Category: tv

send mongeese immediately

I am not, in general, afraid of snakes. An old roommate of mine had a ball python that an ex of hers had left her and I used to have to feed it because the whole mouse thing freaked her out. Snakes are cool.

I do, however, have some particular primal fear of cobras from watching Rikki Tikki Tavi too many times as a little kid. Of course, being afraid of cobras is perfectly reasonable except for the part that there aren’t any in North America (other than zoos) so who really cares, even if I did have a lot of nightmares about them as a child.

So in short: snakes good; cobras bad. Not really something I think about that much.

Until I call Patty in Gujarat and she’s like “So hey, I was sitting by the trench talking to Judy and the older woman who works in my trench started screaming and I was like ‘what what?’ and then I turned around and there was a snake slithering behind me and she threw dirt on it and then it went over by some trees. But it’s the trees where people take their tea breaks so everyone was really freaked. But they found it and killed it later and hung it in the tree.”

So, I, of course, inquired as to the type of snake. Something poisonous, presumably.

Patty said it was either a cobra or not a cobra, but because she doesn’t speak the local language and her Hindi is pretty basic still and it’s hard to translate between snake types she wasn’t really sure. But she was, however, pretty sure cobra-status was discussed, she just wasn’t sure if it was or it wasn’t. So I asked her, based on my Rikki Tikki Tavi expertise, about various markings on it.

“Well, first it was behind me, and then it was dead, so I didn’t look that closely.”

By the time I next speak to Patty this will probably have ceased to be interesting to her. I, however, will be talking about it FOREVER.

SNAKE NEAR TRENCHES. COBRA STATUS UNKNOWN. DEAD AND DISPLAYED IN TREE.

Also, is it mongooses or mongeese?

creepy, icy trash day

It’s finally not snowing or icing in New York, but apparently there’s a storm covering most of the country. Meanwhile, the piles of snow here some of which are several feet high, keep melting and refreezing, making the city look like another world filled with strange flows of melted quartz.

Meanwhile, I had, hands down, the two most terrifying dreams I’ve ever had last night. I’m only starting to be not shaken now, about six hours after I woke up. This is a lesson for you writers: don’t develop magical systems right before bedtime (this is related to a lesson for actors: if you’re playing the Lady in the Scottish play, don’t work on your lines right before sleep or you will dream of murder) or you may have distressing encounters with the powerful, unseen and angry in your dreams. Wow. I can’t really overstate this one.

Speaking of other nightmare items: SurveyFail rides again. For those of you in fandom or who do fan studies, I assume the sentence, “Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex” from the book’s press materials strikes you as it does me: which is, “Yes, but no. In fact, really, really no. Aegjskgjsdfklsg;jgkslg!!!!” Have fun with that. And, fair warning, the part I’ve quoted is, horrifically, perhaps the least offensive of many of their “conclusions.”

I am deep, deep into my Sherlock analysis right now and am having scads of fun with it. You don’t get to have scads of fun with my data yet, but here, have a piece of fanfiction I really love: The Whore of Babylon was a Perfectly Nice Girl. Not recommended for those who don’t get the “Yes, but no” factor in the above paragraph or are purists about the platonic friendship between Sherlock and Watson.

For those of you who don’t generally watch MSNBC, which I know is viewed (mostly appropriately) as part of the newstaintment phenomenon, I just want to pause and recommend the work Rachel Maddow‘s been doing the last couple of days on the targeting of journalists in Egypt. She’s been doing a spectacular job on rounding up the details and explaining why it matters; it’s not just US journalists at risk, and it’s not just Western journalists at risk (no matter what CNN keeps saying). It’s ALL journalists. And bloggers. If you want to learn more about the risks journalists face around the world please visit the Committee to Protect Journalists. No matter what you may think of the current state of the art and science of reporting the news here in the US or elsewhere, the ability of journalists to do their work and survive doing their work, is critical to personal freedom and government accountability everywhere.

Changing gears to the department of crowdfunding: The Witches of Lublin is a radio drama created and performed by a lot of fantastic people, several of whom are friends. It’s currently raising funds to finish production and promotion. It’s a fantastic, feminist story with haunting music and is very much worth your attention. I had the pleasure of participating in one of the early readings of it and it’s been fun to watch it evolve. (If I make the the random Neil Gaiman noise at you, will that make you click? Seriously, Neil’s involved).

