The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Sympathy For the Devil

Much to say, now that I am once more in a place to say things.

Firstly, throat, whatever your problem is, stop it. Stop it right now. I am REAL tired of your attitude. Like, WAY tired. So unless you want to be sent to bed with no supper again, cut it out.

Anyway.

Much going on on the Civ front. I finally have a successful Succession Game in RBC4a, in which our 5CC Mayans do quite a lot of sacrificing, and quite a lot of math. Just what any game needs to be highly entertaining, right? Blood, sweat, and calculators.

And, something like 4 new SGs having started today*, I'm now in RBC9 (NINE!), and am up next, as it happens. An Oscillating War game with chariots should be fun.

Too, I picked up a turn in RBC5, which should finally give me something of a Mongol game.

Toast, never let it be said that I don't at least TRY to provide you with reading material.

* - So Mel and I are sitting around over the morning caffiene earlier, and she's like "You know, there's a whole bunch of new threads on Civfanatics right now. If you want a new game, you should get over there pretty quick." And sure enough, by the time I get there, RBC6, 7, and 8 are closed, and I was feeling lucky to duck into 9, and what will likely become 3 or 4 teams in 10 at some point. Jeeze.

And, incidentally, Conquests has been running for no reason for like, 10 hours now. That's sort of impressive, for some reason.

Moving on...

Having finished the Shogun miniseries, I shall now comment upon it. First by quoting myself:

On a more positive note, the whole 9 hour Shogun miniseries rocks. We haven't finished it yet, but that's ok. It's still sweet. It excises some things, changes others (reminded of LotR yet?), but overall it's a pretty viable rendition of the book. I'd prefer if they put in some subtitles for the rather copious Japanese, instead of the occasional English voiceover, but that's ok. I'll watch it subtitled next time. The way they've done it this time pretty well puts you in Blackthorne's shoes - you don't understand anything, but after a while, you begin picking up the language right along with him. That's cool and well done, I think. Plus it's made me rethink some of the scenes in the book in a way I haven't done for a long, long time. That's cool.

It turns out if you watch the special features that the "let's have the audience learn Japanese with Blackthorne" thing was actually the whole idea. Yes, I pick these things up well. That bit got done well, though by the end I was sort of impatient.

I did in fact rethink a bunch of the scenes from the book and what they actually meant, sometimes by seeing them on the scene, more often because they got cut and I was like "Uh, but..." Strangely, I missed the fight scenes the most. They cut the post-prison one and a couple smaller ones, which sort of sucked, but the ninja attack lived up to expectations, so all was well.

Too, you lost a lot of the book's detail by doing the "only see what Blackthorne sees" bit, which works, but makes it good for a totally different reason than the book ends up being good. *shrug*

The special features, incidentally, mostly sucked. There are reasons for that, most of which likely center around the fact that a good chunk of the people involved, including James Clavell, are very dead. So the commentary and the features are all a very technical making of thing.

There were a couple of little historical shorts talking about samurai and geisha and the tea ceremony. Those sucked too, because almost all movie historical features suck.

*takes a deep, deep breath*

That, incidentally, leads to a sort of strange dichotomy. The lack of historical accuracy, I mean. And let's face it - Shogun isn't even in the same ballpark as historical accuracy. Blackthorne existed as a guy called Will Adams, who did in fact shipwreck in Japan, got in with the real Toranaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and did a bunch of trading, and sailing in ships, and such. The very broad historical outlines happened. Otherwise Shogun sails off the deep end.

Which leads us to the dichotomy. Talk to Randafool on the street who's read Shogun, say my parents for a quick example, and they'll say "Yeah, Shogun was great! I loved every minute of it! Best book ever!" Stuff like that. And it really is good. Exciting, interesting, well-written, you name it. And apparently when it came out back in '75 or so, it sold some rediculous amount of copies (Clavell's books as a whole sold 17 million as of 1986, of which Shogun was a huge proportion).

Talk to a historian, on the other hand, and you're liable, as happened to me once, to get it dismissed in a huff as "historically inaccurate." OSU's history office has a board on the wall right now talking about which movies are historically accurate/inaccurate. Whenever I think on the subject, I always feel like I've stumbled into some bizzare professional territorial defense mechanism, not unlike, say, shit-throwing monkeys or growling at intruders or something.

Never quite sure what to make of that. I mean, on the one hand they've got a point. Historical accuracy on some level is something to be strived for, for the obvious reasons, I should think. You want your story to be as true to life as you can. On the other hand, to sink to the level of not being able to enjoy the story because of that seems to me to be a bit screwy. The public sure as hell is, so get the hell on board and capitalize on that, folks.

Which isn't to say the public doesn't have a certain responsibility to educate themselves on the matter, but let's be honest, here - they haven't got the faintest clue where to start, which is why they take history courses in the first place.

Poor fools. I mean that, too. Have you people ever tried to read academic history? Half that stuff is so dry, I half suspect it's behind the formation of the Sahara. It CAN be made interesting, but most of the people who DO make it interesting aren't actually historians by training - John Julius Norwich and his excellent history of the Byzantines comes to mind. That too leads to bizarre turf wars in which the academic historians beat on the pop historians a lot. Not without some merit at times, because research IS important, but ye gods. The history profession, people in general, could benefit by being taught how to write in an entertaining and engaging manner. And anybody who's taken a writing class knows that that skill isn't exactly widely taught these days.

To a segue a bit, I offer a quote. From an academic historian who can, so far it would seem, write. Sort of shoots my whole argument in the foot, but whatever. From Chester Starr's A History of the Ancient World:

"How do we know what happened in history? This problem may not deeply concern a beginner in history, who perhaps tends to take every statement in a book as true - until he reads another book on the same subject and finds that opinions differ amazingly. Too often the result of this process is the other extreme, skepticism as to whether anything in history is true."

Truth. An important one, no less. One I hold to enough to consider putting a little sign above whatever classroom door I inhabit saying "Question Everything." We aren't particularly taught that in high school that I've found. Sometimes not even college. Certainly many people in the real live world lack the ability to do so. Sad, yet true.

The next paragraph is a good one as well.

"The story of any era rests in the end not upon secondary accounts, written by modern scholars, but on contemporary materials. These, and these alone may be called the sources for the period; they rise directly out of the life and events of the times and must be used by the historian to re-create its story. A general survey is only an introduction to history, which must reflect in part the predjudices and interests of its author..."

The obvious truth of that should be without doubt, I think. It gets lost to the point where I've only done two primary source research papers in my entire career, but. Though that's changing, with the Internet. Used to be you had to go on site to get somebody's letter or something. Now you can get on the Internet and get, say, the letters and papers of Thomas Jefferson, to quote an example.

All of 35 pages in, incidentally, I'm liking this book a lot. Easy to read, but informative and interesting. Good stuff. Also reading David McCullough's (remember him?) Truman. Big freaking book, like a thousand pages. But his John Adams bio was enjoyable as hell, so here I am.

I need to add some fiction to that, but haven't seen anything I wanted to read. Ah well. Pretty soon that won't matter anyway.

Posted by Dwip at January 3, 2004 1:20 AM