Posted 4:42 AM by Liz

In doing some housekeeping on the sidebar links, I discovered that Anna S. hasn't posted to her LiveJournal blog since December 2006. I'm hoping that she simply moved the blog somewhere else, but one of the last entries also mentions that she had uprooted herself from Seattle (and presumably from her job there as well), and was in San Francisco. And then . . . nothing. Except a few posts from people wondering where she had gotten to.

A reply to one of the earlier posts suggested that she might enjoy Bascon, a small con in San Francisco on the first weekend of November. I was there that year. Anna, did we cross paths and I never noticed? What has happened to you? We go back a long way, though not all of it was as good as it should have been (for which I blame myself), and I'm worried about you.

If anyone who reads this knows what has become of Anna, please please get in touch with me. I can try to reach her grandparents, but I don't know whether they're still living in the same place, and I can't remember her mother's last name.

ETA - crap, looks like the YACCS commenting no longer works. I'll have to switch over to Blogger's comment system. Until I have time to do that, I can be reached at liz at allslash.org.

Posted 2:58 PM by Liz

I just discovered that my slash blog had disappeared from the net. I have no idea how long it's been gone. When I transferred everything from the previous host, I thought I had transferred these files too, but evidently not. It's all back now, except for the first year's worth of entries that I lost a long time ago.

Unfortunately, I find that I don't have a lot to say about slash any more. The few slash mailing lists I'm on are quiet to the point of being dormant. Star Trek hasn't been the primary slash fandom for most people in a decade or more, and the programs people are slashing now don't appeal to me in the least. I moderate a slash group on Ravelry, and half the characters that the other members talk about are completely unfamiliar to me.

The original K/S fans used to speculate about whether it would die out when we got old. It didn't, of course--nothing with so powerful an appeal could completely disappear. But as society changed, the kinds of stories that were written changed as well. Slash is still there, but it's cloaked in contemporary mores and ideals, and in storylines and characterizations that often make no sense to me. In any real hospital, House would have been kicked off the staff a long time ago, just for example.

Buffy? Okay, that's pure fantasy. Anything goes. Same for all the other shows with supernatural themes (am I the only one who's getting tired of them?) But House, Office, um, can't think of the other one I wanted to use as an example, do they really, in any way, reflect today's society?

I suppose they're better than this season's crop of uber-violent cop and military programs. Wonder whether anyone is slashing those . . .

ETA - apparently they are. 24 is one of the shows listed on the new Archive of Our Own. I haven't looked to see what else might be there (in the same category, I mean), and it isn't as though I'm really up on that particular category anyway.

Posted 5:36 AM by Liz

I was looking for an obscure bit of slashfic the other day and happened across another article on slash and why people read and write it. This author, Kate Mercier, writing for Alternet, didn't get much right, but it was amusing to watch her try.

I had the fortune/misfortune in high school to be half-geek/half-popular. Where I'm from, it's the popular kids who are sexy (read: "sexual," but I didn't know that then) and the geeks who are, well, gamers. That is, while the cool kids were out drinking and fighting and having sex, the geeks were taking part in role-playing games and reading Anne Rice/Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy/graphic novels. Which is not to say that these "geeks" weren't also drinking and fighting and having sex, they were just doing all that stuff while engaging in a rich fantasy life, and when time permitted, academic studies. These are the people who created and populated the world of "Slash," or "/": a subculture of fan fiction, or "Fan Fic" -- stories written by fans.

As it happens, I do fall into that category of geek, but of the more or less 100 slash fans I know well enough to talk about, there are perhaps two others. All the rest are ordinary, non-geeky, good 'ol middle-class women in a wide variety of occupations and family situations. The one thing that does bind them and characterize them as a group is what the author calls a "rich fantasy life," but you don't have to be a geek to have that.

Mercier did get one thing right:

There are hundreds and hundreds of Web sites with full-to-bursting archives of stories that are often illustrated, rated, and categorized for your reading pleasure. There are well-known authors, published fanzines, conventions, newsgroups, and chat rooms. There is a story for every kink, a fable for every double entendre uttered on the real show, and several endings for every cliff hanger.

But her assertion that "this genre takes itself VERY seriously" completely ignores the fact that WE KNOW IT'S JUST FICTION. We may enjoy a two-hour discussion of why Spock abandoned his beloved Kirk after the five-year mission and went back to Vulcan to renounce every trace of emotion in his half-human psyche, but WE KNOW IT'S JUST FICTION. It's just that this particular fiction is a lot more satisfying than the real life in which some of us are trapped. Rich fantasy life, indeed.

Mercier asks the inevitable question, "Why are the overwhelming majority of slash writers women?" I'd like to know why everyone wants to know that. The obvious answer is that what they produce appeals to women! Does there have to be some deep dark reason for this? She goes on to say

Maybe it's a chance for these fans/writers to step completely out of the bounds of their "normal" heterosexual lives and into one that subverts the formula of aggressive male/passive female, recognizable in most television writing.

But many of us are not heterosexual -- there is a substantial percentage of lesbians and bi's in slash fandom, and a few gay men too. And her assertion that these stories are about gay men completely misses the fact that there is a large component of "femslash" -- stories written about two women together. The fact that more of the stories are about two men reflects the fact that (1) there are more television series featuring men in the starring roles than those featuring women (2) because there are more starring roles for men, there are more straight women than lesbians in slash fandom. If you look at the fandoms for Xena and Buffy, just to name two, you find a far higher percentage of femslash.

So, sigh, another non-slash-fan writer takes on slash, and the deep dark subject of "what it means." You know what? All it means is that everyone is different. Some people ride Harley-Davidsons. Some people play bingo on an almost religious basis. Some people are slaves to their homes. Some people like slashfic. Big deal.

Posted 6:45 AM by Liz

No, I haven't disappeared or given up blogging. Just too much work, too much family stress impacting work, too much concern with political stuff, to leave time or energy for what I really enjoy. But Tim Kaine, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate whose campaign I worked on in Virginia, won last night, whooeee! Maybe the world is slowly righting itself after all. You keep telling yourself that things cannot go on as they are, but after a while it's hard to believe yourself any more.

On to Bascon . . .

Interesting con. I presume it was patterned after the old small intimate K/S cons like Weekend in the Country, though I think the impact of that idea was diffused by the presence of so many fandoms. Unless you were involved in a lot of different fandoms, there weren't more than a couple of things to attend, and it's hard to attract many dealers for something so small. But it was a nice contrast with the crowds at cons like Shore Leave and some of the other huge ones.

There were panels for everything under the sun, but I ended up going only to the "Wild Wild West" panel and the "House M.D." panel, which was heavily attended and raised my consciousness a great deal about House! I haven't had an opportunity to see the show, and I have to confess that it doesn't sound like something I'll be tremendously interested in, but I'll make the attempt.

It was good to see Gayle F. and Caren P. again, two people from my earliest days in K/S. I hadn't realized either of them was still involved in any kind of fandom. My very first art purchase was a print of Caren's.

Con-going for me is primarily an opportunity to meet people face-to-face that I've known only by reading their stories, or more, recently, by email. So it was great fun to meet Jungle Kitty, who I had known from ASCEM, and her partner in crime (whose fan name I can't remember), and also Jonk, who wrote those wonderful post-Kirk-death Spock/McCoy stories, and the classic "Party Pooper." They have a blog at http://lookathisbutt.blogspot.com and also have a long-running podcast, which is linked to at their blog. They interviewed our very own Miss Sunbeam about her TNG episode guides, giving me some sneaky notions about doing something similar for our WWW ep guides.

The highlight of the con experience, however, was coming back into the dead dog party on Sunday just in time to hear that Sunbeam had won both Best in Craft and Best in Show for her amazing Jim/Artie collage, the image of which is on the cover of the Sin and Salvation zine. I wish all of you could have seen the original. The cover is gorgeous; the original piece of art is stunning.

Islaofhope, Sunbeam, Jhava and I spent the rest of Sunday in the city, having the best dim sum I've ever eaten and walking all over Chinatown. We drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, went down Lombard Street, and did all the tourist-y stuff. Great fun--I lived near San Fran once, but I was small and didn't remember much besides the GG bridge and the Zoo. I took zillions of pictures.

On Monday, Islaofhope and Jhava and I went to the Castro, bought books in A Different Light (gay/lesbian bookstore), ate wonderful pizza, took more pictures, bought souvenirs, took more pictures . . .

After taking Jhava to the airport, Isla drove up to the beach just north of Golden Gate Park and dragged me kicking and screaming all the way up to Cliff House and back in the pouring down rain . . . no, really, we had a great walk up the beach, watching the windsurfers, to Cliff House and Seal Rocks. There is a Camera Obscura at Cliff House, but it was closed. I took pictures of it for Sunbeam, who is interested in such things, and Isla took pictures of me standing in front of it.

We looked at the pictures of the old Sutro Baths at Cliff House (which must still have been there when I visited it in 1953 or thereabouts, but I don't remember them), had champagne in the bar, bought more books in the gift shop and then found it was raining when we went out to walk back. By the time we got back to the car, we were both soaked to the skin, but it was a wonderful refreshing walk. I can't remember the last time I had an opportunity or a motive to walk outside in the rain--it was like being a little kid again.

I'll post some pictures here when I get them all uploaded from the camera.

Posted 5:52 PM by Liz

Here's a new fandom, though I won't be writing in it. I haven't the skill to do it well, nor the patience to acquire the skill.

I waited with some nervousness for "Master and Commander," the oddly named film version of Patrick O'Brians tenth book in the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series (oddly named because that was actually the title of the first book, not the tenth). I say with "nervousness" because even though the early reports were encouraging, it was anyone's guess how well the characterization would honor O'Brian. And I knew fan fiction would inevitably follow—fanfic written by people who had no knowledge of the books, but had seen only the movie. Awful fanfic. Fanfic that would make me cringe, and would turn off whole crowds of people who might otherwise have read the original works.

Well—the movie was so stunningly good that I could think of nothing else for days. The fanfic followed, as expected. And it's surprisingly good too, though I think the only authors I can recommend have probably read the books too. Shalott, at least, has done. Her Aubrey/Maturin reads like what O'Brian would have written if he had wanted to write slash. Yet it isn't a slavish echo of his writing; it's hers, unique and quite wonderful, and completely true to Jack and Stephen.

Today I found Tiffany Rawlings' story, The Butcher's Bill, also true to the characters and to the voice of that time period.

Because of various circumstances, I was able to see the movie only once, so until the DVD becomes available, I'll have to make do with the fanfic, and damn, it's good.

Posted 5:10 PM by Liz

I have written nothing lately. I have done nothing fan-related lately, other than update the Wide Wide West website I created for the WWW mailing list. I am so over my head in work that I fear I will never see daylight again. It's probably time to take on another fandom—that always gets the energy levels up.

Most of my writing is political nowadays, which is definitely not something I want to carry over into fandom. Fandom is where I go to escape the craziness of the rest of the world. But the depressing nature of the political writing seems to have damped down my interest in almost everything else—that and the grinding unending hours of work. Don't feel sorry for me—I'm self-employed. I can quit any time I want to. I'm a workaholic. But sometimes I wish I could just walk away and disappear for about two weeks.

Years ago, when I was married and had children, we went away to a time-share townhouse for a week. It had the most comfortable sofa I have ever known, and I spent that week lying in it, listening to the surf outside, and to the kids playing in the sand, and occasionally surfacing to eat something my husband prepared. That week came a year almost to the day after I opened my first computer store, back in the days when no one had heard of "computer stores," and I was so burned out that I wanted to change my name and run away. I still recall that week with pleasure, and I think I need another similar one.

I also think I need to write a marriage story for Jim and Artie from Wild Wild West. Bush is obviously going to use the gay marriage debate as another wedge issue to divide the country, and if I can't make any other contribution, I can at least get my guys married to each other. Accomplishing that in 1875 may be as much a problem as doing it in 2004, but I'll figure it out somehow.

I'm not really into issuing challenges, but if anyone happens to come across this blog and would like to contribute a fanfic marriage story (same-sex, obviously), I'll post it for you. Um, the usual disclaimers apply—mine, that is: You have to be able to spell, use more or less correct grammar (or put up with me correcting it for you), and not savage the characterization too badly. Have fun!

Posted 7:04 PM by Liz

Long time no post. Much strangeness in my world, none of which I'm going to bring into this venue, which has developed some strangeness all its own.

I've had several opportunities to shift this blog over to a LiveJournal, and have been generally too lazy to do so. Now I'm excessively glad that I didn't. Some fucking idiot with a LiveJournal, who calls herself Fandom_Scruples, is blacklisting other LJ'ers who post adult fiction on their sites. Until a couple of days ago, she was merely listing their names on her own blacklist. Now she threatens to report them to some un-named federal agency for violations of the COPA (Child Online Protection Act) if they don't password protect their sites within two weeks. Is this woman a moron? If I were a 14-year-old who'd discovered slash fiction and wanted to read more of it, I sure as hell wouldn't be slowed down by having to swear I was 18.

I'm as concerned as anyone else about children being exposed to things that aren't good for them, like hour after hour of television to substitute for their absentee parents, levels of violence in their entertainment that innures them to real pain and suffering, lousy diets as a result of food industry advertising and parental laziness, such educational mediocrity that children are turned loose from high school with little preparation for living as adults . . . shall I go on? The kid who stumbles across a bit of amateur slash fanfic will be enormously lucky if that's the worst he or she ever has to deal with. In fact, they might learn a thing or two from the care with which most relationships are depicted in fan fiction.

It isn't much consolation to realize that the same open medium that has allowed us to share our love of fanfic also makes it easy for someone else to attempt to gag us.

Posted 4:43 PM by Liz

One Trek list that I'm on has been discussing zines vs. netfic--not exactly a new subject, but this discussion has at least one unusual twist. Someone suggested that had the internet existed in its present form when K/S was first getting its start, fanfic would have spread primarily on the net rather than through zines. And much to my surprise, most of the group--or at least most of those who are participating in the discussion--seem to accept that premise.

I wasn't there at the very beginning--if it's possible to pinpoint one moment in time as the beginning of K/S (and thence slash)--but I was on the scene early enough in its development to be familiar with the attitudes and environment of the time. Moreover, I was on the internet long before most people had ever heard of it, so I think I can comment knowledgeably. My opinion is that zines would still have been the primary venue for K/S fiction.

The factor which most affected the distribution of K/S was not technological limitation, but the culture of the time. We take the existence of homosexuality so much for granted now that it's hard for some people to imagine a society where the only mention of gayfolk came in the form of offensive jokes or pulpit-pounding diatribe. This was the climate in which K/S was born.

All of us in the early days were women, though I knew one man who participated in K/S during the mid 80's. Most of us were housewives, with husband and children to keep in the dark about our strange deviant hobby. Most of us risked the loss of jobs, family relationships--even personal freedom, if we were caught mailing 'obscene' materials. I was fortunate in that my significant other at the time was a K/S writer herself, but few others had that luxury. One listmember said that she knew of women who had never told their families or friends of their involvement in slash, who hid that part of their lives even today. That's a good indication of how paranoid we were.

We lived a strange alternate-universe sort of life. By day we were mothers, wives, co-workers. In our spare time, we wrote K/S, or we wrote letters of comment about other people's stories. Some of us were artists, some editors. We helped to publish zines on mimeographs we borrowed from church, school or community organization (I wonder how many church mimeo's were used to run off K/S stories!). We attended cons where we piled into in each other's rooms and discussed K/S until the early hours. We belonged to a tiny and mis-understood counter-culture that we had to hide from everyone but a trusted few. I was lucky to belong to a local group of K/S fans, but many others saw fellow fans only once or twice a year, at cons.

We lived in fear that Paramount, who owned Trek at that time, would file a cease-and-desist order against K/S fans, as Lucasfilms had done against fans of Star Wars. Individually, we lived in fear that if family members or spouse found out about our activities, we could lose our children. My ex-husband knew of my involvement and said he had no problem with it, but if he had decided to fight me for custody of our children, he would certainly have used it against me.

We lied about what we were writing, or wrote at those few times when we could be sure of not being observed. We spent a lot of time at the library, one of the few places where we could write for extended periods without being interrogated about what we were doing. We mailed each other madly. I do suspect that email would have entered into fandom if the net had been widely available then, even if we didn't publish our fiction on the net! But no--we might well have feared that our mail would be intercepted and traced back to us.

To mail zines overseas, we took the staples out of the binding and mailed the pages one or two at a time in letters (and I know of one country where people still have to do that). In spite of those precautions, zines were sometimes intercepted by postal inspectors. Some of us wrote both K/S and gen stories, maintaining completely different identities for the two genres. We were schizophrenic, paranoid and addicted to K/S.

