sundries

[rm]

I've neglected to mention that our tomato plants are suddenly three feet tall. The Green zebra is flowering again, the red zebras are too, and the tomato of unknown variety has tiny tomatoes and flowers again as well. Buds have reemerged on the peppers we've had so many problems with and I have high hopes. I put stakes in with the tomatoes yesterday, since they are getting so tall -- this morning, squirrels tried to climb them, tipped the pots over and ran off after getting chucked halfway down the fire escape by their own cleverness.

Patty continues on her road trip, but is at least now in the right state.

We're thinking of doing a beach weekend in a couple of weeks (basically, a nice, unplugged, romantic weekend, before DragonCon, which is pretty high-impact on my sanity). I originally thought we should go stay at the really nice hotel in Asbury Park -- I spent summers in Asbury Park as a kid because family has a house there (that we kinda can't borrow, because they're bigots and I don't wanna deal) and Patty wants to see different area beaches (we've only been to Long Beach so far). But it's a hard town without a car, so it's occurred to me that we might be better off in a B&B in Ocean Grove, where getting around on foot is more fruitful. I hear both towns are big gay meccas now, but especially with a B&B I confess it feels a little weird to me... so I'm looking for pages that shows who owns the B&Bs and it's easy to see which ones are likely to be gay owned. Also I'll do the "my partner and I" thing on the interrogative calls and find something perfect. But hey, if you're in the area and have a thought, do let us know.

I might be about to write some RPS. As you know, I have no problems with RPS and have lengthy scholarly thinky thoughts on why it's a valid literary pursuit. That said, even though I've written lots of RPS under my real name, there are reasons that this one might go under my Secret RPS Identity. Don't worry, you'll be able to find it. It's a plausible deniability action more than anything else.

I am struggling with my impulses, my need even, to write about everything. There's the women that were killed because a dude couldn't get a date. There's the continuing fallout of the *fail at WriterCon. There are a million things I feel like I always have to be on about and fighting about and being loud about, because I can, and it's useful and I have a big enough, mouthy enough audience here to get the word out. But I'm tired and I triage poorly and I make myself (and by extension the people in my life) crazy with it sometimes. I'm not sure what the answer is.

I think it's very cute that you all keep sending me info about the "win a walk-on role in Madmen" thing. I suppose I could put an outfit together and enter it, but it feels both silly and required that I do it as a woman, and I like to think I'm enough of a pro not to need to do these things, but then being a struggling professional actor means getting the face out there by any means available, and you guys would vote for me, I'd like to think. So maybe. But mostly (and people in my fandom know why) it's just hilarious, especially people in my fandom who saw me walking around with a Red Bull on Sunday and clutching it as if it were going to keep me from drifting out to sea. Man, the thing I hate about cons is the aftermath. I feel like crap.

More flowers at the tourist office. Thank you lefaym for the tip. (Do I need to put a footnote here that I'm not part of the "bring Ianto back" campaign? The story is the story, but heavens, I love this gesture).

I cannot stop being moved by the above and also fascinated. One of the subtitles of my journal is a devotion to vanishing things. How do things survive? How do stories? Does our digital age mean that memories will persist for longer or be even more ephemeral? What does it really take for anything to be remembered for 1,000 years? I go to the museum sometimes and look at the great porcelain from the 1760s, and I think about each step, each action, that had to occur, and not occur for such fragile wares to continue to exist. Everything is vanishing, why do we even try to arrest the process? What stories are more reasonable to preserve -- the fictional or the non-fictional, when int he lens of history everything looks like a lie? Can you believe Torchwood makes me think such thinky thoughts? It's rather absurd. But I love it, it feels right in my blood.

amand_r wrote When Taken Apart. It's about Ianto being autopsied. Some people will like it or hate it because it's dark and brutal and seems like one of those inevitable exercises that someone in fandom takes on. amand_r comes to the topic with an unfortunate legitimacy (see the comment discussion) and, for several paragraphs in the middle, manages to write what feels like a holy thing. If you are in our fandom and can make yourself read it, I suggest you do.

EtGB, chapter 3 has been started. I'm crazy excited about it.

Comments

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

If you're in the market for edibles, Copperbadge's friend strange_selkie has set up a baked-goods store on Etsy, including parve and gluten-free goodies.

Hurray for the tomatoes!

[splix.livejournal.com]

Cape May is so pretty, and queer-friendly last time I was there.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

*g* The flowers. I'm going to be in Cardiff for a literal couple of hours in a few weekend's time, I might see if I can snatch a visit down there and take some shots(dragging bemused non-fandom friend in wake). It'll be the middle of the night, but possibly even better for that.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

I know it was a quick-and-dirty mention, but I gotta say, those women weren't killed because a dude couldn't get a date. That seems to imply that if some chick had only given him pity, this wouldn't have happened, which puts the onus on women. Those women were killed because an abused child grew up to be a crazy, hateful man who never got the treatment he needed and had ready access to firearms, and because no one read the clear threats in his blog and called the authorities on him.

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

Must second this.

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

Bob Herbert has a good commentary on this in today's NYT.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec. I wish I could be more coherent, but I'm a little ill.

you are making me a thinky person today.

[ophymirage.livejournal.com]

How do things survive? How do stories? Does our digital age mean that memories will persist for longer or be even more ephemeral? What does it really take for anything to be remembered for 1,000 years?

SO, I actually have letters behind my name that say I studied folklore for about 4 years. :D One of the most interesting (and oddly reassuring things) about the discipline is that it's primarily retro-focused and preservationist, and Romantic: it's interested in recovery of what we did in the past, in preservation of things that are disappearing, and in valuing things that are culturally dismissed or devalued.

