Saturday, March 12, 2005
I might well have titled this entry, "Howard Hughes eats a barbecue pork sandwich." (Of course, if you're reading this via Blogger and not LJ, you may well wonder what the frell I'm on about, titling entries and such.)
I may be able to work on Daughter of Hounds again today. The fog seems to be lifting.
Outside, the temperature is supposed to climb to 70F, which I know has something to do with my being in better spirits today. I hate having my emotions jacked directly into the climate like this. I've been this way since sometime in high school.
The postman just brought a check from Gardner Dozois for "Riding the White Bull," which he has chosen for The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Second Annual Collection. I am quite proud of this. For one thing, I'm pleased that "Riding the White Bull" will be reaching a wider audience.
Little thoughts spinning off from me this morning, little bits of light, little vortices.
Last night, Spooky and I watched the very excellent Collateral and the somewhat duller-than-expected The Bourne Supremacy.
That was a little thought.
Here's a bigger one. I'm pressing on through the Humphrey Carpenter biography of Tolkien, even though Carpenter's approach to biography has begun to annoy me considerably. Why is it that so many biographers are obsessed with clearing their subjects of any suspicion of homosexuality? I've been through this same thing, recently, with Algernon Blackwood (who may well have had same-sex relations early in his adulthood), and it's been an ongoing thing with Lovecraft (who I don't believe was gay, but still, I'm tired of people insisting stridently that he was heterosexual). As for Tolkien, yes, I'm quite sure he was a straight man, that he was, in fact, a homophobe, being such an ardent Catholic and all, and that his close friendship with C. S. Lewis and the other Inklings was strictly platonic. I'd never thought otherwise. But the way Carpenter keeps bringing this up, well, you'd think we had just cause to think otherwise. For example, this bit:
Friendship of this kind was remarkable, and at the same time entirely natural and inevitable. It was not homosexual (Lewis dismisses that suggestion with deserved ridicule), yet it excluded women.
I suppose we are to conclude from this that had Lewis and Tolkien's relationship been homosexual, it would have been unnatural, because homosexuality is, of course, unnatural. Naturally, of course. This sort of dren is less common in more recent biographies; Carpenter's was published in 1977.
Okay. Taylor the Egg Timer just screamed at me, so I gotta scoot. Please, please, please have a look at the eBay auctions today. Your bids and purchases are much appreciated. Note that we will only be offering Silk for the price of $10 for the next week (including today). After that, we'll be selling it at cover price, so act now if you want the discount. Thanks!
11:55 AM
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