{"id":10345,"date":"2006-11-11T17:43:59","date_gmt":"2006-11-11T22:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/11\/11\/10345.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:22","slug":"book-report-o-jerusalem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/11\/11\/book-report-o-jerusalem\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: O Jerusalem"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I think <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/catalog\/display.pperl?isbn=9780553581058\">O Jerusalem<\/a> is a great example of why Laurie King&#8217;s books about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes work, because of (rather than despite) the near total reimagining of the character of Sherlock Holmes. Really, there isn&#8217;t very much in the story that makes you think of Sherlock Holmes of this story as being the same Sherlock Holmes that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about. The conceit, of course, is that the Sherlock Holmes in these stories is <I>not<\/I> the same person, in that Arthur Conan Doyle fictionalized the real person and made him nearly unrecognizable.\n<p>An interesting question is whether the original character is <I>idealized<\/I> in some significant sense, and whether Ms. King&#8217;s Holmes is idealized in some different sense, and if so, what the differences between the two characters tell us about the differences between the ideals of the authors, and the perceived ideals of the audiences. And the actual ideals of the audiences, given how incredibly popular both characters are.\n<p>The original is cold, absent-minded, observant, rational, patriotic, scientific and dramatic. He invents things, not just the famous handcuffs, but he invents methods of keeping references and clippings in cross-referenced scrapbooks, he invents chemical tests and procedures for keeping evidence clean. He is in a constant pursuit of novelty. He is obsessed with categorizing and classifying, with fixing procedures and processes, with accumulating knowledge and skill. He also seems to believe in the mind-body split, starving or doping the body to spur the mind.\n<p>The new version is also cold (although more cranky than cold), absent-minded, and observant. He is somewhat rational, although he speaks of how reason is inadequate in itself. He is only mildly patriotic, he is only mildly scientific, he is much more humorous than dramatic. He is patient and thorough. He keeps his information in his head, rather than in scrapbooks. He is a polyglot and a polymath; he accumulates and uses knowledge, rather than extending it. He is, however, incredibly open-minded and tolerant. He is physically active and tough, despite his middle age. He is personally loyal, holding friendship very high indeed.\n<p>I like the new one better, myself, but is that because I, like Laurie King, am a twentieth-century American? What will the successful Sherlock Holmes of the 2050s be like?\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think O Jerusalem is a great example of why Laurie King\u2019s books about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes work, because of (rather than despite) the near total reimagining of the character of Sherlock Holmes. Really, there isn\u2019t very much&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17876,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10345\/revisions\/17876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}