The Garden of Words

Is it possible for me to lurve JSmooth any more?

2008-05-19T16:47:50Z

Apparently, yes.

According to his book, there's a lot of gay people in hip-hop. Just like every other part of the world. Because being gay is... normal, and it happens everywhere.

[...]

Hip-hop has a whole lot of baggage around the topic of homosexuality and manhood in general. So anything we can do to spark some serious thought and conversation on these issues... the more we can do things like that to challenge ourselves, the better.

Cause when we find ourselves thinking that killing a man makes us more of a man, but loving a man makes us less of a man, it's time to reexamine our criteria for manhood.

'Cause see, the real reason why I shy away from embracing hip-hop wholeheartedly is videos like this one. 'Cause when men find themselves thinking that hitting it from the back makes them more of a man, but loving a woman from the front (and back!) makes them less of a man, it's time to reexamine their criteria for manhood.

Also, you'd be surprised at how many women would totally jump in the sack with you if you just gayed up for them.

They didn't take all our sacred texts

2008-05-17T20:00:28Z

Fire, having become speech, entered into the mouth.

Wind, having become the breath, entered into the nostrils.

The sun, having become vision, entered into the eyes.

The four quarters, having become hearing, entered into the ears...

The moon, having become the mind, entered into the heart.

-The Upanishads

From a newsletter from Lap of the Goddess, a new group performing public ritual in Cambridge. No website, so I can't link, but here's the email address: lapofthegoddess@hotmail.com

Next ritual is Monday, May 19, on the full moon.

Location: Cambridge Masonic Building - 1950 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square Cambridge. The Building is convenient to the Red Line and commuter rail at Porter Square station, and there is ample street parking
in surrounding areas.

Date: Monday May 19, 2008

Time: 7pm - 9pm // Please arrive by 6:45pm to register.

Fee: $10-20 sliding scale. Cash or check.

Pre-registration is recommended and appreciated, e-mail lapofthegoddess@hotmail.com to sign up.

NOTE: I practice with the groups based at First Parish Cambridge UU, not with Lap of the Goddess. Contact them with questions, not me. I can tell you one of the organizers was active with the groups that practiced at the now-defunct Unicorn Books.

Best spam ever

2008-05-14T13:38:09Z

Subject: What a real man dreams about

Hot yellow Sun. Virgin sea shore.
Together You and your girlfriend. In private.
Surf and swim, play beach games, relax.
And when the Sun sleeps, have the best sex ever...

She'll love You more:
Grow up your Love Banana. All girls LIKE BIG.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, a real woman dreams about the same thing. And I can just go out and BUY a love banana. Good to be a girl sometimes :)

Hugs heals the world

2008-05-13T17:25:23Z

Via yesthatthom

Linky

Dear nit-picking OKCupid users

2008-05-11T15:37:41Z

Dear nit-picking OKCupid users:

Thank you so much for your feedback regarding my "Are you truly erudite?" quiz. It makes me so very happy when you message me to point out minor typographical errors or the fact that my quiz is light on the math and science questions. You must be an underpaid copy editor or a smartypants from MIT with nothing better to do than debate shit that no one else cares about. Here's a great idea. Why don't your make your OWN fucking quiz? Then I'll come over and poop all over it. That way we can be friends AND debate the definition of the word "erudite." Maybe we'll even get to invoke Godwin's law.

While you're at it, you might want see if there any typos in this old story about the farmer taking his donkey to market.

Or you might want to print it out, fold it until it's all sharp corners, and stick it where the sun don't shine.

Sincerely,

Me

Media recommendations: Kate Nash, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ellen Kushner

2008-05-09T16:02:18Z

Kate Nash. Like Laura Viers, she's one of those female artists they play on WERS but utterly fail to promote. Mabye I'm a tad sensitive or maybe shit is still broken and needs fixing, but I do wish I could go a day without noticing how many more MALE artists get major promos -- in music, in the visual arts, in poetry, in the mainstream book publishing world. Anyway, Kate Nash. After hearing her song "Foundations" for like the hundredth time and wishing they would tell me who the hell was singing it, it finally stuck in my head. Thank God/dess for Google solving the search problem. Wikipedia entry here, official website here. (I'm not linking to the Myspace page because Myspace hurts my designer's eyes. It buuuuurrrns!!) I went ahead and gave Universal Music all my personal information so they can spam me incessantly and get free market demographics data. In return, I got a music download and a peek at the video for "Foundations".

