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alwaysalreadyangry · 4 years ago

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most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS Jan 3, 2020 BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

#martin eden #film

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

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The Precise Moment I Stopping Reading City of Bones

by Wardog

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Wardog is probably a bit patronising.~

Like all inflexible people, I like to think of myself as being relatively open-minded and, therefore, in the spirit of open-mindedness I recently got round to reading (or rather attempting to read) Cassandra Clare's City of Bones. I wanted to like it, no really, I genuinely did. Cassandra Clare, for all those who have been living under an internet stone, is a pseudonym of a pseudonym, but Cassandra Cla(i)re, back in the day, wrote fanfic, the very popular Very Secret Diaries and The Draco Trilogy, which seems to be no longer available on the internet at the request of its author (interesting that, hmm?). Well, when I say no longer available on the internet, what I mean is ... not available unless you spend about five minutes looking, which I might have just done. For the record, said trilogy is beautifully decorated with anime-style Draco Malfoys and black roses. Awww. She also has a hefty set of pages over at the Fandom Wank Wiki (trust me, if anything needs a wiki, it is fandom wank), which are suitably, painfully entertaining in a "for what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" kind of way.

Anyway, background cheapshots and raised plagiarism eyebrows aside, I really have no strong opinions on either fandom or Cassandra Cla(i)re, but I quite liked the idea that a popular, moderately competent fanfic writer managed to break into the publishing world. Fanfic is a difficult beast to comprehend unless you're right there in its mouth but, as far as I see it (and, bear in mind, if you do write fanfic this is probably going to sound like the simplistic flailings of an outsider), there are three possible attitudes, or at the very least a spectrum with some definable stopping points on it:

1) Fanfic is art, man, art and there is ultimately no difference between If You Are Prepared and Bleak House. They're both pretty damn long for starters.

2) Fanfic is like original fiction but not as good, and is basically written by people who can't get their own stuff published

3) Fanfic is entirely different from original fiction

Since the first one is clearly non-viable, and the second is actively rude, I subscribe to the third. Writing for fans and writing for publication is vastly different, and to assume that the one aspires to the other is rather to miss the point (and, arguably, the pleasures) of fanfic. Even so, I would have thought the gulf between fanfic and original fiction to be eminently jumpable. I mean, the ability to string a decent sentence together is a transferable skill, right. Right? Well, evidently not. To be fair, my problems with City of Bones a are not about the sentences (although they are of questionable quality), they goes rather deeper than that.

The truth is I actually couldn't read the damn book. I had to give up. It's not that it was, y'know, bad as such, although it occasionally was, it just didn't - to my mind at least - make the leap from fanfic to original fiction at all successfully. I know attempting to draw a distinction between fanfic and original writing is likely to get me shot at dawn but it's the only hope I have of articulating why City of Bones just doesn't work.

As far as I could tell from the sliver I read, City of Bones is young adult urban fantasy. The heroine, Clary Fray, (and let's not even ask why an author who calls herself Cassandra Clare decided to call her heroine Clary) is exactly the sort of spunky young thing you would expect of a modern heroine. She's out at a nightclub with her best friend Simon when she happens to witness a supernatural murder. Demons yadda yadda vampires yadda yadda Shadowhunters yadda yadda sardonic attractive blonde yadda yadda yadda wise old mentor with bird yadda yadda. Look, truthfully, I don't really have any idea what the plot is because I only made it to page 63.

And this is the exact moment when I snapped.

"In the distance she could hear a faint and delicate noise, like wind chimes shaken by a storm. She set off down the corridor slowly, trailing a hand along the wall. The Victorian-looking wallpaper was faded with age, burgundy and pale grey. Each side of the corridor was lined with closed doors. The sound she was following grew louder. Now she could identify it as the sound of a piano being played with desultory but undeniable skill, though she couldn't identify the tune. Turning the corner, she came to a doorway, the door propped fully open. Peering in she saw what was clearly a music room. A grand piano stood in one corner, and rows of chairs were arranged against the far wall. A covered harp occupied the centre of the room. Jace was seated at the grand piano, his slender hands moving rapidly over the keys. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, his tawny hair ruffled up around his head as if he'd just woken up. Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his hands holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel."

