I don't think it's especially useful to engage in public confession purely for the sake of personal catharsis -- that way lies Jerry Springer -- but I do think it's useful to explain to one's readers when a previously held belief widely touted in one's journal becomes null and void.

So... last night's Angel episode, "The Price"? Worse than "Provider." Yes, it's possible, and yes, I was wrong, and yes, I am making no further pronouncements about the low point of the season before the season is over. The plot was a second-generation copy of a much superior original ("The Dark Age"; see also "After Life"). I vehemently dislike every character on Angel except Wesley, Groo, and (occasionally) Justine and Lilah. Furthermore, I am reasonably certain that this is not clever manipulation on the part of the writers. Why, you ask, do I watch this show? Good question.

Barring a miracle -- and by "miracle" I do not mean "special effect that even I can tell is cheesy"; I mean "revelation that the Powers That Be are really on the side of evil" -- I will be fast-forwarding through the final three Angel episodes of this season to find out what happens to Wesley, and then I will reclaim my Monday nights. Sic transit gloria, so to speak.

Anyone have a good show to watch? Or maybe some pointers on taking up crochet? (Spoilers for "The Price" follow.)

When I thought I could watch last night's Angel episode with some bitter enjoyment, cheering on the glow-in-the-dark magical dehydrating crayfish (a great B-movie concept, I'll grant you) and ignoring all those other c-words (character, continuity, consequences)... I was wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Made it through the teaser (Groo is cute in the short term, and while I find Cordelia's compulsion to psychoanalyze everyone around her kind of grating when it happens every blessed episode, at least she was raising some halfway decent points). Watched an innocent bystander suffer horribly as a result of Angel's selfishness and incompetence. Watched as Gavin manipulated Lilah, who inexplicably loses IQ points every time Gavin comes into the room. Still, the tarantula was funny. Watched as Cordy told Fred (who seems to have done a 180 from last episode) that she's too busy caring for Angel to give a damn about Wesley.

At this point, I very sensibly fast-forwarded to the scene with Wesley and Gunn, and I understand that I missed a funny line of Lilah's but not much else. (Yes, fine, Fred got infested by a glow-in-the-dark dehydrating crayfish. But, y'know, it's all fun and games as long as no recurring characters actually sustain permanent damage.) After noting that Alexis Denisof can act rings around the rest of the cast, I kept watching, because I wanted to see Glinda's Galadriel's Cordelia's "demon" powers for myself. Of course, it makes perfect sense for her demonic abilities to include emitting a bright light that kills all magically-created creatures for half a mile (we know lots of demons who do that, right?) without harming or even upsetting the vampire standing next to her. Of course, Angel doesn't need to feel guilt about anything, because he's the center of the universe. And -- oh, yes, Connor's back. Gosh, I never saw that coming. Oh, and speaking as one of the three or four people who didn't hate Baby Connor with a fiery passion, this is really lame.

For those keeping track, the total "price" of Angel's wildly irresponsible and evil actions in "Forgiving": the floor of the Hyperion lobby is toast and some random guy is dead. Total guilt felt by Angel, Gunn, or Cordelia about this situation at end of present episode: apparently, zip. (For comparison purposes, let's keep in mind that Wesley's efforts to avert a prophecy, help his friend Angel, and save an innocent life have so far been rewarded by attempted murder, assorted threats, exile, and total abandonment by all his friends.) Y'know, it's a good thing the Powers bailed Angel out by giving Cordelia "demon" powers and then returning his son, or we might start to think there was something wrong here.

In retrospect, I now realize that I went about watching Angel the wrong way, given the direction the show has taken. From this day forward, I shall embrace each episode as a brand-new magic crayfish. I'm pretty sure I have some whiskey in the kitchen....

Sadly, the above title is not my invention; it belongs to this site, where you can compare Will, Britney, and a host of others with regard to their artistic merit. This is less amusing than it could be -- a few good graphics and a jazzier interface would help, not to mention a more inventive list of artists -- but it's still kind of interesting.

Just for the record, I feel that "revealing an insight into reality" (that's "reality" as in anything but "show") is a great deal more important than revealing the artist's feelings when it comes to the value of artistic expression, but the voting seems to be running the other way. I am... not actually surprised. I suspect that this Salon article (via Tinka), which jokes about poets doing better if they wrote self-help books instead, is right on target. A sample:

Vegetable Love by Andrew Marvell
Vegetarianism -- it's the health craze that's taking over America. Inexpensive, good for you and for Planet Earth, the vegetarian diet has many advantages. But the most important one? It can improve your sex life! Ask Andrew Marvell. Once a stodgy meat eater, he discovered that when he laid off the lamb chops and went for the apples, grapes and most of all "the curious peach" his love life became "marvell-ous" overnight! Try some of his simple and mouthwatering recipes, and your passion, too, will "grow vaster than empires." Wow!

Ay yi yi. It explains a lot of trends in recent fiction, too. One more perkily self-actualizing heroine who finds her man in the process, and I'm going to buy my own darn Alsatians.

And speaking of artistic merit, or the lack thereof, as well as the possibility of dead bodies, tonight 's Angel offering is only saved from being fast-forward fodder by how narrowly it escapes fulfilling assorted revenge fantasies of mine. Also, there's a good scene, which Alexis Denisof appears in. It's amazing how much one can imply with a single non-restrictive subordinate clause. I'll fill in the blanks tomorrow, but I just have to say one thing now. (The final sentence of this post contains a spoiler of sorts for the premise of "The Price.")

Gooooooooooo, SLUGS! [Edited to note that on actually seeing the episode, they're more like crayfish. I am hard pressed to say which is funnier.]

Today I received a piece of spam email in French -- I usually get them in English, Italian, and "character set cannot be read by this computer" -- which thoroughly entertained me because it made me realize that the Academie Française is in deep doo-doo as regards the defense of the French language. "Vous recevez ce message car vous êtes abonné à la liste 'sexy en vidéos,'" it noted, and directed me to www.loftofsexe.com. I am not bothering to link this URL, nor to investigate further; go find your own illegal porn video sites if you must. I am, however, admitting to being tempted to write back pointing out that, whatever my personal flaws (for the record, they do not include a taste for illegal porn videos), I would never voluntarily subscribe to a list or visit a site with such a linguistically impoverished name. Even its fiercest detractors would concede that the French language is well equipped with words which mean "sexy," n'est çe-pas?

Since I know better than than to respond to spam, especially when it involves agreeing with imbéciles like the Academie, I briefly considered reading a novel or something in French just as a matter of principle. Something by André Gide, maybe -- he's up there on the list of Ought To Reads. Fortunately, I remembered just in time that I could equally well read some French-language articles for the conference paper I'm giving next weekend, because I've spent far too much time this weekend remembering just why I placed a moratorium on leisure reading during the final months of my dissertation. My personal flaws do not include illegal porn video-watching, but they do include compulsive novel-reading. Put me in a room with a novel I haven't read, and I will read the novel. I can only be distracted by something fairly major -- hot Krispy Kreme doughnut, tornado, that sort of thing.

As a consequence of this weekend's (in)activity, Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice is definitely going on my personal shortlist of really worthwhile historical mysteries, as is her O Jerusalem. I was never much of a Sherlock Holmes fan -- the puzzles were nice, but the man himself was criminally irritating, and Conan Doyle's characters weren't terribly well-fleshed-out otherwise, as a rule. But I definitely like what King has done with the Holmes mythos, and I love the settings and plots of her books, even if I occasionally suspect that Mary Russell's middle name should really be "Sue."* I'll be interested to see whether King can uphold and develop her characterizations in the other Holmes/Russell novels. It's probably just as well that the local public library doesn't have them at the downtown branch, though. I have some linguistic anxiety to work off.

* -- Incidentally, these books can be listed as yet another example of Why I Do Not Think Fanfic Is A Useful Category For Anything Other Than Legality. Folks, they're Sherlock Holmes/Original Character, and I could name several other books out there that do the same thing (well, not necessarily with the virgule, but with borrowing Holmes and his world).

Just in case I needed confirmation that I could be wasting my time a lot more egregiously: Socio-Political Themes in The Smurfs (via Boing Boing). I don't know that this is an especially serious piece of scholarship (did I just write that with a straight face?), but it makes some good points about The Smurfs and utopian Marxism, which may in part explain how I came to watch The Smurfs on and off during an otherwise PBS-centric and decidedly left-leaning childhood:

Economically, the Smurf Village is closed-market. There is no money, and all possessions are communal - property of the collective. Everyone is equally a worker and an owner. The Smurfs reject the idea of a free-market economy, with its greed and inequities, and the collective is more important and valuable than the individual....

The Smurfs all refer to one another by the same title; 'Smurf'. Eg, Brainy Smurf, Handy Smurf, Jokey Smurf, Lazy Smurf, Papa Smurf. This is highly reminiscent of socialist states' use of the word 'comrade' when referring to others, instead of more elitist titles.

Adding to the idea of complete equality in the Village, most of the Smurfs wear the same kind and colour of clothes. It is a general work uniform, and with the distinctive caps and blue skin, is highly reminiscent of the so-called Mao Suit, common in Maoist China.

In the tradition of pure Marxism, the Smurf Village is atheist. There is no god, and there is no Priest Smurf....

Those of you bored by Marxism will be pleased to know that there's also a section on Smurfette and feminism, and another on "The Smurf Village As Homotopia," complete with analyses of how various Smurfs represent gay archetypes and how Hefty and Handy are only competing for Smurfette as a way to sublimate the sexual tension between them. (And there is no doubt Smurf slash out there somewhere, with room for the mobilization of reader-response theory. Thankfully -- I think -- this article does not Go There.) Sadly, however, there is no discussion of what the Smurfs' famed height of "three apples" might represent either in terms of religion or market forces.

Even more sadly, I'm supposed to be assessing a manuscript for a journal. Must. Get. Smurf. Theme. Out. Of. Head....

No, this entry is not about what you probably think it's about. Shame on you. I'm not deliberately trying to start a trend of "world's most obscure Tolkien-related entry titles," but I was flipping through one of those History of Middle-Earth volumes (yes, even I start tuning out somewhere around about the fifth variation on Aelfwine the Mariner) at the library earlier and happened to notice that one of the many versions of Galadriel and Celeborn's early relationship had a variant form of his name, as -- you guessed it -- Teleporno of the Teleri.

Hee hee hee.

Once I got that out of my system, I started thinking about how much and how quickly our language and literature have changed. Kat wrote several entries last month (scattered from March 19 forward) about how different the basic conditions of life were 200 or even 100 years ago. She's perfectly right, of course, but I'm equally struck by the idea that Tolkien could consider calling a character "Teleporno" no more than fifty years ago without making the same connections we all just did. (While we're at it, I'm shocked that more LOTR slashers haven't picked up on the exchange at the pub early in FOTR in which Gaffer Gamgee defends the Bagginses to Sandyman with the observation that "If that’s being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts." But that's an easy mark, linguistically speaking.)

Of course, Tolkien also had no idea that he was writing for a genre that would be called "fantasy." Poor man. Spending a few hours at the local public library is enough to move my usual mild indifference at these "genre" categories (can that possibly be a proper use of the term "genre"?) into outright annoyance. Apparently, I no longer read plain old "fiction" -- imagine my surprise! -- but I do read books in the categories of "mystery," "teen" (no, I don't know why all Neil Gaiman's graphic novels wound up there, either), and "contemporary fiction" (my Hometown library just called it "romance").

On what will eventually be a related topic, I received my copy of Hope Mirlees's Lud-in-the-Mist through the Amazon used-bookstore network last week. I am highly susceptible to literary suggestion, and when several of the Washington Post Book World's experts on fantasy* mentioned Lud-in-the-Mist as an important early work and a cult favorite, I was intrigued. I looked it up online and found this essay, which seems much too occupied with Mirrlees's biography and appearance for my taste, but whetted my appetite for the book in question. And since it was out of print and not available at any of the libraries within half an hour's drive, I decided that I would order it as part of an... er... academic project. At least, that's what I'm telling the IRS when it comes time to itemize deductions next year.

Lud-in-the-Mist, first published in 1926, is not quite ideal for a high-budget fantasy film adaptation, no matter what Michael Swanwick suggested in his Post article. There are several scenes in Fairyland that should rightfully be climactic; instead, they are missing. There are parts towards the beginning which drag out for far too long. There are also some tiny plot and characterization questions that nagged at me, but I won't go into those, since they're fairly specific and since some of my readers might actually prefer to learn about key plot points themselves. What is wonderful about this book, however, and what I don't think would translate well onto the screen, is what Swanwick calls "that sense of otherworldly strangeness that is the core stuff of fantasy." I would amend that to say that Mirrlees provides the simultaneous senses of strangeness and familiarity in a perpetual tug-of-war. Her fairies are dangerous, and somewhat different from human beings, yet an organic part of the world. Tolkien's elves, whom he very carefully did not call fairies because he wanted to avoid unfortunate popular stereotypes (he could hardly have foreseen second-generation Dungeons & Dragons players), are only intermittently different enough from human beings to really spook the reader. They are also, apparently, optional to Middle-Earth; one of the things I find least satisfying about The Lord of the Rings is its teleology. I can deal nicely with the notion of irreparable loss over time, but I remain unconvinced that the Elves and Dwarves each collectively have a True Homeland Other Than Where Most Of Them Were Born And Have Lived, to which they will eventually all travel.** Lud-in-the-Mist, on the other hand, begins with a deceptively simple story of a mercantile and rather stodgy land where they tossed out all the nobles, misplaced all the priests, and outlawed all fairy influence some centuries ago; Fairyland is dependably far away, across the Debatable Hills, with clearly defined geographical boundaries -- rather like Tolkien's Aman, only not an island. Then that story gets stood on its head. Unless you want a plot summary, you will have to take my word for it that this is quite wonderful, and beautifully done.

In terms of filiation and influence, Lud-in-the-Mist certainly qualifies as fantasy; it even owes a debt to Dunsany, although it's much more readable. But since I was reading it expecting a fantasy novel -- indeed, in a reprint edition designed to bring together fantasy classics -- I was struck by how different it felt from any of the contemporary "fantasy" novels I've read over the past few decades. In fact, it probably has more in common with Tolkien than with, say, Mercedes Lackey. It starts very slowly, with a lot of (quite necessary) history that isn't the least bit integrated into the fictional narrative -- that is, nobody casually sits down to tell a story of Everything We Know About This World or pipes up with a song or runs into an interdimensional traveler who requires explanations. Its protagonist verges on the unsympathetic and un-cute; he is not, praise the Lord, a thinly disguised twentieth-century adolescent. Indeed, he -- along with most of the major characters -- is middle-aged. The young people are, with a few partial exceptions, not an especially perceptive lot. (Hey, does anyone else find it disturbing that the LOTR movie turned middle-aged Frodo into a dewy-eyed young charmer?) The villains are not attractively antiheroic, but they also do not engage in random acts of cruelty to demonstrate their villainy, and they aren't precisely as expected in any case. There are no Great Romances. There are several important developments which go almost entirely unexplained, and some narrative threads waving loose at the end, although this does not impede one's enjoyment of the intricate plot. There is just... well, that dialectic of strangeness and familiarity, along with an engrossing plot, entertaining characters, and lovely style.

Either Lud-in-the-Mist isn't fantasy (along with, I suspect, The Lord of the Rings), or nine-tenths of the stuff marketed as such isn't fantasy, or "fantasy" is a completely bankrupt term with no significance beyond the commercial. Hmmmm. When I put it like that...

* -- In a lot of articles published on April 7th, which I cannot seem to find links to any longer. (I still have the original direct links in my browser memory, but the Post evidently does not seem to expect people to search for articles which are not strictly book reviews and which are more than a week old.)
** -- I'm not much of a Zionist, either -- certainly not in the religious sense -- and I remain agnostic about the charms of a well-ordered afterlife. This at least makes me consistent.

Well, everyone else is channeling Eliot -- okay, Tinka and Jenny-O, both of whom have valid professional reasons to do so, along with someone or other over in one of the LJ communities I read and my next-door office neighbor. Still, I see no reason not to take Eliot quotation as a meme. After all, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." And in the summer, too, if I can manage it.

Kit had some interesting things to say about my networking post from last week. I'm not sure that we disagree much at all, actually; I'm uncomfortable with the ethical implications of networking as well. That's why I went off on an admittedly idealistic tangent about how it's possible to achieve a slightly-less-utilitarian collegial relationship... once you've run the cursus, cleared the flaming hoops, beaten the house, and joined the establishment. (Excuse me while I take a moment to separate those metaphors. Okay, there we go. Whew.) Still, networking -- broadly construed -- is an integral part of living and interacting with other human beings. I'm doing what I love these days, and I hope that I can keep more of my integrity that way than if I were doing something purely for business. I also recognize the potential for self-delusion in such an attitude. "Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism" and all that. See, there's a line in Eliot for everything...

...except possibly last night's Angel episode. All I can come up with is "Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?" or "You are a proper fool, I said" or maybe just "Twit twit twit / .... / So rudely forc'd." None of these quite cover it, but Eliot never really developed the idea that April was the cruelest month because all the decent plot points were being saved for May sweeps. (Spoilers for "Double or Nothing" follow.)

It's really, really not a good sign -- in the sense that a rain of blood isn't a good sign -- when the most sympathetic speaking character in the whole episode is the Groosalugg, Mr. Please Go Back To Pylea Already And, Hey, How About Taking Fred With You? (Wesley, of course, couldn't speak. And, gosh, I miss Lilah and Justine.) Gunn would've been much more sympathetic if the writers hadn't chosen to portray him as a blithering idiot, both now and at age 17. (I might have bought the whole soul-mortgage concept if it had been to get his sister into a private school, or something equally difficult to attain. Any fool can earn enough money for a used car, and many of them do.) We also got further confirmation for my theory that "That Old Gang Of Mine" took place in a parallel universe, since Gunn's obviously been comfortable trafficking with soul-stealing demons for years now. And, of course, we got a situation in which Gunn failed to share important information with his co-workers and nobody drew any parallels to (a) Angel's behavior, which has always been perfectly upstanding so I don't know why I brought it up, or (b) Wesley's behavior just recently.

Speaking of Angel, he would've been much more sympathetic if David Boreanaz could distinguish between "devastated" and "constipated" expressions and -- much more critically -- if the entire cast hadn't agreed that he hadn't really done anything too wrong last week. (Black magic? Attempted murder? Reckless endangerment of every regular and recurring character then in L.A.? Ring a bell?) Cordelia would've been much more sympathetic if she'd remembered that she and Wesley used to be friends and if the writers would stop portraying her as some kind of Sally Jesse Raphael to the demon world (we already had one of those, and I wish he weren't recurring, either, because he has eff-all to do with himself, but the Sally Jesse model does at least make sense of Cordy's godawful hair). The Angel/Cordelia scenes were unspeakably boring -- and I have an extremely high boredom threshhold. Is it wrong to wish that one of them would turn evil before the fast-forward button on my VCR remote wears out?

I wanted to like Fred, back in Pylea, and was cautiously optimistic about her up through "Fredless." Then we got Fred Knows Everything, along with Fred Is Going To Keep Babbling, neither of which are especially endearing character traits. However, I like schmoopy romance in reasonable doses (although I think I went into an insulin coma during the final Fred/Gunn scene last night); I like smart, capable female characters; I liked Fred in "Forgiving." I didn't really mind her in the A plot of "Double or Nothing," and was actually very pleased that she figured out something was behind Gunn's abrupt breakup. I think it is pointless and juvenile to hate characters who are, after all, fictional. (I loathe Angel, but I don't care enough to hate him.) All that notwithstanding, I now formally hate Fred with an undying passion the likes of which I used to reserve for the University of Kentucky basketball team under Rick Pitino. I've started thinking up very bad poetry using obvious rhymes such as "Fred," "red," "lead," and "dead." (I'll let my readers figure out the rest for themselves.) Let me put this in very simple terms: you do not harangue someone who is recovering from a near-deadly wound in the hospital and cannot speak. You do not make policy for a supposed business in which you are the most junior employee. And, most egregiously, you do not tell someone who has sacrificed everything he has to try and circumvent a laboriously researched prophecy that the prophecy was false and then walk out with no further explanation.

