a meme before sleeping
A meme from vega_ofthe_lyre, in which I have never, ever been so long-winded before (well, okay, that is probably a lie; I am frequently long-winded).
part i.
Respond to this and i'll pick seven of your lj interests for you to explain in a new post.
tam-lin/janet (because I know you don't need an excuse to go on about their awesomeness!)Okay, for me? This is the core, this is the everything of the ballad. On the surface, you see these two people who meet, have a sort of one-night stand (or two or three nights, or whatever), and then she saves him from a horrible fate: but part of the glory of ballads (and folklore and fairy tales in general) is reading the motivations through the lines, and there is so much about their dynamic that I love. Janet's this girl who's too stubborn and adventurous for her own good, and totally goes off to Carterhaugh because everybody says it's a bad idea, there's this guy (or is there? maybe it's all just stories, maybe she doesn't even know if there's any truth to them, but she wants to find out), and she's curious. And I like to think that they're very fascinated by each other, this lonely, isolated, doomed man with his humanity slowly being worn away and this fierce, bright girl who likes to know things. They probably have long, ridiculous, philosophical arguments and swear they loathe each other but are still drawn back towards each other, Tam-Lin because he is achingly lonely and isolated and preparing for his death, and Janet because she just can't turn her back on someone so fascinating and so in need. And then they fall in love. What the ballad tells us is that they do the sex, but considering what happens next, I remain convinced that they love each other fiercely -- they're not just attracted to each other, they fit each other. You cannot claim a man you do not love. Not as Janet does.
I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating: one of the reasons I love this ballad, and Janet, so freaking much, is because while she is obviously one of the great kickass heroines of folklore, her power doesn't lie in violence, in fighting; she doesn't pick up a sword of iron and plunge it through the Faerie Queen's heart to save her lover (and the writer of the story doesn't force this on her despite it not making sense from what we know of her background), she just loves him. Fiercely, unrelentingly, she loves him free of his curse -- making love into a weapon. Using what could be described by others as her faults (and possibly her specifically feminine faults) -- her stubbornness and her unshakable love for a doomed man -- she conquers. For girls like me, who are never going to solve anything through strength of arms, this is glorious. Portrayals of empowered women whose empowerment comes through things other than traditional kickassery just... get me straight in the heart.
And so now this archetype tries to worm its way into every story I write, oh help. I finally relented and resigned the Novel to its fate as partly a Tam-Lin retelling.
viggo mortensen speaking sindarin
A THING WHICH, WHEN IT HAPPENS, CAUSES ME TO LOSE ALL FEELING IN MY LEGS. Um. Yes. Linguistic geekery and extremely hot blokes? Could there be a better thing? Plus, Sindarin with all the ch and the trilled r and the y like in Danish that you pronounce with your mouth shaped for e but saying oo? FNNNNGH. ALSO, when Viggo speaks it he totally sounds natural. Not all of the other actors do, but he sounds totally in his element, and, uh, better than most of the actual Elves. :P
Also of interest: Viggo Mortensen speaking Anglo-Saxon. Which he does. In the scene where he's taming Brego. Eowyn, I honestly cannot fault you for anything there.
mitchell's fingerless gloves (unf)
...Right, so, I already have had a deep, intense, and possibly irrational Thing for men in fingerless gloves. (Which, I recently discovered, is as many things also Viggo Mortensen's fault. The Lord of the Rings films came along at such an influential time in my adolescence! Aragorn's battered woollen fingerless gloves, unf. "Oh," I said when I live-tweeted (shut up) LotR seeing it for the first time in years. "So that's where that came from. I thought that was TOTALLY RANDOM." See also: that scene in Iron Man with Tony building the suit in the cave and his gloves and lovely lovely hands and the camera just kind of focuses on that for a while and I am all OKAY I COULD GET USED TO THIS.)
