I recently tweeted the essence of an exchange between me and Demetrius (my five year old), pictured above. (In case it's not showing up, I wrote "Me: Come on. Put your toys down and come eat food. My 5yo:" and then a gif of Wesley from The Princess Bride shouting "Death first!")
Demetrius is…insistent. I mean, the kid is five, so I understand where he's coming from. The thing about him is his guile. He'll find ways of manipulating others so that he can have toys. He'll ignore important things (putting on shoes, buckling up in the car, eating food, going to the bathroom) because he's so engaged with the molded plastic that has most recently caught his attention, and he'll get snagged by the strangest things. Most often the pink stuff (his favorite color--he was hording bottles of glue at the Office Max we visited yesterday, stuffing his arms full of pink-and-glitter glue; he doesn't even use glue), but if it's a toy, he's interested. Take his birthday, for example. He had, the week or so before the celebration, realized that Wendy's has kids meals that include toys in them. Guess where we went for his birthday dinner? Yup. And did he eat the food? He ate the Frosty and a couple of French fries, then let the chicken nuggets we'd purchased get all cold and thrown away. Why eat when one can play? But what I mean by guile is the way he plays me. I have an entire box of toys from my childhood and teenage years. Nine-tenths of it is somehow Spider-Man related, but there are a couple of G.I. Joes and Transformers in the lot. They're "old" toys according to time; for my kids, they're a treasure trove of novel things. Since I'm a sentimental old coot, I don't really want to have my toys be ruined or lost--an entirely different topic to discuss--so I let Demetrius "check out" toys one at a time. If he wants a new one, he has to return the previous. Demetrius, however, takes this deal very seriously. He'll play with a toy of mine for a number of days, and then he'll at last bring it to me and say, with a tinge of remorse in his voice, "Can I get a new one?" It does take a bit of finagling to get the box down, so it sometimes happens that he wants to trade but we haven't the time. He won't, however, forget. If he thinks he needs a toy to play with in the car (despite the fact that the area around his car seat is littered, like the dead leaves of an autumnal orchard, with toys all about him) and I refuse to let him run back to the house to get one, he will cry. He will pout. He will have injured feelings. This sentiment will stick with him for miles as we trundle toward whatever destination we need to. Recently, he borrowed a Power Rangers toy from a neighbor in my mom's neighborhood. He carried the thing around everywhere I would let him, and the sadness written over his face when we had to return it? Oh, man--you would have thought that I'd just killed his dog* or something. He mourned. Yes, precious, he wept to be so alone… On one level, I get it. I have deep attachments to things and I will sometimes put my better self-interest at jeopardy to do/have those things. What gets me about Demetrius, though, is how monomaniacal he can be. While his True Love™ will probably always be video games, he, of all three kids, will be the first to abandon electronics if a plastic toy catches his eye. Yes, he will whine, moan, and pitch a fit if I take away his video games prematurely, but the kid will actually put down a controller if he gets an itch that only molded plastic can scratch. And good for him, says I. If we had more people willing to gain the benefits of imaginative play, we'd probably have a healthier, happier populace. Until they remember that their childhood dogs died. Then there'd just be sadness, I guess. --- * He doesn't have a dog. We don't do pets in my household, which is one of many dull ways in which I'm gently traumatizing my children and ensuring future therapists of ample things to discuss in their expensive sessions together. I often use these daily essays to give me a chance to do first draft work on my projects. My NaNoWriMo drafts crop up here (which I'm unsure about participating in this year, if only because I don't know if I have a story that I want to tell that's 50k words long), as well as some of the preliminary Wooden O writings I eventually presented on (which reminds me: I need to write about my experience at the Wooden O). Much like my abstract that got me into the Wooden O in the first place, I thought I would pick up on what I wrote before (included below) and maybe see how I could edit and tweak it to make it a better query. Before I jump into that, I should point out that I've been more proactive than just talking about maybe almost kind of beginning to start getting into the position to perhaps try to commence an attempt at the thought of going after an agent again. I try really hard to keep the rejections from getting me down, though I put a lot of effort and time into the few I send out. This invariably means that I'm placing a great deal of value on the submission and allowing the rejection to hurt more than is proportional. I don't really know how to get myself out of this. I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but I have had a really easy life. I mean, if life were a video game, I'd be playing on the easiest settings on the computer with some of the best specs. I don't have cheat codes (I wasn't born into a lot of inherited wealth), but I've got it pretty good. Cishet white male that has a college degree, married, kids…yeah, most everything goes the way I want it to. Yes, I can't go to Disneyland every summer, but, on the great whole of life, I have little to complain about. That's why, I think, I take it so hard when I fail to get an agent. I normally don't fail. I usually succeed at whatever I'm trying to do. Even the hardest time of my life--when Puck was new and going through heart surgeries--I only had a couple of months total where I was unemployed. After leaving my job as a computer salesman (bleck) to student teach, I graduated with my BS degree in English education. I couldn't find a teaching job for the next year. That was really hard and frustrating, of course, but I never really thought, Well, that's it: You're never going to be a teacher. Like, that didn't seem possible; being a teacher was a goal that had merely been delayed. With writing, though, it's a different experience. It's hard to say why, exactly, this is the case. My hunch is that, while there's always a shortage of teachers in the state, the demand for new books, while enormous, isn't as large as the quantity of people who are trying to publish new books. I'm on the losing end of that equation. Admittedly, I'll never get published if I sit around believing that. I have to keep plunking away at the keyboard, I have to keep scribbling down my notes, I have to keep organizing my spreadsheets of potential agents. In other words, I have to try. Even if I do that, though, there's no guarantee. (Okay, there was no guarantee that I would become a teacher, either--no guarantees in life, after all) It's possible that the millions of words that I've written since starting college (not even counting what I did in high school) will never get more exposure than what this website affords. So this is me trying. (It's also me stalling, I don't know if you noticed that.) Here's my old version and then, afterward, the new one that I'm thinking about doing. You'll notice on the second version is a bit longer and personalized. Having done a lot of research on the process, I know that seeing the agent as a human who has interests aside from her job can go a long way to forming a worthwhile relationship. Since that's what I'm after--a business relationship in which the agent and I work together to make a great book that sells copies--I'm trying to be a bit more personable. Okay, enough stalling. Round One War Golem takes place in a world embroiled in horrendous war where massive war-machines known as golems are used--but only as support creatures. In the nasty mire of the trenches, Cori Nettleson decides to use her golem, Channa, as an offensive weapon instead. Round Two Dear Kate, Analysis
Well, of the two, I think I prefer the second one. I think it's more detailed. It's longer, which is okay. At 224 words, it's still on the short side, as far as queries go. You may have noticed that I changed Cori's last name, as well as shifting the emphasis of what the story has. What makes this whole process really tricky is the fact that there are 90k words (increased because, as I'm editing the thing, it keeps growing instead of shrinking) that I'm trying to distill into about 300. I don't mention anything about the other members of the squad, the fact that there's a magical replacement for electricity called feluvium (which is a word that I keep changing my mind about), and the dynamics between Cori and her best friend. In fact, when I rewrite this pitch, I'm going to try to incorporate that, too, in order to show some of the personal and emotional stakes of the story. Well, that's another step. I'm putting my edits into the computer--which I count as my third draft--right now. I'm on chapter seven (of thirty-one), but I'm not really worried about the fact I said the "manuscript is available" because there's usually a window of six weeks or so between submission and rejection/response. By the time she answers--whether I send this to Kate or not--I'll be done with the manuscript. … Yeah, now that I say that, it means that I'll get the agent interested, not really have the manuscript when she wants it, and then I'll have blown my chance. Maybe I shouldn't send my War Golem query yet. Hmm. Have I mentioned the Very Short Introduction series? I was first introduced (lol) to this enormous series back in college. Since then, I've picked up a sparse handful of items, including Postmodernism, Scientific Revolution, Chaos Theory, The Cold War, and Logic.
