So one of the things I'm finding that I need to do, post-breakup, is rebuild networks of connection. I was very - wrapped around him, is as good a way of putting it as any. (Why it took me so long to give up: it should have been perfect. It should have fit. Anyway.) I'm lonely for people to yap at about fannish stuff! Not formally, as here, but just casual bibble. I've also lost my beta, which is difficult and sadmaking, so I sort of want to work on finding people to write with. Where does this kind of thing take place, anymore? IRC? AIM? Gchat? Gplus? I'm way behind the social media tech curve on this. Where do y'all hang out, apart from here, and how do I get there?

This feels embarrassingly naked, but. Is anyone up for a look at a brace of Tortall/Immortals Quartet ficlets?

OH INTERNET NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN.

I'm reading James Eli Adams' book A History of Victorian Literature - exams approach apace - and thinking about a conversation I had with my mama over holiday about history and social justice. Neither of my parents quite understand how they came to raise a Victorianist. I think papa was hoping for a philosopher or a mediaevalist, and mama for a poet. And mama was asking me why, if I was bent on doing this feminism thing, I'd choose such a repressive era. (Oh, historiomythic accounts of the nineteenth century!)

Adams articulates, in his introduction, something that I tried to point out to her (though with less rhetorical aptitude): "Much of the elaborate etiquette that we think of as distinctly Victorian – rituals of introduction, calling cards, the chaperoning of unmarried women, intricate decorums of dress – is at root a strategy for coping with social mobility, by affirming one’s own claims to recognition while at the same time maintaining a distance that allows one to “place” new acquaintances (Davidoff 1973). The Victorian novel developed into a form uniquely suited to represent these dynamics, capturing the textures of social interaction, aspiration, and anxiety, within which social hierarchy could seem both a stimulus and a barrier to personal achievement" (&). This seems really key to me: the moment when society pushes hardest on the brake has to also be the moment when everything is already different, and folk just haven't figured out how to deal with it yet.

Which, actually, gives me some hope for the present political scene. This much repression must mean that, somewhere down deep, we're doing something right.

Tangential, but not unconnected: I have a politics question for those of y'all who inhabit the United Kingdom. I have a feeling that the very simplistic definitions of "whig" and "tory" I've hacked together aren't capturing the entire social context. In my own milieu I can trace all the strands of culture and lifetyle that make up US Republicans and Democrats, even down to breaking each group into a number of subsets: Repubs = Boston Brahmins, The One Percent, Rural Racists, Christian Evangelicals, ect. But I can't seem to get a real grip on Whigs and Tories. I'm guessing they don't just simply map onto US political categories, amirite? How do you understand those terms/groups/identities?

Two weeks ago: warm, shirtsleeves weather
End of last week: bitterly cold, cutting wind, falling snow.
Today: it's bloody 50 degrees out there.

So I did the coolest thing ever today. Because apparently (HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS) my University has possession of the original (as in, very first ever, handwritten, still-untitled, with scritch-ed out bits and different names sometimes) manuscript of Peter Pan. November 1903. So today I went to the rare books collection and they got it out of the vault for me and I sat there and read the whole thing.

theprimrosepath, when you suggested that Barrie wasn't yet capable of writing the ending to this story - you were right. The ending to this version is completely different in every way. That horrible ending that's been a sore spot in me all my life isn't even there. Instead, Peter and Wendy and all the lost boys fly back to London, where they then advertise for all the most beautiful mothers, and then Peter and Wendy test them to see which are the right mothers for which boys - and they're all countesses with ridiculous names, and the entire thing is farcical and ridiculous and completely gives the lie to any attempt to view London and the Neverland as polarized spaces. London is every bit as silly. And then, once all the boys are disposed of, Wendy and Peter try to say goodbye, get all choked up, and eventually get Mr. and Mrs. Darling's blessing to go live in Kensington Gardens as mother and child, and then they have a run-in with the nefarious school superintendent Hook, and everyone ends up dressed up as harlequins and columbines in a complete collapse into happy silliness and carnivalesque make-believe, and then all the stars in the set shine bright, and then go out, and the play is over.

