As part of this blog's sporadic attention to especially silly culturally significant links, let me recommend this alleged transcript of a Fellowship of the Rings movie DVD commentary by none other than Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (via Ghost of a Flea). An excerpt will give you some idea of what to expect:
Chomsky: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf's pipe-weed ring. He's trying to divert it.
Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf's interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.
(Am I the only person wishing the commentary had extended to a Marxist analysis of Lothlorien? Yes? Oh, well.)
I could probably manage a segue here -- there is, of course, a Fellowship of the Peep site -- but I actually wanted to go on and recommend this lovely photo essay depicting Marshmallow Peeps doing library research for any librarians or library-lovers among my readers. I am thinking of sending it to my students by way of a challenge. You know, "if Marshmallow Peeps can do research, perhaps those of you with movable appendages could make it to the reserve desk once in awhile." Only more tactfully phrased... or perhaps not, it being nearly the end of the semester.
The "Purgatory" part of this post is, frankly, a design flaw in the following quiz: it only asked whether or not I held pagan beliefs, and -- strictly speaking -- I do not. By rights, though, I ought to be in Limbo at best, not having been baptized. Still, it's an entertaining meme, and it confirms my suspicion that I need to acquire more exciting bad habits.
The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very High |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Moderate |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Moderate |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Moderate |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Very Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Very Low |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very Low |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Low |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | Moderate |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | Very Low |
This post has been brought to you by the letter P, the number 9, and a whole complicated mess of mortgage-related technicalities which have fried my brain and rendered me incapable of blogging about anything serious.
The more I contemplate the fin de Buffy, the more I realize that I like my textual canons closed. Finished. Ended. Gift-wrapped with a pretty red bow on top. You get the idea. It's not that I dislike playing around with collections of texts deemed authentic or genuine or authoritative, which is what "canons" are in this connection. I love embellishing canons with sequins and glitter, cutting and pasting them into collages, molding them into new and different shapes, and I'm going to stop this metaphor before I wind up with a hermeneutical version of Martha Stewart Living. But, seriously -- I want canons themselves fixed. I wonder why?
It might be ancestral sensibility: a closed Scriptural canon is one of the few things on which both sides of my religious heritage agree. It might be scholarly training: one has to define a group of texts in order to write the Definitive Work on them (while New Discoveries may revitalize your field, they will also explode many of your theories). It might be psychological idiosyncrasy, because I am a control freak, and open canons are uncontrollable. It might even be a vaguely sensed spiritual principle of mine that God enjoys a good debate over established texts more than another round of tedious miracles ("no proof can be brought from a carob-tree"). But it's probably equal parts history and habit: I have made a point of avoiding open canons ever since discovering at a tender age that "classics" were such in large part because their authors were safely dead and couldn't get a huge contract and start churning out annual cookie-cutter trilogies.* Now I mostly deal with texts by long-dead (or otherwise out-of-action) authors, and everyone stays happy.
Only... several years back, I got interested in media fandom and Buffy. The proper attitude in media fandom seems to involve praying for renewal, for another season, for more stories. I only recently started thinking about Buffy as an open canon -- and now I wonder what took me so long. Indulge me for a moment as I compare Buffy to the ur-canon of "Western culture," aka the Bible (any formulation). Both are canonical text collections, often internally contradictory. Both are heavy on intertextual references and subtext. Both lend themselves to creative commentary. Both are supplemented by widely available apocryphal retellings, approved and unapproved. Both are allegedly inspired by a single guiding genius, but bear the unmistakable imprint of multiple authors, some more skilled than others, some more interesting than others, some emphasizing different things than others. (Note: no matter where this comparison has taken us, Joss Whedon should under no circumstances be confused with God.)
So now, with a gently simmering dissatisfaction with most of Season Seven on the back burner and only four episodes to go, I'm wondering what I was thinking to get attached to a show which isn't over yet. Sure, I could've pretended the show ended after S3/5/6, like some people I know, or declared my fondness for "classic Buffy" -- i.e., the first three seasons -- but that, like the people who ignore the parts of the Bible that don't suit them, feels like cheating. Maybe the Buffy series finale won't be as bad as I fear -- after all, spoilers suggest that they're doing many of the things I wanted this time last year. And there's always Angel, which I feel much better about this season, and which will continue the Buffyverse story next year if all goes well. It's just unsettling to realize that I've gone on record praising an incomplete work, that something I liked could turn (perhaps "has turned") into something I dislike, that my favorite characters/themes/concepts are by no means safe.** A series isn't all about the finale, of course, but endings usually reference beginnings, and last words pack a special punch in any situation: I don't think it's accidental that I can remember the last phrases in the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and the New Testament off the top of my head.***
But even if the Buffy series finale disappoints me as much as the rest of this season (post-"Selfless") has, I keep reminding myself that I do know how to deal with these things. I am, after all, a professional text masseuse. I can tell you more than you'd ever want to know about apocrypha, exegesis, commentary traditions, the medieval Matters of a good half-dozen locales, and the postmodern/theoretical equivalents thereof. In my spare time, I study Mishnah and get an arguably perverse thrill from working toward a contemporary, feminist, liberal Jewish reading of Leviticus.**** It's pretty obvious what I ought to do with myself once the Buffy canon closes, and that is pay more attention to referential -- as people quaintly call it, "fan" -- fiction. Good thing I've already got a start on that one.
It's not that any of these reflections will stop me from kvetching about analyzing the Buffy finale. I'll just have someplace to go once I get tired of doing so. And I'll have a nice closed canon to work with. Speaking of endings that reference beginnings, until I actually see the finale, I'm going to imagine the series closing on the same line that opened it seven years ago: "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
* -- Why, yes, I did read a lot of contemporary fantasy at one point -- middle-to-high-school, I guess. However did you guess? ;)
** -- For instance, I don't really consider the Jill Paton Walsh novels to be canonical continuations of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey series, but they're being presented as such. (Once past Thrones, Dominations, this is simply ridiculous; they're legally sanctioned referential fiction. Alas, this awareness does not stop me from reading them, and while they don't quite ring true to the DLS works, they're not bad.) So I can't help dreading that Walsh, craving legitimacy, is going to follow one of Sayers's few explicit suggestions about the post-WWII Wimsey family and kill off Lord Saint-George.
*** -- Respectively, these are "the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up"; "so that, when I come, I do not strike the whole land with utter destruction"; and -- this is the easy one -- "the grace of the Lord Jesus be with all His saints, amen."
**** -- In fact, my least favorite book of the Hebrew Bible isn't Leviticus, not by a long shot: it's Jeremiah. This is probably because I've never bothered to study Jeremiah in depth, and so have the impression that it consists of a lot of self-righteous whining accompanied by jaw-droppingly sexist metaphors.
This entry is as empty of serious content as an Easter Peep. If you want to actually think about something -- after the Easter break, most of my students certainly don't! -- go look at the theory.org.uk Trading Cards, another one of those Links I Can't Believe Nobody Told Me About Before. I am working on a post with actual content, but it'll probably have to wait until after at least five of the things on this week's to-do list are crossed off. And so... I'm going to share the past twenty-four hours of my thrilling life, including menu details and allergy symptoms, with any readers foolish enough to keep going. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The biggest problem with spending four days of Passover on the East Coast is that my holiday-preparation-and-cooking energy is already gone, and I still haven't gotten around to, oh, buying perishable groceries for my apartment. I probably shouldn't blame my fridge depletion entirely on Passover; it's a natural consequence of traveling an average of every two weeks all spring. Fortunately, unless I get a cheap last-minute fare and decide to attend my great-aunt's wedding after all -- and now the family will include a Seventh-Day Adventist! -- I should be staying put from now until, er, early May. (So, yeah, two weeks.) If it weren't Passover, though, I could simply thaw out some of the soups and stews I freeze in bulk for just this occasion. Since it is Passover... well, it's complicated.
