(no subject)

[cahn]

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, mildred_of_midgard and selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days: selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

Comments

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[mildred_of_midgard]

Whoa, go French teacher! *applauds* I'm glad you had a good one to make up for your US history teacher.

I also learned much of my history (not Fritz, though) in high school from historical fiction. Well, a weird self-taught mixture of history and historical fiction--I'd read the fiction to make the history stick in my memory, and the history to know what I should and shouldn't believe in the fiction. It worked pretty well: much of what I've been regurgitating for you the last few days is from 20-year-old memories. (I'll admit I was a bit nervous writing the Seven Years' War summary and relieved when selenak didn't find any egregious errors and gave it the seal of approval.)

Well, and then there was the part where I spent a good half of high school writing an 18th-century alternate history military history novel that I abandoned at 800 pages, because that's so on-brand for me. *That*'ll fix stuff in your memory! (Fritz was a fairly minor secondary character in this novel, but it was specifically researching this novel that led me to discover who he was, fall in love within the first few minutes of flipping through a short bio, proceed to read everything I could get my hands on, and spend the next two years trying to keep him from playing an unrealistically large role in my plot, haha. Then, when I abandoned this novel, I handed him over to my immortal Mary Sue character and said, "Here, he can fit into your eventful life story. Have fun.")

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[cahn]

Oh, don't feel bad for me, my history teacher was my only terrible teacher in high school, and she wasn't bad in a way that was particularly detrimental to me in any way except that I didn't learn very much US history. I had a fair number of reasonably competent teachers, several good-to-quite-good ones (including that French teacher -- who also gets major major points for recognizing me as a lonely nerd who would totally love ALL THE BOOKS to read), and two great teachers (English lit senior year and physics), which I feel is really more than my fair share :)

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[mildred_of_midgard]

Well, that's good to know. :) As you know, my parents literally told me it didn't matter what high school I went to, as long as my brother got into a good elementary school, so my high school was less than well suited to my needs, and that was fine by them.

My individual teachers were by and large not terrible (unlike the guidance counselor), and I got along with a lot of them as people, and a number of them were even good teachers for the rank and file, and I respect that, but the vast majority were not invested in challenging me. Plus the whole system was set up to make sure my time was being wasted, and you know how my parents were about supplementing school with extracurriculars. My two exceptional teachers were US History and junior + senior English. (Not surprisingly, the English teacher was the most hated and feared teacher in the school. She was my favorite.) The librarian was wonderful, I miss her so much (cancer shortly after I graduated). <3 :'-(

My freshman English teacher, god, I liked him as a person, but he argued with me that "The volleyball team played good" was grammatically correct and "The volleyball team played well" was incorrect, because "volleyball team" is a noun, so it takes an adjective. <-- My education.

Freshman me actually asked him to his face what he had majored in, because I didn't think it was English. When my mother heard this story, she made me write him a note of apology. To this day, I think that question was justified.

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[cahn]

I think you were justified in asking that as well!

heh, yup, my US History teacher was also a super nice person! She also told us at some point that the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis were the same thing, which even as high schoolers we were pretty sure was not the case. But she often just didn't even show up for class (we were sent to the library to work on history outlines, which you will be unsurprised to hear none of us actually did), so the amount of actually false things we imbibed was fairly low.

I'm told that earlier classes remembered her fondly, so apparently she wasn't always like that -- I wonder what happened.

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[mildred_of_midgard]

Wow. I feel like at my high school, that's the teacher who *would* have been remembered fondly, but learning things was not considered cool, so...

Re: God save our Saxon cousins

[cahn]

Yeah, that was when I was at the Really Good High School. But even before that, I was at Decent High School where doing well in classes was something people were interested in (even if it wasn't always the most important thing), so such a teacher might have been liked, but not respected.