melannen | Testing a Hypothesis

I believe it's a musical about a French revolution other than *the* French Revolution? I don't think this counts as knowing the story, though. I am sort of impressed that I've managed to avoid absorbing more knowledge than this.

That is not incorrect! I'm kind of impressed you haven't picked up more too, though. Mind you, my knowledge is still just soundtrack + fandom + that time I opened up the book but didn't make it past the Bishop.

(no subject)

naraht - 2013-01-26 14:25 (UTC) - Expand

June Rebellion of 1832 -- doesn't quite count as a revolution since it failed, but notable for strong working-class involvement (which the musical erased to the point that a certain portion of fandom keeps eyerolling about the rich white boy social justice warriors that we shouldn't care about, sigh).

It is a very interesting period of French history!

on public transit in the middle of a snowstorm is the worst possible place to come down with stomach flu very suddely

omg,you poor poor thing. Yeah, pretty much.

Re: Les Mis.

You didn't leave an option for "none of the above". I learned the story (in general outline) through *cultural* osmosis, not fannish. The story of Javert and Valjean, in particular, gets referenced all over the place.

Also, I lived in France for 2 years as a child, one when I was 8 and another when I was 12. I went to French schools. When I was 8, the reading curriculum included the story of Cosette and the doll. When I was 12, we read the death of Gavroche.

Edited 2013-01-26 14:40 (UTC)

Hmm, I guess I was folding in "fannish" with "cultural" - I don't really make the distinction for myself. (I picked that part of it up from "drama class in high school". Is that fannish or cultural?)

...I would probably count 'assigned school reading' as 'read the book', though.

I don't think the cassette tape was pirated, but otherwise, yes. *g* Mostly I learned it during a looooong car trip to Austria with my sister and brother-in-law, who was working for a production of the musical at that time. We sang alog and switched the roles around all the time, so we had to repeat a lot.

Apart from that, I'd say cultural / non-fannish osmosis, too.

Edited 2013-01-26 14:56 (UTC)

Was it a copy purchased in a store with real printed liner notes and everything? :D Because if so you're definitely one up on me.

(no subject)

zing_och - 2013-01-26 19:25 (UTC) - Expand

What I know: it's about the French Revolution but not really? There is a dude in it who steals silver. There is a very poor lady in it, played by Anne what's her name. There is a long section describing bits of furniture. That's it, really.

(It's just been moved up to the top of my list of 'things to read when bored at work,' so hopefully I will acquire knowledge relatively soon. Although knowing about the furniture section is putting me off a little, given how much I hated the whale section of Moby Dick...)

I actually found the bit that I've read surprisingly readable - I picked up the book and was 150 pages in one boring summer afternoon without realizing it (of course I never picked it back up after that so it couldn't've been that gripping.)

Hearing people talk about the long digression about the Paris sewers is tempting me to pick it back up, though. (Paris! Sewers!! :D)

(no subject)

jain - 2013-01-26 21:10 (UTC) - Expand

Unrelated, but I wanted to tell you I just read Frozen in Time, which if you haven't read it is a book about the Franklin expedition. And dude, I don't know how you slept under a representation of one of those mummies, they are creepy as fuck.

God I know! I can't even look at that book cover. :/ (Egyptian mummies, bog bodies, fine, but those frozen ones are just creepybad somehow.)

(no subject)

lindentreeisle - 2013-01-26 17:53 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 18:55 (UTC) - Expand

I actually learned the story by listening to an audiobook version (I think it must have been abridged, knowing how brick-ish the book is) on a very long drive. ~20 years ago. I also saw the non-musical movie, but not the musical yet. I haven't actually heard the soundtrack, other than the famous one the British woman sang so famously, and I haven't read the book with my eyeballs.

...I am deeply amused by "The famous one the British woman sang so famously" being someone's only exposure to the music. Oh, post-internet culture.

I should add that I saw it in approximately the Triassic period, and had only the most distant notion of the plot even after sitting through it. My memory is mostly of occasional eye-opening musical numbers studded through a great mass of I don't know, maybe I could follow this if I hadn't been up three straight nights with LIBOR swaps, but possibly not.

So I still wouldn't have a clue if it weren't for the recent movie, and the attendant abbreviated plot summaries in reviews. But that's not quite fannish osmosis, and as a technical matter I did first learn whatever I knew of the story from the show. So it seemed like the single most accurate choice, but if there had been ticky boxes instead of buttons I'd have checked at least three.

Well, to be honest, I only had the most distant notion of the plot from the soundtrack, in that I like my version of the story better. :P

Don is a ridiculously huge fan of the Musical, as is Sarah, so they both kinda forced me to go to it. I show my enjoyment through intense cynicism and mockery and repeatedly buying tickets to see the musical whenever we're together. Then I complain bitterly that I'm surrounded by people who like a musical about MISERABLE PEOPLE.

