single white female man seeks literary onco mouse with ear on head

[sab]

Cyborgheads -- projectjulie and mostlikely2, I'm lookin' at you -- there's this quote in Donna Haraway's...FemaleMan and OncoMouse, I THINK. Near the intro or first chapter. Goes something along the lines of: "we cannot pretend we live in the world where the cyborg never emerged fully formed from Zeus' brain" or something, but BETTER and without Zeus.

MAN it is one of my all-time favorite quotes -- iffen any of you out there could find me the proper verbiageization, as I have long hence sold my FemaleMan/OncoMouse back to the bookstore in exchange for food and shelter, I would be, well, relly just full of critically theoretical bliss.

The short version, of course, and the one I'm actually going to get tattooed on my hip, is Tony Kushner's, and goes a little something like this: THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD.

Same thing, really.

Comments

[cazling.livejournal.com]

Oh Captain my Captain, you doofus. I love Haraway and I felt like I knew the quote (turns out, I did not) so I did a little quick googling out of curiosity.

"We cannot pretend we live on some other planet where the cyborg was never spat out of the womb- brain of its war-besotted parents in the middle of the last century of the Second Christian Millenium."

And I found that...oh, here:
http://www.grapefruithead.com/ourboys/sabine/hq.htm

[silentfire.livejournal.com]

Is this the quote you're thinking of?

"we cannot pretend we live on some other planet where the cyborg was never spat out of the womb-brain of its war-besotted parents in the middle of the last century of the Second Christian Millennium."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

> THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD

What a good idea.

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

I have always preferred the way the writer Kushner was undoubtedly paying homage to with that line put it:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

But that would be hard to fit on your hip.

BTW, you got my e-mail, I hope?

[projectjulie.livejournal.com]

Benjamin! who really is such a beautiful, florid writer. and I don't have my copy of Female Man meets OncoMouse on me, either, but see? the internet (and the fiction of one iamsab) knows all.