Vladimir

Travel Guide

America and universities

The university in the novel is vague and fictional so the story could take place anywhere in the world, in any university.

“Should we only portray the world we wanted to see? Should we consider certain stories “damaging,” and restrict them from a general audience, not trusting them to take in the story without internalizing the messaging? Hadn’t we all agreed that morality in art was bad? But art did cause damage, and I was affected by films I had seen when I was young, and I was ashamed when I watched an old film and saw racist depictions I hadn’t seen before, and I was glad to be ashamed. But did we all have to see ourselves in the presentations of types? Did I have to feel like every wife and mother was presenting an overarching narrative of Wife and Mother that reinforced or rejected my own experience?”

“My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have – the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the general, highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”