the leaves have changed a time or two / since the last time the train came through

[raven]

I've never been a big fan of October. It always seems like a halfway month that's not on the way to anywhere.

Work continues. So do I, and that's all to be said about that, I suspect. I have funny stories to tell, a few, and a lot more I can't tell because of the number of papers I've signed that have "confidentiality" somewhere in every paragraph, but... well. It's not dull. It's very hard. This week and next I'm out of the office on my professional skills course, the last examinable element of my training, and it's comfortable in a lot of ways - jeans, late starts, lunches on expenses and meeting people - but also damnably dull, and also brings me into contact with a great deal of people who are firmly convinced of how much they know.

And, well, I've been in my job five weeks and they've been in theirs a year and five weeks, but I will not be so sure of myself when I have been. (I will not be so sure of myself if I stay in this job thirty years.) Something that I had to do last week was write a research note on a sticky point of stamp duty land tax. I worked on it for two days, among other things, enlisted a couple of my cohort to bounce ideas off, and wrote it up as rigorously as possible with a note at the bottom that said This is complicated, I'm not entirely sure. My supervisor handed off the same project to a newly-qualified professional support lawyer, who is very kind to me and keeps me apprised of things, and she spent two days on it, dispensed with some of my uncertainties and assumptions, but came to the same counter-intuitive conclusion.

My supervisor took my note and her note and did the work herself. She's still not sure. I guess growing up in the household I did I couldn't really avoid meditations on the professional life over the dinner table, but people are supposed to be unsure about things. I dunno, I've only had my job five weeks. I go on; I'm still here.

--

IN OTHER NEWS ENTIRELY. I am keeping myself cheerful at the moment by watching M*A*S*H and it is very lovely. It is, and I'd forgotten, rather - I am watching the early episodes, with the laugh track mercifully removed on the DVDs, and a couple of nights ago I watched "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" and it made me clutch at my heart rather. I love M*A*S*H in some of the same ways I love Star Trek - because it can be so unsubtle, so in-your-face in what it wants you to believe, but at the same time I believe those things. I can't help myself. I am not cool. I am especially not hipster cool. I heart my lovely khaki-green show with Hawkeye's anger turned sideways and Radar's quiet clairvoyance and Henry who launched a thousand indecisions and Trapper, and BJ, and Sidney Freedman ("Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice...") and my heart will always hurt a little when Hawkeye says, "So I think too fast and I'm afraid of children, that's not so terrible."

(Before anyone asks, I have not dared touch my old fic. I have, however, re-read the remixes, which I recommend: Missing Hawk (the Anger Turned Sideways Remix), by eponymous_rose; The Acme Judgement Company (Uncloseted Remix), by iamsab.

ALSO. Here is another reason why I love Hawkeye Pierce, why he's one of my favourite fictional characters of all time. He's queer. He's almost definitely bisexual. How do we know this? Because he says so. He says so all the damn time.

This is not me going looking, but just from the handful of episodes I've watched lately:

From "Five O'Clock Charlie":

TRAPPER: Count off!

[pause, while Hawkeye and Radar consider this, being the only people there. Finally:]

RADAR: Are you one?
HAWKEYE: Yes! Are you?

From "Sticky Wicket":

[Hawkeye's not asleep, but he's lying on a bed with his hat pulled down over his eyes. One of the nurses comes in and kisses him.]

HAWKEYE: Go away, Trapper.

From "For the Good of the Outfit"

RADAR: Are you guys [Hawkeye and Trapper] making this report together?
HAWKEYE: Why not? Then afterwards, hand-in-hand, we're jumping off Lovers' Leap.

From "Divided We Stand":

MARGARET: There isn't a nurse in this camp they haven't tried to molest!
TRAPPER: Except the male ones.
HAWKEYE: Speak for yourself.

And you might argue that he's kidding, and sometimes he is - the episode where he declares he's in love with Frank Burns, for example, but then there's the fact that Hawkeye makes these jokes, not Trapper, and then there's "Sometimes You Hear the Bullet", where Hawkeye's best childhood friend greets him in Korea by pulling him down by the hair for a kiss, and then there's this, from an episode where Hawkeye is sleep-deprived enough to be honest (he's already sent President Truman a telegram asking "Who's responsible?"):

From "Dr Pierce and Mr Hyde":

HENRY: Pierce, I'm putting you to bed.
HAWKEYE: You're the third person to make me that offer. I must be obvious or something.

Stepping back, I think you could only watch this show in a heterosexist society - a society where your unspoken assumptions code how you hear dialogue - and then come away from it believing Hawkeye isn't queer. (And, here's another thing: queer, bisexual, maybe fluid, not as simple as "gay". I heart Hawkeye, I really do.)

I need to go and read for an exam on financial regulation. It's really not 2002. I checked.

Comments

[rhivolution]

YES. I have always sort of felt that way about Hawkeye and queerness. It's good to see it written out.

[raven]

*smiles* Yeah, it's something I've been meaning to articulate for a while. Oh, show.

[soupytwist]

I now really want to watch that show. Oh.

(I'm really glad you aren't hipster cool.)

*hug hug hug*

[raven]

*squish* yoooou. Katie, are you telling me you haven't seen M*A*S*H? Are you really telling me this? You have been in every fandom I've ever been in, even the obscure Canadiana!

[soupytwist]

I AM saying that, I'm afraid! I'd seen like five minutes of one episode - enough to know it was Korea-that's-about-Vietnam, but that's it. :)

[philomytha]

I like the sound of that show too! I like earnest and unsubtle and I already like Hawkeye just from this.

Also, totally with you on 'it's complicated and I'm not sure' being a good answer to lots of stuff.

[raven]

I think you will like it! I mean, this is entirely apart from it being the show of my fourteen-year-old BNF heart. APART FROM THAT. yeah. It is, oh, it's lovely.

[forthwritten]

Hipster cool is boring anyway. That many levels of irony is so tedious.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on still being here. (Also, I think you are cool!)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That is very kind, on both counts. :)

[bekkypk.livejournal.com]

"...pull down your pants, and slide on the ice..."

I am very glad my fanfiction was comdemmed to the old dead screen cracked laptop...

I should dig out my DVDs sometime. At least they're not gathering dust, they're in a drawer I can't get to at present :/
Oh, I'm sad now, I used to have a M*A*S*H icon :/ I'll use my Sulky Gardar one instead...

Hurrah for still being here!
xx

[speak-me-fair.livejournal.com]

Well done on still being here :-)

Also OH GOD HAWKEYE. One of my first loves. And you have him so spot-on....

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Hawkeye! He vies with Remus Lupin for the exalted position of my first love, and how can you ever forget that, really. :)

(And, thank you.)

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

<3 <3 <3 Exactly.

a great deal of people who are firmly convinced of how much they know
People like this in so many situations, and it would really help, well, everyone if they figured out that they don't know it all and that other points of view might have value or even that 'facts' are contextual. Lifelong learning and all that. All of the police officers I taught had this problem which, given the fact that these people carry guns and ridiculous amounts of power, is terrifying.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That is, rather, but somehow doesn't surprise me. I used to worry that the more educated I got, the less I knew, but I'm starting to think that it's just this, sinking in over a lifetime.

(hi, I miss you. <333)

[the-acrobat.livejournal.com]

I used to find what I didn't know absolutely paralysing, but I think I have a better handle on it now? Education, maybe, is about learning that one doesn't know much, but that it's possible to find the information, evaluate it, and use it well.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit the nail on the head w/r/t Hawkeye. Funny thing is, I also get a queerish vibe from how he appears in Richard Hooker's original book. Which makes it all the odder that, after a somewhat innuendo-laden voyage home with Trapper, he goes back to Crabapple Cove to live Heterosexually Ever After with his family, something I couldn't imagine happening on the show even before I saw "Goodnight, Farewell, and Amen".

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Am I right in recalling that Hooker was v. offended at Hawkeye's film-and-TV sex life? He had him as this sort of wisecracking but going-home-Republican type, and when he became this iconic, liberal, definitely sexual character, Hooker got upset. I think I remember reading that once. But anyway, oh, Hawkeye. I always would have loved to know what did happen to him after GFA - if he ever did have any kind of normal life.

[ballyharnon.livejournal.com]

You're so on the money about Hawkeye. He cracks those jokes all the time and sure they're just silly jokes but they've got a certain desperate everyone's-looking-at-the-rockstar-but-nobody-sees-him vibe to them that always struck me as really sad. It's a bit like he keeps trying to get the point across but no one hears.

I used to have an icon of him that said 'I can't hear you over the sound of gin and tragedy' so pretend I used that icon for this.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

The sound of gin and tragedy! Yes, yes, that's exactly it! Oh, Hawkeye - I really like that characterisation, that he's talking and talking but no one's listening, because in the end no one ever does.

[wishfulaces.livejournal.com]

I guess growing up in the household I did I couldn't really avoid meditations on the professional life over the dinner table, but people are supposed to be unsure about things.

Yes, this. My bosses who have been doing this for 30 years are unsure about things. Strangely, I find that reassuring.

