Experiment in Revision

This post is going to be an experiment, and any reader who haplessly wanders on to this blog in the near future will be my guinea pig. Muahaha! Now you are mine!

I'm going to post fragments of the story I'm currently working on, and when I finish writing and revising the story I will re-post the edited fragments in another blog post. This way I can see in print (and not on my MS Word document) how much I've changed and how far I've come with the story. Why don't I just use Word's built in features, such as 'Track Changes'? Because I hate these special features, that's why. As much as I love looking over my handwritten notes done in four different inks on crumpled paper, there's something about seeing every little alteration highlighted, boxed, and colored in that frankly freaks me out. It's a little overwhelming for me, so I'm doing this instead.

How did I select what passages to post? It's partly random and partly decided by what I feel may have to change. There are a few passages posted because I want to challenge myself to revise something I initially like. There are a few passages posted because I know I really, really, really need to find a better way.

1

The children have been playing in the woods again.

I can smell the fragrance of pine needles on Katie’s jacket, and Jon has a stash of smoothed river stones in his closet beside his rain boots. I’ve found autumn wildflowers in the fridge twice this week. I may have to teach one or both of them how to press flowers and leaves, or I’ll have a bouquet of the mountain’s finest next to the eggs.

And to think Eugene and I were concerned that the kids wouldn’t like it here. Katie more so than Jon; he’s too young to really remember traffic-jammed city streets and overcrowded classrooms, and anyway he likes being Daddy’s little Indian. Before this summer his favorite weekends were those he spent playing with his cousins on the Reservation, gathering shells and pebbles and an assortment of gross slimy things so easy to come by on a lakeshore. Here he loves the colors of the changing trees and the sound of the slow river tumbling over rocks. He’s probably the culprit behind the flowers in the fridge. Katie, though, is a city girl like me and was something of a socialite in her fourth grade class. By the end of the last school year her grades began to slip and words like “disruptive” and “unfocused” appeared on her report cards. She begged for a cell phone and a computer and her own bedroom, far away from her little brother, and wouldn’t have picked up a frond of algae if her life depended on it.

2

I think they may have found a dog out there.

I noticed a package of corned beef went missing out of the fridge this afternoon, and I found the empty wrapper on the ground behind the tent. I only buy it for Eugene; Katie hates corned beef, and Jon almost never eats foods his sister disapproves of.

I also saw Katie cut another length of twine from the ball she used to string up the tent. She tied one end into a loop and walked into the shade, beyond my line of sight.

If they have found a dog, it’s likely they’re hiding it. I told them when we moved in we weren’t getting a dog, not yet, not until Jon is older. They may be trying to keep it from me so I won’t say they can’t keep it.

I wonder what kind of dog it could be, that it could have survived out here among the bears and the mountain lions and the frost-fanged mountain winters? Maybe it’s a stray, an Indian mongrel wandered up from the Res?

To be honest I’m kind of regretting not having a dog around here. I think I’d feel better, knowing there was an extra set of protective eyes to watch the kids. And this house is really meant for a dog, these woods are meant for long roving walks under the trees and for chasing summer-fat squirrels. Maybe I’ll say something to Eugene when he gets home tonight. A pet wouldn’t be so bad, and the children would love it.

3

“My apologies, ma’am. The roads are a bit sharp and the light’s a bit dim, and my eyes aren’t what they use to be. My name’s Wallace,” he took his hand off his gun, satisfied that the madwoman wasn’t violent. “You’re Eugene Whitefeather’s wife, I take it?”

I nodded and fidgeted with the metal flashlight. On, off, on, off.

“Is he inside, ma’am?”

I nodded again.

He walked past me and I felt my rage focus and sharpen, targeting this old, useless man dressed in a uniform he should have left long ago.

Where was he going? What did he think he was doing? Don’t talk to my husband, raise the hounds, find my daughter!

“I didn’t want to go back out there but Katie made me. I told her you’d be mad, but she wanted to make sure he was still tied. He was ugly and he didn’t have fur, but she wanted him, even though he was mean.”

He started crying again and pushed his face against my chest, soaking my shirt with tears and snot and the grief that is also a kind of fear. I clutched him tighter and bared my teeth at the darkness around us.

It took him a few minutes to calm down again. He shook and choked and sputtered and I held him close to me while he cried, trying to take his fear away.

“He chewed through the leash. Katie got to him first, before she saw he’d eaten the rope, and he got up and bit her. He let go, though, because she was hitting him and he couldn’t stand on two good paws and keep biting her. They fell, and Katie got up first and grabbed me. She dragged me back toward the house, and we could see him trying to follow us. Katie pushed me up a tree and kept running.”

Jon pushed away and looked up at my face. His eyes were wide and owlish and tired and bloodshot like no child’s eyes should be. “She’s faster than me,” he continued. “She was going to lead him away and come back for me. He stopped at the bottom of the tree and looked at me with his big red eyes. Just like the Big Bad Wolf. He just looked at me. Then he kept going, following her. I wouldn’t have come out of the tree, but I could hear you.”

4

Eugene and Dennis were in the trees somewhere behind me calling my name. I wanted to call out for Katie but I didn’t dare raise my voice. Eugene and Dennis might not have been the only things hunting in the woods, and it would have been terrible enough if one of them had caught up with me. For the moment, silence was safety.

Trees come alive in the dark in a way they never do in sunlight. Roots arched out of the ground as the oaks and birches sought to mingle and migrate, to trade places in rhythm to a moonlight score only they could hear. Branches swept low, contributing to the darkness of the multitude of shadows that lay moon-soaked and drunken on the earth.

More than once I saw, or thought I saw, a moving shadow flitting between the clumps of dry brush alongside my path. The closer I came to the river the less frequently I saw it, until my feet splashed into the cold, slow snow-melt in the riverbed and the shadow was gone.

The water soaked into my shoes and socks and chilled me from the toes up. Icy prickles dug into my skin as I splashed through the shallow water to the far shore.

Had there always been so many pine trees on this side of the river? The pines enveloped me, hid me from the overcast sky and my husband’s searching light beam. They welcomed me into the evergreen scent of bitter cold winters and warm, well-tended hearths. A thick blanket of long dead needles softened my footfalls until I could no longer hear them, except for the faint squelch of cold water seeping from my soles. Here and there among the pines a bleached birch tree gleamed like old bone, but otherwise there was no color, no break in the wall of dark green that surrounded me.

--------

I apologize if there's anything funny with the formatting. Word doesn't like to cooperate with Blogger sometimes. There, four short fragments of a short story. That there are a few flaws should be obvious, and these flaws are why I'm doing this in the first place. Maybe I should put the entire thing up. I may yet, but I'll wait until I've finished the body of the story before I do.

New Look

Is this easier on the eyes than the last design? I'll never be a pro at webdesign, but I'm trying to make this blog look at least somewhat decent. I like this new format, but we'll see how it ages. I was really starting to hate the last design there at the end. I'm a fan of the color green, but I may have gone a bit overboard...

My goal is to one day make this blog look like a newspaper. You know, those flimsy, cream-colored things your mother used to buy out of a box in front of a grocery store? I know there aren't many around these days and those that are tend to be used to line the puppy's crate. I've always liked the clean lines and straight-forward, in-your-face professionalism the best newspapers had. A box for everything and everything in its box, knowhatah meen?

I just checked my stats for the first time ever, and I want to share my amazement that there actually seems to be a few people wandering on to this blog every once in a great while. Hello, strangers! Drop a comment somewhere and keep a lonely geek and writer company for a little while! I'm going to make more of an effort to keep this blog updated and interesting, and I'd love feedback as to whether I'm going a good job or not.

Also, maybe I should go back and edit some of the more retarded things I've said on here... there are plenty to chose from.

I have to blame Jeff Vandermeer for this decision (gawd, his blog is always full of the weirdest, most delightful shit), so if you need to blame someone for my continuing desire to post my blatherings on the interwebs take it to him. I've been sampling his book on living as a professional writer and he's lit a fire under my ass.

Booklife has given me a few ideas of what I can do to get my writing life together, starting with actually making room for myself to write. After all, that is numero uno in how one becomes a writer, yes? I'm starting with a few simple goals to motivate myself.

• First, I will write one short story every month.
  
• My goal is to reach between 750 and 1000 words per sitting, and this number will go up as I gain speed and endurance. I'm already pushing the upper limit of this goal most times I sit down to write, and twice last week I stayed strong through over 1500 words in a sitting. I'm going to try for another mega-session tonight.
  
