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17 July 2016 at 08:05 #5330317 July 2016 at 08:01 #53302
@missy Ah, well, join the club. I was just about ready to quit TV altogether and stick with old BBC stuff online when Capaldi took over as the best Doctor ever (for me, anyway, but I haven’t been 16 in a very long time, so . . .) and I sank right back in. Now some good shows have turned up on HBO and even some broadcast stations, so I’m hooked again. It’s okay, though. I’ve actually *had* my life, or most of it anyway, and I know I’ve done what I meant to do as well as I could, so what I do with the rest of it is pretty much a free throw. Wishing it away is as good as anything else, at least as things look now.
But you never know. Left Field is always there, glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.
17 July 2016 at 06:16 #53299@puroandson @missy Well, strictly speaking, change is an unavoidable thing, being a function of time; and nobody’s figured out yet how to stop time, at least as far as I know! I’d not eager for a female Doctor either, but I reserve the right to be so surprised, in a good way, that I end up raving like a lunatic about a female actor in the role. And of course I’m a fan of more maturity, not less, so I’m hoping that if/when they *do* have a female doctor, it’s not some prancing or vamping glamor puss in her mid-twenties. A grown-up woman with lines of life on her face and some depth to the gaze, that’s what I’d start with. (I like what Moffat said about choosing Capaldi: that the Doctor should be handsome, but always with a twist, an oddness to his look, not straight-up conventional good looks.)
Fat chance of a such a woman being cast, though, IMO, and realistically speaking. The producers wouldn’t want to alienate millions of youngsters with a Doctor who looks like Mom. Dad, now — Dad’s okay with most, apparently. Same as it ever was . . .
17 July 2016 at 06:01 #53298@missy Yeah . . . gawd, I miss my DW fix! In just about every respect, I can hardly wait for the end of this ghastly year.
17 July 2016 at 05:59 #53297@puroandson I think we’re all getting surprise-proof when it comes to the ferocity of the backlash against so much of the progress of the pas 50 yrs . . . should have expected it, I guess. I just keep expecting adult people in general to be a little more adult, but am always disappointed. I hope I get to see the reverse set in again.
Patience. Long view. So difficult.
17 July 2016 at 04:37 #53295@todeledo Ah, fun! Thanks! No beard — good news, IMO — that face is so expressive, I don’t want half of it hidden in hair. And I do like that statement re beardlessness, authoritative but not snarky or a put-down. That’s my guy.
17 July 2016 at 04:06 #53293@arbutus Why are they recasting Xena and Gabrielle at only 40?
We know why. But we don’t need feminism any more, right?
15 July 2016 at 09:32 #53274@miapatrick Yep, that makes it worse — people who so lack understanding of what “human rights” means scare me when I think of them in the role of husband, wife, or parent.
A smart car! I’d love to have one, but around here there are so many huge truck-like things (including those mini-hummers) that I wouldn’t feel safe enough in such a neat small vehicle to go out on the streets and roads. I admire the folks who drive smarts and minis anyway, but I have brittle bones these days . . . so, no, alas.
15 July 2016 at 09:27 #53273@puroandson Oh, never fear, I am always on the scent; and somewhere, somehow, the game is always afoot.
Got to the second interview on Radio Free Skarro with Rachel Talalay, this one (#534, I think) centering on Hell Bent; fascinating, particularly her generosity toward everyone involved, and her ardent admiration for the actors and what they can do — on command, sometimes, which is just unthinkable. What’s most interesting, though, is what fools this conversation makes of the haters (not here; you all know the other places!) who have nothing more interesting to say against DW and Steven Moffat than “It’s the lazy writing, of course”. Absolute drivel, particularly when you realize how *everything* in the script gets discussed in microscopic detail with the writers and the actors and the Directors and the lighting guy etc.
Also it strikes me that there’s this matter of time — in the US, Talalay points out, everything is done in a rush, usually with no rehearsal time and limited takes allowed, but at Cardiff there’s time built into even a very tight, fast shooting schedule, for actually talking through what she calls “the textures” of pivotal scenes — the layers of meaning, the progression of the emotional build, etc. That “extra” time, as a US TV producer might think of it, is put to sharp-edge good use here, that’s clear.
And, damn, the brain-power, the professional skills, and the heartfelt commitment that goes into this show now — wow. Just, wow. I’m just a sucker for the skilled craft work that ends up making art.
15 July 2016 at 06:50 #53271@1997whovian Thanks for your comment on itFotN — I thought it was clever and funny and didn’t mind the wonky “science” of the thing, which was mostly magic anyway. Haven’t re-watched it recently, but there’s plenty of time (way too much plenty!) to look at the last two seasons before the promised Xmas special.
15 July 2016 at 06:06 #53269@arbutus Happy to lightly share these thoughts . . . I think I got my first dose of perspective-exploding by reading a bunch of SF by early 20th c author Olaf Stapleton. “Last and First Men”, among others (the title kind of gives it away, doesn’t it?).
15 July 2016 at 05:55 #53268@1997whovian I’m a scendle, it seems; how odd — pretty accurate, actually. I am scholarly type by nature . . .
@missy You’re welcome. I’m also given to snooping around for Doctor-y stuff in the internet, I guess. Must go see if I might live to an old age in Sparta . . . which might be not such a great thing, what with story about the Spartan boy so hungry he was hoping to sneak away in private and eat a *fox*! Jeez, the scent glands on those things . . .
14 July 2016 at 08:28 #53252@puroandson Without A/C, there’d be hardly anybody living in the Arizona-New Mexico area, I think. The old maps of early European exploration show huge areas labeled “Great American Desert”, and we are it — except for A/C. Oh, and more likely avacado green in the US, though my blender is white. Love it for mixing tasty drinks! Things that lasted — this was before planned obsolescence took full hold on American industry, as must be the result of consumer based capitalism pushed toward its own sell-by date (in my book, anyway). Also, not coincidentally, before the massive accumulating rubbish problem made itself known, as all those “obsolete” items began hitting the landfills big time. But hey, if you can’t stop “progress”, maybe it’s still possible to survive its stupider current manifestations.
