in which she ponders writing and literary theory and feminism and doesn't come to any conclusions

i can tell you that when every experience is fodder for your character sketches, it makes meetings ever so much more amusing. even better when you can actually sit with your laptop and type the scenes in directly, a sort of simultaneous transcription. i'm gleeful. and leaning increasingly towards fiction rather than anthropology. but it's a fiction that will contain an awful lot of truth. i'm hoping a plot will develop out of the character sketches, as i've got no idea of one at this moment. i'm just riding the waves of inspiration. and figuring that writing it is the best way to make sense of it all.

* * *

i fear i may be a member of the theory generation.

we thought we were so smart.

and we still are.

but at what price?

* * *

one of my facebook friends shared a link to this blog, which suggests that there is a new era coming - one in which women will take the lead and heal the earth. while i think this is a wonderful (if fanciful and slightly new agey) notion, i wonder if this person has spent any time at all with groups of women. because there's no one more hard on one another than women. we do more to keep one another down than any man ever even thought of doing to us. there is more manipulative game-playing among groups of women than anywhere else. if we're not sneering at one another, sniping, talking behind one another's backs or outright treating one another as invisible when we feel threatened by another woman's intellect or viewpoint or very presence, then we're scheming and jockeying for position. it would take a miracle for women to truly embrace the role of healer and begin to heal through peace and love. there might be less bombs, but i am absolutely certain the number of poisonings would rise.

i should note that i am by no means anti-feminist and i most fervently wish that women would start working together and stop dragging one another down. it's just that when i look around me, right here in my own community, i don't see it happening anytime soon.

i think i like the brand of feminism and femininity presented here (and embodied in lady gaga) much better. as halberstam says: "Gaga Feminism as embodied in certain eclectic performers does not promote a new liberal version of femininity, rather it inhabits wild terrains of sonic and political chaos in order to bring new forms of politics, culture, and gender to life." that sounds much more interesting than the earth mother, sit in a circle and gaze at our vaginas kind.

* * *

sabin and i are madly in love with the mean kitty.

* * *

the k boards (sorry, there are no j boards) on pinterest: kitchen goodness (this is one of the early boards), kulturhus inspiration related to my involvement in my local community).

bakhtin's chronotope and murakami moments

russian literary theorist mikhael bakhtin had a theory of the chronotope. it wasn't one of his more-developed theories and the closest he comes to a definition is: "in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. the intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope" (quoted in the dialogic imagination: four essays, edited by michael holquist, 1981).

while this may sound like something generated by the postmodern generator, i think it's actually a way of explaining why when we read murakami, we enter a murakami world - one in which we still access this world, but from a parallel place, where it seems like a good idea to hang out for some time down a well, or make elaborate meals involving spaghetti late at night, or in which we lose our cat and comb jazz bars and hotels full of anonymous, locked doors looking for it, possibly in the company of a brilliant, but young and uneducated japanese girl. murakami time becomes real time and our world becomes filled with murakami moments.

i think what i like about entering that murakami space is that it is so much like the world i inhabit in my dreams - waking and dreaming intersect with no apparent cognitive dissonance in ways that are usually convincing only in dreams. yet they take on flesh and feel concrete and whole - they are, in other words, a chronotope. i think it's the mark of truly magical writing. it transports and transforms everything, including space and time.

i wonder what bakhtin would have made of murakami?