Friends

Item the first: Berries are on sale at the grocery store! Raspberries two for five dollars, blueberries two for five dollars (and in the big pint containers, no less!), strawberries for less than two dollars a carton!

Berries are the most delicious thing in the world. I am going to have a berry feast.

And item the second: I have just realized that for the first time ever, I'm actually going to be in the area of a con - Fourth Street Fantasy in Minneapolis. I...I could attend it!

I've never been to a con before! It is full of discussions of interesting things. Yet it is also full of rooms and rooms of strangers! *flails* *panics*

Also it is expensive. Perhaps I should crunch some numbers before fretting about anything else.

Aaaaargh I have the giantest case of the don't wannas. It's the last week of school - the last three and a half days of school! - and I'm hardly going to be seeing my students because they're having parties and other fun stuff (fun stuff, she says darkly) - but I have to be here anyway because I have to fulfill a certain number of hours.

Even if all I'm doing during those hours is twiddling my thumbs while my students slaughter pinatas.

And all I want to do is take long walks to the library - incidentally, the library doesn't have the complete Immortals Quartet; this is why the Tortall posts are on hiatus - and eat chicken salad sandwiches and read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which is a nonfiction book about a real-life great Victorian detective. GREAT VICTORIAN DETECTIVE, people, how can you possibly beat that? I stayed up till nearly midnight reading it because I've lost all sense of proportion.

I suppose I could have brought it to school. It would give me something to do while the students eat cake.

The author keeps referencing all these mid-Victorian sensation novels, and I want to read them all now too. The Woman in White! Lady Audley's Secret! Bleak House! (It's Dickens' 200th birthday this year. I've been meaning to read one of his books. Except it's A MILLION PAGES LONG.) Murder, bigamy, locking inconvenient people up in insane asylums, general gothicness!

Possibly I'll have to entertain myself by writing many, many LJ posts. I have a backlist of things I've been meaning to write about - general Tortall thoughts, more Downton Abbey stuff (Edith! Mary! Convoluted fic ideas about Sybil and Branson!), Fruits Basket, Lisa See's Peony in Love, a bunch of movies (J. Edgar, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Charlie Wilson's War, Stage Beauty...)

Does any of this strike anyone's fancy? PLEASE TELL ME SOMETHING DOES. I AM DYING OF BOREDOM AND NEED DIRECTION.

If Downton Abbey's Thomas-the-evil-gay-footman weren't the only gay character on the show, then I would be cheerfully raving that he and O'Brien, Thomas's partner in crime and Lady Grantham's maid, are one of the most impressive portrayals of evil on television. Driven by Thomas's desire to become Lord Grantham's valet, they single-mindedly attempt to eject the current valet from his position. They don't manage to ruin his life, but it's not for lack of trying.

The show actually does an admirable job separating Thomas's evil from his gayness. His depredations aren't motivated by lust: he doesn't want to be Lord Grantham's valet in order to get in Lord Grantham's pants. He wants to be Lord Grantham's valet because it's a high-status, low-work job that will allow him to laze around and lord it over the other servants.

Thus, Thomas and O'Brien scheme to get Bates, the current valet, fired. If their schemes to brand Bates as a thief came to fruition, he would not only lose his current position, but would also find it impossible to find work again. But that's mere collateral damage to Thomas and O'Brien.

They aren't heartless - both show flashes of softness, especially in the second season - but they don't care to use their hearts, and there's a thoughtless, even a careless quality to their evil. They seem to see Bates not so much as a person but as a human-shaped roadblock. They want him out of the job and they don't care if they ruin his life to do it.

It's this inexorable pettiness, I think, that makes Thomas and O'Brien's evil so frightening and infuriating. As long as Bates is in his current position, they'll be his enemies, and as long as they're his enemies, they'll continue their spiteful, underhanded attempts to have him ousted.

This is one of the things I love about Downton Abbey, actually: this refusal to romanticize evil. Evil in Downton isn't grand or tragic. It's rooted in an inability or unwillingness to care about other people; it's petty and spiteful, motivated by money or status or jealousy, but nonetheless devastating in its effects.

And if there were just one sympathetic gay character in Downton Abbey to offset Thomas's loathsomeness, then his portrayal would be very impressive. But as he's the only one - aside from the one-off evil duke, who hardly helps matters* - his evil, despite the fact that it's clearly quite a separate quality from his gayness, carries with it an unpleasant subtext.

But who knows? Maybe in the third season there will be a sympathetic gay character. We can always hope!


*There's also a sympathetic injured soldier who might be gay, but it's never definitively stated and he commits suicide anyway, so that's not much help.

The Frances books! Bread and Jam for Frances, A Birthday for Frances, Best Friends for Frances...we had all of Russell and Lillian Hoban's Frances books. I LOVED the Frances books: their beautiful four-color illustrations, black, white, pale pink and pale green; and Frances herself, who was just like me, if I were an anthropomorphized badger. She's neither an angel - an uncommon character type in picture books, anyway - nor exaggeratedly naughty, which is very common: Eloise, Olivia, Max, Curious George…

Oh, I loathed Curious George. I wasn't a big fan of any of the picture books about naughty children, but Curious George was the worst. There's one book where he destroys a dinosaur skeleton. A fossil skeleton that paleontologists lovingly, carefully, painstakingly picked out of the rocks in which it had lain for at least 65 million years! And he doesn't get in any trouble at all! Those poor paleontologists. The poor museum. All the museum goers who will never get to see the T-rex skeleton because of Curious George! RAGE.

But Frances is not like that. She's an in-between girl: she usually wants to do right, but even when she tries to be good it's very hard. In one book she generously uses her own allowance to buy her little sister Gloria candy for her birthday, but then eats half of it before Gloria gets a bite. But sometimes she doesn't want to be good at all.

