Bloggery - Highlights - Archives

Facebooking

January 29, 2011 - View Single Entry

Believe it or not, I finally got myself on Facebook. I'm easy to find: look up Sturgis and you'll find me and a bunch of stuff about motorcycles. :-) Once again, having an unusual name turns out to be an advantage. I've tried to look up a few real-time friends. There are so many Facebookers (Facebookees? Facebookies?) with the same name that I don't have the patience to scrutinize all the photos for a familiar face or at least a clue that I've got the right person.

I've already got more than 50 friends. This is weird. My friends don't come in that kind of quantity. OK, I know that on Facebook a friend is what we call an acquaintance or a colleague in the real world, and some of my FB (see, I'm already speaking the lingo) friends are my friends in real life, but still . . . So far I've been reluctant to "friend" (ditto -- what else are you going to call it?) people whose names I don't recognize or (in a couple of cases) people I actively dislike or seriously disrespect. I don't want just anybody to see my dog pictures!

We'll see how it goes.

The most exciting thing that happened today was that I saw a West Virginia license plate in the parking lot of the Edgartown library. A friend and I went there to hear Jon Katz talk about dogs and the books he's written about dogs. I liked the guy and the talk, and the hot cider and pumpkin pie that was served for refreshments. All that and a West Virginia license plate? Be still, my beating heart. Probably I should go to Edgartown more often.

Eyes Averted

January 27, 2011 - View Single Entry

One of the first poems I had published as an adult -- quite possibly the very first -- was "This is a poem about eyes averted." (Whether that was the title or the first line or both I'm not sure now, and I'm not sure I ever decided one way or the other.) I wrote it around 1983. It was published in Women-Identified Women, a nonfiction anthology, the following year.

I hadn't reread the poem in many, many years, but these lines stuck in my memory:

In fantasy I favor deserts --
endless horizons where nothing hides
save the deep-grown roots of the survivors;
my home New England rock and winter
strip me down to essence
but I live elsewhere

The other thing I remembered about "eyes averted" is that it was very hard to read aloud. Not hard in the emotional sense: hard in the sense that the words and phrases resisted oral delivery. I wrote it before I started to read in public. Once I started reading in public, I paid a lot more attention to how my poems sounded. I read every line aloud while I was writing it, often several times. Now I read prose aloud while I'm writing it. Hell, I read passages from the books I edit aloud when something isn't working and I can't figure it out.

Working on To Be Rather Than to Seem, I wanted to reread "This is a poem about eyes averted." It was a significant milestone in this writer's education, after all. Trouble was, I couldn't find a copy of it. The anthology it appeared in had been in one of the many boxes of books that went into my parents' basement when I moved to Martha's Vineyard; after nearly 25 years of mold-and-mildewing, they were all thrown out when the house was sold in 2009.

I couldn't lay hands on a manuscript copy either. It must be in a folder or envelope or scrapbook somewhere in this apartment, but my scrounging didn't turn it up. Rather than waste any more time looking, I ordered a copy of Women-Identified Women from one of the booksellers in the Amazon Marketplace. Now I'm glad I couldn't find the manuscript.

My recollection of the front cover was accurate -- no surprise there, since we sold plenty of copies at Lammas Bookstore (and nearly always wrote it up as WIW on the sales slips). JEB must have taken the photo, right? The copyright page confirmed it: indeed she did. So many of the other names were familiar, starting with the editors, Trudy Darty and Sandee Potter. I'd met both of them through a mutual friend -- who wrote the book's foreword, which is quoted on the back cover. Trudy and Sandee were partners. Trudy died of cancer after the manuscript was completed but before it was published.

So I read and reread "This is a poem about eyes averted." It still resists reading aloud, but it's a pretty good poem if I do say so myself. Reading it brings back to mind some of the incidents that went into it, like this:

This is a poem about eyes averted
about the day the metro crashed and three people died
and a Florida-bound jet swept commuters off
the 14th Street Bridge and followed them
into the icy river . . .

and this:

Once I heard a woman say
"No woman I know has been raped"
and two of her friends (there were six in the room)
said "I have."

