Week 3 Reading Notes: Jewish Fairy Tales Part B

The Rabbi's Bogey Man- The pov for this story is closest to third person, without any true viewpoint character. Rabbi Lion is definitely the main character and focus of most of the story, but it isn't really told from his perspective. Rather than write what the rabbi is thinking, the story has him speak out loud to an empty room so an outside observer would be able to overhear. The first indication of emotion is that he looks troubled, not that he is troubled, and when the story does state how he feels there isn't any attempt to convey those emotions. During the scene with the king, the reader has just as much insight into how he feels as they do the rabbi.

I think it would be interesting to rewrite this story from the viewpoint of the first golem. It seems like she's capable of thinking, even if she has to obey orders, but since she's less rebellious than the second golem the reader never knows what she might be thinking.

                                                       
                                                             (The Rabbi's Bogey Man)

Week 3 Reading Notes:Jewish Fairy Tales Part A

The Quarrel of the Cat and Dog

I thought it was interesting how the story started with the two animals being friends, and that it made it almost sad when they ended up as enemies at the end. However, I don't think it really makes sense how they became enemies. I don't get why the cat wanted them to never see each other again, or why she was so angry when the dog accidentally showed up again, especially since there was enough room and food for both of them.

I also thought it was cool how the dog was shown fulfilling some of the jobs humans train dogs to do for other animals. He acted as a guard dog for the wolf, hearing approaching danger and going out to chase it away, (although the wolf probably would have been better suited to fighting off wild animals) and he warned the sheep when the wolves were coming like a sheep dog.

                                         
                                                         (Etching by Hendrik Hondius)

Thoughts on Feedback

Overcoming the Fear of Feedback- This article was interesting in its analysis of why people are afraid of giving feedback in particular. I never thought about it having more to do with protecting yourself and what people think of you than wanting to avoid hurting other people's feelings. A lot of it seemed geared more toward helping with running a company than interpersonal types of feedback.

Silence the Critical Voices in Your Head- I have a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of feedback. I just tend to think that the things I need to change and improve on are more important than those things I've already done well. However, after reading this article, I can see how it could be useful to ficus on the good things that could be reproduced in future projects.

                                    
                                                                  (Feedback)

Topic Brainstorm

Mermaids- I've always loved mermaids. When I was little, The Little Mermaid was my favorite Disney movie. As I got older I became interested in the darker original mermaid legends, as well as related creatures like sirens. I will use The Folklore of the Isle of Man by A. W. Moore as a starting  place for my research.

Fairies- My long time fascination with fairies is similar to my interest in mermaids. They were always pretty and friendly in children's media I liked, and when I was older I liked the less occasionally less than benevolent versions of them in older stories. I really only know anything about the Celtic versions of fairy lore, so it might be interesting to learn about equivalent stories in other cultures. I think the book The Fairy Mythology by Thomas Kneightly will be a good source for this.

                                        
                                            (The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Noel Paton)

Goddesses- I'm really interested in the stories of greek goddesses, especially Persephone and Artemis. I would be interested in learning about the goddesses of other cultures and seeing how they compare to those stories I'm familiar with. I think the List of Deities on Wikipedia will be a good place to start looking for goddess stories I'm interested in learning more about.

Witches- The concept of humans being able to use magic is a cool one for me. Honestly, I don't think I'll ever truly get over not receiving my Hogwarts letter as an eleven year old. I would be interested in learning more traditional stories about witches, although I doubt most of them will be very positive. I will use Edwin Sidney's English Fairy and Other Folk Tales.

Week 2 Story- Penelope and the Statue

There once lived a woman named Penelope who was a gifted artist. Her sculptures were admired far and wide, and she loved creating beautiful things to make the world a brighter place. For the most part, she was content with living quietly and working on her art, but sometimes she would feel incredibly lonely, for she was not close to many people.

One day, Penelope began sculpting a statue of a woman as a tribute for the goddess Venus. She worked diligently on this statue, and her skill and attention to detail where such that it appeared almost alive as it emerged from the stone. She gave the statue kind eyes and a playful, knowing smile, and as she worked she spoke to it.

She told the statue what was going on in the world, and what she thought of it. She talked about the books she was reading, and her theories on how the plot would progress. She planned aloud what she would do next to complete the statue, and jokingly asked for its opinion.

                                           

The statue, which Penelope had started calling Grace during their one sided conversations, listened to everything Penelope said. She heard about the world outside Penelope's art studio, and longed to see it for herself. She wanted to read the books Penelope had mentioned, and see if she enjoyed the stories when they were written, or if it was just the way Penelope retold them that made them sound so interesting. She wanted to read other books and see if she liked those stories even better. She longed to be alive.

The day Penelope finished carving Grace she looked into her carved eyes and sighed.

"I wish I could bring you to life," she said. "The world is a wonderful place, though at times it can be cruel. It seems a shame you will never get to experience it. I would have liked to show it to you, I think."

When Penelope began to dedicate her finished statue to Venus, the goddess was touched. She could see from the care put into the statue that carving it had been a labor of love, and she could sense that the statue loved the artist in return. Venus saw that both statue and artist wished for the statue to be alive, and decided to grant that wish.