When I listened to her song on the radio, I had this image of Kate Nash as a tough Londoner, possibly of color, the kind of woman who wears jeans and leather jackets and yells really loud at soccer matches and can kick ass if she needs to. Turns out she's actually super-feminine, curvy, given to wearing girly dresses with puffy bodices in ice-cream colors. The video is extremely well-done. In very detail-oriented sort of way, it does an excellent job of evoking the general sense of wrongness that accompanies the end of a relationship.

It reminded me of a moment when Army Guy and I were walking through the Pru. A woman at one of those little carts stopped me to demonstrate a little device I'd heard about that gives your nails a shine without the use of nail polish. I'm a sucker for personal care products, especially if they're made with natural ingredients, and I'd been meaning to seek out exactly what this woman was selling. Of course, she was offering it at a tremendous markup (I got the same thing on eBay for less than $10 later). But I digress. Army Guy patiently waited because he's a sweetie like that. When I showed him my new, shiny thumbnail, his reaction clearly showed that he didn't see much of a difference.

"Women notice the details more," I said.
"I guess so."

This sort of statement veers closely toward gender essentialism and doesn't really do justice to the full range and diversity of gender expression in this country. But while I certainly have many gender-atypical aspects to my personality, I present as pretty feminine. And after about a year of dating straight men, I've finally come to understand the differences in the way they think.

Kate Nash's new album is called Made of Bricks

Dragonsong, by Anne McCaffrey. This is one of the classics of science fiction literature. I remember buying all the Pern books (or all the Pern books there were back then) from the Waldenbooks in the local mall when I was still in elementary school. Somewhere along the way, I thought I had to put aside childish things and traded in my collection of paperback by Alan Dean Foster and Anne McCaffery for Hemingway's collected work. I still regret the day I dumped them down the garbage chute. After a B.A. in English firmly established my lit cred, I got old enough to re-embrace childish things. I've re-purchased some of the books and it's nice to see that some have been reprinted, but I still long for my original collection. It's an excellent example of the artwork of the 60s and 70s.

A friend of mine recently lent me Dragonsong, the fourth in the original six Pern Novels (Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon; Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums). As she said, "you can read it in five minutes." The prose is, of course, not as finely jeweled as, say Barbara Kingsolver's, but the story and the themes stand up. Reading it as a woman in my 30s, the issues of gender and sexual politics (and the Scottish overtones) really ring true. As an artist who has at times been less than encouraged in my craft, I also identify strongly with Menolly's story. Plus: dragons!

On the subject of science fiction novels for grown-ups that deal with gender issues, I also highly recommend Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels. MZB is best known for The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the legends of King Arthur from the perspectives of Guenevere, Morgan Le Fay, and other female characters. When Anita Diamante came out with The Red Tent a few years ago, the jacket copy described it as The Mists of Avalon for the Old Testament.

In her acknowledgments page, MZB thanked her husband for believing in her and encouraging her to try her hand at something other than potboilers. Some of those potboilers she's referring to are the Darkover novels. The sheer number of volumes and the uneven quality of writing from one novel to another means that I've never read the entire series. I do highly recommend the three Renunciate books, though: The Shattered Chain, Thendara House, and City of Sorcery. I'm also very fond of The Forbidden Tower. While MZB does an excellent job of world-building (an essential skill for any good scifi writer), three recurring themes truly distinguish her work:
1. Gender and sexual politics. For reasons discussed in many novels, Darkover is a very patriarchal society, yet MZB's characters are often strong women who manage to eke out freedom in spite of the dominant culture. She also writes about people on the edges of that society who have found ways to remain true to their own gender and sexual expression. As a woman who came of age after the heydey of the lesbian separatist movement, I appreciate that she avoids the trap of lesbian escapist literature that paints all men as brutes and rapists.
2. Cultural differences and the impact of technology on society. The difference between the technologically oriented Terrans and the Darkovans, with their own, hidden kind of technology, makes for wonderful mind-fodder.
3. Variety of sexual expression. MZB's writes about a world that allows for a variety of sexual and gender expression, rather than the false dichotomy of straight/gay, monogamous/polyamorous, and male/female promulgated in mainstream America. And she doesn't hit you over the head with it like that last sentence did.
Ellen Kushner's Riverside novels. The producer of Sound and Spirit on Public Radio also happens to have written a number of books in the scifi/fantasy genre. Her work, like MZB's, deals with gender and sexuality within an anachronistic, pre-industrial society. The Riverside novels remind me a great deal of Venice in the 15th century, but with more snow. I read The Privilege of the Sword, about a young girl forced by her crazy uncle to learn swordfighting and wear men's clothing. I've picked up the one that tells the story of the uncle in his younger days as well. Privilege has good prose, themes that interest me, and interesting characterization, but the story line comes to a rushed conclusion that ties itself up a bit too neatly. Still, a very entertaining read.

