Okay. The whole Harmless And Wholesome Journal Procrastination Technique is getting out of hand this week; I am currently juggling two extremely important projects, neither one of which is especially exciting, and both of which have to be done this week. I may even skip cardioboxing class tonight. Thus, I am putting this journal on hiatus until (a) I finish or (b) Monday...

...right after I observe for Jenny-O's benefit that yes, fandom is liminal -- at least, according to Victor Turner, the dude who made the terms "liminal" and "liminality" common theoretical jargon. (I think they originated with van Gennep as anthropological language for talking about rites of passage, but Turner made them more generally popular and turned them into a ritual-studies issue. Those of my readers currently rubbing their eyes are advised to go read -- or, heck, do a Google search for a summary of -- a nice little book called The Ritual Process which provides a good introduction to Turner's thought on this topic.) Turner assumes that societies and people veer back and forth between structure (in the purely relational sense of that word) and anti-structure. Anti-structure is related to communitas (a sense of topsy-turvy community; think Misrule or Mardi Gras), experienced during liminal ("threshhold") moments during which everyone goes very briefly nutso. Liminality doesn't usually lead to lasting social change, though; as Turner points out, liminal moments usually reinforce the structure to which they are outwardly opposed. In many cases, they even replicate it upside-down or in reverse. People who lack either structure or freewheeling anti-structured community in their regular lives get it through participation in liminal activities. Does any of this sound familiar applied to fandom?

I don't entirely agree with Turner -- and that's a monster post which I'm sure you can all do without, unless ritual theory is your bliss -- but if you think I'm skeptical about the revolutionary potential of fandom, you'd be right.

And now, another dispatch from the Influence Wars.

They're not really "wars" -- at least, not in the journals I've been reading. I think the whole topic actually originated with some plagiarism concerns in the Harry Potter fandom, but the topic of plagiarism doesn't especially interest me (I have a lovely handout I give my students when I assign their first papers), and I'd rather finish revising my dissertation intro than get into debates about moral relativism. There's also a whole side-thread about academic discourse and its place in fandom which intrigues me but which seems to get on people's nerves very quickly, so I'll postpone it for another time. Suffice it to say that there is a small teacher-shaped part of me hopping up and down in glee every time I read a comment in some journal somewhere in which a poster complains, "Now you've gone and made me think!" Muahahahaha.

I've gotten a few people to make lists of what sorts of categories one might list "influences" under. Melymbrosia listed "content, style, characterization, research, concept, grammar" under "general influences." She also doesn't think that there's anything unlearnable about writing. Valeria, in comments on my post a few down, pointed out that the category of "voice" might be a lot more interesting than the category of "influence" and indicated an extremely strong preference for -- well, she called herself a "born-again determinist," which is to say that pretty much everything important about how one writes is a matter of natural predisposition, augmented here and there. Vera (again, in the comments) suggested that it might be wise to keep an open mind about whether or not there's something unlearnable somewhere down the road. I take all of this to mean that people have wildly divergent views about what lies behind the category of "influence" and the concept of "writing" more generally, which is kind of what I suspected, and that we are doing influence-listing mostly for fun and/or gratification. I am also deeply grateful to my readers for not throwing around the word "hardwired," which is highly relevant but just sounds so damn goofy that I gave up on linguistics as a field. (I really wanted to be a philologist anyway. Those of you keeping track will want to place another tick in the column headed "Clearly Never Recovered From Mainlining Tolkien At Age Eight.") If it wasn't clear from my last post on the topic, I'm pretty much Little Miss Free Will, and while I'll concede that childhood language acquisition may indeed have some biological/genetic components, I disbelieve that the ability to write clearly or cleverly comes from anything other than nurture. It's possible that there's some sort of divine afflatus (is there a more unfortunate-sounding word?) or Odin's regurgitated mead or something involved with creativity; I'm honestly not sure. But what fascinates me enough to write about, how I use dialogue, why one should use a possessive form of a noun before a gerund -- those are drawn from people and places and things in my experience, too many of them to count. I'm not sure how I get from an influence to my own writing, although I can assure you that the process does not involve even symbolic resurrection.

Sarah argues persuasively that fanfic does indeed require its own set of techniques (and hence influences) because it usually involves translating elements from one medium to another. I tend to agree more with Mel, because I am also hopelessly print-oriented -- I enjoy reading Buffy and Angel shooting scripts about as much as watching the show sometimes -- and because I know perfectly well that there are fanfic authors who write for print, movie, TV, and comic fandoms, occasionally simultaneously. Some people's fanfic is certainly informed by a strong visual sense. Some people's fanfic is informed by a desire to pair up their favorite characters, which has very little to do with what medium one is working in -- the conventions of romance haven't changed much with the advent of film. My own minimal engagement with fanfic has been informed by a fondness for fixing problems in the canon while engaging in little character studies, researching nifty historical details, and making jokes. This sounds absurdly like what I do for a living anyway, so I'm not convinced that fanfic really owes more to whatever medium its canon lies in than to its author's interests, habits, and (oh well) influences. But I do realize that we're not specifying what we mean by "fanfic," which seems to me to be part of the problem. Appropriation and transformation of others' texts is the stuff of pretty much all literature, whether or not it's self-conscious about doing so. Come to think of it, I'm not convinced that "fanfic" works as an analytical category at all (obviously, it is a legal category), although I'm willing to be convinced.

Some of the books I had shipped from publishers at Major Professional Conference #2 finally arrived, so if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to engage in some heavy-duty reading about demonic linguistics. Yes, I'm bragging. I love my job.

People who put together massive Internet-based databases out of the goodness of their hearts (or even out of grant money, because I happen to know that one has to apply for those suckers)...impress me no end. Anyway, I found this nifty site via wood's lot, and I thought some of my readers would be interested: The Absolute Elsewhere: Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Lots of beautiful cover scans, and the compiler is working on extending it into the '80s.

One of the things I like about reading "fandom" journals -- not to be confused with other categories of journals I read, such as "people far more hip than I," "people who just tell good stories about their lives," and "people with really great weblinks" -- is that there's some honest-to-goodness metadiscussion happening from time to time. Most people in fandom are writers or are interested in writing, and they sometimes stop and think about what sort of project or activity they're engaged in. Of course, very few of us can resist the urge to parade our intellectual credentials -- some of us more successfully than others -- during these discussions, but I still find people writing about writing to be fun in a very basic way. (I'm a humanities geek. Q.E.D.)

I started following this discussion through Melymbrosia's LiveJournal, where she offered some thoughts about what it means to consider someone an auteur, how this ultimately descends from a kind of anxiety of influence, what her own influences as a writer are, and what sorts of techniques she's learned from assorted writers. I admire her ability to sort that out, actually; she's naming names, and I couldn't be nearly as precise about my influences. Apparently, the topic originated with Thamiris, whose journal I seldom read but who had asked people to comment on their influences and whether or not they felt trapped by them. Apparently, a lot of people writing fanfic list other fanfic authors as their first influence, which surprises me a little bit -- I can see why Mel would want to learn basics of writing SF from other SF writers, but I'm not sure that fanfic is a genre, exactly. I don't know that the techniques required to negotiate and occasionally undermine some canonical body of work are all that different for fanfic than they were for, say, Paradise Lost. In writing PL, Milton had quite a lot of canonical information -- not only the Book of Genesis, but commonly held beliefs and stories surrounding it -- and he also had some previous adaptations to work or distance himself from. (As I understand it, it's quite possible that Milton's feisty Satan was ripped off from an Old English poem unimaginatively called Genesis B.) But. Anyway. It got me thinking.

Truthfully, the concept of "anxiety of influence" annoys me -- it can be traced to a book by that title by the literary critic Harold Bloom, in which Bloom theorized that writers' attitudes towards their precedessors consisted of castration anxiety followed by ritual murder followed by cannibalism. No, I am not kidding -- here is the one-paragraph definition. (That site's excellent for when people start throwing around Theory and Jargon and All Those Words Intended To Indicate That, Look, I Went To College And Maybe Even Grad School.) Some of my issues with this approach are fairly obvious: taking Freud that near-literally? Making all writers symbolic men? (I don't identify all that strongly as a Writer, but I certainly haven't had a lot of problems with castration anxiety, and I don't use any of my secondary sexual characteristics to write with.) And the book is all about poetry (Bloom says as much), which makes its wholesale application to every other form of writing at least mildly problematic. Bloom's book is also much stronger on textual analysis than on bona fide literary history; even putting Freud aside, he relies more than I think he should on nineteenth- and twentieth-century (mostly male) examples. I'm no Milton scholar, but I haven't seen a lot of scholarship emphasizing how nervous he felt about achieving "originality" (whatever that means), and I'm quite positive that the idea of achieving originality wasn't in serious play before the seventeenth century. We all know Shakespeare ripped off plots (and occasionally significant parts of speeches, although generally not the really good parts) from other authors, right? And Chaucer didn't make up the plots to the Canterbury Tales, or the story concept, for that matter. I'm not arguing that any of these works aren't "original"; I'm just pointing out that their authors don't seem unduly anxious about influences. And I don't want to bore my readers by giving more detailed examples unless asked, but Bloom's whole "anxiety of influence" theory, while it's inspired some very interesting work, mostly strikes me as being historically short-sighted and kinda goofy.

So I'm less than fascinated by influence qua influence. What interests me is the persistence of technical categories in these discussions of influence. In the post I linked to above, Mel managed to put together a list of techniques which she feels play an integral role her writing (some of them standard terms, some terms she coined to describe what she does in setting and assembling an SF novel): setting, revision, artistic compression, parallelism, worldbuilding, inclueing, etc. Thamiris distinguished between "style" and "content," among other categories. Harold Bloom, bless his jargony little soul, came up with a list of fancy Greek words to describe what he felt writers did to cope with the influences of other writers -- I'd forgotten most of them, but here's a list if you're so inclined. I recognize a couple of those terms from lists of literary devices, a couple from Greek-language mystical itineraries, and a couple from Buffy; goodness knows what hats he pulled them out of. (The terms fitting into Buffy would be "daemonization" and "apophrades" -- the former is reasonably obvious if you remember that a daemon is more a creative force than a demon proper, and the latter is, according to the website I just mentioned, "the return of the dead" -- the attempt to make it seem as if the later author is effectively responsible for the earlier author's poems rather than the other way 'round. See also "retcon."**) Obviously, the categories each person picks structure the answers they give or receive -- so why these categories and not others?

Now I'm wondering what the most important writing techniques are to various writers, because to ask "who taught you how to [x]?" seems to be begging the question of why it's [x] and not [y] that we're learning. What sorts of things count as techniques? What does it say if we distinguish between style and content? What does it say if we are or are not conscious of genre? Is there some kind of untaught inspiration that goes into the whole process? (I say no, except insofar as I'm a theist and believe that God is a nosy parker; I know people who say yes and who run the gamut from atheist to animist.) Why not ask writers where they learned the rules of English grammar? Why not ask them where they learned about ambition, or sex, or ballistics? Why, for the love of all that's holy, has nobody asked someone else where they learned how to research? (I realize that there's a snarky answer to that question, but I'm serious here.) I realize that twentieth-century Western culture practically fetishized creativity and originality (yes, yes, it comes before the twentieth century; we can go into that another time), but it's still a little puzzling to me that people are tripping over one another to list their influences without (in most cases) wondering: influences on what, exactly?

I'd like to ask anyone who's reading this and considers themselves a writer: what categories do you use to assess influence in the first place? What sorts of things have you learned about writing, and what sorts of things do you consider unlearnable? And I'd like to ask everyone else: now can we call it a meta-meta-discussion?

[** -- I'm halfway tempted to go back and reread key parts of The Anxiety of Influence, because my limited Greek does include the word for "resurrection," and that ain't it -- as I bet many of you know, "resurrection" in Greek is anastasis. What apophras apparently means is "unmentionable/unlucky" (yes, they have a Greek lexicon online, too.) Which leaves me really confused about what Bloom is getting at.]

Yes, yes, I know. Everyone reads The Onion. It's like Salon for the Self-Consciously Ironic (Even If We're No Longer Clear On What "Ironic" Means After That Darned Alanis Morissette Song). But this is still a great article: Archaeologist Tired of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils.

It's always, 'I will drink your soul' or 'I will chew the flesh from your bones' with these hellish apparitions," Whitson said. "When I ask them if that means the ancient Etruscans did, in fact, add copper to their mixing clay to make their urns more sturdy, they don't even seem to hear me.

Hee hee hee.

Ugh. I hate it when I oversleep, especially when I have Bad Novel dreams. Yes, that's right: of the few dreams I can remember, a majority of them are clearly dream adaptations of really bad (imaginary) novels. I've dreamed bad thrillers, bad sci-fi, bad mystery, and once even a bad Western. This morning's selection was one of those quintessentially 90s novels about moving around the country, being alienated from one's family, and committing adultery. There was an incest subplot. There were random characters from the Indian subcontinent. Almost everyone died in the end. Most of it was set on the West Coast and in first-class sections of airplanes, two areas where I have seldom set foot. Part of it was in Leeds, or maybe some other industrial north-England city. None of the characters had anything in common with me, except that a few of them were in some sort of academic field (not mine; they made too much money). After thinking it over, I'm fairly sure I dreamed a David Lodge novel crossed with an Anne Rivers Siddons novel crossed with Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which I had better sense than to actually read but which clearly had the alienation-and-incest stuff going for it. I like David Lodge in moderate doses, though, and I've been known to read Anne Rivers Siddons as summer-vacation fluff. This was just an awful novel.

Let's assume that my subconscious wants me to read more non-academic books and move on, okay?

My future department chair at Wonderful U. called me last night; since this is the third time I've heard from him on departmental business around 9 pm, I think it's safe to assume that he's one of those people who enjoys working at night. At any rate, we sorted out what classes I'll be teaching next year, more or less. Only three preps total, one of which is an introductory course with some standardized components and one of which is an expanded version of the course I was just teaching last fall. That leaves one completely new course I get to design from the ground up, with a virtual carte blanche, so of course my brain has given up on concluding the dissertation conclusion and has instead started suggesting possible readings, techniques, assignments...is it safe to assume that the average American college student has, at some point in his or her life, watched The Ten Commandments in the Revised Heston Version?

Right. Dissertation. Or at least deep thoughts. Hey, the brass elephant's waiting outside our admin assistant's office for her to get back from lunch! *sigh*

Non-Frivolous Announcement: I'm entirely fed up with Excite email. Mine hasn't worked properly in weeks and has, presumably, lost all the nice feedback I was saving, as well as a good handful of messages I was just going to get around to responding to last month. If you sent me anything since, er, mid-November at the Excite account and are expecting a reply...it would be a good idea to resend them to my Yahoo account: naomichana@yahoo.com.

Now let me try to figure out where else I have to change this....

Well. Chapter Six is on its way to My Sainted Advisor, who -- with any luck -- will tell me that I need fewer semicolons. There are still a few things I want to add here and there, but they're not especially crucial things. Some of them could even wait for the book rather than the dissertation. All I need to do now is throw together some sort of conclusion. ("As you can see from the previous hundreds of pages and thousands -- no, I'm not kidding, thousands -- of footnotes, I am right. Right right right right right. Opposite of wrong. The End.") I'm currently doing thrilling revisions (please note that "thrilling revisions" is an oxymoron) on a few other chapters, but I'm going to update that sidebar any day now. Honest. Also, I've spent most of the weekend trying to ignore the fact that I was sick with Not-The-Flu-Because-I-Got-A-Flu-Shot-But-There's-A-Startling-Resemblance. My body is more or less cooperating; I have promised it that we will start eating more salads (also eating more meals in general) and leaving the office before, say, midnight. Of course, what my body doesn't realize is that I was planning to leave the office early today anyway, because I need to buy blank videotapes and then get home for Angel. Muahahahaha.

