Eccentric Flower:199904/trailers backlogs and books
From Eccentric Flower
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april twenty-ninth trailers, backlogs, and books Almost running out of April. How time does fly. Looked at the movie previews in Entertainment Weekly and it looks like a good three months ahead. Of course we barely go see movies these days but I always want to see a lot of them. From the looks of it, my worst fears about The Haunting are true - they're playing it just like any other Old Dark House horror movie. Arrgh! Worse yet, it has Lili Taylor, who is never less than excellent - am I going to have to go to this movie just to see her? I can't take it! - - - I'm still catching up on the email. Last week's mouth organ - which wasn't about sex, for a change, but about the Colorado shootings - generated a huge amount of messages, and sorting through the carnage took a while. This week's, which we did last night, involved a survey that took us most of the night to tweak. So I was too exhausted for email. I looked at some smut for a while and went to bed. Maybe I'll do better today, but I also have paying work to do. - - - Bought the fifth Jack Chalker Dancing Gods book yesterday - I hadn't known there was a fifth, Ysabel had to tell me. I stopped reading Chalker for a while, and thereby hangs a tale. Chalker basically writes narrow-interest fetish erotica in thin F/SF disguise. He likes physical transformations, mind control/alteration, and strong powerplay. One of his favorite themes is someone whom, due to circumstances they cannot control, is forced to act and think like a mindless sex toy. These themes aren't politically correct, obviously. Now, erotic themes rarely are - it's a truism that some of the stuff that makes people the most aroused is the stuff they'd be most embarrassed to admit to. I don't think that F/SF should need to be PC all the time either, but I do think the reader should have some idea what to expect - i.e. to know in advance that the rules of good conduct are going to be temporarily suspended. The thing is, as I said, often Chalker's F/SF themes are really just the disguise for the erotic themes, rather than the other way around. As such, he tends to comply more with erotica standards of correctness (i.e. anything goes) than F/SF standards (more lax than the mainstream, but still present). This combination of factors - the fact that he doesn't care how PC he is and the fact that his F/SF stories often aren't really - annoys a lot of readers. I remember seeing a comment on an SF mailing list that began, "If Chalker pulls this, 'I'm blind and horny!' business one more time ...." (Chalker also seems to like women whose vision is impaired.) The comment didn't come from an outraged woman. It came from a male, who was expecting something he clearly didn't get. I am often more swayed by the opinions of others than I like to admit. Moved by this and other similar comments, I stopped reading Chalker for a while. It didn't hurt that the Quintara Marathon set, which was just coming out at the time, didn't appeal to me. I did buy the fourth Dancing Gods book, because I liked that series intensely. But gradually I reflected on what I liked about Chalker and I realized that the transformation and control scenes were exactly the stuff I most liked about the books! This was when I was first beginning to define my tastes in smut, and figure out what pushed my buttons and what didn't. In keeping with my developing take on sexuality - i.e. be ashamed of nothing - I finally decided I was penalizing myself for no good reason, and Chalker is off the blacklist again. I looked at the Wonderland set while buying the new book yesterday, and it didn't do much for me at a brief glance, so apparently I haven't missed much during my absence. I also bought another of the Adept books that Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris have been putting out every year or so. These are a delightfully cheesy read, involving a well-heeled male witch who is part of a group of people apparently responsible for the arcane defense of England, and his young but extremely promising apprentice. It's a bit like reading about Mr. Steed of the Avengers but as a witch and with a male artist instead of Mrs. Peel. One of the more interesting ideas in these books is the use of Nazism in conjunction with The Bad Guys. This has a basis in fact; Hitler was very interested in the occult, and had people researching whether it could be used as a weapon. If you'd like to see a more serious treatment by Kurtz of the same idea - an arcane defense against a magic-aided Nazi invasion of England - find a copy of Lammas Night. It's good. Everything Kurtz touches is good, actually. Another writer who is always a good bet is Robin McKinley, and I have everything she's ever written. Her new book (the title momentarily escapes me) is a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story. She's already done this once, in Beauty, and it was great ... I'm not sure what angle she'll take this time, but I'm looking forward to it. I think it's geeky to discuss one's fiction tastes in great detail. Discussing the merits of one particular work with others is fine - that's a literary discussion, and I haven't had one of those in a while - but just talking about things you like is pure self-indulgence. Right? It's like telling everyone what's on your CD shelf. On the other hand, I got an email saying basically, "I love your journal but you should stop apologizing for saying things you don't think other people want to hear." Sigh. The thing is, I cannot see how you are tangibly enriched by knowing which authors I like. Just because I like Robin McKinley means nothing to you, or should mean nothing to you. The only way you will know if you like McKinley's books is to read them. Ergo, my words are useless to you. On the other hand, it's my party and I'll blather if I want to, and that's what I wanted to say today. The apology is a compromise: I'm going to say my piece, but I'm going to attach a disclaimer. If we could all agree that the disclaimer was permanently implied, I could stop. For that matter, if we all had a useful language of comparison, I could make comments about McKinley which would be useful to you. I'm sure my meaning isn't clear, but there's a whole postcard coming which will explain in full - I've been thinking about it for three days. I'll write that later today.
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