Author Archives: Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

ficnotes: heart in the whole

14 Saturday May 2011

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So here’s the post that Blogger lost, re-created in its entirety thanks to Google Reader (and I thought I was being anal for scraping the RSS feeds of my own blogs…) …

via questionsleftunanswered

So I was surprised a couple of weeks ago, looking over the ficnotes I’d written, to discover that I haven’t highlighted the delightful, delicious “Heart in the Whole” by Verityburns yet.  I linked to it in my massive round-up of favorite fics over at Harpyness but at that point it was still a work-in-progress. Guess I just forgot to highlight it as a finished (and glorious!) thing.

Title: Heart in the Whole
Author: Verityburns
Pairing: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes
Author Rating: NC-17
Author Summary: Events after “The Great Game” leave Sherlock dependent on his best friend and colleague. But John has a secret of his own… Hurt/Comfort / Romance / Little bit of an actual plot!
Length: 20 chapters
Available At: Verityburns’ LiveJournal. You can also access all of her fics and associated fan art through the index page.

UPDATE: The day after I posted this, Verity has released an audio version and “deleted” scene.

It’s not really giving anything away to say that this fic begins with a Sherlock who has suffered some severe injuries following the explosion at the pool (immediately following the cliffhanger ending of “The Great Game” episode in season one). Sherlock and John are not, at the beginning of this fic, a couple, although John is mooning over Sherlock in quite a severe sort of way. Home from the hospital, Sherlock is crabby and physically damaged and, most crucially, temporarily (possibly even permanently) blind due to his injuries.

What ensues is a saga that’s a scant one third mystery (tracking down Moriarty) and unabashedly two parts romance. John and Sherlock negotiate the new terms of their friendship, and the gradual recognition that they want something more intimately physical than either of them expected. This fic earns bonus points for the way it handles Sherlock’s exploration of sensual and sexual touch with John, in this particular rendering something that he is not entirely sure he wants (or if so, on what terms).

I thought I was going to have a post for you today …

10 Tuesday May 2011

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… but I can see that isn’t going to happen. I successfully executed my thesis presentation at yesterday’s graduate student colloquium and as of today am a free woman (though still most certainly taken). And my brain is suffering from non-permanent brain death. So I’m taking Hanna up on her kind offer to let me plunder her Friday video posts for some stuff. Oh, and while I’m at it I’ll plug a few of her own recent posts:

1. Happy Arbogast Day! | 2011-05-09 (on the character she would have saved from “Them!”)
2. Rage Dump | 2011-05-07 (on reactions to Bin Laden’s death)
3. Short Thought: Reason to Put a Book Down | 2011-04-11 (on sloppy thinking and factual errors)
4. Sitting Still | 2011-03-25 (on meditation practice)

And now for the fan vid. Enjoy!

Check back here Thursday for a new ficnote (I had one picked out and everything!)

harpy fortnight: post-thesis edition

08 Sunday May 2011

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A PATINATED METAL FIGURE OF A HARPY,
 LATE 20TH CENTURY

Hi folks! It’s time again for the round-up of Harpy links. I’m prepping my colloquium presentation for Monday, organizing my bookshelves (finally!) and the piles of paper on my desk, and cuddling my sick girlfriend while we watch crap science fiction movies (Tremors 2 anyone?) together … so I’m not going to make the links list all that fancy. Please forgive!

The beginning of this past week saw a flurry of activity from the Harpies, including two posts from me:

  • While buying medicine at CVS for aforementioned sick girlfriend, I happened to notice a royal wedding-related headline that seemed a bit … incomplete. 
  • I had the pleasure of reading Jill’s now-(in)famous Filling the Gap post on Monday and cross-linked it here and over at Harpyness. While the Harpy link has less than a dozen comments (versus Feministe’s 452 and counting), still worth checking it out if you’ve been following the conversation across the blogosphere to any extent.
  • On Monday, I posted a web video from Susie Bright discussing her stint as an editor for On Our Backs, the lesbian erotica magazine. 

And the week before that saw another three posts:

  •  A post about teens and sexting that turned into a thread that was half about teens texting and half about Sherlock slash … and to round things of, the person whose interview I was critiquing stopped by to speak up. If you want to see how all these things came about, do stop on by to check out the comments! 
  • I posted the trailer for a new documentary from American Experience about Stonewall. 
  • And way back when, in the midst of thesis revising, a web video of a baby penguin being tickled. I made no claims for a substantive feminist critique on that one.

The other Harpies have been busy as well, writing about Canadian politics, the royal wedding, friendship etiquette, reproductive rights, and other tasty and timely topics. Head on over to Harpyness to check them out.

