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- Actually a newborn baby wouldn’t dream yet, as newborns can’t. Occasionally Pratchett does say something that makes me think, ‘somehow despite being a dad you missed out on some of the labour and information associated with early childcare.’ Possibly this is a generational gender issue.
- Even though it’s Early Discworld, I had a good time with ‘Equal Rites’. This runs quite contrary to my lacklustre memories of the early Wizards books.
- This is written differently than a lot of the later titles. You lose a lot of Discworldiness and the whole referential resource of the ensemble cast and prior events, but gain a kind of—precision? There are different affordances. Weatherwax isn’t a badass yet here, but then the witches as a whole aren’t yet quite what they will be. Fundamentally, the world doesn’t yet work like it does in mid career books. Even this early, Pratchett does have trouble holding characterisation elements consistently in his brain for multiple scenes in the same book. But despite that frustrating editorial sloppiness, this prose is fairly tight and careful. The PoV and pacing are close, slow and absorbing. The way he’s working here feels less Pratchett, but very competent?
- We do the wizards duel from T.H. White (which he perhaps picks up from Tam Lin). This is a misstep. Weatherwax’s power should be fundamentally different: she should be able to compete on this level, but not by simply throwing aside her own way of doing things and disciplinary tendencies and performing identically to a wizard.
- Pratchett: hey, have a joke about Peake, because I don’t yet care about that not existing in this world. We haven’t put up that fourth wall yet.
- Why is there a fake Ridcully? He’s very Into Weatherwax, which I thought was Ridcully’s brand, but evidently she suits the popular taste. Granny as romantic lead is wild, but okay.
- I don’t know that this book actually had much to say about gender, for all it seems organised around that theme.

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- Wodehouse just does not care that this is the exact same book as ‘Something Fresh’. He knows, and he doesn’t give one shit. The chutzpah this has.
- This is both the fourth Psmith book and the second Blandings book, which is an interesting way to treat series.
- Almost every character in this could carry off protagonism. They’d be different books, but not bad ones.
- Poor Eve fades out a bit in the second half, overtaken by Psmith.
- Wodehouse is so good at being Wodehouse. Seldom has so much intelligence and training been used to accomplish so little thinking, but he is excellent at his chosen craft, and one can’t help but admire and enjoy the work for it.
- Wodehouse borrows the particular way he uses comic epitaphs (the efficient Baxter) from Dickens (OMF’s the Charmer). You can trace Dickens’ usage through a long line of Anglo Saxon epitaphs, but Dickens, and then Wodehouse, rework this tradition in a fun way. Where Dickens himself got it is something of a mystery. His education was poor, and he didn’t read all that much truly old material on account of it (that said, English education has also not historically been generally interested in homegrown species of antiquarianism, either). Maybe there’s an odd though-line here, something like Bunyan?

Relatedly, I saw someone was giving a paper on classical influences in Dickens the other day that I thought sounded dumb as hell given the ubiquitous but shallow presence of classical motifs in popular entertainment like tableaux and Dickens’ preference for the work of, say, continental contemporaries in his autodidactic efforts—not to mention his conscious choice not to ape a public school education too closely in a way that could only have shown off his lack thereof and wouldn’t have effectively communicated with many of his publics, besides. I just don’t see Dickens as having a really meaningful relationship with the Classics so much as being characterised among his peers by an absence thereof. People truly will shape popular reference points to suit a really ill-fitted research question. ‘What does Shakespeare have to teach us about cloud computing?’ It just goes to show how effectively heritage industry!Dickens is obscuring the actual person and his class situation over time, retroactively claiming him for the sort of incredibly classed intellectual culture he never participated in. A few years ago in an exhibition I saw a characterisation of his conflicts with first-wave pre-Raphaelites that didn’t even mention class, which is like making a strawberry shortcake out of shoes. I mean, good fucking luck working that one out.

Citoyen

Jul. 29th, 2023 12:34 am
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I became a UK dual citizen Wednesday. Several people, including the officiants at the time, have congratulated me on this, which feels weird. I’ve lived here my entire adult life, almost as long as I lived in America. Nothing changes due to this, I just get a degree of insurance in terms of retaining custody of my house and son in the event of an emergency (and the ability to vote myself instead of just doing the research and telling Katy who and what we’re voting for). Even citizenship is imperfect: revocable, as the Begum case taught us, at the pleasure of MI5 or whoever the fuck finds you inconvenient. Over £1k, this cost, on top of indefinite leave to remain and the over a decade of visas that preceded that. I have spent something like a year’s good wages, all told, on simply staying in this country. I have avoided even going near any protest that might get violent to avoid giving the UK any just reason to deport me, including my own union demos (after the cops started catch and release kettling, it wasn’t safe to go to big ones: any police record is a police record). I have lived over a decade of my life in pointless suspense, and the state has chiefly been to me a threat and action of restriction and violence rather than a mechanism by which to enact community. I can’t uwu that shit.

Of course the ceremony includes a Tory civic mayor in fur and gold chain who claims to be called Tony but is unequivocally one of nature’s Pumblechooks. A good room—Morris paper up to the dado line. Some nice tiling and decorative moulding. Appropriate paint choice on the green door. You naturally have to swear an oath of loyalty on Almighty God to King Charles and his heirs in a collective Pledge of Allegiance mumble, and then google the lyrics to ‘God Save The King’ on your phone. Thankfully, you are only asked to favour the company with the first verse thereof. Katy reminded me that I could choose the God-Free version of the oath, but I am too gay to turn down an opportunity for high camp just to Is Pepsi Okay? a situation. If I’m swearing loyalty to the Royal Family in perpetuity I’m chewing some scenery, this will be an Ainley!Master sort of performance.

A Tory minister’s deathmask of a face grimaces a welcome at you from a flier full of vacuous bullshit. Brown she may be, but that hasn’t stopped her from giving fascism a good whirl. She patently wishes everyone here dead, so fuck her too. The ceremony comes with free orange juice, apple juice or water. Only the water is not from concentrate, and only because no one has yet managed to concentrate it. Katy thinks they could have sprung for Prosecco; I am shocked they offered anything at all. The officials gave, Katy observed, the impression of never having done this before despite having done it literally an hour earlier, and presumably on many other occasions.

You can’t take the piss too much—despite being told we can only have two guests people bring huge families, every mate they have. A professional photographer takes photos of the handshake while his assistant successfully amuses children with a stuffed toy, giving the performance his all. We’ve all been through nasty, expensive and demeaning processes to be here, and to me this ceremony is nothing, almost insulting to have to do. To some of them it’s evidently little girls in the Muslim equivalent of Quinceañera dresses levels of important. If you lose this ceremonial certificate it will cost you over £200 to order a new one. Typical.

William slept through the whole thing in a sling. No one but me wore a Covid mask in the crowded, enclosed space, not even Tony the Pumblechook, the guy shaking 50 hands twice daily on a Wednesday.
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It's weird that I've never read any Thackeray--but then people don't much, anymore, to the horror of some of the older Victorianists at conferences. He's ageing out of the canon, and Trollope is sliding off to the side as well. It's about teachability, adaptation, fitness to theses and post-doctoral research, heritage industry shenanigans and the alchemy of textual endurance. Canon is an evolving thing, shaped by a lot of competing imperatives. It's always funny when people talk about Dickens and Austen as highly canonical writers, because yes, I guess it does seem like that when you buy the sausage at the supermarket, but they're quite recent additions (both of which were highly and hotly contested). They're the first to get swiped at by the general public, but they are, not coincidentally, actually also the left 'diversity' picks (chav-populist and lady-populist--Austen wasn't that posh either, which people forget). Sometimes I think they're in the vanguard at the moment because that's also, of necessity, the line of fire. You do see that a lot--the highly-exposed token woman employee whose prominence means she takes the heat for others' poor decisions, etc. It's hard, almost, for a lot of people even to name other 'canon' English writers now, as if the actual, traditional canon has slipped behind a screen (even Shakespeare is kind of Mark 1 of the same phenomenon). I'm never sure what's happening, here. I've given it some thought, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It's not like the cognoscenti are off enjoying Spenser in the back--no one can stand Spenser anymore. C.S. Lewis was the last person to actually enjoy the poem, since then it's just been that one Japanese research team composed, one must presume, entirely of masochists.

Anyway, to the extent you can determine this via the translation of adaptation, this was sort of what I'd thought Thackeray was going to be--'the greatest Victorian novelist!1' because he's posh, cold/restrained (quite relatedly--'restraint' as a class affect, the inverse of 'gosh aren't black people so loud in movie theatres??' bullshit), not particularly political (very relatedly--and no, 'satires on high society' aren't political, it's an obvious Bakhtin carnival pressure valve that enables the untroubled survival of the system as a whole, court jester-ass behaviour), holding all the characters in a suspension of universal distaste. This wasn't bad, but I don't know that I enjoyed it. The adaptation wasn't very well paced, dragging hard from the middle and wrapping up nigh-instantaneously after speed-running an excellent Philip Glenister's disenchantment with courtly love in a way that made him seem to suddenly swerve from being the best guy in the book to something of a Nice Guy entitled asshole. The casting seemed good, though I'm unfamiliar with the originals. I don't really believe that randoms in small towns in Germany know the power of Lord Whateverthefuck in such a way that he could blacken Becky's name in Baden Badtimes or whatever, no matter the extent of his malice. Even now, with the internet and increased global trade, I do not think that even literal Jeff Bezos has the reach to cut off the resourceful Becky's avenues of escape to this degree. I know it's for the Vine/plot, but even so.

Katy liked the Becky's circular return to her first, low-ambition target. She also contends that Thackeray does have time for some people (including, notably, and surprisingly, Becky's fuckboi husband, and of course Becky herself). I do see it, but for me the overall atmosphere was kind of relentlessly lowering, like suffering through more of fucking 'Jin Ping Mei' (such a monotonous tale of iniquity that by the end of it the mere mention of sex will bore you). And I guess someone will claim that's Realism, baybee, but like, it's a realism, and it's also a stylistic choice in the way Grimdark is (and it's not like I have a problem with continental realist writers, for the most part). I guess there's a chance I'm just being partisan, but also I tend to know what I'm not going to like and why going in because of what it is. If something's been praised for its austere satirical cynicism, I'm not surprised when there's a classed 'pwease steppy' vibe to the reader response. Writer's gotta be clever, bloke knew Latin. The issue, then, isn't 'how well-realised will this shrimp cocktail be?', it's that I'm deathly allergic to shrimp, or that the shrimp's gone off. (I'm not. And the shrimp can't go off, it's a metaphor. And nothing's open on a Sunday anyway.)

Liked the credits-sequence pig. And of course a hearty hello to Margoyles, Auntie MM. British period dramas always feel like weird office parties--it's that guy again, from Accounts. Him with the chin. No, the OTHER chin--

Baby didn't seem to fancy it either. Pitched a fit during the finale. More like William Makewar--

EDIT: Also it's super weird in the adaptation for Becky to be sobbing and upset in the 'I am innocent' period, because in this context she definitively isn't, even if things got out of hand, and she's frankly too smart to be surprised that a messy situation came to a fairly inevitable conclusion. What did she think would happen?

Katy also wondered where all this money was going.

Event-ual

Jul. 1st, 2023 11:37 pm
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I didn't mention, but on the 12th of May my partner Katy gave birth to our son (healthy but three weeks early, and even more underweight than this would normally imply). Since then, a variety of things have occurred:

- my mom found a way to make herself a giant nuisance, as we could have expected,
- we were told the baby might be deaf (which turned out not to be the case),
- my sister Meghan came over for a couple weeks to help,
- I had the loft floored out and electrified, enabling us to use it for storage (with an eye to a possible eventual conversion),
- with hired help, I moved everything out of the loft and back (the timing of this would have been very, very different if we'd known the baby would show up a month early),
- I moved all the architecturally-salvaged parquet up there for the time being because the guy who's been, since January, scheduled to come put down that and some tatami mats realised that despite my specific instructions and a site visit, he didn't know how deep a tatami mat was and what putting it down would entail (yes, a tatami mat, which has roughly standard dimensions to the degree that Japanese flats are literally measured in mats--that tatami mat),
- due to a broken Victorian front ventilation grate and the continuing revelation of the DIY fuckeries of the guy who lived here before us, mice have chewed through the wiring around the fuse box. We have thus been without power to the kitchen for a fortnight, with everything on extension leads (which causes us to get mildly electric-shocked on a near-daily basis). The rice cooker then broke, after only one year, so our cooking options have been whittled down to the stove (which I could deal with, if I weren't so fucking exhausted from the new baby).
- the probably-unnecessary surgical intervention the hospital did when Katy was giving birth caused her painful complications,
- the baby got bronchitis,
- I had dental surgery and then a follow-up,
- we had to mouse-proof the house by replacing the grate and getting wire wool in every crack of the Victorian masonry,
- we discovered that a brothel has moved in next door, which has caused some complications (I contacted some sex workers' rights collectives to see if they'd do a peer wellness check to make sure no one was being trafficked, because no fucking way am I going to the cops, and they sent me some fliers for the shelter they're affiliated with to put through the door, so that is something),
- coming back from lunch one day, a bus ran into a small child directly in front of us, so we had to call 999 and salvage bandaging supplies from the baby bag (the boy will be fine--there was a nurse on the bus),
- I got the baby his US citizenship, which was a massive affair involving, I shit you not, my 4th grade report card,
- the UK authorities tried it on, attempting to not list me as the mom for lesbian reasons (didn't work, nice try--it wasn't intentional, really, just lack of familiarity with the procedure for Double Moms),
- Katy had to switch out our car because the ULEZ is expanding, and the new car has MANY undisclosed issues,
- the vet was an absolute nightmare about the cats' flea med prescriptions,
- I'm STILL waiting on my UK citizenship to arrive,
- Katy's Irish citizenship is still in limbo, and will come too late to include the baby (we plan to appeal this, as she started the process well before his arrival),
- we had to secure permission from Ireland to get the baby a Covid vaccine there, as the UK now doesn't administer them to anyone under 11,
- my job has done fuck all to support my all of one week of 'paternity' leave and very nearly found a way to sour the massive, totally necessary project I've set up for them (god I hate this company, I feel like no one but me cares to do the most basic shit), and
- today we spent 6 hours in a&e because Katy, exhausted, accidentally gave the baby 3 drops of toxic lavender oil instead of 3 drops of vitamin D solution (the bottles are identical, except for the label).

The baby is perfectly fine, as I'd thought he would be, but better safe than sorry. I don't regret calling 111, even if the whole ordeal has been annoying and pointless, because it might well not have been.

I'm really exhausted, and even though I've applied all my leave so I'm only working two days a week throughout the summer I'm clinging on by my fingernails. I cannot keep having all these fucking things happening. This is simply too many occurrences.
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A play that dares to ask, ‘what if Shakespeare was bad?’ "Much Ado, but with the fun surgically removed". Honestly this had better be funnier in French, because it has the atmosphere of a dead club. The performance (Skokie's finest (recorded)) did not help the text, but neither can I lay the blame for a failure of this depth on the good people of the northern shore. The same goes for Wilbur's verse translation.

The chief merit of the play is the fact that France has managed to make the otherwise-awful names ‘Agnes’ and ‘Horace’ tolerable with the aid of very liberal pronunciation. However French you're imagining, it was more French than that. This contribution is noted.

