Jae's dreams/Jaes Träume/Jae's dromen

Someone on Facebook asked me this morning if I was "caught up on The Americans." *g*

This is a bit of navel-gazey noodling about how I experienced, and tried to address, a writing/story dilemma I had while writing my latest fan story. I've contextualized things in a way that you don't need to know the story in order to read about the noodling, but because the post is spoilery, you will probably want to avoid it if you haven't read the story yet AND still plan to.

( spoilery for both Tana French's The Likeness and my fan story What Remains )

English links:

This Tumblr post about what realistic translation in film would look like is hilarious.

The Wall Street Journal on why there is no proper English.

Science magazine on how speaking a second language may change how you see the world.

There have been a lot of interviews with the author of that new book about people who decide not to have kids, but this might just be the best one.

Via isis, a story about the celebrity and friendship across the world that resulted from one American man's lost phone.

The Emmy awards have defined "comedy" as a 30-minute show and "drama" as an hour-long show for the purposes of their awards. This is a smart piece about how silly that is and what the repercussions are.

Speaking of shows that it's impossible to peg as a comedy or a drama, I really, really enjoyed Looking this season. Before it was cancelled (*sob*), the amazing Andy Greenwald wrote something smart about it and did a podcast with the main cast.

Dutch links:

This is awesome: the pursuit of a Russian spy couple in Belgium draws comparisons to The Americans in the Belgian media.

This is a totally self-indulgent post, especially given the limited audience for any Dublin Murder Squad story, but just in case there’s someone who actually does care about soundtracky stuff for “What Remains” (back in the Turningverse days there were plenty of soundtrack-loving folks, so you never know!), here goes:

This soundtrack started—as everything concerning this story—unintentionally. After a linkspam a little while ago where I linked to a piece about openly gay pop musicians, I started randomly going through my small collection of queer music from the 90s, which reminded me of the existence of the Tom McCormack[*] album “Missing.” At the time, of course, my head was all up in “What Remains,” so I naturally jumped immediately to: waaaaaait a minute, isn’t there a song on there that starts “this is my house, this is my home”? (There was!) And isn’t there a song on there that’s about a bunch of young friends living in a house together and sometimes having sex? (There was! And neither of those two songs was the most fitting one, as it turns out!) So I started with the appropriate songs from that album and then rounded it out with some other stuff, including the two classical piano pieces that actually occur in the story itself. And voilà, I had a soundtrack.

The only one that works on a line-by-line basis is “Don’t Tell” (just imagine some of those lines in Daniel’s mouth, it’s eerie), and some work better for mood than for anything, but I’ve still tried to put them “in order of appearance” for the story. That quite frankly makes for a lot of bizarre transitions, so please do feel free to only download the ones you want, rearrange things, delete the ones you don’t like, whatever. Oh, and I apologise to non-German speakers about the last one, but if you do understand it, you will get why that song just had to be on this soundtrack (it’s a wonderful song even if you don’t understand it, though!).

1. “Home,” Tom McCormack (mp3)

( This is my heart / This is my home )

2. “Disappear,” Crooked Fingers (mp3)

( I'm gonna disappear / and take this sorrow far away / so you can live your life )

3. “The Time of Our Times,” Tom McCormack (mp3)

( We came from different worlds to make our own / Somewhat afraid but not scared enough to go running home )

4. Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major K.279, Movement I (Allegro), W.A. Mozart (performed by Andras Schiff) (mp3)

5. Piano Sonata No. 7 in B♭ major, Op. 83 (Allegro Inquieto), Sergei Prokofiev (mp3)

6. “Laying Down to Perish,” Alan Doyle (mp3)

( I’m laying down to perish / and God knows where I’ll go )

7. “Don’t Tell,” Tom McCormack (mp3)

( Sometimes saying too much / means things you love may get broken )

8. “In Secret,” Tom McCormack (mp3)

( Why be afraid to love you as if it's a crime / I want to get carried away in the light of day / if it takes a lifetime )

9. “Carrion Doves,” Crooked Fingers (mp3)

( You're guilty now / but in your heart / there soon could be a change )

10. “Still,” Jupiter Jones (mp3)

( So laut und so verloren war es hier / als Stille bei uns wohnte anstatt dir )

[*] Tom McCormack especially is guy-with-a-piano singer-songwriter stuff, so if that is not your thing, you will want to steer clear (zombieallomorph, that means you!).

Juuuust in case there's someone out there who's geeky about these books in the same way I am, I feel like I should share this (in a total misuse of university library privileges, ahem):

Gregorek, Jean. 2014. Fables of Foreclosure: Tana French's Police Procedurals of Recessionary Ireland. In: Kim, Julie H., ed., Class and Culture in Crime Fiction: Essays on Works in English Since the 1970s. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.

