At some point in the past month or two, I DVR'd "Little Darlings", a movie that horrified me when it came out. I was five years younger than the girls in this movie, but even by their own age, I was far too much the Good Girl to be able to stand the thought of a whole movie about a bet over losing virginity.
And so, I've never actually seen "Little Darlings."
Watching it today, as a bright and gusty warm winter Sunday wears into evening, the sight of Kristy MacNicol in her opening scene, walking through her neighborhood in jeans and a jean jacket, smoking took me SLAM back to the Marlboro Country where I grew up. (My high school had a smoking area. For students.) I dressed like that, I had the little scowl like that, I had the fluffy hair that looked different every day.
This is one of those movies I enjoy because it looks real, not production designed. Matt Dillon looks so much like the real live boys I crushed on and hung out with, his youth is almost heartbreakingly gorgeous. The girls in camp look like we did - thick-haired, thin-haired, fat, babyfaced, dorky. Beautiful.
One of the great highlights of the story is Sunshine, the hippie child who defends virginity in the end - and is, hilariously, played by Cynthia Nixon (later famous for her long run in, of all things, Sex and the City). She's rather more likable here.
The emotions, as they come in "Little Darlings", are raw and tender and bear all the importance of youth and first-ness. It's both perfectly nostalgic for those of us Of A Certain Age and acutely immediate; the performances really are good.
I recently re-watched "Valley Girl" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", which also feature kids who look pretty much like we really did back then, and have a very particular feel that is specific not only to the time but to the movies of that period, which went in for a grimy sort of sexiness that has been lost, polished over and production designed and plastic surgerized out of all humanity.
Next up from the DVR: "Smile" - an earlier still peek into teenaged beauty pageants, where you can find Melanie Griffith, Anette O'Toole, and other stars in early roles. And Barbara Feldon, whom I wanted to be when I grew up when she showed up on my TV as Agent 99 in Get Smart.
Some of the details of films from the seventies and early eighties are shocking - the extreme ease of a guy who's been accused of sex with a student; the careless way sexually obsessed young boys stalk pageant girls; sex, and abortion, and the expectations we have now versus those in play decades ago. Some of the honesty is astonishing (the judges in "Smile" are both creepy and dead-on portrayals; the way kids who've been used badly deal with and consider sex; the gender roles).
I think I need to actually collect these movies, instead of parking copies/taking up space in the DVR. Will have to look on Amazon streaming or get them on blu-ray.
Showing posts with label world building. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world building. Show all posts
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Friday, May 22, 2015
Peculiarities
It’s a boring old truism that one of the jobs of a writer is to spend some level of mind-time, *all* the time, on finely observing people, the world, and experience and quantifying these things for themselves so they can eventually steal these considerations, then cannibalize and synthesize them within stories.
It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.
THAT is awfully good writing.
Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.
Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.
All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.
I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.
Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.
No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.
***
For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)
I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?
How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?
It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.
THAT is awfully good writing.
Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.
Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.
All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.
I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.
Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.
No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.
***
For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)
I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?
How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Research, RuPaul, and Affectation
When I was twelve or so, I first ran across the term “affectation” as a somewhat pejorative description of a girl putting on linguistic or gestural airs to Act a Certain way. As my reading widened, the term came to apply to affecting habits by men or women, with a little less insult freighting the description, but still generally seeming to indicate artificial behavior as a negative. “She affected a girlish lisp but seemed no younger for it” or “He affected to carry a walking stick” were the broad-stroked outlines of affectation.
Many of us today, especially Americans today, despise affectation – and yet, for all my own history of Valspeak and its signature (incredibly irritating) rising inflection, as a crotchety old lady, I find younger women and girls now no less affected, and just as irritating. The current iteration, in spoken language, favors either wildly raspy voices or nasal and juvenile sounding voices which remain immature in sound and vocabulary well past the sell-by date on “I’m a liddle gurl” pretension. This was plenty common in my own generation, and earlier in the twentieth century, but as a prejudiced old bat, it FEELS like it’s worse now, and “women today have lost all concept of the allure of a lower and modulated voice.”
