(Source: natashavc)
"They could have done the same thing, alone, in the back yard, seeing the shapes swimming in the sky. I forget how old I was when I asked somebody about it, and I was told that those wonderful gliding changing spots were imperfections in the fluid of my eye-ball, that what I was seeing was in my eye. In your eye! For so long, for a child’s years, the sky was full of wonder, these shapes were in the sky, the sky was full of transparent things that swooped and swam. They were almost invisible, and, I thought, almost bodiless, they were there, but you could go right through them, they were animals that lived in the air. You see, we didn’t go around talking about things like this. It’s only now, when I am grown up and know everything, that I talk about this."
Oh, cool.
I began reading this article because I dislike Joan Didion (she’s too Ernest Hemingway, part of a body of literature I find false and flashy, and disingenuous, probably because their work reminds me of my own futile attempts at pretending to be someone else, someone in control), and while I thought the article was interesting, it has all these points about Didion that I just didn’t get (I don’t care that she may have been a bad mother, for instance).
Then I found out the writer of the article, Caitlin Flanagan, has written books about how second wave feminism was a mistake, and women should be owned by their husbands, and bullshit like that. While I have some similar sentiments about second wave feminism (for starters, it’s fucking boring, and what’s so bad about porn?), it’s just as repugnant to me to hear an intellectual woman defend being an outmoded, but happy, housewife while writing for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. That’s just absurd. Much more than Didion, Flanagan took the false and flashy route. So I went on to read a review of Flanagan’s book Girl Land (apparently a Reviving Ophelia rip off) written by Katie Roiphe, who must have thought the book was so dumb she hardly sought to review it. I looked her up, too, and found out she’s notable for being a feminist’s daughter and for writing a book about how date rape isn’t always a man’s fault, women should take responsibility for getting wasted on dates with people they’ve just met (intriguing, honestly, cos there’s a good point there, but was it made in earnest?)… and blah blah blah.
All these women just rip each other to shreds, in addition to imaginary women, and The Woman, and women everywhere, and who am I to shirk tradition? My conclusion this afternoon is that all women are tiresome unless they are naked.
(Oh, and please excuse the ridiculous amount of parentheticals and dependent clauses getting interrupted by other dependent clauses… I don’t think I’ll ever be in control of my language, or my life.)
i wish i lived in a bubble in the sky with my boyfriend and everything sounded like radioland by kraftwerk and time went in slow motion and there was nothing to see but big clouds and small oceans.
