The Kingkiller Sporkicle: The Name of the Wind: Chapter 12 (Part II)

Chapter 12: Puzzle Pieces Fitting (Part II)

In which Galatea upgrades the book's entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe was a snot, Arliden was a snob, Kvothe's mother was a sexy lamp, and I stormed off in a huff.

I prepared to sneak off before I was caught, but what Ben said next froze me in place before I took a single step.

“It’s probably hard to see, being his parents and all. But your young Kvothe is rather bright.” Ben refilled his cup, and held out the jug to my father, who declined it. “As a matter of fact, ‘bright’ doesn’t begin to cover it, not by half.”

Kvothe is taking cartoonishly slow steps if he hadn't managed to take one before Abenthy got to "Kvothe be smart". Either that, or Abenthy's saying something is "probably hard to see" was, for some reason, utterly shocking.

Also: yes. Please. Let's stop the plot dead so that other characters can wank over how brilliant Kvothe is. This kind of thing only works if the main character isn't already aware of how brilliant they are.

*regards Stu Stew count*

I rest my case.

Stu Stew: 46

Kvothe's parents try to downplay Kvothe's brilliance.

Stu Stew: 47

Abenthy insists that Kvothe really is that wonderful.

Stu Stew: 48

He does this by bringing up Kvothe's musical ability.

“I don’t think you really grasp the situation,” Ben said, stretching his feet almost into the fire. “How easily did he pick up the lute?”

My father seemed a little surprised by the sudden change of topic. “Fairly easily, why?”

“How old was he?”

My father tugged thoughtfully at his beard for a moment. In the silence my mother’s voice was like a flute. “Eight.”

Bitch, I was three when I took up the piano, and six when I started the violin. By the time I was eight I was playing Beethoven and Shostakovich at sleepaway music courses, and by the standards of some of my friends I was a musical late bloomer.

Conversely, I had a friend in high school who took up the piano when he was twelve, which is absurdly late by piano standards, and by the time he was fifteen he was playing circles around everyone I knew, including piano students who had started before they were old enough to sit up unassisted.

The point is that Rothfuss fails. Stringed instrument training starts early, especially if you're part of a musical family, because stringed instruments scale down well. The kind of violin a six-year-old starts learning on is tiny and squeaky and sounds like two stray cats fucking on a rusty see-saw, but you can learn the right notes in the right proportion to your size, and graduate to bigger instruments as you grow. That's something that's just not possible with, say, the oboe, where changing the size of the instrument or the distance between keys changes the pitch dramatically. At any rate, for Kvothe's lute-learning to be as impressive as Rothfuss wants, he'd either have to be playing that lute before he could walk - which is what most of the prodigiously skilled stringed-instrument players I know did - or, conversely, not have picked it up until last year and become skilled well after everyone had assumed he just wasn't musically inclined. Eight years old, in an extremely musical environment? Yeah, no wonder he picked it up quickly. You'd have to be tone-deaf not to.

Stu Stew: 49

Face The Music: 4

Abenthy continued. “I’ll bet he learned each chord, each fingering after being shown just once, no stumbling, no complaining. And when he did make a mistake it was never more than once, right?”

Face The Music: 5

You know what? I had a whole screed written out, but I've decided just to handwave this as Abenthy not being a musician himself, so having no fucking clue how learning a stringed instrument actually works. Hint: it's not like this.

Face The Music: 6

My father seemed a little perturbed. “Mostly, but he did have trouble, just the same as anyone else. E chord. He had a lot of trouble with greater and diminished E.”

Nope.

First of all, there is no "greater" anything chord. The opposite of "diminished" is "augmented". If Rothfuss wanted to invent his own musical nomenclature so as to avoid actual musicians doing exactly what I'm doing now, that would've been fine, but you can't use one actual musical term and one bullshit one and hope no one notices.

Face The Music: 7

Second, even if we accept that by "greater" Rothfuss did mean "augmented", this is still a musical fail. Only certain types of chords can be augmented or diminished, and "E" is way too broad to be counted among them. Are we talking E major triad? E minor triad? Dominant on E? Dominant in E? Neapolitan sixth on E? Diminished major seventh on E? Thirteenth flat ninth flat fifth on E? A freaking Ode-to-Napoleon hexachord on E?

Do you see the issue here?

Face The Music: 8

You know what's almost universally difficult on any stringed instrument? A diminished seventh. Those suckers are awkward on piano, violin, guitar and cello. On the violin in particular, they usually involve smooshing the weak ring finger up next to the stronger but laughably short little finger, while the index and middle fingers play Twister on the remaining strings. Throw one of those on E and I will happily buy that even a musical child prodigy has a little trouble with it.

