Oh for a more traumatic Star Trek; misc. asides incl. sleep and cannibalism

Devon and I have been rewatching Star Trek: TOS for no particular reason other than to gently spite Star Trek: Discovery; today was 1.9 "Dagger of the Mind." I like to imagine an alternate-Trek (aside from the always-superior DS9*) where all the throwaway arcs/reveals have lasting consequences, like a Voyager where Harry Kim has to process the profound trauma of "parallel-me died and then I took his place," facing his mortality, his sense of alienation—which would be significantly less fun than already questionably-fun Voyager, but would bring such depth to his character! Likewise, a TOS where Kirk is still and forever in love with Helen Noel, but she's lost to him in multiple ways: the implanted memory of losing her, but also the conscious knowledge that even his love was implanted. He's grateful when she leaves the Enterprise—it can't really make him more sad, and it alleviates at the least the awkwardness—but he never forgets her. He has many other relationships, some meaningful, some not at all; and his dedication to the Enterprise takes priority over everything, which causes no end of internal conflict; and his relationship with Spock is as profound and as conflicted, complicated here by Spock's Vulcan identity. It doesn't end his life or his relationships, but Helen Noel in the background of everything, the one that got away whom he never had in the first place.

An easy canon solution is that before leaving Tantalus V he has someone use the same machine to correct his memory, but my version has a lot more angst and self-doubt and questions of identity/memory/relationships and is therefore superior.

When I first watched TOS some few years ago, I read along with the rewatches on Viewscreen.com. I'm only glancing at them this time, but it was a fantastic experience then & I still enjoy them now. The mix of trivia/minutiae to summary/off the cuff reaction to social commentary/media criticism is strong, in a readable, casual way. Torie Atkinson's sections are especially fantastic, and helped me contextualize my complicated responses to dated-but-progressive media. To accompany TNG and DS9 rewatches I just read the Memory Alpha pages; that's also satisfying, but is a) way more spoiler-y and b) heavier on the minutiae. Glimpses into production/actors enrich the text in interesting ways, but it's not quite on par with that feeling of pseudo-conversation that comes with a watch-along.

* Although DS9 would also hugely benefit from this! Imagine Jadzia Dax in particular, and Dax in general, who's always willing to disregard convention and society to fulfill a strong personal desire, but in particular falls into "leave the rest of the world behind to live in a pocket dimension/go into exile" love multiple times. These all function as once in a lifetime romances, True Love, etc.—then 3.8 "Meridian" and 4.6 "Rejoined" are never mentioned again as per Star Trek's episodic tradition, and Worf becomes the One True Love. But imagine the Jadzia who not only carries many lifetimes of romances, and struggles with the reassociation taboo, but also is in love, passionate life-altering-love, with multiple people, some she marries, some she can't see again; a Jadzia grieving and loving and missing in overlapping and simultaneous intensity. Alternately: she doesn't change her life for these life-changing loves because the show needs more continuity than that. If not for that limitation, how does she pick—is it first come/first serve, pocket dimension/exile? is it wrestling with Klingon courtship practices while exiled from your homeworld? These are some great tensions & I wish DS9 could've had them.


* * *


Asides:

1) I'm trying to work on my Best of 2018 list with mixed results re: wowowowwww this year has been seven years long, and there was great media, and many forgotten media, at at least one favorite thing I forgot to review, and I want to make none of these trips down memory lane because it was also a phenomenally awful year. It's exhausting to write.

2) My sleep schedule has flipped around and/or is walking around the clock, external factors (like screaming cats/visitors to the house) excepted. I find it easier to stay distracted at night, and have more co-dependent anxiety when waiting for Devon to come home in the afternoon. Things are up in the air for us right now as he makes applications, and I dream of moving to Canada/Sweden/the Moon ( Read more... )

and we wait for the future to happen. And in the meantime, this between-time, the end of the year change-time, my anxiety is particularly bad. So in many respects this makes sense—waking at 5p is productive, even healthy/ier than alternatives! despite the forever-shame that comes with weird sleep habits. It's still surreal, to nap at sunrise, to sleep through the middle of the day. The cats don't enjoy or understand it, but then they haven't liked any damn thing about this living arrangement except that Gillian believes Devon many times more interesting and better for cuddles than I am.

3) Via minutia_r, in one of the more delightful "I saw this and thought of you" that I've ever received: Okay, it's time to tell a Story: "how cannibalism was just a normal thing for Victorian sailors & how it was only in 1884 that it was made clear to everyone that it wasn't legal to eat people no matter what the circumstances, and how the Victorian public were Very Angry about it."

I hadn't heard of this case before and it's as fascinating as expected! Further reading via Wikipedia: R v Dudley and Stephens.

Book Reviews: Crash, Ballard; The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin; The Wolf Wilder, Rundell

Title: Crash
Author: J.G. Ballard
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 (1973)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 205
Total Page Count: 284,220
Text Number: 920
Read Because: fan of the film, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:

Faced with this junction of the crashed car, the dismembered mannequins and Vaughan's exposed sexuality, I found myself moving through a terrain whose contours led inside my skull towards an ambiguous realm.

After being involved in a fatal car crash, a man finds his sexuality and inner landscape remapped by automotive accidents. It's an unexpectedly compelling, perversely logical connection: the violence of a car crash uniting human bodies with omnipresent metal and technology, and with each other; the way that desire wraps itself around trauma and injury. Being drawn into that logic, participating in that same interior remapping, made the film a remarkable experience for me when I first saw it. The book achieves the same work, and I'm glad it exists, but it's a lesser experience.

There's a plot here, but not a complex one, and the bulk of the length is instead profoundly, obnoxiously repetitive language. (Binnacle! "heavy" anatomy! mucus mucous mucosa mucilage! ~45 "chromium" alone!) The explicit sexual content made possible by text is innate to the themes, but likewise is deadened by the language and by the pervasive male gaze. Desensitization is one of the narrative's themes and, perhaps, goals, but it doesn't benefit the book; being familiar with the premise combines with the repetition to make the text a chore. My order of approach probably skews my opinions, but paring the book down in adaptation removes those flaws while maintaining the successful core concept; the original text wants badly for brevity.


Title: The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4)
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrator: George Guidall
Published: Recorded Books, 2016 (1969)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 295
Total Page Count: 284,515
Text Number: 921
Read Because: continuing the series, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: An ambassador comes to Winter, a cold planet inhabited by the only humans known to experience estrus, in the attempt to bring them in to the Ekumen union. This rivals The Dispossessed in depth but not in breadth—it has similar gradual but complicated character growth, but the worldbuilding is frontloaded and the plot less dense. It manages to be both reductionist and insightful in its examination of gender, overlooking gender nonconformity in both societies (nonconformity that absolutely existed in 1969) and so maintaining a gender essentialism which violates its own theses, but it's also rigorous in is examination of gender, of culture, of communication—Le Guin's knack for ground-up worldbuilding, where speculative premises impact entire cultures and entire lived experiences is in full force here. So it reads unevenly, not all of it has aged well—but the second half and in particular that long winter cross-country trek is phenomenal, a quiet interpersonal study with incredible language; and I found this well worth my time.


Title: The Wolf Wilder
Author: Katherine Rundell
Published: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 275
Total Page Count: 284,790
Text Number: 922
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review:

Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was a dark and stormy girl.

The girl was Russian, and although her hair and eyes and fingernails were dark all the time, she was stormy only when she thought it absolutely necessary. Which was fairly often.

A girl who returns semi-domesticated wolves to the wild is pulled into tumultuous events in wintery Russia. The use of language here is lovely—I expected flowery, but it's not that; it's powerful, empathetic—a great fit to middle grade. Combined with the premise, this has fantastic atmosphere and wish fulfillment, the punishing chill of Russian winter, of survival; an impetuous and sympathetic heroine who runs with wolves. (Never particularly realistic wolves, but they hug the line of idealized-but-wild, and that's all that really matters.) I don't love the plot as much, it can be too grim to sell the wish fulfillment, and has the predictable pacing expected from the genre. This isn't my favorite new MG novel, but it gave me what I wanted, and I'm glad I waited to read it until midwinter.