Let's skim all over the things that are awkward about this passage ... wind chimes only make sounds when they're stirred and piano music doesn't sound like that anyway ... how can wallpaper be faded with burgundy ... can a skill be desultory but undeniable ... why does it have to "clearly" be a music room, surely it is just is one ... how many times can you say "hands" in one sentence ... how does she know he's barefoot, he's playing the bloody piano ... and what the fuck is with the rain of silver tinsel...

But, yes, skim all that and riddle me this:

Wouldn't that whole scene be so much better if it turned out be Draco Malfoy sitting at the grand piano?

There's a technical name for what's wrong with this passage. In the industry we call it "blowing your load prematurely" (question is, what industry). Seriously, though, we're on page 63, we've spent all of 20 of them in the company of this character (and, let's face it, he's a pretty, sardonic, wise-cracking faintly angsty type very reminiscent of Cla(i)re's take on a certain slytherin): why the fuck should we be even remotely interested in the sight of him at a grand piano? It's a very senses-heavy scene: we have the sound distant music, the wallpaper beneath Clary's fingertips, and the lovingly detailed description of the ruffle-haired eyecandy sitting at the piano, so there's this self-conscious build up, deliberately (albeit not entirely eptly) evoking something of the fairytale, and what's the pay off? Up until this point the tawny-haired Jace has been a rude and snippy, so it's clear that this little scene is meant to show us a different side of him but character revelation scenes only function when you know the character well enough to experience it as a revelation. This is just ... information, excessively presented. It's like being hit over the head with a neon sign saying: "you should fancy this character now." And for the record, he's a demon hunter, not a concert pianist so there really is no reason to have that scene there except as drool-footage.

Possibly I'd feel differently if I was a teenage girl but I hope I'd have more taste.

What the scene did for me, aside from inducing me to throw the book across the room in disgust, was exemplify the subtle sense of wrongness I'd been getting throughout the previous 62 pages. Essentially City of Bones reads like fanfic - and I don't mean that as kneejerk indicator of poor quality, I mean that it reads like something constructed for a different purpose, functioning on a different ruleset. Leaving aside any criticisms of the actual style, this scene would probably work - for me - if I read it as fanfic. It's visually and linguistically striking - the juxtaposition of scruffy boy and fine old instrument (sorry), the hint at aspects of a character hitherto unknown, the touch of submerged melancholia (playing the grand piano to an empty room is a lonely hobby), all this would be fine if the mysterious pianist turned out to Draco. I mean, playing the grand piano is one of the things that one could potentially imagine Draco being able to do. Well, if you stopped and thought about it for a moment, probably not, because surely wizards have ... like ... magical pianos, or house elves to produce their music for them. But given that Draco is a repressively raised posh kid, it seems to me at least credible his parents made him have piano lessons, even if he hated it. And Draco, being the wizarding equivalent of genetically modified, would probably be reasonably good at it regardless.

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter. And such scenes require no build-up because the reader already knows the characters being written about. Equally, dwelling on the details, and presenting very visual, senusous scenes, seems less purple than it does when you do it in original fiction because it helps to establish a familiar character in what may be an unfamiliar setting: for what's it worth, I can picture Draco Malfoy playing the grand piano very vividly. Pale hair, slender fingers, whatever. Fan fiction, even if you're looking at a 100,000 word AU fic, seems to be all about the establishment of moments, which need not necessarily (and probably don't) exist as part of a continuum of moments.

This is absolutely the opposite to a book.

The scene of Jace/grand piano has utterly no resonance for the reader because, well, partly because it's rubbish and partly because no time has been given to properly establishing the character so it's essentially meaningless, but mainly because it has no real sense of its place in a connected, developing narrative. Although the 63 pages I read did occasionally have moments of genuine mediocrity that made me suspect I should try to be more generous with the text, the whole reading experience felt so ultimately hollow I couldn't bring put myself through it. There's nothing inherently wrong with something reading like fanfic - fanfic reads like fanfic and I quite enjoy the stuff - but City of Bones is a work of original fiction, it's a book that I paid real money for (more fool me) In essence, then, it's original fiction without the necessary underpinnings, and fanfic without any of the characters you like. Worst of all possible worlds.

Comments:

Dan H

at 12:57 on 2008-09-25So I've started reading it now, to pick up where Kyra left off (nearly at good old Page 63).

