Dungeon Journal

Since I have yet to put all my accounts under one username, here's the info for finding me elsewhere in cyberspace. Will update when I finally get around to consolidating everything.

Cheers,
00sevvie

IJ and SB4: 00sevvie
LJ: condwiramurs
LibraryThing: indigorising
Fictionalley: Aurys (one chapter posted, needs to be rewritten to match later story changes)

Signups close Friday! - Tomorrow!

I was in despair over the lack of fics for my apparent OTP, 'Bad Patient,' but fear not: dear sweet janus has written me a drabble! *is touched* The world must know the yumminess of Poppy/Sev.

Title: An Excuse
Pairing: Poppy Pomfrey/Severus Snape (implied)
Rating: G

Greedy Gregory Goyle would eat or drink anything.  But the pumpkin juice was... strange.
 
 One person alone could analyse the texture and colour at a glance: Professor Snape.  Though Poppy said 'Severus' to herself.  She hastened to his dungeon door and tapped.  He smiled when he saw her, briefly shedding his customary wariness.
 
 "He's dropped his gob-stoppers in it."
 
 "His belly-ache?"
 
 "Crabbe received sweets from home."
 
 As their eyes met over the cup, he winked knowingly.  Tingling, she winked back.  Alone, he was not forbidding, and she remembered the young patient he had been.
 
 "They should have been in Hufflepuff."

Just spent two and a half hours hashing out papers and panels for the spring grad student film studies conference. On one cup of coffee alone. When did 9:30 become an ungodly hour of the morning? Meh. Lots of good entries, sad to cut so many. But I think we have four good, solid panels now (and most of my favorites got on, so yay.)

Now I get to go to class! Again! And then dash back over for the Conference on the Discipline, the first day of which I missed. All media studies, all the time - that's my Friday. :)

Tomorrow's Halloween. How?

Just a little something I found while browsing on wikipedia that made me laugh.

In the article for Basilisk:

"The Venerable Bede was the first to attest to the legend of the birth of a basilisk from an egg by an old cockerel, then other authors added the condition of Sirius being ascendant.

There are a couple of arguments I have occasionally seen repeated in defense of various characters’ actions in HP that seem to me both disingenuous and unsupportable. To be frank, they annoy me. But in each individual encounter with these arguments I was never quite able to fully put into words why this was so. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that the reasons ought to be self-evident. I have now had a bit of time to put it all into order. There are two basic arguments in question, what I’ll call the ‘plot argument’ and the ‘verisimilitude (or realism) argument.’ I'll be posting this in two sections: the 'plot' argument first, and later the 'verisimilitude' one, since it all got kind of long.

Many thanks to Janus for beta'ing this for me. Any errors are all mine.

After all the fighting between the Gryffindors of Good(TM) and the Nasty Nazi Slytherins(TM) that ostensibly was over whether "Muggles" and "Muggleborns" should be enslaved/exterminated/etc., JKR implicitly admits what we recognized all along: that the entire WW, including dear Arthur Weasley and Dumbles and all of the Good Gryffindors, is deeply racist. Turns out that any wizard/witch who uses the word "Muggle" is, in fact, using an ugly racial slur.

J.K. Rowling on the invention of the term Muggles: "It is a twist on the English word mug, which means "easily fooled". I made it into Muggles because it sounds gentler."

Got that? The standard (in fact, IIRC, only) term by which magical folk refer to non-magical folk (and that JKR has got 99.9% of her audience using) is a word which connotes stupidity and foolishness. JKR admits this. This is in line with how even the most well-meaning witches and wizards we see otherwise speak of and behave with non-magical people, of course, but she never admitted that.

Never mind that her audience is composed entirely of so-called "Muggles." Unless there's something she and our governments are not telling us.

Suffice it to say that, excepting in quotes from the books and such, "Muggle" has been struck from my casual vocabulary.

*shudders*

Apparently I can't wait until Friday rolls around again and I can do a legit fic rec, so I'll post it here. ;)

Yesterday I read a really fantastic Snarry piece over on Walking the Plank, Crucius by Dolores Crane. Original, witty, in character, delightful. And also quite believable - which is usually my biggest gripe with Snarry. I admit that it took me a long while to 'accept' Snarry because I couldn't find the premise (Harry and Snape suddenly stop hating each other and fall in love) believable; it often felt forced. Yet I found myself inexplicably reading Snarry after Snarry when going through recs lists, and to my surprise I found that it can and often is done well, and believably. (perverse-idyll's The White Road had a lot to do with it.) I suppose I've finally surrendered to the lure of Snarry, though I wouldn't quite describe myself as a Snarry shipper since I have no desire to write it. But this is definitely one of the best Snarry's I've ever read (though the Snarry Games produced some really fine work too!) Read it, read it! You won't be disappointed. Sev is delightfully snarky.

The other thing about this piece I love is how I found it. In attempting to find a way to link my love of fandom to my academic work, I picked up some books on academic studies of fandom, including an anthology of essays edited by Hellekson and Busse "Fanf Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet." There are some very interesting pieces in there, but I loved Ika Willis' "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts." The author uses the example of (and quotes) her own fic (Crucius, that is) in the context of an academic essay to demonstrate precisely the reading/writing practice she describes theoretically. I love the sheer courage of that. Fanfic is not confined to the dim back room anymore! Now perhaps I can stop worrying about publishing my fic on the basis of speculated potential (scholarly, legal, etc.) damage to my rep as an academic.

I've been re-reading some old articles and rants lately, trying to put together a more coherent sense of why I simultaneously like and dislike the Potter books - what it is about them (beyond Sev, of course!) that draws me when my general opinion of them is 'incoherent, immature, morally disturbing and at times poorly written pap.' I found nothing particularly new in the rants to help me. But this past week for a class on aesthetics and mass media I read an article by Umberto Eco on Casablanca that made me go 'aha!'

Eco - Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage

Basically he states that while Casablanca is a cult film with great appeal, it is far from being a true work of art according to any traditional aesthetic standard, as it is filled to the brim with cliches, psychologically unrealistic characterizations, etc. But then, he asks, why is it so wildly appealing and successful at drawing audiences if it is such a failure aesthetically? His answer: it is this very failure that makes it so appealing - not because the people who love it are incapable of appreciation of art or any such thing, but because, rather than having just one or two weak points, it is a giant collage of dozens of these cliches and so on (he gives a partial list). This collage-like nature then allows the viewer "to break, dislocate, unhinge [the work] so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. [...] It should display not one central idea but many. [To become a cult object] it should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness."

Now, in the article he draws a distinction between movies and books, claiming that the former MUST be this way to become cult objects while the latter can become cult works even if they are also aesthetically pleasing. That's getting away from what it was about the article that struck me wrt the Potter books, which was basically the snippet above. That is, I think it is precisely the incoherency, the disjointedness, the flexibility of the Potter books that at once attracts and repels me - perhaps even wrt the morally disturbing side of the work. It makes for an unsatisfying reading experience when I approach the books like any other fiction, expecting a coherent work that I can lay aside afterwards, but as a FAN the books are gold - because the work is never done, I can take them apart and put them back together, write fiction to fill in the gaps or change the unsatisfying bits, without feeling guilty. Because the books, being so incoherent, lack the sort of convincing authority of a work that knows itself and presents just one, stable, reality (and so discourage 'tinkering'), and in fact demand such activity on the part of all but the most casual reader in order to even begin to make sense. You HAVE to start jiggling them and reworking them if you want to have at least the illusion of consistency and stability, IMHO.

And so I wonder if this is indeed part of the reason why the Potter books have attracted such a huge and prolific fan response - because they are cult objects on a massive scale due to their "ricketiness." Am I on to something here (or is it just me)? ETA: "Lost" was posted to OWL last night! *mild squee*

thanks for the clicks!

Thanks for petting the little ones.

Thanks!

The eggies and the baby. Thank you!

Pet the babies, please! Thanks.

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Olbermann just referred to Palin as a Death Eater. "The original Death Eater," in fact.

I told you Cheney was really Voldemort.

*shakes head in despair*

DPR made snapenews!

We're famous. Or relatively. Or whatever. *grin*

With Johnny!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/johnny-depp-as-mad-hatter_n_218747.html

Go look! Go look!