feminist blogs

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]

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

__

* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

[See note re: problem w/ text size*.]

In lieu of the still-unfinished essay referenced yesterday, I give you this**.

My mother with Barack Obama, December 16, 2004, Honolulu, HI.

Someday I’ll find, and post, the one with my maternal grandmother and her hero, Oliver North. (Because I’m nothing if not fair and balanced.)

Plus the ones of my paternal grandpa (who raised me on C-SPAN, God bless him) with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford.

For more goofiness, see this old post with pics of the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone, who went to high school with my dad; Wellstone’s mom and my grandmother also worked together in the cafeteria; the families also got together, on occasion, outside of school functions. (Did I mention the young Mr. Wellstone - for whom, years later - I did in fact vote, when I lived in Minnesota - looks quite fetching in a skirt?)

For better and for worse, the political thing has always been in the blood.

Not to worry though, the chances of my running for office are pretty much nil. Not only did I experiment with some blow while I was a teenager in Hawaiʻi, I also have an arrest record.

Ironically, the Olympia, Washington cop thought I had cocaine on me at the time; I didn’t. Rather, I had unlabeled capsules of another white powder in an unlabeled plastic baggie. Somehow he didn’t believe that the capsules contained boric acid: a homeopathic remedy for yeast infections. So they kept me locked up until they’d tested every last one of them. Following which he sheepishly emerged from the lab, asking whether I had any more capsules back at my dorm, so I could take care of my, ahem, “little problem.”

Needless to say, I was itching to get out of there.

__
* Tech note: WordPress is doing something weird with text size, which renders the individual post with too large text, and the post as it appears on main page of blog with size of title’s text too small. No idea why, trying to figure that out now. Will delete this note after troubleshooting.

** Intended also as a follow-up to a conversation that started here. Because this is the fun response, and I’ve given plenty of energy in recent times to political discourse that is, necessarily, painfully serious.

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.

Were she still among the living, the notorious “second wave” feminist civil rights activist Flo Kennedy would be 91 years old today. She was formidably gorgeous, and gorgeously formidable. I met her once, in 1992 (at “The Farm,” Kate Millett’s art colony for women) at which time I asked her what was then the only major burning theoretical question in my mind: what did the phenomenon of lesbian battering mean to feminism, and vice-versa? And her answer was as simple as it was profound: “Oppression does not make people beautiful.”

Kate’s farm was also where this picture (with Flo’s standard photographic pose: giving the entire world the proverbial bird) was taken, by the late Janet Melvin, a lesser known but also amazing and wonderful woman whom I very much miss:

From Poughkeepsie

This NYT obit that ran on December 23, 2000 does a good job of recounting Flo’s remarkably varied accomplishments and exploits. Here is the text (as reproduced by Common Dreams):

Flo Kennedy, Feminist, Civil Rights Advocate and Flamboyant Gadfly, Dies at 84

by Douglas Martin

Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and political activist whose flamboyant attire and sometimes outrageous comments drew attention to her fierce struggle for civil rights and feminism, died on Thursday in her Manhattan apartment. She was 84. Known to everyone as Flo, recognizable everywhere in cowboy hat and pink sunglasses, she was one of the first black women to graduate from Columbia Law School, where she was admitted after threatening a discrimination suit. She fought in the courts and on the streets for abortion rights, represented Black Panthers, was a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus and led a mass urination by women protesting a lack of women’s restrooms at Harvard.

“If you found a cause for the downtrodden of somebody being abused someplace, by God, Flo Kennedy would be there,” former Mayor David N. Dinkins of New York said yesterday.

People magazine in 1974 called her “the biggest, loudest and, indisputably, the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and radical politics join in mostly common cause.”

Justice Emily Jane Goodman of New York State Supreme Court said Ms. Kennedy gave women courage. “She showed a whole generation of us the right way to live our lives,” Justice Goodman said.

Friends like Gloria Steinem reveled in her razor-sharp wit. Ms. Steinem, who lectured with Ms. Kennedy in the 1970’s, said a man in the audience would all too often stand up and demand, “Are you lesbians?”

Ms. Kennedy would respond that it depended. “Are you my alternative?” she would ask.

Ms. Steinem said by phone from Hawaii yesterday, “She understood what Emma Goldman understood: there has to be laughter and fun at the revolution, or it isn’t a revolution.”

Marie Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation, yesterday called Ms. Kennedy “one of the most wonderfully outrageous pioneers of feminism in America.”

Florynce Rae Kennedy, the second of five daughters, was born on Feb. 11, 1916, in Kansas City, Mo. Her father was a Pullman porter and later owned a taxi business. He once stood up with a shotgun to members of the Ku Klux Klan who wanted to drive him from a home he had bought in a mainly white neighborhood.

In her autobiography, “Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times” (1976), she said her parents almost never criticized their daughters. In fact, they could seemingly do almost no wrong. “We were taught very early in the game that we didn’t have to respect the teachers, and if they threatened to hit us, we could act as if they weren’t anybody we had to pay any attention to,” she wrote.

After graduating from high school, Ms. Kennedy opened a hat shop in Kansas City with her sisters. Within a few years, she was involved in her first political protest, helping organize a boycott when the local Coca-Cola bottler refused to hire black truck drivers.

After the death of her mother, Zella, from cancer, Ms. Kennedy and her sister Grayce moved to New York. Ignoring those who urged her to become a teacher, she enrolled in pre-law courses at Columbia University. “I find that the higher you aim, the better you shoot,” she wrote.

She applied to Columbia Law School, but was refused admission. She was told the reason was not that she was black, but that she was a woman. Justice Goodman said she answered, “To my friends at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, it all sounds the same.”

After threatening a lawsuit, Ms. Kennedy was admitted. She was one of eight women and the only black in her class. She graduated in 1951 and worked briefly for a Manhattan law firm before opening her own law office in 1954. Business was not good, and she had to take a job at Bloomingdale’s one Christmas to pay the rent.

One of her cases involved representing the estates of the jazz greats Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker to recover money owed them by record companies. Even though she won the cases, the experience soured her on the law.

“Handling the Holiday and Parker estates taught me more than I was really ready for about government and business delinquency and the hostility and helplessness of the courts,” she wrote. “Not only was I not earning a decent living, there began to be a serious question in my mind whether practicing law could ever be an effective means of changing society or even of simple resistance to oppression.”

She turned to political activism, setting up an organization called the Media Workshop in 1966 to fight racism in journalism and advertising. Picketing an advertising agency led to the protesters’ being invited upstairs to state their case. She said, “Ever since I’ve been able to say, `When you want to get to the suites, start in the streets.’ ”

Her strategy became to go after the biggest targets possible. “Grass-roots organizing is like climbing into bed with a malaria patient in order to show how much you love him or her, then catching malaria yourself,” she wrote. “I say if you want to kill poverty, go to Wall Street and kick — or disrupt.”

Increasingly, her legal cases were almost always political. “Sweetie,” she said, “if you’re not living on the edge, then you’re taking up space.”

In 1966, she represented H. Rap Brown, the civil rights leader. In 1968, she sued the Roman Catholic Church for what she viewed as interference with abortion. In 1969, she organized a group of feminist lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of New York State’s abortion law, an action credited with helping influence the Legislature to liberalize abortion the next year.

In 1969, she helped represent 21 Black Panthers on trial in Manhattan for conspiracy to commit bombings, among other things. They were eventually acquitted, but during the trial she used them for another purpose.

She and Ms. Goodman, not then a judge, and others were renting a house on Fire Island. They decided to take the Panthers to a community on the island for a dinner at a restaurant that did not accept blacks or Jews. It created quite a commotion, the intended effect. But afterward, Ms. Goodman asked if it was all that important, compared with the life and death issues at stake in the trial.

Ms. Kennedy gave an emphatic yes. “Her point was that you have to fight on all the fronts all the time,” Justice Goodman said.

Other fronts included founding the Feminist Party in 1971. Its first act was to nominate Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York, for president.

In 1967, Ms. Kennedy attended a rally against the Vietnam War in Montreal. Bobby Seale, the Black Panther, was not allowed to speak. “I went berserk,” she wrote. “I took the platform and started yelling and hollering.” An invitation for Ms. Kennedy to speak in Washington followed, and a 20-year lecturing career was born. She made $3,500 a lecture at her peak.

Ms. Steinem called her lectures with Ms. Kennedy on the college circuit “the Thelma and Louise of the 70’s.” Ms. Steinem said, “I definitely speak first because after Flo I would have been an anticlimax.”

In 1957, Ms. Kennedy married Charles Dye, a writer 10 years her junior. He died a few years later. “Anyone who marries a drunk Welshman doesn’t deserve sympathy,” she once said.

Her views on the exclusivity of marriage were not much brighter. “Why would you lock yourself in the bathroom just because you have to go three times a day,” she wrote.

Ms. Kennedy is survived by three sisters, Joy Kennedy Banks of East Orange, N.J., Faye Kennedy Daly of Honolulu and Grayce Kennedy Bayles of Queens.

As her health failed, her spirit did not. In her autobiography, she wrote: “I’m just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing, and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stopped to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”

Today I am breaking my blogging fast of the last 40-odd days, the inspiration behind which remains too complicated and volatile to explain to almost anyone.

One woman in the Upper Midwest, along with one man in the Southeast (plus my husband and shrink*) may be the only parties on this planet to grasp both the moral complexity and the blunt force of some events that occurred right before I took that last hiatus, at least until I can tell the story completely, without concern for any detrimental effects the telling could have on the principal characters involved.

Suffice it to say that after watching a 2005 movie I’d never heard of until this week (it had earned the ‘kiss of death’ NC-17 rating on its initial US release; presently, the DVD version and presumably the cable version I just saw have an R rating), called Where the Truth Lies, I have decided two things:

1. I’m going to have to obtain, as quickly as possible, two copies of Rupert Holmes’s novel upon which the film was based, and hope to God that three certain lines (see further below) as read in the screenplay, do in fact correspond to the novel’s text, so I can
2. Underline the relevant passages in both novel copies, sending one copy to my father, in lieu of a substantively explanatory letter. (No good, either for him or me, could possibly result from my writing him any more substantively explanatory letters. Been there, done that, got psychologically clobbered for it without much healing and/or revelatory benefit to offset the pains, so fuck it.)

These are the lines from the movie which I would have to underline, if in the novel they appear thusly:

1. “God help you when a killer takes a shining to you.”
2. “Pretending to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you’re not.”
3. “There is someone in all this who is totally innocent of any involvement in the events of that night, but whose life would be made infinitely worse if I tell the truth at this time. I want to protect this person from any further pain. I promise you, I promise you I will write down the truth that I have learned, but I have to let matters lie until this person has died, and the truth can no longer touch them.”

Really, it’s as if my life exists purely to prove the old saw about the truth being immutably stranger than fiction. For God’s sake, I have to rip off others’ fictions just to avoid my own nonfictions (while at least letting off a bit of toxically truthful steam in the process).

So this space, ‘Southern Discomfort,’ that I’ve made for myself in the necessarily temporal blogosphere (with alternating ambivalence and enthusiasm, constantly rebuilding and destroying the immediately available body of my work), is literally ‘Where the Truth Lies,’ and the ‘place’ in which I’ve desperately scratched after the truths locked in others’ lies, so that, in time, I could develop the clearest, most comprehensive understanding of real events, and write them.

And like the anxious ‘girl journalist’ in the movie, Karen (the one whose iced corpse doesn’t appear in the initial frames of the film, which features not one, but two curiously symbiotic ‘girl journalist’ characters: one dead, the other not), I can sincerely promise anyone here that “…I will write down the truth that I have learned… (emphasis added).”

But as Karen also came to understand: that truth-telling will have to be deferred, for the benefit of certain innocent parties - which is not to say that non-innocent parties won’t also benefit from this specific silence; of course they will, but I cannot care more about that now than about the benefit of these unnamed innocents, to whom I am accountable, whether they know it or not.

Following are links to some of the blogs I’ve been reading over my hiatus in an effort to avoid going nuts; I’m in their debt (as well as in that of friends who’ve been calling and/or writing to check up on me, even though I’ve been for the most part uncommunicative in response): The Reclusive Leftist, Cosmopoetica; Desultory Turgescence; CouchSurfer (& her companion blog, Notes on a Quest), PostSecret, and (of course) The Lazy Cartoonist.

Thanks, peeps.
___

*Note: The words “husband” and “shrink” as used here refer, of course, to two separate entities. Were it not for my mother having told me, one year and two days ago (as well as on several occasions during my childhood), all about how her own shrink had “saved her life” back in the early seventies, specifically by not sleeping with her (which evidently had been her expectation), I wouldn’t feel the need to specify something that should be that self-evident. But, hey: that’s what happens when one is raised under the specter of one’s mother’s near-constant promiscuity, and that same mother’s entirely constant projection of that promiscuity upon the canvas she had in me, from when I was as young as eight: too young to understand the deadly politics behind women calling other women sluts - much less, the politics of women projecting these socially constructed “slut” paradigms upon their girl children.

Back in 1992, when I was a resident at Kate Millett’s art colony for women, I made the acquaintance of a very wonderful poet and fiction writer named Emily Ballou. Shortly afterward, Emily moved to Australia, where she has since received rave reviews for her work. Presently, a Google search of Emily.Ballou +Australia yields 471 hits, many pertaining to her quite well-received debut novel, Father Lands, but damned if I still can’t track down an email address for her, much less any references to a specific piece of hers that I’d love to re-read, which, if I recall correctly, was called Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton Making Love. (And damned if the last postal address I have for Emily is many years old. Nonetheless I’m determined to re-track her down sometime very soon.)

Lacking Emily’s actual source material, and also having such a fuzzy recollection of the piece itself (for that matter, I may not have read it in 1992; it could have been in a subsequent mail exchange, ca. 1998), I can’t adequately explain what I originially found in it, that resonated so much for me. Perhaps it was the title alone, conjuring as it did a healing act of love between two brilliant American women poets, now lost to us: curses of suicides. The notion that the misogyny-borne self-hatreds of women, absorbed by most of us to one degree or another - but most especially by women artists - could be ritually discarded, in art as well as in life, in such a redemptive way. (And despite the typically divisive notions of gender and sexual orientation; we might do well, here, to remember Adrienne Rich’s essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence; how it demonstrated the extent to which homophobia is at least as destructive for heterosexual women as for lesbians and bisexual women.)
In any event, I had cause to think of Emily’s writing last night, as I watched a fascinating movie, Tom & Viv, on the life of T.S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivienne. In the years since this film came out, Carol Seymour-Jones has published a biography of Vivienne, Painted Shadow, which I’m going to have to get my hands on now. The following is from the book jacket:

By the time she was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after T. S. Eliot deserted her, Vivienne Eliot was a lonely, distraught figure. Shunned by literary London, she was the “neurotic” wife whom Eliot had left behind. In The Family Reunion, he described a wife who was a “restless shivering painted shadow,” and so she had become: a phantomlike shape on the fringe of Eliot’s life, written out of his biography and literary history.

This astonishing portrait of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of poet T.S. Eliot, gives a voice to the woman who, for seventeen years, had shared a unique literary partnership with Eliot but who was scapegoated for the failure of the marriage and all but obliterated from historical record. In so doing, Painted Shadow opens the way to a new understanding of Eliot’s poetry.

Vivienne longed to tell her whole story; she wrote in her diary: “You who in later years will read these very words of mine will be able to trace a true history of this epoch.” She believed (as did Virginia Woolf) that she was Eliot’s muse, the woman through whom he transmuted life into art. Yet Vivienne knew the secrets of his separate and secret life — which contributed to her own deepening hysteria, drug addiction, and final abandonment: the tragedy of a marriage that paired a repressed yet sensual man with an extroverted woman who longed for a full sexual relationship with her husband.

From what I gathered from the film, Vivienne suffered from something along the lines of endometriosis, PMS, literary and social passions, and (perhaps) a touch of bipolar disorder, all of which could have been managed (in artistically meaningful ways), were it not from that other source of her perennial suffering: Victorian-era patriarchy. And this got her locked up - for good. (Interestingly, it is revealed at the end of the movie that her most difficult symptoms became non-existent after menopause; nonetheless, she remained, until her death from heart failure, committed to the mental institution.)

Beyond this, the film’s subtext around Virginia Woolf was most fascinating to me. Woolf had evidently characterized Vivienne Eliot as “this bag of ferrets” hanging around T.S. Eliot’s neck; they were rivals of a sort, with Woolf being an esteemed colleague of Tom Eliot, and Vivienne being “merely” Tom’s wife, with literary aspirations of her own, which went unrealized all the while she had performed ably (if also chaotically) as her husband’s “Muse.”

At some point, Vivienne makes some snarky comments about Woolf, to the effect that Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, had her in and out of loony bins all the time.

It gives me such sharp sadness, that Virginia Woolf, while realizing much success as a writer, ultimately caved into the aforementioned, typical-of-female-artists self-hatred and ended her life; Vivienne, by contrast, was stripped of nearly all the (still limited) freedoms Woolf had enjoyed, and died not by her own hand, but of some pretty simple heartbreak.

Thus, this disembodied, retroactively redemptive notion of Vivienne Eliot and Virginia Woolf making love.

If they had not been so mired in their rivalries…

If they had not been so worn down by patriarchal repression…

If they had not been so tethered to the literary men in their lives…

They very well might have loved and healed one another, and not died in separate, but viscerally connected, tragedies of suicide and heartbreak.