Well, will ya look at that!?

 

Debbie Harry

Dear Whom it May Concern,

Every once in a little while, upon a time, so to speak, I get so ebullient, so touched by something I read that I cannot bear not to share it; and so I get a little pile of the book* to give to friends, or I email everyone with the essay.  Well, once upon one of these times, I was filled with love and admiration for Helen DeWitt.  Well, no, that isn't quite right, because I am still filled with love and admiration for Helen DeWitt.  I think she is a great, great mind.  I feel my cells changing when I read her books.  I adore her, and when I went to share a thing she'd wrote, on cloud nine with my affection, I said that it wasn't just that I loved her, it was that I wanted to inhabit her, to be her.  One of my friends said:  You cannot be her; she has blonde hair and she smokes!  A pause while we consider.

I still wonder at what that means, that rebuttal.  There is, I think, an irony, in that being blonde and smoking is actually available to anyone with, hmm, say 20 bucks and a few hours?  So, those are not the things preventing me from being Helen DeWitt.  The obvious reason, is that someone is already being Helen DeW.  Namely, Helen DeW.  And all of this is crazy self-evident, so what am I saying to you today, exactly?  I am saying:  what are we doing if we are not trying to be like the humans we admire?  Where else can you go for the teachings?  (And yeah, I will give you cats as role models, as mentors, as idols, and in fact you can take the whole of the fauna, and the flora too, and take geo physical while you are at it, but it seems to me to make a lot of sense to emulate those we admire, in any and every way.  And you know, sure, you can model yourself on the cosmos, too; it seems a good design).

You might wonder, though, what has become of my topic: the impulse to share things I love.  Well, it takes an occasional beating from clumsy responders, but even now, I have three very fine poetry books stacked up and ready to give to what I hope will be a receptive and open heart, and I am so excited about it!  And, if they land poorly, that is fine too, because a book lives a long life** and many other readers will come upon these three specific copies and maybe one of those readers will want to be Sandra Cisneros, Ada Limón, Olivia Gatwood.  They won't even need bleach.

* e.g:  Faux Pas, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Hare with the Amber Eyes, Cold Comfort Farm, Cary Grant's Suit. 

** the used copy of Wuthering Heights I read was 76 years old.  I read a copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the library that was 100 years old!  It worked just as good as new.

status: still pissed.

 

Elsa Lancaster; an early Skunk.

Dear Sisters,

Ooh, I keep thinking I have been pissed off enough, that now all that is left is the open expanse of set freeness; but no, it is like the maze of the minotaur, and when I think I am at the last corner of pissed off, I turn and find another corridor of anger, another inner chamber of rage.

I suppose all this further insight into the twisted fucking patriarchy should feel like progress, but it sends me reeling with futility.  When, I ask you, will I be accepting of this crap?  When will my crystal vision be all that there is?  Landing with a thud, yep, there it is.  Thunk.  Not anything to get your feathers fluffed about, just another example of how Man has screwed us all over, and himself, too; probably on accident, but whatevs.

I think about making cookies, about making them to give to people, to say, to mean: here, invite me in, take some nourishment from me; I made them so that you may feel pleasure, that's all.  But cooking, at home, unpaid, is the purview of women's work; mothers, sisters, aunts, wives.  And so what does that make me, as a person who made you cookies?  Just another woman embodying a stereotype, adding to the problem.

  

PS  Here is a film that I never saw before, and I don't know how I missed it, but, then again, maybe a few days ago was the right time for me to see it.  I really hope you will watch it, though; I know, I am asking a lot: listen to this, read these lines, make this, click here, think about that, study this, watch that.  It's a lot, isn't it, that I am asking for?   A whole lot.

The One Hundredth Anniversary

Alice Smith, S. J. de Crasse, and G. H. Halleran sell copies of The Suffragist in Boston, Mass.  Bettmann/Getty          

This image comes from The Atlantic.



 

Dear Worried,

I think where we might be getting into trouble is in thinking that we are somehow smarter than we were some time ago.  It's so nice to feel like we are getting somewhere and celebrate the schadenfreude of how much better it is now.  Of course, yes, it is much better now.  We have no plague and we can vote, and steel can be made into tools, and no one needs to grind acorns at the rock by the river. 

And yet.  We do all this on the backs of those that came before us and we will be the stepped upon of the future, so make sure you are good and sturdy. 

Here is a scholarly article on just what we are celebrating/complaining about, and to mark the 100th anniversary of a women's right to vote in the United States, I give you Girl, a poem by Olivia Gatwood.



i don't think i'll ever not be one
even when the dozen grays sprouting
from my temple take hold and spread
like a sterling fungus across my scalp,
even when the skin on my hands is loose
as a duvet, draped across my knuckles,
even when i know everything there is to know
about heartbreak or envy or the mortality
of my parents, i think, even then i'll want
to be called girl, no matter the mouth
it comes from or how they mean it,
girl, the curling smoke after a sparkler
spatters into the dark, girl, sweet spoon of crystal sugar
at the bottom of my coffee, girl, whole mouth
of whipped cream at the birthday party, say girl,
i think, i'll never die, i'll never stop running
through sprinklers or climbing out of open windows
i'll never pass up a jar of free dum dums
i'll never stop riping out the hangnail with my teeth
i'm a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl
girl next door sunbathing in the driveway
i wanna be them all at once, i wanna be
all the girls i've ever loved,
mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls,
all of us angry on our porches,
rolled tobacco resting on our bottom lips
our bodies are the only things we own,
leave our kids with nothing when we die
we'll still be girls then too, we'll still be pretty,
still be loved, still be soft to the touch
pink lip and powdered nose in the casket
a dozen sobbing men in stiff suits
yes, even then, we are girls
especially then, we are girls
silent and dead and still
the life of the party.



**********



And here is Ms Gatwood reading Girl, and more, from her terrific book, Life of the Party.

Poem for today.

Dear MPD Girls,

Your poem for today, by Olivia Gatwood: