Fingering the text(ile)

Yesterday on my plane ride back from ye olde land of extremely extroverted relatives (Wow, they're a festive bunch! I'll say!), I read Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer winner The Road pretty much in its entirety. It's a very short 287 pages long. And everyone I know LOVES this friggin' book.

But, I, alas, am left wondering, is the surface texture of a piece of writing enough to make it great?

Though it describes an utter burn-out of a post-apocalyptic wasteland (ash, ash, and more ash), it is lush and gorgeous. Of this, there can be no doubt. For those not quite in the know, the basic premise of the novel is that a man and his young son set out on a journey across what was once the North American continent, but is now primarily de-peopled and scorched due to some grave, unmentionable and unmentioned catastrophe. I say "primarily de-peopled" because, it seems, a few cannibalistic asswipes manage to survive and produce adequate menace throughout.

But the thing about this novel that makes me wonder for what purpose was it written is that it takes nary a turn that I didn't predict long before I got there. Of course the father has to kill a man in front of the kid. Of course the two come dangerously close to starving to death before happening upon a heretofore untapped cache of canned goods and blankets. Of course they make it to the coast and of course the coast is only more of the same ashy deathscapes. Of course the father dies a pitiful tubercular death (oops, spoiler-- but then, the whole premise is basically a spoiler, so, I'm not going to lose sleep. Sorry.).

So, then, what's left? A beautiful rendering? A few pithy truisms ("Where men can't live gods fare no better," to pilfer just one)? Is it enough to take a cliched cultural anxiety, pepper it with cliched plot points, top it off with a tentatively optimistic denouement, color all of the above in every shade of the lexical rainbow, smack a Pulitzer-Committee-Approved sticker on the cover and call it a day?

So, yeah, I'm pleased that I paused my holiday festivities long enough to run those cadences and all that inventive syntax through my brain, but I can't help but feel like it's not much beyond an poeticized, emo version of Independence Day (sans tentacles, of course. Well, and sans, uh, that victory-over-the-super-scary-Other business, too. And with more father-son-bonding. OK, it's a lame comparison. So, eat me.)

Shit. Somebody or other is really gonna slap me around for this one.

Ecstacy/Prolixity

Merry Almost X-mas, fair reader(s):

Here's a fantastic article on the love of big words and the pros and cons of using them in quotidian parlance. It speaks to my soul.

And then, there's this new addiction of mine. Soon, you'll enjoy, as I have, hours of time wasted as you learn the difference between pelf and peripateticism.

My gifts to you!

Etymologically yours,
M

sex-positive feminism, my life in emails, and other lighter notes

After that last dreary post, I figure I'd better sop up the mess with something more entertaining.

So, it seems, my new hero, Chelsea G. has gotten it right again. I think I'm just going to have to start linking her virtually every time she posts some darling little nugget of cultural commentary. Today, for example, I think all audiences should check out this post. She makes a millions points more illustratively than I ever have, so, mostly I'll let her speak for herself.

But, just because I'd like to back up her argument with a case in point, I'm now going to include a real-live email thread that occurred between myself and a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago.

Disclaimers:
Please note: All names have been changed to protect those who've already been completely defiled--uh, I mean, to protect the innocent. (Admittedly, I am one of the participants in the ensuing conversation, but I figure it's best to refer, henceforth, to the two of us as "Gossipy Bitch 1" and "Gossipy Bitch 2." And heretofore, I shall refrain from distinguishing one from the other.)

Please also note: Because myself and certain others who participate in my social circle have been embracing our CSS (see post from a couple weeks ago) status as of late, this thread has a distinct anti-breeder bias. Hey, we're cranky and we're spinsters. What do you want from us?

And now...

"my psyche might implode: an email dalliance"

GB1: "Dude" across the hall from me is back in the office for the first time since his wife had twins. I don't know if I can handle overhearing the proud-father-baby-excitement discussions all day long.

GB2: I am so sorry for you. I don't think I could handle it.

GB1: Oh, dear god. It's all men, too! It's all these men, coming in and sharing their own baby stories. I really think I'm going to lose my mind.

GB2: Too bad you can't close your door. Maybe [I should travel to your neighborhood and] we could just have some more of our inappropriate conversations so they can see what they are missing out on...great sex or babies. Tough choice.

GB1: Really, you should come over and I'll say, "so, last night so-and-so came over and I let him cum all over my bare chest." And you say, "yeah, I love when that happens. I'm sure glad I'm not married! I hear married men don't really even like blowjobs anymore." And I'll say, "I hear that too! Isn't that strange??" And then you say, "I'm sure glad I haven't had any babies because my ass looks friggin' fantastic today." And I'll say, "yeah, mine too. I just feel so bad for women who've destroyed their bodies with all that breeding. It must suck to be a mom. Not to mention all the cleaning up of puke and intellectual bankruptcy."

Let's create a real grass-is-greener-on-the-single-side sensibility around here!

GB2: And I'll say, "yeah the bare chest is good, but I like it even better on my face." And you say, "yeah that's good but not as good as giving blowjobs." And I'll say "yeah, I hear women stop giving them when they get married. I'm glad I'm not married. I love giving them." And you'll say "I also hear women's bodies stretch out, ahem, down there, after giving birth." And I'll say "I'm glad I do my Kegels!"

GB1: And who gets to deliver a poetic monologue on how fabulous semen tastes? Me, oh, let it be me!

OH, my god. That is SO much better than the "what kind of antibacterial hand sanitizer do YOU use? I mean, my kids ARE preemies, after all..." conversation!

GB2: An "Ode to Semen"? As you do.

You mean you don't want to hear about dirty diapers?

GB1: Nope. Already have, though. Including the "how do you keep the boys from pissing in your face during diaper changes" Q&A session. Since when did men become such effin' mother hens????

GB2: Uh, you hold it down (that's what she said). Even I know that, and I was adept at avoiding changing my nephew's diaper when he was a baby.


Fin



Enjoy!

de facto hiatus

It's not that I really have intended to stop writing. It's just that it seems I can't. I have ramblings I'd like to express and films I'd like to discuss. But I can't.

As I think I mentioned a few posts back, this Seasonal Affective crap has really thrown me for a loop this year. And yes, it's a real thing. Palpably real. And miserable.

Actually, it hasn't been this bad since my freshman year of college, when I'd just moved to New Jersey and the snow didn't ever completely melt from the middle of October until the beginning of May. I really thought I was losing my marbles. The only comparable experience I've had was when I decided it would be a good idea to screw around with my usually very evenly regulated hormones (i.e., I went on The Pill for 6 months-- never again!).

So, nothing's wrong. I don't make enough money and my job alternates between frustrating me and boring me and, of course, I seem to be entangled in some typically unconventional relational situations (or, at least, I'm entangled in my own head. Participation of others is subject to interpretation)-- but none of that is any different from the usual year-round rhythms of my life.

But I can't stop crying. I wake up and I feel ok, even though my sleep cycles are even more out-of-whack than usual (typical fire-sign insomnia, exacerbated) and then I get into my car to drive to work and the only thing preventing me from falling apart is the simple vanity that I don't want to show up at work with mascara rings under my eyes. Or I get to work and manage to hold it together through the morning hours, but I soon find myself staring spacily at the grid on my office ceiling, willing the tears away (I will not cry at work. I will not cry at work. I will not cry at work.). Or, I proudly soldier through an entire work day and then I collapse into passionate, unweildy sobs as I navigate Georgetown traffic on my way home.

And still, nothing is ACTUALLY wrong, other than my brain chemistry being all half-mast and off-kilter. About the only reprieve from feeling sad that I've been getting is when I feel frustrated and annoyed that I'm so sad all the time. Frustration and annoyance are clearly preferable to this other overwrought, heightened, interminable sadness. Clearly.

Either way, I feel crazy.

And it doesn't help that it's just barely mid-December and the DC area has already seen a significant snowfall and another is predicted for this weekend. Nor does it help that I can't actually remember the last sunny day we had here.

Nor does it help that I arise in the dark, leave my apartment shortly after sunrise (spending a grand total of 25 or so seconds outside as I walk to my car), park in a garage underneath my office building, elevator up, work all day in an office with no windows, elevator down, drive home after dark and spend another 25 or so seconds walking from my car to my apartment. Clearly, three quarters of a minute is not adequate time for my retinas to register enough sunlight to create a sanity-sustaining serotonin level in my puny frenzy of a brain.

I am a mole-rat.

Most of the time, I can manage a little yogic trick. If I adopt the stance of the objective spectator in relation to my own self, I can watch myself feeling so sad, realizing it's a physiological sort of sad (as opposed to a psychological sort), and muster enough sense to realize that I'll weather the storm-- but even this variety intellectual detachment doesn't much help me turn off the friggin' waterworks. It's merely a management tool and does little in terms of solving the problem.

