Annotation for Les Guérillères
Building a Digital Feminary
Building a Digital Feminary
"Fais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, à défaut, invente."
"Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Instead of writing the quote-filled primer on feminism and naming, I ended up writing a very personal statement. so be it. I will work tomorrow on the more academic end of things. i felt that trying to write this woudl clarify my thoughts. It is a draft. It had large gaping holes. I just asked for comments, but don't be all picking this to pieces, please, or correcting my grammar or something. I repeat. It's a DRAFT. It's IDEAS. It is not an essay, it is NOTES for an essay.
I would like comments from other feminists. is that clear now people? anyone who feels the urge to be all like "oh you feminists are so whiny and you drive people away with your ignorant drivel and besides it's men who suffer as we are all going to die of heart attacks when we're 50", listen up. I am officially driving you away. Go away. Go learn something somewhere else first. I've had it up to my millionth chakra with you people. I'm not here to educate you.
A personal statement of feminism and my relationship to the text
As a young girl I was raised to believe that the problems of sexism had been solved. It didn't matter that I was female; I could do anything, because Feminism (meaning something called '70's feminism') had fixed everything. I was told it was different for my grandmother's and mother's generations, but now everything was different. I could be President or an astronaut or a doctor or writer and go to any school I could get into; or at least I wouldn't be stopped because of being female. I didn't have to wear dresses. Hell, I didn't even have to wear clothes.
Puberty, or other people's reactions it, then hit. It was like slamming into an invisible wall, like the bars of a jail-cell, woman shaped, had encased me. It might have been okay for me to do anything I wanted as a girl, but clearly it was not okay for me to do anything I wanted as a woman. Under this pressure of hitting the wall and growing up against the woman-shaped cage - and I think this a very ordinary story of being a suburban girl in middle class America - I came to some hard realizations about sexism. More than that, I realized that sexism was linked strongly to rationality and reason. I turned to language as a safe way to peer into the abyss of unreason; I studied un-happening, un-thinking, un-science, and un-saying.
Anger filled me, insane rage at what was happening to me. The invisibility of the iron cage made it hard to fight against. Some people never see it. I am grateful for the many years of freedom that I had. But that freedom, while it gave me a useful sense of entitlement and self-confidence, also made me naive and blind. Other girls without my freedom had grown armor early. It was part of their being. At 15 - when my breasts finally grew - I had no armor.
I saw the iron cage come down then, at puberty. Once I experienced actual oppression I realized that the cage was everywhere. It was in all the books I loved best. Everything I had loved now had terrible flaws; I could no longer use my imagination to write myself into the Ringworld's Future History, into Middle Earth's quest of the Ring, or into, dare I say it, Le Guin's Anarres. It just wasn't working out between me and the books. I realized they had made it so that I had to be a man just in order to have an identity at all, as my heroes were all male. I was not Galadriel, I was Gandalf. I had even dressed as Gandalf for Halloween as a little girl, with a long beard, a pointy hat, grey robes, and a staff. I was not Gandalf. And I was not Takver, I was Shevek. But Shevek was Shevek, not Shevekia. I was not Shevek and in fact could not be Shevek and Shevek could never become Shevekia because Shevekia would be an entirely different and possibly impossible person. I was mad as hell. There needed to be new books. This needed fixing. I refused to be a man. I refused to be a woman either. The categories were not working. Surely other people had thought my thoughts before - why had they not fixed it, said it, and wrote it? Or had they, and then their work was "disappeared"? Where were they? I had deep faith that they existed; if I was not impossible, other feminists were not impossible in other times and places, in any past and future. This was the beginning of my search for utopia - a feminist utopia, even an imaginary one.
I didn't find out until college, although I was looking quite hard in what library resources I had available to me, that feminism hadn't started with women "being given the vote" in various countries in various years; that it hadn't started with "70's feminism" or Rosie the Riveter. I don't think I would have heard the name Simone de Beauvoir even in college if I hadn't come across pointers to it as a name important for feminists it in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying - borrowed from an adult friend's bookshelf at 15.
Feminist history was hard to find, even when I knew that it was vitally important to look for. My survival as a writer and thinker, and possibly my survival as a living person, depended on it. Why? I needed comrades. Since I realized sexism had not disappeared or been defeated, and yet I was allowed to get as far as I did
The intellectual and poetic forays of teenage girls - their letters, notes, diaries, and especially their poetry - are often mocked as the ultimate irrelevance. We all know teenage girls are overly emotional, self-involved, self-important, concerned with trivial things. They are trivial things merely because the girls are concerned with them. When middle class suburban teenage girls kill themselves, it is because they are silly. This is wrong. I believe strongly that the intellectual struggles of children and teenagers should be respected. Eric Maisel, on writing about the struggles of artists, says, "...why shouldn't just good reality-testing and a keen intelligence provoke feelings of meaninglessness and emptiness?" Maisel does not see feelings of 'depression' as being necessarily pathological. The despair of suburban teenage girls is the despair of slamming up against patriarchy at high speed with a keen mind and eyes open.
At 16-17 I was experimenting with poetic forms and looking for freedom of language. I copied every style in the Norton Anthology. I wrote like ee cummings and T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare and Denise Levertov. Insanely ambitious, I wanted to do more. I knew nothing I wrote at 16 was going to be "really any good" but I felt that because of that, I was completely free to write anything. It could be as bad, as uncontrolled, as stupid, as violent, and as experimental as I could imagine. It could mean nothing. I could completely break my attachment to meaning. I would fear to do nothing and could look at everything. Everything was valid input. This, if applied in real life, is skating on the edge of schizophrenia, and at times I felt that I was dangerously near it. When limited to the realm of the page, it became art. I don't love many of those poems as poetry, but I love them for their fearlessness. I was skating up the half pipe and going out over the edge of language into the air with no helmet, into the air and into outer space. I wanted to do what had been done and then go further and say things that had not been said. Ambition filled me.
I still try to go back to that freedom from the pressure to be good when I write poetry. Anything can be written. Words can just come out onto the page. No thoughts are forbidden. Any of those thoughts can be expressed. To hold back would be to lie.
Lesbians and bisexuals sheltered me and inspired me. I won't say more, but despite their human flaws and their limited power and many problems, they were the only people who showed recognition of what I was up against. They had sympathy. They hid me from view. They let me cut class. They cut me some slack. They did the same for other girls who were hitting rock bottom. I still appreciate it.
Gertrude Stein was helpful once I came across her in college. But de Beavoir was like meeting a friend. I have felt that way about many writers, that warm friendship for Coleridge or someone else long dead or, less cruel than death but sometimes just as painful, writers far above my sphere of possible knowledge other than perhaps a personal signature on a response to a fan letter.
***
This is, in part, why Wittig's book exploded poetry, narrative, science fiction, and history for me — very welcome fireworks. It made everything clear to me.
I think my burning fireworks burned me out before I was 20. Only remnants of that energetic, ambitious girl are still here. Now that I have armor, it is harder to be free.
here is my first stab at the longer essay where I'll talk about the project. I thought it might be good to take Ellen Peel's advice and start from my personal relationship with the text.
After that bit I ahve written I will go into some feminist theory stuff about names and identity and talk about the experience of researching some of the individual names and what that was like and where it led me.
here's the first bit:
I first read Les Guérillères in 1987, when I was 17. It was my first year of college and a time when my reading horizons expanded wildly. I operated on the technique of going ot the university bookstore and looking at the textbooks for classes that sounded interesting. Browsing the reading for classes I never took, I found great books. Other people's bookshelves also filtered information for me in useful ways. In my student housing co-op, I had a hundred neighbors, all with their own interests and book collections and opinions on what was interesting, new, unusual, or good to read. Les Guérillères was a book I read in bed, sometimes out loud, with my girlfriend Rachel, who also introduced me to Alfred Jarry, Anais Nin, and Georges Bataille. I had been a poet on a wild ride through poetry for three years. Wittig's book went off like a bomb, destroying and reconstructing my poetics in a way that freed me from bonds that I didn't know confined me. She and her women could do anything, say anything, be anything.
As a reader, I have been looking for a long time for women in literature and history. I own dictionaries of Amazons and books like "Famous Women Throughout History". They are sometimes hard to find - but not because they weren't there.
A few names in the capitalized lists were strange yet familiar. I knew Dinarazade, Aspasia, Zenobia, Draupadi, and felt proud to recognize them. The more common names like Anna or Martha made me wonder: does Wittig mean by them some specific Anna and Martha? Or several? Or does she mean All Annas, a sort of platonic form, an ur-Anna? Other names haunted me. The names unknown to me, but so unusual that I felt sure they must refer to some famous woman: Prascovia, Damhuraci, Heget, Ashmonigal, Xu-Hou. It seemed that I should know them, and that by not knowing them, I was missing out on something important; failing to pay respects to feminist foremothers whose ancestral shrines were neglected.
(include in the next bit about research specific names, especially dominique aron and ceza. also pick a general hard to pin down name, maybe my own)
(quote mary daly. quote claire goldberg moses. quote fr. revolutionary pamphleteers lwhen they explain why they use only their first names (can i find the originals in french?) talk about how it was important for me to think of what wittig might know differently from my knowing as she is french. (colonies! french feminism's history. quote gomez-pena. quote l. timmel duchamps' great in memoriam essay. )
here is my draft of what will go on the intro page to the project. (by the way, the project is here:Building A Digital Feminary.
Monique Wittig's book Les Guérillères creates a mythopoetic realm in which women instigate a violent revolution. She invokes the first names of approximately 585 women in the main body of the text and in lists of names in capital letters, set off from the body, a body which can be seen as a narrative or as vignettes or prose poems.
My goal is to provide points of entry to feminist history.
The names are keyholes that I look through to see facts, biographies, imagined future history, goddesses, and might-have-beens. At times, researching one name has led me through the keyhole, or through the looking-glass, to let me see whole communities of feminist women; in some cases my whole concept of the history of a time and place has shifted. The names and their possible meanings have been useful tools to dislocate my ways of knowing.
Each name will eventually be linked to at least one definition of the name's meaning, or a glossary entry tying the name to a woman in history, legend, or myth. These definitions and identifications are at times arbitrary. Whether Wittig had a specific "ANNA" in mind when she added the name to her list - a friend, an aunt, a queen, a bluestocking or pampheteer or a saint, is not possible to know in most cases.
The spelling of the names was often changed in the English translation. This Digital Feminary provides the French and English spellings of the names. Page numbers are provided for the French and English editions of the book, so that this Feminary can function as an index to either edition.
methodology notes:
One thing that got in the way of the project was that John and I wanted (uncharacteristically) to make a general tool that I could use or that anyone could use to annotate a book and to make hyperlinked glossaries or indexes or databases. We tried to make this, but got very bogged down. I kept wanting similar tools for annotating the mahabharata or icelandic sagas or dream of red mansions.
but without having a super-specific goal in mind it was very hard to design this tool. What database fields did it need? How would it all be structured?
It worked much better to attack it from the other end. What would the user of this specific project, the Digital Feminary, want to do? What would the interface look like to that person? From the front end, we realized what kind of back end we needed.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
this always cheers me up:
"The bricoleur is adept at executing a great number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools, conceptualized and procured specifically for this project; his instrumental universe is closed, and the rule of his game is to make do with the means at hand." -- someone or another's translation of Levi-Strauss
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Some realizations.
I am better at the name research than I was last summer - my intuition and my detective abilities are better. I attribute this to my genealogical researches into my own genealogy and that of several friends, last fall.
I know that if I look at a name and think "Hmm, that sounds like it could be Persian" - look up "persian goddesses" "persian feminist" "persian feminist history" and see what I get. With the name Aban for example - a cursory googling seemed to show that Aban was an arabic or persian male name (meaning unknown) but one definition in some fly by night looking baby name list said that it was "related to myths of water and fertility". I tried looking up something like "persian myth water fertility" and got a lot of stuff about Anahita. I read the stuff (this time from fly by night pages about zoroastrianism) and got excited about Anahita and decided to read more about her. This led me to (bingo!) the Aban Yasht or "Hymn to the Waters" which was wonderfully interesting. Some other sites then firmed up the connection: yes, Aban is Avan is Ava is Anahita is "the persian Ishtar" or "the persian aphrodite".
The Sunshine for Women site is amazingly useful. I am going to read all of "19th Century French Feminism" book by Claire Goldberg Moses. There was some totally hot stuff in there about the revolutionary newspapers and how the women signed with only their first names and there was a bit quoted from one of these women that explained exactly why. This will be an excellent thing to talk about in my introduction to the project. I read it last summer - it's printed out in my binder for the project - but now I really GET it in some new way.
I am very triumphant over finding the e-text of Montesquieu's _Persian Letters_ and it is fascinating... Yay Roxana. I won't believe in your death (as I refuse to see the movie "Thelma and Louise"...)
My point being really that I feel very close to Wittig after thinking about all this. And I'm enjoying that. I read Persian Letters and... you know, there are plenty of Roxanas in history, and I thought first off of the wife of Alexander the Great, but I _KNOW_ that Wittig read Persian Letters, bookish girl looking for feminist stuff, being french, etc. She just must have known about it. Some definitions for the names I'm making up (and it will be clear which ones they are) and some I'm completely uncertain if she was referring to a specific person or not.
But for some names I feel uncannily certain!
Monday, March 15, 2004
What I really wish for is that I could get the rights and could publish the whole book online in french and english with the footnotes tastefully at the bottom of each page and everything hyperlinked all to hell and back.
It's not even just invididual women who were lost. What is making me very sad and really, grieving, is that clearly they didn't exist just as individuals but for every fabulous feminist there was a fabulous circle of feminists. Whole communities blinked from existence so that the women look like odd blips in history, exceptions to The Rule. Take Helen Blavatsky's mom. I stumble across her as a tiny footnote in Blavatsky's life as I google around for the name Zenaida (Zénéide) and found a few sentences about Helena Andreyevna von Hahn, the famous novelist, who died in 1842 at the tender age of 27, but... "was called the George Sand of Russia by Belinsky and other literary critics who regarded her as one of the principal founders of the women's liberation movement." Okay. Maybe someone out there is thinking "Of course. Zenaida the famous Russian novelist. Everyone knows about HER." But I didn't. I never heard of her! And then the thought of her as a feminist founder - this implies other feminists around her or following her. Who are they? I don't have a clue. Look at how the 1911 Britannica leaves Helena -Zenaida right out. Blavatsky didn't just happen out of the air.
"She realized early how rebellious, how courageous and brilliant her eleven-year old daughter was. On her deathbed she stated that perhaps it was just as well that she was dying for she would be spared seeing what befell little Helene. "Of one thing I am certain," she was quoted as saying. "Her life will not be as that of other women, and she will have much to suffer." Now given that this is quoted from some biography of Blavatsky, who knows if it is true; I'm willing to believe it.
Blavatsky's maternal grandmother, Princess Helena Pavlovna spoke five languages and was an artist, musician, botanist, archaeologist and social reformer with particular concern for the disadvantaged. Unusual occupations for a woman in the Russian empire of the 1700s.(from some other page on Madame B., and I wonder if this sort of info came out of B.'s autobiograpical writings?)
Blavatsky's mother, Helena Andreyevna, was a writer who wrote among other things a proto-feminist novel Theophania Abbiadzhio. She gave birth to her first child, Helena Petrovna (Blavatsky) when she was 17. Sadly Helena Andreyevna died in 1842 at the age of 29.
I also got very sad reading about the Bluestockings. I love to know about them and it's inspiring. But very depressing to see their vital wonderful community sort of melt away into something that barely anyone knows about. i.e. whole feminist movements that it's as if they never were and people talk about "when feminism started" meaning, weirdly, 1972, or at best, the 40s...
Maybe I will prime my friend Jo about this for her daughter's questions about feminism. just so she knows, I dunno, about the french revolution, and seneca falls, which I never saw in any american history textbook... I mean... who would want to read THIS.
***
a lead on Zenieda. Spelling, spelling, spelling:
Literary fate and reputation of E. Gan (Zeneida R-va): the Russian George Sand. An attempt of reconsidering cultural stereotypes in Gan's works. Gan's heroine as a "feminized version of the romantic exile". Plot experiments in Gan's works.
***
YES! a whole short story, "A Recollection of Zheleznovodsk", translated into English...
This led me to here, which is obviously going to be useful! an Evdokia! I was looking for her.
huge list of russian women writers
Another thought about the spelling and translation of names. I think when first reading this book I was happy to see a variant of my name in there (Elisabeth) but was minorly disappointed that it wasn't "really" in there as it was spelled differently. I wonder if a Michelle feels vaguely disappointed when she sees MICHAELA. In the French version it is MICHÉLE and the Michelle might feel closer to that.
The sad plight of girls named LaShonda or Britanniye - they never get to buy barrettes or bicycle license plates with their name preprinted on. (A not insignificant pleasure - why? Why would it be so satisfying to wear barrettes that proclaim me as "Elizabeth"? )
***
As I do the data entry it occurs to me that this seemingly trivial thought is important too. I was joking about the barrettes but look how LaShonda doesn't get hers and how I chose her (in current U.S. world) obviously black name. Of course when someone names their kid LaShonda (traditional enough to be recognizably an african-american girl's name but, still no barrettes of her own) or Britanniye it is a personal/political statement against "standard" dominant culture names and standardized spellings.
