From the Advanced Readers Copy (ARC)* of Laurie Halse Anderson’s new book WINTERGIRLS:
“It’s crazy. I can do anything.”
“Right. Sure.” I laugh and accidentally drink some hot chocolate. “Like what?”
“Where should I start? Poet, philosopher, fisherman. My pop calls me a bum, but that’s elitist, don’t you think?”
From THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, which contains the first systematic statement of historical materialism, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
* Because this is an ARC, don’t take the quote as gospel; they are still correcting the final book. (Or, they were; WINTERGIRLS comes out today.) Penguin has distributed about 80 trillion ARCs of this book to build buzz, and it’s working; watch me blog it all week long next week, most likely.
-->Feed me text
March 20, 2009 at 11:27 am
I tweeted this post to Laurie Halse Anderson herself on Twitter, so she has now seen this.
March 20, 2009 at 12:20 pm
This is another reminder of how I need, need, NEED to read Wintergirls! Here’s hoping I won a copy at Lenore’s contest.
March 21, 2009 at 7:53 am
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Sarah
March 21, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Hey, thanks, Molly! I wonder what LHA (whose politics, by the way, fascinate me more than they should; she’s a registered Republican who very proudly voted for Obama) will think of being compared to Marx.
March 22, 2009 at 11:08 pm
LHA is a registered Republican? I did not know that. I don’t know why it surprises me so much, yet it does.
March 23, 2009 at 2:13 am
Sadako: Yeah, she wrote a blog post about it that I’ll try to find later for you. I am not kidding about being way unduly interested in this. I have thought quite a bit about what her politics are and how they express themselves in her books and why I usually feel such a strong political affinity for her books even though we’re ideologically quite different. I need a new hobby.
March 23, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I’d definitely like to see that blog post, and your thoughts on it. She’s also ideologically different from me, but I really relate to Speak. I guess good writing really does transcend the political.