Guerillas in the rumpus room

Re-reading parts of The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter, an influence on Lost Girls, which I'm currently writing about. Some quotes:

"Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex were itself an external fact, one as immutable as the weather, creating human practise but never a part of it."

"Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances."

"Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practise of art."

"Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer who has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose it is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation."

Nice cover, too, by Roxanna Bikadoroff (there's a good interview with her here).