Hey guys, I'm having one of those moments when I want to transport my Internet Knowledge (tm) into academic writing and am trying to find apt sources and/or research keywords but can't. Somebody's got to be writing about that thing that happens with tearjerker portrayals and racism, where the tactics of representational sympathy demand the display of a sad-but-deserving victim who can't be too weird or political or angry, and so the whole thing ends up reinforcing kyriarchy overall, right? What do you call that?

Hey guise Kalakirya podficced me!

[Podfic] Finds but Riddling Shrift (26 words) by kalakirya
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau/George Cooper
Characters: Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau, George Cooper, Numair Salmalín
Additional Tags: Magic, Winter, Street & Stage Magic, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary:

podfic of lotesse's story

George finds Arram Draper juggling in the snow

It's super fun to hear my stuff read by someone who isn't me! And she did a really lovely, atmospheric reading.

Welp - I keep posting these declarations that I'm doing better, and then I don't post again because I don't want to have to eat those words. Not doing better; pretty crazy this last week, maladaptive & panicky. I've got this problem where university stuff (deadlines, expectations, evaluations) makes me crazy, and my crazy makes me not good at university work, which feeds the crazy even more. I think I'm going to see if I can get permission to take my prospectus defense in the fall, instead of 3 May when it's currently scheduled, because I'm driving myself to distraction with panic over it; note that I have still not pulled it together enough to tell my advisor this, being vastly ashamed of my own inability to overcome my crazy. I did tell my father, though, which is almost harder for me.

It's Wednesday, so now that I've depressed myself let me talk about what I'm reading. I rbrought Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs to class today for a student who turned up absent, so I spent most of my office hours rereading it myself. I really, really dislike the judgmental quality of Levy's prose, but do find myself in accordance with her upset at the empornification of contemporary feminism - although I feel like growing up in fandom, and pretty isolated from mainstream pornography and raunch culture, gives me something of an oddball perspective of the issue, because for me porn is associated primarily with freedom from the male gaze and the need to please it. I've also been working through Rachel Ablow's The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Marriage Plot, which is super interesting but also somehow disappointing. Ablow argues that Victorian novels function as wives, teaching good moral and sympathetic values; but there is, I think, a more radical question to be taken up about the emotional nature of that sort of teaching work - what's the difference between a gentle maternal spoon-feeding of sympathetic values, Dickens style, and more Brontean demands for recognition and valuation whether the reader wants to or not. And then I also, because I was feeling sad and wanted to turn it into angry because angry feels stronger to me right now, picked up Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth - and because it fascinates me the same way Dune used to, where I feel like there's something big and important and flawed and fascinating in it that's just out of my reach.

As you can tell from the promiscuity of this reading list, I've been feeling narrowed down and understimulated - my brain is full of the nineteenth century and nothing else, and I don't think it's doing my particular brand of obsessively anxious crazy any good. So I'm trying to feed it some different stuff - and I wanted to ask the math&science-savvy among you for book or - ideally! - documentary recommendations. Not too jargony, not too sexist? I could go back and rewatch the old Nova specials that I was obsessed with as a kid, but somehow it seems like a bad idea to spend too much time poring over science that's nearly thirty years out of date!

My brain feels narrowed down and

What I'm reading this Wednesday:

I picked up Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus as a treat to myself - a contemporary woman-authored fantasy novel set in Victorian London, what's not to love? Except I'm finding that I kind of don't love it. I'm a little over a third of the way through, and am at present not sure if I'll finish it. I don't see the point of doing a Victorian if you're not going to profit from either the milieu or the language. Morgenstern's prose style lacks the richness that I associate with Victorian pastiche, the kind of thing that Sarah Waters does so beautifully. Her use of the present tense, relatively limited vocabulary, and choppy presentation all seem like odd choices to me given the wonderful descriptive rhythms of so much Victorian prose. Morgenstern's epigraph is taken from Wilde, and imagining what he could've done with this story is giving me a serious sad. But I also just kind of feel like the novel's Victorianism is painted on. The fashion and design stuff in particular keeps frustrating me, because it's almost always general and vague, with broad references to period trends like japanism and monochrome, and all the clockwork stuff that E.T.A. Hoffmann did so much better, without ever feeling real or material or, you know, researched. I'm also more broadly fed up with the portrayal of Spiritualism as a delusional mourning cult led by hucksters - Morgenstern is far from alone in this, but beyond the fact that I was raised by American Spiritualists and actually do believe in afterlife communication and the mediation of the spirit world, this revisionist history totally ignores the sociopolitical radicalism of Victorian Spiritualists, many of whom were early feminist leaders due to the subculture's relative embrace of women in positions of power.

