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primeideal[Edit to add: Last week I lost my wallet on the bus. Reported it to lost and found right away, but no luck. It wasn't stolen/no unexpected credit card transactions, just made me feel like an idiot. But I was able to start the ball rolling on getting stuff replaced, and debit card I was able to get in person rather than by mail, so that was great. I almost mentioned it in the first draft of this post but it's like...it's fine now, I'm not worried.
Then I wrote this entire post and only later did I realize I might. Have left my e-reader with all the annotations/highlights/stuff to remember I just made. On the train. aaaAAAa I will call the lost and found tomorrow but, really feeling like an idiot again. D: ]
Very close to hearing back on the thing I've been working on for the last few months. If it's a rejection I know I'll get over it eventually, but just the nerves of being on tenterhooks for the last few days.
A couple weeks ago we had a snowstorm that, while not as epic as anticipated, was still enough to require a lot of road thawing, so I got two and a half days off of work, which was great. The joke is that I make fun of people out here for not being able to drive in the snow, because where I grew up, most people can and do drive in the snow. "But you can't drive in the snow either." Right, but I also can't drive at all, so that's totally different :P
Anyway, obviously this was a good excuse to revisit "The Worst Journey in the World" and have emotions about it all over again! Maybe this time around I will even get to writing kinkmeme fills because I have a lot emotions, but it's just so hard to keep all the details/canon review stuff in my head at once...
This is probably going to repeat myself from several previous posts (see, "polar nonsense" tag), but I wanted to have it in one place:
Around ten years ago I started keeping spreadsheets of all the books, etc. I read (inspired by board game tracking) to have at least one-line summaries of what I thought. This is the entirety of my review of a book that was published in 2004. I read it in 2017, so several years before falling into the crevasse fannishly:
"Very funny parts (Katherine’s bluntness, horses Davy and Jones drowning, dentistry plus stray cats). Interesting that it was explicitly written as straight-up anti-revisionist history. Needless dig at Minnesotans."
"Antarctic history" is somewhat of an oxymoron. As opposed to, say, the Arctic regions, there is no native human population. Everyone who's traveling there is there because they chose to be.
Terra Nova was 1910-13, so a little more than a century ago. That's been enough time for at least three "levels" of history:
Level 1: Scott et al. were very brave, it's admirable how much we can take from their diaries. Stiff upper lips, understatement like Oates', etc. is something we should all strive for!
Level 2: The Polar Party was not all that, they did not plan well, and most of what they are famous for is dying. Amundsen was first to the Pole with no drama, and he has to share nomenclature of the station with Scott? Not fair. Are we sure Oates even said the thing or did Scott make it up to look good in the press? If it was that cool why did Wilson not even bother to write it down?
Level 3: With the knowledge of Antarctic temperatures and conditions that they had, they were fine actually, they were just unlucky. (The book I read in 2017 was basically this, with a side of "I'm rich enough that I can be a gentleman explorer, so having been to Antarctica, I can say with authority that the guys on level 2 are being mean.) Wilson's notes towards the end are very sparse, he barely mentions his own snow-blindness, so maybe we can't read anything into that.
Level 4 (only comparatively recent research, I think I read this book too, but it would have been before I started booklogging): Okay but like...Oates very possibly abused an underage child, if so that's extremely bad, you can't just say "times were different then," even in 1900 having sex with 12-year-olds was a no. So maybe he should not be on a pedestal.
What struck me in 2017 was not anything in particular about Scott or Oates or Amundsen that I didn't already know, nor did people like Wilson or Bowers register on me enough to make an impression; what was weird about it was that Antarctica is famous enough to have "straight-up anti-revisionist history."
Cherry-Garrard, writing ten years after the events (and after coming through World War I), is working on Level 1-plus-epsilon. He's like "we got a lot of hero-worship when we got home, it was overwhelming. Scott was not a larger-than-life hero, he was a flawed human with a lot of neuroses and gastrointestinal issues."
