The First Rule of Fight Club is...

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

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

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







----






Are you gone yet? Good.






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

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

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

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

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

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

Now You Understand Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remarks on reaching One Hundred Posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like, for instance, this one:

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

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

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

The Created Nature of History

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Audemande of Vinceaux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHERLOCK HOLMES!

The trailer is UP!




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

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

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

A Bone to Pick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crisis

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

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

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

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

End of Semester

My friend Matt put finals week very eloquently the other day:

Finals week is for everyone else -- for English majors, finals week is the week BEFORE finals when they turn in their final papers.
(For more on Matt, check out his Blesis -- Blog for my Thesis -- here)

So very true. So, in lieu of a real post, an excerpt from the paper I'm working on now, my second-to-last Post Colonial Lit paper.

In the great Literature family, we could say that Post-colonialism is something like the middle child, trying to stand up to the reputation of their older, more recognized sibling while at the same time trying to strike out on their own to form a new reputation altogether.[1] Trapped by accepted modes of transmission for stories, both in terms of language and form, Postcolonial authors still continue trying to tell stories that are relevant to them and counteract the last generation’s misinformation. This has been the case in all of the seven postcolonial novels we have read so far this semester, authors trying to tell stories that are relevant to themselves, their people and place, and their causes. Such is also the case in Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago, a 2007 novel about the lives of Egyptian immigrants and some of the Americans in their lives living and working in and around the city of Chicago. Throughout his novel, Aswany uses many of the same techniques the authors we read in class did to make a point about how we think we understand life and minority populations in the United States.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gives us a wonderful example not only of middle child trying to step beyond older child’s shadow, but middle child openly making fun of the whole concept of the western construction of novels. With his absurdly omnipotent Saleem, the young man narrating the story with a healthy helping of god-like panache who takes credit for everything that happens to anyone in the story, Rushdie suggests that one person is insufficient to knowing the whole story, and that many perspectives are needed both to relate the story and also provide connections between all of the characters. That Saleem should be responsible for all events, large and small, is almost laughable. Rushdie’s other lesson in this book is that, at the same time one person cannot know a whole story, a single character cannot be a story unto themselves, and many characters are needed to fully form a cohesive tale. Saleem makes himself into the embodiment of the country of India, just as older sibling’s novels once made other main characters into the embodiments of virtue or experience, held up for the world to see and compare to. Saleem cannot possibly be India, and the experiences of the west’s chosen main characters cannot possibly be everyone’s. Aswany uses both of these concepts to a certain extent in Chicago – realizing that one person cannot know the whole story, he distributes the experiences of the story between many people, providing the necessary perspectives to fully understand the events. And none of these characters are the stereotypes the western audience is accustomed to seeing in their literature – the women are not submissive and veiled (or at least, they do not seem so), the men are neither feminine no brutish, and their culture is not one that wants to blow America to smithereens. Aswany uses his diverse and different cast to show his readers that the story of ‘the immigrant experience’ cannot be shown by one voice alone, just as Rushdie shows India’s story cannot be told by one voice alone either.

---

[1] I am aware that the ‘older/ younger’ divide is a poor choice of words. Certainly the argument can be made (and proven) that non-western literature has been around for generations longer than western literature. However, the west refuses to see it that way, (the entire reason we have this divide in the first place) and so, for the purposes of this paper, the categories will remain as I have named them.

Scholarship and Creativity Day

Today, as many of you who read this blog know, was Scholarship and Creativity day here at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. It's an opportunity for the students to present research that they've been doing throughout the year and be recognized by their peers and their professors.

I was fortunate enough to be chosen to present some of my linguistics research on fanfiction, and so I spent the rest of the afternoon putting together a YouTube video of a live audio recording of my presentation, with my slides, for everyone (family, freinds, writing buddies) who couldn't make it to Saint John's this morning to hear me speak.

New Stories to tell

A few of you might have known that next fall I will no longer be in the good ol' US of A for my academic enrichment. I'll be going to Ireland, to a little village called Spiddal in Galway. I've started a new blog, The Galway Rover, to cover my exploits of being a stranger in a strange land, and I advise you to all add it to your follow lists -- it'll be a different side of me, I think.

We had our second orientation session today, and our Faculty Director (aka The In Loco Parentis Unit Abroad) for good or ill gave us homework -- to write a future history of our trip, as if we'd just gotten back and were recounting our travels. Since I haven't done much else in the way of writing lately (except Song of a Peacebringer, which has gotten no new reviews...sadness.) I thought I would post this futurist history for you all. It's very reminiscent of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. If you're not familiar with that text, go find it and read it. I think it's a wonderful piece of writing.

It seems strange, thinking back on it now, the first few days in this new green country, tentatively foraging forth from the airport into parts unknown. Some of us were returning to the motherland and some of us strangers to all of it. But we were all of us ready, and willing, to learn. Those first few days were hard, getting used to the way the people spoke and the money and the pace of life in small, rural Spiddal. But it grew on us, and we, in turn, grew to love it.

