The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

And of course it was "destined" for me to read this book.
I actually was not very perceptive to this idea of "feminism"- what does it actually mean?
I'm very good friends with a radical feminist and she kept telling me "You are a feminist, but you just don't know it."

The longer I lived in Russia the more I realized what women have dealt with and come out of. More or less- in America. Of course there are still struggles of equality, and the old conservative ideologies are still very deeply integrated in our society. But, in Russia it is a lot more black and white. Russia is still in the 50s concerning women's rights. Yes, some may say that the Soviet system brought women out of the homes and into the factories. But that doesn't address the woman as a person. I have lived there for long enough to see that women accepted this typical role without question. Mothers encourage their daughters to dress "modestly" with their matching purses and shoes, walk down Nevski (I lived in St. Petersburg) with a hand elegantly open (this indicates submissiveness- Body Language) while strutting their "goods" for any man that would have them. Provided he has money. They are instructed to "hook" a young boy while in college. Marriage is still an economic alliance, which is why you end up seeing beautiful drop-dead gorgeous young women with burned-out older men. CHING CHING.

I am not judging them- but for a young woman which has discovered her own femininity while in Russia- of all places- it became very oppressive. I got tired of this out-dated ideology. Please- I had a masters by then! I KNEW that there was something better out there, I KNEW I mattered as a PERSON and that I didn't need a man to fulfill me and my life. But of course- I also am a citizen of the great US of A. And my future is a lot brighter than theirs.

Russia still needs a feminist revolution.

And yet America is not so far off. I mean it has lived through the feminist Revolution, although much like after the Civil War ending in Segregation, the women's rights movement of the 20s and 30s ended in wasp corsets and women dying to pop out children and become mothers. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm pointing out a very striking contrast.
Nowadays, we can see women portrayed as sex objects, while women willingly participate. It is not about their "assigned role" that was forcefully dictated by the media and government (the colloquial phrase "one side of the same coin" occurs to me). Nowadays, vanity further destroys what women have fought for for so long.

But I am not a feminist in the sense that I don't agree with blaming the man. What women seem to forget is that the man too, is targeted by the media. And so are children... minorities, gays, historical figures... anything that can be of their use. Everyone is made to fit a stereotype in order to tell us what people are REALLY like. I don't watch much tv, but from what I've seen- men have been emasculated it seems to me as a way of making up for all that sexism against women. So let's make men sensitive and insecure. Make them wear pink and horrible polo shirts. Make them nervous and scared, while the woman is dominant and controlling. Switch the roles! That's what America wants. Make him be a house-HUSBAND!!!! It's so simple- just reverse the roles.
Gays are nothing more than walking accessories- portraying a superficial consumer. Children are idiots that don't know anything but to not make eye contact and play on their phones. Minorities- don't even get me started. I am sure the black community has a lot to say on this subject.
Living human beings have become useless concepts. We don't exist as people, we exist as a cliche.

Oh media- just so easy.

What Betty Friedan writes about is actually very relevant. Not only has media created a new reality for women, but for every human being. We don't know who we are anymore... and that is why it is so much more efficient to fill our brains with emptiness. So we can STAY empty.
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"The end of the road, in an almost literal sense, is the disappearance of the heroine altogether, as a separate self and the subject of her own story. The end of the road is togetherness, where the woman has no independent self to hide even in guilt; she exists only for and through her husband and children."

"And whether the victim is man, woman or child, whether the living death is incurable cancer or creeping paralysis, the housewife reader can identify."

Women felt they were victims and identified with the oppressed in each fictional story.

"Thus the service article takes over, replacing the internal honest, objective, concrete, realistic domestic detail- the color of walls or lipstick, the exact temperature of the oven."

"The line between mystique and reality dissolves; real women embody the split in the image."

"When a mystique is strong, it makes its own fiction of fact. It feeds on the very facts which might contradict it, and seeps into every corner of culture, bemusing even the social critics."

"Is there a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality?"

"This is the real mystery: why did so many American women, with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for 'something more' in housework and rearing children? For, paradoxically, in the same fifteen years in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of the human world have widened, the pace of world change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality has become increasingly free from biological and material necessity. Does the mystique keep American woman from growing with the world? Does it force her to deny reality, as a woman in a mental hospital must deny reality to believe she is a queen? Does it doom women to be displaced person, if not virtual schizophrenics, in our complex, changing world?"