A very young listmember wrote that it "must have been exciting to be a young person at that time," adding, "the APA had declared that homosexuality was not a disease in 1973." All I can say is that if homosexuality was no longer a disease, it still was, in most people's minds, a state of such moral repugnance that to reveal one's involvement in same-gender erotica was to risk the loss of everything--families, jobs, social relationships.

No, I really do not think we would have had the courage to distribute fan fiction on the internet, to put it out there for everyone to see.

But I'm damn glad the world isn't like that any more, and that young fans don't know what it was like "back then." I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Posted 4:33 PM by Liz

The server where allslash.org resides is getting to be a real irritation. When I moved my files from the previous server (after it bit the dust and disappeared without warning), all my counter code had to be changed to reflect the new paths. Fine, I'd expected that. I installed the counter scripts in the scgi-bin directory, as appeared to be required, and . . . hmm. None of them worked. I piddled around for a while checking the code and the permissions and the paths and everything was correct. So I moved them all into the cgi-bin directory that had been there when I first logged in. Bingo! They all worked.

Recently I happened to check one of the pages that was supposed to have a counter. Four little boxes with 'X' in the middle stared back at me. The counter wasn't working. I snarled, looked all the code over again, verified that all the paths were correct, and moved everything back to the scgi-bin directory. They all began working again.

Tonight, just to be sure everything was still all right, I checked again. No counters. I fired up ws-ftp, double-clicked on the scgi-bin directory to open it, and was rewarded with "Permission denied." WHAAAT??

I don't yet know "what." I sent off an indignant letter to the support address, but have heard nothing back so far. I don't have time to screw around with stuff like this. My own time is pretty thin right now--more than enough writing assignments to fill it up without having to deal with flaky servers too.

On that subject, I have about six WIP's running around on my hard drive. One Jim/Artie (Wild Wild West) for a zine, two stories for kira's holiday slash fest (the one that used to be the Slash Advent Calendar), and a Kirk/McCoy for Acidqueen and T'Len's K/Mc Fest. Wait, that's only four. Well, but there is the Jim/Artie continuing universe story that takes up where Night of New Beginnings leaves off and the long list of unfinished K/S/Mc stories in the Trinity universe.

I need a long vacation from everything else but writing.

Posted 8:10 PM by Liz

Now that I'm watching the server logs on a regular basis, I see how often people are going to various stories of mine--far more often than I'd had any idea of. I'd like to put up a counter for each one, but replicating the counter.cgi program for each page is going to eat up more space than I want to devote to it. Guess I'll have to change the program so it can tell which file it was called from. Then I'll only have to set up a totals file for each story.

The AllSlash on the Net pages are being hit multiple times per day as well. Time to get back on those and add some more links. After the ball game, at any rate.

On another subject altogether, I came across one of those "test-your-learning-style-and-hemisphere-dominance" sites, and was surprised at how well it matched my own perception of myself. It's at http://www.mindmedia.com/brainworks/profiler. My summary says I am "mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing."

It says that a conflict between how I feel and how I think will generally be resolved in favor of what I think. And that . . .

"You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in. "

Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory. "

To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management."

Pretty much right on the nose, though I would have said I was more strongly auditory and more strongly left-hemisphere-dominant.

There weren't enough questions to create a definitive evaluation, but it was fun anyway. Some of the questions could have been answered in more than one way, with an individual's choice showing a preference for visual or auditory styles.

Posted 2:31 PM by Liz

I've updated every page on the list over the past week, and now have story links for all the listed fandoms. I also added a robots.txt file to the domain root to keep robots out of my own fiction, something I should have done a long time ago. As of today, the site is being spidered by Google, Scooter (Altavista's webbot), Grub, Alexa, and Inktomi Slurp (which provides content to Microsoft and Hotbot). All of them are observing the robots.txt file and accessing only the pages with links.

Next project: upgrade all the pages to HTML 4.01. That's going to be a daunting task, because the number of pages is growing like kudzu, but it needs to be done. I've managed to get to about three of them so far.

Posted 8:56 AM by Liz

To my great amazement, one of the K/S lists I'm on has a Mennonite and an Amish member. The Amish woman doesn't post often--she mentioned that she watched television at a neighbor's house and used the library for internet access. She is apparently not "out" --out in the world at large, that is. The other woman lives on a farm, but works as a computer programmer. Her mother married "out" so she grew up with one foot in the Mennonite world and one in the secular world.

There's an interesting twist on the idomatic meaning of "out." For homosexuals, it means to be visible in the community. For some religious groups, it means to have left, or been excluded from, the community. I'm really tempted to find a K/S story in there.

I would have been surprised just to see these two women on the list, but in fact, I have a strong connection to the Mennonite community myself. I sold computer systems to several Mennonite businesses, and for many years wrote software for them and maintained networks. It's only been in the last two years that I've had no business contacts there, and I still go back to visit the folk at one of the businesses when I'm in the area.

Small world.

Posted 7:02 PM by Liz

No, I haven't failed to post since May. I just failed to make a backup local copy of my blog. My hosting server went belly up and I've lost everything that was posted since then. One hopes I've learned from that.

Quick note--I set up a web site for Sin and Salvation, the Wild Wild West mailing list on Yahoo, wherein is posted most of the episode guides and fiction that appeared on the mailing list, as well as info about zines. The site still needs a fair amount of work, but it's worth visiting if you're a fan of WWW.

Posted 8:11 PM by Liz

I've just heard the sad news that Bev Volker passed away yesterday, with colon cancer. Bev was one of the early Star Trek zine editors, and a fine writer herself.

Twenty years ago, those of us in K/S fandom spoke warily of when we were "old." Would K/S survive us? We joked about a K/S nursing home where we could read zines and talk about our guys. K/S did indeed survive, though it metamorphosed into slash, not exactly what most of us had anticipated.

Now it is we who are old, at least in the eyes of most current slash fans, and some of us are leaving the field. Chris Soto, a couple of years ago, one of the finest artists ever to grace fandom. Marian McChesney last year, someone with whom I had deep differences but whose loss I still felt. There have been a couple of others whose names elude me at the moment. Now Bev Volker. The "old school" K/S-ers are fading away.

I remember my grandmother saying that the hardest thing for her in growing old was watching her friends die one by one. She lived in the same town for most of her life--married, bore children and welcomed grandchildren with the same group of friends over a span of two generations. Unlike her, I've lived all over everywhere, from childhood to middle adulthood, seldom more than a few years in the same place. The K/S community has been my extended family. Now I know firsthand how my grandmother felt.

With the rest of K/S fandom, I mourn Bev's passing, and offer my condolences and prayers to her family.

Posted 2:07 PM by Liz

Interesting discussion on one of the K/S lists: are gender-specific words like "husband" and "wife" appropriate for same-gender relationships? Or do they carry such connotations of their dominant/submissive origins that there is no way to expunge their gender-specific implications? One thing I noticed is that many more people felt uncomfortable with "wife" than with "husband," which I suppose says something about the sub-conscious value we assign to each one.

Well, it was an interesting discussion. One of the list mods said there had been too many complaints about the "non-K/S" nature of the posts and that we were all to return to talking about Kirk or Spock. Or, as she said, preferably Kirk and Spock. So now we're trying to determine how many episodes Kevin Riley appeared in, and drooling over the Kirk/Sarek meld in ST III. I can almost figure out why some of the folk on ASCEM got really tired of the so-called "old school K/S-ers," though most of these kiddies weren't even born yet when the series aired. The little side trips we took about language and culture were the most interesting part of it for me. If all this list is allowed to do is rhapsodize over someone's pictures of a young Spock, I won't be staying on it long.

I have to wonder whether we were getting too close to the truth for some peoples' sensitivities.

Posted 6:05 PM by Liz

I have a buddy in the Cook Islands with whom I've been chatting in near real time this evening. He's online playing chess with another friend in New York, and pops off a reply to my mail whenever it comes in. I remarked to him that we're living so close to the kind of environment portrayed in Star Trek:TOS that it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. With the exception of faster-than-light speed and transporters, there isn't much Star Trek technology that hasn't already been equalled or exceeded.

