(no subject)

jennyo showed me the Clinton video, which is one of the more awesome things ever, in spite of the Celine Dion song. I have a billion issues with a second Clinton presidency and yet there is a side of me that just loves the idea of a political ad that is so pomo, media-literate and savvy. A lot of the press comment seems not to be getting just how savvy it is - yes, doofuses, of course it will remind people of the various accusations of skullduggery against Bill and Hils, and the nothing that came of those. Saying 'oh look, we so are gangsters' is a way of mocking such claims. It can also be taken as a quiet promise that they have survived the worst their enemies can do to them and are still here; 'Forgive your enemies' said Bobby Kennedy to JFK, 'but keep a list of their names.'

(no subject)

The other thing that has happened today is that I have realized something crucial about 'Dawn in New York' and my love of Ugly Betty which is that when I was much much younger, I had my brief moment of hanging out with fashionistas. Actually I was hanging out with trendy artists and photographers, and the fashionistas were there at the same parties, but the point remains.

There I was, a tall, still thin, large-breasted moderately elegant tranny with serious cultural pretensions and of course I got asked to things and of course people came up and talked to me. I went to some parties at London Fashion Week - which is where I met the male model boyfriend of one of my oldest friends who did not mix his lovers with his life as a literary figure. I was wearing my long white backless Ossie Clark wrap-around when I was introduced to Ossie Clark, who said something along the lines of not having envisioned its being worn by someone quite like me. I was wearing the gray corrugated Missoni when I dined with the Swiss and Dutch Ambassadors. I know I chatted to Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood and Tom Gilby and that guy with no hair who does the hats.

One of the things I resent about the medical frakkups that surrounded my GRS and nearly killed me is not just that the twenty or so general anaesthetics and overuse of topical cortisone caused me to nearly double my body weight in eighteen months and take away from me whatever degree of glamour I had, it is that they largely wiped my memory of the couple of years before I went into hospital so that I lack the total action replay which generally characterizes my memory.

I don't have all the people; I don't have the sense memories of perfume and smart nibbles: I don't have me. And I never bothered to collect photos of myself in that time.

Now, all things considered, I have a good life and adjusted to being heavier and found people that want me. I might not have put quite as much energy into being smart - except I was very very smart in those days and doing much of the sf criticism which is part of my reputation.

There is an alternate world, though, in which things went differently - I wonder how that version of me is getting on. I sometimes fantasize that dreams are telepathic contact with the other selves across the fanning differences of time. Sometimes in dreams, I am thin and stylish still.

I really must get back to this fic.

(no subject)

The other thing that hits me about the me of the immediately post-transition years is how smart I was back then. It was thin pretty Roz who made the breakthrough to seeing that the polemical echoing of other texts - what I tend to call dialectical metonymy - was the crucial intellectual hallmark of sf, and who wrote pieces for Foundation like 'SF in the 1970s'.

I am not talking about a clash between the life of the body and the life of the mind, just so we are clear.