All the Proust I've been reading got me interested in French classics, but now I'm just confused as to why this lad's famous. Who did he fuck to get into the canon, what happened here?
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I have seldom heard a worse recording of a musical. Either the sound-mixing is poor or the (fast) pacing and (high) pitch of the songs don't accommodate children's voices. The articulation is not crisp, so it's difficult to make out the lyrics. Badly staged G&S has this issue. Two of the children have quite well-defined voices, and whenever they came on I felt physical relief. I had a hard time even considering the story changes because I was so distracted by the mumblecore.

It's no DeVito Matilda.

Also I'm sorry, but the lead's 5head is disconcerting. It's surely just an awkward phase the poor girl's going through, but I would not want the weirder bits of my maturation captured on film. Also the film was very long for what it was, yet still felt rushed. I liked the theatrical presentation significantly more than this.

Katy also observes that none of the songs advance the plot.
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 “The Little Princess” is convinced that the climate of India is bad for children, despite the fact that an abundance of children obviously call the subcontinent home. The same writer opens “The Secret Garden” with a scene of mass epidemic death there, which treated as a matter of course apiece with the scenery. Per Aisha, “everyone in India is dead because that's just what India is like”. This is a recurring theme with varied textual presentations, but where it occurs it’s treated as quite a serious problem. “Martin Chuzzlewit” believes that the American midwest is similarly unhealthy, despite the area’s long settlement by Native Americans and current considerable population. “Treasure Island” thinks that the pirates won’t last a week encamped on the island before taking severely ill. There’s some discussion of a risk of malaria, but the onset of decay is almost instant: the night fog touches the pirates, and by morning they’re on the wane. It’s an almost science fictional conceit. The titular Treasure Island even has conifers (which does seem reasonable), despite what the cinematic imaginary of the story in adaptation had led me to believe: how much of a shock to the system can such a climate really be? What exactly are all these writers on about? 


Aisha, who specialises in post-colonial scholarship (and who, somehow, survived spending her early years in India), suggested a few probable causes. “One is obviously just racism: [the fact] that brown people are okay in these climates doesn't mean they're hospitable to real (white) people. But also, at least with India (I don't know as much about American colonialism, though probably there too), there's often a very determined attempt to live as Europeanly as possible (and I think that's exacerbated by fears of going native). So they do a bunch of stupid shit re: clothing and food that doesn't work in this climate, and then suffer for it. Though I also like the idea of hostile climate as a sort of manifestation of colonial guilt.”


For one thing, these are stories rather than historical records. Ailments afflict characters more as a matter of narrative convenience than as an accurate depiction of the consequences of white incursion into previously non-white space. Yet narrative events must, to a degree, feel plausible: these Victorian novelists and their readers brought a firm conception of extra-European climates as not just hostile but toxic, at least to white bodies, to their engagement with literature. 


Even so, this is a lot to simply invent out of whole-cloth. Were these writers drawing on actual experience? I feel they have to be fitting a theory to some form of data, potential preconceptions about the folly of leaving the mother country aside. Give or take a few poisonous snakes (a legit new one for you, if you’re British), what made American frontier settlements in “Martin Chuzzlewit” such a death trap in a temperate climate where dressing and living in a European manner would have been wholly appropriate? How the fuck do you manage to die due to the environment in like, Kansas? Seriously? Are we just talking about the struggle to build infrastructure for a new community? Is this a problem of sanitation? It’s bizarre that Dickens doesn’t raise similar objections to Australia, which arguably really is a landscape that wants people who don’t know what they’re doing dead. 


***


Frances Hodgson Burnett is a bizarre writer, intensely interested in class and empire but never quite interested enough to commit to the premises she herself chooses. She suggests that the problem with Sarah’s sudden fall from grace isn’t Sarah’s poverty, particularly, but that children go hungry, full stop. Yet throughout the book, Burnett remains fixated on Sarah’s inherent nobility, which she presents as a classed, raced quality. Even in the depths of her depravation, Sarah still thinks things like 'I suppose whoever comes to live in the attic opposite mine will only be an under-servant’. At this stage, Sarah herself is an under-servant. Wither this disdain? Acting like a princess can make you one, but in order to act like a princess, you have to know how to do so. Sarah’s is a “Prisoner of Zenda” level transformation, where you can pretend to be the King of Ruritania if you’re already an English noble—and in fact, already the king’s cousin. 


Nods to the general weal are undercut by Sarah’s dreamy recollections of how many servants she had back in India, a situation that Burnett never looks askance at in the way she does the internecine warfare of white classism. Aisha reminded me that similarly,  in “Secret Garden”,  “Mary's big problem is not understanding that servants in Yorkshire are real people, not like Indians, so you have to talk to them like they're human.” “Little Princess” is sometimes interested in Sarah’s being half-French, but never in her having lived her entire life up to this point in India (until suddenly and conveniently, she does speak rudimentary Hindustani).


When kindly strangers decorate Sarah’s bare attic room, the descriptions of the works indicate that what they have created is an Oriental fantasy. Given their descriptions and provenance the fabrics draping the surfaces are probably Indian textiles, though this is never explicitly stated. Some other furnishings and the general decorating style bolster this, but the narration is oddly coy on this point. You have to guess from the details. These are probably the sort of furnishings Sarah grew up with, and thus a source of comfort to her and the manifestation of an understanding and a connection between her and the giver. Yet for all this Sarah never asks herself, 'could my unknown benefactor be the Indian man I met, the only adult besides my tormentor who I've ever seen come into this attic?' You get the feeling that Sarah would have been disappointed if ‘the laskar’ himself had been the direct source of her life’s improvement rather than his employer, 'the Indian gentleman' (who is white). 


Burnett is, despite these points, quite skilled. She depicts the interior lives of her various strange, ‘old-fashioned’ children well. It'd be easy to dismiss her as twee, but you can't fully: she's smarter and weirder than that. There are moments when the book is reminiscent of “Jane Eyre”, and acquires some of its predecessor’s heft.


Frances Hodgson Burnett seems almost to know, at points, that she’s bitten off more class commentary than she can chew. She tries to force the book into a fairly conventional 'hot dog, I recover my fortune!!' shape that it no longer comfortably fits, complete with, because Burnett can’t neatly resurrect the dead, a replacement father. Like a Marvel movie, Burnett is obsessed with empire but either unable or unwilling to commit to a political project or even make any definitive comment on the subject—which is, of course, ultimately a political project in its own right. “Just accept the situation ¯\()/¯ .” Aisha felts this approach even risks becoming a Joseph Conrad affair, where "the situation is bad because it taints me, one of its beneficiaries”.


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Some notes on this documentary on hot pot in various regions of China:


- They use the term ‘hot pot’ far more expansively than I thought was permissible, in a way that encompasses set, planned and pre-prepared dishes. [personal profile] superborb says she thinks “the only common factor is soup served over a heating element”.


- This guy in the middle of Macau goes five kilometres up a mountain every day with two Culligan jugs yolked on a stick to fetch extra-good spring water. That is so much fucking work.


- Apparently Macau’s cooked food stands can only be passed to lineal descendants, and new licences aren’t issued.


- I enjoyed the intense dramatic montage of men making a copper pot. Their pumpkin-shaped bronze tea pot was very cute, as well. Yunan copperware can get it.


- ‘A fierce dog guards the entrance to the shed where the secret blend is made.’ Cut to: the most innocuous dog you’ve ever seen, just pure O-O.


- This guy lighting his cigarette with a kitchen blowtorch while he works is a whole sexuality for someone, I am sure. 


- This other restauranteur is a Taiwanese immigrant to Chongqing, which is interesting as that’s not a directional flow I’ve heard about before. 


- ‘My son was tricked by duplicitous goat sellers.’ What a problem to have.


- This child’s shoes have small stuffed dumplings on the tips. Astounding.


- This next guy is having ginger milk curd for breakfast. [personal profile] superborb gave me this recipe for it, but I couldn’t get the microwave version to work at all. I might try the stove-top version later. I saved the leftover ginger pulp for cooking: inclusion in a stock might suit it best. 


- WHY IS THERE A SNAKE? [personal profile] superborb says snake tastes fine, it just has too many bones. I say this is like “Condor Heroes” all over again. You can’t trust people. Suddenly, they’re eating a snake. 


- Man, now they’re showing the live bamboo rats they’re going to cook? Sigh. I’m not about that Hot Life. 


- This guy is like, “fuck work, it’s mushroom season and I’m driving home for special mushroom hot pot.“ Who among us?


- This chef is visiting his dad’s grave with hotpot sauce in fancy packages to tell him they introduced his sauce to the Belgian market and it won an award. 


- Some of the show’s participants live in a Tulou village, which is very pretty. 


-  At one point someone in Chongqing with seemingly little money mentions that his wife is pregnant with his second child. I suppose this must have been filmed after 2015, so one-child policy is no longer an issue (the fine previously having been multiple times an average annual income, growing larger with each violation—I think it might have been income-linked, as well). Yet throughout the show, I kept catching strange details related to the topic. A ninety-year-old had multiple daughters: that made sense. But then the show focused on three forty-year-old brothers. The family originally hailed from a village, so perhaps they’d qualified for a relevant exception? 


In general, one-child policy seems so much more situationally porous and time-bounded than I think of it as, in terms of a ‘rule’. There seem to have been many cases where it didn’t quite apply. I guess if your local ‘council’ makes a case for not enforcing this (or simply has other priorities), it’s like any other rule oversight. Croydon Council is 'supposed' to be doing regular rubbish collection, too: a lot of things are supposed to happen.


[personal profile] superborb found a reference stating that many “cadres were middle-aged women who went through the collective period when childbearing was encouraged. They experienced continuous childbearing, and so were strongly supportive of the one-child policy." She commented that she didn't “consciously realise the effect the sudden shift from 'have more kids!' to 'have [fewer] kids!' would have had. In the 90s rural areas also stop violating the one child policy as it becomes [normalised], and this is consistent with rising economic” conditions. She also pointed out that many families registered children under relatives’ names.


It feels like a situation where the original motivations on the ground aren’t immediately comprehensible in retrospect. My understanding of the topic has been shaped by a much later, contemporary reaction narrative that’s entirely external, and specifically Western. Western coverage focuses on this programme as an inconvenient limitation of rights, and is almost entirely disinterested in the policy’s stated goals and the realisation thereof. But from this earlier point of view, imagine the justification and support this must have afforded a fuckton of women who weren’t necessarily interested in being baby factories.

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While not quite reaching the heights of Andrew Davies’ “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation, this well-paced, enjoyable rendition of a later Gaskell novel worked, showing Davies’ capacity to deliver sound work when he feels like doing so. It’s a woman-centred story, as the title might suggest, and the characters are generally distinct and well-drawn. Lady Harriet only swoops in for an occasional cameo, but when she does she’s amazing—except for her weird pixie cut in the final episode, too late to be part of that Terror-inspired wave of them. This is set in the 1830s, so what was going on there?


The protagonist’s stepmother Hyacinth and Hyacinth’s daughter Cynthia sucked a little as people in ways that felt fresh and realistic. Hyacinth attempts to make people happy by giving them what she herself would want. She’s consistently incapable of listening to others’ opinions, which is why the care-labour of being a companion to rich people must have been so constantly vexing to her, relying as it does on listening skills which she otherwise refuses either to learn or to employ. Self-obsessed Hyacinth doesn’t quite understand people around her as fully real, with emotional lives disconnected from her own. She earnestly believes her remarriage will be a boon to her stepdaughter: why wouldn’t it be, when she’s soaked up all these posh airs and is thus god’s gift? She’s not intentionally cruel except in that she never seeks to do anything about this persistent character flaw, however serious its consequences are for other people and her relationships with them. 


Cynthia is cleverer than her mother and significantly more self-aware, but she thinks about her rash flightiness like a congenital illness: she just can’t help being more fundamentally immature than her surface polish would suggest. It’s her nature! Cynthia is pleasant and funny, and infinitely more sinned against than sinning in the matter of her early engagement, but she’s prone to bad decisions that hurt even people she truly cares for like her long-suffering stepsister Molly, the heroine. Molly herself is under persistent narrative threat of retreating into the background on account of having fewer dramatic problems than those around her, but then that’s very true to life with Eldest Daughter Syndrome: the final scenes, as Katy reminded me, afford Molly no lines in her own happy ending.


I realise there’s a parallel structure with Molly briefly preferring the poetic Osborne to his steady brother Roger and Roger preferring Cynthia to Molly. Molly, however, was younger at the time, quickly amended her judgment based on learning more about the brothers and never embarrassed herself as Roger does with his engagement to Cynthia, who likes Roger about as much as she’d like a fairly comfortable chair, and for essentially the same reasons. (Osborne is another interesting, imperfect figure, though in another line, his flaws owing more to a failure to manage unfavourable circumstances outside of his control. His father, the Squire (aka Circumstances), lives long enough for a redemption arc, facilitated by Molly.) It’s hard to fully forgive Roger for sister-zoning the woman who learned botany for him, who follows his letters with compassion and avidity, who did all the familial heavy-lifting around his mother and brother’s deaths, and who is easily as hot as Cynthia. What is turning him off, here? Is it the fact that she’s hard-working rather than some ephemeral ideal of fuckable womanhood? At least he finally shapes up, but Jesus. 

As Katy put it, if you have an 'only real P&P adaptation'-shaped place in your heart, this will slot in in a way few other period dramas will. 

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Del Toro is such an uneven director. People forget that, I think, in the rush to stan—which is itself a kind of uncomplicated relationship to desire with an artist, uninterested in and even antithetical to a fine perception of or deep engagement with their work (apologies to bandom, but I do think the narrow bandwidth of this relationship lends itself to a hyper focused appreciation of a few aspects of an artist’s work at the cost of a broader appreciation of that artist’s contexts and a nuanced valuation of their creative and presentational choices). It may be that del Toro’s successes are a precipitate of his failures. Perhaps he takes risks which sometimes pay off and sometimes do not. Perhaps he learns from his Ls. “Hellboy” is an interesting movie, but it also sucks, and the way things suck can itself be interesting.

Shooting events supposed to take place in America in Bristol and Bulgaria gives the production an odd, lurching visual quality. A UK council estate is not an American apartment building: it’s fairly architecturally distinct, so much so that I went and looked up the shooting location because I was almost certain of what I was looking at. Small details are similarly weird. Hellboy breaks into the mental health facility a work colleague has checked herself into with a case of Bud Light, then proceeds to act as though this is sharable gift rather than a cutting insult to someone already in crisis, really going through it. No one familiar with American beer could make such an error. Not even Budweiser: Bud Light.

This, naturally, is not the film’s key issue. I’d say that lies in how “part time” (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, as mocked by Red Letter Media) everyone’s delivery is. No is shaken or excited by any of the film’s events. Perhaps the direction aimed at a sort of ‘Bruce Willis in “The Fifth Element”’ here-we-go-again quality, but instead it just feels like whole story is taking place in a DMV in Joliet. Everyone in this movie is vaguely tired, even when they’re getting disemboweled by Hitler’s Favourite Robot. I feel tired watching this movie. It’s camp, but camp as in ‘camping with your Uncle Jim, who is extremely divorced’. Not even the existence of a character who can indeed accurately be described as Hitler’s Favourite Robot juices up the atmosphere. It’s especially weird because if you look at the first collection of Hellboy comics, you can see that this pulls out a lot of those narrative strands in a way that does make sense, even delaying the father-figure’s death to add a bit of structure and tension. It’s the characterisation and texture of the piece that suck, more than anything. It doesn’t feel like del Toro has anything he particularly wants to say, here.

The film slumps to a stop, not concluding so much as running out of battery life. The villains’ endgame series of actions make little or no sense in terms of an effort to achieve their stated goals. The finale, featuring some Cthulhu, is totally lacklustre. The actual beast is just, idk, calamari? There’s nothing squamous here. It feels like it needs a contrasting element to keep it from being stodgy, maybe some lemon juice.

After all that, Hellboy smooches the sad girl who catches on fire too much while she’s on fire, and comes out unharmed. (Why? Eh.) Meanwhile, the sad white guy who’s been interested in the sad white girl for all of five minutes looks on in a way that indicates he’s resigning himself to a broken heart because he did not get the girl. But they went on all of one date, so why does he care? Why should I? Why am I still here? “Hellboy”, everybody.
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The generational theme was interesting, and the attempt to meaningfully include Christina's poetry refreshing. The exhibition's narrative championed Siddal in an interesting way, but this whole project seemed to deflate with her death, becoming a muddled Dante solo act.

The exhibition was huge, perhaps to its cost; it was more overwhelming than several I've seen hosted in the same space. I was exhausted by the halfway mark. The whole room on orientalism and race was an odd tonal departure, and I'm not sure this hived-off sidebar content was successfully integrated into the gestalt curatorial endeavour. The exhibit's commentary on class was also uneven, and difficult to come out with a clean read on (even if, like me, you're very familiar with Victorian class politics and commentary thereon). The last room, on outcomes, was startlingly weak. 

There were also several points where I nearly tripped over the metal knee-high floor barriers in front of the paintings; if I’d pitched forward into them, I would simply have had to kill myself. (In design terms it was a little like watching an Emma Rice Globe production, with their extensive suspension work on wires that, even to my stage manager sister, seemed on the verge of snapping at any moment.)
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This novella is simultaneously:

- a tense, gothic story centred on a human 'monster', and
- a possible attempt to represent what we'd now call severe autism.

I rarely go in for Diagnosis: Literature, which fell out of fashion decades ago in academic contexts for good reasons. Yet even given my strong bias against imposing taxonomy, in this case I can't in good conscience fail to admit this retrospective understanding into analysis because the reading is simply too immediately legible. You sometimes hear people ask what happened to severely autistic individuals in the past. Judging by this, they were either accommodated or they Were Not (which, as Isaac observed, must have played out along highly classed lines).

It's interesting that this was published so soon after Dickens' “David Copperfield” circulated in America. Evidently these were peak 'Othered gothic clerks exerting psychological, moral and social pressures on a liberal protagonist' years.
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 Dankodes has started discussing "Little Mushroom", if you want in on that. 
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“Blue Period” was a nice, tight anime about a high school boy who decides to stop fucking around and actually become a person, via the medium of painting. He pursues admission to a competitive art school, as do several of his friends. It’s kind of light, in something like a slice of life register, but it never struck me as badly structured or patronising. At its best, it was truly emotionally engaging. I’m sick to death of high school settings, but I still have time for the questions this piece used this time in a young man’s life to raise.

Some notes:

- A teen in "Blue Period": I should draw my girl’s bewbs, really blow this old lady's mind, haha.
Ancient art teacher lesbian: I love breasts. Do you prefer pillowy or jiggly? There are certainly arguments for both!
Teen:
Art teacher: Make sure to convey their smoothness, virgin.

- I did not twig that the protagonist’s friend was trans until she was dumped over it. Maybe that's more strongly indicated in Not the Dub. She's sort of romantic-interest shaped, and I wasn’t sure whether they were going to go there. Ultimately, it’s not clear whether more will eventually come of their relationship and not terribly important: their development as people and their friendship matters, whether or not it ends up having a romantic component. They took the time to really see one another, literally and emotionally. (Something similar could be said of the upperclassman who first inspires the protagonist to paint: this show is unique in that it gives a young male protagonist really central connections with women.)

- When they said that the trans character was studying traditional Japanese painting, I assumed that was going to involve some kind of identifiable heritage approach. The work she produced for that class seemed to consist of standard still-lives: nothing separates the assignment we see for that course from a Western art seminar equivalent. In Japanese art education, this term must refer to material use or technique? Whatever craft difference occurs must happen at a technical level, to the degree that there's not really a perceptible effect for a casual observer.

- It’s interesting that they build the large canvas. Western art students would rarely be asked to do that, especially at a high school level. My sister went through all of MICA and was rarely if ever asked to stretch. They seem to be working with pre-set parts, combining them to shape it thus? Maybe Japanese art supplies are more modular.

- “Did you guys know that SHARKS have EYELIDS? Sea creatures are WONDERFUL.” Aha, the energy the prep school art teacher has.

