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Monday 19 November 10
Oh, the joy that shall be mine, when this blighted semester is finally over and Monday morning is no longer crank-it-up-to-teach time. A news flash that never reached me until I'd made the transition from sitting in classes to standing in front of them: many instructors feel just as much anxiety, just as much I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, just as much apprehension about negative evaluation, as students feel when they hand in an assignment. Except that we get that evaluation every single class session, from a whole roomful of people instead of from a single prof.
I got into writing Saturday, and felt things starting to move at last, and thought well, hey, in the groove, forward motion is happening!, and then spent most of Sunday not writing, but rather wrestling with a damnable CGI script that was working for a while, and then stopped working for inexplicable reasons. Demonically possessed, I mutter to myself, but probably I've just screwed up some tiny blip of coding somewhere--I'd make the world's worst programmer, having no gift for detail at all.
I developed a mega-headache while code-wrestling, and finally gave up and watched some old Sports Night episodes as a distraction. You wouldn't think SN would be good with a headache, given the rat-a-tat snappiness of the whole thing, but I usually find it soothing for some odd reason. This time, though, I was unsoothed, because one episode had a longish Dan-and-Abby scene, and it reminded me that I have never seen a film or television depiction of psychotherapy that didn't leave me chafed by its inaccuracy and inauthenticity. I've worked as a therapist--not much, and not for long, but enough to be able to distinguish between good and slovenly therapeutic work. And it's one thing when a TV therapist's lapses are a coherent part of the storyline (e.g. Dr. Melfi in the Sopranos). But geez, if Abby's really charging Dan $700 a month, he's getting ripped off, is what I think.
I can sure understand why a writer would be drawn to inserting psychotherapy sessions in a story or show; they're like dream sequences, a way to shortcut the strenuous process of bringing a character's deeply buried stuff to the surface so that you can get it out there and simply get on with the freakin' story. But-- ... and y'know, come to think of it, there aren't that many well-written dream sequences out there either. A whole lot of fairly blatant telling going on, big signposted messages parading out of the subconscious blowing trumpets.
Real dreams are mostly cryptic and obscure, seemingly random and seldom of much interest to anyone but the dreamer. (Except for Anna's dreams, of course, which I adore.) In the same way, most genuine therapeutic work is slog slog slog, with very few dramatic "Aha!" moments. I mean, I understand that art is not photorealism, art must compress and highlight and play up and distort. But it's not really artistically effective to have the therapist, or the yenta-like dream mind, simply pop up and say, "Well, here's your problem! You're afraid of success / You never got over your parents' disapproval / You know you're really in love with him, don't you?" As tempting as such pronouncements can be, they seldom work in either therapy or fiction.
Wednesday 14 November 01
Posting hiatus due in part to mrks.org being moved to new server and my consequent befuddlement over new IP address, and partly due to entrenched inertia.
The uncanny, unseasonal warmth we've been having in Minnesota is into its--what, second week now?--and forecast to persist through the weekend. There are two prescribed reactions when this kind of inexplicable meteorological twinkie is tossed our way: (1) simple gratitude, obeisance to the Weather Gods, and a not-looking-in-the-mouths-of-gift-horses; or (2) the reflexive Calvinistic certainty that every pleasure will be paid for in pain, and that we are guaranteeing ourselves one of those January spells when it doesn't get above zero for a week at a time.
My own reaction is deep unease. Not just because there's something seriously off, incongruent, about mollocking around outside without a jacket when the trees are bare and the sun is so low in the sky, when we're only five weeks from solstice. But even more because--well, because November has a very distinct and practical role in the seasonal cycles and this year it's not fulfilling it.
See, if you take a plant, a nice hardy perennial plant of the kind that's fully capable of surviving harsh winters, and you drop it straight out of mild September weather into mid-winter, when it's still got all its fresh tender sappy growth going, the shock to the system will quite likely kill it. Plants need a hardening-off period, when they retreat inward, as it were, and abandon all the leaves and stems they spent all summer happily sending forth.
Humans don't undergo quite the same kind of physiological hardening-off, but there's a mental process of acclimitization that is just as crucial in order to make it through winter. You need that stretch of slowly-deepening cold, the daily increments of additional misery, to learn a key survival skill: how to stop paying attention to what your nerve endings are telling you (cold hurt pain ow). It's a meditative practice, in a sense, the art of learning to turn your mind elsewhere, pull inward, and it's a lesson that has to be relearned every year, slowly and with some suffering. It's not happening this year, and that makes me nervous. If you know pain is inevitable, it really helps to be prepared for it, and that's fundamentally what November is all about, and it's not going to happen when it feels like freakin' California out there.
Wednesday 7 November 01
Not a whole lot to say about the Buffy episode. I was not looking forward to it, because I have an intense aversion to musicals (sorry, LaT!)--no matter what kind, no matter how good. So I watched with less than total attention, and with my usual lyrics-impairedness (I can almost never make out the words to songs), which means that to get a sense of everything that went on, I'll have to read over a copy of the script at some point, if anyone's still posting these anywhere.
Two things I did enjoy:
(1) The fact that most of the cast are clearly not trained singers. The air of awkward amateurishness that this lent to the proceedings was endearing to me. Touching. And one of the things I dislike about most musicals is the typical well-trained Broadway Singing Voice; I don't know why it grates on me so, but it does.
(2) The relative absence of plot. I hate plot; or rather, I hate the standard TV-episode (or action-movie) plot. Y'know, briefly set up situation, haul in bad guy(s), ratchet up tension, put someone in peril, build to climactic fight scene, resolution, end. Bores me to tears. What I mostly want characters to do is converse; talk is to me the most compelling human action, far more interesting than fights or chases or sex, and the dramatic conventions of musicals do push more in the direction of talking (or, well, OK, singing) about feelings and relationships than they do toward wham-bam action.
Another thing musicals allow for, and conventional TV drama does not, is the soliliquy; it's an established element of the musical genre, and I wish they'd done more with it in this episode. Like Sarah, I'd love to know more about what's going on in Willow's head at this point.
But anyway, my mind isn't really on Buffy just now, because I'm still wallowing in the backwash of bitterness at the Major League Baseball owners' contraction vote, which means my team, my Twins, are probably history. Of course, it's silly to be bitter about this--not because "it's just a game," but because it should have been obvious for years to anyone with the brains that god gave a ball-peen hammer, that it's all and only about the money. That we fans, and our years of love and dedication and loyalty, mean less than nothing whatsoever. That's been patently obvious for a long long time. But it still hurts to get hit in the face with that fact, just as it hurts media fans when a show they've loved and supported gets arbitrarily cancelled.
Nothing's final yet, the legal artillery is being rolled out and there'll be long nasty courtroom fights over dollars and contracts. But you know? I don't care. Even if an unlikely "victory" emerges, even if the team survives--I'm through. I have a depressing capacity for loyalty to obviously lost causes (witness my doggedly watching every sucky XF episode last year), but even I am capable of checking out of a situation where it's clear that I'm being contemptuously used, shaken down for my dollars and tossed aside.
It does hurt to let go. Summers will be a little emptier. But I'm through with this. MLB has just turned yet another dedicated fan into an enemy, and frankly I don't think they can afford to keep decimating their already-thinning fan ranks, but hey. If they don't care, why should I?
Oooh yeah. Deep bitterness, baby.
Monday 5 November 01
Whoa. Can we just dub this week's Angel "The One in Which Everyone Turns into a Freakin' Moron"?! No real spoilers here, just to say that surely I wasn't the only one sorely hoping that during that final befuddled conversation in the hotel lounge/lobby/whatever-the-frap-it-is, we'd hear crossbow noises offscreen, and then Gunn could appear, all "Sorry, y'know, she was bustin' a move."
Ah me. I was yearning for Methos here, the Methos of "Take his head, problem solved." In fact, I'd love to have Methos show up, knock a whole bunch of heads together, and then maybe drag Gunn off to a nearby bar for a few drinks and a nice peaceable conversation about armaments. Heh. (And come to think of it, oh yeah. Gunn honey, there are other and plenty cuter pale attenuated snarky English guys in the world. Ones who could, like, show you some moves...)
To be sure, I watched this episode right after my first-ever viewing of Becoming Part 2, and ... golly. For all that I've ragged aplenty on Buffy for failing at times to Do What Needed To Be Done, I have to say--she gets a free pass here. The rest of you, you get detention. Can you repeat after me? Darla, folks, this is DAR. LA. Heads out of collective asses, please.
