But the sidewalk in front of my café is covered with birdseed, and so it shines a wholesome yellow in the sun, and when the rains roll back the birds fly in, little brown ones happily pecking away. When I walk through them, they rush up right in front of my face. This is probably the favorite part of my day.

Oh, silly me! This isn't my favorite coffee shop, its a sign of the apocalypse.

When I sit here, drinking strong, strong coffee and lotus tea, I think of the only thing that could make this scene more perfect: storytelling. But I have no idea where to go to hear a good story.

Where do you go to hear stories nowadays?

Seriously, where? I’m asking the question in earnest. Back home I know of a bookstore that hosts a folklore night once a week…but I believe it’s more devoted to scholarly pursuits than actual storytelling. When I was a kid, the public library held storytelling hour. I can still remember being about four years old, watching two teenage girls with red and blue streamers acting out a myth about fire and water.

But I honestly don’t know where people go to hear stories nowadays, or if this is even something people “do.”

I know that I can hear “stories” from my friends, though this is actually a dying art. When telling you of an event in their lives, people will often be at a loss as to where to begin, how to tell the story, how to make sense of an event in their lives. At least I find this to be the case. Hearing a real “story” from a friend – even if it’s just a story from their life – is a rare occurrence.

Stories still live in cafés…maybe. There are things like open mic night, and sometimes café patrons will tell stories that are loud and gregarious enough so that they’re meant for others to hear. But the overwhelming majority of cafés are filled with music, snazzy tables, and people minding their own business.

It used to be that cafés were the heart of the storytelling universe. In the Enlightenment, people – and by people I mean white men – would run to cafés to hobknob with men from other social classes that they’d never even met. According to
Juergen Habermas, this was where class boundaries broke down. The menfolk would swap news, stories, and smokes, and create public discourse while they were at it. However, this doesn’t usually happen so much at your local Starbucks, the domain of awkward coffee dates, personal assistants juggling dozens of coffee mugs on take-away trays, and isolated hipsters hooked up to their iPods.

It doesn’t exactly fit with, well, this:

“Literature had to legitimate itself in these coffee houses. [...] Thus critical debate ignited by works of art and literature was soon extended to include economic and social disputes. [...] The coffee house not merely made access to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shop-keepers.” The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere p. 33

In the same book, Habermas declared that “the coffee houses were considered seedbeds of political unrest.” Gack! Unrest! Literature! Stories! Shop-Keepers!

Not at Starbucks.

I’ve actually always heard the most stories in religious contexts; whenever I went to my college’s Jewish Center back home, or whenever I go to the Beit Chabad here in HCMC now, there are stories being told. Some of them are traditional aggadot or folk-stories, gleaned from the Talmud and elsewhere. Some are more pedestrian fare, stories of people the storytellers know, or their own stories. I think that maybe the narrative art thrives here more because stories are more interwoven into the fabric of daily life; the Torah portions are read aloud every Saturday, study of Biblical texts is common, and people are constantly trying to glean meaning from life, make sense of it in a larger context. And they are trying to do this in the context of their community.

I think that this might be one of the reasons why oral storytelling has been dying out. Sure, there are other factors. Rising literacy, for one thing, and TV, for another; books and TV shows are the more typical sources for stories in our everyday lives. But then again, one of the main reasons that people tell stories to one another is ritualistic. In the context of Orthodox Judaism, stories are used to connect us to something larger. They are used in the weekly d’var Torah (explanation of the week’s Torah portion) to make the portion relevant to daily life. They are the link between experience and theoretical framework for experience, the Torah.

And most importantly, this experience is essentially communal. Everyone in the room has something in common – in this case, the wish (no matter how strong or faint) to become closer to the Torah. Any story told is therefore related to some shared experience, speaking to each individual in some basic way.

It’s difficult to pull this off in modern society. For one thing, community has become…I won’t say weaker, but rather differently conceptualized. Nowadays, communities are focused around internal, often biological identities. I’m a woman and a queer, so this automatically makes me a member of certain sectors of society. People with whom I have something in common. Judaism is like that, too, except that belief doesn’t automatically come with biology. It’s the belief that starts the stories.

This is not to say that I think everyone should go out and get some religion in order to hear stories. This post is more of a quick musing on where public storytelling is gone. I don’t have any of the answers, just some fragmented questions.

You too can speak like a library with lungs, just like Borges!

Ah, sweet academia. Being outside it – at last? finally? unfortunately? – feels odd to me. For the first time in a long while, I find myself outside a scholarly community, living in “the real world,” even if only for two years, after which time I shall go to grad school and become a Slave to Academia once more. But this little respite prompts me to ask: is academia useful? For studying fairy tales? Folklore? Does studying something actually partially destroy it, as I’ve suggested elsewhere?

First of all, before you even say it: yes, I agree. Academics need to make themselves – and their work – more accessible. It’s part of the reason why I write this blog, and why I write it the way that I do. I write about what I’m working on, and I write to be read. Understood. Much though I love certain academic thinkers, they specialize in being obscure. Like Lacan! Reading Lacan is like doing mind-gymnatics: how well can you perform on the balance beam? Can you do a triple flippy thingy? Those who cannot do a triple-flippy-thingy are abject failures whose minds are worthless. Or so the prevailing attitude goes.

