New Year’s Eve, 2010

I’m not doing anything special for the new year, so this will be a perfectly mundane post. Going to the Y this morning, and working tonight. I did get tomorrow off of work, so, yay.

1. I am reading more novel-length fiction, suddenly, than I have in a good year-and-a-half. I’ve been reading non-fiction, of course, but the novels have kind of been ehh. Suddenly I am tearing through books at about one every couple of days. This is NOTHING like the reading rates I used to have — a novel a day, essentially. But that was back when I could lay on the bed all day and read and no-one and nothing had claim on my time. These days reading is a thing I grab in all my stray moments.

Let me tell you; I have been reading instead of Tweeting. That should indicate the seriousness of things.

I read, finished, and thoroughly enjoyed Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books; Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless. They follow the escapades of Alexia Tarabotti in a Victorian world containing vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and steampunk science. The books are, I suppose, steampunk paranormal romance, heavier on the paranormal and steampunk than the romance. Not p0rn, is what I’m saying. The leads are lots of fun, the world is well-thought-out, and the books are a fun romp.

I then started, and am now tearing through, Jim C. Hines’s Princess books. The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, and Red Hood’s Revenge. These tell the tale of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White as they comprise the secret espionage strike force of their kingdom’s Queen Beatrice. The books blend elements from different cultural renditions of well-know fairytales, some fluffy and some dark. Sleeping Beauty’s origin story is the darker version, as is Snow’s. But the novels themselves are fast-paced action-adventure tales with a lead trio of women.

I like this. Moreover, I like this because Hines is using some character tropes I enjoy, and see most often in anime. There’s a grouping of characters in anime that goes, “the dark and serious one with violence issues who hides their emotions with anger; the scatterbrained fluffy one who flirts endlessly and cares about clothes but who has a hidden will of steel; the new one who is uncertain but whose pure heart is the key to all success and who holds the team together.” Those three tropes can be male of female in anime, and they are OFTEN found together. And that’s what we have here. In the Princess stories Talia, Snow, and Danielle play those parts. I happen to LOVE that character grouping, and will read/watch it endlessly.

2. I saw True Grit yesterday.

I’m not a big fan of westerns. And I’m not a big fan of John Wayne. But I realized as I was watching the movie that I had somehow mentally conflated the story of True Grit, which I had never seen, with The Searchers, which I have also never seen. (This is what happens when one reads, for fun, movie reviews from decades past but does not go see the films.) So I was pleasantly to find (from the opening moments, really) that this was NOT a gruesome story about how women are objects for men to rape or kill for having been raped. (Which is my understanding of the plot of The Searchers.)

True Grit was fantastic. It wasn’t Coen-Brothers-y at all, which is a good thing in my book. (I like SOME Coen films, but not many.) The character of Mattie Ross and the actress playing her were both stunningly good. Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon inhabited their parts perfectly, and had some great dialog. The movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test (except on a technicality, of Mattie talking to the proprietess of her boarding house.) But I didn’t miss the lack of another female character. Mattie FILLS the screen, cohabitating with Rooster Cogburn and holding her own.

The portrayals of Native Americans are minimal, as is to be expected from this story. But the glimpses are — not uniform. The man being hanged, his final words are cut off, indicating that the town doesn’t really think of him as human. And Cogburn kicks the kids off the porch — but only after they were torturing a donkey. Cogburn clearly trusts the man who runs the trading post, even though we never see him. And the silent Native American on the trail is trusted by Cogburn. The gist I got from these snippets is that this is a world with pervasive racism, but a world in which individuals make their own assessments of each other.

I loved this movie. I intend to buy it when it comes out on dvd. I expect my kids will like it in a year or two.

3. I started watching The Pacific, the companion series to Band of Brothers. Now, I LOVE Band of Brothers liek woah. Pacific is not grabbing me so far — I like it, certainly, but I am not swept into it. I think that is largely because I can’t tell the characters apart. They are all young, athletic men wearing tattered Marine uniforms and they all have short dark hair. I find myself trying to read the names off their shirts. I expect as I get further into the series I will learn who they are.

4. The house is staying mostly clean, in advance of my mother’s visit next week. To aid in that, I should stopping blogging and go do some dishes.

Happy New Year’s, everyone. Best wishes in the coming year.

That year-end meme that’s making the rounds

1) Was 2010 a good year for you?

Yes!

