Can lesbians be misogynists?

Can lesbians be misogynists? 

A brief introduction of two lesbian novelists, the British Mary Renault (1905-1983) and The French-Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), by a contemporary writer Agnes Bushell, suggests that this is a distinct possibility.

According to Bushell, Renault and Yourcenar both created idealized homosexual characters, but they were all inevitably male. Strangely, they both seemed to despise their female characters, all of whom, says Bushell, "are either absent or loathsome."

Moreover, they go back in time to ancient Greek history and mythology to model their heroic gay male characters on.

In other words, their creative inspirations remarkably match those of gay male writers of their era, like Arthur Symons. 

It could be that to come out openly as a lesbian would've been risky for both women, and to champion lesbian characters would've got negative press or no press at all. Safer to exalt same sex male love than same sex female romance? 

The titles of some of the novels by Renault and Yourcenar indicate the presence of male personas. Here are two samples:

Chinese ambiguity

While two of James Joyce's most difficult of novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, have enjoyed near-best-selling status (sale of Finnegans exceeded 8000, while Ulyssees sold 85,000 copies upon publication in 1994), the Chinese ministry of culture refuses a show of Andy Warhol's famous 10 paintings of Mao.

Is this an evidence of Chinese ambiguity?

Conversely,

What the Chinese read is Joyce in translation--can't imagine the quirky Joyceisms retaining their unique lexical flavor in translation--and my hunch is maybe what the Chinese read are watered down to what they can digest, i.e. censored in any which way. 

While words can be tinkered with in translation, a painting can't be altered, let alone 10 paintings.

Below is the 10th; it's the Mao drawn in the darkest of tones.

The jewel in the loin

Can you tell that the young lady in the image is about to embark on an erotic adventure?

I think I can, by glancing at the implement she is apparently trying to girt around, what I assume are her loins.

The image is an illustration from the French enlightenment philosopher and writer Denis Diderot's book named The Indiscreet Jewel. Women speak boldly and frankly in the book about their sexual desires and about what excite them sexually.

Published in 1748 in France, The Indiscreet Jewel is said to be a precursor of Eve Angler's Vagina Monologues. 

Diderot was an ace enlightenment thinker and was known for confronting courageously the unconscionable and uncomfortable issues of his times. One of the issues was an openness about women's sexuality. But he was also an outspoken critic of religion, racism and slavery. 

His positions on most political, religious, social and sexual orthodoxies made him very unpopular in the eyes of the Catholic Church. He was denied a burial spot.

On the eve of his 300th birthday, French President Francois Hollande has decided to honor Diderot posthumously by granting him a symbolic reburial in the Pantheon a massive neo-Classical Church in the Latin quarter of Paris. 

The 120 Days of Sodom

One feels like if the Marquis de Sade, were to be locked in a bathroom, he would spend his time writing reams of filthy porn on toilet paper scrolls.

Locked up he was, but within the less inglorious confines of the Bastille, under a Royal order initiated by his mother-in-law. De Sade was stuck in the famous prison for 37 days and deprived of writing materials--because any form of writing from an enemy of the state would have been deemed incendiary--de Sade wrote furiously and continuously in tiny scripts on both sides of a sheaf of narrow paper. According to the movie Quills, a beautiful prison laundress smuggles in writing quills, ink and paper to the Marquis.

The 37 days of uninterrupted writing produced the controversial book 120 Days of Sodom, that tells the story of four "libertines" who lock themselves up in a remote Medieval castle with forty six victims, comprised of a motley of boys, girls and virginal women. They are accompanied by a handful of experienced prostitutes who arouse the hosts with their outlandish stories. The hosts in turn seduce their guests into performing grotesque types of sexual acts with them.

The 120 Days of Sodom is a potpourri of what came to be patented as "sadism" thereafter. Despite attempts to elevate the book into the category of "erotica," the book remains steadfastly un erotic according to experts. The maker himself described it as "the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began." 

De Sade's objective was to get back at the regime with extreme verbal debauchery--to shock and awe, as it were, his oppressors before they put him to death.

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France is currently negotiating a price of up to five million dollars to acquire the manuscript and preserve it as French national heritage.

From mountains to pit stops

Ennis and Jack meet and fall in passion with each other against the backdrop of majestic mountains in Wyoming as shown in the film Brokeback Mountain. 

