Neil Gaiman on Colbert (Michelle)

If you scroll past the pictures of Neil Gaiman's daughter with and without braces, you will find here on his blog a video of his recent appearance on the Colbert Report. It's pretty fantastic, of course, especially if it's true that the Tom Bombadil thing was utterly unrehearsed.

Gaiman recently won the Newbery for The Graveyard Book, and is also the author of Stardust, Coraline, Neverwhere, and the Sandman series, among other things.

Colbert himself is of course poised to take over the world.

Quotes Not of the Week (Michelle)

So, if you read this blog assiduously [crickets chirping], you may notice that the Quote of the Week has been the same for almost two weeks now. This is due to all kinds of unfortunate situations beyond my control, including mad busy-ness and touring of various and sundry university campuses, but the main reason is that I haven't found anything that has made my heart sing. Can you imagine? Surely the universe is required to furnish me with at least one quote about writing that makes my heart sing per week!

So, I am stuck, but my stuck-ness is of an unusual variety. You see, I find lots of candidates. I have heard and read many interesting things about writing in the past two weeks, but they have all inspired me by requiring me to disagree with them. And therefore I feel some compunction about posting them as the Quote of the Week.

And yet, who am I to judge? Perhaps you may find some of them helpful, or maybe you'll be spurred to work by the sheer force of your disagreement. So, here I present some of the Failed Candidates for Quote of the Week. Consider it the Anti-Quote of the Week Post.

In no particular order:

• "The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, bu tthen transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears."
  --- Orson Scott Card, Introduction to Ender's Game
  This one almost made it into Quote of the Week, actually. But it occurred to me that this can't be the whole story, since many of us write first of all for ourselves, in a room with a closed door, and have no audience (YET!). And surely we aren't suggesting that those stories aren't real, just because there's nobody out there who has yet been touched or moved by them. Think of the details on the ceilings of medieval cathedrals so far away that nobody but the angels in the rafters can appreciate it; even invisible art is art.
• "I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller can learn --- that there are a thousand right ways to tell as tory, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale."
  --- Orson Scott Card, Introduction to Ender's Game
  Well, obviously I just finished reading Ender's Game. I was intrigued by this quote, and there's probably a good portion of truth in it, but frankly I just found it horribly stressful. You could go crazy wondering whether you've stumbled onto the "right" or "wrong" way to tell the story in your early drafts. Just write it, and if you need to revise it, you'll figure it out. Or just write it, and let others be judgmental. Are "right" and "wrong" really helpful questions to bring to the early stages of creation? This blog seems really to be about those early stages, after all. So, thank you, Mr. Card, you sound awesome, but I ultimately am trying not to think too much about this quote.
• "There just can't be that many novels in the world."
  I heard this one, believe it or not, from a creative writing professor! In fairness, she was half-joking, talking about how she tried to keep every short story from growing into a novel. But, being fresh-faced, naive, and foolish, I was still shocked. Of COURSE there can be an INFINITE number of novels in the world! Whether they'll all be published is an economic question, of course, but the endless fertility of stories is a good thing, right?
• "An artist has 'wasted his heart' on the artist's life."
  This was loosely quoted by somebody else from the poet Charles Wright. I was pretty moved by it, but also fairly depressed.
• "Fine writing is, next to fine doing, the best thing in the world."
  --- Keats
  Obviously, there's nothing wrong with this quote. But I got it off a Page-a-Day Schott's Miscellany Calendar, and it's SO vague! It would be such a cop-out Quote of the Week. It would be filler. I detest filler. I'd rather have the sincerely, personally chosen Robin McKinley quote up indefinitely than fill the blog with bland bilge-water that nobody could possibly disagree with.

So, there you are. The Quotes Not of the Week.

Er...if you have any favorite, insightful quotes about writing and/or art, do send them my way...!

Remnants (Jillian)

I have come to learn that Agatha Christie's writing desk is currently up for auction. It's made me think of our connections to historical figures (in Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch or Henry VIII's suit of armor... and practically anyone you can name alive or dead under the sun) but most especially writers and artists - how we strive to collect their works and the tools they used to create those works. There is this overwhelming sense of reaching outwards for remnants of those that inspire us... not necessarily to be a part of that creation, but to feel it up close, under the finger tips.


It's also unmistakably creepy. This was the writing desk that launched many of Agatha's novels. The novels remain. The desk is here. But Agatha is gone. And yet, it goes to prove Time is not as impenetrable as we think it is. She is right there... in the dust and the pen markings. Not so far away.

Duck or Dog? (Jillian)

Not meaning to totally steal the scene today, but the Telegraph has an article about a pet duck that thinks she is one of the dogs - likes to be walked on a leash and competes with her fellow pets for food, etc. Isn't this world amazingly hilarious?

More Monsters (Michelle)

Nothing deep today, I'm afraid, just a collection of whimsies.

First of all, a big thank you to Yahoo for continuing to keep us informed of which automotive vehicles, specifically, would be endangered by various prehistoric creatures. This time we've got a pliosaur from Svalbard called Predator X. I'm not making this up. What a marvelous beginning to a short story this would make: "On the snowy plains of Svalbard, the men are restless. They fear the predator..."

For those of you less into EXTREME dinosaurs, Yahoo has also been kind enough to supply us with information on the iddlest biddlest wittle dinosaur that would nevertheless bite your ankles off here.

I'm a bit frustrated with my own writing at the moment and am somewhat convinced that David Bowie's "Heroes," if written by me, would begin: "I...I wish I could swim. Like a person, who's learned how to swim." I'm sure I'll be posting whatever wisdom I manage to grub out of these difficult days in the near future, but meanwhile, pliosaurs from Svalbard will have to keep us happy.

Note from a Celt (Jillian)

For a week now, I've tried to conjure up a poignant subject in honor of St. Patrick's Day. What I have however is just an amalgam of whimsy. And I think that is perfect in itself!

I have Celtic and Saxon ancestors - primarily English, Scottish and Irish. Who knows - perhaps there is a little Welsh in there, too. I have always been fascinated with this aspect of my heritage, regardless of how little I actually knew. My father used to listen to NPR's Thistle and Shamrock on Sunday afternoons, and that was the start to my undying passion for Celtic music - reels and melancholy songs in the "old language." I remember watching the embarrassingly campy NBC movie Leprechauns (not to be confused with the horror film) in 1999 (starring Whoopie Goldberg, Zoe Wanamaker and Randy Quaid of all people), but somehow making it a tradition to watch our video-taped version of it every year. In high school, I began a story in which an American teenager goes to Ireland to meet his mother's side of the family. The novel I completed for my undergraduate thesis involved characters born out of my conception of Irish rural culture - their fierce devotion to each other, the song-like wonder of their names. Even now, I feel the urge to "go back" to Ireland, dig deeper in my studies to somehow be a part of such a mysterious and yet beautiful place.

A few items that build up the fires of imagination (at least for me):

1. The Celts in Ireland were the first in the Isles to be Christianized (by St. Patrick). It was the faithfulness of Irish monks that eventually brought Christianity to England.

2. Ireland was never conquered by the Romans or by the Saxons; hence a culture that evolved separately and distinctly.

3. There is nothing like a Celtic band playing a rousing, joyous reel to turn the tide of a bad day!

4. I love making Irish Soda bread and kneading the dough with my hands. Is it strange to think lumps of baked dough completely beautiful?

5. One day I hope to learn Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Until then, I am content to be swept away in the beauty of the language(s) anyway! ("tighin air m'huir am fear phosas mi..." - Capercaillie)

6. One day I hope to visit Ireland.

7. The hauntingly beautiful Book of Kells:


8. If you've never seen The Quiet Man (starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara) please do! An American finding his identity in his Irish roots. Lovely and human!

9. The film Once. Bittersweetness!

10. Celtic knots and crosses. I have them everywhere!

The list goes on! By all means it shouldn't stop here!


Slainte Mhath!

Tasty Nomenclature (Michelle)

What’s in a name? I loved Jillian’s post on the subject and couldn’t resist writing one of my own. I’ve been thinking lately about how much I love elaborate, baroque names. They stick in the mind, and there’s no danger of a character or a place or an event with a nice tasty name drifting off and becoming non-descript, bland, or unreal.

I made a very incomplete list of some good names.

Dickens is the king of them, of course:

• Teachers: Mr. Machoakumchild, Mr. Headstone, Mr. Wackford Squeers
• Lawyers (shady and otherwise): Mortimer Lightwood, Tulkinghorn and his assistant Clamb, Mr. Jaggers, Mr. Vholes
• Men of business (shady and otherwise): Wilkins Macawber, Uriah Heep, Harold Skimpole, Ebenezer Scrooge, Mr. Guppy, Mr. Smallweed, Mr. Bucket, Mr. Krook, Mr. Ryderhood, Mr Venus and Silas Wegg
• Ladies and gentlemen: Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet; Miss Havishem; Mr. Twemlow
• Poor souls: Miss Flite, Jo, Charlie Neckett, Oliver Twist, and, naturally, Little Nell

Russell T Davies can be quite Dickensian about his epithets too, as they range from silly to histrionic, tongue-twisting to beautifully, contrastingly simple. I love the way he blends in scientific terms with the lexicon of fantasy as well. Who says television dulls our sensitivity to language?

• Tandocca Radiation
• Jaws of the Nightmare Child
• Shadow Proclamation (which in my opinion was much cooler just as a suggestive name—see picture, when the mystery became an old lady with a rhino…)
• Human-Timelord Biological Metacrisis
• Chameleon Arch
• Slitheen
• Toclafane
• And the counterweights to such vivid tongue-twisters: Time War, Reality Bomb, Void Ship. It also makes a nice contrast that his characters frequently have very simple names: John Smith; Martha Jones; Rose Tyler; Harriet Jones; Donna Noble.

Reading Terry Pratchett has also given me an occasional grin over the names:

• The Counterweight Continent
• Ankh-Morpork
• Susan Sto-Helit
• Mr. Teatime (pronounced TAY-uh-TEE-meh)
• Agnes Nitt and her alter-ego Perdita
• Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick
• Hogfather and Hogswatch
• Twoflower the Tourist (who becomes, for a few seconds in The Colour of Magic, Zweiblumen)

Most of my own characters and places, I’m sorry to report, have very bland names. But occasionally I come up with a corker. I won’t be listing them here, though!

Brush Up Your Shakespeare (Michelle)

More on the image now being called Definitely the Real Shakespeare Portrait No Seriously It Is.

Charlotte Higgins over at the Guardian (again) is unconvinced. Meander on over there and immerse yourself in questions of varnish, restoration, and whether it matters at all.

But, it must be admitted, this picture is so pretty:

I have saved it on my PC as shakespeare_maybe.jpg

Twittertastic (Michelle)

I've found out from the Guardian's addictive and prolific books blog that a number of agents and editors have gotten together and begun twittering (tweeting??) the worst query letters they've ever received from aspiring authors. This is exactly the kind of disheartening stuff I don't post about, so that's all you'll hear about it from me. If you want to learn more, you can read more about it at JacketFlap here. I'm still trying to figure out what twitter actually is.

But the ripple "QueryFail" has caused "downtown" in the City of Books sent a little shiver of worry to even a verbal vagrant like me. It reminded me of a favorite poem, written by the New England poet Anne Bradstreet in the 17th century when a collection of her poems was taken by well-meaning friends and published without her consent.

THE AUTHOR TO HER BOOK.

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th'press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i'th'house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critics hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou had'st none:
And for thy mother, she also is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

I'll be sending out some query letters in the next couple of months for work I completed in the fall. I can only hope I won't end up twittered; and I already knew that I'd have this poem in mind as I sent my stories off to try to flog our wares at the market.

Shakespeare Portrait

I've been reading Bill Bryson's book about Shakespeare, and he spent several pages talking about what Shakespeare might have looked like. So, it was interesting to find this link about a newly discovered portrait of the Bard.

Speaking of Quotes... (Maren)

. . . here's another one from Orson Scott Card.
"I hope that. . . you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that counts more than bestseller lists, royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in." (Introduction to Speaker for the Dead)

Book Love (Michelle)

I have a friend who consistently has fascinating quotes for her gmail status...which is nice for me! Here's one of her latest.

"Make books your companions; let your bookshelves be your gardens: bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and myrrh. And when your soul be weary change from garden to garden, and from prospect to prospect."

--- Judah ibn Tibbon, 1120-c. 1190

Why Read? Why Write? (Maren)

In a previous life, not so very long ago, I was not so into writing and reading. I confess I had a brief period of time when I couldn't remember why I even bothered reading. There seemed to be so many more practical concerns to worry about. Now, happily, I've outgrown that way of thinking, and I'm back into reading. I'm re-reading books and reading new ones and discovering the value of taking a chance on a book that you really aren't sure you'll like.

But the question has remained with me - why do I read? And, similarly, why do I write? Why is writing suddenly important to me? For every person, this answer may be a little different. For some people, the answer may be obvious, or even irrelevant (Rilke would probably be appalled). For me, however, the answer has been elusive. For this reason, I was thrilled when I finally articulated the following for myself:

I read to get out of my own head. I read to stop hearing my own voice for a time, to really listen and immerse myself in another's voice and in their thoughts. I read to immerse myself in the life of another person, not for escapism, but to grow, and to expand beyond myself.

I write for the same reason, which is, of course, a little comical, since what I write comes from myself. Somehow, however, writing gives voice to things in me that would normally be silent. I no longer hear my own voice, but instead hear a voice that I learn to recognize as myself. Parts of me that I'm not even aware of suddenly shout and express themselves, and I discover that I have am actually more than (or less than!) the person I thought I was.

Stephenie Meyer in Vogue (Michelle)

Another article on Stephenie Meyer, from March's Vogue.

Update (Michelle)

The OED tells me that "normativeness" is indeed a word, as is "normativity" which sounds a little more graceful, don't you think?

One can also be a normativist, i.e., one who gives lots of norms.

I'm Not a Writer, I'm Writing (Michelle)

Normativeness. I’m not sure if it’s a word and am frankly too lazy to check in the dictionary, but I’ve been thinking about it. The human bean (as distinguished by Mr. Wonka from the cacao bean, the jelly bean, and the baked bean) is terribly fond of rules. And writers are no exception: they make up all sorts of “rules” for themselves that really ought to be more like guidelines.

A quick scroll through our Quotes of the Week archive will show you how often writers pontificate about what Writers Should Do and What Writing Should Be. Usually, it’s wise, helpful advice, but it is always good to bear in mind that the opposite of any maxim could be true for you as a writer. Alan Bennett says that when you come across a sentiment from another a writer that you thought unique to you, it's like being taken by the hand --- but don't let that proferred hand yank your arm out of the socket and lead you down a road you don't want to travel.

