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alexandraerinWhoo... page-a-day thing's going pretty well so far. My regularly irregular sleep schedule means that the actual dates on the updates don't quite match up to the calendar yet, but I don't feel like fighting with that right now. Stories are getting done and going up.
One side effect of the bite-sized pieces is that it's easier to write ahead a bit, which I've done on 3 Seas since I've been riding high on it lately... when my enthusiasm shifts around to Void Dogs or Star Harbor, as it will, I can do the same with those.
The funny thing is that the Tribe updates are taking the longest of the four shorts right now, even though they're the shortest of them, because (spoiler alert! Well, not really) I'm building towards The Dramatic Conclusion of the fourth chapter. Endings take more work for me than middles do. I've got a science fiction story intended for submission to a magazine sitting on my hard drive waiting on a punchy ending note to present itself to me.
A middle aged Scottish woman recently reminded that I haven't actually read Les Miserables since junior high, and since it's available online I started reading it. According to kipedia, a conteporary reviewer said that there was "neither truth nor greatness" within it... I think add that to that review of Shakespeare I posted on my old blog. There is so much truth and so much greatness in just the opening books of Les Miserables that it's not even funny.
When I read it as a kid, I remembered thinking that the aging revolutionary was full of shit when he was talking to the bishop and going on and on about his wealth and power and privilege when we'd just been treated to a dozen chapters detailing how awesome and charitable and poor Monseigneur Bienvenu, Saint Super Robin Hood, was... reading it now, it's easier for me to see why the encounter had such an effect on the bishop. To the extent that he could, he bent everything that life (God) gave to him towards the benefit of others, but that didn't change the fact that he was given a ton of awesome shit that other people don't get in the first place.
Just as it is equally illegal for the rich as well as the poor to steal bread and sleep under bridges, it is equally virtuous for the poor as well as the rich to give their mansions over to hospitals and their salaries to charity, is it not?
The bishop had a choice between relative luxury and poverty and he was able to enjoy his self-imposed deprivation, living as part of a system that would not let him starve or be homeless, surrounded by people who wouldn't dream of hurting him or taking advantage of him and who would protect him from those who might. His poverty therefore had nothing in common with the poverty of his dispirited visitor Jean Valjean except the name. He's presented to us as a man of tremendous empathy, but for all his travels over the mountains to visit distant parishioners he could not walk a mile in Jean Valjean's shoes. His willing dispersal of his assets is not disenfranchisement. The remoteness of his posting is not marginalization.
And none of that's to say that the bishop was not a good man. He was a great man. He was simply a great man of great privilege. His greatness... his goodness... cannot be separated out from that.
I found myself thinking, very briefly, that this would make a great illustration of the concept of privilege and how one still benefits from even unasked-for privilege no matter what one does, but then I realized I didn't see all this when I was in school. I see it now and it's blindingly obvious, but that's because I've learned to see the world in this way. There is no magic way of making it click.
And people who don't dwell on the bishop's privilege aren't "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective", as they say dans la belle internet... for all that I spent all those paragraphs on it, it's an interesting side note on a brilliant bit of writing. Hugo wrote all that as prologue to the actual story, but in doing so he wrote a bit of... I don't know if I'd call it allegory, but he showed a model of a truly Christlike man and he did so without irony. He was considered an anti-Catholic, but I think the Catholic Church could have benefited from a few anti-Catholics of his ilk among its numbers.
While reading it... even though most of what I read before getting tired was preamble... I had an idea pop into my head for doing a post-apocalyptic cyberpunky science fiction retelling of the story. The protagonist would be a butch cyborg or bioroid named VJ24601. The Javert character would be an android, hence its inability to deviate from programming and inevitable (spoiler alert) self-destruction upon realizing the paradox of its existence. It would all be awesome. I sketched out a lot of it in my head, and then I realized it would be artistically redundant. I didn't have anything to say that Hugo hadn't said, but with "LESBIAN..." stuck in front and "...IN SPACE!!!!" tacked onto the end. And read with an echoey reverb effect.
What's the point? It might be fun, and if I didn't have anything else to write, that might be enough. It might get somebody to appreciate a classic story... or it might convince them that there's no point in reading classics when they can read LESBIAN CLASSICS IN SPACE!!!! I'd rather just tell somebody to read Les Miserables.
I don't know. I think I'll hold onto the basic ideas of a Jean Valjean inspired character and a Javert inspired robot... it's perfectly possible I'll find I do have a story to tell with them in the future, but I don't want to just retell Les Mis and having some characters and a setting isn't the same thing as having a story.
And now I've been rambling on for half an hour and I'm starting to feel sleepy, so I think I'm going to cut off the rambling there.
One side effect of the bite-sized pieces is that it's easier to write ahead a bit, which I've done on 3 Seas since I've been riding high on it lately... when my enthusiasm shifts around to Void Dogs or Star Harbor, as it will, I can do the same with those.
