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azdak at 02:21pm on 23/09/2006 under peter wimsey
azdak at 02:21pm on 23/09/2006 under peter wimseyI haven't posted anything to lj in what seems like months, and looking back over past postings the obvious conclusion is that it seems like months because it is. I can pretty exactly trace the loss of my will to post to when I fell into the black hole that was The Pillowman, and although I have long since re-emerged, pale and wincing at the sunlight, I can't seem to get back into the posting habit. I've been keeping up my with my flist in just about the rudest way possible, reading and making drive-by comments, then buggering off without a backward glance. I know this really isn't very nice, but it's likely to continue being the way I interact with lj for the foreseeable future, so if anyone wants to defriend me on these grounds, or on the grounds that they friended me to read about Buffy and they feel short-changed, then I shall take it gracefully. For some reason, though, I do feel like posting today, so there follow musings on
We have acquired a horse, thus fulfilling a long cherished and then long repressed childhood dream. It isn't actually our horse, since she belongs to a riding stable, but we pay a monthly sum which allows us to ride her whenever she isn't being used for lessons and isn't exhausted by having been used for lessons. She's a white Lippizaner mare called Famosa and I am startled by the force of the emotions that have been released by her acquisition – I am blindly, stupidly jealous of anyone else who gets to ride her, and even found myself quarrelling ridiculously with my eight year old about whether or not Famosa "wanted" to be lunged or taken out to graze. The best parts are when I get to hack out on her on my own – we've been having the most fantastic weather recently, all mild autumn sunshine, and almost every other day I've been able to take her out into the woods, where we canter wildly along the bridle paths. She's the perfect horse for me, because she's vey obedient but loves going fast – we haven't yet quite resolved the issue of how quickly she responds to my decision that it's now time to stop going fast, but we're getting there. As a huge bonus, the rest of the family also rides her – the kids were already horse mad, and both ride better than me, but Wolfgang has also got involved, so we now have a topic of conversation that is always of absorbing interest to everyone in the family. We do make an effort to shut up about horses when outsiders are present, though.
I have started rehearsing Faust I (Goethe's version), for the production which is the equivalent of my final year exam. I've been passionate about Faust ever since I played Mephisto in the Oxford German Players' production some ten or eleven years ago, and as soon as I was accepted by the Seminar I was determined that that would be my fourth year play. It has turned out to be more daunting than I expected as all the teachers – quite literally all of them, including the directing professor – advised me against it (in terms ranging from "I've never seen a good production of Faust" to " Why on earth do you want to do that to yourself?" to "You're crazy"). It knocked my confidence badly for a while but eventually I realised that they were all victims of the established German tradition of reading/performing Faust; that for them the play was about certain things and hence boring, and was poetry, and hence unperformable, whereas I was coming to the play as a complete outsider, who took it simply as an excellent play, to be explored according to my own interests. I suspect the robust English approach to Shakespeare helps here – it never crosses the collective minds of even the crappiest English amateur group that they shouldn't have a crack at Shakespeare, and they're not daunted by the language either. Of course, there are many truly dreadful productions of Shakespeare as a consequence, but the point is that at every level of theatre Shakespeare is seen as accessible and dramatic, not intellectual and lyric. And scratch away the generations of scholarship and Faust is accessible and dramatic in a way that no other German classical drama is, and it has a trio of central characters – Faust, Mephisto, Gretchen – who are all wonderfully charismatic and multi-layered, combined with a gripping central story of desire and betrayal.
I have no time for reading fanfic at the moment, let alone for writing, but the MfU story I have up on the File 40 archive has been generating a steady trickle of e-mails. It's a different kind of feedback from what lj generates – much shorter and not at all analytical – but it's intensely gratifying because it comes from people to whom I have no kind of personal connection. They just happened to find the story on the archive and liked it enough to want to tell me. However, I can't see myself writing any more fic. I have an unfinished B7 story that has been languishing on my hard drive for several years now which I dug out over the summer thinking that if I wanted to write it made sense to work on something that was already in progress. But I realised reading it that the reason I'd never got any further was because I'd written the part that interested me, the set-up, and I didn't really care about the resolution. I have the plot worked out in my head but every time I've tried to write it down it's been so workaday and clunking and uninspired that I give up again. In away, this is symbolic of how I feel about fanfic generally, both my own and other people's – I've already read/written what interests me and nothing else really grabs my attention. I suspect what I need is a new fandom (or probably, given my time scheduling difficulties right now, the last thing I need is a new fandom). A friend is sending me Slings & Arrows, of which I have high hopes, since even if it doesn't inspire me to read fanfic, it might give me some ideas for productions.
Wolfgang brought a stack of Peter Wimseys back with him from his last trip to England and I have been wallowing gloriously in them. I get a huge kick out of the breath-taking casualness with which Sayers drops snippets of information about the period into the narrative. She doesn't need to explain them, of course, because to her they're just part of normal life, but often they contradict what to the modern reader are basic assumptions about human dignity and interpersonal relations. I just adore the bit in The Nine Tailors where Peter and Bunter have had a motor accident in a snowstorm in the Fens and are taken in by the Rector of Fenchurch St Paul. His wife invites Peter to come in for tea and adds "Emily! Take this gentleman's manservant into the kitchen and make him comfortable" – two strangers rescued from a snowstorm, one of whom is treated as a guest and the other – simply isn't. No mucking about, no excuses, that's simply the way they are. And although Bunter is in many ways Peter's best friend, and has saved his life on at least three occasions, when Peter fakes his own death he leaves Bunter a mere £50 a year in his will. Similalrly, when Peter first sees Mary Thoday the narrative observes, with shocking detachment, that "He guessed her to be about forty, though, as is frequently the case country women, she had lost most of her front teeth and looked older." No contemporary author writing a period novel could drop in that sort of detail with such utter casualness. I disliked Thrones, Dominations for a number of reasons, but the part I simply hated was where Bunter is set up in his own little mews flat as a photographer, no longer in service but his own man. It revealed such a contemporary mentality, an inability to accept the world of the time quite simply had different standards and assumptions about the relationship between master and servant, and a desire to rewrite the stories through the lens of equally local, non-universal contemporary standards and assumptions. Peple often draw parallels between real fanfic and this sort of authorised fanfic, but it seems to me that the ficcers motivation of "fixing" what they didn't like about the original is not legitimate in an authorised continuation. Fic is free; I can choose to read it or not. If someone wants to write about Peter and Bunter having Teh Hot Sex, that's their business. But if I pay for someone else's finishing of a work, something that is marketed as having been mostly written by Sayers, then what I am looking for is "More of the Same" not what is in someone else's opinion an improvement upon the original, whether that improvement manifest itself as going into excruciating detail about Bunter's homsexual experiences, sadly untouched on in the books, or turning him into a financially independent twentieth century entrepreneur.
-
The other thing I like about the Wimseys is watching Sayers wrestle with her own snobbishness and sexism. She tries so hard to believe that not having been to public school "within the meaning of the act" doesn't make you a worse person, but she's contantly tripping up over her own unexamined assumptions. And the great fascination of Gaudy Night – apart from the glimpses it afford of old Oxford and the insights into the Scouts' living conditions – locked in at night! Holy shit! – is that she's so clearly going through the same struggle as Harriet. She wants to see women as the equal of men, but she can't shake the suspicion that without the occasional damn good rogering they all turn into catty, repressed wierdos. It's no wonder Harriet can't solve the mystery, trapped in a net of irreconcilable wishes and fears. Having been a don at a former woman's college myself, I was privileged to meet some of the last living specimens of the kind of Fellow Sayers describes, women who were Miss and not Dr and who had devoted their entire lives to women's education. They were either terrifyingly formidable or, frankly, batty. The Senior Modern Languages Tutor (Shrewsbury has a Modern Language Tutor, singular, one of those tiny historical details that fill me with glee - I presume the Language in question was French?) had been the scariest Dean in living memory, known for lurking behind the dustbins to catch undergraduates climbing over the wall in the days when there was still a curfew; she was a stately woman, unkindly referred to by my predecessor in an Oxford in-joke as "the University Chest", and the last tutor in College to insist that her pupils wore gowns for tutorials. They could regularly be seen racing across the lawn, gowns flapping, in a desperate effort not to be late. And I always took particular pleasure in Glory's one and only female scabby minion in S5 of Buffy because she reminded me so vividly of the don who had been Senior Tutor in my day (though in fairness to the Senior Tutor I must say that she was not at all batty, she just looked it, and in fairness to the scabby minion I must say that the minion did not have a ferocious and disconcerting squint). So having experienced up close and personal exactly that ambivalence about how far singledom and personal satisfaction can ever coexist in a woman's life, I find Sayers' efforts to cut a path through the labyrinth endlessly entertaining, watching as I can from the happy vantage point of knowing that one day it will all cease to be an issue (Wolfgang found Gaudy Night to be merely tedious, going on and on forever with nothing happening. He simply couldn't see the shifting perspectives on the female dons as a matter of life and death).
We have acquired a horse, thus fulfilling a long cherished and then long repressed childhood dream. It isn't actually our horse, since she belongs to a riding stable, but we pay a monthly sum which allows us to ride her whenever she isn't being used for lessons and isn't exhausted by having been used for lessons. She's a white Lippizaner mare called Famosa and I am startled by the force of the emotions that have been released by her acquisition – I am blindly, stupidly jealous of anyone else who gets to ride her, and even found myself quarrelling ridiculously with my eight year old about whether or not Famosa "wanted" to be lunged or taken out to graze. The best parts are when I get to hack out on her on my own – we've been having the most fantastic weather recently, all mild autumn sunshine, and almost every other day I've been able to take her out into the woods, where we canter wildly along the bridle paths. She's the perfect horse for me, because she's vey obedient but loves going fast – we haven't yet quite resolved the issue of how quickly she responds to my decision that it's now time to stop going fast, but we're getting there. As a huge bonus, the rest of the family also rides her – the kids were already horse mad, and both ride better than me, but Wolfgang has also got involved, so we now have a topic of conversation that is always of absorbing interest to everyone in the family. We do make an effort to shut up about horses when outsiders are present, though.
I have started rehearsing Faust I (Goethe's version), for the production which is the equivalent of my final year exam. I've been passionate about Faust ever since I played Mephisto in the Oxford German Players' production some ten or eleven years ago, and as soon as I was accepted by the Seminar I was determined that that would be my fourth year play. It has turned out to be more daunting than I expected as all the teachers – quite literally all of them, including the directing professor – advised me against it (in terms ranging from "I've never seen a good production of Faust" to " Why on earth do you want to do that to yourself?" to "You're crazy"). It knocked my confidence badly for a while but eventually I realised that they were all victims of the established German tradition of reading/performing Faust; that for them the play was about certain things and hence boring, and was poetry, and hence unperformable, whereas I was coming to the play as a complete outsider, who took it simply as an excellent play, to be explored according to my own interests. I suspect the robust English approach to Shakespeare helps here – it never crosses the collective minds of even the crappiest English amateur group that they shouldn't have a crack at Shakespeare, and they're not daunted by the language either. Of course, there are many truly dreadful productions of Shakespeare as a consequence, but the point is that at every level of theatre Shakespeare is seen as accessible and dramatic, not intellectual and lyric. And scratch away the generations of scholarship and Faust is accessible and dramatic in a way that no other German classical drama is, and it has a trio of central characters – Faust, Mephisto, Gretchen – who are all wonderfully charismatic and multi-layered, combined with a gripping central story of desire and betrayal.
I have no time for reading fanfic at the moment, let alone for writing, but the MfU story I have up on the File 40 archive has been generating a steady trickle of e-mails. It's a different kind of feedback from what lj generates – much shorter and not at all analytical – but it's intensely gratifying because it comes from people to whom I have no kind of personal connection. They just happened to find the story on the archive and liked it enough to want to tell me. However, I can't see myself writing any more fic. I have an unfinished B7 story that has been languishing on my hard drive for several years now which I dug out over the summer thinking that if I wanted to write it made sense to work on something that was already in progress. But I realised reading it that the reason I'd never got any further was because I'd written the part that interested me, the set-up, and I didn't really care about the resolution. I have the plot worked out in my head but every time I've tried to write it down it's been so workaday and clunking and uninspired that I give up again. In away, this is symbolic of how I feel about fanfic generally, both my own and other people's – I've already read/written what interests me and nothing else really grabs my attention. I suspect what I need is a new fandom (or probably, given my time scheduling difficulties right now, the last thing I need is a new fandom). A friend is sending me Slings & Arrows, of which I have high hopes, since even if it doesn't inspire me to read fanfic, it might give me some ideas for productions.
