From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #141 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Wednesday, July 5 2000 Volume 02 : Number 141 Today's Subjects: ----------------- b/comments7/4 ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/structure ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/research ["Donald G. Keller" ] b/commedia ["Donald G. Keller" ] o/lacan?? ["Donald G. Keller" ] o/test ["Donald G. Keller" ] Re: b/structure [GHighPine@aol.com] Re: o/lacan?? [GHighPine@aol.com] b/little sister (spoilers for next season!) [meredith ] b/personality test [meredith ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:42:33 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/comments7/4 I remember from the GEnie topic days that when I got out of the habit of posting, the discussion would simply drop dead; and given that the =Buffy= season is over, it's not surprising that there's been no action around here. It's not like I haven't been busy; I've been doing a lot of research (and getting distracted in the process)--more about which in a bit-- trying to find a few more details to tuck in the corners of my arguments, and inching towards finishing my two pieces. I've got some notes for some old comments which I still want to deal with. David: We don't know why Buffy got her name, though it doesn't seem to be a nickname (like Muffy for Maureen)(I've often wondered if George Alec Effinger feels like he got ripped off). We know from "Something Blue" (Buffy's indignant answer to Spike) that her mother gave her the name, but the name has seldom been remarked upon. The real reason, of course, is extrinsic, for the shock/ironic value of the title =Buffy the Vampire Slayer=. Interesting about your "finding" the Cheese-Man in =Sandman=. I know the feeling; it's what's been happening to me constantly the last few years. I've presented =Buffy= material at conventions twice; both times I introduced it with a confession, basically saying I'd been a media snob for years, and now I'd had my comeuppance, because I'd never been as caught up in a TV show as I am with =Buffy=. After which I moved on to the idea that everything I read reminded me of the show, for example Dumezil... ...but I don't think this informal approach, which worked in that setting, is appropriate for an academic essay. I'm leaning now toward a short introduction asserting (without demonstrating) the basic assumptions I'm working under (=Buffy= is a myth and responds to that approach; she is a hero as well as a superhero; Jung's archetypes, especially the shadow, are appropriate; and let's move on to Dumezil). I also meant some time ago to comment further on the literary/nonliterary discussion, and given the time lag I'll keep this short. You're right, of course, that there are a number of different axes (intellectual/emotional, for example) which also can represent the difference between staying focused on the work of art or losing the focus. There are very simple extrinsic distractions, for example, like the phone ringing while you're reading, or the musician's equipment suddenly failing (I once saw a guitarist step on her cord and unplug herself mid-song); this is also why, for example, I actually prefer to stay home and watch a baseball game rather than go to the stadium, where there are so many distractions I can't enumerate them, and I lose track of entire =innings=. At home I can focus and pay attention pitch by pitch (not that I'm doing that with the game I have on now...) The bottom line I'm trying to get to here is that, of all the ways to be "kicked out" of my focus, "castle-building" is one of the =least= likely to deflect me. (Hardly a live performance goes by that I don't think about what it would be like to be up there myself; but that's a momentary passing thought.) (What's the Maslovian hierarchy, by the way?) We've mentioned =The Prisoner= in passing once or twice here, and it's still my opinion that it was the best TV series I ever saw. When I went to my storage space this weekend (first of the month), I dug through a box of videotapes there and found my complete =Prisoner= set (taped off Baltimore public TV by my brother in the 80s sometime). (What a perfect candidate for a DVD set, by the way.) I watched the first episode, and you know what? It still stands up--not as dated as you might fear. Nothing really like it on TV, then or since; what I found interesting this time around was that it owes much less to the various 60s spy series and movies (though it certainly is based on them as well) as on such more "experimental" works like French New Wave film (=Last Prisoner at Marienbad= as it were). The late 60s was a very fertile artistic time (in rock music and science fiction as well), and =The Prisoner= is a prime example thereof. I'm gradually going to watch the rest of the series and make some more comments then. (I do remember, as do you, that some of the episodes were kind of dumb.) Jennifer: Thanks for the arithmetic and computer lesson. You have to remember that I almost never have made submissions in conventional manuscript form; my contributions to the =Encyclopedia of Fantasy= went by e-mail. And when I was an editor, most manuscripts came with the author's wordcount on them. I do remember the 250 words per page manuscript/400 words per page finished book normal counts. I guess it was the computer translation I needed most. I followed your instructions