A book in the hand is worth two via interlibrary loan

I picked up two books on Friday, and I've already read one of them, but it wasn't an academic book, so I'm counting the time I spent reading it (only a few hours, which tells you how easy the material was) as entertainment/background reading rather than as serious work.  (An aside:  Zemanta is feeding me a bunch of pictures of Reading, England!  Not too relevant, guys.)  The book is The Action Hero's Handbook, by David and Joe Borgenicht, the team responsible for those Worst Case Scenario books.  The book's subtitle is How to Catch a Great White Shark, Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, Track a Fugitive, and Dozens of Other TV and Movie Skills.  Surprisingly, after only a few pages I realized that it was doing something that Dr. Toffee is always going on about:  it sets up a model that I can use in discussing Sherlock Holmes as an action hero.  I know I need to get that stuff from academic sources, but I think I may quote a few lines from this book, just because it's funny.   As far as the RD/GR Holmes goes, the character is definitely an action hero under the terms the Borgenichts lay out in the book.  He has many of the basic "Good Guy Skills" they mention, and if the film were to be set in our era, he'd probably have a good idea how to safely land the space shuttle, too.

Maybe the most interesting thing about this book is that it was written based on information garnered from experts in each area, including all of the skills listed in the subtitle (the info on the Vulcan Neck Pinch comes from a martial artist, for example), and the Borgenichts give a brief bio and credentials statement for each expert.
I'll get to the other book next time.  It's a much tougher read. 

Here's a funny article about movies:

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Woe is me!

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Yes, I'm way behind.  Worse yet, Lisa is ahead -- I don't know how she does it, but I do know one thing that helped her.  Unlike most of us in the class, she didn't screw up on the first essay.  I have to have a fresh revision for Monday.  It's almost done.  I still haven't finished my library research strategy exercise (that was supposed to be posted to the course discussion on Wednesday (2/24), but I did go over to the library and pick up my two interlibrary loans, before they got sent back and I got a $5 fine (I'll talk about those books next time, when I've looked them over).

I can't get over how much time this takes-- it's way more work than the first first-year comp class, even though there isn't as much actual writing.  I got a few good comments from the peer review on my research proposal, but I think I'm going to try to make it to Dr. Toffee's office hours before Thursday (it's due on Friday).

I've checked, and all of my journal entries so far are a lot more than the minimum 100-word requirement.  That should count for something, shouldn't it?  Not according to the assignment sheet.

Let the good times roll!

Happy Mardi Gras!  Today is the day that I prove my dedication and discipline by actually working on my project.  Yesterday Dr. Toffee talked about how there seem to be organizations for everything and all of them have websites with bibliographies of some kind.  She showed us the sites for NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), which is a civil-rights organization that works to fight discrimination against fat people, and Forces.org, an organization that supports smokers.  So, I went looking for Sherlock Holmes (I've been so into searching the academic databases that I haven't done a web search.  I can't believe it).  I found a ton of stuff, and here's the best of it:

• The Official Website of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate.  There's a Doyle bib here.  I didn't know that he wrote anything other than SH, but he did.
• The Sherlock Holmes Society of London.  This group is a "literary and social society," and they have all kinds of meetings and events.  They seem to be a fun organization; according to the site, "The game that we play is that Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were real people and that the sixty stories are true narratives of their cases." 
• The Universal Sherlock Holmes.  "The web version of The Universal Sherlock Holmes is intended as a reference tool for those interested in the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota."  They also sell print versions, and those are pretty pricey.  I wish I had time for a road trip to Minnesota.  Maybe during spring break.  Hmm . . .  And, the collection was just covered by the Associated Press in an article titled "Fans Can Investigate Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota."
• Discovering Sherlock Holmes:  A Community Reading Project from Stanford University.  This link is directly to the bibliography.  I tried cutting off the url to get to the home page of the project, but it wouldn't let me in.  The bib is really long, which is great for me.
• Sherlock Holmes Bibliography.  This is from the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, and it's unlike the others in that it has entries not for literary criticism but rather for novels and stories published at the same time as SH.
• Sherlock Holmes on the Web:  The Sherlockian.net Holmepage.  This is a web portal run by Chris Redmond, author of Sherlock Holmes Handbook.  He pays for the site out of his own pocket (no ads!), so I'm doing him a favor here by putting a purchase link to the book, in case anybody comes here who might want to buy a copy.

