Garbo Hates Hermeneutics

Open Letter from a Lady Casanova

2011-11-10T21:50:00.005-04:00

To all of those ladies out there with the silky hair, the pearl-white teeth, the voice of a seraphim, and the killer moves of Emma Peel, I say move along. For all others--the devilishly doltish, the confoundingly confused, and the hopelessly hapless--I'm your girl. Call me. Blue Boobs, I'm talking to you.

***

This ode to Blue Boobs dates back to an unseasonably warm October Friday evening. I had just been booted out of a bar by Bridezilla (no joke, a bride-to-be who was getting married at the bar ejected me for fear I might ruin her wedding photos), and not to be downhearted about the whole thing, I went in search of The Wax Lion and adventure. With my uncanny good luck, I found The Wax Lion at a nearby diner merrily downing a slice of cherry pie. The Wax Lion had had an adventure of her own that evening. Across the street she'd spied a playful art exhibition featuring a series of paintings that crossed those Japanese-style wave painting-thingamabobs with small surfing animals. As an added bonus, some lucky species of surfing animals featured nimbuses. What was there not to be intrigued about?! I asked that The Wax Lion escort me back to the show for my viewing pleasure.

Turns out that the art was very much worth the effort of diving across broken segments of sidewalk and dug-up drainage ditches that it took to get there. There, in the midst of Japanese solemnity, perched a great variety of animals hanging ten for all of their worth. (A few lions who had wiped out were also mightily amusing.) The Wax Lion declared that the she would make the surfing squirrel hers if only she could find one of the gallery workers. And that, my friends, is when the Lady Casanova sprang into action, for there's nothing I love more than scaring up some help. And what help was there to be scared! There she was--I knew her instantly by the lanyard that was ruining her ruinous outfit--the gallery worker of my dreams. Blue Boobs swayed purposelessly back and forth as I admired her from top to toe. Imagine dishwater blonde hair, marvelously curly and cut as if her hair dresser had no idea of God's ultimate plan for the universe. Imagine a blue dress, hugging every inch of her Sophia Loren-like curves and cut low to reveal a bust like creamy alfredo sauce. Imagine shapely legs encased by some kind of compression tights your grandmother wouldn't be caught dead in even if she were suffering from lower extremity swelling from Hell. Yeah, imagine that last part. I didn't understand it either. Seriously, the were flesh-toned tights that ran about half an inch thick. What the hell? But it was love anyway.

I strolled up to her undulating figure and demanded (kindly) to know her employment status, and she affirmed that she was a gallery employee by the name of -----, ah, but who cares about her real name? "Blue Boobs" suits her better. After introducing The Wax Lion, Blue Boobs proceeded to give us useless information such as commission rates and the gallery's mission statement. In the words of Jane Austen, I did not hear above one word in ten. With that speech over, Blue Boobs hastened away to collect The Wax Lion's payment information. I didn't see the evidence for myself, but to hear The Wax Lion describe it, you would have had a better chance of reading a prescription written by a doctor with cerebral palsy during an earthquake. Alas, my Blue Boobs was drunk and in no condition to be bothered with the digits of a credit card. But the deed done, The Wax Lion and I left the gallery and returned to our respective cars.

As I pointed my car toward home, my lust for Blue Boobs' alluring cleavage poorly met by her compression tights leaped within me like a forest fire on a dry August day. "I'll swing by and chat her up!" I decided, and as soon as I could find a better parking spot, I set out to find the lass once again. I didn't have far to seek, for not surprisingly Blue Boobs had gravitated toward the one solid, stationary object in the room that wasn't the floor--I found her hanging off of the DJ's turntable. Drunk as a skunk without a nimbus to its name, I decided that that was not my moment, but I vowed to seek Blue Boobs out again some day. After all, The Wax Lion had to come back for her painting eventually...

During the interim, as I pined away, Blue Boobs apparently continued to swirl uncontrollably. During the mad rush of orbit she realized that she hadn't written down the CVN number to The Wax Lion's credit card, nor had she collected any of The Wax Lion's contact info. WTF? Did no one ever think to ask this girl if she's ever had cash-handling experience? Who lets this girl work the till?! To Blue Boobs this must all have seemed to be a slight oversight, and at any rate it was small work for The Wax Lion. In no time CVN numbers were proffered (identities stolen or lost?), and dates were settled in order to collect the prized piece of art.

A date was set--like tonight! Mounting the steps to the gallery I could hardly control my beating heart. In what color would Blue Boobs be clad tonight? Would she still sport compression tights or go with some jauntier football-inspired compression shorts? What of the asymmetric hair? would nature still have its way with it?! I could only dream and hope...and ultimately be satisfied. There Blue Boobs stood, every inch the hot mess that I remembered.

"I'm here to pick up a piece of art I bought," The Wax Lion announced.
"Yes!" blue Boobs shouted from afar. "Only I'm so sorry, I forgot it at home! The good news is that I only live a couple minutes away."
"It's quite all right," I reassured her on my friend's behalf. "It adds value now that it's a stolen work of art." The joke fell flat. Maybe she didn't get it. Maybe it wasn't funny. Just maybe Blue Boobs and I are made for each other.

True to her word, Blue Boobs returned promptly with a UPS parcel.
"Come back again in December," she told us enchantingly.

We walked away bewildered.
"I know exactly what you're thinking," I reassured The Wax Lion.
"Will it be the right painting?" The Wax Lion mused. I guess I didn't know what she was thinking, for she was more charitable than I. I assumed we'd been handed an empty box. But lo, pulling apart the wads of newspaper revealed a surfing squirrel, complete with heavenly halo.

Come back in December indeed. You know I will, 'cause baby, we could accidentally burn down houses together.

And so dear reader, when you smell the smoke, you'll know there's fire.

So Little to Say, So Much Time

2011-07-24T16:13:00.002-04:00

As an up and coming economist I have naturally been obligated to follow the debt ceiling debates, proposals, etc. Exciting stuff, let me tell you. This countdown has all the thrill of New Year's Eve. As I've been checking political blogs throughout the day, however, I find that my New Year's Eve party has been crashed by New York's Gay Marriages. Whilst I hunted about for pictures of Boehner and Obama flashing dirty looks at one another during the weekend conferences, I came across a picture of two middle-aged gay men with their arms about each other and captioned, "'Now we can finally change our Facebook status.'" Interesting.

Despite my own unorthodox leanings, I've never been a fan of marriage, gay or otherwise. If you ask me why, I'd argue that gay marriage apes the most despicable portion of heterosexual behavior that furthers patriarchal oppression more than any other institution known to humankind. Right or wrong, this is an idea that you and I can debate until we turn bluer than the Smurfs. (We aren't going to argue it here, though, as it is not the point of this blog entry.) What strikes me about this gay couple excitedly noting that the upshot of their marriage will be that they can change their Facebook relationship is that this is not an idea about what gay marriage is. Indeed, I've heard precious few ideas regarding the nature of gay marriage. What I have heard in abundance are these content-less declarations epitomized by this couple changing their respective Facebook statuses.

I shouldn't be surprised though. Far from homosexuals having a monopoly over content-less declarations, it occurs to me that they are the expressions destined to carry the day and beyond. Just look at the technology we've come to devote to them...

The history of meaningless gestures is long and varied, but of content-less declarations I think its most meaningful beginnings are rooted in the bumper sticker. Bumper stickers do have an element of fabulosity to them. Flashy, catchy, and utterly engrossing even at high speeds, bumper stickers offer the opportunity to express a complicated idea or opinion in the most insipid and degrading terms possible. If one is very lucky, the catchphrase will even rhyme. We find that in abridging our words, it's very likely that we're also abridging our ability to think. There really isn't need to think about something once it has been raised to the level of cliche.

Bumper stickers have proven to be a durable technology, but they're so sadly temporal and spatial. Only if one is in the right place at the right time will one ever learn how much I love roller derby merely by looking at my truck's bumper. Thank goodness technology has provided us with Twitter, which allows me to tell people all over the world at any time just how important roller derby is to me.

I first wrote about Twitter back in 2009. Twitter perplexed me at the time, but now I see it must be the most perfect form of communication available thus far. Barring other modes of communication such as face-to-face encounters, letters, candygrams, etc., which are obviously flawed due to their sheer outdatedness, let's concentrate on the faults of other modern offerings in order to establish what is just so right about Twitter.

1.) Blogging -- Obviously blogging leaves much to be desired. Complete thoughts meet complete sentences in a collision of too much effort. Not only are the technical standards high, the pressure to win the attention of a passerby is enormous. I forget the statistic, but the amount of time dedicated to most textual offerings ranges somewhere in the neighborhood of single-digit seconds. That means you have a scant few moments to intrigue your readers and draw them in to your verbose and inconsequential rantings. Nearly impossible. Trust me, this blog is living proof of it.

2.) Facebook -- Now we're getting somewhere. The textual commitment is not nearly so intense, but the audience is limited. You're only reaching out to your true intimates, such as the kid who sat three seats away from you in fourth grade. Can't we do better than that? Why not go global?

3.) SMS Text Messaging -- Tsk, tsk, tsk. This is a true regression. The message is focused very specifically and tailored to a recipient or small group of recipients. You have to have at least a glimmer of a reason for sending out a text message, lest everyone will know that you're bored somewhere trying to look busy and important.

Twitter can do better than any of the above. Pithy, global, directionless, searchable, tagable--Twitter does it all. It epitomizes the content-less declaration, the digital bumper sticker for all to enjoy. Go on, tell the world that you support gay marriage. In all likelihood, there isn't much more to say on the matter.

I'm not saying that it is impossible to say something important across Twitter (e.g. the Green Movement updates in Syria during the riots), but just because a message in a bottle might save you if you're stuck on a desert island doesn't mean that we all need to go pitching notes off of the pier.

While I click my tongue in distaste over gay marriage ceremonies as being a triumph for Facebook status updates (which are perhaps highly superior to Twitter feeds since they only involve only a word or the exasperatingly ubiquitous phrase "It's Complicated"), I must admit that these pithy offerings are the hippest thing so-called communication has going for it right now. Raise your glass as our hot button issues become distilled down to content-less declarations. Pity only the fact that people don't take the time to make it all rhyme anymore.

Riddle Me No Riddle

2011-07-23T19:48:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time, a long time ago (circa 1960), there was a China-man who lived in Havana pushing a small refrigerated cart. He was, you might say, a sort of political exchange student. From Red China he came to the newly Red Cuba in a gesture of Communist goodwill and totalitarian population dispersal. (It was about this same time that my third cousin ventured behind the Iron Curtain in order to enjoy the merriments that came part and parcel with post-Stalinist Russia. Or the USSR...whatever. At any rate, that is a different story.) The China-man worked as a mobile fruiterer, for in his refrigerated push-car (which is to say that that everything was on blocks of ice) the China-man toted various fruits. For a penny, nickel, or dime, depending on the exoticism of your tastes, the China-man would cut up a fruit and sell you a cool cup. As it turns out, this China-man was also something of a fish monger, and if you brought him a fresh catch he could de-scale it and fillet it in a deft minute. Yes, the China-man ran a Fruit and Fish cart. Odd, but food often makes for strange bedfellows. (Chocolate-covered bacon from the State Fair, anyone?)

Once upon a time, not quite as long ago (circa 1973), mi abuela was wandering the streets of Chicago's Chinatown. She was, you might say, a political refugee. From Red Cuba she came to the Red, White, and Blue USA in a gesture of Communist revulsion and totalitarian terror. From behind a pile of salt cod mi abuela spied her Fruit and Fish China-man. Turns out the he too had traded in his Party card for a one way ticket out of Castro's Cuba. He was doing well, he told mi abuela, but he was tired. From his native Mandarin he had had to learn Spanish, and now he had to learn English. It is a lot of work when you get right down to it. "Had I only known," he told mi abuela in flawless Spanish, "I would have skipped straight to English."

But of course he didn't know, and mi abuela didn't know either. Certainly my third cousin didn't know either. She returned from Russia, enamored of the memory of Stalin, though unable to translate her political zeal into an effective cure for her diabetes that killed her upon her arrival home. We just never know. Or do we?

In college during my feminist philosophy heyday, I remember well the debates on whether the sexual was also the political. The question seemed interesting at the time. Now the interesting question is whether the economic is also the political, and the answer is, "Of course." Milton Friedman noted that economic freedom was necessary for political freedom, and he was to regret 50 years later that he did not emphasize that the reverse is not necessarily true. Political freedom does not guarantee economic freedom; economic freedom is the Archimedes point.

It is in this spirit of beginning at the beginning that I've come lately to F.A. Hayek. It is Hayek's argument that following certain economic paths will lead to certain political outcomes has made me realize two things:

1) That at any given moment, there is usually someone (not so much a visionary as simply a thinker with tremendously acute insight), who knows exactly what is going to happen over the course of the next few generations.

and

2) That I am not that person.

It must be utterly exciting to know what is going to happen. Failing that, it must be wonderful that amongst a plethora of voices, one is able to distinguish the voice that speaks the truth. I'm not sure I have an ear for that either. After all, I'm clueless as to whether I should continue along my current path or go into the Fruit and Fish business in Panama. In all fairness, there is no voice that is currently pushing me toward Panama. But there was that voice that told me to buy gold at $700 that went painfully unheeded. Perhaps I'd better stick to fruit and fish.

A Career Change

2011-06-04T19:54:00.003-04:00

Some time ago, I remember reading an article about Anne Rice. It described her as "living with her husband, the poet, Stan Rice." And later of Stephen King, an article described how the horror master was married to "the novelist, Tabitha King." Truly it seems that we are defined by our art. I started to think of my own name that would be bandied about should my mother happen to achieve fame. "I live with my daughter, the health care worker, Haywain McTarry," my mother will tell reporters. I don't much like the sound of that. "Should the situation arise," I instructed my mother, "I want you to tell the press that you live with the economist, Haywain McTarry." Ah yes, my new career in economics.

Economics is where it's at, let me tell you. It's politics. It's mathematics. It's utter fiction. I got a good laugh (for all the wrong reasons) over the reports on economists' rosy outlook regarding this so-called double-dip recession. To say that we've come out of our recession once is funny; to say that we've come out of it twice is downright hysterical (and politically-motivated nonsense). As I puzzled over the math constructing intersecting long run aggregate supply curves with short run aggregate demand, I decided not to feel bad at my data-generating deficiencies. Obviously the people who can generate this sort of data aren't doing any better than I am doing without it. Might as well throw the math out the window and rely entirely on the fiction.

Also for the sake of fiction, let's imagine economics in its purity. It is undeniably amazing that in the face of infinite human variety, economic behavior is the great equalizer. As consumers, we all act the same way. Thus the pure economist, the one who promises not to fib, will be able to tell me without fail not just how much less Taco Bell I'm going to buy if they raise the price on their Crunchwrap Supremes, but he will also be able to tell me how much more Coke I'm going to buy in consequence.

How is the Lancelot of economists able to tell me this information, and what is the philosophy that underlies it all? Scarcity is at the root of it all, the economist says. We have limited inputs (namely time and money) to work with, and everybody wants the same thing out of their limited inputs--they want happiness. Therein lies the great equalizer, the thing that makes us all behave the same way--we all want to be happy.

While this is a powerful observation that empowers the economist to make universal generalizations about economic behavior, the implication seems to go beyond even that lofty height. It seems to me that, if we are to take the cynical approach, we might as well subsume ethics beneath the umbrella of economics. Can ethical behavior be predicted according to an economic model? I believe it can. Cold yet vivid are the words that ring in my ears as my friend once mused, "I can do the right thing or I can do the thing that would make me the most happy. I choose to be happy." Predictable enough since there are limited inputs (is integrity an input?), and only so much happiness to be maximized out of them.

To think that I've wasted countless hours upon Tarot. Ha! Who needs cards when the science of scarcity predicts all? No need to use an artistic medium to interpret the future, and certainly no need to ask Socrates what sort of self one wants to be with when one is alone. Those aren't the considerations that make the world go round. So while my other subtitles of Haywain McTarry, Mystic and Ethicist, still apply in some form or another, for the purposes of dealing with the press we may simplify. Merely refer to me as Haywain McTarry, the Economist.

What did you wear to The Rapture?

2011-05-21T20:05:00.002-04:00

Another Rapture come and gone. I feel like Charlie Brown at his brick wall with Linus kissing goodbye another Christmas season. You will recall that Harold Camping's last Rapture was in 1994. Really this end of the world stuff is getting to be a habit. But I don't think Camping should feel downhearted. As Peter Lynch has pointed out, if you're going to make a prediction, you'd better do it often. If he makes it a standing order, Camping stands a better chance of being right eventually.

But truth be told, I'm glad The Rapture has come and gone. For all the merriment it produced at the office (we saved all of our more menial tasks for Monday just in case we didn't survive the weekend), there is also an element of discomfort to the whole thing. After all, who could fail but be discomforted by those outlying coworkers who did actually believe The Rapture was on its way?

I have to give Angel some credit. She had never heard of The Rapture before. It's like all the Simpson's parodies and the year 1994 passed her by without any hint of doomsday gloom. Surely then this novel idea was more likely to take hold of Angel than it would for the rest of us who've been through a Rapture or two. Poor Angel. She looked obviously jittery by 11am Friday morning.
"You don't honestly believe the end of days comes tomorrow, do you?" I asked her.
Her silence in reply said it all.

There's nothing to be done in such cases. The punchlines just get robbed of their humor when you have someone who honestly thinks that their house is likely to be carried away by a bed of hot lava. (Then again, maybe Angel does have a house I don't know about on the hill of that Icelandic volcano that's starting to spew well-timed hellfire.)

Ruined punchlines aside, my mother, whose native language is not English, managed to put the situation in perspective this morning. "Has it occurred to you," she asked me thoughtfully, "that 'rapture' rhymes with 'rupture'?" I had to admit that it had not occurred to me.

Speaking of American Puritanism

2011-05-17T16:11:00.003-04:00

Speaking of American Puritanism, I've been trying (again) to develop a taste for that American Puritan par excellence, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wanting to give him yet another go, I approached him as I thought my mother would approach Mark Twain. My mother says that Twain is best read in translation, wherein his atrocious (I'm sorry, there just isn't anything charming about it) use of American phonetic vernacular is utterly stripped away. Unfortunately for me, I don't have reading proficiency in any other language, so the best I could do was pick up a copy of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun in the hopes that Puritans in Italy would read better than Puritans in New England.

In some ways Hawthorne's expatriates are preferable to his Americans at home, and in other ways Hawthorne just can't help but be Hawthorne. I've always found him a tad laborious to read--something is always something else for the man. Critics surely call his works allegorical renderings with a heavy dose of symbolism; I call it all an obfuscating footnote, but then again I'm ignorant. However, I do see that Hilda's tower is Heaven and that peeling frescoes are representative of Donatello's internal moral decay. I get all that. Call me unimpressed nonetheless.

In the midst of all of these somethings being something else, it's easy to miss that the fact that, sometimes, what is there that is what it is is actually good in and of itself. Consider Miriam's reflection on women and love that she shares with Kenyon:

It is a mistaken idea which men generally entertain, that nature has made women especially prone to throw their whole being into what is technically called Love. We have, to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves;--only, we have nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women, distinguished in art, literature, and science--and multitudes whose hearts and minds find good employment, in less ostentatious ways--who lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice, so far as your sex is concerned.

Forget the symbolic significance of peeling frescoes, that's almost good enough to pass as having been written by a Modernist authoress. And no, being a Modernist authoress isn't the highest of praise that I can think to heap upon an author, but still in all it isn't too shabby.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

2011-05-17T13:46:00.002-04:00

Just when you started to worry that all sex scandals were starting to look alike, Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF comes forward bringing a much needed dose of endless variety. For anyone who initially brushed this off as a passe repeat of Bill Clinton and Paula Jones, you've got to take a moment to read the reactions of the European Parliament. The New York Times reports:

Gilles Savary, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to Mr. Strauss-Kahn's Socialist Party, wrote on his blog that the arrest of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had hints of American-style hypocrisy. "Everyone knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a libertine, and that he is distinguished from others by the fact that he doesn't try and hide it," he wrote. "In puritanical American [sic], infiltrated by rigorous Protestantism, financial misdeeds are far more tolerated than pleasures of the flesh."

Of course, as James Taranto pointed out pithily in his column on Monday, "The encounter at the Sofitel does not sound as if it was the least bit pleasurable for the maid..."

To carry this off into a slight tangent, we can only conclude that the issue of feminism and women's rights is anything but sophisticated. Then again, these issues were never supposed to be sophisticated--they were supposed to be fundamental. Small wonder that French women didn't achieve suffrage until 1944.

But let's return to this issue of American Puritanism (which I prefer to Savary's reference to American Protestantism). In Clinton's case Paula Jones' civil suit was "settled but without an apology." In DSK's case, it seems as likely as not to be settled, and we also imagine that it will get buried without an apology. One wonders then if the real difference between American Puritanism and French libertinism is merely a difference in dollar (or euro) amounts. No one seems to be sorry in either case or to find his own behavior reprehensible. Maybe this is just an understated nod to the globalization of morality--see, we are all more alike than we originally thought.

Adventures in Shopping

2011-05-14T19:38:00.002-04:00

While I know damn well that it is spring and that summer fast approaches, I must say that the days, my days, are getting shorter. Gone are the days when I'm up past 11 o'clock. Thanks to more demanding issues at work, I'm usually exhausted and shutting my eyes by 9:30. Not to be held back, however, my laptop (let's call it Mach 1) appears to be a night owl. With what surprise did I find last night that after shutting it down early, it woke itself up at 3 am and decided it wanted to do...just whatever it wanted to do. Update iTunes, overheat, make random beeping noises, you name it and the hour seemed to be right for it. Up until this point I've been too polite to mention that it has pulled this stunt before. And while we're busy not being polite, I might as well mention that Mach 1's bad work ethic (refusing to open up more than one program at a time is very poor form in my opinion) has really reached a breaking point. Thus annoyed, I resolved this morning for a change of technology.

I marched in early this morning to the local Office Depot intending to buy anything of a certain make and model that would serve my purposes. My reception upon entering the store was the same as it always is these days--an air of shocked horror hangs about whenever I enter a building. Have I suddenly grown 7 ft. tall? Did I finally wake up looking just like Greta Garbo? Do I now sneeze whenever my left foot makes contact with the ground? No, no, and no. Amusing as any or all of these would be, I must simply state that my hair has gone white. Never fear, this is no accident of nature. It very nearly isn't even an accident. After the two strippings that turned my hair school bus yellow, a carefully planned third stripping overshot my intended Betty Grable platinum blonde and instead gave me Betty White white. The affect is actually quite pleasing. I feel like I've finally beaten Billy Idol at his own game.

It also turns out that Betty White white is worth money. As I said, the customary shock and awe overtook the store and staff. On what I suspect was a dare a young sales clerk approached in hopes of engaging the Oddity.

"Do you know what you want?" the clerk asked me after apprehending that I was holding tickets for both the fastest and second fastest of the laptops in stock. For a brief moment I debated whether I would take my usual surly approach that I employ when talking to strangers. It's usually a variation on the them of "fuck off." But alas, I decided to try the friendly approach. "It will be good practice," I told myself. After all, I am turning unusually weird and antisocial, even by my own introverted standards.

"I know exactly what I want," I told the young man. "I'm just debating how much I want to spend." Thus we merrily began discussing price versus processor speeds and amounts of RAM. As time went on, he became more and more hypnotized by my Betty White-ness.
"I bet I can get them to knock 5% off of this model for you," the clerk said pointing to the top of the line. I knew he was mine at that point. Too distracted by contemplating the meaning of the phrase "freakish and disturbing," I knew that I could play my hand and hair for all that it was worth.
"I'll bet you can get them to knock off 20% for me."
"I'll bet I can," he responded confidently.

Ha! Who says my awful coloring jobs don't pay for themselves in the end? So here I sit with Mach 2, the proud trophy of all of my hair coloring woes. Don't be sad on account of Mach 1 though--I'll keep her on a while longer. After all, I appreciate a certain amount of technological randomness and independence almost as much as I appreciate hair bleach.

Tell me something I already know, and say it in the same old way.

2011-02-08T16:24:00.003-05:00

[L.P. Hartley] understood...the sense of treachery that can be felt by an outsider in a group, but he also began to work with something more mysterious and powerful -- a treachery within the self, a treachery conjured into existence by the power of the flesh, by a seductive strength that cannot be resisted, and that stands at the root of life itself. This was a subject that would preoccupy many English novelists of Hartley's generation, including D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, the idea that the senses, in all their heat and spontaneity, were the only useful weapons to withstand the strict, dull, deathly English duty.

--from Colm Toibin's introduction to L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between

I've seen Hartley classed in style and focus alongside Evelyn Waugh, and this seems appropriate enough. The Go-Between purports to be a moral novel, and is problematic in that way similar to Brideshead Revisited. It's a twofold problem, the first being were this moral breakdown supposedly occurs (see above) and the second is with how this troublesome "treachery" is to be expiated (see below).

Of The Go-Between Hartley wrote,

I originally meant The Go-Between to be a story of innocence betrayed, and not only betrayed but corrupted. I was and still am irritated by the way bad boys and girls of modern fiction are allowed to get away with the most deplorable behavior receiving not reproof, but compassion, almost congratulation, from the author.

By Hartley's estimation he failed to allay his own irritation insofar as even he softened towards the sins of his corrupting characters. But on the whole the book strikes an off key for a very different reason. If the above introduction strikes you as priggish, you should see how a whole novel of it hits you. The jejune desire to see bad behavior punished usually isn't just sour grapes over the author himself having been caught and punished for similar misdeeds but rather because the author never had the opportunity to behave badly in the first place. That's rather a precarious position from which to make moral judgments, and it's a far cry from the higher-minded Socratic view that behaving in an ill-mannered way is to be avoided because no one wants to be around someone who is ill, least of all one's self.

The desire to see sins expiated is, however, the latter point, and we've yet to touch upon what brings about this sin in the first place. Let us return to "...the idea that the senses, in all their heat and spontaneity, were the only useful weapons to withstand the strict, dull, deathly English duty." Hmm. Chance would be a fine thing. It seems to me that putting down our misdeeds to the heat and spontaneity of our senses is rather to overestimate the ability and originality of our senses. A case in point:

I retreated to a far corner of the room to avoid a group a young children, and thus ended up sitting next to a young lady of slight acquaintance. She huffed and puffed and furrowed her brow, so I set down my paper in order to let her vent troubles.

"I might as well tell you since everyone is going to find out eventually," she started.
Oh dear, I thought to myself, she's going to tell me that she's pregnant.
"I'm pregnant," she admitted in the same breath.
Don't let it be said that no one saw that one coming...

I must admit that my first reaction was an anachronistic thrill. Just when you thought that medical science and ingenuity had advanced far enough so that no girl need have an out-of-wedlock baby who doesn't want one, you find that the modern drama has fallen back on a tried and true plot device that you worried might never be seen again. Thank god some things never change.

But then there is the horror of embarrassment that sets in, at least if you are at all empathetic, which even I have my moments. The concept of virtue may be laughable and irrelevant, but it hasn't been forgotten and to have been found to be lacking in it still carries the sting of shame however liberal the surroundings.

"I despise children, so I'm very sorry for you," I told her with a smile.

And indeed I am sorry, for I don't see it as Hartley sometimes did that the heat and spontaneity of the senses were to be a saving grace. In the case of my young friend, I only see an ill-used girl acting out of boredom and convention and far from an escape of dull and deathly duty I see a severe neglect of it. When it comes right down to it, I very much doubt that most people are so fettered by duty that they really need to be released from what little of it already hampers them. Calling out sensual heat and spontaneity would seem to be a bit presumptuous, but there it is. The cart falls before the horse, just as the sensual heat and spontaneity boils off the puddles before duty ever even calls for a rain.

Domestic pleasures indeed.

2010-12-19T18:26:00.004-05:00

My house is exceptionally cold in winter. I keep it so partly out of economy and partly out of...no, wait, that's it. It's all about economy. Anyway, I deck myself out in an extreme amount of flannel, which simultaneously battles the cold and helps me to maintain my lesbian identity, as if either were ever in doubt. For Christmas one of my merry coworkers gave me a small votive candle, extraordinary only insofar as it contains a wood wick. Accordingly when it burns it cracks and sizzles as a wood-burning fire does, only it does so on the scale of a votive candle. The affect is pleasing and psychologically warming if nothing else.

To add to my flannel attire, winter also brings out my flannel sheets from the linen closet. My favorite set has a ridiculous print that looks like it came from the same designers who brought us the enthralling artwork featured on all bottles of Log Cabin Syrup. In a nod to feminine domesticity I was studying my sheets this afternoon and decided that the snowy white background of my flannel sheets could stand to look a bit brighter, and oh my haven't I heard of a product on TV that could bring my desire for whiter whites to fruition? I believe there is--it's called Tide with Color Safe Bleach. Hmmm. I am a suspicious consumer by nature. Whilst I was busily wondering how safe "Color Safe" really is, I completely ignored the other property inherent in bleach--it's horrifically sanitized smell. Thus, when I removed my sheets from the dryer, my whites really were whiter, but now the sheets on my bed mask the fact that I've been doing laundry all Sunday afternoon and instead make it seem as if I've been cleaning bathrooms. Most displeasing. My applewood votive candle with real wood wick had better get to work.