ANYWAY. Mitchell wears these gloves all the time and it makes me far, far, far more delighted than is strictly rational. His dress sense without the gloves is delicious enough -- fnngh, that denim shirt with the double row of buttons -- and then with the hair and the accent and oh help I am lost. Plus it's a special Mitchell quirk thing, and I love that he wears hats and sunglasses and gloves to keep the sun at bay AND ALSO HE HAS GREAT HANDS, OKAY, AND THE GLOVES JUST ACCENTUATE THAT.
...I am talking way too much about this. >.>
folk music festivals
Folk music festivals are such a huge part of my life and my memories, and sometimes I forget that this isn't what Most Families Do -- but since I was about nine, my family has spent a weekend attending at least one festival, and usually two. Folk music -- of all kinds, the traditional and the singer-songwriter and the weird offbeat -- is what I grew up with, singing Steeleye Span in the bath as a wee lassie (and why, I think, things like Tam-Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and The House Carpenter resonate with me more personally than Beauty and the Beast or The Twelve Dancing Princesses or what have you), and so these weekends are like... one of the few times I go someplace and everybody speaks my language. We have the same weird cultural history, we know who Bela Fleck or Stan Rogers or Woody Guthrie is and we can sing the chorus to Shady Grove and nobody thinks it's weird when I dance.
When we lived in the Boston area and first started attending festivals regularly, there were several really close, so we'd just drive out every day and pack lunches, but then we moved to the Land of No Culture, so we do the hardcore camping thing and drive all the way out to North Carolina or New York or Connecticut. Half the time it's just me and Dad, because of the family we're the ones who have that deep, visceral response to music and just want to listen to it and fall into it and talk about it, and I take my best dancing dresses and try to remember to pack shoes that are actually sensible. And then we get there and it's like being home. There are vendors selling amazing(ly expensive) things, and so many people to watch -- and I love how many different kinds of people end up mingling at these events, and therefore interacting with each other on a more equal level -- and something is constantly happening, and oh yeah the music. I love watching musicians having fun, and improvising, and dragging their friends from other bands up on stage with them, or getting thrown together with complete strangers in a workshop and then creating something unplanned and unexpected and amazing, and I love the energy of live music, and the intimacy of an outdoor concert -- and of a festival in general; we're all in the same boat, being attacked by the sun and heat, musicians and fellow festival-goers alike. I love the dance floor, and having conversations with strangers, and not being the only person in hippie dresses, and I love those transcendent musical moments that can never be duplicated or even entirely explained, that thrill of discovering an amazing artist for the first time live, or hundreds of people all singing the same chorus from their hearts and collective experience, bound together for those minutes.
(Also, the list of awesome bands we've discovered live is constantly growing! Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet, Crooked Still, the Belleville Outfit, the Duhks, the Greencards, Solas, Steve Tilston, Po' Girl, Richard Shindell... I could go on. Except I already have.)
always the tragic ships? (I empathise)
They don't even always start out tragic! I doom ships! So few of mine end happily, and even the ones that do are often fraught with sorrow or bittersweetness (see Aragorn/Arwen). My first really serious fandom OTP was Remus/Tonks, and, well, you saw how that ended. (Or rather, how fandom at large has interpreted the ending of Deathly Hallows; clearly the two of them really were just taking an inappropriately timed nap and Harry assumed the worst. And Harry is infamous for jumping to conclusions, okay? IT MAKES SENSE.)
Then again, I can hardly be considered faultless in this regard -- I do love the sad romances -- not necessarily angsty ones, where nobody, least of all the reader, gets a moment's peace and everyone's at each other's throats or off being melodramatic all the time, but the ones that involve longing and and grief and that tender sort of tension between two people's hurts and desires.
traditional ballads about vampires (direct me to some!)
Gladly! ...Actually, most of the time I am just extrapolating wildly, or outright re-writing them to suit my purposes, but the ballad 'Reynardine' has a legitimate vampire interpretation (as well as the usual werefox/werewolf interpretation, which is pretty nifty on its own). Buffy St. Marie's version is labelled 'Reynardine: A Vampire Legend'! Also of note is 'The Unquiet Grave', which scholars say comes from the belief that over-extravagant mourning would make it impossible for the dead to move on, but come on. You sit on your lover's grave, mourning their death, and then they come out of the grave and you have a sad little conversation and your lover tells you 'if you have one kiss of my clay cold lips your time will not be long'? If that is not secretly about vampires I will eat my hat. (It is a long-time irritation of mine that virtually every version I've ever heard is all plaintive and sad instead of milking the awesome creepiness for all it is worth.)
