Rick Moody (right) selected this month's book

Elizabeth Seward, Spelling & Grammar
I picked this book up several times without being able to get through it. That was until I started to see it all symbolically. Once I got past the fairy tale settings, it really did begin to dawn on me that Carter was speaking on behalf of all women-and this was before I had any knowledge of her presence in feminist circles. Emily is absolutely right in remarking on her feminism being more of an underlying motif than anything else. Nonetheless, I finally finished the book and it did ring some sort of bell in me. It reminded me of how new freedom is for women and how easily we take for granted the simple things, like earning our own paychecks, that our grandmothers and great grandmothers could not as easily do-if at all. It made me wander about all sorts of trains of thought…particularly the sexuality of women. I think we (women and men alike) often forget that one of the reasons why a woman's virginity is so precious is because it IS an act of violence in a way; causing pain and bloodshed. This creates the dynamic of the man 'taking' the woman in some sense when he takes her virginity and I can't help but associate this with the negative connotations society still has for women who enjoy sex freely…as if we should only bleed for the person we will stay with the rest of our lives. It's a disturbing, yet realistic, picture that Carter paints beautifully in many of her stories in this book.

Dessa Darling, solo artist (Doom Tree)
I have a friend who is half greaser, half tragic artist and once a week we pick a topic, walk around a lake, and argue recreationally. The past couple of lake walks have been informed by questions that relate The Bloody Chamber.

Walk No. 1: Pornography. The tragic greaser thinks that the line between pornography and art is totally artificial, a completely arbitrary distinction designed to sustain a moral code. I wanted to agree -- seemed like the enlightened, cosmopolitan thing to do. But something seemed fundamentally different between the images that would bookend this continuum. Some material is designed to elicit a sexual response without regard to an aesthetic one. Other stuff seems to incorporate sex as part of a larger objective. Nonetheless, on the basis of our conversation, I decided to be more wary of any school-marm, knee-jerk reactions that might prevent me from experiencing work that my smart friend obviously found worthwhile. Reading the first dozen pages of The Bloody Chamber, I did find myself making little distracting internal comments. The gist was that this kind of sexual content, which to me sometimes read like a romance novel, seemed somehow lowbrow. And I thought "A ha, my friend is right." I have codified this distinction in my head. I've accepted a partition between the base and cerebral. And writing to arouse, somehow fell into the less artful category in my brain. Which brings us to the next walk.

Walk #2: Getting it. How much of the success any work of art ought to hinge on the audience understanding subtext -- on getting it? I don't know. But Emily pointed out that much of the content in The Bloody Chamber probably relates to the feminist ideas of the day. (I admit on first read, this escaped me.) Her analysis, though, made me wonder about that ratio—how much should good art depend on the understanding of the initiated, and how much its value should derive from some fundamentals of form? I tried to think of a great painting to use an example and then remembered how little I know about paintings. So. The book The Giving Tree comes to mind as a work with a somber, poignant meaning, but one that can appreciated even by readers who don't 'get it.' Five-year olds, as a rule, don't 'get' self-sacrifice to the brink of personal annihilation. Parents get that. But there's something satisfying about the progression of that book, about the mathematical way the tree reduces itself that compels readers who have no access to the latent shades of meaning. I think the art I like most features that two-sidedness—it is compelling at a glance, but also rewards more thoughtful dissection.

More discussion highlights on page 3.