I feel very virtuous for having done this entry so early in the week, and I think I deserve a little celebration.
Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez!


 

Assessing my progress

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I was having coffee at the Student Center a couple of days ago, and Lisa (she's in the class, too) came over and joined me.  Her topic is interesting; her real first name is "Brittany," which she hates, so she is researching the connection between names and self-image.  Lisa is worried about the research project (I have the feeling that she's always worrying about school), even though I think she may be further along than I am.  So, thanks to Lisa, this seems like a good time to figure out where I stand in terms of deadlines.  I feel like I have a good sense of what I want to do in the paper -- but I know I'll probably do a lot of adjusting before I even start writing.  The due dates seem far away, far enough that I have to keep making myself work on this; if I don't keep cracking the whip, I'll wind up the same way I did all through high school, working like a maniac right before things are due and never being happy with the way they turn out.
Okay, so today is Valentine's Day (despite having a chocolate lunch, I'm not really feeling the love right now), and here's the schedule: 

• Research proposal is due 3/5,
• the annotated working bibliography is due 3/26,
• a draft of the essay (for a peer review and then a conference with Dr. Toffee) is due on 4/2
• the final revision is due on 4/23
• the complete research journal is due 5/7

Lisa told me a couple of weeks ago that she made up a "Master Schedule" as soon as she had the syllabi (or is it syllabuses?) for all her classes.  When she said that, I thought, if she just had disinfectant wipes, she could call herself "Monk"; now I think that she has the right idea, so as soon as I finish this post, I'm going to make one for myself.  I can already see that there is a conflict with poli-sci in week 12. 
The research proposal is no big deal; I could even crank that out now, probably, but it'll be better if I can get some more reading done.  The bibliography seems to be the toughest thing before the paper.  In English 101, I was always getting back papers with corrections all over the works cited page.  I've set up a file where I'm saving the results from my searches, and I've already got a folder going with a couple of articles I printed out (yes, Dr. Toffee, I did buy myself a stapler!).  If I can just keep that stuff organized, I'll have the info I need for the citations.  I'm also going to set aside an hour on the days I don't work to read and search some more.  When I have a better idea of what I need to know, I can -- I hope -- cut that back some.  And, I have a Word file going of ideas, more like random thoughts, really, for the paper.  I can't think of anything else I need to do right now, so I guess I'll sign off.

I Still Need a Hero! (or at least some information about one)

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I've been doing some article and book searches for the past couple of weeks, and it's been interesting, but I'm not sure how helpful the stuff I've found is going to be.  I started looking at heroes (the Library of Congress subject heading) in Academic Search Premier, then in the MLA bibliography, and finally in WorldCat.  So far, I've ordered a few interlibrary loans (the college library is really tiny, bookwise), and I hope they arrive in time for the annotated bibliography assignment.  Anyway, some of the books and articles look really interesting.  I ordered:
Tasker, Yvonne, Ed.  Action and Adventure
       Cinema. London:  Routledge, 2004.
This is a collection of essays about action films, and a couple of the essays turned up in my MLA search.  I think that those will count individually on the bib assignment, so this is great.  Another book I found has a pretty intimidating title:
West, Russell, and Frank Lay, Eds.  Subverting
       Masculinity:  Hegemonic and Alternative
      Versions of Masculinity in Contemporary
      Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
I'm not too sure what that even means, but it sounds good for my project (I think I have to deal with the gay subtext that RD put on the table during promo interviews).
I still have work to do on the Sherlock Holmes searches, but more about that later.  I was pleased to see that I'm already doing what the professors who wrote the tips below say I should do.

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A QHQ?

