Mimi (35 page)

Little Lord Fauntleroy
, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

[Each] month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus, an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in [a] kind of existential loneliness. . . One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

Thinking About Women
, by Mary Ellmann

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

A Christmas Carol
, by Charles Dickens

I’ll just say that I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

Nobel Lecture
, by Joseph Brodsky

MUSIC
:

I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to
express
anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. . . .
Expression
has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.

An Autobiography
, by Igor Stravinsky

PUBLIC SPEAKING
:

There can be few honours more pleasing to an old boy than to be called upon to speak at his old school. . . [Face] the audience squarely and then commence the peroration.

Speeches and Toasts
, by Leslie F. Stemp and Frank Shackleton

Avoid distracting gestures. . .

–
The commander
places her hands on her hips.

–
The chilly presenter
crosses his arms over his chest.

–
The gun-shot victim
clings to her upper arm with one hand.

–
The armless presenter
leaves his hands behind his back.

–
The pocket jingler
puts a hand in her pocket, shaking keys and coins.

–
The clutcher
grasps a pen or pointer and never puts the object down.

–
The slapper
makes noise as he hits his palms against his thighs.

–
The exposed presenter
clasps her hands in front of her, where a “fig leaf” would be.

Guide to Presentations
, by Lynn Russell and Mary Munter

DUALISM
:

[It] is characteristic of men-values that they set the world apart in sharply divided pairs of opposites, one of which is favoured, and the other not. . . [This] is like a solar mythic view, since all shadows flee from the sun.. . . [In] the lunar mythic view, however, which is the more naturally feminine one,. . . the interplay of the opposites creates wholeness.

The Wise Wound
, by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove

FEMALE PLEASURE
:

[The] important question for a male is not: Can I place my sperm inside this female? Rather the crucial question is: Can I persuade this female to use my sperm instead of some other male’s?. . . [The] primary role of the penis is none other than to act as an internal courting device—shaped to provide the vagina with the best possible and reproductively successful stimulation.

The Story of V
, by Catherine Blackledge

THE COLONIZATION OF WOMEN
:

I don’t think about men. I really don’t care about them. I’m concerned with women’s capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy.

Mary Daly

While European cultures continued a peaceful existence and reached a true florescence and sophistication of art and architecture in the 5th millennium B.C., a very different Neolithic culture. . . emerged in the Volga basin of South Russia. . .
This new force inevitably changed the course of European prehistory. [Its] basic features [included] patriarchy; patrilineality; small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry. . . the eminent place of the horse in cult; and, of great importance, armaments—bow and arrow, spear, and dagger. These characteristics. . . stand in opposition to the Old European. . . peaceful, sedentary culture with highly developed agriculture and with great architectural, sculptural and ceramic traditions.

The Language of the Goddess
, by Marija Gimbutas

[Political myths] codify men’s consciousness of and violent maintenance of their own sexual-political supremacy which can be sustained only through an endless process of vigilant suppression, exploitation and
ideological deception
of the female sex.

Blood Relations
, by Chris Knight

[The] more warlike and authoritarian a society is, the stronger its menstrual taboo. . . Warlike, aggressive male societies are in rivalry with women over which sex sheds the most sacred blood.

Margaret Mead

[Only] the bad effects of the menstrual cycle have ever been systematically described.

The Wise Wound
, by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove

I’m convinced that accounts are kept somewhere, that everything is entered on the record somewhere. . . and the bill will have to be paid. Sooner or later, the time will come. So let us imagine women (that hardly negligible half of humankind, after all), those Baba Yagas. . . sallying forth to settle the accounts?! For every smack in the face, every rape, every affront, every hurt. . . widows rising from the ashes where they were burned alive. . . homeless women, beggar women. . . women with faces scorched by acid. . . hundreds of thousands of girls destroyed by AIDs, victims of insane men, paedophiles. . . the circumcised women with their vaginas sewn up. . . the women with silicone breasts and lips, botoxed faces and cloned smiles. . . the millions of famished women who give birth to famished children. . .

