another fic, damnit
I woke up in the middle of last night with an idea. It wasn't an IDEA, or even an Idea, but it was worth writing up, so I did. Once I had written it, I went to bed wondering where I could use this little scene. And then I had an Idea. I mulled it over, and tonight at dinner I sat down and wrote a little tongue in cheek forward to explain how I was going to run this fic. So here it is.
Chapter Description: A Forward, By the Author
My grandmother has a collection of scrapbooks. There are two or three binders for each of her six children, plus some for herself and her husband. These scrapbooks are lined up along an old church pew in the attic bedroom my sister and I shared when we went to visit. There are pictures, and pamphlets from school, and letters, and crayon drawings. A thoughtful letter home from my father during his first year of college lies opposite a picture of him studying on the same bed I lay on to look at it. My great-grandfather's obituary is a few pages away from a first day of school picture of my father and his siblings.
I got to thinking about these scrapbooks one night---how we try to collect the memories that show how we got from here to there. There's no set thematic, no overarching mood; it's just a series of moments that we tried to capture, moments that helped us define who we are. I've slipped into the first person plural---my grandmother is not the only one who tries to collect her own history this way.
At the beginning of one of my classes this semester, we read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, and a piece of this scrapbook puzzle fell into place. If style is to some extent imposed and artificial, then perhaps this ragtag collection of memories can employ it to tell each moment in its own way. I can tell I'm meandering off into the theoretical, so I'd better come back to my point before I confuse myself.
In the chapters that follow, I'm going to be experimenting with style a great deal. Each moment I describe will be true to itself, and will hint at thge greater story of which it is a part. If I were a Victorian novelist instead of a twenty-first century college student taking a postmodernism class, I would write you a frame story about how a Ministry of Magic employee in the late twenty-first century was looking through the archives and came across a set of scrapbooks from the estate of the late Mr and Mrs Snape. Except that a Victorian novelist would never have read Harry Potter. If it would make you happy to imagine such a frame story, please feel free.
Getting back to style, though, my way of telling this story does owe a lot to the Victorian novel---Bram Stoker's Dracula is an excellent example of using a collection of letters and journal entries to tell a story---but like any good writer of the postmodern, I'm not going to give it to you straight. I'm going to tell you this story out of order, I'm going to mix my persons and tenses, I'm going to give you screenplays, comics, letters, and epiphanies. Well, some may call it postmodern. I'm inclined to call it lazy.
In the continuing theme of postmodernism---or laziness, whichever you prefer---I will be updating as ideas come to me, not on any regular schedule. I suspect the frequency will wax and wane depending on how busy I am---ideas being more prevalent, of course, when I have two midterms, a paper, and a job interview in the next week. I will be tagging each scene with a date, to keep it from being too confusing where in the chronology I'm writing from.
That's all the advisory I think this thing needs. Welcome to the Scrapbook, and I do hope you enjoy yourselves.
Oh, and remember, nothing is more postmodern than that which is self-conciously postmodern!
---
A brief disclaimer: Though I absolutely enjoy making fun of postmodernism, I should clarify that it's the popular use of 'postmodern' as a buzzword that I think is a bit stupid. Actual works of postmodernism--such as the Queneau I mentioned earlier--are wonderfully complex examinations of things we take for granted. I mean them no harm, and wholeheartedly admit that my work could never in a million years stand up to theirs. In much the same way I'm playing in JKR's backyard, I'm playing in the backyards of those people who made postmodernism cool.
If you're interested in postmodernism in general, here's the reading list for my class: Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. Tom Stoppard, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. Salamn Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh. Martin Amis, Time's Arrow. I don't have the bulkpack on me, but there's also some papers and short stories as well. And my personal favorite (though not required for the class), is Larry Wall's talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language", which is available here.
---
August 27, 2003. Hogwarts.
Buried in the fifth or sixth box I found a bedraggled old teddy bear. It looked like it might have had an animating charm on it at one point, but now it just blinked its beady little eyes pleadingly at me.
"Look what I found!" I said, waving it at Severus.
In the early days he would have blown a capillary or two, and maybe hexed me for my trouble, but as it was he just glared at me and kept sorting.
"You know," I said conversationally, "I used to give my toys really pretentious names---comes from my parents; look at what they named me---I had a pink rabbit named Beatrix, and a llama named Ophelia, and a big stuffed St Bernard I called Lenore. I named my dolls after characters from Greek mythology. I thought my cousins were so stupid for naming theirs what was on the box."
He ignored me, so I kept talking.
"I guess my earliest choices were a little different. I got a free Bassett hound toy when I got my first pair of Hush Puppy sandles, and I named him Froot Loop for some inexplicable reason."
Master strategist that I was, I fell silent when he started to look interested. We worked in silence a few more minutes.
"Systematically," he said finally.
"What?"
"I named my toys systematically. You have, um, Little Little Bearie."
He blushed. He actually blushed.
It was so cute I just had to kiss him, and then he... well, we didn't finish going through those boxes.
I got the whole story out of him a couple of hourse later, when we were snuggled up and he was feeling a bit less embarrassed by the whole thing. Turns out he really did name them systematically---I had to stifle my laughter when he told me the larger of his two flying dragons (scales and all) was called "Big Bird", and then I had to soothe his injured pride, which was fun in an entirely different way.
I felt bad when I found out why he only had the one left---I know some things can seem unforgivable at the time, but I pray I never do something like that if we decide to have children---but he seems to have forgiven me my clumsy banging around his psyche. After all, he is letting me help with the sorting again tomorrow.
And so I lay next to him, watching him sleep, and I think about how he was probably always a control freak, and anal-retentive, and so utterly a scientist. And you know what? I think he's just wonderful.
