4
" Have you lost your teeny tiny mind, you too-tall, too-skinny, too-crazy jerk?”
“Oh, look who’s talking, Miss Let’s Blunder Around the Time Stream and Hang the Consequences! Thanks to you, we’ve got a dead Marc and a
live Marc in the same timeline . . . in the same house! Thanks to you, I got chomped on by a dim, blonde, undead, selfish, whorish, blood-sucking
leech when I was minding my own business in the past.”
“Don’t you call me dim!”
“Um. Everyone. Perhaps we should—” Tina began.
“Wait, when did this happen?” Marc asked. He had the look of a man desperately trying to buy a vowel. “Past, an hour ago? Past, last year? Help
me out.”
“Oh, biiiiig surprise!” Laura threw her (perfectly manicured) hands in the air. “Let me guess, you were soooo busy banging your dead husband
that you haven’t had time to tell anybody anything.”
“I was getting to it,” I whined.
“Then after not telling anyone anything and not being proactive—or even active!—you grow up to destroy the world and bring about eternal
nuclear winter or whatever the heck that was and how do you deal with your foreknowledge of terrible events to come? Have sex!”
“An affirmation of life?” Sinclair suggested. Never, I repeat, never had I loved him more. I was torn between slugging my sister and blowing my
husband. Hmm. Laura might have a point about my priorities . . . but jeez. Look at him. Yum.
“—even do it and what do you have to say for yourself? Huh?”
“You’re just uptight, repressed, smug, antisex, and jealous, you Antichristing morally superior, fundamentally evil bitch.”
Laura and Marc gasped. My husband groaned. "
― MaryJanice Davidson , Undead and Undermined (Undead, #10)
7
" I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage. "
― , Sonora
10
" A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring " Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys " that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not " just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for " pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the " skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: " O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity? "
20
" You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”
The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit. "
― L.L. Barkat , The Novelist
