kali

rm gave me a gorgeous bracelet (at some point, I'll take a picture of it and post it -- IHNIIHBT fans will get a kick out of it, I think); hofnarr, some awesome Whovian comics; Dave took me to see Chicago & Tam took me to see Le Corsaire.

I can't wait till the death trinkets begin to roll in! (Kidding. Obviously.)

But TONIGHT there was, courtesy of faris_nallaneen the spectacular surprise of seeing Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer at Housingworks, where among other things, they read, sang, told stories, held hands and gazed adoringly at each other like total cuties (!!!) and finally came out of the closet and admitted that they are fucking dating. (All forms of punctuation appear to apply.)

It was the bit where they asked each other questions (supplied by audience) and Amanda says, "Ooh! I like this question... because I want to hear what you're going to say..."

And Neil says, "uh...."

And Amanda says, "So Neil, given that you and Amanda Palmer were naked in a bathtub together on twitter, are you going to admit that you're fucking dating or what?"

Then she blinked at him expectantly, and he stuttered, "Seriously???"

And then said very quietly, "yes, we've been dating for months."

And then Kali yelled said in a penetrating whisper, "Duh!" (I'd had a few glasses of wine by then.)

They gazed into each other's eyes some more, and then said: "AWKWARD!" and moved on. To Amanda auctioning off "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" + some used stockings for $1300. (!!!)

It was a great night.

There were also steamed clams with fennel and bacon, and an utterly divine caramel balsamic gelato. Mmmmmm.

I love Amanda Palmer. I want to buy all her albums.

TOMORROW THERE WILL BE FIC WRITING, OMG. I promise, you guys. (Especially Rach!)

Also, David Eddings is dead. Weird. I have a more contemplate-y post about authors and celebrity and memory, but that will wait for when I am not tired, achy, and soaked by incidental rainstorm.

This has clearly been a poor time to not be on the internets! But alas. While I was otherwise occupied, it seems amazon has been, well, having epic fail. Which sucks, for many, many reasons but is also hugely irritating because I FUCKING LOVE BUYING BOOKS FROM AMAZON. And is also sad, because okay, evil, corporate, whateverthefuck, fine. I'm used to it. We're all freaking used to it, aren't we? But aside from being bigoted, it's also insane. Because it is not good business practice to try not to sell books if you're, you know, a book shop. And sex has been selling for a long time, my friends. And teh gay? ALSO DOING PRETTY WELL, especially of late. Also, James Baldwin? Come on.

And another thing, glaring incompetance at handling the internet from an internet company. This is web 2.0, folks. Did you think that if you just ignored it, people were just going to shut up and go away??? Um, no. This is the internet; being outraged is its hobby. Ditto writers, critics, fans, etc... and all of them have access to keys, and big, loud, cybervoices. Snuggling under easter eggs and hoping problem vanishes = no good. Sigh. Anyway, y'all have heard this already from a myriad of places that are not me, so I will stfu. But yeah. You know the drill, write email, sign the petition. Speak up!

Summing up my thoughts pretty successfully are the salon broadsheet and bodlon's post, where he also discusses the bias implicit in the way queer stuff is considered more "adult" than equivalently explicit straight material.

In other news: my dad is bad-tempered, tired and discomposed by various bodily functions not quite operating via standard parameters. I'll just leave it at that.

Last weekend, we had the cousin-brother invasion. God, so many of my boys in one wee nyc apartment. It was insane, oldest + wife, another one + boyfriend, and the second to youngest. Plus me and D. of course. All the boys put to work moving sofas, dressers, chairs etc. D. was an enormous hit, as he is immensely handy, and also I think they all have little boy crushes on him. Some more platonic than others. The one with the boyfriend, the boyfriend and I did a fair amount of non-platonic heckling at any rate. Fun times.

My dad, of course, decided he wanted to also move things. And mop the floor. I became afraid he was going to have to be physically restrained, but instead after a few minutes of exertion, he simply fell asleep.

I tried to help with the moving of things, but was held back by a horrid pinched nerve or something in my back, which has been going on for a week now in what I can only describe as fluctuating between excruciating agony and bearable pain. I have an appointment with a chiropractor today. I've never been to one before, and am terribly nervous.

Last night I couldn't sleep and watched Bright Young Things. David Tennant plays unsympathetic really well, it's amazing. (I also am beginning to think that the Doctor is the sanest of his many roles. Frightening thought.) Anyway, it's a fun time, this flick, even with the too-hollywood romantic ending. And the actors! Spectacular, one and all.

Then I had terrible nightmares about byzantine intrigue and magical plots and wormholes surrounded by green and blue rubber bands. If the bands were cut: apocalypse. My father had the scissors, and cut them as I begged and pleaded with him not to.

My subconscious is terribly boring these days, don't you think?

via rm

Found, one Dalek. No, really.

I am totally fascinated by this. I wish like anything that I'd been the one to stumble across it.

So, I think about fanfiction a lot, y'all may have noticed. And serial fiction. And the whole act of making fiction "real". What is it in a narrative that makes us think -- after the door is shut, after the windows are pushed down, after the covers are closed -- that the story goes on, before the first page, and after the last?

If you think of a single-author book as a window, or a doorway, you realize that even through you can only see a small portion of the world (i.e. what's framed by the aperture), there must be so much more just out of frame. If there isn't this sense, then the story is flat, two dimensional -- it doesn't encourage wandering. But in a good story, you don't think that the small, squared off picture is all that's real. Because if the thing is three-dimensional, it has solidity. You can pick it up and turn it around. It still exists when you look at it from another side.

Think about mythforms. Superheros. They all exist and the more people use them, carve another perspective onto them, the more solid they actually get.

From Henry James's preface to Portrait of a Lady (a little wordy; James never used one word where fifty would do) :

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million-- a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may NOT open; "fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher--without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.

Now, apply this not just to fiction in general, but to a single story. Isn't this the act of fanfic? To make things real?

D. and I argue about this all the time. He thinks that contradictory/differing versions make things less real. I think they make them more so -- just like multiple eye witness accounts differ, if they're true. When they're identical -- that's when you begin to think people are lying.

What d'you think?

I wonder about this a lot.

On a not entirely unrelated note, remember the Paul Cornell thing? Here is my version, the lovely magnetgirl's version, the dulcet tones of rm's recap...and Paul Cornell's account of same.

Kind of funny, no? We loom so large in our own minds. For everyone else, we're all just sidekicks and extras. Sometimes we're the cool best friend, or the romantic interest. But protagonists? We're all our own. As it should be.

I almost called my thesis "Windows on the World" but then decided the WTC/9-11 allusion was not quite... what I was going for. Fucking terrorists.

First, there were the PUMAs. Have you guys heard about these folks? PUMA apparently stands for Party Unity My Ass, (??? Really?) and they seem to be American feminists women of a certain age who feel utterly betrayed by the election, and spend a lot of time totting up grievances about who has suffered more, people of color, or women? (And what about female people of color? They don't seem too bothered. The sisterhood, it seems, doesn't contain them; it doesn't even seem to occur to them that it ought to...?)

In all seriousness, they actually seem certifiably nuts.

I spent a good portion of today rubbernecking the traincrash reading palinpumawatch and clicking on through to associated links. Whoa. If you don't want it filtered, go straight to Reclusive Leftist and look around. I think the mod, Violet Socks, or whatever is a deranged fruit-bat, but the real gold (or tragedy, depending on how you look at it) is in the comments, and the community being fostered. Here is a pre-election sample. At first I was mesmerized (and enraged!) but then -- I began to see the heartbreak of it. Because, from my reading, these seem to be women who have sad, sad lives. They talk about marital discord. They talk about giving up everything for their families (occasionally in really bad poetry.) They are among the casualties of the system, right? And their lives are ordinary, and seemingly filled with a host of claustrophobic, petty disappointments. And so this neo-con cult of aggressive mediocrity (Exhibit A: Not!Joe the War Correspondent¹) is going to be terribly appealing to them. Something that makes a virtue out of victimhood, that places all the blame for everything terrible that has happened to them squarely on the shoulders of someone else -- much like Sarah Palin, and her post-election, 2012 prep interviews that accuse everyone of being so unfair. At least the bizarrely named NiceDeb who actually compared Obama to Hitler (!!!) is the most offensively wingnut of conservatives; these other ladies seem to be left-leaning? Or believe that they are left leaning? But I don't think the word means what they think it means. Much like their beloved Hillary being named "secretary" of state? Because some of them don't seem to like the idea. Why? Not just too little, too late, but ...the idea of being a man's secretary? ...kinda sticks in the craw, doesn't it???

Um. No.

And yet, there's legitimacy in their quarrel with the world, right? Hasn't socialism/communism failed women in a stunning myriad of ways? Of course it has, just like capitalism, and well, basically every system in the world. It's a sexist world, no question.

And then I started thinking about feminism. Third wave? Radical? Sex positive? Post-feminist? What is the place of feminism in my philosophy?

I mean, not the PUMA way, obviously. Voting the other way for McCain and his "women's health" and Palin, who is NOT a feminist, saying that abortion wouldn't be necessary if young girls weren't "sluts" (yeah, these PUMAs are really pretty weird), dissing on Michelle Obama, who is just pretty awesome, even if she's got the most thankless (if prestigious) unpaid job in the world, AND voting against the man who not only supports a woman's right to choose, and you know, equal pay for equal work, and incidentally, say what you will, is closing down Gitmo, and trying to make government transparent, and is shutting down the secret CIA prisons round the world [And that's just the first three days in office!] cannot be considered left or feminist, in my opinion.

But what can? How do we appropriately deal with a climate of institutionalized and internalized sexism?

Unrelatedly -- but to close with a taste of awesome, via rm, author Cathrynne M. Valente makes this post of sheer poetry about our new world.

¹ I don't even like Rick Sanchez, but I must admit to enjoying that clip. But this begs another question. I love participatory culture. I think the ability of the internet to give ordinary people a voice, and an impact on affairs is staggering, and awesome (in the old, non-valley sense of the word). And yet, (oh god, am i agreeing with Sarah Palin?) -- we shouldn't be getting our news from blogs! Because there's a difference between reading people's opinions (the Op-Ed page, the Editorials) and the actual news! Is it wrong to want journalists to be, you know, trained? I don't think I've got any right to go to Gaza and be a war correspondent...! And I'd like my president to be smarter than me. I mean, the problem with majority rule is that the majority of people kinda suck, don't they? But if we agree that the Great Man theory of history is wrong...? ...Although ever seen a movement succeed without some stellar spear-heading? I just go back and forth on it all the time. But this just leads me back to one of my central problems -- how does one unite a desire for excellence with an allegiance to the interests of the common person? And the old problem of communism - what is it that binds the intelligentsia and the workers together? But this is another post, for another day...

I guess I ought not be surprised that Neil always says it better.

Um, yeah. What he said.

got the link from hofnarr:

Happy Days are here again.

Watch it. No, seriously, watch it.