The gay males in Yen Tan's new film, Pit Stop, have no nature to escape into to pursue their passion. They remain closeted and live straight lives. Or, I infer from the title, that, as they journey in their pickups, they make pit stops to make love.

The film is set in small town Texas, where, as Tan says elsewhere, there are gay males galore. They are mostly working class and married with children. 

Tan takes an objective look at the Texan attitude to male homosexuality. Unlike Brokeback, where Ennis suffers a brutal end and Jack is forced to pent up his emotions--he can't mourn the death of his lover openly, --Pit Stop reveals a surprisingly tolerant community.

Lincoln rebranded

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Ford Motor Company has recently launched an advertising campaign for its Lincoln Mercury line of luxury cars. The Lincoln is being re-branded to appeal to a younger clientele for whom Lincoln might just be equivalent to the image projected on-screen by actor Daniel Day-Lewis, in Steven Spielberg's film, Lincoln.

I didn't see much that is Daniel Day-Lewisish about the ad's Lincoln. The way in which he emerges from a mist reminds me of the Twilight Saga rather. And why not? After all the Saga's wolf-vampire clan from the Pacific Northeast constitutes a defining moment in contemporary youth culture of America.

The best ad campaigns are those that capitalize on the past and the present as well as on complicated versions of both.

Reclaiming Hindu symbols

The play Ganesh Versus The Third Reich first played in Melbourne, Australia. The theme is seemingly simple: a Hindu effort to reclaim the Swastika, a sacred symbol of Hinduism, from the association it has had with the Nazis.

The play is directed by an Australian playwright, Bruce Gladwin, and had an all-Australian cast in its inaugural showing.

Backstage magazine writes up a favorable review of the play, as it opens in New York.

The making of a book

A video from the prelinger archive: The 1947 video: 

[An] archival documentary from Encyclopaedia Britannica Films reveals how a manuscript becomes a book. Clunky machines mold words out of molten metal, stamp out pages, and trim paper. All the while a team of humans shuttle materials from machine to machine.

Bertrand Russell in Bollywood

Here's a gem of a film clip I got from the New Yorker magazine: a moment from a 1967 Hindi movie, named Aman, where a young Indian doctor, played by the very unsightly and singularly untalented Rajendra Kumar (we used to call him "gajendra" Kumar because of his ungainly elephantine gait) meets Betrand Russell in his house in London.

The Indian doctor is an idealist who earns his medical degree in London and wants to work in Japan to help victims of the Hiroshima Nagasaki nuclear holocaust.

Russell, reverentially referred to as the "lord" and the "mahapurush" in the movie, is 97 at this point in his life, and recognized globally for being a champion of nuclear disarmament, speaks in a shaky voice but it's all drowned by a obnoxious Hindi translation (subtitles weren't the norm back then in Bollywood).

Here's the clip:

Monet's light

Eva Figes' Light is

[A] slim book—ninety-one pages in all, describing a single summer day in 1900—but an amazingly capacious one. As the subtitle promises, it’s set in Giverny, the place where Monet produced many of his best-known works, including his paintings of water lilies. These are among the most widely viewed and most often reproduced nature studies in the world. What the paintings don’t show, however, is the dramatic extent to which their subjects were in fact man-made. As numerous biographies have detailed, the father of Impressionism was an avid student of botany; he employed and oversaw a team of up to seven gardeners and imported seeds from around the world. The pond in which the famous water lilies grew existed only because he persuaded local authorities to divert a river, and his garden was as assiduously manicured as any aristocrat’s lawn. He was painting nature, but a nature constantly modified in the service of his artistic project.

Not too many people would remember Eva Figes: She was an English writer, who died last year at the age of 80. Figes is best known for her feminist treatise, "Patriarchal Attitudes," published in the 70's. The treatise ferrets out the sexism that Figes saw embedded in almost every aspect of Western civilization.

It's no wonder then that in the novel, Light, Monet, is recreated in the image of a patriarch. However, unlike her other works of fiction and non-fiction, Light isn't a crude vehicle of Figes' ideology; it is something more, as Figes makes it clear that the greatness of Monet's artistic accomplishments are not cancelled by the conditions of their production.

In Light, Monet is shown to be a callous husband and father, not fine-tuned to the emotional needs of the largely female members of his household. He was single-mindedly invested in the procreation of his art. Even where his own children were concerned, Monet fed them and clothed and sheltered them, but inevitably reduced them to a medium via which an aspect of his art would be refracted:

During lunch, he looks down the table at his stepdaughter Germaine and becomes absorbed by the interplay of light and shadow on her hair and gown—so much so that he momentarily forgets whom, exactly, he is looking at.

