allons, enfants · 26 December 2011, 00:40
Welcome back to the Blague Book Club, where we (prodded back into action by the inimitable* Kidchamp) are talking about IAR Wylie’s “The Little Woman.” Did you read it? The following contains no spoilers, but you should read the essay first anyway. The part that’s sticking in my head this time is this bit, from near the end:
“Men, whatever else they are not [and by this point she’s spent hundreds of words convincingly excoriating them], are at least professionals who treat their talents or their genius with respect. No love of home or wife or child ever stopped a man who was worth his salt from doing his duty – which is, in the first place, to whatever gifts the chance meeting of sperm and ovum have given him.”
It goes on, adamantly enough to make a good-sized dent in Lisa “Opt-Out Revolution” Belkin’s head, were it wadded up and thrown at her – but that’s the part that gets me particularly. The idea of one’s gifts being something to which one has a duty – being that main thing to which one has a duty – has hit me with all the steel-mallet force of a new idea which should not have been new at all. Here I’ve been thinking of tiresome occupations (lazily defined, I now realize, as those that I find uninteresting) as “duties,” and making art as the privilege to be earned by slaving at said duties long enough (it is never long enough), while not considering that there are plenty of people for whom making art (somewhat strictly defined, Everything Is An Art If You Do It Well, etc.) is not an interest, nor would it be a privilege, and some of those people may well rejoice in those activities which yours truly would find boring, and that Being An Artist, ergo, is not something one must earn by X years of tiresome toil at unrelated activities, it is something that one earns by making art, and moreover, something one is obliged to do by virtue of having been stamped that way; that having been given limbs, we ought to stretch em. Well jeez.
I’ve been rather guiltily equating “artist” with “freeloader” lately, anyhow, mostly because I’ve been having a really good time at my friends’ houses just writing and singing and sculpting and baking bread all the time, and whatever struggles I have, though they are often baffling and thorny and artistic or logistical in nature and thus fundamental to my sense of self and/or situation of life, are much easier to deal with than simpler problems with things that I don’t really care about. Why should I get to have this easy life?**
Wylie’s train of thought – one’s primary duty in life being to one’s gifts – hints at a different dynamic between The Artist and The Community – one maybe a little like temple beggars in certain traditions; the act of giving and receiving alms being much less of a one-way transaction than is dreamt of in capitalism’s philosophy**** – the notion that perhaps the artist is doing something socially useful by making art, and therefore is allowed to be an artist without feeling like a complete parasite. Not only is allowed to, but must – that the artist must do something socially useful, and that that useful thing is to make art if one is an artist. That is, better to be a good painter than a bad cook, even if one can’t eat paintings.
I wrote much of this in Pennsylvania, rattling around in a giant cold house with only one other person in it, and I finished it in Hawaii, in a two-bedroom condo with six other people. One of those people is my awesome 2-year-old niece, who makes a compelling argument for throwing over one’s advanced degree in order to hang out with children all day – specifically, her. She is a hilarious crazy daredevil and who doesn’t want as much of that as possible? But backing up a little tiny bit, we see also that she is an excellent demonstration of why we should not neglect ourselves in favor of exclusive cultivation of children, because without some serious effort, we’ll never be able to keep up with her. Il faut cultiver notre jardin after all.
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+ We sure try, though, don’t we?
++ There are those people who would not consider living on three backpacks and a bicycle and food stamps, without a home or a job or even any pants**, to be an easy life. But that is something I am just figuring out.
+++ Not one pair! Instead, in the same suitcase room that I would’ve used on two pairs of jeans, I have ten pairs of tights, four shorts and a miniskirt, plus the less tangible benefit of being readily identifiable as a lunatic Californian everywhere I go except for Hawaii.
++++ For way way way more on this subject, read Lewis Hyde’s excellent The Gift, or get half a glass of bourbon into your correspondent here.
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reading: The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West
eating: pineapple that could make you die of delight
listening to: anything the 2-year-old says, and obeying immediately
looking at: whales breaching off the coast!, and sea turtles, and coral, and flying fish, and rainbows
making: absolutely nothing, which is about the only reason I have to go back to the mainland
— Hannah Mae
The Shantoose of the Banjo Club · 6 December 2011, 09:45
I found a quote a few years ago that really set my hair on fire – so I copied it down, with some annotations involving exclamation points, and lost the source. This is the quote:
“It was discovered that a relative handful of human beings, unarmed save with a resolute fighting temper and a conviction of justice, could set the forces of society – armed to the teeth but with a bad conscience – right back on their heels…. To my astonishment I found that women, in spite of knock-knees and the fact that for centuries a respectable woman’s leg had not even been mentionable, could at a pinch outrun the average London bobby. Their aim with a little practice became good enough to land ripe vegetables in ministerial eyes, their wits sharp enough to keep Scotland Yard running around round in circles and looking very silly. Their capacity for impromptu organization, for secrecy and loyalty, their iconoclastic disregard for class and established order were a revelation to all concerned but especially themselves.
