season of the bitch

Because this lady did it:

101 things to do in 1001 days. (which will be Feb 22, 2011) » Read the rest of this entry «

Because I’m bored. and because Caroline did it.

The Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag a few people.

Nearest Book: Coming to Writing And Other Essays, by Helene Cixous.

Doesn’t he have before his eyes the painting he will not do, the one that slips by his brush? The one he will do tomorrow, tomorrow if God wills it, or never?  There are painters who for me are voyagers of truth.

Once upon a time–well, back in 2002–I took a course on Literary Monsters.

We read lots of lovely stuff that I don’t have lying around to reference right now (but if you want a deeper post on the subject, you can buy me this book, thanks). But the main gist of our study of texts like Beowulf, Interview With the Vampire, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest was seven monster theses that my professor outlined for us at the beginning of class.

I’ve watched this primary campaign go from a spirited competition into a mess where each candidate’s supporters firmly believe the other candidate is a monster. We’ve looked at the actual reasons for that, and I believe that especially with Hillary Clinton, but with Obama as well, the press portrayal of the candidates can be looked at through these theses. And yes, there’s probably a much longer paper in this, but what the hell.

1. The monstrous body is a cultural body.

Both candidates reflect our culture. The older woman, past being seen as sexual…the old queen and the wicked witch, simultaneously, as I said in an earlier post. And the outsider, the younger black man. Both of them arise from categories we know well, but are breaking those rules just by running.

2. The monster always escapes.

Over and over again we’ve thought this horrendous campaign was over, only for one candidate to stage a comeback. We’ve thought Clinton was done after Iowa, then Obama after New Hampshire and Nevada, then Clinton again after Obama’s post-Super Tuesday wins, then Obama again after Clinton won Ohio and the Texas primary and then Pennsylvania, and now…

3. The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.

Of course, they’re bringing on category crisis just by being a white woman and a black man running for President, and certainly by having defeated more typical white male candidates. Hillary Clinton has always been disconcerting–at first she was too masculine a woman, then she was too feminine, standing by her man. Now she’s both uber-masculine–”obliterate,” “if she gave Obama one of her balls…”–and feminine, when her angry supporters accuse Obama and his camp of sexism.

Obama, of course, is both American and not-American, black and white, masculine and feminine (at least according to Carville), rich and poor, elitist and community activist, and if you’d believe the crazies, Christian and Muslim.

4. The monster dwells at the gates of difference.

You see the fear of difference much more with Obama, especially with the reports of overt racism and the repeated cries that he’s Muslim despite Rev. Wright’s best attempts to remain part of the media cycle. Hillary Clinton’s problem is more that she is not different enough. Obama supporters hate her as part of the culture that they despise and reject–not alien, but all too familiar. But Hillary Clinton is still a woman, and still different.

5. The monster polices the borders of the possible.

Is it really possible for America to elect a (white) woman? A black man? And does some of the intense anger at the other side stem from the fact that it feels like not just a rejection of Hillary Clinton or of Barack Obama, but of all (older) women or all black Americans? How much change can America handle? And what ugly truths about ourselves do we have to confront in the process?

6. Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.

Obama is too well-spoken, too charismatic, too seductive. We can’t have that. It must be bad because we can’t quite quantify it. And Clinton is too determined, she wants it too badly, how dare she?! But secretly, the need to over and over again reiterate what’s wrong with the Other candidate (yes, I capitalized that for a reason) is to remind ourselves that we don’t want it, we don’t want it, we don’t want it…

7. The monster stands at the threshold of becoming…

President?

Joking aside, one of the first ways that people learn to commit atrocities is by Othering the opponent, making them not just the enemy but something monstrous and not-human. Soldiers in Abu Ghraib, or in Nazi concentration camps, rapists, police who shoot an unarmed man or drag people from their cars and beat them, the people who killed Matthew Shepard or Brandon Teena or Sanesha Stewart. It always seems easier to do that when the hated person is already different in some visible way–female, black, Arab, gay, transgender.

