just remember me when you're good to go
OMG THIS DAY!
Bosses back from vacay, new VP starting, it has been wall-to-wall in terms of them actually calling my name to do stuff - normally, I am, as they say, self-directed, which means that they give me stuff to do and I do it in my own time (which is why everything is always a last minute rush; my time management skills, let me show you my lack of them), but not today. They're going out for lunch now though, so that should give me a little time to relax and write this entry look over the stuff on my to-do list. This is why even though I really wanted to take today off to recover from my birthday weekend, I knew I couldn't.
*
So I've been reading a lot this year, more than I have in a long time (I was going to say the number is artificially inflated by comics, except that past years have included all the Lucifer or Fables or Y: The Last Man trades or what have you, so it's not really an addition of type, just quantity; the number on Goodreads is inflated by the six books I tagged as abandoned, though), and probably the real change is that in having a shiny new iPad on which to read, I'm more excited about shutting down the laptop and reading books where normally I'd be online at that time. There are other factors - since I broke up with SPN, I'm reading a lot less fic, and there just isn't the same amount of stuff I am interesting crossing my path (if I were really into XMFC, I could be filling the empty space with that, but as much as I ship Charles/Erik, the fic hasn't really been sparking my interest).
The things I have been reading voraciously are comics and Discworld novels, which I will probably post about in more detail when I feel I've reached a stopping point (though you can see my reviews, such as they are, on Goodreads, if you like), and one of the things that's struck me, one of the things that these things have in common, and which is probably the thing that most makes me want to see a Batman/Discworld crossover (or many of them), is the strong sense of place they evoke.
What really crystallized this for me was, oddly enough, reading the paeans to Friday Night Lights, because Dillon is so clearly a character on the show, and possibly the character with the most power and influence over the shape of the narrative and the characters' lives - location as necessity and destiny - even though living in a town like Dillon is far removed from my experience, watching the show makes me believe it exists and understand how it shapes the people who live there. It's one reason I found Homicide and The Wire and Treme so compelling, because they so thoroughly inhabit the cities in which they are set, in ways most television shows don't (and, in a lot of cases, can't). I think it even might be, on some level, part of why I find the Ba Sing Se arc of AtLA so compelling - I think those are probably the episodes I've rewatched most. Ba Sing Se is an awesomely terrible city, but it's recognizable to me in ways most of the villages of the week just aren't.
I'm not a costumed vigilante or the commander of the city watch, but I understand the way Batman and Sam Vimes feel about their cities. The territoriality and possessiveness make sense to me. Do I think it makes Bruce a jerk sometimes, when people offer him help and he's all, "Get out of my city!"? Well, yes† (but not as much as, say, gassing one of his kids to get out of an emotional conversation [see, it's things like that that make me blurt out, "You're an asshole, Bruce!" in packed movie theatres]), but I understand it on various levels. I understand why Vimes feels all asea when he's sent to the Uberwald and has to learn the rules of a completely different place and a completely different location in the hierarchy of that place. Which is what makes it so awesome when he realizes that symbolically, the embassy is Ankh-Morpork. (When I used to travel fairly frequently for work, I was always amazed at how clean other cities were compared to New York. And that was back when substantial strides had been made to clean up the subways! Our clean is not the same as other people's. Otoh, I can probably count on both hands the times I've personally felt unsafe in the city in my entire life, and still have fingers left over, and the majority of them were when I still lived in Queens.)
Gotham is not New York, and Ankh-Morpork is not New York, but they both feel familiar to me in ways a lot of fictional places just don't, and that makes them places I enjoy visiting despite their rather dire reputations.
(Interestingly enough, Bludhaven didn't ping that way for me, possibly because I never got a real sense of the city except that it was even worse off somehow than Gotham, without any of the tattered and tarnished glamour that Gotham tries to wrap herself up in. It's, like, Newark or something. I don't really have a good read on Metropolis‡ - it's got the aspirational qualities, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it has that "in your bones" feeling to it that certain cities inspire and which Gotham and Ankh-Morpork recreate so faithfully.)
It's why I think the best stories I've written are often inextricably linked to the places in which they're set (which also usually happen to be places I'm familiar with).
--
†Because it's just a "keep it in the family" ethos writ large. Which reeks of problematic paternalism that leads to imperialism - especially in terms of Batman Inc. No one can interfere in Gotham, but it's okay for him to go out and create Batmen in other people's cities, rather than letting them develop their own heroes suited to their cities' particular needs. That's the other side of the coin.
‡"Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night." (Frank Miller) Also, "Batman's Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November." (Denny O'Neil) - huh two guys I would not normally quote.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/347740.html.
people have commented there.
Bosses back from vacay, new VP starting, it has been wall-to-wall in terms of them actually calling my name to do stuff - normally, I am, as they say, self-directed, which means that they give me stuff to do and I do it in my own time (which is why everything is always a last minute rush; my time management skills, let me show you my lack of them), but not today. They're going out for lunch now though, so that should give me a little time to relax and write this entry look over the stuff on my to-do list. This is why even though I really wanted to take today off to recover from my birthday weekend, I knew I couldn't.
*
So I've been reading a lot this year, more than I have in a long time (I was going to say the number is artificially inflated by comics, except that past years have included all the Lucifer or Fables or Y: The Last Man trades or what have you, so it's not really an addition of type, just quantity; the number on Goodreads is inflated by the six books I tagged as abandoned, though), and probably the real change is that in having a shiny new iPad on which to read, I'm more excited about shutting down the laptop and reading books where normally I'd be online at that time. There are other factors - since I broke up with SPN, I'm reading a lot less fic, and there just isn't the same amount of stuff I am interesting crossing my path (if I were really into XMFC, I could be filling the empty space with that, but as much as I ship Charles/Erik, the fic hasn't really been sparking my interest).
The things I have been reading voraciously are comics and Discworld novels, which I will probably post about in more detail when I feel I've reached a stopping point (though you can see my reviews, such as they are, on Goodreads, if you like), and one of the things that's struck me, one of the things that these things have in common, and which is probably the thing that most makes me want to see a Batman/Discworld crossover (or many of them), is the strong sense of place they evoke.
What really crystallized this for me was, oddly enough, reading the paeans to Friday Night Lights, because Dillon is so clearly a character on the show, and possibly the character with the most power and influence over the shape of the narrative and the characters' lives - location as necessity and destiny - even though living in a town like Dillon is far removed from my experience, watching the show makes me believe it exists and understand how it shapes the people who live there. It's one reason I found Homicide and The Wire and Treme so compelling, because they so thoroughly inhabit the cities in which they are set, in ways most television shows don't (and, in a lot of cases, can't). I think it even might be, on some level, part of why I find the Ba Sing Se arc of AtLA so compelling - I think those are probably the episodes I've rewatched most. Ba Sing Se is an awesomely terrible city, but it's recognizable to me in ways most of the villages of the week just aren't.
I'm not a costumed vigilante or the commander of the city watch, but I understand the way Batman and Sam Vimes feel about their cities. The territoriality and possessiveness make sense to me. Do I think it makes Bruce a jerk sometimes, when people offer him help and he's all, "Get out of my city!"? Well, yes† (but not as much as, say, gassing one of his kids to get out of an emotional conversation [see, it's things like that that make me blurt out, "You're an asshole, Bruce!" in packed movie theatres]), but I understand it on various levels. I understand why Vimes feels all asea when he's sent to the Uberwald and has to learn the rules of a completely different place and a completely different location in the hierarchy of that place. Which is what makes it so awesome when he realizes that symbolically, the embassy is Ankh-Morpork. (When I used to travel fairly frequently for work, I was always amazed at how clean other cities were compared to New York. And that was back when substantial strides had been made to clean up the subways! Our clean is not the same as other people's. Otoh, I can probably count on both hands the times I've personally felt unsafe in the city in my entire life, and still have fingers left over, and the majority of them were when I still lived in Queens.)
Gotham is not New York, and Ankh-Morpork is not New York, but they both feel familiar to me in ways a lot of fictional places just don't, and that makes them places I enjoy visiting despite their rather dire reputations.
(Interestingly enough, Bludhaven didn't ping that way for me, possibly because I never got a real sense of the city except that it was even worse off somehow than Gotham, without any of the tattered and tarnished glamour that Gotham tries to wrap herself up in. It's, like, Newark or something. I don't really have a good read on Metropolis‡ - it's got the aspirational qualities, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it has that "in your bones" feeling to it that certain cities inspire and which Gotham and Ankh-Morpork recreate so faithfully.)
It's why I think the best stories I've written are often inextricably linked to the places in which they're set (which also usually happen to be places I'm familiar with).
--
†Because it's just a "keep it in the family" ethos writ large. Which reeks of problematic paternalism that leads to imperialism - especially in terms of Batman Inc. No one can interfere in Gotham, but it's okay for him to go out and create Batmen in other people's cities, rather than letting them develop their own heroes suited to their cities' particular needs. That's the other side of the coin.
‡"Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night." (Frank Miller) Also, "Batman's Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November." (Denny O'Neil) - huh two guys I would not normally quote.
***
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/347740.html.
people have commented there.