Fossils and birds and Victor Hugo, mostly
Jul. 20th, 2015 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
heliopausaHere it is Monday morning, and I'm feeling mildly cheerful about productivity, having put the finishing touches to the footnotes on a due-today report before breakfast, and after having gone to morning exercises.
However, getting to that stage did mean that I missed large lumps of the weekend, and hence am late in linking, for anyone who missed it, this wonderfully detailed fossil of a winged-and-feathered dinosaur (you can see the feathers!). The wings have been judged too small to be effective for actual flight, but I'm imagining it could go as far as wing-assisted hops up into trees, like peacocks.
and as a follow-up to the link about bird and languages last time, it seems birds can also learn other bird languages - though only at the most basic level. :)
The cricket has been being watched live in this house, thanks to the Indian internet - and lo! there was scored the first double century at Lords by an australian batsman since Bradman! :) I know this won't mean much to lots of you out there, but it's significant to australians anyway, since Bradman is a name to conjure with. (Who reading this does know the name?)
In reading, I have begun Les Miserables, which I have never yet read - so far, just book one of the first volume, and the only main character has been the bishop, the one with the candlesticks, though Jean Valjean has yet to appear. I felt Hugo was laying it on a bit thick to start with - I get it, I get it - the Bishop is a Good Man. But in the end, it really is a very winsome portrait of goodness (leaving aside his treatment of the women of the house) - which is causing me to mull over the whole matter of the depiction of goodness in fiction - both nineteenth century and fan-. How often is it attempted, how is it shown as interesting - or even exciting? I don't think Dickens ever succeeds, does he? There's Joe and Biddy in Great Expectations, of course. Good but ineffectual.
(Mildly relevant quote from Simone Weil, more or less:
as for my own writing: I'm 500 words into an NFE possibility, without knowing if this is a story I really want to write or not, or if it's the one I'll end up writing, or if I'll end up throwing in the towel. So far there's nobody particularly Good in it.
However, getting to that stage did mean that I missed large lumps of the weekend, and hence am late in linking, for anyone who missed it, this wonderfully detailed fossil of a winged-and-feathered dinosaur (you can see the feathers!). The wings have been judged too small to be effective for actual flight, but I'm imagining it could go as far as wing-assisted hops up into trees, like peacocks.
and as a follow-up to the link about bird and languages last time, it seems birds can also learn other bird languages - though only at the most basic level. :)
The cricket has been being watched live in this house, thanks to the Indian internet - and lo! there was scored the first double century at Lords by an australian batsman since Bradman! :) I know this won't mean much to lots of you out there, but it's significant to australians anyway, since Bradman is a name to conjure with. (Who reading this does know the name?)
In reading, I have begun Les Miserables, which I have never yet read - so far, just book one of the first volume, and the only main character has been the bishop, the one with the candlesticks, though Jean Valjean has yet to appear. I felt Hugo was laying it on a bit thick to start with - I get it, I get it - the Bishop is a Good Man. But in the end, it really is a very winsome portrait of goodness (leaving aside his treatment of the women of the house) - which is causing me to mull over the whole matter of the depiction of goodness in fiction - both nineteenth century and fan-. How often is it attempted, how is it shown as interesting - or even exciting? I don't think Dickens ever succeeds, does he? There's Joe and Biddy in Great Expectations, of course. Good but ineffectual.
(Mildly relevant quote from Simone Weil, more or less:
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.”)
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.”)
Hugo uses this section, though, to shoe-horn in several essays and reflections about the wrongs of the time (which are also wrongs of our own time). I liked the essays and reflections, but they are very obviously primarily things he was determined to get into print somehow, whether it was part of the story or not - especially the long colloquy with the dying revolutionary.
as for my own writing: I'm 500 words into an NFE possibility, without knowing if this is a story I really want to write or not, or if it's the one I'll end up writing, or if I'll end up throwing in the towel. So far there's nobody particularly Good in it.
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Date: 2015-07-21 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-21 12:36 pm (UTC)*Not counting Pheidippides! The other two are W. G. Grace and Annette Kellermann.
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Date: 2015-07-22 05:53 pm (UTC)Lewis says something similar, too; something about saints being infinitely more interesting and variable than villains. In some characters, he pulled it off (Puddleglum is quite awesome), in others, I'm not so sure.
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Date: 2015-07-23 01:34 am (UTC)Lewis - I like to give him a reasonable benefit of the doubt, and assume that he meant some of his "good" characters to have the flaws which show so clearly. (Caspian being the prime example!) But yes, I think he over-reaches himself when he tries to show transcendental "goodness" - Ramandu?
I agree re: Puddleglum( whom nobody could call transcendental :D ).
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Date: 2015-07-23 10:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-07-23 10:24 am (UTC)And to warm up my own soup, as we say in Czech, some Czech film fairy tales also do a decent-to-very-good job of making good intriguing and exciting. :-) The Cinderella portrayed by Libuše Šafránková is undeniably good and undeniably interesting and intriguing and exciting and still fairy-tale-ish (something most other Cinderellas and Cinderella-characters don't quite manage). Others that spring to mind definitely benefit from all the actors clearly relishing their roles and being just right for them.
A huge part of it working is in making good characters active in some way rather than just passive sufferers - not that suffering cannot form part of the story, but having the character choose it in some way for some good reason rather than it falling on them and they oh-so-patiently bearing it... that's where Dickens seems to fail. I wonder how THAT particular feature of goodness could be made interesting? Turning the other cheek and whatnot, and now Methos walks in for me with his sarcastic remarks, so I have to stop because you're not really familiar with him, are you? :-)
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Date: 2015-07-25 04:44 am (UTC)Yes, definitely, about being active in some way - which is The P of P, since he really has to be active.
Re: Dickens and choosing suffering, there's Sydney Carton, of course, whose redemptive goodness leads to passive suffering - but chosen, as a very conscious act. I don't think that fails at all.
Is the difficulty partly that we (in fiction - and maybe in life) see a person's 'evil' as defined by single acts, whereas their 'good' has to be proved, usually, by a lifetime's cumulative goodness?
The fictional bad characters are accepted, too, as capable of doing one bad dramatic thing after another, but if a good character does one good dramatic thing after another, they are seen, outside of fantasy - and maybe in, as well - as laughably OTT heroes. (and of course if they do good undramatic things it makes pretty dull reading.)
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Date: 2015-07-25 07:54 am (UTC)And yay, you've seen it! I'm pushing its fame because it's quite famous already, so it's usually easier to find than other things...
Yes...
Date: 2015-07-25 04:01 am (UTC)Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” <<
I have found this to be prevailingly true, and try to write that way. I wind up with a lot of interesting evil characters anyway, but I have a hard time keeping them. They tend to get themselves killed, or else my readers throw them a lifeline out of the ditch they're in.
Re: Yes...
Date: 2015-07-25 04:49 am (UTC)I've mostly been showing people edging one way or the other - and now I come to think of it, looking at how their actions impinge on each other's paths to good or evil.