Adventures in Bestsellers

2010-12-18T14:39:00.003-05:00

So here is my poor abandoned blog. It had been limping along for a while, but over the past few months I simply haven't been able to do anything with any regularity. Apart from showing up at work at the appointed dates and times, nothing else has flowed according to any pre-determined nod to commitment.

That said, it was foolish of me to undertake (again) this whole Read the Bible in a Year project. Since December 1st, some website developed by my alleged brothers in Christ have been mercilessly pelting me with portions of the King James Bible. Such small excerpts, and yet they build up in a mountainous fashion. It seems that a work divinely inspired just can't be read by a secular spirit. Never have I read such a monumental bestseller that is so monumentally dull. (And it is from the perspective of reading a bestseller that I've approached reading the Bible.) What seems so marvelous in the abstract (what lesbian could resist falling in love with Ruth? what moralist could fail to be troubled by Solomon's loss of faith?) is downright uncompelling in actuality.

Here at Day 18, I've skimmed my way past Job (very artfully written but it does carry on past its due date...) and am now back in the thick of Genesis. The names of Sarah and Abraham woefully recall rumor--it's like I remember hearing the names and adventures, but I just can't tell you what exactly it is that I heard...other than that they lived a long time and that Abraham tried to pass his wife off as his sister, which is pretty messed. See?! That is the good stuff of gossip, and yet in reality it plays out so dully. It is my sincere belief that the Bible could benefit from a graphic novel treatment, and I'm not talking about Zondervan's or those freaky comics that the Jehovah's Witnesses give out. I want to see Allison Bechdel do the Bible with pithy references to The Great Gatsby and ironic allusions to "Star Wars," etc., etc.

I wish I could admit defeat now with the Bible in Year project and just cancel my subscription. I'm worried about offending my brothers in Christ though, if I refuse their kind offering of daily slices of a book that answers all of the questions that I don't have. Into the archived section of my Gmail it goes. I suppose that's why Gmail offers over 7531.33506 megabytes (and counting) of free storage.

Gone, forgotten.

2010-09-01T19:40:00.002-04:00

There were four of us former classmates sitting around a square table. As a conference organizer, it was my job to inspire my volunteer minions into completing a few menial tasks for me. I was not very successful. The conversation kept turning to one of our other former classmates, a fairly well-liked young woman who rose to the top of management chain with relative speed and dignity. Word had just come down the line that she was recently fired for conduct very unbecoming. It caused quite a stir.

"Let's send her a card," Plastic Patty offered up hopefully as she rummaged through her bag.
"Let's not," answered Mary. I've always liked Mary. She's a lapsed Catholic whom I would describe as having Tolerably Good Sense, grounded in that former Catholic sort of way.
With simulated indignation Plastic Patty got all impassioned on our butts. "Didn't you just love K----," she screeched, "It isn't fair what happened to her! If she hadn't gotten caught, she never would have gotten fired."
"If she hadn't messed up and behaved unethically she never would have gotten fired," Mary corrected her.
"That a girl," I muttered, though my contribution was not appreciated. Truly though, it's quite a world we live in where the sin is in the getting caught rather than in the deed itself. This does effectively erase conscience, though we get a hell of a good sense of sneakiness in its place.
"You'll sign the card, won't you Cheerleader?" Plastic Patty pleaded to our last, still silent member. Cheerleader, a lovely lass with girlish enthusiasm and frizzy, permed hair, took the card and signed. Mary soon snatched it away to read Cheerleader's short words of encouragement.
"'I look up to you.' I look up to you?! How the hell can you look up to her after what she did?"
"Well, I don't look up to her now," Cheerleader hedged.
"Then why did you write this?"
"Uhm, because I did look up to her then, so I can't write 'I still look up to you,' and I can't say 'But I don't look up to you anymore.'"
Cheerleader, at this point, was flexing her full linguistic potential. Mary looked peeved...but she eventually signed the card anyway.

