Virginia! Ideas! Truth! Beauty! Freedom! Or, Good "Feminism" At Last!

[unconcluded]

So I picked up A Room of One's Own last night and I finished it after school today. All through the day, however, I have been alternating between frustration with ideologies that negate themselves on principle--specifically, feminism--and intellectual bliss in hearing explications on writing and integrity as such etc. etc., and Woolf in general

Comments

[samwhise]

We've already had this conversation, or I'd submit something intelligent to match the intelligent post (though you did spell parameters wrong so maybe I'm absolved. :D)

ALSO I found the line 'deliquesce' always makes me think of. Look:

"It was a very very nice letter you wrote by the light of the stars at midnight. Always write then, for your heart requires moonlight to deliquesce it."
(- virginia to vita)

[unconcluded]

Yes, I actually just stumbled upon it last night... the source of the word in their letters, I mean.

And I'm glad that nearly the only thing you've pulled out of all that is my spelling mistake. :P That's a very long tongue, in addition.

[unconcluded]

Sexwhat?

[_moratorium_]

I should probably finish that book at some point.

[unconcluded]

That is, in fact, an accurate evaluation.

[unconcluded]

See, that's why I need context. She really means the whole 'sexless mind' thing in a very specific way: as a writer, as an artist, as a creator. She means it in a near-spiritual sense, as she tends to view writing as a near-spiritual task. But she's really not saying that we're all morons and shouldn't care about defining ourselves in terms of masculinity and feminity--quite the opposite, actually. Yeah, that's why one just must read the book, b/c the little bits are obviously incomplete. But I do know what you mean. I have the opposite issue: I am a bit sad to hear people so easily call me 'she' this and 'she' that etc., when it seems so inaccurate. I do not feel at all like a so-easily-she, as you obviously do not feel like a so-easily-he. One has a right to it, but one feels guilt in some cosmic way. Yes yes.

[anonymous]

As an old, old, very old man with an MFA in Creative Writing who worked as a machinist most of his life until retirement and who currently reads a lot of science, specially cognitive science, I must tell you that the hard, hard extremely hard facts are that men's and women's brains are different in very special and gender specific ways. Also that the books I read when I was younger told me more things about myself than I imagined. Like-Tender Is The Night, by F. Scott, informed me that I would marry women who were victims of incest and be the same kind of interesting failure that Dick Diver was. But I was too busy living to listen.

[unconcluded]

What would you say to one who does not identify as either solidly male or solidly female or even some androgynous soup of a human being? (I don't see your point being one against the conception of such a voluntary illusion as identity, as your comments tend to affirm it in terms of femininity and masculinity individually--otherwise, I would have posed another question.)