Quote of the day

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files everything away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you."

John Irwing, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Quotes of the day

Working on my thesis and reading Hewison:

"Whatever the true figures for productivity and employment, this country is gripped by the perception that it is in decline. The heritage industry is an attempt to dispel this climate of decline by exploiting the economic potential of our culture, and it finds a market because the perception of decline includes all sorts of insecurities and doubts that make its products especially attractive and reassuring."

"Instead of manufacturing goods, we are manufacturing heritage, a commodity which nobody seems able to define but which everybody is eager to sell, in particular these cultural institutions that can no longer rely on government funds as they did in the past. Which means every single one, from the universities to the Arts council."

Oh. The sarcasm.

Back to the Women's Room

I've been re-reading some favourite books this winter. So far it's been quite rewarding. Right now I've returned to Marilyn French's The Women's Room. This is a book I read the first time back in highschool, not remembering if I ever actually finished it back then, just how I tried to force myself through it. A couple of years later (after I had left home and went to a public college) I found a torn copy of the book on a flea market and brought it home for an amasing re-read -- in just a couple of years I had learned [things that made me] appreciate it much more. I still remember how I tried to get everyone else to read it... Since then I've returned to the Women's Room (pun not intended) quite irregularly but more than a couple of times, and every new read of it has given me something new. There will be details forgotten or things you simply need to have gone through certain things to understand -- I guess this is typical for any novel written in the form of someones lifestory, and I expect myself to react this way again of course. Normally, it would make me happy to find that I can still relate to an old favorite book and get something out of reading it, but in this case it just makes me more upset. Or rather, there are more things in it to make me upset since there are more things I can relate to. So it's actually a much harder read today than it used to be, but I'm still just as unable to put the damned book down as I was the last time I read it. I should seriously not read it in bed at night, though. Grrr...