Happy Sherlock Holmes Day!

Next year, I think I'm going to try just going with January 6th as "Sherlock Holmes Day."

I mean, really, that's what it is -- a holiday to celebrate Sherlock Holmes.

And the whole concept of January 6, 1854 being the date Sherlock Holmes was born . . . heavy sigh. To a Sherlockian chronologist of even rookie status, putting that exact date on something with no concrete Canonical provenance just makes one shake one's head. And what's that Vincent Starrett poem that we all like so much say?

"Who never lived and so can never die."

Yeah, childbirth is something for mere mortals and really gross old-timey gods. Even the idea that someone out there could have a dried umbilical cord from Sherlock Holmes as a sacred relic in their Sherlockian trophy case . . . well . . .

But we just want to give him a birthday cake and presents, and take him to Simpson's so the wait-staff can sing him that non-legally-troublesome birthday song that was restaurant popular for a while and bring him special dessert.

All of which sounds just so not-Sherlock-Holmes, despite the fact that "The Adventure of the Furtive Festivity" exists and is very cute.

Why does it have to be his birthday?

If it's "Sherlock Holmes Day," we can actually up the level of celebration to parades and other public displays. Birthdays are a pretty limited commemoration, really, one that doesn't rise above a certain level when the birthday person isn't present, as Sherlock Holmes will most likely never be.

Unless he gets actually born somehow. Then, I guess, we can celebrate his birthday.

Approriate afterword for this January 6: Yeah, today was just not a good day to celebrate anything in America. Especially a human being known for his intelligence. On to next year.

BBC Sherlock's greatest mistake

 Folding some laundry with my personal playlist on shuffle tonight, and up came "How It Was Done," the background music for the fake-out version of how Sherlock survived the fall off that rooftop. Very much the perfectly timed caper that answers the question in perfect detail down to a healthy kiss for Molly. The question never got an actual answer, as the writers had been served an impossible task: Coming up with something that both worked and hadn't been already invented by some fan.

Considering the rise and fall of that iconic series in Sherlockian history, one always has to wonder "How did it all go so wrong?" I mean, not for me personally . . . I was too busy trying to figure out what was going wrong with CBS's Elementary to get expectations about its older sibling. But, you know, everybody that had expectations. And here is what I decided was Sherlock's single greatest mistake:

It gave its viewers time to think.

I mean, c'mon, the BBC can accomplish a lot with short-run television, but three episodes every two years? That's a helluva lot of time to think.

While the cast and crew was enjoying all that time off, the fans were creating their own version of the show. Thousands, actually. BBC Sherlock became a hivemind creation of a whole lot of people who weren't being paid to write three scripts every two years. People who were writing a whole lot more.

As much as we deride American television's long term practice of pounding out an hour a week from September to May, you know what that didn't do?

It didn't give the fans time to think. You can't come up with an entire novel's worth of headcanon in the week between episodes. But in two freakin' years? I'd love to see what the parallel universe where Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu's characters gave their fans two years to play between three episode seasons, with the limited content of those three episodes. (As well as what Stephan Moffat and Mark Gatiss would have done to those characters . . . we'd still get Eurus, I bet.)

One can pick at details of BBC Sherlock's run all day (or all two years) long. But in the end, so much of what caused the Great Displeasure was just that they took their hands off the wheel for long periods of time and let the fans steer, even if it wasn't "Canon" proper, even if it didn't have actors or screen time. Something got created between seasons that took on a life of its own.

There are so many movies that I have enjoyed thoroughly while seated in the theater, then got to the parking lot and suddenly realized, "Oh, wait! That was crap!" But it was only because the film-maker gave me no time to think. One of the worst movies I ever saw gave me so much time to think that I wrote a better ending in my head than the one I eventually got.

And that is not something a creator should ever do. Probably Sherlock's biggest mistake, too.

Toxically masculine Sherlock

 Salon.com offered a curious little piece today on BBC Sherlock and CBS's Elementary and their lead characters' toxic masculinity.

Not a topic I'm usually disposed to discourse upon, but since Doyle's Rotary Coffin has placed an even more dangerous challenge in my path today, it seemed just a part of the day. And, actually, the two themes sort of go together -- Toxic Masculinity Holmes would fit well in the DRC's "Worst and Obtusest Man" theme.