2) What was your favorite moment of the year?

This may be a recurrent theme, but getting published. My essay for Whedonistas was accepted and will be out in March 2011, I think. And my short story “No Return Address” was published by Strange Horizons in November.

3) What was your least favorite moment of the year?

Probably some of the conflicts I’ve had with my kids over their poor behavioral choices.

4) Where were you when 2010 began?

At home? At work? I don’t remember.

5) Who were you with?

I don’t remember, see #4, above.

The Monday after

1. I got earwormed this morning with Sisters of Mercy’s “Lucretia My Reflection.” Here, let me share.

2. I’m listening to an audiobook of The Girls of Murder City, by Douglas Perry. It’s the story of the women who inspired the story/play/musical/movie “Chicago.” The woman who wrote the play, Maurine Watkins, was one of the crime reporters for the Chicago Tribune. She interviewed Belva and Beulah, the real-life women on whom Velma and Roxie, respectively, were based.

The book is a lot of fun, and I’m enjoying the story as it all unfolds. The narration, as written by Perry, is lush and lurid, though, and I find myself questioning how he knows what the women were thinking. I expect it’s from interviews in the various papers at the time, but I still have a couple quibbles with that. First, at no point has the author said where he’s getting the motivations and internal thoughts from. Second, even if it IS from the news accounts, the various women contradicted each themselves so many times and the newspapers themselves got the facts wrong so often that I am a little wary of the veracity of Perry’s narration.

It could very well be that he has conducted his research with the utmost rigor; I simply have no way of knowing that.

That said, I am liking the book a lot. The audiobook especially — the narrator is a hoot. He does different voices for all the female characters, when they are being quoted or are speaking in their own words. He adds tone and character and emotion to the text, a breathiness of nerves or an arch knowing humor. Again, I don’t know how historically accurate it all is, but it’s a lot of fun.

3. Netflix Streaming is removing a lot of things from my queue. In particular a number of documentaries are expiring on January 1st. So I have been watching a lot of documentaries this week.

It kinda drives me crazy that most accounts of the suffrage movement in the US don’t mention spiritualism or free love. They mention the ties of suffrage to abolition, and to temperance, and to Quakerism, but they leave out the spiritualism and free love. Why is that? Is it because spiritualism is embarrassing to modern sensibilities? Does it tarnish the gleaming historicity of the abolitionists to mention that many of them believed in free love?

It drives me crazy for a few reasons. First, bland-washing history like this gives each generation the erroneous impression that their rebellions are new, unique, and Special. Like hell, people. Sexting has got NOTHING on the letters people used to write. Think your hastily-sent email was a bad idea? Now imagine sending your best friend on horseback to race through the city at night to intercept the message-boy you dispatched, and said friend getting into a fist-fight on the doorstep of your ex-sometimes-beloved’s house with said messenger and his wife waking up and calling the police.

The means change, but the bad decisions people make are ETERNAL.

Second, these sorts of detail are what make history INTERESTING. I can’t recite the first eight presidents of the U.S., but I know why Hamilton and Burr got into a duel. It wasn’t over a woman, it was over honor and national fiscal policy. National fiscal policy. I bet pundits would pay a lot more attention to their words today if they thought they could be called to a field of honor at dawn. I am a little vague on the exact rise of the Roman Imperium, but I know that some historians are pretty sure that Julius Caesar had sex with his young nephew Octavius, aka Caesar Augustus. That certainly makes Octavius’s later rivalry with the other possible object of Caesar’s affections, Marc Antony, more interesting.

History is made by people. By screwed-up, neurotic, aggressive, afraid, impulsive, shining, intelligent, transcendent people. When we ignore their quirks, faults, and flaws we strip away their humanity. We change them from human to symbol, and I believe that this lessens their accomplishments. The amazing and glorious is made more so when it is done by the ordinary and small.

Frodo, Sam, and Gollum destroy the ring, not Gandalf.

Third, suffrage likely would not have occurred in the nineteenth century without spiritualism. Spiritualism gave women strength and power. Spiritualism was democratic — everyone, anyone, could touch the divine power. Many mediums, and especially the most famous of them, were women. And the mediums berated deadbeat husbands or abusive men, they told women to have strength. The mediums comforted everyone who had lost a child — and everyone in the 1800s had lost a child. Everyone. The mediums told of a benevolent god who loved all and planned to reunite all families in the hereafter. These statements, this faith, gave women strength. The suffragettes, berated and attacked daily for their words and beliefs, took comfort in the messages from the spirit world.

