226. VULVA LANDSCAPES AND FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

From the Archives. (May 2006) Tee Corinne, author of the Cunt Coloring Book, is dying of cancer and needs some money. Susie Bright is holding a fundraiser for her but, well, I ain’t in California, so I sent in my donation through paypal because, as Susie says, Tee is the beginning of lesbian erotic photography.

Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).

Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.

This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!

Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.

He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.

Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”

Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”

And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?

Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..

Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!

Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.

With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.

Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.

I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.

I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.

LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”

READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet

BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand

192. CHAMPIONS OF OBSCENITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) Norman Mailer once described himself as the

embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hardworking author, champion of obscenity ... amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter ... [who] had ... a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

I drove all morning just to have lunch with a writer pal who fits much of this description but is decidedly NOT a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

Tuscaloosa and I met at a Chapel Hill restaurant where racuous southern grrrls like us sometimes seek out flour-dredged ecstasy in between our healthy meals and we caught up over Mama Dip's sweet tea. Then I handed over the edits to her first draft of an excellent nonfiction piece and she handed over her comments to the newest draft of my novel.

Her essay is a real doozy of a piece, a thoughtful reflection on what happens to girls who are so damaged that they turn in on themselves.

I also reviewed her new book contract. And we decided that I really need to find a way to cut back on my academic demands so that I have some chance of giving some more readings with her.

(Plus, damn it, I am tired of being a thank you in another writer’s acknowledgments when what I want is to hold my own published novel in my own two hands and thank all of my friends and colleagues for a change!)

We wound up discussing the “rough South” stereotype over lunch and describing atrocities in our matter-of-fact way that so many people cannot stomach.

Then our conversation wound its way around to The Piano Teacher, a French film that left both of us speechless.

Practically everyone else we know stormed out of the theatre during the screening of this film, but we went back to see it again because it validated our experiences/depicted the damage that we’ve seen with incredible accuracy.

So yeah. We talked about all this in the context of our writing, and that got me thinking about my friend who grew up Seventh Day Adventist.

She had no access to films or television or public education or mainstream culture as a child and cannot view violence now. Nor can she understand why I would voluntarily read poetry of witness or watch films such as Hotel Rwanda or Schindler’s List or Bastard Out of Carolina and allow such graphic violence into my life.

But, let’s face it, violence happens on a very regular basis and often on our tax dollars. And I guess, if my hands aren’t clean, then I want to know about it.

Don't you?
•

Meanwhile I have discovered that, like Mr. Mailer, I am a much exaggerated street fighter.

I studied two styles of martial arts for years and taught self-defense for a while and still operate under the general assumption that, if need be, I could disarm most would-be attackers and, well kick some serious ass should the situation call for it.

This assumption has proven true the very few times that I have had to defend myself, but my new kung fu classes are kicking my ass now and exposing me as the wimp that I have somehow become.

Kung fu is based on monkeys’ movements. This style differs greatly from the styles I studied previously, particularly because the stances involve crouching so low to the ground that your bent knee nearly scrapes the floor (which makes your thighs scream as they become rock hard).

I sit on my ass for way too many hours a day now, I guess, and must have gotten out of shape when I wasn't looking because, wow, these sessions are KILLING me!

(Ow. Wimper. Ow.)

Whine.

188. I NEED A HERO, I’M HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO TILL THE MORNING LIGHT ...

From the Archives

(February 2006) Just drove to the Gothic Wonderland to hear my friend Tuscaloosa read. The place was packed and she was, as always, brilliant and charming and oh so literate.

I’m so proud of her and the good work she’s doing.

Our friends remain aghast that Tuscaloosa and I never got together and, occasionally, I’m surprised by this too. In many ways, we’re a perfect fit. But I was married, then she was married, then I was married again and, well, the timing just never worked out.

We are very dear friends who recognize each other’s gorgeousness however and she’s someone I can talk with about anything—and someone I do talk with about writing on a very regular basis.

I’m going to include a long excerpt from Molly Ivins’s “Why Hilary Won’t Save Us,” but, first, can you believe that I actually heard an advertisement for a Toddler Spa (!) that offers designer haircuts and manicures?

Oh for the love of gawd throw your precious little rugrats outside and let them get grubby instead.

I mean, come on, if they can’t get their hands dirty when they’re toddlers, what hope do they have?

Anyway, here’s Molly. It’s just too good not to paste here:

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, "Look, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes." Bobby Kennedy—rough, tough Bobby Kennedy—didn't do it. Just this quiet man trained by Benedictines, who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes. The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Who are you afraid of?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway ("First, you have to win elections"). Can't you even read the damn polls?

... Oh come on, people—get a grip on the concept of leadership....

Alito is all but confirmed. New scandals are erupting daily. Please! Someone rise up already and call a spade a spade. As Barack Osama said of Rosa Parks, “she reminded us all of the central truth of the American experience—that our greatness as a nation derives from seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

We are in need of a person who can do extraordinary things right now, before the corporations completely take over. (Alternet, 1/23/2006)

Molly’s letting out all the stops now.

82. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

From the Archives

(April 2005) Huh. My Dukie friend just e-mailed me to say that an emu is loose in Durham! Several people have apparently spotted it and called the cops, who humorously note that they can't exactly outrun an emu.

What fun!

Meanwhile, here’s a heart-breaking piece I’ve been working on for a couple of months now.

THE HOLLERIN’ CONTEST (draft)
Every June, in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina, hollerers gather to share their lexicon of calls. Many bring their calls down from the mountains, where they developed these sounds to convey specific information across great distances concisely. An anticipatory bark might tell a wife that her man is one valley away and heading home; a piercing howl might say he’s broken his leg and needs help right away. I imagine the hollerers’ mournful voices drifting over the mountaintops, coloring the fog as it settles in.

A phalanx of Duke residents and I, wearing scrubs and beepers, wander the alley of vendor tents and crafts displays. The fact that I’m on call and must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice looms large in my mind as I study the nuances of the callers’ sounds and eat my bag of kettle corn.

A cacophony of other sounds competes with the contestants’ calls. The deejay by the kids’ rides plays nursery rhymes. Vendors shout out their wares as we pass them. Car alarms reverberate off the sound equipment as a businessman barks into his cell phone by my ear. The teenager beside him describes her new Guess jeans to some disembodied person on the receiving end of her phone call who has probably never even heard of a hollerin’ contest.

It is difficult to imagine a place devoid of any other means of communication, especially here. Research Triangle Park is headquarters to so many high-tech. communications companies, after all, a virtual Promised Land where cell phones and wi-fi–enabled coffee shops and gas-station fax machines and household T lines deliver and receive information instantly. Despite this ever-present technology, though, I have not mastered how to convey some information across great distances with accuracy.

The emcee insists that hollerin’ is the earliest form of precise communication between human beings, but I know it’s sex. Yeah, I talk a good talk beforehand, but I never really communicate with someone until we make love. My previous communications sound right, but they are guarded, selective, partial, incomplete. I reveal glimpses of myself through a copy of some poem or a humorous story about my workday or my careful, measured replies to personal questions. These words offer insight into who I am, but I dispense them from behind a protective wall that hides my vulnerability. Until I stand naked with someone, until we discover how to speak to each others’ bodies without the need for words, I am incapable of conveying love or deep emotion in unrehearsed syllables.

•

The first year that you loved me, you studied my hands in public until you knew that I knew you were doing this. Good hands, you called them. Made for fucking. Your friend Deborah inevitably called when we were deciding if we were hungry enough to get out of bed. You laughed when her call came through, said, “that would be Deborah,” told her that yes, as a matter of fact she had done it again and that she was speaking to a well-fucked woman.

We had our own language of calls then, a holy vocabulary between us.

Later, in a restaurant, you studied the thumbs that had been inside you as I remembered moving them toward that specific spot near my tongue that makes you gasp unintelligibly, each of your unarticulated sounds and movements leading up to that moment conveying so much information: where and when and how and how much and with how much intensity—precise instructions that you conveyed without ever speaking a word.

I told you later, over dinner, in whispered words that made you blush from your neck up to your hairline, exactly what I would do with my hands when we returned home and we stared across the table at each other, anticipating the moment when my entire hand would disappear inside you, reducing you to babel. We shared this quiet language of whispers in such public places.

This morning, in the emergency room, a migrant worker howled in misery. Unable to articulate the source of her pain in words that I could understand, she curled into the fetal position instead and howled at me, her dark eyes desperate. ¿Como esta usted? and the few other phrases that I learned in orientation conveyed nothing useful to either of us, so I ordered a battery of tests and sent the nurse for a translator, did what I could to apply deductive reasoning to our babel as I used my hands to search her body for some physical clue that could tell me how to heal.

Bodies convey information even when their owners can’t. They send signals to the lymph nodes that trigger them to swell sufficiently to indicate an infection; cause pupils to dilate enough to indicate a concussion or drug overdose or loss of brain function or any number of other medical conditions; dispense tears to indicate depression in patients who insist that everything is fine, just fine, just couldn’t be any better, doc. Our miraculous, fragile bodies enable us to communicate love through physical expression more profound than any word in our vocabulary, but they keep their own language too.

People who lose loved ones share a unique language too. ICU waiting-room conversations reflect this language in anguished glyphs of hope and denial and sorrow. These glyphs whisper Failure to doctors who lose patients too, but Hope is the primary word of this whispered lexicon—until I deliver the coup de grace that demolishes any possibility of it with as much distance as I can muster: We tried to save your wife, but her heart was damaged. We tried to save your son, but he is gone. Your Daddy is dead. Your grandmother has passed on. I am so very sorry for your loss.

How did the hollerers isolate that specific sound that represents loss, that mournful call that can make a stranger choke up, missing someone? Adrienne Rich knew the sound. There is no other language for it, she assures us—we have to call it grief. In my case, my friends call it bravery, too, tell me what a great job I’m doing holding up, remaining in control.

Poets reminds me that my walls do not protect me, though, that studying your blue eyes failed to provide sufficient insight into your interior world, your dishonesty. My grief moves over me in waves, becomes a mountain that I lug around inside me, that makes me obsess about that phone call I made when you discussed a meal that you had prepared the night before. For yourself, you said, this meal worthy of Gourmet magazine. Your voice said other things, too, though. And later, when I showed up unannounced and you blushed deep red from your neck up past your dimples all the way up to your red, red hair, you reiterated that you were alone, just sitting there alone because you just wanted some silence, even as I noted the two wine glasses on the counter, the dishes stacked in twos on the dining room table, ready to be put away.

I need a new language to hold all this pain, a deep-throated and gutteral holler that can convey this staggering loss.

I am on this earth to learn, after all, to at least attempt to articulate my experiences authentically and in meaningful sentences, to organize these rabbit screams that escape from me sometimes. I want to do something with these I do and forever memories that have ended so abruptly now, translate our ten years of a shared language that remains so acutely on my tongue into meaningful sounds and phrases.

I write words on charts that heal patients’ bodies, speak knowledgably about immune disorders and disease and disease prevention, but know that I have become a child again—someone who requires a cardboard wheel to identify what I am feeling. I study this wheel that is divided neatly into two concise outer sections. Am I happy or am I sad? The answer is obvious. Your body, our language, are divorced from me now. I will not see you grow old or even wrinkle around your deep dimples and what I feel is anguish. I keen in sobs loud enough to announce our broken union to our neighbors, to my patients.

I do not give you to him, but I have let you go—have walked away and know I must keep walking. I do not know this ground and yet I walk it, take these first strange steps toward a new vocabulary—some descriptive holler that can locate the hollow behind my eyes where I always feel you gone—search for a word that can make me me again.