So maybe they hate it too

2008-05-07T17:40:14Z

This is the thing I've been biting my tongue about bitching about. Unsuccessfully for the most part.

My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the "strategic decision" of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes.

-- Via Silliman's blog, which seems to be a bit of a rainmaker in the small poetry press scene.

Anybody who knows me know that I'm a ~~bossy, outspoken bitch~~ feminist. I find the overwhelming maleness of the poetry scene depressing, uninspiring, intimidating, and nauseating. Yeah, I know men are people too. Some of my best friends are men. But it irritates me. And my experience of the vestiges of that "strategic decision" of separatism (one I understand well -- women-only space can kick ass, especially when we step out of the mindset that we're competing for an inadequate number of finite resources and start to rain-make for each other) has been less than stellar. So that sort of leaves me on teh Intarwebs, making tentative forays into the existing community and attempting to build around me my own tribe of artists/creatives. Being an artist requires a certain amount of selfishness, of stubbornness, of unreasonable belief in one's own awesomeness. I possess these qualities in vastly fluctuating quantities. But I find that I do best when I take the tribal approach advocated by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way.

The constant tension for me is the balance between the solitary creative process and the social/collaborative process of creating a constellation or tribe of creatives whose opinion I trust. Since artists tend to be solitary and weird, it can be difficult for us to keep those relationships alive.

The fact that I am by nature a liminal creature -- bisexual, two-spirit, and just downright contrarywise -- doesn't help me to create and sustain a trusted circle of artist friends.

Spring this year is like a long, slow orgasm

2008-05-07T12:42:23Z

It's the best springtime I've ever experienced in Boston. My camera equipment consists mostly of an LG 6000 and a Treo 650, so my photos don't really do justice to the nuances of color. I've got newer ones to upload. But here's a flickr set documenting that not only did we not have snow on tulips this year, but we had blossoms and buds and blossoms and bulbs and more blossoms. And green. And... spring.

Okelle's Spring 2008 Flickr Set

Invocation of the Goddess

2008-05-07T12:37:44Z

Great Mother Goddess, help me through this day
Great Mother Goddess, keep my eyes on the task before me
Great Mother Goddess, let me release the nonessential
Great Mother Goddess, teach me love and compassion
Great Mother Goddess, open my heart to your abundance
Great Mother Goddess, I am your child and your companion
Great Mother Goddess, remind me I am being taken care of
Great Mother Goddess, I am a lily in your eyes
Great Mother Goddess, I am a rose before you
Great Mother Goddess, I am an oak, I am ironwood
Great Mother Goddess, I am all the creatures of the forest
Great Mother Goddess, I am the bugs crunching within the soil
Great Mother Goddess, I am the slime mold that dismantles the dead
Great Mother Goddess, I am the silence of the frozen winter
Great Mother Goddess, I am the secret germ in the seed
Great Mother Goddess, I am the silence of a swan gliding over still water
Great Mother Goddess, I am a cherry tree in blossom
Great Mother Goddess, I am apple tree bearing fruit
Great Mother Goddess, I am a hive of bees making honey
Great Mother Goddess, I am a bear moving deliberate through trees
Great Mother Goddess, I am a wild mustang in the desert
Great Mother Goddess, I am a cow grazing in a green paddock,
Great Mother Goddess, I am a hen laying eggs in the barn
Great Mother Goddess, I am a tadpole wriggling in a pool
Great Mother Goddess, I am a serpent flying through the endless sea
Great Mother Goddess, I am your child, your child, rocked to sleep in your lap
Great Mother Goddess, I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed

Frances Donovan
May 7, 2008

Note: Cf. shamanic invocations of the Celts before battle and the work of the bard Taliesin.

