Noted in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:"

The essay appears in Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager, possibly my favorite book of the last several years. On page 128 at bottom begins a paragraph, "Beyond the vanishing point lie shocking scenes: exposed negatives reveal a domimatrix with polymorphous perverse appetites and ambitions wreaking havoc in the popular maxiseries, "Civlization and Miss Content." It ends on 129, "To what extent have women been complicit in the substitution of the image of the female for the transgressive experimental feminine?" The whole paragraph is heavily boxed in with ink and marked with three ***, my symbol for "OH THIS IS GOOD."

The marginalia says, "archery, extreme freeze tag, dresses, roses, poking slugs with sticks // that vitality and curiosity in love, sex, work, sleep // enthusiastically living in the world lets us find out // --> 132."

Down the page a bit is this passage: " But the symbolic is not the only logical or associative order of meaning. There is metonymy, as well as metaphor; there are complex dynamic systems and fluidly interactive models, as well as equivalences. The phallus, like the romantic genius and strong poet and symbolic logic it props up, has got to go; the penis may get on quite well without it." 

Amusing to me is this: my marginalia here makes a romantic/Romantic appeal to the polymorphous pleasures of my own childhood, and while that vitality is part of Retallack's project, the implied innocence is most certainly not.

See 132: "Perhaps we can canel our ad nauseam encores as ambiguously smiling, subtextual female repressed. Perhaps we can assume the active textual project of entertaining multiple, complex possibilities/improbabilities/unintelligabilities in our languages and lives."

This crossroads of the postmodern and the romantic/utopian never ceases to fascinate.