Some people seem to think of academia the way that Miranda Priestly thinks about fashion. Click here to listen to Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada explain it all, as she rants at her assistant for not caring about fashion. But fashion actually controls us all!

For those international viewers who can’t watch the clip, I’ve copy/pasted the relevant text here:

‘This… stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.

Oh Miranda, you’re such a honey-bunch. And you have successfully encapsulated the attitude which some academics have towards their discipline! Imagine that! Indeed, some do believe that, odd as all the papers and conferences and classes and books produced by academia are, that they do somehow influence the public. They trickle down, as it were, from Miranda Priestly to Andy Sachs. Or from, say, Habermas to a construction worker.

This is the academic equivalent of trickle-down economics. Remember trickle-down economics? Sounds like someone’s peeing on you. And that’s because they are. During the Regan era, the idea was that giving benefits and tax-cuts to the rich would result in benefits for everyone. Money would just trickle down. Here’s a lovely New York Times article about how and why “trickle-down” doesn’t work, if you’re interested.

My point is that its elitist to say that academics somehow control the way that the public is thinking, like Miranda Priestly, or that our ideas somehow trickle down from the Ivory Tower to bless the crops of the poor, normal folk below. I’m not saying that there’s no truth to it – after all, every action has a reaction – but I am saying that people have free will, are independent beings, don’t act predictably, and have many influences on their behavior. Saying that the awesome dancing style Krumping evolved even in part because of academic – maybe even Foucaultian – interest on the body as revolution would be delusional. It evolved as an alternative to overly flashing b-boy dance moves, and as a way of releasing rage at bleak economic conditions.

Can I just say that I love that clip? OK, I said it. Watch the movie “Rize.” Watch. It.

In fact, the relationship between academia and the outside world usually works in reverse. Something happens. We go: “wow! That something is fascinating! I want to think deeply about it, and then write some well-turned phrases about it.” And it’s actually in this act that academia proves its worth. First of all, it teaches people to think. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of a Liberal Arts education. Academia teaches undergraduate students to analyze why and how something “cool” or “boring” or “weird” produces a response inside of them, and to describe that response in ways that go beyond “cool” or “boring” or “weird,” and maybe even to relate the description to something outside, to the broader world.

But what about for the scholar? Some scholars feel that their access to privileged knowledge enriches them somehow, that it allows them access to a kind of secret knowledge. To quote the historian Arlette Farge:

Reading the archive immediately incites a sense of the real that no printed matter, however little known, can arouse. It is in this sense that it compels reading, ensnares the reader, produces in him the feeling of finally seizing hold of the real. And not examining the real through a story about, a discourse on.

I really love this quote, because it touches on something very true. Doing the work of scholarship feels like being alive, like pushing the boundaries of knowledge, like actually discovering something new in the past. This feeling is not entirely false; historians and scholars often unearth previously forgotten narratives, stories, or ideas. And that is so, so important. But that doesn’t give us the right to feel like we made them.

We do, however, make three things.

1. We make understanding. Even if my work is only read by a small number of people, I can still reach those people, and increase their understanding about something which I find interesting and important. Making clear and interesting what was once opaque and obscure is a noble thing.

2. We make people and ideas come alive. Everyone is good at something. I am good at literary analysis. It makes me come alive. When I do that, I inspire others to do what makes them feel alive, as well. And with academia, I can get paid to do what I love and feel alive. Awesome.

3. We make life-detectives. This is why I love academia so much. I love it because dedicating one’s life to academia means constantly re-examining the work one is doing on a daily basis. It means never really having a clear purpose, and constantly having to make a new one. It means taking your energy and channeling it, using a combination of pre-created moves and putting your own spin on them until you create something that is, at least partly, your own.

In this way, ladies and gentlemen, academia is like Krumping.

Dorothy of Oz, an animated sequel to The Wizard of Oz, is coming soon to a theater near you. True, an Oz-sequel has already been done, 1985′s Return to Oz. It was quirky, it had spunk…and it fell just a *little bit short* of being good. But! Dorothy of Oz looks promising.

She also looks like Lea Michele

So what’s the story about, and why does it have potential? Here’s part of the website’s official description:

In the story, Dorothy returns to Kansas to find it devastated by the tornado that had whisked her away to the magical Land of Oz. The home she had been so desperate to return to is no longer; the townspeople, with nowhere to turn, are packing up and moving out. However, before Dorothy can even begin to react to or resist this change, she is transported back to Oz by equally magical methods as her first trip. Oz is in trouble, and the people there need her help: Dorothy’s old friends – the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion – have disappeared and the land is in a state of decay. As Dorothy journeys to find her friends, she encounters a number of new companions and problems, including a man made of marshmallows who can’t think for himself, a china doll princess whose bossiness is a cover for her fragility, and a tugboat with as many personalities as he has pieces. Dorothy must help this odd group band together against a wicked new villian – a Jester who thinks all of Oz should be under his own control.