Therefore i am on the right track when I decide "yes, when Wittig says Belle and La Vay translates Bella, I can put in my feminary bell hooks." That is actually quite important and I was doing it anyway, but the pleasure of the little pink pre-made barrettes that say "Elizabeth" brought it home a little closer as I realized that part of that pleasure is the pleasure of knowing oneself securely part of an establishment; that someone pre-thought of the thing that is my name and provided for it in some factory where barrettes are manufactured and bothered to print them on there. So it is not the same as the pleasure of having a t-shirt or personalized notepaper made specially for you. It is a product without you having to ask for it specially. The little pink barrettes and the bicycle license plates were actually signifiers of the privilege I was born into. Just as I have purple hair on purpose, Britanye's mom is putting little Brittannye's life in some small way OUTSIDE of that.
So while of course I _CAN_ put bell hooks in this feminary now it is quite clear to me that I _SHOULD_.
Here is a good one: "LOYSE" in the french translated to "LOIS".
Is anyone really named "Hegemonie"? That would be a great name for my kid. maybe virtue-names will be back in fashion someday with someone other than pop stars and hippies and instead of little Briannas and Hannahs and Emilys we will get some Libertys and Liberacions and Hegemonys and Revolutionarys and Enlightenments. "Enlightenment Henry" doesn't that sound great? heh heh. "Hegemony M. Kim." World, be afraid.
I am haunted by the names that seem like they must belong to some great woman warrior or interesting goddess... just out of reach. For instance who is CRETESIPOLIS? TORE? SULEMNA? FORZITIA? And the many women stretching back into time who bore those names: negating the very idea that it is of primary importance to identify "the famous Forzitia". Though I am trying anyway.
sister, mother?
I am pondering whether to make Isabelle Our the twin sister (very Irigaray) or the mother or daughter of Iris Our. In the french there is a sudden apparition of Isabelle Our and the English version leaves it out. Reading the french it seems like a mistake there, although I originally thought it must be a translation error. That I should play with this seems obvious. The trope of the lost (dead) mother? the apparition of a sister later lost? the sudden discovery that you had a twin sister - so often a theme in girls' books - but here, she is discovered only when dead?
Prof. Peel was right: the two English language editions both have the same pagination. So the index of names will work for either edition! Joy.
Yes, "joy", I mean it seriously... Years of noticing that women's names being left out of the indexes of books of history... Mentioned in the book, but left out of the index.
Sometimes I look immediately in a book's index to see if they have some category like "Women". Maybe it will be an entry like "Women, condition of, 249; in the home, 350; status of, 359, 360; rights, 140; and contraception, 503; struggle for by Olympe de Gouges, 325. " Or is there one chapter or one sidebar sort of thing on "Women" and then elsewhere no discussion? Or is there, on purpose, no subsuming of half the human race into one index entry? Or are there separate index entries for actual women like Olympe de Gouges, and then also some "Women" category as a point of entry for someone who might be looking?
I love a good index with multiple entry points. And often a book with no index is sadly flawed...and I want to make that index... I love and admire a book with a really great and marvelous index - for example Von Buitenen's incomplete version of the Mahabharata.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Another mistake I made: I realized somewhere along the way that I should have kept the capitalization of the names the same as it is in the books. If it's ZITA or FLORA I should have entered it that way - rather than as Zita and Flora. That way, information would have been preserved about whether it's one of the names on the pages of names in all caps. I didn't quite realize it until I came across hyphenated or two part names in all caps, like KOU FEI. Uh oh, should it be Kou-Fei or Kou-fei? Okay... that's relatively trivial, but I still care about it.
It seemed too daunting to go back and change them all. It wouldn't be a simple operation because of all the special characters and accents, and because not all the names are in all caps.
It certainly helps my productivity that I have a laptop and can be in bed now with my feet up, doing the data entry for the French names. It was a long afternoon of shopping, cooking and cleaning.
I typed up about half of them in the format [name, page:page] because I thought I would be able to add them in a big batch to the database. But then realized I would have to enter each one so that it was linked properly to its English name. This should have been obvious, but it didn't occur to me.
