field notes:

5.26.2004

A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. – Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet

Barbara Ehrenreich’s speech about the fall of a certain naive feminism came to my attention last night, amidst a group of writer friends. I think this ‘fall’ is an appropriate and necessary movement in the right direction, frankly. But I don’t think it goes far enough. Ehrenreich goes on to say:

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

The problem not being noted is that feminism, like fundamentalism, or any other –ism, sets up rigid moral systems where one side is “right” and the other “wrong”. This kind of thinking is what’s divided the world, what we see playing out in Iraq: fundamentalist Islamic terrorists vs. fundamentalist Christian military power. When this rigid worldview is present, problems will always be seen in a simplistic us vs. them paradigm. This kind of thinking doesn’t lead to solutions that embrace the complicated terrain of real life.

Terry Tempest Williams, in an interview last year, called George W. Bush our “shadow president”. I hasten to include the abusive guards at Abu Ghraib in our shadow as well. Men or women, we know that any of us is capable of this kind of behavior, given the proper conditions. We can’t simply villify the perpetrators, stand back with moral certainty and say, “I’m horrified. How could anybody do that to another human being?” This is the kind of thinking that keeps our prison population abysmally high, that sees us dominating the world with our military, that has our congress divided down the middle on almost every issue—effectively stagnated. Anytime a complicated issue is broken down into “right” and “wrong”, intricate surfaces and hidden commonalities remain unseen.

The “shadow” looms larger into the light when it isn’t acknowledged. As a country, we have ignored our shadow at our great peril, and the world’s as well. The misdeeds and national terrors in our brief history are well-documented: the mass killing of indigenous Americans, slavery, internment of Japanese, government-sanctioned scientific experiments on Blacks and soldiers, subversion of foreign governments, and more, including the funding of Osama Bin Laden in the not-too-distant past.

Terry Tempest Williams again:

We are a nation at war. Can we have the courage to stay in that place of darkness and not be undone by it, not be undone by despair? I have enormous faith in the capacity to transform. This is a powerful time in the evolution of the human psyche – like the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The shadow must be noticed, or it will surface in surprising ways. It will “horrify” because it seems foreign. If we look down into the ground of our own darkness, as people, as a country, we will see the shadows at our feet, everpresent, inescapably a part of our walk on the earth as the sun that casts them.

posted by Lisa on 9:10 AM link |

5.25.2004

Before you read on, take note. Not only am I writing about something that I've never written about in this space, television, specifically, The Sopranos, but I do give away a major plot point, so if you're waiting for the DVDs to be released, don't read another word!

Adriana's demise on The Sopranos hit us so hard because she's been the character most like us as viewers. Especially since the FBI 'turned her', she's been trapped between loyalties. She genuinely likes her mob family, and loves Christopher, seeing only the good in even the most brutal people. (She's terribly naive as her misreading of Matoosh the drug dealer, a "very religious person", who we quickly realize is funding terrorist training camps in Pakistan, shows.) And yet she has to appease the other side, and fantasizes that she and Christopher will someday join the Witness Protection Program and live happily ever after, or that the FBI will leave her alone if she feeds them license plate numbers and other nonessentials.

As viewers of The Sopranos, we're torn in similar ways. After 5 seasons of watching their every move, analyzing Tony's dreams, seeing Christopher through rehab, rooting for Carmella's twisted path towards feminization, it's hard not to hope for some good things for them. At the same time, we're privy to their every brutal breath, their monstrosities, their true inhumanity. We're good people who know bad people need to get theirs in the end, but we like Tony. He has his sweet moments, and he loves his family, even if his way of showing it alternates between the overly sentimental and the deeply neglectful.

Watching Silvio pull Adriana from the car, watching her crawl away begging for her life, we want reprieve for her. But we also know that mob justice must be served. That is the universe of ethics we've enrolled in. Traitors must die. We all know it. Without that very simple fact, there is nothing holding that universe together. All the time we've invested caring about The Soprano's world would be wasted. We're torn, though, between mob justice and societal justice. In the mob world, Adrianna's murder is justice, but in society, Silvio should pay for that, but probably won't. Mob justice is more trustworthy than society's: we can count on it.

