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Nov. 13th, 2010 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDear Yuletide Author
(![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
miarr once suggested using "Dear Judith", and I confess I'm tempted toward it, but I shouldn't assume your Jewishness any more than the Yuletide fest should assume its members' Christianity. Still, I like the notion of dear old murderous Judith as the Jewish stand in for Santa Claus.),
Thank you so much for signing up to write a story for me. I can't wait to read it, and I know that even if the story doesn't work for me I will be thrilled to death that someone wrote a story for me.
Above all else, write something you'll have fun writing. I do this writing thing to have fun and if I'm ever not having fun, I put the piece on the shelf until I can come back to it and enjoy it. I would hope you'll treat the story you're writing for me the same way. So if you don't get sparked by anything in my requests, go ahead and write whatever the hell you want to write. I have notoriously bad taste, anyway.
All of my requests are operas or plays, so if you're stalling on whatever fandom we matched on, I encourage you to explore one of the other sources. You can watch any of them in an evening. Alcohol may help you get through most of them, if you favor partaking. I have no experience with other drugs, but I have a strong suspicion marijuana may also have a favorable impact on your enjoyment. http://www.houseofopera.com is a pretty good place to look for cheap opera DVD recordings.
My fandoms:
1)The Marriage of Figaro Cherubino/Rosina/Susannah.
Quick note if you don't know it: It's the greatest opera of all time. You've heard the overture, but possibly you haven't heard Rosina's beautiful arias. It's Mozart at the peak of his game, given a brilliant, complicated seriocomic libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte to work with. It's a half dozen incredibly rich characters trying to outdo each other and it's loaded with all sorts of powerfully revolutionary thoughts about class and gender roles. It says everything The Magic Flute wishes it could say, without the heavyhanded didacticism.
Cherubino/Rosina/Susannah is OT3est of all OT3s for me. They're so good together. They scheme, they joke, they love fiercely and ferociously and they look out for each other no matter what.
I have an expectation of a good helping of gender and orientation confusion. To the audience, their scenes feature three women fooling around in a bedroom. Mozart and da Ponte expected their audience to understand it to be two women and a man fooling around in a bedroom, but... kind of with a wink, I think? There is a blurryness produced by the trouser role that enrichens the interaction.
There is experimentation, tentative and questing for something bigger. There is affection, physical and emotional. And then there's the farewell, so absurd and ridiculous, revealing the already present cracks in the relationship- Susannah and her attachment to Figaro, Rosina and her attachment to the Count, Cherubino and his love of glory and attention, the differences in class and gender and age that doom the trio from the start, but they don't let any of that show, do they? They treat the farewell just as unseriously as everything else. Life is too important to be taken seriously, Oscar Wilde once said. I think Susannah/Rosina/Cherubino is very Wildean in a lot of ways.
I read Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier as Mozart fanfic, and Sophia, Octavian and the Marschallin as clever echoes of my OT3. So much so that I actually mix up the characters in the two operas. I encourage you to look there for inspiration. (Also, even though the two have very little in common and contradict each other, feel free to consider Rossini's Barber of Seville part of your canon. It's cool with me. In particular, it's become clear to me thanks to the Met's Bartlet Sher Barber that every story is better if a giant anvil falls from the sky.)
I hesitate to try to dictate style, because the great thing about translating a story from opera to fanfic is the liberty you have in terms of style, but if you're stuck, I suggest you listen to this to get the feel of the opera. East Village Opera Company ftw.
Lastly, some notes on the opera I wrote last year, can be found here.
2) Le Contes D'Hoffman - Olympia
Quick note if you don't know it: It's a flawed but enchanting opera by Offenbach, based on the stories of German writer ETA Hoffman. Hoffman is the main character and the 'tales' are adaptations of his fictions presented as flashbacks of his failed love affairs. There are robots and witches. There is humor and desire and despair. It has gender and race problems, but it's nonetheless an extraordinary piece of musical theater.
Really, anything is fine. If you can write something good for this without Olympia I'd be happy, but I'd like to see more Olympia if you can because she's my favorite. I have a bit of a thing for robots. More than a bit, really. Also, I saw Kathleen Kim sing the role at the Met, and I've learned that seeing Kathleen Kim sing a character is a guaranteed way to make me love her.
I love Tales of Hoffman as an opera about storytelling, though. There are so many other stories lurking in the cracks, begging to get more attention at Hoffman's hands.freeradical42 attempted to give Kleinzach a fuller, more sympathetic history but it didn't quite pan out. I'd be thrilled if someone else gave it another try.