In nonfiction reading, I'm working my way back through Gayle Salamon's Assuming A Body, because I'm stealing her phenomenological account of the relationship between fantasy and sexuality for a paragraph in my dissertation prospectus - although I will admit to feeling a little odd about employing the theory that she develops for trans* liberation in a project on heterosexuality. I guess it does ultimately make sense to turn back to the seat of sexual power, the same way the study of masculinity is a necessary part of feminism, but I still feel kind of ish about it. I keep loading down my footnotes with those kind of caveats and attributions: I got this from trans* theory, Black feminism, queer affect theory. The whole question really reminds me of old fannish conversations about "queer het" back in the days of Spuffy and The X-Files - did we ever solve that one? Or did we just kind of move on?

Also, I am watching White Collar now - I found myself in need of something easy and lovely, and the ot3 caretaking and power dynamics in that show are pretty much aces. And apparently it's one of those fandoms where folk are super type-A and keep organized thematic lists of fanwork, so that is also aces.

So right now I feel like I should thank, like, the entirety of the Due South fandom. Because y'all are giving me some of the best and most healing reading experiences of my life.

I think that it took me a while to really fall into due South because I was having an interpretation error: I have an impossibly hard time understanding Benton Fraser as anything like a remotely unreliable narrator. He is, but his mindset it just so familiar, so much like my own, that his thoughts feel like my thoughts and I always believe him. Instead of reading him as a sweet but screwed up guy, I'm right there next to him, going: stand your ground, maintain the right, always get your man, love can move mountains, the truth is the most powerful thing there is.

( personal stuff and also a DS-fandom-wide lovefest behind the cut )

Oh you guys, my grandpa died today. He was 74 and in good health and this morning he cooked breakfast - my grandparents run a B&B - and went out on errands with my gran and then he said he had a headache and he stroked out right there in the car and never regained consciousness. He's on a ventilator now, but mama says he's gone; they'll turn it off tonight, after my aunt gets there.

I don't know what to do or how to feel or what to think. This is so sudden it's hard to believe it. I'm so glad I went home over Christmas. I had this one really great evening with the two of them - I kept them up way past their bedtime drinking wine and telling stories, and it was so good and perfect, and I'm so glad that gets to be my last memory of him. And so sorry, god.

I told my sister that at least we all knew he loved us. There were no last words he didn't get to say, because he said everything he needed to, openly and repeatedly and unconditionally and without shame. I hope, when it's my time, that my loved ones will know how much I loved them, the way that we all know he loved us.

I didn't entirely mean to make three of these - I started with a remaster of the Luke-centric vid that was the first thing I ever made, and that only got uploaded behind lock, but then there was all this footage that I wanted to use and I love the visuals of the OT almost as much as I love the characterization and then I realized that I could do a trilogy to Regina Spektor songs. So that is what I did. I'm listing these in the order that I made them, because they kind of served as a vidding journeyman project - although I'd still really appreciate concrit and vidding tips!