Killing Adriana is a fitting precursor for the coming end of the show next season. This week's show killed a part of us, and engaged us on a deeper level than we've been engaged since Big Pussy got his. We can't sit idly by, watching The Sopranos like we watch ER. We've been challenged, called out. We can't have it both ways. We can't naively pretend that Christopher Maltisanti is a good person. He made his choice and so have we. If we're still watching, and who could take their eyes off that screen, then we've made our choice too.

posted by Lisa on 7:33 AM link |

5.23.2004

Yesterday, I helped friends split logs on their land high above Inverness. I operated the splitter lever.

A splitter works like this: The log is placed on a platform wedged against a stationary wedged-shaped blade. A lever, powered by a gasoline motor, operates a flat ram which pushes slowly towards the wedge, splitting the wood as it goes. At some point in the operation, two smaller pieces of log fall away to the sides.

I watched the center of the logs torn asunder with the slow, inexorable movement of the ram with held breath, always wary lest the log explode upwards or jam the machine. In every case, the splitter bested the wood. Even with headphones on to protect my ears from the constant engine noise I could hear the complaints of certain logs. Some split rather easily, without a fight. That was especially true of logs that had been invaded by termites, ants or worms. We saw into their hidden worlds--cross-sections of life. Some logs, the harder woods, like coast live oak, especially those with wide girth, didn’t split easily. They slowed the splitter down, creaking and moaning, not giving way til the very last, when the ram met the blade. Once or twice, we had to stop and flip the log to another angle, stopped by a knot in the wood which wouldn’t be split. The wetter woods, the most recently fallen trees were the toughest of all. Rather than a clean split, creating wedge-shaped logs, these were gnarled. One side always tore the center out of the other, leaving a heart-shaped hollow in it’s twin.

The oaks from this land had beautiful bark, the color of blue fir. An impossible hinted-at blue, but unmistakable as anything else.

This morning, as I look out the window at my newly stacked woodpile, next winter’s warmth, I see the various shapes, the barks and centers of bay, tan oak and coast oak. The logs tell stories about their splitting that I couldn’t read before. I’ll try to remember that as I take them piece by piece and throw them on a hot fire.

posted by Lisa on 9:20 AM link |

5.21.2004

I finished 'The Stones of Summer' last night. I read it all spring. It was a sustained indulgent exuberant saxophone solo. How anybody could keep that up for 580 pages without collapsing, splitting in two is beyond me. Dow Mossman did. Had a nervous breakdown afterwards and during. Never wrote again for 30 years. It was Kerouac, Cassidy and Salinger--this book.

It begins:
When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood. August was always an endless day, he felt, white as wood, slow as light. Dawes shifted about in his seat, uncomfortable, watching the land slide past. It was late, a steady progression of night; the conversations inside the car were like great wood eyes and, driving west over Iowa, the evening was always air vague with towns, blue fences, and crossroads vacant of cars. He watched the deserted country porches slide by like lonely pickets guarding the gray, outbreaking storm of sky; like juts of rock.

Language beautiful as clouds, large as skies, tight as stones. The final third of the book is a frenzy of madness, the language that was expansive remains complicated but becomes daggers. It turns on the protagonist, this language, these words. He turns on the world and himself and finds the beauty but it is unreachable, locked from him in his slide away from reality and companionability.

posted by Lisa on 7:08 AM link |

5.18.2004

This sounds like a great event, produced by the Speculative Literature Foundation, for those of us in the Bay Area. The organization isn't centered here, though, so check it out wherever you are. Their website has great resources--browsing through their member list I found a myriad of interesting publishers and more, always more books I'd like to read. I'm copying the bulk of the press release here:

Thrilling Wonder Tales:
A border-crossing evening of readings and discussion with Michael Chabon,
Terry Bisson, and Claire Light
When: Thursday, May 20, at 7 pm.
Where: Valencia Street Books