One of the blog-related yet distinctively self-centered thoughts I've been having for awhile now is how much I miss sci-fi/fantasy. (I'm not bothering to distinguish between them; there's too much overlap. There's also Clarke's Third Law. Besides, divvying them up feeds into an exalted view of "science" that's both outdated and really silly. I'll only elaborate if you ask me to.) My Fellowship of the Rings kick probably contributed to this sense, but it didn't start it. On January 1st, during one of my career-related journalling outages, I found a post on Boing Boing announcing that SF writer Jack Haldeman had died. Jack Haldeman -- here's his website if you're curious -- was, among other things, very nice to me when I was ten years old and I met him because he was friends with my parents' friends down around Gainesville. He gave me an autographed copy of one of his books. I could still tell you the plot. I'm sorry he's gone. I'm also sorry, although in a very different way, when I read Melymbrosia's journal and look through her lists of sci-fi/fantasy books. She's so excited about them, and they sound wonderful, and I've tried to take down a few titles for future reference (although I can tell from the titles I do know that our tastes don't always overlap, I agree about the relative merits of A.S. Byatt's 2001 works, and I'm thinking I should've read more Diana Wynne Jones than Fire and Hemlock). I haven't done anything with those titles yet. Maybe after the dissertation's done. (I say that about a lot of things.)

Like most humanities geeks of a certain age, I went through sci-fi and fantasy novels like candy during my middle- and high-school years. I never really got into their usual extensions, comics or role-playing, and this was in the antediluv--er, mostly-pre-Internet era. It was a book thing. I'd just...y'know, climb in and sail off towards the western islands, or fall into the book and not land for a really really long time. (Does anyone else think Alice in Wonderland is an extended allegory about reading? I mean, heck, Humpty-Dumpty's all about semiotics, and...oh, never mind.) I started with mythology and folklore and Obviously Classic Stuff my parents had sitting around (including, I should note, Alice in Wonderland and at least half a dozen takes on those darned western islands), then moved on to the endless trilogies in the "sci-fi/fantasy" section of the bookstores. Unfortunately, a lot of commercial sci-fi/fantasy wasn't anywhere near as good as what I'd read when I was younger, and a lot of my favorite authors got worse as they wrote the same book over and over again. Did I grow out of them? I'm not sure. I mean, I can certainly do without reading the latest Anne McCaffrey or Mercedes Lackey. I circled back around to studying...well, something closer to mythology and folklore than sci-fi/fantasy, but not especially far afield of either. I love what I do, and I've certainly been known to immerse myself in it pretty deeply, but it's not quite the same -- there are those footnotes, and I have a lot more responsibility because I teach it, and I suppose that's probably a sign of maturity or something. Also, I, um, watch Angel. But...I hadn't read any non-academic Tolkien -- Tolkien! And I have a copy of The Lays of Beleriand on my bookshelf! -- in years until I reread Fellowship a few weeks ago in anticipation of the movie. (I'm still trying to figure out where the other two LOTR books landed in my last move. Of course, rereading LOTR isn't absolutely necessary, since I can still recite sizeable chunks of dialogue verbatim, but that's a whole different problem.) I miss the books. My books.

"Catch up on leisure reading" has now officially moved above "have a passionate affair" and "learn to crochet" on the list of Things To Do After The Dissertation's Done.

I still want to go see Fellowship of the Ring again instead of finishing my dissertation. Good thing I have such a strong sense of duty, right? Um...right. But posting in here doesn't require my getting up from the computer, so....

It's interesting how reading fanfic (in general, not Middle-Earth-specific) has changed my take on Tolkien this time around. I don't actually think the members of the Fellowship spent every unchronicled moment engaging in slashy goodness (and I really hope someone's pointed out by now that the second book is much, much more conducive to that sort of thing anyway). I also don't think they spent every unchronicled moment engaging in non-slashy goodness (because, well, the only active female character in the whole trilogy doesn't show up till the second book, either). Frankly, there's remarkably little sexual attraction anywhere in LOTR. There are certainly strong and beautiful bonds of friendship that slide over into love, but that's not at all the same thing, and it seems an injustice to all concepts involved if we persist in collapsing them. (I look forward, in a half-dreading-half-anticipating sort of way, to the inevitable film prequel to the LOTR trilogy: "Beren and Luthien Do Middle-Earth." Or, um, something else from the Silmarillion, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't be Beren and Luthien. Because that's where it becomes really obvious that Tolkien's Middle-Earth isn't quite into sex, even though there are points at which it ought to be, and perhaps the movie can fix that. Or perhaps it'll just depress the heck out of me, because there's also a lot more to that story than sex.)

