This long essay, "A Tale of Two Mounties," takes a rather different approach from my analyses. I don't agree with it entirely, but I think it's extremely interesting, and I both love and am persuaded by the idea of Victoria as a sorceress à la Morgan le Fey and Nimue.

Tags: due south

"Starman" (DS 2.11)
Original air date: February 22, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: How do I get out of this town?
MOTEL CLERK: Left at the corner.
RAY: Well, I don't have a car.
MOTEL CLERK: Then you have a problem.
RAY: You have no idea. Is there a car rental agency?
MOTEL CLERK: Apollo Thirteen Rentals.
RAY: How about a bus?
MOTEL CLERK: Last one went through an hour ago.
RAY: Does the space shuttle fly over any time soon?
MOTEL CLERK: Ask Bob.
RAY: I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a dull spoon.
[she offers him a spoon]
RAY: No, no, it's just an expression.

Spoilers.

( Great Scott. Turtles. )

Tags: due south

Check out the TOC for Flytrap 9.

Tags: bibliographic data, shameless self-promotion

"We Are the Eggmen" (DS 2.10)

[Here we encounter for the first time the problem of discrepancy between the order in which episodes originally aired and the order in which they appear on the DVD. (Yes, this also happened with "Heaven and Earth," but that wasn't a problem because it was quite obvious where that episode was supposed to go.) Given two equally unreliable sources^1,2 and a show which mostly doesn't give a damn about continuity--and given that I may or may not remember to check the IMDb before I turn on the DVD player--I'm probably mostly going to go with the order they're in on the DVD. Not because I think the DVD is an authoritative source but because it's the path of least resistance. If there's an actual authoritative source somewhere, I'd be very pleased to hear about it.

---
¹I watched Firefly when it aired on FOX, thank you.
² On the other hand, these are the American DVDs of Due South, the ones that can't even be bothered to design new packaging when ONE OF THE TWO CO-STARS CHANGES. Admittedly, there's some metatextual appropriateness to their continuing to have Vecchio/Marciano plastered all over everything with no acknowledgment of Kowalski/Rennie, but you know, I really don't think that's why they did it.]

Original air date: February 29, 1996
Favorite quote:
FRASER: I thought it important to inform you that there's been an emergency.
THATCHER: Emergency?
FRASER: Yes. With your car.
THATCHER: What about it?
FRASER: . . . It's on fire.
CLOUTIER: Oh, please.
FRASER: No, it is. It's burning away. All of the other cars feel threatened.
CLOUTIER: You're making this up.
FRASER: Yes, I am.

Spoilers.

( No, there's only one thing to do and that's to mail you back to the Yukon where you belong. )

Tags: due south

"Punctuation, Grammar, Usage: Who Needs 'Em?"
"The difference between 'that' and 'which' or 'anxious' and 'eager'; proper use of the subjunctive mood; the serial comma. Lots of rules...why should you care? Panelists discuss the delicate balance between the precision of expression that the rules are meant to support and the fact that living language is fluid and malleable, and how this all applies to a genre which is sometimes described as unconstrained by time, space, or reality."
Friday, 9:00-10:15 P.M.
Senate B
M: Delia Sherman, Deb Taber, Rebecca Maines, Tom La Farge, Sarah Monette

Two Heads With But a Single Brain - Collaborators talk about writing together
"How two (or more) can do what one can not (or not). The advantages, the pitfalls of writers pooling their talent. Collaborators provide anecdotes, insights, recriminations."
Saturday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Capitol B
M: Richard Bowes, Mark Rich, Sarah Monette, Eileen Gunn

Why Return a King (or Queen)?
"Why are fantasy writers from democratic countries so fascinated by monarchy? Why is The Return of the King assumed to be a good thing? And why do some women writers seem to adopt monarchy and just substitute a queen instead of a king? Is it just easier to write 'in the tradition', or are there deeper forces at work?"
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 A.M.
Capitol A
M: Georgie Schnobrich, Chris Hill, Tamora Pierce, Sarah Monette, P. C. Hodgell

Like Quills upon the Fretful Porcupine
Sunday, 2:30-3:45 P.M.
Fair Trade
Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, David Levine, Ellen Kushner

How Much Is Too Much?
"Unless we're reading or writing about a utopia, the societies in our fantasy worlds are going to have problems. In fact, a culture without problems invariably comes off as shallow and unrealistic. Does this mean we need to include things like sexism and racism if we want to tell a believable story? And if so, are we, as authors, guilty of perpetuating whatever-ism in the real world?"
Monday, 8:30-9:45 A.M.
Assembly
M: Sarah Monette, Catherynne M. Valente, Gregory Rihn, Elissa Malcohn, L. Timmel Duchamp

---

Okay, who, WHO is the sadist who decided that 8:30 AM on Monday was the perfect time for a panel about realpolitik verisimilitude in fantasy?

Everybody who shows up is seriously getting a reward. There may be doughnuts.

Tags: wiscon

icanhascheezburger made me laugh really hard this morning.

Tags: cats, the internet is full of things

I went to bed last night with a headache, and it was still there when I woke up. It has, in fact, persisted all day--although I think it's easing off some--meaning that today has been (a.) less productive and (b.) less pleasant than I had hoped.

However, comma, my general state of decrepitude and despond has been alleviated by two things:

1. The most fabulous fidelioscabinet sent me porcupine quill hairsticks, which are both the platonic ideal of awesome and also useful.

2. The Bone Key is a finalist for the first annual Shirley Jackson Awards. I am pleased about this not merely for the obvious reasons, but also because I think it's incredibly cool that Shirley Jackson is being memorialized in this way. The Haunting of Hill House is one of the most elegantly terrifying books I have ever read.

If you have good things you would like to share, I'd love to hear about them.

Tags: bone key, quills upon the fretful porpentine

Snapshot of the writer's mind.

Tags: r&g, storytellers unplugged

coffeeandink links to an excellent post about the ways in which white feminists are failing pretty miserably at the whole "feminism" part when it is--or should be--applied to women who are not white.

And I say, despairingly, didn't we do this already? That was the big feminist revelation of the 90s--see, for example, Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought--that women who were not white, straight, middle-class American women were still, hello, WOMEN, and that their concerns were not the same as ours (Yes, I am, in fact, white, straight, and middle-class. Rocking the suburbs, yo.), and that that meant, not that they should shut up and let the white, straight, middle-class women drive, but that the white, straight, middle-class women should let go of their deathgrip on the steering wheel.

Apparently, we white, straight, middle-class women don't learn very well. As DWF points out, we are employing all the same strategies against women of color that men have been employing against women since we started trying to speak up for ourselves over a century ago. We're protecting our privilege. And this when we know, as women and feminists, that privilege is toxic. That it's real--all too real, thank you--but it isn't true. You don't get privilege in our society because you deserve it--which I suspect is why people get so panicky when they think their privilege is endangered. It's awarded arbitrarily, so, in fact, there is NO REASON for it to endure. The emperor is bare-ass naked.

The opposite of privilege isn't disempowerment. The opposite of privilege is equality.

Tags: blogging against racism, feminism is the radical notion, the elephant in the living room

I might as well point out that every day is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day over at Shadow Unit, where you may donate if you want to, but all the content is free.

Tags: pixel-stained technopeasant wretches, shadow unit