So we have a presidential primary campaign, supposedly in the party of tolerance, the party that supports people who are women, black, Arab, gay, transgender, Latino, Jewish–at least more than that other party does. And we get this polarized mess, and I can’t help but wonder if this would be quite so angry if it were between, say, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards (it would be for me, because I’d be in the position of trying to care which one of them won when they both rub me the wrong way), or even Barack Obama and John Edwards, to say nothing of Joe Biden and Chris Dodd or some other grey-haired white men. To what degree does all that category crisis, those border issues, that Difference affect our view of the candidate we don’t support?

(Cross-posted to Alterdestiny)

…when my parents are Republicans.

1. My parents. I know this may seem counterintuitive, but I never went through a serious rebellion against my parents that led me to the other side of the coin. Instead, I am a direct result of the values they instilled in me from the time I was little. They taught me to read when I was very young and they did all sorts of crazy things like have flash cards for all the countries in Africa and suchlike. They wanted a baby genius, I guess. What they got, 28 years later, is a sassy feminist politically active tattooed writertype. I think they’re mostly happy with it.

But seriously. They answered my questions honestly when I watched the news with them and wanted to know what was going on in some part of the world, or when I read about someone like Pol Pot and wanted to know who he was and why he was bad. My father would tell me, “He was a dictator that we basically supported for years while he killed his own people.” My mother explained that she left the Catholic church because she disagreed with its views on abortion and women. And they always told my sister and I that we didn’t need a man for anything, and explained sex to us and at least attempted to tell us that using protection was more important than some mythic virginity pledge.

2. My grandparents. My Jewish grandparents, who insisted that my sister and I go to Hebrew school and learn about our Jewish heritage. Being aware that you are part of a group that has seen such hate makes you more aware of the suffering of others, even though I certainly cannot claim to be marginalized as a Jew–I don’t think it’s ever been an issue, and I’ve blogged about it more than once. My grandparents took us to museums (and who I think voted Democrat) and when I was nine and had seen the musical Les Miserables for the first time (after begging my parents when my mother played the soundtrack over and over again), dared me to read the book. Which I did. Unabridged.

Which brings me to 3. Les Miserables.  Some people read Ayn Rand and became Republicans. I read Victor Hugo and fell in love with revolutionaries and poor people and prostitutes and such. In fact, I probably learned what a prostitute was from reading Les Mis. Which I have tried to read once a year since high school, since I always get something new out of it. I have probably mentioned that I tattooed a quote from it across my back, something to carry with me always. If you don’t understand, you probably haven’t read it. It’s the single most important clue to how I think about political issues.

4. Punk rock. I didn’t have that much of a rebellious phase, but when I did get into one, the music I found was expressly political and I had much to learn to catch up. Thanks, Jello Biafra.

5. The GSA in high school school. This happened almost by accident. I became friends with the people who ran the gay-straight alliance. I had probably not thought about it much, other than when I was the subject of one of those awful middle-school rumor campaigns that I was a lesbian, but I didn’t see why anyone would have a problem with gay people, so I joined up. The one detention I ever served in high school was for skipping math class to sit at the GSA table at lunchtime during awareness week. Which we technically had permission to do, but the school didn’t like. Wonder why…

6. Dr. Arrington. I took a class in Marxist theory freshman year at Tulane for the hell of it, because I was curious. I came out with a broadened viewpoint on social ills and a deep distaste for the kid in the class who kept finding ways to talk about his Porsche. Oh, I hate you, bourgeois college students.

7. Dr. McKay. Opened me up to feminism, which like gay rights I had never seen as much of an issue. Of course women could do anything men could, who’d ever said they couldn’t?  And the Wendy Kaminer essay I’ve already mentioned a million times.

8. Sara, my riot-grrrl roommate and goth-club buddy who made me think about women’s issues.

9. Khristina, my fabulous roommate. Khristina and I bonded during the aforementioned Marxist theory class, became roommates our sophomore year, and shaped our political consciousness together. We didn’t like the same music or the same boys, so what we had to talk about was school and politics and world affairs. A brilliant black woman, she made me think about race and racism directly rather than that same aforementioned attitude, “Of course I’m not racist.”

