toft

So, nixwilliams was talking about having seen the trailer for Edge of Darkness, the new Mel Gibson film, and it occured to me that I should post about that. I've been seeing the posters around, and, hm, I thought, could that be based on the eighties BBC miniseries of the same name starring Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker and Joanna Whalley? And lo! It is. So, I have to tell you guys, the new film looks shit, but you should watch that BBC miniseries. It's an absolutely brilliant political thriller about a man tracing his murdered daughter's footsteps through nuclear disarmament groups and environmental terrorist plots. I literally could not stop watching it, I never marathon TV but I inhaled the whole six hours over two successive nights after randomly watching the first episode with A.

It is a perfect example of the great BBC miniseries type - slow-paced, complex, brilliantly scripted, amazing cast with understated acting. It is a bit manpainy, but it's got some cool female characters (young Zoe Wanamaker!), and although his daughter dies in the first episode, her presence permeates the whole series in the strength of her political beliefs and her literal haunting of him. It's actually a very compelling psychological thriller, too, if unoriginal, as he channels his grief into obsession and starts to visibly crack. Also, it is an interesting period piece for the mid-eighties in Thatcherite Britain. Anyway, it's been a while since I've seen it, so I hope I haven't oversold it, but it made a huge impression on me a few years ago. I ought to sit down and watch it again. And am not going to see the new film out of protest.

[ETA - good lord! The same director has done the new film! Well, I'm still very dubious. It wouldn't be the same without Bob Peck.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, chagrined! YOU ARE ONE OF MY FAVOURITE PEOPLE I MET IN THE LAST YEAR. <3 !

And now - to Ottawa!

I dreamed that I met President Obama, Michelle Obama and their kids; I was invited round to their house (I think actually I was babysitting their children), and I had a conversation with them, although he did most of the talking; he asked me some questions like, "What do you think kindness is," I think. Then as I was washing up my cup, he came up to me and gave me some incredibly profound and moving advice which made me wake up crying, and which I now cannot remember.

Yesterday, I dreamed that I went back to high school to finish my English GCSE and couldn't decide whether it was more appropriate/less humiliating to dress in school uniform or business casual, and so was late.

- My mother the style icon - awesome blog where people send in photos of their mums when young wearing awesome clothes. It's a great combination of adorable, hilarious and happy-making.

- Young, fat and fabulous - article about awesome fashion blogs by and for fat women. I particularly love Fatshionista. I have a love-hate, slightly bemused relationship with clothes, but I love looking at beautiful women wearing beautiful clothes. There are some great pictures up there. I particularly like this lady, esp in that last one. Rrowwr.

- Kate Beaton scores again - "ARE THEY LESBIANS?"

- As does XKCD - POOR LITTLE BRAVE MARS ROVER! But it's okay! linaerys wrote a sequel that makes it all better! I love fandom.

- Interview with Toronto poet Susan Holbrook about her poem 'Editing the Erotica Issue'. I saw her do a reading at The Scream, the Toronto summer poetry festival, and totally fell in love with her stuff; I bought her book yesterday, Joy Is So Exhausting. It's clever, funny and sexy. My favourite poem is probably Insert, where she takes the instructions on the back of a tampon box and replaces all the nouns with other nouns that sound similar. It was funnier read out loud, actually, because the sense of dissonance when a word you're not expecting happens is much clearer. I recommend reading it out. Here's a bit of it -

3. Insert the applicant. Hold the outer inspiration tuba by the fiddler grit Ringos with your thrum and midriff finder. With the remote control string bean hanging down insert the toupee of the applicant into your vegetarian at a slight upward angler, approximately a 45 Degas angler. (See Impish one.) Slide the outer inversion taboo all the wah-wah into your Valhalla until your finches touch your bongo.

I love it. I also love 'Nursery'. That's a long one - she told us at the reading she forced herself while interminably breastfeeding to write one line per feed, and each begins with 'Right' or 'Left'. It varies between bad-tempered, achingly sweet, sharp and wry. It's so good.

