And in a way, it seems to me that mocking her lack of verbal skills is just feeding into the class and cultural divides that gave us Red States and Blue States. Dubya was notorious for his lack of oratory, and New Englanders loved to make fun of him for it. But it didn't stop him from keeping the highest office in the land for not one but two terms.
We can't assume that people make rational decisions when it comes to politics. It's much easier to look at things in terms of Red States and Blue States than it is to look at individuals and their motivations. But which is really the more conscious way of viewing an issue?
In the end, I think we can all agree that Palin has about as much a chance of becoming the next POTUS as Dan Quayle does. But we also can't dismiss her because her speeches don't stand up to Obama's. Actions matter -- but so does marketing.
- Feeling:
thoughtful
Without even meaning to, she’s gone underground,
the face whose curve you shaped with your own hand,
fugitive, a sullen stranger’s you’ll never touch the same way
again. Still, you keep brushing and braiding, separating
the strands and binding them together again, as if they were
a rope by which you could hold her, tethering her to your body
as she was once anchored and fed, your blood hers. Before
she got big enough to cross the street without looking back
to catch your eye. When you were still everything she needed.
-- Alison Townsend
The poems here don't always inspire me with tight, bright language, but lately I've been inspired by writers whose work is less than perfect. Some deep inner critic, some just-sprouting bulb of defiance inside me says "if they can do it, why can't I?"
Seeing a feminine moniker in the masthead at least soothes the woman-shaped ire within.
- Feeling:
artistic
Not usually, anyway.
People vote with their hearts as much as with their heads. People--myself included--respond much more strongly to irrational calls on their fears, their prejudices, their own personal and subconscious leanings, than they ever do to the realities of policy, or issues.
How else can you explain the thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters who have decided to vote for John McCain? The only thing the two candidates have in common is skin tone. What self-respecting feminist could possibly vote for a man whose record on women's issues is abominable as McCain? Regardless of what he called his wife (that's his second wife the hieress, not his first wife the disabled woman), just take a look at his voting record.
And even if you're not an abortion-happy feminist, take a look at McCain's economic policy. Is it the folks making more than $250,000 a year who really need help in these tough economic times?
People come up with all kinds of reasons not to vote for Barack Obama, but the main one, the one that no one wants to talk about, is the one that AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka pinpointed in a recent speech. In his words:
"They just can't get past the idea that there's something wrong with voting for a black man. Those of us who know better can't afford to sit silently or look the other way while it's happening...
There is no evil that's inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism."
And even more so when it's self-inflicted.
Barack Obama's speeches are high-flown and hope-inspiring. He's surrounded himself with smart people. I'm sure he's as human as the rest of us, underneath the well-managed campaign. But he's a better human being than McCain by a long, long shot. And I truly believe that he has the best interests of the entire country at heart.
I was born in 1973, during the Watergate hearings. I've never known a time when the office of the U.S. presidency hadn't been sullied by the shadow of Nixon's shenanigans. Kennedy was long dead by the time I was born. But listening to Obama's speeches gives me an inkling of what it might have been like to have a leader who truly inspired people, who spoke to the higher ideals of truth, and justice, and hope. We need bread, surely. And we've been pacified by circuses. But this campaign has opened a little window of belief in me that there just might be someone out there willing to work for roses, too.
- Feeling:
hopeful
Link to video
Some very compelling arguments about how "fetal rights" laws have been used to hurt -- and in some cases kill -- both mothers and the babies they want to carry to term.
Did you know that in states with "unborn rights" laws, hospitals can force women to undergo C-section surgery, even if the surgery would be life-threatening? That a woman is facing life in prison after one of her twins was stillborn?
- Feeling:
determined
Honestly, I no longer know what to make of John McCain anymore. A man who has readily admitted he doesn’t know much about the economy makes a big show of bringing his presidential campaign to a grinding halt to rush to Washington to fix it, which seems a bit like a NASA auto pool mechanic declaring to all and sundry that he’s going to stopped making oil changes to rush to Florida to consult on the Shuttle.
[...]
he also suggests we cancel (or, “delay”) the presidential debate on Friday, and maybe the VP debate next week. You know, just to be sure we’re all focused on the economy, instead of, frivolous things, such as the fact that John McCain apparently hasn’t had a useful thought about the national economy since he married a heiress, and that Sarah Palin can’t be trusted to extemporize [...] without appearing like she’s [shoving her hockey-mom pumps down her throat].
Link to Scalzi's full post
And via
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
yesthatthom, some Youtube videos of Letterman catching McCain in one WHOPPER of a lie. "Could McCain be so out of touch that he didn't realize that Couric, also on CBS, would be interviewing him in the very same building?" Short versions, long versions, all funny-as-hell versions (when did Letterman switch over from the nutty younger late-night guy in a sweater to the Johnny Carson of our generation?). Watch them all here: http://yesthattom.livejournal.com/87949
On a more religious note, I can't get the Family Research Council (a.k.a. family fearmongers' council) to take me off their damn spam list. What began as keeping track of what the other side was up to has turned into a daily dose of hate in my inbox. Faithful America is a nice antidote -- a PAC that reclaims religious values from the far right.
I got fed up enough to send a strongly worded response to a particularly egregious email full of lies and half-truths. I'm sure it's falling on deaf ears over in Tony's inbox, though. Maybe it will amuse you, dear Intarwebs.
From a personal appeal for dough from Tony Perkins, President of this "Christian" organization:
I want you to hear something a California pastor said to me recently:
"If we lose, we go to jail."
It's just that simple, says Pastor Jim Garlow--if marriage loses in California, religious liberties everywhere will be next. [Funny thing, that: here inSodomMassachusetts, religious liberties seem to be alive and well for Christians, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and others alike, gays can get married, and marriage as we know it is still intact.]
The fight for marriage in the states is our first priority.
But we can't take our eye off Washington, D.C. politicians. Your support is vital as we stand up to liberals who want to criminalize your religious speech . . . threaten the religious liberties of employers . . . silence conservative and Christian broadcasting . . . raise taxes . . . and impose taxpayer funding of abortion and embryonic stem cell research.
And my response:
Tony, this is an incredibly offensive letter. Christians have never
been sent to jail in this country for practicing the teachings of
Christ. Untold numbers of homosexuals, though, have been rounded up by
police, beaten, raped, and returned to the street without charges ever
being placed. Recognizing a loving, stable union between two people is
not an affront to marriage. Preaching hatred and intolerance is,
however, an affront to Christ's teachings. Shame on you, and shame on
your organization. Turn off your computer and read your bible.
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have
love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all
knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do
not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I
surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me
nothing.
1 CORINTHIANS 13:1–3 (NASB)
- Feeling:
pissed off
The Scooby Gang's van spotted near the courthouse
Evidence that it is not:
I tried to have an actual conversation with a McCain supporter today. Actually, it wasn't clear whether he was really a McCain support or just an Obama hater. Anyway, I tried. But there's a reason I resigned from the debating society. He was more interested in picking apart my arguments than having a real dialog, and I gave up on the conversation before it occurred to me I should have reframed the whole argument and asked him why he was a supporter of McCain. One is much more likely to be persuasive if one addresses the needs and desires of the person one is trying to persuade.
But that wasn't what happened. I think better with a bit of a time delay, which is why I am a good writer but not as good of an extemporaneous speaker. Also, I get my Irish up pretty quickly with issues that are close to my heart. Like, say, sending people off to die in foreign countries for the sake of questionable foreign policies. Or stripping women of access to decent medical care and reproductive services.
So I couldn't resist the little devil on my shoulder that told me, as I was walking away, that the best course of action would be to flip him the bird and tell him to kiss my ass. I'd done so well up until that point!
"That's why I'm not voting for Obama," he said. Wow, it's so easy to influence people to keep doing what they've already decided to do!
It's not because I flipped him off and told him to kiss my ass (young whippersnapper overpriveleged little white boy with a curved-bill baseball cap that he was); it's because he'd already decided to vote for McCain.
God/dess help us all.
