Week 15 Tech Tip: Image Resizing

This is from a painting I found on Wikipedia Commons. It is called Harbor Scene: An English Ship with Sails Loosened Firing a Gun and is attributed to Peter Monamy, placing its date of creation some time in the late 17th to mid-18th century. I chose this image because sailing ships are cool!

Week 14 Tech Tip: URL Shortener

Black Gate is a fantasy fiction blog that I frequent a lot since it has a lot of useful information on the genre, great book recommendations, and helpful advice on the topic of writing in general. The URL isn't particularly long, but since it's a website I visit a lot, I thought it wouldn't  hurt to get it shortened.

The result was that I went from this:  

www.blackgate.com

To this:

http://goo.gl/MBCL5G

I guess in this case they couldn't think of a way to shorten it any more, so they gave me a slightly longer and more complicated link to remember. I think I'll stick with the original URL for this one.

Week 13 Tech Tip: Google Timer

I normally try to designate specific times for when I want to stop studying and start studying. However, since the times are just things I make up as I go, I tend to ignore my time goals and procrastinate for a prolonged period of time. This timer feature sounds like it could be a really easy and simple to set up way of better enforcing the amount of time I spend studying and taking breaks. It also  might be useful for when I'm writing, since it's important to be disciplined so as not to get drawn away from the keyboard or to some random time-wasting site when I should be focusing on the writing project.

Week 12: Famous Last Words

Whew, I feel like I did a lot today, even though in fact I didn't do all that much. I spent about five hours straight doing research for a big paper I'm putting together for my Oklahoma Writing class. The paper is a study of the Native American (and Oklahoma-born) authors N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo and a few of their works. I basically spent those hours reading through books and typing excerpts that I felt might be useful in a Word document. Reading through some of the conversations Momaday had with various interviewers, I was impressed with just how much the man reveres language, whether written or spoken. Here's a quote from Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (1997, edited by Matthias Schubnell).

 In the oral tradition one appropriates things to his experience. This is the business of being a human being. And the only way we can express that idea of appropriation, of course, is through language . . . I think myths are appropriated to our experience, myths from the long distant past, but we also appropriate things that happen to us in our daily lives, very immediate things. In the oral tradition these recent appropriations have a way of becoming merged with the whole of our experience. It is a process of renewal . . . (41-42)

This idea that Momaday expresses is relevant to what we're doing in this class, I think. We're reading all these myths and experiencing new things through them, or perhaps relating the familiar experiences in them to things we've gone through in our own lives. We're retelling these stories and adding to them our experiences, and as a result renewing those stories, breathing fresh ideas into age old tales. Stories evolve as human experience evolves and changes over the course of time. I think Momaday would certainly be fascinated with the way so many students have evolved stories in so many rich and unique ways in this class. 

I'm really grateful I got the chance to take such an awesome class that allowed me to read so many new and cool stories and that freed me to stretch my creative wings when I write without worrying about making the grade all the time. Thanks, Professor Gibbs, for offering such a fun and engaging class! I've learned so much and have improved as a writer as a result of the work I've done, and hope to continue to improve as I approach the finish line for the course. I couldn't have asked for a better last semester course to take before I graduate.

Penguins! (Wikipedia Commons)

Week 12 Essay: Magic and the Supernatural in Thomas's "Welsh Fairy Book"

Magic and the Supernatural in Thomas's Welsh Fairy Book

The world of Thomas's Welsh Fairy Book is, as one might imagine, a world where there is a lot of fairies. More than this, the actions of fairies very much actively affect the lives of mortal folk as well. As with the stories in the British North American unit, there is not a large gap dividing the worlds of the natural and supernatural. Fairies often interfere in the lives of regular humans, and for their part humans often find themselves stumbling into the territory of the fairy folk.

“The Stray Cow” provides a good example about how the affairs of the supernatural folk often come to affect the lives of your average mortal. When one of a number of sacred cows belonging to some local elfin women—essentially fairies—comes to live among the herd of an old farmer, the fortunate man finds himself suddenly becoming quite rich. This elfin cow produced the best calves and milk one could ask for, yet the farmer, apparently not realizing the exact nature of his divine bovine, fears that the stray cow will eventually grow too old to profit him further and decides to slaughter her. The fairies interfere and take away before he can follow through with this desire, and take the stray and her offspring back to live with the elfin people in their lake. Thus the old man goes from rags to riches to rags all in the space of one short story. This same idea of a man winning a supernatural jackpot and securing the blessing of the Fair folk before blowing it all up is seen in several more stories as well. The relationship between men and fairies is shown to be one that is very dynamic, but more often than not it is the flaws of the mortal that spells the end for the blessings of the fairy people.

Another interesting thing about these stories is how they convey a sense that the realm of man and the realm of fairies are closely connected, such that humans often find themselves stumbling into the fairy realm unexpectedly. Fairies are beings bound up with nature, so places like forests and bodies of water serve as fluid boundary points between the two worlds. In “Owen Goes A-Wooing,” the protagonist sinks to the bottom of a lake and ends up unintentionally crossing the boundary into a supernatural realm in which he can breathe and see just well as if he was on land. Although he spends only a few hours in the mysterious realm, by the time he has come back to the human world, a month’s time has passed. This same idea that time passes very slowly in the fairy realm is shown in "Einion and the Fair Family."

