season of the bitch

In the midst of lots of other important news, why am I taking time out to celebrate James Joyce?

Well, aside from the fact that I just like to point out that I’m a member of the august group of people who’ve not only read Ulysses, but read it more than once and ENJOYED IT. Loved it, really. I love Joyce’s willingness to play with language, to toy with its history and its future and the way it can be changed and manipulated and made to say several things at once.

There’s a dissertation in me somewhere on Joyce and Yeats and the feminization of the Irish people by their colonizers and how it impacted their writing, referencing all sorts of theorists on colonialism and feminist theorists who talked about writing. Maybe if I don’t get a job I’ll go get an MA and then a PhD in literature just to be a nerd.

But even if I never get the degree, I’ll keep writing about that last chapter in Ulysses for a long time, because among many, many other things it’s a lush celebration of female desire.

why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Molly Bloom is just a figure in the background for most of the novel, but here we dive straight into her mind and her thoughts, of course, are of sex. The building, heightening repetition of the word “Yes” is dirtier, hotter than any of the more lurid descriptions in the chapter, and I wonder if those who would have banned Ulysses were more put off by Joyce’s pleasure in prurient description or in the triumphant declaration of Molly Bloom at the end?

I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

And so today, June 16, is the day that Leopold Bloom took his famous walk around Dublin, and book nerds the world over celebrate. I certainly don’t have a Bloomsday party to go to, but I’m blogging it, in the midst of revolt in Iran and war supplementals here, because books have power. If they didn’t, no one would try to ban them.

Pinup model Bettie Page has died.

I’m sure there are so-called feminists out there who would take me to task for glorifying a patriarchy-pleaser like Page, but I really could give a shit.

I love Bettie Page. My story is not in the slightest bit original, so I’m not going to bore anyone with the details.

I’m sad that she’s gone, and I hope that she knew how much she meant to women, not just to the men who ogled her pictures. And a little part of me is glad that I cut bangs again recently. My little personal homage to Bettie.

So I’m reading and idly thinking about the difference between a “scene” and a community.

A scene is a place to be seen. It is by the very choice of that word, a setting, something visual, spatial, artificial. The scene is the clothes you wear to the punk rock show–the community is the group you go home with afterward, or stumble to the diner to talk it all over afterward.

The scene can be a place for community to grow, but it can also kill community by creating the illusion that this is all there is. If all it appears to be is clothes and club nights, then you reject everything when you take off those clothes and stop going to the club nights.

If it means more than clothes–if it means music, art, politics, blood, bone and love–most of all love–then no matter what you wear or how old you get, your community will not fail you.

This is why modern hipsterism feels so damn empty. It is nothing but visual, spatial. You can’t be a hipster on the telephone. You can be on the internet, but only in pictures snapped at the cool parties, with the cool kids, in the cool clothes. You cannot be a hipster alone in the forest.

To write, create, you must go beyond hip. You must go beyond the scene. My writing prof is always nagging us to write a story, not a scene, to find something deeper, something meaningful, something that changes you.

This is why I have more love even for a book like Twilight, cheesy, occasionally inept and often laugh-inducing when it’s not meant to be, because it has not the slightest bit of irony. And this is why it has a rabid fan base (more later). Because to write, to create, you have to put yourself out there to risk being mocked.

And this is why books like that create communities, friendships, bonds, even though many people cheerily admit that they know it’s terrible.

The blogosphere is my new punk rock scene, but more than that, it’s my new community. As I grow older and hide my tattoos under sweaters and skirts and high heels. It creates communities because we cannot be seen. It is not temporal–once you put something on the Internet it is there for good, and you lose control of it–and it is not spatial, because where is the Internet?

While we may blog our bodies, perhaps, we blog those inner pieces that are not so easy to see or to change. Perhaps I would have been more accurate to say that we blog the experiences our bodies have had, have caused for us or been through. After all, would blogging as a Jewish woman be the same for me in Israel as it is in Philadelphia? Was I the same in Boston as I was in South Carolina? It is not just our bodies but the social construction of and around our bodies that really shapes who we are.

And we find community within those lines and across them. Because we put ourselves out there, not to be seen, but to be understood.

This post and the below one are for Kim and Ren and Elena (who I found in comments at Kim’s).

Kim wrote about the “tramp stamp” line and how it is, of course, misogynist. Elena made the comment that getting tattooed is a declaration of our strength and as I wrote before, a declaration of our own ownership of our bodies.

She’s absolutely right that every time we lay a claim to our own bodies, to dress them as we want, to shape and sculpt and decorate them, to eat and gain weight or exercise and lose weight, we are ridiculed, mocked, policed. Tattoos are especially frightening to people who don’t have them, as they cannot gauge the pain we’ve gone through to get them. Somewhat like men and pregnancy (or me and pregnancy, for that matter).

The idea of a woman willing to inflict pain on herself is frightening to people. The idea of a woman staking claim to herself is even more so.

Most of my tattoos are in places fairly easily hidden, and fairly easily shown off if I choose to. They’re something I chose to put on my body, and yet somehow there seems to be the perception that if you’ve done something conscious to modify your body, you have given permission to others to touch it.

I’ve had people come up to me and pull my shirt up to look at the tattoo on my lower back. I’ve had them reach for the one on my upper back, run a finger along it, think it was perfectly OK. My ex was nearly covered in tattoos, and strangers would grab at his hand to read the letters across his knuckles.

Strangely, no one ever reaches for the burn scar on my shoulder.

I’ve had pregnant women tell me the same thing, that strangers come up and touch their bellies, as if they have every right. As if their bodies, no longer simply their own, are now the property of all.

Tattooing, pregnancy. Proof that another person, in one case assumed to be male, in another case almost certainly so, has touched us, been there. And we know that once women have been touched once, they’re open to everyone, right?

So, tramp stamp. Proof that you’re sexual. Like visual confirmation of lost virginity. Someone’s hands have been on you, therefore everyone’s hands can be on you.

Well, forget all that, right?

My tattoos are for me. Just as my body, my clothing, sexuality, and everything else.

So, ultimately, are everyone’s. From the tiny wrist tattoo on the sorority girl in the Thai restaurant the other night to my ex’s facial tattoos, they’re all, ultimately, something we have to live with. They’re on our bodies, after all.

(I found this in draft, realized it was pretty much complete the way it was, and so I’m posting it the way it was written, sometime this summer.)

Ahem.

It has come to my attention that the practice of being tattooed is, in some circles, considered “unfeminist.” Something to do with penetration, or self-mutilation?

I’m already a bad girl in the Jewish community and in the eyes of most of America for having tattoos, though most of mine are still in acceptable places (lower back, ankle, foot). When I crossed the line to the big one on my upper back, the one you can see in normal clothes some of the time, that’s when I really became transgressive.

Transgressions are at the very root of my feminism, though. They disrupt and disturb the order of things much more than any form of separatism, which just allows the other order to go on unquestioned.

Many things I do hurt. Exercise hurts. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning to ride a bus two hours to go to work for free hurts. Getting my heart broken hurts. And yes, tattoos hurt. Just physically, though. And there’s a corresponding rush, and then I’m left with something beautiful. The opposite of a relationship.

When I wrote about tattoos before, I said,

We are a generation reclaiming its skin with tattoos and piercings and experiments, making choices about who we are and how we identify and crossing lines, borders, rules, at every juncture. We are reclaiming ourselves and our power, slowly but a bit more each day, and we are waking up to the larger world around us in strange and wonderful ways…

I reclaim my skin inch by inch with tattooed words and pictures, wings, hearts (myheartforyou), a skull and roses, a leaf–each bit is a little bit more definition of who I am, where I come from, what I do and what I will do, another reminder of what I want to keep close to me always.

It’s my own statement of control over my body. My right to it, and no one else’s. I didn’t get tattoos for anyone else. I didn’t do it for attention, though of course I know it draws it. So do the clothes I choose to wear, my hair and eye makeup, even the books I choose to read in public (guy reading Lolita at the dog park, I’m looking at you). But it ain’t your business.

Getting tattooed was to me a feminist act despite it being a man with the tool in his hand putting ink under my skin. Despite the words on my skin coming from a book a man wrote or a song a man sang. It’s my choice, my reclamation, and it is my body.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Well, maybe not.

But I’ve never been huge on major organized religious ceremonies. There’s nothing ecstatic about them. I prefer the ceremony, the bacchanal of a rock show.

And Nick Cave is high priest of my religion. He even dresses the part, in skinny black funereal suits that cling to his scarecrow’s frame, his white shirt unbuttoned, now with that faintly ridiculous mustache that can be seen even from the cheap seats.

He stalks the stage, high-kicks and gyrates, hips and legs in trousers stretched taut, gets grown men to shout “I love you Nick,” and laughs at them.

He plays all the great, dirty, sacrilegious, profane classics–”Deanna,” “Tupelo,” “Red Right Hand,” “Papa Won’t Leave You Henry,” and closes with possibly the filthiest track ever committed to CD: “Stagger Lee.” His chorus of black-suited backups with their clanging instruments howls along.

Nick is emblematic of one of my biggest beliefs about art: that it should be beautiful, strange, and frightening at times. That the messy is better than the perfect. The fuckups are more interesting than the stories that work out right.

“Only conflict is interesting” a thousand writing teachers have intoned, but it’s more than that. It’s that only a willingness to abandon oneself to the scary, the weird, the impossible, the heartbreaking is interesting. Is more than interesting.

So I love Nick Cave and Jean Genet, Mishima and Diane Arbus, Tom Waits and Lydia Lunch. I love crazy stories and things that fall apart. I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best love story ever committed to film, and I keep falling in love with the wrong guys.

But a great rock show leaves me feeling cleansed, focused, and happy.

And isn’t that what people go to church for?

My LOCAL review at Bust.

Words cannot describe how much I love that comic.

This is a thought-provoking and heartwrenching article on Genesis P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV). Some ideas on gender roles and identity, and meditations on love and art.

Check it out.

I saw In Conflict tonight at Temple. Part of the Philly Fringe right now, it’s making its off-Broadway debut later this month (you NY people, check it out). A play based on actual interviews with Iraq war veterans, this was one incredibly powerful piece of theater.

The actors addressed the audience as though the audience was the journalist, and video clips of Yvonne Latty, the actual reporter who collected the interviews, were interspersed throughout. Each actor took on a character or two and with minimal props, became that person, that veteran, that Marine or Army Sergeant or National Guard medic or doctor or Medevac pilot. They switched accents and folded up limbs to become amputees. They adopted the nervous habits and the drunken slurs, the body language and most painfully, the tears of the veterans.

These were student actors, mostly undergrads, and they impressed the hell out of me.

One played a gay Marine, who spoke about wanting to reenlist but being afraid that he would be outed and he would lose everything. He was working at a TGI Friday’s rather than going back into the army, and the frustration was palpable.

Another was a Russian immigrant. He took on the accent and the politeness, offering the audience a tray of cookies and smiling, knocking on his prosthetic and bragging about having met President Bush. Then after the intermission, he was a National Guard volunteer who got sent to Iraq. You could feel the tension in his arms, through his back as he shouted his frustration at being sent to a war for no reason.

One of the more wrenching ones was a man drinking away his pain, with the best line in the play: “Some guys came back amputees. Well, I’m a mental amputee. Can’t give me no prosthetic mind, though.” A few people in the audience laughed at his slurred words at first, but his horrifying story had them regretting their laughter quickly.

This was the closest many people have come to talking to a real veteran, I think. The closest anyone has come to hearing those stories. We all may have our own feelings about the war and even about those who fight, those who sign up for the military, the very existence of the military itself. But I think whatever your feelings on the subject, you should be confronting the reality of what these people–these young people, ten years younger than I am and I certainly don’t feel old enough–go through. What they put themselves through, since we do still have an all-volunteer army. We should see the funerals on the news and hear the people’s stories who come back, and aside from the occasional This American Life story or feature article, we just don’t.

I have a few friends who have come back from Iraq. Thankfully, everyone I know has come back physically in one piece (there’s one who’s still over there, and I pray that he’s OK) but mentally, emotionally, the scars are there. Some people hide them better than others, but knowing that it’s all in there…it’s hard. It’s hard to know what to do, but listening is a good start. Not trying to ask stupid questions like “did you kill anyone” or “what was it like” but really letting them say whatever it is they have to say. Really listening. It can be hard to do, but it’s something I strive to be good at.

I came away from the play feeling silly, like the problems I’d been complaining about earlier in the day were just so much petty bullshit. I don’t want to be angry at friends or argue about things. Right now I just kind of want to tell everyone I love that I do love them, and that I will listen if they ever need to talk. I want to do something to help people who are coming back from this war scarred and hurting and unable to get help and feeling like no one cares enough to listen.

Sometimes the best thing I can think of to do is go volunteer for campaigns, to try to fix these problems. It drove me out to volunteer for Kerry–one of the stories told in the play was about a vet who actually got a phone call from Kerry, during his presidential run, and who felt that Kerry actually cared about him–it made me glad over again for my volunteer hours even if we did lose that time. It’s driven me out to volunteer for Obama, and will again despite many things I disagree with him on. I have to do something.

One of the things brought home by this play was how class-based the military system is. How the people fighting this war are immigrants, people of color, people who needed the money the military offered, people who didn’t have a lot of options and who have even fewer when they come back and get out with trauma. People whose apartments don’t accommodate their wheelchairs. People who don’t live near a VA hospital. People who don’t get treatment for PTSD. They’re forgotten about. They don’t appear on TV because they aren’t Jessica Lynch.

This wasn’t “fun” to watch. It hurt. It made me cry, and more often made me bite my lip until I realized I was doing it, and want to reach out and hug the people onstage, even though they’re just actors playing a part. They’re telling a story over and over again that it might be too hard for the people who lived those stories to repeat again. They’re making a new audience each night look into the eyes of the veterans and confront the reality of war, not in bloody violence like war movies, but in the aftermath, the trying to move on and live with what you’ve seen done and what you’ve done.

Female, Muslim, and Mutant: A Critique of Muslim Women in Comic Books at Racialicious.