In Regards to Chapters 3 and 4 of
Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place
15 April 1999
As mentioned last entry, I felt Aud is an invert -- a man trapped in (what is barely) a woman's body. There seems to be some interpretation that Aud is a "lipstick lesbian", but even Aud considers herself "butch". Re: "lipstick lesbians", this term is usually used to refer to beautiful (i.e. desirable to men) women who happens to be lesbians. However, Aud has been interpretted (by some) to have a model's body. But a model is not desirable to most sincere men. Only insecure men desiring trophy pieces want those women; the rest of us mock them -- ever notice the discrepancy between the women choosen by fashion magazines and adult magazines? Why is that there? Because the fashion world is ruled by mesogenistic gay men who want their women to look like men. So if Aud has a model's body, it is still a masculine body, not a feminine one.
I was not particularly startled when Aud was "done" with the woman choosen for her sexcapade. There was nothing ambiguous from start to finish; this was not romance, this was a cheap thrill, much as Bond 007 or some other male character might gratuitously experience. So what if this lesbian sex was as mechanical as the orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper. We had been given no intimations that Aud had or was to express her sensual or feminine side.
I think it's a bit far fetched to interpret Nora from Ibsen's Doll's House leaving Trevor to become a lesbian like Aud, even if both were from Norway. Granted Ibsen's work seems strangely lacking in issues pertaining to homosexuality when one considers his other subject matter, but I think only a lunatic would try reading homoerotic undercurrents into any of Ibsen's works.
Sex and Death are really not all that unusual to pair together. Sex and violence have been mixed before man became an individual species. And Marquis de Sade writing in the late 1700s was not the first to envision killing for sexual pleasure. And from an Eastern perspective, orgasm has been known as "the little death". So while the thought may not have endeared Aud to Griffith's readers, I don't felt the juxtaposition was all that odd.
I didn't feel that Atlanta was quite as important and overwhelmingly dwelt upon as Antartica in Antartica. I could easily forget the story took place in Atlantic... it could have been almost anywhere to me; perhaps that is because I am acclimated to cosmopolitian cities and have spent so little time in the South that Atlanta did not seem like an oddity.
I don't know how the idea got spread that Atlanta is "too busy to hold black people down." Ironically, last weekend I saw Lost Creek Township last weekend; in the play, the Republicans from the North convinced large numbers of black people from the South to come North by telling black's how easy and how much better their life would be; this was a lie, but the Republicans wished to change the demographics for the next census so as to change the number of electoral votes for the next election. There are always plenty of lies to go around.
I really can't comment on the idea "Black is not alien, Norweign is". I felt they both seemed pretty aclimated into the city of Atlanta and neitehr is native.
I suppose only in a most tenuous of ways is this book like Girl in Landscape. The lives and environments of both seemed very different even though both had a strong heroine who didn't have to do very much to get by in the world.