I looked in the trap, Ray
After a day and a half of sleepless headache, I have spent most of today in bed, which I am sure will be terrible for both my sleep schedule and my work productivity, but since it seems to have made the headache go away, at the moment I don't care. I have watched my first movies of the new year and this post is not about either of them.
Very unsurprisingly, my favorite thing about the original Ghostbusters (1984) is Harold Ramis' Egon Spengler. Deadpan Jewish ultra-nerd who wears all the sweater vests the '50's forgot, appears to subsist exclusively on junk food tempered by Chinese takeout, and firmly believes that self-trepanation is a reasonable life hack? Come on. He even collects spores, molds, and fungus, which is a godsend to a viewer who once farmed a terrarium of Dictyostelium discoideum in their parents' basement. (I fed it on E. coli, which I ordered through the mail from the Carolina Biological Supply Company. It arrived in vials and made the basement smell like gym socks. I am not sure that's even legal anymore.) I like his working friendship with Ray, in which they demonstrate the happy coexistence of different modes of mad science; I like his awkward, delicate relationship with Janine, which looks as though it might progress into a romance sometime around the next ice age. About the only thing about him that does not give me joy is his declaration that "Print is dead," although at least I have the fun of wondering what exactly he meant by that in 1984—does he listen to books on tape while doing dangerous things to the laws of physics? He doesn't look like someone who would go for movies, although then again neither did Wittgenstein. Maybe he's just really into video games. I did not grow up on Ghostbusters in the same way that I grew up on Singin' in the Rain (1952) or Splash (1984) or Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but I managed even on glancing high-school acquaintance to imprint on Egon as both a favorite character and a kind of encouraging model. I mean, I like candy bars significantly less than he does and the most complicated piece of technology I ever built was a radio telescope, but I went for smart and weird every time I had the option and Egon was definitely that.
I remembered while walking over to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and rushthatspeaks for dinner last night (Fox was there, too, but they don't eat linguine with roasted squash and fennel) that while the original and the reboot Ghostbusters exist in different continuities and the death of Harold Ramis meant Egon couldn't be alive in either of them, I still really want someone to write the crossover with him haunting the reboot team, a cheerfully pedantic, Oppenheimer-haired ghost very seriously studying his own afterlife and desperately confusing Kevin by first using long words and then exiting through a wall. Mostly I just want to watch him interact with Holtzmann, because smart and weird and different modes of mad science, and with Patty, albeit mostly because I think if he said "Print is dead" around her she would read him the riot act and/or have to exorcise him from her phone once he realized how many podcasts about obscure New York and supernatural history she's got on there. If anyone has written anything like this that you know about, please point me toward it.
This train of thought courtesy of Yuletide. My Christmas season was so hectic this year that I didn't get around to most of the collection until the last night of December when reveals were already starting to come out (and I'm still behind on a lot of it), but here are a handful of recommendations that have leapt out at me.
"Second Chance." Hannibal Barca and Scipio Africanus, years after Carrhae and Zama, in iambic pentameter. If I can't get more fic with the goddess Tanit, this is not a bad substitute at all.
"work it out with your fingers." Any fic written for Blazing Saddles (1974) from the perspective of the Waco Kid has two very high bars to clear: matching the freewheeling anachronism and fourth-wall-breaking of the original movie and sounding like Gene Wilder. This fic does both with ease and sounds like Cleavon Little and has enough Yiddishkeit for Mel Brooks besides. Possibly not quite enough dick jokes. A shirt hanging over a cactus will do.
"Statistical Methods in Risk Assessment." I have not yet seen the second season of The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), but I have read Leo Marks and Elizabeth E. Wein and Ben Macintyre and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants' SOE looks right to me. Unless the show gets an unexpected revival and official third season, I am considering this story it.
"Say to Them." Having learned about the Ea-nasir tablet more than ten years ago in grad school, I am delighted beyond words that it has a Yuletide fandom, especially when the fic is as good at the alienness of the ancient world as this one. The material culture is especially well done. "For his part, he could not tell good copper from bad copper, for all ingots looked very much the same to him, as all clay tablets look very much the same to one who cannot read what is written upon them, but it did not matter very much to him. Ea-Nasir did not pay him in copper."
"Twitterati." The cast of Father Ted (1995–98) discover Twitter. The videos are excellent noodle incident.
"Chenelo's Treasures." I don't read much fic for Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) because I loved the original novel so dearly. This story has the same understanding of the significance of small gestures and objects as symbols and also themselves. I like the circle of outside perspectives on Maia, since the novel is so tightly third-person on him. I love the folktale and would like to hear more.
"The Odds."rosefox has written about the inspirations for and process of writing this fic, so mostly I will note that I love how it dovetails the original and reboot Ghostbusters and reminded me strongly that I need to catch up on Daniel José Older's Bone Street Rumba and feels so thoroughly New York that I'm glad I'll be in Brooklyn this weekend. Also I was left wanting to order Chinese takeout.
"Sequitur." I have not seen It Follows (2014). What I like about this fic is not just the metaphysics, but the utter inhumanity of its voice. It doesn't read to me as horror. I can't tell if it's meant to, or if not doing so is part of the point.
"Merrily in Springtime." Maybe I don't look in the right places, but I haven't seen a lot of Robin Hood retellings based explicitly on the Child ballads rather than Howard Pyle or general culture heroism. This one takes its template from "Robin Hood and the Butcher" and contains the best explanation I have ever run across for the Sheriff's repeated inability to recognize a man he has met many times before. The central political argument is not irrelevant these days.
"Savage Lovecast Episode 69: Pounded in the Butt By Savage Lovecast Episode 69 [Transcript]." Dan Savage meets the Tingleverse. Go forth and delight. "Congratulations. That is new. How do you sit down?"
"oh it's fun to hunt and shoot a gun, or to catch a rabbit on the run." In which it is demonstrated that against all odds it is possible to fix-it-fic Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), provided that you start right after the reprise of "Bless Your Beautiful Hide" and AU everything else for the next five months. The results are barbed and lovely, actually as diverse as the Oregon Territory was in 1850, and still somehow retain the warmth and the Technicolor that could break out into barn-raising choreography at any second. Plus this way you can imagine a dance with frontier kitchen gear and a lot of cornmeal.
"Or, What You Will." The OT3 of Singin' in the Rain (1952) star in a pre-Code musical version of Twelfth Night, with Buster Keaton as Feste and it would be giving the fun away to name the rest of the cast. I resent enormously that I cannot rent a DVD of this thing or even wait for it to turn up at the HFA. Everybody's voices are right and so is the cinematography. "Jealousy don't become us."
This post completed in spite of Autolycus earnestly and repeatedly attempting to plant his butt on my hands as I typed. I think he's trying to take up blogging.
Very unsurprisingly, my favorite thing about the original Ghostbusters (1984) is Harold Ramis' Egon Spengler. Deadpan Jewish ultra-nerd who wears all the sweater vests the '50's forgot, appears to subsist exclusively on junk food tempered by Chinese takeout, and firmly believes that self-trepanation is a reasonable life hack? Come on. He even collects spores, molds, and fungus, which is a godsend to a viewer who once farmed a terrarium of Dictyostelium discoideum in their parents' basement. (I fed it on E. coli, which I ordered through the mail from the Carolina Biological Supply Company. It arrived in vials and made the basement smell like gym socks. I am not sure that's even legal anymore.) I like his working friendship with Ray, in which they demonstrate the happy coexistence of different modes of mad science; I like his awkward, delicate relationship with Janine, which looks as though it might progress into a romance sometime around the next ice age. About the only thing about him that does not give me joy is his declaration that "Print is dead," although at least I have the fun of wondering what exactly he meant by that in 1984—does he listen to books on tape while doing dangerous things to the laws of physics? He doesn't look like someone who would go for movies, although then again neither did Wittgenstein. Maybe he's just really into video games. I did not grow up on Ghostbusters in the same way that I grew up on Singin' in the Rain (1952) or Splash (1984) or Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but I managed even on glancing high-school acquaintance to imprint on Egon as both a favorite character and a kind of encouraging model. I mean, I like candy bars significantly less than he does and the most complicated piece of technology I ever built was a radio telescope, but I went for smart and weird every time I had the option and Egon was definitely that.
I remembered while walking over to meet
gaudior and rushthatspeaks for dinner last night (Fox was there, too, but they don't eat linguine with roasted squash and fennel) that while the original and the reboot Ghostbusters exist in different continuities and the death of Harold Ramis meant Egon couldn't be alive in either of them, I still really want someone to write the crossover with him haunting the reboot team, a cheerfully pedantic, Oppenheimer-haired ghost very seriously studying his own afterlife and desperately confusing Kevin by first using long words and then exiting through a wall. Mostly I just want to watch him interact with Holtzmann, because smart and weird and different modes of mad science, and with Patty, albeit mostly because I think if he said "Print is dead" around her she would read him the riot act and/or have to exorcise him from her phone once he realized how many podcasts about obscure New York and supernatural history she's got on there. If anyone has written anything like this that you know about, please point me toward it.This train of thought courtesy of Yuletide. My Christmas season was so hectic this year that I didn't get around to most of the collection until the last night of December when reveals were already starting to come out (and I'm still behind on a lot of it), but here are a handful of recommendations that have leapt out at me.
