Greedy, nocturnal and irregular of habit

Our village lies at the foot of a teeny weeny Alp, the last gasp of raised ground before it flattens out into the Hungarian puszta. Most of the Bisamberg is covered in forest, some pine, but mostly greenwood, and although the major tracks through it attract a lot of walkers and mountain bikers, there are plenty of little paths that let you wander off on your own to commune with nature. I try to take the dogs up there for an hour every day, and yesterday we had two very exciting encounters. One was a man out walking his two goats. The dogs were so astonished, and so unsure what on earth these creatures were that were being walked on a lead just like them, but which manifestly WEREN'T dogs, that I was able to grab Flan before he ran over to indulge in his usual orgy of bottom-sniffing. Ten minutes later, I heard a crashing in the undergrowth and turned round expecting to see a deer, only to have a wild boar run across the path behind me. It was ENORMOUS, at least the size of Fiat 126, and about as fast as well (I'm sure it can't really have been as big as a car, not even a small car, but it certainly looked like it). Fortunately the dogs followed orders and stayed where they were, because if they'd gone after it, they would have been little bits of dog spattered all over the place. For an awful moment I thought it was going to veer round and chase after us, and I had visions of being flattened like a pancake within seconds by the sheer weight of the thing, but to my huge relief it changed its mind and raced off into the forest. I've often seen the ground all churned up by wild boar, but this was the first time I'd actually seen one in the wild.

In other news, on Saturday we're going to a midnight showing of an experimental film I worked on last year, "Bis ana waant". I saw the rough cut on a laptop in the summer, without music, and I have to say it looked fabulous. I only worked on one of the three scenes, but I'm still very proud of it :-)

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.

Conscientious Objector, Edna St Vincent Millay

I read Kate Fox's Watching The English a few weeks ago, and laughed my head off at how well she'd put her finger on my own deeply ingrained cultural biases (she is particularly funny about queueing, about moaning, and about office Christmas parties). By the end of it, though, I felt that the entire essence of Englishness had actually already been summed up a couple of decades ago in Brown and Levinson's On Politeness. On Politeness is one of the founding texts in the discipline of Pragmatics (of which most people have understandably never heard), and it examines cross-cultural politeness norms within the framework of what they call "positive and negative face". ("Slevy" was the Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Cambridge when I was doing my MPhil, and we were all terribly impressed by him, not to say jealous, because the book had arisen out of research he and Penny Brown had done for their PhD theses - they'd hammered it out on a typewriter as graduate students, in romantic cooperation, and it became an instant classic). Fox does refer to B&L occasionally, but doesn't really give them as much credit as they deserve, given that all the rules she formulates in the course of Watching the English pretty much come down to "avoid threatening your interlocutor's negative face" .

If I might oversimplify drastically, B&L's argument is that some kinds of politeness pay attention to your interlocutor's "positive face" (eg making someone a compliment, making sure they have someone to talk to at a dinner party etc - Mr Knightly's asking Harriet to dance is an example of positive face), and other kinds pay attention to their "negative face", which basically means you don't impose on them. And it struck me, reading Fox's book, that English culture is obsessive about negative face. That's why the English don't talk to one another on trains, except in clearly defined situations (it is permissible to moan if your train is delayed for a long time between stations, for instance) - because your fellow passengers may not wish to be obliged to talk back to you. Their negative face - being left in peace - outweighs any possible benefit to be derived from a friendly chat. Similarly the English disapproval of boasting comes from a dislike of being obliged to compliment the boaster, such an obligation being a clear imposition and hence failure to attend to the obligatee's negative face.

I was thinking about this because in the past week or so I have been given a link by various people I hardly know to their various pieces of work, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. These weren't people asking me to beta for them, it was people basically wanting me to send them feedback. And I hated it!!! I feel very strongly that work should speak for itself, that one shouldn't go around begging for feedback, that if someone doesn't comment, it's rude to ask them to, and that putting someone in a position where they are obliged to say something nice about your work, or else come across as an arrogant meanie, is the height of bad manners.

Then I wondered if I was overreacting, if I was turning into a curmudegonly old so-and-so, if I ought to be flattered that people wanted my opinion (even if they only wanted my good opinion....) And then it struck me that what we had here was a clash of politeness models. I wasn't overreacting, I was being English. To me, ignoring my negative face and obliging me to provide a response I quite possibly didn't want to give was massively bad mannered. To the people approaching me, it was nothing of the sort.

Of course, it didn't actually help me draft my responses. I can hardly say "Please be aware that I come from a culture that pays attention to negative face and will therefore react badly to being asked to feedback your work." So I did the classic English thing and ignored the requests. Silence being an entirely legitimate way of expressing disapproval in English culture...

The blame for this lies, as always, with nineveh_uk.


Pre-slash. But not very pre-. In fact, hardly pre- at all.
Rating: Well, nothing actually happens, so PG13? It depends how dirty your mind is.
Warning: Unusual pairing

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You are The Moon

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Moon is a card of magic and mystery - when prominent you know that nothing is as it seems, particularly when it concerns relationships. All logic is thrown out the window.

The Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. This is a card that has to do with sleep, and so with both dreams and nightmares. It is a scary card in that it warns that there might be hidden enemies, tricks and falsehoods. But it should also be remembered that this is a card of great creativity, of powerful magic, primal feelings and intuition. You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial; if you have any past mental problems, you must be vigilant in taking your medication but avoid drugs or alcohol, as abuse of either will cause them irreparable damage. This time however, can also result in great creativity, psychic powers, visions and insight. You can and should trust your intuition.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Fortunately, in spite of the card's concerns, I don't have any past mental problems, so I guess that means I can abuse both drugs and alcohol without worrying about irreparable damage. Go me!

In Bruges is Martin Macdonagh's second film (he won an Oscar for his first, Six Shooter, but it was Best Short Film, so no-one's ever heard of it). It's vintage Macdonagh. Two Irish hitmen, in hiding after a botched job, are sent by their boss to sit things out in Bruges for a while and await his phone call, bringing further instructions. They kill time trailing around the beautiful mediaeval Old Town, like two fish out of water. Then the phone call comes, ushering in a succession of thrilling twists and turns that end very bloodily indeed.

SPOILERS BEHIND THE CUT FOR IN BRUGES AND THE PILLOWMAN

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This weekend I went to an exhibition about desertion from the Wehrmacht in World War 2. It was mostly - quite rightly - case studies of individuals who had deserted, or been accused of deserting, or had helped deserters, or had been in charge of the legal system that punished deserters (desertion counted as "undermining manliness" within the armed forces and was punishable by death. "Undermining manliness" was a bit of a catch-all crime - one woman who worked in the kitchens of the Luftwaffe was sentenced to death for "undermining manliness" when she expressed disappintment that the plot to assassinate Hitler had failed. Luckily for her, Himmler commuted it to ten years in prison. She received no compensation after the wwar on the grounds that she had not been systematically opposing the Nazi regime). But there was one particularly fascinating statistic, the figues of executions for desertion amonst various armies in the two world wars. Germany, for instance, shot 49 deserters in WW1 and 20,000 in WW2. Japan did even better, going from 0 executions for desertion in WW1 to 22,000 in WW2. The Americans shot only one soldier for desertion in WW2, and the British a handful more (the figures were purely for serving soldiers executed by the Wehrmacht for desertion. They don't cover people executed for assisting deserters, many of whom were women, nor men who attempetd to avoid the draft altogether).

There was also an interview with one old man who had deserted fairly early on in the war and joined the Allied forces. He described how he had discussed the possibility with his mother when he went home on leave, and how worried he had been that she and his brother, who was also in the army, would be punished if he deserted. In the end, his mother burnt all his photos and letters and said that if she was arrested, she would claim she hadn't had any contact with him for years. He had been planning to cross the enemy lines with a friend, but at the last minute the friend bottled out because he couldn't bear the thought of having to shoot at his fellow countrymen. After the war, he was treated as a traitor by most people he knew, and ended up keeping his mouth shut for years and years - he was evidently fairly bitter about what he called "the second great lie" of the old soldiers, who claimed that they had been defending their country and had fought with honour, disregarding the fact that they had actually been fighting for the Nazis.

Just to let people know that picowrimo will be running again this November. picowrimo is a brilliant alternative to Nanowrimo for people who fancy the discipline of a little regular writing for a month but don't want to commit themselves to writing 50,000 words. With picowrimo, you set your own goals, and have all the benefits of supportive cheers, without having to get stressed out about word count. If your original goal turns out to be unrealistic, you simply modify it. You can aim to write a hundred words a day, or a drabble a week, or one ficlet across the whole month; or you can aim to write a massive multi-chapter epic. And you can change your mind halfway through and decide you'd be satisfied with a third of that. I found it an enormously productive month and will definitely be doing it again this year.

I cough, therefore I am.

...just brung low by a lurgy. Normal service will be resumed at some point.

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Gacked from edna_blackadder:

Name a character from one of my fandoms and I'll give you:

(a) three facts about them from my personal canon/fanon
(b) a reason he/she sucks
(c) a reason he/she is awesome
(d) five things that never happened to that character and/or
(e) five people that character never had sex with and why

ETA: I have not so randomly changed (e) from "fell in love with" to "had sex with", on the grounds that sex is more frequent than love, and quite possibly more interesting. At least it allows for a greater array of emotional attitudes towards the event.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to akane42me, who is wise and wonderful and thoughtful and caring and deserves the best of all possible birthdays.

I think I shall have to step away from the Lord Peter Yahoo group for a while, because it is bringing out my inner Nasty Person in spades. I dind't even know I had an inner Nasty Person until I joined the group - I thought I was all charm and consideration and sweet, sweet reasonableness - but it turns out I was labouring under a misapprehension and in fact I enjoy nothing more than tearing someone else's throat out in the cut and thrust of what passes for debate. Except I don't, not really. So before I make a complete Helen Denver of myself, I think voluntary retirement is the route to go.

One of the current Crack Van recs praises a piece of fic because "The writing is superb; the syntax, amazing". And ever since, I've been wondering what amazing syntax would be like. Perfect mastery of embedded clauses? An inordinate fondess for gerunds? Or perhaps daring violations of NP constraints?

In one of my favourite bits of Hodges' biography of Turing, Turing attends some of Wittgenstein's philosophy seminars and finds himself the sole representative of "science" in the group. One particularly forward-thinking attender took notes, so we can read the debates between the two of them. There's something thrilling about two famous historical figures that I know from completely different contexts actually meeting and talking - as if life had written a really good crossover. With this in mind, I was fascinated by this photograph that appeared in the magazine Profil a couple of weeks ago:



The third boy from the right, second row from the back, is Ludwig Wittgenstein at the age of 14. The very last boy on the right of the back row is a certain A. Hitler. There's a close-up behind the cut.

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This is Lucky looking at the Ötscher from one side:


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I probably shouldn't have tried to write this, but I did, and now I'm completely fed up with it.

Far from Wipers

Far, far from Wipers I long to be,
Where German snipers can't get at me,
Dark is my dugout, cold are my feet,
Waiting for whizz bangs to send me to sleep.


It was a source of unease to Bunter, who had an eye for the finer nuances of men's fashion, that he was obliged to present himself at Duke's Denver in his demob suit, which was missing a top button and, after four years in storage, smelled noticeably of moth balls. His mother had sewn on a new button the previous evening, but the replacement was smaller and lighter than the original, and Bunter suffered greatly under the apprehension that all eyes would instantly be drawn to it. Assuming, that was, that they weren't watering so badly from the camphor that they couldn't see it at all.
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Vane, that is.

Although perhaps it would be more accurate to call this The Problem of Lady Peter.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Harriet, at least in the novels (I'm less keen on what little we see of her in the short stories, where smugness seems to have become the over-riding feature of her character). And while she is clearly a total Mary Sue, she also proves that Mary Sues are not of themselves a bad thing. It's what you do with them that counts. She's brave, she's prickly, she's honest with herself, even when it's painful for her to be so. I think her combative, push-pull relationship with Peter Wimsey is a delight, and I genuinely appreciate the new perspective she provides on him, allowing us to see beneath the mask of the "chattering icicle" to the vulnerable man beneath.

So. I like Harriet, I like Peter, I like the courtship. I like hearing them talk piffle, and I like seeing them fight, and I enjoy the sense that in spite of everything they really are very well matched. But it all goes wrong at the end of Gaudy Night.

It's often said that in Gaudy Night Harriet finally recognises that Peter is offering her a genuinely equal relationship, and that this is why she's able to accept him. And if their story had ended with Placetne, I'd have agreed. But it doesn't. the story doesn't end there, and Gaudy Night doesn't even end there. It ends with Peter demonstrating his superiority to Harriet by moving into a world to which she has no access, via his appreciation of music. Hold onto that moment. It will turn out to be significant.

Harriet tells Miss de Vine that if she once gives way to Peter, she will "go up like straw". Note the implication of destruction in that metaphor. The rot sets in when Peter writes to Harriet about settlements, ending his letter with "Either your pride or mine will have to be sacrificed – I can only appeal to your generosity to let it be yours." Surprise, surprise it is indeed Harriet's pride that is sacrificed – Peter is not obliged to endure the tiniest scratch in his position of aristocratic male privilege – and she becomes "meekly prepared to accept suitable income" (unlike, we note, Charles Parker, who insisted on finding a compromise solution to spare his pride). After that, things go from bad to worse. Harriet insists on promising to obey Peter as part of her marriage vows. DLS tries to finesse this by putting the counter-argument into the mouth of her least sympathetic character, so that we are treated to the spectacle of Helen Denver, of all people, objecting to the bride choosing to "obey" her husband (DLS pulls the same trick in the short stories, where Harriet, having married into the aristocracy, becomes more toffee-nosed than the toffs, but her views are made more sympathetic by giving Helen – Helen! – an advanced friend, who doesn't believe in beating children, and publicly criticises the system of primogeniture – the very same Helen who was hoping Peter would die without issue so all his money would go to Jerry).

The most gut-churning moment comes when Harriet calls Peter "my lord" in bed (and he likes it), though I'm not dead keen on the mention of her "gratitude" to Peter for being a better lover than Philip Boyes, either. After all, we can't all have rich uncles who pay for us to be educated by the prostitutes in Paris* (though I suspect Boyes' sin of omission was rather more basic than a failure to provide a dazzling array of sexual techniques – cue Harriet singing "I'm lying on the wet patch in the middle of the bed, I'm feeling quite hard done by, I spent ages giving head").

DLS's solution to the problem of being a heterosexual women in a man's world (how do you cope with falling in love with your oppressor?) is, I fear, that a woman can find sexual fulfilment and personal happiness by falling in love with a man who is genuinely her superior. The problem with the Philip Boyes/Harriet Vane relationship, it turns out, was not that Harriet submitted to his will, but that he was an arse whose will wasn't worthy of being submitted to. Submitting to a man like Peter Wimsey, however, will give your life meaning and give you lots of orgasms.

In the end, the thing which "overmasters" Harriet, the "proper job" she recognises by the amount of care she lavishes on getting it right, is looking after a man who is superior to her. Busman's Honeymoon ends with her being honoured by being allowed to provide emotional support to Peter when he suffers the inevitable breakdown that follows when a murderer he has identified is hanged. Her triumph has nothing to with her work, or her friends, or any aspect of her being except her relationship with Peter Wimsey. "Love," says Lord Byron "is to man a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence." Harriet Vane has truly become Lady Peter.


*As an aside, I note that Mrs Weldon is treated as a ridiculous old fool for trying to buy love with her wealth, whereas Peter is considered admirable for buying sex with people he regards as servants.

More Wimseyfic from nineveh_uk here. Peter and Harriet after the end of Murder Must Advertise

Summary: Not the fic you were supposed to be getting, or even the other fic that you were supposed to be getting, but the fic you've got.