Love followed by critique is the way to go, given how you mysteriously make the reader feel as positive as you are. I happen to know this from personal experience and look forward to years and years more.
Love how sharp your woman’s rights messaging is. Shocked that Roe falling is lost in the atrocity a day plan we have now. And nice positive blast how you feel about the zoom gang
Love followed by critique. Exactly. Perfect examples of dramatic narrative. All those performers who could shift characters in an instant you used to write about -- you do it on the page.
So concisely brilliant: "Dear fellow female humans, You don’t have to like the writings of men. Most of it doesn’t like you."
As a former academic and a PhD in Literature, I really wish I had realized this consciously a long time ago. Most of male writing truly does not like us.
There used to be not as much to look at that wasn't them. I totally understand the academic thing. I wrote about that this morning on Facebook before I wrote this post:
All those lives spent reading the books of men, all those women in literature departments in colleges and universities, decade after decade, all those women standing in front of the faces of eager girls and women making some farkakte claims of meaning and interest that can't be made for the female characters invented by men. Gertrude and Ophelia, let's say, oh that great Will, so expansive in imagining women characters for the boys in the company to act.
All those female academics poring over the novels and plays of men and their visions of women, their visions of who is the center of attention and who is the one who looks at the center of attention, listens and reacts to the center of attention that is not her. What about Hedda and Nora. Something compassionate in Ibsen, but also a kind of imaginative day-tripping in the crazy-making entrapment of female social roles.
The point I am getting at, if I have a point, and I don't exactly have a point, it's more like an exhale and a stretch, it's more like a horse leaping over a fence. My point is women don't have to read the books of men that are not written for women, anyway. Men don't care if women read their books. Their conversation is with each other.
The other day I listened to an interview with physicist Carlo Rovelli. In discussing definitions of consciousness, Rovelli mentions that in Homer “there are no words that correspond to a person directly thinking, meditating, deliberating, having ideas, making decisions. […] When [Homer] describes somebody having an idea, it's always a god that comes and gives the person an idea.”
Now maybe that reflects some earlier phase of humankind’s concept of self. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just that Penelope and the other women were the only ones with ideas.
Re this: ==When [Homer] describes somebody having an idea, it's always a god that comes and gives the person an idea.”
Now maybe that reflects some earlier phase of humankind’s concept of self. I don’t know.==
Julian Jaynes' notion is that, before humans began to write down words, they heard voices in their heads, which they attributed to the gods telling them what to do...
Yeah, ancient Greece (let alone modern Greece) was no place for a woman. Unless you were a goddess living on a small island or Medusa. Medusa had a good thing going for awhile.
i would have loved to have been a fly on a treadmill listening to your arguments at the gym, and i'm super bummed to have missed saturday's zoom. soon, soon, i shall return to my little box.
The literary purpose of Telemachus behaving ‘exactly like a man’ is its failure: he’s not. He can only act like one, and his mum Penelope go along with the pretence, but Telemachus has no power in the household and lack of Odysseus is the cause of Penelope’s and his powerlessness. The purpose of the poem as a whole is to rewrite the (male, heroic, warrior) values of the Iliad and say you need to be ‘exactly like a woman’ in Odysseus’s post-war world - as tricky, clever, good at ‘weaving’ (same root word in ancient Greek as ‘storytelling’) and inscrutable/able to disguise yourself/be invisible as women are - all the defining characteristics of Odysseus, its hero, who is ultimately great because he has a wife whose cleverness is uniquely an equal match to his own (she tricks him at the end to test if it’s really him). M Beard is not a literary writer or reader: she’s a historian who sees true or not true. -And what will fly, sell, please the zeitgeist. A very guy thing to say about this gender-bending self-reflexive text, IMHO.
This reading is also valid. But most people throughout the ages privilege the masculinist lens that privileges, in turn, the male experience and ego. I have chosen to read Penelope as what you describe her: tricky, clever, good at weaving/storytelling and inscrutable/disguised/ invisible (all traits Odysseus uses in his encounter with the Cyclops only to ruin his success with his egoistic claiming of the clever strategy by saying his name). I love that Penelope outsmarts them all, including her son who doesn't have a real clue, and enables her wayward husband to recover their land and wealth when he finally returns with the help of a female goddess.
Love followed by critique is the way to go, given how you mysteriously make the reader feel as positive as you are. I happen to know this from personal experience and look forward to years and years more.
Me too with you.