and came up with about 22 pages for each of the essays, which is (multiply by 1,000, divide by 4) about 5500 words; meaning I have enough material that I can add a little bit or cut a fair amount and still be within parameters. What I needed to know. I also confirmed my suspicion that the even easier way of figuring wordcount is divide the computer K-count by 6 (5 characters + space), so that roughly 36K = 6,000 words. My presentations (you saw the second one at Readercon, right?) were more written than they seemed; I'm not the best presenter in the world, and if I hesitated and stammered it was because I lost my place in the writing, like as not. If I do the dream-piece at this year's Readercon it'll all be written out, since it'll be due about two weeks later. By the way, if you refer back to my synopses of "Restless" (b/restlessmap through b/restlessmap4), you will find that I refer to the CHEESE MAN (in caps, even) when he appears briefly in each of the four dreams. Greer: Belated thanks for noting the Padel book (though it doesn't seem to quite be out yet); unfortunately I haven't been able to track down the TLS with the review. My initial reaction is, of =course= music (especially live music) is of the same "order of being" (whatever we mean by that) as myth; that's why among other things that pop stars get treated like mythic beings. (This is probably true of film as well.) Is it possible that it costs only 8 pounds? I was looking at amazon.co.uk for that and the Dunsany omnibus which David mentioned, which is only about 7 pounds. That's about $12 or less for each of them, which seems remarkably low. By the way: can you remind me of the release date of the new Eliza Carthy album? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:45:27 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/structure One of the things I've been "wasting" my time with is episode- structure, after we discovered the uneven length of the dreams in "Restless." So I went through a representative miscellany of episodes (picking on the ones that had dreams I was using for my essay, actually), and compiled the following table. The first number in parentheses is the teaser; the other four are the four acts. =Many= episodes end with a scene or two that could be called a coda (which balance the teaser), as "Restless" did with the final waking scene; but others (especially Part One of two-parters) do not; so I've not broken down the fourth act. Anyway, here are the stats: (2) 9 13 6 11 "Restless" (2) 8 8 14 10 "Graduation Day" I (5) 11 7 11 8 "Graduation Day" II (5) 8 12 9 8 "Hush" (2) 9 12 12 6 "This Year's Girl" (1) 7 14 10 10 "Who Are You" (2) 11 9 12 8 "Surprise" (2) 6 12 13 9 "Innocence" In the sampling here, each of the four acts has short and long segments, and each episode has short and long segments; so there's no pattern as to =which= acts are longer and shorter, but there is a pattern of unbalanced acts. The other interesting item is that, while on the whole the teasers are short, in some cases they're longer: "Hush" with its dream and two connected waking scenes afterward, for example. I could, of course, spend even =more= time going through all the episodes, but I think this is a good enough initial sampling. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:50:08 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/research Another way that I've been "wasting" time is spending an hour at a go "window shopping" at abebooks.com, the best used-books site I've found; frequently I'll look up a handful of books I found at the library, and the commentary will run "ah, I can get that one for $8...that one $10 but it's hardcover...hm, that one's $15...darn, have to pay $20 for that one..." etc. Actually found a copy of the one Dumezil in English I didn't have, =The Plight of the Sorcerer=, but haven't ordered it because I had another look at the book in the library and determined that I don't need it for my short-term research. However, I did find a Quebec bookstore that had a copy of Dumezil's =magnum opus=, the 3-volume =Mythe et epopee=, in its paperback 3-in-1 edition, for about half what the local French bookstore wanted to charge me. So I ordered it, it arrived yesterday, and I've already leafed through it and found some good small facts. A couple weeks ago I was perusing the Mythology section in Barnes & Noble, and came across a brand-new book, =The Epic Hero= by Dean A. Miller. A quick glance confirmed that it was an immediately useful book--a Dumezilian approach (the back cover blurb by Dumezil's chief English commentator C. Scott Littleton proclaimed it "a masterpiece") well aware of previous treatments such as Rank, Raglan, and Joseph Campbell. Exorbitantly-priced, though. So I went home and checked abebooks.com...and found a bookstore listing a review copy for half price. Sent them a check. And the book arrived last week. It's very dense and thorough, and I've been going through it carefully and find it very strong; although it probably will prove =more= useful for "Buffy as Hero/Buffy as Superhero" when I get to that. Speaking of which, I think I've found a couple good books for the superhero part: Ariel Dorfman's =The Empire's Old Clothes= (subtitled "What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds") is written by a Chilean author with some distance and perspective on American culture, and writes quite damningly about it. What he has to say about the Lone Ranger is quite interesting and applicable to Buffy, and I'll go back to it. Similarly with =The American Monomyth= by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, which I'd looked at before but cursorily; it also treats the Lone Ranger, as well as Batman and Superman, and has some trenchant sociological comments to make. And they also cite Richard Slotkin's books, which I also have around, which deal more specifically with the Western (but that's also applicable to Buffy). So I'm feeling a little better informed in that particular sphere. What I may have spent the most time this week, though, is the brand-new second edition of William Doty's =Mythography=. I had already found the first edition a nearly-indispensable resource; the second edition is even better, with a =76-page= bibliography and very good surveys of various approaches to the study of myth; kind of an annotated syllabus of a lifetime's study, really. And it's been easy to get sidetracked into many interesting byways. At the same time I've been more focused on specifically mythic-warrior type stuff, including a number of 19th-century periodical articles, and have found a few useful items. The most startling, and the most immediately salient, is something I knew about, but comes now suddenly in relevance due to more recent episodes. One of the "three sins of the warrior" according to Dumezil, as illustrated by Indra in Hindu mythology, is adultery with a member of the third function (the general populace, loosely speaking). Indra accomplishes this by =taking on the semblance= of the woman's husband. This is hardly a unique mythologem, being entirely typical of Zeus in Greek mythology, for example (and Zeus corresponds to Indra in certain ways, while Hercules corresponds closer in other ways). It suddenly struck me the other day that, in thinking about Faith committing the three sins in "This Year's Girl"/"Who Are You," that that is exactly what she did--took on Buffy's semblance, as it were, and went after Riley. Weird stuff. One more fact to carpenter in... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:53:31 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/commedia In one of my books of alchemy I came across a mention of William Blake using alchemical symbolism, so I ended up looking through my complete Blake and several books about Blake (acquiring along the way a copy of Northrop Frye's =Fearful Symmetry=, which looks very thorough); one book I encountered was Martin Bidney's =Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination= (1988). The following excerpts are from pp. 112-13, under the subhead "The Genre: Multiple-Quest Commedias" (in the chapter "Fourfold Visions"), the topic being Blake's =The Four Zoas= and Goethe's =Faust=: "...a new literary genre, the multiple-quest commedia...all four Quaternals participate in the descent-ascent progression; all experience a union with their creative counterparts of the opposite sex...all four...play an active role in working out their creator's...resolution. "...the descent-ascent structure of a dream followed by an awakening...a prolonged descent into the lower layers of the psyche, concluding with a final scene of transformed, awakened vision. As dream-descents, the two poems combine past-oriented or 'Freudian' features with future-oriented or 'Jungian' ones. In Freudian fashion, each poem presents embodiments of long-cultivated obsessions with a complex past....Troubled feelings and frustrated impulses attain quasi-independent status and run amuck; the result is both unrestrained wish-fulfillment and nightmare....But the feeling of awakening in both poems is equivocal, for it, too, is visionary and is connected with the future-oriented, integrating insights largely worked out in the course of the dream. The dream-work..., in Jungian future-oriented fashion, points the way toward the full acceptance of Holy Quaternities, with each Quaternal also ready to accept a creative counterpart of the opposite sex, an anima or animus. Dream-commedias unite the obsessiveness of Freudian wish-fulfillment nightmares...with the synthesis-visions of Jungian mandalas... "Every dream-descent should be followed by an ascent....But the descent, like the ascent, is also valuable...[in] an educational, cathartic function...both harrowing and therapeutic....But...there are no real, permanent deaths;...dream-sickness becomes dream-cure." (I've cut more than two pages down to these few paragraphs, mostly by removing specific references.) As usual, I wonder if it's just me, or does it sound like he's talking about "Restless"? Spooky stuff. It does give me another angle for what is starting to look like =another= very busy, big section of my =Buffy= material, which as I said I'm calling "The Scooby Quaternio," wherein I intend to explore why the four main characters form such a strong and complete unit, using mythological material and (so it seems now) other symbology. This will also be useful in case I write up my "Restless" material in a more formal manner (which could very possibly be part of "The Scooby Quaternio" as well). But that's for the future. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 17:58:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/lacan?? "...lacks information or knowledge sufficient to form a belief as to the truth..." --formula from legal documents Anybody out there understand Lacan? I swear to you I was =trying= to focus; but in the process of reading through Doty's =Mythography= I kept running into his mention of a Lacanian reading of Jung, which posited (and I'm making this =very= short) that language is =prior= to the archetype. Which seemed like nonsense to me. Doty cites Eric Gould's =Mythic Intentions in Modern Literature= as being based on this reading of archetypes; that's a book I've looked at a couple times and found =very= hard going. There's also a book called =Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth= by Deeanne Westbrook, an interesting topic in and of itself, which draws on Gould (and through him on Lacan), and seems like easier going. And there's Lacan himself and his commentators. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a psychoanalyst who became one of the most important theorists of the last half of the 20th century; being a follower of Freud and French to boot, his theories are so complicated, and so counterintuitive, that they seem to me to have Ptolemaic epicycles compared to (what seems to me) Jung's much more sensible and Occam's-razor model of the mind. Nevertheless, Lacan is very frequently cited; as with a lot of this pomo/structuralist/semiotic stuff, my first encounter with him was in Samuel R. Delany's work. Anyway...trying to keep it =very= simple, Lacan's most famous statement is "the unconscious is structured like a language." Note carefully that this is "structured like" a simile; but Lacan as well as his followers seem--to my reading--to collapse it, not into a metaphor, but into an identity: that the =content= of the unconscious is =only= verbal language. You rang??? Sorry; the unconscious, even in a high-verbal person like me, is primarily imagistic/symbolic; the verbal language part has as much to do with the original images as a baseball commentator's spiel does with the game itself. So I've been distracted this week; I go to the library, get out half a dozen books about Lacan, flip through them, take half of them back as I go to the library again, get out another half dozen. Lacan himself is damn near impenetrable; this is a man who actually titled an essay "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," which would be difficult for even an expert parodist to top. James M. Millard's =Using Lacan, Reading Fiction= looks like a useful book, an introduction to Lacan's theories (including a diagram of dizzying complexity expressing "a full synthesis of the terms of Lacan's thought") and some specific applications of them; Fredric Jameson's essay "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan" seems to have much food for thought (though reading Jameson is no picnic either; many of these people make Delany at his most abstruse seem straightforward); and Francois Roustang's =The Lacanian Delusion= seems a sensible debunking. (Lacan is in fact quite controversial, especially among feminists since he preserves some of the most patriarchal aspects of Freud's thought.) My plan is to put this material aside for the nonce while I finish my essays; but for the future I can see myself trying to produce a Jungian reading of Lacan. Which would be an adventure. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 18:00:55 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/test You're in a bookstore. Displayed among the new books is one with a pale pastel impressionistic cover. Near the top of the cover is a line of medium-sized cover type: Lucy Church Amiably And further down, in larger cover-type: GERTRUDE STEIN Now, the question I asked myself was, when this happened to me (and ask yourself before you scroll down): was this a work by Gertrude Stein, or a study of Gertrude Stein by a woman with an unusual name? Couldn't make up my mind. The semiotics seemed pretty balanced. (What the pomo guys call "undecidable," I guess.) I asked the friend with me the same question; my friend couldn't decide either. So I picked up the book and looked at the back. (Enough spoiler-space?) =Lucy Church Amiably= is a little-known pastoral novel by Gertrude Stein (if "novel" is the term we're looking for), much admired by several blurb-writers. =In retrospect= I should have gone with the name, which has a Steinian ring, as being her creation; but I've come across some pretty strange names in my research recently (like Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, author of several books on Newton and alchemy); and the arrangement of the type on the cover suggested a nonfiction book. So you never know. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 20:38:48 EDT From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: b/structure In a message dated 7/4/00 2:47:23 PM Pacific Daylight Time, dgk@panix.com writes: << In the sampling here, each of the four acts has short and long segments, and each episode has short and long segments; so there's no pattern as to =which= acts are longer and shorter, but there is a pattern of unbalanced acts. >> In television writing, there is no set length for acts, though 18 minutes is considered to be the upper limit. (As you obviously know, but which I want to clarify just in case anyone here doesn't, an "act" in television is a segment between commercials. This causes confusion because the saem word "act" is also used in the sense of three-act structure -- i.e., setup / development / resolution. BTW, what you refer to as a coda is called an epilog in the biz. And a teaser