The thing about these books is that they're not actually introductions. At least, not fully. While they do cover introductory material, they seem to rely on the reader having at least a passing knowledge of what's going on with their topic. The one I just finished reading was one I picked up as a souvenir from Kramerbooks & Afterwords in Washington, D.C. I snagged it because I once was in Paris and didn't buy a book from Shakespeare and Co., a bookstore kitty-corner to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. (My second trip to Paris rectified the oversight). I regretted not purchasing something from an independent bookstore from that trip and I wasn't about to have that happen again. I might never make it back to D.C., so I decided to snag something. In this case, it was an introduction to Dante. Written by Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante: A Very Short Introduction is, at least, brief. It's only 115 pages long, though the font is small and, frankly, the information is densely packed in. It took me a couple of afternoons to read and mark up the book, though the latter half of the process is what slowed me down the most. I've taught Dante's Divine Comedy for…well, starting tomorrow, eleven years. I've read the entire poem once, though I've gone through Inferno a couple of times. (I played the video game, Dante's Inferno, which is…a thing, that's for certain. Maybe I'll reflect on the game (which I haven't played in years) some other time.) The thing is, despite considering Dante as one of the cornerstones of my curriculum, we only spend three or four days reading excerpts from Inferno and the last canto from Paradiso, completely skipping over Purgatorio and if you're suddenly lost on what I'm talking about, that's the issue I have with the book I just read. The thing about these introductory books (I have one about Derrida that is also a slim volume, though it comes from a different publishing company) is that they're trying to do an, essentially, impossible task: Go deep, broad, and fast. It's possible to do two of those things--maybe--but not all three. So Hainsworth and Robey begin with a "famous" exchange between Dante and Ulysses whilst the former is visiting the latter in Hell. See what I mean? If you don't know that Dante is best (let's be honest: exclusively) known for his early fourteenth century work The Comedy (it got the adjective Divine in the sixteenth century), which is one of the most singular pieces of poetry that I've come across. It's a poem that invites the reader to follow a Pilgrim (the character isn't named in the Inferno, the third of the poem that most people know, though he's later called Dante, making the readers to understand that Dante-the-poet was also Dante-the-character) through the afterlife. Beginning in a dark wood, Dante has no choice but to follow his personal hero, Virgil (of Aeneid fame) into the depths of Hell. Throughout the tour--which comprises the thirty-four canti (kind of like chapters) of Inferno--Dante sees all sorts of tortures of people who have sinned and are, therefore, thrust down into the Infernal Realm. By the end, he even sees Satan--a massive, three-headed creature that is chewing on the souls of Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. Virgil then leads Dante up and about Mount Purgatory before Dante continues on (now in the care of his lifelong crush (it's complicated) Beatrice) into Heaven, or Paradise. At the height of Paradise, Dante is at last given a vision in which he comprehends the knowledge and love of God. Then the poem ends. Okay, so that, to me, is a very short introduction. And I'm not saying that Hainsworth and Robey don't do a good job with the book--on the contrary, I liked it a lot and I think there's a great amount of distillation and contextualization about the man and his times that I didn't know from beforehand. Instead, I'm saying that this series as a whole has a tendency of presuming that there's maybe more knowledge about the topic than there really is. In the case of Dante, it's a much more enjoyable read if you've already gone through The Divine Comedy yourself--preferably one with well-organized footnotes (the copy I read was The Portable Dante, edited by Mark Musa)--and then check out the analyses, explanations, and history of the poem that the Short Introduction provides. At least, that's what I did. Maybe I'm shortchanging readers: Maybe this book doesn't require familiarity with the content beforehand and it can be useful to anyone who decides to give it a go. I could be wrong. I would say, however, that if you're looking for a worthwhile book to read, you could do a lot worse than Dante. A lot worse. Same with this introduction; while it may have taken me a bit longer than is normal to finish 115 pages of text, I feel like I now understand Dante Alighieri better than I did two weeks ago, before I started reading it. That's one of the things that I love about my job, by the way: It kindles interest in amazing things from throughout history and all over the world, then provides a motive for investing time in learning more about it. I think I'll be able to better teach The Divine Comedy (the small pieces that I'm sharing, that is) because of what I've read. Life-long learner, that's me. I finished listening to the recently released book Economism by James Kwak. I'm not particularly fond of economics--a point that Kwak obliquely critiques--in large part because of my own distinct hang-ups about math and/or arithmetic. Additionally, there's a dogmatization toward the quasi-sacrosanct quality of capitalist economy that sometimes precludes even a mild critique of systems viewed more as incontrovertible natural laws than human constructs. This makes conversations about economy--and (according to Kwak) the more insidious economism.
A definition is in order: What Kwak calls economism is the philosophy that the entirety of the complex world in which we live can be reduced, comprehended, and predicted based upon baseline understandings of "Econ 101". It is, in essence, the insistence that a freshman comprehension of economics is all that's necessary to run the economy. A separate (albeit older and more disheartening) book, The Shock Doctrine, calls it "capitalist fundamentalism", and that works really well for what Kwak sees. He describes the basics, like supply and demand, and shows how well they work on a foundational, theoretical model. His critique of that system, however, becomes the point of the rest of the book. One of the refrains is the challenge to the assumption that we live "in the best of all possible worlds". That acts as an article of faith of economism and it allows for any and every abuse of people for profit as an assumption of immutability. As I progressed through the book, the quote from Ursula Le Guin kept springing to mind: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." In the context of Le Guin's quote, she decried the trend of publishers replacing the sales departments for the editorial board. The idea of capitulating art to the crushing hunger of capitalism is another way of looking at the same picture that Kwak paints. What really stood out to me was the dogged insistence of economism's veracity. Evidences on economics can vary--sometimes, there's a clear-cut, cause-effect way in which the economy operates. Sometimes, it's murky, with anecdotes and inconclusive analyses. Sometimes, the clear counterexamples to economism's assumptions are laid bare, the inaccuracies and consequences limpid. That reality is, perhaps, the foundational issue: Life is far too complex to be explained by "learning economics". When the 2008 crisis was still in its deep throes, I asked my math teacher coworker why, if economics was mathematical, and numbers are considered unassailable, why we were seeing so many problems in the stock market. His answer has stuck with me: "My brother," he said, "is an economist and you know what? It's all a matter of interpretation." The idea that so much of what we depend on to generate a society is decided upon based upon hermeneutics was shocking to me. On one level, it means that there's a lot more ability to explore, extract, and extrapolate. Things aren't, of ineluctable necessity, any particular way and if there's a problem, we can interfere and change it. On another level, however, it's a terrifying proposition. Theory is all well and good--I'm a big fan of literary theory and I appreciate the uniquely human capacity to generate it--but there's always an uncomfortable friction when praxis meets theory. In the case of the economy, theoretical gains, benefits, and purposes don't operate on a spreadsheet. Real life implications and consequences can arise from economic mismanagement. Money's value may be fiat, but it still matters. Peoples' lives can be ruined--as we saw in 2008--by money machinations. The fact that so many powerful politicians, pundits, and parties base themselves on a rudimentary knowledge of theory without coming to grips with the deeper implications--or, perhaps even more perniciously, the deeply rooted (and often false) assumptions--of the decisions they make really left me shaken by the end of my reading. This isn't (necessarily) confirmation bias, though I admit that's a real possibility. However, for a long time, I have recognized the inherit flaws of capitalism and its outrageous justifications for exploiting human suffering. While my privileges (which are many) have shielded me from the worst injustices of the American system of capitalism, I've seen intimations of just how bad it can be. In other words, I've had stirrings--in manifest areas--that our system is rigged. This book has helped point me in some of the directions in which I can see evidences of that. Finally, if my (admittedly tame) critique of capitalism here in the past 750 words make you upset and you think that I'm now a socialist/pinko, there are a couple of considerations: One, at the outset, I pointed out the problem with thinking that a human-made system is beyond critique. Two, if my self-professed ignorance on the intricacies of economics makes me unqualified to render judgments on that system, how much worse is it that people who are even less-well educated about economics than I am are voted into office and given leave to legislate based on their poor understandings? Three, think about the implications of supporting capitalism if it isn't the "best of all possible worlds". What kind of history have we written if we've done so beneath the belief of a flawed ideology which we mistook for genuine truth? I started work again today. It varies by district and school, but teachers usually have in-service for three to five days before (and, in my case, after) school. For me, I use the time to attend meetings (including things like discussing our summer reading books, training on important new policies, and passing off additional professional development hours) and prepare my classroom.
