Meme - caving to peer pressure:

[concertigrossi]

Pick a paragraph (or any passage between... let's say 200 and 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

From your "Epiphanic Drabbles":

Singapore stank. Not as bad as London, which you could smell for miles out to sea, but it was thickly rank nevertheless. The odor roiled through the port, the effect of thousands of people and their animals, the smoke from their cooking, their food and the resulting effluvia. He stared at the source of the stench and saw in it a microcosm of the whole of humanity. People working and playing. Eating and fucking. Being born, living their lives, and dying. His had been a clean sort of limbo, and he’d gotten too used the cold asepsis of a place above and past and done with all of this. He didn’t feel ready to wade back into the filth of being alive.
“See, here’s how this works, Commodore. They put the pretty board down to the pretty dock, and you walk across it and off my pretty ship. Savvy?”

Then again, it wasn’t like he had a choice.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Well, ok, I needed a snippet for smell. And I'd been reading about how stinky the world was before modern sanitation, that you could literally smell when you were nearing a port.

And, when you get down to it, life is really messy and undignified. The sheer number of gross bodily functions that you deal with in the course of the average day is pretty impressive.

In truth, I was also thinking of the scene in "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" with the King and Queen of the Moon; the King's Head lamenting that it ever has to be reattached to the body and all the nasty things the body makes it do, that once the body dies it can be pure and think elevated, rational thoughts amongst the cosmos.

So there James was, able to sit and reflect without headaches, hard-ons or upset stomachs. And now he's got to face all that again and he has no choice in the matter.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

I liked the whole idea you had in these drabbles of James readjusting to life - like coming back from the dead was a kind of shock he had to recover from over time. It reminded me of that Rilke poem about Eurydice.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, one more! Am I allowed one more? From "In Perpetuity":

He’d lived for pleasure, for a time. He’d even devoted an entire decamillennium to sex and all its wonderful, consenting-adult iterations. Against all probability, against anything anyone he ever knew would have predicted for him, it palled.
So he travelled almost randomly, and tried to help people wherever he found trouble. A bit hokey, perhaps, but it worked for The Doctor, didn’t it?
He was currently on Progera, a little backwater world. Two separate sentient species had evolved on the planet: the St’laga and the Neigeta, and though they’d once coexisted peacefully, the St’laga had gained dominion over the planet, and enslaved the Neigeta. An underground resistance movement had grown up over the centuries, and found a natural leader in Jack, once he landed there.
With his guidance, they triumphed.
However, as it happened, while the revolution started in the hope that peace and equality could be restored once more, the Neigeta elected to power those who sought only revenge. The oppressed became the oppressors, and Jack began to protest. This was always how it seemed to work out: revolutionaries would rise up to right all wrongs, and a few centuries later, they were the jackbooted tyrants everyone wanted to overthrow. And tyrants are distinctly unamused when one of the original revolutionaries sticks around to tell them what they’re doing wrong. They had no compunction about shutting him up in prison, and they’d heard about the Immortal Man, so the security system was built accordingly.
When the Wheel turned again, and the tyrants were turned out, he was fêted as a hero. They returned his original possessions, but enough time had passed that the pages of The Book were crumbling to dust.
He left the planet as fast as he could.
He reconstituted The List, but this time he had it carved onto blocks of basalt, and placed on an uninhabited planet in the far reaches of the Mandala galaxy. Let it be set in stone, he thought. It was as good a monument to his life as any.

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Of course you get more than one. :)

The idea that eternity would get really boring after a while is pretty common, and I think what would get to him would be the futility of a lot of what he does. He'll make a difference for a little while, but things always change, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the better, but in the long run, it's not necessarily he that made it happen one way or the other.

So in the end, what has he really accomplished? He loved a lot of people.

I was reading a lot of Russian history, which is just chock full of assassinations and turmoil and oppression, no matter the century; specifically Trotsky. He might've been one of the leaders of the October Revolution, but see how much that mattered when Stalin's rise started. He criticized Stalin too much, and got exiled and eventually assassinated.

And btw, he was in jail for a damned long time. That summer, I went to an exhibition at the Met of medieval drawings on paper... it was quite humbling to stand in front of a case containing thousand-year-old pieces of paper.

Incidentally, the alien race names? I was drinking a bottled STout and LAGer at the time. The other race would have been Blakta (Black and Tan), except that referring to an enslaved race as anything remotely resembling the word "black" seemed to draw parallels that I really didn't want to invoke. The opposite of black is white, but Whiteta wasn't any better. Somehow, thinking of this, I clicked onto the French word for "snow" aka neige, and TA DA, Neigeta.

I hate coming up with names. The composer later in that piece is so named because I was driving near saraTOGA SPRIngs when I came up with him.

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Haha! I remember the Saratoga Springs thing - I was wondering where these ones came from. I liked this bit because I liked the idea that history has basically become tedious for Jack - first one guy's in, then another, and really it's just more of the same. At least he can afford to wait out the hostile regimes. I dunno, this whole sequence drove home Jack's situation for me in a way all of his melodrama on the show hasn't.

