This is going to have to be quick, and a postscript to the posting that I made last night...I have to be in the shower soon, and get ready for work, but my mind has been chewing on the Crosbie book(sometimes, or often rather, I just can't let go)and I need to expostulate here for a moment...I read the last few pages again, where Madonna is in the Playboy mansion with Hefner(weird I know) and she discovers a few pages of a manuscript, entitled Dorothy L'Amour which reads "His voice was familiar, yet strange to me. Come with me, he said, and I lifted my hand. Dying, I saw him rush before me in the clear blue water, I heard the strings begin, the movement of the sea"...(Crosbie181-2) Madonna asks him what he is writing, and he "wrests the pages from her hands. We are writing about someone you do not know, someone we consider to be the embodiment of beauty and cardinal virtue" (ibid 182). The novel approaches its end by reading "Hefner stands frozen, clutching the manuscript to his chest. We have come this far, Dorothy, he says, as the pages begin to slide to the floor.[paragraph break] We have come this far and it is not over. It isn't over until the fat lady sings, and as you know, we do not allow her on the premises.[paragraph break] Tucking a roll of Viagra into his breast pocket, he opens the door and sails forward, toward the sound of music that has always imprecated him to feel love" (ibid 182). So, now I'm convinced that Crosbie wrote this as if Hefner wrote the whole thing. Why? This is what I'm pondering/digesting. Most fairy tales were written by men(think of the Grimm brothers, Hans Christian Anderson, etc.), and men when they write about women tend to fantasize, embellish, make them wispy faery-like creatures that are hard to pin down, sometimes weak, subject to their ever-changing emotions(stereotype, anyone?), not strong at all...they are almost always "rescued" by a charming prince or doomed because of a tragic flaw. Crosbie's(or Hefner's, depending on how you look at it) Stratten is a bit more complicated than that...she is a bit like Snow White with a dash of the Witch, Sleeping Beauty with the cold-heartedness of Maleficent...but she does posess her tragic flaw, her beauty...and is that what leads to her death? I don't know. She also appears, through much of this novel to be just lost, mentally, struggling with herself, her place, who she is...If Hefner is indeed supposed to be the narrator, writing Dorothy's memoirs for her, filling it with detail that he couldn't possibly know, is he making her into that weak woman figure that is so prevalent in fairy tale, or he trying to make her more human, all the while subconsiously, because of the society in which he lives and functions(and in which he is highly successful), sliding her into a patriarchal ideal? There were many times throughout the book where I found some of Dorothy's "idols" a little weird, given her age and upbringing(she was only 20 when she died, in 1980)...she had a rather intense obsession with Frank Sinatra(a contemporary of Hefner's and frequent guest at the Playboy mansion), and was extremely(and I mean EXTREMELY)well-read, referencing Proust and other rather uppity literati...I just thought, as I was reading that this was Crosbie, a Ph.D in English Lit., inserting her own authorial voice, but it could have been Hefner slipping his own ideas into Dorothy's "thoughts."Or, is this me, thinking that perhaps a Playboy bunny couldn't be quoting Goethe in her sleep, and what does that say about my assumptions that are perhaps socially constructed(and not even appropriate or correct), that one cannot be undeniably beautiful and undeniably brilliant at the same time? I mean, come on, I listen to the Stones and read the classics, a walking paradox...yet, I do not possess the radiance that Stratten is said to have beamed onto the world. I'm really trying to wrap my head around all of this, which is great because I LOVE books that make me think...Why did/does Crosbie write with a male voice, when she is a devoted feminist? I love the fact that she didn't let the reader know until the very end that the narrator was Hefner the entire time, for it makes you wonder, how do men really see women? On what pedestal do they place them? If this woman hadn't been a centerfold, and had just been normal sans celebrity, how would she have been viewed differently? Was Hefner trying to save her reputation? And, how can Lynn Crosbie possibly think as Hugh Hefner would, would he even write something like that? A man who practices something like a modern version of keeping concubines catering to the whims of a patriarchal society in which women are empowered by baring their parts to men? Is Crosbie trying to make Hefner into a sympathetic figure who "really understands" his "bunnies"? Or a pathetic old man trying to hero-worship the women whose stardom he has had a hand in creating, only to inadvertently foster feelings in them of self-loathing and depression? Dorothy was not the first centerfold to die tragically, or to slip mentally, and Hefner talks about ones that preceeded her, but it is her memoir that he writes. Perhaps it is his guilt taking over, and he is realizing a conscience however briefly about his role in the oppression of women in America over the past however many years...It's certainly a bit brief, since he still tucks "a roll of Viagra into his breast pocket" and continues on with his day...Need to shower, work and mull...

