watch your mouth

watch your mouth,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

DonQ has been at it again. Cheesy bumpersticker type image with a kicker of a message...all hail the Thin-King!

Come one Come all: OPEN MIC FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

Attn: MUSiCIAnS! POETS! WRITERS! ARTISTS!
Refreshments provided!

F***NISM
Is
Not
A Dirty
Word

Join us and share your words or words that inspire you at: “Woman’s Word”: a poetic open mic’ lounge on women, gender & feminism
MARCH 8th, International Women’s Day, @7.30pm, Dudley House, Café Gato rojo. Email: dfeo@fas.harvard.edu for details & early sign up
A project of Dudley Literary and the Harvard Anti-Sexist coalition
Sign the petition at: http://www.petitiononline.com/ashncls/petition.html
Can’t make it so late? Go to the Harvard anti-sexist coalition open mic on inequality & Gender at the Ticknor Lounge, Boyleston Hall, 5-6.30pm for a more political flavor, or just COME TO BOTH!!

"what can I possibly say.

I guess that I miss you..."

I can't begin to put how I am feeling about ending my relationship with Will into words. I don't understand the whole thing. People keep telling me that at least we have a bank of great memories. I want to scream when I hear that. It's partially because we have a bank of great memories that I wanted to keep working on the relationship, and it's because we had (is there a "we" anymore?) such amazing times together that I am going ot find it so hard to find anybody even tolerably close to being as wonderful as he is/was to have a serious relationship with. I realize that what lays before me is a lot of comfortable, ok things, but nothing that just sings the way we used to together. How can he not see that??

ugh.

Now I feel like it was all my fault, and I look back at how I was in the relationship and I just think the whole thing was probably intolerable for him right from the start. I don't know. I made a lot of mistakes, I think I learned a lot. I thought we were headed in the right direction. It took effort but every hurdle we went over brought us closer together. I could have worked harder to keep everything fun, but we were both working so hard when we were together that we often just wanted to be safe. Maybe I should say I did. Maybe that is the whole problem.

he has changed a lot too since he's been in China working. Now I don't know how I feel about going back at all. I feel like my whole life got turned on its end.

I have the flu. It is bginning to go away, but it can't go soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

I have so much going on right now that I don't even have time to be depressed about all this...I am too busy coughing my brains out or doing something for some project or other.

so humor me. Get excited for me about my projects and stuff, because I really can't do anything right now except throw myself into things to take my mind off where I am at.

SR65X

wwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!

Ok.

I am a mess. I just broke up with WIll. Somebody call me.

help.

if i had a hammer

if i had a hammer,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

love this. cheered me right up.

MYSTERY BRUISE & Activist poetry news

So it wasn't foot cramp after all...It was a MYSTERY BRUISE!!! how did I get a big bruise across the top of my foot??/ please send responses on a postcard with a self adressed envelope to...etc.

I have a piece of news though, this is in the pipeline peeps:

OPEN MIKE FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN"S DAY:
"This Woman's Word" (tentative title), at Cafe Gato Rojo Dudley House 3/8, a Feminist Space project.

Come and read something of your own or something that inspires you in your everyday life or in your activism.

We've had Vispo, now we are going to have Actpo!

OH my aching FOOT

So last night, after the open mike...which was kind of in two parts...the first part being somewhat awful (solipsistic moanings on guitars of the "why don't you call me" school) and the second part being rather good, (naturally I was in the second part) I trudged home through the snow behind two people who took pity on my rather drunken state and led the way. It was so strange out. And beautiful. Cold and soft. Feathery. Sparkly.

I do not have a hangover, but I do have foot cramp. Go figure.

Somebody remind me never to get drunk, I always regret it. I wasn't tooo bad last night, but still. It always makes me upset...I feel my wig slipping, and always think I have made some huge mistakes. Sometimes I do. THe room didn't spin, I stayed upright and I didn't throw up. Nor did I go home with someone entirely unsuitable. So all in all I came off pretty lightly. I finished Venus as a Boy (Luke Sutherland) yesterday. And that plus the poetry and a panoply of romantic rejection of late I think just sent me to drink. TOasting Hunter S Thompson.

BUT...

I came back and found out I got the Dudley Arts Fellowship. WOW. YAY!!!

Then I made myself two fried eggs and some toast, watched a cartoon and went to sleep, but not before pestering friends at 1/40am...sorry.

So I have to work today. And work I shall. I also have to wait for my atm card to arrive, and sort a whole bunch of other things out.

P>S> Nota Bene Peeps: For all who do not know: I have a piece in the Visual Poetry Exhibition (whose title this year is: "infinity") at Dudley House, which will be opening on thursday at 7pm, so please come along for free booze and a fun evening. email me for details.

PROTEST! My speech from yesterday/Speech in full

Yesterday's demo was great...we are already getting a lot of recognition which is wonderful. I gave an edited version of this speech, but here is the whole thing.

It would appear that, like a lot of people, Mr. Larry Summers has a dream. Although we may speculate as to the true contents of such a dream, from his comments we can as he is wont to do “observe” that despite his reticence in releasing the transcript of his comments and despite his eventual apologies as to the pickle he has placed women faculty members in, his stated aim was to provoke, to incite others to challenge his claims within the confines of an “objectivity”, an “empirical” process that he himelf would define. This is a mental landscape wherein a history of systematic discrimination can be and has been righted as much as it can be by applying the medicament of 25 years of women’s passage to the halls of academe, albeit often through the back entrance. We might say that we are here then, to begin the process of realizing this stated aim of his, of revealing other sides of the argument on the reasons for women’s lack of tenure at Harvard that are markedly absent from Summers’ consideration. Indeed if this is his aim, President Summers should rejoice in his own demise. I am also here to challenge the arguments in terms of quality that are presented within these remarks because the scientific field they represent is far from complete, a fact of which I feel it is paramount that the population of Harvard be reminded.

I am not a scientist. Nor am I an expert in the field of gender studies by any means, but like President Summers before me I will not let this hinder me. It may well be the remit of the president of Harvard to discuss tenure and diversity as Mr. Summers’ did not “feel” like doing on the 14th of January, but one may well ask his qualifications for making statements that run the gamut from the sociological and the psychological to the biological. His defense in his comments at that time and beyond is one of his speaking unofficially, as a private individual. As I said I too am speaking about something I am no expert in, but the differences between the two positions-his and mine-are many: I can simply represent myself, which is what I am doing: I am affiliated with no political party or organization whatever, I receive no salary linked to my saying this, not saying it, or how I say it. Mr Summers claims to be speaking in an unofficial capacity in these remarks are really rather extraordinary: after serving in the Clinton administration, his claimed ignorance to the impact of his speech within the setting of a conference on diversity must strike us as disingenuous, especially when taken together with his aim of provocation. Mr. Summer’s “non-normative” (i.e. anecdotal) “hypotheses” on causes of declined tenure for women display a number of errors, flaws which no doubt if present in the work of a Harvard student would result in round and justified criticism. Mr. Summer’s asks throughout whether he might be wrong; the answer to such a question would in my opinion be that he certainly is not right. This has nothing to do with the opinions he represents therein per say, and everything to do with the misuse of authority to promulgate ideas UNFOUNDED or at the very least, QUESTIONABLE as FACTin the guise of a level of informality that for the President of an institution like Harvard cannot exist within the confines of any academic conference. We should carefully examine the assumptions that lie at the heart of Larry Summers’ comments because they are his and because they are NOT his alone: he speaks of his ability to simply act as an observer cooly unimplicated in judgement or social process, the significance of which he speaks of fairly derisively, unhindered by subjectivity and reliant upon a body of “ clear” and “empirical” scientific data. Summers’ views are symptomatic of a socio-biological trend in academia, not least at Harvard which, despite its potentially racist and sexist uses must be allowed to exist, but must not however be allowed to exist uncontested, or be presented as existing uncontested. Such a presentation abuses pedagogical privilege to hegemonic ends.
In a rhetorical flourish Summers’ speaks about “one”, the ostensibly neutral observer, and the simple truth of the data he cites, and at the same time bemoans the “fetishization” of objectivity. It is interesting too that while he downplays the role of discrimination and socialization significantly, what he views as his most convincing argument for the lack of women with tenure, the absence of desire to work the magical “80 hour week”, would, by many people be thought of as social. We must ask then, if such a desire is separate from social factors, the lack of childcare and equal sharing of family responsibilities, what in Mr. Summers view would account for this. Throughout his argument Larry Summers defines a fairly broad dichotomy between the nurture that for example has him buy toy trucks for hi twin girls, and the nature that in his view WILL OUT, the transformation from truck to “daddy truck”. If the lack of willingness to participate in what he calls “high powered” jobs, a conclusion in itself highly questionable, is not social than what is it? If women are naturally predisposed to want to take on the lion’s share of domestic and family duties, what would be the merit in providing them with greater opportunities?
The “revolution” in “behavioral genetics” that Mr. Summers has apparently been witness to is controversial, questionable and inconclusive, and certainly does not tell us without doubt that a great many trends that were thought to be impacted by societal factors are in fact biologically determined as he claims, and most certainly in those cases that Mr/. Summers discusses the outcome is far from clear. The same style of data that he presents, the use of standard deviation hypotheses that emphasise the greater number of exceptional men (as opposed to women) has been used in diverse publications (such a the Bell Curve”) to justify racism and sexism, and is inherently flawed since it asks no questions as to why this data should appear as it does, and whether as the work of Fausto Sterling, Koeske and other scientists have shown, the question and the questioner have an impact upon this. This data presume absolute objectivity. On this score Mr. Summers’ lack of academic rigor must again be remarked upon. Whether he agrees with other views of the state of the sexual landscape or not, such convincing alternative views, concise and cutting analyses do exist, and the field is by no means whatever mapped, charted or concluded; for every article on the innate lack of scientific ability that girls display there is one that debunks it, for every Wilson & Wilson study there is a piece by Anne Fausto Sterling.

Summers claims to be saying something new, to be challenging the status quo and what to him is a foregone and natural human predisposition to locate the source of discrepencies within the social sphere. It may be interesting to examine Mr. Summer’ comment against the following quote. ”there did not appear to be any social prejudice againt women engaging in scientific work….it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is an innate sexual disqualification”
James McKeen Cattell, “American Men of Science” 1903

• Mr. Summers’ comment is about excusing himself by redrawing the field, limiting the discourse that can be used against him carefully, but even within these confines, he is sorely lacking, for reasons of disingenuousness and incompetence I commit my vote of no confidence.

HApPY NeW YeAR!!!!

The Rooster in Love, 1947-1,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Happy New Year everybody! Yes, it is now the year of the Rooster...MY YEAR!! YAY!

Wishing you all the best of health and happiness this year, and welcoming rooster friendly messages!

SR65X

hell and high water or jacuzzi and sauna?

Well....I have a choice it seems. THe marvellous "Art and Violence in the Cultural Revolution" class is forcing me into a decision of conscience...to take the overwhelmingly scary course with huge amounts of hard work, or to not """""? I hate backing down from a challenge, I don't believe I ever have, certainly not in academic terms, but do I really want to do 4 6 page papers in characters, and oral presentation and a final exam???? hmmm.

More to the point will I give myself some kind of mental hernia if I do so?

double hmmm.

any and all opinions peeps.

old poem reworked: Harley Street Scene

Harley Street Scene

Now the sun is come
Out into a cold world
Casting shadow
More blue more cold,
Deepening its grip on
The pavement.
It reaches up between the
Buildings and we soak it
Up like sponge
We plunge our beings
Into the light to rest the
Blackest form:
The dark quarter of
Despair.

And now the Sun has come
With the smell of bleach and
The White smoke of White
Cigarettes.
The shadows steeped in clouds of
Perfume of
Worried women pacing
In Fur coats sunglasses eye patch

High heels and crutch.
Glamorous up to the last.

Babies and children
Worried walking
We are the sad soldiers
Bastions of the insane
Inner worlds
As we step in square
Patterns, mumbling before
Great Glossy Doors.

A thousand languages
In the sunshine that falls
Relentlessly picking out the
Gold cufflinks, the shimmer of
Stethoscope the bone
Shining through Skin.

Between the buildings the
Sun has come,
Flooding tiny ancient
Detail, the shine of tiles
That face nowhere, the
Beautiful internal
World: the part
They cannot touch.

The Soul that Swims Free...

In the belly of the beast

Two hands for two blogs. Now, I just need to conjure that other "me" from the petri dish and the experiment will be complete.

What Goes Around

Snow is waist high outside my door, but the sun is shining and for once the icicles seem to be dripping rather than just hanging there like the teeth of a winter that will never end...but not feeling all that grand today...at least I have a good saturday in my pocket. Weekday, corner pocket, watch it sppppppin.

So I had the weirdest day on saturday...I went out to work on a piece for the Visual Poetry Exhibition at Dudley House at the gallery where I rent and found a poetry workshop in my space. I happened to have all my poems with me for the purposes of the piece and so decided to join. And the guy who teaches the class is very cool and writes great poetry and has a blog and so I am putting a link to it, he did the same for me. So Instant Karma. What can I say. His name is Edward J. Carvalho, he is working on a masters in creative writing, I believe, and is generally talented and sound, writes stuff with great poise and just a wee bit of rock. His blog is The Outlaw Goatee, it has lots of truly beautiful poems and musings, and pictures of him with abundant facial hair.

After that I went and worked for a bit and jsut before I was to start hacking up my poems a reading begins to get under way upstairs so I ended up reading at that as well...odd happenstances galore on saturday eh?

Now contemplating what courses to try out...think it's going to be a lot of theatre this term...YangBanXi (Beijing Opera of the Cultural Revolution) and maybe a Japanese Traditional theatre course? Noh and Kabuki...zoweee.

any opinions?

Arab Strap

This is Act of War. It is beautiful. Listen to it. Or else.

Belated RIP

I know I live in something of a bubble at Harvard, but I just JUST found out the most awful news: John Peel is DEAD!!!

WHAT THE FUCK???? WHAT THE FUCK????? WHAT THE FUCK???????????

How can I NOT HAVE KNOWN THIS??????

I feel like nelson's column just fell over. The man was a GENIUS, and so fantastic. I remember when jane used to send faxes to him and he would talk about her zine on air. He was an institution, the most amazing institution: not only was he just cool all around, not only did he have this amazingly soothing voice and then would crank out amazing music, he promoted and did soo much for the careers of so many of my favourite bands: he helped THE FALL for fuck's sake. And the Wedding Present. Joy Division. and most of the bands I was friendly with. Good GOd .

RIP. I feel so stupid that I hadn;t heard. god.

PLEH
PLEH PLEH
PLEH PLEH PLEH

Hopscotch

When I was a little boy I found a pearl,
Round, perfect, shining in a roll/shift/roll Shift along
the bottom drawer, making a rattling route:
A smooth world curved, turned inside out
In the no man’s land between socks and sweaters.
It lived like a moon in miniature.

Made its own adventures.

I licked it, put that small reflection right up
To my eye, squinted. It was the loose lost eyeball of some
Firebird, some fairytale fish, its odd soft hardness
It’s rough smoothness. It looked at me with no purpose,
I put it in my mouth. Tasted its taste of the sea.
Rolled it behind my teeth with my tongue.

Savored the clattering noise the clicking between those
Little curved ivories. Piano keys. Stepping stones.
Hopscotch. Don’t step on the CRACK or you’ll
breaK your mother’s…
…It glided down my throat, loose loose in the sinew.

Loose to think of the tooth I swallowed
In a spoon, white and flat, on my 6th
Birthday when I was a little girl. tooth
And pearl sat, whispered a shanty, sea of two together
One Beside the other in my belly,
One daring the other to be the first to grow.

Roots dug int’ me. Loose, Loose skip to my…
Made paths searching out sap and blood,
Inhabited a hot hole between my legs,
Pearl and tooth Skipped Upright in gum-skin.
The bone the flesh the tissue.
Buds of teeth in head, pearls in every vein.

Don’t STEP on the…

Loose, Loose: years were Scots in London:
Walking up Shoot-up-Hill and skipping down
Hillhead. All the catholics, bike chains, wind-chafers,
Cheap whisky, postage stamps. Friction against sheds on grey days.
Boys dressed by C&A with radar in their fingers.
Cum tastes like chicken soup, cock like communion wafers.

Pin point eyes, sweet sweat and smoke:
Fry-up, Gig pass, Mayfair, Cum stain, CharleyZebraX-ray, Don’t step.
White. White skin sweating before the mirror.
The guys at the bar saw the teeth in my eyes. Extra shot.
No Mixers. Subconsciouss swill. Aye and a bag of chips.
Going mad today. Going mad today. Going mad today, CharleyXray.

…Desire Desert…in the rift…rift/crack….

…CRACK or you’ll break….

I vomited pearls.

Phasing like the moon.

Greasy spoon, mate, (ash balancing), Kick hir out of bed.
(S)he’s the pearl girl I found drunk in the park.
(S)he’s the tooth boy put her fingers inside her.
(S)he had a fight with the lead singer.
(S)he bit his neck and it shot out pearls.
(S)he’s got a poem stuck in hir throat.

