This Modern Life

I'm reorganizing my books and I noticed a post-it fluttering. Now if you know me - I mean, not just on the internet - you know I post-it everything. Any book for which I have any use looks like it's wearing a yellow crinoline skirt. I have put post-it's on other post-it's. I have two copies of vol. I of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation. One for post-it's. One plain. (And a German edition.) But that was a different phase of my intellectual life. Although if you want to be left alone in a public place - a cafe, say - wielding a prominent dog-eared Schopenhauer with two-inch yellow ruff is a good way for nature to say 'keep away!'

So why would I notice a post-it in a book? I am trained to ignore post-it's. Well, it was in my copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which doesn't exactly get much use. So what was I thinking? Ah, now I remember. I thought it would be funny to use lines from the third millenium BC as the epigraph for some gritty, hard-boiled, noirish chronicle of life in the Big City:

Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river, and that will be my lot also. Indeed I know it is so, for whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth.

Have you read the greatest post? It's Theresa Nielsen Hayden's link-rich and lengthy literarily theoretic treatment of Mary Sues. (236 commenters and counting can't be wrong.)

So my question is? Is there Mary Sue fanfic for great works of literature besides Star Trek, LOTR, etc. Is there Mary Sue Jane Austen fanfic? Shakespeare fanfic? Homeric fanfic. Gilgamesh fanfic. (Young and springy Enkidina, helping Gilgamesh find the Spring of Youth.) Hey, at least you could write the stuff without getting nasty letters from lawyers for Paramount.

Comments

[k]

Yes, such Mary Sues do exist. Because if people are able to slash classic literature and greek mythology...

No, you do not want to know. Trust me.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Teresa (no "h") says that there is indeed not-very-good Jane Austen fanfic on fanfiction.net.

She says there's also contemporary pornographic Jane Austen fanfic. Contemporary with Jane Austen. It certainly is a large world in here.

[jholbo]

Oops, sorry about the 'h'. And ... there was porn Austen fanfic in Austen's day? Do my eyes deceive me? Well, it follows that there must so enormous stone stellae somewhere in Mesopotamia engraved with the famous Fanfic of Hammurabi.

[dsquared]

The words "Ayn" and "Rand" and "every single character" come to mind ...

[jholbo]

Oooh, I don't want to explain dquared's joke or anything. But I'm a philosopher, which means I often kill jokes. (As Oscar Wilde says, 'each man kills ...') The heroes of Ayn Rand novels are already ... well, Mary Sue Shrugged. And Bob's your uncle. Nothing more to be explained.

[Kriston]

Apparently there was Gilgamesh fanfic in Gilgamesh's (author's) day.