I've been blogged!

2008-05-05T18:27:03Z

Or rather, I've been carnival'd! Which sounds like so much more fun.

All women who like to read comix, watch scifi, or do other similarly geek-boy-mobbed activities should totally check out this next link.

Look, see! Go down to "G" for Garden of Words

Carnival reminds me of this dream I had this morning. I described you a dream but I forgotted it.

That is all.

Butterflies hang on the trees like fruit

2008-05-05T16:57:36Z

Whenever I think about Santa Cruz (my homeland, even though I've never been a resident), I think about the monarch butterflies that migrate there in February. I think that particular tribe (nation? butterfly nation?) splits its time between South America and Northern California. But this photo of the day from National Geographic (::loves her iGoogle widgets::) makes me homesick. For a place I've never lived less than an hour away from.

See the monarch summit

Nothing captures the truth (first draft)

2008-05-01T21:49:52Z

Nothing captures the truth

Nothing captures the truth of the image:
            the luminous quality
            of the center of the pitcher
            and the glass in the morning light,
     that particular color of off-white/cream/not-beige-lighter-than-beige/linen
the linen of the curtain draping
to the floor, the shading of the drape
that you learned how to evoke all those years ago in the classroom
in the early light with charcoal
the classroom with the geraniums struggling in their pot by the window,
the window and the rusty bannister that led to the roof
although no one ever went out there,
we were bent over our sheets of paper,
first with permanent marker so we learned how to draw a line with confidence
and then with the charcoal and the pastel
and the trip to the sideboard where the hairdryers lay waiting
for us to finish off our washes and dip
our watercolor brushes for the next thing,
the colors mixed
                painstaking
but never quite right

and your camera, your camera phone now,
none of it ever captures the truth of the scene you try to capture,
the cherry blossoms set to bloom but not yet, not yet,
the startle-surprise of the first green buds
under the still-lowering sky
and now weeks later, those same buds wafting out a scent
you think is cinnamon but no cardamom but no
         something familiar but certainly not of this place
and the yellow flowers multiplied you recognize now for jasmine
jasmine from the incense stick, the scent packed across mountains
and cities from trucks and forklifts,
packed powdered and tight in boxes within boxes,
bagged and bought and sold
and placed in a fireproof receptacle and lit
and here blooming before you at the end of someone's driveway,
someone who planted a garden they haven't had time to weed
nothing will capture it
                       or the swans gliding majestic
over the surface of the pond,
which itself changes every day
and no one can capture the way the sparkles glint in the light,
moving, like the swans, majestic,
oh they try yes they try but nothing
nothing captures it not even words

Frances Donovan
May 1, 2008

Mother. Fuckers.

2008-04-30T15:47:15Z

News on Feministing is often bad and I usually don't have the energy to get all mad and stuff, but this really riled me up:

At the beginning of the semester, there was an incident here at Yale involving a "fraternity prank" and the Women's Center where 12 members of the Zeta Psi frat stood in front of the Women's Center chanting "dick dick dick dick" while holding a sign saying "We Love Yale Sluts." Quite the incident.

On Monday, the Executive Committee of Yale College found the members of this group not guilty of intimdiation [sic] and harassment charges.

Feministing continues, "The men also intimidated women trying to enter the center. But I guess that's not harassment, huh?"

Apparently, no further recourse.

Link to the Feministing article

Link to the Female Impersonator article

Link to an article written by one the women harassed in the Yale Daily News

The Women's Center at Vassar, my Alma Mater and Yale's former sister school, mysteriously disappeared the year after I graduated. When I was a junior and senior, it was centrally located in the Student Center, with a gorgeous mural on the wall, comfy couches I often used for napping, a decent library of feminist books, a little group-made altar, and a glass wall that looked over the plaza. The next year, they painted over the mural and plopped the main college switchboard offices in there. As far as I know, the Women's Center never reappeared. Maybe they put it in the basement of one of the dorms.

Because, you know, a women's college (now co-ed) must have no need for a women's center.

At least there's no fraternities at Vassar. Just sausage-heads performing pranks independently.

Wither hijab?

2008-04-28T19:29:50Z

In a recent article in Bitch magazine, a woman suggested that the media actually consult Muslim women when covering controversy about the wearing of headscarves (hijab) in public.

Shibhana Mir gives 17 reasons why women wear headscarves on the blog Religious Dispatches.

Can't say I agree with all 17 reasons (does a woman really need to cover her hair to keep from getting harassed?), but many of them do make a good deal of sense -- especially the argument that wearing hijab enables Muslims to gain greater visibility, both to each other and within mainstream society.

Link via the the spirituality blog.

Some notes on Boston in springtime (revised)

2008-04-22T21:24:52Z

1. Still waters of the pond.

2. The ice broke. An email about bacteria count.

3. This morning, wavelets.

4. Will the swans mate this year?

5. I want to slide into the water, skin to water's skin. I want to guide him there, swim the dark waters with him. Fearful of the things below. Rotting leaves.

6. The cold makes you vital. Zip the tiny jacket, slip into sleet.

7. For Puritans, dancing is a sin.

8. Homeland is a beach in Santa Cruz. He surfed there. In the valley beyond, he died in a public men's room.

9. My mother's dancing makes me cringe. Unabashed. Skin to water's skin.

10. Tilt the map. Loose nuts roll to the Pacific.

11. Snow on tulips.

12. Curtain of sleet in the streetlamp. I am alive. Yes. Alive. Yes

13. At the egg moon. Alive.

Frances Donovan
March, April 2008

The pleasure of my thighs

2008-04-21T17:28:28Z

The pleasure of my thighs
For Mark

Maeve offered him even the pleasure of her thighs
- From the story of the Cow of Connacht and the Battle of Cuchulainn

The pleasure of my thighs,
my hated thighs hidden
by Victorians shrunken
by historians retouched
by photographers pried
by your fingers,
marked by your thumbs unwitting always
a mark or two or three discovered
days after our collisions a memento
of the pleasure you took in those thighs
and gave in return, thighs
I keep trying to love

Frances Donovan
April 2008

Names of April

2008-04-21T17:14:27Z

Names of April
For Amy

You pom-pom,
you grape-plinth
you yellow-sprung
you sprink sprink springle
you prlip-bud
you lesser springle
you round seed rolled on the asphalt
hush,
       listen
japanned smoot-pink
you unfurling
hush
       listen
                hush

Frances Donovan
April 2008

We need some ill doctrine up in the presidential debates, yo

2008-04-21T11:57:44Z

Who says rappers don't talk politics?

J Smooth makes me homesick for New York (linky)

Uncool

2008-04-21T11:47:42Z

It has been pointed out to me by someone in the know about these things that no poet worth his (or her) salt actually observes National Poetry Month. Apparently, it's something for plebes who read Poetry in Motion on the subway and who forget that poetry exists the other 11 months of the year. This article by Charles Bernstein seems to sum up the cranky poet's reaction to the notion.

It's difficult, of course, not to draw parallels between National Poetry Month in April and Black History Month in February or Women's History Month in March. Not that poets have been enslaved, oppressed, deprived of the right to vote or hold property, or thrown in jail or insane asylums for no good reason. Unless, of course, they also happened to be black and/or women.

I do find it significant, though, that the article bitching about National Poetry Month was written by a white man who has managed to make a living and gain recognition in the rarefied world of "professional poets."

This is where I find myself having to tread very carefully. Because the fact is that I am am uncool poet. Practicing perhaps, and more seriously since the beginning of this year than for some time previously, but definitely uncool. I don't know what the cool poets are wearing these days, what pens they're using, whether it's more hip to use Moleskine or Black & Red notebooks, whether one should even bother with open mics. And anger is definitely uncool. Resentment and bitterness even more so. So I tend to hold my tongue. But I'll let it slip just a bit and say this:

Every time I see a notice about a reading filled with nothing but white men, I get just a little bit of agida. Every time I see a reading with two white men and one white woman, I feel like I should really really want to go, but I find myself really wanting to go see a movie or cook dinner for friends instead. And don't get me started on my experiences with ~~the ghetto for women writers~~ The Center for New Words. Just don't get me started at all.

The other reason I want to hold my tongue, of course, is that I've been impressed by the kindness and welcomes from individual white male poets. My main informant into the delightful rabbit hole of small presses, after all, is a white man. Even the suffragists needed their benefactors. But the chained dog does get chompy from time to time, even when the dinner bowl approaches.