The funny thing is that the Tribe updates are taking the longest of the four shorts right now, even though they're the shortest of them, because (spoiler alert! Well, not really) I'm building towards The Dramatic Conclusion of the fourth chapter. Endings take more work for me than middles do. I've got a science fiction story intended for submission to a magazine sitting on my hard drive waiting on a punchy ending note to present itself to me.
A middle aged Scottish woman recently reminded that I haven't actually read Les Miserables since junior high, and since it's available online I started reading it. According to kipedia, a conteporary reviewer said that there was "neither truth nor greatness" within it... I think add that to that review of Shakespeare I posted on my old blog. There is so much truth and so much greatness in just the opening books of Les Miserables that it's not even funny.
When I read it as a kid, I remembered thinking that the aging revolutionary was full of shit when he was talking to the bishop and going on and on about his wealth and power and privilege when we'd just been treated to a dozen chapters detailing how awesome and charitable and poor Monseigneur Bienvenu, Saint Super Robin Hood, was... reading it now, it's easier for me to see why the encounter had such an effect on the bishop. To the extent that he could, he bent everything that life (God) gave to him towards the benefit of others, but that didn't change the fact that he was given a ton of awesome shit that other people don't get in the first place.
Just as it is equally illegal for the rich as well as the poor to steal bread and sleep under bridges, it is equally virtuous for the poor as well as the rich to give their mansions over to hospitals and their salaries to charity, is it not?
The bishop had a choice between relative luxury and poverty and he was able to enjoy his self-imposed deprivation, living as part of a system that would not let him starve or be homeless, surrounded by people who wouldn't dream of hurting him or taking advantage of him and who would protect him from those who might. His poverty therefore had nothing in common with the poverty of his dispirited visitor Jean Valjean except the name. He's presented to us as a man of tremendous empathy, but for all his travels over the mountains to visit distant parishioners he could not walk a mile in Jean Valjean's shoes. His willing dispersal of his assets is not disenfranchisement. The remoteness of his posting is not marginalization.
And none of that's to say that the bishop was not a good man. He was a great man. He was simply a great man of great privilege. His greatness... his goodness... cannot be separated out from that.
I found myself thinking, very briefly, that this would make a great illustration of the concept of privilege and how one still benefits from even unasked-for privilege no matter what one does, but then I realized I didn't see all this when I was in school. I see it now and it's blindingly obvious, but that's because I've learned to see the world in this way. There is no magic way of making it click.
And people who don't dwell on the bishop's privilege aren't "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective", as they say dans la belle internet... for all that I spent all those paragraphs on it, it's an interesting side note on a brilliant bit of writing. Hugo wrote all that as prologue to the actual story, but in doing so he wrote a bit of... I don't know if I'd call it allegory, but he showed a model of a truly Christlike man and he did so without irony. He was considered an anti-Catholic, but I think the Catholic Church could have benefited from a few anti-Catholics of his ilk among its numbers.
While reading it... even though most of what I read before getting tired was preamble... I had an idea pop into my head for doing a post-apocalyptic cyberpunky science fiction retelling of the story. The protagonist would be a butch cyborg or bioroid named VJ24601. The Javert character would be an android, hence its inability to deviate from programming and inevitable (spoiler alert) self-destruction upon realizing the paradox of its existence. It would all be awesome. I sketched out a lot of it in my head, and then I realized it would be artistically redundant. I didn't have anything to say that Hugo hadn't said, but with "LESBIAN..." stuck in front and "...IN SPACE!!!!" tacked onto the end. And read with an echoey reverb effect.
What's the point? It might be fun, and if I didn't have anything else to write, that might be enough. It might get somebody to appreciate a classic story... or it might convince them that there's no point in reading classics when they can read LESBIAN CLASSICS IN SPACE!!!! I'd rather just tell somebody to read Les Miserables.
I don't know. I think I'll hold onto the basic ideas of a Jean Valjean inspired character and a Javert inspired robot... it's perfectly possible I'll find I do have a story to tell with them in the future, but I don't want to just retell Les Mis and having some characters and a setting isn't the same thing as having a story.
And now I've been rambling on for half an hour and I'm starting to feel sleepy, so I think I'm going to cut off the rambling there.
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Couldn't find any better place for asking this one, so here I go.
on 2009-04-15 06:41 pm (UTC)Would you prefer a real movie or 3D animation?
What would you do about the sex scenes? (I mean like show everything or only suggest what's going to happen)
Oh, and I have no special reason for asking this, I'm only curious (and I've created a LiveJournal account only to ask this, if this is something worth appreciating:)
Re: Couldn't find any better place for asking this one, so here I go.
on 2009-04-16 06:34 pm (UTC)The first hard and fast rule I would have is that Steff would have to be played by somebody biologically male... none of this casting a woman as the "tranny" and giving her bad cheek make-up. If it were up to me, I think I'd prefer to do an open casting call to find unknowns who really suit the characters, because nobody in Hollywood really matches my mental images of them.
Re: Couldn't find any better place for asking this one, so here I go.
on 2009-04-17 08:40 pm (UTC)