beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Am doing reading about Doctor Who. It's becoming frustrating because so many of these people weren't watching the same show I was. Also, they try and make general and sweeping statements that apply to all of Doctor Who. It's 50 years of canon now, there's very very little you can say that applies to all of Doctor Who. Any attempt to make such statements will erase something.

In many cases it manages to erase a whole gender, since I keep finding article after article that talks about the Doctor's companions as always being women.
Also, specifically, being miniskirt wearing screamers of no particular intellectual distinction or personal agency.
Furthermore, they're alleged to be got rid of by 'frequently' marrying them off.

The exact count of the Doctor's companions is disputed, not least because of arguments over how much of UNIT count and when. My list comes up 26 female, 15 male, and two male voiced robots. ( Read more... )

today I am doing the reading
for pretty much the entire semester
at once

I ... really miss the opportunity to have done this in its right place, alongside example texts, with weeks and weeks to think about it. But I was busy being ill so that didn't happen. *big sigh*

so today I'm reading and taking notes on ALL THE THINGS. And zombies. The zombies make the rest of it substantially better.
... this theory stuff is all going 'hey, people have lives! and they write about them! surprise!'
and they're all pointing out how memory is mostly made up, and people make a narrative out of a stream of random stuff, and they use language, and woah, does that mean it's all secretly made up?
if tis made up, then so is being human. we mostly bump along being done to, life kind of happens, and then being thinking beings we make up a story about it (and mostly post it to the internet)
and that's how we figure out what it is to be human
and that's the neat part.

but this theory stuff we've been given, it keeps getting stuck on the divide between truth and fiction, and how can anything be true? and myself, I reckon it's all fiction, and I don't care, because that's how we put the meaning in it. lives are full of made up stuff, like justice and mercy and love, and rather the better for it. but these theory papers, they never get that far, they're all sitting there making stoned Keanu noises about how you never really know anything. woah.

... I'm so bored. bored bored bored.
... yet I have already got more work done today than I have all semester.

Meds suck. ... depression sucked pretty bad too, but meds seriously suck.



Now I'm wondering if I can quote Hogfather in my Life Writing assignment or if I'll just run out of words if I try it.
... oh dear, I need to double check how the word count thing works this year, they were making noises about changing it last year and I've been away.

... *gets back to work* ...

M1058 (1112) National Cinema 10 Credits
Essay (Essay): 80% Pass (Provisional)

80%
!

(The grade boundary to get a First is 70%. A 2:1 is 60%, etc etc. So I'm doing quite a lot well to get 80%.)

My essay on the significance of Dr Caligari's glasses was a resounding success.

In a semester that also saw my worst mark ever, both for a single assignment and a unit, this is somewhat of a relief. Have not lost brain. *phew*

(I have had this window open half an hour while I poke the page with my grades on just to be sure it hasn't changed.)

okays, happy dance time, :-D

I woke up with thoughts on why when non-genre writers come up with something that is science fiction but they're all It's Not Science Fiction it doesn't tend to work.

Or, more broadly, on why the rules of genre need to be understood by writers, because they're part of the understanding of readers.

( Read more... )

So genre is a long history of texts to reference, that will have built patterns and expectations and a shorthand the reader is drawing on. But it is also a set of writing and reading tools, techniques that foreground different aspects, and ways of approaching decoding the story. If you approach a new genre without familiarising yourself with all that, you're just not going to be communicating what you think you're saying, let alone giving the experience your readers thought the packaging promised.

If a writer thinks they can somehow walk into a genre, pick up on whichever tropes have caught their eye, and otherwise have a clean sheet to start from... language doesn't work like that. Not at the word sized unit, and very much not at the level of story.

We're all working on palimpsests, and we need to understand what we're overwriting.

I was reading a newspaper comments thread (again. yes. sorry.)
this time about an article on a sociology course about Jay-Z.
I know nothing about Jay-Z.
But the comments were often going on about how it's a terrible thing to study because hip hop is full of misogyny, homophobia, crime etc etc etc
... I wonder if they've ever studied English, or Cultural Studies, or indeed read most texts produced in Western culture.

The point of English & Cultural Studies thus far, the method of study in most units, is:

Take a text. Read it. Find out how it sucks. Notice the places that are racist, sexist, homophobic, and really weird about disabled people. Pull it into tiny raggedy pieces until you can see all the sharp edges.

Go 'hmmmm'.

Take your new found knowledge and, now you can identify texts full of gross examples formed in earlier historical periods, aim your toolkit at stuff closer to home.

See current texts. Radio, television, magazines, books. Every area, pop culture through fancy literary award stuff.

Pull it into tiny raggedy pieces and see sharp edges that, on close examination, are pretty much the exact same issues, in new clothing.

Realise it all sucks.



... this is why I've got fed up of studying. 'It all sucks' is not a conclusion I want to stop at. I just keep finding more isms all over all everything anyway. Boo.


So! Whatever text you want to start with, whether it be Homer of the Classics or of the Simpsons, whatever the artist being studied that the commentariat are currently bemoaning, Lady Gaga studies or Jay-Z in sociology, the important thing is the toolkit. You learn to sift it for attitudes, to connect it to conditions of production and consumption, to find how art is shaped by the world of artists and readers, and what fucked up things sneak into it when you're not looking. In my current degree course we've studied everything from Greek tragedy up to postmodern graphic novels, and to be honest I've hated most of it, but hand me a text and ask me to hunt down the attitudes to women, ethnicity, disability and queerness therein, and I'll be all over that. And if what you learn from studying these things is that they are in fact fucked up, well, welcome to Cultural Studies. All ur ideologies belong to competing discourses. Big mess all over the place. Learn the toolkit and you can find where the tensions are at and what particular big messes are all over this one.


We also studied much about class. Since class never made much sense to me, I'm not so hot at analysing for that. But you don't usually go far wrong in the last couple hundred years by reading a text as if it's all about How Middle Class White Heterosexual Men Are The Bestest. And if you find that turns out to be difficult, and if there is in fact a completely different bestest in this one, well that's a delightful surprise.
And you know what kind of artists most reliably draw the commentariat's ire?
... the ones that might just possibly have a different idea of bestest. On account of not being the standard one.

Which suggests to me tis exactly the sort of class we need more of.*



*as long as I don't have to do it. Two semesters, an essay, and a dissertation to go, and then I'm sooooo out of here.

So, having been awake long long times, I realised it was 10 in the morning and I hadn't talked to mum for a bunch of time. So we talked. I described the flat we're viewing this week, mum forbade me from moving there, which was pretty much what I was thinking only more so. We talked more. We talked more. Mum hung up for five minutes. She called back. We talked more. Mum hung up and redialed because it was nearly an hour. We talked more. It was past 1pm and we were still talking. And we always have the same conversation! We talk how difficult mum's jobs are, we talk housing, we talk government and disability, we talk all the same things all the time. For hours! So that was a long conversation.

Then I tried finishing the reading about Goblin Market.
Theology is complicated. Which, duh. ( Read more... ) I'm not even a Christian! Why I got to know this all?
Well I don't, I'm just doing reading about a poem.
... and getting a bit sulky about it, because now I'm thinking of more interesting religious bits than of gender bits, and I need to do an exam about gender.

The end of Goblin Market don't make sense if it's about drug addiction. ( Read more... )

Mostly though, the more I poke it, the more I find most convincing the assertion of the original poet, who says it's just a fairy tale. It don't mean. It just has a story.

This suggests I'm in the wrong subject again.

I know, I know, everything has a moral or ideological position if you poke it. It's just if you poke them hard enough they don't make no sense.
:-p


Okay, I only have to have a coherent opinion on Friday between 10am and 1pm. ( Read more... )


Thing I do like about Goblin Market: It's an adventure story with lives in danger and lives saved BUT it don't depend on hitting to fix it. Hitting is what the bad people do. Good people bring fruit juice. Saving the world with fruit juice should work more often.



Now it feels weird that my studious/puzzled icon is a guy. But my girl icons are either angry or angrier or nice reporter people. Or Zatanna with hugs or bunnies. They are not icons for poking stupid poems unless I'm particularly wanting to throw things across the room.

... some of these essays will probably get the angry icons. very odd mirrors, they are.



okay, I'm done for the day.

One trouble with trying to read up on The Woman in White is there's a lot of bollocks said about madness. Also a lot of use of the word oedipal, about people that are not father and son, and use of the word incest, about people who are not in fact siblings. Marian calls Walter her brother sometimes, and he ends up her brother in law. What a shocker. Hmmm, there's also a Walter section talking about Laura as "Mine to love and honour as father and brother both." That follows a Marian section talking about how desperate things were for them because they had no father or brother to be on their side. Also Walter says "The sad sight of the change in her from her former self, made the one interest of my love an interest of tenderness and compassion which her father or her brother might have felt, and which I felt, God knows, in my inmost heart." Rats, I might have to concede they have a point on this one. It's meant to differentiate his love from mad ill Laura, which is all neutral and caring, from his love for her as his wife, but he do use the words a bunch. It's a bit creepy, really, he marries the useless one they've been treating as a child. There's a lot about brothers, and Brothers, and the Brotherhood. But mostly they're invisible brothers mucking up history, and then killing people. Sisters are right in the middle doing lots of stuff. So there's lots of essays about sisters, which will link in an essay with sisters in Goblin Market. I'd rather research something else entirely but the easiest way to access essays at the moment isn't our Athens logins, which seem to have been neutered, but to ask the teacher to go grab them for us. Is no good. Shall stick to the ones she already got.

The oedipal bit is because the bad guy is older than the good guy. I don't think they really need to go there based on just that.

And then there's all the bit about madness. I just gave up on an essay for a bit because it's starting to go on about (a) how very mad Anne Catherick is and (b) how scary mad people are. As for (a) their evidence is that she 'in her delirium' believes things which ironically turn out to be true. She loves Laura like a sister, which is in fact biologically true. But because she was in the asylum this essay goes 'Anne is mad, Anne believes mad things, isn't is sad how they turn out to be true?' Whereas I go 'Anne was in the asylum because a powerful man believed she knew secrets, Anne believes she knows secrets, Anne believes a thing that turns out to be true. Hmmmm, maybe she wasn't delusional.' I mean I'll grant she has problems with anxiety, but having been locked up, and knowing she is in fact being followed, and the teensy little problem at the end where we only have the bad guy's word for it that she died before he got around to killing her, she really do have just cause for a great deal of anxiety! So she's a bit fluttery and worried all the time. Surprise! She has a lot to worry about! And while people go on about how she's really kind of stupid, that doesn't make her mad, that makes her possibly learning disabled and possibly just ignorant. So I'll go as far as anxious and learning disabled, but mad? What's the sane response to knowing men want to lock her in a mad house?

As for madness itself being scary... grow up and get over it. Really. Low end estimates for how many of us go there are 1 in 4. Mental illness is a common experience. It's scary the way any illness is scary, in that you don't want it happening to you, and it makes people a bit unpredictable, but hello, everyone is unpredictable, there's just an illusion of predictability that's not true in experiments or lived experience. And if they're just saying that someone being very anxious tends to make people around them very anxious, well that's true enough, but they're talking a lot of mystifying bollocks around and beyond that. It's like they just say the word 'madness' and suddenly it's all inexplicable and rabbit hole. :-p

The actual scary people in the book are (1) abusive husbands (2) best friends of abusive husbands who are probably abusive husbands too (3) rich people who can get the law to do what they tell it to, especially when they happen to also be (1) and (2). The allegedly mad person doesn't do anything scary. It's scary to be alleged to be mad, since they then get locked up for the crazy person behaviour of claiming to be themselves. That means not that madness is scary but that men misusing the label madness are scary.

Stupid essays. Vaguely stupid book. Annoyance now.



The exam won't have a question on the depiction of 'madness' in the texts we've studied but there's enough of it in enough places to be very very annoying because Victorians categories were bloody unhelpful. It's like there's the category people, and the category madness, and you leave the one to be the other. Wrong wrongity wrong wrong. Yuck.

... oh my essay language is totally working there. :eyeroll:

Today I read Persepolis, which we'll be studying from Wednesday for Contemporary Narrative.
I kind of can't deal. This whole unit has been grisly death, war, persecution and (attempted) suicide. I think I'm going to have to prioritise my mental health above getting a decent grade and just leave the things in the lessons and not do much studying outside of that. Which will mean putting in only about a quarter of the work, maybe less, but if there were a lesson that required me to repeatedly bang my head against the wall I'd opt out of that, and I think that would hurt less.
Humans suck. Humans are stupid and selfish and evil. Not all of them, just the ones we've been reading about in that lesson.

I'm going to have to go watch Doctor Who instead, I can't deal with that other view.
Because I'd rather live in the hopeful places, thanks. Even if the other stuff is 'reality'.

am reading a long thing about the sensation novel, nerves, and gender identity. (it says it will also be about homosexuality, but I suspect it will be rubbish before then). It reckons that all the characters are described as having problems with nerves, being nervous, having a nervous face or whatever the hell else. It reckons that women describe it as a sign of their femininity, and men as a sign of their immaturity. It concludes from that that everyone is a little bit feminine, and goes off on... oh dear, thirty pages of waffle about gender confusion in the sensation novel and how it extends to the reader, who is assumed by the novel to be male but is also made nervous and hence made feminine. However I would say that men and women are all nervous sometimes therefore in the terms set out by this book they're all a bit immature. Women aren't expected to grow out of it, hence the permanent association with femininity. But then they all do grow out of it by the end, without stopping being women. Well, some of them get dead instead, but on the whole, they get better by the end. In the main male character its a sign he went off to Be A Man and came back all Manly. Which happened because he deliberately sought out situations that could make a reasonable person nervous ie getting shot at. So the reader, assumed male or otherwise, seeks out situations that will play on their nerves, in order to get over them and get more mature. It's very tidy that way and doesn't involve gender confusion at all. Which is why you can't make an essay out of it and we have to read this rubbish instead.