Anyway, Abenthy decides to compliment Kvothe's wonderfully talented hands.

My father smiled. “He gets them from his mother, delicate, but strong. Perfect for scrubbing pots, eh woman?”

Ladies And Gentlemen: 16

Kvothe's parents latch onto the subject and start talking about how wonderful those hands will be when he starts seducing women, and OH MY GOD YOU PERVERTS HE IS ELEVEN YEARS OLD. EW.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 17

It is one thing to say a young boy is going to grow up into a handsome man. It is another thing entirely to talk about what exactly he's going to be using his fingers for when he starts "hunting" women (Kvothe's mother's word, not mine).

“Courting, dear,” my father corrected gently.

“Semantics,” she shrugged. “It’s all a chase, and when the race is done, I think I pity women chaste who run.”

What.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 18

It's not "semantics". It's not "all a chase". It is not, and should never be, "hunting". I know I went to great lengths in my little interlude a few chapters ago to say that, unlike Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, I consider the Kingkiller books harmless, but someone had better pass me the salt because I am going to have to eat those words.

It's not news that Rothfuss has some funny ideas about romance. We've already discussed how it seems likely that he got a lot of his ideas about courting from a very superficial reading of classic plays and literature, which often do portray a romantic "chase" that borders on outright stalking. And if you go to any Kingkiller discussion board, from reddit to dedicated fan sites, there's always some discussion even from diehard fans of how Kvothe's romantic storylines seem to come straight from the mind of a teenage boy whose only experience with women is cheesy vintage pornography and Nicholas Sparks movies. We'll get to that, and it's just as hilarious and icky as it sounds.

But this little line about the "chase", especially coming from the only woman in the scene, is a symptom of something much more disturbing. The funny thing about Rothfuss is that he's clearly split between two attitudes: one that comes from growing up in the middle of nowhere in the 70s and 80s with nothing but classic literature for company; the other from being a successful (and thus public-facing) author in the age of social media and social justice. His solution, more often than not, is to try to reconcile the two attitudes by having these regressive notions of romance and gender roles espoused by women, like Kvothe's-nameless-mother up there spouting the old "women want to be chased" canard that is just this side of rape apology.

I think about that a lot and I'm careful when I write from female perspective. Unless you are a blind, stupid creature you know that our culture has problems with women and because I'm part of this culture I accidentally absorb those things and I must be really careful not to let that unhealthy way of looking at women in my writing.

That's from an interview (quite spoilery, so click with caution) from about a year ago, in response to a question about avoiding writing "bad" female characters. It's a hilarious amount of self-awareness, given how little of it ends up on the page. As with most things Rothfuss, that self-awareness is entirely superficial. I genuinely don't think Rothfuss is actually writing his women any differently than he would if this were the heyday of pulp fantasy; he's just tipping his hat to modern gender attitudes and moving on, as though his supposedly progressive ideals will write themselves into the book by osmosis. And they might, if I thought for a second that he was half as progressive as he thinks he is.

The only time I ever really notice clothes are when someone is wearing something really impractical or ridiculous. Like when I see a woman wearing stiletto heels or a dress she can barely move around in.

When I see something like that, I usually think, “Wow. That must hurt.” Or “She’d be really pretty if she didn’t have to mince around like a geisha walking on hot knives.”

Look at that shit. This is from a 2012 interview, which means it was well after anyone with an ounce of feminism got wise to the notion that a woman can wear whatever she wants, including tight skirts and sky-high heels, for herself. Rothfuss doesn't explicitly say up there that these high-heeled women are dressing that way because either men or fashion demand that they do, but the implication is pretty strong ("if she didn't have to mince around like a geisha..."). I don't know what I find more skeevy, honestly: that, or the implicit white knight saviour complex of it all (I only notice a woman's clothing when it's causing her pain, at which point I think about her not being in pain and thus being more desirable).

I'm going to turn off the questionably-sexist-Rothfuss-quote spigot before I get out of control, and this is a much lengthier invective than I had planned. The point of it all is that, despite what I genuinely believe are good intentions, Rothfuss' inherent superficiality has the unfortunate result of twisting his attempts at positive female-centric writing into something that is even worse than straight-up pulp fantasy sexism, and it's in the throwaway comments like "I pity women chaste who run", rather than the more obvious sexism later, that the book's regressive attitude towards women becomes uncomfortably clear.

In short, like the Hitchhiker's Guide on Earth, I am upgrading my assessment of the Kingkiller Chronicle to mostly harmless.

Abenthy continues to wax rhapsodic about Kvothe's amazing skills, though he thankfully drops the music bit so I don't have to listen to him get it wrong again.

Stu Stew: 50

Ben refilled my mother’s cup. “He’s eleven. Have you ever known a boy his age who talks the way he does?”

Mother Tongue: 16

There is more than a little speculation going into the decision to file "swing a cat by the tail" under Mother Tongue rather than You Fucking Sociopath, but work with me here (and know that my own cats are looking at me with even more disdain than you are). Based on what I know of how Rothfuss operates - his obsession with language, his lack of real understanding of how language works, his enjoyment of little linguistic in-jokes (see: Hetera/hetaira), his tendency to retcon etymology - I think this is Rothfuss having a little metatextual fun with the phrase "not enough room to swing a cat".

See, the origin of "not enough room to swing a cat" (or, more recently, "can't swing a dead cat without hitting X") is commonly misattributed to the use of the cat-o'nine-tails for discipline at sea: a wicked flogger with nine lashes that could make mincemeat of a man's back. To use a cat-o'nine-tails effectively, the fellow doing the whipping needed a fair amount of room, both for the lashes to extend as they swung and to swing his own arm sufficiently wide to build momentum with the cat. If a deck or cabin was too small for a good ol' public whipping, it had "not enough room to swing a cat (o'nine tails)".

It's a neat explanation, with one glaring problem: the first recorded usage of "not enough room to swing a cat" occurs well before the first recorded usage of the cat-o'nine-tails. The fact is that no one really knows where the phrase actually comes from; while there's speculation that at some point grabbing a cat by the tail and swinging it around was a childish game, the most likely culprit is an Elizabethan custom of putting a cat in a bag, hanging it from a tree, and using it as an archery target (the motion of the live, terrified cat would cause the bag to swing, making it a more difficult target). That usage shows up in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in 1612. Personally, I'm inclined to believe this over the idea that children did enough swinging cats as a game for it to become an idiom, for one simple reason: getting a cat to get into a bag is simple; grabbing a cat by the tail is a great way to end up looking like an industrial accident. Just the other day I tried to pick my own cat up for a cuddle - something I do all the time without incident - and a slight misjudgement of where I grabbed her ended with both my boyfriend and me looking like we'd gone rounds with X-23.

I couldn't tell you whether Rothfuss is suggesting what he thinks is the real origin of the phrase, or he read as far as "origin: not cat-o'nine-tails" but not as far as "origin: Elizabethan archery target" (idiomatic dictionaries tend to swing by the children's game origin on their way from one to the other); either way, I think using the phrase at all is an attempt at a cheeky retcon of the phrase's origin. Of course, it also makes it look like Abenthy thinks Kvothe's contemporaries are all serial killers in training, but I imagine that was just a pleasant side effect.

My mother laughed like bells, but Abenthy’s face was serious.

Simile Soup: 50

Abenthy says Kvothe is wonderful, Kvothe's mother says motherly things, same song; different verse.

Repetition(epetition): 42

Even Kvothe's considering giving up on this lazy river of a conversation.

The next silence was longer. I was considering sneaking away when my father broke it. “What is it you suggest we do?” His voice was a mix of mild concern and fatherly pride.

Pausing briefly here to point out that there are roughly seventeen thousand more compelling ways of expressing the emotion in Arliden's voice. This sounds like a sommelier jotting down notes on the least interesting wine of the season.

Abenthy speculates that Kvothe will just be the very bestest at whatever he turns his hand to.

Stu Stew: 51

If, for example, he were to stay with the troupe, he would inevitably become the next Illien, who is (was) basically the ur-trouper. The composer of all their best and oldest songs, Illien is also supposedly "the only truly famous Edema Ruh in all of history".

I Have An Interrogative: 48

Wow. Also: how? The Edema Ruh are somewhere between court performers and a travelling circus. The former means they perform for nobility, which means the movers and shakers of the Kingkiller-verse get to see them on the regular. Stories in this universe travel faster than the freaking Millenium Falcon - we know this from the framing narrative and it'll be reiterated many times - so the Edema Ruh must really collectively suck if no one from the nobility is telling their friends about the players and musicians they saw at court. But even if you assume the nobility really don't care enough about their entertainment to gossip about it, the Ruh spend the time they aren't at court travelling from town to town, putting on pretty massive spectacle wherever they go. In the heyday of the travelling circus, you bet your ass there were "truly famous" circus performers; in the heyday of itinerant players, there were "truly famous" actors and musicians. I can buy that Illien was the most famous Edema Ruh ever to pick up a lute, but the only one? It just doesn't make sense, I tell ya.

