How Do You Follow Parody?

I very lately watched The Hunger Games for the first time. I have never read the book, so my comments are limited to the movie.
Early in The Hunger Games, Katniss parodies the Hunger Games' official language by mocking, "May the odds be ever in your favor." (Parenthetically, I'm a little weirded out by the way American movies sometimes use English accents and Anglophilia to make characters seem villainous. But that's beside the point.) The interesting thing is that we, the audience, get this parodic treatment before we ever hear the Games officials using that phrase. When we hear the phrase for the first time, not only are we primed to think that it is a mark of oppression, but we are also aware that the characters are willing to undermine their authority (in the safety of remote hills).
This scene reminds me of a passage in Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets," which draws connections between Shakespeare's Henry IV (1 & 2) and V and Thomas Harriot's account of English colonization in America. Greenblatt describes how Falstaff's antics parody King Henry IV's rhetoric before the king speaks. Falstaff announces that he is called about at all hours because he is an important man (when it is really because he is a scoundrel); in the next scene, the king is struck with insomnia and laments that great men cannot sleep while small men slumber. Greenblatt writes, "As so often, Falstaff parodies this ideology, or rather--and more significantly--presents it as humbug before it makes its appearance as official truth." The results are perhaps subtler in 2 Henry IV than in The Hunger Games: "Its effect is not (as with more straightforward parodies) to ridicule the claims of high seriousness but rather to mark them as slightly suspect and to encourage guarded skepticism." As a result, the king's rhetoric "reverberates hollowness as well as poignancy." I would say that in The Hunger Games the result is of the more straightforward variety.
In either case, it seems that what Greenblatt calls anticipatory parody is more effective than reactive parody. For those of us who are parodists, that's something to keep in mind. But in thinking about this I have a further question: what do you do when your own project or rhetoric has been parodied in anticipation? How do you speak when your speech has already been mocked? How do you follow an act that already undermines your own?

7 Quick Takes (77)

1. The folks and I went to Ontario to see my brother graduate. If you are a reader in Ontario and you are wondering why I didn't visit, it's because my schedule was very full. We visited family and friends of the family. We ran some errands. We poked around Stratford, the city where I went to high school.

2. For my birthday, my brother gave me a painting, among other things. You can see it here. It is entitled Calliphoridae Megacephala (I assume). I think you'd have to be in our family or a close friend to fully understand why this is a real present.

3. We also learned about Justin Bieber. You see, The Biebs hails from Stratford, Ontario, my maternal homeland. We even went to the same high school, albiet not at the same time. It was a little odd to see that Stratford has to a small extent been made over with a Bieber geography in my absense: Rheo Thompson Candies (a well-known chocolatier in the Stratford tourist industry) now has a Justin Bieber box, Bieber collector's cards and other paraphenalia are available in most retail locations, and places like his favourite restaurant (Madeliene's) which were previously understood in terms of family and friend's connections to it are now labeled as part of the Bieber landscape. Stratford was already a tourist town due to its theatre and arts scene--and its shops and restaurants--but now it has been remade again. I think I prefered Shakespeare-themed tourism to teen idol-themed tourism.

My brother and I discussed the young man in question and determined that he is not at fault for the silliness that surrounds him (though asking the mayor of Stratford to do something about the fans mobbing him was a bit out of touch with reality). The real issue lies with the obsessed fans--hyperventilating because a mediocre singer is in the same city as you? really?--and with the media outlets that encourage this behaviour, typifying it as a valid developmental stage in young women as opposed to teaching girls to make good choices in who they bestow their affections on and how they do it.

4. On Monday I bid Fort McMurray farewell and flew to Vancouver. That makes three provinces in a handful of days and three flights in just over a week. I've maxed my annual allowable environmental damage right there, I think. The weather, scent, and vegetation that greeted me was wonderful.

5. Wednesday evening some friends and I went to see The Merchant of Venice at Bard on the Beach. Other friends would have gone were it not for Game 7 (see next entry). It was an interesting production. Off the top, I'll say that the costumes, acting, and music were as good as one could want. Shylock was especially wonderful. But as with any production of Merchant, there are some particular problems that are hard to overcome. Portia is racist. In order to mitigate this, I think, they really played the suitors from Carthage and Aragon as ridiculous figures, but with the culturally and racially sensitive dialogue, this verged on being racist in and of itself. Further, Shylock's forced conversion is horrifying, but not as horrifying as the audience's laughter at it. One of the more interesting choices, I think, is to make the homosocial relationship between Antonio and Bossanio an unreciprocated romantic relationship: Antonio clearly loved Bossanio as something other than a son, and his melancholy was "explained" by Bossanio leaving him. However, I like a tinge of sorrow in fictions, so this lingering plot, coupled with other moments of sadness and discomfort in the midst of the comedy (including a really uncomfortable Jessica), gave the play a depth and self-consciousness that I think was necessary. As one of my friends said, you can't really play it as a straight comedy any more.