But I think I saw descriptions of Cherry as "traumatized WWI vet" and sort of misosmosed the book by assuming it was more on Level 2, when actually it's mostly on Level 1. (In particular, I hadn't known/remembered anything about the Winter Journey before that book, and so Wilson and Bowers in particular come across as, if not superhuman, at the very least super humans from someone who knew them up close.)
If I were to try to steelman the Level 2 position, a couple places I could give them the benefit of the doubt:
-it's possible that some of the reaction is to Scott as English hero, not just heroism in general. I'm not British! I think stiff upper lips and emotional understatement are admirable, not because they're specific to any one culture, but because there's too much traumadumping and emotional vomit in the world in general. But maybe it's like "our country does too much emphasizing the good parts about our own history and not enough talking about the bad parts, or, in this case, the cool stuff that Norway does." In which case, I might still disagree, but that feels less targeted at me; my country has its own history and its own problems!
-it's possible that the criticism is less directed towards Scott et. al themselves, and more so at the historians who were working on Level 1. Like, however you feel about the naming of the polar station, you can't exactly blame Scott himself for that choice, he'd been dead for a couple decades.
But it still comes across as "very rude of these British chaps to be so eloquent and well-written while they were literally dying, come on guys, you should have just been petty jerks. Also very rude of you, later generations, to be emotionally impacted by that eloquence. They didn't accomplish that much except putting their empire's flag somewhere that Norway had already been, and imperialism is bad mkay."
But.
A few years after Terra Nova, World War I happened. About ten million military people died, among them, Harry Pennell. It's possible that, if the Polar Party had survived, someone like Oates might have died the same way.
World War I was not a good war. It did not free slaves. It did not defeat fascism. It was fought because of a bunch of entangling alliances that nobody knew how to get out of; there was a bunch of agonizing and futile trench warfare; the end position was pretty much the same as the beginning. It wasn't even a war to end all wars, because German resentment about the Treaty of Versailles helped start World War II a couple decades later.
Ten million soldiers died, arguably, for nothing.
I am sure that among them were soldiers who demonstrated virtues like bravery and selflessness and all that good stuff. And I think it likely that when some people, like me, complain about "this was so stupid, a bunch of people killed each other for no reason and nothing good came from it, why do we have to learn about this kind of thing, are you just trying to make us miserable?" That other people will say "hey, it wasn't their fault, they had to be there. So don't insult the troops, show some respect. This is important and you have to learn about it, because we're human, killing each other pointlessly is what we do, that's all it has been and all it'll ever be."
There is no history in Antarctica. There were no indigenous people displaced. No wars. No genocide. No slavery. Nothing except the bullshit penguins. Except trying to plant your flag in the southernmost point on the map, not because it's useful or practical, but because it's there, it's at the extreme.
Child abuse is still unequivocally awful. A lot of Antarctic science today revolves around climate change, which makes me anxious, because it's one of those things where no matter how much I try to make myself small or miserable, it's not enough. But. Compared to literally any other place or time in human history? Antarctica is where it's at.
When I talk about "the two types of people," sometimes I say "the kids and the adults" or "the autistics and the neurotypicals" or "the shallow and the deep" or "the questers and the family people," and none of these are precisely what I'm getting at, but they're all swirling around the same thing. And another way of getting at the dichotomy is "the people who find a lot to admire in Scott et al's deaths, but feel like it's pointless to keep ruminating about stuff like WWI," versus "the people who think it's important and necessary to dwell on stuff like WWI, but find it unseemly and embarrassing to admire Scott et al." Which, obviously, this dichotomy does not encompass everyone in the whole world.
People who make a big deal about the difference between parody and satire often describe the latter as a higher art, something caustic, political, critiquing the real world and trying to advance justice. Pratchett was a satirist. I am not a satirist. My writing is not on that level.
But I am a parodist. And I think, sometimes, we can take the leap from "let's point and laugh at this fictional world, because it's absurd" to "sometimes our world is kind of absurd too, let's go ahead and point and laugh at it, because laughter helps us get through."
Why do I write? Because words are the best tool I have to illustrate what it's like to be me. If, for one moment, I can help someone in group 2 see what it's like to be in group 1, and say "huh, yeah, I guess from a certain perspective the group 2 way of looking at things is kind of silly"--then I feel like I've accomplished something.
Then I wrote this entire post and only later did I realize I might. Have left my e-reader with all the annotations/highlights/stuff to remember I just made. On the train. aaaAAAa I will call the lost and found tomorrow but, really feeling like an idiot again. D: ]
Very close to hearing back on the thing I've been working on for the last few months. If it's a rejection I know I'll get over it eventually, but just the nerves of being on tenterhooks for the last few days.
A couple weeks ago we had a snowstorm that, while not as epic as anticipated, was still enough to require a lot of road thawing, so I got two and a half days off of work, which was great. The joke is that I make fun of people out here for not being able to drive in the snow, because where I grew up, most people can and do drive in the snow. "But you can't drive in the snow either." Right, but I also can't drive at all, so that's totally different :P
Anyway, obviously this was a good excuse to revisit "The Worst Journey in the World" and have emotions about it all over again! Maybe this time around I will even get to writing kinkmeme fills because I have a lot emotions, but it's just so hard to keep all the details/canon review stuff in my head at once...
This is probably going to repeat myself from several previous posts (see, "polar nonsense" tag), but I wanted to have it in one place:
Around ten years ago I started keeping spreadsheets of all the books, etc. I read (inspired by board game tracking) to have at least one-line summaries of what I thought. This is the entirety of my review of a book that was published in 2004. I read it in 2017, so several years before falling into the crevasse fannishly:
"Very funny parts (Katherine’s bluntness, horses Davy and Jones drowning, dentistry plus stray cats). Interesting that it was explicitly written as straight-up anti-revisionist history. Needless dig at Minnesotans."
"Antarctic history" is somewhat of an oxymoron. As opposed to, say, the Arctic regions, there is no native human population. Everyone who's traveling there is there because they chose to be.
Terra Nova was 1910-13, so a little more than a century ago. That's been enough time for at least three "levels" of history:
Level 1: Scott et al. were very brave, it's admirable how much we can take from their diaries. Stiff upper lips, understatement like Oates', etc. is something we should all strive for!
Level 2: The Polar Party was not all that, they did not plan well, and most of what they are famous for is dying. Amundsen was first to the Pole with no drama, and he has to share nomenclature of the station with Scott? Not fair. Are we sure Oates even said the thing or did Scott make it up to look good in the press? If it was that cool why did Wilson not even bother to write it down?
Level 3: With the knowledge of Antarctic temperatures and conditions that they had, they were fine actually, they were just unlucky. (The book I read in 2017 was basically this, with a side of "I'm rich enough that I can be a gentleman explorer, so having been to Antarctica, I can say with authority that the guys on level 2 are being mean.) Wilson's notes towards the end are very sparse, he barely mentions his own snow-blindness, so maybe we can't read anything into that.
Level 4 (only comparatively recent research, I think I read this book too, but it would have been before I started booklogging): Okay but like...Oates very possibly abused an underage child, if so that's extremely bad, you can't just say "times were different then," even in 1900 having sex with 12-year-olds was a no. So maybe he should not be on a pedestal.
What struck me in 2017 was not anything in particular about Scott or Oates or Amundsen that I didn't already know, nor did people like Wilson or Bowers register on me enough to make an impression; what was weird about it was that Antarctica is famous enough to have "straight-up anti-revisionist history."
Cherry-Garrard, writing ten years after the events (and after coming through World War I), is working on Level 1-plus-epsilon. He's like "we got a lot of hero-worship when we got home, it was overwhelming. Scott was not a larger-than-life hero, he was a flawed human with a lot of neuroses and gastrointestinal issues."
But I think I saw descriptions of Cherry as "traumatized WWI vet" and sort of misosmosed the book by assuming it was more on Level 2, when actually it's mostly on Level 1. (In particular, I hadn't known/remembered anything about the Winter Journey before that book, and so Wilson and Bowers in particular come across as, if not superhuman, at the very least super humans from someone who knew them up close.)
