Literary references

[AncientLights]

My first ever start of a thread.

I read a fair bit and am increasingly struck by the current relevance of things written, sometimes years ago, that resonate with me about this trans malarky.

Like this:

'What happens', black poet Langston Hughes asks, 'to a dream deferred?' What happens, one may now ask, when a reality finds itself on a collision course with fantasy? (my bold) from Dark Days by James Baldwin.

Anyone else got any?

All of 1984.

We have always been at war with Eastasia

Seconding 1984. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four."

The Handmaids Tale obvs "Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you're used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary."

Agree with both those. Also Alice in Wonderland:

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

Sorry for formatting issue.

Yes all of those. I find it useful to have these, helps me order my thoughts about this. Always good to quote at people, and to know that the world regularly goes insane.

Film - The Labyrinth

Sarah: You have no power over me!

[echoes]

Sarah: [the clock chimes 13:00 at that moment. Defeated, Jareth sends Sarah and Toby back to the real world where the clock finishes chiming midnight]

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

and

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”

― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

A very strange book I haven't read for years but it must bear reading again in the light of 'this trans malarkey'.

Orlando is online free here with Project Gutenberg.

And I had forgotten the horrific opening paragraph...

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"
Sojourner Truth

‘Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?'

'Because it cannot be helped as they are stronger than women.'

'A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests’

That’s a quote from Sultana’s dream, wonderful book that helped me understand feminism so much.

'There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.'

And
'She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women!

And
'She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world'

All from The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

“Men don’t understand anything that’s going on with women. You think you understand vaginas because sometimes you put your penis in one? That’s like me saying I understand engineering because I once drove through a tunnel.” - Michelle Wolf

“But it is one thing to read about dragons and another to meet them.”― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin

Beneath our veneer of respectability, all men are savages - Halcyon TV S1 Ep 3 (7.27)

Am regretting mentioning Orlando now I've started re-reading it (after about a hundred years): it's shockingly racist and classist. Really mind-bogglingly casually so. Even allowing for the archness of tone, the narrator who isn't 'Woolf' in person, could she not hear herself?Talk about privilege!

Transmetropolitan really good. It's a graphic novel written between 1997 - 2002. It's by the same author as Preacher - there's an Amazon version of that ATM.

It's cyber punk hyper insanity set sometime in the future whereby a journalist based on Hunter S Thompson is on a mission to uncover corruption and fight for truth.

I read it ages ago and I only just thought of the correlations recently. It's well worth a read, even if, like me, you're not really into graphic novels.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

"That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet."

I've always struggled with Virginia Woolf. got through 'Mrs Dalloway' only after seeing 'The Hours' in the cinema.

'She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world'
I especially like with the connotations for woman as costume. I've never read any of her books: must find some.

I thought Orlando was an exercise in unreliable narration.

Lundy Bancroft: 'YOUR ABUSIVE PARTNER DOESN'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH HIS ANGER; HE HAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR ANGER.
and again:
"Abuse counselors say of the abusive client: “When he looks at himself in the morning and sees his dirty face, he sets about washing the mirror.”

Strangely enough, I was thinking about exactly this subject today, discussing utopian/dystopian fiction with my dc, and exploring how all fictional utopias turn out to be dystopias because they rely on submission and thought control. Which is more important: apparent happiness, or freedom of thought and expression? And can you have both?

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar

...

"Well, perhaps your feelings may be different," said Alice, "all I know is, it would feel very queer to me."
"You!" said the Caterpillar contemptuously. "Who are you?"

Does this count? Word by Jenny Holzer

Please god, don’t make me consider reading Virginia Woolf again. I’ll cry.