My generation, of course, entertains the delusional affectation that we’re not getting old, rendering the concept of ageing gracefully all but risible (and I include myself). Every generation has its elaborate fictional lifelong scripts they live by, destinies shaped by prevailing assumptions, and those shaped by rebellion against them too.
Anyway. So affectation is considerably awful, in this day and age. Its reflection of artificial values, and empty aspirations *blah blah blah blah and so on*, pathetic pop culture, distended market interest in body image, consumer *blather blather blather ad nauseum* and … you get the point.
Behavior other than the authentic = bad.
But. Has any one of us ever in life met an ‘authentic’ person? Honest, sure. Even trustworthy. But almost every human for something north of six THOUSAND years now has been subject to some influence or other that has little to do with the natural world. Civilization – and animal behavior – are incompatible and always have been, and what people have ever succumbed to unfettered expression with their words, behaviors, and bodies, have ALWAYS been punished for it, even as we view artificiality with suspicion.
So most of us agree: crapping in public is Not Done. But eating is acceptable. And yet you can’t have one without the other. Looked at for more than five minutes, the standards we’ve cemented over the millennia begin to appear arbitrary, even as we can’t imagine (quite) letting go of them.
We judge the affectation of, say, a monarch so rarefied that for them to scratch their knee is unthinkable, as almost embarrasingly inhuman. Ironically: unworthy, by dint of the very centuries’ sanctioning of overweening position and antiquated political systems. Embarrassing.
And so, we snort, we wipe our noses, we move on with life, glad we’re not stuck in royal protocol … yet ever-fantasizing about silly constructs like “fairy tales” and obessing over Kate Middleton’s dresses.
Affectation is awful. And *aspirational*.
It’s difficult to even comprehend the idea of a world in which touching the ear is offensive, or speaking above the most rigidly-learned modulation. To imagine trying to live without sneezing, yawning, sighing in boredom – unthinkable. Who trains themselves out of these simple things? How can it even be done?
There are few of us living today who can stop and imagine living without the presumption that human feeling is universal. The presumption that a living, feeling person will act in X way given Y to endure, or suffer, or enjoy, is unfathomably deep in us, and yet a moment’s study betrays how wrong modern assumptions can be. Even the concept of individuality is not fundamental.
And it’s the job of a historical fiction author to convey, even in compromised terms, worlds like this. Minds without modern expectations. Relationships, communities, homes, and landscapes not framed by Norman Rockwell or even Titian or Picasso. To completely reframe character within different contexts.
This is where RuPaul comes in.
Here’s a guy who’s made quite a career in affectation, and people only love him for it. He has stated pointblank more than once, wearing a dress really isn’t his favorite thing in the world. Yet few of us – men or women – do it a whole lot “better” (modern presumptions firmly in place). The transformation of which he’s capable, and for which he’s made megabucks, is arresting.
And completely affected. You knew that would be coming, so it’s out of the way. Done.
The year I was so sick I missed New Year’s, I stayed home for days on my couch, so dizzy I could not read nor walk nor focus on anything closer to me that at least ten feet away, and I watched TV. Specifically, RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix (sadly, they don’t carry the show anymore). At first, I thought it would be light and funny and get my mind off the illness – with pretty colors and things to look at I wouldn’t have to contemplate in any depth.
I’ve seen every single season, and most of them several times over, thanks to the magic of cable TV’s perpetual reruns. It never gets old (and the editing is the most hilarious on TV).
RuPaul presides over this show, decidedly NOT taped in HD, and filtered on top of that – and so sits in the shining, golden haze of her wigs, cool, alluring, and utterly remote. Topping seven feet no doubt in those shoes, airbrushed to imaginary, unattainable perfection, she is packaged and presented as a goddess of transformations, and the dozens of minions over the past several years are a panoply of breathtaking talents, all offering up to her their charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent (one of the show’s million catch phrases – and it spells a word, y’all).
