The Village Wordsmithy

You Can't Put Nothing Past William Howard Taft: A Review of Jason Heller's "Taft 2012"

2012-01-21T17:23:00.000-06:00

Those of you that know me could tell a lot of anecdotesrelating to how much I like free stuff. It’s a bit of an obsession, really. Butbetter than your everyday tradeshow swag (Stuff We All Get) is the free stuff Ihave to work a little for – answering a trivia question, or giving my opinion,or playing a game of bingo. One of my new favorite free things is the books Ireceive from Quirk Books when they nicely ask for internet denizens to reviewthem. Two things occur when I get those emails – one, I get to help theenterprising and creative people at Quirk sell more product, and two, freebook!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as in-tune with thepolitical process as I should be. As a self-identified Democrat living with avery conservative Republican father, it’s probably safer for me this way. Thatsaid, I was a little leery of any book identifying itself as a satire of thepolitical process. However, I figured that any book about the guy who inspiredthis song was worth looking into:

Yup. The Two Man Gentleman Band got me to read “Taft 2012”and strongly encourage friends, family, and co-workers to DRAFT TAFT. In mydefense, I’ve read more serious books for sillier reasons, but in the long run,I’m glad I read this quirky and surprisingly insightful look at the American politicalprocess and the absolute circus it inspires every four years.

The premise of Jason Heller’s novel is fairly simple –William Howard Taft disappears from the past without any reason whatever andre-appears in the future – our future – just as election season is beginning.After reacquainting himself with the world, getting in touch with hisgreat-granddaughter and her family, and doing a few rounds of the talk showcircuit, Taft finds himself in the middle of a grassroots movement focused ongetting him re-elected as president, a movement that forces him (and thereader) to examine what the American political process has become.

At a volunteer dinner several weeks ago, one of my dining companions turned to me andsaid, “Now, I know we’re not supposed to talk about politics at dinner, but whoare you thinking of voting for in the next election?” This was a hard questionfor me to answer, since the place where I am volunteering was founded by a verystaunch Republican and I am, as mentioned above, of the Democratic persuasion.I told her the honest truth – “Well, I voted Democrat in the lastelection, but I really don’t know. It seems to me that politicians promise alot of things during campaign season and never follow up on them, so is it fairto say, ‘He promised this and didn’t deliver’ when we know that alwayshappens?”

My dining companion seemed to view this as an acceptableanswer, and the matter was dropped, but the same situation came up in“Taft 2012.” Throughout the book, Heller uses a mixed media format, drawing inpoll numbers, twitter conversations, and plain old prose to tell his story, andone of those ‘mixed media’ pieces is a transcript of a political analyst’s TVcoverage of Taft. The excerpt explainsthat the groundswell of Taft support is because he’s an ideal candidate whowill bring us back to the good old days of yore, as this campaign advertisementwill attest.

Taft is billed, in the beginning of the book and themarketing campaign for the candidate/book, as the candidate who alwaysdelivered on his promises and stuck to his morals, two things modern politicalcandidates seem to lack. Yet as thestory progresses, he finds himself being sucked into the circus just like therest of us, giving up on things he values to help his cause.

John Cass, an op-ed writer for the Chicago Tribune (astrongly Republican leaning newspaper, interestingly enough, run way back when by the same man whose house Iwas volunteering at for that volunteer dinner) wrote a piece about a week ago about why he thinks Obama will win the election. Simply put, Cass says thatObama knows who he is and what he stands for, and the Republican candidatesrunning against him are so busy infighting amongst themselves that they’veforgotten to show the American public who they are and what they’re about. Heller suggests at the end of his bookthat this is the only way candidates can win in politics – when Taft realizesthat he’s forgotten who he was, he begins to work as a force for real change insociety.

If you, like I do, come from a family of mixed politicalviews, I think that “Taft 2012” is a great piece of writing to share with yourfamily. It provides a (somewhat surreal) way to talk about how crazy thepolitical process is, and it’s pretty amusing to boot. And even if you don’t,Taft 2012 is still an amazing piece of literature, and one I’m grateful to haveread.

So, gentle citizens, get out and vote this November – andremember, DRAFT TAFT.

You can buy Taft 2012 directly from Quirk Books, from your local independent bookstore, or fromAmazon, Barnes and Noble, or, if you’re lucky, you can try getting a copy froma site like PaperbackSwap.

Downton Recommends: An Edwardian Trip back in Time

2012-01-14T19:08:00.002-06:00

This will probably be very obvious to anyone who knows me, but it bears putting down on paper: I am a very plugged in person. I read a lot of books, I follow a lot of blogs, I keep up with a number of news outlets, and I watch a lot – A LOT – of television and movies. I do this because I think it makes me a more interesting person, and also because I love having things to recommend to other people. Lately at my house the focus has been on – what else? – Downton Abbey.

I love PBS and the work they put on TV, because it is usually fun to watch and also because, unlike much of mainstream television, their shows can usually be counted on to be something I can watch with my parents. (A lessening commodity, let me assure you.) My parents – my mother in particular – are very selective about what they will and won’t watch, and in an era where swearing and sex are becoming more commonplace on broadcast television, PBS usually pulls through for me with something that has no swearing, no sex, and no dubious scenes in dubious places like dark allies, strip clubs or seedy bars. It helps that my mom likes period dramas, too. So, after I dragged my sister through the first season of Downton Abbey (which I think she likes – she could just be putting up with me) and declared that I would have the TV Sunday night to watch the second season or perish without, my mom came down and watched the season opener with us.And, in a fashion true to my mother, when the whole thing was over, she asked, “So, when’s the next one?”

Picture me at this point beaming in joy.

Of course, when the second season is over and we have to go back to our lives without the shenanigans of Matthew, Mary, and the rest of the Crawleys, I will have to find something else for my mother to watch. (She and my father complained at the end of the first season of Cranford, and the second season couldn’t come fast enough for them.) And being the plugged-in person I am, I’m compiling a list of (PBS approved) shows that I’ve watched in the past and wouldn’t mind watching again.So, without further ado, the list!

1. (The Original) Upstairs Downstairs (ITV/PBS, 1971-1975)

There has been much dirt thrown between the Upstairs Downstairs reboot people and the Downton Abbey folks, but it does bear saying that Downton Abbey is cast from the same clay as the 1970s PBS series. That fact cannot be denied. I still maintain that Downton is much more interesting that the recent remake of this beloved show, but the original is definitely worth watching at least once, if not two or three times. Upstairs Downstairs follows the adventures of the Bellamy family upstairs at 165 Eaton Place, London, and the lives of their servants downstairs as they deal with the turn of the century, the end of Victorian England and the beginning of the Edwardian age. (Interestingly enough, the Earl of Grantham’s sister Lady Rosamund Painswick is said to have a house in Eaton Square. I smell an imminent crossover fanfic.)

My mother claims that when this show was first on in the 70s her mother refused to let her watch it on the grounds that it held some scenes of a dubious nature. I watched it all several summers ago and was not at all fazed by the plot, but I am not my grandmother, and a servant getting with child out of wedlock, broken engagements, the first World War, and shell shock do not shake me. The cast was wonderful, the stories were alive and engaging, and there were some really first rate performances throughoutthe show’s run. I shall forever love David Langton’s Richard Bellamy, who gave a new meaning to the idea of the silver fox and who deserves a lot of really ravishing fanfiction, and Gordon Jackson’s Mr. Hudson, the loveable and peppery butler, was the type of character I should have loved to have spent time under as a housemaid, a demanding taskmaster but truly compassionate besides.

2. The Duchess of Duke Street (BBC/PBS, 1976-77)

When it first came out, this series was accused of trying to ride on the success of Upstairs Downstairs, and to be sure, both shows feature a similar format – a house with servants below and a family of sorts upstairs, trying to deal with life in the Edwardian period. The title character, Louisa Leyton, enters the series as a lowly assistant cook with high ambitions – to become the best chef in London. A big goal in an era when it is universally acknowledged that while women can be cooks, only men have the artistic flair and panache required to be chefs. Through a series of complicated events, she becomes the proprietor of a hotel with its own ménage of interesting guests, servants, and family. The series was based on the life of Rosa Lewis, the proprietor of the famous Cavendish Hotel, a woman who was sometimes titled ‘the Duchess of Jermyn Street’ for the way she held court over the men who came to admire her cooking (and her good looks).I watched this before seeing Upstairs Downstairs, and the memories of it are a bit hazy, but I do remember liking the passionate and spunky performance put in by Gemma Jones as Louisa.

3. To Serve Them All My Days (BBC/PBS, 1980)

If the end of World War One does for Matthew Crawley what it does for David Powlett-Jones, the protagonist of To Serve Them All My Days, I will be a happy fangirl indeed. I watched this miniseries several years ago and loved it so much I went and found the book by R.L. Delderfield upon which it was based. My copy, interestingly enough, is the tie-in version published for the series on “Mobil Masterpiece” as it was then called. (My, how times have changed.) TSTAMD follows the life of young Mr. Powlett-Jones as he returns from World War One a shell-shocked wreck of a twenty-two year old whose doctor has recommended fresh air and an enclosed community as the best hope for recovery. He begins teaching at a public school in Devon called Bamfylde under the auspices of a wonderfully jolly headmaster, Herries, and shepherds several generations of troublemakers and brownnosers alike through the joys of studying and examining history.

Delderfield was criticized for his flat characterizations in the novel, but I’ve never found any of his cast wanting in any respect of character. The miniseries was excellent, with top-notch performances by Alan MacNaughton as Mr. Howarth, the crusty and proud English professor and Frank Middlemass as Mr. Herries, as well as a particularly good bit of casting for the parts of several of the students who make up PJ’s cadre at school. (My favorite is always Boyer, a scoundrel with a good deal of charm who, just missing the action of World War One at the beginning of the series as a troublemaker in the 4th form, ends up enlisting at the end of the series in World War Two as a well-rounded young man of nearly 30.) This show also introduced me to the sound of spoken Welsh. Watch it for nothing else than that, if you must. John Duttine’s simple, scared young PJ is absolutely adorable rambling on in Welsh cadence. As is the terribly British and schoolmastery Carter, played by Neil Stacy.

Many of these shows are Edwardian in word and deed, but PBS has a treasure trove more set in the 1920s that I intend to preview for you! Any suggestions from the peanut gallery would be appreciated as well!

Resolved -- Excelsior!

2012-01-11T14:40:00.000-06:00

Excelsior -- From Latin excelsior, comparative of excelsus (“high”) (archaic) (1) Loftier, yet higher; ever upward. (2) title of poem by H.W. Longfellow, which reads

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
"Excelsior!"

Today we are eleven days into the new year. Eleven days. TodayI had a job interview, and in order to prepare for that interview, I cleanedout my portfolio. I printed out a new copy of my resume, and threw out the tencopies that were still in my portfolio from the Education Job fair I attended inMinneapolis last April. And my, what a lot has changed since then! My oldresumes bear witness to a distinct shift in goals – the objective on the oldones reads “To obtain a position as a mid-level language arts teacher.” The newone no longer has an objective on it, because I needed space to list my manymyriad qualifications for being a museum tour guide.

It turns out I didn’t need the resume – the job I was interviewingfor is at a museum where I’ve been training as a volunteer since August, so mymeeting today was less of an interview and more of a pre-hire meeting where they offer you the job and you fill out paperwork. I justneed to get clearance and name badges and a drug test done, and I willofficially have a second job, for which I am very grateful.

If you had told me at this time last year that in twelvemonths I’d have two jobs, I probably would have kicked you. But a lot changesin twelve months. In the last year, I’ve taught five classes of middle schoolstudents, four classes of high school students, and written I don’t even wantto remember how many lesson plans. I dealt with workplace bullying drama andthe sudden death of a mentor. I graduated from college with honors. I movedhome and read a lot of articles about how this seems to be the new normal of mygeneration. I taught camp for the second summer and learned I’m much better atdealing with crisis and crying children than I ever gave myself credit forbefore.

I decided (probably before the screaming children) that I wasn’t goingto become a teacher. I interviewed at a number of different places, and foundout I was not unemployable. I received my first real job offer, and gave myfirst job refusal. I entered the work force. I began volunteering at twodifferent museums and learned a great deal about the nature of the museumvisitor and the direction of museums in general. I tried to handle all three ofmy living grandparents having serious health problems throughout the year. Icelebrated the birth of two new cousins (once removed.)

I look at that list, and I can’t believe that all thosethings happened in twelve short months. I managed to pack, intentionally orunintentionally, a lot of meaningful, life-changing experiences into twelvemonths, and I’m not sure that another year of my life will ever be so filledagain. Some of them were wonderful experiences, and some of them were very farfrom wonderful, but all of them, I hope, have made me a better, brighter,stronger person.

In the last four years, I’ve seen the amount of writing I dofor this blog slowly taper off, and for all that I know not too many people arereading this, that dwindling number still saddens me. At the beginning of a newyear, it is customary to make a resolution regarding these sorts of things, buttry as I might, I can’t bring myself to promise that I’ll write on this blogmore. My resolutions are different – broader, in some ways. I resolve to makebetter use of my time. I resolve to be kinder and more welcoming with everyone.I resolve to care for my body more. I resolve to be a good steward of my money. I resolve to move myself higher as a human being.

Perhaps a better resolution than ‘write more’ would be ‘be abetter steward of my talents.’ In addition to invoking the Roman meaning oftalent as a unit of money, this phrase brings together everything I want tostrive for in the coming year. Use my time better by finding causes, places andpeople that need my help or my skills as a teacher, as a speaker, as a mover ofboxes or a purveyor of useless facts. Become healthier, happier and morecontent with my life and my place in the world by helping others and enjoying the natural world around me.

It’s a lofty list of goals, to be sure, but I think that I cando it. After all, I’m writing another blog post, aren’t I?

Two Roads and Dark Woods -- or, When Fandoms Collide

2011-12-21T07:45:00.001-06:00

Random things that make me happy:

1. The Hobbit trailer came out yesterday. I watched it six times and shared it on facebook and squee'd with all my freinds.

2. I found out one of my former roommates is now into Downton Abbey. Now I have someone else to squee with.

3. I got Christmas letters and Christmas packages from friends far and near, including one from a lady I work with that I wasn't expecting at all.

4. A freind from high school randomly called to go see a movie.

5. I found tea that says "Keep Calm and Have a Cup of Tea" at the store. I proceeded to buy said tea so I can keep the box.

6. I have two books to review for Quirk, and both of them look amazing.

7. I've read so much good fanfic in the last week my head might explode.

8. I just finished reading John Keegan's The First World War, which was excellent, and am now working my way through Bright Young People, which is so far also excellent.

8. The cute intern at work asked if I was going to be in on Thursday. I am. I'm trying not to read too much into it.

9. And oh, by the way, it's Christmas next sunday.

There's been such a lot of stuff happening in my life lately that I haven't really been giving any time to blogging. Heck, I haven't even given a lot of thought to the fact that Christmas is next week, but that could be because we don't have any decorations up at my house. I've been thinking about writing blogs a lot, but never actually writing anything. Probably becuase no one was reading for a while. But enough fannish stuff has happened in the last week that not to blog about it would seem a little funny.

For starters, that Hobbit trailer! Could it have BEEN any more perfect? Let's watch it again, shall we?

I love everything about this trailer. I love the slightly Arthur Dentish moment Bilbo has in the trailer when they tell him they're recruiting for an adventure and he says "I am a Baggins of Bag End" as if trying to reassure himself that Ford has NOT just said the world will end in eleven minutes. (Yeah, like this.) I love Richard Armitage's smoldering Thorin (this movie is going to make dwarf-centric fanfic explode, let me tell you) and the odd and kind of endearing Gandalf/Galadriel moment. I also really love all the dwarves, all thirteen of them with their rhyming names and their hoods and their plate-rolling antics.

But the thing I like best and most of all the lyric quality they gave the "Over the Misty Mountains Old" song that the dwarves sing in Bag End to explain to Bilbo why it is they have to go to the Lonely Mountain. It's one of my favorite poems in the books (and one of the only ones I always read, which you can do here) and I never heard it in my head like it's sung here. But in the book, Tolkien says "And suddenly, first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of thier ancient homes; an this is like a fragment of thier song, if it can be their song without their music." (Hobbit, p. 26) And that's what it is, plain and simple. You could have lifted it right off the page.

As I was going around like a madwoman last night listening to the trailer, I went to go check my Google reader and find a load of Downton Abbey pictures from this awesome Tumblr I started following -- fuckyesdowntonabbey -- and suddenly my Hobbit trailer euphoria pulled up short. It was an odd moment -- suddenly my two fandoms seemed totally incompatible.

I've figured that for a while now -- I've shelved further work on A Rose Among the Briars to work on a Downton Abbey christmas fic for a freind because I just couldn't keep my mind in two places. But the more I thought about it, the more these two fandoms have a lot in common, working through the person of JRR Tolkien.

Like several of the characters at Downton, JRRT served in World War one with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It was a harrowing expericne for him, (I read somewhere that he was in one of the 'pals' regiments and of the six freinds that he went out with, only one -- him -- came back) and one that would impact him for the rest of his life. I like to think that it's his experience with the merciless way of war on the Western Front that drove him deeper into his studies and appreciation for epic literature, the kind of literature that couldn't (and wouldn't) be written about his own conflict except by jingoists and propaganists.

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

That's Rudyard Kipling right there, one of the more nationalist poets at the end of the war after his own son had died in the fighting, and let's face it -- epic and honorable and rosy it isn't.

And even though he didn't want parallels to be drawn that way, it's not hard to find a sort of crossing-over between the expereince Frodo -- and Bilbo, really -- and Tolkien, and millions of other young men, have when they return from thier adventures. The tired soldier comes home from war expecting to find his home as he left it, and finds instead that home has irrepairably changed, and, perhaps more sadly, so has he. For Frodo, it's coming home and finding an industrialized menace in his hometown, just as JRRT found in Oxford. For Bilbo, the changes have more to do with him personally-- he's no longer content with life in his cozy hobbit hole, and spends the rest of his life longing for the adventures of his youth, all the while holding on to a very small ring that is almost like shell-shock; it changes his disposition, changes his values, and at the end, makes him push away some of the people he loves the most, like Gandalf.

So JRRT comes back, forever changed, and instead of writing poetry about the war the way the rest of his generation seem to have done, he writes a piece of epic fantasy (with lots of really great poetry in) that harkens back to the fairy stories of our childhoods and the epic poetry of another time, a place where wars still have meaning, enemies don't have to have human faces, and death in battle is honorable and valuable to the cause and valued by all.

Since I've already watched season two of Downton (Thank you, internet denizens of YouTube) I won't give away the ending for the characters there in the War to End All Wars. But it will be interesting to watch those that are left deal with the scars the war has dealt them. For Bilbo and Frodo, the real closure on the War of the Ring (and the Ring inself) comes when they go into the West. Somehow, I don't think the same will be true for the Crawley Family -- a trip to America just doesn't have the same allure.

But hey, one of them could always write a novel.

Cinematic Sunday AND Musical Monday -- Oh, What a Lovely War!

2011-10-03T11:04:00.005-05:00

Mercury apologizes for a lack of posts last week. Her internet connection wasn't working, and she didn't feel these blog posts were quite important enough to merit a trip to a library for public acces internet.

Today's offering functions as both a Cinematic Sunday and a Musical Monday because it is a film filled with music!

Oh, What a Lovely War (1969)

Based on a stage musical of the same name created in 1963,

Richard Attenborough's 1969 movie provides a semi-allegorical journey through the life of a soldier in World War One, beginning

with a trip to Kitchener, French and Haig's seaside pier, (named for three of the major players in the British high command) the jumping off point for their exciting foray into soldiering. What was supposed to be as easy as a day at the seashore, however, turns into something much, much worse, and the songs used in the musical reflect that.

I haven't gotten a chance to see the whole film yet, but the bits I have seen make me extremely excited about the prospect. I like the idea of using 'musical artifact' songs for a production

instead of making up new ones, and I also like that the songs used in this production are a mix of both popular published music and the unofficial, unpublished 'barracks room ballads' that the soldiers made up themselves. Both types of music can inform us about sentiment during the conflict, and how the two types of music play off of each other can also help us understand the views of the people consuming this music. Setting music to an already well known tune helps people learn new lyrics (church hymns are great for this) but also pokes fun at the original lyrics at the same time.

I also include this film because it features a dazzling array of Hollywood's finest on its cast list --Ian Holm, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Michael and Vanessa Redgrave, and, best of all, one very foxy looking Maggie Smith.

Yup, that's right -- in her youth, Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, was a music hall star. It is so excellent I do not have words.

I've made a playlist of all the songs I could find on YouTube in the order they appear in the film. My personal favorites are 'Gassed Last Night' and 'The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling'. Call me macabre.

Musical Monday -- Pack All Your Troubles (In Your Old Kit Bag)

2011-09-26T20:03:00.003-05:00

Pack All Your Troubles (In Your Old Kit Bag), written 1915 by George Powell and Felix Powell. Published by Chappell and Company, 1915, recorded by Murray Johnson, 1916, Reinald Werrenrath, 1917.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile,
While you've a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that's the style.
What's the use of worrying?
It never was worth while, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.

This is one of the songs that will define World War One for generations to come. Just like "Keep the Home Fires Burning" it comes from the beginning of the war, and one can see the pop culture aversion to talking about the real problems of war in every note. the song is itself a small narrative poem, following the hijinks of Private Perks, who was " a funny little codger
With a smile a funny smile. Five feet none, he's and artful little dodger, with a smile, a funny smile" who keeps telling the other men in his unit to simply pack up their troubles and smile.

It's interesting that this song comes from the beginning of the war because the essential message of this song, without the bouncy beat, is to keep the terrible experiences of war all to yourself, something that veterans from all wars in all times and all places still struggle with. What's also interesting about this song is that at the end, Private Perks doesn't seem to be changed by his experience at all -- "Round his home he then set about recruiting/With his smile his funny smile." This is the best possible face of war -- we liked it so much we're sending others to do the same.

Like man World War One ballads, this one also saw service in World War Two. And let's face it, if you're letting Judy Garland sing your song in the midst of Hollywood's version of a bombed out village to rally the troops to another blockbuster ending, how much more patriotic can you get?

Cinematic Sunday -- Edwardian Farm

2011-09-25T13:58:00.004-05:00

Cinematic Sunday No.2 – Edwardian Farm, BBC, 2010-11

As I mentioned last week, it is my goal in life to one day be in a place where I get to teach people about history using historical costume and historical artifacts. There are many reasons for why I have this aspiration; my new place of employment being one, and this TV show is another. And believe you me, the team of hosts on this show is a hard, hard act to follow.

The BBC has done a series of costumed history shows that are all very good, (last week’s Manor House being one) and Edwardian Farm is the latest of these offerings. A trio of three very talented reenactors – Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, archeologists, and Ruth Goodwin, domestic historian – took a trip back in time for Edwardian Farm by living and working in Morwellham Quay, a historical property in Devon. They fix up the property to historical specifications, make the place generally livable, bring in livestock, put in provisions, and live on the farm for twelve months -- a whole farm year with each season's varied tasks.

Each episode is centered around two or three period appropriate tasks, like getting a field ready for planting, shearing sheep, or learning how to cook dinner in the Edwardian style, and is filled with facts about life on the farm in the Edwardian period. Aided by experts, archival material, and their own not inconsiderable personal experience, the three hosts do an excellent job of explaining how the typical farmer of the period lived, worked, dressed and carried out his daily existence. While farm life might be a little far away from the hallowed halls of Downton, I still think the show is a must-watch for fans of the period. One could also consider that there are several characters in Downton -- Gwen the maid and Mrs. Hughes the housekeeper -- that come from farming backgrounds themselves. Given the lifestyle this show displays, it's not hard to see why the both of them thought going into service a much better option than remaining to work the land.

Edwardian Farm differs greatly from some of the other historical reality shows that the BBC’s done because the people presenting and living this time period are experts – believe it or not, they actually enjoy feeding chickens and forking hay and eating dishes made with cuts of meat most of us wouldn’t touch. (Sheep’s head, anyone?) Additionally, Alex, Peter and Ruth are all really funny and do a wonderful job of connecting the past to elements of today’s world.

All of the show's twelve episodes (and four additional episodes for the Christmas special) are available on YouTube. And, if you enjoy the show, the same team of experts have done a few other shows for BBC as well, including Victorian Farm and Tales from the Green Valley, a show on life in Wales in the 1600s.

Also, in case you haven't heard, PBS has put all first season episodes of Downton up on their website! I went and had a marathon the other day. It was grand.

Fictional Friday -- No Graves as Yet

2011-09-23T09:43:00.003-05:00

Last spring while I was just getting over the first series of Downton and looking for something, anything, to read regarding World War One, I discovered Anne Perry’s Joseph Reavley books, beginning with the first in the series, No Graves as Yet. Beginning Perry was a daunting prospect – the woman commands two and a half library shelves and a sizable fan following from her Victorian mysteries.

Please don’t let the extremely mixed reviews on Amazon fool you – I’m not a murder mystery fan at all and I enjoyed these books. Regarding No Graves As Yet, I agree with what some reviewers have called the ‘glacial pace’ of the first half of the novel, but I think that, for someone whose fans are incredibly familiar with another set of characters, a glacial pace is almost acceptable. Both author and reader need a little more time to grow into writing and reading for new voices and faces. Glaciations aside, I grew to like the main characters Joseph and Matthew and their family very much over the course of all five books.

No Graves As Yet begins at Cambridge in 1914, where Joseph Reavley, man of the cloth and tutor at Saint James College, has just received the shocking news that his parents have died in a traffic accident – and from the looks of things, it may not have been much of an accident. Together with his brother Matthew, who happens to work for Secret Intelligence, Joseph begins trying to put together the story around their father’s death, a complicated affair that involves several of Joseph’s students, ties to groups supporting pacifism and German nationalism, jilted lovers, jealous husbands, blackmail, secret documents, and the growing threat of a war with Germany that England is not ready to fight.

I also like Perry’s books because each one takes its title from a poetic epigram – the first book’s comes by way of G.K. Chesterton’s Elegy in a County Churchyard, which I include here.

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England,
They have no graves as yet.

Poetry Promenade -- Julian Grenfell

2011-09-22T06:44:00.004-05:00

I had a hard time picking a poet to start our Poetry Promenade series. I wanted someone who had written a good ‘beginning of the war’ poem, but not someone so well known that you’d all be rolling your eyes in front of your computer screens going “Merc, really, we already know about him!” Rest assured, we’ll have time for the Brookes and the Sassoons and the Owens later – I think they’re famous for a reason, and I want to share them with you again because they’ve all got poems that I really enjoy.

Poetry Promenade -- Julian Grenfell

Julian Grenfell is fairly well known among academics who study the poetry of the Great War, but I’d never heard of him before picking up several anthologies on the subject. He’s also interesting to me because the two poems that he’s best known for are so very different – one of them, “Into Spring” is a romantic, optimistic portrait of the mortality and oneness with the Earth that death brings, and the other a cynical, sniping remark on the aristocratic, toffee-nosed –and-useless General Staff that he refused to join called “Prayer for those on Staff.”

Grenfell was born in 1888 to a fairly aristocratic family. His father, William Henry Grenfell, later became Baron Desborough for his political contributions after a long career in the house of Commons as a conservative member for Salisbury. Julian was educated at Eton and later at Balliol College, and was apparently writing poetry from a very young age. He joined the army in 1910 as a member of the Royal Dragoons and served in both South Africa and India before being assigned to the French front as the war began in 1914. (Several sources report that by 1914 Grenfell was dissatisfied with life in the Army, and was considering leaving just before war was suddenly declared.) He won several commendations and was mentioned in dispatches, earning him a promotion to Captain.

So well liked and respected was Grenfell that he was also earmarked for promotion to the General Staff as an Aide-de-Camp, a promotion that he refused, writing the satirical “Prayer” after the incident. He died on the 27th of May in 1915 after 13 days in hospital, following a wound to his skull from flying shrapnel. Interestingly, his poem “Into Battle” was published in the Times on the same day as his obituary.

From what I've heard of the first episode of Downton, it sounds as though Matthew is following the same meteoric rise that Grenfell experienced. I wonder also if he would have been inspired to write a poem like "Prayer," and what he would have thought of "Into Battle" given what he experiences at the Somme.

Into Battle

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-star and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend,
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges' end.

The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him, "Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing."

In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat, and makes him blind—

Though joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still,
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

------

Prayer for Those On Staff

Fighting in mud, we turn to Thee
In these dread times of battle, Lord,
To keep us safe, if so may be,
From shrapnel snipers, shell and sword.

Yet not on us - (for we are men
Of meaner clay, who fight in clay) -
But on the Staff, the Upper Ten,
Depends the issue of the day.

The Staff is working with its brains
While we are sitting in the trench;
The Staff the universe ordains
(Subject to Thee and General French).

God, help the Staff - especially
The young ones, many of them sprung
From our high aristocracy;
Their task is hard, and they are young.

O lord, who mad'st all things to be
And madest some things very good
Please keep the extra ADC
From horrid scenes, and sights of blood.

Musical Monday -- Keep the Home Fires Burning

2011-09-20T06:44:00.003-05:00

Aw, heck. My first musical Monday will just have to be put up on a Tuesday. Oh well.

Patriotic music from all periods has a special place in my heart – I spent the second semester of freshman year listening to nothing but World War Two musical propaganda for a twenty page paper and wrote another essay sophomore year on Irish Nationalism in song. The way people talk about the way they love their country or how they think we should deal with war in music has always been fascinating to me, and let me tell you, while World War Two has some real eye-rollers (Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition comes to mind) it has absolutely nothing on World War One. (George Cohan, I am looking at you.) So, without further delay, our first

Musical Monday!

Keep the Home Fires Burning, written by Ivor Novello with lyrics by Lena Guilbert Ford, published 1914, republished 1915.

Today’s Musical Monday selection was chosen for two purposes. The first, because it is a song written early on in the war and contains its own special brand of home front patriotism, and the second, because it was written by a character in another Julian Fellowes production -- wartime song writer, actor and playwright Ivor Novello, played superbly by Jeremy Northam in the Oscar winning Gosford Park.

The song is better known by the title I’ve given it here, but it was originally published as Till The Boys Come Home. Over the course of the war, it was recorded by James F. Harrison, Stanley Kirkby, and one of my personal favorite recording artists from the period, John McCormack. Apparently the popularity of the song was one of the reasons Novello went on to become such a big star after the war.

The lyrics are almost absurdly sentimental by our standards, and yet, one can see why this would have been a popular song at home throughout the war – no mention is made of war’s difficulties except in an offhand way, saying only that to cry for them would only add to their soldierly burdens.

They were summoned from the hillside,

They were called in from the glen,

And the country found them ready

At the stirring call for men.

Let no tears add to their hardships

As the soldiers pass along,

And although your heart is breaking,

Make it sing this cheery song:

Keep the Home Fires Burning,

While your hearts are yearning.

Though your lads are far away

They dream of home.

There's a silver lining

Through the dark clouds shining,

Turn the dark cloud inside out

Till the boys come home.

The song was also included in the 1969 musical ‘Oh, What a Lovely War,’ which I’ll be featuring on another of my Cinematic Sundays. I include both that movie’s treatment of the song and McCormack’s here.

Downton Daze Introduction

2011-09-18T14:52:00.007-05:00

Today, as many of you may know, is the premiere of the second season of ITV’s smash hit, Downton Abbey. How fortunate for the UK…and unfortunate for the rest of the world, who must now wait until networks in their own countries pick up the broadcasting rights. You can be sure I’ll be hounding the PBS website until January, when they tell me they shall finally be broadcasting.

Until then, for those of us without immediate gratification for our Downton fix, I’m devoting the next several months to trawling through period appropriate costumes, music, poetry, and other relevant media here on my blog. I’m calling this temporary change-over ‘Downton Daze’ and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I’m going to.

Starting off our series will be Cinematic Sundays, a review series of various TV and movies set in the 1900s. Next we’ll have Musical Mondays, where I’ll be featuring various popular tunes of the period, as well as several of the more well known composers. Poetry Promenade will probably float throughout, as I love poetry and I have a lot of poems and poets I’d like to feature, and Fictional Fridays will round out our offerings by discussing written fiction around the Great War Period. I’ve got a stack of books beside my bed just waiting to be read, and I can’t wait to bring them all to your attention. I’ll also be highlighting a lot of great websites throughout the internet world who are also covering Downton and the world it embodies.

Historical fanaticists, take note – I’m more of what you would probably call a popular historical type. I will mainly be reading the kinds of history texts you can buy at your local bookstore, not the more academically minded University press offerings. I apologize in advance for any misdirections on my part and will gladly and joyfully take suggestions and feedback.

So, without more ado --

Cinematic Sunday No. 1 – Manor House, BBC, 2002

Those of you who read this blog already know it is my life’s dream to be able to dress up in period clothing and teach people stuff. What would be only slightly better than that is to dress up in period clothing and teach people stuff on national TV.

Adding to a series of shows that included Colonial House, Regency House Party, Pioneer House and 1940s House, BBC and PBS put together Manor House, a show where 21 members of the general history loving population (like myself) signed up to dress, work, and behave just like their Edwardian counterparts might have done in the years leading up to the Great War.

One family, the Oliff-Coopers, were the ‘Upstairs’ while 15 other cast members formed the ‘Downstairs’ of this historical reality show. The show was filmed at Manderston House in the North of England, where all 21 members of the cast lived just as their counterparts would have nearly a hundred years before. Guiding them on the show were carefully written rule books, patterned after commonly followed advice books of the period, which outlined standards of dress and behavior for each person and their station.

The Upstairs had a pretty easy run of it, so most of the show’s drama focuses instead on the doings of the Downstairs. It turns out living as a maid in the 1900s was a lot harder than some of the cast members anticipated, and partway through the series several members of the cast actually handed in their notice because they were tired – of the long hours, of the regulations placed on the staff, and of the feeling, very strange to our modern sensibilities, that they had suddenly become so much less than the people they were serving upstairs. I don’t usually go for reality shows, but BBC’s production was well-made and very, very accessible. As someone who’s said a number of times that I was born in the wrong period, shows like this always help me put in perspective that, while time travel would be extremely fun, it does help to have been born and brought up with those expectations and social norms.

View the show’s companion page here at PBS! Be sure to check out the page’s ‘You in 1905’ feature – according to their estimates, I would have been running a lodging house with my family. I wouldn’t have married and would have lived a somewhat miserable existence in a shabby dormitory. How’s that for prospects?

You can watch the entire series on YouTube or check it out from your local library. (There's also a companion book that goes with the series.)

Happy watching!

Watchman Says "All's Well!"

2011-09-13T21:01:00.005-05:00

Well, all's well that ends well, I think.

Since my last post, I declined the school job in the city that I really didn't want, accepted and started a job at a local museum that actually pays better than the city job would have in the long run, and began one of my two volunteer opportunities. Last weekend I attended a local Revolutionary War reenactment event and decided those were the people I would really like to be spending my time with, so I've got paperwork out to join the Northwest Territory Alliance so I can join their artillery unit and learn how to properly load and fire a nine-pound cannon, what Jack Aubrey might call a bow-chaser (were it on one of his ships.)

Revolutionary War Days was, in a word, amazing. I was struck at this event, as I have never been before, by the hospitality and openness shown by the reenactors and their families. The willingness to speak about their costumes, historical personalities, campsites, and all things in between was wonderful and welcoming. My dad and I spent ten minutes talking to a guy from Indiana with the Brunswicker regiment about German immigration and settlement patterns. This guy didn’t know us from Adam, but just by dint of us taking two steps into the campsite to admire some folding camp stools, he came over (abandoning his lunch) to talk to us. I’ve been to a lot of these events, but that’s never happened before, and it gave me a really good feeling about joining the reenactment game.

I’ve wanted to join a reenactment society for a long time. A LONG time. But there’s something really, really intimidating about approaching people in costume (people who look like they have made these events their life’s work) with the intent of asking them if you can join their party. I’ve always felt so very, very underqualified. No, I don’t already practice a historic trade. I can’t sew. I can’t even give you more than a grade-school level time-line of this war and some names and apocryphical anecdotes that are probably wrong anyway. I’d still like to join your club.

It’s a hard question for someone like me, who has a genetic need to go into an endeavor knowing everything, to ask, both because I know I know next to nothing and I hate having to admit that. I’ve long felt that in order to join one of these communities, I needed an in – someone already in the group with whom I could latch on, barnacle-like, and sneak into club meetings. Pretty much what I need is a reenactment apprenticeship. Actually, I need a sewing apprenticeship first, but I’ll take what I can get. And reenactment friends are not exactly a dime a dozen. The reason I was attending Revolutionary War days was because I had finally found such a person – a co-worker from my summer job, Jack, a retired teacher and sergeant for Hamilton’s Own Artillery, the local arm of the Northwest Territory Alliance specializing in artillery. Jack was just where I knew I would find him – right next to the guns, explaining his heart out. (Jack and I are very much alike in this way – we put ourselves wherever we will probably have a chance to lecture someone.) We talked for a while about this and that, and he said that when I was ready I should shoot him an email (pun not intended) to get in touch with their group commander instead of going through the NWTA’s website.

But in the midst of this bounty of blessings, something inside me is still reticent about the whole reenactment business. Maybe it’s the feeling of outsider-ness. Maybe it’s the horror stories I’m hearing from the educators at the museum where I work. What if I’m a total Revolutionary war failure? What if I want to join the local World War Two reenactment group (when I find it) or the SCA? Is that considered defecting? Do I get court-martialed for that? Drummed out of the army? Or, god forbid, tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail? (If they’re the super-serious types my co-workers warned me about, option three sounds the most likely, in the interest of continuing historical accuracy.)

Quandry: Noun Meaning "I'm in over my head here."

2011-08-16T13:44:00.004-05:00

Well, here’s a comfortable dilemma. I go in for a job interview this morning, and this afternoon a possible employer from an interview a month and a half ago calls up offering me a different job. Decisions, decisions.

There is something wonderful and terrifying about being called in for interviews, being called back for interviews, being, after all this running around and printing resumes and posturing, employable. Now I have to make a decision. Do I wait for the interviewer from this morning to call me back next week (to say, possibly, that they’ve found someone else, thank you for your time) or wait for the interview tomorrow to do the same thing, or do I call the HR woman back and say that yes, I’d love to come in for this job I’m really not going to enjoy because you’ll pay me a salary, unlike the other two jobs I’m interviewing for?

I think it is time to make a list of pros and cons for this job in the city.

Positives:

1. There is a salary involved. It is a small salary, but it will sit comfortably between me, my student loans, the gas I will need to put in my car, and the breadline.

2. There will be benefits like medical and dental.

3. It will be something else for me to put on my resume, and I will be there for at least two years barring major embarrassments, catastrophes, or acts of God.

4. I would be working in a building full of younger people like myself, and I would not be full time teaching. I would not be planning my own lessons, writing my own worksheets, or fielding angry phone calls from parents. Big bonuses there.

5. I could still live at home.

6. I could be close enough to the city to start doing something about grad school.

7. I would be working in a building full of British people. (Huge plus.)

And now, the negatives.

1. There is a very small salary involved. It is not large enough for me to move into the city, and gas is ruinously expensive. (See #2)

2. There is an hour long commute involved, and I’m not sure I want to go into the city every day. See #1 about gas money. Also, Chicago winters and snow removal. Eeeyeah.

3. There are no immediately feasible public transport options available.

4. I would be working with 7-8 year olds (of whom I am not fond) in a classroom (of which I am also not fond.)

5. I would be far outside my comfort zone.

6. I would be very limited with grad school. (Like, limited to one school limited. Only one university in the Chicago area has an ALA accredited library science program.)

7. They want me to start training tomorrow.

8. ...Mostly the tomorrow bit is what worries me.

I put the question to Facebook, and almost instantly, one of my teachers from high school (a wise and very no-nonsense person I trust a lot) reminds me that a salary is a salary, and at least 7 year olds can take care of themselves in the bathroom. Very true, and things that bear consideration. The job I originally interviewed for was working with their kindergarten, which I now know I would be rubbish at, so second grade might not be so bad. It's a private school, so the parents are all paying an arm and a leg to send their children there. They're invested. They care. Can that be a problem, parents who care too much? The headmaster mentioned that in the interview. He also mentioned the job is pretty temporary -- after two or three years, they want new people. I guess I could handle that.

But, seven year olds!

So, do I call the HR lady back tomorrow after my other job interview and tell her I’ll take the job, sorry for missing the first day of training? Or do I call her back and tell her that I’m definitely not interested?

Making New Friends (I Hope.)

2011-07-16T12:19:00.004-05:00

One of the wonderful things about summer vacation is that one finally has time to do fun things with fun people.

Unless, of course, one has all the time in the world…and no people to spend it with.

Now that I’ve finished college, I feel like the next several months of my life, hot or not, are going to be like one long summer break – friends in distant climes, family busy elsewhere, and little old me, stuck with nothing to do and no one to do it with.

I tried really hard to find something to do with my time. I checked out a boatload of books from the library. I bought 20 feet of rope and tried to learn how to do decorative knotwork. I started watching the birdfeeder in my backyard and identifying birds. But all these activities are things I can do alone, and after a month, I’m bored. I have one friend within driving distance of my house, and to be honest, we’ve been friends for so long I’m not sure how we’re still friends with each other. Our tastes are totally different.

So, in order to solve this problem, I took it first to the person to whom I present all my problems – my mother. She told me to join a book group. Easy enough. Now I have to FIND a book group, so I turn on my computer and google “Book Groups Near REDACTED HOMETOWN.”

What I discover is a lovely little site called Meetup, an online forum/water cooler of sorts for people who want to find (or start) groups of their own to, you know, meet up, and do things. And to be sure, I found a few I thought would be cool. (Renaissance dance? Sure, I want to learn renaissance dance! Sign me up!)

Unfortunately for me, one of the perks of living near a big city is also a problem – you live NEAR a big city, not IN the big city. I can’t drive 45 minutes to a strange part of Chicago to go to Renaissance dance practice, and it’s far enough away from downtown that I can’t take the train, either. I was finding all sorts of meetups left, right and center, and every single one of them was in the CITY, right where I couldn’t get. Get me an apprenticeship with someone who can help me navigate the city bus system, and that might change, but for now, I’m marooned out in the suburbs and I still don’t have anything to do.

I also seem to have proved that nothing ever happens in the suburbs. My life is full of fail and loserness.

So I took my problem to the other person to whom I present all my problems – my dad. My ever-so-helpful father was amazed that I hadn’t heard of Meetup before. ( I lived on a college campus, Dad – if I wanted to meet people I shouted down the hall or baked a loaf of bread and left the door open.) He suggested that if I couldn’t find a group, I should just start one of my own instead.

A brilliant idea, to be sure – but what did I want a group about? Birdwatching? Science fiction? Women’s issues? Writing fanfiction? A steampunk discussion group? I can’t start a group based on something I WANT to learn about. I feel like I have to chose a topic I already know a little about and move from there.

I’ve been trolling around and one of the ideas I keep coming back to is the Book and Movie club, where every month (or whatever) you read a book and then get together to watch the film adaptation and discuss the book and the movie. I can do that. I like books. I like movies. I like comparing the two, and I'm sure some other people do, too. I'd even take suggestions from other people. We could host it on a rota.

Does anyone have any other ideas? My hobbies seem to be brilliantly idiosyncratic.

Found: Old Memories, Slightly Dusty

2011-07-03T19:23:00.001-05:00

Last week I got two important documents in the mail. The first, my Minnesota teaching license, assured me that the second, my degree from CSB, was, in fact, in the post. Two pieces of paper that now mean I have officially left childhood behind. Now, it seems, I have to go and be a real person out in the real world with real bills, real worries, and a real job hunt.

And yet, coming home has been strange for me. I don’t feel any older or any wiser. I don’t feel prepared for any of those ‘real world’ challenges yet and, as the job hunt has gone so far, I don’t think I’m going to be moving out of the room of my parent’s house I’ve lived in for the past six years any time soon. However, I was, to use the 19^th century advertising euphemism, “desirous of change” and since I obviously wasn’t changing spaces, I decided a revision of my current room was in order. My mother being the saint that she is helped me move my furniture, vacuum my floor and give the place a general going over. (When one only lives in a room for 4 months out of the year, dust does tend to accumulate.)

While I was giving my room the old rub down, a lot of curious items emerged from cabinets, bookshelves, and file cabinets, relics from past friendships and activities that once defined me. Acres and acres of a slowly developing writing talent, tracing both the developing penmanship as well as a grasp of character development and plot. (Oh, lord, character development and plot. How far you have come.) As I look at these items, I see the people who gave them to me, and I wonder, even after having relinquished their friendship for four years, if they still occasionally look at something and think of me. I am a different person now than I was then, of that I am sure. Would they still be friends with me? And for my newer friends, whose additions to my room have not gathered quite as much dust: Will you still be with me four years from now?

Found:

Numerous notebooks, inscribed to me from Morgan, Katie, and others, in the hope that I would fill them and become a famous writer. To date, they are all empty, a testament to how frightened I was to fill such beautiful pages and live up to such high expectations.

Wooden animals, given to my siblings by my great aunt Alice on her return from an African safari. The cheetah is missing a leg, but they are still beautiful.

One wooden paddle, the duffer paddle my group carried for a week throughout Collegebound, our canoe trip through the Boundary Waters.

One manual typewriter, given posthumously by my grandmother, who never knew I would have liked to hear about the time she used such things.

One long white feather, alternatively called a panache, from Sabrina to complete the four Musketeers Costumes we wore to Bowling one Halloween. Used as a Harry Potter prop for Wingardium Leviosa spells. Also, four wands made out of wooden dowel, created 2010 for Harry Potter premiere party.

One folder of World War Two party notes, reminding me of several happy hours planning with Meredith, Mallory, and Katie.

One rather old picture from 10^th grade Achieve class with the group I built a desk with.

One really old picture from fourth grade Challenge class, occasion unknown.

One Harry Potter cookie jar, missing head, given as a birthday present by Meagan.

Two large scrapbooks, filled with pictures from Ireland and many happy wishes for the people who went there with me.

One small volume, “Crusades and the Holy Land” inscribed from my dear friend Helen.

Two long yellow posters decorated with Michelle and Shannon for the hallway of our freshman dorm.

Many textbooks from English literature classes shared with all my fellow English majors and especially my fellow English education friends, whose books will probably know more use than mine will in the future.

Cupcake paper flowers from Sarah, Emily and Katie, on the occasion of my date with the next door neighbor’s grandson.

One reproduction Beatles Poster from Rachel, given without the knowledge that one day I would find the fact that it was letterpressed more interesting than the band it describes.

Numerous copies of “The Bible Says Be Bold” made in my Book Arts class among many fine souls. Also miniature books from the same.

To Vaughn, on the Death of Your Father: A Reflection on Endings

2011-05-16T17:20:00.004-05:00

This last week has been, for me, a time for extensive reflection on endings.

As my friends were partying away the end of another school year, and celebrating the end of our years as college students, I received the unwelcome and unanticipated news that my cooperating teacher from my high school student teaching experience had died. I began reflecting a great deal not on the end of eras, but on the end of a life.

My teacher (I will call him ‘my teacher’ because that is what he was, in a number of respects) took his own life last Monday. No one will say why, but it has been speculated that he was dealing with a number of personal demons of great magnitude. As a colleague of only two scant months, I could not point to any one thing in his life and say with certainty, “This was what troubled him most.” In fact, from what I could see, there was so much in his life pointing away from suicide – his teaching license had just been renewed, his master’s thesis was well underway, and it was finally warm enough to take his two year old son outside to play, something he had been looking forward to for months.

And yet, here we are, and I am writing a blog post about endings, and not beginnings.

As I moved out of the dorms yesterday, saying goodbye to people I have spent the better part of four wonderful years with, it seemed to me that I was almost sealing them into coffins. “These are the people I will not ever see again. These are the laughs I will not hear, the voices I will not listen for, the door knocks that will not sound.” I think part of the reason I did not grieve as much as some at the passing of my teacher was that I had already done the same for him. He was a part of my life that I was finished with, and I was moving on.

Yet now something strange has happened. Instead of remaining in that closed part of my life, as he would have done had he lived, he is now more a part of my thoughts than ever. Listening to his funeral, and watching the hundreds of students both he and his wife had mentored, I wondered if I was making a bad decision not to stay in teaching, if I was somehow dishonoring him by not remaining in education. He was described by his brother as a humble man, a sentiment I concurred with, and yet my most vivid memory of him remains what he told our students on my last day at the high school – “Miss G is extremely smart, and she could do pretty much anything in the world. We are extremely lucky that she has chosen to go into teaching.”

High praise, especially for a man of few words and no mean intellect himself.

My immediate thought after hearing about his death was that I should write about it. I tried this several times, each poem sounding more terrible than the last. This, I decided, was because I was trying to write a poem about him and instead writing a poem about my personal experience with the news of his death, which didn't make for a very interesting poem topic. None of the poems I started begged to be finished.

While I was walking around campus last week on one of the final sunny days of the semester, I couldn't help realizing how green the grass was. Monday morning had been incredibly and vividly sunny, a welcome break after several dismal days, and as I was walking, I realized that he had missed seeing that sunny day, taking advantage of the first real opportunity to go outside with his son. And the first line came to me.

He died in springtime, as the grass was greening.

Here, finally, was the poem begging to be born. I decided to write a poem, not addressed to him, but to his son, a boy of only two years who is, by all accounts, the child who will grow up to be his father.

So, here it is—the celebration of the end of a year, an era, a life. If I were teaching this in our creative writing class, I would remind everyone that this is an elegy, a poem of praise for the dead, and ask everyone to look for poetic elements. I might also ask them to compare it to WH Auden's In Memory of W.B. Yeats, and explain that Auden's poem influenced the poet. I can still hear him telling me about the different poetic techniques I should be sure to cover in class.

I ask you all only to read it.

To Vaughn, on the Death of Your Father

He died in springtime, as the grass was greening.
The birds were singing, and the wind was blowing,
and the breath of the universe blew him away,
overwhelming.

Let me tell you what I knew of him, in the way that heroes are told of their long-dead kin,
so that you will know of his greatness, and remember him well by it.
You do not know it now, but you were a hero to him.

He was tall in the way that trees are tall (and that all fathers are tall to their sons)
in the way that reached up to the sky with confidence and grace
and walked his ways in such a manner that said, to those that knew him, I will take my time with this, and it will be time sweetly taken.

He was a man of few words, carefully said, painstakingly spoken, and yet a man extravagant in praise.
Often he praised you. Praised your smile, your laugh, your walks and child’s ways.

He was a man of great love.

I did not know this as others did, did not see this as others saw, but I saw he loved you.
His desk was filled with pictures of you, and he had,
on a keyring already heavy with responsibility, a huge picture of you, taken at Easter,
one more reminder of you, his greatest joy.

And you brought him great joy.
When you are older, and you wish to have known him, and you hate him for leaving you so soon,
know that it was not your fault that he left, that he took away what was only his to give.
Know that he loved you, as the wind loves the branches of the trees,
inseparable.
Know that he was loved by his students, his far-sons and far-daughters.
Many there were of them, and yet only one of you.
He was father to them as he did not have a chance to be to you,
his only son.

Other things I wish you would know about him were small things, things that will not matter.
Yet I will say them.

Every day he ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch,
Quietly chewing, grading papers.
Silence was his golden time.
He golfed and was good at it.
Laughter was not his enemy, and his smile was wide.
He wore brightly colored shirts, and was uncomfortable in ties.
He read the New Yorker religiously, and John Updike’s writing brought him to rapturous attention.
Determination comforted him,
Irreverence and studied ignorance tried his patience.
His counsel was good, and he was reckoned among the wise.

He wished that you would know the sunshine, and the wild winter he waited out to bring you into the sun.

So, son of your father, go out into the sunshine.
Listen for his voice in the hallways of his school, in the fairways of his game, in the simple pleasure of a sunny day, shared.

He died in springtime, as the grass was greening.
the leaves were budding, and the flowers were blooming,
and at his passing, the universe paused to grieve him.

High School, Abbreviated.

2011-04-07T06:57:00.002-05:00

The hour is over, and I long for the days

When men still wrote poems in pursuit of praise.

