feminist blogs

On Monday it was my great fortune to have a coffee date with a new friend, one Ms. Jennifer Jane, a.k.a. @peeppeep, found via the social media wonder that is Twitter. (My profile: here.)

Allow me to provide you with a sampling of her posts on Twitter that quickly established her awesomeness, and made it clear to me we were actually going to have to meet in person. (Besides her reply to my message, “Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ makes me feel better about being one,” with “that song got me through my last breakup. best played while lying in bed for the third day in a row.” So true, so true.)

• bought jelly shoes today. can’t wait until my sweaty feet make those farty noises. i am a sex bomb.
• @ the mall. Person in next dressing room either having sex or an asthma attack. Kind of worried.
• running only on caffeine and a bite of chocolate bunny. ears, natch.
• If you are one of my customers and i am rude to you today, i am sorry. It’s just that i hate you.
• is it okay to tell someone that you’ll have sex with them if they promise not to talk before during or after?
• my last customer was an old lady who totally farted while standing in my line.

See? Awesome.

So we arranged to meet on Monday, and predictably I was running late because I couldn’t find my ass with both hands, much less stuff like keys, driver’s license, and sunglasses. Once I finally found the first two, I gave up on the third and headed out the door. Of course it was incredibly bright outside, all the more so to me because I had just pulled a writing all nighter. (This post. Worth the effort, but still, oof.)

If you’re not in the habit of pulling writing all-nighters and then walking out into the blazing light of day, let me assure you it is an uncomfortable, squinty experience. Then, once in the car, I scrounged around to see if my husband had any abandoned sunglasses laying about. His head is unnaturally large, so whenever I do swipe his shades (like when I steal his socks; he has boats for feet), they tend to fall off me, but they’re better than nothing when I am in need. Alas, I found nothing.

What I did find, however, was one pair of 3D glasses from when my husband had taken the girls to Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds (in Disney Digital 3D! says the promo). At which time, blissfully, I had been writing, exempt from both the added expense (the tickets were $15 each!) and the emotional overwhelm (see this photo for some indication of how I felt about getting dragged to a Jonas Brothers concert during our last State Fair). See why I love my husband?

And while thinking persons might question the wisdom of wearing 3D glasses for driving, after an all-nighter in particular, I have to say they did the job just fine, tamping down the impossible glare, and enabling me to make it only ten minutes late to my coffee date.

And of course, I made a dashing first impression:

…And we went on to have one of the most pleasing conversations I have had with another human being in quite some time, the actual substance of which would be impossible to recreate here, but suffice it to say, we have enough bizarre stuff in common, and enough about our respective life experiences that is radically different, that we totally bonded, talking nonstop until I had to finally dash off to fetch the youngest girlchild from school. (Also, she has teenagers. All our local friends who finally decided to breed did it late enough in the game that my own teen is always the oldest kid in the crowd, when we have family-friendly parties. The idea of getting our respective offspring to hang out too is pretty fab.)

I go through a lot of angst over friendships, because so many of the people I love (outside the network of friends I pretty much married into) are largely out of state. When I meet people locally, so many of them have no context for the whacked out kind of life I’ve lived (geographically, politically, whatever). When I make connections online with people whom I might, ostensibly, meet face-to-face at some point, it’s much the same, with a few brilliant exceptions.

For example, there has been the wonderful Joriel, whom I first found via the Blogger listings for Richmond (before we both moved to Wordpress). Even without having a (by my standards) particularly insane personal history, she somehow understood me (because she is a real, honest-to-God serious writer, and that’s an altogether unique breed). But then she and her equally wonderful honey moved away, to the very place where so many of the people I already love and miss terribly live: Seattle.

And there is the equally brilliant Jane, with whom I have almost as much radically in common as I have radically not in common, which makes our interactions edifying, stimulating and fun (particularly given her wicked sense of humor). (Also, she is a kick-ass photographer. Go buy some of her Etsy stuff, seriously.) And while she is, at least, here in Virginia, she’s still far enough away that we have not yet been able to make good on our threats to go hog wild someday at Ikea¹. (Don’t ask me why this possibility appeals to me. It just does.)

But Jennifer? Not only gets me (a tall order for any human being, seriously), but she lives right here! Less than a ten-minute-drive away! And it makes my heart go pitter-patter, and feel significantly less angstful about my place in the universe.

Richmond just got a lot better.

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¹There has also been a proposal that Jane and I might someday see Molly Hatchet together, but when the celestial bodies might properly align to make such a thing come to pass, I couldn’t possibly guess.

I got up ridiculously early this morning (a little after 3:30 AM), having caught up what felt like weeks of missed sleep, after the mixed blessing of having been knocked out so hard by Benadryl that I’d fallen asleep at the dinner table (in a restaurant, no less), following which we’d returned home, and I’d zonked out again almost immediately after noting said embarrassing fact. I’ve done three loads of dishes, one of which was required merely so that I could gain access to the espresso machine (no, I will not soon be nominated for any homemaker of the year award), and I’ve been catching up on a backlog of podcasts for The Writer’s Almanac.

Which was how I came to hear this wonderful poem, called Sestina for the Working Mother, which I hope my fellow mommybloggers (both those who’ve embraced that moniker and those who’ve distanced themselves from it, for understandable reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s the descriptive label most often invoked by others when a decision has been made in advance that the ‘mommyblogger’ in question is not to be taken seriously) will enjoy; the poem “works” whether one falls under the “Stay at Home,” “Working,” or hybrid designations of the Mother identity.

This link should, in theory, should open the RealPlayer audio file, though it’s being persnickety for me, of course, now that I want to share it with you. At least you should be able to read it, either here (on a page transcribing a whole week’s worth of broadcasts) or, better yet, at McSweeney’s (where you won’t have to hunt for it among several other poems). It begins thusly:

No time for a sestina for the working mother.
Who has too much to do, from first thing in the morning
When she has to get herself dressed and the children
Too, when they tumble in the pillow pile rather than listening
To her exhortations about brushing teeth, making ready for the day;
They clamor with goodbyes and “up” hugs when she struggles out the door…

[click here to read poem in its entirety]

I’ve been working on a huge piece on my (specifically feminist) support for Barack Obama’s candidacy (first conceived as “Part II” of this), but the rascally ol’ narrative isn’t taking the expected form of a polemic. (Which will relieve some of you, and annoy the rest).

At this point, I’ve slept some five hours out of the last 48 - and in a little more than an hour, it will be time to get the girls ready for school. (Their dad, meantime, has carried about 95% of the parenting weight over this weekend - God bless him.) I could either post something for which I haven’t written a particularly coherent ending (the bulk of it is finished though, weighing in at 2,500+ words), much less finished editing, or I can post a drive-by excerpt, nap for a few minutes, attend to Mama Duties, crash while the girls are in school (thankfully I have nothing else scheduled today), and hopefully, finish this up tonight.

Meantime, you can view recent posts in the political category, for some “credibly wonkish” encapsulations that, taken collectively, form some of the basis for my stance.

Finally, please note: this isn’t just a mere excerpt - it’s a mere draft of an excerpt! I don’t often send my words out naked into the universe like this. But if I don’t, no one may believe the essay exists. Which it does, I swear!

I am not a policy wonk.

I am, however, a feminist and a mother, whose personal and political lives have been intensely commingled. Where laws exist that address the welfare of women and children in poverty, I have had a vested interest. So too with legislation concerning lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, women’s access to complete reproductive health care, and the needs of the disabled…

[And] while I can, at times, write credibly wonkish vignettes, this piece is nothing like that; it’s more in the vein of creative nonfiction, where the raw narrative of my life happens to intersect with that of the Polis. Those short on time or attention span may feel free to skip the backstory; I’m just nerdy enough to have wrapped this thing up with a [section to be hyperlinked once completed] summary - in bullet points, no less.

Yep, you read that right: this wily bastard of an essay is projected to end in bullet points*. Sheesh!

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* Unless I change my mind.

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

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Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

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Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

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*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.

I know it’s probably the result of global warming
but goddamn it’s gorgeous out
High of 80 degrees expected
this first week of February
and I’m in short sleeves, walking the dog
loving the state of my birth
taking in the improbable sight of deciduous
trees stripped of their leaves, against a hazy,
summery sky. Yes, Virginia,
there is some hope left for democracy
Change is a palpable force you can almost
taste as you whistle, still walking that dog,
as the nation, earnest with buzzwords,
awaits the ascendancy of a new Camelot
in the person of Prince Obama or else
the just as remarkable Queen Clinton
Not at all embarrassed to be witnessed embracing
such overt political themes
Just grateful for any force that speaks uncynically
to the possibility of that anti-war march chant:
The people, united,
will never be defeated

As some of you may know, I have a serious addiction problem. My drug of choice is cop shows. Specifically, I’m a fan of Law and Order: Criminal Intent* (and to varying degrees, the other Law & Order spawn). So I was tickled to see this image of the program’s writers (and actors supporting them), heading up a holiday greeting to LOCI’s fans on the message board for my similarly afflicted brethren:

I especially love the sign, “AMPTP [the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] has Criminal Intent.” And having just visited said organization’s website , I’m really irritated to see them repeating the old distortion about how “the average working WGA writer makes more than a surgeon…” etc.

Well, okay, let’s “truth-squad” that. Oh wait, someone (text-search username “minderbinder” in comments) has already done that:

For a writer to be eligible to get WGA health insurance, they need to make $32K in a given year. HALF of the WGA members (6000 of the 12000 total) don’t make enough to qualify for that. Median income for writers is said to be only $5K per year. I doubt many people would be happy to be making that, much less a quarter of it.

Now, I’m not a WGA member (and I let my National Writers Union membership lapse years ago), but I know bullshit when I read it, and this bit about the writers making out like bandits en masse is a veritable crock of such bullshit. (Want another reality check? See this old post by Dan Tobin, an enormously talented writer and WGA member whose blog I’ve been reading off and on for years.)

I realize, of course, that the strike issues are fairly nuanced; one WGA writer who would really like to get back to work as soon as possible made his case quite eloquently on Talk of the Nation just the other day.

But c’mon. We’re talking about a group of people that, even if they do make mad money on specific projects, generally go through exceptionally long periods of unemployment between those gigs. I don’t buy the AMPTP’s bullshit, and as much as I’m aggrieved at the idea of my favorite cop show running out of new scripts in the very near future, I still support the writers, and would humbly submit that you should too**.

So, click here, if the spirit moves you, to tell the lazy (and incontrovertibly wealthy as shit) moguls of the AMPTP to get their sorry asses back to the bargaining table. And if you can deal with the oh-so-very-folksy musical accompaniment, check out this vid from YouTube:

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* For which I have a totally rad script idea, should the strike ever end, and should I ever get my ass in gear enough to pursue writing as a career (no matter that overall earnings from such pursuits will likely remain modest).

** But - sorry - I’m still gonna watch The Daily Show. (Or rather, as Jon Stewart has since rechristened it, A Daily Show, given that only with all his writers back at work could it really be The Daily Show.) It’s election season, y’know? I need that shit.

Anachroclysmic

a·nach·ro·clysm·ic

adj.

Manner of narration, in either prose or poetry, characteristic of persons who have had chronic, first-hand experiences with serious trauma and/or disaster. Features include scrambled chronologies, staccato linguistic patterns, apparent self-contradiction, compulsive hyper-cerebrality*, as well as inadvertent transpositions and/or omissions of relevant facts and characters, in earnest recountings of truthful, yet often “unseemly” stories (which otherwise could not be told). This form is less interested in assessments of ‘blame’ than in developing fully realized, transcendent narratives concerning flawed human beings (author necessarily included). The inevitably disjointed (and often darkly humorous) form of anachroclysmic narration reflects, among other things, psychic fragmentation resulting from past trauma; at the same time, careful readings reveal patterns of significant “order” belied by the material’s overt “chaos.” Further elements include unselfconscious deployments of irony, and a vacillation between unusually deep engagement, and equally pronounced distancing. Typical themes include naming, exile, and silence.

Not to be confused with making shit up (à la James Frey).

Antonyms: dogmatic, self-pitying, political.

Synonyms: shameless, panoramic.

* Also a made-up word.

There are lots of reasons for my relative silence of late. If I could explain them - well, I guess I wouldn’t be silent then, right? It’s all I can do right now to move from day to day, occupying my variously contradictory and emotionally draining roles - writer, mother, daughter, wife, etc*.

I’ll be okay. And honestly, there’s a lot about my life right now that is going right. But this whole struggling- for- integration- amid- perpetual- sources- of- dissonance situation that afflicts, I think, most women writers (or writers, period) is an incorrigible beast - one I live with every day, and have even made peace with to some extent.

So, for whichever among my blogospheric friends might still be reading me (and who may be rightly offended that I’m so off the grid that I’m no longer reading them, much less posting any viable material here; sorry, right now it just cannot be helped), please know there is nothing to worry about.

That said, I’ll proceed with what I actually sat down to post.

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The following began as a response to, of all things, an early 90s pop video posted on YouTube. Wisely, that site’s designers forbid commenters from posting messages in excess of 500 characters, so when my little comment became utterly unwieldy (but was too obviously relevant for me to just delete), I had to put it some place.

The song is Ooh Child, and in the video it is covered by some band called ‘Dino.’ (In my internet wanderings tonight, I’ve discovered this song’s been covered by countless artists; this blogger has the lyrics for a recent Beth Orton version; the original, as best I can tell, as explained further below, was performed by the Five Stairsteps.)

Now, I can’t embed the video for Dino’s version (that feature was disabled by the guy who uploaded it - one ‘eightiesdood’), but those curious may view it by clicking here. (For some indication of its obscurity in the ensuing years, Wikipedia’s ‘disambiguation’ page for Dino, as of this moment, lists a total of twenty four things or people the term can refer to, among which this band is not one.)

Here’s what I would have posted, space permitting:

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Good Lord. This song figures in a (true) story I’ve been trying to write, and stumbling upon this answers a question that had been nagging at me. It was, indeed, 1993, and this song had been on the radio while I was living with my girlfriend at the time in Fargo, ND. I liked it, but my girlfriend found it offensively trite. Too “pop.” And I got her point. But I still quietly hummed along to it whenever it came on the radio.

We had a really miserable existence there - we’d moved to Fargo, in a huge rush, from Seattle because of some explicitly life-imperiling trouble she was in, which I was trying desperately to get her out of. Alas, said “trouble” followed us there, too, and on one mad July night we had to flee our apartment. We took refuge at this scary shelter downtown, where we didn’t know if we would be safe or not for the night - we were sort of holding our breath. The agency was going to try to get us tickets on the Greyhound to Minneapolis, though they weren’t sure, yet, how soon it could happen, since it was already late at night.

After we got settled in, we had this huge fight (the kind of fight two people have when they love each other but they’re trapped in a completely impossible and terrifying situation), which ended with me telling her that I didn’t know how or why, but we were going to get out of that mess - we were going to make it to Minneapolis alive, and we were going to shake this bad situation for good - eventually.

Then we started walking around the facility - being too scared to sleep, while we waited to see if indeed this agency was going to follow through with getting us the bus tickets. The hallways were dark and we were tip-toeing, trying not to wake any other of the emergency guests, and we saw light coming from a door. As we walked toward it, we could hear music coming from the room, growing louder as we approached, until we could make out the song.

It was, of course, “Ooh Child.” But NOT the goofy 90s version that had been on the radio weeks before, the lyrics for which I’d quite liked (for obvious reasons, I guess), while its execution in that format had been found so reprehensible by my girlfriend (who fancied herself to be an R&B aficionado**). It was clearly a different version, a truly soulful version, and (having no awareness of the original, as performed by the Five Stairsteps, as I figured out only tonight from Wikipedia), I wondered if I was having some sort of auditory hallucination - interpreting both our current circumstances and the music we were hearing in wishful ways which, objectively speaking, were wholly unwarranted.

And then we were at the door, surreptitiously peeking through it. And there was this old man there, the janitor, quietly mopping the floor. And he had a little radio plugged in on the counter behind him, so little it didn’t seem like that rich sound could possibly be coming from it, yet it was. And we just stood there, listening and watching.

He never saw us, but his presence that night somehow made us feel less alone and terrified. And a little while later our tickets came through, and we got the hell out of Fargo. (Needless to say, I’ve never been back.)

Since that night - most of which I still can’t write about, even though more than fourteen years have passed; it is to me as Dresden was to Kurt Vonnegut - I’ve heard the R&B original “Ooh Child” on several occasions, but never, somehow, the particular version that had played in our apartment earlier, which for whatever reason my girlfriend and I had bitterly argued over. Thus, while in that shelter in July of 1993, I wondered if I’d lost my mind at hearing the original for the first time, I later questioned my memory as to whether the cheesy remake I’d heard first was something I’d imagined. Because when we as human beings endure terror, every bit of sensory input passes through that terror’s filter, coloring it inexorably. In the weeks before we’d had to flee (with almost nothing save for ID, a negligible amount of cash, and the clothes on our backs), things were so tense between us, we would have fought over anything, real or imagined.

Finding this song tonight helps me to put a few puzzle pieces together. Maybe one day I’ll be able to write the rest of what happened that night, and over the ensuing weeks - which we did, both, survive, although not unscarred.

That idealistic “Ooh-oo child, things are gonna get easier/ Ooh-oo child, things’ll be brighter” lyric - with its apparently Providential timing and grace - helped to get us through the worst night of our lives. It wasn’t enough to keep us together forever (walking “in the rays of a beautiful sun”), but it served as a bridge, from the near-inevitability of a certain torturous hell (the trouble she was in, by all rights, should have gotten us both killed that night) through to a series of subsequent purgatories, before we finally split four years later.

It’s a magnificent song. Even when delivered by early 90s pop stars not heard from previously or since.

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* Notice I am not currently listing ‘activist.’ That term would imply, you know, a state of being active, which, for reasons truly beyond my control right now (and which I did not forsee when I was embarking upon the Ohio conference, which I do have thoughts about that I will eventually share), I cannot presently engage.

** Translation: She had, on occasion, lived with black folks.

The 12 News traffic reporter
blithely conveys the day’s fatalities.
Who died is never the question.

Rather, one is to be made aware
That if one’s weekday commute relies
On Northbound Rt. 288 at Tuckahoe Creek
One should allow a few extra minutes
In case of rubbernecking.

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Note: Given that I haven’t written a single poem in months, and the fact that I’m allegedly on hiatus from blogging, I’ve no idea why I feel compelled to post this, but there it is. In the spirit, I guess, of William Carlos William’s bit about ‘getting the news from poems’ (the actual news having been reported some ten minutes ago).

So… RIP, whoever you are. - Victoria

Somewhere in the overflowing boxes upstairs I have a poem, from which I can only remember the following two lines:

Revising poetry while driving
is not recommended.

Perhaps it should go without saying that I figured this out through direct experience; that is, I came perilously close to taking out a stop sign once, because the poem I’d been working on for weeks just couldn’t wait until I got back home for its latest minor revision. (Most of my poems go through a minumum of 20-30 drafts; each individual draft will undergo countless tweaks such as the one that nearly resulted in the plowing over of the aforementioned stop sign.)

This, in any case, is why I take such delight in the following excerpt from Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

I write while I’m driving. This is probably rather dangerous. Worse than being on the cell phone, really. But I try to be careful. I write in my head and then I speak it out loud so I won’t forget and then I jot it down at red lights. This is why I do not take the freeway.

I should mention here that I’ve been reading Ariel Gore for years now, starting with her articles in the publication she started, hip Mama: the parenting ‘zine, but I have yet to get my mitts on this latest book, a situation I must soon remedy, particularly after the above excerpt, as well as this one: 

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: You need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out 37 issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom–except they would have cut off my welfare by now. It might be nice to have money and a room–or it might be suicidally depressing, who knows?–but all you need is a blank page, a pen, and a little bit of time. [emphasis added]

I needed to read this. Because the fact is, I haven’t had ‘a room of my own’ (much less money!) for nearly two decades, and it’s not at all likely that situation will be remedied any time soon. I have distractions galore; in fact, my distractions beget their own distractions, and so forth until my insides want to collapse; I am in the vice-grip of so many silent pressures and pressuring silences. Enough.

The direction of my life - and thereby, the direction of this blog - has got to change. When I first went online, I had a homepage where I occasionally posted updates that were directly relevant to matters of publication and craft; I’d announce readings I’d been invited to and publications I’d  be appearing in. I saw the internet as a tool like any other, rather than as a medium unto itself.

Since then, I’ve fallen in and out of love with blogging as its own peculiar form. One week will find me falling down the rabbit-hole of interblog wars and the like, while the next week I’m swearing off the whole mess (and usually, threatening to nuke my own blog in the process). Needless to say, throughout this torrid blog-affair, I’ve forgotten all about actually sending out work to existing (print or online) publications.

Well, fuck that. I have to come up with a means of embracing the available technologies without getting swallowed up in the process. The benefits of blogging are the same as its drawbacks: the instantly available audience, the capacity for developing community among readers and writers.  The commenting functions, link-exchanges, and pingbacks which facilitate connectivity between bloggers and their readers serve, often quite gloriously, to lessen individuals’ loneliness. This makes the blogging medium difficult to resist, but the fact is, works of more sustained narrative really require loneliness - or at least, a lack of dependence upon constant external validation, such as bloggers find in the form of site traffic statistics and, especially, comments.

In the blogging medium, nascent thoughts one might otherwise develop into fully-realized stories, articles, poems, or even books, become mere “blog entries,” blips in one’s ultimately disposable data-stream. Or so it seems, at least, when one has not yet mastered the art of balancing the separate demands of each form. Which, obviously, I haven’t.

I am reminded, now, of some fairly bold statements I made more than three years ago, right here on this blog:

I’m not going to prioritize publicity-mongering over my website’s content, any more than I will prioritize my website’s content over the actual books I am laboring to create: out of my own dire necessity, and a fierce love for the work itself.

Surely, in the three years since I wrote that, I might have created some actual books. But noooo, I’ve only been blogging (and sometimes, I haven’t even been doing that.) What gives?

Yes, I’ve had a number of material crises, from the loss of a certain job (under especially egregious and illegal circumstances) to a complete falling-out with my mother, such that I am no longer on speaking terms with her. There have been been physical as well as emotional health problems that have been mutually exascerbating. There has been palpable economic strife, and countless other stressors. 

But, really, so what? 

When I was a teenager, I had this poster on my wall, featuring a Zimbabwean proverb: If you can walk you can dance; if you can talk, you can sing:

What strength I took from this proverb at the time, I desperately needed; in fact, I would go so far as to say this notion helped to keep me alive. It resonates still.

I’ve been blogging since 2003, and writing for most of my life before that; surely I can also finish writing the books I’ve had in various stages of development over the last decade. If you can blog, you can write a book. Or at least, you can try, and you have nothing (least of all, a room of your own) to lose, so why the hell not?

***

To read more from Ariel Gore’s book, click here.