(no subject)
Oct. 19th, 2014 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDear Yuletide Author,
I am not very good at writing Yuletide letters, but I've never let that stop me, except for that one year that I let it stop me. I am probably, all things considered, a bad Yuletide recipient, but somehow that has not stopped writers from giving me fantastic stories. I've been incredibly blessed by the gifts that I have received in past Yuletides, so if you end up writing me a terrible story, don't worry about it. I probably deserved it, and I may enjoy it. I have terrible taste in fiction. All my friends say so.
I have found that people have a tendency to try to write things to fulfill my prompts. This has always seemed to me to be a bad idea. I write Yuletide prompts by thinking up the craziest ideas I have in a particular fandom and then mashing them together. I write prompts designed to be prompts- things to inspire you, kickstart the imagination, then see where it goes. I don't write prompts as prescriptions to be followed. Instead, I suggest you write a story that you think you'll have fun writing. Less anxiety all around that way.
My taste in fiction tends toward things that skirt the edge of genre, whatever genre. I like post-modernism and meta and deconstruction, I like crossovers and alternate universes and betrayals of the reader's expectations. I like fanfiction that thinks it's original fiction and original fiction that thinks it's fanfiction, I like real person fiction with fictional people in it and fictional person fiction with real people in it. I say 'Down with the tyranny of genre' a lot, and sometimes I'm being ironic, but sometimes I'm not.
I don't believe in authenticity, and so I don't really believe in canonicity, but I enjoy canonically-oriented fanfiction if it asks interesting questions about canon and about characters. I like character-driven storytelling and I like plot-driven storytelling and one of the things I most enjoy in my fiction is being surprised by where it ends up going.
Some specific notes/thoughts/comments/prompts on my requests
1)Danger 5. Jackson/Ilsa
It is hard to imagine a show more perfectly tuned to my taste. The bonkers take on Hitler, the terrible special effects balanced against terribly sharp, clever writing, the density of the pop culture references and the outrageousness of the pop cultural subversion, the game of chicken the writers are playing against their audience to see what we will object to. Danger 5 is not always a satisfying show, it is not always a successful show, it is not always a compelling show, but it is always daring to push the envelope and it is often an entertaining show for this reason.
I love how bad a couple Jackson and Ilsa make, and my broad request is for something that explores this badness. Something preposterously domestic would be fun, Jackson and Ilsa going curtain shopping or sitting in on a Sunday morning reading the newspaper and sipping tea. Something soulbondy and ridiculous would be cool, Jackson and Ilsa forced to share minds. A story where they attempt to have sex and fail badly would be welcome. As would a story where they realize that they actually have to both stick to an agreed-upon plan or else they'll die. Also, a story where Ilsa decides to impregnate Jackson would fit neatly within the gender politics and metaphysics of the show.
I don't know. Everything about Danger 5 makes no sense, so I welcome whatever your imagination presents.
2) Manhattan Project RPF: Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer
This is tricky to request because one of the most attractive things for me about the fandom is its cast of thousands, so requesting one or two characters seems wrong. Isolated in the New Mexico desert, working on a project with world changing implications, a sort of family requiring a coming together of all different kinds of minds. I love that in this fandom, the big heavy tomes on the historical context and moral implications of the moment are counterbalanced by things like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and its treatment of the Project as a game.
Szilard is my favorite character because of the way he seems to move freely within different circles of that massive cast. I kind of ship him with everybody. He seems like a frustrating person to be friends with, the kind of friend where you're constantly balancing the good against the bad in staying friends. But when he is rewarding your friendship, oh boy does he do it in spades. I particularly am interested in his interplay with Teller, Bethe, von Neumann, Feynman, Einstein, Fermi, and of course, Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer seems like a fascinating cipher, both a communist-sympathizer-of-sorts and a patriot-of-sorts, a warrior who believes in peace, a man wrestling with unimaginably heavy self-imposed burdens. I ship with him Szilard, as mentioned, but I also ship him with Kitty, and I'm also interested in his relationships with Frank Oppenheimer, with Teller, with Bush, with Grove, with pretty much anyone else in the Project.
But if you want, you can write something that doesn't involve those characters, I won't mind. I love the drama of the story and am interested in new ways to tell new parts of that drama. I couldn't think of a clean way to nominate them, but I'd be particularly interested in fic about the human calculators, working so hard to do the arithmetic calculations that the physicists depended on, when a single addition mistake could cost days of effort. And expecting and getting little to no credit for their triumphs, in large part because many of them were women in the horribly patriarchal project.
Speaking of which, I also ship Szilard/Meitner, and would be interested as well in using Lise Meitner and her trans-Atlantic connections to the Project as a tool to explore the patriarchy at the Manhattan Project. And as a tool to let Lise Meitner be awesome. I have a lot of feelings about Lise Meitner and they're not really directly relevant to the Manhattan Project, but they are relevant to the way that many women were responsible for the creation of the Atom Bomb and they never get the kind of acknowledgement that the men did.
I guess my one caveat is that, while I won't rule it out completely if it's what inspires you, I'm not all that interested in the spy story and Klaus Fuchs and all that part of the narrative. But look, it's there, it's always seemed to creep into every Manhattan Project narrative I've ever read, even Surely You're Joking, so I'm not asking you to sweep it under the rug if its presence is required by the story you want to tell.
3)This Is Where I Leave you - Rabbi Charles Grodner, Philip Altman
A disappointing movie that still hit me in the heart. I really enjoyed Ben Schwartz's Rabbi Grodner/Boner, the apparently in-over-his-head Rabbi who doesn't let the Altmans get to him because even though he's young and goofy-looking and his energy is a little off-key, he is actually experienced at his job and he knows how to keep an even keel even when he's ejecting his boyhood friends from the synagogue for causing a fire alarm. He is a surprisingly competent Rabbi for a movie like this.
His relationship with Philip was particularly interesting to me. Philip actually is a fuckup, so it is clearly galling to Rabbi Grodner to see Philip think of him as the fuckup. I feel like in a certain sense, the parking lot scene is where he proves that he doesn't need to change Philip's opinion because he knows he is superior, but it would be interesting to see that status change move forward.
The film is ambivalent about faith and religious infrastructure as a positive mover of change, in a way that rather surprised me. I'm used to stories like this ending with an affirmation of the surprising power of religious ritual to bring closure and meaning to our lives, and certainly I believe in such power myself, as an observant Jew, but in This Is Where I Leave You, the shiva ritual seems coercive and meanspirited and unhelpful, and that leaves Rabbi Grodner as an outsider to the game, perhaps even an agent of coercion. Which is perhaps where my fascination with him comes from. He clearly knows just how powerful shiva can be, and here he is watching a situation where it is completely failing a family, and he is forced to decide in the end that he is better off backing away from them and leaving them to disassemble the ritual on their own. In other words, he is forced to give up on the religious ritual he, unlike everyone else in the story, believes in. Surely that must come at a cost.
4)The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria (Journal Article)
If you don't know the fandom, that's because it's not a fandom. It's a fictional journal article proposed as a joke by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in an interview a few years ago.
Um... Probably it can argued successfully that this is me trolling Yuletide. I saw the interview with Justice Roberts and immediately said "I want fic," so maybe it isn't trolling Yuletide. But it's probably trolling Yuletide.
The money quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.” I don't know why I decided this ought to be a fandom in Yuletide, but I did, so here we are.
Its greatness as a fandom stems from the pitch-perfect parody Roberts manages: The title is long, jargony, and apparently random, but if you look closer this is something that you could conceivably see an out-of-touch academic writing about. It's not unreasonable to imagine Kant's writings influenced legal thinking in 18th Eastern Europe, and it's not unreasonable for a legal historian to be curious about this. And yet there could be no easily imaginable scenario in which a court could find this research useful. It would be the legal equivalent of the scientific doctrine of 'pure research'. And further and more subtly, the specific argument we might imagine the hypothetical academic exploring is exactly the debate Roberts is talking about. Kant's philosophy fundamentally is structured around an argument about the value of 'pure reason' and 'practical reason', much as Roberts is presenting an argument about the value of pragmatism in the courtroom and the legal academy. On the Court, Roberts's jurisprudence has been characterized by a series of ideologically inconsistent bargains struck with the intention of balancing the political and cultural interests of the Court against the demands of the law. This is precisely why he has a contentious relationship with the academy, which attempts to systematize a body of work that has no system.