I actually don't think it reads that much like fanfic (at least not like *good* fanfic). There's way too much exposition (fanfic tends to assume that everybody knows what's going on) including some truly wonderful scenes with people actually saying things like "surely you recognise a girl, your sister, Isabelle, is one" (Isabelle, it should be pointed out, is *right fucking there*).

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink".

What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

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Arthur B

at 15:32 on 2008-09-25It strikes me, actually, that while most of us have a good idea of what "bad" fanfic is like, good fanfic must by its nature vary widely in style, because at least part of the point of fanfic is to produce something that is reminiscent of the source material, so good Lovecraft fanfic will read different from good Firefly fanfic, or good Pratchett fanfic.

(Which would mean that, say, "good" Cecilia Dart-Thornton fanfic is a contradiction in terms: if it's good, it's no longer reminiscent of the source material.)

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Dan H

at 18:38 on 2008-09-25I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

Actually they probably do.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

In further updates on City of Bones I've now got past the point reached by our intrepid editor and have the following to add:

Holy Crap the wise old mentor dude is a lot like Dumbledore. There's a bit where he asks the heroine if she wants anything and I *totally* expected him to offer her a sherbet lemon. And if you don't read "Muggle" for "Mundie" every time you're a better man than I am.

Also, some exposition from earlier in the book which I found particularly awful:

"Demons," drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger, Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, as any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension."

"That's enough, Jace" said the girl.

"Isabelle's right," agreed the taller boy, "nobody here needs a lesson in semantics - or demonology."

As you know, I *almost* applaud the bare faced cheek of it.

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Arthur B

at 00:38 on 2008-09-26

I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

To be fair, there aren't that many recurring characters in Lovecraftian fiction except for the Old Ones themselves, who get reused all the time. And I've lost count of the number of times I've read stories about long-lost offshoots of the Whateley clan or where yet another dozy protagonist realises they come from Innsmouth stock.

I agree, though, that the Lovecraft-tribute scene is pretty unique; I expect this is partly because Lovecraft was one of the first authors who genuinely encouraged people to write stories set in his mythology, to the point of sending them detailed letters showing them how to boost their fanfic to peerfic. Having essentially established the core of his own fandom before he died, that core went on to set the norms for Lovecraft tribute works forevermore.

I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

Which might explain why City of Bones exists. Once you don't care what the background to what you're reading is, so long as it has shipping and mary sues and whatnot, it becomes easier to accept the idea of fanfic-like work which is fanfic of nothing in particular - nothing, that is, except fanfic itself.

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Montavilla

at 01:55 on 2008-09-28

Sadly, you made me immediately start wondering what Remus would play in James Potter and the Silver Marauders band. He might, ala George Harrison, play lead guitar. (Sirius would be play rhythm guitar and James would play the bass). Peter, of course, would be on drums. Which might explain why they put up with him all that time. It's hard to find someone who's got their own drum set.

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink". What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

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Dan H

at 12:18 on 2008-09-28

Hee hee.

In all seriousness, though, it's not the comparison to ink that bugged me, it just strikes me as elementary that if you're saying "X was the colour of Y" then unless you're doing a Blackadder style joke "Y" should not include reference to a specific colour. "Her hair was black as ink" "her hair was black, like ink" "her hair was ink-black" would all have been fine. So for that matter would be "her hair was like black ink". "Hair the colour of black ink" is like something out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest: "Her hair was the colour of black ink, her eyes the colour of a blue crayon, and her dress the colour of a dress made out of red silk."

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Wardog

at 14:16 on 2008-09-29

Since we're playing Favourite Lines, my personal shoutout goes to: "He had electric blue dyed hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a startled octopus..." I guess it's just the awkwardness of the construction coupled with that startled octopus...

Arthur: I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

I'm not sure emulating the original work has ever real been the goal, well, not unless there's specific stylistic feature *to* emulate if that makes sense - like Lovecraft. I mean, you want to make your characters sound like the characters they are but ... well ... to indulge a bit of JKR bashing just because that's what we do here, most of the Harry Potter stuff I've read has been stylistically objectively better than the author.

"Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hehe!!!