This past end-of-year flutter was made more frustrating because I had to pack up almost everything in my room, including the countless posters that I put over the walls. (The school was painting and changing the floors of the classroom, so I needed to get my stuff out of the way.) That means that today's classroom preparation meant unpacking stuff that I'd put into boxes ten weeks ago. I tried to triage it back then, throwing away some of the useless stuff that I had picked up over the years. I did another triage today, tossing whatever felt like useless clutter. There's still a lot to do, and I'm not even remotely close to being ready for students. Then again, it's only Monday, so I'm not particularly worried about that. But here's the thing: I'm feeling really frustrated with the first day of trainings. This is quite strange--I've only missed the first day once, a few years ago, when we were still on our way home from a trip to Yellowstone--as I've always enjoyed being with my coworkers. Yes, I'd prefer to have one more week of summer, but at least going back to work means that I'm spending time with coworkers and friends, catching up on their summer adventures. It's usually pretty enjoyable, with a lot of laughter and even some important ideas that are discussed. Not this year. It's not just that I'm tired (I didn't fall asleep until after midnight, regardless of the fact that I had to get up early again; my circadian rhythm isn't designed for my career), though that's a part of it. It's not just that my room is basically exploded, with stuff everywhere. It's not just that I have overloaded classes. It's all of it. It's none of it. And that leads to really what I was thinking about, which is the way in which we deal with frustration. And by "we" I mean "I" and maybe people who feel similarly. When something isn't going right, I have a tendency to want to complain about it. There can be a motivation of trying to fix the problem, which is probably when that impulse is (al)most useful. If I complain that my shoes are hurting me, then Gayle knows that we need to go shoe shopping. That works out. But what about when it's an ephemeral thing? A real but temporary mood that is coloring my feelings? Or when it's something that can't be acted upon? There's nothing doing for the fact that my room is a mess. The situation was what it was, the result is what it is. I have friends and help--it's not like I'm cleaning it up on my own--and complaints about it don't do a single thing to alleviate the quantity of work, nor can they change the fact that I'm in this situation. It's pretty pointless, honestly. Yet I want to complain. I want to grouse about how "put upon" I am because a small part of my life isn't running perfectly. I want to piss and moan about certain things that I can't control--that no one can control--and I want someone to listen and commiserate. Why is that? Maybe it's an attempt to refute a sense of powerlessness on a level that is more approachable. I can't do anything about the fires consuming my state or the rest of the West. The train wreck of politics and the complacency of people in the face of rising fascism isn't really something that, on a day-to-day basis I can change. The endless stories of injustices against other people aren't within my sphere of influence. So maybe by murmuring about the small, minor things, I'm casting about in order to do anything about the garbage going on in the world. Then again, maybe I just like to hear myself complain. There's something to be said about giving voice to the frustrations that are in my mind, as if the act of expression is cathartic enough to justify the exercise. That catharsis, sadly, comes with it a negative aftertaste of a justified victimhood that, for me, is almost always falsely applied. Not only am I not a victim, I'm not necessarily justified in feeling cranky about my life. Part of this has to be the "grateful for what I have" mentality. Because, as I mentioned yesterday, I have had a very enjoyable and memorable summer. When I consider how much I get to enjoy--the quality of life that I'm experiencing at this moment, sitting with my nice computer in an air conditioned office, surrounded by my books and appreciating the view from my window--it's ridiculous to think about having anything to complain about. After all, "there are starving people in _________" that can make me feel bad for sipping a White Out Mountain Dew as I write. Difficulty, however, isn't strictly objective: There's a spectrum of experiences that cause suffering. While some things can be thought of as uniformly problematic--the curse of war, the pinch of hunger, and other, more extreme, forms of living/surviving--it's also clear that one's own difficulties are still that: Difficult. I'm feeling out of sorts and unhappy, in part because of a perceived lack, but also because of the context in which I sit. No, I don't want to be jobless or to have any other job than the one I have (except being a writer, as I've mentioned before). The frustrations are bundled into the situation itself, and I can't isolate them, necessarily. I don't think I'm making sense. Ugh. That's frustrating. In retrospect, I have accomplished a great deal this summer: I began the season with my two oldest boys enjoying a summer camp, followed by a trip with friends to the cabin to get some writing done. The family came after the friends, and after that cabin trip was over, we took a weekend in Heber where Gayle got to work on some school stuff and we swam in the hotel pool. We celebrated Gayle's thirty-fifth birthday, saw the new Jurassic World movie, and then I set out to finish the novel I'd begun on the first writing retreat. During that time, I grew as a person via a reader-response approach to It, solidifying this season as one in which I understood myself a bit better.
The first week of July saw a celebration for my youngest child (he's five now) and playing Dungeons and Dragons, as well as a photo shoot for Gayle's Christmas present--Gayle dresses up in her costumes and my friend takes footage of her costumes, all of which will be used to make a music video at some future time. The day after that, I was on an airplane, headed to our nation's capital. Washington, D.C. was an eye-opening and exciting experience, especially when I bumped into an old coworker. I learned a lot at the training--stuff that, with summer officially over for me today, I'm eager to conceive of how I can apply it--and I really enjoyed all of the different aspects of D.C. that I experienced. I arrived home on Saturday, 14 July and on Sunday, 15 July, the family and I were in the car, headed toward St. George. We spent the week there, visiting Zion park, going to the dinosaur tracks museum, playing in the pool, and generally enjoying the time together. We came home on 19 July, only to head to the cabin (again) on 23 July. We spent that week in Mt. Pleasant, arriving home in time to prepare for a large-scale Harry Potter birthday party, which we celebrated on 31 July (obviously). The first full week of August saw me and Gayle in Cedar City where I presented at the Wooden O symposium and watching four Shakespeare plays: The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and 1 Henry VI. I start work tomorrow. I write all of this down in part to tell anyone who's curious what I've been up to. I also wrote it to help me remember and appreciate what I have done this summer. The time is fleeting, in part because of how many video games I played (a lot of Overwatch and Jurassic World: Evolution this year) and how many books I've read (I think it's five or six). Part of it, also, is that the lack of schedule is really enjoyable. Indeed, the thing that I don't like about teaching is how abrupt the change is between summer and the school year. One day, I'm able to wake up when I wish, make calls about what to do as the moments come, and generally follow my interests. Then, the very next day, the alarm is set and the expectation is clear. It's the downside of having that very process reversed when the end of May finally arrives. Anyway, I do like my job. In fact, I love it. I've had plenty of places where I worked that weren't a real fit for me, places that didn't use my skills well or where the overall atmosphere wasn't something that worked for me. I'm glad to be gone from there. It's hard to always be forcing yourself to do your job, and when I'm teaching, that doesn't happen. I'm almost always happy to be teaching whatever it is I'm teaching at that moment (except the Age of Exploration: I hate that unit), and, save the early schedule, I am pretty content to be a teacher. That being said, I think summer hints at a maybe-world that I might have had, provided my life had fallen slightly different courses. I know there are hard parts--dark sides, as it were--to every profession. There are dream jobs but the adjective doesn't completely undo the noun: They're still work. They still require things of a person. My dad is a musician. We watched him perform with his cover band (the Salamanders) last night at an end-of-summer event in a nearby city. He did a great job--as he always does--and it was impressive to me how quickly and adeptly he and the entire band shifted from song to song, hardly giving the audience time to clap or catch their breath. He was on his feet, sweating through smoke-drenched Utah air, for two hours straight, cranking out the music. I'm sure it was fun. I'm sure it was hard, too. And so when I picture myself as a full-time writer, it's a weird mélange of fantasy and pessimistic expectation. The fantasy is being able to sit down in my office, slap my keyboard for a few hours, then do something else with my time. I do my writing retreat in part to remind myself that, given the right amount of time and correct circumstances, I can write. I can output a lot. (Aggregate, I wrote more than 120,000 words during the month of June, which is longer than most popular novels. The writing varied between my new book, essays, edits, and personal writings, but that's still a lot of words. We're over halfway through the year, and I have over 400,000 words written. The quality of the words is not something that I'm willing to discuss at this time.) I think about "What if this were my life?" when I sit down each morning at the cabin, tunes blasting, outline in front of me. I put my shoulder down and I push forward. I ignore everything except potty- and food breaks, using this little time I have to get down as much as I possibly can. At the end of, essentially, a week, I had an entire book--longer than its predecessor--written. Completed. Unedited, yes, but finished. What if I had a publisher who wanted another story from me? That needed me to write something quickly? I can say, with a straight face, "You give me a solid two weeks of full-time writing, I'll get you a book." Surely that's a marketable skill, right? But then I look back at my productivity since NaNoWriMo 2017. Because I obsessively (and probably pointlessly) keep constant track of my word counts, I know that, after I wrote that short novel, I was significantly unimpressive with my writing. In my Novel Writing class, I usually have the students strive for the goal of 50,000 words in a semester. It's a huge number, and it pushes the kids further along to try harder. But this last semester, I was unable to really compete. I ended somewhere in the 30,000 word mark--far lower than I've ever done before in that class. Up until my retreat in June, I put down, essentially, nothing. I wouldn't call it writer's block, but it certainly was a stoppage of some kind. I got over it--until it crops up again, I'm sure--but it makes me think that, maybe, I really wouldn't be able to handle being a full-time writer. There are lots of responsibilities that I would have to make room for that I don't when I'm just writing as a hobby. I don't have to worry about deadlines, first of all. There's nothing but internal pressure to do anything with regards to edits or additional drafts. I can jump from project to project like a humming bird, sipping from the inspirational flower that most suits me at the moment. I can decide not to write for a while, if I so choose. I don't have to worry about public appearances, travel, or signings that eat into my writing time. I don't have to figure out how to get myself to write whilst on the road, where there are abundant distractions. So why do I still wish that I could try it? Knowing the uneasiness of money--how hard it is to pay out, how unsteady the royalties are--why would I want to shift? I'm a handful of years from being officially "middle aged", and I know that people have mid-life crises all of the time. I'm not the type who's likely to want to buy a sports car or have an affair, but the view of the future is a bit murky. I may have written about this before, so pardon me if I'm repeating myself: I have a hard time seeing what the next decade of my life is like. See, when I was younger, it was mapped out. Like almost all teenagers, there was a pretty deliberate path set out--high school, college, mission (a Mormon thing, obviously), more college, family, career--with some of the pieces more or less in place while others could be shifted around. But the point was, when I was thirteen, I had a pretty good idea of what I would be doing at age twenty-three. At thirty-five, I can picture the next year well enough…and I worry that what I seen when I'm forty-five is the same view. Will I be content with that? Is that what I want my contribution to the world to be? A long list of students who've passed through my class, maybe-maybe-not being impacted and affected by what we do/discuss, and graying hair? Can I still be a good teacher--assuming I am one now--if I'm no longer as familiar with popular stuff, with slang and music and memes? As I age, my interest in remaining connected to the youth through that type of experience wanes. Will I become a worse teacher as a result? Of course, a year ago, I was not expecting to have had a major summer like this one. In fact, I thought that our trip to Disneyland and visiting some friends in California would be the highlight of this small cluster of years. I didn't think I would end up in D.C., touching early editions of Milton, or in Cedar City, presenting a paper to a bunch of Shakespeare scholars and touching a copy of Cymbeline from the Second Folio. There were great joys hidden in my futurity…so how can I expect what else may be in store? This is one of the strange quirks of humankind: We can recall and record the past easily. While incomplete and sometimes biased (or completely incorrect), our recollections of what's come before are all tied into how we perceive and experience the omnipresent now. But the future? There are plans and expectations, yes, but we can't recall the future. As my summers end and I grow ever closer to my final days--however far away they may be, since I can't see them coming--it always gives me a chance to meditate on what I've gained on the journey, what I'm doing differently than anticipated when I was further back into my own past. This is hopeful, I think, if a little bittersweet. Just like the end of summer. I got a haircut today.
The city I live in is not particularly business-friendly. I'm sure there are tax incentives and all sorts of attempts to try to entice businesses here, but as far as a "city" goes, it's not that impressive. We've a Starbucks (even in Chapel Valley, Utah, Starbucks is around) and a grocery store that doubles as the hardware store. A couple of over-priced restaurants. A Subway (because Subways are the weeds of chain stores; I'm surprised a Subway hasn't opened up in my basement). A gas station. A couple of traffic lights. Farther west than anyone cares to go is the City Center, where a gas station and other potential businesses reside. For the most part, though, we don't have a lot of commerce. Since I'm now settled (I keep telling myself, as if I have any control over my future--having a kid with half of a heart shows one the folly of assuming that), I'm interested in trying to support local businesses. They aren't ever the cheapest option--the grocery store, knowing that it has a monopoly (the closest competition is about ten minutes' drive away), sells worse products at a higher price--but if I have to buy gas, I'll drive the extra half-mile to the local gas station. I'm no hero. Just a man, trying to do his part. So when it comes to a haircut, I go to the Great Clips nearby. It has an online "check in" feature that lets me know when they'll be able to help me. I've had times where I checked in while getting off the freeway (whilst waiting for the red light to change, I'm not a monster. Just a man, trying to do his part.) and could drive straight to the salon. Fifteen minutes later, I'm done and back to life. Today, I woke up really late. The exclusive reason is that I started playing Jurassic World: Evolution, a park-tycoon game except with dinosaurs. I was tired at about ten o'clock last night. I started playing the game again. It was 2:30am before I went to bed. The thing is majorly addictive and I both love and hate it (much like Gollum, who loves and hates himself). Anyway, because of this summer indiscretion, I rolled out of bed about ten o'clock and showered. I thought, I'd like to get my hair cut before I go to the Wooden O symposium. When my hair gets long, you see, it tends to grow straight out. It makes my head look…poofy. I don't like looking poofy. As I got ready for the day, I checked-in with Great Clips (only a 17 minute wait!) and essentially walked straight into the salon about twenty minutes later. The stylist was a recent import from California who had moved here because of the lower cost of living. We chatted whilst she trimmed--which is kind of rare for me. I'm not particularly extroverted, and social situations are really uncomfortable for me (I tend, for example, to go through most of the three hour block on Sundays with maybe two or three sentences to the people around me, excluding my family). I normally sit in a morose silence until my hair is done being styled. Then I pay my moneys (including a tip--after all, I'm not a complete cheapskate. Just a man, trying to do his part.) and head home. That's what I did today. I may have mentioned before that I'm a fan of the Cartoon Network series Teen Titans GO! This is a point of friction between me and some of my students, as there is, apparently, a lot of angst toward TTG as a perceived (rightly or wrongly) usurper to the five-season Teen Titans cartoon show. As I understand it, the fifth season ended on a cliffhanger and, due to behind-the-scenes issues, the sixth season wasn't made.
