cryptolect

Maybe this is something which is true of a lot of people, giving rise to the saying, but I have found that after saying I would never do something I end up doing it almost immediately.  To the extent that when I hear myself saying it I often take a mental pause to think 'that will probably happen quite soon then'.  Recently in a conversation I found myself saying that I hate babyfics (which in context of thinking about fic was the equivalent of saying I'd never write one).  The next morning while having an unusual lie-in I got hit with a sudden ficspiration for...yes.  It will have to join the queue though.  I have no idea how some people (people with little children, no less!) manage to write so many long plotty fics.  I can barely crank out a few basic smutlets and that's stealing from time when I should be doing other things.  Let alone my to-read list...

Today's link is to I Blame The Patriarchy.  I have no idea whether everyone already knows about it or not, but it's a feminist blog which I have found very helpful in untangling my own troubled relationship with sexism.  Like a fish trying to describe water, or whatever the saying is, I find it hard to think clearly about the issues which are actually affecting me.  But Aunt Twisty has such a clear view on it all.  It doesn't really matter whether I always agree, although I usually do, it's just a really helpful reference point.

This 30-day posting commitment / challenge has had such an amazing effect, it's like Spring Comes to Dreamwidth, everything budding and shooting all over the place.  I thought I'd give it a go, although I'll have to stop almost immediately and start again later as I am going for a few days to a place with no internet.

I'll start by linking this blog, which is ostensibly a cooking blog in main part and which does have some lovely recipes but is mainly attractive for the quality of the writing.  The writer is Russian, living in Amsterdam, and writes wonderful English but in the distinctive style of a non-EFL speaker.  That gives rise to some of the charm of her prose but my guess is that an interesting and talented writer probably betrays herself as such in any language.

So on top of various visa-based madnesses we have been engaging with lately, some poor soul has got our address entered against their passport application so I keep receiving their passport, letters etc. through the post, which of course I've returned but they keep coming.  Today I called the Passport Agency to try to get them to put a note on their system and the chap I spoke to was so stern that I started stuttering so much I could hardly get the words out.  What between that and the fact that he was working the late shift and (therefore, possibly) wasn't really interested in listening to what I was saying it was a right old comedy of errors.  I feel very blessed that I don't have to deal with this shit on the regular.  but still, so much for a relaxing start to my bank holiday weekend.  Now I'm wired with anxiety.

Argle.

Just sticking them down as they come to me in no particular order.

Seen it three times and still haven't had enough.  I can't remember any other film I've enjoyed this uncomplicatedly - just sat there grinning like a fool.  The flaws in the plot do unfortunately become more apparent with repeated viewing as well.  I'm sort of hoping that there might be an extended cut released which will fix some of the issues.  But that said, I'm not complaining - given all the givens it was an amazing achievement.

Loki.  Unfortunately although I saw Thor and enjoyed it, I don't really remember it very well so I only have AA to draw on.  I enjoyed Loki as the villain, loved his costume and thought he pulled off the helmet very well.  The sceptre sometimes seemed a little unwieldy but ay, that shot in the museum where he so elegantly flips it and cracks that guy on the head like he's spiking a volleyball...well.  I didn't get very much emotion off Loki throughout, for the most part he seemed no more than mildly aggravated when things weren't going his way, and no more than mildly amused when they were.  That meant that Coulson's remarks about him lacking conviction and it being in his nature to lose rang very true.  If he had one defining characteristic it seemed to be that of grace in defeat. 

Given that, I struggled a little to read his motivations and some of this might be my own extrapolations, but.  On the one hand I think he probably does have himself on a fairly tight rein.  On the other hand I actually think he doesn't really care too much about any of it, really, as long as he continues to be the focus of Thor's attention, and crucially, as long as he continues to cause Thor pain.  Thor has held out an olive branch, but I think, to Loki's mind, if he accepts that then Thor gets to move past this and think that everything is alright again with his world.  But I don't think Loki ever wants everything to be alright for Thor ever again, no matter what he has to go through to keep being the grit in the ointment.  And although obviously the events of the previous film are causal to that...my feeling is that it's possibly not so much about him not being an Asgardian, or not having a throne of his own, but about how that discovery caused a paradigm shift in how he sees Thor's perspective. 

I feel like it just flipped a switch in him where he realised that for Thor, life is basically *always* going to be easy in crucial respects, and for Loki it *never* is, and that crucially, Thor is never going to understand that or be able to acknowledge it.  Thor is the oldest, Odin's son, an Asguardian, and an uncomplicated soul who finds pleasure in life pretty much everywhere.  He even lucked into a girlfriend the second he entered his banishment.  And because he has all that, he doesn't really get where Loki's coming from.  Thor just wants to say, look, you're still my brother, can't we just make as if nothing's changed and, can't everybody just get along?  And quaff something, probably.  So Loki's mission now is to take Thor down to a place from which he can get a new perspective.  And he wants to do that up close and personally.  I guess it's the difference between Loki being motivated by what he isn't, which would mean he could prioritise amassing his own power and building his own future, and if he could put one over on Thor that would be a nice benefit, vs. (still with me?) being motivated by how Thor is, which means that all the power stuff is just a means to an end. 

Now, how to reconcile that with all the speeches about liberation through slavery?  I guess I read that as an aspect of Loki's intrinsic personality.  He's on Earth to annoy Thor, but as he's here anyway, he'll do things according to his own personal style.  The only time we really saw Loki get riled up about anything during the film was in his 1-1 with Natasha.  On the one hand that shows how skilled she is, to get under his skin, and it does show that yes, there are emotions roiling in there.  But also, it's when he's talking about devising exquisite tortures for her and Clint.  Humans to him seem to be essentially livestock who make a nice visual effect when corralled and addressed in large groups.  But we also have enough intelligence to really understand when we are being headfucked, and the emotions to get excitingly upset about that, which he clearly gets a charge off.  Those 80 people who  were presumably crushed in the sinkhole, I don't  think they would even register with him, I don't think he'd get any pleasure from that at all.  Except  if he could use it to cause intimate pain to someone he's with at the time. 

Something I struggled with was Bruce Banner's line that 'you can smell the crazy on that one'.  As much as I find it an evocative line and I enjoyed the delivery, it didn't land for me at all because I just didn't get that from the performance. Loki may be hugely selfish and cruel, may be doing evil things with no regard for anyone else's feelings, but.  Unless, like my mother, you think that anyone who deliberately hurts other people *must* be mentally ill or they couldn't do it, then I'd argue that there really was no evidence  for it.

Phew. I'm sure I could have said all that more efficiently. 

Black Widow.  Ohhh so much love.  Didn't see Iron Man 2 so again, just drawing on this film.  And I was completely unspoiled and hadn't even seen any trailers so I got to sit open-mouthed through the initial chair fight sequence.  Bam, what an opener, establishing three things: first, her competence, which I would say was unbelievable except that the thing I loved about it was that for possibly the first time (except maybe in Haywire) I genuinely believed that a petite action heroine could, in real life, beat the guys she was up against.  Second, her normal  human frailty and appropriate fear in the face of danger (not knowing the character I was really psyched when I realised that she wasn't superpowered beyond being basically an Olympian).  And third, that she isn't a dress-up doll (she carried the shoes!).  I felt like a little girl again watching her, like I would have felt if I'd had someone like that to watch when I was little, and would have pretended to be her every playtime.  I think I mainly loved the same things that everyone else did - fighting Hawkeye, trying to gentle Banner and then fleeing Hulk, commandeering the flying bike thing, facing Loki down (and so many things to love!  So much time on screen leading the film!).  The part I keep holding my breath for every time though, is when she decides to make a run for the Tesseract.  And oh, she's tired and she's scared and Cap gives her an out and her voice shakes, but she's doing what has to be done and she is SO BRAVE.  And there's my inner child again, with eyes wide, just blown away and awed and inspired. 

Having seen the film a few more times there's a part which slightly falls flat which is after she's got Loki's game plan and she goes to the lab (?I think it's the lab) to see Banner.  She has these great social smarts but she doesn't play it well, at all.  She goes straight to telling him he needs to isolate himself which, no, is not going to produce a good result.  In order to make this make sense to me, I have thought of the following.  First, nobody's perfect.  And as much as I love that the film does espouse that philosophy, I'm not sure that's what they are going for here.  Second, she does seem to be a bit wary of Banner/Hulk in general and maybe that throws her off.  But, at the same time she does theoretically know that she can reason with Banner, because that's what she tries after they fall through the floor together.  But perhaps without much conviction and only as a last resort.  So I think that one probably carries some weight.  And third, that the Sceptre is affecting them.  And while I agree with others that wasn't made particularly explicit in the film, I do think that was happening.  And although she had only just come into the room, the lab didn't seem to be far from where she was with Loki.  Ooh interesting sidebar - I wonder if Loki was affected too, and that's why we got his outburst of emotion? 

I really need to remind myself of this.  Daily.  Twice-daily.  The comments are where the pain is. 

Morning walk: horrible.  Dark, dark, dark. 

with people whose work I really like dying too soon.  I know, because it's all about me, right?  Well, yes, up in here, it is.

David Foster Wallace has died.  I am confident that in years to come I will still be looking back in frustration and wondering what he might have written, the same way I wonder what Kirsty MacColl might have sung, or Bill Hicks might have said.

When people I know have died, thankfully not many of them young, I'v missed the person and my relationship with them.  Their wasted promise is just a pale also-ran in the grief stakes.  But I didn't know these people and so, without the immediacy of personal loss, it's the work that I regret.