A Certain Slant of Light

Oh, look, the five questions that poeticknowledge asked me...ages ago! It has been patiently gathering dust in some dark corner of my computer, waiting to be rediscovered.

1) How do you feel you have changed the most as a person in the past 10 years?

I think I’ve become a lot more open to new people. Admittedly I started with a super low baseline here, given that in high school I basically viewed extracurricular activities as a blood sacrifice I offered on the altar of getting into college - because I had to be around people I barely knew, the horror the horror! -

And then of course I went to college, and once I arrived realized that I had managed to land me in a place where I was literally surrounded on all sides with people I did not know, and had either to get to know them or sink like a stone. So I learned, metaphorically speaking, how to swim.

A success story: I met with one of our prospective grad students for next year this morning. I kept up a conversation for a whole forty-five minutes! We agreed that Lawrence of Arabia is awesome on the big screen.

2) What is the biggest challenge you have faced as a writer?

I am not sure how to answer this, actually. I think overall the biggest challenge has been a difficulty coming up with plots, but possibly you mean which specific project has been hardest? I’m not sure.

3) What do you feel are the most important lessons your parents taught you?

My dad likes to remind me that “intelligence is not a virtue” - meaning not that intelligence is bad, but that intelligence is, in many respects, a gift from God or the gene fairy or what have you. Virtues are things you strive for: goodness, kindness, justice. Intelligence is just a tool for creating those things, and merely being intelligent doesn’t make you morally better or spiritually superior than anyone else.

4) Describe a moment that changed your life.

I’m thinking this one, in Scarborough. I suppose “changed my life” is a rather strong way to describe it...

Alternatively, the moment I posted my first Torchwood fic on LJ, thus launching myself into LJ-land. Hello, LJ! You have been good to me.

5) Which character (from a book/movie/TV show) do you feel you can most identify with? Why?

Oh, man. You want me to pick just one? I basically collect characters who I identify with, so the answer to this sort of thing fluctuates. Phoebe from Phoebe in Wonderland, maybe, or Bindy from The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Because...now I want to find more functional characters to identify with...Bindy, much as I did high school, feels a deep antipathy to pretty much everyone else, never mind they're mostly harmless. I still feel that the ending of that book is a cop-out.

Next, up in the Five Things meme: egelantier, who asked about my top five fictional female relationships, which is also a hard one, because there are so many and how can I decide?

I ended up having to leave out so many things! Sara and Ermengarde from A Little Princess, and Mel and Nee from Crown Duel, (two books I should post about someday!), and of course my beloved Lily & Nina from Black Swan, and Jess/Jules from Bend It Like Beckham, and Julie and Maddie (oh, Julie) from Code Name Verity...

But then, if I had listed everyone then probably this post would broken LJ’s word limit.

Anyway! Top five female relationships, from ( Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The Changeling, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Phoebe in Wonderland, Baby-sitters' Club )

I rewatched Phoebe in Wonderland last night - it's one of my favorite movies; it's about bright, imaginative ten-year-old Phoebe, who wins the lead in her school's production of Alice in Wonderland.

There's a lot to like in this movie. Phoebe is wonderfully portrayed, as is her whole family; I particularly like her relationship with her mother, who set aside an academic career to raise her family and still has doubts about her decision. It's an unusually complex and complicated portrayal, which is unusual, I think, with mothers in movies.

Also, the settings are just gorgeous. The school auditorium seems appropriately cavernous; Phoebe's house is inviting and surprisingly realistic (you could imagine people living there); and the neighborhood, when they walk through to trick-or-treat, looks like the neighborhood such a house would be in.

So there's a lot to like about the movie, but I don't watch it often because of Phoebe's drama teacher. Oh, God, Phoebe's beloved drama teacher is a terrible, terrible teacher. I can totally believe that Phoebe loves her, but I have no idea why the movie expects us to share this affection.

Phoebe's drama teacher is the sort of teacher who creates a seemingly free-wheeling, do-what-you-want structure to her classes; but clearly she's not-so-secretly judging her students all the time when what they want to do isn't what she thinks they ought to want to do, if they were truly imbued with the spirit of Art, or whatever. Those who don't are, as she explains to Phoebe, "the awful normals," and who cares about them?

The underlying belief seems to be - the awful normals don't have feelings like us sensitive types, so it's perfectly fine to direct one's teaching at the 5% of the class that will get it, and be brusque and irritable with those who don't.

And you can see it drives the other 95% of the kids (aside from Phoebe, who totally gets it) nuts, because the drama teacher does clearly have specific expectations which she withholds from them for her own capricious reasons. She doesn't want to have to teach her students anything; she wants them to already be something, and she has no time for the ones who aren't.

It makes perfect sense that Phoebe loves her, because Phoebe does get it, and when you do understand a teacher like this it makes you feel tremendously special. But surely its possible to make the sensitive types feel special without making the rest of the class feel like chopped liver?