Life flowed slowly into Grace. Penelope watched, stunned, as the statue drew her first breath. She nearly fell when her legs turned from stone to skin and bone, but Penelope managed to steady her. 

Grace looked up at the woman who had created her, and, for the first time in her existence, spoke.

"Hello," she said. "I'm so glad to be able to talk to you."

Author's Note: This story is based on the story of Pygmalion from Ovid's Metamorphosis.  In the original, Pygmalion thinks all women are wicked, so he makes a statue and pretends to date it before asking Venus to bring it to life. I wanted to write a story where an artist's love for their creation brings that creation to life, without the creepy sexist overtones. I also wanted to include a bit of what the statue thinks of all this, since that perspective is entirely missing from the original. To be clear, the two characters in my story don't feel romantic love for each other at the point that the story ends, although I do think it could develop that way once Grace learns about the world and has a chance to become a real person.

Bibliography: Story Source Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000).

Image: Statue of a woman

Reading Notes: Metamorphosis-Pygmalion

Metamorphosis

The story of Pygmalion seems like a precursor to the robot girlfriend episode I've seen in a lot of TV shows. However, unlike those episodes, it doesn't go into the part where everything ends up going horribly wrong. And based on Pygmalion's personality, it would have definitely gone horribly wrong.

Pygmalion is one of the worst characters I've ever read about. In general I think most stories involving some guy making his ideal girlfriend are really creepy, whether they use robots or magic or the blessing of Venus herself. Like, there's nothing wrong with wanting love, or creating and feeling attached to something you find beautiful, but it's always handled in an incredibly misogynistic way that Pygmalion really exemplifies.

Pygmalion hates women. He thinks they're all wicked by nature and can't stand to be around them. And yet he also thinks he's somehow entitled to a girlfriend, just one that lives up to his weird sexist standards. There is nothing about dressing and having "conversations" with and sleeping beside a statue that isn't creepy. He only "loves" her because she's perpetually beautiful and can't speak or think on account of being a statue. there's no way he's going to be happy after she becomes a real woman. This video really sums up my problems with Pygmalion.

                                       
Image Information: Pygmalion priant Vénus d'animer sa statue by Jean-Baptiste Regnault.

Reading Options

Fairie Queene

• This one caught my eye because I love fairy stories and excessive vowel use.
• What's not to love about a gender bending lady knight?

Indian Fairy Tales

• Like I said, I love fairy tales.
• I took a class on Indian religions a few years ago and loved it, so I thought this would be interesting.

Japanese Myth

• I don't know much about Japanese myths and so I think it will be interesting to learn.
• All of the stories mentioned in the summary sound really cool.

                                  

                                               (Susa-no-wo and the Serpent)

Time Management

I read The Important Habit of Just Starting by Jory Mackay and How to Beat Procrastination by Caroline Webb. I picked these two articles because I have a major procrastination problem. I always say I'm going to start working on projects days or weeks in advance, and then end up doing the entire thing the night before it's due. Both of these articles went into the psychological reasons behind procrastination and gave advice on how to get over it. It was mostly advice I'd read before, which says less about the articles and more about my habit of looking up tips to stop procrastinating as a method of procrastinating. At least for this semester, all of my classes with large projects have built in schedules that will force me to work on them long before the due dates.

                                                        
                                                             (Procrastinators unite. flickr.)

Technology

I've never used most of the technology tools listed before. I was surprised to see Tumblr listed as an option for setting up our project websites, because I've alway used and thought of it more as a social media platform. However, now that I think about it I can see how its setup would work pretty well for the types of projects we looked at. I don't know if I'll use Tumblr since I'm already familiar with it, or one of the other website options so I can learn how to use them.

                                             
                                                                 (Technology. Source.)

Assignments

I'm looking forward to the storytelling assignments for this class. I'm in a novel writing class this semester, and I think it will be nice to take a break from that and work on smaller writing assignments, especially if they're stories inspired by reading different myths. It will also be a good opportunity to practice with story telling styles that won't work in my novel class. I'm intrigued by the Wikipedia Trails extra credit assignment. I sometimes click through random links on Wikipedia articles anyway, so it will be cool to get class credit for doing it.

                                            
                                                                 (Frog. Source.)

Growth Mindset Response

I had never heard of Carol Dweck or growth mindset before, or at least not referred to as such. I have seen some of the ideas she spoke about in the video before, mostly on Tumblr post where people talked about how always being praised as the "smart kid" growing up for getting good grades had made them unable to deal with difficult classes when they were older, and caused them to view their own intelligence and self worth as being dependant on getting good grades. They talked about how they wished they had been working hard rather than doing well. I can really relate to a lot of these experiences. The first time I had a class that didn't come easily to me was when I took a college level chemistry class in high school. I cried at almost every homework assignment and test and spent the entire school year thinking that I had somehow lost whatever it was that made me smart. As far as academics go, I still have a pretty fixed mindset, although I've been trying to change that. I would say I have more of a growth mindset when it comes to music. I played the trombone all through middle and high school, and I always found songs with super easy base lines to be mind-numbingly dull. I went to almost every honor band audition and solo competition offered in the area, and those required playing pieces that were much more challenging than anything we ever played in class. I won't  say I never got frustrated with these more difficult  pieces, because that would be a lie, but I always persevered through them and was proud and excited by my improvement when I could play them well.

