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jwaneeta at 11:02pm on 16/07/2004
jwaneeta at 11:02pm on 16/07/2004I can't post the first.
The Ford's down again, but I can't restrain the bursting gush. I only bought Firefly the night before last, but so far I love it. I posted a giddy thang about the ex-Confederate migration to the Wild West, the commentary on the birth of the American culture of guns/cowboyhood/perceived virility/violence and so forth. Right now it's out of reach. But I'm so enthused I'm posting a response to a Fordmember's response about the courtesan thing, because I'm all fanny. Whee!
I'll just have to rewrite this with quotes when the Ford goes back up, but for mara, here's a quickie response to one of the exceptions
you took with Firefly.
About courtesans. If Firefly is, as I suspect, an AU of the American Civil War, the courtesan thing still isn't throwing me out. Firefly has definite ideas about being futuristic (the mention of the combat maneuver Crazy Ivan) but of course there's no standard futeristic weaponry: no one's got lasers, guns have bullets, and spaceships seem to burn fossil fuel, to judge by their delightfully graphic exhaust trails. Is it Dune, set in our timeline, on the other side of a great war that wiped out some advanced technology, but not all of it? Or
is it a parallel world? Is it a deliberate lark, or a fiendish
inversion?
Eh, got ahead of myself. But as far as courtesans go, in the 1870s, in the world of Tombstone and Fort Griffin, there were whores and there were whores. Women were scarce and cathouses were not only legal but generally defended as firefree zones, which is notable given the acceptance of casual gunplay. And there were plenty of women who were not simple prostitutes but free agents of sexual favor, not bound to bordellos, who moved from one high roller to the next, demimondaines of the desert. Kate Elder is one who's passed into myth already -- she seems to be an amalgam of several professional courtesans who amassed wealth and bore children and were considered leading citizens of that strange and hardly imaginable society.
(I don't mean that it's unimaginable for us, but in the context of the day. In the 1870s, the voyeristic thrill of reading about a Kate Elder, much less a Calamity Jane -- who was real person and well- documented -- can hardly be embroidered upon.)
It really was a very strange time. The more you read of it, the
weirder it gets.
The Ford's down again, but I can't restrain the bursting gush. I only bought Firefly the night before last, but so far I love it. I posted a giddy thang about the ex-Confederate migration to the Wild West, the commentary on the birth of the American culture of guns/cowboyhood/perceived virility/violence and so forth. Right now it's out of reach. But I'm so enthused I'm posting a response to a Fordmember's response about the courtesan thing, because I'm all fanny. Whee!
I'll just have to rewrite this with quotes when the Ford goes back up, but for mara, here's a quickie response to one of the exceptions
you took with Firefly.
About courtesans. If Firefly is, as I suspect, an AU of the American Civil War, the courtesan thing still isn't throwing me out. Firefly has definite ideas about being futuristic (the mention of the combat maneuver Crazy Ivan) but of course there's no standard futeristic weaponry: no one's got lasers, guns have bullets, and spaceships seem to burn fossil fuel, to judge by their delightfully graphic exhaust trails. Is it Dune, set in our timeline, on the other side of a great war that wiped out some advanced technology, but not all of it? Or
is it a parallel world? Is it a deliberate lark, or a fiendish
inversion?
Eh, got ahead of myself. But as far as courtesans go, in the 1870s, in the world of Tombstone and Fort Griffin, there were whores and there were whores. Women were scarce and cathouses were not only legal but generally defended as firefree zones, which is notable given the acceptance of casual gunplay. And there were plenty of women who were not simple prostitutes but free agents of sexual favor, not bound to bordellos, who moved from one high roller to the next, demimondaines of the desert. Kate Elder is one who's passed into myth already -- she seems to be an amalgam of several professional courtesans who amassed wealth and bore children and were considered leading citizens of that strange and hardly imaginable society.
(I don't mean that it's unimaginable for us, but in the context of the day. In the 1870s, the voyeristic thrill of reading about a Kate Elder, much less a Calamity Jane -- who was real person and well- documented -- can hardly be embroidered upon.)
It really was a very strange time. The more you read of it, the
weirder it gets.
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