mightyisobel

[mightyisobel]

i think men are too emotional to own websites

[mightyisobel]

Wearing the floppy ears -- A 1910 antecedent to the Meereenese Knot (repost from 2018 r/asoiaf)

Daenerys Targaryen in Meereen is not the first ruler of a fantasy realm to chafe under the burden of ruling rabbits while wearing unsuitable headgear.

You may know that that the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz was an adaptation of Book 1 of a 14-book series by author, playwright, and filmmaker L. Frank Baum. The series was extremely popular and their author became famous from writing them.

Book 6 of the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), is a great read. It follows two converging point-of-view narratives with Dorothy on a cutesie-pie walkabout through the realm while the Nome King, Roquat the Red, prepares a subterranean invasion of Oz. The invasion story is wholesome fun, but I want to focus on one of Dorothy's encounters, during her visit to Bunnybury.

Here's her description of the place:

Dorothy now found herself in a city so strange and beautiful that she gave a gasp of surprise. The high marble wall extended all around the place and shut out all the rest of the world. And here were marble houses of curious forms, most of them resembling overturned kettles but with delicate slender spires and minarets running far up into the sky....

But the rabbit people were, after all, the most amazing things Dorothy saw. The streets were full of them, and their costumes were so splendid.... Silks and satins of delicate hues seemed always used for material, and nearly every costume sparkled with exquisite gems.

Yes, Dorothy goes to the land of the rabbits, and lunches with their King (Chapter 20).

And check out what he says to her:

"I've often thought," said Dorothy, who was busily eating, "that it would be fun to be a rabbit."

"It is fun—when you're the genuine article," agreed his Majesty. "But look at me now! I live in a marble palace instead of a hole in the ground. I have all I want to eat, without the joy of hunting for it. Every day I must dress in fine clothes and wear that horrible crown till it makes my head ache. Rabbits come to me with all sorts of troubles, when my own troubles are the only ones I care about. When I walk out I can't hop and run; I must strut on my rear legs and wear an ermine robe! And the soldiers salute me and the band plays and the other rabbits laugh and clap their paws and cry out: 'Hail to the King!' Now let me ask you, as a friend and a young lady of good judgment: isn't all this pomp and foolishness enough to make a decent rabbit miserable?"

So many elements of Dany's desolation in Meereen are laid out right here. The complaint about uncomfortable showy clothes and of feeling confined in splendor befitting a ruler. Also the fatigue with ceremony and attention, all "pomp and foolishness" making the monarch "miserable".

By the way, after luncheon, the king presents an acrobatic dance show for his guest (Chapter 21):

"It is our royal duty, as well as our royal pleasure," he said, "to provide fitting entertainment for our distinguished guest. We will now present the Royal Band of Whiskered Friskers."

As he spoke the musicians, who had arranged themselves in a corner, struck up a dance melody while into the room pranced the Whiskered Friskers. They were eight pretty rabbits dressed only in gauzy purple skirts fastened around their waists with diamond bands. Their whiskers were colored a rich purple, but otherwise they were pure white.

After bowing before the King and Dorothy the Friskers began their pranks, and these were so comical that Dorothy laughed with real enjoyment. They not only danced together, whirling and gyrating around the room, but they leaped over one another, stood upon their heads and hopped and skipped here and there so nimbly that it was hard work to keep track of them. Finally they all made double somersaults and turned handsprings out of the room.

Compare their frisking with this moment from ADWD Dany III:

As the drums reached a crescendo, three of the girls leapt above the flames, spinning in the air. The male dancers caught them about the waists and slid them down...

On second thought, best not. L. Frank Baum was definitely not thinking of topless dancing bunny pornography here and neither should you.

Look, I'm not saying that GRRM was explicitly or intentionally referencing this scene or that we can know for sure he ever read it, without Word of GRRM one way or the other. But I do think the books can be read as a delicious gumbo of all kinds of cultural influences beyond his deconstruction of Tolkien-inspired epic fantasy like Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn tetralogy. Reminders of ASOIAF scena are everywhere; some of my personal favorites are: The Godfather, The Court Jester, I, Claudius (short version), I, Claudius (long version), and Gone With the Wind.

GRRM has an uncanny ability to remix motifs from across multiple genres, formats, and cultural eras into something that feels both familiar and startlingly original, something with the capacity to constantly reinvent itself anew. It's an ability that he happens to share with the original Wizard himself, an entertainer and storyteller writing over 100 years ago about strangers in strange lands and the magic and wonder that they find there.

What do you think? Have you noticed other elements borrowed or referenced from the original American fantasy realm, the marvelous Land of Oz? Or other cultural references that seem underappreciated?

originally posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/8laanv/spoilers_adwd_wearing_the_floppy_ears_a_1910/

[mightyisobel]

This gown, clearly inspired by a dress once worn by Madame de Pompadour, was first spotted being worn by Louise Linton in the 2007 CSI: NY episode A Daze of Wine & Roaches. It was seen again being worn by Kia Fulton as Florinda in the 2017 episode of Encore! – Back to the Woods. Finally, it was worn by Este Haim as Lady Este in the music video for Taylor Swift’s song Bejeweled.

Costume Credit: Anonymous, Ann-Mari, Redrosecut, Sarah von Books on Fire 

E-mail Submissions: submissions@recycledmoviecostumes.com

Follow: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram

[mightyisobel]

a SCOTUS opinion

FedSoc is a force that is intellectually spent, and is going to require ever more political power shoveled into it to sustain itself. GOP has a lot of political power to burn on that pyramid scheme, and it will do incalculable damage along the way, but the supply of talent and cash is not inexhaustible, if we continue to organize in opposition to their power grabs.

When I say FedSoc is intellectually spent, its politics are now unrecognizable as legal practice to careerists with white shoe partnerships and law professor tenure, whose training is structured around being completely nerdy about transactional squabbles and corporate compliance.

White shoe partners and law professors are, of course, bourgeois capitalists and NOT comrades, but bourgeois capitalists see themselves as the inheritors of our small-r republican tradition, in the most pedantic possible ways, and the more the GOP invests in making-shit-up Kraken-law, the less legitimacy its judges will have in the eyes of the lawyers who get paid a lot of money by businesses to be their supernerds-for-hire.

Young conservative lawyers who have the talent to build a decades-long career in the law are going to choose careers where they are going to get paid, working for mainstream business clients who value the stability of a settled legal system. The Kraken-style lawyer only has the pyramid scheme of media attention to sustain herself. 

FedSoc judges have rejected shaping the long-term conversation about what our constitution can/should look like in favor of spending down GOP political capital on violent recidivist Hail Mary bullshit with no precedent like the Texas abortion ban. And a court that chooses violence, a court that chooses a world without lawyers, is a court that is in the process of surrendering its legitimacy as legally binding authority. 

[mightyisobel]

I did a thing!

So, a few weeks ago, I joined @poorquentyn on the NotACast Podcast. We were supposed to talk about unreliable historical narrators, and we did, but we also ended up talking a lot about fanfiction.

It was a lot of fun. I’m hoping to convince @poorquentyn and BryndenBFish to have me on for a regular episode, but we’ll see. :-)

Guest Episode: Dr. Kavita Mudan Finn on Historical Narrators

[mightyisobel]

Bree is a difficult character on Outlander

Brianna Randall has never been my favorite character in the books and I think I finally got a grip on why. 

She has no friends!  Outlander is a franchise that is crammed with deep meaningful friendships, arising from Gabaldon’s interest in those fuzzy lines of platonic/erotic relations and her use of those grey areas as story drivers. 

Jamie, of course, is enmeshed in ties of clan and business and has a supernatural ability to command the affection of fighting men.  From the jump Claire finds a confidant in Geillis, and always connects on a personal level with the local healer along her travels. 

show!Bree has... Lizzie and Phaedre?  Ladies in her service.  Bree gets the laird side of personal relationships with none of the complexity and depth that most of the other characters enjoy. 

It makes it hard to see what is likeable about her, when no one in her world is close to her. 

[mightyisobel]

Welp he’s getting cancelled again

It’s jarring to see how poorly Buffy is aging, when, during its original airing, it felt so ahead of its time.  I unabashedly loved that show, I loved watching it with friends, and it was the constant cultural touchstone that carried me through a great life transition from one career to my next life doing whatever <wavey hands> this is now.

https://twitter.com/AllCharisma/status/1359537746843365381

So Joss Whedon’s brand has always been dudebro feminism, based on creating Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer, whose coming-of-age story is one of the most influential television story arcs of the 90s.  Every single show today with demon hunters and spellcasters is building on the stories and the audience that the Buffy writer’s room created.  And those shows are either lazily rehashing Buffy’s tropes, or they are shaking her vampdust from their heels to create something better.  On those grounds I will defend BtVS no matter how hard Joss Whedon gets himself cancelled.

“Cultural influence” is my rhetorical move here, because I’m not interested in Death-of-the-Author to resolve this.  In some ways Whedon is like JKR (creates a wildly popular fantasy series starring a female lead with an overt message of tolerance, scaffolded with shocking misogyny).  The problems that Whedon brings to his work are right there, already baked in.  His stand-in character, Xander Harris, appears in virtually every episode of BtVS, a walking friendzone, the original Jorah Mormont. 

In a lot of ways as a Buffy fan I'm with SMG and don't really want to see a post-MeToo rework of the Buffyverse. The Buffyverse as an object of analysis and admiration is illuminated by his four network TV series (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse), which do offer a coherent (if dudebro-ey) metaphysics of individual choice and accountability, ethics and existentialism.  No, the sexual politics are often awful, and the genre is still working out the problems of dubious consent that Whedon gleefully packed into his yarns about the ultimate “empowered” female lead.  But Whedon knew how to create television moments about the power of choosing to do good or choosing to do wrong.  Credit to YouTuber Passion of the Nerd, exploring this aspect of Whedon’s work.

I’m deeply skeptical that the Buffyverse would be handed off to showrunners tuned in to the moving choices and philosophical angles of the original series. That kind of television is now prestige television, entirely the wrong vibe for a show that earned its prestige moments (”The Body”) by putting in the popcorn work week after week being a show called Buffy.  

So, anyway, it’s time.  Cancel Joss Whedon.  Please.  No actor or actress should have to put up with his bullshit ever again. 

And please, don’t reboot Buffy.  Let it age poorly, with Xander’s gay panic jokes becoming staler, year after year, like Hawkeye Pierce’s leering at nurses did.  Let Whedon’s work stand as a historical document of how genuinely awful mass media was, for feminists and queer people, for fantasy nerds and for people who appreciated how “deeply stupid” the local police have always been.  Buffy‘s fandom should only end up where Mayor Wilkins did, chasing the Chosen One into a rage of flame, in the library, where the Hellmouth yawns, where abusers’ careers are smashed into dust but their stories live on..

[mightyisobel]

Guessing games in A Christmas Carol

Stave IV of A Christmas Carol, featuring the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, may be one of the most unfilmable famous sequences in English literature. I’ve never seen an adaptation of this chapter that doesn’t throw up its hands in despair and simply deliver a spooktacular tripartite memento mori of 1) the shrouded figure of Death a-lurking half the frame, 2) the body of our hero laid out in a cold dark room and 3) the gravestone with his name etched upon it (EBENEZER SCROOGE). And yes, of course, there’s usually a domestic break to tenderly mourn Tiny Tim, alongside Scrooge’s psychological horror sturm und drang.

But Dickens was paid by the word, so in the book he takes his time getting to the money shot in the graveyard. We dawdle along with Scrooge and Ghost, eavesdropping on three city scenes of people reacting to the death of some? unknown?? person referred to as “Old Scratch” and “a wicked old screw”. They banter Victorianly about a funeral with no lunch served and what a man’s bedcurtains are worth, and these scenes require a stupendous effort of dialect work beyond the capacity of mere American casual readers. Throughout all of this Scrooge wonders and wonders and wonders some more who it could possibly be who has died, and feels a bit sorry for whoever it was whose death inspires callousness and even rejoicing. Who is it? he asks the Spirit.

Dear reader, of course, you know the answer – the answer is always Scrooge. It’s not a difficult mystery. And yet. Dickens stretches out our protagonists’s discovery of the answer over pages and pages, and it works wonderfully; the reader is carried along on the irony, laughing AT this one asshole who has disconnected himself from the world so thoroughly that he doesn’t know we’re cackling at him when he asks, Why are you showing me these trivial encounters? And, Where am I on this future Christmas morn? We are told he is a competent man of business, but he is genuinely flummoxed here by his persistent lack of self-knowledge, by a failure to add 2+2 and get 4, and it quickly becomes too grim to be as funny as it is.

Any attempt to adapt this joke for performance after what has already been at least an hour of ghost FX and flying beds and Fezziwig’s dancing and some carolers and fake stage snow, and knowing that Turkey Boy AND another Tiny Tim benediction is Yet To Come, well, it’s not hard to understand the temptation to cut these city scenes, for dragging on the momentum of the extremely filmable story of the Cratchits’ grief, and for making our protagonist look like a fool at the climax of the story.

Moreover, this is a three-part joke, because comedy comes in threes, but one of the earlier scenes is a tempting cut. At the end of Stave II, just after the Jiltening, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows us this charming domestic scene:

“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who was it?”

“Guess!”

The answer is Scrooge.

This first set-up scene is a throwaway; it delivers an expository glimpse of Scrooge on the night of Marley’s death, but otherwise simply repeats information and regrets already staged more effectively in the Jiltening.

Now, in the second scene of the set-up, in Stave III, with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Nephew Fred and his holiday party play a rousing game of Yes and No (It’s 20 Questions but I always always call this scene the Charades scene), and it goes like this:

The brisk fire of questioning to which [Fred] was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

“I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!”

“What is it?” cried Fred.

The answer is always Scrooge.