RuPaul HIMself appears at least once every episode decidedly out of drag, and each one ends with a judging, a ceremonial in which SHE makes a new appearance each week, magnificent and made-up, glittering and … “perfect” … There is a runway walk to showcase the week’s eye-popping dress and wig and makeup, then a few minutes’ marvelously Hollywood-fake-nice emceeing where she introduces the judges du jour, and then she takes her seat at the center of the panel and rules with an iron fist, a tongue in cheek, and the most eerily polished personal deportment this side of a royal court, seriously. Even on the rare occasion she takes a queen to task for something, the flare-up presented has the sheen of protocol, the fairy-tale monarch enacting the off-with-their-heads archness that does not so much as crack the heavily shellacked shell of the persona; indeed, only adds to the …
Affectation.
The more I watch RuPaul, the less I see the human, the private life, the man for whom this is decidedly a living, and for whom life is lived on a farm with a longtime partner, a private life beautifully and blankly unavailable to millions of viewers. It’s a work of art, and it’s kind of magnificent, thinking about all the unseen-ness or not.
As Marilyn Monroe was a persona worn, perhaps almost to excess, by a woman with intelligence and agency of her own, and deep vulnerabilities she actually used to fuel the machine of a career centered on affectation … so is RuPaul the product of the collective gaze, more than the real reflection of a man making a hell of a living looking like few women in the world can even aspire to.
(My apologies for the preceding sentence; this blog is largely unedited, and certainly not beta-read.)
Over the past couple of weeks, watching Rusie Q in her magisterial grandness, the very carriage of her head a lesson in imperiousness and royal dignity, the more I am thinking of the rarefied nature of affectation, and how IMPORTANT it is for certain characters. How it informs an entire existence – where animal humanity is locked away and hidden – where protocol’s demands are met, and with aplomb, but life as lived is a separate thing; and not, perhaps, a greater one.
Writing a world in which no voice should ever be raised, where bells are not rung to get attention, in which religious and court demands come above all things, the example of RuPaul in drag is perhaps hardly obvious, and yet I am inspired by the vision, by the transformative nature of the demands of the Supermodel of the World’s role. Watching the performance, the work, the absolute dedication is instructive, even if I will never directly use an ounce of it. The very angle of that sculpted chin is evocative. And that is enough.
Creative artists, writers, and those we work with, are fond of saying you never know where inspiration lies.
It’s impossible to convey in toto just how random, and true, that really is.
Many of us today, especially Americans today, despise affectation – and yet, for all my own history of Valspeak and its signature (incredibly irritating) rising inflection, as a crotchety old lady, I find younger women and girls now no less affected, and just as irritating. The current iteration, in spoken language, favors either wildly raspy voices or nasal and juvenile sounding voices which remain immature in sound and vocabulary well past the sell-by date on “I’m a liddle gurl” pretension. This was plenty common in my own generation, and earlier in the twentieth century, but as a prejudiced old bat, it FEELS like it’s worse now, and “women today have lost all concept of the allure of a lower and modulated voice.”
My generation, of course, entertains the delusional affectation that we’re not getting old, rendering the concept of ageing gracefully all but risible (and I include myself). Every generation has its elaborate fictional lifelong scripts they live by, destinies shaped by prevailing assumptions, and those shaped by rebellion against them too.
Anyway. So affectation is considerably awful, in this day and age. Its reflection of artificial values, and empty aspirations *blah blah blah blah and so on*, pathetic pop culture, distended market interest in body image, consumer *blather blather blather ad nauseum* and … you get the point.
Behavior other than the authentic = bad.
But. Has any one of us ever in life met an ‘authentic’ person? Honest, sure. Even trustworthy. But almost every human for something north of six THOUSAND years now has been subject to some influence or other that has little to do with the natural world. Civilization – and animal behavior – are incompatible and always have been, and what people have ever succumbed to unfettered expression with their words, behaviors, and bodies, have ALWAYS been punished for it, even as we view artificiality with suspicion.
So most of us agree: crapping in public is Not Done. But eating is acceptable. And yet you can’t have one without the other. Looked at for more than five minutes, the standards we’ve cemented over the millennia begin to appear arbitrary, even as we can’t imagine (quite) letting go of them.
We judge the affectation of, say, a monarch so rarefied that for them to scratch their knee is unthinkable, as almost embarrasingly inhuman. Ironically: unworthy, by dint of the very centuries’ sanctioning of overweening position and antiquated political systems. Embarrassing.
And so, we snort, we wipe our noses, we move on with life, glad we’re not stuck in royal protocol … yet ever-fantasizing about silly constructs like “fairy tales” and obessing over Kate Middleton’s dresses.
Affectation is awful. And *aspirational*.
It’s difficult to even comprehend the idea of a world in which touching the ear is offensive, or speaking above the most rigidly-learned modulation. To imagine trying to live without sneezing, yawning, sighing in boredom – unthinkable. Who trains themselves out of these simple things? How can it even be done?
There are few of us living today who can stop and imagine living without the presumption that human feeling is universal. The presumption that a living, feeling person will act in X way given Y to endure, or suffer, or enjoy, is unfathomably deep in us, and yet a moment’s study betrays how wrong modern assumptions can be. Even the concept of individuality is not fundamental.
And it’s the job of a historical fiction author to convey, even in compromised terms, worlds like this. Minds without modern expectations. Relationships, communities, homes, and landscapes not framed by Norman Rockwell or even Titian or Picasso. To completely reframe character within different contexts.
This is where RuPaul comes in.
Here’s a guy who’s made quite a career in affectation, and people only love him for it. He has stated pointblank more than once, wearing a dress really isn’t his favorite thing in the world. Yet few of us – men or women – do it a whole lot “better” (modern presumptions firmly in place). The transformation of which he’s capable, and for which he’s made megabucks, is arresting.
And completely affected. You knew that would be coming, so it’s out of the way. Done.
The year I was so sick I missed New Year’s, I stayed home for days on my couch, so dizzy I could not read nor walk nor focus on anything closer to me that at least ten feet away, and I watched TV. Specifically, RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix (sadly, they don’t carry the show anymore). At first, I thought it would be light and funny and get my mind off the illness – with pretty colors and things to look at I wouldn’t have to contemplate in any depth.
I’ve seen every single season, and most of them several times over, thanks to the magic of cable TV’s perpetual reruns. It never gets old (and the editing is the most hilarious on TV).
 |
| Image: Wikipedia |
RuPaul presides over this show, decidedly NOT taped in HD, and filtered on top of that – and so sits in the shining, golden haze of her wigs, cool, alluring, and utterly remote. Topping seven feet no doubt in those shoes, airbrushed to imaginary, unattainable perfection, she is packaged and presented as a goddess of transformations, and the dozens of minions over the past several years are a panoply of breathtaking talents, all offering up to her their charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent (one of the show’s million catch phrases – and it spells a word, y’all).
RuPaul HIMself appears at least once every episode decidedly out of drag, and each one ends with a judging, a ceremonial in which SHE makes a new appearance each week, magnificent and made-up, glittering and … “perfect” … There is a runway walk to showcase the week’s eye-popping dress and wig and makeup, then a few minutes’ marvelously Hollywood-fake-nice emceeing where she introduces the judges du jour, and then she takes her seat at the center of the panel and rules with an iron fist, a tongue in cheek, and the most eerily polished personal deportment this side of a royal court, seriously. Even on the rare occasion she takes a queen to task for something, the flare-up presented has the sheen of protocol, the fairy-tale monarch enacting the off-with-their-heads archness that does not so much as crack the heavily shellacked shell of the persona; indeed, only adds to the …
Affectation.
The more I watch RuPaul, the less I see the human, the private life, the man for whom this is decidedly a living, and for whom life is lived on a farm with a longtime partner, a private life beautifully and blankly unavailable to millions of viewers. It’s a work of art, and it’s kind of magnificent, thinking about all the unseen-ness or not.
