LookingLand

Poppet on the joys of soldiering:

[H]e has learned the ordinary soldier's lessons:
to taste blood and like it;
to brave death and care nothing for life;
to hope for letters and get none;
to hope for the end of the war and see none;
to find in victory no more than the beginning of another march;
to look for promotion and get none;
to pass from death and danger to idleness and corruption;
to ask for furloughs and get none;
and finally, to despair,
and hope for death to end his sufferings.

The slave-driver has now become a butcher...

man, that's rough. way to keep it light and cheerful, Poppet.

: o p

it also about sums up my mood. i'm just tired, a wee strung out. this is my last free-ish weekend until august (and i still have a paper to write ~ and one next week as well). i just want to be mindless and watch television for 48 hours, but i know i'll only spend part of my weekend actually vegging.

i finished Eleison, though i know it'll come back with needed corrections at some point this weekend as well. we're almost over the hill. just gotta trudge up that last mile.

i haven't seen the Jack proofs. it's off to the printer, so there would be no point anyway.

happy friday all!

: D

32 days and counting down now: (won't you be glad when it's done?)

last night i started writing the doctors Barnes, Porter, et al. scene.

i realized i could set it in the hall of the jail instead of the courtroom ~ the dramatic effect would work wonderfully and we would have a respite from the interrogation box. i could also splice all the relevent parts of the testimony together and eliminate the repeats.

all this lead me to do a little side trip into the so-called "Shakespearean test" for insanity (popular then, and the method by which Barnes judged the defendent competent). this test consisted of using a study of Shakespeare's characters as the meter stick by which moral sanity should be determined (including: "that a well-formed brain, a good shaped head, is essential to a good mind.") ~ and i thought dr. nicholls for the defense was a crackpot! you can't make up stuff this bizarre.

geez.

suddenly all that talk about constipation doesn't seem like the most absurd part of the testimony.

: o p

( fun things about the insanity defense in 1865 )

anyway, i have no idea how many words i wrote (not many, but they're words that count).

in other news: the work on Jack is going much more slowly that i thought (and that's starting to worry me). i want to finish the layouts this weekend if at all possible, and then there's still the cover and end material to deal with (which i have so far put no thought into).

and let's just not even talk about the fact that i haven't started Eleison at this point.

i dunno why we agreed to do two books this year. but it's gotta get done. and this seems to be how it always goes, so i need to get to it.

the picture of the day: completely unrelated to anything for a change ~



Weep not that the world changes ~
did it keep a stable, changeless state,
it were a cause indeed to weep.

~ william cullen bryant ~

i purposely didn't get on the 'puter all day yesterday ~ i feel compelled to apologize to my flist (livejournal can get so obligatory, can't it?). and then i feel bad because i have read a lot of your entries, but didn't respond because i was busy elsewhere in my head.

anyway, i apologize. for what it's worth.

~ * ~

i'm 2k away from finishing NaNo. big whoop. congrats to the rest of you who are sticking it out in a more committed fashion!

i've been working on painting stuff and trying to get Eleison in order. I'm also trying to breakdown, compositionally, pages for Jack because we were supposed to debut this in 2006 and it would appear the year is coming to a close.

all that and i have been thinking about Beeton's dime novels lately. we had a tour of the Anderson Library special collections (got to see a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle up close and personal, even ~ squeeee!). Anyway, the Anderson Library has a large collection of Sherlock Holmes materials, including Beeton's first appearance of the character in A Study in Scarlet from 1887 and another copy that was in the library of the Tzarina of Russia (and allegedly among her possessions when the family was executed).



at any rate, this got my mind turned back in on the whole dime novel thing, which i have ruminated over in the past (and which was my original desired concept for Reconstruction except i chickened out on doing it). i'm thinking seriously of picking up this thread and trying to start again on this particular quilt. see, i don't think i will find a solution to the narrative problem that i continue to tangle with. i've come to the conclusion that there is no fast and easy solution, that i simply must choose a "box" and start packing this thing into it or else it will never get done. i don't know why i continuously talk myself out of my ideas, but this is definitely case-in-point.

all that remains is deciding whether there is one box or several (divided by epoch, for example, or by some aristotelian sense of unity), what goes in the box (in terms of regular content to be indexed), and what wrapping to give it (ooo pretty covers!).

and that's as far as i've gotten with this idea because it's about here that i always get stuck on the same problem of chronology.

so here's question about spoilers (please elaborate in a post):

American Beauty begins with the narrator explaining that he's about to be dead very soon. so we know he dies. i think it works anyway, but any story that begins at the end and then employs flashbacks can potentially tell "too much" and spoil certain aspects of the drama (i know bachsoprano is wrassling with this issue as well). john knowles frequently employs an authorial intrusion (i'm thinking specifically of The French Lieutenant's Woman) that tells us what's going to happen (my favorite moment in the book is when it "ends" halfway through and the narrator says [paraphrasing here] ~ "well you know that can't be the real ending because you can clearly see there's so many pages left" ~ brilliant).

anyway, what do you think? is this maddening and destructive to the enjoyment of a story for you?

let's poll!

[Poll #871087]