Licking The Book of Salt

Exquisite.

A relief for me. This is the kind of story I want to read more of, in which there are people like me, generally speaking (I'll settle for anything that isn't very heteronormative), but who have lives outside their genders, identities beyond their sexual partners and practices....Someone's got to do it, normalize (for lack of a better word?) queerness so it's not all Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don't Cry and The Well of Loneliness. Stories about queer people, not about queerness.

... And so perhaps The Book of Salt represents an accomplishment which feminism is right now struggling with: this book achieves a kind of inclusiveness, in which any and every person is relevant because any and every person is gendered in addition to and, and, and ... And the gendering informs the rest, the rest informs the gendering.

III. What role does Stryker's notion of "geographic circulation" play in this novel?

"Bridges belong to no one...a bridge has to belong to two parties, one on either side. There has to be an agreement, a mutual consent....Every bridge is...a monument to an accord." (92)

(The man on the bridge has the pseudonym Ho Chi Minh used while in Paris:
a "scholar-prince" with a postcolonial consciousness?)

On what are such bridges of accord built?

"She thought she was hearing GertrudeStein's laughter....I thought I was hearing my father's voice.
She had left hers behind. I had unfortunately overpacked." (160)

"there is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt." (196-197)

"To them, my body offers an exacting, predetermined life story. It cripples their imagination as it does mine....I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man...." (152)

"She has a democratic stare....She looks and looks until she sees....Her weakness...lies in the sheer force of her suppositions...They make her vulnerable in unexpected ways." (157)

"Sorrow preys on the unprotected openings, the eyes, ears, mouth, and heart. Do not speak, see, hear or feel. Pain is allayed, and sadness will subside. Ignorance...is best for someone like me." (107)

"I lie to myself like no one else can." (80)

IV. How do we read this novel, in light of Stein's aesthetic?

"Pointless overdecoration, GertrudeStein explains, thinking of the commas and periods she has plucked from the pages of her writings. Such interference, she insists, are nothing more than toads flattened on a country road, careless and unsightly. The modern world is without limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accomodate the possibilities--a road where she can get lost if she so choses or go slow and touch each blade of grass." (28)

"My comprehension...is based mostly on my ability to look for the signals and intepret the signs. Words...are convenient, a handy shortcut to meaning. But too often, words limit and deny." (117)

"'Slip your own meanings into their words'...Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys." (155)

"A 'memory' for me was another way of saying a 'story.' A 'story' was another way of saying a 'gift.'" (258)

V. But: let's look harder and longer at the uneasy power relations in the novel (per Clausen):