We were told stories, dozens of stories, stories about men still living and men long dead and some about men who had never lived at all, except in the hearts of other men. Ireland is a land for storytellers, and even the ground sometimes speaks, strange stories out of a long past. All of us shared stories – Megan told us things on our trips we would never need to remember again and Professor Davis told us things we would, indeed, need to know for the quiz later. And we made our own stories too – like the time we got lost in Galway and found our way to the best fish and chip shop on the planet, or the time the girls went thrift shopping and came back with articles of clothing with their own interesting stories to tell, or the time in the pub when the guys…well, there were a lot of times in pubs. We drank our way through none too few good times in the city. We were kings and queens in our own age, heroes in our own time, unafraid to go out and see the world as it would have itself be seen. Not to conquer but to be conquered by the sights and sounds of Eire. We were open, and we had to be, to see everything that needed to be seen and a few things that didn’t. We went everywhere, and like good soldiers we never left a man or woman behind, though some of them might have wanted to be left.

We had skills, and we shared them – Our english and communication majors checked and double checked our papers, our accounting majors helped us budget, our management majors kept us all in line. We all shared laughter. We all shared pain, the pain of being away from home and the sweet pain of adventure and the pain of wearing new shoes you forgot to break in the summer before. We shared each other’s weight, carrying each other home from the pub or shouldering the burden of a day gone wrong. Not that there were too many bespoilt days, mind you.

We fed each other everything we had – enthusiasm, which came in droves from all fronts, and knowledge, which came from our professors, and food, in all kinds. The food! Katie kept us in cookies and muffins and all sorts of warm, fresh from the oven goodness and Megan, heaven bless her, made us dishes we couldn’t name with ingredients only she could identify and we put up with them anyway because eating them made her smile. Not that she ever tried foisting on us anything unfit for human consumption – she had limits just like the rest of us did. We put up with singing, too, singing and whistling and all the manner of music making, because humans like to express themselves in song, even if their singing could wake the dead.

When we were annoying, we were tolerant. When we were angry, we remembered to count to ten. When we needed silence, we gave it, and when talk was needed, we listened.

Inspiration, or Lack Thereof

Some days, writing is easy. You sit down, and by some act of god or the alignment of the cosmos or the fact that you're just having an awesome day, the words come. My inspiration has a lot to do with weather, and when it's about thirty degrees outside and then you get a new full blanket of snow (and then, of course, a snow day in which you would like nothing better than to write all day), trying to write a scene that takes place in a desert becomes a lot harder than you would think.

This wasn't any snow, either -- it was wet snow, the kind skiers hate because it clumps and sticks to everything and slows you down. I would know -- I went out and snowshoed in it. Powder, the light, airy kind of snow, behaves like sand -- it drifts, forms snow dunes. Looking at wind swept powder looks a lot like looking at a desert. Looking at wet snow...looks like looking at a winterscape. Not helpful at all.

I have a new chapter due this Friday (I use the word 'due' as an indication that I am giving myself deadlines, one new chapter a week, to make sure this story goes faster.) and I haven't edited it yet. Tomorrow I go to a conference on Medieval History in the Twin cities at the University of Minnesota. Topics being lectured on will include the following:

10:15am - Introduction to Exhibit of Medieval Books
10:30am - On the Road with the Crusades
11:15am - Food, Feasting & Fasting
1:15pm - Beowulf: Fact, Fiction, & Film
2:00pm - Exploring a Medieval City
2:45pm - Readers’ Theatre: The Chase: Harts & Hearts

Needless to say, I'm terribly excited, because most of these speakers (with the exception of Beowulf) have something to do with Song of a Peacebringer. I'm also the only CSB/SJU student going with someone from the HMML, who sent out a free range invitation to the entire history department. I'm the only one who responded, and I'm not even part of the history department! Hopefully more inspiration will strike after the conference is over.

Editing -- An elephant, only with more punctuation.

Editing. Everyone hates to do it, but it's the elephant-in-the-room of the writing world -- something that cannot be ignored despite the fact that everyone wants to.

And I'm not talking about the cross your Ts and dot your Is editing, either. I'm talking about the redirect the last forty pages of your story editing, which I am getting a crash course in this week as I try to do that in addition to juggling a host of other things, not the least of which is beginning my prep work for my study abroad experience this fall. (Galway, Ireland? Anyone? Anyone?)

Was it necessary for me to abruptly decide to uproot the ending and take it in a completely different direction? No. But one of my reviewers suggested it, and after much thoughtful consideration, I decided that her suggestion had a lot of merit, and it would pose new and interesting challenges for me as well as a different (and more thought-provoking) message for the reader.

Last Friday I posted the first chapter in this new and revised ending sequence, and it felt a bit like pushing the button to initiate a countdown sequence on a bomb. A very large, imposing, life-in-the-world-as-we-know-it-altering kind of bomb. Well, now it's several days later, and I still don't feel any better about it, mainly because of the three people who I can generally count on to review only one has actually gone and done it.