Where the old would smile and the young would nod

On hearing a verse in search of God,

When turning a poem was as much an art

As drawing a drink from the well of the heart.

These are not them; the rabble I feed

Have neither joy, nor want, nor need

For the stories I tell or the verse I share.

All this, to them, is empty air

And poetry brings no thrill, but curse,

A malady, blight, a rot or worse

And yet it seems so clear to me

They’ve filled their lives with poetry

With their heads fairly teeming with childhood songs

And the rise of the headphone headed throngs.

So why not venture, if only to gain?

Why not spill the wine if it may not stain?

Or…perhaps it is your greatest fear

That you will see something in what’s said here

And your mind’s eye, like mine, will gaze

Back to where they wrote poems in pursuit of praise.

----

That's kind of how I feel about high school now. Also, you all should start following Taylor Mali's blog, Definitely Beautiful. He's one of my new favorite people.

More Gore with the Georgians- Thoughts on "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Dreadfully Ever After"

2011-03-06T12:11:00.003-06:00

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead."

Most die-hard Jane Austen fans read those lines, the opening lines of Quirk Classic's 2006 hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in something close to abject horror, wondering what they had done to bring down this disgrace on their favorite author and her beloved "Pride and Prejudice." I read them and thought several things. One, that was hilariously clever of Seth Grahame-Smith, and two, what a great way to explain why there are no people living at Netherfield. (That part of P&P always irked me.)

Curiously enough, I didn't read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for the zombies. Unlike the target audience (that part of the reading or non-reading population generally turned off by 19th century social drama,) I enjoy Jane Austen. P&P isn't my favorite book (that honor goes to Persuasion) but I still get a kick out of Elizabeth and Darcy's angry repartee and can laugh a little at Mr. Bennett's constant trials in a house filled with women and their worries. I read P&P&Z because I like the original enough to also enjoy making fun of it.

And, true to promised form, P&P&Z did not disappoint. Way back in December while I was home on break, I sat down with three different mash-ups of varying persuasions and saturated myself for about a week in Austen homages. All of them were interesting; P&P&Z, however, was without reserve the best of the bunch.

So it was without hesitation that I told the wonderful people at Quirk Books that I'd love to read the latest installment of zombie-infested Austen, Dreadfully Ever After.

I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for the same reason I enjoy reading re-told fairytales and rehashed Shakespeare -- because I can admire the writing and the thought that goes into trying to create something new and innovative out of an already existing work. (For my thoughts on Android Karenina, the Quirk treatment of the Tolstoy Classic, you can read my post here) I liked finding those strange little parallels into the original text, and it's for that reason that I didn't enjoy DEA as much as P&P&Z.

Allow me a moment to explain.

Dreadfully Ever After opens on our fearless friends, the zombie fighting Darcys, four years into their happy marriage. Life for them is pretty much the way we left it at the end of P&P&Z -- Darcy is still Darcy, Lady Catherine is still a pain in everyone's side, and Lizzy is finding it a little hard to adjust to life as a married woman. For one thing, it means she can't wear her trusty katana outside of the house. For another, this lack of swords means that when she and Darcy are set upon by a horde of the undead, she is powerless to stop the zombie who bites her beloved husband and begins the process that will slowly turn him into one of them.

So, off our characters trundle on yet another adventure filled with ninjas, the walking dead, and enough venom from Lady Catherine to burn through a steel door. It's a wild, rollicking ride through post apocalyptic London to try and obtain the antidote to the zombie onslaught.

Now, I can appreciate the delicate art of the Jane Austen spin-off. I have, in a moment of delusion, attempted to write one myself. What unnerves me about DEA is that the great JA characters and nuances I read these things to find are gone, a mere sidenote in this ruckus of katanas and carriage chases. The cleverness that brought me to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is missing here, and if I enjoyed zombies, that wouldn't be a bad thing. As it is, I'm not the first line at the movies when someone mentions the living dead.

The knowledgeable folks at Publishers' Weekly have said of DEA that "This happy sacrilege is sure to please" and I agree with that, as long as one adds "if one enjoys the literary company of flesh-eating unmentionables."

How Reading is Helping Me Hold It Together.

2011-02-14T19:55:00.000-06:00

The library is keeping me sane.

No, really, it's true. As I sit here, typing my latest blog post in I don't even want to think how long, I would like to thank the library for this one small moment of sane thought. There are no screaming sixth graders here. No one is off-task (and if they are Facebooking or something, they'll go back to particle physics orTom Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles or the meaning of life in a moment) and everyone is blissfully silent. The only sound is the cheerful hum of monitors and the well-timed tapping of computer keyboards. No touch-typing in this establishment, no sir!

But more than the calm of the storm, it is the contents of the library that are keeping me tethered in this world rather than letting my mind flee to the next. In the first several weeks of teaching, I had nothing to call my own except facebook, and while mindless banter and endless acres in Farmville can be relaxing to a point, they are by no means helpful towards maintaining an even keel.

It was only after going to the library for a 'big kid book' (Clan of the Cave Bear, an excellent big kid book if I do say so myself) and reading a little bit before going to bed every night, as well as a little bit in the morning that I returned to my usual, cheerful self. I was a much happier person. It was not all school, all the time, and I didn't feel like there was a big, empty hole in my chest. I imagine this is becuase my students are expected to complete reading one book every two weeks. How was I supposed to expect that of them when even I wasn't reading every night?

About a month ago, one of my favorite professors posted on his own blog about the importance of having personal time while student teaching. Our first concern while teaching, he wrote, was to take care of ourselves first.

But if you don’t make time for yourself and insist on taking that time, then you’ll never have it, because the responsibilities of a teacher are endless.You can always devote more time to students, always make more of an effort to prepare for class, always learn more about your subject, always spend more time on students’ papers, always devote more time to your colleagues and the community around your school. It can feel overwhelming sometimes, and the giving of yourself to others can be exhausting. (Theory Teacher's Blog, 1/30/2011)

As a teacher, I was giving myself to everyone else, for six hours a day, five days a week. Only after I'd done that 'giving of myself back to myself,' so to speak, could I begin taking care of my students and then taking care of my curriculum. The reason for this was simple -- when we take care of ourselves, we become better mannered, better functioning human beings that students want to interact with. When we are happy, our students have a better chance of being happy. We will want to teach, and they will want to learn. After that, the subject matter follows.

Today I had a pretty rotten day. I wasn't nearly as prepared as I should have been, and while lots of learning went on, my co-operating teacher wasn't very...impressed with me, shall we say. That, however, is the past; nothing I can do will change it. Tomorrow, my students will come in with their rough drafts and that will be the end of it. We will edit them and on Wednesday we will be in the computer lab working. I can't change any of that now any more than I change the way the sunrise will look tomorrow. Tonight, I can only worry about tonight and the first few hours of tomorrow. I will go home, eat a very late dinner and read my next book. (Juliet, by Anne Fortier, which I am super excited for because I am an English major, and I miss Shakespeare.)

After that I'll go to bed and wake up ready for tomorrow.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

2011-01-08T07:01:00.001-06:00

Wow, what a heck of a way to end the year. No blog post until January Eighth. I'm losing my touch. And I had so much to blog about over the holidays, too.

It really must say something about my priorities when the last three or four blogs have started with some sentiment akin to "Gee, I should really update more often!" but there you have it -- Since starting this blog, my priorities have changed. And after updating my stories, talking with some old friends who haven't gotten a lot of face time lately, and clearing up some other lingering bits of business, I've been doing a lot of thinking about priorities, believe it or not.

This week I started my first round of student teaching -- two months in the middle school with a group of the funniest, sweetest, sixth graders a teacher could hope for. I was scared on Monday and Tuesday; I really didn't think I could make it through the rest of the semester. I didn't know any names, the kids all looked at me funny when I introduced myself, and my desk kept getting shoved aside. It wasn't a great way to start the week, especially when your roommate (who is also student teaching) comes home rhapsodizing about how well she and her teacher get along, how much the kids love her, how much she's loving student teaching and how much she's looking forward to the rest of the semester.

To put it bluntly, I was not getting the same warm fuzzies.

I'm still not getting the same warm fuzzies today, but they're better, more confident fuzzies. We had a great conversation in the car on Thursday (after staying after for speech practice, because not only is my roomie incredibly confident that this is what she wants to do with her life, but she's also incredibly generous with her time at school and her participation in the school community. She wants to do everything.) about priorities, and Jackie said something really insightful to me, something I've wanted to hear someone say for a long time -- "Merc, I'm not saying this to be mean; you'd make a great teacher, but I think you'd make an even better librarian. That's where your head's at."

And it's true. Jackie was getting all excited this week because she got the kids who don't usually speak in class to speak, and I was getting excited about library day on Thursday and Friday. I got excited when I recommended a book to one of my kids (one of my books, from my personal library, that I loaned him) and he came back the next day after only reading in class and said "Can I take this home and borrow it? It's REALLY GOOD." Now I get updates every day from him on how much he's enjoying The Hunger Games . (What really makes me happy is I think the fact that I was happy about this made Jackie want to start reading Hunger Games, and SHE ended up not being able to put it down either. SCORE.)

The library is where my head's at. I'm not thinking about how to make my language arts class better -- I'm thinking about how to make library time better. (Is there a list of authors who write about similar subjects? Can I put together a list of great new books? How would I put together a book display? What could I do to make this space more inviting? When can I get around to sending Rick Riordan a fan letter for writing the books that at least fifteen percent of my kids are reading?)

Of course I have to invest time in my teaching, and I will, but I think the course ahead is pretty clear -- One weekend, I'm going to have to sit down with some Grad School applications and find some more scholarship money floating around someplace.

Steampunk Shenanigans, Part One

2010-12-05T23:50:00.000-06:00

Eeegads, Sherlock! It's been nearly a month since Miss Gray has posted anything! Whatever happened to her?

The end of the semester, gentlemen. That's what has happened. My life is slowly circling a drain right now. Not a whole lot of time for writing blogs, especially when you're working on really hard-core awesome writing projects.

Early on in the semster, my Contemporary Liturature Professor made us begin thinking about a two-fold final project: read a work of contemporary literature and produce a peice of our own contemporary literature incorporating ideas or contemporary elements from the book we read. Ideas and books read included flash fiction, experimental text, a lot of David Sedaris (he visited our campus in November) and, of course, that most contemporary of offerings, the mash-up. One of the girls in my class read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies while I tackled Android Karenina, the steampunk mash-up of Leo Tolstoy's well-loved Anna Karenina.

Oh. My. Stars. It was FANTASTIC! As someone who couldn’t stand the original Anna Karenina, I give Ben Winters a lot of credit for not only allowing me read the story again but also for making me thoroughly enjoy it the second time through. What had previously seemed like an unapproachable ‘high art’ novel, one of those books whose meaning will never be fully understood except by the chosen few, was now a book with messages and undertones I could wrap my head around. Robots were the exploited lower classes. One day they might be the authors of their own revolt and no one was expecting that. Technology is a mixed blessing and we have to be careful how we use it. And, of course, even if Tolstoy’s characters now have personal robots to comfort them, even if they travel around the country in gravity trains and take vacations to the moon, misfunctioning families are still all alike.

Android Karenina starts in the same way Anna Karenina does – “Functioning robots are all alike; each robot malfunctions in its own way.” The lovely Anna Karenina has just arrived in Moscow to help with one such misfunction – her brother, Stiva Oblonsky, was recently caught sleeping around with the family’s mechanicienne, the woman employed to keep their household robots running. Upon Anna’s arrival, she meets Count Alexei Vronsky, a handsome and very single captain in the Guards who has recently returned a hero from the Border Wars. Their attempts to find happiness are constantly opposed by Anna’s husband, the cold and unapproachable Alexei Karenin. Meanwhile, Konstantin Levin, a landowner and proprietor of a groznium mine, (the miracle metal that makes the world these characters live in possible,) is trying to win the affections of the young and lovely Kitty Shcherbatskya and come to terms with the conditions of his own existence. It should sound very similar to the original until this point; there is love, class issues between characters, and – here is the twist – all of the main characters have a personal robot, a Class III, who accompanies them throughout their day, gives advice and functions a sort of externalized source for many of Tolstoy’s originally internal monologues. (The only exception to this rule is Karenin, whose Class III is a menacing facial implant who only speaks in capital letters and is trying to take over its owner’s brain. Creepy, and it works.)

Where in Tolstoy there are strong religious sympathies in some of the characters, Winters uses a belief in the pending arrival of an alien race called “The Honored Guests” and where the threat t of the coming Marxist revolution looms large in Tolstoy, Winters uses instead a group of rogue scientists called UnConSciya, a group that Levin and Vronsky later learn are trying to help the world prepare for an impending sea change in Class Three robots and the alien invasion of the flesh-eating Honored Guests. Technology makes appearances inside Android Karenina in surprising ways – instead of attending a ball, Kitty makes her debutante appearance at a Float, a dance at which the dancers are vaulted into the air by means of jet powered air timed to the music and piped through the floor. The mood is no less magical than the original, however:

“Kitty turned her attention to her fellow dancers, as the music slowed from triple time to a common four-four and the air slowed with it, transforming from the swift, giddy puff-puff-puff of waltzfloating to a controlled series of magisterial gusts…Down below, in the seating area, Kitty caught sight of Stiva, and beside him the exquisite figure and head of Anna, with Android Karenina beside her, glowing not lilac, but purest black” (Tolstoy/Winters 93).

It is only in the past five years that authors have even started to think about bastardizing some of the world’s best beloved works of literature. But the reasons for this are equally contemporary as well – these authors want to make what is assumed by many young readers (like myself) to be old, boring and staid into something fun, exciting and adventurous. They want them to read, and in order to do that they appeal to what is hip and current in the world of movies, creating books that are practically cinematic in description (Android Karenina also has a picture every fifty pages or so) and which use common tropes from recent popular movies for the teen demographic. (Examples include vampires (Jane Slayre, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter , Mr. Darcy, Vampyre) zombies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), creatures from the deeps (Sense and Sensibility and Sea monsters), and the steampunk aesthetic used in Android by Winters, a movement in science fiction that attempts to reimagine a victorian past with some of the technology of the distant future. )

On a side-note, I was a steampunk airship officer for Halloween. It was awesome.

By getting people to read Anna Karenina with a few robots and some futuristic technology thrown in, students and casual readers alike are still receiving many of Tolstoy’s original messages and themes about social justice, Marxism, the nature of love and how technology can corrupt our world. It is for this reason that Android Karenina succeeds in my mind where some of the other recent mashups on the market have failed. Winters’ additions help bring readers to the key themes in the story, while the addition of flesh eating zombies to the Netherfield Ball is just a bit of silly fun and doesn’t contribute to a greater understanding of the source text or its original intended meaning.

Whatever the additions, mash-ups are still a kind of hybrid literature, using the text from the past with a trend or taste from the present to create an old story told in a new way. And at the same time that they are considered new, they may also be considered old as well – literary theorists have long pointed out that when we tell stories we are merely following old forms and constructs to tell what amounts to the same story over and over again. “In primitive societies,” writes noted French Theorist Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of The Author,” “Narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman, or speaker, whose performance may be admired (his mastery of the narrative code) but not his "genius." The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as…it discovered the prestige of the individual.” (Barthes) The recent mash-up craze is merely being obvious about this recycling of forms and modes, and the authors who write mash-ups are sacrificing and at the same time exploiting this ‘prestige of the individual’ by using the text of an already prestigious canon author and merely adding to it.

So, moral of the story -- the folks at Quirk Books are awesome and they publish some damn entertaining literature. You should support thier noble cause of bringing high art literature to the low-brow masses and buy some books from them! (They're also sending me a copy of P&P&Z for blogging purposes, but it hasn't come yet...so QB PR types, we should email again soon. Just sayin'.)

Thus concludes Part One of my Steampunk Shenanigans. Tune in next time for Part Two -- my own foray into writing mash-up literature!

Literature Does Not Exist in a Vacuum, and Other Things the Seventh Harry Potter Movie Taught Me

2010-11-19T07:00:00.005-06:00

I don't think there are any spoilers in this post, but just to be certain, I am talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, so anyone who hasn't seen it might want to beware.

-----

Last night I was one of those crazy college kids out at midnight to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. This morning I am one of those crazy, sleep-deprived college kids who will go through thier Friday absolutely over the moon at the fact that the movie was so good. I was euphoric leaving that theater last night. I was so happy I had no words. I just sat in the car and beamed. This was the story I loved, the story I read aloud to my little sister and then re-read out loud just for fun a second, and a third, and a fourth time. They kept many of what I thought were some of Rowling's best bits and I was grateful for that.

I had a rough day yesterday -- I gave my book review of Android Karenina (coming soon to a blog near you!) and I taught part of a lesson on Narrative Poetry. The poem I chose was one of my favorites, The Geebung Polo Club by A.B. Paterson, and the response volume fell flatter than a water balloon eating concrete after being dropped from the 90th floor.

It was bad, in other words. No one said a thing. Getting answers out of those kids was like pulling teeth. And after all that stress, I needed a win, and I found one. Dan, Emma, Rupert. David Yates and all their many friends and accomplices DELIVERED. But stories are curious things -- as we were watching the movie, my friends and I, we couldn't help making connections to other things we had seen, things we had read. Each of us brings a unique selection of prior knowledges and texts with us when we read: it's like packing a suitcase and stowing in on the train for the remainder of the ride. And for us, many of those things we were bringing with us were poems.

Before the movie began (we were at the theatre two hours early, we had to amuse ourselves somehow) we were singing quietly amongst ourselves. Selections included Pippen's Song from Return of the King, The Call from Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and There and Back Again, also from Lord of the Rings. All these songs can link back to Harry Potter -- they talk about the eventual triumph over evil, the renewal of hope, and the belief that we, too, have a place and a purpose in the world.

During the movie I thought several of David Yates' nature shots looked like Lord of the Rings country (including one where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are walking through a field -- I wanted someone to start singing "There and Back Again" right there) that Locket!Harry and Hermione reminded me of some perverse version of Adam and Eve (and also, at the same time, Scary!Galadriel from Fellowship of the Ring) and, perhaps best of all, that Dobby's death reminded me of a poem, one of my favorites and one which, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share with my friends on the car ride home because we were too busy discussing the rest of the movie.

While Dobby needs no other epitaph than the tremendous life he lived, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" is, I think, also fitting given Dobby's final lines.

"REQUIEM"

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

And more than anything else, I wish I could share this expereince of poetry with my students, the idea that it connects us and shares threads of experience just like stories do. It provokes emotion, attempts to answer our questions about life, and binds us to other people. It does not always have an arcane meaning. You do not have to beat it with a hose to get a meaning out of it, to paraphrase Billy Collin's excellent poem Introduction to Poetry. Sometimes you can merely let it be.

My Grandma and Cricket Magazine

2010-11-17T09:07:00.000-06:00

My grandmother was one smart woman. She knew where my head was at. She knew where I was going, and I hadn't even gotten there yet when she died.

This morning I had an odd desire to revisit a magazine I read as a child, a magazine that, as I now recall, my grandmother faithfully renewed for me every year until I was well beyond the age to which it was geared. That magazine was Cricket. I loved Cricket with a passion. Before that she'd subscribed to Ladybug and Spider, both publications that, in thier time, I loved too. But Cricket was the one I stayed with the longest -- the stories were better, the pictures brighter. It was practically a party, opening up a new issue every month. I especially loved saving all the issues and going back through to read the stories that came out in episodes. I loved them so much I saved many of my favorite stories in a box, laborously ripped from the magazines that had originally housed them. I think I still have a box of the magazines at home, too. I don't want to get rid of them -- it's a link to my childhood and a link to Grandma.

I picked up an issue several years ago in the children's section and was a little disappointed -- the myths and legends that I had loved so much had been replaced by newer, gritter, young-adult kinds of stories. I don't care what your teacher education manuals tell you, not every child wants to read about the problems they might be facing in their day-to-day lives. I know I didn't. Ramona, Amber Brown, and pretty much anything Judy Blume every wrote were not welcome additions to my library bag.

I think this magazine might have been part of why I became a writer of stories. Because my grandmother saw they were important to me, and continued buying that magazine subscription so I could continue to see new examples and continue to read. In pedagogy now we're talking about the writing process and how reading (and subsequent discussion of that reading) is important to formulating how a story works.

Thanks, Grandma. I think you taught me that already.

Collecting My Thoughts

2010-11-07T21:04:00.000-06:00

Under the subject heading of "Things That Don't Get Done While I Am Computerless," we find one item: Creative Pursuits.

Well, we knew it was going to happen sooner or later --the lack of a functioning personal computer is slowly starting to drive me bonkers. Nothing is getting done when it should. My North and South Mashup, which I have had ideas on for the past week, has gone exactly nowhere, a serious problem considering that is a homework item. My LOTR fanfic is floating out in the ether, my steampunk story is also on a oneway track to nowhere, and all this pent-up creative energy is creating a block on completing schoolwork that I can, in fact, complete on school computers. I have a poster to create, lesson plans to review, journals to write. And nothing's getting done.

Can I also state again for the record that I hate not having a comma key? I am a lover of long sentences, and while it is nice that my roomate is letting me borrow her computer when she's not using it, I ABSOLUTELY HATE that her comma key is not working as it should. I have to press down twice as hard to get a comma to register; ergo, every time there is a comma I have pause so the damn thing will register. Grrrr...

Sorry. This blogger has not been having a very good several weeks. Hopefully sometime in the next few days my mood will improve enough to write some posts on the steampunk novels I've been reading and my opening thoughts on the projected arc of the mash-up.

I have at least made one small bit of progress, however; in lieu of a witty title like Jane Slayre or Android Karenina, I've decided on something a little more subtle -- Elizabeth Gasket's North and South.

Homelessness and Space

2010-11-03T09:22:00.000-05:00

The worst of news, readers.

Last Friday, after a visit from the angel of doom and my idiotic tendency to prop my feet up on my desk, I spilled tea on my beloved laptop and turned it into a zombie computer. After taking the battery out, drying it out for the better part of three days to the best of my ability, it will not turn on.

Thus, three years worth of pictures, music, and, worst of all, writing and homeworks, are now in electronic limbo. They might still be on my harddrive. They might not. I have no way of knowing and no way of checking, yet, but I have some of the smartest and most technologically inclined people I know working on it, so we'll see how it goes.

This episode has made me realize two things. One is how incredibly dependent I am on my computer to entertain me, keep me connected with people I don't see on a daily basis, and complete my homework. I wanted to watch a TV show yesterday (and I watch all my TV online) and felt silly going to the computer lab to turn on 'Castle.' I didn't want to check my facebook becuase really, how trival is facebook anyway? And I don't want everyone else in the computer lab to see what incredibly silly game I'm playing!

The second thing I realized is that without my laptop, I feel like a displaced person. I feel homeless without that electronic space to call my own.

I am not by any means trying to trivialize homelessness here. I come from a county with an incredibly high cost of living and an equally high homeless population. I can't say I've ever been physically homeless, but my brother and sister, who have participated multiple times in events like Sleep-Out Saturday, inform me that it's not fun.

When I speak about being homeless, what I really mean is spaceless. I don't have that personal space to store my thoughts or my productions anymore. My stuff doesn't have a home anymore. Using a school computer's not the same -- I have access to the same spaces as I did before, but in a public space. I have a hard time using a public space to do personal things, like write this blog, for instance. I didn't feel anchored enough to devote my time to thinking about blog topics -- I was too worried about when I could get another computer to work on real homework later on that evening.

Hopefully we can recover my data. Hopefully my stories won't have to be recreated from scratch and I won't have to re-acquire all my music. And hopefully I can use this feeling that I have right now, this dreadful, uncertain listlessness, to understand the small percentage of my students that statistics tell me will be homeless. I know my schoolwork's suffering because of my lack of a computer -- how much must they be suffering when they dont' know where they're sleeping that night?

Airship Ahoy! Student Teaching Dead Ahead!

2010-10-14T11:06:00.000-05:00

Good news! The best of news, in fact.

I have received my student teaching placements for next semester!

There are two of them, one in an area middle school and the other in a high school, and I am assured by people in the know that they are wonderful teachers who really know their business.

I was so overcome with joy at this prospect my productivity for the day imploded, and I ended up leaving my homework until my shift at work last night. Three hours of heavy productivity. It was great.

But after that I went home feeling a great deal like a failure. Here I am, a quarter of the way through senior year, practically swimming in homework and midterms, and all I want to do right now is work on a Halloween costume. Talk about trival.

Not just any Halloween costume, mind you. A steampunk airship officer, to be precise. I spent the better part of Wednesday Googling Do-It-Yourself steampunk accessories, including the obligatory round-rimmed goggles and making a shopping list for the local craft store, thrift shop, and bargain outlet. I realized I want to work on this, instead of writing the 5 mini-essays I have due next week, because I’m bored. A little burnt-out, too. I’m sick and tired of learning about how to teach kids, and it doesn’t help that in two of my classes we’re talking about exactly the same thing. I need a week, I think, to not do any schoolwork at all, and a week is a luxury I don’t have.

Steampunk is an interesting aesthetic. It tries to combine the power, creativity, and mechanical prowess that the Industrial era embodies while at the same time embracing the whimsy, romance and beauty of the Victorian age. Simultaneous creative periods, but very different ideas in terms of what form and function are. It’s like Gaskell’s North and South in a big way, the culture of the city meeting the machinery of the town. (Speaking of which, I got a massively awesome mashup idea involving Mr. Thornton and a bunch of robots that I think I might use for my final project in Contemporary Lit.)

Anyway, as I’m googling around I can’t help but be fascinated by what some of these people have built. These contraptions are beautiful – mahogany keyboards with repurposed typewriter keys, working blunderbuss guns that fire ping-pong balls. (That was another reason I was ashamed of myself – I’m not half that creative or talented to be in this genre) I realized that cosplay of any kind says something very interesting about our society in general. We have such creative, artisanal talent as human beings, and in our industrialized, buy-it-out-of-the-box world, that energy that in earlier periods would have been put to the purpose of making useful objects is rerouted into making objects that could have been useful, but instead are used for this specialized kind of play. Steampunk’s fascinating to me because it tries to embody this past-present binary, the beauty of past design but also the desire to be futuristic and imaginative as well. (Also awesome - dieselpunk, the 'punk that started after WWI and the Age of Steam left off. Think Art Deco, Soviet Realism, film noir and really futuristic looking cars. Epic.)

