Freckles & Doubt

The start-of-academic-year hell continues apace, with the attendant 12-hour days, failures of student (and advisor) reading comprehension, random system glitches, horrible database processing queues, and the usual seasonal infestation of load shedding, sigh. It is randomly leavened at infrequent intervals by Stardew Valley, student and advisor gratitude, light rain, affection from my cat, and the smug glow occasioned by getting the daily Wordle third go for five days in a row, the last in under 30 seconds.

Wordle 229 3/6

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I have also retreated, as is my wont under admin pressure, to only the lightest and fluffiest fanfic reading, which currently appears to mean Drarry. I find that reading Harry Potter fanfic these days comes with a side order of defiant glee, as it's the only way I will henceforth interact with the franchise, I am fucked if I am going to spend any further money on it in any way which will accrue to Rowling's smug, bigoted, hateful, TERFy coffers, the horrible cow. But even in the leaden haze of reg exhaustion, I have found the last couple of weeks' reading to have vouchsafed me an Insight, possibly sizzling.

I love Drarry because it tends to recoup the awful, deterministic condemnation of Slytherin in the novels; it humanises, complicates and adds nuance to Rowling's mean-spirited Slytherin Bad Griffindor Good reductionism, and it invites you to see the Slytherin kids as victims of Voldemort's war even if technically their families allied with him. This isn't a feature of the books, in which Slytherins are pretty much all bad and for always; even the vague semi-redemptions she allows Snape and Narcissa manage to insist, in both cases, that it's not real redemption, that self-interest plays a part; they remain unchanged in essentials despite the redemptive act. Draco, struggling with fear and threat under Voldemort's sway in book 6, nonetheless sticks to his Slytherin allegiances more or less uncritically. Rowling doesn't, fundamentally, believe that essentials can change. Which is, of course, why she's a TERFy bigot in particular, because somewhere at base she thinks identity as much as character are burned into you from the start, fixed and immutable, and no change is real.

Which has always annoyed me, but actually takes on a whole new meaning when you think of it in the context of contemporary internet culture. Tumblr and Twitter in particular, but actually social media in general, have enormous problems with callout culture, with dogpiles on popular social media figures for the least transgression - and, often, single transgressions somewhere in the past. (Note that here I am obviously not referring to obvious/horrible/ongoing abusers such as those targeted by something like #metoo, but things more like the cancellation of Thomas Sanders in some circles). The current culture doesn't allow for the idea that people can screw up, admit they were in the wrong, learn from their mistakes, consciously not repeat them, and grow as people as a result. Nope! you said/did Heinous Thing back in the day, so now you are Invalid, and nothing you say is ok, and no-one should listen to you ever again. You were always in Slytherin, in fact, and can never be anything else. Worse, let's now revisit everything you have ever said and decide that it was never actually OK, because condemnation is retroactive as well as permanent.

And I'd say that this was Rowling being simply a reflection of her generation, but actually it isn't. Rowling was born in 1965, she's older than I am by a few years; our generation was not, in fact, raised to black/white divisions and wholesale condemnation. Those have been a feature of the internet landscape only in the last decade or so. The black/white thinking thing isn't characteristic of her generation, but it's sure as hell characteristic of a lot of people who were raised on HP.

The first HP book came out in 1997, the first film in 2001. A lot of people who grew up on the series are now in their 30s. And the question is: did Rowling only reflect an inherent cultural trend which has become worse in the last ten years, or did she directly contribute to it? if you're the kind of person who cancels a media personality now for a single incautious statement or stupid response, is that not at least partially because, somewhere in your adolescent identity formation, you had internalised the idea that Slytherin is Bad and anything they do is Bad and they can be simply written off? And, yes, a lot of it is broader cultural pressures and the tendency to retreat into reductionist thinking as a response to excessive complexity, but if the cultural zeitgeist is pushing you in that direction anyway, doesn't it simply entrench and exacerbate the tendency, to have a ready-made, catchy, whimsical mythology which gives you lovely symbolic terms in which to authenticate your bigoted thinking?

It's just that, reading fic which explores and attempts to recoup anti-Slytherin prejudice in the novels, it's all horribly familiar, suddenly. And I think that Rowling's TERFy kick is an inexcusable use of her platform, but I'm actually starting to wonder if, in fact, she's guilty of a whole lot more?