On a final, fairly random personal note, it seems like I may get to chop all my hair off for Gallifrey One after all. This is a long, somewhat complex, story, but I’m maddeningly shaggy right now. By Tuesday I find out if I get to hit the barber before I hit LA. We shall see. It’s a mixed thing, either way.

news selection, narrative, fiction and non-

I have started, stopped, and restarted this post four times. Basically, all I’m trying to do is talk about Egypt, media, propaganda (as a value-neutral political marketing word), and news selection, about how history isn’t just written by the victors but by the editors.

The problem is that I’m exhausted. That the news hasn’t slowed down enough for me to eat a meal away from a screen (honestly, sometimes as many as three live screens) since the Giffords shooting. And I’ve been on the night-shift for the last week, covering Asia and Europe. Then on Friday at about 3am, I spoke to Patty in India who has no news access there, to tell her Egypt was falling.

Fundamentally, the unifying nature of all the stuff I do is that I’m interested in how we tell stories, whether they be fiction or not fiction. I’m interested in (although not exclusively) the space between what we think we’re talking about and what statistical examination of what we’re saying actually shows we’re talking about. When we talk about the news, we call this agenda-setting theory, although many of its basic principles can also be applied to fiction. Time, however, has a much different function when dealing with fiction over non-fiction because fiction is generally happening in a forever-past that is also a constant-now and non-fiction is generally happening linearly and currently.

When you choose what news to read to garner information about the situation in Egypt, you are performing an editorial function on behalf of yourself and engaging in news selection. When it’s easier for you (if you’re in the US) to access The New York Times vs. Al Jezeera, or you are leery of accessing Al Jezeera because of its association in the US with terrorism (which, if you’ve ever left Al Jezeera on for 24 hours like some of us also do CNN, you’d realize is essentially absurdist), you are being impacted by news selection activities from others that ultimately help dictate your own news selection choices. When you read an article or watch a TV report, no matter where it is, there has been news selection that impacts both the language used in that report, the prominence of the placement of that report in the media in question, and the decision to make that report available at all.

News selection is the central manipulation (again, used here, like propaganda above, as a neutral term) through which we understand the world. But, as viewer, we mostly don’t feel like this is the case. What we don’t see as or don’t personally select, we don’t consider; it is often as if the material we do not select never even existed to be chosen or not. So there is the news we see, and there is nothing. Even if we don’t trust the news we see, our ability to be mindful about what didn’t make the selection available to our personal experience is often incredibly low. That’s why agenda-setting theory is so compelling. That’s why the agenda matters so much.

Fiction can be considered in all the same ways (and on the many more detailed levels that also come into play with news-related agenda setting theory, but I’m not sure I’m getting there in this post). Story selection happens much the same way and is conducted by you, by writers, by editors and then by the journalists and pundits of fiction: critics and fan communities. How much screen time did Jack and Ianto’s relationship get in the first two seasons of Torchwood if we count it scene by scene or statement by statement? How much screen time does it get in fandom if I look at the number of fanfiction stories self-described as focusing on that part of the shows narrative? What does the audience member ultimately see? What was in the story or what they were told (or participated in telling others) was in the story?

It works with anything really. Compare how many statements in the Harry Potter books were meant to showcase that bullying was bad to how many statements showed characters you were supposed to view as heroes engaging in bullying without repercussion (another fun one there is to look at what the films say about tragedy vs. the books solely due to character age in the text vs. casting ages in the films).

Or, take a look at Buffy and Angel, do a gut check, and then see if that matches up with the focus the shows ultimately put on life vs. death. The message you extrapolated might be different than the one you were actively being told depending on where else you were getting information-selection on the two series.

The many iterations of Sherlock Holmes, particularly that of the recent BBC series, Sherlock, provides us with a particularly fun one if we look at, on a scene-by-scene or statement-by-statement bass, statements about character’s sexualities and compare those frequencies and shares to what goes on in fandom. Are the canonical characters that surround Sherlock in the narrative (that is, his fictional audience) queering him? Or is that solely an act of fandom (his non-fictional audience)?

News-selection and salience when compared to audience responses can have predictive qualities regarding media influence. They can also highlight, especially with regard to fiction, what are effectively optical illusions of the soul.

