Spotted in the wild (at the local library) by Christopher Rowe.
]]>]]>
This is a great post and makes me want to watch the Taming of the Shrew. I do want to quarrel with your characterization, though, that "the old medieval and Renaissance way of looking at love is as something that maintains the hierarchies by which society is structured."It's certainly the medieval and Renaissance way of looking at love -- of a certain kind -- as something that can maintain those heirarchies. Particularly, say, love of God, or the love involved in fealty. But it isn't the characterization of romantic love -- by which I particularly mean heterosexual, unconsummated, non-marital love, the aspirational affective relationship between a man and a woman who've not yet mated, which is what's at issue in Shrew -- that I'm most familiar with in medieval and Rennaissance works.
Rather, it seems like romantic love is usually a destructive force which at least potentially puts the social heirarchy at risk. Courtly love is supposed to be unrealized and platonic, but it's distinctly an unrealized extramarital affair, one that if realized would lead to bloodshed. Guinevere and Lancelot's love does not reinforce the social order, and much more time is spent on that love, in the Arthurian saga, than on Guinevere's love for Arthur; indeed it seems to me that it's more likely to be a modern version which would cast Guinevere as conflicted and dwell on her emotional marital love for Arthur. In the medieval context it seems that what is important, and at risk, and morally decisive, is her pledge to Arthur, emotions having little to do with it.
Where romantic love is not a tragic or potentially tragic force, it's a usually comic one, lampooned as a reason for people to make fools of themselves, as in the commedia dell'Arte or the mortals' hijinks in Midsummer Night's Dream, etc., which is another way of acknowledging its disruptive nature -- it causes otherwise sensible people to act in foolish, immoderate and risky ways.
It actually seems to me that the story of romantic love -- a premarital affective passion -- leading ultimately to marital happiness is more of a modern innovation -- if I were a Marxist I would say you get it when, say during the regime of Jane Austen, the bourgeois have become the dominant class. It seems like our myth, the drama of our Hollywood movies and the paperbacks in the aisles at Wal-Mart, is that the love which initially seems disruptive -- in which the lovers "meet cute" and start as combatants, or in which the brooding Mr. Darcy or Rochester seem forbidding and dangerous -- turns out to be the key to stability and bliss. Love not only conquers all, but restores all to social harmony: coupled status, regularly available sex, a house in the suburbs and a really great nanny. (In the medieval, omnia vincit amor was bittersweet, part threat). The contemporary Hollywood Darcy or Rochester, or their Wrong Guy competitors, is less likely to actually harbor any real threat than the Austenian or Romantic version did -- Hugh Grant may have been a cad and the Wrong Guy in Bridget Jones, but he was actually kind of a nice cad, well-meaning, not a Wickham capable of ruining a younger girl or scheming to obtain an inheritance. A modern Hollywood version of Rochester is unlikely to actually have locked a mad wife in the attic -- not if the heroine is going to end up at "Reader, I married him."
Of course, literature is an inaccurate guide to what people really felt, not least because writers are constrained by the need to write about something exciting, which is ipso facto not the typical case; and I am committing the typical error of comparing great old works to average new ones (I did rather like Bridget Jones, but it's fluffier than Pride and Prejudice, to be sure); and you've doubtless read more medieval and renaissance literature than I, so my sample may be skewed.
Still, it seems to me that specifically romantic love, the kind easily confused and mixed up with bodily lust, as opposed to love of God and King, was really seen mostly as a potentially truly destructive force in the medieval and early modern -- one which could perhaps be trivialized in farce, constrained by pious vows of platonic courtly love, or even resolved, in the relief-filled laughter of comedy, into a proper marriage -- but which could just as easily end in tragedy. When, as in Shrew, the lovers end up becoming a socially acceptable marriage, there is the sense of a bullet dodged: a destructive social force, passion, which would naturally lead to tragedy, has been transmuted alchemically into a sustaining social force, the fealty of the vassal/liege relationship between a wife and her husband. Cause for the laughter and relief, and for celebration.
Whereas in the tales we like to tell ourselves, romantic love appears dangerous but is actually safe, and in fact obligatory -- it is an invitation to temporarily dangerous adventure, but at the end, when the hero kills the bad guy and gets the girl, romantic love -- passion -- is in fact the safe and sustaining social force with which he is rewarded. When Mary Jane runs off from her wedding to the Wrong Man to find Peter Parker moping in his apartment and says "Isn't it about time somebody saved your life?" and then they kiss, there's no need for a transmutation of passion into fealty. The kiss, the offer of romantic passion, is the life-saving; it restores the sustaining social force of romantic love whose absence was a threat. Under the rule of the bourgeoisie, romantic love is no longer a dangerous power which can erupt without warning and bring about doom, something to be feared and managed until safely bound; rather, it is something we all deserve and should have on tap, like hot water, refrigeration, and the movies.
chrononaut: Somebody appears to think the stuff about filters and strategies in "True Names" wasn't meant to be taken literally.plausible-fabulist: You mean "that computer stuff works as an sfnal metaphor"?
"Metaphor" may not be the right word, but I see where he's coming from. It's not really a 2009-era computer with processes, threads, a stack, a heap, etc.
chrononaut: Hey, it might be! That's as plausible as a 25th-century spaceship having thrusters, airlocks, ventilation ducts, a life support system... :)
plausible-fabulist: What do we call steampunk in which the archaic technology which is whimsically given the job of implementing far greater functionality than it could actually support is 21st rather than 19th c.?
chrononaut: I think between "True Names" and "Down and Out" we may have just invented siliconpunk. :)
plausible-fabulist: This email exchange needs to be blogged.
Update: On further reflection, David and I are of the opinion that "siliconpunk" sounds hoary: a beige, late-70s, early-80s flavor, the fairchild semiconductor era; the imagined future of computer nerds (not geeks, 'cause geeks didn't exist yet) before cyberpunk and the internet.
The actual extrapolation-of-now literature would be twitterpunk, but we are not hip enough to write that. Paging Alice Kim.
]]>He gave me actual physical copies of the first two. They are marvelous.
]]>Updated: Please don't get up at five in the morning: the show has been preempted by a fundraiser. We're still going to tape it on Sunday; I'll let you all know when it's going to air.
]]>
Spotted in the wild (at the local library) by Christopher Rowe.
]]>(Moles and I are trading contrib copies, so I'm also reading Eclipse Two, which I'm not in, but also like a lot.
(Note: I'm trying to link to Powell's more because I am pissed off at Amazon for their gayfail, but their entry for Eclipse Two is so mangled I'm not even sure they're talking about the same book; please, Powell's, get it together.))
Like Old Man River, we keep on rolling.
]]>It's a piece of folk art -- that's what fan art is, you know -- which surpasses the commercial art it uses as its materials, taking the well-acted, but deeply reactionary and triumphalist scenes from the Narnia movies -- bowing to the lion, gleefully occupying one's new throne -- and putting them into a fresh and heartbreaking context, turning them, message-wise, on their heads.
(I also really liked Gaiman's story "The Problem of Susan".)
What I'm bitter about, you know, about the whole Susan thing, is not the Act of God that renders her a brotherless, sisterless, abandoned orphan, nor even the pretense that this is a Righteous Thing. I'm comfortable with divine brutality -- the Bible, after all, is full of God doing things which are unforgivably appalling if judged by human standards, and this seems if anything to me to be a strength of the text. The world is in fact full of horrors, after all, and therefore a Sunday-school Bible Stories redaction in which God doesn't go around doing awful things, simply severs the connection of the text to the world -- or ramps down its monotheism. If you are going to attempt monotheism at all, you are going to have to come up with some theodicy in which your God is the source of at least apparent evil.
Thus God, or Aslan, smashing the trains up and leaving Susan all alone, is entirely in character. I can imagine Lewis's thought being, that Susan requires this tragedy in order to learn what she needs to learn, and thus that from a God's-eye view it's part of the necessary pattern of her life.
