lies, damned lies, and fiction

I have finished a TERRIBLE terrible draft 2 of my dissertation. Like, it is so bad, I cannot believe I am handing it into my advisor today, because she is a lovely person who doesn't deserve to have to read this, and I just want to lie. Down. And. Die.

I have not slept in a while.

I just. WANT TO WRITE FANFIC, OKAY??? AND READ FANFIC and watch soothing police procedurals (WHAT? DON'T JUDGE ME!) and not have to write this thing anymore ever, and okay, I seem to be watching Hawaii Five-0? I do not understand myself. But I've got to the point in Numb3rs where everyone's just like, upset with everyone else, and IT IS TOO STRESSFUL FOR ME, OKAY? I CANNOT WATCH IT ANYMORE because it makes me have too many of the feelings! It was just supposed to be my soothing math-brothers place AND NOW IT IS NOT.

Anyway, Hawaii Five-0 is ridiculous, but also, um, really fun. I'm like 16 episodes into S1. I watch it on the subway, on my two hour each way commute to work. That means I can watch, like, four episodes a day.

OKAY. I should go, like, shower, and hand this piece of shit in, I guess? Maybe I will die on the way, and thus everyone will be saved.

I saw the space shuttle Enterprise fly over NYC this morning from Riverdale Park. It was, I have to say, pretty cool. (How much do I love that it's named Enterprise??) I took some pretty crap video (see below), but trust me, it was cool.

So! I haven't been around because I've been seriously, soul-crushingly depressed. Yeah. BUT. I just had to stop in because a cool thing just happened! One of my students -- I had him in three different courses, starting when he was a sophomore and, um, wanted to be a rock star when he grew up, and hated renaissance literature, and finishing up when he was a senior, by which time I'd converted him to the church of Shakespeare, Milton, and Victorian novels from a post colonial perspective -- just wrote me this email:

Hello Professor,

I hope all is well. I just wanted to write to thank you for helping me get into the masters program. I am extremely grateful that you wrote the recommendation letter for me, and gave me the confidence to apply to the program. Thank you so much, Professor kalichan, for everything.


Sincerely,
****

I just. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And I had another student yesterday asking me if I thought she could pursue a masters in English with a specialization in queer theory to go with her secondary school teaching career. Because of stuff I said!

You know, lots of times I hate teaching. I used to feel like it was a complete waste of time. A stupid and annoying day job. And often I still do. But... I'm pretty good at it. And it's kind of nice to know that you did something that mattered to someone. Made a difference.

God, that was so cheezy I might throw up in my mouth a little. Okay. End of sappiness.

MEANWHILE. Have you guys seen the ads for the new USA show? Common Law? Where there are two cop partners who don't get along, so they get sent to marriage counseling? USA, where the subtext is... no longer sub. At all. They're not even *trying* to disguise it anymore. Jesus.

Who else is?

"There's nothing wrong with your love story, baby..."

From Interview magazine:

With audiences clearly exhausted of modernity, the Braveheart remake comes on the heals of successful medieval fantasies Game of Thrones and Spartacus.

Medieval fantasies? Spartacus?!?!

Also, while I admit that GoT and Spartacus have soothed and medicated my savage spirit, it's heels, not heals, my friends.

HAVE WE LIVED AND FOUGHT IN VAIN???

Okay, to cheer both you and myself up, have some naked Fassbender (NSFW). He really makes me feel all full-on crushy.

Adrienne Rich is dead. God, that's sad.

"Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of enter-ing an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival." [source]

I always think of that when I'm thinking of the fanfictional project.

-- politics-fandom-fail: WTF PEOPLE ARE UPSET BECAUSE A BLACK CHARACTER IS PLAYED BY A BLACK ACTRESS? Are you kidding me with this shit, Internets? #thehungergames.

-- politics/fail: Of course in a world like this, where you can just shoot people in the street without the expectation that the police will, you know, care, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I am. Speaking of not caring, I don't care, btw, if Trayvon Martin actually did punch Zimmerman in the face, or whatever. (I don't believe it, but I don't care AT ALL if it did happen.) You know what? Facepunching, burglary, thuggitude, whatever -- NOT AN EXECUTABLE OFFENSE. Stop the world, okay? I want to get off.

