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

[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