In my head I tend to interpret every murder ballad possible as having vampiric origins, because... that is what I do. "Henry Lee" is particularly good.
I'd love to be able to find out if there are any Eastern European ballads about vampires, also.
robin mckinley
Robin McKinley! How do I begin to describe Robin McKinley? I hear her hellhounds are insured for $10,000. ...Um, anyway. *shifty eyes* Seriously, though, of all of my favourite writers, she has had one of the largest influences on me and my writing. Too many of her books are both comfort books for me and books I read when I need to be inspired again. I love the way she mixes the magical and the mundane, and keeps her high fantasy grounded with wry humour. I love that she somehow manages to make her dialogue archaic and conversational all at once. I love that she has a favourite fairy tale -- Beauty and the Beast -- that's got such a hold on her that she retold it twice (and its echoes are pretty clear in Sunshine and Chalice as well), which makes me feel a little better about Tam-Lin shadowing me everywhere. I love that she gives herself no limit on what kind of stories she writes -- after years of being known for high fantasy she came out with Sunshine, which is one of my favourite books in the entire world (and what got me started on vampires), but thoroughly -- at least on the surface -- different from anything she'd written before that point. I love her wordbuilding -- I could read pages of it quite happily; Sunshine and Spindle's End in particular have long, clever, fascinating descriptions of everyday life in worlds that aren't ours and I love them and want to be able to do that so badly. I love that she wears Converses and loves Steeleye Span and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes long, hilariously cranky blog entries with three million footnotes. In other words, she's basically just hardcore awesome.
part ii.
I pick six of your icons for you to explain, you offer the same for your commenters.
In my mind this is definitely a werewolf thing. Um. But yes -- I stumbled on this photograph about a year ago, and it fascinated me immediately, and I feel as though there's so much that could be written about it. It could be a wolf-raised child, or a girl and her familiar, or -- well, lady_moriel finds that the girl looks like the protagonist in her werewolf story Moonstruck and that makes me irrationally happy.
I've always loved images of women in water -- I think it's a lingering effect of the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which does belong to me in a way that few poems do. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
ANTHONY/PRIYA, OKAY. VICTOR/SIERRA, WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL THEM. They are amazing. And I really didn't expect to ship them so hard, in a way, because the ~destined~ sort of love doesn't usually do much for me, but they were just... so sweet and quiet and heartbreaking, and this scene, when Priya/Sierra is remembering how when she was frightened Victor used to wait up for her so that she wouldn't be alone... oh my heart. (And then they ended happily, which I was bracing myself not to see, and that pleases me more than anything. Plus Enver and Dichen are so ridiculously amazing and I hope they are in a billion more shows and films and things because yes.)
Their bickering: my favourite. They riff off each other so beautifully, plus they're always striding around in these gorgeous hats and suits and things (I may never get over Watson's rounded collars... look, shut up), and bantering and looking extremely badass -- that scene at the beginning where they doff their hats before charging into the fray below comes to mind -- and I hear them. The end. :D
(Well, that and: hot guys in period clothing. Always my favourite. Always.)
Oh, my girls. I wish half of Doctor Who season four didn't make me cringe so much, because I love Donna and would like to watch her be awesome and snarky, but then I think about how she ended and my stomach gets acidy. Stupid RTD. But anyway -- Martha is My Girl; I became a fan during Season Three, and really fell in love with her, because she was clever and geeky and full of wonder and unappreciated, and I got her. I love her enthusiasm and arms-wide-open attitude to everyone, and this embrace between her and Donna (and Donna's pretty red hair!) makes me ridiculously happy.
My personal motto, the question that I feel I should always be asking myself: and also the ALA National Poetry Month poster for 2009, which we got at my library, and which my librarians set aside for me when April was finished, because they are awesome. So now it is on my door, questioning me every time I enter the room.
part i.
