Why This Is Hell

Some random quotes


Joanna Russ
One of the best things (for me) about science fiction is that — at least theoretically — it is a place where the ancient dualities disappear. Day and night, up and down, 'masculine' and 'feminine' are purely specific, limited phenomena which have been mythologized by people. They are man-made (not woman-made). Excepting up and down, night and day (maybe). Out in space there is no up or down, no day or night, and in the point of view space can give us, I think there is no 'opposite' sex—what a word! Opposite what? The Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine become the poetic fancies of a weakly dimorphic species trying to imitate every other species in a vain search for what is 'natural'."

"Turning certain, select women — or all women — into honorary males is not what womens liberation is about [...] The 'honorary male' is a category recognized by the 'good guy' [... who] believe[s] in equal pay for equal work [...] and [has] gone out of [his] way to bring a woman into the organization/department/business [... He] treat[s] her like just like a man, just like one of the boys [...] and even tells dirty jokes when she’s around." (Russ “Dear Colleague” 179



Alexei and Cory Panshin:
“On a certain level, The author’s dismissal of criticism is correct and unarguable. These are her feelings, sufficient in themselves by their very existence. If you share these feelings, The Female Man is a perfect emotional mirror, if you don’t share these feelings, go fuck yourself.”

“The Female Man does not dare to be a novel, to challenge its own certainties and test them in the crucible of character and action."

“We will never be whole until we imagine ourselves whole, and live what we imagine.”

Sarah Lefanu:
"The Female Man breaks all formal rules of narrative fiction. It has no beginning-middle-end, no clear relationship between author and characters and, indeed, no clear relationship between text and meaning [... it] challenges the simple notion of an author speaking and her readers hearing."

"Joanna Russ":
"Years ago we were all cave Men. Then there is Java Man and the future of Man and the values of Western Man and existential Man and economic Man and Freudian Man and the Man in the moon and modern Man and eighteenth-century Man and too many Mans to count or look at or believe"

"This is the lecture. If you don’t like it, you can skip to the next chapter"

"this shapeless book ... of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond ... twisted, neurotic ... some truth buried in a largely hysterical..."

"For a long time I had been neuter, not a woman at all but One of The Boys, because if you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! [...] there is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep twisting and writhing [...] I back-slapped and laughed at blue jokes, especially the hostile kind. Underneath you keep saying pleasantly but firmly No no no no no no."

"Go little book [...] bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millett, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest. [...] Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines or a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses."

In May 1997 I had my hair cut - probably for the first time in two years. Since then - aside from a bit of growing to an inch - I've been no. 4 to no. 0. I don't want have to start growing my hair down to my ass again.

I'm surprised I got anything done today, given a stuff up over the council tax which came to light today. I am still waiting for the council to phone me back.

Mostly today has been reading around feminism, and failing to find all the stuff I was convinced I'd written six months ago. Today's question: who coined the label second-wave feminism and where and when? The first part appears to be Marsha Lear, who so far evades Google fu and doesn't show up at the Library of Congress catalog, nor in Lisa Tuttle's Encyclopedia of Feminism. I suspect I'm also going to need a copy of "The Image of Women in Science Fiction", which ought to be in To Write Like a Woman but isn't. I once had a photocopy, but now? H'mm. A copy of Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon will be sought. [Campus on the Hill: PD 826.W6]

Meanwhile:

LVIII: Farah Mendlesohn (ed.) On Joanna Russ (2009)
I suspect that if I'd sat down and analysed the contents page and seen some abstracts I could have predicted the way I'd react to each chapter - I wasn't entirely convinced by Paul March-Russell's connection of Russ and Loy (but perhaps I don't know Loy well enough) and Brian Clarke's Deleuze/Guattari's theories left me cold as always. I didn't expect to like Delany's use of DW Griffith, but he convinced me, but in part the connection didn't matter save as performance. I was amused by one writer quoting Russ talking about how (male) reviewers see her work as violent, and then Jason P. Vest writing about how violent her work is. I spotted a few glitches - Bakhtin 1968 seemed to become Bakhtin 1965, "The Second Inquisition" was 1968 or 1970, Women of Wonder 1974 or 1975. I reread my own piece, and didn't hate it, but it felt a little overpowering. If I recall a reviewer suggested I goofed by saying the narrator murders all the characters in We Who Are About To... - "she is not averse to hastening the extinction of the passengers and crew by killing in self-defense" doesn't say all.

This sounds all more negative than I want - it is a good solid collection, with no obvious gaps - but I took fewer notes than I expected to. I'll be dipping back in, of course, but I didn't quite get what I want for the current project; I'm not sure what I wanted, but... On the other hand, the early chapters about the sf community sparked some useful thoughts, and I will be using that. I need to scratch my head a bit more about Vonda McIntyre.

Here's a thought: I've always had the notion that We Who Are About To... parodies the shipwrecked rebuilding society/crashed spaceship rebuilding the world. One chapter here makes good links to Lost in Space and Gilligan's Island, but surely there's more solidly sf there. I've gone blank. Robinsonades? No reproduction for Crusoe.