Sunday 4 November 01
Have spent a long and frustrating weekend attempting to duct-tape together parts of the crap-in-progress. The problem is that I have, in my head, a relatively clean and smooth-flowing story arc; but what I actually have on the hard drive is a godawful unsightly dog's breakfast of scenes. Scenes, scenes, scenes. None of which want to fit together in any kind of cooperative, helpful, story-arc-building kind of way, oh no. Instead we have a bit of Ray cooking dinner, and a bit of Fraser snarking at his new supervisor, and Ray in the bar, and Fraser taking a boat down the Mackenzie, and Ray and Fraser having sex, and so on and on and disjointedly on. Dammitall. I'm tempted at times to just shove the whole thing together, post it on my webpage as "Miscellaneous dS Scenes," and say "Hah! That's it! That's all you're getting!! For chrissake, it's not like I'm getting paid to make this thing make sense, am I now?"
In other news, I've been enjoying reading Omar's MBTV recaps of Smallville ("Look, I may be of the straight persuasion, but even I buckle under the weight of the Lex Charisma. It's strong and powerful and so wrong, it's right. Oh, Lex. Take me out of this Kansas farmtown before I wilt like a hothouse flower! Ahem. Sorry. Moving on...") considerably more than I've been enjoying the show itself. (Yes, I watched it again last week. I know, I know, but I heard John Glover was going to be on, and I'd put up with worse than Smallville for some time with Mr. Glover. Can I just say that damn, I miss Brimstone?) I was very amused to see on Omar's weblog that he'd gotten an e-mail from one of the show's writers, saying that she and the other writers have been reading portions of the recaps aloud to each other. Heee. I wonder which portions...
Got to spend the afternoon today with the estimable Carol S., watching a whole raft of new songvids, hers and others'. The upward arc of technical and artistic quality in songvids over the last few years has been really striking--whatever one thinks of songvids as an enterprise, there's some really imaginative and well-crafted work being done. I am tempted again to shell out the bucks for Pinnacle and Premiere, except that I really know that this is something for which I don't have much natural aptitude.
Ohh, god, teaching again tomorrow, and there's a stack of assignments yet to grade. I am so profoundly grateful that I never launched into a for-real academic career, because there is nothing in the world I hate more than grading assignments. Even duct-taping scenes together is less awful. And no, I'm not going to do this tonight, I'll do it in staff meeting tomorrow morning, when I'm supposed to be listening to updates about the latest deranged policy changes the U is foisting on us. The U seems to be hell-bent lately on doing things that piss me off, and I think I should start polishing the resume and scouting out the exits. It's clearly a sign of age that I'm even hesitating, thinking about staying in this job just because, uh, it's comfortable, and pays me good money, and has [shamefaced whisper] a really good pension plan, and stuff. I have to hang on tight to my life motto, which I lifted from e.e. cummings's Olaf: There is some shit I will not eat. Not even if it comes candy-coated with a pension plan.
Thursday 1 November 01
An extraordinarily mild day to be starting November with--soft milky air and vague clouds. Ten years ago today we were in the middle of a blizzard that left two and a half feet of snow. Heh. I remember that one vividly. Couldn't get my car out of the garage for over a week, because when I tried to shovel there was literally no place to put the snow; I finally had to carry it, shovelful at a time, down to the end of the block and dump it. My back still remembers that one.
Halloween was quiet here; I had maybe six parties of trick-or-treaters, down from the usual numbers, and two incredibly cute small kids going solo (with parents lurking on the sidewalk)--one in a miniature tuxedo, with a top hat perched jauntily sideways on his head, who observed solemnly that my storm door was sticking and set his candy bag down to help me close it, and another dressed in a mime get-up and facepaint, who kept strictly to role by not even saying "trickertreat!" but who was inexplicably playing a small plastic accordion.
I've been feeling mildly unsettled, vaguely apprehensive, all week, partly due, I suppose, to all the ominous warnings issuing from Our Leaders, and partly because a few writers I value have abruptly blipped off the 'net in recent weeks. I'm very much reassured by Ins's reappearance in her non-LJ diary, and by news that Hth is alive and well and has plans to get her page back up at some point. For all of my fine talk a few days ago about how someday I'll orbit out of this odd on-line world, I hate it when other people do. Stay here! Amuse me, dammit!