Respond to this and i'll pick seven of your lj interests for you to explain in a new post.
tam-lin/janet (because I know you don't need an excuse to go on about their awesomeness!)Okay, for me? This is the core, this is the everything of the ballad. On the surface, you see these two people who meet, have a sort of one-night stand (or two or three nights, or whatever), and then she saves him from a horrible fate: but part of the glory of ballads (and folklore and fairy tales in general) is reading the motivations through the lines, and there is so much about their dynamic that I love. Janet's this girl who's too stubborn and adventurous for her own good, and totally goes off to Carterhaugh because everybody says it's a bad idea, there's this guy (or is there? maybe it's all just stories, maybe she doesn't even know if there's any truth to them, but she wants to find out), and she's curious. And I like to think that they're very fascinated by each other, this lonely, isolated, doomed man with his humanity slowly being worn away and this fierce, bright girl who likes to know things. They probably have long, ridiculous, philosophical arguments and swear they loathe each other but are still drawn back towards each other, Tam-Lin because he is achingly lonely and isolated and preparing for his death, and Janet because she just can't turn her back on someone so fascinating and so in need. And then they fall in love. What the ballad tells us is that they do the sex, but considering what happens next, I remain convinced that they love each other fiercely -- they're not just attracted to each other, they fit each other. You cannot claim a man you do not love. Not as Janet does.
I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating: one of the reasons I love this ballad, and Janet, so freaking much, is because while she is obviously one of the great kickass heroines of folklore, her power doesn't lie in violence, in fighting; she doesn't pick up a sword of iron and plunge it through the Faerie Queen's heart to save her lover (and the writer of the story doesn't force this on her despite it not making sense from what we know of her background), she just loves him. Fiercely, unrelentingly, she loves him free of his curse -- making love into a weapon. Using what could be described by others as her faults (and possibly her specifically feminine faults) -- her stubbornness and her unshakable love for a doomed man -- she conquers. For girls like me, who are never going to solve anything through strength of arms, this is glorious. Portrayals of empowered women whose empowerment comes through things other than traditional kickassery just... get me straight in the heart.
And so now this archetype tries to worm its way into every story I write, oh help. I finally relented and resigned the Novel to its fate as partly a Tam-Lin retelling.
viggo mortensen speaking sindarin
A THING WHICH, WHEN IT HAPPENS, CAUSES ME TO LOSE ALL FEELING IN MY LEGS. Um. Yes. Linguistic geekery and extremely hot blokes? Could there be a better thing? Plus, Sindarin with all the ch and the trilled r and the y like in Danish that you pronounce with your mouth shaped for e but saying oo? FNNNNGH. ALSO, when Viggo speaks it he totally sounds natural. Not all of the other actors do, but he sounds totally in his element, and, uh, better than most of the actual Elves. :P
Also of interest: Viggo Mortensen speaking Anglo-Saxon. Which he does. In the scene where he's taming Brego. Eowyn, I honestly cannot fault you for anything there.
mitchell's fingerless gloves (unf)
...Right, so, I already have had a deep, intense, and possibly irrational Thing for men in fingerless gloves. (Which, I recently discovered, is as many things also Viggo Mortensen's fault. The Lord of the Rings films came along at such an influential time in my adolescence! Aragorn's battered woollen fingerless gloves, unf. "Oh," I said when I live-tweeted (shut up) LotR seeing it for the first time in years. "So that's where that came from. I thought that was TOTALLY RANDOM." See also: that scene in Iron Man with Tony building the suit in the cave and his gloves and lovely lovely hands and the camera just kind of focuses on that for a while and I am all OKAY I COULD GET USED TO THIS.)
ANYWAY. Mitchell wears these gloves all the time and it makes me far, far, far more delighted than is strictly rational. His dress sense without the gloves is delicious enough -- fnngh, that denim shirt with the double row of buttons -- and then with the hair and the accent and oh help I am lost. Plus it's a special Mitchell quirk thing, and I love that he wears hats and sunglasses and gloves to keep the sun at bay AND ALSO HE HAS GREAT HANDS, OKAY, AND THE GLOVES JUST ACCENTUATE THAT.
