Odi et Amo, Plus Personal Best
Jun. 11th, 2021 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraYesterday was still hot.
I did a bunch of weeding. My garden plots are a lot wilder than the garden plots of my compadres. Clearly, I’m not interested in optimizing my vegetable yield.
I did a bunch of remunerative work.
I thought some more about the Gore Vidal Gothic story.johnny9fingers made an excellent suggestion: The first line of the poem should always remain the same throughout every iteration. Something like, Odi et amo it is then…
And I thought, Perfect! Since the opening line I had devised for my rough, rough, rough first draft was actually, It had shocked Eugene to discover Latin could be used to write about smut.
This would make the title of the story, Odi et Amo.
Palimpsest was not in the library, so I put in a request and instead checked out a book called Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, which I first read some years back, memorable for an excruciating description of Vidal in his declining years when the writer was confined to a wheelchair and racked by Korsakoff's syndrome:
He looked like a down-and-out panhandler who had sneaked in off Duval Street to swipe a drink and a fistful of peanuts. A sad, shrunken doll in a rumpled blue blazer with an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders, he wore stained sweatpants and bright red tennis sneakers and sat slumped to one side in his wheelchair, as if the bones had been siphoned out of his body.
Whoa!
I guess the sad fate of Gore Vidal in his declining years teaches us that love is the only currency that means anything.
###
In the evening, I watched Personal Best. Probably the best movie ever made about athletes.
The narrative showcases two female decathaloners training for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The U.S. boycotted the Moscow Olympics, of course, so the glory was all in the effort.
Early on in the film, the girls become lovers, so the film was slipped into a CriterionChannel lineup tagged Queersighted Breaking Taboos. So beside the point for this particular movie. I mean, yeah: There are sex scenes. Graphic sex scenes. Rather beautiful sex scenes, not at all sensationalistic or exploitive.
The sex scenes total maybe two minutes of screen time.
The scenes where the athletes train total at least one hour of screen time.
Because basically, the film is about the drive to compete. And what happens to your own performance when one of your competitors is someone you care for.
The sexuality in the film is very fluid and reminded me of my own sexuality earlier in my life: I was one of those people who always had to love the people I had sex with; however shallowly, however briefly, at the moment of consummation, there had to be love. But the objects of that love were never classified according to their genitals: Sometimes they were men, sometimes they were women.
That fluidity feels very different to me than today’s “bisexual” category of the LGBTQ taxonomy, which so far as I’m concerned is strictly a marketing category.
Honestly, I think the whole same-sex attraction thing was so much more fun when it was marginalized. I mean, apart from the physical sensations, isn’t what makes sex fun its transgressive nature? Isn’t that why most people get bored with their husbands, wives, officially sanctioned sex partners?
The young Mariel Hemingway who plays the POV character in the film looks startlingly like my dear friend Barbara Angell in her youth. Oddly enough, I was never sexually attracted to Barbara, though she was quite beautiful and we were very close. But it did remind me—gotta get in touch with Barbara about the upcoming California pilgrimage so we can spend a couple of days at the Petrified Forest while I’m out there.
I did a bunch of weeding. My garden plots are a lot wilder than the garden plots of my compadres. Clearly, I’m not interested in optimizing my vegetable yield.
I did a bunch of remunerative work.
I thought some more about the Gore Vidal Gothic story.
johnny9fingers made an excellent suggestion: The first line of the poem should always remain the same throughout every iteration. Something like, Odi et amo it is then…And I thought, Perfect! Since the opening line I had devised for my rough, rough, rough first draft was actually, It had shocked Eugene to discover Latin could be used to write about smut.
This would make the title of the story, Odi et Amo.
Palimpsest was not in the library, so I put in a request and instead checked out a book called Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, which I first read some years back, memorable for an excruciating description of Vidal in his declining years when the writer was confined to a wheelchair and racked by Korsakoff's syndrome:
He looked like a down-and-out panhandler who had sneaked in off Duval Street to swipe a drink and a fistful of peanuts. A sad, shrunken doll in a rumpled blue blazer with an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders, he wore stained sweatpants and bright red tennis sneakers and sat slumped to one side in his wheelchair, as if the bones had been siphoned out of his body.
Whoa!
I guess the sad fate of Gore Vidal in his declining years teaches us that love is the only currency that means anything.
###
In the evening, I watched Personal Best. Probably the best movie ever made about athletes.
The narrative showcases two female decathaloners training for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The U.S. boycotted the Moscow Olympics, of course, so the glory was all in the effort.
Early on in the film, the girls become lovers, so the film was slipped into a CriterionChannel lineup tagged Queersighted Breaking Taboos. So beside the point for this particular movie. I mean, yeah: There are sex scenes. Graphic sex scenes. Rather beautiful sex scenes, not at all sensationalistic or exploitive.
The sex scenes total maybe two minutes of screen time.
The scenes where the athletes train total at least one hour of screen time.
Because basically, the film is about the drive to compete. And what happens to your own performance when one of your competitors is someone you care for.
The sexuality in the film is very fluid and reminded me of my own sexuality earlier in my life: I was one of those people who always had to love the people I had sex with; however shallowly, however briefly, at the moment of consummation, there had to be love. But the objects of that love were never classified according to their genitals: Sometimes they were men, sometimes they were women.
That fluidity feels very different to me than today’s “bisexual” category of the LGBTQ taxonomy, which so far as I’m concerned is strictly a marketing category.
Honestly, I think the whole same-sex attraction thing was so much more fun when it was marginalized. I mean, apart from the physical sensations, isn’t what makes sex fun its transgressive nature? Isn’t that why most people get bored with their husbands, wives, officially sanctioned sex partners?
The young Mariel Hemingway who plays the POV character in the film looks startlingly like my dear friend Barbara Angell in her youth. Oddly enough, I was never sexually attracted to Barbara, though she was quite beautiful and we were very close. But it did remind me—gotta get in touch with Barbara about the upcoming California pilgrimage so we can spend a couple of days at the Petrified Forest while I’m out there.
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Date: 2021-06-11 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-12 12:50 pm (UTC)