Left: Feeling like a mother didn't happen when you were born, or when I first fed you, or first used the word 'daughter'. It's happening six months later, in the dark, as a mosquito kazoos around and, without a second's hesitation, I pull up your covers, lay my bare arms on top of the blanket, whisper 'bite me'.

- Yesterday we watched the X-Files episodes over the 4th season hiatus where Krycek and Mulder go to Russia and there's evil black oil in rocks and it's all fun and games until somebody loses an arm. Mulder's hair isn't great right now; I'm holding out for Season 6. But Scully OH she FACED DOWN A SENATORIAL INQUIRY and she WORE A SWAT SUIT WITH A HELMET and was beautiful and formidable as a switchblade and more than made up for Mulder's unfortunate hair.

Here is the problem. I'm currently taking an English Lit graduate course for the first time ever, and although I think of myself as a literature scholar and have been taking literature classes right the way through my university education, I suddenly find myself all at sea as to what the hell these people are talking about. English literature scholarship seems to have a language and set of internal references with which I am unfamiliar, and I'm struggling. So - if you could recommend to me five (or more, or less) works of scholarship that are given to English undergraduates/early graduates regarding either Middle English texts or about approaches to the text in general (I'm particularly struggling with people talking about Formalism, New Criticism, etc), please tell me what they are. I would be extremely grateful for your expertise. That said, if there's a book about Modernism or whatever that changed your life, I'd like to hear about that too. Please help.

Rroooowwr.

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SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE ME READ DEPRESSING MIDDLE-ENGLISH POEMS ABOUT THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH INSTEAD OF THE INTERNET

Gacked from mraltariel, ( Book survey meme )

The other day I decided to do some promptfic to get back into a routine of writing again, and I have done some! I have written Teyla/Samantha Carter, candleplay (explicit, no warnings except, uh, candleplay) and Shawn/Gus with banter and kinks (adult, no warnings). And then I had this idea for chagrined's prompt and it became a whole proper fic that is a bit big for commentfic. So, I decided to put it in a separate post.

Title: Textbook
Fandom: Mythbusters RPF
Pairing: Kari/Grant (het! or, um, pre-het. What has happened to me!)
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2400ish
Summary: chagrined wanted something set in the universe of Robots Need Love Too, my Yuletide story for T'wings in which Jamie and Adam are kids in elementary school in space. So this is set slightly after that story.

( Textbook )

- I woke up the gf last night in the middle of the night by practically hyperventilating and whispering, "Giant bee! Giant bee! It was very loud!" I had a bad dream about a giant bee that was very loud, okay?

- I'm slowly putting more of my stories up on AO3. I'm mostly putting up my smaller fandom stories up first, mostly for tidiness. SGA can wait. There are too many of them. Right now stories in Mythbusters, Sherlock Holmes, Bones, The Sentinel and Harry Potter are up there.

- Today I was told a story by a woman who worked up in Sudbury (very small northern Canadian town) for a while, and happened to go to a local hockey game with her co-workers. They were very taken aback when, the first time the Sudbury team (The Wolves) scored, the entire stands erupted into a wolf howl; then, slowly, a moth-eaten, taxidermied wolf was dragged slowly along a washing line pulley rig across the roof of the stadium, jiggling all the way as one single guy tugged on the line. It eventually hit its head on the scoreboard, and then was pulleyed back again. They spent the rest of the game in horrified fascination, waiting for Sudbury to score again so they could make sure they hadn't all imagined it.

- My grandmother, when we were staying with her, was talking to us about my uncle's recent visit, and the conversation got onto my uncle and aunt's various (to her) foibles, which include vegetarianism and Buddhism. "Of course," my grandmother then adds, "he won't sleep in a room with an ironing board in it."

"What?" we said.

"Well," she said, with great disapproval, "I don't know if it has something to do with that new religion of his."

I think we managed not to laugh too much while expressing our doubts that Buddhism has anything to say about ironing boards.