Melting drifts of sheet in the silver slick of morning,
Making dry islands in the sea of Saturday shops.
Crazy Paving. Praying to the angel of Turnpike lane
Pieced myself together. Strung myself about my neck:
CharleyFoxtrot. Extra shot. No Mixers.
Sister Ray. No Problem. No TV. No time. No time atall

Now mint tea and be
Mother to me.
Polish that tooth
Nurse that pearl knee.
Living on smooth roads.
Sinking no ships, fearing no fall.
This was Just a little...
Hopscotch
That’s all.

Happy MLK, Goodbye ZZY

So Happy Martin Luther King Day, everybody.

I think this is the first time I have celebrated, or observed MLK Day since I was 6. It's a good holiday. I am glad it exists. Martin Luther King had all kinds of faults but he was still an amazing amazing man and as an orator was in a class all his own...Don Q has an MP3 of MLK speaking about Vietnam at a meeting of church leaders to which I am giving the link here...


MLK Link


it is such an amazing speech, because it is so apt to the moment...he could just as well be talking about now.

truly sobering stuff.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to remember Zhao Ziyang, who died today in Beijing. Zhao Ziyang was Chairman of the Communist Party of CHina for a brief time after the death of Hu Yaobang. Hu's death was the catalyst for the 1989 protests, with tens of thousands of students, workers and ordinary beijingers takng part at various times in protest parades, democracy walls, public meetings, hunger strikes and of course, the occupation of Tiananmen Square, which lasted several weeks. Zhao Ziyang was indeed a member of the communist party and a believer in socialism and communism, but he was on the more liberal side of the split that divided the CCP at the time, and he by and large sided with the students, bravely standing up for them even though he was aware that storms were brewing. He famously addressed the students in the square before he was obliged to leave the country on a political engagement. In his absence the massacre occurred, and upon his return he was ousted from the party and placed under house arrest where he remained up until his death.

I wrote something on the BBC comment board on this subject, I am not sure it will get posted, but I just wanted to say that the thing that Zhao, and MLK for that matter, was not afraid to do was to criticise a country and political system that he ulimately had some faith in because he was afraid of seeming like a traitor. He believed that that examination and criticism of corruption and wrong practises "strictly according to the facts" (ru shi) would yield a better CCP and a better China for all. I beleve this is the great lesson to be gained from the more notable parts of his political life, especially here in the US, and for all of us, perhaps. Introspection, striving to do better, be kinder and fairer, avoiding the same mistakes, or trying to. THis is precisely what MLK talks about in his speech when he is speaking of the need to think about the position of those brothers we call our "enemy". It is something quite powerful, and somthing that though it exists as a strong theme in the christian world is not confined to it by any means.

SR65X

Chavela Chavela Chavela again

So, here it is....click and fill your homes with Chavela Vargas singing "Macorina" as only she can...no-one can make "caliente" sound as "CALIENTE" as Chavela!!! how much better can it BE???? SR65X

chavela chavela chavela

chavela1,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Finally got the Chavela Vargas stuff I ordered ages ago...having a fag working on stupid projects, but Chavela's voice is grinding deliciousssssly through the apartment...makes me think of my Great Aunt Margarita, missing her much (she was a passionate skinny frame, with a brilliant smile...a great letter writer), and all the others too, of course...so many to miss...and Chavela is nothing if not gut wrenching. Will put audio blog of her on tomorrow...now gotta go back to work, but just had to share the picture.

Hope you are all well. thanks for the round of emails...really cheered me up...exams and etc. not doing me a good turn at the mo'...

Keep on that train to victory,

SR65X

THERE"S TOO MUCH LOVE

Beautiful Belle and Sebastian thing from "Fold Your hands child you walk like a peasant"...Have listened to it several times today..:

"I could hang about and burn my fingers
I've been hanging out here waiting for something to
start
You think I'm faultless to a "t"
My manner set impeccably
But underneath I am the same as you

I could dance all night like I'm a soul boy
But I know I'd rather drag myself across the dance floor
I feel like dancing on my own
Where no one knows me, and where I
Can cause offense just by the way I look

And when it comes to blows
When I am numbering my foes
Just hope that you are on my side my dear

But it's best to finish as it started
With my face head down just staring at the brown
formica
It's safer not to look around
I can't hide my feelings from you now
There's too much love to go around these days.

You say I;ve got another face
That's not a fault of mine these days
I'm honest, brutal and afraid of you.

Have a good dance about, everyone!!

SR65X

Chronotope Chronic: The Night Fell.

the night fell Green
again on manhattan.

again
In the shadows were seen
bare arms of black trees
opened silently to a sky
held aloft fragile high
by
columns
so much
Taller
so much
Bigger
than they.

again
the White arches:
lincoln centre a flash
of candles fading in the half
light…a festival of flickering
bones leaning like a rib cage
curving in to tuck a space in Red, a rage
of motion, a flight
of feet and
an ocean of light
to swim in, to
wish and swish in:

an arena for the twilight.

again
in a whisper it was said
that swallowing the seas
would do no harm, that lives
were not tandem but arrived
at like
knots on
string.
that there
was nothing
to be done at the
base of other White columns

but piss

again
on the pavement was heard
a hum of a thousand glories
glittering in the grout, like chips
of Gold, like sails of flying ships, but
there is
scraping by
the broken heel
some shit
scraping by
up with
scraping by
which i
scraping by
will
not
put.

limping politic clatters
through the night

a near burnt bulb in the heart,
a wave about to crash….

this was the dry land
that was the wet
this is the mainline coming.

this the place we
dance in dust
and do not see the warning.

the night fell Green
again on manhattan

once more you were miles
away stretching out your smiles
like towels. i was walking by
lincoln center in a measured aisle
of beauty
before
the end, my
friend, I
in the Green
light of a rich
night, that Green
of leaves,
of money
and of graves...

"THERE ARE SOME BAD PEOPLE ON THE RISE"

saloinspection,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Morrissey had it right. Picture from Salo to illustrate...ever get the feeling you were being watched??

Haven't written...Opera was great. Tales of Hoffman, fun and beautiful. If it wasn't beautiful it would be Romantic piffle, but it is, so it's fun and luscious. But haven't been able to really say much about things that is too happy...the Tsunami has kind of been domnating my thinking, and the 30 million dollar initial "pledge"...now that waas a SCANDAL of Epic proportions. If I had been feeling less depressed it would have made a *fine* addition to DonQ's Scandal page. As it is, thankfully our resident "oval office ogre" (thanks for the phraseology goes to Rufus Wainwright) has upped the ante somewhat, but it's one of those hide under the bed moments, I think. I was watching CNN this morning and found out that Colin Powell is again being rolled off to the area of crisis. They ALWAYS send Colin Powell...he's the resident Brown Man, I think, getting all the messy sticky diplomacy stuff that I thought being president was supposed to be about. Not to say that there is anybody more qualified on the current staff. But of course Jeb's tagging along to represent White America in his fine figure of manhood, so all is not lost!AAAAgh. The whole thing is a farce. Harvard activism on this is happening, but everybody is still away on holiday, so...

Donations to Medicins sans Frontiers...what do you think? Most of you are more knowledgable about links ties and arrangements between charities and corporations/governments than I am, so. We sent some cash to the Red Cross, but I dunno...there's no way to fathom this.

Christmas Gift Part 3: Binary Counting

Binary Counting

A simple thing: “This is me, this is mine”.
And all done.

Two become one
and a two.

My fingers are shining in a halo
Lamp in the still of the turning
Groaning
World

O

I remember my feverish dreams of Mexico
Orange peel scent in the sweat of a virus
In the Red of blood the hibiscus blooms.

I remember a future of records and wine
In an elegant lone ness a cigarette poised
A one by one. A two by two.

My perfume coiling up in snatches like
A song long lost and my eyes fixed on
Horizon
Haze

I remember I was to be loved. In my
Most white lone ness I was to be a loved
One by one. Two by two.

I had a dream of myself as my mother.
She in natural shine and blue inscribed eye
In the heart of things I was her powder.

A one and a two and.

I am sitting in an hour of many hours
A night of many nights, a ship on the
Crest of
Time.

I am wrong and always will be.

O

A one and a one and a one and a one….

Christmas gift part 2: Dot

.

Don’t be a dot. tonight
Be a line lion I can lead
On a leash around the town to
Describe the edges of your form in footprints
Twisting about you like a licorice stick

Say Grr baby.

Do not be a dot dot: tonight
Do not ask me the meaning of “Our Frank”
Talk make me sweet in pushing the punch of
Your content and hot to the answers of your
Circular questions.

Say Grr Baby.

Do not be a dot dot dot…

Tonight we’ll pretend we have
Finite ends, firm means and motives,
I’ll pretend I’m you and you can pretend you’re Me.
As good as any
In a flash as hot as dark.