I’ve realized, in between trying to finish the midterm exam due tonight and the final project due tomorrow, that this is an excellent conundrum for several reasons. First, I have to practice a good deal of self control in sticking to my time management options. Second, I’m realizing teachers cannot live on homework and grading alone. And third, if I’m getting burnt out thinking about the same thing all day and it’s only October, how must my students feel when they’re learning about five or six different subjects and they have to write a bunch of papers?

All of this is pointing me towards a conclusion we’ve discussed, both in Pedagogy and in Young Adult Lit-- students need to have a way to engage with the literature they’re reading beyond just writing about it. Involve an art project once in a while, something that uses a different part of the brain. This is why art and music and the humanities in schools is so very important! Kids need a creative break!

I know this teacher does, too.

Plagiarism (And Other Things In My Life I'm Not So Sure About)

2010-10-01T14:01:00.001-05:00

Every time I wrote a paper for middle or high school, my teacher would remind me not to plagiarize. It's a staple for essay writing instruction -- Tell us where you got everything and don't copy anyone else's work word for word. If you don't, we'll come after you with a red pen and a vengeance.

Simple.

As a future writing teacher, it's important for me to remember this, and remember to teach it to my students. But what I've been having difficulty with lately is the idea that in order to teach someone about plagiarism, I have to plagiarize someone else's idea on how to teach.

Let me explain. In classes like my English Pedagogy we're given books written by prizewinning, veteran teachers that are full of strategies and observations on what works in the classroom and what doesn't. Our professor is filling us with tools from her own experience to help us when we get out into classrooms of our own. And this, to me, sounds an awful lot like plagiarizing, or copying off of someone else's paper on an exam. Aren't I supposed to just know all of this by myself? Aren't I supposed to be coming up with these mind-bogglingly good theories of pedagogy all on my own?

When we speak of sharing lesson plans or ideas on how to teach, isn't it technically intellectual plagiarism when I think Emily's lesson on how to wrap up a unit on critical theory lenses was so awesome I'd like to do exactly the same thing in my classroom because I thought it worked well? Are my roommate and I going to plagiarize each other when we discuss at the end of each school day and try to come up with a plan of attack for tomorrow using these textbooks and their ideas?

My good friend Ben recently linked me to the blog Teaching FTW, the one year labor of love of one Ross Trudeau, a teacher in a Boston charter school. Trudeau describes a very prescriptive approach to his teacher training at said charter school, something that runs counter to most educator preparation programs in America today. I'll let Mr. Trudeau explain himself on this one:

"Program founder MG once likened traditional teacher prep to putting a pilot in a cockpit after teaching him about aerodynamics and meteorology... but not telling him what any of the buttons do. 'What? You crashed the plane into the mountain? It's cool! You get a whole new plane next September, and you probably learned SO much from that first plane crash! Go get 'em, tiger!'" -- Teaching FTW Feb 4 2010.

"This feels like the best way to learn how to teach. TELL me the moves. WATCH me practice them. CRITIQUE me on how good my presence is, or what my face looks like disciplining students, if my line of questioning is appropriate, yadda. It's like the total opposite of learning adolescent psychology and debating at length the place that ebonics has in a classroom. It's a common-friggin'-sense way to go about learning how to teach. " --Teaching FTW Jan 21, 2010

And while I am reading this blog, I am thinking several things. One: Ben was a genius to link me to this. Two: This is really funny. A little unreadable at times, but funny. Three: I wish my blog had 76 followers. Four: The prescriptive program sounds really awesome, but isn't that intellectual plagiarism too? Shouldn't you have to build your own classroom from scratch first and yes, crash a few planes? (I hate the idea of crashing a plane as much as anyone else, believe me, the idea that the parents of America will trust me with their children's futures is terrifying no matter how many people tell me I'll make a good teacher.)

I suppose at the bottom of this well of self doubt is the way I was taught to look at information and who it belongs to. I'm the girl who wouldn't ask a question in class unless I already knew the answer -- My idea about how knowledge should be handled is strange, to say the least. In my little world, this information on how a classroom works and how students work belongs to someone else. They did the research. They spent the time compiling it. If I were to use it in a paper, I would have to cite where it came from and I would have to paraphrase it. And yet here are all these people telling me that no, I should just use these ideas, lock, stock, and barrel, and maybe mix in a few of my own.

I think something's rotten in the state of educational training here, and I'm not sure if it's my training as a teacher, my own education prior to that, or something else entirely.

The Fairie Queen Joins Facebook

2010-09-22T15:46:00.002-05:00

In contemporary lit on Monday we were discussing Twitterature, the phenomenon of taking large classic novels and whittling them down into twenty Tweet sized tidbits or less. You can read some examples and/or buy the book they inspired here. Being the strange internet dweller that I am, I brought up Sarah Schmelling's book Ophelia Joined The Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs On To Facebook and how this might be an expression of the same movement in literature, an effort to make these dated texts a little more modern.

So, in the continuing effort to offset the effects of the Mondaze, I'm sharing with all you English major types out there something that has brought me a great deal of joy over the past two days -- The Fairie Queen Joins Facebook. The idea is courtesy of Sarah Schmelling, the characters come by way of Edmund Spenser, and the humor is all mine.

---
Redcrosse has updated his contact info and changed his profile picture.

Redcrosse is now friends with Una and The Dwarf.
Redcrosse added "The Den of Error" to the Places I've been application.
Redcrosse sent Death to The Beast of Error. Die, Throw Obvious Religious Symbols and Papist texts, or send Death back?
Redcrosse hates small Errors. Hates them hates them hates them. The children of Error should DIE.

Archimago sent Redcrosse a friend request. Personal Message: "Hey, so I'm a lonely old dude out in the forest. We should be friends, yeah?"
Archimago and Redcrosse are now friends.
Archimago tagged Una in a picture.

Caption: Hey, Redcrosse, let's you and me hook up.

Redcrosse: ????!!!

Archimago tagged Una and Some Random Squire in a picture.

Una: That's not me!

Redcrosse: Una, how could you? I thought you were better than that!

Una: THAT'S NOT ME.

Redcrosse and Una are no longer friends.
Redcrosse is angry at Una. Stupid woman. Should have known she'd turn out bad.
The Dwarf wants to know where we got that squire. Something's not right here...

Duessa changed her profile picture and contact info.

Sansfoy invited Redcrosse to the event "Thinly Veiled Crusades Metaphor."
Redcrosse is attending this event.
Sansfoy is no longer online.

Fidessa* sent Redcrosse a friend request. Personal message: '"Oh, woe is me! You've won me from Sansfoy! Listen to my pitiful tale full of sorrow and woe!"
Redcrosse and Fidessa* are now friends.
Redcrosse is taking a break with Fidessa* and chilling out underneath this tree.
The Tree is Ow.
Redcrosse is OMG A TALKING TREE.
The Tree has shared his sad tale. Sympathize with, Listen carefully to, or Learn from the tree?
Redcrosse learned nothing from that story. Nothing nothing nothing.
The Dwarf thinks his master is an idiot. Possibly full of sound and fury. Possibly signifying nothing.
               Shakespeare: Hey, Eddie, don't steal my lines!
               Edmund Spenser: It's not me, it's the Dwarf.
               Redcrosse: I signify lots of things!
               The Dwarf: I'm not having this conversation anymore.

Una and The Lion are now freinds.
Redcrosse* sent Una a friend request.
Una and Redcrosse* are now friends.
Sansloy invited Redcrosse* to the event “Family Vengeance”
Redcrosse* changed his profile picture and contact info.
Sansloy wrote on Archimago’s wall: “Sorry about that, dude! Thought you were that Redcrosse fellow.”
The Lion is no longer online.

Una is very, very confused. And sad that she lost her Lion.
Two people like this.
Reader One: You’re tell me you’re confused – I was lost three cantos ago!
Reader Two: Seconded.

Redcrosse and Fidessa* added “The House of Pride” to the Places I’ve Been Application.
Redcrosse likes this Pride place. Although the queen isn’t very nice and didn’t give me any bling. I deserve bling. But I’m not proud, no, never.
The Dwarf could make a comment about the whole ‘pride’ thing and a certain crimson friend of his, but won’t.
Fidessa* sent Sansjoy a Token of Affection. Poke, Kiss, or Send a Token of Affection back?

Lucifera, Queen of the House of Pride, invited Redcrosse to the event “Death Match to Prove Your Worth”
Redcrosse, Fidessa* and Sansjoy are attending this event.
Sansjoy added Sansfoy and Sansloy as brothers using the Family Tree Application.
Sansjoy sent Redcrosse a private message. "My name is Sansloy. You killed my brother. Prepare to die."
Redcrosse sent Sansjoy a private message. "Yeah, whatever. (And what is up with your names???)"
Sansjoy sent Redcrosse a Fatal Blow. Die, Surrender, or Send a Fatal Blow back?
Fidessa* wrote on Sansjoy’s wall “Take the shield and me, too!”
       Redcrosse: Okay!
Fidessa* is Oh crap.
Redcrosse sent Sansjoy a Fatal Blow. Die, Surrender, or Send a Fatal Blow back?
Fidessa* sent Sansjoy a Dark Cloud. Hide, Flee, or send a Dark Cloud back?
The Dwarf is wandering around the castl –oh lord, that’s scary.
The Dwarf has tagged Redcrosse in the album “This could be you”

Redcrosse: Okay, we’re leaving now.

Sansloy sent Una a friend request.
Sansloy sent Una a friend request.
Sansloy sent Una a friend request.

Una wrote on Sansloy’s wall: “Stop trying to friend me! You kidnapped me and tried to do a lot of other nasty things!”
The Satyrs wrote on Sansloy’s wall: “Leave the lady alone, or face us. Capiche?”
Una is now friends with The Saytrs.
Una is now friends with Saytrane.
Sansloy sent Saytrane A Challenge! Throw a Glove at, Charge, or Send a Challenge back!
Saytrane is locked in an epic battle and will be busy for the rest of the story.

The Giant Orgoglio wrote on Redcrosse’s wall. “Hi, I’m about to kill you now.”
Redcrosse is weak…so weak…
Fidessa* knows that her evil plan is working.
Fidessa* and Orgoglio are now friends.

The Dwarf met up with Una again today! Happy day!
Prince Arthur is now friends with Una and The Dwarf.
Una tagged Prince Arthur in a note “The Backstory we should have gotten at the beginning of the story”
             Prince Arthur: Gee, that’s really sad that your parents are being held captive in a tower by a dangerous dragon. Admire me for my shining prettiness!
              Una: Yeah, I was hoping you could help me with that dragon business.
              Prince Arthur: Sorry, busy being the personification of magnificence! But I will help you get Redcrosse back from the Giant and HE can do that whole dragon slaying thing.
              Una: *grumble*

Prince Arthur saved Redcrosse from certain death today. That’s right, I’m awesome like that.
Redcrosse and Arthur are now friends.
Fidessa* updated her contact info.
Duessa changed her profile picture.

Redcrosse is AGGHHH! RUN AWAY.
Redcrosse and Duessa are no longer friends.

Prince Arthur tagged Una and The Dwarf in a note “My completely useless backstory”
              Thomas Malory: Say, this is good stuff.
              Edmund Spenser: Really, you don’t say.
             Chretien De Troyes: If copyright infringement had been invented by now I would sue you both blind.

Redcrosse, and Una added “The cave of Despair” to the Places I’ve Been Application.
Redcrosse and Trevisan are now friends.
Redcrosse and Despair are now friends.
Una wrote on Redcrosse’s wall – “What the hell are you doing? Get out of the damn cave!”
Redcrosse doesn’t know what he would do without Una.

Despair is trying not to be online anymore.

Redcrosse and Una added “The House of Holiness” to the Places I‘ve Been application.
Redcrosse and Una are now friends with Charissa, Fidelia, Speranza, and Caelia.
Fidelia has tagged Redcrosse in a note “Thinly Veiled Protestant Bible Exegeses Allusion”
Speranza sent Redcrosse a Piece of Flair – “Here, have an anchor!”

Redcrosse is chilling out with Penanace, Remorse, and Repentance.
Una is going to save Redcrosse from himself. Again.
Redcrosse and The Holy Hermit of Contemplation are now friends.
The Holy Hermit wrote on Redcrosse’s wall “See, aren’t I much more fun than those Remorse fellows? And oh, BTW, here’s your backstory.”

Redcrosse has changed his profile picture and contact info.

Redcrosse is now Saint George.
Una invited Saint George to an event: Slay-A-Dragon-And-Save-The-Day!
Saint George will be attending this event.
Saint George exchanged blows with the Dragon!
Saint George is still fighting the dragon!
Saint George fell in a pool of water. Bollocks.
          Saint John: Nice baptism metaphor!
          Saint George: I wasn’t trying, but thanks!
          Saint George: Have anyone of you tried fighting a dragon while wet? Just wondering.

Saint George is really tired of this. Just make it stop already. We know it was epic.
Edmund Spenser: Yes, but this is the first epic written in English! It has to be REALLY epic!
Saint George: You sadist.

Saint George was welcomed into the garden of heavenly delights today. Oh, Una, you make me so happy.
         Reader One: Okay, I give up. No one cares about the rest of this story anyway.
        Edmund Spenser: *is hurt*
        William Shakespeare: See, this is why I have more friends than you do.
        Edmund Spenser: Shut up.

Saint George received a friend request from Saint David, Saint Patrick, Saint Margaret, Merry Olde England, and Moscow.
Saint George joined the group “Patron Saints” “The Heavenly Choirs” and “Why yes, I am that guy in the Icon.”
          Una likes this.

Edmund Spenser tagged Redcrosse in a note “Needed: cast of characters for medieval-styled epic.” Also in this note: Britomart, Guyon, Prince Arthur, Merlin, and a bunch of other people.
               Saint George: There is no way you are getting me to come back for another book, Spenser. We’re through.

Case of the Mondays

2010-09-20T21:35:00.000-05:00

So, it seems like the world is out to get me and everyone I know today. Huge exams happened, people were violently ill, papers got handed back with horrible grades on them, hurt feelings came to the boiling point, expletives were exchanged in large quantities and my afternoon apple was full of mold and tasted like lemon scented cleaning solution. It was just a bad day to be here, in other words.

In the midst of all this Monday nastiness, I have managed to retain some shred of hope that the rest of this week will be better. And in honor of all my long-suffering freinds, who could all probably use a kind word and a glass of something stronger right now, I am re-posting a poem I wrote a little while ago on the subject of bad days. I hope it is a source of comfort to those of you who, like my freinds, have come down with a bad case of the Mondaze.

It Could Be Worse

The days for frowning are varied, I know,

when the rain won't stop and your car won't go

The days that poets never praise

are the days that require my special phrase

It's nothing fancy, just four little words

to remind me my troubles are far from absurd.

When your brow is furrowed, expression terse,

remember this -- It could be worse.

Oh, some will rant and some will curse

I say only "It could be worse!"

I could be sick, or stuck in bed!

I could be hurting -- I could be dead!

The sky could be falling, the grass could be blue,

I could be small bits in somebody's stew.

My life's going forward instead of reverse --

I can get past this; It could be worse.

We haven't hit bottom, the end's still in sight,

There will be a stop to this terrible blight.

I have people who love me, and people who care

(and people who don't want me ripping out hair!)

So when your day stinks, remember this verse,

and repeat after me -- "It could be worse!"

Hyper for Hypertext!

2010-09-17T14:21:00.000-05:00

This week I took a break from my typical writing routine to try something different, something so groundbreaking and new that I had to explain to every single person I told this project about what it was, exactly, that I was writing. Short stories? Yes, everyone knows one or two of those. Fanfiction? Okay, it's sort of like a short story. But Hypertext? Hold the phone there, buddy; what on earth is a hypertext story?

Well, Imaginary Rhetorical Device Man, I'm glad you asked.
In the process of describing a hypertext story, I explained it as 'a series of photographs no one will ever see in the order they were taken' 'a story written on notecards you throw up in the air and read in a different order every time' and ' a labyrinth out in cyberspace'. It's a series of events -- things like text, pictures, music, videos -- strung together by hyperlinks. The idea is that the story is partially created by its author and partially created by its user. When we read a text, we bring our experiences to it and interpret the text through that experience. Hypertext stories bring this to the forefront -- our very experience of the text itself will be different than our freind's, and that is the first thing we will talk about when we discuss the story -- the experience.

I didn't write the story so much as I built it -- I created a map where I wanted all my links to go and then starting carving out bits of trail where someone could stop, take a breather, admire the flowers. Some are paths that lead to more paths and some are paths that lead to dead ends you have to back-button out of. There's music, some quotes, some pictures. It's not just a story, as I've said it's a stereophonic, mulitmedia event. (Much like this blog!) And not a purely textual event, as I've just described.

You can read the whole thing (or parts of the whole thing) here at Past Lives: A Hypertext Story

Graphic Novels -- Great Books?

2010-09-12T21:51:00.001-05:00

Mmm, canon. A big word with a lot of punch. Add another letter and it will shoot you. Leave it as it is and it'll fill your English classes with misery.

The idea of "The Canon" has come up in classes twice in the past week. In Pedagogy, we're discussing what parts of the Western Canon we should keep and which books we'd pitch. (The Scarlet Letter, unsurprisingly, was binned without question. Somewhere millions of high school students should be rejoicing.) And in Contempory Lit we were discussing graphic novels and whether any of them should be considered for entry into the sainted halls of canonical literature.

Like Sister Mara always does, after we'd considered if Persepolis (our graphic selection for the semester) could potentially be a canonical choice someday, she asked us if we could consider using a graphic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice instead of having students muddle through Austen's volumious prose in the original.

In my mind, this is a great question becuase it makes us consider two things --
1.Why are we having the kids read this book in the first place? Is it the complexity of the language or the plot or the themes expressed throughout the book or is it simply because we read it and gosh darnit, someone else should, too?
2.What do you add or subtract from the book when it becomes a graphic novel?

Thankfully, Pedagogy has already answered question one for me. We continue to read the Canon because we want to challenge students with the language, there are supposedly universal themes we can find in classic novels, they discuss Big Ideas and by being 'foreign' to our students, they allow us a space to teach them how it is we're supposed to read, not just taking in the words but finding the meaning behind them.

Question Two has also already been discussed, this time in Contemporary Lit. When we read a graphic novel, we need to take on a new way to read, using the pictures in tandem with the text. When Pride and Predjudice (or any other canon book) becomes a graphic novel, it loses some of the language and complexity that English teachers love so much but adds images so that visual learners might be able to connect to the text more. To me it seems like the same process that occurs when a book becomes a movie -- the themes and big ideas should still be there, but in an abbreviated version. In the movie there is less room for the storytext, or plot events; in the graphic novel there is less room for the storytelling text. What we loose in storytelling text, however, we gain back in relevance for our students. Maybe Pride and Prejudice doesn't seem like such an old and out of date story when Eliza Bennet has a face we can see.

I have a different perspective on Canon entirely: for me, the word means what my English teacher mind needs it to mean, the accepted cultural representations of the Western world. But it also means what fanfiction makes it mean -- the world according to a specific author. In fanfiction, every text can be a source of 'canon'. To be canonical does not mean that it belongs to an elite group but rather that it follows the rules well. This, I think, is interesting -- in subverting the world of print literature and copyright, we've taken a word that meant something very insular and turned it on its ear to make it mean something inclusive.

I think if we as English teachers take the fanfiction definition of canon as our guidepost when we're choosing novels our classes might not be so universally disliked. Fanfictioneers choose their canons because they find them (or can make them) relevant to their lives. If we can do the same in English Class, using both the Canon with a capital C and the rest of the literature out there, we might get more kids on the reading wagon.

And who knows -- maybe they'll like the graphic version of "War and Peace" so much they'll be tempted to try the original...

A House Full Of Books

2010-09-03T16:16:00.002-05:00

A big part of teacher education at Saint Ben's is the idea of the reflective teacher, one who examines her own experiences in the classroom as a teacher and as a student and determines what it is that worked and didn't work. So it happens that my assignment for Pedagogy this week is an autobiography of myself as a reader.
If any of you have been to my house, you will know immediately the wall to which I am referring in the introduction. As it was in my youth, it is full of books that have always dared me to build my own library.

A House Full of Books

My earliest memory of reading does not actually involve reading at all. It involves books. A whole, wall-wide bookshelf's worth of books. They weren't even interesting looking books, either; Mostly they were religious texts and the remnants of my parents' personal college libraries. But the wall of books intrigued me, and when I was old enough to reach, I pulled down a volume whose title I recognized (the Complete Sherlock Holmes) and began reading it. A heavy task for a girl of twelve, and one that thoroughly confused me. But I'd made some assumption early on in childhood about reading and what it does for people -- I'd made the connection that if you read certain books, people give you a certain kind of power. It didn't matter that I hadn't understood most of Sherlock Holmes; merely by saying I had read it people gave me a look of almost awed appreciation. (I re-read Sherlock Holmes several summers ago: I still didn't understand it.) It's a lesson I've carried into adulthood. Have I read Moby Dick, Vanity Fair, War and Peace? Yup. Now, ask me if I enjoyed them. Whole different story there.

I mark time in my elementary school memories by the books we were reading. In first grade I realized what I didn't want to read -- the PeeWee Scouts books by Judy Delton. In every book Molly came up with a stupid plan and got into a lot of trouble trying to implement it. And don't even start me on Henry and Mudge or Amber Brown. I hated reading about people getting into trouble in first grade. The idea confused and annoyed me. I wanted to read about successful people.

Second grade was Stone Fox -- I remember reading the book in one sitting and sitting down to sharing time realizing that everyone else had only read the first chapter. I began to hate reading for school. Everyone else read too slowly. If I finished my book I could start another one, right? No, Mercury. We have to discuss this one first. (Insert annoyed sigh from one small second grader.)

Third grade was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I loved it, but we watched the BBC miniseries version and I remembered thinking "Man, I wish someone would make a better version of this." During my freshman year of college, Walden Media finally obliged me. Third Grade was also The Giver, and Fourth grade was Number the Stars and a confusing book called The Silver Crown, a text I went back to in middle school and still didn't understand.

But fifth grade...Fifth grade created a monster. In fifth grade we read the first Harry Potter book. And what's more, we read it aloud. (I'm twenty one years old and I still love reading Harry Potter out loud.) To get another chapter of Harry Potter was a privilege, a treasure, a new adventure before we had to leave Challenge class and go back to normal fifth grade stuff. Harry Potter was my hero, my savior...my friend. He fought dragons and his ugly cousin and had really cool friends that did really cool stuff. (I didn't start seeing myself as Hermione until middle school.) As Harry grew, I grew, too. His final book is being made into a movie and I'm graduating college this year. By the time he's done growing, so am I.

In sixth grade I remember being angry. This movie that had been adapted from some old fantasy book from way back when was stealing Harry's thunder. Budge up, Frodo Baggins, let the new kid through. In sixth grade I wanted nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. My friend (and sometime nemesis) Luke had already read Lord of the Rings and really enjoyed it. I didn't want to read it if Luke had. It wasn't until 8th grade that Tolkien caught up with me. Finally I gave the hobbit a chance...and fell in love again. Eighth grade I discovered that writing could have immensity, that stories didn't all have to take place here, with human concerns. I also read Dune that year and loved it, devouring the rest of Frank Herbert with the relish of a devoted biblogastronome.

A strong current throughout my childhood was the library. Every week during the summer, the worn maroon library bag was hauled across town to be filled with every kind of book you could imagine. As a kid I made a summer's study of every Cinderella adaptation I could find, or all the Irish myths in the children's section, or the entire works of Lloyd Alexander. Those were good summers. Filling the summer reading program timesheets was easy-- if you remembered to mark your hours down. It wasn't ever that I hadn't spent fourty to sixty hours reading that summer, because the chance was good that I had. I just didn't enjoy filling in the fifteen minute marks. Who sat down and read for fifteen minutes at a time? It didn't occur to me then, as it sometimes does not occur to me now, that most people take more than a day or two to read a book.

I took the library seriously because my mother took the library seriously. It was important to her that her children read, and at least with my sister and I, she succeeded. With my brothers it was a different story, but there are still some books that will tease them out of their computer chairs. Now that I'm old enough to drive I take our family minivan and the same maroon library bag across town to our newly remodeled library building, and sometimes, just for laughs, I'll descend down into the children's section and park myself in one of their big comfy chairs to treat myself to a picture book.

A lot of my memories of elementary and middle school reading have stuck with me as a reader because they highlight what and why I didn't like to read -- to answer questions on a test, to keep pace with the rest of the class, to address 'age appropriate' issues, or to inch through it a chapter at a time. I had to read books deemed 'age appropriate' at a time when I was reading at an 8th grade level in a K-5 library and there weren't too many books to chose from with that wonderful little reader's rating in the front cover. And all this ties into the idea of CHOICE and SPEED. In my classroom, I will make every effort to make sure that there some choice involved in reading and the discussion of that reading. I'm going to work to find some system that works for slow readers and fast ones. I'm going to build a house full of books in my classroom, and I'm going to try my hardest to make sure that everyone finds one book that says "Wow, that character's my hero."

Hello, Universe Speaking

2010-08-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."

When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.

I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.

Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.

But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.

Quiet Time

2010-08-23T10:28:00.001-05:00

I talk a lot on this blog about secular writing -- writing stories, writing songs, writing about my life. I'm going to take a break from that for a little while and talk about something I don't discuss a lot about: writing prayers, which I have been known to do from time to time. Oftentimes when I write a prayer I don't actually commit it to paper -- I just say whatever comes to mind about what I'm thankful for around a dinner table or with some friends. Yet this, too, is writing. Some of those have been pretty good, so I've starting writing prayers, on paper, for other things.

It's my first day back at campus, and lately I've been thinking a lot about the fantastic examples on how to live life that I see in the people around me. So I thought I'd write a prayer about it. A freind of mine, Cody, who is a great deal more religious than I am, told me that when writing a prayer one is actually praying it a number of times while one composes it, going over the words and the ideas one wants to put on paper.

