I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.
— Katherine Dunn
Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.
Most professional fighters, male and female, hold day jobs, but the women's game attracts a wide social spectrum: hash slingers, teachers, police officers, landscapers, stuntwomen. Many are wives and mothers. Their husbands or boyfriends work their corners, or hide in arena restrooms, scared to watch their bouts.
And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet.
This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.
The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.
Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.
The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.
But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
I think that it's really important to go away and come back.
Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.
I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.
My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.
Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.
Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.
But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.
Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.