[Edit: Apropos of this topic, I present to you Poet School, from Savage Chickens]

Media Recommendations

2008-04-16T12:37:47Z

In the interest of just saying it and not waiting to write the perfect review, I present to you my latest media recommendations:

Print

Best Fantastic Erotica from Circlet Press. This is a small press just down the street from me. I met Cecilia Tan back in 1998 (wow! ten years ago!) at the International Bisexual Conference IV at Harvard. She and her partner have been running Circlet Press for years and years, and the cover letter that came with my review copy pointed out something interesting I'd never thought of: Circlet Press has had an impact on the scifi genre as a whole. Good examples? Uber-sexxay Tricia Helfner as Number 6 in the new Battlestar Galactica. Inara in Firefly. Seven of Nine in Star Trek Voyager. Is it a girly thing? A pervy thing? Who cares? Science fiction is no longer JUST about hard science or sociology. Me likey.

The anthology itself can be rather uneven but still totally worth the read. Winners of the contest appear first in the book, and I thoroughly enjoyed the lush, sensual descriptions of the winner, "Monsoon," by Arin Dembo. It's also nice to see Indian mythology penetrating American culture. Uh huh huh. I said "penetrating." "Marked," by Cody Nelson, evokes shades of the AIDS epidemic. Plus, really hot, kinky gayboy sex. "The Night the New Hog Croaked," however, echoed every annoying thing about typical kinky pr0n that you can think of (uber dominant females in tight corsets and 5-inch platforms). The prose of that piece lays in the stomach like one of Mrs. Lovett's meat pies, but parts of the story still please. "Copperhead Renaissance" fascinates and disturbs at the same time and serves up a little ironic twist in the last paragraph. "Nocturnal Emissions," about a Catholic priest's relationship with a wild spirit, will be a great read for anyone interested in the history of the rise of Christianity in Europe. And "Twilight" (the first story I flipped to), while less than stellar in the prose department, offers a compelling story about an oft-explored subject: vampires and Van Helsing. Plus, the descriptions of the New York subways made me homesick.

Overall, I would recommend searching out this anthology. It's still rare to find straight-up erotica mixed with science fiction and fantasy. As with comix and fanfic, the genre allows for unexpected possibilities you won't find in the mainstream.

Echo, from Terry Moore, the artist who brought you Strangers in Paradise. Early in my entree into the world of comics (I came to it late -- you can blame Hugh Jackman and Brian Singer), I was discussing the dearth of female comics with Tony, the awesome proprietor of Million Year Picnic. He mentioned that many people assumed that Terry Moore was a woman since Strangers in Paradise had such a strong female voice and since the female characters lack the bizarre boobie phenomenon so prevalent in most mainstream comics. Alas, Terry Moore is an XY, but we won't hold that against him. The story line of his new self-published title contains many familiar comic tropes (secret agent, girls with super powers), but Moore manages to inject a freshness to the old themes with brilliant characterization, suspenseful storytelling, and his characteristic pleasing, accurate drawing style.

Buffy Season 8 For those of you who have been hiding under a rock (or who don't keep up with the Whedon fandom sites), the Buffy story didn't end with Season 7 on Fox, or Angel Season 5. Whedon continues the line, sans the restraints of the TV medium, with Buffy Season 8. You'll find plenty of reviews online, so I'll just mention the highlights: hot Buffy girl-on-girl action in the latest issues, combined with Whedon's characteristic humor and wordplay. Artwork varies but for the most part provides more accurate depictions of the female form than you'll find in, say, the Marvel line

Angel: After the Fall Not my favorite comic of all time. Too many monsters and not enough character development. But folks who fell in love with Wesley Wyndham-Price, everyone's favorite green demon, and the rest of the gang will have fun reading about their further exploits in the hell that broke forth over L.A. at the conclusion of Season 5.

Misericordia The only bona fide new title written by a woman I've come across recently. Better than some efforts I've seen, but not quite A-list material. Mostly wordless, with evocative drawings and an interesting story line involving a dystopian, possibly post-apocalyptic society.

Bitch Magazine. Feminist response to pop culture. Can be a bit dour at times, so I recommend reading Bust (for women with something to get off their chests) as a counterpoint, which can be a bit too frivolous at times. Mix them together like cheese and crackers.