-- more politics: On the killing of Shaima al-Awadi, Basic facts on clothing and murder for American bigots. I love this guy so much! And what's more, to cheer us up after the horribleness he catalogs, he generously provides links to this Tron-dance masterpiece from Japan:


-- fic rec: Don't Show, Don't Tell by abbichicken is one of the hottest stories I've ever read in this or any fandom. Mind the warnings though, kidlets, it's NOT vanilla. But it is X-Men First Class Charles/Erik awesomeness with blood and pain and cigarettes! Which, you know, of course Erik smokes. It's the SIXTIES.

-- physics-math nerdity with a slight hint of fandom: An article on Emmy Noether, the most significant mathematician you've never heard of, who I've adored to bits for a long time. Noether's theorem shows, among other things that "a symmetry of time — like the fact that whether you throw a ball in the air tomorrow or make the same toss next week will have no effect on the ball’s trajectory — is directly related to the conservation of energy, our old homily that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form." Like I said, I've always loved her, and in fact, in Rach's and my Rose/Jack/9 story, I gave Noether's theory a guest appearance in the TARDIS fireplace:

"This is nice," she said, ignoring the way that the Doctor stiffened a bit at the contact, and not, as far as Jack could tell, in any useful way. "I never asked. Is that a real fireplace?"

"Define real," the Doctor said.

"Wood burning. Smoke. If I touched it, I'd get burned?"

"Yep," said the Doctor.

"Is there a chimney?"

"No."

"Where does the smoke go?"

The Doctor smiled. "What happens to footprints in the snow, after the snow melts?"

"That doesn't make any sense, Doctor."

"D'you think if I explained it, you'd understand it any better?"

Rose laughed. "You could have a go anyway."

"It's probably a Noetherian thermodynamic converter. Continuous symmetry of energy in an invariant system. Smoke gets reabsorbed into the fuel, and the whole thing cycles."

Both Rose and the Doctor stared at Jack, who grinned. "What?" he asked. "Thought I was just a pretty face?"

See, I've got my bona fides. Anyway, check out Emmy Noether, she is awesome.

-- booktalk: In my epic quest for more epic fantasy (gritty, awesomely well-written, sense of humor, not misogynistic, racist, or heternormative -- good luck with that, kali!), I think I'm about to start reading K.J. Parker. This looks promising (will keep you posted!) but in the linked interview, I saw this in answer to the perennial "where do you get your ideas?" question:

TH: Now I’m going to ask you the question that always makes me want to shed blood when I get asked it. Where do you get your ideas from?

KJP: I see pictures in my mind, and they intrigue me, and then I try and figure out the story behind them. That gives me a central character, if I’m lucky, or a group of characters. With the Engineer books, I had this mental image of a man who really wanted to go home. That was all; an overwhelming longing to go home, but it was impossible, but he refused to accept it. From that I gathered that he had to be a patient man, a builder of mechanisms to achieve a very difficult objective. That meant he had to be an engineer. Then I was reading about mechanical toys in Alexandria, and also the legend of Weyland the Smith. That gave me enough to feel confident there was a book there, and I started looking around for auxiliary characters. Then someone was telling me about hunting wild boar in Germany, and I remembered there were a whole lot of medieval handbooks on hunting, and that gave me Valens, though I got his face, so to speak, from somewhere else.

TH: Where?

KJP: An extremely fine example of Harry Potter fan fiction I stumbled across on the Internet. Actually, the character in that which I liked so much turned into a different character, Miel Ducas; and my friend the boar-hunter got roped in as his cousin, Jarnac. But these clues I get from different sources are just starting points. The characters only really start to grow once they get talking to each other.

LOVE, right? It's awesome to see fanfiction cited as just another literary reference, though it would've been great to hear what the story was.

So... I was looking for something new to read after working my way through scott_lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies (they are awesome, btw. Highly recommended -- if you like lovely, long, engrossing caper-style fantasy novels set in Renaissance alt!Venice/alt!Mediterranean Europe, with con-men, thieves, pirates, casino-heists, and a high death count. Neal Caffrey would love this world, is what I'm saying. As do I! They're especially pleasurable, I think, because although plenty of terrible things happen, the characters are still having immense amounts of fun, even when they're thoroughly screwed. Although I enjoy Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, if I woke up one day in Westeros, I'd slit my own throat and consider it a win -- if you're a peasant, you're just fucked, and if you're a noble, well, then you're magnificently fucked -- and either way there's no fun to be had, only bleakness and despair. Conversely if I woke up in Camorra, I think there's a high probability that I'd have a pretty good time, before I was devoured by sharks. [Which is a thing that happens. Literally. The sharks are awesome!] Serious things definitely transpire, but everyone's not always SRS BSNS, you know? BUT I DIGRESS...)