Monet's patriarchal attitudes are, if one could say this, luminous; he is shown to be in pursuit of "light," not crude power.

If you really want to know a people...

...start by looking inside their bedrooms

When I first read these lines, T sprang to my mind. for this could have very well have come from T and others who believe that to understand social mores one has to do a deep study of a society's sexual mores.

But these are the words of Shereen El Feki, the author of Sex and the Citadel

The daughter of an Egyptian father and Welsh mother, Cambridge-educated immunologist, former science-writer for the Economist, and the current Vice Chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and Law, El Feki has " spent the past five years traveling across the Arab region asking people about sex; what they do, what they don't, what they think and why." 

The result is this vibrant and bouncy accounting of sex in a changing Arab world.

El Feki says she wrote the book as a response to the following:

The Arab world [...] once famous in the West for sexual license envied by some but despised by others, is now widely criticized for sexual intolerance. ... And the West, once praised by some in the Arab world for its hard line on same-sex relations, is now seen by many as a radiating source of sexual debauchery from which the region must be shielded.

El Feki is not simply interested in chronicling the reversal in Arab attitude toward sexuality, but she also forecasts a change--not the advent of an "Arab Spring" in the culture's sexual sphere, but a gradual moving away from the "intimate order" of the Arab world, an order deeply entrenched in accepting marriage as the sun of a sexual cosmology. 

Change is coming to Egypt [...] not a sexual revolution, I think, but a sexual re-evaluation, in which people will one day have the education, the inclination, and the freedom to take an unblinkered view of what they were, how they came to be what they are, and what they could be in the years to come. The confidence and creativity of Arab civilization was once reflected in its sexual life. For the first time in a long time, we have a chance to see this again—not by gazing at our past, but by looking to our future.

A review of the book can be found here.

Jodie fosters complexity

I have been a big fan of Jodie Foster and knew her to be a thinking woman's Hollywood actress. Somehow, the words brainy, thoughtful and educated come to mind when I see Foster on screen.

Yesterday's Golden Globe award ceremony confirmed that impression: Foster received the Cecile B. Demille award for lifetime achievement in cinema. A very young recipient of a very hoary award, but it was the graceful and un-Hollywood speech with which Foster received her award that stirs the mind.

True to her metier, Foster gave a thoughtful speech in which the actress, director and producer, addressed her personal sexuality and privacy with finesse.

The LA Times described Jodie Foster's acceptance speech as  "obliquely playful, complex and emotional."

Rape and burger?

According to Mr. Asaram Bapu (a popular Hindu Guru) and other "conservatives" in India, the following items (it's a list-in-progress) are responsible for the epidemic of sexual violence and harassment of women in the nation:

1. Skirts

2. "Revealing" clothing

3. A lack of overcoats on girls (?? somebody has been reading Gogol?)

4. Junk food

5. Astrology

These are the current list of things that "lure" women out of the house and put them in the path of trouble.

I wonder if this gives "junk food" a bad name!

I also wonder how junk food made it to this particular list.

An alarmist, not a hypochondriac

Woody Allen has a gift for intelligent humor.

So when he writes to clear any misconception of who he really is--an alarmist, not a hypochondriac--it's worth a read. 

Allen confesses to also having "an animal fear of dying":

I sometimes imagine that death might be more tolerable if I passed away in my sleep, although the reality is, no form of dying is acceptable to me with the possible exception of being kicked to death by a pair of scantily clad cocktail waitresses.

But, to be a misunderstood alarmist, a hypochondriac and somebody who is pathologically fearful of dying, is better than to be a Republican, concludes Allen.

Slapped silly

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is, has been, for me a good reading experience. I read the novel, during my long subway rides to and from work, in November 2010, and 7 months later, much of the novel exists on the canvas of my mind as vividly illuminated flotsam.

What I’ve managed to salvage from the 500+ page-long novel is a notion that Tsiolkas is offering readers a bird’s eye view of contemporary, multicultural Australia. Multiculturalism, as seen through the primarily Greek-Australian eyes of the novel’s main characters, is both a boon and a curse for the evolving fabric of a 21st century life down under.

For the Greek immigrants—and being of Greek origin, Tsiolkas writes of them with panache—Australian multiculturalism is nothing but the modern state’s attempt to police both public and private human behavior so as to manage and contain intra-ethnic conflicts, if and when they arise.

Many of the characters in the novel seethe internally at the extremities to which a culture of political correctness has traveled and distorted one’s will to live freely. People are in loathing of being berated, rapped on the knuckles by the local judiciary and even arrested by the police for smoking inside a cab or for making an allegedly racially insensitive remark. Minor domestic actions, like slapping a brooding, recalcitrant child because he is trying to crack open another child’s skull with a cricket bat, become occasions for a major discourse on anti-child offence. 

The excesses of multiculturalism is abhorred, and the excess is foreshadowed best in the beginning, when one of the central male characters, Hector, finds himself waking up on his bed next to his lovely Indian wife, Aisha, wholly dissatisfied and resentful. The experience of his conjugal bed-mating, he realizes, is artificially fabricated, not an expression of his authentic self. He has had to rein in his organic bodily functions, and sanitize his physical being to ensure sexual cordiality between him and his wife. He has had to ostracize a significant part of his physical reality simply to be sexually/conjugally acceptable and/or functional. 

Hector likes to fart, but in the presence of his wife, he has to censor this most natural of his bodily desires so as to keep himself desirable in her eyes:

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I don’t want to sleep in a boy’s locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learnt to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude; she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girl’s locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleep’s tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt, he’d spoken out loud.

His wife makes similar compromises. The absence of authenticity in their marital bonding spills over from body to mind, from outside to essence. Thus Hector and Aisha compromise on mutual truth-telling—if the truth is told, the edifice of the marriage will collapse.

But multiculturalism has not only bred a culture of self-policing; it is also upheld as the inevitable and alternative-less direction in which the destiny of the industrialized Western world—a world that has for ages been hosting within its demesnes the arrival and settling in of migrants from every conceivable corner of the globe—unfolds. Australia has no option but to endorse diversity in order to survive as a modern nation.

As a genuflection to the marvels of accepting diversity as the norm rather than the exception of modern life, the novel creates another male character—that of the very Australian Richie. The characterization of Richie, a young adolescent who comes of age as an openly gay man in a society that’s pretty Grecian (Tsiolkas refers to contemporary Greece—not the mythical Greece of yore—and its practices of rampant sexism) in its intolerance of anything but the purely heteronormative, is, I feel, the most refreshing in The Slap. Richie is gay and sensitive and very intelligent; most significantly, he is loyal as a driven in nail to his friends and is capable of making cardinal sacrifices to protect the sanctity of friendships. He is, in other words, selfless without being naively cacophonic about being so.

Richie, the independent-minded, attuned-to-the global complexity of the world (he realizes he is emerging into a global society, not just an Australian one) gay male is, I believe, Tsiolkas’ best gift to his readers.

The undercity rises?

At the end of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo writes of the death of two horses in Annawadi, the Mumbai slum around which Boo's narrative is woven.

The horses, we learn, are kept by one Robert, the "Zebra Man," who also has zebras and other animals in his keeping.

Every summer, on a Sunday in June, an illegal horse racing event is held on the "gleaming Western Express Highway," a highway, one figures from Boo's book, that divides the part of Mumbai nestled close to Sahar International Airport into two worlds: the "over" and the "under" cities. 

Robert, a deposed slumlord of the "undercity" of Annawadi, makes money by running his horses in this "overcity" race.

Robert's horses are harnessed to a carriage with a pretty facade. However, behind the illusory "forever" of a fresh coating of paint, the carriage is ill-maintained. So, during the course of the race, the wheels come loose and the horses fall from the overpass to their death.

What follows the death of the rickety, underfed, yet exploited horses, elicits the writer's irony. A small group of animal rights activists rally around the horse-tragedy and demand that Robert be prosecuted. The event garners media coverage as well, and Annawadians, strangers to receiving a driblet of civic concern over the death, mutilation, sickness, wrongful imprisonment, and the terror of a cruel police force, are genuinely "bemused" by the attention paid to the dead horses.

The activists manage to take the case of cruelty and injustice (meted out to animals in Annawadi) to the Mumbai police Commissioner and Robert and his wife are eventually "charged under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act for failing to provide adequate food, water, and shelter to their four-legged charges."

Boo notes that with the promise of a conviction "the forces of justice" will have "finally come to Annawadi." 