So, basically, this episode has managed to make me fantasize about a sweeps-week meteor hitting the Hyperion and wiping out all of Angel Investigations' current employees and hangers-on. We could have a lovely show with Wesley, Lilah, Justine, Aggie, maybe that guy Angel rescued in "Provider," and occasional appearances from Drusilla and Lindsey. Failing that, I would settle for a meteor simply wiping out Angel and Fred, provided that Lorne and Groo discover their true love for each other and move out to start a Pylea-themed tiki/karaoke bar which would appear a maximum of five times per season.

And, dear God, that episode was in no way worth the time I spent typing this in (and I type pretty darn fast). It might have been worse than "Provider." I am basically watching this show for one character and a long-departed concept I loved. Next week I should just give up and watch the Wesley scenes, shouldn't I?

If you just looked at the title of this entry and said, "Oh, of course, the vampire Lúthien pretended to be when she infiltrated Angband," you are... well, frankly, as hopeless a Tolkien fan as I am. If you can also remember that Sauron shape-shifted into a vampire and ran away at one point in that story, you are even more hopeless than I, because I had to confirm my distant memory that something like that had happened. And if you take those two data points from the Silmarillion and immediately start fretting about whether or not the people writing Pervy Vampire Hobbit fanfic are making full use of the Tolkien canon, given that vampires were servants of Morgoth and would require significant retconning of the War of Wrath and the War of the Ring in order to survive into the Fourth Age, you are... oh, wait, that's probably just me.

Let me say at the outset that (a) I am not making Pervy Vampire Hobbit fanfic up -- there's an archive in development here, and a mailing list here; (b) I don't especially like PVH fanfic, but think it is infinitely preferable to LOTR actors fanfic, and sincerely hope that none of the authors involved care about my opinion in any case; (c) yes, I do have a sense of humor, and realize that vampire hobbits are a running joke gone wild; and (d) I know that several of the people involved in this PVH project know all about Tolkien's vampires; in fact, I saw a post in an LJ discussion somewhere that reminded me of the connection. (I haven't subscribed to their mailing list; for all I know, there's a giant backgrounder in there with details about Middle-Earth vampire mythology that I've forgotten.)

That said, I do think "canon" is an important concept, and PVH fanfic a useful (if somewhat bizarre) example of what could be done with it. Just to get the sources straight, I'm riffing off a series of remarks Jenny-O made last week to the effect that canon is "stupid, stupid bullshit" and that we are all "nuts for buying into that concept." Jenny makes it clear that she's not trying to dictate anyone else's actions vis-à-vis fanfic preferences, as do I. I am also, however, reminded of a remark that I accidentally ran across in Neil Gaiman's journal: "When one plays with archetypes one should know what the archetypes are one is playing with."*

So, canon. At its simplest, it means "rule," and starts out (in Latin and the European languages) strongly associated with the emergence of Christianity. I imagine many of you have heard the expression "a canon of the Church," or, failing that, "canon law" (which can be opposed to both civil law and customary, or unwritten, law).** In time, "canon" came to be more generally applied to any rule or standard by which one could discriminate in whatever field. Of course "canon" also came describe the authentic works of a given author, who may or may not have been God (thus "the Jewish canon" or "canonical epistles"). The concept of a literary canon partakes of both these (related) senses of the word; in other words, it implies both regulatory authority and authenticity.

The concept of a canon in any given fandom is... trickier, I think, because it definitely implies authenticity but is sometimes also taken to imply regulatory authority. I will cheerfully support "canon" in the former sense; I think "canon" in the latter sense is worth knowing about, but do not feel bound by it. (After all, part of the canon in most fandoms is a sheaf of copyright declarations which do not, strangely enough, make exceptions for fanfic.) The coinage "fanon" also shows this dichotomy; it is inauthentic yet does wield a sort of authority. People who distinguish between "fanon" and "canon" are precisely the ones who worry about authenticity, though, and I am very much one of those people. By all means, I suggest, borrow the most logical and/or beautiful parts of fanon and weave them into your stories, but do remember what is or isn't present in your primary source material. (It is also considered polite to credit your sources, if you can trace them, although I have no clue offhand who to thank for, say, Ethan Rayne as '70s glamor boy.)

Canon is less optional, at least to my mind. You can play with it, but you ignore it at your peril. Most of my readers will probably have seen at least one fanfic with the dreaded disclaimer: "this is really about me and my boyfriend, but I thought it would make a good MaleLead/FemaleLead story." Some of my readers may have encountered something along the lines of "this is set in an AU in which all the characters are alien janitors and FemaleLead is married to an Original Character."*** I do my best not to rain on anyone else's parade, but I do like to exercise my occasional right of critical judgment, and I do not think it is especially controversial to say that either of the fanfic-types mentioned above is a Very Bad Fanfic, even if it has an engrossing plot, multidimensional characters, and gorgeously styled prose. (In other words, it might be a very bad fanfic and a very good work of fiction -- although I've never actually encountered such an example.) When you claim to be writing "fanfic" in such-and-such a fandom, you are assumed to be using that fandom to its fullest extent. When you claim to be writing multi-fandom crossovers (and not as a joke), you are taking on responsibility for a hell of a lot of source material, and writing really good fanfic becomes exponentially more difficult.

Please note that I have no problem whatsoever with fanfic that creates an alternate universe, even a very, very alternate universe. I also have no problem with fanfic that ignores certain aspects of canon purely for humor -- the Pervy Vampire Hobbit stories seem to have gone past elaborate jokes and into semi-serious fanfic, which is why I'm able to use them as an example, but I trust none of the PVH writers will take me too seriously. I do have a problem with fanfic that entirely ignores the universe it purports to be derived from, because the whole idea of an "alternate universe" derives significance from the fact that it's the alternate of something else. And the "something else" is, yes, canon.

The less obvious problem with ignoring canon is that you lose out on a lot of richness, complexity, and (this last is pure opinion) fun in both writing and reading. Tolkien has vampires; they are not quite the same vampires as in the Buffyverse, or Forever Knight, or Anne Rice novels, or what-have-you. How would you explain their survival into the Fourth Age, when not only Morgoth's creatures but also Sauron's have largely disappeared? How would you make Frodo (or whomever) meet up with one in a convincing fashion? How would you make all the things we don't know about them fit into the general atmosphere of Middle-Earth? (I am reasonably certain that a thinly disguised Anne Rice vampire wouldn't get along well in most of Middle-Earth, although there might be something to be said for hanging out in the graveyards in ruined Osgiliath late in the Third Age. Still, no Anne Rice vampire would get within miles of the Shire. It's the Middle-Earth equivalent of a stereotypical Midwestern state. Also, not much in Middle-Earth is sexy enough for an Anne Rice vampire.) It may be that very little of this backstory makes it into the fanfic you eventually write, but it will enrich your story immensely. And, again in my opinion rather than my judgment, it's more fun that way.

I think that the Fellowship of the Ring movie script, which one could easily consider a sort of (legally authorized) fanfic, did a generally excellent job of paying attention to canon -- preserving the infinitely more complicated history and atmosphere of The Lord of the Rings and its many related works -- in its retelling. Sure, it beefed up Arwen's part. This bothers me -- well, a tiny bit, but not much. It also managed to emphasize the friendship between Aragorn and Boromir, and their respective internal conflicts, which are occasionally mentioned but not really told in Tolkien's version. The scene where the two men are hanging out in Lothlórien and Boromir starts talking about his father -- that's really brilliant fanfic. It wasn't in the original; Tolkien would probably never have thought to put it in the original; it does, however, add depth and fit into the original.

The same could be said of some fanfic that doesn't fit into canon at all, of course. I can't provide an example offhand from LOTR fanfic, and that's both because I don't read it much and because I'm emotionally attached to the Tolkien canon, but I'm sure such an example exists. Buffyverse fanfic, which I do read, tends to be relatively difficult not to fit into canon because there are so many canonical AUs floating around and the series hasn't ended. Even non-canonical AU work usually fits in somewhere, somewhen, somehow (unless it's the "they're all alien janitors" type). But I could cite, say, Hth's Pink Ladies (Tara/Drusilla, all kinds of disturbing) as an example of a story that's solidly AU and is nevertheless engrossing, revelatory, and enriched by developing and improving on the (rather lackluster) canonical backstory we got for Tara in "Family."

But if fanfic -- writing it or making critical judgments about it, or both -- is the project, I think you have to have some sort of awareness of canon before you can play around with it or undermine it or correct it or fit into it or shatter it. Yes, even the Pervy Vampire Hobbit folks. (I'm all for having a surviving vampire hanging out in Moria and getting disturbed by Gandalf's battle with the Balrog, myself. Now excuse me while I pretend I never thought about that. ;)

* -- This remark, by the way, has made me resolve to go out and purchase one of Mr. Gaiman's books. Since reader response is running against American Gods, I'm thinking some part of the Sandman series would be sensible. Yes, I know, I'm the last person on earth who hasn't read the Sandman series. There are lots of characters whose names begin with "D," okay?
** -- The later use of the noun "canon" to describe a type of vowed religious depended on a (person-) canon's being someone who lived under a specific rule. The use of "canon" to describe a form of music also depended on its being strictly regulated, and on the fact that one can sort out the entire piece from a very small section by knowing the correct rule to apply.
*** -- For shows in which "alien janitors" are not entirely unthinkable, please substitute "yuppie accountants living in Lincoln, Nebraska." I'm pretty sure that covers everything, even The X-Files.

Sometime last week, I missed a seminar on "networking" sponsored by the Large Midwestern University career-services office. I had thought about going, because I was curious about what a self-proclaimed expert on the topic would say, but whatever else I was doing at the time won out. Besides, I like to think I've gotten a handle on networking, at least in its academic forms.

Networking -- "working the beat" -- was a job skill back when my job was being a journalist, and I just kind of slid into approaching academia the same way. You have your "beat," your department or division, and you make your rounds occasionally. You chat with people, ask after their kids and health problems, inquire about whatever work they're doing. I wasn't very comfortable as a journalist, though, because there always seemed to be something false about my persona as I made those rounds. I liked many of my sources, but I couldn't get too close to them, I had to be prepared to throw over any relationship we might have built in favor of a newsworthy story, and I would never have met most of them had I not been assigned to cover that particular beat. I also had to be interested in some singularly uninteresting people, and I had to head off interesting tangents of conversation that had nothing to do with my job. I did it, and fairly well, but it wasn't my idea of fun. I never wanted to become bosom buddies with the world, but I wanted to be able to relax around my sources, and I never quite could. I was using them, or they were using me, or both.