I'm pretty sure I remember who made that remark, and if I'm right she herself was raped a year or so later, down by the Other Side, the lesbian bar on 8th Street, S.E.

What really strikes me is how in "eyes averted" I was already working with (obsessed by?) the themes that grew into the essay "My Terrorist Eye" more than 20 years later. The bombed-out Belfast train station appears in both works. Both works explore how we keep putting one foot in front of the other even though we know that very bad things can happen to us without warning.

This isn't the first time that To Be Rather Than to Seem has sent me back to my own past, and it won't be the last. The experiences and writing that sustained me then can keep me going today. The truism about wood is that "it'll warm you twice -- once when you cut it, and again when you burn it." Writing has the same power.

Photographed

January 24, 2011 - View Single Entry

Here's another piece from To Be Rather Than to Seem. I'm not sure when all this happened, but my best guess is around 1980. I hope the short piece I wrote to go with the photo turns up in my files. In those days I kept copies of everything, thanks to the carbon sets I filched from my employer. This experience was an important step on the road to "When the Truth Doesn't Fit: On Fat, Choice, and Silence" (Lesbian Contradiction, Winter 1983–84), which I just posted to the Essays & Articles section.

JEB (Joan E. Biren) was a big-name photographer in the gay and lesbian communities from the mid-1970s on. She had been part of the D.C.-based Furies collective in the early 1970s, which put out one of the first lesbian-feminist newspapers and had even more cachet because Rita Mae Brown had been a member of it before Rubyfruit Jungle proved that funny novels about wiseass lesbian protagonists could sell to straight audiences.

JEB's Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, published in 1979, was a runaway best-seller in feminist bookstores and everywhere lesbians congregated, and with good reason: it was a milestone in lesbian visibility. Its excellent photographs showed lesbians of all ages, doing all sorts of things, from demonstrating to hanging out at home. Many of the portraits were accompanied by excerpts from interviews with the women depicted: they talked about living on the land, parenting, recovering from alcoholism, playing pool -- giving a little insight into their lives and attitudes.

Just about every lesbian household had at least one copy of Eye to Eye. The more adventurous even gave it to our parents, co-workers, and best straight friends -- some of the subjects were naked, but the nudity was discreet, which is to say there weren't any pictures of lesbians having sex.

The only thing that bugged me about Eye to Eye was that nearly all the women in it were thin, and the ones who weren't were nowhere near fat.

Fat liberation was just getting started in those days, and most of the ferment was on the West Coast, not in Washington, D.C., which was rarely on the cutting edge of anything. It hadn't taken root in my head either, which is why I kept my opinion to myself for a couple of years. I took it for granted that fat was a liability. Feminists and especially lesbians had long been stereotyped as ugly and unattractive, which included fat. "Can't get a man" was the familiar taunt, used by those who couldn't begin to entertain the possibility that a woman might not want a man. If she didn't have one, clearly she was deficient in some respect. This deficiency nearly always had to do with physical appearance. Intelligence was never a factor.

Eye to Eye was a brave, pioneering book that challenged so many stereotypes about lesbians. I sure wasn't going to say anything out loud about the absence of fat women. Who was I to even notice? Didn't the photographer have the right to decide what pictures to use in her book? Maybe she had asked some fat women if she could photograph them. Maybe they had said no.

Then Beth Karbe, another very good photographer whom I knew from my women's center days, announced at an informal gathering that she was working on an exhibit that would combine portraits of lesbians with the subject's own words. Her subjects could choose where they wanted to be photographed and what they would be wearing. She was looking for volunteers.

Gulp. How could I complain about the absence of fat women from JEB's book if I wasn't willing to be photographed myself? In those days I couldn't fit into "ladies-size" pants; I did a fair amount of my clothes shopping in large-women's shops, where the selection didn't lend itself to a dyke about town and most affordable garments contained a high percentage of polyester. I volunteered.