One of the most unique stories that deals with the connection between the two realms is “Why Deunant has the Front Door in the Back.” In this story a fairy explains to the man Deunant the unusual reason why the farmer’s cattle has fallen under a curse and become sick with the black quarter. The fairy states that he was the one who placed the curse on the cattle because Deunant is unintentionally throwing his slops down the little man’s chimney. As it turns out, whenever Deunant throws his slops outside his front door, they end up mysteriously going under the earth to some manner of under realm, where they find themselves going down the fairy’s chimney.
 The great thing about these Welsh stories is that when you read them, you truly feel like you’re entering a world where logic is suspended and anything seems to be possible. The world of Thomas’s book is supremely rich and mysterious in its treatment of the supernatural. Fairies seem to be almost everywhere, and their realm exists directly alongside that of humans, such that it becomes very easy for humans to stumble into threshold of the uncanny without even knowing it. Living in such proximity to humans, fairies often involve themselves in the affairs of men, often to the mortals’ eventual detriment. 

And this is why you have to watch where you throw your slops! (Un-textbook)

Week 12 Reading Diary: Welsh Fairy Book Unit (Thomas)

So I did a full reading of the Welsh Fairy Book unit by W. Jenkyn Thomas and pretty much got what I expected: Many somewhat strange but thoroughly entertaining stories featuring names and places that I have a hard time remembering by nature of Welsh’s unique letter combinations (“Rhad Duw ar y da” for instance). Since there is no one protagonist to follow throughout all twenty-one of the stories in this unit, I found myself forgetting a lot of the characters that I read about, but I don’t get the feeling that the actors in the narratives are really so much important as the plot. The most enjoyable thing about these stories to me is the magical world that is created in them. In the world of Thomas’s book, fairies and magic are very real and very much in contact with the everyday, mundane world of shepherds and farmers. This makes for some very neat and compelling tales about the interaction between the worlds of the natural and the supernatural.

The first story in the unit—“Arthur in the Cave”—is among the most memorable since it deals with the legacy of King Arthur and the Round Table. This story presents a different fate for Arthur since it places the Once and Future King not in Avalon, but in a underground cave in Wales. In addition, Arthur is portrayed as being the future savior of Wales who will at the appointed time arise from his subterranean sleep and, together with the rest of his knights, take back Britain for the Welsh. It’s intriguing to see how the Welsh took the story of King Arthur and made it their own, transforming the British mythological icon into a messianic figure for Wales.

“Einion and the Lady of Greenwood” was among my favorite of the stories in this unit. It features the protagonist Einion, who falls under the spell of a goblin trickster known as the Lady of the Greenwood. This story was fun since when you think things are going Einion’s way as he is freed from the goblin’s charm, a twist comes in when the Lady decides to take the form of a handsome nobleman and casts the same love spell over Einion’s own wife. Fortunately Einion manages to win the day and win his wife back even as he exposes the goblin’s true nature.

“March’s Ears” was one of the most out there tales in the unit. The whole concept of a king having a horse’s ears and somehow managing to keep it concealed from everyone but his barber is pretty weird in itself, but the series of events that leads to the creation of a pipe that, when played, exposes the monarch’s secret marks this story as bizarre in the most hilarious sense of the word. Thomas definitely takes to a somewhat odd style in this story as well. I can safely say that this is the first fairy tale I’ve read in which a character refers to his neck with the scientific term cervical vertebrae.

The theme of normal people benefiting from faeries is recurring throughout several of the stories in the unit, including “The Stray Cow” (although the beneficiary in this story ultimately ends up the worse by the end of the story because he had the misfortune of looking a fairy cow in the mouth so to speak), “The Fairy Reward,” (again the main character doesn’t end up better off by the conclusion since fairies aren’t very beneficent once their beneficence becomes known to too many people), “The Bride from the Red Lake” (another unhappy ending, this one seemingly arbitrary:  Are fairies allergic to clay or something?), “Einion and the Fair Family” (actually has a happy ending too!), and “Dick the Fiddler’s Money” (which teaches us that playing a mean fiddle can really pay off at times).

My favorite story in the unit was “The Men of Ardudwy.” This story is absolutely epic in how it focuses on the fiercely fought battle between the Men of Vale and the Men of Ardudwy, who have made off with the maidens of Vale since Ardudwy has been suffering from a shortage of women of late. Many of the stories in this unit focus on how a certain geographical location came to be, or how it came to called a specific name, but among these types of stories this one stood out to me since the lake that comes to be called Llyn y Morwynion—the Maidens’ Lake—has such a memorable and tragic story behind it. The language in the story is also quite lovely at times, with the description of the women of Vale jumping to their deaths being particularly poignant and evocative:

“When the last of the men of Ardudwy fell, and the desperate fight was done, they plunged into the waters red with the blood of their lovers and kindred, like some great flight of white birds sweeping down from a wave-washed cliff down to the sea. The still waters leapt in foam: one loud shriek woke the air, and then silence reigned over all.”

“The Martyred Hound” is also a good story, but as you might expect from a tale titled as such, it’s a pretty sad narrative. I’d recommend not reading it if you’re in a depressed mood.

The Battle of Llyn y Morwynion (Un-textbook)

Week 11 Tech Tip: Google Define Tech Tip

For this tech tip I looked up the etymology of . . .  etymology!

Since the screenshot is not coming out in good quality I'll just link to the page at etymononline instead here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=etymology

It's originally a combination of the Greek words etymos and logia. Cool!