RivkaT

( Felix! Mildmay! Vampires! Anticlimax! )

Schadenfreude, with wit: “Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal…. Like Sanford, Palin snuck away to visit a distant land and fell in love with a siren she cannot bring home or leave behind. Her fatal attraction was the national spotlight.”

Further on Palin, did she seriously say that she didn’t want to be lame duck because it’s not enough fun for her (or, generously, for the state)? She does know that term limits mean that lame duckishness is a feature of the system, right? Who’s supposed to be running the show in such circumstances? I am baffled.

( Steve Almond on everything and Mary Roach on sex )

My very first Smallville story, The Presence of Fire, is up at the Audio archive, courtesy of cathexys.

( Jim Butcher and Ilona Andrews, heir to Laurell Hamilton )

Quotes for my commonplace book:

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)

“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats

"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

( competition policy, reusing music, happiness, persuasion )

(Post title taken from actual grading story I was told by a professor who shall not be named.) Grading today; confronted with an exam bearing a note that the examinee had not noticed Part 3 until the end of the (8-hour) exam, and thus had not provided an answer, ensuring a pretty bad grade given that the question was worth 35% of the grade. I feel horrible for the student, but mainly I think because my embarrassment squick’s been triggered. Here is what I did beforehand: I announced there’d be three sections in class, each with a different format: short answer, essay, fact pattern. I posted the exam instructions on the course site before the exam; the instructions specify that there are three parts and set forth the percentages. On the exam itself, those instructions are repeated. On each question, the points available are marked at the beginning. The exam has “page X of Y” on each page. The third part took up several pages—it even had pictures, for pete’s sake! It’s an exam disaster, to be sure, and I do feel sorry for the kid. But sorry with a lot of argh attached.

( fiction: YA fantasy, Regency paranormal, and Patricia Briggs )

( Biblical contradictions, local money, and craftsmen )

Philip Margolin, Executive Privilege: Margolin sent me an autographed copy for talking over some details for the in-progress sequel, so it’s probably churlish to say that I’m not a big fan of airport thrillers. But I press on nonetheless! An Oregon associate pursuing a death row inmate’s habeas case and a DC PI independently discover information suggesting that someone close to the President—perhaps the President himself—is a serial killer. It moves fast, anyway. The characters reminded me of Duplo toys: largely human-shaped, and moving around in an environment recognizable as an abstraction of our own; mostly not stereotypes, but not exactly identifiable people either.

But what I really noticed is how spoiled I’ve been by fanfic. And not just in the standard “fanfic is focused on stuff I like” way, though that too. But fanfic is the apotheosis of “give me just the good parts” not only at the level of plot/trope, but also certain aspects of writing. Margolin introduced his guy protagonist by having him look in the mirror. It’s cheesy and artificial and we have to let him get away with it because there are only so many ways a limited POV (standard in modern fiction) can describe the narrator. We don’t have to put up with it in fanfic, though, because regardless of source text fanfic gets to operate using audiovisual conventions: no description of main characters necessary. Skip the preliminaries, tell me something new.

Margolin is relatively competent with infodumps, and usually manages to have them well-motivated by the text: two people are out on a first date and telling each other their histories, or one lawyer summarizes an area of the law for another who is unfamiliar with that area. This is a problem for lots of plot-based stories, and it helps to have characters who canonically deal in infodumps, which I suspect is another reason I find it easy to like cop-types. It was simplest for Mulder and Scully: for them, infodumps were foreplay. Lex lectures Clark or, if Clark is unavailable, himself, because he’s always performing for someone, if only the imagined audience (which in his case is us). Sam and Dean tend to summarize, driving information out of dialogue and into narration, where I think it often fits best. Character backstory often has to be chunked too; one of the reasons Margolin seemed clunky was that he started out with what felt like too much description of backstory, though to be fair he left a good deal to be worked out later. See also: spoiled by fanfic, where we don’t need much backstory and so seeing what history characters reveal, if anything, tells you more word-for-word about the characters and the author’s take on them than it does in standalone fiction.

Trying the DW crossposter again. Apologies if it looks awful; I do not understand how to make the cut tag work in the rich text interface, much less the block quote, and think that Semagic may be my best option for the time being. ( Free theory! )

Dear diary: Today I did a very good job at something where the extent to which I did a good job doesn’t matter and should. It is a little depressing!