This is really no stupider than any other belief fad ever in the history of ever. And I wish more documentaries and histories explored the connections.

4. Christmas went lovely, there were presents at home and I had a nice dinner at work. All is well, and now we are moving back into the normal routines. The kids got Nintendo DS’s (NOT from us) and are playing them quite a bit. There may be DS-restrictions on the horizon if they do not find a natural balance of which we approve …

Christmas Eve 2010

I have to leave for work in a bit. Not many planes fly on Christmas Eve, but some do. And those planes, and those people on those planes, they need air traffic controllers too. Hence it’s my turn to work.

As a result, though, we did Christmas a bit early. We open presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas morning, and we do stockings only within the household. The rules are everything must fit into the stocking of the recipient. We mostly end up complying with the rule, with some things sticking out the top.

It’s pretty lovely, actually. We light the Advent candles and sing carols. This year N and K treated us to euphonium duets, which were fantastic. We light a fire — that didn’t happen this year, the flue seems to be blocked and we’ll have to have it looked at. Then we open our stockings.

Everyone got some candy, of their preferred sort. N got weird-flavored non-chocolate things. J got chocolate imported from England. I got Godiva Pearls. The kids got weird, goofy, ridiculous candy that looked sillier than it tasted good. To each their own on the holiday.

I also got a Nook case, which I am extremely pleased with. And my family got me a waterproof mp3 player so that I can listen to it while I swim.

It’s good to be known.

The kids have announced that they have eaten Too Much Candy, and we’re all sitting down for a late-lunch/early-dinner to counter the effects of the metric tons of sugar.

There is snow everywhere outside, a fresh layer to cover the dirt and grime. The city is not plowing tonight out of respect for the holiday and the fact that so many people are either travelling or having guests. So all is quiet, and peaceful, and when I saw the sun today so very low in the sky I nodded because I know it’s on the rise.

Soon I will leave for work. I will drive in happy and content and loved, a state I wish for each of you. Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, happy holidays, best wishes and kindest regards. to you all.

2010 Moments in Fandom

I ganked this meme from LJ and Caroline —

Your main fandom of the year?

Twitter

I think my biggest fandom this year was Twitter. I still love this social proprioception. I love hearing about the days my friends are having, as well as the days of various writers, artists, celebrities, or people I vaguely met at a convention that one time. Twitter gives all of these people a human face that I find compelling. I like hearing about Felicia Day’s WoW characters. I like hearing about the workplace holiday party a blogger I’ve never met is at, and what sort of drinks she is having. I like the picspam, the James-Marsden-rickrolls, I like the twelve-part rants about politics, feminism, marketing, horse racing, Bruce Springsteen, or the cultural meaning of the word “cock.” Rants divided into brief little snippets and sent out to the masses.

I like sending my words out and not knowing who will respond. I like chiming in on a question of bathroom tile colors or dog breeds. I like reporting the weather to people around the world and reading, in turn, the weather reports from four continents. I like seeing three days of Halloween costumes.

From Twitter this year I have learned about violent riots, legislative results, border wars, earthquakes, and floods. I have learned about airports conditions worldwide. I learned that a favorite character may be getting a tv show. I have learned of new bands I now like and new books I have now read.

Twitter is suited, well-suited, to the way I like to interact with the broader world. I have been and remain a fan.

My second-biggest fandom is still comics. I mostly avoid the larger haunts of comics fandom, though. I don’t read the main news sites or post to ANY message boards. That’s because I love comics too much to devote my time to the pervasive negativity I found in those places. Whatevs, y’all. I’ll read my comics and write my essays and reviews for Fantastic Fangirls. I’ll write emails and tweets to the creators whose work I enjoy, pleading with them to keep being as awesome as they are. Comics are, along with RPGs, my deepest and longest-lasting fannish loves. The longer I read comics, the more awesome they get.

Your favorite film watched this year?

Easy A, reviewed here.
The Runaways, reviewed here.
Black Swan, reviewed here.

Your favorite book read this year?

Other Powers, by Barbara Goldsmith. My review, here.
Denial: A Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern. My review on Goodreads.
Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann. Extremely brief thoughts on Goodreads.
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, by Sara Marcus. My review.

My Goodreads page can be found here.

Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

I did a whole post about this. Two posts, actually.

Your favorite TV show of the year?

This has got to be a tie between Fringe and Hellcats. I talk about Fringe further down, when I discuss Agent Olivia Dunham, and I review Hellcats here.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome

Oh dear sweet crickets, I love these shows.

You can look up both shows on TVTropes, Mai-HiME, Mai-Otome, or you can look them up on Wikipedia here or here. And if you read all four of those links you will get a fairly good sense of the show. But none of that conveys the sheer unbridled force of the repressed sexuality, the hyped-up heightened emotions, the drama, and the intensity of the shows.

All the anime I’ve ever seen is about intense emotions. Usually repressed in some way until the emotions are undeniable and come exploding to the surface. This is, clearly, a self-selecting data pool, but it is what keeps me coming back to anime. That, and the women.

For reasons I do not entirely understand, manga and anime are formats rich in titles featuring a cast of women. Whether it’s the “harem” genre, like Love Hina, or the “magical girl” genre, there are a ton of shows and comics that have easily a half-dozen female characters, or more. And these a leads and major supporting characters, not walk-ons. Forget about the absurdly low hurdle of the Bechdel Test. These shows, and Mai-HiME and Mai–Otome in particular, show the variety an complexity of the relationships women have with other women.

In the Mai shows we have platonic love, maternal or sisterly dynamics, hero-worship, asexual crushes, sexual crushes, bitter jealousy, and twisted sexual aggression. We have best friends, lovers, and rivals. And these relationships grow over the course of the shows, shifting and changing as the characters grow. These women, these girls, they are people, flawed and fallible and transcendent. How could I not love these shows?

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

I am most frequently disappointed by comics. But that’s only because I care so deeply about them. I won’t list the specific titles that disappointed me here, because it’s all water under the bridge. Suffice it to say, it only hurts because I love.

Your TV boyfriend of the year?

I don’t want to DATE the guys from Terriers — in fact, their lives are so chaotic and messed-up I don’t want them in the same state I live in. But Hank Dolworth and Britt Pollack are the best-written, best-acted, best-conceived male characters I saw on television this year. In, I might add, an amazingly well-written and -produced television show that was cancelled after thirteen episodes. Tim Minear worked on the show, did I mention that? (You can find Tim on Twitter, as @CancelledAgain.)

Your TV girlfriend of the year?

Olivia Dunham.

Agent Dunham did not impress me the first few times I watched Fringe. In fact, the show did not impress me. But this post here explains a number of reasons why you might like the show. And I’m going to quote a bit here about why, specifically, I like Agent Dunham so very much.

”Olivia Duhnam is will push herself to her limits to protect people and solve the case, but she is not so good with Talking about Feelings. She loves deeply; she will literally go to the other side of the world, and beyond, for just a chance to save someone. She’s just much, much better in situations where she can lean in someone’s face threateningly, or use her gun. Or if she can just swagger her way through it. She’s good at swaggering.

That, my friends, is tight wrapped fury in motion.

Olivia Dunham does not damsel in distress; she can and will save herself, thank you very much. The first time she is full on captured by Bad Guys, she ends up strapped to a medical table, and starts sniffling about if they are going to kill her, could she please have a glass of water? Cue me sighing. Then she talks the henchmen into untying her hands so she can sit up and drink. She immediately smashes the glass over his head, and fights her way out of the building. On top of that, she fills her pockets with evidence of what they were up to, and then quickly hides it as soon as she is out the facility, so she can come back for it, once she’s sure she can get it into the hands of people she trusts. Competency.
“

Competence, intelligent, empathy disguised as emotional unavailability; god, I do love Agent Dunham.

Your biggest squee moment of the year?

I got published.

I really, really, REALLY am pleased about this. Like, a huge amount. A lot. Oh, yes, I am full of squee. A month later and the squee has not abated.

The most missed of your old fandoms?

I’ve been feeling nostalgic this year for Theatrical Muse. I don’t have the time for it, not in a million years, but it was amazing fun.

The fandom you haven’t tried yet, but want to?

Huh, nothing comes to mind. Mostly because I have no time.

Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

I’m keen on this whole “being published” thing that I’ve just started. I look forward to it continuing. But that’s not really a FAN anticipation. I’m looking forward to Wiscon and CONvergence, both because of the people who will be there. I am excited to see a lot of friends-I-have-made-on-the-internet (see the above-mentioned Twitter) and to catch up in person with friends I see only a couple times a year.

It’s the people that make the fandom. The people. The bright, shining, wicked smart, articulate, passionate, devoted, insane, creative, witty, living breathing people. Without them — without you — there is no fandom.

Year in Music 2010, part two

[This is part two of my post on this year's music. Part one can be found here.]

Here we go, with more songs and videos:

Year in Music 2010, part 1

[This post is split into two parts, for length. This is part one. Part two is here.]

The Year in Music 2010

This year was the year of the playlist. Many of my favorite songs came to my attention through character-themed playlists given to me by friends. It occurs to me that I don’t know how many of you do this sort of thing, or know what I’m talking about. A character playlist is when you like a character, or a relationship between characters, and you make a playlist to describe that person or relationship. I have found in the last few years that this is the best and easiest way for me to access new songs. The playlist aspect gives me an emotional hook — I listen to the song’s lyrics and apply them to a character I love. I end up feeling that I both know more about the character and also about the song.

This is because the part of music that I most listen to is the emotional story. That story can be in the repeating hook, or it can be in the verses, or the chorus. But I’m not listening to the musical complexity; I’m listening to the story. For a lot of rock tunes the story is … a little bit up to the listener’s discretion. It’s opaque. And for a lot of pop tunes the story is a little generic. In both cases, tying the song to a specific character give me a clearer image of what is happening. (This is also why I like music videos and vids.)

Solstice eve

It’s time to mention, again, my favorite solstice poem. I blogged about it last year, here.. And you can find the full text here.

Go, read it.

Go on, I’ll wait.

This year I’m thinking that this poem is likely the first steampunk story I ever read. There is a whole world there, a whole Victorian steam era world of knightly deeds connected by the lines of rail, of rail and commerce, and by the lines drawn from one heart to another.

The older I get, the more I identify with Kay in this poem.

And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,
Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,
Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,
Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,
To help mature women that they may encounter,
Report pickpockets, gather up litter,
And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)
Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.
He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch
(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):
The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,
And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.
He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,
Doling out pennies for platform tickets,
Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,
Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.
The patrons half turn–it’s the fella from Camelot, innit?
And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.
He’s barely halfway when a page tumbles in,
Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,
So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),
Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,
And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)
To summon his liveried army of lads.

There’s an orderliness to him that I maintain in my current life. Getting the kids from place to place, respecting the schedule, making allowances for lateness and weather — it’s snowing like anything outside as I write this — and remembering to tip strangers. It all seems very familiar, Kay’s life. Half Falstaff, half Hotspur. I like to think that Kay is Falstaff’s wisdom and generosity combined with Hotspur’s passion and commitment instead of the other way around. I like to think that because I like to flatter myself, but, you know, the poem does not specify.

Anyway.

Tomorrow is solstice. It is the darkest day of the year. The longest night. But the day after, everything becomes just that much brighter.

The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,
The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.
And at the great glass station, motion goes on,
The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,
The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,
The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,
The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,
Running to a schedule as the world ought,
Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,
The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

The train may stop, but the line goes on.

Happy Solstice, to all of you.

You tell me; reviewing Black Swan

I saw the classic Catherine Deneuve film Repulsion in college. I saw it in the college’s weekend cinema at at time in my life where I was reasonably unhappy. I walked out of the theater sick and shaking and half-convinced that I was going out of my damn mind.

I really don’t like stories that want you the reader to guess the ending. I don’t like stories where you don’t know at the end whether the narrator is crazy or dead or it was all a dream or whatever. Just tell me, oh author, because if I wanted nauseating helpless uncertainty I would stick with real life and ponder the death of the environment.

Given both of those facts you would think that I hated Aronofsky’s Black Swan. I didn’t. I loved it.

It’s hard to say one loves a movie so painful to the narrative protagonist. Nina, played by a manically tightly-wound Natalie Portman, is either really turning into a swan or she is really going out of her damn mind. And either option, transformation or madness, seem preferable to her life of unrelenting emotional abuse and repression. But Portman is freaking transcendent. Every single line, every single look, is an acting tour de force. Every single gesture, because this is such an intensely physical film. Every breath, deliberately caught by the microphones during moments of exquisite dancing, is a triumph of an actor who is giving the performance of their life.