The thing that I found most interesting, I think, was the way this initial version framed Peter and Wendy as much more similar in their attraction/repulsion to adulthood. Peter is tremendously enthusiastic about playing father, only pulling back when he gets scared. Actually, this Peter is scared rather a lot - this version casts no doubt on his story of having been closed out of his own nursery by his own mother. Peter never recoils from Wendy, or from her obvious feeling for him - instead he repeatedly asks her to help him understand. Which she doesn't yet have the courage or maturity to do - she also holds back from that step, that change. Both feel the draw of being grown up, the excitement available there, but both are ultimately afraid. Their home together in Kensington Gardens is a sort of ultimate representation of this; even in London, they're still playing more than anything else. The play doesn't ever force them into the sort of choice that later versions do, to have or give up once and for all. No one in this play ever leaves the Greenworld; in fact, their playfulness is contagious, infecting the citizens of London with commedia del arte tropes and spontaneous costumes and jokes and dancing.

Behind the cut, ( some of the best bits, as transcribed by yours truly, with parenthetical apostrophizations of delight )

Meme, nicked from wordweaverlynn: Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

Nonfiction edition, from Dysfunctional Families in the Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy by Lois Bethe Schoenfeld: "Here Hardy stresses the need for close, intimate relationships between the siblings, if not with the parents as well, although he does not offer us solutions to the changing form of the family as a result of social and economic change." Ahahahaha INCEST? LOLWHUT.

Fiction edition, from The Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy: "Receptive." OKAY THEN. I'LL TAKE THAT.

In love we disappear
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Holmes/Watson UST, Irene/Simza, Sherlock & Irene
summary: I'm in ur movie, emphasizin ur hurt/comfort, queering ish up, and unrefridgeratin ur wimminz. Only, more nineteenth-century than that. Holmes, Irene, and Simza, post-Reichenbach.
2412 words, G

( read here, )

or read at the AO3

Yuletide reveal & yearly fic roundup, 2011 edition!

For yuletide, I wrote:

Entreat me with your loveliest lie
Vorkosigan Saga, Gregor/Miles ust with bonus Simon and Aral
longing, betrayal, abandonment, and body & disability issues
summary: Count Vordroza never says the word “mutant” when he talks about Miles.
1669 words, general

and, as treats,

All the way from China
Leonard Cohen - Suzanne, Female Narrator/Jesus/Suzanne
bookmaking, babies, and memories, bittersweet
summary: She doesn't know what Suzanne has done, if she's still there, if she's changed, grown old, died, forgotten.
357 words, general

Come away, come away
Peter Pan, Peter/Wendy contemporary university AU
recreational drug use, impaired consent, and anarchy
summary: They left Wendy's familiar haunts, went to where bright fluorescent lights shimmered through the gathering dark, and vendors sold curry and meat pies and falafel on the curbs, and climbed up to a third-story flat on a dingy ill-lit street. The door was painted sky blue, and huge cumulonimbus clouds surrounded the knob. "Welcome to Neverland," Peter said, not using a key, just opening the door.
3075 words, mature

And for the rest of the year: ( Star Wars OT, Firefly, Prydain )

By the numbers: 7 stories, 6 fandoms, 34,500 words. \o/

All my books have changed, because I have. Some of them have become very beautiful; some frightening; some important. Middlemarch is very different now. And I always knew Millay mattered, but this is something more - a lesson, I think, a dose of some powerful medicine to drink down.

From "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree," Edna St. Vincent Millay:

IX.

Not over-kind nor over-quick in study
Nor skilled in sports nor beautiful was he,
Who had come into her life when anybody
Would have been welcome, so in need was she.
They had become acquainted in this way:
He flashed a mirror in her eyes at school;
By which he was distinguished; from that day
They went about together, as a rule.
She told, in secret and with whispering,
How he had flashed a mirror in her eyes;
And as she told, it struck her with surprise
That this was not so wonderful a thing.
But what's the odds? — It's pretty nice to know
You've got a friend to keep you company everywhere you go.

As expected, stayed up to 5:00 am last night & produced over a thousand words of Sherlock Holmes fic. Homg new movie! Wtfyuletidebears!

( spoilers for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows )