The Tradëscan Codex

I've just noticed that I have 666 books entered into LibraryThing tagged as "fiction." Huh.

(Yeah, still mostly gafiated. I'll be back eventually.)

VoicePost 208K 1:08

“Hey buddy he's on my ___ and she still I have found it. Nobody will know who that is so if you are safe to ___ bites ___ I called my own line channel” Auto-Transcribed Voice Post

Okay, that didn't quite work. Heh.

( spoilers )

It doesn't pass the Bechdel test. The idea that, in the feminist utopia, every movie will be one that Alison Bechdel (or the character from her comic strip, I guess) will want to see is kind of silly. Now, the Bechdel test is really useful to me, because it does do a fairly good job of predicting which movies I would want to see and which ones I wouldn't. And it's very possible that if Dr. Horrible hadn't been written by Joss or starred Felicia, I wouldn't have felt any need to see it, just as I'd have no interest in seeing a movie about the trenches of World War II unless someone assured me it that X (insert whatever reason I might watch a movie here). To me the logic of the Bechdel test (and it's a logic I agree with--let me make it clear right now that the people who use these moments to write off the usefulness of considering the Bechdel test or the Women in Refrigerators trope in general, e.g. in some--certainly not all--of the comments here, make me much more deeply uncomfortable than those people making feminist criticisms I don't think apply to a text I enjoyed) as a political instrument (as opposed to a tool for Alison Bechdel to decide what movie to go see) is that--and I'd hope this is uncontroversial--there are a disproportionate number of films which fail the Bechdel test when compared to the movies that have at least two male characters who have a conversation with each other about something other than a woman? For every Dr. Horrible, there should be a Welcome to the Hellmouth (which now that I think about it, is a good comparison; we don't really get into the POV of a character other than Buffy until later in the season). If we look at Joss, though, I think his ouvre since 1997 (by which I mean Buffy, Angel, Fray, Firefly, Serenity, Sugarshock, Astonishing X-Men, Runaways, and Dr. Horrible--have I missed something?) actually as a whole privileges female POVs to a much greater extent than male POVs.

The only logic that I can think of which says that no work should be produced which fails the Bechdel test and which makes sense to me is to say that since under patriarchy Bechdel-passing texts are so rare, that as a feminist it is incumbent upon Joss to produce only works which pass the text. I'm not unsympathetic to the sentiment; I do think that we can't just live our lives as if we already lived in the feminist utopia, but must sometimes go strongly (but temporarily) to the other extreme to counterbalance the evils of systemic injustice in today's world; that's what affirmative action is about. And I don't think art is excepted from that; that is, it is incumbent upon an ethical artist to write her texts in ways which may go beyond what her (patriarchally-influenced) narrative instincts might otherwise tell her for political reasons. But (and admittedly I say this from my position of privilege) when art becomes completely subject to politics, then--well, first off I think it's not just bad art but also a lousy apologetical tool. One must use the master's tools to tear down the master's house; one has to keep some of the conventional narrative structures in place while deconstructing others, or else one isn't going to be able to speak to one's audience at all. (Joss is really good at that, I think, but it does earn him a decent amount of feminist criticism.) But mostly, I think when the rallying cry becomes "You can't tell that type of story" instead of "These sorts of stories need to be told, too," then something is profoundly broken.
 
Why did he have to write Macbeth when he could have written As You Like It, or at least Cymbeline? This is the criticism I have the least respect for, especially since the people making always for some reason seem to bend over backwards to fire potshots at the BSG reboot (and a few other shows, I think? but mostly BSG) at the same time, complaining TV in general has gotten too dark and it's all Joss's fault, and that unhappy endings are not intrinsically better than happy ones, and anyone who thinks they are is an elitist snob, so there. Which, I mean, I love happy endings--this is the guy who just last week was absolutely bawling over the end of The Princess Diaries 2. But I also respect the worldview that Joss' narrative kinks come out of, and think it's right in a lot of ways--that the meaning of life is what we make of it, and that if nothing matters but what we do then . . . however it goes. Help me load the truck. I sort of want to kill that dragon. And at the end of the day, I'd take the inspiration and hope I take out of an episode like "Not Fade Away" over the artificial illusion offered by most happy endings anyday. Well, some days. If I'm not already in a bad mood, I guess. Artificial illusions are good too. They make me cry.

It doesn't bother me that some people don't enjoy what Joss has to say. That's fine. But that they seem to take that as license to disrespect it. . . . well, that does bother me.

 . . . wisdomeagle, who gave the meme the best subject line ever.

[01] -- Look up TEN of your favorite movies on IMDB.
[02] -- Click the "trivia" link in the sidebar.
[03] -- Post a fun and random bit of trivia from each film.

( Read more... )

Well, it also not only fails the Bechdel test so badly that it not not passes it but flunks it so badly it could be sleeping with the professor and still not manage a D. Which is a function of the fact that there are only four speaking parts (at least so far) in the whole thing (and NPH, Nathan, and Felicia are all perfect for the roles)--but explaining away the individual situation is always a bingo card response.

So it comes down to me that it's all about a pattern--Whedon has a good track record on feminist issues and a lousy one on race issues. After Buffy and its (admittedly multi-faceted and contradictory and self-problematizing) messages of female empowerment, and Angel and Firefly with their wonderful female characters in their ensembles even if the protagonists are male (and Firefly/Serenity is ultimately River's story at least as much as Mal's), not to mention Astonishing and Sugarshock (which I still have not read) and Runaways (which Amazon tells me is in the mail!), it's okay to me that he's telling a story with only one female character, and one who is essentially a prize to be won at that (although Felicia plays Penny wonderfully).

"This is the story I wanted to tell," is a bingo card response not because we shouldn't be telling stories like that (I mean, there are times when I think romcom formulas can be doing actual damage, but I'm not sure this one), but because it sidesteps the issue of why other stories aren't being told. The answer is always pluralism, more voices at the table, not less. Because I have a love for stories like Dr. Horrible, too, I've pretty much spent the entire time since I've gotten home work in tears, first crying through The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement and then through Superman: Doomsday, so the traditional stories are able to affect me in ways that are near and dear to my heart.

Dr. Horrible is so short--about the length of a single (non-musical) episode of Buffy--and simple that I don't think there's really enough to hang a critique on. OTOH, neither does it suddenly earn him points or turn over a new leaf when he should be working to do so. Luckily for me from my position of privilege, I can roll my eyes and just groan, "Oh, Joss" at just how white the show is and go on loving the show (almost three hours until the denouement!--how will I go on after there is no more left to look forward to?)--but not everyone is so lucky.

. . .

So once the canon is closed (or at least flat-lined, if one will be treating Commentary! as canon, which I probably won't be 'cept for RPF), and the possibility of being jossed eliminated, what Dr. Horrible femslash should I work on?

Poll #1225918 Dr. Horrible Femslash
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What is the Dr. Horrible femslash OTP?

What should Dr. Horrible be crossed over with?

ETA: I forgot to put Who on the list! I really want a Dr. Horrible/Torchwood crossover. I mean, like, badly.

Title: Please Have Snow and Mistletoe
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairings: Buffy/Faith, Dawn/Vi, Xander/Shannon, Willow/Kennedy
Summary: When Dawn returns home from college for winter break to a house she's never seen before in a city she's never been to, she finds out if it is possible to go home again.
Rating: Very mild NWS. (Think PG-13.)
Warning: Drunk sex.
A/N: There's a debt in this story to annakovsky. (More than one, actually.)

( please have snow and mistletoe )

So that was fun.

(The link, in case you've been living under a rock.)

I don't think of myself as easily spooked.

But I do need to acknowledge that whenever I get into my car at night, I always check the back seat to make sure Aaron Echolls isn't hiding there.

I can understand why Amazon.com thinks someone who owns all the Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes TPB's would be interested in Superman and the Legion of Superheroes.

But they're still wrong.

I've been sort of absent 'round here lately, but I've really dropped off the face of the planet for everybody except my place of employment; I've skipped church a couple of times lately, haven't been to my Christian discussion group in almost a month, and fallen behind in a bunch of other things too--some of you might know what some of them are. (Apologies.) I feel like I have control of my life again, though, as I slowly step back into action, so that's good. I took the advantage of the paid LibraryThing account alchemia gave me to enter my books. I now have 711 books entered--not every book I own by a longshot, but almost every book I think that's currently in my bedroom, not counting the children's books (including YA stuff like The Hardy Boys and The Boxcar Children) in boxes under my bed. I'm surprised; I thought I had more than that, even just up here. There's still a whole bunch of books in storage in the crawlspace in the basement, though. Here's a random 100 books out of that 711 under the cut:

( Read more... )

You can refresh to get a different 100 books, I believe.

"Osiris Serenity" by hermionesviolin.  "Tender is the touch of someone that you love too much" (Elizabeth's summary). Simon/River. 4:20. Original text.

I've omitted the author's notes at the beginning of some chapters.

Streaming: http://alixtii.vox.com/library/audio/6a00c225215966f21900fa968097de0003.html

Download: http://www.sendspace.com/file/58gqv1

Poll #1205159
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

If one wishes to an all-powerful genie to become a prince, and the genie makes one a prince, then would telling one's true love that one was a prince be telling the truth?

Having been made a prince by an all-powerful genie, would someone who had wished to become the most powerful sorceror in the world be able to undo that wish using magic?

Geoffrey Pullum, returning to a subject both he and I have discussed before:

I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.)

So I'm off to receive The Bishop's Touch--if I don't boil to death in my two-piece suit first.

From the new revised LJ policy document thing--via penknife, as I have not read it myself yet:

This includes things such as an image of a mother breastfeeding their child,

Sinular they with an explicitly gendered antecedent represent!

Dar is adorable.

My parents complained that she rambled too much, but I really enjoyed her ramblings.

Coming out of my computer speakers, Dar's voice isn't particularly the type to speak to me for whatever reason, but it was perfect for the venue, echoing out into the park and filling it beautifully. It's the same venue I saw Lisa Loeb in, a couple years back, and it's very small and intimate and outdoors. Dar herself seemed to really enjoy all of the little children running around, as children are wont to do when they are brought by their parents to a free outdoor concert.

By the end of the concert--pretty much everything that came after "The Christians and the Pagans" (it goes without saying that the tears were streaming down my cheeks there)--I was hanging onto every word she sang, which is pretty impressive considering the attention-deficit-disorder way I usually listen to music. I can't even sing sit through an entire vid without switching windows (and I know I'm not alone among fen in this!).

So I'm a fortnight away from my confirmation, now. Still not a big deal since it's still the case that I made my baptismal vows as an adult, but I find myself looking forward to it nonetheless. I didn't get to meet the bishop the last time he celebrated a mass at our church; this time, presumably, I will.

Okay, I'm still thinking about femslash08 and related topics. One of the arguments I've made more than once in this journal is that femslash is more different than m/m slash than one might at first think, they each have their own histories (each within the greater history of media fandom, of course), tropes, conventions, and expectations. Some of these are fairly easy to make like the different role of genderswap or mpreg vs. fpreg. One "difference" that has never been quite so easy to demonstrate, however, has been my claim that femslash fandom is less OTP-oriented than m/m slash fandom. To me, girlslash is something one finds hiding in the interstices of a canon--and indeed, it's one of the things I really love about it. We manage to find the really interesting points of connection in canon, those that would be impossible to find if we weren't already actively searching, in a type of search which just isn't necessary if one is interested in male characters.

The exceptions are obvious: Law and Order, Xena: Warrior Princess, Wicked (although the RPF wing of such isn't nearly as OTP-oriented as it once was, as more and more actors take over the roles of Galinda and Elphaba), possibly Star Trek: Voyager. I always think of these fandoms being set up "like boyslash fandoms"; think of the way Xena, textually speaking, parallels a Starsky&Hutch or Due South--or, more obviously in its format. (People sometimes want to add BtVS, with Buffy/Faith, to the list of femslash OTPS, but I don't buy it--in my experience, Buffy femslash fandom embraces rarepairs like an embracing thing embraces an embraced thing with a vengeance.)

And there's a spattering of smaller (Yuletide-sized, but showing up on femslash_today with fair consistency nonetheless), mostly film, fandoms where activity, such as it is, is almost exclusively centered around an OTP: Devil Wears Prada, Ice Princess, D.E.B.S.

This last one has always astounded me as to just how little is written outside the pairing of Amy/Lucy. How is it that in a canon with rampant general female homosociality like D.E.B.S. has that general homosociality has so largely been ignored in favor of the single canonical OTP? Why are such wonderful female characters as the other D.E.B.S.--Max, Dominique, and my personal favorite, Janet--or Anne and Zoey from Ice Princess passed over? We do not have so many awesome female characters in this world that we can afford to squander them.

But so there are these canons with these highly cathective female/female relationships, and these tend to be OTP-centric. Which makes sense, I guess. (Bring It On does, I believe, have a decent amount of fic involving other characters such as Isis and Big Red, despite having this sort of cathective relationship at its core.)

Within the bigger picture, however, it may still be true--it still feels true to me, although my experience is limited--that girlslash isn't as OTP-heavy as m/m. After all, in order to have the sort of intense same-sex relationship which is a staple of the big m/m fandoms, a canon needs to, as a prerequisite, pass the Bechdel test--still not something that is always easy even in our day and age. Of the canons which do have well-developed female characters, most tend to be ensemble shows (or films or books). And they tend not to be genre shows: I can name shows which haved focused on pairs of sisters, but I think the very idea of a show about two sisters who travel the country hunting demons, with a very limited recurring cast, is still unthinkable even in this post-Buffy world. So Xena is still very much the exception

A quick look at femslash_today confirms this suspicion: while the OTP fandoms provide steady content and cannot be discounted, most femslash still comes from shows which are ensemble and/or genre in character: Battlestar Galactica, the Stargates (and the fic I'm looking at isn't Sam/Janet--I don't know who Janet is at all and only a vague sense of who Sam is, but I know this is sometimes brought up as a potential OTP), Doctor Who, The West Wing, House, Veronica Mars, Buffy, and so forth.

And yet I look at femslash08 and think about what I might offer--and the knowledge that if I'm assigned D.E.B.S., it won't be Janet/Max, and if I'm assigned Ice Princess, it won't be Zoey/Ann.

I feel like there are some really obvious canons, either girlslashy or brimming with the potential for girlslashing, of which I'm not thinking to offer for femslash08 and will remember right after sign-ups close.

Ari has offered "contemporary feminist theologians" or some such, which tempts me to request Rebecca Chopp/Kathryn Tanner or some such (although the thought of reading porn about one of my former teachers is squicky is to say the least).

There's some metafandom-ed posts about Supernatural and class, and at least one flocked post on my flist thinking about it in the abstract, and it's gotten me to revisit my thoughts, because class really does color the way I view fictional characters quite deeply. Well, maybe not class per se, since I've said things like that in the past and been forced to take them back, but classed markers certainly, even as I'm still not at all sure the distinction makes any sense. (Not gender per se but gendered markers? Not race but racialized markers? What are gender, race, and class except a set of markers? Is there such a thing as class essentialism?) Education, idiolect, certain values, cultural capital--things like that--with the archetypal example being high-school student Buffy Summer's ability to make topical allusions to Arthur Miller or Samuel Beckett. (So admittedly it is a very narrow set of classed--and raced and gendered, but especially classed and raced--markers that make me interested in a fictional character.)

Now, the thing I'm still struggling with is how problematic that fact is. It seems acceptable to say "I'm not interested in watching a show about working-class characters" in a way it would never be to say "I'm not interested in watching a show about women" or "I'm not interested in watching a show about characters of color." But as a person of immense privilege, the fact that it seems acceptable may be no more than an indicator of how far I still have to go--the way that replacing "white" and "black" for "men" and "women" in a certain situation can make it much clearer how problematic it is, as in this comment to a languagelog post:

In general, though, I would say there is clearly much more public tolerance in the US for prejudice against women and misogynistic speech than there is tolerance for racist speech. This was most clearly illustrated to me in a story a professor of mine in University told of an administrative meeting he attended where one of the speakers was discussing a vote that had taken place and in relation to that made a joke about how giving women the right to vote had been a mistake, and was met with genuine laughter. He noted, truthfully I think, that this would have been met with awkward incredulity if it were instead about African Americans or some other racial group.

Of course, the degree to which this works will depend on just how "real" one considers sexual difference to be, as evidenced by all the people who disagree with me on whether there will be gender-segregated bathrooms in the feminist utopia. (Of course, insofar as the point of gender-segregated bathrooms is to keep the other sex out, I'd argue there's something hugely heterosexist as well as sexist going on there.) (And if we look at the way racial difference went from seeming quite real to the idea being almost absurd, I don't see why the same process couldn't play out wrt gender.)

Still, it seems to be natural and unproblematic to say "it's better to be rich than to be poor" (even though what I'm really interested and invested in has nothing to do with income except insofar as hip-hop music has something to do with race or skirts have to do with gender) in a way one can't even say, say, "it's better to see than to be blind." (Not that I'd want to say the latter, mind you--I've learned better--but I think it's still intuitive for a lot of people.) And I can only doubt my privilege so much.

In the end, I suppose it comes down to the fact that while the "reality" of sexuality difference is more or less irrelevant to gender inequality (by which I mean that having a penis doesn't convey in itself any real power), and thus the semiotic power of gendered markers are able to function more or less independently of that reality, and the reality of racial difference (none at all chromosomally) is in some ways more and some ways less divorced from racial inequality, Not having a penis is only a lack once you've read Lacan. Similarly with not being white. Not having money, on the other hand--well, obviously this too is a lack which is in large part semiotic, since currency doesn't have any intrinsic value, as you can't eat or drink it--not having the stuff which money can buy to satisfy one's needs and wants, however, represents a real imbalance in power which is not present in the raced or gendered scenarios. And "classism" as a superstructural system of injustice where the rich think the poor are ignorant trash and the working-class think the upper class are pretentious twits sort of operates above this base.

Except that now I sound like some cross between a Lacanian, a classical Marxist, and a metaphysical realist (what is this "real" of which I speak?) and--perish the thought. And ultimately, this distinction does seem to be bogus. The phenomenology of women's lived experience under systemic injustice is that of a "real" lack, no more or less than the one that comes from not having money to spend. All the money in the world won't help you if your boyfriend won't let you out of the house to spend it.