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How to be a cultural imperialist
Sep. 3rd, 2009 05:08 amI am tempted to open this note with a protestation, but that would be to concede that the idiot I am about to describe (though not to name - it would love the attention I am not going to give it) has some remote claim on anything resembling fact or truth. Now, then.
I like the idea of serenades, although in today's world it would be quite impractical to sing up to your beloved's window. Nonetheless, the image works for me at a very deep level. Some of my favourite pieces of music - such as for instance Schubert's Staendchen and De Curtis' Tu ca nun chiagne - are serenades, and I have used them both in fics (http://www.fanfiction.net/secure/story/story_preview.php?storyid=1912039&chapter=1 , and http://fpb.livejournal.com/413735.html) and in an essay (http://fpb.livejournal.com/384498.html) as a central moment of the encounter of man and woman. It may reflect my own lack of success with the opposite sex, that both fics have less-than-happy endings; but anyone who reads anything but a straight (heterosexual) context there is simply not reading what is on the page.
Which is why, of course, the only review I got on the second fic was from some mindless thinks-with-the-crotch who described it as "the gayest thing I ever read."
I felt this was both dishonest - cultural imperialism of the lowest kind, trying to annexate to their own obsessions something that had no more to do with it than Robert Browning's poems to Elizabeth Barrett - and personally offensive, trying to distort my own experience as I had interpreted it in my fics. After a brief exchange, I deleted and banned the poster. Think of it what you like, but I do not want my own experience mangled in the service of someone's sexual obsessions.
I like the idea of serenades, although in today's world it would be quite impractical to sing up to your beloved's window. Nonetheless, the image works for me at a very deep level. Some of my favourite pieces of music - such as for instance Schubert's Staendchen and De Curtis' Tu ca nun chiagne - are serenades, and I have used them both in fics (http://www.fanfiction.net/secure/story/story_preview.php?storyid=1912039&chapter=1 , and http://fpb.livejournal.com/413735.html) and in an essay (http://fpb.livejournal.com/384498.html) as a central moment of the encounter of man and woman. It may reflect my own lack of success with the opposite sex, that both fics have less-than-happy endings; but anyone who reads anything but a straight (heterosexual) context there is simply not reading what is on the page.
Which is why, of course, the only review I got on the second fic was from some mindless thinks-with-the-crotch who described it as "the gayest thing I ever read."
I felt this was both dishonest - cultural imperialism of the lowest kind, trying to annexate to their own obsessions something that had no more to do with it than Robert Browning's poems to Elizabeth Barrett - and personally offensive, trying to distort my own experience as I had interpreted it in my fics. After a brief exchange, I deleted and banned the poster. Think of it what you like, but I do not want my own experience mangled in the service of someone's sexual obsessions.
