memed!

[thingswithwings]

mirabile_dictu memed me! so now I will talk about the things she asked me to talk about.

Comments

[isagel]

I'm looking forward to the next round of kink_bingo - lately I've been storing porny fic ideas (mostly OT4) away, labelling them with mental post-it notes saying "If I get "Toys" for kink bingo, I will write this", "If I get "Piercing" for kink bingo, I will write that," etc. I have a whole little imaginary folder of these. So I will be prepared and possibly able to actually achieve a bingo this time. *g*

My point with that was that I agree about smutty smut writing and the way it expands your horizons in various ways. It's something we're on the same wavelength with, I think.

You're one of the people on my flist who make me regularly wistful about academia and not having ended up with it as my path in life. Basically, the only reason I didn't go for a doctorate in Comparative Literature was that a system change was taking place in Swedish universities the year it would have been most natural for me, which meant they simply couldn't take on new people. I hung around for a few more years, studying other things (which I don't regret, because that's how I discovered queer theory and got my epiphany of OMG, THIS IS MY WORLD VIEW RIGHT HERE), but the end result was that I burnt out on academia without ever getting to the point where I could do anything "useful" with it. I was always planning on going back, but now I don't know if I could make that work. I think the part of me that wants to be a fiction writer is stronger than the part that wants to be an academic at this point, so if/when I make drastic changes again, it will probably be in that direction instead. And what I wanted to say with all that was that you remind me of all the things that are great about academia. Which you should take as a compliment. :)

(As an aside, the last thing I did at university was a cultural studies course with intermedia focus that involved an essay on Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd and its E.M. Forster/Eric Crozier libretto. That would have been my second B.A. thesis if that hadn't been the semester I stretched myself too thin and lost all energy to do stuff. It's still something I really wish I'd done, though, because it annoys me that I never found a good angle of attack on the subject matter. And, yeah, still my favourite opera.)

[thingswithwings]

that is WONDERFUL re: kink_bingo . . . I cannot wait to read the wonderful smut that you come up with for this round! Also, psssst, we're changing some of the kinks around a bit, so if there's a kink you desperately want on the list, you should tell me about it. And yes, I think one of the reasons that I like your porn so much is that it has the same quality of boundary-pushing and play that I strive for in my fic - but I get to watch someone else doing that in their own way. PLUS IT'S HOT.

I do take the academia thing as a compliment! Thank you. I'm sure that complit had a real loss when you got mixed up in the shuffle, but then, perhaps fiction had a real gain. It's like anything else, it has its pros and cons - for me, though, teaching is the big joy, the vocation part, the thing that keeps me from ever getting fed up and leaving because of the petty stuff.

PS, I thought I was the only one who had heard of that libretto! Oh Forster. Have you read his essay On Listening To Music? It's great; he's such a passionate amateur, which I find charming.