Quote of the Day

One of the problems for the woman as writer...is to face whole traditions of depiction of female figures and to get some tread on what to do with them. A characteristic of that cultural figure is her stasis as icon and her quality as a receiver of the gaze-- a semifrozen, singular figure whose spiritual responsibility is often already to "be there" so that with great sweetness and intensity she can induce the male follower to "get there." (And possibly, as in the 1948 fulmination by [William Carlos] Williams, to take some grief for her causeway status.) -- Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "The Gendered Marvelous: Barbara Guest, Feminism, and Surrealism"