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
, by Dubravka Ugreši
ć

MALE NUTTINESS
:

People would sooner watch the natural environment collapse than transfer the responsibility of governance from men to women.

Antony Hegarty

[S]ooner or later. . . we will use up energy supplies, minerals and resources. Current green thinking will just delay the inevitable. Getting off the earth is the only way to make us truly sustainable. Our heavy industries could be moved to the moon, or just put into orbit. . .

Letter to the paper

Technical in the social situation, sociable in the technical situation? That’s the hallmark of a nerd.

Charlie Brooker

WAR
:

Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.

The Last Fighting Tommy
, by Harry Patch

This memorial commemorates the 48,000 members of the Commonwealth who died in the campaign in Italy which commenced in June 1943. All these battles were fought at great cost and the total casualties, killed, wounded and missing were 300,000. There are 50 Commonwealth cemeteries in Italy. We of the Italy Star Association do not forget our gallant American, French and Polish comrades, who with other nationalities. . . fought and died alongside us.

WHEN YOU WALK

THROUGH PEACEFUL

LANES SO GREEN

REMEMBER US AND

THINK WHAT MIGHT

HAVE BEEN

WE DO REMEMBER THEM

Memorial in the Westgate Gardens, Canterbury, Kent

ITEMS FROM THE NEWS
:

A single scream, a brutal end: police work to uncover murdered woman’s secret fears

DNA match leads to life sentence for man who raped and strangled girl 26 years ago

Boy, 14, in court over murder of schoolgirl

Gunman shoots girlfriend, then kills four more, in Helsinki attack

Ex-employee arrested for Orlando office shooting

Mother and daughter found murdered

Twelve children die in rampage by gunman

Stalker who killed woman with bolt gun is jailed

Man arrested over woman’s murder 14 years after her death

Body of 11-year-old girl found after kidnapping

Killer who murdered woman dog-walker was in “bad mood”

11 bodies and counting. . . angry families in Cleveland ask why police ignored their pleas

Dad is guilty of daughter stab murder

Plea to killer to reveal where he hid woman’s body

8 years for drunk driver who killed two women

Man murdered partner after argument about Facebook

Girl murdered by her father had hoped to be a doctor

Newlywed admits oar attack

Driver who killed six at Dutch Queen’s parade had lost his home in the recession

Husband arrested after car bomb killing

Man crashes plane into US tax office after angry online rant

Millionaire facing ruin shot wife and daughter then killed himself

Yorkshire Ripper asks for limit on sentence

Children filmed before murders: father arrested

Anguish over murder girl

Jilted men behind spate of killings in Italy

Killer of widow gets life

Father who killed son in hotel plunge is cleared by Greek court

Student sportsman accused after ex-girlfriend found dead

Life for killer who battered grandmother to death

Post Office killing—husband arrested

Freed mental patient killed woman in random attack

Father who kicked and punched baby to death gets life

Jilted schoolboy jailed for killing two girls in house fire

“I’m the crossbow cannibal,” oddball PhD student tells court

Horror house of death for mother and baby: police name man who killed them

Man linked to missing girl and murder victim

Chef who hid wife’s body in trash found guilty of murder

Man in family killing had been arrested over death threats

Ex-boyfriend held after nurse is stabbed to death

“They want it really”—review of police attitudes to rape

Decades of police blunders in murder case: killer could have been stopped

Four killed in China care home attack

Campaign for mother facing death by stoning

Bouncer accused of shooting three people told police, “You aren’t taking me seriously”

Bodies of sisters lay by mother: family deep in debt: father killed wife and girls and then himself

New Orleans shooting spree—officers charged

Driver shoots 8 dead after being fired

Murder victim had reported her ex-husband to the police four times

Husband killed wife 5 months after wedding

Man kills seven in Bratislava shooting spree

Husband is jailed for ordering machete murder

Murder case jury sees video of attack on baby

Teenager in court over rape of woman found dead

“How could they dump our daughter like trash by the side of the road?”

Youngest Tucson victim laid to rest

Jail for man who strangled wife in front of sons