In general, don't necessarily let Kant win in a landslide. The Germany vs. Eastern Europe social/political/cultural/legal dynamic set up by Roberts is problematic and I would appreciate seeing it problematized. (Of course, the dynamics were different in the 18th century as compared to today, and both might be kept in mind)
This is a silly request. If we matched on it, you are probably as silly a person as I am. Have fun with it.
5) Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came- Browning
I love the famous Browning quote about this poem: "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows."
I saw this was nominated and got very excited because every year in February I say I'm going to nominate a Browning poem for Yuletide and every year in October i forget. Childe Roland is not my favorite Browning poem- that honor belongs to Andrea del Sarto or Caliban Upon Setebos or Rabbi Ben Ezra depending on my mood- but it's certainly high up there, and it's definitely the Browning poem that most beggars more fic.
I love how Childe Roland is a quest story where the destination of the quest is uncertain or ambiguous or maybe even doesn't exist. Or maybe Childe Roland is describing what comes after the quest. I love that Roland is not sure he wishes to complete his quest, whatever it is. "I might go on; nought else remain’d to do." I love Browning's landscape- barren, bleak, desolate, and yet curiously alive, with constant reminders that others have trod this path before- animals, plants, and even men.
And I love the poem's position as the link in a long, complicated chain- backwards to Chanson de Roland and King Lear, forward to C.S. Lewis and Stephen King and many others. If "Childe Roland" is Browning's vision from God, it's a vision that we as a literary species keep having over and over, reinvented for each new age, as if called once more to dream by Roland's slughorn.
I am not very good at writing Yuletide letters, but I've never let that stop me, except for that one year that I let it stop me. I am probably, all things considered, a bad Yuletide recipient, but somehow that has not stopped writers from giving me fantastic stories. I've been incredibly blessed by the gifts that I have received in past Yuletides, so if you end up writing me a terrible story, don't worry about it. I probably deserved it, and I may enjoy it. I have terrible taste in fiction. All my friends say so.
I have found that people have a tendency to try to write things to fulfill my prompts. This has always seemed to me to be a bad idea. I write Yuletide prompts by thinking up the craziest ideas I have in a particular fandom and then mashing them together. I write prompts designed to be prompts- things to inspire you, kickstart the imagination, then see where it goes. I don't write prompts as prescriptions to be followed. Instead, I suggest you write a story that you think you'll have fun writing. Less anxiety all around that way.
My taste in fiction tends toward things that skirt the edge of genre, whatever genre. I like post-modernism and meta and deconstruction, I like crossovers and alternate universes and betrayals of the reader's expectations. I like fanfiction that thinks it's original fiction and original fiction that thinks it's fanfiction, I like real person fiction with fictional people in it and fictional person fiction with real people in it. I say 'Down with the tyranny of genre' a lot, and sometimes I'm being ironic, but sometimes I'm not.
I don't believe in authenticity, and so I don't really believe in canonicity, but I enjoy canonically-oriented fanfiction if it asks interesting questions about canon and about characters. I like character-driven storytelling and I like plot-driven storytelling and one of the things I most enjoy in my fiction is being surprised by where it ends up going.
Some specific notes/thoughts/comments/prompts on my requests
1)Danger 5. Jackson/Ilsa
It is hard to imagine a show more perfectly tuned to my taste. The bonkers take on Hitler, the terrible special effects balanced against terribly sharp, clever writing, the density of the pop culture references and the outrageousness of the pop cultural subversion, the game of chicken the writers are playing against their audience to see what we will object to. Danger 5 is not always a satisfying show, it is not always a successful show, it is not always a compelling show, but it is always daring to push the envelope and it is often an entertaining show for this reason.