Christmas Gift part 1: Story

As my Christmas Gift to you all I am posting 3 new poems...including a "Christmas poem" that follows. I hope you all have had a good and warm time...I are getting ready for a huge Lasagna dinner, and enjoying the quiet. much love SR65 X

------------------------------------------------------------------
STORY


She was big as can be, you see
Heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

The trip to see the taxman

To pay up and be counted

We started off as two
And ended up as three

The census was confounded.

“Is this my crown?” she screamed

She was so young then



He was so good. He walked along and let me lean
I was heavy and tired, with him
Kicking all night

A pain ran through my body,
From hands to feet and back,
And a ring of sweat beading round my head
Is this my crown? I screamed,

Now that’s a joke.
And us not yet married,
But not til then…

We started off as one and ended up as two.

I can’t remember so much anymore but…

But not til then…

We looked for somewhere to stop.
And me with a Nile inside about to break and wash
Up our little fish, our little lamb.

It was too late, no one would take us,
We sat in a barn thinking of what to do.

Joseph chewed a straw.
Then he was so young.
His hands were still soft,
And I loved every inch
Of flesh that held the
Best of souls.

Not til then did I know, for sure for
Certain…

When he finally came, and it took many
Hours I lay on the straw in my gore
I looked into the face of that body

The most beautiful face in the world



She looked into the face of that body the most
Beautiful face in the world, and was silent.
I wondered what she was thinking.
Then we were so young, so moved about
So shuffled and shifted but in the light of God
We thought, In the light of God.



He was so small, so pink in the warm night
I looked at that part of myself that is a miracle,
I thought, “This is my glory, this is my crown
This is my burden, this is my pain.”

I guess all mothers think that.

manhattan mania

oh well. Home again home again. On Long Island safely ensconsed in something like a christmas snowglobe, feeling ok, ate a big slice of my favourite vanilla meringue cake at dinner, but also strange/ wondering why nobody's been writing to me...ho hum. Out to dinner today and saw a terrible musical...won't go into it...Christmas with the fam' has it's various rituals...some good some bad.

cookies good. musicals (especially modern ones), generally, bad. Going to the Opera after christmas though...and that I am looking forward to...OFFEnbaCH: TALEs OF HOFFMAN, WOW!!!! so exciting! i love the Opera, haven't been in over 4 years. haven't been to the Met' in about 12 years! SNOWFLAKE LIGHT FIXTURES....twinkle twinkle.

but now I need to do some work, and think about things.

Christmas is kind of eluding me this year. we walked by the tree in rockefeller center, and past windows bedecked and layered on 5th Avenue, and it kind of didn;t do much...maybe i am jaded. Which would be a great pity. Actually one of the things I value most is wonder. Or maybe it's just missing those I love. You know who you are.

SR65

wo shuo: Yazhi Zaijian!

So the wisdom teeth are out...I have a face like a 6 year old chipmunk, and I didn;t get into the Vagina Monologues!! Can you believe it!!

anyway, just wanted to say goodbye to my teeth. and my wisdom, perhaps.

more later, when not full of codeine.

SR65X

When Lips Speak Together....

Apologies to Irigaray...it seems like I am always apologising to her actually, even though I disagree with her on so many things...actually while I am at it I will apologise to Kristeva too even though I hate what she says becaus I am so nasty about her in every class at every opportunity, and it's nearly CHristmas and I sholdn't be mean...I son't want to get a lump of coal for being a bad feminist....anyway...I am here announcing that I auditioned for the Harvard production of THe Vagina Monologues yesterday, and it went quite well...I am hopeful...so everybody keep your fingers crossed...maybe one day you'll see my name in lights....the lights of Loker Commons! GLAMOUR.

much love and lips.

SR65
X

The British Embassy

Firstly, Hello to all thoose here whom I have not met, hopefuly one day we might..

So, Yesterday I went to the British Embassy Christmas Party (By the way I live in Beijing if any of you didn't know), I had mixed feelings as I walked in to the Pub inside the Embassy (the only embassy with a license to sell alcohol, says alot about English society), indeed it was a strange experience which after a while as I was being given mulled wine and guiness became beautifully surreal. There was a curtain drawn across the stage when the manager of the Embassy, this realy straight no nonsense guy, poked his head out and started singing the monty python song "I like chinese", the curtains were pulled back revealing three rotund guys dressed up in traditional chinese dress performing to the music in absolute perfect time. It was beatifully offensive, I'll have to try and find the lyrics and post them on here.

I havent quite digested what exactly was going on there in that bastion of Englishness, but whenever someone would say something that normaly would have made me feel like an unwanted misenthrope in England (should I be not offended when some one asks me "who the fuck are you?" just because they're drunk and irish? I don't know, I'll let you know the answer when I've worked it out) I was quietly reasurred that outside the walls of this building (classic 1960's foreign concession style) these confused feelings of nationhood and identity would quickly evaporate for me, but perhaps not for them.

Anyway, national identity looks all the more ridiculous when it's isolated and slightly defensive and indignant, that, I found quite empowering actualy. In any case, I think I've been hanging around with too many Canadians as I was told I had a North American twang to my accent, Ah well, I think there is something beautiful about having the people you love around you affect the very way you speak, not that its true though!

Practical Theater: Identity, Role and Acceptance in Stone Butch Blues

In the novel “Stone Butch Blues” and the accompanying pieces we have looked at this week we have been exploring the practicalities of living as a “Gender Outlaw” that we had begun to examine in “Boys Don’t Cry” we are facing issues of class and race, and moreover, again coming upon the practicability of living “without” norms, or normativity. I explored a lot of the issues of binary replication in classification of lesbian groups, and the need for solidarity that simultaneously arise for individuals treated as gender outlaws and so here I will be further examining these issues alongside the personal story created for the character Jess Goldberg by Leslie Feinberg in this novel.

This is a bildungsroman in the true sense. It talks about the layered and painful development of its protagonist Jess Golberg through h/her violent and in many senses circular trajectory through a working class life in the US and indeed through variously gendered and sexed bodies, and through the conceptual mire of gender itself. From the outset Jess is looking for home, a home within hi/herself and in a community of others who can accept her, as is exemplified by her childhood encounter with the mirror, or h/her early life in the company of a group of Native American women, and indeed, h/her early propulsion in the New York state bar scene. He/She seeks a harbor of recognition and safety represented in h/her dreams and daydreams in the form of a hut, a gathering circle, or a ring. Again and again we see the symbol of the circle manifest itself, whether representing a unity of workers, of butches, or an acceptance for a new body, or indeed the safe home offered by the arms of “high femme” (who at certain points embodies a kind of motherly ideal, interestingly), which in the end is the feature to which Jess is most attracted, regardless of “sex”. And it is striking that throughout the novel despite the evident and painful search for individual identity, the “type” as a group, a home, a locus of solidarity remains fairly strong. Jess strives heroically to create and recreate, to build and rebuild a home around and within h/herself, to nurture and be nurtured. But the strong association between femme and home between “wife” and home remains remarkably stable considering the precarious path jess walks through the gender minefield, as does the character and ideal of butchness, although that it seems that that is subject to more change than the former. These signifiers have a purpose: Edna is attracted to the qualities of “Butches” for example, the “butch heart”. In h/her reaction to h/her evident placement within a continuum of evidently fairly interchangeable butches and her striving for a lineage of the butch as is exemplified in h/her need to search out Butch Al, Jess aligns herself with a set of characteristics, a stereotype constructed inside Lesbianism itself. The political and emotional necessity for this tracing of a butch family tree for Jess, even though in the end he/she in many ways has transgressed even these boundaries, is understandable and evident. But again we must ask what the effect of such fixed binaries of “butch/femme” are within lesbian/gay groups…we see the horror with which Jess reacts to the relationship between two butches, in many ways echoing homophobic discourse, and we are faced with the consequences of a perpetuated politics of symmetrical complementariness along what truly are gender lines, now having been removed from their presumptive biological foundations. It is not my intention here to belittle the efforts of our resourceful and engaging principal character, who, after all stands as an example of an experience that in many ways is widespread. I believe however that it is precisely the aim of Leslie Feinberg in writing these situations into the novel that we should question the distinctions drawn, as Jess h/herself does in the end, even as we revel in the Kerouac-like “beat” and beaten grace of the Butch. We must conclude that in all events Jess walks a tight rope between an idealized trajectory of “self-realization” whether itself believed to be innate or in socially informed and socio-economic pressures in h/her journeys through gender, and that in any and all events he/she is engaging in a self-making practical theater of which he/she is at various points extremely conscious.

The novel itself, as well as being a document of development in the fog of gender war, is a sort of confessional. We are party to the most intimate and painful moments of Jess’ existence…the humiliating and horrifying rape, menacing beatings, private doubts and public embarrassments. The responsibility of the writer to create a relationship between the text and reader that is not engaging, or relying upon a sort of gender exoticism is extraordinary, and in fact Leslie Feinberg manages this well, we become a sort of lover to the character… We stand facing the image of the little girl in her father’s suit. It becomes our image and that of our fantasy, just as it is for Jess…we are made so intimately sympathetic to Jess that we cannot but identify with h/her, and in effect we are thus allowed to act as femme and “melt the Stone”. At the cool climax of this record of intimacies, at the end of the novel, we again find ourselves in within the circle… catapulted into a confession-within-a-confession that echoes the letter that begins the novel…and into the effects for the protagonist of a self-conscious confession before the crowd. Judith Halberstam speaks in her articles of a need to find a new language to describe the erotic life of the butch, the erotic life based on giving pleasure but remaining resistant to it oneself, what she actually identifies as a catalogue of “negative” sexuality based on “what is not done”. In fact this is the ultimate contradiction at the heart of the condition of being Butch with a capital “B”: in the moment that one admits, confesses, lets flow all that has been inside into discourse, in some senses one ceases to be a Stone Butch. However we view the political effectiveness in this sense of Jess’ articulation of h/her condition in public in the final pages of the novel, we are confronted with the joy and release it provides, and the perhaps necessary redrawing of
Jess as an individual in relation to categories of sex and gender within and in fact beyond heterosexual norms. Perhaps that is the ultimate endpoint of the ring.

Punctum/"You are my sweetest downfall"

It is after 4 in the morning and I am listening compulsively to Regina Spektor...this is "Samson". I am sitting in a pool of white light cast from the lamp on my desk and smoking a fag, making a spotlight in the darkness like a lighthouse on the sea off the South Coast. Thinking about something I read of Judith Butler's new book today...the idea of relationships, of love or mourning, passion, as an undoing, an unzipping of the soul, where we sit beside ourselves in abject ex-tasy or horror. I am sitting at the centre of the ennoument, wondering what is happening now across town, what boats are floating across the sea and what birds are picking through crumbs many many miles away. Light is spreading across the hazy clouds high over head. Peaceful sleep is sneaking in and out of the eyelids of 3 in an upstairs apartment, snacks are being eaten in bed by the light of a quiet cigarette, the cat is sleeping between a couple in Texas, weak sun is coming through the kitchen window of somebody's basement flat sparking off all the pots and pans, and the workday is dragging itself into its final waltz in a classroom and an office.The ends of the threads of my heart are spreading themselves out at 4am, at 4am we are all connected.

You are all my sweetest downfall.

Listen to this and find a quiet centre in your heart.

SR65X

the italian icon

scaryMichelepastaface,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

So I know Dimaco is going to kill me for putting this on, but I couldn't help it, it's the ultimate italian stereotype...I think Dimaco's friend who came to visit in London took the picture and set it up so that his parents wouldn't worry that his italian-ness was being corrupted by living in the UK so long. "Here Mama, don't worry about me." So I think we should all get our wife beaters on, smother ourselves in Parmigiano...grano baby grano, and bring out our inner italian in honour of Dimaco as a fine italian man.

Ciao!

fairylights

fairylights,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

I am tired...what, more work???
watch me slump...fag in hand.
But note well my new fairy light halo...Aren't they great??? getting ready for the holiday season...have had discussions about Yule, Xmas and Hannukah today, so I know that the season is upon me.

Also it's fucking freezing which is usually a good sign.

Will I ever get to bed??

V

Show and Tell: Drag/Passing/Performing/Being

1. Drawing the same circle a thousand times: Repetition and Synthesis

This week we have been exploring the idea of performativity in a number of different contexts and valences (hereafter referred to by the synecdoche V), the extent to which performativity constitutes identity, or fails to as the borders of same escape the edges of the performance necessitating repetition. Further some of the texts and film we have looked at explores conscious performance and the implications on that on the necessity of the subject to “pass”, without revealing any split between their assigned sex and assigned gender so as to prop up the conceit of continuity between and within the two categories even as its logic undermines the very primacy of the original. Judith Butler posits a link not only between all gender and drag, but also between repetition and constitution, in effect concluding that gender is a kind of spell made true by repeated incantation, a mantra with no original form that both is and does.

2. V for Vicious

Implicit in the idea of this mantra of gender/sex is the idea of passing, for though, as the film Boys Don’t Cry (and countless other examples) shows there are members of the gender/sex continuum whose process of “passing” is more acute, more dangerous, practically violent and filled with trepidation, we all “pass” to a lesser or greater extent, and not only in terms of our physical appearance. Indeed it is perhaps less of a case of “womanliness” as masquerade as it is “personhood” as masquerade, where, however the mask and the face are part of one another, as I have argued elsewhere. In semantic groups, in grouping within groupings we reduce the variety of the individual as a flow of social and biological into logical and workable groups for better or worse, and this fact becomes particularly noticeable in those places where our own logic shows its multitude of flaws, and disrupts the epistemological net upon which phallogocentricity is supported. These more potent points of confrontation between the conceit of the natural and the (not-necessarily-self-identified-as…) subversive performative, are perhaps the very loci of which Butler speaks where there may be a “political imperative to use…necessary error or category mistakes” to reuse names that divide sharply… like “gay” and “lesbian”, “butch” and “femme” but I consider that it can be a thorny problem; essentially we face the perennial difficulty of using such dichotomous logics in attempting to disrupt them, we try to keep a subversive hand on the wheel, though the road ahead seems straight, but that is not to say that such terms are not useful at times. Processes of thought, modes of expression are all converted for acceptable use within dichotomies of “pro” and “anti”, “left” and “right” within which we may or may not feel comfortable, indeed much psychotherapy whether focused on the sexual strata of psychoanalysis or on cognitive behavior is about learning to “pass” comfortably in society. To return to the idea of gender in particular, as an aspect of this self-constitutive process, and to the parallel concepts of drag and passing, first let us consider what is involved in drag, in dragging. Whether we are seeking to emulate the “male” the “female” or a vision of ourselves, constituting oneself can always be seen as a process of becoming the other, since the ideal is the mirror image, the imago and thus not the self, but a vision entering into the realm of desire, and therefore, ultimately, an impossibility. Thus to a degree we are all cross-dressers, perhaps. But in the process of acting a “gender” or “type” this process becomes more obvious, and the potentials and pitfalls of the dressing, the drag and the detail are revealed. In repetition, as Butler argues, we can see the self, or impossibility of a Self balking at a label, so that the label like some band-aid on a swimming child’s knee needs to be attached and reattached to cover the wound where move, change and growth is happening. In fact, this re-iteration of category is, even in those who willingly conform to heteronorms, obviously and evidently unstable…a person’s vision and presentation of themselves is in fact expected to change over time, as age and experience of various kinds act upon us, and we upon them, but the limitations of this expected to change are interestingly closed off…for someone to seem to become less or more masculine or feminine, if moving “away” from their proscribed sex ( a sex that is socially inscribed and constituted in this other to which they move) would be considered unacceptable or suspect, as can be seen in the attacks on the perceived “masculinization” that occurs in menopause as Anne Fausto Sterling explores it in Myths of Gender. In the repetition, and the inability to produce a stable definition, or even a truly reliable copy, we can see the potential disruptive and creative force within the layered gender. We can also see how the effect of this incantation is to make it seem natural, and internal, because in fact, it is no more external than internal, it is no more other than self, since as indicated above the other and the self are linked across a fluid chain. When “re-performing” a “gender” or “type” however, certain other problems come to the fore…although such performance may have disruptive power to the idea of the primacy of the natural as implicated in gender performance, the cluster of concepts around the gender remain fairly fixed, and the dichotomy is repeated. To act like a woman, even for a man remains to be ladylike, emotional, and concerned with personal grooming, among other things, so to be a woman still carries this baggage with it, clearly. Thus although the being of a woman may have become disengaged from a “female” body per se, what it is to have a female body and to be a woman is still circumscribed within the focus of the performance…the “real” that is striven for but that is precisely not real. While it may be true that there is “no proper gender, a gender that is proper to one sex but not another” in practical terms, in problems like the “urinary segregation” spoken of by Judith Halberstam et al. we see that the unstable perimeters that circulate sex, gender and self are constantly policed through a network of hegemony, and that they are policed precisely because they are unstable, and it is for this reason that drag may at once signify a valence that is v for vicious and a v for victory in both directions.