The Yes and No (Charades!) scene is wonderful in performance; it practically adapts itself as playscript off of Dickens’ original page and it’s funny and the costumer can have some fun with these Victorian hipsters and it gives the actor saddled with the thankless Fred role a chance, if he knows what to do with it, to shine after playing the lighthearted straight man to Scrooge in Act I. And Dickens tells us nothing about Scrooge’s reaction to the surprising! reveal, which gives the actor playing Scrooge enormous leeway to invent a necessary moment of petulant shock or hurt before the next scene change (though I would just once like to see a Scrooge with the wisdom and maturity to appreciate the joke, coming from his sole living relation, whose thoughts are clearly fixated upon Scrooge on this day, even just a little bit as a step along his journey to redemption).

Anyway:  Setting aside questions of adaptation, Book!Scrooge has watched both of these guessing-game scenes. He knows the answer is always Scrooge. And yet in Stave IV, as he listens to the businessmen and domestic pilferers and reprieved tenants enthusiastically answering the call of how he lived by assessing his life’s worth in purely transactional terms, he wonders, Who Could It Be? Who Is It?

It’s you, Scrooge. The answer is always Scrooge.

So no, you are unlikely to see a film or stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol that centers the structural joke of delayed insight that brings Scrooge to an understanding of himself. This joke is released in burst of laughter that constitutes the elaborate denouement in Stave V, with the shaving and the bells and the Turkey boy and the Boxing Day prank of raising Cratchit’s salary (lol, Scrooge is still a fucking dick of a boss). Stave V is so filmable and iconic, it really is best to get on with it and let go of the dismal science of the price of bedcurtains. But in a sprawling read-aloud over several nights, Stave IV gets its chance to shine and be appreciated for the structural payoff it delivers.

[mightyisobel]

Packing a First Aid Kit

I have been assembling first aid kit coverage for our household.  This is a thought-dump post about my progress.  I have no medical training beyond my 20+-years-rusty first aid course, so if you're looking for real/medical advice, please go to a real place like https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/anatomy-of-a-first-aid-kit.html.  This post will talk about various possible superficial and life-threatening injuries.

Situation: I'm staying-at-home with a relative away from my primary residence.  The location is within a 10-minute drive of two modern rescue facilities.  There are three of us: myself, my relative, and an older child for whom I am the primary caretaker.   We enjoy outdoor activities such as hiking and river boating.  We have pre-existing conditions that are managed with medication, diet, and exercise, but no mobility-restricting disabilities. My relative has significant first responder training and some rescue gear, but no formal medical credentials. The location of the house is prone to flooding and snow impeding access, and treefall power outages are not uncommon, in any weather.  The house's water well system requires power to operate.  The house fronts on a narrow two-lane highway with a traffic load beyond its capacity and we regularly observe reckless drivers on it.  

Due to the pandemic shutdown, the vast majority of our time is spent in immediate proximity to our home medicine cabinet, so stocking it is a higher priority than preparing for more exotic treatment settings.  Common "household" medical incidents that we maintain readiness to handle without seeking professional care are:

falls and scrapes

kitchen accidents like cuts and burns

rashes and bites from plants and insect

blisters

joint sprains

headache and menstrual pain

upper respiratory infections

My preference is to treat the above situations out of a well-stocked, organized in-home "medicine cabinet" rather than a packed "first aid kit".   From the list of anticipated incidents, we need to be able to disinfect and bandage a flesh wound, apply Rest-Ice-Compression-Elevation (RICE) care to a joint sprain, and administer OTC meds.  This resource has a lot of ideas about what a home medicine cabinet could include that would meet those needs, and more. I like how it emphasizes 80/20 preparation and thinking strategically about where to spend your money and space budget on supplies.  

From out of the medicine cabinet, "boo-boo kits" can be packed for everyday carry (EDC) and ready access from virtually every bag and outerwear with pockets.  I.e., bandaids + disinfectant + tweezers + a dose of your favorite pain meds.  Depending on the outing, I like to have some multi-use items at hand (I like this list of ideas), items I already have a high level of comfort of working with on the go.  Right now my EDC bag has the following multi-use items: a bandana, a multitool, medical tape, and a lightweight mylar blanket.  

Supplies:  It is foreseeable that we could face situations beyond the scope of the home medicine cabinet, where more robust mobile trauma first aid supplies would be of use:

serious outdoor sporting injury

road accident

stranded in the home without access to rescue facilities

mandatory evacuation from the home

attending a political protest in proximity to aggressive police

mass casualty incidents (MCI)

My goal is to have a grab-and-go kit of a reasonable weight and size, appropriately organized for use by me or another first responder, and to have training in the safe use of the equipment I'm carrying.  I want to be able to stop a catastrophic bleed and stabilize a hiker with a bone/joint injury, as either a primary or secondary caregiver.  Packing list includes:

EMT shears

Triangle bandages

Ace bandage wrap

Tourniquet

Israeli bandage

Headlamp

Sterile pads in various shapes

Medical tape

Emergency blanket

Antiseptic swabs

Moleskin patches

Irrigator syringe

Eye injury protector

Of course, this kit also serves as a supplement to the home medicine cabinet.

