h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You know, as in 'joined at the hip', plus 'nice place'.
Clever, yeah?
...Oh, well.

I thought I'd come over 'cos we're supposed to be in AWW of that other place and sticking to the topic in hand. (No, to be fair they're pretty laid back in AWW and it would only be in Peer Review or it's ilk where you go off-topic and then limb-from-limb shortly afterwards).

Beatles+Howerd seems kind of improbable. But I would say that, wouldn't I? Everyone else seemed to get the hang of Tyler/Formby...

Sounds like you're (both) enjoying that good time in life before you somehow build yourself a system and find yourself maintaining it. The sparkiest people stay there (I noticed you're in with Boots). I try my best, but I'm only a virtual resident. "Yes dear, of course I'm making you a coffee".

The cat is good, surely. Cats make better bad air detectors than canaries, even. If a cat things you're light and easy company, then it lets you know in a nice way. And if you start to curdle it will sneer at you, just to make sure you sort your head out before it's too late.

Anyway, you guys seem settled in nicely and eager to write with edge, which is honestly what we need round here. Keep it up. We're sure to keep colliding in this confined-and-yet-sadly-depopulated space.

See you around,
Pin

Hey man, how's life?

True about the cats, god bless 'em. I'm a bit hungover today, and typing is not the easy job it once was. I'm at work, in a call centre, so this should be a fun shift.

Tyler/Formby? Clarify? Bonnie and George? (Almost Rainbow)

As you can tell, sparkle do I not. Definitely on go slow. Still, last night was a ball.

Oh yeah. The missus read your message to me this mornin', and Hip Joint made me giggle with joy.

Fatty, under a minor cloud.

Sorry we hijacked that thread. No excuse, we really do know better, but we get rowdy after the witching hour.

See ya.

Hijacked? Till you turned up, no-one had read it for 6 months! Anyway, Tyler and Formby can be found here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F19585?thread=134823&skip=0&show=20 Don't ask me to explain it, and don't on any account attempt the entire backthread. I just mentioned it as a similarly improbable double-act to Lennon and Lurcio. ...never occurred to me before that Mr Howerd was a proto-Lurker...

Oh, I'd vote for Dear dear George every time!

If you want to know more about the origin of my Virginia obsession there's a diary entry on the subject on my page, though why you would want to know the mind of a strange lesbian I can't think.

Her various fandoms are rather more inexplicable. She was always an odd one.

I couldn't bring myself to vote for either of them...

I read your Journal. There are times in our lives where we're open to these resonances. If I think back to the time when I was reading avidly and discovering my own values and needs, there were books and writers who had a similar impact.

Woolf probably never stood a chance with me. Women in general were frightening enough; lesbians terrifying. A Sackville-West descendent was a friend-of-a-friend, too. Not sure even if I ever met her myself, but the superiority of that whole set was a major put-off. (I was a bit of a working-class hero in those days. Anyone vaguely connected with titled families tended to get lined up against the same imagined wall)

I'd have prided myself on my feminist sympathies, though. Perhaps it wasn't proper feminism, with hindsight. I remember Vera Brittain's 'Testament of Youth' as a powerful book and a significant influence.

But there's a big difference between books by women about the folly of male aggression, and books by women about the experience of womanhood. I guess I'm still not grown-up enough for the latter, even now!

Pin

It is a wonderful feeling to read something and have everything shift slightly and realign with a clearer focus. To find something that speaks to you so clearly that You understand yourself better for it. I hope that it never stops happening to me!

The class card is often used against Woolf. I'm from a deeply working class background but I never found it to be a barrier. She, like anyone could only create from herself and she was very much a poduct of her background. I don't hold Lawrence's sexism against him, or at least I try not to. It's too much of a barrier for me to get much from him, but I don't begrudge anyone else his influence because of that. Class is a tricky one. I dislike a great deal of the social elitism of the Bloomsbury group and the Paris set, but there is so much more than that involved that I can't help but forgive or ignore it. Perhaps that's a fault, but I try to be just as understanding of the failings of movements and works that are less in keeping with my personal sympathies as well.

I shouldn't worry about the state of your own feminism! You're right about the distinction between those two types of feminism and it is the latter that has had more impact on me. I can't help that, being rather woman-centered, but the type of feminism that deals with the relationship between men and women on both personal and political/social levels is just as valid and valuable.

And Vera Brittain is eminently claimable, even if she did resist the label of lesbianism. So you have at least one terrifying lesbian influence!

Funny you should mention Lawrence. I nearly did.

Years ago, I was the scientist among artists at Uni. I was also in a regional minority, a northerner among southerners. I got the superintelligent-child-with-no-soul treatment, and Lawrence was part of my retort, the proof to those stuck-up elitists that people of my stock could write, could make art, could set imagination alight.

And yet, when I read him now, I see what I couldn't see then, and I shudder at his narrowness.

Maybe I sold out?

Thanks for talking, guys. Already you're among those who make me think differently. That's what we're all here for, isn't it?

Meantime, I've got to rush because my daughters want a lift to the gym for their jiu-jitsu. Honestly true. Appropriate or what?

Pin

I don't think we ever mentioned, but lizardy loves seals. She had a thing for them as a child, collected little models of them and cuddly seals. She still goes all gooey over them now.

Lawrence is narrow, but he had some things to say. I don't like his style, all that heightened melodrama, makes me laugh and it's hard to take his points seriously when I'm laughing at his style. But I wouldn't dismiss him entirely. For all his biases he did occasionally express a good idea, and at least he was moderately origional. If he helped you through a difficult situation I'm glad you found him.

Lets see, female heroes of less exalted social standing from that era...There are surprisingly few. Well perhaps it's not really surprising, there being so many more barriers before women intent on writing in those days that a lack of independant means would be pretty much insurmountable. There is Rosamund Lehmann. Not quite working class, but certainly not rich. Rather downtrodden and grubby a lot of the time. 'The Wether in the Streets' is particularly good. Not many women with no need to think about money troubles in those. Rather powerfully written too. Used modernist techniques but in a way that allows for plot.

For me gender has been a bigger stamp on my life than class, ethnicity or even sexuality. But we all balance these things in different ways and I come from a rather repressive and sexist background, these things cannot help but shape us.

Have fun.

I wouldn't recommend THAT seal, Lizardy. Perverted individual if you ask me...

Non-U female writers paralleling the Bloomsbury set. Dunno - Stella Gibbons? Cold Comfort Farm suggests an author nowhere near silver spoons, though I couldn't say. A very good book, though.

The inverted snobbery in my last post, berating my fellow students, was really meant as irony. I never felt quite that strongly. In fact, none of the list of shaping factors from your last paragraph really leap out at me. I was lucky in having a fairly balanced (and maybe sheltered?) upbringing. I don't actually have many natural edges; the ones that sometimes show through in my writing are wannabe edges, if I'm honest.

If I had a shaping trait, I guess it was a compulsion to try smooth things out. Even in days well before political correctness, I tried to treat people as if I didn't notice their gender, colour, status symbols, lack of status symbols, in fact anything much.

I now know that this is a really stupid thing to do. It means you finish up trying to neutralise all the things that make people interesting. I was shocked when people finally told me what impression I'd conveyed, years later. Acute sexual repression for one. And there was I thinking that punching my girlfriends in the arm was paying them a compliment.

You're not the first to recommend 'Weather in the Streets'. This time I'll find and read it, and let you know what I think.

Pin

Hi Pin,

Yeah, I had a fairly sheltered upbringing also, in a harmonious family. Yet, in many ways, this made me an outsider, becasue god knows, most people I knew had anything but. And of course I'm gay, and that gives you a different view also.

Yes, read 'The Weather In The Streets', it is a fantastic book, one of the few I'd recommend to anybody. It's very powerful.

Which seal is perverted? I don't understand, but I can be something of a Stupid.

Fatty, rambling on again.

Hi Fatty

Should I call you that? I can never tell which names are pet names. Usually seems to be the uncomplementary ones.

They called me "Snod" once. Never did work out why. Now who's rambling?

The seal is...well, the seal. Pinniped the RP character. He's objectionable. If you're fortunate enough not to have met him yet, best leave it there.

A girl at work said she'll lend me Weather in the Streets. I guessed she'd have it on her bookshelf, though I thought she looked at me a bit funny when I asked. I said I'd had it recommended by a bunch of internet lesbians. She said that figured.

Do hope this is not going to further damage my dishevelled reputation.

Pin

It does have a lesbian character, blink and you'll miss her though. It's not *that* sort of novel, so your reputation shouldn't be too tarnished.

Now I'm curious about your work colleague. What sort of person is she that she would *obviously* have Dear Rosamund on her shelves.

Oh and She is genuinely delighted when people call her fatty! strange lizard that she is.

oh dear I seem to have become and undecided

I wouldn't call myself Fatty if I didn't want others to follow suit.

I'm a rather perverted lizard.

Fatty

Hey Pin.

If you get a moment your opinion on A1288587 would be goodsome. Very much 'in progress' still, which is probably a better time to garner commentary than when a story is done and dusted.

Hi Speckly
Will get back to you later at length - only a brief reading so far, but it's good...

A quick first thought : I wonder if you've considered how someone who doesn't know you will receive this. There's only the brief and late paragraph referring to the way 'you' wear your hair that marks this as a lesbian relationship.
A casual reader will mark the author as an older male, I think.
Pin

Thanks Pin,

As for the reader thinking the narrator is male, well now, that's just the reader's problem. The assumption is made because the romantic interest is directed toward someone female. Heterocentricity takes over at this point. Any competent queer reader with their lesbian specs on could tell you that it is a 'lesbian' story. But all that's beside the point. If they read it as het they can still get the age gap bit out of it and I like the idea of multiplicity of meaning anyway. The reader should always be an active party in interpreting the text. Why should I dictate how others read my work. It's just communication. Reading and writing are just other ways of having a conversation. I always place myself within a text when I read, meaning is negotiated between the writer and the set information they have given out and the reader who can choose how to interpret the text and to some extent who cannot help but filter meaning through their own lived experiences.

Anyway, the point is I don't mind if people don't 'get' that the narrator is a woman. But it probably will be cleared on a second draft, just because there will be more text.