It can be found here.
There may be some other stuff mixed in with the fanfic posts, but I'll try to make it clear with tags, and in the titles of the posts, what is what, so you don't have to wade through Part Infinitum of the Adventures of Charlotte, Halo and the Valley as they fight the good fight on behalf of the Colonial History Workshop. Unless you want to, that is.
(makes 'rock on' gesture)
There is a Roslin-baby-meme out there, and it likes the smell of our brains, I think. Because here it is again, but with a little twist. Lee Adama, now I have another reason to wish you did not exist . . . .
In other news, I will soon have something constructive to say, I promise.
Heads up. There is a BSG rumor challenge.
Hopefully (hint, hint, to anyone who may be reading this) there will soon be stories there . . .
To get you all going, I offer this:
A muscular and well-oiled hoplite in my phalanx of fanfic.
Fanfic has led me to learn some new words. We have had squee. We have also had squim. (I will not write an entire post on squim, though. There are limits.)
Another word I have learned about is squick.
In several previous posts, I have discussed some things that are a little bit icky. Squick is a version of icky, but squick is much milder as a term. Some things that make me go squick will not make others go squick. And the reverse. Some of us like being squicked, a little.
The Smoking Threesome makes a lot of people squick. (Yes. Some day I will drop this. But not today.)
This threesome makes some people squick, and others not. Personally, it is the Tigh/Roslin component here that makes me squick. Others squick at Tigh/Adama, or the entire package.
There is a bit in this story that makes me squick. It is the part where the violence turns into the love. Minor squick for me, because although this idea rubs me the wrong way, it is possible and totally kosher to write stories where such things happen.
Also, as aside, I am not sure whether this falls into the squick category, but I came across the best raunch sentence ever in fanfic today. "His cock [came] to a screeching halt inside her." Found here. This is otherwise a perfectly ok story. But the screeching cock really got me. I mean, I've been with men and I can tell you that has never happened in my experience. Hot damn.
Squick can be a sign that a story is doing something interesting. I squicked a little at this. The story is about Cally, and it is, at least in part, dealing with the contempt many fans (and some writers) have for that character. My squick was a squick of recognition, of the fact that Cally is interesting precisely because she gets jerked around by the story, and never gets any revenge. Cally almost wants the chief to beat her up so that she knows he loves her, Cally cannot remember if anyone helped her escape from the cylons, and Cally gets airlocked. She is easy to dislike. She is almost squick personified, and this is why there ought to be more Cally stories.
Which leads me to think that squick, in general, is a sign that the reader's buttons are being pushed. Some boundary has been crossed. This can be in a bad way, or in an interesting way, or in a funny way. I mean, in truth, Tigh and Roslin frakking in an airlock is actually fairly harmless, as a concept.
But other boundaries, like the ones about violence and love, or contempt, need to be handled with thought, or the squick merely squicks, and does not edify. This was my problem with the handling of rape or suspected rape in the story mentioned here. That story squicked me, big-time, partially because I think the squick aspect of it was not a conscious authorial decision.
But, to make up for using the word "edify" in the previous paragraph, I will now bring this post to a halt with the extremely juvenile obvservation that the phrase "Screeching PleasureCock of Ultimate Satisfaction" has just entered my head and will not leave.
Again, hot damn.
Or, I do, at least. There is a new X-Files movie coming out later this week. I intend to see it, although I admit I worry it won't be as good as I want it to be.
I came across this post on Feministing today. My experience was similar to that writer's. The X-Files appeared on TV when I was 14, and it ended my senior year of college. I grew up watching that show, and I totally wanted to be Scully when I grew up. Minus the abducted-by-aliens bit, and the infertility bit, and the cancer bit.
Actually, now that I consider it, my attachment to the Scully character is like my attachment to the Roslin character. I love the fact that they exist, I would not want to live either of their lives, and now and again the respective narratives in which they are enmeshed do things that make me go squick. Yes, I learned a new word via posting about fanfic. Squick. Squick. Squick.
I talked about the parallels between these two ages ago, and I won't go into it again. I am not the only person to whom this has occurred, either. Again, my failure to take notes kicks my ass, and I can't find the place I saw this, but someone had done a play by play comparison of the two characters. Totally worked.