• I will write at least three times a week, possibly more once I get a better grasp on what my schedule will need to become for me to meet my goals.
• Any and all editing will not be considered as a writing session. Maybe later, when I'm more comfortable with my level of productivity, but at this initial stage I'm worried that I'll use "oh, but I did some editing" as an excuse not to sit down and write. I'm old enough to know the way my brain works.
• I'll work on something Fairway related at least once a week. I'm more concerned at this point with writing short stories, but I'm not going to let this novel sit on the back burner forever. I want to go somewhere with these characters, even if I'm not entirely sure where.
  

Fairway is still so much a work-in-progress that I'm sort of embarrassed to bring it up, but I haven't given up on it completely, oh no. I've been indulging in my bad habit of deleting things after I write them because they don't make me happy. Starting today I will not continue this habit, and may I do penance for a thousand years if I ever hit "delete" again. No more deletion, only revision. This I swear.

I'm almost finished with a horror story that I started fiddling with at the end of last month. I think with one more significant push I can end the story and get on with revising a few things I can already see have gone wrong. This is the first real effort I've put into fiction writing in some time, and I'm so excited and relieved that I'm relearning how to tap into this energy. I'm already looking forward to putting together the pieces for next month's story.

Between Vandermeer's guidance and Damon Knight's advice, I just might find my motivation to do what I've been talking about doing for years.

J-pop, J-pop, and more J-pop

I got on the computer to deal with school stuff, look for present ideas, and hunt down information about various artists. What did I do all day instead?

Do you know how many An Cafe, Gackt, and Dir en Grey music videos one person can watch in an afternoon? My ears are ringing.

Better posts coming soon, I swear! What little free time I've had lately I've spent either writing or reading. I may post a fragment of what I've been working on (a segment from Fairway that may become its own thing. We'll see) or I may put up something completely unrelated.

To be honest, though, all I want to do is read some yaoi and listen to An Cafe's "Maple Gunman".

Am I Still Here?

I'm trying to revive my interest in actually keeping this blog going. Not that I want to ditch it, I just don't have tons of time to put something together to post. But I'm not giving up! (I am, however going to avoid J-pop music videos for a little while. I think my brain is adapting too quickly to translation-language. "We can do this together!" I don't want to sound like a walking subtitle).

I may have spoken to a few of you about what I'm planning for my geek-tastic tattoos. Granted, I'm broke as sin at the moment, but if I ever obtain money again I'm walking down to the neighborhood parlor and slapping these ideas down on the artist's table.

Right leg- I'm taking the sakura design from Yoshitaka Amano's cover art for the first issue of The Sandman: Dream Hunters. The branches will begin on the top of my foot and reach around my ankle, going higher across my calf. I'll have my black fox climb these branches, looking over his shoulder at the viewer. Again, artwork will be derived from Amano's work in Sandman. I just have to put together a composite of the images I want and presto.

Back/shoulder- Mostly shoulder, for the moment. This time the artist I'm looking at is Charles Vess (another Sandman artist, actually...) for the most part. I want chrysanthemum blossoms to curl over my left shoulder blade and over my right shoulder, ending just above my right collarbone. I'm taking the blossoms from traditional Asian tattoo styles, not Vess. Vess' work will supply the design for Hal Duncan's Jack and Puck, who'll get to chase each other across my back for the rest of my life. I know I can find a faun in Vess' repertoire to base Puck off of, but I'm expecting Jack to be a bit more difficult. I'm also leaving the bottom edge of the tattoo alone for hte time being, because there's no telling what I may want to add to it in the future. Payul and Leland?

Left arm?- Chain of narcissus blooms. "Nuff said.

Yeah, I'm still working on the final designs. Hopefully I'll be able to get to work on these before too much longer. Being poor sucks.

Currently reading: Peake's Gormenghast and various stories from Peter Straub's American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From the 1940s Until Now. Loving both, especially Gormenghast even though it's taking me forever to read it. I still have half the mini-series to watch when I get the chance.