(pdf download here)

The paper deals both with The Likeness and Broken Harbour. Here's the summary from the book's introduction:

Jean Gregorek takes up the issue of class and real estate. Focusing on the “tendency of the popular detective genre to tap into the anxieties and stresses of the middle class,” Gregorek studies Tana French’s psychological hardboiled Irish novels which “use murder plots to examine topical issues shaping middleclass life—a fading sense of Irish heritage, the housing market collapse, unemployment resulting from the imposition of austerity—among others.” Gregorek’s tracing of the Irish housing crisis prepares us to see how “French’s fiction usefully highlights the psychological toll exacted by the contemporary Irish economic crisis.”

Holy crap, lots of people sure do hate Kevin from Looking, don't they?

*backing away from the fandom--and the critics!--slowly*

Remember my panic over finding out that the writer of Gossip Girl had bought the rights to make a feature film of The Likeness transported to the U.S.? Remember how this was old news that I'd just happened to find out about due a recent reference to it on my Tana French google news alert? Well, there's an update. And it's good news, with the potential for being very good news!

( putting the whole thing under the cut just in case it disappears )

Starting with the good news: The offending option by the Gossip Girl woman HAS LAPSED. I can't even say how relieved I am about this, seriously.

As for the rest of it, I will defer judgment until I know more about who will be writing them, but I honestly think this has potential? I love that the folks who want to do this optioned the first three books instead of just one (they're not directly related to each other, which is where I think they're getting the True Detective reference), and that they're going to do them as seasons of a television series instead of as feature films (so that there will be room to tell each whole story). It's a UK company that's doing the production, which is arguably a bit dodgy, but it at least means that they're likely to still set them in Ireland and cast Irish actors. I'm not nuts about the reference to the "elite college town" still being in there, but that might just be a holdover from the original news story, and therefore a mistake. I don't know, I'm kind of okay with this, actually. And I'm certainly okay with the other option lapsing, oh my god. The only real things to fret about are the British production house and the up-in-the-airness of the writer(s). (Although if a British film-and-television writer was going to end up being tasked with adapting these books over an Irish one, I have to say, I know wish one I wish it could have been. :( )

The weird part is that I've had a Tana French google news alert for several years, so there's no reason I shouldn't have found out about the original optioning-of-horrors much earlier than just recently. I'm kind of feeling like the universe must have conspired to keep the original news from me until right before this much better news was released. ;)

Back in February (wow, how is it even March already?), I lurked on a bunch of meta about the fallout from a university course about fanfiction. Most fans in in the discussion seemed to take some form of the "fannish works cannot be divorced from their fannish context" argument for granted (though there was certainly plenty of opposition to that take as well), and one of those fans was ivyblossom, who had (among other things) the following to say:

Our work is not for you. I know this one is hard to understand. If someone’s written a story, or otherwise created art, surely that’s for the whole world. Surely we want everyone to see it, like any other novel or piece of work. You need to stop thinking that way. Fandom doesn’t create work for the whole world. It creates work for a specific community, and that community has expectations, norms, jargon, customs, traditions, ethical rules, and structures that you don’t yet understand. 

If you’re a fan of “alternative” and bluegrass anti-folk music and you listen to rap for the first time and are like, wow, this isn’t music, this sucks! you already know you’re being an asshole for judging something you have failed to explore fairly on its own terms. It’s not that different when you turn your eyes to fanworks. Before you can judge us, you need to understand where we’re coming from, what our own strictures are, and what we’re trying to achieve. Don’t barge in and tell people what you think they could do better. You don’t even understand what we’re doing in the first place, okay?

This part of ivyblossom's post has been going around and around in my head ever since then, and I've been thinking about the extent to which the "our work is not for you" tenet holds true for me (since my approach to fandom and fanfiction is often rather different from the approaches that are held up as "typical"). And the verdict is: it turns out it actually does hold somewhat true...more so than I might have expected at first.

I mean, on the one hand, there are plenty of ways in which this clearly does not hold true for me. For one, I am not at all the sort of fan who looks at, say, a mainstream article about yuletide that links to fanworks, and thinks "oh my god, that is such an awful thing to do!" (I am instead the sort of fan who gets a little wistful that my own story wasn't one of the ones linked to *g*). For another, I've never been terribly enthusiastic about many of the standard fannish expectations, norms, bits of jargon, etc., and so they don't really apply to my stories. And for yet another, I've always encouraged my non-fannish friends and relatives to read my stories once they have expressed an interest in doing so, and I've never felt a need to explain any sort of surrounding fannish context for those stories first (beyond "have you seen the show/read the book it's based on? okay, good, that's important!").

