Week 3 in Style

Topic

My Storybook will be an anthology centering around Aesop animal characters on shows like Jerry Springer and Dr. Phil, and on twitter. 

Stories I will be using for Jerry Springer Show will be two or three of these (I haven't narrowed it down yet): The Dog, The Cock, and the Fox, The Farmer and the Stork, The Travelers and the Purse, The Wolf and the Lion, and The Wolf and the Lean Dog.  Maybe one episode could be “What to Do When a Friend Is In Need” and use the characters from The Dog, The Cock, and the Fox, The Travelers and the Purse, and The Wolf and the Lean Dog.

(Note: while the characters will continue to go by their animal names, I still think of them looking human - so perhaps it's a universe where some people have second forms and, if they do, they go by the name of that form.  That second form won't give them any special powers beyond transformation or influencing their human forms just a little.)

Shea Weber (#6) and Seth Jones (#3) as Big Dog and Lean Dog respectively. [x]

Stories I will be using for Dr. Phil are The Boy and the Filberts and The Mice and the Weasels.  The boy’s mother from The Boy and the Filberts is trying to get help for her son, who won’t take his hand out of the filbert jar; meanwhile, the mice from The Mice and the Weasels come on to talk about their PTSD and try to rally the rest of animal kind to their defense.

The social media outlet I was thinking about using was twitter and the stories I will use are The Lion and the Ass and The Wolf and his Shadow.  In both of these cases I’ll be working along the theme of animal A calling out animal B, or A bragging and B calling them out, and, say, if either of them were famous, what kind of reaction there would be from various news outlets or gossip columns.  Will the boxer, Wolf, who keeps boasting about how big and tough he is, finally be successful in getting a fight with renowned heavy weight champ Lion?  Will Ass, who keeps sending vaguely threatening tweets to Lion, finally get a response?  There’s a lot that can happen on Twitter…

Bibliography

1. The Aesop for Children, with illustrations by Milo Winter (1919).

Styles

Interview.  I believe this style will fit wonderfully with either of the talk shows, especially Dr. Phil because there is much more of an interview – a lot of give and take – going on during his show.  Certainly more than there is with Jerry Springer.

Story told in a bar and Outsider POV.  For this style, I was going to tell it from the third person point of view of an audience member during the taping of Jerry Springer.  The story I want to use is The Wolf and the Lean Dog, so this audience member, Jackdaw, is talking about how he was SO SURPRISED when the Lean Dog brought out his friend, Big Dog, and how Big Dog wasted no time in tackling Wolf and beating him up. 

Now since Jackdaw isn’t in this story himself, and is looking in on the plight of the three main characters, he has the outsider’s point of view which lends a new perspective to the overall feel of the story.  Does Jackdaw pity Wolf for not getting his meal?  Does he think Lean Dog is cunning for how he tricks Wolf?  Does he marvel at Big Dog’s strength and loyalty?

Video Note: Edward Kenway, the guy in the white hood, is a character from Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, and if you're curious as to why I chose him as Jackdaw, read this reading diary and this storytelling post.  (I put up this video because I couldn't choose which screencap to use.)

Social Media.  I’ve written fictionalized twitter interactions before and it was a lot of fun – especially trying to stick to the 140 character limit.  So I think it will be a great challenge to see if I can nail down the characterizations of Aesop’s animals within such a limited space.  Which animal would be most likely to post Instagram photos to their account?  Do they use Twitlonger to go on rants about social injustices?  How is their grammar?  How often do they change their avatar and name or do they ever change either?

Storytelling for Week 3: Of Mothers and Sons

Author's Note:  What I did with this story was I wrote it in drabbles, in 100-word snippets, in different point of views.  Two of them are from Aible's POV and two of them are in Wolf-Mother's POV. The story I used is The Wolf Mother of Saint Aible, the story of an infant who is abandoned in the woods before being adopted by a wolf. The boy spends a few years with the wolf and her cubs, but he is soon chanced upon by a hunter who scoops him up, "rescuing" him, and bring the boy home to his wife - the wolf and her cubs (who are mostly grown) chase after the rider, but can't quite catch him.  The boy, named Aible, grows up to become a holy man.  One day, he hears hunting dogs barking and runs outside - and immediately recognizes his now old wolf mother as the dogs' prey.  She recognizes him, too, and runs into his arms.

Of Mothers and Sons

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Wolf-Mother

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The moment the hunter scoops up her fur-less son, Wolf-Mother feels rage spreading through chest like winter ice – unforgiving, deadly.

Mama! Aible cries, screaming and reaching over the hunter’s shoulder.

She stretches her long body over the earth – praying to Wolf Moon for speed and endurance.  For if she and her sons could take down the mighty stags of the forest, surely this horse and its wicked rider would be easy enough to pull to ground.

But then one of her wolf sons begins to slow. And then the others.  And then herself.

And then her fur-less cub is gone.

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Aible

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Aible dreams of the woods sometimes. 

He dreams of sunlight dappling the forest floor and fresh flowers beginning to bud.

He dreams of the wolves he called elder brother, big brother, small brother, and young brother.  He dreams of playing their games and learning bird songs.

He dreams of cuddling into warmth and softness, of whispering mama with a low growl as an answer.  He dreams of big golden eyes and long fangs that always offered protection and the rare rebuke.

Aible dreams of the woods sometimes – and, when he wakes up, wishes only to return there.  To return home.

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“What did you say, sir?” asks a priest.

“Nothing,” Aible says, turning away pointedly to stare out of the window.  The people around him were harder to deal with than usual today – Aible’s patience was already nearing its end despite the earliness of the day.

Aible turns and walks down to the gardens – the only place in the town that made any sense to him.  The birds would often come to see him, to laugh at his stories and give him encouragements.

He knows it frightens some when they find him talking in the language of animals – he doesn’t care. 

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Wolf-Mother

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It is only because of her old age that she didn’t hear the hounds before they were nearly upon her.  She snarls viciously at the dogs, and runs – she twists and winds her way through the forest, but she’s cut off.

Then a crow screams, Head for the town – there is someone there who will protect you.

She doesn’t know why she listens, but she does.  And it’s not until she is near, when she sees a man much like the others, that she feels her heart sing.  Her fur-less cub falls to his knees and opens his arms wide.

This is who I pictured as Wolf-Mother. [x]

Bibliography:

The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts by Abbie Farwell Brown (1900).

Reading Diary B: Saints and Animals

You would almost think that because of the superstitious nature of early Christians, that anyone with the kind of power over animals that these saints  have, that they would be accused of witchcraft. Well, maybe if they were using the animals to kill people or to steal, instead of getting those animals to stop killing and stealing.

Saint Athracta’s Stags was a ballad I thoroughly enjoyed. There were just so many different things I could focus on. Two old chargers plowing a tiny field is wonderful to try to imagine. (But what happened to their previous owners? Was it common practice for knights to just get rid of old horses who had been with them in war? Seems a bit callous.)

The stags coming along to help pull the lumber is another awesome picture (I tried to find a picture of deer pulling a cart and couldn’t find anything that wasn’t Christmas related; there were some interesting ones featuring elk, moose, bison, and dogs). But I can’t really see Bambi’s dad subjecting himself to hard labor outside of running away from a forest fire. He’s too majestic.

So much majesty. [x]

Nearly as majestic as Thorin Oakenshield of The Hobbit, portrayed by Richard Armitage in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of the same name.

Majestic Thorin is majestic. [x]

The other story I loved was The Wolf-Mother of Saint Ailbe – which may be the one I do for my storytelling post, but I’m not sure. I may take it and see if I can put a twist to it, set it against the backdrop of Assassin’s Creed or perhaps The Hobbit.  It would be interesting to see the story from the wolf's point of view and I think it would be a fun challenge to take that story and set it in a different universe.

Reading Diary A: Saints and Animals

While reading this unit, all I could think about was the Doctor, the titular character from Doctor Who.  Doctor Who is a British television show that ran during the sixties to late eighties before being rebooted in 2005, and is still running today. 

It follows the story of a Time Lord, an alien species from Gallifrey.  The Doctor is able to regenerate – change forms – if he is severely injured, so there have been several actors who have portrayed him in in the series.  The Doctor can travel throughout time and space in his TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), which due to a malfunction, looks like a blue police box (but don’t worry, it’s bigger on the inside).  The Doctor usually travels with companions – usually women who he has no romantic inclinations towards (though there have been exceptions to this).

All of the Doctors.  The bottom row is from the reboot, sometimes called New Who.

Since the series’ reboot, there have been four new Doctors – in fandom they are referenced by their regeneration number as Nine, Ten, Eleven, and Twelve.  In the 50^th anniversary special, The War Doctor was introduced as the Doctor between Eight and Nine, who fought during the Time War.  The War was between the Daleks and the Time Lords over control of the universe or time itself, I’m not sure.

Though the Doctor isn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination – he is still a good person, he still wants to help people, but he would still never see himself as such.  And it takes a lot to get him angry – something his antagonists soon come to realize was a horrible idea.

All four of the saints in the first half of the unit show flashes of anger after varying levels of abuse, particularly Saint Comgall.  There’s a line in the Doctor Who episode “A Good Man Goes to War” when the big bad says that “the anger of a good man is not a problem.  Good men have too many rules.”  Eleven had simply responded with, “Good men don’t need rules.  Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

Eleven, portrayed by Matt Smith. [x]

So while the Doctor doesn’t seem himself as a good man, he has proven throughout the series that he will go out of his way to help – not only people he cares about – but also total strangers, often changing lives wherever he goes.

   

Twelve (Peter Capaldi) and his companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman)