Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

Yesterday I sent out the confirmation email for a mixed faculty-grad student event I'm helping organize. I received an email back from one of the more famous members of our English faculty. His question?

"Will there be lunch?"

Because young or old, famous or unknown, what academics are really concerned with is whether you will be feeding them.

***

( Tonight's White Collar was Old Skool, man! )

***

Spent the weekend at my parents' house, mostly to see Caz, who's with them until I'm off crutches. I did a lot of reading and a lot of kitty-cuddling, and I let my parents feed me and take care of me for a couple of days. I miss my kitty something awful, you guys. The apartment is so empty without him. But the new roommate is working out very well! I like her a lot. Former Roommate R was a great roommate, but New Roommate B is a lot more fun.

Today was exhausting. Too much crutching. I was so out of spoons by 8pm that all I could do was come home and sprawl on my bed. I didn't even have enough left to do dinner and WC with jarsofwind like we'd planned. *sigh* Tomorrow will be easier - all I have is a lunch meeting at noon, and then I can come home.

***

I haven't been writing at all. I wrote myself out on fandom_stocking (still haven't posted the last couple of fics for that, actually), but I have a couple of fics that need writing. Speaking of which, would any of the UK people on my flist be willing to talk to me about house-hunting in the UK? I really want to write the house-hunting fic set in my TenII/Ianto/Jack 'verse, but the truth is that I've been prevented from doing so by my complete lack of knowledge about how that works in Britain.

***

Got my "This is not a bill" statement for my knee surgery. $40,499.19. And that was just for the time I spent directly under the knife. Everything else got billed separately.

That's more than I make in a year. Thank God for insurance . . . but at the same time, insurance is what fucks the market up and allows hospitals to charge more than the market can actually bear. What a fucked up system.

SOPA and PIPA tabled indefinitely

YAY!!!!

Do not take on the internet. We are bigger and badder than you, and you won't like us when we're angry.

No love,
Me

Apparently the "Email your Congressperson!" servers crashed today. If this piece of shit legislation passes, it won't be because people didn't care (no, it'll be because Congress is being paid to pass it, the bastards).

Title: After THE END
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating/Pairing: G; Amy and Rory
Word Count: 700
Summary: Sometimes going home is harder than leaving it.
Author's Note: For kerravonsen in this year's fandom_stocking.

After THE END (at AO3)

A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze

I'm so glad someone wrote this. This is a brilliant, brilliant piece of meta that I recommend to anyone on either side of the Irene Adler debate. Blum makes many awesome points, both about the text itself and about the fannish reaction to the texts, which I think is the more fascinating (and often enraging) aspect of the conversation that's been happening since "A Scandal in Belgravia" aired. In particular:

"The thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing something a little more complex than either side is giving you credit for."

Word.

"As fans, we don't really do ambivalence. We love intensely, or we hate intensely; the same passion pushes us to either opposite extreme. So it's actually harder for us than anyone else to look at things from a sort of measured middle ground. If anything, when surrounded by people who share a similar strong opinion, or arguing against people at the opposite pole, it only encourages us to spiral off further towards our own extreme in a spiral of incestuous amplification.

"And from that intensely amped-up starting point, we construct our own context -- in many cases, we're telling ourselves a story of our own, which may bear little or no relation to the story the writer is actually telling to the audience in general."

Wordity word WORD. I thought a lot about this while taking my Cog Sci and literature course last year, about how all stories in the end are confabulations, and we're drawn to those stories that are closest to the stories we're already telling ourselves.

AND (this is my favorite bit) . . .

"Really her reputation as The Woman Who Out-Thought Sherlock Holmes is entirely down to a couple of paragraphs of good press from Watson as narrator, rather than what she actually does in the action of the story. In that story, she doesn't actually keep pace with Holmes; she's genuinely taken in by Holmes' various deceptions -- even though she's been warned in advance to look out for him in particular. The victory she wins over Holmes is simply a matter of spotting when she's given herself away, and getting the hell outta Dodge before Holmes comes back -- having decided that she can't go up against "so formidable an opponent". Far from engaging in an intellectual battle of wits with Holmes, she's actively trying to avoid such a clash."

YES.

Here's my thing: I love Steven Moffat's writing. I really do. I acknowledge that it is not perfect, but there is something about it (and especially about his women) that hits me right where I live. I love them. I love how strong they are, I love that they misbehave, I love that they often refuse to be hemmed in by labels like "good" or "bad." I love their vulnerabilities, too, I love that they have weaknesses, and I love that they love.

