Dog is a good old cat

[sovay]

My afternoon blew up on me. At least I spent the remainder of it with a_reasonable_man, drinking iced herbal chai and learning about Sam Houston and the gonzo run-up of Texas to the Civil War; I got to meet his [not Houston's] daughter's French bulldog and eat homemade biscotti and I had to borrow an umbrella to wait for the bus because the weather in Cambridge had by then returned to its regularly scheduled monsoon, but I am reliably informed there was a rainbow afterward. In the evening I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) with my mother. spatch brought me coconut-lime ice cream when he got out of work. Autolycus has been attempting to distract me from the composition of this post with earnest headbutts and a purr that would put bandsaws to shame.

1. I am charmed by this comic about the Julio-Claudians.

2. I am really charmed by this epic hockey cross-stitch, whose perpetrator I am proud to know.

3. Courtesy of umadoshi: the woman who invented slash.

4. This is some excellent sociopolitical jewelry analysis.

5. E. M. Forster famously thought that Dickens hardly ever wrote three-dimensional characters, the kind he called round; instead he thought Dickens had a genius for flat characters presented so cleverly that the reader could be fooled into recognizing them as human beings as might be found in the reader's own life when they were nothing but vivid types in two dimensions.

I am sympathetic to this argument, to a point.

"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"

"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."

"And why not?"

"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Comments

[ethelmay]

I remember the Seattle Weekly publishing an article about K/S fic in the mid 1980s. Joanna Russ got mentioned a lot, IIRC.

[teenybuffalo]

I read somewhere (it was the Joanna Russ RIP thread on Making Light, I seem to recall -- it's a wild internet rumor, so it must be true) that in her later years, Joanna Russ was interviewed and the interviewer tried to get her to talk about her original work or literary theory or feminism or genre, and Russ only wanted to talk about Angel/Spike, which by then had become her OTP.

[sovay]

in her later years, Joanna Russ was interviewed and the interviewer tried to get her to talk about her original work or literary theory or feminism or genre, and Russ only wanted to talk about Angel/Spike, which by then had become her OTP.

I very much hope that's true.

[ethelmay]

Patrick Nielsen Hayden: "I never saw her after we moved away from Seattle in 1983. But a few years ago, at a Wiscon, Chip Delany conducted a public interview with her over a phone hookup. Avedon Carol and I watched from the back of the large function room, and nearly killed ourselves laughing at Chip's distinct bemusement over the fact that the single thing Joanna seemed most avidly interested in talking about was BtVS [Buffy the Vampire Slayer].

"(Chip is of course capable of containing multitudes etc., and was entirely gracious. It was funny because one so rarely sees Chip knocked even a millimeter off his poise.)"

Teresa Nielsen Hayden: "I have a small knack: if you show me the patterns or shapes of something, I can sometimes tell you what other things share them. That night, I listened to her analyzing and pattern-fitting this slash fanfic; and when she finished describing how arbitrary (and therefore required) the deaths of one or both characters were in stories where they didn't act on their mutual attraction, I said "Which is not to say that The Left Hand of Darkness is a Kirk-and-Spock novel."

"Joanna's jaw dropped, and we stared at each other in wild surmise. Then we dived straight into it, talking as fast as we could..."

[cyphomandra]

That is fabulous!!

[teenybuffalo]

I found it! Here on this thread from 2011, in memoriam. It's actually in Patrick Nielsen Hayden's next comment, but I linked to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's comment because it gives context (and is generally heartwarming).

https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012974.html#547586