#george r.r. martin chair in storytelling

[westeroswisdom]

Last November we reported that Northwestern University alum George R.R. Martin donated $5 million to the University’s Medill School of Journalism. $3 million is going to establish George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop and the remaining $2 million created an endowed professorship at Medill.

The university has announced that one of GRRM’s fellow alums will be the first person to hold that professorship and lead the summer workshop. Journalist and author Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan joins the faculty in September. 

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, BSJ97, will serve as the inaugural holder of the George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.

Tan, a journalist, author and teacher, will lead the George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop, as well as teach courses across a breadth of genres to both undergraduate and graduate students.

The George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop will provide support for journalism professionals seeking careers in creative writing. Launching in 2024, the workshop will enroll six to eight writers and authors each summer and afford budding fiction writers, screenwriters and playwrights the time, space and guidance to develop their projects.

“Journalists have always been compelling storytellers, and many have a wealth of stories and ideas that would make for rich novels, films, TV shows and plays,” said Tan, whose book career launched when she turned an essay she wrote for The Wall Street Journal into the 2011 memoir, “A Tiger in the Kitchen.” “I am thrilled to be leading this unique program that will help journalists make that leap from news narratives to creative writing.”

[ ... ]

In addition to teaching and leading the summer workshop, Tan will collaborate with faculty in the School of Communication and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences to convene panels and conferences on writing for students, the greater Northwestern community and the public and be a liaison to industries related to long-form narrative and storytelling.

Perhaps Prof. Tan will advise her students: Be sure to complete your long-form projects before starting new ones. 😉

[harry-lloyd]

“It’s been a gentle start to the day,” Harry Lloyd says with a smile, speaking at a subdued volume while his six-month-old baby naps in the other room. We’re chatting on a Saturday afternoon, and Lloyd’s tousled hair is silhouetted against the sunlight streaming through the hotel room windows. It’s a warm day in Los Angeles, a stark contrast to the subzero chill that he braved for last month’s photo shoot in New York.

On screen, the English actor’s piercing gaze bespeaks a calculating persona, an agenda beneath the charm. Offscreen, there’s an unguarded, guileless ease to Lloyd’s manner—he’s thoughtful and genuinely engaged in the questions posed to him.

Lloyd is perhaps best-known for his portrayal of the unscrupulous, throne-obsessed Viserys Targaryen in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Since his character’s macabre demise, the 35-year-old has been plenty busy. Among other screen and stage projects, Lloyd played the classmate and confidante to Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything; a brilliant (and womanizing) novelist in The Wife (Lloyd mentions that he’s thrilled for Glenn Close’s Oscar nomination); and an intelligence officer, opposite J.K. Simmons, in the Starz original series Counterpart. His latest undertaking—the reason he’s in LA—is the Marvel comics-based series, Legion. For the third and final season of the FX show, Lloyd will play the role of David Haller’s father and X-Men leader, Professor Charles Xavier. (In so doing, he joins the ranks of Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy, who portrayed Professor X in the film series.)

Our conversation starts with Counterpart, the sci-fi/espionage thriller. A Cold War experiment in East Germany has splintered the timeline, and two formerly identical worlds now exist in an uneasy and rapidly unraveling détente. Each character in the show has an “other” self—a counterpart on the other side—and crossovers between the two dimensions wreak geopolitical havoc. There are slick diplomats, hapless bureaucrats, a contract assassin—and at the center is Peter Quayle, the director of Strategy in the Office of Interchange, a sort of United Nations-meets-MI6 outfit.

The morally obtuse Quayle is not exactly a sympathetic figure, but Lloyd embodies the character with a subtlety that allows the vulnerability to seep through the cracks in the bravado. As Quayle’s carefully-calibrated life crumbles, you feel for him—a national security strategist who’s in way over his head, blind to the fact that his own wife is a mole. Those pale, elegant hands are not meant to be dirtied fumbling about dim halls and holding rooms—and that’s not even getting into the subplots within the plot twists.

