cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

I posted last time about the fun we had on our trip to Brussels and Amsterdam, not to speak of our misadventures getting there and getting up in the morning of the day I was supposed to deliver my paper (called "The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre") at the second International Conference on Popular Romance in Brussels. While as to why I spent countless hours preparing this presentation -- well, sometimes I find myself so fascinated to be writing in the popular romance genre (such a huge market! so little respect from the outside world! such amazing women writing! about what's so incredibly important!) that I have to take a big bite of literary theory, season it for romance, and chew on it for a while. But if I don't commit to having something to share with a roomful of people (particularly in an attractive conference venue), it's a lot less likely I'll take that first bite. So Brussels sounded like a great opportunity t...

I'd been working on the paper forever, it felt like -- the rather formidably titled "The Queer Theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre," to be delivered at the second annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, to be held in Brussels, Belgium, Thursday August 5 through Saturday August 7. And it was a pretty sensible plan, I thought, to show up in Brussels on Wednesday, to shake off my jet lag, make some final, fussy, changes to the paper and get the thing slimmed down at long last, to the 20 minute length the conference organizers had asked for, before I delivered it at at the 11:00 am panel on Friday, the conference's second day. A sensible, even a good plan. But a plan, alas, that required the cooperation of American Airlines and the weather (as in no thunderstorms in Chicago in August). So instead, I and my husband Michael found ourselves dragging our wheelies into the Paleis der Academiën...

The significant birthday I'm going to be celebrating soon has its good and its bad aspects. But when I'm feeling down about it I comfort myself that I can blog at this site about anything that interests me because I , after all, am history. For certainly the romance genre changed since I've been writing in it -- as one of the Smart Bitches might say, let me count the ways, yo. At least from the erotic side of things, which is where I, uh... sit... I'd begin counting thusly: -- Beginning with those readers who were shocked, shocked , when I suggested, in Almost a Gentleman , that a man might ever be attracted to a man (except for when he was part of that acceptable romance device of bad first husband who didn't make the heroine feel sexually desirable). -- Or when writing about certain sexual positions was enough, as romance reviewer Mrs. Giggles once said of my novella "A House East of Regent Street," to "send genteel readers into seizures." --...