Which brings me to the observation that it's almost impossible for a science fiction program to portray anything like what the future might actually be. TOS basically focused on a few techie little show-off throwaways. There was no attempt to show shifts in language, even in the use of new slang terms--which could have been done without throwing viewers off altogether (the instant acceptance of "grok" shows that it's possible to create new terminology without losing your audience). There were some hints of a change in male/female relationships, and some heavy-handed plot devices intended to prove how much the human race had "progressed" in three hundred years, but still, not much to pull the viewer out of hir 20th century mundane life and shove hir into the future. What propelled TOS into a whole new realm was something the creators and producers probably couldn't have predicted (and might have toned down if they had imagined it)--the forbidden, exciting, half-repressed dynamic between two powerful and handsome men whose meaningful glances at each other across the bridge created a whole new mythos in the late 20th century. I wish I could be here 100 years from now to see how slash has evolved and how people think of its origins.

Of course, part of the reason slash is so compelling is that it is still in that gray area of explicit sexuality. Perhaps in another 100 years we'll have progressed beyond our current need for it, and though that would be good indeed for a large part of the world's population, I'll be sorry if the genre completely disappears.

Posted 12:28 PM by Liz

Posting the "What's going on with fathers?" question to a Trek list brought forth some fascinating responses. There were the expected formula-tv-conflict suggestions, which I'd already thought of myself, of course, and Rae posted a link to an essay on myth which had some things to ponder.

But two responses in particular are worth deeper consideration. Anna Greener brought up some research suggesting that fathers and sons are in biological competition with each other, whether they realize it or not--competition for the same food, the same jobs, possibly the same mates. This would go a long way toward explaining why father-son conflicts seem so universal a theme.

Specifically in regard to Star Trek: TOS, T'Guess suggested that Sybok's 'failure' would have created a major crisis for Sarek, in terms of needing to analyze where he had gone wrong as a father and to avoid making the same mistake with Spock. He would surely have been far more critical of any hint of 'emotional contamination' in Spock than he might initially have been with Sybok.

This works as a full explanation only if you believe Sybok's existence was anticipated back in the days of the original TOS eps, which obviously is not the case. But it's an interesting look into Bill Shatner's state of mind, perhaps, if nothing else.

T'Guess also tossed out the intriguing prospect of how Amanda would have fit into this scenario. Sarek sires a full-Vulcan son, a compelling and powerful young man who appears, to begin with, to be a chip off the old block. Sarek relaxes a bit, marries a human, brings her into his house, and what happens? His pride, his son, his heir, suddenly acquires an obsession with emotion, and for whatever reason (it must have been something worse than just smiling in public), gets himself banned from Vulcan.

Poor Sarek, who must have endured great criticism from his peers and relatives for contaminating his promising son with a human wife. Poor Amanda, who must have gotten the brunt of the blame, but--most of all--poor Spock. Amanda would not have dared repeat whatever mistakes she thought she had made with Sybok. Sarek would have been the most severe and distant of Vulcan fathers, not just to avoid mistakes himself but to make up for any that he imagined Amanda might still be guilty of, and everyone from relatives to schoolmates to complete strangers would have been watching to see Sybok's alleged character faults turn up again in Spock. With that in his background, Spock is more easily seen as the poorly adjusted, emotionally stunted adult that so many fan writers have portrayed.

Posted 5:54 AM by Liz

It has occurred to me recently that nearly all the media characters who end up in slash stories have some kind of father issue. Spock has been estranged from his father for 18 years when the episode "Journey to Babel" occurs, and fans gleefully incorporate various degrees of awkwardness between them even after that. Kirk's father dies when he is still somewhere in childhood.

In the Sentinel series, Jim Ellison's father is portrayed as a bigot and an asshole. Blair has never known who his father was.

In the old Professionals series that generated a lot of fan fiction in the 80's, at least one of the characters is usually portrayed as having some kind of family problems.

Duncan's whole family, in the Highlanders, rejects him. Clark Kent has lost his family and is being brought up by adoptive parents. Luthor and his father are frequently at vicious odds with each other. Batman's family was killed before his eyes when he was a child. Robin loses his family in the first Batman movie.

I don't watch Buffy, so I've no idea how family relationships are portrayed, but I suspect the same situation exists there, taking into consideration the number of vampires who seem to inhabit the cast and whose family backgrounds don't get mentioned at all.

Okay, obvious reasons: nobody really wants to watch a program where everyone is perfectly happy. We all get off on watching other people's problems, and probably half the extant fan fiction was written to iron out the author's own feelings about some family-related problem. And since everyone has 'em, family problems are an easy way to introduce tension and conflict that everyone will relate to into a series. But this focus on fathers in particular has me wondering. Are fathers seen as such an integral part of a child's life that one is presumed to be permanently impaired if the father was lacking in support, or just lacking, period?