Best of all was the discovery that when it came down to a real slugging match they were not at such a hopeless disadvantage as tradition would have had them suppose. The day that, with a straight left to the jaw, I sent a fair-sized CID officer… into the orchestra pit of the Pavillion Theatre where we were holding one of our belligerent meetings, was the day of my own coming-of-age. It set me free to be whatever I was to the top of my bent….
For two years of wild and sometimes dangerous adventure I worked and fought alongside vigorous, happy, well-adjusted women who laughed instead of tittering, who walked freely instead of teetering, who could outfast Gandhi and come out with a grin and a jest. I slept on hard floors between elderly duchesses, stout cooks, and young shopgirls. We were often tired, hurt and frightened. But we were content as we had never been. We shared a life of joy that we had never known.”
Shit-kicking, right? Doesn’t it make you want to be a suffragette? I did some digging, and I found the source: an essay by Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, “The Little Woman,” published in Harper’s in November of 1945. Through the kindness of the Johnson County (Kansas) Inter-library Loan Program, I got to read the full text, and: Holy Shit.
It made me giggle, and then it made me furious and bristly as the fearful porpentine, and then I felt sad and bleak and resolute and stony and all kinds of things. It is about gender and warfare and art and genius and social history and parts of it may be bullshit – I don’t know, I’m ensorceled, I can’t tell – but parts of it are definitely not. Do read it – I would love to hear what you think.
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reading: the last of the Granta back issues, Anne Lamott Bird by Bird, some Rumpole I found laying about the house, and of course IAR up there
eating: $3/doz local organic free-range eggs, suck it California (just a little)
listening to: Genesis Nursery Cryme, Dead and Gone TV Baby, Liturgy Renihilation, the Pittsburgh Banjo Club
looking at: Butler Memorial Park in the unexpected sunshine
making: two stories, a website, a bunch of tiny sculpture bits, eleventy loops
— Hannah Mae
here's one more day on the Grey Funnel Line · 23 November 2011, 14:34
I’m in the thick of research on what may be a big project, if I let it. This is the part that both excites and bedevils me – the part where I get all revved up and fill myself with the enthusiasm that will carry me to the finish line (and, indeed, to the starting gate in the first place) – but also the part where I can get mired for years, chasing ever more obscure details, coming asymptotically close to beginning, and all the while feeling like I’m really doing meaningful work, really getting things done. I am doing meaningful work, at least for awhile – the trick is seeing where it shades into a subspecies of procrastination.*
I read an interview with Jim Crace some months ago** where he talks about doing little to no research for his books. His settings are often strange worlds, strange versions of the world, so it’s not like there are wealths of obvious primary sources out there for him to consult, but a writer of a different temperament*** would have no problem finding relevant reading material. I read The Pesthouse a few weeks ago and had it been me, I would’ve consulted the literature on pre-industrial societies, insular religious communities, the geography and ecology of eastern North America, long walks and communicable diseases, and read some other post-apoc novels just to make sure my particular ground was not yet too trodden-upon. Jim Crace, writing a story in which the taste of earwax is a crucial point,**** did not even venture far enough into Researchland – a country which, in this case, can be reached directly from Worktopia, and in which one’s stay, in this case, can be extremely short, consisting as it does of the search for the answer to only one small question – to taste his own, or anyone else’s, earwax.***** Which is not, by the way, sweet.******
Anyhow, there must be a happy medium somewhere between Lost In the Library and persisting in Aristotelian misapprehension******* – no? And those of us who find the real world’s details infinitely weirder and thus more compelling than those which we invent can’t be completely on the wrong track, right? So when do we – okay fine when do I – switch gears? How do I tell in the moment, instead of months or years too late, when all the steam and vim have gone out of the thing and I’ve moved onto something else? If I thought there was a book that would tell me, I would be down at the library getting it right now.
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+ ...says the blogger.
