the problem of an ending
Jul. 13th, 2019 05:01 pmRead The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown yesterday; did read the entire thing in a day, staying up late to do so, so I suppose that's some recommendation.
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no subject
Jan. 9th, 2019 11:53 am(the president is deranged, oh my god ...)
Short fiction rec: The Good Guy, a story from the author of Cat Person - a brutal takedown of male privilege, depicting how easy it is for white straight men to slide into dehumanization, manipulation, and abuse of women. 1st person male pov.
Short fiction rec: The Good Guy, a story from the author of Cat Person - a brutal takedown of male privilege, depicting how easy it is for white straight men to slide into dehumanization, manipulation, and abuse of women. 1st person male pov.
meeja consumed
Jan. 3rd, 2019 04:05 pmWatched Roma with my family over the holiday. It was very beautiful, a very intense and high-detail sensory experience ... other parts, though, felt very inaccessible. I felt like I understood it better when I read that it was based on Cuaron's memories from his childhood, because it very much conveys the caring detachment of children toward their caregivers' griefs. The film loves Cleo, and cares about her, but it's a child and it does not understand; and Cleo, also, seems not to understand. I was somewhat frustrated, by the film's end, that clearer understanding did not come; but it was an obvious artistic choice not to give it, for sure.
I re-read the first half of Parable of the Sower, and then had to take the book back to the library -- and I'm not sure if I'm going to try again to make it through. This is my first return to Butler since I first read her as a college student. She's a figure that I have huge respect for, as a literary giant and a woman of genius. I didn't like PotS in college, because it was just so heavy. I went back to it now very deliberately, because for all that I didn't like it fannishly, as a work of predictive fiction it's continuing to be uncomfortably on point. If anything, my initial problems with the book are magnified -- it's so powerful and well-written and interesting and real, and it just drains away all my hope for human existence, and it gets hard to go on. I'm also not real into the religious angle, and that doesn't help. It makes me see life as so tissue-paper fragile, civilization as such a courtly lie -- and it's not wrong, not wrong at all, but a person can only bear so much looking directly into the sun. Maybe I need to try another starting point w Butler all together?
I re-read the first half of Parable of the Sower, and then had to take the book back to the library -- and I'm not sure if I'm going to try again to make it through. This is my first return to Butler since I first read her as a college student. She's a figure that I have huge respect for, as a literary giant and a woman of genius. I didn't like PotS in college, because it was just so heavy. I went back to it now very deliberately, because for all that I didn't like it fannishly, as a work of predictive fiction it's continuing to be uncomfortably on point. If anything, my initial problems with the book are magnified -- it's so powerful and well-written and interesting and real, and it just drains away all my hope for human existence, and it gets hard to go on. I'm also not real into the religious angle, and that doesn't help. It makes me see life as so tissue-paper fragile, civilization as such a courtly lie -- and it's not wrong, not wrong at all, but a person can only bear so much looking directly into the sun. Maybe I need to try another starting point w Butler all together?
no subject
Dec. 15th, 2018 01:17 amDoing pretty well, all things. Finding life here in Uptown very easy, much easier than the hard winter in the cold rural world I'd been planning on getting through. Emotionally, I'm continuing to process and move forward. I am continuing to find myself grateful for my current ease, grateful to be enjoying it, to have the means and education to escape.
Going to feminist book club; ready Sady Doyle's Trainwreck, next up This Bridge Called My Back. Read the first half of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me on the bus to my sib's this evening (two things struck me; the epigraph from Baldwin, elliptically describing the aftermath of a lynching, that made me stop hard; and a bit when Coates is writing about his response to an image of a black child hugging a police officer, and Coates doesn't identify him by name but I remember, I remember Devonte Hart cause he's dead now, his crazy white mother drove his whole family off a cliff. hoo.)
Working a lot, and making money. Feeling lots of existential angst about if I'm doing good enough or not. The impermanence and instability of my situation seems to me to be a great defect -- although, now that I write it down, it's also been one of the reasons why I've gotten through all the upset in my personal life as easily as I have, because my work is portable. Hmm.
Listening to Louisa May Alcott. Read a great editorial in the New Yorker (eta: link!) about Jo/Bhaer as daddy kink, with specific implications of Bronson Alcott; the essayist didn't address it, but I increasingly see Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom as id-tastic daddy/little girl obedience and reward fantasies. It makes the moralism easier to bear; like the argument people make about The Taming of the Shrew.
Going to feminist book club; ready Sady Doyle's Trainwreck, next up This Bridge Called My Back. Read the first half of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me on the bus to my sib's this evening (two things struck me; the epigraph from Baldwin, elliptically describing the aftermath of a lynching, that made me stop hard; and a bit when Coates is writing about his response to an image of a black child hugging a police officer, and Coates doesn't identify him by name but I remember, I remember Devonte Hart cause he's dead now, his crazy white mother drove his whole family off a cliff. hoo.)
Working a lot, and making money. Feeling lots of existential angst about if I'm doing good enough or not. The impermanence and instability of my situation seems to me to be a great defect -- although, now that I write it down, it's also been one of the reasons why I've gotten through all the upset in my personal life as easily as I have, because my work is portable. Hmm.
Listening to Louisa May Alcott. Read a great editorial in the New Yorker (eta: link!) about Jo/Bhaer as daddy kink, with specific implications of Bronson Alcott; the essayist didn't address it, but I increasingly see Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom as id-tastic daddy/little girl obedience and reward fantasies. It makes the moralism easier to bear; like the argument people make about The Taming of the Shrew.
Books recently read
Aug. 14th, 2018 09:37 am-Right now I'm about halfway through Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, a very heavily stylized short novel about a jazz musician losing his mind in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. The prose is pretty thick; it reminds me of Mrs Dalloway a bit, the falling into the fragmented mind ... but I guess it's strange to my ear that a novel so vividly written about Black characters also sounds so very ... formal? I'm enjoying the cameo from the historical photographer Bellocq; I taught Natasha Trethewey's book of poems Bellocq's Ophelia a few times, and it was entertaining to see another set of descriptions of the Storyville milieux, and of Bellocq's artwork.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Dragons in the Waters. A belated entry in my "reread all the Kairos books" endeavor. I always liked this one as a kid. Poly, Charles and Calvin are on a ship heading to a mystical lake in Venezuela. There's a shipboard hearse and a portrait of Simon Bolivar. That stuff I still very much enjoyed, but I was perturbed by the strong vein of US Southern exceptionalism that runs through the book; at the beginning, Poly and Charles make shipboard friends with a little boy who is the last scion of a "happy plantation" family, where, we are to understand, the slaves really were all well-treated. The descendants of the plantation-owners have become poor, and have to live in an outbuilding, displaced from their patrimony. The boy and his grandmother are presented as tragic and aspirational figures; and there's a tense bit when Poly and Charles, having protested that slavery was, in fact, bad, get lectured about how, actually, the North perfidiously laid waste to the South, where things were not, in fact, so bad. It feels like the author is advancing that opinion pretty uncritically; it was a moment of seeing L'Engle, who I've admired since I was little, as a very imperfect theorist of her chosen sphere of human moral history.
As always, I tremendously enjoy glimpses at Calvin as an adult; he gets a much fuller adult arc than any of the other WIT cast, and it's hugely satisfying -- even if I am still always rubbernecking around trying to catch a glimpse of my Meg, who's almost always relegated to the background. I don't know that I'd recommend the book; it's very much a retread of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, still with the fantasy racism and colonialism issues but without the benefit of that amazing unicorn.
-Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The first time I've reread this one since it was first recommended to me when I was twelve. Then, I was very focused on the precocious girl genius character; my life experiences at twelve were pretty narrow. I enjoyed the book a lot more at thirty-two; I can better appreciate the beautiful and aching human symmetries in the novel's various driven and inchoate characters. All of these people have something very urgent and true inside of them, but they can't seem to communicate it to other human beings; when they try, it all goes wrong. They pour themselves out to a Deaf man, who lives to visit his somewhat uncaring institutionalized best friend, the loss of whom leads to his suicide. All these good people, trying so hard and failing so utterly!
Stylistically, the thing I thought about most was the ethics of the author's work with communication forms from othered communities of which she was not a member. There's a strong engagement with the mechanisms of Singer's communication, from the feeling of sign language in his hands to his rare uses of a pencil. Also, several of the prominent characters are African-American, and McCullers is interested in, and reproduces, their speech, attending to who uses AAVE and who does not. There was something uncomfortable to me at first in seeing a white author reproduce AAVE so broadly; I wasn't sure it wasn't mocking. As I got more deeply into McCuller's analysis of Black language, it became clear that she was engaging in good faith, with deep insight. I suppose it's her insight that I marveled at most. But I don't know that it would fly in work published now; I do think it would be perceived as exploitative. Still, the confrontation between the passionate Marxist white man and the Black doctor with dreams of uplift for his people, where they totally fail to reach each other, felt very, very contemporary. It reminded me of arguing with my father before the 2016 election; in a way that helped me step outside my anger and see more clearly my father's own good intentions, but also the impossibility of communicating political and ethical truths in a world where we are already all caught up in our own tragedies.
-Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
After I finished THIALH, I wanted more -- so I picked up McCullers' slim second novel, which has a much tighter and more claustrophobic focus than her first. Reflections takes place within a few days on a military base in the south; there are a bunch of men and women in various stages of relationships, desire, and neglect; there's sexy horse whipping and crashing through the forest; and a portrait of a sensitive progressive woman going mad surrounded by people who do not understand her or share her values, which back this spring was touching to me in ways I'm only now feeling fully cognizant of.
-Madeleine L'Engle, Dragons in the Waters. A belated entry in my "reread all the Kairos books" endeavor. I always liked this one as a kid. Poly, Charles and Calvin are on a ship heading to a mystical lake in Venezuela. There's a shipboard hearse and a portrait of Simon Bolivar. That stuff I still very much enjoyed, but I was perturbed by the strong vein of US Southern exceptionalism that runs through the book; at the beginning, Poly and Charles make shipboard friends with a little boy who is the last scion of a "happy plantation" family, where, we are to understand, the slaves really were all well-treated. The descendants of the plantation-owners have become poor, and have to live in an outbuilding, displaced from their patrimony. The boy and his grandmother are presented as tragic and aspirational figures; and there's a tense bit when Poly and Charles, having protested that slavery was, in fact, bad, get lectured about how, actually, the North perfidiously laid waste to the South, where things were not, in fact, so bad. It feels like the author is advancing that opinion pretty uncritically; it was a moment of seeing L'Engle, who I've admired since I was little, as a very imperfect theorist of her chosen sphere of human moral history.
As always, I tremendously enjoy glimpses at Calvin as an adult; he gets a much fuller adult arc than any of the other WIT cast, and it's hugely satisfying -- even if I am still always rubbernecking around trying to catch a glimpse of my Meg, who's almost always relegated to the background. I don't know that I'd recommend the book; it's very much a retread of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, still with the fantasy racism and colonialism issues but without the benefit of that amazing unicorn.
-Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The first time I've reread this one since it was first recommended to me when I was twelve. Then, I was very focused on the precocious girl genius character; my life experiences at twelve were pretty narrow. I enjoyed the book a lot more at thirty-two; I can better appreciate the beautiful and aching human symmetries in the novel's various driven and inchoate characters. All of these people have something very urgent and true inside of them, but they can't seem to communicate it to other human beings; when they try, it all goes wrong. They pour themselves out to a Deaf man, who lives to visit his somewhat uncaring institutionalized best friend, the loss of whom leads to his suicide. All these good people, trying so hard and failing so utterly!
Stylistically, the thing I thought about most was the ethics of the author's work with communication forms from othered communities of which she was not a member. There's a strong engagement with the mechanisms of Singer's communication, from the feeling of sign language in his hands to his rare uses of a pencil. Also, several of the prominent characters are African-American, and McCullers is interested in, and reproduces, their speech, attending to who uses AAVE and who does not. There was something uncomfortable to me at first in seeing a white author reproduce AAVE so broadly; I wasn't sure it wasn't mocking. As I got more deeply into McCuller's analysis of Black language, it became clear that she was engaging in good faith, with deep insight. I suppose it's her insight that I marveled at most. But I don't know that it would fly in work published now; I do think it would be perceived as exploitative. Still, the confrontation between the passionate Marxist white man and the Black doctor with dreams of uplift for his people, where they totally fail to reach each other, felt very, very contemporary. It reminded me of arguing with my father before the 2016 election; in a way that helped me step outside my anger and see more clearly my father's own good intentions, but also the impossibility of communicating political and ethical truths in a world where we are already all caught up in our own tragedies.
-Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
After I finished THIALH, I wanted more -- so I picked up McCullers' slim second novel, which has a much tighter and more claustrophobic focus than her first. Reflections takes place within a few days on a military base in the south; there are a bunch of men and women in various stages of relationships, desire, and neglect; there's sexy horse whipping and crashing through the forest; and a portrait of a sensitive progressive woman going mad surrounded by people who do not understand her or share her values, which back this spring was touching to me in ways I'm only now feeling fully cognizant of.