14 July 2016 at 07:39 #53251Interesting find on ye internette; have folks here come across this?
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/doctor-who/feature/a800125/doctor-who-bbc-original-plans/
14 July 2016 at 07:08 #53249@puroandson And thanks for your concern, by the way. Cars are a big subject here as well as there, since we also have large distances to drive to get anywhere less empty than substantial portions of this state. They’re also an enormous nuisance; but (if I may don my reincarnation cap for a moment) every lifetime in every time and place has these inescapable annoyances (like, getting around), and I try to view them as just part of the panoply of god nuisances/dangers that come with all lifetimes. They never go away, because it’s part of the job of being here to *deal* with, one way or another, although you can never actually “solve” them (because everything changes all the time — the first rule, maybe, of life on the physical plane — so no “solution” works for very long, in the grand scheme of things).
It is interesting, though, to think about the s**t that happens this way: “I”, or some continually developing version of me, lived with heat stroke in Egypt, really crazy government in Rome during the Empire, endless cockamamie religious wars in northern Europe, various forms of slavery and prostitution always and everywhere, lots of rough lifetimes at sea, etc. It’s *always* perilous and stressful on many levels even for the privileged few, but the world wobbles on. The way I see it, perspective is my very good and helpful friend, when I remember how infinitely adjustable it is.
14 July 2016 at 06:51 #53248@puroandson Oh, the subject will rise again no doubt (and should, really) as new developments occur. And pickled onions would go very well right now . . . well, maybe not after lying down to sleep! Me, I like a generous shot of Grande Marnier straight up, no ice, except that I don’t drink it any more because of the $#%^&*() calories. It is but a fond memory now . . . I’ll have that wonderful monastery-brewed beer from Austria (Germany? Doubt any of it makes it to export, in fact), if there’s some on hand.
Ah, the car . . . it’s a 2009 Toyota sedan, just fine for my needs in most ways (specifically a *good* air conditioning system, without which I would find life impossible here — supposed to be 100 F all week long and on til August, *if* we get our pretty pathetic “monsoon” season at all). But I have had to replace the front bumper a couple of times, and it now is held on a bit better by something called a “bumper liner” that my pal at Duke City Body Shop got for me and installed. How long it will work, by re-enforcing the bumper itself and maybe the attaching things as well, is anybody’s guess. So far, so good. The car only has about 75,000 on it and remains reliable, and also not a prime target for theft (busy profession around here), so I’ll stay with it as long as I can.
To tell the truth, I loathe and despise all the fancy electronic frou-frou that comes with all new models, having learned long ago that there’s nothing more crazy-making than a failure in a car’s electrical system, which may actually never be found (and if they have to tear out your dashboard to fix one that has, Big Bucks ensue). I suspect that I have, in regard to practical matters at any rate, ridiculously simple tastes. I still use the blender my younger sister gave me for a wedding present back in 1968. It works; why not? Though I guess I’m missing the “pulse” function. Is okay, my own pulse is still bopping right along.
14 July 2016 at 06:29 #53245@puroandson Developers: I hate ’em. 🙂
Me too, but *without* the smiley face. Stop me if I’ve told you this before (I may well have, but it’s way too late to go hunting back for it): we’ve got some slimy creep from Arkansas who moved here to fix up (into “condos”) the handsome old High School buildings that the city was at loss about and would have eventually torn down. He did it the way these utter bastards do everything: get other people and the city to invest in your “development” and get the city to okay your nice-looking plans, and then cut back and back on the quality of what is actually built or “developed” to the cheapest level you think you can get away with (NOBODY ever sues over prettified plans completely not matching shoddy realization, *ever*) and pocket the money you stole out of the public budget as your “profit”. Capitalism at its disgusting finest, its way greased by a bribe here, a bribe there, etc. It’s a way of life here in the southwest, where we have very little manufacturing and *lots* of land (which without water rights is pretty much useless, but there are “ways” around that, every single time).
So this schmuck did over the school, substituted a gulag barracks for the nice-looking “mediterranean style” condo promised on a major street crossing, and is now colluding big time with a Republican mayor who’s done literally nothing in office but now needs a showpiece he can use to run for governor. Their big idea was to tear the heart out of the city — a 20 mile stretch of historic Route 66 — and installing some kind of fake trolley line down the middle of a street that literally has no room for it. But by calling this moronic plan (which almost everyone except developers and real estate sharks hates — banners on business frontages, since there will be massive business failures along this corridor while the place is ripped to shreds for months on end) “environmentally forward looking”, these two creeps got a promise of funding from the federal government, on the basis of how “progressive” it is.
Fortunately, this is so disastrous that a small consortium of people — business folks, environmental experts and lawyers — have brought law suits against these con men on the grounds that they never submitted an Environmental Impact Statement, and also lied outright in saying that there was no “significant” public opposition to their planned raid on quality of life in this city, so the federal funding will (we all hope like mad) be denied. Without big fat tax money to play with, I doubt the schmucks will proceed. We’re all holding our breaths. Corruption is endemic down here (well, where isn’t it, really), but the good guys are well connected with people in the court system, so the ordinary citizens do have a chance. The f**king mayor was warned several years ago not to try this scam, and told that it would blow up in his face. If only that were *literally* true . . . one can fantasize.
Phew. There. That felt *good*. Thanks all for your patience (and if you skip the rant, I completely understand).
14 July 2016 at 06:09 #53244@countscarlioni Thanks, yes, I think so too. I have a friend in Bristol, a publisher (years ago) of a feminist press in London that put out some things of mine in the UK. I really need to visit her, before we (the crowd that was so active in these sorts of things in the genre) all croak . . . !
14 July 2016 at 06:01 #53243@missy Oh, I think there’s no problem theorizing. Sometimes I think that’s all that politics is really for! Well, that and exhibitionism and about a hundred other things, so . . . What we can’t do, at this point (or maybe ever, with real accuracy) is test a theory against hard data to “prove” it one way or the other, as is so often the case with issues of human will and behavior. Believe me, we’re going to get theories up the wahzoo for damn near ever about how this really went down. By the same token, I claim my theories as my own only — useless (in practical terms) ideas that could be interesting to consider.
@janetteb Yes, to some extent most certainly. But I really, really hate to attribute that much influence to one revolting example of humanity (there are so many on offer these days — ), so I’ll stand back on that one. Funny, now that I think of it: I went through a phase in my early teens (I think?) of reading nearly every biography in the public library, and at that time I think I burned through my initial attachment to the “Great Man” (in both + and – senses) theory of history. I’ve ended up much more on the side of the annalistes (or whatever they’re called these days); example (I think), The Armada, an old book looking into the recorded material offering all sorts of causes for the destruction of that great Spanish fleet. Can’t remember the author’s name now, but it was a fascinating book and irresistibly seductive to me long before I read Fernand Braudelle (sp?).
@purandson It’s also what SF writers do, compulsively and with or without degrees, which is why few pols (but many scientists-in-the-making and also made, thank gods) read, and we rarely get paid anywhere near such figures. We also have our crypto-Nazis in our genre, who last year were dealt a resounding defeat in the “Sad Puppies” Hugo Award affair. There are not many of them. Maybe fewer than before, in light of what nasty morons they showed themselves to be during that fracas.
But we’ve reached the Nazi level now, so I think that means (in internet chat terms) the discussion is irretrievably done, at least for the present?
14 July 2016 at 02:29 #53234@countscarlioni Thanks for the link to the interview with Sarah Dollard — liked it very much. In particular, love the idea of going back in time in her Tardis to see great theater performances, which reminded me of historic ballet performances and other “lost” moments in the ephemeral arts — yes! Of course! “Hamilton”, wow, that would be great.
But what’s the inscription on the stone thing? Something university, I think, but it’s too faint and blurry to make out what it says, at least on my mac screen.
14 July 2016 at 02:14 #53233@miapatrick I should also probably just shut up and be happy with my distinction!
Oh, don’t shut up — but yes, be happy! Congratulations.
(from a later post, re Brexit and somebody’s boyfriend): he voted out because he wanted to scrap the human rights stuff. That was the only reason. Then she pointed out to him that the convention on human rights came from us. Which apparently makes all the difference to him, and he would have voted in.
Really, that is *pathetic*. The guy voted on the basis of “the human rights stuff”? Jeez. Your friend needs to *get a new boyfriend* — one with a heart *and* a brain!
@1997whovian Wow — you must be one of the few who would choose “Forest of the Night” as your fave for S8. Can you expand a little on what you loved about it, and any caveats as well? I liked it too, myself, and Moffat has “predicted” that at some point it will be generally recognized as wonderful (literally and figuratively), but the most common reaction, at least among people who feel strongly enough to comment on DW boards, has been negative.
@puroandson Love the photo! That front bumper . . . I’m forever backing out of a parking space and tearing my front bumper half off on the curb (Toyota went streamline-crazy and dropped their front bumper to lower than most parking curbs, the idiots), so I look at that hanging crumple and feel a pang of fellow feeling in the bosom, as it were . . . (that’s a Groucho joke, I think, but really. . . so long ago . . . but *so* good!).
@missy even if it were the wrong decision, it took guts to make it.
Well, looks to me as if it took guts IF the voter knew what he or she was actually voting about, rather being rather blindly driven by reactionary longing and/or propaganda that didn’t look thought-through or honest. To this US liberal, what I heard and saw from the Leavers’ side resembled Tea Party kicking-and-screaming (against changes too overwhelming and comprehensive to accept) rhetoric to me. That’s a personal generalization, strictly IMO of course.
14 July 2016 at 01:38 #53232@mudlark I hope Living & Dead is shown here, too — my husband and I both loved Life on Mars, found it wonderfully refreshing, so anything by the same writer is of great interest to me! Is this a one-off show, mini-series, or some other format?
14 July 2016 at 01:23 #53231@missy Michael Dibdin — that’s the guy I’m thinking of — has written a line of crime novels set in Italy? I’m pretty sure I read this Holmes one, but I’ve read a half dozen Holmes things in the past year, so can you talk a little about the story? Now that copyright is no longer controlling what people write about Holmes, some interesting variations are appearing, usually tackling the sorts of subjects ACD stayed away from, and “humanizing” Holmes (while Watson becomes much more autonomously action-y than I remember from the original stories) in pretty unsuccessful ways, at least as I’ve seen so far.
@1997whovian re Stephen King, The Shining, which is brilliantly creepy and now legendary through film, and Pet Semetary which I found impressively horrible.
30 June 2016 at 08:35 #53002@kharis Why, thank you — I hoped it would be coherent, at least. I do sometimes write to the local newspaper (owned by a bunch of starchy liberal-haters) about various issues, usually local ones though, and I like it that they always print my letters — they don’t even phone me any more to make sure I’m really the person who wrote them, and not some fraudulent whatever-the-hell. I have advantages, you see. I’m a professional writer, for starters, who aimed (way back) at becoming a professor in academe, so verbal expression is my natural metier. And SF — reading and arguing about and with — some really brilliant people (and also some on the cutting edge of the feminist resurgence of the sixties and seventies) was a huge help in learning to think about big questions and articulate ideas about them.
I owe my field — my much-maligned, often automatically denigrated and dismissed field, and that includes a myriad of very smart and passionate readers, editors, critics, the lot — an incalculable debt for welcoming me to their sandbox, where I got to play happily for decades.
But I don’t send out articles to mainstream venues, since I used to be completely occupied with writing fiction and preferred to let my fiction speak for me. Now everything is so contentious that getting into public wrangles with opponents (and sometimes with allies) can gobble up an entire lifetime’s charge of energy. Not to mention being concerned that I’m not as well informed these days as many proponents of competing viewpoints are, and may be out of touch and off base in many ways. I don’t like to hit and run, so to speak, bugging out on a discussion because my calcium-loaded blood is knocking me out and demanding that I sleep another day away. (Surgery scheduled for late July to fix this! Rogue parathyroid, pain in the neck. As it were.)
