rymenhild

Once upon a time, in the days when the wicked Saxons (those are the English, my friends), were just beginning their invasion of pure, unsullied, Celtic Britain, there may have been a king, or a war leader, whose name might possibly have been Arthur.

(Yes, the part about the wicked Saxons and unsullied Britain is sarcastic.)

As the centuries passed, and the Saxons conquered the Britons, and the Normans conquered the Saxons, and the Britons (now referred to as the Welsh, much to their displeasure) sat around in Gwynedd and told stories about their former greatness, a series of histories and tales coalesced around this king or war leader.

The stories, at least the later ones, tend to involve the clashing of swords, the slashing of armor, the sneaking into people's bedrooms in the dead of knight... I mean night... that was an actual typo which was far too good to delete... and the meeting damsels in various woods and going off slaying beasties on their behalf.

I tend to like the earlier Arthurian stories better (less clashing, slashing and sneaking; more bizarre Welsh politics and randomly inserted saints' lives), but then I'm obsessed with Geoffrey of Monmouth. As Elf (

navelofwine) once said, when asked to provide a capsule biography for me, "Andrea has just eloped with Geoffrey of Monmouth. This rather surprised her friends, who didn't think she was interested in men, especially not men who'd been dead for eight hundred years."

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You just gave away your identity, if that's a problem.

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Haven't read much Christine lately (I suppose I should take her off my interests list, shouldn't I?) but she's wonderful. She's got a great series of letters in which she knocks the Romance of the Rose for being anti-woman.

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goblinmouse.livejournal.com

Oh do leave Christine on your interests list. It makes me so happy. I am a particular fan of her creation of diety-like female authorities in The Book of the City of Ladies to replace the unfriendly male authorities who had been accosting her in her mind. The lady Reason has most certainly been added to my personal pantheon.

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You're so right. Hurray for female auctoritas. (It just means "authority", but it's so much better in Latin...)

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How about because it's boring? I say that rarely about a piece of literature because it's all relative, but even being tested on it I couldn't get through it. I had no idea that the single-minded pursuit of romance could, with the insertion of enough allegory, be made that yawn-inducing.

Though I do love the part where the narrator takes Reason to task for using sexually explicit language (unbefitting a lady) in her description of Greek myths, and she takes him to task right back, pointing out that she invented the words so who's he to tell her not to use them? It was a wonderfully modern sort of moment in the midst of all the navel-gazing and philosophizing. (Interestingly, at least the edition I was reading from astrixes the words out...)

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I haven't managed to get through the Romance of the Rose yet either (blush).

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Have you added "procrastinatory" to your spell-checker yet? Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't put there on its own.

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I don't use it in research papers, for obvious reasons. Microsoft Word doesn't need to know about it.

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To be fair, a few of those really shouldn't be words. (For that matter, one or two may not be.) ;P

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I've seen every single one of them in critical theory on English and/or medieval literature. Granted, at some point they must have been added to the English language, but I wasn't the one who added them.

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Yes, but the former category doesn't count.

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As in critical theory? When I write papers, I'm afraid, I do have to use English-grad-speak. Otherwise the people grading don't know what I've written.

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Of course. But that doesn't mean they should be recognized as words.

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ayelle.livejournal.com

Rainbow Brite and the Unicorn Tapestries.

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Rainbow Brite: My very favorite television show when I was about four years old. I wanted to be Rainbow Brite. In fact, I organized what seems actually to have been a rudimentary roleplaying game in my nursery school class, assigning my friends to various characters. I was R.B., of course. When I had to assign a part to a little boy... I think his name was Gerry... I made him Starlite, the horse. He came to me one day and said, "I can't be Starlite. Rainbow Brite called Starlite 'girl', so it must be a girl horse." I said, "That's not true. All horses are boys."

The Unicorn Tapestries: A series of late fifteenth-century Dutch tapestries in the collection of the Cloisters in northern Manhattan. They display the hunt of a unicorn, from its first appearance to its capture. Various art historians think it's a Christological (there's that word!) allegory involving the sacrifice of the innocent creature, but I believe that the art historians are a bit too bound up in the notion that everything medieval or early modern must be Christian somehow. I like to think that the tapestries are pure secular visual storytelling. That's too boring a thesis for anyone to put in a scholarly paper, though.