The phrase "toxic masculinity" tends to trigger a reaction, depending upon how one heard it most in being first  introduced to it. Even if one has dwelt among the beastly denizens of a boys high school Phys Ed locker room and knows full well the monsters therein, it can evoke a bit of a cringe for the gender stereotype aspect. (Side note: "Toxic" implies poison, where the worst of masculinity has always been the blunt force trauma. Even as a full grown adult, that's still the part that concerns me most about any problematic member of the sex. But that takes us out of this parenthetical and back to Sherlock.)

In the Salon article, the writer gets into how TV Sherlocks exhibit all sorts of toxic masculine qualities, except violence. They leave Watson out of the piece, and as he seems the more violent sector of BBC Baker Street, given to physically abusing Sherlock off-puttingly much, even in the "comic" moments of Holmes's return from the dead. Watson and the blunt force trauma.

In Elementary, of course, we get a Holmes and Watson where neither of the pair spontaneously beats on people, helped by the fact that Watson is in no way masculine, toxic or otherwise. It makes for an interesting note to compare the two series. While I always felt that the CBS show was the less intellectual of the pair (Sorry, E-fans!), when looked at through that lens it seems a lot more cool and cerebral, leaving the violence to its villains.

Overall it seemed like the Salon article was taking all of Sherlock Holmes's negative qualities and assigning them to his gender, when many of them are non-gender-specific bad behaviours. Which brings me back the upcoming Doyle's Rotary Coffin collection of bad Sherlock.

How bad can Sherlock Holmes get? Well, there were the villainous Sherlocks of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and The Criminal Mastermind of Baker Street, but one always feels there was something even worse in him. Adolph Hitler loved The Hound of the Baskervilles and had his own adaptation made, but Holmes probably didn't go full-on Nazi for that, and have Stapleton be secretly Jewish or somesuch. There's toxic, and then there's TOXIC. Considering how dark things got for a work or two in the last DRC paperback, However Improbable, one wonders. (A descendent of Sherlock Holmes becomes the unlikely Trumpian President of the United States? Dark! Not writing that!)

Holmes's masculinity is definitely as aspect that might lend itself to such a collection, though, if one is thinking of heading in that direction.

Irregulars having a little fun

I stumbled upon this picture this afternoon from a 1937 collection, and it seemed appropriate for the week ahead, as Irregulars of regular and irregular stripes hold their own celebrations of Sherlock Holmes's birthday. The kids in the picture are having their own streetlamp party, and they well could have been among the ranks of Holmes's own lot. 

The book it is from, Victorian Panorama by Peter Quennell, seems to have made it to Peoria from Glasgow, bearing the marks of "Baillie's Institution" that it seems to have been liberated from at some point. Conan Doyle's uncle gets a mention in the book, as well as Conan Doyle, but no Sherlock Holmes, just "The dense yellow fog that plays so important a part in the romances of Jules Verne and Conan Doyle had not yet lifted." Sherlock Holmes would probably give a bit "I told you so!" to Watson, were they to stumble across that line -- Romances! 

But we get to see how Irregulars might have amused themselves when not hunting up people, cabs, or boats for Sherlock Holmes. The book is full of pictures of Covent Garden flower-women, Scottish fish-wives, shooting parties, and the like, as well as the occasional celebrity.

Did Holmes pose as smugly as Blondin, after doing his impersonation of the "King of the Tightrope," as that fellow's photo shows? I wouldn't have put it past him. And if Holmes wants to strike that pose again this week as he celebrates one hundred and sixty years of life, he certainly deserves it!

 

Once more into the breech

 There's a thing about Sherlockians. Sometimes if we don't have a book of something, we make a book of something.

Since I was starting work on another run-through of the Canon to settle my little chronology issues, and maybe produce something of worth, I had to do a little gathering of the work of one of our great modern chronology experts, who had mainly published his previous work in the local club newsletter about ten years ago. Vincent W. Wright was kind enough to supply me with the missing bits I didn't have, and once I had gotten it all in order, the next step was finding a place to put it, and putting it on a bookshelf -- though it's not going to stay there long. My own gathered tome doesn't fit there nearly so nicely.

Chronology work is, at the same time, both arcane and absurdly simple. Much of it is treading over the exact same ground as every chronologist that came before. Same-old, same-old, same-old, yet perhaps it's that aspect that makes one always think there is something new to offer. And as it contains classic Canonical questions that will, as with all classic Canonical questions, never have an answer that will satisfy all of us, the challenge remains eternally open. It's the quiz beyond all quizzes. The chance to pit one's Sherlockian powers against the ancients of the cult, to put it at its most grandiose. But also a chance to connect with one's peers and see how they're doing with that same little puzzle.

