candle: Dave Luckett's is a stanza from Swinburne's "The Garden of Proserpina" (and a very nice take on it, too.)
Oh, this was fun! Tough, but fun:
Lay your sleep-caught head, my love,
On this arm that let you down.
Time, the flush of heat, these may
Burn off what makes fair each lone
Care-filled child, and the grave prove
Him more weak with each fast-flung year.
But in my arms till break of day
Let him who breathes here all night lie,
Death-bound, sin-trapped, but to me
In each part and in whole most fair.
Soul and flesh, these have no bounds:
To those who love, as they lie on
Love's free-to-all and thick-spelled slope
And swoon in ways that all men swoon,
Grave, to them, the sight She sends:
To heed the world's law not, and feel
As one, in world-wide love and hope;
While not seen is the sight that wakes
Hard joy, in fields of ice and rocks,
In men that lone and stern there dwell.
To hold faith, or to know it's held--
In the night those fled, like sound
That rolls off of a sharp-struck bell.
And mad men of the mad-run crowd
Once more their old well-learned tale told:
Each last small coin of the cost,
All the long-feared cards now tell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a hushed word, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Night dies, and fair sights with it die:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Soft all round your dream-caught head
Such a sweet, sweet new day show
As beat-wracked heart may bless, and eye,
The death-bound world be all you crave;
Let dry noon-tide see you fed
By the powers, will they or no;
Nights of harm still let you go
Watched by all the loves men love.
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned roasting the turkey (brined or not) upside down, supported on balls of crumpled aluminum foil. The breast is shielded from the most direct heat, and the juices of the turkey trickle down and collect in it; the dark meat cooks thoroughly, but the breast doesn't dry out. For the last 10-20 minutes of cooking, you can flip it back over to brown the skin of the breast-- buy a new pair of heavy cotton work gloves for this part.
(And we had turkey cassoulet for Thanksgiving, made with smoked drumsticks in place of duck. Very yummy, very easy.)
Mary Kay: Have you tried baking soda?
Have you see either of the links here yet? Sen. Landrieu and a German news correspondent on the dismantling of Bush's Potemkin aid stations/rebuilding sites.
(Regular lurker, rare commenter.)
"What do 'lapsed agnostics' believe in? Or do they just become UU's?"
I usually describe myself as a lapsed UU: I still don't believe in anything, but now I'm bored with talking about it.
From this week's Onion horoscopes:
Leo: (July 23—Aug. 22)
You thought you'd seen the worst humanity had to offer, but that was before you read fan-fiction set in an alternate universe where Hawkeye Pierce and Father Mulcahy are lovers.
If you can digest coconut milk, it makes a very rich and flavorful rice puding.
The Icelandic example sentence which gets repeated in nearly every syntax paper on transitive expletive constructions is about jólasveinarnir eating pudding.
Lydia-- But there's usually some degree of construction to the canon. I don't write in RPF-- Real Person Fic, of which the most common exemplars are slash of boybands or of the Lord of the Rings actors-- but I'm given to understand that what constitutes canon in those fandoms is extremely fluid and under constant debate. Or there's DC universe fanfic, with decades' worth of contradictory comics, movies, live-action and animated TV series, books-- again, I don't write this fandom, but choosing what constitutes one's canon for writing Batman must be every bit as fraught as trying to pinpoint a canonical Robin Hood.
A serious answer: The minimum number of well-developed or fascinating characters is still zero-- taking a cardboard character or a spear-carrier and making him three-dimensional (or queer, or both) is a very common fanfic strategy.
The number of characters, period, that a source text needs to be slashed is one, if you're allowing for crossovers.
WHICH fictional characters have that degree of immortality? [...] And what is the minimum number from a given novel / TV series / film / anime / whatever for viable slash?
The minimum number of immortal characters is zero-- and good thing, or else buddy-cop shows would only be slashable in crossovers with Highlander
I think I'm with Lucy on this one-- good writers have convinced me to go along with things that don't do much for me but that the characters got off on, and have made things I have no problem with seem strange or threatening or gross.
Grr, I *did* preview that last post, but it's late. "I'm not denying for a moment," is how that last paragraph should have begun.
Mris-- As Avram clarified upthread, the characters in that M*A*S*H story, except for Mulcahy, were from a darker mirror universe, and the tension between the mannerisms that Mulcahy (and the readers) recognize, and the twisted behavior, drive the story. (If I'd known the post would be read by anyone unfamiliar with Star Trek's Mirror universe, I'd have been clearer about that.)
Moving from the specific to the general--
What confuses me, Ellen, is that I have seen some slash writers talk about how the characters would never, and how that's part of the appeal. If they wouldn't, isn't that out of character? Not if they haven't, but if they wouldn't.
Do you mean that they wouldn't *on the show*, or that they just *wouldn't*? Certainly most slash relationships are never going to be more than hinted at on the show, and even that is rather rare. But that's a different thing than saying that the characters-- if they had lives beyond what was shown on the screen-- would or wouldn't do something. We don't see every minute of their lives-- if we want to think about the characters' lives beyond the small slivers we see in canon, we have to extrapolate from what we're shown. And if what we're shown is a character having much more chemistry or understanding with his same-sex best friend or arch-enemy than with his opposite-sex love interest, then it may not be a stretch to extrapolate a slash relationship of some kind.
Very few mainstream shows, if any, have characters for whom it would be in character to sleep with every single other member of the cast.
True, but it's only if you look at slash in the aggregate that most characters do sleep with every other member of the cast. That is, search a major archive for fic about Jean-Luc Picard or Xander or whoever, and you'll find stories pairing them with everyone they ever starred with. Look *within a single story*, and their romantic histories and predilections are a lot more limited. And even across all stories, most fic will be clustered around a few of the most plausible pairings-- statistical outliers crop up, in large numbers if you have a large fandom with a large cast, but for every story pairing Remus Lupin with, say, Draco or Hagrid there are probably a hundred pairing him with Snape and a thousand pairing him with Sirius Black.
I can understand the slash writers who look at characters and say, okay, this is how so-and-so would behave in bed, based on what I've seen of them in non-sexual situations in this show/book/etc. But I don't see how that could cover all or even most of the slash out there. It varies too much. I can accept that viewing characters as sexual beings and refusing to ignore that part of life is a good thing. I have a hard time believing that the main character in every show or book has shown signs of preferring everything that turns the viewers or readers on.
I'm not for a moment that there is a lot of badly written, poorly motivated slash *and hetfic* out there in which characters exhibit the author's favorite kinks. But there's also fic out there in which those same characters exhibit those same kinks, and it's entirely believable. In most fandoms, with most characters, we've seen so little of the characters' sex lives that we simply don't know how they behave in sexual settings-- we can extrapolate, yes, but we can extraopolate equally plausibly in several directions from the same data. Good writing makes almost anything believable.
Mris-- if it has nothing to do with the personalities in question, why is it more appealing to have them be those personalities?
*confused*
Where in this discussion has anyone said it (by which I assume you mean slash fanfic?) has nothing to do with the personalities in question? At least in the circles I hang out in, fanfic is all about the characters.
it seems that once again some people are classifying "stuff [they] want to read" as "daring and edgy" and assuming that the reason other people aren't writing or publishing it is that it's too emotional, too hard, they don't dare.
If by 'some people' you're referring to my post-- I wasn't trying to say this, though obviously I wasn't as clear as I needed to be. I was trying to make a point similar to Mitch's, actually-- that some writers shy away from some storylines not because they're daring and edgy, but because they're *embarassing*, because they cut too close to kinks (sexual and simply emotional) that they might be shy about admitting to-- and shy not because the kinks are necessarily edgy and daring, but because, under the weird and cracktastic story trappings that support them, they're often quite pedestrian, cliched, and embarassingly *un*-transgressive.
Naomi clarified, Elizabeth, I might be wrong, but my interpretation is that the shame Ellen is referring to is not shame at putting the writing out there necessarily, but shame at *feeling* the underlying visceral pull of kink, so it may be the same discomfort that you're describing.
That is what I meant, though I don't think I expressed it very clearly-- I only expected that post to be read by the people who usually read my lj. But, yes, it's that fanfic tends to be more successful than profic at engaging the sorts of kinks we (as writers or as readers) are most embarassed at *having* in the first place, and more successful at transmuting a kink-support framework into an effective story-- sometimes, into a story that appeals to readers who don't share the kink. (I'm using kink to cover all emotional hot-buttons, not just the sexual ones, btw.)
Teresa-- you've got an asterisk on 'fandom' up there-- is there a footnote on its way?
I'm also leery of putting a flag on it-- I know that it's ceding a lot of ground to let the right claim that symbol as theirs and theirs alone, but I'm afraid that any hint of a flag motif would have to be paired with a much simpler and more explicit text for it not to be interpreted as rah-rah-yee-hah these days.
Insular minuscule, without ornamentation, on a plain background would be my choice.
Graydon-- Defeat is something that happens in the spirit; wounds and death are something that happens to the body.
There are times when this is a meaningful distinction, and it is this to which I understand the speaker of those lines -- and their cultural weight of sentiment generally -- to refer.
Yes, absolutely, and I'm not suggesting that anyone is going to take the quote as an exhortation to stand and die for others' ofermod. I just wish that the stirring sentiment went together with a happier ending; it would hearten me. Though I do like Ariella's suggestion of þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg as the back tagline-- that's a very heartening thought right now.
*delurks pedantically*
Old English, not Old Norse. It's from the Battle of Maldon.
...and though it's a good sentiment, beautifully phrased, I can't help remembering that the shield wall breaks and the speaker of those words gets mown down along with all his comrades...
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