Month: September 2015

Cycletherapy, that’s what they wanna give me!

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Blurbing books is kind of a weird practice. I mean, it’s actually a very good idea, and I for one always notice who’s been quoted on the back (and sometimes front) of a book I’m considering reading. But I can tell you, as someone who’s written two books and was asked by her publisher to do so, seeking these blurbs out is a bit scary and awkward (though probably most people are very kind about it, as the writers I asked were). Famous and sought-after writers probably get asked to write blurbs often, which must be something of a nuisance.

Lucky for me I’m more infamous than famous, and am sought after by only a highly select few!

Elly Blue, the author of several excellent books on biking, asked me to read and consider writing a blurb for her new one, an anthology she edited called Cycletherapy: Grief and Healing on Two Wheels, put out this month by Microcosm Publishing. Elly is also the co-owner of Microcosm, which published my two books, White Elephants and Slip of the Tongue. Microcosm has been knocking it out of the park lately, if I may say so. My hubby Joe and I tabled for them at the Small Press Expo last weekend, and their books were a huge hit there. (Joe is also a Microcosm author.) SPX is comics-oriented, and Microcosm does indeed have some comics titles on its roster (the Henry & Glenn series being the best known and, frankly, awesomest), but other types of books were flying off our temporary shelves, too: The DIY ones by Raleigh Briggs; the more overtly political and wonderfully-titled The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting; the silly-yet-totally-serious Manspressions, which makes fun of machismo using made-up words and charming illustrations; and yeah, my own pocket-sized memoir, White Elephants.

Cycletherapy was too new to make it to the expo, but it’s out now, and I’ve got my copy here. It’s a beautiful book. Highlights include Elly’s own essay, in which she writes about carting her partner around on a bamboo bike trailer on days when he’s too sick to bike himself; a short piece by Sara Tretter that touches on the awkwardness of burgeoning teenage sexuality; Julie Brooks’ chronicle of working through the grief she experienced after being struck by a car while riding her bike (she’s okay now); and Gretchen Lair’s fine illustration of her beloved bike Ariel, who was stolen days after their last trip to the beach together. She quotes The Tempest: “My quaint Ariel … Our revels are now ended.”

Lookit all their bike books!
Lookit all their bike books! (This is a photo of Elly and Joe Biel, from the Microcosm website.)

I’m not a biker, not since childhood, really. I’ve always felt a little too chicken to get around the city on a bike, like so many of my friends do. (They’ve all been doored by parked cars or clipped by moving ones. Plus, I love to plug in and listen to music while I’m out and about, which isn’t such a hot idea when you’re riding a bike in traffic.) But I am a big walker. I walk everywhere because I don’t drive a car, and never have: My mode of transportation is my own two legs, plus whatever SEPTA conveyance I feel like catching. But I walk for pleasure and exercise and for my mental health, too. A lot of what the folks in this anthology (all but one of them women) wrote about biking resonated with me because I use long walks the same way, to keep my mind and body healthy and strong. Some days I push through physical discomfort or miserable heat and humidity to get to that feeling that my physical self isn’t creaky and cranky and tired, but like a well-oiled machine, taking me where I need to go. Going out in the evening is different, like gliding through dark water, thoughtful and quiet. I prefer to walk through city neighborhoods because I like to look at buildings and people, and peer down little alleyways and see grass growing up between the cracks in the concrete. But I live just up the street from the Schuylkill River, which has a paved path for walkers and bikers that runs alongside it all the way into downtown Philly from a little town 25 miles from here called Oaks. Sometimes I’ll walk down to the trail and stay on it till I reach the part of the river where the rowers practice, past their charming boathouses and the sleek boats themselves, sluicing through the water. I move my body to get my head feeling right and it always helps, at least a little, which is more or less what the stories in this book are about. It’s good to be reminded how useful that can be.

That girl, she holds her head up so high I think I wanna be her best friend

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Years ago, when I was trying my hand at internet dating, I made friends with a guy from one of those sites, and we’d sometimes talk over the chat function. I asked him whether he’d ever gone out with a girl from another website, and he told me no, because “There are too many sluts on there.”

“WOW, I can’t believe you just said that to me,” I answered. “I don’t like that word. Don’t say that about anyone.” In response, he sent me a girl’s profile photo from the site, in which she was leaning over toward the camera with the word “slut” written across her chest.

Huh.