I knew where I wanted to be photographed: on the stone bridge over Rock Creek behind the National Zoo. Most days I commuted by bicycle from my group house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood to the Red Cross publications office in Alexandria, a ten-mile trek each way. I crossed that bridge every morning and late every afternoon. Beth and I set a date.

It might have been a date for my execution, or at least major surgery. As it grew closer, I had fantasies of getting hit by a dump truck or coming down with a fatal disease that would conveniently kill me before the appointed hour. Sure, I could have backed out at any time, but I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the eye afterward. I was well aware that the most effective forms of oppression sink roots deep into the minds of the oppressed, and that fighting for social change includes identifying them and pulling them up -- ideally without toxic chemicals.

Why was I afraid to be photographed? Did I think that being fat made me a liability to the movement? Beth didn't seem to think that including a portrait of me would ruin her exhibit. Why did I?

Looking out of your own eyes is one thing. You can study your hands, your fingers, your ragged fingernails; when you take a shower you can look down between your breasts and see your belly, your pubic hair, your thighs, your calves, your feet and toes. You can look at yourself in the mirror -- but you can't see yourself the way others see you, from the outside. You can't know what they're thinking when they look at you.

In those days, whatever I didn't know tended to assume monstrous proportions. It leered, it laughed, it drooled. I tried to stay on familiar terrain, and when I had to venture into dangerous territory I donned my armor and marched forward, looking neither left nor right.

Here I was venturing into dangerous territory. I was going to let a photographer not only look at me but take a photograph, develop it, and hang it in a show so other people could look at it too. And the only armor allowed was my street clothes.

The jeans, work shirt, and sneakers were pretty much what I wore every day. I chose my T-shirt deliberately, though. SECEDE NOW, it said, and showed a seagull flying over the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. A few years before my home state had reduced the size of its house of representatives from 240 to 160. Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard no longer had their own representatives at the State House. My shirt commemorated the movement that rose in opposition. The movement came to nothing, but I wanted its defiant sentiment on my chest.

What I saw in my photograph was a woman trying to be comfortable in her own body, looking directly at the viewer as if to say, Here I am -- what's it to you? She wasn't entirely successful, but she was making a good go of it. I had to give her credit, too: she had chosen a location that offered nowhere to hide.

I still have the photograph. Somewhere along the way the glass in the frame broke and the black-and-white print acquired some stains. What I lost was the short piece I wrote to hang beside my portrait. As I recall, it compared becoming a writer with becoming a lesbian -- I couldn't point to a moment when either one happened, but happened they had. I'm certain it said absolutely nothing about being fat, or about why I had volunteered to be photographed and how hard it had been to go through with it, or about how unusual it was for a photographer to ask for volunteer subjects and turn no one down.

Words for all those things came later.

The photograph, by Beth Karbe

Pens Away!

January 22, 2011 - View Single Entry

Working on To Be Rather Than to Seem lately I've been getting sludgy. I'm moving into the 1980s, when I was writing and publishing a lot more, and thinking of myself primarily as a writer. My head is full of interconnected stuff, everything is multiply linked to everything else, and I couldn't even figure out where to start.

Finally I caught on: Been there, done that -- left brain gets paralyzed in situations like this, let right brain have a go.

With me computers are a left-brain tool. Their output is crisp, with clearly defined words, lines, paragraphs, files. Trying to turn amorphous interconnected stuff into clearly defined words, lines, paragraphs, and files with appropriate titles -- that way lies paralysis. I was paralyzed and floundering all at the same time. Not good.

Right brain loves writing in longhand. My handwriting is borderline illegible. Nothing is clearly defined. One letter flows into the next, one word into the next, one line into the next, one subject into the next, with nary a worry that I'm not writing about what I started out to write about.

I'd been away from my pens long enough that their ink had either evaporated or dried up. Bad sign. The pens, however, are forgiving, and I have plenty of ink. I retrieved a spiral-bound notebook that has "The Essequam Book" written in black cherry ink at the top of the first page. (Essequam is short for Essequam videri, the Latin original of To Be Rather Than to Seem.) It had plenty of blank pages left.  I plucked my pens out of what they probably thought was their long winter's nap, filled them with ink, and started writing.