But I'm still having fun researching and adding new elements to my story, one of which I am shamelessly borrowing from the Arabian Nights -- the character of Scheherazade, the great storyteller who sets the fantastic and elaborate tales of the one thousand and one nights in motion. I'm not actually putting her in the story, per se, but instead I'm borrowing the concept of so skilled a storyteller and applying her to my main character, herself something of a storyteller. Her new love interest refers to her by this long and strange name, and Aude asks her tutor where the name comes from. The tutor explains the story of Scheherazade and Sharyar, and Audemande realizes what a great compliment this is coming from her love interest.

As I was sitting in the library reading The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West in between my math class and Shakespeare, I realized something very interesting about Song of a Peacebringer in relationship to the Arabian Nights. The Nights are well known for their use of a frame story (Scheherazade having to tell stories in order to be spared execution) and for their subsequent deepening levels of narrative within the narrative -- Much like Hamlet's 'play-within-a-play' plot device, some of Scheherazade's stories have in themselves more people telling stories, embedding a story within a story within a story.

Song of a Peacebringer, then has an 'intertext' or 'narrative quilt' five layers deep, something I certainly didn't plan on but was kind of pleased to discover. Let me explain:

First there's
ME, Mercury Gray, the author, telling a story about
AUDEMANDE, who is in turn listening to a story about
SCHEHERAZADE, who is telling Sharyar a story about
A PRINCESS IN A FAR AWAY LAND who is telling a story to her children about
AN ENCHANTED CASTLE.

and Voila! Intertext five layers thick. Needless to say this discovery made me feel very talented this morning.

A confession, of sorts.

So I think it's been determined that I'm an Orientalist. Edward Said would be ashamed of me. Professor Mitra will be ashamed of me. Professor Steve will be ashamed of me.

After a review last week from Axel Blaze, my original character Audemade from my Kingdom of Heaven story up and decided she didn't want to marry a Frankish knight, go back to France, and have five lovely children. No, she wanted to marry Nasir Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and make my life difficult.

I'm sure the august personages mentioned at the beginning of this blog post would chalk this sudden change of heart up to Audemande's creator's weakness for Arabic love poetry and an ongoing love affair with the image of a world that has never existed, and they'd be very right. If Post Colonial Lit is teaching me anything, it's that I'm very much an Orientalist. I love to read about "the mystic east," about Mughal India and pre-Meiji Restoration Japan and the Middle East under the Ayubbid caliphate. "Latticework, caravanserai, fountains," to quote Nazim Hikmet, the Turkish poet. "This is the Orient the French poet sees. This is the Orient of the books that come out of the press at the rate of a million a minute. But yesterday today or tomorrow an Orient like this never existed and never will."

So true, Mr. Hikmet. I'm sure you wouldn't approve of this turn either. It involves a franj woman falling in love with a poem-composing Syrian general. Somewhere everyone who fought against the image of the lacivious Arab is turning over in his or her grave. Hopefully I won't rouse too many ghosts -- this is going to be a relationship built on mutual appreciation. And I'm well aware I'm going into dangerous territory here -- now it's not just my own religious history I'm fiddling with, but someone else's. But what is art besides taking chances?

So, in response to this turn of events in my Kingdom of Heaven story, the readingand research list for this week looks like this:

Music of a Distant Drum. An anthology of classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew poems. I read this today. Those 9th century arab poets really knew how to turn a phrase. Some of the best love poetry I think I've ever read.

Arabic Script. A book on the art of Arab calligraphy. Beautiful work. It's making me want to learn calligraphy in any language.

Becoming Muslim: Western Women's Conversions to Islam. Because the contents of this book may become necessary to the direction of the story. I still have to look into this.

EDIT: Success! Apparently Aude doesn't need to convert at the end of the story! Women in Islam, by Wiebke Walther, tells me that Muslim men may marry non-Muslim women, but Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire (which I own, by the way -- wonderful text) only mentions women who converted and my hasty scanning of the Qu'ran online seems to indicate otherwise. I think I need to find out which theology professor teaches the Islamic studies course here...

Islamic Art and Archaeology of Palestine. I get to design Nasir's house, and I needed suggestions. I at least know they weren't all zenanas and flowering gardens.

Night and Heros and The Desert: An anthology of Classical Arabic Literature. More poetry. I am a glutton.

Di'bil b. 'Ali. A poet of the Ayubbid period, so someone who would have been Nasir's contemporary. I need him for stylistic purposes. 12th century arabic poetry has a very set form, and I have a feeling I'm not talented enough to recreate that in translation, because of course I will be composing thier love poems in English.

The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival. Fascinating book -- started some of it last night at dinner. The Author mentioned Orientalism in the introduction.


Yes, it's going to be an interesting next few weeks.

Public Enemies!

