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#3
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past the scandalous libels and misrepresentations of what was said in the interview, i must say i disagree. as deleuze said, "who is to say i cannot write about medicine, if i write about medicine from the perspective of a dog?" it's a gigantic leap to move from saying that there are few differences in individual psychology to calling women a man-without-phallus or anything like that. indeed, the primary male character in the book, John, is incapable of voicing his desires or behaving as anything other than passively. this is not "the" male experience, but simply one of "a" vast range of human experiences.

i've wanted to avoid getting into this, so i'll only say it once: almost every sentiment that's expressed w/r/t avril is a sentiment that has been expressed to me before in some form by a woman. this is a poisonous argument to make, a pathetic one, one from direct experience, but the point i'm trying to get across is that the range of experience can be shocking, as indeed it is almost always shocking to me. perhaps it was "unbelievable" as presented in the combination that it was, i don't know.

i'm reading a book right now by dany laferriere - "heading south." he is a black french canadian who was born in haiti; the book is about the individual sexual politics in haiti, and about half of it is written from the perspective of white women. almost everything that is said in the book has been shocking to me, both the things the black men say and the things the white women say and think, and similarly to fuck and destroy, many of the events described in the book are simply fantastical or "unbelievable," yet i have no doubt all of it's happened, or more importantly could happen. in any case, whether the events confirm to plausibility or not i'm glad to have been able to consider them.

as for writing about locations one hasn't been to, i don't think that sort of research is helpful at all. conforming to what is a simple list of facts - well, it can be good or it might not be. i don't think the research necessarily helps. there's a scene in "heading south" where a man gives a woman a handful of scented herbs. later, an innkeep tells the woman "over here, when a man gives a woman scented herbs, that means he wants her." i have no idea if that is true or not, but then i don't care either. i like it because it's novel - true or not. i wouldn't be disappointed to learn that it's a lie, as those sorts of facts so often are in fiction

Edited by Impper ()

#4
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#5
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which isn't to say that i disagree with everything you're saying. there can be a lot more strength and truth when you write in your comfort zones, as long as you're speaking deeply from your soul or your self or whatever. i'm not going to talk any more about how the characters in that book relate to myself though
#6
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discipline posted:
But do you know why this is a poisonous argument? It's not just because the method of research is so unprofessional necessarily... it's mainly because you are asking women you know and are not accounting for how your gendered position influences how they speak with you about certain issues, especially about things like sex.

oh, well i was saying it's a poisonous argument for other reasons than that. as far as that goes, these aren't things that i seek out or "ask for". people often confide in me however, when i'm not necessarily looking for that. i do see the point you're making though

#7
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#8
Mike Nelson here.
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Zizek just had this in the London Review of Books. Just an excerpt.

Talking About the Woman in the Mirror
By Slavoj Zizek

An old Buddhist story compares the self to an onion: You can keep peeling away layers, but eventually nothing remains. A good materialist might note that what we are truly left with is onion peels. This latter truth is the key to Lacan's dictum that the subject is always minimally hysteric. The hysteric asks "Who am I?" The answer is not found through introspection, but through the "prison house of language" that structures our very world.

What do we make of John Christy's novel "Fuck and Destroy"? Some critics have suggested that claiming a woman's voice as a male author is to transgress a boundary, to make an unwise choice in a sort of literary ventriloquism. Christy's novel certainly suggests bravado - the use of sex and violence to shock the reader is only thinly chained together by references to contemporary theorists (including, I must disclose, myself). Is there, then, not a commonsensical injunction to "write what you are"? This seems problematic.

The idea that we inhabit a particular position within the social field that makes us sensitive to its unique voice is not at issue, here there is full agreement. What must be clarified, though, is the nature of this (to use a word in vogue) "positionality". If the subject is interpolated by the social, then the idea of a unified, coherent core that is wholly ours is put into question. Put simply, we can never write what we are, because what we are is a disparate collection of linguistic and cultural cues that we have absorbed throughout our lives. In other words, even our own voices are a ventriloquist's.

...
#9
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thank you getfiscal.......... thank you
#10
tardy on these heaters
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Is Christy not "writing what he is" in writing misogynist pornographic trash?
#11
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babyfinland posted:
Is Christy not "writing what he is" in writing misogynist pornographic trash?

lol harsh

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#13
tardy on these heaters
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tpaine posted:
how can a man be a book tom.



youre a book

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discipline posted:
But do you know why this is a poisonous argument? It's not just because the method of research is so unprofessional necessarily... it's mainly because you are asking women you know and are not accounting for how your gendered position influences how they speak with you about certain issues, especially about things like sex.



Derek Freeman was certainly a contemptuous douche.

#15
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I read the preview - an interesting first chapter but I don't get psychology of dudes who hang out together on street corners awaiting victims. I can only tolerate the presence of other males for brief moments, certainly not long enough to co-opt a sexual assault.

Then again I never bonded with my father and had no brothers.
What sort of bonds do you have Impper?
#16
penitent
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to write what you 'are' assumes a singular indivisible & stable Being, & that's deeply problematic. become other through writing other. happy new year
#17
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getfiscal posted:
The idea that we inhabit a particular position within the social field that makes us sensitive to its unique voice is not at issue, here there is full agreement. What must be clarified, though, is the nature of this (to use a word in vogue) "positionality". If the subject is interpolated by the social, then the idea of a unified, coherent core that is wholly ours is put into question. Put simply, we can never write what we are, because what we are is a disparate collection of linguistic and cultural cues that we have absorbed throughout our lives. In other words, even our own voices are a ventriloquist's.

...



did you mean interpolated or interpellated, sorry in advance

#18
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NounsareVerbs posted:
I read the preview - an interesting first chapter but I don't get psychology of dudes who hang out together on street corners awaiting victims. I can only tolerate the presence of other males for brief moments, certainly not long enough to co-opt a sexual assault.



i figured that stuff was some 70s exploitation movie throwback and never questioned its verisimilitude

#19
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if avril was written unironically and not the most extended troll ever (gj on this!) -

i don't think the narrator has any understanding of any kind of sexuality - but i'm sure as hell not offended by some words an internet dude wrote.
#20
Mike Nelson here.
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cleanhands posted:
did you mean interpolated or interpellated, sorry in advance

interpellated.

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#22
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i think the idea that literature is supposed to be political activism is strange at best. it's just a criticism i suppose, like any other, but its sin is that it demands to be taken seriously like no other. surely this is a book that is almost oppressively subjective and in the author's head, that's kinda the point right? the idea that writing a novel is fundamentally about writing "good characters" seems to actually mean something pretty elitist, that you have to portray some sort of deference to a weird set of "deepness signifiers" that arent actually that deep or interesting. seems like every two-bit dinosaur critic at npr or the new yorker or whatever writes about "complexity", things that are "deeply contradictory", and "nuance" like these are the pillars of good writing. not really. the truth is that any hack can write about rape victims in a way that pays homage to progressive ideals, but that doesnt somehow make it good (or bad). sorry if im stating the obvious here.
#23
tardy on these heaters
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im pretty sure that i believe in some fundamental way that art and literature transcends the political, or rather than art and literature approaches a discursive legitimacy greater than that of modern political discourse.
#24
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your post reminds me a little of this dolan piece i found recently

I just started reading Jean Rhys and can't believe how good she is. I tried to read her once, long ago, but she seemed too close to a kind of terror and bitterness I wanted to avoid. Well, I know better now. You don't avoid that stuff, any more than Hazel Motes could run from Grace.
These days I respect only invention, as in PKD and Jack Vance, and blunt intellectual honesty. And that's what Rhys delivers. The book I've just read, Tigers Are Better Looking, consists of two lots of stories, about a young woman dragging through chronic poverty and the general swinishness of other people in London and Paris. No use pretending the protagonist here is anybody but Rhys, who once said, "I never wrote about anything except myself." Damn right. Same thing holds true for Celine and Limonov: it's all what hicks call "self-pity," and how wonderful it is, after wading through the hotel paintings that we call Fiction, or Writing.
Rhys is too smart to settle for that Writing crap. She's going to tell you to your face. She reminds me of a strange set of people who'd hate each other, Schopenhauer and Celine (the only two writers I know who use those damn three dots effectively, they also share a healthy loathing for human life) and Naipaul. But she's much more honest about London and the English than Naipaul, who will never say a thing about what he suffered there. Rhys spits in London's face and thanks Fate for the opportunity. She's not shy about her sheer hatred of the place and people. A sample: "That was the English for you: heads I win, tails you lose." Every story in the London half of this book is framed, very loudly, as a hate-letter to Britain.
Yet no critic can see, or will admit seeing this. They talk about her hatred for any safe substitute: colonialism, men, "life"--and indeed Rhys has some spittle left over for all of the above. But in this part of the book, the clear target is the English.
Is the critics' 'failure to mention this the result of an impenetrable smugness--"She can't mean us, we're too wonderful!"--or a grim determination to ignore provocation shouted by a "horrid colonial"? It's an interesting question, reminding me of similar reactions to Swift's "Modest Proposal." You can't imagine how many critical essays on that text begin, "Clearly, Swift does not mean simply to condemn England." Oh yes he did. And so does Rhys. Can they not see this, or are they just lying about what they see? Yeah, that's the question these days, about a lot of things.
The second part of the book is set in France. It lacks the fierce hate of the London stories, displaying instead a wonderful contempt for all the fussy Writing decorations favored by amateurs: moral lessons, endings, pathos. Her motto here is "Take it or leave it, idiots." She's tired of talking to the world Celine describes in Journey, full of brave idiots. She'll tell you quickly and drily what it's like to be smart, female and scared in a world of male chimps and trannies. If you don't like it, go read Barbara Kingsolver.
Like Celine, Rhys is above all a writer forged by the 1930s, the most insanely misogynistic decade of the last century. Celine thought he had it bad in that world of vicious apes; Rhys had to deal with being a woman there, writing for idiots about idiots. She must have thought Celine was a sissy.
Her take on the French in these stories is very different from her fierce bombardment of the English. She looks at the French with a squint and a shrug; they're rational animals, no more and no less. They must be dealt with, but there's no need to hate them, any more than you'd hate the trees as you struggle through a forest.
Strange how the feminists of my youth claimed Rhys as one of their own. It's oddly reminiscent of the way Leftists claimed Celine after the publication of Journey. A classic case of a handy misreading by idiots. But Celine's came while he was young enough to enjoy it. By the time the idiocracy had misread Rhys as one of its own, she was past caring. When she got a big award in her old age, she said simply, "It has come too late."
A taste for truth. That's what you end up respecting, after you puke up all that Writing.
#25
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babyfinland posted:
im pretty sure that i believe in some fundamental way that art and literature transcends the political, or rather than art and literature approaches a discursive legitimacy greater than that of modern political discourse.



i agree wholeheartedly

#26
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a. art is personal
b. personal is political

therefore,
#27
Kurdt
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an aphorism
another one
a sweeping conclusion
#28
Poronto
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furu ike ya
kaeru tobikomu
mizu no oto
#29
penitent
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art isnt personal though
#30
penitent
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adorno thought that great art transcended the circumstances of its creation and spoke to the untransfigured suffering of man but he was also a snobby fuddy duddy who probably wouldnt have liked any of my favourite rappers
#31
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old dude didnt even like jazz waht a fascist!!!!
#32
Dont Mess With Sucess
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deadken posted:
art isnt personal though

it is to me!!!! I guess you're speaking personally

Edited by swampman ()

#33
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#34
Dont Mess With Sucess
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tpaine posted:

swampman posted:

deadken posted:
art isnt personal though

it is to me!!!!

yeah we know. that's why you think adam's song is about you...terry

CAn i please keep my real fictional life and my fake fictional life separated.. this is Getting out of hand

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#37
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deadken posted:
art isnt personal though


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#39
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gyrofry posted:
an aphorism
another one
a sweeping conclusion



ah youve played knifey spoony before

#40
Kurdt
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discipline posted:
what do you think about black face


its funny when dave chappelle does it