This has nothing to do with Moffat as a person. I refuse to watch interviews with the man, because some of what comes out of his mouth really is appalling. So when fellow fen use those interviews to point out sexism in his texts, it makes me really angry. Probably more so because I am starting from a point of loving the hell out of Moffat's women (particularly his bad girls, River and Irene), and so being told that I shouldn't (that it, implicitly, makes me a bad feminist) absolutely enrages me. It puts me on the defensive and I end up making excuses for things in the text that I otherwise would probably not excuse. I certainly didn't excuse them for Aaron Sorkin (who is brilliant but has sexism issues coming out his ears) or Joss Whedon (who, for all his feminism, really drops the ball on occasion).

But when a Moffat episode of anything airs, I know exactly what story certain parts of fandom are going to tell themselves about it before anyone ever watches it. And that makes me, in my stubborn way, tell myself the opposite story, when that's not really what I want to do at all - what I want is to be allowed to love a problematic text in all its complexities without having to defend it to everyone I know online who has decided to hate it because it didn't match the story they were already telling themselves. I think this is especially true of "Scandal," because, as jblum points out, the Irene in fandom's head . . . wasn't actually Arthur Conan Doyle's Irene at all.

I loved "A Scandal in Belgravia." I especially love that it queered everything, and that it emphasized how relationships - whether or not they're sexual - refuse to be bound by labels. That scene between Irene and Watson I take to be absolutely true, whatever happened afterward. I love that she refused to buy Watson's usual line about not being gay and therefore not in a relationship with Sherlock. I love that Moffat went there, and I see him going there as incredibly progressive and, yes, feminist. Had I written the script, I probably would have done something else with the last five minutes, but I didn't, and Moffat gets credit (from me, at least) for the other eighty-five.

Anyway, jblum said it better than I ever could. Go! Read! Think!

ETA: Okay, so I don't actually mean, "Don't post negative reviews" (though I do ask you to post them behind a cut-tag, because some of us would like to avoid them). I think my objection is to the conflation of Moffat with his texts. The argument, as jblum says, has not been so much about whether the text was sexist (though it may have started there), but rather about whether Moffat is sexist. At this point, a large portion of fandom has decided that he is, point blank, and that anything he writes is therefore going to be riddled with it. Moffat might very well be sexist (see above re: my refusal to watch interviews with him), but that doesn't make every script he writes irredeemably sexist. I think there's been a lot of transference of rage from S6 of Doctor Who to Sherlock, and I wish we could avoid that.

And I need to get better about not clicking cut-tags I know are going to only aggravate me. *sigh*

Title: Resolution
Fandom: White Collar
Rating/Pairings: G; Peter, Elizabeth, and Neal gen
Word Count: 1800
Summary: 2011 was a bad year for Neal. Fortunately, El is happy to help him let it go.
Author's Note: For lefaym in this year's fandom_stocking.

Resolution (at AO3)

Title: The Slayer, the Watcher, and the Mage
Fandom: White Collar(/Buffy fusion)
Rating/Pairings: G; Peter/Elizabeth, Peter/Elizabeth/Neal (sort of)
Word Count: 1900
Summary: In which El is a vampire slayer, Peter is a watcher, and Neal is a wayward sorcerer.
Author's Note: For ct in this year's fandom_stocking. Probably the strangest thing I wrote for f_s this year (it wanted to be a novella, but I was stern!).

The Slayer, the Watcher, and the Mage (at AO3)

Title: A Cup o' Kindness
Fandom: White Collar
Rating/Pairings: PG; Peter/Elizabeth, Peter/Elizabeth/Neal
Word Count: 5500
Summary: Two years after leaving without saying good-bye, Neal comes back to New York. But all is not as he left it.
Author's Note: For elrhiarhodan in this year's fandom_stocking. Not so much a stuffer, really, but by the time I realized how long this was going to have to be to tell the story I wanted to, it was too late! Many thanks to fuzzyboo03 for making me fix the ending.

A Cup o' Kindness (at AO3)

Title: Absolution
Fandom: White Collar
Rating/Characters: G; Peter, Neal, and Elizabeth gen
Word Count: 1300
Summary: Absolution: 1) act of absolving; a freeing from blame or guilt; release from consequences, obligations, or penalties. 2) state of being absolved.
Author's Note: For rabidchild67 in this year's fandom_stocking.

Absolution (at AO3)

Title: In This Together
Fandom: White Collar
Rating/Pairings: G; Neal/Sara, Neal/Peter/Elizabeth
Word Count: 1400
Summary: "It's a group date, Neal. I'm on a date with you and so are they! So no, it's really not just dinner and a show with friends."
Author's Note: For lionessvalenti in this year's fandom_stocking.

In This Together (at AO3)