Offenbach's Judaism is a strand I sense beneath the surface here.freeradical42 proposed that Kleinzach might be Jewish, and I find the idea both compelling and repelling in near equal measure. In any case, it's an element of the text I would possibly appreciate sensitive exploration of. Or I might hate, and that hatred would have nothing to do with you. I don't know.
Brief notes on the opera from the last time I saw it are here.
3) Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'autore- Any
Quick note if you don't know it: It's the story of a group of actors who are interrupted in rehearsal by Six Characters- a family that has been abandoned by its author and is looking for someone who will tell its story for an audience. The play is both realist melodrama a la Ibsen and absurdist comedy a la Jarry, sometimes simultaneously.
Still haven't requested anything English language, have I? Good for me! Six Characters in Search of an Author was one of my earliest exposures to high quality metafiction. I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I read it in an old Modern Library anthology of European theater. The same anthology I discovered Capek's R.U.R. in, actually. I read it and I thought, "I didn't know art could do that." It really was a gamechanger in my intellectual development.
I'm on a huge metafiction kick lately. Last year, I wrote If on a winter's night a traveler fic for Yuletide and I'm working on a new story in that fandom. I read Infinite Jest this summer and am also writing fic for that. I went on a Percival Everett kick this spring and I'm pushing through Midnight's Children and Tristram Shandy at the moment. Requesting Six Characters for Yuletide is an expression of that same desire for metafic. I'd love to see anywhere it can be pushed.
What if the Six Characters find an author? Could it be JK Rowling, Dan Brown, James Joyce, Jonathan Franzen? Could the Six Characters meet other orphaned characters, Mal Reynolds or Rand Al'Thor or Heat Vision and Jack? Maybe the Stage Manager could go to a support group for straight men (the humor function, not the orientation) in metafiction, the unsung, dull heroes who let the zaniness happen?
Also, this snippet of conversation was in #yuletide:
(8:59:43 PM) tzikeh: ILU
(8:59:57 PM) tzikeh: Pirandello in the same fiction challenge as care bears.
(9:00:22 PM) tzikeh: 2,000 Yuletide Stories in Search of an Author.
(9:00:30 PM) ferret: hee. if i get lucky, pirandello in the same fic as care bears
Seriously, just go wild with this one.
4) Moses und Aron - Any
Quick note if you don't know it: It's not the greatest opera of all time, but it's unquestionably my favorite. A quirky, very very personal grapple by Schoenberg with questions of belief and leadership, it's considered one of the most important atonal operas. Moses is a sprechstimme role, the one speaking character in the world of operatic song. Aron is a lovely tenor. God is an eerie six-part chorus. The opera deviates from the Bible in significant and intriguing ways, and makes a compelling sell of its odd theologies.
I don't just want Biblefic here. Moses und Aron is not a Biblefic opera, though it resembles one, but a Bible AU where things go drastically different in the end. And I think fic should engage with those differences.
Where does AU!Miriam fit into the psychodrama between Moses and Aaron? Does she side with the brother she's known her whole life or the one she saved from the river? In the Bible, she finds a way to choose both. Is there even room in Schoenberg for that?
And what about poor Joshua, so important to the Heston version and completely missing here? What of Bezalel and his dreams of a beautiful house of worship? Surely that gets erased by Moses's unseen, unknowable deity? What of littler stories still? Does the unyielding Moses of Schoenberg's story ever unbend to allow Tirzah to inherit? How does Moses's sin of striking the stone happen here? Could the story of the spies happen in a world where Moses is as authoritarian as we see him at the end? How is Moses and Zipporah's marriage in this story? Aaron and Elisheva's?
At the core of Moses und Aron, though, is Schoenberg's thesis about the Moses and Aaron relationship. I wouldn't mind Moses/Aaron slash, along the lines of Zephyrprince's beautiful Cain/Abel story. I definitely think there's a slashgoggles reading of this story. But what really fascinates me is the game of telephone- God to Moses to Aaron to the people, with transmission loss at every stop along the way. The tragedy of the story is Moses's inability to ever speak the same language as his brother or the people. The tragedy is that he loves them anyway, and they love him, yet they're fated to disaster.
My one warning: There is a recent Viennese staging of the opera that sets the action in a concentration camp. I lost family in the Holocaust and found this staging, when I saw a clip on Youtube, very upsetting. Please don't do anything that invokes that version of the opera.
