last tryst with Julie B

[fflo]

That's it; I'm done with her. In a moment I'll dispatch her back to the LoC, now that I'm sated, spent of desire & wash-my-hands finished, in a way she'd probably appreciate---though not as much, I suspect, as if I'd gotten to her. "This woman is an egocentric bitch," wrote a vandal among the volume's previous readers, having restrained herself from pulling out her ballpoint all the way until page 148 (of 197), and apparently not having noticed that Julie had proudly claimed that very identity more than once in earlier passages. What had prompted the need for retort? The suggestion that it's not getting married that's the trick for women, but getting AWAY.

The librarians are feeding us s'mores. They're leftover from a kids' thing. I was hungry, too. A/C Refuge closes in half an hour, and then I'll see about getting some right proper supper.

And now, Julie B, I ditch you, not a helluva lot better able to sympathize with your modus op. But I did take some pleasure in your company, while I felt like it.

Comments

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

away from what? marriage as a way to get away from the first family?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Away from the husband/marriage. No problem getting married, any woman can do it, but the real problem: getting away from the (resultant) marriages.

It was like those were fighting words for our anonymous previous reader. (I guessed female from the handwriting, knowing it's not certain, but I'd have bet money.) (Do male-identified Nellies or pre-transition women in what are considered men's bodies have girly handwriting much of the time? I'm guessing no.) (Is there girly handwriting in Serbia[n]?)

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

there is girly writing in serbian, or 'feminine' handwriting at least. it's very much unlike mine -- it's bigger and rounder, a bit like most american women's handwriting (at least what i see from my students' stuff).

men's handwriting is usually just ugly. i wonder why most men's handwriting is ugly, in a way that makes me think "dumb." i know maybe three men whose isn't.

it is very prejudiced of me to anticipate people's qualities from their handwriting, but there are ugly kinds of handwriting that are not dumb, only ugly. but some people's letters and the way they link them just can't have resulted from much thought and use of language.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me started on revealing my hard-fought prejudices about people's writing (hand- and otherwise). I know it's wrong. I don't really think, ultimately in my full intellectual ken, it's a good way to judge character. Yet...

I can confess, though, that girly writing says "dumb" to me more than sloppy or ugly or harsh or careless men's hand tends to. The girly says "I'm trying to make my handwriting look right for the other girls" no more than men's says "I'm trying to make my handwriting look right for the boys" --- but the latter is, by virtue of the dominance/standard of the masculine, harder to graspe. And, yeah, it's an internalized misogyny.

There was a great bit in Julie B about how teenage boyfriend-getting is more about communication between the girls than about the boys. I don't know how dead-on it was, ultimately, but it was funny and had a ring of truth.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

yes, the girly handwriting is creepy in the way it all collapses into one.

we had this translation class in high school where there was some 'theory' mentioned about 'gender'-specific and 'nation'-specific handwriting, which i think makes some sense still, although i think the gender-specific handwriting also cuts across nations (now that i've known some), so that the same type of ugliness re-appears regardless of geography.

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

What's the book again? (I looked at your links earlier, but I can't seem to find them now.) I think I might wanto check it out after I finish the P.D. James novel (The Children of Men, which is not a mystery, oddly enough) I'm geting ready to start.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember being propelled right along in The Children of Men but not enjoying it uncomplicatedly, or in a politically relatively uncomplicated way, as I do her mysteries. But I certainly thought it was worth reading, and it's arguably more thought-provoking in Big Ways than the Dalglieshes. (I'm suddenly thinking I didn't finish the latest before having to send it back to the library. Maybe I should get in line for it again. Yeah, yeah---I should buy hers, cuz she's still alive & I like her very much. But I've voted for her before with a lot of $$---even for hardbacks---so I don't feel so bad.)

The Julie Burchill autobiog is I Knew I Was Right. I'm thinking, judging from what she says about how much sex it has in it (!), you might like her novel Ambition. Or her Diana:

Of all the books that emerged from the death of Princess Diana, this is the most intensely personal. If historians want to understand the depth of feeling--mourning, sentimental self-identification, feminist and republican and class rage--that overtook large parts of Britain for several weeks after her death, they could do worse than look here. What sometimes count for faults in Burchill's writing--failures of logic, overstatement, the pursuit of the smart-ass remark at the expense of overall control--are her ways of saying what someone needed to say, or expressions of a person transfixed by deep emotion. Burchill sees Diana as a woman betrayed by a using and adulterous husband and distorted from childhood by the false values and iniquity of a class, who grew into a person of real compassion and social usefulness, escaping self-destructive urges and eating disorders to settle into a mature sensuality. The randomness of the car crash in a Paris underpass is seen as all the more terrible because it cut short the productive personal development for the princess. This is not the only possible reading of the facts in the case, but it is a coherent one, memorably expressed. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

She talks about Diana briefly in I Knew I Was Right, and I felt more in the princess's shoes than I ever had before.

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

Okay, I have to read Diana. I was (rather embarassingly) into the Royals while she was alive.

