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Homesick for Beltresa, Trapped in Camelot
Oct. 19th, 2005 09:22 pmFor 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.
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.
