something queer going on

The state of me in general:

Meh. Nothing in particular to report, just, you know, everything.


Reading:

Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet. I'm a bit more than halfway through with this, but stalled at the point where the main character is about to make another very bad, self-destructive choice. There are other novels by Waters I like more.

T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call. Kingfisher's novels are always worth a read. I found this one quite harrowing on an emotional level--something about the particular brand of abuse the main character goes through really gets to me. But Kingfisher never just drops her characters into hell and leaves them there, which is an assurance I need these days. Bonus points for how she plays with the "lonely girl bonds with a magical horse" trope.

And I'm re-reading the Murderbot books (after having finally finished the series) to see if I get more out of them this time.


Watching:

The Murderbot TV show, which (at the risk of heresy) I'll admit I like more than the books. I've never found it easy to connect emotionally with Martha Wells' writing, so I think the story benefits greatly from being performed. Alexander Skarsgard is very, very good as Murderbot, managing to convey huge amounts of layered characterization using mostly his eyes, his voice, and some body language. And David Dastmalchian, whom I'd never heard of before, almost steals the show as Murderbot's semi-nemesis Gurathin. The two of them play off each other very well, as two similar personalities who, naturally, can't stand each other and are incredibly awkward about it.

Leverage: Redemption, which I like fine but which can't quite hold up to the original show. The (mostly) lack of Hardison changes the emotional dynamic I loved in the original, although at least, mercifully, the show quickly stopped trying to make parenthood its new dynamic. I do like Breanna, and I like that there's now a canonically queer person in the main team, but it's just not the same.

I'm still watching, though. I'm only up to the first episode of S3, so no spoilers past that, please.

Taskmaster S19 is a delight. I love this series' cast and they are very, very funny together. I was nervous about Jason Mantzoukas, because I only knew him as Derek from The Good Place and that character irritated me, but he brings beautiful chaos to Taskmaster.

I've started trying to watch the BBC comedy Ghosts. (Which, yes, just ended, and it was people talking about how good the finale was that got me interested. OFMD S2 has reaffirmed my sense that I'm better off fannishly with closed canons.)

Anyway, I'm most of the way through S1, but I'm finding the repeated instances of "the ghosts cause Alison to make a fool of herself in public" pretty hard to take. Does this become less of a thing as the show goes on? I really like all the characters and I want to see what happens, but my secondhand embarrassment is literally painful. (Plus, there's so much potential in the show's premise and I'm already bored of seeing it wasted on the same joke again and again.)

Please advise!

Health: I'll put this under a cut.

Nothing gory or TMI, but probably not very interesting.

My sciatica flare-up continues to flare, alas. I was doing okay, actually having pretty long periods of being pain free (with the help of OTC painkillers, gabapentin, and muscle relaxants). And then on Friday at work I bent down, and something went TWANG in my back, and it was not good. I went home early and haven't been back to work since.

That weekend I started taking the leftover prednisone from my last round of this shit. I'd been hoping to avoid it because of its blood sugar effects, but that clearly wasn't going to be possible.

On Monday I got an appointment for a same-day video call visit with my doctor, but several levels of technical failure meant I had to go in instead. So I dragged my sorry ass in--for a while, driving in and having to lean over in my seat at an angle to keep the back pain under control, I wasn't sure I'd manage to get there. But I did, and got more drugs and a referral for physical therapy and a work note, and the pain eased off and was pretty bearable even when I was sitting.

So, on the way home I thought "Why don't I stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things?" I was coping okayish--in considerable but not intolerable pain--most of the way through the brief shop, and then suddenly the pain ramped way up. I gritted my teeth through checkout and carrying my bag to the car and driving home and carrying my bag up two flights of stairs to my apartment, then more or less collapsed in a heap. The rest of that day and the next were pretty bad.