Here's the current arsenal, arrayed on top of Hekate along with my indispensable reading specs. From left: a Sailor Procolor, currently writing in green ink; Pelikan 200 (red-orange); Verona (blue-black); another Pelikan 200, this one a demonstrator (black cherry); and a Pilot/Namiki (purple).

My turquoise Sailor Procolor has gone missing. It may be hiding in the chaos that is my apartment, or it may have fallen unnoticed into the wastebasket under my desk and been lost forever -- which is what happened to my first born-again longhand writer pen, I think.

No sooner had I pressed my pens back into service than I started thinking of acquiring more. In the last 24 hours I've been haunting eBay again, on the lookout especially for Pelikans and Sailors. This afternoon I lost out on a Sailor 1911 in the last 60 seconds of bidding, when the price went from $88 to $121. I'm watching two for which bidding closes in the next 24 hours.

Meanwhile I just ordered a Platinum from Fahrney's Pens in D.C. It's really pretty. You don't want to know how much I paid for it. In my defense I must say that it was a fraction of what Hekate the laptop cost me last summer, and why shouldn't I be investing as much in tools for my right brain as I do in tools for my left?

The Long Road to Rhodry

January 17, 2011 - View Single Entry

Until this moment I haven't been sure if this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem or not. It's an important part of my life, but was it part of "a writer's education"? Well, duh: Pixel in The Mud of the Place is closely based on Rhodry, and whose picture is that on the back cover?

When I was growing up, my family usually had two dogs and two cats. The cats were always closely related and exactly the same age. The dogs never were.

Jill was our first dog. We got her when I was seven, and I gave her her name. This set the pattern for subsequent pets: I didn't name them all, but I did have veto power over names I didn't like.

Jill was part Labrador retriever and part hound of some kind. She was medium-sized and solid black, till middle age turned her muzzle white. Dogs ran loose in those days. Jill was a champion car chaser. While honing her skills, she got hit two or three times in her first couple of years, but she survived the hits and became an expert. She'd zoom toward a front tire, angling her approach just right then chasing the offending car till it was out of her territory.

Like most Labs and Lab crosses, Jill was an avid water dog. She swam, she went canoeing, she crewed on the Sunfish we sailed on Tisbury Great Pond. She was seven when my family spent our first summer on Martha's Vineyard. Once I was tacking around the point of a sandbar and Jill didn't attend to my "Ready about, hard alee!" The Sunfish boom whacked her in the butt and she went overboard head-first. Up she popped, forepaws above water, with a startled look on her face.

When Tisbury Great Pond was opened to the ocean, the current between the two ran strong when the tide was coming in or out. We'd dive in on one side of the cut, swim like hell for the other side, and inevitably come ashore yards downstream from where we'd gone in. Jill would splash in and swim straight across.

Two is optimum capacity for a Sunfish; three is manageable if the third is small, you aren't going far, and the wind is brisk. When there was no room for Jill, she didn't stay behind. Sometimes, especially if there was another dog in residence, she'd swim across Thumb Cove, then run along the pond shore to the barrier beach and catch up with us near the opening. Other times she'd take the water route. The prevailing summer winds on Tisbury Great Pond are southwesterly, and the route from the family camp on Deep Bottom Cove to the beach was due southwest, so a sailor had to make long tacks across the widest part of the pond, getting closer to her destination with each one. Jill would swim a few yards beyond the boat, tacking when it tacked. From cove to beach is about a mile as the crow flies. If the crow is tacking back and forth, it's more like four or five. The distance didn't faze Jill in the least.

I was still in elementary school when we added a puppy to the family. We named him Traveller, after Robert E. Lee's horse. He was sandy colored with white on his belly, chest, and legs. He was hit by a car and killed when only a few months old. I don't think I ever knew where or how it happened. I do remember my father and I going to collect his body, which was lying on a blanket in the third, usually empty bay of Grandma's garage. He looked as if he were sleeping.

Soon afterward we got another puppy. He was a collie-retriever mix -- we always said the retriever was Labrador, but his black fur was long and wavy like a golden's. Of course he became Traveller II. Like his namesake he had white on his belly, and a white pattern on his chest that looked like a dagger with an abbreviated blade. Just before his first birthday he was hit by a car on Newton Street, near the sledding hill at Pine Brook Country Club. Newton Street was the winding road that carried traffic from Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Weston Center. When the sledding was good, cars would be parked along the edge of the road where it curved along the top of the hill. Busy road narrowed by parked cars and snow, kids pulling sleds, toboggans, and Flying Saucers -- it's not hard to imagine how young Traveller got hit.

One of his back legs was badly broken, with serious damage to nerves and ligaments. Because he was a big dog, our vet decided not to amputate the leg. Instead, he inserted a pin in Traveller's hip and set the leg bones as best he could. Traveller spent most of that winter in a cast. He wore a sock over his paw, and we taped a plastic sandwich bag over the sock to keep it dry whenever he went out. When the cast came off, his injured limb was like a furry peg leg. When he walked or stood still, he'd use it for balance, but when he ran he'd tuck it up under his tummy and run on three legs. And run -- and swim -- he did, until he died of old age at twelve or so.

After Jill died, in 1968, we got Fritz, who was mostly German shepherd. I left for college when Fritz wasn't much more than a year old. We got along fine, but we weren't close.

During the fifteen months or so after my grandmother died, I lived in her house and looked after Max, her Labrador retriever. Max and I went for long walks in the woods. He stayed at home when I went to work and greeted me when I got back. In the summer we went to the Vineyard together. I'd leave the car in Falmouth; we'd take the ferry to Vineyard Haven then hitchhike to the end of the Deep Bottom road and walk the two miles in to the family camp. On Martha's Vineyard in those days you could hitchhike with a large dog and still get rides.

Once I set my sights on Washington, I couldn't afford to think too hard about Max. Getting out of Weston was too crucial. Nothing but nothing, not even Max, could get in the way. I found a room in a boardinghouse near Dupont Circle; I asked the landlord if he allowed dogs, and when he said no I was relieved. I couldn't imagine a dog being happy in the city -- especially not a big dog. Another home was found for Max.

In D.C. I didn't have a car, or want one. I got around by bicycle and public transportation. I worked all day, and evenings and weekends were taken up volunteering at the women's center and participating in other community activities. There was so much more to do in D.C. than there had been in Weston. There was no room for a dog in my life.

My life did make room for dogs, however, as long as they belonged to someone else. Franklin, a black and brown border collie type, belonged to my first serious girlfriend. I'm pretty sure he was part of the attraction. Tosca, a mop-headed white terrier, belonged to a musician housemate. I liked having a dog to hang out or go walking with. Owning a dog, though, like owning a car, was out of the question. To shoulder the responsibility of car ownership, I thought you had to be a mechanic; otherwise what would you do when the car broke down? How could you take good care of a dog without veterinary training?

Martha's Vineyard was dog heaven. Nearly everyone, it seemed, had at least one dog. Dogs went to work, dogs rode around in pickups, dogs hung out at play rehearsals. When I got to know Mary Payne, founder of Island Theatre Workshop, she had recently quit smoking and become a born-again walker. She and I walked together frequently, exploring the Lambert's Cove area where she lived, accompanied by Jenny, her Schipperke, and Featherbell, a Lhasa Apso, who belonged to Mary's partner, Nancy. Nancy had a real job, as a legal secretary in Edgartown, and so was gone from nine to five. Jenny I never warmed to, and Schipperkes look more like hedgehogs than dogs as far as I'm concerned, but Featherbell and I became best buddies. Before Fuzzy Bell, as I called her, I thought that if you could pick it up and carry it, it wasn't really a dog. I could carry Fuzzy in the crook of one arm, but she was a real dog.

I couldn't carry Jackson: I could barely pick him up. Jackson, half Lab, half Doberman, belonged to my friend Cris; he looked like a large, floppy-eared hound. My first several years on Martha's Vineyard I had winter rentals and moved in with Cris in the summer, so I got to know Jackson pretty well. Cris went back to school to train as an early childhood intervention specialist. I moved into her house and looked after Jackson when she was away. Island Theatre Workshop produced a simplified version of the famous Christmas Revels; I was a member of the company, and Jackson made his theater debut as the lord of the manor's faithful hunting dog. He was probably the best behaved member of the cast. The school system of San Bernardino County offered Cris a job, so she moved to California, taking Jackson with her. They came back summers, though, so we kept in touch.

By then I had learned that properly maintained cars don't break down so often that only the mechanically adept should own one. All you needed was a good mechanic. It seemed the same was true of dogs. By then Martha's Vineyard did have several capable veterinarians.

Jill, Max, and Jackson were either all or part Labrador, and on Martha's Vineyard it seems that every other dog you meet is a Lab, yellow or black. So I assumed that when I got around to getting a dog of my own, it would be a Lab or Lab cross. Fate intervened, and instead I got mixed up with malamutes. I became auntie to Tigger and Petrushka, littermates with different owners. Their father, Bear, was a malamute; their mother, Nanu, was a Samoyed–border collie mix. "Pooshka" was white, taking after the Samoyed grandparent. Tigger was black. Bear and Nanu's first litter was planned. The second wasn't. The universe was giving me a second chance. I got in line for a puppy.

Nanu gave birth to eight healthy offspring on December 17, 1994; I was among the attendants. Being unemployed at the time, I made almost daily visits -- point-and-shoot camera in hand -- until the puppies went off to their new homes. I helped assign their litter names, nearly all from Star Wars. (The exceptions were two of the three girls; after Leia, Star Wars didn't offer many options in the girl's name department.) I cuddled and played with all of them, asking each one at irregular intervals, "Are you my puppy?" One afternoon, when the puppies were nearly three weeks old and I was hanging out in the puppy box, little Han Solo came toddle-trotting toward me with such determination that my heart opened and there was no more question about which one was my puppy.

But what to call him? At the time I was immersed in Katharine Kerr's wonderful Deverry novels, so I had several names from the series in mind. Early one evening nearly all the puppies were asleep in the puppy box. Not mine, however: he was sitting in the middle, surveying the snoozers with mischief in his eyes. He pounced. In an instant peaceful slumber turned to pandemonium and I knew I had a Rhodry on my hands. His namesake, Rhodry Maelwaedd, is handsome, smart, noble to a fault -- and given to berserker fits on certain occasions. Whether I named him true or he's just lived up to his name, Rhodry Malamutt was without question a Rhodry.

Rhodry was friendly, outgoing, and drop-dead gorgeous; he had friends all over the island, and it was a rare trip to town that we didn't encounter at least one old friend and make a new one. Rhodry had his own distinctive Malamutt take on things, which I did my best to channel in the bloggery.

Not long after his thirteenth birthday, at the dawn of 2008, Rhodry started favoring his left hind leg. We treated it as an injury, with rest and pain-killing anti-inflammatories, but it didn't respond. In late January, he stopped eating. We went back to the vet, whose X-rays identified the problem: a tumor at the base of the spine, probably prostate cancer.

With my vet's concurrence, I chose to alleviate the symptoms -- the bum leg, some trouble eliminating -- as long as possible. His appetite came back, and Rhodry and I had another good month before a pathologic leg fracture strongly suggested that the cancer had metastasized to the bones of his leg.

Rhodry passed peacefully around 10:15 the morning of February 26. We buried him at Malabar Farm, which was Rhodry's home away from home during the years that Allie lived there.

Pixel, Shannon's sidekick in The Mud of the Place, is closely based on Rhodry; Pixel is Rhodry 25 pounds smaller and female. Betsy Corsiglia took that beautiful picture of Rhodry and me the day after I learned Rhodry had inoperable cancer.