On the subject of character pairings, I read some Scully slash recently. Scully/Monica, specifically. For whatever reason, it didn't grab me. Might have been the story, might have been the weather, might have been the fact that I was mostly thinking about Maryland that day and dissertation revision is not conducive to losing oneself in worlds of imagination. Charles Calvert is just not a turn-on, on many, many levels.
Or, it might have been my own personal relationship to the X-Files narrative. I absorbed that show in my mid to late teens (I didn't watch it much during college, and returned only in the last season, to see the end) and at that point in my life, it had not occurred to me that I could find other girls hot. There was no element of desire in my fangirldom. For whatever reason, the 'wow, hot' part of my brain and the 'Scully is awesome' part of my brain are non-overlapping components of a Venn diagram. Roslin, as dedicated readers may have guessed, is a different case.
But anyway. This post is verging into squickdom.
The X-Files also coincided with my growth as a feminist. I had read The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex at thirteen or fourteen, and my up-bringing was very much influenced by the second-wave feminism of the 1970s. Which was a great thing for me. But I had the fortune, or misfortune, never to run into any serious difficulties due to gender while I was growing up. My feminism came a little too easily.
But in college, for the first time in my life, I had one of those moments. A tenured professor at my undergraduate alma mater, Snide University, laughed at something I said one day during a discussion of my plans for graduate school, and told me, "you're too pretty to be a history graduate student." The fuck you that I did not utter that day still trembles on my lips whenever I think about that.
It was after this, and a few other such incidents, that I realized why Scully was such a kick-ass character.
So, rock on, Starbuck.
I have had the great good fortune to be offered, and to accept, a postdoc at the institution that granted me my PhD. This means that I did not have to move last fall. This also means that I maintain ties to the Bleak University Department of History.
Octopus like, those ties are now attaching their purple and many-suckered arms to my person, and the suction of those little purple suckers calls forth my deep, deep capacity for snark.
Let us begin with the Colonial History Workshop. Two of my graduate school colleagues, who I will term Halo (because of his golden curls) and the Valley (because it's a transparent play on his name) have run the CHW for the last few years. So this year, I am up to help out. I volunteered, as a matter of fact, partly because I felt guilty, and partly because I am a sucker.
This, I think, was a mistake. For one thing, in order to arrange the talk I have to arrange this week, I have to know whether the Program in American Studies has scheduled an event for the afternoon of the eighteenth of November. I do not know whether the Program in American Studies has scheduled an event for the afternoon of the eighteenth of November, because I am not a mentalist, and because their secretary is on vacation and is not answering my emails.
This, I should add, is only the beginning of the business. The rest is not worth discussing. Let me merely say that when an esteemed member of my dissertation committee passed me in the hallway today, and said, "Have you heard back from Professor [name deleted], Charlotte?" (she always calls me Charlotte. Charlie is a boy's name, I think is the reason, and this is confusing) I almost let loose on a long, bracelet-jangling rant about co-sponsorings, the English department, and certain persons I would like to flay. But I didn't. I was close, though.
Halo and the Valley, if I do not sleep this term, if the CHW continues to interfere with my visions and revisions, if the CHW in malicious combination with British Studies (let us not begin on British Studies just yet) deprives me of solitude and a chance to read Battlestar Galactica raunch, I will place you, Halo and the Valley, in separate burlap sacks and I will beat you with a copy of something by Bernard Bailyn. Something heavy.
Have either of you read The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson? I have.
And as I said, we had better not begin on British Studies. British Studies is a poorly organized, beer-drenched sinkhole which, on its better days, offers a relatively convincing impersonation of an intellectual community. British Studies is riven with faction. British Studies suffers from failures of discipline. British Studies has difficulty reaching a consensus on Ireland. British Studies is whistling Dixie. British Studies, like Archbishop Laud, desperately wants to go down on the Duke of Buckingham, but says so only in Latin, in a private journal. British Studies spits into the wind.
And yes, I just proofread and submitted the British Studies funding application for this year. I also wrote the description of us for the department website, because, due mainly to louche administrative practices, we have never had one before.
As I said, I am a sucker.
Yet another ship in the fanfic convoy that is my blog.