... because I cannot throw it across the room on the laptop.

"if held to a mirror - that is if read backwards - the body of the word golden might be seen as the imperfect reversal of goblin"

*blinks and gapes*

This, we study for university?
( Read more... )

I have read 200 pages of Victorian novel.
So far there's an heiress, a poor man, and an aristo. I think we can guess the rest from there.
The fact the aristo is deep in debt and stands to gain £20,000 if the heiress dies does not bode well for her. Or someone. There's a definite Doom hanging around here.
... so so so bored.
... really, it's hard to get invested in the dilemmas of people who wouldn't be in a bind at all by modern mores. She doesn't love him, she just promised her dad she'd marry him. And her guardian is being an idiot, not even with her best interests at heart or anything complicated like that, just because he doesn't want to be bothered. I don't know, would a 20 year old still have a guardian in charge of her money in any circumstances? Would they need to draw up a contract for where her money goes when she marries and have her guardian override her wishes, or could she just be the boss of her own stuff? It's clearly stupid to do it this way with men doing all the deciding.
So I'm bored. She should just go :-p and marry the drawing teacher and have a messy divorce when she grows up a bit. Or maybe just go to college, or art school, and meet a lot more drawing teachers and maybe some models.
The plight of people trapped in what Victorians considered acceptable options for nice girls is difficult to sympathise with when the only sensible option from here is to just make new rules.
So it's a total grind trying to read this stuff.

Also, I keep on getting distracted by Atlantis stuff. Maybe I should actually watch the show at some point.


Now I get to read theory stuff. ... or, since that made me feel all arrgh, possibly take a break for some hours. I appear to be nocturnal but that doesn't mean I have to study all night.

Why did I choose a subject area where we spend half our time reading about suicidal blithering idiots?
Be it Mariana or the Charge of the Light Brigade, they're all terribly depressing.
It's entirely possible to write poems about being alive and not miserable, but you wouldn't know it from this lot.
( Read more... )

... I strongly suspect I prefer the Renaissance. Or the Romantics, from the Revolution and Reaction unit last year.

On the plus side, it's not modernism.

There's stuff about JE choosing between StJohn Rivers and Rochester
and there's stuff about how Helen Burns and Bertha Mason/Rochester represent parts of Jane's psyche
but Helen Burns is just like St John Rivers, only StJ is a bully and Helen is bullied,
and Bertha does the same drinking and shagging things that Rochester does,
and the main difference between them is gender-and-power.
Helen Burns is a girl who just accepts being told what to do and accepts god's will and looks forward to death and dies,
StJohn Rivers is a man who goes around telling people what to do and accepts god's will and looks forward to death and dies.
Bertha and her husband do much the same things, but Bertha gets locked in an attic for them, by Rochester, who keeps doing them with continental women instead.
The only difference in those pairs is the men have the power and the women are powerless.

But Jane doesn't choose either of those men when they're still the powerful telling her what to do people.
And she does not accept powerlessness like Helen, or even live violently in restriction like Bertha, she just runs away.

She chooses Rochester before she knows he or his situation have changed though. But the book rewards her by making him pretty much powerless. He's still the guy who is about sex not religion, but now he really needs her so he's not going to be locking her away anywhere.

But the women get writ about as parts of her psyche, and the men don't. And those two women out of lots and lots of women get writ about as parts of her psyche, which is weird, because what makes them more psychological than Mrs Fairfax or Georgiana or Adele or Mary?

There's not just a binary opposition going on there. For most of the book the assorted women have ways of life Jane rejects, and the assorted men are great big bullies. Once Jane finds a way of life she can live with, with other women living the same way, she goes back to Rochester, who isn't a bully any more, cause Bertha got out and burned away his capacity to do the same thing to others.

We kept on being told to notice the fire-and-ice binaries in the book, and we wrote columns on the board with fire-Rochester-passion and ice-StJohn-reason, but that ignores so much I think it's stupid.

I should probably phrase that better in an essay though.