I love how bad a couple Jackson and Ilsa make, and my broad request is for something that explores this badness. Something preposterously domestic would be fun, Jackson and Ilsa going curtain shopping or sitting in on a Sunday morning reading the newspaper and sipping tea. Something soulbondy and ridiculous would be cool, Jackson and Ilsa forced to share minds. A story where they attempt to have sex and fail badly would be welcome. As would a story where they realize that they actually have to both stick to an agreed-upon plan or else they'll die. Also, a story where Ilsa decides to impregnate Jackson would fit neatly within the gender politics and metaphysics of the show.
I don't know. Everything about Danger 5 makes no sense, so I welcome whatever your imagination presents.
2) Manhattan Project RPF: Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer
This is tricky to request because one of the most attractive things for me about the fandom is its cast of thousands, so requesting one or two characters seems wrong. Isolated in the New Mexico desert, working on a project with world changing implications, a sort of family requiring a coming together of all different kinds of minds. I love that in this fandom, the big heavy tomes on the historical context and moral implications of the moment are counterbalanced by things like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and its treatment of the Project as a game.
Szilard is my favorite character because of the way he seems to move freely within different circles of that massive cast. I kind of ship him with everybody. He seems like a frustrating person to be friends with, the kind of friend where you're constantly balancing the good against the bad in staying friends. But when he is rewarding your friendship, oh boy does he do it in spades. I particularly am interested in his interplay with Teller, Bethe, von Neumann, Feynman, Einstein, Fermi, and of course, Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer seems like a fascinating cipher, both a communist-sympathizer-of-sorts and a patriot-of-sorts, a warrior who believes in peace, a man wrestling with unimaginably heavy self-imposed burdens. I ship with him Szilard, as mentioned, but I also ship him with Kitty, and I'm also interested in his relationships with Frank Oppenheimer, with Teller, with Bush, with Grove, with pretty much anyone else in the Project.
But if you want, you can write something that doesn't involve those characters, I won't mind. I love the drama of the story and am interested in new ways to tell new parts of that drama. I couldn't think of a clean way to nominate them, but I'd be particularly interested in fic about the human calculators, working so hard to do the arithmetic calculations that the physicists depended on, when a single addition mistake could cost days of effort. And expecting and getting little to no credit for their triumphs, in large part because many of them were women in the horribly patriarchal project.
Speaking of which, I also ship Szilard/Meitner, and would be interested as well in using Lise Meitner and her trans-Atlantic connections to the Project as a tool to explore the patriarchy at the Manhattan Project. And as a tool to let Lise Meitner be awesome. I have a lot of feelings about Lise Meitner and they're not really directly relevant to the Manhattan Project, but they are relevant to the way that many women were responsible for the creation of the Atom Bomb and they never get the kind of acknowledgement that the men did.
I guess my one caveat is that, while I won't rule it out completely if it's what inspires you, I'm not all that interested in the spy story and Klaus Fuchs and all that part of the narrative. But look, it's there, it's always seemed to creep into every Manhattan Project narrative I've ever read, even Surely You're Joking, so I'm not asking you to sweep it under the rug if its presence is required by the story you want to tell.
3)This Is Where I Leave you - Rabbi Charles Grodner, Philip Altman
A disappointing movie that still hit me in the heart. I really enjoyed Ben Schwartz's Rabbi Grodner/Boner, the apparently in-over-his-head Rabbi who doesn't let the Altmans get to him because even though he's young and goofy-looking and his energy is a little off-key, he is actually experienced at his job and he knows how to keep an even keel even when he's ejecting his boyhood friends from the synagogue for causing a fire alarm. He is a surprisingly competent Rabbi for a movie like this.
His relationship with Philip was particularly interesting to me. Philip actually is a fuckup, so it is clearly galling to Rabbi Grodner to see Philip think of him as the fuckup. I feel like in a certain sense, the parking lot scene is where he proves that he doesn't need to change Philip's opinion because he knows he is superior, but it would be interesting to see that status change move forward.