nothing's gonna change my world
Nov. 21st, 2015 10:55 pmI'm not planning on seeing Crimson Peak myself, despite my lasting love for del Toro, because it just doesn't look like my sort of thing (also because i walked out of Mia Wasikowska's Jane Eyre and i might still be bearing a bit of a grudge). But the talk around it has been helpful for me in clarifying something about my gendered investments in the gothic.( Read more... )
I forget how much I dislike reading historical!KingArthur scholarship until I try it out again, ugh. It's all that thing in "The Monsters and the Critics" - the questions that are being pursued in the research are overwhelmingly documentarian-historicist when what i want is mythopoetics and sacred/social anthropology, I don't care if Arthur was real or not I just want to talk about who was telling what stories when and with what meanings -
I was trying to find out about Arthur, land-magic, and British-Isles colonialism. I want to know if I can legitimately make the land of the Thames valley react to Bran Davies as the rightful king come again, being that he's not English but Welsh. I would be confident having the Welsh mountains react that way to Bran, and the Thames valley would absolutely react to say T.H. White's Arthur, who isn't Welsh at all - but I'm not entirely clear on how it works, having a Welsh king function as a unification figure for Britain, when Wales has had a subordinated position in the British Empire since basically forever.
T.H. White's is the version of the canon that I know the best, and it doesn't deal with that aspect, being pretty post-Tennysonian in its characterization of Arthur and the meaning of his reign; and I mean I've also got a bunch of MZB bouncing around in the back of my head, but that's not likely to help me much in terms of either clear politics or good history. I turned up a book by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose work I've liked before, on the postcolonial Arthur that I mean to read, and I've had Graham Robb's book on sacral Britain on loan from my dad for about forever; but unless I turn up something explicit to prohibit it, I do think that Susan Cooper gives me enough in-text justification to cross British regional folklore traditions, if not to completely intermingle them. I feel like DiR very much lets particular traditions wash over each of the books in the series, leaving behind a series of overlapping residua. There's the never-explained Bran/Herne connection, for one thing, to justify the linkage; Herne is very solidly Thames-region-specific, and Bran Davies has his eyes.
I was trying to find out about Arthur, land-magic, and British-Isles colonialism. I want to know if I can legitimately make the land of the Thames valley react to Bran Davies as the rightful king come again, being that he's not English but Welsh. I would be confident having the Welsh mountains react that way to Bran, and the Thames valley would absolutely react to say T.H. White's Arthur, who isn't Welsh at all - but I'm not entirely clear on how it works, having a Welsh king function as a unification figure for Britain, when Wales has had a subordinated position in the British Empire since basically forever.
T.H. White's is the version of the canon that I know the best, and it doesn't deal with that aspect, being pretty post-Tennysonian in its characterization of Arthur and the meaning of his reign; and I mean I've also got a bunch of MZB bouncing around in the back of my head, but that's not likely to help me much in terms of either clear politics or good history. I turned up a book by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose work I've liked before, on the postcolonial Arthur that I mean to read, and I've had Graham Robb's book on sacral Britain on loan from my dad for about forever; but unless I turn up something explicit to prohibit it, I do think that Susan Cooper gives me enough in-text justification to cross British regional folklore traditions, if not to completely intermingle them. I feel like DiR very much lets particular traditions wash over each of the books in the series, leaving behind a series of overlapping residua. There's the never-explained Bran/Herne connection, for one thing, to justify the linkage; Herne is very solidly Thames-region-specific, and Bran Davies has his eyes.
don't act like you forgot
Jul. 11th, 2015 09:21 pmtwo things make a post:
-I'm starting a first watch of Lois & Clark; i hear it gives good het, and Dean Cain is a toothsome fucking morsel. 20 minutes into the first ep and I'm (mostly) hooked: the 90s gender stuff is egregious, but the Due South-y/Quantum Leap-y sugar and social responsibility vibe is v. nice. And also damn the old lady reciting Chekhov in the condemned theatre is giving me all kinds of feelings about my own grandmother and maybe choking me up a little.
-Apparently the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman this week is actually going to be really exciting? ( could be spoilery i guess? )
(there's going to be so much scholarship. like, easily a decade of publications. a big first wave in a year or so. I can't wait.)
-I'm starting a first watch of Lois & Clark; i hear it gives good het, and Dean Cain is a toothsome fucking morsel. 20 minutes into the first ep and I'm (mostly) hooked: the 90s gender stuff is egregious, but the Due South-y/Quantum Leap-y sugar and social responsibility vibe is v. nice. And also damn the old lady reciting Chekhov in the condemned theatre is giving me all kinds of feelings about my own grandmother and maybe choking me up a little.
-Apparently the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman this week is actually going to be really exciting? ( could be spoilery i guess? )
(there's going to be so much scholarship. like, easily a decade of publications. a big first wave in a year or so. I can't wait.)
There doesn't seem to be an attested link, not one that I could find in a cursory googling, anyway - but I've just been amazingly startled by something. I'm working on an essay about Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel El reino de este mundo, a magical-realism work about the Haitian Revolution, and toward the end of it Ti Noel, the former-slave narrator, is starting to reach real wisdom; and he begins to be able to turn himself into animals; and he disguises himself as an ant, but it reminds him too much of carrying heavy burdens as a slave; and he disguises himself as a goose, . And I got to that bit of the text and went, holy fucking shit that's The Once and Future King, contrapuntal transformations into ants and wild geese as the culmination of a lesson in political wisdom.
I've been thinking a lot about White, the last month or so, so I might be reading too much in to things. The ants and the wild geese are a special pair of adventures, though - they're the ones that were translocated from "The Book of Merlyn" back into "The Sword and the Stone" for publication. In the full recombined narrative - which is the one I've been thinking about - they're the hope all-unlooked-for that comes at the very end: when Arthur sits in his tent at Camlann, reflecting on the failure of the table and his reign, Merlyn comes back to him and explains that he forgot to teach the Wart two key lessons as a child. He hadn't turned him into an ant, letting him experience fascism, or a wild goose, showing him the purity of anarchism. And Merlyn gives the old king those transformations, and it lets Arthur have this fucking essential moment of final character development where he gets angry about what he's sacrificed for his ideals and fantasizes about walking away and then chooses to go die for his people but with a lighter heart.
I've been thinking a lot about White, the last month or so, so I might be reading too much in to things. The ants and the wild geese are a special pair of adventures, though - they're the ones that were translocated from "The Book of Merlyn" back into "The Sword and the Stone" for publication. In the full recombined narrative - which is the one I've been thinking about - they're the hope all-unlooked-for that comes at the very end: when Arthur sits in his tent at Camlann, reflecting on the failure of the table and his reign, Merlyn comes back to him and explains that he forgot to teach the Wart two key lessons as a child. He hadn't turned him into an ant, letting him experience fascism, or a wild goose, showing him the purity of anarchism. And Merlyn gives the old king those transformations, and it lets Arthur have this fucking essential moment of final character development where he gets angry about what he's sacrificed for his ideals and fantasizes about walking away and then chooses to go die for his people but with a lighter heart.
hold me close, the sky is breaking
Sep. 18th, 2013 04:13 pmI'm looking for stories, either fic or books, and wondered if y'all could help me. I want stories about the part of loss that happens before death, stories about choosing to be with the dying. But I don't want maudlin death fic, or anything about romantic love reaching beyond death. The only story that I can think of that does this the way I want is ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sahiya and lightgetsin's Vorkosiverse fic What Passing Bells, with Ivan caring for Miles on his long way down. I love that part of that fic, more than I can say. And there's maybe something of what I'm looking for in the movie Chocolat, with Armande: her grandson, Vianne, knowing that she will be dead soon and being with her in that knowledge.
I'd really appreciate help finding these kinds of stories; I'm feeling in real need of them right now. The death can happen or not happen, but I want stories about the feeling of its inevitability, of the nearness of death, the approach.
sahiya and lightgetsin's Vorkosiverse fic What Passing Bells, with Ivan caring for Miles on his long way down. I love that part of that fic, more than I can say. And there's maybe something of what I'm looking for in the movie Chocolat, with Armande: her grandson, Vianne, knowing that she will be dead soon and being with her in that knowledge.I'd really appreciate help finding these kinds of stories; I'm feeling in real need of them right now. The death can happen or not happen, but I want stories about the feeling of its inevitability, of the nearness of death, the approach.
on an island in the blue bay
Aug. 4th, 2013 03:12 pmHaven't posted in a bit - I've been up north with my parents, enjoying the lovely film festival with which Michael Moore has seen fit to gift my hometown. Finally seeing Much Ado About Nothing this evening, which makes me glad I waited - because it will be lovely to get to see it with my family in the lovely restored State Theater of my native downtown.
Went gliding with my father for the second time last week, and I still really really like it. Being up in the sky is lovely, and there's no noise or anything, because no engines. I envy my sister for living so close to home - tho of course she's not nearly as in to it, and despite her opportunity has only been up once. And half the fun is getting da's lessons on the mechanics of flight, which I could listen to him talk about all day. So fucking soothing. So much like rereading The Once and Future King.
Read Kameron Hurley's God's War and Infidel, which I enjoyed TREMENDOUSLY, especially the second book. I'm a long-time reader of her blog, and it was really fun getting to see her work in print. Waiting with excitement for Rapture.
