HSU IT Department

mywitch has embarked on 25 days of fan art. Today she picked MY prompt, and gave me half-dressed Lucius. Go. See. Marvel.

Hubba hubba!

Thanks to squibstress for the link to a quite good and thought-provoking article by Foz Meadows on sex, desire and fanfiction.

Meadows' article is in rebuttal to this piece in The Guardian, which attempts to be a sort of primer for the fanfic novice by defining some common terms. It gets some of them right but some of them laughably wrong, such as attributing the origins of Mary Sue to someone named, of all things, Paula (???), alleging that the Futurians had fascist tendencies, and defining slash as "a sub-genre in which buddies from classic TV become gay lovers." Er, huh? Also his punctuation is atrocious (yes, Ewan, it's a blog but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how to use commas and remembering to pair your parentheses). Several of the comments, notably the several by EllaLeigh, are far more scholarly and intelligent than the article itself.

Meadows' article, on the other hand, though equally casual in tone, makes some singularly cogent points about the role fanfic plays for women in particular, and why it's an important one:

...while an undeniably massive proportion of fan fic deals with romance, relationships, non-canonical or otherwise impossible pairings and -- yes -- spectacularly detailed pornography, the titillating novelty of this fact is such that few people often bother to stop and ask why this is...Culturally, we've spent thousands of years either denying, curbing or vilifying the female sex drive, to the point that even now, the idea of pornography geared towards a female audience is still fundamentally radical...[and] the rest of the world still tends to find [it] ridiculous: Romance novels have always been sneered at, while the new vogue for disparaging various sexy, successful books as 'mommy porn' always makes me want to stab things -- not necessarily in defense of the books themselves, but in outrage at the need to establish adult female desire, and particularly the desires of mothers, as being somehow comic, diminutive, novel. It's a species of sexual condescension -- oh, you're 40, female and fond of orgasms? how quaint! (or how disgusting, depending on the level of misogyny involved)...

One of her most interesting points, and one I haven't seen made elsewhere, is that fanfic works for women because women want emotional investment and desire, not just the mechanics of inserting tab A into slot B. With fanfic the characters are already drawn and the emotional investment is already present -- you know who they are, you've been through adventures with them, you care about them -- which means as a writer/reader you can skip straight to the smut without the pages of buildup that a romance novel requires. I'd never thought of it that way but it makes sense:

These aren't just strangers we're perving on purely because we like their bodies (although that can certainly still be part of it); they're characters to whom we feel a strong emotional connection and in whose relationships we're invested, such that watching them have sex, regardless of the quality of the prose, is guaranteed to be about a thousand times more arousing than the sight of yet another anonymous blonde get screwed by some faceless, grunting goon on the internet.

Again I must say thanks to noeon for a fabulous book, this time for Call Me By Your Name. Packed with lush imagery, complex emotions, creative and supple language -- one of the most intense and vividly written love stories I've read in ages (doesn't hurt that it's set on the Italian Riviera!). Had to take it slow as all the emotion wore me out :)

Take this, for example, when Elio shows Oliver to his favorite little slope overlooking the sea (which, he says, is where Monet painted):

It never occurred to me that I had brought him here not just to show him my little world, but to ask my little world to let him in, so that the place where I came to be alone on summer afternoons would get to know him, judge him, see if he fitted in, take him in, so that I might come back here and remember.

Or this, two days after they've kissed for the first time, which closes with an unusual but stunningly apt metaphor for the permanent mark love leaves behind:

Oh Oliver, I said to myself...I'll do anything for you. I'll ride up the hill with you and I'll race you up the road to town, and...I'll wait at the bar in the piazzetta while you meet with your translator, and I'll touch the memorial to the unknown soldier who died on the Piave, and I won't utter a word, I'll show you the way to the bookstore, and we'll park our bikes outside the shop and go in together and leave together, and I promise, I promise, I promise, there will be no hint of Shelley or Monet, nor will I ever stoop to tell you that two nights ago you added an annual ring to my soul.

Or this, when Elio's father is speaking about the end of a love affair, the old man looking back on youth and passion:

You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you...if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything -- what a waste!

The ending is perfection, the final paragraph a knockout.

One of the reviews calls the author "the grammarian of desire." Yup. He's like Anita Brookner, e.g. Hotel du Lac or Brief Lives: that same ability to precisely capture all the minute shadings of emotion -- fear, love, passion, desire, self-loathing, etc. Like those medieval miniatures, tiny jewel-like paintings with exquisite detail. *happy sigh*