I woke up randomly at 5.30am this morning, which is fairly standard at the moment, probably because my body actually hates me and refuses to take more than 7 hours of sleep regardless of what time I go to bed, whether or not I set an alarm or how tired I am (newsflash: very, more or less perpetually). What was cruel and unusual was lying awake for ten minutes happily plotting out my Saturday and luxuriating in the feeling of not having to fight traffic to work, which lasted only too briefly before I suddenly remembered it was actually Friday and a work day. Not cricket, brain. I do not appreciate being hoodwinked and conceptually ambushed by my own cerebellum before my first cup of tea.

I am now sitting in my office having a mental wrestle with myself about whether or not I'm going to attend a faculty curriculum symposium in twenty minutes, which will subject me to (a) crowds, (b) political rhetoric, and (c) interpersonal tension, all of which give me hives. I am very, very close to mentally categorising it as "not my problem, I'm not an academic", giving this whole profoundly flawed academic edifice the finger, and buggering off home. Which would be bad, and wicked, and awful, and lovely.

On the upside, tonight I take my sister out for a birthday dinner at the local Italian joint, which is very nice, so I suppose there's that. On the further upside, for the last few days I have been re-reading the entire Drarry fanfic archive of blamebrampton, which is unduly British and frequently hysterically funny Potterslash written by someone I darkly suspect is personally located somewhere in the bowels of the British civil service, and to which I attribute any preponderance of British idiom in the above.

This is a piece of fan-fiction that posits the Avengers taking over the American presidential election, and I love it very, very much. It's acute and funny, but it's also a beautifully-encapsulated demonstration of exactly what fanfic does. Superheroes are already about wish fulfilment, and most importantly about agency - they are a response to the increasing complexity and scale of our lives, in which our own agency is nil in the greater scheme of things. Superheroes are a projection of our desire to make a difference. So this fic externalises that desire and makes it literal by injecting that utopian notion of agency into one of the most obvious and hopeless examples of large-scale dysfunction in our current environment, namely the American political system. Fanfic does for narrative what superheroes do for social evil - it gives us control. It must be a horrible feeling of helplessness, to be American and to feel that there's no way to stop the obvious asinine stupidities of Trump rampaging bullheadedly over the American political landscape. I'd take a Tony Stark puppet government in a heartbeat. Clean energy in three years, socialised medicine in five. Fanfic and superheroes both have power because their ultimate engagement is not with reality, but with utopia.

I am Randomly Amused this morning.

1. My lovely new car is a lovesome thing, god wot, but it has a rather cheap and nasty sound system. As a result, I can't persuade it to play music off my MP3 player in any format other than through individual tracks in one ginormous string. This means that when it randomly resets, as it does occasionally if I don't switch the car off in exactly the right order, it starts at the top and works down, playing my musical collection in strict alphabetical order by (a) artist and (b) album title. The last time it did this I thought, right, clearly the Cosmic Wossnames are trying to tell me something, let's just let it. In the last week it has thus played through Arcade Fire and Bed on Bricks in short order and is currently in the middle of the more than elegant sufficiency of Belle & Sebastian which characterises my music collection. I am thoroughly enjoying the resulting slight whiplash, as well as the chance to rediscover odd corners of my musical taste I'd forgotten about.
   
   The Rules dictate that I don't skip tracks or otherwise disturb the order, other than the obligatory repeat of "Crown of Love" and "Wake Up", because I'm physically incapable of listening to either track just once. (Other than that I have decided, on mature reflection, that "The Suburbs" is probably my favourite Arcade Fire album, possibly because "Wasted Hours".) I'd forgotten how much fun Bed on Bricks are - they're a local outfit of some maturity and skill, not to mention considerable iconoclastic whimsy ("large Nigerian..."), whose overall style is eclectic but sounds at times like Chilli Peppers circa "Californication". And, for no adequately defined reason I haven't actually listened to any Belle & Sebastian for months. They tend to land me on campus in the morning obscurely soothed regardless of how many actual BMWs have cut me off in traffic. Possibly it's the Scottish accents.
   