Have been having thoughts about psych meds, courtesy of mama; I continue to find all the - I think five now - varieties of antidepressant I've taken fairly ineffective? I mean, I think I'm better off than I was a year ago, but I feel like a lot of that's down to other things, like me being able to run around outside more and also remembering more frequently that I am not the ubermensch and that there's no shame in resting when you need it. Kind of want to go off meds altogether, but I'm not sure if that's a bad impulse. Either way, I won't do anything without seeing my shrink, obvs, but the guy who prescribes for me is kind of a dink - very superior about traditional medicine, told me that not smoking mary jane would solve all my problems, has in two separate sessions now made cracks about me being a "big girl," fuck you very much asshat.
Went gliding with my father for the second time last week, and I still really really like it. Being up in the sky is lovely, and there's no noise or anything, because no engines. I envy my sister for living so close to home - tho of course she's not nearly as in to it, and despite her opportunity has only been up once. And half the fun is getting da's lessons on the mechanics of flight, which I could listen to him talk about all day. So fucking soothing. So much like rereading The Once and Future King.
Read Kameron Hurley's God's War and Infidel, which I enjoyed TREMENDOUSLY, especially the second book. I'm a long-time reader of her blog, and it was really fun getting to see her work in print. Waiting with excitement for Rapture.
Have been having thoughts about psych meds, courtesy of mama; I continue to find all the - I think five now - varieties of antidepressant I've taken fairly ineffective? I mean, I think I'm better off than I was a year ago, but I feel like a lot of that's down to other things, like me being able to run around outside more and also remembering more frequently that I am not the ubermensch and that there's no shame in resting when you need it. Kind of want to go off meds altogether, but I'm not sure if that's a bad impulse. Either way, I won't do anything without seeing my shrink, obvs, but the guy who prescribes for me is kind of a dink - very superior about traditional medicine, told me that not smoking mary jane would solve all my problems, has in two separate sessions now made cracks about me being a "big girl," fuck you very much asshat.
ain't no use in turning on your light babe
Jun. 5th, 2013 05:25 pmWednesday reading: currently vibrating between Josephine Butler's anti-CD Acts pamphlets, which are tremendous, and a reread of the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy, which is actually a pretty logical drift from Star Trek's whole Age of Sail IN SPAAAAACE! thing. Unlike I want to say most people, though, I started with the Bounty Trilogy and picked up Trek later. Nordoff and Hall, the authors, are two of my father's pet figures; he has all their books, and will go on at length if prompted about their quest for Robert Louis Stevenson. Also just picked up yhlee's new anthology Conservation of Shadows at the library, but as I haven't finished the first story yet all I have to say is that her prose and imagery are typically gorgeous and majestic. I'm looking forward to the rest of it.
meme from everywhere: Give me a fandom and I'll tell you
my favourite female character
my favourite male character
my favourite book/season/etc
my favourite episode/issue/chapter, etc
my favourite cast member
my favourite relationship
a character I'd die defending
a character I just can't sympathize with
a character I grew to love
my anti otp
yhlee's new anthology Conservation of Shadows at the library, but as I haven't finished the first story yet all I have to say is that her prose and imagery are typically gorgeous and majestic. I'm looking forward to the rest of it.meme from everywhere: Give me a fandom and I'll tell you
my favourite female character
my favourite male character
my favourite book/season/etc
my favourite episode/issue/chapter, etc
my favourite cast member
my favourite relationship
a character I'd die defending
a character I just can't sympathize with
a character I grew to love
my anti otp
where no man has gone
May. 16th, 2013 11:50 pmI've been really rubbish crazy this week - changed the dosage of my antidepressant and it doesn't seem to be agreeing with me, to the degree that I'm wondering if the lower dose I was taking all last spring wasn't also messing with me, just more subtly. Lord knows it was not a great spring. I have an appointment Monday, so right now I'm just kind of trying to hang tight and get through and working assiduously to distract myself through the consumption of narrative media. I read the first 160 pages of Dan Simmons' The Terror, because musesfool recently mentioned it, and the idea of a supernatural monster story about the (still living! but only just barely!) hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea sounded too good to pass up. It is so far eminently readable, although the pastiche style badly wants to be Patrick O'Brian and just really isn't.