This is the next selection for the 3D book club...I've been lagging on getting started on it with the whole car getting stolen thing, but since people keep asking, I shan't put it off any longer.  

Breathless. After reading Lynn Crosbie's Dorothy L'Amour, that is what I am: simply breathless. I had to lie on the couch for a few minutes and just be, as I let the final words of the narrator wash over me like ice-cold waves, refreshing, reverberating. When I began the book, I knew it would be so...I fell in love with her poetry my last year at McGill, in Professor Lecker's Canadian Long Poem class...We read Queen Rat, Crosbie's new and selected poetry. She is in-your-face, gritty, bloody, harsh with descriptives but also starkly beautiful. I had dreamed of finding someone who wrote like that, publishing someone like that, being the person who was published who could write like that, and there she was staring back at me page after page. I even used her to formulate a thesis surrounding cannibalistic nature in her work, but my professor, a balding short man who hated all Americans and everything they stood for, though he admired my comments and thought processeses up to that point, ripped my paper to shreds in front of the entire seminar...brutally in fact such that other classmates(including a girl on which I had a crush)took to my defense. Anyway, I found out at that time that she had published one novel, Paul's Case, as well as several books of poetry. I searched for that novel far and wide, it had been out-of-print for a bit, especially due to its graphic and controversial subject matter. That is why I loved Crosbie so much, she wasn't afraid to push the envelope and all its contents, however dirty and revolting into your lap, laughing the whole time at your somewhat frightened/perturbed expression(or at least I imagine this so). So, doing my normal search on Amazon for stuff that I might like to read, I discovered about 6 monthes ago, that she had written another novel, called Dorothy L'Amour, it being a novel written in journal/first-person stream of consciousness style about the Canadian playmate Dorothy Stratten. It seemed like a much easier novel to come by...Well, I went digging...Every time I was in Canada I went looking for it, in used bookstores, in new bookstores, Book Warehouse, everywhere...I also went looking for her poetry, but I really really wanted to see how she wrote a novel. I even got a free Gwendolyn MacEwen book out of a long-winded discussion surrounding MacEwen(another one of my favorite poets)and Crosbie that I had with two lovely older gentlemen at a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore in the old part of Vancouver. I had absolutely no luck: it seemed like this enigma, this Holy Grail of novels that I felt that I was perhaps not worthy to find...I could have ordered it off Amazon, potentially, but I wanted to find it, to know that someone stocked it, to believe that someone else wanted to sell her to the world of readers...Well, it was all I talked about, I guess...I obsess over books that I can't find or have readily(earlier this year all my friends had to listen to me rant about not being able to find The Devil Wears Prada for at least a good few weeks)...Well, Keren, while we were in bed one night, asked me about Crosbie's novel, what the name was, etc. I didn't think anything of it, and I may have actually apologized for boring her with my praise of this feminist, but not so well-known, Canadian author. A few weeks later, a package was waiting at my mailbox when I got home from work...It was from a small bookstore in North Dakota...I was on the phone with Keren, and said, "I didn't order any books!" To which she replied "Maybe you did it in your sleep!" I responded back by saying, "If that's the case, I have really big fucking problems now!" After I got off the phone with her, I opened it up, and there was the book, my Grail. What a gift. I've thanked her everyday since I began it, and now that I've turned the final page and closed the cover, I thank you once more my love. Sheer brilliance, cover to cover. I wish I could write like that, I hope upon hope that someday I can. So heart-wrenching, so thought-provoking, so true. I don't necessarily think this book is for everyone, Crosbie has a different style (think Faulkner gone pop culture mixed with Sylvia Plath), but her prose, just like her poetry is just very real. It documents Stratten's life, from a young teen all the way to her tragic death at the hands of her estranged husband(all of the fact is true, common knowledge, so it's not like I'm blowing the ending or anything). Stratten is a sometime poet herself, and her thoughts and writing are lyrical in their disjointedness(this is possible with Crosbie, believe me). Oh! It's not like there's a really gripping plot, it's a memoir told through thought and memory, but wow...What is interesting, though is that all along, you believe it is Dorothy writing the memoir, though the last few pages were told from Hugh Hefner's point of view, trailing off, leading me to believe that perhaps(only perhaps, for that would seriously colour my reading of the novel very differently, and for Crosbie a proclaimed feminist to pull a twist like that? Huh!) he is the narrator/writer instead...This is when I wish other people read the books that I did, instead of going "Oh! That's interesting..." like most people tend to do, so I could discuss instead of pasting this drivel on the internet. But Crosbie is not everyone's cup of tea, think Jasmine: seductive and deep, with a dash of absinthe and a hint of crimson blood. I drew in every word of her prose, like it was oxygen, necessary to my living, but there are some quotes that I absolutely adored(as per usual)..."On a morning in August, I am awake at dawn, reading. I am looking for ways to better remember my childhood, my life until now. I watch the sun rise, its beauty diminished by contemplation. The sky is roseate, apricot, ice blue: a pasque flower, strewn with purplish bells. It is a chromatic phenomenon, emptied of meaning, confined by the conventions of sensation and form.[paragraph break] I think of how well writers evoke and situate their lives, each splinter and pang, the corresponding pastorals: locking themselves away with boxes of madeleines, becoming enormous with recollection" (Crosbie 21). In the next quote, Stratten is talking to Hefner: "We are sitting at the edge of the pool, wrapped in striped beach towels. I tell him that my memories are as isolated as little villages in glass globes. [paragraph break] When I write, I tell him, everyone's voices merge together in my memory, like iron filaments to a magnet" (Crosbie 43). And here too, talking to Hef again: "I still feel something for him, I told Hefner when he asked.[paragraph break] That is merely what remains of dead love, he said. How it clamours to be heard, predicating angrily, I made you. The cells and skin we discard periodically, that allow us to become someone new" (ibid 149). Finally, one of the last things Dorothy thinks about before she dies, when she's on the way to visiting the man who will soon kill her: "I think about failure. Those who have failed utterly, emanating a furious regret that is as palpable as pleasure, or success. [paragraph break] Shifting into neutral, I know that I emanate neither. Still, others gravitate to what I represent, measuring or breaking themselves against me" (ibid 161-2). Crosbie gives a Playboy playmate a charged, screamingly intellectual, full of woe retrospective on the world, the world which views her as an object, as filmy as the negligees that she poses in...Both Crosbie and Stratten are not just another pretty face, rather voices to be reckoned with. If one could reach an orgasm of the mind(and it is possible, I believe) here, I did.:)

Lynn Crosbie is one of my favorite poets, an in-your-face confessional modern Canadian poet, and her stuff is super hard to find, especially novels(of which she has two published). Keren found this for me on Amazon from some small bookstore in the Dakotas. Thank you, ma chere. It's next in the queue... 

There are some novels that I read that make me want to go grab my journal and write and write and write like there's no hour from now, like there's no job that I have to be at, like there's no tomorrow. There are other novels that I read that put fear into me, make me quake with astonishment, make me wonder if I can ever write like that particular author, if I can ever be "good." Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories is a work that falls, for me, into the latter category. Butler's collection won the Pulitzer prize in 1993 and marks my return, however brief, to the list project...It took me forever to get through this book, but not because the stories weren't amazing, I just had a real mell of a hess(as Mrs. Schermer would say) of a past few weeks, with(sigh!) not any time at all to read...The beginning of Keren's trip home to see her folks I was determined to read as much as possible, missing her was rather rough and left this icky feeling in the pit of my stomach, enough so, that I determined to be the "ostrich" that I am noted for, and wished to stick my head in the endless sand of the written word...I was somewhat successful and then that real world application, my job, kicked into high gear and I faced a weekend that rivalled the holiday season...After that nightmare, I found out my car had been stolen. When I finally resolved within myself to be happy that I was rid of that piece of crap, the police found it! I've been dealing with mechanics, car insurance, etc. ever since. And, for a woman who can't handle planet Earth all that well, it's been at the very least mildly stressful and antagonistic. So, that made it so that a book that would normally have only taken me a few days to read, took me instead almost two weeks...argh. But, the stories were incredible. All of the stories are written from the point of view of men and women living in New Orleans or an area encompassing the real or fictional(my US map was stolen with my car so I haven't really looked)town of Versailles, LA., all of whom are Vietnamese, almost all of whom, if not all, are immigrants due to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Books like this are hard to read for me and at once wondrous. I will never ever be able to understand what these people went through, what their culture is like, what even the American veterans dream/nightmare about and have as a part of their waking hell. I grew up a white upper-middle class girl in the middle of nowhere Vermont, my father was number one pick for draft the year they decided to stop doing it. The only real connection I have with Vietnam(and it's patchy at best) is through a woman I once loved very very much, who came to this country when she was 4 monthes old after the end of the war. I talked to her quite a bit about her background, what her parents and siblings were like, but it is an experience from which I am extremely far removed. So, this book is wondrous, because it gives me a glimpse into a world of which I know nothing, and of course that is one of the main reasons why I devour books of all kinds. All the stories had their strong points and it was an overall well-put together collection, even better in its roundedness I found than the two Munro story collections I read. "Fairy Tale" tells of a Vietnamese immigrant woman who works in New Orleans as an "exotic dancer"(my words not hers) and prostitute, and finds an unlikely Prince Charming in a soft spoken, shy, sometime client. In "Crickets" a Vietnamese man tries to relate to his rapidly becoming-American son, by telling him a story and involving him in the reenactment of said story from his childhood in his faraway country, it is sadly to no avail. "Mid-Autumn" is told from the point of view of a mother who is about to give birth to a child who is the son/daughter of a GI, telling him/her of her very first love back in Vietnam. There are so many stories, beautiful in the description of a country I have only seen in the movies, of a contrast in the description of the new world of these Vietnamese and the old. These are a people who are trying to find their place in a society that is as divided over the outcome of their country's struggle as they are. They left Vietnam for a better life, and in many ways of course it is, but they also have to adjust, and like all of us, carry around figurative suitcases of memory. There were a few quotes that I absolutely loved, very tiny ones(well at least for me), though the prose itself is so stunning that it flows like water, each story a tributary into an ocean of words...The first quote is from the story "Fairy Tale" when the narrator says: "I like the way fairy tales start in America. When I learn English for real, I buy books for children and I read, "Once upon a time." I recognize this word "upon" from some GI who buys me Saigon teas and spends some time with me and he is a cowboy from the great state of Texas. He tells me he gets up on the back of a bull and he rides it. I tell him he is joking with Miss Noi(that's my Vietnam name), but he says no, he really gets up on a bull. I make him explain that "up on" so I know I am hearing right. I want to know for true so I can tell this story to all my friends so that they understand, no lie, waht this man who stays with me can do. After that, a few years later, I come to America and I read some fairy tales to help me learn more English and I see this word and I ask a man n the place I work on Bourbon Street in New Orleans if this is the same. Up on and upon. He is a nice man who comes late in the evening to clean up after the men who see the show. He says this is a good question and he thinks about it and he says that yes, they are the same. I think this is very nice, how you get up on the back of time and ride and you don't know where it will go or how it will try to throw you off" (Butler 45). The second quote is from "Mid-Autumn": "The Chinese gave us the celebration because one of their early emperors loved poetry and he wrote many poems himself. Since all poets are full of silver threads that rise inside them as the moon grows large, the emperor yearned to go to the moon" (Butler 98). The last quote is from one of the first stories, "The Trip Back." "I am just a businessman, not a poet. It is the poet who is supposed to see things so clearly and to remember. Perhaps it is only the poet who can die well" (ibid 29). All I know is that I don't always see things very clearly at all, and I guess I am a sometime poet. Actually my brain is often a jumble of thoughts that are expressed in enigmas of word play. Perhaps I will die well. Here's to hoping. But what I do know, is it will be a long time before Butler's stories die in my memory of books that will never cease to inspire me, as a reader and one who appreciates all facets of culture and as an aspiring writer. Wow. GG's-20, Pulitzers-16.

Well, I'm going back to the lists, for a change of pace, and to keep on top of the goal...Next up is Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories here...winner of the Pulitzer in 1993. I've heard nothing but good things, and it's also a subject matter of which I know very little, the Vietnamese...just because you date a Vietnamese girl does not an expert make.:) 

I can remember the exact time when I was introduced to Toni Morrison...it was AP English, my senior(grade 12) year. That class was exceptionally amazing for me, right around then my Faulkner cherry was popped as well, and everyone knows how much I admire Faulkner.:) The class read Morrison's Beloved, a work I've read at least 2 times since, which is incredible for me, given my "there's too many books on the planet I want to read, so it's rare I'll read a novel more than once" rule. Beloved has to be my favorite Morrison novel, perhaps because it is so close to my heart since it was my first, and also since it is rich with food and religious imagery, both of which are wrapped up together so heartily...I can remember reading Beloved, and at first being like "What the fuck?" and then like a lightbulb turning on, I saw. Like Faulkner, I find that Toni Morrison is a master of language and displaying its inadequacies in describing basic human emotions. I don't read Toni Morrison, I feel her. Her descriptions of scenery, of weather, of us, makes me want to write, and be a damn good writer. There are many authors that make me feel this way, including Faulkner, Winterson, even Atwood, definitely Allende, but Morrison's female and American voice is so unique. And the topics she conquers...I wrote a paper in college comparing Beloved and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, discussing the idea of death or even murder as it were, as liberation and demonstrative of love. It was risky, and nearly got me in trouble, but also got me the highest grade in the class on a final paper. As a I am a writer, both critically and creatively, of somewhat unconventional topics at times, I find Morrison to be a downright inspiration. I've also read Song of Solomon and Jazz, in which one of the protagonists kills his lover because he can't stand living with so much love crushing his soul...interesting, eh? Many people, men especially that I discovered via my lit program, don't care for Toni Morrison very much and are surprised when I rave about her...One man told me once that he can't stand reading her because he feels awash with an overwhelming sense of guilt every time he reads her, like she's making him feel guilty because he's white. I don't know...I don't get that from her, but perhaps I'm just looking for different things when I read. Anyway...I just finished The Bluest Eye today, Morrison's first published novel. It was different then I expected, at least from the description on the back of the book. I was expecting, given the description, a straightforward narrative, told from a young girl's point of view, describing in great detail an overwhelming wish/desire to be beautiful, to be rid of a chronically sexually abusive father, possibly I was expecting something slightly more stylistically similar to The Color Purple. This would not have been surprising, given the fact that it was Morrison's first novel, I thought perhaps her disjointed narrative voice(one of her writing qualities that I adore) was something that developed over her later novels; but here it was in all of its glory. What an amazing first novel. One sees a very sad child, who just wants desperately to be beautiful, because that is what she thinks she needs to be loved, through the eyes of two young girls equally confused at the world and what it holds for them both as black children and as human beings. You also see this child and the world around her through the eyes of her parents, including the father who will eventually impregnate her, and a few outsiders of the town, not to mention the child's own thoughts. What I got out of the book was a sense of confusion and disappointment...not on behalf of myself, but on behalf of the characters in the work. There is confusion regarding the world in which they(the characters) live, and disappointment when faced with the bleakness of their life situation when the confusion is clarified. We all cart around a lot of personal/mental baggage...some of us have it in an easy backpack, some of us need our own U-Haul(you know, the 2-bedroom+ kind). I was expecting a much more brutal rape scene, but what came finally towards the end was not brutal, just as sad as I expected it to be. Morrison makes the dad into a person too, with his own awful upbringing, lack of love and sense of familial belonging, that he is no monster, just mentally lost. This book reminded me quite a bit of Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Bluest Eye, like Heart, is not just about one person, it is about a human experience, the desire to love, to be loved, to belong. The sense of belonging is different for a black person, I think, and is probably something I will never ever be able to fully relate to, but I can make an effort through reading Morrison. Morrison writes beyond that, though, it's not just about being black, it's still ultimately, I think, about being human. The final page just blew me away: "She however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply because it bored us in the end. [paragraph break] Oh, some of us 'loved' her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye. [double paragraph break] And now when I see her searching the garbage--for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim has no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (Morrison 206). Wow, wow wow. This is why I read and read and read. For words, statements, paragraphs like this. Ironically enough, Morrison is hard on her own novel in the afterword, self-critical if you will, and also contextualizes it in terms of the time. But, she also acknowleges how much it was dismissed at the initial publication...It, like all of Morrison's oeuvre, should not be dismissed at all.

It was between this and Robert Olen Butler's collection of short stories about the Vietnamese post-war...I have Keren's copy, plus a book that she just got me, which was also a possibility...reading either would make me feel close to you now that you're so far away, my love, but I guess I'll dive into the Morrison first, since this one actually touched your hands for a while...or perhaps because I do just like Toni Morrison's writing a lot? Sigh. 

I don't know what it is about me...I have a fondness/curiosity towards literature about sexual perversions...I've read and loved Lolita, countless erotic anthologies, much of the Marquis de Sade's work(you know you've got sexual perversion down when they make your last name into an adjective depicting brutally violent sexual behavior), The Story of O, and now Edith Templeton's Gordon. As mentioned on the back of the book, there is a relationship to O, and her story, though on a slightly different level. Both women, Louisa(the protagonist in Gordon) and O are educated women who have had some sort of career...O is in fashion, Louisa served in the military. Both could see their self-worth in all that they've accomplished and through themselves, both enjoy being sexual slaves, however, to men. Okay, this is what I find really hard to wrap my head around. Both women, in their own ways, claim to almost be empowered by these relationships in which they are often taken against their will. O even undergoes severe bodily modification(rings hang from her labia, amongst other things...sorry for the graphic detail folks, but imagine reading pages about it) to prove that she is a slave to her master. Now, both subjugations are definitely psychological, though I would hasten to argue that O's slavery is definitely to the fullest definition...she is given/sold to other men because her master, Rene wants her to be used by them, she is his gift to guests/friends. Louisa is used only by Gordon, who uses humiliation both in the bedroom and in public locations to show his dominance over her, and she like O, openly mentions to the reader how much she enjoys this behavior, and when he ignores her completely, she is terribly upset. Here's where I take issue. So, you would rather be raped, or endlessly violated, than feel unwanted? Or rather, abuse is a sign of love? Perhaps this is a strong, truncated interpretation of the stories, but I'm not sure I see any kind of empowerment here. Though, Louisa, through her talks with Gordon pre and post the somewhat bizarre sexual encounters, awakens parts of her past which she hadn't addressed for many years, clearing up some psychological demons...Hmmm...perhaps it wasn't all bad. However, at the end, we discover that Gordon killed himself after he ended the relationship with Louisa and subsequently got married, to give that one last hurrah. It is implied that it was because Louisa was too good of a match for him, she enjoyed the abuse so much and took so much that it became too much for him...Huh. The human desire to be dominated is an interesting conundrum. I cannot say that I do not enjoy being dominated at some points in my life and in the bedroom, however, I do enjoy a bit of role reversal and being a somewhat assertive if not slightly aggressive lover myself. Everything carries tenderness with me, though, I am assertive but ardent. I want to make you cry with exhausted pleasure, not because I've beaten the living crap out of you, obviously. But, on the other hand, all of us, at some point or another, have been in relationships which were at the very least psychologically destructive on some level. Now, I'm all for handcuffs, and even some of the other more S&M things(whatever gets your rocks off, and I'll try anything once), but when your lover "rapes" you on more than one occasion, and you actually sort of like it(or that's implied), then first of all, can you call it rape? Second of all, don't you think there might be something else that you need to address? I don't know, I'm just sayin'. What I do really like about both Gordon and O is that both women have an unadulterated voice: they say exactly what they are thinking to the reader, in all its graphic detail(Louisa is much more well-educated and colours her narration with quotes from Goethe and other German poets and writers). Women writers, especially, have only been that graphic in the past 30 years I would hasten to say, and even then, the detail exposed in these books is not common. Open frank discussion about sex is extremely feminist(I think, I could be wrong), and highly refreshing especially since even I have a hard time doing it, and I write about sex A LOT. I would also say that along the same lines, embracing your sexuality and preference therein is also very forward given the times in which both books were published(mid last century I would say), and I applaud the writers for their voice and subject matter. What I am not sure about is how the protagonists go through with their sexual awakening, and how it is through subjugation by men. That is what I find inherently problematic. But, as Dennis Miller says, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. One quote I loved from Gordon, is one from the psychiatrist himself(for that is what Louisa's lover is, a psychiatrist, which makes his domination and mind games all the more dangerous, I think). He says, "'You think life is like passing an exam. You get a good mark. Or a bad mark. And that's the end of it. But it isn't. You are your own examiner and it always goes on. It never stops'" (Templeton 52). I guess I like reading these books because I like to see what other people have to say about something so human, sex. And sex, whether you have a lot of it, none at all, in weird positions, with people of the same or opposite sex, is a part of all of our stories, however much we want to admit it. We're all here because of sex, we all dream of it on some level, and long for that basic of human needs. How we go about it just varies. I try not to pass judgement on others' sex lives, for I do not need them passing judgement on mine. Somethings just aren't for me. But, if they work for you, more power to you, I guess. Oh well. Fiction Junkie is still on vacation from the lists...