HSU IT Department

My first crush on a fictional man was at about age eight or nine: Prince Gwydion from Llloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Well, how could he not be? With his green eyes and wolf-grey hair and the sword and cloak and also hello, a prince, he was everything that a girl bored with sappy Disney royalty would adore. He didn't waste his time rescuing princesses, he was fighting THE LORD OF DEATH, for Merlin's sake. And I loved that he was noble yet accessible: a prince for working days, as it were, not in the least high and mighty, because he didn't need to be.

My next fictional crush was Laurie from Little Women (so sweet and funny and romantic, and played the piano with such passion -- Jo, how could you turn him down?!) closely followed by Dan from Jo's Boys (my black-eyed wounded rebel soul, I'm still sad he didn't win the heart of Bess).

Then I read Dragonsong and fell hard for Masterharper Robinton, with his sharp intelligence, his weakness for Benden wine, his wit and his generous heart; when he and Menolly were alone on the boat in Dragondrums I thought, "At last, at last!!" but the silly tart thwarted me, a betrayal for which I still have never quite forgiven her.

Next: a toss-up between Lord Peter Wimsey -- war hero, collector of incunabula, and sooo very persistently faithful -- and Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes. The scene with Peter and Harriet on the bank of the river is one of the all-time sexiest scenes ever, even though they never touch each other, and the night that Holmes tasks Mary Russell with wanting to propose to him caused me to cheer out loud.

You'll notice that Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir, Eomer & Co. are conspicuously absent. They were a bit too distant for me when I first encountered them, I think -- I was eleven, and at the time they all struck me as rather biblical, probably due to Tolkien's elevated language. Snape is also absent from this list since he didn't ring my bell until I saw Alan Rickman. After that it was very hubba hubba, but I don't feel right about including him in this list when it was a real person that actually spurred my interest.

So tell me, who are/were your fictional (book) crushes and why?

I've recently been promoted to co-moderator of the Other Worlds Writers Workshop, and we'd be happy to have a few new members.

OWWW is a well-established workshop-style online group which has been around for more than ten years, open to anyone interested in writing original speculative fiction, fantasy, or science fiction. The requirements for membership are fairly low; you have to participate on average twice a month, and participation can be either submitting a story or critiquing one submitted by others. Six crits are required before subbing your first story, but after that it's just the two-something-per-month minimum. The stories people write range from a few thousand words to entire novels of 200K or more (you get extra credit for subbing or critting a novel, of course!), and run the gamut from hard SF to steampunk to high fantasy to time travel to just plain weird. In addition to the writing experience, it's a great place to ask for/offer advice about everything from potential markets to medieval currency to the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Check out the OWWW website for more information; if you're interested you can join via the OWWW Yahoo Group. I know some of you dabble in original fiction and we'd love to have you!

0 hrs, 0 words (I wrote a lot of words in my head, does that count?
(...42 days...)

First, a link to this fabulous article about the difference between online friends and real friends, and how our ability to customize our environment is just possibly making us both lonelier and less tolerant. Thanks to kilter for the link.

Now, on to the book stuff!

Read Teen Dreams the last couple of days. The subtitle is "Reading teen film and television from Heathers to Veronica Mars" so of course I'm all interested, having though John Hughes was a god (not THE god, but certainly part of the minor pantheon). In a nice concatenation of circumstances, in the couple of days before that we had watched Breakfast Club (for probably the 47th time) and Heathers (for probably the 20th time), so at least those two were fresh in my mind, and of course I have huge chunks of Buffy committed to memory...

Best part of the book was the way Kaveney, who it turns out is on LJ as rozk, traces the evolution of the teen genre film from something ABOUT teens that treats them as anthropological curiosities, to something FOR teens that treats them as a critical and appreciative audience in and of themselves, intelligent enough to be at least somewhat self-reflective. For example, one way that a "low" type of entertainment graduates to a "high" level is when it demonstrates it can take "high-culture" icons and adapt/adopt them, so for example Cruel Intentions (Dangerous Liaisons), Clueless (Jane Austen's Emma), 10 Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew). She also gives the lineage of some of the stock characters, like James Dean => John Bender => Jason Dean (J.D.) and has some interesting things to say about the various representations of class as exhibited in, for example, Pretty in Pink vs Bring It On. One thing she doesn't discuss, which I think is interesting, is that most of the movies seem to represent the well-off and/or preppy characters in a negative light -- shallow, venal, self-absorbed -- while the lower-class characters are represented as sensitive, kinder, less prejudiced. Think for example Steff vs. Keith, Claire vs. Brian, etc.

She does spend a bit of time in each chapter highlighting what she sees as same-sex attractions/undertones/implications, which in some cases (Buffy/Faith, for example) I think are valid but in others seem a trifle manufactured. It's perfectly plausible that people of the same sex can be close friends, even to the point they will put that friendship above heterosexual romantic relationships, without there being a sexual element to the friendship. Maybe the hetero-romantic relationship is on the rocks, or not as long-standing, or (at the moment) not as much in need of reinforcement or support, to give only a few examples. I also learned that there was such a thing (for directors) as "coding" a character as gay or straight (or, I suppose, neutral). Having never taken a film class I didn't know this was something directors had to deliberately think about.

It was fascinating to see movies like American Pie analyzed critically (who knew there was a valuable statement about female sexuality buried in there?), to think about the "family tree" of movies, if you will (e.g. the way Heathers was in a sense a rebuttal of John Hughes' more wholesome/less dark vision), to consider changes in the way virginity is viewed from 198x to 200x, etc. I did think Buffy -- both the show and the character -- got short shrift. The show is mentioned in scattered places throughout but it wasn't clear to me why it didn't rate its own chapter. However, Kaveney's written extensively on BtVS, so maybe she thought she'd covered that subject.

I have to pan the index, though. There are two: a movie index and a subject index, which is in theory a great idea, but they're both inconsistent and incomplete. For example, Dangerous Liaisons is included in the movie index while Taming of the Shrew isn't, in either the movie or subject index. And although characters from all the movies and shows are mentioned by name in the text, the subject index has only the names of actors/actresses (e.g. Veronica Sawyer of Heathers is discussed in the text, but only Winona Rider is listed in the index). (With one notable exception: all the characters from Buffy are listed LOL!) In addition, the two indexes are not cross-referenced, so for example let's say I remember the character Watts was discussed. Watts is not in the index. So to find all mention of her, I have to a) remember the actress and look her up under "Masterson, Mary Stuart" and also b) remember the name of the movie (Some Kind of Wonderful) and look that up in the movie index. A minor nit, but as an indexer I feel compelled to mention it :)

So: two thumbs up for anyone who (like me) likes deconstructing pop culture, teen movies, the evolution of gender in film, and just reading about some really awesome movies. And now I'm going to go put Cruel Intentions on my Netflix queue ;)