What's changed, though, is my sense of possibilities. Take Arwen. If you put the entire Tolkien canon together -- and this is, God help me, off the top of my head and not having reread anything but Fellowship in the last five years, so I may be missing some details -- she's three-sixteenths human, is constantly mistaken for her legendary great-great-grandmother, has her mother abandon her after said mother is gang-raped by orcs, has her brothers wander off to become Rangers, watches several attractive kingdoms fall and a lot of people she knows die, oscillates between staying with her Enormously Powerful father at Rivendell and her Enormously Powerful grandmother at Lothlorien for a few centuries, falls for the wrong guy by her father's and almost anyone else's standards, spends a few decades hoping against hope that it'll all work out, eventually marries the guy, promptly loses her entire family except for him and their kids, and then has to deal with the realization that she doesn't especially want him to die, or want to die herself, that whole I'm-giving-up-immortality-for-you shtick notwithstanding. There's room for characterization there which patently does not appear in either Tolkien or the Fellowship movie (although I concede that it's nice to see Arwen kick ass as a matter of principle). One could do the same thing with many other characters in Middle-Earth -- I think that's why I love the appendix to The Return of the King and the entire Silmarillion, because you get more of the back-stories that way. I've always loved them, but fanfic provides the state of mind in which one thinks about the implications of the back-stories. I don't even have to read or write Middle-Earth fanfic to enjoy the benefits.

Of course, fanfic also provides some hearty laughs. Someone whom I'm pretty sure goes by Rivka in the blogging world recommended this brilliant LOTR story: "Nine Men And A Little Lady." Go read it. Really.

The Fellowship of the Ring is not my favorite movie of all time -- I'm not sure what is, and the only serious candidates which spring to mind are Thelma and Louise and the Disney version of Robin Hood, so you go right ahead and lose all respect for me -- but it was a well-spent three hours, and I go to very, very few movies precisely because I hate sitting there waiting for some sort of payoff that doesn't arrive. This was good all the way through. I'm seriously thinking about going to see it again, and I never do that.

There were, of course, things that didn't work. Depicting Sauron was arguably the film's worst mistake; I've never fully understood people who find evil-as-privation-of-good a wussy theodicy, because what can't adequately be imagined is actually a great deal scarier than what can be. (Lidless Eye = Scary. Tall Guy In Mask Kicking CGI Butt = Not Especially Impressive Special Effect.) Making Merry and Pippin borderline cretins was the second worst mistake. There is no textual justification whatsoever for doing this with Merry. There's very slight justification for the movie's reading of Pippin, but some bathwater splashing in an FOTR passage they cut from the movie, one moment of goofiness in Moria, and one misjudgment about a Palantir several books later does not add up. For those of you who haven't read the book: Merry and Pippin do not blow Frodo's cover en route to Bree, at the Prancing Pony, or at Weathertop. They do some very sensible things which didn't make it into the movie; they don't deliberately divert the orcs from Frodo at Parth Galen (the end of Fellowship), because neither they nor Aragorn know that he is leaving. Which leads us into mistakes #3 and #4: bizarre and unnecessarily confusing changes to Frodo's encounters with evil at Weathertop and Parth Galen. But I'm sure someone, somewhere, has already gone into laborious text-comparing detail about this. Finally, mistake #5: Saruman's take on evil and accomodation was actually a bit more sophisticated -- and therefore more seductive -- than the movie let on. Oh well.