10. Religion. Though I went to Hebrew school, our family never went to religious services. I grew up with a deep curiosity about religion itself, what made people believe, practice, think about religion. Because I wasn’t really indoctrinated into any one faith, I explored many of them, learning and picking up bits and pieces of things that made sense to me in a way that I couldn’t have had I been raised and trained that one way was the only right way. Having one Jewish parent and one Catholic parent didn’t hurt, either–nor did the knowledge that my parents were forced to marry at City Hall because no church would accept their interfaith relationship. I identify as Jewish, but my Judaism is so much more than just that. (that Feminism and Theology class at Loyola was pretty rad, too.)

11. Chris. My high school sweetheart, my first love, the one that got away. No one understood why I couldn’t let go. Because that beautiful, loving, open-minded person, the one who had fierce pride in being Jewish and would knock you out if you said anything racist, the one who screwed up but never meant any harm and taught me to look at people who commit crimes not as Other but as very real people with very real problems that aren’t solved by jail, taught me more than I ever taught him about what kind of person I want to be. And he still does, though I almost never see him and we almost never speak.

12. New Orleans. If I can credit one place with truly shaping my adult self, it would be New Orleans. I grew up in liberal Massachusetts, but left it when I was 16. I lived in South Carolina but never really felt at home there, went to Denver after college, and now I’m in Philly. When people ask where I’m from I never really know what to say, but I should say New Orleans because without it I would not be who I was. I transferred from Tulane after two years because I hated it, but I ultimately could not leave that city and ended up just next door at Loyola (which I loved). New Orleans was a mix of black and white, very rich and very poor, and drag queens, strippers and transpeople were part of my everyday experience in the city. I befriended jazz musicians three times my age and went from their shows to a rockabilly band at the Dragon’s Den to hip-hop night at the long-lost Matador. Everything was acceptable, everything was cool, everything was beautiful–except, of course, the poverty.

It was in New Orleans that I first had a child fear me because I was white and was confronted with the hard facts of my own privilege, not in a classroom or in a text, but in the real world. It was in New Orleans that I went to a fund-raising party for a transwoman to get her surgery. It was in New Orleans that Khristina and I decided to support Ralph Nader because Al Gore wasn’t on the right side of any of the issues we really cared about (Oh, looking back…) And it was there that I really learned to see everyone as human.

Sorry if this isn’t the most organized. It was more of a therapy session for me, trying to tease out the reasons why I am who I am, why I think as I do, and why I’m so passionate about it that I will give up my free time trying to fix this screwed-up system.

How it works: these are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

This made me realize that I need to get readin’.

Brit Hume, quoted in Tim Crouse’s “The Boys on the Bus,” from 1972: “All those reporters care about is ‘Who’s gonna run, who’s gonna win?’ And that just isn’t enough. The press has a greater responsibility than to do a bunch of goddam handicapping stories. They ought to do one big story on each candidate’s overall strategy and then bag it. Let the AP cover the candidates and play that stuff on page 7, page 8. Maybe have your best reporter go out and write a highly opinionated story about each guy, and then put him to work on something useful, like the money.”

Further, “Those guys on the plane claim that they’re trying to be objective. They shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they’re not being honest. Their so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality. They report what one candidate said, then the go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to finding if the guy is telling the truth. They just pass the speeches along without trying to confirm the substance of what the candidates are saying. What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality.”

Congratulations, Brit. You’ve managed to become the kind of blowhard you hated back in the day. You didn’t believe in objectivity–well, I don’t either. But you sure as hell aren’t honest and you definitely aren’t doing any investigating.

It’s always weird to trip over a familiar name while reading these books from the ‘72 campaign. It’s just a reminder that the political class–and the people who cover them–is such a small part of this country. It’s what makes anyone who can genuinely paint themselves as an outsider so attractive.

On Politics: Happy. Needed break from thinking about the rest of it.

On LA Ink: I get sucked into marathon TV very easily. But I really like Kat Von D and as a tattooed woman, I love seeing three beautiful, talented women become the public face of tattooing. I love the difference between their reactions and the guys from Miami Ink when a porn star or drag queen or unconventional woman walks in. And their work really is beautiful. World class. Love.

On body issues: A few years ago I got to a really unhealthy place. I gained some weight, drank way too much, had a terrible bout of adult acne. I was floating around with no career prospects, no money, no family around and few real friends (two that I still talk to on a semi-regular basis). I lost the weight without dieting, mostly from cutting down on the booze and sleeping better and most importantly, not fucking worrying about it. The skin took some serious work, but it’s almost back to normal, though I feel slightly feminist-guilty about spending money on getting laser treatments to zap some of the red spots. And most importantly, I spent enough time alone to get to a place where I was really happy with myself.

