inheritance

 

In the midst of packing yesterday, I found a ring so tiny I can’t imagine it would ever fit anyone’s fingers. It was on a brittle, dirty, knotted chain that I cut through easily with a scissors. I managed to put get it on my pinkie, but it didn’t make it to the first knuckle.  The ring is gold with a yellowish orange topaz, my birthstone.

I have no memory of anyone wearing this ring, least of all me, but I found it in a box of my mother’s jewelry, which I’ve lugged from apartment to apartment since 1998, always with the intention of either wearing the contents or purging it. Right now, I’m working on the purge. What’s survived are several bracelets, two pairs of clip on earrings that I’m saving because they remind me so much of her, some crazy beaded necklaces that I might actually wear, and various rings. The rings are the most problematic, because my mother had long, slim fingers, which I did not inherit. (Instead I got her ass, her handwriting sometimes, and her anxiety.) I don’t really know what to do with the rings, but it feels like I should keep them.

The boxes have been condensed into one bag. I threw some jewelry just now into the trash, and I feel a little like I committed a crime. The thing is, none of it reminds me of my mother anymore, it just reminds me of determined I am to be someone who is not trapped by my possessions. The writer Gary Shteyngart said about parents: “In the end, you really are still them, with all the things you’ve done to not be them.”

 

adornment

Recently I’ve started wearing two bracelets that once belonged to my mother on my right wrist, one black and beaded with many rows, and one silver and flowered, with a clasp.

Also on that wrist is the blue thread from Mexico, meant to help us remember  our intentions for building the community. (I don’t remember my intention, but I seem to be unwilling to cut the thread off.)

On my left wrist are two hair elastics, one brown, one black, the kind without the metal piece, and on my middle finger, my silver ring from Israel with the purple stone.

Last night at E’s, I drew a tiny flower on my ankle with a four color pen. It’s still there. I managed to get a butterfly sticker on my right arm, just above my elbow, in spite of having showered twice since then.

further deliberation on lady business.

 

Me: It’s (this article) a great example of women not being seen as full, complicated people-even by other women. We just want to have babies and raise babies and that’s all we need, not other jobs or other fulfillment, and if that’s not true of us…then what?

Fat and the Ivy:  It’s so hard to explain to people that not allowing woman to opt out of motherhood is dehumanizing.  But that’s exactly what it is.  The ideal woman is a child– docile, sweet, small, subservient, unable to make her own decisions.  Until she becomes a womb– where she is still subservient to this “life” growing within her.  And then she is subservient to her children.  Until she dies.

An Open Letter to a Dude in Zabar’s

 

Dear Dude in Zabar’s:

I’m pretty sure you just looked at my sandwich and said, “Somebody’s hungry.” Thanks for noticing! I actually am hungry, and I purchased this sandwich so that I could be nourished and therefore more effective today.

I’m not totally sure what you meant by that comment, and you may have noticed me remaining somewhat close to you as I thought about what I should do. I considered asking you what you meant, and wondered what you might say. Most likely, you would say that you meant nothing. You might accuse me of being overly sensitive. In the worst case scenario, you would call me fat.

Being a woman who is short but not thin and therefore not seen as traditionally attractive, and you being a man, it seems likely to me that you would be implying something about me as an individual consuming this particular sandwich. Maybe you think I should be eating something else? Something smaller? Something diet? Something that was in theory but not in reality food? (This is Zabar’s. They don’t make shit like that here.)

I watched you leave, rooted to the ground. You took a very long time doing whatever it was you were doing to your coffee. Would you have made an off handed comment like that,  if that’s what it was, to a man? Did it occur to you not to say it, or was it a “reflex,” like some men claim street harassment is? You might have made the comment because you were certain that I would either not hear you or not respond to it. That’s usually how it works-men rely on women’s socialization around passivity and niceness to protect them from consequences.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear what would come out of your mouth if I challenged you or asked you to clarify your statement. I knew I didn’t want to hear it, I wasn’t sure it was going to make me feel better. I was skeptical that you would gain anything from it. Maybe now that you’re gone, I wish I’d said something. Maybe I don’t.

Anyway, Dude in Zabar’s, thanks for the observation and for reminding me that I needed to write a blog post today. Have an awesome day.

Chanel

“I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.” (Jeanette Winterson)

(main floor of the archive. autobiographies, fiction, filing cabinets, purple couch. photo courtesy of fuck yeah, lesbian literature.)

I spent three hours at the archive today, upstairs in the periodicals, looking at and filing copies of Heresies, Aegis and Chrysalis (save an extra copy of things published before 1980).

There’s a grey box that contains what folks at the archive think is the first lesbian newsletter, Vice Versa, written in 1947 by a woman in California on her typewriter “for all her dykey friends.” (F, another volunteer) I was afraid to touch it, it’s so important, but this is the point of an archive, especially a feminist one, for enable people to encounter history.

We looked at piles of newsletters and magazines that had been donated from individuals and universities, deciding if they had anything to do with lesbians, or if they were just general feminist publications. It was such an interesting distinction to make, and to consider, since for me, they’ve always been inseparable. I have such great, complicated thoughts at the archive, there must be something in the walls, or the books, or, most likely, it’s the energy of all of it.

Before I left, F told me that the brownstone next door  had recently been purchased by two women, a couple, for around two million dollars. “Some women have money, I guess,” she said.

Dorothy Allison on Writing

Dorothy Allison  is the author of Bastard out of Carolina, Cavedweller, Trash, The Women Who Hate Me, and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.

“Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked to me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.”

Jhumpa Lahiri on Fiction Writing

 

Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of the short story collections Interpreter of Maladies (winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) and Unaccustomed Earth, as well as the novel The Namesake.

“…Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”

the second cup usually works.

songs: the mess inside, the mountain goats; lost in my mind, the head and the heart; fake tales of san francisco, the arctic monkeys; iowa city, eleni mandell; there will be no divorce, the mountain goats; where we go, folded light.

I sat in the park today near Columbus Circle, where I drank the second cup of coffee cart coffee and intensified the  tan line on the middle finger of my left hand, where I usually wear my silver ring with the giant purple stone in the middle.

I’ve started to write this new piece, which takes place in Los Angeles. I know only a few things about Los Angeles, having been there once. They include: what stores were in the Sherman Oaks Galleria two years ago, the fact that no one walks anywhere, the Getty is breathtaking and free, Whole Foods is cheaper, a churro is a delicious food and not a furry animal, Santa Monica is awesome, and that when you are standing on a tree lined, good smelling street in the Pacific Palisades, it’s hard to imagine a smog filled city sky.

I’m feeling very inside of this new piece, very aware of my process, which seems to be amassing a significant amount of material and then somehow shrinking it all down into 1,000 words that I hopefully really like and that feel true to what I’m trying to make. Whenever this happens, and my head feels wrapped securely around it, like I’m swimming in water with the perfect temperature, I resent anything that pulls me out of it-peeing, a phone call, a low computer battery. It took a while for this to happen today, mainly because I ignored my physical needs until I could get to a certain place with the writing, so thoroughly am I in the thrall of these characters and their weird, safe beauty.

happy 2nd birthday to diverge!

Yes, it’s happened. This blog is two years old this month. I suppose this means you can expect a lot of temper tantrums, bossiness, impatience, defiance, and other charming traits that come with two year olds. Thanks for reading, everybody. Tell all your friends.

“you know, where they keep all the lesbians?”

 

On Saturday, I spent a long time at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. It makes me feel so hopeful there, my thoughts get so much larger, my imagination comes off its leash. It’s full of pulp novels, photos, posters, oral histories, diaries, music, fiction, autobiographies, and basically anything else you would find in an archive. There is a delicious purple couch and a kitchen and a long, curved staircase and shelves and shelves of book with yellow and green pages from the 1970’s that smell old and wise. All the fiction, biographies and autobiographies are shelved by first name, not last, a holdover from 70’s radical feminism, which I love. (Subversive feminist action: Reshelve all your books in this manner.)

I read two essays while in the Archive, both from Voices from Women’s Liberation, possibly published in 1971. (Yes, I opened it and inhaled, which is what one should do with old books.) I made a plan to volunteer there, and thought about some things.

1. What I was wearing that day, which is dangerously similar to what I’m wearing today, and what I wore yesterday, which are these shorts I made out of a pair of corduroy pants, some flip flops, and a purple v neck shirt. I felt really attractive and confident in those clothes, the way I often feel when I’m wearing clothes that are comfortable and modest (not by religious standards, but by my own). It seems to be curious to others that I dress in a manner that may not attract men. What does it mean to feel good in clothes we’re not “allowed” to feel good in? What about feeling good in bodies that we’re not supposed to love?

2. This is a  conversation I have often with S and Fat and the Ivy, about when it’s okay to claim a queer identity. Apparently, there’s an essay out there by a white Dude, who’s straight, and identifies as queer. If anyone knows what I’m talking about, send it to me. I’m thinking about whether, because my politics are queer (as in  radical, out of the mainstream, anti essentialist), it’s okay to identify that way, even if I want my sexual partners to be male bodied. If I claim that identity, am I an imposter? Who does it matter to? If I’m perceived as queer anyway (because of politics, appearance, etc), how much heterosexual privilege do I really have?

Easy questions, obviously. I expect you all to have answers.