I Run From Bears

“I was driving through Oklahoma, which makes you uncomfortable if you’re a midget, so that you pretty much pull in and out of Chevrons as quick as you can, avoiding the cheaper truck stops so you don’t run into a rabble of rednecks. I’d been just driving and driving, probably thirteen hours straight, so I could get to Arkansas before dark. When you’re riding like that, a lot of thoughts go through your mind. I’d been sort of thinking about my life, about this wanderlust I had. It wasn’t a bad life—wandering around bum fuck Egypt, seeing a lot of America, freaking people out when I showed up at their church rummage sales—but it was feeling increasingly purposeless.”

“Generally, men’s books are about abandoning consciousness and setting off for adventures and solving physical problems; Levine wanted to write a book with a female protagonist who wants a physical adventure but can’t have one. Levine “refused to leave the feminine behind,” which I took to mean that she didn’t want to drop a female character into a traditional male plot because that would mean abandoning the real constraints women face–the obligations/tethers to life that preclude “going out into the world!” This reminded me of Sylvia Path writing in her journal at eighteen about her “consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soliders, barroom regulars–to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording … to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night”; but, she goes on to say (in a tone I can only read as a torpedo to the gut), she can do none of this, because, “I am a girl, a female, always in danger of assault.” The adventures of men and women are different.”

“Hesperus Press has raided Woolf’s volumes of critical writing and rescued four lesser-known literary essays, grouping them under the title On Fiction. Each essay brims with insight and interpretation that is conveyed stylishly and authoritatively. Here is a writer expounding on the secrets of her craft. In one essay, “Women and Fiction”, she classifies criticism as one of the few “sophisticated arts”, something seldom practised by women, at least in 1929. She foresees more women tackling and mastering it, albeit in a “golden” future when they will no longer have to protest to be heard, being enfranchised, financially and socially independent and with “a room to themselves” – a reference to her most celebrated critical work, “A Room of One’s Own”, published one year earlier. The essays are bound by ideas that are perceptive and prophetic. She scrutinizes the worth of literature past and present but goes the extra mile to consider if it, and its practitioners, can improve and increase in value in the future.”

“In early August 1936, Joyce had sent his grandson ‘a little cat filled with sweets’ – a kind of Trojan cat to outwit the grown-ups. A few weeks later, while in Copenhagen and probably after hunting for another fine gift, Joyce penned ‘Cats’, which begins: ‘Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen.’ Surely there were cats in Copenhagen! But perhaps not secretly delicious ones. And so the story proceeds to describe a Copenhagen in which things are not what they seem,” said Herbert. “For an adult reader (and no doubt for a very clever child) ‘Cats’ reads as an anti-establishment text, critical of fat-cats and some authority figures, and it champions the exercise of common sense, individuality and free will.”