If I were to try to steelman the Level 2 position, a couple places I could give them the benefit of the doubt:
-it's possible that some of the reaction is to Scott as English hero, not just heroism in general. I'm not British! I think stiff upper lips and emotional understatement are admirable, not because they're specific to any one culture, but because there's too much traumadumping and emotional vomit in the world in general. But maybe it's like "our country does too much emphasizing the good parts about our own history and not enough talking about the bad parts, or, in this case, the cool stuff that Norway does." In which case, I might still disagree, but that feels less targeted at me; my country has its own history and its own problems!
-it's possible that the criticism is less directed towards Scott et. al themselves, and more so at the historians who were working on Level 1. Like, however you feel about the naming of the polar station, you can't exactly blame Scott himself for that choice, he'd been dead for a couple decades.
But it still comes across as "very rude of these British chaps to be so eloquent and well-written while they were literally dying, come on guys, you should have just been petty jerks. Also very rude of you, later generations, to be emotionally impacted by that eloquence. They didn't accomplish that much except putting their empire's flag somewhere that Norway had already been, and imperialism is bad mkay."
But.
A few years after Terra Nova, World War I happened. About ten million military people died, among them, Harry Pennell. It's possible that, if the Polar Party had survived, someone like Oates might have died the same way.
World War I was not a good war. It did not free slaves. It did not defeat fascism. It was fought because of a bunch of entangling alliances that nobody knew how to get out of; there was a bunch of agonizing and futile trench warfare; the end position was pretty much the same as the beginning. It wasn't even a war to end all wars, because German resentment about the Treaty of Versailles helped start World War II a couple decades later.
Ten million soldiers died, arguably, for nothing.
I am sure that among them were soldiers who demonstrated virtues like bravery and selflessness and all that good stuff. And I think it likely that when some people, like me, complain about "this was so stupid, a bunch of people killed each other for no reason and nothing good came from it, why do we have to learn about this kind of thing, are you just trying to make us miserable?" That other people will say "hey, it wasn't their fault, they had to be there. So don't insult the troops, show some respect. This is important and you have to learn about it, because we're human, killing each other pointlessly is what we do, that's all it has been and all it'll ever be."
There is no history in Antarctica. There were no indigenous people displaced. No wars. No genocide. No slavery. Nothing except the bullshit penguins. Except trying to plant your flag in the southernmost point on the map, not because it's useful or practical, but because it's there, it's at the extreme.
Child abuse is still unequivocally awful. A lot of Antarctic science today revolves around climate change, which makes me anxious, because it's one of those things where no matter how much I try to make myself small or miserable, it's not enough. But. Compared to literally any other place or time in human history? Antarctica is where it's at.
When I talk about "the two types of people," sometimes I say "the kids and the adults" or "the autistics and the neurotypicals" or "the shallow and the deep" or "the questers and the family people," and none of these are precisely what I'm getting at, but they're all swirling around the same thing. And another way of getting at the dichotomy is "the people who find a lot to admire in Scott et al's deaths, but feel like it's pointless to keep ruminating about stuff like WWI," versus "the people who think it's important and necessary to dwell on stuff like WWI, but find it unseemly and embarrassing to admire Scott et al." Which, obviously, this dichotomy does not encompass everyone in the whole world.
People who make a big deal about the difference between parody and satire often describe the latter as a higher art, something caustic, political, critiquing the real world and trying to advance justice. Pratchett was a satirist. I am not a satirist. My writing is not on that level.
But I am a parodist. And I think, sometimes, we can take the leap from "let's point and laugh at this fictional world, because it's absurd" to "sometimes our world is kind of absurd too, let's go ahead and point and laugh at it, because laughter helps us get through."
Why do I write? Because words are the best tool I have to illustrate what it's like to be me. If, for one moment, I can help someone in group 2 see what it's like to be in group 1, and say "huh, yeah, I guess from a certain perspective the group 2 way of looking at things is kind of silly"--then I feel like I've accomplished something.
