throbbing light machine

Abigail Nussbaum has a cool article up on three stagings of Much Ado About Nothing: the Branagh film, the Whedon film, and the Tennant/Tate production.

Although I liked the Whedon adaptation more than she apparently did, and saw it as definitely expressing an interpretation, albeit a nihilistic and chaotic one. I was struck by the way Whedon's characters stumbled from scene to scene, how drunk and out of control they all were, how random their choices are - in contrast to the Branagh film, where you see Beatrice and Benedick warming to the thought of one another and genuinely deciding to match themselves, I saw Whedon's characters as very much the victims of their friends' tricks, tricked into sex and love and marriage and betrayal and penance and forgiveness, tricked into doing wrong and tricked into doing right.

I suppose it also doesn't help, in my case, that looking at Sean Maher's little faaaaaaace makes me go all melty and trusting, whereas I don't trust Reed Diamond as far as I can pitch him.

nicked from celandineb

Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humour?
(Much Ado about Nothing. Act ii. Sc. 3.)

Attention: the most awesome fanvid ever made is this one (Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing, No Doubt), which was just posted in festivids. homg you guys. freaking amazing.

Because this one is always fun. Works-in-progress meme: post a few lines from the fic you're working on.

*

“You remind me of someone,” he said at last, which was partially true – if Darla had ever been a sweet young thing, which Angelus privately doubted, she may have been not unlike this gilded knife of a girl. “What's your name?”

“Rebecca Sharp. Becky. And I shan't ask yours,” she answered pertly. “By your voice you're an Irishman, and by your face you're not low born, but by your voice I should call you quite a wicked personage, for no virtuous man would ever speak so sweetly of buying and selling.”

*

Jack knew that Daniel needed an anchor. He just didn't know where to find the chain. Sha're possessed links by the score: her lips, her voice, her finger in the sand, the smell of her body. The breathing artifact of her skin, her language straight out of Daniel's work, Daniel's dreams. Egypt had been his home as a child, surrounded by love and care and the dusty remnants of history. Sha're – Abydos – was that home come again.

*

It was just as well, Angel thought. He didn't really want to see them cover her over with cold earth. He didn't really want to have to remember what it felt like to claw a way through clinging soil, pull yourself up onto the wet grass and feel the demon pawing over your dead heart. He didn't want to have those memories get so close to her, as if their gore might splash her pretty bright clothes, stain her mouth bitten red.

*

Prospero opened the chest, and it was full of bright and beautiful cloth, and pearls, and small dainty things that shone like jewels. Miranda gave a little gasp and fell to her knees before it, her hands going out to touch and caress the luxurious silks and velvets, the like of which she’d never seen. They were softer than the fur of any creature, cooler than the sea at night. The gowns that she pulled out to their length were heavier than she expected, and longer than she was tall. “Try them on,” her father said. “They belong to you.”

*

I've been thinking about women's anger in narrative. My Boy just read Jane Eyre for the first time, and while he loved Jane's passionate rage as a child, he was disappointed by the way that she cools down and reigns herself in as an adult. Also, Hoyden About Town posted a feminist exploration of The Taming of the Shrew yesterday - the one Shakespeare play that I can't get my head around, that I can't figure it out.

(I also saw Australia last night, and while I loved the film I rather wish that the heroine had been more Mary Lennox or Jo March than Indiana Jones Sidekick No. 2)

I love angry girls in books. Anger is a useful resource; if you are oppressed, anger is a necessary reaction. Out of anger is born activism. I love the angry girls because they see gender oppression as the crock it actually is, and they aren't willing to play along. As a girl, the angry girls made me feel validated, like I wasn't making it all up - like I had a right to my anger. I felt with their fire.

( My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. )

...I just dreamed I was teaching my sister to speak Shakespeare. She had to recite "full many a glorious morning," and I was beating out the scansion for her. She was complaining that it sounded weird when I read it like that.

TOO MUCH SHAKESPEARE IN MY BRAINS.

...Coleridge called the pun "Shakespeare's fatal Cleopatra."

A meme, from emei
Drop me a comment and I will give you 3 interests on your list, and 3 of your icons, for you to explain. Here are mine.

Interests:

litslash - I feel like something of a fannish oddity at times, because my dearest-loved fandoms are textual, closed, and old. If I could find a fan community for Prydain or the Secret Garden or LeGuin that was as active as media fandoms, I'd be there in a flash. (The slash part of this interest has moved omnisexual in recent months. Don't care if they're boys or girls, just want the fic and the meta and the community)

acafan - I got into fandom young, and started hanging around the big girls' journals, the ones who were in grad school and who talked about Derrida. Which meant that I learned literary theory as a kid, from fen, in reference to hobbit sex. It's a great way to go.

donkeyskin - a fairy tale about a Princess whose father wants to marry her. She asks for three gowns as radiant as the moon, as shining as the stars, and as golden as the sun, and then puts on an animal skin to make her escape. She flees to a neighboring kingdom where she lives as an animal-girl, working in the palace scullery. The prince gives three balls: he's looking for a wife. She goes each night, but then flees back to her animal skin. He finds her out by a ring she gave him, and marries her. I'm doing my senior honors work on it next year - it's unique. A girl takes on an animal disguise in order to find positive sexuality and freedom. I don't know what's going on, but I love it.

And icons:



Tia Dalma was my favorite thing in Dead Man's Chest. She's a wonderful combination of things that I find fascinting, love and ships and fortune and foresight and the sea. She's so beautiful that I can't breathe whenever she's on the screen. So there was no way I wasn't going to have Tia Dalma icons. The text is Emily Dickinson, Nor noticed that the Ebbing Day Flowed silver to the West -- Nor noticed Night did soft descend -- Nor Constellation burn -- Intent upon the vision Of latitudes unknown.



Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia in Twelfth Night. I frelling love Twelfth Night, for many reasons. They never really leave the greenworld, just step off even further into Illyria. Olivia is a unique character in the corpus - she's not the soubrette or the Best Friend or any of the other usual second fiddle parts. She's a sorrowful, loving, determined, sexual woman. I caught this cap by chance, and in looking through my set later I found that it somehow seemed to encapsulate all of those things. The text is Anne Carson, who is dreamy and literary and harsh and weird, and somehow fits up nicely against Shakespeare's girls. I read her for class this past fall, and jotted down lines in my notebook.



River is the best textual/deconstructionist toy that could ever be dropped into a show. She's a walking, dancing knot of literary theory. I wanted a River icon, and also something that I could use for theory posts or school-related stuff. Text from Anne Carson again. This was such an easy icon to make - it all just fell into place. Didn't take me more than ten minutes. I love it when that happens.

The thing that I really love about Shakespeare is that I can just sort of move around through it, swim through the text with ease. Not that it's simple, but that it somehow seems to open up to me, show all of its complexities and doublings and shiny bits. And I can juggle it around, find the right spaces to sink down in, breathe it and understand things and make it go. The girls and the fools and the scansion and the unsexing and the Sedgewick triangles of both genders, the Greenworld theory and the racial issues.

Chaucer, on the other hand, baffles me. Sure, I can talk about the individual Canterbury Tales, but I can't do a damn thing with stringing them together. I love Chaucer, but I have nothing to say. It feels like the text actively resists me, pushing back when I push in. Both of my Chaucer papers last term were cop-outs, Loti taking the easy way out. Not that they were bad papers or anything, bit I have some bigger issues that I have thus far failed to wrestle with. What I really want is to write a paper about the specific ways in which Chaucer resists interpretive readings.

Maybe I have an easier time with Shakespeare because my brain starts in the space of the performative tradition. I give myself permission, with Shakespeare, to go there. The author is dead, man. I can put any reading I want up on stage, an nobody's going to bitch if it's not period. Chaucer I worry about--can I really put deconstructionist theory in the mouth of a mediaeval writer? But I'm downright blithe about the Bard, more than happy to mix it up and turn it around.

I must have really nailed my three big end-of-term papers last month, because I got A's in two classes that I definitely had B's in pre-paper. Which is gratifying, because I totally worked my ass off, and I think maybe what I'm getting a handle on is where to work, and how, seeing the flaws in my own writing and learning how to target them. The sort of essay my daddy taught me how to write, straight litcrit, I'm doing well with that.

The thing that I don't know how to do, and that I really want to work on, is the literary-personal essay. "A Room of One's Own". The sort of essay that's both about the reading and the reader, that works with the idea that a reading of a text is a collaboration between the writer-at-the-time-of-writing and the reader-at-the-time-of-reading. A narrative of me reading a book, of me running in to quandaries and coming to moments of clarity. It's what I like best to read myself, and I'd really like to figure out how to do it. I'm trying right now to get into a Creative Nonfiction workshop with a visiting prof who The Boy really likes, and I'm hoping maybe I can talk to him about it, because I know what I want to make but I haven't the slightest idea as to how to go about starting.

So I'm doing this workshop at school for a week, to train half-a-dozen baby college professors. It's sort of a ghost town around here, with everyone away on break, and I was terribly depressed and lonely last night when I got in. But now I think that this can be okay. Maybe it will even be sort of cool.

Right now more than anything I want a chance to get to work. I think that because of my background I've had to think a lot more about the natrue of teaching and learning than most of my age group. From fifth grade on, I was always looking for something better, something real. And in that process I tried an awful lot of things.

So now I find myself with a lot of strongly-held convictions that are hugely untried. Last term I tried some of them out--TAing Shakespeare was a blast, and as a final project my prof handed the last week of class over to me, and told me to use it to teach "The Tempest." And I had a blast.

I want to do this. I want to teach. But it can be hard for me to articulate why, because education comes so naturally to me. It's difficult for me to explain why learning is important, because I've always seen it as self-evident.

And navel gazing, clearly.