Fear of Flying – Erica Jong

Vintage 2004, First Published 1973

I read this, about a year ago, and really quite enjoyed it. I know it’s old, it’s probably on feminism 101 reading lists, but I liked the tone- Isadora the main character is smart and reflective and wry and horny and wondering. She makes mistakes, she has phobias, and she has a patchy history in love, but I liked her heaps. Nice to read a female lead who is neither simpering nor brittle nor simple nor ‘sweet’ nor completely 2 dimensional. Isadora is a proper gutsy likeable flawed story hero. Even though I’m too lazy to write a review right now, I thought these quotes were interesting. AQsthe main character is a writer (poet) quite a bit of the book relates to this. The first quote is a character in the book speaking to Isadora Wing, the last two quotes are Isadora herself.

The writer being accused as using lovers as material:“You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependant on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weaknesses and then you despise him for being human. You sit there the whole time keeping tabs, making mental notes, imagining people as books or case histories – I know that game. You tell yourself you’re collecting material. You tell yourself you’re studying human nature. Art above life at all times. Another version of that puritanical bullshit. Only you have a new twist to it. You think you’re a hedonist because you take off and run around with me. But it’s the bloody old work ethic all the same because you’re only thinking you’ll write about me. So it’s actually work, c’est-ce pas? You can fuck me and call it poetry. Pretty clever. You deceive yourself beautifully that way.”

The voracious and open minded reader:“I had always worshipped authors. I used to kiss their pictures on the back of books when I finished reading. I regarded anything printed as a holy relic and authors as creatures of superhuman knowledge and wit. Pearl Buck, Tolstoy, or Carolyn Keene, the author of Nancy Drew. I made none of the snotty divisions you learn to make later. I could happily go from Great Expectations or the Secret Garden to Mad Magazine.”

Books as refuge:“Growing up in my chaotic household, I quickly learnt that a book carefully arranged in front of your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, “the absent-minded professor.” They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.”

Atwood quote

Just read this morning:

..By this time he is almost an anecdote, and Julie is almost old

The Bog Man, from Wilderness tips (short stories)

After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
- Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

on poetry..

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
John Keats (1795 - 1821)

A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words." - Robert Frost

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in
the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Jack Kerouac - "On The Road"

Literature is part of the flow of life. We don’t exist in some simple ‘factual’ way. We exist in virtual worlds made of stories we constantly tell ourselves. It’s made of master stories told by master storytellers or by whole communities, and contains in coded form the experience of our race. It’s a well of resource at which we can drink.

Writer-critic Yap Kun Bek