And now I fall into bed

[petronia]

1) Updated website with everything written since July (except the SSBB story, because I don't have the gumption). Tons of verbiage for JoJo, geez. Ka says she's written more for this fandom than all others put together, and I seem to be heading in the same direction. o_O This for a series listed in the interests of less than 200 people on all of Livejournal.

That being said I think there may be more readable fic in English now for JoJo than there is for Initial D. At first I wrote "that being sad", AND IT IS.

(one_if_by_land is chipping away at that one, though. XD)

2) More bookblogging! As I look back over this past year, I find I read many books because my friends found out I hadn't and physically sent them to me before I could embarrass myself and them further. This is a good gambit; I could get pretty far on this one. XDDD

Kristin sent me The Left Hand of Darkness and I read it last... Thursday? Straight through from 8PM to 3AM, couldn't stop. It was like some kind of alien superglue. By dint of careful maneuvring I could free a hand every hour or so long enough to make myself more tea and give the kitchen window the beady eye for not showing any snow outside, anywhere. Then I gave it to my sister and she finished it in one day as well. She said it was deeply moving, which it is. You may want to take away that conclusion and tl;dr the rest of this post. XD;

...I don't normally excise trains of thought from LJ, even if they are dubious fandumb metaphors breaking up an otherwise respectable book/film/music review (alternately, ridiculous over-analysis of BL manga tropes, fandom behaviour, etc.). I figure I have to be honest w/r/t the way my brain works, and besides I'm here to entertain not edify ahaha. However I had to excise a great deal of what I've written on the subject of this book since last week, because much of it was actively nonsensical. So this is... not the smart version, but the relatively coherent one. ^^;

* Book possibly worth reading just for the myth/legend bits, which have the heft of real myth and are just as alien/human (Japanese, Scandinavian, Amerindian - the stuff that Neil Gaiman touches on in Anansi Boys, for instance, which freaks me out if I think about it too much. I can't fathom what it must be like to believe those stories, as presumably people once did. Or did they?) It took me two-thirds of the book to realize they were directly relevant to the characters and not just neat-o examplars of worldbuilding. >_>

* Speaking of neat-o worldbuilding, the settings felt foreign, not made up - the architecture, the geography, the border controls. How not everything comes with an explanation attached (the incest and suicide taboos, for instance, although the former is more baroque than the latter - did the genetic engineers get rid of the Westermark effect while they were at it? >_>) I was reminded of Singapore + Malaysia, not that Gethen is anything like (polar opposite lah) but because the sense of place was so strong.

* Perversely I may like the book more because Le Guin didn't think her setup all the way through - maybe 85% of the way through? XD For one thing she's a good prose stylist and a conscientious one, and as such probably let aesthetics trump clunky neologisms without paying much attention. "Well gotta pick one, guess I'll go with masculine because it's the generic default in English grammar." And then some years later: ".........*facepalm*"

That being said politics and power are "masculine" markers, still, as much as grammar, decades after Le Guin wrote tLHoD. Women wear them as androgynizing traits, like a suit jacket with padded shoulders. And the majority of the named characters in the book are ruthless politicians on a national scale. I tended automatically to think of Estraven etc. as male not because Le Guin was using words like "he" or "brother" but because it's a brain-wrench to think of someone female as prime minister in a feudal society. Was completely aware of this while reading but there's no conclusion to be had. ^^; The perspective issue doesn't fix itself merely because they also have babies (and all levels of government and society give you those two-three days off a month).

In that sense the setup is an inkblot and you bring your own brain to the table. It's not in fact hard for me to reconcile all that with them having babies, due to... ahaha. orz I imagine it would be weirder for a SF fan reading in 1969, but actually I have no idea. Peeps should read it and tell me how you reacted. Mostly when Genly Ai would parse some Gethenian trait as feminine when he expected masculine (and vice-versa) I would think he was on crack, because I would've slotted it all under "cultural bizarreness". Not that gender relations or lack thereof isn't part of that... But I kept getting reminded of wossname analyst ranting in the NY Times that Westerners go to the Middle East expecting the leaders there to come clean off the record and say whatever the people want to hear in public, whereas over there they do the exact opposite.

Though the point is more that Genly does these mental flip-flops, and then he doesn't anymore. By the time you're down to 7 billion cubic feet of ice + one (1) tent, social constructs of whatever kind stop mattering, and even biology is just sort of there. (Or according to the homely refrain that kept running through my head - "You can't tell under all those layers, and you don't care as long as they can jump start your car"- which is dumb but approaches the heart of the matter in some metaphorical way.)

* It's not about race but race is dealt with in a way that's actually sensible, i.e. if you're making First Contact with a group of people who seem more like Inuit than anything else you may as well send someone who's visibly different but not too different. ...Instead of writing about gender and race and mythology I should attempt to sell the book on moe value like I did to Chrissie ("it's sort of political maneuvrings plus tragic brothercest plus LOTS OF SNOW, the snow is important, did I mention I love Estraven"), and then people will actually read it. Or at least laugh at me. I'M HERE TO ENTERTAIN NOT EDIFY.

* I still get the "cold" feeling off Le Guin's prose - not the same cold as in, she's describing a sub-Arctic climate. Nor is it cold as in clinical/distant/emotionally removed. Metaphorically it's like... lake water? When you're swimming in it your body adjusts, you feel warm and it's perfectly yielding, but after you haul yourself up onto the deck you realise you've been moving in a medium much denser than air. And that you're wet and it's getting windy.

* On Friday morning I got up, went to work and read a Ted Chiang story linked by morphaileffect, because that is how much of a sucker for punishment I am. Friday evening I went to see Justin and it turned into wine + philosophy as per usual and at one point it came up how women spoke a different language from men, and I said when you're in a relationship with someone you have to learn their language; it's a language that only one person speaks. You can be fluent but you can never be native.

But people teach and learn anyway, because it's the only way to have a conversation.


STUFF I EXCISED FROM THE ABOVE:

* Complaints about the weather (srsly guys this is like March, WTH).
* A digression on Greykey concepts in City of Diamond.
* Why I thought Dr. Ten was (understandably) underrated as a storyteller.
* Various dubious similes involving AT fields, Sydney Losstarot, etc.
* Character archetypes in Hoshino Lily.
* Speculation regarding the viera race in FFXII.
* Approximately 1,093,775 facetious comments re: snow.


3) There is no 3. After all that, are you kidding. XD;

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

I could do with the excised comments. Or at least the Hoshino Lily stuff. XD

I wish I could tell you what I thought of this book the first time I read it, but that was probably in 1991 or so and that was a very long time ago. I do remember that Genly's initial thoughts about the Gethenians kind of irritated me, as he didn't quite get what was dead obvious to the reader (if the reader, in this case, was a thirteen-year-old who read a lot of feminist sf.)

There's a story about the same world in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, and in the foreword to it Le Guin explains a bit about the pronoun issue.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It will probably crop up at some other point. XD I had to cut because it was just getting too rambly.

canis_m said she read it in the tenth grade. I can't fathom what I'd've thought of it back then. Though possibly I'm not giving my younger self enough credit. XD

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

In 10th grade I thought it was, well, deeply moving. I cried a lot at the end, was wibbly for a few days after (in the throes of adolescent hormones, probably). I loved the mythology, the worldbuilding, Estraven <333, etc. Your reactions are familiar in that sense. XD; I'm really glad you liked it enough to want to pimp it at others, though. :D

I don't think I ever really experienced the Gethenian characters as androgynous, or specifically as non-male. Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Genly's insistence on seeing gender everywhere, and on gendering, didn't really bother me--I think I took it as a reminder that we all do that, whether we realize it or not. Maybe you or I personally wouldn't do it in the same specific instances Genly did, but I think it's true that if humans were faced with genderless beings, we would inevitably make those sorts of mistakes, at a subconscious level if nothing else.

Le Guin has done other Gethen stories, as meril mentioned. There's at least one in Birthday of the World which is all about t3h sex. ^^;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I left out the stuff re: my personal experiences w/r/t androgyny as well (in the sense of not being able to gender-sort someone in a casual social situation). In the end it wasn't all that relevant. XD; I think the thing about this book is it caused me to think a lot, overtime, in that tiresome can't-turn-brain-off power-drill way, forging connections but no conclusions.

But yeah, I did the exercise of incorporation, taking that situation of not-being-able-to-tell and extrapolating it to the population of a city, a country... it's a bit dizzying, actually. XD I mean, they have romantic love - passionate romantic love. But passionate romantic love in which sexual desire plays no part 12/13ths of the time. Biochemically it must be a different beast altogether. It's like this epistemological vertigo.

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

What I really want to know is why there is still hardly any Shingo/Takeshi and no Bunta/Iketani whatsoever.

...mostly I mean, the former, because in the latter case I know perfectly well it's because nobody else is smoking my 'Iketani is the cutest puppy evar' crack and fangirls don't like 40 year olds.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Fandom this size, ain't nothing gonna happen if you don't write it yourself. XD; I dunno, T ships Shingo/Takeshi and I've always thought it was cute but...

...It's the later path of the series, too. Shigeno is a Takahashi fangirl hisself which is sort of the series' salvation and damnation both. And... maybe I should write some sort of meta post. ^^;

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

That's the trouble, I suppose -- I don't have anything AGAINST the Takahashi brothers, but I imprinted on Iketani very strongly in the first 5 eps or so, and all the love I had left over went to Shingo and Takeshi doing their "stop standing near me, people might think we're friends!" dance. And then I never did get past the first season.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

There's some book (which I need to find) that argues that Greek mythology etc. wasn't taken all that literally. At least, I think it was Greek....

But even Tendai philosophers, who are normally as into brainwarping as anyone I should think, occasionally and exasperatedly go: Okay, look. So even trees have original awakening and Buddha nature. This does not mean you're allowed to complain about eating sentient beings at vegetarian dinners so stfu, jokers.

So I don't know--I read this as a practical limit on philosophy, mythology, the effect of the miraculous on life. Tadazane probably had to make a lot of apologies to the divine for breaking his abstinance periods for the demands of political life.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's always a stretch to reconcile with the ordinary, isn't it. XD I've wondered if the ancients were really more in touch with the perceived divine on a day to day basis, or.

...There was something else here but I forgot. XD; Will comment again when I remember.

[troisroyaumes]

Oh, what's the Ted Chiang story you read? He's one of my favorite SF writers.

Worldbuilding was what made me fall in love with Le Guin's writing. ^_^ I once read a biography of her, and apparently she grew up with two anthropologists for parents (one of her favorite books as a child was a children's copy of the The Golden Bough), which I think explains a lot about the "coldness" of her prose. I don't perceive it as coldness as such, but it is a very careful sense of detachment. I also remember reading an introduction by her where she mentioned the use of masculine pronouns (apparently it was a deliberate choice at the time).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

"The Story of Your Life" (from Starlight 2). To harp upon the same theme. XD

I agree Le Guin displays a trained eye for things most fantasy or SF writers don't. And yes, she's very... careful. There's always a value judgment attached, though, even if it's a complex one, so on that level I can't call it detached.

[jokersama.livejournal.com]

Well, if you need a modern example of a pretty fantastic mythos that people appear to literally believe in, take Hinduism. >_> It appears that your level of literal belief in the mythology is a function of your...socioeconomic status/level of sophistication, in a way. There are hundreds of millions of villagers who believe in the stories and gods in a very literal way - animal heads, transformations, magic, and all and then there are the religious philosophers/priests/modern yuppie scum who seem to take them more as allegories. I guess that with this kind of background, it never struck me as at all weird and improbable that in civilization X they believed bizarre mythology Y! XD;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I always assumed people believed literally in mythology, actually, but as I was writing the above the idea came that maybe I'm not giving enough credit where it's due. ^^; The Ancient Greeks etc. knew perfectly well what an allegory was.

Then again I don't know if folk belief is the same thing as belief in dogma, at all, even if they happen to utilize the same gestures and the same houses of worship. There's something that keeps me lighting candles and leaving flowers under statues, and it's not the modern concept of faith or religious adherence by any means. :P

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

I think I have one more minor ficdump for Initial D and I'm giving up on the series. The list of fics is painful. ;_; I resorted to sifting through fanfiction.net, which actually wasn't too scarring of an experience, because most writers (male and female) sort of uniformly agreed, "Okay, Keisuke might be straight, but Ryousuke is definitely gay as a picnic basket." XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Noooo Bing don't give up - but it's fruitless, I see it happen too often with this series. orz Among other reasons it's... purely difficult to write for, I think.

I've never even finished my fic, although there was a period where it was my main project (in between uni grad and finding a job XD;;). However I do intend on writing the Five Things That Never Happened, spurious though it be.

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

My main problem lies in how I'm not even sure what sort of fic I'd want to read for this series. I think I'd get my fix as long as I could watch more of Ryousuke, Takumi, and Keisuke; Initial D is fulfilling in a lot of ways, but-- but--- *gestures hands wildly*

I don't think I could ever write longfic for Initial D; much like how I'm unsure what I want to read about, I can't think of anything lengthy to fic. Mostly I write to explain a concept or character sketch, but there's nothing hugely complex that pulls at me.

(That being said: IF YOU EVER DECIDE TO FINISH/WRITE FIC, YOU KNOW I'D READ IT IN A HEARTBEAT XD)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The problem, like I was saying above, is that Shigeno Hisself is too much of a Takahashi fangirl. XD;; By fourth stage he's actually divested the storyline of character development threads except for Takumi, Keisuke and Ryousuke (and Itsuki, but YOU KNOW THE HET IN THIS SERIES). Which is great if you like Takumi, Keisuke and Ryousuke, but it gives you no angles for fic because what is important is what happens and Shigeno Hisself is writing what happens, at a going rate of one (1) manga tankoubon = 2/5 of a race, per annum.

Basically there are two longfics to be wrung out of it: one if you assume Project D succeeds, which would be far!futurefic of the sort people write for PoT, and one if you assume it fails (or comes close), i.e. Ryousuke fucks up. I think the thing is canon!Ryousuke is playing it so close to the edge at times that you don't want him to fail, analogously to how you don't want Raito to fail in DNote because you just want to see someone pull it off. XD; But if he doesn't fuck up you can't get any real fic out of it, you'd just be reproducing the canon situation.

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

Thank you for filling in my missing logic sequence. XD I often feel like the entire fourth stage/Project D is just one big fanfic for Initial D. (which is probably why I love it so much, ahaha.)

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

man, now i want to reread the left hand of darkness. i, too, finished it in an evening. it's very moving; your description of the lake water seems familiar to how i felt reading it, but it's been five years or so.

[bravecows.livejournal.com]

I was reminded of Singapore + Malaysia, not that Gethen is anything like (polar opposite lah) but because the sense of place was so strong.

No understand. Plz to explain!

I read The Left Hand of Darkness just a month ago, and now remember very little of it. I think it's a basic brainiacal incompatibility; I remember it took about three pages of the first Earthsea book for cheerful anticipation to morph into grim determination to finish the damn book. (Which didn't pan out anyway. I don't remember if I even finished the book.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just meant that Singapore and Malaysia were the last two foreign countries I'd visited. *g* There's a sense of reality to physically being somewhere that can't be reproduced by reading or learning about that place - obviously - and there's also a mental state of being, induced by tourism or travel somewhere not-home, that's nothing like the regular state of existence, and tLHoD evoked both pretty well. It's probably what kept me reading compulsively through the first third of the novel or so.

I'd thought I was brainiacally incompatible(?) too. I read the first Earthsea when I was 11-12 and it seemed pretty grim at the time, especially since I was introduced to the first two Discworlds from the same stack. XD I should probably try again. But I suspect tLHoD is going to be my favorite Le Guin, period, no matter how many of her books I manage to read or re-read, and much as I rambled on semi-intelligently in this post it's going to be because it blindsided me in my squee buttons. XD;

[sesame-seed.livejournal.com]

Sabina, I'm totally blanking out on who you compared Estevan(??) to that, um, made your LHoD pimps one of the best pimps ever. XD; Help?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Check the gmail log, I'm not going to reproduce it in public! XD

(P.S. are you on chat?)

[kit-sin.livejournal.com]

Hey S :P
Mouth functional yet? Wanna watch FMA tomorrow?