(
miarr once suggested using "Dear Judith", and I confess I'm tempted toward it, but I shouldn't assume your Jewishness any more than the Yuletide fest should assume its members' Christianity. Still, I like the notion of dear old murderous Judith as the Jewish stand in for Santa Claus.),Thank you so much for signing up to write a story for me. I can't wait to read it, and I know that even if the story doesn't work for me I will be thrilled to death that someone wrote a story for me.
Above all else, write something you'll have fun writing. I do this writing thing to have fun and if I'm ever not having fun, I put the piece on the shelf until I can come back to it and enjoy it. I would hope you'll treat the story you're writing for me the same way. So if you don't get sparked by anything in my requests, go ahead and write whatever the hell you want to write. I have notoriously bad taste, anyway.
All of my requests are operas or plays, so if you're stalling on whatever fandom we matched on, I encourage you to explore one of the other sources. You can watch any of them in an evening. Alcohol may help you get through most of them, if you favor partaking. I have no experience with other drugs, but I have a strong suspicion marijuana may also have a favorable impact on your enjoyment. http://www.houseofopera.com is a pretty good place to look for cheap opera DVD recordings.
My fandoms:
1)The Marriage of Figaro Cherubino/Rosina/Susannah.
Quick note if you don't know it: It's the greatest opera of all time. You've heard the overture, but possibly you haven't heard Rosina's beautiful arias. It's Mozart at the peak of his game, given a brilliant, complicated seriocomic libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte to work with. It's a half dozen incredibly rich characters trying to outdo each other and it's loaded with all sorts of powerfully revolutionary thoughts about class and gender roles. It says everything The Magic Flute wishes it could say, without the heavyhanded didacticism.
Cherubino/Rosina/Susannah is OT3est of all OT3s for me. They're so good together. They scheme, they joke, they love fiercely and ferociously and they look out for each other no matter what.
I have an expectation of a good helping of gender and orientation confusion. To the audience, their scenes feature three women fooling around in a bedroom. Mozart and da Ponte expected their audience to understand it to be two women and a man fooling around in a bedroom, but... kind of with a wink, I think? There is a blurryness produced by the trouser role that enrichens the interaction.
There is experimentation, tentative and questing for something bigger. There is affection, physical and emotional. And then there's the farewell, so absurd and ridiculous, revealing the already present cracks in the relationship- Susannah and her attachment to Figaro, Rosina and her attachment to the Count, Cherubino and his love of glory and attention, the differences in class and gender and age that doom the trio from the start, but they don't let any of that show, do they? They treat the farewell just as unseriously as everything else. Life is too important to be taken seriously, Oscar Wilde once said. I think Susannah/Rosina/Cherubino is very Wildean in a lot of ways.
I read Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier as Mozart fanfic, and Sophia, Octavian and the Marschallin as clever echoes of my OT3. So much so that I actually mix up the characters in the two operas. I encourage you to look there for inspiration. (Also, even though the two have very little in common and contradict each other, feel free to consider Rossini's Barber of Seville part of your canon. It's cool with me. In particular, it's become clear to me thanks to the Met's Bartlet Sher Barber that every story is better if a giant anvil falls from the sky.)
I hesitate to try to dictate style, because the great thing about translating a story from opera to fanfic is the liberty you have in terms of style, but if you're stuck, I suggest you listen to this to get the feel of the opera. East Village Opera Company ftw.
Lastly, some notes on the opera I wrote last year, can be found here.
2) Le Contes D'Hoffman - Olympia
Quick note if you don't know it: It's a flawed but enchanting opera by Offenbach, based on the stories of German writer ETA Hoffman. Hoffman is the main character and the 'tales' are adaptations of his fictions presented as flashbacks of his failed love affairs. There are robots and witches. There is humor and desire and despair. It has gender and race problems, but it's nonetheless an extraordinary piece of musical theater.
Really, anything is fine. If you can write something good for this without Olympia I'd be happy, but I'd like to see more Olympia if you can because she's my favorite. I have a bit of a thing for robots. More than a bit, really. Also, I saw Kathleen Kim sing the role at the Met, and I've learned that seeing Kathleen Kim sing a character is a guaranteed way to make me love her.