Intertexuality and Star Trek: DS9

Intertexuality in Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Star Trek as a franchise belongs to the tradition of those frequently derided, brightly-painted monthly science fiction magazines and their descendants, weekly space opera television shows like Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon. The writers of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, more so than any other Star Trek series, were aware of the pressures of genre and canon on the show and the need to play to the audience to build and sustain success. This was especially true after the writers brought on board characters from earlier series who required careful attention in characterization for the sake of the fans, such as the beloved Lieutenant Worf from The Next Generation, but from the start DS9 catered to its audience of Trekkies, Trekkers, and people who just like sci-fi by providing viewers with “a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world” (Eco, “Casablanca” 199). From the first episode, “The Emissary”, Deep Space 9 displays a close knowledge of Star Trek history and careful attention to detail that gives each major character a role in the recent history of this future. However, no DS9 episode reaches so far into Star Trek and science fiction history as does “Far Beyond the Stars”, which manages to intertextualize science fictional history from the boom of genre magazines in the postwar period onward to the creation of Star Trek itself while still managing to pay homage to ‘traditional’ science fictional tropes such as time travel in the midst of a metanarrative about science fiction.

“Far Beyond the Stars” features the usual cast members of Deep Space 9, albeit in new guises, “to remind the reader that mediation/representation [as] the name of the game [is], in itself, nothing new” (Delany 223). In this case it is the viewer rather than the reader who comes to realize that who and what is present on the screen is infinitely transmutable into new forms and interpretations and that Star Trek is by its science fictional nature open to altering characters and changing actors in order to have them represent whatever it is the story needs. DS9 in particular is exemplary for reusing actors in a multitude of roles. Actor Jeffrey Combs plays a major villain in the series, but reappears under heavy makeup as a number of other characters not only in DS9 but in other areas of the Star Trek franchise such as The Next Generation and Enterprise. He shows up in “Far Beyond the Stars” playing ‘himself’ as Weyoun in addition to portraying a violent, racist police officer who brutalizes Avery Brooks’ Benny Russell. Other actors double their roles in the episode as well, playing both characters fans recognize from the show and new ones created just for the episode’s story. Doubling the actors’ performances like this brings the viewer’s attention sharply into focus on the narrative and highlights not only the natural intertextuality of the episode’s toying with established Star Trek canon, but also jars the viewer into recognizing that what the viewer is seeing is, after all, a televised science fiction show. Samuel R. Delany calls this textual mediation, and claims that “textuality is mediation per se. To experience textuality for moments as invisible is to confirm mediation’s strength—not to deny it” (221). However, the audience never escapes the text, even when as a reader or viewer the text seems most obvious in its rhetoric of self-referencing, nor are they meant to in works like “Far Beyond the Stars”. The self-references are part of the story and an integral element in building the narrative around the idea of the episode being Star Trek as Star Trek and science fiction as science fiction. The audience at some point will begin to recognize the textual building blocks of the episode, regardless of how many viewings it takes, and at that point the episode transforms from a simplistic space adventure to a more complicated story about space adventures and the people who create them.

To experience textuality as visible likewise confirms the strength of textual mediation by giving the audience a significant amount of room to interpret the episode. According to Umberto Eco, audience members can be divided up into two categories- the first level of readers or viewers simply enjoy the episode as it is written and the second level of audience members who get the jokes and bring into their viewing a background which allows them to put the show in context. Eco does not push the idea that either level is necessarily a ‘superior’ method in which to read a text or watch a movie, though he does explain that “the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated” (Eco, “Intertextual Irony” 223). To become a second-level reader one must have been a first-level reader, perhaps for a long time in order to accumulate the sort of knowledgeable background a text may need for a second-level reading. “Far Beyond the Stars” is no exception. It is perfectly possible to watch the episode as merely a progression of plot- aliens make Captain Benjamin Sisko hallucinate he is an African American science fiction writer in post-WWII New York, and in addition to deciding which reality he belongs to he must come to grips with his responsibilities in the ‘real’ world as a space station captain. Taken this way, the plot is rather campy but still an enjoyable watch, even if the viewer fails to recognize Sisko’s fellow writers as being stand-ins for genre greats like Issac Asimov and Leigh Brackett, not to mention that the characters are played by other members of DS9’s main cast, adding another layer of complication and self-awareness for the alert viewer. Eco’s second-level viewer, however, would bring to the table a working knowledge of the early magazine history of science fiction as well as familiarity with Star Trek canon, especially that of the series in question. In theory, this viewer would notice and understand the show’s many references to the shoddy pay and disrespect given to early magazine writers, and perhaps make the jump to thinking about how genre fiction and those who create it are treated now, especially by more mainstream readers and critics. This reader would perhaps recognize the allusions to Bradbury, Sturgeon, and Heinlein and probably the namedropping of W.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright as well. Perhaps some viewers would even have had direct contact with the works of some of these authors and could delve deeper into the literary heritage this episode has to rifle through so quickly. Though these references have little to do with the main storyline of Sisko’s struggle and are not strictly necessary to a viewer’s first-level interaction with the episode, those viewers who do carry with them this body of knowledge will have a very different experience than those who come to the text empty-handed, looking for straight-forward entertainment that involves green alien women, disruptor blasts and warp-core breaches.

In addition to classifying and defining readers, in discussing the fragmentation that often creates cult hits such as Star Trek Eco defines his own breed of modernized intertextual archetypes which some contemporary writers make use of in order “to indicate a preestablished and frequently reappearing narrative situation, cited or in some ways recycled by innumerable other texts” which “can belong to a rather recent textual tradition” (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). Star Trek is a model example of this complex incorporation of a multitude of literary work, including itself. Star Trek: The Original Series calls on famous works ranging from Hamlet to The Bible in order to legitimize its place in storytelling and literature, and every subsequent series has followed suit. The Next Generation turns to Melville’s Moby Dick to explain Jean-Luc Picard’s obsession with the Borg, and DS9 repeatedly calls on poetry from both World Wars to make a case for universal peace. Meanwhile, Captain Benjamin Sisko can no more escape the shadow of one James T. Kirk than Sisko’s analogue Benny Russell can hope to buck the racial and artistic codes of his day. Both characters played by Avery Brooks invoke a particular ‘new’ archetype here. Sisko retains echoes of those Star Trek captains who have gone before him in the canon, namely Kirk and Picard, and hybridizes Kirk’s swaggering captaincy with Picard’s intellectual leadership into his own blend of rough-and-tumble adventurism and thoughtful humanism. Benny Russell epitomizes the ostracized Sensitive Artiste who suffers grandly for his creative vision in a conservative society that is simply not ready for his groundbreaking masterpiece about race relations in a utopian future. Both characters are meant to “[provoke] in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of déjà vu” that hopefully keeps the audience coming back for more adventures of Sisko and his crew (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). In Sisko, audience members are supposed to see both the captain they would want to have and the captain they would want to be, while Benny seems to more closely represent the audience members as they are. He’s the quiet nerdy type who likes stories about extraterrestrials and ray guns, and is trying to make a living through writing science fiction. His character is clearly aimed at garnering sympathy from the literate audience member who is presumably well read in science fiction and perhaps interested in producing more of the fiction he or she finds so intriguing. Any of these representations are also generalizations, all of which play off of stock characters, situations, and concepts that can be found in the best and the worst of not just genre fiction but literary works of all stripes. These intertextual archetypes are not meant to be mythic in scale, but are merely intended to characterize a person or situation the audience will recognize and respond to, presumably due to earlier encounters with similar representations in other works. Every audience member who meets DS9’s Captain Sisko will remember his notorious predecessor due to his ubiquitous presence in contemporary pop culture. Watching Star Trek: The Original Series is not a prerequisite to understanding Sisko as a Star Trek captain when Kirk is so well situated in his own archetypical role as The Captain.

Eco’s idea of intertextual archetypes ties in to his concept of the intertextual frame, which differs from what he calls ‘common frames’ by representing scenes and situations drawn from literary traditions rather than real-life experiences. Naturally, Sisko’s alien-induced hallucination falls more into the science fictional tradition than into what most people would consider reality or realistic fiction. However, it’s not such a strange idea for audience members who are familiar with such science fictional concepts as aliens, time travel, and the role-playing of historical and fictional characters. That isn’t to say that DS9 viewers, even those most thoroughly seeped in Star Trek lore and science fiction history, believe what they are seeing is true or based in some kind of reality outside the text and those texts preceding it. Rather, the episode is tailor made to invoke those earlier literary works, either indirectly by having Sisko ‘time-travel’ to postwar New York or through characters on screen directly referring to H.G. Wells and his science fiction involving time travel. Not only do these invocations amuse and interest viewers who can relate them to their experiences with these earlier texts, but by referencing science fiction’s traditional works the episode actually explains its own plot. The episode’s straight-forward evocation of H.G. Wells is a perfect example of such a draw on literary canon. Even non-readers of science fiction have been exposed to Wells’ socially far-reaching work, either by children’s storybook editions of his more famous tales or through any of the multiple movie adaptations, including several remakes in recent years. Many viewers of DS9, even those who aren’t habitual watchers of science fiction, probably know The War of the Worlds and, here more importantly, The Time Machine. Wells provides the framework to understand one of the trickier parts of the episode’s narrative, that of scientifically improbable time travel, simply by being the H.G. Wells who provided so much literary material for later modern science fiction to build upon. The point viewers are to take home after the episode isn’t that time travel is impossible, it’s that within the tradition of Star Trek and science fiction at large there exists a narrative language that seeks to accomplish and explain the impossible within the texts themselves.

Star Trek comes from a rich background of literary history encompassing a huge range of legitimate speculation and fanciful misapplication of science and reason, and the show itself has used this background to inform its own growth, sometimes even turning to feeding on itself when its storylines demanded it. This maze of self-references and cross-references to other texts have kept fans busy since the show first aired over a quarter of a century ago, and every subsequent series, movie, book or comic adds yet another twist to the labyrinth. Fans have kept the show alive to this day because of their love of Star Trek’s free use of trivia and information. Alternate histories, alternate futures, alternate universes, and holodeck illusions merge with legitimate scientific inquiry and exploration to entertain and inform multi-generational audiences. Episodes such as “Far Beyond the Stars” up the ante on the monster-of-the-week episodes that characterized The Original Series and strive for a more inclusive view not just of overreaching storyline but of the genre as a whole by incorporating the literary traditions that gave rise to the show in the first place. There is no question that Star Trek owes a great deal to the Golden Age science fiction magazines and the writers and editors who built the genre from the basic building blocks of rationalism, modernism, and romanticism, and there’s no doubt that Star Trek has in turn influenced later works of science fiction, not least of all itself. The writers of DS9 would have written a very different show if H.G. Wells, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury had never written science fiction and if Gene Roddenberry had never dreamed of making the world a better place through space exploration. If the goal is to seek out new life, Star Trek has succeeded by giving new life to old and new literary forms alike.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Sex, Race, and Science Fiction: The Callaloo Interview.” Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994: 216-229.

Eco, Umberto. “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.

---. “Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading.” On Literature. Trans. Martin McLaughlin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2004: 212-235.

“Far Beyond the Stars.” Star Trek: Deep Space 9.Writ. Ira Stephen Behr and Hans Beimler. Dir. Avery Brooks. Paramount, 1998. DVD.

J-Pop: An Cafe

Will my sporadic presence online recommence? We'll see.

These guys are totally rocking my world right now. Especially this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaekLMnv9lM&feature=related
I would karaoke this all day long.

Tracy Letts and Intellectualism in the Southern Family

    In August: Osage County, Tracy Letts examines the role of intellectualism in the home of an educated Southern family. The Westons and their descendants represent an element of Southern society usually ignored in American culture. Instead of 'typical' white trailer-trash usually associated with the poverty-stricken state of Oklahoma, the Weston family is mostly comprised of intelligent, educated men and women with moderate success in their careers, if not in personal relationships. In fact, professional and academic recognition seem to come to the Weston family at the cost of personal happiness and the ability to relate in an efficient manner with other human beings. However, even failure to find this kind of success is no guarantee that a Weston descendant can achieve contentment, mostly due to familial and cultural pressures which keep the Weston scions perpetually attached to the physical location of their childhood home and the psychological traumas associated with it. Geography toys with the family members, leaving them to cling to one another in the Southern landscape usually depicted as unfriendly toward academic 'impracticality' and 'elitism'. However, this reliance upon family seems to breed resentment between family members, and education becomes less a tool of self-improvement and more of a weapon for venting social and familial anxieties. Education, and even the lack thereof, also becomes a shield, not only from attacks but from taking responsibility seriously.

