A Certain Slant of Light

Stealing troisoiseaux’s five question meme! I've been given five questions to answer and I'll give the first five commenters their own five questions.

1. How did you pick your default icon?

I’ve had this default icon for well over a decade now. I wanted something that wasn’t fandom-specific, because I knew that if it was a particular fandom icon I’d have to change it out when my fandom interests drifted, and I like the suggestion of daydream and imagination in the girl gazing out the open window.

2. Have you ever read a fic that you liked better than the source material (or that you liked despite not being familiar with the source material)?

Ahahaha so in my misspent youth I read LOTS of fic for fandoms with which I was unfamiliar (look, it was all right there on the crack_van LJ community, what do you want from me?), chief among them Man from UNCLE. Much later I saw a few episodes of the show, but I never really got into it, and if I’d been strictly truthful in the historical note in Honeytrap I would have copped to the fact that the germ of the idea came straight from the fanfic with no intervention from the show itself.

3. What's your favorite type of nature (forests, ocean, etc.)?

Forests, particularly northern forests: birch woods, spruce woods, the heavy dark trees and the stony shores of Lake Michigan behind.

4. What was your favorite class in undergrad?

Oh, this is hard to answer! This is not one specific class, but probably my Russian classes - I was with basically the same group all the way through, and we had class every day (the first year it was at 8:30 every morning), plus Russian table once a week and a yearly trip to the campus’s forest retreat Bjorklunden, where after dark the night before Easter we walked around the Bjorklunden chapel trying to keep our candles alight…

The Russian department did a wonderful job conveying not just the language but the history and the culture and the literature of Russia: in first year Russian they already had us reading Korney Chukovsky’s children’s poems and Daniil Kharms’ micro-stories. It’s fascinating to feel that you’re learning not just a language but a whole universe.

5. What's a childhood favorite media that didn't hold up to the nostalgia, and one that definitely does hold up?

When I was about eleven I fell headlong into a Tortall obsession, particularly with Daine the Wildmage and Keladry of Mindelan (and even now, you will pry Kel from my cold dead hands), but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more aware of the shortcomings of the prose and the, IDK, underlying imperialism of the books’ worldview? The selectively approved-of imperialism. When Carthak conquers people it’s Bad, but when Tortall conquers people it’s whatever.

I don’t think you need to agree with the underlying worldview of a book to enjoy it: for God’s sake, I read Mary Renault. But the Tortall books are meant to be didactic - their didacticism is part of what I liked about them! I liked the fact that they were so baldly in-your-face about their feminism, so blatantly enraged by the limits that society sets on girls. So it becomes a real problem when some of the lessons turn out to be wrong.

On the other hand, Lillian and Russell Hoban’s Frances books are just as good as ever. What’s not to love about a sometimes cranky badger child who likes to sing to herself and go on long expeditions with picnics?

I first read about the Vavilov seed bank about three years ago, in the book Never Out of Season: during the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the scientists of the seed bank moved into the building to protect their seeds, in some cases literally starving to death surrounded by bags of barley and wheat in order to protect that genetic diversity to feed future generations.

Even at the time, I thought that sounded like an amazing story. Evidently director Jessica Oreck had the same thought, because now there’s a film centered around the incident: One Man Dies a Million Times.

Or at least, kind of centered around the incident. The film is in black and white, and it has a voiceover drawn from the words of people who suffered in Leningrad during the siege (Anna Akhmatova, among others), and the characters have bread ration cards that look exactly like the World War II era ration cards reproduced in Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking...

But, the introductory text at the beginning of the film informs us, the film is not actually set in Leningrad during the siege. It’s set in the near future, during a hypothetical war that will lead to a siege of St. Petersburg that is exactly the same as the siege of Leningrad, right down to the design of the bread ration cards. There are a few incursions of post-World-War II technology into the film (a young man has what appears to be a Walkman; there’s a digital clock on a nightstand) but the overall impression is that it’s maybe 1980, not the future. There are, for instance, no computers.

