A Certain Slant of Light

In the afterward to Max in the Land of Lies, Adam Gidwitz mentioned Melita Maschmann’s Account Rendered: A Dossier of My Former Self as one of the most important sources for the book, and also a book that he would urge everyone to read. Of course I had to try it, especially given that Gidwitz’s Melita Maschmann is one of the most likable characters in Max in the Land of Lies, for all that she is a true believer Nazi who, moreover, gets only very limited pagetime.

Now I realize some people may object to the idea of a likeable Nazi true believer, but I believe in order to understand evil one of the things we have to let go of is the belief that there’s any clear relationship between likability and goodness. If you will excuse a digression into quadrant theory, likability and goodness are two separate axes, and most of us are happiest with the “likable and good” quadrant and the “unlikable and bad” quadrant. Neither of these create cognitive dissonance. We want the people whom we like to be good and the people we hate to be bad.

But “unlikable and good” and “likable and bad” can both be a torment. You know that you should like so-and-so, because they’re so useful and helpful and have all the right opinions, but really you would climb out a window rather than spend an hour alone with them because they just grate on you. Or, you like so-and-so a lot, because they’re so funny and charming, and when other people say they’ve done bad things it’s probably lies, or jealousy, or a failure to understand the complexity of their character, or… oh God what if they are bad. You like them so much and they’re bad?? What does that say about you??? NO the accusations of badness are LIES.

(Or else, you insist that you never really liked them THAT much, like my friend with the Harry Potter tattoo who insists she was never THAT into Harry Potter.)

So: Melita Maschmann, likable Nazi true believer, who very slowly after the war began to look back on her former self and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?” This book, written in the form of a letter to her former best friend, a Jewish girl who had to flee Germany, is Maschmann’s attempt to figure out what, in fact, she was thinking.

The idea of the book as a letter is sometimes slightly alarming (can you imagine handing someone a book-length manuscript and saying “This is why I was a world-historically bad friend”?), but as a literary device it’s useful, because it gives Maschmann an imaginary interlocutor to pull her up short whenever she reaches a particularly “But didn’t this make you rethink your choices?” moment. Kristallnacht? The starving Poles when you were first posted to Poland? The time the local German army didn’t have enough troops to evict the Poles from their village to make way for German settlers, so you had to help? Maybe the time that you drove a truck around stealing furniture from the local Poles to give it to a German family that had settled in one of these newly emptied villages?

This last in particular was not merely wrong but also illegal even at the time, but rather oddly it’s also the only one that Maschmann didn’t have a single qualm about when she did it. The rest of these events did give her pause, but at the end of the day there’s a vast gulf between being taken aback and actually rethinking the ideology that has shaped your entire life.

Maschmann turned to National Socialism because she was an idealist who loved the idea of the National Community that cuts across classes and binds everyone together and fixes the poverty and shame that have crippled her country since the Great War. It was a way of rebelling against her parents that nonetheless embraced many of their beliefs: not only the sense that democracy had failed, but also the belief that violent competition among countries is inevitable, so although you might flinch from things you saw while invading Poland, if you didn’t invade Poland then Poland would assuredly invade you.

By this point you, my imaginary interlocutor, may well be asking, “But what part of this is likable, you monster?” Well, part of it is the fact that Maschmann had the strength of character to look back afterward and try to make sense of what she had done. This is something that most human beings seem to find almost impossible even when there aren’t war crimes involved.

Her account is clear-eyed, both in the sense of sheer observation - there’s tons of interesting detail here about life on the ground during the invasion of Poland, for instance - and in the sense that she’s trying to look at these events squarely, to explain without justifying, to say “this is what we were thinking” and hope that this might help turn other people aside if they find themselves straying into a similar path.

But even in Maschmann’s younger self, there are many appealing qualities. She was an indefatigable worker with a yearning to help people, an idealist who latched onto absolutely the wrong ideal. If she had latched onto a different ideal –

Well, the twentieth century was not short on ideals that led to mass destruction, so if Maschmann chose a different ideal, she might have been just as destructive in a different direction. Why do I find something so appealing about idealists, when ideology is used to create and justify so much suffering?

Recently sholio review Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and as I have long vaguely followed Newport’s career, and also am a choir who loves to be preached to about the problems of productivity culture, I picked it up.

Newport lays out a seeming contradiction I’ve vaguely noticed before but never formulated: the people who find productivity culture most enraging are often, in fact, very productive people, who yearn to achieve great things. But the contradiction is purely a matter of semantics: “productivity culture” enrages such people precisely because it often leads to a kind of distracted busy-ness that makes it hard to actually dig in and accomplish something meaningful.

The problem, Newport explains, is that current productivity culture privileges steady work, and moreover steady work that is pretty close to the outward edge of a worker’s capacity, whereas innovative artistic or academic work by its nature requires more slack. There are periods where you’ll work sixty hours a week (and be happy to do so! The ideas are flowing! Work is the thing you most want to do in the world!) but also periods where you’ll outwardly be doing nothing.

He illustrates the point with stories about artists and scientists from the past: Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, New Yorker feature writer John McPhee. I love reading about people creating things, whether it be a novel or the theory of gravity, so very much enjoyed these interludes.

But my main takeaway from this book is that, although I enjoyed it, it’s not really the book I need right now. My problem in this moment is not “how to step away from meaningless busy-ness toward true accomplishment” but “how do I start writing fiction again?” (Obviously I’m still banging away at book reviews and letters to penpals etc. etc.)

The problem is twofold. One, I haven’t made time to write; and two, I don’t currently have a story I feel an urgent need to tell. I have written some short stories this year (eight currently in the caddy!), and when I’m excited about a story, suddenly it becomes easy to make time to write. But I think that if I were writing more regularly, I’d have more story ideas, perhaps even more long-form story ideas, which is really where my heart lies.

(Actually, the problem is not ideas per se, but ideas I’m so invested in that I’ll keep working through the frustrations inherent in writing a novel. You can scamper through a short story on inspiration alone, but a novel always has bits where you yell “This is the worst story ever written and I am the worst writer ever born!”)

However, if you make time to write and then sit down with nothing you want to write, you may just end up staring out the window at the Canada geese. There’s a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.

But the first step to fixing any problem is to define the problem, so at least I’ve done that?

Here’s the premise of Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace: although many human beings believe that wild animals are driven largely by instinct, in fact many animals, particularly social animals, have to learn almost everything they will need to know to survive, just as humans do. Moreover, what an animal learns is dependent not only on its species, but the culture of its particular family or clan: some chimpanzee groups crack nuts with rocks and some don’t, some orcas hunt only mammals and others hunt only fish, and so forth and so on.

Safina also notes that among social animals, a sense of “us” and “them” is basically universal. What isn’t universal is conflict based on this categorization: “us” and “them” doesn’t have to lead to “us versus them.” Although humans, wolves, and chimpanzees spend a lot of time fighting other creatures of their own kind over things like territorial rights, elephants and orcas and bonobos just avoid the groups that they dislike. Those Orcas who eat That Thing We Don’t Eat are weirdos and we don’t talk to them, but when we meet by accident, we don’t fight about it; we just go in opposite directions.

I feel like a lot of human visions of conflict resolution involve widening the frame of who we see as “us,” ideally until it includes all of humanity and maybe some of the more intelligent animals too (easier to see an orca as “us” than Donald Trump, tbh)... but given that every social animal on earth has a concept of us vs. them, maybe this is simply too big an ask. Like, literally, maybe most people are not capable of sustaining this conception outside of moments of ecstatic spiritual experience.

And also, maybe most of us don’t want to, deep down inside. I haven’t seen this framing often recently, but in my early LJ days I remember a good deal of discussion about how the only people you were “allowed to hate” are Nazis and pedophiles. Okay, first of all, it’s amazing how wide those words can stretch when there’s someone you just really really really want to be allowed to hate, like Those Shippers who ship the Wrong Ship - but also, what a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances.

In any case, the human and orca situations aren’t truly analogous. All the orcas have apparently agreed to Orca Truce, no matter how repulsive the salmon-eating orcas may find those weirdo orcas who peel seals with their teeth. (Seals! Those Other Orcas eat cute little seals, who are mammals like us! Don’t talk to those seal-eating orcas, children. Some of these orca groups who never fight each other have also refused to interbreed for literally tens of thousands of years.) Humans have not achieved Human Truce. And maybe “They are Them and THAT’S FINE, we don’t need to fight about it” is even harder for the average human to cope with than “all humans are Us, really”?

***

On a lighter note, one of my ongoing projects has been a matriarchal fantasy world. It was Carl Safina’s earlier book Beyond Words, actually, that suggested to me that rather than remake the wheel, I could just model this society off one of the female-dominated animals societies, orcas or elephants or bonobos… Okay, maybe not bonobos. That would be so many sex scenes.

All of these species, as noted in the above paragraphs, don’t have wars. And I’ve been contemplating, one, is this even a human society if they don’t have wars - are you at some point simply elephantomorphizing your human-shaped characters, if you will?

Which is not perhaps a bad thing! But, two, am I interested in writing it if no one is marching off to war? At Beth & Becca’s wedding, I was chatting with someone about my books, and she teased me that Briarley is a fairytale retelling set in World War II, and A Garter as a Lesser Gift is an Arthurian retelling set in World War II, hmmm, suspicious, and I insisted that no, I write lots of things that aren’t World War II!

At which point blotthis piped up cheerfully, “Yeah, Aster has books about other wars too!”

BUSTED. I mean, I do write non-war books! I have multiple books in which there are no wars at all! (It occurs to me that the no-war books all have female main characters.) But yes. I do go back and back and back to war.

As I reported yesterday, I have AT LONG LAST finished Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, which I have been reading since, God help me, August.

In the past I've sort of informally sorted war books along an axis, based on their attitude from war, which axis runs from BRUTAL to GLORIOUS. During Fire from Heaven, it occurred to me, perhaps belatedly, that these are properly two separate axes: brutal to not-brutal and glorious to not-glorious. These axes should be overlaid to form four quadrants of war stories.

So, on the glorious/not-brutal quadrant, you have classic boy's own war adventures. On brutal/not-glorious, you've got things like All Quiet on the Western Front. And then you've got Fire from Heaven, which is in the "war is brutal AND glorious" quadrant."

In a sense this is unavoidable: it's a book about Alexander the Great, who is Great because he conquered a swathe of the known world, and this is not a book that is trying to complicate your understanding of whether that is truly Great. This is a book about how Alexander is the bee's knees, and although war is brutal (I wouldn't say that Renault lingers unduly on the brutality, but there is a certain "this is not a boy's own story" emphasis on its presence) this does not, somehow, mean it is not glorious. In fact, brutality and glory may be inseparable.

For many modern readers, and by "many modern readers" I of course mean myself, this is an alien view. Frankly, I probably found it as challenging as many of her early readers may have found her positive depiction of Alexander and Hephaistion's love affair. (This is adorable and does not take up a lot of page time.) I was not, unfortunately, in the mood to be challenged, particularly not on this particular topic, because I read so many war books over the past year that I am honestly just tired of war right now, so whenever Alexander marched to the cusp of another brutal yet glorious battle I screeched to a halt, hence the fact that it took me four months to read the darn book.

Possibly I'm just not the right audience for historical fiction about world conquerors. I should keep this in mind if I ever run across a novel about Napoleon.

***

ALSO, does Mary Renault have an Oedipus complex kink, or DOES she have an Oedipus complex kink? It had not occurred to me that this could be a thing, but I've read four of her novels now, and the Oedipal thing is ALL over three of them, and the fourth one has female main characters, so there's really no place to shove in an Oedipal complex, but let's be real, The Friendly Young Ladies had MORE than enough going on already.

1. In The Charioteer, baby!Laurie asks his mother to marry him. They grow up to have an arrestingly dysfunctional relationship during which she's more or less constantly telling him to stop having feelings about things like "you put my beloved dog down because he was inconvenient." (At one point Laurie, apparently with no sense of irony, tells Ralph "my mother's pretty well-balanced." Laurie. Laurie. IS SHE, Laurie?)

2. In The Last of the Wine, Alexias's father accuses him of sleeping with his hot young stepmother and Alexias runs away into the hills SO far and SO fast that he almost DIES and then collapses, sobbing, because although the accusation is not literally true it is true in his HEART. And then he gets his first girlfriend, who is literally old enough to be his mother.

3. In Fire from Heaven, baby!Alexander (like Laurie!) asks his mother to marry him, AND ALSO spends most of the book seesawing about whether or not he wants to kill his father, before finally deciding that his father is NOT his father so patricide is not technically patricide and is, therefore, okay, probably. But then his father dies of other causes anyway.

In a way it is futile to ask why an author kinks on certain things, but also WHY. WHY, MARY.

I scream this to the heavens as if it is going to in any way hinder me from reading more Renault books. It definitely will not. I will continue reading them and then shrieking like an incoherent dolphin.

...But probably these further Renault readings will take place after a break of some months because honestly I am SO tired of war books right now. I've read so many. I just want to read books about books and savor the quiet life among people who are not leading any conquering armies at all.

I got halfway through Catching Fire and WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT, I had to stop for a breather because ( spoilers )

Ahem. On a different note, I feel the strange urge to give President Snow How to Be a Better Dictator tips, because he clearly needs some help in this department.

And by “better” I definitely mean “capable of holding onto power indefinitely despite being evil,” not “actually being kind of a good ruler” tips. This poor man, he walks into Katniss’s house and is all “let’s speak honestly with each other,” and then he actually does it like a rank amateur. All the best dictators lie like rugs, President Snow. Get with the program.

Anyway, in the course of speaking honestly, President Snow strongly implies an ultimatum to Katniss, and later on he lets her know that she’s failed. President Snow! No! You never tell your political enemies that they have failed and are powerless putty in your hands until they’re actually walking down the hall to the firing squad! Until then, keep dangling shreds of false hope in front of them and make them jump through hoops like porpoises. Surely that’s amusing in a tedious sort of way.

At all times, keep this maxim in front of you: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” You want to minimize your subjects’ freedom, you’ve got to make sure they’ve always got something to lose. The revolutions come when the bread lines get too long, President Snow.

And this is really his problem: he’s all iron fist and no velvet glove, when that soft fuzz of lies is what makes dictatorships function. You want to prevent revolution? Then you need buy-in. You need your subjects to believe the system offers them something.

Why present the Hunger Games as what they actually are - a terrifying reminder of the wealth and power of the Capitol and a punishment for recalcitrant districts - when they could be rebranded as a glorious opportunity for district bonding and social advancement? Make people root for their own district tributes! Set up tribute training centers in each district! Smile as parents fight each other for the chance to train their children to die gory gladiatorial deaths, because a win in the arena is their best and maybe only chance for social advancement.

(I get why Collins wanted the drama of selection-by-lottery, but as long as volunteers are allowed, I really think that every district no matter how poor would be training tributes. Sure, the poor districts’ tributes are going to be kind of like the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings, but they’re still going to give it their best shot.)

And all that intra-district bonding will have the glorious side effect of making all the districts loathe each other. Encourage that. To you all the districts may be indistinguishable conquered colonies, but don’t let them realize that. Play up their differences. Get them to direct their hate at each other. Divide and conquer, President Stone. Divide and conquer.

I’ve been dipping into Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea over the last few days, reading it slowly and leaving a bristling porcupine path of bookmarks through the book: quotes that I want to remember. I think it’s a good book, and an important book, although perhaps not a book that I needed at this very moment: it’s about finding solitude in a life that has grown too hectic, even if hectic with much-beloved things - “For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures - an excess of shells, where one or two would be sufficient.”

The shells are a metaphor for stages in life, relationships in life; really any part of life that you can imagine becomes embodied in shells. Lindberg wrote the book while staying in a cabin on the beach, and the rhythm of the waves creeps into her writing.

“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, and relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

If her major theme doesn’t feel applicable to my life right now (I have too much solitude, oceans of solitude), then this sub-theme of ebb and flow and continuity through change and living in the moment probably is: “One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, and intermittency.” Other kinds of security are ultimately illusory.

Or this quote, which I have been chewing over since I read it, because I’m not sure if I believe it - and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t believe it’s true, or if I do, but don’t want to. How true is a friendship that has no durability in the face of adversity?

But, on the other hand, perhaps a friendship doesn’t need to last forever to have been true at one time.

“Duration is not a test of true or false… Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. It relates to the actual moment in time and place… The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”

I almost mended a copy of Olivia today, but at the last minute we decided its condition was too poor for repairing, so into the recycling it went. :( Hopefully another Olivia will show up soon; I really want to read this book.

I did read Elizabeth Schoonmacher's Square Cat, which is about Euly, a square cat in a world of round cats. It's a hard life, being a square cat. She looks silly in stripes. She's invisible in rooms with lots of right angles. She tips over, and - being square - she's just kind of stuck there. At first Euly's friends try to make her feel more round, so she'll feel like she fits in; when that doesn't work, they put on cardboard boxes, and they all experience the square cat life together, at which point Euly realizes that being square has its advantages. At the end, they all flop down together and look at the sky, which is, the book tells us, a view "only a square cat could have."

I guess maybe the round cats would roll away if they tried to lie down and look at the sky. Or something.

There are many things I love about picture books, but one of the things I find irritating about them is that they can be so relentlessly upbeat. Every cloud has a silver lining. When one door closes, a vast panoramic window with a view of the Grand Canyon opens. The ugly duckling will always turn into a swan, and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer will always save the day in the end.

And I like upbeat stories, I do. But in the aggregate, this relentless positivity begins to feel emotionally dishonest. I realize that picture book authors don't want to discourage the three-year-olds of the world, many of whom will in fact outgrow their ugly duckling stages and do just fine, but at the same time, I feel like it would be good if these books would occasionally allow disappointments to actually be disappointing.

Maybe being a square cat is tough, but Euly has managed to acquire two awesome cat friends who want nothing more than to cheer her up. Isn't that happy ending enough without pretending that round cats are incapable of looking up at the sky?

I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier again (they’re showing it at the Union), and in between this and dipping my toe in the waters of Winter Soldier fic I, like everyone else in the universe, have been having many Bucky thoughts.

1. The general assumption in fic seems to be that as soon as Bucky realized he was actually Bucky, he shucked off years of brainwashing and was left mostly with overwhelming guilt, anger issues, and the instincts of a feral cat.

But it would be really interesting if he doesn't shuck it off that quickly - if, for instance, once he starts working for SHIELD (everyone seems to assume he's going to work for SHIELD) he mostly expects it to work like Hydra, just maybe with less elecroshock memory-destroying chairs. "So when am I going back into cryo?" Bucky asked, after he and Steve completed their first mission. "What do you mean I'm not going back into cryo? That seems awfully wasteful."

And Steve died a little inside as he tried to explain that no, SHIELD doesn't put its agents in cryo between missions, and no really Bucky, it's not because we don't value your skill set properly. We do! Really! Even if we never tell you that your work is a gift to humanity.

It's like people raised in really restrictive environments, religious cults or whatever: even if they leave the fold and consciously reject those believes, that doesn't mean they've rooted all those unconscious assumptions about how the world works out of their heads. Or, actually, I think anyone who has decided to make a conscious effort to fight racism or sexism or so forth has probably experienced this: it's easier to change your conscious beliefs than your underlying assumptions.

2. Speaking of "your work is a gift to humanity" - and I love that scene, by the way, because Pierce gives this spiel about how the asset's work is a gift to humanity and shaped the century and is creating freedom for everyone blah blah blah, and Bucky listens and at the end of it he's like... But this isn't even slightly related to my question about the man on the bridge... Because Bucky is brainwashed, not stupid: he's observant enough to notice that Pierce didn't actually answer his question, just gave him a puff piece to distract him.

Anyway. The common assumption seems to be that once Bucky finds out he was brainwashed, he's going to feel super guilty about all those assassinations. But maybe not. Maybe he thinks some of them were unnecessary but some of those assassinations, goddamnit, really were gifts to humanity, and nothing Steve says is going to take that away from him!

After all, if he decides that all the assassinations were just wrong, that means that all his suffering and pain were pointless. It might be less painful to believe that some good came out of it.

I also think this would set up an interesting conflict, where Steve is inclined to see current Bucky as essentially a broken version of the old Bucky, and Bucky gives him a lot of push-back on that because, well, look at all I've accomplished! Fuck you, Steve, just because I'm not the same person you knew doesn't mean I'm nothing but the empty traumatized hull of your best friend. I've been doing things for the last seventy years! Can't say the same for you, glacier boy.

Not that he's totally ungrateful, mind. Just resentful at the same time. The world was a lot simpler when Pierce assured him that his work was a gift to humanity whenever he got confused.

3. Paranoia! I want so much more paranoia, you guys. Paranoia from all sides!

Sure, Bucky saved Steve's life, but then he just up and disappeared and who knows where he's been for the past few days/weeks/months before he turns himself in or Steve finds him or whatever. Going back to his Hydra handlers? Being recaptured, re-brainwashed, and sent to SHIELD as a Hydra spy? "You have to accept that possibility," Agent Coulson told Steve.

"But - !" Steve protested. "After what they did to him - !"

"If you can't," said Agent Coulson, "you're really too emotionally compromised to look after him. Because you have to keep an eye out for signs that he might be in contact with Hydra. We can't have them infiltrating us again."

And Steve is tormented, TORMENTED by the fact that he has to spy on Bucky, but when Bucky finally finds out he is all, "THANK GOD you guys are actually putting some effort into counterintelligence this time around, I don't want to wake up some day and discover that I am working for Hydra again because you fuckers couldn't be bothered to do your due diligence. Not that I would be waking up. The first thing they would do is stick both of us in cryo. TRUST NO ONE. CONSTANT VIGILANCE."

I kind of expect that Bucky would be at least as paranoid as Nick Fury. I'm not sure it counts as paranoid once you've realized that, no really, everyone you knew really was lying to you all the time about everything. With the aid of a memory-erasing chair, to boot.

Given that history, I think talking honestly to a therapist would be near the end of a very long process of healing. Because for a long time, being asked to discuss weaknesses, fears, and painful memories is just going to sound like, "Please hand us all your vulnerable points on a silver platter so we can use them again you."

Especially if the therapist is SHIELD connected. Especially given how Hydra-infested SHIELD was in the first place. Oh sure, you think you've caught all the Hydra agents, but... TRUST NO ONE.

***

I actually have some other thoughts, largely of the "Time to get my Soviet history geek on!" variety (I'm sure that if anyone ever acquainted Stalin with the idea of a brainwashed amnesiac super-assassin, Stalin would have responded by demanding a whole battalion of them, and possibly summoning the already existent one to shoot vodka glasses off Politburo members' heads), but this has become mammothly long so I'll stop.

I’ve just finished reading Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell’s Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, which is an affectionate, insightful, and hilarious lambasting of a genre that both authors love. I think it’s worth reading purely for the funny, although its capsule history of the romance genre (and brief romp through romance subgenres) are interesting for their own sakes, even though I would have enjoyed a more detailed section about subgenres in particular.

However, they briefly hit on a pet peeve of mine. The book is quite worth reading otherwise, but I just had to share.

Specifically, Tan and Wendell argue that the romance genre is inherently revolutionary, which is a move that slash fandom has made me wary of. I think in both cases there’s a kernel of truth to this argument: het romance and slash are both largely genres by women, for women, and there is something revolutionary about any marginalized group making a space where its voice is dominant.

But I think people who buy into this argument often go far beyond this kernel of truth and believe that their genre either is or ought to be revolutionary about everything. On the one hand, I am all in favor of self-improvement projects, and I think there’s a lot of pleasure (leaving aside, for the moment, the social justice benefits) to be gained from, for instance, watching/reading/playing more diverse source materials and striving to connect with a more diverse range of characters.

But on the other hand, the idea that a genre is justified by its inherently revolutionary nature leads to the embarrassing spectacle of fans twisting themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to rationalize that X, Y, or Z seemingly non-revolutionary (and note I say non-revolutionary, not anti-revolutionary) trope or pairing or whatever is actually totally revolutionary. As if that were the only possible excuse for liking something. Because we need excuses to like what we like.

And honestly, I’m sick of arguing about whether such-and-such a thing is revolutionary. It’s such a reductive question. Is Jane Eyre revolutionary because of the primacy it gives to Jane’s voice and her passion and her desires, to the extent that its forthrightness shocked many contemporaries? Is it anti-revolutionary because it channels those things into a marriage to Rochester (or because of its treatment of Rochester’s first wife Bertha)?

Of course the question is unanswerable. The book is both things at once, and a lot of other things as well. Most art is like that. If we could boil it down to one word, what would be the point?

It is a misty, misty morn! I meant to get up and be productive, and indeed I did eventually, but it took a while because I was up until two last night on account of having two pots of tea in the evening.

Not all to myself, mind. My parents brought me a box of Belgian chocolates (did I mention they went to Belgium? They went to Belgium. "You always go the best places when I'm in school," I said wistfully.

"Do you even know anything about Belgium?" asked my dad.

"They have chocolate!"

"Anything else?"

"...more chocolate?")

Anyway, having acquired this box of Belgian chocolates, it was clearly imperative to have my friends over for a Belgian chocolate tea party. Sadly the photos didn't come out very nicely - let's face it, the interior of a chocolate box is only visually interesting when you're trying to decide which one to eat - but it was a lovely party. We discussed whether or not ghosts count as undead. Rick said no, I said yes, provided they're the kind of ghost that can talk to you and still has feelings and such, rather than just a ghost that mechanically repeats the same movements as if they're in a movie.

And, as all loyal Scooby Doo fans know, if you find the second type of ghost, you should probably start looking around for the projector anyway.

You know what would be great for a non-Scooby supernatural investigation show? If the show split half and half between supernatural and non-supernatural causes. It would add an extra layer of interest to the investigation to have to put serious work into deciding if this one was really a ghost, or just a vengeful relative or disaffected teenager with a projector.

***

Also also! fic_corner stories are live!!!!! And I have TWO, OMG, both for Crown Duel, but filling different prompts! I haven't read them yet, because I am reading the dullest book ever for my nineteenth-century US history class - I shouldn't complain too much, this is the first bad book we've read - so I'm going to let myself read the stories when I hit milestones in the book.

I will link those once I've read them. (Also, any other recs I have for the exchange. WANT TO READ EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW.) For now, here are the stories I wrote:

Ivy and Thorns, Ella Enchanted, G. “The language of flowers,” said Manners Mistress, looking over the finishing school garden with a dreamy smile that usually meant she was thinking of the king and queen. “Ah! Is there a language in the world sweeter, more delicate, more suitable for gentle maidens than that of our petaled sisters of the garden?”

At finishing school, Ella and Areida learn about the language of flowers. Hattie, as usual, gets in the way.

I enjoyed writing all of this - Areida's sweetness, Ella's defiance, musings about how Ella's curse works - but I think my very favorite bit was writing Manners Mistress. My friend Emma betaed it for me.

The Persistence of Memory, Code Name Verity, G. “Did you ever read A Little Princess?” Julie asked. “I loved to pretend to be Sara Crewe." Maddie remembers playing pretend with Julie.

Betaed by our most excellent rymenhild, who pinpointed brilliantly why it wasn't quite gelling. I think it does now!