As Marilyn Monroe was a persona worn, perhaps almost to excess, by a woman with intelligence and agency of her own, and deep vulnerabilities she actually used to fuel the machine of a career centered on affectation … so is RuPaul the product of the collective gaze, more than the real reflection of a man making a hell of a living looking like few women in the world can even aspire to.
(My apologies for the preceding sentence; this blog is largely unedited, and certainly not beta-read.)
Over the past couple of weeks, watching Rusie Q in her magisterial grandness, the very carriage of her head a lesson in imperiousness and royal dignity, the more I am thinking of the rarefied nature of affectation, and how IMPORTANT it is for certain characters. How it informs an entire existence – where animal humanity is locked away and hidden – where protocol’s demands are met, and with aplomb, but life as lived is a separate thing; and not, perhaps, a greater one.
Writing a world in which no voice should ever be raised, where bells are not rung to get attention, in which religious and court demands come above all things, the example of RuPaul in drag is perhaps hardly obvious, and yet I am inspired by the vision, by the transformative nature of the demands of the Supermodel of the World’s role. Watching the performance, the work, the absolute dedication is instructive, even if I will never directly use an ounce of it. The very angle of that sculpted chin is evocative. And that is enough.
Creative artists, writers, and those we work with, are fond of saying you never know where inspiration lies.
It’s impossible to convey in toto just how random, and true, that really is.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
A Bigger Playing Field and The Inevitability of Sound
One of the new things to explore in the second novel is the wider perspective both of an omniscient POV (The Ax and the Vase is first-person), but also the breathing room of spanning generations. Clovis’ story takes place across thirty years, to be sure – but the new work (it still has no title, but I refuse to refer to it by the extraordinarily cheesy working title it’s borne all this time it has languished on the backburner) takes a look first at the mother, then the queen, then her daughter. It should cover something like seventy years or so, and ranges much farther afield geographically and culturally as well.
More to the point, it’s a novel focusing on feminine characters. (No, I don’t mean girly girl wearers-of-pink with dainty hand motions and lots of giggles; “feminine” is a perfectly accurate way to describe characters who are women.) This is remarkably gratifying, because even in the return to my own gender I will get to explore a manner of living still completely unfamiliar. Did you know that the Ostrogoths of Late Antiquity operated from a point of view in which sound itself was a different experience than we today would understand? We often don’t stop to think how unfettered—how, in fact, ostentatiously selfish—our “natural” behavior is. In a world dominated by court protocols and technologies which did not grind, screech, nor blare common noises into every possible milieu, human sound carried a very different currency. In one character in particular, I will get to explore a kind of physical and even verbal modulation few women *or* men even imagine today.
I’m at least an occasional user of modulation myself. Communicating with Penelope, in particular, requires a great deal of consideration of the speed of one’s physical motions, the sharpness—no matter the corresponding volume—of one’s voice. I’ve joked for twenty years about my Patented Modulated Phone Tones, but I do find it is far easier to be understood on a call at the office when I slow down my speech; and, too, keeping a low voice in a cube farm can be key if it’s possible to remember to try. Speaking to someone on a cell can render me almost intolerable over cube walls, and I know it; more’s the pity I tend to work for executives who often call from airports or their cars—I hereby apologize to every coworker I’ve ever worked next to. Even the sound of my typing (I type with my nails, pretty fast, and not gently) has, at least once, been an issue for someone working next to me.
It is an extreme stretch, in many ways, to concentrate on the atmosphere of a world without white noise, without motor vehicles, without even the imaginary, to-us-un-hear-able hum of electronics, climate control (even just an electric fan)—the *inevitability* of *sound*. For some of us, it may be difficult to imagine never quite being alone of other people. For others, it may be difficult to imagine *being* alone—completely, truly.
