luthien13, posts by tag: rant - LiveJournal

The thing is, plonking a homosexually-involved Sam and Dean Winchester down in the middle of the greenwood makes perfect thematic sense. Behold my theories on the subject in the essay I shall call

Justifying a Silly Idea
or
I Meta Me
or
An Expensive Education Wasted

There's a established association with the realms of the natural world and illicit love in literature. People go skipping off into the woods, escaping society, shag like animals, then put on their underthings and return to be ruled by culture. This is obviously not true in every secret love story, but the theme repeats:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream


• Snow Falling on Cedars


• Tolkien's story of Beren and Lúthien (sorry)


• Lady Chatterley's Lover


• "The Illusionist", and, obviously


• Maid Marion and Robin Hood in Sherwood.

In short: there's a persistent image of people sneaking out to a conveniently placed woodcutter's shack and shacking up.

The wilderness in its function as an escape and chance to be "natural" (for better or for worse) is most often claimed by men. Examples include:

• Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass


• Gore Vidal's The City & the Pillar


• Nial Kent's Divided Path


• Barry's Peter Pan (Wendy is never really the Lost Boys' mother)


• William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, and


• E.M. Forster's Maurice

A particularly good essay has been written on the subject of the latter, which is a classic in early gay literature, and I'll steal offer what I believe to be The Point here:

.... E.M. Forster's Maurice (1913/1971) is a homosexual love story. It is also about the discovery of homosexuality and the search for the Ideal Friend. Once the discovery is made, accepted, and ratified, and the friend is finally found, Maurice and Alec enter into their Arcadia. Forster calls this "the greenwood". Maurice sought the greenwood because "he was an outlaw in disguise". Perhaps, he mused - this after the certain discovery of his homosexuality - "among those who took to this greenwood in old times there had been two men like himself - two. At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world" (p.137). Maurice and Alec ... do indeed escape to the greenwood at the end of the book, and Forster tells us that they went there to seek "a cave in which to curl up . . . a deserted valley for those who wish neither to reform nor corrupt society, but to be left alone" (p.254).

Bringing this back to my stupid story:

Supernatural
In the Wincest!AU of fandom, I see the Winchester boys as inhabiting a modern "greenwood". They do inhabit an American wilderness: living in motels (if not in the Metallicar), getting their money by hook and by crook, and living on the fringe, and unable to be themselves in mainstream society. That we the slash-fans should see a potential to push the boys into bed together may not be due only to the usual dementia of slashers, but to how the show has already placed the two characters beyond the pale. We could get the impression of lasting relationships with women from assorted characters, but all their meaningful relationships are with guys. Living as they do in microculture that is largely homosocial and far from anything society would deem to be "normal", it doesn't take much for us send Sam and Dean further into the wilderness.

Robin of Sherwood
The characters in this show live outside the law of the land, in a forest, under the aegis of a pagan god. Before I get into this: first, let me say, as a neo-pagan with an eye for history, let me say that I doubt Anglo-Saxon paganism was "ok" with homosexuality, if the Old Norse stance on sodomy is to be any guide.
But paganism in popular culture is more usually associated with sexual "deviance", and given the antics that RoS gets up to, I think it's safe to let historical fact take the backseat.
We have to imagine that, in an England where the peasants are still celebrating "The Blessing" with dancing in the woods, venerating a horned god of the forests (a shout out to Cernunnos and Pan, here), and obviously wenching (did you see how many ladies Nasir got?), homosexual relations aren't too much of a stretch.
As for the Normans... well, if you saw the episode "The Sheriff of Nottingham", you'll know that I really don't need to say anything.

The End

Here I am, doing my research on Vikings - a blissfully happy nerd. I want to fact check about the Rígsþula, which is the story of the origin of the different classes of Viking society:
- thralls ("slaves", whence "enthralled")
- karls (Eng. "churls", but really "yeomen")
- jarls (Eng. "earls")
There are physical descriptions for each of these types, and they generally match up with what you'd expect. The thralls are dark-skinned (tanned, duh), the jarls are pale-skinned (no field labour, duh). The thralls are brunettes, the jarls are blondes, probably by the same reason that Christina Aguilera dyes her hair.
But what the whackjobs really love is that thralls are described as being dark-haired and dark-skinned and suchlike. Seriously. Check it out, this one guy even highlighted the bits he thought were racial.

And the fact that the Scandinavians were usually getting their slaves from the Irish (who were more than happy to enslave each other and then sell each other off) or the Slavs (way to get stuck with a crappy name, guys) completely escapes them. Also the fact that, in that period, people were going about and merrily enslaving their neighbours all the damn time, has evaded their clever brains.

I HATE THEM I HATE THEM I HATE THEM.
Keep your filthy racist paws off of my history, you swine-swyving bastards. DO YOU HEAR ME?!?

Oh, and do I need to even mention that the same assholes are in a tizzy about Obama for obvious reasons?
*smashes furniture*

TV does not rot your brain. Or, rather, it doesn't rot your brain any more than anything else does.
I can understand arguments that children shouldn't watch too much TV (and especially that they shouldn't play too many video games), because if they don't read some books, they'll be idiots, but TV is not, in itself, a moron-maker. Stupid shows ("I Love New York", for example) are stupid, but the thing is that people have always watched stupid drama. Think about the rude plays that the peasants and plebeians of antiquity watched - were they any more filled with quality than "A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila"? Not really. I mean, "Tila Tequila" had a lot of hot tub scenes, and common theatre had a lot of gigantic fake penises (Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" y/n?). The enlightened looked down on the latter and still look down on the former.
Furthermore, bibliophile though I be, there is something intrinsically more engaging about a performance with real people than a story stuck trapped in black letters. There's more of a human element, and it engages a bit more of the right brain, I suspect. TV shows serve as great cultural indoctrinators, for a start, which we don't really have in a basic old-storyteller-by-the-fire format, which would've been how we learn what our culture demands of its heroes and how it determines what makes a villain. Even musical theatre (which I have to admit I tend to loathe) is a sort of descendant of the ballad song-stories!
What makes a good TV show better than a stupid play? Plays are still, for the most part, able to don a semblance of artistic integrity which TV shows just about never do. But I'd put forth that "Robin of Sherwood" or "Rome" are more worthy than some of the heinous productions I've seen in my time on stage ("Cats", anyone?).
Even the damn History Channel, with its particularly wonderful programs about "mysteries" that manage to keep you in front of the screen for a half-hour of interesting graphics, creepy narrators, inexpert experts, and dramatic fanfares, has a purpose. People have always had their myths, haven't they? And what the hell is more fluffy myth than "Mega Disasters: Hawaii Apocalypse", or "Decoding The Past: Prophecies of Israel"?!? These are real shows on the History Channel, by the way, and I'm particularly intrigued by the latter, which promises to reveal secret prophecies from the Tanakh "about the fate of the Jewish people and the State of Israel." I bet they have those bits where they show the same shot of the same mysteriously cloaked historical people riding dramatically into the sunset 50 times during one half-hour programme! Yay!
Is it garbage? Without a doubt. But it's the same kind of cultural garbage as Prester John, folks, or the stuff that John Dee believed in. Is Scarface all that different from the story of Sigfried, Sigurd, or other figures from the Saga of the Volsungs? No, not really.
It's all the same thing in the end, and the sooner people stop whinging about TV being a bad influence the better. At least we're not all reading trashy novels the whole time, right?

The Saudi king has pardoned a female rape victim sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with a man raped in the same attack, reports say.

The US had called the punishment "astonishing", although it refused to condemn the Saudi justice system.


I really want to ask why we still deal with these people, but unfortunately I already know the answer.
It occurs to me that the whole "from sea to shining sea" bit of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" (sung to the tune of "God Save the Queen/King", for those of you who didn't get to sing patriotic songs in American elementary school) is rather specific. We get brotherhood and goodness etc within the boundaries of the two seas on either side. Monroe Doctrine be damned, we have the Bush Doctrine now. And as sole superpower, we can intervene when we choose, and just as righteously look the other way when we choose.

I love this country, seriously I do. I've travelled enough to know I am more American than anything else, and for all our craziness, it's my craziness. Like, being a Seattleite, I know that Starbucks is evil corporate coffee, but it's my evil corporate coffee, so don't mess with it.
But what happened to us? I mean, I kind of want to point at Hamiltonian democracy or something, but God help me, I just don't know what happened.

At least we're not fucked-up all around. I mean, France has done some very cruel things, while we still let people wear their hijab and whatnot. But America was bound to come down on the side of religion in the first place. I mean, "separation of church and state" is just a phrase - you can't actually separate people from their religion, and you really can't separate people from our Judeo-Christian cultural inheritance. We're stuck with religion, for better (Salvation Army) or for worse (Televangelists).
I suppose the religion of my birth can't be easily hijacked one way or another in quite the same way (Catholocism FTW? Am I even allowed to write that?), but I look at my organised church of choice, the Episcopalian once, and I feel proud. Admittedly, Episcopalians are Catholics without the Papacy, but that gives the Episcopal Church the freedom to do those things the liberal elements in the Catholic Church aspire to, but cannot achieve.

On the other side of the equation, something about a lot of newer Protestant faiths disquiet me. The Book of Mormon, for example, reads like poorly-researched Bible fanfiction. I mean, my unorganised religion of choice is generic neo-paganism, which should tell you something about my personal penchant for images and ceremonies. Protestantism, as I have experienced it, tends to be more based on the Bible, which creates problems. The Bible says contradictory or just plain opaque things all the time. I mean, you can cobble things together and decide that you have a coherent message, but it just doesn't hold up under close scrutiny.
Look at the Nativity story, for example. The earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark (though still not written by Mark, obviously, as it came a century or so after Jesus' death) doesn't say a damn thing about Jesus' birth. Then Matthew, who writes from a very Jewish perspective, comes up with a whole lovely story with Joseph receiving a dream that Mary's going to have a kid. And then there are the magi/wise men, because if Jesus is going to be the Messiah, then the prophecies have to be fulfilled, and that's a part of the prophecies.
So. Wise men.
Then Luke's all "no, it was Mary who had the vision". Moreover, forget that Jewish messianic prophecy thing: it was shepherds. That's right, shepherds. Because Jesus was a man of the people. Shepherds! The common man! Right there, at the birth of Jesus! Amazing, isn't it?
And don't get me started on the gospel of John. Whoever wrote that had some serious anti-Semitism going on. He/she doesn't go in for the story so much as for the spiritual talk, anyway.

WTF, man?

A girl on my floor just got engaged!

She's a nice girl. I like her. A lot.
BUT WTF?

We're eighteen!! Well, actually she was born five days after me! We are too young and stupid! No way! No!


At least.
I don't think so.


But yes, in case you were wondering, my Torchwood mood theme perfectly matches my actual mood. Yes, I feel like Ianto looking into a fridge full of bits of dead people.