It's still better than last time--I can stand, but only for a minute or two before the pain gets bad. I don't know when I'll be back to work, though. Doc prescribed me a higher dose of prednisone and I'm on day 3 of 5 for that, and I do feel a little better but not nearly as much as I was hoping for.

Doctor also gave me some exercises that I'm forcing myself to do, and a referral to physical therapy (but the PT doesn't start until the second week of September). I guess the goal of the PT isn't so much immediate rehabilitation as preventing this from happening again.

Bodies, why are they so terrible?

Reading:

I finished Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving, which turned out to be less of a mystery novel and more of a novel about crime, with literary aspirations. It was fine but not as profound as it wanted to be, and I don't have any real interest in reading the previous book in the series.

I've also read most of Paul Magrs's short stories collected in Silver Jubilee. They're really a kind of fictionalized (sometimes quite heavily, with time travel etc.) memoir, and most didn't absolutely delight me. But they were interesting enough to finish. My favorite was probably "Companion Piece," in which an occasional writer of tie-ins for the cult classic TV show Iris Wildthyme* does an event at a bookstore with one of the performers from the series. It's richly textured, the fannish in-jokes aren't too jokey, and it reckons with life not turning out quite as you'd hoped in a way I found really appealing. (*Iris Wildthyme is a character of Magrs' own creation who appears in several of his Doctor Who novels. She travels the universe in a double-decker London bus.)

Currently I'm reading Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. It's one of those melancholy Scandinavian (Swedish, in this case) crime novels, but it seems to be going in interesting directions--the protagonist is a writer, and there's a strong meta level about the construction of narrative meaning. The translation's excellent as far as I can tell--it doesn't have that clunky feel that a lot of translations do.


Watching: Good Omens S2, which was hit and miss for me.

Spoilery stuff under the cut.

I'm glad Gaiman finally decided to go ahead and make the Crowley/Aziraphale relationship explicitly romantic, and that aspect of things was very well done. Unlike a lot of people, I'm not upset that S2 ends with them broken up--even if S3 never gets made, it's clear that they love each other and will probably find their way back to each other. I also appreciate the show's careful, joyful, understated inclusivity, with lots of queer people, gender-nonconforming people, angels who use wheelchairs, etc.

As a story, though, it was a hot mess. Poorly structured and poorly paced, which surprises me, because co-writer and co-executive producer John Finnemore knows how to write a supremely well-structured story in which every twist is surprising but perfectly built up to. But GO2 was just kind of a ramble, and while I often like that sort of thing, what didn't work for me here was that the show didn't embrace its rambling. It was trying to pretend to be a tight, coherent story, while actually being a lot of filler and throwaway scenes pasted together. All the flashbacks (Job, the resurrectionists, etc.) were longer than they needed to be and didn't cohere thematically. As for the zombie Nazis, the less said, the better. I was particularly annoyed by that episode because the cathedral sequence in GO1 was so beautiful and so emotionally climactic, and the weird silly gross-out zombie stuff came close to retrospectively ruining that for me.

And then there's the Gabriel/Beelzebub romance, which was a bad idea in principle and completely unearned in practice. A bad idea because, it seems to me, you don't want your B couple to have THE SAME ARC as your A couple. What's the point of showing us Aziraphale and Crowley growing closer over thousands of years, gradually changing and growing to the point where they can love each other, if we're then going to be presented with a far more rules-bound angel and demon doing the same thing in the blink of an eye? It diminishes the narrative, emotional, and even ethical weight of Aziraphale and Crowley's story, which is a damn shame. (Also, I will never stop resenting GO2 for getting that fucking song stuck in my head for days at a time.)

The ultimate unearned twist, of course, was Aziraphale's return to heaven. I didn't find it very believable at a point when we've seen him learn to defy heaven over and over again, to value the earth and humanity and above all Crowley in ways that heaven forbids. It might have worked better for me if we'd seen the temptation itself (the Metatron's conversation with Aziraphale), and of course had some buildup, but as it was, we just got a pretty damn sudden, massive about-face. I'm not saying it was entirely out of nowhere--there were little suggestions that Aziraphale was still struggling--but the story gave them nowhere near enough development. (Cf. the equivalent moment in Our Flag Means Death, which was much better built-up to and did make emotional sense for the character.)

I did like it overall, but it felt a bit like they went and filmed the first draft of the screenplay instead of the final one.

I've been in a bit of a reading lull since finishing Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds. I have his latest novel The Spear Cuts Through Water and I'm looking forward to reading it, but . . . not right now.

Yesterday I bought Katie Daysh's Leeward and have just barely started it. It's an age-of-sail m/m romance, with both men being British Navy officers, so I could hardly not buy it once I knew it existed. The author has clearly done her research, or at least attentively read the Hornblower and Aubrey & Maturin novels, which is good. And yet . . . I don't think I'm going to love it.

Some possibly spoilery stuff under the cut, much of which is hearsay based on a review I read; mostly we learn that I am not the ideal audience for genre romance

The very first scene happens at the Battle of the Nile; we get the explosion of L'Orient, near enough to our hero Captain Hiram Nightingale's ship to kill his lover (? . . . clearly something was between them, but as of right now its exact nature is unstated) and give Nightingale A Trauma. It is a truth universally acknowledged that every protagonist of a male/male romance novel must have A Trauma. I am very tired of it.

The Trauma is the first annoying thing. Second is that goddamn name, which just feels off for an English gentleman in this time period. (I could be wrong and will accept correction. Nevertheless, I would believe Hiram Nightingale as a Union officer in the American civil war more readily.)

Third is something I only know from the review. Nightingale is married to a woman, but Daysh takes pains to assure the reader that this is a mariage blanc and that Nightingale's wife has no interest in a sexual or romantic relationship with him.

Fourth, again from the review: Nightingale's eventual new love interest is his first lieutenant. Apparently Daysh manages to arrange events so that it's absolutely 100% clear to the reader that the power imbalance doesn't mean there are any ethical issues around consent, or practical issues around naval discipline. How she does this, I don't yet know.

Points 3 and 4 annoy me because I am every bit as tired of mandatorily morally pure queer romances as I am of the hero's defining, sympathy-inducing, dickishness-exempting trauma. I recognize that romance is meant to be a fun genre, and people don't necessarily want moral ambiguity or discomfort. But . . . I do. Especially in a historical romance, I don't want to gloss over the reality that many, many queer men and women acceded to the (Western) cultural expectation that they would marry and have children. In a lot of cases, they saw absolutely nothing wrong with that expectation, and no particular conflict between getting married and fulfilling their own desires on the side. (Obviously this was easier for men than for women.) Also, even now, some gay and lesbian folks get heterosexually married for a variety of reasons--from "my religion demands it" to "trying to be ex-gay" to "thinking about that political career" to "didn't really know they were queer"--and end up either having affairs or getting divorced, or both. And they hurt, and their partners hurt, and it sucks, but it doesn't make them irredeemably immoral people who are unworthy to be part of a love story.

Homophobia makes queer lives messy sometimes. Also, queer people are people, and people are messy sometimes. I would like us to be allowed to be messy in our* stories. (*"Our" is a bit complicated here. I don't know if the author is queer, but she's not a man, so it's not ownvoices. A term I hate but we need, I think.) Messy queer characters should get to have happy endings, too.

As for point 4: we're in a cultural place right now where a lot of folks are hyper-aware of every potential sexual abuse of power. Mostly I think this is a good thing! (Though I could do without the nonsense of "a 30 year old dating a 23 year old is abuse!!" and similar.) And I think there are ways of avoiding abuse-of-power situations in historical stories without giving the characters anachronistically modern concerns. But a writer making her hero's love interest his direct military subordinate, and then saying "but it's okay because of x, y, and z" is trying to have the tasty, tasty power-imbalance cake and eat it too. Maybe Daysh handles it well; I don't know yet. But I am skeptical in advance. (Full, and perhaps unnecessary if you remember the kind of fic I've written, disclosure: I like power-imbalance relationships. I've written 57 varieties of master/servant and teacher-ish/student-ish fic. I'm interested in how people navigate around that, how they create balance in the relationship despite it, or don't, and in what ways that matters. I'm not really interested in making the power difference vanish in a puff of exceptional circumstances.)

Yeah, that was a lot of complaining about a book I've barely started. I'm still going to try to approach it with an open mind, and I'll report back what I think once I've finished it.


On other cultural fronts, I've similarly been in full Bartleby "I would prefer not to" mode. The 50 New Things in 2023 project has stalled because it was starting to feel like a chore, and I don't want to add more chores to my life. I haven't been writing, though I am probably going to sign up for a Rare Pair exchange (delphi, this is your fault) and perhaps get an unrelated bingo card as well, so that may change.

What I have done is start watching Taskmaster, because Thingswithwings kept talking about it on Twitter. This is a British comedy show where a group of comedians compete to see who can accomplish ridiculous tasks the best (the definition of "best" is often fastest, but may include with the most panache, the most effective rules-lawyering, the most stylish cheating, and the most pleasing flattery of Greg Davies, the host and sole judge whose word is law).

The same group of comedians sticks around for the entire 5-6 episode season, so much depends on the chemistry of the group. I loved S1, but I'm now on S2 and not liking anyone very much. Also, the show is leaning hard into the kinky dom/sub energy of the premise; I had thought from the tweets that it was accidental, but it's clearly scripted and thus not as much fun. Still, for the moment I plan to keep watching. My brain continues not to want TV or film fiction apart from Our Flag Means Death (speaking of messy queer characters, and also, new season when?), but I can handle this deeply silly, pointless romp.


And finally, with Pride month upon us in the US, I have acquired this shirt in purple, bringing my total of queer t-shirts to 2. The other is this one, whose message is, I realize, contradicted by the new shirt. But I would absolutely have bought the new shirt in black if it had been available in black. I guess they're taking that "visibility" thing literally. By the way, purchase of any of the Point of Pride shirts at the first link benefits their work providing gender-affirming clothing and other help; the shirt at the second link was designed by a trans person and benefits him, but only if you buy from Teepublic; at any other site it's a copycat.

My thoughts on the transition from S6 to S7 of Shetland can be summed up as: what a fucking cop-out.

( Spoilery details under the cut )

Over the last few days I've been binge-watching the British TV series Uncle, which I wanted to watch because Con O'Neill (who plays Izzy in Our Flag Means Death) has a supporting role in it.

It's about a 30-something struggling/failed musician and profoundly immature man-baby who reluctantly finds himself helping his divorced sister look after her adolescent son. (In very basic ways, like taking the kid to football practice--he's not stuck raising the kid, which is a plot that I am allergic to.)

I can report that I almost always liked it a lot, and loved it occasionally. The storytelling is solid, occasionally really inventive, and mostly doesn't go for either unearned pathos or unearned redemption.

Whether you'll like it depends a bit on whether you can stand detesting the protagonist, Andy, about 90% of the time. It's true that most of the time the show doesn't want us to like him. But I'm not sure I was supposed to dislike him quite as much as I did. What saved the show for me was literally every other character. They're all interesting, rounded, and really well-acted, beginning with a consistently excellent performance by Elliot Speller-Gillot as Errol, the nephew, a brilliant, deeply nerdy and weird boy who's probably somewhere on the autism spectrum. (But, to be clear, the character rises far above the stereotype of the autistic genius.)

And Con O'Neill is an absolute delight who steals every scene he's in. (My biggest complaint about the show is that there should have been much more of his character, Val.)

It's three seasons, 20 half-hour episodes total, so not a huge time commitment. I'll note that the storytelling becomes more inventive and less strictly sitcom-y after S1.


( And under the cut, some spoilery stuff )

I've survived my first week back at work. It was rough, both because I'm still in some pain and because spending so much time in bed left me much weaker than I used to be. But I managed, and fortunately my bosses and co-workers are being helpful and understanding.

( Not so good work news, under the cut )

I wish I could say I spent my month off of work learning Russian or watching classic documentaries or something, but between the pain, the meds, and the concentration problems that I (like a lot of folks) have been having for the last two years, I can make no such claim.

( What I've been reading, under the cut, no spoilers )


Even more than reading, my ability to watch things has suffered since the pandemic began. I haven't been able to watch any new movies, start any new TV shows, or even continue with shows I was already watching. I'm just unwilling to engage with narratives that might disappoint me, I think.

( What I've been watching, under the cut, no spoilers )

From the question-a-day meme:

August 12: If you could implant one false memory in the minds of everyone in your country, what would that memory be?

At first I thought I would implant the memory of how Hilary Clinton won the Electoral College, as well as the popular vote (which, of course, she really did win) in 2016. But if it didn't actually change history, just our perception, it would only result in her getting the blame for the shambles the US is in.

So, I'm going to implant the vivid, clear, unmistakable memory of Donald Trump kicking an adorable puppy for no reason while on live TV. Even Trump fans love puppies, right? They've been able to excuse everything else he's done, but how could they excuse that?


August 13: If you could bring back any canceled TV series, which TV show would you choose to bring back?

The obvious answer is Hannibal, a show I adored that was canceled prematurely, but . . . no. By S3 it was strained to the breaking point, what with the queer love story/stories that Fuller wanted to tell, and the limits the network imposed on him, and Fuller's inexplicable attachment to retelling the events of Thomas Harris's novels even when they didn't fit into the story world he'd established. S3 was a hot mess with a few beautiful moments, and even giving Fuller complete creative control wouldn't fix the problem of him wanting to keep all of Harris's plots while telling an entirely different story. As a Hannibal fan, I think the show ended not a moment too soon.

Hmm. This is a hard question for me, because I have been disappointed, even heartbroken, too often by shows I started out loving. I would actually prefer that a show ends too soon, with lots of unfulfilled potential, rather than too late.

I'm going to go weird on this one and say: Cadfael. A show that I watched almost exclusively for some supporting characters, and that (except for those characters) was never as good as it could have been. It could be better now, with bolder scripts, deeper emotional arcs, and actual queer characters! Bring it back set twenty-five years in the future, with England finding peace again after the devastation of civil war, and some elderly monks of Shrewsbury Abbey still getting on each other's nerves. Let Cadfael take on some mysteries with fewer plot contrivances, less "dark ages of superstition" nonsense, and more genuine moral complexity. And let Brother Jerome and Prior Robert struggle through their feelings for one another.


August 14: Are you usually early, late, or on time? Why?

Usually a bit early. I hate being late. I also hate it when other people are late. I detest waiting; it makes me so tense that I can't relax and enjoy anything. (I've just spent all afternoon waiting for the pharmacy to deliver my meds, and it was awful even though I wasn't planning to go anywhere.) So I try not to make others wait for me, and hope they'll return the courtesy.

There is, in fact, more to my life than medical stuff, although you wouldn't know it by reading my posts. Here's a start on correcting that.

Reading: I've spent the last few weeks mostly reading all of Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels. It was an odd experience. I liked them, although they're neither strongly plotted nor, for the most part, deeply characterized, and the early ones especially have a cringey level of sexism. Also one book has, of all things, an anti-abortion plot. And while Peters clearly did an enormous amount of research, there are things I think she got wrong (such as the abortion thing, where the discussion has to me--though I'm not an expert--the feel of a modern conservative view rather than a medieval one). For all their flaws, though, the books have a streak of compassionate humanism which is appealing, and at times (often the times when they're most medieval) they touch the genuinely strange and wondrous.

If Peters were just a generation later I would suspect her of having dabbled in early fan writing, because she loves to write what used to be called smarm (heavily homoerotic but officially non-sexual relationships between men). And in one book, her glee at writing homoerotic scenes just leaps off the page, ( Spoilers for something you will probably figure out almost immediately if you read the book in question ) There are some textual references to same-sex desire, as well as one Genuinely Bisexual Character, although we're told that he is bisexual because he is too heterosexual to be in a monastery.

I know there's a TV show with Derek Jacobi, and I've seen bits but I don't think I've ever seen a full episode. Is it worth watching? Is there any actual gay or is that too much to hope for even with a gay man in the lead?

I'm currently reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which is interesting so far. I'm getting the sense that it's going to be one of those books where the main character never gets to have a rest, which is something I increasingly find tiring to read.

Listening: My usual podcasts: This Podcast Will Kill You (excellent podcast about diseases, mostly infectious diseases), Radiolab, Pop Culture Happy Hour, sometimes In Our Time when the topic is interesting enough to make me tolerate Melvyn Bragg, sometimes Throughline. I gave up on Medical Mysteries, despite my interest in the subject, because both the presenters have such affected deliveries that I couldn't bear listening to them. I keep trying true crime podcasts and then quitting them, although I do highly recommend CBC Uncover's miniseries "The Village," which is sober, thoughtful, and responsible about the serial killer who preyed on men in Toronto's gay village, and about the whole context of violence against gay men.

In music, Spotify's algorithm got one right in directing me towards Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman. His latest, a collaboration with Annika Norlin called Correspondence, is stunning. Lekman and Norlin alternate songs in the form of letters to each other, responding to each others' ideas about everything from the fear (and the liberation) of failure, to rape culture, to the history of the song "Silent Night." You can buy it here and no doubt in other places. Here is one of the more stand-alone songs, "Forever Young, Forever Beautiful," a good intro to Lekman's work. I recommend giving the much earlier Lekman song A Postcard to Nina a listen too--it's the song that first caught my ear.

Watching: I haven't settled into anything much since the latest season of Shetland. I've tried a lot that hasn't worked for me, mostly crime shows.

I'm not loving S4 of The Good Place, which seems even more directionless than S3. I can't imagine how they can end the show satisfactorily, unless ( pure speculation, spoilery only for aired episodes of S4 )

I'm nervously looking forward to the final season of Bojack Horseman, which is about to drop. Last season's finale would have made a perfectly good series ending, and it's hard to see what else they can put Bojack through. On the other hand, most of the other characters' arcs feel much less finished, and I'm hoping for good endings, in every sense, for them.

I'm watching the Bake Off, of course, though nobody this year has grabbed my affection the way some bakers have in the past. I like them all but don't have a favorite, except in the sense that some of them are better bakers than others. Also, the challenges have gotten so difficult that I find them kind of stressful to watch. This may be good in a sense, because it means I get less of an urge to bake, and alas my diabetes means that delicious baked goods have to be much, MUCH less of a presence in my diet than they used to be. *sigh* (NB I know sugar substitutes are a thing. I have to restrict not just sugar but all carbs. Believe me, if there was a loophole I would have found it by now. Suggestions not needed, thanks. Commiseration always accepted.)

I want to watch the new Watchmen series, and several other things I'm not remembering right now. Suggestions for good things to read, listen, and watch ARE accepted, gladly.

And now I will end this long post.

Yesterday I posted about Brooklyn 99. Today it has been cancelled. Am I the kiss of death or what?

Other shows I loved that have been cancelled this year include The Exorcist and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

It may not be  coincidence that all three shows included characters of color in major roles and that two of them had queer characters in major roles (and in the third, Dirk Gently was heavily coded as some flavor of queer).

*sigh*