This does not go over well when they're sobbing over "bring him home."

Hah! Yeah, I had a bunch of drama-geek friends in high school who would have been all SO MANY FEELS about it (if we'd had feels way back then.) I always wondered what the point was of the name; recently learning that it's apparently a bad pun in French made a lot more sense. :P

(no subject)

beatrice_otter - 2013-01-26 23:21 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-27 00:41 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

rymenhild - 2013-01-27 02:58 (UTC) - Expand

I learned the story from my mom, who read the book a few years ago and felt the need to recount the entire plot. :) I am *ahem* acquiring the 2012 film as we speak, so I will soon know it first hand.

Having the plot involuntarily narrated to you by a friend or loved one = best way to learn a fandom! :D

You did not offer an option for how *I* learned the story, which I am sure a lot of people also did; the 10th and 25th Anniversary Specials! They're concert versions, where they took a massive orchestra and chorus, and the very best singers for each role from all over the world, and have them just run through the music of the whole show. The characters are in costume (the chorus is in t-shirts), but that's it for staging. They are both awesome concerts (though I like the 10th anniversary cast slightly better), and every PBS station I am familiar with shows one of them at least once a year during pledge breaks. The 10th anniversary was filmed in 1995, so that's 18 years of being on television every year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables:_The_Dream_Cast_in_Concert

Then, once I had seen and fallen in love with it there, I purchased the soundtrack. (The original cast recording, which was a mistake--the voices used in the original production are, in places, a lot more "musical theater character voice" than the classically-trained powerhouse voices that have become traditional since then.

Then, in my senior year of high school, I took Advanced Placement Literature. We were required to read eight classic novels outside of class (we had a list to choose from) and come in to discuss them with the teacher during our lunch breaks. If we were taking a foreign language (French, Spanish, or Japanese) we were required to read a novel that had originally been in that language. She *strongly* pushed Les Miserables for French students and Don Quixote for Spanish students. I took French, so I read Les Mis (and she about hit the roof when I called it that).

The original, unabridged novel is an awesome 500 page novel, several great novellas and short stories, and a few decent essays, all trapped together in one 1200 page behemoth with some dreck for filler. You can definitely tell he got paid by the word. That the story is so compelling despite all that is proof of the power of Victor Hugo's abilities. But I would highly recommend the abridged version instead, if you don't have to read it for a class.

Actually, the pirated cassette tape

melannen and I had was pirated from the soundtrack release of the 10th anniversary concert!

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 18:49 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

stellar_dust - 2013-01-26 19:19 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 19:28 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

stellar_dust - 2013-01-26 19:46 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 21:03 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 21:17 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

stellar_dust - 2013-01-26 21:34 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 21:47 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 19:26 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

beatrice_otter - 2013-01-26 23:10 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

jain - 2013-01-26 21:18 (UTC) - Expand

As a child, I feverishly read and re-read the liner notes that went with the CD, especially the synopsis, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.. And I also listened to the soundtrack obsessively. Les Mis was the first CD we ever owned.

We had a whole bunch of Broadway musicals on LP that I did that with! And then I finally got to see a couple of them performed, and it was very strange.

I saw a theatre production on Broadway in college and that was my first 'true' exposure to it. (Funny thing, it was a 2nd-ary choice b/c the will call line for Miss Saigon was too freakin' long and the person I was with and I both refused to see Cats or Phantom.) I'd heard *of* the story before that, but no real details.

Since then I've acquired the London cast recording soundtrack and seen the HughJ movie. I'm wishy-washy on getting the soundtrack for the movie b/c I'm pissed they didn't include "Do You Hear the People Sing" - b/c wuh? why would you leave that off?

What? But... that's the best song! Why would you leave it off?

(no subject)

highlander_ii - 2013-01-26 21:36 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

beatrice_otter - 2013-01-26 23:14 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

carmarthen - 2013-01-29 02:51 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

lannamichaels - 2013-01-26 23:48 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

highlander_ii - 2013-01-27 02:26 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

lannamichaels - 2013-01-27 02:35 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

carmarthen - 2013-01-29 02:50 (UTC) - Expand

I saw a road show-- I think the first national tour-- in the fall of 1990, a little after my fifteenth birthday; my high school drama coach organized a trip down to Iowa City to see it. I acquired the book very quickly-- I think I requested and got both the unabridged book and the CD for Christmas that year. I listened obsessively to the CD, and even more obsessively to some pirated cassettes of the complete show, but I also reread the book, a lot-- it became one of the two massive books (the other being LotR) that I reread, regularly, twice a year, usually over the course of a weekend in which I did nothing else.

I read the book eight times at six-month intervals-- not skipping anything, even Waterloo-- and I browsed and reread favorite chapters even more often. I saw the musical twice more in college, the next two times it came through Iowa City. After the third time seeing the musical, at which point I was twenty, I was pretty much done with it for over a decade, though at that point I had the entire show and large swathes of the book memorized, so it wasn't so much that I stopped reading/listening as that I no longer had to.

I saw the new version of the musical last year at the Kennedy Center, and while it was lovely to see it again, it didn't tip me back into fannishness. The movie of the musical, though, brings in enough of the book to have flipped a switch somewhere-- I've seen the movie twice, just finished my ninth read of the book, and am wallowing in fannish feelings-- the kind of wonderful fannishness you can only have when you revisit a very formative fannish source and find out it's even better than you remember.

I have kind of gotten the impression over the last few weeks that you have STRONG FEELINGS about this fandom, yes. :p

I had some version of this feeling with my yuletide fandom this year, and it was wonderful, although I think I managed to back out of it before the switch quite flipped all the way.

Sorry about your stomach flu. :(

For fannish osmosis, read: summer camp in elementary school in which I learned Do You Hear The People Sing off by heart. ;) And then osmosis through the years for the rest of the basic plot summary (loaf of bread, etc). And then since the movie came out for everything else. I *was* surprised to learn it was not about *the* French Revolution, though, but about an unsuccessful one instead. Ah, the failures of osmosis.

Edited 2013-01-26 19:51 (UTC)

I picked up the "not *the* Revolution" part eventually, but it took me awhile. (Honestly though I think some of the people I learned from who'd seen the show multiple times still hadn't realized that...)

How I know the plot of Les Mis:

I stole the book. I didn't really mean to steal it, it's just that I never got around to giving it back, I guess. I proceeded to read the first 100 pages or so, up to the point where Valjean steals the silver, and then went off to read other things while never returning it. So that part I know from the book.

After that, I at some point heard the soundtrack which was supposed to be on two CDs, but I only had the first one.

Skip to a month ago, and I watched the movie, which was my first introduction to everything that happens after the second CD.

Then I read someone's fannish book review, so I got to learn about Waterloo and the sewer digressions and the relationship between Eponine and Gavroche.

None of the ticky-boxes quite worked for me :)

That's about as far as I got in the book!

And I guess for the poll question, you'd have to figure out at what point you thought you knew the plot, which is up to you figure out. (I still haven't seen the movie/play, so I have no idea how accurate my head-version is, anyway.) :P

For "fannish osmosis," read "was friends with the musical theater kids in high school," but it fits well enough. And then someone tried to explain the actual plot to me this winter break, but it didn't really stick.

(Ugh, I hope you feel better. Based on recent experience, a friend of mine would like to argue that in the airport about to board a transatlantic flight could also compete for the worst possible title.)

It would be close. At least at the airport there are presumably trash cans and the prospect of barf bags and helpful people in official positions, not just "oh fuck I'm going to have to try to aim for that newspaper on the floor."

Although I could at least get off the train at the next stop and barf into a snowbank until my stomach settled a little and the next train came. On a plane you're a bit more trapped for longer. So I can see the point.

(no subject)

sylleptic - 2013-01-26 23:03 (UTC) - Expand

I checked "fannish osmosis," by which I mean "that episode of DS9 where Sisko hunts Eddington down."

DS9 did not prepare me for the eventual denouement of the Valjean/Javert saga, let me tell you.

....the Valjean/Javert saga ends with the two of them admitting they're in love and being a pair of adorable old men playing chess in the park, right? Just like the Xavier/Magneto saga? FANDOM CAN'T HAVE LED ME WRONG. :P

Edited 2013-01-26 22:56 (UTC)

(no subject)

beatrice_otter - 2013-01-26 23:19 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

melannen - 2013-01-26 23:26 (UTC) - Expand

I read the book in 9th grade, but don't really remember much of anything. I have zero knowledge of any musical or film versions, including the one currently out.

None of the above! My piano teacher gave me the score of Castle on a Cloud and then I started going through the other songs. Age nine, maybe?

1998 movie! I am ashamed, a little. Then musical. Then fannish osmosis. I've read fragments of the Brick, but not the whole thing, although I read some of Hugo's other novels in my first phase of fannishness in high school.

I have been rotating through my soundtrack collection (4 languages, many recordings) since December, occasionally interspersed with other musicals. Last week I CRIED AT WORK while listening to Ragtime, wtf is wrong with me.

(Previously I spent almost a year listening to almost nothing but Irish music. Unfortunately, musicals are not as good for practicing dance steps under my desk.)