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The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.
Katherine Dunn -
Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.
Katherine Dunn
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The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn -
Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.
Katherine Dunn -
The denial of female aggression is a destructive myth. It robs an entire gender of a significant spectrum of power, leaving women less than equal with men and effectively keeping them 'in their place' and under control.
Katherine Dunn -
It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.
Katherine Dunn -
But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.
Katherine Dunn
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I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.
Katherine Dunn -
I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.
Katherine Dunn -
We live with a distinct double standard about male and female aggression. Women's aggression isn't considered real. It isn't dangerous; it's only cute. Or it's always self-defense or otherwise inspired by a man. In the rare case where a woman is seen as genuinely responsible, she is branded a monster - an 'unnatural' woman.
Katherine Dunn -
Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.
Katherine Dunn -
Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.
Katherine Dunn -
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.
Katherine Dunn
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In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as a painter's hand.
Katherine Dunn -
An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.
Katherine Dunn -
But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.
Katherine Dunn -
A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
Katherine Dunn -
Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.
Katherine Dunn -
I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
Katherine Dunn
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Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.
Katherine Dunn -
I'd always been fascinated by boxing and became very engaged with it through my husband, actually. But I started to write about it because so many decent, righteous people wanted it banned.
Katherine Dunn -
Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.
Katherine Dunn -
My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him.
Katherine Dunn