The film is ambivalent about faith and religious infrastructure as a positive mover of change, in a way that rather surprised me. I'm used to stories like this ending with an affirmation of the surprising power of religious ritual to bring closure and meaning to our lives, and certainly I believe in such power myself, as an observant Jew, but in This Is Where I Leave You, the shiva ritual seems coercive and meanspirited and unhelpful, and that leaves Rabbi Grodner as an outsider to the game, perhaps even an agent of coercion. Which is perhaps where my fascination with him comes from. He clearly knows just how powerful shiva can be, and here he is watching a situation where it is completely failing a family, and he is forced to decide in the end that he is better off backing away from them and leaving them to disassemble the ritual on their own. In other words, he is forced to give up on the religious ritual he, unlike everyone else in the story, believes in. Surely that must come at a cost.
4)The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria (Journal Article)
If you don't know the fandom, that's because it's not a fandom. It's a fictional journal article proposed as a joke by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in an interview a few years ago.
Um... Probably it can argued successfully that this is me trolling Yuletide. I saw the interview with Justice Roberts and immediately said "I want fic," so maybe it isn't trolling Yuletide. But it's probably trolling Yuletide.
The money quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.” I don't know why I decided this ought to be a fandom in Yuletide, but I did, so here we are.
Its greatness as a fandom stems from the pitch-perfect parody Roberts manages: The title is long, jargony, and apparently random, but if you look closer this is something that you could conceivably see an out-of-touch academic writing about. It's not unreasonable to imagine Kant's writings influenced legal thinking in 18th Eastern Europe, and it's not unreasonable for a legal historian to be curious about this. And yet there could be no easily imaginable scenario in which a court could find this research useful. It would be the legal equivalent of the scientific doctrine of 'pure research'. And further and more subtly, the specific argument we might imagine the hypothetical academic exploring is exactly the debate Roberts is talking about. Kant's philosophy fundamentally is structured around an argument about the value of 'pure reason' and 'practical reason', much as Roberts is presenting an argument about the value of pragmatism in the courtroom and the legal academy. On the Court, Roberts's jurisprudence has been characterized by a series of ideologically inconsistent bargains struck with the intention of balancing the political and cultural interests of the Court against the demands of the law. This is precisely why he has a contentious relationship with the academy, which attempts to systematize a body of work that has no system.
In general, don't necessarily let Kant win in a landslide. The Germany vs. Eastern Europe social/political/cultural/legal dynamic set up by Roberts is problematic and I would appreciate seeing it problematized. (Of course, the dynamics were different in the 18th century as compared to today, and both might be kept in mind)
This is a silly request. If we matched on it, you are probably as silly a person as I am. Have fun with it.
5) Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came- Browning
I love the famous Browning quote about this poem: "When I wrote this, God and Browning knew what it meant. Now God only knows."
I saw this was nominated and got very excited because every year in February I say I'm going to nominate a Browning poem for Yuletide and every year in October i forget. Childe Roland is not my favorite Browning poem- that honor belongs to Andrea del Sarto or Caliban Upon Setebos or Rabbi Ben Ezra depending on my mood- but it's certainly high up there, and it's definitely the Browning poem that most beggars more fic.
I love how Childe Roland is a quest story where the destination of the quest is uncertain or ambiguous or maybe even doesn't exist. Or maybe Childe Roland is describing what comes after the quest. I love that Roland is not sure he wishes to complete his quest, whatever it is. "I might go on; nought else remain’d to do." I love Browning's landscape- barren, bleak, desolate, and yet curiously alive, with constant reminders that others have trod this path before- animals, plants, and even men.
And I love the poem's position as the link in a long, complicated chain- backwards to Chanson de Roland and King Lear, forward to C.S. Lewis and Stephen King and many others. If "Childe Roland" is Browning's vision from God, it's a vision that we as a literary species keep having over and over, reinvented for each new age, as if called once more to dream by Roland's slughorn.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-21 07:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-10-21 04:15 pm (UTC)Of course the Roberts quote is unfair, and Roberts himself was also on Law Review, and Roberts has cited academic papers on occasion in his decisions.
That doesn't take anything away from how funny the line is.