I love Tales of Hoffman as an opera about storytelling, though. There are so many other stories lurking in the cracks, begging to get more attention at Hoffman's hands.
freeradical42 attempted to give Kleinzach a fuller, more sympathetic history but it didn't quite pan out. I'd be thrilled if someone else gave it another try.Offenbach's Judaism is a strand I sense beneath the surface here.
freeradical42 proposed that Kleinzach might be Jewish, and I find the idea both compelling and repelling in near equal measure. In any case, it's an element of the text I would possibly appreciate sensitive exploration of. Or I might hate, and that hatred would have nothing to do with you. I don't know.Brief notes on the opera from the last time I saw it are here.
3) Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'autore- Any
Quick note if you don't know it: It's the story of a group of actors who are interrupted in rehearsal by Six Characters- a family that has been abandoned by its author and is looking for someone who will tell its story for an audience. The play is both realist melodrama a la Ibsen and absurdist comedy a la Jarry, sometimes simultaneously.
Still haven't requested anything English language, have I? Good for me! Six Characters in Search of an Author was one of my earliest exposures to high quality metafiction. I was probably thirteen or fourteen when I read it in an old Modern Library anthology of European theater. The same anthology I discovered Capek's R.U.R. in, actually. I read it and I thought, "I didn't know art could do that." It really was a gamechanger in my intellectual development.
I'm on a huge metafiction kick lately. Last year, I wrote If on a winter's night a traveler fic for Yuletide and I'm working on a new story in that fandom. I read Infinite Jest this summer and am also writing fic for that. I went on a Percival Everett kick this spring and I'm pushing through Midnight's Children and Tristram Shandy at the moment. Requesting Six Characters for Yuletide is an expression of that same desire for metafic. I'd love to see anywhere it can be pushed.
What if the Six Characters find an author? Could it be JK Rowling, Dan Brown, James Joyce, Jonathan Franzen? Could the Six Characters meet other orphaned characters, Mal Reynolds or Rand Al'Thor or Heat Vision and Jack? Maybe the Stage Manager could go to a support group for straight men (the humor function, not the orientation) in metafiction, the unsung, dull heroes who let the zaniness happen?
Also, this snippet of conversation was in #yuletide:
(8:59:43 PM) tzikeh: ILU
(8:59:57 PM) tzikeh: Pirandello in the same fiction challenge as care bears.
(9:00:22 PM) tzikeh: 2,000 Yuletide Stories in Search of an Author.
(9:00:30 PM) ferret: hee. if i get lucky, pirandello in the same fic as care bears
Seriously, just go wild with this one.
4) Moses und Aron - Any
Quick note if you don't know it: It's not the greatest opera of all time, but it's unquestionably my favorite. A quirky, very very personal grapple by Schoenberg with questions of belief and leadership, it's considered one of the most important atonal operas. Moses is a sprechstimme role, the one speaking character in the world of operatic song. Aron is a lovely tenor. God is an eerie six-part chorus. The opera deviates from the Bible in significant and intriguing ways, and makes a compelling sell of its odd theologies.
I don't just want Biblefic here. Moses und Aron is not a Biblefic opera, though it resembles one, but a Bible AU where things go drastically different in the end. And I think fic should engage with those differences.
Where does AU!Miriam fit into the psychodrama between Moses and Aaron? Does she side with the brother she's known her whole life or the one she saved from the river? In the Bible, she finds a way to choose both. Is there even room in Schoenberg for that?
And what about poor Joshua, so important to the Heston version and completely missing here? What of Bezalel and his dreams of a beautiful house of worship? Surely that gets erased by Moses's unseen, unknowable deity? What of littler stories still? Does the unyielding Moses of Schoenberg's story ever unbend to allow Tirzah to inherit? How does Moses's sin of striking the stone happen here? Could the story of the spies happen in a world where Moses is as authoritarian as we see him at the end? How is Moses and Zipporah's marriage in this story? Aaron and Elisheva's?
At the core of Moses und Aron, though, is Schoenberg's thesis about the Moses and Aaron relationship. I wouldn't mind Moses/Aaron slash, along the lines of Zephyrprince's beautiful Cain/Abel story. I definitely think there's a slashgoggles reading of this story. But what really fascinates me is the game of telephone- God to Moses to Aaron to the people, with transmission loss at every stop along the way. The tragedy of the story is Moses's inability to ever speak the same language as his brother or the people. The tragedy is that he loves them anyway, and they love him, yet they're fated to disaster.
My one warning: There is a recent Viennese staging of the opera that sets the action in a concentration camp. I lost family in the Holocaust and found this staging, when I saw a clip on Youtube, very upsetting. Please don't do anything that invokes that version of the opera.