Fans got Teen Titans GO! instead. Whereas the first iteration of the five-person ensemble superhero teenage drama/action hybrid was just that, the second version is a five-person ensemble superhero teenage slapstick/rando-comedy extravaganza. Each of the characters--as much as the comics from which they sprang as the different versions of the cartoon show--has a clear, distinct personality, complete with disparate goals and flaws. Raven (my personal favorite) is more interested in reading and is gloomy all of the time--plus, let's be honest, has the coolest power set of the whole lot. I mean, she can create portals and fly and make objects out of her dark demon energy. All of that is the same among whichever version you're looking at. But the way that Raven works in the midst of a bunch of zany jokemongers is quite a bit different than what she does when she's helping to stop the H.I.V.E. and whatever other superhero job she needs to do. Both are fun for separate reasons. Both are interesting takes on the one character. I would argue that neither is superior to one over the other with one notable and important exception: The Raven (and, by extension, entire cast) of Teen Titans is saturated in the stench of nostalgia. For a lot of my students, watching Teen Titans was part of their after-school routine, much like coming home and bingeing on Batman: The Animated Series and Animaniacs was for me. And, to push my empathy a step further, if someone had taken Batman: The Animated Series away and given me Batman: The Brave and the Bold instead, I probably would be rather resentful, too. But it wouldn't change the caliber of the show that replaced it. (That being said, I haven't ever watched The Brave and the Bold so I can't speak to its quality.) And in the case of Teen Titans GO!, I have my own (admittedly quasi-) nostalgia that connects me to it: It helps me with my depression. I stumbled upon TTG (and its slightly-superior-but-for-hard-to-define-reasons broadcast mate, The Amazing World of Gumball) during a cabin writing retreat. I had neglected to bring enough movies to watch at the cabin after my writing was done for the day, so I ended up turning on the cable TV we have there. Since I wasn't interested in basically anything that was being shown except for cartoons, I tuned into TTG. It was the episode called "Oil" and it had me laughing out loud before too long. Once I came home, I found snippets of the show where I could, but at last I succumbed to an available DVD at Target, bought it, and showed it to my family. My three boys fell in love with it, my wife laughed and rolled her eyes, and I used it as one of my coping mechanisms for when I feel really glum. It's bright, cheerful, exceptionally random (and I've always been a fan of well-done random comedy), and shockingly unexpected in a lot of ways. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's one of the funniest cartoons I've seen. It's hard to compare (except to The Amazing World of Gumball), so I wouldn't say it's "better" than, say, mid-to-late-nineties' Simpsons, but it is really funny stuff. Part of it is the premise is perfectly in my wheelhouse: Random comedy, but a through-line via the superhero stuff that can provide context and grist for some of the jokes. It's entirely episodic, but it still builds on itself and the jokes of previous episodes and seasons. (See, for example, the fact that Robin has baby hands in those green gloves.) So when it comes to Teen Titans GO To The Movies, I had already become familiar with how the characters interact, the predictability of their motivations, and even some plot twists. In other words, I am the prime target audience for this film. And I loved it. They managed to slow things down--a tricky thing, since the cartoon itself is highly frenetic--without feeling like they were padding anything to get it to fit into the feature-length time frame (clocking in at 88 minutes, plus a Batgirl short at the beginning). The animation was better, though still characteristic of the series' character design and tone. But what really makes TTGTTM work so well for me was its theme: Superhero movies. The setup of the entire conflict of the film comes when the Teen Titans sneak into a premier for the next Batman movie. During the previews, they see that everyone is getting their own superhero movie. Alfred does. So does the Batmobile. Even Batman's utility belt is slated for "next next summer". Robin then goes on a quest to figure out a way to get his own movie. As the film progresses, more and more familiar (and some really esoteric) DC characters make an appearance. Often they're in the background, but the idea is that the DC Extended Universe--the arena in which Justice League and Wonder Woman all exist--is a part of the Teen Titan's universe, too. The commentary about how many superhero films are around--while even managing a shout out to a couple of Marvel characters--and what kind of tropes they employ is satirized and ridiculed with all of the love that TTG showers on the objects of its humor. In the end, I loved the film. It had me laughing throughout most of it, and the last line before the credits was so beautifully timed and executed that I can't really explain it. It's just…amazing. That being said, I don't really recommend it if you're the kind of person who doesn't get slapstick, random humor. The jokes--some of them inside jokes--come fast and furious throughout most of the movie, and if superheroes aren't that interesting to you, or if you find hyperactive (and -colored) cartoons tedious or bizarre, this probably won't suit you. But for me and my family, it was worthwhile and enjoyable. For me personally, it was significantly more enjoyable than Hotel Transylvania 3, which I liked quite well. Note: I have finished my paper for the Wooden O. I've shown pieces of this on the website before, but this is my final draft. The formatting is weird, I know. Also, there are asterisks everywhere. Those are to let me know when to advance the slides during the presentation. Feel free to ignore them.
