{wittering}

it is founded upon the observation of trifles

[granada-brett-crumbs]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Ouija board: This wooden Ouija board is engraved with black letters of the full alphabet, numbers from zero to nine, and the words, “Yes”, “No”, and “Goodbye”. Scratches on the top indicate signs of use. —Arthur Conan Doyle Personal Effects Collection, Harry Ramson Center.

[wild-blue-sky]

want, please!

[wild-blue-sky]

i seem to have acquired a number of new followers over the last few weeks, and this is impetus enough for me to actually start posting. i’m afraid i’m somewhat old-fashioned, so i’ll use this space to post my thoughts and ramblings about arthur conan doyle & his beautiful sherlock holmes (in all his many iterations!), pictures, even the odd reblog, but i’ll probably also talk a fair amount about my actual life, which is about to undergo some significant changes as my partner, one-year-old, and i pack up our life in upstate ny and move to cambridge, uk where my partner will be taking up a new position as a special collections librarian.

i am also -- at least for the next two weeks! -- a librarian. i oversee a medieval studies research collection, and am the de facto curator of the medieval and early modern manuscript collection at the university where i’m based. i love both medieval literature & culture and the 19th and early-20th century antiquarians who collected & hoarded manuscripts and wrote about them in pretentious little clubs and coteries. i long ago realized that on some level, i am a victorian at heart. when i get to teach with & about manuscripts, introduce students to these amazing objects, let them touch and smell and play with them for the first time, i am deeply in touch with this inner victorian. to sit in a worn leather chair in my own richly decorated study crammed full with curiosities -- in short, to be a rich white dude in 19th-century london or edinburgh -- that’s my idea of happiness.

in any event, several days ago i was prepping for a manuscript studies lab i ran for an english professor here. as i browsed the stacks a small brown book caught my eye, william audley’s “guide to the art of illuminating and missal painting” (london, 1867). i flipped through the pages and came to some lithographed plates of common manuscript decoration -- illuminated capitals, floral and architectural borders, this kind of thing. i paused because they were pretty and unexpected and then my eye caught the bottom of the page, where in a small fancy script it said “printed and published by george rowney & co., 51 rathbone place, london.” i smiled, because i’m a nerd with holmes on the brain, and because i’m a librarian i did some research: george rowney & company were lithographic printers and suppliers of artists materials, but the company began a generation before, in 1783 as purveyors of perfumes and wig powder. the company still exists, as daler-rowney (http://www.daler-rowney.com), but no longer based at rathbone place. 

i’m not sure why i’m writing about this, other than to break the ice and to reflect on a little moment where my holmes fixation brought me a little flicker of pleasure in an otherwise ordinary day.

[wild-blue-sky]

On fandom, love, & reading

Hi friends. This is a new forum for me, and I’m not quite sure what my voice is going to sound like, so bear with me. If you’re annoyed with this post, and with me, I’m just going to have to go ahead and direct you to my friend @ivyblossom because she’s the one who asked me to write this. So please, have at her.

Before I say anything, though, because I’m not interested in smoke and mirrors or cloaks and daggers, I’ll tell you this: my name is Marie. I am 32 – no wait, shit – 33 years old. I am a librarian, and a medievalist, and a feminist, and the mother of a one-year-old, and a thousand other things. I am married to a lovely man, though am in possession of a sexual identity that fails to make itself clear even to me. None of this really matters, but the preamble makes it easier to begin to say anything at all. I have been a fangirl always, and in fandom for a while now – I’d say about 15 years – but I’ve always stayed out of the fray. I read, I commented, I admired, but never said anything outright, never tried to initiate a conversation. Now I’d like to have a conversation.