So, thank god the winter solstice is only 10 days away. I can only hope that, as the days begin to lengthen, I'll be able to think like a person again-- and maybe write something of substance.

Until then, fair reader(s).

Somebody had to say it.

Thank you, Chelsea G., for hitting just the right note of amalgamated fury, indignation and pointed egalitarianism here.

On an almost-related note, someone who doesn't know me very well recently told me that I'm too hot to fall into the sorts of complicated relational entanglements that I do-- as in, I could get anyone I wanted, so why make it so hard for myself? Even if it was true (which it's not) that I could bag any simple, available, easy boy who crosses my path, I'm pretty unmotivated to do so. It would be a waste of time (and also, boring) for me to engage in solipsistic and ruthless self-analysis in which I parse out why I choose the particularly stumbling blocks that I do (over and over and over again) in this forum, so I won't. But I bring it up because Ms. Chelsea's point about how it's not all that easy for even women far more attractive than myself to get laid on a whim --or even, in a more calculated and mindful manner-- is an awfully good one. I mean, yes, absolutely. If it gets that bad, I have people I can call. But I'm always disappointed afterwards. As much as I'd like the girl who can do it without ladeling out a puddle of what Chelsea calls "steaming emo pudding," I'm not. And I'm drawn to challenge and complication, so, no, I can't make it easy on myself.

Fomenting attachment with another human being is bound to be rife with anxiety. Love -- and the fear of not obtaining it, the fear of losing it once it's obtained, the fear of never finding it again once it's been lost -- is an anxiety-ridden condition by definition. And that's WHY it's desirable. In other words, it's not boring. And being bored is a lot worse than being anxious. We don't fall in love to make our lives easier in the first place, so why would anyone assume that I would opt for an easier road just because my physical appearance and the fact that I'm a woman might provide a slim little by-way through the barricade that usually blocks said road?

Nary a moment to spare and a newly-minted CSS

Somewhere between the too-intense-for-public-consumption intrigue going on inside my head and my somewhat ramped-up social calendar in November, I've had plenty of time to, uh, neglect my blog. I'm really hoping December will be better, but it doesn't look like the excitement will let up until the new year begins. I miss the writing and the discipline, though, and I would very much like to return to it soon. Also, I miss the movies, as I haven't had too much time for those, either.

And tomorrow, I turn 31. A few of my friends and I have agreed that this birthday marks the official onset of Cranky, Spiteful Spinsterdom. So, please be prepared, in the upcoming year, for posts in which I bitterly avow that if you are married or have babies or both, you are a gigantic loser. That's what spinsters do. You can thank me later.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether or not celibacy is a prerequisite for considering oneself a Cranky, Spiteful Spinster (heretofore known as the CSS). If you would like to weigh in on this matter, please feel free to post a comment, but be kind. Do not banish me to the hinterlands of sexual deprivation. I beg of you! It's only a birthday and I still get carded every-damn-where I go.

This Thanksgiving, Will would like to share his cracker with the world.

And a truer T-shirt adage may have never before been worn.

The real inner conflict resides in the body.

When I was in high school, I had a dream that continues to haunt me. I was in a house comprised of all hallways. All the rooms were long and narrow and gloomy and painted this awful, dingy, nauseous green. I navigated the hallways until I found the kitchen, another hallway, though this one was lined with kitchen appliances and cabinets. All sick and green. I began to open the doors to microwave, dishwasher, oven... and out of each tumbled a full-grown, naked man. They were beautiful-- white-skinned and dark-haired. Well-muscled. And significant quantities of some milky fluid burbled out of the appliances as they lurched forward from their tucked and cambered postures. And blood. Needless to say (or maybe needful, I don't know), all the men were dead. As is often the case in my dreams, I felt screams well up in my chest, but I just couldn't scream. This non-screaming happened here. And so, in lieu of screaming, I found a scabby-looking screen door at the end of the kitchen-hallway and I banged through it, barely breathing. I found myself on a big expanse of a beach, a swollen, tumescent sky above. I ran to the water, hoping to wash off the blood and fluid that had spilled all over me in the kitchen, but I found more of these beautiful dead men washing up onto the shore. The entire ocean was amniotic and cloudy. I don't suppose I've ever had a dream in which I've felt that level of terror-- before or since.

The imagery of this dream does not strike me as particularly subtle. Though I was probably only about 14 or 15-- and still miserably virginal-- it's clear as day that I was already feeling some anxiety about birthing babies. Dead bleached-out corpses, falling from narrow openings amidst assorted bodily fluids? Yeah, they are tough to miss, my still-born sons. Next week, I'll be 31 and my worries about using my body to produce children have shifted a little. It's not so much a horror show of death and blood anymore-- and more about a simpler vanity, I suppose. I still get carded virtually every time I buy alcohol-- and though I find this ridiculous, as I most certainly look older than 21-- I must admit that I kinda like the fact that all my body parts are still in the right places. I must also admit that I LOVE the social cache that my body parts being in the right places afford me. God help me, I love male attention. Preferably, male attention of my own choosing, but even less desirable male attention is nice, so long as it doesn't cross boundaries. And I worry, to an embarrassing degree, that all that will dry up when I get that post-baby belly-sag and breast-droop. I worry about it so much that I'm finding it difficult to apply language to the thought. And I'm shuddering a little to think of it.

Now, the irony here doesn't escape me. I spend an awful lot of time thinking about sex-- how to get it and what it means, why it's such a powerful force and how it's a filter for virtually everything in my life. And so, I find this insane bodily tug-of-war--- between the ways our bodies goad us into reproducing and a real physical tremulousness at the actual prospect of birthing a baby-- pretty funny. Surely, it's totally stupid that I have such a massive libido and also so much trepidation regarding the natural effects of indulging said libido. But whatever. No human drive is ever simple.

I bring all this up now because, a few weeks ago, I watched a little film called Stephanie Daley, and I found it so difficult to watch that I haven't been able to write about it since. Now, very few films make me squeamish (unless it's got vomit in it, and I feel like I've covered my vomit issues aplenty in this blog). On the list of films that have gotten to me is probably Requiem for a Dream (I really did have to fast forward through the gang-bang-followed-by-vomit scene-- give me exploding track-marks any day!) and well, Four Rooms-- though this is back to vomit again (there's no goddamn WARNING!!!). But in all honesty, I was really on the verge of fast-forwarding though a long, brutal sequence of this film. I managed to weather it, but it's tough, I'm telling you.

The basic story is about a 16-year-old girl and her shrink. The shrink is hugely pregnant and, we learn, found herself in such a state very shortly after suffering a still birth. The girl stands accused of murdering her baby while claiming to not have known she was pregnant in the first place. In many ways, it's clear that the writer/director, Hilary Brougher, drew inspiration from some sensational headline or other. But, ultimately, it's a story of two women dealing with the flip-sides of the birthing conundrum: when you don't want it, it comes so easily, to the detriment of your whole life-- and when you pine for it, it eludes you in the most painful way possible. It's a thoughtful exploration of quiet aches and particularly female aches they are.

However. My goodness. There is a scene in this film. It's pretty much muted out and you get only brief smatterings of sound. It's shot primarily through the gaps around the door of a public bathroom stall. And it's all close-ups of this girl's face while she's giving birth into the leg of her ski-pants. If you ever want to know what it feels like to have your guts ripped out through your vagina, please consult Amber Tamblyn's face during this scene. Her confusion, her physical pain, her utter all-alone-ness are palpable in the most disturbing way. Since when does the sheer emotion on the face of another human make me turn away in the same way that a puke scene would? Well, it's never happened until this film, during which I found my own head buried in my sofa pillows. I can only assume this is the case because the idea of forcing a kid out of my own body engenders no small amount of anxiety in my person-- as foretold by my scary dream.

For all you girls who've done it? Good god. You're all my heroes-- though I'm still not sure if I'll ever wanna be you.

yeah, yeah, yeah, 9/11. But also...love and the lost self

It seems that a number of typically snark-jock movie critics really seem to like Reign Over Me. It's true, the real allure of Adam Sandler resides in his characteristic cocktail of rage, self-loathing and soulfulness. And, at last, this film is a real showcase for those aspects of his soul. He's subtle and funny and furious and it really works. For once, viewers can, perhaps, put Opera Man out of their heads while watching... not that I really have anything against Opera Man, per se. I'm of the camp that concedes that some of Sandler's deconstructionist comedy in the SNL Weekend Update segments were really fairly innovative. However, this piece is about character, not rule-breaking, and he carries it pretty well. It's no doubt he won some critic-fans with the role-- and the film.

However, all the reviews discussed the barely-scabbed-over lives of those whose families were affected by 9/11-- and how sensitive a story this movie is... blah, blah, blah. Sure, I guess it IS sensitive, but, just for the sake of argument, let's take 9/11 off the table. What if this were just a story about a couple of guys who've conceded some portion of their selfhoods to their relationships?