This story made me laugh, because it is a story about fanfic. In this story, rumors spread about Adama and Roslin. They are catalogued by Billy, and Roslin and Adama get together and read them.
And some of the rumors are very raunchy, and some of the rumors make no sense, and some of the rumors are a little bit disturbing, and some of the rumors . . .
You get the idea. Or, at least, this is the idea that I got. It made me smile, in any case.
I will admit, I liked this in part because a large chunk of my dissertation is about news and rumor as a political force. And my project does with news and rumor in Maryland in the 1670s and 1680s pretty much what Billy does with news and rumor in the fleet in this story, although with a different purpose in mind.
And no, my dissertation does not end with Charles Calvert pulling a muscle due to getting it on too enthusiastically with Louis XIV, the pope, and the Five Nations of the Iroquois. I thought about it, though.
I have been told that in Philadelphia, they re-enact the storming of the Bastille every 14 July, and last year, the actors rained Twinkies down upon the assembled crowd. Apparently, if tossed with enough force, the little packets explode upon impact.
Part of that infernal series. And yes, I was listening to a Janet Jackson video on YouTube when I came up with the title.
The university at which I teach has a well stocked library, and yesterday I withdrew several books. Two were fantasy novels by Gene Wolfe, one was about the development of the public sphere in early modern England, and one was a collection of erotic stories edited by a woman named Susie Bright. It had a bright pink cover, and on the cover was a curvy lady wearing nothing but black stockings and one strategically placed hand.
Stay with me, here.
I am writing about this for several reasons. I have a point to make about genre conventions, and I have a point to make about library shelves. I will make these points in reverse order.
First, although the bright pink book was in the PS section (Library of Congress style) along with all the other modern American literature, it was surrounded by a little nimbus of other books containing raunchy stories. This book was not, in other words, classified by author alone, or even by the fact that it was an anthology or collection. The raunch aspect had marked it off and caused it to be placed in a particular spot.
This is common. Things to which the label 'erotica' sticks, for whatever reason, tend to end up in the same place, however dissimilar they may otherwise be.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially given that the three novellas contained in this book were merely that - novellas. They had a fair amount of sex in them, but I didn't get the impression that I had fallen down some pink-rimmed rabbit hole of transgression. The last of the three stories, in particular, was more about South African politics than it was about raunch.
In a certain sense, the cataloging of smut by the Bleak University Library is parallel to the ratings writers often use to tag their stories, such as K, T, MA, NC-17, and so on. We have a lingering sense that if something contains smut, it ought to have a little warning-label on it. Fine. I really don't think myself that dirty stories are dangerous, but tags merely provide information, and hurt no one.
But the interesting thing about the way fanficdom operates is that the K stories and the NC-17 stories are mixed promiscuously together. Check the three most recent stories over on Survival Instinct and you're liable to get a fluff story about pink gel-pens, a weirdly contrived romantic interlude with some mild groping, and a full-on three-way involving Doc Cottle and a lot of lube. (I'm sorry. That story is still in my head. It will be gone soon, I promise.)
Or, hit The Lady's In Charge, and you might get Laura/Three bondage using a compass and some torn stockings, a little Tory/Laura angst interlude that anyone can enjoy, or one of Trialia's evocative little five-liners that says rather more than it appears to. Ditto over at LiveJournal, where the romance and the raunch and the deer and the antelope all play together. I am thinking in particular of our friends at bondage_rz, where the last story I read careened wildly from supperraunch to supersweet, and was entertaining as all hell. That is not a ship that I usually sail on, but I'll watch the regatta every now and again.
So, fanficdom is actively engaged, whether intentionally or not, in breaking down the line between the smut and the not-smut. You can even make the argument that fanfic smut does this by its very existence. After all, writing and reading raunch encounters is a way of nudging the canon and saying - this happened, too. Pocketwitch's untitled Laura/Kara series, links to which can be found here, and that chaste hug Kara gave the prez so long ago are part of the same text.
Which means that maybe, someday, collections of erotic novellas can be shelved alongside everything else, where they belong.
Google "Tom Zarek Love Phalanx," with the quotation marks.
Single hit.
Is this evidence of having accomplished something?
