philosophy supernatural nude

More meme questions! montfelisky asked for a day in the life of my job, which I thought was a really interesting question! I’m going to make the executive decision that you meant my job as it used to be, not before this working-at-home endless nightmare whatever (though my department is actually phasing people back into the office, it won’t be mandatory for a long time yet).

So, once upon a time, I used to try to get to work for 9.15am, though it’s always a struggle with my not-morning person self. Get to work, drop bag, find desk (not always an easy task; my department has no money), boot up computer, check email, make to-do list, do first thing on it! At which point it’s usually 10am and I go down to the Pret under the department and get coffee, unless someone else in the team has beaten me to it. The things on my to-do list can look like the following:

* Drafting (on which more here): but usually this is on the longer list, a big project that I work at slowly over weeks and months. It gets displaced day-to-day by:

* Small requests for advice. The government wants to do X, where X might be “refuse to reply to Freedom of Information request” or “invite engineers from Network Rail to visit a secure site” or “write to the European Commission as follows” or “conduct three-week vegetation review of rural railway lines”. My task here is to assess the request, consider if it’s a) legal and b) sensible, and write up my advice. Usually, the answer to both questions is “it depends”, in which case I have to make a judgement of how much risk they run in doing whatever they want to do. If they want to send a letter/publish a document, it’s my job to review it line by line, amending and commenting as I go.

* Submissions to ministers. This is the same, but bigger scale. The government wants to do something substantial, possibly related to its manifesto commitments; the civil servants set out the course of action with some alternative options in a document called a submission, which is then formally checked by finance, legal and press as well as policy, before it’s put to the Secretary of State for an opinion. These are the bread-and-butter of government business, but they’re tough and usually require days of work.

* Meetings! So many damn meetings. Sometimes they replace small requests for advice. Sometimes it’s that the department is just thinking something over, and wants early input; sometimes it’s us trying to decide on options following a screw-up; sometimes it’s formal international negotiations; sometimes it’s a Friday afternoon and we’ve decided to deal with all our correspondence in one go.

* Parliamentary and ministerial work. This is the bit where I’m actually in the House of Commons or House of Lords, advising on the floor of the House or in Committee. I don’t do this a lot (no one does!) but it’s my favourite bit. I also advise ministers in meetings when they ask for it - this is incredibly stressful but I get a kick out of the adrenaline rush and I am getting better at it! (The key to it is to dress nicely, know the area inside and out, and it’s a cliche but it really helps to deliberately play up to the role. I think most of us do? Be clear, deferential, and make sure you don’t show any emotion or expression. (My favourite memory of this is waiting in a Commons corridor for the minister to come up from the despatch box and having her say, instantly: “Oh, no, the lawyer looks worried.”)

Plus a million other small things, and my administration. I record my time, like most lawyers, but much more haphazardly; I also, in theory, keep up with my reading - being a constitutional lawyer in deeply constitutional times means I should keep abreast of developments but I am not very good at this. And in addition to that I have a separate role as the legal secretariat to a high-level Whitehall working party, so I follow them around one day a week.

I don’t work very long hours, though, because as lawyers go I don’t get paid very much, about half of what my private sector counterparts would get. I’ve been in the Commons at 10pm before, but there are also days I go home at 5pm on the dot (and after the tough times last year, got 11 days in lieu, which was a thing.) And the great thing about the job is that every day comes out differently. Like, some days I turn off my computer and draft by hand all day, and other days I spend traipsing around Westminster, and there are days when there’s nothing much on and then there are days where I’ve advised on five different things before lunch. I’m not sure if this has answered your question but I hope so!

soupytwist asked: I know you love the quotidian and everyday portrayed in fiction (as is only right and proper): do you have any further thoughts on either good portrayals, or ways you think work/don't work to incorporate those kinds of details?

I do love the quotidian in fiction! Very much. Partly I just think that that’s the important bit of a story. Good portrayals, uh. Here’s the beginning of Kalpa Imperial, one of my favourite books.


