Marshalling my forces

There's a button on my corkboard over my desk: All the sane people quit here years ago. I also taped up a quote by Harriet Beecher Stowe that is right at eye level:

When you get into a tight place
and everything goes against you
till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer,
never give up then
for that is just the place and time
that the tide will turn.

I put up a postcard of Muench's The Scream right alongside an image of Horatio Hornblower with upraised sword. I have the book The Open Heart by the Dalai Lama perched on my desk so that it looks like he's peering around the side of my computer monitor when I'm working.

Guess I'm one of those people who surrounds themselves with talismans at work.

The Emperor and I have stumbled across what we gather is a kind of phenomenon, in the form of a television series, and they're appropriate for my life just now.

This is a bunch that you'd want at your back in any battle. They're the characters from the late '90s historical ficition television series, Sharpe. Leader of this pack is Major Richard Sharpe (Sean Bean). Behind him, left to right, is Sergeant Patrick Harper (Daragh O'Malley), Rifleman Cooper (Michael Mears), and Rifleman Harris (Jason Salkey). Kneeling in center is Rifleman Perkins (Lyndon Davies) and to his left -- your right -- is Rifleman Daniel Hagman (John Tams). In every episode, using wits, valor, and deadly aim, these guys basically save the kiesters of King George's Army in Napoleonic War-era Spain and Portugal. There is always a woman in peril (or imperiling Sharpe) and treachery abounds. The Sharpe series was very popular in the UK and is about to be re-shown on BBC America. I've added a link to the Sharpe Appreciation Society to my sidebar, which is where I found the above image.

There's an interesting class difference between the Horatio Hornblower movies and the Sharpe series, which are both set at roughly the same time period. The character Hornblower is the son of a doctor and a young man of some education who joins the Royal Navy as a career officer and through brains, pluck and the appreciation of a gifted captain skyrockets through the ranks. Hornblower quickly learns that in order to gain effective work from his crew, he has to win their respect. However, he's not one that sits and watches other do the hard tasks -- he volunteers for everything and ably performs the most dangerous chores himself.

Richard Sharpe is the illegitimate son of a prostitute who grows up on the streets and joins the army at an early age. He saves the Duke of Wellington's life in India and is then promoted "from the ranks" and spends much of the rest of the series fighting prejudice. At first, his newly assigned company hates him because he's an upstart and not a gentleman -- only gentlemen are fit to command them, they think. After he wins the respect of the Chosen Men, Sharpe then has to deal with the prejudice of a series of gentleman officers -- effete, frequently stupid, and almost always self-absorbed. The officers don't take him into account and always underestimate Sharpe because he's not one of them -- he's not a gentleman. Sharpe hits the glass ceiling of the ossified British class structure and he doesn't like it, so he subverts it by being a good soldier of solid honor, a stark contrast to almost all of the other priviledged officers.

Both programs are frank in their portrayal of the complicated historical relationship between the British and the Irish. Many times the most intelligent (and occasionally dangerous) characters are Irish.

Perhaps the next talisman for the office corkboard should be a shamrock.