On 14/1/06 7:22 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> And what is this, where Janet needs say her muse is not a seminaked woman, or
> Alison must specify the complex difficulties of being a heterosexual woman,
> are
> we all defining our museselves by reference to our sexual preferences? ergh,
> what happened to ideas?
Hmm. I thought I was undefining, by pointing out (sigh) some of the ways
actual women have been confined and defined within the idea of the Muse. All
of which, by implication, are things I wish to escape.
Being a Muse has never been amusing for me. And there has never been a
person who served me as a Muse, perhaps because my experiences of having
been cast as one, mostly when I was a young woman, were fairly desolating.
Hence my preference for the idea of Duende.
On the other hand, muses have been used in very interesting ways by women -
say Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, which remembers that there are nine
muses, and that they are the daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory (whom I have
invoked in a poem sequence of my own). Anne Carson explores the connections
between Eros and writing (without reference to muses) fascinatingly in her
book Eros the Bittersweet. And so on. No shortage of ideas in that, I would
suggest, and neither a defining.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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