But hey, there’s the Fox Inn — a great place for thinking out your own ideas, and engaging with those of others whose caliber of thought and experience is impressive — and fun. Now that’s the last of the wine, and off to sleep. There’s a Brexit opinion piece in today’s NYT that I wanted to bring up, but I read it in the coffee shop this a.m. and don’t remember it in enough detail to do so . . . damn.
29 June 2016 at 08:21 #52977Not a spoiler exactly, should probably to the Fox Inn, but — let’s just say it’s a PG-rated-for-language link. Parents and the tender-eared, be warned, I guess:
yrs in laughter and appreciation
ichi
29 June 2016 at 07:57 #52975@puroandson Closing off borders and creating small governments isn’t the answer. I’m in favour of government -the bigger the better. The era of big government isn’t over (as Toby Ziegler famously said).
Far from over; I agree. In fact, the wreck we’ve made of our planet’s natural equilibrium actually *requires* Big Government, to martial the kinds of funds and projects we’re going to need on the scale we’ll need to rescue some form of environment that a large human population can live in decently. This may still be possible to do, but I don’t think anybody is saying it will be quick, easy, or fun, or that what we replace post-industrial “civilization” with will be pleasant for everyone and loaded with free choices for individuals. Big change is nasty, but I think when the ocean changes drastically, everything changes like it or not, and you adapt or you stop surviving, and I think that means narrowing down choices, not opening them up.
Governments will have to use force for a lot of this — which is always enormously risky and involves abuses, because there are always abuses. That’s no surprise, considering how we got here (well, as I see it, anyway). The “dominant culture” (meaning modern consumerism run amuck, as its promoters have designed it to do) was created by force — the force of money in high concentrations being used to grab the goods of the commons (clean air, water, fertile land and the decisions about what’s grown on it, fuel, trade routes and centers, etc.) and turning vast swathes of it into poisonous sludge while selling the usable bits, polished up and divided into packets, back to everyone else at a huge mark-up (see recent water wars waged by Nestle and other bottlers against entire populations’ drinking water supplies).
How can that money-power be re-aquired by the citizenry at large and deployed instead in forms that will alleviate, repair, or even heal some of the waste and loss that blind greed has created. You can tax the rich and their luxuries, and then use the revenues to pay for intentionally restorative work rather than use it to extract the greatest possible cash profit, or you can refuse to redistribute and end up with revolution instead, which tends to just dig us all deeper into the greed-and-spoil heap.
Ideally, we could develop a more effective mix than we have now of Big Governments taking on jobs like relocating coastal cities as the oceans rise, and smaller governments maybe creating local solar power systems to replace as much as is feasible of the old plant-and-wire grid systems, and so on. Or, we could have a heavy-handed, inefficient, and often deeply stupid “World Government” lumbering around trying to make changes using the military and its “contractors” against fanatical local resistance. Probably both — well, we have both now: the US is a very large government that can barely get a budget through Congress while our population re-fights the god damned Civil War, while the Dutch have been busy fortifying their coastline against the North Sea.
And the first real, lethal pandemic of this century has yet to sweep through.
So, hard times coming; at least, so say the folks who study and sample and write about the environmental vectors already on the move (Bill McKibben’s name comes to mind, and there are lots of others; “futurists”, they’re sometimes called. Only the future is already now).
Some signs are there: the 20th c saw several attempts at consolidation of large political units, like the League of Nations and the U.N. The European Union is another try, and having big problems. We’re new to this, and bad at it. To me, it looks like the home-grown version of the old SF meme of Earth governments uniting to defend humanity from invading aliens. Only it’s environmental breakdown that must be adapted to — if enough of us are prepared to figure out what’s necessary and then do it. Gigantic corporate wealth is already tenuously united against a long, livable future for more than the 1%. Can their grip be broken by anything less than a unity of governments, working together against them? Seems to me we either find a way to encourage that — rather than retreat into our separate national bunkers with our fists raised against all comers — or we go full-on dystopia, and probable extinction long before the natural apex of our full potential as an evolving species.
That would be a shame; we have so much promise. The universe, caring not a jot, would just roll right along. Isn’t that something the Doctor might say?
27 June 2016 at 09:21 #52948@pedant Thanks for that clarification of specifics. Do you think there’s a chance of back-pedaling from this insanity? Sounds as if Europe is entirely ready and willing to just step up and fix *their* end, leaving England to wallow in its own self-made nightmare, and I don’t see any eagerness from Europe to help stop the bleeding by encouraging a re-think. Do you? Comes a point where it’s more trouble to fix the crash than to take off in an adjusted, working model of a new, England-less vehicle.
27 June 2016 at 09:14 #52947@jimthefish I suspect the fundamental changes in the way we are living our lives now is going to require a fundamentally different politics. I just have no idea what that is going to involve. I suspect no one does yet.
Exactly. It’s as if “the Singularity” has indeed come upon us, only it wasn’t about cyborgs or contact with space aliens etc. at all, but about something much bigger: a reality-based imperative to get society and the planet re-organized such that we can keep living here, or else dying out because there’s not enough left clean and un-poisonous enough to breathe, or eat, or drink and civilization has been flooded out by the rise of hot, fish-less oceans and massive storm systems.
The divide between Before the Event people and After is perhaps about those who are already simply going ahead with the blending of viewpoints and dropping of paradigms like nation-states, class warfare, corporate bodies, and who knows what else so that we can get down to the very necessary and pressing business of Cleaning Up Our Room vs. defending the old patterns that have led to the “globalization” of an unsustainable way of life, which must yield to new ways, like it or not.
So the Before Event folks are, IMO, the nationalists screaming about being “robbed” of everything they think of as theirs by incomers, while the After Eventers, adapting to new conditions because the old ones don’t even exist for them, look back at the old-liners thinking, “How could they have been such idiots? What are they talking about anyhow? Don’t they see that it’s all different now?”
A number of possible new patterns were pictured in post-fifties SF, involving gender shifting, the disappearance of race as a significant social categorization tool, systems of economic anarchy and super-organization in confrontation (LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed” comes to mind), dispersion into a vast array of differing micro economic and political systems across interplanetary and ultimately inter-galactice systems, etc. But nobody *knows* just how things are actually going to develop, or on what time scale, or what could work and what couldn’t — only that change is here and picking up speed. The prospect of a future increasingly unmoored from old certainties is terrifying. When humans are scared, rationality is so easily overruled by emotion. We tend to get frantic and flail about, or retreat to our various bunkers.
