Two links and a book review, or: a tale of (wrong) perceptions

[selenak]

Today is Elementary day, and here is a good meta post about Joan Watson, complete with lovely illustrations. :

In other news, during the last months I've taken part in a discussion about Mary Renault's The Charioteer - our discussion posts by chapters are here - which on that occasion I had read for the first time. (My previous Renaults were all

Comments

[penknife]

I do like Ralph, despite sometimes feeling that he needs to be slapped with a fish. He's a mess, but in a way I have a weakness for. I am ambivalent about Laurie -- it's possible that if he could work through his issues, he would stop being so unbearable to live with, but he does need to be slapped with a fish a lot. (Fish therapy?)

I never can warm up to Andrew -- his religiously-motivated pacifism doesn't help to sell me on the character, and "he's handsome and a nice person" isn't enough to do it for me -- but I agree that there's no way to know what choices Andrew would have made if Laurie had been honest with him from the first. Alec may be the most sensible character in the novel, despite his unfortunate tendency to date drama queens.

[selenak]

Two or three years ago I saw a religiously motivated WWII era pacifist interviewed at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He wasn't a Quaker, he was a Jehova's witness, but he'd been in a concentration camp for his conviction, his refusal to serve in the army. (And as opposed to everyone else, the Quakers and Jehova's witnesses could have gotten out of the camps if they had abandoned that principle.) I don't think I would have had that kind of courage, but I respect it deeply.

Re: Ralph, he's a bona fide Byronic hero, checking all the boxes: cynical quips and lots of sex with people he doesn't like but a One True Love for whom he longs and is ready to sacrifice everything, irrestistable sex appeal to men and women, emotional fragility beneath the attitude. I'm not immune towards the type, but I prefer it when he comes with a sensible, no nonsense person to balance him, not with an even more neurotic and self loathing True Love...

[penknife]

I agree that having the courage of one's convictions is an admirable character trait; I just find Andrew's particular convictions so distressingly wrongheaded that they kill any romantic appeal he might have for me. I don't have to agree with everything a character thinks to like them, but there's a point at which someone's ideas about what's morally right (and likely to produce desirable results) are so different from mine that it really reduces their appeal.

[amenirdis]

I guess the thing that strikes me is that when Ralph says, "You have no idea how low it can go," he's right. It can. It's not internalized homophobia to say that yes, as a community we have some really severe problems. We need to acknowledge the culture that victimizes very young and powerless men, that objectifies youths who are hopefully of legal age, and that abuses drugs and alcohol to a dangerous extent. In working for LGBT organizations, the level of sexual harassment of employees that's considered acceptable for young gay men would NEVER be acceptable if they were young women and the harassers were men. I had one wealthy man in his fifties offer my organization a donation of $5,000 if I would send my handsome, boyish 23 year old assistant to "pick it up" and spend the night at his house! When I demurred, two of my board members urged me to do it

[selenak]

But you see, I really doubt that either in the 40s or now sexual exploitation wasn't present in the het variation as well. As for the level of sexual harrassment and what's deemed acceptable for young women versus young men, I remember reading late year a story where on a film set, one of the stars demanded a girl from the camera crew took of her sweater to show him her breasts, and held up production for an hour until she gave in. The only one protesting and defending the girl was another actor. Not the director or anyone from the team. And every waitress I've talked to mentioned that basically the patting, pinching etc. were something they had to get adjusted to instead of complaining. Or: apparantly Dominique Strauss Kahn thought it was self evident a maid should only be too happy to give him a blow job. And that's today, not decades ago. So I do think that Ralph's comment is internalized homophobia, because preying on the weaker in a sexual way isn't a vice more dominant among either subculture. (To say nothing of drinking or

[amenirdis]

No, it's not more prevalent, but in certain parts of the community it's completely acceptable! That's the thing that's problematic. If I had worked for Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or certainly the Democratic Party and had a donor trying to rent my assistant for $5,000, I wouldn't have had board members saying that it was ok. Can you imagine if it were the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders having a meeting, and a national board member brought three eighteen year old girls to share his hotel room, college students who he was paying tuition for in exchange for "companionship?" Nobody blinked an eye. Nobody said it was inappropriate. Nobody did anything at all. I can say with absolute certainty that if that had happened at a DNC meeting, the board member would have been told that his escorts could not stay. Possibly he would have been censured or removed from the board. We have an acceptance of these kinds of abuses in a certain part of the community that really, truly, is not ok.

[vonniek]

Sadly, there is no new Elementary today because of the March Madness. :( Next new episode is on April the 4th.

To make up for the disappointment: here is an adorable Angus/Clyde paper art.

ETA: the correct link!

[selenak]

Oh, that's adorable indeed! And the pox on the evil schedule gods!

[blpurdom]

Turned on CBS at 10 pm to discover no Elementary. Gah. Stupid March Madness!

The big climax and denouement is the biggest collection of ridiculous circumstances that could have been avoided by one direct conversation since Jago used a hankerchief to prove adultery in Othello.

Ha! True, although it took me a minute to realize that "Jago" must be the German spelling for "Iago". (I was actually trying to remember a character named Jago in Othello before I caught on.) On the other hand, I once wrote a paper about Iago being an personification of the Devil, not tempting people to do things that are inherently out of character for them but making people actually behave more like themselves, telling them what they already believe to be the truth, even when it isn't; it's what they want to believe, so they do. (The Devil as a character in Italian fairy tales is very common, and Shakespeare did something similar when he retold tales that were originally Italian, without naming one of his characters "the Devil" in so many words.)

one main

[selenak]

The title refers to a parable in Plato's Phaedrus, which two of the three main characters are big fans of.

Sorry about the automatic German spelling for That Guy From Othello. :)