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Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (1997)

de Angela Carter

Outros autores: Jenny Uglow (Editor)

Outros autores: Veja a seção outros autores.

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The third volume of Carter's essays and journalism which follows her from the 1960s onwards as she explores new territories and overturns old ideas. The material is derived from sources such as student magazines, New Statesman, Nova, Vogue and the London Review of Books
Adicionado recentemente porchloe.ct, aczenica, philcbull, arwa-fm, litacore, ELIZON, sbnicar
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Exibindo 4 de 4
If you only know Angela Carter from her fractured fairy tales or her novels that take down the patriarchal structure that has characterized narrative fiction for centuries, then you only know half of the story. Carter had a wonderful imagination but this imagination was fueled by her potent intellect and curiosity for everything from literature to travel. She has to have been one of the most well read persons of the 20th century.

Shaking a Leg is the companion volume to her collected stories and covers the timeframe from the late sixties until her death in 1993. The other half of the story I referred to is her career as a columnist, critic, and freelancer as well as the other half that was a fiction writer. Her wit and wisdom, so different from the surrealism of her fiction comes out in all these pieces, she comments everything from cinema to art to town festivals.

Somewhat of an iconoclast, she isn't afraid to call D.H. Lawrence the "greatest English novelist of the 20th century" while taking him down as an impotent male chauvinist who didn't know a thing about women at the same time. She is not being facetious. Who else would deride the Booker Prize in the same year she was one of the judges? Carter calls them as she sees 'em as I like to say. At the same time her writing always remains both serious and entertaining.

This was the perfect "bathroom book" (not that I left it in the bathroom!) for me because most of the pieces are only a few pages long; I think the longest entry might have been a dozen. If you don't have a lot of time you can pick up one or two entries and not lose your context. I hate reading stories and novels in fits and starts so I usually have at least one book of this kind around all the time.

There is a nice chronology to put all the pieces into context with each other (they are arranged broadly by topic). There is a detailed index. ( )
  Gumbywan | Jun 24, 2022 |
entertaining observations from past eras
  ritaer | Aug 18, 2021 |
‘Books about books is fun but frivolous,’ Angela Carter once said to an interviewer – which just goes to show that she, unlike most, was capable of proving herself wrong. This collection of her reviews, essays, articles and general criticism is definitely fun but far from frivolous – on the contrary, having it all here in one brick-sized articulation gives it the contours of quite a serious cumulative argument, one focused on the intersection of eroticism, feminism, intellectual frustration and dry wit. And it's useful to have it. I always liked the baroque, oneiric oddness of her fiction, but I never quite understood what argument or philosophy was motivating it. Now, I feel like I do.

Carter was born in 1940, the year after Germaine Greer and Margaret Atwood, and one way to think about her is to recognise that she, like them, grew up imbibing and driving and reshaping the same intellectual currents of second-wave feminism and power politics. (If only she, like them, had also lived long enough to make bloody-minded comments on the latest iterations of the gender debates.) Feminism is, for her, not so much a political position as an inherent facet of her common sense, and when you read Angela Carter on gender issues (which is an utter joy), you never feel that she's writing to work out some animus against anyone.

Rarely, in other words, is she interested in facile attributions of blame. Instead, her basic position is one of bemused frustration, which she makes seem incredibly productive. Surveying the profusion of women's magazines, for instance, she examines the photo-strips and romance tips confusedly, before concluding:

It is as if marriage functions as the sexuality of women. It occupies the imagination of these magazines to the same obsessive extent that sexuality itself does in the tit mags. Perhaps, like the tit mags, these magazines do not truly reflect the central preoccupations of the readers.

This is a theme she develops in several pieces – nowhere more thrillingly than in a virtuoso essay called ‘Alison's Giggle’ which she wrote in 1983 for a book called The Left and the Erotic. The essay's title comes from an incident in The Miller's Tale where, if you remember, a cheating wife sticks her bottom out of the window and contrives for her cuckolded husband, who is confused by the darkness, to kiss her arse. This makes Alison the wife giggle – as Chaucer tells us (‘Tehee! quod she’).

Carter takes this bawdy heroine as a foundational example in English literature of ‘the assumption that men and women share an equal knowledge of the basic facts of sexual experience’, an assumption that lasts ‘up until, curiously enough, that very time in the eighteenth century when women in significant numbers take up their pens and write’. It's a thesis she follows through Austen, Eliot, Colette, and up to Doris Lessing and Jean Rhys, full of fascinating detours and pointed conclusions on how women are treated in literature.

