Watched Flying Down to Rio tonight. More accurately, I watched the subplot with Ginger and Fred and gave the main plot (some kind of love triangle between people I didn't care about) a miss.

I have to say, there must have been some good crack being done in Hollywood in 1933. Nothing else can explain that last production number, with all the women on planes. No, really, through the magic of special effects, there were chorus girls dancing while harnessed to the wings of old-style prop planes. The people in the movie viewing it had to look through binoculars to see the show. One memorable sequence had a line of girls lauch some parachutes which ripped all their clothes off, leaving them to dance about in their underwear 10,000 feet above Brazil. No, really.

Yeah, this was obviously made before the Hays Code came into being. If it weren't for that sequence, the see-through dresses most of the women were in would've given it away, as would some of the dialogue. ("What have those South American girls got below the equator that we don't?" comes to mind.) Even the Carioca itself might not have passed muster the next year, given the scandalous way everyone pressed their foreheads together while dancing.

For what it was, it was fairly entertaining, even if Fred and Ginger only danced together for about two minutes. (Two pretty good minutes, though. In addition to the nifty stuff, I laughed quite a bit when they bumped their heads together and staggered around all dazed after trying to do the forehead-touching thing.) Ginger in particular got to pull off some snappy dialogue, and Fred got in a few amusing lines as well. Here's a conversation I found funny:

Ginger/"Honey Hale": What's this business about the foreheads?
Fred/"Fred Ayres": Mental telepathy.
Ginger: I can tell what they're thinking about from here!

Them drunkenly watching the denoument of the main plot together through a pair of binoculars was also pretty funny. Not to mention that the placement of it right before the fadeout seemed as if RKO was saying very loudly, "LOOK, HERE ARE FRED AND GINGER. THEY ARE OUR NEW MONEY-MAKING PAIRING. YOU WILL BE SEEING MORE OF THEM."

Now I...kind of want fic. Hmm.

Dear Body,

Now is so not the time to be getting sick. Not at all. You can't wait a week?

Also, if this is swine flu, or any other kind of flu and not just a cold, someone's head is going to roll.

Uckily yours,
Me

*

Dear Millay paper,

I revised you. Can't you just conclude yourself?

Frustratedly yours,
Me

*

Dear Thesis,

Thank you for being you, even if we are having some trouble with that section on "Quarantine." I have faith we will manage, though. We must manage, for this chapter has to be done before I leave town next week.

Soppily yours,
Me

*

In less annoying news, my teaching evaluation went pretty well. It was weird seeing myself on video, but I got over it eventually, and the director of the composition program liked what I was doing and even wanted copies of my paper assignments to put in the sample assignment bank for other 101 teachers. Perhaps I should go into curriculum planning or the like.

I think I finally found the Millay paper I want to write--in the conclusion of the one I did write.

CURSES.

*

Here is my contribution to the annual retail frenzy: pretty, pretty shoes.

I have no reason to buy them--I refuse to wear heels if I can possibly get away with it, and anyway, these are suede-soled dance shoes--but I kind of want them anyway. I can't actually remember ever wanting a specific pair of shoes--I'm more of a "Oh, the sole is falling off my boot/tennis shoe/sandal. I should get new ones" type of shoe shopper. And then I look for something as closely related to my current footwear as I can get. But these are so pretty, and it's nice to imagine having an occasion to wear them--and perhaps also a sleek 1930s evening gown to go with them. (Not to mention the figure that would go with said gown. Heh.)

Alas, I have none of these things, and so no shoes. But I will pretend.

I've never done one of these before, but for some reason, I feel inspired. I dunno. Maybe because my last however many fannish obsessions have all been for rarepairs or rare fandoms, and I've cruised through everything available for them three times over now. (Or, for one, appear to have written the only thing available.)

( Step One )

( Step Two )

MY WISHLIST
1. Ivanova/Garibaldi fic
2. Fic for any Fred and Ginger movie (i.e., "How Huck and Lizzie from Roberta became childhood sweethearts" or "What happened to Penny and Lucky after Swing Time?" Sherry&Bake and Huck&Lizzie are my favorites, but I like all their characters!)
3. Fraser/Thatcher fic
4. Northern Exposure fic (particular preference for Fleishman/O'Connell or gen for any character, but given how small the fandom is, I'll take pretty much anything)
5. Vids for any of the above.


And now I must pack, for the drive home tomorrow starts bright and early. (Also, if I don't finish this poetics paper tonight, I'm going to go crazy. At least my prof pretty much told me tonight that I was done with it and didn't need to go the extra mile I was thinking I had to go. Now all it needs is a thorough revision--and probably a conclusion would be good--and it'll be ready to go.)

Yeah, there's musical!fic. This probably shouldn't surprise anyone.

Title: We Were Very Tired, We Were Very Married
Author: icepixie
Rating: It would pass the Hays Code with flying colors.
Summary: There's not much room on a ferry, but Peter and Linda dance anyway. (You know how Fred and Ginger never danced to "They Can't Take That Away From Me" in Shall We Dance? This is my attempt at rectification.)
Notes: My deepest apologies for the title. I could not help myself. For those of you scratching your heads, check out Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo." Just don't come after me with pitchforks, please.

( I already married you. You can't expect me to actually fall in love with you. )

Due to some ill-advised Wikipedia browsing, I now have "Heart and Soul" lodged in my head for all eternity for at least the next day.

And now, because I mentioned it, so probably do many of you. Bwahahaha.

(And if you don't, you can!)

*

I watched Roberta last night. ( Some thoughts on that and other movies in the series )

*

It is raining, and yet I still must head down to campus and make copies/print paper comments/return library books. Booooo.

I just titled the half-finished fic I've been working on in between paragraphs of my Millay essay* with a really, really terrible pun. It's so bad that even I don't want to admit to it, and I'll admit to just about any pun. Aside from that, it doesn't entirely fit the general mood of the fic, though there is a section of dialogue it matches ever-so-vaguely.

Just...wow. The pun fairy in my brain must have been putting in some overtime lately.

* Four pages down! Only six left!

My Millay essay is slowly turning into one about her intersections with Eliot and the Modernist conception of "the moment." Considering how very little I know about Eliot, and how much less I know about Modernist perception of time, this is somewhat disturbing.

*eyes paper worriedly*

New journal header: accomplished!

(That was the result of the "every five papers you grade, you get to spend twenty minutes fooling around in Photoshop" bribe I made myself. Worked fairly well, I'd say.)

I still can't figure out what I need to change in the CSS code to make the Previous 20/Next 20 links show up gray rather than blue, but I don't know that I care anymore. Actually, I may go back and make my other links various colors, because while monochrome goes nicely with the header, I'm already missing color. Hmmm.

I will say that CSS seems more intuitive than HTML. I was thinking it was scary, but it's really not that bad. Of course, I was just customizing an existing theme; rewriting one from scratch it probably a lot different. Still, not too bad at all.

( This week's Castle )

*

I've decided that if when I write a Bake/Sherry (Follow the Fleet) fic, it should concern them ditching the vaudeville act in order to head off to Hollywood and make a series of musicals with flimsy plots and great dance scenes for which they become incredibly popular.

Ah, metafiction. *draws postmodern hearts*

Now, back to typing up my comments on student papers. Nine more to go, and then that's it! Until the next set comes in in two and a half weeks, anyway. *sigh*

Spending an hour reading about the 1920s on Wikipedia totally counts as research for my Millay paper, doesn't it?

*sigh*

I don't know, y'all. I want to write this paper, and I think it'll turn out well (even if it doesn't, there are fewer than thirty pieces of scholarship on her, so it's not like I have a lot of competition), but I've been really, really easily distracted over the past week or so. Often that's been by grading, which I guess is a good thing, although if I read one more paper on sex ed, I think I may murder something.

Often this distraction has been in the form of Netflix's instant watch feature. I RUE THE DAY they implemented it.

That said, some thoughts on a few movies. You will undoubtedly have already guessed whom they star.

( Natterings )

Right. WORK, ARGH.

I just realized that in less than two months, we're going to have an easy way to refer to our current decade: the 'teens. No more of this awkard "2000s" business; we'll have a real decade name again.

That feels a tiny bit shocking. I'm not sure why.

Maybe it's because my immediate assocation with the phrase is with the 1910s, which seem incredibly remote to me. It's weird, but they seem somehow more distant than even the last decades of the nineteenth century, and certainly moreso than any of the decades that came after. The twenties and thirties, I get on a visceral level; I feel like I have enough common referrents with them to understand, more or less, what life was like then. The period before 1900 is so removed from my daily experience as to make any hope of understanding life then impossible, so in an odd way it's easier; I write off the whole enchilada and concentrate on the aspects that are accessible.

The Edwardian era¹ doesn't quite fit into either category. It's tantalizingly close--you have the rise of the automobile, the silent movie, the gramophone; not the same as today, but close enough analogues. Even telephones had been around for a few years. But at the same time, you have the crazy hats and hobble skirts of women's fashion; you have the whole social system that made WWI an even bigger mess than it was going to be anyway (for that matter, you have a cavalry in WWI); you have the decade with the greatest percentage of the population having servants or working as servants in 1900-1910; you have women unable to vote in this country; you have the huge popularity of ballroom dancing and vaudeville. These are things I can read about--or even do, as with ballroom--but never really know.

I do think WWI has an incredible amount to do with it; there are echoes in WWII and in the sweeping cultural changes of the 1960s, but nothing really makes a big black uncrossable line across the timeline of the past century or of any century quite like the Great War. (Which makes me wonder why we don't study it more in, say, high school. I knew the dry facts of Franz Josef's assassination and everything, but it wasn't until very recently, when I started reading Eliot and Woolf and other Modernists with people who really know what they're talking about, that I got the true impact of this war on every area of life.) You can go up to that line, you can wave at the people on the other side, but there's no getting over it.

