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linkspam: empathy, self-worth, Dworkin
Apr. 28th, 2024 11:06 pmA Novel Is an Empathy Engine by Cecilia Tan: "When I unleash a book onto the world, I imagine it as a fiction-fueled thresher, reaping hearts and leaving a trail of those who laughed, cried, and were changed in its wake. This might seem like a fantasy unto itself, but this metaphor is based not in my own wildest dreams, but in science. A novel is an empathy engine, and an SF/F genre novel is the turbocharged model."
(I did research on this sort of thing, once. I appreciate the boldness of Tan's tone and approach; got some good swagger)
On Self-Respect by Joan Didion: "Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions."
(a rather hard piece, but one I found bracing, in a moment when I needed bucking up)
Hostile to Female Status Altogether: Reading "Intercourse" With Gender Dysphoria by Jude Doyle: "Though she's rarely given credit for it, Andrea Dworkin was one of the great horror writers of the twentieth century."
(this essay spoke to me; I've loved Dworkin's glorious militant language and anger, the sweep and exhortation of her rhetoric, while struggling with her politics and the rotten legacy seen in the terfs. It was interesting to hear from another person who responded, as a youth, to Dwork's prose, and I like the reparative attitude of taking what you can use from sites and sources that may be, are likely to be, impure or problematic)
(I did research on this sort of thing, once. I appreciate the boldness of Tan's tone and approach; got some good swagger)
On Self-Respect by Joan Didion: "Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions."
(a rather hard piece, but one I found bracing, in a moment when I needed bucking up)
Hostile to Female Status Altogether: Reading "Intercourse" With Gender Dysphoria by Jude Doyle: "Though she's rarely given credit for it, Andrea Dworkin was one of the great horror writers of the twentieth century."
(this essay spoke to me; I've loved Dworkin's glorious militant language and anger, the sweep and exhortation of her rhetoric, while struggling with her politics and the rotten legacy seen in the terfs. It was interesting to hear from another person who responded, as a youth, to Dwork's prose, and I like the reparative attitude of taking what you can use from sites and sources that may be, are likely to be, impure or problematic)