6. There were riots in Vancouver that night. If you've been following Canadian news or coverage of the Stanley Cup, you may know what I'm talking about. Post-game rioters turned and torched sixteen police vehicles and looted numerous businesses in the Vancouver district. Also in attendance were riot police.

While waiting outside during the intermission, I suddenly noticed and called attention to a plume of smoke rising from the downtown district across the water. I hadn't paid mind to it at first because I was so used to smoke in Fort McMurray. A quick check on assorted Internet-connected gadgetry and my friends had the story. Since we knew people who had been at the game, we were a bit worried. Fortunately, all such friends were safe.

I've been distressed by the coverage of this event. The city officials have been blaming anarchists, which is ridiculous. While the blatant disregard for law shown by the rioters has a surface resemblance to anarchy, it is no more than surface. On Facebook I saw people writing that they were down there and there was no riot, only riot police. This is also ridiculous, considering ample first-person civilian reports of rioting. Beyond which, I don't think the riot police set their own cars on fire. Others are trying to deflect criticism from hockey itself, but of course there are problems with that, too: riots have occured in Vancouver before following big hockey games, but not following much else. What's most concerning, though, is the increase in sexual predation and harassment following hockey games. There are two articles that I found especially helpful. This one explains what happened and what has been said about it; this one looks closer at hockey itself and what gender has to do with it.

7. On Thursday I bought a new camera. I was quite pleased with it in the store, if leery of the touch screen, but now I'm not so sure. I'm not comfortable with its supermacro. I'll play with it a bit, continue trying this supermacro, and if it's not as good as my previous camera's, I'll go exchange it. I have two weeks to exchange, so long as I don't damage it. I'm sure I could live with this camera, but I'd rather have one I'm comfortable with considering that I expect it to last me a few years. It does have some nice features, mind you, including underwater photography and scrolling panoramics.

That is all! Please visit Conversion Diary, host of this blog carnival.

Catch-Up

Looking through my archive, I see that I have not given you all an update of my life since 25 February. My apologies; I assure you that I have been quite busy. If you take a look at that last 7 Quick Takes, you'll see that I bought some journals, which means that I actually have a record of what happened in the meantime. Fancy that. Let's dive in.

1. I have become a sidesperson and a liturgical assistant-in-training at my church. I am a member of the church for real. In the instance of the latter, I get to wear an alb again. Regular readers will know that this pleases me. What's even more exciting is that my church does not have albs big enough for me, so I get to wear the priest's spare clergy alb. One of the unexpected privileges of being a liturgical assistant-in-training is that I am sometimes asked to serve the priest the Eucharist.

2. I gave up tea for Lent. It was difficult but I survived. I also planned to write a sonnet each week; I only got two written. Not so good. If you want to see someone who succeeded at a more daunting sonnet Lenten devotion, go visit Miss Lazarus' site.

3. I picked up a new webcomic, Order of the Stick. I'm no table-top RPG player but I still find it delightful. Genre-savviness makes me swoon, what can I say?

4. I went to a Contemplative Prayer service or two in the elapsed time. In the most interesting I was introduced to the Anglican Rosary. I am a fan; I wish I had one. I am not sure what makes it different from a Catholic Rosary.

5. For class I have read a number of interesting works, some new to me and some familiar: "Death and the Compass" by Borges, The Tempest by Shakespeare (as well as other things by him, but that's in my opinion the most interesting of them), Waiting for Godot by Beckett, a host of stuff on reported speech, including an article by one Wooffitt on mediums reporting (supposedly) the speech of spirits.

6. I have officially (for myself, at least) moved towards Universalism. I'm aware that it's not fully worked out, but I consider the problems with Arminianism and Calvinism more insurmountable than those of Universalism. This move was entirely instigated by the series over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog.

7. I have started running. Twice a week, that is, in the morning, with a friend of mine. Athleticism is such a strange concept for me yet I've fallen into this routine easily enough. The trick is, will I continue over the summer?

8. I saw a Green College production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you can believe it, I'd never seen nor read it before. I quite enjoyed it.