I did not.

~~~~~~

Back on the home front, my immediate supervisor retired this week. My boss asked us all to submit memories of said supervisor so they could be incorporated into some kind of scrapbook. Much to my shame, I couldn't think of anything to write. It's not that my supervisor ever failed to make an impression. Far from it, she is quite distinctive. The memory of an exceedingly handsome woman with steely grey hair, as tall as a church steeple and as no-nonsense as a mother superior will stick with me for some time. The thing is that, as with most of my coworkers, we tend to remember her in her severity. She could give a verbal whipping like few others, though she cowed easily enough when challenged. How I remember her slapping my hands (and hard at that) when she was training me, though I also remember her kissing me behind a door one late night. Don't think anyone wants that story for the scrapbook.

I think I will remember her vanity best of all though. It was certainly not her defining quality, but it was striking because it matched the level of her incredible good looks. At 64, she never ceased in pointing out patients who were the same age as she and quietly noting, "Isn't it amazing how much better I look than they do?" Of course, she was right every time.

With no suitable story to submit to the collective scrapbook, I copied out some verse for my supervisor in my best uncial, which wasn't very good. Didn't seem to matter. The gift fell flat anyway. It's like reading poetry was too difficult; no one had the patience for the poem, which was a pithy 12 line Dickinson offering. I even picked it out especially for its accessibility. Lord knows how disappointing my gift would have been had I copied out the George Crabbe poem I was considering instead.

The Earnestness of Being Important

2010-08-25T18:35:00.002-04:00

In a concerted effort to establish our market dominance, such as it is, my office hired out a professional ad company in order to script and shoot a tv commercial. I was uneventfully enough hired on as technical advisor for the spot, a job which I did not relish. (I was assigned to make everything look as realistic as possible, which utterly did not happen.) I'm not sure if it's all of my reading on Marie Antoinette that is clouding my judgment or what, but never have I been around a group so reminiscent of what I imagine the court of Louis XVI at Versailles to resemble. Imagine 40 people each performing the most minute of tasks and guarding their tasks jealously, as they knew their rank depended upon it. The masters of the boom microphones and cables appeared to be at the top of the food chain; the mistresses of the sandbags who, I kid you not, were assigned to watch the sandbags that were being used as doorstops, were at the bottom. The crew endlessly moved furniture to and fro. I thought at first it was to accommodate all of the video equipment, but I think now they just needed extra space in order to fit all of the self-important egos in one room at the same time.

There was precious little space for my ego through it all. I retreated to a back corner when not needed and memorized verse by Charles Hamilton Sorley ("When you see millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions go...") after I just couldn't read up on 100 year bonds any more. All in all I felt thoroughly traumatized by the whole experience. There should never be that many assholes in one room at the same time.

Lesbian lit crit, Baudrillard, pizza!

2010-08-22T09:21:00.007-04:00

Precisely because Victorians saw lesbian sex almost nowhere, they could embrace erotic desire between women almost everywhere.

Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

If Marcus is uncannily astute in considering the Victorians, I think she would be just as prescient about today (and the future) if we turned things around and said that because lesbian sex is almost everywhere today, erotic desire between women is almost nowhere.

It is possible that at this early date I've read too many studies on western lesbian literature that purport to reveal the overarching themes/major archetypal characters which populate literature from the 12th century to the present. It's like a project that would do Jung proud--here is an army of scholars harvesting from the collective literary consciousness in order to give lesbian literature its body, be that body voluptuous, ghostly, or otherwise. Emma Donoghue's Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature is the most recent work I've broached. This time around Lillian Faderman's category of lesbian vampires are Donoghue's monsters; the transvestite has been re-categorized as the female bridegroom travesty, and so on. It's a different approach to the same sort of project, and for what it is, it is interesting enough.

I'm getting this aching suspicion, however, that to find lesbianism everywhere (proving that sapphism taints everyone from lesser-known authors such as Isaac de Bensenrade to the continually classic Charles Dickens) is to guarantee that eroticism between women occurs nowhere. One of Jean Baudrillard's many controversial philosophies argues that sex, like everything else, has become a system of signs that have no meaningful reference. Female sexual signs are constructed along lines of phallocentric values, which means that they are bogus in terms of a feminism. Rather, sex and and the existence of sexual signs are but another symptom of Production. This is significant because within the rubric of postmodernism, the only thing Production produces is itself; it does not produce meaning nor a correspondence of sign to signified.

I see in these studies such as Inseparable a search for lesbian signage in literature. The problem with this, however, is manifest when we bring Baudrillard in--these signs are just that, signs. This idea of erotic desire between women becomes a figment of our imagination, lost in the hyperreality of signs without reference to reality. As Baudrillard further notes, the opposite of producing this system of sexual signs is seduction, which carries with it an interesting definition. From Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic's Introducing Baudrillard (and yes, forgive from quoting from such a book, but it really is the most concise account I can find):

Seduction is always opposed to production. Seduction withdraws something from the visible order and so runs counter to production, whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an object, a number, a concept.

Baudrillard takes this idea much further into the realm of symbolic exchange and power, but that goes beyond what we need right now. The important thing is, I think, this idea that there can be dueling projects--one which hides and one which produces. Production, in postmodern terms, is the dead end of meaning. Seduction is where it's at. What now appears as problematic is that Donoghue and her ilk (c.f. Terry Castle, Lillian Faderman, even my much-favored Alison Hennegan) are caught up in this disturbing game of production by their projects' very purpose. As ever, hats off to Patricia Juliana Smith's Lesbian Panic for interpreting lesbian subtext qua subtext. It's a delicate project that discusses the hidden without destroying it.

If eroticism between women is to survive, I think it will require the very arduous task of seduction rather than production. However much I like these lit crit studies (and I do like them very much because they generally direct my reading toward worthy works), they are a self-defeating projects guaranteeing that lesbian sexuality everywhere is lesbian passion nowhere.

After the fact.

2010-08-19T20:17:00.003-04:00

LCB and I walked along the gravel path of one of the lesser well-maintained gardens in downtown Indy. She had her head up, scoping for an appropriate backdrop for our group photo for our upcoming conference. I stumbled along studying the gravel; I'd seen the overgrown flower beds before.

"This is where you came with Amelie?" LCB asked me.

Amelie was one of LCB's longer standing lovers, and one of the very few who left LCB rather than vice versa. Hardly the heartbreaker, Amelie simply moved on to proverbial greener pastures shortly after I met her.

"Yes, we walked here," I told her blankly.
"On your romantic walk?" she pressed further.
"I remember nothing romantic about it."
"I was so mad at you guys being out here together for your romantic walk."
"Give it a rest," I commanded her. "We were friends. Amelie had a right to a friendship outside of your guys' relationship."
LCB thought for a moment. "No, it wasn't friendship. It was just another excuse in order to avoid me."

"It." The problem with the designation is that there wasn't an "it," there was me. I, the friendship I had to offer, was the excuse, the retreat, the distraction. It hurt to think of myself in those terms, because of course in my arrogance I wanted to believe that Amelie was there because she enjoyed my company. Something gnawed at me, however. Something that told me LCB was probably right, and that I was wrong.

It's an angst I've expressed before--that it is tragic not to be desired in terms of one's singular wits that one brings to the table. I had never really been bothered by Amelie's desertion (or one could argue that I was the deserter...it doesn't really matter, and really, we were never that close...). I had always put down the collapse of that particular friendship as being circumstantial. But perhaps it wasn't just mere circumstance. If LCB is correct, I outlived my utility, apparently having no more to offer than a temporary retreat. Mind you, this isn't a complaint about feeling used. It is, again, a gnawing, nagging sensation that I failed to see something...that I failed to be on the lookout for something important. I wonder if I'll know better the next time, but I'm suspicious that I won't.

Why Zombies?

2010-08-15T17:39:00.004-04:00

They grunt; they groan. They don't seem to have any particular talent beyond being uncannily undead and having no aversion to eating live flesh. Nothing can be said for the company they keep. If they're very lucky, they tend to attract gorgeous supermodel superheroes (a la Milla Jovovich of "Resident Evil" fame) who handsomely puts them out of their misery. Who are these minions of the army of uncool? They're zombies.

I'm a disturbed sleeper. So many of my nights are plagued by nightmares...nightmares populated by zombies. I hate zombies. I don't understand the point of them. The elusively seductive quality of vampires hardly needs to be expounded upon (even if it has become confused by that overly-powdered creation known as Edward Cullen), but what appeal do zombies hold? They're not even that threatening when you get right down to it. They're a slow-moving threat that can be outrun by any slacker on a pogo stick. And yet fear them I do.

Personally, and perhaps culturally, I think what is so fearsome about zombies is this idea of identity robbed. Sure your zombie self still mildly looks likes you, but you've lost all of your pizazz and ability to utter a witty comeback. And unless you're Michael Jackson, you're just never going to be able to bust a move again in your undead life. The most profound thing you're likely to slobber out of your mouth includes and is limited to the exclamation, "Brains!" In short, when I have nightmares about zombies, I think I'm expressing my hidden dread of losing all of my mental acuity, such as it is. (I don't much worry about losing my physical adeptness. I was never able to dance like Michael Jackson anyway...)

And I'm not the only one who's nervous. What started with Nicholas Carr's excellent book, The Shallows (see below), is continuing with the daily news reports. The printed word is evaporating within the desert that is the digital media barrage. We won't read print and become absorbed anymore; we will skim and become purveyors of superficial factoids. That whole mental acuity thing goes out the window, and the zombie nation takes hold. It's like a nightmare come true.

I didn't freak out when I learned that The Christian Science Monitor went entirely digital. I found it slightly unnerving when I read last week that Dorchester Publishing is moving entirely into e-book format. But I positively spat out my milk this morning when I found out that you can no longer by the print edition of The Times of London in the United States. What's happening? Are zombies taking over in an attempt to make more zombies?

You may say that I'm overreacting, but I do hold cling (as does Carr) to Marshall McLuhan's much touted tenet that "the medium is the message." Physical print is important because it is physical print and because of the level of absorption it invites a reader to delve into (as opposed to the shocking level of distraction provided by digital media sources...I mean, good god, do books really need video content? What a way to bastardize the medium...). I am slightly worried, during my waking and my dreaming hours, that when the army of zombies come, it won't be to your door but to your computer.

And as a blogger, I would seem to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The zombies have a hold of me too. Now all I can do is wait for Milla Jovovich to come get me, so I guess this isn't all bad.

From Ivory Tower to Golden Gutter

2010-06-15T22:08:00.002-04:00

As far as I know, there is no Complete Idiot's Guide to Lesbian Literature, but give it time. One more anthology featuring Juvenal's Sixth Satire and Coleridge's "Christabel" isn't going to hurt anyone. It's going to be hard to top Lillian Faderman's Chloe Plus Olivia or the equally formidable Lesbian Pillow Book compiled by Allison Hennegan, but you never know. It is with that streak of optimism that I approached Terry Castle's collection, The Literature of Lesbianism, but I was strangely turned off this time around.

Seeing as how there is so much crossover between these collections, what makes or breaks these anthologies is the editor's perspective in compiling the texts. All of the above mentioned editors are guilty of justifying themselves, as if it would be intellectually embarrassing to put a collection of texts together about chicks getting it on with chicks simply because the topic has titillating entertainment value, with or without intellectual appeal. The anthologies would have sold on that less than honorable virtue alone, but never mind. For Faderman, the lesbian-themed anthology is an opportunity to present the different roles that lesbians play (e.g. the romantic friend, the carnivorous flower, etc.). For Hennegan, these texts represent a question of finding oneself within a text and constructing a lesbian identity. For Castle, the anthology is the opportunity to trace the history of the idea of lesbianism, an idea not easily to elucidate. She explains in her introduction,

...even as the number of literary and artistic works devoted to the lesbian theme has increased (spectacularly, over the last three hundred years), the topic of female same-sex love has been repeatedly ruled out of bounds, as a subject radically unsuitable for polite inquiry. We have the numerous entrenched religious and cultural proscriptions against female homosexuality to thank, undoubtedly, for this state of affairs.

Thus speaks the Ivory Tower. Religious and cultural conservatism always gets in the way of intellectual progress, doesn't it?

It's getting to be a rather tired argument, and one not without its own tinge of irony. After all, if an anthology that pulls from the sixteenth through the twentieth century isn't a testament to lesbianism as a cultural artifact and subject of inquiry, however reviled, then I don't know what is. One might even call it cheating to complain about cultural entrenchment and then to use those same cultural inheritances to trace the history of an idea. Lesbians weren't born yesterday. They're abundant, past, present, and future, precisely because they are culturally entrenched. And if you've ever talked to a lass considering a vocation, you know that religious entrenchment and lesbianism can, on occasion, go hand in hand.

In short, I don't much care for the Ivory Tower. I'm tired of the self-appointed enlightened bastions of knowledge contending that our inheritances, both cultural and religious, are bad. It's a thinly veiled attack on cultural conservatism, and it bothers me because to my unenlightened eyes there is so much to be brought forward that is good.

Placing my personal disgust behind, though, let us ask what we get when we cast off our cultural and religious entrenchments. Certainly, as I mentioned before, we lose our right to compile our anthologies of lesbian literature, but then with what are we left? My God, I think we're left wandering around in the heat at Gay Pride.

Yes, you saw it coming--I'm going to start taking shots at Pride, that holiest of holy gay holidays that I would have more respect for as lesbian if I were more (or is it less? I'm getting confused...) culturally entrenched. And granted, I didn't go to Pride this year. I don't think I've been since 2006 or so, but the memories remain strong. What always struck me at the time about Pride is, appropriately enough, how culturally illiterate it is. If entrenchment was holding us back before, however, I guess this would be about right.

What is Pride anyway? I honestly couldn't think of the answer, so I had to consult Wikipedia. Wikipedia tells us that Pride is about (a) being proud of your sexuality, (b) celebrating diversity, and (c) recognizing that sexual orientation is...wait for it...genetically entrenched. The first point continues to mystify me, as I'm not sure why being gay or not is such an accomplishment. Mind you, it goes some way toward making Diane Keaton's character in Woody Allen's "Sleeper" markedly less comical when she boasts that she has earned an advanced degree in oral sex. Point (c) I've always found to be an interesting dalliance into philosophical folly. The birther theory behind sexuality has always seemed weak because it hinges its soundness upon unproven scientific claims. It always seemed smarter (and more empirically accurate) to hypothesize that sexual behavior is taught/learned. Yes, homosexuals may be called upon to explain why they turned out the way they did, but then, if we extend this thought inductively, the straights will be called upon to do the same. This, I think, has important feminist implications in terms of compulsive heterosexuality that are worth pursuing, though we're not going to pursue it here. (For this cultural inheritance, see Adrienne Rich).

So what has the Ivory Tower gotten us? We cast off our entrenchments, those cultural and religious artifacts that we've clung to, apparently, in our ignorance, and where have we arrived? We've made it to this point of sexual identity entrenchment, and what a desert it is. Again, I submit Pride as the prime example of a cultural movement that has completely lost sight of its inheritance, even if you do think you know so much because you've heard of Stonewall. From the Ivory Tower of academia to the Golden Gutter of gay pride, we've arrived at modern homosexuality--liberated yet not inherited, new but not unheard of...in a sense, lost without ever knowing that there was a landscape to explore.

-----

There are, of course, flaws to this whole line of thinking. Some of the flaws I could laboriously try to iron out, and some of them I don't know how to answer. And I'm not going to expound why exactly Pride is such a cultural wasteland. Suffice to say that beer tents, rainbow headbands, HRC stickers don't exactly form the foundation of a cultural revelation. I'm not going to attempt to polish anything because the above is not an argument; it is a lament. It's a lament because when I read so many different texts, (some in Faderman, some in Hennegan, and some even in that rogue Castle), I see threads that make up the world at large, not just lesbian-themed literature. They're threads that made may the way I am and that taught me something worth learning. I don't see any of that at Pride. I see instead a movement that clings to shocking arrogance and to cliched notions of diversity. One might even call it ignorant, in spite of all of these "entrenchments" that have been left behind.

Within the dreaded AfterEllen's coverage of the forthcoming "Secret Diaries of Anne Lister," the screenwriter noted how Anne Lister, until now, hadn't been much discussed outside of academic circles. To this I say, why not? Two volumes of her journals have been published for years. (Hell, I think they're even out of print at this point due to lack of interest, surely.) Interestingly on the message boards, the Lister BBC special seemed to attract a lot of interest in watching the show, but no one as far as I saw seemed interested in actually reading Lister's diaries. What is a movement that is bumper-stickered but is otherwise content-less?

By "Smart" Did You Mean "Dumb"?

2010-06-06T16:57:00.002-04:00

The savvy shopper knows that when he goes out to buy a "whisper-quiet" dishwasher, the thing is going to be as loud as a brass band. So when the savvy shopper went out to buy a smartphone, did he know it was going to be dumb?

Eh, he probably didn't because truth be told that smartphones do actually seem, well, smart. And in contradistinction to a dishwasher, it turns out that smartphones are changing the retail landscape--smartphones aren't dumb, it's their users who are stupid. The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition ran an article yesterday by Nicholas Carr who argues that the disjointed and distracting ways we receive information through the internet (and, if I may extend, through portable internet access devices like smartphones) makes us into shallower thinkers. So the argument (and research) goes, the brain responds to an inundation of information not by making us into better multitaskers capable of handling massive amounts of data and ideas but by making us into superficial skimmers. The brain loses its ability to think about one thing deeply because it has become directed toward brushing over many things at once it a way that is more thoughtless and automatic.

As someone who stills prefer the print edition of the paper to the online version and will be forever attached to a physical book rather than an electronic reader cluttered by extraneous information, this research filled me with a sort of Protestant self-righteous glee. You see, it isn't just that these new, more distracting ways of receiving information seem to be making some people into shallower thinkers, it's that it also seems to be making them ruder. Spend a dinner with a compulsive surfer/emailer/texter/Facebooker via a Blackberry or iPhone and you'll know exactly what I mean. And what does this have to do with self-righteous Protestantism? Because there is a part of me that believes that rude behavior should be punishable on earth as it is in heaven. Amen. Turns out the punishment is that your smart device is making you stupider...which really turns out to be a punishment for all of us. (Eh, that's self-righteously fair as well.)

Religious temperament aside, if we are to take this research seriously, it goes some way toward explaining why many smartphone advertisements are indeed so stupid. The woman who explains that she needs an iPhone in order to turn her lights of at home starts to make sense--the device that helps her to turn the lights off can now be blamed as the reason she couldn't remember to turn those lights off in the first place. This is superficial, scatterbrained thinking on a grand scale indeed. Luckily, technology is there to save us from our own stupidity, so long as the battery holds out.

Rocky and Bullwinkle, or That Show You Hated as a Kid but Have since Come to Love

2010-04-10T20:28:00.006-04:00

Every now and then the soft glow of visual media makes an inexorable pull upon my attention. I'm not big into TV or movie rentals, but this Netflix streaming stuff is turning out to be damned convenient. What started out as a search for Simpsons episodes (streaming unavailable through Netflix, as it turns out) led me to season 1 of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Rocky and Bullwinkle. Did anyone actually like that show as a kid? I remember despising it. Rocky's voice reminded me of a nun I knew, and it grated on me. Hell, Rocky's voice still bothers me, but I seem to overcome the irritation these days through some strange, cosmic self-control that has developed with age. As a kid I couldn't wait for the Rocky and Bullwinkle segments to break into Fractured Fairy Tales and Mr. Peabody's Improbable Histories. As an adult now, I relish the entirety of the show. Who knew the show was that damned smart?

Seriously, Rocky and Bullwinkle pack enough word plays, satire, and il/logic puzzles into a 23 minute show that Lewis Carroll would be proud. And as if the punchy writing weren't enough for you, the stories are narrated with flawless execution.

While it may have been marketed for children, Rocky and Bullwinkle share with other classics like The Muppets the fact that they have undeniable appeal for adults as well. Why aren't all kids' shows built with such dual appeal? Many adults may enjoy Sesame Street, but let's face it, The Teletubbies have nothing going for them and don't even get me started on Dora. Spongebob Squarepants, you're actually okay, but you stand alone and well below the bar set by Rocky and Bullwinkle. But again, the question is, why?

Let's run through a few thoughts:

1.) Educational TV isn't as educational as it used to be. For all of those who think their kids need to spend their entire day counting to ten with Dora, I tell you that some part of their day should also be spent immersed in political satire, whether they understand it or not. An important part of learning is being exposed to ideas that don't normally come about during discussions involving the colors of various fruits.

2.) Maybe adults are getting dumber. Maybe you can't make a show with the adult appeal of Rocky and Bullwinkle anymore because the adults won't understand it. Yikes. Does the over 30 crowd need to count to ten with Dora as well?

2.5) Rocky and Bullwinkle works so well because it does have that classic cartoon silliness to it along with the sophisticated humor that attracts adult viewers. But what is adult humor these days? Is it only the low-brow, vulgar junk that you could never mix into kids' programming? Do we have to keep separate spheres because adult humor has become so wildly inappropriate? Where is the adult humor, sans innuendo? Is such a thing not funny anymore?

I don't have an answer, though I'm thinking that the jokes about the Cold War that play so well on Rocky and Bullwinkle wouldn't be understood (or be understood as funny) today if you attempted to translate them into, say, the current debate on nuclear disarmament. That's sad. I don't know if it's that people aren't aware enough of current events to keep this sort of humor afloat or if it's because of a void within our cartoon programming that is causing adults to lose track of modern policy issues.

Fancy Reading You Here

2010-04-06T19:35:00.002-04:00

Fads run aplenty, and one would figure that eventually one will get swept up by the latest diet or fashion fancy. For that reason, I'm not entirely surprised that the iPad is making me twitch, despite the fact that I'm not an Apple devotee or anything. I probably spend about 60% of my leisure time reading my [print edition] newspaper and other online publications, and I look at the iPad and salivate over the idea of being able to have a handy online reader wherever I go.

And yet...ick. There is something wrong with depending so largely upon online content, and Gordin Crovitz's editorial this week postulates an interesting reason why: online reading lacks serendipity. It's true that when you have the ability to customize your reading and follow sites that speak specifically to your taste, you do miss out on that piece of randomness, put there by the grace of an editor's genius, that you wouldn't normally read were it not for the fact that it's placed next to the column you normally do read. This, in large part, does explain why I like the print edition of the paper so much better than the online edition--I end up reading articles in the paper that I probably would have skipped over (or not noticed at all) online because it's just sooo much work to follow that link to something that may or may not be worthwhile.

But while Crovitz argues that many online readers are hungering for an electronic editor to recreate the serendipity of print reading, I do believe that the way online publications have become so tailored is symptomatic of the fact that people don't want editors anymore. In fact, I think serendipitous reading has been weeded out of content sites in a process of natural selection because people have come to hate it. This hate, I think, has been born out of the internet itself. Let's face it--there's a lot of crap content online. Serendipitous searching has become a risky, time-consuming project in light of all the truly dreadful content one has to wade through during the process. As an example, one could point out that blogs like this one are really part of the problem much more than they are part of the solution. I mean, how often do you hit the "Next Blog>>" button at the top of your screen? I gave up on it years ago. One can search the internet desert for days without finding a drop of blogging water.

So perhaps that is what the vastness of the internet has done--it has carved out an ever more narrow space for our views. Crovitz believes that this is unwelcome to web readers; I'm worried that it just might be what most of people wanted from the start.

The Trouble with Chloe

2010-04-04T15:18:00.004-04:00

I didn't know at the time when I watched Anne Fontaine's "Nathalie" (2003) a couple years ago that it was something of a lesbian cult classic, but it's easy to see why.

(Warning: Plot synopsis with spoilers ahead.)

Catherine (played by the the ever-luminous Fanny Ardant) is une dame d'un certain age who stumbles upon the fact that her husband Bernard (the refrigerator-like Gérard Depardieu) has been cheating on her with whatever young play he can get his hands on. Dismayed and distraught, Catherine decides to investigate her husband's unfaithful side as only a French woman would--she hires a prostitute to seduce him. At a local skeez bar across from her office, Catherine meets Nathalie (played by the equally too hot for words, Emmanuelle Béart) and hires her to bait her husband, sleep with him, and report back. Ostensibly Catherine wants to know what her husband is getting out of these encounters that she is no longer capable of supplying herself, which is understandable. After all, you look at Fanny Ardant and wonder how any woman would have anything to offer beyond what the oh-husky-voiced one has got. It's practically inconceivable, but that's beside the point. Nathalie skillfully runs into Bernard at a cafe, and the trick begins. Every few evenings, Catherine meets with Nathalie in order for the paid professional to give her report on the most recent sexual goings-on. It has voyeuristic appeal to it, and Catherine becomes hooked. What is so masterful about Fontaine's film is that the audience is eventually given to understand that Catherine, who is undoubtedly hooked, is hooked on Nathalie, not the betrayals of her husband. Catherine seeks out Nathalie more and more, which she seems to justify to herself as wanting more and more information about her husband. What becomes clear, however, is that she wants more and more of Nathalie. They dine together, share their emotional turmoils, and ultimately Catherine sets Nathalie up in an apartment of her own.

As the meetings between Catherine and Nathalie grow more intense, the sexual tension reaches a fever pitch. Lesbians around the world hold their breath as they expect the most satisfying coupling ever seen on film to transpire...only they are sadly disappointed. Nathalie, we find out after an attempted/failed meeting between the three members of love triangle, never seduced Bernard at all. She made an attempt to entice him as she was hired to do, but he never took the bait. As Nathalie points out, however, Catherine did take the bait, which payed Nathalie's bills just as well, if not better. With this, Catherine seems forced to look at the fact that she has become obsessed with Nathalie. Nathalie, to her credit as a human being and not just a working prostitute, is also forced to recognize just how much she has come to love her client.

So why the hell don't they just make love and satisfy themselves and the audience at large?! (Hey, this is a chance for everyone to win.) Catherine and Nathalie never end up consummating their desire for one another because "Nathalie" is, unfortunately, an imperfect movie with an incoherent ending. Catherine leaves Nathalie after their last emotionally-wrought encounter to be with her husband, with whom we are left to understand that she will live happily ever after even though he is still a cheating bastard. Catherine drops her emotional bond with Nathalie conveniently enough, and Nathalie evaporates back into the twilight world of prostitution whence she came. Ugh.

Clearly, there is room for improvement in this story. Cue Atom Egoyan's 2009 Canadian remake, "Chloe."

Okay, so here's Catherine again, this time played by Julianne Moore, who always looks like she's on the verge of tears, but that seems to work for this movie. Why shouldn't she be crying? Her son is a skank loser, and she suspects her husband is cheating on her. Good thing Chloe (the sometimes seductive, sometimes scary looking Amanda Seyfried), the local prostitute from across the street, is available to take the case. Wash, rinse, repeat. Catherine thinks she's finding out about her husband when really she's losing herself in her obsession with Chloe. Catherine, however, wises up this time and realizes that this "investigation" is about Chloe. Now we're getting somewhere. Catherine can't take the tension anymore and gives in. Hooray! Catherine and Chloe get it on. By report they agree it's hot, though as a member of the audience I must say I was unimpressed by the sexual choreography. But hey, Chloe is Catherine's fantasy, not mine.

And then, dun dun dun! We find out as before that Chloe never seduced Catherine's husband as she was hired to do. Hell, we find out that Catherine's super-husband was never even cheating in the first place. How's that for irony? For this film, it's not enough.

Catherine fires Chloe, telling her that their "business transaction" is over and she does, after all, want to go back to being the happy wife. Chloe has none of it. The film kicks into lesbian-psycho gear. Chloe seduces Catherine's son, though it's clear she can only get off whilst staring at Catherine's shoes. Catherine catches them and freaks out. Chloe stabs herself with a hair comb, threatens to stab Catherine in the neck with same said hair comb, then falls out of a window and dies. Holy hell, where did this go wrong?!

Fundamentally, both films go wrong because they insist upon supporting heterosexual prerogative--at the end of the day, the call goes out for all wives to return to their husbands. This is unreasonable and bad storytelling. In the case of "Nathalie," Catherine is returning to a cheating husband and marriage that is still broken. In "Chloe," Catherine has a loving husband to return to, but she must do so at the cost of disregarding her sexual awakening prompted by Chloe. In both cases the audience is expected to believe that the two Catherine's are going to be able to cast off Nathalie and Chloe as easily as they picked up the girls. Real emotions, of course, don't work like that, and they don't work that way in movies either.

What would have worked, in either film, would either be for Catherine to return to her husband with the audience understanding that it is going to be an unhappy marriage or for Catherine to leave her husband in favor of her new feelings. Nathalie did love Catherine, and Chloe was a good kid until Egoyan took the cheap way out and ended his movie with the cliched lesbian-turned-psychopath ending that seems to make heterosexual audiences breathe a sigh of relief. (Can't have our wives going gay on us, after all. That might lead to chaos. Chaos, I tell you!)

Getting this movie right should not be that tough, which is what makes it all the more disappointing. Listen to me moviemakers--the premise for this story is a goldmine. If you get it right, you have the chance to make one hell of a fantastic drama.

In the meantime, I eagerly await for a third rendition of "Nathalie/Chloe." I've no preference as to whether Catherine unhappily returns to her husband or happily moves on to more lesbionic pastures. It would be coherent and sensible for the story to go either way, and at the end of the day it is the storytelling that counts...especially considering how heretofore the sloppy storytelling has been this otherwise exquisite story's undoing.

I'd like to drink my coffee in the rain.

2010-03-09T20:03:00.003-05:00

It turns out that if you follow County Road H in Wisconsin for long enough, eventually you hit a score of nice little towns all with nondescript names and homogeneous populations that vary from a sparse 244 to a bustling 1444. Bibi and I had the good fortune of hitting several of these towns over the past couple days. In Dubuque, Iowa, the bartenders wanted to know, as obvious outsiders, where we hailed from. Along County Road H the townspeople didn't feel the need to ask us. They just humored us as wayward tourists and waxed poetic about the simplicity of small town gas pumps and the superiority of local pickles. We were thrilled and couldn't wait to hit the next stop where, we promised ourselves, we would attempt to blend in like chameleons. We continued to stick out the entire time.

Of course, the bigger city and our natural habitat could not be shed completely. We carried it with us wherever we went in the form of our continued assessment of local Indy lesbi-drama--who is sleeping with whom even though they are dating someone else who happens to be their ex from umpteen years ago. That sort of thing. The sort of thing that both fascinates and sickens me. It was during these gossip-swapping sessions at tiny WI cafes that something occurred to me--I suddenly realized that I would have preferred to be the lonely dyke in a town of 250 than the dyke I am now in the cradle of America's comparatively more crowded crossroads. Indeed, for an afternoon or two, I did get my wish. We'd be sitting drinking our orange juice amongst the natives and it would become immediately obvious that no one in the general store was sporting short, spikey hair quite like I was. You'd think this would be uncomfortable, but on the contrary it felt strangely honest. It seemed better to me to stick out like an obviously gay sore thumb in Wisconsin than to blend in well enough but still feel completely isolated in the gay mecca that is Indy. In my arrogance, I suppose I would prefer to set the standard for lesbianism, even if it does mean being completely demographically isolated in a small town, than to be a part of a larger lesbian movement here in Indy that is so not me.

I'm bothered by the tawdriness (I've used that word so often in the last month in my head) and the degradation of the scene around here. It's demoralizing, literally and figuratively. I don't like it, and I don't want to be a part of it. But what is there to do with it? It is home after all.

Bruce Campbell on Experience

2010-03-03T21:00:00.004-05:00

Something terrible must have happened along the way today because all of a sudden I find myself cold (not true), alone (also not true, but let's say it anyway...), and watching Old Spice commercials on YouTube (very true). The following is a Bruce Campbell monologue at its very best.

I'm right there with you, Uncle Martina

2010-02-28T00:20:00.003-05:00

I seem to remember an old interview on one of the late shows, possibly hosted by Tom Snyder, that featured Martina Navratilova. She came onto the set with some awful flowery jumble of an ankle length dress, the sort of style which the tragically unhip would be expected to wear in the mid 1980s when the interview took place. The host couldn't help but be condescending and said something embarrassing like, "Now look at that? Don't you look nice in a dress after all?" Martina demured, as she looked completely uncomfortable in her costume. It just can't be helped--a butch in a dress usually ends up looking even more butch than if you'd just kept her in a track suit.

I'm experiencing similar pains myself these days. It is suspected that upper upper management doesn't appreciate our work attire around the office. Of all the offenders, I'm probably one of the more grievous ones. I don't wear coordinating scrubs with cutesy prints. I stick to the basic blue scrub bottoms and some kind of active wear top. It isn't fancy, but it gives me freedom of movement (which scrub tops do not) and wears well across a day of being grabbed by patients and splattered by their various bodily fluids. Upper upper management decided to put a stop to this freedom of expression, however, when they moved to provide us with scrubs. And not just any scrubs mind you--given that I work at a women's clinic, they just had to give us pastel scrubs. Don't get me wrong, pastels are lovely. Powder pinks, Easter yellows, and seafoam greens are marvelous...until you put me in them. Upper upper management undoubtedly had a plan to soften my image only to be foiled by the fact that I now look butcher than ever in this more womanly get-up. It's as if they've learned nothing from Uncle Martina's bad encounter with that mid-80s hausfrau dress. You can lead a butch to women's wear, but you can never really make her femme.

The One-Eyed Man

2010-01-23T17:50:00.002-05:00

As if to strategize with the help of an unwilling accomplice, LCB told me about her newest lineup of pretty young thangs that she has added to her potential hit list. I was immediately struck by the fact that all of the girls averaged 20 years younger than herself.

"What do they see in you? You're getting on the old side for them," I noted.

Okay, I didn't put in quite like that. I wish I could remember how I did phrase it, for by some miracle it managed to come out in such a way that LCB wasn't offended. In fact, LCB looked pleased at the opportunity to draw my attention to one her high points. She immediately pointed to her head.

"It's this mind of mine. They're attracted to my intelligence. They want to fuck my mind...my status, my career, my house, my kid."
"They want to fuck your kid?" I asked.
"You know what I mean. They like my stability," she frowned.

I was frowning too, though by and large, everything she said made sense. Given LCB's largely witless crowd, I could understand how she has become edified as local Indy intelligentsia. And given LCB's largely unemployed crowd, I could also understand how her position is the pinnacle of success.

I mention all of this as a nod to social relativity. LCB has indeed found hill over which she is king. I have to give her props for that, even if her status as Indy intelligentsia is wasted upon me.

The New Reductio ad Absurdum

2010-01-07T19:36:00.002-05:00

The 'reductio ad absurdum' was always a favorite of everyone's in logic class. Like so many of the things I love, it's kind of a gimmick. It's like a poem that rhymes--everyone can do it, and once you get the rhyme right you get the rhythm for free. (Bonus!) In the reductio ad absurdum argument, you don't necessarily get a rhyme, but you do get to look at yourself and the world around you in its most comical form, which might also be its barest, might it not? You get down to some barebones meaning, and who doesn't like to find comedy buried at the end of such a rainbow?

With comedy in mind, I've been reading with interest the new proposals to regulate tax preparers. I work in a highly regulated field myself, and as such there is one thing that I have come to appreciate about regulations--they make no difference as to how well or how poorly I do my job. Nay, they make my job more difficult, but they raise my skill level not a whit. Of course, there are many who like the regulations because of what they do do most effectively--keep other, non-regulated, workers out of the field. This I find to be almost a slap in my own face. After all, is it not enough that my merits should assure me my place in my field rather than the (often irrelevant) regulations I've come to satisfy?

Poor tax preparers. It is to be expected that the big firms like H&R Block are going to be in favor of regulating the field, as they have a vested interest in keeping people out. It is to be expected that the government likes the idea of regulating the field, as this provides a handy source of revenue. I can accept these points in spite of despising them. What I cannot fathom though, is the government's justification for regulating tax preparers--"In most states you need a license to cut someone's hair," says IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman. Stunning logic. The reductio ad absurdum has been turned back in on itself--now patent absurdities are being used to justify further absurdities. Have we gone down the rabbit hole at this point or stepped through the looking glass? It's hard to tell.

Ending on an Anti-Anti-Existentialist Note

2009-12-31T00:23:00.003-05:00

The clock hasn't struck midnight yet, but I think I'm going to declare my 2009 reading year over. It ends with The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. Yes, could it be that the year ends on an anti-existentialist note?

***

Albom's novel is curious, and I mean that in the same sort of way when people tell you that your hair looks interesting. Here is a novel in which a man dies and experiences heaven as a revelation told in five acts by five different people. After all, it turns out, God's greatest gift to you is to make you understand both the coherence and purpose to your life.

Hmm. I'm respectfully recoiling, and I'm resisting saying that I'm offended. Let me flippantly add that this book is so 2003 (when it was published).

It seems very much of the times that we have traded a strenuous reflection upon our actions in favor of spoon-fed revelation. Don't worry if your life doesn't make sense to you. Don't worry if it seems purposeless, pointless, and mistaken. You don't need to try and make it meaningful. God's gift to you will be to be told what the cosmological skinny is.

I've seen The Five People You Meet in Heaven compared to Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but really the differences couldn't be more striking. Scrooge is visited by three spirits in order to help him reflect upon the meaning of his life and his actions while he is still living, not after he is dead. It is this reflection that allows Scrooge to make himself a better man. It gives him his place in the world. The Victorians might have called this repentance, but moreover it's also a good old existentialist victory over the Absurd. It's a necessary trial of the Self in order to be a Self. Without it, you aren't really anything, no matter what God may hand to you at the end of the line.

But then that is my criticism against Albom's book and my haughty criticism against culture in general--this highlights people's need to be told after the fact (i.e. after they've done all these things that they can't make any sense out of) that everything they did was o.k. It had meaning. It had purpose. Don't worry about it.

Frankly, between you and me, I think you should be worried though. If your life seems meaningless it is either a) because your life is genuinely meaningless, which is pretty scary, or b) because you've failed to actualize yourself has a Self, which is your own damned responsibility. That's why Sisyphus is still pushing that rock. That's what makes him the better man over Albom's Eddie.

Christmas Eve fiascoes you can't make up.

2009-12-25T13:29:00.002-05:00

I should have known something was off with the world last night when the ticker tape read, "Woman tackles Pope in St. Peter's."

***

Mercifully, Christmas Eve gets smaller every year at my grandparents. Spouses have been divorced, siblings have moved far away, and cousins have begun to avoid the yuletide table owing to some scary fare. Consequently, my mother and I were the last souls standing. It started out well enough--no cashews, but plenty of cava to go around. (And go around it did, particularly to my mother.) Things began to spin out of control once my grandmother had an inexplicable panic attack, ranting and raving the whole time about how this was to be her last Christmas on earth. My mother couldn't stop laughing (perhaps we'll put that down to the cava), and my grandfather briefly looked to me as a "medical person" only to be told that, in practical instances such as these, I'm only qualified to do certain aspects of a gynecological exam and to start IVs. "Never mind," he said, "I will give her Xanax." Good thinking.

With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather doing god knows what, my mother and I managed to round up six pounds of extra sharp cheddar and part of a roasted chicken in the fridge. Truth be told, this sort of Christmas fare is much more to my taste than the traditional pork, white rice and black beans combo we normally feast upon, so all in all I was a happy camper. After an amusing meal in which my mother continued to dominate the bottle of bubbly, we returned to the living room in which The Animal Planet droned on melodiously in the background. The special was on the deep blue sea, and while transfixed by the wonders at the bottom of the ocean, I couldn't help but fall victim to a touch of motion sickness as fish darted here and there.

After three hours of this, my mother and I couldn't take it anymore. And besides, there was mass to attend! Yes, midnight mass--the one time of the year I actually go to church. It's newish to me, but I'm fast appreciating the fact that midnight mass is the best part of Christmas. The evening wouldn't be fully bizarre, however, until I too decided to add my own ounce of inexplicability to the mix. It became central in my mind that I really wanted to ask a girl I'd met at roller derby to join my mother and me at mass. The girl was mystified and confessed a phobia to churches. "Mass is the easiest thing in the world," I reassured her. A lot of standing, a little kneeling, but other than that the superficial joys of the mass (which mainly involve the organ music and choir) are completely passive. Suspiciously, she agreed to go.

My new friend's anxiety levels were high. She seemed to be under the impression that the collective weight of her sins would cause the cathedral to implode. I should have reassured her that the only sin in this was that of arrogance in assuming she could out-sin the rest of the parishioners. It's true, I continued to reflect during the mass, we could all probably sit around and match each other black for black and culminate in some great peak of hypocrisy. All rather depressing, so I tried to forget about it. The music was indeed wonderful (augmented this year by a few extra pieces of brass in addition to the choir, organist, pianist, and violinist). I think my friend got into the groove of the "ups and downs" that make a Catholic mass a Catholic mass, though I can appreciate that the whole ritual must have struck her as completely bizarre. I hope the experience didn't shell-shock her and ruin her Christmas. If it did, I suppose we always have roller derby to fall back on.

My American Idol

2009-12-02T20:37:00.004-05:00

Just to prove that this blog is not all Socrates, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, and tortured reflections on ~~love lost~~ love that never existed, I would like to change gears and talk about something completely different. Let's talk about Lady Gaga.

Lady Gaga is my new idol. It's possible that I want to be her even more than I want to be a roller girl. Mind you, I want to be her minus the alleged penis, which (in common with others) I like to call her Mini Gaga. This admiration is based entirely on the fact that a) I like two of her songs (the only two I've ever heard), b) she's a freak, and c) she obviously has a good ear for the Pop-meets-Eurotrash sound that occasionally breaks out and does well in this country. Of these three considerations, (c) is the most important. (c) takes real talent, however much you may scoff. (b) is a plus because it helps fill the void that Madonna left behind now that she's an enlightened British earth mother Kabbalist...or something. And (a) is what bring (b) and (c) all together. Check it out:

I don't know what the hell this is, but I know I want to go out on a date with this woman.

Absolutely Speechless

2009-12-01T18:19:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was the first Monday after Thanksgiving. Yes, I know that seems like a Muppet News Flash, but the day is kind of an event. The first Monday after Thanksgiving is always the day that LoverComeBack's company organizes a caravan up to our field's big trade show in Chicago. You may remember this trade show from such disasters as Last Year. I did a Tarot reading Sunday night to see how this year's trip would go. It promised doom and gloom. It was sort of right.

As I think I've mentioned before, the trade show is a week-long event in which medical manufacturers great and small come to display and sell their very expensive wares. I've never been involved in purchasing, and as time goes on I've become even farther removed from it. Not surprisingly, my office does not sponsor me to go. LoverComeBack's office does, however, so it's just us trekking it up to Chi-town. Oh yes, and the Planning Committee (which sounds like a group but is actually made up of only one woman who's working on the conference with us for next year). Ah yes, an unstoppable, inexplicable threesome. I can't figure out whether LoverComeBack has come to dislike dealing with me on a one-on-one basis, or if she has just plain ceased to function at all outside of a group setting (she never was one for intimate twosomes to start with...she does so like an entourage). This troubles me as I loathe groups, even very small ones, but it's also beside the point.

So LoverComeBack, the Planning Committee, and I head off on our merry way. As I've also mentioned in the past, the upcoming conference will meet not only the demands of our professional society at large, but it is also currently serving to bolster LoverComeBack's vanity. The Planning Committee is absolutely smitten with LCB, and this is of course no coincidence. She would hardly be on the committee otherwise. In her smitten-ness there also breathes the wind of emulation. The poor Planning Committee wants to be just like LoverComeBack, and with the amount of drama in her life she's off to a good start. They have a lot to talk about, of which I listened to only part of most painfully. I've already mentioned that I've been feeling marooned and peevish, and listening to them did not help. There's isolation, and then there's this kind of moral isolation in which one observes certain behaviors in others that lead one to say, "This is both wrong and horrifying. Can you not see that?"

A stupid question anyway. I retreated to my newspaper, which happily held good tidings. LoverComeBack and the Planning Committee noticed that I had visibly brightened, and they asked me why. I explained to them that, at the outset, Honduras' election appeared to be a success in and of itself. I tried to explain about Zelaya, Chavez, etc. It's not something I talk about a lot, but it is a topic about which I have very strong feelings (which is probably why I don't talk about it a lot). Within moments,though, it was clear that I couldn't communicate to them the implications of what had been happening. On a more depressing personal level, it occurred to me that I have a special inability to convey anything that I find to be meaningful as meaningful to 95% of the people I know. I simply can't seduce anyone into finding meaning (even if it isn't the same meaning as mine) in things that seem to me to be inherently meaningful. I count this as a personal fault. Not only am I having difficulty connecting with those around me, but apparently I have nothing to offer anyone else to connect to either. That's sad. I don't feel like I have so little to offer...

With this melancholia the trip rattled on. Things perked up a bit at the actual show. This year was remarkable for something you don't always see: a vast array of bogus science. Quite simply there was some equipment that was being sold for diagnostic purposes that I'm not convinced would work any better than my Tarot deck. Witching sticks would be cheaper and possibly more effective. It was startling, and thankfully it was (oftentimes) only available in China.

At lunch We Three traveled down in a spiral of degradation. LoverComeBack was busily texting through our preliminary drinks. "If I can't get things to work out with Tender for tonight, you'll be fucking me," she said as she mentally arranged her plans and her contingency plans. The Planning Committee stared on in a disbelief rooted in what was probably painful jealously. Mind you, it was painful for me too. "Am I such a thing?" I wondered to myself, "Just a thing? A use-object? The dreaded means to an end? And a second choice, no less! How could it be so that I am to be a means to an end when I have loved you as an end in and of yourself?" There is a purposefully ridiculous love scene in George Cukor's "Camille" in which Armand claims the right to love Marguerite. "No one has ever loved you as I've loved you," he tells her. "That may be true, but what can I do about it?" Marguerite responds dismissively. And of course, Marguerite is right. A good love bestows no rights and means nothing if the object of affection can't see the value of it. I wanted to cry and must have looked it. The Planning Committee asked me if I was drunk. I told her no. "Your drink looks like it's getting the better of you." I might have said the same to her, though in both of our cases it was not the drink.

LoverComeBack went to the rest room, giving us a few minutes of respite. Upon returning, she placed one hand behind my back and the other on the table in front of me, blocking my left flank.
"Would you like a kiss?" LoverComeBack asked.
I looked doubtful.
"I would," hastened the Planning Committee.
"You're too big of a coward," I dared LCB. And it's true. For all of LoverComeBack's outness, she isn't often comfortable with her lesbianism outside of gay bars. Perhaps that's true for most, but it's easier for her to hide since she doesn't look butch. Get looking kind of dykey like me and hiding your lesbianism in public becomes moot.

To my challenge LoverComeBack responded with a smile and placed a Hershey Kiss in front of me.
"Uh huh," I muttered in place of an "I told you so."
As she hates it when I'm right, she brought her face closer and gave me a kiss at my mandibular angle. It was sensual without being intimate, a technique which LoverComeBack excels at. I recoiled at the fact that she couldn't manage a kiss on the lips.
"You are a coward," I declared, and little did I know that those were to be my last words. Literally.

I'd started out hoarse that morning, but I'd put that down to the 4AM hour when my alarm went off. Suddenly, before LoverComeBack could even take her seat, my voice disappeared altogether. And we're not talking really hoarse here or anything; we're talking gone. It was as if my feelings of isolation found a way to be complete. Now I really wasn't going to be heard.

And I wasn't heard from for the rest of the day. Nor have I been heard from today. I can push out some breathy words, but it's rather laborious. Occasionally a real sound will squeak out, but it's a sound that's roughly on par with a busted bagpipe. I think the gods are trying to tell me something.

Now if my fingers break off so that I can't even blog anymore, then we'll know the universe really wants me to shut up.

Toward the end of the day, LoverComeBack reminded us of something:
"I have a blanket in my bag. Anyone going to cuddle with me on the way back?"
She looked at me, and of course I said nothing. I had precious little choice. Matching my wordlessness, the Planning Committee quickly raised her hand.
"Well all right then," LoverComeBack smiled, though it was clear to me the Planning Committee wasn't going to get what she wanted anymore than I was going to get my voice back.

LoverComeBack made sure to busy herself throughout the whole trip back, guaranteeing that there would be no time for the cuddle that she obviously had no intention to give. I'd say "Poor Planning Committee," but that's how this game works. "She'll learn. We all do," I thought to myself...in silence of course.

Wherein MGD takes all the punches.

2009-11-28T22:27:00.003-05:00

It necessarily follows from [Socrates'] identification of virtue with knowledge that virtue can be taught. We would make a distinction: intellectual knowledge of what virtue is can be imparted by instruction, but not virtue itself. However, if wisdom as real personal conviction is stressed, then *if* such wisdom can be taught, perhaps virtue can be taught too. The chief point to remark is that "teaching" for Socrates did not mean mere notional instruction, but rather leading a man to a real insight. Yet although such considerations undoubtedly render Socrates' doctrine of the teachability of virtue more intelligible, it remains true that in this doctrine the over-intellectualism of his ethic is again apparent. He insisted that as, e.g., the doctor is the man who has learnt medicine, so the just man is he who has learnt what is just.

--Fr. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece & Rome Volume I Part I

You know, it's all well and good for Fr. Copleston to talk about the teachability (and by extension, learnability) of virtue, and quite another thing to try and tell your friends that learning virtue is your new pet project. Amazingly enough, it all sounds kind of stupid when you sit around talking about it over a Miller 64. It sounds about as stupid as a 64 calorie beer. Yeah, that stupid.

But there it is; and here I am. This all got started when an acquaintance of mine inquired into my apparent lack of interest in dating. This observation isn't entirely correct. I've not lost track of the appeal that a Stanwyck-like spunk and Dietrich-like swagger hold; I've just got other things to think about. And it's just occurred to me (i.e., within the past 4 years) that morality and virtue are pretty damned exciting. They're remarkably applied concerns and, as Socrates would point out, refreshingly over-intellectualized. It's like mental masturbation on overdrive.

Truth is, though, that you get going fast enough and virtue turns out to be not just stimulating but scary too. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but this seems to be having a profoundly isolating effect on my psyche. Whereas Plato promised me that contemplation of the Forms and of the Good would lead to true happiness, all I'm feeling at present is distant, marooned, and peevish. Like I said, maybe I'm not doing it right. Or maybe the cynicism and nihilism inherent in MGD 64 speaks the truth. Hard to say.

Meanwhile, back at the party wherein a I made an ass of myself to such an extent that my friends felt the need to reassure me that they still loved me me even though they think I'm a fool, the conversation drifted to various dyke drama (as it inevitably always does). The drama is not so important as the conclusion that was reached: that so long as a woman is dating another woman, she should have no need to meet with a another woman alone. "There is nothing a woman should have to say to a friend that she can't say in front of her lover," it was declared. It is as I've always feared--that modern lesbianism is contributing to the death of female intimacy. I can think of plenty of things a woman might want to say to a friend in the absence of a lover, and none of them have to do with cheating, disloyalty, or dishonesty. Rather, it recognizes that bonds of intimacy vary across female friendships. They need not threaten a romantic attachment because they do no compete with it nor do they betray it. It's just another tool in the toolbox.

Finding intimate friendships to be threatening to a romantic relationship is, I believe, one of the less desirable attributes that lesbianism has assimilated from heterosexuality. This is to be expected, though. Within the whole infrastructure of society is an element remarked upon by some feminists but hardly defeated--that one of patriarchy's primary goals is to isolate women. Lesbianism, which should have outsmarted patriarchy, has been duped by it, adopting heterosexual norms that serve to isolate women every bit as much as a hetero relationship would. It's sad; it's scary. Yes, as scary as 64 calorie beer.

Shy Bladder be Gone!

2009-11-22T15:20:00.001-05:00

My sister, my niece Blaise, and my brother-in-law Bob the Builder are in town for the week. It's only been a month since I've seen Blaise last, but at less than 3 years old this accounts for a not insignificant portion of her life, and the changes from one visit to the next are noticeable. This month's visit begs the question, Is it possible to predict at two and half years of age that my niece is going to be a sexual cripple?

The Evidence:

After my niece successfully expressed her desire to use the potty, she delivered a very decisive command: "Mommy, out! Privacy!"
"Does she have shy bladder or something?" I asked jokingly.
"Yes," my sister replied seriously, "She won't go potty with me in the bath room."

Ay yay yay. To a certain extent, this makes sense. Ever since Blaise has been able to crawl, the command whenever my sister (and presumably her husband as well) goes to the bathroom rings something like, "No Blaise, wait outside. Mommy needs her privacy." Mommy apparently needs this privacy whenever she's naked, I think. Weird.

My sister and I grew up in a house of full-frontal nudity. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but now I look upon it as a good thing in terms of being comfortable with my own body both in the privacy of my own company as well as during the occasionally intimate tete-a-tete. Indeed, I can strip for anyone, anytime. Such is the state of my immodesty. (And if you couldn't guess already, I connect this with my lack of bladder shyness.) I don't often strut around naked, however, because in spite of believing fully in being comfortable whilst defrocked, I don't believe in giving anyone a free show. But I could if called upon to do so if need be. This to me seems healthy. Being two and a half and not being able to drop trou in front of your mommy does not seem healthy.

The Outlook:

Not good. What must I do to reverse this terrible course charted toward bodily discomfort and, by extension, sexual dysfunction? I'm not sure, but I'm wondering if it involves putting a protective placemat down on my chair and foregoing clothing during Thanksgiving dinner.

Temperanzi

2009-11-03T13:52:00.007-05:00

Moderation, blah, blah, blah. It's time to move on to Temperance. (Image is from Jude Buffum's Housewives Tarot.)

Temperance is, I'm guessing, one of the most misinterpreted cards within the Major Arcana. Temperance does not suggest moderation wherein black is folded in along with white in order to arrive at the happy medium (or happy median, if you'd like to continue talking about averaging values) of gray. Rather, Temperance within the Tarot (as within life as well, no?) implies a balance of black with white in a recipe that is both, not a mixture of the two. You don't lose the qualities of the extremes in Temperance; you do have an equal representation of them.

That makes for a pretty exciting reading, if you ask me. For those who do not want to compromise, for those who do not want a dilution of equally enjoyed opposites, for those who want it all as it is, Temperance is the card for you. I love it when Temperance pops up in my readings (though it does very infrequently) because I'd rather have the highest highs and the lowest lows than a consistent, steady path.

Or maybe I don't. Sometimes it is hard to work it all out. Before going to bed last night, I laid awake contemplating the current absurdities. My chairman won't speak to me because I won't sleep with her. (I told you this upcoming conference was going to supply endless copy...and a bottomless bucket of laughs as well, it seems...) Is this one of the low points? It certainly feels as if we've swung away from extreme civility into the land of ridiculous childishness, but that's all part of the Temperance movement, right?

Anyway, as I tried to work things out in the background, I switched from Father Copleston's introduction to Plato to Albert Speer's memoirs. I must have gotten lost in thought, for I was roused from my reflections by a painful thrust to my chest as Albert Speer made a nosedive for my left fourth rib. (If you've ever read Speer's Inside the Third Reich you'd understand my pain. I recommend you pick up a copy for yourself. Just make sure you pick it up with two hands, if you know what I mean.) I now have a nasty gash on chest thanks to the tome. (I'm the only person I know who manages to hurt herself reading.) Somehow the wound seemed fitting though. As Temperance dictates, the sensual pleasures of the past predicate the pains of the present. It's all part of the concoction.

Moderation

2009-10-28T18:35:00.002-05:00

There come times (and this is one of them) when everything seems to be at a crossroads, and I feel like I would best be served by being honest with myself...and yet this is the thing I cannot do. So here we are, lost about in the vagueness. Part of me is completely contented, feeling as if the sun shines on my face only for me (though this is a rather fleeting feeling). Part of me is utterly anesthetized, perhaps even zombified, owing to the company I've been keeping. (That is, the sort of company that is not at all demanding, which you might think would be nice, only it isn't. There is a certain sort that demands nothing of anyone because they can't actually distinguish people from the chairs they're sitting on. To be on the safe side, they ask nothing. After all, who would want to get caught asking a chair for a ride home?) Part of me is hung up haplessly waiting for nothing at all. This isn't even the waiting-for-Godot type deal in which you know you're waiting, you just don't know for what. Nope, I know there isn't anything coming for me, and yet I'm still waiting.

During the time that I haven't been wasting recently, I've been reading up on the ancients, which is the large portion of philosophy I missed completely as an undergrad. Hannah Arendt did teach me a good deal about Socrates after graduation, so I've been filling in the caps courtesy of Father Copleston. As part of Socrates' ethical theory, he posited that virtue is achieved through discerning what is best for the soul as well as mankind. No one, he argued, does evil intentionally. Rather, they act in ignorance of what is truly good because they have not reached that level of moral discernment yet. This, of course, can be a problematic perspective. As Hannah Arendt would argue 2400 years later, what if evil is not an issue of ignorance due to people neglecting to think well, but is instead an issue of people refusing to think at all. Closer to hand, Plato pointed out Socrates fails to account for the people who are perfectly away of what is best for the soul but still do not follow through on the proper actions. (For example, the good citizen who knows that drunkeness does not produce long lasting happiness but chooses to get smashed from time to time anyway.) Socrates might have said that such a person lacks true conviction concerning what promotes the soul's true happiness, but this is a pretty weak argument. I wish it were not so, and I wish Socrates could answer me better, for I am one of those cases of the woman fully aware of what virtue is, and yet I refuse to act in a way that is virtuous. Why be such a fool? It isn't for lack of having thought about it...and it isn't even that I've fooled myself into believing that drunkenness, for example, is the real key to happiness. No, it's sheer stupidity on my part, and it ought not to be this way.

Saturday Night Artistic Endeavors

2009-10-17T23:48:00.007-04:00

I've gotten used to the idea of fake Christmas trees (perhaps witnessing Charlie Brown's horror over shiny aluminum Christmas trees as a child served to desensitize me before my own days of fire-resistant fake trees as an adult), but I just can't quite get used to the idea of fake pumpkins. This is my second year carving one, and while it is way easier than slaving over a real pumpkin, something is definitely missing...and I'm not just talking about the copious amounts of seed and slime inherent in the real thing. I miss that pure pumpkin smell topped off by a dash of cinnamon thrown in at the end right before you light the candle on the inside for the first time. And certainly it's odd to spend a couple of hours on a pumpkin and have a mass of sawdust as the unwanted byproduct of the endeavor.

Be that as it may, this is what I've got for 2009. It took about 2.5 hours using a small carving saw and a Dremel. It's a dual-sided pumpkin so when you place it near a wall, you get a nice little shadow (in this case, 3 little ghosts) coming out the back.

I also attempted to video it in all of its spooky glory. The camera appears to drift away at the end because I tried [unsuccessfully] to catch the ghost shadows dancing across the fireplace brick. They don't show up on this video though, but trust me that the effect is quite fetching when you see it in person.

Now where is Alistair Cooke when you need an intro?

2009-10-15T20:54:00.004-04:00

I'm having a dramatic moment. No really, I am, though it doesn't come easily. I have very little patience watching most dramatic performances because I end up daydreaming about what I assume the actors' real lives to be like (e.g. Can this guy afford his rent on what he's making from this show?) more than I concentrate on the play itself. And I have a hard time reading plays because I feel like they lack the level of reflection I expect out of a good novel. I don't want the rising and falling action inherent in drama nearly as much as I want the thought of the day snaking throughout a novel.

Still, there are, for me, standouts amongst the dramatic crowd. Oscar Wilde's Salome happens to be the very pinnacle. I was watching Salome's final soliloquy this evening and wanted to share it. It's meant, I think, to be the final illustration of what a monster Salome is supposed to be. Dastardly as she is (this speech is given to John the Baptist, whose head at this point in the play now rests upon a silver platter, just as Salome requested), it's an amazing expression of obsession and frustration that I think makes her quite sympathetic in a twisted sort of way. If I used tags for my entries, this speech would merit a "sweet sickness" label.

Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now...But wherefore dost thou not look at me, Iokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are now shut. Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelide, Iokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Iokanann, that thou wilt not look at me?...And thy tongue, that was like a red snake darting poison, it moves no more, it speaks no words, Iokanaan, that scarlet viper that spat its venom upon me. It is strange, is it not? How is it that the red viper stirs no longer?...Thou wouldst have none of me, Iokanaan. Thou rejected me. Thou didst bear thyself toward me as to a harlot, as to a woman that is a wanton, to me, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea! Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will. I can throw it to the dogs and to the birds of the air. That which the dogs leave, the birds of the air shall devour...Ah, Iokanaan, Iokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men! All other men were hateful to me. But thou wert beautiful! Thy body was a column of ivory set upon feet of silver. It was a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory. There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth. Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music. Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Iokanaan? With the cloak of thine hands, and with the cloak of thy blasphemies thou didst hide they face. Thou didst put upon thine eyes the covering of him who would see God. Well, thou hast seen thy God, Iokanaan, but me, me, thou didst never see. If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I saw thee, and I loved thee. Oh, how I loved thee! I love thee yet, Iokanaan. I love only thee...I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire. What shall I do now, Iokanaan? Neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion. I was a princess, and thou didst scorn me. I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me. I was chaste, and thou didst fill my veins with fire...Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death.

Don't look twice.

2009-10-15T20:33:00.003-04:00

After a stream of colossal fuck-ups at work on Monday (actually, I really only messed one thing up, but it was big enough to fill the space of several smaller fuck-ups), I finally managed to do something right today--I shone as the bright beacon of virtue in a field of salacious decay. And I wasn't even trying.

It all started when a mysterious young man strolled into my office. I'd never met him before, so I supposed introductions were in order though I'd already guessed he was attached to the new office across the hall. He made the first move, as he was invading alien territory.
"Hi. I'm the new doctor from across the hall," he told Nurse Wingman and me. Huh? That wasn't what I thought normally passed as an introduction. Instead of a name we only get a rank these days? I was tempted to introduce myself in turn by saying that I was Capricorn who likes roller derby, but Nurse Wingman cut me off with a breathy sigh.
"Wow, hi," she said dazed.
"My fax machine isn't working yet. Can I use yours?"
Nurse Wingman stood petrified.
"Let me take you to the front office. This one back here is kind of wonky."
I led him through the back end of the office, a trip during which he managed to stop traffic with his apparent Adonis-like good looks. I ascertained that he was indeed the famed Dr Hanky, his office across the hall has three consultation rooms, and he also intends to hire a massage therapist.

I did all this without drooling, which turned out to be laudable. After Dr Hanky left I was pulled aside and applauded for my professional demeanor in dealing with the young doctor.
"He was just so good looking, I didn't know what to say to him," one of my coworkers admitted later. "I don't know how you did it."
"It seems I'm immune," I observed.

Yeesh. And so I am.

Before he left Dr Hanky told me to drop by the open house he was holding this evening. Never was an invitation bestowed on someone less likely to attend. And I didn't.

Near Hits and Total Misses

2009-10-10T12:37:00.006-04:00

Having succumbed to illness, I stayed in last night and listened to the Fever game on the radio. (Yes, I'm the only kid on the block who doesn't have cable/satellite/dish whatever...long live AM radio). It was actually rather cozy. With my mother bringing me dinner in bed, my book at my side, and my cell phone near at hand for rapid texting purposes (I DO have texting back finally--take that lack of cable!), I was able to participate in the Fever's fast-paced trot to embarrassing defeat. Since I was also the only lesbian present at this party for one, there was also notably less drama than there might have been under other Fever party circumstances.

Doesn't make for a very good story, though, does it? So instead of lingering on Game 5, let's talk about the last Fever home game on Wednesday night.

Game 4 at Conseco was set to start at 7:30, and I was scheduled to see patients until at least 8 so I'd written off going to the game. By 6:30 however, things started falling into place. I was pumping out patients with uncharacteristic rapidity, and free tickets suddenly fell into my lap. By 7:15 I was out the door and on the road.

It's at events like these that Indianapolis shows its truly extraordinary Naptown-ness. After all, in what other city can you go to a game and pay $5 to park one block down from the venue? Shockingly quaint. Only in Indy.

I soon found LoverComeBack in the crowd of 17,000, with her lover, The Pinkyless, at her side. Per usual, The Pinkyless was smashed...smashed to the extent that she'd seemed to have forgotten the fact that we don't exactly get along. Smashed to the extent that by halftime she was all over me. No one was more shocked than I to find myself wearing a combination of her beer and saliva on my neck. *shudder* As soon as I politely could (I never try to piss off someone who is both taller and drunker than I), I retreated to the arms of Bibi. I don't actually know Bibi very well. We're familiar with each other on the basis of reputation only, and as such are already relatively disposed to liking one another. As we cuddled close she confided that she wasn't "getting any love from Row 20." I roared with laughter. "Row 20" was the code name she had given to the group she'd been sitting with earlier, which was comprised of the WaxLion and her posse. (Independently, the WaxLion wrote me later to say that she hadn't taken to Bibi, so apparently no one was getting any love from Row 20 on either side. Sorry 'bout your luck, WaxLion. :-P)

Ultimately Bibi went on to find even more love. The Pinkyless evaporated into thin air, probably in search of something more tangible than love. LoverComeBack and I were left holding her 'Go Fever' sign, she saddened by the fact that they'd just lost the game and I disappointed by the fact that they hadn't had the decency to lose wearing skirts, fishnets, and roller skates. What can I say? Basketball just isn't derby.

Subliminal Signals...apparently.

2009-10-06T15:18:00.002-04:00

It's the hair; I know it is. Why this surprises me is beyond me.