I, too, like P.D. James. I saw an interview with her, one I've probably mentioned to you before, in which she talked about coming into her writing career rather late in life. She was working for Scotland Yard at the time, and she used to get up really early and write for a few hours every day before she went to work. She seemed like one of those people who has a really intelligent interest in all aspects of life. A "renaissance woman," so to speak.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I think I do remember you telling me about that. What I like to say about P.D. is that she writes some kick-ass sentences. That is, seems to me she's exceptionally good with that unit of language. She takes it places others don't. Like Annie Dillard, I perceive, does magic things with the unit of a paragraph.

You know---you finish it and say "Damn, that was a sentence [paragraph]." And would light up a cigarette, as after fucking, if you were a smoker, but instead parlay the readerly afterglow by whatever means available (such as saying "Damn, that was a sentence," or phantasizing^* about making it into an acrostic, or reading it aloud to any living being nearby or reachable by phone who might appreciate it) (or quoting it in yer blog---what am I thinking---that's a new way to do the sharing sort of savoring).

^*Notice: I'm using shmizla's suggested spelling of forms of "phantasy" now.

<<it's not getting married that's the trick for women, but getting AWAY.>>

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, that seems to be a theme among some people I know lately, one of whom is het-married-with-kids. Well, mostly het. Maybe. I think. Interesting that in the cultural parlance, it's the other way around. Figures about more women being available than men (except in China, of course), and women worrying about those stats. Meanwhile, I heard a 76-year-old woman use the word "mistake" recently in talking about her own marriage long ago.

my original response to you here got et by browser crash...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Basically I'd said that JB had mentioned the infamous 1986 Newsweek story, which I'd linked to, and that it must have long been debunked before Newsweek's recent half-assed pseudo-retraction (which I also linked to), and then I had this link to a review of that Susan Faludi book, Backlash, which contains discussion of the "journalism" involved & was, I thought, worth tracking down again.

JB followed up with talk of U.S. journalists' hang-up with either factoids or earnestness or something---I can't recall right now. That led me to mentioning a piece I heard recently (was it on "On the Media" on public radio?) about American journalists' training/penchant to tell the story of an individual/family in order to represent the bigger picture, and how that's not really cutting it with stories like what's going on in southern Lebanon and Haifa.

Re: my original response to you here got et by browser crash...

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

have you read backlash? woudl you recommend it?

Re: my original response to you here got et by browser crash...

[sprig5.livejournal.com]

wow... pretty wild to think that the harvard marriage study could have seriously influenced some young educated women of the 80s. I remember sitting at the dinner table in 1986 as a college freshperson with 2 black women (also first year students) who had just read a major black magazine's take on that study, which was basically: it's much worse for black women! Does Faludi deal with that at all in her book? I've heard the stats over and over about how, for black women, there aren't many marriagable black men available.

Re: my original response to you here got et by browser crash...

[fflo.livejournal.com]

The household copy of Backlash, I'm pretty sure, went with my dear H-bomb, who'd brought it with her into the relationship. ("Back when she was a feminist," I seem compelled to add, pettily.) I don't think I'd managed to read it through during its tenure under a roof with me---so I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me if Faludi didn't get into those issues. (I'd like to have a crack at the volume again sometime, if that counts as a recommendation. I certainly have the feeling it's an "important" book in feminist history.) (Or should that be "in herstory"? ... ha)

I was recently reading a NY Times piece Big Fat Blog linked to that talks of stereotypical depictions in advertising of "large African-American women who are kind of sassy and feisty and humorously angry" ---it mentions the idea of such stereotypes written/perpetrated/furthered by black vs. non-black writers. And that had me thinking about those movies (and I presume novels) about the hapless black women looking for a good black man. Some of which strikes me as bogus, who-gives-a-shit het whining soap opera gender difference enforcement (and even bemoaning the disruption to traditional dominant culture gender roles within that subculture---which is a slightly confusing issue for me, who roots for the disruption of traditional gender roles). At the same time it's certainly true that a way-disproportionate number of adult black men are in jail or, well, dead, and, really, I have some sympathy for the complaint of black men going for white women. Yeah, I know; it's ironic. *shrug, perhaps with slight blushing* I don't believe anyone should be constrained from having an "inter-racial" relationship any more than I think once-lesbians should be constrained from sleeping with men, but I understand the subcultural distress, the sense of betrayal.

Some of what we see in media about that business is certainly intra-cultural reference to the social/hetero complications of those facts/numbers for straight black women---and a reflection of that theme. That it has a big element of bamboozley scare tactics being used on black women seems unlikely to me, though, as it's my hunch the dominant culture doesn't care so much, or at least think it cares so much, about what black women do. So if Faludi was mainly addressing dominant culture backlash against feminism, maybe that's not in there so much. But there surely was a nugget of wisdom in your experience of that story in the context of that dinner table conversation--- the nugget of the truth of what's in the mass media often being not only removed from the perspective of so many real people but mainly aimed at influencing, in its more & less bogus declarations, the worlds of those who "count."