9. I also attended the EndNotes conference, the UBC English Department annual graduate conference. This year's theme was "Beyond the Book." I heard friends and colleagues give papers on how the Twilight franchise has impacted the community of Forks, Washington; how Canadian history and archive is explored in the comics of Seth; how V's mask relates to reader identification and the genre conventions of melodrama (theatre) in V for Vendetta (the graphic novel); how narrative pornography has begun to rise with Pirates and what this has to do with the potential for feminist pornography (that one was a bit controversial, you can imagine); how Girl Talk enacts the Death of the Author; and how intertextuality and copyright operate in the Arthurian legend of Swamp Thing #87, in which Merlin draws Swamp Thing back in time to Camelot to defend the kingdom against Mordred. It was an exultation of grad student nerdiness and I loved it.

10. I wrote two papers. One concerns a particular type of self-reporting speech which I examine in detail in order to learn more about self-reporting. The other concerns the constitution and perversion of the ideal male military body through its parodic inversion in the Coventry and Gloucestershire muster scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV respectively. (Those are Shakespeare plays, in case you are not fully read up on your early modern drama.) The process of researching, writing, and editing was, of course, harrowing.

11. Immediately after submitting my papers I graded about 50 student essays (each of my 25 students had to write two essays for their final exam, as well as do an identify-and-state-the-significance-of section) and calibrate my final grades for submission. I did this perforce over the Easter weekend, which I found quite distasteful. During this process, I crashed a little bit.

12. For these essays, I read papers and books on the early modern English constitution of masculinty and on the dynamics of everyday speech. For the former, may I suggest Gary Spear's article "Shakespeare's "Manly" Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida" and Patricia Cahill's Unto the Breach; for the latter, may I recommend Goffman's Forms of Talk. (His Frame Analysis is also interesting and was written earlier, so perhaps you should skim it first. Both are tomes.)

13. I have given substantial thought to some things other than my papers during this time, among which has been what friendship is and what sorts of requirements come with it. Altruism has always been important to me but certain interpersonal issues seem different when framed by general ideas of altruism than when framed in a context of friendship. As I make and solidify new friendships here in a new city, these question gain some immediacy.

14. Some time in the midst of the above, I finished One of Us, which I wrote on before. I'd like to share another excerpt, one I thought worthy of copying out in my journal: "But what if we understood such twins as people who are no more broken than anyone else? What if we stopped thinking of biological anomalies as the sworn enemies of humanity, and started recognizing their full social nature, perhaps even their social potential? In the long run, we can do more than try to guarantee every child a 'normal' body. We can try to guarantee a just world. If you take seriously what conjoined people have said about their bodies and their lives, you realize they are still experiencing what Mary Wollstonecraft felt in the late eighteenth century: 'It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.' Let us now stop referring to children who undergo massive normalizations as 'real fighters,' and start recognizing that we are the ones who construct what they are fighting against." [emphasis mine]

Now I'm free; I'm very tired at the moment, but I'm loose in the world again. And, who'da thunk it, but it's spring! (Actually, it's been spring here for months now. Vancouver is like that.)

7 Quick Takes (75)

Yet another two-week edition.

1. Last week was Reading Week. What time I did not spend procrastinating, watching Firefly, or visiting with friends, I spent working on a biography review or grading papers. I shouldn't talk about the later as a matter of professional discretion, but I can discuss the former. If I were you, I would not read Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. It is surprising that a biography about a brilliant poet and playwright, a libertine with ambiguous sexuality, a swashbuckling spy, could be so boring. If you do read this book, prepare for such a surprise. If you nonetheless insisted on reading a biography of an early modern playwright, then I might be more inclined to recommend Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. While its literary readings of Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet are not the best in the world, they are at least interesting, and it nicely situates Shakespeare in the time of his writing. I am not a fully-converted New Historicist, but I find that I appreciate Shakespeare far more (and far more maturely) when I think of him as situated in his time, nation, and culture.

2. I went to the Regent Chapel service on Tuesday morning with a friend, and we went for lunch afterwards. The service was interesting; I'm intrigued by, though not entirely comfortable with, the idea of an overtly religious post-secondary institution. This one is small and feels very collegial. I did, however, like the looks of their library and bookstore.

3. That following Wednesday evening I acquired Hopeful Monsters and a journal. I had received a phone call explaining that my book order for Hiromi Goto's collection of short stories had come in and realizing that I had reached my threshold of productivity for the day, I visited Chapter's that evening to get the book. While there I bought a set of journals. They have writing-paper lining and not graph-paper lining, but otherwise they are identical to those pictured. I have been told by Creative Writing professors and others that I should use a journal as a collection of insights into experience. This will be a useful repository as I write. I am not thinking of it as a "Dear Diary" sort of writing-as-catharsis exercise, though it may be that in some instances; rather, I am thinking of this as a commonplace book of experience. It is also a little bit of a commonplace book more generally, as Bakhtin, Foucault, Barthes, and Firefly have all featured in this first journal.