Grad school suited me better. I could go ahead and forge friendships and acquaintanceships with some of the people whose work and behavior I was studying -- fellow grad students, especially the ones more senior than I was, and staff members. I liked them, I partied with them, and I learned everything I could from them: photocopier locations, book recommendations, which professors could be reached by email, where to get the best lunch on campus. In my relationships with professors, though, there was always a kind of reserve; I am not at all cowed by titles or erudition (although the latter impresses me), but I am conscious of power relationships. People who grade you, while they are grading you, cannot fully be your equal -- you are using them for the grade, in a sense, but they also exert control over you. You can like them, learn a little about their personal lives, go over to their house for dinner, exchange small gifts and cards on holidays -- but you're not quite friends, the way a journalist and her favorite sources aren't quite friends.

A few months into graduate school, however, I started going to workshops, then conferences. People you meet at workshops, however senior, are from other departments; people you meet at conferences are from other institutions. They are vastly unlikely to ever be in a position to grade you. (Some of them are potential dissertation readers, of course, but that's a different issue.) And they are interested in the same sorts of things as you, which is why you've wound up listening to the same speaker or drinking wine at the same reception. To my delight, I discovered that most of the people I met at workshops and conferences were perfectly willing to interact with me as an equal. Once I started organizing the occasional session, in fact, I got a lot of highly respectful emails submitting proposals which addressed me as "Professor." (Yes, I set them right, but I still enjoyed it.) After I started work on my dissertation, I became more comfortable with professors in my own department, the ones who had no direct role in judging my work. Now I'm trying to make the shift in dealing with my (former) advisor, and it feels kind of odd, but good. I don't miss being a graduate student one iota, apart from the student loans coming due.

Strictly speaking, of course, we are all locked into a web of power relationships (blah blah blah Foucaultcakes); more obviously, my future colleages at Wonderful University will be voting on my tenure decision in six years and I will continue to depend on various professional contacts to write me recommendations, alert me to new research developments, and so on. Also, I'll start teaching in the fall and give myself a whole new set of People With Whom I Cannot Be Friends. But I'm really enjoying myself these days when I attend a lecture or conference, and I've been emailing a lot of my future colleagues about teaching, apartment-hunting, and just getting to know one another. We might not be friends; we might be cordial acquaintances, or sporadic lunch buddies, or people who sit next to each other at faculty meetings. But we'll be...well, there is a word for it, and I've been using it: colleagues.

The word "colleague" comes from the Latin prefix con, "with" or "together," and the verb legere, "to choose." In other words, "colleagues" are people who have chosen to be together. Isn't that... y'know, neat? "Colleague" is related to "college," of course, which means that it's carried an academic connotation since at least the thirteenth century. As a matter of fact, "collegiality" is the elusive third requirement for being granted tenure (the other two are accomplishment in research and teaching) at most American colleges and universities. It's difficult to quantify and sometimes abused (not liking someone personally isn't really supposed to be a reason to deny them tenure), but I like having it there. I like having colleagues. I like being a colleague.

I also like being a sentimental sap about my job, but only once in a great while.

Looking over the past week's entries, I note that I am apparently (a) obsessed with vampires and (b) incapable of saying anything in fewer than four paragraphs and three footnotes. While (b) is a natural tendency urged on by my current career, I do dimly remember a time (cue the violins) when I tried to write concisely. It was my brief but happy journalist phase, during which I learned all sorts of useful things, including how to shop for snazzy little business suits, how to live very happily in my own apartment, how to run down extremely long escalators in high heels, how to dispose of disposable income, how to charm the living daylights out of almost anyone, and why men who invite you out to lunch usually think it constitutes some kind of semi-formal date, but men who invite you out to hot tubs do not. I never learned to write concisely, but you take what you can get.

The Bellona Times just issued a nifty little piece on "Brenda Starr," the comic strip. My Hometown's newspaper did not, alas, carry "Brenda Starr," but my grandparents' hometown paper did, so I read it during the summers and various vacations of my childhood, always wondering what had happened to the last plot thread. I also read "Brenda Starr" with great enjoyment during the aforementioned journalist phase, and was duly entertained when a friend started calling me "Brenda" from time to time. (For the record: I am not a redhead, I do not run into mysteriously handsome strangers nearly often enough, I hardly ever wind up being imprisoned in isolated chateaux or threatened by gun-wielding villains, and I am not unfailingly glamorous, but I do love impractical shoes and my own independence.) Brenda can be annoyingly slow on the uptake sometimes, but compared to most of the other ladies of the comics page, she's still a breath of fresh air.* And, from the look of things, she's recently gotten some... coffee. (It's even funnier if you read the strips for the week leading up to it. "'"Nightline!' I just remembered! I can't miss 'Nightline!'")

Meanwhile, I repainted my toenails a nice coral pink in honor of the unseasonable but utterly delightful weather. When that macho-yet-sensitive fashion photographer comes looking for me, I'll be ready. Provided that he does so after Major Professional Conference #3 and before I have to start looking for a new apartment.**

* -- If I ever turn into Mary Worth -- or, really, any of the characters on "Mary Worth" -- I'm moving to Oregon and taking advantage of their new laws on physician-assisted suicide. Yikes. And I don't want to be a child or a cardboard-cutout stereotype, which eliminates a lot of options. In case of emergency, I would be willing to go through life as the heroine of "Rose Is Rose." But Brenda's much more my speed.
** -- Ha! Made it under the wire on paragraphs and footnotes. If I knew how to program in Perl or Java, I'd write a footnoting add-on for Movable Type. If I knew anyone who knew how to program in Perl or Java and was susceptible to bribes of homemade baked goods... anyone?

The lovely thing about my particular fandom affinities -- I am referring here to methods rather than subjects -- is that they are often self-fulfilling. I enjoy well-thought-out analyses of what makes fandom tick, and lo and behold, I have helped to set off just such a discussion (not that it wouldn't happen without me, but it did happen with me, so there). Muahahahaha. I mean, yay.

One point that I seem not to have made clear enough in my original post on fandom and analysis, judging from Kat's thoughtful response, is that I enjoy and support others' enjoyment of the wide variety of fandom-related activities that aren't analytical.* I adore well-written fanfiction, and admire those who can produce it. I feel the same about vids and fan art, although I spend less time in those corners of fandom. I genuinely and deeply respect people who devote their time and resources to archival work in fandom. I've written a piece or two of fanfic, and while I'm sure they didn't rock anyone's world, I had fun and got a nice assortment of feedback. So let me go ahead and reiterate: analysis is not always worthwhile, any more than fanfic always is (and I know my readers can come up with their own examples on both counts), but people should follow their bliss either way. Remember how I said that nobody is a pure type, or should have to be? I'd guess that the people who want to enact their fannishness (and sweet Lord, yes, it's performative) more creatively than critically are probably a majority, but we all do some of both. This, as Martha Stewart would never ever say, is a Good Thing.

I'm kind of confused by Jenny-O's reply to my initial post, though. I don't think she was making the argument that fannish analysis should exist only to serve or inspire fanfic, but that's what it sounded like, especially towards the end. I mean, if something I say in this blog happens to inspire someone else's great fanfic, I'd be thrilled, but that's really not what I'm doing it for. I'm no more interested in having someone tell me I need to inspire great fanfic than, presumably, any of my fanfic-goddess readers are in having me tell them that they need to inspire great fannish analysis. To pick on a recent discussion, thinking through the moral implications of character judgment might just be a fun exercise in mental stretching, might conceivably be handy for one's own development as a moral person, and, of course, might help with one's ongoing interest in fictional characterization from either a critical or a creative standpoint. Any or all of the above results are fine by me. Sarah tackled this issue much more eloquently, though, and I pretty well agree with her, so I'll leave it at that.

I want to address another part of Jenny's post, a part that I largely agree with but want to add on to. Yes, there can be pointless and bad and mean-spirited analysis, just as there can be pointless and bad and mean-spirited fanfic. I try my best to ignore both the people who fling around their supposed intellectual credentials (P.S.: doing so automatically means that yours aren't good enough) while trying to make everyone else like exactly what they like and the people who post fifty-seven-part epics with no vestige of plot or characterization in which everyone in their fanverse pairs off according to the writer's libidinal whims except for the ones who die horribly because the writer hates them. I also try to ignore both the fanfic attack sites ("So-and-So's writing just sucks, and, no, I won't tell you my name") and the analytic attack... well, I'm not sure there are sites, but I've certainly seen board topics and a few blogs that seem overwhelmingly devoted to analysis along the lines of "let me take violent offense at nothing in particular, pick a sub-sub-subtopic of said nothingness, throw in some half-digested jargon from a class I took once, harp on it until the sun goes supernova, and engage in personal attacks against anyone who disagrees with my position."

I would gently suggest that if we must call something "fanwank" (although I still have issues with the implicit metaphor), we should apply the term to both bad fanfiction and bad fan-analysis, since both are capable of evincing "precious, solipsistic, ideological, repetitive tendencies" in spades. What annoys me is that while most of us agree that fanfic attack sites (that's "attack," not "review" or "critique") are tricky at best and downright harmful at worst, there is a strong current in fandom which thinks nothing of publicly dissing or dismissing a critical discussion in terms that they wouldn't consider using about Lady Sparkling Thunderhippo's unbeta'ed magnum opus, "Mulder and Mary Sue Have Triplets."** We might roll our eyes as we delete LST's posts from our inbox, and we might make fun of her in email to our betareaders, but most of us wouldn't actually make a blog/diary/LJ entry about "The Worst Fanfic I Have Ever Read Two Paragraphs Of." I'm not suggesting that we should, by the way; I am strongly on the honey side of the honey/vinegar debate. I'm suggesting that if a discussion strikes us as a waste of bandwidth, we move on in the same way we move on from an equally catastrophic fanfic; or, alternatively, we try to offer constructive feedback, as we would for a fanfic that shows promise but isn't quite there. Picking up one's toys and going home is fine, but try not to kick sand in everyone else's faces first, okay?

