lycanthropia

1. Running legs = running nose. It never fails that I forget to bring a tissue.

2. It’s hot to run on blacktop at 10 pm. I prefer running by the lake, even if it is a fetid dammed marshy “river.” Tonight I run on blacktop.

3. Old gold smoggy moon, low in the sky.

4. Latina girls walk slowly in pairs; husbands push baby strollers; everyone laughing softly, norteño music playing from their pickup trucks. I feel freakishly pale and gangly in my sports bra and shorts.

5. My shoes have little shiny reflective bits! And my bra! Who knew?

6. Sweat behaves strangely when it’s a hundred degrees at night. Pops out of my skin suddenly; acts like mercury, slick, gelatinous, almost a solid. Is binary: there is a moment of no sweat and then, instant, a bead at every pore.

7. Breath cycles with legs driving out thoughts. I told my best friend, tugging on shorts and tying shoes, I have to go run, nothing else will drown this out.

Because last night I had an ancient self-hatred unexpectedly reawakened, mostly from accidentally encountering misogyny in an undilute form here on the Internet, I won’t name the small but noxiously pungent group of bloggers, what they call themselves, please don’t look for them, don’t entertain their hate speech, slurs, they rage against feminism, are rape deniers, claim our society overvalues women (who have never made any real contribution), believe the Nineteenth Amendment should be overturned, a woman’s education or career is meaningless, she is less than human, she only has value sexually and then only when dominated; and single female writers over forty are universally acknowledged to be—what was it? “whorish, despondent, and defiant.” To which the irrepressible Ms. F. responded wittily, “You say that like it’s a BAD thing.” Which I love about her, I who am alarmed with the speed with which I have been thrust into a dark cellar by encountering these men, I wish I were able to dismiss the fringe element as purely that, shudder/shrug and move on. But it taps into an old wound in me, the training I was given between the ages of nine and maybe thirteen, at its most intense, that by being female I was innately bad and could only be rendered marginally acceptable with male approval, that women were to be subject to men, that women without men were foul witches and Jezebels, that I was wrong in my whole being generally, and also in particular in my “extreme” emotionality and physical weakness and bookishness, a crippling wound to my amour-propre which I instinctively dressed by going to two women’s colleges and surrounding myself with female intellectuals and writers; yet my secret is that the wound never heals, festers inside me to this hour and that I still believe these things to be true. That they are right, that I am “depressed” and on medication because I am not fulfilling the destiny set forth for me by natural law, to be subject and never to think. To be honest I had become complacent, I no longer thought people like this, men like this, still existed in any real numbers, I supposed even the political right wing as cozily mocked by The Daily Show wouldn’t dare to put forward ideas like the Nineteenth Amendment should be repealed because women are animals: yet here are these men, priding themselves on their Latin pseudonyms and the rigor of their arguments, committing the most elemental of logical fallacies as their argument is founded on the ad hominem, yet they astonish me in the same way that Ash speaks of the alien bitch’s acid blood in Alien: “I admire its purity,” the unqualified nature of their vitriol is almost impressive in itself, I staggered into this nest of viperous blogs searching for a female poet’s work, it was like accidentally walking into a Klan meeting, and found them savagely mocking her NYT obituary, keeping it classy, yes, they should be dismissable, but they were not, that voice is so contemptuous and dismissive in my head, it’s my grandfather calling my grandmother “estúpido” behind her back, I guess not knowing he should change the gender, and then smiling craftily at me, our shared secret, as he shuffled and dealt the poker hands, and me uncertainly smiling back, was I his favorite, and how did I feel about that, and did it matter, the smell of beer, the taste of his tobacco on my lips, in the streetlight now running I can look down and see my belly protruding over my running shorts, and that old voice hisses Satanically in my ears, fat cow, disgusting, no one wants you, slut, whore, bitch, cunt, the man at the bar a few weeks ago, drunken and inexplicably enraged, no, not inexplicably, it was because I defied him, I held that eye contact too long when I told him my friends and I didn’t want to talk to him, him pointing at me and J., the youngest of us, the lesbian, and shouting The rest of you are okay, you’re nice girls, but you two, you’re bitches, I was being friendly, I was just trying to be nice, you two will die miserable and alone! and his friends wising up and muscling him out just ahead of the bouncer as I stood up from the table and faced him down, I don’t know why, weighing half what he did and shaking with anger but also grinning and now too I smile, I smile from ear to ear in the dark because at this moment all I have to do is gasp for the next breath and fucking run.

8. Cats in yards, stretched out under cars, boneless in the heat, dirty white cats, sleek little black cats, gray cats that blend into the night deedling rapidly across the street, feet centipeding, ears furtive, I resist looking at the cellphone to see how much time is left.

9. Then. Then too, I have to write a half-retraction, an apology to a friend for misunderstanding what he said and therefore misrepresenting it here, but without at the same time, and this is important, being ashamed of or apologizing for what I took him to be saying or for my having a blog at all or for the blog as a valid artistic form, I have been mulling this in my head for days, weeks, I have been officially blocked to my amusement, and I stopped writing the long thing, instead I sleep and I sew and I run. Also my ex found the blog, which, actually, whatever, he’s welcome to read it. But so altogether I’ve discovered gender is too important to me, in writing. That any male objection, no matter from whom or how mild/neutral/guileless, can silence me nearly utterly, presumably because it’s already almost impossible for me to write at all thanks to the totalizing din of withering criticism in my head. Yes this is a cliché and it is my cliché and I actually inhabit it, for every one of my working hours. At least now I can detect its contours whereas in my twenties and thirties it was the marbled wallpaper of my brain and I wasn’t even aware of its existence, it is miraculous that I got anything written at all. I don’t think most or even many girls are raised with this internal voice now, I hope that I am a Victorian rarity, like an antimacassar or a watch fob made of hair or an hysteric; but it has fairly crippled me. My friend is a feminist deeply committed to social justice, and someone whose company I love, and yet even his most casual observations/musings, for example his inquiries about the intellectual scrupulousness of blogging, have all but gobstopped me. It would be a logical error to fault him, and it was unfair to place that critical voice in his mouth. I am left not knowing what else to do about my reactivity other than to maintain a ridiculous degree of purity—that word again—a closely guarded hermeticism of my writing life. Because I am like an immunocompromised patient and apparently everyone around me must wear latex gloves and face masks lest I catch cold and expire. Perhaps I should simply admit that my need is for staunchly supportive female friends, and that it is a limitation on my part. I can accept that. We all start the race with handicaps. Mine is that I was raised, for the most part, in one of the more esoteric strains of American evangelicalism and apparently being asked, even with innocent goodwill, the hard questions, causes me to collapse on myself internally like an anemone. I think I can live with this. Because you know why? Because tonight, because I am a runner.

10. Time comes in thin mental slices of: I can, I can’t, I can, I can’t, I can. I can’t do this. I can’t keep on doing this. I’m going to have to stop. No, it’s okay, I can do it a few steps more. No, I can’t. Yes, I can, this feels fine, it’s coming more easily now. No, no, it’s suddenly just too hard. —Back and forth. Back and forth the thoughts.

And all this time the legs in their rhythm, moving.

Read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923, at the unveiling of a statue of three leaders in the cause of Equal Rights for Women.

Upon this marble bust that is not I
Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;
But in the forum of my silenced cry
Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.
I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;—
Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
Only my standard on a taken hill
Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust
And make immortal my adventurous will.
Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Facts the reader may find of interest after reading this poem:

(1) Suffrage worker Inez Milholland collapsed while speaking at a rally in Los Angeles and subsequently died, due to complications from anemia which were due in turn to her taxing speaking schedule. She was only 30.

(2) National Women’s Party leader Alice Paul wasted no time in making her into a martyr for their cause; helpful to this end were Milholland’s previous glamorous appearances on a white horse, and her final public words: “Mr. President [Woodrow Wilson], how long must women wait for liberty?”

(3) Milholland had been happily married to Dutch importer Eugen Boissevain.

(4) Boissevain later married poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

(5) Both Inez and Vincent attended Vassar College, but a few years apart.

(6) In this admittedly kind of clunky sonnet, Millay does nonetheless succeed in wrangling to her own ends the conventions concerning the frailty of mortal beloveds and the questionable durability of memorializing same in verse.

(7) Millay wrote the sonnet, originally called “The Pioneers,” in 1921.

(8) American women were only granted the vote (not the right to vote) in 1920.

(9) The statue to which Millay is referring, by sculptor Adelaide Johnson, has been irreverently dubbed “Three Women in a Bathtub,” and it has moved around rather a lot, which is surprising since it weighs eight tons. You may currently see it, if you visit DC, on display in the Capitol building; it depicts Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

(10) While Millay was (so far) wrong about the statue crumbling to dust, she had a point: as long as the song of dissidence continues to be sung, that would’ve made Milholland happy.

Because (11) it hasn’t even been a hundred years since women were given the vote. Because as much as our country hates on its people of color, it actually manages to hate on women worse. Because even as a child I was taught that Susan B. Anthony dollars were wrong, were immoral, that she was a bad woman. And because, as I keep trying to tell my poor students, the real American history is that of civil disobedience and protest—not our ever fancier and increasingly resistant government, but our ongoing everloving refusal to sit down and shut up.

Or as another writer puts it:

I love my country; by which I mean
I am indebted joyfully
to all the people throughout its history
who have fought the government to make right;
where so many cunning sons and daughters,
our foremothers and forefathers
came singing through slaughter,
came through hell and high water
so that we could stand here
and behold breathlessly the sight:
how a raging river of tears
cut a grand canyon of light—

(ani difranco, “grand canyon“)

And then just like that, not a moment too soon, I remember that I’m the one who can make me feel better.

After a grim four-day siege by the menstrual faeries, with attendant weeping and pain (and much consuming of ibuprofen and paracetamol and chocolate biscuits and cheezy poofs, the latter of which have shredded the roof of my mouth), this is important information. That I have it in my own power not to just feel huge and stupid and useless forever.

(Looking for your keys with your keys already in your hand.)

Accordingly I get up off the sofa, open all the doors and windows to fresh night air, do a tidying raid on the worst of the house’s flat surfaces, sweep laundry into baskets and dishes into the sink and rubbish into trash cans, and then snap a pound of asparagus and start sautéeing it in a suitably indecent quantity of pasture butter. Pour the Riesling over ice cubes and toast Maman. Put on Rickie Lee Jones and sing along, however much it irritates the cat, who hates sopranos more than dogs and slinks outside to sulk on the front porch, also mad that I’m not giving her any butter.

love seems sure around the new year
now it’s April love is just a ghost
spring arrived on time
only what became of you dear
spring can really hang you up the most

Thus I haul myself out of the small trough of last week, grateful inch by inch. I am wearing sparkly indigo fake acrylic fingernails which make typing almost impossible—in fact, they make many things almost impossible, which is why I’m wearing them, because in the lycanthropic phase this month I literally shredded my skin, and this is a last-ditch effort to leave it alone long enough for it to heal. There are several parts that need to heal.

Other ghastly features of the moon-phase this month were a renewed preposterous obsession with the growing size of my body, and an ongoing terror that I will never write a real poem again. At therapy today I asked Lauren if I could use the scale in the clinic’s hallway, which I guess is there for eating-disordered clients? She said sure, so I did, and, fair reader, the number there was not one I had ever seen before associated with me. It was very interesting! It is so unique! I just keep getting larger, where will it end!

So too is the fact that this is the only kind of poem I can write, right now.

Wildflowers.

She don’t know how to anything, whacks with her hoe
at the dirt along the concrete block wall, there should be wild-
flowers and she stubborn will put them there, in spite of her
long sparkling indigo fingernails, thick acrylic just glued on.
A creosote drizzle wets her hair flat. She ignores, hacks,
the cat watches impassive. Stub the blade edge on rocks,
on roots. At least three inches deep for seed to catch
and take. Now is the part where you come in, you with your
tricks, with those women walked straight up to you and
murmur you want to party baby, was it something on
your forehead said you’re a john, she wonders and method-
ical chop-chops like her grandma at a cotton row. At a
payphone (that long ago) as a girl, unable to speak for tears,
and the same old woman saying with finality, after an unhappy
pause, Well they’ll sure run around on you. The folded paper
packet has red poppies, blue flax, something gold. And she
stopped crying then. Yes ma’am, they surely will. Has black-grit
glitter between her fingers. Has something real to hold.

I don’t know what it will take for me to be able to write again, I mean really write real poems, but I suspect it’s going to involve monkeying with meds and my pdoc doesn’t believe me so I may have to go commando on this one. Or am I done writing? Am I just empty of all lyric, anything aslant and interesting, I envy every poem I read and feel completely incapable of figuring out how people manage to do it, how to put them together, I just finished an MFA and am starting a PhD and the terrible truth is I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE POEMS, what will happen to me! Again it is so interesting! I curl up on the sofa (back on the sofa again!) eating buttery spears of asparagus with my fingers and wondering what I’ll do next!

As it happens, my phone rings, I look down, it says Beth’s name, I pick up: “Hi, Beth.”

“For one thing, that was a starmaking turn from Gene Hackman.” It is Scott, Beth’s consort, starting in mid-paragraph concerning The French Connection, which I dissed in a text earlier in the evening. “For another, it’s a rare example of William Friedkin at work. And were you not on the edge of your seat when they tore apart the car? Come on!”

I’m already laughing. “Yes, okay, great set pieces. I think it’s because I watched four seasons of The Wire over winter break. I’m burned out on police procedural and narcotics units. But I liked the editing. The way Friedkin shamelessly cuts from one scene to the next, total change of lighting, then immediately, no dialogue, cuts straight to a third, compressing the time scale—”

“Do you want frozen yogurt?”

“Um, YES?”

“Do you need time to get ready?”

“I’m already standing here with my purse waiting for y’all.”

Yogurtology is closed so we go to Half Price Books, where Beth and I discover to our delight a section called MEN’S ADVENTURE, also INTERRACIAL ROMANCE and PARANORMAL ROMANCE. It’s Scott’s birthday so Beth buys him a record album called, and I am not making this up even a little, The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood (1963), which has songs by both Liza Minelli and The Animals. Then we get 99¢ Frosties™ at Wendy’s.

Now I am home and so relieved that my dreary little blue period is officially over. Tomorrow I grade papers with Mark and then, oh then, attend the thesis defense for my friend, poet Allyson Boggess, who has the most beautiful defense invitation ever—and she took the photograph herself. Mira! Behold its atmospherically inviting bedlinens.

There are two other wonders of the Internet I must share with you before I retire this evening, full of asparagus and Frosty™:

1. The magical website of poet Patricia Lockwood, which is pretty much the funniest damn thing I have read in lo these many weeks. Just her deconstructions of The Boxcar Children book covers ALONE. But also she is an amazing, muscular, loopy, rococo, did I already say amazing, poet. I’m pulling for her to get into the Best American anthology, either for her Hayden’s Ferry Review poem or the one from Poetry. I feel tongue-tied around these poems, like the awkward girl at the Q&A who you just know is going to raise her hand and say adenoidally, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

2. An excellent speech by playwright and television writer Theresa Rebeck, an honest and funny and clearsighted look at how being a woman has made it harder for her to do her job, and is making it harder for lots of other female playwrights and television/film writers to do their jobs too.

This is the situation: Plays written by women are not being produced. In 2007, the one year I opened a play on Broadway, I was the only woman playwright who did so. That year, nationwide, 12 percent of the new plays produced all over the country were by women. That means 88 percent of the new plays produced were written by men. (Back in 1918 before women had the right to vote, the percentage of new plays in New York, written by women, was higher. It was higher before we had the vote.) [...]

This is a disastrous statistic, and it is related to another disastrous statistic, which is the number of women writers and directors in Hollywood. This year 6 percent of films were directed by women, and 8 percent of produced screenplays were written by women, or women had a shared credit on them. That means 88 percent of all plays were written by men, 94 percent of all movies were directed by men, and 92 percent of all movies were written by men.

Women playwrights like myself have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support some pretty coherent theories about why this is the case. People in the power structure seem more mystified and often they don’t seem sure that there is a problem. (One of them actually said to me, not to long ago, “But Theresa, where ARE the women playwrights?” Seriously, he looked me in the face and said that.) Several artistic directors have expressed concern at the idea of “quotas,” they really don’t like the word “quota.” I don’t like that word either. Another word I don’t like is “discrimination” and, “censorship,” and I wish I could get them to dislike those words as much as they dislike “quotas.” [...]

The Dramatist Guild tracks the percentages of women and men who enter graduate school as playwriting students, and it also tracks the numbers of people who apply for membership, and those numbers either stick to the 50/50 ratio OR there is a higher number of women. So in the ideal world, those women and men who are over the years developing their craft as playwrights should rise though the system at an even rate. This is not what is happening. Women are being shut out, at different levels of development and production, and you end up with this crazy 17 percent number which seems to be the highest percentage we can get to, year in and year out. Seventeen percent of fifty percent is thirty four percent of a hundred percent. (Bear with me I’m not making this up I’m actually pretty good at math.) That means that sixty-six percent of the best plays by women—the plays that SHOULD be rising to the top, the plays that in a fair world would move into the culture as the stories we are telling ourselves—sixty six percent of women’s stories are being lost. Every year.

And I have to reiterate the premise of those numbers is that playwriting is NOT in fact a gene on a Y chromosome, and that we are NOT losing women playwrights because they decided to run off and have babies. The reason we lost all those women playwrights is, We buried their work, and we sent them away.

[An anonymously written feminist-theology version of AA's Twelve Steps]

1. We believe that we are not responsible for creating the oppression that permeates our society.

2. We believe that a power outside ourselves and deep within us can restore our balance and give us wholeness.

3. We make a decision to ask for help from the Goddess and others who understand.

4. We acknowledge our beauty, strengths and weaknesses and look at the ways we have been taught to hate ourselves.

5. We acknowledge to the Goddess, to ourselves, and to another person our successes and shortcomings.

6. We make a list of the ways we have acquiesced to oppression.

7. We become ready to say no to oppression.

8. We ask for the courage to resist oppressive situations.

9. We mend our lives with respect for all.

10. We continue to be conscious of our actions and thoughts, promptly acknowledging our mistakes and enjoying our successes.

11. We seek to improve our conscious contact with the Goddess.

12. We believe that every moment we are doing the best we can, and that is enough.

13. We accept ourselves exactly as we are, trusting our experience and affirming that health, joy, and freedom are our Goddess-given rights.

In an editorial move that would be hilarious if it weren’t so completely offensive, the LA Times, in reporting that Jennifer Egan won the National Book Critics Circle fiction award this year, ran a photograph of Jonathan Franzen with the story, and—well, you’d better just take a look for yourself.

I had to read this hed/lede/cutline over again several times before I believed that it wasn’t a parody by the Onion. Honestly it still makes me laugh. “Here is a picture of the person who didn’t win! But he’s a MAN, so how cool is that! Want to know what else didn’t happen today?”

I’d probably still be laughing if this didn’t follow a small windfall of weird and appalling media assaults against women this week. First and worst was the paper of record running a “story” so offensively redolent of rape culture that it galvanized over 40,000 signatures on a Change.org petition, and finally extracted an (inadequate, grudging but at least a public) acknowledgement from NY Times editor Arthur Brisbane that the story “lacked balance.”

Exactly how the reporter was supposed to balance his subtext of accusation that the 11-year-old girl in question was responsible for her own gang rape, not to mention the piece’s wringing of hands in re: how lives of the EIGHTEEN young men have possibly been RUINED, including their participation in BASKETBALL, and how the town is just so UPSET that this can’t “end in a better light”—well, as Mac McClelland said, writing for Mother Jones, imagining herself to be the piece’s editor: “We don’t want anyone wrongly thinking you are being lazy or thoughtless or misogynist! Please advise if literally no other kinds of quotes are available because every single person who lives in Cleveland, Texas, is a monster.” (Whereupon the Huffington Post ascertained that this might in fact be true.)

It’s one of the worst print debacles I’ve seen in a long time, though at least it has provoked some fiery and beautiful responses, such as Roxane Gay‘s over at the Rumpus. But the Times‘s non-apology…it’s so not good enough, and the whole thing has a stench of reactionary Reagan-Era politicking which bewilders me. Did we climb into the DeLorean accidentally? Is it really not 2011 but 1981? And where the hell did President Obama go?

But wait that’s not all there’s more! Look how CNN redeems the fourth estate by covering the same story, and…and…no, sorry, wait. They’ve actually made it even worse.

BALDWIN: Now, so far, 18 young men have been arrested. According to you, they range in age from middle school all the way up to 27 years of age. How are police tracking them down—all through these videos that were allegedly shot?

HORSWELL: I believe so—and interviews, and it’s been a long investigation. But I think it’s 17 total so far. But it’s been very— Because people are wondering who’s involved, who’s not. It’s disturbing the whole basketball team, and I think they lost on Wednesday. Needless to say they’ve lost a couple of players. Some of these people are adults. Some of these people had criminal records.

BALDWIN: Because you’re saying some of these young men were on this Cleveland High School star basketball team. Is that what you got from investigators?

HORSWELL: Right, right. I think the basketball team is ranked third in the state. And so at least two of the people played on the team and were starters, and now they’re not on there anymore, I don’t believe, because they haven’t returned to school.

HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO I DO NOT FUCKING CARE.

BALDWIN: I know you spoke with an attorney representing three of these young men. What did he say? What is his defense?

HORSWELL: Well, he believes that, you know, you can’t— He’s not trying to say anything that hap—whatever happened—that anything would be good for an 11-year-old, but he said the little girl is not, you know— It wasn’t like she was completely innocent in this case; it wasn’t like she was kidnapped or something, and whether he was indicating that she might have been a willing participant.

BALDWIN: At age 11, as you point out, an 11-year-old cannot legally give consent!

HORSWELL: Right. And I do believe at some point a police affidavit says she was not—that she was balking and there were threats made.

And at this point we all just run out of words and we stand there open-mouthed and pointing, as at a giant centipede or radioactive scorpion or some other garishly inappropriate freak of nature. All I can say is, PLEASE JON STEWART PLEASE JUSTIFY MY LOVE FOR YOU AND SKEWER THEM ALIVE PLSKTHX.

Even my first-year rhetoric students were capable of seeing through all this; two female students especially were hopping mad about the NY Times piece. “The author destroys his own ethos!” I was proud of them, yet the pit of my stomach roiled. How can I teach them that there’s a brighter better world outside of Exurbia, if there actually isn’t one?

The cherry on this misogynist sundae was that March 8 was International Women’s Day—or, as Teresa Carmody noted over at Les Figues, 364 for the blokes, 1 for the birds. She did a dazzlingly thorough round-up of articles about “The Count,” singling out Sina Queyras’s piece for Lemon Hound, and rightly so:

Let’s make something very clear: no one wants to have these conversations. Particularly women. Or particularly whoever is outside of these gates. They are a bother. They detract from one’s work. One’s important work, I might add. They make the person doing the banging on the door seem shrill, annoying, pathetic. They remind the person doing the pointing that they are outside. They affirm to those being barked at that they are inside. They allow the object of the complaint to indulge in that slightly hurt, eye brow raising gesture that is reflected in the eyes of their loyal affirmers. I can see the editors of the LRB and NYRB etc., swiping the nattering voices away with a rolled up copy of their weighty and important rags… Don’t bother us with your petulance. We have important reviews of important books to attend to. We are keeping culture alive single-handedly. [...]

I would rather be doing my work. I would rather be writing essays. I would rather be developing my prose style. I would rather be reading intelligent, lengthy essays by women who have been commissioned or are being acknowledged in some way for their thinking. And their writing.

I dislike the fact of women always having to hammer these points home. And having their voices in special “women issues” or “women’s literary journals” (read, the issues no serious male thinker ever has to read…). I am tired of the divisiveness. I’m tired of what is important being unconsciously “what I’m familiar with.” I’m tired of not having women’s voices in the mix becuase they don’t write sentences in the same (or proper) manner. Or they don’t engage in evaluative criticism. Or they don’t use military terms. Or they don’t want to set up the field and knock each competitor down as they progress through their essay. Or they don’t adequately regurgitate enough other criticism or theory or the “Important Ones.” I don’t want special treatement, I want something that reflects a more accurate slice of contemporary thinking. I don’t want a women’s review of books, I want a woman assigning reviews at the LRB or NYRB or the NY Times, or here in Canada, because let’s face it we are no better. I want a woman directing the traffic flow. [...]

What is important work? What is a circle jerk? When do these things overlap? Discuss.

Discussion is good. Laughing is excellent. But not only that. I’m sorry, I’m tired of processing. I want results.

As if all this were not simultaneously encouraging and disheartening in its way, I randomly surfed onto The Hairpin and found this article by Dolores P., a nurse practitioner training to be an abortion provider. She’s a funny writer and a good one, and she notes soberly:

How many providers do you think there are in this country? Like, total. 30,000? 10,000? Nope, fewer than 2,000. Here’s a quote I read today: “Now only 2 percent of ob-gyns perform half of all abortions. Many are approaching retirement. Others are weary of stigma, threats and violence. The number of providers has declined by 37 percent since 1982.” Fewer providers in practice mean fewer people to train from. And other factors—like how only 12% of ob/gyn residency programs require training in abortion—also contribute to our dwindling numbers.

Okay, now I’m bringing myself down. The point is…what is the point.

The point is that none of this is okay. That it wasn’t okay in 1919 when Congress finally let the states ratify women’s suffrage and it wasn’t okay in 1972 when the ERA went down in smoke and, you know what, it’s all still really not okay in 2011.

But you know what else? A lot of us are pretty used to its being not okay and we are still not going to shut up about it. In addition to all the horrors of rampant unchecked girl-hatred, that’s what I’ve seen on the Internet this week. That decent women and men still have a lot to say, which is the entire history of social justice in this country. Decent people talking back to inequity and just refusing to put a sock in it. Like Cynthia Newberry Martin, who helpfully ran a picture of Jennifer Egan, in case the LA Times just didn’t have one on hand. Because surely they wouldn’t have done that on purpose.

And like Jennifer Egan, who wrote a book in spite of all the very good reasons I’m sure she had not to write one, and whose novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the NBCC fiction award this year. Brava, chica.

Let’s don’t give up. Don’t quit talking and writing and being annoying.

I don’t know how to tell anything the way it is, I was thinking this yesterday looking out the window feeling racked simultaneously with hope and suicidality and thinking of all the days that go by during which I don’t ever manage to tell anyone or write down exactly how it is, yesterday afternoon looking out the window during a break while I was hypomanically cleaning, a siege of cleaning seized me after a weekend of headcold and tissues and sofa, I was scrubbing out the toilet with the sage and lemongrass cleaner, sneezing, wiping baseboards almost angrily with a finger as I hoovered up the dust bunnies, more like dust buffalos, changing cat-hair-strewn bed linens, wondering when I will stop thinking of them as our sheets and start thinking of them as just mine, wandering out into the yard and yanking up weeds that obstruct the grass so the cat cannot curl up in the grass where she would like, making a pile of wet green weeds and then just as suddenly going back inside and sitting down on the sofa and going through all the 2010 receipts, from when we had joint checking, hundreds of them throwing receipts into the recycling in fistfuls, saving out only the ones for tax deductions (medication co-pays, therapy co-pays, premiums, the price of sanity). On the receipts his signature over and over, dinners we had together, vacations we took, hotel receipts from spring break a year ago (the Santa Rita Lodge, the hummingbirds, the sound of the creek, the lovemaking late into the night), receipts with his handwriting on the back, phone numbers and email addresses and notes from AA meetings (WE ARE THE IDENTIFIED PATIENTS OF OUR CULTURE. MY ADDICTIONS ARE MY PATH) and then one receipt with three I Ching hexagrams on the back. I kept that one so my friend Farren could tell me what they meant. (Then today she told me and I could not take it in, it was too enormous somehow and I went into the bedroom to think about it and instead fell asleep for nearly two hours, that bad kind of nap where you fall asleep in the day and wake up in the dark and your body doesn’t know what you want it to do.) Somewhere in the receipts were ones for him withdrawing $100, $200 cash. I threw, I threw, I threw them all away and felt so deeply refreshed by that I wondered why I hadn’t done it months ago. A merciless paragraph.

Finally there was nothing left to clean but the mountain and I do mean mountain of dirty dishes generated since AWP. They scare me. And now there was nothing between me and the dishes but the last six student papers, I stood there trembling ridiculously, half-panting, feeling wild-eyed and pointless, not knowing how to slow myself down enough to do either task. I thought, I should eat. I thought, I haven’t taken my meds today. I called my therapist finally and it took her forty minutes of talking, but we got me settled enough to make and drink a cup of tea (lavender and chamomile) and to put comments on the two worst papers. The two that I’d shuddered over and dreaded doing anything with for three weeks. I am so behind in the course I am teaching, we are two weeks behind the syllabus, next week is spring break already and we are just so behind and it’s my fault, because I look at the papers I’ve been handed and my mind goes perfectly blank and my stomach plummets, one of the students had written on Amy Chua’s tiger mother editorial and every time the word “Chinese” appeared the student had spelled it, “chine’s.” When students produce this kind of writing almost always English was not their home language and they almost always they show a learning/processing deficit and almost never am I going to be able to address it in English 102 and almost always are they going to be angry at me no matter what happens.

I ate Amy’s frozen cheese enchiladas while I put comments on all six papers. Then it was 11 pm and I started getting ready for bed. Then I went to bed. Then I woke up three times slick and chilled with sweat, my hair plastered in long strands to the side of my neck. Once in the night the cat wheezed, she has a hairball again. I did what I always do while I lie half-asleep half-awake in bed all night long, I pray, I send love to him, in the direction where his house is, sometimes I try to lull myself to sleep by pretending I am sleeping in his arms, sometimes I try to send love to myself, sometimes I make up bits of poems I know I will forget, sometimes I turn on the light and read Chaucer or another book by my bed (right now Sarah Vap, Thalia Field, Ariana Reines, Allison Carter, Teresa Carmody, all my still-new and stiff-covered AWP books), sometimes I count my breaths or sometimes just fold myself up in the covers even no matter if I am not cold, I fold myself up into a still tight package and just wait.

I don’t know how to tell anything the way it is, I have a premenstrual headache over my eyebrows and just drank a bottle of orange carrot juice leftover from my cold, you’re supposed to drink juice when you have a cold so I did, I was still miserable and at once point I texted my sponsor and said I am missing him really badly today, do you have any suggestions and she called me immediately, I always forget I can ask for help, she said, Of course, this is happening because you are sick and vulnerable, you should be nursing yourself back to health, she used that phrase and it enchanted me, nursing myself back to health, so we got off the phone and I made that too-salty bright-yellow chicken soup from a packet and had another popsicle and read a reading she suggested on kindness and gentleness, she said this is the time for the slogan “Easy Does It” and the thing about the slogans is as everyone knows they are ridiculous, the most obvious clichéd phrases, and yet the other equally true thing about the slogans is they work.

And but so today I felt better and woke up and showered and took a minute to look at myself in the mirror, I noticed for the first time my left arm is browner than my right, probably from driving, I resolved to wear more sunscreen on my arms, I noticed my breasts that used to seem disproportionately full when I was really skinny now seem disproportionately smaller since the rest of me is full, a body is like an accordion box, growing here and shrinking there, I saw how really some of my curves were quite fine and I knew, this is the funny thing, I knew right away he would love them, how he always would say breathlessly, I love the shapes of you, and here were these shapes and no one to admire them but me, then I said something terse aloud to myself and got in the shower, then I put on my favorite gray t-shirt and jeans.

Then I drove to exurbia and taught and it was fine and no one flipped out on me or anything. The student who hides behind his black hoodie and the bearded student who argues for the right to bear arms, even they were cheerful and we were all fine, even the student who wrote “chine’s” because he wasn’t there.

And the whole time, all this time, throbbing in my mind is the refrain of wanting to text him, my ex, just the word, “Love.” Because how can you argue with that? How can you say, don’t send me love? Love that is universal and large and contains multitudes?

I dimly remember that I have made the rule for myself that I am not supposed to text or call or email him but at these moments I cannot remember why, and my brain presents me with seemingly logical reasons why it is okay, and I though I mistrust my brain at such moments, it seems completely clear and reasonable to text him, and I’m not sure why I haven’t for three months. Love! It’s just love, how can any harm come from love. My love for him seems as natural as drinking the orange carrot juice or petting the cat when she comes in from the front yard exclaiming and trilling and telling me her little stories which I cannot really understand but listen to just the same, like parents of incoherent small children, I nod and say yes, yes, and thusly encouraged she tells me more, tells me all about it, the yard, the grass, the smells, what was out there.

I did email my friend Farren the hexagrams and she kindly looked them up and told me what they are. I can’t understand, the I Ching is something he did, not me, I don’t understand their meanings, #20 Contemplating and #48 The Well. I don’t remember whose hexagram was whose, on the back of the receipt, the front of the receipt says May 30 so I suppose we had already started breaking up by then. I have really started to hate this blogpost but I keep writing it anyway because sometimes to do something new you have to do something you really hate.

This is what one of my thesis committee members used to say and I thought of it during the writers conference when I brought in the five poems I wrote in the first five months after the breakup, the short poems that came grudgingly one per month, right before my period, and they seem to me so plain and narrative and ugly, nothing prepossessing about their language or their length or their anything, dull poems to me, American McPoems. But they were what I had to workshop so I brought them. And she said, Connie Voisine said (who was an amazingly gracious and gentle teacher, and one who really brought her entire attention very generously to our work)—well, I typed out what she said and it was like this, I am going to resist my temptation to edit my notes so here they are:

• anaphora—catalogue poems, accretion/accumulation
• “It’s so much more interesting than a poem like this could be.”
• the thing that comes next is a jolt and that’s how the energy accumulates
• the interest comes from the intersection of things you do eat and things you don’t
• scale—large/small, impossible to eat, movement, keeps it exciting
• the activity of accounting all these things that are still around
• “I wasn’t sure if bread was the right object for that incredibly important section”
• I read bread as singular, and then when I get to the loaves I’m not in the image anymore
• I was refusing, I ate…she cuts what was eaten
• exploring parallelism as a strategy to take advantage of, structure the emotion
• events/details seemingly random, but the intuitive connection is what is wanted, the ones we’re getting, the ones that are crucial—?
• confusion around PLACE—the bus, the swimming pool, then images of home—?
• an obsessive accounting that allows for some of the more digressive elements
• “if you’ve had that experience, it’s a high point” (the swimsuit spinner at the gym)
• the way anaphora depends upon the speed of the list—so it seems like just another moment or item, so people don’t get committed to it as a location—2/3 lines of description slows the poem enough to make us feel like being there
• strategies to resist confessing the actual details of the betrayal, they resist the confessional
• this lovely movement—the mesquite, the volunteer trees—a contradiction, then another definition/redefining of the situation, another refinement/correction—that’s how lyric poems move—you start here, you redefine, prevarication—is the movement of lyric
• at that point the speaker has permission to reflect—because of the preceding active thought

That was all very nice of her. She was so nice to those five poems, which are bald little catalogue poems, lumpy and homely. I feel embarrassed about them but they are what I have to show for those five months, so I’d be better off befriending them more and trying to revise them to be better at working with what they have, the little machinery of each poem as Connie Voisine would say, I asked, do you mean the conceit? the poem’s operant metaphor? and she said yes but also no, she preferred to say the little engine or machine that makes each poem work.

And her little blonde daughter was so adorable, with tiny sneakers with lights in them, and messy hair, bossily taking pictures of things, including me, with her mom’s cellphone, and Connie Voisine calling her “little bitty.”

To do anything new sometimes you have to do something you really hate.

What I have been trying to say and not managing to say is that I love myself, and that scares me. That the body will be taken away eventually and it is best not to love it. That I am clean and fresh-smelling and beautiful and curvy today, in my favorite t-shirt, the soft Calvin Klein gray one that fits perfectly, and my new soft dark blue skinny jeans, and in honor of how pretty and womanly I felt I decided to wear my matching dragon-patterned turquoise blue bra and underwear, that I bought in 2005 specially for him, thinking we might hook up and so I needed a new set of lingerie which wouldn’t remind me of anyone else, and now here they still are although I don’t fit into them quite as well as I did, I am trying to write what it’s like to have a grown woman’s body where the hip straps of the underwear press into the hip fat and there’s a gentle curve coming in and out there, and a red mark left behind if the strap shifts, and you bend over to pour your breast into the cup of the bra but when you stand back upright it still is spilling out of the outside of the cup a little bit, and I catch myself thinking with fascinated irritation, this is all wasted because no one is seeing it, there is no gaze, no one to love it, and then I think, Well, okay so I should love it, but then who admires their own womanly body? That seems even stranger. Maybe like drinking the good wine, the champagne, alone. Then I just put on my sneakers and some soft berry lipgloss, it is not a day for lipstick, I fill a water bottle and print out an attendance sheet and get ready to go teach.

Another day over and another day closer. Thank you for this.

The last couple of posts have been a little angsty even for my taste, which is saying something. I don’t know why, but the crazy’s really been acting up the last couple of days. Well, let’s chalk it up to the pinot grigio (the remainder of which I gave away to a good friend) and move on.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about artistic big sisters—artists who come sometimes just a few years before me, whose work is slightly (or hugely) ahead of mine, who give me permission to do something I haven’t had the nerve to do before—the ones whose lipstick and sweaters I try on experimentally, padding my bra with some Kleenex to see how womanhood looks on me. Here are a handful who’ve been on my mind just in the last 48 hours, even in the midst of all my self-engrossed February miseries.

Pam Greer

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, music was really bringing cultures and races and religions together. It was so ripe and sweet and had all these flavors—incense and patchouli oil and sitar, Ravi Shankar and Buddhism and chanting and Tolstoy and Keats and Homer, R&B and Fillmore East and West, and so much stuff happening. I wish we’d had a time machine to take all of the young ones—Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys and Smash Mouth and Nirvana and the White Stripes—take them back to that time of revolution and music. I can’t even come close to describing it. In 1975, I went home to Colorado, and I was skiing in Aspen with Jack Nicholson and Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Bradley, the late CBS correspondent who went up there and bought a home. At that time we were listening to “Hotel California,” Funkadelic, Philly soul and Motown. It was still acid and coke and weed and music and just a wonderful communion. And then the ‘80s came, with the business and the stock market, and that’s when it all changed.

We were singing at the Reverend James Cleveland’s church in Watts, and the third day we were there, the Watts Riots broke out. The city was burning, bullets were flying and we were stranded. One church member took us into his apartment, so there were literally 30 kids and six adults in a one-bedroom apartment. After three days we got out, because we were running out of money and food. After that, the tour was over. It was scary, seeing a black community in absolute war. I was 12 or 13 at the time, and that was the beginning of reality for me. I realized America was at war.

Rebecca Solnit

Being told that, categorically, he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world. Several years ago, I objected to the behavior of a couple of men, only to be told on both occasions that the incidents hadn’t happened at all as I said they had, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history has helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women are out there on this 6-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it’s part of the same archipelago of arrogance.

Dana Levin

Levin’s aching but restrained third collection is an attempt to quite literally come to terms with the deaths of loved ones (“The father died and then the mother died / And you were so addicted // to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp / inside,” writes Levin). To find the terms she needs, Levin (Wedding Day) hunts in some very far-flung places, including Tibetan and Aztec rituals, Wikipedia, correspondence with close friends, “the symbol book” and the University of Tennessee. These poems are alternately cryptic and crystal clear, though Levin says, in the stunning “Letter to GC,” “I would be disingenuous if I said ‘being understood’ is not important to me.” Of course, what language we can find for grief is often ambivalent and complex, as these poems attest. Levin delves into esoteric mourning, burial, and religious practices—”They weren’t really gods, they were / ‘emanations’”—resurfacing not so much with answers as, to paraphrase Frost, momentary stays against confusion. She finds little in the way of lasting comfort, but much permanent poetry.

Margaret Cho

There are things that I have held onto for decades, these events that define me, that control my everyday lady actions, even at 42, even at the lady successful level of charmed existence that I lead. No matter how many dreams I have dreamed and realized, these nightmares still haunt me. I’ve never grown up really. They are small things. Barely a blip in the consciousness of another, but a deep unrelenting scar that aches for eternity in me. [27 January 2011]

What I was unprepared for was the tidal wave of compliments and comments and generalized insanity about what I perceive to be my (relatively) unchanged body. Of course, I think I look great now, but I thought I looked great before. I am sure I am insane, but I am the type of person who receives and answers a compliment with a pang of suffering at having not heard the praise before. I don’t take in the sweet words, I only remember the times when they were not forthcoming. I live in the lack. [9 November 2010]

I had a nightmare that night where I was trying to eat the inside of a loaf of unsliced wheat bread and my teeth were stuck in the doughy middle, falling out and staying in the bread, bloodying the thing, making the hard swallows thick and copper tasting. I have many dreams in which I lose my teeth because when I was little a young gay man was killed outside the bookstore that my parents owned. He had been gay bashed and they never found the people who did it. it was so horrible and terrifying and we found his teeth outside the store for weeks afterwards. Ever since then, broken teeth are scattered throughout the landscape of my nightmares: sometimes mine, sometimes his—but they are always there, the teeth. [25 October 2010]

Winona Ryder

Ryder’s in [Black Swan] for maybe ten minutes, and all of them are crazy and important. She’s the former ingenue who refuses to go quietly when Cassel pushes her aside in favor of Portman. The character is a raging mascara-smeared wreck who embodies, in a Ghost of Christmas Future kind of way, everything the movie has to say about the terrible toll performance extracts from young women.

It’s about ballerinas, but it could just as easily be about actresses. And maybe it is, really. Ryder’s 39, a former ingenue herself, and casting her as the cracked-mirror version of Portman, who’s ten years younger and an exemplar of a breed of actress that essentially didn’t exist as a Hollywood commodity pre-Winona, opens up all kinds of meta-resonances. It’s the best role Ryder has had in years, but you could imagine some actresses having second thoughts about steering straight into that subtext.

Ryder didn’t, though. “I thought it was a cool parallel,” she says. “Being replaced by the young thing. I know that definitely happens in Hollywood. It’s harder to find good roles, and suddenly there’s new girls. I’m at that age I’ve been warned my whole life about.” [...]

It’s hard not to look at her arc and the arc of somebody like Robert Downey Jr., who starred with Ryder in 1988′s 1969 and then again in Scanner, and was a far bigger mess than Ryder before he became a superhero, and wonder if Hollywood and/or the American viewing public has different rules for fallen women and fallen men. But maybe she would have wound up here anyway.

As many of you know, I have a personal interest in this topic; but given the way my mind works, my personal situation also threw me into a year of thinking really hard about both the abstractions and instantiations of pornography and prostitution. I collected scores of links, read hundreds of articles and arguments, debated it for hours and hours in my head, even made my students debate it in class for me (all the while never brave or clear-minded enough to hold my own opinion).

What follows are my more or less incoherent notes on the topic, written over the course of several months. I can’t include all the links and don’t really want to. I just hope some of it makes sense and/or is halfway interesting, but I’m publishing these thoughts, no matter how poorly they hang together, just to draw a mental line under the topic and to put myself on notice that I’m done thinking about it, anyway for now.

•

At the heart of the debate lies a question about interventionist leftist government versus laissez-faire libertarian ideals. While it seems clear that the government should step in to regulate corporations, it’s harder to state conclusively that the government should also regulate individual businesses, though taken together they may comprise “an industry.”

And what are the parameters of an industry such as sex work, which in the US alone spans every single socioeconomic class of worker and employer and customer, and every conceivable motivation for undertaking or consuming such work? No disputing that it’s work—per Elaine Scarry’s definition from The Body in Pain; sex workers can have their bodies altered by everything from RSI to STDs to scarring from violent assault. So that it’s work isn’t the question. The question is, do we regulate work? And the answer seems to be yes, ever since Upton Sinclair and Frances Perkins, anyway. Workers should receive a certain level of wage; workers shouldn’t be mistreated or overworked; workers shouldn’t be coerced into working.

Of course all of these things happen at all kinds of levels of employment—my partner’s 18-year-old nephew, for example, is about to enter a service academy, and does he really do so because he genuinely wants to be an officer in the US military? He has a lot of very convincing arguments about why he wants to be nominated, and how it will be a wonderful opportunity for him—but it’s hard to overlook the fact that his own father washed out of Annapolis 25 years ago. Is this an anxiety of influence, an I-can-do-what-you-couldn’t, type of move? Who knows? Did my sexually abusive childhood mean that I was going to grow up and, especially during one troubled period in my life, think certain sexual activities involving domination and humiliation were hot? Is it my twisted culture which has altered my brain? Or is it merely an excess of estrogen that makes me feel this way? And aren’t these questions sickeningly simplistic?

Good luck having an opinion without being RIPPED TO SHREDS by someone’s else’s oppositional rhetoric, is all I can say. The Internet is stalked at present by rapacious binary arguers who are determined to pull you down and make you a) burn your porn or b) burn your legitimate concerns about sex work. In general, though it’s fiery and fulminating, on either “side” of the debate you encounter astonishingly poor rhetoric. There are consistent logical fallacies—mistaking the part for the whole (“I’m one happy call girl/porn star who wasn’t abused as a child, is well-paid, and genuinely enjoys her work!”), mistaking correlation for causality (“research indicates that married couples have the most frequent, and conservative Protestant women have the most enjoyable, sexual relations” and “sexually oriented businesses lower property values” are a couple of examples from thepinkcross.org), and, possibly most infamously of all, the slippery slope (porn will inevitably turn hapless teenagers into Ted Bundy).

It’s irritating, to say the least, to try to read through the bad rhetoric in search of anything meaningful or actually descriptive of the complexity of human felt life. The only psychologist I’ve found who even comes close to touching this is Michael Bader, and I don’t know that a single other writer, in all the books I’ve read, has managed to pull it off. (Though having said that, here’s a fascinating article by Robin Turner about the Lakoffian metaphors used and misused in anti-pornography rhetoric.)

NB by the way I’m including pornography and prostitution under the same subject heading (sex work) because it seems very clear to me that both lines of employment ultimately offer pretty much the same thing: I am earning money (however much or little, however happily or unhappily, however freely or unwillingly) by displaying/using my sexuality in such a way as to stimulate yours. Whether I’m actually there in the flesh touching you, or whether I’m touching some other person onscreen, the intent is very obviously the same: you get pleasure and I get paid. (And perhaps I get some pleasure too, though there’s literally no way for you as a customer to ever know, whether I’m there in person or on film.)

The much-vaunted difference, of course, is that if I’m in a pornographic film, I never have to see or interact with the real consumers of my product. One theory is that this is why the men (still mostly men) who use pornography (and let’s don’t say “view” or “look at,” which is a far more passive designation than the reality—let’s say “use,” because porn is used) are able to enjoy it—there’s no emotional relationship. There is, of course, an economic one; but the consumer doesn’t necessarily realize that he’s been sexually stimulated by an actual person—not because I was two-dimensional, but because I didn’t see or speak to them. I performed for them invisibly; I never saw them.

Baden says, the reason men like porn is precisely because they think it isn’t real; the reason women are threatened by porn is that they think it is. Like every such sweeping claim, this is patently overgeneralized and therefore/nonetheless usefully so.

Women who view a film are usually going to put themselves in the position of the women. Why I cry when I watch stupid sentimental movies with other women crying (e.g., I don’t know, Stepmom). It’s Pavlovian—a woman cries on screen, I cry too. I am her. As Salinger’s Seymour wrote in his journal of Muriel’s rapt attention, “The Warner Brothers identification is complete.”

(Someone really wise and not all strangled in rhetorical binaries wrote a strong blogpost on this, in which she said: “Theoretically, I don’t have a problem with sex work. I don’t think there’s anything inherently, fundamentally wrongdirtybad with sex as a job, or sex for pay. But that’s based on a concept of sex work in a vacuum, and we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a patriarchy.”)

My partner said, “After all, you’re hardly a libertine.” Oh. Really?

Porn objectifies women, claim hoary second-wave feminists such as myself. As if this were a surprise to anyone. When every cultural artifact we produce objectifies and denegrates women.

Denegrate. To blacken. To make dark and other.

The question then becomes, is there a problem with objectifying people?

The answer has to be, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re trying to accomplish a society where everyone has open access to their own physical pleasure, the jury’s still out on whether Internet porn in particular helps accomplish that. Frankly, no one can pull themselves up out of their rhetoric long enough to do actual human research—and they’d be trying to draw a bead on a moving target anyway. The Internet is changing our brain chemistry so fast that I don’t see how post-docs with spreadsheets tracking dopamine levels can really keep up.

For as subjects, we aren’t black-boxed; we’re dynamic, and the presently living generations who’ve been able to access pornography with unprecedented ease (and just not still photos, but films) have developed brains that are biologically different from those of the previous generations. If you don’t think that’s true, I feel sorry for you. You probably also think technological devices like smartphones don’t change how students learn or read or think. I invite you to visit my classroom and watch the core differences play out visibly in the process of education. That poor fucker Allan Bloom, talking in the eighties about “souls without longing“; he had no idea. And neither do we.

So the question “Is this a problem?” can only be answered if we have established an answer to the question “What kind of world are we trying to create/manipulate?” People with whom I live who’ve been squawking for years about my supposed “essentialism” and my nasty “reductionism” (e.g., testosterone makes it hard for my male students to sit still and think about logical fallacies because quite frankly I think they’re meant to be outside stalking animals in tall grasses)—have misunderstood me if they think that description equals prescription, or anatomy equals destiny. I accept that my brain and body are quantifiably different from those of: men: my students: my parents: my cat: and any other entities I could care to name.

Courtesy of behavioral therapy and Zen training and my innate thought processes, though, I also don’t believe that the hand I got dealt, or the hand I get dealt every day when I wake up with some new slightly adjusted set of chemicals raging through my brain, is the hand I have to play.

This all seems so self-evident as to be ugly when stated aloud.

Or, if the answer to the question of “What kind of society do we desire?” is “One in which biological genders are accorded equal respect and benefit,” then I cannot for my life figure out how the consumption of sex work contributes to that end. (Not its production; its consumption.) Not because adult sex between non-partners or for economic remuneration is morally wrong; but because I cannot see how it fosters a transitive recognition of the other as the self.

If this is my mental limitation, then I also do not have to take the hand I’m dealt. If I find it unarousing, in a mate, such consumption, consuming sex work, I can consider whether or how or if I want to change that emotional/physical response on my part—to a degree. It’s why the Serenity Prayer has three parts. There are things I can change, and things I can’t. I’d better be granted the wisdom to know the difference or I am in for a lot of additional suffering.

If I want to be a writer, and I have a hard time meeting deadlines, I can use emotion-opposite action (for example) to start rewiring my response to cues. I am adaptive.

If I want to be with someone who consumes the products of sex work, but I find this behavior unattractive, I can use emotion-opposite action to start rewiring my responses to cues. I am adaptive. If I choose to be. If I think it fits what DBT calls my wise-mind values or my long-term goals.

I pray daily for the wisdom to know the difference.

Is such consumption on a par with being overweight, with smoking, with eating fast food, with driving one’s car where one could have easily walked? or with not wringing out the kitchen sponge, with not wiping the coffee grounds from the counter, with not changing out the toilet paper roll when it is empty? Or is such consumption on a par with buying ostrich-skin boots, fur-collared jackets, cheap clothing made overseas by children? Or is it on a par with hiring undocumented Mexicans to do the yard work? Or is it on a par with shouting at the dog? Or using intimidation to browbeat the girlfriend?

I don’t know about equivalence, but I know about spectrums. I know that the same industry which makes available supposedly innocent massage-parlor handjobs is the same industry which maims, rapes, murders, trafficks and shatters. The exact same one. Which causes harm in ways most of us cannot conceive. When we know this, can we continue to collude? Despite the rare yet dazzling examples to whom we like to refer, the few but happy, the Sprinkles and Taorminos, the Brights and the Queens—do we like to point to them because they make us feel better?

When the argument depends upon the exceptions, it is fundamentally flawed.

Frankly I think the complexity of the debate can only be properly represented in theater, poetry, or the novel.

Or perhaps a film. That film has not been made. It could not be either a documentary or a feature film. There may not be anyone working today who could make it.

Rhetoric cannot get us out of every situation, or perhaps even out of very many. Cf. Steven Pinker on why the ridiculous yet tempting abortion-debate question of “when does life begin” will never be the right one, because it treats as if life could be switched on and off with all the subtlety of a circuit breaker.

I think I would respect the entire agon more if there were less hypocrisy on either side.

If sex work is good for sex workers, they will eventually become fewer in number and more highly skilled, trained, and remunerated. If instead sex work benefits primarily an alienated consumer class, we can expect to see it increase proportionally, as part of a gross national product, according to late capitalist income levels and leisure time.

Then too, if American men and women really want to be sex workers, why is there not enough supply for the demand. Why do we have to traffic in additional workers? If you ask this question about agricultural trafficking, the answer is harshly obvious.

If I think I want to remain with someone who considers himself non-monogamous, and is interested in relating with other women for spiritual, emotional, intellectual as well as sensual benefit, for pay or not for pay, then I have even more rewiring to do.

You can only experience compersion, mudita, or sympathetic joy for your partner, if she or he is truly experiencing joy in the first place.

Does consuming sex work increase compassion, toward oneself or toward its providers.

We don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a capitalist patriarchy and we co-create it daily.

What unalloyed pleasure is even left us to experience, given our straits, given our anomie.

The most libertine among us cannot recognize our enislement.

Katha Pollitt is one of my very favorite journalist-poets (okay, maybe she’s the only journalist-poet)—she has such a massive oeuvre, and her voice always remains so indefatigably bright and feisty, that I was especially interested to hear what she’d have to say about the whole so-few-women-in-literary-publishing ball of beeswax. And she says this:

I’ve written so often about the dearth of women in high-end magazines, including my own home base, The Nation, over so many years, and to so little effect, that sometimes I see myself, sitting at the kitchen table in some year like 2050, enjoying a nice bowl of reconfigurated vitamin-infused plastic bags, and over my phlogistatron will come the headline “Study Shows Men Write 85 Percent of Articles in Interplanetary Media. Martian Weekly Editor in Chief: Where Are the Women?”

[Sorry, just have to interrupt to say, I could kiss her for that phlogistatron.]

Of the relatively few editors who have made a consistent effort to find and develop women writers in recent years, most are female. […] Editors matter. A cursory look at some of the publications that fared the worst in VIDA’s count finds that they have particularly lopsided mastheads: At the Atlantic, where just 26 percent of 2010 articles were by women, of the top seven editors, only the managing editor is a woman. (Women are often managing editors, a position with lots of work and not much power.) At the New Republic, of the top 12 editors, only two are women (and one of these two is the executive editor, which sounds suspiciously like a managing editor). The list of 41 contributing editors, who are basically those writers who belong to the magazine’s inner circle, includes only four women, only one of whom is under 60. I wouldn’t look for a dynamic approach to the byline problem from mastheads like these.

I especially like that she calls out that fact about managing editors; myself having been one, I can attest firsthand to the lots of work and not much power. It’s all subscriber mailings and layout and filing requisitions, and no one ever asks you to write a fucking book review. I wrote more during my brief stint as a dirt-poor freelance alt-weekly writer than I ever did in my salaried lofty days of managing editorship. Actually, I think only a single five-line poem survives from that era, reminding me of Joseph Brodsky’s entire output when he was poet laureate in 1991: “I sit at my desk, / my life’s grotesque.”

So unfortunately BACK TO ME and my personal little self-engrossed concern about the underrepresentation of women in literary publishing, namely the underrepresentation of ME in literary publishing. Or, more honestly, the total absence of me. In the last twenty years I’ve completed six poetry manuscripts, only one of which has appeared in print (albeit without an ISBN). (Though I am eternally grateful to Allison Carter for printing it up so beautifully.) And so I wonder:

Does the fault lie with me for not sending out work more aggressively, entering more contests, following up assertively, being more pro-active? Most certainly, a great deal of the responsibility for my underpublishédness is mine. Or does the fault lie with the editors who reject my poems and publish those of my male peers? I don’t know. A guy who was at Cambridge with me now teaches full-time for an MFA/PhD program to which I was considering applying. Two someone elses who were at Cambridge with me have now won Booker Prizes (but they’re both female). A former student is currently a Stegner Fellow (again, female). I’ve never felt my situation was because I was a woman, but more I’ve wondered—is it because I lost all those years being crazy? Is it because I taught too many courses, watched too many movies, spent too many weekends taking naps, wrote only sporadically and manically, didn’t set myself to the path with stern discipline?

Or is it because I’m just not very good?

Among other publishers, I’ve submitted my most recent manuscript to Nightboat Books, as much because I love their website and its purple-indigo logo as because I also love their author list (Daniel Borzutsky, Michael Burkard, Fanny Howe, Myung Mi Kim? hello, come to mama). But the thing is, I know they won’t take it. I know it won’t win their contest, as it never wins any contests, and I suspect this is because half of the poems in it are plain-vanilla American narrative lyric, and the other half are almost unreadably experimental.

I fell asleep brooding on this fact and woke up this morning still thinking about it, and before I even got to the bathroom I suddenly decided: I should carve that book in half, and make two books out of it—I have enough uncommitted narrative and experimental poems kicking around to fill out the pages of both. Then I remembered something Jon Davis said to me when we snatched half-an-hour from the AWP bookfair to have a cup of tea together: he told me that he’d been tempted to do that very thing, early on in his publishing career, but that his professor Richard Hugo had said no, don’t succumb to that temptation. That it makes a more interesting book if you leave it organically hybrid.

Buy this book. No really. Do it.

It sounded wise enough when Jon said it, especially since he’d just sold out of his wonderful Copper Canyon title, Preliminary Report. But when I think, no one will ever accept my weird genetically-modified child with three eyes and five limbs, then I feel heartbroken and like trying to make her prettier and more normal-looking, so people will love and accept her.

So while I feel confident that Nightboat will never take my book in a squillion bazillion gagillion years (roughly speaking), as with my ex-boyfriend, I also still feel this ridiculous hope: He’ll call me! He’ll email! He’ll come to his senses and beg to have me back! For once in my life I’ll get that phone call that says—we loved your book and and we love your poems and we desperately want to print them!

Oh heart. You are so, so touchingly optimistic sometimes.

Now enough of all that, here’s the brain-candy part of the post: a new Jane Eyre! I’m not sure about Rochester’s mutton-chops, but I do like his house, and the suitable youth and plainness and elfin quality of our Janet. Most especially the dialogue seems word-for-word, which makes me so happy I cannot adequately express my relief. For too long have film adaptations tampered with the overwrought quality of Charlotte’s prose! Let it out, say I! Let it be completely unwieldy and preposterous and grand. For that is what she did best. I’ve read that novel so many times I’ve unwittingly memorized vast swathes of it, and found myself saying the dialogue along with Jane and Rochester (the original vampiric Edward) in this scene. I can’t wait to see how the filmmaker handles Jane’s mystical encounter with a female god.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite passages, by the way, from Roland Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999), with its dry concluding sentence:

More remarkable is the case of Charlotte Brontë who was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, chose to return to live in his rectory, and eventually married his curate. She always paid a passionate lip-service to Christianity, and made her heroine, Jane Eyre, contemplate going abroad as a missionary. Emotionally, however, Jane operates within a cosmology where a single supreme God has created nature to be a divine mother for living things, and perhaps in particular for women. It is to this mother (and not to Jesus) that Jane turns for comfort when in serious trouble, and who at one point appears to her out of the moon in a dream-vision, to warn her. It never seems to have occurred to Brontë that this view of divinity was not actually Christianity (Hutton 34).

And finally, today is the only date in literary history I’ve ever been able to remember—that of the passage of Sylvia Plath from this world in 1963. (I manage to remember that Lyrical Ballads were published in 1798, because it always surprises me that romanticism has been around for so long; and that Dickinson’s annus mirabilis was 1862; but other than that I’m lousy with dates.)

So, happy Sylvia death-day everyone. In honor of her seldom-celebrated sense of humor I link you to Tiger Beatdown’s screamingly funny take-down of The Birthday Letters, which makes me laugh every time I read it. And I hope somewhere, Sylvia and Ted are laughing too. And that she is poisoning his tea.

I mean, all Ted Hughes did was pick up a gal with a history of suicidal depression and massive abandonment issues relating to The Dudes, marry her, abandon her (whoops!) in the cruelest manner possible, leave her with the responsibility of caring for two small children which as I understand it is incredibly hard and stressful even if you’re not clinically depressed and dealing with a recent traumatic abandonment that has re-opened that big old treasure trove of Your Issues and set them loose to devour your brain like Dad-shaped zombies, and then, following her totally spontaneous and out-of-nowhere and in-no-way-foreseeable-to-the-point-of-being-almost-inevitable-given-these-specific-circumstances suicide, go around re-editing manuscripts so that they excluded the poems about hating him and getting rid of diaries surrounding the circumstances of their break and her death, much in the manner of a man who has but recently thrown a lit match into a pile of oily rags being all, “well, it really is a shame that the house spontaneously combusted this way! Nothing we could have done to prevent it, I suppose. What a tragedy. Let’s not assign blame here; this is a private matter.” I mean, you guys: What could people possibly be mad at Ted Hughes for? WHAT DID HE DO WRONG????

Editors continue to respond to VIDA’s head-count of women in literary publishing: Tin House and the redoubtable Jessa of Bookslut weigh in, with the latter’s confessing frankly:

The refrain of “we want more submissions from women” started to gnaw at me. Because I never pitch work. That makes me part of this problem. I have a working relationship with certain publications, and I’m content with staying with them. And most of them approached me initially, rather than me showing up on their doorstep with my CV saying, “Hi! Publish me, I’m good.” And I wonder why that is. God, could it be because I’m under-confident in my writing? I don’t want to talk about it! Okay, yes. Maybe. Fuck off. And it’s easier for me to take an idea to the same editors I’ve been working with for years, rather than try to work for somewhere new, with a higher profile and better pay rate.

Whereas poet Annie Finch (doubly fascinating to me because she’s both a formalist poet and a fully out-of-the-broom-closet witch) puts the responsibility squarely on editors’ shoulders. Her first suggestion to publishers who want to equalize representation:

Merlin and his poet Annie Finch

Actively solicit women contributors. This is the only realistic way to get from the slush pile (likely at least 75% male) to your goal of at least 50% women. You have no moral obligation to reflect the percentages of your slush pile; if you did, most of what you publish would be below your standards. So how can you be proactive about the percentage? A) Read other magazines, or browse in bookstores, and look for women writers whose work you admire. B) Look up their postal or email address online and send them an email asking to look at some of their work for consideration. A query does not put you under any obligation to accept. Follow up until they send, and if you must reject, invite them at least once to send more work immediately for another round of consideration.

(I saw Annie from a distance at AWP but was too shy to say hello, though we have mutual friends. I really wish I had met her.)

This whole where’s-the-women kerfuffle takes a bit of a backseat today, though, to the big post-AWP buzz of Claudia Rankine’s having called out Tony Hoagland on a poem which, to be fair, is not only racist but just kind of awful (because really, Tony? Do you really want to rhyme “dummy” with “tummies”?). Apparently Nick Flynn read Hoagland’s poem aloud, and then Ms. Rankine responded; she has kindly reproduced her remarks on her own website (look under “criticism” for the tiny “awp”), while writer Sara Jaffe describes what it was like to be present at that panel:

Does it sound as if I’ve been holding my breath? I was. It was breathtaking—the degree of bravery and boldness it took for Rankine to present this performance to an audience that, I imagine, was mostly expecting a “regular” poetry reading. The fact that she explicitly addressed a member of the poetry elite; that she publicly allowed herself the vulnerability of admitting that she found the language in Hoagland’s poem to be hurtful. And that she did, again, in this talk what I so admired—loved—in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: she spoke of her grappling with Hoagland’s poem as both an individual and highly personal process that she experienced as a black woman, and located that experience in relation to the wider poetry community, to history, and to the contemporary political moment in the U.S.

Frankly, it sounds as though the worst thing Hoagland could have done was what he apparently did—in trying to defend that poem, and his choices in writing and publishing it. A more gracious and wiser response would have been to plead ignorance and internalized racism, to apologize, and to thank Rankine for bringing his blindness and grave errors to his attention so that he might write from a place of greater awareness in the future.

(I admit I am feeling not a little pleased with myself at this point about my decision not to take a master class in a couple of weeks with Mr. Hoagland, but instead with Connie Voisine, a decision I based almost entirely on a nifty little lyric that appeared in Poetry last year, “Testament.”)

Concerning Hoagland’s poem and Rankine’s response, my former classmate, accomplished Canadian poet Chris Hutchinson, quoted (on Facebook) from Wallace Stevens’s “Of Modern Poetry”; and it is so wise, so perfect, that I think I will let dear Mr. Stevens have the last word.

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage….

In non-poebiz news…there’s not much news. I can’t figure out why I have had literally the worst menstrual period in months and months. Every time I think I can safely get out of bed I wind up back under the covers clutching the hot water bottle. I actually had to cancel therapy, which, if you know me, that’s mighty rare. Was AWP somehow to blame? Was it the night of the many brandy alexanders? If so, it was still worth it. I do have two posts simmering in me, one on sex work and feminism, and one on the representation of women’s bodies in dance (with, yes, a bit of bavarder on Black Swan), but neither of these are so exciting that they can’t wait for me to be able to sit upright without twisting pain and the overwhelming desire to eat every piece of dark chocolate within reach. (And there’s not any left.)

The thing about AWP is, I always wish when it’s over that I could do it again. Bit of a Groundhog Day experience—I wish I could go to different panels, have drinks at different off-site venues, hear different readings, and not go to bed at 11 pm but find this or that person and stay up all night talking. Then I’ll tell myself, there’s always next year—but it’s not so much that I want to go next year, it’s that I wish I had a second crack at THIS year.

Another chance. Precisely what each poem denies its writer as well. I can’t really imagine being Tony Hoagland and not just copping to that immediately. Not just falling all over yourself to say,—I know, I know! It’s terrible, that poem didn’t do at all what I wanted it to do! I wanted it to skewer racism, make it visible, it didn’t do that though did it, that is not what I meant at all, that is not it, at all.

(Because I basically want to preface all my poems with such a blanket proleptical erratum anyway. Cf. women’s lack of writerly self-confidence, above.)

(A lack of self-confidence which also might extend to what one did or what one did not do while tipsy on aforementioned brandy alexanders.)

though I know what I love most of him
I’m walking on needles and pins
my addiction to the worst of him
the low moon helps me sing

he’s my brandy alexander
always gets me into trouble
but that’s another matter