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I got a little behind this week (from what I heard in class yesterday, I'm not the only one, and our first checkpoint is next Friday!), so I'm doing two entries in one day.  This one is supposed to be a Question-Hypothesis-Question, and (according to the assignment page) "the first question should be whatever initial research question you've formulated. The hypothesis is what you think the answer is and why you think that. Once you have your hypothesis, you should be able to tell what the next question you have about the topic is."  I'm not sure how this will work out.
My first question was "is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?"  Now, my hypothesis.  From what I've read so far, the R/D SH actually fits ACD's SH in a lot of ways.  The big difference I'm seeing has to do with the presentation of SH as a man of action, and a really quirky one at that.  Is that a distortion?  Maybe, maybe not.  I've been reading "The Six Napoleons," and in it Holmes and Watson are constantly on the move, going all over London (from the best to the worst and back again) to ask questions.  So, there's a lot of that kind of action.  I'm also thinking that SH -- or Conan Doyle -- is always secretive about his background.  We never find out much about how he came to be a detective or where he grew up.  His brother Mycroft doesn't turn up in the early stories (I think, but I'll have to check that), and when he does, he's kind of mysterious, too.  In the stories, the focus is always on the mystery at hand, and description of SH is doled out in small details here and there as they occur to Watson (who is usually the narrator).  The film can't help but provide lots of information, since the audience is seeing everything (well, almost everything) of Holmes, and all the visuals suggest many things about SH.  For example, the way he dresses is obvious in a film, but in the stories, his clothing is described most often when he is in disguise.  I also think that the Holmes of the stories is of a higher class than in the film, but I'll think more about that later.  So, I guess that the film is not a serious distortion, but it does have a point of view that is different from a very conservative reading of the stories.

And that leads me to the last question:  Is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?  I ask this because that is the thrust of the film and it appears that the stories support that idea.  Now I suppose I need to begin thinking about what an action hero really is.  

A Fifteen-Minute Free Write

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According to the assignment, this week I’m supposed to do a 15-minute free write to get “everything I know or think I know” about my topic down on paper. I’m not wild about free writing; I always feel like an idiot when I look at it afterwards. Here goes.



Sherlock Holmes relies on logic and deduction. He knows a lot of strange things about different subjects that come in handy. I remember that in one of the stories I read, he talks about knowing where a bit of cigar ash came from because he wrote a monograph about tobacco (what’s a monograph, anyway?). He wears a deerstalker cap. He sometimes uses a bloodhound named Toby to track a criminal. He lives with Dr. Watson (before the doctor gets married) at 221B Baker Street. Their landlady is Mrs. Hudson. He plays the violin when he is thinking, and he smokes a pipe. He also uses cocaine in a 7 percent solution (what that means, in terms of strength, I have no idea, but I guess that the people reading it when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories would have understood). Watson is an educated man, has served in the military, and sometimes carries a handgun. Holmes does not carry a gun.
Think, Rhonda, think!
“Elementary, my dear Watson”—I seem to remember my dad telling me that this isn’t in the stories. I’ve seen the old black-and-white movies with Basil Rathbone; Dr. Watson is a goofy old man in those and usually kind of bumbling. He mostly gets in the way, and he’s the comic relief, I guess. My dad likes the BBC tv series, I think it’s from the 1980s, with Jeremy Brett. I think he’s kind of creepy, but he makes that work for the character. His Sherlock Holmes is very enigmatic. He keeps everything as secretly as possible. I guess my favorite movie Holmes is the one from The Hound of the Baskervilles, the British one, could be the 1960s, with Peter Cushing. Actually, he reminds me of Rathbone and Brett. They all have similar faces. And now that I think of it, the kid in Young Sherlock Holmes has that kind of face, too. A narrow, hard face with a prominent nose, they all look like their skin is kind of close to their skulls, if you know what I mean. Weird. Robert Downey Jr, on the other hand, has a much softer looking face, and he is built differently. I bet that he has to work hard to keep his weight down. So, there’s one difference.
The Dr. Watson in the new film is different in one interesting way—he actually gets mad at SH. The others sometimes became exasperated, but they seemed to regard Holmes as if he were a superior life form or something, like they don’t have a right to get angry at him. The new Watson seems to be angry at Holmes repeatedly. I need to see the film again!



Can’t think of anything else. Can’t think of anything else. Waiting for an idea. The dog that didn’t bark, and that was the strange thing. Which story is that from?


15 minutes are up. Yay!