And nearly the first things it started to study were stories. "Fairy tales," people say dismissively, and yet these little stories persist, in surprisingly CONSISTENT form, for hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of years. Print collections of Chinese tales from the 9th century AD have a *recognizable* version of Cinderella. A tale in the Jatakas, or Buddha birth-stories, dated somewhere between 300 BC and 400 AD, is the same basic story as Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, written down minimum a THOUSAND years later. Without going into HOW this works (and really, we don't know either, but we think it's really really interesting and have some great ideas on the subject), we know it DOES work. Stories change and grow, but they do so on a basic skeleton that persists like granite, or diamond.

In re digital preservation; as we change from medium to medium, I think that information actually becomes MORE fragile, because we rely on the medium to preserve perfectly, instead of relying on our brains to preserve and then pass on the information, however imperfect. but we don't allow for damage, loss, or outside catastrophe, just assume that somehow, somewhere, these are being kept in memory. To bring that back to your own disciplines, I'd point at the loss of the film archives, as film breaks down and degrades over time, so conserving and preserving becomes a monumental task.

Because we stop interacting with the data, assuming the record is "somewhere," it runs a much greater risk of suddenly being "nowhere," while we have not been Paying Attention.

I go to the museum sometimes and look at the great porcelain from the 1760s, and I think about each step, each action, that had to occur, and not occur for such fragile wares to continue to exist. Everything is vanishing, why do we even try to arrest the process?

Because memories and emotions make us who we are. and because they remind us that even if we, singular, do not persist, we, species, persist and grow. As my old prof Henry Glassie would say, we circle around till we reach the beginning, but we are one level deeper on the spiral.

I went to an exhibit recently at the Asian Art Museum, that was of treasures recovered from Kabul, from separate digs that were basically gotten out of Afghanistan before the Taliban came in and blew everything up.

One half of the exhibit was trade items from the Silk Road: they were uncovering a whole small city, got in past one of the walls of a building, and found an entire room full of small sculptures and luxury items, possibly 2000 years old. Utterly fascinating. And the item I remember most was a glass bowl, sectioned off in five parts. It was textured glass, bright iridescing aquamarine, and had gold leaf gilded into the glass. It looked, I kid you not, like a Pier 1 $20 chips-and-snacks bowl, and was probably about the same size and function. it was pretty, it was functional, and it was 2000 freaking years old. and I looked at it and thought, our ideas of beauty and design and function do not change, at base. And I found that deeply reassuring. We persist. We come round the spiral to the same ideas, one level down, and find we had common ground with the ones who came before us.

It's as close as I get to spirituality, anyway. :D

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

What is it about RPS? I rarely read it, most of them are completely ridiculous, and I never in a million years thought I'd write one, or even want to. And then I did (sort of couldn't not to), and I felt so uncomfortable about it that I used a secret identity. A month later I figured I was just being ridiculous, it's just RPS, right? I could at least post it on my LJ, friends locked. So I went over to the RPF comm where I posted it (locked, of course) to re-read it and make sure it was all in my head, and again, all I could think was 'omg, if this ever get's connected back to me, I'm so screwed'.

No one actually takes RPS seriously, right?

[rm.livejournal.com]

There are definitely ill-in-the-head people who do, and it's upsetting to me, in a number of ways, because it makes the genre unacceptable.

There's also a book called Starf*ckers that is pro, published RPS. FWIW.

I'm only at all cagey about it, because of what I do for a living. I've run across RPS about people I know well (and in one case, had to stop myself from mailing the author to say, "man you nailed [redacted], he is exactly that much of a dick in RL" because it seemed inappropriate even though the dude pisses me off) or grew up with, and that's always a little weird. And stuff about people I know in professional passing is slightly strange as well. And since I could know anyone in professional passing at any time, sometimes I'm a little more neurotic about it than others, but really, I think it's totally a valid literary pursuit.

[marita-c.livejournal.com]

Is the degree of familiarity with someone determines whether it's cool or uncool to write RPS about them? Where is this line drawn?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think if you have insider information, so to speak, you run the risk of, instead of writing a fantasy about public personas, of actually writing about people's actual private lives, which is definitely where it gets sketchy to me. Where the compartmentalization line i, is different for different people.

[svollga.livejournal.com]

I would really like to read about your point of view on RPS, because I'm in a process of changing my own viewpoint from 'unacceptable' to 'acceptable with conditions', and usually reading what other people think about things helps me to become clear about what I think.

I actually happened to read some RPS fiction about people I know. Mostly, it was written so bad you couldn't but laugh at it, and once, it was send to me by the very person it was written about, and we laughed together. :) Still, RPS was a squick for me. DW/TW fandom changed my mind on many of my previous squicks, including RPS. Now, I'm even writing it myself - the process feels actually the same as fanfiction, writing around the small hints and details from interviews and biographies, using them as a canon. But I feel unsure about posting it anywhere, because I'm still of two minds on this genre being acceptable...

[rm.livejournal.com]

RPF as pro phenom:
http://www.amazon.com/Starf-cker-Shar-Rednour/dp/1555835163/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249762345&sr=8-5

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the fic link. It's an amazing piece.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Deleted the last comment because I'm not sure I actually want to have a conversation about it. But I am still interested to know your answer to the question, so maybe you would consider elaborating in a post some time.

Also, meant to say, it gives me a huge grin that you are growing Green and Red Zebra. I love how all those old wacky tomato varieties have come back into favour.