![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Be safe, be seen, be anyone you like
While looking for something else, I found a page of notes I made to myself last summer, it looks like on the way to/during NecronomiCon. The first one reads as though it might have been shaping up to be a post, but I have (appropriately) no idea where it was going:
There are ways in which traveling by myself, especially at night, feels better than going anywhere else any other way. This strikes me as dangerous and also in some way irresponsible: one of the classic noir fantasies is to walk right out of your life and into someone else's and in most of these stories someone forgets to mind the gap. Taking the night train is itself like traveling into a dream. Outside of the safe confines of routine, you might be anyone. Might even surprise yourself. Pleasantly or unpleasantly, the journey doesn't care. Like Dionysos. When the walls fall down, it's just you against the sky, and you'd better be strong enough to stand on your own. So many characters in these dream plays find out they aren't.
In other news, I just read my own dream record dating back to 1999 (some years nothing written down, some years it's like I was never even awake) and I think I have some kind of reflective hangover. What I wish I had was the breathing room to write fiction. I feel terribly as though I am forgetting, or have already forgotten, how.
[edit] I took a hot shower and reminded myself that I am underslept and still sick to the point that I may bail on tomorrow's chorus rehearsal and that tonight's Hanukkah party was a success but also intensely full of people: in other words, not in good condition for accurate self-evaluation. I suspect it did not help to transcribe a bunch of half-finished introspection. I am going to read some more Raymond Durgnat, who delighted me almost on page one by suggesting that one could read Psycho (1960) as a werewolf story, as I do, and see what I can do about the sleep end of this problem.
There are ways in which traveling by myself, especially at night, feels better than going anywhere else any other way. This strikes me as dangerous and also in some way irresponsible: one of the classic noir fantasies is to walk right out of your life and into someone else's and in most of these stories someone forgets to mind the gap. Taking the night train is itself like traveling into a dream. Outside of the safe confines of routine, you might be anyone. Might even surprise yourself. Pleasantly or unpleasantly, the journey doesn't care. Like Dionysos. When the walls fall down, it's just you against the sky, and you'd better be strong enough to stand on your own. So many characters in these dream plays find out they aren't.
In other news, I just read my own dream record dating back to 1999 (some years nothing written down, some years it's like I was never even awake) and I think I have some kind of reflective hangover. What I wish I had was the breathing room to write fiction. I feel terribly as though I am forgetting, or have already forgotten, how.
[edit] I took a hot shower and reminded myself that I am underslept and still sick to the point that I may bail on tomorrow's chorus rehearsal and that tonight's Hanukkah party was a success but also intensely full of people: in other words, not in good condition for accurate self-evaluation. I suspect it did not help to transcribe a bunch of half-finished introspection. I am going to read some more Raymond Durgnat, who delighted me almost on page one by suggesting that one could read Psycho (1960) as a werewolf story, as I do, and see what I can do about the sleep end of this problem.
no subject
Re: your last paragraph, I'm glad you know that the circumstances aren't right for self evaluation. I know you know also that moods can come and sit on you (generic you), extending their Borg tubules into you and filling you with all sorts of destructive notions about yourself. Re: your penultimate paragraph, and relating to the ultimate one, you have to let the record speak for itself. You have **published** fiction every year that I've known you, I believe? Including the last couple. Maybe not all that fiction was *written* in those years, but the Vulcan in me feels it is illogical to conclude you're forgetting or have forgotten how, and that it's the nanoprobes that are giving you this perception. ... I apologize; it's the Voyager rewatch we've been doing. Please switch to a better metaphor. Little Wittgenstein is tried and true.
no subject
I just got hit with this swamping wave of you are good at none of the things you do (but you used to be better once, which is worse). There are real problems. I just decided I wasn't going to solve any of them exhausted and overpeopled at four in the morning.
Walk away from everything, even your own shadow, obliterated by the dark, and into something else.
That's so good. Please turn it into something.
... I apologize; it's the Voyager rewatch we've been doing.
How's it going?
no subject
Voyager rewatch: We embarked on it after having finished a Deep Space Nine watch-through. I had not been interested in watching Deep Space Nine back in the day, so I'd seen only a handful of episodes. I ended up really, really liking the show. Voyager, by contrast, I'd seen a lot of (though not all of), and I *thought* I liked it. On a rewatch, I've realized that I only really liked it after Seven of Nine joined the show (which just goes to show that that character was not there only for adolescent boys; I think she's brilliant). There are occasional episodes before that which I like, but the antagonists they set up in the first half of the run are just dreadful (boring and stupid), and there is *so much* entrenched, uncommented-on sexism--despite having a female captain. Mainly it shows itself in planets they visit that duplicate 1950s-TV/film sex roles--or popular conceptions of sex roles from earlier eras. Tedious. Also, Captain Janeway is, for me, annoyingly sure of her values and happy to condescend to everyone she meets when talking about those values.** It's great to have Seven of Nine around to offer pushback. Also, Seven of Nine is that rare female character who refuses, who says no, who contradicts the people around her, without apology, defensiveness, or, for that matter, self-aggrandizement or bombast--just self-assurance. It's a thing of beauty to behold.
**Admittedly that's a trait she shares with the male captains in the franchise, but I may have some internalized misogyny going on that dislikes hearing it especially from her.
ETA: I realized after blathering on that I was writing as if you hadn't seen any episodes of the show and hadn't expressed an opinion! I don't mean to be overly negative--I still do like the show overall, upon reflection... just I like it *more* once it has Seven of Nine.
no subject
Yay!
I had not been interested in watching Deep Space Nine back in the day, so I'd seen only a handful of episodes. I ended up really, really liking the show.
I bounced off it completely back in the day, but at
Mainly it shows itself in planets they visit that duplicate 1950s-TV/film sex roles--or popular conceptions of sex roles from earlier eras. Tedious.
And even more so now than in the late '90's, I suspect.
Also, Seven of Nine is that rare female character who refuses, who says no, who contradicts the people around her, without apology, defensiveness, or, for that matter, self-aggrandizement or bombast--just self-assurance. It's a thing of beauty to behold.
Similarly, I know from other people's reactions that she was valuable then, but she feels like even more of a treasure now. That kind of character written female is still unusual.
I realized after blathering on that I was writing as if you hadn't seen any episodes of the show and hadn't expressed an opinion!
I'm not insulted!
no subject
And yeah, some of those Ferengi episodes in Deep Space Nine were very good.