Hope all of you are having a good weekend and best wishes to ya as you head out into the week.

from the neighborhood: validation thursday

05 Thursday May 2011

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cross-posted from …fly over me, evil angel… where I wrote this post for Hanna this morning.

So for some reason, this seems to have been the week from hell for a lot of folks. Here in our household, Hanna has the flu, which is why I’ve volunteered to break radio silence with a photo post so you don’t think she’s been, you know, abducted by Mulder’s alien friends. Or something.

Yeah.

Anyway. Here are some pictures by Hanna from our walk last weekend along the Charles River Esplanade. May 1st, through some strange coincidence, happened to be one of the first truly gorgeous spring/summer days here in Boston — and we took photos to prove it!

Even the sailboats were enjoying the weather
Joggers and walkers were out in spades; and leaves
are finally starting to fill out along bare branches.
About halfway along the walk, we found that someone
had been busy with chalk writing encouragements on the pavement.
Encouragements like this — charming in their artlessness.
(And to be honest, moving as well — that someone took the time.)
This was my favorite. The text reads:
“<– DUCK. Don't be afraid to fail (even at drawing)"
This was Hanna’s favorite. The text reads:
“Just keep swimming!” (and a picture of a fish)

All of which reminded me of T.J Thyne’s little gem of a film, which really should be broadcast on a weekly (daily? hourly?) basis across all forms of media worldwide. Possibly then there wouldn’t be so many people doing stupid things which make us sad. It’s 16:24 and I swear it’s worth it. Make time in your day. You’ll thank us.

We hope to see you again next week for our regularly scheduled programming.

ficnotes: sensual ace

03 Tuesday May 2011

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Last Saturday, Hanna, Minerva and I were talking about how difficult it is (the novels of Laurie King withstanding) to picture Sherlock Holmes as straight.

by berlynn_whol

M and H, who have far more by way of Holmes fan credibility than I do, maintain that Sherlock really only works as a character when depicted (in modern terms) somewhere long the homosexual-asexual axis. And even I know that, whether we’re talking Arthur Conan Doyle canon or the most recent Sherlock television series, the relationship at the center of the Holmes universe is Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. So whether we’re talking about homosocial friendship, homoerotic male friendship, homoromatic asexual sensuality, or whatever-the-hell we want to call it … it’s Holmes/Watson all the way.

Within the Sherlock Holmes fiction-writing fandom there’s quite a bit of imaginative speculation over how a John/Sherlock relationship might look if Sherlock were asexual and John were, well, anything from straight but prioritizing his friendship with Sherlock to bi to fluid to gay (rarely asexual himself).  Today I’m bringing you one such imagining: a story in which Sherlock might be sexually uninterested in John, but sensually starving for his attention.

Title: Sensual Ace
Author: cagedwriter61
Pairing: John Watson/Sherlock Holmes
Author Rating: PG-13
Author Summary: “In which John finds out the real reason Sherlock does cocaine and agrees to become a substitute.”
Length: 1 part, 2,403 words
Available At: LiveJournal.

Whether you find “asexy” Sherlock believable, or prefer to imagine that the physical contact in this story will eventually lead to more directly sexual things, I personally think this is a contribution to the body of fan-created literature that is one part heart-breaking, one part heart-warming, with a wee bit of humor thrown in for good measure.

required reading: jill @ feministe on "call-out culture"

02 Monday May 2011

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Cross-posted @ The Pursuit of Harpyness.

I’m sending y’all on over to Feministe to read a post that Jill published this morning on the dynamics of “calling out” the “big feminist blogs” for being less-than-perfect on the issues you care about.

[In some ways,] online feminism is worse for wear. Part of that is what Florence is talking about above — blogs, and especially the “big blogs,” are perceived as institutions rather than collectives of people writing about something they’re interested in when they have time, in order to facilitate a conversation among like-minded people. With the perception of institutionalization comes expectations — that a blog will not only cover about what you think it should cover, but will also cover it in the way you think is most appropriate, using the words you think are the best. Which isn’t totally unfair, but which segues from potentially productive into poisonous when the method of conveying those expectations is Calling Out.

I’m as guilty as anyone else when it comes to partaking in feminist Call-Out Culture. Calling Out, I think, is part of any activist’s growing pains. We all want to do right. We all feel like we’re doing more right than some other people who we perceive as having more power (or influence or airtime) than we have. We all want to be a good _____: feminist, ally, woman, activist. Part of that, if you love an idea (and I think most of us do love the idea of feminism, even if we don’t always love how it plays out in real life), is saying something when you see someone else Doing It Wrong. There should be space for that. We should keep each other in check; we should all want to be better.