Today's More Joy day, on which it is recommended that one do nice things for people in order to make people happy. I kind of believe everyone should try to do that all the time, and so I'm a bit meh about it in the same way that I'm meh about Mother's Day and Valentine's Day - why have just one day a year for it? - but on the other hand, it's good to remind oneself once in a while that it's important to be nice to people. So anyway, here are some good things.

- help_haiti - fannish types are offering and buying fannish goods to raise money for people in Haiti who have suffered as a result of the hurricane.

- festivids - almost up!!

- I've been reading newer Sherlock Holmes fics lately. Here's some I liked.
( Recs! )
I haven't really talked about the 2009 movie; I saw it over Christmas, and, y'know, I liked it, but for various reasons I was sort of depressed around it for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie itself, and I didn't really want to think about it for a while. But reading all this fic has been making me remember what was good about it and be enthusiastic again. So, here is my short review: ( Spoilers. )

I think I am most torn about the fact that the movie puts a less angsty take on the relationships than has previously been canon. It was all just a lot less *tragic*, which I like less in some ways, more in others. I think the way is open now, as it hasn't really been before, for awesome Watson/Holmes/Adler/Morstan OT4 hijinks where Holmes and Adler are the volatile pair and Watson and Morstan are the stable ones who keep it together and pretend not to be enjoying themselves. Where is my life-of-crime crossdressing Morstan/Adler femmeslash, where is my Adler-and-Watson-tie-Holmes-to-a-bed-and-have-sex-in-front-of-him fic, where is my Mary-makes-Holmes-awkwardly-but-with-increasing-enthusiasm-teach-her-how-to-spice-up-her-marriage fic, where is my fic where Holmes and Adler are left with the baby while John and Mary go on a nice holiday in the Cotswalds and hilarity ensues, etc. OT4 hijinks, I wants them.

- Today I made pizza from dough with mozzarella, feta, olives, artichoke hearts, tomatoes, sundried tomatoes and spinach, and also I made apple crumble, and I drank beer. I still have a cold and spent a fruitless two hours at the doctor's, so I'm trying to get better through application of delicious food.

- I have been really, really enjoying White Collar (hiatus soon over! Whee!), which didn't seem like it was going to follow up on the awesome of the pilot but has steadily been inching its way back up to par, and this is more than partly because of isagel's posts about the Peter/Neil 24-hour bdsm dynamic. It's so interesting, watching it with that in mind; it reminds me of when I first started watching with slash goggles, you find yourself noticing different things, suddenly, that it's not just a homoerotic relationship, it's a very specific kind of relationship. I get shivers every time Peter refuses to let anyone else cuff Neil. Ooooh.

- Last night I watched a Mythbusters episode where Grant and Tory put lie detectors on each other and asked each other awkward questions. (Grant: "Have you ever lied about your age?"* Tory: "Have you ever made or wanted to make a female robot?") Also, Adam and Jamie love each other. I want to write Mythbusters fic all the time now. I got really frustrated in this episode, though, because they were initially testing whether or not plants feel pain, and they hooked up a plant to a polygraph machine (what they were expecting to measure, they did not say), but then they started to test whether plants feel *fear*, and then it was, do they read *minds*, and then they were testing whether, like, yoghurt and eggs can read minds or feel fear, and the whole thing was just very unscientifically rigorous, and I just wanted them to go back and find other ways to test whether plants are telepathic, because that bit looked like it was going somewhere.

- Just finished reading my first ever Chaucer. Yes, I'd never read any Chaucer. Well, now I have. I was not expecting to love it. BUT I DID. I read The Book of the Duchess, and it was hysterical, in part because it was really not very good. It's one of his early works. Chaucer! His bouncy little rhymes! Inexplicable emphasis on nudity at odd points! Random beginnings of stories that don't go anywhere! Then I had to read an absolutely *terrible* article on it, sadly. My concluding note on it was, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH HAVING A THESIS?"

- I think maybe I won't be ill tomorrow. I've got a good feeling about it.



* this is hilarious because Tory is, like, forty, and dresses like he's fourteen.