I flew back into Boondoggle yesterday afternoon, and last night I attended a women's seder at Temple Boondoggle, which was an extremely satisfactory solution as far as food for that evening went -- soup and potluck salads and desserts. I even arrived early and helped peel eggs. Now, I remember women's (sometimes "feminist" or "Miriam's") seders as something we did in college. This was apparently Temple Boondoggle's first such seder -- a surprise to me only because Temple Boondoggle is very left-wing politically -- and two of the three women organizing it are friends of mine from Torah study. I would've done things a little differently, but for starting from scratch, this was great. Amusingly, though, it turns out that my Seder manners are a little... dominant. We were divided into smaller tables, you see, and nobody else at mine seemed to know to start the matzah around during the reading beforehand, or to tell everyone to take three pieces so they wouldn't have to pass it around again, or to encourage people to recite prayers together when appropriate. (Some of this is Service-Leading 101, and some of it's Seder-specific. I guess most women haven't had much experience with leading either, though.) And then there's the part where I like to throw in little bits of random laws or history or customs or funny stories as we go, and I thought everyone did that, but apparently it's just my family -- oh, okay, mostly just me, but my family's used to it by now. ("Where did you learn all of this?" one woman asked. "Have you been to Israel?" Oy.) And our senior rabbi. who showed up about halfway through this seder, very nearly annoyed me by sitting at my table and going into her own little extemporaneous asides. Hello, my name is Naomi, and I really like running things. Oh, well -- thank God I was born into a world where I can be that way. Next year, though, I think I'll get them to add some songs.
So I had no energy left for grocery-shopping last night. This morning, before I taught, I had Kosher-for-Pesach bridge mix for breakfast -- left over from the Easter basket I fixed for my father, and can I just point out that the intermarriage statistics in this country suggest that there should be a market for kosher-for-Pesach chocolate bunnies? For lunch, I had a food-court salad (no croutons) with halakhically dubious dressing. Why, you ask, do I not get off my tuchus and go to the grocery store now that the afternoon meetings are over? Well, either God has punished me for complaining about mold counts, or I have finally gotten far enough south for my sinuses to feel at home, because the pollen count apparently hit some point over Palm Sunday weekend that causes me to have an Instant Sinus Headache (with bonus scratchy eyes and sniffly nose) every time I spend more than five minutes outdoors or in my not-very-well-insulated, tree-surrounded apartment. Not surprisingly, I am developing a profound attachment to my sealed and climate-controlled office. If I moved a loveseat and a mini-fridge in here... no, the nearest shower would still require me to go outside. Also, I don't have a mini-fridge in here right now, and since it's Passover, there's not a whole heck of a lot I can eat on campus. In my office: tea. And then some other tea. And possibly more tea. There is an event going on downstairs which I could legitimately attend long enough to help myself to dinner, but it's... pizza. And we're back to that Passover thing.
Do you think the Israelite slaves had to deal with sinus headaches? I mean, sure, slavery and infanticide, but I bet Egypt has a low pollen count. On the other hand, Claritin -- which I will be getting at the drugstore whenever I finally decide to leave -- does look an awful lot like manna.
Another Seder, another year... does anyone else sing that to the tune of "Makin' Whoopee," or is it just us? I'm not so big with the showtunes myself, but most of the family loves them, and since everyone put up with my forcing them through all thirteen verses of "Echad Mi Yodeah" (non-Jews: think "Twelve Days of Christmas," only in Hebrew and with actual theological content) this year, I'm feeling relatively mellow. The fact that my laptop is currently running on my aunt's family's wireless system makes me even happier. I love cordlessness.
I also love creatively overdetermined holidays, and I hope everyone so inclined had a lovely commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, displaced ritual sacrifice, spring fertility festival, Hellenistic banquet, celebration of the barley harvest, anti-government rally, meditation on a couple millennia of carefully timed massacres, study session on the theme of spiritual liberation, seasonal poetry reading, and filksing (just so you know, "Echad Mi Yodeah" is a Jewish filk on a 15th/16th-century German "counting" song) over the past couple of nights.
This post actually started almost a week ago, when I led Torah study at Temple Boondoggle -- something I seem to be doing every month or two. (Torah study involves teaching stuff I like without having to assign reading or grade papers, and is therefore verging on Better Than Chocolate status.) Anyway, last week was Shabbat Ha-Gadol, the "great Sabbath" just before Pesach in post-rabbinic tradition, when some congregations have a custom of reading through the Haggadah. Temple Boondoggle has no such custom, to the best of my knowledge, but the Torah-study crowd did get my argument for why the Miriam-the-Prophetess-centered rituals which started in "feminist Seders" in the '70s have every reason to wind up in mainstream Haggadot in the twenty-first century. (If you are easily shocked by classical midrashim, liberal Judaism, or mild sexual innuendo, please take a deep breath before continuing.)
Shabbat Ha-Gadol is usually explained as being "great" because the special Haftarah reading ends with the promise that God will send Elijah "before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord" (Malachi 3:23). There are other explanations, though; my personal favorite comes from the classic midrash on Exodus (Shemot Rabba 15:5): “How great is the love that God has for the Jewish people, for He revealed Himself [to them] in a place of idolatry, in a place of filth, and in a place of impurity.”
The idea of God's showing up in a place of impurity is, conveniently enough, a perfectly good segue into last week's Torah portion, Metzora, which lays out laws for the treatment of tzara'at ("affliction," usually translated "leprosy,"* but it can occur on clothing and houses as well as human skin) and various types of gender-specific impurity (menstrual and seminal emissions). Most of these situations are treated by a period of self-imposed exile or isolation, followed by sacrifice, immersion in a ritual bath, or both. Now, I personally have trouble with purity laws -- not to mention the reasoning behind which ones are still in force and which ones aren't, and that's a post for another day during which I take Mary Douglas's name in vain a lot. But -- in marked contrast to the "family purity" laws -- very few Jewish interpreters have ever seriously tried to read tzara'at as medical; what with the house-and-clothes thing, many didn't even read it as a literal "disease."
The rabbis overwhelmingly concluded that the term tzara'at denoted a spiritual affliction (manifesting itself in physical symptoms, if at all), and they diagnosed the cause by looking at the most famous cases of tzara'at in the Hebrew Bible. Predictably, all the victims had been Doing Something Wrong, but the best known -- Moses at Mount Horeb, Elisha's servant Gehazi, and Miriam in Numbers 12 -- had seemingly been engaged in the complex and endemic wrongdoing of lashon hara, literally "evil tongue," more generally gossip and slander and falsehood rolled into one. Miriam was stricken with tzara'at for having spoken disapprovingly to Aaron about their brother Moses' relationship with his wife; this is the sort of thing which most of us consider a legitimate family concern, but God (who is, in the Torah, a serious busybody) took it otherwise. It took a week of exile from the camp for Miriam to recover from the resultant skin disease, and the Israelites waited for her before they moved on.
However -- and this is where I think it gets interesting -- the tradition associates Miriam with purity as well as impurity; indeed, Miriam's Well, the source of water which is said to have stayed with the wandering Israelites during her lifetime, is described as mayim chayim, "living waters," precisely the defining characteristic of a ritual bath, or mikveh, which confers purity. Many rabbinic commentators made this connection and explained that Miriam's Well was used as the communal mikveh during the Israelites' initial wandering in the desert.** Miriam, being female, would have been required to use it as well, not only to cleanse herself of tzara'at but also after the end of her menstrual period each month -- at least, according to the rabbinic fiction that everyone in the Hebrew Bible observed Second-Temple-era Pharisaic-style Judaism, but that's another story. At any rate, it's safe to say that Miriam's interpretative legacy is a bit complicated, in the same sense that it took the Israelites a bit longer than expected to cross the Sinai Peninsula.
Now, there are only six events which the Jewish people are explicitly commanded to remember, and they are conveniently listed in the Orthodox siddur as zechirot, "commandments of remembrance": the Sabbath day and its holiness, the day of the Exodus from Egypt, the receipt of the Torah at Sinai, the Amalekites' attack, "how you angered God in the wilderness" (Deut. 9:7; in context, about the Golden Calf), and "what God did to Miriam on your way out of Egypt" (Deut. 24:9). The Passover Seder is big on remembrance, perhaps even more so than most Jewish rituals, and when I thought about it, I realized that the traditional Seder actually does hit pretty much all the zechirot except the last. The Exodus is, of course, a gimme. If neither Seder falls on a Sabbath, the topic is covered in Dayenu, as is the revelation at Sinai (which is also suggested by the beginning of the Omer and in numerous places throughout the traditional Maggid). The dangers of idolatry and of angering God are emphasized by the part of the Maggid which begins with "long ago, our ancestors worshipped idols," not to mention the fate of the Egyptians. Amalek -- now synedoche for all foes of the Jewish people -- gets full time thanks to medieval additions such as "Pour out your wrath" and "It happened at midnight."
But what about Miriam? "What God did to Miriam" makes for a remarkably vague commandment. Within Deuteronomy 24, the verse is clearly alluding to the tzara'at episode in Numbers, but the traditional linkage of the six zechirot removes this context and leaves the question open. Why not make the remembrance about everything God did to Miriam? Drawing from the classical Jewish interpretative tradition, this would include not only the tzara'at episode and Miriam's Well, but her precocious advice to her father which allowed for her brother Moses' birth, her talent as a midwife, her gift of prophecy, her famous song at the Red Sea, and her eventual death by a kiss from God (like her siblings Moses and Aaron).***
So Miriam belongs in the Seder -- in a way which Moses, oddly enough, does not. Miriam and her relationship with God form one-sixth of the zechirot, cover the whole range of states of being from tahor ("pure") to tamei ("impure"), and fit handily into the most obvious aspect of Passover, the account of parallel physical and spiritual liberation. In my family Seder, we seem to be mentioning Miriam quite a bit, and while this owes something to the fact that I'm the one who does most of the Haggadah editing, even the conservative members of my family have yet to object.**** As I've said elsewhere, it's certainly important to Acknowledge The Presence Of Women In Our Tradition, but grafting them onto previously established rituals willy-nilly is pointless -- there are so many good ways to get them there regardless. Only now I have the weirdest urge to go take a dip in a mikveh....
* -- Tzara'at was translated into the Septuagint as Greek lepra, and that went straight through into Latin, and into English as "leprosy," by which point it meant something infinitely more medically specific than it ever was meant to.
** -- With the entertaining corollary that after Miriam's death, the community lacked a mikveh, putting all the women in a permanent state of impurity and thus making it impossible for anyone to have (presumptively heterosexual) sex. This line of reasoning then offers sexual frustration as a justification for all sorts of peculiar happenings, especially Numbers 25.
*** -- The explanation for why this is not specified in Miriam's case is that it would give rise to improper or immodest speculation if God (or, more precisely, the Shekhinah) were described as kissing a woman. I will leave my readers to draw whatever conclusions they wish about the rabbinic conception of God, modesty, and/or kissing.
**** -- Funniest moment of the first night: Aunt Miriam's expression as she realized simultaneously that (a) our newly rewritten Maggid did, in fact, include the midrashic bit about the Israelite women outsmarting Pharoah's first population-control plan by making themselves so beautiful that their husbands were never too exhausted for sex, although it was phrased much more delicately, and that (b) obviously, nobody had really read over what I had typed until now. Funniest moment of the second night: Aunt Miriam's expression as my easily shocked mother, who had not been present the night before, wound up reading that part out loud and completely missing any hint of scandalous content. (Nobody under age 18 Got It either night, which says something for my talents in the area of well-phrased euphemism.)
During my sophomore year of college, I had a brief but passionate literary affair with Matthew Arnold which has since mellowed into a comfortable long-distance friendship. Before that time, we'd barely met ("Dover Beach" in high school, I think), but after we were properly introduced in a course on literary criticism, I devoured every Arnold poem and essay in the Prepster College library. Thinking back through my favorites from "The Buried Life" to "On Translating Homer," I now recognize this as a portent: Arnold hits all my favorite literary genres and most of my pet topics as covered in this blog and in my academic research. Also, there's a great deal to be said in favor of the insult "Philistine," especially since the people it's likely to be directed against won't get it. Of course, Arnold and I have our differences, especially when it comes to merits of fantasy or his taste in French Prose, and the less said about "Sohrab and Rustam" or "St. Paul and Protestantism" the better (except, perhaps, that in both cases they deserved one another).
That said, Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy" seems more relevant to our recent debates about academic living, although in a fairly oblique way. The poem ostensibly retells an seventeenth-century story about an Oxford grad student in anthropology who goes off to finish his dissertation on a "Gipsy" community and runs into a centuries-long case of writer's block, but gains immortality as a result of never having had to attend faculty meetings.*
One could easily read an indictment of academia into this poem. The protagonist is "of clever parts and quick inventive brain" but becomes "tired of knocking at Preferment's door" and takes off. Years later, when a couple of his former colleagues run into him, he tells them that he wouldn't be caught dead back at Oxford because, frankly, the Gypsies are a lot more powerful than any piddling don: "the Gipsy crew, / His mates, had arts to rule as they desired / The workings of men's brains; / And they can bind them to what thoughts they will." Fortunately, perhaps, the scholar-gipsy isn't planning to use his mind-control techniques on his former advisor: 'And I,' he said, 'the secret of their art, / When fully learn'd, will to the world impart: / But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!'" (Funny how there's always a catch.)