    The Southern intellectual, especially in states such as Oklahoma, is often portrayed as something of a rare breed. American culture at large seems to assume that there is no such animal, or that the creature is a rare enough aberration that its Southern roots can safely be ignored. The South is not generally known as a hotbed of intellectualism, and those people with interest in scholarship and learning are often isolated in their community. The Westons formed their own conclave of educated individuals, though this act of circling the wagons did little more than isolate the Weston family from the larger community. This larger community is less a fixed geographical point to be marked on a map, and more an idea composed of rather uncertain, metaphorical boundaries which almost seem to shift with the characters as they move (Jackson 5). No matter where they go, Oklahoma stretches out to follow them and remind them of their roots as educated people in a world where higher education is not the ticket to success. The house shared by Beverly and Violet Weston embodies the isolation and slow decay of the Southern intellectual- Letts describes the house as "a century old", with "additions, renovations and repairs [which] have essentially modernized the house until 1972 or so, when all structural care ceased" and the house entered into a state of decline (Letts 9). Though occupied by two human beings, the house has been shuttered and left to rot in the heat of the Oklahoma sun. The intellectual capacity of the house's inhabitants is no match for their sense of abandonment in a region devoid of intellectual drive. Characters such as Ivy and Barbara try to find ways to leave the Oklahoma plains for better prospects elsewhere, but the family home acts as a magnet which draws them back time and again for more punishment. Ivy in particular shows an interest in escaping her life on the Plains and fixates on the city most famous for being a place to escape and find new meaning- New York, a city as known for being as metropolitan and diverse and intellectual as Osage County isn't. Ivy feels entrapped by the limitations of her hometown, and by the close-knit nature of her Southern community. Entrapment is a common theme in Southern literature, and is usually seen either in captivity narratives or in depictions of doomed marriages written by Southern women (Busby 99). However, Letts examines captivity in a geographical sense, essentially locking his characters into place and tying them down to a single location from which they can't escape, no matter how much physical space they attempt to put between themselves and the county they grew up in.

    Education doesn't act only as a community barrier in August: Osage County. It also behaves as a weapon for various characters, most notably in Bev Weston and in Barbara and Bill Fordham. Bev utilizes his intellect as a defensive measure against his responsibilities as a husband and father. He plays the part of the wounded poet to avoid dealing with his wife's addiction to pills and the emotional failings of his children. Bev also relies on his status as the misunderstood and maligned artist to excuse his own alcoholism and emotional unavailability. His methods of escape are easy enough to trace as they develop. In the early stages of his marriage to Violet, he found release in books and in writing his poetry. Once he tasted critical acclaim for his academic work, it is likely that he lost some of the feeling of independence his writing may have inspired and turned to drinking as a new source of protecting himself from the daily demands of living which "have over time made burdensome the maintenance of traditional American routine" (Letts 11). When alcoholism no longer blocked out the discomfort of living in a dark, empty house with an unstable wife and the memory of three unhappy daughters, suicide became Bev's final answer. In his case, what started out as a shield of academic success turned into a double-edged knife of isolation and alcoholism, made worse by Bev's genuine intelligence and his difficulty in reconciling his intellect with what he considered to be a mundane world of paying bills and driving the wife to chemotherapy. Meanwhile, Bev's daughter Barbara and her soon-to-be ex-husband Bill put their education to a slightly different task. Instead of leaning on their education to further themselves, Barbara and Bill use their intellects as weapons against one another. Both are highly intelligent people with potentially fulfilling careers, but neither can navigate their relationship without turning a disagreement into an intellectual competition. On one occasion, Barbara accuses Bill of abandoning their daughter, to which he responds "I have not forsook my responsibilities" (Letts 76). She jumps on his use of the word "forsook" and turns the subject of the argument from their daughter's happiness to the lesser issue of her husband's word choice, all for some vague hope of upstaging him on an intellectual issue. Her concern with her husband's intelligence, and more importantly her worry over his perception of her own, reappears in a later scene in which Barbara is speaking to Sherriff Gilbeau. She mentions that Gilbeau's occupation is ironic, given his family history She corrects herself a moment later, stating "it's incongruous. I think I misused "ironic." Oh, if my husband could hear that", showing that even when Bill isn't in the same room she can't escape the need to defend her intellectual capacity while attacking his in a twisted form of self-defense (Letts 125).