Oh, but it gets better:

What’s more, if you believed the stories, Illien reinvented the lute in his lifetime. A master luthier, Illien transformed the archaic, fragile, unwieldy court lute into the marvelous, versatile, seven-string trouper’s lute we use today. The same stories claim Illien’s own lute had eight strings in all.

Is This The Real Life: 19

I'm gonna need help for this one. Rothfuss, meet lute:

Lute, meet Rothfuss:

Lute? Lute, come back! Lute...

Ahem. Rothfuss, please take a moment to count the strings on the lute. You'll find that there are, in fact, thirteen.

This is because six out of the seven strings are doubled up. The double strings for each note - called "courses" - are, in fact, a defining feature of the lute. This probably had something to do with the lute's early purpose as a continuo (accompanying) instrument: the double string increased the volume and rounded the tone so that the lute wouldn't get lost behind the higher and more piercing melodic instruments. Later, as the lute came into its own as a solo instrument, the two strings in each course were sometimes tuned to the same note in different octaves, which gave the lute a rich, polyphonic sound.

Lutes with single strings for each note are one of two things. Either they're lutes that have been recently adapted, sometimes to be friendlier to guitar players, or they're not lutes. The lute's predecessor, the oud, had single strings. Its successors - the intermediary instruments in the lute's evolution into the guitar - sometimes had single strings. But the lute itself? Always, always courses. The number has varied over time, from five or six courses for early Renaissance lutes up to thirteen or even fifteen courses for late Baroque lutes, but courses they have always been. Simplifying down to seven strings, as Illien apparently did, doesn't make the lute any easier to play: it just makes it no longer a lute.

If you consider the likely time period of the Kingkiller-verse, at least relative to the real world, I can just about wrap my head around the notion of Illien taking a late Baroque lute - a large, often unwieldy instrument with upwards of thirteen courses - and simplifying it down to a seven-coursed instrument that more closely resembles a Renaissance lute (though technically that still takes us away from the lute and into mandora or lutar territory). It's pretty clear, though, and will become clearer as we go, that Rothfuss really does mean strings, not courses, which makes it pretty clear to me that this here blog is the first time Rothfuss has actually encountered a lute.

Face The Music: 9

And if Illien did transform the thirteen-coursed court lute into the seven-coursed troupers' lute, then his own lute having eight courses is kind of unimpressive, no?

Face The Music: 10

The three adults daydream about Kvothe as an Illien-like super trouper.

“The wild women in his lap,” my father enthused, “laying their breasts on his head.”

Them's some freakishly flexible wild women, Arliden.

Ladies And Gentlemen: 19

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then my mother spoke slowly, with an edge to her voice. “I think you mean ‘wild beasts laying their heads in his lap.’ ”

Yeah, that's...not less weird.

Abenthy muses about all the things Kvothe could be if he put his mind to it.

Finally Abenthy gets to the reason we're being forced to listen to this inane conversation in the first place, and says that Kvothe will certainly be admitted to the University when he's old enough. Kvothe, in his first display of emotion for the entire chapter, gets very excited about this, and, just as with the last time he got excited about the university, it's believable, well-written, and even kind of sweet. It's also very similar to that last time, right down to some of the phrasing, but I'll take what I can get.

Repetition(epetition): 43

Kvothe's enthusiasm for the idea causes him to miss some of the conversation, and he resumes eavesdropping at the worst possible moment.

My father was looking down at my mother, nestled under his arm. “How about it, woman? Did you happen to bed down with some wandering God a dozen years ago? That might solve our little mystery.”

My God, this is gag-inducing.

She swatted at him playfully, and a thoughtful look crossed her face. “Come to think of it, there was a night, about a dozen years ago, a man came to me. He bound me with kisses and cords of chorded song. He robbed me of my virtue and stole me away.” She paused, “But he didn’t have red hair. Couldn’t be him.”

Spoke too soon. Pardon me while I go find a bucket.

Simile Soup: 51

That, thankfully, is pretty much it for this chapter. Arliden and Kvothe's mother kiss, and Kvothe muses that this happy scene is how he likes to remember them. Then he leaves, and the chapter ends entirely too abruptly, despite how deathly slow it's been up until now.

NaNoPadMo: 30

Let's tally them typos and grammar fails, and we'll resume next time for a breather before the plot begins. As if we haven't had enough breathing room already.

Monday, April 17, 2017

The Name of the Wind: Chapter 12 (Part II)