[NON BLOG] Identity Confusion
May. 22nd, 2005 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI went to the Glad Day Bookshop this evening to try to connect with GLBT culture. This is a standard approach of mine to cultural experimentation, rooted in matters literary and quite certainly overthought. I've a worrying tendency to try to commit ethnography whenever I'm in an unfamiliar situation, you see, and while being at the right end of the ethnographic gaze is certainly a good way to avoid overextending oneself it's a bit limiting. No matter.
I was pleased to find that Geoff Ryman's novel Was happened to be available at a remarkable discount.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
getawaywithit recommended that title to me, I think, after I explained at length why I was such a huge fan of Ryman's The Child Garden. Note that Ryman's interactive novel 253 is available online, if you want an extended sample of his prose. I skimmed parts of the book over lemon chicken this evening, and it looks rather interesting, a sort of magical realist treatment of The Wizard of Oz and late 19th century Kansas in the era of pre-protease inhibitor AIDS. Perhaps ironically, I'm quite unfamiliar with the mythology Ryman taps into: I've only read the first volume of Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz series--in fact, until runyon told me otherwise, I thought that there was only the single book--and while I can sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I learned the song in elementary school. Irony's an overexploited condition in the early 21st century, though
I'm not particularly fond of the print versions of The Advocate and Out (too little interesting content, too much online), I don't think that I understand zines very well, and the mass-market Canadian equivalent magazines I've glanced at are about as dispiriting as Maclean's. Têtu, now, looked to be interesting, since not only does it have the largest circulation of any GLBT magazine in the Francophone world, but (as the cover declared) the May 2005 issue was the hundredth ("Numéro collector / Spécial 10 ans / + de 350 pages"). It turns out that the sort of hypersexualization of news coverage identified by Maya Saibil, writing recently in the Ryerson Review of Journalism, is just as common in the French-language GLBT press as in its English-language counterparts. It's a bit disturbing to notice that the perfect bodies so prevalent in the North American press, almost Platonic ideals in their impracticality for most people, are just as common in the European periodical literature. Still, the hundred interviews are interesting.
I admit to feeling a bit out of sorts. One reason why I ended up moving to Toronto after Queen's was because the Ontarian capital hosted a fairly large and diverse GLBT scene that I was already somewhat familiar with, thanks to previous visits and established friendships. Now that I'm here, I'm discovering that I haven't the slightest idea how to insert myself into entirely new situations. I'm not depressed or angry about this, and I'm not alienated since, whenever I luck out, it works reasonably well. I'm just profoundly ignorant about what there is out there and confused about how to consciously take advantage of any of it.
More later.
I was pleased to find that Geoff Ryman's novel Was happened to be available at a remarkable discount.
getawaywithit recommended that title to me, I think, after I explained at length why I was such a huge fan of Ryman's The Child Garden. Note that Ryman's interactive novel 253 is available online, if you want an extended sample of his prose. I skimmed parts of the book over lemon chicken this evening, and it looks rather interesting, a sort of magical realist treatment of The Wizard of Oz and late 19th century Kansas in the era of pre-protease inhibitor AIDS. Perhaps ironically, I'm quite unfamiliar with the mythology Ryman taps into: I've only read the first volume of Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz series--in fact, until runyon told me otherwise, I thought that there was only the single book--and while I can sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I learned the song in elementary school. Irony's an overexploited condition in the early 21st century, thoughI'm not particularly fond of the print versions of The Advocate and Out (too little interesting content, too much online), I don't think that I understand zines very well, and the mass-market Canadian equivalent magazines I've glanced at are about as dispiriting as Maclean's. Têtu, now, looked to be interesting, since not only does it have the largest circulation of any GLBT magazine in the Francophone world, but (as the cover declared) the May 2005 issue was the hundredth ("Numéro collector / Spécial 10 ans / + de 350 pages"). It turns out that the sort of hypersexualization of news coverage identified by Maya Saibil, writing recently in the Ryerson Review of Journalism, is just as common in the French-language GLBT press as in its English-language counterparts. It's a bit disturbing to notice that the perfect bodies so prevalent in the North American press, almost Platonic ideals in their impracticality for most people, are just as common in the European periodical literature. Still, the hundred interviews are interesting.
I admit to feeling a bit out of sorts. One reason why I ended up moving to Toronto after Queen's was because the Ontarian capital hosted a fairly large and diverse GLBT scene that I was already somewhat familiar with, thanks to previous visits and established friendships. Now that I'm here, I'm discovering that I haven't the slightest idea how to insert myself into entirely new situations. I'm not depressed or angry about this, and I'm not alienated since, whenever I luck out, it works reasonably well. I'm just profoundly ignorant about what there is out there and confused about how to consciously take advantage of any of it.
More later.