Brexit, however it turns out, is just a prelude. From here, I think, the 21st c looks to be a very bumpy ride.
26 June 2016 at 05:18 #52919@kharis I’ve always been completely at sea with regard to the damn cracks and have just gone with it without figuring it out; Tasha Lem is a blank to me — Star Trek? Star Wars? Battleship Galactica? Babylon 5? — So I can’t comment on your theory — sounds like a fun one to play with, though.
I hope the FBI comes through for you. I just closed an old online account, and I don’t bank online — too shy of all that exposure, although of course actually limiting your internet exposure to possible fraud is pretty much impossible these days. I keep thinking that all those genius hackers shown working for the cops, CSI, Superheroes, and vigilante groups of the Righteous would be working for the bad guys instead, in the real world; the pay is better.
As for Brexit — wow, what a horrible mess! I suppose “independence” does sound so good to worried people constantly being urged to view all their troubles as coming from outside their societies that they don’t read the fine print, let alone the exposure of the deliberate, manipulative lies involved. And it *is* often partly a matter of the increasing distances between rural experience and ideals and urban experience and ideals dividing populations. This fracture has been accelerating since at least the early 1900’s in America, but an increased pace of change more recently has been making it much more of a problem here (Jefferson’s idea of a democratic America was a nation of small farmers, remember, with larger landholders running things — cities on the modern scale of size and wealth weren’t foreseen, as far as I know).
And with the many-faceted and deeply daunting environmental crises of crises already upon is, I think most people are desperate for the (illusory) security of the “old ways”, the “tried and true”, all that stuff — that created the crises in the first place, but you just close your eyes and refuse to admit that because it’s just too damn scary.
None of which really helps; this chaotic devolution (as I see it) is here now, and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.
26 June 2016 at 04:39 #52918@nerys Oh, there are lots of sane people in the States who share my feelings about the political scene, including (it seems) some self-styled “conservative” big mouths (latest, George Will, one time political columnist and backer of the very Rethug strategy that has brought us Drumpf; he has announced that he’s leaving the Thug party because he can’t stand it any more — as if he had never been complicit, the miserable fucker) are making lots of look-at-me-coming-to-my-senses noise right now as they withdraw their previously enthusiastic support of the Killer Klown Show of Thug politics. How it will work out at the election itself is unpredictable, except that even a centrist Democrat like H. Clinton won’t be able to budge anything if the Thugs retain a majority in Congress sufficient to block appointments etc. In that case, nothing will change: just more chaos. I don’t like to think about it, but can’t stop thinking about it for long.
Re: Penny Dreadful. Yes, I do see the point of the theme of the story being the limitation and distortion of women’s lives by male domination in forms still with us now. I was horrified to see, though, how many fans of the show commented online about how the outcome was such a wonderful, romantic ending, what with Vanessa’s noble sacrifice for all the mournful men and the future of the world, as in people saying she became a female Jesus figure — as if that were not just okay but admirable and a deeply fulfilling tale.
This evidence, as I take it, of the persistence of these attitudes about women’s only heroism being in self-sacrifice for others I found very depressing, given that I saw no comments that I can remember along the lines of your excellent analysis — except here.
There were other problems, though, story problems, that disappointed me (I think I mentioned some of them in a comment somewhere above — poor structure and pacing, mainly) as well. But maybe I’ll watch it again some time and come out feeling differently, so thanks for your comments.
25 June 2016 at 05:55 #52897@missrori @puroandson I also think of “Husbands” as — not exactly the S9 finale, but it denouement or coda: here is the fully developed result of the massively painful and wrenching events of S9, some time after the dust has settled and the final departures have been made. Here’s the Doctor showing his acceptance of those departures, not in the heat of the moment of the “hybrid” revelation and necessary consequent actioin, which he may not even remember with any clarity if at all, but after reflection; after searching for whatever memory scraps he could find, and probing the nature of his feelings about what he thinks happened; after being the Doctor again for a while, the lone traveler who often picks up passengers.
Heck, he states it outright, the chief lesson of that hazy resolution to S9: “Some things end, because they have to.” Implying that you don’t always have to know exactly why they had to (or can’t remember), but it’s a damned good thing to recognize when fighting to turn things around, to avoid an ending, is fruitless and should be let go (way better, IMO, than “never give up, never give in”, which I’m pretty sure was also a mock-heroic motto in the comedy “Galaxy Quest”).
“I’ll never, ever stop!” is right for Heaven Sent, because the castle is a Groundhog Day trap that he’ll never escape unless he punches his own way out; but “Some things end” in that quiet voice is right for “Husbands” because there was nothing left to punch against. In terms of the Whoniverse, they’d come to the only alternative ending for them to spiraling into causing universal destruction. The difference is huge, and accepting that “some things end” is as legitimate as “Never, ever stop”.
I enjoyed the comedy too, of course; but I loved the lesson. I know the Doctor has learned it (and taught it — MotOE) before, but when you’re that brilliant and that powerful, surely you have to learn it over and over again. And I agree that Ohila is a very strong character — I’d like to see more of her in future.
25 June 2016 at 05:24 #52896@kharis I’m saying Clara’s death was orchestrated, needed, and meant to happen by the people closest to the Doctor. It was always her destiny, that’s why the name Ravenwood and the necklaces.
This is intriguing and I want to give it some thought, but I can only make very limited sense of it, myself.
You aren’t positing an actual conspiracy to kill Clara among the people closest to the Doctor, are you? I would take them to be, Missy, River, Ohila, Vastra’s household, Davros in his own peculiar way, maybe (sort of) Ashildr — I’m sure I’ve missed some. I just don’t see any evidence of collusion among these folks, or motives to kill Clara that they share. Individually, of course, some have their own reasons to want to wound the Doctor, out of grudges and spite, and killing Clara certainly hurt him. Missy enjoys using Clara for her own purposes, but she doesn’t seem anxious to *kill* her — why kill the entertainment, which is moreover so weak and puny in your eyes that it poses no threat? Why does Ashildr or Vastra need Clara to die?
Actually, there’s nothing about Clara per se that makes her a prime target, so far as I can see; anyone who knows the Doctor knows that he’s had many companions; they come and go but rarely die on his watch. Why her, in particular?
Because she’s one half of the hybrid? But who really knows that until Hell Bent, when she’s already been killed? It’s in Hell Bent that the Doctor himself comes up with the reason that she’s dangerous — and even then, she’s not dangerous by herself. She’s half of a deeply dangerous hybrid when linked to the Doctor, because she makes *him* more dangerous. Besides, the Doctor is a clever fellow: as soon as he understands that the hybrid is Doctor + Clara, he moves (as his intimates must expect that he would) to separate from her in a decisive and irreversible manner, so — why kill Clara?
My understanding of the situation is that once Clara connected up with the Doctor and became his obsession, *the universe* needed them separated so that he could go on being the Doctor to everyone who needs his help, not first and foremost her guardian and partisan. She didn’t need to die for that to happen; she just needed to accept the necessity of parting. Ohila might have seen that larger necessity of restoring him to being a fully free agent, but who did she conspire with, and how, to get Clara killed?
Finally, there is an interview with Moffat (Radio Times, I think) in which he says quite clearly that Face the Raven was deliberately designed and carefully tuned so that it was clear that *nobody* caused it deliberately — it wasn’t meant to be but the same damn-fool combination of accidental factors and various misjudgments as the accident that killed Danny — a human death, although she’s a human enhanced by her travels with the Doctor. Once she stopped being the Impossible Girl, she had no “destiny”, no more than any of us do. It’s the nature of mortality for a species as fragile and short lived as ours. In the Whoniverse, I see a difference between “Fixed Points” and the idea of “destiny”, because DW stresses the crucial nature of Free Will in the exercise of individual ethical judgment, Fixed Points are there to keep time untangled, not to cement certain persons into certain roles or actions.
As for the raven necklace and “Ravenswood”, that looks to me like simply thematic foreshadowing of future events, cues to help weave the episodes together. But I’m interested in your case for a conspiracy — maybe you made it fully back somewhere in the discussion already, but I can’t find it (which also means that I may have miss-stated the details of your position, so I welcome correction).
25 June 2016 at 01:35 #52888@jimthefish Thanks for the info.
25 June 2016 at 01:34 #52886@nerys Ye gods, why are we still allowed on the internet? Anywhere else, we’d be trying to tear each other’s throats out over the ending of Penny Dreadful (or something else equally ephemeral and largely weightless).
Not really laughing. A pal of mine with an unsettling habit of being right about the future said to about 2 weeks ago, “We’ve got about 4 yrs of chaos ahead of us, before things settle down.” In four years, I’ll be 82, for cripes’ sakes, so that hardly signifies for me; unless, of course, the Trump monster becomes US President, in which case my blood pressure will kill me long before the end of another four years of downright lunatics and imbeciles running the world.
24 June 2016 at 20:48 #52878@blenkinsopthebrave Thanks for those recce’s.
@jimthefish Um — who’s Maxwell Edison, for those across the pond?
@stichintime Maybe a “fudrick” is what just happened in Britain?
24 June 2016 at 08:30 #52869@nerys Wish I felt the same, but instead I was let down by the final two-parter. It felt rushed and rather chaotic to me, and I am so weary of the exceptionally gifted woman of strong will and character sacrificing herself and leaving the men who were swept away by her mournfully grieving and then resolving to get on with their lives. True to period, mind, but just — irritating as Hell.
And other stuff, but never mind: it clearly worked for you, so maybe better to leave it there.
24 June 2016 at 08:21 #52868@missrori @puroandson He’s never fared well on Gallifrey, has he? His infrequent stops there are always dangerous for him. Maybe he’s had enough of that kind of danger for a while, and just needs to get back to his ramblin’ ways asap, since that is what he and Clara have freed him to do by agreeing to part company. The TLs are still anxious to retrieve Clara and dump her back in Trap Street, so they’re not exactly on his side, or hers.
So it’s not surprising that he honors her command over trying to make terms with Gallifrey: “Go be a doctor.” He serves their joint decision even though he can’t remember making it . . . Love it: heart; irony. All that’s strong and solid about the Doctor.
24 June 2016 at 08:14 #52867@missrori Thanks — I’m always intrigued by art inspired by the art of others. Welcome to our conversations.
ichi
24 June 2016 at 07:57 #52866@bluesqueakpip One of my favorite pieces of music — thank you!
23 June 2016 at 16:19 #52859@janetteb Yes, that was clear in the story — especially since there is actually something for her inherit, later in the story, from — a deceased aunt, I think? So her family is perhaps lower bourgeoise rather than outright peasantry, I suppose. But she does start out a poor orphan, treated as some one just one insecure cut above servant class, and always conscious of the precarious nature of that position and the need to defend it with little else except her own force of character. Made for a compelling story, all right, but fiction. I can’t think off hand of any real-life examples of such a woman marrying up into the class that employed her, certainly not with children on the scene.
22 June 2016 at 17:30 #52837@janetteb I love period dramas too but it frustrates me that all of them depict the lives of the privileged few. For every Elizabeth Bennet there were three or four servants living lives of absolute drudgery.
Exactly. You might look up a book called “Mary Reilly”, set in the household of Dr. Jeckyll. Also, there’s modern British author whose name I cannot remember — Cookson? Coulson? — who wrote quite a few late 19th-early 20th c (I think) precisely about the “servant class”, to which she said her own family had belonged for at least a couple of generations before her own. It’s there, but you have to go looking for it.
Actually, that’s probably why the first iteration of “Upstairs, Downstairs” on TV was so mesmerizing: it *was* about the servants as much as the masters, and gave a pretty good idea of that life of drudgery, although a bit prettied up all the same. Best thing about it was, to me, what doofuses the upstairs people were, blundering along kind of on the edge of gentility since Bellamy Sr. had no country seat, as I recall — just a very nice house in London — ? Though that was Edwardian times, rather than Victorian, if I remember correctly. Actually, “Jane Eyre” is about a governess and her uneasy relations with her “betters”, isn’t it? Only without the drudgery.