Because in fact, all a writer is is someone who writes stuff. Anything more specific is going to be personal, idiosyncratic, and discovered by you yourself.

Point for discussion: One of my biggest quarrels with Letters to a Young Poet was Rilke’s tendency to make up rules for young writers, who are already have enough challenges. Take this one, from the First Letter:

Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write?...It is possible that even after your descent into your inner self and into your secret place of solitude, you might find that you must give up becoming a poet. As I have said, to feel that one could live without writing is indication that, in fact, one should not.
(pp. 11-13 of the New World Library edition)
I take it that Rilke means that if one could live without writing, one should not write. To which I say: Piffle. Poppycock. Tripe and other expressions of increasing vulgarity and anatomic specificity. Certainly there are people who feel that writing is lifeblood—but if you don’t feel that way, or don’t feel that way every second of every day, that doesn’t mean you aren’t a Proper Writer.

What’s really criminal about dicta like Rilke’s is the way they undermine the tentative soul. Who is really confident enough to declare: "Yes! I know exactly what my inner soul is saying and I would die if I couldn't write!" Frankly, such a person sounds insufferable. (Further, I often think that the more unselfish love is the one that can live without the beloved but does not wish to. Then we are looking at the gift of self rather than selfish, acquisitive love.)

I think that for every one reason I have to write, there are about ten insecurities waiting to gobble it up. Writers are geniuses at explaining why their work doesn’t really count, why they are hacks, why they are not even proper writers at all.

Any of these sound familiar?



"Writers are supposed to scribble constantly, seized by inspiration like Jo in Little Women or Cassandra in I Capture the Castle or Jamal in Finding Forrester. I don’t do that. In fact, I hardly ever feel like writing."
"Writers are also supposed to have heads brimming with stories and characters. I don’t."
"I never played make-believe as a child, so clearly I don’t have a vivid imagination."
"I can’t write a novel. Ernest Hemingway wrote short stories for years before he wrote novels, and I haven’t written a single short story, so I have no business writing a novel."
"Stephenie Meyer had a dream that grew into Twilight while her kids were little. I never dreamed when my kids were small because I was too tired! I must not really have a creative mind."
"J.K. Rowling started Harry Potter while she was a down-and-out single mom, but all I can think about is where my next meal is coming from. I must not really be driven to write."

"I’m too normal to be a writer. Aren’t I supposed to be a total mess or something? Isn't this where material comes from? I'm too boring."
"I’ve never even been in love. How can anything I write be credible?"
"I don’t dress interestingly enough to be a writer."
And the worst: "I’ve never finished anything, not even a journal, so I’m not a writer."
There are plenty of responses to the doubts I’ve just listed. For one thing, wanting to write comes from making a habit of writing. There's a lot of habit-forming that goes into being able to finish something. For another, for me at least, it takes continual practice to crystallize vague emotions and interior colors into characters and plots. They don’t come ready-made, however the movies make it look. It is also ridiculous to compare ourselves to such a rubbish writer as Ernest Hemingway (and everyone has their own genre gifts anyway). Most importantly, if you’re worried about how you dress, just buy some fingerless gloves at Hot Topic. Insta-funky, and your hands will be warm while you type as an added bonus.

Forgive the tongue-in-cheek, but I am writing from a place very close to my heart, as someone who has wasted a lot time enumerating the reasons why I don't "count" as a writer. The point is that we all have different stories. We all have different artistic needs, different ideas to express, different roads that led us to the page. Comparing ourselves to our heroes, fictional or real, is natural, but they can’t be allowed to make rules for us.
The relationship between every writer and his or her pen is as unique as every relationship between one human and another. People are all different; writers are all different. Though you may benefit from the example or advice of Hemingway or Shakespeare, Stephen King or Francine Pascal for all I care, what you write, why you write, and how you write are all up to you.

I really am convinced that there are many more potential writers out there than dare to declare themselves. Many, many people would be happier and more alive if they would allow themselves to be writers or artists of other casts. Please: take a piece of paper, and a pen, and write something. String a few words together to describe what you are seeing right now if you can't think of anything else. It'll probably stink; so revise it. Welcome to the guild.

As Faulkner says: "Try not to be a writer. Try to be writing." If you give up on being Jo March, you might just become yourself.

A writer is someone who writes stuff. End of story.

Leonardo da Vinci and Productivity (Michelle)

Madame Mental Multivitamin has once again posted a very thought-provoking article, this time about the stultifying way in which our culture views procrastination. If you've ever wondered why the novel isn't proceeding faster, what your "useless" work really contributes to society, why other people seem to be able to churn out work at prodigious rate . . . please read it.

This quote, for example, resonates all too well with me:

The rhetoric of anti-procrastination — constructed by imperialists, religious zealots, and industrial capitalists [Isn't it great how these our are out post-modern vampires? Bring them into an argument and, ZING, you've won! Not that I feel much sympathy for any of these categories, but still...] — had become internalized. We no longer need to be told that to procrastinate is wrong. We know we are sinners and are ashamed. What can we do but work harder?

Like the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we live our lives with regret for what we have not done — or have done imperfectly — instead of taking satisfaction with what we have done, such as, in Coleridge's case, founding English Romanticism in his youth and producing, throughout his life, some of the best poetry and literary criticism ever composed, including his unfinished poem "Kubla Khan." But that was not enough; always, there was some magnum opus that Coleridge should have been writing, that made every smaller project seem like failure, and that led him to seek refuge from procrastinator's guilt in opium.

W.A. Pannapacker (fantastic name!) tries to poke some holes in the traditional view of Leonardo da Vinci as a "procrastinator" and "underachiever" to show how important "procrastination" --- call it rather incubation, or contemplation --- is to the pursuit of good work, not to mention truth, beauty, and all those other embarrassing transcendentals. He has some particularly interesting comments on Leonardo's notebooks and the value of keeping commonplace books in general.

Probably the only wise thing my senior-year English teacher ever said to me was: "A mystic is someone who wastes time before God." The idea is not unrelated.

Sandy: A Recantation (Jillian)

I spend a fair amount of time at UNL, despite the fact that I graduated in May. There is something about it that spells home to me, and its hidden nooks and woody areas provide a retreat from my not-so-quiet job. If you've ever been to UNL, you've probably walked through the "Sculpture Garden", the area of which is merely sprinkled with a collection of modern statuary. One of these is Richard McDermott Miller's "Sandy: in Defined Space", or as I often dismissed it: "Girl in a Box." When Michelle visited me last week, I have to say what came out of my mouth was an arbitrary "I hate it." And yet, in almost five years, I'd never really looked at her. And for a writer to have never looked deep on a piece of art… well… it's silly.

The statue, as you can see, is a naked girl perched in one of two little boxes. On campus it is located in front of a boxy-looking Art building (Woods Hall) - not exactly in the middle of campus foot traffic. And yet, she's always made me uncomfortable… for obvious reasons. When I see nude sculptures - particularly modern ones - I tend to be nervous. At first glance, "Sandy" is trapped in the box. I always detected a thread of womanizing sentiment from it, especially since, not twenty feet away to the north there is another sculpture of a woman's backside, as if the rest of her is buried just below the soil. I recoil. I cannot abide the objectification of women.

After my dismissive comment about hating "Sandy", I started thinking and really looking at her… and the silly fears I had about her began to fade. First of all - yes, she's nude, but why is she nude? Is it any worse than Michaelangelo's David? The nudity, I decided is only a small part of it. In this case, it is to measure an unhindered spirit, protected inside the little space and concealing nothing. Further, she isn't trapped. There is no look of terror or despair on her face - nor is she looking out at me or any passersby with a silent plea for help. In fact, she is glancing off into space, at the foot she has planted up on one of the panels. It is a deep, pensive look - neither smiling nor frowning. Inside herself. She lets one hand dangle free. She does not grasp for an invisible door because she is free. She has made a choice between this box and the box beside it. She has made this space "defined". She is not, I am confident to say, associated with the one submerged in the soil a few feet away.

It is amazing how much I am still learning… by seeing and thinking about the possibilities… imagining her to be a character with feelings and choices and a name instead of an object made of metal! Meanings inside meanings… the perpetual nesting doll! That is art!

Sandy - with the Sheldon Art Museum to the south of her

Botanical Inspiration (Maren)

As Spring approaches (oh, please say that Spring approaches!), my mind is turning more and more to garden planning. I keep turning over in my mind the different things I would like to plant this year, and it turns out that a lot of these have their inspiration in literature. I want to plant blackberry bushes because they appear in The Wind in the Willows. I want to plant feverfew because it appears in Dealing with Dragons. I want to plant lavender because Harriet Vane's potpurri smells of lavender in Busman's Honeymoon. Almost every plant imaginable has some significance in some work of literature, and is therefore tinged with meaning.

On the one hand, this meaning seems as if it must come from the work of literature, right? I mean, my response to feverfew very clearly comes from Dealing with Dragons. That's undeniable.

At the same time, however, does our response to roses come from the way they are used in literature, or does literature merely reflect the way we feel about roses? Would Beauty and the Beast speak to us in the same way if Beauty's father had picked a buttercup or a daisy? There is something serious and complex about a rose that makes the Beast's rage somehow comprehensible, even if we do not understand it.

In Hamlet, when Ophelia drowns under the willow tree, somehow this seems to make sense (and not just because willows grow near water). There is something melancholy about willows, beautiful as they are. Even The Wind in the Willows has something of this sadness in its nostalgic tone, as bright and playful a story as it is.

The role played by flora in literature illustrates a give and take between nature and art. The natural world and the artistic one each lend themselves to one another in such a way that a person can never be absolutely certain whether meaning is bestowed by art or whether it belonged, somehow, to nature in the first place.

Chickens in Sweaters (Michelle)

Chickens in sweaters are the subject of this Daily Telegraph article. It's not as loopy as it sounds, actually, because these animals are being rescued from egg-production farms and genuinely need the extra warmth because they're balding.

Still, I doubt that the stripes and Christmas-themed patterned are strictly necessary. But if I had to knit tons of chicken sweaters, I'd probably try to make it fun for myself.

This picture reminds me of an illustration from Jerry Pinkney's The Talking Eggs.

Letters to a Young Poet (Michelle)

I recently read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet for the first time. I liked it quite a lot, though I do think it's important to feel free to disagree with Rilke...he is rather prone to pontification, which is not completely helpful for the artistic life in my opinion. But there is quite a lot of rich material for reflection, and he embraces the basic solitude of human life in some interesting ways. He sees a individual's interior almost as a landscape to be explored.

I particularly enjoyed this passage:

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are OUR OWN terrors. If it has precipices, they belong to us. If dangers are present, we must try to love them. And if we fashion our life according to that principle, which advises us to embrace that which is difficult, then that which appears to us to be the very strangest will become the most worthy of our trust, and the truest...Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where everything comes from and where it is headed? You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself.

This also reminds me of something Victor Hugo said: "There is one spectacle greater than the sea; that is the sky. There is one spectacle greater than the sky; that is the interior of the human soul."

Sorry I don't have page numbers and editions for these quotes, but I'm traveling and don't have my library with me.

Anyway, happy exploring!

Inspiration (Michelle)

This from Billy Burke, who plays Charlie Swan in the Twilight movie:

Q. Who or what inspires you?

A. Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Seriously, I don’t mean to take the piss out of this question but as I see it, inspiration is a completely subjective concept. Anyone who says that they are consistently inspired by anything, will ultimately end up a liar. Inspiration by nature, is an accident. It happens when you least expect it and with any luck, when you most need it. Shame on me if I ever put the responsibility to inspire me on anyone else’s shoulders.

Just one man's opinion, of course, but interesting.

In Our Time (Michelle)

In Our Time is a BBC Radio 4 program hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Each week, they assemble three or four experts on a given topic and let them talk about it for an hour. Topics range from "The Physics of Time" to "The Library at Nineveh," "The Sassanian Empire," and "The Fisher King." Yep, yet again, all hail the BBC.

I have a low-grade addiction to the program, meaning that I subscribe to the podcasts and they collect in my iTunes folder until I get sick and decide to listen to them, at which point I learn many, many cool things and wonder why I don't listen to them more often.

This week's program is about the Brothers Grimm, so I thought it might be of interest to the mythopoetic among us. I might even listen to it soon, even though I'm completely healthy!! You can download the program for free from iTunes, or you can go to the program website and click on "Listen to the latest edition." You can also browse around the archives, which is good fun.

Trompe l'Oeil (Michelle)

Well, I have no idea how to pronounce it, and only recently learned how to spell it, but I have trompe l'oeil on the mind --- i.e., the artistic style which tries to make a flat painting look 3D and real. For example, this "dome" is painted on a flat ceiling in Gozo Cathedral, Malta.

I've been thinking about this because I recently spent yet another magic morning in the library doing research for the novel, stressing out about historical realism.

As I was walking out of the library, I thought of another metaphor to add to my previous discussion of the problem. It's like trompe l'oeil. Think about it: a representational painting creates the illusion that you are seeing into space (the much-vaunted "picture window"), but at bottom it is still just an arrangement of lines and shapes and colors on a flat canvas. Trompe l'oeil is the most extreme example of this principle, striving for an illusion that borders on trickery.

It's the same with historical writing: I want to make my reader think (s)he's seeing into history --- and to do so I'd better look at history pretty darn closely and replicate it as nearly as I can --- but the very nature of my project is illusion and craft. That's the nature of the beast.

And aren't the best stories, that pull us in and wrap us up, a form of trompe l'oeil? Why do we cry when Romeo and Juliet die, if there's not a part of us that thinks they seem real?

Snakes and Salamanders (Michelle)

Forget giant prehistoric salamanders! How about this AP report of giant prehistoric snakes?

I love the tone of this article, which is similar to an eleven-year-old gushing about how really, really, big these snakes are. Bigger than a bus! No, they could eat a cow! Man, you would be toast if you met one of these guys. And dude, what if they got on a plane???

The Problem of Place (Maren)

Every writer has heard the advice "write what you know," but sometimes it can be a difficult thing to know precisely how to do that. Right now, I'm having a difficult time writing a scene that takes place in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. The Shrine is somewhere that I was taken frequently when I was in preschool, and it is somewhere that I went a lot during college as well. It had a formative influence on me in a lot of ways, and it also seems to have had a formative influence on the character I'm writing about. It is an important place for the story I'm writing, and I want to convey the sense of reality it has for me, and for my protagonist.

Unfortunately, I'm stumped by this problem. When I write the phrase, "He walked into the Shrine," I know exactly what I mean. I know what my character is seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling. Thinking about walking into the Shrine has a very tangible familiarity for me that it of course doesn't have for everyone, and I'm uncertain how to convey that. The problem is really two-fold. One the one hand, how do I convey the concreteness of a place without falling into excessive description? Similarly, how do I convey the intense familiarity that a place can have for a person?

