#i think david tennant drew parallel

[cto10121]

R&J Clown Takes Special Edition—The Romeo-Hamlet Connection

It’s so nice to take a break from the usual clownery and get into actually reasoned clownery. But alas, clownery is still clownery, however minor. This post especially got a ridiculous lot of notes:

Sigh.

So this is all predicated on the notion that Romeo’s flaw is rashness and Hamlet’s is indecision, and so all you need to do is switch them out of their respective tragedies and—presto! Crises averted.

Hmm, no.

For one thing, Romeo and Hamlet are much more alike than many think. I was actually going to do a whole post about the similarities between Hamlet and Romeo (similarities actual critics have picked up on!). They are both prone to melancholy and passivity, both prone to spurts of bold/rash action, both highly sensitive and intuitive. But I think it is ultimately their upbringing that makes the bulk of their differences.

Hamlet is a prince and Romeo is the son of a minor lord, and that makes a big difference in how they act and react to their given situations. Romeo may not gaf when it comes to youthful shenanigans and falling in love, but he does refuse to fight Tybalt and be involved in feuding. He also had to warm up considerably into killing Tybalt as vengeance for Mercutio. So yes, while he would romance Ophelia regardless, I don’t think he’d be one to kill Claudius right away; it’s a very huge decision after all.

Hamlet, on the other hand, is reared to consider the bigger picture always. He is a prince, and whatever his feelings towards Ophelia, he can and did cut her off when he suspected she had betrayed him to her father and uncle and is now a spy for him (she had no real choice, of course, but even so…). He is also a university student and thus educated in that scholarly (and thus misogynistic) tradition. So with all that said, I doubt he would pursue Juliet.

But what if they were born into their circumstances and not just body swapped? Let’s say Romeo is a prince and Hamlet is the son of a minor lord in a destructive feud. Honestly, they would probably behave more or less the same. OP is right in that if Hamlet did go for Juliet, he would try to broker a marriage of alliance between the two families rather than relying on the Friar. But all things being equal, I don’t see Romeo behaving all that differently from Hamlet.

[besidesitstoowarm]

"Journey's End" thoughts

doctor you suck shit

okay again i'm gonna blow through the plot stuff bc i don't care it's not the part that matters. the doctor avoids regeneration by channeling the energy into his hand. mickey and jackie are here now! martha goes to germany and the daleks are speaking german lmfao. the daleks have an instrument called the crucible and taught the doctor by dropped the tardis into an incinerator...

bitch you THOUGHT!!! the hand is calling out to donna and she touches it and gets slammed w regen energy and then the hand grows into naked david tennant. tentoo has arrived! a dalek shoots jack but he's fine. we learn tentoo has one heart bc he's half human! his singular heartbeat "rippled back" which is what donna was hearing that drew her to the hand and he says "we were always heading for this" HAVE I NOT BEEN SAYING?? THIS WAS ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN SHE'S BEEN DEAD SINCE THE BEGINNING

martha tries to use the world-exploding key and gets teleported to the dalek ship and they explain they made a "reality bomb" using the aligned planets as a scope. like the planets aligning in hercules to release the titans. davros gets on his bullshit "you take ordinary people and you turn them into weapons" he's not wrong actually. the doctor does very much do that. "always running and never looking back because you dare not, out of shame" again got it in one

donna's powers activate bc she got turned part time lord by the regen energy! regenergy. sure. she's the doctordonna and ten remembers the ood foretold such. always listen to the ood. so now there's three doctors! jack says "i can't tell you what i'm thinking right now" bc he's narsty. dalek caan has betrayed the daleks by letting all this shit happen "i saw what we did, creator, and i said no more". tentoo explodes every dalek. i'm fine with that who cares

k9 is here! everyone teams up to drag the earth back home to its proper place. the tardis is functioning appropriately bc it finally has enough drivers and it's sweet to see everyone get along. rose, jackie, and tentoo get dropped off in their parallel universe bc she needs to babysit him?? "he's me, when we first met" so she gets a project man. i'm glad rose gets her very own tenth doctor to fuck but this is kind of a copout ending for her sorry. that said "how was that sentence going to end" "does it need saying?" and then tentoo DOES finish it and kisskiss. good for her genuinely