The place where this stuff can, and often does, intersect the most vividly is when we have news rounded up, tightly edited and set to music. It’s like the montages of those who died in the last year we get at the Academy Awards or in that “a look back at the year that was” stuff that airs non-stop between December 27 and January 3 because there’s usually little new news in the world when so many people (at least people with the power and resources to agenda set) are on holiday. These things are news selection on top of news selection: a greatest hits of the agenda, framed in narrative styles we more closely associate with fiction.

Mostly, I think of these things as interstitials and station promos that make me tear up if I watch CNN when I’m feeling particularly fragile. But thanks to the Internet, cheap and relatively easy video editing, and a world in which huge numbers of people outside of agenda-setting institutions (unless you choose to count the Internet as one), finally, have the power to be agenda setters for more than themselves, Tamer Shaaban has made this video about the current situation in Egypt. It is exceptional in its use of image, music, rhythm, and framing to connect the viewer not just to the events, but to a selected emotional state about those events. When I first saw it yesterday, it had 10,000 views. At the time of this posting? Nearly 200,000.

History is a type of story we tell. And it is told not just by the victors, and not just by writers, but also by editors. In the world as it is now, we are all, in one way or another, increasingly capable of being those editors, if only for ourselves. And that experience of the world, and our increased of ability to share that experience of the world, both helps us understand stories as they happen, but can, in fact, also help obscure them.

I can, for example, try to aggregate the facts that seem pressing and relevant to me from multiple broadcasts — which is one form of news-selection — or I can tell you that sometimes it seems that history (by which, of course, I also mean narrative, and mythology) focuses to a point always in certain places, like Berlin. And, this week, like Alexandria.

It’s all true, in its way. But is any of it accurate? If news is arguably a showcase for the public events of the human heart, are facts truly certain or viable? And if fiction showcases the truth of our collective longings, what matters more — the stories we’ve actually seen or the ones we’re convinced we did because they were what we wanted, so much and more than anything?

truth + fiction doesn’t just = marketing

In the world of fanfiction there’s fictional person fiction (FPF) and real person fiction (RPF). While fanfiction is often viewed with skepticism from people outside of the fan community in general, despite humanity’s long tradition of telling and retelling stories as social currency, RPF is often met, instead, with skepticism from people within the fanfiction community itself, while people outside the community don’t even really seem register it as so specific a category.

And, to be fair, on a pure gut level, sometimes I can find RPF to be really, really weird. But then, I’ve stumbled over stories about a person I went to high school with who is now famous and one about a friend of a friend’s ex that I once had beers with and found to be remarkably unlikeable. RPF, which is arguably about personas and the packaging of fame — when people write RPF they it’s possible (even quite likely) that they aren’t writing about real people’s fictionalized private lives so much as real people’s publicly fictionalized persona’s private lives — sometimes appears to drop under that layer of fictional truth for me, not out of speculation but because Oh my god, I know those people.

I’ve heard all the arguments about the morality or ethics of writing and reading RPF, and it’s not that I don’t think these are fundamentally important conversations on some level (and yes, I’ve thought long and hard about “Well, how would you feel if someone did it to you?” The answer? “Well, like I’d probably have a lot more important things to be doing than reading wank about me on the Internet if I were known enough for that to be going on.”). It’s just that I’m not that interested in those discussions of how not to be an asshole. Not being an asshole is good, but I’m not all that qualified to tell anyone how to do that, despite various attempts I fully admit to having made. Besides, from a thinky thoughts perspective, on this one I’m really, really much more riveted by — and useful to — talking about the critical implications around RPF.

Perhaps the most irritating aspect of RPF-related discussions is the degree to which people dismiss it as, “Oh god, more creepy porn on the Internet.” I think it’s pretty toxic how often both fan community participants and critics dismiss sexualized-content for irrelevancy because it contains sex. Our collective libidos are, among other things, narrative tools, and chucking a lot of fanfiction into the sex bucket and saying it’s not worth looking at from a critical position for that reason isn’t just one of those high-/low- culture false divides moments; it’s a sloppy misuse and abuse of data. The stories people feel compelled to tell and witness and share, whether or not they’re well-written, or whether or not you’re personally interested in them, or whether or not that represent masturbatory material for some people, represent a cultural map that it’s foolish to dismiss (even if I won’t read anything published on fanfiction.net either — I never said I wasn’t a snob).

