Stand by, no way, stop

[sovay]

So my family made the decision not to hold a seder tomorrow night because my mother is still coughing (I will break matzah, pour wine, and open the door to the stranger, because that is the most important thing) and I think it was just as well because I appear to have come down sick. I was invited out to a movie tonight, but instead I fell over sideways and have alternated the last few hours between staring vaguely into the middle distance while feeling nauseated and sort of sleeping, minus rest and plus whiting out when I tried to stand up. I am not thrilled.

1. Erin Horáková seriously analyzes the popular reception of Captain James T. Kirk in context of the simplifying and not apolitical rewriting of the past: "Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift." (I feel some of this same process may explain my feelings toward neo-noir vs. noir, especially where the supposed ubiquity of the femme fatale is concerned. Somebody please remind me to write about the Wachowskis' Bound (1996); I loved that movie and it's been more than half a year.) The statement below flashed out at me:

Heterosexuality has been through the fucking ringer in cultural productions in the last decades due to backlashes against feminism and queer visibility that have transformed portrayals and interpretations alike into dumbshows—crude pantomimes, as before the play. These frantic defenses have done more to render the proposition of men and women loving one another a piece of one-note unsustainable ridiculousness than women's lib and LGBTQ rights ever could.

Boyd McDonald was making much the same frustrated point in the 1980's. I am not pleased that the problem has worsened again since. Also I had not actually realized that not everyone thinks of William Shatner as Jewish.

2. These poems were not published back-to-back, but I read them that way and they resonate interestingly: Robert Peake's "Homesickness" and Dante Di Stefano's "National Poetry Month."

3. I was just trying to run down a reference using Google Books. I ran into a biography of Wilfred Owen. Oh, hey, I thought to myself, I should read one of those sometime. Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) doesn't count. I began flicking through the randomly available pages and then—

Robert Graves: "Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were homosexuals; though Sassoon tried to think he wasn't. To them, seeing men killed was as horrible as if you or I had to see fields of corpses of women."

JESUS H. MAGDALENE GRAVES.

Seriously, every time I try to parse that, it just gets worse. I feel sufficiently lousy that I would be going to bed right now no matter what, but really, Robert Graves, you're not helping! [edit] The former Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me! Goodnight.

Comments

[kore]

I am so sorry you are sick! I was getting better but had a relapse, but nothing like you and your mom, sounds like. Bleah.

Graves, not unlike Lawrence, is a fine poet and a bit of a shit human being, and he was always very weird about possibly being bi- or homosexual himself, like Lawrence was. It's like this bizarre pre-WWI British male cultural Thing. OH NOES I AM ARTISTIC AND FIND MEN HOT I MIGHT CATCH TEH GAY.* So they became hypermasculine in consequence in ways that make you go "...." like the way Graves writes about Sassoon and the wrestling scene in Women in Love. I don't know.

That essay was quite interesting -- it's very true the progressiveness of the original Trek (including the casting of Uhura and how the original deck crew is supposed to look like the UN) gets erased and turned into a weird notion of planetsfull of willing alien women and miniskirted = available crew women and so on. I was pretty surprised they didn't mention Janeway even once, though, and the discussion in the comments is disappointingly dismissive -- Janeway isn't written as a coherent character and so she's not really worth bringing up? Hunh. (Early Janeway is at leas as consistent as TOS Kirk, I think.)

*You can also see this a bit in US male literary culture a bit later? like in the 20s.

[moon_custafer]

Wilde's trial and imprisonment were not only rotten for Wilde, but for everyone else -- I think we're still seeing the fallout from that particular bit of society-wide gay panic. See every article about modern* straight men being unable to show affection for each other.

*In North America and the UK, anyhow. Also, I'm fascinated/depressed by the apparent greater freedom for men to hug each other in countries where homosexuality is outlawed. It's probably the only way for the ban to be tenable -- after all, if public displays of affection with your best buddy is just Normal Manly Stuff, a lot can hide in plain sight, the authorities only have to arrest people they want to, and the real size of the LGBT population is unknown, thus never recognized as normal. Of course some places seem to have the worst of both worlds.

[sovay]

I am so sorry you are sick! I was getting better but had a relapse, but nothing like you and your mom, sounds like. Bleah.

I am so tired. I am just dead-in-the-water tired and having a lot of trouble even wanting to get out of my chair. The nausea has mostly faded, but I haven't very much like eating anything since my peanut-butter-and-matzah sandwich when I got up. I slept possibly eight hours and don't feel like it.

Graves, not unlike Lawrence, is a fine poet and a bit of a shit human being, and he was always very weird about possibly being bi- or homosexual himself, like Lawrence was.

DAMMIT GUYS IT IS NOT THE WORST THING. IT IS DEFINITELY NOT WORSE THAN ALL THOSE METAPHORS ABOUT YOUR PENIS YES LAWRENCE I AM LOOKING AT YOU.

it's very true the progressiveness of the original Trek (including the casting of Uhura and how the original deck crew is supposed to look like the UN) gets erased and turned into a weird notion of planetsfull of willing alien women and miniskirted = available crew women and so on.

The casual dismissing of the progressiveness of the past is something my mother has actually been talking about recently, because it angers her very much. She doesn't talk about it so much in terms of making the present look better by (false) comparison; she feels it's part of the same deep reactionary conservatism we are currently suffering through because it claims that the past was always grey flannel and martinis, always brightly smiling housewives, always unquestioned racism and sexism across the board and in so doing it normalizes the fake conservative idea of the "traditional" past so that it becomes just that much easier to persuade people that all these queer voices of non-Christian color really are some kind of weird recent invention and not always part of history. People have always been radical and marginalized and taking up as much space as they could, even if that space wasn't well-recorded or very much. She is watching decades of which she has vivid memories being mythologized and mischaracterized and used to beat back the same advances that occurred during that time and she is not happy about it.

I was pretty surprised they didn't mention Janeway even once, though, and the discussion in the comments is disappointingly dismissive -- Janeway isn't written as a coherent character and so she's not really worth bringing up? Hunh. (Early Janeway is at leas as consistent as TOS Kirk, I think.)

I agree that Voyager as a show is so weirdly fragmented that it's hard to say anything about it that the next week's episode couldn't disprove, but that doesn't mean it's not worth talking about. I was shown a handful of episodes a few years ago by a friend who knew which were the interesting ones and which ones should be avoided at all costs and some of the interesting ones were, to my great surprise and pleasure, among the best science fiction I'd seen on TV.

You can also see this a bit in US male literary culture a bit later? like in the 20s.

Honestly, I think it's still with us.

[ethelmay]

Even the gray flannel also involved men and boys wearing pink shirts, a fact I sometimes have trouble getting people to believe. Not that the pink shirts were so very progressive in themselves, but I am sure you can see what I mean.

[sovay]

Not that the pink shirts were so very progressive in themselves, but I am sure you can see what I mean.

Yes. (And I have seen the photographic evidence of those shirts.)