It may turn out to be a problem without a solution and I may have to sacrifice sense of place and sense of familiarity for the sake of the storytelling, but I hope I won't have to. Only time will tell. . . .

Puppies and Flowers (Michelle)

I have mixed feelings about this blog, which is inevitable given how mixed its content is, but I've finally decided to post it for your consideration. It's called "Puppies and Flowers: ...For when you need to think of something else in a hurry," and it does what it says on the tin. It's a collection of random photos, news stories, videos, and links. I stumbled on it one day when searching for photos of, I think, Anglo-Saxon jewels.

It has a pretty strong post-modern bent, with a lot of interest in advertising as art, and there are a number of posts that I'm not comfortable with at all. But it's a place to go, well, when you need to think of something else in a hurry. In part, the fact that it often does differ so markedly from my own sensibility makes it a fresh voice when I'm stagnating.

Some recent posts:

• Scrabble keyboard
• Top 10 space photos of 2008
• Photos of abandoned mansion in Beirut
• Movie posters for The Birds

Damsels in Distress (Michelle)

I’ve been musing on damsels in distress lately. Let me give you fair warning that this post will go on for a bit, but I've got a lot of ideas about said damsels to work out. As a writer of fantastical and perilous situations, it seems sometimes like I can’t live with ‘em and I can’t live without ‘em.



Damsels in distress are deep in the bones of Western literature at this point—maybe Virgil didn’t feel he needed a blonde woman going “Save me!” but by the time we get to the 13th century, they’re pretty firm fixtures. Your hero has a woman he fights for—a lady fair. Oh, there are variants: sometimes she’s really ugly. Sometimes she’s treacherous. Sometimes he needs her more than she needs him. But she’s always there, getting into scrapes and thereby allowing him to demonstrate his masculine prowess.

And there are reasons it works—reasons far too deep and lengthy and controversial and hard to express to get into here—but let’s all admit that it is so satisfying when Edward saves Bella from the potential rapists in Port Angeles; or when the Doctor shouts, “Now there is no power on this earth that can stop me!”; or when Mr. Darcy pays for Lydia’s wedding so that Elizabeth’s life won’t be ruined…on and on and on, all the incarnations. At its best, the tradition of the damsel-in-distress can do some very nice things to develop a character or a relationship. What jump-starts a confession of love better, for example, or proves its sincerity, than a perilous rescue?



The weaker-vessel-female thing also has some very lovely manifestions, in ballet or figure skating or fairy tales. There’s also a fun strain of irony in those manifestations, as we all know (or should know!) the strength and physical prowess it takes to be a ballerina, or the hardiness of heart required to survive a fairy tale. So the illusion of weightlessness in such stories is always just that—she only appears to be a creature of glass. If we don’t forget that it’s an illusion, it can be a fun game to play among ourselves.

“If we don’t forget.” But oh, how we forget. And the damsel in distress becomes so very problematic.

The first problem you probably saw coming a mile away. In many of the traditions, the damsel has no character. She becomes nothing more than an object to be won, a cipher for the hero to project himself onto. In actual fact, medieval romance perpetrates this kind of bland commodification much less often than 1930s heroic films or Walt Disney movies, but that’s neither here nor there. Remember the ridiculous women of Errol Flynn films, or to take a more elevated example, Lucy Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. I love A Tale of Two Cities, please don’t mistake me, but does that woman have any characteristics besides golden beauty and undiscriminating goodness?

And you’d be surprised how quickly the cipher damsel can take on darker characteristics. Take all the collective fantasies about sleeping, unconscious, or otherwise immobile women—Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Pygmalion—who must be restored to life. In a lot of the original versions of these stories, it’s not a nice little kiss that awakens these women, either, but fully fledged sexual conquest. I’m not of the camp that says these stories should be utterly jettisoned, as I think there are many interesting things going on in them besides a necrophilic impulse, but the pathological passivity of these women in many of their cultural incarnations—particularly the Disney ones!—shouldn’t be overlooked.



Or look at this Fuseli painting again: It’s not hard to see that while the source of the horror is supposed to come from the dark powers encroaching on the pure woman, there’s quite a voyeuristic sexual charge coming out of the threat to her as well. Why save her, when you could watch what happens next?

Then there are the scores and scores of Victorian poems involving ladies fair who die, the countless pre-Raphaelite paintings of dead or dying women, the images of Leda all painted from a masculine perspective in which the woman who is raped by a swan gazes lasciviously out of the canvas while it happens. Sorry to disturb you, but this is the heritage of anybody who writes in the Western tradition. Granddad left us more stuff up in the attic than the Mona Lisa.



So where does that leave a writer?

Contemporary adventure films always have to confront the damsel-in-distress tradition. Often, I think, they do it extremely unsatisfyingly, even when writers are clearly trying to be PC. Indiana Jones gets plucky companions, but the scriptwriters seem to mistake shrill shrewishness for feminine strength. As far as I’m concerned, this is just another form of misogyny. Elizabeth Swann in the Pirates franchise is also clearly a direct attempt to circumvent the damsel-in-distress tradition (“You like pain? Try wearing a corset!”), but to me and almost everyone else I know, she registers only as irritating. And as for the tough-and-rough women of sci-fi (Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider? Charlize Theron’s assassin in Aeon Flux? River Song in Doctor Who?), with their lycra costumes and dominatrix overtones, they’re fantasies just as disturbing as all the sleeping princesses in all the towers you could imagine.

Where's the good news, Michelle? Well, despite all appearances, I do actually think that this isn't a hopelessly screwed up motif. There are some examples of fiction, ancient and new, that offer some possibilities for hope.
The best and most broadly applicable answer is probably just to write rich characters. As I said earlier, if the damsel tradition is used judiciously in a relationship that is developed sufficiently in other ways, it can be very moving. If the damsel motif is so deeply ingrained in the Western tradition, then it stands to reason that it’s pretty deeply ingrained in the Western man, and that this is one way that a character born and raised anytime after the 13th century would communicate love. So, yeah, Edward wants to save Bella, and as long as he’s not objectifying her, we can and should accept it as an expression of love. Similarly, it doesn’t bother me that the Doctor is always trying to save his companions in NuWho (that’s kind of his thing, anyway); that Darcy gets all protective of Elizabeth; that Tristan comes swooping in to keep Yvaine’s heart from being cut out…etc, etc, etc. I’d sure appreciate that if my heart was going to get cut out, after all, and all the women saved in these stories have sufficient personhood that we experience these moments as expressions of feeling rather than defense of possessions.

Another contemporary film that has effectively dealt with the damsel issue is, bizarrely, The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weiscz. The filmmakers let the man demonstrate his physical prowess as he’s always done, but provide the woman with a definite character and unique contribution to the situation. So, Brendan Fraser got to swoop in and save a woman who’s as hopeless in a crisis situation as I certainly would be, but she’s the one who is able to figure out what was going on by virtue of her archaeological expertise. (Again, though, this requires script development: it’s not enough just to put Jessica Alba in glasses and a lab coat and say, “See? She’s a scientist!")