Now let’s be clear, not all fanfiction, and, I find, particularly not all RPF, is porn. And even when it is, that porn is usually there in service to the idea of the backstage story (which if you’ve been following the development of Dogboy & Justine you know is a particular fascination of mine). And, conversely, not all RPF is fanfiction (e.g., works created on a not-for-profit basis by enthusiasts). Note the erotic anthology StarF*cker, which is fiction about sex and real famous people, but very much not part of the fanfiction ethos. In the less sex, but still definitely RPF department, what do you think Primary Colors was? Or the forthcoming O (not to be confused, amusingly, with The Story Of O)? RPF. Totally, totally RPF.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover how pervasive this trend has become; Steve Erickson, for example, doesn’t just use both historical figures and himself as a fictional characters in his novels, but also included personal encounters with Sally Hemings (a particular obsession of Erickson’s; she shows up in his novels too) in Leap Year, his arguably non-fiction book on the 1988 presidential campaign season. Other examples include the Aaron Sorkin Jed Bartlet advises Obama piece from the last campaign season and an article The New York Times also did on the real people as fictional characters in novels phenomenon, although I’m having trouble finding the link (please leave comment if you’ve got it!).

RPF is a real, saleable thing, both in its smutty and not smutty versions. None of which necessarily makes it less uncomfortable for many readers (or, even, in the abstract for non-readers). Nor should it. Part of the charge of reading RPF, sexualized or not, is, I think, that it is so profoundly unsettling and messes with our boundaries regarding what is real and what is true (two of my favorite categories for making Venn diagrams about stories). Another part of the charge is, I think, the violative nature of reading something and realizing that a particular fantasy, daydream or fear you have harbored is shared, is part of our collective story in the dark. It is the guilty that can bring the pleasure when it comes to RPF.

In the midst of hanging about on Twitter the night Countdown went off the air, there was a tweet saying that AC360 was going to do a bit on the Countdown thing, which got fairly widely misinterpreted as “Olbermann’s going to be interviewed on Cooper’s show.” Which, in the world of the Internet, or at least the people I talk to on the Internet, led me to make a crack about how Olbermann/Cooper would make certain corners of the Internet very happy, which led someone to reply with, “Have you read this?” and a link.

Obviously, I read some RPF. I’ve written some RPF (some of which you’d even be able to track back to me with ease). Some of that I have mixed feelings about. Some of it I don’t. But there’s ton’s of RPF I won’t touch with a ten-foot pole for no other reason than it squicks me. It doesn’t mean the story is morally or ethically wrong (for me or anyone else) or not well-executed; it just means that for whatever reason, sometimes one I can’t even put my finger on, there are some RPF places I don’t want to go unless I have to for some sort of scholarly/critical thingy. For me, pundit slash, as the world of RPF about political talk show hosts is called, is one of those no-go zones for me. I’ve no idea why, but so it is. This surely seems like a perfectly rational choice to many of you.

But I had a headache, and I was in a bad mood, and people on Twitter were like “You have to read this story called ‘The 28th Amendment,'” and I recalled that, that Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel piece from Yuletide a few years back was one of the smartest meditations on ambition I had ever read, even if I did find parts of the story really, really uncomfortable. So I decided to give the rec from Twitter a go, and that’s how I fell down the rabbit hole of pundit slash on a Friday night, and why I’m writing this post and have a linky or two to share with you now.

One of the biggest problems for me as a (critical) reader of RPF is that I often feel like people who are trying to use RPF for commentary don’t know how to write a story, and people who just want to write a (hot) story, don’t necessarily know how to add criticism into the mix. That both those things should happen in RPF aren’t, of course, anyone’s requirements but my own, but hey, my journal, my pickiness. What’s so remarkable about “The 28th Amendment” (which imagines a The Handmaid’s Tale-esque religious police state in the US under a President Huckabee with our intrepid pundits (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann and more) on the run), is that it knows how to do both. While I reflexively read it with an editorial eye (and there were things in there I would have changed or didn’t ring plausible for me even in the suspended-disbelief of the narrative, although it’s hard to say whether that was related to personal comfort or actual editorial consideration), the fact is, it was a well-told story that got under my skin for reasons that I am fairly sure were broader than liberal-paranoia and the fact that I read all sorts of stuff that freaks other people out on the Internet all the time.

Maybe, I decided, pundit slash wasn’t totally squicky. Maybe I should read more! So I started digging around on An Archive of Our Own and found a remarkable number of charming fictions about Rachel Maddow being a cool person to have drinks with, a BDSM-AU about various pundits, several high school AUs (a particular favorite of my partner’s), and an essentially general audiences Doctor Who/Rachel Maddow crossover. It’s a beautiful world out there on the Internet. Or something.