Today the Trailer for Public enemies came out, and I have to tell you, I'm just as excited for this film as I was when I first heard they were filming in and around the city of Chicago. (As a native of the Chicago Suburbs and something of a sucker for Chicago crime history, this piqued my interest immediately)

You can see at least one Chicago landmark, the Great Hall of Union Station, in the trailer.Oh, Union Station, how fond my memories are of you. I remember walking into that room and thinking, "This building was made for films about the 20s." Wonderful piece of Chicago architecture history, something that also fascinates me.

You're probably wondering why I'm writing about a movie trailer on a writing blog, but I promise to make this legitimately about writing (or reading, actually.)

Public Enemies the movie is based loosely on Public Enemies, the book by Brian Burroughs, a wonderful history of America's greatest crime wave, and the personalities behind it, including the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigations. I read the book back in January, and loved every minute of it -- Burroughs takes a very narrative approach to retelling history, and the non-fiction reads a great deal like fiction, which I suspect is the reason they decided to make it into a movie. It's a little hard to follow at points, probably because Burroughs follows several different criminals, and the G-Men who pursue them, simultaneously; One chapter will deal with Dillinger in September and the next will deal with Baby Face Nelson in the same frame of time, and the next after with Bonnie and Clyde during the same September. Then he returns to Dillinger.

It makes sense to follow the events in this fashion, since Burroughs is writing about these men to show the evolving process (or lack thereof, in some cases) of the FBI, which, during this period, was under the command of J. Edgar Hoover and still trying to figure out what the ideal FBI agent followed in regards to process, how he looked and who he answered to. I'm interested to see Christian Bale tackle Melvin Purvis, the agent responsible for the Dillinger case -- according to Burroughs, Purvis was, like many agents in his day, little more than a pretty face with a Southern accent, a good education, and no clue about how law enforcement really worked. One of the things that I enjoyed about "Public Enemies" is the frank, no-nonsense way Burroughs dealt with the extremely human errors and flaws of his characters -- none of the vast cast of this Depression are heroes in any sense. Bonnie and Clyde are two-bit, second rate criminals put up on a pedestal because they made a good story, Dillinger is an image obsessed playboy, and Hoover is a man in charge of running an agency that has little jurisdiction and little clue about how to use the little power they do have.

So -- Public Enemies. Go read the book. If you like the book, go see the movie! Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotilliard, David Wenham, Billy Crudup, Channing Tatum, Carey Mulligan -- it's a great cast with some great names on it and I'm sure it'll be a great show.

A Birthday!

Today, dear friends, is the birthday of one of my all-time favorite poets, and the reason why I can safely say I love dusty old white man poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--So, Happy 202nd birthday, Henry! Now, my readers have a lot to thank this man for -- he contributed the rhyme scheme from The Skeleton in Armor to my Chronicles of Narnia poem The Star's Daughter, the title and driving inspiration for my first major fanfic, The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, the driving inspiration behind my ACHIEVE project, The Epic of Astrid, and above all other things, a longstanding love of narrative poetry.


I first met HWL here, at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. We went to have lunch there with my grandparent's neighbors, the Cammetts. I was about seven at the time and couldn't appreciate the book they gave me, a clothbound copy of The Tales of a Wayside Inn, a collection of narrative poems Longfellow wrote inspired by a summer he spent here in the 1860s. In it, a group of travelers (The Landlord, the Student, the Sicilian, the Spanish Jew, the Musician, the Theologian, and the Poet) meet around a fire and exchange stories. It's a wonderfully evocative collection, containing such classics as Paul Revere's Ride, that staple of the American History class, and it's been my friend through a lot of interesting adventures. Now in my slightly more appreciative age I want to go back and see the old place again, as I remember lunch being really good. There were also a lot of old millstones on the other side of the road and some wonderfully picturesque stone walls.

So, in commemoration of HWL's birthday, I want to share a snippet of one of my favorite poems with you - Emma and Eginhard, the poem responsible for The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose. This is one of many passages of his I can recite by heart; Hopefully those of you who know me will understand from this clipping why I like his work so much...

When Alcuin taught the sons of Charlemagne,
In the free schools of Aix, how kings should reign,
And with them taught the children of the poor
How subjects should be patient and endure,
He touched the lips of some, as best befit,
With honey from the hives of Holy Writ;
Others intoxicated with the wine
Of ancient history, sweet but less divine;
Some with the wholesome fruits of grammar fed;
Others with mysteries of the stars o'er-head,
That hang suspended in the vaulted sky
Like lamps in some fair palace vast and high.

In sooth, it was a pleasant sight to see
That Saxon monk, with hood and rosary,
With inkhorn at his belt, and pen and book,
And mingled lore and reverence in his look,
Or hear the cloister and the court repeat
The measured footfalls of his sandaled feet,
Or watch him with the pupils of his school,
Gentle of speech, but absolute of rule.

Among them, always earliest in his place.
Was Eginhard, a youth of Frankish race,
Whose face was bright with flashes that forerun
The splendors of a yet unrisen sun.
To him all things were possible, and seemed
Not what he had accomplished, but had dreamed,
And what were tasks to others were his play,
The pastime of an idle holiday...

Mister Shakespeare

For those of you who don't already know, one of the English Classes I'm taking this semester is Shakespeare. So far, we've plowed through Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and latest, Othello. Now I have to say, of the plays so far I'm two for four on enjoying reading them. (Measure for Measure, while an intense play with lots of great stuff to discuss about hypocrisy and the nature of power, didn't quite do it for me, and Troilus and Cressida ends poorly.)

So in the spirit of plays I actually enjoy, I watched the 1995 Fishburne/Branagh version of Othello (SO good!) and then played around a little with Wordle. (If you haven't tried it yet, stay away! It will eat your life.)

So, here's the full text of Othello:

Hamlet, because I felt like it and it turned out well...
And King Lear. We're reading that next! I'm not excited so much for the story but that I've read it once before, in high school. I remember disliking it then.

I think I enjoyed Othello for what some might consider a strange reason -- We started reading some of it in my Post Colonial Lit class, which gets more face-time on this blog than Shakespeare does, probably because it's po-co, and it wants to make me feel bad for letting my literary tradition disenfranchise it for so many years. Mea culpa. In one of the books we read for Po-Co, Season of Migration to the North, by Talib Salih, one of the main characters, Mustapha, references Othello after one of his lovers asks him where he's from in Africa, since he doesn't quite look Arab and he doesn't quite look African (He's Sudanese.) Here's an excerpt from my latest paper for Po-Co, addressing Salman Rushdie's phrase about the empire writing back --

“The Colonized world,” Frantz Fanon writes in his 1963 book The Wretched of the Earth, “is a world divided in two. The dividing line…is represented by barracks and police stations…” This division Fanon speaks of is also evident in our Empire model, divided into Imperial Center and Periphery. (We can also designate this as “Everything that belongs to the Empire but isn’t the home country.”)

However, if we introduce into this model a group of people who are neither Central or Peripheral, the binary is undermined and proven useless for the purpose it was designed for, to separate and legitimize Central power. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso SeaSeason of Migration to the North both give us characters who exist in this neither-nor group; Rhys’ Antoinette is born of European parentage but is culturally a black Islander, and Salih’s Narrator and Mustapha are born Sudanese but are educated in the European fashion. In the case of Antoinette, these differing identities drive her to insanity, forcing her into an identity that can be compatible with the Center-Periphery model as a crazy Islander, the ultimate expression for the Center of how backwards and Other the Periphery is.

Salih takes a somewhat different approach with Mustapha Sa’eed and his unnamed narrator. While Antoinette goes insane trying to satisfy both identities, Periphery and Center, Mustapha exploits the created identity assigned to the Periphery by exposing women to so much of it they realize how false it really is. Bringing the created Periphery into such close contact with the Center and exposing it as creation drives the Center into insanity, leading two women Mustapha seduced into killing themselves after they understand the truth. Salih’s Mustapha makes two comments about this collision, invoking Shakespeare’s tragic hero Othello to express himself. In the first, he says that “I am Othello – I am a lie” but in the second, later on in the book, he says “I am not Othello – Othello was a lie.” The first comment expresses Mustapha’s acceptance of the created Peripheral identity, and the denial of any true Native identity; the second, however, is his acknowledgment of the created nature of the Peripheral and his assertion that he has no obligation to be part of that creation.

Call to Arms

I WANT YOU

TO READ THIS BLOG

Sometimes my friend Michelle has a photo kick, and sometimes awesome pictures like this one happen. I'm wearing a newspaper bicorn and her Sergeant Pepper Coat, and I have to say, I look pretty spiffy.

Celebration!

Last weekend I posted my 40th fanfiction over at FF.net. As of this past October, I have been a member of that site for nearly five years, since the 8th grade, when I bravely ventured out from my floppy-disk bound writing endeavors into the big wide world of public critique.

Let's see how times have changed, shall we?

First off, I no longer save my stories on floppy disks. In fact, the computer on which I now save my stories no longer has a space for floppy disks. My first public story was a Lord of the Rings parody of Wierd Al's Phantom Menace, written with some help from my friend Katie on the way between her house and mine for an occasion that has gone beyond memory. My 40th story was a Kingdom of Heaven fic explaining a minor incident in my Song of a Peacebringer fic (I think we could start calling it a fanfiction novella at this point -- it's 114 pages long...)

My first contributions to FF.net were in the Lord of the Rings archive, centered on Boromir, my first real literary crush. My first large piece of work was The Meaning and Mystery of the Rose, a Lord of the Rings story I affectionately called 'My Baby' for a long time because it was the longest thing I'd ever written. I wrote each chapter in a separate document, so it's difficult to say how many pages long it actually was, but FF.net puts the word count at around 53,821 words, including, of course, the Author's Notes that were regrettably common in those days. Song of a Peacebringer (which is being composed in a single document and parsed out into separate chapters) is, at the time of this blogging, some 55,178 words long. And it's not quite done, either.

Goodness, how times have changed -- I'm still verbose and still writing obscenely long fanfic.

Today my high school friend Catroux interviewed me for a paper she's writing on fanfiction and identity in teenagers -- hopefully, if she says yes, I'll post an edited (for continuity) copy of that interview up for you to read and learn a little bit about me and my journey as a fanfiction writer. And hopefully she'll post some of her paper, too...

Speaking of papers, I don't know if I ever told you all that my own paper on fanfiction (the one mentioned here, here, and here on this blog) is going to be presented by yours truely at Scholarship and Creativity day! Not everyone gets to do that, you know. You've got to special. Ground-breaking.

So, share around the balloons, have a slice of CAKE


-- and celebrate this milestone with me! What milestone, you ask?

The milestone of being thought important and authoritative enough to interview!

Foiled by the Hill AGAIN!

Okay, it's bad enough when you constantly check books out of the library like these:

(Yes, that last one really is the size of my head -- it's a little over 1000 pages and weighs about five pounds. I think I have a serious problem when the books I check out for kicks and giggles are bigger than the ones I check out for actual classwork.)

But it's really bad when you're looking for obscure books in the library catalog and not only does your library have them, but they're so obscure they're held at the RARE BOOK LIBRARY on your campus.

Yeah, that's right. I've been foiled by the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library on not one, but TWO books tonight. I wanted a copy of "Berengaria : in search of Richard the Lionheart's queen" and "A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea" (the Babcock translation) and both of them are at the Hill.

I know, I need a new hobby. Or a life. But I really don't care.

And I just found out this evening that Hildegarde of Bingen, my favorite 11th century mystic, told someone not to marry Princess Sybilla of Jerusalem. This makes me excited!

...Yes, I have a favorite 12th century mystic. Deal with it.

Colonialism at Work

...in P O'B's HMS Surprise. Mr. O'Brian starts his description (Maturin's description, actually) with some of the stock images we've come to expect when talking about the east, and then he veers off a little, talking instead about what the British have also brought to India, what some of the hands refer to earlier as 'the spicy coast'. (Recall Colonel Brandon's response to Margaret's inquiry about what India is like in Sense and Sensibility -- "The air is full of spices!")

"Bombay: Fresh fruit for his invalids, iced sherberts for all hands, enormous meals, the marvels of the East; marble palaces, no doubt; the Parsee's silent towers; the offices for the Commissioners of the former French Settlements, counters and factories on the Malabar coast; the Residence of Mr. Commissioner Canning." (P.189)

That is the expected -- in the next chapter we see the real.

"Fresh Fruit for the invalids, to be sure, and enormous meals for those who had time to eat them; but apart from the omnipresent smell and a little arrack that came aboard by stealth, the wonders of the East, the marble palaces, remained distant, half guessed objects for the Surprise." [bold my own] (p.190)

It's interesting (and telling) that P O'B uses the same phrase twice, the 'marvels of the East'; He, like so many others before him, is using Orientalist stock images, renting a crowd, as Achebe would say. And his last line, about how the crew of the Surprise will remain in the dark about what India really looks like, says a lot about how those stock images are transfered -- by ignorance and a lack of original data.


Quotes from O'Brian, Patrick. "HMS Surprise" Reprinted WW Norton and Co, New York, 1991.

'Cause We Are Living in a Colonial World

...and I am the product of a colonial system. *music notes*

Not the Madonna song you all know and love, is it? Hey, materialism has everything do with colonialism. Joseph Conrad's insistence on the prevalence of the ivory trade out of the Congo tells me so. ( I could use this post to rant about how much I hate Heart of Darkness, but I have other fish to fry.)

In my Post-Colonial Lit class we started out by reading several articles by people like Edward Said, theorists and authors who have made it their life's work to understand the relationship between 'The West' and 'The East' in thought, writing, and politics. Said posits that there's a mindset Europeans have called Orientalism that colors the way they see the Eastern world (ie, anything that's not Europe) and that this mindset is still prevalent in today's society, especially in our news and entertainment media.

Today's example comes to us courtesy of BBC's recent adaptation of the Robin Hood legend. As BBC dramas go, it's not their best, but it's entertaining and it kills time on weeknights when I'm supposed to be doing homework. I've got a lot of problems with it, though, and one of them is increasingly becoming the portrayal of non-Europeans on the show, mainly because all the non-European characters turn into stereotypes. My problem yesterday was that some of the characters were of African descent, and, while I have the highest respect for equal opportunity hiring practices, I contend that there were no people of African descent wandering around in England in the 12th century, slave or freeperson. However, today's problem was with their portrayal of Arabs. Since this is the 12th century, and Robin has just come back from the Crusades, I buy that they can (and should) show up in this story. However, the re-occuring Arabic character on the show, Djac (say: Jack -- I have no idea where this name came from, as it doesn’t quite sound right for the period or the character) is played by an Indian actress (a very fun, spunky actress -- I give her props) and this, I think shows just a little of what Said is talking about when he indicates that Europeans tend to group everyone into "Us" and "Not Us."