"As the motivational researches keep telling the advertisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives. They look for the image they will no longer take from their mothers."

"'Only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to hold yourself back."

"I think that this has been the unknown heart of woman's problem in America for a long time, this lack of a private image. Public images that defy reason and have very little to do with women themselves have had the power to shape too much of their lives. These images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity."

"What if those who choose the path of "feminine adjustment"- evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping- are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their own identity?"

"The expectations of feminine fulfillment that are fed to women by magazines, television, movies, and books that popularize psychological half-truths, and by parents, teachers and counselors who accept the feminine mystique, operate as a kind of youth serum, keeping most women in the state of sexual larvae, preventing them from achieving the maturity of which they are capable."

But Freud was interpreted to American woman in such curiously literal terms that the concept of penis envy acquired a mystical life of its own, as if it existed quite independent of the women in whom it had been observed. It was as if Freud's Victorian image of woman became more real than the twentieth-century women to whom it was applied."

"It filled the vacuum of thought and purpose that existed for many for whom God, or flag, or bank account were no longer sufficient- and yet who were tired of feeling responsible for lynchings and concentration camps and the starving children of India and Africa."

"If reproduction were the chief and only fact of human life, would all men today suffer from 'uterus envy'?)"

"Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men." Margaret Mead

Garden of Eden = traditional roles
If Man's achievement = child-bearing (men are "inferior" in that case)

"As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else. They go through he motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them- the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect"

This reminded me of the book I read about D.H. Lawrence and how he used the same motif. The girls were too smart for "sex" and so became defensive but it's a facade. They actually "go through the motions".

"A sublte and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years: the new sex direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some colelge presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students' future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence."

"Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a "latent" desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man."

Therefore, "Somehow, the student gets the point that she doesn't not want to be the " 'exceptional woman.' "

"The needs of sex and love are undeniably real in men and women, boys and girls, but why at this time did they seem to so many the only needs?"

"The mystique spelled out a choice- love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. Given such a choice, was it any wonder that so many American women chose love as their whole purpose?"

"Properly manipulated ('if you are not afraid of that word,' he said, American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity, the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack- by the buying of things."

"The moral of the study was explicit: 'Since the Balanced Homemaker represents the market with the greatest future potential, it would be to the advantage of the appliance manufacturer to make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influences (without becoming a Career Woman. The art of good homemaking should be the goal of every normal woman.' "

"As one housewife remarked, 'As for some magical push-button cleaning system, well, what would happen to my exercise, my feeling of accomplishment, and what would I do with my mornings?"

The problem was- how to KILL TIME.

"Get them in schools, churches, sororities, social clubs; get them through home-economics teachers, group leaders, teenage TV programs and teenage advertising. 'This is the big market of the future and word-of-mouth advertising, along with group pressure, is not only the most potent influence but in the absence of tradition, a most necessary one.' "

Absence of tradition = money. When you don't have traditional ideals to contradict, anything is permitted. (ex: wasting food)

"Does sex become unreal, a phatansy, when a person needs it to feel 'alive', to feel 'my own identity'?

"Just as college girls used the sexual phantasy of married life to protect them from the conflicts and growing pains and work of a personal commitment to science, or art, or society, are these married women putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes?"

They were boxed in and therefore directed their whole happiness towards sex.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But something has evidently gone wrong."

"Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. [...] American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy."

"The most frequent manifestations of vicarious living is a particularly structured dependence on another person, which is often mistaken for love. Such extremely intense and tenacious attachments, however, lack all the essentials of genuine love- devotion, intuitive understanding, and delight in the being of the other person in his own right and in his own way. On the contrary, these attachments are extremely possessive and tend to deprive the partner of a 'life of his own' ... The other person is needed not as someone to relate oneself to; he is needed for filling out one's inner emptiness, one's nothingness. This nothingness originally was only a phantasy, but with the persistent self-repression it approaches the state of being actual.
   All these attempts at gaining a substitute personality by vicarious living fail to free the person from a vague feeling of emptiness. The repression of genuine, spontaneous impulses leaves the person with a painful emotional vacuousness, almost with a sense of nonexistence..."
Andras Angyal, Evasion of Growth

Women used love as a way to fill their unfulfilled lives/emptiness.

"Then the patient accepts a confined world without conflict, for now his world is identical with the culture. And since anxiety comes only with freedom, the patient naturally gets over his anxiety: he is relieved from his symptoms because he surrenders the possibilities which caused his anxiety... There is certainly a question how far his gaining of release from conflict by giving up being can proceed without generating in individuals and groups a submerged despair, a resentment which will later burst out in self-destructiveness, for history proclaims again and again that sooner or later man's need to be free will out."
Rollo May, Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy

One removes anxiety by removing the possibilities.

"In our culture, the development of women has been blocked at the psychological level with, in many cases, no need recognized higher than the need for love or sexual satisfaction."

Stunted at a hormonal level.

"For, as such a person, with the years, becomes more and more himself, and truer to himself, he seems also to have a deeper and more profound relations with others, to be capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification with others, more transcendence of the boundaries of the self, without ever giving up his own individuality."

"All these words that have been written criticizing American women for castrating their husbands and sons, for dominating their children, for their material greediness, for their sexual frigidity or denial of femininity may simply mask this one underlying fact: that woman, no more than man, can live by sex alone; that her struggle for identity, autonomy- that 'personally productive orientation based on the human need for active participation in a creative task'- is inextricably linked with her sexual fulfillment, as a condition of her maturity."

"Evidently, the further women progressed from that state, the more sex became an act of human intercourse rather than a dirty joke to men; and the more women were able to love men, rather than submit, in passive distaste, to their sexual desire. In fact, the feminine mystique itself- with its acknowledgement of woman as subject and not just object of the sexual act, and its assumption that her active, willing participation was essential to man's pleasure- could not have come without the emancipation of women to human equality. As the early feminists foresaw, women's rights did indeed promote greater sexual fulfillment, for men and women.

"No one has warned them that sex can never be a substitute for personal identity; that sex itself cannot give identity to a woman, any more than to a man; that there may be no sexual fulfillment at all for the woman who seeks her self in sex."

"Maybe a woman has to be by herself to be really with her children."









The frustrations were in turn also unleashed on the children which resulted in negligence on the part of the mother.

"But a job, any job, is not the answer- in fact, it can be part of the trap. Women who do not look for jobs equal to their actual capacity, who do not let themselves develop the lifetime interests and goals which require serious education and training, who take a job at twenty or forty to 'help out at home' or just to kill extra time, are walking, almost as surely as the ones who stay inside the housewife trap, to a nonexistent future.

The solution is not a job but meaning in life for the development of the individual. Something that requires one's full commitment which they are happily willing to give.

"It is the face of the feminine mystique with its powerful hidden deterrents, educators must realize that they cannot inspire young women to commit themselves seriously to their education without taking some extraordinary measures."

"A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination." 

"No woman in America today who starts her search for identity can be sure where it will take her. No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands. But the women I met, who were moving on that unknown road, did not regret the pains, the efforts the risks." 

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"When their mothers' fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to 'beat themselves down' to be feminine; they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another's weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally see each other as they are. And this is may be the next step in human evolution."
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"The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution for men and women which will restructure all our institutions: child rearing, education, marriage, the family, the architecture of the home, the practice of medicine, work, politics, the economy, religion, psychological theory, human sexuality, morality, and the very evolution of race."

"It seemed to me that men weren't really the enemy- they were fellow victims, suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."

The problem of today concerning men and societal expectations of masculinity.

"But the media began to publicize , in more and more sensational terms, the more exhibitionist, down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions. Those who preached the man-hating sex/class warfare threatened to take over the New York NOW and the national NOW and drive out the women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children."

The media/government sent in "feminist" spies to sabotage the feminist movement.


AUGUST 26th, 1970: Women's Strike for Equality
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"Mayor Lindsay wouldn't close Fifth Avenue for our march, and I remember starting that march with the hooves of policemen's horses trying to keep us confined to the sidewalk. I remember looking back, jumping up to see over marchers' heads. I never saw so many women; they stretched back for so many blocks you couldn't see the end. I locked one arm with my beloved Judge Dorothy Kenyon (who, at eighty-two, insisted on walking with me instead of riding in the car we had provided for her), and the other arm with a young woman on the other side. I said to the others in the front ranks, 'Lock arms, sidewalk to sidewalk!' We overflowed till we filled the whole of Fifth Avenue. There were so many of use they couldn't stop us; they didn't even try. It was, as they say, the first nationwide action of women (hundreds of men also marched with us) since women won the vote itself fifty years before. Reporters who had joked about he 'bra-burners' wrote that they had never seen such beautiful women as the proud, joyous marchers who joined together that day. For all women were beautiful on that day."
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More wonderful info on the revolutions happening in the 70s here. For example, Earth Day and how it came about.

"And today who is financing the campaign to stop the final act of the women's movement for equality? Not a conspiracy of men to keep women down; rather, it is a conspiracy of those whose power, or profit, rests on the manipulation of the fears and impotent rage of passive women. Women- the last and largest group of people in this nation to demand control of their own destiny- will change the very nature of political power in this country."

"I think the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E = MC2- the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima. I believe the locked-up sexual energies have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible violence erupting in the nation and the world during these past ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will liberate these energies from the service of death and will make it really possible for men and women to 'make love, not war.'"

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The Epilogue was breathtaking and inspiring.

Basic points of the book:

Women had this undefinable problem- depression, anxiety because of their lack of meaning in their lives.

Business, Education and Media was directed at the stunting of woman's growth so she could stay in the home.

Women had nothing to look towards as a role model because their only model was being a housewife.

The feminist movements was undermined by the media: men-haters, bra-burners, frigid, spinsters...

It is not about "working" like men traditionally do. It is about finding a passion in life, something that is consistent and therefore stimulating progress in one's self.

All Betty is saying is that women weren't given the chance to develop as individuals, and they deserve this right. No matter what that turns out to be.

This book is life-changing. It relates to everyone.
"For all the new women, and the new men,"
Marvelous and deeply touching address. This summarizes the entire book and her whole message. We are all people- let us all grow together and enjoy this marvelous gift of life that we have!

--
Pub by W.M. Norton Company

Towards a Poor Theatre by Jerzy Grotowski

"Ours is not a deductive method of collective a "bag of tricks". Here everything is concentrated on the "ripening" of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bare of one's intimity- all this without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the "trance" and of the integration of all the actor's psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of "trans-lumination." 

"It is capable of challenging itself and its audience by violating accepted stereotypes of vision, feeling, and judgement- more jarring because it is imagined in the human organism's breath, body, and inner impulses. This defiance of taboo, this transgression, provides the shock which rips off the mask, enabling us to give ourselves nakedly to something which is impossible to define but which contains Eros and Caritas." 

"The spectator had thus a renewed awareness of his personal truth in the truth of the myth, and through fright and a sense of the sacred he came to catharsis. It was not by chance that the Middle Ages produced the idea of "sacral parody." 

The words "actress" and "courtesan" were once synonymous. Today they are separated by a somewhat clearer line, not through any change in the actor's world but because society has changed. Today it is the difference between the respectable woman and the courtesan which has become blurred." 

"If the actor, by setting himself a challenge publicly challenges others, and through excess, profanation and outrageous sacrilege reveals himself by casting off his everyday mask, he makes it possible for the spectator to undertake a similar process of self-penetration." 

"He must be able to express, through sound and movement, those impulses which waver on the borderline between dream and reality. In short, he must be able to construct his own psycho-analytic language of sounds and gestures in the same way that a great poet creates his own language of words." 

"One most resort to a metaphorical language to say that the decisive factor in this process is humility, a spiritual predisposition: not to do something, but to refrain from doing something, otherwise the excess becomes impudence instead of sacrifice. This means that the actor must ct in a state of trance." 

"At any rate, the decisive principle remains the following: the more we become absorbed in what is hidden inside us, in the excess, in the exposure, in the self-penetration, the more rigid must be the external discipline;" 

"We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performance, to analyse himself. We are concerned with the spectator who does not stop at an elementary stage of psychic integration content with his own petty, geometrical, spiritual stability, knowing exactly what is good and what is evil, and never in doubt. For it was not to him that El Greco, Norwid, Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky spoke, but to him who undergoes an endless process of self-development, whose unrest is not general but directed towards a search for the truth about himself and his mission in life." 

"But if this process is followed through to its extreme limit, we can in full consciousness put back our everyday mask, knowing now what purpose it serves and what it conceals beneath it." 

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Unfortunately I don't have the patience- as good as it is- to read the whole book. But- from what I've read- this can be applied in "REAL" life as well. One must always strive towards self-understanding and therefore be able to communicate one's own humanity to another.

Pub by: Simon and Schuster

Farewell Waltz by Kundera

"It seemed to him that with every oversalted mouthful he was tasting Kamila's tears, and it was his own guilt that he was swallowing."

"For a moment his photograph had acquired a three-dimensional reality, a warmth, a weight, and then had again become an impalpable. colorless image reproduced in thousands of copies and thus all the more abstract and unreal."

"Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, while blonde hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, weaness, and passivity.Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman."

"I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul," said Bertlef doubtfully."

"If black hair became a universal fashion, life in this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved."

Now, he's just making fun...

"Why do you think they try to seduce us? Solely to defy and humiliate their fellow women. God instilled in women's hearts a hatred of other women because He wanted the human race to multiply.

Both Klima and Ruzena have groups of their own sex trying to advise them what to do in situation. Basically: what men and women do in case of an unwanted pregnancy.

"Just as love makes the beloved woman more beautiful, anxiety inspired by a woman one fears brings her smallest flaws into disproportionate relief..."

"[...] the sadness that emanated from these words of Klima's had for her a pleasant odor. She sniffed at it as if it were roast pork."

Sadness is very attractive in a vain kind of way.

"Only now having lost its charm, was the mouth suddenly what it was, a real mouth, an nonindustrial orifice through which the young woman had already taken in cubing meters of dumplings, potatoes, and soups, a mouth containing teeth pocked with fillings and saliva that was no longer an intoxicating liqueur but the cousin of a glob of spit."

Pregnancy = Power

"It thrills me so to think of giving you a child."

This is such power- overrides that he has a wife!! She isn't even in a position of saying such a thing, but just because she's pregnant- he has to pay for it. It's funny, but some women take pleasure in blaming the man for his natural "reaction". It takes two to tango.

Marriage Metaphor:
"Every time we climbed up there," Skreta went on, "Suzy tried to convince me we should get married. And I'd be so worn out by the climbing that I felt old and that there was nothing left for me but to marry. But in the end I always controlled myself, and when we came back down from the scening view my strength would come back and I'd no longer want to get married. But one day Suzy made us take a detour, and the climb took so long and I agreed to get married even before we got to the top. And now we're expecting a child, and I have to think a bit about money."

"Olga was actually one of those modern women who readily divide themselves into a person who lives life and a person who observes it."

"If Olga had been a little more foolish, she would have found herself quite pretty. But since she was an intelligent girl, she considered herself much uglier than she really was, for she was actually neither ugly nor pretty, and any man with normal aesthetic requirements would gladly spend the night with her."

"I picture my soul with a strong chin and sensual lips, but my chin is small and so is my mouth. If I'd never seen myself in a mirror and had to describe my outside appearance from what I know of the inside of me, the portrait wouldn't look at all like me! I am not at all the person I look like!"

"You need to have at least one certainty: to remain in control of your own death and o the ability to choose its time and manner. You can put up with a lot of things. You know you can get away from people whenever you want."

"It's incredible that hideous-looking individuals decide to procreate. They probably imagine that the burden of ugliness will be lighter if they share it with their descendants."

"Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up something itself on this small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile." 

"Something that always utterly disgusts me about mankind is seeing how its cruelty, its baseness, and its stupidity manage to wear the lyrical mask. She sends you to your death, and she experiences it as a romantic feat of wounded love. And you mount the scaffold because of an ordinary narrow-minded woman, feeling that you are playing a role in a tragedy Shakespeare wrote for you." 

"They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper in men's ears: Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as the breast you so madly adore." 

"When he is more mature he will find out that things are transient, and he will become aware that beyond one woman's horizon there opens up a horizon of yet more women." 

"Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty." 

A reference to a toothache (Notes from the Underground):
"He cannot sit down. Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth." 

