I've had the term "Secret History" in my inventory lately, first from reading Emma Bull's Territory and watching Gaiman's Beowulf* last year, and finally from my brother describing my post on Elder Races, and Younger as "forensic ecology as literary analysis technique, a sub-genre of secret history literary analysis".

I noticed that I really like secret histories. This is my analysis of why I quite enjoyed the way the story of Beowulf was adapted for the movie, whereas my friend Thomas (once a medieval history, iirc) was much less happy with it.

Then last week antilles1382 linked Darths & Droids, a Star Wars (Phantom Menace) comic in the style of DM of the Rings**. Darths and Droids is absolutely hilarious. I was in pain from laughing while reading it.

Among other virtues, it is a secret history: it explains how many of the particularly stupid parts of Phantom Menace came to be. For example, the character of Jar-Jar Binks is conceived, named, and given a physical description by the baby sister of Qui-Gon's player, who brings her with him when he's stuck baby-sitting ("big floppy ears like a bunny! And a face like a pony! And he comes from an underwater city!")

And I noticed again that I really like secret histories. And then I noticed that the fact that forensic ecology as literary analysis is a sub-genre of secret history analysis is generalizable. Evolutionary/Ecological Biology is secret history; especially my favorite subfields of paleontology and behavioral ecology. These are fields which seek to find the stories behind the stories. To wonder, therefore, how they got that way.

Oops, I forgot part of this entry. We watch Across the Universe again last night. And it's not-exactly-kinda-really a secret history. It's goal is to create a world-story in which Beatles' songs make perfect sense in the conversation, ideally, a new and different sense than they made in their original context.

*Neverwhere is also secret history, a secret history of the London Underground (esp. the station names). Sandman, once or twice.
**The Hobbit is also a secret history.

Story #1: Passage

Excerpts from Sharing Knife: Passage went up on the HarperCollins site yesterday. At first, the excerpts were bizarrely the first 3 pages of each of the first 5 chapters (or so I hear). This seems like a reasonable way to preview a non-fiction book, but extraordinarily unhelpful for a novel.

( more story, a little review, and some thoughts on viewpoint technique )

Story #2: Lore goes to the Opera

Lore has a new Alt Text up, about going to see La Bohème, and enjoying it. I was amused by this line:

"I figure if I can enjoy grinding for Worn Dragonscales in Warcraft, I can sure as hell enjoy watching a busty Chilean soprano in a corset emote for a while."

But the really piece of the story I'm telling about his story is about his byline, which is often entertaining, though i think he used his best ones first. This one doesn't use the second half of the formula, but replaces it with an entertaining little side joke (set up by his comparison of himself to "Orlando Bloom. Well, OK, Elijah Wood. All right, Sean Astin" just previously):

"Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to assert that someone really ought to write an opera about the One Ring."

I was going to say, "surprisingly no one in the comments seemed to get it". But then I noticed the comments were being cut off, and once I expanded them, there was one comment that vaguely acknowledged the joke, but I think probably didn't realize that it was intentional (and I'm next to certain it was).

I guess the normal idiots who comment on his Alt Text because they're missing his irony don't know enough about Opera/German Mythology/Tolkien to complain about this one. (Actually, they've been pleasantly absent for a while now. Maybe they finally got bored and stopped reading a column they didn't think was funny. Novel approach, that.)

fiona was complaining about the d&d setting, in particular she doesn't like alignment (a commonly recognized problem), or the treatment of goblins.

I started thinking again about a framework I've somewhat codified that's hinted at or briefly discussed in pieces in d&d settings, which i think makes a number of things more palatable. Things like the treatment of goblins, and also my problem with the treatment of humans versus other races.

The framework is thus: in D&D, races age, each passing from Younger Race, into their particular age of glory, and on into the status of an Elder Race.

( Expansion )

I got a cold on Wednesday or there abouts. Thursday, I tried to get my contract materials back to Powerset by fax, but no luck. Eventually, I took them to kinko's and scanned them all in and made an Automator script that could combine pdf's into a single document and e-mailed them back.