I've oft heard a very female lament about the girl who marries her dreamboat of choice and then winds up "losing herself" to the relationship, sacrificing her identity, her soul, her likes and dislikes, for the purpose of being the wife HE wants her to be. Oprah is a big pusher of the notion of the tragic narrative of the just-can't-say-no girls. I've had friends complain about having lost track of some aspect of identity when ensconced in a romantic relationship-- and I think I might even have phrased my own complaints similarly (though, in retrospect, I know I have most often been the one to force concessions from my partners--having a strong personality sometimes breeds some curious obliviousness), but I've wondered: what of the men who no longer recognize themselves, so lost are they in the daily morass of gesture and habit and ritual? Surely, assimilation into a relational unit couldn't possibly be a single-gendered activity, could it?

And along comes this movie. In it, we've got two guys. One guy loses his wife and three daughters (it's significant that all three kids are female, I think) to one of the passenger projectiles that have since entered our lexical commonality. As a result, he devolves into some crazy amalgam of automaton, ghost and rabid wolf. Simply put, without his family, his female flotilla, he has no real self left. When they were alive, his life was full because of them. And without them, there really isn't much man to spare. And the other guy, well, he still has his wife-- and two female children. But as a result of his "putting family first," he's manifested such a disconnect with his own desires, his own identity, that he begins to foment a fairly expected variety of resentment towards his wife.

Now, the solution to this problem is really the hinge of the plot. Both men seek refuge from domesticity in each other and, because they each adopt this outlet, they are able to return (or at least begin to heal in order to return at some point in the future) to some modified version of the family fold. Easy. Total cake. It's a reasonable and real-life solution to the emotional deprivation experienced by some men. And it works. But, it's also not all that interesting to me.

What is interesting, however, is the set of social constructs that create the types of ravenous hunger so readily apparent in these men. To be fair, I'm sure this aspect of the film's emotional tenor stuck out to me because I've been reading Laura Kipnis' book Against Love: A Polemic of late. This is a book that would be incendiary if it were required reading for the population at large, but, as it is, it's more like a flagpole sporting some tattered rag outside a seedy bar on the fringes of town. It rages about the ways in which conventional companionate co-habitation squelches our emotional lives and lulls our libidos into sad little stupors. The book wants more for us than so-called wedded bliss. It wants actual bliss. And I suppose I'm reading it because I, too, want actual bliss-- for myself and for the people (plural) with whom I fall in love. And so I read books that swear up and down that that which is packaged as blissful (love, stability, monogamy) is actually the enemy of the temporality and flightiness of real, mindful fun. I keep hoping that if I resist that which feels like it might entrap me or own me, I'll find a new transgressive joy. So far, so good. No, wait: so far, so occasionally good. It's a trepidatious mountain passage at best.

But anyway, I look at the stories of these two men-- one who is a veritable wraith of loss without his primary relationship and one who can barely speak, so gagged by the confines of being a "good father" or "good husband" or even "good man" is he-- and I am fascinated by the meandering avenues through which their marriages lead them-- and deposit them squarely in their respective marital miseries. Sure, they find their ways out again (via the flip-side of the self-same love that drove them to despair in the first place, mind you), but it is the insularity of love that is the problem for each. I can't help but wonder: if these two men dedicated a little less of themselves to their primary relationships-- and a little more to a legitimate pursuance of bliss? Would they feel so stranded and without recourse when those primary relationships wind up NOT being the be-all-end-all? Would they feel so alone, were they not so protective of their own emotional fidelity? If they put a couple of eggs in other baskets? Who's to say?

I would like to understand more about men's emotional lives. Though male actors continue to dominate the screen, rarely do we find filmic plumbings of male loneliness, detachment, estrangement, and ache for simple human connection of the nature found in Reign Over Me. I won't say that it goes this distance flawlessly-- it occasionally waxes maudlin and, frankly, it overshoots in terms of subplots and connectivity of narratives-- but at least it's trying. At least it's attempting to represent the ways in which the conventional social institution of marriage fails these guys in terms of their rawest, simplest emotional needs. It's supposed to be another diary page from the post-9/11 New Yorker. Ultimately, national tragedy is just a backdrop here. Because I came to this film with Kipnis in my head, I'm having a hard time seeing the real subject matter as other than how these men fight for stability in a landscape in which the bedrock of relational love swims in and out of their reach.

Another concession: the time-change has hit me like a brick. I'll acclimate soon, surely. But for now, I've had a week of imagined heartbreak and utter listlessness. Oh, sunshine! Oh, serotonin! How I miss you. This Seasonal Affective bullshit is a bitch. Time to fire up the Happy Lite again. So, apologies if I, too, am waxing overly maudlin. It's been a weird and weepy week. At least I can blame it on body chemistry, rather than real problems.

cultural climate in which renegades, instead of the line-towers, look like zombies

It's been a good long while since I posted about a film. Don't ask me why. I've been watching them. It's just that sometimes I get sick of my own usual foul-mouthed, sexpotted rigamarole. It's a shame, isn't it? So, I figure I may as well get back on track with a big bloody, fiery, explosion-porn-rife zombie flick. Sure. Why not?

Much has been said of the cultural reflectivity of this particular genre. I don't suppose I really need to rehash it-- but, it's true. The Archetypal Zombie can function as cinematic folk devil for any measure of societal ills. Joshua Clover does a slick, dense little rundown about this film genre here. And I suggest you read his smart version, rather than allow me to indulge in blatant plagiarism. And it just so happens that his write-up is also about 28 Weeks Later, my sofa adventure this evening. What I find particularly interesting about this other blog-review is the comparison between the zombie outbreak in this film and the French Revolution-- or, say, ideological insurgency of any kind.

As my regular readers might have noticed (ha! regular readers... that's funny!), I'm sorta partial to rebels and outlaws, rule-breakers and transgressors of all colors. Well, maybe not all (some could argue that the likes of Hitler-think arose out of social rebellion, I suppose). But in general, social order doesn't often sit all that well with me, so I think folks that undermine it are kinda fun. But in Clover's analogy, the zombie are the rebels-- and they spread disease in rapid-fire. And they're pretty fucking scary, even considering they don't really have access to me personally, safe in my apartment, an ocean away from the rage-syndrome-ridden British Isles of the film. (Yeah, it takes a lot to ACTUALLY scare me.) They puke blood and are mindless consumers of human flesh. Chills and thrills all around.

But if we relay this back to our current American cultural Bogeymen--suicide bombers, insurgent militias and renegade ideologues of the Middle East-- well, then, would this film not reflect back to us a particular anxiety about THEIR ideology being contagious to us? We rational, not-religiously-zealous-AT-ALL, tolerant and diversity-loving Westerners? Yeah, that sounds just LIKE us! So, if we're worried that ideological insurgency is both contagious and zombie-fying, my sarcasm in the preceding sentences alone could lend itself to the argument that we're ALREADY zombies.

And so, in this circular method of thinking, rebels wind up right back on top--and paradoxically, at the bottom-- of the hero pile. And here's why: fear of zealotry can entail blindness to one's own version of zealotry which leads to the application of social pressure towards intellectual conformity which often manifests in a manner remarkably similar to (hey, surprise!) zealotry and therefore, the only voice of reason becomes the renegade--who is, indeed scary, because his or her new and innovative ideology might well be every bit as contagious and zombie-fying as the original form of zealotry. Christ. I think I might have lost myself in this argument. No, that makes sense, right? It's the same old overturn-the-government-with-a-new-regime-that's-every-bit-as- problematic-as-the-first-regime-because-both-have-been-devised- by-bumbling-humans argument, isn't it?

In any case, the movie's fun. Probably not as emotionally ripe as its prequel, 28 Days Later, but bloody and absorbing and anxious in its own way. As a zombie flick should be.

In honor of the re-legalization of absinthe in NOLA---and for Joe

Ms. Dita as Le Feé Vert.

Crusaders who get naked

Please note the addition of the prettydumbthings blog to my blog roll. This site is kind of a hub of the stripper-literati discourse, as written by Chelsea G. Summers. I quite like her brand of feminist parsing and she's got a fairly fascinating bunch of sex-text links worth exploring on her own blog roll. Also, her archive lists April as "the cruelest month," which, I suppose gives her a little extra lit-nerd street cred. Enjoy.

Me and my new boyfriend

Please note, to the right and in the middle, that wedding ring. Alas. Also, genetically speaking, this union would portend bad news in the hair department for prospective offspring. Still, poetry crushes die hard.

Enough already! This gushing sycophanticism simply must end. It does not become me.

Other people named Marjorie just SHOOT their chickens

During one of the presentations given at the SFA symposium this weekend, a woman read an excerpt from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, famous Southern-ish (Florida?) writer, in which Ms. Rawlings described a near-calamitous episode featuring a shotgun, a chicken and a professor who just about lost a tooth on the bullet he found in his serving of bird. Southern food/lit/social politics folks love a good shoot-the-chicken story.

