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Posts categorised ‘Books’

Link: “Sex in stories, stories in sex

Original post found at: https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/sex-in-stories/

As an author, and as a lover, I have found that sex is best when it’s done as an act of communication. I don’t mean that good communication is fundamental to good sex (though it is). I mean that the hottest sex is communicating something, whether between participants or to observers, an expression of something that needs to be shared. What that thing is varies with the people involved, but the best sex is the most uninhibited and authentic in what it reveals, and always expresses some part of what it means to be human.

And if this is true, is this not storytelling? Do we not tell a story to ourselves, our lovers, our audience when we fuck? Stories of love, stories of lust, stories of power and control, stories of uncertainty, and vulnerability, nervousness and teasing, stories of anger and reconciliation, stories of self-loathing and obliteration, stories of catharsis — so many different stories, all reaching toward a freedom that lies beyond ourselves alone.

It follows that, in storytelling, sex is a powerful means of characterisation that can in turn transform characters and advance narratives. As an expression of humanity it can be as powerfully thematic as any other literary device. Sex can be the pulsing blood of stories that have something to say about life. How sad it is, then, that so many well-established authors are more comfortable depicting scenes of sexual assault than writing a meaningful everyday screw. When the full, human power of sex in writing is shunned, no wonder people grow weary and wary of sex in media, not to mention alienated from their own sexuality.

What makes a story hot? When it means something. The best sex scenes mean something to the story, and the best stories are interwoven through their sex scenes. Together, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

I loved this piece. I’ve never liked the sneering down at sex scenes, as if sex isn’t a part of life, and as if it doesn’t reveal a lot about someone’s character, the way they behave sexually. I’m not about pretending it doesn’t.

Link: “‘I should not have written ‘A Clockwork Orange’’: How Anthony Burgess came to disown his own novel

Original post found at: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-01-29/i-should-not-have-written-a-clockwork-orange-how-anthony-burgess-came-to-disown-his-own-novel.html

British author Anthony Burgess was inspired to write his best-known novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), by the uncivil drift that he perceived among the youth of his time. That is why, a decade later, when headlines in the vein of “Police hunt the Clockwork Orange rapist gang” or “Child dies in Clockwork Orange war” started to appear in the press, he could not help but feel that something had gone tremendously wrong.

“The misunderstanding [of the novel] will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation,” he wrote in 1985 in Flame into Being, a biography of D.H. Lawrence where he compared the scandal caused by Lady Chat­ter­ley’s Lover (1928) with the controversy surrounding his popular dystopia. “If a couple of nuns are raped in the Vatican, I get a call from a newspaper. They have turned me into some kind of expert on violence,” he lamented in a television interview. Burgess, however, was clear that his problems did not necessarily stem from the book, but from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation.

An interesting article. Not overly related to the article, but something I’m reminded of nonetheless, is the time I was having a conversation with someone I know about books, and reading. She mentioned how much she enjoyed books that experimented with the English language, devising fictional new dialects of English and making extensive use of them, and so forth. So naturally I said, “Oh! Well if you like that, you should read A Clockwork Orange, because the whole thing is written in this fictional, Russian-influenced argot…”

She told me she had heard this, but she’d also “heard” there was a rape scene in A Clockwork Orange, and that this was the reason she’d never read it, because she really hated reading about “anything like that”. She did ask me to confirm whether it did or it didn’t, but of course I had to be like, “Well, uh, yes, I really recommend you never read A Clockwork Orange then…”

Anyway, it’s been many many years since I read this book. I’m not sure how I’d feel about it if I read it again now. I guess at the time I got the impression it had some confused premises, and ultimately couldn’t provide a satisfying answer to the core question it posed, which was whether the state has the right (or even the responsibility) to effectively torture people into behaving “morally”. Partly because it concludes that such torture isn’t even effective (which seems about right), but also because IIRC it never bothers to wonder why Alex and his crew are running around committing violent crimes in the first place, beyond a vague “oh, they’re young, lol”. In the final chapter – the one infamously omitted from the original American edition as well as the film adaption – it becomes apparent that Burgess’ “solution” is for young men to settle down with a wife and child, as if violent men won’t just become domestic abusers. And I get Burgess basically wrote the book as a trauma reaction to his pregnant wife being brutally bashed (losing her baby, and dying a few years later from unresolved complications), but still, it doesn’t a satisfying thought experiment make.

There was another quote from the article I found interesting:

“Anthony Burgess was an established man, conservative in many of his beliefs, his social, religious and political values. With that ending, he was putting the middle class as the savior against authoritarian states,” explains Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, teacher of English literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. “The problem with free will is the philosophical concept that the novel articulates and that he sees as the space where youth develops. When he starts to explore it, he notices the enormous burden of the influence of the state on that free will. His way of understanding good and evil in the novel is political, not metaphysical or moral in the classic religious sense. The authoritarian state penetrates the psyche of the individual, the self.”

As in: maybe the reason he couldn’t satisfyingly answer his own question is that as a conservative, his conservative values impeded his ability to think through a logically coherent position. Why would you presume that “free will” means violence, and that “the state” is a counter to violence, when the state is the most violent entity of all under capitalism? The men who bashed Burgess’ wife were soldiers, after all. Who teaches soldiers to live and breathe violence? And not just under “authoritarian regimes”. The idea that middle-class respectability politics is another counter to violence is another laughable proposition, but whatever…

I guess the point is, it’s a book with a complicated legacy. But at least that Nadsat stuff was unique.

Link: “Afterword to Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin 1994

Original post found at: http://theliterarylink.com/afterword.html

This had been languishing in my “opened but still unread” tabs for ages, but I found it interesting – Ursula Le Guin’s ruminations on her use of the pronoun “he” for the genderless (except in kemmer) people of her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and what other approaches she could have taken instead, since in the years following the book’s publication she’d come to agree that the so-called “generic he” never really existed. Even though this afterword mentions various example texts, with the pronouns altered, that you can read, you can’t actually read them (at least not on that site). But the piece is interesting nonetheless.

Link: “What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures” by Charlie Jane Anders

Original post found at: https://buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/what-the-universal-translator-tells-us-about/

A neat piece about the allure of the “universal translator”, often seen in science fiction and sometimes fantasy, being that the audience stand-in characters can understand totally foreign people without having to expend any extra effort (e.g. to understand cultural differences).

I bought Tom Ballard’s I, Millennial as a Christmas present for my mum this year, and I’m now frantically reading it before I have to wrap it up to give it away 🤣 It’s so good! I always knew he was a leftie, ever since Tonightly (RIP) did an item on the Marxism conference and it was actually positive, lol. This book is both riotously funny and a genuinely Marxist denunciation of capitalism. My mum is going to love it 🤣

Link: “Freedom and Creative Vitality in a Market Society: Ursula K. Le Guin on Saving Books from Profiteering and Commodification

Original post found at: https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/12/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-award-speech/

Blog post about how Ursula K. LeGuin (one of my heroes, insofar as I have such a thing!) opposed the commodification of literature, and other creative works. This really resonated with me – the profit motive, and publishers’ desire for “marketable” works over “good” ones, are so toxic and counterposed to what actually motivates creativity.

Esperanto’s Influence on Orwell’s Newspeak

A couple of times in recent weeks I’ve seen some discussion about Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and whether it was influenced by, or how it could be translated into, Esperanto. After all, Newspeak infamously uses words like “ungood” for “bad”, which is unironically parallel to Esperanto’s standard word for bad, malbona.

It seems like …

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a cartoony avatar of Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.