    Education and the thirst for knowledge affect the lives of the entire Weston family. Little Charles Fordham illustrates the family attitude toward learning in an interesting manner. He is the only 'failure' in the family with relation to his drive to learn and showcase his knowledge. He is the family black sheep for lacking interest in Bev's constructed community for intellectuals and preferring his non-scholarly puttering to any pursuit of higher learning. In the larger Oklahoma community, this would hardly be abnormal and may even be perceived as a more practical endeavor than Bev Weston's poetry, but within the Weston family Little Charles is a failure. His mother lashes out at him verbally on several occasions, making no secret of her disappointment in him. Ivy and his father attempt to protect him, but Little Charles often seems content to be run over by the hostility the other family members hold for him for not fitting into the Weston model of the capable intellectual. He seems to feel that he deserves their derision and makes no attempt to prove to anyone but Ivy that he is anything more than the family fool. By playing the helpless child, he dodges the familial responsibilities he would otherwise have to shoulder- he even manages to skip attending Beverly's funeral through intentionally "accidentally" sleeping through his alarm clock. The Weston family sees his lack of interest in scholarly activities as a symptom of his lifelong aversion to adulthood and the duties he is expected to perform. Likewise, Ivy accuses Barbara of abandoning her familial duties under the guise of furthering her career in Colorado. Like Little Charles, Barbara uses her intellectual status as a way to dodge her supposed responsibility to take care of her mother Violet. She escapes to her new teaching job and her growing family and leaves her younger sister to deal with their mother's insecurities and whims. She is only able to do this, of course, because she is herself of the intellectual class, just as her father was, and other than her sister there is no one in the family who will call her out on her abandonment. Any other character who would accuse Barbara of skirting her duties would open him- or herself to an equal accusation, as the entire family is guilty of putting personal gain first and familial responsibilities second at some time or another. Even Ivy, for all her talk of how "the obligation of caring for [their] parents was [hers] alone" wants to cut her ties with Violet and flee to the distant, almost-mystical city of New York where freedom waits and no angry old women horde bottles of pills in rehab (Letts 103). Still, because she is the oldest daughter, tradition would dictate that Barbara should be the one calling the shots in what remains of the family after the various breakdowns suffered by her parents, sisters, and husband. However, Barbara leans upon her academic responsibilities as a way to deflect her familial duties onto other people, much as Little Charles uses his academic ineptitude to avoid responsibility altogether.

    Letts seems to believe that intellectualism plays an odd role in the lives of Southerners with academic aspirations, especially in people imprisoned in the South with only other family members to share their academic aspirations with. The Westons created a community in miniature to support their academic pursuits in a region where academia is not the usual career choice, but their ring of scholarly 'support' is rife with competitiveness, feeling of inadequacy, and outright hostility to any form of either success or failure. The Weston mini-community is less a circle of academic thought and more a boxing ring which allows for familial jealousies to air and for family members to attack one another either verbally or, on several occasions during the course of the play, physically and with intent to harm. Repressed anger does not stay repressed in this family for very long, and almost all of the family members spoil for a good fight at some point in the play. Academia and aggression are not commonly associated with one another in this manner, but Letts does not seem to want to depict his scholars as pacifists and do-gooders- he wants the audience to know that the people walking on his stage have problems stemming from jealousy and insecurity and a great deal of pent-up anger, and that these issues are likely fed by the family's awareness of their own isolation from one another and from the Southern community they seek to escape. Responsibility to the family is a secondary concern to the extended family of the Westons, and it falls after scholarly success which does not seem to provide emotional fulfillment for any of the characters. Instead, seeking recognition in one or more fields of study rather than working out issues within the family in a way forces the Westons to view one another as competitors rather than family members, therefore perpetuating the cycle of hostility and undercutting. Intelligent and self-aware though they are, the Weston family members are more concerned with arming themselves against one another and deflecting blame than in seeking out one another and truly being a family.

Works Cited

Busby, Mark. "The Significance of the Frontier in Contemporary American Fiction." The         Frontier Experience and the American Dream. Ed. Mogen, David, Mark Busby, and Paul     Bryant. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 95-103.

Jackson, Robert. Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture. Baton Rouge:     Louisiana State University, 2005.

Letts, Tracy. August: Osage County. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008.