Two Bards

[alixtii]

It is ungodly hot and I cannot sleep.

To me, Robert A. Heinlein's appeal has been located primarily in the characteristics associated with his later work, which is for all intents and purposes professionally published fanfic, even down to the "fanfic aesthetic" that cathexys sometimes likes to talk about. There's the adolescent fantasy and the will to power, the constant emphasis on sex, the so-called "id vortex" being close to the surface, the incest, everything. Mix with a healthy helping of didacticism and philosophizing, and you pretty much have my ideal work of fiction, fan or professional. So it isn't surprising that Heinlein's my favorite writer.

But Heinlein knows how to wrench one's heart, too, when he wants to. Perhaps the best example is the novella "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter" contained within the novel Time Enough for Love, which just happens to be my favorite book. But another is "The Green Hills of Earth," the tale of Rhysling, the blind bard of the Spaceways. Heinlein really recreates a sense of the longing for Earth in the heart of his reader, and the recounting of simple heroism really touched my heart and brought a tear to my eye.

Most recently, when I took my evening walk for exercise. (On second thought, that tear might have been sweat--my eyes were stinging from the salt water.) I was listening to a dramatic recreation of "The Green Hills of Earth" by X Minus One (whomever they are, but they do a decent job) and I thought I would share it with you all now. I really recommend listening to it.

You can download it using any of the following links:

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=AD6853E5191A1E29
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v1wb27
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QXAZ5UQ4
http://up-file.com/download/3151cc873985/Heinlein,-Robert-A---Green-Hills-of-Earth.mp3.html

I also watched the Liz Taylor Taming of the Shrew--it was one of the free movies on On Demand. I had never seen the play before, and I suppose there are a lot of things to say about it. Out of all them, I suppose that's the one I most want to say--that there are a lot of things to say about it. It's just so incredibly rich. As I watched it, I was struck by how many different ways it could be interpreted, how the lines the actors were speaking could have been played in a complete different way. There are just so many different ways that Kate can be played or understood, ways that her motives could be constructed, that there isn't really anything at all that one can say definitive about the play, because the face it shows is so radically different when viewed from different angles. It really is pretty amazing. (Of course, this is in part a result of elements of the play not making any sense. Somehow Shakespeare gets away with having this be a part of his genius and not a sign of his inability.)

In its way, every performance of a play (well, unless it's a Beckett play) is like its own fanfic, filling in the gaps in canon, making some things clear that weren't originally, shifting the emphasis. And of course movie versions often even add in the extra sex during those gaps, so in that way they're exactly like fanfics. (Although they tend to be boring OTPs like Hamlet/Ophelia or Romeo/Juliet. Where's the onscreen Rosalind/Celia? (Then again, I don't think I've ever seen a movie version--or, for that matter, even seen it on the stage--of AYLI, so maybe there would be onscreen Rosalind/Celia. Everyone agrees that play is the gay, after all.))

And since there's no way one could possibly turn a Shakespeare play into a movie without some massive cutting, I now have my Riverside Shakespeare open on my bed. It's not at all because I'm entertaining thoughts of Kate/Bianca incest femslash. No, not at all.

Anybody who can point me to already written Kate/Bianca wins a billion points. I'd even take 10 Things I Hate About You Kate/Bianca, because, hey, Julia Stiles and Larissa Oleynik are hot. (Not that that is all that relevant in fanfic, but hey.)

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

In its way, every performance of a play (well, unless its a Beckett play) is like its own fanfic

Oh yes, I've long thought this! Right down to the "Well, my Hamlet only imagines the ghost/isn't really mad/is in love with his mother/wants to have sex with Ophelia in the grave/is in a homosexual relationship with Horatio" views of character. Putting on a play is the ultimate opportunity to legitimise one's own personal vision of the text (or even to ruthlessly disregard the text in favour of one's own personal vision, depending on what kind of theatre you're into).

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

And it has its own fanon, too, as certain ways of performing the play become traditional so that they effectively become part of an unwritten script (like England's unwritten constitution?) in addition to the written one. And there are the same old authorial intent issues (although they're pretty much endemic to all literature); I remember when I was taking my Shakespeare class at university we spent a lot of time imagining how the play would have been acted out on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, and I'm not sure if that's relevant or not. (And there are deleted scenes, and director's cuts, and....)

But this leads me to two somewhat contradictory conclusions: 1) we take this fluidity for granted when dealing with drama in a way we don't with fiction; 2) somehow when discussing the text we still end up talking about the One True Hamlet (or do we?). Which I suppose shouldn't surprise me; Buffyverse canon permits of an infinitude of equally valid interpretations, but I still maintain that at least ideally there is a least hypothesis interpretation where the Scoobies aren't robots (although I don't claim that we will ever be able to agree on what the least hypothesis interpretation is). We still have the idea that a performance is capable of certain sort of "violence" to the source text akin to what one might find in OOC, noncanonical fanfiction. And there's a value hierarchy functioning in much the same way.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

And it has its own fanon, too, as certain ways of performing the play become traditional so that they effectively become part of an unwritten script

Oh, yes! Victorian audiences used to know all the "high points" and wait for the actor to produce each one of them.

azdak: but isn't one reason that the institution of having a director evolved so that there was a unified vision, e.g.,Ophelia wouldn't be reflecting the many times Hamlet had raped her starting when she was 8 with Hamlet playing out his idealized courtly love for Ophelia against his guilty passion for Horatio?

Friday

[frogfarm]

The first Heinlein I read was FRIDAY, while in high school. Overall this was a positive experience, though it took years to work through the negative side effects :)

(And when The Taming of the Shrew was on television one night when I was around 10 or 11, my mother INSISTED that I watch it, and though I was skeptical I ended up loving it. No idea what production it was. Oddly, this did not instill a blanket love for Shakespeare or a burning desire to seek out more of his work.)

Re: Friday

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I probably read Friday about halfway through making my way through Heinlein. I enjoyed the Mary Sue-ish aspects of the eponymous character, but still scratch my head at the structural mess that makes up its plot. Not sure what Heinlein was doing with that one. Curious as to what the negative side effects it caused were, though, if you feel like sharing.

I certainly didn't expect to enjoy The Taming of the Shrew as much as I did. And neither do I have a blanket love for Shakespeare either; some of the comedies are baldfaced hackwork.

Re: Friday

[frogfarm]

It could easily take a chapter of the book that is my life to describe the subtle and long-ranging destructive gender culturechaos from many sources, not just FRIDAY, which took years of painful experience to overcome. At least part of the fallout was my age at the time. Let's just say I wish my first Heinlein had been something with equal emphasis on character *and* plot. It's amazing how inconsistent he can be; I cringe at THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON for the most part, despite my philosophical sympathies, but the ending makes me cry every time and never feels manipulative in its tear-jerking. It's borderline wankery, but for that final stretch, he makes it work.

And Blackadder made it rather more difficult to enjoy Shakespeare's material. Or at least, most people's interpretation :)