Dear LJ,

When my friend posts a long, carefully crafted English translation of a German poem to her flist, we do not want to see a pop-up video ad for Best Buy before we read it.

I'll bet there are a few other sorts of posts that are also unimproved by Christmas advertising, eh?

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This makes me a big hypocrite, doesn't it?

THE FANFICTION LOVE MEME

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I used recipes from the internet for all of my Thanksgiving cooking, so I'm posting a review of the experience of cooking and eating them with links. ( detailed reviews below the cut )

I had planned to finish Gilead and then reread my source text for Yuletide. I finished Gilead and then decided I had to reread Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping. I just had to see more of her writing, had to try to understand her work.

I need to reread and digest all three of these books to understand why they acted on me the way they did, why I felt such tremendous empathy with Reverend Ames in Gilead, a person absolutely unlike me in any way. Perhaps it is because he is the elderly father of a child the same age my son happens to be. Perhaps it is because, as a very pious Protestant Christian, his entire frame of reference is scriptural, and I resonate with that. ( cut for length--I gushed a lot here )

I find that as I get older, my opinions about medicine swing like a pendulum. I used to be very critical of people who didn't see a doctor for everything, and now I'm less so because...I hate going to the doctor. ( stuff about me and my breasts )

Now the government has changed its guidelines and I am off the hook, but...should they have changed them? What were the issues? The trustworthy (I think!) people at Our Bodies Ourselves say, Mammogram Guidelines are Causing Confusion But They Make Sense. Here's a relevant quote:

Around 37 million mammograms are done each year. So what’s the problem there? For starters, mammograms use low-dose X-rays to examine the breast, and exposure to radiation can have a cumulative effect on the body. And they’re imperfect. About half of all pre-menopausal women, and one-third of postmenopausal women, have dense breasts, which makes their mammograms more difficult to read.

Mammograms produce false-positive results in about 10 percent of cases, leading to anxiety that can last for years, unnecessary and sometimes-disfiguring biopsies, and unneeded treatment, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy — each of which present their own complications and health risks, including an increased risk of other cancers and heart disease.

The tests themselves are potentially iatrogenic. (I learned that word from Barbara Ehrenreich--it means a treatment that causes disease.)

nancylebov posted a link to Gail Collins' piece in the New York Times, and that was also interesting. She found a lump in her breast through self-exam (while watching BTVS, Buffy fans) that was probably caused by estrogen-replacement therapy. (My mom's might have been from that, too.)

What I've learned from this: I probably should continue to feel guilty about my reluctance to see the doctor, but I would do better to casually feel myself up from time to time than to stick my boobs in the mammography machine right now. (And I'm also wondering why Gail Collins was touching her breasts while watching Buffy, knowing what I know about fandom and...well, whatever. I completely understand.)

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Here's a little drive-by fan fiction recommendation: check out the_con_cept's (that's Abstract Concept's realy screen name, apparently) latest sweet little Snarry. She's calling it a "Snarody" because it reprises a common cracky Snarry plot: Snape is a vampire and feeds on Harry. Naturally, it's called It Sucks to Be Severus Snape. It's incredibly funny with great, surprisingly hot NC-17 sex scenes. I just love her sense of humor. Her original minor characters in this one are great, and this is a very credible Harry--she hasn't sacrificed his characterization in order to up the sexiness factor.

The piece is 15 installments long, but it's all done. I'm reading another story in progress by mailroomy but I'm not going to rec it until it's all done. So DON'T GO OVER THERE AND READ EVERYTHING SHE'S WRITTEN RIGHT NOW OR ANYTHING OKAY? Ahem. Show a little self-restraint.