While I'm being critical, two more negative categories. Major things left out which should've been in: song/verse (subtitled Elvish, while good, does not make up for it), Gimli's characterization (Legolas doesn't get characterization till the second book), and mortality (which deserves a whole separate post, if I address it at all) -- not necessarily in that order. Minor things left out: did those of you who haven't read the book have any clue about why Frodo was Bilbo's heir, what Legolas's and Gimli's reasons were for being at Rivendell, or why the hobbits trusted Aragorn at all that night at the Prancing Pony? Some details would have been easy to convey in a few words or a single sentence.

All this notwithstanding, there were some things in the movie which were better than in the book. The sets almost uniformly rocked, I think it was smart to shorten the hobbits' journey to Bree, I enjoyed seeing Gandalf atop Orthanc and Saruman destroying trees in Fangorn, and I'm delighted that Arwen got a personality. (Neither Liv Tyler nor Cate Blanchett knocked my socks off, incidentally -- I thought Hugo Weaving's Elrond and perhaps even Orlando Bloom's Legolas were more convincing immortals. But Arwen definitely needed a personality, even if that wasn't quite the one I would've chosen.) I'm also delighted that Aragorn got a personality; he strolls through most of Fellowship-the-book being Perfect Hero Guy, and I liked him a lot better in Fellowship-the-movie. And I found the introductory sequence about the Last Alliance (depiction of Sauron aside) extremely compelling, more so than the book's low-key discussion of hobbitry. (Granted, I would've tried to find someone who could throw together some decent alliterative verse instead of prose narration (the book's ditty about "Gil-galad was an Elven king...." is supposed to be an excerpt from a longer work, after all), but, um, that's me.)

However, my single most favorite thing about the movie (as opposed to the book) has been strangely absent from the collective blogconscious: Boromir. No, I don't have the hots for either the character or the actor (he's certainly not bad-looking, but I think Aragorn would be more my type, and then only slightly; I'd really prefer a much younger Gandalf). Yes, I thought there were a few too many anvils flying about Boromir's temptation. Also, cutting Faramir and the Rohirrim completely out of Boromir's story was foolish, since they play important roles in the rest of the trilogy, and it further confused me that movie-Boromir, unlike book-Boromir, did not join the Fellowship with the stated purpose of peeling off for Minas Tirith. But the speeches the scriptwriters gave Boromir at Rivendell, Lothlorien, and Parth Galen (either expanded or altogether changed from the book), their delivery by the actor (whose name I cannot recall), the relationship and communication between Boromir and Aragorn, and the impact of showing Boromir's attack on Frodo and his death together in one near-continuous scene...well, I'd never thought of the second half of Fellowship and the first chapter of The Two Towers as the story of Boromir, but there it is. Frankly, I found him a lot more interesting than Frodo. In The Two Towers, the first chapter -- "The Departure of Boromir" -- concludes with a lament for Boromir which I've always found moving. I guess it's too much to hope that the second movie will put that in, but hope I do.

So, yeah, I liked it.

Today I...relaxed. As I did yesterday. I also cooked supper (picadillo) for my parents, enjoyed their continued presence in my life, and calculated that I have another thirty-six hours before I leave for Large Midwestern University Town and the delightful solitude of my apartment and office. (Well, strictly speaking, I share the office, and it'll be maybe two weeks before I start complaining about my lack of a social life again. I'm accurate, not consistent.) I am trying to remember to watch the Smallville rerun "Hourglass" tonight, because Sarah has somehow managed to convince me that (a) I have no business talking about a show without watching an entire episode of it straight through and (b) I might just like it, Sam, you'll see. She has not, however, reckoned with the fact that I will be watching the entire episode straight through with my father sitting next to me, which has spoiled far greater media experiences. At least I'll get some much-needed exercise trying to get the remote away from him.

Today's actual content is brought to you via a Boston Review article authored by Joyce Hackett, "The Territory of Trauma." Hackett, a practicing novelist, focuses on the question of whether it is possible for a non-survivor (and, I think, non-European non-Jew) to write about the Holocaust. She points out the extent to which the National Socialists themselves engaged in revisionism, presenting Therensienstadt as a privileged artists' colony instead of a death camp. She also gives due attention to the reasoning of those people who want Holocaust survivors to retain a sort of monopoly on its field:
"Revisionism is an ancient practice," Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote, "but the revisionist crisis occurred in the West only after the turning of the genocide into a spectacle, its transformation into pure language." If rhetoric can precurse genocide, then it makes sense that the title of Vidal-Naquet's book about revisionists, Assassins of Memory, wrests a physical act of violence onto an abstract object via catachresis, conflating truthtelling with preserving life, and rewriting with killing. And it makes sense that there are those who would want to keep storytelling on that subject off-limits to those who might do it wrong. In the wake of the tidal wave of narrative abuse by the Nazis, and the subsequent kitschy exploitation of Holocaust suffering by perpetrators and their cultural inheritors, by non-survivors, by survivor-impersonators, and even by survivors themselves, the act of narrating even a single detail of the Shoah seemed to raise profound moral problems.

This sort of argument is worth thinking about for anyone who writes, anyone who wants to be a capital-w Writer, or even those of us who simply earn a healthy portion of our living from writing. I suppose that's why I wanted to include it in this journal, since so much of my known readership falls into at least one of those categories. Words have power (if that statement actually requires proof, let me know, but it's a post unto itself), and so writing brings with it a moral responsibility. Q.E.D. However, Hackett continues, the problem raised by not narrating such details is even more striking. She points out that "the first portal to understanding an other is to try to empathetically project yourself into his or her life" and concludes that "spending years writing about a person you hold cultural power over can be some of the most laborious moral work of all, the fundamental work of recognizing an 'other.'" I tend to agree. But what I think is missing from Hackett's article is another, equally good, equally moral reason to write about the Holocaust: the need for history. (I mean history in a fairly non-technical sense; one can argue that the "historical sense" only shows up in Western civilization around the twelfth century, and the discipline of historical studies is certainly modern. On the other hand, there are people writing something that we English-speakers translate as "history" several centuries before the Common Era -- Herodotus, or a good half of the Hebrew Bible.) To put the matter as baldly as possible, there are fewer Holocaust survivors every day. In another hundred years, there will be few or no people alive who have encountered a Holocaust survivor. First-person testimony has its limits. And anyone who wants to argue for a singular and therefore unrepeatable event called the Holocaust (or Shoah; is it more frightening to be consumed by fire or swept away by a whirlwind?) is going to have to keep that event in cultural memory. Empathetic understanding of the Other, to use Hackett's language, is only possible if one remembers that there was (and therefore is) an "other." Quote Santayana if you like, or Livy, or just stick with the "never again" slogan -- history is necessary.

I seem to be making a great many sweeping claims in the above paragraph, but I'm still thinking all this out. It's not that history is inherently moral itself -- history, considered in the abstract, is a bloodless form of necromancy in which one claims to raise the dead in order to hold enlightening conversations with them, and it's almost as easy to abuse as a Ouija board -- but I do think it's necessary for any sort of moral reckoning. Without an historical framework for the twentieth century, Hackett would have never considered writing a novel about Holocaust survivors in the first place, would have been unable to make sense of (perhaps, to locate) details and testimony about Theresienstadt, would have been unable to accurately identify the patterns of thought she keeps encountering: "[T]he fundamental problem with sanctifying survivors is that it plays into the way the Nazis spin-doctored their crimes with Christianity's stock plot, that people or societies are made pure via suffering." (Nota bene: this is a stock plot and one which has certainly been used by Christians. It has also been used ad nauseum by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and an awful lot of other groups down on their luck. Hackett's larger point is correct, but she is committing both an historical and a theological error here.)

It's also not that history can be separated neatly from fiction. In fact, I suppose I'm responding to Hackett's article by pointing out that her fiction-writing does indeed qualify as history (again, in a non-technical sense) and is therefore valuable from that perspective as well as for either aesthetic or affective/cathartic reasons. And I'm wishing that more people who want to be writers would demonstrate some awareness that they are also engaging with (if not necessary in) history. I am also, mystifyingly, stuck in the present progressive.

Tomorrow I get to go see FOTR, finally. I have this sneaking suspicion that there may be some thematic leakage. Consider yourselves warned.