And you, Helen

In 1916, while in the army, Edward Thomas often sent drafts of his poems to his wife Helen. Some of those poems mentioned love, which caused her to worry that they were written about another woman. On February 24, Thomas wrote to her:

"As to the other verses about love you know that my usual belief is that I don't and can't love and haven't done for something near 20 years. You know too that you don't think my nature really compatible with love, being so clear and critical. You know how unlike I am to you, and you know that you love, so how can I? That is if you count love as any one feeling and not something varying infinitely with the variety of people."
- Edward Thomas

On April 9, 1916 - a year before he was killed at the battle of Arras - Thomas wrote the following untitled poem:

And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
Upon the travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
Anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.
- Edward Thomas

Barcarolle (or a rainy day song)

A cloud lets go of the moon
Her ribbons are all out of tune
She is skating on the ice
In a glass in the hands of a man
That she kissed on a train
And the children are all gone into town
To get candy and we are alone in the house here
And your eyes fall down on me.

And I belong only to you
The water is filling my shoes
In the wine of my heart there's a stone
In a well made of bone
That you bring to the pond
And I'm here in your pocket
Curled up in a dollar
And the chain from your watch around my neck
And I'll stay right here until it's time.

The girls all knit in the shade
Before the baby is made
And the branches bend down
To the ground here to swing on
I'm lost in the blond summer grass
And the train whistle blows
And the carnival goes
Till there's only the tickets and crows here
And the grass will all grow back

And the branches spell 'Alice'
And I belong only to you.

Doctor Who and racist/sexist hiring practices

Can I just write about this, please?

Seen on livejournal:

The short version is that, yes, 100% of the writers and directors were both male and white. Because Steven Moffat can't even be bothered to make a little effort to find one person of color and/or one woman. This explained a lot for me about why the show has been drenched in fail. The people at the top can't even bestir themselves to give a shit about their racist and sexist hiring practices. In all of Britain, tell me there isn't a single person of color and/or woman who would like to write or director for Doctor Who. Tell me, and you'd be a liar.

First of all, I think that for a show to be drenched in fail, the writing has to be bad. It doesn't actually matter if the person writing is black or white or Asian or whatever. It's the actual quality of the writing that matters.

Second, I am getting a little tired of people looking at the cast and crew of a show and raising hell when there isn't a "strong female character" or "strong colored character." For a society that loves artistic license so much, can't we allow the artists behind shows to decide what they will, and to let their own imaginations and talent dictate their creations, and not political correctness? I would rather that the writers be chosen because they're good, NOT because it would look good for the show to hire someone from a minority group. You can't just scream "racist!" or "sexist!" without any proof, and you can't just declare that a show is awful once you discover that the people behind the scenes are of a specific race or gender. It's unsound and it's not evidence-based, and it's such a hair-trigger reaction that really irritates me. People should be conscious of representation in the media, sure, but maybe they should do their research before saying things that are potentially libelous.

If we're going to discuss the quality of shows, let's dwell on the script, the production, the character development, the plot. Let's at least acknowledge that these are things that quality depends on--NOT whether the only black character in a recent episode gets killed within the first five minutes. (AND! It's a show that features, as its main characters, a couple--Amy and Rory--where the woman wears the pants in the relationship, and where the lead character's female love interest, River Song, is made to look superior to him in athleticism, in knowledge of things to come, in general awesomeness, and even in operation of his own spaceship. One of her regenerations was even black, which was completely unnecessary, and yet which was done in an effort to include a colored character. Isn't it just so convenient to overlook these things, as well as the existence of female producers for Doctor Who, when you're arguing about discrimination.)

The bottom line? People who write for one of the biggest shows in Britain should be hired because they're good enough, not because of tokenism.

A Three-pipe problem

I have to write this here, because no one in real life is interested enough to listen to it. Ha. Ha.