...I am talking way too much about this. >.>
folk music festivals
Folk music festivals are such a huge part of my life and my memories, and sometimes I forget that this isn't what Most Families Do -- but since I was about nine, my family has spent a weekend attending at least one festival, and usually two. Folk music -- of all kinds, the traditional and the singer-songwriter and the weird offbeat -- is what I grew up with, singing Steeleye Span in the bath as a wee lassie (and why, I think, things like Tam-Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and The House Carpenter resonate with me more personally than Beauty and the Beast or The Twelve Dancing Princesses or what have you), and so these weekends are like... one of the few times I go someplace and everybody speaks my language. We have the same weird cultural history, we know who Bela Fleck or Stan Rogers or Woody Guthrie is and we can sing the chorus to Shady Grove and nobody thinks it's weird when I dance.
When we lived in the Boston area and first started attending festivals regularly, there were several really close, so we'd just drive out every day and pack lunches, but then we moved to the Land of No Culture, so we do the hardcore camping thing and drive all the way out to North Carolina or New York or Connecticut. Half the time it's just me and Dad, because of the family we're the ones who have that deep, visceral response to music and just want to listen to it and fall into it and talk about it, and I take my best dancing dresses and try to remember to pack shoes that are actually sensible. And then we get there and it's like being home. There are vendors selling amazing(ly expensive) things, and so many people to watch -- and I love how many different kinds of people end up mingling at these events, and therefore interacting with each other on a more equal level -- and something is constantly happening, and oh yeah the music. I love watching musicians having fun, and improvising, and dragging their friends from other bands up on stage with them, or getting thrown together with complete strangers in a workshop and then creating something unplanned and unexpected and amazing, and I love the energy of live music, and the intimacy of an outdoor concert -- and of a festival in general; we're all in the same boat, being attacked by the sun and heat, musicians and fellow festival-goers alike. I love the dance floor, and having conversations with strangers, and not being the only person in hippie dresses, and I love those transcendent musical moments that can never be duplicated or even entirely explained, that thrill of discovering an amazing artist for the first time live, or hundreds of people all singing the same chorus from their hearts and collective experience, bound together for those minutes.
(Also, the list of awesome bands we've discovered live is constantly growing! Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet, Crooked Still, the Belleville Outfit, the Duhks, the Greencards, Solas, Steve Tilston, Po' Girl, Richard Shindell... I could go on. Except I already have.)
always the tragic ships? (I empathise)
They don't even always start out tragic! I doom ships! So few of mine end happily, and even the ones that do are often fraught with sorrow or bittersweetness (see Aragorn/Arwen). My first really serious fandom OTP was Remus/Tonks, and, well, you saw how that ended. (Or rather, how fandom at large has interpreted the ending of Deathly Hallows; clearly the two of them really were just taking an inappropriately timed nap and Harry assumed the worst. And Harry is infamous for jumping to conclusions, okay? IT MAKES SENSE.)
Then again, I can hardly be considered faultless in this regard -- I do love the sad romances -- not necessarily angsty ones, where nobody, least of all the reader, gets a moment's peace and everyone's at each other's throats or off being melodramatic all the time, but the ones that involve longing and and grief and that tender sort of tension between two people's hurts and desires.
traditional ballads about vampires (direct me to some!)
Gladly! ...Actually, most of the time I am just extrapolating wildly, or outright re-writing them to suit my purposes, but the ballad 'Reynardine' has a legitimate vampire interpretation (as well as the usual werefox/werewolf interpretation, which is pretty nifty on its own). Buffy St. Marie's version is labelled 'Reynardine: A Vampire Legend'! Also of note is 'The Unquiet Grave', which scholars say comes from the belief that over-extravagant mourning would make it impossible for the dead to move on, but come on. You sit on your lover's grave, mourning their death, and then they come out of the grave and you have a sad little conversation and your lover tells you 'if you have one kiss of my clay cold lips your time will not be long'? If that is not secretly about vampires I will eat my hat. (It is a long-time irritation of mine that virtually every version I've ever heard is all plaintive and sad instead of milking the awesome creepiness for all it is worth.)