I loved all the Frances books (special mention goes to Best Friends for Frances), but Bread and Jam for Franceswas my favorite. So many long, lovingly described scenes all about food - like Albert's description of the lunch he brought to school:

"I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread," said Albert. "And a pickle to go with it. And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk. And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with."

And then there's a whole page devoted to Albert's preparations for eating this enormous lunch, and only then does he actually eat it. I wouldn't have eaten almost anything in Albert's lunch at the time, but nonetheless I found the passage immensely satisfying.

There's often an assumption that descriptions are satisfying because they evoke reality well - that one can feel or see or taste the thing described. But descriptions like the one above are satisfying purely for their own sake. It has a rhythm - I have this...And this...And this - with long and short sentences intermixed; and it keeps going, and going, and going, creating in its length a sense of repleteness. An absolutely satisfying lunch, even if it is just words.

Author: GwynneP

Rating: Explicit.
Warning: Naughty bits alert - send young children and impressionable animals out of the room.

Characters: Ekaterin Vervayne Vorsoisson, Miles Vorkosigan

Just what are the rules for the second time around?


On AOL: http://archiveofourown.org/works/413046

Title: Shareholder
Author: philomytha
Length: 1600 words
Content: suitable for all
Summary: Duv at a crossroads in his life.

Shareholder

I’ve read that The Graduate is the movie that captures the zeitgeist of the sixties generation. If this is so, it raises one very important question: what the heck was wrong with the sixties generation?

After graduating from an elite eastern college, Ben Braddock moves back to his parents’ house in California. He spends the next few months floating around his parents’ swimming pool, having an affair with Mrs. Robinson, and sulking whenever his parents nudge him to get a job, go to grad school, or otherwise behave like a grown-up.

(When my generation moves back home after college, we help with chores, assiduously send in applications for jobs and graduate school despite the terrible, terrible market for both, and are still castigated by the press as lazy spoiled brats.)

Then Ben’s parents force him to take Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine on a date. Ben is so irritated that he takes Elaine to a strip club. Elaine bursts into tears and flees the club, but is nonetheless surprisingly receptive when Ben kisses her later. (Elaine’s emotions are always dictated by the needs of plot. She stays mad at him just long enough to provide a little conflict, but not long enough that it might be inconvenient.)

Mrs. Robinson is totally furious. She threatens to tell Elaine about her affair with Ben. Ben tells Elaine first, and Elaine shrieks and tells Ben never to see her again.

Ben decides that he’s going to marry Elaine. Never mind that they’ve been on only one date! Never mind she despises him! This is true love. And by true love, I mean that Ben tells Elaine that she’s the first thing he’s liked in a long time.

(As a side note, there’s a good argument to be made that Ben is depressed. That comment to Elaine, his general listlessness, his disconnect from all the people around him - there a number of scenes where people are talking at Ben but he can’t hear - all support the possibility. This makes him more sympathetic than the “He’s a lazy bum” reading, but valorizing his maladaptive coping mechanisms still makes for a very unsatisfying movie.)

Inspired by the fact that she makes him feel something, Ben follows Elaine to Berkeley. Because stalking is totally romantic. Elaine tells Ben that her mother said that Ben raped her, but forgets about this instantaneously when Ben tells her indignantly that it’s not true. Because...because...because obviously if it was true he would totally admit it? Or something.

Ben follows Elaine around campus pestering her; there’s an appalling scene where he starts shouting in the library and Elaine is so embarrassed she flees the room. Nonetheless, she says that she might marry him. Because stalking is totally romantic! And Elaine has no feelings of her own anyway, so she might as well!

But Mrs. Robinson gets wind of this and sets out to break them up. By...marrying Elaine off to someone else immediately. Why does Elaine agree to marry a man she doesn’t much care for, in a ceremony so rushed that it makes everyone snicker about how she must be pregnant? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not the filmmakers! Elaine is a plot device, not a character, and her nuptials provide an appropriately dramatic setting for Ben’s climactic scene, wherein he runs into the church howling “ELAINE! ELAINE! ELAINE!”

“BEN!” cries Elaine, and they flee the church together. They barely know each other and are united by nothing other than mutual purposelessness, but who cares! They're capturing the spirit of their generation.

Which, if Ben and Elaine are anything to go by, was apparently defined by aimless self absorption. No wonder we have so many problems now that they've grown up and are running things.

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

I'm jumping on the bandwagon! A little late, as usual, but I just came up with a topic: 100 Books that Influenced Me, starting with books from my childhood and going on up.

This morning I was dispatched to get a picture book to read to the kindergartners. Naturally, I started thinking of old favorites to share. Should I get something by Jan Brett? But my favorite book of hers is The Wild Christmas Reindeer, and it's nowhere near Christmas time. Patricia Polacco? It's raining outside today - perfect weather for Thunder Cake...

And then inspiration struck! I got Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, which is about a girl who decides to do three things when she grows up: to go to faraway places, to come home to live by the see, and to make the world more beautiful. And then Miss Rumphius grows up, travels to faraway places, gets a little house by the sea, and sows lupines across the land so that she becomes the Lupine Lady.

I love the completeness of it: wanting these things, and doing them all, one by one. And I love Miss Rumphius's goals so much that they've become mine. I too want to travel to faraway place, live by the sea (or a lake, or a stream, or a forest; something natural and beautiful), and make the world more beautiful.

Mind, I would probably still want these things if my mom hadn't read me Miss Rumphius at an early age. But I don't think the purpose of books is to change who we are. It's to show us who we are: to uncover new facets of our characters and nourish neglected corners of our souls. Books help us become our best selves.

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!