Now I have got an XML dump of what is in the mySQL database. I am editing the XML file directly as plain text. All the accents and special characters must be entered by hand in HTML style: so that you have to type things like "é" to get an e with an accent over it. It's a pain in the ass! Typing in the French names, I certainly notice how arbitrary the translator's decisions were. Sometimes a name keeps its accents and sometimes it doesn't. I think it must have been decisions based on how "exotic" the translator thought it would sound if Anglicized or not (I think for the American rather than the British ear, but I am not sure).
I'm still in The Office Of My Own. I am wishing heartily for a Bathroom Of One's Own. Because if I go out there into the house, my kid will see me and realize I am actually here and he will want to play with me.
Oh for a Bathroom of One's Own! Perhaps a Chamberpot of One's Own?
I am using this site fairly heavily: Sunshine for women. It is working well for me to go to this sort of source - feminist biographies and encyclopedias - and look to see if any names intersect. If they even slightly match, I am putting them in.
This is also quite useful
http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/index.html
and I am using the 1911 Britannica as well. I have it in print but the online version is very handy.
I am very curious: If I went to a library and looked up her in a modern encyclopedia, do you suppose she would be there still? I am dubious.
The translation of names is very important - makes a huge difference.
For instance I think of myself as a fairly sophisticated reader. But when I first recorded the english names from the translation of Les Guerilleres, I wrote "Simona" into the database. And thought to myself, "Gee, it's actually odd that Wittig would have put in a Simona, but not a Simone. Was she actively trying to avoid any homage to de Beauvoir? did they hate each other? Even if they did disagree or not like each other personally, how could Wittig leave her out?" Very quickly I constructed this whole weird mental narrative where Monique thought "Bah!" rather petulantly as she x-ed out the name of Simone.
Having entirely missed junior high level girl-politics at the proper age, I am now fairly aware of that level of sociality, and wondered seriously why Wittig hadn't invited Simone to her party at the roller rink.
As I entered definitions just now I revisited this thought and ... DOH! Of course it is "Simone" in Wittig's original version in French. OF COURSE.
The translator, David Le Vay, deserves a special burn in hell for contributing in a small way to the loss of feminist connections and history. Why translate "Simone" to "Simona"? Sometimes the -e names in the french version are translated to -a names or even to -ia names. Because Americans are too dumb to know they are women's names unless they have an -a on the end, and are printed in barbie pink? Por qué?
I have to say it's kinda hard having my husband work on the code. When I have to ask him for help I feel bad. he is quite helpful. I used to be at least a passable programmer, but i don't understand his methods and he is a lot faster than I am with his lightning emacs. It has always been instructive for me to watch the things that he has mastered with programming and the things that he has to look up, and how he debugs. Somehow when it's my project and he's like my tame software developer and it's this project, I feel very uncertain and wish I were doing it all myself. For the glory of womankind, or something.
For the first time in our new house I have just gone into the office, which I realized could be (gasp!) MY OFFICE (could it?) and I shut the door. And John has blessed this shutting of the door and taken the phone calls and the child and the responsibilities of breakfast, getting dressed, and playing "castle" for an indefinite period of time so that I can think and concentrate.
I don't think that my feelings would be very different because of his gender. It is hard to feel so vulnerably dependent on another person. If I had just hired him and paid him 12 bucks an hour as a nanny, and 35 bucks an hour as a programmer, I would still be grateful and guilt-ridden.
The "Motel Room of One's Own" incident made me cry (where a certain Professor, searched for, was accidentally revealed to have checked herself into a motel at an undisclosed location for a couple of days to work on her book uninterrupted and undistracted by mundane cares, despite having a large house, a nanny, a partner and an office) This made me feel so very relieved that I was not alone in my desperate need for space and time for thinking - and the incredible difficulty of getting that space and time - of separating out responsibilities large and small that never end. Of my own inability to deny anyone - if I even suspect that someone might need help there I am ignoring my own thing in order to focus on their thing. Anyway. I had been feeling really bad in January and February and overwhelmed by everything, and wondering if I should just quit school, and oddly it was The Motel Room Of One's Own incident that whapped me on the head and made me think "no way! I can do this!"
I just felt like that needed to be said- I'm not sure why.
There's nothing like a little radical feminism in the morning every morning. I feel a scary clarity of vision lately. The people around me, like zombies.