Lloyd’s enthusiasm for the project is clear. He calls Counterpart one of the favorite things he’s ever worked on, and credits Justin Marks, the creator of the show: “The writing is excellent, which attracts really good actors.” Among the sterling cast is, of course, J.K. Simmons, who plays two Howard Silks—the placid paper-pusher, Howard “Alpha,” in dimension one; and the cocksure clandestine operative, Howard “Prime,” in dimension two.

“I was very scared of him originally,” Lloyd admits with a laugh when I ask about his experience working with Simmons, who garnered an Oscar for his portrayal of a ruthless music instructor in Whiplash. “But he [Simmons] has been so welcoming and makes you feel at ease. I’ve learned so much from him—and we have a lot of fun.”

The scenes with Quayle Alpha and Howard Prime are often tense, even claustrophobic, not just because they take place in dark cars and cramped rooms, but because we sense the stranglehold of identity—the underlying question of just how much of one’s self is the product of choice versus circumstance. If you put John le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges in the same room, they might come up with something like this—forking paths that diverge and converge, labyrinths of spies and alter egos.

Lloyd describes Quayle Alpha and Howard Prime as an ��unhappy couple, both caught in this lie, who must rely on each other even though neither likes or respects the other.” On the flip side, Lloyd continues, “Quayle Prime and Howard Alpha have a completely different relationship” such that playing his character’s “other” feels “like a completely different job.”

There’s a cerebral, granular detail to Lloyd’s musings when I ask about the characters, fictional or real, that he draws from in portraying the two Quayles.

He explains that while on break between filming the Berlin and LA portions of season two, he and Justin Marks discussed the aesthetics of Alien 3. Marks envisioned Echo, the interrogation facility in dimension two, as a “penal colony, rather than a hospital or prison. The relationships between the inmates and officers draw on that” psychological dynamic.

In conveying Quayle’s “slightly unhinged” persona, Lloyd takes cues from other classics: Billy Bibbit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a “somewhat childish figure who looks up to McMurphy,” and Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now, who harbors a manic obsession with Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. Lloyd incorporates elements of these characters in Quayle Prime’s dynamic with Yanek, a warden at Echo—there’s an “evangelical fervor, where you sense [the character’s] loss of contact with reality.”

Season two of the show delves deeper into the deceit, paranoia, and existential quandaries inherent in navigating and manipulating two worlds. (It seems no coincidence that the writers chose Alexander Pope as the name of the character who trains sleeper agents—a little learning is a dangerous thing.) I ask Lloyd about the techniques he uses to keep his Alpha and Prime personas from getting jumbled.

“In terms of playing two parts for the first time, I’m lucky in that Quayle Prime exists solely in the Echo location, so we were able to do all that filming in a couple of weeks over the summer,” Lloyd tells me. “This season, we started filming in Berlin and ended in LA, so having a new location, new set,” helped keep the two characters separate.

Lloyd can’t discuss more details from season two without risking plot spoilers, so we pivot to other projects. I mention the internet speculation over whether Viserys Targaryen makes a comeback in the next season of Game of Thrones. “Really?” Lloyd replies with a mix of curiosity and incredulity. “That death seemed pretty final to me—I’m not sure how he comes back from that.”

I explain that the Reddit murmurings refer more to flashback scenes, and then ask Lloyd about filming his character’s grisly exit.

“That was pretty much the last scene I filmed on that show, and I remember that day very well,” Lloyd says—the amusement is pronounced in his voice. “It was freezing cold. We shot quite early in the morning, and I had to act drunk. Doing that so early in the day can go horribly wrong,” he explains, as you don’t want to overact it. But with a death scene like that, where the would-be king is “crowned” as molten gold is poured over his head, Lloyd could really let loose with the screaming—a finale that’s seared into fans’ minds.

