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.

Kairosis: or, Another Exhortation!

 

Colette is very photogenic!

Dear Ones, 

Oh!  I want to read this to you, sitting very close; I want to be the one to show this thing of beauty, but, but it won't be intimate enough, you or I will feel clumsy, or unsure, and then it will just be another pile of words. You must read it alone; you must be awed by it and face the wonder alone.

My dearest literary love (at this moment, because I reserve the right to change my paramour parameters) is the memoir-ish sound of womens' voices.  This one, and this one, and this one, this one, this one, and oh!  Claire-Louise Bennett most of all right now.  I hadn't near enough of these kind of voices when I was younger- I had a few, to be sure, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, Jeannette Winterson: but now, well, now my shelves are overflowing with good guidance and the words of my people.   

Don't leave me waxing and gushing, hyperbol-izing, and superlative-ating all over the place; please, if you have ever done a thing (which was hopefully to read Helen DeWitt!) will you now, please, also do this one thing, too???  Pond, Pond, POND!!  

PS  More wonderful women writers that might lead you to a "moment of psychological integration in time:" 

Annie Ernaux

Colette

Jenny Erpenbeck

Sheila Heti

Lauren Groff

bell hooks

Carrie Brownstein

Patti Smith

Tove Jansson

Kelly Link

Annie Dillard

Lydia Yukanvitch

Sandra Sisneros

Amy Sillman

Rumor Godden

PPS  Now, maybe, maybe you have finished it, and you want a little more about it, and in that case, but no sooner, you may want to read this.  But, do not read it before you read Pond!

PPPS  Okay, well, since you asked, I love it because I don't think that I am using my first language, either, but if I were, if I could, it would sound just exactly like Pond.  Also:  

There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountain again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.

Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt. 

 

Not a metaphor, nothing like that- I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure.

As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing. 

It's a devil to know what to take seriously.

And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemized. 

It's been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going- and I don't know what it sees as it stands there, I don't know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me- and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can't be at all sure where it is I'd be without it. 

 

 

 

bread

 

Dear Toast,

You are the best:  with cheese, you are dinner; with jam, you are dessert!  Of course, without butter, you aren't much; but you lead a double life under olive oil that is just as wonderful.

I begin today with bread, because I decided to begin my day that way, with bread.  If consequences were cosmos, I'd eat bread every day, at all meals, and I would have a room full of flowers!* 

I am all fired up on bread and words, because I am reading a lovely little book, a memoir that ignites my passion for the messy life we lead:  Cary Grant's Suit.

Yes, I did say no more OWMW (ow-mao), but, this guy!  I tell you, he's worth the transgression.  But, I am not here today, to tell you to eat bread with all its charms, or to read old white men, with all their charms, I am here today, to say to all and sundry, that I feel very sad when I think of all the Things I Have Done in the Name of Self Loathing.  

But, yes, this is all in the past; except, it isn't it, is it?  I don't know that you could have convinced me that my actions were motivated by self-hatred.  Because, you see, people that are terrible (like me) deserve all their punishment, and they don't ever get enough, and so they give it to themselves.  Yes, this reasoning and sentence are head-ache inducing, certainly, but that is all part of the verdict, sentence, punishment.  Which means, probably that my current self-loathing is extra clever and totally invisible to me, just like the old kludgy stuff was.  Which means, that I will ask you, I will beg you not to do as I have done, but that I also understand, accept, and love you anyway, even if you can't stop doing the things you do to hate yourself.

*  Or pink martinis!

roadside libraries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear New in Town,

 

I was thinking that this might be a good way for us to get to know each other-  We could have a Little Free Library.  We could build it together, or if you don't want to participate in the collection, if you don't want to work in the 'stacks,' you could just borrow some of the books.  I think we should paint our library a color that will look nice in front of the house- nothing too ostentatious, nothing too gingerbread-y. 

