Stargates and Dentistry

I went to the dentist yesterday. The hygienist who cleaned my teeth was incredibly cute, and had really pretty eyes. She also didn't harangue me about the caretaking of my teeth, as the other hygienist I've seen used to. All in all, it took a lot of the terror out of going to the dentist. Just thought I'd make a note of that. Considering my rampant flirting and all.

I'm finding myself becoming ever more fond of Stargate: SG1 and its Atlantis spinoff. First off, there's Claudia Black, pictured here. I think she's gorgeous. Secondly, both series have a sense of humor, which I find as something that is sorely lacking in most science fiction shows. The genre has a tendency to take itself so goddamn seriously. Thirdly, the shows seem to be a refuge of sorts for good actors fleeing from their own canceled series. Claudia Black, for instance, played Aeryn Sun on Farscape for some time, a show that I enjoyed the few times I watched it. Recently I caught an episode featuring Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame, and Jewel Staite (also from Firefly, and another personal favorite of mine) has a recurring role as a doctor on SG: Atlantis.

Overall, though I haven't any honest idea about the overarching metaplot of either show, I just enjoy watching the characters interact. There's a bunch of gobbledegook about ancient weapons of mass destruction and suchforth, but I can hang on to the plot of the current episode just fine without having to know what precisely it all means. Shows that are exclusively metaplot-driven--like The X-Files in its later years--drive me crazy, because if you miss just one episode all of a sudden you're completely out of the loop. Characters die, secrets are revealed, people have sex, and when you tune in the next week you're sitting there going, "Why the fuck is the T-1000 suddenly in the FBI?"

It's refreshing to not have to worry about that sort of thing.

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"Looks like we have a John McClane here."
"...What're you talking about?"
"Die Hard."

Portrait of Grad School as a Catholic Schoolgirl

I'm going to start completely off topic by addressing a commercial I just saw on USA. This commercial (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--which is to say, for the last good PotC) muses on the subject of the "fairest pirate of them all". It notes that Orlando Bloom has the hair (fair enough), that Johnny Depp has the makeup (affirmed by the shot of him in full cannibal-god facepaint), and that Keira Knightley has "the chest".

I adore Keira Knightley (now that there's a year or so of distance between me and the debacle that was At World's End), but nobody is attracted to her because she has boobs. Because she doesn't. The girl is in the same category as Natalie Portman. She's practically concave.

Don't take this to mean I have something against small breasts. I just think it's kind of ridiculous that Mademoiselle Knightley is being advertised as having something that she clearly does not.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I spoke to my short story prof earlier today. I'd tried once before and failed miserably, and damn near missed her this evening. I caught her just as she was leaving, though, and we had what I think was a fairly productive talk. It basically came down to her apologizing for pressing the point so hard in class, that she was just trying to get me to branch out into different things. Which I can understand, but I also explained to her that writing fantasy and horror is when I have the most fun, and that I find literary fiction to be rather boring, in all honesty.

That led to kind of a strange place, wherein she compared my seeming inability to like literary fiction because of my fondness for high-energy and plot-centric genre material to her inability to like jazz because her musical realm of choice has always been rock. Which makes sense if you squint a little bit and try not to think too hard.

Then things returned to normalcy, and she pointed out that everyone has a tendency to teach to their strengths, and that perhaps she doesn't know enough about the fantasy genre to really help. When she asked for a recommendation for a short story collection, I said I'd bring around Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman and a couple old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction for her reading pleasure. She seemed to take well to that.

Anyway, the main thing she told me was to not worry about the thesis, that what I write will work for it. Or that they'll make it work, or whatever. The main thing was that I would be able to construct my thesis out of the sort of stuff I like to write. So I suppose I'll hang about for a while and see how things go.

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"So I figure I'll dally with graduate school for a while longer, make out a bit, see if I can get her to take her knickers off, and if she won't...I'll go find something else to do."
"An easier girl, you mean."
"Yes."
"Men. You're all alike."
"Hey, y'know, sometimes the penis just asserts itself."

This...Might Be A Problem

I'm aware that I haven't made an update in quite some time. There's a perfectly good reason for that, and the reason is this: school started. I've been up to my neck in the beginnings of grad school for the past several weeks, and I can't say I'm altogether fond of it. Things didn't improve today when we had our first workshop session. I wrote one of the pieces that was workshopped, and while the class seemed to think highly of it in general, the professor didn't like it near as much.

Her major beef with it was that it was a genre story. Urban fantasy, specifically. She seems to think that the science fiction and fantasy genres are used as crutches by younger writers, especially those who feel insecure enough in their skill that they want to have something stable (like, say, genre conventions) to shore up the weak spots in their storytelling. She thinks my writing is better than that--which I'm afraid I can't exactly say is flattering, per se.

But that's all well and good. Her opinion is just as valid as mine, which in turn is just as valid as that of the next guy in line, particularly if the next guy in line happens to be an unmedicated drunken schizophrenic. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and she just happens to opine that genre writing is "lower class".

The problem of the post title is her assertion that one cannot piece together an MFA thesis with "this kind" of writing--by which I assume she means genre writing. This is a problem because I write nothing else. I'll do some moderately realistic/literary stuff when I'm writing for the stage, but beyond that it's all Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. We spent a whole class period in this short story course talking about knowing what our material is, what we work best with and what we like to write...and my material is Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. That's pretty much all it comes down to. And if I can't compose my thesis using those kinds of stories...I guess I'm not going to have a thesis, then.

So it would seem I'm at an impasse. The main thing that baffles me is that this woman, who was on the selection committee for the program, seemed to think that genre writing was not my standard schtick. Even though the story that I offered up as my writing sample was comic fantasy. It had a thief, and a princess, and a tower with a wizard in it! I can't fathom how it could have come off any other way. Aside from which, I included with the application the required letter talking about myself as a writer. Here is a direct quote from it:

I have a distinct leaning towards genre stories, especially fantasy and speculative fiction. I think that it is in the extreme conditions that these genres so often present that the best, most exciting, and most illuminating stories can be found.

...Does that sound like genre writing is not my standard schtick? I'm beginning to think that someone wasn't paying attention when they accepted my application.

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It's like when you're watching a play and someone walks on stage naked. You get used to it eventually--it just becomes another costume--but until then you're just sitting there going, "That guy's naked."