I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: “Elementary, My Dear” (1973).

You have to have a particularly cruel heart if you don’t love School House Rock.

All of the songs, well, most of the songs, are super catchy and by golly if you don’t learn a lot.

And they attack problems in an interesting way.  The premise of using Noah’s Ark to show how to multiply by 2 is genius.

You’ll get that “elementary, my dear” section stuck in your head.  But I’m also impressed at the way the song goes into unexpected chords for “you get an even number.” And I love the way Bob Dorough really gets into it (whooping it up at the end).

Few people would think that the 2 times table is hard, but man is it fun to sing along to.

This song is not as popular as some of the other ones, but it’s still great

[READ: April 14, 2014] “A Study in Sherlock”

A while back I wrote a post about Sherlock Holmes on TV (Sherlock and Elementary) and in the movies (Sherlock Holmes).  I had read a few stories and so I did a brief comparison of the shows.  Since then while I have continued to believe that Sherlock is the better show, I have really grown to appreciate Elementary a lot more.  They almost seem incomparable because they are so very different in structure and intent.  Elementary has actually been a little more satisfying lately because it has so many more episodes that it allows the characters to develop and fail in interesting ways–something that the three episodes of Sherlock simply won’t do.

Laura Miller has done a similar thing with this article.  Although in fairness she did a lot more research than I did and talks a lot more about the original books and stage and early film adaptations, and she talks a lot less about the TV shows.  And no she doesn’t cite my post.

This was an enjoyable piece because it goes beyond the commonly known elements of Conan Doyle–how he did not like Holmes and tried to kill him off twice, that he wanted to write more important fiction–and into what Holmes was like after Doyle was finished with him.  Holmes has entered the public domain in both England and America, and so he is basically free for everyone to use, much like a classic myth or a fairy tale.  The big difference is that we know his origins.

What I especially enjoyed was that so many things that we think of as quintessential Holmes are actually not from Doyle.  His deerstalker hat was added by a book illustrator but is never mentioned in the text.  The calabash pipe came a decade later when a stage actor used it so that the audience could still see his face.  Conan Doyle was still alive while these changes were being made.  Indeed, when a play of Sherlock Holmes was written, the playwrite called and asked if he could give the man a love interest and Conan Doyle replied, “Marry him, murder him or do what you like with him.”

In the 1930s, Sherlock Holmes Societies cropped up–instigating the first instances of fan fiction.  This included ideas that both Holmes and Watson were actually women and the ever present belief that they were both gay. There was the Baker Street Irregulars which included FDR and Harry S Truman as members.  Societies like this spent time trying to concoct elaborate plots for the holes that Conan Doyle left in his stories.  Conan Doyle was rather careless with the canon, such that Watson’s war wound was alternately in his leg or his shoulder, it was even unclear how many times Watson was married.

She also mentions Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution, which I read in high school as assigned reading (and was shocked by the drug use!).  I love Miller’s look into this book which makes me want to read it again when I finish the canon (although I won’t be going beyond that into the other noncanonical works).  But she says that Meyers’ exploration in to the psyche of Holmes (with Sigmund Freud no less) had encouraged the kind of psychological explanations for Holmes in the current incarnations.  In the original stories there’s no real look into the man’s behavior.  He is just an astute observer.  And yet now we have him being almost clinically crazy.  In Sherlock, he states “I’m not a psychopath, Anderson, I’m a high-functioning sociopath.  Do your research.”  And the very premise of Elementary is that he needs a sober companion to guide him through his addiction.  (The fact that Joan Watson has morphed from sober companion into fellow detective has really made the show blossom).  But he is also a sociopath, as he tells Watson, “There is not a warmer, kinder me waiting to be coaxed out into the light.”

Perhaps it is Conan Doyle’s carelessness and elliptical storytelling that makes Holmes and the Holmes universe so compelling.  Irene Adler, Mycroft Holmes and Moriarty barely appear in the stories at all, so they are absolutely free to be explored in greater detail.  Conan Doyle also often alluded to cases without every talking about them “the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”  For the author, it may have been an easy way to talk about something without giving it much thought.  But for fans, it opened up avenues to explore.  And we all benefit.