magpyr

The Handmaid's Tale is the single most horrifying book I've ever read. I finished it last night and then got all of two hours of sleep because of the nightmares. I'll write about it more when my thoughts are a bit more organized and I've managed some sort of emotional distance.

Can't we ditch the m/m debate everybody's so sick of, and talk about the serious lack of femslash in any fandom but The L Word? Why is it so easy for people to see "queer subtext" in a work concerning straight male characters, but not females? Can we look at what is not being written? Gay women, asexuals, genderqueer people,... where the hell are they?

Some gay women are stating how male slash isn't just straight women writing porn and there's more to it and all, but why are gay women not writing f/f?

When I go through an archive of Firefly fic, any archive, the majority of non-gen fics revolve around male characters being gay. Then there's a smaller number of het pairings. The two or three f/f fics usually include Inara, who is shown to be bisexual in the canon. What is going on here? Where is my subversion, people?

See, I'm an arachist and a feminist. I believe in the evilness of established hierarchies and loathe the gender binary. But all too often, it seems to me writers are only subverting heteronormaivity by turning straight male characters gay, and ingoring the women (cue "but there are no women in my canon!" "nobody wants to read that!" "the women in my canon are written so poorly!" etc).

Also, in an all too familiar linguistic process, "slash" has come to mean male slash, and surprise! We have to modify it by an adjective when it is about women! (Is there anyone who doesn't cringe at hearing "chairperson?") Why isn't anyone writing about how, in the context of fanfiction, men are the norm and women are absent? Isn't that a bit too familiar? Doesn't it worry anyone?

(More on this coming later, I'm in the middle of finals right now -they're now because my school is crazy- and haven't been following the discussion that closely)

So guys I haven't been here for a long while, and I missed you.

There's been a lot going on in my life, and I'll probably bore you with the details later. But the gist of it is, since June, I've been forced to reevaluate a lot of assumptions and relationships with people I know, and it's HARD. That's part of what caused me to disappear from a lot of place including Insanejournal (but also work, which is a long story and deserves its own post).

Also, before June, my participation in the Farsi regions of the internet was very close to zero and then it grew to include 99% of my online interactions. Apparently there's a limit to the amount of information the mind can consume and produce everyday, and that means if I'm on the Farsi side of the internet all the time, I'm not gonna be here.

But I'm gonna be here a lot more, mostly because I'm tired, but also because I missed knowing about what you wonderful people were doing and thinking and writing. I missed fandom and reading fic and pointing at the implications of tiny details in obscure books and knowing someone will understand what I'm saying.

In other news, I'm a Firefly fan now.

Oh, and happy 2010. I hope it won't suck as much as 2009 did.

I'm buying a new computer and a netbook. Having money is awesome. (I really don't get why people buy e-book readers when they can buy netbooks for the same price.)

I was looking at that last post and... yeah. I was high on heroism and adrenaline. The effects are fading now, and I really don't think I want to write about the whole mess anymore. I'm completely cured of ever trying to play martyr again.

Yes Minister is brilliant.

Tim Burton's making Alice in Wonderland. Stephen Fry is the voice for the Cheshire Cat. How awesome is that?

I wanna be China Mieville when I grow up.

In case you haven't seen the best webcomic ever yet: 2D Goggles

Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad resoundingly won Iran's election, preliminary official results showed on Saturday.

Nobody deserves to wake up to such news. Not even me.

...I'll go back to crying now.

I'm looking for songs about Lebanon, Palestine, and/or Israel. Anything about the countries themselves or their various conflicts is fine, as well as all languages.

The only song I can think of is one by Chris de Burgh with a refrain that goes something like "the skies of Lebanon are burning." (I'm too lazy to google it.)

*glares threateningly* No, I do NOT listen to Chris de Burgh.

Racefail09 and now Round Two are in part about raising awareness of how fiction is not just fiction and has very real effects on many people's lives, and I'm all for that. Hell, I am those people. But there's something I think nobody's talking about, and that is getting hit by the clue train friggin' hurts.

( Here's how I got hit by it. )

*Edited so as to not eat up friendspages.