Lloyd draws out nuances in his characters through deep-dives into their back stories. When filming the Game of Thrones pilot, he kept George R.R. Martin’s books under his chair for ease of consultation. As the filming continued, though, Lloyd wanted to get beyond Daenerys Targaryen’s narration of Viserys as the “brute—the petulant, unkind older brother.”

In Lloyd’s view, that perspective discounts the whole of Targaryen history: “This character feels the weight of his family on his shoulders. He’s had a terrible childhood; his parents are dead. He has no family apart from a little sister who doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation. He carries these scars, and by re-writing the narrative as the ‘Chronicles of Viserys Targaryen,’ we start to see how Viserys justifies his cruelty.”

Lloyd pauses briefly, mulling over this re-framing: “That’s the job of an actor—to give your character a mouthpiece” and guide the audience as to where our sympathies should lie.

“It’s a great time to be an actor,” Lloyd continues. “I’m lucky to be working with people I’ve admired for years, and to arrange projects [in a way that allows me] to explore different avenues. I hope it stays like this—there are so many more stories to tell.”

Our conversation drifts to more meta territory—how technological evolution continues to reshape the way we consume and relate to art and storytelling. Lloyd is democratic in his engagement with cultural mediums—he enjoys audio books and made-for-radio plays, and he’s fascinated by the future of VR. He loves the stage and recently played the lead role in The Good Canary, John Malkovich’s London directorial debut. Lloyd has also been on the other side of the camera, writing and directing “Supreme Tweeter.” The short web series, made in 2015, is premised on a cheeky concept that came to his co-creator (and now wife), Jayne Hong, in a dream: What if North Korea’s Kim Jong-un suddenly follows you on Twitter—what absurdity might ensue and what are the implications of treating your identity as a commodity, a “brand”? (I point out that this satirical take on social media as propaganda was an eerily prescient concept, given our current Tweeter-in-Chief—a topic that Lloyd diplomatically sidesteps.)

With streaming services supplanting cable and the proliferation of social media content, it’s a challenge, says Lloyd, “to hold erratic attention spans for more than a moment.” Among the tech-driven transformations that he references is how long-form television shows like Counterpart, with intricate plot lines and character arcs, are replacing the novel as a way of enjoying long-form stories. He also observes that interactive video games are looking more like films, with complex narratives and attention to visual detail and cinematic soundtracks, and vice versa—there are online films that contain a choose-your-own-adventure component with multiple plot lines. These various forms of entertainment may all be converging, Lloyd hypothesizes, as “new audiences have a desperate thirst for full immersion.”

For all these innovations, though, Lloyd jokingly refers to himself as a “fuddy-duddy” who loves to read books and has a record player back home in London. That doesn’t rule out throwback video games, though—for Christmas, Marks gave him a miniature version of the original Nintendo system, preloaded with all the old NES games. His favorite? “Super Mario 3, where Mario gets to wear the raccoon tail.” And continuing the theme of constant evolution, Lloyd points out that players now design new levels for these old games, which everyone can then upload to their own handheld consoles.

For now, though, there’s not much by way of free time. Lloyd is a new dad, and it’s entirely endearing how his tone and manner warm to the point of giddiness when discussing fatherhood. “Long story short, it’s phenomenal, beyond description,” he says. “There’s definitely a lot to learn,” but he’s enjoying the daily agenda, which includes “a lot of singing and chatting and mimicry” with the baby—spending time “staring at each other, making each other laugh, communicating in this pre-language way, just getting to know each other.”

As for audiences just getting to know Lloyd, the depth and versatility he brings to screen and stage promise many more dimensions beyond Quayle’s Alpha and Prime selves to be explored. Lloyd doesn’t rule out anything when it comes to collaborations and characters—as he puts it, “the more you give, the more you get out of the experience.” And more of Harry Lloyd is a very good thing.

