throbbing light machine

Original Daniel Jackson cast as the Avengers 2 villain! I am happy about this!

Getting back into the swing of teaching this week; I'm doing a sci-fi focused comp class again, but unlike last time I have surprisingly few nerds. Lots of interested mundies, though; they all picked the class, and they all seem into it. Today was a bit of an impeded lesson, as I found on arrival that my computer/projector system was nonfuctional, and then the tech guys disassembled it in the front of the classroom for the whole rest of the period. Thank god enough of my students had laptops with them.

Very, very much enjoying Elementary, particularly the way it's dealing with criminal insanity - admitting that it does exist, but focusing on the cruelty and manipulation and abuse of the people who use the mentally ill as their tools, dupes, and scapegoats. I love Gregson, and the gentle respect of his relationship with Sherlock (also god I love Aiden Quinn, have ever since I imprinted on Desperately Seeking Susan). I wish the one Black detective didn't seem like such an obvious cardboard stand-in.

I also like the way that they keep emphasizing the intellectual strength of their Watson, coming back to the fact that you have to be damn smart to be a doctor. Watson is a more linear, traditional thinker than Holmes, but she's ferociously intelligent in her mode. Holmes is a nonlinear thinker, loops and multiple tracks and always a certain intertextuality between representation and reality (and this is why I tend to identify with Holmes characters, because. Yes.) But the trick of the thing is that it's really helpful to have access to both kinds of intelligence. It's why Holmeses and Watsons work well together - and I really like that this iteration seems to be emphasizing the intellectual, rather than physical/violent/actiony, aspects of that partnership. (and it is so nice to see other parts of one of Lucy Liu's characters being focal than her sex appeal!)

eta: watching 1.08 tho and am v. sad to see Lisa Edelstein's character being sexually humiliated - maybe it's just leftover sensitivity from House, but I hate it when she gets objectified.

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

( read here, )

or read at the AO3

Dear Self,

I think you had better plan on writing, like, 90% of your yuletide story today. You know you're going to get Sherlock Holmes plotbunnied like crazy as soon as you see Game of Shadows.

Sincerely,
the remnants of your sense of responsibility

five icons, to be blathered about below!

keyword: Sheeta/Pazu

Laputa! My favorite Miyazaki film, largely due to this scene. I love this moment, when Pazu touches her but isn't quite holding her yet - it's this little soapbubble of not-quite-yet, because as soon as her crystal releases her into his arms, he's lost to her completely. The text is from Pablo Neruda, and is possibly the most romantic sentiment I've ever heard: "let me remember you as you were before you existed." I use this one for Miyazaki stuff, innocence, romance, and potentiality.

keyword: p&p

This was a silly - watching the Pride & Prejudice with my partner, as one does, and making snide Buffy references at it. Big swelling music, panoramic landscapes, period frocks = Spike, apparently. Somehow it turned into an icon, idek, these things happen. Possibly the most random thing I've ever made?



This is from a set I made a while back, when I really started to become dissatisfied with the films as visual reference points to Lord of the Rings, and for the hobbit characters in particular (no one's the proper age! they're all too skinny! seriously, this ickle teenager is supposed to be Frodo Baggins?). Frodo/Merry is my secondary hobbitfic otp - I have this thing for the eleven years of Frodo's life we know so little about, when he was Merry's fostersibling and playmate. And Frodo's Brandybuck lineage doesn't get enough play! I'm really pleased with how the layout on this turned out, restrained and balanced and playful without losing a certain sense of formality.

keyword: virginia

Virginia Woolf is one of my three Patron Saints. The other two are Tolkien and Charlotte Brontë - Tolkien teaches me compassion and patience and plainness and love, Charlotte helps me connect to my reserves of anger and determination to change my life and my times - but I call on Virginia for aesthetics and politics, and being in pursuit of a higher degree I tend to call on her a lot nowadays. Talismans of all three pop up in my living spaces, and this is one of them. I think that Virginia Woolf was one of the most heartbreakingly lovely women I've ever seen - that curl at the nape of her neck, oh god! The photomanipulation with the embroidered flowers in the background was a sort of visual loveletter to her. I thought, when I uploaded this icon, that I would use it for feminist stuff, but I never seem to. It's queerly romantic rather than stridently political - for the latter, I go to Mary Wollstonecraft!

keyword: sherlock

Unf. Sherlock and his violin. This is, like, half the appeal of the fandom for me, and I haz a sad over how many media adaptations dodge or avoid or halfass the violin. The late nineteenth century produced some of the most marvelous violin music I know - Mendelssohn, Grieg, Dvorak. It's all so hopelessly overfull, oversexed, mad with feeling and beauty - and the idea of Sherlock Holmes of all men hooking into that makes me just about faint with happy. This tends to be my grumpy Victorianist Holmes icon, deployed resentfully against bloody modernized adaptations that blow right by all my pretty history in ways that I Do Not Appreciate. (point of interest: in my keywords, "holmes" means Holmes09, "sherlock" the Granada series. which is actually rather strange - don't know what I could have been thinking.)