The episode I'm watching today includes the character al-Malik, Saladin's nephew and a real historical character. However, this man is portrayed as wearing eyeshadow, bright red robes, and speaking English without necessary articles like 'the' and 'a.' He eats food that the European characters don't, he's a little effeminate – these are all hallmarks of the classic stereotype of the Eastern male. (He also refers to himself as Saracen, something no Muslim or Arab would EVER do, as Saracen is a European designate.) Chinua Achebe, whose article “An Image of Africa” we had to read for next class, gives the reason for these negative portrayals thusly, a description that applies to Arabs as much as it applies to the African peoples Achebe is really talking about –

“For some reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry, the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparing it with Africa.”

By using Non-Europeans as the bearers of ‘bad’, ‘backwards’ characteristics, the European characters look much smarter and better than their “Eastern” counterparts.

Back to the show -- al-Malik is trying to broker peace between the English and the Muslims, and Saladin has sent assassins, (not THE Assassins, unfortunately) to kill him in order to stop this from happening, something I think the real Saladin would not have done as the real Saladin did, at one point, try to broker peace using al-Malik. (The plan was to marry his nephew to Richard's sister Johanna, but that fell through when they both refused to convert to the other's religion. Go figure.)

But wait, it gets better -- the assassins are all women. Women wearing turbans and green bodysuits, who undress in the presence of men and then do a cool slightly ninja-esque thing with their swords to totally own Robin Hood and his men. Now I know that modern Muslim women are a lot more enfranchised than their 12th century counterparts, and I know that there are several examples of women who held tremendous power in the Arab world in the 12th century (Thank you, Fatima Mernissi), but the bodysuits and the unveiling and the being assassins bit strikes me as a little odd. There's also a point where these women look to be doing something like tai-chi and using throwing stars, which, as all men of learning know, are both CHINESE. al-Malik is also going to present the peace delegation with something that looks suspiciously like an acupuncture dummy, another Chinese innovation.

My point is, whoever cast this show or wrote it was thinking as Said implies all Westerners think -- as Us and Them. There's no real distinction between the inventions and culture of the Chinese and the inventions and culture of the Arab world, two great cultural traditions that should be given their own due. They’re both not European, and that means they can be lumped together.

In the show’s defense, there are a few bright spots. When Much tells Djac she could escape slavery by renouncing her god and saying that she’s a Christian (the sale of Christian slaves is forbidden, but any non-Christians, apparently, are open game on the slave market), Djac tells him to try it first if it’s so easy. Much, after a lot of trepidation about the Hand of God coming down to smite him, realizes he can’t do it, and Djac, smirking, makes him come to terms with the fact that it’s no easier to denounce Allah than it is to denounce the Christian God. Robin, at one point, quotes the Qu’ran, calling it the “Saracen Bible” when the rest of the Merry Men ask if he’s quoting the Christian Bible instead. It’s a nice interfaith dialogue moment, even if it’s a mislabeled one. At the end of the episode, al-Malik and Robin have a chat about peace, and he is allowed to continue on home with a shell-shocked crusades veteran who is going to try some Arabic medicine to see if he can’t get better that way.

My Post Colonial Lit professor stressed at the beginning of the semester that the point of Post Colonial literature is something along the lines of making the world understand the validity of all experiences, colonized as well as colonizer, and that one of the first steps along this journey we’re taking this semester is evaluating how we read and perceive works of literature. Recognizing Orientalism is one step.

I think I’ve got that down, or at least, I hope so. Or is this entire post and my observations just another unenlightened westerner preaching about what the East is really like? I think I’ll need Professor Mitra’s opinion, just to be sure.

Progress on This Blessed Plot

Today I made the first update to my original story (We'll call it a co-authored original story, since it's not really my idea) in several months and made Simon (the co-author) very happy. You can make me happy by reading and reviewing it here, at fictionpress:

This Blessed Plot -- A MechKnight Story

To try and refocus my mind after so many months of non-work on this project, a few nights ago I started writing a little woodle to regain a sense of my characters. I wrote this into the future of The Lady's Guardian and This Blessed Plot, so it'll probably only make sense to me and Simon, but I'm curious what the rest of you will think of it. It's called Tea and Solace.

Jane loved Japan. There was always something serene about the place she had spent so much of her adolescence, the place that had been home when home had not wanted her. Years of riotous tumult and lost wars had taught the Japanese two things – how to cultivate patience and peace. Every imperial islander seemed to have both in spades.