2. The Insightment(sic) to look

In her article “Decking Out: Performing Identities” Butler speaks of the content of this interstitial space between and inside self and sex in the following terms...”Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which to some degree, can never appear”(p.25). The tensions between the unseen nature of this realm and its status as part and parcel, and indeed centre to an economy of desire is at the heart of both the creation of sexualities that run along a continuum in relation to social sex designation and sex object, and to the contradictory desire to see what is not there, that is found in the bathroom drama described in Halberstam’s essays, and in the dialogue of revealing, both violent and “voluntary” that takes place in Boys Don’t Cry. In this film the audience is made party to a series of revelations on the nature of Tina/Brandon’s “Sexual Identity Crisis”, we are put in a position to see the line of cleavage, to his menstrual drama, and to his forced confessions. But in the end though at times we are in intimate and sympathetic relation to the character, we are party to his undoing, we are implied in his rape, and are forced, like Lana to look at his genitals which have no bearing whatever to his conception of himself. We are made culpable and our gaze is involved in a visual rape that prefigures the physical rape to which we are also invited. To add insult to injury perhaps, we are then presumed to have seen the truth of Tina/Brandon’s sexual status as a woman, a lesbian, as is evidenced by the lesbian lovemaking seen, where Brandon takes on an incongruous female role , which seems preposterous, (a result of his being taught by the phallic eye and the rape, perhaps a “true” role?) especially in relation to his nearly immediately preceding rape. The rape, the necessity to rape as a punishment for transgressing gender roles is in fact a site of the more violent aspect of this afore mentioned policing of gender. The rape, the use of the penis as weapon, seems to be the only way in which the characters, in this film can regain a sense of the importance of this organ after the true castration they undergo upon discovering that Brandon does not happen to have one. This castration is absolute, rather than physical or phantastic, because it reveals the true semantic distance between phallus and penis, and the import or LACK(sic) of same, in the organ in the making of masculinity.

4. VVVVVVVVVVWV
There are many more questions to be asked about the nature of identities that, like Brandon’s self describe within the binary dichotomy of male and female even as they challenge them. The objects of desires, and natures of desires can be seen to create a multiplicity of different identity formations within the realm of “gay” and “lesbian” in a way that can be an effective tool for reflecting the reification of desire in the heteronorm if they can be excised in part from dichotomous schemes of their own, so as to highlight the constitutive and synthetic functions of repetition and to allow perhaps some basis for practical movement on these issues that so violently impact the lives of many.

"Us":by Regina Spektor

"We're living in a den of thieves...rummaging for answers in the pages."

New music...the album,"Soviet Kitsch" is great, something that I got recently after hearing it on local radio...for all you voyeurs out there (and I know you're out there you gorgeous perverts... you tell me!) keep an eye for Regina wherever you are, and enjoy.

more later,

SR65
X

Neruda: poem of the day///

So the morning was rather beautiful today and this Pablo Neruda poem came into my head...visions of verdant crepescular plants and memento mori et al. what follows is a spanish version without accents...sorry, and then a translated version, which I am not one hundred percent certain about...any suggestions welcome, that;s what you get from th inernet, what can I say.

Anyway, Enjoy,

SR65
X
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CABALLO DE LOS SUENOS

Innecessario, viendome en los espejos
con un gusto a semanas, a biografos,a papeles
arranco de mi corazon al capitan del infierno,
establezco clausulas indefinidamente tristes.

Vago de un punto a otro, absorbo illusiones,
convero con los sastras en sus nidos:
ellos, a menudo, con voz fatal y fria
cantan y hacen huir los maleficios

Hay un pais extenso en el cielo
con las supersticiosas alfombras del arco-iris
Y con vegetaciones vesperales:
hacia alli me dirijo, no sin cierta fatiga,
pisando una tierra removida de sepulcros un tanto frescos,
Yo sueno entre esas plantas de legumbre confusa.

Paso entre documentos disfrutados,entre origenes,'
vestido como un ser original y abatido:
amo la miel gastada del respeto,
el dulche catecismo entre cuynas hojas
duermen violetas envejecides, desvanecidas,
y las escobas, commovedoras de auxilio:
en su apariencia hay, sin duda, pesadumbre y certeza.
Yo destruyo la rosa que silba y la ansiedad raptora:
Yo rompo extremos queridos: y aun mas,
aguardo el tiempo uniforme, sin medida:
un sabor que tengo en el alma m edeprime.

Que dia ha sobrevenido! Que espesa luz de leche,
compacta, digital, me favorece!
He oido relinchar su rojo caballo
desnudo sin herraduras y radiante.

Atravieso con el sobre las iglesias,
gallopo los cuarteles desiertos de soldados
y un ejercito impuro me persigue.
Sus ojos de eucaliptus roban sombra,
su cuerpo de compana galopa y golpea.

Yo necesito un relampago de fulgor persistente,
un deudo festival que asuma mis herencias.

--------------------------------------

Needlessly, watching my looking-glass image,
With its passion for papers and cinemas, days of the week,
I pluck from my heart my hell's captain
and order the clauses, equivocally sad.

I drift between this point and that, absorbing illusions,
converse in the nest of tailors:
sometimes the voices are glacial and deadly-
they sing and the sorcery goes.

There's a country spread out in the sky,
a credulous carpet of rainbows
and crepuscular plants:
I move toward it just a bit haggardly
trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade
To dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

I walk between origins, beneficient documents
chopfallen, dressed like a natural: I want
the spent honey of deference,
the sweets of the catechism under whose leaves
drained violets drowse and grow old;
and those bustling abettors, the brooms, in whose image,
assuredly, sorrow and certainty join.
I plunder the whistle of roses, the thieving anxiety:
I smash the attractive extremes-worst of all,
I await a symmetrical time beyond measure:
The taste of my spirit disheartens me.

What a morning is here! What a milk-heavy glow
in the air, integral, all of a piece,
Intending some good! I have heard its red horses
naked to bridle and iron, shimmering, whinnying there.

Mounted, I soar over churches,
gallop the garrisons empty of soldiers
While a dissolute army pursues me.
Eucalyptus, its eyes race the darkness
and the bell of its galloping body strikes home.

I need but a spark of that perduring brightness,
my jubilant kindred to claim my inheritance.

____________________________________________________________

in frame

in frame,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Ok, so I am frustrated with Roland Barthes and Kristeva...(oooh, she makes me MAD), and I am writing about confinement, incarceration, ranting and silence...so I put myself in a box...sort of, jsut for fun

THings are better...I can;t believe what a big difference it makes just feeling more cheerful to my work and everything

I don't even mind that I have a stupid amount of work anymore. I guess it's social conditioning Harvard style.hmmm.
Human beings can get used to anything, huh?


XXX

J'AI RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC VOUS by George Brassens

The fabulous and naughty French songster George Brassens sums up my mood when waiting for an SMS date...Recorded from my mom's old vinyl (hooray Mom!!) from the late 60's, so crispy, but warm, huh? I am rying to promote George Brassens here...go out and find some...he seems pretty damn near forgotten and he's sooo cool. He writes with humour and passion about 10 minute love affairs beneath umbrellas, escaped gorillas raping judges, lovers on public benches, being hauled off by the police, feeling like a puppet to love, falling in love with the shape of a flower in the skin of a cow. I love him, I hope you all will too.

translated Lyrics:

My Lord the sun
As I do not admire him much
Takes away his fire, but I don't give a damn about his fire
I have a date with you
The light I prefer
Is the one from your jealous eyes
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

Monsieur my landlors
As I have wrecked everything
Kicks me from his house, but I don't give a damn about his house
I have a date with you
The residence I prefer
Is your rustling dress
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

Madame my housekeeper
As I owe her too much money
bars me from her table, but I don't give a damn about her table
I have a date with you
The dish I prefer
Is the flesh of your neck
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you

His financial majesty
As I do nothing to his taste
Keeps his gold, but I don't give a damn about his gold
I have a date with you
The fortune I prefer
Is your heart of tinder
All the rest leaves me cold
I have a date with you.

got thanks?

Folks, this is the first Thanksgiving I have spent in the United States since I was six, and I think I am ready. I have planned how to avoid Sport on TV, my parents have a plentiful supply of indigestion aids, and i am set for turkey heaven.

I am currently in the Sturbridge Host Inn in Sturbridge MA, where we used to come so often when I was a child, for holidays with my brother and all, and also when I would come up to Boston for surgery. We would always stop in Sturbridge and try to relax, swim in the superbly 80's pool, which still exists, and play arcade games, and eat muffins in front of the fire. THe fire is now electric and purely "decorative", (bastards) but the place is much the same. A bit more decrepit perhaps, or maybe it's just a matter of perspective. But they do have WIFI, and that you've got to love/

I am wishing all of my friends a Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are. I am not sure exactly what the whole thing means, especially since I am not doing what I normally am doing at this time...making italian sausage stuffing with my brother and in the kitchen of our London house, and getting ready for a weird day. My Dad would put the turkey in the oven uber early in the morning so that you wake up to the smell of meat, whch is really strange, I think, but kind of exciting. My mother makes amazing pumpkin pie, and I really love pumpkin pie, I can't even tell you how much...so yummy...with whipped cream and nutmeg! We always had a big dinner party to which all my parents' British friends would come and I would occasionally bring a few of mine. This would be the day on which I would be a pseudo American, just by virtue of the fact that I was more American than anybody else there except my parents, of course. Plus the Ubiquitous Priest, and of course, my Gran who is now gone, sadly, she would normally be hovering around, having taken the principle of a holiday that is pretty much purely about eating to heart, making sure that everything was being done exactly as she wanted, and being a fantastic fussbudget generally. I miss her so much. My father would invariably have some kind of loud, obnoxious and filthily conservative discussion at table. I remember one year it was on Thanksgiving that Margaret Thatcher got ousted from parliament...my brother cried. help. I was too young to really understand, I just felt bad, cause everybody seemed so upset.

