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Brainworm posted:And some fandom is just inexplicable. Like, I've watched maybe sixty hours of Dr. Who and I just don't get it. I mean, I get it in the sense that after watching an episode I feel as though I have understood it on every level at which it can be meaningfully understood. Yet I can't shake the suspicion that Whovians must be watching a different (and much better) show. Football's the same way. Human excellence loving rules, but I'll be damned if I'm going to sit through two hours of Verizon commercials and Country music to see it. I love Doctor Who (and I've watched every fully extant TV story) but I watch it in much the same way that I'll read a random sci fi short fiction collection: consuming something that's entertaining enough to keep going while waiting for that totally excellent story to come along. The best DW stories are the ones that avoid swimming around in the show's own mythology. That aside thanks for the cool answer - any thoughts on my literature about literature / confirmation bias musing?
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Jul 6, 2018 23:26
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Great takes, thanks guys. The replies around here are some A+ essays.
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Jul 7, 2018 20:52
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CommonShore posted:[...] I think you're spot on, although I think I'd use a phrase like "naked self-interest" or "evangelism." I don't think anyone who writes about the value of their discipline is, like, convinced of their own impartiality. They (we?) insult everyone's intelligence by pretending to be objective. The thing that amazes me about those kinds of pieces -- and popular writing by critics more generally -- is that it's so bad. I just read A.O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism, and it's representative of the form. I don't want to poo poo on the guy because, you know, in TYOOL 2018 a critic who makes and emperor-has-no-clothes statement like "The Avengers was just OK" has to face an avalanche of bitchy Samuel L. Jackson tweets and I guess that makes him some kind of modern-day Diogenes. But it's disappointing to pick up a book that promises to relate criticism to real, human development and get a combo platter of insights like "criticism is necessary so that people know which movies to see and why" and jokes in the form of Platonic dialogues.* This is an issue in the Humanities apart from Scott's book. I don't know why it is that the people least capable of making a case for the Humanities are the ones who feel a public obligation to do it. * They're not terrible, but there are too many of them. Like Law schools or Creative Writing programs.
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Jul 9, 2018 15:09
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Wallet posted:This may seem like a wild non-sequitur, but I recall you mentioning not having any taste for Ulysses, and this particular discussion made me wonder if you have any particular feelings about Finnegans Wake? I wish I had something good for you. What I remember about Finnegan's Wake is that Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake has overdetermined a lot of Wake criticism. Long story short, Key finds typically Campbellian ways to impose a kind of root-myth order and structure on Wake, and I've yet to see a reading of Wake that convinced me this search for some higher-order consistency wasn't a fool's errand. I suspect that Campbell's later credibility as a critic (by way of his influence on George Lucas) is part of what's kept both Key and Wake off the scrap heap. Without Campbell, Wake its just another highly-experimental late-career work by a writer so established he could afford to take risks: Joyce's own Pericles, Prince of Tyre. That said, Wake might be the funniest of Joyce's books and is probably worth reading for that alone. I have zero problems reading Wake as a set of loosely-related comic vignettes and character studies, all told with the same regard of internal consistency that you get from Greek Mythology or comic books. That's a low-stress approach, but it helped me enjoy Wake when I last read it like 20 years ago.
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Jul 13, 2018 16:33
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Brainworm posted:I wish I had something good for you. What I remember about Finnegan's Wake is that Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake has overdetermined a lot of Wake criticism. Long story short, Key finds typically Campbellian ways to impose a kind of root-myth order and structure on Wake, and I've yet to see a reading of Wake that convinced me this search for some higher-order consistency wasn't a fool's errand. Wake criticism does have a tendency to get channeled into one of a few fairly simplistic schemes for unifying it, which seems misguided. Wake strikes me as a moderately insane response to Ulysses, at least if you want to read Ulysses as being about literature as much as it's about anything else, which I'm inclined to: Stephen's search for some resolution to his angst regarding the capacity of literature to transcend the lifeless fixity of history—causality begins to look like fate when you examine it post-hoc—through the sort of referential response that often shapes academic conceptions of the literary is matched up with that of Bloom, who searches for answers to his own angst in sifting through his emotional experience and accumulated wisdom. Then there's some bizarre business where the two of them become spiritually consubstantial, or whatever the gently caress becoming "mirrors of the reciprocal flesh" refers to (U 17.1184). Joyce spends twenty or so years stewing in syphilis, and then follows up Ulysses with a work that forces the reader to redefine it in the reading; as weird as it is, Wake seems a creditable attempt at answering Stephen's concerns about literary works being 'resolved' and little more than history as well as Bloom's regarding legacy and self perpetuation. That is all to say, attempting to solve Finnegans Wake seems a futile fight against its nature, at least to me. Anyway, sorry for the faff, what you were saying about the things people pull from texts having "their fingerprints all over [them]" is what brought it to mind. Wallet fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 01:31
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Are you familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons character Drizzt Dro'Urden? Is there a more antique precedent for that kind of character other than maybe Chiron?
