MUSES SOMETIMES PROVE TO BE FALSE

First read about this notion from a short story called THE MOON IN IT'S FLIGHT by Erica Jong.

How many times have you been influenced to do something energized by getting to know someone, or having a "thing" for someone (you don't really know them at all)?

Spurned by fantasy, I have:

Done a painting. (Which has been lost, I don't know where.  I thought I had it as a rolled up canvas but have not seen it in years.)

Moved to a bigger apartment. (Where I had a party and he flirted with another woman in my kitchen!)

Avoided my favorite TA at UCSC.  (Long explanation not forthcoming.)

Cried my eyes out for a whole day - at work yet. (I claimed allergies.)

C 2017-2025 Christine Trzyna

ERICA JONG Quote

"A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive." - Erica Jong in "O" Magazine 2003

NEXT MAGAZINE REDUX - Update

Earlier in this blog I mentioned that I would be presenting articles I wrote which were published in NEXT Magazine years ago. NEXT Magazine was a poetry scene magazine in start up when I gave a lot of energy to it for well over a year of my life. Like many such start up magazines it started up and sputtered, deficit of enough volunteers who shared the vision of what it might be by the editor and owner of the magazine, G. Murray Thomas. Like poetry magazines in particular it was started on small funds and failed to attract the kind of important advertising necessary to any magazine on any subject. But what was worse was the well known "fact" that poets were a stereotypically poverty-stricken group, bringing their own tea bags into independent artsy "coffee houses" and performance rooms because they just wanted the free hot water. Seems hardly anyone believed poets would read the magazine, read the ads, and actually spend.

Dealing with the poetry scene and the reality of poets who played upon those stereotypes as well was my forte. Coming up between music videos of songs that have come into my consciousness recently, I'll be running some of my articles from so long ago. Coming up first FROM RIGHT TO JONG, my review of the American Booksellers Convention of 1994...

Search for Erica Jong elsewhere on my blog...

Christine

Affirmed August 2025  Orignally posted August 30, 2008

ERICA JONG's 20 RULES FOR WRITERS - HER WEBSITE

What do you think of her RULES ?

ERICA JONG "HOW DARE A WOMAN WRITE ABOUT HERSELF"

Erica Jongs' "Fear of Flying" was a book I read several times over the years since in came out on the heels of the 1970's feminist movement. The first read, amazingly perhaps for a woman who is not Jewish, a New Yorker, married, rich, or especially literary at the time, was a story I could relate to. Marketed for the sexuality (which is barely explicit) and considered controversial, I recall one marketing blurb that suggested that we (Americans? people? men?) didn't know women "Thought Like That." Like what? Exactly how distanced from our own bodies were we thought to be? Like saints, like ghosts...

I remember I had a male friend that saw me carrying the paperback around and said, "Oh that's that book by that crazy woman about a crazy woman." Hmm. The same male friend said I was "too liberated." (His wife wasn't. She knew her place as a stay at home mom and I came to find out he cheated on her.)




Over the years I've found Erica's Jongs nonfiction, in particular her essays about what it is to be a writer - a "woman writer," more interesting to me and inspirational than her fiction. This is a YouTube video about the punishment for success and celebrity in our culture...

Is it more difficult to be accepted as a "woman writer" than a "man writer?" I suppose yes in that we find "woman writer" is not silly to say and "man writer" is silly to say.


(Video down and removed summer 2016)