   
2. I think I posted the gifset of the cute wol bathing in a previous post, probably accompanied by the horrible moist owlet pun with which it was doing the rounds. Someone in my Tumblr feed unearthed the YouTube video which spawned it, which features not only the full bath experience (bathing birds are ridiculously cute, I love the air of ferocious concentration), but the bit where someone dries the bedraggled wol with a hair dryer. This makes me obscurely happy because I have rather lovely memories of my dad doing the same to his peregrines, when they'd been sitting on their block in the garden during a highveld thunderstorm. They do the same thing the wol does, spreading their wings to dry under them. I do like birds.
   
   
   Watch on YouTube
   
   
   
3. Obligatory BC content: the Sherlock fandom is currently all up in arms because Benedict Cumberbatch, in an interview, was somewhat patronisingly dismissive of fanfic. (Not that this is anything new, he's characteristically a bit tone-deaf to fanfic issues and tends to make pronouncements which are clearly based on extremely sketchy knowledge; I suppose the fandom will eventually stop having small volcanic eruptions about it on the grounds that exhausting). What's tickling me no end, though, is the beautifully in-character fan responses: the current meme is to pick up on the rather outrageous interviewer phrasing of fanfiction as something which turns Sherlock into "a lustful cock monster". Current games: strategically place "lustful cock monster" into Sherlock dialogue on the "in bed" principle. (On John's forehead in the drunken Rizla game scene. Replacing SHERLOCK in the opening credits. "William Sherlock Lustful Cock Monster Holmes. If you’re looking for baby names.") Design new and ever more pink and sparkly t-shirts, icons and banners declaring "LUSTFUL COCK MONSTER" in defiant capitals and sprinkle them across the internet. Summarise the fic elements he mentions in the article and write actual fanfic to match, claiming that you're allowed because Benedict did. Etc, etc, etc.
   
   I love this. Apart from the fact that it's given me the giggles all morning (particularly since I teach a Sherlock seminar on Wednesday afternoons and have spent most of the morning making screencaps and constructing a Powerpoint on "His Last Vow" in between internet noodling), this is the essence of fan production. Take an element in the canon text which is clearly not addressed to you (and this is almost always a female "you") and which is ignorant of your actual desires and interests. Appropriate the hell out of it. Comprehensively reject the version of you it enshrines. Recontextualise, reshape and reimagine it in ways which do authentically reflect you, and which incidentally comment somewhat trenchantly on the limitations of the original text. Share and enjoy.
   
   I keep saying it: fanfic is a political act. The fact that it's enjoyable is almost incidental.

One of the more entertaining side effects of my liminal academic existence and strange research interests is that I'm becoming the go-to person for The Media when they approach my Cherished Institution for commentary on the more outré corners of culture: Lewis Carroll, or fairy tale, or Terry Pratchett, or vampires, or, apparently, fan fiction. Yesterday I found myself giving, at extremely short notice, a ten-minute interview with Cape Talk Radio, because two of the show's staff suggested to the host that he talk about fanfic, and he said "What's fanfic?" and proceeded to find out. I rather enjoy being given an opportunity to babble enthusiastically about my interests, and he asked good questions, and this morning there are three emails in my inbox from previous students going "gosh, fanfic, loved your lectures, nice to hear you babbling". (Not in so many words. Students are generally more polite, possibly because they're afraid I'll bite if they're not.) Also, apparently there's a podcast.. (I'm a bit sorry I didn't get into the gender stuff. Fanfic as a female response to the male domination of media narratives is my current personal hobby-horse).

But it's also amusing to note the attempts by said media forces to box and label my weird place in this faculty, leading to me being variously and erroneously identified over the last few years, despite my best efforts, as "the Head of the English Department", "the Dean of Literature", and, yesterday, "Lecturer of Fan Fiction", which sounds like far more of an official position than it actually is. While I lecture volubly and enthusiastically on fan fiction, this faculty would scream, shudder and faint in coils at the mere thought of a precious official position devoted to fanfic. But it's a nice illusion, for ten minutes.

Of course, this also means I was nicely primed for today's XKCD, which is enough on the nail that my colleague in the office next door has just wandered in, slightly worried, to find out the source of the mad cackles of laughter proceeding from my location.



