stunt_muppet

Every time I read something for my Romanticism class I end up thinking about where I could use it in a fic. Sometimes I don't even know where I'd use it; a poem just jumps out at me and passionately cries "paste selections of me in your story to make it sound profound!". (See: Blake, First book of Urizen)

Occasionally I will have these thoughts in class, which is a little embarrassing when I'm trying to engage in actual discussion. Right in the middle of a talk about illusion, symbolism, and what the title character of Keats' Lamia represented, it suddenly occurred to me that this poem could be interspersed quite nicely with a  Rose/Handy fic. Really. Specifically, the section where Lamia assumes her human form (painfully, and shedding her unique features and colors in the process, dissolving in an almost chemical sense) could powerfully set the scene for a chapter on the way Handy sees himself, in relation to the Time Lord that part of him used to be - because there's got to be a conflict going on there, right? Part of him has always been human, but part of him has been a Time Lord, and he'll always have the memory of all those senses and memories and perceptions of time, even if he can't properly remember them because his human brain isn't wired that way. Even his memories might feel shallow, stripped of their color, because they no longer appear to him with all the vibrancy of all his alien senses.

And the part where Lyceus thinks that Lamia is either a goddess or a dream, but plays along with the illusion because he wants to believe in it (which my professor interpreted as Keats' commentary on Coleridge's famous principle of willing suspension of disbelief) could relate to Rose's decision to try to make a life with Handy work, even though he is in many critical ways not the man she fell in love with. Could be either grim or hopeful, that one - either with Rose knowing that the relationship isn't going to last because it's an imitative copy of the one she wanted or her walking in knowing that it's not going to be the relationship she wanted but determined to see it through anyway. Even...though...that last one didn't sound nearly as sexist in my head. Um. It's been a bad day for that.

So, yeah. It'd be kind of grim and unhappy, but then again, so is Keats. :D Life-affirming, ultimately, but not a cheery fellow.

And now I've got to read part I of Frankenstein by tommorow, and I really, really want to stick a line in An Experiment, Of Sorts Chapter 2 where Liz quotes one of the eponymous doctor's lines at the Doctor. Probably during a conversation about why she became a scientist, although it might be a bit of a stretch for them not to have had that conversation after a year. And as awesome as the quote would be, it's probably not very in character, since I'm not sure Liz would really find it all that amusing to cite the archetypal Mad Scientist, and anyway I don't know if she'd have the patience for the Romantics. She seems more like a Modernist woman.

You know, that's the one thing (aside from general block and busitude) that's holding me up on this chapter - the Doctor spending much time in Liz's company outside of work means I have to know what she likes to read, and watch on TV, and eat, and drink, and wear, and et cetera, and I cannot figure it out. I mean, I think she'd prefer having a shelf full of nonfiction/reference books, but surely she reads some fiction, right? Does she prefer full-on modernist lit? The occasional not-quite-as-challenging suspense or mystery? Genre fiction? Absurdist lit? I kind of want to write her as having a few books of Clarkean hard SF lying around, or at the very least some Wells, but I worry that that's a cliche, and besides, maybe she wouldn't have any interest in fictionalized science as opposed to the real deal.

Does she watch television at all? I mentioned her as having one, but does she use it? For that matter, what was even on TV in the early 70s? Must research further.

Can she cook, or does she call for takeaway nine times out of ten? I kind of want to have her cooking for herself, since I think she'd value being self-sufficient and takeaway gets expensive if you're eating it all the time, but at the same time I'm wary of having her stray into a stereotype. Furthermore, I'm wary of making the two of them too domestic and thus wandering into the treacherous waters of curtainfic, because in order to ward off unpleasant images of "woman cooks, man waits around for her to finish", I'd have to have both her and the Doctor in the kitchen, if only so she can shove a pan at him and say "hold this", and while I don't mind characters doing domestic a bit, I don't want it to be cutesy.

Of course, the logical solution would be that the Doctor doesn't actually need to eat, so she just cooks for herself and gives the Doctor a look when he nicks things off her plate.

 

*sigh* In a way, I love fleshing out a character's mundane life like this, but it does get frustrating when I don't have a lot to work with.

...and my goodness, it's late. You'll pardon me; I've got a lot of reading to do before tommorow.