The Sherlockian , written by Graham Moore, came in 2010 to a world recently reminded of the existence of the Great Detective of Baker Street. There was the Hollywood film starring Robert Downey Jr., and that other unremarkable British film that piggybacked on its success, and then the BBC SHERLOCK series. In a way even the most staid Sherlockian purist should be grateful for the influx of new blood brought in by these adaptations. I mean, if the old school fandom could survive “Detective Conan” and “The Great Mouse Detective” and “Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century,” then what can’t we survive? The Baker Street Irregulars and other scion societies live on.

The adaptations also stirred activity by way of more online communities interested in discussing the canon as well as the newly-created fanon. I appreciate this because, being one of the first—if not the very first—fandom, Sherlock Holmes shouldn’t be lagging behind in the consciousness of geeks everywhere, while more and more fandoms crop up with every new book written, every new series filmed, every new movie made. Long before either the internet or Star Trek was born, fanfiction (pastiches) of Sherlock Holmes was being written and published and enjoyed worldwide. Authors now famous for a variety of things—GK Chesterton, Christopher Morley, Ronald Knox, and so forth—participated in the Game.

The Game, as stated in the second Morley principle, consists of pretending that “The characters in the stories are not fictitious creatures of some author's imagination. They are real people.” Arthur Conan Doyle, if he is mentioned at all, is mentioned as the Literary Agent of a real John Watson.

The Game began, with Ronald Knox and Christopher Morley, a new kind of literary criticism. For example, a biography of Sherlock Holmes—again, an entirely fictional character to a sane mind—was pieced together by WS Baring-Gould from tiny clues in the ACD’s narrative. The existence of a son by Irene Adler was even posited (and that son eventually turned out to be Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe—a fact still tenaciously believed by many). After all, Holmes himself said: “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” The application of Holmes’s own methods to the text spawned a game that is still being played more than a century later.

Which brings me to The Sherlockian , a book focusing heavily on the first and most exclusive Sherlockian society: The Baker Street Irregulars. To call them fans might be correct but inaccurate. These are scholars who have gained prestige in the study of Sherlock Holmes. Whether they’re doing it for fun, as Ronald Knox and Christopher Morley appear to have done, or for altogether different reasons, is immaterial. The point is this: in The Sherlockian , Alex Cane—an Irregular who claims to have found the lost volume of Arthur Conan Doyle’s diaries—is found dead in his hotel room, garroted with his own shoelaces and with the word ELEMENTARY written in blood on the wall.

The chilling part is: in 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green, a Baker Street Irregular and an authority on Arthur Conan Doyle, was found dead in his luxury flat, garroted by a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. No, he hadn’t found the missing volume of ACD’s diary, but the event did come after the sale of a collection of “lost material”—letters, drafts, notes—at Christie’s. He believed that these materials belonged in the British Public Library, where the public could access them, rather than being dispersed among private bidders, most of them American. He publicly opposed the sale. After some time, he began to believe that his life was in danger. Whether these concerns were unfounded is unknown. The coroner gave the case an open verdict—it was quite possibly suicide but nobody could rule out murder. The case remains unsolved even today, despite the best efforts of Sherlockians everywhere.

And that is probably the most interesting thing about Graham Moore’s novel, The Sherlockian —that it’s based on a real case. On the one hand, it does offer a Sherlockian the opportunity to read something (relatively) mainstream and enjoy being smug about something he already knows, but which has to be explained to the uninformed reader. There is hardly a page without a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story or to a known event or fact of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and times. And, I have to be honest, seeing this line from a well-known and much beloved poem about Sherlock Holmes--“Only those things the heart believes are true”—gave me goosebumps and made me want to put the book down to hold some tears back. (I posted the poem in this blog some time back; it’s found here.)