I find this framing decision baffling, and I’d be really curious to know at what point in the filming process the idea was introduced. Was it before or after they filmed an entire movie where no one has a cell phone? (I can buy that the cell phones might stop working during World War III, but I can’t buy that they’re just not there in the first place.) Did they realize that if they set the film during World War II they were going to have to paste up Stalin posters everywhere, and they just couldn’t face it?

The issue is distracting enough to weaken the movie. Perhaps it was an experiment that went wrong. There are a few other stylized elements here, like the aforementioned voiceovers, and the fact that two scenes in the otherwise black-and-white movie are in color - the two scenes where the characters are directly confronted with the violence of war, the red falling sparks from an explosion and a neighbor who has been injured by shrapnel, and gushes red blood. Maybe the supposed near-future setting was also a stylistic element, only that time it just didn’t come off.

I’ve been meaning to do a month about Soviet women directors for a while, and I’ve finally tracked down enough movies that are available in the US to make it worthwhile.

I started with Larisa Shepitko’s 1966 Wings, a precursor to her most famous movie The Ascent, which I also intend to watch. Wings reminded me of Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, another slow-moving black-and-white movie with a mere wisp of a plot that is mostly a character study of the heroine and an exploration of her world.

Petrukhina, the heroine, is a school principal and general local bigwig who is nonetheless dissatisfied with her life: she often looks back on her days as a pilot during World War II, remembering not so much the fear and excitement of combat as the enchanting freedom of the skies.

This sounds like a set-up for a movie about a middle-aged woman throwing off the shackles of respectability and finding herself, and in some ways it is: over the course of the movie Petrukhina haunts the airfield, quits her job as school principal, asks a museum curator to marry her (he’s clearly been courting her for years so I’m not sure why he doesn’t jump at the chance, but maybe he’s not sure she really means it).

But at the same time, these plot developments seem almost beside the point, practically afterthoughts: there’s no big scene where Petrukhina quits, just an aside later on when she mentions it to someone else. The focus is not on her journey, but on her sense of malaise. There are moments when you can almost see her thinking: this is what we fought for? Boredom?

What I've Just Finished Reading

Or I suppose I should call this "What I've Read Over the Last Three Weeks," because it's been a while since I posted it.

I read Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, which is a good book to read if you want to be reduced to seething rage about the level of mendacity and fear that turned torture (sorry, "enhanced interrogation") into official American policy. The book presents a fairly compelling argument that in the aftermath of September 11th, Bush and Cheney both took it as an article of faith that the war on terror would demand the use of torture, and therefore reached out for any advice that bolstered this belief with both hands. Any contrary advice, they ignored, even when it came from lifelong Republicans who were military lawyers or experienced FBI interrogators and therefore had no political reason to oppose Bush's policies and also had the legal knowledge and on-the-ground experience to realize that torture was illegal and wrong and also didn't work, if by "work" you mean produce useful intelligence rather than reduce the victims to gibbering wrecks, which it tends to do pretty well.

This would be bad enough if all the people arrested were genuine terrorists, but in the early months especially hundreds of innocent people were arrested - this is according to internal investigations within the military, by guys who figured that this was a problem someone might actually want to fix. HA. Release suspected terrorists? Even though there was absolutely no evidence that this suspicion had any basis in fact? That would mean admitting to making a mistake! Much better to keep them there as along as possible.

It's worth reading, but it's probably not good for your blood pressure.

Otherwise, I read Mary Stewart's The Stormy Petrel, which is very similar to her Rose Cottage: both are atmospheric books with beautiful descriptions of small communities in beautiful countryside with thriller/mystery elements that never gather enough momentum to become properly thrilling or mysterious. They heat up a certain amount, but the plot never quite boils, if you will. But they're both pleasant comfort reading.

I also read Dick Francis's To the Hilt, which I enjoyed but not so much that I think I'll be seeking out his other books.

And finally, Maureen Johnson's Shadow Cabinet. I was under the impression that this was the final book in the Shades of London trilogy, rather than the third book in an ongoing series, which as you can imagine is a misunderstanding that made for an unnecessarily frustrating reading experience. I suspect that made my judgment of the book unnecessarily harsh, but I also think that the series as a whole is just moving in a direction that is less interesting to me than the place where it started. I really liked the combination of boarding school story and ghost mystery in the first book, but the series has moved entirely away from the boarding school plotline and I think I was, unfortunately, actually more interested in that than the ghosts.