*Jacques Derrida: "There's no racism without language…The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words, but rather that they have to have a word. [Racism] institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes."[i] *Othello: "I know thou'rt full of love and honesty,/And weigh'st thy words before thou giv'st them breath." *Iago: "I hate the Moor." In his eponymous play, Othello is called by his own name twenty-seven times. He is referred to as "the Moor" forty-three times. This statistic underscores the use of nomenclature as violence against aliens, the way the most fundamental system in which people operate and learn and grow--namely, language--can be sharpened as a tool of oppression against the Other. From Derrida's perspective, that is the only way that racism germinates. (For context, I am using Vron Ware's definition of racism: "[that which] encompasses all the various relations of power that have arisen from the domination of one racial group over another."[ii]) We can perhaps interrogate Shakespeare's motive, but, like Iago's, it is as allusive as it is elusive. Certainly, meter plays a part of Shakespeare's decisions. *"The Moor" has two syllables, while Othello does not. And though *"uh-THELL-oh"[iii] contains a full iamb, on its own it's an amphibrach. The Bard could not end a line with Othello's name without pushing it into a feminine ending (with the stress on the penultimate syllable). This is not to say that Shakespeare doesn't rely on feminine endings. Desdemona completes her husband's line: *"I'll not believe't./How now, my dear Othello?" (3.3.282) Always keeping in mind that perhaps Shakespeare was less worried about his lines than we are, we can see all three of Desdemona's lines in this section are feminine. The extra syllable is necessary, of course, to express all of the words that she's using, but there could also be an additional tension, an indication that though she's innocent of the crime Othello assumes of her, she senses something wrong in him. The lines throughout this middle section of the scene scan differently. Lines with too many syllables, others with too few--Desdemona's words and actions, all orbiting around the napkin that proves to be the false evidence her husband needs to commit murder, interact with the tension of something being wrong. The relationship, much like the scansion, is falling apart. There are other times where the language of oppression is subtly attuned via the euphemism. For example, when Iago expresses his enmity toward the hero (1.3.375), the line also scans differently than the norm: *But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor. Not only is it eleven syllables, but the inclusion of the *pyrrhic foot between the ultimate syllable of "profit" and the monosyllabic "I" is what causes the line's extension. "Othello" could not be simply swapped into this line's current structure. It would become hexameter instead of feminine pentameter and gain an unstressed ending. The deterritorialization of humanity and Othello's ontological beinghood that is perpetrated by means of the euphemism thus stands within the poetic system as being integral, yet at the same time uncouth, out of place, and indicative of a deep problem. We can read this, then, as a poetic excoriation of racism. Shakespeare tends not to take sides and it would be too much to say that a bonus syllable on a line early on in the play is his way of subverting the oppressive system which allows the continuation of racism. Rather, it may be better to consider this as symbolic, a recognition of the ways in which something that is wrong can nevertheless be explained away, incorporated into the system, and--as is especially the case of Iago--thought of as "the way things are". There's nothing too extreme about having an eleven-syllable long line--Othello is replete with them. So, too, do racists in Western culture often justify the small expressions of white supremacy with which they vocally oppress minorities. Snide comments, failure to listen to those whose lived experiences are filled with examples of the very real ramifications of racism, or jokes that only operate by assuming the worst of a stereotype are all "eleventh syllable" versions of racism--tiny things, operating on the fringe, yet allowed within the system. Othello--both the man and the play--exists in a world where the whirl of words underscores and expresses the depth of the anxieties within the Venetian society. Iago as Othello's foil is foul, his mind at its starting point in the gutter and only descending lower. Iago's *vileness is sketched at *first with hasty lines about what Othello and Desdemona are doing--a married couple's consummation seems to fill him with revulsion and disgust. And though *his (in)famous line about the "old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe" (1.1.88-89) equates the act among the same species, his implication is only a matter of degree away from Horace's "snakes do not mate with birds, or lambs with tigers" (qtd. Neil 41). That these are racist "undertones" is clear: To imply that there are gradations of humanity, that the Human Race can be subdivided into separate species, some of whom are inferior to another, is visible inside of how almost everyone sees, treats, and speaks to Othello. The frequent allusions to him being of demonic breeding, hell-sent, or animalistic serve to enhance this reading. Othello even has to struggle against the internalized racism, which slips out in some of his moments of distress. *Consider: "Her name, that was as fresh /As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black /As mine own face" (3.3.388-390). Equating the color of his skin to an inherent filthiness is perhaps not surprising when one recalls that Othello is a former slave (1.3.138), or that his father-in-law is so openly hostile that he accuses Othello of having charmed his (Brabantio's) daughter, a piece of witchcraft that could be the only explanation for the miscegenation: I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o'er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her. (1.3.104-107) Certainly there's something about Othello's society that has seeped into him. We see his words degrade the longer he spends time with Iago. By the end, it seems as if he's swearing almost as often as his ensign. Perhaps the endless assaults on his basic humanity, the innuendos and the prejudicial barriers, the need to justify a behavior as fundamentally human as falling in love with a woman and, seeing that love reciprocated, marrying her--perhaps it's not surprising to see Othello is crippled with doubt. Othello's eventual downfall is done because choosing a beautiful woman as a wife without it being called into question is a denied privilege for a Black man. We hear this pitiful pathos when he says, as much to convince himself as Iago, "For she had eyes and chose me" (3.3.192). Iago uses the verbal tools of his own demoniacal brilliance and the linguistically saturated assumptions of the racist society in which he lives to leverage that gift in order to extract all would-be meaning from the life and marriage of Othello. Though Shakespeare doesn't always imbue deep significance in the final words of many of his creations, he does do so on occasion. In the case of the end of Othello, there is great meaning in Iago's final lines: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know; / From this time forth I never will speak word." Sadly, the silence of Iago cannot undo the damage that his words have done. "There's no racism without language," meaning that, sometimes, silence comes too late. *The Merchant of Venice *"In early modern anti-Semitism…the Jews were denounced for their limitation, for sticking to their particular way of life...With late nineteenth-century chauvinist imperialism, the logic was inverted: the Jews were perceived as cosmopolitan, as the embodiment of an unlimited, 'deracinated' existence, which, like a cancerous intruder, threatens to dissolve the identity of every particular-limited ethnic community." --Slavoj Žižek[iv] *"Jews have never been grafted onto the stock of other people." --Andrew Willet, 1590[v] *"Just as it is often hard to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, so too it is often very hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal..." --Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom)[vi] *"Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation." --Lancelot Gobbo Modern audiences of any of Shakespeare's works see a different story than what the Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences experienced at the Globe Theatre. Nowhere is this more visible than with The Merchant of Venice. Reading this play in our post-Holocaust world means that we access the story through Shylock--an avenue that likely would have baffled the original audiences. In some ways, our extratextual sympathies for Shylock come as a type of cultural allergy to anything connected to Nazism. In my view, such an allergy is important, and in the case of The Merchant of Venice, it serves to urge a cautiousness on the readers. After all, Germany had, for many years before the rise of the Third Reich, called the Bard "unser Shakespear", or "our Shakespeare".[vii] Hitler is said to have declared that "Shylock was a 'timelessly valid characterization of the Jew'."