Film and TV
(Loves her Netflix)

Firefox I missed Angelina Jolie's early work and have been rectifying this omission slowly via my Netflix queue. Gia, the drama-mentary about the first supermodel to bring "fierce" to the catwalk, should be a staple for lesbians looking for more recent evidence that we exist. Firefox, however, holds together much better as a movie. It's a rare thing in modern media, a bildungsroman for girls. Empowerment, rebellion, sexual awakenings, and haunting endings, plus a kick-ass revenge scene for all girls who have ever survived sexual abuse at the hands of authority figures.

The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman Laura Kightlinger joins the ranks of women in the film industry sick of men's stranglehold on production and writing and makes her own damn series. Acerbic, satirical, sometimes cynical, and often funny, it tells the story of two women out to scramble to the top of the heap in L.A. Makes me glad I live in Boston. Favorite line so far?
Magazine editor: "You can't write for someone else! That would be cheating!"
Jackie Woodman (gesturing to her clearly female form): "Do you see a ring around this cock?"

Robyn Art: here at last the body, window cracked open at the helm

2008-04-15T03:25:56Z

In recognition of National Poetry month (April) and belated recognition of Women's History Month and Small Press Month (March), I'll be posting notices for the rest of the month about (and, wherever possible, links to) women poets from small presses.

From Wicked Alice Poetry Journal, Winter 2008, Robyn Art:

And here at long last the body, its window cracked open at the helm
[...]
stay here all you broke-down
visions, supernumerary impulse-buys and over glutted infomercials of love, stay here
betwixt and between Restless Leg Syndrome, TMJ, discretionary income and the oft-extolled pleasures of the drug-free life, O boggy and efflorescent self, self of root cellars and forgotten tinctures, of mud and excrement and loam, but still at long last
the body, the non-body nearly arrived, relentless, full-throttle toward the irreparable
becoming [...]

See full text here (second item on page)

Who said lolcats can't read?

2008-04-15T02:29:44Z

see more crazy cat pics

Lovingkindness instead of melioration

2008-04-14T19:06:19Z

From today's Daily Dharma:

"If I could meditate, I'd be a better person."
When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual
discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve,
which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's
a bit like saying, "If I jog, I'll be a much better person." "If I
could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person." "If I could
meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person"... But loving-kindness
- maitri - toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything.
Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can
still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous
or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change
ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves
away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are
already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right
now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's
what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

- Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness from
Everyday Mind, a Tricycle book edited by Jean Smith

This reminded me of an exchange I had last night with the official leader of the Women's Sacred Circle last night as I was driving her home from the church potluck where the pagans sniffed out the new ministerial candidate for the church. I've always really appreciated the very quiet way she has of making things happen. One might describe it as mellow, or laissez faire, or t'ai-ch'i-master-like. "I'm just more comfortable doing things that way," she said. "It just feels more natural to me."

Anyone who has ever known me knows that I am the polar opposite of my Circle Sister in this respect.

"I've come to a level of acceptance about who I am," I said as we walked through the chaos of Harvard Square. "But I've tried to moderate my own style in that respect."

"Why?" she asked.

Because we haven't really come a long way, baby

2008-04-11T13:18:17Z

tammy212 articulates in a full-of-awesome way what I've been too busy with my own little dramas to say. About the Texas raid on the Fundamentalist Mormon compound in which over 100 women and children were "seized." More info here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89395841 or google "mormon texas polygamist raid" or some combination thereof.

From tammy212's post:

So feminists have achieved their revolution? Women are equal? Our rights have been won in our enlightened country?

Apparently not as far as law enforcement in Texas is concerned.

...

It was bad enough that this "lead" was given to law enforcement a year ago. But today it comes out, according to MSNBC.com, that Schleichler Counter Sheriff David Doran has had an informant in the church compound for four years. He has known that underaged girls were being forced into marriage against state and national law for four years. But this upstanding representative of the public's civil rights has this to say:

"We are aware that this group is capable of (sexually abusing young girls)," Doran said. "But there again, this is the United States. We are going to respect them. We're not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry. I've said that from day one."

There, you see? Forced marriage is only important if women and girls living in a compound under the control of men complain to outside authorities. Otherwise they should just be left to the control of their men, who today are weeping as the chapel where the marriage beds are is being searched. I would like to give each of those men a red-hot iron handkerchief for their tears.