[iamliberalartsgt]

Ivan Allen College Professors Discuss 'Game of Thrones'

Twenty years ago, Janet Murray, Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communications, predicted many of the narrative shifts depicting in sprawling stories like Game of Thrones. (Photo Credit: Rob Felt/Georgia Tech Institute Communcations)

The Game of Thrones may be nearing an end for viewers of the hit HBO series, but it is sure to live on in the classrooms of Janet Murray and Richard Utz, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts professors who find the show an ideal platform to help students learn to untangle a complicated world.

Murray, Ivan Allen College Dean’s Professor and director of the Prototyping eNarrative Lab, sees evidence in the series' sprawling plots of the very changes in narrative structure she predicted more than 20 years ago in her seminal book, Hamlet on the Holodeck.

“The confusion we feel in viewing programs like Game of Thrones, and the immersion that draws us to them, are signals to me that these stories are outgrowing the classic television format,” Murray said.

Utz, professor and chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communications, sees in the show "rich opportunities to examine our current interplay of cultures, politics, and social mores," and plans to use it as part of an upcoming class in the new Global Media and Cultures program.

Read more about what these professors have to say about Game of Thrones below, then visit the Georgia Tech feature A Science of Ice and Fire to see a video featuring Mariel Borowtiz, a Sam Nunn School of International Affairs associate professor, and two Georgia Institute of Technology graduate students and their simulation of what might have happened had the legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal had a dragon like Daenerys Targaryen's.

Merging Media: Breaker of (Narrative) Chains

More than 20 years ago, in her seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray, the Ivan Allen College Dean’s Professor, predicted the rise of a new genre of deeply complex narrative driven by the marriage of television and computer.

It would be what she called the “hyperserial.” Plot, backstory, and detail too fine to showcase in an hour-long drama would pass back and forth between television screen and computer screen, high-speed digital transmission of content would enable new ways of accessing stories, and narrative would, as a consequence, grow richer and more complex.

Nowhere has the promise of complex narrative storytelling been so fully realized as HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. So it is no surprise that Murray and her students in the college’s Digital Media program have used those stories to test her hypothesis.

“The confusion we feel in viewing programs like Game of Thrones, and the immersion that draws us to them, are signals to me that these stories are outgrowing the classic television format,” Murray said.

In recent years, Murray’s students in the Prototyping eNarrative Lab (PeN Lab) have prototyped a companion app meant to help fans keep track of the dozens of characters, backstories, alliances, and antipathies that make up the dizzyingly complex world of Westeros. Working with Murray, they also have built an application to help viewers track the many plots of Game of Thrones, and the fates of its characters.

The companion tablet app provides a moment-by-moment window into a Game of Thrones episode, automatically serving information about onscreen characters and their relationships without user intervention.

The Digital Story Structure Project graphed the fall and rise of characters, showing, for instance, the opposite fates of Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow early in the series, followed by the merger of their fates in season 7.

“I am interested in prototyping the future of narrative,” Murray said. “Computers give us a new vocabulary of representation, and I believe this will lead to ever more complex storytelling. We need more complex storytelling to understand the world and share our understanding of complex systems and multiple chains of causation, multiple points of view, and multiple possible outcomes.”

Maester of Humanities

Richard Utz, professor and chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communications sees in Game of Thrones "rich opportunities to examine our current interplay of cultures, politics, and social mores.” (Photo credit: Rob Felt/Georgia Tech Insitute Communications; Game of Thrones image courtesy HBO)

To a medievalist like Richard Utz, professor and chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Game of Thrones is engrossing, if unsettling, fantasy, one of the most complex narrative structures ever attempted, and a “highly valuable admission ticket to the study of contemporary media.”

One thing it is not, he said, is “medieval.”

“None of the reasons for Game of Thrones’ popularity — attractive world building, thriller-fiction pacing, complex characters, sexposition, bait-and-switch plot, escapist fantasy, intricate power play, clever play with archetypes, diverse female characters, guilt-free barbarism and violence, Sopranos-like family drams — is intrinsically ‘medieval,’” Utz said.