I'll probably check out the next book when it comes out, though, because this book did introduce a quite interesting pair of villains.

What I'm Reading Now

Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which I'm actually finding less soul-destroying than The Gulag Archipelago, if only because they're short stories and therefore offer a natural breaking point to walk away from the book every few pages. I would definitely recommend them if you want to know more about the gulag but don't feel like committing to 1,500+ pages of Solzhenitsyn. There's definitely a spiritual affinity between the two works, even though Shalamov's interpretation tends to be more hopeless than Solzhenitsyn's. Or hopeless isn't the right word, necessarily; his characters are often too exhausted even to feel despair.

I've also, on the much brighter side, been reading Malcolm at Midnight, the story of a classroom pet rat who has taken to sneaking around the school. I've started volunteering at the library once a week to process and mend books, and I saw this book's sequel and was charmed by the footnotes (I am such a sucker for novels with footnotes), so I picked up the first one. It's cute.

What I Plan to Read Next

Marie Brennan's The Voyage of the Basilisk. Yay dragons!

December 4: Bucky Barnes the Bolshevik. Tell me more. (for sineala)

MY TWO OBSESSIONS, LINKED TOGETHER IN ONE. YES.

My thinking is this: while Hydra might be happy to create a hollow human shell, the Bolsheviks would never go for it. You don’t brainwash someone to leave their brain empty; you brainwash them to fill their mind up with other (from the Bolshevik point of view, better) things.

And the Bolsheviks didn't merely want to remake government: they wanted to remake human nature, too, to create the New Soviet Man. (For all that the Bolsheviks talked about gender equality, at least in the early years, they tended to focus on men.)

The New Soviet Man would be a heroic creature, an entirely different breed from the pathetic specimens created by bourgeois society. He would look like a Socialist Realist statue come to life, strong, tall, physically courageous, bursting with energy. But he would be smart, too, well-educated about Marxist doctrine, always up for a rousing chat about Leninism.

Selflessly loyal to the party, naturally, in that particularly Bolshevik way: full of partiinost, which is "partyness," most literally, or "party-mindedness." A loyal party-minded Bolshevik is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to the party, because the party is the vanguard of History, spearheading the charge toward a Communist heaven-on-earth. No sacrifice is too great: all suffering will be redeemed when this paradise arrives.

(Stalin liked to arrest Politburo members' wives or children or brothers to test their partiinost. A good Bolshevik bows his head and says "Let the Party's will be done." Partly out of ideological fervor, and partly because otherwise Stalin will just arrest the whole family, placing personal love above party loyalty being a clear sign of moral rot.)

And anyway, the New Soviet Man doesn't suffer much. He's a happy, optimistic fellow, full of good fellowship towards his partners in the fight against socialism, and just as full of ruthlessness toward enemies. His whole life is subordinated to the struggle for Communism, and with the glowing vision of a beautiful future forever before his eyes, who could help being happy?

The Bolsheviks believed they could create this paragon. They subscribed to the idea that humans are born tabula rasa. People are bad now because they've been raised in bourgeois society. Raise them in socialism, and how could they help but become better?

And then providence (or, as the Bolsheviks might prefer, History) plopped the perfect test case in their laps. He already looks like a Social Realist statue (barring the arm thing, but whatever, they'll build him a new one. Do we know for sure he lost it in the fall? Maybe he lost it later on, during a Soviet mission.). And he's sharp as a tack. And he doesn't have any nasty bourgeois memories to gum up his mind.

(And he came back to life after they thawed him out. Stalin will be more than interested in that! Stalin was always super interested in longevity research, and if Zola's supersoldier program was anything but a massive failure, Stalin absolutely would have signed himself up in the hopes of living FOREVER. He probably would have handed Zola an entire gulag full of test subjects if he got the chance. I need to consider the timeline for when Zola could have visited the Soviet Union...)

In short, this amnesiac supersoldier is the perfect raw material for the New Soviet Man.

