Country Roads

I'm back to being interested in the novel. My protagonist finally got to do something active, not reactive.

It was a tough scene to plot. The outline only said, "She does something clever here." Which is, amusingly, how my protagonist sees it as well. This is the first big moment when she consciously puts the fictional adventure-archaeologist character she created for a YouTube series into the driver's seat, in hopes that Athena Fox has an idea for "something clever here."

It wasn't that clever, but I guess it gets the scene written.



So, I was getting a little bored. But then I got into research for the next big set-piece and I found one of those crazy things that makes it worthwhile. Oktoberfest in Munich. Those giant tents. Playing music and there are of course a few songs that people feel obligated to sing along to. (There are other songs which arise spontaneously, of course).

And, yes, it is one of the standard songs; I found several clips on YouTube showing ten thousand drunken Germans (and foreign guests) singing...Country Roads (John Denver).



I have to say I'm all in a dither again about cultural appropriation and stereotyping and speaking for others and all that rot.

I hope I am going to be able to pull together a nuanced portrayal of Germans, Italians, and Greeks, but even if I do, there is the problem that theirs is not my story to tell.

I don't know if it is even possible to do a travel story without in some way invoking some exoticism. But I think it is worse when you are writing fiction. As a traveller, I can say I found the people I encountered were "this and that." But as a writer, I am often in the position of creating a character who then says, "My people are this and that." And I think there's a difference.

My first scene on the ground there are neo-Nazi's. Who are mostly Americans and other foreigners. But still, although it takes a long time for it to become clear, the locals in that scene are still of a more generic racialism (volkish, actually, but that's hard to explain succinctly.)

The next big scene is happy drunken Bavarians in a beer hall. Well, again, a lot of the people at Oktoberfest come from elsewhere. Oh, and there's a major character who, for not-terribly-sensible reasons, is going around disguising his perfectly good lowlands accent with a music hall Prussian officer accent, complete with archaic word choices, gratuitous German, and quotes from movie bad guys.

I am really not sure these are good choices.

The fake-accent guy turns out to be a real pain to write dialog for, too. Or is that a real puzzle? Even the orthography is a trap. See, there's so much about language acquisition and code-switching in this book, I'm choosing not to italicize. Not only that, but any unfamiliar words are never spelled phonetically; instead I give the correct spelling for that language. (The exceptions being when someone tries to repeat it; my protagonist's first attempts at kalimera and epharisto, for instance, or her attempt to repeat from memory part of an opera aria she heard.)

(Another wrinkle to the latter; my starting point is me trying to quote the aria from memory. Just as in a later scene I'll do some Shakespeare from memory, with the intention of discovering natural errors that I can then use.)

That turns out to be an interesting problem. This crazy accent fellow might say "Was ist?" and of course I'll spell it the correct German way. But then he might say "Was it?" and that could be spelled phonetically to simulate the accent; as "Vas it?" So from word to word you are sort of guessing which pronunciation to give it, depending on whether it is an actual German word, or an English word with a German accent....or the wrong German word, or a word given the wrong accent because he's putting it on and isn't entirely comfortable in it....

Fortunately, he isn't committed to his act. And I don't have to do every word phonetically to get across the accent. So I can for several lines without anything more tricky than German syntax go.

(No, I only did that once. And very mildly.)

Well, my Austrian in the Tyrolean is on stage now to explain that München is also known as Munich and Oktoberfest is actually in September. Among other things. But there's a dirndl and eine Maß (well, at least one) waiting for my protagonist. And she'll get to sing "Country Roads."