                                         
                                                         (Drawing by Bryan Mathers)

Introduction to Emily

Hi everyone, I'm Emily. I'm a professional writing major. Professional writing is part of Gaylord College and focuses on writing and marketing genre fiction. I'm minoring in religious studies because I've always found learning about different religions to be fascinating. I also think knowing about these different beliefs and practices could be helpful for world building in fantasy writing. I want to write fantasy novels, mainly urban fantasy. I prefer stories that integrate magic into modern society over the vaguely European, medieval-ish kingdoms of high fantasy. The best class I took last semester was Writing the Short Story. I learned a lot about how to plot and execute a good story and got some good feedback from my teacher and classmates. It also forced me to actually finish some stories rather than starting and abandoning a bunch of works in progress. I'm currently reading It Devours, the second Welcome to Night Vale novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. I'm enjoying it so far, but I liked the first one better. It had less of a romance subplot. My favorite book is probably Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. There's a BBC series being made of it starring David Tennant that I'm excited for.

                                                      
                                    (It Devours: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel. Amazon.)
        My copy has this cover--> 
                                                                (Good Omens. Amazon.)

I have two cats and two dogs, but my grandma has recently come to live with us and brought her dogs with her, so we currently have four in the house. They all get along pretty well, so it's mostly been okay, but it is a bit more than we're used to taking care of. My dogs are a Labrador mix of some kind (possibly part grey hound?) named Fiona and a Schnauzer named Tinkerbell (my dad insists it's just Tink, but it's Tinkerbell). My cats are named Han Solo and Scruffy. Solo is especially my cat, because I've been his favorite person ever since he was a kitten.
                                                       
                                                                       (Fiona as a puppy)

                                                       
                                                                       (Han Solo the cat)

Storybook Favorites

Death's Final Story

I was drawn to this storybook because I generally really like stories featuring a personification of Death, especially when that personification is something of a protagonist or narrator rather than something to be feared. I found the structure, with Death speaking directly to the reader in the form of giving advice to a successor to his job, very interesting, as it was not something I had seen done before. The introduction drew me immediately with the statement that Death also dies. Most Death personification stories I have read or seen before state the exact opposite, so I was intrigued to see how the storybook would resolve this statement.

Selkies in Celtic Folk Lore

I've always been a fan of Celtic stories, and I was familiar with the idea of selkies, although I didn't previously know any specific stories about them, so I was curious to read this storybook. I really liked the way it was set up as a mother telling a series of stories to her daughter. It allowed for an introduction and reaction to each story without disrupting the flow of the stories themselves. It was also interesting to see these stories from the perspective of the selkies instead of a human perspective, and the way this shift in viewpoint gave them the appearance of cautionary tales. I felt that the picture of the statue in the last story really communicated the longing and pain of the selkies in this storybook.
                                                     
                           (Statue of the Little Mermaid. Alena's Daughter, Selkies in Celtic Folk Lore)

Ghost Stories

Honestly, who doesn't love a good ghost story? I wasn't familiar with any of the specific stories that where used for inspiration in this one, but I did recognize elements of each one from various urban legends and scary movies. The way it was framed as an investigation was a good way of building suspense by limiting the amount of information both the reader and the narrator herself had access to at any given time in the story. I was clear from the introduction that the storybook was going to focus on investigating the haunted house and retelling the experiences of previous residents, but I didn't expect the level of sympathy given to the ghost. I also really didn't see the end coming.

My Favorite Place-Devil's Den State Park

There isn't a lot to do in the corner of Kansas where I grew up, so my family used go on short road trips into neighboring states on the weekends. One place we went frequently and my personal favorite was Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas. The park has a lot of different trails to hike. As much as I'm normally an indoorsy type of person, I actually really love hiking in wooded areas. I like the way the light filters through the leaves and creates shifting patterns when the wind blows and the possibility of spotting different animals among the trees. There's something about walking over an uneven dirt hiking trail that's just more satisfying than walking down the sidewalk, especially if there are rocks you have to climb over to stay on that trail.

                                              
                                       (Trail at Devil's Den State Park Wikimedia Commons)

However, the best part of these trips wasn't the trail itself. It was the cave at the end of the trail. The cave is closed to the public now to protect the bat population that roosts there in the winter, but back when I went with my family people were allowed to walk through. The cave isn't the easiest to get navigate. The floor is uneven and at times you have to climb up or down to keep going, it's extremely narrow most of the way, and I remember my parents having to duck frequently, although I was short enough to just walk through. The ground was always wet and you have to carry a flashlight because it's pitch dark inside. My sister never wanted to go to far into it because she was (irrationally, in my opinion) afraid of it collapsing, but I always loved caves and liked this one even more for its familiarity.

                                         
                                (Cave entrance Devil's Den State Park Wikimedia Commons)

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