George Orwell wrote of "two great facts about women": "One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality."

 A passage from a notebook, quoted in "George Orwell gets his comeuppance in a new book about his first wife/Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom’ focuses on Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, beginning with her influence on the creation of 'Animal Farm'" (WaPo). The article is by Francine Prose.

“Wifedom” is part biography and part speculative fiction written in the present tense; it includes passages of dialogue and accounts of private thoughts and intimate moments that only the people involved could have recorded or witnessed. (“The sex is strange. Perfunctory. Or performative. It doesn’t seem to be an act of communication at all, or of passion.”)...

"I hate the word process, I just can’t bear it. People say, ‘What’s your process?’ My process is allowing my soul to leave my body and enter into the body of another human being...."

"I like to pretend that I’m the most attention deficit disordered person I’m ever going to meet.... I’m very conscious of keeping the reader’s interest. And I’m easily bored — I’m easily bored by books, I hate to say. And so I want there to be some sort of suspense or some sort of payoff.... It’s all about language.... Once I can figure out what the language inside [the characters'] head is — that way in which people talk to themselves without saying anything, the stream of what is running in your head — once I can figure out what that language is, I can get the character. It just clicks in."

From "‘I’m Easily Bored by Books,’ Says Writer of 22 Novels/The latest from the aptly named Francine Prose is 'The Vixen,' a surprisingly funny tale involving Ethel Rosenberg and the C.I.A." (NYT).

Notice that she's talking about inhabiting the head of the characters and the head of the readers. Those are 2 very different processes, but she's set on doing both things. If you had to choose one or the other, which would you pick? Do you want to read things written by writers who assume you have no patience at all? I'd rather be trusted to absorb what is actually good and also trusted to cast off what is bad. Write well, and earn our patience. Write badly and credit us with the sense to throw it off no matter how desperately you worked to grab our attention. So of the 2 processes, the better one is to get inside the characters' own stream of thought. Do that right and the problem of reader boredom should take care of itself. 

By the way, how funny is Ethel Rosenberg? Ethel Mertz funny?

FROM THE EMAIL: Paul quotes my long paragraph — the one that begins "Notice..." — and offers this quote from Umberto Eco's "Post-Script to The Name of the Rose" (1984):

My friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the mountain.

ALSO: EDH sends this (and why have I never heard of it? I love Jermaine Clement!):

"I’ve been thinking about aging a lot lately because of Keanu Reeves and his rumored girlfriend, who is 46 and has gray hair."

"She’s gorgeous, of course, but the fact that she doesn’t dye her hair has caused an absolute cataclysm online. Everyone’s been congratulating Keanu on his age-appropriate date, — only nine years younger than him! So different from Leonardo DiCaprio! Some people have also confused her for Helen Mirren, which is somewhat reasonable because they do look alike, but also horrifying because Helen Mirren is 74. This supports my long-standing theory, developed the minute I turned 35, that people under the age of 35 think of all people over the age of 35 as 'old.' Once someone has crossed that barrier, it doesn’t matter if she’s 46 or 74 — the point is that she is not young.... I wish this were not the case, but I’m a little freaked out about turning 39. I liked being 35, right in the middle. Because let’s be honest — what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about women and aging, is losing status. Just by staying alive over the next decades, just by not dying, my value is going to drop. What a raw deal! It’s going to happen to me, and if you’re a woman, it’s going to happen to you, and it already happened to Alexandra Grant, which is why we’re all so proud of Keanu, a man with so much status, for allegedly dating her anyway."

From "Keanu Reeves’s Lady Friend Has Given Me the Courage to Turn 40" by Izzy Ginspan — which is a fantastic name for a humorist — in New York Magazine.

In a far less comic mode but on the same subject enough to keep me from making a separate post, here's Francine Prose, the 72-year-old novelist, in "Cruel jokes about the old are everywhere. When will we face our ageism epidemic?/We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group. But we’ll all be old one day" (at The Guardian):

It’s unsurprising that animosity toward the elderly has been profitably commodified... [T]he phrase “OK Boomer” is “Generations Z’s ... retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it.” OK Boomer now appears on phone cases, stickers, pins, and sweatshirts and on a range of products that say, “OK boomer, have a terrible day.” “‘If they do take it personally’,” according to one 17-year-old quoted in the piece, “‘it just further proves that they take everything we do as offensive.’” And yet one wonders if the public would be quite so amused by a logo that said: “OK Jews, have a terrible day.” Given the losses and infirmities that so often accompany age, don’t the elderly have enough bad days without being told to have more?

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young... [but] I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing.... What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot. Few misogynists, I imagine, fear that they eventually will turn into women, nor do racists worry that the passing decades will radically alter their ethnicity and the color of their skin. But the young will get old, if they’re lucky....

Maybe we can talk the young out of their mockery and aversion by telling them they're attacking their own future selves and magnifying their own fear of aging. I would add that we Boomers in our youth were very cruel to those who were older. We had the slogan "Never trust anyone over 30." Confront the young of today with the idea that they're acting like we did in our time. If you don't like what we are, you'd better work on being something else. And that goes right along with the cancel-culture fastidiousness about any mockery or aversion to any traditionally discriminated against group. Be that, kids, and manifest nothing but the celebration of diversity that includes the old people. OK, Zoomer?