Scriptor Ignotus > Recent Status Updates

Some interesting tidbits in the history chapter. Historically, women have only had freedom and autonomy when they were not integrated into the social structure. There were several female condottieri who took to battlefields during the renaissance. Women of the ancien regime were more powerful and influential than women of post-revolutionary France. But the woman issue was always seen from male perspectives

"The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth, but to the one that kills."

Man as transcendence, exceeding of animal life. Women want same transcendence, but they're subordinated to the species.

Catling's surrealist imagination and appropriation of historical figures makes for an utterly unique setting; his writing is by turns evocative, eyebrow-raising, and nearly incomprehensible; his plotting and character-building is, so far, disconcertingly weak. In a strange way, it reads more like a work of visual art than like a story. When I stop reading, I don't feel an urge to pick it up again. But I will.

You know who I'd like to see in a room together? De Maistre and de Sade. De Maistre would probably lay down some heavy punishment on de Sade, and de Sade would probably like it.

The last 200 pages or so have been...Shakespearean. Interpret that how you will.

I think I'll finish this sucker tomorrow.

Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is an asshole.

"Let's suppose you lived on the moon...Let's suppose you did all those absurd, vile things up there...But now you're here...From here, what do you care about everything you perpetrated there...that people will be holding you in contempt for a thousand years...?...Life exists, but death doesn't exist at all...There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stops and it will become eternal..."

Everyone in this book is insane, and I don't think I've even met the craziest characters yet.

"Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live...God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God...Everyone who wants the main freedom must dare to kill himself. Whoever dares to kill himself has learned the secret of deception...Whoever dares to kill himself is God. Now everyone can do it...there will be no God..."

Dis gon b gud.

This book is kicking my ass, but I'm loving it. Having built up his analysis of the regional literary cultures of colonial America (New England captivity narratives, the surveyor-naturalist of Virginia, the "Good Quaker" of Pennsylvania and Delaware, and the hunter myth developed by the back country settlers and Indian fighters), Slotkin is now showing how Filson's Boone narrative was expanded upon by each culture.

18th century: Weakening of Puritan orthodoxy and its control over literature. European rationalism and liberalism creates an interest in the "original man", which Indians are taken to represent. Missionaries live among Indians not only to convert them, but also to study them in order to understand their own flawed humanity. Pastoral vs. Sublime view of nature; Indians can be a means to salvation or degradation.

The Indian Captivity Narrative as the first distinctly American literary form. Wilderness and Indians as outward manifestation of Puritan subconscious. Increase and Cotton Mather use literature to subordinate nature to their Calvinist doctrines on total depravity and the preservation of the saints. Frontiersmen like Benjamin Church begin to take on an Indian persona; to become the beast in order to kill the beast.

Don't ask.

Despite the needlessly provocative title, I've heard some good things about this book.

The first article, on the history of evolutionary thought, is stimulating and accessible for the layman -- possibly because it was written by a philosopher rather than a biologist. The second article, on the origin of life, is for my uneducated mind as opaque and impenetrable as the subject matter. This is going to be a character-building experience for me.

Quaker time.

William Byrd II was a prick.

Learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now it's time to enter the wonderful world of the dissident Cavaliers who colonized Virginia.

I've been anticipating this one for a long time, and now it's here. Wilson is the author of Europe's Tragedy, the magnificent general history of the Thirty Years War.

Kata sarka. Say it five times fast. Kata sarka kata sarka kata sarka kata sarka kata sarka.