It feels remarkably unfair that I should come home and the construction should restart immediately on our street, all three mornings until this one where it didn't matter that we weren't contending with the noises of steel road plates and humps of new asphalt, I had been in too much pain to sleep all night. I managed to nap for a couple of hours around the middle of the day. I had several things I wanted to do this weekend and so far none of them are getting done.
Because there were multiple unclaimed paperbacks lying around chez![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie, over the course of the last weekend I read about two and a half het romances traditionally published within the last fifteen years and none of them will be named herein, but the cumulative experience made this post feel particularly on point. I understand it would be taxonomically inaccurate to refer to the major players of Merchant Ivory as insane bisexuals, but I thought of it again while spatch and I were watching A Room with a View (1986), which did have the advantage of a primarily queer creative sensibility and is fully as allergic to heteronormativity as a successful m/f romance should be. That impassioned speech from George Emerson, Julian Sands of spiky and beloved memory straw-haired in his shirtsleeves, intensely and imperfectly beautiful and articulating a philosophy of relationships that shouldn't feel so radically sensible more than a century after its Edwardian origins: "He wants you for a possession—something to look at, like a painting or an ivory box. Something to own and to display. He doesn't want you to be real and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings even when I hold you in my arms." Good grief, thank God, I read the mother of my godchild half a dozen professionally published sex scenes that couldn't pass that bar. No wonder I get most of my favorite romances out of film noir.
The best thing about being asked by my godchild for the definition of hetero- as in -sexual was not the opportunity to discourse on classical etymology, but the fact that he thought the half Greek/half Latin line from The Invention of Love (1997) was hilarious.
Because there were multiple unclaimed paperbacks lying around chez
selkie, over the course of the last weekend I read about two and a half het romances traditionally published within the last fifteen years and none of them will be named herein, but the cumulative experience made this post feel particularly on point. I understand it would be taxonomically inaccurate to refer to the major players of Merchant Ivory as insane bisexuals, but I thought of it again while spatch and I were watching A Room with a View (1986), which did have the advantage of a primarily queer creative sensibility and is fully as allergic to heteronormativity as a successful m/f romance should be. That impassioned speech from George Emerson, Julian Sands of spiky and beloved memory straw-haired in his shirtsleeves, intensely and imperfectly beautiful and articulating a philosophy of relationships that shouldn't feel so radically sensible more than a century after its Edwardian origins: "He wants you for a possession—something to look at, like a painting or an ivory box. Something to own and to display. He doesn't want you to be real and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings even when I hold you in my arms." Good grief, thank God, I read the mother of my godchild half a dozen professionally published sex scenes that couldn't pass that bar. No wonder I get most of my favorite romances out of film noir.The best thing about being asked by my godchild for the definition of hetero- as in -sexual was not the opportunity to discourse on classical etymology, but the fact that he thought the half Greek/half Latin line from The Invention of Love (1997) was hilarious.