I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

Touch
A bed. Not a cot, or a bunk, or a hammock, but a proper feather bed. Big enough for him to stretch out completely and only have his feet sticking off the bottom. Soft enough to burrow into, the better to escape the penetrating chill of late fall in London. Linens, clean and fresh-pressed, smelling faintly of lavender. A new night-dress. The sheer sensuality of all that snowy cloth against his bare skin engulfed him as much as the duvet did. It was bliss, and he reveled in it.
Chagrin took over, as sleep began to claim him. Good Lord. He was waxing rhapsodic about bedclothes. Much more of this and he really would run mad.

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

:)

Well, I needed "touch." I was going to do sex but 1) I'm not good at writing smut, and 2) it seemed a tad obvious. So I got to thinking of really sensual things that didn't involve sex.

And that's one of them right? You hop into a soft bed with fresh linen right after a shower, and it just feels really, really nice and comforting. Especially on a cold night, when it's nasty and raw outside.

So I figured the guy's been on a ship for months, at best in a bunk if not a hammock, so a real-non-moving, actually-tall-enough, total-lack-of-vermin bed would be a real treat.

But he's James, so he's going to be all, OMG, I just got excited about the bedding. What's wrong with me?

A book I read once about people recovering from traumatic events said that people who have been through hard times can get fixated on little things, mundane things, and this seemed to fit.

(Incidentally, one of my favorite puns ever is in one of the next ones down, where James goes into a fugue state while listening to Handel. :) )

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I VERY nearly picked that line. Well done. (It's just that, well, spacing out when listening to music isn't particularly weird... James. Really. Not on the scale of gasping: "Look! It's a mango!"- and really, that was only because you were used to mangos. Most of your contemporaries aren't, although admittedly mangos are actually quite difficult to identify if you've never seen one.)

(And yes, the idea of James going: "Look! It's a mango!... damn, wrong character!" is very, very funny.)

The beds on ships- old and relatively new (HMS Britannia being the other ship of the line that I've seen the sleeping quarters of) intrigue me. They're too short, by such a bizarre margin. Men of those times really weren't that much shorter than now (certainly not on board the Britannia, where the bunks for the Marine corps were fitted in the 1970s. My dad's contemporaries used those bunks- and they're about 4 feet long, albeit on the wide side.) I sort of imagine that hammocks automatically tip you into a foetal position, but the Sick Bay hammocks on the Victory were clearly designed to be quite rigid, letting the patient lie on his back... I and don't think any were longer than 5' (I measured by lying on the floor- it was exactly my length.) Now, okay, so 5' is within the bounds of normal for British people- I'm an British person!- and a lot of the 'men' were not actually fully grown, but... well.)

This is a bit of head-scratcher for me, actually, in ship-board-smut; one has to try to ignore the fact that beds that comfortably fit two (or more) were not normal on ships. Not impossible, obviously- (there's one double bed on Britannia, but obviously, as a Royal Yacht, it's unusual in a lot of ways), but not a standard bit of equipment. Certainly, the Captains' beds on the Victory are strictly one-man units!

(I suppose it was possible to get two in a bunk for a short while, in order for loblolly girls to... perform their duties. (Another thing that's ignored in PotC fanon and certainly canon, of course.) Just not to lie back afterwards.)

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

:)!

I know in the 18th century they had this thing about not lying flat to sleep, that it was somehow bad for you. I've toured a bunch of 18th century houses in the States, and they all have these absurdly short beds.

I know Captains did occasionally bring their wives on board, but I haven't found anything on how the sleeping arrangements worked... and in terms of the loblolly girls, it's not like you need to lie side by side, either.. :)

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[soubie.livejournal.com]

And, um. You know you asked me once to check for 'Brit-speak'?

Well, um. The use of 'cot'... in British dialect now, it doesn't make sense here. I know from seeing it in other places, that in this context it means a collapsible or temporary bed. But in Brit, it exclusively indicates a bed for a baby.

(Specifically, in my dialect, it's the larger, usually wooden, permanent, rectangular sort of baby's bed, you know, with the bars. 'Crib' means a cradle, bassinet or basket for a very young baby.)

HOWEVER, I'm a little uncertain, because I don't think 'cots' in that sense were actually used in this period. (Baskets and cradles, sure, but the sort of 'cot' I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure was a furnishing of the 19th century nursery- as I understand it, in days of the wet-nurse, nurseries in the Victorian sense only came in when the pre-industrial wet-nurse was replaced by the more 'modern' nanny and her nursemaid.) Now, it's possible that the American usage is actually an older one that was commandeered in England to mean something rather more specific. (I tend to let 'fall' go for just this reason- it's not used in that way in Britain any more, but I think it actually pre-dates 'autumn'.)

In fact, the use of 'cot' that I'm aware of before the great parenting revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century is as a truncation of 'cottage'. So I don't know whether it's period or not.

Re: I had a real difficulty picking this particular one out...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Ah! Gotcha. V. tricky, I wouldn't have thought of that (clearly!).. Thank you!

It's funny how words move back and forth... in the SCA, people want to use the word "remove" to indicate a course at dinner, because it feels older, but it turns out that the word "remove" in that context is a Victorian innovation, and when medieval people wanted to indicate the bringing on of a dish during a feast they used the word...

"course." :)

Thanks muchly..