"[...] it was because of her that their marriage was menaced by a bomb deposited in another woman's belly, by a charge timed to blow everything up in seven months." 

Everyone is death with anxiety- with things that mean the world to them- and in a second don't matter. Like for Ruzena and Jakab- they eventually become indifferent to their world/anxieties.

Kima and Mrs. Klima have a very sick love. They know everything about each other and the relationship is seeping with jealousy and regret, They have lost the connection long ago but don't want to admit it.


Further CONNECTIONS with Dostoevsky:
References Crime and Punishment

"Yes, there was something that brought him close to Raskolnikov: the pointlessness of the murder, its theoretical nature." 

and

"Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character's hysterical feelings." 

"'The police don't have much influence over the infernal powers,' the inspector said."

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He spun around this controversial topic very elegantly. I really liked each person's perspective/incentives towards abortion and pregnancy. Klima had to remove this from his wife's knowledge so wanted an abortion. Ruzena was a "stupid slut" apparently with a "good heart" and used her pregnancy as a way of getting money/fame. The poor girl was very CLOSE to thinking though!  Mrs. Klima is a typical housewife suffering from paranoia and yet beautiful. The Doctor helped Klima because he wanted fame.

Interesting story- of course I take it more of a farce than discussing the topic of abortion seriously. I guess it shows what happens to certain individuals when such a situation presents itself.

Pub: Harper Perennial

Slaughter-House-Five by Vonnegut

"And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?"

"But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."

"He still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist."

"It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

"Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons."

"He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more,' said Rosewater."

"The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well connected. So it goes."

God is the best connection to have!

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I'm glad I first read "A Man Without a Country" first- because it really helps me understand this book. He talks about how he tried to write the book and how he didn't know where to start. He had seen so much and he wanted to do it justice.
"Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O'Hare was saying, in effect was, 'Why don't you tell the truth for a change?'"
And I guess that's what the book turned out to be- about some idiot guy who stumbles into this situation and doesn't know what to do with it. Ridiculousness.

I enjoyed the concept of time in this book- and how we just get stuck in this chronological way of life. We can't see beyond it most of the time.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

My very good friend suggested this book to me while in Russia- having never heard of Kurt Vonnegut. They pronounce it as Vohn-e-gut. I had no idea that he is such a famous American writer.

"Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball." 

"Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup." 

"He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress." 

"Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one." 

"What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work you do."

"How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."

"[...] but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit."  

"I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren." 

"What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do." 

"What has allowed so many PPs [psychopathic personalities] to rise so high in corportations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive." 

"By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society." 

"God would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time." 

"I'm startled that I became a writer. I don't think I can control my life or my writing." 

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn't nice, I don't know what is." 




Saul Steinberg
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Jesus Christ was an anarchist.


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Pub by Seven Stories Press 

The Master of Petersburg by Coetzee

"Her tongue like a bird fluttering in her mouth: soft feathers, soft wing-beats."

"If we do not forget, they say, the world will soon be nothing but a huge library."

"It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air."

Thinking animal- I like that.

"In his fingers a needle is a curiosity, an arrow from Lilliput." 

"Forever I look back. Forever I am absorbed in your gaze. A field of crystal points, dancing, winking, and I one of them. Stars in the sky, and fires on the plain answering them. Two realms signalling to each other."

"Rather, he feels like a leaf or a seed in the grip of a headlong force, a winged seed drawn up into the highest windstream, carried dizzily above the oceans."

Marvelous. Coetzee connects the process of sex to reaching his dead son. 

"Nothing in the pressure of her body answers to him. Disgrace, he thinks: this is how one enters disgrace."

Maybe that is the secret to his other book.

"For that is surely what a woman wants: to be courted, wooed, persuaded, won! Even when she surrenders, she wants to give herself up not frankly but in a delicious haze of confusion, resisting yet unresisting. Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No: to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of resurrection."

"'Why are we given old age, brothers? So that we can grow small again, small enough to crawl through the eye of a needle.'"

"A horse does not understand that it has been born into the world to pull carts. It thinks it is here to be beaten. It thinks of a cart as a huge object it is tied to so that it cannot run away while it is being beaten.'"

"Is such a woman marked by abandon, an abandon that does not care where it leads, to pleasure or to pain, that uses the sensual body only as a vehicle, and only because we cannot live disembodied?"

"Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes?"

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He writes beautifully. I actually read this while living in St. Petersburg, Russia. He knows the city pretty well- I wonder if he lived here for awhile?
I like that he wrote about Dostoevsky. and from such an interesting angle.

Pub- pdf 

Disgraced by J.M. Coetzee

"Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes - all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?"

He doesn't see her for who she is because he doesn't have an interest in her but the idea of her and what she inspires in him.

3 different kinds of disgrace: his own resignation, his daughter's rape, and the dogs that are killed because no one wants them. He cares about the disgrace of others, he is very attentive to it. "But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway? For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing." It gives him meaning in life, a purpose, to save the dogs' honor. He also compares his daughter to the dogs, him needing to be a guide in her life.

In a way it's unfair- what Bev thinks of David. Expecting him to "do his duty" just because he has heard things about him. Thinking a man will not say "no" which is true most of the time.

"He thinks of himself as obscure and growing obscurer. A figure from the margins of history."

"But I say to myself, we are all sorry when we are found out. Then we are very sorry. The question is not, are we sorry? The question is, what lesson have we learned? The question is, what are we going to do now that we are sorry?"

"[...] trying to accept disgrace as my state of being."

He asks himself whether he will be forgiven for betraying the dogs. From whom is he asking forgiveness?? Is it God? Is it himself?

"That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better."

Stepping over time.

"Teresa now sits staring out over the marshes toward the gates of hell, cradling the mandolin on which she accompanies herself in her lyric flights [...]" 

This would make a great painting.

"That is what Soraya and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry."

"By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness."

"'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.' 
'Like a dog.' 
'Yes, like a dog.''

Clever how he ties it back to the dog motif.

"How can he ever explain, to them, to their parents, to D Village, what Teresa and her lover have done to deserve being brought back to this world?"

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Dogs symbolize disgrace. He chose to give up his disgrace maybe, in the end.
I like this character, but he doesn't have much depth. He is very confused most of the time, but in an "obscure" way. That's right he is obscure- nothing really defined. I don't understand what he fought FOR exactly. He keeps saying that it was his "principle" to plead guilty but not grovel in front of his accusers and beg for his life back. Maybe it was pride, it certainly wasn't love. He just picked her up one day and had his way with her, and mostly without her consent. That's the creepy part. I guess it was probably her youth that got to him. He was losing himself, becoming older. He doesn't seem to have much meaning in life, doesn't like his job, and has occasional sex with whores.
Then why did he take it so hard? When he lost his job- one which he didn't like? When he became a laughing-stock? What was it exactly that he lost?
That's what's puzzling.
The fact is- I don't think he learned anything from this experience. He still experienced desire when he looked at her little sister, he still went to the theater to see her. If he wasn't chased away by the boyfriend, what would he have done? Gone after her to the dressing room? I wouldn't put it past him.
He likes to have things his own way, incapable of understanding the decisions of his daughter.
He has attachment issues, picking up women and then discarding them.
Yes obscure. For that- I like Coetzee because he showed this ambiguity perfectly. One can't put one's finger on what exactly this character is. Not maybe because he doesn't have depth, but it's not shown, because maybe the character himself doesn't even know.
His daughter was raped and decided to keep the child. That's the worst kind of disgrace, especially with the little boy living on the same land. And yet- she lived with it. She didn't give up, while David is complaining and moaning about his little affair. Mr. Isaac was right- he's sorry because he was found out. Actually he's sorry because she didn't return the same passion he had for her. She betrayed him in a way, and that is his disgrace. Doing the act itself, no regrets whatsoever, justifying it by saying it's a "passion". Anyway I don't think he did something wrong, good for him, good for her- although she wasn't that into it.

He is unwanted just like the dogs which are put down. No one wants him, not his daughter, not his lover, not the school. He is not needed by this world, and I guess that is a hard thing to live with. Which is why he goes back to the dead and finds comfort with them, with the concept of Immortality. Teresa was also discarded by Byron (not loved). He finds comfort in that.

Interesting book, too plot-based, not the style I usually read. But I like the way he doesn't really tie anything together, and how undefined it is.

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Pub- pdf (here)