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I am so excited! Are you? ( I put some details below the cut to be helpful and squeeful )

I read Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home on the airplane back from my parents. I read her book Housekeeping in the 1980s in college, and always wondered whether she would finally publish another novel.
Well, I'm kind of out of it, apparently, because in 2005 her novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. I went to look up Gilead on Wikipedia and I realized that Home is a sort of sequel to Gilead--at least, it continues the story of some of the characters. I feel foolish for being so eager to read this book without the context of the other. (I think also the Wikipedia article might have spoilered me, but I'm not going to fuss about it.)
I found a lot of similarities between Home and Housekeeping. Both are the stories of large families in which remembered happy childhoods prepared some family members for miserable adulthoods. (Others, of course, were miserable all along.)( more of the review under the cut )

Of course you have all paid attention to me and are already following protowilson, correct? So you didn't miss this hilarious G-rated authorial insertion/Snape comic right?

Please do not miss opportunities to laugh your tushie off.

I also read A Confusion of Will and Desire, by gatewaygirl. It's a 70,000 word novella, Harry/Draco slash. One thing I liked about it was that the romance was not the central feature of the plot--rather there was a psychological mystery at the heart of it. gatewaygirl had written one of those PWP stories where someone has sex with someone else because they each took a potion to remove inhibitions. The story had a nice unreal sense of lack of consequences--and she began thinking about what would happen if there had been consequences, if the memory of the incident were recoverable. It's a great premise.

I once wrote an orgy fic that was very lighthearted, and a reader asked me "what would happen if Character A was accidentally impregnated by Character B and had to tell her girlfriend Character C that she'd had sex with Character B?" And I thought, "I ought to try to write that, but I really love happy endings and don't think I can stand to put A, B and C through that--they suffer so much in canon." It was great that gatewaygirl actually took on that kind of challenge.

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I did this meme because others on my flist did. Comment if you have another meme for me to do. ( or just to say hi, if you want )

My husband found this. It's a great cover of one my favorite John Lennon songs. The singer is Annie Clark, who goes by St. Vincent. (I hope that's because of Edna St. Vincent Millay, but who knows.) I like her breathy take on the chorus.



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I saw this on the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog. (Did you know they had one? It's a good resource, too.) It's a list of 40 books about sexuality. I think some of them are more political than practical. I figure some folks on my flist will like this because they write about sex, and others because they think about culture as they take in various media (books, television, movies, etc.) and it's good to be armed with additional insights.

If you have a plug for any of the books or essays on the list, let me know.

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I am making a very quick rec post as I move from one activity to another--I wrote this up in Googledocs over the last week and finally finished it and have time to post! I think everyone has already posted recs for the snarry_games, but I have time now to add my two cents, so I will. ( recs for six stories beneath the cut, and an admonition to look at ALL the fan art! )

Finally, someone stands up for the health insurance companies. Since the embedding is down, feel free to click the link to go straight to either Funny or Die or my DW journal to see it. You can comment on DW with OpenID.



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I've seen this on my LJ flist twice, and followed the link to the explanation of the problem. I found, when I followed the instructions I found there, that a flash player had been placed on my top post, the one with my fic masterlist. I removed it, but that means that anyone who viewed my journal probably also got hit.

Ewww.

I had meant to read Jerome Groopman's book How Doctors Think, on how doctors diagnose illness, since I read the excerpt in the New Yorker and heard a few interviews with him on various NPR shows. Sometimes when you've read excerpts you find you know the whole book, but this one had a lot of material I hadn't covered before.

There are two med students (I think only two) on my flist, but they are both luckily going into a socialized medical system and so this book will have only partial relevance for them. See, even though the book should be about universal decision-making processes, it's obvious that this is how doctors in the United States think. ( some thoughts that came out of the book )

I've been meaning to post recs, since I find that I'm reading a lot late at night and barely ever comment. I only found three, and I'm sure I had more! Well, three for now.

atypicalsnowman's Snarry Games fic explores one of my favorite clichés in fan fic--the protagonist stuck in his own head. I remember that I recced a Snarry story by svartalfur who subsequently left fandom and wiped all of his stories, in which Harry has to go after Snape, who catatonic. Here, it's still Harry's POV, but Snape goes after him. What I liked about this was the way Harry's canonical POV blended with the POV in this story. In canon, Harry is an unreliable narrator who is somehow aware that he's missing some piece of information. He has to act, and act boldly, even though he sort of dimly knows that he's developing his strategies based at least partially on prejudice. Here, it's the same. He isn't quite aware of what's happening, but he knows something is wrong. Great use of fan fiction technology, as I sometimes like to call it:
The Weight We Carry.

I know that I've already recommended a story that I beta-read, countesszero/carolinelamb story for the lupin_snape Retrofest, The Addiction. I don't think I said quite enough about why I liked the story and how much I looked forward to having some of my flisters read it as I did the beta-read. The story is darker than most gender-switch-spell cliché stories are. Snape is traumatized by having his body suddenly become female. He doesn't become a woman in any way except physically. His psychic damage can't be saved by true love, and this Lupin is not a loving person--he is also too damaged, in less obvious ways.

carolinelamb was the evil friend who made me read The Magic Mountain, and by doing so gave me insight into the German literary tradition that formed her as a writer. I could completely understand why her story was full of suffering and humor at the same time. It's such a compelling combination. OK, I know that some people on my flist will never like this, but you darkfic and Snape-humiliation fans had better get on this.

As she continued to post the story, I realized that there wasn't an easy way to navigate it, especially as it's on the comm's Insane Journal site. I probably needed to show countesszero/carolinelamb how to code a link to the next chapter into the bottom of each chapter (which I'll do) but until then, here are all the chapters in order.

Chapter One, The Addiction
Chapter Two, The Addiction
Chapter Three, The Addiction
Chapter Four, The Addiction
Chapter Five, The Addiction
Chapter Six, The Addiction
Chapter Seven, The Addiction
Chapter Eight, The Addiction
Chapter Nine, The Addiction
Chapter Ten, The Addiction
Chapter Eleven, The Addiction
Chapter Twelve, The Addiction
Chapter Thirteen, The Addiction
Chapter Fourteen, The Addiction

I almost never read on Walking the Plank, but I was there, and read this fic, In November, completely by accident. I have been reading the snarryficfind because it's complete crack. I mean, it's addictive to read the fic requests and they are also kind of out there. People ask for stories that sound completely absurd, and they usually exist! Usually they aren't my cuppa, but sometimes I like them, and I kind of have to look, you know? So I'm pretty sure I was linked to something else by this popular author or something like that, and found this remarkable little story. Horrible sad ending darkfic with a beautiful, perfect Snape, and very short--a gem of a very sad fic.

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I have taken to posting from Dreamwidth to LJ. When I do this, DW automatically formats all the usernames to DW. If I want some to link to LJ accounts, I have to go edit the LJ post, and I can't make an LJ icon appear on the DW post.

I've seen entries on both LJ and DW that feature LJ, IJ and DW usernames with appropriate iconage. How do you folks code that?

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If you don't follow politics in the United States, you've probably missed out on how incredibly putzy and ridiculous the Republicans are being about their status as the opposition, minority party in government. It's one thing that they are promising to block any and all healthcare reform proposals. It's quite another when they go along with the nutjob wing of their party in opposing the president giving a speech to schoolchildren advising them to study hard. The various right-wing TV demagogues claimed he was going to promote socialism. (OK, fine, that's what they do.) And then some of the actual Republican officeholders complained about the speech.

Oh come on. I do not think one can roll one's eyes enough. Seriously.

Laura Bush, the First Lady from the previous administration, went public with a defense of Obama addressing schoolchildren.

But on the plus side, this stupidity prompted the Obama administration to release the text of the president's speech before he delivers it. Among other things, he advocated that children wash their hands and stay home from school if they feel ill. (I agree with this. Is that because I'm a socialist, or just a Jewish mother? Which is worse in the eyes of the extreme Right?) He also wrote this:

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won't love every subject you study. You won't click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won't necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures. JK Rowling's first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Awww. Well, I suspect this speech is going to be too long for my first-grader, but I'll have to find out what he thinks. It's certainly no worse than his teacher telling him last year that good readers get ready to make the sounds when they read, which resulted in some alarmingly silly faces.

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