Nico reading. I want a pair of white Levi's for my birthday.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH MARGUERITE DURAS - SUSAN HUSSERL-KAPIT (WINTER 1975)

MD: I think feminine literature is an organic, translated writing... translated from blackness, from darkness. Women have been in darkness for centuries. They don't know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness.
SHK: More so than men?

(...)

SHK: Poets are different, but maybe is because they have what you would call a feminine mind.
MD: Yes, poets are androgynous. In poetry, you no longer have sex. But couldn't one say that my books are more musical or poetic than... intellectual?

(...)

SHK: It's worse in America, I think.
MD: No, it's the same. Do you know the thesis by Michelet about witches? It's admirable. (By the way, I think, and meny people think, on the basis of letters and journals, that Michelet did not have a normal sex life -which is certainly in his favour.) He says that in the Middle Ages, when the lords went off to war or on the Crusades, when the women stayed alone for months at a time on the farms, in the middle of the fields, hungry and lonely, then they simply started talking. To whatever was round them: trees, animals, forests, rivers... Perhaps to break the boredom, to forget the hunger and the loneliness. The men burned them. That's how witches came into being. Men said, "They're in collusion with nature", and they burned them. That's how the reign of witches began. I add, personally, that what they did, in effect, was punish those women because they turned a little away from them and became less available to them. The women who began to come into contact with nature, as if by osmosis, took part of themselves away from men. So men killed them to punish them. And that madness -talking to animals, trees, that part of themselves which suffocates and explodes, that transference -you find it in all women, including women in the middle class. It's what I call their neurosis. Neurosis in women is so ancient, thousands of years old -all women are neurotic in my opinion- that people are used to their behaviour. And much female behaviour that one finds normal would be considered neurotic if exhibited by males. Of course women express this neurosis differently in our day. They no longer talk to animals or trees, because apparently they aren't alone. In fact, however, they are completely alone in their millions, in their poverty, in their comfort, and in their slums, in all their completely functional marriages -whether rich or poor. They are as alone as before. And everywhere. Madness has found othes expressions, but it is still there. It is still the same madness.