The storyteller said: Now that the good winds are blowing, now that we’re done with days of anxiety and nights of terror, now that there are no more denunciations, persecutions, secret executions, and whim and madness have departed from the heart of the Empire, and we and our children aren’t playthings of blind power; now that a just man sits on the Golden Throne and people look peacefully out of their doors to see if the weather’s fine and plan their vacations and kids go to school and actors put their heart into their lines and girls fall in love and old men die in their beds and poets sing and jewelers weigh gold behind their little windows and gardeners rake the parks and young people argue and innkeepers water the wine and teachers teach what they know and we storytellers tell old stories and archivists archive and fishermen fish and all of us can decide according to our talents and lack of talents what to do with our life—now anybody can enter the emperor’s palace, out of need or curiosity; anybody can visit that great house which was for so many years forbidden, prohibited, defended by armed guards, locked, and as dark as the souls of the Warrior Emperors of the Dynasty of the Ellydróvides.

People plan their vacations, and the innkeepers water the wine. I love this, I love how holiday planning is on a level with the end of the night of terror. It feels real, and particularly now that that “live through a global pandemic” and “put the recycling out” are both things I do in a day, I really get what Gorodischer was doing here. I think that’s how you do it well - by taking the everyday as seriously as you take everything else. And don’t get me wrong, I do think a fantasy world absolutely can survive on dragons alone, I get why we need epic stories where everything is in broad strokes, but, y’know, I like a world with economists, or washerwomen, or people wondering if they’re going to claim on the insurance for this. (I love the bit in Memory where Miles Vorkosigan discovers he may be the protagonist of an epic space opera series, but he needs a car if he’s going to get anywhere and he needs to cook if he’s going to eat, and Vorkosigan House has a cleaning service but he’s going to have to call them if he wants them to come and clean. The bit where Tsipsis, the family accountant, listens to him talk for a while and then says, “My lord… do you need money?” is just so good as a send-up both of the entire genre (where does spaceship funding come from, anyway!) and of the incredibly privileged aristocracy.) I do love it.

You can still ask me to talk about things, if you like.

glinda asked: I’d like your opinions about the recent controversy around the whole Gaelic in the Vernacular Community book. Does it tell us anything useful about the state of the language? How does it look from the perspective of urban adult Gaelic learners outside the Gaidhealtachd? ( ie is it remotely relevant to you and your classmates?)

This is such a big and good and important question, and I have been thinking about it a lot. It finally occurred to me that rather than feel like I have to write a whole dissertation on it and then not write anything at all, I’m going to make some random observations and hope that those are interesting.

(for background: Gaelic in the Vernacular Community is the product of a several-year study recently published that sets out that Gaelic as a community language will be dead within ten years. It has raised a lot of questions about whether the Gaelic revitalisation movement, which has been wildly successful on some metrics but has often focused on places and people at some distance removed from the remaining Gaelic-speaking communities, has really achieved its purpose.)

(Where I come at this: a Gaelic learner with some personal connections to the language but certainly not from a family that has/had any speakers, and I’m not myself from the Highlands or islands. I have a Gaelic-speaking community, though (including glinda, of course, who knew she’d get a wall of text in asking me this question!) and I call myself a speaker as well as a learner because I choose to use the language in my day-to-day life, notwithstanding my complete lack of fluency.)

Here are the random observations:

* Ultimately, I think the postcolonial lesson is this: it’s always too late. Gaelic as a community language has been dying since the early seventeenth century, and in some ways it was too late even then. If I can be a complete dick about it and quote myself for a minute: "Relearning it is possible; decolonisation of the mind is possible. But [we] have been changed, first by the forgetting and the relearning. What is left is post-glacial, a landscape irrevocably altered." You know? I wasn't actually talking about Gaelic there, but I kind of was, and anyway it's too late, and there's nothing we can do about it.

* Gaelic’s decline in its heartlands is also a function of the loss of an old way of life. It’s not just the language that’s dying; it’s an old world. This is the bit where I got worried about possibly having to write a dissertation to say anything at all on this, but the decline of the language can’t be untangled from everything else about colonisation: poverty, clearances, land loss, lack of education and mobility, urbanisation, gender and history. So while I do agree that more could be done for the vernacular communities - I really do! I feel like that’s not coming across, I really do think that - in some ways there’s no way to reverse the damage to the language in a way that solely focuses on the language.

