Homesick for Beltresa, Trapped in Camelot

[dr_pretentious]

For the past few days, I've been feeling both Under the Weather and Out of Sorts. Sortless, I tell you!

Only today did it occur to me that I'm pining for Beltresa. Obvious, wouldn't you think? I've lived in my novel for two and a half years, and I've barely been back in three weeks. After living with the same characters all that time, I've hardly seen them at all since the ms went out to the Shiny Young Agent. The prequel's 200 years too early for me to see any of the familiar cast while I'm in it. The short story characters are engaging, but I don't know if I'll ever see them again once this little project is done, so it's hard to get quite as attached.

I thought it was so weird when my grad school friends would finish their dissertations and then slide into a malaise they'd describe in terms of post-partum depression. Over a dissertation? That's like going into a funk over having been cured of ebola. But I get it now. Maybe my friends weren't just suffering from cognitive dissonance, false consciousness, flat-out brainwashing. Is it possible they loved their dissertations? Can a dissertation be loved? Because I think this is what they were describing. It's all the clearer, in that case, that I was in the wrong line of work. Once my degree was filed, I slid into a state of bovine contentment that lasted three months. I mean, really, really bovine. Like, every once in a while, I would grin like an idiot, moo out loud, and giggle to myself. Cud chewing may also have been involved, but I don't really remember. One day faded blissfully into another, and the dissertation stayed gone, which was all that really mattered.

Nothing at all like this. No wonder I've spent the past year wallowing in perfectionism and didn't want to let the ms go.

Tutoring's going well, though. One of the ADD Brothers tried to invent a theory of intertextuality this week. He's 13--the twitchy one, not the hyperfocused one. Mostly, we concentrate in our sessions on close readings of primary texts, proper grammar, developing a thesis, articulating a relationship between evidence and argument--the basics. We don't talk much about genre, lineage, any of that stuff. But a while back, when the boys were on a big Garcia Marquez kick, this kid started figuring out how to think about Garcia Marquez and Poe at the same time, and though he had no terms for the job, he was trying to invent the concepts of magical realism and the gothic. I fear he may be doomed to do graduate study in comparative literature. Anyhow, the ADD Brothers love reading Garth Nix, so they wanted to write about all the pieces in Nix's new short story collection. Without some background in the Arthurian mythos--the ADD Brothers are Chinese, and a month ago had never heard of Lancelot--they weren't going to be able to make hide nor hair of the two Arthurian revisionist pieces, so they begged for some old-school Arthuriana. Would you believe, I'd never read Le Morte d'Arthur straight through--just enough bits to discover that Howard Pyle is, for me, One True Teller of those tales. Everything else feels like fake Camelot, even Malory, the way all Iliad translations but Lattimore's feel like fake Homer. Nonetheless, I'm slogging through Malory in a modernized edition, assigning to the boys those bits that are not too saturated in adultery. The pickings are, as you might imagine, slim.

So I finally understand, now, why people can't let well enough alone. Pyle's Camelot is orderly and organic, but Malory's Camelot is nonsensical, and the temptation is always there to fix the story until it works, dammit, works. Anything any of us could do would make a more plausible plot than the basted-together non-sequiturs Malory gives us. No, I don't think I'll be perpetrating Arthuriana anytime soon, but I can't disdain it as a project anymore.

Though we don't do much creative writing together, today I gave the ADD Brothers an assignment to rework any scene in "The Tale of Sir Gareth," to give it the Garth Nix treatment. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this week I get paid $50/hour to demand that teenage boys write fanfic for me.

Comments

[calene.livejournal.com]

Yep, this is perfectly normal. Holly Lisle calls it post-bookum depression. I've gone through it for almost every project I've done. Although, the longer ones, 6 months +, definitely hit me harder. You spend so much time and energy doing your best to make the book the best that you can. There's a lot of joy and pain along the way. It's no wonder many of us go through this depression when we finally have to let it go.

The best advice I've heard is to treat yourself for all your hard work, do something nice for yourself to help combat the ickiness. Do something, big or small, that gives you some joy in life. And then . . . get back to work and fall in love all over again. :)

*hugs* I hope yours doesn't last too long.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I had that kind of depression when I finished my last big writing project. I get it. I think it may be why people write sequels.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of teaching Arthurian fanfic. I rather love Malory. You just suspend all your disbelief and it does strange things. All the conventions are different, all the ideas about what should be. It's like an almost-alien world, like the quality of dreams. Very weird. They might like Rosemary Sutcliffe's 'Eagle of the Ninth/The Silver Branch/The Lantern Bearers' trilogy or Mary Stewart's 'Merlin' series, which I loved as a kid and love now.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

You must have been a modern English lit person. As a medievalist [slidding into concealed glee at the thought of being able to lecture to a phud], I'm not too surprised that you find Malory disjointed. There is a good argument out there that Malory did not right a single, long piece, as we generally know it. The arguement goes that Malory wrote a series of stories based on the various tales he'd heard/read. Later, when they were published, the publisher/printer, William Caxton, did some editing, including putting them in their present order and creating the chapters as we know them. Basically, he tried to take a bunch of unconnected stories and cram them together into a single unit.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yep, I was a Modernism specialist. Modernist poetry by women, more specifically, with a dissertation about a single author. My universe sprang into being in 1886 and ended precipitously in 1961. But I've limped through Pound's Cantos, so I know from disjointed.

One of the least appealing things about being affiliated with a Research I institution was the cult of hyperspecialization. "Generalist" was a dirty word in my department. We were all highly credentialed cultural illiterates, if we once began to speak about anything outside our respective intellectual fiefdoms. I still am, really, but at least I don't have to pretend otherwise anymore.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

I've been on the edge of that cult, both from my father and from my own toying with academe.

I wouldn't expect anyone not into either medieval literature or Arthuriana to know about the concept that what we commonly think of as Le Morte D'Arthur may not have been set up in the way that Mallory originally wrote the stories. But I have so few oppurtunities to use my little bits of academic trivia. :)

If I may ask, where did you get your phud? Was it at Fair to Middling State U.?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It was, indeed. Rutgers doesn't sound like a state university, but it's a sneaky institution. From time to time, whoever's in the governor's mansion will try to strong-arm the university by threatening to change its name to The University of New Jersey or somesuch, and the thought of losing the prestige of a private-schoolish-sounding name gets everybody to submit to pretty much anything.

Rutgers had, and still has, many virtues. No, really. It does. I genuinely admire the school's commitment to diversity. Most places just give the ideal lip-service, but at Rutgers, it's the real deal. Unfortunately, in order for socioeconomic diversity to work out, the trade-off is that the education is mass-produced. An assembly-line education is better than none, but it's genuinely not as useful or effective, let alone as enjoyable, as what we were getting at Vassar. Hence, Fair to Middling State University, rather than any of Rutgers's other nicknames. Screw U. is a popular one among alumni, after the famous RU Screw, which is what happens when the administration's various fiefdoms conduct their power struggles at the expense of the students' well-being.

Completely off topic

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

I just figured out that you're you, and that we know each other - I added you to my friends list, feel free to do the same.

Re: Completely off topic

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I thought you might be you, but I wasn't sure. Good to see you. Consider yourself friended!