- Feeling:
politics gives me agita
The real sexism against Palin, like the designs above, has been the flip-side of the sexism against Hillary Clinton. A sadly perfect illustration of the Catch-22 women face. You're either a scary, ugly, old, mannish harpy. Or a ditzy, perky, fuckable bimbo. You're either cracking nuts between your thighs or dressed up like Britney Spears. The sexist remarks about Clinton and Palin are like our hate mail ("you ugly man-hater!" followed by "gimme a blow job!") writ large. It doesn't matter that, in reality, neither Hillary Clinton nor Sarah Palin fits these stereotypes. Both are attractive women who have made their fair share of political enemies. But reality doesn't matter much in terms of how they're portrayed.
Word.
Link to full article
You know, a dystopian future where the cost of basic necessities for living skyrockets, where the gap between rich and poor reaches ridiculous proportions, where entire classes of people are suddenly declared illegal, rounded up, placed into camps, deported to countries they fled, or otherwise thrown into dehumanizing, life-threatening situations.
And still the sun shines, the electricity works, the water flows. I must be one of those women in a pleasure garden on the roof of a skyscraper. While my sisters and brothers sweat and skimp and starve and suffer.
- Location:La Officina de Casa
- Feeling:
distressed
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.
The video blog:
The link for RSS feeds that don't like my video embeds
- Feeling:
awesome!
- 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:- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
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.
- Feeling:
frustrated
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.
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.
- 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?"
- Feeling: cheerful
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/storFrom
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.
- Location:La Officina de Casa
- Feeling: disgusted and afraid
- Listening to:River of traffic, early morning and still
So. Rita Dove. In an interview in some literary journal, probably conducted because she was the poet laureate of something or another, she talked about learning to leave the end of a poem open, rather than sewing it up with a final sewing-up type line. I think about that a lot when I'm writing poetry. I try to leave room for the poem to breathe at the end, rather than making it a self-contained little jewel. A stale cream puff. Some poems lend themselves to open-endedness more than other poems.
"Daystar" has a lot in common with Rich's "Orion", as it speaks directly from the female experience and explores the theme of juggling the various responsibilities of motherhood, womanhood, and artisthood. I hate getting all reductive with the gender stuff, but yes, our society still expects women to be mothers and caretakers and homemakers. Of course, now we get to have careers as well. Which still leaves little time for writing. Or for sitting and thinking.
Daystar
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.
Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
Rita Dove
From The Longman Anthology of Contemporary American poetry, second edition. Friebert, Young, eds. Longman, New York:1989.
pp 529, 530
- Location:La Officina de Casa
- Feeling: contemplative
- Listening to:Open window, traffic in the cool spring air
I am Irish, but not Boston Irish. The Boston Irish are a breed unto themselves, simultaneously clannish and inclusive. Inclusive, that is, to anyone with an Irish surname. If you're Latino or Brazilian or Vietnamese or one of any of the many groups of new arrivals to this cold little city--not to mention African American, whose arrival in Boston predates the Irish--it's a different story.
The Boston Irish--and the Irish in general--have good reason to be bitter. But they also seem to have a profound inability to make the connection between their own suffering and that of other immigrant groups.
Okay, so over one hundred and fifty years ago, the British imposed genocide-by-inaction on the Irish when the only food they were allowed to eat (potatoes) suffered a terrible blight and went the way of the American Elm and the Chestnut. There are horrible stories about the potato famine. There's a certain type of grass, for instance, that they call hungry grass, for the people who ate grass as they were starving. There's the fact that cartloads of meat, fish, and vegetables left the country for England, while the proud and starving Irish watched them go. There's the story of the soupers, Irish Catholics who converted to Protestantism for the price of a bowl of soup. There's the eradication of Irish history and the Gaelic language that went hand in hand with their starvation (yes, Virginia, the Irish did not always speak English. They had their own language which English schoolmasters beat out of them).
There's the complete and total apathy of the English in the face of this mass starvation, so eloquently characterized by Jonathan Swift's satirical essay A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested that the Irish eat their own children. The English, after all, thought of the Irish as pesky barbarians with their weird songs and their strange language and their tendency to lapse into poetry. Or barfights, take your pick. Not to mention all their superstitions about the sidhe, or the fairy folk, or the Shining Ones, which one might argue are a sort of collective guilty memory of the six waves of invasion that have broken over the Emerald Isle.
The potato famine (or un-famine) resulted in an Irish diaspora remarkably similar to the Jewish diaspora and the Puerto Rican diaspora. As a result, there are more Irish in the world than could ever comfortably return to their homeland; in this, they are just like the Nuyoricans and the many many brands of Jews.
The diaspora was hard. When the Irish arrived in the U.S. (which many of them did), they were greeted by No Irish Need Apply (NINA) signs in the windows of shops and restaurants in Boston and New York. As immigrants have been doing for centuries, they took the hardest, dirtiest, most degrading kinds of work. They became miners, prostitutes, factory workers, housemaids. Many Irish became indentured servants -- slaves for a limited period of time as they paid off the debts incurred to come to this new country where they would not starve. It was not uncommon for Irish servant girls (assuming they could find the work) to be forced to allow the master of the house rape them over and over again. And heaven help them if they had the bad manners to become pregnant! The old families of Boston and New York, most of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) stock, profited off their labor. They lived in sumptuous mansions while the Irish crowded into their tenemants and three-deckers. But at least they didn't starve in the New World.
Maybe it was the prouder ones, or the smarter ones, or the less lawful ones who turned to organized crime. For some reason, the Irish Mafia doesn't get quite as much press as their Sicilian or their African American cousins, but they were every bit as violent.
A century and a half later, the Irish run the city of Boston. And what does this formerly oppressed minority do? They turn around and oppress the newer arrivals: the Italians, the Puerto Ricans, the Dominicans. Instead of recognizing their kinship to African Americans--a people who didn't even choose to come to America, whose Middle Passage makes the Irish diaspora look like a pleasure cruise, and who suffered 400 years of oppression at the hands of whites--they hate them. A black woman I know once told me that she simply knew never to set foot into certain parts of Dorchester. The Boston busing debacle of the 1970s is a stain upon the history of the Boston Irish.
Of course, I also do get why oppressed minorities poop all over each other. It's because they think there's not enough. The poverty mentality brings out the chompiest, most hard-scrabbling alligator parts of our brains. But it's not true. There IS enough. We should band together and demand it from the folks who have it.
Or something.
I suppose I've lost my heritage. And I suppose that's why the Boston Irish are so fierce in their protection of that heritage. But in reality, my heritage is more complicated than that. California and the trek across the country is a big part of my heritage. That smidge-inch of Cherokee or Arapahoe in me bubbles up. That Italian ancestor gifted me with a big booty, and for all I know that booty traveled all the way from the savannah or the jungles of Africa.
And my heritage, too, is that of the Kelles, the Irish temple priestesses who did not marry but proudly bore their children and gave them the last name O'Kelle. Padraic, that English colonist, he and his men who loathed and feared feminine sexuality, called the Kelles sacred whores.
I am descended from sacred whores.
And I have no interest in celebrating the day of St. Patrick, a man who was born in England, was captured by Irish raiders and pressed into slavery, escaped, and returned to the land of his captors as a missionary. When people say that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, they're not talking about literal snakes. They're talking about the old religion of Ireland, symbolized by the serpent, an ancient symbol of wisdom and renewal. Padraic, who drove the snakes out of Ireland, is about as worthy of celebration as Christopher Columbus with his smallpox and his firewater.
- Feeling:
awake
Jay Smooth is my new favorite vlogger (that's "video web logger" to those of you who still use "electronic mail"). He fills a void left vacant for just about a year by Ze Frank. His vlog is watchable because he edits it. Yes, boys and girls, that is the key to a good vlog. You have to edit the crap out of it. No one wants to watch you say "um...." and roll your eyes into space while you think of the next thing to say.