You guys, I am sad about fandom. This fandom. I am so disheartened watching the fallout from this past season of Sherlock. I am disheartened not because – or not only because – it is now clear that there was never an intention on behalf of the show to give us an explicitly queer Holmes. I am disheartened, and I am heartsick, because of the deep sadness I see in the fandom, and the in-fighting between those who are angry and those who are seeking something redemptive – or at the very least interesting! – in TFP. I didn’t hate the episode. I thought the plot was absurd and stupid and pretty abysmally written, but I didn’t hate the episode because I appreciate what it was trying – and for the most part, failing, I think – to do. But I’m not here to talk about that. I can, if I ever get up the nerve to post anything ever again. I have a lot of thoughts about how TFP moves Sherlock closer to canon Holmes, and toward Conan Doyle’s own characterization of his stories as romance – not romance as love story, but real romance as a literary genre consumed by history, and family, and identity – but that’s for another day.

Look, let me tell you: I am nothing if not a Johnlock shipper. This has nothing to do with whether or not I see these two characters together because I do, I do, I do. Nothing can or will change that for me. And yes, I believe that we are right to want and to expect better queer representation in the media. We are right to want and expect to be shown worlds that match the granular, non-binary, indefinable realities of our relationships. We are right to want and expect a queer Holmes. And I believe that Sherlock constitutes a huge missed opportunity to give us that – but I do not believe that that opportunity was missed last week. It was missed years ago, when it became clear that the show was consistently moving away from an explicitly gay reading of John and Sherlock’s relationship.

Okay, wait, I have to back up again – I’m sorry. Like I said, new at this. Back to fandom. Here is my fundamental understanding of what fandom is: fandom is a radical and radically queer set of reading practices. Radical in that it prizes the means of production from the hands of the author and puts them in the hands of the reader; radical in that it allows for us to blur the lines between personal and communal; radical in that it demands such profound intimacy between its adherents. It is this last that has always been the most important to me, and is to my mind the beating heart of fandom and its ability to heal (how many of us have said or heard “fandom saved my life”?). In short: fandom is communal reading as an act of love.

This is what I really want to talk about: reading and love. I’m not sure I have more than a sentence or two to say, actually. Maybe a question. Look, I am not in the business of telling people that they are doing fandom wrong. I’m not sure that there is a way to do it wrong. But watching the tortuous and protracted reading of real world events during and following season 4, all the energy that has been expended collecting hints and clues potentially dropped for us by the writers and the showrunners – will there be a fourth episode?; why are there so many obvious plot holes?; does Piccadilly Circus have a message for us? – is not a version of fandom I fully recognize. All these breadcrumbs people are so painstakingly gathering are, I think, leading back to the wrong text. 

There is a whole beautiful, messy, deliciously flawed narrative laid bare for us now, and it is ours, fully ours. All our energy could go into reading and re-reading these stories, thinking deeply about them, taking them up and playing with them, or better yet creating new and better versions of them. So why are so many of us trying to tell ourselves stories about Moffat and Gatiss rather than John and Sherlock?

[meiringen]

[thegoldenhaggis-deactivated2019]

“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”

[abrakafuckyou]

the battle of wits has begun

for let’s draw sherlock. the princess bride was begging to be done, it’s exactly the same scene (hi-res looks best look at that)

[bakerstreetbabes]

YES.

[peepingdevice-blog]

[bakerstreetbabes]

Cover design by Bohdan Bocianowski for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Warsaw: Państwowe wydawnictwo Iskry, 1956.

Lovely.

[vitalysolomin-deactivated201808]

[wild-blue-sky]

The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen

by Sherlock Holmes

[sidgwicks]

“The Doctor’s Case”, Stephen King, 1987.

[scrickiras]

cuties at a coffeshop!!

[wild-blue-sky]

from spaced 1.5 (1999), still one of the best shows about geek culture out there. 

[planestrainsnpages]

[wild-blue-sky]

...but where's hogwarts: a history?

[wild-blue-sky]

via the incredible digital archive at the nypl

[tea-at-221b-blog]

[wild-blue-sky]

Original admission ticket for William Gillette’s 1930 radio performance of “The Speckled Band”, dramatised by Edith Meiser (x)

[ireallyshouldbedrawing]

Think, think, think

[bigbangthesis]

“Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.”

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2006. (via bigbangthesis)

[wild-blue-sky]

from the pursuit of the house-boat. being some further account of the divers doings of the associated shades, under the leadership of sherlock holmes, esq. by john kendrick bangs, 1897. illustrations by peter newell.