One of the views I have particularly little patience for is the idea that fanfiction isn’t real writing, that it is somehow “practice” for the “real” work you are obligated to aspire to do. Sure, writing fanfiction is one way to learn some craft skills, but to me original fiction and fanfiction are profoundly different endeavors that I engage in for profoundly different reasons. To me, fanfiction is something of an acting exercise: that is, how do I execute, in text, on a character whose blueprint has already been provided to me by a writer/director? While original fiction utilizes some of those acting tools, but also the structural components of the writerly and directorial eye. And I think it’s absurd to tell anyone they have to aspire to anything, especially when I’ve had so much experience turning something I love into a job — sometimes it’s still fun when you do that, and, sometimes, it really, really isn’t.

But I do think that people playing in the RPF sandbox — whether they be part of fan communities or not — would benefit from looking at the bigger picture. If you read Primary Colors, it’s absurd to snark on the existence of RPF in fan communities even if you’ve never read fanfiction and never plan to (because, guess what? In a way, other than that money was involved, you already have). And if you’re writing RPF and think it has to stay in the land of fanfiction but wish it didn’t? Well, sometimes it doesn’t have to stay there. And you should know that too (and I say this, particularly, to people writing historical RPF — have you read The Baroque Cycle? History is a playground! Although please, if we can avoid any more plays about six great minds from different time periods having a dinner party in Hell, I would love you forever).

Fiction appeals to many of us, often, because of the pieces with in it that could be or feel true, no matter how impossible or unlikely for us or for anyone. There is a reason, after all, why so many adults confess to still feeling at the back of wardrobes when they encounter them for the door to Narnia. So it makes just as much sense, really, no matter how discomforting it may be, that there is this not insignificant impulse to put not just truth in our fiction, but fiction in our truth. RPF is a corner of both the fanfiction and generalized fiction space that illuminates, with a sometimes queasy-making light, just why we read fiction and just how far away truth can seem.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a killer story sitting on my hard drive about once-was but no-more Ziggy Stardust David Bowie and Lady Gaga and matters of persona, mentorship, love and desire. Anyone want to buy it?

my own special comment

No matter how busy I am in my very hectic life, one of the few schedule things I try to do when Patty is away (when she’s home I certainly have other incentives to be home at a decent hour) is to get home in time to watch Keith Olbermann. I don’t always manage it, but I do try.

So imagine my surprise tonight when I got home ten minutes late for even the end of it to a stack of emails that basically boiled down to OMGWTFBBQ about the news-to-me announcement that tonight was the last edition of Countdown.

To be clear, because it needs to be said so as not to distract from the rest of this post, I didn’t always agree with Olbermann’s positions or the way he framed them. Sometimes, I found myself frustrated with him, both as an audience member and as someone who has worked in and about journalism. But, to be frank, it wasn’t strictly due to journalism that I had such an affection for Countdown. The reasons I did are complicated, personal, and often, a little bit silly.

I’m a lot more hesitant than I used to be to talk online about my education. The discussions tend to make other people angry, and me frustrated. But it suffices to say that I went to private school where an emphasis was put on all forms of communication. I wrote two-hour essay examinations in every subject but mathematics from sixth grade on, and took mandatory classes in subjects like rhetoric and Latin. Because of my education, I learned to speak in very specific ways that were designed to be assertive, excessively nuanced (sometimes for the express purpose of deception), and deeply attuned to cadence.

That mode of both speech and writing has been both my greatest asset and, often, a headache. It is a style that can make people bristle, both because it is sometimes somewhat impenetrable, and because it leaves little room for phrases like “in my opinion.” This education, this adherence to my education, has certainly gotten me into trouble more than once, and part of those occasions have also largely concerned the fact that I come in female form. This combination of gender expectations and personal delivery mechanisms hasn’t always been kind to me, and it is something I am, frankly, unwilling to modulate.

Countdown reliably riveted me because, for good or for ill, and whether or not I agreed him with on any given evening, Olbermann used language on that show in the manner I was taught to aspire to. The program was, especially in his finer “Special Comment” moments, the way I was told as a child the world was supposed to sound. As someone who has struggled with even the benefits of my education and the awkward way they intersected with the reality of the years I spent concurrent to that education in speech therapy, Olbermann’s rants often made me feel as if I am not as wrong to engage with language in the manner that I do, as I have often been encouraged to feel.