Jay Smooth is, in fact, an improvement on Ze Frank because he's got that thing, that thing that's so hard to find up here in
Jay Smooth also rocks the hardest because he gets that whole "we're on the same side" thing. That sexism and racism are both fucked up and BOTH need to be stopped. And that America's attitudes toward sex versus violence are pretty fucked up.
Plus, he posts some good hip hop videos from time to time. And good hip hop is hard to come by
About the Spitzer scandal:
About race and why being post-race is total bullshit:
JSmooth, I would totally have your babies and they would be caramel colored and sweet. The girls would have big booties and child-bearing hips. The boys would be good-looking boys. Whichever gender (or in between) they happened to be, they'd be wicked smaht.
- Feeling: determined
There were also some moments of pathos, which were well played.
I did find the ending a bit schmaltzy, but perhaps it is my own cynical, broken-so-often-it-has-a-rakish-tilt heart that refused to buy the "Dad, do you think it's possible for two people to really really love each other forever and ever for their whole lives?" scene. Of course, Dad's response was pretty spot-on. I just think I'm setting myself up for another Lucy-football moment whenever I fall for the idea that the person
Before I saw the movie, I posted an article about it to a mailing list of Unitarian Universalists. I belong to a few, because UUs believe in plurality. Or in listservs--I'm not sure which. This one was for YAG, the Young Adult Group for which I still qualify age-wise, at least until Christmas of this year.
Here's the article:
The Trouble with Juno
Birth mothers debate Oscar-nominated movie's view of choices and consequences pregnant teens face
andtruth, who gives good email (witty, dry, with a blackberry finish), emailed me directly with this response. And then gave me permission to post it here. This fits in nicely with my
Ahhh...now I have seen "Juno" a bunch of times (living by the Somerville Theatre is awesome). I think the people in the article raise good points--but good points about the issue, not the movie. The story of the movie, despite all the indie cred it has received, is really just that of a high-school coming-of-age comedy for the pregnant wiseass teen set. I don't think Diablo Cody's agenda is even as much about the politics or even the personal experience of adoption as it is about how you can survive in regular high-school society if you get pregnant; the issues of dealing with the aftermath are adult, and therefore off-theme. Criticizing it is for this is kind of like criticizing "Gilmore Girls" for painting an idealized portrait of teen pregnancy (which some people did), or criticizing "American Pie" for not including a safe-sex lecture by your gym coach. If the movie was a drama I think it would be a little different.
Now, I do think the last couple of minutes of the movie are a too sunny and perfunctory...this is very much someone's first movie script and endings are always hard. But I think the critics here are wrong to say that "all" Juno goes through is nine months of awkwardness (which, in a teen comedy, is a tremendous obstacle) and "some tears" at the delivery. The tears Juno sheds in the birth scene are the only ones she sheds in the movie. They're big, they're scared, and I think one look at Ellen Page in those scenes shows she's going through something she won't be able to understand for years. Since that comes from the performance instead of the text it's the sort of thing that slides past people who aren't invested in the characters as much; but I think this is an extremely well-acted movie and I don't believe that these issues didn't cross anyone's mind.
But it is a shame that these issues didn't get to be addressed more overtly, and indeed I think this article points the way for some fertile ground for "Juno 2"--I would love to see how this character deals with the adult consequences of her decision.
Anyway, if I sound obsessed it's because this is the first movie I've ever seen whose every detail reminded me of people I know, which was frightening (I wanted Michael Cera's room sooo bad in fourth grade). Then the Boston Phoenix bashed it for being a "cynical" attempt to cash in on the ever-popular "twee" scene. I've since discovered that "twee" includes almost everything I like that I thought know one else knew about, which was a rude awakening for me. Dang it.
- Location:La Officina de Casa
- Feeling:
quixotic - Listening to:PJ Harvey -- Long Snake Moan
Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder--
If you hate me so much
don't bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything--
as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy--
I'm not the enemy.
Only to ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can't rest until
you attack the cause, meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion--
It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.
I don't need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.
-- Louise Glück
From The Wild Iris, The Ecco Press (an imprint of HarperCollins publishers). New York: 1992.
- Feeling: still stretching