First of all, I like the plot. A little bit of darkness! Genuine drama! Marshmellow men! Also, the cast looks great. Aside from Lea Michele, the cast also includes Martin Short, Kelsey Grammar, Hugh Dancy, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd…and two magic words.

Patrick. Stewart.

Starring Captain Picard as a Rogue Grandmother Willow

There he is: the love of my childhood. No, seriously. I was in love with Captain Picard from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” during my formative years. And…I love him still. It’s an issue I’m working through, okay? But that has no bearing on the matter at hand, which is that Captain Awesome is playing what the website calls “a humorous talking tree turned tugboat.”

Only awesomeness can lie this way. However, I do have one bone to pick:

This looks like my childhood nightmares of Roman catacombs.

CGI? Haven’t we had enough CGI? 3D Extravaganza? Haven’t we had enough 3D extravaganzas? I guess not. But I’m willing to set aside my misgivings; all things considered, this looks like an excellent project.

To see the rest of the concept art (there’s lots), visit io9′s page here

Sure, I’ve had other dreams. Ever since I was 12 – which was when I spoke my first words of German – I knew that I wanted to be German professor. But this was a dream which could only be realized after the primary objective was attained: Independence. That was my dream. And now that I’ve got it, my dream has expanded: enjoy it. Protect it.

More than one of my friends has called me a nutcase for being so obsessed with being able to take care of myself by myself. But you see, it’s not my fault. I blame the fairy tales. Specifically Young Adult novels based on fairy tales. Especially those written by Donna Jo Napoli.

Napoli was one of the defining authors of my early years. It was her, Leon Uris, and Charles Dickens (weird, weird mix). And the book which I remember most from that time is Napoli’s excellent Rapunzel-retelling, Zel.

This + Exodus + A Tale of Two Cities = 10 Year Old Me

I have a very clear memory of reading this book. I was in my elementary school’s library, which was purple, and had hulking green Apple computers. Mrs. Leighton, the librarian, came up to me and recommended the book. It had just come out year or two earlier. She said it was a bit “mature,” but that it was a great twist on a classic fairy tale.

And it is. Napoli retells Rapunzel with great power. Each of the three main characters – Zel, her mother (the witch), and Konrad the “prince” – all get to speak. The story is told all in present tense. Twelve years after reading this book, I can still remember some of it verbatim…almost at the very end, with the witch helpless as Zel leaves her:

I touch the world; I have no powers anymore. I see as though through a goose’s eyes.

Gooses recur throughout the novel, actually, one of the few pieces of description in Napoli’s otherwise sparse prose. This style actually serves the book well; her rigid prose helps keep the novel tense, present, moving.

Anyway, the novel is driven by two things: Zel’s mother’s fear of loneliness and Konrad’s sexual hunger. Yes, the book contains sex. Yes, I knew this as a ten year old, but in a vague sort of way. Napoli capitalized on existing sexual metaphors in the original fairy tale, such as hair and eating, and worked them into the story’s fabric without my ten-year-old-self knowing. Though I did catch the actual sex part. But then again, it was way less graphic than some of the stuff my cousins watched on TV. So there’s that.

The point is, my ten-year-old-self absorbed something from that story which solidified an already extant tendency in my nature. Zel‘s evil character was defined by her inability to let go. She couldn’t let her daughter leave, so she locked her up in a tower. And Zel, her issue was that she had no idea how to break free for herself. Konrad was only half a solution. Girl, if you want to have a real life – Napoli seemed to be saying to me – you’ve got to break out of that tower and make it for yourself. Take risks! You’ll do some weird stuff, to be sure, and you’ll make mistakes, but at least they’ll be your *own* mistakes.

Own mistakes! Excellent. If I ever have a ten year old, I intend to tell her to make her own mistakes and own those mistakes. It sure worked for me. Immediately my “Operation Apartment” dream was born; Zel’s problem, it seemed to me, was all about location. She was stuck in that tower. This obviously happened because she had no stronghold of her own. Get own stronghold and be safe from marauding witches.

Cunning plan.

I find that Young Adult fantasy novels – that are not Twilight – do a good job in general of promoting independence. Think about it. They are usually about young protagonists confronting some problem in the world by themselves and prevailing. I am thinking specifically of anything ever written by Jane Yolen, who specializes in excellent female protagonists, and often does fairy tale adaptations, such as Briar Rose. The recent work of Sarah Rees Brennan is also very promising, though it doesn’t touch on fairy tales. These are stories about independence, doing it yourself, standing up against the demons and monsters and kicking some serious ass.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that novels like these aren’t really for children; they are too violent, or have too much sexual innuendo, or what have you. Basically, the same objections that people still have against the Brothers Grimm. But if the goal is teaching young readers to think for themselves, then they have to be exposed to this kind of work. Even if they don’t like it…that’s great! Developing one’s own taste is part of becoming independent. How are children supposed to figure out what they like and don’t like if they are only exposed to the Sunshine-And-Kitties side of children’s literature?

Not that I’m anti sunshine or anti kitten. I’m merely pro-independence.

Of course, then I really should start practicing what I preach. I’ve got to study more Vietnamese. My daily struggles with the language put a bit of a damper on my independence. Darn it all. Independence isn’t independence if you can’t understand what strangers are shouting at you on the street.

It was during the last winter vacation I had, in December 2009. I was busy being super lazy; I was supposed to be researching for my thesis, but I’d had enough of obscure Finnish poems. So I hunkered down with a quilt and watched *the entirety* of the SyFy channel’s Merlin Series 1 marathon. That’s about ten straight hours of Merlin. My mom watched it with me, and we laughed a lot about how Merlin looks like a scared deer.

Like Bambi, but British.

Ah, Merlin. He is forever being too clumsy to live. He goes about banging into brooms, dropping vials of Important Potions, and stuttering every time he’s caught doing something Sneakily Magical. Happens every episode. I should know, I watched them all in a giant chunk. And when do you do something like that, patterns stick out to you. This sort of clumsiness doesn’t just happen in Merlin, it happens in *so many fantasy adaptations.* Why?

Consider the evidence!

Exhibit A: Ella Enchanted. The movie, not the book. Anne Hathaway’s character falls over everything in sight. Everything. In. Sight. Though she can’t always help it; she’s cursed, after all.

Exhibit B: The Princess Diaries. Anne Hathaway’s character falls over everything in sight. Everything. In. Sight. There is no excuse.

Exhibit C: How to Train Your Dragon. Hiccup is a wiry, scrawny sort who can’t lift heavy objects and falls over everything. He is our Noble Hero with a deep understand of magical beasts, especially dragons. Kinda like Merlin, who in addition to being made of Sparkly Magic, is also the “last dragon lord.”

Exhibit D: Tinkerbell. Have you seen the recent Disney Tinker Bell movie? She’s kind of a klutz. With anger issues. Never a good thing.

And so on. Of course, this trend isn’t necessarily restricted to the fantasy genre. There are klutzes everywhere, especially in rom-coms. The theory for why this is is pretty simple: give the main character a flaw to make them more likable! But make it a little flaw, so they remain a super awesome hero/heroine. And let’s just reuse the same flaw over and over again, because we’re lazy.

But I think that there’s more to it in the fantasy genre. See, folk and fairy tales have great tradition of fools-as-heroes. They are usually under-noticed sorts: youngest sons, mostly, like in The Youth Who Went Out To Learn What Fear Was, as retold by the Brothers Grimm. The Youth isn’t so much clumsy as he is foolish; he has no idea how the world works, what he should be afraid of, or even what a corpse is. Consequently, he is able to face some frightening adventures without flinching, and wins himself a princess in the bargain.

These kinds of heroes are super-common in classic fairy tales. There are several reasons for this. First of all, having a fool unwittingly outsmart the “smart” people around him allows for a subversion of the status quo. You don’t have to be a daring and intelligent prince to win the day. Those who operate outside the system and what is defined as “brave” or “smart” can, in fact, seize the day.

Stories like this also posit that no one should be written off because of their disadvantages, like being a youngest son, or being clumsy or foolish.

This pops up in contemporary adaptations, too. Everyone writes off the clumsy, doddering Merlin. He doesn’t fit in with the rest of society. But what they don’t know is that Merlin is actually a secret magician! Ha! And he protects them all, too.

Merlin: Using Sparkly Magic to Save You since 2008

That last point is really what I want to get at. Foolish and clumsy characters start out as subversive: they practice magic, don’t conform to society’s expectations for intelligence, rank, decorum, etc. They fly in the face of all that is usual. However, they use their abilities to support, better, and reform the status quo, not abolish it. The Youth uses his foolish daring to save a kingdom and win a Princess, not to bring down the whole system of feudal obligation all together. Anne Hathaway eventually abandons her gawky-outsider ways to assume Princess-hood and conform to normal beauty standards. And Merlin – heaven bless every awkward bit of him – uses his subversive magical powers to *repeatedly* save Uther and his magic-phobic Kingdom. He also always stays in his position as a servant, never really challenging the status quo.

Thus something which starts out as subversive is re-incorporated into the dominant societal matrix. Reform, not revolution. This is the focus in all but a few bits of classic mythical and fairy-tale literature. Merlin: King Arthur’s extremely powerful yet loyal adviser. The fantastical sidekicks of “How Six Men Got on in the World”, patiently serving a hero far weaker and less cool than they. You can be different if you like, the tales say, but don’t go trying to think you can upset things because you are.

Of course, there are some exceptions to the rule, and I love them dearly. The most familiar to most people is probably Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. Elphaba is unapologetically different, not seeking to change herself, and refuses to be an agent of the Wizard. She tries to change the world, does Elfie, and don’t you get in her way. (She is also, by the way, given to bursts of clumsiness).

Elphaba’s fate, however, shows how difficult a life like hers is: refusing to assimilate into the accepted hierarchy often means scorn, persecution, general ridicule for things like green skin, etc.