 

I am very excited to select the books we shall put into it!  Educational, yes, of course, but we cannot ignore the soul.  I thought Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and On The Road, by Kerouac, and we will have everything written by Italo Calvino, and lots of Annie Dillard books too, plus Borges, and we must have The Dud Avocado, and the mysteries about the pig, and we should have Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett, and Rumer Godden, Diana Wynn-Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Nabokov, Joan Didion, Neruda, James Joyce, Tove Jansson, John McPhee, Wodehouse....

I am going out to see how much old redwood fencing is left, and to see about some scrap roofing.  Meet me in the cool of the evening, and we can draw up some plans.  Bring a pencil.









 

An Ostentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Illustration to a Ragamala Series:  Gujari Ragini

by Hamid Ruknuddin

circa 1680

Bikaner, Rajasthan, India.

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Lonesome,

There is a peacock, still, in the bottomland,  near the willowed stream bed:  I hear it at evening time.  There were a few of them; escaped, I suppose- a couple of years ago.  The neighbor was annoyed by them- they were vocal, and they tramped around his foolish little lawn.  Well, what is a lawn for anyway?  And who are we to say who tramps on it?  Well, these are not the questions that everyone lives by, I realize.  He had some tenants of his trap and sell the females and they disposed of the male- by what I expect was gunshot.  I don't tell you this so you may be outraged, or indignant, I tell you this because there are a billion little deaths, little lives ending every instant.  I tell you this because I miss them, the little band of peacocks, and I wonder what that last lonely peahen or cock might be feeling when I hear it.

I noticed on a postage stamp that Flannery O'Connor had peacock plumes behind her, and I thought of our little muster of peafowl.  I asked the big reader in my life what he knew of Flannery O'Connor and peacocks and he found that she kept them, and that their feathers often ornamented her volumes. 

Who could resist?  We ordered a collection of essays called Mystery and Manners from the library south of us.  It commences with a piece called The King of the Birds.  If you can live without reading it, okay, you'll probably have extra time then to mow your lawn, but if you do read it, and you then find that you cannot live without peafowl, I support you in your decision.  I will drop by later with a bag of Startena and we can enjoy watching them together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS 

 

It was Hera who set the eyes of Argus Panoptes into her beloved Peacock's tail.  Here is another many-eyed pheasant you might enjoy:  The Great Argus.  

 

 

Jane's Cake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers,

Presently, the team at the Dodo are reading Calamity Jane's Letters to Her Daughter.  It is possibly written by Martha Jane Cannary Hickok, aka Calamity Jane.  You probably love the idea of Calamity Jane enough to burke this trifling detail, because you know that the existence of a Big Blue Ox named Babe is missing the point in reading Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. Plus what, most of us prefer to live in a world populated by blue oxen and women of dubious authenticity. 

 

The book begs the question, regardless of its veracity, of what it is we leave for the future; of what to tell Jane's daughter.

 

The author gives a few recipes in her book, this one is for 20 Year Cake.  I reprint it here exactly as in the copy of the book I borrowed from the library, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976.

 

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20 YEAR CAKE

 

25 eggs beaten separate

2 1/2 pounds sugar

2 1/2 pounds four

2 1/2 pounds butter

7 1/2 pounds seeded raisins

1 1/2 pounds citron cut very fine

5 pounds currants

pint brandy

1/4 ounces cloves

1/2 ounces cinnamon

2 ounces mace

2 ounces nutmet

2 teaspoons yeast powder or 2 teaspoons soda & 3 cream tartar

 

This cake is unexcelled & will keep good to the last crum 20 years.   Pour over cakes while still warm the pint of brandy.  Seal in tight crock.  This will make 3cakes 8 pound each.

 

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By now, I know you are rushing out to obtain your own copy and trying to figure out whether to cut the recipe in quarters or fifths, but to further whet your appetite for this curious little book, know that her beloved horse was named Satan. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS  

 

Calamity Jane's Letters inspired composer Libby Larson's Songs from Letters, hear some of them here.