Also curious to us are the peculiarities of behavior in a world so unlike our own—between people whose experiences are so foreign to our perspective, our expectations. Laughter, that simplest of pleasures, which we seek without encumberance, and usually seek to share, would have been almost an assault on the ears of an Ostrogothic courtier. Indeed, in many royal palaces through history, tittering would not merely have been rude, but inexplicable. Even today, it’s hard to imagine the average honoree presented to Emperor Akihito thrusting out a paw for a handshake or greeting His Imperial Majesty with a hearty guffaw. We created royalty as a rarefied institution wherever it exists, and its rules—its sounds and sights and even its very fragrance—are meant to be uncommon, no matter where in time or in the world we find such a world.
World-building requires research into the setting of time, and into the realities for a gender or an age group and ever role, but it cannot be complete without the sensory understanding that NO world has ever been quite like our own. The very point of historical fiction is to explore a world other than the one we live in, that we know; indeed, to depart our own and visit the other.
I visited the world of a man with Ax. Now I am stretching my legs and touring a warmer place, a more exoticized place … a time not so far away from his, and yet a world unlike Clovis’ in almost every way. It’s a gorgeous experience.
More to the point, it’s a novel focusing on feminine characters. (No, I don’t mean girly girl wearers-of-pink with dainty hand motions and lots of giggles; “feminine” is a perfectly accurate way to describe characters who are women.) This is remarkably gratifying, because even in the return to my own gender I will get to explore a manner of living still completely unfamiliar. Did you know that the Ostrogoths of Late Antiquity operated from a point of view in which sound itself was a different experience than we today would understand? We often don’t stop to think how unfettered—how, in fact, ostentatiously selfish—our “natural” behavior is. In a world dominated by court protocols and technologies which did not grind, screech, nor blare common noises into every possible milieu, human sound carried a very different currency. In one character in particular, I will get to explore a kind of physical and even verbal modulation few women *or* men even imagine today.
I’m at least an occasional user of modulation myself. Communicating with Penelope, in particular, requires a great deal of consideration of the speed of one’s physical motions, the sharpness—no matter the corresponding volume—of one’s voice. I’ve joked for twenty years about my Patented Modulated Phone Tones, but I do find it is far easier to be understood on a call at the office when I slow down my speech; and, too, keeping a low voice in a cube farm can be key if it’s possible to remember to try. Speaking to someone on a cell can render me almost intolerable over cube walls, and I know it; more’s the pity I tend to work for executives who often call from airports or their cars—I hereby apologize to every coworker I’ve ever worked next to. Even the sound of my typing (I type with my nails, pretty fast, and not gently) has, at least once, been an issue for someone working next to me.
It is an extreme stretch, in many ways, to concentrate on the atmosphere of a world without white noise, without motor vehicles, without even the imaginary, to-us-un-hear-able hum of electronics, climate control (even just an electric fan)—the *inevitability* of *sound*. For some of us, it may be difficult to imagine never quite being alone of other people. For others, it may be difficult to imagine *being* alone—completely, truly.
Also curious to us are the peculiarities of behavior in a world so unlike our own—between people whose experiences are so foreign to our perspective, our expectations. Laughter, that simplest of pleasures, which we seek without encumberance, and usually seek to share, would have been almost an assault on the ears of an Ostrogothic courtier. Indeed, in many royal palaces through history, tittering would not merely have been rude, but inexplicable. Even today, it’s hard to imagine the average honoree presented to Emperor Akihito thrusting out a paw for a handshake or greeting His Imperial Majesty with a hearty guffaw. We created royalty as a rarefied institution wherever it exists, and its rules—its sounds and sights and even its very fragrance—are meant to be uncommon, no matter where in time or in the world we find such a world.
World-building requires research into the setting of time, and into the realities for a gender or an age group and ever role, but it cannot be complete without the sensory understanding that NO world has ever been quite like our own. The very point of historical fiction is to explore a world other than the one we live in, that we know; indeed, to depart our own and visit the other.
I visited the world of a man with Ax. Now I am stretching my legs and touring a warmer place, a more exoticized place … a time not so far away from his, and yet a world unlike Clovis’ in almost every way. It’s a gorgeous experience.
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