Showing me that photo didn’t excuse his calling her (or anyone else) a gendered slur, especially when he was talking to another woman, in my opinion. But it was thought provoking. What does it mean when a woman calls herself a slut, as opposed to when a guy calls her that? How about when other girls are the ones saying it, and everyone involved is 11 years old? Or when it’s the 90s and it’s Kathleen Hanna, and she’s performing on stage and she’s mad as hell?

slu*t

And what about now? Where do we stand with the word slut? I think it depends on who you ask.

In 2011 the Slutwalk was born. If you’re unfamiliar with that event you can read about it all over the internet, but in a nutshell, a group of women at a college in Toronto were enraged when a cop who had come to their campus to share self-defense techniques with them suggested that women could avoid physical attacks from men by not dressing in a “slutty” way. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’d had that idea run past them, I can tell you that. But I guess they were wishing it would be the last. They organized a rally that they called the Slutwalk, and the idea–and, I daresay, the name–caught on all around the world. We did a Slutwalk here in Philadelphia that year, and I was proud to participate in it. I met up with everybody in a small park downtown, and we marched with our signs and chants through the streets to City Hall, where speakers addressed the crowd.

But I had such complicated feelings about that name. I liked the idea of angrily taking it back–a la those riot grrrl punks who I so admired as a teenager trapped in a Catholic school lockdown–but, I don’t know, I didn’t really want to say it. I surely didn’t want to write it–not on my sign, which bore the slogan “DON’T PARTICIPATE IN GIRL HATE”–and not on my body.

I had to take the subway to the rally because I have to take the subway (or the bus, or the train) everywhere, because I don’t drive. Staying safe in public is something I spend a portion of every day thinking about, and that day was no different. Riding public transportation alone with the word SLUT anywhere on my person seemed like a bad idea.

I’m not mad that the event was called the Slutwalk; I get it, and more than anything I appreciate being asked to think about these ideas in more, and more nuanced, ways. But I was far from the only one who had issues with it. That day at City Hall, one of the speakers was the filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who said that she initially planned to skip the protest altogether because of the name, but decided to agree to speak about that very idea. She explained that many Black women in particular felt alienated or attacked by that word because they don’t have the same privilege white women do to “reclaim” it. What I heard was that the use of the word SLUT is one more way in which non-white women are made to feel ostracized from Feminism with a Capital F, which is so often, and so destructively and annoyingly, a white, middle-class, ivory tower sort of thing. Simmons’ talk (and other voices as well) made a big impact on me, and on the rally’s organizers too. The event has been renamed (somewhat clunkily) The March to End Rape Culture, and it’s still going strong. We’ll be marching again on October 3rd, which is why I’ve been thinking about this damn word again.

I’ve been reading SLUT, a play developed by Katie Cappiello, Meg McInerney, and the members of The Arts Effect All-Girl Theater Company. It’s a fictional story about a rape that was inspired by true events (which ought to go without saying) and is told in the realistic voices of girls in high school. In the print edition I’m reading, the play is preceded by several teenage girls telling their own stories of victimization around this word and its ideas. It’s one story after another of bullying, school-administration bullshit, humiliation, confusion, coercion, and sometimes physical attacks. These stories are disturbing because they are so very ordinary. They’re coming-of-age stories, in a way. I’d go so far as to say that no girl gets to grow up without being initiated into the SLUT mindset, and for many of us it’s a violent introduction. It makes me so angry, thinking of older women having gone through this stuff before me, and young women dealing with those same things now, but some days it just makes me feel blue.

But you know, the heart is a muscle the size of your fist: keep loving, keep fighting. The organizers of the March to End Rape Culture have been selling original art to raise funds for the event, so I spent a couple weeks embroidering the words NO, NOPE, and NO SIR! onto pretty floral tea towels. I’m going to make another sign and march again. (I think this year’s one will read TRUST GIRLS on one side and BELIEVE WOMEN on the other.) I’ve got my TRANS-INCLUSIVE FEMINISM ALWAYS badge to wear, and I’ll sew my self-defense patch onto the back of my sweater: It’s a picture of a woman kicking a dude in the crotch. I like it because when I first saw it, it made me smile. Once in a while, though, it makes me cry.

I Capture the Castle

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professorSeveral years ago, when Trixie the cat and I were living in our cozy bachelorette pad, I got an ad in the mail from the London Review of Books. They offered me a year’s subscription to the weekly paper for some very low price, like 30 bucks, so I decided to give it a try. I thought the writing might be over my head – and sometimes it was – but I really enjoyed picking through the essays in there every week. (The classified section was a revelation, too. A quick look shows me that this week’s personals aren’t especially charming, but some very funny people submit ads to that paper, and following them week to week was a hoot. One of them, posted by a woman, ran for months with only her first name and one word: “Elegant.” Then one week that one ran as usual, but out of the blue a new one had appeared: “Natasha: Inelegant.”)

But there was one writer alone who made my pennies-on-the-dollar subscription worth every cent: Terry Castle. What a fuckin genius. Castle is a literary critic and a scholar, and most of her publications are academic books that never crossed my path. But she writes about books for a more general audience too, and in a bombastic and hilariously autobiographical way. I loved these essays and looked forward to getting updates on her life with Blakey, the woman to whom she is now married, and used to refer to by a funny nickname – I forget what now. She’d talk about a new book she was reading – with insights like an arrow to the heart – in the same paragraph that she described rummaging through cardboard boxes to get ready for a move, or sitting up in bed poking at her laptop and eating chocolates over the Christmas holiday. And somehow all these things were about the same thing. Her life and the the life of her mind were totally intertwined, in the most interesting way – she seems to make such good use of the things she reads, thinks about, and experiences, as if her whole life is a fact-finding mission on how to get through it. It’s really nerdy and pained and passionate. I relate to it.

Furthermore, she is funny as hell. After enjoying her work in the LRB I ordered her book of essays, The Professor, which I took off the shelf just now. I’m looking at the piece she wrote about a book on the jazz alto saxophonist Art Pepper, which she called “My Heroin Christmas,” but hastened to explain, “Not that I used any … I’ve always been afraid of serious drugs, knowing my grip on ‘things being okay’ was pretty tenuous already.” I relate to this too. Just now I found this (ALSO RELATABLE, though I won’t elaborate), in a LRB essay about getting gay-married:

“Despite being friendly and garrulous to a fault, my mother has always been somewhat averse to self-examination. Nor is psychological transparency her strong suit. Indeed, she might once have served as poster-lady for that delicate mental process Freud called the Censorship. Given all that seems to go on unacknowledged in her emotional world, these undated, untethered notes can often read – shockingly – like eerie and unprecedented eruptions from the maternal unconscious.

Witness a pencilled memorandum from one of the real-estate pads: ‘WE’VE BEEN THRU A LOT TOGETHER & MOST OF IT WAS YOUR FAULT.’”

If you’re not laughing right now I don’t understand you at all.

The reason I’ve got Terry Castle on the brain is because she’s coming to Philadelphia in November, to give a lecture. Hooray! And it’s a free lecture, open to the public, at Penn, that’s part of a themed series they do every year that is always excellent. This year’s theme is sex. See?

They put this picture on the brochure. The audacity!
They put this picture on the brochure. The audacity!

But it looks like the symposium is also, maybe mostly, about gender, which of course is not the same thing at all. Gender is something I spend about 30% of every day thinking about, and Terry Castle writes about it a lot as well. This talk she’s giving is called “No, I’m Not a Woman–I’m a Not-A-Woman: A Not-A-Woman Dossier.” Hee. This is Castle’s own term, according to the brochure, for “a person who looks and functions as a woman only in a nominal sense, having lost, refused, or neglected to cultivate standard markers of the “feminine.” Her examples include Gertrude Stein – okay, sure, no surprise there – as well as Hillary Clinton and Greta Garbo.

!!!

All of this makes me feel so happy and intrigued. I mean, Greta Garbo, could you die? This conversation also puts me to mind of Nuala O’Faolain, who I wrote about below, and who once, after being introduced as the Only Woman to Such-and-Such at a lecture she gave here in Philadelphia, said plainly, “I’m not a woman. I’m an honorary man.”

Woof. There’s a lot to think about here. Learning about Castle’s lecture came at an interesting time for me, because just yesterday I finally started reading that stone cold classic, Stone Butch Blues, which I saw was being given away for free as a PDF. As a not-very-obvious gender weirdo, I found the childhood stuff in the beginning relatable and tough to read; the book already feels so important to me. Maybe this will be the year I sort out some of my feelings about my gender, for once and for all. Maybe I never will, but instead I’ll keep on reading and writing and thinking about it forever. I guess I could be alright with that too.