Keeping The Company of Wolves

Lookie what has come to a local (for me) bookseller!  Daedalus always has great prices on books – I mean, you can get every gift you need for an entire year at this place, but I am pretty excited about this bad boy.  This shall soon be mine!

Here is the blurb from the Daedalus site:

A storytelling sorceress, Angela Carter has often been named as a literary godmother to Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J.K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other masters of supernatural fiction. Along with her James Tait Black Memorial Prize–winning novel Nights at the Circus, she is most often recognized for this pivotal collection of stories, from 1979. The Bloody Chamber mines some of our most enduring fairy tales—”Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Puss-in-Boots,” and “Bluebeard” among them—and includes the story that inspired Neil Jordan’s 1984 film of the same name, “The Company of Wolves.” Carter extracts hidden themes and parts of the tales that went untold, giving them new life in a gorgeous prose style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. “Since I first came across The Bloody Chamber, I have kept a copy with me wherever I have been living,” writes Link in her introduction. “Reading Carter, each time, was electrifying. It lit up the readerly brain and all the writerly nerves…. The girls and women in The Bloody Chamber remake the rules of the stories they find themselves in with their boldness. And Angela Carter, too was bold. I have tried to learn that lesson from her.” This handsome trade paperback edition celebrates what would have been the tragically short-lived author’s 75th anniversary.

“Sex isn’t a subtext in The Bloody Chamber, but the text itself…. Carter produced … fiction that was lavishly fabulist and infinitely playful…. Salman Rushdie, who became her friend, described her as ‘the first great writer I ever met.’ Yet her legacy has been a slow and stealthy one, invisible to many of the readers who have benefited from it…. Most contemporary literary fiction with a touch of magic, from Karen Russell’s to Helen Oyeyemi’s, owes something to Angela Carter’s trail-blazing.”—Salon

“She was, among other things, a quirky, original, and baroque stylist, a trait especially marked in The Bloody Chamber—her vocabulary a mix of finely tuned phrase, luscious adjective, witty aphorism, and hearty, up-theirs vulgarity.”—Margaret Atwood

Snuggle Puppies

I found this short article to be quite interesting.  I’d love to read more on the subject of “petting parties” of the 1920s.

One thing I noticed was the mention of how young women are pretty much the ones people were trying to stop from going to the parties.  I suppose it’s not totally illogical, since if there aren’t girls then there’s no party.  But it’s the attitude about the girls that seems to put the onus on girls to uphold all the morals. You know, the girls “allow” liberties.  It’s too bad that the usefulness of this kind of sexual and social experimentation wasn’t seen as a gateway to healthy sexual behavior.  I could see how parents might worry things would get out of hand.  But instead of teaching sexual information, girls were maligned as the gatekeepers and therefore somehow the troublemakers and conduits to misbehaving.  It seems later was twisted into an idea that if you wanted to open the gates, you were not a good person.

There is one thing that’s for certain – I think girls are often the ones being told to watch out for their chastity because they are the ones who can become pregnant.  And ultimately, they are the ones who can be abandoned in a crisis pregnancy.  Men can walk away.  They can imagine themselves as innocent if they can convince themselves that she was with anybody else.  It’s as though this one simple fact of biology has made all kinds of strange, teetering, oddly shaped social constructs around sexual behavior.

Very interesting topic.  Also – I still use the word “spooning” but we definitely need to bring back “twosing.”

Wonderful Word Wednesday

Wonderful Word Wednesday

Wonderful Word Wednesday

Wonderful Word Wednesday