Many of the criticisms that seem to be flying about Olbermann with particular frequency in this immediate wake of the demise of Countdown also resonate for me. Olbermann is a celebrity celiac. And while he has noted on-air that he is lucky in that his symptoms are not as severe as many with the disease, and has generally been unspecific about those that he does endure, it is worth noting that my experience of celiac disease has been that I am subject to attacks of temper, cruelty and despair, particularly if I have been exposed to gluten (this is a recognized and common symptom). I spent decades of my life being labeled mercurial, unstable, angry, crazy, and dramatic, and huge swathes of that experience were related to my then-undiagnosed disease. Today, I can recognize the feeling of my mind and temperament being terrifying hijacked by any exposure to one of the world’s most common foods. I have no reason to know, and no comfort in speculating, as to whether Olbermann’s notoriously difficult temperament has any connection to the disease we share in common, but the mere possibility of it has been a private and awkward comfort to me, especially when I consider the more embarrassing and volatile moments of my personal history.

Finally, my affection for Countdown and my respect for Olbermann comes from my queerness. It’s not just that Olbermann did something significant when he delivered Special Comments wherein he, as a self-described straight man, choked up when speaking out about the wrongs of marriage inequality (although, that was pretty awesome). It’s that he has advocated for queer people from a presentation of not just heterosexuality, but of a somewhat classic (and yes, unfortunately at times misogynist) presentation of masculinity. I don’t like that the queer community needs allies that fit that blueprint — it shouldn’t be necessary — but in a world where it is, I’ve been glad that Olbermann has been that ally.

And that gladness has not just been because of Olbermann’s verbal agility, but because, and this is perhaps the silly part (although surely understood in its significance by other gender non-conforming people), he’s been one of my sartorial role models. Once I decided it was okay to present myself as male, masculine and/or in men’s clothing with some regular frequency in my day-to-day life, watching Countdown was a huge part of how I learned men’s style in terms of color, pattern mixing and cut in men’s suits, shirts and ties.

I truly am beside myself for, among other reasons, this loss of my nightly personally-queered fashion fix.

DVDs as temporal distortion

Yesterday the DVDs arrived; this was the second of three shipments in a massive (and horrifically expensive) order that’s been mostly Doctor Who-related stuff (i.e., Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood, the most recent Doctor Who season) for a book chapter I’m writing (although the box I’m still waiting on is the Sherlock DVDs which I need for an essay I’m writing on spec and will eventually find a home for somewhere if not where I’m currently intending it to land).

But don’t you own all that stuff already, Rach?

Actually, not so much. I watched the first two seasons of Torchwood on Netflix and own a couple of episodes for my iPod. I watched Children of Earth through the wonder of somewhat sketchy technological choices. And I fully admit to doing that a lot to get around region-based delays; sometimes because I’m impatient and sometimes because I actually need to see the thing because of a looming deadline and can’t leave it out of work I’m doing just because I’m in the US. I do, however, always buy the material once it becomes available to me, because that’s the ethical thing to do — I earn money from residual payments related to DVD purchases and cable airings of films I’ve been in, and it’s important to me to respect that paycheck for other people; that feeling is, of course, magnified when it’s about properties people I know and like work on (as is the case with things Whoniverse).

But sometimes, I’m just not super-efficient about ordering stuff. I’m waiting for a sale, or I don’t need it for a project right that second, or I want to combine it with a larger order, or whatever. Yesterday, however, the big box came (and there is a surfeit of DVDs in my life right now — Kali bought me The Duchess; SAG just sent me The Social Network and The King’s Speech for awards voting) full of stuff I need to get to much sooner rather than later.

What surprised me was my emotional reaction (beyond I have too much work to do!) to the stuff. Look, to cut to the chase, pulling out those Torchwood DVDs made me really sad for a few moments. Ayup, I’m one of those people. Or maybe not. It depends on which people you are (if you care at all), I think.

Look, I liked Children of Earth (CoE) (and the comment thread here is not for discussing why you did or didn’t like it; if I know you, I already know; if I don’t know you, I know the 20 arguments I’m most likely to hear — do feel free to mention how you felt if you’re posting about how you feel about how you feel about CoE, but let’s not rehash its merits or lack there of today, okay?). A lot. There were places I felt it was flawed; there were narratives I had hoped for or anticipated differently; there were choices I wouldn’t have made, but at the end of the day I liked it. It was satisfying for me (and Day 2 had truly exquisite pacing).

