The Fiction of Ideas

I really enjoyed learning about the "fiction of ideas." I think it would be really cool to do a thesis that toys with the fiction of ideas. It would be so hard to do it successfully and convey a whole new idea about the world within a minute-long film, but it's something I'll consider.

I didn't get a chance to read a full novel for this week, but I will talk about the short story "Aye and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany. In class, a few people said that they thought that frelks might not be human or have something weird about them... I found that interesting because for some reason when I was reading it, that thought just didn't really cross my mind. I assumed that frelks were completely normal humans who just happened to have a fetish for spacers, like how it's really common in real life for people who act completely normally to have a weird fetish. I guess the main reason I assumed they weren't aliens was that people couldn't tell who the frelks were so obviously there was nothing about their appearance that people were able to tell. I don't know. I thought it was kind of sad how "frelk" was a really derogatory term for people who seemed to be perfectly normal in the story. They consider being in love with something unattainable to be a perversion, but I think almost everyone has been in love with something unattainable so that's actually really normal.. Maybe that was the point of the story, for the reader to empathize with the frelks. It was kind of hard to tell exactly what the point of the story was but it was still pretty interesting. I read that the author of the story was gay, so maybe he was using the story as a bit of a metaphor on his love life. Being a frelk is kind of like being gay in a way, since there's not really anything bad about them but society can be super judgmental of them anyway.

I also thought the movie A Scanner Darkly was really interesting. I liked the style of animation. Have you heard of the movie Waking Life? As I was watching A Scanner Darkly, I thought, Wow, this looks just like Waking Life, and lo-and-behind, the animation stuff was done by the same people. Waking Life was a philosophy-themed movie and it was really good! I saw it for the first time my junior year of high school and I don't think I've made it through one English class since then without bringing it up at least once; I didn't really realize I did this till now.

Waking Life