Carthage

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February 11, 2005

A little zooey

I've got the country cousin of a fierce cold. The cold itself would have knocked me on my ass but the cousin is more hesitant and contents itself with scratching its initials on the back of my throat where it thinks no one will notice and stomping aerobically around my head where it thinks no one can hear.

Getrude Stein thought the comma was a servile punctuation mark and refused to use it.

I spent a lot of the day writing, which is more time-consuming than I ever give it credit for. Pamela Dean, for example, forces herself to write either four hours or four pages each day, which doesn't seem like much until you try it. Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, probably wrote entire novels in a day once she dismissed unimportant things like punctuation and sense. Today I wrote five pages, mainly about radiators and clocks for some reason, but as I have filled my quota I don't see any reason to quarrel with the subject matter.

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which asserts that we shouldn't give up the distinction between male and female styles. I was thinking of Tunis while I read this, near neighbor of Carthage (city not blog), which most likely has a separation of male and female worlds (and even languages--the men speak Arabic, the women speak French). Virginia Woolf might be right to want to preserve the separation, which allows multiple cultures to form that can enrich the common culture, but you'd have to preserve the limits too.

Why does it feel sort of gauche to say Austen or Woolf but fine to say Miller or Shakespeare?

Where is my orange juice?

Posted by didofoot at February 11, 2005 05:04 PM

Comments

Woolf and Miller both sound kind of gauche to me, maybe because there are other Millers and Woolf is also the name of an animal, sort of? I think Austen is alright. I think it's more of a chronological, rather than gender thing. No one gets just a last name, post-Joyce, for me.

Posted by: sean at February 11, 2005 06:27 PM

Not even Faulkner? What about Nabokov? I think when you get into the fruity deconstructionists later you sound something much worse than gauche (honestly, Lacan?), but maybe that's my chronological bias.

Posted by: christine at February 12, 2005 10:52 PM

Faulkner, I'll grant you. I avoid speaking the name "Nabokov" aloud, because someone will always think it's being pronounced incorrectly. Usually Sting.

Posted by: sean at February 13, 2005 10:18 PM

no, see, the thing to do is to refer to authors by their nicknames, because that makes you sound like an important author. art miller, bill shakespeare, dima nabokov. see? don't i sound important?

Posted by: holohan at February 14, 2005 09:41 AM

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