20190614.0430

I have not been particularly diligent about writing on 14 June, doing so in this webspace only in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last three are snippets of verse that I do not want to revisit at the moment, whether because of their context or because of the lack thereof. The prose piece from 2014 might merit a bit of attention, though, in part because I have ended up talking about some similar things in the years since (here and here, for example). I am sure there is some kind of rhetoric that might append itself to more formal treatments of things like Renaissance fairs and historical festivals, some more erudite understanding that accounts for what I miss--but I note a common thread in my musings on such events as the Pawnee Bill show, the ScotFest, and the North Texas Irish Festival, among many others.
The common thread is this: there's an implication that what is on display is "how things were," that the festivals somehow encapsulate the reality of the time and places being depicted, and that those times and places are somehow not universal but moving that way. That is, the "medieval" and the "Wild West" are not conflated, but they are aggregated and expanded in such ways as do not admit of much nuance--or even much recognition of temporal or regional variation. The medieval of Beowulf and the medieval of The Canterbury Tales are different things; so, too, are the medieval of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. Similarly, frontier life differed from, say, 1836 to 1866 to 1896. Yet the medieval is compressed and homogenized, even as the Old West has been. (And both are made Californian all too often, which annoys for different reasons.)
I understand that festivals and celebrations and shows have to remove themselves from the mundane, the "normal." They have to do so to mark themselves as special events set aside from the broader lives that enfold them. I find no fault with them for it, even if my still-curmudgeonly self tends to prefer to be at work to being at play. (Indeed, this last weekend, while my wife and daughter went to a waterpark, I stayed home to take care of some things around the house that have long needed doing. In the event, I am glad I did; the work needed doing and got done, and they got to have fun without my stolid self slowing them.) What I do find fault with, still, is the idea that many such festivals reinforce, overtly or tacitly, that the way things are shown is the way they always and in all places were. It does not take doctoral research to find that it is not so, and it chafes that even such cursory work is too often elided.