That being completed, I was invited to call in for the weekly conference call/meeting of annotators on Friday at 1:00. Luckily Friday breakfast at Silver Spur was able to be moved up (Silver Spur has the best food), so I managed to squeeze in that between breakfast and running out the door to get on the bus.

By the time I got to San Jose, I was pretty miserable from running around at near the peak of my cold. Got to Sarah's house shortly before my scheduled individual call with my supervisor-guy (get off the phone, get on the bus, get off the bus, get on the phone). Then nap, then game. Game till very late (or in my case, this week, observe game till very late).

Up early the next afternoon to go see Beowulf. We managed to find a relatively cheap theater that had matinee prices. Got several people there. I didn't think of calling people to see if they got the e-mail until too late to do much good. The people were definitely going to come did get it, though, so that was good. emerald_moon519 and antilles1382 didn't get it, it sounded like, so they couldn't evaluate the low price i found and decide if it was low enough :-/

I liked the movie. It doesn't attempt to tell the story told in the poem of the same name, and certainly not to hit every scene or line. Instead, it tells a secret-history story: it tells a story that might have gotten writ down as the story we have in manuscript form, and a story, furthermore, which weaves together some of the seemingly unrelated events that happen to Beowulf (I can make a narrative connection between the first two monsters he fights in the poem, obviously; or a thematic connection between the first and last; but the whole set of three doesn't quite fit).

There was some Old English in the movie, which made me very happy. All of Grendel's lines are in Old English. Most are designed to be more or less understandable, but strange to the attentive, Modern-English-speaking audience. There's also a scene in Beowulf's late life, before the dragon incident, of the song of his battle with Grendel being sung in Old English.

Wiglaf has a much expanded role. I liked him a lot, but he becomes a much older character. I hope he will meet with animate_mush's approval.

Also, I have already seen reviews, for example, in the Boston Globe, which use the phrase, "Grendel's Mom has got it going on" (Also, the phrase "After all, if you had magical powers, wouldn't you turn yourself into naked Angelina Jolie?")

I gave a lecture in the theater before the movie :P ("You didn't realize you were signing up for a literary history lecture... oh wait, you're going to a movie with Aidan, you probably did.") And some more lecture after, at dinner, which turned into a brief summary of the Silmarillion.

We got dinner at a Italian place near the movie theater. I hear it had good pizza, but it wasn't very impressive, in general. My curly fries were pretty underdone. But I was able to later put them in the oven and make them much better.

Then we went back to sarkat's for a bit, and then out to see the Mythbuster guys with her dad and his friends. That was pretty entertaining, since the narration is the main part I dislike about the show, and this was just them talking.

Then back, and then back to Santa Cruz. Very busy two days.

Sunday was a lot less busy, but wracked with health problems. I had a bad asthma attack, triggered by my cold as it mostly went away. sarkat had a bad headache with some migraine-like qualities. We watched Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" as part of a program to fill in some of the Disney movies sarkat hasn't seen.

Got up this morning to do the work I got on Friday, which is training work and ideally would be in by this evening, in time for supervisor to give me feedback, and then some real work before he goes on vacation for Thanksgiving. I hadn't had any oppurtunity to do more than set up the annotation program during the busy, sick weekend. Luckily, that only took three hours and a bit, and I got it in with lots of time.

"You can compare copyright infringement to trespass but not to theft. You might as well compare it to other criminal offences as to theft: 'Fanfic is illegal. This is not an irrelevant concern. It is the keeping of an unlicensed slaughterhouse of intellectual property.'"
-legionseagle via Making Light, replying to Keith DeCandido

Also, read Game of the Gods again recently. I'm nearly positive I had read it before, or maybe only the first half± and then got sidetracked.

Possibly only Lia among my friends can fully enjoy it as much as i do.

Gonna try re-reading the Silmarillion with my sister. But we need to get/find a second copy first.