philosophy supernatural nude

So after some time of not, I am reading and watching TV again! Hurrah. I asked around for recs and usuallyhats told me to read Mars Evacuees, by Sophia McDougall, which I completely adored. (Charismatic teenager and her super-cool BFF are evacuated from an alien war, to Mars! Have adventures! Save the world from an alien threat, almost incidentally! It’s great. Actually, it reminds me of The True Meaning of Smekday, both because of the joie de vivre and because it has a thoughtful approach to race. Our protagonist, Alice, thinks she can hang around, join one or another of the factions, when the adults disappear and it’s just the child evacuees, in their base camp on Mars; her best friend, Josephine, wants to get out immediately. She’s black. She knows that whatever happens, when the white kids start re-enacting Lord of the Flies, it’ll be her they’ll come for first. I actually found this whole little section very upsetting.) I’m reading quite a bit of YA at the moment, mostly because of cosmic_llin, who loves it, and I used to know much more about it when I worked at the bookshop and it turns out there’s tons of amazing YA been published since 2008, who even knew.

Relatedly, I am also reading Frances Hardinge for the first time, because many of you love her and the teeny Cambs branch library down the road surprisingly had most of her books. So I’m working my way through, and, hmm. I liked but didn’t love Cuckoo Song - I thought it was very good, very well done, so interesting in the way it engages with tropes of psychological horror and women being branded as hysterics, as well as more traditional fairy-tales about women. I loved the way it grounds itself in the literature of the world immediately following the First World War (I am sort of doing this myself, in the novella that I occasionally refer to here as the Immensely Aggravating Fantasy Historical, so it was a bit urrrgh in the good way to see the same thing done so much better, so precisely and neatly!). But I think it’s too far out of my usual genres, just personally speaking – I’m not into horror as a general thing and I was too thoroughly creeped out to enjoy myself while reading it.

That was not true for Gullstruck Island, which I loved - it’s my favourite book of the year so far and maybe of the last few years. I think it was called The Lost Conspiracy in the US? Anyway, a proper review of it is forthcoming, I think, but in the meantime, aaaah, what a good book. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, set on an island of living volcanoes and magical creatures and people who can send their awareness aloft like birds, but also colonialism. Also people being complex and intricately political, like they are, but not for the sake of it. (I really hate books that are all about “intrigue”, whatever the hell that is.) It’s also joyously imaginative and funny and wonderful. My favourite thing about it ( is a spoiler )

The next Hardinge on my list is A Face Like Glass, I think. I’m looking forward to it.

Um, what else? I tried The Raven Boys, but sadly couldn’t really get into it, thus adding it to the list of Things Everyone Else Is Into But I Am Not. (A list that now includes Community – I tried it yet AGAIN, still no dice – Avatar: The Last Airbender, the entire Marvel films-and-TV universe, the Hunger Games, RPF of all stripes, and Frozen! And I wonder why I feel like my involvement with fandom drops year on year! I’ve no idea what to do about this, actually, except let it happen. I’m not going to suddenly discover a passion for superheroes, am I. Or figure out how to use Tumblr. Time to go gently into that good night.)

Urgh, that’s depressing. What else? Shim and I finished off Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and it was great and I loved it and there’s no more for a while, so we picked up Parks and Recreation again and oh, oh, oh my show. We’re in the middle of season 6 right now, and the show has seen better days, I think – it’s pretty well mined its seam of small-town comedy - but there is so much I love about it even at this stage. April is my favourite. I love grown-up April SO MUCH: April who’s learned so much about how to live from Leslie and Andy and Ron (and Donna and Ben!), but has never lost her essential Aprilness. She and Leslie teaming up to do stuff is my favourite thing.

I am massively behind on Brooklyn Nine-Nine but I know rather a lot about one of the upcoming guest stars! Definitely the next thing to catch up on. And despite my thing about Marvel, I am reading Ms Marvel and enjoying it. Maybe more on that at some point - it's a super-sweet comic about a brown girl with adorably quotidian brown girl problems, and I like it.

Basically another installment of Ben Wyatt and April Ludgate, my favourite sitcom nihilists, otherwise known as Parks and Recreation JAEGER PILOTS. No spoilers for Pacific Rim and none but the tiniest for Parks & Rec.

Fic:: Nothing Beside Remains
by Raven
2500w, Parks and Recreation/Pacific Rim, gen fusion, Ben, April & Leslie.

"I should never have done that." Ben sighs. "Now we have to be human experimental subjects."

( it turns out that they're not drift-compatible )

Yesterday was a hard day, on the personal rather than the professional level. (I'm fine! Everything is fine. But being a grown-up is hard, sometimes. Tum-ti-tum, here I am on back on the 8.15)

No meme post today. Instead, it was thingswithwings' birthday yesterday the day before yesterday and I asked what she would like: she wanted Parks and Rec femslash! Hurrah.

(Set during early s4, for Reasons.)

ficlet: the way the autumn came
by Raven
1200w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/April. "I hate corn," April tells her, "I hate mazes, I hate corn mazes, I hate trees and I hate cotton candy and I hate parks and recreation."

( getting a rollercoaster is stupid if everyone in town can have a ride at once )

New job! New job almost began in total disaster! Running half a mile in the rain! Cycling two and a half more miles, in the rain! Nearly actually honestly crying with happiness on platform 7 of Cambridge station because the 8.15 was two minutes late! Steaming gently all the way into King's Cross! Panic woe fail panic and then the air, fresh and promising, between the main line station and the Underground, and Sufjian Stevens' "Chicago" coming up on shuffle.

(I'm exhausted. It was nothing like what I was used to. I have a three-stage epic commute in either direction, I was so tired I just slipped down the wall at KX and hid behind a newspaper rack while waiting for the train (having missed the 5.45 - I touched it, dammit). But - they were kind. They wanted me there. They made me pick my menu choices for the Christmas party. And the work can be done by hand, on paper, on the floor, everything bright and clear and perfect. More on this when I am not half-dead.)

thingswithwings asked me many interesting things, and I might just answer all of them at some point, but today, all i can do is feelings, so: Leslie Knope feelings! Or any other ParksnRec feelings really.

Leslie Knope. Leslie Knope is just, she is my hero. I haven't ever sat down and made this post before because, ah, well, I'm supposed to be writing something for The F-Word on the same topic (shhhhh), and writing that has been a problem, because it degenerates into flkgldkfgldxfg so quickly. LESLIE KNOPE. Please excuse everything that comes next for its basic total incoherency.

Okay. Leslie Knope. Here is why I love Leslie Knope. Leslie is a committed feminist, socialist and public servant. She's ambitious, she's civic-minded, she works harder than any ten people you know. (I love the sequence of episodes where for whatever reason, she can't work, and Ron, April, Andy, Mark and Tom are all required, all at once, to do her job.) She's loving, she's dedicated to her friendships and her relationships in the same way that she's dedicated to her job, and Leslie is, straight-up, brave as all hell. She'll do a filibuster on rollerskates, dying of thirst, dying for the bathroom, making an idiot of herself and missing her partner's birthday party, to keep the vote for a bunch of citizens who are out to destroy her, because enfranchisement is more important than any of those things.

She's also totally ridiculous. She falls over a lot. She fills people's offices with balloons, she has a devoted crush on Joe Biden, and she eats more waffles than anyone else in Pawnee and possibly the world. And sometimes, she isn't cute: she's involved with not one, but two government bribery incidents; she uses Ann to get at Ben and Chris; she tries to destroy April's political ambitions; she can be, as Ann puts it, a human steamroller. But - she's Leslie Knope. She apologises, she calls a hearing, she serves out a suspension, she apologises some more, she gets up and tries again. It's like women can have terrible first dates, failed work projects, bizarre food cravings, be nasty to their friends and then redeem themselves with grace, and then get up and make truly beautiful, powerful, moving speeches in front of hundreds of people, all in the same week, because it's almost as though women are human, my god.

Other things about Parks and Recreation that I love beyond the telling:

-April. I adore April. I love that in the show, she is so weird and awkward and malevolent and basically every apathetic-goth teenage stereotype - and yet. And yet, April has character development and a clear emotional arc. April learns to love Andy and she learns to respect Leslie (and don't even get me started on how Leslie looks after April: Leslie mentors a younger woman in her field because for Leslie, that's the only right thing to do) and she's respectful of (and kind to!) Ron and she and Ben are constantly at war but when she goes too far she apologises to him by threatening his interns, oh my god, and it's amazing. (I would so so happily watch the Ben-and-April-take-on-the-world show.) And what I love about that incident is that it's part of April's whole thing where she's learning that yeah, Leslie can be a role model for her but there are all sorts of forms of power: she can be April and be awesome. I adore her. (In "Both Hands", I had a lot of fun writing her taking responsibility for Ben - not that she'll ever admit she's doing it because she likes him even a little, but because Ben is running a rebel alliance but he's doing it wrong, urgh, Ben, shut up.)

-Ben Wyatt, congratulations on your face. (I relate to Ben - adorable socially-awkward slash-fic-writing Ben - faaaar more than I ought.) And that whole bit where Ben is crying over Leslie through a Batman mask, omg. Firstly it's absurd and it's hilarious and it's kind of heartbreaking too; I sort of feel like there's something there about kink and anonymity and vulnerability, and fannishness, too, which I can't unpack right now but just want to admire, from a distance, as a beautiful thing; secondly there's something kind of beautiful about how kind Donna and Tom are to Ben crying through a Batman mask, and also just idfjgdfkjgldkg. I mean. Parks and Rec is so, so often just about people being kind to one another, and I am just fine with that.

-Oh, and. And. April, Tom, Donna and Ann. All brown people. I mean. I never knew how happy that could make me on television until I saw it.

-Also, Ben and Leslie. Urgh. Okay. I adore them, they are adorable together, I ship them a LOT. Which is weird? Because, okay, remember Buffy and Angel and Janeway and Chakotay and Ross and Rachel and all the other TV couples I didn't give a damn about? Yeah. Even Niles and Daphne out of Frasier - that was the build-up, more than anything, it wasn't so much about the substance of it.

But Ben and Leslie - urrgh. They are the closest thing I've ever seen to my own marriage on television, seriously, though - and quite apart from the fact I am also married to a calzone-fixated trivia nerd - because... okay, you know how het romance on television is so often so deadly dull? And I feel that that's because TV likes patriarchy. It thinks it's super. Take a woman, and a man, and slip them into the groove of every heteronormative narrative ever. Boy meets girl. Flowers. Candy. Something. (And it's meant to be aspirational? One day, you too can grow up to have a relationship just like this! Blergh.) And Leslie and Ben eat a lot of waffles, and have stupid jokes and secret handshakes, and giggle and have sex in government buildings and do Eleanor Roosevelt roleplay and giggle some more, and they're adorable and quietly super-kinky, it's ridiculous and it's believably the real thing, the kind of love that sustains over a lifetime, and it's also ice-cream and Game of Thrones and domesticity. And - this is adulthood. Leslie runs for City Council and Ben runs a congressional campaign. Sometimes ambition and vocation are greater than love, sometimes sacrifice is necessary, sometimes long-distance sucks. I have this weird feeling that their lovely, cracky, kinky, silly relationship is more grown-up, and more about what matters, than TV ever seems to give me.

(Oh and. The episodes where Ben and Leslie are doing the long-distance thing and, it's okay but it's also really not, and I... well. Back in 2010, I remember I was doing pretty badly; just before I left the UK, I sat down and wrote here one night: "All I am not doing is sitting down and explaining, this is what is more important than you."

And of course I went home after a year, and in the end Shim and I got married, and everything turned out fine, because what was more important to me than my partner was more important for a reason, and sometimes you make those sorts of horrible decisions, but I didn't know any of that back then and I wish this show had been made then. I really do. One of my favourite memories of that whole time is when Shim came to visit and Tobermory asked, casually, "What are you guys going to do this weekend?"

The Siren gave her this withering glare and said, "She hasn't seen him in four months, what do you think they're doing this weekend" - and, to me - "honey, try not to do it in your carrel.")

-I feel like I've got distracted. Er, Parks and Recreation. Er, municipal land use and planning! I love that I love land use and planning and so does Leslie! I love they've got these running plots about what to do with Lot 48 and zoning errors and city budgets. Because, you know what? Those things matter. Parks and Recreation isn't The West Wing, but it makes those things matter. And it makes me chew over all the basic notions of political science in my head - all that first-year institutional politics stuff, but also the define-your-terms stuff which is basic but also not basic at all, things like, what is a government? If it's how you organise resources and a collective rule of recognition for, like, twelve people, is it still a government? Can there be ideologically-neutral government even at that level? Should we privatise pothole repair? Should we do so because our form of government is constitutive of our metaethics? When Ron yells at Leslie, that's what he's yelling about! I love that. I love this show. (Again, I had a lot of fun dealing with that for "Both Hands", but what I want to know is why this 22-minute sitcom has more to say on this topic than, you know. Serious political drama.)

Wow that was a lot of feelings. Okay! Clear eyes, full hearts, on to day two!

Fic:: Both Hands [2/2]
by Raven
17,000w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/Ben, April/Andy.

[Please see part one for content notes and summary]

( after the dust had settled )

( notes and acknowledgements )

Happy Diwali, all. Thank you, everyone who came to the party last night - it was a lovely time - and everyone else, I hope your days and nights are full of light.



This is our living room, from last night. Everything there is a gift - the candelabra and candles are from the wedding, the bookends were a gift from my colleagues, the little stone candle-holders are Diwali gifts from previous years - which seems oddly fitting. In lieu of other gifts for y'all, I offer four short stories, on the usual theme:


building normal
Deep Space Nine, Sisko, Kira, Dax et al.

( increased efficiency on Deep Space Nine )


hope
Welcome to Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos.

( on one of the dark days )


comparative religion
Parks and Recreation, Tom, April, Leslie, gen.

( an overwhelming smell of kerosene in the Parks Department )


love in a hopeless place
Gentleman Bastards, Locke and Jean, gen(ish). No spoilers for The Republic of Thieves!

( Locke can't walk )

Dear yuletide author,

Thank you very much for writing for me. I appreciate it. As I say every year, I am a very strong believer that optional details are optional, and also that it does me good to read things I didn't expect to read. So if you have your assignment and your idea, go away and write that now and never mind me, and I will love whatever it is.

If you like to have more guidance, then here we go:

( The True Meaning of Smekday - Adam Rex )

( MASH )

( Parks and Recreation )

( Amstel Lager - The Chef )

Generally I like: people being competent; people being kind; found families and communities; gen and queer gen, though I'm down with any kind of pairing you like, inc poly; cliché tropes; friendships.

Generally, I don't like: women being erased; PWPs; character-bashing.

Lastly: I just got married. It was great, we threw a party. Why do you care. Because it was wedding no. 1 of 2. Wedding 2 of 2 takes place on December 29th and 30th, in New Delhi, a city which is approximately 4500 miles from where I'm writing this. While I may have time to read/comment on yuletide the week before the wedding, I may well... not. I honestly can't say at this stage. And after the wedding I am away another week, so I may not read your story until, ah, Epiphany or reveals or whatever. I am so sorry about that, in advance, and I don't want you to think I hate you or your story or that I'm not enormously grateful to you for writing for me! Because I don't and I don't and I am, and thank you, again.

Happy yuletide!

Raven