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Homonemia; riverbeds; going up—

The inimitable ginmar saw Alexander and the second Bridget Jones movie in a theater that was apparently deep in the heart of the Unheimlichsenke, and what she has to say about the power dynamics of desire and being an object of desire end up cutting a lot closer to the heart of what Jed was getting at back in the summer of ’03 than, you know, the really quite terribly simple idea of tokening up your futurefic with a (fully realized) gay character (or two), no matter how happily ensconced in a fulfilling relationship well-validated by those about them. —This isn’t about tolerance, people; it’s about building new worlds. Even if only on paper.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out why my brain’s insisting on holding Victor/Victoria up against “The Riverbed of the World.” My next move apparently lies in limning how each does what it does and yet doesn’t what it wants done; when I get that figured out, I’ll make it. (Maybe I’ll stick ’em in a room for a bit and let ’em interrogate each other.) —If nothing else, it’s been instructive to reflect on how a contained, mythologized setting such as the theatrical demimonde can, like the aggressively (didactically) otherworldly settings of (some) SF, serve as a source of that paradoxical ostranenie the audience expects: the unheimlich that isn’t. Just, you know, not as much. —But that leaves me feeling like I’m on the verge of telling everyone something they already know, so maybe instead I’ll point out how much fun it is to read The Intuitionist as an SF novel? (Though it was odd, running into Ben Urich like that.)

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