I know perfectly well that I will not get a chance to read much of Hopeful Monsters soon.

4. On Friday I went to a dinner party organized by the church. It has been a long time since I've been to a dinner party. It was very nice. Fortunately I knew most of the people there at least a little bit, but it's interesting to note how this sort of event, in which the host is good at leading conversation and involving people, is an excellent way of getting to know people better or at all. Having dinner parties is a skill I don't see developing especially well in my generation and/or demographic, and yet it seems tobe a key element in the social fabric of previous generations. Something to think about.

5. On Tuesday, despite being intellectually and emotionally exhausted by Reading Week (I hope you'll forgive me my reticence regarding the reasons--plural--for the emotional exhaustion), I gave what I felt was a good presentation in my Reported Speech class. It was on an essay by Short, Semino, and Wynne on faithfulness in reported speech. That is, they argue that faithfulness is important in some contexts when people report the speech of others. This may interest anyone outside of the field because most people (or most academics, anyway) assume that when we quote, we quote verbatim. What I am learning in this class is that such an assumption is all lies and deceit. We certainly do not quote verbatim. For the most part (especially in conversation) we don't even pretend to. What Short, Semino, and Wynne argue is that faithfulness (not verbatim) is important in some contexts, and while they are right to point this out, their argument is still problematic on a number of details. If this interests you, let me know and I'll tell you more.

6. The last few days have been spent in a glut of social interaction. I am making up for the scarcity of the same over Reading Week (other than ocassional Skype, a smattering of collegial talk in the Graduate Reading Room, tea at a bakery one morning, and what I wrote on above, I spent most of my Reading Week in scholarly isolation). I have a short but heavily-weighted paper due on Tuesday, so I need to put my nose to the grindstone and all of that good stuff. However, to see friends again, even after a week's absense, is a balm.

7. Just last night I started reading DeLillo's End Zone for the class in which I am a TA. I love it so far. I am not a fan of American football (nor should I be), but this book is only about football on the surface. So far I can tell that it is far more about language and the politics of devastation: it examines the jargon of the Cold War and the jargon of professional sports, reducing them to a moment in which they mean either far more than we'd like or nothing at all. Of a player, Bobby, who is "famous for saying he would go though a brick wall for Coach Creed," the narrator says the following:

Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one's struggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby's need to be loyal to someone. [Creed does not want or deserve loyalty.] But Bobby had this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it. Tradition, of course, supported his sense of what was right. The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning.

The brackets are my summary of a longer passage; the embolding is my emphasis of sentences I love.

[Bonus round!]

8. I found this video on Facebook, and I was fascinated. It's a fanmade trailer for Riverdale, a fictional "gritty remake" of the Archie Comics. "Lux Aeternae" is likely responsible for 25% of my fascination with the video. My nostalgic and theoretical pull to Archie Comics is responsible for my 35%, and my interest in the genres of the dark remake and the movie trailer account for the remainder. I should warn you that, no matter your politics, something about it will probably offend you. Also, I should give a trigger warning.

9. Due to my nose-to-the-grindstone sentiment I expressed before, I will not be writing the posts I have planned. In response to Leah's post on transhumanism at Unequally Yoked, I plan to write a series of posts concerning the boundries of self. That is, what does and does not consitute "me." I intend to talk about somatic control, prosthetics, two-headed snakes, Judith Butler, and friendship. Do not expect this to be a simple or traditional account of identity; I want to write these posts at all in order to complicate the sort of naive delineations of self that I saw expressed in the comments section of that post. However, I must beg your patience on this matter, as my workload and lifeload not only demand that I abstain from writing those posts any time soon, but cease writing this one as well.

Please go visit Conversion Diary, the host of the 7 Quick Takes blog carnival.

Woe!

Gentemen of the Shade is already a book title; the book in question is written by Harry Turtledove, and pertains to vampires during Jack the Ripper's reign of terror.

It should be a law that no line from Shakespeare can be used as a title of a book that does not deal adequately with the themes in the work from which the line was drawn. Books about vampires should be especially forbidden.

(For those who don't know, "gentlemen of the shade" is a phrase from Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, spoken in a speech by Falstaff to Hal, the crown prince and his drinking buddy: "Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty. Let us be called Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal." Ah, Falstaff. I'd have loved to have drawn from this speech in a short story or novel. There's so much fun to be had, so many ideas to un/ravel.)