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ravenI'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), byeponymous_rose; The Acme Judgement Company (Uncloseted Remix), by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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no subject
on 2011-10-14 07:30 am (UTC)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. ;)
no subject
on 2011-10-14 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-10-14 06:03 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
on 2011-10-14 06:15 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
on 2011-10-18 06:57 pm (UTC)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.