But really the thing that I wanted to post about - I've been casting about for a show to cuddle up with, trying various rewatches. And I just now figured out what I need, and I'm so excited. Ladies and ... ladies, I am now about to embark on my first rewatch of "Star Trek: Voyager" since it first aired when I was nine.
musesfool recently mentioned it, and the idea of a supernatural monster story about the (still living! but only just barely!) hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea sounded too good to pass up. It is so far eminently readable, although the pastiche style badly wants to be Patrick O'Brian and just really isn't.But really the thing that I wanted to post about - I've been casting about for a show to cuddle up with, trying various rewatches. And I just now figured out what I need, and I'm so excited. Ladies and ... ladies, I am now about to embark on my first rewatch of "Star Trek: Voyager" since it first aired when I was nine.
I'm warning you I'm weightless
Apr. 17th, 2013 02:33 pmWelp - 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
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
the past seems so far away
Mar. 27th, 2013 01:25 pmWhat 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.
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.
{tred tired semester teaching exam list argh} - so pretty much the usual. Except I'm pretty sure that when George Gissing told me that "there are half a million more women than men in this happy country of ours," i.e. Victorian Britain, he was either wrong, lying, or doing some really weird shit with population statistics. Because. That can't possibly be true.
And, for a change, I am writing words that are fictiony! Which is making me so, so, so happy. And, yanno, maybe someday I'll even finish a fic and I can do that thing I used to do where I posted the words on the internet and people read them. In the meantime, meme! Ganked from everywhere, idek:
Pick a number and I'll answer the question.
1 - Your current OTP
2 - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind
3 - A pairing you have never liked and probably never will
4 - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t
5 - Have you added anything stupid/cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what
6 - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom
7 - Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it
8 - Do you prefer characters from real action series or anime series
9 - Has the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why
10 - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr [let's substitute LJ here for a more meaningful question in my case]
11 - How do you feel about the other people in your current fandom
12 - Your favorite fanartist/author gives you one request, what do you ask for
13 - Your favorite fanart or fanartist
14 - Your favorite fanfiction or fanauthor
15 - Choose a song at random, which OTP does it remind you of
16 - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)
17 - A ship you’ve abandoned and why
18 - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships
19 - Show us an example of your personal headcanon
20 - Do you remember what your first fanwork was?
21 - Self-rec: What's your favorite fanwork you've created?
22 - Are you one of those fans who can’t watch anything without shipping
23 - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms
24 - 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms
25 - A fandom you’re in but have no ships from
26 - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go
And, for a change, I am writing words that are fictiony! Which is making me so, so, so happy. And, yanno, maybe someday I'll even finish a fic and I can do that thing I used to do where I posted the words on the internet and people read them. In the meantime, meme! Ganked from everywhere, idek:
Pick a number and I'll answer the question.
1 - Your current OTP
2 - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind
3 - A pairing you have never liked and probably never will
4 - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t
5 - Have you added anything stupid/cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what
6 - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom
7 - Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it
8 - Do you prefer characters from real action series or anime series
9 - Has the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why
10 - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr [let's substitute LJ here for a more meaningful question in my case]
11 - How do you feel about the other people in your current fandom
12 - Your favorite fanartist/author gives you one request, what do you ask for
13 - Your favorite fanart or fanartist
14 - Your favorite fanfiction or fanauthor
15 - Choose a song at random, which OTP does it remind you of
16 - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)
17 - A ship you’ve abandoned and why
18 - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships
19 - Show us an example of your personal headcanon
20 - Do you remember what your first fanwork was?
21 - Self-rec: What's your favorite fanwork you've created?
22 - Are you one of those fans who can’t watch anything without shipping
23 - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms
24 - 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms
25 - A fandom you’re in but have no ships from
26 - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go
here I am a rabbit-hearted girl
Jul. 22nd, 2012 06:44 pmOh my god, you guys, I just finished reading through Freud's "Dora" case history in full, and I don't think I'll ever feel clean again. I knew there was some bad shit behind this one - I read about it when I was researching psychoanalytic perspectives on father-daughter incest for a paper on the Donkeyskin fairy tales - but I wasn't prepared for just how horribly obvious it would be that Freud was denying this girl's experience of rape and using her to flatter his own egotism, as well as to bolster his psychiatric career.
She's eighteen, she says she was propositioned, touched, kissed, by a friend of her father's. She's close to her daddy; he denies her rape, says she's making it all up. He brings her to Freud; Freud determines that she wanted to fuck the friend, that she wants to fuck her daddy, that she wants to fuck Freud himself, and that she masturbates. Also, he decides that she's abnormal for reacting to a man's advance with repulsion, even though she didn't ask for it, didn't consent to it, didn't want it. It's sickening. Utterly utterly sick. I want to scream and yell and punch something and rend him limb from limb and just. Can I kill them all, please.