How appropriate, in a movie about a dancer giving the performance of her life as a character giving the performance of her life to defeat her evil alter ego giving the performance of her life. Which reminds me, go look at the credits page for the movie. Every lead actor has two character names, one of which is from Swan Lake. The movie is a movie interpretation of the ballet their characters are interpreting. Worlds within worlds, a style of storytelling that I usually detest with its emphasis on being cleverer than the audience. But that’s not the case here. Aronofsky is not interested in showing us how clever he is. He shows us with relentless clarity how transparent the metaphor is. We the audience are invited into his shell game to see the horror unfolding from the inside. He holds our hand and points out the landmarks on the way.

Every actor in the movie was amazing. Mila Kunis was impossibly perfect as Lily, the Black Swan. Easy and confident and sexual and inhabiting her body as if it was a pleasant place to live. She is also dangerous and manipulative as the charismatic can be. She’s not a genius, not a perfect and inspired dancer, but the company (and the movie audience) is compelled to watch her.

Vincent Cassel was spot-on as the director of the company (and The Gentleman.) Demanding, abusive, manipulative, and at the same time he got the performances he wanted from his dancers. He is a bastard and I want to see him arrested or fined or something, but he likely is a genius. This is really important, this balance. Too often we see a caricature of this sort of man, a mustache-twirling villain who is so abusive that I cannot fathom why he still has a position of authority. In this case I believe in Thomas Leroy. I believe that he consistently delivers stunning performances, I believe that he gets the absolute best out of his dancers. I believe that they hate him and crave his praise.

Barbara Hershey as Erica Sayers, The Queen, is frightening. Her love is a sucking tide of ego-death. There is nothing she doesn’t want for her daughter — except anything her daughter wants that is not The Queen’s own goals. The sheer invasiveness of this is impossible to convey to you. You must see it yourself. The part where I actively shuddered was not where she threatens Nina, but where she trims Nina’s nails. It was horrifying in everything it implied.

Winona Ryder played Beth Macintyre, the Dying Swan. I had the most trouble looking at this part objectively because all I could think was “oh my god I have gotten old, if WINONA RYDER is playing the middle-aged retiring ballerina.” Which is true, I have gotten old, and I’m okay with that. But the nuances of her performance were lost in my head, entwined with memories of Beetlejuice, Heathers, Mermaids, and Girl, Interrupted. That’s my fault, I think, not hers. It is a tribute to her that I didn’t recognize her at first, until she said the line “suck his cock,” and there is something in the way she hits her final consonants that is unmistakable.

Natalie Portman.

Much has been made of the sheer work Portman took on to become a ballerina. That is a feat in and of itself. But so was her performance and delivery. Portman’s acting career has been sort of inexplicably uneven, with brilliant performances like the girl in Leon, inane drivel in romantic comedies, and performances seemingly faxed in from another continent like her work in Attack of the Clones. But I have always held that Natalie Portman can actually act and she proves it here without any question.

This is not an easy film. I averted my eyes from the screen more than once. The much-ballyhooed sex scene between Nina and Lily is not sexy, it is wrenching and frightening. At no point in the film does Nina seem to have any ownership of her body. She is constantly touched by others, sexually, professionally, invasively. It is painful to see her will so stunted and twisted. People are not bonsai, yet that is Nina — a bonsai, molded by the will and hands of others to be one beautiful thing and to be nothing else at all.

The most terrible fact of this molding, though, is that Nina desires nothing else but to succeed at the goal set for her.

Is this agency or collaboration? Is Nina a victim or a participant? Does she desire Leroy or fear him? Is she really turning into a swan, or is she completely freaking delusional?

I don’t know. The movie doesn’t give clear answers. This is a film like Mulholland Dr. where intelligent people can talk about it for hours and still not be sure they even have their facts right. I want for Nina to have been turning into a swan. I want for her to be a collaborator with agency, a participant in her own destruction. That would be a satisfying story to me. But I can’t argue against other interpretations. At least, not without seeing it a few more times.

Tell you what. You go see Black Swan. You watch the movie and think it over, and come up with your theory of what happened. And then we can talk it over. You tell me.

Unplumbed steampunk depths

When I look at the steampunk stories that are out there, I think that we are nowhere near through mining this genre for what it can tell us about ourselves. There is so much more to it than airships and railroads. History is always weirder and more complicated than you think.

1. Everyone knows that the Victorian Era was awash in new technologies. Steam engines, telegraphs, phonographs, the mechanization of industries. But it was also an era of intense scientific belief in what was then referred to as Other Powers. Spirits, souls, telepathy, distance viewing, remote healing, and a host of paranormal and supernatural phenomenon.

People believed in these things because it made scientific sense to do so. After all, the principles of electromagnetism were not fully understood, yet telegraphy worked. People could communicate across the globe in minutes. It was a breathtaking example of either man’s mastery of nature or of the wonder of the Creator’s divine world, take your pick. Scientists could manipulate metal rods from a distance — who was to say that they could not manipulate the organs of the body in a similar manner?

The same unknown vistas of science and technology that give us the steampunk tales of airship wars and mechanical men gave the Victorians themselves tales of communication with the dead and the power of mesmerism. It was all science, and at the same time it was all faith. The Victorians believed that science was enabling them to participate in the mysteries of God’s creation. That God was comforting his creatures when he allowed the souls of the dead to give messages to the living. They believed, and had no real reason to think otherwise, that these messages were delivered to the medium through the electromagnetic waves of the air in the same way a telegraph was sent from one operator to the next. And, as with telegraphy, a skilled operator or medium was better at receiving and sending clear messages than a new or untrained one.

The Free Love movement was a part of this, as was suffrage for women, the abolition of slavery, and temperance. (Yes, free love. Believe me, there is nothing new under the sun. Whatever radical and preposterous ground-breaking social notions Young People think up, someone hundreds of years ago did it first. The technology and means may change but the intention does not. Especially if it has anything to do with sex, drugs, or killing.) All of these things were based in a melange of religious fervor and scientific support. It was God’s will that human beings should improve themselves, to be as close to holy as was possible for base flesh. Therefore humans should all strive to perfect themselves internally and in their relationships with others. It made sense to not artificially restrict such divine emotions as Love — such restrictions led to a smothering of natural feeling and stifled God’s intentions, you see.

I could go on.

2. It has been pointed out by others (and I don’t recall where I read this and therefore cannot quote the person directly, but the idea is not original to me) that the Gilded Age in America (corresponding to the late Victorian Era in England) bears a strong resemblance to our current time. Intense religious fervor. An enormous and growing divide between those with wealth and those without. Questions about the role of expanding empire. Fear of and reliance on the press. Despising and attacking immigrants for their foreign-ness and strange religious practices. A sense that everything is changing too fast. These stories of steampunk are relevant to us, here and now, in ways I think the detractors miss. Fantasy and science fiction have always used the tongs of other worlds and time to address the complicated issues of the day. These particular tongs are well-suited to our current situation, as contract workers in Qatar and Abu Dhabi live in abject squalor while building magnificent paens to wealth and power.

3. There is a whole world out there, you know.

While England was being England, and New York was being New York, the rest of the world was also a part of the late 1800s. Britain conquered and then held The Raj. The wars against and genocide of the Native Americans took place in North America. King Leopold of Belgium held the Congo as his personal rubber plantation. Africa was divided among European colonial powers. The Boer Wars. The Boxer Rebellion. The Great Game for Central Asia. The Russo-Japanese war and the Sino-Russian war and the Sino-Japanese war. The mapping of the source of the Nile. The search for the headwaters of the Amazon.

If the theme of the late Victorian era is “Europeans got EVERYWHERE, oh my god,” then what of the places they got to? The people they encountered in the Punjab and in Brazil were not idiots — they tried to take everything they could from the Europeans. They tried to learn everything they could for the betterment of their countries and peoples. Other lands hungered for the power of European guns and the perceived power of European religion.

In conclusion, I’ll say it again. History is weirder and more complicated than you think. But throughout it, people are still people. They aren’t stupider than people today, nor are they smarter. They aren’t more or less venal. They aren’t more or less sexual. There is so much more to get out of the late Victorian era than goggles — though, don’t misunderstand me, I love the goggles, and own a pair. It was a chaotic, fervid, rapidly-changing time in which everything seemed uncertain and humanity was determined to make the world anew. Whether a Raj in Sind or a poppy farmer along the Yangtse or a rubber harvester on the Congo or a Bostonian blue-stocking, all of these people saw the world unfolding in strange and terrible ways. Ways that they sought to comprehend and control with whatever new tools science and faith gave them.

The steampunk world is vast and wonderful, and I cannot wait to see what happens in it next.