Testing a Hypothesis

[melannen]

Poll #12695 Les Mis

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 111

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I first learned the story of Les Miserables via:

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reading the book
18 (16.7%)

watching the musical
18 (16.7%)

watching a movie version
7 (6.5%)

fannish osmosis
11 (10.2%)

listening to the soundtrack
26 (24.1%)

specifically, listening to a pirated cassette tape of the soundtrack. Repeatedly.
5 (4.6%)

I still don't know the story of Les Mis.
23 (21.3%)

Goddammit you people, I have had the songs stuck in my head for the past week straight. >:|

View Answers

yes
44 (100.0%)

(ps: so yesterday I learned that on public transit in the middle of a snowstorm is the worst possible place to come down with stomach flu very suddenly.)

Comments

[naraht]

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.

[melannen]

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.

[naraht]

It's weird because it seems the sort of thing that I *might* like. I've certainly heard tunes from the musical but none of them have really grabbed me, so I never pursued further.

[mecurtin]

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.

[zing_och]

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.

[melannen]

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.

[marginaliana]

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...)

[lindentreeisle]

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.

[isis]

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.

[melannen]

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.)

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

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.

[trouble]

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."

[green]

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.

[beatrice_otter]

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.

[lindentreeisle]

I like looking at them, they're the fun kind of creepy. But I definitely wouldn't want to sleep under a picture of one, is what I'm saying. ;)

[staranise]

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.

[stellar_dust]

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

[highlander_ii]

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?

[melannen]

I did not know that! (Do you know what happened to that tape? I have searched the whole house for a complete copy of the soundtrack (see above re: songs being stuck in heads) and could not find one.

[melannen]

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.

[melannen]

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)

[melannen]

I don't actually think I slept. If I'd slept it wouldn't've been burned into my memory quite that strongly, I think. (TRAUMA. Of course I've just spent most of the morning feeling vaguely nauseus and voluntarily reading about Mallory's frozen corpse again (in The Lost Explorer). BUT THERE ARE NO PICTURES.)

[ellen_fremedon]

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.

[stellar_dust]

It's a two-tape set, and the last time I saw it was ... I think last summer, or possibly last Christmas? One of the last 4 or so times I was home, when we went through all my old tapes. It is either a) gone to the flea market, b) you stashed it somewhere, or c) possibly there is still a box somewhere with a few of my tapes in it?

I don't think it's c) though, I'm pretty sure I decided I didn't need to hang on to any of them, since I no longer own a tape player and also mp3s exist. If it is c, before poking in the shed, try the box in my room that has high school yearbooks and photos and stuff in it? I might have stashed it there since one of my hs friends copied it for me. Unless that box is in the shed now. idk.

If b), I think this would have been the same time you also liberated several other tapes including Warren Zevon, misc 1950s rock, Muppet Show, possibly the Cats soundtrack .. ringing any bells?

[zing_och]

Weeell, I mean, there probably was a legal CD involved somewhere, but definitely not by the point the car trip came along. Fortunately it was the German version, and the singers were native speakers, so the lyrics were easy to make out. (I still love the German lyrics best.)

I've found that it's extremely easy to sing along, but when I sing on my own (like always atm *g*) I keep getting songs confused and switch from one to another. So many instances of basically the same song in the play, and when you don't actually know the plot, it's really difficult.

Thanks for making me think of that, btw! My sister and me just sang the opening Javert/Valjean parts at each other over the phone. *g*