pool, bakery

 

Sunday

 

Dear Days,

Sunday is the best radio night on my public radio station.  The first show is Global Spin, which has, yes, World Music-  And if want to be a citizen of the World, you will want to listen to World Music!  Then comes the best show, Speak Low:  which is all kinds of good including French pop music.  It's a terrific two hours of radio.  Lastly, comes Citizen Sound, which is also good, sometimes even great.  The show is varied; I think interns run it, at 11 pm on Sunday eve, and I don't often listen past midnight.  This song, your song of the day, was played on the middle show, Speak Low, one recent Sunday.  It is great, no question; but if for some reason you are too old or too young to recognize that circular staircasing sample is coming from, it is from here, another peerless song.

the big wheel

 

read me

                                                    Untitled (Cat), watercolor on paper, Robert Smithson.                                                                       Check out more museum-worthy kitties at this Smithsonian link.

Dear Y'all,

You know it's bad when circumstances lead me to consider wearing a t-shirt as a sign to tell you what I think.  My body, my billboard is what they say, but I never quite like it.  It's possible that I am self conscious about people reading off the front of my chest, it might also be that I like form more than content; it's hard to say. 

I settled on a tee shirt that says Hell Cats on it.  I think I will get another.*  Read me and know what I am feeling, then go away.

*  If you don't want a shirt, you could get one of these.

nonwork (& delulu & skeuomorph)

 

Wonderbread, 1962, serigraph, Corita Kent.

Dear Y'all,

So many good new to me words lately!  Non-work, or nonwork is all over my mind right now.  See, I have long struggled to make what I do seem like work to that annoying voice in my head that suggests I am 'doing nothing.'  I defined my reading or thinking as my 'research;' my bed as my 'lab' - but I think, my up and doing* friends and the rest of you comrades in nonwork, that I have got it wrong- backwards, even.  It is the nonwork I should be cataloging and cherishing- which, yes, is just a matter of definition- all the work I do at making things and thinking things and writing and playing that is all now, from this day forward, officially, nonwork.  I am taking my research hours back and putting them into this other pile!  It's like moving your socks and underwear drawer from the second drawer down to the top!  I expect great things from this new definition.  

It should be said, it should be emphasized, that I don't think I could have gone directly from indoctrination in The Meritocracy to nonwork.  (Even though I have read a lot of French authors).  No, I think the roundabout arrival via research and lab work was the better way for me.  For you?  For you, for you! I wish the world of goodness!  I wish you to go directly to nonwork as your sustenance and paydirt, your bread and butter, your raison d'etre.  Go, go now!  While no one is looking!  Let us be honest about what gives us meaning, what love is, and where love is.

Let's meet again soon, to take a nonwork look at delulu and skeuomorph!  It's going to be fun!

a day in that blue month September

 

maquette III, Moon of Alabama, bronze, Lynn Chadwick

Dear Maria,

It's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl!  I saw you in a book I was reading; The Quest for Christa T.  It was in German, but I looked at a translation and I remembered that I knew your song well!  It's your song of the day!*

* And if you also, first met Bertolt Brecht through your fervor for David Bowie, we should start a club!  Let's screen some shirts and start a zine!  How about we call it Zinzin?  Zinzin Zine!  It's another new word for me this year and one of my favorites!  The rest of you?  Well, you already know Bertolt Brecht only you don't know you know him!  For example, Mack the Knife.  Or Pirate Jenny  Or maybe you are a Doors fan?  Yeah, that's B. B. too!

who knows

 

Dear Time,

Here is your song for today.  It's unbearably beautiful, so if you aren't in the mood, in the space, for a further breaking of your trampled heart, don't listen to it.  I think I will even offer you an alternate track; here you go, my fragile ones!

another woman to love

 

Dear Lovers,

Oh!  This!  This is so good!  It's your song for today!  If you don't recognize it, that is the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, and my only question is, still, why haven't I been there yet?*

* Everytime I read the name, or see a photograph of the BBMT, I get a massive wave of déjà vu, which makes me think that I have been there.  The ice cream chairs, all the red....  Maybe when I was five years old?  No one can confirm or deny, which is a nice place to be, because it means I can write my own memories without any heckling or pesky factualities.

my year with the women

We Are All Alike, Eleanor Lowden.

Dear Books,

It's been about a year now, that I have been keeping track of the books I have read; in conjunction with a commitment to reading women authors.  I also include non-white writers (any gender), and trans or non-binary authors, but my favorites are from women like me*, writing about what it feels like to inhabit their bodies.

It isn't a total ban, either, I read some white men now and then; and, as I go along filling my head with predominately women's voices, or perhaps I should say: non male writers? I notice, I notice it hard, when I read one of these menwrit books that is trying to build a great castle, an empire, with words- all about their sex organs and oozing what have yous.  I know you think I am exaggerating, but try it- try 5 books in a row by women, and then pick up one of these men and see if you ken what I am getting at.

It's not that all the women (plus) are the same style/type of writing, and it isn't that I could pick them out in a blind taste test, it's something kind of small and ineffable.  Many women write in ways that have a very Male Voice, and some men write in a genderless way, too.  If I had to distill it all to one single difference, it might be a question mark.  The lack of definiteness, not authority or confidence, but a kind of inherent acknowledgement that the view is multiple, and this line, this sentence, can only be a snapshot.  Or, maybe the question mark is the sense of searching.  One thing, though, even if I cannot define it, it is there.

It's also not that I don't love, love a word castle, built out of strange and wonderous similes and inhabited by lonely princes of darkness and light.  No, I love that kind of thing, I really do.  I think what I am trying to tell you, is that I was surprised to find a such a definite feeling of difference.  

For the counters and statisticians, it has been 64 books by female and female-identifying writers, and 14 by men in 49 weeks- and that makes 88, and well, if I had counted sooner I'd have seen what a silly thing it was to start this calendar year off with a plan to try to read 50 books!  Oh, and I am not done with the women, not at all!  Check out this list of writers on my shelf still to be read:

Clarice Lispector

Han King

Lillian Hellman

Jenny Ditski

Dianna Athill

Maeve Brennan

Alice Munro

Lillian Faderman

Sara Ahmed

Eudora Welty

Donna Haraway

Eileen Chang

Jen Hatmaker

Samantha Harvey

Kathleen Hanna

Kate Zambreno

Ágota Kristóf

Saidiya Hartman

Tove Ditlevsen

Lydia Lunch

Kate Manne  

Barbara Comyns

Cristina Campo

Willa Cather

Janet Frame

Isabel Allende

Fleur Jaeggy

Inger Christensen

Esther Kinsky

Ellen Meloy

Eileen Chang

Agnes Smedley

Cookie Mueller

Claire Messud

Susana Kayson

Shirley Jackson

Margaret Drabble

Jean Rhys

Angela Carter

Anaïs Nin

If you are still wondering why anyone would read like this, well, let me put it this way:  These are my sisters, and they have millions of pages of wisdom to give me!  Who the hell am I to refuse such a gift?  

*  Like me, in this case, means a woman who writes.  It's also extra dear to my heart and enlivening when the women authors are within ten years or so of my age.

PS  If you want to hear a few favorites, well; The Price of Salt, The Quest for Christa T., What Kingdom, Astragal, To Throw Away Unopened, The Last Samurai, The Lady with the Little Fox Fur, The Old Child, All Passion Spent, Checkout 19, The Lover, Small Things Like These, and here is one old dead white guy for you:  A Room with a View.

ground plane XXI