This is such a beautifully layered joke, not just because it relies partially on our knowledge of the personal proclivities of black-hat guy in the strip. "Headcanon", for the uninitiated, is a fanfic term used to describe the personal, internal micro-narratives you have which round out a media character in some way not actually defined by the text, or not necessarily defined in a particular fanfic you might write - it's almost an unspoken assumption, and as a result of being unexamined, is often deeply personally felt. (In my Avengers headcanon they're totally all living in Stark Tower, and having sitcom interactions around movie nights and who's cooking and why Hawkeye is perched on things again. I tend to have a momentary snarl at each new Marvel movie because it doesn't actually embody that. Maybe Age of Ultron will, the preliminary stills are promising.)

The thing about fanfic communities, of course, is that they're intense and passionate, because they're built around intense and passionate feelings about texts. This means that they are prone to outbreaks of conflict which too often degenerate into mud-slinging and hissy-fit and demagoguery, known colloquially and collectively as "fandom wank". I am currently a little stunned by the divisions in Sherlock fandom around what is known as The Johnlock Conspiracy, which is the fervent belief that Moffat and Gattis always intended Sherlock as gay, John as bi, and a romantic relationship between them as the endgame of the series. The personal headcanon of "it's romantic/sexual" versus the personal headcanon of "it's not and the bastard showrunners are all about the queer-baiting" is, indeed, about heavy artillery and the need to obliterate the opposition, because the opposition's mere difference is intensely threatening to the inside of your own head. I shall be extremely surprised if this strip is not all over my Tumblr feed this morning, because, yup. That's exactly it.

My fanfic habit is at the hyperaddicted stage where I'm subscribed to a whole bunch of uncompleted fics on AO3. This means, I discover, that I have evolved a particularly happy little "ooh!" of delighted discovery when another email notification pops up in my inbox to say another chapter has been uploaded. Almost a mini-yodel, really. Like a response to unsolicited chocolate, or kittens. With the particular flavour of unexpected joy which comes from the fact that, unlike most of our other common experiences of serial fiction (TV shows, mainly), fanfic comes with no guarantee of regular posting, so every new chapter is a slightly unexpected gift.

And I was thinking that my willingness to wait without guarantee of reward is about love, in the sense of how much I love these texts and am willing to commit to ongoing and erratically delayed gratification, but it's also about the love the writers have for their text, and their willingness to commit time to it on a strictly amateur basis. Unlike a TV series, they have no support structure or financial incentive which allows them to guarantee regularity. My "ooh!" of a fine morning's notification is gratitude for their time, as much as anything else.

I face with a tolerable equanimity the prospect of a four-day Easter weekend, even though within its generous grasp I absolutely have to do some serious work on this damned African fairy tale paper. I'm going to have to man up and confront postcolonialism, and postcolonialism gives me hives. On the other hand, I am deriving some slightly perverse satisfaction from the awareness that the meat and tenor of the paper are in no way going to be a dutiful survey of African fairy tale film, because (a) there ain't much, (b) I lack the time, resources or desire to dig through the arcane minutae of the home film production of a dozen countries which would be required to offer any genuine sort of survey of the not much there is, and (c) I think my approach is more interesting, anyway. Pertinent case studies, that's the ticket.

I am also deriving some small comfort from my Tumblr feed's latest offering of random surreality. I have no idea why this tickles me as much as it does, but it really does.



The source is a delirious little Tumblog calling itself TL;DR Wikipedia, whose adjacent definition of the Sphinx I also recommend. In bizarrely related news, yesterday's internet eroticism lecture featured a spirited discussion of the concept of tl;dr and its relationship to internet eroticism. Of such things is my life made.

Happy Easter, y'all. In the secular sense of "long weekend". This week's outbreak of unctuous His People billboards featuring "MAN GIVES LIFE FOR OTHERS" as a news headline is making me grind my teeth.

Subject Line Gloss: I am quoting, of course, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, because I can.

Oh, lord, it's orientation season. Close on 500 bemused first-years are wandering the campus in small herds, being corralled in a large lecture venue at intervals while I harangue them on the mysteries of curriculum design. With Powerpoint. Yesterday was an 11-hour day. Today was better, being only a 9-hour day, although it provided varied interest by being wall-to-wall orientation all morning, and then wall-to-wall briefing curriculum advisors all afternoon. There's a subtle, surreal dislocation in briefing the same curriculum structures from opposite ends only a few hours apart.

Tonight I should have been allocating advisors to registration sessions, but my subconscious, with unerring accuracy, leaped salmon-like from the depths and kiboshed the sending of the necessary files from work to home so I could work on them. (I know I pressed "send" on the email, but it never arrived and my outbox is innocent of it. Aetheric bears appear to have eaten it. Most mysterious.) I was practically forced to spend the evening reading fanfic instead. Today I have discovered Sherlock/Firefly crossovers, Sherlock/Star Trek crossovers, and a Sherlock/Winnie-the-Pooh one that I've actually refrained from reading on the grounds that my sanity is fragile enough as it is. At least the Star Trek is explicable on the grounds of Vulcans.

All of the above being the case, I'm completely buggered but surprisingly low on stress. I have, it appears, reached a point of familiarity and facility with the large-scale logistical demands of my job that I simply drift along doing the necessary in good time, properly, with only half my attention. So far no wheels have fallen off. It is also pleasantly cool and rainy this evening, mitigating somewhat the tragic fact that today has felt like Durban, i.e. a sort of muggy soup. I am now going to bed, on the grounds that I'm dead and also mosquitoes are eating my feet. Please confidently expect me to return to normal human function, like socialising and interesting posts, somewhere around March.

Subject line is from Magnetic Fields, "The Horrible Party", which sounds like something Edward Gorey should draw (actually, given the lyrics he probably has already.) Fields are still the flavour du jour in my car music buffet. Love at the Bottom of the Sea is their latest album, it's slowly growing on me as it ambles through the rotation for the umpteenth time. My dear, it was heaven until they ran out of champagne.

Things you do not expect to see on a respectable campus while trotting off to the library for your important pile of Girly Swot books (subset: crash course in African cinema): live horses. Six of them. Tethered in the shade against the columns of the old Student's Union, peaceably chomping. There's something fairly major filming on campus at the moment, the place has been a madhouse: the stairs have sprouted fake extra columns and exotic greenery and weird screens positioned with arcane precision. I parked my car next to and partially under a giant cherry-picker boom sort of thing this morning, and there are approximately three million acres of random, presumably desperately important cabling snaking down the avenue, tended by skinny grip types in Bauhaus t-shirts. Actual African film, in fact. Curiously appropriate.

It's too bloody hot for serious thought (what's with February heatwaves before Christmas? Not Cricket), so have a random linkery round-up, I need to clear these tabs.

• If you go to the UK Vogue page and type the Konami code, extremely entertaining things happen when you keep on hitting A. Random internet easter eggs ftw.
  
• For some demented reason this ridiculous Boba Fett love story really amuses me, possibly because of the way the sarlacc is drawn. The rancor BFF one is also cute.
  
• Sherlock fandom is in a tizzy because of the Caitlin Moran faux pas (I never liked the wretched woman, her book is actively irritating) - she had the inexpressibly tone-deaf bad taste to pressure/trick the lead actors into reading erotic fanfic aloud at a screening. Daily Dot has a good summary. It really isn't safe these days to try and taunt subcultures you perceive as geeky and pitiable, they end up having way more power and self-awareness than you expect. I cannot help but be amused, though, at the cosmic inevitability of Moran attempting to sabotage Sherlock and failing dismally. It is, after all, simply an enactment of the Doyle plot. (Sebastian Moran is Moriarty's sniper sidekick in canon, if your Sherlock geekery is a bit rusty).
  
• Random fanfic recc! I am currently actually re-reading The Least of All Possible Mistakes, which is a rather well-written and often laugh-out-loud funny Sherlock fic featuring a Sherlock given to entertaining tantrums and a Mycroft/gender-swapped-Lestrade relationship which is both amusing and real. The fandom fascination with Mycroft fascinates me. I blame Mark Gatiss entirely.

I finally sent out the Boxing Day braai email last night, after more than average levels of procrastination and forgettory. If you weren't on the list but usually are it's probably because of my cheese-brain, please drop me a reproachful line.

The subject line is the Konami Code, which as a concept and a catch-phrase as well as a random bit of esoterica has always amused the hell out of me.

Took myself off to see the new Star Trek yesterday, which apart from anything else was a good excuse to drive my new car places. Which is just as well, because I'm not entirely sure the film justified the trip. It annoyed me. I'm a bit out on a limb here because I've never watched the original series¹, but based on my voracious consumption of the entirety of Next Generation in about two months flat, I mostly think JJ Abrams has the tone all wrong. (And I don't think this is just because Canal Walk's sound balance and volume are habitually set by ham-fisted drunken gorillas).

Into Darkness was frenetic action from the get-go; loud, brash, violent, fast. In my sense of it, Star Trek is not a standard action narrative. The TV series (certainly Next Gen and the odd episode of TOS I've seen), and even the older films, are at least partially contemplative; they dwell on character interactions and evince a sort of leisurely, self-indulgent enjoyment of the utopian aspects of this futuristic society, both scientific and social. They have exciting action sequences, certainly, but they're interleaved at suitable intervals with slower sequences to give a very different sense of pace. The two new films don't have that; they're all action, with the contemplation (and there is some contemplation; I liked the examination of moral decisions, and the attempt to redeem the immature-twit-Kirk-should-not-be-in-charge plot holes from the first film) tacked onto action sequences in breathless gasps. JJ Abrams films are all chorus and no verse. They're exhausting.

This is a pity, because I think he has his cast absolutely right, they're really enjoyable to watch. And I spent most of the film giggling at inappropriate moments because the classic Kirk/Spock slashy subtext is so beautifully pandered to. Honestly, you can feel a thousand slash writers squeeing in the background in some of those sequences. I think the films have the Kirk/Spock dynamic pretty much down, particularly because their version of Kirk is such an impulsive, emotion-driven idiot, and I love these versions of Scotty and Bones et al. It's just a pity that the mood and pace (and the script, with its usual giant logic holes and reliance on cliché, good grief) don't match the characterisations.

I just wish they'd done more with the tribble. I was expecting trouble.

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¹ I feel the need to watch the original series, anyone have it?

Subject line: if I actually need to gloss my random concatenation of "Live fast and die young" with "Live long and prosper", I'm saddened, is all. Saddened and disappointed.

We had a Salty Cracker expedition on Tuesday night, to Kloof Street House, which was lovely (Jo will presumably review it sometime, although given that I only just put up my review from the previous Cracker, when we went to The Greenhouse almost a month ago, this is not to be construed as any sort of dig or pressure. Greenhouse was amazing, incidentally).

Kloof Street House was fun, warm and quirky and atmospheric, with excellent food in substantial quantities. (They do splendid things to hand-cut fries). What made the evening for me, though, was the waitress. She was one of those slightly off-beat arty-student people in a marginally hipster hat, with a sparkly attitude which absolutely chimed with the Salty Cracker vibe. She also looked faintly familiar, and I spent most of the meal vaguely thinking I must have taught her at some stage. Which was, in the event, not quite accurate. After the main course she arrived with a tray of fruity shooters of some sort we absolutely hadn't ordered, and which weren't actually a restaurant-standard palate cleanser: she'd begged them off the barman for us, on the stated grounds that the curriculum advice I gave her last year absolutely saved her life and she wanted to say thank you.

I'm still going "awwwww". Meeting one's students in random social settings can be a bit fraught (it was worse in my Goth nightclub days), but not if they're going to be all heartwarming about it. I must be doing something right. It's moments like these that I don't actually hate my job.

Today's fanfic rec is in the spirit of bouncy liberal arts students: Avengers again, but this time featuring Darcy/Steve. I really enjoy the things that the Avengers fandom does with Darcy, who's Jane Foster's pol-sci-student sidekick from Thor: she's presented as strong-minded, pop-culture-savvy and slightly iconoclastic, and a lot of fandom versions of her make her fairly kick-butt. She's not actually super-powered, which I think makes her a good point of fan identification, although quite a few fics put her, as does this one, as a recruit to SHIELD. Teand's Five Things Darcy Loves About Working For Shield. An amusing read.