is a teaser.) Each act is supposed to have its own mini-three-act structure (set-up, development, and climax instead of resolution). Naturally, the length of time for each of these mini-stories varies. The most crucial thing in a television script (according to my friends in the tv biz, this is the first thing that the network execs zero in on when reviewing a script) is the act breaks. The act break is the mini-cliffhanger -- or mystery, or puzzle, or shock, whatever -- before each commercial break. All the acts must build to something that will keep the viewer from changing channels during the commercials (and keep them sitting through the commercials). Conventionally, the first act must have the strongest act break, IOW, must end in a mini-climax that is dwarfed only by the main climax of the episode. This is because it is believed that if you have the viewer hooked enough to pass the first commercial break, it won't be as hard to keep him or her through the rest of the show. So the second and third act break can be less intense, but then the climax of the episode in the final act must, of course, be the most intense point of all. Length of acts is not terribly significant in the script structure. Varying lengths don't make for an unbalanced structure, either. TV scripts are structured from one act break to the next act break, and what balances the structure is the relative intensity of the climaxes. If you analyze the structure in these terms, you will probably find that BUFFY tends to follow the common patterm in which the shortest acts have the most intense climaxes, and the longest acts have the less intense climaxes -- arguably packing a relatively similar amount of =total= emotional and intellectual content in some unquantifiable way. So if you really want to analyze the structure of these or any other TV scripts, look from act break to act break. Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 23:20:35 EDT From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: o/lacan?? In a message dated 7/4/00 3:00:13 PM Pacific Daylight Time, dgk@panix.com writes: << Lacan as well as his followers seem--to my reading--to collapse it, not into a metaphor, but into an identity: that the =content= of the unconscious is =only= verbal language. You rang??? >> That seems like a truly strange idea to me. If you get any insight into the reasoning processes behind it, I would be interested to hear it. << Sorry; the unconscious, even in a high-verbal person like me, is primarily imagistic/symbolic; the verbal language part has as much to do with the original images as a baseball commentator's spiel does with the game itself. >> Excellent metaphor. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 23:27:32 -0400 From: meredith Subject: b/little sister (spoilers for next season!) Hi! If you don't wanna know anything about the upcoming season, delete now. Just stumbled across this: Buffy Adopts a Sis, Actresses Queue for Role Wednesday, June 21, 2000 By Adam Buckman NEW YORK — Young actresses are lining up for a shot at playing a "little sister" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A new character named Dawn, aged between 10 and 15 years old, is slated to join the popular WB show as a regular, but the part has not yet been cast. The girl, whom Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) will sort-of adopt as a "little sister," has the power to channel evil spirits and dead people, according to a source close to the show. Source also say the young girl will develop a crush on Xander (Nicholas Brendon), another one of the show's regulars, which may spark hard feelings from Anya (Emma Caulfield) an insanely jealous, sex-crazed, 1,120-year-old former demon. The casting sessions are expected to be over soon, as shooting for the new season is scheduled to begin next month. In the popular fantasy series — now heading into its fifth season — Gellar plays Buffy Summers, born to protect the world from evil, but yearning to be a regular girl. Her small group of friends, who call themselves the Scooby gang, help Buffy in her fight. This past season the gang headed to college after their high-school was destroyed in a much-publicized fight with a giant demon. The last new character, a college student/special operations soldier named Riley Finn (Marc Blucas), joined the show earlier this season as Buffy's new boyfriend. Her first love, vampire Angel (David Boreaneaz), left the show for his own spin-off last season. "Be back before dawn", indeed! Hmmm.... +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 23:50:30 -0400 From: meredith Subject: b/personality test Hi! Here's an amusing little summertime diversion: http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/9315/quiz/enter.html Find out which Buffy character you most closely resemble! Apparently I'm most like Jenny Calendar. Hmmm... +==========================================================================+ | Meredith Tarr meth@smoe.org | | New Haven, CT USA http://www.smoe.org/~meth | +==========================================================================+ | "things are more beautiful when they're obscure" -- veda hille | | *** TRAJECTORY, the Veda Hille mailing list: *** | | *** http://www.smoe.org/meth/trajectory.html *** | +==========================================================================+ ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #141 *****************************