Meet with E: Thursday March 11 at 10am.

on names: "Aimé" = loved one (masculine)
"Aimée" = loved one (feminine) both look that way because it's how you make the past participle (like "amado")

Suggestion: put the alternate history or made up stuff in pink or something. Or indicate at some minorly obscured level which things are alternate/madeup.

Take a look at Wickedary - Mary Daly.

Come to fem. theory class Tues. march 9th Language and silence. Read "Language and Gender" article by R. Freeman. HUM 381.

Get these books:
Feminisms (a huge anthology)
New French Feminisms (a smaller anthology with great history introduction and non-boring writing)

Look at NALW for A. Rich article and others
works by Karen Offen - articles mostly - look in library.

narrow fem. theory reading to : naming and names. French feminism (history of, to get names)

Settle down, focus, catch up. Dont' worry about writing giant 20 page paper. Instead write 5-10 pp introduction.

Thinking about phd possibilities: read "Real Guide to Graduate Schools" in comp lit library.

- posted by Liz @ 4:13 PM

 
french naming conventions - useful

My question here was this, a nd I think this naming explanation has answered it. In the english version I was certainly struck by t he appearance of Orpheus and I thought "hmm here is the first named male." and figured that I must ponder the significance of that. but in the French version it is Orphée which I think would be the feminine form of Orpheus. Is that true? Orphé? Or is it always just "Orphée" in French no matter what the gender? Why believe this is a masculine Orpheus suddenly coming into the text? "Orphée, le serpent préféré de la femme qui marche dans le jardin" My French, non existent, except for what I can figure out from cognates and knowing Spanish. "Le serpent" = masculine meaning that serpent in general is a gendered noun that's gendered masculine? Or "Le serpent" meaning "the boy snake"? I need someone who knows French to go over this paragraph with me... or just clue me in to what is probably obvious to someone who knows French.

- posted by Liz @ 11:00 AM

 
it gives me great pleasure - the pleasure of a plodding pedant - to find an error in the English translation of L.G. On page 56 of the French version is the story of Iris Our and then also Isabelle Our. The English version has just Iris Our and then Iris Our again. Isabelle, the long lost sister of Iris!
It could perfectly well be an error in the French version that I have that was changed later. But I think I will bring Isabelle to life and put her in the database.
- posted by Liz @ 10:36 AM

 
I have a new idea for the project. As I type in the french names and mull over the "Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary" I was thinking that for some of my name definitions, I will make up stuff and cite as sources the imaginary sources in Lesbian Peoples. I will refer to the imaginary countries and history. This when I can't find anything good on a particular name or just when I have a good idea at random.

I have been inspired lately also by reading Guillermo Gómez-Peña's New World Border and more stuff from the 70s Chicano movement and the country of Aztlán and its mythical history. Alurista and others in the early to mid 70s seemed to be thinking along similar lines as Wittig, creating mythologies, overturning "disappearance" from history.
- posted by Liz @ 10:12 AM

 
I am also thinking as I look back over past entries here about
Ceza, the writer and magazine publisher in Egypt. Just a little digging and there is the tip of her iceberg of what could well have been something quite amazing and someone amazing. The way my publishing projects, magazines, start up with great excitement, and vanish, and 10 years later, someone writes a history of that movement, but my magazines are not in the history. But I was there and all us riot grrlz were writing to each other and I have boxes and boxes of their magazines and ranting and manifestos and letters. Like everyone waking up at once with an electric jolt. I imagine Ceza getting that electric jolt and that wake up call and springing nobly into action - tired of hearing people whine, tired of casual sexism, "I'll start my own literary scene" and doing it successfully. Only to disappear by all the methods listed by Joanna Russ in "How to Suppress Women's Writing." the unwritten companion to "How to Suppress" should be written. Like a continent "undiscovered' though inhabited, that lost history is there and I want to know it. We keep "discoveringg" the same things over and over. I finally get to the land of Ceza and her magazines and realize not only that I have been there, that she was there before me and others were there before her. How to break the breaks in the chain of disconnection between women's movements and women's attempts? Did Action Girl Newsletter and Fantastic Fanzine know of Ceza? of the many other foremothers?
The clues and names in Lesbian Peoples and its bibliography with feminists old, new, real, imaginary and their important works, from Gaul, Large Country, Lesbos, Albion, Pelasgia, and their Glorious, Iron, Bronze, and High-Speed Steel Ages.

The definitions, compared to Laureano Alban. The Comb, Alphabet, antenna, armpit, asp, athena, axe. I would guess these would be found in the Encyc. de maravillas.

Study the entry for "Medusa".
- posted by Liz @ 1:03 AM

 
Cross-posting with my bilingual poetry project.

Not that direct of a link, but I can't help but think of my other project on Monique Wittig as I read Gómez Peña.

I will repeat again for myself:

"The artists and writers who inhabit the Fourth World have a very important role: to elaborate the new set of myths, metaphors, and symbols that will locate us within all of these fluctuating cartographies."

And am thinking of Wittig's myths and histories and symbols in Les Guèrilléres and with Sande Zeig in Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.

Reversals, fiction, myth. How I felt on reading Egalia's Daughters. Rewriting of histories.

I am also thinking of my love of Laureano Albán's Enciclopedia de Maravillas. Its similiarities in the dual language edition to "Lesbian Peoples" rewriting symbology by creating authoritative encyclopediac definitions in poetry. Poetry, leaping, illogic, fiction, as legitimate source material for an encyclopedia or a dictionary. The possible truths or could have beens in "Lesbian Peoples" and the cheerfully sly personal jokes. The feeling that "real" history is this false or this subjective as well.

- posted by Liz @ 12:59 AM

 
ability to Delete entries

add language field (french and english)
mark everything in there now to be english

have alphabetical index across top of "listwords.cgi"

search box where I can type a name and hit search.
might also be able to search on page number
returns the full entries of both the french and the english

change wording "appears on page"

ability to page through by page, click on page numbers
ability to page through/search by alphabetical a - b - c - d - etc.

in showall, or in the indiv. showing of entries,
make the source reference into a link.

a script to show all sources.


- posted by Liz @ 11:09 AM

 
I'm back in the saddle with this project as of January 2004.

Today I will add commenting to this blog and will start typing in the French names.

I am feeling a bit daunted by the task. I think the first order of business should be to get a basic "name definition" for each name, using ONE source book. Last summer I got very bogged down by surfing names and finding things like whole networks of fascinating Victorian women in medicine. That was good and made me think. But I would like to have a basic reference in place with a nice structure. pronto! Later I'll add the speculation and the cake.

In the meantime I will read more feminist theory. Joanna Russ's What Are We Fighting For? is extremely good. I recommend it to anyone who happens to read these words.

- posted by Liz @ 9:00 AM