[viii] In some ways, audiences want to sympathize with Shylock simply as a way of, as it were, striking back against the horrors that Nazism unleashed on the Jewish people. Shakespeare makes it easy for us to sympathize with his villain. There is, after all, his *stirring speech about the shared humanity of all: *"Hath not a Jew eyes…?" (Harold Bloom argues that he is "not moved by [Shylock's]…litany, since what he is saying there is now of possible interest only to wavering skinheads and similar sociopaths"[ix], perhaps mistaking the specific for the general.) And, read in this excerpted sense, it's easy to see how sympathetic Shylock's plea is. *Read in further context, however, we see that Shylock's words also spell out his justification for a legalized murder. The difficulty of critiquing this sort of behavior is that Shylock is himself a victim of oppressive systems--if not through Shakespeare's version of Venice, but through the centuries of anti-Semitism. Shylock, then, is a different villain than Iago. What would Othello look like if the Black character were Iago? The villain? That is what we get with Shylock, and yet he manages to gain the sympathies of the audience more fully than perhaps any other antagonist in Shakespeare's canon. But what of the language itself? When the words are on stage, what do they say? Almost all of the Christians in the play have a racial bias, if not against Jews (as Antonio, Bassanio, the Salads (Salarino and Solanio), Lancelot, and Gratiano all show), then against any who look different to the Christian society (consider Portia's snort, "Let all of his complexion choose me so" (2.7.79)). *To pursue but one example of many: Consider this conversation between the Salads and Shylock (3.1): SALANIO Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, for here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. Enter SHYLOCK SALANIO …And Shylock, for his own part, knew the bird was fledged; and then it is the complexion of them all to leave the dam. SHYLOCK She is damned for it. SALANIO That's certain, if the devil may be her judge. SHYLOCK My own flesh and blood to rebel! SALANIO Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these years? SHYLOCK I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood. SALARINO There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. The racial lines are clearly staked in color, flesh (with attendant connotations of sexuality), and animalistic metaphors, but there's an unambiguous intonation, too, one that we've seen time and again throughout the play: The equation of Jewishness to the devil. *As demonstrated by the colors on the slide, you can see the interplay of assumptions, contradictions, puns, and insults mounting on top of Shylock and, in many ways, the Jewish nation in general. Shylock's explanation for such hatred and scorn is never denied by the Christians: They do hate him, it seems, because he is a Jew. The manifestations of the racial animus are heard throughout the play, then most clearly seen in the climactic trial scene (4.1). When Portia first arrives, she asks a question (that can be read in many ways): "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" (169), a question that can be comedic if the merchant is in chains and the Jew is wearing his gaberdine and yarmulke, but points to the possibility of Portia's disinterest in the case. Yet Shylock's assertion when he completes the brief *chiasmus ("Is your name Shylock? / *Shylock is my name" (171)) points toward what David Suchet observed: "He's only called by his name, Shylock, six times; Jew, twenty-two." In a world where the removal of a Jew's name carries with it dark undertones, it's difficult not to see the significance these words carry. *Perhaps it is *poetically rational, as it was with Othello: *the Jew as opposed to Shylock (the one being an iamb, the other a trochee). *Portia's split line (177) "Then must the Jew be merciful" can't fit the meter with "Shylock" in place of his euphemism. Still, Shakespeare is not always consistent with his verse. No, this subtle form of racism--of "deracinating" or, more largely, "dehumanizing"--is encoded in the words which are spoken and support the system which is designed to oppress and deny those deemed subhuman. Maybe we should say that Shylock's eventual--perhaps even inevitable--defeat is the largest indictment of a racially unjust society. His goal of murder is hardly laudable, and there is much to be said about the way in which the Venetian government got out of the curse he laid on them ("…fie upon your law" (100)), but the point still remains that, in a racist, anti-Semitic society such as the one we see on the stage, Shylock never had a chance. He tried to show the Christians their "villainy", only to be subsumed into Christianity. His rebellion turned into submission with the heart-breaking lie, "I am content" (389), and we see, yet again, how those exploited by the system which oppresses them is designed to keep them in their so-called "proper place". *1 Henry VI *"The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." --Charles Bukowski [x] *"Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite…" --Talbot *"These women are shrewd tempters with their tongues." --Alençon Intersectional feminism--a term first coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw--shows us how the previous examples of racist coding that support their oppressive systems is also at work in patriarchal constructs. Though there are many Shakespearean examples of female disempowerment at the hands--and language--of men, we will focus on Joan la Pucelle. Before we go too far, a word on women in Shakespeare. From the beginning, Shakespeare was interested in the feminine. Adriana points out the double standard of masculine versus feminine behavior in The Comedy of Errors, and it is drawn in more nuanced terms late in his career in the conversation between Emilia and Desdemona in Othello. This rendering of women in sympathetic light is made more remarkable when we remember the Tudor's restrictions on female representation prevented Shakespeare from exploring the feminine more frequently than he otherwise could have. Without being able to allow women on stage, it is, in some ways, exceptional we have as much from him as we do. *Statistically, women are severely underrepresented in his plays (though I would disagree with Ray Bradbury when he says "all the best lines went to the men"). This is explicable in that much of the subject matter Shakespeare discusses has to do with monarchies--historically masculine, particularly in these history plays. However, Shakespeare had no compulsion to render women in anything other than stock characters or stereotypes. So it is surprising to see how often women are given a great deal of lines within the broader context of the society and limitations in which the plays were written. In fact, there are a handful of plays in which the lead female character has a greater percentage of the lines than any other single speaker. These include Cymbeline (Imogen 16%), All's Well that Ends Well (Helena 16%), As You Like It (Rosalind 25%), The Comedy of Errors (Adriana ties with Antipholus of Syracuse at 15%), The Merchant of Venice (Portia 22%), The Merry Wives of Windsor (the two Mistresses make up 22%, though Falstaff has the largest single chunk at 17%), and Twelfth Night (technically a three-way tie among Belch, Viola, and Olivia at 13%). [xi] That being said, let us consider Joan of Arc. Though the other two plays discussed likewise have sources, Joan la Pucelle is a real-life historical character--as are the others throughout the play--and Joan's treatment by Shakespeare is worth observing. As she's allied with the French cause and Shakespeare seems more sympathetic to the British, her character falls within the Madonna/whore trope: She's a *"holy maid…Ordainèd is to raise this tedious siege" (1.3.30, 33) when first introduced by the Bastard of Orléans and *tried as "Wicked and vile" (5.6.16) by the English. The trope is pushed even further at the end of the play when she throws out names of would-be lovers in the hopes of gaining clemency. This binary is familiar to *feminist critical theory as it's one of the most frequent tropes women are cast in throughout Western literature. Joan's complexity as a character--marred as it is by Shakespeare's burgeoning talent during this early play--does suffer from the lack of nuance that other Shakespearean women enjoy. The Madonna/whore trope seems ridiculous when applied to someone as conniving, manipulative, and textured as, say, Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, Joan la Pucelle works well throughout the play as a relative trope: She is both halves of the trope to each side. For Tina Packer, this is indicative of Shakespeare recognizing that he'd created someone charming, but Joan had to be "evil" for his version of the story to work. Packer says, *"Shakespeare's first impulse toward Joan was a generous one…He liked that she dressed as a man, had visions from God and God's mother, wielded a sword…This is Shakespeare at his most natural. It's only when he followed Holinshed's story that he turned…" (20).[xii] (Marjorie Garber points out that even Joan's name is pointing toward this ambiguity: *"Joan, known as La Pucelle…represented the paradox of purity/promiscuity, since 'puzel' and 'pussel' meant 'slatternly woman' or 'slut'" (95).[xiii]) This play is also encoded the way the cross-dressing comedies were: We have a male actor playing a woman's part, who is, in turn, behaving like a man. While Joan never pretends to be a male in the way Portia does, she acts masculine, thereby playing a part that others, sometimes against their own instincts, choose to believe. Consider, for example, the English shock at a woman behaving in a man's role (2.1.22-23): *LORD TALBOT A maid, they say. DUKE OF BEDFORD A maid? And be so martial? DUKE OF BURGUNDY Pray God she prove not masculine ere long. *The first line is split, with Talbot's reference to Joan setting up Bedford's dismay. Interestingly, the line itself is feminine, in part because of the word *martial being the final foot. Read in this light, the feminine ending of the line works ironically against a word normally associated with masculinity. The feminine has usurped and taken over the masculine. Burgundy's *follow up line, therefore, becomes a patriarchal reassertion, invoking both God (patriarchy par excellence) and masculinity. This line is regular verse, alternating its stresses in an iambic pattern. Even the trisyllabic masculine fits into the meter, drawing attention to itself as the only polysyllabic word in the line. The expectation--societal, religious, poetical--of masculine dominance is thus subtly restored. The men about her are quick to doubt, anxious to find fault. In similar ways that women in the twenty-first century are often given half as much a chance to do twice as much, Joan la Pucelle is first called an "Amazon" (1.2.106), but, when the English surprise the French, the men almost immediately lay blame on her for her "failings". *DAUPHIN Is this thy cunning, thou deceitful dame? Didst thou at first, to flatter us withal, Make us partakers of a little gain, That now our loss might be ten times so much? JOAN DE PUCELLE Wherefore is Charles impatient with his friend? At all times will you have my power alike? Sleeping or waking, must I still prevail, Or will you blame and lay the fault on me? Improvident soldiers, had your watch been good, This sudden mischief never could have fall'n. (2.1.53-62) Joan adroitly points out the truth of the situation, and to his credit, the Dauphin recognizes that she's right. After some more scapegoating, it is Joan who pulls the squabbling French nobles into the more important enterprise of escape. Joan's speech, however, shines a light on masculine expectations. Her cry, "At all times will you have my power alike?" can remind us of how much is demanded of women in our Western society even in our day. Part of the Shakespearean difference is his acknowledgement that women are, perhaps shockingly to his audience, people, too. When Joan protests her treatment and the unrealistic expectations placed on her, she is part of an ages-old refrain critiquing the double standards of so-called standard. Nevertheless, she is, from Britain's view, "the bad guy (or girl)", necessitating the eventual terror of Act 5 scene 3. This, perhaps, goes along with Packer's assertion about Shakespeare's interest in Joan. It certainly helps to explain the inconsistencies the character can have, vacillating from humble servant to militant Amazon to ungrateful child to pleading prisoner. Perhaps the Bard didn't quite know what to do with a character who wanted so much to be her own person--a lesson that he learns throughout his career--so we don't see any attempt at making her sympathetic to the Elizabethan crowd when 5.3 opens. Joan explains that the "Frenchmen fly" (5.3.1) and then invokes the minions of the "Monarch of the North" (5.3.6)--a euphemism for Satan, who was believed to inhabit the north (see, for example, the placement of Satan's pre-Fallen headquarters in the northern part of Heaven in John Milton's Paradise Lost)--and she then attempts to do anything she can to save herself and reputation. This desperation goes far in this scene, all the way to whoring herself to the fiends, who refuse. She will then compound her sins by lying in order to avoid the pyre. Joan is led off with her *final hex echoing: A plaguing mischief light on Charles and thee! And may ye both be suddenly surpris'd By bloody hands, in sleeping on your beds! …I prithee give me leave to curse a while. (5.3.39-44) Metrically this is all solid, strong, and effective. What's most significant here is the idea of the curse. More fully explored in Richard III (see 1.3 and their "fulfillment" in 3.3), the women that people the history plays often rely on "curses" as an equalizing form. It's linguistic--they're mere words, after all--but they also strike the hearers with a usurpation of the linguistic status quo of masculinity and patriarchy. In a world where martial, political, and religious powers are all monopolized by one gender, and being without any other power given to her, the unuttered curses of Joan stand as her last attempt at retribution. Thus we can return to Derrida's assertion that racism--and, I would argue, sexism or even all modes of Otherness--are embedded inside of language. Shakespeare demonstrates that these methods of dehumanizing our fellow human beings do rely on being able to "institute, declare, write, inscribe, prescribe" the oppressor's will upon the oppressed. We see time and again the poetry of Shakespeare's words implicitly condemning the status quo, even if we can be certain that Shakespeare's words have directly been used to further causes of racism and misogyny. That, perhaps, is the greatest indication of Shakespearean prowess and power: He always gets the last *word. ---- [i] As quoted in "Othello's African American Progeny" by James R. Andreas. Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Verso Books. 1995. [ii] Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. Verso Books. 2015. [iii] See http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/characters/charactersO.html for a pronunciation guide. [iv] Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. The MIT Press. 2006. [v] As quoted in James Shapiro's book, Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press. 1996. [vi] As quoted at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/der-giftpilz where the Nazi children's book The Poisoned Mushroom is discussed. [vii] As quoted in "Shylock and Nazi Propaganda" from The New York Times. 4 April 1993. [viii] Dickson, Andrew. Worlds Elsewhere. Henry Holt and Co. 2015. [ix] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead. 1998. [x] Taken from http://flavorwire.com/417099/7-breathtakingly-sexist-quotes-by-famous-and-respected-male-authors/8. [xi] Statistics taken from the Shakespeare300 app, which uses Dave and Bill Crystal's calculations, also available in the Shakespeare Miscellany. [xii] Packer, Tina. Women of Will. Knopf. 2015. [xiii] Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. Anchor Books. 2005. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs 1 Aug 2018
When it comes to dinosaur books, there's often a binary, instead of a spectrum. On the one side, you have kids books. There are a lot of possibilities in this side of things, with everything ranging from pop-up books to coloring books to sticker books to encyclopedia-style books. And that's just the beginning. Then, on the other side of the binary, there are the more technical books. These are often published by university presses of some sort and they tend to have a lot of technical aspects. They're filled to the tips of the Brachiosaurus nostrils with information, as well as conjecture (as all science writing has) and hypotheses. The reason I say that it's almost a binary is because the stuff in between, the not-too-complicated-but-still-above-a-fifth-grade-reading-level is kind of rare. The two books that jump to mind, actually, would be My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Switek (of which I have two copies, both signed by the author, *humble brag humble brag*) and this one, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte. Not only is it written by a Steve (so odds are good that it's done well), but it hits that Goldilocks zone of dinosaur writing--clear, fun, passionate, and easy to access. Brusatte's style is light and enjoyable, with a natural ease to the prose. He doesn't wax poetic too often, which is probably the best way to approach a book like this. He's quick to give credit to his fellow paleontologists, even going so far as to recommend some of their books as alternatives and supplements to what he provides in his book. Admittedly, he gets a little too sycophantic (though that's too strong a term) and sometimes the book borders on self-indulgent memoir. That's a nitpick, however: The book is solid and enjoyable. Occasionally he dips into a Raptor Red style of narration, describing the prehistoric world as it might have been. He never has these possibilities do anything contrary to what we know about them and their behaviors, but he also posits these stories as "could bes". The book didn't hold a lot of surprises for me--probably a sign that I'm almost to the intermediate level of my dinosaur knowledge, I think. His arguments about feathered theropods were fairly convincing, but I'm still unwilling to go all the way up to a full-feathered Tyrannosaurus rex. Aside from the fact that it wouldn't look as cool (though there is some paleoart that maintains his fearsome reputation while still incorporating the feathers), which isn't a scientific--or, really, important--argument, I simply don't see how a creature that big could survive with insulation all over its enormous body. Cryolophosaurus? Yeah, I could see that--assuming that there were colder conditions in the Jurassic Antarctica where that particular theropod's bones were found. (Bit of an assumption there, but the point is, if you have comparatively cold-weathered dinosaurs somewhere, then feathers on larger theropods make sense.) The reason I hold to this view is twofold: One, there hasn't been any direct evidence of T. rex feathers. North American sediment doesn't preserve as finely as the Chinese sediment does, so it's hard (so far, impossible) to get the kind of impressions we'd need for a "smoking gun" on the feathered question. Two, the larger an endotherm gets, the more heat it releases. However, the skin of the creature provides too little surface area to expel all of the pent up heat into the atmosphere. (That's why elephants' ears are the way they are: They increase the surface area as a cooling mechanism.) Spinosaurus was predominately aquatic in much the same way polar bears are--terrestrial animals that would have spent most of their time in the water. But that massive sail on its back was likely an adaptation that also aided on cooling off its immense body. When it comes to T. rex, we have a similar issue: The fellow is just too big to be covered in feathers. That's my hypothesis. Obviously, all we need is a clear piece of fossil evidence to change my mind. Brusatte asserts that rex was feathered for certain as a chick and perhaps a juvenile, and believes that the proto-feathers--more like quills or spines than what we think of as feathers--likely covered the Tyrannosaurus' bodies. I'm willing to go that far, in particular because of his observation that feathers probably evolved somewhere in a proto-theropod dinosaur, an ancient ancestor to the feathered raptors and theropods, which means that T. rex might have had vestigial reasons for feathers of any type. Wow, okay. That was a tangent. Uh, yeah. The book. Look, I really liked it. I marked it up, threw in the appropriate exclamation points at the cool parts, and Google image searched a handful of dinosaur names that I wasn't familiar with. As far as an introduction to the whole scope and sequence of the animals, this is an awesome book. In fact, I'd probably recommend it right along with My Beloved Brontosaurus (though, of the two, I think Switek's is written just a little bit better). It's accessible, smart, and--best of all--it talks about dinosaurs. What more could you want? |
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