It was an island outside the world. Across the sea, the People’s Socialist Republics of Asia created sprawling factories out of entire villages, employing faceless masses of people making everything from children’s toys to parts for cheap, readymade ‘mechs. The pieces were like their producers, stamped out of the same unchanging molds by the billions. In Japan they still valued the hands of the artificer and the artisan, taking years to craft the perfect blade. Jane had two such blades over her mantle at home, unused, gifts at her first leavetaking from Japan many years ago. They had never come out of their sheaths, reminders of a simpler time she wished she could have seen. She was not a knight as those knights were – she had different weapons and a different, equally deadly precision. But they valued the old ways in Japan, and she had learned to use blades like that. She had honed her body into a weapon, her teachers making her learn the limits of her fleshy shell before they would let her near a mech.

And all that training was nearly wasted when Father made me come home to fight in the Balkans, Jane mused. Because Harry and Vincent had the bad sense to die and leave me to pick up their part in the Balkans. And I didn’t understand it all, young as I was.

There were many wars she didn’t understand, even some of the ones she fought in now. This business with Vlad and Monica, the bad blood between the Pallavincini and the Hunyadi: that she understood, even if she didn’t want to. That was why she was leaving Japan so soon, even though she had only been there a matter of weeks. She had come back to her old teachers and her old school after Vlad and Byrghir had rescued her from Count Rudolf. She had needed time to rest, trying to run away from the world and her injuries. But now it was time to settle debts. She owed Vlad this.

In her luggage, stowed somewhere beneath the decks of the hulking transport ship, there was a plain wooden box, tucked lovingly inside one of her chests. Nesting inside that box like precious eggs were two identical celadon cups, glazed the traditional, translucent ephemeral blue. Jane had called them skyware when she had first seen them as a child, though she knew they had a different name. There were also seven canisters of finely powdered tea leaves, a whisk, ladle, kettle and siphon, as well as several bundles of charcoal.

It was more than just a tea set – it was tradition, it was grace beyond time. It was peace.

She was bringing it with her to share with Monica, during the long, cold days of Romanian winter when Vlad was away. The tea ceremony needed no words – and Jane knew (because she was in that place as well) that where Monica was, there were no words. Jane had been caught before falling down the well; Vlad’s message had indicated to her that Monica had drowned and would never swim again.

Jane’s body twinged at the thought of that kind of violation, so far removed from what she herself had suffered. It went beyond the physical into the emotional, the psychological – yes, even the religious. And it was partially her fault.

Who but God alone knows what our ends may be? Something inside her asked. He placed mountains in front of us to test our faith, and enemies behind us to test our courage. To turn aside is to turn away from him.

She could offer no words of consolation to her friend’s wife, but she could bring her own peace, and company. It was all God had given her, and it was all she could give. And they would share tea, and solace, and hopefully, the hurts would heal.

Edith Wharton

Today, my Quote of the Day email informs me, is Edith Wharton's birthday. For those of you not familiar with the Pulitzer Prize winning authoress, Edith Newbold Wharton, nee Jones, was born on January 24th, 1862 and came into her life and her writing at the turn of the century. She saw the Old New York give way to the New, and the nineteenth century bow out to the twentieth as World War One came, and went, leaving a bloody swath and a irraprable impact on world politics. Wharton wrote several novels and short stories, including a manual on interior decoration that continued to guide American fashion for many years as well as Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and the House of Mirth.

The Age of Innocence holds a special place in my revered literary canon as one of the only books I've started reading after I saw the movie, and one of the only books I thoroughly enjoyed after watching the movie. Martin Scorsese is to be commended -- his film brilliantly realized what I think is some of the greatest prose writing ever, in some places even going so far as to narrate passages straight from the novel, as if he were afraid it would loose something in visual translation. I would give anything to be able to fully realize a place in prose the way Wharton does.

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing- rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room...

Everything Old is New Again

In case you were wondering, the title of this post is the theme of this semester's reading material. Last semester I realized I was very into the 'women's studies' area of historical exploration, and I decided I needed a focused vein of inquiry in my free reading books. I wanted to re-read all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin Series (armed with my two news books from paperbackswap, Men of War: Life in Nelson's Navy by P O'B himself, and Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian. (I'm waiting for a copy of this book to show up on my Wish List Request Filled queue any day now -- When I have that, my P O'B experience will be complete. Plus I'll be able to make a dish called The Last of the True French Short Bastards. I love historical cookbooks.)

So that's this semester's theme: Everything Old is New Again. I'm reading many books I've already read before, many books I haven't, but are on historical things -- I'm in the middle of Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers and Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, which as we speak is being made into a movie.





Yeah, I'm excited, too. Crime, Tommy guns, the 1930s, and Christian Bale. But I digress.

So I took this "What Kind of Reader are You?" Quiz (as seen and promoted on Jane Austen Today, which I subscribe to.) and this is what I got:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Book Snob You like to think you're one of the literati, but actually you're just a snob who can read. You read mostly for the social credit you can get out of it.
Literate Good Citizen
Dedicated Reader
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I have to say, I'm a little...leery of this result. I don't think I read for social credit (although, granted, being the person at parties who always has random things to say is a social function, albeit not a very loved one.) But I want to know now -- Who gets social credit for reading?