I have a HUGE amount of stuff to do for work tomorrow (and tomorrow's like, the post-postponed deadline for this project), not to mention the Korean exam which covers three chapters two of which I have never before seen in my life (okay, I may have flipped through the pages), and I can't keep myself away from the internet long enough to actually do something. THE INTERWEBS IS EATING MY SOUL PEOPLE.

(And I can't stop listening to the Dar Williams song. Unwelcome memories of puberty are unwelcome, yet I go on listening to this. I have given up all hope of one day making sense of things.)

I love [romantic representations of] failed rebellions and it's April 27th, three days into the Easter Rising of 1916. So I thought I'd celebrate share the heartbreak with you through songs.

( Clicky )

And here's a Kate Beaton comic featuring James Connolly and Patrick Pearse.

"This means that from today, listeners to Last.fm Radio outside of the USA, UK and Germany will be asked to subscribe for €3.00 per month, after a 30 track free trial period."

I am not amused.

This was in my midterm poetry exam today. I had no idea he could write this beautifully.

Morning Work, by D H Lawrence

A GANG of labourers on the piled wet timber
That shines blood-red beside the railway siding
Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning
Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding,

The red-gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling
Hither and thither across the morn's crystalline frame
Of blue : trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining,
And laughing with work, living their work like a game.

Today seemed to be unofficial D H Lawrence day. We were discussing him in another class, and the award for the stupid comment of the day goes to its (female) professor for "Lawrence is quite feminist in his writings." I swear, the stupidity is following me around.

*Not that I'd ever actually do that. But it gets frustrating sometimes, what with so many people stubbornly refusing to GET A CLUE.

I have a confession to make. I find Stephenie Meyer attractive.

( picspam )

*dies of shame*

Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus
by Francis Brett Young

Arthur is gone... Tristram in Careol
Sleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleeps
Beside him, where the Westering waters roll
Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

( Lancelot is fallen )

Dr Starkey went further, by saying that modern attempts to paint many women in history as "power players" was to falsify the facts.

He said: "If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify."

Packing this much fail into a relatively short speech takes real talent, you know.

Also, I love (not really) how some people have their own alternate universes in which New Historicism has never happened.

Another name for the kestrel is "windfucker."

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

I love having an excuse to post my favorite poems.

what if a much of a which of a wind, by e. e. cummings

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

( what if a keen of a lean wind flays )

When the world ends, it'll be because of Neil Gaiman and his dog. The universe was not programmed to contain such high levels of cute.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/03/past-present-and-stick.html

I'm in the middle of re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Here's some language-related things I've been thinking about:

'Back to the ship, then,' he was saying. 'Viktor, how are you feeling? Did you eat enough? Should I send for some mulled wine from the kitchens?'

Harry saw Krum shake his head as he pulled his furs back on.

'Professor, I vood like some vine,' said one of the other Durmstrang boys hopefully.

'I wasn't offering it to you, Poliakoff,' snapped Karkaroff, his warmly paternal air vanishing in an instant. 'I notice you have dribbled food all down the front of your robes again, disgusting boy-'

1. What I don't get is, why do they speak English, amongst themselves? We're not told where Durmstrang is located. It's most probably somewhere in northern Europe. The students/teachers we encounter have names pointing to different countries (Bulgaria, Russia, Germany). So it makes sense for them to have a lingua franca as the language of instruction in their school. But why should it be English? Why is it not the language of whatever country the school is in? Among wizards, who use a lot of Latin in their spells, Latin would have been another understandable choice. English though? An odd choice.

2. It will be interesting to figure out what exactly the place of English is in the Wizarding World. British imperialism and the aftermaths of WWII must have left their linguistic marks on the WW too, but surely those can't have been in the exact same ways as in the Muggle World.

What we are told about languages in the WW seem to say that here too English is the international language, though. Not many English-speaking people seem to know/want to learn other languages, and those who do (Dumbledore, Crouch) are a source of amazement because of their linguistic abilities. Also, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students speak English, but we're never told of foreign language classes in Hogwarts.

3. And it occurs to me, why would they even need to learn other languages? Don't they have, like, magic? Surely, someone must have come up with the Wizarding World's Babel fish?

4. The inconsistencies in Krum's accent really annoy me. He devoices his final v's, but not the d in 'overheard' or the g in 'wrong.' Also, he pronounces 'what' as 'vot,' but has no problem pronouncing 'well' properly. /phonological nitpicking