Following certain exams, my patients usually look like hypnotized bunnies. Through their haze they peer at me, wondering who the hell I am at first, then realizing that I'm the person whose kept them in pain for the duration of their exam. I usually have to face the fact that, at the end of the hour, I'm just not that popular anymore. Many patients try to hide both their haze and their dislike though. They'll start up the question machine as they get their bearings. How does the equipment work? How long did I go to school to do what I do? How is it possible to actually enjoy my line of work? That sort of thing. It's the kind of thing I was expecting when W. raised up her head and said, "Lemme ask you something." Instead, W. started on a line of seemingly innocent questioning concerning my marital status and homelife. Once she seemed suitably satisfied by my brief answers and terse declaration of love for my mother, the fun began. "I'm thinking of switching to women," she told me. Over the next ten minutes I proceeded to hear a lot more about my patient's sexual fantasies than I thought possible whilst being on the clock. "It's better with women, isn't it?" she asked me. "You'll have to exhaust your options and see," I told her non-committally. By the end of confession she seemed relieved, as if by telling me she had approached the gateway to Lesbianism (ha! she finds a very poor gateway in me) and found it reassuringly nonchalant. Weird. It must have been the full moon.

She Makes My Tooth Ache...cause she hit me in the mouth.

2009-10-02T22:53:00.002-04:00

I noisily sat myself down in the only other chair in the doc's office. It was dark, and she had her back turned to me. I couldn't tell what she was studying so intently when suddenly she whipped around.

"Have you read these ridiculous new regulations?"
I frowned at her. I know them like the back of my hand. She'd forgotten that come lawsuit time, underlings like myself are oddly more liable for such regulations than she is as supervising physician.
"Impossible," she told me again, as if framing a conclusive argument, "And what the hell do you want anyway?" Ah, she's a gruff one, this doc. I think that's why I love her.
"I'm going to ask you a question," I start my preamble.
"And I'm going to give you an answer."
"Indeed, you're going to tell me 'no.'"
She couldn't resist and eyebrow raise at that.
"I'm just telling you that I know what you're going to say because I don't want you to get any sort of unnatural kick out of denying me." I do know her too well, after all. "I want you to give a lecture for me at my conference I'm organizing."
"Hmm," she thought for a moment, "No."

I was impressed that she managed not to burst out laughing. In fact, for being so generally curmudgeonly, she was slightly sympathetic. At her insistence I described the absurdities of the conference--the apathy, the incompetence, etc. She loved it. "Beg me, plead with me, and act like you're completely desperate, and I might consider speaking for you," she laughed sadistically. Fortunately, I'm not that desperate yet and told her so.

"Get Dr Cheshire to speak," my doctor said kicking her head back. Dr Cheshire is the most powerful, and most sought after, doc in the business in central Indiana.
"She is speaking at the conference, smart ass," I told her triumphantly.
"Well damn. She does like that sort of thing. If I can find anyone who likes to hear their voice as much as she does, I'll send them your way," said my little softening curmudgeon. "And hey, you bimbo, the last study you sent me was fucked. Go fix it."

You've got to love this woman. She's slightly reminiscent of Prof. K, who drew scores of admirers after telling us that we had rocks in our heads. People only liked him so much because they thought he was joking. Those with rocks in their heads never knew he was deadly serious.

Everybody'd be in Love with Me

2009-09-20T15:56:00.003-04:00

LoverComeBack took me to a bar on the extreme northside...Dick's or Dave's or Don's...I don't remember what it was called, but it was pleasantly dark, with wood paneling throughout the place. We sat at the bar and LoverComeBack recited the Litany according to Her, in which the form was familiar, though the names change from time to time.

"You think S----- has a crush on me?"
"Yeah," I conceded between gulps.
"You think R----- likes me?"
"Not on your life."
"You think J------ has a thing for me?"
"Definitely."

It's a game we'd played before. Or rather, it's a game to me. The arrogance that bothers me in some passes without too much irritation in the case of LoverComeBack. In fact, it can even be satisfying to feed her vanity so. Little did I know that this time, it was no game. By my very agreement or disagreement, LoverComeBack was using my feedback in order to populate the list of sub-committee members for our conference that we're planning. We now have an entire planning staff populated by LoverComeBack's most willing would-be lovers. (Can you tell that I'm going to be getting A LOT of mileage out of this whole conference debacle?)

It occurred to me only later that that is perhaps one of the top three reasons LoverComeBack is participating--the conference allows her to amass a troop of admirers and keep them close to her, all for a legitimate reason. A boon to her vanity indeed. It's almost sinister. What's perhaps more troubling, however, is that our conference is over a year a way. LoverComeBack's interest in any one person doesn't tend to last more than six months. I sense a troubling deficit in which six months are going to be spent dealing with crushes who have been demoted to undesireable hangers-on. A lot could go wrong.

But this is still to come. In the meantime, I marvel. I've always chided LoverComeBack for her lack of discrimination. She'll add anything and anyone to her life, so long as they adore her. This is foreign to me, as I'm as picky about my admirers (of which, admittedly, I have far fewer than she to start with anyway) as I am about whom I choose to admire. Not that that makes my taste any better than hers, only more exclusive. At any rate, I can't help but feel a certain distaste and discomfort over this whole recruiting process. I wish to set myself apart in some way, as if I could wear a t-shirt declaring something to the effect of, "I'm not here to fawn. I'm here to collect copy."

A Beautiful Yours

2009-09-15T20:29:00.002-04:00

Another conference season come and gone. This year it was my turn to watch LoverComeBack present for the first time. (I presented last year, though she skipped my talk and reappeared unexpectedly at my repeat performance several months later at a smaller conference.) I like watching LoverComeBack make public performances. She always has a polarizing affect on the audience, half of the audience being utterly charmed by her sheer youthfulness and playful folly while the other half stares on in horror at her absence of professionalism and mind-numbing lack of meaningful content. I know that I'm one of the few who manages to balance both perspectives in such a way that I'm still charmed. It is somehow impossible to divorce this myriad of impressions from the other quirks that make me look upon her affectionately--her bad habit of spitting before setting off on a trip, her small neat hands that she speaks with in a very un-American way, and her distinctive laugh reserved for when someone has said something particularly nasty about someone else.

To relieve her nerves following her speech, LoverComeBack proceeded to the hotel bar and approached a state near inebriation. Once she had run out of money we went to one last lecture together for the day. It was one of the smaller presentations with a crowd of about twenty stuffed into a 30' x 20' room. The smell of beer coming off of her floated throughout the audience. The constant belching that she tried to keep under her breath left no one in doubt as to who in the room had been downing a few. I kept her left shoulder propped up as she continually leaned over to whisper off-color tidbits in my ear: "Do you suppose the speaker's curtains match her carpet?" etc., etc.

It is for that reason that the Board had a distinct look of horror when LoverComeBack announced that she intends to run next year's conference. What could they say? No one else really wants to, and it is her turn. What's more, I'm to be second in command. The punches just kept on coming for the poor Board.

There is no accounting for my participation as one of the conference organizers for next year, which is probably what bothered the Board. I have trouble accounting for it myself. It's all rather vague. There is something about my professional society that fascinates me. The society is peopled by such a variety of characters that it makes the organization seem like a microcosm for the world at large. Yes, it's as if I want to make my mark in my professional society as a way of reacting against Hugo Chavez or something...'cause it's true--isn't everything just a microcosm for everything else?

Conference Season

2009-09-10T21:49:00.001-04:00

I've two days of conference talks ahead of me. It happens every year in September, and it's a time I both love and loathe. Part of the inherent satisfaction is in the absurdity of it all. It's a "professional society" meeting populated entirely by people who aren't professionals. (Let's face it, I work in a vocational trade, which is no sin if you ask me. It does, after all, pay my bills even if it does absolutely nothing for my non-existent mystique.) The tricky (and touchy) thing about my line of work is that you can have everything from on-the-job training to a Ph.D., and you get paid about the same no matter what. With little monetary difference to show for all of that extra work, everyone's last resort is to go around touting their sometimes long, sometimes short list of credentials. It's rather comical. If you do it according to custom, most people can't even fit everything on a single PowerPoint. (That's what happens when you include your Good Citizenship Award from kindergarten as part of your credentials. Be on the lookout for it. E.g. Haywain McTarry, Ph.D., G.C.A.) Of all of my meaningless credentials, I get the most joy out of throwing around my philosophy degree. Ha! Take that! you well behaved kindergartners! The whole show is fairly pathetic. Still, the bar at the hotel this year is a good one. Look for me there. I'll be the one hopelessly hunched over that math major I didn't finished but will still try to impress you with anyway.

Save us, Superman!

2009-09-09T19:56:00.002-04:00

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Cautionary Tale is trying to save the sea turtles, or something. This I do not understand. How can anyone love an animal that they cannot eat? Seriously, the beauty is in the utility. But I digest...*

What concerns me is something much more dear to my heart that is about to become extinct at the end of the month: clove cigarettes. What a travesty! Good American that I am, I promptly went out and bought five packs as soon as I heard the news, to what end I've no idea. Do I actually smoke cloves on a regular basis? No, but that's beside the point.

Seriously, it is beside the point. The Administration and the FDA claim that flavored cigarettes are "beginner" cigarettes that kids learn to smoke before moving up into "real" tobacco products, like Marlboro and Parliament. (Ha! Does anybody really smoke Parliaments either?) I somehow doubt this. The WSJ reports that clove cigarettes account for less than 1% of all cigarette sales in the US. I'm not sure that ripping them from the market is really going to stem the tide of underage smoking...but this also is not the point...

And now that I start to write about, I don't want to articulate the point, which is probably apparent anyway. As I've always said, most people are not at their best when making political statements, and I know I'm no different. Rather than making this into a political issue then, how about turning it into sentimental blather?

I'm sorry to see cloves go. They're a part of my childhood. (Yes, that part of my childhood in which I was over 18 and thus old enough to buy them legally. Don't quibble with me on when childhood ends. That is also not the point. Are you sensing a theme throughout this entry?) Cloves smell nice, they have a distinctive look to them, and they make your lips tingle. What would a winter's night be after class would get out at 9 without smoking a clove on the long walk out to my car? It wasn't an addiction. It was a treat--a chance to channel Audrey Hepburn in that hookah bar in the sky. And now they're being taken away. And yes, I know that I can still buy them in cigar form (until that is banned as well), but I don't want to be forced into them. I just want that damned stupid part of my life to endure as a mildly rebellious right, and I'm angry that it won't.

---
*Did you catch the blatant rip off of "Family Guy"? No? Good.

Grown up in Translation

2009-09-06T23:59:00.003-04:00

I'm a little over a third of the way through Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy this evening, and admittedly children's literature makes me a bit nervous. I find it hard not to approach it with a certain degree of suspicion. On the surface I worry that how the experience of being a child will not ring true, and beyond that I worry that I will fail to be able to determine whether it really rings true or not. You see, for all that I remember my childhood, I don't actually remember what it was like to be a child. I suppose I'm so limited that I don't see how anyone else remembers the experience either. Does that not, then, make the bulk of children's literature a projected approximation of what adults think childhood is like?

There is something disturbing in that, if they are approximations indeed. I think (if I may return to a constant favorite) that Muriel Spark does get it right in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is of course not a children's book. And even more so, there is something to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, also not a children's book, but at the same time you get something that is a very real experience of childhood--a world in which everything seems to be logical, ought to be logical, and is logical at times, and yet it's simultaneously the stuff of nonsense.

Anyway, with all of this discomfort and suspicion in mind, I think that's why I normally turn to fairy tales before any other story intended for a child's consumption. Fairy tales of course have their own breed of fantasy, moral overtones that can be both bizarre and comforting, and, best of all, some of them don't involve children as characters within the story at all. Mind you, I do like my fairy tales watered down to a certain extent. I'm still scared by the knowledge that Prince Charming didn't originally awaken Sleeping Beauty with a magical kiss but instead rapes her unconscious body. Indeed, only in a fairy tale can the prince rape the princess causing her to wake up (that's to be expected) and fall in love with him (what.the.fuck?!). I mean c'mon. Since when did date rape ever really lead to a happily ever after?

Hmm. We're starting to veer away from Harriet the Spy. The point to all this is that, in order to deal with my discomfort over whether Harriet's experience truly mirrors what it is like to be a kid or not, I propose that all children's stories with children in them be translated into adults. That's right, just make Harriet 24 or so. Instead of Harriet the Spy, we get Harriet the Voyeur. (That I definitely know is part of adulthood, whether you want to admit it or not.) The Boxcar Children? Transport them to tent cities with the rest of the unemployed. Anne of Green Gables? Fast forward the clock and bit and put her with the WWI nurses a la Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. And Nancy Drew? Ah, just make sure she's over 18 and set her on a road trip with George. We know how that is going to turn out. Oh yeah.

2009-09-05T23:00:00.002-04:00

And even now, with the complete panorama of this human life within my vision, I sometimes wonder whether what I took at a distance for a growing tree was perhaps after all only a lifeless trunk, its own greenery stifled by the vines that grew around it.

from The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong

I was touched when I read this because it so perfectly describes the unfortunate time in one's life when things fall out of focus.

I feel like I'm having one of those days (weeks? months?) in which I've been given those drops that dilate your eyes so the optometrist can examine your retinas. The borders of everything are recognizable, but ultimately it's all quite fuzzy and utterly impossible to make out if the light is too bright. I blame it on the terrible repetitiveness of the past week or so. It's dulled me into a state of mental torpor in which I either can't perceive the ripples that are in the air or worse, I don't care about them when I do see them. It makes it impossible to tell what things really are, be they trees or be they lifeless trunks. What does one do for a world gone out of focus?

At any rate, The Tree and the Vine was a good Saturday read, albeit a depressing one. Like Manning's The Chinese Garden, it has a protagonist who is characterized by her willful unknowing. As a characteristic that tends to affect the outcome of the story overall, I'm really digging it, though it walks a fine line between the engrossing "privilege of ignorance" and that otherwise irritating aspect called "denial."

I really hope I snap out of this haze soon.

Car Sickness

2009-09-04T23:11:00.003-04:00

I feel like I've been neglecting the blog recently, but what can I say? As I suggested earlier, life has been an unexpected flurry of activity lately. Riley and I have been out and about hiking and roadtripping a good bit (we've logged around 600 miles in the past five days alone...driving that is, not hiking), and all that takes time. But there's something else that also takes time--justifying the propriety of monopolizing the time of a woman who, it seems, ought to be spending more time with her family and less time with me. (I always seem to understand too late that I should never tell other people what I'm up to.) Indeed, the peanut gallery has demanded to know what right I have to take a married woman away from her family and, conversely, what right she has to spend her time as she chooses. It's very perplexing.

And indeed, how is it to be justified? How is it to be spoken of at all? I'm not sure it is possible to explain exactly what happens over twelve hours of talking within the confines of a car over the course of a couple trips.

From time to time, I like to consider taboos. So many taboos have come and gone, and regrettably so. (Lesbianism is the most notable one that pertains to this blog.) I like to guess at what the last taboo will be. I used to think that the last taboo will be incest--that incest will be the last activity to be adopted/accepted in the mainstream. Now, however, I think the last taboo may be more mundane. Perhaps the last taboo will be the final one to go because it was one of the latest to become prohibitive. I speak, of course, of female friendship. It's odd, but I think people would be more accepting of Riley's and my gallivanting if we were lovers and if our love had destroyed her marriage and thrown her into divorce. To be friends, however, and to seek freedom and escape whenever possible is unimaginable, toxic, suspicious, perverse. It's a strange sickness, or so I'm told.

Say you're sorry.

2009-09-02T21:06:00.002-04:00

Reichstag
Originally uploaded by Haywain McTarry

Riley and I went to Auburn yesterday to check out the various museums. We hit the Dusenburg, Kruse, and WWII museums. Of all the stuff we saw (and it was mainly an amazing array of cars), this picture is the thing that has really stuck with me. It's a photograph of the bombed out Reichstag shortly after the Soviets took control of Berlin. If you look closely (click on the picture to enlarge it), you'll see a Russian soldier in the center of the photograph making his mark on one of the Reichstag columns.

What I find to be interesting about photograph of war torn buildings is the inherent sadness of them--that habitable places are reduced to angry skeletons of their former selves. This isn't exactly so for the Reichstag. Symbolically, the Reichstag was something horrible even before is was pulverized. And now this--the edifice covered by the proclamations and derisions of the Red Army victors. It's like a testament to hopelessness.

Away Games

2009-08-30T21:10:00.004-04:00

Hemingway had his bullfights; I have roller derby. I think we both know which is best.

I wish I had taken pictures of the Kalamazoo bout last night for then, per usual, I'd be able to make up for my lack of content with pictures. Truth be told though, it wasn't a visually spectacular event. The crowd was, I hate to say it, a lot more normal than our hometown crowd. The event was lacking in lesbians, and the goth element was missing completely. But don't let it be said that you can't have a good time without dykes and draculas. As ever, the roller girls from both teams gave it their all, and the sweet potato french fries added a charming touch of local color. All in all, well worth the 8 hour total commute time. I know you don't believe me, but it's true.

Oh, and by the way, Naptown won, 87-58. Go Sirens!

The Human Doing

2009-08-27T22:50:00.006-04:00

For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

I'm always impressed by people who can rattle off bits of poetry that are relevant to their given circumstance, assuming they can do it without ostentation. (Most people can't do it without extreme pretentiousness, so you could say that I'm not impressed very often.) I've always assumed that they've been able to do it because the words actually meant something to them, which is startling to me because poetry very seldom speaks to me. Besides a smattering of Arnold, Dickinson, Rossetti, Sor Juana (of course) and Blake (see above), I'm completely devoid of any poetical feeling. I can, however, quote Blake this time, because he does get it right. That's how the week has gone--a lot dancing, drinking, and singing...now I'm waiting for a blind hand to brush my winging. (Sorry, didn't want to ruin the rhyme...) That's why I haven't been blogging much. Isn't it amazing to be so busy and yet to have nothing to talk about? That's the problem with so much doing. You have this ledger, see? and you add up all your doings, and in the end you find you've summed a bunch of bankruptcies.

It's just a vignette.

2009-08-18T10:51:00.002-04:00

We go to this bar on the near east side. It is, amazingly, one of the few remaining gay guy bars I've not been to. The ceilings are low, and my slight sense of claustrophobia increases with the addition of low-hanging Christmas lights, Chinese lanterns, and parasols. The place is a cross between an old world style pub and an all American dump. Some of the men look familiar. From the presence of one man, whom I've always assumed was a medium-level pusher, I immediately assume that most everyone else at the bar is as well. This seems to be correct: there's more money floating around than you would expect. My friend re-introduces me to the two men, Big Daddy and his gigolo Sugar, whom I met over a year ago.

"You've been to the house, haven't you?" Sugar asks kindly as he extends his hand.
Yes, I've been to the house. It's a fabulous house...the kind of house that makes you wish you were a gay man with limitless disposable income living in a gay man neighborhood. Big Daddy bought the place very shortly before I first saw it and from there holds court with his boy Sugar in toe. Big Daddy tells me later that Sugar is useless, but Sugar does have beautiful brown eyes and perfect caramel skin.
"This is my former employee, Haywain," my friend tells Big Daddy and Sugar, even though they remember me. "Scandalous," she adds, which lets them know that we've slept together. They seem to remember this as well and look to me for an explanation as to why this is important.
"I have only one identity, it seems, and I'm stuck with it," I tell them. They give me silent, sympathetic smiles.

Big Daddy can drink like no one else I've ever seen. To my one beer that I nurse over twenty minutes, he downs six. And he'd already started long before I'd gotten there. Still verbally lucid, his eyes betray that first step into annihilation. He's surveying the crowd, waiting. Big Daddy has a tendency to get arrested for soliciting sex in public restrooms. Out of a sea of gay men, Big Daddy has a gift for finding the one or two straight men who won't appreciate his advances. Sugar is always there to bail him out. That seems useful.

The girl next to me--who the hell is she? No one has taken much notice or introduced her. I swipe a sideways glance and notice that everything about her is pointy--pointy nose, pointy cheeks, pointy chin. She looks harsh, but her maker must have had absolute faith in what the final product would look like. Hers is a face without compromises.
"You're drinking what I would normally drink," she says looking at my beer. "Why don't you drink what I'm drinking?"
"I like my drinks vegetarian," I tell her. Her drink is garnished by a piece of beef jerky. She starts digging around her purse for a lighter. "Damn, I've got nothing," she continues, referring to the fact that she's out of matches as well.
"There's a candle right in front of you," I tell her. For once, here is a woman who doesn't mind me stating the obvious.

And there's my friend in front of me. She's explained to the crowd why I'm there, but she's looking at me, unable to explain it to herself why I'm with her. This obviously bothers her, so she starts texting absent friends whose presence would require no explanation. I don't know why I'm there either, but I know that I love watching the dissipation. Relegated to casual observer, I've only a slight pang of disappointment that I can't find an active place within the degradation.

The Stakeout

2009-08-16T14:29:00.004-04:00

After years of watching, the stakeout finally ended yesterday.

Across the street from my house stands a rental property that one of the local luxury builders bought years ago in order to rent out to families who were waiting for their houses to be completed. The house, which in and of itself isn't anything to look at, sits on a sizeable portion of land, partly cleared but mostly wooded. It's bordered at the back of the property (quite out of sight) by a creek that, much farther to the east, I used to wade in as a child.

When I look out of my bedroom window, it is this house and that land that I see. Not really given to fidgeting, I do tend to pace about when left to my own devices. In front of my window I pace, watching the house across the street all the while. Since families come and go so often there's always a lot of calm but steady activity. Usually unpredictable, its comings and goings have prevented me from doing the thing I've dreamed of for years: roaming the private woods at the back of the house.

Growing up, it was said that the woods boasted an Indian burial ground. What seems silly now sounded reasonable at the time, and being the relatively gentle times that they were (think 1988), none of us kids dared go looking for the cemetery which we felt sure would be both haunted and cursed.

Years later, the builder who owns the property proposed tearing the house down, clearing the woods, and building apartments on the lot. I could think of few things worse than apartments within full view of my pacing grounds, so I went to the city council meeting to protest. I was not alone in this. Other neighbors came out to voice their discontent over the idea, and it was clear the council was not in favor of it either. One of the issues confounding the plan, so said the council, was no less than the presence of the old cemetery at the back of the lot.

"For those of you who don't know," one of the council members began, "The Lyons kept a family cemetery on their land." I had heard of the Lyons before. My house sits on a lot that used to be home to their barn. "Their farm extended from the creek, through B----- (an older subdivision), and on south. As the city developed, the land was split by the creation of F---- Road." (I live on F---- Road.) "At the time it was created, no one thought to run F---- Road up to the cemetery, and now it is completely landlocked." To have extended the road would have further divided up the Lyons' farm anyway. Besides, who knew that the land would ever fall away from them and their private cemetery end up in strangers' hands?

Alas, that is how the story went. I think about the old farm a great deal, mainly because I remember when so much of the land nearby used to be populated by fields of corn or soy beans. I still remember the horse farm on the corner, and the small dairy farm about three miles south of my house. You wouldn't think it had ever been rural Indiana around my house so deeply suburban as we are now, but it was once...and in my time I still remember its vestiges of loveliness.

Ever since the council had mentioned it, I'd wanted to see the Lyons' cemetery. Not knowing exactly where it was tucked away, though, and knowing as I did how many owners in that area had a penchant for large dogs, I'd kept away. My moment came yesterday when the previous renter came to look for any unforwarded mail and ere long drove away again. At that, I told my mother I was off adventuring. She frowned. "There will be big dogs," she said. Ha! I brought my trusty Gerber with me to stab at any offenders. "They've never liked trespassers back there." Ha! I wore my running all the better to run away in. With my camera in hand as well, I dove into the underbrush in search of my geographical ancestors.

I walked about a quarter of a mile and began to think I was looking in the wrong quadrant of the property. No sooner had I thought this, however, than the cemetery enclosure (complete with "No Trespassing" and "Beware of Dog" signs) appeared before me. While I wasn't surprised that the place appeared neither haunted nor cursed, I was amazed to find it could be described in other terms--namely, it was immaculate. The place positively glowed. The graves, I believe, had been restored by a volunteer group a number of years back, but beyond that it also had the appearance of accidental grooming. I call it "accidental" because what appeared at first to be carefully cut grass was soon revealed to be a neat ground covering consisting of poison sumac. I quickly snapped a few shots and looked through the names and dates. As far as I could see, it appeared that the Lyons were buried there (among other branches) through the 1880s. It was a beautifully peaceful little retreat back there, complete with the sounds of an ice cream truck in the distance. I darted, however, when the sounds changed from ice cream bells to gruff barks.

Bitten by dogs I was not. Bitten by mosquitoes, however, I was. Given the thick undergrowth and the presence of the creek nearby, I returned home covered in gigantic welts and possibly, my mother fretted, with a case of West Nile. As I pace again today, I see that I was right to go yesterday: already new tenants have begun looking over the place today. One wonders if they even know what lays hidden beneath the thicket?

Cracked

2009-08-12T19:49:00.002-04:00

When you start talking about lesbian boarding school romances, normally I'm right there with you. Strike that--I'm there way before you are. Everybody has a thing, and for me the phrase "lesbian boarding school romance" rings sweetly in my ears. For that reason, I decided not to wait until the film adaptation of Sheila Kohler's Cracks came out; instead, I decided to read the book immediately. Having finished it a couple of days ago, I'm now struggling to find a fancy way of saying that it was a crummy book that pissed me off.

I'm not sure a plot synopsis is even necessary. Rather, let's change tracks and talk about why the lesbian boarding school romance plot is so appealing. Titillation (or lack thereof) aside, the whole nature of the genre is appealing because, in ways, it's a somewhat ubiquitous experience for most women. I mean this loosely, but it's true enough to say that most of us have had the experience of growing up amongst other little girls (and we have quite an idea of the kindness and cruelty therein), and most of us, if we're honest, have experience of crushing on a female teacher at one point in our lives. (As yet a further digression, you will note how odd it is that, in these enlightened times, many women will not admit to having had any sort of adolescent homoerotic attractions. Of course, it is no difficulty for me to admit to this since I'm a lesbian, but good luck getting a straight woman to admit to such a thing. In an age fascinated by sexual deliniations and accepting them for what they are, we also seem to be uncomfortably constricted by this process of naming behaviors. If your feeling falls outside of these deliniations, it starts to make people nervous. For example, try talking about your schoolgirl crushes if you're a straight woman and try concurrently to avoid having someone accuse you of bisexuality or worse, even if you know you're not. It's territory strictly for the very secure straight woman.)

At any rate, here we are with these stories of shared experience. It's nice to be able to identify, right? It's a little harder to identify with Cracks because the main drama of the story involves the urequited love of a teacher for a student, but that isn't my beef with the novel. Rather, my complaint involves another facet of our englightened times. It seems that just as there is this ubiquitous experience amongst adolescent girls (which I do subscribe to), there is also supposed to be the ubiquitous, analagous experience shared with adolescent boys (which I think is bogus). It is this kind of thinking that, as many have noted, turned the "shocking" ending of Cracks into a female version of The Lord of the Flies. Without giving away the whole ending, there runs the argument within Cracks that female repression and sexual awakening will, under the right circumstances, be channelled into sexual aggression and sexual sadism.

I take issue with this, as I take issue with this whole notion of equality that asserts that the sexes reach a point of equillibrium when we all adopt a stereotypically masculine sexuality. I don't believe that there is such a thing as an authentic female version of The Lord of the Flies, just as I refuse to believe, in the same misunderstood vein, that by "liberation" we mean that women are free to exploit their bodies sexually (i.e. through pornography, wet t-shirt contests, any public sexual act performed for male titillation...) and enjoy it. The whole line of thinking bugs me...this line that posits that we have reached a level of equal, common ground once we can imagine that we are all equally debased.

A Brief History of Blonde

2009-08-09T00:01:00.002-04:00

I swear this wasn't my idea.

Blonde started years ago. When I was four my mother used to put a peroxide solution in my hair and send me out into the sun for a while. It worked wonders. By mid-semester in kindergarten I was an unapologetic (and fairly natural-looking) blonde. It stuck with me for several years because it is true--blondes do have more fun. By the end of elementary school, however, I was ready for a change. I transitioned to some reds (tending toward burgundy) and eventually toward dark browns (again, tending toward red). Little did I know that beneath all of that haircoloring, however, my natural haircolor was changing from a flexible brown to raven black. But knowledge of this change is still in the future...

My college years were colored conservatively. I stuck within the brown family. I still splashed peroxide in my hair from time to time, but nothing too liberal. It was just enough to give a hint of lightening my hair, but nothing more.

"You'll never be truly blonde at that rate," my mother told me, which seemed odd because I had never thought that being blonde was the final goal. "You'll need a good strong bleach." And that's exactly what she went out and bought. L'Oreal Feria #200, to be exact. Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2004 my mother dumped a bottle of the stuff in my hair. The results were disastrous. On top of the fact that I was attempting to bleach over colored hair without having stripped it first, my hair natural haircolor had become too dark. The result was a brassy red that had to be seen to be believed. After about six months and stepping up to Feria #205, though, I was real deal Billy Idol blonde.

It should be noted that even in the midst of this hair-bleaching success, I still looked awful. When you have a color that is so completely unnatural, it's impossible to look good. At best, you can only hope for a look that approximates the word "bizarre." Despite the fact that I never really loved the look, it was still, well, fun. It had a certain endearing (and enduring) quality to it. I was blonde throughout my whole clubbing lifestyle with LoverComeBack. Months after we had parted ways, LoverComeBack told me that the club regulars, whom we knew by sight alone, would still come up to her and ask, "Where's Blondie?" Alas, the bleaching job lasted longer than the relationship. C'est la vie.

By 2006, just over two years after that first fateful bleaching, I renounced blonde. I felt like I was too old for it and that I needed to look a little more professional before diving into my full time job. I attempted to go back to brown, which ended up as a pink, washed out into an ash grey, and then mysteriously settled on a very odd shade of champagne. (It actually looked pretty awesome while it lasted.) I was happy enough to go back to brown, and I swore that my Billy Idol days were over.

So what in the hell happened today? I wish I could tell you. My mother obviously caught me in a moment of weakness. "I've always wanted to see you in that haircut with your blonde hair!" she confessed. (It's true that during my previous blonde period, I had been wearing my hair a tad longer.) I told her to do as she wished. My tarot reading the night before revealed that my future lies in my past, and blonde is certainly an element from my past.

Was it really all in the cards? Probably not. I still don't exactly like my Capt. Peroxide look. I'll probably change it as soon as my hair recovers from the shock of it all. (We left the solution in for two hours today, an hour longer than suggested, in a successful attempt to overcome my naturally black haircolor.) The burning was tremendous, and the pain of washing it out was excruciating. Bleaching one's hair is not for wimps. It's also not for anyone who has any sense. What the hell was I thinking?

Oh the mountains are high and the flood plains are wide...

2009-08-04T21:03:00.006-04:00

So you know how I've been talking about the significance of The High Priestess in my life and that metaphorical, mystical journey one embarks upon when one follows a body of water to its source? Well, I did that today...only it wasn't so mystical...and it smelled like fish. Where is the source of it all? Turns out it's a sewer.

Deep, huh? (No pun intended.) Yes, with the torrential downpour today came the floods. We have a storm sewer/ditch system that starts about a third of a block east of my house (which is what you see pictured above) and runs along the eastern and southern-most aspects of my property and ends about two blocks west of my house. For the past twenty or so years, this has worked pretty well. The ditch has had to hold a lot of water, but generally speaking it has always been able to handle it. Recently added subdivisions in my area have made this system markedly less effective. Apart from having less ground to soak up the water, the ditch in my backyard is slowly turning into the basin that collects all the neighborhood storm water.

Ultimately the water today approached within 8 feet of my walk-out basement, which was a little too close for comfort. After some quick deliberations, my mother and I decided it was time to start sandbagging. This wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, and it made me feel oddly vindicated for being poor. You see, the only reason I have large bags of sand around is because I couldn't afford to buy a 4 x 4 truck. Instead I bought a 2 x 4 truck and 400 lbs. of sand to weigh my bed down when the winter months roll around. My mother and I took about 100 lbs. worth of sand and started filling pillowcases to line the bottom of the back door. I don't say this very often, but fortunately all of our effort was wasted since the water never made it quite that high. It was a very near thing though.

Of course, outside of sandbagging I spent a good part of the day walking around in the rain photographing the new flood plain. I wish that I had reached the source of enlightenment at some point during my walk, but I didn't. I mainly did a lot of sinking into the mud, which was not what one would call spiritually gratifying. As with the tarot, however, perhaps I'm just not doing it right.

The Goddess Re-Invented

2009-07-28T20:19:00.003-04:00

