Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Interpretation
The quote personifies cities, attributing gender characteristics to them, which reflects cultural perceptions.
Angela Carter's quote creatively assigns gender identities to cities, suggesting that each city embodies specific traits typically associated with masculinity or femininity. London is portrayed as masculine, Paris as feminine, and New York as a balanced amalgamation, challenging conventional gender binaries and promoting a more nuanced understanding of identity and urban life.
In practice
During a lecture on urban culture, I quoted, 'Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual' to illustrate the different vibes of major cities.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.
I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
What is perceptible to oneβs mistrust is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made form it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the pre-formations passed down by generation after generation, the ready-made language not only of the tongue but also of the sensations and the feelings.
Since only what is material is perceptible, knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God.
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