everyone else goes back home and donna starts glitching out bc a time lord brain can't live in a human body and it's going to kill her. he takes all her memories, wipes her brain, as she's crying and begging him not to. it's hard to watch, it's very violating, and it's a bullshit copout for her too. i know rtd has said he does not like the way the episode ended but honestly couldn't untangle the knot in a satisfying way and i do get that, there were a LOT of pieces in play. still bullshit to me tho

he drops her at home and warns wilf and sylvia that they can't ever tell her the truth or it'll kill her. he gets wet in the rain pathetically and the episode is over. as i said last time, this story makes no fucking sense but the fanservice really does work for me and everyone is so charming, all the pieces falling into place from the season-long foreshadowing, it really is a great story. not my fave finale, i'm too much of a sucker for s3, but i think it was probably the best possible way to get all these characters involved in a way that felt natural for them and useful for the story

up next i'll do a series retrospective! i'll probably let the specials sit as their own mini-series and do another after the regeneration. farewell for now to donna noble

[lit--bitch]

Charlotte Geater, ‘poems for my FBI agent’ (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t know Charlotte Geater, but as I’ve previously stated I am familiar with Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall from Bad Betty Press — though I don’t particularly know them well).

poems for my fbi agent is a convoluted, multi-faceted investigation into surveillance and our present-day predicament. Who is watching us? Who is watching those who watch us? Every time an advertisement appears boasting a lipstick from a brand we were talking about just yesterday, do we still call this serendipity? Or is it evidence that we’re being observed? And is our relationship with “our agent” a symbiotic one, where we share, even indulge, in each other as voyeurs? Unlike Crispin Best’s Hello, Charlotte Geater’s collection probes more sinister pockets of Internet culture: of spy and spied.  It’s provocative, surreal and deeply disturbing. It’s also encrypted by so many different subtexts and jarring imagery, which makes this a challenging and very personal read, because it entirely depends on you and your experiences. So strap yourselves in.

Whenever I start a new book, I always read the acknowledgements first. I do this because I’m nosy. I like to make sense of the writer, I like to know who they are thanking, where work might have been previously published (particularly if it’s a poetry collection or a photobook). Because beyond the author’s name, the acknowledgements page is the writer’s final note. Afterwards, you’re flung into the book’s meat, and you’re on your own. 

I flicked to the acknowledgements and I had a look at what Charlotte had written. At one point she says: “[I thank] all of my friends, for being supportive when I said, “I’ve started writing some poems inspired by a meme that is already kind of dead.”’ I understood what she was referring to. She’s talking about memes like this: 

It’s interesting to see that we as a generation deal with a lot of our problems in meme-culture (and that is a whole separate conversation from this review). The FBI memes were one such example. They’re designed to nullify and humour our digital anxieties about being spied on. We have developed an acute self-awareness both outside in real time, and on the Internet. We know that we are constantly being watched, whether it’s through cookies or CCTV. Privacy is a luxury. It can be purchased like groceries. We’re not automatically entitled to being left alone. And that brings up questions about authenticity, self-identity, self-integrity. It throws up all kind of worries and fears, as our online presence and real selves chafe against each other. But unlike these memes, poems for my fbi agent doesn’t minimise your worries, it amplifies them. 

I couldn’t always penetrate this collection and hold myself to one specific intepretation; it flummoxed me. I was really confused by the dislocation of imagery, the subtlety of Charlotte’s writing style. It’s exactly how Sam Riviere put it: “a Lynchian rabbit hole”. The series of images, which seemingly bear no relation to each other, is quite jolting. You have to make the connections yourself, you have to look within and draw on your own references to access what certain poems “mean” (I’ll expand on this later). At one point I just sat back in bed and gulped. Because I thought “how the fuck am I going to write a review about poetry I don’t always understand?” And I was panicking because, I thought, “there’s a plethora of ways to understand this work, I don’t have to hold myself to one specific interpretation”, but I was struggling to grasp the imagery and syntax. So I figured talking to my mother about it would be useful because sometimes you need to discuss a book and bounce off one another to engage with it. So really I owe a lot of this review to her and our discussions. 

One of the most disarming things about this collection is its perturbing elusiveness. As my mum said, “I can’t put it into words what she means, but I can feel what she means”. 

A pretty good example of this (and what I mean by jarring imagery) is in ‘my FBI agent is a mathematical problem’:

and not just a philosophical one. if i ask who watches the agent  who watches me, it sounds insincere;  but let’s get down to it in our underwear [...] who does he text when he’s lonely?  who gets to see his underwear, [...]

So far, I’m with Charlotte. I too ask the very same questions. Who is keeping our agent under watch? Y’know, does it become a situation of meta-surveillance where everybody is a threat, even the ones who supposedly work “to prevent threat”, like the agent? Is the agent part of, or rather, included within the same system? Or more worringly, do they sit at the top of the hierarchy, and are therefore untouchable? 

if i type a poem instead of writing it out first it feels closer to god, by which i mean closer to you, watching me and if i am not a problem, are you there? 

The FBI agent and our traditional conceptions of “God” as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, are conflated here. It’s true; the agent has total power and knowledge over everything we do and investigate, even the things we plan to do. The agent can wield time, can document and record. The agent can create business and yet the agent is our business. The agent can defend and attack, break things, read your mind. It’s in the agent’s “god-like” apparition (you can’t put a face to your agent like you can’t with God I guess), and in the agent’s “god-like” power, that we are wholly subservient and are most afeard, because the FBI agent knows all our conversations, thoughts, and internet searches. That access to our personal psychologies makes for an entity like that of God. And it’s all supposedly in the name of our protection, to defend from terrorism or people who might break into houses and axe us out of the blue. The question is: If we’re not posing a threat, or being threatened, where’s the need for the agent? Does the agent evaporate? Do they move only when we move? 

matter changes when it’s hit am i a problem for you yet?  the lake turned to ice improbably fast; and the custard became a rock inside your mouth. 

I mean like, lake? Ice? Custard? This is so random and strange. I sat there scratching my head for ages about this. But I’ve sort of hazarded the best guess I can. And there’s two things. Firstly, this idea about matter changing when it’s hit, liquid states and solid states. So in quantum theory, there is a  suggestion that observation affects reality. So for example, if you wanted to observe electrons and how they move, you have to get them to behave with a proton. And electrons know that they’re being observed when they’re forced to interact with protons, because their wave function changes. It’s horrifically complicated and I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to really unpack it in detail. But basically, what it means is, simply observing something can change the appearance of how it is perceived. It can have an affect on outcomes. And I’m linking a pretty good, simplified article about this here. 

The second interpretation of this really odd image is a little easier to understand, and again relates to this “lake turning to ice impossibly fast-custard to hard rock” metaphor. So ages back, there was this Doctor Who episode (when David Tennant was the Doctor), called ‘Blink’. In that episode, they were these aliens appearing in the form of stone angel statues, called The Weeping Angels. If you get touched by a Weeping Angel, you get zapped back in time and the Angel feeds off all the energy you might have potentially lived in the present-day. They move impossibly fast. Like they can make their way from a garden into the kitchen within a blink. Here’s the snag: they only ever move when they’re not being watched. The minute you look at them, they turn to stone. They can’t even be seen looking at each other, if they are facing one another, they’ll never move again. 

I think about this episode a lot still, and whenever I watch it, it never fails to get my heart racing. But when I read “matter changes when it’s hit”, I was reminded of the clever, foolproof defence mechanism of the Weeping Angels, which renders them the loneliest creatures in the universe. There were parallels between this and the statement implied in the poem. Is it possible then that like the Weeping Angels, the agent’s movements are rendered undetectable when we try to watch them back? When we catch them in the act, say when our phone randomly opens up an app we closed, does the agent freeze? Or is it the reverse? And how lonely that must be. How alone the agent must feel. It was at this point I became more aware of how I was receiving the writing. When I thought about Doctor Who, and made comparisons from the bulk of my own references, I really tapped into the essence of the work, which is written so cleverly. 

