I see what you did there

[freckles_and_doubt]

Woe is me! Have stampeded madly through three seasons of Smallville with only occasional pauses to shake my tiny fist at the asinine stupidity of the scriptwriters, and have reached a sudden forced hiatus owing to the weird fact that Season 4 is unaccountably unavailable from any outlet I can find, including the local online ones. (1-3 and 5-8 are cluttering the shelves). I'm gently revolving a theory that the season does something that utterly offends the sensibilities of a more than usually cuckoo cult somewhere, and their Seekrit Operatives have nobbled all extant copies. If it's the season in which Clark finally gets the hell over himself and tells Lana his Big Seekrit, I'll be extremely miffed. The push-me-pull-you irresolution of their relationship is driving me nuts. Lex, however, still rules.

Anyway. I'd be more ashamed of my predilection for junky teen television if it weren't for the fact that watching it has vouchsafed me an insight - interestingly, in conjunction with critting the micfics of my fellow micficcers. Apparently, in sharp contradistinction to the bulk of my fellow lit professionals, I follow a reasonably consistent principle of responding to texts, at least initially, on their own terms. If they're trying to be lemon curd tartlets I shall not waste my energy and opinionated breath in deploring their failure to be a hearty three-course meal, or an exquisite nouvelle confection involving caviar. MicFics are all over the show, but a quick analysis shows that I'm far more likely to nitpick issues of language than to take issue with the writer's choice of tone or genre. If that's what they want to do, I'll go with the flow. Likewise, Smallville is fun as teen superhero television. Castle is good-natured personality-driven detective fluff. (And the recent meta episode with the actress playing Nikki Heat was enormously good fun). Vampire Diaries is teen vampire television with considerably more to it than Twilight, and a very hot cast.

It goes further, however. All of these guilty-passion TV shows are acceptable to me in their category because they're aware of their category; they're not trying to persuade us that they're anything more. Texts should know their place, basically. Even more importantly, they frequently nod to their own identity, traditions and clichés with a certain amount of irony and occasional deliberate inversion. I am a sucker for irony. Self-conscious genre play makes me ridiculously happy.

All of which is an extremely laboured lead-in to the simple fact that I just caught myself laughing like a loon at Rodrigo y Gabriela's semi-flamenco guitar cover of "Stairway to Heaven". Clearly I'm enough of a music geek to LOL at musical jokes, but see self-conscious genre play, above. They also cover Metallica. Hee.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Apparently, Look and Listen claim to have it in stock:

http://www.lookandlisten.co.za/view/8640/

Although they could be lying. That's just the sort of thing they'd do. ;)

Jo

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Well, the Claremont branch didn't have it, and they phoned Canal Walk and Cavendish, who didn't have it. The Musica in Cavendish also didn't have it. Both Cavendish stores had all the other seasons except 4, so I went all paranoid conspiracy and gave up. Loot has it on order for me, but it hasn't yet arrived. Twitch. And Take2 list all their suppliers as being out of stock.

Thank you for ace researching. The online version of local stores never occurs to me in these little emergencies. On a related point, are you still out of things to do at work...? ;>

[herne-kzn.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, you do not mean "reply to SMSs" when you say "respond to texts". Confusion abated.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it's the couple of decades in literature academia which is responsible for the fact that I never actually think of SMSes as "texts". Although, of course, they are, on the plane tree principle ;>.