Love how sharp your woman’s rights messaging is. Shocked that Roe falling is lost in the atrocity a day plan we have now. And nice positive blast how you feel about the zoom gang
Love followed by critique. Exactly. Perfect examples of dramatic narrative. All those performers who could shift characters in an instant you used to write about -- you do it on the page.
Thank you my dear friend.
So concisely brilliant: "Dear fellow female humans, You don’t have to like the writings of men. Most of it doesn’t like you."
As a former academic and a PhD in Literature, I really wish I had realized this consciously a long time ago. Most of male writing truly does not like us.
There used to be not as much to look at that wasn't them. I totally understand the academic thing. I wrote about that this morning on Facebook before I wrote this post:
All those lives spent reading the books of men, all those women in literature departments in colleges and universities, decade after decade, all those women standing in front of the faces of eager girls and women making some farkakte claims of meaning and interest that can't be made for the female characters invented by men. Gertrude and Ophelia, let's say, oh that great Will, so expansive in imagining women characters for the boys in the company to act.
All those female academics poring over the novels and plays of men and their visions of women, their visions of who is the center of attention and who is the one who looks at the center of attention, listens and reacts to the center of attention that is not her. What about Hedda and Nora. Something compassionate in Ibsen, but also a kind of imaginative day-tripping in the crazy-making entrapment of female social roles.
The point I am getting at, if I have a point, and I don't exactly have a point, it's more like an exhale and a stretch, it's more like a horse leaping over a fence. My point is women don't have to read the books of men that are not written for women, anyway. Men don't care if women read their books. Their conversation is with each other.
In myyyy life, I’ve loved them all.
I was totally thinking of that lyric and didn't use it as the subtitle. Yes.
The other day I listened to an interview with physicist Carlo Rovelli. In discussing definitions of consciousness, Rovelli mentions that in Homer “there are no words that correspond to a person directly thinking, meditating, deliberating, having ideas, making decisions. […] When [Homer] describes somebody having an idea, it's always a god that comes and gives the person an idea.”
Now maybe that reflects some earlier phase of humankind’s concept of self. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just that Penelope and the other women were the only ones with ideas.
Re this: ==When [Homer] describes somebody having an idea, it's always a god that comes and gives the person an idea.”
Now maybe that reflects some earlier phase of humankind’s concept of self. I don’t know.==
Julian Jaynes' notion is that, before humans began to write down words, they heard voices in their heads, which they attributed to the gods telling them what to do...
Yeah, ancient Greece (let alone modern Greece) was no place for a woman. Unless you were a goddess living on a small island or Medusa. Medusa had a good thing going for awhile.
Ironically, your link to the Rebecca Solnit post did not work for me. If anyone else had trouble, the link seems to be
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/listening-to-cassandra-misogyny-classical-and-modern/
Thanks, helpful. I fixed it, too.
Good evening, Laurie. It feels like you're saying to your readers, "You can come here and talk without worrying." 😇
i would have loved to have been a fly on a treadmill listening to your arguments at the gym, and i'm super bummed to have missed saturday's zoom. soon, soon, i shall return to my little box.
Love you and love you in your little box. It was a super interesting and interactive conversation. xxL
The literary purpose of Telemachus behaving ‘exactly like a man’ is its failure: he’s not. He can only act like one, and his mum Penelope go along with the pretence, but Telemachus has no power in the household and lack of Odysseus is the cause of Penelope’s and his powerlessness. The purpose of the poem as a whole is to rewrite the (male, heroic, warrior) values of the Iliad and say you need to be ‘exactly like a woman’ in Odysseus’s post-war world - as tricky, clever, good at ‘weaving’ (same root word in ancient Greek as ‘storytelling’) and inscrutable/able to disguise yourself/be invisible as women are - all the defining characteristics of Odysseus, its hero, who is ultimately great because he has a wife whose cleverness is uniquely an equal match to his own (she tricks him at the end to test if it’s really him). M Beard is not a literary writer or reader: she’s a historian who sees true or not true. -And what will fly, sell, please the zeitgeist. A very guy thing to say about this gender-bending self-reflexive text, IMHO.
This reading is also valid. But most people throughout the ages privilege the masculinist lens that privileges, in turn, the male experience and ego. I have chosen to read Penelope as what you describe her: tricky, clever, good at weaving/storytelling and inscrutable/disguised/ invisible (all traits Odysseus uses in his encounter with the Cyclops only to ruin his success with his egoistic claiming of the clever strategy by saying his name). I love that Penelope outsmarts them all, including her son who doesn't have a real clue, and enables her wayward husband to recover their land and wealth when he finally returns with the help of a female goddess.