It also knocked me over. It was exhausting — the show itself, but also the hype, the fandom, the five-day grind of it all while being a fan and a fantasist and a critic. It was an experience in real-time that was made for the way in which I try to encounter the world, and which, having had the opportunity to so encounter the world, served as this amazing cautionary tale: liminality can be a real pain in the ass.

Seriously, how do you do criticism when you’re crying? How do you interact with your partner when you are grieving for the loss of phantoms? How do you participate in fandom when you know too much about the nature of production processes to feel comfortable with some of its arguments?

I’ll tell you, over a year later, I still have absolutely no damn idea. What I do know is that the whole CoE experience (It was like a fun park ride! Just… not always very fun.) led me down some really interesting research avenues (that’ll actually be available soon, I just need to make some tweaks and then it’ll be up on Friends of the Text), took me to the UK, was partially responsible for my most recent tattoo (which says Be grand and was acquired 4 hours before I boarded a flight at Heathrow back to New York), and has continued to open up some really exciting professional possibilities for me.

On the other hand, it also led to strained friendships, awkward con moments (John Fay, you’re a class act), a weird ambivalence about cosplay (um, for those who love the coat if not me, I’m not actually sure it’ll be coming to Gally this year), and a probably over-developed concern regarding fandom’s supposed displeasure with my existence. Yay. Or, you know, not. But the CoE experience sticks in my mind perhaps most for its weird You Are Not Alone (Doctor Who joke there, for the uninitiated) quality.

My whole childhood I was told I was wrong, and weird, and probably mentally ill for allowing books to mean so much to me. My father, jokingly, but with what felt like real disapproval to me, said something about my needing an exorcism because of my fondness for The Vampire Lestat. So when people kept saying in the first couple of days after CoE, “I had to keep going into the bathroom at work to cry,” I felt so glad for the tangibility of narrative that was being demonstrated through that grief. Stories suddenly weren’t just one of my vices or a secret society of inappropriate desire amongst my other lonely friends; they were real and shaping us as much as we were shaping them.

Mostly, CoE is a thing that happened long ago and far away now. We were all different people then. I’m busy being, well, busy, and I’m also really excited for the next Torchwood series coming from the Starz/BBC collaboration. But I do miss our silly, cracky show that was sometimes brilliant; I do miss us all tuning it at the same time; and I do miss the possibility I felt in Torchwood back when I wrote a silly letter to The New York Times.

It’s just television. Except when it’s not. Putting those boxes on the shelf made the whole messy, sordid, strange, not always okay for anyone, journey seem small and nearly imagined. It wasn’t, of course, and it’ll all unfurl for me again when I have to watch all three seasons over two days really soon (albeit with a totally different focus that’s on how Whoniverse stories portray and use media and marketing in their narrative constructions).

That’s the wacky thing about the DVDs. By existing in DVD format, a story is strongly designated as a part of the past. So is the story about the story (i.e., release and immediate reception). Yet, DVDs are also a preservation not just of an eternal present, but of the moment before. By being a story you already know, DVDs are also an odd innocence and a temporal distortion. They tell me what I keep telling everyone else: all times are now.

Yummy yummy trash day goodies

Later year over 3,900 projects were successfully funded by Kickstarter to the tune of more than $27,000,000. Dogboy & Justine was just one tiny piece of this. I personally also support a lot of crowd-funded projects both through Kickstarter and through other sources. As part of today’s trash day, I’ve got a few to share with you.

Hate doing dishes after parties? Hate what disposable cups do to the environment? Dreaming about beng able to serve cocktails in vegan, gluten-free, flavoured, edible cups? Jelloware wants to make all your dreams come true, even if they are going to have to change the name.

I love the past as it never quite was. I also love photography. Which is why I’m supporting The Fifties: A Tale in Black & White which seeks to create photos that borrow from iconic 1950s imagery while speaking to African and African-American history and culture.

Another photographic project I’ve pledged to is Dirt Floors & Stone Walls, a photojournalism project about India’s public schools. India has a large presence in the life of me and mine and this artist’s work really jumped out at me.

Finally for today’s crowd funding items, Kendarra Publications is raising funds to publish its first novel. I haven’t read the book, and I haven’t actually met Tessa, the press founder. But I do know her from LJ, and I find her to have an excellent critical eye for writing and the absolutely fortitude to run a small business in a challenging space.