"Second Chance." Hannibal Barca and Scipio Africanus, years after Carrhae and Zama, in iambic pentameter. If I can't get more fic with the goddess Tanit, this is not a bad substitute at all.
"work it out with your fingers." Any fic written for Blazing Saddles (1974) from the perspective of the Waco Kid has two very high bars to clear: matching the freewheeling anachronism and fourth-wall-breaking of the original movie and sounding like Gene Wilder. This fic does both with ease and sounds like Cleavon Little and has enough Yiddishkeit for Mel Brooks besides. Possibly not quite enough dick jokes. A shirt hanging over a cactus will do.
"Statistical Methods in Risk Assessment." I have not yet seen the second season of The Bletchley Circle (2012–14), but I have read Leo Marks and Elizabeth E. Wein and Ben Macintyre and
skygiants' SOE looks right to me. Unless the show gets an unexpected revival and official third season, I am considering this story it."Say to Them." Having learned about the Ea-nasir tablet more than ten years ago in grad school, I am delighted beyond words that it has a Yuletide fandom, especially when the fic is as good at the alienness of the ancient world as this one. The material culture is especially well done. "For his part, he could not tell good copper from bad copper, for all ingots looked very much the same to him, as all clay tablets look very much the same to one who cannot read what is written upon them, but it did not matter very much to him. Ea-Nasir did not pay him in copper."
"Twitterati." The cast of Father Ted (1995–98) discover Twitter. The videos are excellent noodle incident.
"Chenelo's Treasures." I don't read much fic for Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) because I loved the original novel so dearly. This story has the same understanding of the significance of small gestures and objects as symbols and also themselves. I like the circle of outside perspectives on Maia, since the novel is so tightly third-person on him. I love the folktale and would like to hear more.
"The Odds."
rosefox has written about the inspirations for and process of writing this fic, so mostly I will note that I love how it dovetails the original and reboot Ghostbusters and reminded me strongly that I need to catch up on Daniel José Older's Bone Street Rumba and feels so thoroughly New York that I'm glad I'll be in Brooklyn this weekend. Also I was left wanting to order Chinese takeout."Sequitur." I have not seen It Follows (2014). What I like about this fic is not just the metaphysics, but the utter inhumanity of its voice. It doesn't read to me as horror. I can't tell if it's meant to, or if not doing so is part of the point.
"Merrily in Springtime." Maybe I don't look in the right places, but I haven't seen a lot of Robin Hood retellings based explicitly on the Child ballads rather than Howard Pyle or general culture heroism. This one takes its template from "Robin Hood and the Butcher" and contains the best explanation I have ever run across for the Sheriff's repeated inability to recognize a man he has met many times before. The central political argument is not irrelevant these days.
"Savage Lovecast Episode 69: Pounded in the Butt By Savage Lovecast Episode 69 [Transcript]." Dan Savage meets the Tingleverse. Go forth and delight. "Congratulations. That is new. How do you sit down?"
"oh it's fun to hunt and shoot a gun, or to catch a rabbit on the run." In which it is demonstrated that against all odds it is possible to fix-it-fic Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), provided that you start right after the reprise of "Bless Your Beautiful Hide" and AU everything else for the next five months. The results are barbed and lovely, actually as diverse as the Oregon Territory was in 1850, and still somehow retain the warmth and the Technicolor that could break out into barn-raising choreography at any second. Plus this way you can imagine a dance with frontier kitchen gear and a lot of cornmeal.
"Or, What You Will." The OT3 of Singin' in the Rain (1952) star in a pre-Code musical version of Twelfth Night, with Buster Keaton as Feste and it would be giving the fun away to name the rest of the cast. I resent enormously that I cannot rent a DVD of this thing or even wait for it to turn up at the HFA. Everybody's voices are right and so is the cinematography. "Jealousy don't become us."
This post completed in spite of Autolycus earnestly and repeatedly attempting to plant his butt on my hands as I typed. I think he's trying to take up blogging.
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My guess is that the disappearance of books was something that future-shock types were all forecasting at the time the movie was made; like the paperless office (ha ha). Trepanning as life-hack *was* and maybe still is a Thing; I heard a proponent interviewed on CBC radio in the nineties.
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I appreciate that all the cameos could be canonical for the 1984 film. How else would that cab driver know so much about apparition classes?
I'm so glad you liked my story. :)
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This is pretty much the exact spot of my multi-generational Ghostbusters kink.
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As you do.
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