Freckles & Doubt

I'm trying to work out why this is so funny.



Possibly because Giles, who is quite one of my favourite Buffy characters, and it's beautifully edited, but mostly I suspect that there's just something inherently funny about Chumbawamba.

I am Still Sick, although much, much better - now at the pale/shaky/weedy end of it, with occasional coughing and a throaty contralto, instead of the hacking-consumptive-bring-me-a-place-to-die bit. Doc has put me off work until Thursday. On mature reflection, this was sensible and necessary, because doing anything much makes me fall over, or at least want to.

(You can attribute the Cassie Claire weed-smoking Gandalf subject line to the fact that I rewatched the second Hobbit film last night, which only served to reinforce my convictions that (a) Martin Freeman is a tiny hobbitoid acting god, and (b) BC was born to voice the more intelligent sort of dragon.)

This is a public service announcement: please not to take it personally if I haven't returned any of your emails or made any effort to see you in the last couple of weeks. The equation goes something like start of term = inevitable lurgi = inevitable post-lurgi fatigue = inevitable depression. I am a small, hedgehoggy ball of misery and self-loathing and am not summoning much energy to do anything, much, unless it's arranged for me and presented to me inescapably on a plate. Normal communications will be resumed when I have hauled myself out of it via my bootstraps and, possibly, gin. I have to say, having my Very Own House in which to hedgehog is definitely a plus.

The subject line is, of course, the Magnetic Fields, who are the official sound-track of depression. They've cycled round to being my driving music again. They're surprisingly consoling.

The weather is officially absurd: Cape Town traditionally does February heatwaves, but usually not for so long, or so hot. It was pushing 40 for a couple of days, and I survived the weekend only by spending a portion of it submerged in jo&stv's pool, sipping champagne. I'm insomniac and headachy and stressed and tend to lie awake in my superheated bedroom panting gently and wishing for a nice comfortable death, preferably by hypothermia or freeze-ray. It's like the sultry heat before a highveld storm, only continuously, relentlessly, and without the catharsis of the actual rain. Am not happy. Am clearly on the wrong continent. I know the northern hemisphere is having a horrible winter, and I'm sorry if you're frozen or flooded or snowbound, but honestly, this is its own kind of unspeakable.

I shall proceed to avoid the horror by somewhat belatedly chronicling our last Movie Club, which was the weekend before last. Jo's choice: theme, Abused Sexualised Girls Strike Back And Kick Butt, although to variable effect. The films, in a classic whiplash configuration, and encompassing frankly improbable extremes in terms of thoughtfulness and political acumen: Sucker Punch, and Hard Candy.

Sucker Punch is a terrible film. I'm really glad to have seen it, because as a pure distillation of ingrained Hollywood sexism and exploitation it's an extremely powerful document, but it's an astonishingly bad piece of storytelling. I have to admit it has a certain amount of visual style and the germ, somewhere in the putrid depths, of a potentially interesting idea, but it's otherwise without redeeming feature. The most terrifying thing about it is, I think, the fact that watching it gave me the sneaking, inescapable fear that Zach Snyder, its perpetrator, is actually under the delusion that he was celebrating female empowerment. Which he really wasn't. The premise involves skimpily-clad girls incarcerated in a variety of institutions under highly sexualised threat, and escaping from it into layers of fantasy in which they fulfil video-game-style quests with the maximum possible amount of stylishly-shot action sequences, guns, swordfights, leering villainy and massive explosions. Given that the film skips between giant samurai statues, Nazi steampunk zombies, orcs, dragons, planes, zeppelins and Bioshock-style Big Daddies, the whole thing boils down to what Stv defined as "MashCeption: The Music Video". Or, possibly MashCeption, the Video Game. Something entailing lots of mash-ups and multi-levelled dream sequences and loads of visual style at the expense of plot, at any rate.

And in the final analysis it's about absolutely the opposite of female empowerment. It does no good whatsoever to take abused women and give them big guns and swords and allow them to kick butt if (a) all said women are vacant, childlike blanks whose abuse at the hands of lecherous monsters is dwelt on with slavering fascination, (b) they're all hyper-sexualised and skimpily if not fetishistically clad, (c) their every move in the "empowering" fantasy is dictated by benevolent, rescuing male figures, (d) the bulk of them end up dead, and (e) the whole thing is shot like a particularly hyperactive and clichéd wet dream. It's ultimately a deeply ugly film that spat me out the other end in a state of stunned disbelief. But also with a sort of horrible satisfaction, because after all the film simply takes to the logical extreme the kinds of objectifications and exploitations which are actually at the heart of a frighteningly high proportion of Hollywood blockbuster movies, in which women are ravaged, empty things splayed across the screen for the gratification of a gaze which is assumed to be entitled, unconstrained, heterosexual and male. Our cultural systems are pretty broken; this film should not be excoriated as an aberration but as a symptom of a system whose darker corners, thus mercilessly exposed, are nauseating.

Hard Candy is a very good film. We watched these in the right order, because after Sucker Punch it was a bracing blast of fresh air. Its take on the theme highlights Sucker Punch as the bizarro mirror world thing it is: Hard Candy is still about male sexual predator versus pubescent girl, but the power poles are ruthlessly dissected, examined and reassembled. I'm not going to talk about the film's plot detail, because its effect is very spoiler-vulnerable, but it's exquisitely cast, shot, paced and constructed. Compared to the gratuitous CGI sprawl of Sucker Punch it's a minimalist work of art, effectively two characters and one set. Ellen Page is revelatory (also, mad props to Ellen Page for her recent coming out as gay, both a brave and an important thing), and Patrick Wilson is as good as he always is, which is very. The cinematography is amazing: the house which forms the set is all clean lines and modern, blocky colours, and the camera lingers on these for moments of full-screen primary colour which punctuate and pace the action, underlining the film's overall mood of analytic contemplation. It's also a very tense viewing experience, full of build and shock and horrified expectation and, I have to say, a fair amount of vindictive satisfaction.

Watching it in tandem with Sucker Punch highlights the differences, particularly the extent to which Page's character is almost entirely unsexualised, with a matter-of-fact thoughtfulness about her which undercuts potentially flirty moments and allows her to swing between childlike innocence and tomboyish determination. But the juxtaposition also demands that the film be subjected to the same questions: is this about female power? does it escape the exploitative presentation of women seen in the blockbuster? And of course you have to be aware that the highly-charged power relationship the film depicts is fully capable of being sexualised even given Page's performance; of mining the young body under the lens for purposes of titillation rather than thought. It also, despite the film's plot twists, runs the risks of demonising the victim, presenting her as damaged and inhuman: the film's violence is both more restrained and more real than Sucker Punch's. But on the whole I think my vote is for success rather than failure on political grounds. It's an uncomfortable watch, but for the right reasons - because it shakes up your assumptions, explores and redefines rather than adopting, externalises the rot in our cultural constructs rather than either eliding or exploiting them. I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word, but this is a good film, and I respect and admire what it achieved. Although, my pervy fairy-tale fancying heart being what it is, they could have done a lot more with the Red Riding Hood motif. I'm just sayin'.

My subject line is from the Eurythmics, "Wide Eyed Girl", mostly because I automatically think of Annie Lennox when I think of women kicking butt. Also Buffy, River, Phryne Fisher and Captain Marvel, but song lyrics are traditional.

In the Department of Oh Dear I Am A Sad Geek this gif made me go "oooh, sexy!" in heartfelt tones when I saw it first. Not because of Anthony Mackie's butt, although I admit it has its aesthetically pleasing qualities. But because the articulation of the mechanical wings is just so damned cool. I really like the character line-up for the new Captain America, I've always liked Falcon. Looking forward to the movie.

I am still in the throes of orientation, the second programme now, another 11-hour day after which I am deaded by bang. The second programme is a bugger because it's doubled, I give 90 minutes of curriculum talk followed immediately by 90 minutes of the same curriculum talk to a different set of students, followed by another hour of briefing students on technical transfer credit thingies. Then I go and run registration. In between all of the above I must have micro-advised fifteen to twenty different students who stop me with queries as I dash between venues. I have earned my deadness, is all. I shall continue to be incoherent for a while yet. Usually I'm human by March or so. Oh, lord.

Since the subject line is taken from the Magnetic Fields' "All my little words" and is prefaced with the statement "You are a splendid butterfly", I must admit to having chosen it purely for its incongruity value. Sorry.

Last night I dreamed that I was faced with the difficult choice between re-training as a doctor and re-training as a sailor. I went the doctor route (alongside Jo, sorry, Jo, it's probably about your family), and after a few slightly frantic scenes of digs cooking with fellow med students, woke up feeling vaguely terrified about having to learn chemistry again, and wistfully sad that I couldn't have both sets of skills. Something about knots and ropes and setting sails with technical verve. General hatred of my work life notwithstanding, it's not actually as bizarre as it sounds to say that wistful doctor dreams are almost certainly the result of reading really quite an unlikely amount of Sherlock fanfic over the last month or so. The strangely fetishised things that fic writers do to John Watson as a deceptively cuddly BAMF! are ... strangely fetishised, actually.

I also blame the fact that I randomly woke up at 3.30am on Monday morning and couldn't get to sleep again, as a result of which I wandered through most of yesterday on four hours of sleep in an exhausted daze which didn't, for some reason, prevent me from giving a really rather good double period tut on Dracula, to which even my cabbage class responded fairly well. Then again, I probably didn't need to demonstrate the fact that I can babble entertainingly about vampires and gender roles and Victorian anxieties literally in my sleep. (In this case with added postcolonialism at no extra charge, on account of dodgy Eastern European reverse invasion of London by degenerate lowlifes). However, it didn't help to be woken up promptly at 3am this morning again by Golux being heartily sick on my bedside rug. I did manage to get back to sleep this time, but the free pass she's currently getting on horrible behaviour on account of her nose cancer is wearing a little thin. Especially since the nose cancer has retreated, for its own inscrutable reasons, to a small black spot rather than a giant black sore, which is either sinister or encouraging, I'm not sure which.

We have set a date for the vetination of Macavity early next week, following a slightly drunkenly uproarious session of dinner and cat-fondling at our place on Sunday night. Currently the major challenge is going to be preventing Carlo from exiting stage left with a two-for-one ginger ex-tom deal, he seems rather taken with Hobbit. Put down the floofy ginger kitty and back away slowly, say I. He's a slut anyway, and doesn't mean it.

Subject line a quote from "Life on the Ocean Wave", which is one of those saccharine little Victorian ditties I blush to say I know entirely through the bastardised versions occasionally perpetrated by the Goon Show. On the other hand, a hasty lyric search suggests that them saccharine Victorians can seriously turn a stirring phrase.

Well, that was Hellweek, that was. The first week of term is the space in which students are allowed to madly change their minds about their course sign-ups, which means that they're dropping and adding them in all directions. With one hand I construct the schedule of team of about 30 advisors running all-day curriculum-change advice sessions carefully tuned to the erratic and unlikely sine waves of student arrival, while with the other I wrangle said advisors in their adherence to said schedule, since they're almost as erratic and unlikely as students. With one foot I pat them gently on the head in passing to reassure them on their reading of the rules or untangle particularly knotty issues for them. With the other foot I attempt to fend off the stream of students sent up to my office having baffled their advisors beyond the point of recovery, and distentangle their tangled curricula with my nose, eyebrows and sheer power of will. With my honed administrative laser glare I scorch the secondary stream of students demanding arcane and impossible concessions.

This year I have had to grow an entirely new set of tentacles in order to deal simultaneously with the 50-odd students we are forcibly decanting into an extended version of the degree, comprising an extra year and spread-out course load; these have been struggling, distressed and frightened youngsters who have needed extremely gentle and empathetic handling. They have mostly been pathetically grateful for the attention, reassurance and offer of a way out of their difficulties and a bit of a lessening of pressure, but all that empathy is exceptionally draining. On the upside it's also extremely rewarding, and it's probably the warm glow of gosh-I'm-really-helping-these-kids which has reduced to two the number of students I completely eviscerated over the course of the week, both of whom damned well deserved it. (Pro tip: if you turn up with a blank form, no transcript, no good reason and a hopeful grin ten minutes after the advisors have left at the end of the last session of the last possible day for making changes, you will be righteously shredded and will obtain the desired signature only at the cost of leaving my office pale and shaking. I consider this to be a public service offered to students in the spirit of preparing them for Real Life, TM, by demonstrating that they can't, in fact, pretend that the rules don't apply to them.)

Despite its bi-annual reconstitution of me as a whirling and multi-limbed creature, this session has gone surprisingly smoothly, a fact I attribute to my increasingly experienced and wily pandering to the complex, structured gods of administrivia. My inner jack-booted fascist appreciates the exercise, and is getting really good at this. The week has, however, spat me out the other end in full fatigue resurgence, which means I'm glandular and basically buggered, waking up in the morning with the all-over aching bodily languor more usually the product of a full day's physical labour. Fortunately I have a Lovely Boss, who doesn't turn a hair when I wander into her office and inform her I'll be fleeing campus a bit earlier than usual for the rest of the week, to work gently from home on various catch-up administrative tasks. She has a marvellous way of simply taking for granted that of course I'll do that if that's what I need to do. Fortunately the Dean is apparently ecstatic at how well Hellweek went, so I may be thought to have earned this. Damned straight.

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Subject line quote from Bowie's "Ch-ch-ch-changes", possibly the Hellweek anthem. "And these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds / Are immune to your consultations / They're quite aware of what they're going through." Disclaimer: I never actually spit on students.

Sunday is apparently all about creative and unlikely juxtapositions, or weird genre collaborations, although in the strictest possible terms I don't think you can actually count a manatee as a genre. Nonetheless! Just because, or at the very least just because they poke beautiful fun at superhero body-fetishism and are also incidentally cute, superheroes as manatees!



Captain Amanatee is my favourite, although the name isn't nearly as funny as Batmanatee. Iron Manatee is surprisingly svelte.

On a not entirely unrelated note, at least by processes of bizarre genre-bending theme, have an alt-country cover of the Sisters of Mercy's "This Corrosion". It's oddly laid-back and melodic, and nicely deconstructs the lushly self-indulgent Goth sprawl of the original.



This public service message brought to you by the Movement for Lateral Sundays, or possibly the Moving Very Little For Lateral Sundays, on account of how I had a week full of students with dead parents and drug addictions and bouts of weeping, followed by curriculum talks to the seething hordes at Open Day, and am somewhat dead.

Mid-orientation/registration, and I am dead tired like a dead tired thing being tired in a lake of tiredness. Clearly dragging one's way through two intense weeks of organisation and lecturing on top of what appears to have been viral bronchitis is somewhat exhausting. Odd, that. My voice has mostly returned, although it's considerably more of a contralto than my wont. Hopefully the students are at least enjoying the husky seductive bit. Matters may also improve given that I slept properly last night for the first time in a week, the racking coughs having hitherto kept me awake. Health, how I do want you back.

I am dead enough that today's tabloid billboard caused me to giggle for ten minutes straight.

CRIPPLED CONMAN HAD SEX IN MOSQUE!

Perfect tabloid: layer the transgressions until they become completely ridiculous. If we were still doing Microfiction I'd love to see the narratives people might invent to reach that unlikely apotheosis.

Still in the Department of Being Easily Amused, Sarah Rees Brennan's summary of Bujold's Vorkosigan novels is amusingly apt. (Spoilery, if you haven't read them, and if so why not?, but pleasingly acute if you have).

In other random news, I have discovered Everything Everything. Their music is poppy, but complex and quirky. They're more electronic than I usually tolerate, and I also don't usually enjoy falsetto, so I'm a bit weirded that they're demanding my attention as much as they are. (The music video for "Kemosabe" is also interesting). Whether it remains complex and quirky once I've had some sleep is another story entirely.

Good lord, my sleep patterns are horrible. Last night I was totally, absolutely and completely uninterested in anything resembling this strange "sleep" of which you speak until about midnight, at which point I forced myself to put down the Avengers slash and back away slowly. Then I spent large tracts of the rest of the night wandering somnambulistically around my bedroom looking for small, random but earth-shakingly vital items on the floor that I could never find, possibly because Hawkeye was hiding them, the sod.

Today I am hallucinating Hobbit in the corridors of the faculty. It's disconcerting. (Alternatively, in this morning's somnambulistic haze I absent-mindedly packed Hobbit and brought him up to campus without noticing. Hmm. Theory. He's probably off somewhere conducting a quiet war with the deputy Dean's fluffy black dogs.) Also, I have spent a lot of today convinced it's Tuesday. Which, apparently, it isn't. Wednesday, yes? It feels more like Tuesday, but my diary begs to differ.

I have also just spent 45 minutes talking down a student who has backed her curriculum into such a corner that even I, with years of creative curriculum finangling behind me, can see no way around her inevitable exclusion. It's depressing to be confronted by a situation in which your curriculum-wrangling superpowers don't function, although conversely given the sleep dep it's not entirely surprising. However, in mitigation of this I appear to be wearing a Girl Genius trilobite pin, which I also have no recollection of putting on this morning. It's cool.

I finally banished "Me and Bobby McGee". Thank FSM.

I have just spent two days at home with a weird virus thingy which caused me to feel hot/cold, faint, faintly nauseous, slightly hovercraftian¹, and as though my arms are around three miles long. It's an odd feeling, watching your hands do things completely independently of yourself. I am now back at work, but am prone to look vaguely at a point just beyond a student's left ear and mutter things about squid². My hands are still typing this post more or less off their own bat, to which I say hooray. If I can work out how to outsource actual student advice to my hands, perhaps my head will stop aching.

During the course of the last two days I have read multiple volumes of frivolous YA fantasy (still very enamoured of Kristen Cashore and entertained by Tamora Pierce), played short snatches of computer games which have been prevented from being long snatches by the spinning of my head, and imbibed a great deal of fanfic. The list of links at Making Light is a particularly fine selection which has introduced me to Doctor Who/classic lit crossover fic (Austen and Gone with the Wind) and to Avengers fanfic, which tends to the cute. Still not sure about Tony/Captain slash, though. However, delightful to be reminded that Steven Brust wrote a Firefly fanfic novel. Also, memo to self, must watch Leverage, if only because Christian Kane.

My current state of weird finds curious comfort in H P Lovecraft as agony aunt. With, of course, emphasis on the agony.

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¹ Floaty, teetering, and likely to spin off in odd directions. Also, full of eels.
² I have no idea.