By the way, Rainbow Brite and the Unicorn Tapestries could be the title for a very strange book. It would probably be far too cutesy for anyone except the four-year-old girl I used to be. I'm sure if I watched an episode of Rainbow Brite now, I would trigger a gag reflex... but I haven't seen it in years, so my memories are still fond.

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ayelle.livejournal.com

By the way, Rainbow Brite and the Unicorn Tapestries could be the title for a very strange book.

Please, *please* write it.

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shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com

What's "cimorene/alianora"? You appear to be the only person in the LiveJournal universe to list that particular interest.

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It's rymenhild taking characters from my most beloved set of childhood books and imagining what it would be like if they were gay and romantically involved with each other.

(Yes, I know, I'm a ogress with a very low tolerance for slash fanfic, at least when I'm artistically or personally attached to the first round of books. I've known people who tried to reconcieve of all their favorite characters as Jewish, and that left me with a strong negative impression at a very early age of the whole enterprise of rewriting the works of others in light of specific personal preferences (narrative, not necessarily romantic!). Though of course anyone can write whatever they want, and if they write well more power to them. For the record, I'd be just as annoyed if anyone reconceived of clearly gay characters as straight...wouldn't you?)

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You've just mentioned something that I find fascinating about slash. In most life, everyone assumes everyone else is heterosexual (except for people who decide to use blatant homosexual stereotypes). In slash, everyone assumes that everyone else is homosexual or bisexual. It's refreshing.

For me, it's kind of like being the American Christian who suddenly finds himself at Brandeis and living in the same hallway as all the observant Jews.

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I know, I'm just a literary purist. (One who almost didn't go to Brandeis because she was really looking forward to being a minority for once, actually.) I kinda figure if you want gay characters (or straight characters, or turquoise characters) just write them for goodness's sake. Which is not to say that derivative art does not have a long and proud tradition (or, for that matter, that ALL art isn't derivative in one way or another.) But I've never been comfortable reading any third-party sequel/rewrite that didn't stand overwhelmingly as its own piece of art (like, on the level of a classic in its own right), no matter how interesting the philosophical points it made by referencing the original were. Just a personal thing.

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I think this makes sense. As a matter of fact, I would be much more comfortable with myself if I didn't read fanfiction. As it is, I've decided to accept the inevitable, and I look for positives where I can.

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Yeah, well, Cimorene and Alianora decided they really didn't want to be set up, and they weren't going to let me write them at all. So don't worry too much. That one I actually will take off my interests list.

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Awww. Will we get to read the bits of the fic that you've written?

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LOL. Some things about writing are universal.

You could always create some previously unknown Enchanted-Forest-world characters who do happen to be gay, I suppose. My major issue is with reconfiguring existing people (since I do feel really well-crafted characters practically are) much more than with using the general story themes.

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ayelle.livejournal.com

Aww! I loved that one Cimorene/Alianora story you wrote. I don't have a problem with rewriting straight characters as gay... nor would I have a problem with rewriting gay characters as straight in a story, as long as it seemed it was being done not out of anti-gay sentiment (or a desire to make all the characters "normal"), but rather out of a perception that the characters in question had a romantic connection that deserved to be explored in fanfic.

Often I see fanfic as very experimental, "what if" kind of exercise. If you're going to write fanfic at all, what's wrong with the writer taking the characters and making them her own, even changing them drastically from their original conception? It does no harm to the published work, and may do a great deal of good for the fanfic writer, and other writers. And, if at the same time, gay relationships get some healthy cultural exposure and readers find themselves more and more desensitized to ideas they had previously considered "deviant," so much the better.

Also, sometimes the sexual tension is SO obvious that you have to think the original writer(s) are repressed, a la Buffy/Faith. (You can tell where my fandom loyalties lie... though it's been about 5 years since I read fanfic in earnest...)

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And Aubrey/Maturin, from Master and Commander. At least in the movie, that was not even a stretch of the imagination. And aside from all the tension there in the movie, in the books, apparently, they even spent most of their time being in love with the same woman! I bet they were imagining threesomes.

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vitabeata.livejournal.com

I found your livejournal because you're the only other person who lists Richard Rolle as an interested.

Since we're both in grad school (though if you go to school where I think you do, I'm very jealous) and we both like Richard Rolle, do you mind if I friend you?

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