something queer going on

There are still lots of open days if you want to ask me anything!

For today, executrix asked why I like military fandoms.

I have to start my answer by borrowing a phrase from oursin: it's all more complicated. I wouldn't say that I like military fandoms in general. I'm only interested in a small subset of them: those set during either the First or Second World War and focused on Britain, or at least not on the United States. Stories about wars more recent than 1945 tend to engage my political brain and make me angry, whereas WWI is distant enough that I can see it as tragedy, and while I do have political thoughts about WWII, essentially I believe that both the Nazis and Japanese imperialist expansion had to be stopped. And stories that are primarily about the US experience of those wars don't appeal to me, partly because of my Anglophilia (I might as well openly admit it) and partly because I strongly dislike the way American involvement in the world wars is presented in American popular culture and popular history. The U.S. did not save the world either time, nor did we make great heroic sacrifices; our involvement in both wars was comparatively limited. To the extent that we did play a crucial role in WWII, it was mostly due to our industrial capacity, which kept both Britain and the Soviets armed. The country that came closest to single-handedly stopping Hitler was the Soviet Union, but even now the hangover of Cold War politics makes that almost impossible to say in the US in a popular medium. Basically, I think U.S. war stories are parochial and very often jingoistic. British war stories can be both those things too, but it's less common and less blatant. (I said in another post that the difference between U.S. WWII films and British WWII films is that in U.S. ones, the hero lives and triumphs; in British ones, he dies. That sums up the different attitudes fairly well.)

Having said all that, the question still remains: why am I attracted to war stories at all? ( click here to read more )

I'll end with a few recs in case any of this has piqued your interest. Colditz has been my favorite fandom for some years now: it's a British drama that aired in the early 1970s about the eponymous high-security POW camp and the men who lived in it, sometimes escaped from it, and more often failed to escape. Wings is another British drama, this time about Royal Flying Corps pilots in the early years of the First World War. It has its flaws, but at its best it's wonderful. Manhunt is a 1969-70 British drama about two French resistance members and a downed RAF officer trying desperately to escape from occupied France; it's slow to get going and can be offensively sexist, but it gets better, has some consistently great acting and intermittently excellent writing, and its final episode packs a hell of a wallop. Secret Army is yet another 1970s British drama; it focuses on the members of Lifeline, a Belgian underground organization that helps downed Allied pilots escape back to Britain; it's bleak, bleak, bleak, and after series 1 it gets bogged down in its creator's anti-communist views, but the first series is great. Almost everyone with any interest in WWI had read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, but if you haven't, do. Mary Renault's The Charioteer is well known, but worth thinking about as a war novel as much as a gay novel. And I like Susan Hill's Strange Meeting, an exploration of the tender friendship/love that develops between two young British officers in WWI.

1) I've been thinking about this poem since samskeyti posted it on their journal a few days ago. It's by Elizabeth Bradfield and is from Approaching Ice, her volume of poetry about polar explorers.

Against Solitude

Leave your reindeer bag, damp and moldering,
and slide into mine. Two of us, I'm sure, could
warm it, could warm. Let me help you from your traces,
let me rubs what's sore. Don't speak. Your hair has grown long
in our march, soft as my wife's. Keep your beard turned
toward the tent's silk, your fusty breath — I know none of us
can help it, I know, and truthfully I'm glad for any scent in this...

Hush. How long has it been since my mouth has held anything
other than ice and pemmican? Your skin, though wan and sour,
is firm, delicious. Yes, your shoulder, your hip. I'd not thought
how soft a man's hip would be, how curved the flesh above the backs
of his thighs — listen. Do you hear the wind moaning, the ice
groaning beneath us as it strains?

I'm afraid that I don't think very highly of it as a poem. My tastes are old-fashioned
and I still have my doubts about
free verse,
being disinclined to believe
that putting in some line breaks turns
prose into poetry.

But if I think of it as a ficlet rather than comparing it to "The Good Morrow" or "The Waste Land" (which is free verse, yes, but excellent free verse) I like it much better. ( my thoughts on RPS and artistic respectability; cut for length )

2) I drove the 50 miles (each way) to Albuquerque today to visit the Magical Bookstore, bringing a bunch of my own books to sell and hoping to acquire exciting new ones. I didn't unearth any amazing queer books today, but I did get Understanding the Former Prisoner of War: Life After Liberation, by Guy J. Kelnhofer Jr., which is highly relevant to my interests. It's even signed by the author, who was himself a POW in Japanese custody from 1941-45. I haven't read it yet but it has some first-person accounts by ex-POWs that look informative. I also snagged the April issue of Harper's, because "new fiction by John Le Carré" was emblazoned on the cover and I couldn't resist. It also has a good article on how the Christian hippies of the 1960s became the right-wing evangelicals of today, an excerpt from a 1980s piece by Claude Lévi-Strauss on cultural definitions of parenthood and family, and Terry Eagleton reviewing a new biography of Karl Marx.

3) I recently watched the 1969 film Battle of Britain, which has a cast of bazillions, some nice aerial combat sequences, flat characters, an overcrowded yet aimless storyline, and Susannah York as a WAAF in a wildly period-inappropriate hairstyle. York's character is scolded for her war work by her Canadian RAF-pilot husband, who likes to pontificate about a woman's place and with whom I think we're supposed to sympathize. Luckily they're not in the movie that long; as I said, cast of bazillions and an overcrowded storyline. There is one very good scene set the day after the Luftwaffe called off its attacks on RAF airfields: the pilots, aircrews, operations room staff, etc. wait anxiously in dead silence while nothing happens. It's not historically accurate--the attacks didn't stop, they just started targeting cities instead--but it's the most effective moment, emotionally, in the whole film. The other thing I liked was a moment in which York's character is introduced to a new ops room staffer, an ex-pilot whose face is scarred from severe burns. TBoB is the earliest war film I've seen that touches on this particular topic. Other films have lots of shots of Spitfires and Hurricanes going down in flames, but their pilots are never shown to survive and be scarred as many real pilots were. And, unless film make-up was a lot better than I think it was in 1969, the ex-pilot was played by an actor who had himself experienced that kind of injury.

On the subject of war films, Netflix has finally sent me King Rat, which has been at the top of my queue for ages. Perhaps I will end this post and start watching it now.

Er, it's been a while since I've made a fannish post, hasn't it? My job and other things have kept me pretty busy for a while.

I'm still all about the RPF at the moment. In a way it's not that surprising: over the last few years I've been feeling increasingly dissatisfied with scripted media, because too often, stories I start out loving go horribly wrong. ( More on RPF versus scripted fandoms )