After I got through those, what I wanted to read was some more epic, woman-friendly, racially diverse, QUILTBAG fantasy -- of which there is an unsurprisingly, alarmingly short supply. (Lynch's books aren't exactly QUILTBAG -- in fact, the two main characters appear to be straight white dudes -- BUT they live in an amazingly diverse world, with people of many colors, genders, and sexual orientations, all treated with respect! It made me like the books EVEN MORE.) Anyway, after some googling, I moved on to Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains, which I've just started, but is pretty good so far... (OK, DIGRESSION, PART DEUX)

ANYWAY, for reals this time, when I was googling around looking for recs, I happened upon the cover of Alex Sanchez's gay YA classic, Rainbow Boys, that CLEARLY used Matt Bomer as one of the cover models. This is from back when he was on Guiding Light, right? 2003? How does that happen?



Did you like how I brought that round to Neal Caffrey? *grins* I told you there was a point in there somewhere. Sort of.

Okay, back to work...

So. Very strange things happen in the head when you fall in love with two fandoms at the same time. It's even weirder when one of them is Spartacus. And the other is Marvel movie-verse. DEAR GOD. And pictures like this:



are just no help at all with the brain-melting crossover.

And okay, Fassbender is just ridiculously hot. RIDICULOUSLY.

(I know I'm going to hell for thinking that smoking is just nnngh. But I can't help myself and I say this as someone whose dad's got lung cancer as we speak. I still love it. Though I'm not a smoker anymore -- maybe 2 or 3 a year -- some of the best sex of my life has involved cigarettes. In all kinds of permutations. That was more than you wanted to know.)

Anyway. I am totally torn between these two fannish loves who are duking it out in the arena of my mind. I'm not usually fannishly polyamourous. More of a serial monogamist. But here I am. Torn.

Spartacus fandom is, kinda, on the ground floor still... Which is always fun to get in on. However there is no novel-length fic as far as I can tell (yet), whereas of course Marvel is thriving. (And for me to really 100% fall for a fandom and not just the text itself, I need novel-length fic. Full on immersion, baby.) Conversely, new canon with Spartacus is happening right the fuck now -- EXCITING! -- whereas Marvel is happily waiting Avengers & Spidey, and so on, but the new!stuff isn't out yet. (And also, there's a lot of confusion as to what really IS canon, which I always find unsettling, because of comicsverse and cartoonverse and so on.) And then there's the fact that the relationships between the gladiators are just... really healthy. Which is, you know, kinda not my bag? To me, the most perfect love stories are ones where murder is, you know, always an option. And maybe the most intimate thing you can do to (or with) someone is destroy them...

(I've heard the first step is in admitting you have a problem...?)

So, you know... Loki/everyone.but.especially.Thor really works! That's where I started out, reading Thor, then segued into some straight up Avengers (nothing Tony Stark does is healthy!) and now am happily ensconced in X-Men First Class, which is, like, the PERFECT fandom for me. (I mean, first of all, what is this, people? I ask you.) And then there's Charles/Erik, which is, like, the platonic ideal of FoeYay. WHICH IS THE PERFECT THING, okay? God, I am so in love with them right now. Reading XMFC fic is like someone stroking a bruise perfectly and it is delicious and hurts and is AMAZING and doesn't stop, like ever, and my id is exploding in a world of squeegasm.

I do not think that this is compatible with the wonder that is Nasir and Agron. They are so nice to each other! They do not secretly hate/love each other. There is no universe in which they would kill each other for fun and lols. I am so out of clues as to how to write this? Let's remember that if I'm known for anything at all in fandom, it's for a love story that starts out with one of the parties killing the other during sex and goes downhill from there. And yet, LOOK AT THEIR FACES!!!! And the show itself is so brutal and deathsome and powerplay and OMG.

What do I do???? </wail>

In conclusion, I am way too distracted from my dissertation. And I should probably do some work now.

Would it be wrong to write a really fucked up dystopian high school AU for Sparty and co.? With a football team called the Gladiators, and, and Batiatus as, um, the evil!Coach? (Lucretia running Cheer? is that too much??? All of the Romans would be teachers, prolly...) And Glaber as the vice-superintendent of schools? It could take place in Rome, NY. Sparty would clearly be the quarterback.

It would, wouldn't it?

Oh man, I love this show so much. It's gotten so good, I don't even think it's a guilty pleasure anymore.