every now and again, people try to force me to like something that i don’t. years ago, it was house music. this past year, it was alcohol. it’s not that i’m against these things per se, i just haven’t needed to consider them in my own life, like religion or getting a driver’s license-they’re on my list of things to do, just not very high. i have the utmost respect for one of the most important positive choices that my father ever allowed me: “religion? just figure it out when you do.” i never read science fiction or fantasy because i never really got to it. there was/is enough that i don’t understand in this world, i didn’t/don’t need to go that far to start learning. like how there are more francophones in ottawa than montreal because people respond better when they have free will, margaret atwood had me reading science fiction in the best way-by writing well, not writing genre. i’ve always loved her essays, so this one is a real treat, because i love her voice best when she’s directly describing her process.
“As the twig is bent, so the tree grows, they used to say, so I suppose I should reveal what sort of things bent my own twig; for surely at least some of the books that writers eventually produce as adults are precipitated by what they read avidly as children.” (39)
“I often read this kind of book when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I was, in fact, leading a double life, or even a triple one: the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow were much in use at that time-the metaphor was based on some idea of Neanderthals having receding foreheads-but I seemed to have a taste for all three kinds of brow, which I can’t say disturbed me.” (40) Burning Bushes
i am only of the last two brows…but i’m all for anything that our first lady births. pen is envy.
process:
“From the point of view of we Jungians, however, Robin is a Peter Pan figure-he never grows up-and he represents the repressed child within Bruce Wayne, whose parents, you’ll recall, were murdered when he was very young, thus stunting Bruce’s emotional growth.” (30) Flying Rabbits
“…I suggested that the literary offspring of theology, such as angels and devils, moved to outer space because we no longer believed in their doctrinal underpinnings sufficiently to make these creatures plausible in realistic narratives set on Earth. But maybe this emigration was also caused by a real estate problem. We filled the unknown spaces with us-with ourselves, and our names and roads and maps. We tidied up, we gentrified, we put in streetlights; so the rowdy and uncontrollable bohemians of the imagination-always dwellers in the penumbras-had to move on.” (70) Dire Cartographies
“By this time I was if anything even more bohemian, and was already a coffee-house reader of my still rather terrible poetry, so I thought I should go to London, or possibly to Paris, and live in a cockroach-infested garret, and write masterpieces while gnawing on crusts of bread, and if I was really up to it, drinking absinthe.” (76) Dire Cartographies
sign o’ the times:
“The answers range everywhere from your first-born to burnt kidney fat to endless devotion and obedience to not sleeping with the wrong person to having to avenge your murdered father by killing your mother. That’s the problem with gods. They specialize in cleft sticks-damned if you do, damned if you don’t-and they’re maddeningly oblique. Gods don’t come with clear instructions; or not according to the stories about them.” (52) Burning Bushes
“For instance, mating is seasonal: in season, certain parts of the body turn blue, as with baboons, so there is no more romantic rejection or date rape. And these people can’t read, so a lot of harmful ideologies will never trouble them.” (91-2) Dire Cartographies
“The upper classes, in other words, have become a bevy of upper-class twitterers and have lost the ability to fend for themselves, and the working class have become vicious and cannibalistic.” (153) Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau
werd.