While the global fascination with Game of Thrones is sometimes seen as a recruitment opportunity by scholars of the Middle Ages, focusing on the books and HBO show from a traditional medievalist’s perspective is too limiting and self-serving.

“It is a global phenomenon. It is the most widely watched television show in the world ever,” he said. “While it is set in a fictional past, it raises a host of issues about our past, present, and future, and provides rich opportunities to examine our current interplay of cultures, politics, and social mores.”

Utz has written about his aversion to the use of novelist Martin’s world as way to lure students into studying the Middle Ages.

“Classes on the Middle Ages rarely need advertising because of the general cultural love affair students have with medievalist topics,” he said. “Game of Thrones needs to be studied as a contemporary media phenomenon that uses a vague ‘medieval feel’ as one of its attractions.”

In fact, he finds it notable that one of the main characters, Sansa Stark, began the series seeking the trappings of the romantic ideal of the Middle Ages — princesses, knights, and all — only to see that fairy tale viciously taken from her at every turn.

“Watch out for Sansa Stark in season 8,” he predicted. “She will play a major role in how the story unfolds, as will some of the other women whose paths have been transformed throughout the series. Like in classical drama, it’s the survivors who, having learned many difficult lessons, are the real heroines of this story.”

But he does see Martin’s stories and especially the HBO adaptation as an excellent place to meet students where they already are — invested in stories that are indelibly shaped by our current experiences, while retaining the enduring fascination with all things premodern.

“The premodern is an eternal mirror. On the one hand, we like to shudder at the otherness of it to reassure ourselves that we have long overcome its negative features,” he said. “On the other hand, we get to go back, fictionally, to a life that seems so much easier and unburdened by the complicated rules of contemporary civilization. Both responses are illusions, but that doesn’t mean we won’t entertain them.”

Utz plans to use the series as a case study in an upcoming class in comparative media cultures, as part of the new Master of Science in Global Media and Cultures program in LMC and the School of Modern Languages. The program is designed to prepare students to pursue professional careers that require advanced training in communication, media, language, and intercultural competency.

Utz believes that the narrative complexity of Game of Thrones is exactly the right realm within which to model the kinds of practices his students need to succeed and find fulfillment in their future jobs.

“The global city of Atlanta is in dire need of a workforce educated to be skilled communicators across cultural and linguistic divides,” he said. “I am planning on an approach that will confront my students with a wickedly complex scenario that allows for a deep understanding of multiple governmental structures, leadership styles, gender and race relations, linguistic and cultural traditions, and human behavior, a scenario just as complex as the ones increasingly common in future work environments.”

Dancing with Dragons

It isn’t a particularly bold supposition that dragons are a formidable weapon. Still, we wondered: exactly how much of an impact would a dragon have on a battlefield? Chandler Thornhill, a graduate student in economics, and Matthew Redington, a graduate student in computer science, offered to devise a few simulations.

Both are currently enrolled in the course Modeling, Simulation, and Military Gaming, an interdisciplinary, project-based class requiring collaboration across a range of backgrounds and skills. Groups of students spend a semester researching and dissecting historical battles, using this deep understanding to adjust variables and outcomes through computational modeling.

Introducing fantastical elements may seem an inconsequential exercise, but to one of its instructors, School of International Affairs Assistant Professor Mariel Borowtiz, introducing pop culture elements allows students to connect with modeling simulations in a different way.

“One of the things I like about bringing dragons into a simulation is that you really have to go through the same research process,” she said. “You have to be rigorous in how you find data and how you make assumptions. Obviously, there’s not a lot of data available on a dragon’s efficiency but you can look at the information sources available as a basis to formulate and justify assumptions. It shows the process can be applied in all sorts of areas.”

So how much of a difference did the dragon have? By their calculations, roughly 70 percent of opposing forces were turned to ash.

IAC Link

GT Link

[cometsweepandleonidsfly]

“There is nothing more powerful in the world than a good story.”