Finally, in response to Jenny, Sarah, and Kat, along with assorted other commenters and respondents... is this really about academia? I didn't think it was; I wasn't writing as a professional academic, but as a Person Who Enjoys Critical Thought And Shoots Off Her Mouth Regularly. I know many such people who wouldn't get within ten miles of a university campus if they could help it. Most of them went to college, I guess, but that applies to, what, 70% of American 18-year-olds at this point? Academic discourse is a subset of analytic/critical discourse, and the latter does not necessarily imply the former. "Fanalysis," as I've started calling it with tongue firmly planted in cheek, can be put into academic language and directed at an academic audience, but it doesn't have to be and usually isn't. Victoria did a much better job than I of coming up with some not-as-deliberately-esoteric examples of what subjects fandom can and should encompass. As for method, well, I could point to examples of really wonderful sustained analysis from fans who have not gotten a bachelor's degree and have no current affiliation with any sort of educational institution; I could point to examples of truly horrendous attempts at analysis from fans who have PhDs. These supporting details about educational background can be relevant to a discussion once in a great while, but they usually aren't, and dragging someone else's credentials (or lack thereof) into an argument by way of disagreeing with them is ad hominem, rude, pretentious, and pointless. (Of course, "academia" isn't as homogeneous as it looks from the outside -- we have a hierarchy that won't quit and a caste system we try to ignore -- but that's a whole different post.***)

The "-lysis" part of "analysis" is a Greek word which means (and is cognate to) "loosening." I don't especially like how we've gotten from thinking about analysis as a form of loosening -- breaking something complex down into simple parts, the opposite of synthesis, where you take the parts and build them into something complex -- to thinking about analysis as something that traps you so you can't function freely. Let's... not, okay? Let's loosen up.

* -- I say "analytical" rather than "intellectual" because writing smart, thoughtful, technically sound, creative fanfic is obviously a use of one's intellect.
** -- If there is indeed a fanfic writer out there who goes by Lady Sparkling Thunderhippo... I'm so, so sorry for you.
*** -- Speaking of caste and class... I also didn't think this was about class, not because class is entirely irrelevant, but because Internet-based media fans are (a) relatively homogeneous as to class -- we all know exceptions, but they don't call it the digital divide for nothing -- and (b) almost impossible to accurately peg by class within that limited spectrum, because we are lacking so many cues about one another. Unless I happen to gratuitously share it with you, you have no idea what I am wearing, what I do for a living, what my parents do, where I went to school, where I wanted to go to school... and if I told you all that, you'd still make some inaccurate assumptions about me, because you'd still be missing some important data. The part of myself I show here isn't even close to enough for anyone to draw those assumptions. And if I posted a ten-page rant about pogroms and the DAR and why shag carpeting is evil and hardwood floors are good, it still wouldn't have any effect on the issue of how open fandom is to purely analytical activity.

(I'll dive back into the nature-of-fandom debates tomorrow, I promise. This post is All About Angel.)

Last night's Angel episode, "Forgiving," was perhaps the most poorly -- or is it ironically? -- named outing since Buffy S2 "Innocence." Nobody forgave anyone for anything. Therefore, I can only assume that my inability to forgive Angel for his actions in this episode is just what the writers intended.

It's not that Angel hasn't done bad things before. Most of his career as an unsouled vampire consisted of Doing Bad Things (aggravated, the first time 'round, by Having Bad Hair). Since he got his soul -- both times -- he repented, and has allegedly stopped feeding on human beings. Now that he's working for the Powers That Be -- I'll go into my reservations about them some other time -- he's also supposed to be helping the helpless and saving souls. And in the first season of Angel, we did indeed get several episodes in which Angel sacrificed chances at personal happiness in order to continue his mission ("In The Dark") and protect loved ones ("I Will Remember You"). We also got the not terribly subtle message that it is heroic to sacrifice one's life for one's fellow demons/humans/etc. ("Hero"), and we got the much more subtle message that one should not pursue career advancement at the cost of harming innocents, the newly repentant, or one's own immortal soul (Wesley in "Five By Five," Lindsey in "Blind Date"). Personal attachments were important to Our Hero -- indeed, they kept him from simply throwing his life away in one good cause or another. But personal attachments weren't what drove his mission; remorse was.

I am forced to conclude that "To Shanshu in L.A.," one of my favorite episodes and the first-season finale, set a bad precedent. Angel learned that if he kept up the good work, he might ultimately become human. Although he tried to avoid making this a goal ("Judgment") and eventually decided not to take it into account at all ("Epiphany"), it seems to have set off a gradual waning of interest in helping people for the sake of helping them. For most of Season Two, Angel was helping people because he felt like it. If he didn't feel like it, increasingly, they were SOL. Sure, Cordelia had visions, but he demonstrated that he could and would ignore them (that'd be "Reunion" through "Epiphany"), and his reconciliation with his co-workers was played as personal rather than moral -- that is, he made up to Cordelia by giving her new clothes ("Disharmony") but never really addressed concerns about his behavior. He also tried to kill himself in a kamikaze attack on Wolfram & Hart ("Reprise"), risked losing his soul by having sex with Darla ("Reprise"), then let her go on her merry way with a few threats ("Epiphany"), which struck many astute viewers as puzzling at the time. In retrospect, it's perfectly clear that Angel was functioning on his new principle: he felt like boffing Darla, but he didn't feel like killing her. He felt like rescuing Cordelia, repeatedly, and continuing to work with her, which required him to deal with her visions occasionally, but most of his actions for the remainder of the season were prompted by the need to rescue Cordelia. He didn't feel like hanging out in L.A. all last summer, so he took off on a nice long retreat, during which Cordelia's visions were presumably addressed by Wesley and Gunn. He didn't feel like hunting down Billy after "That Vision Thing" once he'd saved Cordelia. He didn't seem to feel much like helping to solve the demon murders in "That Old Gang of Mine," and he reacted to direct threats against himself in "Heartthrob" and "Carpe Noctem." He finally dealt with Billy in the eponymous episode, but he showed no guilt at the many people who died in the interim. Then we were back to Darla, and Angel didn't feel like killing her until she threatened Cordy, but he did feel like keeping her alive long enough to have his baby, regardless of any prophecies about the child's being potentially evil, and regardless of the way he was physically endangering people right and left. Once the baby was born, Angel got a new person to protect. This, er, "mission" extended to threatening Linwood at Wolfram & Hart -- not for being a minion of evil, but for having caused Connor to get a boo-boo ("Dad") -- and, even more charmlessly, to shaking down victims for money ("Provider"). Angel only got involved in breaking the spell in "Waiting in the Wings" when his friends were put in jeopardy, and he fought the tree demon only to help save Fred and Gunn's bacon during "Couplet." He helped Lorne's client with her demon problem in "Sleep Tight," but by then his newly awakened bloodlust craved violence, so it's difficult to see that as a selfless act. He spent most of "Sleep Tight" threatening Lilah for, again, threatening his son.

I must give "Forgiving" credit for perfect Angel characterization. I didn't especially respect him after S2, and I didn't really like him after "Provider." Now I actively loathe him. Good thing he's not the show's central -- oh, wait. (Episode spoilers follow.)

Let us consider the people who behaved more admirably than Angel did in this episode: Fred, Gunn, Lorne, Justine, Linwood, Lilah, the random driver who hit Sahjan, Wesley (being unconscious during the entire episode does at least prevent one from doing evil). Let us, then, contrast this with the people who behaved about as admirably as Angel: the homeless bum who stole Wesley's money and left him to die, the evil demon Sahjan who tried to kill everyone around him. Gosh, it's obvious that Angel's a hero, isn't it? I mean, just because his son was kidnapped into a hell-dimension, that totally justified his kidnapping and torturing a human being, performing black magic, and loosing a super-powerful time-shifting corporeal demon on L.A. (We won't even get into the many etiquette errors involved, although I feel that not untying your hostage from the chair before letting him fall down the stairs is extremely tacky.)

Obviously, saving the life of a possibly-still-alive infant far outweighs the need to behave in any way ethically, even when all your friends and co-workers and mortal enemies are telling you that what you're doing is a bad idea. And, obviously, it was a great help to Connor when Angel tried to suffocate a helpless man, his former friend, who had acted on the basis of his own best knowledge, had been deceived, and had inadvertently provided an opportunity for Holtz to kidnap Connor. (Bear in mind that Angel knew all this.) Yep, that's it. Nothing like misplaced vengeance to solidify our confidence in Angel's heroic stature. I never really watched the show for Angel, but now I'm utterly baffled as to how the characters I do respect could be working with him.

On the plus side -- a small but significant plus side -- Fred reverted back to being an interesting character. This might, possibly, have had something to do with the fact that she and Gunn were able to investigate Wesley's disappearance somewhat effectively, without pausing for a round of tonsil hockey and/or angsting about the propriety (not, oddly, the advisability) of doing so. Justine continues to be mildly intriguing (although I did sort of anticipate the Urn of McGuffin showing up again). There were some slightly nifty developments pertaining to prophecy subplots (although, really, if I were a time-shifting demon, I'd've gotten rid of defenseless human Darla instead of hopping around forging commentaries -- and if he couldn't touch anything, how on earth did he forge them?). Cordelia continued to be absent, although judging from the previews for next week, her demon aspect is manifesting itself in truly hideous hairstyling choices. And Wesley's alive.

I'm watching next week, of course. I need to see whether Gunn and Fred will sink back into idiocy, whether Angel will sensibly use his new amoral attitude to off Groo, and whether Wesley will, as I devoutly hope, reveal that he only rented that godawful SUV.

This post started quite some time ago, but it crystallized yesterday, when I swung by Merry's blog and ran into an interesting post on fandom and research interests. I was going to simply leave a comment, but when the comment ran into three paragraphs, I thought it might be better to just use up my own bandwidth. The short version of my comments: "Please, yes, fandom needs more People Who Look Things Up. And nobody ever needs to apologize for claiming that they have an intellect." The long version is, of course, longer, and extra flamey.

You see, I've been trying to sort through a similar set of issues about fandom and intellectual stagnation. Now, I realize that I'm a bit of a know-it-all, and I can't resist opening my mouth about it, but I do try to make it interesting. You could say a big part of my identity is tied up in being intellectually stimulating (except that you would immediately realize that such a phrase evokes its direct opposite; I started yawning while typing it). Plus, I proselytize (this may be the only time you hear a Jew admitting this) and I love to teach; I don't want to bore people, but I do want them to share my enthusiasms, of which I have loads. I will tell you about all of them at the drop of a hat. Several of them, lately, fall under the commonly accepted category of "fandom," and I have come to the conclusion that I am a "fan."

So... fandom? Well, my definition of "fandom" -- which I shall cleverly avoid giving, because I haven't nearly worked it out yet -- expands every time I think about it. It reminds me of bread dough; once you get the basics in there, you can add just about anything you'd like, and the stuff will keep on rising.* It definitely covers more subjects and approaches than you'd think. Why, exactly, in popular parlance, can one be a fan of golf (I am not) or a fan of Tolkien (I am), but not a fan of Origen of Alexandria? I mean, hey, the guy had a controversial life, narrowly escaped martyrdom several times, may or may not have castrated himself, pretty much invented several genres of religious writing, wrote well in all of them, mixed Middle Platonism and Greek Christianity in new and inventive ways, got posthumously condemned at least three times for different reasons... frankly, and even without dragging out the sex manuals written by his mentor, Origen seems an awful lot more interesting than *NSync to me. (With no disrespect intended to *NSync fans, of course.) But the *NSync people can discuss Justin and J.C. in fandom circles without anyone raising an eyebrow, whereas I have to make lots of weak jokes and self-deprecating remarks if I want to bring Origen into discussions outside the academy, or outside the classroom (where I have the huge advantage of, y'know, being able to assign grades), without people tuning me out. I'm pretty sure nobody lists "early Christianity" as a fandom on the multi-fandom lists. Goodness knows Origen doesn't have his own flashy fan-club website. (At least not last I checked. I am more than halfway tempted to create one for him as a matter of pure principle and call it Apokatastasis, Yay!**)

Why, on a similar note, is it that every time the fan-related journals I read get into a long, satisfying discussion about the ethical or moral or metaphysical or historical or whatever implications of a favorite book or TV show, half a dozen people start whining that (a) we have made them feel stupid (without their consent? uh, whatever); (b) we have been mean and nasty and judgmental (this is said with no trace of irony); (c) we are stupid, and have been engaging in a pointless wankfest*** (usually a shorthand way of expressing (a) and (b) together)? And these aren't the people engaging in the discussion; these are non-participants, either commenting from the sidelines or engaging in the hallowed tradition of YAGE (Yet Another Grand Exit) posting. Yes, of course, they have every right to announce their opinions (drat those civil liberties), but if a discussion bores me, I usually exercise my motor nerves and move on to another discussion. If I don't feel like discussing something in detail (that does happen, sometimes, in leap years), I don't. I find it odd and frustrating that people who are otherwise intelligent, friendly, resourceful human beings suddenly turn into cranky anti-intellectual zealots when enough of their acquaintances start showing signs of being interested in the dreaded "meta" zone.

I'm fairly sure that this reflects a general anti-intellectual trend in -- forgive me, everyone, for using this phrase -- Western society.**** And insofar as fandom is in any way countercultural, revolutionary, or reformative -- insofar as we get to do fun things like deconstruct and subvert and play with established people, places, things, and ideas -- I think we owe it to ourselves not to play into societal attitudes we object to. Yes, gentle readers, I think we owe it to ourselves to be as smart and literate as we goddamn well please, and refrain from dissing others for doing the same even if we're not in the mood at the time. I will no doubt fall off the wagon tomorrow and start making jokes about how "meta" all this is, but I'm being less tactful and more honest right now, and I honestly fail to see anything the matter with analysis and/or comparison and/or displays of exceptional yet relevant knowledge. It's fun. It usually interests me; if it doesn't interest you, fine. If it makes you feel stupid, I am profoundly sorry for you and profoundly angry about the educational system that failed to teach you the difference between feelings of inadequacy and lack of intellectual capacity, but I'm not going to shut up just because of that. Obviously, there's a variety of ways in which we like to approach the subjects of which we are fans. Some people are more analytical and others more emotional; some people put most of their thoughts and reactions into fictional form and others into non-fictional essays. Nobody is a pure type, though. Nobody should have to be.

In a way, I'm lucky; my corner of academia would allow me to give the occasional conference paper on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, write the odd article, and drag my tapes into class from time to time. I could do the same with Origen, even though neither Origen nor Buffy is precisely my specialty. For some people, that'd be unspeakably dull, but it fits neatly into the ways I mostly approach fandom. Still, I'm not a pure analytical/non-fictional type, and it's not enough. I don't have to read mailing lists (someday I should come out of the closet on both Glass Onion and Zendom, but I so much enjoy lurking and listening!); I don't have to wade into debates in other people's blogs; I certainly don't have to keep this one up, or try to make it interesting to people who aren't my personal friends. But if I'm going to be a fan, well, I've come to the conclusion that part of the point of fandom has got to be integrating your personal or singular passions into a broader context (historical, social, intellectual, theological, what-have-you). Otherwise, I think there is a very real risk of intellectual stagnation. And that's just... have you guessed that I really don't like this word?... stupid.

* -- Except that the additions can't be too hot, and you sometimes have to add gluten if you're working with really low-gluten grains, and... oh, wait, it was a metaphor. My bad.
** -- "Apocatastatis" is a rather nifty way of expressing the doctrine that all things return to (and are saved in) the divine. It was one of the things Origen was condemned for.
*** -- I am not carrying this metaphor any further, because if I did, I'd wind up saying things like "I'm intellectually multiorgasmic and proud of it, dammit!," and that's really not my style. Also, it's not a good metaphor, especially if you subscribe to its apparent premise -- namely, that sex is all about the One True Orgasm. Intellectual discussion is not simply intended to get you (much less your partner) to a certain point of happiness/agreement by the fastest possible route. Neither, I would suggest, is sex, but that's altogether off topic.
**** -- More precisely, of course, it reflects a uniquely American anti-intellectualism which can be traced from somewhere around the election of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier. Those of you in or near the U.S. may wish to think back to our most recent Presidential election and the kind of rhetoric used against Al Gore -- he's an egghead! He reads all these weird books! He cares about "policy issues"! But I know some of the same insults -- configured a little differently -- work outside the U.S., and goodness knows we have no monopoly on anti-intellectualism. Someday I should check out Francophone fandom discussions to see whether the different position of "public intellectuals" in French (as opposed to American) society reflects a different way of approaching fandom.

When the alternative is starting on my taxes, I can do astonishingly little. Today -- well, yesterday, but I will sneakily date this to the end of Saturday night -- I managed to read about five novels, engage in assorted minor domestic chores, talk to several family members on the phone, cook quite a bit, and, um, watch a few Buffy episodes in syndication. Alas, the current syndication schedule on FOX is in mid-S4, which means that I sat through "The Initiative," thinking about precisely where Season Four went wrong.

(1) Riley's trying to date Buffy while he's her TA (and therefore, hello, grading her papers?) is ethically icky. (Dating college freshmen while a grad student is icky, too, but purely on grounds of relative maturity, and Riley doesn't seem significantly more mature than Buffy and company.) I wonder if anyone on the Mutant Enemy writing team has even been to grad school? The show seems to portray Riley, Graham, and Forrest as frat boys more than anything else; they should've just called them college seniors, put Riley in Buffy's Psych class because he had to fulfill the requirement for his major and Maggie was his senior honors thesis advisor, and had done with it. This would also have allowed them to reconsider the total lack of any day job for Riley in S5.

(2) All dating issues aside, Riley has the ethical awareness of a five-year-old. He doesn't figure out that it might be wrong to violate civil rights and research protocols, harming potentially innocent humans and the occasional peaceful demon, until the Initiative starts messing with people he knows personally. This is simply pathetic. It's one thing to think that all demons are evil; it's another not to worry about the human beings involved in "enforcing quarantine" -- remember, in "The Initiative," he was prepared to take Willow in because she'd been caught with Spike. I fail to understand how we are supposed to sympathize with Riley after this episode, or how we are supposed to countenance his pursuit of Buffy, or, really, how we are supposed to see him as a vast improvement over Parker. I'd rather be loved and left than captured and tortured any day. (Fine, let Riley be redeemed by love for Buffy, but they should've made him a perfectly un-self-conscious villain for the middle of S4 -- rather like the Mayor -- and they tried to play him as a good guy instead.)

(3) Riley's kind of dull anyway, as written and acted. It's not a good idea to have a sizeable part of the season pivot emotionally around a newly introduced character. Sadly, Mutant Enemy didn't get this message in S5, either.

(4) The Initiative was a giant mass of wasted potential. It could've been fascinating, subversive, morally ambiguous, picking up on "question authority" threads from "Becoming" and "Anne" and "Gingerbread" and the whole ending of S3. A giant, secret, soulless, apparently oversight-free government agency is really scary. Reducing it to Bad Demons Versus Good Humans For The Umpteenth Time is... not. (And I say this as someone who kind of liked "The Yoko Factor" and "Primeval." I just think they could've been so much more.)

(5) Adam, in particular, could've been much more interesting had he not engaged in gratuitous skewering and had he instead been seriously presented as a seeming "Martin Luther King," trying to bring all demon races together. The realization that Adam wanted to turn all his human acquaintances into cyborgs would then have been devastating and much, much more frightening.

(6) We should've found out what happened to Ethan Rayne. And, in a related issue, Giles should've had something to do besides feel sorry for himself.

(7) Xander should've been recruited by the Initiative; the stage was perfectly set for it, from Xander's military "background" to his alienation from Buffy and Willow to his well-known dislike of all things demony. It would've made "The Yoko Factor" about a million times better. It also would've made Xander and Anya's relationship more complicated.

(8) I am beginning to understand the widespread Spike-adoration. In S4, Spike is the only recurring character who seems to realize that there might be multiple shades of right and wrong. As such, he's oddly charming. (I am well aware that the basis for widespread Spike-adoration is probably not his nuanced ethical awareness, but let me enjoy my delusions.)

Now, speaking of scary government agencies, I really do have to deal with my taxes.

[N.B.: I finally edited the title to what I initially wanted to put in. I will be impressed by anyone who can immediately sort out that reference.]

Somewhere, somehow, there is room for a hilarious parody of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" with reference to Gens X, Y, and Z, not to mention our parents the Boomers. Fortunately for all my readers, I'm not going to try and provide it for you. It does strike me that I should try rereading Emerson one of these days, since I last tried him in high school, and my tastes have evolved a bit since then.