There are also older stories that complicate the issues very satisfyingly. Jane Eyre springs to mind, with its constant fluctuation of power between the two protagonists, ultimately leading them beyond questions of power into love. In The Lord of the Rings, too, I love the character of Eowyn, who clearly can save herself with a sword but also suffers from a deeper spiritual distress (totally lost in the movie). Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale also portrays a woman who triumphs by the strength of her own character even as we wait for her to be reunited with her warlike husband. If memory serves, Chretien de Troyes’ Eric and Enide is also interesting on this score, as is Book III of the Faerie Queene, featuring Britomart, the female knight who is questing for her beloved.
Possibly it just says more about my personality than anything else that I prefer stories that work within the tradition to enrich and subvert it rather than stories that declare open war on it. Still, as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White prove, the good and the bad in culture can be inextricably tangled.

That is certainly the case for all those poor damsels in distress. Let’s save em, shall we?

Visibility and Art (Maren)

One of my favorite artists is the Swedish painter Carl Larsson, and I was lucky enough to receive a book of his paintings for Christmas this year. One of the points that the book stressed was that Carl Larsson and his wife decorated their house themselves and, in fact, made most of the decorations themselves.

Of course, this shouldn’t have surprised me. Why wouldn’t an artist make the art in his own house? But, I have to admit, I was surprised. I am used to having my art pre-made. I buy cds, books, and paintings for the walls. When I feel the need for something new, I go to iTunes or Amazon. When I grow tired of the paintings on the walls, I browse sites like Allposters and art.com.

And there’s no doubt that it’s a good thing to have art readily available. My life is richer for having music, books, and pictures in it. At the same time, however, the massive availability of other people’s art means that I rarely think of making my own. Writing and drawing are fairly new activities for me, and I’m enjoying them so much that I wonder why it took me so long to discover them.

Michelle recently posted an article about the lack of solitude in modern life, and this article was helpful to me in thinking about my own creativity. I especially liked the part about visibility as the defining feature of postmodern life. It seems that, to a certain extent, we assign value to art based on its visibility. Most of us scramble to read Oprah’s recommended books; we buy art prints by famous artists; we choose to watch movies that have been pre-reviewed for us by critics. We gravitate towards art based on its visibility, and personal art is rendered unimportant because of its invisibility. The irony is, of course, that the creation of art is always personal, and its visibility is only incidental. When we make visibility the goal, we become less likely to create because, “Well, who’s going to see it anyway?” We lose the joy of creation because creation becomes not an end in itself, but a means of achieving fame.

As I said before, writing is new for me, and I don’t think that anything I write in the near future will become visible to anyone outside of my immediate circle of family and friends. I’m just not that skilled. But that’s okay. My goal right now is to keep writing and to keep finding ways of creating that are personal and that bring joy. And if that means that no one ever hears my stories or sees my drawings besides my family, well, I think I’m okay with that.

Valhalla, I Am Coming (Michelle)

Whimsy, whimsy, and nothing but whimsy to the point of utter inanity. Do not follow this link if you take your Led Zeppelin songs very seriously. If Viking kittens sound interesting to you, however, please have yourself a good laugh.

Solitude (Michelle)

Here is an interesting article about solitude in postmodernity from the Chronicle. (All credit due to Mental Multivitamin for posting it first.) Obviously, this is a topic of relevance to writers (and artists in general), because the time you spend creating, "courting Psyche your soul," is time not spent down at the bar meeting eligible bachelors and bachelorettes (so to speak).

Deresiewicz summarizes a history of solitude in Western civilization very succinctly and lucidly, from the prophets and saints who drew greatness from solitude to the contemporary 15-minute celebrities. He also, a little predictably but probably correctly, is concerned about the effect of Facebook, text messaging, and---the horror! the horror!---blogs on our ability to be alone. Some highlights:

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

[W]e no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness...The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.

Losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness."

I do think Deresiewicz oversimplifies at times. He seems to labor under the misapprehension that all young people are explicating their inner souls on their MySpace pages, sending 100 text messages a day, and are terrified to be alone. I think the tension between solitude and community, too, is a somewhat eternal one, independent of (post)modernity and the temptations of the internet.

Deresiewicz quotes Emerson at one point, who said: "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions."

Fair enough, I suppose, but consider what Marley tells Scrooge to remember before it's too late: “It is required of every man...that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."

Only you can decide when you are supposed to walk abroad and when you are supposed to go out to Walden and bait your hook with darkness, but at least Deresiewicz raises the question.

****NEWS FLASH**** (Michelle)

Doot doo doot doot...okay, typing out fake Morse code is annoying even me.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blah blah blah to tell you that....[drumroll]

Jillian and I are excited to welcome another writer to Daedalus Notes! Coming soon, look for posts from Maren, who is (you guessed it ) another writer. We’re excited to see the different viewpoint she will bring to the blog, and you’ll be excited to see how she will probably not post as often about Doctor Who as Jillian and I do!

A House Divided (Michelle)

Do you remember this scene in Pirates of the Caribbean 3? Apparently, Captain Jack Sparrow’s version of hell is to captain a ship crewed by Jack Sparrows. I’m not a big fan of the Pirates franchise, but the third installment was redeemed for me by some of the arresting images it offered: my favorite is the surreal spectacle of Far Too Many Jacks and a man at war even with himself.


It’s not something I’d like to emulate, but I have to confess that I sympathize with him. I want to be one and whole, but as a writer, I feel subject to warring impulses of all kinds. I’ve got enough desires for several lives, not just one. Does anyone else experience this?

I haven’t got them all categorized—and I doubt that anyone would be interested in hearing the definitive catalog anyway—but my crew of Michelles, responsible for getting my life to safe harbor, argue constantly among themselves. There’s Ambitious Michelle, who ferociously wants to get her writing published and be part-of-the-world, constantly at war with Private Michelle, who doesn’t want to make an exhibition of herself and is happiest on some lost floor of a university library. There’s Writer Michelle, who doesn’t understand that Physical Michelle must eat and have health insurance. Don’t even get me started on Domestic Michelle and what that means for Adventurous Michelle. I want to be, well, everything, and I am often extremely discontent that I just can't be.

Contrary to all appearances, I’m not posting this as an opportunity to navel-gaze ad nauseam. (Believe me, I can do that without posting.) It’s just that I think that it might not be just me who can’t reconcile all these impulses. I think a lot of artists experience this. Everybody has contradictions, but artists, who tend to feel and think whatever they feel and think so intensely, practically have multiple selves to deal with.

Even characters can be a bit like multiple selves—I’ve got whole populations and races of people jostling around in my imagination, clamoring to get out! And they all have bits and pieces of me, of course.

I’m not particularly fussed about this. I’d like to think I’m a better captain than Jack Sparrow—nicer to all my little constituents, for a start. I took a walk yesterday, and I didn't kill the Workaholic Michelle who was protesting like mad; I just politely asked the other Michelles to sit on her head.
It also seems to me that it ties in nicely to Plato’s diagnosis of the soul: we have Rational Souls, Appetitive Souls, and Spirited Souls. Happiness is a matter of bringing those souls into balance. I imagine that it’s much the same with the artistic life—none of those Michelles get to run the show, but none of them should be shunted aside either.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for saying that an artist is someone who can hold two opposed views and still function. When I looked it up, it turned out that he actually said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I guess the jury is still out on the subject of my intelligence, and it remains to be seen if I will “retain the ability to function.”
But I’ve got 169 pages of a novel and I love my family: my hopes are high. I hope yours are too.

ShakespeaRetold (Michelle)

From dire illness, I return (gradually) to the land of the living and, hence, the blogosphere. And I return with a film recommendation that made me want to write like mad!