I know people whose relationships with their fathers were dreadful, or non-existent, yet they manage to be functioning happy adults. I know others with loving and intact families who never have successful relationships in their own adult lives. So I have some difficulty with the idea that fathers alone cast that long a shadow over their offspring's life.

Perhaps we're just seeing at second hand the dysfunctional families and childhoods of the creators and screenwriters, or their assumption that anyone with emotional issues must have had a father-deprived childhood--which translates into creating father-issues for their characters. It just seems so widespread that one wonders whether there is a meme at work here.

Posted 8:24 PM by Liz

An excellent article on slash has turned up on the BitchMagazine site, at Fantastic Voyage, A Journey into the Wide Wild World of Slash Fiction! The author, Noy Thrupkaew, manages to examine the phenomenon of slash without being either patronizing or pseudo-enthralled with it all. In fact, considering how she might a write a slash story herself, she realizes why other women write slash:

And suddenly I had my own explanation for why slash-loving straight women might write male/male relationships: The relationships between male characters allow a writer to strike a harmonious balance between working within the framework of a show and spinning a tale of her own imagination. The best slash I’ve read captures the rhythm of the characters’ speech, probes their psychology, and shows a mastery of complicated plots, all while taking the characters in new directions. And although a similar sense of possibility could await a writer delving into unexpected male/female pairings (Scully and Skinner, for instance) or trysts between two female characters (say, Buffy and Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), male/male pairings add an extra dimension—the opportunity to recraft masculinity itself. And for women—straight or queer—who write slash fiction, this certainly seems to add an extra-enticing challenge, a sense of going where no woman has gone before.

She also writes: [The writers] also flesh out their heroes with qualities that are a combination of traditionally male behaviors (assertive, confident) and female characteristics (nurturing, communicative). In other words, the best pieces feature players who are more like real people than the characters you find on TV.

I'll add my own opinion that women write men the way they would like them to be. But writing that characterization into a story with another women, with het sex, isn't believable. We all just know, correctly or not, that men don't behave that way with women. Perhaps with another man, however? Is it possible that the caring, the tenderness, the empathy that straight women would like to see in their men is possible only in male/male relationships? I think not, but I also think that the script acted out by straight men in het relationships is so firmly established, both genetically and socially, that it's extremely difficult to see, and act, beyond its limitations. The only way to make loving and equal relationships believable is to set them in a context where straight women, at least, don't have preconceived and strongly reinforced ideas of what the relationships are like. Hence male/male slash.

That also explains why, although there are more than a few lesbians writing slash, they're far outnumbered by the straight women. Lesbians are likely to be much more closely acquainted with what male/male relationships are "really" like, and therefore less likely to romanticize them. It explains, as well, why few gay men write the kind of fiction that falls into the category of "slash." In fact, gay men, for the most part, seem to think slash is unrealistic and stupid, certainly not erotic. Their personal experience of male/male relationships clashes too strongly with the idealized world of slash for them to be able to write the kind of stories that straight women do.

Posted 8:26 PM by Liz

A friend who managed to trace me back here from my other blog (which has a link to my slash page, which has a link to . . . ) wanted to know why I had two blogs. Good question. The simple answer is that my life is compartmentalized into the outer mundane me, visible to the world at large, and the 'real' me who lurks here, and I shuttle uneasily between the two.

The full answer is more complicated. Neither persona is the whole me, and the liklihood of integrating the two any time soon seems minimal. For the sake of my business, I have to retain the socially acceptable veneer.

But there's more to it than that. Nothing intrudes on this space. In my other blog I talk about my business, about my family, about war, about the gritty realities of daily life. Here I shut them all out, except for things which are directly related to my writing, such as the discussion of slashfic with my mother.

Still, keeping this space separate suggests a life that exists outside the real one. To be honest, sometimes it's hard to know which one is "real," the more or less concrete space (allowing for the vast distances between atoms) that we communally accept, or the often far richer and more complex space in my head. Relationships with people are more intense there, but mundane life is flattened out and intermittent. In "real" life, it's the other way around, of course. The complications of daily life preoccupy us, taking precedence over any emotional intimacy we might like to cultivate. It doesn't seem to be possible to balance and integrate the two. So I continue with two blogs.