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When I encountered The Lady of Shallot (to take a for instance allusion from the many in the book, this one from the Etiology section) it was still considered a great poem. What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?

Laura Mullen

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Laura Mullen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: January 1
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More quotes by Laura Mullen

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Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)
Laura Mullen
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.
Laura Mullen
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I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word intention, confusing (trust the art, as D.H. Lawrence said, not the artist). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.
Laura Mullen
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We live in a culture that insists on moving on (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's Miss Havisham with some (self) recognition if not relief.
Laura Mullen
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If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.
Laura Mullen
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One might say that Torch Song is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.
Laura Mullen
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So when we're told to move on or let go, we should take a look at who is saying it and why, and when we see repetition happening it's worth trying to understand it before attempting to shut it down.
Laura Mullen
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Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein obsessing? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen
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With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.
Laura Mullen
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I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.
Laura Mullen
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Wherever something is pinned down there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.
Laura Mullen
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Is it possible that where the subject is socially approved (tah tah tah TAH tah, it's war) almost no one thinks we're stuck, but when we think too much about what no one else wants to think about, as well as when we think without the thoughts evolving, then we're seen as trouble (and / or troubled)?
Laura Mullen
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And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some apparent or usual protections, and a need to re-examine identity in the light of an acknowledgement of our entanglements and interdependence.
Laura Mullen
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Given our examination of the behavior of our police forces at this moment the question of protection has an extra resonance, yes?
Laura Mullen
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The most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own complicated grief in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.
Laura Mullen
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In the Intervention section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in repetition and revision (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.
Laura Mullen
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It seems all protection has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). Torch Song, the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!
Laura Mullen
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There's a nice clear difference between real protection (wash your hands, or wear a condom) and the fake protection offered by institutions which often come, finally and sadly, to be much too interested first of all in protecting their own power.
Laura Mullen
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The failure of protection, the importance of recognizing the ways in which we influence (and infect) each other - the fact that being an individual can't protect you - these are issues I've been thinking about for a while.
Laura Mullen