When all's said and done, Arnold seems to envy the scholar-gipsy something fierce:
Thou waitest for the spark from Heaven: and we,
Vague half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose weak resolves never have been fulfill'd;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah, do not we, Wanderer, await it too?
I used to have trouble deciding whether this was an internal or an external criticism of academia -- as of the writing of "The Scholar-Gipsy," I wouldn't necessarily place Arnold in the "academic" category, but he is certainly trying to speak for denizens of the ivory tower Joseph Duermer described as springing up right around this time. Certainly, I've heard variations on this part of the theme from both inside and outside academia: "Is that a real job?" "Don't you do anything useful?" "Shouldn't I be finding a cure for cancer or something?" "Why doesn't this live up to my/your/our expectations?"
After nearly a year of full-time tenure-track teaching, though, it's clear to me that the scholar-gipsy is an internal fantasy. I'm tired. Really, seriously, tired, to the point that I'm pronouncing it "tahrd" and you can tell just by listening to me that I hail from significantly south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I just filed for a tax extension for the first time in my life, I'm several weeks behind on grading, and I'm going out of town for something like three out of four weekends in May. I need to publish something. I need to update my blog more often. I need to have lunch with approximately three dozen people. I need... more time, apparently, or possibly the ability to go without sleep. A small part of my brain has started fantasizing about returning to school, not because I miss being poor and sub-adult, but because I like learning more than grading. I want to wander off into the countryside, away from my responsibilities, and hang out with a bunch of people who will shoot the breeze about esoterica while indefinitely delaying my return to the Real World of academia.
The thing is -- as the scholar-gipsy himself attests -- running off to learn from the Gypsies doesn't actually work. The Heaven-sent moments never quite arrive. Furthermore, Arnold explains, the scholar-gipsy is now a living anachronism who can only continue to exist because he was born before "this strange disease of modern life, / With its sick hurry, its divided aims." He has no immunity to this "disease," and if he comes into contact with anyone, he will contract "the infection of our mental strife, / Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; / And we should win thee from thy own fair life, / Like us distracted, and like us unblest." The real problem, according to Arnold, is not academia but modernity.
Perhaps fortunately, this is where Arnold and I part ways: my romanticism only goes so far. If it comes to a choice between modernity and Ye Olde Fantasie Past (not to mention the historic past, with no indoor plumbing), I'm going with modernity. Throw in the scholar-gipsy's requirement of isolation, which is probably an introvert's dream but my nightmare, and it's no contest: the Gypsies can keep their secret arts. I have a job to do -- distracted, yes, but not altogether unblessed. Academia isn't perfect, but neither is any other job. And, after all, if I want to ignore my responsibilities for the afternoon and go learn from mysterious people who are skilled at understanding and convincing others... I've got a blogroll. Let the sparks go to someone who needs them.
* -- Er, more or less. And then there's way too much description of the Oxfordshire countryside and that weird extended simile at the end about Mediterranean trade routes, but we're not going there.
I know I promised to write an end-of-Buffy post, and I eventually will, but right now I won't for the simple reason that I've recently agreed to write an end-of-Buffy article to appear in actual print under my actual name.* And I'm not exactly convinced that I can write both an article and a blog post on similar topics without there being just enough similarity for it to cause problems. Oh, right, and the other thing is that the current end-of-season Buffy spoilers are coming across as kind of tedious, and since genuine bitterness would only be wasted at this point in the show's history, I'm just hoping that there's some great stuff I'll only discover by watching. If all else fails, I'm a sucker for apocalypses.
And this brings us back to Angel, which is playing on my weaknesses a thousandfold. Expect me to swallow a one-episode plot dump explaining away everything that's happened in the past two and a half seasons of the show (more or less), plus some egregious character assassination, as a putatively evil power's plan to be born into this world? Well, if you throw in some prophecy jokes... sure, why not? (Spoilers follow for both "Players" and "Inside Out," along with irresponsible but unspoilery speculation for the rest of the season.)
I didn't write about "Players" last week because there was obviously more to come; the Unmasking Cordelia B-plot of that episode became the A-plot of this one. "Inside Out" was good, maybe even very, if not quite amazing. Granted, Connor as a character has never particularly thrilled me, and if I'm supposed to feel sympathy for the easily manipulated little psychopath, it's at least two grievous errors of judgment too late. I'm also sick of hearing people describe Cordelia to Angel as "the woman you love" (derivative much?), and Darla's reappearance was a major disappointment unless we optimistically assume that the "Powers" which sent her really wanted Connor not to stop the girl's murder but to consider himself irredeemable afterwards. But, if nothing else, I have to admire the chutzpah it takes for the Angel writers to cheerfully retcon most of the series, and the designer touch of having all this information come from unreliable and/or incomplete sources, so that we can't be absolutely certain about anything. In other positive news, someone finally got Charisma Carpenter to deliver a few lines with something approaching feeling, and the AI team all reacted in character and did mostly appropriate stuff, and I almost felt sorry for Angel.** So the outlook for the show is surprisingly bright.
Me, I'm enjoying mulling over the implications for the show's mythos. Which Powers are which, and what are they after? Nobody on Angel has thought it through so far, but that's probably because nobody in the Buffyverse except Ethan Rayne can think theologically worth a good goddamn (so to speak).*** Given Fred's expertise in speculative physics, though, she's the logical choice to fill that slot -- you'd expect Wesley to be, but the Watchers must train it out of themselves, and Wesley's got prophecy issues a-go-go at this point. Still, this is one of the reasons why I'm not the least bit bothered by the implications of the trailer for next episode. (The other reason is that I am all in favor of Fred's not getting stuck in Yet Another Romantic Plot. I'll say more after next episode, of course.) While Fred is getting around to thinking about it, though, I want to take a crack at the sixty-four dollar question: how far back does the Master Plan really go, and what does it include?
According to the highly untrustworthy and mercifully late Skip, a character who I liked well enough but couldn't grok the worship of, the Master Plan began at least as far back as S1 "Hero." But I strongly suspect it's going to revolve around the S1 finale and probably my favorite Angel ep ever, "To Shanshu in L.A." (The episode is about prophecies, translation problems, friendships, and a quasi-apocalyptic demon foe. How could I not love it?) "Players" already featured the joke, dating back to "TSILA," of Wesley "mistranslating" a prophecy, not to mention the Magic 8-Ball, subject of one of the many excellent quotes from that episode: "This is an ancient sacred text, not a Magic 8-Ball!" This time it was a Magic 8-Ball that Lorne was holding, which pretty much sums up Angel Investigations' current views on prophecy. On the other hand... there's been a Beast. "Things are unraveling. The dark ones approach our temple now." There's been a lot of severing of connections (and not just decapitation). There's Cordelia, who "know[s] neither friend nor family" in her current state (just as back in "TSILA"), and there's a vampire with a soul who's looking kinda close to becoming human.
Angel was probably right not to believe everything he's foretold, and Gunn is right to insist on his own free will, but I think Vocah was right as well: "The old order passes away, and the new order has come. He that was first shall now be last, and he that was dead shall now arise."**** Or as Wesley put it in "Blind Date," "there's a design, Angel. Hidden in the chaos it may be, but it's there, and you have your place in it."
Yes, I know, there go my expectations rising again, and they're going to take a fall. But in the meantime, I'm having fun, I'm either four or five out of five on my wish list for this season, and apocalyptic prophecies -- as I've said about a million times -- aren't exactly a science. ;)
* -- In a magazine I've heard of, yet. And they emailed me with the idea. And they're paying me. As an ex-sorta-journalist, this last should not surprise me, but as an academic, it's novel -- and a clear sign that God wants me to invest in Buffy DVDs.
** -- As Headmaster of the Really Stupid Plans Academy, you'd kind of expect Angel to decide to go alone to take down his superhuman son and kill the evil being which has given his former friend equally superhuman strength in a highly time-sensitive manuever. But you'd also expect someone in AI to pipe up with a little advice along those lines.
*** -- And just possibly Tara. Note, by the way, that I just named one permanently exiled and one dead character: the Buffyverse is not kind to people who act according to explicitly religious principles.
**** -- I really doubt that the "he" there is intended to be gender-specific: the last risen dead person we had was Darla, and my money's on either Cordy or Lilah for this rep.