M*A*S*H is some of the best comfort brain food out there, I think. Many a time I have turned back to righteously angry Hawkeye and slyly pranking BJ and the sheer, total comfort that is Sydney Freedman when I need to soothe myself. (Oh, yes, exactly too about Hawkeye's flexibility. Huzzah.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, so do I. I mean... it's part of the job to be unsure about things. It's hard, that's why we train so long to do it, and get paid as though we were people held to very high professional standards. I just, I'm working on it. :)

M*A*S*H is good for the heart, I think. It's so full of warmth and affection even it's showing you things that are awful.

[wishfulaces.livejournal.com]

I've only in the past few months stopped feeling like the intern--most of the time; I still have the occasional panicked moment of "You want me to decide what now? On my own? Like I'm a competent professional?" So, yeah, keep working on it?

Mmm, yeah, I need to watch some M*A*S*H again soon.

[canaana.livejournal.com]

Apparently, I really must re-watch M*A*S*H as an adult.

Shouldn't be too hard, given that I married a man who owns the DVDs. Now I just have to find the time . . .

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Heee. It's good for the soul, I suspect, and at 25 minutes at a time, good for the soul in small doses.

[macadamanaity.livejournal.com]

Oh, Hawkeye. M*A*S*H is a show that will never leave me, not the least because of how fantastic the content is and how there's so much unspoken text or subtly spoken text to dig into, like what you've outlined so wonderfully here, but also because I'll never be able to read those texts without thinking about all of you all on the yahoo list and how you read it or don't read it too.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

This this this all of this. I wish so much I'd gone with you and Leigh to see Alan Alda that time, if I'd been certain I wouldn't have exploded into paper hearts.

[not-vacillating.livejournal.com]

I think you could only watch this show in a heterosexist society - a society where your unspoken assumptions code how you hear dialogue - and then come away from it believing Hawkeye isn't queer.

Isn't that the point, though? That those who remain in an unquestioned heterosexist society think he's straight, and don't complain, while those who are reading from a queer positionality see him as queer, thus giving the show the best of both worlds by keeping both audiences?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure, but it's not really important to me about the intent behind it, not now watching the show at this remove from its historical period and so many decades after it was made. I mean, it's easy to argue in response to me that Hawkeye wasn't written to be queer in 1972, and I accept that - but now, I want to make the point that you have to make an effort, put on your heterosexist goggles, to read him as straight.

(I had a M*A*S*H icon! Damn you, LJ.)

[not-vacillating.livejournal.com]

Intent is hardly relevant now, indeed. Re. heterosexist googles, yes, I do have to make that effort; but I have slash googles, and I have a conceptual space, a possibility, for someone being bisexual. I suspect that if you lack that - and much of the population doesn't have it even now - Hawkeye's queerness is easily overridden by the straightness he also displays, so that the complexity ("queer, bisexual, maybe fluid, not as simple as "gay"") is ignored because it seems impossible.

(I still had this one uploaded, and I have some more lurking in dusty corners of my hard drive.)

[furies.livejournal.com]

sigh. i am one of those people that just can't really see hawkeye as gay. especially with bj. queer, okay, possibly, if we use today's definition. maybe. mostly i think hawkeye loves - he loves people, he loves gin, he loves life (most of the time) and his love isn't restricted to the things that society says it should. so yes, he loves bj. is it a sexual love? i don't think so.

i guess the thing for me is, we have so many instances of delving into hawkeye's brain. for all intents and purposes, m*a*s*h is the hawkeye pierce show. and the thing that i know most about hawkeye is that he balances between extremes, and korea brings in all this gray. these orders, this concept of "duty" for a cause that no one can really agree on. i think hawkeye's character is the one that is used to exploit the whole "war is insane, there is no point, we're staring into the abyss" thing that i really think makes this show so clearly a response to vietnam.

so, when faced with the absurd, or the void, how do you fill it? you laugh into the abyss. sometimes it gets swallowed, and sometimes it echos, and sometimes you only laugh with your voice and not your eyes. hawkeye, to me, is doing everything possible to be sent home - at a time when being gay would get you sent home. (i don't think klinger is homosexual either, for the record.) the jokes are just silly things to make people laugh. they are a finger in the face of the government and the military that force him to be where he is. the military is supposed to be a straight-laced proving ground of manhood - and this was true through WWII - and hawkeye rejects that. how can you define yourself as a man when you are stitching boys up just to be sent out to get ripped apart again? so what, then, does it mean to be a man? the psychological stress of that is . . . well, it's a chicken and a child.

so. yes. that is my understanding of the hawkeye pierce that i love and have grown up with. granted, he was my first tv crush, so that could be part of it. but still, when i watch episodes now, i very much see a character that is the seventeen year old vietnam kid that signed up before the draft because he believed in a world that made sense, and then he got to the jungle, and heart of darkness happened. of course, i am now watching the show through the lens of history and psych, so is certainly something to take into account. but it was a show that was a hit with the vietnam generation - not the ones that really knew JFK or even LBJ as their "first" president (in terms of voting), but rather the post-watergate nixon kids, where respect for government was just lost. i really think the show hit a very strong political spirit in the midst of the reagan era - and the show itself was playing the political game before that became something tv could really do.