But, it's just the horses whose death is avenged by the due process of the judiciary.

Karam, his son Abdul, and his daughter, Kehkanesha, long-time Muslim residents of Annawadi, on the other hand, suffer torture in police custody, endless extortion from both the police and petty local officials and pre-trial incarceration, on the basis of fake murder charges leveled at them by Fatima, the "one-legged" enigma and pariah of Annawadi.

Fatima had set herself on fire in a fit of extreme envy against her next-door Muslim neighbors. As Boo unfolds, she begrudged their relative affluence over time and wanted to ruin them. What better way than to set herself on fire and cry "murder?"

Fatima's trick goes overboard as nobody helps douse her third-degree burns and her stint in the local state (free) hospital worsens her condition.

She dies, but not before an official gets her to accuse the Karam's of having set her on fire. 

The family of Karam isn't affluent by any long shot; nobody in Annawadi is. But they are scavengers and had come into some money as a result of diligent scavenging on the part of Abdul of the right kind of trash--plastic and metal. In the market of global capitalism, the price of plastic and metal trash had soared.

The Fatima's next door, which is really the other side of a think wall separating one shanty from another, could not reap the harvest of this market. 

While swift justice befalls the dead horses, the lives of Annawadi's human denizens get emptied by the day of any hope for justice whether earthly or otherwise.

The dead and mutilated bodies of two of the scavenging children, Kalu and Sanjay, remain less than mere statistics, because the police don't keep records of the poor dead in the city of Mumbai. They are to be dispensed like trash.

What goes through the minds of the Annawadi boys like Abdul, upon seeing the spectacle of justice meted out to the horses of Annawadi is expressed in frilless prose by Boo:

They weren't thinking about the uninvestigated deaths of Kalu and Sanjay. Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths would matter not at all. The boys were simply puzzled by the fuss, since they considered Robert's horses the luckiest and most lovingly tended creatures in the slum.

Yet, as Boo implies in her book, the Annawadians too can, if they wanted to, avenge the deaths and injustices that rain on them on a daily basis. Their particular enemy is the local police. The police of modern India isn't a state infrastructure that provides protection to all Indian citizens; it's a private army whose services have to be bought by those who can afford to. 

Boo's modern, or as she insists on the label "globalized," India, is a privatized nation much like modern-day Haiti is. The poor of Annawadi, like the poor of Haiti,can't buy the services of the police, the local government or the judiciary, but they can resist the tyranny of the system through unity.

The horses got justice because the activists persisted through unity. Disunity is the bane, one feels of Annawadians. In the "Author's Note" segment of the book, Boo ponders on why the slums of Annawadi-like places in India don't look the insurrectional video game Metal Slug 3 (there is a video parlor run by a Tamil man in Annawadi; the Annawadi boys play games like Metal Slug 3 regularly). Boo's answer is disunity and at the core of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the telling of the story of this abysmal disunity.

Here is a sampling of that core:

At Annawadi, everyone had a wrong he wanted righted: the water shortage, brutal for three months now;the quashing of voter applications of the election office; the worthlessness of the government schools; the fly-by-night subcontractors who ran off with their laborer's pay. Abdul was one of the many residents who were angry at the police. Elaborate fantasies about blowing up the Sahar Police Station had become the secret comfort of his nighttimes. But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together [...] Instead powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another [...] In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife createst only the faintest ripples in the fabric of society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. 

I think Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a book on contemporary India, not simply a book on Indian poverty.

How to think Holmesian

Literature has always provided valuable fodder to the human sciences.

The basis of much of Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis was literary. According to the Freudian scheme of things humans are fundamentally ruled by animalistic sexual drive, and none emblematized this more forcefully than the Greek mythical figure of Oedipus.

If sons display an overt love for their mothers (and by default wish to be in their father's shoes, in a manner of speaking) then they are in the grip of an Oedipal complex.

In her new book that explores the intersection of literature and psychology, Maria Konnikova claims that if we are in the habit of stereotyping, seeking confirmation for our biases and are not prone to question our assumptions, then our brains are in the grip of a Watsonian complex, Watson being the famous sidekick of the legendary Victorian sleuth Sherlock Holmes.

What then are the evidences that our brains are on the side of Sherlock? When we don't just "see" but keenly "observe" as well. When we are attentive, mindful, self-questioning and rational.