* Part of the criticism is about the modern lexis that has been created for the language that didn’t exist when it was solely a vernacular (the word I almost used there was “sanskritisation” of the language, which, another story). But actually I do feel strongly about that. I have one Gaelic-speaking friend who is always trying to smooth off my rather formal Gaelic and make it more colloquial (“what we actually say!”), which I really do appreciate, but I still believe a living language needs a formal and literary register. If we don't want the language to be “just” a language of house and home (and I'm not saying that’s not valuable; languages without hearth and home become Sanskrit and Latin) then we need to outfit it for the public sphere. If we have to lapse into English for, say, "equality and diversity policy”, then are we saying that those things are only important through the coloniser’s lens?

* (Now I come to think of it, this is exactly the same reasoning for as preserving it as a language of a community. To really be a living language, it has to be the language of all everyday life, going to the shops and tweeting at your friends and doing your taxes and all.)

* If we do lose it as a community language, leaving only a language of heritage and of revival (like Cornish and Manx) then that will be a tragedy. But if this is the choice we get, between a world with no Gaelic and a world with Gaelic - then there’s no contest. There’s nothing noble about refusing what we have left.

* Finally: I have paid for lessons where I can, of course. But the vast majority of the Gaelic I have has come to me for free, from the friends who found out I loved it and took it upon themselves to give it to me as a gift. I have another friend who talks a lot about creating a “native space” for the language, places where it’s spoken, even if that space is as small as one table at a party or one night in a coffee shop, once a week. (Tuesdays, 6pm, Caffe Nero in Covent Garden, you’re welcome.) I think there’s something precious and beautiful and kind of awful about a language that is treasured and cherished in such small increments.

Sin an òraid bheag a th’ agam. A bheil i feumail, cudromach, ’s docha nach eil. But that’s my opinion for what it’s worth, and tapadh leat airson a' cheist seo.

I’m going to answer your other question as well, cos that was very depressing.

On a lighter note, what’s the silliest/most charming encounter you’ve had with Gaelic in the wild - perhaps the least likely place you’ve encountered the language?

Lake Tekapo, Aotearoa (!) A. and I were on the South Island in 2017 and came across a little statue of a collie that had been raised as a monument to the local sheepdogs, and they’d inscribed it with "Beannachdan air na cù caorach”! I was so charmed.


(If you want to ask me something, you still can.)

( that was the year that was; my goodness I talk a lot )

An older version of this meme asked for a song lyric, or a life lesson, or some such good place to end. In lieu of both, here is something I have been listening to a lot just recently: from Lin-Manuel Miranda's first musical, In The Heights, "Alabanza".

After a short break, we're back. frayadjacent asked me two things!

-Clothes! Whatever you feel like saying about them.

Clothes! I love clothes and I think I pretty much always have. As a teenager, I was super-awkward and convinced I was hideous - and, in retrospect, fighting some kind of internal war against my own queerness - and it took me quite a long time to actually start dressing in ways that made me happy and suited me. Part of it's been growing up, and partly it's been the privilege of disposable income, of course. (Something that's nice: here in my late twenties, I've actually started seeing myself in the mirror. It's funny how that works. I never could see myself in my reflection, and now I can: the girl in the mirror with the hipster glasses is definitely the same person who lives inside. It's nice.)

So, anyway, things I like! I like dresses, usually short ones with tights and boots (in winter) or sandals (in summer). I really like natural fabrics; I love brushed cotton, real leather, and wool. I like everything cut femme - lace necklines; frock coats; A-line skirts - except sometimes I like really chunky, military-ish boots to go with them. I don't wear trousers, except for jeans. I wear a lot of red and black and deep colours in general; I'm brown and I dress accordingly, mostly. I have some wardrobe staples that I really love, like my winter coat, which is out of the cupboard again - it's a black frock coat with a copper lining (though the autumn-spring coat is a brightly coloured flower-print on black confection from Desigual, and I like it a lot too); and my handbag is this gorgeous brown soft leather satchel (from Rowallan, I think?) that holds a tablet, a book and all the rest of my crap, and cheers me up every time I pick it up.

