feminist blogs

OK, I'm going to throw this out here and see if anyone is interested. I have an idea for a Sci-Fi series or movie, but I don't have the patience to write it. If anyone out there is into writing SF, or has experience writing for TV, and wants to do this, get in touch with me. I'll consult if you like, but you can take it an run with it as long as I get credit for the idea.

The idea is to follow the history of the Bible from a sort of "Chariot of the Gods"/ Book of Enoch perspective : Yahweh is a captain of a ship of people called the Annunaki, angels are crew members, Jesus is one of them, and there are competing ships or races that become pantheons of other cultures - Isis leads one ship, her lover Osiris is murdered, etc. Moses is talking to a hologram, the ark of the convenant is a radio transmitter that allows the humans to communicate with the ship at great distances, Ezekial is taken aboard a ship he describes a a wheel, etc. We see the story from the perspective of the Annunaki, who are observing and interacting with primitive humans. Some, like Yahweh, intend to establish themselves as deities in the minds of the humans; others, like Isis and Jesus, are trying to help civilization develop along peaceful lines.

There are places on line you can read more about the Annunaki. The twist is to take the audience into the stories from the Annunaki perspective, rather than the perspective of the "patriarchs" that we get in the bible. The Annunaki would be more like modern humans watching a more primitive race, interacting with them and maybe even doing genetic experiments on them.

Speculative non-fiction books have been written about these ideas, but no one has put it into a dramatic format yet, though some series like the original Battlestar Galactica have hinted at it.

Any takers?

chinatown
by: jared greer

tourists, mooning
over dead ducks
hanging
in greasy windows
block sidewalks

cameras snap
snap snapping
in unison

a cook
in a white paper hat
squatting outside
lights a cigarette
and exhales menthol
smoke
into the crowd

at the top of the hill
a cable car disappears
around a corner
and it's just
an ordinary city
once more.

i'm so glad heart posted the whole thing:

Monster - by Robin Morgan
Listen. I’m really slowly dying
inside myself tonight.
And I’m not about to run down the list
of rapes and burnings and beatings and smiles
and sulks and rages and all the other crap
you’ve laid on women throughout your history
(we had no part in it — although god knows we tried)
together with your thick, demanding bodies laid on ours,
while your proud sweat, like liquid arrogance,
suffocated our very pores.
Not tonight.

I’m tired of listing your triumph, our oppression,
especially tonight, while two men whom I like –
one of whom I live with, father of my child, and
claim to be in life-giving, death-serious struggle with –
while you two sit at the kitchen table dancing
an ornate ritual of what you think passes for struggle
which fools nobody. Your shared oppression, grief,
and love as effeminists in a burning patriarchal world
still cannot cut through power plays of maleness.

The baby is asleep a room away. White. Male. American.
Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature
of the species.
His hair, oh pain, curls into fragrant tendrils damp
with the sweat of his summery sleep. Not yet, and on my life
if I can help it never will be “quite a man.”
But just two days ago on seeing me naked for what must be
the three-thousandth time in his not-yet two years,
he suddenly thought of
the furry creature who yawns through his favorite television program;
connected that image with my genitals; laughed,
and said, “Monster.”

I want a woman’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies
we all exhale, that I could die just
with the passionate uttering of that desire.
Just once in this my only lifetime to dance
all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees
with no fear of where I place my feet.
To even glimpse what I might have been and never never
will become, had I not had to “waste my life” fighting
for what my lack of freedom keeps me from glimpsing.
Those who abhor violence refuse to admit they are already
experiencing it, committing it.
Those who lie in the arms of the “individual solution,”
the “private odyssey,” the “personal growth,”
are the most conformist of all,
because to admit suffering is to begin
the creation of freedom.
Those who fear dying refuse to admit that they are already dead.
Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight,
from this dead weight of struggling with
even those few men I love and care about
each day they kill me.

Do you understand? Dying. Going crazy.
Really. No poetic metaphor.
Hallucinating thin rainbow-colored nets
like cobwebs all over my skin
and dreaming more and more when I can sleep
of being killed or killing.
Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears
rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet,
each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets
to kill whatever it is in men that builds this empire,
colonized my very body,
then named the colony Monster.

I am one of the “man-haters,” some have said.
I don’t have the time or patience here to say again why or how
I hate not men but what it is men do in this culture, or
how the system of sexism, power dominance, and competition
is the enemy, not people — but how men, still, created that system
and preserve it and reap concrete benefits from it.
Words and rhetoric that merely
gush from my arteries when grazed
by the razoredge of humanistic love. Enough.
I will say, however, that you, men, will have to be freed,
as well, though we women may have to kick and kill you
into freedom
since most of you will embrace death quite gladly
rather than give up your power to hold power.

Compassion for the suicidal impulse in our killers? Well,
on a plane ride once, the man across the aisle –
who was a World War Two paraplegic,
dead totally from the waist down,
wheeled in and out of the cabin — spent the whole trip avidly
devouring first newspaper sports pages
and then sports magazines,
loudly pointing out to anyone who would listen
(mostly the stewardesses) which athlete was a “real man.”

Two men in the seats directly behind me talked the whole time
about which Caribbean islands were the best for whoring, and
which color of ass was hotter and more pliant.
The stewardess smiled and served them coffee.
I gripped the arms of my seat more than once
to stop my getting up and screaming to the entire planeload
of human beings what was torturing us all — stopped because I knew
they’d take me for a crazy, an incipient
hijacker perhaps, and wrestle me down until Bellevue Hospital
could receive me at our landing in New York.
(No hijacker, I understood then, ever really wants to take
the plane. She/he wants to take passengers’ minds, to turn
them inside out, to create the revolution
35,000 feet above sea level
and land with a magical flying cadre
and, oh, yes, to win.)
Stopping myself is becoming a tactical luxury,
going fast.

My hives rise more frequently, stigmata of my passion.
Someday you’ll take away my baby, one way or the other.
And the man I’ve loved, one way or the other.
Why should that nauseate me with terror?
You’ve already taken me away from myself
with my only road back to go forward
into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea,
in order to free you — men — from killing us, killing us.

No colonized people so isolated one from the other
for so long as women.
None cramped with compassion for the oppressor
who breathes on the next pillow each night.
No people so old who, having, we now discover, invented
agriculture, weaving, pottery, language, cooking
with fire, and healing medicine, must now invent a revolution
so total as to destroy maleness, femaleness, death.

Oh mother, I am tired and sick.
One sister, new to this pain called feminist consciousness
for want of a scream to name it, asked me last week
“But how do you stop from going crazy?”
No way, my sister.
No way.
This is a pore war, I thought once, on acid.

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame
and burns through the cobwebs.
May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.

May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.
May I realize that I

am a
monster. I am

a
monster.

I am a monster.

And I am proud.

sometimes i find that i can't write or talk or post about all the rapes and murders and abuse of women that's on the front pages of the newspapers everyday. it tears me apart and i too slowly die inside myself. this is the part of the poem that touched me most in that place of sorrow and exhaustion:

May we go mad together, my sisters.
May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution
be the death of all pain.

May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.

yes, may we all.

this is one i submitted to a few places earlier this year. and although they didn't outright reject me, instead, they acted like tom wilson did when i wrote him that love note in tenth grade and pretended like they never got it then promptly ignored me for the rest of my life. it's just as well.

the dreamer
by: jared greer

frequently i dream
of dilapidated houses,
porches buckle
under white snow

(sometimes my mother lives there)

many rooms fill these houses
all sparsely furnished,
yellowed wallpaper peeling
and stairs that give up
halfway through
collapsing in a splintery slide
into darkness

freud was once there at the bottom
waiting to catch me
at least i think it was him -
older man, cigar, white hair and beard,
the glasses

i wanted to ask him
what it all meant,
the symbols, their representative
purpose

but suddenly he changed
into an elephant
and i was riding him
along the beach
as a great storm
was approaching

(waves crashed against condos)

another time it was my mother
down there in the dark
who was waiting to catch me
her arms stretched high
her open mouth: a gaping black hole
her eyes: wide, empty sockets
i screamed in this one
tried to claw my way back
up the slide

but suddenly it changed again
and i was sitting in a car
with the heater going
waiting for the windows to defrost,
watching the old farmhouse
crumble before me

i'm going to try and get back in the habit of poetry fridays so i can start adding to the collection and maybe i'll use blurb to publish my very own book of my greatest writing failures. huzzah!

not having internet access at home has opened my eyes to the fact that i'm a bit addicted to the dubya-dubya-dubya and i really need to get a grip. without it, i've been reading and writing more creative stuff and i even put actual pen to actual paper and started journaling again in "real life". weird how that works.

i guess i just get caught up in the various arguments. whether it's over makeup or blow jobs or pornography or activism or whatever, i just can't seem to look away from the wreckage once it happens. and i think that might have something to do with why i get depressed so easily. there is so much that needs to be done and so much time wasted on petty things and senseless name calling (of which i too am guilty) that i feel kind of hopeless and helpless and worn out. so i'm gonna make a change.

i mean, i'm going to continue to blog and stuff but i'm not going to get as drawn into the bickering and negativity. it makes me hard and bitter and cold which makes my creativity and sensivity wells dry up. i haven't written a poem in three months, for the love of maude! that just ain't right.

so. from here on i'm going to try to focus more on kindness, compassion and generosity, in the hopes that it will inspire my own desire towards goodness and creativity. lets see if i can do both: rage and fight against poverty, oppression, and patriarchy while still finding beauty, serenity, and joy in the world around me. and, as i am a hardcore, radical-fucking-feminist, it will be a feminist act, maudedammit!

to kick it off and show y'all that i mean business, here's a poem i wrote right after my birthday when things were still looking bleak and merciless in my personal life. (i'm happy to report that they're much brighter now.)

dream in a blue raincoat
by: jared greer

when you're in the middle
of it
you don't notice

can't see beauty
in it:

a wide panorama
stretching out

a pale, tender girl
pressed
against a vast grey sky

trudging through
a barren field
in her blue raincoat

not weeping

i do have another blog of stuff (some of it scary bad!) that i've written over the years. i'm going to fix it up and add missing bits as i find the time so if you're interested you can follow the progress here: low hanging moon.

create, publish, and sell your own book!

my friend just got a job at blurb and i'm psyched. i've never heard of anything like it but it sounds perfect for aspiring writers like myself. maybe i'll see myself in print someday after all!

The new Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People. Go stroll the Midway, ride the roller coaster, eat some cotton candy. You'll feel smarter by the time you're done, I swear.

by Marianne Moore

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting

and baseball is like writing.

   You can never tell with either

      how it will go

      or what you will do;

   generating excitement--

   a fever in the victim--

   pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

	Victim in what category?

Owlman watching from the press box?

	To whom does it apply?

	Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--

a catcher's, as, with cruel

   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly

      back to plate.  (His spring 

      de-winged a bat swing.)

   They have that killer instinct;

   yet Elston--whose catching

   arm has hurt them all with the bat--

	when questioned, says, unenviously,

   "I'm very satisfied.  We won."

	Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";

	robbed by a technicality.


When three players on a side play three positions

and modify conditions,

   the massive run need not be everything.

      "Going, going . . . "  Is

      it?  Roger Maris

   has it, running fast.  You will

   never see a finer catch.  Well . . .

   "Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why

	gild it, although deer sounds better--

snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,

	one-handing the souvenir-to-be

	meant to be caught by you or me.



Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;

he could handle any missile.

   He is no feather.  "Strike! . . . Strike two!"

      Fouled back.  A blur.

      It's gone.  You would infer

   that the bat had eyes.

   He put the wood to that one.

Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.

   I think I helped a little bit."

	All business, each, and modesty.

        Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.

	In that galaxy of nine, say which

	won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.



Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws

by Boyer, finesses in twos--

   like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-

      diagnosis

      with pick-off psychosis.

   Pitching is a large subject.

   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to

   catch your corners--even trouble

	Mickey Mantle.  ("Grazed a Yankee!

My baby pitcher, Montejo!"

	With some pedagogy,

	you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)



They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying

indeed!  The secret implying:

   "I can stand here, bat held steady."

      One may suit him;

       none has hit him.

   Imponderables smite him.

   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds

   require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!

	Celebrity costs privacy!)

Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,

	brewer's yeast (high-potency--

	concentrates presage victory



sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--

deadly in a pinch.  And "Yes,

   it's work; I want you to bear down,

      but enjoy it

      while you're doing it."

   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,

   if you have a rummage sale,

   don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.

	Studded with stars in belt and crown,

the Stadium is an adastrium.

	O flashing Orion,

	your stars are muscled like the lion. 

Posted in celebration of National Poetry Month.

There's been some tremendous writing by Caliberal and Bluebird about poverty. Liza has written about the mommy wars at home. It has gotten me to thinking about a time, not so long ago, when I experienced first-hand what happens to a lot of single mothers in this country. I've been working for almost 3 years now at a job I hate. I was thinking this morning of how much I hate my job, thinking, once again of quitting. The time for me to go is approaching. I know myself well enough to know that when I've reached this point of despair, there will be a period of bitching and moaning, but eventually, I'll leave.
This piece was written in May of 2003. It's not polished, and ultimately, it pulls back and lives inside my head, but it's not hard for me to remember what hunger feels like, what fear feels like, and, ultimately, what a belief in self feels like.

------

I am a few days past my 40th birthday, out of work, a writer who can’t seem to get published recently, a mother who doesn’t have custody of her children, a woman who frequently does not eat meals because she is completely out of money. May I mention my two advanced college degrees? May I mention my feminist faith in self-sufficiency? May I mention how difficult it is to maintain my dignity, let alone faith, in the face of failure?

There's been some tremendous writing by Caliberal and Bluebird about poverty. Liza has written about the mommy wars at home. It has gotten me to thinking about a time, not so long ago, when I experienced first-hand what happens to a lot of single mothers in this country. I've been working for almost 3 years now at a job I hate. I was thinking this morning of how much I hate my job, thinking, once again of quitting. The time for me to go is approaching. I know myself well enough to know that when I've reached this point of despair, there will be a period of bitching and moaning, but eventually, I'll leave.
This piece was written in May of 2003. It's not polished, and ultimately, it pulls back and lives inside my head, but it's not hard for me to remember what hunger feels like, what fear feels like, and, ultimately, what a belief in self feels like.

------

I am a few days past my 40th birthday, out of work, a writer who can’t seem to get published recently, a mother who doesn’t have custody of her children, a woman who frequently does not eat meals because she is completely out of money. May I mention my two advanced college degrees? May I mention my feminist faith in self-sufficiency? May I mention how difficult it is to maintain my dignity, let alone faith, in the face of failure?