Baron Porkface fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Oct 2, 2018 |
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Oct 2, 2018 19:46
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Baron Porkface posted:Are you familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons character Drizzt Dro'Urden? Is there a more antique precedent for that kind of character other than maybe Chiron? The short answer: I don't know. The longer answer is that I've heard of Drizzt but never read any Salvatore (I graduated from playing D&D before Drizzt was a thing). A glance at the Wikipedia page gives me some threads to pull on, though, and if I had to guess, I'd guess that Drizzt is a Shakespearean (rather than classical, medieval, or modern) character. Here's why: 1) Drizzt's origins look like a textbook coming-of-age story. The most general formula for that story is that a character (a) looks at the way their society does things, (b) chooses to do things differently, and (c) becomes an adult by negotiating the resulting conflicts. That genre is a Shakespearean invention, and he wrote a bunch of stories on that model: Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and -- most famously -- Hamlet. I've spilled a lot of electrons talking about how, in the Hamlet version of the coming-of-age story, the protagonist's choices about how to live are represented by different parental (father) figures who embody different values systems or philosophies. It's hard to tell whether that happens with Drizzt, but Wikipedia says that (a) his father (Zaknafein) represents a values system, and (b) Z was murdered by the avatar of an opposing values system (Lloth), and (c) Z comes back as a ghost. That's at least Hamlet-flavored, although it's hard to tell how much. 2) If we're talking Shakespeare, the basic pattern of generational relationships looks like this: children either accept (and imitate) their parents' values and philosophies, or reject them.* In the case of acceptance, conflict results because the child is somehow significantly different from their parent. In the case of rejection, conflict results because the child and parent are fundamentally the same. Hamlet can be a model for both, since he has two father figures. He accepts Old Hamlet's (the warrior king's) values and rejects Claudius's (the plotter's), even though he's a lot more like Claudius than Old Hamlet. That value alignment gets him coming and going. In modern literature, a good case of Shakespearean parent acceptance is Miles Vorkosigian (from Lois McMaster Bujold's books). Miles's physical disability leaves him unable to enjoy the forms of military and political success available to his father -- although he accepts those values uncritically and very much aspires to them. A good case of Shakespearean parent rejection is Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. There's a kind of irony in his saying "I'll never join you!" to the only other member of the lightsaber club. The same sequence plays out in most modern Lear stories, too. Think Biff and Happy in Salesman, or Michael and Sonny in The Godfather. All the kids (sons) end up in conflict because (a) they want to be their father and they can't or (b) they don't want to be their father and they are. So that's another way to think about Drizzt -- or another version of the same way. If he's a Shakespearean character, his efforts to accept his father's values are going to be fraught with conflict because he's a fundamentally different person. If Drizzt is a classical or medieval character, his values system is going to act like a heritable trait -- like Harry Potter's. If he's a modern character, that system is going to be overdetermined by the story -- kinda like Bilbo Baggins's (or everybody in One Hundred Years of Solitude). That doesn't mean that those characters don't experience internal conflict (although sometimes they don't) -- just that those conflicts don't take a specifically Shakespearean form. * Or, as in Midsummer, the parent is a non-character who exists to present an obstacle.
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Oct 5, 2018 18:51
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Brainworm, long-time reader, and a [edit: second]-time responder. Thank you so, so much for all of your thoughtful comments over the years. I would like to just bat a broad prompt at you: Have you read much of Christopher Hitchens? What do you think of him and his writing style? How would you compare him with other polemicists? What would you encourage an enthusiastic fan to think about when reading his works? (I actually am not crazy about his atheistic writing; his various collected essays and other columns are where the treat really is for me, as well as Hitch-22 and Letters to a Young Contrarian). I find him incredibly entertaining to read -- as he definitely is going for -- and his feats of memory and textual reference really astonish me. I'm a total sucker for it. Beyond being enjoyable, I also think he's pretty persuasive and clear, and would love to hit on that mix of the three attributes in my own writing. But, of course, I also realize it would be extremely dangerous to try to imitate his style. It's a shame that he's gone, as I never got to experience following him while he was alive (same with David Foster Wallace-- another person who I find reading to be a good cure for narcissism). What do you think we can take away from Hitch today, as a writer and as a public figure? Mushroom Zingdom fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Nov 11, 2018 |
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Nov 11, 2018 08:57
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Mushroom Zingdom posted:Brainworm, long-time reader, and a [edit: second]-time responder. Thank you so, so much for all of your thoughtful comments over the years. Thanks. It's good to be here. Also -- true story -- I've finally gotten these collected posts together to write a Shakespeare textbook that ultimately looks nothing like any of them. I'm also going to apologize for the rush. I'm dashing this response off in the space between meetings. quote:I would like to just bat a broad prompt at you: Have you read much of Christopher Hitchens? What do you think of him and his writing style? How would you compare him with other polemicists? What would you encourage an enthusiastic fan to think about when reading his works? (I actually am not crazy about his atheistic writing; his various collected essays and other columns are where the treat really is for me, as well as Hitch-22 and Letters to a Young Contrarian). I haven't read much Hitchens at all, and nothing written this century. But -- just to prep for this -- I read this piece in Vanity Fair. I don't know that I'd call the Hitchins I see in this piece a "polemicist" although everything I know about his religious writing suggests otherwise. quote:I find him incredibly entertaining to read -- as he definitely is going for -- and his feats of memory and textual reference really astonish me. I'm a total sucker for it. Beyond being enjoyable, I also think he's pretty persuasive and clear, and would love to hit on that mix of the three attributes in my own writing. [...] What do you think we can take away from Hitch today, as a writer and as a public figure? What makes Hitch a good writer -- at least in this Vanity Fair piece -- is his focus on particulars. When I teach writing and research, I like to say something like life is complicated or the world is complicated, and good researched writing helps people make sense of it in ways that are accountable to that complexity. That means being perceptive without being ideological, or -- in other words -- avoiding big-idea thinking, getting the details right, and working inductively. It is rare to see writing that uses strings of verifiable facts to reach a justifiably limited conclusion. It's only in that context that Hitch's other writerly qualities become distinguishing virtues. That Vanity Fair piece follows the same formula over and over: 1) Introduce the narrative by providing a short overview (a summary sentence, or the question that the narrative will answer), 2) Give the narrative in detail, punctuating it with exposition as the audience requires, and 3) Use a short allusion, proverb, reference, etc. to capture the tenor or affect of the narrative. For instance: quote:So here’s what happened between Sidney and me, and here’s how the “compartmentalization” broke down. [<-This is (1)] In March of last year, I came back to Washington for the first time since the Lewinsky scandal had broken. (I had been teaching at the University of California.) [<-This is (2)] The first thing that Carol and I did was to have a catch-up lunch with Sidney. And I have to say, it was a shock. He was rather grim and businesslike, and in a very defensive mode. He could think of his boss only as the victim of a frame-up. [... the narrative continues here]. This is, in some ways, a very silly town. [<-This is (3)] Here's another (the next paragraph): quote:And, at the time, this seemed like no more than a disappointing lunch. [<-1] Our old pal had said one rather disagreeable thing and had asked us to believe in one self-evidently preposterous theory. (A president, if you think about it for a second, just can’t be stalked in his own Oval Office.) However, as time went by, the significance of the conversation metamorphosed. I became convinced that, a few weeks before the lunch, Kathleen Willey had been threatened in person, had received threats against her children by name, and earlier had had her car brutally vandalized [...]. [<-2]. Just another day in Clinton’s Washington. [<-3] Lather, rinse, repeat. I think you can do that in your own way without being an imitator. That is, I think you can find your own way to show a reader something complicated, and then interpret it in a well-justified and limited way. People think that being perceptive is coming up with the right kind of idea that applies to everything -- rules for life, or proverbs, or whatever. Really, it's about finding similarities between different particulars, or differences between similar ones, and summing those up in a way that accounts for the complexity of whatever system they're embedded in.
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Nov 13, 2018 21:32
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Brainworm posted:I think you can do that in your own way without being an imitator. [< 1] That is, I think you can find your own way to show a reader something complicated, and then interpret it in a well-justified and limited way. [< 2] People think that being perceptive is coming up with the right kind of idea that applies to everything -- rules for life, or proverbs, or whatever. Really, it's about finding similarities between different particulars, or differences between similar ones, and summing those up in a way that accounts for the complexity of whatever system they're embedded in. [< 3] Or at least I think that’s what I saw!
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Nov 14, 2018 14:35
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I don't have a particular question, but I'm so consistently impressed by these answers. It seems like you have an insightful thought about everything.
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Nov 15, 2018 04:50
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Business of Ferrets posted:Or at least I think that’s what I saw! [1] and [2] fit for sure. If I wanted to turn up the volume on the Hitch pattern, I'd do it like this: * quote:You can be perceptive without being a Hitch imitator. [< 1] You got to get that last punch in at [3]. * Ignore the paragraph breaks. They're just to separate the steps.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:06
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a_good_username posted:I don't have a particular question, but I'm so consistently impressed by these answers. It seems like you have an insightful thought about everything. Thanks. Also -- and I don't mean this as a backhand -- I'm always impressed and fascinated when people are good at things they ought to obviously be good at. I'm right now working on a budget project with our VP of Finance and I was amazed by how quickly she could build pivot tables. It was all keyboard. Click clack done. I could have watched her do that for hours.
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Nov 15, 2018 21:15
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Brainworm, do you have any thoughts on John le Carré? I finished his more famous work and am going through the rest of his novels.
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Jan 15, 2019 23:18
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Sarern posted:Brainworm, do you have any thoughts on John le Carré? I finished his more famous work and am going through the rest of his novels. I've got nothing on him, and never actually read him, but his bio is fascinating. It's a case of Conan Doyle, where the life of the writer is more interesting than their very interesting books.
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Apr 11, 2019 17:41
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Brainworm, I've been trying for ages to think of a good hook to get you talking about James Hynes but I can't think of one. So, have you read James Hynes? What do are your thoughts?
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Apr 13, 2019 19:56
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Just curious if you'd read The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation? I figured you would've but I've only just come across it myself. Do you think contemporary audiences would enjoy or 'get more from' a Shakespeare performance using 'Original' (or our best attempt to reconstruct it) pronunciation or a performance in modern pronunciation? Do you use anything like that when you help stage shows? I saw King Lear a few months ago (via one of those performances where they broadcast it through a bunch of cinemas) for the first time as an adult and I enjoyed it a fair bit. If I liked King Lear (though obviously its also down to the specific production as well), what next Shakespeare play you'd recommend watching? (Also, this thread is so old. I've almost finished the third year of my PhD and I remember reading through this thread the first time before I got my acceptance letter. Jesus.)
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Apr 26, 2019 11:40
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This thread celebrates its 10th birthday a week from tomorrow.
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Apr 26, 2019 14:40
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FightingMongoose posted:Brainworm, I've been trying for ages to think of a good hook to get you talking about James Hynes but I can't think of one. So, have you read James Hynes? What do are your thoughts? I haven't, and actually I had to Google him. That triggered a vague memory of a friend of mine really pushing The Lecturer's Tale when it first came out, but apart from that I've got nothing. I am gonna give Tale a shot, though. I don't usually dig on campus novels, but my once-upon-a-time friend had great taste.
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Apr 29, 2019 15:24
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Brainworm posted:but my once-upon-a-time friend had great taste. and so do I, of course.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:17
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Stabbatical posted:Just curious if you'd read The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation? I figured you would've but I've only just come across it myself. Do you think contemporary audiences would enjoy or 'get more from' a Shakespeare performance using 'Original' (or our best attempt to reconstruct it) pronunciation or a performance in modern pronunciation? Do you use anything like that when you help stage shows? Original Pronunciation (OP) is an academic curiosity that's blown up because David Crystal (and his son Ben) have been really good at marketing it. I've never seen OP used in a passable edition of Shakespeare or in a passable performance. Springboard Shakespeare (Ben Crystal's line of editions and companions) are painful. And teaching actors to work in OP takes time, which sounds trivial until you realize just how close-cut most production timelines are. Every OP production I've seen has had to burn so much time training actors to work in OP that the rest of the production was essentially unfinished -- I'm taking about shitshow levels of unfinished (with blocking issues, bad cues, and underdeveloped scenes). Ben Crystal and his cohort of already-OP-trained actors seem make it work for their in-house and traveling productions, and that's probably the niche where OP can comfortably live. I guess what I'm saying is that OP probably belongs in a pile of other editorial techniques -- the kinds of things that get represented in Notes. As a vision for production, it gets two major things wrong: 1) The idea that a mainstream Shakespeare theater is going to add two weeks to a production schedule to teach everyone OP, and that this will improve the quality of your production enough to justify the effort and expense -- it just doesn't add up. And trying to add one more thing to a production schedule is a recipe for failure. 2) The idea that OP is clearer, or more accessible, than modern pronunciation doesn't add up either. It might be better, in the same way that reading Chaucer in Middle English is better than reading Chaucer in translation, but that's a totally different dimension of quality that doesn't necessarily serve the needs of the audience. quote:I saw King Lear a few months ago (via one of those performances where they broadcast it through a bunch of cinemas) for the first time as an adult and I enjoyed it a fair bit. If I liked King Lear (though obviously its also down to the specific production as well), what next Shakespeare play you'd recommend watching? That's a tough one. When I teach Shakespeare I start with Richard III -- it's the simplest play in the sense that its character webs, conflicts, and oppositions are all centered on one character who openly declares his motivations and goals. It's not a great, but it's a lot of fun. Its simplicity means that most film productions get it right. The recent Hollow Crown adaptation (with Benedict Cumberbatch) is really good, and so is Ian McKellan's (from 1996). quote:(Also, this thread is so old. I've almost finished the third year of my PhD and I remember reading through this thread the first time before I got my acceptance letter. Jesus.) Yeah, it's a little bonkers. Two marriages, four houses, four job titles, and one thread.
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Apr 30, 2019 16:42
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I first read this thread before I started undergrad full-time, and now I'm a couple months away from a Master's in literature. It's been almost as powerful a corrective to my academic writing as the "venting about students" thread. Nothing so far has caused me as much heartache as this line:Brainworm posted:And "thus." loving thus. You've got no license to use that word unless you wear a suit of armor for a living. I wish I had never read this post. Growing up, I had two dogs: a big lummox who ran straight into the electric fence and yelped whenever deer appeared on the other side, and a quicker one who learned to wriggle under after the first time it shocked her. No matter how much I write, I can't break the habit of structuring paragraphs as if I'm approaching the all-purpose transition thus, and I have to turn somersaults to avoid it when I finally remember Brainworm bitching about words that annoy him. Eugene V. Dubstep fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Apr 30, 2019 |
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Apr 30, 2019 17:56
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:I first read this thread before I started undergrad full-time, and now I'm a couple months away from a Master's in literature. It's been almost as powerful a corrective to my academic writing as the "venting about students" thread. Nothing so far has caused me as much heartache as this line: When I die, I need you carve those words on my tombstone. Mrs. Brainworm isn't going to go for it.
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May 8, 2019 15:00
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What's wrong with "thus"? Supplanted by "ergo"? "hence"?
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May 9, 2019 18:33
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Discendo Vox posted:What's wrong with "thus"? Supplanted by "ergo"? Out of those three, I would think "thus" is the least offensive.
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May 9, 2019 23:25
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:Out of those three, I would think "thus" is the least offensive. What about whence, whither, and wherefore?
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May 10, 2019 13:08
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Thuswise
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May 10, 2019 13:11
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Thence
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May 10, 2019 14:19
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Heretofore
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May 10, 2019 14:44
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So...do you have to actually BE English in order to be an English Professor?
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May 12, 2019 23:47
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Vietnamwees posted:So...do you have to actually BE English in order to be an English Professor? I think all you need is PhD-level competence and (as the market tanks) a knot of luck that, like a sebaceous cyst, is always getting bigger and constantly messing with your self-image. Boatswain posted:What about whence, whither, and wherefore? Someone who uses whence will also end an email with cheers -- the signature of choice among Dunning-Kruger poster children. For instance: quote:Me (as a petit Dean): Admissions is reporting lower prospective student interest in your program. You're losing your traditional students to Computer Science and Pre-Health. Unless your numbers improve, I'm going to reallocate your next vacancy to one of those programs. Every email from Department X was signed "Cheers." Obviously. Obviously. For me, cheers is a puka-shell necklace caliber clue that I'm dealing with a specific kind of insufferable person. Thus, whence, and all their Hapsburg-jawed kin -- forget it. They are the vape pens of language. Toxic, bubblegum-flavored clouds of faux-sophistication. If a fedora-wearing incel would choose a word to shore up his self-image, don't use it. You become what you pretend to be, even if you do it by accident. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 19:36 on May 14, 2019 |
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May 14, 2019 19:29
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Any insight into Carl Sandburg? My wife introduced me to his poetry recently. I haven't read much yet, but my incomplete take is that he's got a great eye for image and late 19th/early 20th century America (what he seems to be known for), but his better stuff is a lot more personal and reflective. Here's a couple I really like: Ice Handler posted:I KNOW an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with pearl buttons the size of a dollar, This is, like, Stephen King-level Americana - steak and mashed and none of that kale, by Jesus. It tells a pretty good story about a pretty big rear end in a top hat. But then there's Sandburg's war poems, like A.E.F. - A.E.F posted:There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, which has a deeper feel and weight to it that some of his other stuff (like Ice Handler or Chicago) doesn't. I might be off base here - poetry's something I only have passing knowledge of - but I think it almost feels Modernist in tone (that is, "please god, no more war") but isn't heavy with allusions like something from TS Eliot or have that sense of Biblical dread like Yeats. Is Sandburg considered a Modernist? I know they were his contemporaries, but the stuff of his I've read seems like it only shares a few traits with what I know about Modernist poetry. Edit: Here's a definition from wikipedia - quote:"Modernism emerged with its insistent breaks with the immediate past, its different inventions, 'making it new' with elements from cultures remote in time and space. The questions of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to Modernist poetry. Modernism developed out of a tradition of lyrical expression, emphasizing the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world. Even when they reverted to the personal, like T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets and Ezra Pound in The Cantos, they distilled the personal into a poetic texture that claimed universal human significance. So some of that seems to apply to Sandburg - "emphasizing the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet" - but that second bit about moving toward intellectual statements doesn't seem to jive, at least for his Chicago poems. They feel half Norman Rockwell and half Bruce Springsteen. Asbury fucked around with this message at 15:32 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 04:40
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So what was Game of Thrones about, anyway?
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May 20, 2019 15:20
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Siivola posted:So what was Game of Thrones about, anyway? *checks notes* uh...representative leadership apparently
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May 20, 2019 15:22
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Siivola posted:So what was Game of Thrones about, anyway? I want to pick up on this question before the Sandburg one. It's a fastball right down the center of the plate. The first thing to know is that Song of Ice and Fire, as in the books, is a straight-ahead reworking of Shakespeare's first series of Histories (sometimes called the first Tetralogy): Henry VI Parts 1-3, and Richard III. Those plays are a retelling of the story of the Wars of the Roses, and -- especially early on -- George R.R. Martin follows them very, very closely. Instead of Yorks and Lancasters, you get Starks and Lannisters. While Martin writes his family trees a little differently from Shakespeare, his major characters almost all have Shakespearean analogues. For instance: Shakespeare's Last of the British Heroes, a guy named Lord Talbot, gets pressed into reluctant service of the kingdom and dies as an indirect result of its political corruption. Martin makes him Ned Stark. There are differences, right? But the tenor of these characters and the timing of their deaths (at the end of the first big chapter in each story) is spot on. Likewise, Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester (the quick-witted, romantically frustrated hunchback later known as King Richard III), Martin adapts into Tyron Lancaster. Tyrion is less of an out-and-out villain, and Martin introduces him earlier in the story (Shakespeare holds Richard back until the end of the third play in the series, when he murders the safely-imprisoned, noble, and inept Henry VI). Arya, as far as I can tell is Young Clifford (the kid who is too long to vow revenge but does it anyway when their father gets killed). The list goes on. (It's also worth pointing out that in Shakepeare's Histories, magic is 100% real. The most famous example is the warrior wizard Owen Glyndower (from Henry IV), but Joan of Arc (who Martin adapts into Danerys) is supernaturally gifted even if she is also evil and a master propagandist.*) Anyway. The point is that Shakespeare's first Tetralogy has a really clear moral vision: political corruption and opportunism among the nobility create a situation where a weak king (Henry VI, a child) is placed on the throne. The uneasy alliances that keep him there (including marriage to a Genuinely Evil Woman) lead first to civil war, and to political and social destabilization that gives free range to the story's most depraved and vicious characters (in Shakespeare, think James Tyrrel and -- of course -- Richard of Gloucester). That's a pretty common tune in war-focused storytelling -- even in pop fiction like Joe Abercrombie, who compresses it into passages like this: The Blade Itself posted:"You’ve seen a lot of death, then?" From what I remember reading of Martin, he sticks pretty closely to that line. The Mad King was awful, and getting rid of him was necessary. At the same time, that essentially noble and probably well-intentioned action also balkanizes the Seven Kingdoms, and the resulting power vacuum under the over-allied king Robert causes squabbling between the remaining Baretheon brothers, and invites no-goodniks like Ramsey Bolton into conflicts over how the kingdom ought to be run. Watching the show, it seems to have lost that thread at or around the time it departed from Martin's books. I don't want to sound too sadistic about it, but there was a point in GoT when everybody was intimately suffering because chaos was reigning. Once the series left the books behind, that suddenly became less important. An entire kingdom known for flaying people alive just one day decided to stop. Like, this story was a bareknuckle boxing match and suddenly everyone's wearing gloves. I'm not saying the show stopped being violent, but that the violence stopped being intimate and personal. That robs it of a lot of its emotional power. In Shakespeare, of course, all that gets resolved by a divinely-appointed warrior king repressing everybody into decency. And -- from the beginning -- I thought that's where Martin was going (like, the forces of Fire unite first and then take on the Night King in one all-out holy war). Based on how the show went, not so much. * There's a lot of criticism of Joan's presentation that -- for some reason -- relies on readers taking what British characters say about her at face value. In Shakespeare's first Tetralogy, the British are not categorically good and honest people. Their corruption and opportunism is what gets their heroes, like Lord Talbot, killed, and they are 100% OK with burning God's own messenger at the stake if it suits their short-term interests.
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May 21, 2019 22:14
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Thanks, that's much more thorough an answer than what I was expecting. Brainworm posted:In Shakespeare, of course, all that gets resolved by a divinely-appointed warrior king repressing everybody into decency. And -- from the beginning -- I thought that's where Martin was going (like, the forces of Fire unite first and then take on the Night King in one all-out holy war).
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May 21, 2019 22:33
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Siivola posted:Thanks, that's much more thorough an answer than what I was expecting. If it helps, Richard III doesn't really follow that formula. The play follows the villain (Richard) and the divinely-appointed warrior king (Henry) who shows up to defeat him gets maybe 10 minutes of stage time. It's like having the Night King stampede over everyone, except that -- in Richard III -- the Night King is the Good Guy backed by the Right God.
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May 26, 2019 15:00
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Hey Brainworm, I just wanted to say how impressed I am that you've been running this thread successfully for the past decade.
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Jun 16, 2019 06:44
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Failed academic here. I've been reading the thread for a couple months on the recommendation of a colleague/goon/current academic. What a gem of a thread - great questions, great answers. It's also been fascinating to read as a decade long slice of life. Nothing to add here other than my thanks for a great thread. Did you ever see The Last Jedi? Thoughts?
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Jun 21, 2019 16:52
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b mad at me posted:Hey Brainworm, I just wanted to say how impressed I am that you've been running this thread successfully for the past decade. Let's not call it successful. Really, this was a successful thread for about five years and has been on something like life support since then. Which is fine. Lord knows there are goons who don't look up from the keyboard when their kids are born, but I'm not that guy. That said, I have about a month of breathing room. Here's some professional updates in case anyone's interested in what it's like to be a mid-career academic: 1) I'm up for Full Professor this year. It's sort of like tenure except it counts for less and means you get a shorter title instead of a longer one. 2) I've now been three different kinds of Dean, plus a department chair, and done things like revoke tenure, cut budgets, and salt the Earth of people's hopes and dreams. 3) I am best known as an administrator (inside and outside my College) for capping my Faculty's work weeks at 40 hours. This has met with some controversy. 4) I (finally) have some popular press books under contract. The first is about Shakespeare and aimed squarely at the NPR crowd, with a textbook edition to follow. 5) My wife runs a mid-size hospital Lab and is hilariously overworked. We also have a toddler. So we can talk about work/life balance in academia, too.
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Jun 23, 2019 23:02
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