Crikey O'Reilly!
Jan. 8th, 2015 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSo: as you may or may not know, I (perhaps stupidly) agreed to read for the World Fantasy awards, which essentially means that I'm probably not going to have to buy any books this year, because people are already sending me .pdfs and physical books by the score. The first one I've completed thus far is something I actually already wanted to read anyhow, Darren Gregory's novella We Are All Completely Fine, which centres around a support and therapy group for survivors of supernatural events. Said supernatural events all turn out to be related, of course; they're based around incursions from a hell-like other dimension, one which has in its time infected this reality with its presence through a Silent Hill-like video game, a serial killer who opens his victims up and shrimshaws their bones, a djinni-worshipping cult, a family of cannibals trapping people to feed their mutating “spider-mother,” an Innsmouthian village full of weird creatures, etc. The attention to detail in terms of PTSD is really great, but so is the not-so-slow-burn plot, always building in the background and drawing you along headfirst. It's been a really nice introduction to the process, though I need to start and maintain a spreadsheet ASAP, instead of just piling the books in the corner and saving the .pdfs to my desktop.
Otherwise, one not great side effect of me upping my output so frantically has been that the degerated disk in my neck is flaring up again, which means I spent a portion of today getting my Mobicox/Tecta prescription refilled for the first time in about a year and a half. Up 'til now, I've done okay with core training, physio and way too much Robaxicet, but the last two days have been frankly excruciating. The weather doesn't help, of course—sixteen below all yesterday, causing ice to form on the inside of our bedroom windows—nor does the stress; I'm trying to be zen, but it obviously ain't working, because I keep waking up from nightmares at 4:30 AM every damn morning no matter when I go to bed, then spending an hour calming down before I can get any more sleep. Still, I'm probably a hard push away from the end of Chapter Six, which puts me hovering on the edge of the second part of the book: Quarry Argent Folklore Museum and Vinegar House ahoy. (I'd been thinking that I would probably write out the entirety of Mr and Mrs Whitcomb's honeymoon tour of Europe, but it occurred to me earlier today that just quoting various diary entries/letters and providing a précis of the parts in between will do just as well, in context.)
The big nice thing over the last couple of days has been Marvel's Agent Carter, which I break the mold not at all by admitting I loved a lot. As I said to sovay:
Wow, that was pretty much pure pleasure. It's the Hayley Atwell slugging dudes show, but it's also paced like a 1940s serial (naturally), so there's a cliffhanger at every opportunity. Loving the relationship between she and Jarvis, Howard Stark's butler and the human template for Tony Stark's A.I. (One assumes Tony probably knew him growing up, which is bittersweet.) It's completely platonic and likely to remain so, since Jarvis is very happily married to a thus far off-screen wife, but the juxtaposition of his "feminine" traits with her "masculine" ones is wonderful. She feels like she can't get close to people because she might get them hurt, as happens fairly early on to her first roommate, but he points out that just as she was once the moral/spiritual and otherwise support for Steve Rogers, she now needs somebody to play that same role for her. This means the the narrative is explicitly framing her as a superhero, as having taken over Captain America's mantle, and I love that. (Other people have also pointed out that Steve is effectively serving the function of a fridged GF in this, causing Peggy womanpain—or hell, let's just call it hero-pain—and spurring her to greater heights of super-spyness.)
I do very much love Peggy's physicality in this—Hayley Atwell's foursquare, compact, period-appropriate frame, almost chunky by modern standards, less graceful than athletic. She's been trained, but her first instincts in combat are always to simply pick something up and punch the person confronting her with it, and it's gorgeous. She can do the honey-trap stuff, but not for long; there's a running gag about her essentially being "too good" at her job in some ways, always knocking antagonists out before she can question them, which is only compounded when she ends up fighting not one but two operatives who've had laryngectomies.
People come and go pretty fast, but there's some nice tension being developed with Agent Sousa (Enver Gjokaj), the one guy at the office who's similarly routinely sidelined/not allowed into the field not by male chavinism but by the fact that he lost a leg in the war, and Angie the automat waitress (Lyndsy Fonseca), who eventually gets Peggy to move into the all-female apartment building she herself occupies. Will she be a sidekick, Peggy's Bucky—with all that that implies—or is she maybe an undercover agent keeping an eye on Peggy, waiting to attack or switch sides (Peggy's Natasha)? I'd go for either; Fonseca used to play Alex on Nikita, so she certainly knows the drill...[at any rate,] THIS FOR YOU SHOW, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT WHEN YOU GET TO SEE IT, is all I'm basically sayin'.
So yeah, all that. I get that it has intersectional issues, because what the fuck doesn't, but on the strength of those two episodes alone, I trust them to eventually be addressed. One way or the other, I'm in.
Okay, back to it.
Otherwise, one not great side effect of me upping my output so frantically has been that the degerated disk in my neck is flaring up again, which means I spent a portion of today getting my Mobicox/Tecta prescription refilled for the first time in about a year and a half. Up 'til now, I've done okay with core training, physio and way too much Robaxicet, but the last two days have been frankly excruciating. The weather doesn't help, of course—sixteen below all yesterday, causing ice to form on the inside of our bedroom windows—nor does the stress; I'm trying to be zen, but it obviously ain't working, because I keep waking up from nightmares at 4:30 AM every damn morning no matter when I go to bed, then spending an hour calming down before I can get any more sleep. Still, I'm probably a hard push away from the end of Chapter Six, which puts me hovering on the edge of the second part of the book: Quarry Argent Folklore Museum and Vinegar House ahoy. (I'd been thinking that I would probably write out the entirety of Mr and Mrs Whitcomb's honeymoon tour of Europe, but it occurred to me earlier today that just quoting various diary entries/letters and providing a précis of the parts in between will do just as well, in context.)
The big nice thing over the last couple of days has been Marvel's Agent Carter, which I break the mold not at all by admitting I loved a lot. As I said to sovay:
Wow, that was pretty much pure pleasure. It's the Hayley Atwell slugging dudes show, but it's also paced like a 1940s serial (naturally), so there's a cliffhanger at every opportunity. Loving the relationship between she and Jarvis, Howard Stark's butler and the human template for Tony Stark's A.I. (One assumes Tony probably knew him growing up, which is bittersweet.) It's completely platonic and likely to remain so, since Jarvis is very happily married to a thus far off-screen wife, but the juxtaposition of his "feminine" traits with her "masculine" ones is wonderful. She feels like she can't get close to people because she might get them hurt, as happens fairly early on to her first roommate, but he points out that just as she was once the moral/spiritual and otherwise support for Steve Rogers, she now needs somebody to play that same role for her. This means the the narrative is explicitly framing her as a superhero, as having taken over Captain America's mantle, and I love that. (Other people have also pointed out that Steve is effectively serving the function of a fridged GF in this, causing Peggy womanpain—or hell, let's just call it hero-pain—and spurring her to greater heights of super-spyness.)
I do very much love Peggy's physicality in this—Hayley Atwell's foursquare, compact, period-appropriate frame, almost chunky by modern standards, less graceful than athletic. She's been trained, but her first instincts in combat are always to simply pick something up and punch the person confronting her with it, and it's gorgeous. She can do the honey-trap stuff, but not for long; there's a running gag about her essentially being "too good" at her job in some ways, always knocking antagonists out before she can question them, which is only compounded when she ends up fighting not one but two operatives who've had laryngectomies.
People come and go pretty fast, but there's some nice tension being developed with Agent Sousa (Enver Gjokaj), the one guy at the office who's similarly routinely sidelined/not allowed into the field not by male chavinism but by the fact that he lost a leg in the war, and Angie the automat waitress (Lyndsy Fonseca), who eventually gets Peggy to move into the all-female apartment building she herself occupies. Will she be a sidekick, Peggy's Bucky—with all that that implies—or is she maybe an undercover agent keeping an eye on Peggy, waiting to attack or switch sides (Peggy's Natasha)? I'd go for either; Fonseca used to play Alex on Nikita, so she certainly knows the drill...[at any rate,] THIS FOR YOU SHOW, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT WHEN YOU GET TO SEE IT, is all I'm basically sayin'.
So yeah, all that. I get that it has intersectional issues, because what the fuck doesn't, but on the strength of those two episodes alone, I trust them to eventually be addressed. One way or the other, I'm in.
Okay, back to it.
