I slept about three hours last night. I slept about three hours the night before. I don't think I slept a lot on Tuesday. This post is apparently composed of things that have annoyed me over the past week. Why the hell not.
1. Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (1981). The title caught my eye in the drama section of the Harvard Book Store on Saturday; I had never heard of it and thought instantly it might be about Alan Turing. It is in fact about a young woman who joins the ATS, is assigned (unknowingly) to the Ultra project at Bletchley Park, and is completely screwed over by her intelligence, her independence, and her refusal to conform to feminine stereotypes even in an ostensibly more open-minded environment than the munitions factory she was expected to sign up for, along with all the other girls in her town, in the first act. I would not have found this story any more cheerful, but I would feel much more positively toward it if it had not also contained a brilliant, socially gauche codebreaker named John Michael Turner who invented the title game and explains it in the exact words used by Turing in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and is straight, sleeps with the heroine, and betrays her with the same thoughtlessly sexist male privilege as his colleagues. Okay excuse me what? I have enough problems already with Enigma (2001), which substitutes a fictional heterosexual hero for Turing. (Seriously, I don't care if Tom Stoppard wrote the script, it is not okay to have the pivotal cryptographer with two girlfriends casually allude to one of them that he's solving the Entscheidungsproblem.) Is there a point in substituting a fictional heterosexual schmuck?
2. Whoever owns the car I saw parked outside of Not Your Average Joe's in Arlington Center on Wednesday, covered in campaign stickers with the slogan written across its back windshield: "VOTE ROMNEY—IT'S A MITT-ZVAH."
I am not sure how political I am in public. It is probably obvious that I feel strongly about certain rights. My very first reaction:
YOU FAIL TIKKUN OLAM FOREVER I HOPE THE GHOST OF EMMA GOLDMAN NEVER LETS YOU SLEEP.
3. The fact that I am not in New York City right now, seeing Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, because somehow this month became just as complicated as September and I don't have teleportation.
And the middle of this week was just demoralizing. On the other hand, I am meeting Matthew this afternoon and this evening I am going (for a change) to the opening night of the Post-Meridian Radio Players' Tomes of Terror: New Arrivals and I just found out people are still buying copies of A Mayse-Bikhl, so here's the traditional wish for a better weekend.
[edit] And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sigerson just sent me Tiny Charles Darwin! The afternoon is definitely looking up.
1. Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game (1981). The title caught my eye in the drama section of the Harvard Book Store on Saturday; I had never heard of it and thought instantly it might be about Alan Turing. It is in fact about a young woman who joins the ATS, is assigned (unknowingly) to the Ultra project at Bletchley Park, and is completely screwed over by her intelligence, her independence, and her refusal to conform to feminine stereotypes even in an ostensibly more open-minded environment than the munitions factory she was expected to sign up for, along with all the other girls in her town, in the first act. I would not have found this story any more cheerful, but I would feel much more positively toward it if it had not also contained a brilliant, socially gauche codebreaker named John Michael Turner who invented the title game and explains it in the exact words used by Turing in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and is straight, sleeps with the heroine, and betrays her with the same thoughtlessly sexist male privilege as his colleagues. Okay excuse me what? I have enough problems already with Enigma (2001), which substitutes a fictional heterosexual hero for Turing. (Seriously, I don't care if Tom Stoppard wrote the script, it is not okay to have the pivotal cryptographer with two girlfriends casually allude to one of them that he's solving the Entscheidungsproblem.) Is there a point in substituting a fictional heterosexual schmuck?
2. Whoever owns the car I saw parked outside of Not Your Average Joe's in Arlington Center on Wednesday, covered in campaign stickers with the slogan written across its back windshield: "VOTE ROMNEY—IT'S A MITT-ZVAH."
I am not sure how political I am in public. It is probably obvious that I feel strongly about certain rights. My very first reaction:
YOU FAIL TIKKUN OLAM FOREVER I HOPE THE GHOST OF EMMA GOLDMAN NEVER LETS YOU SLEEP.
3. The fact that I am not in New York City right now, seeing Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, because somehow this month became just as complicated as September and I don't have teleportation.
And the middle of this week was just demoralizing. On the other hand, I am meeting Matthew this afternoon and this evening I am going (for a change) to the opening night of the Post-Meridian Radio Players' Tomes of Terror: New Arrivals and I just found out people are still buying copies of A Mayse-Bikhl, so here's the traditional wish for a better weekend.
[edit] And
sigerson just sent me Tiny Charles Darwin! The afternoon is definitely looking up.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}