Facebook...

I resisted the Myspace trend for as long as I could and in the end joined after the big boom - and of course being as tech savvy as I am struggled with the whole layout thing and all the other stuff... and now, well history has repeated itself and I have been dragged unwittingly into Facebook. I have to say I hate it - for various reasons: it's not really user friendly and I honestly didn't want to see some of these people again. I know I'm sure they feel the same way about me. I made the comment to Cheryl about all the girls I graduated with being married, having kids - but it's only the single ones with degrees and that I'm sure they're all snickering that we're single because of our feminist leanings (which is rather simplistic). Yet I find it all too ironic at the same time in that the surprising majority of the married females had hyphenated names. Since when did the group who was party the the anti-feminist machinery get all "modern?"
Personally if my brain does leave my body and I do get married I sure am not taking his name. Why? Well as I said to Cheryl re: keeping the name....

"I am keeping my name, but no hyphenating business. Hyphens are too much stress for me - the lit world has too much to say about them for me to saddle myself with that kind of responsibility"

Cheryl's response - "Far be it for there to be a woman writer with a hyphenated name - it really does sound absurd - like all the feminism that brought her to get published work and yet she's weighed down by the hyphenated name"

Bingo! Anyways - I am happy for all who have birthed and chained themselves to the archaic institution - me, well I'm working it out and whenever I have a Bronte or Austen moment I look at these and it all goes away... hmmm vegan handmade stilettos.

For literary discourse on hyphens.

1. Gaston, Sean. Derrida and the History. Textual Practice 21.2, June 2007.

"The hyphen brings together what can never absolutely be brought together: there is always a gap. As Derrida suggested in a 1996 paper on Artaud, the hyphen appears to make one out of two, but this two-in-one also indicates what is always more than one."

2. Wah, Fred. "Half-Bred Poetics." Author of Diamond Grill

"in the middle, . . . not in the centre. . . . a property marker, a boundary post, a borderland, a bastard, a railroad, a last spike, a stain, a cypher, a rope, a knot, a chain (link), a foreign word, a warning sign, a head tax, a bridge, a no-man's land, a nomadic, floating, magic carpet, now you see it now you don't."

If you are still interested check out Hyphen or Rice Paper, as while discourse on the hyphen related issues go beyond Asian Canadian/American literature from what I have read it is most fervently discussed in these venues. And you all thought I was crazy about the hyphen issue.