( books: tattoos and decisionmaking )

Query: anybody know if the Dreamwidth crossposter has fixed its cut-tag issues?

Rob Thurman, Nightlife: ( SPN fandom, why was I not informed? )

( The rest: Butcher, Martin's Wild Cards, Marshall )

1. Here’s a kind of funny thing: google “begin optional trim.” It’s kind of comforting to know that, no matter how embarrassing your mistake, a couple of thousand people out there have made it too.

2. Confused RT is confused ( (Dreamwidth blather): )

3. Another quote for the SPN essay I’m not writing:

Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim 71 (2000): “Consider that the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States). These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest.” (And hey, whoa, an intelligible Butler quote!)

4. ( Law book! )

( intellectual property, extradiegetic music, marketing, cheerleading )

Things that make me happy:

1. jadelennox on Ada Lovelace Day and women in programming.

2. I am slogging through my SV story at about ten words a day, but I know how it ends at last, and so I put myself up for auction at Sweet Charity! I am offering:

A story, at least 1000 words but possibly a fair amount longer (past auction stories are in the 15,000-25,000 range). Fandoms: SPN, Chuck; SV or crossovers with anything I know by negotiation--I will try Buffy, SCC, or almost anything else if I think I can make it work. Gen, het, slash--again, I'll try almost anything, though my strength is taking standard tropes and putting a bit of a topspin on them.

3. I am almost caught up on professional reading, and hope to give away a bunch of fiction soon. This will include three Marjorie Liu books:

( sadly, not a rave review )

I wrote Castiel/Mary over in the Castiel commentfic thing. My prompt, which everyone is encouraged to fill, is Sam/Castiel, bonus if it’s because one or both is pining for Dean. justabi already did one version, yum, but the more the merrier.

( possibly related review: Sexual perversion )

The evil side of me really wants a vid about shows we break up with—XF, SV, Heroes, BSG, Dollhouse, etc.—to Voltaire’s Future Ex-Girlfriend.

( books about making books )

( Stephen King, free downloads, metal girl, K.J Parker )

( Brief note about SPN, Family Remains: )

( Inaugural review: Dreams from My Father )

So, in the latest go-round on racism, reader response, and the like, I have very little useful to say. The one thing that I haven’t seen much discussion on--though I haven’t waded into many comment threads, so I might just have missed it--is about the false opposition between rational/academic/literary analysis and emotional/political response, specifically about what it means to have emotions. Anyone who tells you that they aren’t responding emotionally to anything they have spent the time to analyze has made a mistake. Emotion/reason is a common dualism (and therefore it’s never surprising to find it mapped onto power hierarchies). But no rational judgment can be made without emotion. This isn’t exaggeration: without emotion to tell us what to value, weighing factors with perfect accuracy is useless. A person engaging in what she calls “analysis” as opposed to “reaction” may be responding with emotion so well accommodated by prevailing structures that it looks to her like computer logic. But emotion is behind any analysis. For an overview of the relevant neuro/psychological research, the first half of this paper by David Arkush covers a lot of ground. (It’s law-oriented, but it’s also the most recent thing I read on the subject so it’s an easy cite.)

( A book on the public domain )

( sf and fantasy recommendations )

My Yuletide story was a character piece, Michaela Dupont from Anna to the Infinite Power.

Fannish things I have recently loved:

Sarah Walker vid, Creator, by talitha78.

linabean’s poem taken from snippets from sgastoryfinders.

…
the one where
McKay
is turned into a puppy!!!
It ends up
with John and Rodney together

I'm almost sure
I didn't imagine it.
I know it's out there

I'm looking for a story
Please?

John is very politely (with guns) asking
I am looking for a fic

See also trinity_clare’s riff on William Carlos Williams in the comments:
I have read
the stories
that were in
the comm

and which
you were probably
saving
as bookmarks

Forgive me
they were del.icio.us
so slashy
and so hot

And then there’s the additional material, not McShep, which is funny but also seems to me to serve as a critique of the pairing-centeredness of so much fandom, especially when it’s two white guys at the center.

Jayne Leitch, Dearly Divided: SPN/Dexter, Dean & Deb. I don’t know Dexter, but the SPN plot—oh, Dean. (Also, oh, Sam.)

( short reviews: Pratchett, King, After School Nightmare, Eternal Sabbath )