And, you know, I do think clothes are important as armour. it's very easy to think you're a bad queer or a bad feminist for loving clothes, but that's such nonsense, I'm finding. I used to hate dressing for work when I was a trainee, because I hate "traditional" office clothes - I hate suits and and I hate synthetic fabrics and I hate the way women's shirts are always tailored for women who a) are significantly taller and b) have rather more up top than me - and rather cathartically gave all my old work outfits to Oxfam when I qualified. I now work somewhere with no real dress code and have enjoyed watching my clothes and aesthetic settle into something that makes me happy, and makes me feel like myself and like I can really take on my life and everything in it every day. That's worth having.

Also: what are your favorite character types and/or story tropes? I.e. tell me about sad robots and other things.

Aha, you know me well! I love sad robots (and I was very much in a sad robot place when frayadjacent visited) - because... well. I suppose, the character and story trope I love is the story of almost, but not quite. Characters who look like they ought to be part of their communities, but for one reason or another, are balanced on some sort of edge (see Commander Data; Breq from Ancillary Justice; Simon Illyan; Remus Lupin, oh my god) between belonging and not.

(Actually, I'm not sure if my love for this trope or Remus came first. Oh, Remus! I love him so, so much, and still.)

Other things! I love characters who act as human moral compasses (see: Daniel Jackson; Toby Ziegler; Spock, who is not human but whatever). I think off that list of characters I imprinted on it at an early age, but I love it like burning. Both the fact of it - all those characters have their counterparts, Jack and Bartlett and Kirk, who love them and trust them so much that they're willing to be guided like this - and the narrative weight of flipping the trope over. (Take Stargate SG-1, a show I adore but has no shortage of wacky plots and cheesy tropes and just general ridiculousness, that turns around and gives you an otherwise unremarkable episode, "Serpent's Song", in which Daniel tries to commit a murder and is stopped by Jack. It's completely devastating and it's because of this trope.)

Unsurprisingly, I also love friendship tropes and everything that comes with them, often more than I like romantic tropes. I love best-friends-since-childhood (Marauders!); I love friends in adversity; I especially love adversaries-becoming friends (Hawkeye Pierce and Margaret Houlihan are my favourite example of this! So perfect).

The thing that’s my number one thing, though: characters who have to do a thing, because, ultimately, there are no good choices left. The ones who fight to the bitter end; who die gracefully; who jump off the roof in each other’s arms (oh, Amy and Rory!). And relatedly, characters who sacrifice part of themselves, for something greater than themselves. Witness Benjamin Sisko, standing up at the end of "In The Pale Moonlight", telling the camera that if that's all it took - just that he lied; that he cheated; that all it took was the self-respect of one Starfleet officer, well: "I can live with it. I can live with it." And Tuvok, compromising his own (Vulcan!) ethics so Janeway, whom he loves, won't have to (“Someone had to spare you the ethical dilemma. I was the logical choice.") And Rupert Giles (“She’s a hero. She’s not like us.”) And Aral Vorkosigan ("You don't remember the first time.") There's also Leonard McCoy, who carries his friend's soul around in his head; Hawkeye again, who will not touch a gun ("Why are they bombing us? We're already bombed!"); and ( spoiler for Death At The Dionysus Club, which I know some of you are reading ) No good choices, and they still choose.

I just – moral courage is the thing that destroys me. What I want, actually, is to see this trope much much more in women. Leslie Knope is as good as an example as she can be, from a sitcom (e.g., that episode where she's on rollerskates filibustering to save the votes of the people who are out to destroy her!) and Hermione Granger putting a memory charm on her own parents comes to mind, but, urgh, needs more ladies.

(Actually, the very best example I can think of a lady fitting this trope - Code Name Verity. And now I'm sad.)

riverlight asked: I'd love to hear about some of your favorite books, the kind you read over and over again!

I have a lot of favourite books! But limiting the list to ones I actually do re-read regularly made narrowing it down easier. Here they are, and I've probably forgotten a half-dozen:

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
I’ve written at length about this elsewhere, but in brief: it’s Seth’s monster 1400-page novel that’s sort of about Lata Mehra, and her mother’s struggle to find her a suitable boy for a husband, and sort of about the 1950 general election, India’s first, and about India: India the unreachable idea, the enormous concept, so shown to us through the lens of fifty or sixty Indian people leading their lives. It is engaging and funny and warm and vast and infinitely human and humane; I re-read it every few years and I adore it.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
I’ve written about this one elsewhere as well! It’s 1806, England is in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, and bit by bit, magic is returning to England. It's a novel about magic and wartime and the way white, and male, power works; it's also silly and funny and happy and delightful and replete with worldbuilding and footnotes. And it's also about England: about places, and placeness. There's a line in it I come back to and come back to: The land is all too shallow / It is painted on the sky. The book is more than a thousand pages but I have read it thrice in three years. I love it very much.