This brings to mind a near-calamitous dream I had while I was attempting to complete my graduate manuscript for my MFA. First of all, most of the poems in that manuscript are about using Southern cooking as a method for dealing with assorted racial identity issues that arise when you're a white girl from the South-- and you leave the South-- and people assume that a) you're a demonic racist asshole and/or b) you've slept with a sibling and/or c) you don't own shoes (anyone who cares to contest this one, I'd invite to tour my closet, except that you really can't walk in there because there are too damn many shoes in the way (last count: 65 pairs, not counting flip-flops because flip-flops do not really qualify as shoes, even if you THINK it's a fashionable idea to wear them to work.)). So, all that's just to say that I've been toying with notions of food and identity and politics for a while, now.

So the dream goes, I was somehow put in charge of offing chickens for some large family fete. I have a memory of being kept in the house as a child while my dad and some neighbor or other slaughtered chickens on our farm out in West Tennessee-- but other than a cloudy image of a pimply-looking already-quite-dead, featherless creature, I don't remember much of anything about the actual practice of chicken-killing. My dreaming self, however, determined that the best plan of attack would be to attempt snapping their scrawny li'l necks. As it turns out, I'm not the greatest at chicken-neck-wringing. It seems that I maimed and deformed quite a few chickens without learning an effective manner for actually breaking a chicken neck. In the chicken yard of my dreams, 20 or 30 chickens hopped about, shrieking in pain, with their heads all at half-mast. It seems that I was unable to kill them, and therefore, was readily inflicting pain on myriad god's little critters-- and was also failing in my duties toward the production of a bounteous feast. I was feeling pretty awful about my dream-self, I'll tell you what! It wasn't the best dream I've ever had.

Were I to play Freud with myself for a moment, I might point out that my inability to properly kill a chicken (where's a dream-gun when you need one?) serves as a most blade-like and incisive metaphor for how I felt about finishing my manuscript, and followingly, finishing grad school. In taking a third year to complete my degree, I felt confident I'd injured my manuscript pretty severely--it screamed and moaned and copped attitude with me on a daily basis. But I could no more find a way to heal it than I could find a way to kill it good and dead.

But Freud is passe and I'm no kinda analyst.

Why is it that I'm still relieved when I realize I don't really write poems anymore?

SFA belly overload

Yeah, so, I've thrown my wheat-free veganism to the wind this weekend. There'd be no surviving around this crowd of pig-eaters otherwise. This large-scale consumption of animal agriculture is giving me both a planet-concern-related heartache and a lard-ass, but whatever. And I've already made a red velvet commitment for next weekend... because all my DC friends know not of the joys of cream cheese icing and red food coloring...but soon enough, I'll be back to my monastic lentils. Hopefully, I'll get there without becoming obese in the meantime.

So, here are the Highlights of the SFA Symposium's Saturday Events According to Marjorie:

1. Kevin Young. Dear lord. It has long been the case that, when I needed to be reminded about how much--and why-- I love poetry, Jelly Roll is one of the books to which I regularly return. But today he read some new poems that drew quite a lot of laughs from the audience. Laughs at weird stuff. We were an eager audience-- so much so that we had one of those great rare moments in which non-poets cheered and whistled at the end of the reading. I, of course, welled up-- partly because I was so excited to hear this particular poet, and partly because it was so great to be reminded about how wretchedly cynical I've become about how receptive folks are to real, challenging, thoughtful and innovative poetics. Quite simply, we ate it up. And the work--he read a bunch of new stuff that has a habit of cracking wise, then ripping the rug out from under you. It mourns. It fleshes. It was lovely. Good god, I love this poet.

2. The connections between food and linguistics/semiotics and between race and gender and between food and race and gender and between food and race and gender and semiotics all joined up and interlocked in my head today. And this happened with Bernard Herman's arguments regarding the apotheosis of so-called low-brow foods and cooking methods (i.e., pretty much all that is Southern, as opposed to that which has a more rarefied, or ethnically (European) unmixed heritage, such as the haute cuisine, which is obviously French, and only French, in derivation). And "apotheosis" is exactly the right word here. Allow me to take a quick meander through these ideas because, otherwise, I might lose all that good thinking I got done today: let's say there are two manners of communication. Herman calls the first "restricted code" and by this term, he means an limited-vocabulary manner of speaking that is readily accessible to most folks-- and we can draw an easy metaphoric link with this manner of speaking and homestyle cooking. And then he spoke about elaborated code, which is more specialized and containing a very specific jargon and can be metaphorically linked to professional cooking/chefery (spellcheck says I just made up that word). So, there's that-- and to extend it just a little farther, a discussion arose in a Q&A about how women are cooks and men are chefs, which then drops the lens of gender over this differentiation in vocabulary, implying that the food of women is easy and accessible, while the food of men is elite and specialized and requires a convoluted vocabulary. So, despite my clearly simplistic re-rendering here, that's pretty interesting. But then, this relates back to some of the stuff that I was talking about yesterday about appropriating, fetishizing and developing connoisseurships around the food preparation of marginalized peoples-- hence that concept of the "apotheosis" or ascension of that which is traditional, homey and "low", now achieving new heights in terms of cultural capital. Oh, this is all very messy, and I'm far too excited about the implications of this thought process to be able to relay in any logical fashion, but I will say that food academics are super cool. And listening to them is straight adrenaline to the synapses.

3. Another metaphor between food and language continually arises throughout this discourse: Ingredients are like the vocabulary while the method is like the grammar. Food has a syntax. No wonder it translates so handily to poetry.

3. I'm making friends with sweet potatoes, a heretofore repugnant-in-my-opinion vegetable. Sweet potato flan helps. And, to be fair, the Thai-esque vegan sweet potatoes I made last week didn't hurt either.

4. I may well have been won over to the pro-boudin camp. I'm still a little wary about exactly WHICH pig parts they put in that shit... but, oh, my god, I have been missing out on some pork!

5. Peanut cotton candy is amazing. Wonderbread icecream? Not so much.

6. Free Abita. Need I say more? Probably not, but I will say that there is no more enjoyable way to support a New Orleans business than to make your mom drink New Orleans beer. That said, Pecan Harvest is no Turbo Dog. There is no equal to the Turbo Dog.

7. Never underestimate the collard green. Particularly if there's bacon involved.

8. A little tip: if you are interested in pursuing a degree in, say, interdisciplinary critical and gender studies, buy the books of gender studies gurus and have them sign them. They sometimes have a delightful way of offering to introduce you around their programs. OOooH, I just got shivers! I heart smart people. I really heart smart, generous people.

SFA brain overload

I've trekked down to Oxford, MS this weekend for more than a glimpse at Faulkner's house-- and for more than a book-buying spree at Square Books. This weekend is the Southern Foodways Alliance's annual symposium, and once I learned that Jessica Harris (famed culinary anthropologist, southern food genius and English professor all in one) AND Kevin Young, one of my favorite poets, would both be speaking, there was no way I'd have missed it. Joe Allison, don't tell me you're not jealous!

So, anyway, Kevin Young speaks tomorrow but I sat right across the aisle from him today and kept stealing star-struck glances. He busted me a couple of times. And Dr. Harris spoke this morning and was not a let-down in any way. Though I'm already pretty familiar with most of her research, she leads the room as though she is queen-- and for her contributions to this field of scholarship, she most certainly is. And so, she's something pretty fantastic to hear.

Now, for the purposes of concise reportage, I'm going to regurgitate just a few of the amazing tidbits I've learned today.

1. The sensors for bitterness in our mouths warn us of poisons. Sourness sensors indicate spoilage.

2. Absinthe never was poisonous or hallucinogenic. The only reason people were thought to go crazy from drinking too much of it was because unscrupulous distillers often added poisonous copper derivatives and the like to cut costs. Also, they're re-legalizing absinthe in this country as of next week. I tasted some once when I was in college and am excited about the opportunity to do so again.

3. I'll freely admit that I don't know a hell of a lot about alcohol, but I was unaware that "cocktail" isn't a generic term used to indicate all mixed drinks. A cocktail, in order to be considered a cocktail, should have whiskey, cognac or brandy in it and MUST have bitters. A drink with whiskey, cognac or brandy without bitters is called a "slide."

4. I learned of several new restaurants that I MUST try in the DC area, including Gillian Clark's Colorado Kitchen-- where I just might get a decent mess o' greens in the big city.

5. Conceptually speaking, American barbecue is to white Americans what curries are with white Brits. If we can take it for granted that barbecue is a cooking method that we southerners have co-opted from the natives of this continent-- usurped, fetishized, mythologized and developed conoisseurships around-- through the vehicle of the objectifying "colonial gaze" (I just learned this term and I love it and equate it with the "male gaze" terminology you'll find under that gender-relations lens), well, then, Brits have done a very similar thing with the conoisseurship they've developed around their very Brit interpretation of Indian curries, post-British-Raj, that is. After hearing this analogy come straight from his mouth, I immediately high-tailed it to Square Books to buy Andrew Warnes' lit crit book, Hunger Overcome?: Food and Resistance in Twentieth-Century African American Literature.

6. Katrina pervades. Present tense. This is not an historical event here in Mississippi-- or in NOLA, obviously. Though there are at least two different kinds of fried chicken you can find in the Quarter by now, this hurricane and her after-effects are a wound in the souls of Southerners. And there is fury when multi-millionaire white San Diegans claim those fires are "their Katrina" on the evening news. 800 homes burned? 800 pieces of the most valuable real estate in the country? one woman asked,then adding: try 150,000 people displaced! Maybe it's petty to compare, and to put tragedy within the framework of race and economics. But how can I help but think in those terms when a touchstone of my culture-- native? adopted? abandoned? I don't even know anymore-- continues to flounder?

7. I think I might have wagered my soul to Square Books.

Love of my life

OK, potential suitors, here's your only real competition. Unless your feet ALSO smell like delicious corn chips and you can look at me as though my very existence fills you with an utterly ecstatic variety of joy, you'll pretty much lose out to this guy every time.

Oh, how I've missed you, Noah, my love!

But this makes it all better

I always KNEW this could be true!

Heartbreaking

Sad news!

Here's why this is so sad to me: not only do the evolutionary findings described in the article indicate that more, um, inclusive attitudes toward relationships exhaust the body and soul of any given animal, they'll eventually leave the girls of the Geritol set--of any number of species--lacking in a male peer group. Not good statistics at all. Gender diversity is a GOOD thing, after all.

Not only that, but it indicates that my slutopian dreams might encounter difficulties in terms of sustainability... especially if the boys just can't keep up.

I feel daunted.

What the internet tide washes in

I've said before how much I love all the oddities of the internet. Here are a few more examples of great weird crap available to all who care to look:

1. Japanese sex dolls: This hysterical article pretty much says it all, striking just the right tone, somewhere between derision and self-mocking. But to make it even better, I found the actual site. This is endlessly funny to me and I feel totally juvenile for thinking so. The best part though-- and you really mustn't skip it-- is if you go to this page, scroll to the bottom, and watch the video of the hand squeezing the tits. It goes on forever. And then it loops. And it's so rubbery and un-sexy-- so damn funny!

2. A documentary about the history of vibrators: This article provides a write-up, but my friend Nadeea says she just might be in San Francisco during a showing. I have every intention of commissioning her to go and see it on my behalf and then, upon her return, she shall write a guest blog post for me. You're up, Nadeea.

3. A show about sex and design: Here's a great little slideshow. Why didn't I know iPods came with a dildo attachment?

4. A cultural history of virgins: Yeah, it's weird to me, too, but here's a write-up.

5. Why life just might be easier if I was French: This is yet another article on how Americans proved that their cultural heritage resides in the Calvinist prudery of the Puritans when they freaked out about Monica Lewinsky, while the French happily fornicate willy-nilly, seemingly without a need to reconcile such behavior with their Catholicism. In so many words, at least.

I wish I could find a way to play on the internet and get paid for it. Why, no! That is not AT ALL what I do all day. Shame on you for making such an assumption...

A couple of confessions and a reminiscence

When I was in graduate school, I was working really hard to be both a lesbian and a monogamist. I was pretty successful-- one can do anything when one really puts her mind to it. And while there can be no denying that I loved-- and still love--my ex-girlfriend very much, I am not, nor was I ever, above developing crushes. Both bodily and brain-derived crushes. In fact, I find I'm desperately bored--bored to the point of mild depression--when I find myself sans-crush.

And so, there was a boy on whom, during grad school, I had a somewhat embarrassing, yet totally manageable crush. He's real cute. Beyond that, he's so swooningly talented that, in the reading of his work, I found that I wanted to eat the paper on which the poems were printed. And seeing as I wrote a fat lot of nada during my first three semesters of grad school, I was pretty much intimidated by ALL of the other poets in the program. But, I found I particularly responded to this poet's idiosyncratic word choice, eroticism and explorations of body-consciousness.

So, I just read his recently-released chapbook. And godDAMN it, it's hot! The work has evolved quite a lot from the earlier work that I saw way back when-- and I'd seen a good bit of it published in other venues. But really, with this kinda poetry in the world, who needs a vibrator? His full-length book is due out any minute and I'm perfectly breathless about it.

Also amongst my recent readings is the book of another grad school cohort to whom I may have referred previously. While Spring and I were never close enough friends for me to know all the aspects of her that gleam through this text, it's full of all that I couldn't help but intuit about her. I find that there is something funny that happens when you know a poet. In general, I assume that at least half the work of some piece of art coming into existence is the responsibility of the reader, and therefore, once the work is out of the artist's brain, it belongs to the audience. However, when the audience has a personal acquaintance with the artist, it is difficult to see the work as anything other that the product of the soul of a friend. And that's what Spring's beautiful book is to me. And that why I also have a crush on Spring. And that crush is why I'm prevented from offering any particular insight into her work, beyond a vehement recomendation that everyone should read it, because it really is a fascinating piece, full of the searching through of at least a couple different souls. Oh, and buy it! Support kore press! They're good people, publishing great work by phenomenal women.

And on another note, I learned today that one of my grad school professors, Jon Anderson, died recently. My experience with him was curious. He led my first graduate workshop and, man, I was scared. As I mentioned, I was pretty convinced that all the poets with whom I went to school were significantly more talented than I was... and that first workshop was a big part of the reason why I felt that way. Fairly early in, another poet, who's since published a handful of knock-out little books, brought in a poem that contained an image of a 12-year-old boy cutting a hole in a mattress and masturbating into it. When his reading was complete, the lot of us sat their silently for several beats-- after all, we didn't yet know each other well enough to feel comfortable jumping into that sort of discussion. So Jon goes, "Yeah, you know, I, for one, like to use a galosh!" And just like that, our classroom comfort zone was established!

And so, this is a post of pining for poets and poetry and reading and language and grad school. And one of excitement for all this great work. And there's more coming! How lucky am I to have known all these people before they made stuff for which I need clear space on my shelves?

Good god. Why am I getting all mushy over the good ol' grad school days? Something strange much be affecting my body chemistry today. I've been eating a lot of sweet potatoes lately. Yes, clearly, the onset of autumn root-vegetable season turns a brat sentimental.

... take my sofa. Please!

The time has come for the infamous Bird Sofa de Chez Marjorie to find a new home. It's a lovely sofa, it really is. I've taken many a satisfying nap thereupon. However, it's getting replaced by a sexy new clean-cut version. And the sexy new clean-cut version happens to be swathed in a deeply erotic cranberry-red microsuede. *Shivers!* More than likely, it's so sexy that no one will want to buy the new one from me when I'm done with it... if my gist isn't too distastefully blatant. The Bird Sofa, however, is in near-pristine condition, due to the fact that it's been slipcovered most recently. So, despite all the napping, there has been no drooling. And it's for sale!

In a slightly misguided attempt to reach a wider audience, I'm posting about it here, just in case somebody in the greater Washington DC area happens upon my blog and is in desperate need of a sofa with birds on it. For cheap.

You know you want it! You know you have a friend with a truck who'll drive you to Alexandria to pick it up! C'mon... It can be your sexy new clean-cut Bird Sofa!

Just take the flippin' thing, damnit!

Lars Von Trier and his sacrificial lambs

About a year ago, I put up this post about Dogville and Dancer in the Dark and how I struggled through my viewings of those films. I'm not quite sure why I thought I'd be in for something different with Von Trier's 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, but I was lured by the blurb: "A paralyzed man asks his wife to satisfy his sexual desires by seeking out other men." I mean, there is potential here for an alternative love/sexuality story that exceeds norms and leads to some sort of liberation for all involved. But, alas, Emily Watson's female lead, Bess, is another of Von Trier's cherubic, innocent women who allows herself to be destroyed because she has so little agency of her own.

Where this movie is different, however, is that, as Bess becomes more debauched and ruined, she becomes the vehicle of redemption and recovery for her husband. When Jan (the husband) becomes paralyzed, she begins to bargain with God, giving herself over to all sorts of behavior that makes her feel degraded, in exchange for Jan's recovery. And with every so-called sin of the wife, the husband does, indeed, recover a little bit. And in her ultimate death, he walks again. Blockbuster Online blurbs the film, saying, "With Breaking the Waves, director Lars Von Trier fashions an often disturbing tale of the singular power of love." Again, it's no wonder I was misled, because, I would argue here that the real subject of this movie is not Bess' overarching love for Jan, but Jan's vampiric, though not entirely conscious, abuse of Bess. And that's why this is a Von Trier film.

In last October's post, I talked a lot about the sick thrill an audience of one of these films receives as we watch the ruination of yet another image of female innocence (and interestingly, female stupidity) progress. Again, I have two problems with this filmic conceit. The first being that there is no representation female goodness without rendering the character as a simpleton, as is the case with Kidman's character in Dogville, Bjork's character in Dancer in the Dark, and again here with Bess.

And then, the second is that a conventional ideal of moral virtue is equated with victimhood. Now I don't really know if Von Trier's second contention here is true or not. In some ways, I think it is, but there are also plenty of examples of innocent ignorance being an active, rather than passive, destructive force-- like in Genesis, maybe? Also coming to mind is a curious little novel I read when I was in high school called Photographing Fairies, in which supposedly innocent little girls went around picking off male fairies as they attempt to fuck female fairies, because the girls are "innocent children" and therefore do not understand the generative quality of the act. But, I'm getting derailed. Von Trier posits that female goodness is a liability. And then he takes great joy in proving this notion, through an extended degradation of one such innocent. And again, I'm troubled by the fact that my role as audience member makes me feel complicit in his thrill. It seems I haven't really moved past this problem in the year since I saw Dancer in the Dark.

So, now, this brings me to a fascinating paper I just read about representations of sexuality of Kubrick's much critically maligned film, Eyes Wide Shut. Now, I could go on and on about how I think there's good stuff happening in that movie, even though the critics pretty universally panned it, but that's not really why I'm bringing it up now. The paper discusses at some length this notion that, in modern western culture, there has been a "sexualization of love" --i.e., a conflation of sexual desire with relationship and affection--and how this has been a heretofore unknown concept (because it's been only recently that people starting pairing off for reasons relating to affection and/or desire-- throughout history, it's been about money, property, family and/or bloodlines, right? ) But then, Deleyto makes a very interesting point that I think is relevant to Von Trier's overriding perspective:
"Torben Grodal [a film critic] has recently challenged this perception [that until recently, sex has not been a culturally available solution for women in the throes of marital discord], taking issue, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, with the contemporary tendency to reduce all types of emotions, particularly, love and desire, to a single origin, namely sex. For him, love and desire are clearly differentiated emotions that have different historical origins and that may interact with each other in historically specific manners but must be kept apart in cultural analysis. Film genres reinforce this division, with romantic films being about 'personalised bonding' and pornographic films about 'anonymous desire.' That is, for him not only are the two emotions different in theory and in people's real experience but cultural discourses such as films also keep them separate, in spite of the insistence of ideological critics who tend to either collapse the two or categorise them according to fixed ideological apriorisms: that love is repressive (for women) and desire is liberating, or, in other words, that the only liberating way of conceiving love is by equating it with desire. In his view, the fashionable link of love with patriarchy and desire with emancipation, fluid gender roles, and the body does not stand up to historical investigation."(Emboldening is mine.)
So, if I'm understanding correctly, Deleyto is saying that Grodal is taking issue with the popular "academic" notion that love is stultifying for the female, but sex is not. And I suppose, I had never considered the idea that this was a fashionable, though flawed, concept-- but now that I do, I see some truth to the labeling it as such. On a side note, I would argue that Grodal is missing something however, in that he does not address how, in many popular discourses (let's just toss Black Snake Moan back into the pot for a moment, shall we?), female sexual liberation is seen not as liberation at all, but as acting out and/or trying to solder over some psychic wound-- that a woman cannot be sexual for the sake of sex unless she's damaged in some way. But again, I'm digressing.

Where I think Grodal and Deleyto are onto something, though-- and where it applies to Breaking the Waves-- is that I think, perhaps, Von Trier espouses this "fashionable" idea that love is repressive of the female (OK, OK, if I'm really being honest, I must concede that sometimes I espouse the self-same thought. Juries still out on whether or not I actually believe it.). Here, I'll point out that Deleyto pretty consistently uses the word "love" as a synonym for "relationship," rather than as a synonym for "affection"-- big frickin' difference, eh? The character of Bess destroys herself because of her love (read: relationship) for her husband-- and for her god. Because she has a pre-existing condition of being in love, any sexual experiments outside of her marital relationship are not freeing, but horrific and they happen ONLY because she is enslaved by her relationship with her husband-- and by her relationship with her god. And so, her only moments of happiness occur when her emotions of love are conflated with her feelings of sexual desire as directed towards her husband.

Deleyto goes on to say that Grodal's arguments eventually fall apart on one level: "While no doubt encouraging and inspirational for people whose alternative sexual habits have previously been socially denigrated, the insistence of much of film theory on equating heterosexuality and/or romance with conservativeness and patriarchal oppression runs the risk of becoming just as oppressive and inhibiting for many other people." And I guess I think this is where Von Trier's perspective falls apart for me, too. If I'm feeling generous and assume that Von Trier is after more than getting his kicks from telling gratuitously salacious stories about ways in which sweet, simple girls are abused-- and that he's really after proving how our culture treats what is commonly perceived as a feminine predilection toward romance in a consummately predatory fashion, well, then, I can't help but feel that there IS something oppressive going on there, too. Perhaps I feel this way because Von Trier writes a story in which activities that have the potential to be liberating for Bess wind up being used in service to her deference to her husband. So, if all of her motivations stem from her need to maintain romantic connection with a man who, though seemingly kind and affectionate, does not have her best interests at heart, Bess becomes a victim of the, uh, what shall I call it? The Patriarchality of Love? An to this end, it is not the love that's so important, but rather, Bess' victimhood. And therefore, Von Trier is necessarily complicit in her subjugation. And I, as voyeuristic audience, am as well. That, in a nutshell, is my problem with Von Trier-- he offers no way out in which people can be both sexual and be in love. More to the point, he offers no way out at all, especially if you are good-hearted and a woman.

And this brings me right back to the idea that, in the cultural discourse, being a good woman is perceived as a) not possessing a faculty and/or desire for sex for the sake of sex itself (i.e., un-entangled with the desire for love/relationship) and b) as being necessarily disempowered. Fuck! This is so blasted frustrating! My blogging is taking on the characteristic of something vicious and cyclical. I just can't get away from harping on this one point, time and time again, now, can I?

This is why I need to go to grad school again, write this damn book that's in my head, and hope I can make some peace with my little demon-in-the-discourse. So, OK, critical film studies programs-- you're on notice. I'm coming. Sooner or later, I'm coming!

When life calls you a freak, find some scholars who are thinking thoughts similar to yours and make freak-ade.

It's true that in my every day life, acquaintances who stumble upon my blog gain a whole lotta insight into my strange perspectives. At a recent family wedding, a cousin to whom I'd sent my URL admitted to me that, as he read my post about Anne Sexton's poem, "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator," he kept thinking that he shouldn't be reading the sorta stuff I write-- that somehow, he was invading my private world or something. Secretly, I was a little thrilled to have excited such a sentiment. If I wasn't looking for intimacy through language, I don't quite know what I'd be doing with myself, even if that means exposing parts of myself that are not readily available to all who know me in real life. After all, I am not so presumptuous to assume that my public persona is anything other than basically, mundanely normal.

That said, I certainly do have my obsessions. In a deeply personal sense, I'm working very hard to carve out a life for myself in which I question social norms that do not seem to serve me well-- and then to go one step further, and question my own assumptions that, likewise, are not doing do my life any favors. To that end, I think and write and obsess a lot about how to be a sexual person and an self-possessed woman at the same time. And I mean, a lot. You might have noticed

So, then, it's really heartening when I find a cluster of articles that show that there are other brains out there in the world who've tapped into the same rivulet of thought that I've found. Here's a quick list of cool stuff the internet-cat dragged in:

1. This one that explores whether or not jealousy and feelings of sexual propriety are as ingrained as we've all grown accustomed to thinking they are.
2. This one that wonders, in the context of contemporary life, whether the very concept of monogamy serves us all that well in the first place.
3. This one in which the hyper-moralizing of American politicians acquires an air of hypocrisy, as, well, politicians, even Republican ones, are subject to the whims of their own physicalities-- as are the rest of us.
4. This one that points out how sheltering kids from all things sexual is detrimental to their education, their self-esteem, their reproductive health, their very senses of identity...
5. And THEN! Now, I know your excitement must be reaching a fevered pitch with all this fascinating text abounding, but someone wrote a book about how American culture is frighteningly invested in restricting sexual choice and denying relevant information about the very fecundity, variety and plurality of sexuality to assorted subsets of mentally solvent folks. And here's a review of that book.

On this note, I'll now mention that, last Friday, I went to a gathering of giggling women, during which I doubtlessly spouted off about how the last thing I want from a relationship is a situation in which I and some other poor sap feel it necessary to regulate each others' bodily functions. And, while most of my audience was at least politely sympathetic, one girl said something along the lines of, "Well, that's OK for YOU, freaky, weird girl that you are...but NORMAL people WANT to own each other (italics are my additions)." So, honest to god, it's such a damn relief to find reasonably articulate people writing articles and books that don't succumb to the ever-suspect conventional "wisdom" that espouses the paucity of sexual choices available to us. Especially if you throw them into contrast with the likes of Wendy Shalit and her paleolithic girls-n-modesty diatribes.

Thank heavens for scholar/freaks. I would feel so alone, were it not for them!

Paired passages on the topic of writerly aspirations

A couple of weeks ago, I found this review of a movie I'll never see, if I can help it. I'm not that interested in the film 300 and I don't think this particular article says anything above and beyond what every other critic has said about it: it's a lame, uber-violent, and yet still boring, extravaganza of homoerotica. I don't get the appeal, but then, I don't think I really have my finger on the pulse of money-making Hollywood anyway.

What I find interesting about this article, though, is the fact that Scott is talking about the movie-going public relishes fictionalized fascism-- a topic that isn't really dirty at all--but she relentlessly peppers the article with the spewages of her potty-mouth. In the first paragraph alone, we've got metaphorical circle jerks, tarted-up showgirls, and The Clap.



Now, I know I'm just a big ol' black pot here, trying to call out Scott for her black kettleness, but I really find her relentless sexualizing of her review language to be sensationalistic and distracting. I may engage in more than my fair share of gratuitous fellatio allusions, but at least I TRY to employ them in the service of discussing subjects about which sex actually pertains. So please tell me that what she does and what I do are not the same thing? That my explorations engage in something beyond cheap, attention-getting tactics in a misbegotten attempt to wow a readership with trying-too-hard brazenness ( or rather, the type of prudery that masquerades as self-conscious, scantily-clad brazenness?)



So, then, this morning, I found this article in n+1, which is, in general, a very smart magazine. Now I'm no critic of music at all--and though this article is basically about its author's disenfranchisement with rock and roll music--I think the sheer quality of this writing is able to bear the weight of so much sexual innuendo without seeming flashy and juvenile. Indeed, it is arousing both in terms of directional bloodflow AND synaptic response.



Daniels' writing is lyrical and associative, spastic and specific. He's talking about how rock and roll, through it's mechanized attempts to replicate the rhythms of sex, merely regulates them. And how this, ultimately, pisses him right the hell off. And so he is impassioned-- and disillusioned, as he points out he's paid his musician dues several times over. His, of course, is not a new sentiment-- I've been to two different Saul Williams performances (*swoon*), and in each, he did the bit about how the body's natural gesture in response to hip-hip is the rhythmic head-bob. A vehement nodding "yes," no matter the sentiment of the song. ("kill the sheriff" (yes! yes!) "slap the bitches" (yes! yes!) ) You get the picture. And how the imperative of the back beat can assimilate even the more rebellious of minds and bodies. This article swerves off the road and talks about more than just this back beat/copulation analogy, and I would argue that Daniels' employment of sexual language is effective beyond titillation-- and that his point is well-taken.

But moreover, he's a good writer, whereas Scott is more of a verbal pantyflasher and not in a good way. With luck, my own bloggish stylings will approach the former, leaving the latter gasping for breath in her dirty dust.

Giving Head

Yeah, I'm really gonna title a post like that. Isn't it about time I dedicate a post to talking about it?

So, I recently finished reading Lisa Jean Moore's Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid. For those who haven't seen its cover flashed over every bookish rag in the land, it's a feminist scholarly work that explores the sociological semiotics of semen (Jesus. That might be my new favorite alliteration). And quite frankly, I think it's a lame-ass book. But I'll get to why I think that in a minute.

Yesterday, I found Camille Paglia's review of several gender-studies books-- ones that, in particular, finally get around to talking about the male side of the gender-studies coin. And really, it's true. Scholarly works that specifically privilege the male experience are few and far between these days. Also true, it's nice that there's plenty of room in the discourse for non-white, non-male, non-hetero perspectives now, but you know what? Hetero men didn't exactly stop being interesting-- at least, not altogether. So, the other two books that Paglia discusses sound like fun reads to a big ol' gender-issues nerd like me, but for once, I'm going to withhold opinions about stuff I haven't read.

I will say, however, that while Paglia's review of Sperm Counts isn't altogether favorable, I think she's still far too kind. For one thing, Paglia praised Moore for her accessible, engaging tone throughout most of the book, and criticizes her for her for slipping into the ever-suspect language of the academy every now and again. About that, I would say that, when Moore speaks Academic-ese, she's pedantic, repetitive and patronizing to her readers, in that she feels like she has to define every last goddamn term. Even ones that have entered the common parlance. It's dreadful. But, in my opinion, when she's chipper, "humorous," and accessible, well, she doesn't, ultimately, have much to say beyond parroting the well-trodden party line of middle-aged feminists across the land. Basically, Moore's more of a researcher than she is a writer. Paglia's definition of lively does not seem to sync up with my own, let's say.

Paglia also points out that Moore relies on a particular brand of paleo-feminism that claims it's a man's world after all, and that women are still mere victims of the paradigm of objectification. Yawn, yawn, yawn! How many time have I said this? I'm sick to death of being told that the world is out to get me because I don't have a dick (and, in this case, because my body doesn't make semen). OK, OK, OK--I know I've ranted about that point ad nauseum already. I don't need to do it again.

But there's something else a little funny in the subtext of the book that just rubs me the wrong way. Moore announces pretty early on that she's a lesbian who has been on the board of some big sperm bank for umpteen years and that both of her daughters were conceived via donor sperm with the help of a turkey baster. So, that's her stake in the (oh, forgive me-- I'm not usually a rhymey kinda girl, but this one's irresistible) jizz-biz. But that's the extent of it. Although she spends a chapter discussing money shots and all cum-related niche-market porn, and another discussing sex workers and their precautions against a potentially bio-toxic substance, she never really gets around to discussing the complicated and layered relationship hetero, non-prostitute, non-pornstar women have with semen.

Much in the way it would behoove your average straight guy to get over any squeamishness he may feel towards menstrual blood pretty early on in his sexual narrative, it seems to me that it's also in the best interest of a woman with any investment at all in heterosexual behavior to relinquish her grossed-out-edness at semen. Because, after all, no one wants to feel that his or her lover finds him or her icky. And yet, straight girl/sperm relations remain complex, even for the most sexually blasé among us. Were a glob of the stuff to, say, land in a girl's hair, would she feel more triumphant that she'd been the cause and catalyst of such an event, or would she feel more degraded because it's hard not to find the excesses of someone else's body on your person without feeling little sullied? Some combination of the two? A more vicarious experience of pleasure? Or something else entirely? Though I'm finding it rather un-nameable, the mixture of attitudes that one who does not create semen might have about having a man come on her, in her, or inside her mouth can only ever be fairly multifarious. And this is the real emotional resonance of the female feeling regarding sperm that I think Moore misses.

She describes smells-- chiefly unpleasant ones ("bleach, household cleaner, or swimming pool water"). For the record, I deem all these inaccurate descriptors, as they all seem to be lacking the notable animal-scent that I think most often predominates. Also, I find it slightly ironic that these are chemical scents, rather than mammalian ones, when Moore spends so much of the book attempting to demystify, normalize (and also de-anthropomorphize) assorted conceptualizations of semen. How does equating the stuff with all the things under the kitchen sink on which a parent might stick a Mr. Yuck sticker demystify or normalize any damn thing? And then she recalls her partner saying, "This stuff smells gross, " upon their first turkey baster moment. I'm not saying it's the loveliest fragrance around, but c'mon, my lesbian sisters! It's not that bad!

Later, in discussing cum shots in porn, she says, "Women appear to be insatiable and competitive about their desire for ingesting the semen as they rush to get to the ejaculating penis, the full shot glass, or the residual ejaculate on a sheet. What does it mean to see women completely overcome with their desire to drink semen? To smear it all over their bodies? What does this say about male desire and masculinity?" And while it's often true that, in the fantasy-world of Porn Land, female desire for men is, ahem, overblown (it's a show, people! Porn's not supposed to look like real life!), she answers her own rhetorical questions by getting bogged down in a bunch of stuff about how the celebrations of semen in porn are pointedly ignoring the bio-toxic aspect (in the age of HIV) thereof, and are therefore titillating. But this is missing the point. She does manage to concede that "it is perhaps more accurate to theorize that men, both as spectators and actors, want women to want their semen" while she is discusses porn actresses' apparent pleasure at all this swallowing-and-smearing business, but what DOES it say about male desire and masculinity? And more relevant yet, what does it say about female desire?

She never does get around to admitting that, outside of porn films, female desire for men can be very real. And sometimes that means not minding if you get a little on you. And sometimes it even means appreciating the vicarious thrill of feeling it hit the back of your throat (my, I AM feeling brave and confessional tonight, aren't I?). So, I suppose that what I think is missing from this book is this: if one doesn't have an investment in willing, causing, and/or enjoying male pleasure, a feminist exploration of the physical evidence of that pleasure feels quite impoverished. Quite frankly, it's the least sexy book about a very sexy topic that a person could dream up. I can't help but feel like that's because, to Moore, semen really is nothing beyond an X or a Y chromosome, nothing beyond a fluid composed of "prostoglandin, fructose, and fatty acids"-- and that, somehow, a lingering neo-puritanical gross-out factor clings to it. Now, I don't mean to imply that I feel the stuff should be treated as though it were a veritable god-ish nector, worthy of idolatry, but we cannot go around behaving as though it's a)by definition, some sort of HIV-ridden venom, b) something about which we should only have a clinical interest, or c) something ooky on which only someone flagrant and shameless as a pornstar could get off.

When am I gonna find a feminist who not only doesn't make the assumption that "we live in a male-dominated world where most men have more power than most women, and where having a penis and producing sperm is valued" (she really does deliver this tried-and-true paleo-feminist aphorism-- I'm not contesting that it's, on some level, weight-bearing, but it just smacks of self-fulfilling prophecy in such a way that its very admission in such a text pisses me off!), but also at least tries to understand what women stand to gain by forming political, sexual, interpersonal alliances with men? And what we stand to gain by sucking one off every now and again? Surely, there's something in it for us. Right?

The upside of a crappy task

Selecting passages on which to base reading comprehension questions for a standardized test is a truly demoralizing job. You have to pick the blandest, most innocuous stuff that is least likely to offend the broadest range of people. The reasoning-- which is reasonable--is that young students might not be equipped to interpret texts in the most generous light possible without the benefit of guidance from a more experienced reader-- namely, a teacher. I could really go on and on and on about the other hang-ups I have about this portion of my job, but, really, I'm trying very hard not to badmouth my job on this blog any more. That's a bad idea for karmic reasons.

But, really, the best part of it is that I've been pouring through my own bookshelves in search of stuff that's not about sex, racial identity, moral ambiguity, queerness, blood, guts, dicks, the eating of pork (literal, not metaphorical--I'm a little obsessed with writers who talk about Southern food) or social class issues. Yeah, there ain't a whole hell of a lot in my own personal library that doesn't touch on one, many, or all of these topics. However, I have been reminding myself about how much I still love some of the books I read years ago. So, here's an impromptu nostalgic list composed of readerly jaunts from yesteryear:

1. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, by Hart Crane
2. What the Living Do and The Good Thief, by Marie Howe
3. An American Childhood and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
4. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, by Nathan Englander
5. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop
6. M.A.C.N.O.L.I.A., by A. Van Jordan
7.Complete Poems, by Marianne Moore
8. The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean
9. The Lone Ranger and Tonto: Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie
10. China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston
11. Ariel, by Sylvia Plath (the new original-order one is better than Ted Hughes' version)
12. Fever: Stories, by John Edgar Wideman

Now, mind you, virtually nothing from any of these will ever appear on a test. But, damn, they're good books.



And by the way, this happens to be my 100th post this year! Cheers!

Makes me shudder (in a good way)

My new favorite Hart Crane poem (I've been reading a lotta Ohioan writers lately... wonder why...):

National Winter Garden

Outspoken buttocks in pink beads
Invite the necessary cloudy clinch
Of bandy eyes.... No extra muffling here:
The world's one flagrant, sweating cinch.

And while legs waken salads in the brain
You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke.
Always you wait for someone else though, always--
(Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke).

Always and last, before the final ring
When all the fireworks blare, begins
A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin,
Some cheapest echo of them all--begins.

And shall we call her whiter than snow?
Sprayed first with ruby, then with emerald sheen--
Least tearful and least glad (who knows her smile?)
A caught slide shows her sandstone grey between.

Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats,
Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands.
Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount
Each other--turquoise fakes on tinselled hands.

We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,
--All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door....

Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,
O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.
Then you, the burlesque of our lust--and faith,
Lug us back lifeward--bone by infant bone.


God. How is poetry not, like, the biggest turn-on ever?

September is the NEW cruelest month

I work and then Mom visits. I work and then someone gets married. I work and then someone else gets married. And then I work some more.

Oh, my blog! I miss you so!

Blogging and having a social calendar and having a job are beginning to feel imcompatible. This makes me sad. I think I'd rather sacrifice the latter two for the former, if only I didn't like my friends and family and need money.

Hence, September will prove sparse.

Dear Future Beau: Please read me Ondaatje when we are old

I'm really bored by romantic movies, for the most part. Thus far, the most pronounced exception to that rule is Secretary. Some will doubtlessly question why I classify Secretary under the heading "Romantic Movie," but I guess, to me, I think it's the MOST romantic movie. It's about two really weird people who, between the two of them, happen to have a matching set of emotional suitcases. Regardless of their various and sundry kinky sex games, that's really pretty sweet. Because I don't have much of a cinematic sweet tooth, (at all, at all, at all!) I find that that film tests the limits of my gag reflex without pushing me over the line. To me, this is the mark of good romantic movie.

And here comes Away From Her, another sort of romantic movie altogether. All those movie critic people have been talking up Sarah Polley's directorial debut for a while. And Away From Her is, pretty much, all it's cracked up to be. It's a lovely artistic collaboration between three women, and the breath of each is readily apparent throughout. It's Polley's own adaptation of Alice Munro's lyrical short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Munro's muscular, palpable presence haunts the film in its poetic and incisive dialogue, as does Polley's general persona. For me, because I've been watching Polley's acting for years--from The Sweet Hereafter through Go and all the way on up through The Secret Life of Words-- Polley's wide-eyed vulnerability and dutifully contained passions pervade this film. And the soul of the director finds its avatar in the body of Julie Christie, the third point of the creative triangle.

Beautiful women often prove an unforeseen challenge for directors-- the strength of their visage alone often overtakes the story or tone or impetus behind the film. And it's undeniable that watching a woman as lovely as Julie Christie weather the aging process could be distracting. But she is so understated and thoughtful in her performance that there was no reason to ugly her up in the least. And though we can't keep our eyes off her face, I don't think a less perfect face could have carried such a role. Her character is rapidly progressing along the Alzheimer's trajectory. To praise Christie and Polley for not robbing this character, Fiona, of her dignity (they don't) would be cheap praise, indeed. There is something far more wrenching going on within Fiona's progressive vacancy. And while I feel at a loss in terms of being able to name that something, I can't help but marvel at the Christie's layered performance. And it goes above and beyond the usual beautiful-woman-destroyed thing, like we in films like Monster's Ball or, say, Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons.

And she's not even the real main character. Fiona's husband Grant, as played by Gordon Pinsett, is stoically heartbroken throughout. The film opens with a ritualistic evening meal, followed by even more ritual--his reading a very recognizable excerpt from The Cinnamon Peeler aloud. Even if I didn't think Michael Ondaatje was about the only writer around who could tickle my sentimental bone (yeah, it's buried really fucking deep-- but I guess I have to admit that I, too, am equipped with just such a bone), it would be hard to not get all mushy over a couple of old people who are still in love after 40 some years. We learn that they've slogged through assorted nonmonogamous interludes and other events that might stress out a marriage--including the Alzheimer's itself. There is, however, no doubt that these two belong together. And so, after Fiona goes to live in a facility, we follow Grant's attempts at daily living and it is clear that, really, his perspective is the driving one. He version of their history is, after all, the more reliable of the two.

I've relayed a handful of theories about the nature of life on this planet over the course of this blog--and I have one about climate and human temperaments that I've yet to tell. Are you surprised I have yet another crackpot theory about something random? So, basically, I've noted a strange correlation between art forms that come from cold places vs. those that come from warm places. If you compare German painters to Italian painters, it's like comparing a turnip to a nectarine. The work of the former tends bloodless and rooty--fascinating in its hardness, its colorlessness, while the other is fleshy and fat-- tangible and lusty. Consider Lucas Cranach the Elder as compared to Raphael. Compare Kirchner to Boccioni. Similarly, think of the New York art scene in comparison to what shows in galleries in San Francisco or Los Angeles. I tend to think New York poets have a different sensibility than California poets, too. And so, I look at a film like Away From Her, and it could be nothing if not Canadian-- Munro and Polley both claiming Canada as their points of origin. These folks are contained. They are not explosive in their grief. They emote in the same way their landscape does--conservatively.

And perhaps this is why I think this is a love story that I can like. I like a Canadian love story, just like I like an Mississippian sex drama (a la Black Snake Moan). In any case, I do hope Sarah Polley's quiet, measured directorial career has some legs. She's fun to watch.