Even more perfect than they realize, because Bucky already had most of the qualities they wanted: physical courage and good fellowship and ruthlessness toward enemies (think of the scene near the beginning of The First Avenger where he chucks the bully off Steve. This is not a man who has qualms about using his physical strength against people who he thinks deserve it), and of course loyalty.

Admittedly, his loyalty is personal loyalty to specific people, not partiinost (“I’m following the skinny kid from Brooklyn”: words to make a good Bolshevik gag.) But it's easy to mistake one for the other – especially when your experiment is riding on your ability to create partiinost. Probably even the Winter Soldier thought he was a beacon of partiinost.

And, of course, having taken so many pains to teach him Marxist-Leninism, they probably used the chair as little as possible. Why wipe that out? Especially as it became clearer that Zola's experiments were a dead failure, and the Winter Soldier was the only supersoldier the Soviet Union was going to get.

The Winter Soldier probably took the fall of the Soviet Union very hard. At least until Pierce burned the knowledge out of his head.

What use was a good Bolshevik to Pierce, after all? Pierce had to scorch the Soldier’s memories away with the chair – so he’s not the Soldier anymore, just the Asset.

But the Asset’s not nearly as useful without any memories. Sullen, silent, easily confused, unpredictably violent. It disappoints Pierce: he put so much trouble into getting his hands on the Soldier, only to have to wreck him like this. But what was he supposed to do? Send him on missions “for the good of the party”? Like he has time to waste mouthing that Bolshevik mumbo-jumbo.

1. Castle season five. I was worried that the show would go downhill now that Castle and Beckett got together. But aside from a couple hiccups early in the season - which are not even Caskett related, but a result of the Castle writers’ unfortunate and apparently growing fondness for conspiracy plots - it remains as delightful as ever. The sci fi convention episode, you guys! Castle’s comment that he’s fond of some space operas, like “that Joss Whedon show!” Beckett’s fervent defense of letting yourself love terrible things for their good parts!

(Beckett the secret nerd is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.)

I also enjoyed the Christmas episode. I am a total sucker for Christmas episodes and there were lots of sparkly decorations, but I also loved the meditative aspect of the episode, the themes about Christmas traditions and traditions in general and the way they change as life goes on - Ryan and Esposito’s old Christmas traditions shift now that Ryan is a married man (happy for Ryan, sad for Esposito; I really like how they deal with the changes Ryan’s marriage has wrought for their friendship.)

And Beckett got another great speech in this episode, about her Christmas tradition: standing guard at the precinct to watch over other people’s Christmases.

2. I’m almost caught up with New Girl. I would be entirely caught up with New Girl, except that the Fox people have apparently decided not to let the newest episodes online until eight days after they’ve aired. So if you missed an episode, there’s no way to catch up before the next one airs.

WHAT THE HECK, FOX? WHAT KIND OF POLICY IS THIS. DISAPPROVE.

I am growing increasingly certain that if someone drowned Schmidt in a bucket, nothing of value would be lost. I suspect that I am the only person in the world who feels this way about Schmidt.

3. I went to the cinema to see a Russian movie called Garpastum, which is about a couple of soccer-loving brothers in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg who are trying to make enough money to build a stadium. I feel like something must have been lost in translation, because I’m not actually sure what the point of this movie was, or if it even had one.

Their stadium must be much less expensive than what I envision when I think “stadium,” because they manage to hustle enough money to buy the field by betting on their street soccer games. Then they send a friend to buy the field, at which point the friend walks into some kind of feud and gets killed for seeing too much or something. Naturally the brothers lose their money, and then the revolution happens somewhere offscreen - we just skip over that part - and they never get their stadium.

Actually, maybe not having a point is the point? The brothers work hard to make these plans come true, but World War I and the Russian Revolution means that it all comes to naught.

Having a theme does not make the movie any less of a slog, but at least now I feel slightly less cheated.

Stilyagi! I made a post about Russian movies a while ago and two different people urged me to watch Stilyagi, a Russian musical about stilyagi subculture in the 1950s in Soviet Moscow: young people who played jazz off records made on old X-ray plates, chose their clothes based solely on how eye-bleedingly bright they were, and occasionally got raided by over-zealous Comsomol members seeking to stamp out their colorful deviance.

Seriously, the stilyagi's clothes are so bright. There are a number of shots that contrast the butterfly stilyagi with the rest of Moscow's denizens, who dress mainly in gray; the contrast is startling every time.

Our hero, Mels, begins the movie as one of these Comsomol members. Led by their fearless leader, Katya, they raid a stilyagi party. They cut off the stilyagi's long hair! They slash their bright-colored clothes! Presumably they break the records, too, but we don't see that because Mels has pelted off to chase a stilyagi girl through the woods.

She outruns him, despite wearing high heels. But her high heels trip her up by the waterfront, and Mels, who is a gentlemen, stops to help her up. "What's your name?" he asks.

"They call me good-time Polly," she says.

"Why?"

"Help me up and you'll see."

He helps her up. She pitches him into the lake. This means war love! Mels, brain permanently addled by his fall in the lake, sets out to become the jazziest stilyagi of them all in order to win Polly's heart.

But unfortunately for Mels, the fearless Comsomol leader Katya is not about to let just let him go over to some jazz-heads in checkered coats.

Katya is my favorite, in the sense that she is most interesting, rather than likable, because mostly she's kind of a jerk. She puts her virtues - her bravery (I was not just calling her "fearless leader" as a joke), her fierce belief, her spine of steel - to such misguided use that they become vices.

She wants Mels to come back to the Comsomol. Her ostensible plan is to seduce Mels back to the path of righteousness. Actually, although she hasn't quite admitted it to herself, she's in love with him and this is just an excuse. But unfortunately (for Katya) Mels is in love with Polly (who by this time has begun to return his feelings), so Katya's plan fails.

There's a quite chilling scene where Katya rouses the whole Comsomol against Mels: they chant (this being a musical) his sins, until Mels, tight-lipped, stalks down the steps to the rostrum and slaps his party card on the podium, glaring at Katya, angry and betrayed - he didn't love her, but they were friends - daring her to be happy.

She isn't quite happy: she may realize, perhaps, that she destroyed a friendship because of jealousy, and did it so viciously she can't even properly apologize. But for now she is secure in her self-righteous triumph. Her coldness is what makes her fascinating to me.

And then a bunch more stuff happens! (Indeed, a bunch of other stuff happened that I left out. Mels' transformation from straitlaced Comsomoletz to stilyaga is fascinating.) But the movie's so jam-packed with things that it would take a ridiculous amount of time to summarize, and in any case, I don't want to spoil it. If you like musicals - maybe even if you don't! It's got less singing than a lot of musicals - I definitely recommend it.

(Also, if you're looking for it in the English-speaking world, the title was translated as "Hipsters," which seems unfortunate: I don't think there is an English word that stilyagi translates into - it being a pretty specific social movement - so they should have just left it as it was.)

Recently I showed my friend Emma my favorite Russian movie, House of Fools, which I've seen an unprecedented three times and still love and think is a brilliant introduction to Russian movies. The cinematography is characteristically stunning, none of the characters we care about die, and when characters are offered chances to behave horribly - they don't automatically use them!

So at the end of the movie, misty eyed with cinematographic bliss, I looked at Emma - only to find her huddled on the opposite end of the sofa. "Most depressing movie ever!" she croaked.

Which I suppose it is, until you've seen other Russian movies; then you will realize that House of Fools is in fact far, far behind in the brutal race for the "most depressing" Oscar. Consider its competition:

There's Tycoon, which is The Social Network, Yeltsin-era Russian style. Platon and his college buddies make a ton of money by manipulating the newly liberalized Russian banking system to steal from widows and orphans. Then Platon betrays everyone and his former friends come after him. With guns!

And if that's not enough betrayal for you, there's always Brother, in which a veteran of the Chechen wars becomes embroiled in criminal shenanigans that end with him shooting his older brother who planned to offer him up as a fall guy to his criminal bosses.

And speaking of the Chechen wars - and who can get away from the Chechen wars - House of Fools also takes place during the Chechen wars - there's Prisoner of the Mountains. Two Russian soldiers get taken prisoner by partisans in the Caucasus, escape, get caught, at which point the older one gets shot, but the younger escapes again with the help of the young daughter of one of his captors with whom he has developed a Stockholm-syndromian affinity.

And then, as he trudges away, her village gets carpet-bombed. He's the only character in the whole movie who survives.

But we’re still several echelons above the bottom of the barrel of despair. Next up is Burnt by the Sun, a slice of Stalinist Russia with gorgeous sun-dappled cinematography reminiscent of that in Bright Star.

But as we all know nothing gold can stay, particularly not in Russian movies. A bitter NKVD agent proceeds to insinuate himself into this golden world in order to get his former beloved's current husband arrested. The titles at the end helpfully inform us that this will lead to the whole rest of the family, including the adorable daughter, getting shot or sent to the gulag.

Don't date future NKVD agents. It never helps.

For a lower body count but, stunningly, even higher misery quotient, there's The Barber of Siberia, in which young cadet at a tsarist military academy falls for a visiting American woman. Unfortunately, his commanding officer falls for her too. The cadet, driven mad by jealousy, leaps off the stage in the middle of a performance of The Magic Flute, attacks his commanding officer, and is duly sent to Siberia.

This may be the single most depressing movie ever made, not so much because it is brutal - it's not like anyone's died, after all! - but because the tragedy is so pointless. Really? He couldn't even wait till the opera was over to attack his commanding officer? Really?

I could go on, but there I’ll stop. Almost every Russian movie I've seen, but for a couple Soviet comedies and the delightful Cheburashka children's movies, wends its way through misery to end in black despair.

Why, then, do I keep watching?

Well. The cinematography is stunning. The light is crisp, the colors are saturated, and the depth and length of the shots gives the stories an epic quality - the more so when coupled with despair. There’s lots of despair in epics. Beowulf dies, Achilles dies - actually I think that doesn’t happen in the Iliad proper - Odysseus’s entire crew bites the dust, etc. etc.

And they’re unpredictable. Doubtless Russian movies have their own patterns - all kinds of movies seem to have their own patterns; but the patterns are different from Hollywood patterns, which means I can’t necessarily shout “That’s the love interest/red herring/villain!” at the screen with 99% accuracy whenever we meet a new character. It's so refreshing!

So I visited my aunt over the weekend, and we went to a hardware store, and at the hardware store they had this:



(Which reads, above the name, "Get hammered and sickled!" Oh terrible, horrible, awful puns. Someone had waaaaaaaaay too much fun with this.)

Obviously I had to buy it. It's just too bad I can't show it to my old Russian professor - it seems to be an occupational hazard of Russian professors that they can't resist quasi-Communist kitsch.

You guys! You guys! A miracle has occurred! I can read Russian!

But let me back up: in Russian class we're reading Sofia Petrovna. On Friday we read the chapter where Sofia's son Kolya just got arrested, and the suspense was simply unbearable, so on Saturday I ensconced myself before the fire and finished the book. Which took four hours and gave me a monstrous headache.

But then next class we were reading aloud, like we do. I read Russian like a dim third-grader: everything in a muttering monotone, stuttering over the hard words (a.k.a. "words with more than five letters") and stumbling against every piece of punctuation as if I've never met a comma before in my life. It is so embarrassing.

Except! Except! THIS TIME FINALLY I READ LIKE A NORMAL PERSON! My Saturday reading marathon must have flipped a switch in my brain, transmogrifying the hitherto esoteric and terrifying Russian orthography into words!

My professor was so transfixed that she let me read for three paragraphs. "Очень хорошо!" she cried at the end - "Very good!"

(My professor is awesome. She reads us Russian poetry! Tomorrow she is bringing us a Russian fairy tale! She has a necklace that looks like lifesavers!)

***

In other happy language news, the local library has the Spiderwick Chronicles in Spanish. I was a bit too old for the Spiderwick books when they first came out, but I figure reading them in Spanish will be like reading them as a child, because in Spanish I read so much more slowly.

Last year I reread Number the Stars in Spanish, to test this theory. I read it the first time the summer after second grade - my teacher for summer Spanish camp gave it to me, though in English; funny how things loop back like that. It was the first serious book I read, and had such an effect on me that though I didn't reread it till I read the Spanish version, I remembered the scenes, even the details, before I read them. It gave rereading an eerie echo effect.