In my head I tend to interpret every murder ballad possible as having vampiric origins, because... that is what I do. "Henry Lee" is particularly good.
I'd love to be able to find out if there are any Eastern European ballads about vampires, also.
robin mckinley
Robin McKinley! How do I begin to describe Robin McKinley? I hear her hellhounds are insured for $10,000. ...Um, anyway. *shifty eyes* Seriously, though, of all of my favourite writers, she has had one of the largest influences on me and my writing. Too many of her books are both comfort books for me and books I read when I need to be inspired again. I love the way she mixes the magical and the mundane, and keeps her high fantasy grounded with wry humour. I love that she somehow manages to make her dialogue archaic and conversational all at once. I love that she has a favourite fairy tale -- Beauty and the Beast -- that's got such a hold on her that she retold it twice (and its echoes are pretty clear in Sunshine and Chalice as well), which makes me feel a little better about Tam-Lin shadowing me everywhere. I love that she gives herself no limit on what kind of stories she writes -- after years of being known for high fantasy she came out with Sunshine, which is one of my favourite books in the entire world (and what got me started on vampires), but thoroughly -- at least on the surface -- different from anything she'd written before that point. I love her wordbuilding -- I could read pages of it quite happily; Sunshine and Spindle's End in particular have long, clever, fascinating descriptions of everyday life in worlds that aren't ours and I love them and want to be able to do that so badly. I love that she wears Converses and loves Steeleye Span and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes long, hilariously cranky blog entries with three million footnotes. In other words, she's basically just hardcore awesome.
part ii.
I pick six of your icons for you to explain, you offer the same for your commenters.
In my mind this is definitely a werewolf thing. Um. But yes -- I stumbled on this photograph about a year ago, and it fascinated me immediately, and I feel as though there's so much that could be written about it. It could be a wolf-raised child, or a girl and her familiar, or -- well, lady_moriel finds that the girl looks like the protagonist in her werewolf story Moonstruck and that makes me irrationally happy.
I've always loved images of women in water -- I think it's a lingering effect of the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which does belong to me in a way that few poems do. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
ANTHONY/PRIYA, OKAY. VICTOR/SIERRA, WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL THEM. They are amazing. And I really didn't expect to ship them so hard, in a way, because the ~destined~ sort of love doesn't usually do much for me, but they were just... so sweet and quiet and heartbreaking, and this scene, when Priya/Sierra is remembering how when she was frightened Victor used to wait up for her so that she wouldn't be alone... oh my heart. (And then they ended happily, which I was bracing myself not to see, and that pleases me more than anything. Plus Enver and Dichen are so ridiculously amazing and I hope they are in a billion more shows and films and things because yes.)
Their bickering: my favourite. They riff off each other so beautifully, plus they're always striding around in these gorgeous hats and suits and things (I may never get over Watson's rounded collars... look, shut up), and bantering and looking extremely badass -- that scene at the beginning where they doff their hats before charging into the fray below comes to mind -- and I hear them. The end. :D
(Well, that and: hot guys in period clothing. Always my favourite. Always.)
Oh, my girls. I wish half of Doctor Who season four didn't make me cringe so much, because I love Donna and would like to watch her be awesome and snarky, but then I think about how she ended and my stomach gets acidy. Stupid RTD. But anyway -- Martha is My Girl; I became a fan during Season Three, and really fell in love with her, because she was clever and geeky and full of wonder and unappreciated, and I got her. I love her enthusiasm and arms-wide-open attitude to everyone, and this embrace between her and Donna (and Donna's pretty red hair!) makes me ridiculously happy.
My personal motto, the question that I feel I should always be asking myself: and also the ALA National Poetry Month poster for 2009, which we got at my library, and which my librarians set aside for me when April was finished, because they are awesome. So now it is on my door, questioning me every time I enter the room.