I ... kind of don't know what to do with the mass of my own anger and repulsion. I've also got "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" on my list, and I've read a lot of that one and know I like it better, know it's one of the ones where Freud is more smart than stupid, but I don't think I can keep reading him right now. If I hadn't been reading on my computer, if I'd had a book, I think I might have torn it down the middle.
I kind of actually want to go buy a copy so I can do just that. Instead I'm going to go read Toril Moi's critique of the case history for some second-hand cleansing and catharsis.
She's eighteen, she says she was propositioned, touched, kissed, by a friend of her father's. She's close to her daddy; he denies her rape, says she's making it all up. He brings her to Freud; Freud determines that she wanted to fuck the friend, that she wants to fuck her daddy, that she wants to fuck Freud himself, and that she masturbates. Also, he decides that she's abnormal for reacting to a man's advance with repulsion, even though she didn't ask for it, didn't consent to it, didn't want it. It's sickening. Utterly utterly sick. I want to scream and yell and punch something and rend him limb from limb and just. Can I kill them all, please.
I ... kind of don't know what to do with the mass of my own anger and repulsion. I've also got "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" on my list, and I've read a lot of that one and know I like it better, know it's one of the ones where Freud is more smart than stupid, but I don't think I can keep reading him right now. If I hadn't been reading on my computer, if I'd had a book, I think I might have torn it down the middle.
I kind of actually want to go buy a copy so I can do just that. Instead I'm going to go read Toril Moi's critique of the case history for some second-hand cleansing and catharsis.
I'm finally reading Elaine Scarry's "On Beauty and Being Just," - one of the ones I've been pretending to have read for years - and, idek, guys, I kind of hate it. Like, the prose is gorgeous, of course, hers always is, but I feel like she's strawmanning all over the place. I'll agree that extrapolating from feminist critiques of beauty to argue that, say, a vase is negatively reified when looked at is silly as anything. But similarly, I feel like extrapolating from a vase or a flower to human aesthetics is just as wrongheaded, and that's what she keeps doing. The feminist critique doesn't object to beauty qua beauty, it objects to the weaponization of beauty in the service of racism, classism, and misogyny. So I just. Don't know what to do with this book. And am frustrated.
some linkspamming:
oursin, 'Adequate' and 'competent' are not, in fact, pejoratives - this conversation was something I really needed to read. When I was in fifth grade, my parents convinced me that even top marks were meaningless, because all my As meant was that I was doing better than the other kids, not that I was working at my own maximum potential. So I just possibly have some issues.
Abigail Nussbaum reviews the Avengers - everything she said, please.
new Regina Spektor Album with streaming option!
eta: Garland Grey, Buffy Vs. The Beige Demon: Good Riddance to Riley Finn: Most modern television shows display their enlightenment by unleashing paper sexists at their heroine and allowing us to take the clobbering of these shadows as a triumph over sexism. Which, in the unscripted world, is too often not a douchebag saying “You can’t cuz you’re a girl” but is instead someone internalizing that belief and using their power to punish you for it. This scenario creates a false image in the culture of “What Sexism Looks Like” which men use to calibrate their understanding of misogyny. Which means anything less blatant than THAT is just the moaning of people who can’t compete AND once the show has labeled itself NOT SEXIST, it is free to deal in subtler, more insidious forms of sexism. Also with lovely Classic Trek exempla.
some linkspamming:
oursin, 'Adequate' and 'competent' are not, in fact, pejoratives - this conversation was something I really needed to read. When I was in fifth grade, my parents convinced me that even top marks were meaningless, because all my As meant was that I was doing better than the other kids, not that I was working at my own maximum potential. So I just possibly have some issues.Abigail Nussbaum reviews the Avengers - everything she said, please.
new Regina Spektor Album with streaming option!
eta: Garland Grey, Buffy Vs. The Beige Demon: Good Riddance to Riley Finn: Most modern television shows display their enlightenment by unleashing paper sexists at their heroine and allowing us to take the clobbering of these shadows as a triumph over sexism. Which, in the unscripted world, is too often not a douchebag saying “You can’t cuz you’re a girl” but is instead someone internalizing that belief and using their power to punish you for it. This scenario creates a false image in the culture of “What Sexism Looks Like” which men use to calibrate their understanding of misogyny. Which means anything less blatant than THAT is just the moaning of people who can’t compete AND once the show has labeled itself NOT SEXIST, it is free to deal in subtler, more insidious forms of sexism. Also with lovely Classic Trek exempla.