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Arthur B

at 15:47 on 2008-09-29

I think direct stylistic mimicing is, as you point out, actually rare, especially since a lot of fanfic is written about TV series, so you're translating a visual format into a literary one. But at the same time I think that the aim of a lot of fanfic is to emulate the source work in the sense that the writer's trying to tell a story that is a) reminiscent of the source material, in that it establishes a mood and tells a story which could recognisably fit within the source, and b) features the characters behaving in a manner recognisable from the source (unless the explicit point of the fic is something like "What if Captain Lolcats got possessed by a brain worm?"). At the very least, a lot of fanfic authors seem to want to produce something where the reader would look at it and say "Yes, that's very much how it would have happened on my favourite show if the screenwriters had only had the courage to write an episode where the ship's doctor and the robot owl consummate their love".

I say "a lot of fanfic" because I've seen the occasional piece (generally AU fics) where the premise is so utterly far removed from the source material that I start scratching my head and wondering why the author bothered retaining the link to the source material in the first place. Sure, perhaps the characters retain scraps of their personality, but they're in such an utterly different scenario it becomes a stretch to call them the same characters; to my mind, at least, characters are at least partially defined by context. Being a cheeky black marketeer on Deep Space 9 is a very different proposition from being a cheeky black marketeer in Blitz-era London.

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Wardog

at 16:01 on 2008-09-29

We are now mainly haggling over semantics, dear boy.

So instead I would like to play the "Her hair was" game.

I submit: Her hair was almost precisely the colour of one of those motorola telephones, the ones with that come with a gloss finish not matte."

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Claire E Fitzgerald

at 16:32 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of a grey cat in a room that was totally dark, such that the colour of the cat was indistinguishable from black.

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Arthur B

at 16:59 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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Wardog

at 21:20 on 2008-09-29

Oi! Minus three points from Slytherin for being meta.

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Arthur B

at 00:26 on 2008-09-30

“Minus three hundred points for turning the comments section into Harry Potter fanfiction," muttered Harry, glowering at his Nintendo DS. He was pretty sure he was on the right track in this Phoenix Wright episode, but the game was being evasive about precisely which investigative avenue he should pursue. Harry was not looking forward to the half hour he'd have to spend looking for the plot, but he supposed he couldn't complain: he normally had to doss about for half a year before getting anything done in real life.

"How's my hair looking?" asked Ron, anxious about his big date with Hermione. He had spent the last six hours smearing his skin with Hackiburr's Very Useful Ointment in order to conceal the telltale marks of gingerness, and was now in the process of rubbing the stuff into his scalp. Harry glanced at his bare-torsoed chum and then returned his attention to his game.

"Your hair is all carroty," quipped Harry, "like someone was just sick in it."

Draco giggled and ran his hands through his hair, which was bright yellow like artificial egg yolk.

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Rami

at 12:17 on 2008-09-30

I think these are still worse, but you're getting there ;-)

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Guy

at 04:26 on 2009-07-24

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of light with a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz, and as she moved the angle of its inclination to her scalp seemed to undulate with a regularity that spoke softly to his soul.

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Rami

at 04:41 on 2009-07-24

a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz

I think you got the wavelength and frequency swapped around ;-)

A redhead, eh? Why is it that female protagonists never seem to have violently ginger hair?

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Guy

at 08:34 on 2009-07-24

Oops, so I did. I could pretend that it was a deliberate attempt to further enhance the awfulness of the sentence, but no, I just muddled it up. :)

It would be kind of interesting to see some kind of frequency histogram of female (and male) protagonists and the wavelengths of their hair colours... but I suspect nobody would be mad enough to actually do the work to make such a thing.

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Michal

at 05:29 on 2011-09-29

And I only stumbled on this when I found out Cassandra Clare will be one of the instructors at the 2012 Clarion Writer's Workshop.

Suffice to say, I won't be applying. (Jesus Christ guys, you had Neil Gaiman and Ellen Kushner and Particia C. Wrede and Gene fucking Wolfe as instructors and now you've had budget cuts or what?)

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Arthur B

at 11:25 on 2011-09-29

Well they also had Orson Scott Card.

I guess it's like Hogwarts. Not everyone can be a Griffindor or a Ravenclaw. They also have to recruit Slytherins (Card) and Hufflepuffs (Clare).

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Michal

at 13:30 on 2012-11-18

There's a movie now.

I think I caught a half-second glimpse of Henry VIII at one point.

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Arthur B

at 14:05 on 2012-11-18

Urgh, they actually say "mundanes".

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Ibmiller

at 15:05 on 2012-11-19

It's like they learned nothing from Golden Compass...

