Ink And Incapability Quotes

The fact that gendered violence is overwhelmingly enacted by men on women* is not because women* are incapable of fucking up; a lot of it’s because we’re not brought up to feel that we’re entitled to other people’s bodies. Sometimes we barely feel entitled to our own.

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me—naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe’s furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration)—but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description.

While we are in the realm of comedy, it is worth recalling that one of the best and best-known episodes of the historical sitcom Blackadder, titled ‘Ink and Incapability’, confronts this very subject. Its fidelity to history is limited (Jane Austen is Johnson’s contemporary, and apparently has ‘a beard like a rhododendron’), but its representation of the perils of lexicography is just. The

Cilla fought not just as a woman but as the thing she kept at bay. Her adrenaline was off the charts, and her emotions had fluctuated between fear and rage. The ebb and flow felt like a tsunami she was incapable of controlling. The chaos she held on to so tightly was now loose, and the man who unlocked the door was now its victim. Cilla’s magic rose to the surface and erupted in a blinding display of rage.