Notably, the EMT shears are the only thing anywhere close to a bladed object in the med kit, because I want this kit to be protest-ready, and carrying blades to a protest can result in bullshit felony charges.  I don't have a cold pack, and I should, but I haven't found a product that I like for portability and durability.  

I'm not carrying gear I have not familiar with how to use safely, like anything esophageal or trachial, or an epi-pen.  I will probably add aspirin to my mobile kit and otherwise limit my supply of pharmaceuticals.  

Procurement: So the first thing I did was I bought a couple of cheap commercial first aid kits.  They aren't sufficient for the grab-and-go trauma kit I would like to build: the supplies aren't of high enough quality, and they aren't robust enough to stabilize a heavy bleed or a bone/joint injury.  The cheap kits I bought are, essentially, very fancy boo-boo kits that include a mish-mash of starter first aid and survival gear. They’re fine as anxiety-relief while I educate myself and decide what equipment matches our needs and my comfort level.  

However, I am getting something out of these kits as learning devices.  I can practice care-providing-skills with the cheaper stuff, AND I can spec out packing capacity and organization without unnecessary wear and tear on the real supplies.  Meanwhile, I am upgrading to better materials (I'm happy with the order I received from https://www.chinookmed.com/).  In the long term what will probably actually stay with me from the commercial kits is the cheap-but-not-flimsy carrying bags with their high-visibility medical markings.

An additional consideration is that some or most of the gear I purchase here at my relative's house is not going back to my real home when coronavirus restrictions end.  So I'm getting spendier with gear that I know my relative likes to use, or that would supplement gaps in their first aid kit.  But I’m not going to duplicate their SAM splint, which is a terrific item but I don’t have a completionist need to check it off my list.

Real Prep Talk: One of the worst things about many many of the first-aid supplies lists out there for Americans is that they are written from an individualist perspective, as if your sole obligation is to buy and carry a tourniquet, while assuming we’re on the brink of an inevitable collapse that makes such gear necessary :( .  When what we really need is robust systems that support communities caring for each other.  If you are stocking your home medicine cabinet, and you have the means, consider sending some cash or supplies to protest medics, jail support crews, and other groups fighting for a better world for us all.

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/#bail

[mightyisobel]

Research for Episode 3 - Michael Bloomberg

Soundcloud - Episode 3: Michael Bloomberg 

NY Times on Bloomberg’s spending of more than $250 million on 3 campaigns

NY Post on lawsuit against Bloomberg LP over sexual abuse

EEOC lawsuit against Bloomberg LP for pregnancy bias

Massive increase in NYC homelessness during Bloomberg’s term

More than $1.65 billion in city/state subsidies for Goldman Sachs new HQ (primarily tax free bonds)

Bloomberg opposition to taxing bonuses at bailed out banks

Gotham Gazette: End of Bloomberg’s own Advantage Subsidy pushes 8500 families back into the shelter system. Cut more than $8.3 million in homeless services

[mightyisobel]

On Account of Her Womanhood

I started this post over two months ago with the hope that it would help me work through my iffy feelings on Fire and Blood, namely how much I dislike the way many of the female characters are written in this book and how it repeats and expands on some unsavory elements of GRRM’s narrative that have been broadly noted in fandom across multiple books. But a closer look only increased my frustration with this book for how it underlined several of Martin’s problematic patterns when it comes to writing women but in a more condensed form this time, perhaps due to the nature of the medium. The history book form of F&B focuses these recurring problems and offers little to offset or challenge them that the authorial issue of casual and uncritical misogynistic writing feels more pervasive. It may be that Martin tried to address at least one aspect that’s been criticized before, but I remain disquieted with how he largely traded one issue for another.

Whatever the case, I think that a writer of Martin’s caliber and with his affinity for interrogating and examining traditional genre tropes can and should do better than this uncritical use of misogynistic writing that he not only leaves to stand unchallenged, but actively leans into. In this depressingly long post, I’ll address some of the problems that jumped out at me while reading. Feel free to add any I may have overlooked.

Keep reading

[mightyisobel]

This hub links to a couple of short essays I wrote about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

The first one is about trauma, family, and orphaned children.

The second one is about how Dickens structures Scrooge's miracle around guessing games.

One of the holiday traditions in my family is our annual read-aloud of A Christmas Carol; last night we wrapped up this year's, which is why this tale has been on my mind.

Also, in a previous life, I worked backstage on more than one stage production of the story. It's a story that many of us know, and I feel like I know it well, and yet on every contact, it reveals new details and nuances.

You can read download etc A Christmas Carol here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46

For you, in this holiday season I hope that you have stories on your shelf that reward you upon each reading or viewing or listening, and that you are able to take some time to make contact with them again, and that you have the blessing of sharing them with your loved ones and chosen family.

[mightyisobel]

Guessing games in A Christmas Carol

Stave IV of A Christmas Carol, featuring the spectral Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, may be one of the most unfilmable famous sequences in English literature. I've never seen an adaptation of this chapter that doesn't throw up its hands in despair and simply deliver a spooktacular tripartite memento mori of 1) the shrouded figure of Death a-lurking half the frame, 2) the body of our hero laid out in a cold dark room and 3) the gravestone with his name etched upon it (EBENEZER SCROOGE). And yes, of course, there's usually a domestic break to tenderly mourn Tiny Tim, alongside Scrooge's psychological horror sturm und drang.

But Dickens was paid by the word, so in the book he takes his time getting to the money shot in the graveyard. We dawdle along with Scrooge and Ghost, eavesdropping on three city scenes of people reacting to the death of some? unknown?? person referred to as "Old Scratch" and "a wicked old screw". They banter Victorianly about a funeral with no lunch served and what a man's bedcurtains are worth, and these scenes require a stupendous effort of dialect work beyond the capacity of mere American casual readers. Throughout all of this Scrooge wonders and wonders and wonders some more who it could possibly be who has died, and feels a bit sorry for whoever it was whose death inspires callousness and even rejoicing. Who is it? he asks the Spirit.

Dear reader, of course, you know the answer -- the answer is always Scrooge. It's not a difficult mystery. And yet. Dickens stretches out our protagonists's discovery of the answer over pages and pages, and it works wonderfully; the reader is carried along on the irony, laughing AT this one asshole who has disconnected himself from the world so thoroughly that he doesn't know we're cackling at him when he asks, Why are you showing me these trivial encounters? And, Where am I on this future Christmas morn? We are told he is a competent man of business, but he is genuinely flummoxed here by his persistent lack of self-knowledge, by a failure to add 2+2 and get 4, and it quickly becomes too grim to be as funny as it is.

Any attempt to adapt this joke for performance after what has already been at least an hour of ghost FX and flying beds and Fezziwig's dancing and some carolers and fake stage snow, and knowing that Turkey Boy AND another Tiny Tim benediction is Yet To Come, well, it's not hard to understand the temptation to cut these city scenes, for dragging on the momentum of the extremely filmable story of the Cratchits' grief, and for making our protagonist look like a fool at the climax of the story.

Moreover, this is a three-part joke, because comedy comes in threes, but one of the earlier scenes is a tempting cut. At the end of Stave II, just after the Jiltening, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows us this charming domestic scene:

“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”

“Who was it?”

“Guess!”

The answer is Scrooge.

This first set-up scene is a throwaway; it delivers an expository glimpse of Scrooge on the night of Marley's death, but otherwise simply repeats information and regrets already staged more effectively in the Jiltening.

Now, in the second scene of the set-up, in Stave III, with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Nephew Fred and his holiday party play a rousing game of Yes and No (It's 20 Questions but I always always call this scene the Charades scene), and it goes like this:

The brisk fire of questioning to which [Fred] was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

“I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!”

“What is it?” cried Fred.

The answer is always Scrooge.

The Yes and No (Charades!) scene is wonderful in performance; it practically adapts itself as playscript off of Dickens' original page and it's funny and the costumer can have some fun with these Victorian hipsters and it gives the actor saddled with the thankless Fred role a chance, if he knows what to do with it, to shine after playing the lighthearted straight man to Scrooge in Act I. And Dickens tells us nothing about Scrooge's reaction to the surprising! reveal, which gives the actor playing Scrooge enormous leeway to invent a necessary moment of petulant shock or hurt before the next scene change (though I would just once like to see a Scrooge with the wisdom and maturity to appreciate the joke, coming from his sole living relation, whose thoughts are clearly fixated upon Scrooge on this day, even just a little bit as a step along his journey to redemption).

Anyway:  Setting aside questions of adaptation, Book!Scrooge has watched both of these guessing-game scenes. He knows the answer is always Scrooge. And yet in Stave IV, as he listens to the businessmen and domestic pilferers and reprieved tenants enthusiastically answering the call of how he lived by assessing his life’s worth in purely transactional terms, he wonders, Who Could It Be? Who Is It?

It's you, Scrooge. The answer is always Scrooge.