Kalpa Imperial, Angelica Gorodischer (trans. Ursula Le Guin)
I love this book so, so much I kind of want to learn Spanish just to read it in the original (this, and Borges). But given I don’t speak Spanish, the Le Guin translation is a blessing. This is a a collection of short stories that are connected, in that together they form a history of an empire that never existed – and they are beautiful, interesting, witty and grounded, and they speak to me on a very basic level. It's hard to say what they're about, but mostly, about history: about education, about humanity, about kindness and the way on. hathy_col gave me a Christmas present – I mean Christmas this year, because she's the most organised person I know – of Lord Dunsany’s collected stories, and the resemblance is quite noticeable, actually; Dunsany also writes like this, with a clear-eyed sparse style that nevertheless suggests the great history of empires.

This is Kalpa Imperial:

( The storyteller said: )

Isn't that perfect? That's how it starts. I guess what it is, is this: I have never liked fairy tales, and they are not fairy tales. They’re not stories about the private sphere – not about evil stepmothers or princesses spinning or even subversions of that – but about the public sphere, about great cities and governments and republics and wars, but with the humanity of the small and the precious. I’ve read them many, many times and I’ve never got sick of them. And although I’m reading Dunsany mostly for the first time right now, I think his stories are going to be like Kalpa Imperial, that I come back to and come back to.

(Actually, let's give Dunsany a minute, even though he's not quite in the spirit of the question being asked. He writes exactly the sort of myffic fantasy I can't stand, except in his hands the great beauty is in the details: he tells you, for example, of swords and sorcery and great quests and battles, along the banks of the River Yann in the Land of Dreams; and he also tells you that among the river sailors, it's the custom to pray one at a time, so the gods don't get confused. All this, and shatteringly crystalline prose. (e.g., "It is vey difficult to draw away from the face of God—it is like a warm fire, it is like dear sleep, it is like a great anthem, yet there is a stillness all about it, a stillness full of lights.” (!!)) He seems to have been this huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ type, living in mildly aristocratic Anglo-Irish splendour in the early twentieth century; he’s the last person in the world you would have expected to write like this. I suppose we all do contain multitudes. I talk too much.)

Voices, Ursula K. Le Guin
This is one of Le Guin’s later books, nominally YA and kind of overlooked generally, I think – the series is the Annals of the Western Shore, and there are two others, Powers and Gifts, but they each stand alone – and it’s… well. It’s the story of Ansul, which was a university city full of libraries and books. When it was invaded and taken over, the books were destroyed as sinful, and the city’s Waylord – its elected leader – kidnapped and tortured. All of this happens before the story begins. It’s actually the story of a girl called Memer, born during the siege, who is taught by the Waylord in secret to read. And that’s it, in a way – it’s a coming-of-age story set against a revolution, but it’s also small, and human and meaningful. That’s why I love Le Guin (and why I think she was such a good choice to translate Kalpa Imperial): because she writes things like this:

( housekeeping and cooking )

Reading over this, I’m noticing that word “human” a lot. I don’t really do epics or grimdarkness or sword and sorcery or middle-class alienation or anything like that. I think I return to books that are about people, doing what they can, doing small things that matter, in worlds that are politically and fantastically complex. So, like real life, in fact.

I didn't promise to do these in any order! So let's begin with marginaliana, who asked: "I'd love to hear about your long term writing goals. Where do you see your writing life ten years from now, if you think that far ahead?"

Ten years ahead!

