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

[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.)