And yet when I think about the sentence "fandom doesn't create work for the whole world," I have to say that statement holds true for me as well. Example: I live in total irrational fear that people I work with will find out that I write fanfiction, track it down, and read some of it. And you can attribute this in part to me being in a profession that tends to think that if you're not either working or sleeping or spending time with your family, you're slacking off (I am incidentally currently thumbing my nose at this tenet of my profession by sitting in my office while writing up this post: ha-ha, take that!), but I think it probably has at least as much to do with the fact that I know many of the people I work with would read what I write and not get it at all. As things stand currently, you don't have to be a participant in organized fandom to read my stories, but you have to at least know enough about organized fandom to find them: you have to follow a link from my journal, or know (mostly fannish) people who can recommend them to you, or know about the Archive of our Own and use the search tools to find them that way. And those gatekeeping mechanisms make it much more likely that the people who do come across it will be the kinds of people who, as ivyblossom says, "know what I'm doing in the first place." Even in the case of a mainstream journalism article about yuletide, there would be some basic form of gatekeeping mechanism through the topic of the article (which is why that idea doesn't bother me). If one of my colleagues were to send a URL to another and attach my name to it, though, without any sort of intentionality behind seeking it out in the first place...ugh, that very idea just horrifies me (and not at all because I'm embarrassed by anything I've written, because I'm not).

I guess what it comes down to is that while I don't really write "for fandom," I do write for a certain type of reader: the sort of person who gets something out of thinking about a television show, book, or film long after they've stopped watching or reading it, and who prefers to conceive of and talk about the characters in those source texts as full-fledged people with rich internal lives. If you are the kind of person who takes said television shows, books, or films much less seriously than that, you are very unlikely to find my fanfiction worth reading, and there is at least some chance that you might find it weird and off-putting. Fandom is where I've found an audience for what I write, so clearly there are plenty of readers like that in that community. It's clear to me, though, that there are lots of people who participate in organised fandom who are not readers like that, and it's also clear to me that there are people outside of organised fandom who are readers like that. So for me, the issue isn't that my work needs to be read within its fannish context, but that my work needs to be read by...the sorts of people who will appreciate the sort of thing that it is? And at the moment, this means the fannish context is important because it works as a gatekeeping mechanism that keeps away most of the kinds of people who won't tend to get it. (It unfortunately also probably keeps away a lot of people who would tend to get it, but hey, I never said it was a perfect gatekeeping mechanism.)

To bring things back around to the "fannish studies" course that was the original topic of the discussion I lurked on, then: when I asked myself if I would have been upset by one of my stories being included in that syllabus, my answer was both yes and no, with a tilting toward yes. On the "no" side is my knee-jerk "moar readers yay!" reaction, but I think that's more than drowned out by a real distaste for the idea that these people would have to read my story in order to get course credit (ugh) and the fact that they were required to leave comments in order to get that credit as well (double ugh). I enjoy being read, so I'd always love to get more eyes on my stories, but if the cost of that is a whole bunch of people reading it who won't be able to wrap their minds around why I might want to write something like that in the first place, I'd much rather languish in obscurity!

I don't try to get people to watch The Americans anymore. I figure if you know me and you're inclined to watch, you're already doing so. So this isn't a pimping post.

I did want to be sure to say, though, that when I first fell in love with this show, there was very little indication that it would ever be quite this good. I still would have adored the show that it felt early on like it was going to end up being--it has always been a show that was almost eerily aimed at absolutely everything I love about television--but the writing, the direction, the acting, absolutely everything is so airtight now that it's hard to even find things to criticise. It pushes so many boundaries, stretches beyond tropes, and all in the service of character development. Every single time.

I am just feeling so proud of my little show these days, and of all the marvellous people who make it.

I have no interest in either reading or seeing Fifty Shades of Grey, but the cultural commentary on it is ubiquitous, and so I'm reading some of that, anyway. And it turns out I do have two (mostly unrelated) things to say in response!

1) I remain completely baffled that so many articles can be written about this book and this movie and yet so little of the verbiage in them can be devoted to the world of fanfiction (i.e. where the book originated). And even the ones that do mention it do so in passing, along the lines of "this was originally Twilight fanfiction, isn't that interesting, now let's talk more about the book." Not a single article that I've seen has been devoted to the fact that there is waaaaay more fanfiction like this out there (or in other words, if what you're after is poorly written kinky romance stories with a lot of explicit sex in them, there is OH SO MUCH MORE where that one little book came from, and there's plenty that's actually well-written, too, and it won't cost you a penny to read it all). And you know, at some point you've really got to wonder why that is! Are the journalists deliberately steering clear of that topic for whatever reason, or is it just not occurring to them? Just so baffling.

2) Apparently Jamie Dornan, the Belfast-born actor who plays Christian Grey, has gone out of his way to say in a couple of places that aspects of the film were difficult for him because he had to "do things to a woman that he would never do in real life" or somesuch. Which, fine: I actually have no problem with him wanting to deliberately divorce himself from his character in that way, and if I were him I would probably want to do the same. But it does kind of make me want to give him the side-eye, because those of us who have seen him in The Fall are a bit concerned that it's this particular project of his that he feels the need to say that about!