The Spectacle of Distraction

It seems that bear-bating in Elizabethan England could be seen as their version of Roman gladiators. It would be interesting to try and find some equivalence (if one expected) for most other eras of history. One can make arguments for soccer and reality TV in the modern era (or TV in general, I suspect), but the visceral thrill of watching people be executed or hanged at the gallows seems to have been resigned to the past. On a basic level, every society needs values to let pressure escape from them, some being obvious and others much less so.

Religion counts as well, since one can argue that its primary purpose is social control/conformity. That's not to say it is what religion is about, but effectively what it becomes as a tool to maintain social order. If you want to avoid a revolt, you make sure people can't even conceive of it or convince them that they will be vindicated in some future time (via heaven/reincarnation/the dead all being equal and so forth).

The more obvious and gruesome spectacles to distract people also serve as warnings, much as being called a witch did in times gone by -- they told people that this is what happens if you screw up and warned them against stepping too far out of social norms. That betting on them is also the norm and can allow one some measure of wealth and perceived control over their lives is definitely an important factor in such events, but the fact that they become necessary for a society could be considered to imply a breakdown or at least symptomatic of a massive change in said society.

Elizabethan England was having the Protestant/Catholic wars straining ideas of what it meant to be of one faith or the other, and the price of conversion vs. that of souls, whether the nation could be considered godly and so forth, while the Roman empire was bursting with slaves and falling apart at the seams. I suspect that a society with less discrepancy between the rich and the poor in terms of wealth would require less overt or obvious means of social control, but it is likely a difficult theory to study.

on writing poetry again (a ramble)

I haven't written poems in years, not really. Oh, small scraps here and there, but mostly stories and novels in the past six years or so. At present, however, I am reaching my nadir period, wherein I don't write much for a month or two. It happens every year: I figure the brain needs to recharge.

I'll continue with Boy& Fox, at the slow pace I'm doing now, let other stuff marinate. And in defiance of that, slowly write more poems. I don't consider myself good at it -- I wouldn't subject the world to a book of them, for example (chapbook or otherwise) but it's a nice pov to throw my brain into, to tease out pure economy from words.

Also to dig up old stuff and revise it, which is always an interesting experiment.  Shall see how the next month goes.

On characters, some thoughts

I'm working on characters for a novel, getting a feel for how they work in my head again. It's been a while since I looked in on them, and the story and the characters have shifted and changed a lot over that time. I've written sequels to their story that failed, tried to write their story a few times to have it die on the page. Sometimes change is good, both for the story and the character. (For example, the 'sequel' idea failed utterly because the one character simply could not be the other as an adult. Which has led to re-thinking both characters. Again.)

I have found that I tend to approach characters from the central question of what lies they tell to themselves and to other people. The starting point, in my head, is where they are the most dishonest, how they fake honesty and so forth. We're different people depending on who we chat with and when, and why: in a lot of ways, we never let go of our masks, or we convince ourselves we do so well that said desire becomes a mask in and of itself. As an author, the fun part is finding the bits of myself in each character, and building -- or removing -- masks around that as the story and character dictate.

So I am looking at their masks, at the lives they choose to lead, the lives chosen for them and the costs (and sacrifices) of such things, sure in the knowledge that no one truly believes themselves the villain of their own story and wondering what would happen if someone did....