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

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Wardog

at 15:36 on 2012-11-19

Oh no, that's Jamie Campbell-Bower. Officially the drippiest boy in Hollywood.

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Arthur B

at 15:44 on 2012-11-19

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

I suspect they are going to mimic Twilight/Potter as closely as copyright will allow. It's got that "clinging to the underbelly of the bandwagon and trying to scrape as much gold as you can out of it" look. (Of course, this is likely to lead to jibbering incoherence due to Potter and Twilight being two different bandwagons...)

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 16:51 on 2012-11-19

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

Hey, at least they got that right.

#Ferretbrain #Cassandra Clare #The Mortal Instruments #Harry Potter #Fanfiction #City of Bones

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sparkermiller · 5 years ago

Text

Socialism

Socialism Exacerbated by the candidacy for the presidency of Senator Bernie Sanders who claims to be a Democratic Socialist, the subject of Socialism keeps raising its, some might say ugly, head in the news these days. Unfortunately, in our culture the word Socialism has become a pejorative. Just the sound of the word creates animosity in spite of the fact that most of us don’t really know what Socialism really is. We only know the very thought of it makes us mad. In defense of our position, we may use the words free markets and capitalism; but most of us can’t really provide a good explanation of what these are either. If you don’t believe me, ask around. Ask what these things are; or, even more difficult, see if you can get your answers in writing. In almost every case those whom you question will not be able to answer. They aren’t dumb. Up to now, they just haven’t had the need to know. So what is Socialism, Capitalism, or a Free Market? For this venue, I believe as simple an explanation as possible will suffice. In short, Socialism (not to be confused with Communism) is a system wherein ownership and management, i.e. governance, of the means of production and related systems, are by the people. Competition is minimal if at all. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system based on private ownership of the means of production, the creation of goods and services for profit, the accruing of profits to a capitalist class, and a system of salary and wage labor for the workers. Decision-making and investment is determined by the owners and/or managers of the factors of production. Competition is foremost with a philosophy of “survival of the fittest, let the devil take the hindmost”. As to free markets, no matter what others may tell you, they only really exist in the classroom. In the real world, markets are affected by manipulation of one kind or another, monopoly, and/or price fixing. In the end, both Socialism and Capitalism are self-defeating. Generally speaking, without competition, under Socialism everybody wants to receive, nobody wants to give. By its very definition, Capitalism is self-defeating because, in the end, only the winner, i.e. the strongest, remains—then it is no longer Capitalism. As a result, all that is left is some form of dictatorship, i.e. an autocracy, oligarchy, etc. I think you can already see that in the progression of our democratic republic today (unless we do something about it before it is too late, that is). Hopefully having cleared the air on this to this point, where are we now? I’ll tell you how I view our nation’s status and you can (and you will) see for yourself. In all candor, our nation and our people, i.e. YOU, are being literally raped by an Oligarchy of the Corporatocracy and Power Elite, operating through a Shadow Government surreptitiously controlling our nation through our government elected by us, we the people, and bribed and manipulated by them. They, that oligarchy, even write our laws. We vote (some of us—that is) and pay the bills. They rule and take the spoils. You have heard the expression, “to the victor belong the spoils”. You have heard from many sources of the course our income has taken over the past forty years, the disappearing middle-class, and of the growing disparity in income and wealth. You have even felt the pain. You have to know where you stand, i.e. your status, in these matters. You surely know. These people have owned the Republican Party from the beginning; but, now, in recent years, they have done the unthinkable. They have begun to take over the party of the people, the Democratic Party—the only hope the people, we in the 90%, have had left to represent our needs, the party of Roosevelt, the party of Truman, and, yes, the party of Carter, after which we begun to go downhill. But “Avast”, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The honorable Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has thrown his hat in the ring for president. He calls himself a Democratic Socialist. I call him a Liberal. Everything he proposes is liberal. Nothing he proposes is any more Socialist than we are now. Nothing he proposes is any more Socialist than we have ever been in the past. Was our bailout of General Motors Socialist? Was our bailout of the mortgage industry Socialist? Is anything we support, our guarantee of the risk, with the private industry receiving the profits, Socialist? Let me tell you what one of the greatest, if not the greatest, leaders in all history had to say about Socialism vs. Liberalism in a speech one hundred years ago; and it is just as true today: I want to-night to speak about these cross-currents; and let me first say a word about Socialism. There are a great many Socialists whose characters and whose views I have much respect for—men some of whom I know well, and whose friendship I enjoy. A good many of those gentlemen who have delightful, rosy views of a noble and brilliant future for the world, are so remote from hard facts of daily life and of ordinary politics that I am not very sure that they will bring any useful or effective influence to bear upon the immediate course of events. To the revolutionary Socialist, whether dreamer or politician, I do not appeal as the Liberal candidate for Dundee. I recognize that they are perfectly right in voting against me and voting against the Liberals, because Liberalism is not Socialism, and never will be. There is a great gulf fixed. It is not only a gulf of method, it is a gulf of principle. There are many steps we have to take which our Socialist opponents or friends, whichever they like to call themselves, will have to take with us; but there are immense differences of principle and of political philosophy between our views and their views. Liberalism has its own history and its own tradition. Socialism has its own formulas and aims. Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. Socialism assails the pre-eminence of the individual; Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass. Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly. These are the great distinctions which I draw, and which, I think, you will agree I am right in drawing at this election between our respective policies and moods. Don’t think that Liberalism is a faith that is played out; that it is a creed to which there is no expanding future. As long as the world rolls round, Liberalism will have its part to play—grand, beneficent, and ameliorating—in relation to men and States. The truth lies in these matters, as it always lies in difficult matters, midway between extreme formulas. It is in the nice adjustment of the respective ideas of collectivism and individualism that the problem of the world and the solution of that problem lie in the years to come. Steven P. Miller (Gatekeeper-Watchman) #sparkermiller Winston Churchill October 11, 1906 One hundred years ago, Winston Churchill called it Liberalism. I call it Progressivism. The truth of the matter is that some markets are better adapted to collective governance and others are better governed as regulated “free markets”. In no event of which I can think should we allow Laissez-faire Capitalism to prevail in our economic markets. How many times do we have to suffer thieves in our hen houses? Our government is permeated with them. Surely we should not over regulate. Surely we should eliminate the liars, cheaters, and thieves in our government and restore the will of our people to power. We should elect Bernie Sanders to the presidency and we should elect the right people to support his efforts. All we have to do is get out and do it. __________________________________ “We the People” Let us think about: the future of the United States of America, and others in world. Let us think about: Where we have been and where are we going? Let us think about: What’s in its Best Interest? …What are the real solutions? Let us think about: whether we are for solving a problem or are we the problem? ___________________________________ From: Steven P. Miller (Gatekeeper-Watchman) Jacksonville, Florida, Duval County, USA. Facebook: http://facebook.com/sparkermiller Twitter: @sparkermiller Hash tags: #sparkermiller, #Melchizedek, #Shebuel 02/28/20...05:31:16 AM est.

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fox-steward · 6 years ago

Photo

@illinoisbeau didn’t respond when i said it was up to him about tagging, so i’ll give him the chance to respond, but please let me know if i should remove the tag.

where to even start with this? it’s wildly illogical but i am waiting for my wife to get off a 9hr plane ride so i’ll bite.

image 1: i’m sorry if you think i just came up with everything on this blog like some inspired fount of radical feminism, but these ideas are here to help make sense of my experience. they do not come out of my experience. what i’m saying is, my experience with dysphoria is likely indistinguishable from most other female trans people, and you said it best yourself, “transition [is] not the right treatment.”

i try to make this point with exhaustive examples, drawing on the indisputable conditions of being female in this society.

image 2: acknowledges misogynistic society? check. everything you said after that and before your own experience? word salad. how am i missing how “misogyny permeates each person in society in all areas of life?” that is exactly what i’m saying. and extrapolating from there, im suggesting that even sex dysphoria is informed by the all-permeating misogyny. why do i have to repeat this? it would seem we agree here?

you’re right we never stop learning from society, but as you experience the socialization of manhood, you do so with a history of girlhood. guess who fundamentally does not do that: natal males. which means even now, your experience of manhood is going to be fundamentally different from theirs. just as mine was. just as all transmen’s are. we never stop learning from society,“ but we also cannot just erase what we already learned. i’m suggesting it is possible (probable) that for female people like us, who experienced girlhood with dysphoria, it is precisely the experience of misogyny that gives rise to desires to become the opposite sex.

image 3: my man, there is no reliable difference between “cis and trans dysphoric people.” it’s not helpful (except insofar as to construct and substantiate some kind of innate trans narrative) to distinguish between types of dysphoric people, especially when the overlap of our experiences is so huge–nearly a circle!