I remember too the first year Will came to my house for the whole affair...we turned up with a big bouquet of flowers for my mom, and I can remember being so proud to have him with me. And so pleased to have someone to conspire with in a "pinkosubversive" manner. Oh I pledge allegiance to the f(l)ag! (thankyou brad epps.)

So here I am, away from my little room in Cambridge and trying to fathom out what Thanksgiving is all about, and what horizons I am to keep my eye on now. But I was writing this to say to all, enjoy the break, and much love and I send my thanks to whatever powers that be for giving me the friends that I have and the friends that I have made, and the strength to be where I am doing what I am doing to which you all have contributed. much love.

Thankyou!

X

nice doohicky I picked up from lady_babalon on LJ

tea is love
brought to you by the isLove Generator

SNO

It;s been snowing here almost all day...the first real snow of the season...I can't believe winter's here already. Normally snow makes me really excited and childlike, especially when it actually sticks...and we've got about an inch on the ground. But I got a kind of depressing email from my tutor, I have shitloads of work...I'm stressed, my skin is terrible and I'm generally kind of down. And I don't have anyone to share the snow with. I'm snowed under. I'm experiencing extreme academic anxiety, and I think my IQ is going down every second///Help.

Ballad of a Mapmaker

What is the lay of the land?
How does the land lay, and
How does it lie? I am making
Taking notes now when I walk Out
Humming in the canyon
Between waking and sleep,
On empty streets with only
The wind as my companion.
The light is cut in logical squares
And All the soft darkness that hides my
{My (invisible) } friend
They weave the web of sense the
Geography of wakefulness
The deceit of what could be.

The trees swing in that breeze, swinging with dancing like tangoing privately
In the cold. Lost in thought, not seeing that they are seen
Doing
A little striptease
(bend then, stand straight as compasses) as the leaves
come
down
to
warm
their
feet...
They
at last
Stand Nude

Vulnerable and wholesome.
Frightened and thrilled
Waiting to be touched

By starlight, by moonlight, by a child’s hide -and
-seek -hand

And how does this land lie?
In the rustle of a paper bag in the park
In car horns and coded traffic the flashing
Light. In breaths and tones on telephones…
Light.
You ask me what it is that I am doing> what games nowadays?
I tell you I have become A CARTOGRAPher

Making sensual maps of the city streets
Walking a sentence around this town
With steps like words
Hiding from the punctuation of the road.

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This poem has a lot more graphical play than it seems to have here...sorry, it won;t let me do it on the posting.
Any questions about that, just ask me.

SR65

X

I think this about speaks for itself-quoting Lady Babalon

TO all those on the mirror stage...again I am quoting a very astute person from LiveJournal for the purpose of better understanding. How does this election affect the average American you might well ask...well....Average we can't help you with, but American, we can certainly try. Lady Babalon wrote this in a fit of justifiable rage, but I think we all benefit from her rapier-like wit. Thanks for letting me quote you, Lady Babalon! Again, if you are interested in having a look at Lady Babalon's blog which is filled with strange dreams, occult divinations, weather gazing and black humour, go to:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/lady_babalon

muchos besos

SR65

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Dear America,


How do I hate you? Let me count the ways...
I hate you for your unquestioning hatred and fear of dear friends and family of mine, and your eager willingness to deny them equal human status, which extends so far as to excuse people who violently beat them to death for merely being who they are by saying "Oh, they felt threatened, they couldn't help themselves."
I hate you for your eagerness to jump to war as the first solution for everything, and to rabidly defend your war leader even when he has been proved over and over and over again to have been lying about the reasons for the war, the difficulty of the war, the length of the war, the numbers of innocent people killed in the war; the goals of the war; and the benefits you will receive if you just give in and join his army.
I hate you for your knee jerk reaction to the word "liberal" as if it meant "baby raper" instead of someone who feels all people deserve an equal chance and has a somewhat different view of how things should be run than "conservatives".
I hate you for your willingness to use Christianity as a club to force through any law prohibiting adult consensual behavior, thereby making the nicer sort of Christians feel guilty if they don't go along with it and giving great energy to the asshole wanna be theocrats who are multiplying at alarming rates.
I hate you for your craven running and hiding in fear and being willing to give up every liberty granted you in the Constitution without a fight just because the television tells you your life will be better and safer that way.
And I hate you for your sheep like insistence on voting for only two candidates, despite the fact that you almost all admit you don't like either one of them, instead of fomenting a national revolution and en masse voting for a non Republicrat. Your easily won compliance virtually assures they will do nothing to change their policies which are slowly dragging us into fascism, an impossibly huge national debt, and a deep economic depression.
This is a democracy - you came out to vote - and you made yourselves the mockery of the world with the idiocy of your choices.

I hereby renounce you, America - I am no longer your citizen, I am a free person. I will take part in no more of your rituals other than the ones you threaten to imprison me for if I avoid them. Take heed that I do these things only under great duress, do not take them as a sign of happy good-citizen-like compliance. I will subvert you every place I can. Your nation's government is a worthless sham and not worthy of my support or respect, and neither are you.

Those who have actively worked for human equality and real political change may exempt themselves from this rant (which almost certainly includes most of you on my frineds list). But if you are anti-gay or pro-Bush you may go away now, you aren't wanted here. You aren't just part of the problem, you *are* the problem.
Now excuse me while I work out a bunker mentality for my family, whom apparently, most of America wants to destroy...

political piece/peace by SophiaSerpentia

Dear all on the Mirror Stage...I am posting some writings by very clever friends on another blog that I think may be especially interesting to those of you outside of the United States...THis one is by SophiaSerpentia a friend and Massachussetts resident who writes on LiveJournal, who has kindly allowed me to quote her here and provide you with a link to her blog which contains much spiritual searching and musing of the divine, philosophy, ephemera and politics, if you are interested please go to:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sophiaserpentia

Enjoy, much love,

SiRen65
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So, John Kerry said some pretty words in his consession speech about how we need to heal the divide between us and try to be nicer. It's not going to happen, and here's a few reasons why.

1. For many of us who are opposed to the war in Iraq, this matter is not a question of policy, not a matter of taxes and budgeting to be debated rationally. We believe that the war in Iraq is an unspeakable evil being perpetrated in our name.

2. The Republicans have no reason to start playing nice because they're winning. They consolidated their hold on the House of Representatives by creating gerrymander districts in Texas so severe, a federal court has ruled that they may well violate the civil rights of millions. They won the governorship of California through a campaign of misdirection. They sent out mailings in rural areas claiming that Kerry wanted to outlaw the Bible. Before the election they actively discouraged people from voting in New Hampshire and they worked to invalidate the registrations of many voters in Ohio and elsewhere. Sure, the Democrats have done their share of dirty tricks, but not on nearly the same scale.

3. Social conservatives in this country are not united around their support for something, they are united by their fear and hatred of people who are different. They speak of "defending marriage," but if that was truly their goal, they would focus on the people who are having trouble staying married, not the people who want to be able to get married. We who are queer did not start the culture war against us, but we have no choice but to fight it, as viciously as we must, until we prevail, or at least to a standstill. We are outnumbered and outgunned; our very lives and happiness are on the line. It is not reasonable to ask us to be "reasonable" in the face of organized hatred.

4. The very freedoms that fundamentally define this country are being threatened in the name of "defending" it. The cure (if indeed it is a cure; it has yet to be demonstrated that the loss of civil rights makes us any safer) is worse than the disease. This last point is actually aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, who have been united in their assault on basic American freedoms, and is the main reason I did not vote for the candidate of either party

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Any of you on my friend's list who voted for Bush, I have a few questions. I'm really, really curious.

1. Regarding those claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The specific WMDs Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair claimed to have detailed information about, but which simply and plainly did not exist. You know, the "weapons" we said we wanted to keep out of the hands of terrorists so much, we started a war. Those claims either represent gross incompetence, or are blatant lies. What I would like to know is, what are you telling yourself about these claims that made it possible for you to vote for Bush?

2. Speaking of keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists, what about the weapons and explosives in Iraq which really did exist, but which were left completely unguarded after the invasion? America is not safer now than it was before the invasion of Iraq. The security situation, in fact, is much more grave. Do you really find that acceptable?

3. Why should any friend of yours who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered ever speak to you again?

4. Please explain, using your understanding of economic theory, why you think it is good for America to continue to widen the gap between rich and poor in this country. For extra credit, explain also why we are better off working for Wal-Mart than keeping the high-paying technical jobs which now belong to workers in India or China.


sophiaserpentia

Exhuming Nature

Exhuming Nature: The Matter of Sex and Self

1. To Thine Own Self Be True

In the essays and writings we are looking at this week, in Fausto Sterling’s erudite exposition (literally as well as metaphorically) of intersex and its treatments and her dissection of the underlying problematics of the nature/nurture dichotomy as well as in the majority of other works we have looked at over the last few weeks we are running against a basic problem. This problem although it is recognized in linguistic and conceptual terms really needs to be faced head on…that of where exactly we are trying to arrive at when we begin to dismantle the trip wired room of sexuality in current discourse. One of the main features of much analysis of the character of sexuality it seems is focused on unmasking its “natural” pretensions. But once we have accepted that the making of the sexual personality, the person marked by sexuality is discursive modern and a complex process involving both biological and cultural factors although in what admixture and along what axis we have no way of knowing, where are we to go? The problem is that all this stripping of sexuality’s robe of “nature” implies a hierarchy…nature, being true, is preferable to the sham.

2. Going Digging

In fact this brings us back to the same reductions and difficulties associated with attempts to locate a female or homosexual brain. We are still looking for an inherent “truth”, an essential, measurable nature of mankind (sic), desiring knowledge of the true desires and needs of the natural man. Feeling ourselves in the modern world to be far distant from “nature’ we seek to exhume it and breathe life into its corpse. Fausto Sterling addresses this in her discussions of the two models of an individual through time, as if cloned and propelled by time machine into the distant past…she points first to an understanding of sexuality as fixed, as biocentric, genetic or con-genital(sic) that it seems is commonly held and is essentially bound up with the idea of the self-knowing individual, as well as with the primacy of genetic science and thus with the construction, as we might have it, of both the phallic human and the monstrous perfect. . If a basic nature for a pre-social individual is buried somewhere, an unlikely prospect if not an oxymoron in itself we might think, it may well be a series of dis-membered(sic) parts, the fragments before the first confrontation with the mirror, and thus basically outside of the individual as a concept. There is no body for us to breathe into. Quite apart from the ultimate futility of framing ourselves thus within a self evident economy of desire, I think perhaps it is necessary to admit that we have no real context for understanding our hypothetical corpse, our un-socialized human, the basic essence of man, if there is one, and would have him either savage or sage, monster or innocent. Thus such seeking out of the true nature of sex, or sexual identity only serves to bolster ideas it ostensibly seeks to rend.

3. Mask or Face

Indeed, instead of decrying the false nature of our sexual roles, our personhood, the sham of the constructed and synthetic, I feel it would be well advised, having made clear our dissatisfaction with the roles into which we have been cast, note that there is much freedom in the constructed…there is freedom to add subtract and change, while taking well into account the limitations of such an endeavor for the “individual” mind. This perhaps is to find a locus of power in a creative act that can belong to all. That is not to say that one should not fling spanners liberally into the epistemological works, but perhaps more in line with Fausto Sterling’s second model accept the human mind in all its complexities, (the only way to do which is to admit that we only partially understand it and that this inability will most likely persist---consequently, from a biological perspective too, there is no way in which we can “know ourselves”, and consequently no way in which we can be “true” to ourselves since we do not know what that self consists of), as not covered or clouded by the constructed, but as perhaps precisely to be located within the constructed. In other words masquerade is not womanliness, it is personhood, but the plethora of masks donned at various time are not so much the masks of a carnival as precisely the at once disposable and integrated faces of the mutable person.


4.Catch 22 and the Möbius Strip

Charging head on and skirting away in successive regressive advances, the model of the Möbius Strip as introduced into the current discussion by Fausto Sterling’s article, has been my undulating guide here, but in the self stated uncertainties we have visited above a certain anecdote comes to mind. “There is no such thing as absolute truth” was for a while a tattoo across my tongue, but I have since revised my tattoo…it now reads “There is no such thing as absolute truth…sometimes.” The certainty of my uncertainty came back to haunt me. I have at the centre of this ribbon of reasoning a basic uncertainty that must be thus be brought into the half light…a catch 22 that forms the essence of our ramble with the ants, and all other tentative stumbling in our afore mentioned trip wired room…at the risk of falling head first into a solipsistic pillow we must take up a position that in its destabilizing facility may very well destabilize any proclamations we seek to make. The task of picking a path through these shifting sands is then perhaps at its heart both a basic denial and requirement of those grappling with the practicalities and theories of living in the sexed and sexualized self.

Anyone for Canada??

I've heard rumblings. People are getting their red and white flags/socks/tshirts in order, collecting the bright red leaves as they float gently down on the pavements of the people's republic of Cambridge. People are thinking about it....how long can we actually enjoy railing our opposition to certain policies, certain politicians, certain penises (N.B. Not phalluses...they want to be...oh yes they want to be)? I saw myself in an everyman with a leafblower engaged in a syssiphian (did I spell that right?) sruggle against the wind (What the fuck are leaf blwers supposed to accomplish anyway?). No amount of chai tea can sew that one up sister. TO all my American compatriots in arms: in the interests of personal inquiry and greater understanding across the board I am posting a lnk to the BBC's coverage of the presidential election and particlarly to a page of comments from correspondants across the world on global impact of same:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3978489.stm

it doesn't seem to be hypertexting so just copy and paste.

So on a beautiful Autumn day I found myself in the Science Centre (I know I know Center, not Centre...honestly, who gives a fuck.)eating Sushi and reading about the Mobius strip (would be a great name for a strip joint, no?) in relation to the creation/construction/conception/construal (is that a word?) of sexuality. Looking outside at trees that look like they've been decorated with painted paper leaves and a fresh blue sky with the cleanest sort of light, the closest I've ever come to the light in South Africa in Autumn...And in any case, dear friends, I thought about it. How is it that a nation as self consciously constructed as the United States can be so divided on precisely what it is that is the "content of the character" of an American? Or does it really have anything to do with that...are we all just frightened children looking for someone to look up to, someone to save us...squabbling over state hood and the constructed importance of marriage. We are being polarised. THis is bad. It's bad because it ends up being part of the same thing, a global struggle enacted in our petulant nation on a foucauldian grid of power, and it's even worse because the poles are artificial...we are closer together than we are shammed up to be...not to say that I'm happy with where we are. I'm not. I guess that makes me a Pinko Subversive. I dunno.

I shuffled along the pavement listening to Tracy Chapman and smoking a cigarette manufactured with the worst possibe auspices, and looked up a the sky. Going off the neatly swept path I kicked through a heap of red Maple Leaves. Consider your options, baby, they rustled in chorus. As I latched my front door shut I considered the Divine Comedia slouched on the sofa and with hands raised in a gesture of supplication cried out,

"God why couldn't you have Reversed the important Curse??"

voting blues: ICH HABE DIESE REIGERUNG NICHT GEWAHLT!!!!!

To all those of us who voted for Kerry, or who are horrified at the prospect of 4 more years of Dubbya, I give this song...Remember: "Nobody can steal the way you sway, the way you walk..."

"May there Never be a time you don't live through."

ever wonder2

m&mhalloween2,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

Here Dimaco and Miguel pose for a photo op. "damned reporters" they think to themselves..."tasty though...what do you think...sauce bernaise, Dimaco, would that go??" says Miguel. "Oh yes," says Dimaco, pictured right, "Very well indeed".

Ever wonder....

m&mhalloween1,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

How zee ovver hahf lives?? aristo vampires michele and Dimaco get ready their bloody appetites for a night on the tiles first checking out their "reflections", projected in an elaborate scheme from the small camera in Dimaco's cold hand of deathso as to keep their status secret when necessary. They would be rocking out with other ghouls but you never know when some dirty mortal is leering at the vampires only restrooms...anyway, vanity is no sin, especially for a vampire. tasty.

toomuchwork

toomuchwork,
originally uploaded by SiRen65.

How much work did you say I have to do again?? Surely not. Surely there must be some kind of mistake. Surely you don't expect me to read a 150page novel, 100 pages of a novel in Chinese, 40 pages of comment and write a paper about it all for one class in one week. surely not. surely you don't expect me to also read 350 pages of theory for another class and 150 more for yet another. And prepare a chapter of business chinese. and starting writng about the chinese stock market. And have two precis of final papers and a mid term paper due in 2 weeks. surely not. somebody pinch me. oh yeah, can't be asleep because I DON"T SLEEP. I forgot.