the one where being everyone's messiah is actually kind of rubbish:
title: human of the year
fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
music: Regina Spektor
length: 4:07
summary: {Luke character study} hello, hello, calling a Luke Skywalker to the front of the cathedral, you have won
download: 61.95 MB at Sendspace, 30.71 MB at Sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

the one where Leia Organa is more badass than you
title: all the rowboats
fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
music: Regina Spektor
length: 3:07
summary: {Leia character study} see them hanging in their gold frames for forever and a day
download: 64.70 MB at Sendspace, 25.96 MB at Sendspace
( streaming behind the cut )

the one where Han Solo is a total softy
title: firewood
fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
music: Regina Spektor
length: 3:16
summary: {Han character study} everyone knows you're going to stay, so you might as well start trying
download: 52.10 MB at Sendspace, 26.80 MB at Sendspace

( streaming behind the cut )

It's sort of weirdly hilarious that apparently everyone I know in fanspace is having the exact same problem that I am - everyone's in input-only mode, reading instead of writing, feeling quiet and disconnected. And we all seem to keep going around apologizing to each other for it! I'm sure some of it is seasonal - it's a sleepy time of year. And I've been extra sleepy, because I guess they weren't kidding about the drowsiness side-effects of my antidepressant. I'm sleeping like a champion, and also having dreams that I'm consciously aware of, which is weird for me. I've never been a big dreamer; I'm sure I have them, because everyone does, but I've always gone dark in sleep, not dreaming or even moving much. Now I'm having - I guess dreams the way most people do, random and weirdly heavy, and it's weird dealing with. Night before last I fell asleep listening to explicit Fraser/RayK porn and dreamed that I had a dick. It was freaking wild.

I'm really falling hard for due South. But interestingly, I really needed the fandom to mediate it. I think I was initially frustrated with the show's, ah, gentleness - I like shows that play hard, emotionally speaking, that go for the big buttons and mash them hard, and dS does this thing that I find really frustrating where it walks up to the big buttons and just sort of tickles them. But, relaxing into it - oh god is it touching some of my major buttons. I'm kind of vibrating back and forth between dS and Slings and Arrows - and oh god and all his angels, Slings and Arrows. I'm so in love with this show. So, so, so in love. I'd heard of it before, but I had a fanbrain fail and somehow thought that it starred David Tennant, and that was why fandom was into it. And I'm not a Who girl, so I thought it was not for me. But oh it is, it feels like it was made for me. The third season in particular - Charles Kingman is so familiar to me, so like my own wonderful brilliant failing actress grandmother, and it feels really good to watch him with Geoffrey, to see that relationship from the outside as well as experiencing it from the inside.

Anyway, I think the antidepressant is doing me good, even if I feel a little over-tranquilized - it's easier for me to work through sleepiness than it was to work through anxiety. I'm getting going on my dissertation prospectus, which is terrifying but it's so nice to be back to writing, making an argument with words. All quiet on the midwestern front.

Internets, bless me, for I have gafiated. It has been three weeks since my last update. I needed to disconnect for a little bit after the holiday, but now I'mma try to hook back in.

Which means that I never got round to posting my 2012 fic roundup, or linking to my yuletide fic. So here's that:

for Yuletide, I wrote:
Other creatures that have eyes (4090 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Boomer/Athena, Apollo/Starbuck
Characters: Boomer, Lieutenant Athena, Dietra, Captain Apollo, Lieutenant Starbuck, Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh
Summary:

Boomer didn't often see the stars this way, although he flew among them daily; in a Viper space was segmented by tylinium plates and dark duralumin bars, broken into panes like oldfashioned glass windows.

I had a fun writing year, if a bit stop-and-go. (I'm not going to do a link list here, because I think the AO3 has started to obviate that convention; it's no longer hard to find an author's recent output listed chronologically!) I wrote in a megafandom for the first time since forever, and had awesome fun with the Avengers. That was awesome, I should write some more of that sometime. I think I'm most happy with Alive in your blood now, which said some things about the Vorkosigan saga and family and honor and progressive politics that are really important to me. Final fic stats: 11 stories, 33,552 words.

I also learned how to podfic, and am working on the vidding thing, so yay for new skillsets!

Goals for this next year: to finish and post some of the really large quantities of Prydain and original Star Wars words that have been accumulating on my hard drive.