i’m not sure what exactly you’re arguing, but the notion that therapists aren’t helpful to dysphoric people is…dubious. from one side of the coin, i agree, from the other, i don’t. i agree that right now, therapists are not doing dysphoric people right and helping us investigate the deeper meaning of dysphoria and helping us work on ways to deal with it outside of steering us toward medical transition. i don’t agree that therapists are seeking out reasons to “make us normal.” this is…a wild claim. so intangible as to be useless to this discussion.

again, there is just no use in trying to draw a line between “cis” dysphoric people and “trans” dysphoric people unless that purpose is to bolster the idea that transness is an innate state of being. practically, there’s no difference between your life experience (what you’d call trans) and mine (what you’re calling cis). any difference exists in your mind in order to justify why we can have different outcomes of the same experience: transition.

image 4: not sure what the point in bringing up the difference between society and nature is. sure, they’re different, but each one is real in that we have to live with both and with the ways they interact. those interactions being something like: all females (nature) are oppressed by misogyny (society).

no one is asking you to obsess over your biological sex? all i’m suggesting is, it’s better for mental health when we acknowledge our reality, that we are female, rather than believing we are or could become male.

look, you’re 18 and an adult, so i’m not trying to belittle you when i say this: at 18, the human brain isn’t done forming. in my late 20s, mine is. i guarantee i have life experiences behind me that you just don’t. i say from experience and observation of others, feelings change a lot between 18 and 30. i say from experience, it’s no good for mental health to feverishly pursue something you can never attain (becoming male). whether you believe me or not is up to you, but you in particular is not who i write this for. i write for any dysphoric female, myself included.

image 5: no, what jeopardizes your healthcare is a medical industry that suggests transition without the appropriate investment of time and resources in figuring out how to physically and emotionally care for trans people. what jeopardizes your healthcare is a lack of research into long term testosterone use and how that changes a female body. but make no mistake, changed by medication or not, it’s still a female body. what jeopardizes your healthcare are transphobic doctors and nurses who turn away trans patients because they don’t understand or are disgusted by our bodies. and that is a flaw with society, not nature.

i get that you don’t want the experience of womanhood and transition will functionally fix that for you, but your body will not enter some mystical space between male and female. it will be a female body on testosterone. and that’s fine! like you said, functionally, it does the job! no one “gives a shit” that transition is an aesthetic approximation? this discussion is not about feeling a certain way about transitioning, that is literally just the honest description of what it is. claiming to somehow slide into a biologically male body? that has a lot more to do with feelings–namely, appeasing your own internal sense of being. and as my personal experience informs me, insisting doesn’t make it so.

no one said or implied that transness or transsexuality is unnatural and thus wrong. nothing about this discussion or any of my writing is about transness being wrong. it’s almost all about how females suffer misogyny, how that influences dysphoria, and wondering if medically transitioning is the best treatment for it. that’s it. and you can agree or disagree, but trying to make it seem like i am anti-trans isn’t true or fair.

image 6: you are the only one distinguishing our dysphorias, though. you insist they’re fundamentally different, while i suggest that maybe they aren’t? your evidence that they’re different? i acknowledge the role of misogyny, while you deny it. at 18 i would have denied it, too. functionally, though, experientially, i’ll bet your story and mine have a near perfect overlap. our experiences likely mirror one another’s. and that is my point from above: there's no practical difference in distinguishing between you and me unless we’re trying to support the idea that transness is innate. and that distinction relies not on our actual, concrete, lived experiences, but on how we choose to describe them.

if i had to guess why you want to create this gulf between our experiences, it would be to rationalize why it is two very similar people with exceptionally similar experiences of functionally the same thing can reach different outcomes.

image 7: i just wanted to include this to publicly acknowledge that i had permission to post these screenshots.

but as i said in our chat message, LMAO @ the notion that my experience with transitioning doesn’t necessitate an opinion on transness!!!! what a wild stance to take! “your experience doesn’t necessitate an opinion on that experience.” lmao 😂

good luck out there, this world is a trip. i wish you well.

#ftm #trans #transmen #trans men #transition #gender #gender dysphoria #sex dysphoria #transgender #gender identity #gender critical #radical feminism #radfem #detransition #detrans #detransitioned woman #detransitioning

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