between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Many and complicated were the hoops I jumped through in order to watch this second episode...


We open at an AA meeting. "I have been sober..." Sherlock does not look patient. Bored is the word. Watson looks much more like she respects the proceedings.

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Verdict: Something of an improvement on the pilot, in terms of smoothness and character-work: the actors bring a lot to their roles. I'm disappointed by the to-date maleness of the named police officers - and I'd be very happy to discover that this show isn't going to be just about murders - but based on two episodes' form, I think I'm going to continue to enjoy watching Lucy Liu and Johnny Lee Miller at work.

So, I was reading this post by amagiclantern (via alankria), Dear Western SFF: stop it with 'exotic' already.

It is an interesting post. And got me thinking about my own life experience (because it's all about me, of course [ed. note: snark in play]), growing up with certain things coded exotic/foreign/strange. (And other things, familiar things, romanticised in an unfamiliar way - but I am not going to get my hate on for US portrayals of Irishness and Irish mythology.)

Anyway. So, the coding of things as "exotic." I accepted it mostly uncritically. Because, you know. Fresh melons. Halva. Grapefruit. Fava. Spicy food that wasn't bad curry. Beans that weren't baked in tomato sauce. Polish sausage. These things didn't form part of my daily experience, so clearly they belonged to a bizarre and impenetrable world of foreignness.

Which, you know. I have come to acknowledge is bullshit framing. But only after getting a tiny bit of enlightenment kicked into me a particle at a time. And only after spending enough time in a foreign country - and reading widely enough; hard to see people and places and things as terribly Different when you spend a lot of time reading their own words, even in translation - to start to get in my gut that what's weird to me is perfectly ordinary to other people. And actually have stuff that started out weird to me become perfectly ordinary. (Rice flavoured with oregano. Fried cheese. Melon. Buying bread in a bakery and meat in a butcher's shop.)

I'm not special. And I fuck up bunches, especially navigating Greek culture - I get cut a bit of slack, because I try to use my pathetic infant Greek, but that rebounds when the nice Greek person assumes I understand more than I really do - and I have the option of taking the easy way out, of being the idiot tourist who assumes everyone speaks English and doesn't even try. I'll never get it from the inside. But if I keep working on learning the language, maybe I'll get it a bit better than I do now.

Lots of things still strike me as strange and weird and hard to understand, but that's on me. It doesn't make them objectively strange and weird and incomprensible.

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In an odd confluence of links, I was reading amagiclantern's post at the same time I was reading a certain writer of alternate histories claim that Europe and specifically Mediterranean Europe/the Levant/North Africa is not and was not historically phenotypically diverse.

Is this an American thing? Not seeing regional variation? Because even within a limited range of skin pigmentation (which was historically less limited than said writer claims, considering the amount of trade with sub-Saharan Africa during the medieval Islamic period), even today, there's a significant amount of regional variation in terms of body-type and features around Europe, and even around the Mediterranean.

(Otherwise there would be never be accusations of northerner-southerner prejudice in Italy. And the detective-type Greek policeman, when I reported my pickpocketing, wouldn't have asked me if the boys had looked like Macedonians or Serbs. And "he looked like a Turk" wouldn't be something I've heard.)

Dear Americans: just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And just because you can't see it doesn't mean I don't know Polish folks in Dublin who've been hassled for looking too Polish. Or that I don't know someone you'd probably call "white" have his shoulder dislocated because some young arsewipes thought he looked too foreign.

Not that I'm celebrating the fact that more visible regional variation usually equals more bullshit reasons for othering people. I'm saying don't use the bullshit argument that because you can't see diversity in the real world, there should be less diversity in fictional worlds. Because bullshit.

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I'm watching Marple, and recognising why it irks me so. Agatha Christie's work is astonishingly classist, and though the television series has toned down the xenophobia I remember from the novels, it's still there. Miss Marple, like many other cosy detective stories, elides the reality of all the intersecting oppressions that make a "respectable" rural middle and upper class possible. Marple is fundamentally unchallenging, fundamentally reinforcing a nostalgia for power structures in which people knew their places, in which "girls of that class" can be spoken of with a certain smug certainty. Those people aren't like us, don't you know, Freddy.

I identify with the murderers too much. Even the child-killing ones. Because I'm one of those kind of people too, aren't I? Not respectable. Not polite.

I mean, it's lovely to see a mature lady be the smart star. But *shudder* the values of the "respectable" middle class...

So very alien.

Oh, Americans.

I am watching episode four of Undercovers, a mildly entertaining spy show. This episode happens to be set in Dublin. And aside from the accents - which, as usual, for Americans doing Dublin seem to be mostly stuck with country (not that anyone not used to it can interpret some types of Dub) - the guns. Oh, my. Armed gardaí, armed prison service officers... (I have been inside Mountjoy. It was a thing my secondary school did, to intimidate sixteen-year-olds into a respect for Law Und Ordnung. It still looks very much like a nineteenth-century prison - ie, not like that - but, you know. Television.) Guns, guns, guns.

And we are only five minutes in. What is it with the American obsession with lethal force?

(And. Er. Easiest prison break ever? Strikes one as excessively implausible. Research, people! Versimilitude!)

ETA: Oh, the accents. This is actively painful. If they're working for the Dept. of Justice, they may as well have kept their American accents. God knows it's not as though they're implausibly rare hereabouts.

(I do not like seeing what I know well misrepresented. Especially since television is the closest many USians will ever get to foreign travel. But, well. Television, god help us. And television pubs seem to be so much more accepting than the ones I visit, alas.)

(And at last, in the pub, an authentic accent. The owner. I may not survive the shock.)

My thesis may not only be suitable for toilet paper after all. I declare myself to be relieved. Also slightly terrified, because now I have to make the mess that is draft 1.0 into a solid, intelligible, hopefully scholarly 2.0.

It should take about six weeks. Anyone want to read it when it's done?

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In other news, this week's Criminal Minds episode was made of win. Even better than last week's one.

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I have no brain. Perhaps I should look for it in the gym tomorrow.

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I also need to find an extra two hundred euro somewhere to take a society trip to Budapest. It is now to take place after the thesis deadline, so I can contemplate going. On the other hand, maybe I should save the money and the itinerary and take a solo trip at the end of summer, so as not to miss any classes and not to kill any persons whom I usually like but probably would not tolerate well in a hostel dorm-room...

Dear "Bones",

Ground penetrating radar does not work like that.

I realise I have never watched your show before, and this being season five, possibly I am missing the fact that it is supposed to take place in an alternate reality where GPR is and does something else entirely to what it does in this reality.

Nevertheless. Does not work like that.

Yours,

A viewer who may not, actually, watch to the end of the episode.

ETA: On the other hand, the bit with the feral cats munching on corpse? Kind of made of win.

So, since I received small-but-unexpected monies yesterday, I bought myself a present.

Primeval series one. Six episodes of dinosaurs, time travel, snarky civil servants and incredibly stupid (or at least single-minded) academics.

It's kind of hilarious. I watched it all last night. And I really liked the snarky civil servants. The guys the audience is supposed to identify with, though? The only reason they do not all die three times an episode is because this is television.

The special effects are kind of crap, but if the characters are stupid, they're entertainingly so; the actors can act, and the dialogue is pretty good, more than occasionally witty, and sometimes freaking brilliant. I'd definitely watch more of this.

Well, wasn't that a fascinating weekend?

(That's sarcasm, if you're wondering.)

I did a chapter and a half of Greek, and all of 600 words of the most boring assignment this year. I did some running, some walking, some necessary errands. I ate a lot. I misplaced my brain.

Now we look forward to another week of early starts and late evenings, and trying to not let the anxiety grow unmanageably large.

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I also watched some more of the Sarah Connor Chronicles. It has flaws, but you know, it's really quite good. Unlike Dollhouse, the first episode of which I underhandedly acquired. That is terrible television. Terrible.

This is easily one of the sharpest, smartest, and most ambiguous television series I've seen in years.

