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

[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.