Francesca Penchant
Favorite quotes from The Complete Stories:
“The other side of alientation is freedom.”
—Benjamin Moser, Introduction to The Complete Stories
“Not being devoured is the most perfect of feelings. Not being devoured is the secret goal of an entire life.”
—Clarice Lispector
“What a talent she had for cruelty.”
—Clarice Lispector
A great high five of a book!
“Thumb your nose at all jeerers, know-it-alls, and critics” (Brenda Ueland) and read this ode to all of us pantsers, INFJs, and INFPs who start fast and fix later.
“You should lower the bar from ‘best-seller' to ‘would not make someone vomit.'”
“The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.”
“Amateur writers who take years and years to write their rough drafts are sentencing themselves and those around them to a constant barrage of ‘novel guilt.' ... By compressing all the procrastination and ensuing self-loathing into thirty manageable days, you'll be more pleasant to be around the rest of the time.”
“‘She knows everything about the sublimation of loss, about suffering as the nourishment of genius, about pain's resonance as harmony in a work of art,' [thought a friend of Blixen]. And all the same, she yielded to the most banal human moods and impulses, pettiness, impatience, caprice, stinginess. She suffered from a craving for power in spite of her generosity. She toyed with human fates, in spite of a contempt for such toying. Yes, she suffered from self-contempt, in spite of her mighty, legitimate self-confidence and pride. She was a paradox outside of any moral category....”
“Perhaps it will help ... if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”
William L. Shirer
May 1990
“[The Nazi party] lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.”
“No cérébrale could ever be happy as a Cinderella.”
Anita Loos's claim to fame is writing the worldwide bestseller “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
The novel was tangentially inspired by H.L. Mencken, whom she was in love with in 1926, but who was smitten with a blonde—whom Loos subsequently burned to ridicule. (Loos's none-the-wiser husband asked her to dedicate the novel to him, which she did.)
Nita didn't understand how Menck could be fascinated by a female who was less intelligent, less charismatic, less funny, and less pretty than she, until finally she identified the one thing the blonde had less of that mattered: melanin in her hair.
The most fascinating part of “A Girl Like I” is Nita's early life, culminating in her Hollywood touchdown in 1915 at age 27, mother attached.
The leitmotif of “A Girl Like I” is the financial power-relationships between the sexes that Loos observed throughout her life. Her relationship with her father, an amusing alcoholic sponge, was formative. In fact, Nita supported both father and mother from the age of about fifteen. Loos punctuates the book with a friend's declaration: “You sure are flypaper for pimps!”
Loos writes in a precise and formal style; a style so grammatically correct and tortuously witty as to be delicious to bluestockings—or cérébrales—like I.
“I belong to a third, distinct sex, which as yet has no name: higher or lower, more defective or superior; I have the body and soul of a woman, the mind and power of a man, and I have too much or too little of both to be able to pair with either.”
This novel doesn't disappoint the fan of Decadent literature—it has all the beautiful language, sensual detail, subversiveness, and misanthropy one expects from it.
“I have acquired a taste for murder. I torture the flowers!
“Leaning over them, I pour little drops of violent poisons, which make them die slowly, very slowly; some, like orchids, have petals that flutter, which one might think were flapping wings; and, my eyes bright, my hands clenched, and my respiration halting, I watch and rejoice in their agony. . . .
“What abominable being am I becoming? Two days ago I brutally tore apart, petal by petal, all my red violets. I kneaded them between my fingers and rolled them into little balls, and the juice that ran along my hands resembled a thin and frail ribbon of blood. Yesterday, I burned lilies atrociously, large lilies in all the majesty of their expansion; then I tried to care for their burns. I surrounded them with minute cares. Most of them were dead this morning, but some have survived. Those bear in red stigmata the traces of their suffering. And what other dolors await them tomorrow?”
This book is a barrage of questions to think about when writing characters. Some are useful, but overall their point of view betrays a conventional and gender-biased approach to characters and plots.
For example, the author asks questions of female characters that he doesn't ask of male characters.
From the beginning, the author focuses on female bodies: “Let's say the murderer is a woman. Some other questions might arise: Does she have large or small breasts? Her waist? Hips? Legs?” He doesn't also say, “Let's say the murderer is a man. Does he have a large or small package? His chest? Hips? Legs?”
And when he asks, “Are her clothes revealing?” he doesn't also ask, “Are his clothes revealing?” Or, for the non-binary, “Are their clothes revealing?”
Again and again, the centrality of straight, male characters is assumed. For example, “Let's take a scene where a man and his wife are having lunch.” It's implied that a straight man is the protagonist, just as a straight woman would be the assumed protagonist if he had also written, “Let's take a scene where a woman and her husband are having lunch.”
He often describes women as “girls,” as in, “A poor girl marrying a rich man...” (No, he's not describing the custom of child brides.) “A poor woman marrying a rich man...” would've been more accurate.
Again and again, the author makes cultural assumptions—the main character is male, has a nine-to-five job, has a boss, is middle class, is straight, is married—that give the whole book an oppressive conventionality—not something I want in a book that's supposed to be about creativity!
I liked this book more because of its strange and intriguing subject than the quality of Andrew Bennett's scholarship, but I owe him props for exploring this difficult literary terrain.
My favorite chapter is the author's comparison of the poets Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith—I'm grateful for the introduction to Smith. There's a movie called Stevie (1978) with Glenda Jackson about her life and poetry, which is on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZUqYFJvo8Q
Andrew Bennett explains the explosion of suicide in the plots of modern novels here: “The increase in the cultural prominence of suicide in eighteenth-century narratives is thus understood as contingent upon the era's emphasis on bourgeois individualism and on the development of the “modern” sense of autonomous subjecthood on which the novel feeds and that the form itself promulgates.”
I loved this book; it has a fascinating premise and empathizes with the iron-willed saints it examines. I'm grateful there are authors like Bell, who take on such controversial and daring research.
“Anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer.... [In] genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness.”
—Hilde Bruch
Quoted in Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell
“The only path [for a medieval girl] was from parental domination to submission before a husband. Western culture reproves any deviation from this pattern in ways distinctly unfavorable and psychologically guilt-ridden for women. Spinster-not-bachelor, whore-not-philanderer, prostitute-not-john. Such gender-split words convey images of a deep historical reality, which tolerates or only smirkingly disapproves the same self-expression in men that it condemns in women, especially sexual expression in the refusal to be bound by marital vows.”
—Rudolph M. Bell in Holy Anorexia
“You don't have to look at yourself with their eyes. Ever.”
I love this book. Wise, funny Kate Bornstein guides readers through those hells and taboos that “normal” and “polite” people pretend don't exist.
Bornstein wants readers to stop proving themselves real whatevers (fill in your binary nouns): “Free your imagination from the institutions that enthrall you.” In other words, if you can free yourself from either/or thinking, you can expunge others' tyrannies from your brain, and lessen your suffering.
From the beginning, I knew I'd have to increase the audiobook speed by 150% to get through his pretentious delivery.
This book has some useful lists of commonly swapped words, of common spelling mistakes, etc. And some funny and fascinating parts. But too much of Dreyer's book consists of lists of mistakes he deems okay with no explanations of why. Maybe it's because these mistakes have graduated into general usage, but I would've appreciated that explanation. And too much of the book consists of examples of mistakes you must not make EVER. Because he said so.
“Many people believe a life well lived is supposed to culminate in material wealth and an expansive family. Not renegades—for them, living on their own terms is both the adventure and the reward, whatever pain or glory results.” —Eddie Muller
Colorful 1940s Hollywood anecdotes. In the same vein as Hedy Lamarr's and Barbara Peyton's autobiographies. Great intro by Eddie Muller.
Basinger knocks this one out of the park. Her thesis: Hollywood movies of the Golden Age not only dictated female conformity, but more importantly, did the exact opposite: they depicted women breaking all the rules, hence making audience members' dreams reality. This is why women's films were so popular among women. Before the perfunctory “happy ending” moral-of-the-story of marriage and children, these films showed women doing everything—and everyone—else.