Here's the scary part - ten years ago, I was at about the beginning of my writing life. I was seventeen, and I'd been writing since I was twelve, so perhaps not the very beginning, but I wrote a story around that time - Walking Barefoot to Palestine - which apart from making me some friends who have stayed with me for years (hi, Sal!), has the dubious honour of being one of the first stories I ever wrote that I can still bear to look at. I've always thought that year marked a turning point: the year my writing became less about ALL MY FEELINGS and more about a craft I worked at, though one with enough feelings to keep me going for another decade and half-million words. I have no formal training as a writer beyond, er, A-level English and Legal Draftswomanship 101, but that ten years has been an education: I've written and edited and been edited and practised and played and tried things and written a few things I'm proud of and a few that were terrible but enormous fun and generally had the time of my life.

I've also written a novel and published some short stories, but - I did both of those this year. At the beginning of 2014, I resolved to get some original publication credits, and I did that, and finally finished the novel last month to boot, though it's out being looked at right now - so here's what I hope for ten years' time. To be able to look back at me-at-twenty-seven as I do now at me-at-seventeen, and say: that was a great time in my life, a time of transformation. Not quite so much transformation, perhaps - I think there's probably more change in a life, writing or otherwise, between seventeen and twenty-seven than there is at other times - but certainly change, and trying and learning new things. And one thing I have very recently started doing is thinking of myself as a writer. Not just a fanfic writer or just as someone who has a hobby to fit around my day job or just, anything - but a writer, someone who writes, a lot, every day. I look forward to meeting the version of myself who's been sustained by that thought for such a length of time.

We shall see.

Some fannish housekeeping! So today, in and around building flatpack furniture (The Great Flat Redecoration '14, don't even ask) I hung out on Tumblr and was fannish about silly Star Trek AUs, and it made me SO HAPPY. (Fandom and I have been kind of... on a break, recently, for Reasons.) But possibly there is hope for me yet! Hurray.

Anyway, so, I have just been alerted to the existence of Deep Dish Nine, a fluffy all-human Deep Space Nine AU where Sisko & co run a pizzeria. It is just as adorable as it sounds. And, totally delightfully, there is also Chez Entreprise, which the TNG crew run down the street, and over the road, the coffee shop run by Janeway and Seven called (what else?) Nebula Coffee.

So I wrote this piece of total fluff.

The Flaw In The Plan (571 words) by Raven
Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kathryn Janeway/Seven of Nine, Data/Geordi La Forge
Characters: Kathryn Janeway, Seven of Nine, Data, Geordi La Forge
Additional Tags: Deep Dish Nine, Alternate Universe, Fluff
Summary:

"Huh. Next you're gonna tell me Swedish Fish aren't made of fish."

I am also writing another, longer, more serious story about Janeway and Seven, which is super fun, and contemplating whether anyone would read fic for The Oversight. (Probably not, is the answer to that.)

And finally! So there's a meme going round where you post your ten most important, most indentity-constitutive films, and I - well, I just. I am so bad at films, I don't have the attention span for them. So I had dinner with happydork quite recently and we spent a couple of hours playing the same game, for TV episodes. And here is my list, for completion, with a line of dialogue from each because I thought it would be fun:

"Sometimes You Hear The Bullet", M*A*S*H ("Rule number one: young men die.")
"The Measure of a Man", Star Trek: TNG ("Consider that in the history of many worlds, there have always been disposable people.")
"In The Cards", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ("It's not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favour of some philosophy of self-enhancement.")
"The Fifth Race", Stargate SG-1 ("Right now I'm possibly his only hope for communicating on any kind of serious level. I can't leave him like this, and I won't.")
"Are You Being Served", Frasier ("My reasoning? My reasoning was based on my mother's obsession with VERMIN!")
"Win, Lose, or Draw", Parks and Recreation ("I never wrote it.")
"Mary Pat Shelby", Sports Night ("How much do you love me?")
"Take This Sabbath Day", The West Wing ("Shalom, Toby.")
"The Body", Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("I don't understand how this all happens!")
..and season 1 of Slings and Arrows. ("Why did you fuck me over?")

(Shh, I know that's not a single episode, but happydork's chosen episode of The Wire was... The Wire.)

That's my list! I should go to bed.

Another day! Still building taxonomies. It's... wow, I'm exhausted right now.

gamesiplay asked: You have a tag called "FIAWOL"; it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what that was an acronym for. What does fandom as A Way Of Life mean to you?

So "fandom is a way of life" is certainly a set phrase that's older than I am, and I don't suppose I use it in the same way as those who coined it did, or possibly many other people, but, anyway, here goes.