Ovid tells the story of Actaeon in his Metamorphosis, but like most stories told therein, it needs a little help. (For example, a theory as to the meaning of Actaeon's wandering would be more interesting than a list of the names of Actaeon's 35 hunting hounds. Ovid includes the latter but not the former. Clearly Ovid needed a good editor in his life.) For that reason, we'll leave the telling of the story to Rachel Pollack (see Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom).

To paraphrase the telling of Actaeon, Pollack presents to us the young hunter in the midst of his element. He's out on a hunt when he happens to come across a peaceful river. Actaeon decides to break from the pack and follows the river to its source, which flows from a spring where Artemis bathes. Crouching behind a rock, Actaeon becomes enthralled by Artemis' beauty and stays to watch her for quite some time. He could have gotten away unnoticed at any earlier moment, but he just can't tear himself away and is ultimately caught by the goddess. Enraged that she's been the victim of a Peeping Tom, she turns Actaeon into a stag. Confused and bewildered, he runs throughout the forest until his hounds pick up his scent, and the hunt begins again. The master is successfully hunted down by his hounds, and the dogs tear him to pieces.

Pollack uses the story of Actaeon to explain trump II of the Tarot, The High Priestess. The High Priestess is a card of mystery and intuition. It's a card of stillness wherein one turns inward in order to explore the unconscious. Since it's a card of reflection rather than action, it is also a card of intrinsic passivity. Therein lies the danger of what The High Priestess has to offer: it is possible to venture inwards so far and, finding one's inward insulation to be so comforting, never leave one's internal landscape ever again. There is a price to be paid for such inwardness, though, and Actaeon is the example.

Actaeon followed the river to its source, which Pollack notes is metaphorical for an unconscious journey to the self. The water itself represents the mystery of the unconscious, and the journey to the source is of course a search for the truth of one's inmost self. Actaeon found such a source, but he didn't want to leave it. As we are beings who cannot live completely inward existences, however, not to turn outward again can carry dire consequences.

In looking at The High Priestess, we see her on her throne holding her book of secrets. The veil above her separates us from the sea behind her (the same source of water from which inner truth flows). The journey inward involves passing beyond The High Priestess, which is certainly no small task, but interestingly the connection to Actaeon highlights the even greater challenge: leaving The High Priestess again once one has found her. (Image is from Marco Nizzoli's The Secret Tarot.)

The High Priestess is one of my favorite cards from the Tarot. As I've mentioned before, she sits between the pillars of severity and mercy, a place not to be scoffed at. And she is awfully seductive, even if she is hiding a retro-60s beehive hairdo beneath that hat of hers. As one who is relatively comfortable being rather than doing, as Hannah Arendt would say, Pollack's insight has added that last important dimension to the card for me--if it isn't tough to get to The High Priestess, it can be damned difficult to leave her. That's about where I'm at.

That said, I still can't do a reading for myself. My eighth Tarot deck arrived this past weekend, and at some point I'm going to have to admit that my rapid acquisition of decks is but a futile search in order to find a deck that will tell me my own story. Clearly the problem is not with the deck that I'm using but with me. Hopefully this is something that I will accept before I blow the rest of my remaining pocket money on yet more Tarot decks.

New Look

2009-07-27T21:29:00.003-04:00

It's funny how you can clear up clutter on your floor, and your space will immediately appear tidy. Tear stuff down from your walls, however, and the room won't look any tidier. It just looks empty.

Little did I know when I was sixteen that when I plastered my walls with posters that I was actually making a lifetime commitment. It just so happens that it is aesthetically impossible to take down a poster or print of longstanding without replacing it with something else. This becomes a dilemma when on occasions, such as now, I feel like I've grown out of some of my artwork.

Truth be told, I haven't really grown out of anything; I'm merely trying to de-gay my room. Mind you, my room will always be gay...it's difficult not to be when you have as many publicity photos of Garbo and Stanwyck as I have up. But hey, they're pretty subtextual, right? (Ha! Yeah, that's what I like to tell myself.) Cecile de France, yummy as she is, is not so subtextual though. Check it:

European or lesbian? Ah, that is the eternal question. (According to the IMDB she only answers to "European," but really, no matter.) How is it that the Continent manages to take two such disparate ideas and merge them into one nearly indistinguishable ambiguity? At any rate, I took down my "Haute Tension" poster (which angrily brought down part of my wall with it) in favor of the much more subtextual cover art for an old edition of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. That's got to be subtextual, right? After all, I'm still puzzling through Sandy's feelings for the legendary Miss Brodie.

But why do this now? It must be that time of the season when spending one's passion in the most over-intellectualized way possible seems more satisfying than any other way. Tune in again next month. Maybe I'll be feeling a little more earthy or something.

But I doubt it.

2009-07-26T18:01:00.001-04:00

My sister and her family piled onto a plane this morning back to Costa Plonca. The family reunion is over, and what did we learn from it? I wonder.

Bad Timing

2009-07-21T20:26:00.003-04:00

Hello. I'm just here right now to prove that I can keep my head above water, in spite of a number of small disasters, just before I sink back down to the bottom of the ocean.

I suppose it would make sense that everything happening right could be characterized in terms of mild bad luck since I am reading Hardy right now. Hardy was the king of bad luck and unfortunate circumstances, no? (Well, if I may say so, it's also bad luck to be reading Tess. What a stupid book...) It all started Saturday afternoon. While I was out to lunch that afternoon I happened to get a call at home from Firsty, my first love. This was by no means ironic considering how I'd just been discussing her at lunch...and explaining how I never talk to her any more. But there was her characteristically rambling message on my machine, and truth be told I was delighted. I returned the call immediately.

"I'm moving out to California in two months," Firsty quickly revealed.
"You're what? Why?! I mean, I know we never talk to each other these days, but I still want you nearby," I said, as if my desires in any way played into her decision making, but it's true. I have always liked knowing she was there. As I stumbled around one Saturday night, which happened to be Pride evening, I felt better looking up to her window on Mass Ave. and singing "On the Street Where You Live." Mind you, I immediately felt a good deal worse once I'd ascertained that she'd moved. Oops.
"Penske is moving out there, and I'm going with him," she explained. Ugh. That does indeed explain a lot.

(Watch as the image blurs and we drift into a flashback...)

Firsty and I met when we were both freshmen in college. Instantly I loved her, as Pat Highsmith would say. She was easily the most intelligent person I'd ever met, and she was also one of the most original. Her imagination and conversation were always an amusing mess of thoughtful discordancies. Add to this the soft brown eyes, voluptuous hips, and a naturally intoxicating scent, and I was done for. I continued to obsess over her for the next 4 years.

These were not what could be characterized as 4 blissful years however. Volatile would be more the word. Firsty had a sort of genius that carried madness along with it, and I don't say that lightly. Her depressions were deep, and her moodiness made easy living difficult. On top of her inner turmoil, Firsty didn't play well with others either. Her tremendous powers of observation she used for evil rather than good...or even satire. Firsty had an uncanny and unscrupulous ability of sensing a person's weaknesses and exploiting them to the fullest. She could be extremely hurtful and extremely cruel. Not many of her friends survive from those days. No one fancied the abuse...not that I fancied it myself, but it did fascinate me. As nasty as she could be in her estimation of me and my faults, she usually happened to be right. No one knew me better than she, and this was gratifying.

Her other friends that did survive and talk to her to this day fall into a very specific class of person--the pseudo-intellectual male. Firsty's Achille's heel lies in a disappointing and devasting need for masculine approval. She likes a good show though, and her small streak of gullibility always leads her right to the arms of the nearest so-called intellectual who always promises to "fix" her.

There were several such magicians who came into her life during our 4 obsessive years. It took its toll on our friendship. I was always second to these men whom I knew to be charlatans, and I didn't appreciate it. (This isn't to say that Firsty didn't love me. I believe she did, but I also believe she thought a good deal less of me than she did of the men in her circle. This is a most unfortunate quality in a girl who believed herself to be a lesbian at the time. It was also unfortunate considering how badly I wanted to be first in Firsty's eyes.)

Penske is the latest in the long line of Firsty's menagerie. What form does this one take? Penske was always exceptionally easy to pick out when were all in school together. He used to wear the black sweat shirt, black sweat pants (held close at the ankle by large elasticized cuffs), and no shoes. It was a mark of his sincere devotion to anarchism that he didn't wear shoes. Nevermind the fact that his sincere devotion to being anti-government hasn't kept him from begging for state grant money his entire life. At 40, Penske has never held a serious job. I asked Firsty to consider her position--she's moving cross-country with a loser with dirty feet.

The whole idea is, as you can imagine, very upsetting. Then, as now, my opinion, advice, and desire for something better for her, really doesn't matter. To California she goes, and I can't help but feel devastated. I want her here, even if I don't want to be with her. Such is my tyranny.

All this debate eventually moved from a phone conversation to my back porch. We sat outside drinking and smoking cigars for some five hours. My mother joined us for part of it, as she always adored Firsty. At some point whilst we were outside the phone apparently rang unbeknownst to everyone. It was my sister calling to say she'd be at my house in less than 12 hours. My mother and I never got the message. Hardy-esque bad luck strikes again.

Come Sunday morning, my sister, her husband, my niece, AND my sister's in-laws all appeared on my doorstep, and of course I was nothing less than surprised. I wasn't prepared to receive them. My Pop-Tart t-shirt and daisy dukes that I'd worn to bed just didn't seem right for the occasion.

Talk about an uncomfortable meeting, and it hasn't gotten any better. Uncomfortable silences abound. It's becoming stressful...and it's only been three days.

Move Along. Nothing to See Here.

2009-07-15T21:01:00.003-04:00

Spencer, Indiana
Originally uploaded by Haywain McTarry

The weather was so nice yesterday that I felt compelled to take one of my characteristic mini-roadtrips, though this one was less than spectacular perhaps because I didn't have Riley as a sidekick.

I randomly picked S.R. 37 as my byway of choice. I figured I'd just start heading south until I got tired of the whole thing. Round about S.R. 46 I didn't exactly get tired, but Spencer somehow sounded compelling so I turned off 37 and headed west. I knew Spencer would either be really cute or really stunted. Turned out to be the latter.

What is there to be said about such a place as Spencer? Not to dis on it too much, for I do love anything Indiana, but Spencer is home to one of the ugliest courthouses I've ever seen. (Click on my Flickr link for evidence of this.) The town square is bordered by row upon row of abandoned offices and is also fenced in by a set of railroad tracks along its northern most aspect. This gives it a junked, industrialized look that is rather depressing.

I sat around the square for a time just getting a feel for rhythm of the place. I was not alone in this activity. People were standing around everywhere in apparent states of paralysis. With such a lack of industry and such an excess of townsfolk, there seemed to be little else to do apart from good old fashioned gawking. It was as if Spencer's entire citizenry existed as a potentiality alone...as if it were a community directed toward waiting for something to happen. And of course, save for a dyke walking around taking pictures, nothing did happen...as probably nothing ever does happen. Mind you, you still have to pay for parking. (Twenty-five cents for two hours to park on the square.)

After watching a rather gruff policewoman corral a handful of twenty-something-year-old delinquents into the County Corrections mini-bus for road duty, I set off myself. I ventured away from the square but soon returned to the courthouse once I sensed that the natives were not taking too kindly to this new fangled technology known as the digital camera. They probably didn't like my unnatural hair gel either. In the end, the atmosphere was mildly creepy.

I decided to take refuge at the nearest McDonald's because, hey, everyone belongs at McDonald's, right? Little did I know that I still hadn't managed to make it out of the Twilight Zone. I entered in a side door and was immediately struck by a large crowd of old women, all completely silent. The place smelled of a nursing home and had adopted the reverence of a church. I wondered what mystical, cultist proceedings I had stumbled into.

"B - Hamburger," I heard called out by one of the women. "C - French Fries," she continued. "A - Chicken Nugget," the same voice cried. Clearly this woman was the dreaded ringleader.

Slowly it hit me that I had trespassed upon the town event of the afternoon. That's right, it was McDonald's themed Bingo. And I was not welcome.

"I'm just here for a Coke," I reassured them, and they continued on.

All in all, I must say that the journey was better than the destination. On my return voyage I hopped onto 44 East just for the hell of it. It's an interesting twist of road that signifies the victory of the farmer over the civil engineer--the road has so many ninety degree turns because the farmers refused to allow their land to be split. It was really pretty country, albeit hard on the brakes at times.

Only Epigraph

2009-07-12T14:11:00.002-04:00

During my sophomore year in college the creative writing department sponsored a "graffiti wall," which was really just a cork board covered in construction paper. The wall invited any passerby to write down a random thought. It was an amusing project, and the board never failed to fill up within a week, by which time the creative writing staff would hang new paper so we could start all over again. Variety abounded...except for one participant. Every week, the same neat hand would come by and write "Only connect..." The philosophy caught on like wildfire, and soon enough it seemed like every undergraduate was using it for his email signature, including several acquaintances of mine. Just to be a snot, I used to ask them what they were connecting that week. I never got an answer. Seems like people weren't really interested in only connecting after all; I don't think they even connected "Only connect..." as being the epigraph to E.M. Forster's Howards End, which it is. Thus, "Only connect..." was left flung out in space, strangely unconnected to anything save some undergraduate email accounts.

***

I suppose it would be remiss of me not to connect this recollection with the current moment. After being so impressed by Rosemary Manning's The Chinese Garden, I slowly rounded up three more books by her. These additions ranged from dreadful to mediocre. In one of her mediocre books, she reflects upon "Only connect..." and decides that the more realistic and mature approach is to change the epigraph to "Only accept." Still not a very compelling imperative.

At any rate, I think I can put Rosemary Manning aside now. It really was a shock that after the perfection of The Chinese Garden that her other work should be so unremarkable. It does, however, support my persistent theory that some people only have one story to tell...usually the story of the one or two things from their past with which they have failed to come to terms. Manning started The Chinese Garden some twenty years after the events of the novel, and I don't think she ever got over the experiences she recorded therein. It's amazing and in some ways makes me jealous--I can't imagine any self-imposed emotional experience that will still seem meaningful twenty or more years down the road. Perhaps this comes from being too disconnected...but at least I can identify where a few famous epigraphs are pulled from, dammit.

Multiple Choice Manuals

2009-07-08T20:40:00.004-04:00

I've been buried up to my eyeballs in paperwork over the past few evenings. Not that paperwork is ever especially exciting, but this particular set of tasks happens to be excruciatingly gruesome--writing up rules and procedure manuals that bring us in compliance with various government regulatory commissions. This is a task to which I am not well suited, as I have not heart for The Rules. Rules and regulations, especially within my work sphere, have always seemed like a very depressing admission that 98% of people cannot be trusted to behave ethically or, worse yet, sensibly. It gives one cause to pause.

Late Night Lit Crit

2009-07-04T23:44:00.003-04:00

I spent most of the day finishing up Patricia Juliana Smith's Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. It was an arduous but worthwhile read as I especially enjoyed her evaluations of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The underlying observation that gives the study its name is worth noting:

In terms of narrative, lesbian panic is, quite simply, the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character--or, conceivably, an author--is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire.

What also becomes apparent in her interpretations is a common function that lesbian panic fulfills--namely that it forces the narrative into heterosexualized plotlines. For instance, lesbian panic may provide the rising action and conflict, but traditional courtship or marriage plots ultimately prevail as the lesbian character either denies, subverts, or sublimates her desire. And if marriage and heterosexuality can't supply the expected resolution, well, there's always suicide.

I liked Smith's application of the concept of lesbian panic to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie even if I think it is a bit suspect at times. The word 'lesbian' appears all of one time in novel, and I think Smith is very right to pull it from the book and make much of it:

She [Miss Brodie] thinks she is Providence...she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end. And Sandy thought, too, the woman is an unconscious Lesbian.

From an interpretative standpoint it is an important line because it forces the reader explicitly to consider Miss Brodie as a lesbian since Sandy is our reliable observer. We have to take what Sandy gives us with much more than a grain of salt. The problem is what to do with it once you have it. Much more clear, but no less troubling when you're trying to work out Miss Brodie's character, is the obvious fact that Miss Brodie is using her students as sexual proxies. To what end? Smith argues that through the complex triangulation of Miss Brodie vs. her ex-lover Teddy Lloyd vs. a Brodie girl, Miss Brodie is able to create a sexual bond with her female student by way of her sexual link to Teddy. Sandy ends up being that student, whom Smith also argues is frustrated in her desire to sexually bond with Miss Brodie, which she only manages to do by sleeping with Teddy Lloyd.

I'm not so sure about this, but this is mainly due to a sort of mental block since I cannot possibly understand how triangulation can in any way be sexually satisfying. What I do like about it, however, is that it does go some way toward explaining why the movie version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie departed so pointedly from the novel. In the movie Sandy destroys Miss Brodie, confronts her with the fact, and then departs triumphantly, presumably having reached the end of her bildungsroman. The novel is much less resolved. Sandy still destroys Miss Brodie, which Smith claims is out of sexual frustration, but does not confront her with this fact. She has no triumphant march off-screen either. Rather, we see exactly where Sandy ends up. She converts from Calvinism to Catholicism and becomes a nun, Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, in the process. Notably, she is a nun who writes books on psychology. The novel ends:

And there was that day when the enquiring young man came to see Sandy because of her strange book on psychology, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace," which had brought so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever.

"What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?"

Sandy said: "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime."

My mother has always maintained, cynically and simply, that the change in the ending was necessary in order to give a broader appeal to the movie-going audience. Give them a big finale, not ambiguity. The function behind Sandy becoming a nun that Smith cites, however, suggests something different. Insofar as Sandy was frustrated by her inability to sexually bond with Miss Brodie, Sandy is attempting to recreate her childhood experience. Perhaps, she's trying to do it over again to her satisfaction. In becoming a nun, Sandy has maintained the homosocial environment that typified her all-girls' school experience. In what is a greater stretch, though not one I think is entirely implausible, Smith argues that Sandy becomes a Miss Brodie. Either way, this is not really an appropriate ending for the movie, which certainly does not allow a great deal of room for lesbian interpretation. Sandy's becoming a nun is consistent with the underlying lesbianism of the novel; deleting it from the movie is consistent with the deletion of the rest of the lesbian content as well.

I take much less issue with Smith's interpretation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The fact that she mentions it at all deserves praise, and to explain this I must again refer to the movies. In 1997 Marlene Gorris and Eileen Atkins, who are both capable of phenomenal work when they're at the top of their game, teamed up to adapt Mrs. Dalloway for the silver screen. It was a surprisingly monstrous failure due to the simple fact that I think they missed what the book is all about. When you get right down to it, Mrs. Dalloway isn't a story that contains elements of homosexuality, it is about homosexuality. In Smith's terms, the novel's action is predicated along the lines of lesbian/homosexual panic--Clarissa's lesbian panic in relation to Sally, Septimus' homosexual panic in relation to Evans, and Miss Kilman's lesbian panic in relation to Elizabeth. In light of these panic attacks, the resolutions are grim--unhappy heterosexual unions, suicide, frustration, and general regretfulness all around. Smith's interpretation formulated in these terms, is, I believe, spot on. (VERY ironically, the other person to have gotten this right amidst a sea of "wrong, wrong, wrong" is Michael Cunningham in his novel, The Hours. In what is an otherwise horribly contrived and atrocious rendering of Mrs. Dalloway, at least he recognized Mrs. Dalloway's lesbianism...sort of. It's still an awful interpretation though...spare yourself the agony.)

That Smith highlights Mrs. Dalloway as a classic example of lesbian panic and I call it a story about lesbianism per se carries implications of its own that I've been giving some thought. As I read over Smith's numerous examples of lesbian panic, it occurred to me that by my own definition, lesbian panic is, very simply, what lesbianism is. That's was lesbianism does--it puts women on an emotionally touchy ground in which they ultimately retreat into some lifestyle that is consistent with heterosexual norms (though I'm much more liberal in my idea of "heterosexual norms" than most people probably are--for me it goes up to and includes gay marriage). This perspective is, of course, a reflection of the sum total of all of my most significant emotional relationships...relationships that have always involved "straight" women, women significantly older than myself who are more often than not married, and women who are off-limits due to social/moral constraints (e.g. those in a position of responsibility/authority over me). All of these relationships have been failures, and all of these women in these situations have panicked, so to speak. So you see, there really is no practical difference, no great divide between lesbianism and lesbian panic, for me.

Why would anyone ever want it to be so (and have no doubt, this is how I want things to be to a certain extent)? As Smith also rightly points out, once characters resolve themselves, they become utterly non-narratable. (I really love this idea of the "non-narratable," by the way.) So long as there is panic, there is a story. In fact, it is the panic that gives the story its impetus. At the end of the day, I almost cannot imagine there not being a story. It is, strangely enough, no way to live. A denial of the happy ending, or even just a plain vanilla resolution, stands as insurance against being non-narratable. That is, I think, what is most important at the end of the day.

The Nightcap

2009-07-02T22:33:00.003-04:00

I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.

from Rilke's "I am too alone in the world"

(I am aware that to quote Rilke is to approach the summit of gayness, perhaps only to be surpassed by Whitman. But what the hell? These things happen.)

I mysteriously fell asleep with my book nestled against my chest, which was odd because it's a really good book. I awoke when my cell phone rang--Bach's "Badinerie" blaring. It's a nice little ring tone that never fails to irritate me. Tell me again why it is anathema for cell phones to ring like normal phones. "I'll be there in 15 minutes," I hear on the other end of the cellular waves. It's too late for a nightcap, but I head down to S---- anyway for one beer before bed.

S---- must suck in and do something unwholesome with select members of the crowd, for the parking lot is always full but the place itself always empty. I have never understood this. I also don't understand how the bartender can be such a perplexing cross between the Scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz" and Kenny G. The Badinerie piped in again in the midst of my musings.

"You sitting at the bar?"
"Yes. The frost is on the beer mug and the fodder's in the shock."
"Good girl."

I could tell from her tone that she hadn't caught my James Whitcomb Riley reference. She had let the comment go as something obscure and unimportant, vastly unimportant in comparison to this early victory she'd scored over me--she'd gotten me to go into the bar on my own to wait for her. She knows that I *hate* sitting at bars alone. I could afford a lame chuckle though. After all, she didn't know that I'd already set up a defensive position behind my newspaper. Combine that with my "Talk to me and die" look, and I felt relatively secure that no one would say anything to me.

After making it through the editorials, national outlook, and the market outlook, she finally appeared. The soliloquies, her soliloquies, could begin.

The problem is that my cynicism was already up before she had entered the room. Maybe some adverse osmotic process had occurred earlier when my book had spent so much time on my chest. Maybe I just know better at this point. The confessions begin and I am utterly mystified. It suddenly occurred to me that 90% of all forms of self-expression must be exercises in deceit. But the thing was was that she wasn't lying to me; I had the distinct sense that she was more interested in lying to herself, while I was but the tiny bystander. At the present moment, removed from my nightcap, I don't honestly believe that the majority self-expressive endeavors exist for the purpose of dissimulation alone. But you see that's her poison--when you sit next to her it all seems so logical and so expected that you can't help but assume that everyone must be lying all the time.

While it's shocking to lulled into a state of contempt for everyone around you based off of the ramblings of one person, I was more disturbed by my general lack of clarity. What if I couldn't tell the difference between the lies told for her benefit, the lies told for mine, and the miscellaneous excess banalties that comprise the truth? What if, God forbid, my perceptions were wrong. It would be artful, romantic, obsessive, and frustrating to say that I must believe that I have a certain mental mastery over a woman whose heart I could never conquer. (The overly-dramatic use of words like "mastery" and "conquer" is what makes this artful. Just pointing that out 'cause I'd hate for you to miss it.) But it isn't true. I would want to be spot-on in my judgments even if I'd never cared a damn thing for her.

It's a sickness or a neurosis or something similarly socially shameful to want to believe that one can always analyze a situation and always extract the truth from it. It's even sicker to believe in one's perfect ability in this area. But that's what I want, and I don't know why it's so damned important. I am dismayed by the thought that I'm using it as a sort of outsider's consolation prize, as if being excluded doesn't matter so much so long as one knows exactly what's going on should one be included. Indeed, it is to know even better what's going on than the actors themselves are aware. It establishes an omniscient narrator's superiority over the subject, and that is a very pleasing idea.

The mere desire to dissect and my confidence in my perceptions guarantee nothing, of course, and it worries me that I've lost, or tend to lose, my objectivity in instances when I would most prize it. Sadly, it is hardly worth casting a critical eye unless one is given a window into truth. That's all I'm asking for even though I know it's unreasonable...and possibly unhealthy.

Easy Riding

2009-06-30T19:48:00.001-04:00

I'm chapped!
Originally uploaded by Haywain McTarry

The idea today was that Riley and I would beat the heat and take a tour of the Scottish Rite Cathedral. When I got outside, however, I quickly noticed it wasn't hot. It was, in fact, quite pleasant. Why waste the day on a bunch of Freemasons? We were off to Brown County!

Our first stop along the way brought us to an off the beaten path roadside cafe in Bean Blossom. We ate outside in a lovely shaded garden, dismayed only by the fact that the place didn't serve beer. Perhaps this was all for the best. Sotally tober as we were, we still managed to spill a little bit of everything on the tablecloth. This was remedied by hiding our stains beneath strategically placed dishes and corn chips. We had to leave once we ran out of chips.

In Nashville Riley and I decided to hit every candy store we could, though we quickly tired after two. "Let's move on to leather," Riley said, and so we did. She showed me to her favorite biker shop. It was there that I lived the dream.

Ages ago Cowgirl had let me borrow her rodeo chaps. I didn't need them for anything in particular; I just wanted to try out a pair. Once I had tried them, I knew that someday I would have to buy a pair of my own. I'm not sure what the experience is like for men, but wearing chaps when you're female (yes, I'm going to speak for my entire sex) is an incredibly satisfying experience. If they fit correctly, which is to say like a glove, chaps will pull on your pants in just the right way making every stride a memorable one, if you know what I mean. Combine that with the tanned leather smell, and you're guaranteed to feel like a badass sexy mofo when you walk down the street. Lord knows I certainly did as we crawled across Nashville. (And if I may say so, kudos to Riley for indulging me by not being embarrassed as I paraded around thus. But hell, why should she be embarrassed? At this point, we have matching chaps! She couldn't talk me into the vest though...)

Now what am I going to do with the things? Strap them on when I mount my Schwinn? Probably not. It's very likely that I'll continue to parade with them on at various inappropriate times. (Look for me randomly strutting downtown.) Besides that, I've no doubt that they'll complement any outfit worn to Roller Derby. It all just kind of fits together. You'll see.

Sweet Seyrig

2009-06-28T17:27:00.004-04:00

Originally uploaded by Varla's Drive

The time has come to mention an actress whom apparently everyone has heard of (especially if you're European) except for me. Dig it--Delphine Seyrig.

I was newly introduced to Seyrig last night when I watched "Daughters of Darkness." The movie itself is pretty dreadful but is redeemed in part by Seyrig playing the role that all femme fatales should play at least once in their acting career--the lesbian vampire. As a lesbian vampire, Seyrig ranks very high. She manages to channel the Marlene Dietrich look to utter perfection. Her accent is delightfully unplaceable, though it happens to be a French accent, and her seductive, throaty laugh is enough to make 800 virgins want to drain their blood for her.

While Seyrig apparently hit the big time in Europe, facts on her are scant. Several sources note that she took a decidedly feminist turn in the mid-70s. Indeed, in 1976 she directed a short film based off of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. That's not just a work of feminism there; that's hardcore separatism and quite a statement to make to boot. Tasty.

Just like the lesbian vampires themselves, actresses like Seyrig ought to carry on being seductive and dangerous forever, but sadly she died in 1990. She lives on in my overactive imagination, however, immune to both time, aging, and the dialogue inherent in bad Belgian B movies.

Unknowing in the Garden

2009-06-26T20:16:00.004-04:00

There are some books that I simply enjoy discussing and still others that I feel compelled to mention in the hopes of carving out a small space for some deserving but forgotten work. Rosemary Manning's The Chinese Garden fits the bill on both counts.

Put simply and inaccurately, The Chinese Garden is a lesbian coming of age story set in the late 20s. It has the whole all girls' boarding school thing going on, which immediately classes it alongside Dorothy Strachey's much better known coming of age story, Olivia. While the two books do hang together copacetically enough on the same bookshelf, they differ substantially in terms of the delivery of their content. Olivia offers a first person narrative of a young woman who loves [her teacher] and loses. (And, I might add, she loses her across a tremendously perplexing hermeneutical landscape. The reader never knows whether he should be applying a Freudian interpreation to a pre-Freudian story.) Hermeneutics aside, however, it's a fairly straightforward setup.

In contrast The Chinese Garden starts out as a first person narrative in one chapter then moves to the third person in the next and back again to the first person. Just when you think you've gotten the rhythm of the thing, Manning switches perspective midparagraph and is merciless in perspective changes evermore. What's truly shocking, however, is not the mere schizophrenia of the perspectives but that these different points of view defy our expectations. With Rachel, the first person narrator, one expects to hear the voice of innocence turned to bitterly won experience while the third person narrator ought to be (so we suppose) the omniscient guide and faithful observer what lies beneath. This expectation of the roles the narrators ought to fulfill is quickly seen to be incorrect, and I think it has to do with the main theme and curiosity that underlies the story--whereas we expect coming of age stories to be stories about a gradual sense of knowing, The Chinese Garden is very defiantly a story about unknowing.

The Chinese Garden follows Rachel, an adolescent boarder at Bampfield. She is surrounded by the faithful, moonstruck Bisto and the seductive rebel Margaret. Much of the outward drama of the story is fueled by Margaret, who is clearly on her own path to discovering her burgeoning lesbianism. When Margaret is caught in bed with another classmate as well as owning a copy of the newly published The Well of Loneliness, the school is scandalized. While never directly discussed with Rachel, Margaret swears that Rachel would understand her sexual revelation. It is a claim that implicates Rachel and forces Rachel and the reader to confront her own coming of age story. But what has Rachel come to learn? From both perspectives we see a school populated by closeted lesbians and thwarted schoolgirl attachments (both to other girls and from Rachel to one of her teachers). Rachel is able to see and articulate her surroundings (in the first person) quite clearly, but much of the story rests on her refusal to synthesize what she knows into a coherent image of the school. The third person narrator, the powerful voice that we the reader expect to lead us out of the darkest corners with the benefit of a narrator's omniscience, only serves to aid and abet in this stubborn refusal to comprehend. It's something of a shocker that a narrator should refuse to help the reader in such a way, but that's part of the complexity of the story.

Rachel's coming of age story only very obliquely deals with her own budding lesbianism. What Rachel, the first person narrator, truly has to offer is a deft account of how it is possible to see all and to refuse to understand it. I don't think it will ruin the ending if I give away the fact that by the end of the novel, the Chinese garden, that proxy for Eden and setting for sucking upon forbidden fruits, is ultimately destroyed. This follows perfectly from Rachel's own story--the story of one who took her substantial insight and, in an act of fear, denied its grander meaning. She does not allow her own tree of knowledge to take root but instead rips it up.

A small and rather stupid review of The Chinese Garden I found notes that the subject matter, being coming of age lesbianism, is both more palatable (thus making the book more likely to be read by a wider audience) and more commonplace in this day and age (thus making the book one in a series of what is now a passe genre, ergo no one is going to read it). I think such a verdict misses the point of the story. Coming of age lesbianism is the vehicle, but the true adventure lies in how we can see and simultaneously refuse to understand in frustrating acts of unknowing. The third person narrator is a surprising party to this unknowing, and there is always the risk that the reader will be sucked in as well. (After all, as readers we're used to trusting the omniscient voice.) For those who follow Rachel in her first person observations, however, one will appreciate the tragedy of refusing to forge a coherent body of knowledge no matter how disturbing the constituent facts may be.

2009-06-25T22:23:00.000-04:00

Well geez. I wanted to post something today, but who can find the time with all of these celebrities dropping dead? Just think, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson all on the same day. Ryan O'Neill must be pissed at the diverted publicity.

So what if I'm jealous?

2009-06-20T23:15:00.000-04:00

My new shipment of books has been trickling in over the past week, among them Andrea Weiss' Vampires and Violets. It's one of my used finds. I was going to bitch to the seller about the amount of underlining throughout this "Like New" book, but then I realized that I only paid $0.50 for the thing. Seems like poor form to complain.

But anyway, look at the the book and tell me if it's not disgustingly alluring that one knows, without seeing her face, who the woman on the cover is. No one should be that distinctive, that swaggeringly singular, that uniquely sexy. Damn you Dietrich, you offend the gods. And me as well.

Meditating on Meditation

2009-06-18T21:07:00.002-04:00

Back in my student days, I remember trailing along in the shadows of 4Eyes. She used to take me up to the waiting room in the vision care center in between cases. It was a nice waiting room for hanging out--very few patients, and the lighting was always kept delightfully low. Inexplicably, it also had a sort of altar with candles on it for your prayer intentions. (I think it had something to do with a very zealous receptionist who worked in the department.) All in all, just a nice quiet spot. 4Eyes took me up there one day with the intention of facilitating her own meditations.