Yesterday’s report on Frosty, the pit-bull found dead in the trash, was originally going to be part of today’s links, but I wound up writing about him when the story of the rescued pitbull came to light. I can now report that the rescued dog as found a forever home.

Rats are smart, clean creatures who make great pets. But they also live in New York City’s subways and they are afraid of nothing. Why not to doze off on the subway, part 542,356: Rats. The truth is, I find this rat oddly charming, and I keep watching the video in rotation with the Craig Ferguson Doctor Who show opener routine when I feel down. Intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism! And, even if you hate Doctor Who or don’t know what it is, the Ferguson thing is a freakishly accurate and hiliarious summary of the program

On the acafen front, I’ll be working on a possible submission for Transmedia Sherlock over the weekend. It’s about queer theory and Sherlock Holmes’ reception both by other characters within the narrative and by the audience. If anyone happens to have any good bibliography items related to queer theory, textual analysis and asexuality they want to share, it would help me out for a small section of the paper.

Buffy, Angel, and a whole bucketload of spoilers

At least a year after we started, Patty and I finally finished watching Buffy and Angel. For her, it was a rewatch; for me it was a first time thing brought on both by the scholarly work I’ve been doing on mourning for fictional characters and a desire to understand more about the stuff she loves.

What a ride. As she predicted embarking on this thing, I’m more of an Angel person (even if I really hate the season of demon pregnancy incest whining) and she’s more of a Buffy person. It’s easy to say that’s about me liking the darkness of Angel or her being a teen girl when she first saw Buffy, and those things aren’t untrue, but on my side of the aisle it also has something to do with a sense of intimidation I feel in the face of the women — good looking, feminine and more popular than they think they are — of Buffy, which is something I write a bit about in the forthcoming Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them. Aside from being glad to be include because, Hey, writing about stuff! for money! Yay!, it means a lot to me to have my perspective included there both as a queer woman and a genderqueer person.

Early on in our watch, the Internet warned me: You’re going to love Wesley. You’re going to identify with Wesley. And it’s going to break your heart. I entered the shows with my teeth grit for that reason alone. I didn’t necessarily want the burden of anyone else’s stories right then; the journeys I’d been on as a fan and at least tangentally-related pro with Harry Potter and Torchwood had been exhausting and personal enough. There are only so many broken boys with strange codes of personal honor this heart can house.

Luckily, Buffy-era Wesley turned out to be a buffoon, and I was more worried that I was Spike and his obsession with the word effulgent (which you have to admit is great fun to say). Last night I cried when Spike got the reception he always deserved if not in talent, then in desire and ambition, for his poetry. And when Wesley just did the work — not because he maybe had nothing left to live for, but because the work is what he knows how to do well and with passion better than anything (he’s not a man with hobbies) — I just nodded.

Yup, that’s right, I don’t believe Wesley went into Angel’s grand plan at the end because he had nothing to live for. And it’s not just that he sort of liked Illyria in her own right (actually, can we talk about the her for a minute? Ilyria is describes itself as “godking of the universe” and inhabits a female body. It was, for me, daring and compelling stuff about gender, that I wish the show had had time and inclination to go farther with; Ilyria isn’t female. It’s not male. And it’s not sexless.); it’s that when Angel asks everyone if they are in on his suicidal mission the camera lingers on Wesley and his face seems to say I can survive this; I’ve survived so much else. It’s remarkable to me. Where I expected the smile of someone ready to die in the way that we so often see in these hero narratives, there was the smile of someone who was somehow, in spite of everything, ready to live. And then he volunteers anyway.

It was an absolute punch in my gut.

The last episode of Angel is sort of a mess because the season had to be wrapped up so quickly. It’s not, strictly speaking, emotionally satisfying, but it has a glorious symmetry. In the last shot and line we are told that this whole grand story — of heroes and watchers and vampires and desperation and of small people trying to do great things in an uncaring-if-you’re-lucky universe — is about to start all over again. As it always does and always will.

I won’t tell you the last lines of my piece for Whedonistas, but I will tell you that I am, having finally seen the end of Angel, remarkably satisfied and a just little bit startled by my essay’s conclusion. I managed to nail the thing I hadn’t seen yet; time is, it seems, always out of order.

And Wesley? I didn’t cry for him. But I sure felt like his brother there for a while.