++ I would look it up, but that’s research
++ but I think it was Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News
++ do you read The Morning News? it is really worth reading – their meatier articles are quite good (though I’m irked by their recent tendency toward short pieces which venture only an inconclusive paragraph or two beyond their teaser blurb), and their “news worth reading from around the internet” curation is without peer
++ actually maybe I’ll have a look at it right now
+++ who could that be?
++++ I promise it is not at all as gross a book as this implies
+++++ ...really? Not even, like, making out with somebody and you stick your tongue in their ear a little bit? You should really try that, you know. It’s pretty great. Not because of the earwax, though.
++++++ Neener neener! That is the only thing I will probably ever have on Jim Crace, who is in all other ways the sort of writer I aspire to be when I grow up, so I’m going to enjoy it.
+++++++ I was told, some long time ago, that Aristotle, who surely had seen enough flies to know better if only he had looked carefully, believed that flies have eight legs. I’m not going to look it up, because I would enjoy the irony of being misinformed in this particular situation. I would enjoy it even more if you looked it up and told me I was wrong, though.
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reading: about a million back issues of Granta circa 1999-2001
eating: greens with dumplings which are in all ways the redemption of the terrible dumplings I made a few weeks ago (sorry, Louisa)
listening to: loops, drones, the Box Tops
looking at: Ryan’s grandma’s bonkers awesome house; Ryan’s stepdad’s bonkers awesome 7” collection
making: blank paper into not-blank paper, full bottles into empty bottles, and quiet time into loud time
— Hannah Mae
O JUSTUS DRUGSTORE THOU PARAGON OF FOODPLACES · 15 November 2011, 08:14
The blague does not generally do commercial endorsements, but today I can’t help myself! I even waited to make sure I really meant it, and I do: Justus Drugstore and YJ’s, the two eating establishments at which I spent a combined nine hours on Saturday night, are freaking awesome and you should go there.
Justus Drugstore is in Smithville, Missouri, which is just outside of KC, which is pretty much in the middle of the US, and therefore basically on your way to anywhere you might be going. They have a bar, which is all about foraging and botany and has things like house-made autumn leaves bitters, which actually tastes like the smell of kicking through piles of leaves in an orchard (I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but I can tell you, those leaves do not naturally taste like they smell). The kitchen does that “farm to table” thing, and they do it marvelously well, and not only are they not snobby or smug about it, they are incredibly friendly. So friendly that not only did the chef come around a few times during dinner to talk about what was on our plates, he came and sat with us at dessert and we all drank a drink Louisa helped invent and I helped name*, and the chef and I geeked out about art made of trees. So friendly that not only did the bartender not pick us up by our collars and huck us out the front door when we asked a million questions and second-guessed his menu and took eight hundred years to pick a cocktail, he invented us new drinks, and took Gabe on a tour of his homemade bitters collection, and invited us back to “the place where I keep my piano…”
...which is YJ’s, back in KCMO proper (yeah, you thought it was a bartending botanist musician version of “come up and see my etchings,” huh?), where they are open 24 hours Thursday through Sunday, and they make a million permutations of egg sandwich, and they’re arty and punk rock and they do really have a piano and I felt so happy and at home eating breakfast food at 5am and talking nonsense with lovely people. Oh, KC, there you are.
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+ it’s called a snowbank, and a version of it – date-pine vodka, chai bitters, cream, lemon – is going to be on the next official cocktail menu, so, you know, we feel famous.
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eating and drinking: cucumber-rhubarb pisco cocktail, snowbank, fried green beans, the best veggie burger I have ever had in a long life of veggie burgers, three-day fries, parsley lemonade, fig turnovers with sabayon, grape blossom cognac, autumn leaves elixir….
— Hannah Mae
Hunting down the sublime · 7 November 2011, 17:42
My mom sent me a fantastic photo of my 2-year-old niece in which the niece is wearing a cartoon character t-shirt, a tutu, and pearls. I am also allowed to dress myself sometimes, and my favorite outfit lately is basically the same thing. Coincidence, or strong genes? Either way, I can’t wait to play dress-up next time we see each other.
