Westmark!

Okay, here we are: March 9. Time to discuss Lloyd Alexander's Westmark. For those of you just tuning in, discussion of The Kestrel will follow on April 9, and The Beggar Queen will be discussed here May 9.

When I say discussion, I do mean it. If you want to write things in your own ljs or non-lj journals, please link in the comments or send me an e-mail; I will edit the post to add links if I get them. You do not have to be on my friendslist to participate; everyone's welcome.

Reminder: this post will contain spoilers for Westmark and only Westmark. Spoilers for The Kestrel and The Beggar Queen can come later. (Another post on my feelings about spoilers may also come later, but that's related to West Wing, not Westmark. Big difference.)

( Books are one thing; how the world goes now is another. )

ETA: markgritter contributes Westmark: Resisting Tyranny to the discussion.

painted dreams

What I wanted to tell you here comes with some extraneous details, so please bear with me; I know it will be the first time in the history of livejournal in general and my lj in particular that such a thing has ever occurred.

So. With the vertigo, I need to have longer workouts to make me hungry enough to punch through the nausea so I can eat. People need to eat. This is a rule I have. This is how I can make the rule happen right now. And an hour and a half of bike every single day--plus weights most days and yoga or Pilates some days--means that I sweat a bit and need to launder the workout clothes after one wearing, especially since I work out in the clothes I sleep in. So instead of getting two nights out of a sleepshirt, I'm getting one. This means I needed new sleepshirts so that I can do a big load of sweaty sleepshirts in extremely hot water at once rather than having to wash small loads in extremely hot water every few days. So.

My mom was out shopping, and she agreed to stop in at the Land's End outlet up past Khan's, you know, the one by Don Pablo's. (Perhaps you don't know. It's the one by Don Pablo's. Now you know.) It was January, and she knew I needed more sleepshirts and had not gotten more sleepshirts out of Christmas, at least not in the quantity required. And they were having a sale on good soft cotton sleepshirts, long-sleeved, well-made, very basic, that had been made up as packages for Christmas. They were each tied with a ribbon and a tag, so in January they had to go on sale. I didn't mind the ribbon and the tag in the least. Two of them had snowflakes. I like snowflakes. The third was something I would never wear out in public because it is a vastly unflattering color for custardy-colored me, but for sleeping and working out it doesn't matter much: it's the color of unpainted canvas.

My subconscious has taken this and run with it. Every night I wear this sleepshirt, I have dreams that it's been painted or otherwise done in the style of one visual artist or another, and the rest of the dream goes along with, sort of colored and styled in the appropriate palette. So far I have had Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the same night, both Monet and Manet (different nights, though), the Bayeux Tapestry, fake-medieval Victorian tapestry, Rodin (the sleepshirt was sculpted iron, which was awesome), Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Burne-Jones, Tyko Sallinen, and Mark Rothko. Last night it was some of Dali and some of R. Crumb.

The pleasantness of the dreams is not well correlated with how much I like the artists in question, so I should be careful what I wish for. But I do hope this keeps happening, and I hope I get Rene Magritte and Akseli Gallen-Kallela before I wear the thing to shreds.

surprise, startle, unfold

When I was a small kid--early grade school, say--some of my playmates discovered that I startled easily. They took great delight in grabbing me from behind, jumping out at me, making loud noises suddenly, etc. More frustrating, they went on and on about how I was scared, how easily scared I was, how they could always scare me. This seemed to me wrong, and my mother put her finger on the semantic difference I was seeking: "You're not scared, you're startled," she said. And that was just it. I was not likely to burst into tears or have other stress-reactions to being startled. I was not experiencing heart-pounding, lasting fear reactions. I was just jumping. (I am not, perhaps, the least high-strung person of your acquaintance.) And all this came to an abrupt and happy stop around the third or fourth grade, when my reflexes were trained enough that instead of jumping when someone grabbed me from behind, I rammed a sturdy little shoulder into her chin, and suddenly someone was scared, it just wasn't me, so they gave it up.

But it gradually became clear to me that some* of these people thought it was fun because they liked to be startled. They liked the jump. They liked to try to prolong any heart-pounding reaction to this sort of thing as long as they could; they thought it was neat. It felt good to them. I think there was more genuine fear, but safe fear, the haunted house kind of fear rather than the kind that comes from being pursued by a genuine attacker. I went to a haunted house once, because it was a fundraiser for a Boy Scout troop a friend of mine helped with in college. It bored me for about nineteen minutes and startled me in the remaining one. Others loved it. I want to make it clear throughout here: I am not saying that my reaction is good and theirs is bad, or mine is smart and theirs is dumb, or anything like that. I'm saying that it looks like there is a bit of hard-wiring that varies from person to person, and that's okay.

I was watching the end of West Wing S1, and there was an event that made me wonder if that's part of why some people care more about spoilers than I do (and some care less). ( cut for spoilers of S1 WW and the first two episodes of S2, because I do try to be considerate )

But here's my point: if they couldn't make me react that way at that moment, knowing it was coming, fully prepared for it, if they couldn't get an involuntary no out of the scene then, I am not at all sure the show would be worth watching in the first place. It certainly wouldn't be worth watching twice. What they are doing as storytellers is giving me the particulars. The concrete bits. What is happening and how, and what it's doing to the people it's happening to when it does. If the specificity of characters I liked being shown in that situation didn't move me, there would be no point to it. I might as well listen to a listing of events--"and they try to get Admiral Adama put on the Supreme Court and there's something about a panda"--and watch Desk Set or Sneakers again instead.

For me, what's left when you're no longer startled is what's worthwhile. The way the events unfold, not what the events are. I know it's not like that for other people, because the startling itself has more value for them.

When I was watching Veronica Mars--at least the first two seasons of Veronica Mars--I thought I finally had an emotional understanding of what some people were so adamant about when they begged others to avoid spoilers in descriptions of fictional series. But I haven't felt like that about anything else since, even things that supposedly have mystery to them. For example, I knew who the four Cylons were who would be revealed at the end of S3 well before I watched the end of S1 of Battlestar Galactica, and I was fine with that. I think what happened with Veronica Mars is that the narrative unfolding--the bit that makes it worthwhile to read book one first or watch episode seven before episode eight instead of the reverse--was really tied up in the pace of revelation of clues. I don't find it this way with all mystery plots, but mystery plots are more prone to it than non-mystery plots. The other thing was that I trusted the people who made Veronica Mars to make the revelations worth my emotional energy/risk, and I don't trust very many TV teams that much.

*Others were mildly sadistic or power-hungry. Yes, at the age of 6. Especially at the age of 6; do you know 6-year-olds?

**Yes, I talk to the TV a lot, particularly when it's just me watching it. I have a general sense of how tolerant markgritter and timprov are of which kinds of comment, so I talk to the TV some when they're with me. With other people I really try not to because I don't want to interfere with their enjoyment. Talking to the TV is one of the ways in which I am totally my grandpa all over again.

This weekend we discovered--and by we I mean I, because my folks and timprov apparently already knew it and markgritter was out of the room for it--yet another way in which I am totally my grandpa all over again. Some of you know the face I make when I totally disagree with you and refuse to argue or pretend to agree or anything like that, I just make the face for a few seconds and then I go on with the next thing. I discovered this because Mom was telling a story about Grandpa and she did the face he did, and it suddenly looked very familiar, like I had felt it once or twice before. Apparently everybody else already knew this was my Stubborn Like Grandpa Face. People do not give me all the memos I'm supposed to be getting, I don't think.