Things on My Shelf

What I’m Watching: Xena, Warrior Princess

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So I’ve been watching the first seasons of Xena for the last couple of days. Largely I blame Tansy Rayner Roberts for this, since I borrowed the DVDs from a friend after reading the Xena Rewatch Notes on her blog. I can recommend going and checking those out, should you want to follow an in-depth discussion of the first season, for although I’m enjoying the show I’m primarily going to note the three things that are really, really bugging me.

Surprisingly, it’s not the casual relationship to history – I’m totally down with the mix-and-match approach to myth and historical reference points. It’s not the dodgy CGI monsters either (although I’m struggling to figure out where the hell the bat-winged, skeletal dryads came from in one of the early Season 2 DVDs). It’s not even Gabrielle, who is irritating for the first half of the season *with a damn purpose*. It’s not even the complete disregard of the laws of physics that occur during the fight choreography.

No, I’m irritated by a couple of very specific things. Basically, they go something like this:

1) Why is Xena a Warrior Princess?

Seriously, this is bugging me. I get that Warrior Princess scans better than any of the more obvious sub-title options, but I can’t quite figure out why she isn’t just a Warrior, a Warlord, or even a Warrior Queen. I mean, princess of what? Where’s the damn the lineage? And if you get to pick your own title, why pick the secondary role rather than selecting a title at the top of the damn hierarchy? I could probably have lived with this if it was just a sub-title for the show, but it keeps coming up in conversation. Secondary characters call Xena a Warrior-Princess a couple of times throughout the season, and at least once she’s used it to reference herself, so it’s obviously a thing. A real thing, in the setting. And I just don’t get it.

2) Fights where people balance on things

I mean, seriously, there are a half-dozen of these over the course of the season. And I could maybe understand it as a motif thing – there’s a certain balancing act going on in Xena’s character – but they rarely play it as such in the same episodes where they actually depict the emotional balancing act. And I suspect I’d be totally put off if they did tie the two together, for it would be twee and obvious, but at this point I don’t trust the show to be doing this kind of thing with subtlety.

3) The Use of Christian Mythology

Not because I feel any particular attachment to Christian myth or ideology – I don’t – but the realities of pitching of a television show to a contemporary audiance mean that it’s very hard to treat the mythology in the same way as the other myths due to the frothing-at-the-mouth-and-complaining factor that’ll inevitably follow. There are still the occasional moments where this is handled well, but by and large things take a downhill slide the moment a character talks about having a new, singular god.

5 Books

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If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this:

The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler: I keep talking to people who haven’t read this, even if they’re fans of Fowler’s other work. Apparently there’s some combination of the cover art and the movie that was made that warns people off, thinking it’ll be a very different book than it actually is. And I keep telling people “no, no, you’re wrong. It’s fricken’ awesome!” and occasionally they’ll listen to me and actually read the book and get in contact and say “yes, actually, you’re right, it is kind of awesome.” From the communal narrator to the unabashed love of books (both Austen and SF) that permeates the narrative, it’s just good.

Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn: There are very few books in the world that make me miss working in universities, but this is one of them. Essentially a long essay examining the role shame and embarrassment plays in contemporary culture, complete with a series of eloquent and personal arguments for the many ways they can be recontextualizes as positive things. Utterly fascinating.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and The Art of Editing Film, Michael Ondaatje:Just what it says on the tin – this is essentially the transcripts of several conversations Ondaatje (who wrote The English Patient, among other things) had with Murch (who edited a bunch of films, Apocalypse Now among them). I have this working theory that there is nothing better than getting two smart, passionate people together and letting them talk about the stuff that interests them, regardless of whether it how interesting it seems on the surface. Despite its title, this ranges across a variety of editorial approaches (including poetry and fiction) that makes it one of those books all writers should read. I keep coming back to it, again and again.

The Chains That You Refuse, Elizabeth Bear: One of the first books I picked up ’cause I saw it mentioned on livejournal, which then lead me to a series of novels that were similarly cool. But this, Bear’s short story collection, remains my favorite thing that she’s done – it’s wide-ranging in terms of genres, voices and approaches, setting seeds for the seemingly disparate approaches  she’s touched upon in longer works since, and there are several stories that are worth the price of entry on their own (including Two Dreams on Trains, And the Deep Blue Sea, One Eyed Jack and the Suicide King, This Tragic Glass).

6 Days ’til Worldcon

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So this morning started with a trip out to my not-so-local post office to check my mailbox, largely on the assumption that a terribly efficient postal system stood a very small chance of delivering a hardcover book from England to Brisbane in the space of a week. Admittedly I figured it was a long shot, but if I didn’t check today I wouldn’t get a chance until after Worldcon, and at the back of my mind was this constant what-if-what-if-what-if…

And lo, when I opened my PO Box, my faith in the postal system was rewarded with this:

Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories in all its fabulous, hard-covery glory. And it is freakin’ glorious – a hardcover and with a placeholder ribbon that’s packed to the gills with stories that rock the freakin’ casbah. Plus it’s one of those books that looks just as good without the dust-jacket:

And, as with all good books that enter the house, it was in my hand all of six minutes before the Spokesbear clamoured to start reading:

 

Personally, I suggest you head head over to  Tartarus Press and snag one of the remaining copies before the limited run of 300 are gone. ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m just going to torment you with my copy for the rest of your days.