There’s a quotation sourced to Lev Grossman that does the rounds periodically about how what fandom is, basically, is, punk. Here it is:

( really aggressive towards the source text )

That's exactly it, to my mind. I guess, what I mean by fandom as a way of life is that fandom is important to me in the abstract sense as well as the day-to-day specifics. I think fandom is, both in substance and function, transformative. I’ve written before about how I believe that it was fandom, in conjunction with other things that mostly were also brought into my life by fandom, that transformed me from a shy and awkward thirteen-year-old to a shy and awkward, but settled-in-herself, adult. Fandom gave me community and the confidence to take my place in that community, and a cheerful cognisance that my community was really a global community: that I belonged to something greater than myself. But in some sense that transformation is over – I’m grown up now! Twenty-seven next month! What even happened? – and now I’m sort of getting ready to push off into that long haul of adulthood and I suppose, yes, it is the time to think about what fandom is to me now.

I guess, to be in fandom for me, regardless of whether I’m currently writing a 20,000-word epic story about Parks & Rec and alien invasions, or not; or whether I’m super-excited about a TV show about spaceships, or not; or if I went to four cons this year or none or wanted to but couldn’t afford to or saw fangirls last weekend or haven’t in months; regardless of any of those things: fandom is to make a choice, every day, to be part of a transformative world. To think, I can tell that story better, or differently, or just, with more cock jokes. To make people in power angry. To be such a threatening force in the world that we must needs take our place in the grand litany of women’s writing and art, and the writing and art of other subaltern groups, and be trivialised, demeaned and category-errored out of existence. Fandom is what teenage girls do (because, of course, to be young and a woman at the same time is the worst crime society can conceive of). Fandom is derivative and unoriginal (which is bad, unless it’s Margaret Attwood or Shakespeare doing it, in which case it’s innovative and literary). Fandom is theft (because to create a means of production of culture for no material gain is worryingly anti-capitalist). Fandom is nothing but badly-written porn (because mainstream porn is, of course, so suffused in quality, and young girls and women mustn’t be allowed to think for a moment that they can claim ownership of their own sexuality). I’m over all of that bullshit and people who peddle it. Those people are scared of fandom and they ought to be. Fandom teaches, you can retell the story your way. Consider how powerful an idea that is. Today it'll be the stories we tell ourselves about spaceships. Tomorrow, it'll be the stories we tell ourselves about justice. The day after it will be both of those at once.

(Relatedly, I loathe this pseudo-cute fannish thing right now of white fans saying things like, “Fandom loves [pretty white boys]”, or “I love [X], but of course fandom doesn’t, fandom only likes [Y] [because he's a cute boy] etc”. I am fandom. I have been fandom every day for thirteen years. It’s super-precious that you want to erase me for the sake of making a rhetorical point, except, actually, it’s not.)

And as well as that, fandom is love. Fandom is, well, fandom is how to be open to that – to look at the world and think, wow, there’s so much there to be excited about. Some people kissed on TV and it was awesome and it made me so happy and I want to go tell all my friends about it! Some other people successfully hit a small round object through a standing structure in front of thousands of spectators (and it was awesome and it made me so happy and I want to go tell all my friends about it!) There was a movie about giant robots! There was a book about spaceships for great justice! There was a story retelling another story that was itself a retelling of a story written 5,000 years ago by human beings just like us! (And it was awesome! And it made me so happy! And… you get it.)

So I guess the rumours are true and that fandom does skew young - in mind, I suppose, rather than body; because it demands of you the capacity to remain angry, to remain punk, to reject cynicism, to love them all and their faces so damn much. I think, at this stage of slightly unwilling adulthood, that's okay.

Today's question comes from littlered2, who asked: If it's not too personal, languages: which languages you speak, in what contexts, and what they mean to you.

Well, this one is personal (and I'm honestly so touched by your sensitivity in picking that up - it's not immediately obvious as a personal question!), but I am trying to talk - and let myself think - about it more, so here we go.

Languages! Okay. I am good with, and love languages. (I have to remind myself of this a lot, for reasons which will become clear in a moment.) Not in the sense that I'm a super-effective communicator or whatever as the job apps would have it; I mean languages in themselves, their grammars and structures and interesting twiddly bits. (I write stories and I draft things for a living. I figure all of this goes together.)

So the first language I ever spoke was Hindi, and Hindi more than any other is the language of home - both for me, and for everyone; if any one language could be, Hindi would be India's national language, and that makes sense in a way because Hindi is an acquisitive workhorse of a language, anecdotal and crude and beautiful and weird. Hindi speakers, more than any other, drift into English and Urdu and all the other languages of India when they talk; there is this push towards Sanskritisation in India, using new coinages and back-formations, trying to make a purer tongue of it, but I don't think it's terribly successful. For me, Hindi is the language of making tea, getting the milk in, can you chop a couple of onions, and stay tuned, we'll be back after this.

There's more to it, of course. But I lost it. I had it, and I lost it. If I could have any wish granted, it would be to go back in time, to my parents who were so scared - justifiably scared! - that I would never fit in, and we would never go home. I lost Hindi as my language of choice by the time I was six; by the time I was sixteen, it had gone almost entirely; now, I'm twenty-six, and it's back, in moods and lights, and I work at it and I get by, but sometimes there's no there there, like, just, some awful howling loss where an identity-constitutive grammar should live. (This is what I mean when I talk about the decolonisation of the mind - how to rid yourself, both of internalised colonialism, and also guilt: that because you were on the wrong side of a system that didn't want you, it's not you that's made wrong. I dumped a Hindi teacher I had once for not understanding this.) What comforts me at this stage is that it is there, somewhere. I was in India for six days in October and by the sixth day I was reaching for it without thinking; my grandfather once said, live with me for six months and I know you'd be reading me the newspaper. Which was kind, and maybe even true. I hope it was, and is.

(I can read Devanagari script, something of which I am inordinately proud. I read at the grade school level, slowly, sounding everything out, and I annoy everyone by stopping in the middle of the street to do this. Mostly, people observing this come to the conclusion that I have a learning disability.)

I also speak French. Kind of. I had no choice about French - I had a polyglot primary school teacher who loved teaching it, and it's the one I kept on with through secondary school - and although I wish very much that I had more of it, and had kept up with what I had, I think I'm actually at the stage with French where the only thing that will convert me to easy fluency is moving to France for six months and getting unstuck trying to order soup. As a language, I never used to like it very much, but I'm coming around to it now as I get the feel of it as well as just learning it - I like its softness and its elegance of expression. On ne puisse pas rentrer. Yes. Since I left school I've had friends who spoke French from francophone Africa, and oddly, that helped: I thought it was beautiful and grounding to hear it from non-white people.

The only other language I speak anything worth mentioning of is Gaelic, and Gaelic is wonderful - it's so beautiful and fascinating and replete with a kind of musicality, I adore it, and given all my capital-I Issues detailed above, it's a gift. Why learn to speak Gaelic? Not because it's my mother tongue. Not because it would be particularly useful for anything. Not because I'm likely to meet another speaker I didn't already know about! But just because it's a beautiful language, and I love it and I'm pleased to be a statistically significant addition to its body of speakers.

There are some others: I can understand some conversational Bengali because my mother's family are all Bengali, and I have two years of Spanish I can't remember, and have been taught Welsh, though I couldn't say a single meaningful thing about it at this remove of time. Oh, and I have four years of Latin - which I remember the shape of, rather than the substance; I absolutely love Latin grammar and how regular and interesting it is, amo amas amat amamus, etc; and in conjunction with that I was taught some Greek (I'm English-public-school-educated, shut up) - and my father taught me the very beginnings of Sanskrit grammar. He loves Urdu poetry and has tried teaching me the basics of that, to no avail; I believe if my father's father had lived longer, he would have had more success teaching me. Something else that comforts me: my grandfather had never had Hindi, either. He learned it in his thirties and was deeply distrustful of it all his life.

(Oh, English! I forgot about English. Despite everything, I love English: though it isn't home, and has never been designed to be a language for living in, it has been a good place all these years. I love writing in English, I love its wacky spelling and ridiculous plethora of synonyms for everything and shameless biffing up of other languages for vocabulary and cheerful lack of grammatical gender. English is just, it's wonderful and ridiculous and amazing. Did I mention I love languages? Because I really, really do.)

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!