And I haven’t really looked back.

My relationship ended recently. I’m spending time alone again, and once again really enjoying little things about myself. My body, my brain, my heart. They’re all part of me.

And when I see these diet commercials and such, I get sad. I really feel that I had to let go of all those body obsessions to cut through the crap and get healthy. I used to eat until I was stuffed–now I don’t remember what that felt like. I learned to eat what I wanted, stop when I was done, and cut through the bullshit to find what I enjoyed. Like I did with my personal life.

On Dorothy Parker: I’ve been a fan for years, but this year I finally watched Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, and just polished off The Portable Dorothy Parker: poems, short stories, criticism, and humor. I feel like I’ve got a new friend. I would have loved to be her friend. Hang out, drink champagne, take the dogs for a walk in the park and make fun of men. I wonder if she’d have been happier with some good female friends. I’m pretty sure that if she were around now she’d be a blogger, knocking out epigrams and stories and criticism a mile a minute. Wonder what she’d think about George W. Bush?

I’ve had a hard time with the Best Of’s this year, except for the book. But still, it’s not a new year without a list of the things that really affected me in the past year. I’m not big on resolutions, but next year I’ll try to hear more new music, see more movies, and read more books. Promise.

Best Book: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. A big, lush, gorgeous thick detective story set in modern India, with gangsters, religious clashes, and love in a culture full of  beauty and magic. It’s out in paperback now. Go get it.

Best Album: I’ve got to go with Ms. Winehouse. Back to Black was the soundtrack to my days, nights, road trips and breakup. Honorable mention and a close second goes to Feist, whose The Reminder hasn’t left my CD player since I unwrapped it on Christmas morning and is that rare album that feels like it was written just for me. But Amy and all her lanky-armed, tattooed beauty and personal demons took over the world this year, and made pop music listenable again.

Best Movie: I haven’t seen a lot of the films everyone’s going gaga about yet, but I’ll write a best-of list when I’ve seen all of them. For now, I’m picking Juno, the smart, cute, hysterically funny story of a teenager “dealing with things way over my maturity level.” As I wrote earlier, Juno was a big kick in the face to all those dick comedies, but still a movie that anyone can enjoy. Written by a smart young woman about a smart young woman, Juno is a rarity these days, and loaded with excellent performances. Hell, even Jennifer Garner nearly made me cry.

Best TV Show: Completely addicted to The Tudors on Showtime. Yes, I know it wasn’t historically accurate (I read and recommend Antonia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII for that) and that it was often front-loaded with sex and glamour, but that’s how I like my TV. If I want history, I’ve got books for that. And Henry Cavill, who plays Thomas Brandon, is my favorite new discovery. Thankfully season two starts this month. Love.

I’m back home with the family for Christmas break. And since my family is completely backward when it comes to computers, I’m trying to scrounge up my campaign coverage from a dialup connection or a coffee shop. It’s not very easy to do. Especially the dialup, though the coffee shop does lend itself to peoplewatching rather than trying to figure out just when John Edwards decided to start talking about poor people.

Christmas includes mother’s home cooking, picking up some hours at my old job to supplement the TA income, and feeling like there are many things I should be doing that I am not. Probably because of the lack of highspeed connection.

Even the radio at work doesn’t like to pick up NPR without static.

So I am blissfully uninformed, and kind of enjoying it. Pretending that there isn’t a campaign on that I should be writing about, and reading Dorothy Parker short stories, and debating when to go see Sweeney Todd. (After watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night, I really must. Soon.)

So…yeah. Back to regularly scheduled programming sometime after New Year’s.

Apropos of Fresh Air on in the background discussing the new movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” here’s Molly Ivins reviewing the book it’s based on. And since Molly, god bless her, knew Charlie pretty well, she knows what she’s talking about.

I loved Molly Ivins and was genuinely really sad when she died. And took that opportunity to read every book she’s put out.

You should too.

Also, if you need Chrismahanukwanzakeid gifts, supporting the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund is a good way to buy them: