feminist blogs

[the last one having been discovered in my underwear drawer, at which time I was delighted persons still in Olympia shared my delight.]

This flier:

Queer Nation flier, Olympia, WA, ca. 1991

…was from the first meetings of Queer Nation in Olympia, hosted by my roommate Tod Streater (RIP). With him, I attended said meetings - along with the first local meetings of ACT-UP, which was hosted somewhere else. I have to confess, though, that the only clear memory I have from the Queer Nation meetings was the time Tod answered the door, took one look at the guy who’d just knocked, and said “Why hello, FBI! You don’t belong here!” And then he cackled in his most gloriously queeny voice and slammed the door. (As for whether the Olympia chapters of such groups were, indeed, under any sort of government surveillance, I have no idea - but Tod, as one of the loudest voices around in terms of AIDS and queer rights activism, had every reason to be suspicious.)

The fliers were placed on bulletin boards at the Evergreen campus and the like. The phone number was for the campus queer rights group. The address was our rented household, affectionately then known as The Dreary Biscuit (one roommate - Julia, I think? had once lived at another Olympia household called “The Sunny Muffin”).

Some time ago, I tweeted, “I really need to find a way to sort out which of the voices in my head I should be listening to, and which I should ignore.” Lest anyone imagine I was joking, I present the following, composed, yes, entirely on my blackberry this morning (with a few edits/link and file insertions) - or, shall I say, afternoon - after long, fitful dreams into which I could not, finally, collapse until well past dawn (the insomnia thing is killing me lately), because it was too important then, for me to wait for my computer to fire up. (Which is happening a lot lately. I swear I’m doing 80% of my writing entirely on my phone, and when I choose to share it, posting directly from there to my Medium Sized Blog - relative to the bloated largess of this one - on Tumblr.)

__

Image: Tears spilled listening to Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers & reading email, taken with the crap phone I had back in June.

Pertains to a different album by The National than is referenced here, but image is still apt.

__

Some notes on waking, early one Saturday afternoon

Why go to your shrink, when you have the song that’s been stuck in your head for going on 72 hours, which, even though you love the voice of the man who sings it, is getting excessive, so finally you Google the lyrics and then freeze, with a certain horror of recognition, on reading this (on your blackberry, while you are still on the potty)?: If I were a spy in the world inside your head/ Would I be your wife in the better life you led?¹

For context: In 1990, when I was first with my future husband (whom I’d first met when we were ages 3 and 4, respectively, and again in 1984, when I was 13), we had a romantic date at this Mongolian and Japanese restaurant in a strip mall, anchored by a K-Mart².

When we got our fortune cookies, his said “Friends long absent will be returning to you.” (Through the seven years following - through each of our insane girlfriends, which in my case included decidedly non-awesome confrontations with the law - he kept it in his wallet, along with a picture of me he’d taken of me, in the yard of my now-estranged aunt.)

We laughed then, on reading his fortune, because that was how it had always been with us: rotating in and out of each others’ orbits.

Then I opened mine, which read, “You and your wife will be happy in your lives together.” We laughed at that too, because I was entirely out then as “bisexual, erring on the side of women.”

Coming back to him, seven years later, was, among other things, an admission that my fortune had been very, very wrong.

It took awhile for us to figure out that perhaps our fortunes hadn’t been so much “wrong” as “switched.”

Even so, I’ve had moments of ambivalence, in which my brain takes leave of my body, aimlessly wandering its “less traveled” roads. (Or, perhaps more accurately: “roads traveled extensively, but finally abandoned out of dire necessity.”)

And that’s when I need to get back into my own head, cutting through the static of last night’s drinks and dreams, to figure out what that persistent melody is trying to tell me, so I can pull myself back from the detour, and remember “this is the person I married, for all kinds of good reasons stretching far beyond the necessity of abandoning those other failed, landmine-infested roads, and I truly love him.”

__

¹ The song is Bitters & Absolut, by The National (from their eponymous record). You can hear it and read the lyrics here here, and/or buy the mp3 from Amazon. No, there’s no affiliate link giving me any kickback from purchases (not that I couldn’t use kickbacks! See pathetic note in column at right, unless you’re reading via RSS!), because I’m too lazy to figure that shit out.

² Said mall having been built over the literal rubble of one of my numerous, vaguely remembered childhood homes. Only clear memory from that address, on or near Williamsburg, Virginia’s Waller Mill road: when the stepfather I had for a brief period stepped on a nail in the yard, which may or may not have gone all the way through his foot, but there were weird and, considering his artistic rages and otherwise erratic behavior, nonsensical and scrambled allusions to Jesus that, still, I somehow associate with that moment. (And a further tangent: Since the restaurant still exists, we celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary there, in 2007.)

(But First, A Ridiculous Preamble)

Tonight I was reading one dude’s entertaining post in response to a “Seven Things No One Knows About You” meme. This led me to recall the fact that a number of perfectly lovely people have “tagged” me with such memes in the past. However, because I am a surly and uncooperative person (the handful of people who will read this already know this about me), I failed to respond. (So too with well-intentioned “blogging awards.”)

First, I don’t have too many secrets. (Particularly from those following me on Twitter. The poor wretches.) Second, if I wanted to make lists of stuff about my life that could be considered freaky (shall we talk about the funeral of my uncle, which had its own bouncer, or about being reported as a missing person in 1993 to Washington State police?), I could do that full time and never run out of material. Third, my best material is precisely the stuff I need to pull together for more sustained narratives - e.g., more short stories and fewer itemized blog posts. (And when I get better at finishing the goddamned stories I start - and, omigawd, start sending out work again - this is the last thing I published - can you say “pathetic”? - I need to move back in the direction of books.)

But whatever. Tonight I figured, “oh why the fuck not.¹” So, following are seven things you don’t (or at least, probably don’t) know about me, which, rather than being individually substantive, are tangential but still (one hopes) relevant. I should be able to keep that short and sweet, right?

Seven things about two brands of whiskey I’d just as soon never drink, and why

1. I am named after the granddaughter of the founder of Southern Comfort, whom my parents met at William and Mary: a woman named Vikki Fowler. (This has something to do with my blog’s title, although that’s only part of it.) I’m told I met her as a baby, and that she may have gone to Africa (on the inspiration of the 1966 film, Born Free, supposedly); in any event, a relative of hers, reached at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History some years ago, had no idea where Vikki ended up; in fact, she said if I ever learned what had become of Vikki, to please let her know. (I’d still really like to know.)
2. Yet I can’t stand whiskey.
3. Which is because whiskey was the beverage of choice for one of my most heinous ex-girlfriends, late in 1990 through early 1991.
4. Who claimed to have a (juvenile) record for attempted murder, and whose behavior was otherwise sufficiently terrorizing that still, from time to time I run her name through her hometown newspaper’s search engines, because what’s more interesting to read than any given town’s police blotter?
5. Which is how I know that among items she has been arrested for stealing (in addition to violent crime arrests), one of these was, indeed, a bottle of whiskey.
6. However, that whiskey was not Southern Comfort. It was Black Velvet, which I understand is a) Canadian and b) Also the name of an extraordinarily cheesy late 80s tune recorded by one Alannah Myles.
7. Who was just her type.

__
¹ Not to worry, however. I will not further perpetuate the tagging-with-memes thing; I trust that if you feel like writing something in response to the “seven things” notion, that you will, and that if you don’t, you won’t, and I will love you just the same.

On Sunday, I returned from a five-day trip to Greensboro to see visit with he who is known to most of my peeps on Twitter as “the BFF.” Here’s us, goofing in an appropriately blurred manner at the local Krispy Kreme:

We go back as far as our time in the collective primordial soupcan, I’m pretty sure. He’s the Hansel to my Gretel in our respective (wildly) dysfunctional family narratives. (Or sometimes he’s Gretel and I’m Hansel. We’re versatile like that.) We went to high school together for a few years, before (in a story that would take far too long to explain here) I impersonated a social worker on his behalf, leading to my doing a fake interview of his family, in order to establish his fitness and stability to enter into a student exchange program - in freakin’ Egypt, because his main issue was getting as far as possible from his family no matter what that took. And it was hard - so hard - to see him go; to help him go, even - but I knew we’d continue to cross paths.

And so we have, ever since our time together in the mid-eighties on the North Shore of Kauai. He’d be living in Florida or Georgia or North Carolina or Alabama while I’d be living in Washington State or New York or Minnesota or Virginia and we would find each other again, and catch up on all the mad chaos of our times apart.

I love him to pieces. He’s both the brother and the sister I never had. And because, now that I’m back in Richmond, and already miss him something terrible, I thought I’d posta compendium of past BFF-related tweets, for those who appreciate that sort of thing (what? There are some).

The usual guiding premise of my trips to Greensboro is that we will write. And we do write! But sometimes we also act like silly kids:

• Extracting chapter titles for work in progress from past tweets. (To BFF: “See? I TOLD you there was a literary justification for Twitter.”) (link)
• BFF now actively sabotaging me. Sends email w/ (blessedly un-twitterable) graphic w/ slogan at bottom (as it were): “Ass: The Other Vagina.” (link)
• BFF thinks his Chewbaca impressions (& threatening to show me pictures of foreskin) is going to help me write. Seriously. GOING TO KILL HIM. (link)
• BFF has adopted my fave exhortation (via @jagosaurus), “Sweet Sparkly Jesus!” In return, he enriches my vocab w/ phrases like “donut puncher” (link)
• Trying to convince BFF that since, when we were teenagers, I credibly impersonated a social worker on his behalf, I can now act as his agent. (link)
• BFF, as Lionel Richie song plays on 80s channel: “To you this coffee’s weak, but after I drink it, my BALLS will be dancing on the ceiling!” (link)
• BFF (suspiciously): “Are you twittering?” Me (doe-eyed): “Of course not!” (pauses) “…But I am, you know, lying.” (link)
• BFF, indignant: “I have NOT had plastic surgery! I’ve had a minor amount of laser and chemical resurfacing.” Well okay then. (link)

Sometimes it’s a family affair:

• BFF’s sister, who is known for telling the story of how she photographed Oprah (twice!) - just mentioned having photographed Oprah. (Twice!) (link)
• OMG! My BFF, his husband and his bi sister are all forcing me to watch an Oprah special. ON CHER. I AM the butchest person in this room. (link)
• BFF’s husband: “Omigawd! She’s like, all Sade now.” Me: “I can’t believe that’s a metaphor for you.” (link)
• Oh fuck all. Now Cher is talking with Tina Turner and Oprah ABOUT TOM CRUISE. BFF & fam staring as if experiencing rapture. How I love them. (link)
• “Uh oh. She’s texting.” - BFF’s sister, earlier tonight. (link)
• For my benefit, BFF put on VH1’s “40 Best Metal Songs.” I name-drop, proving I am as tedious as his sister about her (twice!) meeting Oprah. (link)
• Explaining “The Great Sharon Osbourne Versus Iron Maiden War of ‘05″; BFF finds this approximately as fascinating as I found Cher last night (link)

Sometimes it’s just about us:

• BFF to pay for my next train ticket to Greensboro. Claims this isn’t charity but for his selfish benefit; he writes better w/ me there. Aww. (link)
• BFF & I go back light years; we are often each others’ single common thread, ribboned through our respective decades of open throttle chaos. (link)
• BFF has learned to send text messages, though they’re always quite brief. Latest: “Sphincter Spasm!” Not sure how he’d fare on Twitter. (link)
• BFF has texting now & is sending various alternate spellings/pronunciations for “vagina.” Latest: “Mugigera.” It’s going to be a long night. (link)
• Nap interrupted by panicked BFF’s “CALL ME” txt. Called. The emergency: his screenplay needs title! So, watch for future hit film, “Mmmmph.” (link)
• BFF is most vag-obsessed gay dude I know: “1st we’ll turn right on Aycock.” (Note: an actual street.) “Then we’ll turn left on… A Vagina!” (link)
• BFF: “Did I tell you that I am so extra-incredibly gay?” Me: “…?” BFF: “What I mean is, in two weeks I get to see Dolly Parton! Yay, me!” (link)
• “Can we stop for a minute & just count our blessings?” - BFF. “Can I blow my nose first?” - me. (after a long talk and a good cry) (link)

When we’re together, it’s awfully hard to keep track of all the words that pass between us, what with all the giggling like schoolgirls and watching after six dogs (whom I’ll be taking care of in December when he & his partner go to Vegas) while actually getting in some writing, too. But I try my best to record for posterity some of our better conversations. This one, following the above “counting our blessings” discussion, is a personal favorite (and was just brief enough to fit into one tweet):

BFF: “You have a GREAT husband. I mean, he’s funny…”
Me: “Very!”
BFF: “He’s a Democrat…”
Me: “Yep.”
BFF: “And he’s hairy!”
Me: “Sure. Wait, no! That’s NOT a plus.”

While avoiding packing for my trip to Greensboro tomorrow (though - crap - it’s now 4:11 AM, so let’s call it “today”), I ended up watching a movie called Heaven which I found interesting enough to look up on IMDB, leading me to a distracted series of link-clicks until I ended up at a completely unrelated (and true) story from the late ’60s, which completely blew my mind.

Speaking of my mind, here’s a (rather embarrassing) glimpse at how mine operates - I am drawn to stories involving high-stakes adventures, wherein one seeks catharsis after experiences of trauma, from the (actually fairly implausible) story told in Heaven, to the story at which I finally landed later on, through this chain:

1. IMDB listing for Heaven, to
2. IMDB listing for co-leading actor Giovanni Ribisi, to
3. Wikipedia listing for the same dude (who, it turns out, is a Scientologist), to
4. Wikipedia entry for Scientology, to
5. Section on the organization’s past illegal activities (where I read about how they tried to ruin the life of a journalist named Paulette Cooper, whom they’d targeted as a so-called “Suppressive Person” for her 1970 book, The Scandal of Scientology), to
6. Wikipedia page for Paulette Cooper (where I was interested to note that she’d gone from fairly intense works, like the one that got her into trouble with the Scientologists, to “fluffier,” co-authored books like The Most Romantic Resorts for Destination Weddings, Marriage Renewals & Honeymoons), to
7. A story by Cooper about the Scientology fiasco, hosted on her own site, to
8. A story hosted at the website for the Ocean Liner Museum about how she’d once been a stowaway.

Paulette Cooper, in 1967

Here, finally, is the paragraph from that story that grabbed my attention (in light of details I’d read on Wikipedia about her early life, to which I’ll return momentarily):

…And now, for some armchair psychiatry (aka “projecting”):

Why, indeed, did she do it?

As someone who knows some of the more bizarre contours of intergenerationally as well as directly acquired PTSD, it’s impossible for me to discount another aspect of her story, mentioned in the ‘early life’ section of her Wikipedia page: that she was born in Auschwitz, where her parents were murdered. She is compelled to act out a high-stakes drama involving intense hypervigilance and hiding, passing among others, surviving without access to basic resources, etc - as her parents may have attempted, but failed to do (while her own life was spared, so she has that ’survivor guilt’ thing happening as well).

On that cruise ship, though - a site of incongruous splendor, for its being a site for a Holocaust survivor’s subconscious exercise in re-enacting trauma - she could at least feel assured that even though she faced certain dangers (indeed, her risk of being sexually assaulted is a primary focus of the piece), she could never be in the same ‘neighborhood’ of risk that she was, on some level, remembering.

This, then, is the only interpretation that makes any sense to me: That her adventure was a creative, albeit risky way of scratching at the lingering ‘itch’ left behind for years - sometimes for decades, or even generations - following extreme trauma.

I could be wrong, of course - hers is not my experience to judge, whatever (wildly uneven) parallels I may find between certain aspects of our experiences.

Of course, it is not lost on me here that I strongly prefer to analyze others’ traumas, rather than my own. (Distancing, anyone?) Or that I went from compulsively watching a film about one kind of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma, through a random assortment of links, until I found a completely separate story of catharsis-seeking-after-trauma: lather, rinse, repeat - ad infinitum.

What is most sad, here, is that on any given day, I go through scenarios much like this. Maybe I’m reading a book instead of watching a movie, or talking with a friend about his past trauma rather than compulsively clicking through link after link until I find some random trauma narrative online to which I can, on some level, relate. The stories are different, but they always repeat some element of the catharsis-seeking-after-trauma script.

Of course, the more constructive thing for me to do would be to get back to writing my own stories, because they will either corrode me to death from the inside, or they will be allowed out, and perhaps even be permitted to do “good” of some kind out there in the world.

In my defense, I have been doing that much more lately - but the closer I get to the really, really difficult material, the more I have these episodes of freakout behavior, wasting hours upon hours soaking in the variously helpful and distracting narratives of strangers.

I’ll close with some especially apt George Orwell:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

(qtd. in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage, p. 395)

In the middle ground between tweeting and blogging, there is, apparently, tumblr-ing - so in case people had wondered whether I still formed thoughts outside 140 character increments and the occasional hellishly long post here, this is where I’m doing that. It’s nothing much, but it’s more than nothing. If I were a smart girl, I’d stop here and figure out a way to integrate the tumblr posts with this space. (Okay, it’s less an issue of ’smart’ than it is one of ‘I just don’t have time to research that,’ but whatever.)

Drive by life update, then:

• Still pretty wrapped up in election news (to wit, frequent page refreshes of http://fivethirtyeight.com), and yes, still refusing to blog about it (other than peripherally), because I exist in a precarious state balanced between hope and rage which I find difficult to manage. There is more I will write about the election, once it’s over. Right now it’s just too volatile. Suffice it to say, like most thinking feminists, I am supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama. (Note: Comments taking me to task on this “thinking feminists” bit will simply be deleted. Scurry off to your own blogs and whine about what an Obamabot you think I am, if you find that sort of activity rewarding.)
• I recently read an extremely thought-provoking book, David Carr’s Night of the Gun. Highly recommended, will post a review as soon as possible.
• In between tweeting, tumblring, politics-obsessing, and reading, I’ve also been getting some mad writing done. Nothing very blog-suitable, but stories. Mostly from the early 80s, with forays into the mid-90s when I can bear the anxiety of doing so. (Even more so than the early 80s, the mid-90s were rough.) Also, I’m finally sending out work again. Go, me.
• Was thrilled to finally meet baby Sagan, son of my friends Joriel and Ben back in Richmond for a visit this week.
• The kids are doing great. The eight year old is as wildly energetic as ever, and writes quite imaginatively for her age. (Has some attention span issues though. Wonder where she got that from?) Meanwhile, her straight-As earning, honors program-enrolled teenage sister attended her first homecoming dance last night, and looked spectacular, as did her equally nerdy boyfriend, of whom I completely approve. (So far. A mother can never be too vigilant, right?)
• Wishing a happy birthday to Claudine O’Leary, the smartest person I know on issues confronting youth in the sex trade (among many other difficult topics), and a dear friend.

That’s all for now.

So I’ve changed my blog title from Square One (which had only been intended as a placeholder anyway, after my blog-nukage back in April) back to one I used for a while in 2006, Southern Discomfort. I guess it’s the only title I ever truly loved, so there you go.

At the time, I explained the title thusly to the lovely, brilliant, insanely (and usually inappropriately) funny savoytruffle:

…For one thing, [Southern Discomfort is] the first book I ever read by Rita Mae Brown. (My, but that was interesting to my fourteen-year-old eyes.) For another, I am, in fact, named after a whiskey heiress (the granddaughter of the founder of Southern Comfort) - yet I can’t abide by the stuff; my sociopath ex, Amy (the one with the record for attempted murder) rather ruined that for me.

Another title I considered was Scotch and Prune Juice, for this quote from Sarah Schulman’s The Sophie Horowitz Story:

Lesbian liberation and the Mafia mix like scotch and prune juice. You don’t try it unless you have to.

But I figured that might be a tad obscure, and/or that it would imply a fondness for either scotch or prune juice, when indeed, I am a fan of neither.

What I am a fan of, though: stories. (So one of my own stories, which indeed involves a “lesbian liberation” narrative as well as a fleeting interaction with Mafia - curiously, around the same time I last saw Kate Millett - must eventually be written.) The more improbable and true, the better.

Which is not to say I don’t love fiction, too. I just have enough true material to work with that it’s impossible for me to imagine working in that medium, even if I do borrow from fiction’s forms.

I have a brief post on my Tumblelog in honor of Kate Millett, an imperfect and, in many circles, all but forgotten feminist revolutionary here.

Here, also, is a photo of me with Kate in 1992:

There’ll come a time when I’m ready to write much more about her. For now, suffice it to say that her memoir Flying, which I first read in 1990, changed my life, as did my time in 1992 at her art colony in Poughkeepsie, as did my visit with her in 1993 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The latter segment of that story is the one that has proven most difficult for me to write, and I have only done so thus far in fragments. (Some fragments addressing that tumultuous period may be found here and here, although none address Millett’s influence specifically.)

Hopefully, I will get to assembling all those fragments while Kate is still alive.

Finally reading Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty (a gift sent by my friend Chris, to whom I owe a good three or four letters). Here, the biographer is speaking of her early, delicate negotiations with the late poet’s sister, owner of Edna’s estate:

There were only three things she said she’d destroyed. One was a letter returned to her by a no-longer-young man to whom Edna had written. Norma said it was indiscreet. Edna described his physical beauty in detail and made what she wanted clear. He was homosexual. Norma said, “Maybe she didn’t care. Anyway, he turned her down. We can’t have that.” There was an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed. And there was a set of pornographic photographs, taken, she thought, about the same time as the nude photographs from Santa Fe in 1926 or 1927, when Millay was writing her libretto, The King’s Henchman, for the Metropolitan Opera. These were of Eugen and Edna, she said. Some were taken down at the pool, perhaps shot by Eugen using a timing device on his camera. Norma guessed that Arthur Davison Ficke had a hand in shooting them. “Vincent was already a famous poet, how could she have let these photographs of her be taken? Well, she did. Naughty Vincent Millay! I found them, and I destroyed them. For her own good! You can put that down!”

- Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001, xv-xvi.

Jeff came home just now with Dave, his friend who is visiting from out of town (for whom we recently threw this party). While Dave was on the back porch, I shared with my husband this little fact, tweeted earlier:

…Based on 7 Year Bitch’s “Dead Men Don’t Rape,” iTunes Genius recommends Black Flag’s “Slip it In.”

So Jeff says, “Go tell that story to Dave. Then ask him why that’s spooky.”

So I do.

And Dave tells me all about how he played some shows with 7 Year Bitch, back in the day (he was in some other band at the time, which, by his own admission, sucked), and how one of the band members once threw her instrument down, walked off the stage, demanded a cigarette from him and then that he buy her a drink, which he gladly did. (Dave noted that he didn’t sleep with her, not for lack of wanting to. As well as the unrelated fact that it wasn’t long after that, that she died of a heroin overdose.)

So Jeff comes out on the back porch and Dave and I are discussing 7 Year Bitch, among other aspects of the early 90s music scene. Jeff has no idea of Dave’s fleeting history with the band in question, he just thought Dave might remember that earlier in the evening, when they’d been out on the town, Jeff had actually been randomly singing/humming the Black Flag song in question. (Which doesn’t seem to be a song about rape at all, though it does exist, certainly, in curious juxtaposition with the 7 Year Bitch track concerned.)

At no time did I mention that it was my schizo, formerly prostituted girlfriend who’d first introduced me to 7 Year Bitch, and with it, to her own peculiar brand of gutterpunk*-infused lesbian separatism. (Which would morph into other philosophies as the months and years wore on; always, I was expected to keep up, to be plugged into her beliefs as they changed and to accept them as my own, no matter how frequently they changed. Which was sometimes an hour-by-hour occurrence. I mentioned she was schizo, right?)

Because, had I gone into that story, it would have been like peeling another layer off the collective onion that was awkwardly positioned, somehow, between the three of us. Who knows what else might have been revealed? I was tired, so tired.

“Please, God: no more material.”

_

* A specific-to-Minneapolis street youth reference.