![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cabin Pressure 4x03, "Vaduz"
Jan. 24th, 2013 01:10 pmI love Cabin Pressure, really I do. And I enjoyed "Vaduz." And yet ( I'm troubled by something, which will be predictable if you know me. )
Jan. 24th, 2013
Currently reading:
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. I had to set this aside for a while when I got to the point where I couldn't face another story of atrocities, but I've resumed it and am getting near the end.
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff. I'm bogged down in this novel, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, and not sure if I'll finish it. I jumped ahead to see what happened to the gay soldiers (one of the useful features of an e-reader is being able to search for particular names or words), but the other characters have not caught my interest. Normally I eat up Arthuriana with a spoon, but I think Sutcliff makes a fatal mistake in telling the story from Arthur's POV. Her Arthur is dull, with an interior life consisting entirely of battle strategy, horses, and dogs, and also somewhat priggish and intolerant of others' emotions; this is plausible enough for a great warrior but doesn't make him much fun to hang around with for hundreds and hundreds of pages. About all Sword at Sunset has done for me so far is show me how many of its ideas Catherine Christian "borrowed" for her 1978 novel The Pendragon, which despite its dubious provenance is a much more interesting book.
Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum. I requested this through Interlibrary Loan because it had an essay on camp theaters that included some discussion of female impersonators, but it turns out to be a treasure chest of historical detail, with essays on topics like improvised medical technology in Japanese-run POW camps, camp newspapers created by Japanese POWs held by the British as forced labor after the war, embroidery made by Western civilian women internees in Asia, and the re-creation of family structures by prisoners during the First World War. Most of the articles show their origins as comference papers--they're brief, and like a lot of academic military- and military-related history they tend to be short on theorized analysis--but they're still a fresh and insightful view of POW life. (Special note to![[livejounal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_other.png)
halotolerant: in the essay on camp theaters, there's a photo showing Bobby Spong in costume. He looks beautifully elegant and, at least in that rather distant shot, very very convincing.)
Recently finished:
The League of Gentlemen, by John Boland. Another ILL book, which I requested after seeing the film, which I discuss here. The novel is bleaker and more violent than the film, with more mistrust and less camaraderie among the criminals. Interestingly, and contrary to what I expected, the gay character, Rangerhope, in the novel is conventionally masculine (he's a race car driver), unlike his equivalent character in the film (who is feminine but heterosexual, his gayness having been transferred to a [conventionally masculine] minor character). The story is unjudgmental about his gayness; the protagonist is at one point shown as being disgusted by the fact that Rangerhope is gay, but the protagonist doesn't exactly have any moral high ground, and anyway most of the time he admires and even likes Rangerhope. Not too bad for a pulp novel published in 1958. The book isn't all that interesting otherwise, being mostly devoted to the details of the bank robbery.
What I'm reading next:
Possibly Triumff: Her Majesty's hero, by Dan Abnett, which I picked up super-cheap secondhand and looks like it might be a fun alternate history.
Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur. I had to set this aside for a while when I got to the point where I couldn't face another story of atrocities, but I've resumed it and am getting near the end.
Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff. I'm bogged down in this novel, a retelling of the Arthurian legend, and not sure if I'll finish it. I jumped ahead to see what happened to the gay soldiers (one of the useful features of an e-reader is being able to search for particular names or words), but the other characters have not caught my interest. Normally I eat up Arthuriana with a spoon, but I think Sutcliff makes a fatal mistake in telling the story from Arthur's POV. Her Arthur is dull, with an interior life consisting entirely of battle strategy, horses, and dogs, and also somewhat priggish and intolerant of others' emotions; this is plausible enough for a great warrior but doesn't make him much fun to hang around with for hundreds and hundreds of pages. About all Sword at Sunset has done for me so far is show me how many of its ideas Catherine Christian "borrowed" for her 1978 novel The Pendragon, which despite its dubious provenance is a much more interesting book.
Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, ed. Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum. I requested this through Interlibrary Loan because it had an essay on camp theaters that included some discussion of female impersonators, but it turns out to be a treasure chest of historical detail, with essays on topics like improvised medical technology in Japanese-run POW camps, camp newspapers created by Japanese POWs held by the British as forced labor after the war, embroidery made by Western civilian women internees in Asia, and the re-creation of family structures by prisoners during the First World War. Most of the articles show their origins as comference papers--they're brief, and like a lot of academic military- and military-related history they tend to be short on theorized analysis--but they're still a fresh and insightful view of POW life. (Special note to
halotolerant: in the essay on camp theaters, there's a photo showing Bobby Spong in costume. He looks beautifully elegant and, at least in that rather distant shot, very very convincing.)Recently finished:
The League of Gentlemen, by John Boland. Another ILL book, which I requested after seeing the film, which I discuss here. The novel is bleaker and more violent than the film, with more mistrust and less camaraderie among the criminals. Interestingly, and contrary to what I expected, the gay character, Rangerhope, in the novel is conventionally masculine (he's a race car driver), unlike his equivalent character in the film (who is feminine but heterosexual, his gayness having been transferred to a [conventionally masculine] minor character). The story is unjudgmental about his gayness; the protagonist is at one point shown as being disgusted by the fact that Rangerhope is gay, but the protagonist doesn't exactly have any moral high ground, and anyway most of the time he admires and even likes Rangerhope. Not too bad for a pulp novel published in 1958. The book isn't all that interesting otherwise, being mostly devoted to the details of the bank robbery.
What I'm reading next:
Possibly Triumff: Her Majesty's hero, by Dan Abnett, which I picked up super-cheap secondhand and looks like it might be a fun alternate history.
the LGB representation bingo card
Jan. 24th, 2013 10:54 pmI've decided that the world needs a lesbian, gay, and bisexual1 representation bingo card for all those oh-so-reasonable answers some people like to give when one asks why a particular text contains no characters who are identified as LGB. I'm probably not the first person to think of this, but a quick google didn't reveal an existing card except for a comics-specific one.
So, wanna help me brainstorm squares?
Ideas so far (mine and others'):
1I'm aware that the list does not cover the entirety of the queer spectrum. That is because I think the issues of visibility and inclusion around, for example, trans* or asexual characters are sufficiently different from those around LGB characters that one bingo card will not fit all. For that matter, there could probably be separate bingo cards for gay men, bisexual men, bisexual women, and lesbians, if someone wanted to make them.
So, wanna help me brainstorm squares?
Ideas so far (mine and others'):
It's a children's/YA story.Your contributions are encouraged!
It's not important to mention the characters' sexualities.
Lesbian/gay/bisexual people only make up X percent of the population, so statistically it makes sense that all the characters are straight.
The creator is at the start of their career and obviously can't risk including queer characters.
Wasn't that one character who had two lines in episode eight gay?
The author said Chracter Y is LGB but it just wasn't specifically mentioned.
It's set in [historical period or historical event] and there's no evidence of any queer people then (and if there was, they were all in the closet).
The creator is gay, why are you singling out their sexuality?
It contains [other minority group], why does it have to have queer people too?
The character is bisexual, they just happen to be attracted to the opposite sex for the whole of this canon.
Why do you have to make everything about sex?
The creator is straight, how can you expect them to write about something they haven't experienced?
It's fantasy! And this universe just doesn't have any queer people in.
There are queer people in my universe.. I just didn't think any of them were worth writing about.
In my universe, nobody cares about sexuality.
They'd just mess it up anyway.
It's about [common setting for situational homosexuality] so that would be stereotyping.
They're as good as dating already!
It just never came up!
The creator is gay, so I'm sure they know what they're doing.
We all know [Character X] and [Character Y] are doing it, anyway
1I'm aware that the list does not cover the entirety of the queer spectrum. That is because I think the issues of visibility and inclusion around, for example, trans* or asexual characters are sufficiently different from those around LGB characters that one bingo card will not fit all. For that matter, there could probably be separate bingo cards for gay men, bisexual men, bisexual women, and lesbians, if someone wanted to make them.