. . . sorry, i need to go to bed, and i am just commenting at length all over the place.

and i guess it goes to your point about work - you can be unsure about many things. not only that, but there can be many truths to the same question. which one you find more valid may say more about you than the actual source. (like rorscharch inkblots - though i am not a fan of projection psychotherapy). stopping now. really. ;)

[furies.livejournal.com]

(of course, i believe dan and casey are just best friends who love each other - but not in a sexual way at all, and i still live in a world where scully never ever slept with mulder and never would, so yeah. i think i have my own set of issues with relationships on tv. ;) )

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I can't see him as gay, either, as above - queer, bisexual perhaps, yeah, but not gay. (Queer in that loving-people way is how I am queer, too, so I'm invested. :P)

And I guess, I don't share your reading? But I do find it interesting and resonant. I mean, yes, of course, Hawkeye does laugh into the abyss, and yes, God, he is twenty-five years old at the start of the show, and his youth and his conception of manhood and the military - yeah, I'm totally with you on that. Nevertheless, I do read him as queer, while acknowledging a lot of what you say about the contexts of the show.

[furies.livejournal.com]

then i agree with you as well in that . . . well, my definition of queer is loving people without any sort of boundaries or limits, you know? you just fall in love with people.

i guess my only is issue is that i don't see hawkeye *acting* on it. i think hawkeye has a lot of ways of showing love, and most of the time it's not sexual. does that make any sense? so i guess i could see him hooking up with a random dude, but not one of his nearest and dearest. in part, i think, because he is secretly worried that everything he touches he destroys. i don't have an issue with people reading him as sexual and acting on it, i just can't really see it myself. which then makes me wonder what is up with me, but that's a whole different can of worms.

(i have this thing where i think people can love each without a sexual component, and i think that's where i get hung up here. and in other places. possibly too hung up.)

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

I think (I need to rewatch, haven't for ages despite having the DVDs) that I see him that way too - in that he loves people; he's not gay or straight, and if you had to label it it'd be queer.

I getting the loving people thing too - I think it was you I had a conversation about it with on the side of the stage in St John's in final year, how actually I didn't realise until embarrassingly late that everyone didn't just love people, and gender wasn't a factor. Growing up in a village with lesbian and gay couples may have helped this, but I do remember thinking that men and women usually ended up in couples because that was how you had children, or at least the easiest way to have children.

Tangents, I have them.

[fyrdrakken]

I've always loved October, but then again A) it's got my birthday in it, and B) it leads up to Halloween, and C) Thanksgiving is coming up the next month, so it's like the kickoff to the holiday season. And I think pretty much none of those reasons are applicable A) for you or B & C) in the UK.

Glad you've been enjoying revisiting an old favorite show, and that it's standing the test of time!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks, my dear. :)

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

I have been reading your posts and entirely failing to comment, but I just wanted to say - I know what you are going through, please feel free to send me an email or text or whatever if you ever want to talk about it or vent.

Also, the many-days-spent-researching to come up with, essentially, "I think this is it but I really can't be sure" - that happens a lot, and it's OK. I've lost count of how many times I've discussed something with a supervisor, we've said "logically and based on our general elgal knowledge it should be X; find a case that says this or just deals with this situation" and there is jsut nothing even vaguely relevant, but I'm always uneasy because I can never say for sure I read every case ever to be certain... yeah. Happens a lot.

If you do ever have any free time at weekends and would like to have lunch or coffee or hang out, you are very welcome in Wimbledon, or I can pop up to Cambridge if it makes it easier (45 minutes from Kings Cross, simple). Just let me know.

xxx

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That's really nice of you, thank you. I think I will definitely take you up on that - I'm on the PSC at the moment, but when it's done a listening ear would be very very nice indeed. I'll drop you a line inna bit. :)

[mi-guida.livejournal.com]

Getting back on track - I came to reply to this and got distracted! - it's no problem at all. I hope the PSC isn't too dreadfully dull (mainly my experience of it) but that it's also a nice excuse to get home at a sensible time!

Drop me an email (you have my address, right?) and the offer to meet up is definitely still open :) x

[tau_sigma]

I think I should watch some more MASH, sometime. Unfortunately my list of 'things I should watch sometime' is very, very long, and still not nearly as long as my list of 'books I should read'. Still. One day.

You continue! Well done on continuing. It is hard, starting a real adult full time job (at least, I found it hard). You sound like you're doing well. :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, my dear! I have uploaded some M*A*S*H, and I think you should watch it. *nods* Somehow I think you will like it; it's very humane and comforting.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I love M*A*S*H in some of the same ways I love Star Trek - because it can be so unsubtle, so in-your-face in what it wants you to believe, but at the same time I believe those things. I can't help myself. I am not cool. I am especially not hipster cool.

Iona, if we hadn't been friends already, this would have MADE us become friends right here, right now. :D

Anyway. One of the things I like about M*A*S*H is... it's difficult to articulate, but its interplay between text and subtext, the way the repressed returns in all sorts of slightly askew ways. Hawkeye is traumatized and so sleepwalks/sneezes/substitutes chickens/etc; this is a story set in the '50s but made in the '70s and '80s, post- all kinds of liberation, so some of that modern queerness seeps through in calculatedly casual banter (we had a whole webpage devoted to queer quotes in M*A*S*H, didn't we, at one point?); it's a story set during the war in Korea, but often almost palpably overshadowed and haunted by the war in Vietnam... the list goes on. I think that's one of the reasons that Sidney's line about "anger turned sideways" is so resonant. Because so many things are so cleverly turned sideways in M*A*S*H.

...I know, that made absolutely no sense at all outside my own head.

The discussion farther up about the nature of Hawkeye's "queerness" and how he might (not) act on it is really interesting. I am actually hugely promiscuous about my textual readings, and so quite comfortably can watch M*A*S*H and think:

1. God, Hawkeye is SO QUEER.
2. There is undeniably a pattern, throughout almost the entire run of the show, of characterizing Hawkeye by way of queer allusions, and c'mon, I know the author is dead (WHATEVER, POST-STRUCTURALISM, I AM STILL SUCH A STUFFY BACKWARDS-LOOKING FORMALIST AT HEART) but patterns like that don't just happen accidentally.
3. Furthermore, Hawkeye so totally loves-shading-into-is-in-love-with [insert male character of choice].
4. I want to read/write that story RIGHT NOW. Possibly ALL THE STORIES.
5. PS, Hawkeye is most likely not intended to be read as gay.
6. From a strict-constructionist viewpoint, Hawkeye-on-the-show has most likely not slept with [male character of choice], and if the show had gone on in the same vein to tell what happened post-war, Hawkeye most likely would not have ever slept with [male character of choice].
7. And I actually really like the ambiguity of the queerness with which the show invests Hawkeye.
8. However, at a moment's notice I still will read ALL THE SLASH STORIES, and also write them (at least mentally), and not feel that I'm contradicting myself somewhere.

In conclusion: basically I was just very excited and pleased to read a M*A*S*H-y entry by you. Then I ran off at the mouth. The end. \o/

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Everything about this comment makes me happy. Everything. Oh, god, Hawkeye and his queerness and M*A*S*H and how it was unafraid to be radical. I just.... yes. Yes. Yes, the interplay of text and subtext, yes. (Also, you know what I love? I love how I always looked at M*A*S*H as though it were essentially a political text, as though it were a polemic, and you always looked at it through the lens of literary analysis and form, and here we are TEN YEARS LATER DOING THE SAME THING.)

I am writing M*A*S*H fic again. It's making me so genuinely happy.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

1. OMG ICOOOOON.

2. I love how I always looked at M*A*S*H as though it were essentially a political text, as though it were a polemic, and you always looked at it through the lens of literary analysis and form, and here we are TEN YEARS LATER DOING THE SAME THING.

Well, I mean, only one of us is really successfully doing her respective thing. ;) But no, I know what you mean; I love our consistency.

3. I am writing M*A*S*H fic again. It's making me so genuinely happy.

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(If I ever write anything fanfiction again, it'll be M*A*S*H fic. Because buried somewhere on this laptop there's a whole long outline, and a few pages of actual prose, for the epic postwar story I always meant to write.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Leigh! Will you beta my M*A*S*H fic?? :P

(Also, I would be ALL OVER a postwar epic from you! But you knew that.)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

NEED YOU EVEN ASK

[3a-berkeley.livejournal.com]

I love this post...however, the way you're using the word 'queer', I think you might mean 'pansexual', instead? A pansexual is a person who can love sexuality in many forms. Like bisexuality, but even more fluid, a pansexual person can love not only the traditional male and female genders, but also transgendered, androgynous, and gender fluid people.