The Sherlockian captures some of the most frustrating and wonderful things about growing up obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. Harold, the main character and the only one who does manage to solve the mystery, is the socially awkward and youngest Irregular whose highest aspiration has always been to be inducted into the BSI. He likes Sherlock Holmes conventions because they are the only place that he can wear his deerstalker hat and people wouldn’t laugh at him. (He has what might be an eidetic memory and he probably has Asperger’s.) However, his lifelong obsession with Sherlock Holmes doesn’t stop him from seeing the flaws of either the creator or the creation, and he’s aware that he probably looks ridiculous to Sarah, the (Non-Sherlockian) journalist who accompanies him as he flies across the pond to solve the mystery. I suppose it’s the best perspective with which to view the fandom: a gut-wrenching obsession coupled with awareness of its inherent ridiculousness.

None of this squee-making fannishness, however, can disguise the fact that The Sherlockian is really two very flimsy whodunits combined into one mystery that is only slightly more substantial.

In the present day, Harold and Sarah track down the location of the diary and Alex Cane’s killer; in 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, brought to life by Graham Moore, are on the trail of the murderer of three young women. (As an additional layer of complexity, the mystery is also obliquely related to the "death" of Sherlock Holmes when ACD decided to push him off the Reichenbach.) Little impressive detection is actually done in either mystery. Most things that the author was at pains to conceal are actually very apparent from the first pages (e. g. Sarah’s true identity). And I know that real life doesn’t work like mystery novels do, but I wish that, in writing the Arthur-Bram mystery, Graham Moore had stuck to the first of Ronald Knox’s (50% tongue-in-cheek, 50% entirely serious) Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction: The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

Criticism on the nature of mysteries aside, The Sherlockian also offered little by way of narrative richness and style. I’m not Laurie R. King’s biggest fan—her characters, even if they aren’t Mary Sues or Gary Stus, still tend to be one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs—but I wonder what she could have done with the book, with her skill for weaving narratives with sumptuous detail, if the premise of The Sherlockian had fallen into her lap. I can think of a handful of Sherlock Holmes pasticheurs who might have handled the text more deftly. Even Neil Gaiman, whose work I don’t like but who apparently was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2005, might have written it better… no, wait—he couldn’t.

Still, The Sherlockian seems to fall apart if you take away the fun and interesting facts rooted in ACD’s canon. Mystery novelists have fought for so long to get the genre recognized as “legitimate” literature, and writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and PD James have gone to great lengths to ensure that their books are actually novels—concerned with the human experience and condition, not just telling a corking story. I don’t mean that Graham Moore’s novel is less legitimate or less clever; only that I found the sparse style unsuited for a novel which might have held so much potential. A novel that might have explored more thoroughly the nature of awkwardness and obsession and death among people who like murder so much in theory.

I would still recommend the book. After all, it isn’t everyday that a mainstream introduction to Sherlockian culture (of the BSI kind) comes along. And because I have a soft spot for the way the author brought to the fore one of the biggest Holmesian mysteries of all--why Sherlock Holmes was killed off, and why he came to live again in 1901. The book made me want to hunt for a black arm-band to wear in honor of Holmes's (temporary) death.

I just wouldn’t recommend the novel as a three-pipe problem.

And wow, I really hate that nobody reading this blog is going to get that last reference.

Links:
The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction: http://www.mysterylist.com/declog.htm
Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Knox):
http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/knox_essays_in_satire/essays_in_satire_knox.pdf
In the Beginning was Ronald Knox: http://members.cox.net/sherlock1/grand.htm
An article in The Guardian on Richard Lancelyn Green:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/may/23/books.booksnews

this timorous beastie

I once read this story where Snape (yeah yeah) made a very valid point. (In fic he's always making valid points anyway.) I mean about how people assume that Hermione has a very organized mind because she has all these timetables and lists, when in fact, it's people with disorganized minds who really need them. I think he was right. (It turns out I'm one of those pathetic people who quote fic wisdom as gospel.) I like making lists--grocery lists, things to do lists, things to bring on trips that are two months away, things to do in the summer when it's only September. Right now I'm up to my neck in radio transes, and my detox in between every two transes is making a list for a trip two weeks from now. It somehow feels like this tangled bramble that is my mind gets sorted out somehow, and it makes me less afraid of the future.

And I have no idea why I felt like sharing this now. Excuse me while I ramble on randomly.