I’ve been thinking an awful lot about clothes lately, and it led me to a book called The Thoughtful Dresser, by Linda Grant – subtitled The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping and Why Clothes Matter. I read it all in one gulp, and then immediately started arguing with it. Without spending too much time recapping (y’all go read it yourselves, and then we can really get into it), here are my issues:
1. She is kind of apologetic/defensive. True, anyone who wants to discuss fashion with pleasure rather than disapproval has to contend with the notion that fashion is a frivolous pastime which silly women obsess over while men do serious and important things. But Grant makes a solid case for taking fashion seriously in the first small segment, and then continues to reiterate it throughout the book. Okay okay, clothes are worth writing about. Please write about the clothes now.*
2. She tells a story about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen: apparently someone in the British Army or Red Cross ordered a case of red lipstick to distribute to the former prisoners. Says a British soldier: “I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick…. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again…. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.” Says Grant:
“how they looked in the mirror… was less important than the knowledge that lipstick was the attribute of a woman, not that word the Nazis used for them: Stücke, or pieces…. I cannot see how [the desire to look pretty] could be described as superficial if it can withstand the almost total destruction of the personality.”
Strictly interpreted, we don’t disagree – the desire to look pretty is not superficial, it is deeply ingrained – but she looks at it as a firm positive, whereas I’m wondering if another explanation could be that the social imperatives which go with gender are so rigid that they can survive even a concentration camp. That is, what that lipstick offered the former prisoners was not the opportunity to re-assert their individuality and humanity, but the means to begin to conform to social norms again. (Oh, hell. If you compare it to a concentration camp, conformity doesn’t sound so bad, does it?)
3. For a book which is deeply involved with gender, and which makes no bones about it, there is lamentably little interrogation of which of fashion’s characteristics are universal to all fashion, and which are associated only with women’s fashion. Because while fashion may be seen as primarily a female concern, Grant makes an unshakable case that it is a universal concern. (In my favorite example, she points out that a lack of clothing is treated, at least by society at large, like an emergency far sooner than a lack of many other basic necessities: “a starving man will sit on the pavement begging for food and a thousand people will pass him by and give him nothing. A naked man will be hauled off to the police station in a blanket.”)
What I’m getting at is, she shows in many ways that the desire to be beautiful is so strong that it leads us to all kinds of self-mutilation, but at no point does she address the curiosity that in western culture, at any rate, the conventionally well-dressed man is not uncomfortable. We can justify the existence of stilettos and Spanx all we want – but for me, it all comes down to the fact that a conventionally attractive female – that is, a person with no physical “flaws” for which her clothes must compensate – requires uncomfortable clothes to be considered well-dressed, and a conventionally attractive man does not.
I think this indicates a fundamental failure on the part of fashion designers. Bee tee dubs. If you can’t make women’s clothing which is both beautiful and un-torturous (I don’t ask for much!), then you aren’t trying hard enough, or else you suck. Now go do better.**
Anyway, in all this thinking about clothes, I’ve finally figured something out: what bothers me about fashion, as opposed to style/costume, is that it is driven not by one’s own internal impulses and particular tastes, but by the dictates of others***: you need to wear miniskirts because someone else says miniskirts are the thing now, or you have to stop wearing miniskirts because someone else they are not the thing, and unless you’re Karl Lagerfeld or Anna Wintour, it doesn’t really matter what you think. It’s easy to see how trends could happen organically – oh hey, a long lace skirt on top of shorts, I never thought of that before! I’ll try it too! – but the “you must wear this” fashion magazine lockstep – well, I hope, as with much of the other stuff on the pages of Cosmo****, that nobody actually does that in real life.
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+ The London Times Saturday blurbing the book as “wonderfully unapologetic” struck me as ridiculously off, unless the famously excessive British modesty is even more excessive than I have been led to believe.
++ I feel I should mention, by way of clarifying my position or full disclosure or something, that I own six or seven pairs of high heels, at least half of which are much nicer to look at than to wear. So, you know, I’m just as confused as everyone else.
+++ This is also what bothers me about television, as opposed to YouTube. Or at least that is what I told Louisa the other day, to square my perennial scorn for treating the former as a legitimate conversation topic with my recent obsessive referencing of Hennessy Youngman.
++++ I am aware that, despite Cosmo’s concern with clothing, the cognoscenti do not really consider it a fashion magazine. But one cannot make penis-scrunchie link jokes about Women’s Wear Daily.
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reading: the above, plus Agatha Christie, and a lot of internet about ancient Egypt
eating: like a princess! soba, arugula, farm eggs, Prairie Breeze cheese, Louisa’s rum balls…
listening to: carefully chosen selections from the Young Money full-length – I can listen to “Bedrock“ multiple times a day (oh, and I do), but the next song I wish I never heard in the first place
looking at: the niece’s crazy awesome hair!
making: an audiotour story set at the Nelson-Atkins museum, and a lot of stuff out of coffee straws
— Hannah Mae