Lavinia Collins's Blog, page 11

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

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Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,600 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Boys Don’t Cry: Translating Medieval Men Crying in a Contemporary Novel

‘Than kynge Arthur and all the kynges and knyghtes kneled downe and gave thankynges and lovynge unto God and unto Hys Blyssed Modir. And evir sir Launcelot wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn!’

In this famous moment from Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthurian epic, commonly called Le Morte Darthur, in a hall packed with his closest friends, fellow knights, and lover, Sir Lancelot weeps like a child. And while this moment is significant for its complex articulation of the breakdown of Arthurian society, this is not the only time that a man who is also a great knight weeps publicly.

An image of the Virgin weeping. Images of men crying are very rare.

King Arthur weeps when the knights depart for the quest for the Holy Grail. Tristan weeps for Isolde. The Knights of the Round Table weep for the dead Elaine of Astolat (later Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot). Gawain weeps for his brother Gareth. Male weeping is ubiquitous in Malory’s world in a way that it is not in either our modern literary or our modern “real” world.

Weeping doesn’t diminish the knight’s masculinity, either. In fact, it confirms it; to feel as fellows with King and brother knights confirms their social place, and their belonging to a community of those whose values are the same, and whose emotions can be performed and confirmed simultaneously. Fellow-feeling, and the outward demonstration of that with tears, is part of what holds the chivalric (and decidedly and emphatically masculine) community of the Round Table together. It is not shocking, in the quotation above, that Lancelot cries, but rather than he cries alone; his fellows do not know what he feels, and cannot know why he feels it.

So, when I wrote Guinevere and Morgan, I was faced with a problem.  Men lying on the floor swooning and weeping ‘reads’ very differently in the cultural climate of the UK and US of the twenty-first century. There’s something comically pythonesque to the modern reader, in fact, in the way that Lancelot can’t seem to go more than three pages without bursting into tears. I had to cut it, had to change it, because that amount of weeping would just seem ridiculous to a modern reader.

And it’s a shame; in Guinevere, my narrator and title character performs far more emotions through the body than either Arthur or Lancelot do. And when the men stop weeping, you end up with the uncomfortable dichotomy of the ’emotional’ woman, and the ‘strong and silent’ man. For some reason, we now live in a world where for a man to show emotion is weakness. I don’t know how we came to be here, but I know the problem is bigger than just a literary one. The answer isn’t, of course, for us to all lie weeping and swooning, but I think it’s something that we should all think hard about.

Swanky New Site!

Hello all!

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve updated the site in anticipation of the new year. Not only have I moved domain names to laviniacollins.com (much more profesh), but I’ve added a few new pages. There’s the ‘Recommended Reads’ section where I’ve shared my favourite reads of the year, and a link to my page on my publisher, The Book Folks’, website, from where you can browse their other authors and sign up for news on new releases, offers etc.

I hope you enjoy the new-look site!

Lavinia x

Exciting News!

I’m very honoured and excited to have been chosen by Crystal’s Many Reviewers blog among their top 50 books of the year!

Do check out all of the recommendations from this excellent blog! Click here to see the whole list.

Losing Your Head at Christmas, Medieval Style

One of my favourite Christmas stories of all time is the late fourteenth-century anonymous poem Gawain and the Green Knight, which survives now only in a single manuscript filled with charming pictures (see left – aren’t they sweet?)

In this rollicking tale, King Arthur’s court is interrupted during some festive feasting by a peculiar green chap (who is also sparkly in the frankly bizarre in the terrible 1984 film Sword of the Valiant) who invites the knights to partake in something that he calls a ‘Christmas Game’.

It turns out that this ‘Christmas Game’ is that Gawain and the Green Knight will chop each others’ heads off (pictured above). Gawain is not very keen, until the Green Knight tells him he can have first chop. Thinking he’s on to a winner, Gawain chops off this chap’s head and thinks he’s safe. Not so since the Green Knight picks up his head, and tells Gawain the blow will be repaid a year and a day from then, and to keep his honour Gawain has to find his way to the Green Chapel to receive it.

So far, so not what you want to receive for Christmas. But off Gawain goes until he comes to a castle near to the Green Chapel. He’s generously hosted by its lord, more feasting ensues, and ends up as the object of his host’s wife’s alarmingly persistent desire, which culminates in her giving him some underwear of hers that he accepts since she claims it has the power to save any man from death. (Magic pants indeed). Quite a useful festive gift for a man who’s about to have his head chopped off.

I shan’t spoil the end (you can google it if you’re dying to find out), but rest assured that our dashing hero has quite a tale to tell at the next Christmas feast. Gawain and the Green Knight, although it covers an entire year, is closely tied to medieval traditions surrounding Christmas. It opens with a Christmassy feasting scene, and King Arthur demanding stories and entertainment for the festive season. The ‘Christmas Game’ that Gawain accepts would usually have been something more whimsical and fun than having one’s head chopped off. Perhaps they even played charades.*

Anyway, when you are all sitting around at your family Christmases, do take comfort in the fact that at least no one is going to chop off your head.

 

(* I am sure they did not.)

 

Ten Medieval People Who Know Exactly How You Are Feeling

When your friends are laughing about what you did last night, but you can’t remember what embarrassing stuff you did. 

2. When you’re out for the night and  you’re feeling your look

3. When   you have to work on Saturday, but you know all your friends are out Friday night. 

4. When you’re doing a really good  job but nobody’s noticed

5. When  someone brings home baking into work and everyone else is being polite and waiting for lunchtime 

6. When you’re getting really sick of explaining yourself for the millionth time 

 

7. When you’re in a restaurant and you can kind of hear the people on the next table having a fight

8. When you’re starving hungry and sick of waiting for everyone else to be done showing off their jewels

9. When someone is sleeping and you really need their eyes 

10. (My personal favourite) When your friend tells you a long, exaggerated anecdote that makes them look really cool and suave and funny and you’re not buying it. 

Don’t Bomb Syria

 

Click here to lobby your MP

 

The so-called ‘Islamic State’ (who for brevity I will here call IS though I know that a collective like them can have nothing to do with a religion whose very name means ‘peace’) are anathema to everything I believe in. They kill aid workers. They radicalise vulnerable, idealistic teenagers online and send them out to war zones. They suppress female education. They suppress freedom of expression. A systematic tactic of theirs is to rape Yazidi women and girls, and to sell them as sex slaves, claiming this is the will of their god.  I have close (very close) friends in Paris who live near the sites of the shootings and bombings. There is no justification for the actions of IS. They are a canker on our world. I loathe them and the absolutist, militarised regime they stand for.

I still don’t think we should bomb Syria.

The IS ‘base’ in Raqquah is not the centre of IS. IS is a poisonous ideology; it exists everywhere. In this internet world where everything is connected, IS can reach everywhere and everyone. They’re not a few people who can be bombed. They want to be martyred. Their IS magazine shows images of fighters next to their corpses, praising how they died in the cause.

We bomb Syria, we only slice the head off the hydra. And two more grow in its place. Bombing Syria becomes fodder for IS recruitment. Feeds the narrative that the wicked west hates Muslims and indiscriminately bombs them. And doesn’t it seem like that? Doesn’t this seem like a retaliatory action, for Paris? I’m heartbroken for Paris. I’m angry. But more death is never the answer.

So those are my practical considerations, but there’s more to it than that. Violence only begets more violence until somebody demands it stops. My beloved friend Bex has put this into better words than I could in her moving open letter to her MP John Glen. But ultimately, violence can only lead to more violence, and more hate. I don’t have the answer – perhaps it is to starve IS of weapons and oil supplies – but I know the answer is not bombing. Every single life belongs to a person as complex as yourself – someone with hopes and dreams and worries, someone with a family. Someone who takes too many pictures of their pet. Someone who does their hair in the morning. Someone who dreams and cries. Every single one of those people lost in senseless violence is an awful tragedy.

I want to leave you with these words from the Prose Merlin. These same fears and sorrows have been with us for centuries. I hope that we can be brave, and learn compassion, and undertake the hard, slow work of diplomacy instead:

‘And whan the Kynge Rion saugh the grete mortalité and slaughtur of his peple, and also of the peple of Kynge Arthur, his herte wax tender and hadde therof pitee, and seide to hymself that that mortalité wolde he no lenger suffre. And than he toke a braunche of sicamor in his hande and wente before the hoste to dissever the bateiles, and wente forth till he fonde the Kynge Arthur, and spake so high that he myght wele ben herde. “Kynge Arthur, wherfore doost thow suffre thi peple to be slayn and distroied, and also myn? Do thow now well, yef ther be so moche worthinesse in thee as the worlde recorded. Delyver thy peple fro deth, and I shall deliver also tho of myn, and we shull make oure peple withdrawe on bothe parties a rowme. And thow and I shull fight togeder body for body, by soche covenaunt that yef thow may me conquere, I shall returne to my contrey with the peple that is me beleft on lyve; and yef I may thee conquere, thow shalt holde thi londe of me and be my soget, as ben these other kynges that I have conquered.’

– Prose Merlin

(I want to thank Bex again for providing this reference)

I am aware that this is an emotional issue, and not all of my readers will agree with me. I would like to invite respectful disagreements, critical questions, etc. in the comments. Thank you for reading

Guest Post: Patrick Baker on Sci-Fi and Arthurian Legend

Famed science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s once proposed “three laws of prediction”:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For the Arthurian cycle, this last law is the most pertinent.

The first literary references to Arthur are from the Historia Brittonum, or The History of the Britons written in the Ninth Century, some 300 years after the events described. This work depicts Arthur as a Romano-British dux bellorum, or war leader, who fought beside the “Kings of Briton” against invading Germanic tribes. The Historia also brings up some of the first fantastical tales about Arthur. For example, Arthur, his men, and his dog, Cabal, hunted a giant boar named Troynt, or Twrch. Besides being supernaturally large and strong, the beast also dripped poison from its bristles. Arthur and his company finally killed the monster by driving it into the sea.

As the stories about Arthur grew, eventually turning into the cycle of tales and legends known as the Matter of Britain, many more fantastic elements were added. Elements such as a shape-shifting Merlin, Arthur being taking to Avalon to sleep until call on to again save England; the super-powerful weapon, Excalibur, being drawn from the stone, and so on.

We can apply Clarke’s Third Law to these various supernatural elements of the stories. For example, the giant boar, Troynt, instead of being of magical origin could be seen as the result of genetic engineering. Excalibur, as a product of advanced metallurgy and weapons’ design, not enchantment. Arthur’s sleep in Avalon as suspended animation, etc.

Many science-fiction writers have laid an advanced science template over the fantastic elements of the legend in their retellings of the Arthur story. The graphic novel Camelot 3000 and Steve White’s books, Legacy and Debt of Ages, are just two examples of this kind of re-exploration of the Arthur mythos. In Camelot 3000 King Arthur awakens from his long sleep and with the help of his reincarnated Knights of the Round Table battle an alien invasion of Britain. In Legacy and Debt of Ages, humans from the far-future use time travel to rescue a wounded Arthur, this time in his guise as a dux bellorum, and transport him into the far-future where he becomes a time-travelling military troubleshooter for this advanced civilization.

In the Uffda Press anthology King of Ages, a collection of short stories re-examine the Arthur legend in a variety of context, including straight-up science fiction stories, such as “Unto His Final Breath” by Mike Morgan: a story about the end of the Universe. “The Siege of Battle-Station Camelot” by Patrick S. Baker where Arthur is a commander of an orbiting battle-station fights interstellar slavers with Merlin as his advising AI.  “Arturia” by David W. Landrum is another sci-fi story, that has Arthur as a woman in a love triangle with a male Guinevere and a female Lancelot is a woman.

The Arthur mythos template can be used to express any number of themes, ideas and concepts from love, to war, to politics and in any number of genres from romance, to young adult and, of course, science-fiction.

Struggles Writers in the Computer Age Know Too Well

 

Not remembering what ‘cryptic’ name you saved your WIP under

Things hidden in folders all over the computer why no sensible filenames, why why why?

 

2. The fear that you will accidentally email a draft to the wrong person

The eternal fear that some unfinished draft might be accidentally emailed to your boss, who doesn’t know you write…

 

 

3. When the file for your WIP won’t open because of computer updates

Computers are our enemies, not our friends.

 

 

4. Had a really great writing spree, computer crashes when you haven’t saved for the last hour

Noooooo!

 

 

5. The endless distractions available online 

Because concentrating is haaaaard :(

 

 

Five Things I Have Learned from Men This Week

I love new information as much as the next gal, and I’m always grateful for what men who are non-experts in my field deign to teach me about my own work. So, to thank them, I have compiled a list of the helpful tidbits some generous men have given me just this week…

Shakespeare is the Only Author to deal with Mental Illness

Last week I was, I’m afraid, also on about the Shakespearean Hegemony, and the theme continues. This time, it was a discussion about the (excellent) recent book Elizabeth is Missing during which one of my students kept insisting that we talk about King Lear instead, since King Lear (according to that student) is the origin of all discussion on dementia and mental illness. Aside from the question as to whether this is actually what King Lear represents, mental illness has always been a theme throughout literature. One pre-bard example that springs to mind is Thomas Hoccleve’s amusing, moving and excellent (semi)autobiographical poem My Compleinte in which the author describes jumping up to the mirror again and again trying to catch his face pulling an expression that is not his own.

There Were No Women Writers Before 1800

Anyone who says this is an idiot. 

There Was No Marital Rape in the Medieval Period

Because the law was different in the medieval period (there was no legal recognition of marital rape), therefore these weren’t rapes and women must have not been bothered by them at all.

Chaucer’s Publisher Demanded the Inclusion of Certain Scenes

Chaucer died in 1400. The first printing press wasn’t invented until roughly forty years after. Chaucer wrote for the court, and employed a scribe whom he complains he had to frequently correct. There were no publishers, no publishing houses and no publishing conventions.

Women Oppress Men

Some guy I know’s mum told him to do something once, so it’s actually women oppressing men. #TrueStory #teachthecontroversy #taketheredpill