But in the feminist blogosphere, “calling out” has increasingly turned into cannibalism. It’s increasingly turned into a stand-in for actual activism. We have increasingly focused on shutting down voices rather than raising each other up. Pointing at the gap has replaced doing the hard, often thankless work of filling it.

I mean it: go read the whole thing.

thoughts on the death of a man

02 Monday May 2011

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Hanna and I woke up this morning to near-ceaseless NPR coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s death during an American military raid on his compund in Pakistan. I have a lot of ill-formed thoughts here, and reading through the blog posts that have gone up over night on the topic is making me rather sick to my stomach so this is not destined to be the most cogent of blog posts. But with all of the media speculation about what this means for the “war on terror” and with the coverage of celebrations of death that seem to be taking place across the United States, I feel compelled to point out

a human being died last night.

Yes, he was a sick and twisted person who was responsible (directly and indirectly) for the suffering of thousands upon thousands of other people.

Kind of like we, as a nation, are responsible for the suffering of thousands upon thousands of people due to the two wars we started ten years ago in retribution for the suffering we held this man responsible for.

And now here we are celebrating death in the streets.

I’m just not comfortable with that.

The first thing my mind presented to me this morning when I heard the news was a memory of hearing, ten years ago this coming October, that the United States had begun bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11. I was huddled around a campfire on a beach in Oregon among a group of folks with whom, for the past month, I’d been reading about the horrific things human beings do to one another in wartime.

It’s hard to imagine bombing or invasion is the way to solve the pain of loss or to drive away the fear of vulnerability when the first thing that comes to mind is the seige of Sarajevo or the violence of South African apartheid or the war of attrition that is (to this day) taking place between Israel and Palestine.

It’s equally hard for me to imagine that assassinating Osama Bin Laden will bring any sort of political or personal resolution to the violence of the past decade (and beyond).

A human being died last night.

The world that he (and we) created remains. There is still suffering, there is still inequality, there is still anger … there will still be violence.

Adding to that violence will not make us safe.

And the purposeful killing any human being should never lead to dancing in the streets.

UPDATE: My friend eskenosen @ kai ho logos sarx egeneto has put it much more eloquently than I ever could:

I mourn with those who still mourn, after 10 years, the absence of their friends, coworkers, and family members. I understand those who celebrate the death of bin Laden as long-awaited justice.

But I also grieve for our nation, that instead of crying out to God in our shock and horror, we cried for bombs, for guns, for shock and awe. That a human has died, and people sing in the streets.

from the neighborhood: spring cleaning!

01 Sunday May 2011

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This being the first weekend post-thesis, I had the urge to clean. All that stuff that had been accumulating over the course of the winter months that we said to one another “we’ll take care of that when …” suddenly felt like too much and just had to go.

Even though this is a tiny apartment, we’re going to have to tackle this in stages. Stage one was our closets, which basically double as our only form of storage apart from under the bed. In addition to cleaning, we also wanted to do the great changeover of winter-to-summer clothes and linens, putting away the flannel sheets and wool sweaters until next autumn.

Here’s what we ended up gathering together for Goodwill.

At least most of it came from Goodwill in the 1st place?

And (yay!) here’s what our spectacularly organized closets looked like when we were through:

TARDIS cross-stitch courtesy of Diana
You can see floor!!

 The cat was spectacularly unimpressed and thought we should be playing with her instead.

Unimpressed cat is unimpressed

We agree with Gerry that playing string is more fun
than spring cleaning any day!

Up next weekend: book organization and the kitchen cupboards!

post-thesis thursday

28 Thursday Apr 2011

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So yesterday at 4:57pm Eastern Standard Time, I sent the following tweet to my twitter account:

And then Hanna and I put on our sneakers and sandals and walked out into the beautiful spring evening to visit our local Staples and print out two complete copies of my Master’s thesis, “How to Live?: The Oregon Extension as Experiment in Living, 1964-1980.”

I’ll be presenting my work at the Simmons College History Department’s graduate colloquium on May 9th. At some point shortly after that, I plan to post details over at my OE Oral History blog about acquiring a copy of the thesis and viewing the presentation online. I’ll cross-post or link out from here, so those of you who are interested can stay tuned for further details.

Meanwhile, I offer this music video in self-congratulations for the past four years of work. I don’t know why this was the song I found rattling around in my head during these final days of revision. I haven’t listened to this album in ages — not since shortly after I moved to Boston. Maybe it’s my subconscious trying to come full circle. Anyhow. As someone who’s always found her work to take longer than originally planned, and who has (as my mother wrote in a recent email) found myself living an “unexpected life,” I like the underlying message of this song.

More soon!