The Island of Lesvos

A short story by Jeanette Winterson, The Poetics of Sex, is available on the Random House website. It is an extended poetic exploration of lesbian sexuality, written as a response to the sort of questions straights ask, but going far beyond those questions into the land of Sapphic delight. Here's an excerpt...

Hang on me my darling like rubies round my neck. Slip onto my finger like a ring. Give me your rose for my buttonhole. Let me leaf through you before I read you out loud.

Picasso warms my freezing heart on the furnace of her belly. Her belly is stoked to blazing with love of me. I have learned to feed her every day, to feed her full of fuel that I gladly find. I have unlocked the storehouses of love. On the Mainland they teach you to save for a rainy day. The truth is that love needs no saving. It is fresh or not at all. We are fresh and plentiful. She is my harvest and I am hers. She seeds me and reaps me, we fall into one another's laps. Her seas are thick with fish for my rod. I have rodded her through and through.

It's a wonderful piece of writing, very lush and sensual; it reads more like a prose-poem than a short story, but it has a narrative element.

Lesbian separatist ants

Mad Science reports that there is a female-only species of ant.

Technically these ants reproduce asexually, not through some kind of Nicola Griffith-style lesbian parthenogenesis. They are, however, one of the only known all-female animal species. Who is to say whether it wasn't some lesbian urge that caused them to diverge from other ant species and give up sperm altogether?

I am reminded of the ant society in T H White's The Once and Future King.
Males = Not-Done.

There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites — there were only two words for qualifications, Done and Not-Done — which applied to all questions of value... Their life was not questionable, it was dictated...

Congratulations!

How lovely. Susie Orbach and Jeanette Winterson are an item. And they're in love. Winterson wrote in her blog:

I am in love. Unexpected. Glorious. Happy. A great dancer and an amazing cook. How lucky am I? And yes, she is very smart and totally together. And she loves me too. Wow.

And when I say unexpected, I mean that I wasn’t looking, and certainly not in that direction. As ever, the important things happen by chance, unplanned, unseen.

Jeanette Winterson is one of my favourite authors - Oranges are not the only fruit was a very important book for me when I was discovering my own inclinations (I'm bisexual), and I love her other stuff as well.

I never got around to reading Fat is a feminist issue (I preferred Shelley Bovey's The Forbidden Body) but I notice that Orbach is doing the 2010 Price lecture at the "birthplace of feminism" Newington Green and Islington Unitarians, the church attended by Mary Wollstonecraft.

There is some speculation that the press will be all sleazy about this - that would be terribly sad in this day and age, but sadly it does happen; people still have misconceptions about LGBT people, and we have not yet reached the stage where your gender and/or sexual orientation is irrelevant. On the other hand, the Evening Standard has a rather positive article about this and Mary Queen of Shops' relationship.

Anyway, I hope that Mss Orbach and Winterson will be very happy together. We here at The Bluestocking would like to raise a virtual glass of champagne to toast their continuing happiness.

stories that never were

Wired.com has a wistful yearning for stories that never were.

I agree that I would like to see Harry Potter as an Auror, but suspect that Ms Rowling will turn to other things. I am not sure what else could be done with Lord of the Rings, but interestingly, Tolkien didn't mind the idea of other people writing stories in his universe.

So here's my list of books that I would like to read:

• A sequel to Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin. This is one of my favourite books, and is about the deep mythological and spiritual relationship that is possible between people and landscape
• The final part of Robertson Davies' Toronto Trilogy (I loved the second one, The Cunning Man, though I was not so keen on the first one, Murther and Walking Spirits)
• Branwell Brontë's diary, conclusively proving that he did not write his sisters' novels (well, obviously I know he didn't, but it offends me that some people think he did)
• Radclyffe Hall's lost lesbian steampunk novel
• The gospel according to Jesus (he was writing one, but "I'm not the one and only Messiah" and "why can't you all be nice to each other for a change" were not messages that went down very well with the gospel-reading public). Fortunately you can now read fictional gospels according to Judas and Mary Magdalene and Jesus too.
• The original scripts for the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were probably never written down, as the mysteries were only ever revealed to initiates. The rites were suppressed by the Christians and lost.

What books-that-never-were would you like to read?