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Feb. 3rd, 2008 05:00 pmThe advantage of being not well is watching the DVDs of friends. It's fun to admire the stability of ships at sea in Hornblower (not even the rum sloshes against the bottle on a fair day) or the lack of dialects and alternate languages in Rome. I focus on one problem only for each series, because otherwise I'd end up not watching any of them. One major hiccup is allowable anyway, though yesterday (not on TV) Gregory Maguire's Norman peasant with an Anglo-Norman accent and a touch of Poitevin made me think of a manuscript and scribe, not of a girl who had not moved far from home until her death (her ghost landed in Poitou and then in England while the Middle Ages were still going strong, obviously).
All this made me think. It's only a little think, so you don't have to run and hide. Besides, there's nothing new in this think. I just feel like putting it to words today, is all.
When we write about our lives, we try to find the bits of our lives that are interesting. If it's a private diary then it's those things that are of particular interest to ourselves. If it's a public journal or other document, then it's stuff that we think others will care about.
Why write about getting up and brushing your teeth and tripping over the cat and swearing and going back to bed again and oversleeping and showering and racing to work only to find you've missed the beginning of a boring staff meeting and you turned plum coloured and tripped over a chair as you walked in late and you think your boss might have it in for you because it's the third time in a row you've turned up late on staff meeting day, when you can write about the amazing guitarist you heard last night?
Each time we make those choices we set up a bit of the way we see our culture and the paths other people may find into our culture. Those other people may be historians or novelists or archaeologists or anthropologists or enthusiasts or bored teenagers picking up the nearest book.
After many other processes over a long period of time (see, I'm choosing what's sexy to write about) the choices someone has made about what to include in their writing, turn into TV history. The most important bit of the transformation is that the things that *are* written about (not the mundane exclusions) get picked up by someone who is then used as a source by someone else, and so on until a place and time has its own apparent characteristics*. Things we need to know to admit we're watching something of that period pop up. In Rome people wash themselves a lot, have sex a lot, eat a lot, fight a lot and worry about money and politics and the gods. The same people are murdered, over and over and over. From I Claudius to Rome, this stuff is so.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere. Sorry. Unless I point out that a ship that's totlly stable is not nearly as interesting to hsitorians as all the things that get left out of TV series so that said series will make emotional sense to readers and viewers. The choices are about creating a feel of being in the period through playing with our expectations. They're seldom about giving an earlier period the same reality as we sense in our own lives. To be very honest, that would create dull storytelling.
*Just because I keep a food blog doesn't mean that I eat 24 hours a day, no matter what pop history says about me in 300 years time.
All this made me think. It's only a little think, so you don't have to run and hide. Besides, there's nothing new in this think. I just feel like putting it to words today, is all.
When we write about our lives, we try to find the bits of our lives that are interesting. If it's a private diary then it's those things that are of particular interest to ourselves. If it's a public journal or other document, then it's stuff that we think others will care about.
Why write about getting up and brushing your teeth and tripping over the cat and swearing and going back to bed again and oversleeping and showering and racing to work only to find you've missed the beginning of a boring staff meeting and you turned plum coloured and tripped over a chair as you walked in late and you think your boss might have it in for you because it's the third time in a row you've turned up late on staff meeting day, when you can write about the amazing guitarist you heard last night?
Each time we make those choices we set up a bit of the way we see our culture and the paths other people may find into our culture. Those other people may be historians or novelists or archaeologists or anthropologists or enthusiasts or bored teenagers picking up the nearest book.
After many other processes over a long period of time (see, I'm choosing what's sexy to write about) the choices someone has made about what to include in their writing, turn into TV history. The most important bit of the transformation is that the things that *are* written about (not the mundane exclusions) get picked up by someone who is then used as a source by someone else, and so on until a place and time has its own apparent characteristics*. Things we need to know to admit we're watching something of that period pop up. In Rome people wash themselves a lot, have sex a lot, eat a lot, fight a lot and worry about money and politics and the gods. The same people are murdered, over and over and over. From I Claudius to Rome, this stuff is so.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere. Sorry. Unless I point out that a ship that's totlly stable is not nearly as interesting to hsitorians as all the things that get left out of TV series so that said series will make emotional sense to readers and viewers. The choices are about creating a feel of being in the period through playing with our expectations. They're seldom about giving an earlier period the same reality as we sense in our own lives. To be very honest, that would create dull storytelling.
*Just because I keep a food blog doesn't mean that I eat 24 hours a day, no matter what pop history says about me in 300 years time.