According to Konnikova, our brains have both systems--System Holmes and System Watson and we spend most of our time running System Watson, so we jump to conclusions, travel along familiar cognitive paths and bungle when the chips are down.

But it is possible to train ourselves to run system Holmes by practicing the following on a daily basis:

Pay mindful attention, think twice, question your own assumptions, be methodical, and if you're stuck on a problem take time out to let it percolate through your unconscious while you go for a stroll / do some knitting / chase the cat round the house with a Nerf gun. Be aware, above all, of your own fallibility.

Come to think of this, actualizing the System Holmes part of our brains sounds like an uphill task, yet to the owner of that brain, it's "elementary".

The world as a distraction

I had always had a particular image of the writer: it's of somebody who is compelled to tell a story to the world because she feels it's a story that has to be told for a variety of reasons.

In other words, I had thought of the writer as somebody who intrudes madly into the world and makes a (meaningful and moving) noise in it.

A figure that had embodied the ideal writer in my mind was that of the Ancient Mariner--the storyteller in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The unnamed mariner is a disheveled man with a time-worn face; the carcass of a dead albatross hangs round his neck. He was afloat, in the wilderness and the first port of civilization he alights upon, upon his re-entry into society proper, is a marriage party.

He isn't invited but he is so in need of society or the world that he barges into the party.

The mariner feels compelled to tell the story of his experience to his audience, to any audience that would care to listen. His sole objective is to tell and to symbolically disburden himself of the albatross around his neck.

From this, I had understood the storyteller as an intruder in this world; people had to be wary of such creatures for they would mesmerize the listener and momentarily carry him away from his duties toward the world.

In other words, the storyteller had stayed in my mind as a distractor who needs to engage with the world for his story to anchor itself.

The more recent image of the writer is of somebody who needs to run away from the world or be momentarily (and severely) disengaged from it to focus on the writing. 

The world for such writers could be a distraction that barges into their mental worlds, not to enrich, but to deplete.

Take for instance the daily matutinal routine that writer Roxana Robinson has created for herself, just so she can keep the world out of her way during those precious early-morning hours she dedicates to her writing. 

No sooner than she wakes up Robinson feels the world is encroaching on her and the noise of the day, she fears, will dissipate the words that have accrued in her mind during the night. "The night" she says, has spun a "fine membrane, like the film inside an eggshell."

An intersection with the world could just break the shell that's "fragile" and can be "easily pierced."

So, like a vestal virgin, Robinson tries to seal herself off from the world by adopting a daily matutinal routine of abnegation:

In the morning, I don’t talk to anyone, nor do I think about certain things.
I try to stay within certain confines. I imagine this as a narrow, shadowy corridor with dim bare walls. I’m moving down this corridor, getting to the place where I can write.
I brush my teeth, get dressed, make the bed. I avoid conversation, as my husband knows. 

Any dealing with the world is strictly utilitarian: The coffee is had just for the "kick" not for the enjoyment, and the granola cereal, tasting like "horse feed" is gulped down mirthlessly because it "validates" the coffee.

Without the coffee and the breaking of the fast the writing may not come.

There is an anxious avoidance of all other worldly emblems:

I don’t read the paper or listen to the news. One glance at the headlines, the apprehension of the dire straits of the world, and it would all be over. The membrane will be pierced; it will shrivel and turn to damp shreds. I will find myself thrust into the outside world, my opinions required on unfaithful politicians and the precarious Middle East and the threat of global warming: I should really take action. The voices of the outside world are urgent and demanding.

The writer thinks that the inner voice--wrapped up in that private gossamer "membrane" of hers--will disperse were she to listen to the voice of the world.

Then there is the world's arch miscreant--the Internet--to contend with. But the "endless electronic niggling" of the Internet is easily blocked off by yanking the cable from the laptop.

Finally, with the distracting world kept at bay, the writer settles down, trying to get caught up

[...] By something larger than myself, held in the light by some celestial movement. For a brief charged time I may be irradiated, able to cast a shadow version of something I only imagine. The shadow will never be the bright true self that I know exists, but it will be as precise as I can make it, as real, as sharp, as beautiful. I will cast this shadow into the air, where it may never be seen, or where it may be seen at a great distance, and only by one person, someone I will never know. The point is to cast the shadow out into the air.

A beautiful accounting of the writerly rigor, but the disengagement with the world and the casting away of it as a mere rudiment of distraction, is cruel.