"How do you meditate?" I asked her. 4Eyes immediately misunderstood. I was asking how she in particular meditated, but instead she approached my question as if it had an objective, universal answer.
"You look at one of the burning candles over there, and then you close your eyes and try to imagine how the candle looks as it continues to burn." She stared momentarily at someone's flaming intention and directly closed her eyes. I, in turn, watched her suspiciously for some time. This was the woman, after all, who advised me to blow off steam at work (should the need arise) by going to the closet at the west end of surgery and jerk off. And why not? That's what she did, so she said.

Ultimately I caved in to the peer pressure and began to stare at one of the candles, and then I closed my eyes. All I could see, though, was 4Eyes beating her meat in a dark closet one wall away from some poor appendectomy patient. Not a pretty vision. I opened my eyes with a shudder, never to contemplate burning candles ever again.

The question of mediation has arisen again with my increasing Tarot collection. So many of the guides recommend concentrating on a particular card in order to give one a focusing point during meditation. Uhh, okay. I'm somewhat suspicious of the recommendation as it seems to come from authors who want you to be sure that they're not kooky enough to actually read from their decks; they're just hip enough to meditate from them. I don't know. For once I think I'd rather be kooky than hip.

Meditation remains a compelling thought, even putting the Tarot aside. I'm never quite sure whether I'm supposed to be clearing my mind or concentrating on something profound. Doesn't seem to matter as the result is normally the same--I usually end by falling asleep.

It's unfortunately true. I decided I was in need of mental clarity today so I decided to wipe my mental slate clean for a bit as I stocked of the rooms. The enlightenment that blessed me, however, is the recognition that I have an uncanny ability to be able to fall asleep standing up. (I learned that in school too, though not from 4Eyes.) Luckily, though, falling asleep standing up seems to be frowned on upon less than passing out in a more comfortable chair. Spartan ways have their benefits after all it seems.

This still doesn't get me any closer to enlightenment, or clear-mindedness, or wherever the hell I'm supposed to be heading. Oh well. I suppose the destination is not so important if one is still having the elemental problem of locating the path, Confucius says.

At least I wear bottoms to bed...

2009-06-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

I desperately wish I had something to say but at present can find no words to describe my current frustrations. Much to my disbelief, the Tarot said it would be so. I did a reading on Wednesday concerning my weekend outlook, knowing intuitively that some part of it would not go smoothly. The reading was summarized by the card at right (from Kat Black's excellent Golden Tarot). I don't think you need me to explain the card to you.

Be all of this as it may, I've taken my Sunday pretty easy. The persistent sound of lawn mowing just ceased not more than 30 minutes ago. (This is the downside of living across from a house that sits on 7 acres.) The constant singsong of Dirk Bogarde's voice ceased as well after my mother finished with the three hour interview she found on YouTube. In the midst of her viewing I asked her if we could switch bookshelves. I wanted to move my overflow from the family room into the bookshelves that line our main hallway. My books have simply become too revealing to be left about in plain sight. I'd rather not have them within view of any visiting guests. The ironic thing is, of course, that no one comes to the house. I hate having guests over. It throws off the context of my living space as most people are very much not compatible with it. It's too disconcerting. But still, it seemed imperative to put my books out of reach of prying eyes. You never know when there might be intruders.

Eating Brownies. Hehe, you meant that sexually, right?

2009-06-09T21:51:00.004-04:00

I went to Camp D---- with Riley this afternoon. Instead of an afternoon of shotgun shooting, Riley promised to teach me archery along with a few straggler Girl Scouts. The camp looked familiar enough, though I'd not been there in over 20 years. Ugly green buildings, mud, sweaty troop leaders deprived of air conditioning, and latrines that look primed for spreading both dysentery and bubonic plague--it was all there as I remembered it. I told Riley about all of this as we sat with our feet kicked up in the front of a golf cart.

"Scouting isn't for everyone," Riley assured me after I'd run through my list of complaints.
"Doesn't matter. I got booted out anyway shortly after crossing the Daisy bridge to become a Brownie." That's the sort of confession I can afford to make around Riley because I knew she wouldn't ask why exactly I wasn't welcome at Scouts.
"You know, there's a joke about reject Boy Scouts," Riley offered. "'I got kicked out of Cub Scouts for eating a Brownie.' There's no corresponding joke for the Girl Scouts though. I mean, what are we supposed to say? 'I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for being eaten by a Cub Scout'?"
That joke could be modified, I wanted to tell her. After all, I got kicked out of Girl Scouts for eating out another Girl Scout...insofar as any Brownie can.

It all goes back to first grade. My best friend was a Little Blonde Thing. We had a lot in common. If you took one letter off of her name and added on two other ones, you ended up with my name. When you're in first grade, that practically makes you blood sisters. We didn't split our wrists and let our blood mingle though. What we did do was a whole lot of kissing. You could always find us on the steel bleachers in the cafeteria going at it. It all seemed quite natural, so much so that we didn't bother to hide it. I look back on it now and realize that my mother aided and abetted us: as second-in-command Troop Leader, she never made any attempts to stop us. Troop Leader Karen was not so forgiving however. We soon found out that kissing a fellow Girl Scout was Just Not The Girl Scout Way. This ended our careers as Brownies. It didn't break up our friendship, though the makeout sessions did cease after we were told we were doing something wrong (even though we didn't know what). We were six years old.

The Little Blonde Thing and I did eventually part ways after elementary school. We never had any classes together after that. I do remember the last conversation we ever had. We were sophomores getting dressed after gym class (same locker room, but different instructors and activities during the same period).

"I'm so glad I was born a girl," she told me.
"Why's that?" I asked.
"I just think we have more fun." And then she darted off.

I saw Little Blonde Thing in the last school play senior year, but have not seen her since. She's now a professional opera singer. I wonder if she's still having fun, and in what way...

Questions asked in our innocence

2009-06-07T16:28:00.003-04:00

I finished re-reading Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca last night. It compelled me to revisit it in the midst of my bad week (see the previous post) since my fantasies sent me in search of a suitable ally, real or imagined. It seemed to me that in times of crisis, it would be nice to have a Mrs. Danvers in my corner--obsessive, psychopathic, diligent, devoted, manipulative, and utterly in love with me. True, you can't have this sort of woman around all the time (not without scaring away everyone else you know), but I can see that sometimes it is nice to have someone slavishly devoted to you.

Some minor details at the end of the book were not as I remembered them, but I think I'm fogged by recent TV adaptations. Still, I went in search of an older edition to make sure there was no funny business going on. (I just couldn't bring myself to trust my newer hardbound copy. How can you trust a work of adult literature that has cheesy illustrations done in pastels?) My older copy backed up the newer one though. After firmly establishing this fact, I lovingly started to thumb through my old copy, which is currently held together by a complex system of paper clips and rubber bands. It's an old "Readers Enrichment Series" 75 cent copy from 1965. Designed to be a student's edition, the final section of the book is chock-full of useless and irrelevant commentary, as well as questions for directed reading. I shuddered as I looked over the ten essay questions. It took me back to high school english when we'd get similar questions like, "Why did Character X behave in way Y when it was inconsistent with his previous actions?" I always hated questions like that. Utterly meaningless and impossible to answer. Inevitably Character X always acts in way Y because there wouldn't be a story if he didn't...but you can't say that and get full credit on an exam. However, that last question in a series of dreary irrelevancies was a real gem:

10. Mrs. Danvers' feeling for Rebecca is in some ways very like a feeling entertained by some quite normal girls for glamorous older women. Mrs. Danvers' behavior is close to insanity at times. What reasons can you give for her behavior?

Lord, this question can be loaded with such a helping of nuance that it isn't even funny.

When considering Mrs. Danvers, I think it's best to approach her with Hitchock's 1940 screen adaptation of the character rather than ripping her from the novel. Mrs. Danvers was originally brought to life by the creepy, campy, severe, and secretly Sapphic star Judith Anderson. Her obsessive fawning over her dead mistress is a good rendering to keep in mind when you need a visual to acompany the book. Mrs. Danvers--tall, gaunt, dressed in black satin--the perfect subconscious lesbian who feverishly keeps alive the memory of the love her life. It's hero-worship and erotic angst all rolled into one, making Mrs. Danvers one of the most striking of villains ever.

Does Mrs. Danvers embody a "feeling for Rebecca [that] is in some ways very like a feeling entertained by some quite normal girls for glamorous older women"? Of course she does, but I think this is more of an interesting criticism on the lives of "quite normal girls" than it is a criticism of Mrs. Danvers. We know what Danny is up to. She's a woman in love, fitted out with every facet of jealousy and obsession you'd expect from an abandoned lover. But what are the "quite normal girls" up to? Where does "quite normal" behavior end and Mrs. Danvers begin?

That is of course where the question above is going when it wants to know why Mrs. Danvers is a freak and my great-grandmother who, like me, was in love with Greta Garbo was not to be considered a freak. We could say that we've entered into a great age of egalitarianism, for now that we've lost our innocence from 1965, there's no doubt that Mrs. Danvers is a pervert just as there is no doubt that I am one too for my *wink wink* hero-worship of Garbo. Progress strikes again.

It isn't progress, though, is it? And I don't say that because I mind that I'm a pervert whereas Great-Granny wasn't. I mind more the fact that now we can't mention that "quite normal girls" do fall prey to these obsessions with other women, only it's better not to refer to them at all than to assert that there is a little bit of Mrs. Danvers in us all (as undoubtedly there was then), not just within us self-proclaimed Sapphics. Indeed, I look around at work sometimes and I feel positively out-gayed by my straight counterparts. Of all the nerve! But there it is--new hires who form obsessive attachments to the older workers, and especially young underling lasses who fall for the rather fabulously secure female physicians. It happens often enough, and damn you if you raise an eyebrow at it. "Quite normal girls" don't have anything in common with Mrs. Danvers! you'll be told. But of course, they do.

I shouldn't wish things to be other than what they are at this point, though. In an age when deviant sexuality has lost all of its taboo appeal, this blindspot formed since 1965 is actually a bright spot in an otherwise boring world. A revitalized, scandalous, salacious taboo has emerged from the ashes of the Readers Enrichment Series essay examination. You still have one hour to complete the 9 essay questions. What happened to the tenth question? Stricken from the list. The correct answer was too hot, too curious to handle.

Memento me.

2009-06-05T19:42:00.001-04:00

Natives of Indy may or may not realize that we had a small TB scare here in the city during the spring of 2007. I remember it well because I was still a student at one of the major hospitals. You'd see dozens of suspected carriers walking through the halls wearing their surgical masks. We'd bring them into the exam room and then, stupidly enough, they'd take the mask off. The patients seemed to be under the impression that hospital workers couldn't catch TB. I wish I could have considered their oversight as a compliment to my strapping good health, but I'm not that naive...nor am I that strapping. Patients seemed to believe that they could remove their masks and risk exposing us because we weren't really people to them. We were extensions of our examination equipment--mere functionaries who didn't breathe and catch diseases and fall ill like they did.

So it goes in health care. Working part time last year I met over 900 different patients, less than 10 of whom probably remember my name. S'alright. I'm not really there to make an impression on them anyway, but every now and then there's the exception.

Earlier in the week I dealt with a patient who will remember me forever. Why so? Because she hates me that damned much. Yes, long after the woman who baked me a chocolate cake has forgotten all about me, this other woman will live on cursing my name. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if her dying words involved calling out into the darkness for me to fuck off. How's that for making an impression?

Shit like this happens and fortunately not too often, though I can think of one other woman who will scratch my eyes out should she ever get the chance. It's an odd sort of personhood that is awarded in this circumstance. Far from the TB patients who lumped me together with the surrounding medical equipment, these patients invest a god-like power in me. I seem to control their fate. I am a merciless and deaf judge. My powers are such that I am responsible for all medical occurrences from Hippocrates on. Most frightening of all, I'm loaded with this omnipotence, and yet I seem to have been put on this earth in order to frustrate and obstruct their every desire. (So you see, am I really so powerful? Or am I but a slave dedicated to exacerbating their frustrations? It's not easy being a god...)

Good grief. I'm very glad this week is over. Stuff like this is too depressing. In addition to finding it dislikable that I am so disliked, it's also sad to note that in some ways the TB patients do hold the more accurate appraisal of my personhood. Due to medical liability, workers such as myself who are not physicians are, in ways, reduced to mere functionaries. Legally, we're not supposed to be anything else, lest of all gods. Trust me, if my employer finds out I'm a god, I'll be fired on the spot.

Kick Her Where? or, A Night at the Derby

2009-05-31T15:02:00.004-04:00

Ah yes, another glorious Saturday with the Naptown Roller Girls. What fun! What excitement! What tackiness! Case in point, where else can you buy one of these?

They were handing out surveys at the derby that asked such important questions as "Do you think the sport portrays women in a positive light?" You know, I'm just not sure how to answer.

Contradictions and cooters aside, though, derby can be highly entertaining. The heady gathering of rednecks, goth/grunge holdovers, and last chance dykes makes for a magical mixture. (The magic being that at any one given moment a fight should be breaking out somewhere, yet mysteriously it doesn't.) But roller derby at its best also provides good sport as well. Our Tornado Sirens (never more aptly named considering the weather that followed the last bout) were well met by the Fort Wayne Bomb Squad. Points were bitterly won, jams were strategically called off, elbows flew, and bodies hit the floor...all in aid of a 78-70 win with our Sirens emerging as the victorious cooters.

In all seriousness, though, it is interesting to see just how a curiosity slowly but steadily establishes itself as a sport. Much of this hangs on just how sincerely the roller girls play out their bouts, but another side of the issue rests on the fans' shoulders. It's the tenacity of the crowd that simultaneously adds a new level of the absurd alongside an added mark in favor of the legitimacy of the sport. After all, how can you not take roller derby seriously when it has cheerleaders like this:

It all started because of a snubbing...

2009-05-28T20:44:00.002-04:00

Is it poor form to comment upon a book you haven't finished (and have no intention of doing so)? Is it even poorer form to say you liked the book as if you've given it a definitive reading? No, it's most likely only poor form to criticize books you haven't read. Praising books you haven't read must be fair.

With that in mind, we turn to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. Sorry, I just couldn't finish the sucker, but I respect and like it anyway. Arabella, who is our female Quixote, is a young woman whose worldview has been entirely shaped by early 18th century romances. She speaks the language of the books, and she holds its characters to be figures from history rather than literature. Within the first hundred pages of the book Arabella mistakes gardeners for "men of quality" in disguise in order to woo her, shady ladies as "women with adventures," and kindly uncles as incestuous interlopers. Her rejected lovers she expects to commit suicide in the midst of their sorrow, unless she should happen to forgive them and command them to live again. The ladies nearest to her are not rivals but fellow princesses. Arabella's altered perception of the world leads to quite a few misunderstandings and adventures of her own, all quite humorous. What is unfortunate is that the adventures are repeated, ad nauseum, over the next two hundred pages. What happens in the last hundred pages is a winding down of the same, until we reach the resolution of our female Quixote.

But what is to be done with such a woman? Cervantes had trouble himself in concluding his heroic man. Don Quixote, you will recall, ultimately rejected his idealized notions of chivalry and romance, and it's a shame too. I don't see that there was any reason why Quixote should have given up the impossible dream, and it would have been charming of him to have continued. Lennox has her female Quixote abandon romance as well, only in her case it isn't a deathbed renunciation. No, the world of romance dies, significantly enough, when Arabella marries. Now what is that supposed to mean?

It's worthwhile to consider what exactly makes the quixotic Arabella so perverse. The humor, as I said, comes from the fact that Arabella responds to the world as if it ran along the lines of an intricate romance novel. She helps the plot along, and she expects others to follow suit (and is sorely frustrated when they don't). What's really shocking about Arabella's behavior, though, is what living in a romance novel necessarily entails for its heroines. As Margaret Anne Doody very rightly points out,

Through reading her romances Arabella frees herself from fearing, or even seeing, the dangers of her position in relation to paternal inheritance. She conceals from herself the sad truth, that she is a pawn in the game of property, by reading books in which women are of great importance...Surrounded by such incestuous and greedy demands, Arabella retains the presence of mind that her reading inculcates. Strong in her conviction that she herself is supremely of importance, she resists the hectoring and the bribery [of her guardians]...

Seeing her perversion from this perspective, it makes sense why Arabella's renunciation of her quixotic ideals is realized in marriage. By marrying she does abandon her autonomy and supremacy that make her such a laughable oddity to those around her.

Arabella's end is, of course, every bit as depressing as Don Quixote's himself. Forced to abandon what is admirable in favor of...of what? What an odd world it is when our heroes and heroines are brought to their senses only when they are brought to heel.

-----

I like Arabella very much, and I sympathize with her. I wanted my first loves (hell, my entire adolescence and young adulthood) to conform to a very particular literary outlook. (Virginia Woolf, you have a lot to answer for.) And while I've put aside at this point the fact that life is not to be lived out in A Room of One's Own, I would still not think to question Arabella's claims to supremacy and autonomy.

The fundamental fact remains, however, that it is perverse (if not downright arrogant) to expect everything of everyone. But why should that be so? I don't see that it was so wrong of Arabella to refuse to be a pawn (and I don't just mean within marriage but within life in general), and it's a sorry state of affair when we do demand it of our heroines to renounce this streak of perversity.

-----

I've been thinking along these lines because it goes along with my current sense of guilt. I feel guilty regarding my variety of arrogance, with which Arabella would sympathize, but I don't necessarily see that this arrogance is wrong. Therein lies the rub. :-/

Once more, with determiniation.

2009-05-27T18:52:00.003-04:00

I'll try posting this once more, hopefully sans technical difficulties, just for you Will. The shame of it is is that it's not even that funny. (But it does feature my hands nicely.) :-D

You should see my oil paintings. Ha!

2009-05-26T19:49:00.001-04:00

Calligraphy
Originally uploaded by Haywain McTarry

Calligraphy is one of those few activities that I do on occasion that helps to reaffirm the fact that I'm an utter artistic failure. (To prove that I'm an artistic disaster, I move to sketching.)

I started doing calligraphy about 13 years ago. (Don't ever let anyone tell you that there are no life skills to be learned in middle school art club.) The problem is that, 13 years later, I have not noticeably improved. What you see at right is my own interpretation of an uncial script, which is more to my taste these days than the flourished carolingian I used to do. I also use a dip pen these days rather than a fountain pen with a calligraphic nib. The dip pen gives a nice depth to the text overall since the intensity of the ink varies across the page. Other than that though, no real progress has been made since 1996. Wait, I tell a lie. I can approximate progress, but only about four days worth. You see, I started this page last night. By Friday I can probably recopy the same poem, only the spacing will be more even and the individual letters more fluid. Yes, four days is all it takes more me to realize my [limited] potential.

If I thought my skills were going anywhere, the page at right would represent the rough draft done in order to assess the necessary spacing for the final project. I would cut out the individual lines and tape them down to piece of paper the exact size of the desired outcome. Then I would start all over again on my good paper, saying a small prayer before each line that I don't misspell anything and that my script doesn't start to expand too much as I go along.

As it is, though, you're looking at the final draft, done simply for the enjoyment of putting pen to paper. I wish I were better, but time has proven that practice does not make perfect.

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T19:38:00.005-04:00

We all braced against the misty wind. After all of the rain, it was a bit cool for a picnic perched up on the balcony of our hostess' third floor apartment. An unnecessary citronella candle had been lit just for warmth.

"Dull, dull, dull," the hostess muttered, referring to one of the now outcast members of the circle.

With that pronouncement everyone around the table seemed to recede into their own silent remembrances of this outcast woman. Let's call her Sarah. Sarah the striking. She was sculpted like Michelangelo's David, or perhaps she traced her lineage back through another of Michelangelo's works...perhaps the monumental daughter birthed from one of the Sistine Chapel's sibyls. Yes, a sibyl's offspring emerging from the womb as a huntress-goddess--that's how she looked.

Sarah did well by her looks, as she also did well by her career. In a circle of mainly uninspired, down-and-out dykes, Sarah was the only executive who could claim any kind of social clout beyond the lesbian velvet rope. Despite these advantages, though, Sarah was never really trusted.

No unfortunate victim of a cynical collective, Sarah really wasn't trustworthy. She attracted folly without fail. A terrible judge of character, Sarah always ended up the unwitting dupe. What might have otherwise made her a sympathetic character made her anathema instead--responsibility was never her strong point either, and when Sarah stumbled, she dragged everyone down with her. Everyone wanted to believe that she would do the right thing by situation x, y, and z, but at every turn she left an inheritance of trouble to those standing nearest to her. She had to go.

That she lasted as long as she did could also be put down to her shy reticence. With all of the folly she did attract, at least she rarely put her foot in her mouth. Indeed, her silence acted as an effective shield for a time, with most assuming that her silence indicated a thoughtful nature that would ultimately sort through the problem at hand. Therein lied part of the mistake on all of our parts. Silent, striking Sarah. She had a contemplative nature, yes, but a thoughtful one, not exactly. And I'll be damned, but at the end she did stand against adversity looking just like David--quiet and scared, but with a cunning plan. Little did any of us know that her plans made her more like a river rock than a giant-killer. When the big waves came, her only plans involved where she would roll to along the bottom of the bed next. Making a stand against adversity was never in the works, and those of us rocks who were too well-entrenched to do anything besides stay put were bound to be abandoned. This of course did not speak well of her integrity, of which she had none, but it did guarantee that at the end of the surge, she emerged as a polished rock.

Out of the whole group, I should have been the first to see through her. I had always liked Sarah. She unapologetically mixed wisdom with her own personal fantasies, usually concocting something of originality in the end. Despite being a rotten judge of character, she could usually identify anyone's foibles with a keen eye toward social satire. I remember walking downtown with her. She would give me tours of places I already knew in my own right, but she would invest in these places a history that was foreign to me. They were histories rich in her own weaknesses. Her accounts were so detailed and so reflective that one couldn't believe she would ever make the same mistake twice. Perhaps she didn't. It's entirely possible that she always found new and devastating mistakes to make. And perhaps it didn't even matter so much that she made so many mistakes. She turned out to be entirely too dangerous because, ultimately, it was obvious that she didn't care about the mistakes she made. The wreckage she produced didn't matter, as she would be rolling along to safety at any moment, emerging at the end of the river as the fairest of tumbled stones you ever did see.

"Dull, dull, dull," our hostess repeated again, bringing us back from our reflections.
"You cannot always have felt that way about her," I returned. Sarah was made famous by our hostess.
"I always thought she was boring," our hostess persisted bitterly. Clearly, it was more damning that Sarah was reserved than that she was a natural betrayer of everyone's interests.
"She was about as exciting as watching water boil," El Diablo directed toward me, as she could tell from my furrowed brow that I disagreed with our hostess.
"Have you ever met her?" I shot back, already knowing the answer. El Diablo is a young buck, and for all that I may not be hip, I'm also not a newcomer. "Sarah had many faults, but being boring wasn't one of them."

El Diablo chortled into her beer. I could hardly suppress my anger. I like justice done to my enemies as well as I like it done to my friends, and I was frustrated by my inability to defend a woman whom I still regard as irresponsible and dangerous. Kind of ridiculous, when you come to think of it. But like so many ridiculous things, it also seemed important.

I know you didn't know this already...

2009-05-22T19:39:00.003-04:00

Life is about learning of course, and it occurred to me that before we all dive into this Memorial Day holiday, I'd like everyone to leap into it with a new skill. For that reason, I have posted a short How To video. What is the topic, you ask? Tush, tush, impatient grasshopper. Watch and see. It's only 55 seconds long, and the musical score is by Vivaldi. Aren't you willing to learn something that only takes 55 seconds?

P.S. No, this isn't what I do for a living. No, even considering this you still don't need to consult the advice of a medical professional. The procedure shown in this video is all a bunch of bunk anyway. Enjoy! :-D

The Next Lesson Will be on "Absence"

2009-05-21T21:24:00.003-04:00

After an unaccountable hiatus (unaccountable because we've been on good terms), LoverComeBack had me over to her place last night. She told me that her new[er] girlie, whom my mother now calls "Childie" after "The Killing of Sister George," would be there, but as I pulled up I saw no visiting car. Being the polite person that I am, I didn't delve into the absence. I knew without asking that it meant she'd had some sort of characteristic meltdown.

After a time some friends of LoverComeBack's, M1 and M2, called up and asked to crash the party. I didn't know the chicks, so LoverComeBack had to explain.
"M1 thinks she's Rico Suarez."
"And M2?" I asked somewhat unenthusiastically.
"M2 thinks she's straight, but you'll see her and think 'Lesboooooo.'"

I'll give LoverComeBack this, her pithy character analyses are usually spot on, as they were in this case. Rico swaggered in and approximated what she must think is Latin charm, while M2 definitely look like a dyke du jour. Thus the stage was set. It's always a fairly repetitive scene. LoverComeBack makes friends about as quickly as she loses them, so to know her over a month is to be constantly introduced to new faces. At this, our 900th repetition, a strange social practice, always there of course, finally made itself manifest before my eyes--whenever I meet a new acquaintance of hers, LoverComeBack always goes into an elaborate introduction on my behalf. It's partly a soliloquy of what qualities she believes are my strengths, my qualms, my eccentricities, and another part that seems to be made up of her vain struggle to prove to me that she can remember things that I know she is on the verge of classifying as "forgettable." At some points it seemed to make the others uncomfortable, as if they resented the presence of a voiceover to explain the object before their eyes that they had already dismissed.

Sporadic introductions and asides continued until Rico's cell phone started ringing. LoverComeBack failed to mention during the course of her narration that starting up a conversation on a cell phone during the middle of a vis-a-vis conversation is one of my biggest pet peeves. (She probably couldn't mention it as she does it enough to me herself.) Speak of the devil, LoverComeBack's phone started to ring. Over Rico's pathetic attempt at attention-getting by talking too loudly on her phone, I manage to make out that Childie had called LoverComeBack. After several minutes of silent listening LoverComeBack looked at me and explained that Childie picked a fight with a wall and lost.

"Can you move your pinkie into full flexion if you have a boxer's fracture?" LoverComeBack asked me.
Assuming every appearance of an expert, I started to evaluate my fifth metacarpal and the fifth proximal phalanx's motion in relation to it. I nodded: "I do believe such a motion is possible under the circumstances. The associated swelling might make it difficult though." Hahah, it's the details make things sound more believable.
LoverComeBack continued to listen. As if to say "nevermind," LoverComeBack explained, "She's cut part of her pinkie off with a switchblade." Ah, nothing takes your mind off of a fractured hand like a severed digit.
Still, not to be unsympathetic, LoverComeBack empathized: "Well, I had a bad day yesterday too; today is yours," and hung up on Childie. There aren't too many things that come in between LoverComeBack and good time...or even a mediocre one.

-----

I'm not sure if I've painted the picture correctly, but small crowds like this are actually kind of disturbing. In a word, everyone is pathetic, and everyone is trying desperately to hide it...and flaunt it at the same time. Rico labored in order to perpetuate a ridiculous caricature merely to hide what is probably a congenital awkwardness. LoverComeBack wanted everyone to believe Childie isn't imbalanced, only she can't resist mentioning Childie's spells of the crazies. And of course, I was pathetic for merely sitting there. Only Dyke du Jour maintained any dignity whatsoever, and that's only because she talked less than the rest of us. Silence--always a good lesson to learn.

Your needle is stuck in your groove.

2009-05-17T21:18:00.003-04:00

Woman overheard at the Broad Ripple Art Fair today: "You know at this point everything starts to look the same."

Yeah lady, well not everything can be memorable. With who knows how many hundred booths at the art fair, this chick wants every one of them to make a unique impression upon her. It's a tough crowd, I tell you.

However, the woman does have a point. There is only so much ingenuity that can be pumped into a ceramic bowl. And photographic pastiches, while limitless in their content, are really nothing new medium-wise. Still, this doesn't bother me as much as it seemed to bother the Overheard Woman. Every now and then a terrific find is there to be had. I didn't happen to find any earth-shattering art this year, but I have been meaning to post a picture of my fabulous find from the 2008 State Fair for a while now.

It's a charcoal by local Indy artist Kyle Ragsdale. Unfortunately because of the reflection off the glass it does not photograph well, but take my word for it that it is a beauty in the flesh. I still remember clapping eyes on it for the first time and thinking how much I wanted it. I also remember my sister clapping eyes on it and deriding me for singling out the most depressing work in the room. Still, it was my find of the season, and I get enjoyment out of it everyday.

At any rate, I can't help the Overheard Woman with the fact that life is repetitive and forgettable, or can I? The Wax Lion and I (with whom I went to the BRAF) were talking about blog topics this afternoon. We noted how bloggers have their main topics that they harp on repeatedly. Yes, those subjects that seem so interesting to the writer...but dammit they can get dull and repetitive for the reader. Because of this I've had an idea that one month out of the year readers need to submit taboo blog topics to their writers. For instance, I'll ask that Janeism cease and desist with all talk about New York City, a Cautionary Tale will forget about museum talk, and the Wax Lion will refrain from mentioning newly dead high school classmates. And I, dear God, I will stop referencing lesbianism for a whole month.

Is this possible? Can Garbo Hate Hermeneutics without lesbianism? Probably not. Janeism needs New York too, a Cautionary Tale has to have place to vent about work, and the Wax Lion is an occasionally haunted soul. What's to be done about it? Bear with us. If we're not the sum of our actions, we are most certainly the sum of our obsessions.

This makes the second "HELLO!" this month.

2009-05-16T23:50:00.004-04:00

As an "Auntie Mame" fan, I have a place in my heart not only for Rosalind Russell but for Coral Browne (who played Vera Charles) as well. Hell, I have a place for all women who, as my mother would say, look expensive. And on top of everything else, put Browne in a movie where she makes it with Susannah York (see "The Killing of Sister George"), and we have a winner!

True, the scene is a little awkward and there are some disturbing emotional undercurrents floating around, but trust me, it won't bother you. It certainly didn't bother me.

Avert your eyes!

2009-05-15T20:47:00.002-04:00

Monastery Immaculate Conception--Ferdinand, Indiana
Originally uploaded by Haywain McTarry

Well shucks. I love readers as much as the next blogger, but this isn't a site for everyone.

I attempted to write an entry last night about my roadtrip with Riley down to Ferdinand to visit the Monastery Immaculate Conception, which is home to the Sisters of St. Benedict. It's an absolutely wonderful place, as were the other roadside attractions Riley and I hit, such as the old state capitol in Corydon and Schimpff's Candy Store in Jeffersonville. I removed the entry this morning because it didn't seem to be in the spirit of my blog. I hate posting uber-generalized accounts of my day. Besides, I knew in my heart of hearts that I was avoiding talking about the most interesting aspect of the trip--the fact that Riley's husband and children seemed to resent so much that she took off for the day to said attractions. More on that later.

Anyway, as I said, I took the entry down this morning. I think Google mixes up links pretty quickly though, and though the entry was off by 7:15 am, at 9:30 this morning I had a hit from none other than the Sisters of St. Benedict. It's a link that essentially led nowhere, since its reference to the Monastery had already come and gone. Sister So & So stayed on for a while though, through 15 minutes and 10 page views. For this, I feel truly embarrassed and guilty.

It's difficult to explain, but somehow I feel like nuns should not be exposed to my blog. I write to entertain, not to offend, and my fear is that I'm more likely to offend an unsuspecting vocation than to amuse. *sigh* Maybe the web hit came from one of the secular landscape artists...I can only hope. Lord, stop me from offending those whom I respect most in the world. Avert their eyes, and let them not take note of my Biggest Peter contests I hold with the Devil in my dreams.

But anyway, on to the subject I avoided the first time around. I arrived at Riley's place at 7:45 am on the morning of our roadtrip. Her son let me in. I gave him a merry "Good Morning," which was met with stony silence. I next spotted Riley's daughter, whom I gave a more subdued, "Morning!" She ignored me completely. As soon as Riley came into view I slid over to her corner.
"They have no idea why you're here," she whispered to me.
"Couldn't you have told them?"
She shrugged. They did not seem to be happy with the prospect that their mother was waiting for the bus to pick them up so that she could jet on out of there. I could understand that to a certain extent. I'd take a trip to the Monastery any day over going to school.

More disturbing were the text message that came later from Riley's husband. They started out numerous and insistent that we head back early so that she could go eat ice cream with him. Being as how we were just in the thick of our adventures, Riley declined. The text messages continued though, until an hour later when Riley's husband wrote to say that the offer of ice cream had been rescinded. WTF?

As a rhetorical question I must ask, what's the big deal that necessitates such a short leash? After the events and contacts throughout the day, I do believe that Riley's family resented her picking up and going, even if it was only for a day. What terrible and wonderful things did they think she would be up to that she shouldn't have ventured out? Where's the threat? What were we going to do together that was going to threaten her long-term home life? (And that is a question I ask quite honestly and innocently.) Seriously, chill people. I mean, I know we have established (by my very authorship) that I do have this wickedly seductive/threatening side, but c'mon. What a world we live in when Haywains such as myself are mistaken for Pied Pipers of Hamlin. Even Don Quixote didn't make that mistake.

Maybe if I wore pink more often, this wouldn't happen.

2009-05-10T15:36:00.000-04:00

Speaking of Freudian overtones, I had a dream last night where Satan challenged me to drop trou to see which of us had the bigger penis. I won easily, but I'm not sure this is such a good thing.

