Vacation Thoughts

Weather Harlot returns (northern Harlot, Momcat equals southern Harlot)

 

I am back from my vacation and am still in that awkward transfer from vacation zone-out back into the real world. As I get older it is harder making the adjustment. It’s a mild version of post-traumatic-stress-spring-feverish out-time that has to be transitioned across.   It’s painful coming back into reality.

 

At work I’m still day dreaming about the mountains, the beautiful fall foliage and the bracing cold. I can feel the wind burn on my lips. I actually had to use chap-stick, a once in a decade purchase for me.  I also miss Vala’s incessant jitteriness as she was bouncing about trying to keep warm. I think she is only truly happy when the temperatures soar and stay in the high-humid nineties.  

 

I’ve also enjoyed four weeks of minimal computer use, which gave me time to think about stuff that normally stays subsumed in my thoughts because I’m not particularly good with expressing intangibles in words this is going to be difficult to communicate.

 

 I have been thinking about several related topics one is why SGU universe isn’t connecting with me, and how that is related to other general and very old intellectual questions I been mulling about fan fiction since I first encounted the genre.( years ago ).   It goes back to reading Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie A. Fiedler. I decided on vacation I was ready for a re-read of this amazing critical study. Since I’d forgotten most of it and because the intellectual issues the author addresses haven’t changed that much in forty years I knew it was going to be fun. 

 

Fiedler’s cultural criticism is more relevant with each passing decade and he gave me an interesting lens with which to interpret fanfiction and the media products they are based upon.

 

Momcat has been putting up with my rants about this for awhile--Why can’t young men get over their fascination with dark and edgy fiction about loners, psychopaths, and dark characters as the pinnacle of literary (or screenplay) sophistication.?  Or to quote the blurb on the back cover of Fiedler’s tome.  

 

“….. there emerges Fiedler’s once scandalous—and now increasingly accepted—judgment that our literature in incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.”

 

Here are a few more quotes, to get the gist of Fiedler’s points.

 

“Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality”

 

 

“--our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys.”

 

“...the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid “civilization” which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility.”

 

(Must get to work will continue this later)