Since I didn’t exercise my bod, I tried to stretch my brain during the long highway miles with my travelling companion, Q. Q is so named because:

a) the rental car had a rather severe rear wheel rattle –”for those who like their martinis stirred, not shaken” Q said. Furthermore
b) the car had a lot of fancy buttons (heated seats, uberstereo system activated via the steering wheel, controls for the skylight, automatic locks, etc) and Q pushed every one. I was afraid he would perhaps accidently eject himself from his seat like Roger Moore did in some 007 trailer I no longer remember
c) Q has multiple degrees in women’s studies and sexual identity theory, and refuses easy categorizations of gender

So what revelatory notions did Q leave me to play with?

The epistemology of experience!!! A whackload of words, but Q pointed out to me that the second wave of feminism was based on the supremacy of experience as a way of knowing — women telling their experiences and etc.

The odd thing is that this same kind of dogma (you can only learn by doing; ‘experience’ is the most valid thing) also underlies a certain wave of twentieth century fiction that is particularly popular among young men (the Hemingway–Kerouac trajectory). But as an ideology, it’s a bit underexamined. If these young lads really believed experience was everything, shouldn’t they be forming NGOs to send other young radicals to volunteer in war zones and drink themselves into a stupor and otherwise join the vanguard of the revolution of the disaffected? Wouldn’t that be what they’d want to do to spread experience and therefore enlightenment? But they write instead, implying that there is an (probably big) element of ego — one is writing not to share enlightenment alone, but to declare to the world that one is the marked, enlightened one. Also, this writing is on some level about turning experience into something mythical–writing or storytelling is itself the scaffolding on which wisps are transformed into knowledge and something is built. In other words ‘write from your own experience’ (and the corollory, go out and ‘experience’) is a bit epistemologically loopy–as a strategy it is not very clear on itself because it is vaulting experience above all other ways of knowing when in fact writing and reading are completely different ways of knowing from ‘experience’, and the writers must believe in them or else why are they writing anyway?

So how does experience fit? I must have some idea about this that inflects my own fiction, but I’m not very aware of what my assumptions are, either.

Q and my’s other multi-faceted discussion was about gender –if I have time I will post it later.