What: From Chaucer to Dante to Shakespeare to contemporary authors like
Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood, literary novelty has
evolved out of genre-crossing and interaction with popular culture. Today,
American literature is seething with innovations derived from science
fiction, comic books, B-movies, and other popular or commercial sources.
Tonight, we'll hear readings and discussion by Bay Area writers who are
crossing the borderlands that traditionally divide mainstream from
speculative fiction. This event is a fundraiser for the new Fountain Award,
a $1000 prize for excellence in short fiction, which will encourage this
thriving tradition. Hosted by Charlie Anders (Publisher of _other magazine_
and MC of Writers with Drinks) and Jeremy Adam Smith (book critic and
Director of the Independent Press Development Fund).

Cost: $5-10, sliding scale. All proceeds go directly to the Fountain Award.

The Speculative Literature Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literary quality in speculative fiction. "Speculative literature" is a catch-all term meant to inclusively span the breadth of fantastic literature, encompassing fiction ranging from science fiction to ghost stories to folk and fairy tales to magical realism to modern myth-making.

posted by Lisa on 8:47 AM link |

5.14.2004

Goodbye unremembered dream. I try to stay with you but another plane to catch and a ready bladder pull me awake--too far from sleeping too fast. The sense of loss envelops me, the images I can't recall still more real than this steaming coffee. One empty page remains in my first dream journal. A catalog of dreams. Where the world is answerable: peopled by the characters of my psyche. My personal map.

posted by Lisa on 6:34 AM link |

5.13.2004

Excerpted from the screenplay 'Bright Young Things'
written by Stephen Fry
adapted from Evelyn Waugh's novel 'Vile Bodies'
published in last Sunday's New York Times, Summer Movies section.
Lord Monomark's lines will be delivered by none other than Dan Akroyd.

Adam: Of course not, Lord Monomark. And I will start straightaway on your book. it's all up here.

Monomark: 'Bright Young Things,' that was the title, right? Tearing the lid off the young, idle and rich. My readers can't get enough of that kind of thing, Mr. Symes. I put Signor Mussolini on the front page, nobody buys a copy. A picture of one of your set in a nightclub and we can't print enough copies. Ours not to reason why, ours but to poke and pry. You a butterfly or a bee?

Adam: Excuse me?

Monomark: You wanna flit around looking pretty and doing nothing, or do you want to make honey? Can't figure you out. Your father worked for a living. A Greek professor, wasn't he?

Adam: Well, a professor of Greek rather than a Greek professor.

Monomark: Kid, never get cute with someone you owe money to. I was told you were the smartest of your generation, that's why I bought you up. Maybe all those college friends of yours have gone to your head. What do you want to do with your life?

Adam: Well...

Monomark: Win the Nobel Prize? Raise children and smoke a pipe? Climb mountains, fly airplanes? Find a cure for influenza? Govern India? Hell, God gave you two legs and an immortal soul in the capital city of the largest empire the world has ever seen. You gonna spend your life eating plover's eggs and sucking up cocktails?

posted by Lisa on 7:01 AM link |

5.12.2004

And yet it felt familiar, like a spoon impossibly balanced on its handle. She studied the dark blue colors at its center. They were not colors from her usual pallette. They were a dark ocean of blue, a mad scream. She mixed colors until she found that blue again. Then held the brush, thick with intent, to the canvas. Indecision gripped her. She laid down the brush and found the Mingus CD, put on ‘Song with Orange’. There. That felt right. She took the brush up again, closed her eyes, followed the inside of the music. She found the ocean inside her, that dark day, that blue, the horns, the chaotic waves, the briney wind filled her. She touched the paint to the canvas. Determined to find her way into the painting she kept moving, until the wave occupied and damned her, until it beat against the rocks and she felt it’s cool foam’s reach on her toes. Her face was wet with tears. Finally she pulled back from the work and looked away.

posted by Lisa on 2:34 PM link |

5.11.2004

I put a birdhouse in a tree behind my house early last spring in the hopes that it would be picked up by some little bird family and put to use. It didn't happen and I forgot about it this spring until I heard some very tiny bird sounds coming from it this weekend. Indoors, I watched the round opening and soon saw two chickadees flitting in and out.