So no, you are unlikely to see a film or stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol that centers the structural joke of delayed insight that brings Scrooge to an understanding of himself. This joke is released in burst of laughter that constitutes the elaborate denouement in Stave V, with the shaving and the bells and the Turkey boy and the Boxing Day prank of raising Cratchit's salary (lol, Scrooge is still a fucking dick of a boss). Stave V is so filmable and iconic, it really is best to get on with it and let go of the dismal science of the price of bedcurtains. But in a sprawling read-aloud over several nights, Stave IV gets its chance to shine and be appreciated for the structural payoff it delivers.

[mightyisobel]

Ebenezer Scrooge Visits Himself Upon Scenes From His Past

(an essay about A Christmas Carol)

Stave II of A Christmas Carol, In Which Scrooge Visits Himself Upon Scenes From His Past, provides the basic narrative of where the miser Ebenezer Scrooge came from. In flashbacks, we see that Scrooge was sent away to boarding school as a child, then apprenticed with a warehousing business, and then was dumped by his long-term fiancée Belle for being too career-driven. These scenes appear to set up the obstacles before the Three Spirits in changing the old miser's heart, particularly in Belle's scathing (but loving) read of how greed and acquisitiveness have changed and overmastered him. But they also hint at hope for Scrooge yet, by letting us glimpse, as if out of the corner of the Spirit's eye, his sincere affection for friends of the past and his regrets for roads not taken.

The chapter also addresses the question, Why Is Scrooge The Way He Is? but that story is only lightly sketched in with some scant details scattered through the chapter.  Dickens is not particularly concerned with unearthing Scrooge’s boyhood traumas for display upon the page, but he is alert to the effects of bad parenting and systemic privation upon a man’s soul.  Why, when Belle delivers her ultimatum, does Scrooge resign himself to the life of the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner" that he becomes? There are answers in the previous two scenes, in the schoolhouse and at Fezziwig's party.

At his boyhood school, while Scrooge is delighted by the sight of his old friends, the narrator describes the scene:

It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed... entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much to eat.

I.e., in this scene we learn that Scrooge was sent away for years by his father to starve at a shabby boarding school. Until his sister Fan walks in that one Christmas morning to bring him home, home and family do not mean love and safety to the child Ebenezer Scrooge. Home and family are rejection and privation, and being warehoused in a place that is "dreary" and "cold".

The contrast with Fezziwig's holiday party is so stark, and so sudden, Dickens does not even give us a moment to recognize what Scrooge has survived. And we know he can show us privation when he wishes to; the opening scenes of Oliver are the trope-setter for portraying starving young boys. Here, we share Scrooge's relief in escaping that place and are invited, like young Ebenezer did, to never think upon it again.

So in the blink of an eye we join young Scrooge in clearing a dance floor and celebrating the holiday in a bright, warm, safe place with a boisterous chosen family -- and plenty of food.

Given the stark contrast between the cold neglect of the elder Scrooge (let’s call him “Tywin”, shall we?), and the open-handed care and joy of the Fezziwig establishment, is it any wonder, when Belle runs out of patience with her fiancé's "changed nature" (is it really changed, or has she simply come to see the truth?), that this young Ebenezer chooses the safety of the counting house over the risks and frigidity of a family? Can we fail to notice how many of the scenes visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present feature the display, preparation, and consumption of food, from the birds being toted to the street bakers' ovens, to the Cratchits’ devouring of their Christmas goose, to the grog shared by the lighthouse keepers. 

And of course, note how Dickens ends this Stave of celebration and plenty with a hard look at the starving children allegorizing Ignorance and Want, children in far more distress than we would think that Scrooge and his schoolmates would have suffered, who constitute Dickens's sharp rebuke to the austerity politicians of every era.

But to get back from politics to the personal drama that fuels the central character study here, we also get a glimpse of the generational trauma affecting Scrooge's family, centered on the bright spot that is Fan, and her untimely death. In Stave III, Nephew Fred, who is Fan's son and Scrooge's only known surviving blood relation, tells us:

Here, he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won’t come and dine with us.... I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better of it—I defy him—if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you?

There's a whole prequel's worth of story here (which I beg you not to make because there are already far too many prequels in the world), the story of Fred deciding, in that year when his mother died, to visit his uncle to give holiday greetings, and being aggressively rebuffed by the old man so grieved by his beloved sister's death that he never NEVER thinks of it again. 

And that's how these two men maintain a slender connection to the woman they both loved, by trolling each other every Christmas Eve with a dinner invitation and a Bah Humbug in response, and their resolution to hang on to this most meager tradition of care for one another. It's not much, these gifts that old Tywin Scrooge handed down to his children and grandchildren, but this is what the Scrooge family is, until the miracle of the Spirits.

Perhaps Dickens is overly sentimental about how the magic of Christmas can heal childhood trauma, but he delivers a character study of Scrooge's magical transformation that feels grounded in a family yearning for each other’s affection.

For the full text of this novel, visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46

[mightyisobel]

This week, we: 

-Rank our favorite Star Wars movies (lest we be the only ones not to) 

-Discuss our...mixed feelings about Dany's prophetic arc in ACOK and her spiritual place in general

-Praise how George writes Dany as a young mother, albeit of lizards.... 

Our patreon: www.patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF 

Our twitter: twitter.com/NotACastASOIAF 

[mightyisobel]

There’s this tired, baseless argument that is bandied around certain areas of the ASOIAF fandom regarding Rhaegar’s treatment of Elia. That for a man as gentle and as chivalrous, there must have been a reason for him to mistreat his wife so, and that too in such a public manner. That he had found true happiness elsewhere that his marriage failed to provide and that justified everything that came with it. The oft drawn conclusion is that Elia was the problem: she was either a wicked, unfaithful woman that drove him to the arms of a fourteen year old or a dull, insipid wife that couldn’t inspire any feeling in a man, so of course he had to go get the kind of woman he deserved. But the text already addressed that argument way back in “A Storm of Swords”.

“But that was the tourney when he crowned Lyanna Stark as queen of love and beauty!” said Dany. “Princess Elia was there, his wife, and yet my brother gave the crown to the Stark girl, and later stole her away from her betrothed. How could he do that? Did the Dornish woman treat him so ill?”

Daenerys is Rhaegar’s most ardent and blind supporter (aside from Jon Connington). I almost take her as a stand in for the Rhaegar adoring readers here. She (understandably to a degree) idolizes her brother, views him through the most rose tinted of glasses, even going so far to romanticize his supposed kidnapping of a betrothed teenager- at sword point, no less. And yet, so appalled, even she cannot rationalize his impossibly cruel humiliation of a pregnant Elia at Harrenhal. She cannot reconcile the Rhaegar of Viserys’ gushing stories and the Rhaegar who publicly disgraced his wife for every major lord in Westeros to witness in favour of another. Her only explanation, like some readers, is that Elia must have been to blame.

From “Princess Elia”, she becomes “the Dornish woman” who must have ill treated her gallant and devoted brother. From the butchered mother who pleaded for her son’s life as Daenerys remembers her in AGoT, she becomes the stranger who helped bring her humiliation and suffering upon herself. She must have been the cruel, unloving spouse who practically left him no other choice but to find affection elsewhere. For her idealized version of Rhaegar to hold up, Elia must become the villain. Yet that is dashed in the very next line.

“It is not for such as me to say what might have been in your brother’s heart, Your Grace. The Princess Elia was a good and gracious lady, though her health was ever delicate.”

Barristan Selmy, the Targaryen loyalist and vice president of the Rhaegar fan club, firmly states that Elia was in fact a good woman (in a later book also describing her as “kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit”, someone that Rhaegar actually liked). She had done nothing to provoke Rhaegar’s mistreatment of her, a worthy spouse in every way, crushing Daenerys’ argument of a mean Dornish wife. There is no mention of affairs or discord as fans like to speculate. And when Daenerys then wonders if things would have been different if she had married Rhaegar instead, making him happy where poor, deficient Elia could not (once again putting the blame on her shoulders to absolve her brother, not dissimilarly to fandom), Barristan replies:

“But I am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy.”

If it was simply not in Rhaegar to know happiness or contentment, no woman could have succeeded where Elia apparently “failed’. The onus is not on Elia, she was not the source of his discontent, she was not fundamentally lacking in pleasing her husband. His issues were his own and Elia was not to blame. And so his actions at Harrenhal, abandoning her and their newborn baby as she lay in her sickbed, absconding with another woman to Elia’s homeland, leaving her defenseless to die- they cannot be laid at her feet, with her bizarrely being made responsible for suffering a spectacle of public shame and humiliation at the hands of her own husband.

Every facet of this argument is debunked in no more than half a page yet still Elia is vilified by Rhaegar fans who know there is no other way to justify his choices. She was not some evil thorn at the saintly Rhaegar’s side, not some scheming shrew, waiting to be exposed. Elia is the price paid for his so called love story, Rhaegar and Lyanna’s grand romance came directly at her expense and she- along with her infant children- suffered the horrific consequences of his choices.

It’s clear that, just like those who cling to this argument, it’s Daenerys who doesn’t truly know or understand her brother here. Not when he’s still so deeply buried in this twisted romantic narrative that absolves him of any wrongdoing. His actions are what led us here, and so his actions must be the ones to examine. And if the only way to maintain your pretty illusions of Rhaegar is to make a villain out of Elia… Well. I think that tells you all you need to know.