Legacies

2009-05-10T12:24:00.002-04:00

It occurred to me as I woke up this morning that I was supposed to remember something today. This happens every Mother's Day--I get this nagging sensation that something has been forgotten. Then it hit me that, oh yes, my father is dead.

My father died, by suicide, a few days before Mother's Day back in '86, so Mother's Day is always sort of the makeshift anniversary. This is convenient because I can never remember the actual day that he died, so it's best to make it into a sort of traveling anniversary, like Easter or something. Unlike Easter, however, it's not the sort of anniversary that really gets mentioned around here. I believe my father's side of the family used to hold a remembrance mass every year, but I'm not really in contact with them. And my mother, like me, seems to forget as often as I do what happened over twenty years ago. You might think this unbelievable, but it's true. If many people leave a void behind in the lives of the survivors, my father does not happen to be one of them.

I was of course only four at the time, so I have less to remember (or forget) than most. What I do remember very distinctly came about two years later, when my mother did say something a propos on Mother's Day: "It tells you something about a man when he kills himself on Mother's Day." At age six, it really didn't tell me anything. By that time, I'd already forgotten who he was. A man I saw little of I now saw not-at-all, and if a man offs himself on Mother's Day, the only thing I could think was that he hated his mother. That point is, actually, where my mother was heading, and when I finally verbalized this banality, she added body to it, "It tells you what he thinks of his wife as well." I look back on this now and see this as a foundational lesson in terms of how my mother taught me how married men relate to wives and mothers, with the point being that there is a messy Freudian overlap underlying the two relationships. I believe the Freudian overtones she adopted were culturally inherited, but the added feminist interpretation my mother seasoned the collective cultural knowledge with was forged independently of the feminist movements of the late '80s that were to take such a strong hold on me later. Emotional incest may be one thing, but how this translates into power relations is another issue my mother constructed with a flare of her own. I took to it fiercely; my sister, apparently, did not. Maybe she just never heard it. It is an interesting Mother's Day gift to pass along to a daughter. Interesting also because when I gave this gift back to my mother in more explicit terms (when I entered into my 20s), she didn't exactly approve. No matter anymore. I have DVDs for her this year.

Holy Bang Bang, Batman!

2009-05-05T22:32:00.002-04:00

Gert Frobe and Anna Quayle
Originally uploaded by Hilly_Blue

How on Earth did I manage to forget this scene from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"?

My mother bought me "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" on DVD a couple weeks ago, reminding me that it was one of my favorite movies growing up. True, it was a favorite, though at this late date I no longer had the desire to watch it anymore. ("Bedknobs and Broomsticks" seems more my speed these days.) But I thanked my mother for the gift anyway and started watching it in installments last week.

Everything was business as usual until the movie makes it to Vulgaria. I vaguely remembered that Anna Quayle played the Baroness in the movie, and I did particularly look forward to seeing her again. She's always been a favorite of mine out of the original "Casino Royale" and her one episode stint on "The Avengers."

Undoubtedly I would have been even more enthusiastic about seeing her again if I had recalled the "Chu Chi Face" number in the movie. HELLO! What a bizarre scene to throw into a kiddie movie! The song takes place on the morning of the Baron's birthday. He pops in to the Baroness' room in order to make multiple inexplicable attempts on her life, each one failing in a different and amusing way. And oh yes, all of these attempts occur while she's slinking around the room in her sexy negligee, legs occasionally in the air. No wonder this was one of my favorites growing up.

You don't need to know.

2009-05-03T20:50:00.003-04:00

I missed my sister's weekly call home this evening. Not a big deal to me since we usually never have much of anything to say to one another. She always tells me about how frustrated she's feeling, and I usually have some new moronic adventure to share with her (e.g. last week as I was playing with an aerosol can of deodorant, I managed to spray myself in the eyes. In case you were wondering, spray-on Suave provides all the wetness protection of Secret and all the personal protection of Mace). But as I said, no sharing this evening. As a show of good will and sisterly affection, I figured I'd hit her up with an email complete with a Tarot reading courtesy of Mystic Haywain. The problem is that her reading was about as negative as you could possibly hope. I can't write her about it. Negative Tarot readings are that much more upsetting when you don't believe, I think, because you have no faith in your ability to change the direction of your cards and reorient your outlook and future. I speak from experience on this issue, as I'm both faithless and plagued by readings haunted by portents of ongoing isolation and directionless wandering--two things I do not particularly need and have no faith that are likely to change. *sigh* Perhaps I shouldn't do readings after dinner. It's like the cards are picking up on some sort of cosmic indigestion.

Everything Expires

2009-05-02T20:47:00.006-04:00

Reading, as this anthology should make abundantly clear, has for a very long time had a particular importance for lesbians. Over the centuries, many women who love and desire other women have turned to books, hoping to find there some answering echo of their own, often confusing, sometimes perilous, emotions and experience. They have sought enlightenment, affirmation, evidence of a past and a pedigree. At the most basic level, they have quite simply been looking for company, women they'd like to spend time with, somebody else like them.

--from The Lesbian Pillow Book, edited by Alison Hennegan

Clearly we are not lacking for commentary regarding the lesbian reader this quarter, and that's a good thing.

I bought The Lesbian Pillow Book (an anthology that seems a distant second in popularity in this country to Lilian Faderman's Chloe Plus Olivia) on the strength of the fact that Hennegan wrote such a fabulous introduction to Regiment of Women. For Pillow Book, Hennegan opens with the observation quoted above. She touches upon the same thing Vanita mentions--the search through literature as a search for one's pedigree. What I like even better though is this concept of the lesbian reader walking around with a mental anthology that is as highly personal as a memoir or confessional might read because our anthologies trace a lifelong series of questions and answers regarding how we relate to others (especially las chicas) and function within ourselves.

That is one of the things that I continue to love about LibraryThing. To a certain extent the site works off of the premise that users can be adequately represented by the books they read. That's especially true if you look at users and their tags. My own top five tags for my collection of books (currently 314 books cataloged) is telling indeed:

fiction (tagged 186 times)
non-fiction (tagged 101 times)
women (tagged 89 times)
lesbianism (tagged 74 times)
British literature (tagged 72 times)

It's true--my perfect book is a novel written by a Brit and centers on a story involving lesbians. There is something that LibraryThing misses, however, that Hennegan gets. In Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (fair warning: the title of the book is more interesting than the book itself), Bayard makes use of the concept of the "mental library." One's mental library is different from one's actual library in a couple of important ways. For one thing, it is populated only by those books that have made an impression on you and thus that you actually remember. For another thing, it is organized in a highly personal way. Your mental bookshelves categorize books very specifically, meaning that in my mental library Regiment of Women gets placed alongside The Child Manuela and Olivia because all three of them involve lesbionic erotic elements between teachers and students. One misses these associations if one looks at a library overall. Tags can make up for this to a certain extent, but they still don't quite capture that last detail that the anthology does--some passages are more important to a reader than others. Indeed, some parts of a book relate to another in one way while another passage might connect it to a completely different book. And some passages are forgotten and thrown out all together. Hennegan's recognition of the importance of an anthology is correct--lesbian readers do walk around with a fragmented collection of passages, poems, dialogues, and lone words that all help us formulate an idea of our existence.

Many readers (not just lesbian readers) must have these highly personalized mental anthologies of their own. The fact that these anthologies are so crucial to the individual lesbian identity is a separate issue. The fact that not all lesbians are readers is yet another issue. In truth, I know more lesbians who are a collection of Ani and Indigo Girls lyrics more than they are a collection of texts. Forgive me for being judgmental, but this is an unfortunate state of affairs, as I've never found Ani to have much of anything worthwhile to contribute to lesbian consciousness, to say nothing of the inane "contributions" by the lesbian-friendly likes of Sarah McLachlan. There is something inexplicably pre-digested and stale about the whole genre. Yes, definitely stale. That must be why I fear salmonella poisoning whenever I hear Ani quoted ad nauseum.

Mrs Math

2009-04-29T21:14:00.000-04:00

I cast a sort of message in a bottle today. It all started yesterday as I walked through Half Price and got all nostalgic about classic books that I'd read in school years ago. These were not, in fact, happy remembrances. Of the books we had to read in high school, I only remember enjoying one of them (Great Expectations), and hating most of the others (The Scarlet Letter, Tom Sawyer, and...damn, I can't remember any other ones, but I'm sure I hated them...). I look back on it now and I blame some of my teachers as much as I blame the books themselves. I see those women now--completely uninspired and teaching from a set of hollow bullet points. Miserable.

Rotten English teachers aside, I fondly remember one of my math instructors. As a math teacher I really don't remember how effective Mrs Math was, but as a person she was the godsend who was always in my corner. (As I was often in trouble in high school, this was a position that desperately needed to be filled.) I kept in touch with her for a couple years after leaving high school, but email addresses eventually broke down and we lost touch.

I'm not sure why I miss Mr. Math. I'm not normally given to nostalgia, and the past when left behind is, for me, normally left well enough alone. But I think it has something to do with the fact that Mrs Math had a peculiar sort of faith in me, not that I would accomplish great things, but that I would have great adventures. And I think she meant that literally. In a way, that's about right. I haven't made any mark on the world, but I have had my own series of follies that could, liberally interpreted, be called a set of adventures. What I liked about Mrs Math was her faith that adventure was just as valid as achievement. As I feel like I've hit a rut at this point, perhaps I'm hungering for her faith in adventure once again.

At any rate, I looked Mrs Math up in the online White Pages. It said something to the effect of, "Mrs Math, age 61, married to Joe Math." I did remember her talking about her husband Joe, but the age seemed all wrong. She couldn't be more than 50, I thought to myself. Then it sadly occurred to me that she was 50...eleven years ago when I had her as a sophomore. It's been eleven whole years since I've sat in her class. I wonder if she'll think my Batman greeting card and words of salutation an embarrassing intrusion. Maybe she won't remember me, but I hope she does. I hope she tosses me back another message in a bottle.

Would Books Mean More if Children Numbered Less?

2009-04-28T16:16:00.002-04:00

The child's perception that the emotional and intellectual rearing has been less than adequate if not actually damaging is almost always accompanied by the choice of another person--uncle, aunt, neighbor, teacher, friend, or dead writer--as the one responsible for "making" him or her. Often dismissed as a crush or a youthful phase, this urge to find other ancestors frequently becomes muted when the young adult is subsumed into marriage and parenthood and develops a stake in biological ancestry, wishing to assert claims over his or her children.

from Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination, by Ruth Vanita

Sounds rather bleak in at least one sense--I've never thought of myself as not having a stake in biological ancestry, but on the other hand I'm not sure I necessarily care for the exact reason Vanita mentions--I have self-designated ancestors of my own. Do all singles without progeny really do this? And do so many give it up after the birth of their children? Would books and our ancestors in the literary world mean more to us if there were only less children in the world?

This is a fanciful consideration dancing around my current dilemma--I'm out of books. I normally don't leave myself without a stock of at least a few readables, but come Sunday this is exactly what happened. My mother's recommendations from her library were to no avail either, as I'm in a rather picky mood. It was then that Vanita spoke to me, justifying my pickiness because I am, after all, in search of my ancestors.

I'm not sure I buy into that though. It seems to me that many a reader goes looking for himself as often as he goes looking for his forefathers. At present I'd like to find myself in more 1950s lesbian pulp, but that's a hard task since re-published pulp of this variety is in short supply. (Short enough that I've already read nearly every "rediscovered" classic that has been re-published since 1980.) That's a shame considering how lesbian pulp has a definite appeal rooted in what is supposedly its host of anachronisms. Secrecy is one such aspect of the lesbian pulp story that seems to be receding in a weird way. There's so much corny emphasis on honesty and openness (which could very well lead me on a diatribe against the MySpace and Facebook phenomenon...it might even lead me to say something against blogging!) that secrecy is anathema. Now instead there is deception by production, where first and foremost posters deceive themselves in producing an identity before they even start on anyone else. Pulp characters are different though. They're usually sure of who they are, which is why they keep secrets, lead life in the shadows, and generally expend their energy on hiding from others in order to protect their integrity, however much guilt and shame may cloud their sense of self.

So I went to Half Price Books this afternoon in order to seek out my ancestors, secret keepers, or whatever you will. Not a lot of luck in the pulp arena. I don't have the luck I used to over there. Half Price is now the place where I go to get my "normal" books, with Amazon filling in the gaps in my education in providing me with the exotic. Amongst the normal, I picked up a copy of Tess of the D'Ubervilles. What an embarrassing book to buy! One should endeavor never to get caught buying a classic that everyone has read but you. (For that reason, you must also never buy Hamlet, Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, or Pride and Prejudice. If you get caught with these, beg forgiveness and explain you're replacing copies of your own dog-eared editions. Remember, this is a life of secrets that we ought to be living (a la 1950s lesbian pulp) and that you have the integrity of your ignorance to protect. :-)

End of Comment

2009-04-25T22:17:00.002-04:00

Wednesday night we (my office) gathered for a retirement dinner for one of our longest standing coworkers. About 15 of us populated a long table. I got stuck at the very end away from the action, where I longed to get drunk. Moreover, I longed for my boss to make a farewell speech, in which we all could have concluded by raising our glasses with a serene, "Goodbye, and good riddance." Seriously, no one is going to be sorry to see this woman go. Instead, we ate our overpriced food in relative quiet. I suffered from a mild allergic reaction to my dish that caused the inside of my mouth to break out in hives. We took a group photo at the end. I dared not smile for fear of spewing blood from my mouth.

That's about how this week has gone.

Bit'O'Bunny

2009-04-23T20:34:00.003-04:00

During my mid college years I used to keep a LiveJournal. For my friends and me it functioned similarly to how Twitter seems to function now. We'd post short little blurbs about what we were doing at the moment. As we all worked across the computer labs on campus, it was a good way of passing notes back and forth during working hours without engaging in that forbidden behavior, online chatting. My LJ is long gone now, as are many of those friends. With this passing I find that I miss one minute detail from LJ (though I miss little else about it)--summarizing emoticons. At the end of an entry you could pick through a key word that described your mood, and the word had a matching animated icon to express it visually. I used a sort of Pissed-Off Penguin scheme. That wasn't its official name, but by and large it seemed to include many a penguin that was either red in the face or stamping one of its webbed feet. I kind of wish I had those penguins for this blog. When I was too flabbergasted to express myself, a penguin and a key word were always there to pick up the slack for me. Let's see...what key words would I need to make use of now?

-Apprehensive
-Anxious
-Irritated (with myself)
-Exhausted
-Morose
-Morally bankrupt (this is only temporary, I hope)

Moral bankruptcy. You know, there is no betrayal worse than when you betray your own common sense. And there are no words (at least, none worth airing for public viewing) to describe how one ends up in this position.

It's time like these when I'm forced to consult the unwavering moral compass in my life--Happy Bunny. If you've not seen it before, you need to get on Amazon and buy Jim Benton's It's Happy Bunny: The Good, The Bad, and The Bunny, which of course helps the reader to understand that there are three moral sides to every issue. Happy Bunny is there to help guide you and ultimately seduce you to the Bunny side. It's a very instructional book. Allow me to copy one of the learning exercises (although recognize that you're missing out on the fabulous illustrations:

QUIZ TIME!

Stealing is wrong, but if you're starving to death, is it okay to steal a potato?

Answer: A raw potato? Are you kidding? You'll just starve to death with a raw potato stuck in your throat.

Happy Bunny says: See? Sometimes it isn't easy to know the difference between good and bad. But I know choking on a potato is bad.

BUNNY WISDOM: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But you can make him drown. And when you remind him of that, he'll probably be willing to drink.

---------

Thank goodness there is moral guidance out there in these times of need.

Thoughts on The Sportswriter

2009-04-19T17:52:00.004-04:00

I think it was one of the customers on Amazon.com who wrote that Richard Ford's The Sportswriter ought to be mandatory reading for women in order that we may better understand male psychology. In a way there may be something to the demand, for (if you'll allow me to appeal to every generalized gender stereotype I can think of) there is something undoubtedly alien in the character of Frank Bascombe that made me, at nearly every page, think to myself, "Hmm, a woman definitely didn't write this."

Frank Bascombe stands in sharp contrast to the Mr. Darcy type of Jane Austen fame. When Darcy says to Elizabeth something to the effect of, "Dearest Elizabeth, it was by you I was truly humbled," you know you're at the mercy of a woman's fantasy. The author is female; perhaps you could even say Mr Darcy is female, which is what makes him utterly recognizable to female readers. We know what our voice sounds like. It doesn't sound like Frank Bascombe.

I read Frank Bascombe as a character formed by a trifecta of qualities--sensitivity, introspection, and psychological self-containment. This is not an odd combination in and of itself (compare Hemingway), but I think it is the fact that the three qualities do not play equal roles that makes Frank (and his author) so decidedly not female. It is as if within Ford's philosophy that psychological self-containment is the foundation for a man's sensitivity and ability to reflect. And that, quite simply from a woman's perspective, is odd.

It's not inconceivable for every woman, though. A female author who immediately comes to mind who crafted male protagonists in this same way is Patricia Highsmith. Tom in the Ripley novels, David in This Sweet Sickness, and Vic in Deep Water, just to name a few, all share this quality of being sensitive men in an environment of psychological claustrophobia. Highsmith's characters in this vein also share one other notable quality--they're all homicidal sociopaths. Is it a coincidence that a woman would take this combination of qualities and end up with a much more disturbing type of man?

Probably not. But how, taken the same ingredients, does Ford end up with an Everyman while Highsmith ends up with a man you hope you never meet? I don't have an easy answer for that, but I think it lies in the fact that women understand that psychological claustrophobia is not a necessary condition of sensitivity and reflection and that to think so is, at its most fundamental, perverse. For Highsmith they become murders; I think for most women the result is much less dramatic. They are, as Ford writes and as Frank admits, lost in dreaminess. How sinister this dreaminess goes is an issue for Ford and Highsmith to battle out.

One lingering question remains, though, should Ford win. Why, if Frank is a lost Everyman, cannot women share in this dreaminess? Why is Frank still alien to women at the end of the day? No easy answer to that either, and I suspect Ford is going to have to duke it out with Djuna Barnes over this one. My ultimate female character lost to dreaminess is Nightwood's Robin Vote. (Hell, Nora, Matthew, and Felix are lost as well. You might as well throw everyone in the book into the kettle.) What makes them familiar to women in a way that Frank is not? I'll have to think about this further, but at first glance I think it has to do with what the different characters perceive they've lost in the course of their tragedy. That starts to get sticky when we talk about what lost things mean to men and what they mean to women. What if the loss of a love, a child, a friend, an image, etc., doesn't mean the same thing to us? This wouldn't be that big of a deal were it not for the fact that someone down the line is (rightfully) going to ask if losing 'Concept X' means less to a man than to a woman, or vice versa. That could get ugly.

Step Aside, Felix Krull

2009-04-18T18:35:00.006-04:00

Thanks to David, I have a renewed interest in Tarot. Tarot is something a friend tuned me in to back in high school. We had a communal Universal Rider-Waite deck that we'd thumb through during study hall. We would do endless spreads consulting the Tarot on goodness knows what...probably our respective non-existent sex lives, but I really don't remember. It was enjoyable novelty fun, and I've loved Tarot art and symbolism ever since.

In spite of this enjoyment, the cards were eventually put aside due to a fundamental problem--in regards to my own life and future, I do believe I'm Tarot-proof. To put it more bluntly, I'm just not a believer. Having such a strong sense of both my autonomy and the randomness of life (as opposed to Jungian synchronicity), I've never felt that the Tarot has anything to tell me. As a reader, I feel like I strike out as well. I have no faith in my ability to get in touch with any metaphysical springs of knowledge that might allow me to effectively interpret the Tarot. It's just not something that's in me. Mind you, this doesn't mean I write off Tarot all together. Just because I feel myself to be psychically deficient doesn't mean I also believe everyone else is. I do have faith that there are good readers out there, just as I have faith that some people's lives can be successfully interpreted using Tarot. I just don't happen to fall into either of those two categories.

So why the revitalized interest? Hate to say it, but lacking in metaphysical sincerity as I am, the main reason Tarot continues to interest me is for a very specific psychological reason--I'm fascinated by a good con. Indeed, I may never be a great reader, but I am interested in becoming a great confidence artist. Back in the days when I was more comfortable "reading," my most favorite of all exercises was laying out a spread for someone whom I knew few lurid details about, but the person had no idea that I knew. In this case it's highly satisfying (and also stupendously easy) to give most people what they want out of a Tarot reading, namely to hear things they already know about themselves. I don't believe this is true of everyone. Again, I do believe it is possible to faithfully seek guidance, but more often than not I think people look to polish off their vanity more often than they feel compelled to seek enlightenment. I am just the reader for that latter category. Essentially I'm interested in telling the best story I possibly can. Give me a spit of information about someone, a pretty Tarot deck, and some of the basics of interpreting so I can create the illusion of credibility, and away I go. Give me the querent who knows what they want to hear, and I am the reader who will gladly tell it to him. If I've done my homework just right, you won't even have to give me any hints (someone else will have done that for me). I'll lay out the cards for you, adapt them to your wishes as best as I can, and the cards before you will act as proof, my perfect alibi, because you want to believe, don't you?

In truth, I want to believe too. That's why I'm always on the lookout for the good con artist that I myself hope to become. I haven't found him or her yet, but I'm keeping the faith.

In the meantime, as I hone in on my skills, I'm also thoroughly enjoying shopping around for new decks. I have one nameless deck (included in a sort of cheesy gift set, though the guidebook it came with is one of the best I own) that is an adaptation of the Tarot of Marseilles. It's a terrible deck for a beginner since the minor Arcana is nearly devoid of all helpful symbolism. The deck I've read with for the longest time is my Medieval Scapini deck, though I've never felt comfortable with it. The artwork is first-rate (see above left), but many of the symbols are a little too esoteric for a novice like me, and the cards are longer than normal and harder to hold and shuffle. My Radiant Rider-Waite deck just came in the mail Thursday, and as a deck for a tyro con artist, I'm very pleased. It preserves everything that is wonderful about Rider-Waite while giving new life to the coloration, which badly needed work. Lo Scarabeo's Secret Tarot is on its way. I bought it on the strength of The Popess, who appears fantastically seductive and mysterious in the deck. I took this as a good sign because I look to the High Priestess as a vision of myself when I shuffle through a deck. I like many things about her, from her mysterious origins (is she descended from the Virgin Mary? the controversial Pope Joan?), to her virginal blue robes and throne placed between the pillars of severity and mercy (elsewhere logic and emotion). It all sounds about right.

Lazy Tuesday

2009-04-14T21:23:00.003-04:00

Today marked the first day this year that Riley and I were able to make it out to go shooting. Despite the five month hiatus, we really didn't do so badly. I'm able to hit about one in three targets, while Riley is able to hit about one in five. Together we managed to shoot around 50 rounds before the rain came. No matter really--our shoulders weren't prepared to take much more than that.

After finishing up on the field we went to one of the local bars, where we were the only customers under retirement age. Or maybe we just stuck out because we were very obviously not part of the regulars. Either way, it didn't put us off. We curled up on our respective stools at a high table and nestled up against a gigantic bay window that looked out onto the town square. With a coke nearby and a burger topped with perfectly fried bacon, it was about as close to heaven as you could ask.

The shotgun-cleaning process is what hits after heaven wears off. It's astounding just how much gunk builds up in the barrel after a short morning of shooting. Gun cleaning is painstaking work in order to get every speck of dust out from the inside of the gun, but I do it lovingly of course, and now the pores in my hands are stained with a mixture of gunpowder and Hoppe's Solvent that I can't quite wash off. Ah, the mark of a mighty clay pigeon huntress.

.....

To my most devoted reader--you'll note that I've started reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter at your recommendation. I realize the recommendation was made quite some time ago, but I have to wait until a book calls to me. I guess this book, appropriately enough it seems, was waiting until around Easter to call.

When Spirituality Meets Practicality

2009-04-09T20:54:00.004-04:00

Nurse Wingman came into my office for a friendly word before leaving tonight. She wanted to know if I had anything special planned for the weekend, and I had to confess that I did not. In contrast, Nurse Wingman told me about her planned trip with her family down to N-----.

"What on earth are you doing down there?"
"Getting a cabin, and we're going to Easter Vigil at St. R-----," she told me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Hardly. If St. R---- were a bar, one could easily describe it as a dive. Because it's a church, however, it's given the less stigmatizing label as being "rustic." I have vague memories of that hole in the wall church, which admittedly did have its charms when I was last there nearly 15 years ago. I also have fond memories of sitting there with a congregation of 6 whilst my friend sitting next to me croaked, "Did you watch 'Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman' last night?" Poor girl always meant to whisper at key moments, but she never quite mastered it.

With some incredulity I asked Nurse Wingman how she happened to pick St. R----.
"Easy," she told me triumphantly, "I called around to all the churches in N------ and asked them how many baptisms they had planned. St. R---- only has one."

There is a reason why my department runs with such efficiency when Nurse Wingman is around.

Henceforth to Indifference

2009-04-08T18:52:00.004-04:00

My lecture was over. I remained at the front answering any lingering questions and providing words of advice to newbies wanting to enter my field, but out of the corner of my eye I knew She was there. I could see Her standing near the door rather lazily leaning up against the wall, not moving but watching me as I addressed the smaller groups one by one. After a bit there was no one left to talk to, and I had to turn to face the music.

"Surprised to see me?" smiled LoverComeBack.
"Shocked," I admitted, "Shocked and appalled."

As is typical of her, LoverComeBack strolled into the back of the lecture hall 10 minutes late. I nearly vomited. After our latest falling out in December (see "Take it and leave it."), LoverComeBack was not the first person I wanted to top my "Surprise Guest Attendee" list. It's always a bit unnerving to meet up with someone when you don't know how the land lies, and I considered myself to be at quite the disadvantage since she was able to watch me for a full hour while I was held hostage by the contents of my speech.

Once the initial shock had passed, I did manage to hit my stride. It didn't seem to matter, though, as it appeared that most of my audience had already checked their interest at the door.

"Would you like to take a walk down the street?" she asked, still comfortable up against the wall.
"Sure," I answered wearily, knowing that down the end of every street is a bar and an opportunity to catch up over a beer or two.

It's the same every time. LoverComeBack always talks a great deal, which suits me fine. In some ways whenever I'm around her I always forget that I have interests and news of my own because I know that to mention any of these things would be futile. There are very few aspects of my life that ever interested her, and so in her company they might as well not exist. But I enjoy her complaints and tales of her trials and tribulations. She does lead a rather picaresque life.

Eventually the conversation fell to our falling out. LoverComeBack reevaluated the disaster in hindsight for me. I'd forgotten that another one of her charming qualities is her binocular vision. This is to say that at the time of an event, she uses her binoculars to magnify something already close to her, making it seem disproportionately weighty and meaningful. Then, some time down the road, she turns her binoculars and looks through them the wrong way, making an event seem ever more distant and ever more meaningless. In general I don't approve of this sort of approach, but in this case it was appropriate. So now we are on more unambiguously friendly terms, again...for now. Not that I expect that means much. Before it always seemed important to establish an actual friendly bond. Now it only seems important to confirm a certain cordiality, but nothing more. This is, I think, a stop along the road to indifference.

Productive Miscellanea

2009-04-07T18:01:00.003-04:00

Little did I know that when I accepted a Dremel as a Christmas gift from mi abuelo, I was unwittingly matriculating in his School of Elementary Tool Usage. Tool-less as I am, mi abuelo has apparently committed to outfitting me one new tool at a time, but it seems he wants to be sure of my competency with each new instrument. Thus, over the weekend he brought me an RG6/RG59 cable stripper. I have no idea what that means but gather it has something to do with the size of the cable. It's kind of a funky wire stripper. Rather than having a single split hole that you close around a bit of wire and then twist to remove the wire casing, this stripper has two sets of blades set about 8 mm apart. And there is no split hole anymore; you have to thread the cable through a diamond. Hopefully you get the idea. Along with this cable stripper he also brought me a length of cable for hooking up an antenna.
"I want you to work on stripping this wire using this stripper. It's a "6" stripper but it won't strip a "6" cable," mi abuelo warned me.
"Sounds like a strange riddle."
"No, it's just a bad stripper." Mi abuelo did not seem in the least embarrassed that he had brought me a bum stripper.
"So you want me to fix the stripper?" I asked.
"Yes, fix it. Use it," he mumbled and left.
One wonders what the flunk-out rate at his School of Elementary Tool Usage is like.

I need not have feared expulsion though. Using a small allen wrench (an unlikely choice, I know) I managed to pry off the blades, and after removing some "spare parts" from the splitter, I was able to reattach the blades at a different orientation. Eh voila! My "6" splitter now splits "6" gauge cables. I hope I won't get points deducted from my homework assignment for having broken the tool further in order to fix it.

After that small victory under my belt, I backed my truck into the garage in order to unload my winter cargo, i.e. 400 lbs. of sand and an extra 100 lbs. of my now beloved road salt. Thankfully unloading all of that weight is always easier than loading it, but it did beg one important question--how does anyone ever move a dead body? As I huffed and puffed over my sandbags, I thought of Tom Ripley disposing of all of his murder victims. How ever did he do it? I know I'm no Charles Atlas, but dead weight is profoundly difficult to maneuver. Personally, I don't think Tom Ripley could have disposed of Freddie Miles as easily as Highsmith described it. Then again, I doubt Ripley had any proficiency with a "6" splitter either.

Murder mysteries aside, the sand and salt is now mostly out of my truck. I say "mostly" because the bags always leak a little bit. That is, in fact, starting to become a problem. My bags are six years old at this point and not as intact as they used to be. I don't know where to put these nearly defunct bags, and I don't want to dispose of the sand either. You never know when you might need the stuff. Last flood season I nearly made a very gallant effort to start running those bags down to my walk-out basement door in order to protect us from the rising tide, and I'll be damned if this season I'm denied my chance to be gallant because I pitched my sandbags. That just wouldn't do.

The Double Life of a Double Blogger

2009-04-06T21:22:00.006-04:00

Allow me to preface this entry by saying that I'm really not enjoying this whole Twitter thing. Give me a blog any day with a complete thought in complete sentences rather than a twitter of an incomplete thought in an incomplete sentence. It seems to me that most people are just not pithy enough to carry off an ongoing one-liner. And while it was fascinating to watch comments roll in right after we the nation had finished watching "Little Dorrit" on Masterpiece Theatre (sorry, but I just can't call it Masterpiece Classics...), at the end of the day I really don't care if you lost your knitting in the middle of the second half of the show. "Charles Dickens rocks more than Jane Austen"--no, this tweet is not as wildly exciting as the tweeter probably thought it was upon posting. In a word, Twitter has made me feel utterly apathetic toward my fellow cyber-surfer, and I don't want to feel that way. Blogs don't make me feel that way. Why should I put up with such a downer coming from Twitter? So I hate to say it, but next time I stub my toe, you will not be the first to hear about it.

I will give thanks to Twitter for at least one thing though: it did provide me with an interesting 20 minute identity crisis. As I signed up for my Twitter account I started to use my real name. It quickly occurred to me, however, that I much prefer my McTarry identity to my public one. Why is that? you ask. Sadly, I realized that my public identity is roughly equivalent to my work identity. I mean this in a couple of different ways. When you don't know someone very well, which most people don't since I have very few intimates, you tend to identify her with her job. That's a depressing thought if ever there was one, and I even like what I do. In another sense, my public identity is the same as my work identity because only the things that are fit for viewing at work do I feel are also fit for a public persona. There is no release upon leaving work. My closeted qualities remain closeted whether I'm on or off the clock. There is a persistent feeling of restriction that remains constant between the two worlds. That's also a depressing thought, and that's the reason why I ultimately set up my Twitter as Haywain rather than as being searchable by my real name.

This preference for my Haywain identity is what next brings me to my double life as a double blogger. Is it heresy to mention that I have another blog while, in the same breath, refusing to disclose where it is? So be it. My other blog is written expressly for my sister, brother-in-law, and niece in Costa Plonca. At my mother's insistence, she wanted a place where we could post pictures for the family to see what was changing up here while they are away. Fine. Whatever. My only problem is that I suffer from perpetual writer's block when it comes to this other blog, and this is undoubtedly so because it is written within the confines of my public (i.e. work) persona. The only thing my immediate family knows about me is what I do for a living; thus, the only thing to blog about are changes at work, which I flatly refuse to discuss. It's too dull, and it's not me anyway, if you know what I mean. The brute fact of the matter is that if I can't tell you about my absurd sexual attraction to Emma Fielding (see "My Most Masculine Quality" below), then I really don't have anything to say to you. This doesn't mean we can't talk about other things, but if you're not prepared to put up with an ounce of inappropriate absurdity, then there is no basis for conversation...and my profession will not stand in substitute for this missing foundation. How could it? The competition is too steep.