This morning, however, I was about fifty years further along in history but still in upper-middle-class Boston, reading Sarah Smith's The Vanished Child. It's good -- very good -- although I think the mystery aspect isn't quite as satisfying as the history, characterization, or prose quality, all of which are simply wonderful. (Of course, as I said in the conversation that caused me to start reading Sarah Smith, I tend to prefer mystery novels to mystery novels.) I would like to say that the sheer quality of The Vanished Child is what caused me not to get into work until 1 pm today, but in fact I have little or no willpower when it comes to putting down half-completed books of any quality.* That said, I did manage to escape the apartment before I could start on its sequel; the public library down the street came through beautifully with all three of Smith's interrelated books.

There were several other library books I had left in the car Wednesday night because I had to get the groceries in first. Most of them dealt with gardening; I think I shall have to prioritize getting an apartment with a balcony this summer, because nobody I know wants to listen to me talk about perennial borders, dammit. Here, I'll stick to discussing books that my presumed readership might enjoy. It turned out that I had already read the best parts of A.S. Byatt's short-story collection Elementals standing in a bookstore someplace (I hate it when that happens). Still, it was nice light reading ("light reading" in a non-pejorative sense -- perhaps "refreshing" would be a better word?), especially thinking in terms of Byatt's stated fondness for ice and glass metaphors in one of the essays from Of Histories and Stories. My favorite story, incidentally, was "Cold" (the one about the ice princess), but I would've appreciated a little more self-consciousness being injected into it. Then again, I am also one of the two or three people worldwide who liked Byatt's Babel Tower, so I obviously have a near-limitless tolerance for cleverly self-conscious fantasy with hints of developed histories and religions sprinkled in. Byatt's religious interests aren't quite developed enough for my taste, though, which is why "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" fell short for me and "Jael" left me vaguely bored. Yes, thank you, I know my Bible stories. I am not shocked by people retelling them. I also know a lot of what people have said about those Bible stories. If you, the author, plan to talk about Bible stories, you'd better come up with something pretty exciting, because I can tell you offhand that Meister Eckhart had a much more subversive and fascinating reading of the story of Martha and Mary than Byatt does, and that was in the fourteenth century.

Speaking of fantasy and religion, I had somehow picked up a Diana Wynne Jones short-story collection called Seeing is Believing, in which, again, I only really loved one story -- "The Sage of Theare" -- which also combined an intriguing fantasy world with highly entertaining snippets of social and theological satire. The difficulty in pulling off that particular artistic task, I think, is that the author must never seem to be belittling either her characters or her reader -- I sensed that problem with most of the other stories in that collection. It's especially endemic in a lot of children's fantasy, I think, although not in the really good stuff.

All this reminds me of a question I wanted to pose to my readers: is Neil Gaiman's American Gods really All That? In other words, is it worth purchasing in paperback, or should I go on the library's waiting list? (I have never read any of Gaiman's work.) Please feel free to refer back to the reading preferences I mentioned above.

Today I am catching up on my email. Tomorrow I shall catch up on my laundry. You must admit that it's much more interesting for me to write about books. But it still feels faintly self-indulgent. ;)

* -- I closed out the local Borders on Wednesday finishing off Nora Roberts's latest opus, which I would not in a million years buy in hardcover, but enjoyed nonetheless, even if I'm starting to pick out all her recycled character types from the first descriptive sentence. Why, by the way, do all her lovely and repressed female professors meet gorgeous guys from stable families who fall for them instantly and lead them on a whirlwind courtship involving danger and hot sex? Am I not repressed enough? Just wondering...

I'm disturbed. I know I've been re-reading it intermittently for the last eighteen years, and I adore every bizarrely constructed sentence, but, my gosh, The Lord of the Rings is really really all-male.

Y'all can stop laughing now.

Seriously... no, seriously... I'm kind of weirded out by this discovery. There are so few female characters, and they do so little, and I was so used to being the only girl among lots of boys anyway, that I never noticed the lack when I was reading it as a child. It's almost as if the races of Middle-Earth had only one gender. Certainly, there are no female "role models": Éowyn is the only human female who actually takes action (we are dealing with the book here, not the movie), and she's not only handily fulfilling a prophecy and getting helped out by a random (male) hobbit, but she's also presented as seriously demented and her actions as wrong if ultimately helpful. At the end of the book, she gets what, under certain lights, looks an awful lot like a personality transplant. The only other female character who shows signs of having a personality is Galadriel, and Galadriel is an immortal, super-powerful High Elf who still doesn't leave home until Sauron is good and defeated.* Arwen doesn't open her mouth, much less leave Rivendell, until Sauron has been overthrown. She and Galadriel both influence most of the action, as far as they do, by giving gifts that the male heroes actually use later on. And... guess how many female characters actually speak during the whole six volumes, not counting appendices (where Arwen develops a bit of a personality). Go on, take a guess.

Okay, I'll tell you. Ten. I think. In approximate order of wordiness: Galadriel, Éowyn, Arwen (and right there we left even tertiary character territory), Goldberry, Ioreth, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Rosie Cotton, Mrs. Cotton, Mrs. Maggot. I don't remember whether Shelob actually speaks, but I can never stand to re-read that part, so I'll put her on the list for good measure. (The only other named female characters I can think of in LOTR proper are legendary First-Age figures Lúthien, Elbereth, and Elwing; Faramir's deceased mother Finduilas; and about half a dozen female hobbits related to either the Baggins or Gamgee clans.) There are no women at the Prancing Pony, or any of the inns in the Shire. There are no women who say anything at the Council at Rivendell, and the only woman even mentioned as being nearby is Arwen. There are, obviously, no women in the Fellowship, unless you've spent too much time reading bad fanfic. There are also no female orcs or trolls or Ring-Wraiths, although there is Shelob, for those who want to embrace their inner fiend. There seem to have been no female settlers in Moria (not the best way to start a colony). There were no female characters in the whole of The Hobbit except for a mention of Bilbo's long-deceased mother, the stated fact that Fili and Kili were Thorin's sister's sons, and something about "elf-maidens" in Rivendell. While we're at it, there are exactly two married couples depicted in the whole of LOTR before Sauron's defeat: Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, and Celeborn and Galadriel. Yes, okay, almost all the women have left Gondor because there are armies marching towards it. (Odd how the House of Healing is run by a man, even when its staff obviously includes women.) And, yes, this isn't a civilization in which women go into battle (Éowyn being the exception, and that to fulfill a prophecy). But it seems that Tolkien has gone to remarkable trouble to create an all-male world, especially outside the Shire.

Consider, if you will, the sheer volume of single or widowed men wandering around Middle-Earth. Not only are Bilbo and Frodo inexplicably single (judging from the family trees in the appendices, this isn't usual hobbit behavior), but so is every blessed member of the Fellowship, and the excuses run out somewhere around Legolas. (Legolas isn't engaged, he isn't too young, he isn't too enamored of battle, he isn't a Dwarf. Yes, we all realize that Legolas and Gimli are married by the end of Fellowship, but that's beside the point.) Then there are the widowers. Does anyone find it bizarre that, at the end of the Third Age, the only Middle-Earth potentate we know to have a living wife is Celeborn, and his takes off immediately afterwards? Elrond's wife has gone West (and his sons show no interest in settling down with nice Elf-maidens); the Entwives are lost; Théoden and Denethor are both widowers. (A host of minor rulers ranging from Thranduil to Dain to Brand to Imrahil to Peregrin Took to Ghân-buri-Ghân are simply not in the story enough for any wives to come into evidence, although they generally have children.)

All jokes aside, by the way, I don't think this necessarily makes LOTR a Big Gay Epic. It's just a Big Epic. Sex doesn't seem to matter at the end of the Third Age; love and loyalty do matter, intensely, and it is precisely those characters who inspire love and loyalty most strongly (Frodo and Aragorn; Galadriel; to a lesser extent, Théoden and Faramir) who stand out as heroic figures. One could say the same thing about the Odyssey. But the Iliad... well, that's something else altogether in terms of female characters' involvement, if not their agency. And so is the Quenta Silmarillion. (Let's leave aside the relatively egalitarian creation account which precedes it for the moment.) In the Tale of the Jewels, you have a preponderance of male characters, certainly, but you've also got memorable female characters including Melian and Lúthien and Elwing and Aredhel Ar-Feiniel (there's a nice story of spousal abuse for you) and Morwen and Nienor Níniel. Less strongly characterized women still play a part in some pivotal plotlines; witness the absolutely horrifying story of how Barahir's company of outlaws is betrayed because of Gorlim's love for his wife Eilinel.** Throughout the story, motivations and outcomes hang on the actions of and reactions to women. The Silmarillion wouldn't work without couples (Beren and Lúthien being the most obvious example); it certainly wouldn't work without female characters. LOTR would -- any number of other creatures could have slain the Witch-King, and the succession of King Elessar's line would've been a little complicated, but all they needed was a genealogical place-holder in any case. Galadriel (literally) and Arwen (figuratively and racially) are leftovers from an earlier age, when Men were Men and Elvish women kicked butt.

Is it something about Elves? That is, with the exception of Éowyn (who is spectacularly in the wrong place at the right time, and who in any case takes after ancestors from Gondor and therefore from Númenor), aren't all the women who become a part of the action in Middle-Earth either Elvish or affiliated with the Elves? Would it therefore follow that the Fourth Age, the Age of Men, is also the age of patriarchal dominion? I don't seriously think this would hold up as a theory, but I'm at a loss to analyze such development otherwise. Men on their own have a pretty lousy record with regard to womens' rights. The Second Age has never held my interest as strongly as the First, and they only have Ruling Queens in Númenor when the male line runs out (although Elendil is descended from Elros through the female line). More to the point, the one vivid image that I remember from the Akallabêth is in fact that of a woman: Tar-Míriel, the dispossessed Fourth Ruling Queen of Númenor, making for the top of the Meneltarma and drowning, last of all the Númenoreans, because her unwanted husband was an idiot. That's the image Tolkien chose to give us to emphasize the sorrow of Númenor's downfall, and he doesn't exactly describe her mental state; rather, she's "fairer than silver or ivory or pearls."*** Yep, nothing like being prettier than other luxury goods to make that situation more palatable. I realize that it's supposed to be unfair and all, but is it also supposed to be that uncomfortable?

Do any of my readers have a theory about this? Was Tolkien doing anything at all consciously with the shift from The Hobbit (no women) to LOTR (few women, mostly incidental) to The Silmarillion (lots of women, many pivotal)? And is there something fundamentally wrong, from the perspective of remaining true to the spirit of LOTR, about the way the movies are padding the roles of Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn? (I'm instinctively all for it, provided they do it well, but I think it's a question that should be raised.)

Or should I just consider getting back to actual work at some point today?

* -- Yes, I know, they were fighting off waves of Orcs in Lothlórien, and then Galadriel went and broke open a can of whoop-ass on Dol Guldur, and it all happened off-screen, in a manner of speaking. Also, Galadriel's borrowed way too much imagery from the Virgin Mary (specifically, the post-courtly-love version) to feel much like the "elf-woman" Tolkien describes her as right after she rejects Frodo's Ring. She's the "Lady of the Golden Wood" most of the time, which suits her better.
** -- I had to look up "Eilinel," but I knew it began with an E. The others I came up with off the top of my head, so I'm very probably missing something or someone obvious. It really has been several years since I read the Silmarillion, and it's currently packed up in a box awaiting my next move.
*** -- Apparently, it's possible to find any quotation from Tolkien online somewhere if you know about half of it.

Spring, I am learning, arrives slowly and tentatively in the Almost Upper Midwest. There are tulip leaves popping up in beds which I pass on my way to work, but there aren't any flowers, much less the riot of forsythia, crabapples, and redbuds you'd see in My Hometown this time of year. (Well, that was what I saw two weeks ago. By now, I imagine, the dogwoods are also in bloom, and we have a lot of dogwoods in my part of the country.) Spring also arrives rather squishily here; most of last week was intermittently snowy, most of Sunday and Monday were rainy, and the sun is breaking through clouds for the first time this afternoon. But rain doesn't bother me as long as the temperature's rising, which it seems to be doing in fits and starts. Last night I stumbled out of my office sometime after 9 and I could smell things growing -- earth, grass, wood, the occasional evergreen. I stood outside and inhaled for several minutes.

In what will eventually be a related idea, my recent efforts to slog through the Talmud without properly knowing either Hebrew or Aramaic have been... not entirely fruitless. I've signed up for a couple of daily email lists working through the tractates one section at a time; it takes seven years to cover the whole thing, and I sort of hope I'll find another solution by then, but this is extremely helpful at the moment. Right now, the list is in the middle of the longest tractate in the whole Babylonian Talmud, Bava Basra, which is about property law. Now, there are relatively few things which do not interest me on some level, but property law is... um... kinda dull. Still, the number of digressions in any Talmudic text ensures that eventually something fun will come up, and so it does. Midway through all the business about how close to your neighbor's pit you can dig your pit, and who can claim a chick found between two dovecotes, the rabbis break into a vigorous debate about which direction you pray in, which turns on which direction the Shekhinah* comes from. The answer: either from the east, or from the west, or from everywhere. (I love Talmud.)

At this point -- are you still following me? There's a connection coming, I promise -- Rav Yehudah** explains the difference between the four winds based on some questionable Hebrew etymology. The West Wind comes from the strength or back of the world (the majority opinion puts the Shekhinah in this direction); the North Wind brings heat and famine; the East Wind agitates the entire world like a goat***; and the South Wind brings rain and makes plants grow. Judging from CNN, most of the world is still dealing with east winds. But I have decided, without consulting the Weather Channel, that we are experiencing south winds today. Grow, plants, grow!

I really, really want to go out and plant something. Except that I already own enough houseplants to fill most of my car, and I'm moving in three months. I need my own garden. Or, failing that, some more spring.

* -- That is, God's presence. Only a good deal more complicated than that. And female.
** -- Whose biography is not especially relevant, for a change.
*** -- Usually, the East Wind gets much worse press than the North Wind. Elsewhere in the Talmud, the East Wind is blamed for causing miscarriages and making pearls rot; it has the power to destroy the world, except that it is held back by an angel.

It has finally dawned on me, after spending a solid week complaining about a sore throat and a gravelly voice, that I might be sick. I'm not planning to do anything about it except possibly take a Vitamin C tablet now and then, but I guess it's good to know.

Have you ever had one of those journal-hopping days when everyone else is doing such interesting things that you spend all your allotted time posting lengthy comments? No? Well, my contribution -- my longest contribution -- to the whole fictional-moral-judgments discussion (starting here) can actually be found right here. In brief, I fail to understand why fiction should have such a privileged status that judgments made about it are entirely unrelated to judgments made about Everything Else. But it is, of course, more complicated. I like complication.

There is also a nifty conversation about the best ending for Buffy which I thought I'd go ahead and blather about in here. It's branched off into all sorts of fascinating sidepoints, and I can't take time to respond to all of them. But my preferred end scenario would indeed take off from those long-forgotten questions in "Gingerbread" and would involve Buffy and Friends achieving some sort of consequential victory -- preferably something to do with the Hellmouth, sealing it in such a way that it could never be reopened or recur anywhere else. At that point, Sunnydale would become a normal small city. Spike should waver on the edge of redemption and die heroically in the process; he's a great character, but there's less and less left for him to do on the show these days, and nothing at all to do in the world after it ends (if vampires are still around at all). Dawn should actually receive confirmation that her Key powers are gone, to make us all happy, and should then go off to college -- probably someplace urban and artsy -- knowing that she is loved. Willow, if she can be rescued from her horrible character arc this season, should graduate from UC-Sunnydale with an honors Religious Studies thesis containing the research that helped her friends seal the Hellmouth for good, then join the Council of Watchers so that she can help Giles reform them. This, incidentally, should be what Giles has been working at indirectly ever since he left Sunnydale, although he'll come back to Sunnydale for the Buffy finale. (Of all the poor characterization decisions in S6, the choice not to give Giles a better excuse to leave Sunnydale is the most egregious.) Xander should wind up with a job that makes him happy and, perhaps, a girl who makes him happy, although I feel no need to pair either him or Willow off at the show's end. I don't know whether or not he should stay in Sunnydale, but suspect he'd enjoy rebuilding some of the things damaged in Buffy's final Hellmouth showdown. (I am willing to contemplate a continuation of Xander/Anya somewhere down the line, but with a really long break, and with the understanding that she's now CEO of her own Fortune 500 magic-supplies ("dietary supplement") company and he's had some serious therapy.) Buffy... well, I think Buffy deserves some time off to travel and relax, but I kind of suspect she'd eventually choose to move somewhere within reasonable driving distance of Dawn, keep in touch with her friends and with Angel, and maybe get into police work. (Remember the aptitude tests from "What's My Line?" Remember Buffy's crime-busting talent in "Anne"? Remember "Restless," and "I'm going to be a fireman when the floods roll back"? Think a much, much more together version of Kate Lockley in Angel S2. Buffy could do a lot of good that way.) I'd want to end on a note of new possibilities for Buffy.

And, speaking of That Other Show, I am also among those who feel that Buffy and Angel should have both the desire and the opportunity to be a couple again after he turns human and she retires from active Slayer duty. They might opt to go back to being good friends in the end, but we've been told repeatedly that they love each other, and I like to think that love lasts in one form or another. I want that to be acknowledged. (I also want them to resolve Spike and Dru's relationship somehow -- no, not a happy ending, just a resolution. "Crush" wasn't it.) But romance shouldn't be the center of either series, and so shouldn't be completely central to the ending. I'd like Angel to end not with just any old apocalypse,* but with a convincing Final Battle and End of Days in which the Original Scoobies play key roles. One can have such a battle and keep history going -- Tolkien did it twice** -- but everything has to be rather thoroughly changed afterwards, and that won't play well on TV.

* -- This entry's title is actually taken from a very interesting book by Frank Kermode which has a great deal to say about the appeal of apocalyptic visions in fiction. Kermode distinguishes between "terminal" and "apocalyptic" endings, and I would prefer the former for Buffy and the latter for Angel. Of course, the Buffyverse use of "apocalypse" is much less serious and final than Kermode's use of it.

** -- Yes, I realize that there were Four Ages in Middle-Earth, but I've never thought that the end of the Second Age amounted to nearly enough. Perhaps it's just because we never got the Akallabêth in the kind of depth and breadth as the Silmarillion.

Hours of sleep last night: 4. Food consumed today: one peanut doughnut, a few bites of truly execrable blueberry bagel (am not and have never been a serious bagel snob -- prefer more exclusive company of bialy snobs -- but bagel in question was especially awful). Academic administrative responsibilities accepted: 1. Number of unpaid academic administrative responsibilities currently being juggled: 3. Ability to add extra lines to CV and feel powerful, not necessarily in that order: priceless.

Cannot actually decide whether am possessed by spirit of MasterCard commercial or Bridget Jones's Diary, but am writing journal entries on laptop on train in effort to stay awake. Trouble with BJD paradigm is lack of possible use for scenic British slang such as "shag" in descriptions of ever-more-mundane academic life.

Should probably not attempt to imitate Helen Fielding's style. (Neither should Helen Fielding, judging from Bridget Jones sequel.) Attended Smug Married dinner party this past weekend, was baffled by installations, and am wearing extremely short skirt and smart matching jacket, but realize that this is all Bridget and I will ever have in common. Also, need dark-purple rather than black pumps to complete ensemble.

Weekend rundown, to prove point: enjoyed delightful conversation with nuclear physicist from Oxford at SMs' house Fri. night. Think he is almost entirely wrong about direction of medieval Muslim philosophy of religion. Spent Sat. and Sun. in conference. Managed to moderate panel and respond cogently to papers when really wanted to jump up and scream "GetoutgetoutGETOUT" to one presenter à la Dawn on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Did, however, manage to talk about Buffy in different session. Believe that at least half of all humanities professors watch or have watched Buffy, and wonder why commercials never reflect this demographic. Love small conferences, as quality socializing opportunities much more extensive. Will love small conferences even more once new job begins and institution will pay for nearby hotel room.

Will admit that dropping one's first-person-singular pronouns and definite articles retains a certain allure, especially when exhausted, but am frustrated by inability to signal clearly whether exhaustion belongs to self or part of speech.

Have nothing in particular to do tomorrow, thank God. Will swing by lesser American equivalent of kebab van on way back to apartment (not flat). Suspect nourishment would be sensible.

Possible content-related post tomorrow, after lie-in.