As I sit here in my t-shirt from the Arboretum near my house, it's not hard to imagine me as a tree-hugger. I love trees, and I love being outdoors, and I love the image of the Tree of Life, as well as that line in John's gospel "I am the vine, and you are the branches; Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned." People are a lot like trees; we grow up, we reach out to people, we put down roots. When I first had the idea for this prayer, I only had the first line -- "You have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest."

As I finished writing this piece this morning, I was thinking a lot about the freshmen and women who are just starting their orientation process today at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. Really, this prayer is for them, the tiny seedlings who are being transplanted in this forest here in central Minnesota and the many other seedlings in other colleges all over the United States who are beginning classes this week, including my brother. I pray that they can grow tall where they are planted, just as I feel I have.

Great Creator God, Cultivator of the Universe,
you have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest.
Let me grow here, let me prosper;
Let me reach up my branches and feel the warmth of your sun, and the cooling comfort of your rain.
Let the great trees around me be my shelter and my guide;
Let me learn from their example, that I may grow tall here in your Garden of gardens.
When the wind blows, let me bend, but not break;
Where there is rottenness in other trees, let none break my branches or uproot me.
Let my roots grow deep, that none may move me from your holy ground.
May the others in my life use the gifts you have given me,
the shelter of my arms and the fruits of my soul and the shade of my spirit.
When I die, let me seep back into the soil
and enrich another.

Drawing From the Model

2010-08-15T20:38:00.001-05:00

When Edith Wharton speaks of Ellen Olenska's unorthodox education in her novel "The Age of Innocence" she speaks of 'drawing from the model' as a thing 'never dreamed of before,' an element of Ellen's education that most of New York society can never condone. If we may take "drawing from the model' to mean that Ellen, like many aspiring artists, learned anatomy and muscleture from sketching both men and women in the nude, it's no small wonder the rest of 19th century New York found it so appalling.

Writers of fanfiction also draw from the model -- we take our source text and strip it bare to see how muscles move and bones work underneath the skin. We then take those basic anatomical ideas back to our own canvases and do something new with them.

For the next chapter of A Rose in the Briars, however, I'm finding that drawing from the model has become rather difficult. The scene is a simple one -- two characters are getting married. I need a marriage formula. Tolkien gives me little to go on here -- of the two marriages mentioned in his text, the first (Aragorn and Arwen's) is unspecific and the second (Sam and Rosie's) is unapplicable.

Having nothing in my original model, I turned to my friends at the Gwethil for some suggestions as to who I might get to officiate this important scene. Simon suggested no officiant, in the Pre- Council of Trent Christian tradition, and Robyn suggested having a justice or magistrate. Having no sourcebooks on early Catholic pontifical councils lying around my house, I took the opportunity to ask my grandparents, who know a great deal more about Catholic theology than I do. They, too, were stumped, but suggested instead the Jewish tradition instead.

It is much easier to find documents about the customs surrounding a Jewish wedding than it is to find those pertaining to marriage customs in 14th century Christian Europe. One of those elements common to both types of marriage is a marriage contract, in the Jewish tradition called a ketubah. It lists the date, who is marrying whom, what each party is bringing to the marriage in terms of material goods and what each party should expect of the other. I used a form similiar to the one found here.

Simple, right? A large part of my ceremony will now be the two parties reading and signing the contract to make it valid and sharing a cup of wine, found in both the Jewish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. Except, of course, that marriage contracts involve giving dowries and those usually involve currency, something ELSE Tolkien didn't include much of in Lord of the Rings. After searching "middle earth currency' and coming up with ONE quote on Gondorian currency from Tolkien's History of Middle Earth Volume 7 --

"Similarly farthing has been used for the four divisions of the Shire, because the Hobbit word tharni was an old word for 'quarter' seldom used in ordinary language, where the word for 'quarter' was tharantin 'fourth part'. In Gondor tharni was used for a silver coin, the fourth part of the castar (in Noldorin the canath or fourth part of the mirian). "

Ah, helpful. Currency conversions to more currencies I still don't know about, because Tolkien never discussed the buying power of the castar, only silver pennies. So I arbitrarily decided a Gondoran castar is equal to the late medieval ducat, and using some average dowry figures from the same period converted the whole mess to some numbers I could use.

If Eleanor of Montfort's dowry was 200 pounds a year in 1230, and she's about the same rank as Serawen, what would the same dowry be in Gondorian castari?

Well, Alex, one ducat is equal to 9 shillings 4 pence (according to Sir Robert Palgrave's The History of Politcal Economy, found on GoogleBooks) or 85 pence, and there are 240 pence in one pound (there being ten pence in a shilling and 12 shillings in a pound). If we multiply the number of pence in a pound by the number of pounds and then divide that by the number of pence in a ducat, we should come out with the number of ducats and therefore the number of castari needed to give Serawen a nice nest egg: roughly 565 castari.

Fhew!

And the moral of the story is this -- Not every canon is perfect. Not every model will give you a perfect idea of how the human body moves. Even Tolkien, who has more than nine volumes of supplemental material to his name, doesn't cover all his bases. Covering those bases is what writing fanfiction is all about.

I just wish sometimes I didn't have the compulsion to be so thorough.

Character Development

2010-08-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

I don't enjoy summer vacation. All this unstructured time gives me the idea that I have nothing to do when, in reality, I have lots of things to do. Go get a haircut. Finish my student loans. Update my resume. Write blog posts. When you're scheduled you find time to do things becuase you know you won't have time later. When you're not scheduled, the famous phrase "Aw, I'll just do it later" becomes later and later and later until you find you've never gotten around to doing it at all.

One of those things for me, unfortunately, has been blog posts.

Melisa, one of my writing class students, wanted to know how to develop her characters better, and I didn't have anything to tell her. How do you teach character development? I've always been told I have well-developed characters, and I'm trying to figure out why that is. What makes someone two dimensional or three? Where does that leap come in?

Storm-brain over at the Veritas Writing site thinks well-developed characters come after filling out a worksheet of things like "Things this character has in their pockets" and "Foods this character will never eat" as well as more mundane questions they might ask you at the doctor's office like "Height" and "Mother's maiden name." Other writers agree with this technique, and I think to a certain extent it helps, but a well-developed character embodies all the things on the worksheet without having them mentioned in the story.

A common mistake that beginning writers make (and I've been there, I've done that, I'm guilty, too) is to create this elaborate mental picture and then share the entire thing with the reader in the first several pages of the story. The reader doesn't care that your leading lady is exactly 145 pounds and her eyes are really cerulean instead of just blue -- they care about her thoughts, her emotions, what she's going to contribute to the story.

In the first few pages of the Rose rewrite, which I'm going to use as an example here because it's recent and people seem to generally like Rhoswen, the reader learns several things about my main character, Rhoswen of Anfalas. They learn she has dark hair, that she's good-natured and kind, that she is tallish (taller than her maidservant, anyway), that she is going to be married to someone she has never met and she's sad about it not because she's afraid of marriage but because she doesn't look forward to leaving her home. We don't know that she's a gardener, that she enjoys playing the harp or that she has a fairly good singing voice because we don't need to know. Her skill with the harp doesn't come up until the fifth or sixth chapter becuase it didn't need to.

When characters are presented for judgement in front of the reader, they say "I did this." Well developed characters say "I did this because..." and give a reason. The reason is not always immediate -- it would have been really easy to write Rhoswen as a woman who was afraid of marriage. But the first reason she gives for being hesitant about leaving home is that she's going to be homesick. She's not afraid of marriage -- she's afraid of childbirth, because her own mother died in childbed. (A little hokey, I know, but my mother's afraid of heart disease because her mother died of heart disease -- it's kind of the same thing, right?)

Long story short, well developed characters have motivation. I have a theory that character motivation is directly linked to author motivation. Why YOU are writing this story will probably have a great effect on how much thought you give to why the characters are doing what they are doing. Oftentimes beginning writers simply want to be part of the story, and this is reflected in the characters they write. Why are you doing this? Because my creator wanted to. They don't have enough internal substance (all those little background details) to stand on their own when they stand before the Writing Gods and are asked to explain their existence.

So, Rhoswen, why are you caring for the wounded in Osgiliath even though it makes you a little uncomfortable?

Well, Reader, I'm doing it because it's something I'm good at and getting better at, because it's part of my duty as the future wife of the steward to care for the people, and because having a job leaves me less time to think about Boromir being gone. At least that last one's what I tell myself, but my freinds don't think it's working.

If you had asked the first incarnation of Rhoswen that question I don't know that she would have had an answer. Actually, the first incarnation of Rhoswen wasn't a healer or a gardener. She didn't have any hobbies. She was a showpiece.

Art imitates life -- My characters are sixty percent me and forty percent who I want to be. When I need to write that forty percent I study the people around me, what I like about them and dislike about them.

Writers need to distill, clarify and collect people as well as experiences, not only becuase it helps them describe things but also because it gives them an arsenal of feelings, emotions and settings with which to play. When I wrote the last chapter of A Rose in the Briars, a chapter that deals heavily with grief and funerals, I thought a lot about all the funerals I've been to and the emotions and actions of the other people that were there. I also used the ten-year old version of myself to write the ten-year old Miriel, who appears at her father's funeral trying desperately not to cry. The observation Rhoswen makes about her ("Why do children think they must take on the world?") was something that was said to me when I was ten and wondering why Slobadan Milosevic was such a terrible, terrible person and Yugoslavia was such a political mess.

Motivation is only one small part of character development -- Does anyone have anything they think I've missed?

The Writing Workshop -- A Reflection

2010-07-23T07:45:00.000-05:00

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned – It’s been over two weeks since my last blog post. There’s really no excuse for it other than monumental laziness. In the middle of Midwestern July heat, one finds oneself content to merely sit and wallow and occasionally pick up a book.

Last Wednesday my writing class met for the last time with a grand total of ten participants. It’s been interesting to see who comes back and who doesn’t – throughout the course of the four weeks I had a grand total of twenty-two people show up, with about four kids who showed up to every class (Melisa, Kahil, Hadiya, and Monica, you’re the best!) and seven or eight more who tried their darnest to make it to at least three because they’d forgotten week one or had to be on vacation. As my grandfather commented, it might have been wiser to charge something for the program because then people would have a reason to come – they’d be "invested" in it.

I didn’t feel right charging people to come hear me talk about writing – for starters, I don’t think what I had to say was anything worth charging for. I was sharing experience, not proven and published fact. If I had a New York Times Bestseller under my belt or a Booker Prize, then yes, I would start thinking about selling the secrets to my writing success. As it is, I was happy I wrote six pages of my fanfic yesterday. My writing is supposed to be non-profit to keep the copyright folks happy and I think that’s the way it’s going to stay.

Over four weeks I learned just as much from my kids as I hope they learned from me. They taught me that it’s unsafe for my voice to talk for an uninterrupted 45 minutes, that this is very boring for middle schoolers in particular anyway, and that one has to be very careful with the way one words one’s advertisements. (Some parents signed their kids up thinking it would be an ESSAY writing workshop, which makes sense, given that all the other teen programs at the library are geared towards school somehow.)

In their evaluations on Wednesday night, they reminded me of many other things as well. Kids need time to practice and share their ideas (“More sharing time, please!”). High schoolers have different writing needs than middle schoolers do (“Grammar wasn’t very helpful – more on character development?”) but everyone can use positive criticism (“Thanks for all the great feedback – really helped my confidence!”). I also learned, once again, that you cannot please everyone – I had high achieving students so elitist in their reading habits I’d never heard of anything they’d read and kids who hated to read whose parents had signed them up in the hopes that I would work some magic on their kids and open books for them. (Newsflash to parents – if your child is in middle school and hates to read, it may be that they have a problem a qualified reading instructor needs to sort out. Also, if they hate to read they will probably also hate to write)

If I do this writing workshop again, I’ll be more selective on age – middle schoolers in one section, high schoolers in another. I’ll make the class longer (an hour and a half) and make sure I have enough handouts for everyone. I’ll request a better meeting space so everyone has a place to write and I'll come to class better prepared than I was this time. I’ll listen better. I’ll remember your names. I"ll always bring pens and paper. I’ll find more resources for different writing development topics like character development so that students with specific needs or wants will be able to get the help they want and deserve. I’ll make them read a little more and have discussions. I'll make your assignments easier and cleaner cut.

My students also told me something I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else – “You’d make a great middle school teacher!” Three or four of my students told me that, and that made me feel really good. Tomorrow I have to go in and take the Praxis, a big liscensure test that will measure whether I can, indeed, begin my student teaching in the spring. Let’s hope for the sake of future middle schoolers in Minnesota and elsewhere that I pass.

Why I am not enjoying “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”

2010-07-09T09:34:00.002-05:00

As part of the summer reading program at my local library, I have to read books from a number of different categories – a novel, a non-fiction book, a biography. I decided I’d choose for my biography the life of someone whose time period or lifestyle I’m interested in as a broader research topic. My first choice was William Marshall, but alas, the reknowned Plantagenet knight has few books and fewer biographies devoted to his life and times, a problem I think someone should solve very soon, because he’s a fascinating historical character. I didn’t have a second choice as I trolled the ‘Biography’ section of the library, and the books I was seeing on the shelves weren’t helping me either, because the library seems to have stopped buying biographies in the late eighties and nothing looks interesting when the dust cover is sun-faded and the books smell like they haven’t had a good airing in a while. If no one else has read them in a while, why should you, right?

Then it hit me – Showtime is doing a series on the Borgias soon, starring the always amazing Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, the patriarch of an eccentric family whose 15th century exploits would make most gossip magazines today kill for coverage of. I’ll read about the Borgias. Specifically, I’ll read about Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo’s illegitimate daughter and Renaissance bombshell who married three times, had a lot of affairs, and may or may not have poisoned a bunch of people, slept with her brother and organized an orgy at the Vatican.

This girl knew how to party, in other words. How bad can reading her biography be?

Lucrezia has three books on the shelf, none of them published before 1960. Wonderful. I pick the least moldy looking, “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia” by Maria Bellonci (published 1939, translated by Bernard and Barbara Wall, 1953) and check it out, my anticipation on slow simmer. Today I actually sit down to read said book, and about fifty pages in, I can take no more.

I’ve read fifty pages, and what I’ve gotten so far is not “The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia”, but rather “The Times and Political Climate Surrounding Lucrezia Borgia, Who’s Really Just in the Title of this Book so Someone Who’s Interested in 15th Century Women Will Be Persuaded to Read About Italian Renaissance Politics.” Lucrezia’s come up ONCE in the first fifty pages of her biography, and in that one instance, she was getting married.

Eeeeenteresting.

I take a moment to step back and consider why this is. Certainly one can make the argument that in order to understand Lucrezia’s life one has to understand the political circumstances of her father, Rodrigo, who, as I have already mentioned, was Pope Alexander VI. But to open a biography with the events that got her father elected as pope and not with, say, the birth of the title character, seems to me a bit dodgy.

Maybe there’s not enough research material on Lucrezia, and after Miss Bellonci picked her thesis topic figured this out and so padded it out with the available material on the men in Lucrezia’s life to make her three hundred page mark and appease her Ph.D. Thesis Examining Board, who wouldn’t have liked a biography on an Italian Renaissance wildwoman anyway. Too edgy. Not suitable reading material for the Misses Smith and Jones of the world who need good examples of pristine womanhood when they get home from their jobs as secretaries and elementary school teachers.

I’ve been reading Jill Ker Conway’s True North, the second of her three memoirs of her life as an Austrailian academic and a female trying to find a place in the post-secondary system. (For my review of her first memoir, The Road to Coorain, click here) Conway talks a lot about being taken seriously as a female academic interested in studying the contributions of women throughout history, and I wonder if that wasn’t the case with Miss Maria Bellonci circa 1939. It’s a man’s world in academia, and if she wants to write a book about one of history’s leading ladies, what she really has to write is a book about the men surrounding history’s leading ladies and keep her title character in the role she herself is supposed to be playing – a pretty face, a focal point at parties, but not the headliner or the leader of anything worth reading.

It struck me that history writing has changed a lot since this book was written – since women like Conway have worked their way up the ladder and worked to get Women’s Studies on the curriculum and allowed historians and economists and theologians to examine the part of history that can get ignored in history books. Nowadays, women like Antonia Frasier and Alison Weir can write biographies where their subjects can become the center and not the periphery of the world being described. I enjoy reading biographies like that, where I get just enough historical context to get me through the chapter and enough about the person I wanted to read about to sustain my attention.

Now come on, Amanda Foreman or one of you other great literary ladies, get on this Lucrezia Borgia issue and write me a biography I’m not going to have to kill myself reading.

(Interestingly, I read two articles on the “feminization of history” while writing this post – apparently a British historian named David Starkey got his undies in a bunch about a year ago over the fact that some people think the history of Europe wasn’t exclusively piloted by white males. You can read one response to his comments here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6035805.ece )

My Fiesty, Feministy Fourth

2010-07-04T17:04:00.000-05:00

I am having a very strangely fiesty, feministy Fourth of July.

First, I was overcome with a sudden wave of anger when I walked into church this morning and hear the choir rehearsing “America.” I explain to my sister that I’m not sure why I’m angry but that it might have something to do with the imperialist, capitalist sentiment that seems to ooze from patriotic songs. We sing nothing but patriotic songs for the rest of the mass, except for The Prayer of Saint Francis and Let There Be Peace On Earth, which I think are very hypocritical for the day when we’re celebrating the proclaimation of the document that started us out on the path to being the world’s warmongers. Which, by the way, I think we should actually read on the Fourth, just like they used to do in the good old days.

Second, I keep seeing this headline on the CSM page -- Fourth of July: Female power triumphs at the movies

When I first read that, I thought “Oh, gee, what cool, feminist, uplifting-for-womenfolk film is coming out this weekend that is getting great reviews at the box office?”

Do you know what the story’s really about? The fact that New Moon is breaking box office records with a primarily female audience. Talk about misdirection on my part.

I finished reading all four books the other day and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. As so many other feminist bloggers have stated, Twilight is a harmful book for young women to read because among other things it glamorizes relationships with abusive characteristics, normalizes relationship violence in Native communities, glorifies a protagonist who thinks she doesn’t mean anything without a man in her life, and above all of this from my perspective, is just second-rate writing to begin with. Heck, it might even be third rate. Maybe my standards are too low. I only started enjoying myself halfway through New Moon when Bella becomes a vampire and actually starts, you know, enjoying her life, or un-life, or whatever you want to call it. Even then I still wasn’t enjoying it much – I rushed through the book in a day and a half and then refused to read anything else for a few days afterwards because I didn’t want to look at another book for fear it’d be just as bad.

Here’s what scares me about the mix of supposed 'female power' and Twilight -- Twilight doesn’t promote female power, it dampens it considerably( for all the reasons listed above and more.) And that women are getting together (in droves, apparently) to share this story instead of another story about the power of female bonding, about healthy love, about…anything else, really, is quite frightening.

I skipped the usual Fourth festivities – My dad and brothers went to go partake in RibFest and the manly activity of eating large hunks of meat (my brother seems to be under the delusion that if he eats a vegetarian meal, he’ll lose face or something) and no one in my house felt like going to the parade or the fireworks. So I went for a four mile bike ride with my mom. And we had fun.

Book Recommendation: The Road from Coorain

2010-07-04T12:57:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Jill Ker Conway’s The Road From Coorain, her memoir about growing up in the Australian Outback in the 1930s and 40s, and realized there’s nothing better in my life at the moment to write about, so I’m furnishing you with a book review.

I didn’t realize this until after I finished the book and read the back cover, but the author was at one point in time the president of Smith College and an accomplished women’s historian, which should have been a huge clue that I’d enjoy this book. As it happens, I checked it out because the cover looked interesting, I’m in love with the idea of the Australian out country, and I was also checking out Eclipse and Breaking Dawn and wanted something a little more intellectual looking in my pile at the check-out line. (I live in fear that the librarians will judge me by what I’m checking out – It’s why I’ve never gotten around to just sitting down for a week during the summer with a heap of trashy romance novels.)

One of the first things I thought after finishing the first page of this wonderful little book is “God, this woman can write. This prose is mind-bendingly brilliant.” And it only got better as I zoomed through the rest of the book. Conway’s descriptions of the back country where she spent her childhood, working and helping her father on their sheep farm, drew me into a landscape I’ve only dreamt of through the poetry of Banjo Paterson. As I read on I couldn’t help feeling a sense of kinship and like-mindedness with Conway; One of the things that continually struck me as the narrative went on was the way she seemed to find the Divine in the harsh but somehow beautiful vistas of the desert around her. Raised by a devoutly anti-Catholic mother and a father who only dabbled in his faith, Conway stayed away from religion for most of her life, but despite this maintains a strong sense of the mightiness of nature and the serenity or intense strength one can find there.

As she moved away from the family farm and into the city, the author turned her insightful prose to examining her relationships, the people who enter her life and finally the academic life she’s easing into at the end of the memoir as a Master’s candidate in history at the University of Sydney. What really interested me towards the end of the book was the way she was drawn towards comparing the Australian Experience of settlement with the similiar American experience settling the West.

Anyway, it was a fantastic book, and I’d recommend it to everyone.

Good News!

2010-06-26T14:45:00.001-05:00

This upcoming Wednesday is the first session of my writing class, and as before any endeavor like this, the kind where you set yourself up as the embodiment of all knowledge on a subject and other people have to accept that knowledge from you, I'm very afraid that I'm not credentialed enough to make an impression on these high school students.

Oh, did I mention? I have fourteen people signed up for my class! FOURTEEN! So that's exciting.

Anyway, returning to my lack of credentials. College degree? Working on it. Published? Only in school literary magazines. Nominated for any awards? Nothing anyone else has heard of.

I've only got small feathers in my hat, but even so, sometimes adding another feather helps, even if it's just another small one. Today I got the news that my Percy Jackson story A Goddess's Lament has been nominated for The Veritas Award in the General category.

Yeah, you read that right. I've now been nominated TWICE, once last voting cycle and once this voting cycle. I'm the first person up on that page. See? Here I am!

Nifty, huh? Here's what my 'anonymous nominator' had to say about why my story deserved to be nominated.

It has this nostalgic reminiscing tone that adds a special feel to the story, and unlike many PJO fanfics, their is no character-bashing or anything like that. The words flow smoothly, and Amphitrite is a very realistic character.

My last nomination said "It puts characters in a new perspective and also shines a light on Amphitrite." Two different nominations with a bit of different reasoning behind them! Excellent!

So just when I was afraid I couldn't write, someone comes along and reassures me that they think I can. It's a good day to be me.

(Oh, and if you want, you can vote for the story by visiting http://fanmortals.webs.com/general.htm after the fall equinox. Or you could just go to fanfiction.net and review it -- I accept anonymous reviews as well as those from people with ff.net accounts)

The Mind in Summer, Idling Along

2010-06-21T05:58:00.000-05:00

Having just recently discovered the simultaneous joy and curse that is social gaming on FaceBook (Hello, FrontierVille!) I am ashamed to admit that I haven't had a lot to write about this past week. I also just completed my first week of work, and as kindergarteners are not the most literate of audiences, the most word-based thing I've done in the past week and a half is read a few books (none of them knock-out-of-the-park brilliant) and emcee my library's Poetry Slam, which turned out be a resounding failure because a) someone is telling today's youth that poetry isn't cool and b) the Slam was at 3pm on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, the three kids that did show up had a great time reading stuff out of books and I think good fun was had by all.

Since feeding my pigs and harvesting my apple trees has been taking up most of my idle time, I haven't been paying very close attention to my feed reader, which I've set to alert me every time FF.net gets a new submission in about ten different categories, among other things. Many of these posts are coming from the Percy Jackson section, and I think that's another reason why I'm breezing through and skipping over a lot of them. There's nothing there that really stands out, nothing that I want to read. I'm also getting a lot of posts from Flamespots, which I've also added to the feedreader just to see how much lag time there is between the story getting posted and someone putting it up as flamable. It's also interesting because occasionally the Flamespots posters will add comments that they've gotten back from the authors, and those are ALWAYS worth a read.

Reading these replies, you get the sense that there seems to be an idea of entitlement in the writing world -- I wrote it, I worked on it, it must therefore be good, and if you don't agree with me, I have the right and possibly the duty to shout at you. I know this exists because I feel it sometimes. No one is entitled to be recognized as good -- you have to earn that right, through practice, through revision, and through listening to critique. But everyone is entitled to know what they did right and wrong, and it is a duty of owning that right that you must listen to all your supporters and detractors with good grace, and not shout back in your author's comments.

I actually got talking with the three teens at the poetry slam about online reviews, and their response was clear -- everyone needs to get bad reviews once in a while. But one of the teens said something very interesting on the subject of non-complimentary reviews -- "Everyone needs constructive criticism."

Very true, everyone does need concrit. Concrit is what makes the writing world go round. I endeavored to explain to him that in the online writing world there is such a thing as a non-complimentary review that offers very little basis for improvement, which shocked him and my other two audience members (I was at this point doing a little lecture/Q&A on fanfiction).

Does such a thing exist in the face-to-face world? Is it easier to deal with there? Or are the social situations in which writing is shared so exclusive (or so friend- or kinship based) that baseless criticism is seldom found there?

Summer Reading

2010-06-13T09:40:00.001-05:00

Ah, the glorious month of June. Home to the beginning of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, the Glorious First of June and at my local library the beginning of Summer Reading Programs. This year's theme, rather lamely, is BANK ON YOUR LIBRARY, just to hammer home to the rest of the community who hasn't heard about their budget troubles. I think it needs to be given a rest, but hey, I go to the library at least once a week, so maybe it just seems like overkill to me.

Anyway, I've made several goals for this summer -- one of them is to finish summer reading, another is to learn how to roll sushi, and the third is to read the last three Stephanie Meyer books. So, yesterday, with great trepidation, I spent a good five minutes in front of the bookshelf at the library contemplating why it was again I wanted to bring these books home. My sister walks up, looks from me to the bookshelf and back again, and says "No. Don't do it."

Not even kidding. That's my sister -- always looking out for me and my continued mental stability. I respond "Well, I know they're terrible...but if I read it then I'll have something to write a blog post about!"

