{"id":1040,"date":"2013-04-01T14:41:10","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T14:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simoningsmirror.wordpress.com\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2013-04-01T14:41:10","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T14:41:10","slug":"bedding-heather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1040","title":{"rendered":"Bedding Heather"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

So I was on this panel about sexuality at EightSquaredCon<\/a>, paraphrasing a pick-up scene by professional Yorkshireman John Braine and hazing people with the idea that maybe we didn\u2019t invent same-sex attraction last week, and that anyone writing novels or reading them may for the longest time have had a fairly sophisticated take on the subject; one we just can\u2019t see these days, obsessed as we are by labeling everything. And then I read The Productions of Time<\/em> by John Brunner, an indispensable book if only for its jaw-dropping overuse of the expression \u201cfullblown Les\u201d. As in:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd me as a fullblown Les,\u201d Heather said. \u201cIt\u2019s so frightening, Murray! They said \u2018the urge was on her tapes\u2019 and if you hadn\u2019t worried me so much\u2026 I\u2019d have been seduced by Ida and then\u2026\u201d
\n\u201cBut it might not have worked, young woman!\u201d
\n\u201cIt would have,\u201d she said obstinately. \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of it in all of us \u2014 you should know that, as a doctor. I used to get crushes on older girls when I was at school, so it\u2019s probably still in me, just below the surface, waiting for\u2014\u201c
\nHysteria on the way,<\/em> Murray diagnosed, and wondered if he was going to have to slap her face to quiet her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So that\u2019s my oh-so-sophisticated take on the historiography of sex blown out of the shallows. Though of course Brunner, while capable of writing like a dog and thinking like a dog, was not incapable of irony, and this was published (in 1967) by New American Library, so maybe there\u2019s a sneery transatlantic joke being played here on the cowpokes.<\/p>\n

All that remains is to write a cracking outline to go with \u201cFullblown Les\u201d \u2013 a title too po-mo to waste.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was on this panel about sexuality at EightSquaredCon, paraphrasing a pick-up scene by professional Yorkshireman John Braine and hazing people with the idea that maybe we didn\u2019t invent same-sex attraction last week, and that anyone writing novels or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,87],"tags":[203,86,264,289],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-scrapbook","tag-john-brunner","tag-science-fiction","tag-sex","tag-the-productions-of-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}