Hi Rebecca: 
Thanks for your own intriguing responses. I would suggest two things:

1. I see your take on Crusoe - but the Robinson, unless I am getting him
confused - is also a "cast out" personae/character in Weldon Kees' work. At
least that Robinson was also part of the reference of earlier parts of this
thread. But, anyway, I was not thinking in the direction of your concerns
with a search for the 'other' in terms of a feminine or racially or
geographically defined subject (to be subjected). I think I am talking about
someone who remains "other" - in fact may be, for example, black, or for all
social purposes, invisible - such as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

 

2.  In terms of "reality" I don't believe I mentioned any assumption of a
'fixed point'! Communities, utopian or pragmatically defined are, by
definition, not going to be ever 'fixed' into some permanently stable site.
In terms of women and utopia, I think recent history is full of examples of
various women's collectives with utopian aspirations. They must have missed
your awareness. 
The notion that women are more likely than men to experience the
contemporary (reality) as more fragmented and provisional slides into gender
assumptions and separatisms that I don't find productive or true of my own
life, as well as many of the lives I see around me, men and women. This is
not to discount the 'big boys run the school' world - so obviously true with
the current administration of the USA (but what a band of hysterics and
rookie and dangerous fuckups).

Yes, you can find angels anywhere - provisionally! And I would say that
writing built on 'im'provisional' responses to time (as different from
formal impositions) engages me the most, as well as the writers I read.

I remain interested - if there is more - where Edmund may be going with
this. But may he's done it - particularly those Egyptian writers
(contemporary) that he suggested who have taken the genre of the "cast out"
into new directions. I certainly do not want to suffocate his fresh insights
(to me) with my assumptions.

Stephen V
 

  


> Yes, I've also found this an interesting thread due to
> Edmund's posts and also yours, Stephen., though I view
> it somewhat differently in that Robinson is always the
> male figure 'cast out' who wanders a landscape in
> which he may or may not find an other, an other which
> is often at least implicitly feminine, for instance
> that whole bit about finding "Friday," the less than
> other by virtue of being black which can be heard in
> the language itself by the cliche "girl Friday" to
> refer to whomever has to get the coffee.  And it is
> very different if one is used to being viewed as the
> 'other' to begin with, and usually, so that one's body
> itself is regarded as metaphorically as landscape, or
> interior imaginative landscape, or unknown unvisited
> unconquered nation.


> 
> For instance this
>> (How to talk to angels while you are 'on the
>> run.'??)    
> a most evocative phrase, btw, but my sense of it is
> that they talk to you, in any number of random
> occurrences, in the light attendant at your elbow, in
> the most unpredictable and unlikely of forms.
> 
>> These themes of exile in contradistinction to
> communal notions of >utopia,
>> or, alternatively, feet to the ground pragmatic group
> approaches to a
>> perpetually provisional/changing 'fragmented'
> reality.
> 
> I really have no experiental or subjective experience
> of this, either communal notions of utopia or
> pragmatic group approaches to a perpetually
> provisional/changing fragmented reality, and, perhaps
> accordingly, what I notice is both postulate a fixed
> point, either the fixed point of the communal notions
> or of being able to say, in comparison to a fixed
> point, that one's approaches are provisional/changing
> and fragmented. This may be just due to my
> experiences, an eccentricity of fact and sensibility,
> rather than those of gender, but these terms to me, as
> a woman, seem almost nonsensical, what is the communal
> notion of a utopia? the second choice with a
> provisional/changing fragmented reality makes more
> sense to me in that it is I think how many women
> actually live, adapting and 'fitting' their own
> fragmented reality into or against a prevailing fixed
> point of reality, and often 'happiest' when their
> fragmented reality is given support by fitting into
> the roles of wife, mother, etc, and allowing them
> support to engage in their fragments, as long as they
> are 'fragments' and useful or productive work, work
> products, in some way.
> 
> Anyway, I'm just thinking, this is not meant to argue
> with anything you've said, more a riff of my own
> preoccupations, and in that an implicit
> acknowledgement of interest and thanks for the
> discussion,
> 
> Rebecca
> 
> 
> From:         Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject:      Re: Snap All Three Auteurs
> 
> 
> Wonderful post, Edmund. It's nice - for me, at least -
> to get so educated by
> the paragraph full!
> This whole notion of 'the cast out' and finding ways
> to negotiate from that
> position in terms of making a 'residence in the
> writing' - whether it be on
> an island (in reality or one's imagination), and/or,
> as a wanderer, or urban
> flaneur - pose interesting possibilities, as well as
> the diverse literary
> histories to which you point. (How to talk to angels
> while you are 'on the
> run.'??)    
> These themes of exile in contradistinction to communal
> notions of utopia,
> or, alternatively, feet to the ground pragmatic group
> approaches to a
> perpetually provisional/changing 'fragmented' reality.
> As we have, for
> example, with Dewey and the Objectivists in poetry.
> 
> Definitely all food for my thinking here, and
> compelling me to look more on
> my own takes and works with Walking.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Stephen Vincent
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com