I could just feel the awful leaking out of the book as I went to go check it out. I'd make a big deal of blogging how bad it is, but someone else is doing that -- if you haven't already heard about it, go check out Alex Reads Twilight, an absolutely hilarious series of YouTube videos done by Alex Day where he reads Twilight and makes fun of how bad it is. (The rate of posts on this subject on his YouTube Channel is a testament to just how difficult Twilight is to get through when you don't want to read it.)

Maybe the little sister and I will watch the Twilight movies and make fun of them while we're at it. Dunno if that will happen, though... To give you some idea of the movies we enjoy, right now we're in the middle of a cracking PBS series called Colonial House. It's reality TV as only PBS and your history teacher can provide, and it's wonderful!

New Moon is sitting next to me as I write this blog post, so obviously it did make it home, but I realized something about reading and books when I put my library books away.

If you need to rationalize why you're getting the book, chances are it's not a good choice for you at the moment.

Beyond the Law -- A Review of Robin Hood.

2010-05-29T21:34:00.002-05:00

Being the rabid Ridley Scott fan that I am, last week I went to go see his new movie, Robin Hood, at the theatre. (Being the cheapskate that I am, I went in the morning and paid four dollars less than going at night, because really, ten dollars to see a movie is ridiculous.)

Robin Hood isn't Kingdom of Heaven, let's start with that. I know a lot of reviewers, myself included, went in thinking it would be much of the same material, and it wasn't...to a point. Robin Hood takes place about nine years after the events in KoH, close to the end of Richard's wars in France, which come to an unforeseen halt when Richard dies. The main character, Robin Longstride, is an average man in the ranks of Richard's army, pulled to the king's attention when Richard, on a whim, goes through the camp looking for 'an honest man.' Scott set out to retell Robin Hood, and in that he succeeded, but while he was doing it he took a lot of the fun out of the Robin Hood story and inserted a lot of politics.

I think the big draw of Robin Hood is that he's a man that exists outside of political interests, or if he is involved, his intentions are always very clear -- he's King Richard's man, he supports Richard's causes, and he supports the people. Simple and easy to remember. Scott's Hood should be simple, but instead comes off as much more complicated and politically embroiled than a character who up until a half hour into the movie was just a common archer. He expresses himself much better than a commonborn would have. That's kind of a theme in Scott's movies, but Balian somehow got away with it in KoH. On Robin, the high-handed speeches just sound dull.

What's interesting to me about this movie is the extremely mixed response it got throughout the reviewing world. Most people disliked it, and I can see why. Two sources that liked it a little more than the rest, however, interested me. Feministing.com's regular contributor Anna Marie reviewed it with evident enthusiasm, reporting that she loved the strong female lead offered by Cate Blanchett (appropriate sentiments for a feminist blog) and the revolutionary aspects of the idea that you didn't have to be a noble to speak up an affect change in a society.

The other interesting review is from the National Catholic Register, which is the only weekly paper my house now recieves. Thier film critic, Steven Greydanus, the writer of The Decent Films Guide said it was "more watchable in most respects" than Kingdom of Heaven (a statement I'd like to vehemently disagree with) and judged that "the moral issues [were] less muddled, the hero more compelling, the heroine more relevant, and the romance at least relatable, if not especially engaging."

I've read Greydanus' review at least three times now and I still can't decide if the man liked the movie or not -- halfway through the article he lashes out at Scott's conception of the medieval world, saying that "I'm sick of this...grim joyless faux realist medieval world with its constant brutality, hypocrisy and debauchery" but adding at the end that the movie should get some points for portraying its main character as a man capable of piety. I agree that the medieval world does get a bum rap in Hollywood, but after that he kind of lost me with his more compelling hero/ relevant heroine argument.

As much as I love Blanchett and the idea of a feminist Marian, that was one of the elements in the movie that didn't sit well with me. Both critics bring it up as something to be praised in Scott's epic, and I'm going to have to disagree. Kingdom of Heaven had a strong female lead in Princess Sybilla, a woman who was interesting because she was hard to understand at times and remarkably transparent in others. Sybilla made sense in the context of her story -- for part of her life she had been a political pawn and needed to continue being a political pawn (something that went against her personality) if she wanted to see her kingdom survive. Marion, on the other hand, makes less sense. Even if her husband had been gone with Richard for ten years, the idea that she would have become this Amazonian leadership lady in that time didn't seem possible in England circa 1200. Is she more relatable? Yes, more people could probably relate to Marion than they could to Sybilla. That doesn't necessarily mean she belonged in the story. A woman taking up a sword at the end of the film? It doesn't even begin to make sense. The feminist element in Robin Hood contributes just as much to the revisionist view of history that Greydanus (rightfully) accuses Scott of as any of the other wildly inaccurate historical elements in the film.

As I tried to figure out how to write this post, I attempted to find some lesson I could take away from the different ways these different people reviewed this film. Anna watched it as a feminist and found something she liked -- Steven watched it as a Catholic and found it lacking. As for myself, watching the film as both a Catholic and a self-identified feminist as well as a lot of other things, I found my lens as an amateur historian taking more and more of my attention away from the others.

I won't claim that I took note of all the inaccuracies in Robin Hood, and I'll certainly admit to ignoring some of the revisionist elements in Kingdom of Heaven. But both movies inspired me to do more research on the period in question -- I have four books from the library on William Marshall (a small character in Robin Hood) and a growing collection of literature on what life was like in Europe and the Latin East in the 1100s. To me, the idea that a piece of media can be a gateway into a wider world of fact-checking and research is a valuable one, and one that is helping me find the joyful Middle Ages behind Hollywood's "faux-realist medieval world", the real links of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the Christian one, and the real proto-feminist figures in the medieval history, women like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegarden of Bingen and Queen Melisande of Jerusalem.

Overall, I'd recommend avoiding the admission price (however low) at the theater and waiting for the DVD of Robin Hood if you were thinking of going to see it. In the meantime, you'd be welcome to join me in reading "Warriors of God" by James Reston or "Four Queens" by Nancy Goldstone for a more historical look at the the Crusades or women in the middle ages.

And if you must have your ridiculous but fantastic crusades, there's always the other Scott named Walter.

New Books, Author Talks, and Fanfic

2010-05-12T10:41:00.005-05:00

Let me begin this post by saying that I never buy new books, and when I do, I buy paperbacks. I'm a poor college student and both space and hardcovers are expensive. So when I shell out twenty-six dollars to get a hardcover copy of Rick Riordan's book signed by him (in person!!), it's kind of a big deal for a lot of reasons. I was just as excited as all the ten year olds I was sharing the theatre with, and they were really excited. I got there a half-hour early (the doors opened an hour early) and sat reading my new book against the background of the musical gymnastics of the Tivoli Theater organist and the excited murmurings of the nearly 800 people who'd come to listen to what Mr. Riordan had to say. ( I also observed that I was probably the only college student in the audience, so I don't know what that says about me... or about my fellow college students, for that matter.)

I'm fortunate enough to live in a heavily suburban area with at least one indie bookstore, Anderson's Bookshop, within reach. They're wonderful people there, and they really love what they do. They also bring A LOT of authors to come and sign books, and I got lucky -- Rick Riordan was one of them. So I paid my money and bought my book and went to go hear him speak. I guessed from his blog that he's a really laid-back, cool kind of guy, and seeing him in person confirmed that for me. (Truth be told, I wouldn't have minded having this guy for a middle school language arts teacher; the teaching profession has lost a special one there.) He basically book-talked his new book, The Red Pyramid, which I thought was funny, since these kids have already both bought it and dragged their parents out on a school night to let them hear the author speak. They're not the ones that need the book 'sold' to them on why it's a good read. But it was good to hear a well-done book talk.

After his prepared remarks, he took a few questions from the audience, most of which I took notes on if I didn't know the answer already. (Ten-year olds ask some really obvious questions sometimes.)

He says he was inspired to write about Ancient Egypt because that was always popular with his students while he was teaching. "Maybe it's the mummies, maybe it's the pyramids -- I don't know exactly why." It takes him about a year to write a whole story, but he's trying to shorten that to six months now that he's writing both the next two books in the Kane Chronicles and the new Camp Half-Blood Series Heroes of Olympus. The title is always the last thing he writes and the he really made my day by reaffirming something I'm going to share with my writing campers at the end of June.

He said that if there was one thing that he'd recommend to new writers it would be to outline everything that's going to happen in the book before you start writing. That way, he explains, you'll never be stuck on where the story will go next. He talked about how he started writing when he was twelve and there are a lot of stories he never finished, but that's because you're just practicing and you're learning how to write.

A real life example of prewriting! Fantastic! I was really excited for that.

Anyway, I've had a post-it note with a question for Riordan all ready and waiting on my desk since I found out he was speaking at Anderson's -- it was a good question, too, I think. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to ask it to the big group because I think there was a little ageism going on with the microphone lady, but I guess that's what I get for being a college student going to a young adult book signing. The question was this:

Mr. Riordan, on your blog you've made several posts about YouTube videos of tapes of Carter and Sadie Kane that fans have made themselves from the audio clip posted on your website and you say that 'it all must mean something.' I was wondering if you could expand on what you meant by that and what you think of other fan-produced works like fanart and fanfiction based on your work?

Needless to say, I didn't have time to ask all of this in the signing line, so I clipped it down to a very simplistic version of my original question.

Scene.

Me: Mr. Riordan, I have a question. What do you think of fanfiction? [had to add the 'question' marker since I obviously looked old enough not to be the one getting the book signed for myself]

RR: *slightly stressed face, appropriate for a man who's had to sign several hundred books in the space of two hours* Well, you know I can't read any of it, for reasons of copyright and all that, but I don't...I mean...I... I don't like it. It's like someone else trying on your clothes. *gestures with hands as if indicating he is trying to get something slimy and disgusting off them.*

Me: Trying on your clothes. That's a good one. Thanks! *moves along in line and writes this down in notebook*

End Scene.

And it was a good one. In fact, it was a great metaphor. Writing fanfiction and using someone else's characters is exactly like trying on someone else's clothes. I don't think he'd ever gotten that question before (His lack of an immediate answer would seem to suggest this) and I'm glad I asked it for that reason. There are a dozen better ways I might have asked it, whether he was impressed or flattered that children love his characters so much that they want to write adventures of their own for him, but I didn't, and I think that means I got an honest answer.

Does this mean I'm going to take down my PJO fic because I have it from the author himself that he disapproves? Nope. The way I figure, my one lonely PJO fic uses a character Riordan himself used for about a paragraph, and my story uses characters exclusive to PJO for a small fraction of the story. I think it's a fair exchange, more like borrowing a pair of socks from a friend after yours were soaked through than stealing a favorite t-shirt. You return the socks when you're done and thank him for the gesture.

I had a lot of time on the drive home to extend my metaphor, and this is what I came up with.

If writing fanfiction is like trying on someone else's clothes, then isn't writing fanfiction about a dead author's works something like second-hand clothes shopping?

Think about it. Jane Austen's dresses are having the ride of their life right now if that's the case.

Letterpress

2010-05-07T12:11:00.001-05:00

Check Your Flamethrowers at the Door -- a few thoughts on Flaming.

2010-05-07T10:20:00.003-05:00

I know I've been talking a lot about the Percy Jackson people on this blog lately, but it's really interesting watching this community work and evolve. It's like I'm turning into the Jane Goodall of fanfiction. It's kind of scary and kind of cool at the same time.

And lately, I've been thinking a lot about flames.

I've been seeing this kind of notice in story summaries for years, but I haven't started thinking about it until now -- it's the kind of hopeless, feeble attempt at saving face you could only find on the internet. "Plz don't flame! first fic!!!!!" the newbie writers cry plaintively from their summary boxes.

First of all, if you think your story is worth flaming, chances are you might be right, which means that you ought to go back and change it, get a second opinion from someone you trust and whose writing you admire...something else besides putting a note in your summary that might only attract more flamers.

I understand why people put the notes there. They're scared. They're venturing out onto the ice for the first time and they don't want to end up at the bottom of the lake with ten-thousand pounds of icy pressure drowning them in the sentiment that their writing sucks. And after a lot of further thought about this, I realized that not only does flaming hurt the recipient, but in the long run hurts the writer of the flame and the community as well.

A lot of you may be sitting in your desks going "Really now? Flaming doesn't hurt the flamers." But it does. Allow me to explain.

The reasons behind how flaming hurts the recipients is easy enough to understand. It's almost a form of cyberbullying, a senseless barrage into why the story is terrible and, in tandem, why the authors as people are terrible as well. Without face-to-face interaction, critiques against the material become critiques of the author themselves. (And often, flames bite into an author's personal character, asking why they'd be such a terrible person to put this up in the first place.) Flames also hurt recipients because they do nothing to solve the problems that started the flame. If flamers are truly anti-bad writing, they should begin by telling people (personally, not just in a blanket statement on their profile page) what it is they need to fix.

Now, on to the tough sell -- how flaming hurts the flamers.

The best writers (as Nancy Atwell, writer-workshop teacher extraordinaire, tells us in "Writing from the Inside Out") are the self-reflective ones, the ones who in addition to reading extensively THINK about what they're reading, why they like it, and what they can incorporate from that writing style to better their own work. I experienced this firsthand last semester when my Writing Essays professor asked us to read several essays by Annie Dillard (AMAZING!) and incorporate something from her writing that we admired (her sentence structure, her format, etc) into our next essay. Flaming as a practice does nothing to encourage this reflection -- because flamers don't stop to identify problems as well as possible solutions, their own writing doesn't benefit from the give-and-take process of attempting to mentor another writer.

When you attempt to explain what you would do differently, you're mentally problem-solving for something that you yourself might have to do in the future. When writers begin to work collaboratively and mentor each other's work, they gain an increased understanding of what they themselves need to change in order to become better at what they do. I know I've become very mindful of the critiques I give others and make sure that I'm following my own advice when I post my own stories.

Flaming is also hurtful to the flamers for another reason -- by starting blogs like Flamespots, (a collection of the worst PJO fanfics on the web) writers are drawing attention to the terrible examples of writing, which beginning writers see ALL THE TIME. Instead, attention should be given to the exemplary pieces in the collection, which serve as models for newer writers to emulate (like Annie Dillard in the example above.)

Now, I know what the hard-core flamers are thinking -- We haven't got time for all this hold-your-hand-and-talk-you-through-it nonsense! The world's a tough place. Deal with it. And I realize that in some cases, this very well might be true and there may not be much time for mentoring. If that's the case, then go with my mom's Golden Rule --

IF YOU CAN'T FIND ANYTHING NICE TO SAY, DON'T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL.

This works in fanfiction almost as well as it works in life. A lack of reviews says volumes to a new writer. It says "No one likes this enough to take the time to tell me; I need to change something." Just like attention-seeking children, sometimes giving them the cold shoulder is the best thing to change behavior.

In addition to all of this, flaming is hurtful because it doesn't foster a sense of community or networking, only fear. (And as we all know, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering and suffering leads to the Dark Side.) Who's going to want to begin writing if they know their first efforts are going to be knocked over like so many passers-by in a police chase? Heck, even I was scared to post my first PJO fic, and I'm a senior in college! People respond much better to the sentiments of a helping hand up -- "Well, I didn't loooove it, but if you changed this it could be really good -- keep working at it!" than a stomp in the face suggested by "You have got to be kidding. Seriously? Is your conscience clean after you posted this piece of sh*t? It can't be. It just can't." How can you expect the quality of writing to improve if you don't offer any suggestions on where to start?

Flamers only network with other flamers. Constructive Critics network with new writers and become mentors, sounding boards, and beta readers. Mentoring means that you hold yourself to a higher standard because you know someone's looking up to you for advice and direction. (This is also great practice if you want to teach English and/or writing some day like I'm doing this summer, but that's a small side-note.)

Constructive Critics also get emails like this in thier inboxes (received after five lengthy and at points kind of harsh reviews were sent to the same author) "Thanks for your in-depth reviews. Nobody apart from my beta has given me such CC before. I really feel as though I can improve this story with your help!"

That's much better than a flamewar, methinks.

All Systems Go!

2010-04-29T18:55:00.000-05:00

An update on my summer plans. I've been officially rostered on to the schedule of events for Teens at the Glen Ellyn Public Library -- my writing workshop has been given the green light and I'm going to be teaching a (hopefully largish) group of teens how to improve their writing the last week in June and the first three weeks of July!

I don't have words for how excited I am!

I've also got some of my freinds lined up to make some short YouTube videos on what they're now doing as writers in College. I've got a comm major who's also in my book arts class now and one of my other English major friends who is involved in our poetry club and our school newspaper! (By the way, if you're an English major friend of mine and you're reading this, email me to talk about doing one of these videos, too!)

We're winding down to our last week of the semester here at CSB; several of my friends have just returned from London where they were studying abroad. It's hard to believe I've been home from Ireland for a whole semester now -- one of my freinds brought back a a whole lot of Digestives, which I practically lived on last semester, and they really brought me back.

Today I learned two new book bindings, one of which I'm going to be using for my final book project, which is going to be printed saturday and bound sunday. Tomorrow I'm turning in a semester's worth of writing prompts and four finished essays for my Writing Essays class. Sometime between now and next Wednesday I'm writing five lesson plans for a unit I just finished timelining this morning. I had no idea how good it feels to have at least a vague idea of how you're going to fill two and a half weeks of classes. And I have a really awesome final project planned!

There hasn't been a lot of time for free writing during all of this -- I posted my one and only Percy Jackson fic to great acclaim last week and I think it's been nominated for an award. I really hope it wins -- I've never been nominated for an online award before. Work is still progressing bit by bit on my Life of Godfrey piece, and I'm hoping I have some time in the carride on the way home to brainstorm a little bit.

Not Without Ambition -- Summer Plans take shape

2010-04-25T07:26:00.000-05:00

It has been a very productive last two weeks. Since my last blog post, I've curated a book (put all the pages together in the right order, bound and covered the whole thing) typed my last essay for my Writing Essays course, have almost finished my portfolio for Writing Essays, sent a belated birthday package half-way around the world, and helped work a triathalon. I've sent in all my paperwork for one summer job (camp counselor's assist at my local Park District) sent an email asking for another job (summer term rush at the bookstore) and am now planning another caper.

I'm going to try and host a writing workshop this summer.

Yeah, I know, ambitious. I haven't really got any credentials to be doing this kind of thing, but I figure three years as a literature/education student and seven years as a participant in online communities should be to my advantage. Where did I get this crazy idea? Well, the dinner we hold for the English majors every year brings one of our alumni back as a guest speaker, and this year's was a woman who since graduation from Saint Ben's has worked on a children's lit mag, New Moon Girls, become a freelance copy editor and is now working as a young adult librarian.

Basically, she's where I want to be in ten years.

So after this, as well as the extended study of the Percy Jackson fanfiction, I thought it would be really cool to get together a group of beginning fanfic writers and talk to them, face to face, about how to create better stories online. Online critique is some of the worst to write and to read, and most of the time it's the hardest to get anything helpful out of, too. Beginning writers are either good from the get-go or really downhearted that the only thing people are saying about their stories is "This sucks; go do something else for a hobby, you loony." It doesn't have to start like that, but the advice given to these beginning writers is all the same, and it doesn't mean a terrible lot unless someone in real life affirms that yes, this would make the story easier to read or more interesting or what have you.

And I'd like that affirming person to be me. Now I realize I can't get a group of fanfictioneers exclusively, so I've expanded my criteria to beginning writers (6th through 12th graders) of varying ages to impart some lessons I've learned over the years. I began drafting a one day workshop.

After talking to several people (two professors included) it's morphed into a four session seminar. Here are the basic topics we'll be covering at each meeting.

Week One -- I'm a Writer: Who are You?( And what are you writing about my story?) -- introductions, goals, and how to leave good reviews
Week Two -- Before the Pen Hits the Page: Prewriting your Way to Good Product -- timelining, research, narrative decision-making
Week Three -- Creatures of Habit: Developing a Writing Process and a Revision Process
Week Four -- So, What Happens Now? On getting published, online communities to join before that happens, and how to get more help doing what you love

Thoughts, suggestions... strong hints I go get a new hobby? I'm open to anything.

Before The Pen Hits The Page -- Pre-Writing Your Way to Good Product

2010-04-09T07:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday in Pedagogy we began our unit on Writing Instruction, a process that my whole class (all eleven of us) has agreed is nuanced and complicated and definitely intertwined with reading. If you want good writers, it's been decided, you have to make them good readers first, and if you want them to be better readers, you have to get them to reflect on their reading activities by writing. Creating this kind of classroom, with the constant stimulus of new reading material and the constant expectation to have to think about it later, allows for the most development of a student's personal voice and taste when it comes to their own books, which will hopefully encourage them to read more later.

I've been reading voraciously for years. That is why I know what I enjoy reading and what I don't enjoy reading. I have a hard time explaining to people that I put the book down because I don't like the way the author structures sentences. Some people get it; some people don't. It's also why after three years, my mom can read this blog at home and hear my voice coming out of the computer. Constant practice is making it easier to put my narrative voice into type.

The first step of the writing process in the classroom should begin with Pre-Writing, a brainstorming process where the student puts down a lot of thoughts on paper first and then goes back to organize and further distill those thoughts. One process is webbing, where a central idea (the big question of the paper) is placed in the middle and offshoot thoughts are added to form a thought web. Another is questioning, a method where a question is asked by the teacher, the paragraph answer is written down and then four or more questions are asked to further shape your answers and finely tune your paragraph. This second method is a freewrite, where your brainstorm takes place in complete sentences and may form part of your finished work.

And while we were learning all of this, I began thinking about prewriting in fanfiction. The PJO people (I love them dearly, but they are really quite young) are showing more and more stories about "How to Write A Better Fanfic" and it saddens me that pre-writing never seems to show up on their lists.

So I've created some interrogative prewriting questions for fanfic. When I defined Fanfiction for my Linguistics paper (boy, was that a while ago...) I decided this brand of writing comes down to this:

Fanfiction. N., fan(atic), one who admires or follows + fiction, a work of writing not based in fact. A story written by a fan of a particular existing work in which the writer re-examines the work and attempts to answer a question the work has raised. Also the entire body of said works. May also be clipped to 'fanfic.'

Questions in fanfic are things like "What event or series of events was Jack Sparrow talking about when he said 'Clearly, you've never been to Singapore'?" or "What happens to Elizabeth and Darcy AFTER the happily ever after?" The first prewriting question an author should ask themselves is

1. What question in the Narrative am I trying to answer?

I just started a fanfic recently to answer a question I have about the character Godfrey in Kingdom of Heaven -- "What was Godfrey like before he came to the Holy Land?" We'll use that for example purposes here.

The second question is harder for younger writers because we don't teach them to look at both sides of an argument.

2. What possible answers can I find in the Narrative already? Am I creating this story because I don't like those answers?

This question is especially important because we need to see what preconceptions people already bring to our fanfic when they read it. If the book says that Percy and Annabeth end up together, it's going to be harder for you to make the case that Percy should really be with Rachel. You can do it, and you should do it, because fanfiction is meant to be subversive, but know that you're going to be talking to a tough crowd if you do. Come to the fight armed.

If the answer to the second part of that question is "Yes, of course!" you're going to have to work harder to answer some of these other questions. For the Godfrey question, I have to look at what other characters say about him; Tiberias and Baldwin IV both describe him as a friend, Baldwin recounts the episode where Godfrey determines he has leprosy, his brother in the extended edition talks about how his brother took the Cross. In this case, I don't need to answer the second part because I like the answers and I want to reveal more of them. The second part becomes important when creating stories around the premise of an alternate romance than the one the Narrative offers.

3. What answer did I want to find when I was reading?

I'd call this question the 'I could have been chasing ghosts' evaluation. Regardless of what it is we read, we bring to that text a list of assumptions and world views that shape what we read and what we pass over in a text. I'm going to use religion for this question because it's a bigger example (and I can make a pun!) I read the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and relate it to the Eucharist because I'm Catholic and that's what my theology teaches me. Judaic scholars read the same accounts and recognize that Jesus celebrates the Passover wrong because it's their tradition and they're trained to notice that. Catholics pass over the Passover part, and Jews pass over the 'Jesus is trying to be divine here' part of the story. (Passover, pass over...see, there's my pun. I didn't say it was going to be good.)

If we read to look for evidence, we often skip the parts that could form a counterargument. This is bad, because in those counterarguments we could find (or create, as in Question 5) more evidence towards our goal.

4. What answer do I want to create?
Hopefully you already answered this question when you created what question it was you were trying to answer, but if not, now's the time to do so. Recognizing here that you're going against the Narrative is important -- if you are, it means you have to work harder than those canonically leaning fanfic folks to sell your case.

5. What, if anything, can I use from the Narrative to create my case?
Return to the evidence you collected or recalled in question 2 and see if there's anything there you can use. With Godfrey, I realized I could include his brother, his friendship with Tiberias and Baldwin, and his 28 year stint in the Holy Land as building blocks in my narrative. His brother's the reason he leaves in the first place, one of the first people he meets is a sixteen year old Raymond of Tiberias, and the story takes place over a good 28 year chunk of time. I'm also using the image of his house at Ibelin and Godfrey's flashbacks from the beginning of the movie.

6. What additions to the world of the narrative will I have to create in order for this story to work? How or where can I find help creating them?

Since very little is said about Godfrey in KoH, I needed to create his parents, where he was from in France, his hobbies, and perhaps most importantly, his history in love. To do this, since I had little Narrative scaffolding to work on, I turned to my Medieval Life sources about life in Frankish towns and cities during the 1150s, SCA name lists and chivalric code books.

In my Rose ReWrite, I needed to create the domestic sphere within Gondor -- what the women do when they're not looking pretty in the narrative. For help on this, I returned to Tolkien and looked at points in the narrative where women are involved in Rohan and in Gondor as well as researching what life was like in medieval cities and castles. Armed with these facts, I'm working on the less war-like side of life in Gondor during the War of the Ring.

When I was discussing the 'cyberbullying incident' of several weeks ago with my Pedagogy teacher, she seemed to think researching the links between home literacy and school literacy and the links that exist (or don't exist) between the would make a great senior thesis. Why do fanfiction writers shy away from teaching influences online? Why aren't they using tools they learned in school and applying them to their productions outside of school? Do we need to give them more tools they can use outside of the classroom? Is there a way to bring products like fanfiction into the classroom for instructional use?

It would be a fascinating study, I think.

My New Reading List

2010-04-03T22:24:00.000-05:00

Finally! After waiting about two weeks for it, my library's copy of Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian was returned! I read the whole thing in about a day and then (as has become my custom with all the PJO books) I re-read it a second time. Good stuff. I didn't think the pacing was as good as some of Riordan's previous books -- the battle seemed to go on for forever -- but when I got to the end I was satisfied. I'm a little annoyed that he ended it on such a blatant "Yes, I'm writing another series" note, but I want to know more about Camp Half-Blood and the new life it's taking on after Percy's earth-shattering request, so I'm looking forward to the new series no matter what.

Riordan's announced on his blog that his new Egyptian series is beginning in May, which should be pretty awesome and apparently in May he's coming to a town near me for a book tour. I might have to recruit my sister or someone else to go -- I have a question I'd really love to have him answer. Given that he's writing in two mythological universes that are interacting with the present world, does he think that the gods of different mythologies should or could ever interact with each other in his books? Is it possible that, say, Horus and Athena ever get together and discuss pertinent world topics, or Hera and Isis do lunch sometimes?

Anyway. This week's my Easter Break, and in consequence of me being home, I've not only almost finished a PJO fanfic I've had floating around my head for a while, but I've also finished and added two books to my newest reading list:

"So You Liked Percy Jackson: What to Read Next"

I've divided the list into both Young Adult and Adult books, since I've been reading both. I've read some good ones and some so-so ones, but all of them are related to Greek Mythology somehow.

Young Adult Books

Quiver, by Stephanie Spinner.

A gorgeously retold Atalanta tale, sweetened still further by interjections from Artemis and Apollo. Spinner's Atalanta is wonderfully alive and her portrayal of the heavenly twins is quite funny. She's also written Quicksilver, about the messenger god Hermes, which I haven't read yet but can say has gotten great reviews from people who ought to know like, oh, I don't know, the School Library Journal.

Troy and Ithaka, by Adele Geras

I read both of these books when I went through my "Epic Poetry is Awesome" phase in 9th grade. Geras retold both the Iliad and the Odyssey very well, and I'll have to revisit these books again.

Oh My Gods, by Terralynn Childs.

This was one of my so-so books, a novel that uses as it's premise the idea that the descendents of demigods have their own school on a tiny island in Greece where they can get in touch with their godly past and hone their skills. Childs' protagonist was hard to empathize with and the premise was a little thin. At least Riordan's book involved the gods themselves -- Childs' style veers much more into the present.

Inside the Walls of Troy, by Clemence McLaren

Another book from my "Epic Poetry" period, and another winner, this one because it focuses not on the men of the Trojan war, but the women, who are an interesting and exciting bunch all to themselves. I've always had a soft spot for Cassandra, but Adaromanche, Helen, and Hecuba are all important characters as well. I'm still waiting for someone to write the story of Troy told exclusively from the gods' perspective.

The Arkadians, Lloyd Alexander

I remember during one summer reading almost every single book Alexander wrote, and the Arkadians was certainly among them. While I don't recall the exact plot, I remember that all those books were a joy to read.

Adult Books

The War at Troy, by Lindsay Clarke

I just finished reading this today and it was AWESOME. A beautifully worked retelling of what went on during the Trojan war. Clarke takes the interesting vantage point of Phemius, Odysseus's bard, and both telling the godly version of the story (Zeus smote the earth and a wall cracked) along with what we might take as the more modern version (there was an earthquake without any godly intervention and a wall cracked) I also like Clarke's retelling because his version of Helen isn't a floozy who runs off with Paris the first chance she gets, but a woman who's genuinely in love with her husband. I'll definitely have to read his Return from Troy when I get a chance.

The Last of the Amazons, by Steve Pressfield

It takes a guy to write about the all-female warrior society in such a headstrong, bloody manner, and I found myself becoming bored by the page-long bloodbaths. Pressfield did do a nice job delving deeper into the Amazonian culture (like all misunderstood 'savage' civilizations, they have another name for themselves, tal Kyrte, the Free) and I enjoyed reading from the different vantage points throughout the tale. Pressfield's also written novels about Alexander the Great and the Battle of Thermopylae, as well as more modern epic figures like Erwin Rommel.

Mary Renault wrote several fantastic books about Age-of-Heros Greece, including The King Must Die, The Last of the Wine, and The Bull from the Sea.

The Penelopia, by Jane Rawlings

This is an interesting offering, the continuation of the Odyssey centering around Penelope and told in epic verse. It was a bit boring at parts, but definitely did a lot to flush out the role of women in and around the time of Troy using the male-dominated epic style. Not to be confused with a similarly titled book by Margaret Atwood.

The Next Reason I Should Become a Librarian

2010-03-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

Has it really been ten days since my last post? Sheesh. What kind of a sad excuse for a blogger am I?

As is the case with most huge gaps between posts, real life was giving me the short end of the stick when it came to having too much to do and not enough time to do it with. These last two weeks in addition to having to prep for my usual four classes, I had to carve out three hours everyday for teacher observation and find time to print and correct forty copies of my Book Arts project. Well, actually, forty copies of one side of my book arts project -- I have to go in next week and print the OTHER side of the sheet now. So that's where all my time's been going. No time for writing, no time for reviewing, and a smidge of time for reading before I went to bed at night. But them's the breaks, right? And I'll graduate in four years, which is fine and dandy because I don't want any more debt.

Teaching observation these past two weeks has been interesting, to say the least. For three hours every day I get to hang out and observe some seventh and eighth graders at a local junior high. I had conditioned myself to fear these two weeks, thinking those crazy preteens and their raging hormones and their ridiculous mood swings would get the most of me.

Truth be told, I'm having a lot of fun.

Seventh graders are fun because sometimes they still remember how to be kids. Give them an art project and they're happy. Ask them to read and eventually everyone will read. They love to tell you things about thier lives they don't think you already know (I got a lecture on how Facebook works after I had already said I have a Facebook) and they enjoy laughing. Some of them have learned already to hate school, but some of them -- some of them! -- are still out to learn. Last week we worked on poetic language, in the form of metaphors and similies, and I was pleased as punch to hear a few students describe school not as prison (although it was mentioned about four times) but as a party, a jungle, and a picnic. (Alliteration was one of the lessons I wasn't there for.)

On Friday I had planned to expose the reluctant reader I've picked out for a case study I have to conduct to ten books I thought she might enjoy. The week before I'd given her a reading interest survey and asked her about what she already enjoys reading (Twilight) her favorite movies (Twilight, John Tucker Must Die) and her hobbies (none)

Using this smidgen of information (and what I'd already observed about her) I found ten books I thought she might enjoy -- Books with strong, spunky female leads, books about vampires (all vetted by me to be better than Twilight, which, by the way, only has a forth grade reading level and a ninth to twelfth grade interest -- yikes!) and books with a healthy dose of comedy in them. At the end of class on Friday I tried to speak to her about why these books are awesome, using the 'book talk' format. It's a bit like pitching a new product to a consumer base, a commercial for the book, if you will. Well, my reader didn't listen to me, but five other people in the class did, so you know what? I call that a success. Some of them wrote titles down, some of them agreed that the books I had brought were good. I had gone home on Monday feeling like a failure. On Friday I felt like a hero. The Great Momapedia, savior of reading everywhere.

The mental conversation I had afterwards is one I've had with myself a few times this year -- I might not be good at this teaching stuff, but I am really good at being a librarian. I give a version of book talks every friday night when someone comes in without a movie and I find five or six to pitch to them. I love that part of my job.

And let's face it, I love to talk about books.

Ethics and the Internet

2010-03-19T18:14:00.000-05:00

Several studies have come out lately analyzing and examining the effect the Internet is having on our ethics, morality, and willingness to voice opinions. The case is being made that the Internet allows us to say things that we wouldn't normally say in public.

Today I experienced just that -- a random writer, whose work I'd never reviewed , set me a rather snarky PM chastising me (chastising is a soft word -- she reamed me out) for leaving what I thought was a friendly reminder review on someone's fic saying "I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but this shouldn't be on this site; it's listed in the rules as something you're not supposed to post here and I'm reminding you because I want to be nice instead of just reporting you." (I'm not the only one who noted this, either.)

This writer (who did not review the story in question herself) messaged me saying I was an "uptight asshole" for giving this review, no one gives a shit and I should "shut the hell up about it" because "a third of the fics on ff.net are chat-style stories anyway" and "some of them are really good."

(I have yet to read a chat style story that was any good, but I digress.)

I was going to PM the writer and say that I was sorry she thought that way but I thought I was doing something nice by reminding the author instead of just reporting her (as someone had already done on another story, leaving the review "Terribly OOC and against the rules. Reported for using a text format.") At least I gave the first writer the benefit of explaining which rule she was breaking. And I used a complete sentence to do it, too. Interestingly enough, the second author had disabled private messaging.

So I did the next best thing possible.

I wrote a really nice, really constructive-criticism filled review to her story. Her only story. The one where she nicely asked for constructive criticism and said she'd ignore flames. You tell me if this sounds like an uptight asshole. Because if it does, I have a problem; I've been reviewing like this for YEARS.

I don't know that I've ever read anything where a little voice inside someone's head has a name. I like the concept. I also like the little voice, who has a bit of a down-home personality I feel I could get along very well with. I hope you keep her in the story. I also like that you didn't directly come out and say who the immortal parent of your original character is -- that's a great first step towards not writing a Mary-Sue. Using all your clues (like the hissing hair and actually threatening her hairdo to behave) was a great way to introduce that in a way that shows rather than tells.

I'm not sure how much I like using the underlining as a way to denote when Queen is talking; for me it's a little distracting, but maybe that's just me. Apart from that, there's only a few punctuation errors (omitted commas in some places) and a randomly capitalized word (Jacket, in the last paragraph) keeping this from being a really solid beginning to what I hope will be a great story. My only other comment (and you can take this any way you like) is that I prefer my beginnings to be a little longer to give the reader just a little bit more of an idea where the story might be headed.

For a first try, this is very good, and I really am looking forward to see where you take this. (This is also my attempt at trying to prove that I am not, as you termed it, uptight.) Wherever you do take this, I'm sure it will be a good place. Best of luck, and keep up the high quality!

One Big Fishbowl

2010-03-12T08:15:00.000-06:00

When teachers need some kind of observable assessment process to see if their students are learning (or have learned) something, we are told we can facilitate the type of discussion known as The Fishbowl, a technique where a small group sits in the midst of a larger group and are told to hold thier own discussion sans teacher guidance or outside class imput. The first two minutes of such a technique are agony for the students who haven't done their homework, as everyone is now watching them fail, which in my mind makes this a very strong motivator.

I've come to realize that my subscription to the "New Stories" thread in the Percy Jackson fandom on ff.net is exactly like me being on the outside of the fishbowl circle looking in.

This story is the third or fourth that I've come across there and it's fascinating to read. I say it's interesting because it's not a story at all, which means that as a violation of site rules that link will probably be broken soon. Rather, it's an open letter to members of the community who are behaving in an anti-community building way (flamers, writers of less than quality fanfic.)

After I discussed the question posed in my last post with a friend of mine, also an education student interested in young adult literature-- (I'm wondering if this narrow-mindness with the Canon is due to the relative youth of the fandom itself or the relative youth of the fans themselves) -- we decided that the PJO participants' adherance to Canon comes from a lack of confidence in thier own creative abilities due to their relative newness to the process of writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community. Harry Potter, being a fandom that recieved a lot of traffic both from younger readers as well as older ones who had grown up with the series (like myself,) produces a different milieu of fanfiction because of the wide spectrum of ages and the length of time the participents have had to grow into the fandom and the writing process.

When in the case of PJO you have such a concentrated body (over 4000 fics) of young, inexperienced writers, it makes sense that from that group there will emerge several slightly more experienced writers who serve as flamers, reviewers who never have anything nice to say but always refrain from saying nothing. I think this happens when a fandom experiences a large growth spurt -- the 'old growth' writers in fandoms like LOTR (which got new life after the movies came out) become resentful of both the movies and the writers inspired by them who don't love the same fandom for the same reasons and so turn to flaming.

The most common response to flamers by young authors like this is to post passionate pleas asking them to stop or refrain from commenting in the first place. It's an ineffective tactic at best -- flamers pick the worst of the worst fanfics, usually the writers who are just starting out, and bully thier tenuous hold on their new craft into a complete lack of confidence. Asking them to stop won't do anything. (I got lucky in my beginning years as a writer -- I was adopted by a wonderful group of older writers who gave me confidence when I did get hurtful reviews, and...well, I never got many very hurtful reviews.)

This writer, however, takes a remarkably adept approach. In the first part of her essay (that's what we'll call it; diatribe's too strong a word) she speaks to people who flame, but in the second part, she addresses the authors themselves, saying this is a two way street and if they are getting flamed, they have only themselves to blame. I don't know of any beginning writers who have taken that approach before, and I must commend this young person on being so open to the idea that the problem of flames is two sided -- I created something you didn't like, but you didn't give me the help I wanted to make it better. She (or he) offers little in the way of specific improvement strategies, which in this fandom can usually start with "Find someone to teach you how to punctuate your sentences, and learn what a run-on sentence is and how not to write one." Nevertheless, a good effort.

Her/His style is very elementary, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint with a lot of hopeless-to-follow mess in between coherant points (a style I believe might come from watching cartoons; it bears some resemblence) but her/his intent is admirable. A little beta polishing and a better place to post this would do wonders.

At the very least, it's teaching this writer-teacher once more that observing what your students produce outside of class may be the very best way to direct your instruction inside of class.

Grammar, here we come.

Percy Jackson, Time Thief

2010-03-07T14:42:00.006-06:00

Friends, I've been to the land of Young Adult Literature, and I've come back bearing wonderful treasures. Behold, a Percy Jackson addiction!

There aren't too many young adult books I hound my librarians for. Percy has become an exception. I read the first book in the five part series two or three years ago and remember not being terribly impressed -- I didn't like the main character, the language was simple...

Just me being an elitist jerk of a reader again, in other words.

After news that the movie was going to be starring two of my favorite leading men:

I gave the books another try. I wasn't disappointed this time. I went with a totally different approach and a drastically different set of expectations, wanting a young adult book that might be appropriate for reluctant readers and might also be great for a unit on the greek gods and perhaps mythology in general, and I found all I wanted. Percy was nicely snarky and pre-teen and perfect for any students I might have who deal with ADHD. In my true fashion, I stalked the library and devoured the first three books in a matter of a week and a half. Now I'm waiting for returns on books four and five and I'm still excited.

To make all this age-unappropriate fangirling even worse, I carved out part of my Monday afternoon two weeks ago to go and see the movie. Sean Bean and Kevin McKidd aside, I was more than a little disappointed. So much of the material that I had really enjoyed in the books wasn't there. I realize that sometimes film has to cut material to keep time manageable. Observe Lord of the Rings. But re-writing the whole plot so you don't have to cast someone as Ares, introducing some teen romance and topping it all off with lamentably poor fight quality? Poor show, Chris Columbus, poor show. My movie-going buddy Mal and I enjoyed ourselves, though, because we hadn't gone to the movies to see a top-quality, oscar winning film; we'd gone to see a tween movie. That's exactly what we got. (We also got the whole theatre to ourselves -- BONUS!) Mal hadn't read the books, so she didn't have anything to be disappointed about. (She has also been woken up to the wonderful realization that Kevin McKidd is VERY good looking, so there were no complaints on the car ride home about that.)

After all this, I've also starting following Rick Riordan's blog, and I have to say, he sounds like a wonderfully approachable fellow. He's in the middle of writing another Percy-Jackson universe book and another series, based in Egyptian Mythology, is coming out this year. I read the first chapter and I'm not going to deny that I'm excited.

Riordan's PJO universe has sparked a few fanfic ideas, one of which I've already started playing with about a semi-major Greek deity he left out of his universe, the sea-goddess (and wife of Posiedon!) Amphitrite, and per my usual, I've begun following the incoming stream of fanfic on FF.net to get a handle on what kind of audience exists out there for this kind of thing.

Friends, that audience is big, it's bad, and it's all under the age of fifteen and incapable of writing anything other than Mary-Sues. It's scary and exciting at the same time -- I want to know what happens when someone introduces something that's not quite Canon (and hopefully better written) into the fandom pool. (All these Mary-Sues also make me want to send in Thursday Next and some Reality Rounds, but that's a fanfic for another time.)

On the subject of Canon, one of the other things I've noticed about Percy Jackson's fans is that unlike some other genres of young adult literature (Harry Potter comes to mind) PJO people are VERY concerned about adhering to Canon. We're talking "almost to the point of insanity" concerned. If you don't ship Percy-Annabeth, they don't want you there, period. I've read the books, and just as in Harry Potter, I know that a case for Percy being romantically involved with any number of other female characters could be made and written very well. I'm wondering if this narrow-mindness with the Canon is due to the relative youth of the fandom itself or the relative youth of the fans themselves. More observations might have to be conducted for me to find out.

Anyway, that's all that's new from the Wordsmithy.

A Different Kind of Book Art

2010-02-26T08:57:00.004-06:00

Being the week before spring break, today’s Monday to Friday was pretty hairy-scary, as the saying around here goes. People had too much homework and not enough time to do it, I had to theoretically be in three places at once on Thursday night (although I’m glad I was where I was at the end of the night) and everyone’s freaking out about how we’re going to get through the projects due on the flipside of break.

Not a lot of time for the blogging, in other words.

But now it’s Friday morning, I haven’t got to be anywhere for an hour and then all I have to do is finish my essay for Writing essays on my revelation on the nature of life, the universe, or anything and I’ve got two days before I go on retreat at the Monastery here at Saint Ben’s.

Ah, blog, how I have missed you.

I got to participate in two cultural activities this week I’d love to share with you, but I think I’ll save the first one for tomorrow morning. On Monday night I went to the movie theatre and saw Percy Jackson and Olympians: The Lightning Thief with a good friend of mine, and on Wednesday, I ate lunch with Buzz Spector, a reknowned book artist, art critic, and currently the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Percy needs a whole other post – Buzz I can talk about here.

If you EVER get a chance to see this man’s work or hear him speak at an event, GO. He is one of the most insightful, depth-filled and honestly funny men I think I’ve ever met. And he’s succinct, too. I honor and respect people who can be succinct without trying. He doesn’t look like much when he walks into a room, kind of a mad scientist type with curly gray hair that’s going everywhere and anywhere, but get him talking and it is a thing awesome to behold.

Buzz (I’m friends with him on facebook, I think I can call him Buzz; Mr. Spector sounds a little strange) is, as I mentioned, a book artist. He does things with books. Yes, that could sound dirty, but he also writes about how the rest of us do things with books as well – in his article “Going Over The Books” re-published from the magazine Dialogue in his collection of essays The Bookmaker’s Desire, he talks about how books, unlike any other artwork, are a medium consumed when we are at our most vulnerable –

“The space of reading is intimate; only the beloved’s body comes closer to that
of the reader than the book, held in the hands, resting on the chest, or nestled
in the lap…we dress up and go out to look at art. Undressed, in bed, we read.”

Buzz also addresses the physical presence of the book as an erotic thing – open a book to the middle pages and set it out on a table. Do the spread pages remind us perhaps of spread legs? Do we not say after we have read a book that we “know” it?

I thought it was a beautiful image. The rest of my book arts class was a little wierded out by that one.

In our tour of the gallery exhibition Spreading The Word (which I had to help set up in exchange for good grace to be somewhere else other than the opening on Thursday) Buzz brought up the idea of surplus meaning when we read a book, and in order to explain this, I think we have to expand on the word 'book.'

BOOK in the book arts sense can, I think, be broken down into three elements. First we have Book as Concept, the ideas we get when we think of the word Book. A repository for knowledge, a way to communicate experience. Historically and conceptually, a scroll is a book, just not one we recognize. Book artists explore these ideas when they create books that at the end of their process don’t look like the second concept at all, Book as Object. This category intersects with element One a little bit -- Covers, pages, spine, words maybe, pictures maybe, story maybe, a particular book, paperback, hardback, no back at all. And third, we have Book as Text. Now that Kindle is removing the physicality of covers and paper pages, reading a book is coming back to reading text in a different vehicle. When we ‘discuss the text’ in English class, we don’t care about whether your copy is hardback or paperback – as long as it’s not abridged and you have THE TEXT, we’re fine.

The surplus meaning that Buzz was talking about comes when the book as text and the book as object work together to convey meaning. A less obscure example than the one Buzz gave us is Harry Potter’s textbook in Prisoner of Azkaban, the Monster Book of Monsters, a book about magical creatures that is itself a creature – attempting to pacify the book enough to read it is also to experience in the anger and power of the creatures portrayed in the book.

One of Buzz’s concepts as an artist is altering books – he tears out pages, removes text, adds elements like spindles to the middle of books. He feels bad about this process sometimes, as he grew up in a family of committed bibliophiles and is technically taking apart someone else’s piece of art. “The book came to me a finished product,” he says, “and I have unfinished it, yet when it leaves my hands as an artwork it is once again finished.” (On a side note, this reminded me of the quote from DUNE – “Arrakis practices the attitude of the knife – chopping off that which is incomplete and saying ‘It is complete because it ended here.”)

As I look at Spector’s work online, I can’t help drawing some connections between the art of physically altering the book and the less physical process of fanfiction and the way it alters the way we experience books. Can’t we say that attempting to make two characters love each other in a non-canonical way is the same thing as putting a knife through the text in an attempt to create “space”?

I’m not saying all fanfiction rips out pages and gouges prose. Certainly some of mine does. The Rose re-write, for instance, is akin to taking a tractor-trailer through Tolkien’s original concept and brutally running it down in the middle of the road, a blatant disrespect in some eyes. But some of it is a different type of book art, the kind that gently pries apart the spine of the book and gently attempts to wedge another page, another character, another scene inside, something that expands the experience of the text at the same time it alters it.

Fanfiction is also different from book art in another way – it’s far more accessible on the internet than most galleried art works. But does it loose something as Text when we don’t have the physically comforting prescence of the Book-Object to find it in? Is there a way to incorporate fanfiction as part of a Book-Object-as-Art-Experience?

An interesting thought.

Eine Kleine Schneemuisk -- A Little Bit of Snow Music.

2010-02-16T12:29:00.005-06:00

I could write an actual blog post this week about my writing essays paper on relationships, which I am turning in today after what I think was a successful workshop and edit. I could talk about the unwilling and struggling readers we've been discussing in Pedagogy. I could talk about my book arts project and the typographer Eric Gill.

All of these involve work and some semblence of brain function. Instead, I'm going to give you a poem. I wrote it while I was at work the other day staring out the window to our courtyard and watching the drifting snow.

I think, if I stare out this window long enough

out into the whiteness,

out into the drifting snow

I'll see an angel there.

The wind wraps the snow around,

folds it up like origami and makes it slide around curves

that aren't there,

sewing up the seams on this sheet

with a needle made out of the icicles

hanging from the house eaves.

I think they're angel curves

that make the body being wrapped around,

the celestial being getting dressed for the day in another snow-white garment.

So maybe, if I stare long enough out of this window,

I'll catch a glimpse of what has never been before seen by man or woman --

One of God's elect in their underthings,

Another form to be caressed

Another body made cold by wind
and warm by love.

When Worlds Collide

2010-02-12T08:24:00.005-06:00

In string theory, the universe is given as being composed on a gigantic membrane, a large flat surface that ripples, flows, and in some cases, runs into other membranes like it, causing the universes (yes, in string theory there are multiple universes) to collide. If you watch Fringe, you know that funky things happen when universes collide, like what happened in last week's episode, Jacksonville.

Yeah, I know, string theory. Something you probably thought would never be mentioned on this blog. But it's interesting stuff, though, really. If you are looking for a book, I recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Good stuff.

Back out in the real world, we don't necessarily have worlds colliding on a quantum level, but I at least have my internet life and my real life colliding quite a bit this week over the matter of reviews.

Normally I'm pretty open about the fact that I lead this 'other life' on the internet. I write a blog that I love to tell everyone about. I use Facebook. I Skype. I write a lot of fanfiction. And, perhaps more importantly about the fanfiction, I review other people's stuff. Not as much anymore as I probably should in order to remain an active and participating member of my community, but enough. And I start running into trouble when people from my real life outside the internet tell me they'd like me to read their stories and review them.

Okay, that's not the troubling part. The troubling part is when I read them and I don't like them.

It's one thing to get a review from someone you don't know saying "I didn't like this for reasons A, B, and C listed below" and another thing entirely when you get a review from someone you DO know saying "I don't like your story for reasons A, B, and C listed below." When someone asks you to read something in person you feel obligated to like it and say nice things.

Especially troubling is when the person you're reviewing for is older than you (so theoretically you should be defering to them in matters of style and expierience) and you have more experience in the online community. I've been writing (and publishing, the publishing-and-exposing-for-critique part is important) online for six years -- the person in question has been writing and publishing online, as far as I can tell, for two.

Let me explain for the fanfiction laypeople in the audience-- In the online community, because many participants lack what in the real world might be called credentials to show that they're experinced in the field and because the age of the participants ranges across such a wide continuum, legitimacy is defered to those members of the community who have been participating the longest. I've been writing for six years. I have well over three hundred reviews on those stories, with several of them having a chapter to review ratio of 1 to 20. Chapter to review ratios mean that not only have a lot of people read it, but a lot of people have liked it enough to review. It's one thing to have a hundred chapters and six hundred reviews -- that's six reviews a chapter. Nothing special. It's another thing to have twelve chapters and 150 reviews. That's twelve reviews a chapter, a much more respectable number. The LOTR rewrite is averaging seven or eight reviews a chapter, not surprising given that the fandom is large and the original population has moved on to writing and reviewing other things.

Ergo, six years of writing fanfic and review ratios like that give me...well, I don't know, something like a bachelor's degree, maybe even a master's degree equivalent in fanfiction. At least that's what I like to think of it as.

And so we're at a bit of an impass. I'm supposed to defer to her in real life, but in online life, she should be defering to me. Meaning it's going to be hard for her to take my critique and it's going to be hard for me to give it. I don't want to write a long and disinterested review because for reasons of online etiquette no one gives those disinterested reviews and for reasons of proximity I don't want to tell her flat out that I didn't like it because then she can come up to me in person and say "Why?"

I'm also having the same problem not with fanfiction but with editing and workshopping we're supposed to be doing for my Writing Essays course. This week we turned in copies of our essays to our workshop groups and this afternoon we'll be getting together to discuss revisions. There are three other people in my group.

I had no problem finishing and editing two of the essays.

The third was a disaster. Okay, maybe I'm overstating a little bit. The first two were funny, relatable. The third was...an essay. We had a topic, and Essayist Number Three wrote about his topic. It was neither funny nor engaging nor even very well written. It was words on a page, and they weren't even cleverly placed. And I don't know how I'm going to tell him that in workshop today after I'm in raptures about the other two essays.

Anyway, we'll report back this afternoon and tell you how it went. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to type up my notes to my online/real-life freind and see how rocky that road gets. Maybe worlds colliding won't have to be a diaster after all.

Under a Snow-Tipped Maple tree, the Village Printshop stands...

2010-02-09T10:03:00.009-06:00

Say, that title line ain't half bad.

Writing news has been a little thin on the ground lately. I thought I’d maybe post one of the essays I’ve had to write for Writing Essays, but as those are neither indicative of a great breakthrough of any kind nor indeed very good, I felt I’d be shortchanging you. So I guess I’ll talk about my book arts project, which is to illustrate a fable, as some of you already know. I’ve chosen a rather obscure one from the writings of a Jewish author named Berechiah ben Natronai, ha-Nakdan. Task one – find and adapt fable. Done!

A dove saw flax being sown in a field, flew to the rest of the birds and said "Sisters, please come and eat the flax seed with me. If we do not eat it now, the flax will grow tall and the farmer will use it to make nets to trap us in." But the other birds ignored her, saying, "We have already eaten one meal today -- we do not need another."

However, the other doves listened, went to the field, and ate the flax, though they were not numbered enough to eat it all. When the time came after the harvesting, the doves stayed inside while the rest of the birds were snared in the nets the farmer had made from the flax.

Be careful whose counsel you discredit today -- it may be of more use to you tomorrow.

Task two is slightly harder – using the resources at our disposal at the Hill Manuscript Museum and library (HMML or Himmel, as it’s pronounced here on campus), find a 19th or 20th book artist (lithographer, typographer, engraver, fine press printer, etc) and emulate their style to illustrate your fable. I’ve chosen Eric Gill, the guy responsible for Gill Sans:

Perpetua:

And the Golden Cockerel Bible, which is the example I’m choosing to base my fable illustrations on. I actually got to handle one of these bibles, which, according to the Christie’s website, has a going auction value of a little over eight thousand pounds, or sixteen thousand dollars.

And I got to hold one.

I don't get to say this often without sounding like crazy, but I love the HMML.

Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So this is what the mock-up looks like right now, with Gill's characteristic 'inhabited capital' filled with my sower. That's the little guy underneath. I like him a lot. I think his name is Ezra. Or Schmul. Something Hebraic and nifty.

So that's my life at the moment. Lots of books, lots of engravings, lots of bad sketches, lots of printing and typesetting. Hey, a girl's got to do something with a foot and a half of snow on the ground.

Warning, This Content May Not Be Suitable for Young Adults

2010-02-01T21:07:00.005-06:00

Yeah, I put that as my title in a joking sort of way, but I'm actually serious. Some of this content may not be appropriate for young adults. I'd hide it behind a cut or something like you can do on LiveJournal, but Blogger has its limitations, and that's one of them.

So I'll write it again in LARGE RED LETTERS.

SOME OF THE ISSUES ADDRESSED IN THIS BLOGPOST MAY NOT QUALIFY FOR A PG13 RATING.

Okay, best I can do. Anyway. It's my job both as an academic and as a member of the fanfiction writing community who takes her appropriative art form kind of seriously (as seriously as you can take fanfic, anyway) to question why my community does the things they do and what that says about its component members. You may remember my post on marginality a few days back.

No sooner had I written about why fanfiction is often used to involve or emphasize overlooked populations when this little gem crossed my LJ flist. (A flist, for those of you not familiar with the term, is a portmanteau of freind-list)

chichuri (chichuri) wrote in oliviaandpeter
Entry tags:fic
Fic: A Minor Adjustment (Olivia/Peter)
Fandom: Fringe
Characters/Pairing: Olivia, Peter, Olivia/Peter, male Olivia/Peter
Word Count: 3105 Rating: R
Summary: Olivia runs afoul of a pathogen that changes her from female
to male.
Warnings: Smut, some swearing.
Spoilers: Through Season 2.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fringe or its characters.
Author's Note: Written for Porn Battle IX.
Prompts used: genderswap, secret.

Given the reactions of the characters involved, this story should either be categorized as crackfic or as evidence that the Fringe team has become way too jaded. About a ton of thanks go to crazylittleelf , muselives , alamo_girl80 , and vagajammer for enabling me; without them this story never would have been finished.

Okay, so now you all know that yes, I follow the TV show FRINGE enough that I'm part of a group on LJ that ships Olivia/Peter (because come on, after last episode we all know even Walter ships O/P) and you also know that let's face it: fanfiction writers write some CRAZY shit. This is otherwise known as crackfic or crack!fic, i.e., writing you would do if you were on crack. Additionally, you also may have figured out that I'm crazy and liberal enough to give this fic half a chance. I only got about half-way through because I am not a slash shipper and as much as I support the gay rights movement, I don't want to hear about gay sex. Sorry. I have issues with heterosexual couples kissing in public, too, though, so I don't know what that says about me.

Anyway. The mere existence of things like this brings to my mind a lot of questions about fanfiction and the crazy people who propagate it. Olivia and Peter as a m/f pairing is something that is a completely and totally viable plot option within the premise of the show. As I've already mentioned, we even have a canon character rooting for the Olivia/ Peter ship to sail. So why go through the trouble of making Olivia turn male for the purposes of a story? Fringe is one fandom where, oddly enough, things like that might actually happen.

The obvious answer is that some teen girls (and some not so teen girls, for that matter) really like guy on guy sex. Don't ask me why, I'm not one of them. The more subtle and slightly less obvious answer is that fanfiction has always been a way to question the standards of heteronormative society (big word that i'm sure my Human Relations prof would be proud of me using) and this is one more way to do it, by physically changing the gender boundaries already placed on the characters to allow a heteronormative pairing (Olivia and Peter) to be made into something that can question the norm (Oliver and Peter.) Catherine Tosenberger in her 2008 article for Children's Literature magazine entitled "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction" brings in the work of several other authors on why slash is prevelent, saying

"It is unsurprising that most fandom scholar-ship presents slash as a potential
site for women to resist the dominant ideologies of patriarchal, heteronormative
culture. [Constance] Penley draws upon the work of Joanna Russ, as well as that of Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, and discusses slash as a subversive act, wherein women can articulate a fantasy of equality between romantic partners that is difficult to achieve in heterosexual relationships (see "Brownian" 155–57, and
NASA/TREK 127–30)."

Never thought about questioning the heterosexual norm for reasons of equality, but hey, I guess it makes sense. (The rest of this article, by the way, is really interesting, and if you can get to an academic library that can get you an online copy through Project Muse or something, read the rest of it.) Tosenberger goes on to talk in the rest of her article about why Harry Potter fanfiction in particular is a great playground for authors intent on exploring thier identity through fanfiction, gender or otherwise, which is something that I've already explored in other writings.

In the course of my wanderings to make something substantial out of this find I discovered two things. One is the existence a term I'd come across before but never known the meaning of -- acafan. Tosenbeger identified herself at the end of her article as someone who participates in online fandom; like all statements of this nature, I wanted to find out more. A search of her name lead me to 'acafan'. The term can be hyphenated (aca-fan) and appears most significantly in the title of Henry Jenkins' Blog "Confessions of an Aca-Fan." Henry Jenkins, whose work was only some of the source material I used for my fanfiction paper, is an academic at USC currently teaching a course on participatory culture, and the term he uses in his blog title comes from the abbreviated term 'academic fan' an academic who both identifies themself as a member of the online participatory culture community (as either a contributor or observer) and a mainstream academic involved with researching appropriatly mainstream things. (Or teaching about non-mainstream things, as Jenkins' case may be.)

Does this make me an acafan? I consider myself academic, and I consider much of the fanfiction writing I do now to be based in an academically sourced ethos (observe the five books I checked out today on medieval poetry and courtly love for research on where to begin an interesting cultural exercise I'm inserting into the middle of my LOTR fanfic reboot.)

The other discovery (more of a pet peeve, actually) is why my fanfiction, as a perpetuation of the heteronormative discourse, isn't worthy of scholarly articles. Can't I explore my sexuality too and have people write about it? I know that's what I used fanfiction for in middle and high school. It's something I'm revisiting as I revisit this LOTR story that occupied most of my time as a fanfic writer then, too. Two massive (and may I say for the fifteen year old version of me, very racy) sex scenes? Probably not going to be in this version. At least the first one isn't. The second one is going to be toned down on account of a lot of things, not the least of which is me paying more attention to the ROTK timeline.

So that's my two cents worth of research that I'm not getting a grade for. Like so much other research in my life at the moment, unfortunately. But hey, as my pedagogy class is teaching me, the self-motivated learning is the kind you get the most from, so maybe this blog thing might be beneficial after all...

Well, It Ain't Hot, But It's Off a Press...

2010-01-27T21:59:00.006-06:00

Friends, I've been to the land of letterpress printing, and I have to say, it's pretty awesome. For once in my life, I am intensely conscious of not only the amount of work that used to go into printing anything but also the feeling of power you get when you run the press over a matrix full of type that you set and inked yourself and pull a sheet of paper out that has your work all over it in nice, sticky black ink.

It is a process full of love, and it's hard. Our first project for Art of the Printed Book wasn't actually a book at all, but rather a poster. A protest poster, to be precise. Here's mine.

Okay, I'm not protesting anything. Problem is, I couldn't find a pithy way to protest something using only a few words. One of the other things that letterpress printing teaches you is how to conserve your words -- you can't print your message if you haven't got enough letters, and wood type, the type I've used for this poster, is very expensive, so we don't have a lot of it. I was originally going to do "Don't Talk To Me About Your Sparkly Vampires" but we didn't have enough type, so I went with an homage to one of my favorite movies instead.

Dead Poets Society for the win! I had to keep explaining the poster to people, but I guess that just means more people need to watch DPS. Anyway, this project is part of ongoing events here at CSB relating to the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who in 1968 walked into the draft office of Catonsville, Maryland and, taking draft records out of the office, staged a 'peaceful protest' by burning the draft records with homemade napalm. I guess someone said they wanted a revolution.

As a further development of this project in Book Arts, our professor brought in Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a man very widely known in the letterpress world and quite a character in his own right. Go visit his website and buy a poster -- I'm a fan of this one. His slogan -- Put the message in the hands of the people. He does that but printing posters of his own like the one above, and he discusses topics from books to blackness and back again. Pretty awesome, in-your-face kind of guy. So as part of our workshop, we set up and printed a poster evoking the character of 60s protests but still relevant today. Here's what we came up with:

Pretty cool, yeah? Anyway, Writing Essays was canceled today, so, having a whole afternoon free, I went to the print studio and worked on another poster of my own. And I took my camera to document a little bit.

Wood type before I cleaned the ink off from the first run.

Our inking area, where I can mix color and apply ink to the brayers (those roller type things in the middle of the picture.)

Letterpress filled with BOLD and lots of furniture (the spacing material we use to make sure the type doesn't shift when we run the press over it.)

Finished product. The text at the bottom is 48 pt. Caslon Bold metal typeface and 62 pt. Caslon bold metal typeface. In case you were, you know, wondering or anything. Total prep, production, and cleaning time? Four hours.

And that's what I came up with. I had to do two runs through the press because that B in Be and Bold? Same B. Limits of letterpress again. And please don't mention the lack of 's' in Catonsville -- I had an s and second-guessed myself after my prof misspelled it on her class handouts. Typo aside, I'm actually kind of proud of it -- incorporates the Catholic social thought involved, draws the situation into the present, might prompt people to do a little more digging into who the Catonsville Nine were. And it's mostly legible from a distance.

My next out-of-class letterpress project? I'm shooting for calling cards.

Authors on Film

2010-01-26T08:58:00.005-06:00

Move over, Roland Barthes, the author ain't dead yet. At least, that's what Hollywood would like us to think. No less than four biopics concerning some of our favorite pen-and-ink men and women are slated to come out in the next few years -- Paul Giametti is playing Philip K. Dick, Sandra Bullock is tentatively going to star and co-produce a film about the woman who wrote Peyton Place, Ioan Gruffudd is hopefully playing Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows, and (perhaps the one generating the most buzz) James McAvoy is going to be starring in a film about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. Having read a little about Fleming as well as all of his original novels, I'm super excited for the Fleming flick.

This isn't a drop of the hat change for Hollywood, either. Helena Bonham Carter is playing Enid Blyton, the famous children's book author, in an upcoming BBC project, and at least two films that I know of dealing with authors came out this past year; Bright Star, about poet John Keats, and The Last Station, based on Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy. Before that we had Miss Austen Regrets and Becoming Jane, both about the venerable JA, Finding Neverland, about J.M. Barrie, The Edge of Love (Dylan Thomas) Iris (Iris Murdoch) The Hours (kind of about Virginia Woolf) Sylvia (Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes) Love and War (Hemingway) Quills (Marquis de Sade) Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter) and Infamous as well as Capote, two films that came out almost at the same time dealing with Truman Capote.

So why do these films come out? Over my winter break I watched Love and War and finally understood why Hemingway was the way he was. It doesn't make me like his misogynistic writing any more than I did before I watched the film (even if he was played by Chris O'Donnell) but I got a fuller sense of him as a person that I wouldn't necessarily have been motivated to find in a biography. Over the last week I also watched The Edge of Love, even though I'm not a huge fan of Dylan Thomas, and Becoming Jane, which I had already seen.

The question "Why make an Author Biopic?" could probably be answered by "Why make a biopic at all?" The answer to that, I think, is the result of my Love and War watching -- we'd like to try and figure out what makes those we consider good and great tick. How was Jane able to write these fantastic love stories? She was conflicted herself about love. Why did Dylan Thomas produce all this wonderful poetry? He was a man with a lot of experiences and a lot of intense emotional things in his life. How did Ernest Hemingway come to hate women so much? He had a bad experience in one of the most difficult times in his life and never got over it.

Obviously the biopic is flawed for this reason -- in attempting to bring out these motivations Hollywood, in its true style, overdoes it sometimes. Jane Austen fans were a little miffed over how their beloved JA got turned into Anne Hatheway for Becoming Jane, who, apart from being too pretty and having a terrible accent, seemed to get far too much romantic attention than humble Jane ever got. (Come on, JA fans, were you expecting better? This is what happens to ALL your Austen adaptations.)

I personally liked Becoming Jane, not only because it was a movie filled with actors who are generally regarded as knowing a great deal about what they're doing (Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, James McAvoy, Laurence Fox) but because the screen writers worked in elements from some of her novels to show a discerning audience "This might have been where Jane got the idea for..." Maggie Smith's Lady Gresham is Lady Catherine to a T, Rev. Austen's pupil Mr. Warren could be a stand in for Mr. Collins any day of the week, Jane's cousin Elizabeth bears hints of Lady Russell and Lucy Lefroy could be any number of Jane's daftly airheaded, only-out-for-the-manhunt filler characters.

If you're in the market for a movie this weekend, consider checking one of the films I've listend above out from your library or local movie rental place. If they're not profoundly insightful then at least they are an attempt to be both entertaining and educational. You might even be motivated to go out and learn more.

New Year, New Look

2010-01-20T10:12:00.004-06:00

I had a little bit of time on my hands over the past few days, and I decided the Village Wordsmithy site could use a little love. A little change is good for us, right? It keeps us on our toes, keeps us from stagnating.

So I've made a new banner. Same title, same slogan...little bit of a different look. I added a Word of the Day feature because let's face it, we could all do with a new word. I've toyed around with a few of my comment features, I've made it so you can email posts to your friends (not that any of you need to do that, but maybe I'll use to harass my friends...)

Anyway, I hope you like the new look. If you've got comments (I can't read your banner) or concerns (This blog sucks, it didn't need any changes) feel free to drop me a message. I think they go straight to my gmail...

Playing with Technology

2010-01-18T14:31:00.003-06:00

Have any of you other denizens of the blogging culture out there on the internets ever tried playing with the "NEXT BLOG >>" button in the blogger bar on the top of this page?

Let me tell you, it's actually kind of fun. Chances are if you're reading this blog today for the first time it's because I started following your blog or something and you're wondering how I got there. Wonder no longer! It was, dear, sweet, lost readers, the magic of the Next Blog button. I surfed through the next blogs from this site as well as my Galway Rover site and was amazed at how focused the Village Wordsmithy is when it comes to subject matter. How did I reach that conclusion?

Here's how I think the Next Blog works -- using your tags or your content or a mixture of both the Google gurus sift through the millions of other blogs they're currently hosting to pull out works similar to yours. The Next Blogs on this site bring you to more writers, poets, and, perhaps not surprisingly, more educators.

(On a side note, I'm really, really happy that I'm not the only person who thought of putting students' work online for critique. Some people seem to think this suggestion would incite more internet bullying. I think these people need to give it a chance, since I would argue the anonymity of the internet (and some non-obvious psyeudonyms) might actually enable kids to share more. But whatever.)

The Galway Rover lacks more focus -- hit the next button there and the Google gurus bounce you around travel blogs, personal rants about foreign policy, and, again unsurprisingly, food blogs. (Did I really talk about food that much?)

As Jack Aubrey would say, What a terribly modern age we live in.

Writing in the Margins

2010-01-17T11:15:00.003-06:00

When we speak of marginality or marginalized people, we're referring to those groups who for whatever reason (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) aren't given space to express themselves in the political or social spectrum as much as they should be or when they are allowed a chance to speak, participate in political process or vocalize their ideas aren't given legitimacy as participants.

I'm doing a lot of reading for my education seminar on Human Relations relating to how we better involve those students who are in the margins in our classrooms and how we can give them positive stereotypes to grow into and aspire to. Many of these activities involve self-expression of some kind because young adolescents (the technical term for what we might also call Tweens, the middle-school age group) need a lot of self- expressive, self-reflective activity because this is the stage where children start really developing their sense of who they are and where they fit in the world.

And this, of course, has gotten me thinking about my own writing. When I was stalled over break trying to work more on "A Rose in the Briars" I tried many of my usual techniques for jumpstarting a stalled brain. I watched the movies over again. I reread pertinant passages in the books. I tried to do some photocollages and changed my background several times. I tried (very unsuccessfully) to do some research. And I realized why all this reading and movie watching wasn't helping me.

When we write fanfiction, we are "Writing in the Margins," bringing out characters that the author could have written in but didn't. These characters exist in possibility but for reasons of brevity or a lack of appeal to a wide audience don't make it into the narrative. (There's a technical term for this, but I can't recall what it is.) Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite authors, brings characters like these into his books by literally putting them in the margins when they have footnoterphone conversations. Thursday overhears two extras from Anna Karenina discussing AK's affair with Alexei Vronskey on her footnoterphone -- marginalized characters being pulled into the narrative.

I can't find the characters I'm writing by reading the original material because they're not there, and if they are, they're in the background, very faintly. Fanfiction has a long history of trying to include the marginalized populations, particularly when it comes to sexual preference -- anyone who's familiar with the origins of widely recognized fanfiction in the 70s is familiar with the concept of slash coming from the notation Kirk/Spock, a widely practiced pairing in the Star Trek fandom.

In the case of A Rose in the Briars, as it is in most of my work, my marginalized population is women. There aren't many female characters in Lord of the Rings, and there isn't a lot written about the ones that are there. Add to this the additional problem that most of the women who are mentioned can't come into my story for reasons of rationality and geography, and therein lies my dilemma. But I think I've finally gotten over it by realizing this is an opportunity for me to break some new ground in LOTR. For instance, last night I wrote several pages about Rhoswen and her friend Faeldes preparing the body of Faeldes' husband for burial. It's a very emotional passage, but a female-centric one. It's women's work, and it allows Rhoswen space to both face what she might one day have to do, deal with the war-heavy context of Gondor and show off some things Tolkien never really talks about; the daily lives of women, how death is received at home, and what princesses do when they're not gracing high tables at feasts and fighting off Witch Kings.

If only bringing marginalized students in my classroom was this easy.

Safe and Sound At School Again

2010-01-11T08:07:00.004-06:00

I had the amazing and somewhat predictable revelation yesterday as I was paying my social calls (yes, I pay social calls, so very 19th century of me) that I am now AN UPPERCLASSMAN. Well, Upperclasswoman, really, but we can argue for inclusive language later. One of my friends is a Residence Assistant (RA) in one of the sophomore dorms and I went to go visit her. On my way, I had to walk through the building I lived in last year, and I realized, as I was walking the same route I usually had to walk to get to my friends' rooms last year, that I was a Junior, and that, theoretically speaking, I did not belong in this building.

It was WILD.

So I'm back at the always beautiful Saint Ben's, getting ready for my first day of classes. I've got a lot of good ones this semester, and hopefully the things I'm studying will contribute a lot to the content of this blog. Today I have Mid-Level Literature and Language Pedagogy, which is a big and complicated name for a class in which they are going to teach me how to teach English (very exciting, very scary at the same time) and Writing Essays, a class where they will...teach me how to write essays. That one kind of explains itself.

Hopefully Pedagogy will supply me with a lot of interesting topics on how english is being taught today and how online literacy is changing the face of reading in our society, a topic which this blog and this blogger are uniquely positioned to describe. And Writing Essays, one hopes, will also help this blog pull itself together in the way of cohesive points and arguments.

Tomorrow I have only one class during the day, the class I am taking to fulfill my art requirement. While this blog pulls me forward further into the electronic age, the age when the demise of newsprint and hard copy seems to be on every publisher's mind, my art class will pull me back. It is called Art of the Printed Book, and I will be setting type, inking presses, researching the history of print and cutting woodblocks to my heart's content all semester long. I'm super excited and I hope that between those three classes, my night class, and my 10 hours a week at the library I'll be able to keep myself occupied.

If not -- well, you'll be seeing a lot more posts on this blog. I've got some good ideas in the days to come, including my theory on why I have writer's block and a review of some biopics about famous writing types!

Make New Friends, and Keep the Old?

2009-12-30T09:11:00.009-06:00

The fact that several people I don't know and have no prior connection to have started subscribing to this blog (and the resulting guilt that I haven't actually posted anything here for a while) has made me start thinking a lot about the still-evolving issues of identity and the Internet. Over the past semester, as I've used Skype to talk face à face with my family six time zones away and used a blog to share my day to day ramblings with a lot more people than I expected, I've realized, as I often do, that the Internet is making the world either a much smaller place by bringing people together or a much larger place because the possibilities open to exploration are so much nearer. And this larger or smaller world is filled with lots of people who, for whatever reason, come to this blog and meet what amounts to an electronic version of me.

My literary theory classes have made me face a lot of questions about identity, society and how literature can be used as a tool to enforce or establish identity, but I think that the question of new literacies, like the Internet and its associated tools like blogs and web forums, has never really come up. I would argue that in the age where anyone can say anything anywhere in the world the written word is loosing its power -- because so many people are 'speaking' at the same time, does anyone bother to listen to what anyone else is saying? Obviously I've been using this blog as a force to establish my identity as a writer -- or rather, using this blog as a force to project that I want to be seen as a writer -- and some people are apparently interested in what I have to say.

This boggles my mind, as I seem to lack the authorial legitimacy to be considered a blogger worth listening to. (As one of them is, in fact, a published writer according to his own blog, I think this legitimacy question kind of answers itself.) They are in fact buying into the projection facilitated by the mask of the Internet and assuming I have legitimacy to make statements about how to write or craft characters or even make comments about whether a book is good or not. (I'm sure at least one of the people who chimes in on my comment box from time to time will have a field day with this legitimacy thing, but I think it's true, even if he doesn't.)

I have a running inside joke with the members of one of my online social groups about my age -- for at least one year when I was actually in my final year of middle school and part of my first year of high school I had them all convinced I was in college. It was a great compliment for me and a bit of a joke for them that a fourteen year old middle schooler managed to make several grown men and women think she was four or five years older than she was, but the story brings up a great point about the masking power of the Internet. Behind the veil of webservers, proxies and computer screens, legitimacy actually becomes easier to attain, so much so that a third year college student from a small suburb of Chicago who can't even get up the nerve to submit her poetry to the school literary magazine can wax theoretic (okay, partially theoretic) from her soapbox and actually have people who have published books and written masters theses on this stuff listen. Or read. Or...well, whatever verb you want to use with that, actually.

And I'm wondering if this supposed legitimacy is a good thing. Like the effusion of the written word the Internet has facilitated, can we not also say that this over-application of legitimacy to Internet-based communication is in fact diluting what legitimacy actually means? Take Twitter, for example. Putting the power of the microblog literally in the hands of everyone with a BlackBerry is diluting what it means to make something worthy of reading. Do we need to follow everything Perez Hilton or Ashton Kutcher tweets? Some people might say that Kutcher's 4 million followers bestow on him some kind of legitimacy credentials. What makes their lives worthy of listening to? What makes everyone else's stream of consciousness, 140-characters-or- less Tweets a worthy use of our time and space in my feedreader? (The reason this blogger doesn't have a Twitter is because a) she knows no one would read hers and it is therefore a waster of server space and b) she can't make a coherent point in 140 characters or less.)

I'm not saying that you, wonderful readers, are following my every word with baited breath. I know that this blog is simply not that interesting (or frequently updated) to merit that kind of following. But the fact that I'm on your blog rolls and feedreaders astonishes me. And I'm touched. Really, I am.

So, as we near the last days of an old year and begin a new one, let's raise a glass to old friends we haven't seen in a while, new friends we haven't met and probably never will and the socially fascinating power of the Internet.

James Joyce is a Linguistic Genius and I Want In.

2009-12-10T05:30:00.007-06:00

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?
+
+
+
+
+

Are you still working?

+
+
+
+
+

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

2009-11-27T07:38:00.007-06:00

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

2009-11-04T09:17:00.001-06:00

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.