This is the United States. We are going to respect the rights of adults to force sexual behavior on underaged girls. We are going to respect the rights of men to hold women and girls captive. Have I got that right?

I am too angry to breathe. The next person who tells me we women have it made will be lucky to walk away without my teeth in his/her throat.

This story was way too close to an account of a fundamentalist Mormon compound in Sheri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country. I don't agree with all of Tepper's ideas, especially those around social engineering, but her account of a post-apocalyptic society and the different ways that surviving groups and cultures deal with gender issues is compelling and a great read.

It chills me to think, though, that what happened in her fictional, dystopian account, was actually happening in Texas. Here. In this day and age. While I run around being all sexually liberated and economically free and stuff.

So you can take that "strident feminist" crap and shove it up your ass.

Faithful America, religious liberal traditions, and why I belong to a UU church

2008-04-10T18:16:49Z

I came across the activist group Faithful America a while ago and really appreciate the message they stand for. Political discourse in this country around religion has been very much shaped by the religious right. Faithful America aims to reshape the discourse to include members of more liberal religious traditions. Their latest campaign is to shape some of the debate happening during this year's presidential campaign. There's a "compassion forum" live on CNN this Sunday at 8pm. You should vote on which issue to have the candidates address: click here to do that.

Whenever I talk to someone new, I feel self-conscious saying things like "I know her from church" or "I do lay ministry," because as soon as people hear the word "church" slip from my lips I know they're making all kinds of assumptions about my religion, my politics, and my beliefs. For the record (are the new viewers gone yet?), I have been a practicing witch for more than a decade. Most of that time I spent as a solitary practitioner, although I did study with a coven in Connecticut and also ran a website for About.com on the subject that included virtual ritual in chat rooms (not to mention mountains and mountains of emails, and the ~~time-sink-hole morass of bitchy pagans~~ forum). I belong to First Parish Cambridge, a Unitarian Universalist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Years before I attended a Sunday service at the church, some friends of mine introduced me to the CUUPs rituals that take place on Fridays near the Sabbats of Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, and sometimes Samhain. I appreciated CUUPs's eclectic approach to pagan practice and was also impressed with the depth and breadth of knowledge possessed by the facilitators.

While the notion of a liberal religious tradition is not entirely new to me, my experience at First Parish Cambridge really was life-changing. To steal the words of my ex-girlfriend, it was an important part of my re-churching. It wasn't until Sunday services at First Parish that I actually heard the man up in the pulpit saying the exact same things I believed. The words in the hymnals weren't full of things about Jesus, only-begotten Son of the Father saving us from eternal damnation. They were about a hard-working Mother God, a loving Father God, a Spirit of Life that imbues us all. Instead of the "thou shalt nots" of the 10 Commandments, the seven principles talked about things like the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, the importance of social justice, and the free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

People like to make fun of the UUs for having wishy-washy beliefs. At the beginning, I used to laugh along with those jokes. But I don't anymore, because I see the Unitarian Universalist movement as a group of people with very deeply held beliefs. They're beliefs not based in shame however, but in the irrepressible presence of the Divine in all aspects of existence: in human beings, in society, in the earth itself. People need deeply held beliefs to fight the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany, or speak out against the excesses of the McCarthy era, or take practical steps to fight racism, or get arrested protesting the genocide in the Sudan, or support the rights of gay families to equal treatment under the law.

The UU tradition allows for a heterogeneity of beliefs that includes secular humanists, deists, Buddhists, "Jew-U's", pagans, Christians, and others. It also has something sadly missing in the Catholic church of my youth: democratic governance. All members of a congregation have a say in how the congregation is run, and all matters of theology and the like come up before the General Assembly each year. Ministers don't get any more say in the running of the church than lay people.

I never expected to find a congregation that so completely shared the same views as me, and certainly not one as active, welcoming, and thriving as First Parish Cambridge. As a result, I give back a great deal to the church, both with an annual pledge and with a fair amount of lay ministry. I'm co-leading a Sunday service for Beltane this year on May 4. If you're in the neighborhood and would like to hear me preach, please come by. It's the second lay-led service the Women's Sacred Circle has done in the past 12 months, and I hope there will be more to follow.