Comments | extemporanea: the swimming pool is empty

extemporanea

the swimming pool is empty

Sep 16, 2006 16:25

It's been a bookish sort of 10-day vac. Yesterday I finished reading the new biography of James Tiptree Jr., apparently written over ten years by one Julie Phillips. It shows. This was a beautifully researched, meticulously written, empathetic, insightful and generally socks-knocking-off piece of writing. It was also, weirdly enough, reviewed as a ( Read more... )

writting, feminista, sf, books

Comments 6

anonymous September 17 2006, 08:30:07 UTC

It seems an awful lot of writers get started pretty late, and I suspect the writing is all the better for it. Similarly, the dysfunction and insecurity helps enormously with creativity. I get depressed when I worry that I'm far too happy to ever write anything interesting.

Then again I'm not so much wanting to write these days, so that's okay.

scroob

strawberryfrog September 17 2006, 14:09:45 UTC

Having just read those two stories, the author of "The Screwfly Solution" would I think have to be a mass of insecurities and disfunctions.

extemporanea September 18 2006, 09:04:36 UTC

What interests me is her particular insecurities about being a woman: she has this very clear, urgent, rather despairing sense of female identity in a man's world, which is exaggerated in its expression by her personal disfunctions, but remains valid and insightful. SF is absolutely the only possible genre for her to write in because of its symbolic tools for dealing with alienation, I think.

anonymous September 17 2006, 18:58:18 UTC

Seems like there's a lot of pressure (from society in general) to be 'successful' as soon as possible. How do you measure success? And why does it have to be by a certain age? I don't understand that. I guess there's always that sense that time will run out, because death is inevitable and all that, but each year or month or week or whatever is new, and we bring more experiences with us that have enriched us and/or made us grow in some way (I'm thinking of new year blog entries, and scroob's fairly recent on on being in ones 30's). Time is our enemy, but also our friend.
everymoment, caught in a philosphical wossname.

The timeline of success first_fallen September 17 2006, 20:45:25 UTC

I've experienced this lately in my workplace. So many of my colleagues who are my age have already finished their degrees and are busy with their articles or CA board exams. When I mention that I'm planning on starting my BCompt next year they look at me in horror, like "omg! you're 26 and you're only starting your studies next year! you'll be, like, 35 when you finish and qualify!" and I think "yes, so? It's a long-term plan. There's so much pressure in the accounting field to be qualified by the time you're 30 and I don't understand why. Perhaps for women it's the must-qualify-before-I-pop-out-the-babies thing (I've heard that from a few people now). Eish. People are living longer lives now, there's much more time to get somewhere in your career, or even change your career in midlife and still make a success of the new one.

Re: The timeline of success extemporanea September 18 2006, 09:26:41 UTC

Darned capitalism, with its fetishisation of Success and Money: what about Maturity and Enjoyment, huh, capitalism? didn't think of that, I bet.

I think Scroob is right, with writing particularly it's probably a good thing to delay a bit. SF is a bit funny in that it has a solidly successful subset of the sort of Young Turk style of fizzing, explosive immature writer, but I suspect that says something about the maturity of the genre...