Unbearable Weight, 2
6 September 2008
by: Susan Bordo
. . . the anorectic embodies, in an extreme and painfully deliberating way, a psychological struggle characteristic of the contemporary situation of women. That situation is one in which a constellation of social, economic, and psychological factors have combined to produce a generation of women who feel deeply flawed, ashamed of their needs, and not entitled to exist unless they transform themselves into worthy new selves (read: without need, without want, without body.)
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Unbearable Weight, 1
4 September 2008
by: Susan Bordo
Instead of my usual blunt final impression, for Susan Bordo’s book Unbearable Weight I will conduct a series of personal responses. The book is too dense and eludes any summation; too valid today, ten years later; and much too personal. I imagine I haven’t come across the title yet because I haven’t been ready; picking apart my “eating disorder” if even of the past, will be no simple task. As a writer, a person, a woman, I owe this exploration to myself. I do not want these “personal responses” to echo a therapy session, but sometimes they might; I want good ol’ deconstruction. . . let me reach for my knife.
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Sketchy Surroundings
1 September 2008
You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside. —DH Lawrence
What writing was when I first began was an absolutely spontaneous expression of myself trying to make some peace with the world. That I was in the world, of it and subject to its throws; my writing was a coming to terms. Sometimes I am feign to believe that the cycles I experience in writing mimic the cycles of the world in its natural forms. The cycles of a creation which is of me, the artist, are as inexplicable as the world is.
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Shikasta
29 August 2008
First in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series
by: Doris Lessing
I have learned that good books employ the forces of the cosmos. By cosmos I mean: the unpredictable, unknown, the omnipresent surrounding, inexhaustible, incommensurable, unseen, unheard; there’s always some other “state of being,” other invisible, invincible entities passing between us and our experiences, passing us by. Doris Lessing in Shikasta has evoked the cosmos literally, but not in the Battlestar Galactica kind of a way, no, no flashing universes or bright striking planets. Doris Lessing evokes the history of Earth, the broken, in steady cadence and seamless prose.
Free Shots
24 August 2008
Atop a beaten green flower stand in Camp de’ Fiori I watch them come and go. And though the night-time cobbles are swarming with many variations on a theme I am able to delineate at least five Americans, girls. I know they are Americans by the dress they wear, tight around the breasts it holds their butt as if in a crinkled plastic bag. They wear them in blue or green or black or grey; they wear them with flip-flops or high heels. These dresses must be the fashion of this season. . . for American girls in Rome, at least.
Bread
18 August 2008
When in the beginning I gave myself a typewriter and sat myself down to write I struggled. I was writing a book and I was also writing page long treaties most days which were my bread that kept me going. As always true to form I will transcribe as typewritten five years ago.
july nine
full tummy, heads all empty and i don’t care
Good Waste, Bad Waste
14 August 2008
Bad Waste: Waste: To use, consume, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly; squander. “We live in a disposable world,” so said someone to me lately. My jaw dropped in disbelief for shock came up over me and washed into my mouth on a wave; I responded, “That’s not what my father taught me.” I was taught that everything is used until it is finished.