What won't fly, though, is her siblings' dismissive reactions, their lack of anguish at her plight, their writing her off. They are human, and to be judged by human standards. They don't let the loss of their sister ruin their party in paradise, they don't rebel against it. When I first read that (I must have been not much older than Aviva is now) they lost any claim on my affections.
(Did you know there are no Google hits for the phrase "triumphalist theodicy"? Or not before now, anyway. Welcome, future readers who arrive searching for that phrase!)
(Which may be just as well as I am single-parenting this sojourn and a bit run ragged with the lovely social and familial activities....)
]]>But anyway:
So, if various logistical things happen on time, I might be reading there. I'll post something more definite sometime beforehand. Hope to hope to see you there!
photo credit, once again: Holly Black/Kelly Link/Gavin Grant model: Holly Black's cat
Cory and I made the Hugo Ballot for True Names!
There's also a sort of secret thrill in seeing works you critiqued on the ballot -- "Little Brother" and "Pride and Prometheus" in this case, and earlier stories in the series of which "The Political Prisoner"(which, by the way, rocked) was a part. And it is fun to be on a ballot with Scalzi and Paolo and Mary Kowal and Ted Chiang and Aliette de Bodard, GVG and Ellen and Lou and Sheila and Nick and so on.
Congratulations to all the nominees!
]]>Created by the able and fantastic Jeanne Kramer-Smyth a.k.a. Jeanne, Jeanne, The Street Team Queen!
If you are all into that Facebook thing and becoming a fan of things on Facebook and are, you know, a fan, well... encodify your fannicality in the Facebookitron, friend!
(The multitalented and indefatigable Jeanne, a woman of many quests, is also responsible for audio review site Books for Ears, an informative site on C-Section Recovery, a chronicle of archival adventurism Spellbound Blog, blows glass, re-enacts the Bronze Age and plays a mean game of Settlers of Catan.)
]]>The other night, inspired by Mary Anne's latest post chez Scalzi, and also, and in particular, by nojojo's analysis of her own work in her post "we worry about it too" -- and being that I am a statistics-lovin' geek like that -- I skimmed through my own short story collection, The Ant King and Other Stories, trying to get a sense of how I handle race, ethnicity, and other kinds of difference.
Excluding all the Other Cities except The White City, because they're not really character-based (there could be a separate analysis of how multicultural each of those cities reads as), I counted
(I ignored nonspeaking "henchmen" whose only actions are explicitly directed by speaking characters, such as the Ant King's henchmen, or the various non-speaking pirates in "Biographical Notes" or Max's gym buddies in "Start the Clock" -- in the latter two cases explicitly ethnically mixed groups).
One interesting and perhaps illuminating note on this skew: of all the stories, the only one with a majority of its characters marked explicitly as characters of color (albeit just barely) is "Biographical Notes"... but it has a majority of South Asian characters, and the Aryan Raj is the dominant hegemonic power in that alternate history. So interestingly the pull we see in this statistical skew is the pull to write about the ethnically dominant group -- whether that's white (as in our world) or not. I think it's particularly fascinating because with Biographical Notes I had no particular intention of making it a story about the Hindus -- if anything its focus for me was about alternate Judaism and an alternate destiny for the Americas -- but the Hindu characters proliferated for reasons of story mechanics, because as the dominant group, they had the most agency.
It was fascinating to read my own work through this prism, and I heartily recommend it. Among the less pleasant insights were the following instances of fail:
Another thing I learned: when I write a story which I think of as explicitly addressing race -- like "Biographical Notes", or like (the post-Ant-King stories, written with David Ackert, who's of Iranian descent) "Stray" or "King of the Djinn" -- I'm likely to do my homework and think through the issues.
But it's easy for race to simply be off my radar when the focus of a story is elsewhere; a racial analysis of "A Siege of Cranes" simply never occurred to me until three days ago.
(The racial issues in "King of the Djinn" are not entirely unfraught -- Nick Mamatas said about the story, in email, "...the tragic, disaffected Muslim (especially those who are middle-class and thus supposedly the best people in the whole wide world) is the 21st century liberal's version of the tragic mullato. A stock character, a political signifier searching for a sign" -- but I can't claim I never thought about them.)
]]>