It's a great solitary activity, but the fact that there are no absolute answers means there are no winners in this game. No one gets to stand above all others when it's done. Time to make this more of a group activity? And how would that even work with so many of us being particularly solitary in the sort of personality that gets draw most to such things.

Perhaps it's time to find out . . .

Sherlockian Camelot

When I was a kid, there was this musical about King Arthur. You may have heard of it . . . Camelot?

Yeah. There was a movie of it, I think, where an actor named Sir Richard Burton would sing this very mopey song at the end about how there was once this great place called "Camelot," and even though it didn't exist any more at the end of the movie, people would remember it and go, "Yeah, that place existed once and it was great."

As a kid, with my whole life ahead of me, that just did not resonate with me at all.

And when I got into Sherlock Holmes and started moving into the greater Sherlockian world, there were those who really wanted to go on about a similar sort of place that existed before any of us. In the 1930s or 1940s, something like that. These guys named Morley, Starrett, and something, having a grand moment in the past that we would never know anything like, that we could never rise to the standard of, that was gone forever and yet would be with us always.

Sherlockian Camelot.

Echoes of that old actor singing that old song from that old musical.

Standing at the start of another year, it's natural to look back, think of the really great moments in life. Live long enough, get a little lucky, and you get some of those moments. You get a Camelot, when things seem like they were as good as they could ever be. And they're yours, not some people you didn't know at some time you didn't know, doing things you don't really know. But even at that, the past isn't a place where people live. Memories of food aren't food.

Not sure why I thought of Camelot this morning, as our most recent memories are probably not a place we're going to want to hang in the years ahead. The hopes for 2021 are a little bigger than for a normal new year. It's got a real phoenix-from-the-ashes feeling. Definitely no time to be singing about the glories of a fallen Round Table.

And maybe that was the point of that memory. Time to look ahead.

The work of our avocation goes on

 The first day of a new year always seems like a good starting point, but the thing is . . . it isn't really.

Everything we begin comes from what was before, whether we're changing, enhancing, attempting. It all springs from something, some past choices or influences. The interesting part is what we choose to focus on for this holiday of rebirth, recharge, and restart.

Chosen any Sherlock Holmes yet?

Not shaming you if you have not. Some of us, I have to admit, spend far too much time here in "cloud Sherlocko land," letting some other things slide. I've had an interesting balance of Sherlocking this morning, organizing some work by a Sherlockian I respect, and also collecting some materials on a Sherlockian of ill repute. In the process, I accidentally had a chance to review the works of a third Sherlockian who has put an impressive amount of time and effort into this hobby, and even ponder how the last decade went in a Sherlockian sense.

While one might be tempted to focus upon the miseries of the last year, to look back upon the last full ten years is to see a glorious rise of Sherlockiana across a spectrum and range few would have even dared hope for in 2009.  The opportunities that lay before us now are incredible. We can go so far beyond the same-old, same old should we so desire.

That said, we don't have to do everything, go everywhere, own everything, or accomplish anything just to prove our love of Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't feed our families or fix our plumbing. But he does make the load lighter by his presence by our side. Sherlock Holmes is very rarely anyone's vocation, normally our avocation. Holmes gives us connections, anticipations, and opportunities, but he isn't going to fire us if we don't hit our quota for the year.

Sherlockiana isn't a job, it's a path of discovery. Chances are, you're already on the path you'll take for this year, whether it's the familiar part of the trail with all the signs and maps established, or some unknown area you have to wander into to see if anyone has been there yet. If they have, you can enjoy finding what they left behind, if they haven't, you can tell others and leave your own trail markers. The key to it all is thinking of those who will come after you. Those who came before are fine at this point. We can hold literary seances so new folk can see their shades, but they're not who we're doing it for now.

When I come right down to it, thinking about the year ahead, I think my main resolution has to be just trying to be a little more considerate and a little less selfish with this thing that I love called Sherlockiana. We all have to know our limits, as well as when to just say "no," but if we're really having a good time with our friends Holmes and Watson . . . and I mean a really good time, as why else are we here . . . then there's probably enough fun to pass some along.

So welcome to 2021. Take "nothing" out of that number and it's "221." That should tell you something about the kind of year we're heading into. Good luck!