I personally think that we need more heroes like Elphaba and fewer like Merlin, though it pains me to say it. Life doesn’t always have a happy ending, and not everyone fits into the graceful-princess-saves-the-day mold. Differences and agitation should be celebrated, especially in children’s literature and films, which reach readers/viewers when they’re at that critical phase, learning whether they are “normal” or “outsiders.” Abolishing this terminology altogether, or at least teaching children that there’s power in being subversive…well, I think that’s something to work for. Though I’ll still watch Merlin in the meantime. It’s fluffy, but oh so endearing.

I’ve found the right café, that’s certain. The coffee is good, and it’s about a two minute walk from my apartment. However, despite living in an area teeming with bookstores, I have yet to find the right one.

I have very specific requirements for a bookstore. The first is that it have books in English. The second is that these books must be a mix between popular fiction and classics. The third – and trickiest – is that the selection must include Vietnamese books translated into English.

It’s the third one that kills me. There are plenty of stores with books in English; one of them, a mere fifteen minute walk from my place, features nothing but English-language materials. But no one bothers to translate Vietnamese books into English. This is perhaps undertandable. The average American/British traveler may not be interested in poetry during the reign of Gia Long. But gosh darnit, I am.

So the other day I broke down and ordered some books from Amazon and Magers and Quinn, my favorite stateside bookstore. I opted for a dual-language edition of the poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương, and another bilingual edition of Vietnamese feminist poets.

My interests: they are obscure. But I really can’t wait for the last one…apparently it contains some oral poetry! Though how one can know the gender of the authors – if there even *are* authors – of oral poetry is a mystery to me. But I hope the anthology is interesting reading! It’d better be; shipping books to Việt Nam is a really quick way to break the bank. Oy vey.

The book apparently opens with Glinda under house arrest. Well that, at least, is good! I was wondering where Glinda was in “A Lion Among Men.” I hated that book. Maguire can do so much better. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and I will definitely read the book whenever it comes out.

Something Wicked This Way Comes. Let's hope it's wicked good.

Find out what I hope happens in the book, after the jump.

1. Absolutely no Mother Yackle. None. She reminds me of Yoda, but with a potty-mouth. This is not a good thing.

2. No Brrr. He might be the most insipid character of all time.

3. Write the Oz characters, and nothing more. Stop inventing characters. Stop trying to bring minor characters from the original series to the forefront. I’m sorry, friend, but you work best when you’re working from characters developed by others. Stick with Glinda.

4. The exception to the above rule is Nor. She is cool. More of her!

5. Bring back Elphaba. Just do it. We know you’re going to.

6. Tell me what the Clock of the Time Dragon is. I want to know. If you just have it vanish, I will be very, very pissed off.

7. NO sex scenes. Absolutely NONE. You are a terrible sex scene writer. I’m sorry. It needs to be said. The worst part of Wicked was the Elphaba/Fiyero sex scene. After I read the terrible kitty-kitty sex in A Lion Among Men, I felt like replacing my eyes with golf-balls so I could never read again.

Other than that…

I believe in you, Gregory! Bad though it was, A Lion Among Men was better than Son of a Witch. May Out of Oz equal the greatness of Wicked, and may it be worth the cost of international shipping which I will have to pay to get it to Việt Nam.

The most terrible thing about this song is that I absolutely love it. I’ll come back to that in a minute. First of all, I want to note the things which the movie – both explicitly and implicitly – makes reference to:

Fairy Tales. This is an implicit reference; however, we do have Taylor Swift standing on a balcony in a tower. (Rapunzel anyone?) The song’s title, “Love Story,” is also a gesture towards the fairy-tale genre, as is its opening line, “We were both young when I first saw you.

Romeo and Juliet. The classic love story, no? Swift is Juliet, Dashing Man With Very Styled Hair (I’ll call him DMV) is Romeo.

The Scarlet Letter. Not a good idea on Swift’s part. The line: “Cause you were Romeo, I was a Scarlet Letter, and my Daddy said, ‘Stay away from Juliet.’”

Jane Austen. Here I am not talking about any particular Jane Austen book, movie, or other adaptation, but rather the sort of romantic “brand” that Regency England has become, and which is often talked about under Jane Austen’s name. This sort of Jane Austen has several things: waistcoats, lovely dresses, women with diamonds and/or gold in their up-dos, country dances of the like shown in Swift’s music video. In fact, that dance is basically just a flashier, more polished, less witty version of the dance between Darcy and Elizabeth from the 2005 film (which in turn was a flashier, more polished, less witty version of the same dance from the 1995 mini-series). You’ll find the video after the jump:

See what I mean? Especially that bit when they are dancing by themselves. Also, the scene near the end of Taylor’s video is a flashier, brighter, more fancily costumed and less complex version of this scene from the same movie:

OK, so the music video makes visual links to Jane Austen style love stories; it borrows the tropes with which we are familiar, even if it doesn’t explicitly quote Pride and Prejudice or any given adaptation. Why does Swift do this? We’ll come back to that in a second.

First, let’s look at the other items on the list. The Scarlet Letter. Why the heck would Swift reference that? It is *not* a happy story, people. It is not even really a love story. The “letter” in question is a scarlet “A” that Hester is forced to wear, which is for “adultery,” not “apple” or “ambrosia” or “aphrodisiac.” Why, then, does Taylor Swift reference it in a tale about pure, young, shinysunnyperfect love? Either she hasn’t read it – which is possible, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt – or something else is going on.

Let’s move on to Fairy Tales/Rapunzel. It’s an iconic image, isn’t it? Girl locked in tower, waiting for her love to rescue her. It’s a trope, something that we’re super familiar with, classic.

Hmmm, what was that word? Iconic. Classic. Same goes for Romeo and Juliet. The story is in a class by itself. It isn’t just a story, it’s a symbol for something: perfect love. In fact, the story is so well known, so over-used, has embedded itself so deeply into our culture that it has in fact become empty. And that is exactly the point.

Fairy Tales have always had a special sort of property: their glaring unspecificity. They always begin “once upon a time,” never “ten years ago in Brooklyn.” For the most part they star nameless Princes, Princesses, Miller’s Daughters and Youngest Sons, never a Sally, Hildegaard, or Jayma. They are *types.* Most fairy tales follow the exact same storyline; the differences in individual tales are just variations on a theme. And this, in part, accounts for their enduring appeal. If a story and its characters are unspecific enough, it can purport to be universal. This story about a Young Girl is a story about every young girl! This story about a Princess is everyone’s story (if they were a princess)! The stories are therefore, in a sense, empty: they have little specific content. They are waiting to be filled with the hopes, dreams, and projections of those who read them. (If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend that you read this post about fairy tales and psychoanalysis).

See where this is going? There is method in Taylor Swift’s mash-up madness. Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter and Jane Austen all have one thing in common with Fairy Tales: their status as iconic classics. And as such, they derive their meaning not so much from themselves – their plots, what they are as works of art – as from the way they are used in our culture. Saying the words “Jane Austen” seldom actually means Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park or Pride and Prejudice anymore; it means Perfect Romance. Same thing with Romeo and Juliet. The Scarlet Letter is trickier; it does enjoy status as a classic, but it is more obscure. However, many of those who have heard of it think that it ends like the Hollywood film version with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman, in which there is a happy ending and love prevails.

The Sexed Up Scarlet Letter: I promise you that the book is not like this

“Love Story” takes all these things, mixes them together, and comes out with a love story. Not love stories. But a love story. The video, by referencing so many classic tropes in one single story line, implies that all these love stories are in fact one single love story. They are all just variations on one single fairy-tale theme. All love stories have the same trajectory, they are all part of one single love story, The Love Story, the epic one.

This is why Ms. Swift, apparently, feels justified in changing the ending of Romeo and Juliet. To make it happy. Romeo just talks to Taylor’s dad, and everyone’s cool. The Scarlet Letter stands for love, man, not adultery. Oh, and fairy tale characters hang out in towers because it looks awesome, not because anyone locked them up there.

This is part of what makes the song, and the music video, so appealing. By “flattening” everything out and making all these stories into mere “types” – a classic technique, even if Swift doesn’t know it – Swift empties her song of any content. It isn’t about Taylor and DMV and how they met 3 months ago in Detroit and got to know each other by discussing a mutual love of geckos. The story lacks all specificity, making it empty, making it easy for listeners/viewers to insert themselves into the song and vicariously live out its story.

Of course, this is a really scary, dangerous thing. First of all, it implies that there is only one way to be in love. It’s called “Love Story” after all, not “Love Stories.” You mean that your story doesn’t fit into this mold? It’s wrong. Change it. What, you say you don’t want to change it? Hey, if you can change Romeo and Juliet – maybe the greatest love story of all time – so it can better be a part of the love story, anything’s possible. Stop being different and conform.

Songs like this bug me. They are problematic. True, fairy tales – which I adore – are often problematic in the same way for many of the same reasons. They, too, have “empty” story-lines which beg to be called “universal,” and which beguilingly invite readers to insert themselves into the otherwise “empty” plots. (For more on the good/bad of fairy tales, see this post).

Fairy Tales have this problem, but Taylor Swift’s song goes a little bit too far. It goes beyond fairy tales and tries to make just about every love story *ever* conform to a pattern. The problem is that I actually like the song quite a bit, as far as the music bit of it goes (I could leave the lyrics; they’re boring). So what can I do? How can I possibly enjoy this song without being a total hypocrite?

Well I can’t; I’ll always be a little bit of a hypocrite. But! When this song first came out I decided that I would balance out its saccharine simplicity with some excellent specificity. The first time I heard this song, I knew exactly what it was about: Achilles and Patroclus. That’s right. The Iliad is one of my top-five favorite books of all time, and it is at least partly because I think Achilles and Patroclus were meant to be. I cry every single time when Patroclus dies. I lose it every time I read about Achilles stretching out his hands to embrace Patroclus’s ghost yet left with nothing but air.

So, when I started writing my thesis about a year ago, I read the Iliad multiple times, sometimes for 8 hours at a time, and when I did it I would always listen to “Love Story” on repeat. Yeah, I’ve probably spent a grand total of 30 or so hours of my waking life listening to that song and crying over an old greek book. ‘Tis a strange life that I lead.

But! I draw from this a valuable lesson. Non-specific, “universal” love stories like Swift’s version of, uh, every love story on the planet might be tempting. They tempt us to identify with them because of the illusion of perfection they present. But we also know that this view of the world is a lie. The stories that we find the most touching are actually apt to be the specific, flawed ones, since those are apt to have more in common with our lived experiences. They’ll never be quite as iconic, since they’ll never have that claim to universality, but they’re super enjoyable all the same.

…And besides, no one will ever make a painting this beautiful and tragic bout a Taylor Swift song:

Blog Reader: Great! Can’t wait!
Dae: Fiend, stay your excitement! I have *most sobering news.*
Blog Reader: Oh no! Whatever could it be?
Dae: Catherine Hardwicke is the director.

Yep. Twilight‘s director. So it should come as no surprise that the Wolf in this movie has been re-imagined as… a werewolf.

If he shows up in this movie, I swear I'll have a stroke

But wait! There’s more! More pictures, I mean, and they are quite the puzzle. Here we see Amanda Seyrfried in the traditional Red Riding Hood getup:

Or not. Are those horns? What? Don’t get me wrong, messing with the storyline is not necessarily a bad thing. Could be interesting! I’m intrigued! But I am also wary. I mean, with all the other fairy tale film adaptations floating around, I’m worried that they’ll just get tired and sad. Or way too overblown. Which may lead to tired and sad.

If you want to see more pictures of Red, check out this photo gallery at Just Jared. I’ll post more as the film develops!

So I’m a mute in my own life. This makes me think about fairy tales! And cultural crticism! Surprise! Joseph Jacobs – collector of English Stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries – is my target today. Like many fairy tale collectors, Jacobs saw himself as preserving a vanishing tradition. England, he warned, was losing its folk culture due to industrialization. Also, and way more importantly, they were being shown up in the Folklore arena by the Germans and the French. SO not okay, people. But! In his otherwise rather pedestrian Preface, Jacobs says something really interesting:

Who says that English folk have no fairy tales of their own? [...] The only reason, I imagine, why such tales have not hitherto been brought to light, is the lamentable gap between the governing and recording classes and the dumb working classes of this country–dumb to others but eloquent among themselves. It would be no unpatriotic task to help to bridge over this gulf, by giving a common fund of nursery literature to all classes of the English people, and, in any case, it can do no harm to add to the innocent gaiety of the nation.

Dumb to others but eloquent amongst themselves. When you first read it, it’s pretty easy to dismiss the comment as dated and classist. And in a way it is. Though Jacobs isn’t using dumb to mean “stupid;” Laura Gibbs of the University of Oklahoma believes that Jacobs’ comment refers to a lack of literacy in the non-governing classes. And this might be the case. But I think that there’s something more in Jacobs’ comment, soemthing more telling, even if there’s also a hefty dose of elitism mixed in.

I'm a bald elitist with a large moustache, but I still may have a point.

Thing is: the idea that the underclasses – for lack of a better word until later – can’t communicate themselves may have a grain of truth in it. But it’s not because of a lack of intelligence. It’s because of the nature of communication itself. See, not long ago a gal by the name of Gyatri Spivak wrote an essay called “Can the Subaltern Speak?” By “subaltern,” she means literally a person who is in a subordinate position. Not the masters. This notion is tricky. Who is subaltern? An oppressed group? Not necessarily. Let’s take women for example (because I am one). Women are not the masters of this universe, though it pains me to say it. Yet that does not mean that all women are subaltern. Individuals can choose to align themselves with the ruling institutions, they can be cut off from female identity, or – worst – they can go to college, take classes in cultural theory, and then go about writing things – like essays and blog posts and essays disguised as blog posts – claiming to represent subaltern women. And this is dangerous, because they are not, in fact, the Metatron of the subaltern. They aren’t being, showing, or representing the subaltern; rather, they are filtering subaltern experience, making it their own and not representing that experience but rather re-presenting it, if that makes sense. The subaltern, says Spivak, is necessarily heterogeneous; it isn’t composed of “the workers” or “the poor” or “the minorities.” A member of any one of these groups may be subaltern, but then again, the circumstances that they are in, and their relationship to the power-structures of those circumstances, changes their status.

So when asking “can the subaltern speak,” it’s good to keep in mind how complex the idea of the “subaltern” is. But the word “speak” is also important here. And I don’t mean my issues with speaking in Việt Nam, which in no way classify me as subaltern. What I’m talking about isn’t just everyday communication – we all do that – but communication of the self. Can the subaltern speak, communicate their situation, represent themselves outside themselves? Or are they doomed, as Jacobs implies, to be eloquent only amongst themselves, unable to have their unadulterated experiences shown out in the world without the risk of appropriation?

People who write histories write the histories that they want to write, and they erase subaltern experience in the process. People who collect folk tales also erase subaltern experiences, even when they think – like Jacobs did – that they are preserving that experience and showing it to the world.

