throbbing light machine

Heard a great lecture from Suzanne Keen today - I think I need to my by own copy of her book Empathy and the Novel.

my answers to the ten-questions meme from this weekend, each comprising a nice little babble: Fullmetal Alchemist, SG-1, the Aubreyad, The Dark is Rising, Prydain, Eight Cousins, Star Wars, Downton Abbey, and Westmark.

I am sitting here morbidly avoiding the tab in which I have opened today's Mark Reads - it's the Choices of Master Samwise today, and I can't take this chapter, I can't, just thinking of it makes me start tearing up, I couldn't read this chapter aloud to my little sister when we were kids because it made me cry so hard. I love it so, it's the most beautiful thing that's ever happened to me. And I have the tab open and I keep, like, accidentally switching to it and then covering it up again really quick.

...

Oh, hell. Now I am crying. God, Samwise, Samwise, Samwise. Further inarticulate muttering and general weeping & gnashing of teeth will continue until morale improves.

I've been having a lovely wallow in Brecht over the last few days - I volunteered to lead seminar on him this week, because he's where I come from and very dear to me. I very much like his point about the unsure intersection between ethics and sympathy, although I don't always live by it - but it gives me language to talk about what happens to me in fandoms like Iron Man or Stargate, where I fundamentally disagree with the characters on ethical grounds but fall in love with them anyway.

(I just realized, this might be why I watched all the "Jack and Daniel fight" episodes of SG1 this week - because those episodes actually get close to articulating some of the Very Deep Issues I have with the entire premise and mission of the SGC. This is also, nb, why I hold so close to earlier characterizations of Daniel and am troubled by latter ones - because for me there's a big difference between a geeky outsider trying to shift the system and a scientist-collaborator who sells knowledge and intellect to a government for the purpose of making war.)

I don't want to NOT fall in love with them, though. My love affairs with characters like Tony Stark are oddly precious to me. They represent some of the best feelings of my life. And, every now and again, some lovely fanworker will make something like Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City, and bring love into line with ethics. Brecht knows that to be a passive part of the audience is to open oneself up to being used through one's loves; his solution is to force the audience to participate in the creation of meaning, so that they cannot be victimized, so that they have to be a responsible part of what is made.

I watched Theater of War last night, a gorgeous documentary - available on Netflx Watch Instant! - that follows the Tony Kushner/Meryl Streep production of "Mother Courage and Her Children" in 2008. Seeing clips from that production was lovely, but the documentarians also did amazing things with the model book from the original 40s production. The model book gives a series of stills of the production, sometimes only seconds apart; the documentary put them into a semi-animated slideshow, with the text spoken over, so that you got a real sense of ghosts in motion. Streep has a great line at one point - the interviewer asks her what it is to be an actor - she says that she is the voice of people who have died.

The film's worth it if only for the footage of Brecht's testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He treats it like a farce. It's beautiful.

Here's [a meme] where I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for (some of) my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info.


A Study in Circles: The Amestrian military keeps doctors as well as dogs on its leashes; having completed my course of medical study at the Second Laboratory in Central, I was bound to service for several years.

my gold signal like a dragonfly: Teal'c tells people, when they ask him, that his inlaid golden serpent tattoo is a mark of his former slavery to false gods.

Neglect me, lose me, only give me leave: “No,” Taran said, pulling away from under Fflewddur's hand.

saffron and haze and Tyrian purple: Arram Draper had left Tyra as a very small boy, taking with him only a dark olive-brown complexion, a head of curling dark hair, and the recollected tastes of cakes flavored with saffron and sesame, and aromatic bread heavy with olive oil on his tongue.

sorry for the unexpected drop off the face of the planet - I was having the Februaries, and got v. sulky and quiet for a while. But one of my instructors just extended an essay due date, and the sun was out today after the mungy ice-rain, and I'm getting over it, yanno? Because depression is boring and cruddy.

So! I just watched this fucking awesome movie (The Fall, 2006, seriously guys check this one out it's bloody gorgeous and also streaming on Netflix. it's one of those movies where someone tells a story and then the movie cuts to the story and it's all surreal and gorgeous and I seriously don't even know how they got some of those shots, but damn). I showed my brats clips from Singin in the Rain today, and we talked about metatheater, and the lesson was actually fun for once. It's Friday and what the fuck ever I'm gonna make some damn Star Wars icons because have you seen the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on that one?! And maybe even write some fucking porn (is that redundant? that's redundant). Vibrating between Han/Luke and Daniel/Teal'c, though I really want to write about some sexy ladyparts. Why am I not currently watching shows with femslash? And also why can I not get started on Lost Girl fic whywhywhy?!

Also, Egypt! Tunisia! revolution! my hopes are with them in their struggle for great justice!

that such a dirty thing as charcoal can become so incandescent

Stargate SG1, Jack/Daniel, 2,303 words, PG-13. Set late in Season 3. Jack doesn't know how to be the family that Daniel's lost.

( Is it not beautiful to think that such a process is going on? )

Carry

Sam/Daniel, PG, 2,095 words. prompt: I can't carry it, but I can carry you and it as well. Daniel-whumping, scary-alien-artifacts-made-them-make-out. Kinda-sorta a Lord of the Rings fusion – I couldn't resist, with that prompt.

but I can carry you

Is it bad that Said's "Orientalism" is mainly making me think about Stargate SG1?

Because I love the girls and women in my fandoms, and think they're awesome.



( spring on horseback like a lady )

Okay, there's a line where that sort of thing goes from fun into badficland, but still. It's the girly men that I'm looking for. I fetishize and get off on their youth, their physical smallness, their visible and invisible innocence. Their tendency to use words instead of fists. Their ability to speak the language of emotional need. Their understanding of c retaking, and their own need for the same.

Their receptive sexuality, which basically gives you girl-pov hetsex with two guys.

I know that, objectively speaking, Daniel Jackson is a tall, strong man some five to ten years my senior who can more than take care of himself. But for some reason, I want to read about the side of him that's needful, young, sweet, vulnerable. This is one of those things that has more to do with identification than with sexual preference – so it's not that I'm irl attracted to femmy guys, so much as it's the fact that I'm a cis, femmy woman myself.

( I think that what I'm really looking for in slash is some foothold for my gender )

Having a sick day today, watching Stargate:SG1 season 7 on telly (which is weird, because I've never had a telly - this one belongs to my auntie, for whom I am housesitting), and having worries. We've watched seasons 1-5 on Hulu now, and I've found Japanese internet sources for the Daniel-relevent bits of season 6 plus "Fallen" plus "Moebius," and I'm trying to figure out where I go from here wrt this fandom.

( I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control, I didn't even know there was a war )