These are the words of Tyrion Lannister toward the end of Game of Thrones’ series finale. Meaning that they are the words of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Meaning that the pair’s 80-minute send-off to Westeros on Sunday night was not just an accidental explosion of indulgent self-defensiveness, but a conscious and true effort in expounding its own genius to an audience that has every right to now feel corrupted and betrayed.

For (most) of its previous seven seasons, Game of Thrones was a creation that appealed equally to the head and the gut. Its blend of ultra-detailed mythology, emotionally complex characters, classic themes, expensive set-pieces, frequent nudity, and buckets of gore swirled together to create the smart person’s trash, and the trashy person’s jewel. In 1996, novelist George R.R. Martin created a fantasy for those who supposedly hate fantasy, but in 2011, Benioff, Weiss and whoever cuts those massive cheques at HBO turned that creation into an uber-fantasy. Here was something so overwhelmingly compelling in its material and slick in its execution(s) that the announcement of its end has forced the culture to question whether or not culture itself will ever be so easily united under one single act of creativity.

And then GoT’s eighth season unfurled, and the first word I could ever muster every Sunday night was: ugh. As in, ugh, how did Benioff and Weiss (and, we can only assume, Martin) find and then magnify every flaw in what has otherwise been a fantastic production? As in, ugh, how are we to accept that characters who we knew to be layered suddenly turn into parodies of themselves?? As in, ugh, how did HBO hear Benioff and Weiss’s plan for the final stretch and not decide, hmm, maybe you guys need a half-dozen more episodes to actually accomplish that without it seeming stupidly rushed??? As in, ugh, can no one on GoT figure out how to properly light a damn battle scene????

At least Benioff and Weiss seem all-too-aware that these questions might be asked as audiences were exposed to this last stretch. After all, “The Iron Throne,” the sixth and final episode of the series’ eighth and final season, is consumed with responding to any and all of the potential criticisms of the material that came before it, especially last week’s horrendous “The Bells.”And their answer, by the way? Well, it is just as Tyrion puts it above: We’re great storytellers, so shut up.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start with talking about what went right in “The Iron Throne.” First, there was that fairly cool, if obvious, shot of Dany walking in front of Drogon’s wings. Then there was the interesting decision to abandon any score for the episode’s first 10 minutes, to underline the hollowed-out nothingness that has become King’s Landing. And then … okay, that’s all I’ve got, because right now, all I can think about was everything that went wrong. This might take a while.

Or not, because if Benioff and Weiss decided to abandon so much of their own thought and consideration into this season’s narrative, character, themes and aesthetics, then why should I devote any of my own to their supremely thin effort at defending their own creative powers in this, their final (and, as they would surely say, finest) hour? So, here’s more of a rapid-fire rant of all the many things that sank GoT’s finale:

Dany swaps her wardrobe for something Sith-esque, because if you’re going to have a beloved character suddenly turn into a genocidal monster, it’s best to have her start wearing black immediately.

Drogon must really hate chairs. Oh, and Tyrion really loves rearranging chairs. This episode was very obsessed with chairs. (Wait: Does Drogon think the chair killed his mother? Or is he just heavily into obvious metaphors? Maybe this is something that will be clarified in the inevitable GoT spinoff, Warg This Way with Bran the Broken.)

Bran? Really, Bran?? I’ll come back to this in a moment.

It’s wonderful how the various lords and ladies of Westeros can seemingly teleport into King’s Landing at the drop of a hat to decide the fate of their kingdom. Also wonderful is the chin-scratching/Googling that everyone must have been doing during this scene to remember who Tobias Menzies used to play on this show (answer: Edmure Tully).

“Bran the Broken”? Okay, really, I’ll come back to this again.

How much of Benioff and Weiss’s script was just "Character X walks away portentously”?

I wish we could all pull a Brienne and go into the history books to write a better ending.

When Samwell hands Tyrion a copy of A Song of Ice and Fire, I swear we were all one Sigur Rós cover of All Along the Watchtower away from GoTpulling a Battlestar Galactica. (If that sentence makes no sense, I’m sorry. And if it does: I’m even more sorry.)

I just know that there is a half-decent Donald Trump joke to be made about Jon’s fate at the Wall, but there is no way I’m going to attempt such a thing at this late hour.

It was nice that Jon got to see his direwolf Ghost again, and I’m all for any Tormund appearance, but are we to believe that the man was brought back from the dead by the Lord of Light … just to kill a woman he himself helped put in power? That is not just me quibbling with the “logic” of magic, either. It is a simple question of the strength of Benioff and Weiss’s (and, again, Martin’s) narrative foresight.

Okay, back to the Bran thing: Tyrion essentially puts GoT’s favourite creepy weirdo on the throne because “he has the best story.” It is a pretty good story, no doubt. But has no one on this show been paying attention to Arya’s arc? You know, the one in which she started off as a little kid who watched her father die and ended up becoming a face-changing assassin who defeats the greatest evil in this world’s history? Bran can fly, but Arya can slay.

I guess we’re never going to know why the Night King was so obsessed with arranging his victims’ corpses in that circular pattern, hmm? Okay, no problem! I was just wondering if that was a deliberate storytelling decision or another one of those “it-simply-looked-cool” ideas.

I could go on, but it’s late and you likely have 17 other GoT-related tabs open on your browsers (because not only does “The Iron Throne” mark the end of HBO’s cash cow, it spells the end of such guaranteed traffic drivers as this very review; publishers around the world are drowning their sorrows in Dornish wine this very moment). And besides, what more could be said of an episode that name-checks its own storytelling brilliance? Well, perhaps on this note Tyrion puts it best again – and, again, highlights in bright yellow the smarmy satisfaction that has characterized so much of Benioff and Weiss’s work this season: “It’s a good compromise,” the once-and-future hand of the Seven Kingdoms says, “if no one is happy.”

Fair enough, my friend. Fair enough.

[westeroswisdom]

George R.R. Martin has endowed a chair at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism – his alma mater. He was at Northwestern in late February for the investiture of Prof. Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan as the inaugural holder of the George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling.

He wrote at Not a Blog...

I attended Medill back in what they now like to call “the turbulent 60s”  (and no kidding, they were pretty turbulent), and departed with a couple of degrees, BSJ ’70, MSJ ’71.  I did not get back often  in the half-century that followed, alas. Life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing. But I always looked back fondly on my years in Evanston, and the courses and teachers that helped shape me as a writer. I had been writing long before I arrived in Illinois, of course. Monster stories for other kids in the projects in grade school (got a nickle each for them, enough for a Milky Way, and if I sold two I could buy a comic book) and amateur superhero stories for comic fanzines when I got to high school (Powerman, Dr. Weird, the White Raider, and Garizan the Mechanical Warrior), but it was during my years at Northwestern that I began to submit to professional magazines. It was while I was in Evanston that I got my first professional rejection slip (from AMERICAN SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW, for “The Fortress,” a story I wrote for a history class at Northwestern) and made my first professional sale (from GALAXY, for “The Hero,” a story I wrote for a creative writing class at Northwestern). So it seemed only fitting for me to “pay forward” to Medill for all I learned there, by endowing a chair in storytelling. The investiture was my first opportunity to meet Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, who was chosen over thirty other highly qualified applicants to be the first “GRRM Professor.”  It seemed only fitting that I give her an actual chair, as well, as the title… so I did.

If you're a student at Medill, take a peek inside Prof. Tan's office to see the miniature Iron Throne which GRRM presented her.

Cheryl has written both fiction and non-fiction. She has been a news and fashion reporter for the Wall Street Journal, InStyle, the Baltimore Sun, and other major news outlets.  Her books include the bestselling novel SARONG PARTY GIRLS, set in her native Singapore. She will teach both undergraduate and graduate students, organize panels and conferences, and conduct an intensive writing workshop every summer,  to help professional journalists cross over into creative writing.