Take the Brothers Grimm for example. They did not go galavanting about the countryside, walking up to peasants and collecting oral folktales. Actually they got most of their tales from middle-class women in Kassel. The German scholar Heinz Rolleke has devoted his entire life to showing how the Grimms’ fairy tales evolved. Far from being the pure outpouring of German folk spirit, most of the tales are bourgeois in origin. Moreover, the Grimms changed the tales *significantly* before publishing them. There’s a lot of debate going on about the changes they made; many tales were made tamer, less sexual, such as “The Frog Prince.” Some, however, were actually radicalized, like “The Robber Bridegroom.” Whatever the case, the stories which many believe to be representations of under-represented, illiterate German peasants are actually the product of some bourgeois women and two literary geniuses.

This Is Not An Image of the Subaltern Speaking. It's also, by the way, no how the Brothers collected their stories.

The subaltern doesn’t speak to us from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Do subalterns speak elsewhere?

A while back, I wrote a post about ca dao, vietnamese folk poems. The collector and translator of these poems, John Balaban, collected them by wandering around Việt Nam with a tape recorder, asking farmers, workers, anyone he met to sing him their favorite songs. Surely the subaltern spoke there! I mean, Balaban didn’t change the poems, right? He just collected them, wrote them down, translated and published them. Problem solved, right?

Not necessarily. First of all, consider the circumstances under which the poems were recited. Were they sung in their natural, normal setting, among members of a village without outsiders? No. Does this fact effect the poems? Yes; the choice of subject matter, of which poems to sing, was almost definitely swayed by the fact that the singer was performing for *Balaban;* we’re talking about an American collecting folk poems during the Việt Nam war. And it’s true; a lot of the ca dao in his volume have to do with the nation, with war, loss, etc. On top of this, you have to add in the fact that Balaban did not publish all the poems he collected. Many readers also come to the poems through translation, which also effectively robs the poets of their voices (though this is not Balaban’s fault).

It’s also a good idea to think about to whom the subaltern is trying to speak. Who are the receivers? Can they even receive the experience/knowledge that the subaltern is trying to communicate? I’m going to quote Spivak (at my peril; she can be obscure)

When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance.’ The sender – ‘the peasant’ – is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is ‘the real receiver’ of an ‘insurgency?’ The historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge,’ is only one ‘receiver’ of any collectively intended social act.
- Spivak, p. 82.

OK, so that’s brilliant, but also opaque. Let’s say I’m a peasant and you’re an ethnographer out to collect folktales. Good for you! You come up to me and ask me to tell you a tale. Being a rather nice person with an excellent voice and a great repertoire of tales, I’m happy to oblige. You collect it and go on your merry way.

But what happens to the story?

Caution: Potential Weapon of Mass Destruction

Maybe you publish it. People read it and are educated. Good job! But your readers didn’t actually experience a folktale. What they experienced was a “text for knowledge.” A “folktale” is something quite different. It is told among people for whom it has great meaning, tying back to their way of life. It is more than itself, it’s its context: told to (or sometimes by) a group of people in the fabric of daily life. You tell a tale about harvests in the fall, a tale about sexual desire when infidelity blows through town, tell tales as a way of experiencing life more fully, adding meaning, community, experience, etc. The folktale is inseparable from its context. Someone who records it and sells it in a book, like Jacobs did, may “preserve” it and ensure that others read it, but what he’s written down is a piece of knowledge, albeit a beautiful one. He’s lost all the experience that makes a folktale what it is.

When I read a folk or fairy tale, I try to remember that I’m always reading a translation. Even if the fairy tale was originally told by English-speaking peoples. It’s a little clinical, actually, even if the tale itself is beautiful. When I’m critiquing a fairy tale, I try to remember where I’m speaking from. Writing about the practice of widows’ self-immolation on the funeral pyres of their husbands, Spavik says:

Obviously I am not advocating the killing of widows. [...] [But] in the case of widow self-immolation, ritual is not being redefined as superstition but as crime. The gravity of satiwas that it was ideologically cathected as ‘reward,’ just as the gravity of imperialism was that it was ideologically cathected as ‘social mission.’
- Spivak, 97.

The religious authority telling women to self-immolate claims to represent the wishes of the woman: she wants to die and receive her reward for doing so. The white men “saving” these women from this “barbarism” are doing so because they are such benevolent, humanitarian people. The women’s voices are nowhere. And if you go to the source to try to figure out what these women think – and you should – how do you know that the answer you get is a true representation of what the woman wants, rather than a response which is merely *supposed* to be given to you, the researcher?

Dialing down the stakes by a *lot,* this is useful when thinking about folk tales. Who is presenting them to me? What did they change and why? The Brothers Grimm screwed around with gender roles in their fairy tale collection, and you’d better believe that they did it with an agenda. Then again, even if I were a German peasant woman, listening to these tales (here unchanged or “pure”) tales and retelling them to my children, am I actually speaking in my own voice? That is, am I just re-presenting a story, or does the story actually represent me?

These are the thorny questions. I don’t have answers to them, but they do a lot to make me aware of what it is I study and why I study it. A folktale tells a story beyond itself, even if some involved in that story are silent.