Lane. Burn that." -- John Keating, Dead Poet's Society, after looking at his senior year Welton Academy yearbook.

Learning to live in a 12 by 15 foot space for six months of the year on a carload of clothes, a 2 foot tall fridge, and standard set furniture teaches a person a lot of things. It teaches you to set schedules because your mother is not there to do it for you. It teaches you to clean up after yourself, because there is no cleaner place for you to run to. It teaches you to put things away, becuase otherwise you will rapidly run out of functioning space. It also teaches you that there are many things in your room at home that you do perfectly fine without when you're up at school in your dorm.

This valuable piece of information was why the first thing I did on Saturday morning when I got home after an 8 hour drive was clean my room. It wasn't really a clean -- I didn't sweep and I didn't vacuum -- it was more of a purge. I went through every ounce of paper I had and recycled two large paper bags full of back issues of Merc's Life and National Geographic. And a lot of that paper brought me back a few years, to when I first started writing. I had old drafts, slips of paper I had written down ideas on that never got used, notebooks filled with now-useless conversations between characters I grudgingly remembered I had written.

And to put this quite bluntly, it was scary. I thought I was hot stuff back then, writing the next Hugo Award-winner or something. (For those of you that don't know, the Hugo Award is given for the best of the best in the Science-Fiction genre) And the writing! Man, the writing was just bad. And I'm trying to decide what I've learned from this.

A few of my friends have started rewrites of stories they started five, six years ago, stories that made them famous. (Really, I do mean famous. These were like 'toast of the Internet' stories. I have never written one of those.) It makes me jealous because, as I just mentioned, I have never written a toast of the internet story. But it also makes me wonder, because I don't have enough pride in anything I wrote five years ago to attempt a re-write. Meaning and Mystery of the Rose? I wrote that because I was a raving Sean Bean fangirl. Now my fangirly heart is bestowed on about five other actors. That was my magnum opus back then, and now I look at it and chuckle fondly. People thought it was so good! I thought it was so good!

People also thought I was in college then, because that's what I told them, and they believed me, so I'm not so sure now how much we should trust 'people.'

I'm reading a story written by a girl my age on ff.net now, and let me be the first to tell you, it's not the greatest. I'm the only one who's reviewing it, which should give you an indication of how bad it is, because I feel bad and it's in my token category right now. And I'm having a hard time finding the right words to tell this author that everyone has to start at the bottom and work up. Sure, you may have been writing stories that only you can read for years and years, but it's the critique from having them out on a public forum, whether that's in a classroom or online, that makes you grow as a writer and recognize your mistakes. I'm a grammar Nazi now because online writers HATE people who can't spell correctly or be bothered to proof their text before posting it. I'm a better writer now because people shot me down a lot when I was younger. They boosted me up a lot, too, but they shot me down more.

So I guess the point I'm making is this -- Tari.Tinuviel, AurelliaFramboise, and anyone else on ff.net that I may or may not have written less than complimentary reviews for, I'm not doing it out of spite. I'm doing it because that's what I wanted when I started writing. I wanted someone to tell me what went wrong and try and help me fix it. Please accept my apologies for any down days I may have caused and let me be that person for you.

Crisis

In the past four hours, I've left three reviews on two stories on ff.net. None of these reviews were particularly complimentary -- in fact, all of them had several items the author needed to fix. And now, after having left these three reviews, I'm feeling a little...full of myself. Haughty. Mean. Egotistical. What gives me the right to tell someone "I don't think the way you're writing a story is the right way?" What gives me the right to say "You're making a lot of the same mistakes many beginning writers do" to a girl from Jordan who's been on the site for all of a month and probably doesn't speak English as her first language? What authority do I have that could possibly allow either of these girls to take my criticism seriously?

I liked the first story. Really, I did. It was a fairly well constructed and clearly well planned Horatio Hornblower fanfic. Finding one of those (especially after the A&E miniseries came out) was impossible -- book canon went out the window. Mary-Sues were rampant. This story had all the promise of not being a Mary-Sue, or at least of keeping the Mary-Sue as a supporting character, a stock image for the background to annoy Hornblower and keep a female presence in the room. She even acknowledged that she had read the books, which I gave her due credit for. But I spent a whole paragraph in my reivew explaining the vagaries of the Duke of Wellington's title to her and why "Wellington" is not a name we can apply to Barbara Wellesley, the Iron Duke's fictional sister and Horatio's wife. What gives me the right?

The second story was the one written by the girl from Jordan. I wanted to read it because her author's note was afraid she wouldn't get any "good reviews" because her main character was a Muslim. I wanted to show her that the religious orientation of her character shouldn't be a grounds for flaming. (And we all know how I feel about multifaith dialogue fics...) I wanted to give her a 'good review'. Sadly, that didn't happen. The story was written in a very elementary style, introducing superfluous details about the character in the first paragraph that could only come from an author trying too hard to make it look like they spent time thinking about who thier main character was. I thought the concept was great, but the execution needs a lot of help. I don't know if I can give that help. I'm not qualified to teach English yet! Heck, I can't even explain my own grammar to other English speakers! What gives me the right to tell this girl "You're making a lot of the mistakes beginning writers make, but it's okay, practice makes perfect!" I'm still learning how to write myself! I'm not perfect. I'm not even particularly good at what I do.

Obviously I haven't reviewed anything (seriously reviewed anything) in a while. And clearly I'm having a little bit of a crisis of authority now.