Yesterday, the swirling winds in this ravine were tremendous, trees bending and sawing, some breaking. I watched the little bird house with worry. It didn't have a usual top-hanging mechanism, so when I initially placed it in the tree I wired it into a crux, where three branches come together. The winds were moving those three branches around too much last evening, and I wasn't sure if the birdhouse would stay through the night. After each wind rose through here I'd watch the birdhouse, sometimes the opening was completely covered by branches. Falling out of the tree, or the opening inaccessible, neither one was acceptable. I had to act.

Grabbing some bunji cords and a ladder I went out into the windy dusk. The ladder was precarious and I thought about getting a neighbor, but the darkness was coming fast, and I figured I needed all the time I had. The first bunji ensured that the house wouldn't fall, but the second was trickier, because it needed to keep the house in such a position that the opening would remain uncovered. I managed to find a configuration that might work, and without falling myself. I quickly folded the ladder and left the scene. The work was done, now the prayers could begin.

I went inside and propped my elbows onto some books with my binoculars pressed to my eyes. The light was fading and I had to know before dark if the parents would come back to their nest. Fairly quickly, they came to the house and flew past it, then returned to light on a branch, look at the bunji cords and leave again. Timidly, they continued to check the situation from every angle, looking for me continually. One of the bunji cords went right past their front door, its two red hooks hung right outside their foyer. I didn't blame them for being suspicious. Finally, one of them lighted on the bunji cord itself. A hopeful sign for me. She hopped towards the doorway, (I'm boldly declaring that it was the Mom that went in first), and not wanting to resist the call of parenthood any longer, she finally stood in the doorway itself. After several long minutes she passed inside. I breathed a sigh of relief. I could sleep in peace.

I see this morning that their opening is smaller than before, partially covered by a branch, but I see them going in and out, so it must be sufficient. I hear them now, busy as before. I'll check on them daily now.

It won't be curiosity that keeps me interested in their welfare anymore. I'm viscerally connected to them. I put the house there in the first place, I invited them in. If it failed it would be my failure. My latest attempts to help could also have jeopardized the babies, either killing them, or driving their parents away.

My little chickadees: the responsibility of birdhouses, of neighborhoods; the concern of proximity.

posted by Lisa on 7:14 AM link |

5.10.2004

from 'On Beauty and Being Just'
by Elaine Scarry

The very pliancy or elasticity of beauty--hurtling us forward and back, requiring us to break new ground, but obliging us also to bridge back not only to the ground we just left but to still earlier, even ancient, ground--is a model for the pliancy and lability of consciousness in education. Matisse believed he was painting the inner life of the mind; and it is this elasticity that we everywhere see in the leaf-light of his pictures, the pliancy and palmy reach of the capacious mind. Even when the claim on behalf of immortality is gone, many of the same qualities--plenitude, inclusion--are the outcome.

It sometimes seems that a special problem arises for beauty once the realm of the sacred is no longer believed in or aspired to. If a beautiful young girl...or a small bird, or a glass vase, or a poem, or a tree has the metaphysical behind it, that realm verifies the weight and attention we confer on the girl, bird, vase, poem, tree. But if the metaphysical realm has vanished, one may feel bereft not only because of the giant deficit left by that vacant realm but because the girl, the bird, the vase, the book now seem unable in their solitude to justify or account for the weight of their own beauty. If each calls out for attention that has no destination beyond itself, each seems self-centered, too fragile to support the gravity of our immense regard.

But beautiful things, as Matisse shows, always carry greetings from other worlds within them.

posted by Lisa on 7:22 AM link |

5.09.2004

Last year, I wrote about the origins of Mother’s Day and took myself to a peace rally in Berkeley. I’ve quieter plans today. I’ll call my Mom and a few other select mom’s in my life. I won’t be able to take mine to brunch due to distance, but I’d love to if I could. Instead, my day will be devoted to peaceful pursuits: writing most of the day, perhaps a swim if the wind doesn’t come up, a bit of work outdoors, and if I’m good, I’ll reward myself with the Sunday Times and a pastry.

The new owners of the Inverness Store are bringing in pastry from the Lafayette Bakery in San Rafael. Raj tells me their pastry is fantastic—as a matter of fact, I caught him licking his fingers yesterday. I may try some, but perhaps not. I’ll be happier later if I stick with a bagel. My stepmom Ginger taught me the best way to prepare bagels: generously butter the two sliced halves, then place in a hot skillet. Mash them down with any convenient item—I use my ceramic salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand. Keep pressing until the buttered surface turns a crisp brown. Eat, noticing how the bagel has become as decadent and wonderful as a Krispy Kreme donut. The cafeteria ladies at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach used to make these for Ginger and her co-workers in the lab. Thank you cafeteria ladies everywhere!

My good friend D is a cafeteria lady. She cooks wonderful, mostly organic, mostly sustainable meals for the Canyon School in an unincorporated area called Canyon, near Oakland. It’s lovely--a school amongst redwoods. These kids eat well. Even adults sign up for lunch in that cafeteria.

I used to love certain cafeteria food. I remember begging to be allowed to forgo my sacked lunch on certain days: Sloppy Joes, Tacos and Pigs in a Blanket . I think each of those meals fell on Fridays, in celebration of the end of the school week. In my last year at that school we were also allowed to wear long pants on Fridays—we girls, that is. I remember my favorite outfit: brown courdoroys pants with a red sweater. I loved the way I felt in that outfit—I owned the playground. I knew who had crushes on me, and whom I loved back.

posted by Lisa on 8:32 AM link |

5.06.2004

pop culture. so easily swallowed. makes the passage of time enjoyable, easy. dulls the roar of impending mortality.
In 36% of households, the television is always on, whether or not anybody is watching. More hours devoted to the end of 'Friends' than to the end of time. How to kill a life: work all day in a job you can barely stand, come home to a routine of dinner and 3 or 4 hours of television. Go to bed with a detective novel. Wake up the next day and do it all again.

Or, stand in front of a single image and let it speak to you, slowly. Don't turn the page. Try not to think too much about technique or origin or even history. Let the beauty enter you and wind its way through your hidden passages. Follow that path. Open doors you forgot you had, doors that open onto dark chambers with heart-shaped lockets in bedside drawers. Hear that slow dripping behind the wall? Remember the secret entrance and go there. Follow it all the way in. Stand in the smallest, oldest room in the house. Ask yourself if you're alive now, if only for a little while.

posted by Lisa on 6:57 AM link |

5.04.2004

New York City is the opposite of Inverness. People on the streets at all hours and as much to do and see as you have time or money or inclination. It really is the big apple. It's fantastic. From the luxury of Takashimaya to the shuttered back rooms of Canal Street. But sitting on a crowded subway, reading a friend's novel, I could access the same solitude that's available to me lying on an empty beach. Even surrounded by people, when I was out by myself, I felt alone. I think it's because other people are engaged in their own walk, their own train ride, their own conversations. They didn't seem to be checking each other out the way we do here on the west coast.

How do I stack up? Am I walking too fast? Are my clothes hopelessly goofy?

There are a million styles in New York. Find your own and it's yours. There's nothing to aspire to, at least not on the street. All types welcome.

On crowded subways it's rare to catch another person's eye--unless you have something to say to them or by accident. Sometimes for a flirt. So I found myself staring at small details of other people's bodies. The freckled wrist of a matron, the dandruffed shoulders of a middle-aged tourist, the unlaced tennis shoes of a young hip-hopster, or the soft belly button of a midriff baring woman. Anywhere but the face. It's still a good place to people watch, but the watching needs to be sureptitious. A glance around the car, a look towards the back that really encompasses those near you as well. Staring out the windows opposite at stops allows you to see the people across from you without too much discomfort.

Now my dreams are of walking. I wake and look out the window and wonder why I need all this space.

posted by Lisa on 6:50 AM link |