Wolfgang brought a stack of Peter Wimseys back with him from his last trip to England and I have been wallowing gloriously in them. I get a huge kick out of the breath-taking casualness with which Sayers drops snippets of information about the period into the narrative. She doesn't need to explain them, of course, because to her they're just part of normal life, but often they contradict what to the modern reader are basic assumptions about human dignity and interpersonal relations. I just adore the bit in The Nine Tailors where Peter and Bunter have had a motor accident in a snowstorm in the Fens and are taken in by the Rector of Fenchurch St Paul. His wife invites Peter to come in for tea and adds "Emily! Take this gentleman's manservant into the kitchen and make him comfortable" – two strangers rescued from a snowstorm, one of whom is treated as a guest and the other – simply isn't. No mucking about, no excuses, that's simply the way they are. And although Bunter is in many ways Peter's best friend, and has saved his life on at least three occasions, when Peter fakes his own death he leaves Bunter a mere £50 a year in his will. Similalrly, when Peter first sees Mary Thoday the narrative observes, with shocking detachment, that "He guessed her to be about forty, though, as is frequently the case country women, she had lost most of her front teeth and looked older." No contemporary author writing a period novel could drop in that sort of detail with such utter casualness. I disliked Thrones, Dominations for a number of reasons, but the part I simply hated was where Bunter is set up in his own little mews flat as a photographer, no longer in service but his own man. It revealed such a contemporary mentality, an inability to accept the world of the time quite simply had different standards and assumptions about the relationship between master and servant, and a desire to rewrite the stories through the lens of equally local, non-universal contemporary standards and assumptions. Peple often draw parallels between real fanfic and this sort of authorised fanfic, but it seems to me that the ficcers motivation of "fixing" what they didn't like about the original is not legitimate in an authorised continuation. Fic is free; I can choose to read it or not. If someone wants to write about Peter and Bunter having Teh Hot Sex, that's their business. But if I pay for someone else's finishing of a work, something that is marketed as having been mostly written by Sayers, then what I am looking for is "More of the Same" not what is in someone else's opinion an improvement upon the original, whether that improvement manifest itself as going into excruciating detail about Bunter's homsexual experiences, sadly untouched on in the books, or turning him into a financially independent twentieth century entrepreneur.
-
The other thing I like about the Wimseys is watching Sayers wrestle with her own snobbishness and sexism. She tries so hard to believe that not having been to public school "within the meaning of the act" doesn't make you a worse person, but she's contantly tripping up over her own unexamined assumptions. And the great fascination of Gaudy Night – apart from the glimpses it afford of old Oxford and the insights into the Scouts' living conditions – locked in at night! Holy shit! – is that she's so clearly going through the same struggle as Harriet. She wants to see women as the equal of men, but she can't shake the suspicion that without the occasional damn good rogering they all turn into catty, repressed wierdos. It's no wonder Harriet can't solve the mystery, trapped in a net of irreconcilable wishes and fears. Having been a don at a former woman's college myself, I was privileged to meet some of the last living specimens of the kind of Fellow Sayers describes, women who were Miss and not Dr and who had devoted their entire lives to women's education. They were either terrifyingly formidable or, frankly, batty. The Senior Modern Languages Tutor (Shrewsbury has a Modern Language Tutor, singular, one of those tiny historical details that fill me with glee - I presume the Language in question was French?) had been the scariest Dean in living memory, known for lurking behind the dustbins to catch undergraduates climbing over the wall in the days when there was still a curfew; she was a stately woman, unkindly referred to by my predecessor in an Oxford in-joke as "the University Chest", and the last tutor in College to insist that her pupils wore gowns for tutorials. They could regularly be seen racing across the lawn, gowns flapping, in a desperate effort not to be late. And I always took particular pleasure in Glory's one and only female scabby minion in S5 of Buffy because she reminded me so vividly of the don who had been Senior Tutor in my day (though in fairness to the Senior Tutor I must say that she was not at all batty, she just looked it, and in fairness to the scabby minion I must say that the minion did not have a ferocious and disconcerting squint). So having experienced up close and personal exactly that ambivalence about how far singledom and personal satisfaction can ever coexist in a woman's life, I find Sayers' efforts to cut a path through the labyrinth endlessly entertaining, watching as I can from the happy vantage point of knowing that one day it will all cease to be an issue (Wolfgang found Gaudy Night to be merely tedious, going on and on forever with nothing happening. He simply couldn't see the shifting perspectives on the female dons as a matter of life and death).