I've been exploring the BBC's 2005 miniseries, Shakespeare Retold. There are four 90 minute adaptations: Much Ado About Nothing (set in a provincial newsroom), The Taming of the Shrew (with Kate as a stroppy politician), A Midsummer Night's Dream (in a faux-rustic resort), and Macbeth (in a gourmet restaraunt).

Usually I avoid modern retellings of Shakespeare that excise the language, not from snobbish impulse but because they're usually just not very good. I do enjoy 10 Things I Hate About You as much as the next teenybopper, but it has to be said that just a tad of the original play's richness is lost, and I'm usually acutely aware the entire time that whatever is being said, Shakespeare said it better.

Not so with these adaptations. Occasionally I do miss the language (when Beatrice says, "I love you so much I can hardly breathe," I do wonder what was wrong with Billy Shakes' "I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest!"), but most of the time I'm just slavishly admiring the creativity of the scriptwriters and the skill of the actors.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, Peter Bowker captures the spirit of the conflict between nature and artifice in the original play with its touristy setting in DreamPark. Sally Wainwright, the scriptwriter of The Taming of the Shrew, makes some brilliant strokes as well, including some clever adaptations of the totally over-the-top, utterly un-PC farce of the original.

And there are so many good performances, too, but some of my favorites are Rufus Sewell's Petruchio, Shirley Henderson's Kate, Imelda Staunton's [Hip]Polly[ta], Dean Lennox Kelly's Puck, and Sarah Parish's Beatrice. If you like British TV, it's a good actor-watch. A good half of the cast have been on Doctor Who at some point or other.

The scripts are frequently eloquent, moving, and hilarious. For example:

"My advice to Titania and Oberon? Leave the forest. It's this place. It gets into your head. I mean, all this nature...it's not natural, is it?" (Puck)

"He just didn't want you to mistake him for one of the grown-ups. In reality, he's probably not more than about...six." (Petruchio's friend whose name escapes me.)

"Love is probably one of those things that a man grows into, like...jazz! And olives." (Benedick)

"If Beatrice doesn't watch it, she's going to grow into one of those women whose idea of a big night is a really big bowl of hommus." (Margaret)

"If you don't get it right, I'm going to turn you into a novelty key chain." (Oberon to Puck, of course)

A Misummer Night's Dream, written by Peter Bowker; starring Bill Paterson, Imelda Staunton, and Johnny Vegas

Much Ado About Nothing, written by David Nicholls; starring Sara Parish, Damian Lewis, and Billie Piper

Macbeth, written by Peter Moffat; starring James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes

The Taming of the Shrew, written by Sally Wainwright; starring Rufus Sewell, Shirley Henderson, and Stephen Tompkinson.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/shakespeare/tvdramas.shtml

Doctor Who: the Question of Identity (Jillian)

I have been waiting to babble about this for a long while. I want to thank Billie Piper for saying what I've felt sincerely for months now: the Doctor should never be played by a woman. "Forgive me, I know it's not a feminist thing to say, but it's like saying, 'Let's make James Bond a woman.' It's a man's role."

For those of you who don't know, for months after David Tennant announced he would be leaving the show, a long list of possibilities emerged to replace him as Doctor Eleven. Before Matt Smith was confirmed, there was an interest expressed by several (including Russell T Davies) to have Catherine Zeta-Jones take over the role.

I will be frank. The day the re-creators of Doctor Who decide that he will regenerate into a woman, I will be done with the story. Why? I do not believe this is an issue about feminism or politically correct sentiments. This is a basic tenant of the Doctor's identity. He has been a man for ten regenerations from personality to personality from Time Lord to Time Lord. It is not the same issue as the Doctor asking Rose (right after he regenerated into David Tennant): "Now be honest, how do I look?... Am I ginger?" It is not so simple. In fact, it is complicated... perhaps too complicated. When you change the gender of a character, everything changes. And that is not simple a "rule" that applies to the Doctor and James Bond, but to any character.

I have come to believe that masculinity and femininity are simply not interchangable. And the Doctor so far this revival has not exactly been sexless. Out of the many episodes where the Doctor and Rose struggle with their relationship, or Martha pines away because the Doctor won't even look at her... with a girl in every fireplace... a smarty pants, a lady-killer... the "fire and rage" and the broken soul of a lonely wanderer, a father without children... all these and more point to the reality that the Doctor is undoubtedly a man. In nearly every episode, the inevitable question about the enigma of his identity must be asked: "Who are you?" His answer has been expressed in a variety of ways, but one definitive answer that pops into my head in this moment is from "The Girl in the Fireplace": "I'm the Doctor! And I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!"

The Doctor is an enigma, multiple facets brought out by many different men. The mystery deepens around his name, the lives he's led, the people he's met, the enemies he's battled, the people he's lost. We see him clearer with each mystery. He is many men. And once, you could even say he was a woman - when Donna absorbed his regenerative energy - we did have a taste of this particular what-if. But there can't be more than a question. The Doctor is a fixed point in his story. Perhaps he reflects pieces and echoes of the companions that have shared the TARDIS with him over the years. But he retains a few fixed points of his own. And this has to be one of them.

Words Creating Pictures (Jillian)

Once again, the Daily Telegraph has me completely under its spell... because it just takes the time to celebrate art... art that totally takes us by surprise in its ordinary yet magical ways! (follow the lovely link at your leisure!)

Today's subject of intrigue: typewriter art by Keira Rathbone! Literally pictures, portraits and landscapes brilliantly rendered from ink strokes and letters on a typewriter! It creates this brilliant metaphor in my head - of words threading themselves together into a tapestry to create an striking picture, creating layers, hidden messages... ah! Not to mention, I wish I had an old typewriter... not necessarily to create pictures (I'll leave that to Keira's amazing talent), but to connect with words in that special way. Perhaps the next time I venture to a garage sale or an antique shop! Wonderful, wonderful whimsy!

Thank you Daily Telegraph! You are my inspiration!

Just a Name? Poppycock! (Jillian)

At long last I have returned to the blog... with more observations on our strange world!

Today's topic: names and the wonder that is behind them. Reader, you may snort a little at such a trite observation, but 'tis true. As a writer, I am obsessed. I have been known to ruminate over the names of my characters for months, only to settle on the one that will feel essentially right. I find myself wondering how people I meet in random situations were named the way they were... especially if they are unique... or if there is a particular story behind it. Names are, after all, identifiers. Even if your parents could not predict what you would be like as an adult, they chose names that were meaningful in some way to them. It is one tiny thread of a person's identity that shapes them and continues with them throughout life.

I have enjoyed creating names out of existing ones for my more wayward and fantastical stories: Annara (a combination between Anne and Sara); Rurac (a version of the Celtic surname Rourke); Shadow (nickname for a man named Brey); etc.

But I continue to balk at the growing trend of name-changing and children given utterly bizarre or offensive names. To change your name is your decision, but what, ultimately, does that look like? People have been known to change their legal names to domain names, advertisments and other sorts of meaningless tripe. Meaningless? Yes. Meaningless. Done on a whim to satisfy spur-of-the-moment impulses. Honestly, "Thor, God of Thunder" might appeal to you now, but what about in ten years? Do you really want that on your marriage license? Your diploma? Your death certificate? Or are we really not thinking that far ahead anymore? I have begun to appreciate the fact that we do not, in general, choose our names. We grow into them, we learn to tolerate them or find some way around them (via fun and interesting nick names). But it says so much about our character if we are able to honor the people who gave them to us. Being named after a grandparent or your mother's favorite Jane Austen character might actually give the opportunity to redefine that name with your own life. What good is a journey with the name you were given if you give up? (Think along the lines of a "Boy Called Sue" by Johnny Cash.)

What about children who are given bizarre and unflattering names. And I'm not actually referring to, say, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's newborn daughter Seraphina... which is actually quite pretty, if you ask me. There has been a recent story floating around the news media in recent months about the Campbell family out of New Jersey whose 3 year old son, named Adolf Hitler Campbell (not kidding), and was refused a birthday cake with his name on it. "Adolf" apparently has two little sisters with similiarly themed names: JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honslynn Hinler Jeannie. His father, in a video interview, expresses his apparent disgust with the dismissive comment, "They're just names." I am sitting here with my mouth dropping open. Just names? All right, this is a little worse than the "Boy Called Sue". As if Hitler was just an ordinary person. The implication is that the origins of those names do not matter and that everybody else needs to be "tolerant." It saddens me that he can be so careless.

A few scenarios:

The name John was taboo when it came to the English monarchy. John, you ask? Remember the cruel, greedy, awful King John - whose barons forced him to sign the Magna Carta (or evil Prince John from the Robin Hood stories)? He was the cause of so much grief in 13th century England, with his murderous rampages and conflicts with France that caused him to lose much of the land that was once considered English soil. I consider it to be no coincidence whatsoever that there has not yet been a King John II.

Switching to Doctor Who, the Doctor actually has a name other than Doctor. Trouble is, no one knows what it is, and I've heard that Time Lord names are forgotten once they've chosen their designation. (Anyone well-versed in Time Lord culture, please feel free to correct me!) There are a few episodes in Series 4 that touch on the secret knowledge of the Doctor's name - as the difference between the trust of strangers and being chucked out of a car ("Midnight") or the identification of a person he hasn't met yet ("Silence in the Library"), but might be the most important person he ever meets in his life. Further, there are other little identifiers in Doctor Who which seem like nothing, but are actually carry earth-shattering importance. If a mysterious blonde woman appears from a parallel universe, carry with her the key phrase "Bad Wolf"... we know it can be no one but Rose Tyler.

In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf has many, many names... all of which carry different meanings: Gandalf the Grey, Gandalf the White, Storm Crow, Mithrandir... he goes by all of them and yet they are all, essentially, him.

In Return of the Jedi, (I smell a pattern) Darth Vader responds to the utterance of Anakin Skywalker: "That name no longer has any meaning for me." To which his no-doubt miserable son returns, "It is the name of your true self you've only forgotten."

In the pilot episode of Criminal Minds, FBI agents Hotchner and Gideon get into a conversation about how difficult it is for Hotch and his wife to choose an appropriate name for their unborn child, because any innocent sounding name makes him think of an infamous serial killer. That, apparently, is not a burden Hotch wants his son to carry with him.

~

Obviously, Mr. Campbell, it isn't merely a name if the world still shudders when they hear the name Adolf Hitler. I feel for his little son who doesn't know any better. When he is older and in school with other Timothys, Adams and Brians how will he discover the dreadful history of his name? It really is a burden already weighing. Names shape us. How was Adolf Hitler meant to shape him? Or was it merely an identifer of his parents... and their questionable political leanings?

Forgive me if I've burdened you with this flood of words. Names are art to me, and it makes me sad - and, I admit, less articulate - when people see them as nothing more than gibberish or an advertising space. Names make us human, connect us to our history and make the steps we take distinctly ours. We are characters in a larger story, and no character is meaningless. Why should their designations be any different?

Tell me, am I totally overreacting or this a legitimate defense of art?

James Moran and Writing for the Screen (Michelle)

I have been very sick this past week and have resembled nothing so much as a particularly large couch cushion (but only in my more energetic moments). Until I am feeling well enough to generate actual thoughts, this will have to serve to sustain the blog:

From the treasure trove at Den of Geek, Here's an interview with James Moran, another screenwriter, on the joys and perils of screen-writing. Moran has written for such sci-fi gems as Torchwood and Primeval, but to be honest, what makes him cooler than most of us is that he wrote the Pompeii episode in Series 4 of Doctor Who.

Be warned: he does occasionally talk about things like how hard it was to get to the screen, which is not what this blog is for. So, if you feel that may depress you, no one will judge you if you do not read the interview.

Hey, It's Okay... (Michelle)

...if this is what your writing sessions look like sometimes. This is from John Crowley's Little, Big; it describes the exploits of Auberon, a writer, who shuts himself into an "Imaginary Study" within his tenement apartment to write.

What he intended to do...was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn’t have put it that way; to court, on long wool-gathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. (p. 315 of the Harper Perennial edition)

For Over-Achievers and Other Demons (Michelle)

My sister pointed out to me yesterday that achievement and creation are different animals. The purpose of writing is creation.

I post this in case any of you, like me, have trouble remembering this.

This has the obvious meaning, of course, that the point of writing (or any other kind of art-making) is not to achieve adulation. But it also applies on the micro scale, I think; for example, yesterday, I was worrying that I wouldn't achieve or accomplish anything by the end of the day if I took the time to try to get my back (currently tied in multiple knots) to relax. That was when my sister pointed out that at least in relation to my art, I shouldn't be trying to accomplish but to create.

I find this a very rich idea, the notion that creation is an act different in kind from "getting something done." If you think about it, "achievement" is all about finishing something (e.g., "demolishing" your to-do list, "completing" your tasks) but creation is about bringing something new into being. Adding rather than subtracting.

David Nicholls, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Writing for the Screen (Michelle)

This Sunday, a BBC adapation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles was aired on American public television. I missed it, and in any case, I haven't read Tess --- it's one of those glaring gaps in my literary knowledge, not likely to be rectified any time soon. (Episode 1 is currently available to watch instantly on the website, if you are curious.)

However, if you visit the PBS website here, you'll find a link to an online conversation with the screenwriter, David Nicholls, at barnesandnoble.com. He is answering questions about the issues involved in screenwriting (particularly, adapting classics) until January 12. This is something that does interest me intensely, and I'd highly recommend checking it out.

Nicholls (IMDB profile here) also penned an extremely deft modern retelling of Much Ado About Nothing for the Beeb in 2005, as well as the quirky Starter for 10 starring James McAvoy.

Salamanders, Part 2 (Michelle)

Happy New Year!

For those of you who were intrigued by the Renaissance idea that salamanders live in fire, I finally found that Thomas Browne reference. I'm on a mild pre-modern science kick, as that quote from Plutarch's Moralia also indicates.

Anyway, Browne, writing in 1646 or thereabouts, is actually debunking this idea with his "new science," but in so doing he describes the previous belief. Here we go, from the fantastically named Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

That a salamander is able to live in flames, to endure and put out fire, is an assertion not only of great antiquity but confirmed by frequent and not contemptible testimony...Pliny assigns the cause of this effect: an animal (saith he) so cold that it extinguisheth the fire like ice.
...
It hath been much promoted by stories of incombustible and napkins...which endure the fire, whose materials are called by the name of salamander's wool [how cool is that?!]; which many, too literally apprehending, conceive some investing part, or tegument of the salamander. [Browne goes on to explain how in antiquity the bodies of kings were burned in "salamander's wool" to keep their ashes pure. Goodness knows if this is true.]

There you go. A particularly arcane piece of whimsy to start off 2009. With the holidays behind, I hope to start posting a few more substantial things soon. But meanwhile, enjoy some eggnog!