no subject

[lotesse]

Doing pretty well, all things. Finding life here in Uptown very easy, much easier than the hard winter in the cold rural world I'd been planning on getting through. Emotionally, I'm continuing to process and move forward. I am continuing to find myself grateful for my current ease, grateful to be enjoying it, to have the means and education to escape.

Going to feminist book club; ready Sady Doyle's Trainwreck, next up This Bridge Called My Back. Read the first half of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me on the bus to my sib's this evening (two things struck me; the epigraph from Baldwin, elliptically describing the aftermath of a lynching, that made me stop hard; and a bit when Coates is writing about his response to an image of a black child hugging a police officer, and Coates doesn't identify him by name but I remember, I remember Devonte Hart cause he's dead now, his crazy white mother drove his whole family off a cliff. hoo.)

Working a lot, and making money. Feeling lots of existential angst about if I'm doing good enough or not. The impermanence and instability of my situation seems to me to be a great defect -- although, now that I write it down, it's also been one of the reasons why I've gotten through all the upset in my personal life as easily as I have, because my work is portable. Hmm.

Listening to Louisa May Alcott. Read a great editorial in the New Yorker (eta: link!) about Jo/Bhaer as daddy kink, with specific implications of Bronson Alcott; the essayist didn't address it, but I increasingly see Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom as id-tastic daddy/little girl obedience and reward fantasies. It makes the moralism easier to bear; like the argument people make about The Taming of the Shrew.

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

That... I always read Jo/Bhaer as more of a student-teacher thing, or like, coach-student (since he was privately teaching her), but yeah, daddy kink works too.

[lotesse]

I mean I think, biographically speaking, it's both? Insofar as Louisa Alcott was one of those historical cases of a woman who is permitted to be literary/educated because it suited her father to have a well-educated dedicated scribe. A very Lacanian complete binding together of the literary with the Name of the Father. It makes sense to me that there would be a great deal of ambivalence there -- see also Mary Shelley.

[princessofgeeks]

I like your thinky thoughts about Alcott.

[lotesse]

:)

[lavendertook]

Glad you are doing well. Portable work is an excellent thing to have. I think figuring out how to dance through instability is just what life is at all times. <3

[lotesse]

Hmm, maybe time to reread Annette Kolodny's essay "Dancing Through the Minefield"! I do think that's the right way of thinking, it's just hard to believe in consistently, at least for me, at least at the moment. I am hoping that, if I give it time, I'll be able to settle back into a more beneficial sense of pronoia.

[nocowardsoul]

Jo/Bhaer as daddy kink

It's the opposite of the Oedipal-ness of Jo/Laurie.

[lotesse]

I can see that! I'm such a sibcest shipper, you'd think I'd be all about the Jo/Laurie. But for some reason it's just not exciting enough. I like my sibcest very powered up, two powerful scions made more powerful by their relationship, and Jo/Laurie has always given me stagnant vibes. I mean, I can see what everyone else is getting there, but it's never, even a little bit, come through for me.

[nocowardsoul]

I mostly prefer them as friends, but I like some Jo/Laurie fic.

[starlady]

That Alcott essay is quite interesting. I'm still not over the absolute burn of "He was an intellectual, or at least, a man who had thoughts."

Glad to hear you're doing well.

[lotesse]

Bronson Alcott reminds me powerfully of my own dad -- who has been completely lost, at this point, to the leftist version of the Russian internet propaganda. Sometimes, a man who has thoughts is a dangerous thing.

<3