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I used to be better, but I could never be them again
My poems "Phliasian Investigations" and "The Keystone Out of Your Arch" have been accepted for reprint by The Stellar Beacon. One of these poems is Orsinian; the other about Axiothea of Phlios. I have R.B. Lemberg to thank for publishing both originally in different anthologies.
I was not raised in the traditional sense by fans. I was raised by people who read, watched, and listened to science fiction and fantasy such that it was the dominant literature in the house when I was growing up, but they were not plugged into any kind of wider community. (One of my god-aunts was a serious con-going fan and filker, but never succeeded in describing a convention to me in any way that made it sound attractive rather than overwhelming, which is how I did not meet Ursula K. Le Guin at Readercon 7.) It has nonetheless not escaped me over the years that both of my parents have more classically fannish instincts than I do. My mother has more finely developed slash goggles and stronger shipping opinions. My father gets extremely vocal when he feels a show or a series has gone out of character with itself and extremely meta when sufficiently invested and may actually have provided my first experience of slash in the wild, as he has taken Londo/G'Kar as read since 1996. I find this wonderful. It is a valuable counterweight to the idea that thirty is fandom dead. In any case, I have had to go off some of my medications in preparation for some tests next week and when I said to my mother that I am not quite at the point of forming a symbiotic relationship with a soul-devouring demon sword but it's looking better all the time, she understood what I meant.
I was not raised in the traditional sense by fans. I was raised by people who read, watched, and listened to science fiction and fantasy such that it was the dominant literature in the house when I was growing up, but they were not plugged into any kind of wider community. (One of my god-aunts was a serious con-going fan and filker, but never succeeded in describing a convention to me in any way that made it sound attractive rather than overwhelming, which is how I did not meet Ursula K. Le Guin at Readercon 7.) It has nonetheless not escaped me over the years that both of my parents have more classically fannish instincts than I do. My mother has more finely developed slash goggles and stronger shipping opinions. My father gets extremely vocal when he feels a show or a series has gone out of character with itself and extremely meta when sufficiently invested and may actually have provided my first experience of slash in the wild, as he has taken Londo/G'Kar as read since 1996. I find this wonderful. It is a valuable counterweight to the idea that thirty is fandom dead. In any case, I have had to go off some of my medications in preparation for some tests next week and when I said to my mother that I am not quite at the point of forming a symbiotic relationship with a soul-devouring demon sword but it's looking better all the time, she understood what I meant.
no subject
Right? A tragedy in the making, yet strangely appealing.
Congratulations on the reprints!
Thank you!
And yeah, most of the fans I know are over 30, that's for sure.
I mean, same, if for no other reason than most of the people I know are over thirty, but it still delights me that I have had serious conversation with my mother over the queerness of Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version (1951).
(The conversation rests on a devastating disclosure made in the third act of the film by the protagonist to his wife's newly ex-lover, clarifying an unexpected light on their marriage which has heretofore looked one-sidedly vicious: Millie is flagrantly unfaithful to Andrew, tears him down to third parties and his face, refers to him contemptuously as "the dead" who have no emotions and can't be hurt. Andrew accepts this treatment, we are left to assume out of indifference or exhaustion until he's pressed for his reasons for not divorcing his wife and suddenly it looks a lot more like penance:
"Because I should not wish to add another grave wrong to the one I have already done her."
"What wrong have you done her?"
"To marry her . . . She is really quite as much to be pitied as I. We are both of us interesting subjects for your microscope. Both of us needing something from the other to make life supportable for us, and neither of us able to give it. Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart, as I know now, though when I married her, I did not think that they were incompatible. Nor, I suppose, did she. In those days, I had not thought that her kind of love—that the kind of love she requires and which I had seemed unable to give her—was so important that its absence would drive out the other kind of love—the kind of love I require and which I had thought, in my folly, was by far the greater part of love. You see, Hunter, I may have been a very brilliant scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the facts of life. I know better now, of course. I know now that the love we should have borne each other has turned into a bitter hatred. And that's all the problem is. Not a very unusual one, I venture to imagine, nor half so tragic as you seem to think. Merely the problem of an unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband. You'll find it all over the world. It is usually, I believe, a subject for farce."
What this speech rather strikingly spells out is that Andrew brought love to his side of the marriage, but no physical desire. The obvious mid-century inference is that he's not attracted to women; that like his playwright, he is in fact attracted to men. All that Greek literature flying around besides. My mother read him instantly and effortlessly as a romantic asexual in an era which would not have provided him with the terminology to explain the reality of his feelings for his wife, especially when his efforts to offer marital satisfaction were having exactly the opposite effect. Sex therapists were thin on the ground in interwar England. What might have worked in the days when they still loved one another—even Millie admits that her husband "wasn't always the Crock, you know"—was an open marriage, negotiated as such and reinforced by whatever common ground they could find. Instead they have fallen into a mutually wounding pattern of affairs from which Millie derives sexual but not emotional gratification and of which she always informs her husband so as to remind him of what they are both missing and after eighteen years, though the focus of the drama is on Andrew, it's all but destroyed them both. My mother thought that was not even so unusual nowadays, only painful when it happens. If we watch movies together and they are at all interesting, this the kind of conversation we end up having.)
no subject
Good luck with the tests!
no subject
It did! And it's an honor.
Good luck with the tests!
Thank you.