Give me a yo if you want to do the meme, and I'll give you five icons to talk about!

I seem to be writing a Fullmetal Alchemist/Sherlock Holmes fusion with Holmes as an alchemist. And I'm having huge amounts of fun with it, but I need to figure out how not to make it a whitewash.

( nattering )

Advice plz?

kink_bingo amnesty fic! Written for the square "crossdressing" - The summer ate me, and I've only now got it done. Le sigh.

Pass, repass, glide away

Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock/Mycroft. 5, 540 words. Explicit sexual content, references to homophobic violence. Crossdressing, incest, pre-canon, underage. A story about siblings, and gender, and being different, that splits off partway into a family narrative – and an incest fantasy. It was a very good disguise, but having once observed it Mycroft could not fail to see with strangely doubled vision: at once the familiar stripling boy-body he'd watched from childhood and the enchanting odd lovely girl-form that Sherlock was wearing like a second skin.

( Read more... )

Am currently watching a 1976 BBC production of Dorian Gray on Netflix Instant - starring Jeremy Brett as Basil Hallward. He has a mustache! His shirt is quite entirely open at the chest! It is making me v. v. charmed.

I found an amazingly terribly book at the uni library. No, seriously. Terrible. Far too bad not to share.

It's called In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle's Stories of The Great Detective. It was written by a gentleman with a lovely string of alphabet soup after his name on the title page: Christopher Redmond, B.A., M.A. It's funny, because the book isn't published by an academic press, so the credential-waving just comes off as pathetic. B.A.? Don't knock yourself over patting yourself on the back there, dood. Lots of people have gone to college.

Despite the prose, this book was written in 1984. It reads like something from 1948.

Have some choice passages!

( sporking and bad research behind the cut )

FWIW, I've also been reading - and tremendously enjoying - Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. Not only does he win my heart right off the bat by giving the diss to some of the more extreme strains of Foucauldian sexual theory, but his book might be the gentlest, sweetest book I've ever read about sexual "deviancy." He goes beyond law and medicine to talk about actual queer lives, in the process re-discovering the fact that queer relationships can involve love as well as sex. It's a heartbreaking book, as all books of its kind are bound to be, but it's also surprisingly romantic.

Internet access might be sporadic for a while - my neighbor's nowhere to be found, and our shared wireless went caput in the storm last night. Am currently reading porn at the public library, which closes in an hour and a half. Drat and blast.

Wrote a fill for the new Holmes kinkmeme:

gentle heart but not acquainted, Holmes/Watson, pg-13, 975 words. total unredeemable waff, adoring!Holmes.
prompt: While in bed with Watson, Holmes is absolutely adoring and besotted, the opposite of his usually cold, calculating self. Watson is both surprised and amused. Part one, part two

eta: never mind! intarwebs restored! glory be!

Stanley Plumly
The Kenyon Review, 1993

Conan Doyle's Copper Beeches

In the story they're in a clump at the front
hall door, as huge as an extinction,
yet Holmes, the literalist, ignores them,
focused on the options of the case.

It's Watson, his Boswell and naturalist,
who makes them beautiful, if only for
a moment, "shining like burnished metal
in the light of the setting sun" - Watson,

soldier, biographer of adventure.
The woman, Miss Hunter, is alone and
will be saved by deduction, then action,
and always the same conclusion - the lives

that were interrupted will go on, lives
that were broken will heal or go under,
like all the other stories an elegy
of the century, the country, the seasons.

The beeches, though hardly mentioned, suggest
the melancholy of the piece, the weather,
mood, the sense of failure in the house -
they're like a background for the color of

the clues: bright blue dress, copper coil of hair,
the bone-white starving of the dog. They
link the past, medieval to the modern,
the leaves still dark in summer, bronze and

butter through hundreds of falls and winters.
They're what's left of a larger thing. Watson
knows this, accepts his friend's insulting him
as one for whom the art is for his sake,

who loves embellishment, the odd detail,
Miss Hunter's face flecked "like a plover's egg,"
who's disappointed such beauty will
be dropped back into private life as just

another aspect of the landscape,
one on whom nothing once was lost - Watson
the memorist Watson the lover,
writing from the heart, aware that his friend

is isolated, suicidal bored,
perfectionist misogynist, genius
of the obvious, a man made of glass.
The beeches turning in the wind are glass.

As for the evil parents now children
of their servants, as for the prisoner daughter
now free to marry, gone to Maritius,
as for Miss Violet Hunter, gentle, gone -

Watson understands the resolution,
how the gray cathedral ruminating
tress display their power within a human
emptiness, letting a few leaves fall.