But at least Alison managed to get herself fucked by the man of her choice, to her own satisfaction and with no loss of either her own self-respect or the respect of her male creator, which is more than a girl like her will be able to do again, in fiction, for almost more than half a millennium.

Though fair-minded and full of humour, she is especially fun to read when she does take exception to something. She opens a review of Arthur Marwick's Beauty in History by noting drily that the author

certainly knows what he likes and a fitting subtitle for Beauty in History might be: ‘Women I have fancied throughout the ages with additional notes on some of the men I think I might have fancied if I were a woman’.

Carter pauses to ponder, uncensoriously, ‘the way in which appearance functions as a kind of visible sexuality for women’; then, with that hanging in the air, she turns her attention back to Marwick's approach. Ruthlessly unpicking the prurience underlying his book, and quoting him to devastating effect (‘Twiggy, with her 31-inch bust, had beautiful, small but perfectly proportioned breasts, as can be seen from the photograph of her in a bikini reproduced III, 116’), Carter summons up a sort of dismissive indulgence which is more withering than any denunciation:

There is something almost – but, again, not quite – touching about the boyish enthusiasm Professor Marwick evinces towards his subject. There are whole pages off which one can feel the acne rise.

Christ! One pictures Professor Marwick limping towards the nearest burns centre…. In real life (she says, in the introduction to Expletives Deleted), she is ‘notoriously foul-mouthed’, and spent a lot of time when writing reviews struggling to translate her initial reactions (‘bloody awful’, ‘fucking dire’) into more high-minded language. The results are impressive.

Of course, it helps that the range of her interests is so broad – in here is everything from travelogues of Japanese fertility festivals, through reviews of Bertolucci, to a Bob Dylan gig in 1966 (‘thin and black-clad and linear, a Beardsley hobgoblin’), from thoughts on fashion and cooking, all the way to explorations of fanzines and an investigation into the ethics of HP Lovecraft's horror stories (in which ‘Evil is…it is not what men do’).

She was a powerhouse, and this collection – huge but still not complete – makes you miss her voice more than ever. No one has really replaced her, and indeed, reading through Shaking a Leg, you wonder how anyone could. ( )
3 vote Widsith | Mar 12, 2018 |
I'm just going to include one of my favorite passages, from her essay "Notes from the Front Line":

"Since it was, therefore, primarily through my sexual and emotional life that I was radicalized—that I first became truly aware of the difference between how I was and how I was supposed to be, or expected to be—I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination. . . .

"The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, at any other preceding time or place. I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline. . . .

"There are one or two lies in the lumber room about the artist, about how terrific it is to be an artist, how you’ve got to suffer and how artists are wise and good people and a whole lot of crap like that. I’d like to say something about that, because writing—to cite one art—is only applied linguistics and Shelley was wrong, we’re not the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Some women really do seem to think they will somehow feel better or be better if they get it down on paper. I don’t know. . . .

"To backtrack a bit about ‘applied linguistics.’ Yet this, of course, is why it is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women—it is part of the slow process of decolonialising our language and our basic habits of thought. I really do believe this. It has nothing at all to do with being a ‘legislator of mankind’ or anything like that; it is to do with the creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language has previously existed. . . .

"It’s been amazingly difficult, trying to sort out how I feel that feminism has affected my work, because that is really saying how it has affected my life and I don’t really know that because I live my life, I don’t examine it. I also feel I’ve showed off a lot, and given mini-lectures on this and that, in a pompous and middle-aged way. Oh, hell. What I really like doing is writing fiction and trying to work things out that way." (39-43) ( )
2 vote DawnFinley | Jul 2, 2006 |
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» Adicionar outros autores (3 possíveis)

Nome do autorFunçãoTipo de autorObra?Status
Angela Carterautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Uglow, JennyEditorautor secundáriotodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Bikadoroff, RoxannaArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Smith, JoanIntroduçãoautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado

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In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a Utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition where machines do all the work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris's mind reel, publishers quail.
The realm of faery has always attracted nutters, regressives and the unbalanced, as though a potential audience of children granted absolute licence.
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The third volume of Carter's essays and journalism which follows her from the 1960s onwards as she explores new territories and overturns old ideas. The material is derived from sources such as student magazines, New Statesman, Nova, Vogue and the London Review of Books

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