Are there any novels about 19th c servants that show lives of quiet desperation but without the solace of climbing out of the drudgery somehow, which I doubt very many managed to do?
20 June 2016 at 09:07 #52801@puroandson If it needs to move forward then it shall -and should. Analogies about the French Revolution are interesting but not necessarily comparable. Is feminism an ideology? Some would view it as such and others not.
Oh, to be sure. I alluded to the Fr. Revolution as an example of going from one extreme to another, very quickly, and with some disastrous effects. As for feminism as an ideology — I never could get into it as an alternative theory of history, complete with some unprovable, and probably false, back-story creation (like some stone age era of feminine leadership overthrown by jealous males) of what some *wish* were true. To me, it’s very present-day and a matter of viewpoint, not structural analysis of the largely unknowable deep past: more a matter of “once you see, you can’t un-see” than “ideological analysis shows that x must be true”. It’s a mind-set, for me, and one that men can and do share without having to up-end history as we know it to support it.
What you see is what you get, e.g. 73 cents on the (male pay for the same work) dollar, and that’s not ideology: it’s fact. I just read a study concluding that one of the methods that top management use to control costs is to hire more women executives, who can *still* be paid less than their male counterparts, thereby seeming to abide by demands for more gender parity in leadership positions while maximizing their own pay packages at the expense of the women they hire. Talk about resistance to change!
20 June 2016 at 08:44 #52800@arbutus Not to mention how many of these lovely girls would have lost their lives at an early age in childbirth– assuming that they survived childhood themselves. And yes, lovely to be courted by some guy three times your age who your father is going to make you marry, like him or not. The list goes on. I’ll take the 21st century, thanks
Gods, yes! There’s a good time-travel story by a British Y-A writer (“The Devil in the Road”, or perhaps “The Devil in the Forest” — was years ago) in which the hero (on his motor bike) ends up the England of witch-killing times. The first thing that tells him that this isn’t Kansas any more is the sight of a rotting corpse hanging on a gibbet and twisting in the wind . . . and the stench of that wind, and pretty much everything else (never mind the lice, the microbes and leech-treatments and gangrene and food poisoning and typhus etc.). He meets a young woman who laughs at him for smelling “like an apothecary’s shop!” Even for guys, a “Disney Experience” this would not be.
Ah but “Highlander”, and all the rest of that sanitized and prettied up tripe! I’d laugh, if it wasn’t for the crying. I love history — but to read about, not to visit (Heaven forfend!).
20 June 2016 at 08:30 #52799@blenkinsopthebrave Just reading your impressive reflections from a couple of weeks back on the possessive insanity of fandom
Thanks, I appreciate the appreciation!
What I become increasingly dispirited by is that so many people seem to fear, and even hate, change.
Sorry, that seems to have turned into a bit of a rant. Clearly time for a reviving glass of wine…My feeling about the drawing-the-line-at, the digging in of heels, and the pull toward illusions of the past is that while there’s always been some of that (” . . . to hell in a handbasket . . . these kids these days . . . ” shows up in a text from ancient Mesopotamia, as I recall), we’re now more scared than ever because the observable changes are piling up right in front of us at a truly alarming rate, and we’re built to *adapt* over long periods of evolution rather than to watch a tsunami coming at us that’s going to hit us in about twenty minutes (well, the next bit of it to roll in, with many more after). This isn’t political conservatives growling about economic policy and “handouts” to “the poor”. This is (scientists are saying) more like Noah’s flood. So let’s just yell about evil brown immigrants and the evaporation of “jobs” as we’ve known them, instead. It feels like doing *something* instead of just standing there quaking as the wave of real change starts to break.
Not that this really works for most of us, I think. Like other animals, we sense the ground shifting radically (and in some places literally, where there were few earthquakes before) beneath our feet, with no place to run or hide, and creeping dread everywhere . . . it’s not surprising that most would rather cross their fingers and shut their eyes. Our own ill-treatment has, IMO, turned our home planet against us, and the response is already being felt.
And, hey — isn’t it always time for a reviving glass of wine? Or one of those naps that should be half an hour and you wake up refreshed and ready to go, except that the sun has already set and the day is gone.
20 June 2016 at 07:54 #52795@arbutus Here’s a link to the review of the book about Elizabeth I in last Sunday’s NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/books/review/elizabeth-the-forgotten-years-by-john-guy.html?_r=0
19 June 2016 at 22:42 #52775@arbutus I agree about Xena. Also the slowly dawning sense (slow for me, anyway) that the relationship of this heroic female figure and her female sidekick was different from, say, the female leads in Cagney & Lacy. That in itself was fascinating, and refreshing.
I do wish a show would be done with Lucy Lawless as an older Xena — what happens to a kick-as *anybody* when they’re not young any more? How do we do this, and do it well, when we can’t seriously kick ass and win every time any more?
19 June 2016 at 22:34 #52774@puroandson I’ve stayed out of this because I don’t really understand why we keep coming back to it.
I think a basic reason we keep coming round to this again is that we’re all at a crisis point in our own history, with enormous changes required of us if we’re to survive a massively shifting environment. There’s also great resistance from people who can’t or won’t accept this, for many different reasons. Change and survive, or freeze in place and die isn’t just about politics, economics, and “values”. We feel the conflict everywhere, and it’s scaring the hell out of us to a greater or lesser degree. “The Singularity”, the panic over Y2K (remember that?), the internet with all its pluses and minuses, we could go on and on with currents of change that we can’t begin to see the shape of yet.
One venue where humans argue this kind of thing out is in the arts. Surviving compressed and as yet immeasurable change is an underlying concern, and it surfaces everywhere in times like this. A majority react by clinging hard to whatever they think they can hold onto; a minority thrive on riding the wave-front as best they can. You could say that that’s always been true, as all times are times of change; again, compare the relative stability of Ancient Egypt to the galloping chaos and instability/growth of western history since the Industrial Revolution.