The last one should sound a bit familiar to someone---who should comment on my journal so I know what he thinks! (love you, dear ^_^)
Chapter Description: A Forward, By the Author
My grandmother has a collection of scrapbooks. There are two or three binders for each of her six children, plus some for herself and her husband. These scrapbooks are lined up along an old church pew in the attic bedroom my sister and I shared when we went to visit. There are pictures, and pamphlets from school, and letters, and crayon drawings. A thoughtful letter home from my father during his first year of college lies opposite a picture of him studying on the same bed I lay on to look at it. My great-grandfather's obituary is a few pages away from a first day of school picture of my father and his siblings.
I got to thinking about these scrapbooks one night---how we try to collect the memories that show how we got from here to there. There's no set thematic, no overarching mood; it's just a series of moments that we tried to capture, moments that helped us define who we are. I've slipped into the first person plural---my grandmother is not the only one who tries to collect her own history this way.
At the beginning of one of my classes this semester, we read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, and a piece of this scrapbook puzzle fell into place. If style is to some extent imposed and artificial, then perhaps this ragtag collection of memories can employ it to tell each moment in its own way. I can tell I'm meandering off into the theoretical, so I'd better come back to my point before I confuse myself.
In the chapters that follow, I'm going to be experimenting with style a great deal. Each moment I describe will be true to itself, and will hint at thge greater story of which it is a part. If I were a Victorian novelist instead of a twenty-first century college student taking a postmodernism class, I would write you a frame story about how a Ministry of Magic employee in the late twenty-first century was looking through the archives and came across a set of scrapbooks from the estate of the late Mr and Mrs Snape. Except that a Victorian novelist would never have read Harry Potter. If it would make you happy to imagine such a frame story, please feel free.
Getting back to style, though, my way of telling this story does owe a lot to the Victorian novel---Bram Stoker's Dracula is an excellent example of using a collection of letters and journal entries to tell a story---but like any good writer of the postmodern, I'm not going to give it to you straight. I'm going to tell you this story out of order, I'm going to mix my persons and tenses, I'm going to give you screenplays, comics, letters, and epiphanies. Well, some may call it postmodern. I'm inclined to call it lazy.
In the continuing theme of postmodernism---or laziness, whichever you prefer---I will be updating as ideas come to me, not on any regular schedule. I suspect the frequency will wax and wane depending on how busy I am---ideas being more prevalent, of course, when I have two midterms, a paper, and a job interview in the next week. I will be tagging each scene with a date, to keep it from being too confusing where in the chronology I'm writing from.
That's all the advisory I think this thing needs. Welcome to the Scrapbook, and I do hope you enjoy yourselves.
Oh, and remember, nothing is more postmodern than that which is self-conciously postmodern!
---
A brief disclaimer: Though I absolutely enjoy making fun of postmodernism, I should clarify that it's the popular use of 'postmodern' as a buzzword that I think is a bit stupid. Actual works of postmodernism--such as the Queneau I mentioned earlier--are wonderfully complex examinations of things we take for granted. I mean them no harm, and wholeheartedly admit that my work could never in a million years stand up to theirs. In much the same way I'm playing in JKR's backyard, I'm playing in the backyards of those people who made postmodernism cool.
If you're interested in postmodernism in general, here's the reading list for my class: Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. Tom Stoppard, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. Salamn Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh. Martin Amis, Time's Arrow. I don't have the bulkpack on me, but there's also some papers and short stories as well. And my personal favorite (though not required for the class), is Larry Wall's talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language", which is available here.
---
August 27, 2003. Hogwarts.
Buried in the fifth or sixth box I found a bedraggled old teddy bear. It looked like it might have had an animating charm on it at one point, but now it just blinked its beady little eyes pleadingly at me.
"Look what I found!" I said, waving it at Severus.
In the early days he would have blown a capillary or two, and maybe hexed me for my trouble, but as it was he just glared at me and kept sorting.
"You know," I said conversationally, "I used to give my toys really pretentious names---comes from my parents; look at what they named me---I had a pink rabbit named Beatrix, and a llama named Ophelia, and a big stuffed St Bernard I called Lenore. I named my dolls after characters from Greek mythology. I thought my cousins were so stupid for naming theirs what was on the box."
He ignored me, so I kept talking.
"I guess my earliest choices were a little different. I got a free Bassett hound toy when I got my first pair of Hush Puppy sandles, and I named him Froot Loop for some inexplicable reason."
Master strategist that I was, I fell silent when he started to look interested. We worked in silence a few more minutes.
"Systematically," he said finally.
"What?"
"I named my toys systematically. You have, um, Little Little Bearie."
He blushed. He actually blushed.
It was so cute I just had to kiss him, and then he... well, we didn't finish going through those boxes.
I got the whole story out of him a couple of hourse later, when we were snuggled up and he was feeling a bit less embarrassed by the whole thing. Turns out he really did name them systematically---I had to stifle my laughter when he told me the larger of his two flying dragons (scales and all) was called "Big Bird", and then I had to soothe his injured pride, which was fun in an entirely different way.
I felt bad when I found out why he only had the one left---I know some things can seem unforgivable at the time, but I pray I never do something like that if we decide to have children---but he seems to have forgiven me my clumsy banging around his psyche. After all, he is letting me help with the sorting again tomorrow.
And so I lay next to him, watching him sleep, and I think about how he was probably always a control freak, and anal-retentive, and so utterly a scientist. And you know what? I think he's just wonderful.
The last one should sound a bit familiar to someone---who should comment on my journal so I know what he thinks! (love you, dear ^_^)