- The pastry chef friend is so good. The way he reached out to the protagonist was touching. I also found the protagonist’s ‘seeing’ his mom via sketching her moving.
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"Hook"

Most attempts to film period design end up looking like total shit after a decade or so. Productions tend to let their own era’s aesthetics eat a period. Their efforts to gentle whatever they’re invoking make the quotation look half-hearted, adding a clashing layer of datedness. This 1991 staging of a Victorian house, however, still looks great. In part that’s because “Hook” shares an aesthetic sensibility with its late Victorian source material. There’s a Peake-ish, illustrative quality to the film’s composition (“Slaughterboard” comes to mind.). From the set-design to the wirework the frames are busy, but harmonious and intelligible.

Rufio’s death feels oddly timed—I spent the whole final scene thinking about it, wondering if it would ultimately be undone. Marita suggested that this could be the point, but agreed that it could also simply be badly-executed. The publication history of this text (even before extra-Barrie adaptations) is so complex that my sense of the degree to which this decision could be a comment on the source material is muddled. At one point I found myself wondering where I remembered Hook being an Etonian from. The book? The play? It wasn’t necessarily important, just indicative of how messy the version history is and the impact of that on my reception.

***

"Bugsy Malone"

I had never seen this before. The script is pretty good, as are the songs. I had the weird feeling throughout that someone had written a solid 1930s gangster movie, but it was 1976 and no one would make it until the writer suggested casting it entirely with children (which doesn’t really change anything except the final fight sequence, but okay, sure). Apparently no: it was always conceived as pretty much what you see here.

- Per Wiki, the children do not sing. In fact almost all the singing was done by the songwriter, because the production was pressed for time.
- THAT’S JODIE FOSTER??
- Why shoot this in England? How many American kids did they have to fly over?
- The song about Bugsy does not describe Bugsy very well.
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I go back and forth on this book. At times it made me feel like I couldn't read, like I had cottage cheese for a brain. I longed for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who

1. fucks severely, and
2. goes in for narrative.

But then I read the second half of the book, which is more narrative-driven, in a sitting and found myself entering into the collection much more successfully, grasping the rhythm and substance (if not the import of every line). Ultimately though, I do think I do better with narrative poetry. I appreciate imagery and sound, but not exactly as aims in their own right when the piece's conceptual coherence isn't rock-solid. (And it may be more solid here than I always appreciated: right now, I'm not a great reader of this form.)
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Katy and I watched the 1994 adaptation of “Middlemarch”, which Andrew Davies wrote right before doing the only good “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation to date. He’s an uneven writer, occasionally inspired and more frequently leaden. I was unimpressed with the carelessness he displayed when asked about his favourite Trollope novel in 2015: “While we were rehearsing my BBC adaptation of “The Way We Live Now”, I got talking to one of the actors, Oliver Ford Davies, a tremendously knowledgable Trollope enthusiast. I asked him if he knew of any other Trollope novels with a comparable edge and intensity, and he suggested I look at “He Knew He Was Right”, a book I’d never heard of.” By the time the BBC is producing the your adaptation of a man’s novel, you should probably have skimmed his “Who’s Who” entry. This level of thoroughness is probably only to be expected, given that Davies’ work is so often half-baked. It’s truly disappointing, however, because Davies’ best work shows how capable he can be if he does make an effort. As a mature artist, why waste both your rare chances to make art on this scale and everyone’s time on mediocrity? These are chances I’ll probably never have, so I’m not really inclined to be gracious about this man’s squandering his ample supply of them.

Anyway, not having read the book I can say that this largely works from my limited point of view. The beginning is awkward, though, and Ladislaw is badly handled all ‘round. The romance never quite coheres. Davies starts to talk about the estate Ladislaw’s actually entitled to, but never circles back to the topic. It’s left as an odd lingering question. Casaubon’s malignant influence is alluded to, but does not, I think, fully flower on the screen. The adaptation’s ending plops. Even an ambivalent novel ending could, I think, feel a bit more structurally unified in its dramatic presentation. The awkward resort to a voiceover from Judi Dench as Eliot, who we've never yet heard a word from, feels like the waving of a white flag.

It’s slightly unfortunate that Elliot makes a wrong guess about the future direction of scholarship on comparative religion. She seems to suggest that the topic’s been exhausted by recent contemporary German work when in fact it’s about to blow up in a big way, on the continent and in the UK. Max Weber, “Golden Bough”, “Totem and Taboo”—still all to play for. Writing back to your intellectual milieu and engaging in dialogue with it just carries this risk, I guess.

The most surprising element of the plot is that the crap brother who gets Fuckboi Fever pretty fully recovers. Astounding. Never seen a case like it.

"In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among the most important Western writers of all time." It’s tragic that after you die you can't stop Harold Bloom from liking you, at great detriment to your reputation.

I’m thinking about reading “Middlemarch”, but am slightly put off by how I took up "Silas Marner" and didn't finish it because Eliot got so weird about class so fast. ‘Now what you—I’m just going to go ahead and assume we’re all posh here—can't comprehend are the absolutely limited and tiny minds of poor people. And it's all situational, right, but poor people? Functionally dim children. This is SJ." I mean. Is it, girl? Is this the way? Iiiii am not so sure. Gaskill wouldn't have done me like that. Say what you will about Lizzie Hexam's inexplicably perfect diction, but at least she's allowed a functioning brain? That choice to assign agency to her, arguably 'at the expense of realism', has been made to give room to her personhood.
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Dankodes is starting
Little Mushroom in a week's time, if you'd like to participate in the book club.


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