Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Re: Travel,Persona
Date: Thu, 09 Apr 1992 22:56:02

 Fra Tadhg Liath unto His Grace the Duke Sir Cariadoc of the Bow and all
 others unto whom these presents shall have come giveth greeting:

 DD> A proper lesson plan does not increase the number of minutes in an
 DD> hour. The choice was between leaving some things out without comment,
 DD> or leaving some things out and using the fact that she was doing it
 DD> to increase the dramatic effectiveness of her class and make a point
 DD> about how a culture looks from the inside.  She chose the latter--I
 DD> think wisely.

 Nobody seems to have cottoned to the obvious and inoffensive statement,
 "Sorry, we have only a limited amount of time and that would eat up too
 much of it." I've used that very line myself in teaching classes, to good
 effect. Instead, the teacher in question chose an excuse that I, had I been
 in the audience, would have been angered by. She chose, I think, unwisely.

 DD> Both this correspondent (who does not give his name, which is why I
 DD> am referring to him by his EMail address) and Fra Tadhg seem to
 DD> assume that the lady wanted to teach about that particular sort of
 DD> poetry but felt she couldn't because it would be out of persona. That
 DD> is not what was happening.

 No - her reasons for not wanting to teach it are not strictly relevant. For
 whatever reason, she chose not to, and did so in a manner perhaps not
 *calculated* to frustrate the enquirer but nevertheless effective in doing
 so. Granted that learning how to cope with frustration is a "valuable
 lesson", nevertheless it tends to overwhelm other issues.

 DD> What seems to be going on here, if I correctly interpret their
 DD> criticism, is something that one sees much more often when the issue
 DD> is authenticity rather than persona. People who are not interested in
 DD> authenticity assume that the only reason to be authentic is that the
 DD> rules make you (or that you are showing off), and therefor put the
 DD> issue as "authenticity vs fun." That assumes away a large part of the
 DD> argument, since those of us who are in favor of more authenticity
 DD> believe that it makes the society more fun, not less.

 I yield to none in my support for more authenticity in the Society, but I
 can't help but feel that playing persona games, doomed as they are to
 failure, merely discourages people who know no better - they think, "Well,
 if this unworkable system is what more authenticity means, who needs it?"
 In that regard, it hinders rather than helps.

 DD> Similarly, Fra Tadhg and hzhao@eagle.wesleyan.edu seem to be viewing
 DD> "staying in persona" as the equivalent of fighting with one hand tied
 DD> behind your back--an arbitrary restriction that makes it harder to do
 DD> what you want to do. In fact, in many contexts, including the class I
 DD> was describing, staying in persona is a device that makes it easier
 DD> to do what you want to do--which is one reason to stay in persona.
 DD> David is not a nearly as good a story teller as Cariadoc.

 Someone who is not as good a storyteller out of persona as in has a
 personality disorder that needs being looked at. Tadhg and Tiomoid are
 equally good (or bad, depending on one's viewpoint) as teacher,
 storyteller, singer, calligrapher, embroiderer, herald, lawyer, historian,
 or whatever, precisely because *we are the same person*. Having to get into
 persona in order to effectively act medieval strikes me as about as silly
 as having to get drunk to have fun. Crutch city, so to speak.

 I pray that Your Grace, and my Lords and Ladies, may be ever well.

 * Origin: Herald's Point * Steppes/Ansteorra * 214-699-0057 (1:124/4229)