Andrew Buchan plays John Mercer, a former special forces soldier who spends five years in prison for murder. His early release is arranged by Lenny Douglas (Peter Mullan), a former police officer who now runs an extra-judicial task force aimed at combating organised crime. Mercer's continued freedom is contingent on his role as this group's hitman.

Jody Latham turns in a sharp performance as Calum, a cheeky chap who does 'this and that' for Lenny. His main interests are drugs, girls and music, but over the course of the six episodes we see an increasingly complex damaged young man underneath. Tamzin Outhwaite as Rose, a former copper who departed the force in scandal, gives an uncomfortably well-realised and complex portrayal.

Mercer's increasingly complicated and ambiguous relationship with both Rose and Lenny and the job they're doing is the heart of the thing. His relationship with his sister (Liz White) and her children is his sole tie to a normal life, and Mercer becomes less and less comfortable with the nature of his work and all the things Lenny holds back, especially after his encounter with Lenny's former hitman, now an uncontrollable spree murderer.

The series is an argument about the justifiability of vigilanteism, and flawed people doing morally questionable things in the conviction that they're necessary. It's beautifully shot and lit - one of the producers on the 'Making Of' DVD extra said that they were trying for an atmosphere of 'poetic realism', and that's actually a pretty apt description - and it doesn't take the easy way out of the hard questions.

Apparently, it's coming back for a second series. I hope it manages to keep up the tightrope-walk of ambiguity, complexity, and self-awareness while still keeping its characters both sympathetic and real: I have high hopes it might just manage to pull it off.

It's truly excellent television, and I seriously recommend it.

The problem of "Merlin" is not that it mangles Arthurian myth: many retellings have taken liberties as great. The problem is not that its plots are predictable, for television is frequently predictable; nor is the problem that its language and register are jarringly anachronistic: this is fantasy, after all, and not very tightly historically located fantasy at that.

No, the problem of "Merlin" is that it is lazy. It is lazy in its treatment of knighthood and courtly behaviour, and it is lazy in its treatment of women. It is especially lazy in its treatment of women. Morgana and Gwen are cyphers, blank pages whose motivations and desires are opaque to non-existent. They are not active players: occasionally they show a spark of agency, just enough for you to see how little the role is challenging the actor; but mostly they are tokens, existing to be rescued, or competed for, in the context of the homosocial world of Uther's court and the Arthur-Merlin focus. There are no strong, active women in Uther's court: the only women whose agency has impact on the story are the "evil" witches (who I actually find quite sympathetic. Nimue could even be likeable, if she wasn't such a cypher).

(It's telling, too, I think, that the only non-pale characters of note are Morgana's maid, and the blacksmith. Lazy. Why not let the court physician be a foreigner? A Moor, even, and use the medieval stereotype/fascination with Arab medicine. But I forget: all Arabs are terrorists, right? At least on most TV. Certainly they aren't sensible fatherly old men.)

So much for the problems. A half-minute's thought could come up with half a dozen ways to make it more complex and more interesting. (Personally, I think it would have been interesting if instead of being simply Uther's ward, Morgana was also a noble hostage of some kind. Because then even a half-decent writer could insert some emotional complexity.)

And Gwen. It seems all dramatic presentations of Guinevere are doomed to blandness. For gods' sakes, in the romantic tradition the women committed treason for the sake of love. With Arthur's best friend. How can you screw that up? But it seems you can.

Which is not to say I don't like "Merlin". I do. The actors have energy and comic timing and convey a sense that they are having incredible fun. (And Richard Wilson as Gaius can do more with a look than many actors can with a paragraph.) I find it ridiculously entertaining, and I would have fallen head-over-heels in love with it at age ten or twelve.

But that doesn't mean I'm blind to its faults. Which are glaring, and disappointing many.

(Of course, I still want to watch the rest of it.)

Happy birthday, atheilen. Feel better soon!

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So, I discovered the BBC has a new series on Robin Hood. The seventh episode of season two is the only one I've watched so far, but man, it's dreadful.

Precisely the kind of dreadful I have a bad habit of loving. Man, I do not need to go on a Robin of Sherwood kick. Seriously. There is like research involved in that.

Haven't I enough to do already?

No? Okay, then. *starts reading*