I wonder, though, if it's just the war, and if those two decades wouldn't seem so remote to me if it hadn't happened. Is the horizon of understanding always fixed at ninety or so years in the past? I guess I wonder because I'm curious how our current era is going to look to the people of the 2110s. So much of this decade, at least technologically, has seemed to be refinements of previous technologies--the iPod for the Walkman, 3D movies for 2D movies, etc. Nothing quite like the paradigm shift of the automobile has come along.²

Maybe this century, though, will be one of primarily social and cultural rather than social and technological sea changes. The recent healthcare reform bills, for example. Perhaps the European Union organization and ideal will spread to other areas of the globe; maybe the Vulcans will show up and we'll end up uniting under a world government. Or perhaps in 2083, there will be a law passed that requires all meat to be grown in vats. (I guess that would be both social and technological. Hmm.) Maybe people of 2110 will marvel at a world that had 193 separate countries and where people killed animals for food.

What are things about our current era that you think will be unknowable to the people of 2110s?


* Icon is not related; it's just pretty. How much do I want Ginger's dress? Oh, wait, that would be a whole lot.

¹ I'm using the extended definition, i.e., from 1900-1918.

² Granted, that paradigm took probably thirty years to really shift entirely from horses to cars, but I think you get my meaning. Then again, maybe it's just that we're still riding the wave of the 80s and 90s, with the infiltration of computers into all areas of our lives; the car and the telephone have been telescoped by time into these immediate, sweeping changes, but really they were more like the information revolution.

Another set of papers to grade. WHEN WILL IT END?

(Oh, wait, that would be in about a month. A month. Crap! WHY IS OVER SO QUICKLY?)

Hmmm. I promised my students I'd have the papers back on the 18th, because my two-week revision policy has rather boxed me into a corner. I should get on that. *mopes*

I was not expecting this to work nearly as well as it does. (It does seem to fall apart a bit near the end, but the beginning is really impressive. You know, I think my cha-cha would've improved about a hundred percent had I been wearing tap shoes instead of Latin heels.)

This weekend, I corrected a grievous oversight plaguing my life: I finally saw a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flick (Top Hat). The plot was so incredibly lame* that I wound up fast-forwarding through most of the talky bits to get to the dancing, which is magnificient. I wanna be able to do that.**

You can really see the influence they had on American Smooth dancing (my favorite of the four ballroom dance types). Like right here, in this clip from Roberta, there's definitely some American Foxtrot sensibility going on, even if they aren't performing actual steps from the syllabus. (Granted, there are sometimes little Russian-accented voices in my head yelling at them to stand up straight when they dance with each other, for the love of God, but then I remember that, a.) they were doing tap dance together more often than they were doing anything strictly ballroom-related, and b.) it's Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and I have absolutely no room to criticize.)

Speaking of YouTube, there appears to be some kind of fad over there for replacing the original music with modern songs (such as here and here) and...it actually works, once you get past the initial weirdness. I guess when the beats are roughly the same, you can kind of do whatever you want. (Or possibly just that particular number is so amazing it can handle any music you throw at it.)

There are also actual fanvids, such as this one, which was surprisingly well-done and even somewhat touching.

Anyway. Back to the thesis. I have new critical scaffolding that I like better than my old one, so I need to go and integrate that.


* Mistaken identity plots are my number one narrative hate. I truly, truly despise them, because they rely on characters being SO, SO STUPID.

** Also, Ginger manages to make being sung to by--and dancing with--Fred look like the most awesome thing in the world. Since he's doing the soloing, in theory my attention should've been on him, but no, it was all on her. I am duly impressed.

A kind soul is holding a job fair in his comments. If you're looking for work, or will be soon, you can leave a comment with what kind of work you're looking for, and then people who know of job openings and/or have advice will be able to see and respond to the comments. Better than nothing, right?

(Thanks to wintercreek for the link.)

I was browsing the WriteRCastle Twitter feed, and whoever's behind it re-posted a joke that was so amazingly bad, I had no choice but to stick it up here. To wit (or at any rate to groan):

Two philosophers walk into a bar. One asks, "Can you mix me a Nietzschean Cocktail?" The bartender shrugs. "Kant."

It almost makes up for the frustration I've felt today while trying to a.) find Millay criticism in online databases*, and b.) finish this frakking B5 fic.


* I've decided to write on her celebrations of transience. Wish me luck, especially considering there is literally a book of essays on her, and that appears to be it, aside from two biographies. Good thing this paper appears to be intended as a mainly formalist analysis.

Structuralism is really dead now.

(sleepingcbw is the only one who's going to get that joke, isn't she?)

More seriously, I had no idea he was still around. What an impressive intellectual life he led.