Remember how I said earlier that, to understand what Charlotte’s getting at, you have to look within and draw upon your own experiences, in order to access the work? What I meant was, understanding the random collage of images requires understanding your own anxieties, about being watched all the time, reaching into your own pocket of knowledge, and relating all of it back to the work. Like how I drew upon my memory of Doctor Who. And it’s very much like social media, or Wikipedia. You’re constantly having to manage cookies or accept cookies, so you can continue using the programme. Likewise, you’re constantly forced to share more of yourself in order to access a level of understanding in Charlotte’s poetry. So for example, ‘my FBI agent takes me on a date’. This is Page 28. At this point, the gender pronoun of the agent has shifted. The agent is no longer “he”. “He” is now she. 

and decorates her hair with crane flies  prawn cocktail lips / when i said scare me she listened badly  [...]

[...] and I hate anything with a see-through body  plastic wings dancing no,  it’s the legs are wrong in the air like that  it’s the compartments, the exoskeleton  it’s that she doesn’t know how & she pries me open early  & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure at the cracking / she says i will like it 

that she has heard fear / makes us braver people in the end & she eats from within

You can feel the discomfort, the repulsion, in this poem so keenly. Sentences like “& she pries me open early // & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure // at the cracking / she says i will like it”, it’s so menacing. I could vividly picture the clacking of plastic wings, the sensation of sharp teeth, the cracking. It’s just horrible. And when you try to think about what a “date” is, and what that means when it’s with an FBI agent, you get something really odd, intimated by the gender shift of the agent to being “she”... When I read this transition, I saw it as an indication that ‘I’’s conscience had evolved. At some point, we become so self-aware of everything we say and do online, that we develop the objectivity like that of the agent. If I’m to assume that the ‘I’ is a she here, it’s arguable that and that the ‘I’ and ‘she’ in ‘my FBI agent takes me out on a date’, are the same entity. 

I think this poem implies that as we reveal more of ourselves online, the acuteness of our self-awareness intensifies. We become our own agents, we assimilate the role of our watchers and watch ourselves. We become transparent, as we study our profiles through our own focalisation. This, to my mind and my mother’s mind too, is the “exoskeleton” that Charlotte resents. It’s the imagery of self-consumption, the self-destruction in laying yourself bare to the world, where in turn it’s you that becomes the meal, it’s you who dates yourself, it’s you who tucks into yourself. We become indiscernible from watching and watched, and in these inexactitudes, we end up disorienting ourselves. We have to share so much in order to be able to “progress” or access sites or information we need. It’s parasitic. This is what Charlotte means by “she eats from within”. As though we’re the parasite and the host, we eat of ourselves. 

Other perplexing images: ‘my agent, a rational object / the same size as a mannequin’ (from ‘my FBI agent takes a holiday’) I found this image really wonderful and so apt in defining the agent’s agency... The mannequin is like, your anonymous blank slate. You change its clothes, it remains the same sculpture. It’s something you imprint, and it projects what it wears, how it wears it. The agent being depicted as a mannequin is again, another non-sequitur of a metaphor in this poem, but it makes absolute sense. The agent’s identity is subsumed in the person they surveillance. The agent is in a strange way, our personal twin, which is basically saying, we’re bonded. 

This symbiotic relationship is reflected on deeply throughout the work, oscillating between the way we are watched, how we watch, and how we watch ourselves. Take ‘my fbi agent doesn’t like to read’:

i read a lot of ebooks because i am always thinking  of him                           and his lack of access to an academic library  marxist monetary theory  kate millett’s sexual politics william morris biographies  [...]  i like to read through his eyes 

This is a profound image. As if the agent and the ‘I’ here are sat together. Whatever ‘I’ indulges in for reading pleasure, the agent indulges in also. Ultimately this is not a space that the agent is invading, when we’re aware we’re being observed. Like in those ‘fbi’ memes, we welcome the agent in, to laugh, to trust that everything, as uninnocent as it all is, is still ultimately innocent. No harm, no foul. So with that assurance, we make do with their elusive presence, content to let them read over our shoulders. 

One perplexion I do have about this work, and perhaps it’s an intentional move from Charlotte, is the inconsistency of grammar and capitalisation. Most of the poetry is written lowercase, it reads like the way we text. But every now and then there’s the odd full stop, or comma or semi-colon, that just doesn’t seem to sit right, and I wonder what the motivations are behind introducing punctuation at certain points. It’s something to think about when you’re reading the collection. Similarly with capitalisation, the book cover title is in lowercase “fbi” whereas all the poems are in the uppercase acronym: “FBI”. Funnily enough when you type ‘fbi’ into your phone, it will autocorrect it to uppercase. So that was an interesting distinction I found. Ultimately I don’t think this writing is yearning to read entirely like a text message, it is inviting punctuated sentences, grammar, clever choices in the positioning of semi-colons. But it’s not always clear why they appear within certain poems at particular points, and I question the impulse behind their inclusion. The form too, is fairly consistent, bar ‘my fbi agent talks me through my facebook ad settings’ on page 14, which really experiments with sentence length and the ‘/’:

i say: is this how you see me?  birthday in october / close friends of men with a birthday in 7-30 days / close friends of ex-pats / commuters / gmail users // 

i want to know about data in poetry when it’s bad data & i want to know about how you see me in these systems when they’re bad, i don’t mean morally, i mean shitty, incomplete, i mean you know too much and it’s all worth except. except for the ways in which it works for you. 

I perceived the ‘/’ here as not just a spacer. I think of it as an imitation of a navigation menu, the “clicking and loading” from one page of information to another. The writing itself also stretches right across the page, like it would across a computer screen. The best way to edit your Facebook ad settings is on a computer, not a smartphone device. And similar to Crispin Best, Charlotte’s line breaks often occur less than half way across the page of the book, imitating the dimensions of a phone screen, again. But in this poem, there’s more elongation, there’s more steps. For that reason, it really stands out and it’s also one of the more clogged pieces in terms of its references. The random assemblage of information pertaining to the ‘I’ and their profile, problematises the way information is harvested on social media. It’s loads of ubiquitous, vacuous crap which is all vested in the same person, but ultimately means very little. The only connection in having a birthday in October and being close friends with ex-pats is simply in the ‘I’, here. But there’s about a bajillion other people out there who could have the same thing in common. This poem is a criticism of the conjectures that the agent makes based off watching everything about us. What is the point in having all this crap on me? How boring. How confusing. 

I understand now why I lack conviction in a lot of my own thoughts about this collection, and it’s also why Charlotte Geater is incredibly talented. Everything in our world is open to reasonable doubt, even more so with technology. That same notion is integral to this collection’s thematics—we doubt who we are, we doubt what we do, we doubt what is around us and worst of all, we know that someone is recording those doubts and documenting them as evidence. The fact that Charlotte can recreate our digital anxieties, forcing us to think and overshare with ourselves so we can access an understanding, in the same way that the Internet does, that’s powerful. That is a technique. 

poems for my fbi agent articulates something much greater than ourselves, and yet we have the power to dispel of it whenever we want, collectively as a species or simply as individuals. Otherwise, morbid consequences follow (and are already a reality): ‘your coffin / is there / for the rest of your life’. This absolutism of our persona’s enduring presence that remains long after physical death is the ultimate artifice of reality, and immortality. We’re never truly dead and gone, we’re never really buried, when the evidence we lived is always there. 

It took me time to wrap my head around it, and tbh I don’t think I’ll ever totally wrap my head around everything, but I loved this collection, and I’m interested to see what Charlotte produces next. This is an incredible debut with an amazing press.

If you want to read some of these amazing poems in full, you can view them in some of Charlotte’s previous publications here, here and here. Or you could skip the bullshit and just buy this amazing work at Bad Betty Press, and follow Charlotte on Twitter.