I know that this comment is all hyper-simplification and way over-generalized, but it’s what I think I see (today, anyway).
19 June 2016 at 22:10 #52773@puroandson feminism can’t go too far. It’ll go as far as it needs.
Well, yes and no, IMO. It *is* possible for any sort of big change to go “too far”, correct for distortion, swing back again, etc. I’m thinking of politics mainly, eg the French Revolution of 1789 becoming the Reign of Terror (and then the White Terror as the pendulum was shoved back again after the Bourbon Restoration and all the other restorations around Europe after Napoleon was dealt with). It’s most obvious there. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction — although it’s never *exactly* opposite and never *exactly* equal, in human affairs at least. Of course, “as far as it needs” can also mean “as far as it can without tipping over into reaction”, if you care to take a long view.
@pedant The most catastrophic blunder any show can make is to pander to the most reactionary part of its fanbase.
Yes. Because that show will die, as their smaller and smaller fanbase grows old and dies off. I’d rather have the show (which is supposed to be *about* change as well as about enduring values) take the risks of making innovative changes than see it mummify in place. At some point, of course, DW will fail and fall (“blow away like smoke”, actually); but in the meantime, let’s let it live, which I think means let it change.
19 June 2016 at 10:04 #52761@missy If a show is working and has been working perfectly and is popular as it is for decades, why change it?
It’s been working for 50 yrs. or so, and in terms of modern culture and how quickly it shifts, that is a long time. I don’t think it’s ever worked “perfectly” either. Viewers have been complaining about it becoming “stale” for some time, and certainly “monster of the week” has long been an issue (one that led me to quit watching the show the first time I did that, shortly before “the gap”). Public tastes change over time. It can’t be helped. These days, change has been sped up incredibly (take a look at Ancient Egyptian tomb art, and how slightly it varied over several *thousand* years, for a sense of the change in the pace — of change).
A popular art form *must* respond to palpable shifts in public taste or become unpopular, and die (no more “Perry Mason”: not with “Broadchurch” or “Law and Order” on hand). This isn’t ideology: it’s the economics of the entertainment industry, and the fact is that just because something “worked” pretty well for decades does not mean that it will continue to work with new audiences whose ideas are making them restless and less responsive to the “tried and true”.
As for the kids, well, the kids are all right. The problem is actually that they *do* know who and what they are, often quite early, and are no longer willing to shut up about it and live “normal” lives even though they are variants of a “norm” that has long been harshly constricted by judgmentalism. If they choose to assert their own knowledge of themselves over other people’s opinions of who they *should* be, how is that a bad thing? More power to ’em, says I.
“To thine own self be true”, says St. Willie the Shake. Hear, hear! says me. Make your life count by making it *your* life, not your parents’ or your community’s idea of who you are supposed to be.
19 June 2016 at 09:39 #52760@puroandson Thanks for kind words, and a salute to your mum while we’re at it. There’s still plenty of resistance to feminist ideas, though, even among SF readers and writers, who you’d expect to be more flexible in their thinking since social change does seem to be an unavoidable effect of time and we’re supposed to be pushing conjecture into “the future” as each of us sees it. Even superhero stories have acquired female superheroes these days, as SF literature has been addressing all aspects of human (and alien) cultures, not just war and conquest, for decades now. But there are lots of readers and viewers who still prefer the older, simpler stories with dependably familiar stock characters, not all complexified with people’s changing values, varying psychological states, and political, religious, and economic convictions (as in real life).
So there are (unfortunately, IMO) still plenty of people who aren’t just “not feminist” but who are flat-out anti-feminist, for various reasons. Time, however, seems to be against them, judging by recent polls and studies of generational differences. I certainly hope so.
@mersey like Xena series which was spin-off Hercules and was a bigger success and made much more bigger impact).
Oh, I didn’t know it was a Hercules spin-off — we started watching a bit late, I think. Thanks! I think Xena had that impact because of this surprisingly rapid shift, among younger people at least, to a more open, less judgmental feeling about gender relationships. That change was already established, going right back to the ill-fated anti-booze crusade of Carrie Nation’s followers, and on to the votes-for-women Suffragettes. Women could assert themselves as adventurers, political leaders, childless by choice yet more than “spinsters”, visionary artists and scientists, etc. instead of either demure Angels of the Hearth or evil, destructive seductresses with unnatural ambitions.
Here, I’ll trade you: did you know that Elizabeth I of England signed herself *not* as “Elizabeth Regina” but as “Elizabeth Rex”. She knew herself to be not some King’s consort or widow, but a King herself — the full, real, deal (there’s a new biography out about her, focused on her later years, about 30 of them, instead of her early dramatic power struggles and possible “romantic” entanglements). Can’t wait to read it myself!
I’m ambivalent myself, come to think of it, probably because feminism doesn’t come in just one form, and some varieties of it aren’t for for me.
Maybe next year, though . . . you never know. Little story, if I may: I wrote an SF novel about a super-masculinist post-apocalyptic future culture falling apart. When I had conversations about it with readers and other writers in the SF community, I was surprised to find some people backing away simply because it was too extreme for them — women enslaved outright and down-graded to beasts to be abused at will by the men who owned them in common. I answered that I had just pushed some current misogynistic ideas as far as I could, to see how far that went (the spark was a news item in The Nation magazine, about a dry-run for evacuating DC bigwigs in case of nuclear attack — only Justice William O. Douglas, among all the upper Admin personnel and Pentagon honchos, refused to flee to a “safe” underground city because he was forbidden to bring his wife — only young female secretaries and staffers were welcome. I am not making this up, and I will never, ever, forget or forgive. Ever, in this world or any other).
But one night I gave a talk about the book to a community college class, meaning that the students (all women) were working class, getting their higher ed in night school; they’d been assigned my book to read. I prattled on about how I’d extrapolated satirically from the attitudes of the Nixon Administration and its supporters. Someone put her hand up and said, “But it’s not just a story. It’s my life.” Other hands went up; heads nodded. This was in 1975.
The person who got educated that night was me.
Yes, Puro’s son: these are emotion-packed subjects, all right.
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